"Let it at the very least be said, if it ever comes to be said, if there is ever anyone in some remote future interested to know the way we lived, that in this farthest outpost of the Empire of light there existed one man who in his heart was not a barbarian."
J.M. Coetzee, the first author to win the Booker Prize twice, is one of South Africa's best known writers. A white man of Afrikaner descent, he is also one of few African writers to receive the Nobel Prize, in 2003. His short novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, has some unsurprising parallels with Beckett's Waiting for Godot in that the novel focuses on a frontier town of an empire preparing for a barbarian invasion that never comes. Much like Godot, the people of the town, partly due to propaganda and misinformation (in addition to excessive punitive measures taken, such as raids on the nomadic barbarians) from the Empire, actually fear an invasion by the united peoples of the desert and mountains beyond the frontier. The narrator, an unnamed magistrate comfortable in his middle aged, corpulent body and a life of peaceful relations with the "barbarian" nomads, he resists the Empire's warmongering and dehumanization of the barbarians, whose land the Empire seized unjustly during its own expansion anyway.
The irony of it is the barbarians, despite the lies and insanity of Empire bureaucrats and military officials from the distant capital, never evinced any sign of military aggression. Indeed, when pursued and attacked by the foolish army led by Colonel Joll, the barbarians simply led them further and further into the desert and mountains during the winter months, letting nature take care of the true barbarians, the Empire. The civil magistrate of this frontier settlement nevertheless loses power, is publicly shamed and tortured, and imprisoned for several months after making an unauthorized visit to the barbarians in order to return a lover he took from the prisons, a young woman who was partly blinded due to the torturous practices of the Empire. The rest of the novel focuses on the suffering of the town and its abandonment by the military in the face of an expected "barbarian" invasion by nomadic peoples who never come. Indeed, at the novel's conclusion, one is forced to accept that everything that transpired was avoidable, but imperialism, which relies on dehumanization of the Other and fictional notions of nationalism which manifest in reality through an unnecessary military, created the conditions favorable for human self-destruction and violence.
Coetzee skillfully avoids the obvious flaw of presenting the narrator as a blameless, sinless individual forced into the Empire's genocidal mania. Though he resists futilely the Empire's torture and inhumane practices on barbarians, he also takes advantage of the so-called barbarians himself, essentially using one as a sex slave. The rest of the frontier town become complicit in the extreme actions taken by the Empire, including joining in the beating of captives and, when the narrator finds himself shackled, participating and cheering over his public beatings and suffering. In fact, at one point the soldiers who have taken over the town invite a child to beat 4 "barbarian" captives in the square! From all this one can see that Coetzee is exploring the nuances of human oppression by illustrating how even those who seem to be the "victors" or non-oppressed are also fundamentally worsened morally and socially by the extreme violence they partake in or accept as part of the human condition. This has striking relevance to the Holocaust, for instance, or, given Coetzee's South African origin, the history of white European colonialism and apartheid. Like the fictional, unnamed locale and empire in Waiting for the Barbarians, the Cape Coast of South Africa was settled under the direction of the Dutch East India Company, which then blossomed into expansion of the Cape Coast colony at the expense of local Khoikhoi pastoralists, slavery, and trickery.
These aforementioned raids and colonial land grabs led to later conflicts with the voortrekkers, whites from the Cape Coast who, traveling with wagons and animals, pushed further north until the new frontier led to border conflicts with the Xhosa peoples, and eventually, pushing further northeast until inevitable conflicts arose with other South African peoples, such as the Zulu in the 19th century. Though lacking the obvious political centralization of the Empire in Coetzee's novel, the white Boers or Afrikaners, adopting a semi-nomadic farming lifestyle while stealing land and resources from other peoples, formed Boer republics in the 19th century to escape British rule in the Cape Colony and continue the practice of slavery. Needless to say, white South Africans, represented by the Empire in Coetzee's novel, are the ones oppressing the "barbarians" who have been pushed gradually further and further into inhospitable land, representing the Khoikhoi, Xhosa, and other South African peoples. Where Coetzee complicates this narrative, however, is through the almost entirely focused plot on the people of the Empire, thoroughly exploring the nuances of their own oppression due to the Empire's mismanagement, abandonment, and desire to create war for the sake of perpetuating it's own existence.
By taking advantage of the "barbarians" image as the despised and dangerous Other, the people of the town accept the necessity of war while at the same time becoming pawns of the Empire. Likewise, white South Africans, accepting white supremacy and the propaganda supporting their own cultural superiority (ignoring the fact that as a frontier settlement, the town the magistrate works in is distant from the imperial capital and more of a fusion of multiple frontier identities, like white South Africans multiple European, African and Asian influences) begin to internalize it and accept white rule and apartheid. However, Coetzee's novel has universal dimensions, since this story of human oppression pertains to human relationships beyond South Africa. The predilection for torture and excessive violence in the novel has obvious connotations to everything from the Holocaust to slavery, for instance. Furthermore, the narrator himself is reminiscent of Schindler and other non-Jews who resisted the Holocaust, while simultaneously bearing moral culpability since the narrator, like Schindler, also gained privileges and rights over the subjugated Other.
Unfortunately, the "barbarians" of the novel are never fully explored. Their perspective on the history of relations between themselves and the Empire which seized their land, is never fleshed out, save for the lover taken by the magistrate who abandons him immediately when given the chance to return to her people. The barbarians encountered then, armed with short bows and ancient muskets, become vacuous shells of developed characters whose own culture and way of life as "barbarians" seems to focus entirely on subsistence and nothing else. Coetzee's troubling reduction of the barbarians to seemingly animal-like existence, though done through the lens of the narrator, nevertheless lacks the appropriate, nuanced approach to give depth to the barbarians. Indeed, all the reader really learns is that, due to the magistrate's amateur archaeology, there was a civilization in the region in the distant past with it's own script, the area used to be far more fertile but the lake near the settlement is becoming increasingly saltier and the land less arable, and the barbarians used the land previously for pasturage. The fact that there was a "civilization" in the region in the past inevitably conjures the story of Great Zimbabwe and the obvious fact of black civilizations and advanced cultures in southern Africa, a powerful contradicting factor in the historiography of southern Africa written by Afrikaners and whites of English descent, which necessitated a mythological history of ancient white or Semitic-speaking settlers who constructed the zimbabwes across Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
However, since the novel's focus is on the Empire and the narrator as an official for the oppressive side, Coetzee's novel focuses on depicting the "barbarian heart" of the so-called civilized Empire. Interestingly, since the novel was published during apartheid and Coetzee himself opposed the insidious institution, the novel can also be read as Coetzee's critical self-reflection on white opposition to apartheid and apartheid's dehumanization of whites themselves, since the real barbarians quickly become the white oppressors and proponents of imperialism. Anyway, Coetzee's novel is fascinating and actually a dark comedy in its denouement, with the incoming marauding hordes of "barbarians" never coming. The actual prose is descriptive, accessible, and, since the novel's location is not rooted in any known time or continent, could be almost anywhere (though we know the barbarians have long hair and distinct eyes differing from those of the Empire). One does not have to read the novel through South African lens, but given Coetzee's own background and the contemporary system of apartheid when it was written, it certainly appears to be a powerful critique white-ruled South Africa and imperialism more broadly. Furthermore, Coetzee's novel explores the inner psyche of a person compelled to live in the most horrendous environment, with huge consequences for the narrator and everyone else. Nobody wins in war, nobody truly wins through racism or colonialism.
Another great quote!
"But my torturers were not interested in degrees of pain. They were interested only in demonstrating to me what it meant to live in a body, as a body, a body which can entertain notions of justice only as long as it is whole and well, which very soon forgets them when its head is gripped and a pipe is pushed down its gullet and pints of salt water are poured into it till it coughs and retches and flails and voids itself. They did not come to force the story out of me of what I had said to the barbarians and what the barbarians had said to me. So I had no chance to throw the high-sounding words I had ready in their faces. They came to my cell to show me the meaning of humanity, and in the space of an hour they showed me a great deal."
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