André Brink’s A Chain of Voices appeared in 1982, after a revival of interest in the history of slavery. It tells of a revolt of slaves in 1825 on a remote Cape farm. Brink has signalled in the form of his novel—a series of internal monologues by the inhabitants of the farm—his awareness that the records exclude the views of slaves and Khoi, but he has followed the records in matters of fact. Since they omit any account of the emotions or aspirations of slaves, he has had to infer or imagine what these might have been. In doing so he has produced stereotypical figures of what history suggests ‘the slave,’ ‘the Khoi’ and ‘the Cape Dutch frontiersman’ were.
J M Coetzee’s paper “The Novel Today,” delivered in 1987, questions the relationship between the novel and history, claiming that the pressure in 1980s South Africa on novelists to produce fictions that supplemented history was illegitimate; the novel must follow its own rules. His practice in depicting a slave appears in Foe (1986), and he had earlier written a fictionalised account of the Cape Dutch frontiersman Jacobus Coetzee (1974). In his Jerusalem speech (1987) he suggests the constraints on the imagination which South Africans have felt when imagining the lives of historical Others.
I shall discuss the way in which the ethical problem of speaking for someone else has influenced Coetzee’s practice and constrained Brink’s imagination.