The Dark Universe of Complicity

Franco Sorrentino’s romantic relationship with Devorah Kirschenbaum draws him inadvertently into white Leftist student political activism on the eve of the collapse of the Portuguese colonial empire in Africa. For the South African white student Leftist movement it becomes a time of revolutionary expectations which foreshadows the eventual overthrow of apartheid. Hardly any fiction has been written which was embedded in the framework of the political activism of the white student Left during the 1970s. The white student Left on South African Anglophone university campuses had become decisively Marxist during the1970s and this political and intellectual phenomenon also represented a decisive break from the liberalism which characterized the political activism of white English speaking students during the 1950s and 1960s. This shift from liberalism to Marxism was also due to the tectonic changes in political thinking which followed in the wake of the 1960s counter culture revolution in the US and Europe. Critical revisions of South African history which was informed by applying Marxist class analysis to explaining and understanding the origins and development of Apartheid began to have an intellectual and political impact on white Anglophone students in South Africa. White Anglophone students also became increasing exposed to the writings of Marxist thinkers such as Lukacs, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School and Althusser. Works by Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas and Poulantzas also became popular in the 1970s. This literature gave fresh impetus to the rise of a new kind of white student radicalism which characterized the white student Left in the 1970s. However the intellectual drift among students was not towards the 1960s Neo-Marxism of the Europe and North America, it was rather something much more radical, more African in a manner of speaking, it took the form of a rediscovery of Communism. An influential hard-core minority of white students became Communists without necessarily joining the banned underground South African Communist Party. However, as we now know Marxism never took root in Southern Africa. Instead a new class of African Nationalist emerged in the guise of the rent-seeking compradorial bourgeoisie who became the new political elite. In the end the old oligarchy was replaced by the new oligarchy. Nothing really changed. Everything turned out to be a repetition of the same. Franco and Devorah were two such people associated with the student Left. Franco Sorrentino the grandson of an Italian prisoner of war and the son of a panel beater and Devorah Kirschenbaum the granddaughter of Jewish Trotskyite grandparents who fled Warsaw in 1939 and daughter of a prominent Johannesburg businessman become involved in a relationship. Together they become drawn ineluctably into radical political activism causing them to face choices fraught with moral dilemmas. In the end they become Anarcho-Communists.