I've been looking for words of wisdom from our writers of the previous century whose lives were touched by the Spanish Flu. A passage to inspire the soldierly march onwards, perhaps – or a poem to light the load shedding-doused nights, giving succour to the fearful and lonely.
Unfortunately, there is precious little in the way of literary inspiration from 1918 – previously so distant, now so near – to be found.
Mind you, the era gave us a bounty of scribes to celebrate. To name but a few, in that year Guy Butler was born – as was a bestselling memoirist, a certain NR Mandela. Meanwhile, 1919 would touch the soul of the world with southern Africa's imagination: Peter Abrahams, Noni Jabavu, Sibusiso Nyembezi, Es'kia Mphahele and Doris Lessing all appeared that year. Push forward a bit and 1923 yields up Nadine Gordimer. Push back a bit and you get Herman Charles Bosman (1905). Push back a bit more and the great Solomon Plaatje makes his appearance (1876).
None of them, however, seem to have applied their talents to polishing the uncut horrors of the epidemic into bright prose or verse. Horrors, for example, which sent World War I below the fold of Kimberley's Diamond Fields Advertiser. That city's mortality rate ultimately topped eight percent: almost 5,000 of the 50,000 people who lived there succumbed.
Plaatje himself, a Kimberley resident at the time, was struck gravely ill during the epidemic, as was his daughter Olive, who, greatly weakened, died three years later. He dedicated his novel Mhudi to her memory. (His own death in 1932 has been linked to the virus’s undermining of his health 14 years earlier.)
For all the human drama on the dusty streets, though, nothing like a literature of the pandemic seems to have taken root. This is in stark contrast to the celebrated poetry of the Great War – and despite the fact that the South African dead alone, from 1918's influenza strain, could fill hundreds of Flanders Fields with poppies.
(I should mention that I would be only too glad to have myself proven wrong on this point. By all means, please send your SA Spanish Flu literary findings my way.)
In the end, I stumbled upon a scrap from a minor luminary whose name is close to being forgotten. The poet RN Currey, son of a Methodist Minister, born in Mafikeng in 1907, witnessed the flu’s arrival as a child. He remembered the time thus:
Spanish Influenza 1918
I waited for my father in the trap
Outside the wire-fence cemetery where he laid
Away from all but memory Mrs Petrie
Mother of six with whom we often played.
He had no choice but to take me; our two servants
Were grey with fear and fever, and my mother
Stretched on the threat of going. All that week
His funeral services followed one another.
That odd parade of European bones
Beside the shabby location, above the vlei,
Was something to take for granted, side by side,
In ranks, convenient for Judgment Day.
— published in The Africa We Knew, David Philip, 1973
No universal truths are to be had in Currey's poem: just the familiar, depressing South African ones.
In the absence of anything more uplifting than Currey’s grim sketch, it seems best simply to offer the following hope: that poets of the current moment find no cause to commemorate a new odd parade – updated for the cemeteries of a democratic SA – in the weeks ahead.
Postscript
Following this column's publication, the author and historian Professor Howard Phillips, whose work on the 1918 Spanish flu in South Africa sets the standard, wrote to me with a number of literary leads – a most welcome development – as follows:
"In response to your question about literary works on the Spanish flu pandemic in SA, there are several such works, mainly in languages other than English, which may itself be telling. Those in Dutch/Afrikaans include DF Malherbe’s emotional poem, "Die Plaag" (he lost his young daughter to Spanish flu), CJ Langenhoven’s Mof en Sy Mense, Uys Krige’s "Swart Oktober" in his Ballade van die Groot Begeer, Morkel van Tonder’s Halfkrone op die oë and HS van Blerk’s Swart Oktober. In English there is a short story, "Klas", by Mary Byron in her Dawn and Dusk in the High Veld and a story set in the then Southern Rhodesia, "Africans All", by A.S. Cripps. Most poignant of all is a song in isiZulu, ‘Influenza’, by Reuben Caluza. The words (and an English translation) are to be found in my book, In a Time of Plague: Memories of the Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918 in South Africa, published in 2018. This is now available as an eBook at www.hipsa.org.za."
Thank you, good Prof! DM/ML
Ben Williams is the Publisher of The Johannesburg Review of Books.