Why I Wrote... Our Free And Happy Land
- cepmurphywrites
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
By Dr Charlton Cussans.
A few years ago, I read a poem about South Africa which called the country “our free and happy land”.
Well, I think I did. I could have sworn that I did, because the phrase stuck with me. I wish I could remember who wrote it, or what it was called, because I’ve not been able to find the damn thing since. Maybe it never existed, but I’m not going to claim the phrase is my own creation, it’s too evocative for that, and I’m not that good a writer. But I can claim credit for Our Free And Happy Land the book, and that’s what this blog piece is about.
The first post of the first draft came in November 2020, 15 days into the second COVID lockdown. Our Free And Happy Land was the product of COVID, and of my PhD, which had only started two years before. My PhD was about settler identity in Colonial Zimbabwe and was part of a wider interest in southern African history, politics, and society. I was also inspired by personal ruminations on the developments of liberalism as an ideology, the relationship of liberalism to both colonisation and decolonisation, and the sad tendency of post-colonial Africa towards various kinds of dictatorship until the end of the Cold War brought a wave of democratic reform to the continent.
I guess that single question - what would South Africa look like if it had been a multi-party democracy since the 1960s rather than the 1990s - drove Our Free And Happy Land. From that emerged further questions: why did the National Party win in 1948? What was the state of democratic forces, in the broadest terms, in South Africa in 1948? How does South Africa develop with the Anti-Apartheid Struggle? How do the Afrikaners develop without the National Party defining them for decades?
Liberalism has been a political force in South Africa for a long time, but has never formed a government in of itself. The old pre-1948 governments were pro-Empire conservatives, the National Party governments since 1948 were a racist nationalist republic, and the ANC governments since then are socialist on paper if not always in practice. Yet South Africa is a liberal democracy, with an incredibly advanced liberal constitutional order (which weirdly resembles the one Madison proposed for the USA). How might this constitutional order come about earlier, I wondered, and what would it mean if someone with the talents of Steve Biko hadn’t been murdered by the police? I included Georgism because I needed a liberal answer to the land question, and I needed an answer because I wanted to explore African Liberalism as an ideology. It helped that Joshua Nkomo, one of the great figures of the Zimbabwean struggle for liberation, was a Georgist. And so I could write about a successful liberal party in South Africa, and have my narrator be a liberal - for better and worse.
Avoiding the deaths of certain individuals proved crucial for the story to function. Avoiding noted liberal Jan Hendrick Hofmeyr working himself to death in WW2 was an easy step. Having WW2 war hero (and personal icon) Adolph Malan who did not develop Parkinson’s, was, I admit, a bit of authorial fiat, but needed for the story to work. So was making sure the American government was a bit less paranoid in the 1950s, or having Belgium collapse to produce a very different Congo Crisis. President Harold Stassen fit the first purpose, as did an alternate Royal Crisis for the second. Contrived, certainly, but I needed South Africa to be in a certain place for the story to work.
The framing device for the book is a South African journalist writing a retrospective for the (in OTL defunct) Rand Daily Mail. This served a useful purpose, both because any mistakes I, the author, made can be attributed to the in-universe writer, and because as the out-of-universe writer, I know things my chosen narrator does not. He does not know the precise details of the Koop Administration’s attempt to overthrow Prime Minister Biko. I do, but I’m not telling. That also enabled me to somewhat fudge the edges of the story, which, whilst not soft AH, is not hard either. I’m not tracking every single impact a democratic South Africa in the Cold War would have on history, but there are hints of a very different world. An off-screen Franco-British confederation, a Falklands War that takes place in the 1990s, a considerably more liberal United States, some plausible outcomes, and some outcomes that could be plausible. There’s a cowboy actor who becomes President but it’s not Ronald Reagan.
I was harder with South Africa than I was with the rest of the world. Some stuff that didn’t even make the first draft was a Soviet-Iranian War in the 1980s, a divided Lebanon, and what I can only describe as “Neo-Garveyist West African Black Fascism” which I got as far as writing as a foil to South Africa before realising it was a) ridiculous and b) only existed to contrast with Biko’s Premiership of South Africa. The rule of cool is one thing, but I try to be both cool and true with what I write. The attempted assassination of Biko was modelled on the assassination of Juvénal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira; President Koop’s conflicts with his own party mirror his clash with President Reagan; and Gerald Bull was even more of a supervillain in real life then he is in the story.
Speaking of, Thabo Mbeki and Elon Musk (who I would have written very differently had I wrote the story now) collaborating to try and get South Africa nuclear weapons was inspired by both of them being described as supervillains - Colbert called Musk one to his face a few years ago, back when Musk wasn’t just a plain old villain. I guess that’s why I changed Biko’s premiership so much.
Biko himself has changed dramatically in the telling, and I admit I was unfair to him in the first draft, both personally and politically, for I fear I reduced him to a caricature, which is why the story under several revisions before it was published in 2023. I am a white person, a white British person, and whilst I like to imagine that I am free of any conscious sort of biases, I am fully aware that I must have some unconscious ones simply because of my time and place in life. I intended to write about a living Biko, a successful Biko, a Biko who might have been. I think I, I hope, I ended up doing that. But I admit I initially failed, going for shock value and not something more sensible and frankly true to Biko’s character.
One thing I would love to do if I revised it again, based on further observation of South African politics, is the rise of multi-racial conservatism as an ideology, further emphasis on religion, and more on ANC economic policies in the 60s and beyond, which barely receive any attention in the text. In light of recent events in South Africa, I would also like to talk more about immigration and racism in Our Free And Happy Land’s South Africa, adapting, as I often did in the published book, trends from real life. More of that, I think, would have been great.
This is a work of a fictional journalist focusing on Prime Ministers, but I feel that I should have gone into more depth on Mandela’s massive reforms of the trade union movement, management of the mines and their relationship with the central government, blending post-war West German and British labour relations policies. But I didn’t, and in retrospect I should have - and maybe focused less on Colonel Gaddafi’s Maltese Misadventure. Our Free And Happy Land is the story of a state and of statesmen and stateswomen, not of statecraft. But looking back, perhaps more effort should have been spent on South Africa and African policies and politics on a more minute level. Or perhaps not - I fear that would have been quite dull.
But overall, I’m proud of what I wrote, even as I recognise its flaws. South Africa is a beautiful country, now celebrating 31 years of freedom. In Our Free And Happy Land, the election of 14 September 1963 marked the transition of the country to full democracy. Coincidentally, December 2023 was when Our Free And Happy Land was published by Sea Lion Press. I set out to write Our Free And Happy Land to make a case for South African and African liberalism, or more broadly, to imagine a world where Africa gets to enjoy democracy without CIA men, white supremacists, corrupt oligarchs and gangster warlords ruining it. I hope I succeeded in that endeavour, and I hope you enjoy what I wrote. I certainly enjoyed writing it.