ULA MASONDO
by William Plomer, 1927

"Ula Masondo," a long short story by William Plomer, is also, as Edith Sitwell told its author, "a great short story," great in itself and great in its influence. For Ula Masondo, the man of the people, is the prototype of the innocent tribal African who leaves his family hut in the rural reserves and goes to seek money in the white man's city, invariably Johannesburg (or Goldenville, as Plomer calls it in earlier printings), and the effect is invariably malign and corrupting. Ula Masondo is more than a mere type; he is a living character, an individual whose development the reader can follow from the day he buys a blanket and dances down the mountain path with it in childlike ecstasy, through his journey to and experiences in the frightening, exciting city of gold, where he is soon initiated into the ways of the sophisticated, detribalized Africans, until his return to Lembuland as a prodigal dandy, adorned with rings and high-heeled shoes and a cane. The simple and dutiful son who set out from his tribal village at the beginning of the story has become a superior Westernized and Christianized African who repudiates his aged mother as a "bloody heathen" and goes to live with a prostitute he met in the city. His mother hangs herself.

The characterization of Ula Masondo is done with the sure touch of a master storyteller who almost miraculously enters into the very being of his creation to convey how the man thinks and feels and even, in a risk-taking poetic phantasmagoria after a mining accident, dreams. In achieving these things, Plomer displays technical knowledge of gold mining as well as an extraordinary sense of intuitive sympathy with his hero, and the mining terms—of which Ula Masondo would probably be ignorant even if he knew the things to which they referred—give way touchingly to convincing poetic comparisons of the kind he could make himself:

When one came off shift at midday the sky was dusty grey like the pelt of a donkey, and the air was full of the perennial roar of the stamps rising and falling … on revolving cams in the battery … shaking the ground, as the ground trembles to a war-dance of warriors, or summer thunder in the mountains of Lembuland.

Nor is Ula never allowed his own words without authorial transmutation or explanation. His attractively naive earlier character, for instance, is allowed to show itself in his speech, as when he, a novice in this new world of Western clothing, money, drink, drugs, gambling, and syphilis, an innocent who does not understand that sleeping with a friend for warmth and company risks a flogging for sodomy, is taken under the wing of the fast-living, fast-talking Vilakazi. Plomer's close observation of the speech patterns of the customers of his father's trading store in Zululand is evident in his careful dialogue between the greenhorn and the veteran:

" Wé, Vilakazi," said the younger man, "I have a letter."
"Where is it from, that letter?"
"From my home."
"What does it say?
" "This letter? It says I am the chief of my father's people."
"What!"
"It says I am the king of the white people."
"What!"
"It says you must give me money. It says only ten shillings."
"You are cheating me, my friend."
"It is true. Read my letter."

The letter is itself a small masterpiece, and what follows is not only a melodramatic but also a moving and an authentic ending:

I cannot sleep always always I am coughing and your father has fever he is sick and all the people send greetings but they are dead as to their stomachs send if it is a pound only o my child my beloved greeting from your mother.

The unprincipled Vilakazi pretends to his illiterate protégé that the letter contains only greetings and pockets it:

"If you have it you will lose it, and it is safe with me. Some day we shall answer it; I will tell you when."

Ula Masondo made no answer. It was Sunday afternoon, and he wanted an excitement of the blood, he wanted to drink and shout, to drink and forget.

The foregoing quotations may help to demonstrate the closeness of Plomer's identification with and empathetic understanding of Ula Masondo and to counter any suggestion that nothing is seen through his eyes, for the man's characterization is an impressive mixture of external detail and inner revelation. The white characters are the merest sketches, appropriately maintaining the illusion of their being seen primarily from Ula Masondo's point of view, as in the brilliant presentation of the anonymous overlords of the mine only through his awareness of their gleaming limousine, "its fat tyres treading richly on the gravel." The commentary given to two white couples is a disfigurement, forming an unnecessarily explicit framework to Ula Masondo's story. But the other black characters are also distinct personalities: the moody giant Vilakazi; the eloquent gangster Stefan, whose analysis of the white race makes Ula Masondo feel the first stirrings of resentment; the voluptuous and exuberant Emma; and Isimayili, called Smile by the white people, who think him a cheerful houseboy and know nothing of the violent sadist his drunken off-duty self reveals. Smile's brand of Christian dandyism becomes a model for the young, impressionable Ula Masondo, who is much taken with Smile's Sunday manner, as, with a Bible in his pocket and a cane in his hand, he dispenses scorn (" Hau! He's just a heathen!") or praise ("Truly, this tobacco is Christian!") according to his idiosyncratic criteria. The white storekeeper who sells the blanket to the "decent" Ula Masondo at the beginning of the story, bewails this influence above all the others at the end of it, when Ula returns to Lembuland.

"Ula Masondo," collected in the volume I Speak for Africa (1927), remains one of the few undeniably great stories to have come out of South Africa, and though not flawless, it is perhaps the greatest of all, a story to which one can return again and again with profit and one that on each reading reveals new depths to its brilliance. In Roy Campbell's words, it "makes one's blood dance."

—Michael Herbert