The Fogstar Project

By William Ngwenya Burroughs

The Fogstar Project is a romp through 1970s South Africa as members of the Okhela Group train their sights on Fogstar, Prime Minister of the Republic. Rambunctious Sithole, professor of Hitler Studies at the University of Umtata, provides the backdrop to this thrilling comic novel by lost surrealist writer, William Ngwenya Burroughs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Ngwenya Burroughs
• Release date: Apr 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310351594

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THE FOGSTAR PROJECT

William Ngwenya Burroughs

Text copyright © 2014 William Ngwenya Burroughs

All rights reserved

Cover painting: Man of the Red Mountain (Madiba), 1986 © Jayne Beaumont

No such project exists.

This is a work of fiction. It is not based on a true story. It is a narrative inspired by actual persons in South Africa but is neither an attempt to depict the actual persons, nor to comment on their actions.

The narrative also presents characters whose existence is purely fictional, albeit inspired by the zeitgeist of the 1970s.

The events are improbable.

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For Gorki and Gramps

and you, butcher

burdened with the security of the state

what are your thoughts when the night begins to show her skeleton

and the first burbling scream is forced from the prisoner

as if of birth

flooded by the fluids of parturition?

are you then humbled by this blood-smeared thing

with its humanoid shuddering shocks

and its broken breath of dying

in your hands?

does the heart also tighten in your throat

when you paw its slippery limbs

with the very hands that will caress the secrets of your wife?

—Breyten Breytenbach

When I turn on my radio, when I hear that someone in the Pondoland forest was beaten and tortured, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead, when I turn on my radio, when I hear that someone in jail slipped off a piece of soap, fell and died I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead, he is likely to be found in Pretoria.

—Steve Biko

Contents

Editor's Foreword

Chapter One-Fogstar Speaks

Chapter Two-The Paper Curtain

Chapter Three-Die Lucky Dip

Chapter Four-Shark Island

Chapter Five-Nakob

Chapter Six-The Fogstar Project

Chapter Seven-Fogstar in Jerusalem

Chapter Eight-Sowhereto?

Chapter Nine-Annamarie gets an Abortion

Chapter Ten-Transkei

Chapter Eleven-Pelindaba

Chapter Twelve-Ideological State Apparatus

Chapter Thirteen-Om te Dreun

Editor's Afterword

Appendix

Acknowledgements

Glossary

Editor’s Foreword

In 2012, I was browsing the book dealers on the Grand Parade in Cape Town, when I came across the yellowing manuscript of a novel called The Fogstar Project. On closer inspection, it proved to be a narrative account of the turbulent history of the 1970s in South Africa, with many allusions to Hitler and Nazism.

As I am a Professor in Hitler Studies at the University of Transkei, this grabbed my attention, and mirabile dictu, I felt that I was living up to my name, Sithole, which means ‘we have found’. I acquired the manuscript on the spot.

Of the ostensible author, William Ngwenya Burroughs I could find no trace in the official records. Judging from the age of the manuscript’s paper, I estimate that it was written around 1980. Readers will have to excuse the somewhat rough and ready nature of the text: it is clearly the outpouring of a young mind, one that Plato may have regarded as immature and not capable of philosophy.

The ‘Fogstar’ of the title and one of the principal protagonists in the novel clearly refers to Balthazar Johannes (John) Vorster, the Prime Minister of South Africa from 1966 till 1978. Other members of his government are referred to by the code names they gave each other. ‘Langman’ refers to General Hendrik van den Bergh, head of the Bureau for State Security (BOSS). ‘Stefaans’ or ‘Blink Stefaans’ refers to Eschel Rhoodie, Secretary of the Department of Information, responsible for the secret propaganda campaign that led to the Information Scandal that finally ended Vorster’s rule in disgrace. ‘Pangaman’ refers to P.W. Botha, the Minister of Defence of the time. Vorster’s actual code name was ‘Olympus’.¹

Eminent historian, Hermann Giliomee, has characterised Vorster’s leadership in these terms:

Vorster represented a strange case: a leader who dominated parliament, led his people to resounding victories at the polls, and enjoyed the trust of his people, yet was unable to provide any leadership to extricate his country from a system that had become dysfunctional, threatening the very possibility of peaceful change.²

The novel poses the question: was Vorster, in practice, a Nazi – given his internment during the Second World War as a General of the Ossewa Brandwag, an organisation with marked pro-Nazi sympathies? It also raises the question of whether the system of apartheid rule can properly be seen as a form of fascism, an issue on which there has been extensive debate.

The evidence-in-chief for saying that Vorster was a Nazi lies in a report in the Ons Land newspaper of 5 May 1942 about a speech Vorster gave in Mossel Bay, in which he is quoted as saying:

We are not National-Socialists; we stand for Christian Nationalism, which is an ally of National-Socialism. A land can only be governed in two ways, namely, on a democratic basis or on an anti-democratic system. In the first instance, it is the money power that plays that role today. The anti-democratic system you can call dictatorship if you like. In Italy, it is known as Fascism, in Germany National Socialism and in South Africa Christian Nationalism.³

In an interview, Mr Vorster had this to say about whether he was a Nazi or not:

We were not opposed to the rise of Nazi Germany. But that does not mean that we were Nazi’s or that we ever hung onto or took over or marvelled at the Nazi ideology. I can say with a clear conscience that I was never a Nazi. I never regarded myself as a Nazi. We were not anti-English; we were against British imperialism.⁴

In passing, the novel also traces a number of peculiar similarities between the Vorster period and the current government in South Africa, on which I have taken the liberty to add comments as footnotes, here and there, for those readers willing to divert themselves momentarily from the story itself. In electronic publishing the footnote is revealed by clicking on it. This poses the question of whether the coalition government of the ANC, SACP and COSATU can be characterised as having totalitarian tendencies, in the mode analysed by Hannah Arendt in her magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism⁵

As you can imagine, these are questions that are grist to the mill of any self-righteous Professor of Hitler Studies. However, I will reserve my observations and comments to my ‘Afterword’, but I do want to make a few observations about time and history. I was recently reading the fine book on time by physicist, Lee Smolin, and was struck by the observation he made about time past:

The past was real but is no longer real. We can, however, interpret and analyse the past, because we find evidence of past processes in the present.⁶

As I was driving away from the Grand Parade with the manuscript of The Fogstar Project safely in my possession, I heard Evita Bezuidenhout on Cape Talk radio and she said, ‘In South Africa, the future is certain, it’s the past that’s unpredictable!’

Dear reader, I invite you to sit back, relax and enjoy the ride!

Prof. Dr. Rambunctious Sithole

Professor of Hitler Studies

University of Transkei

13 December 2013

Chapter One

Fogstar Speaks

Please allow me to introduce Fogstar, beetle-browed, a great slab of beef of a man, Prime Minister of the Republic of South Africa, Brezhnev of the Boers, a Colossus striding the campus of the University of Stellenbosch. We join him as he approaches the Arts Building, bodyguards akimbo, to address a meeting of the SAAK club⁷, the debating society of the verligte students.

Looking up at the raked tier of white students, all standing, the din reduced to a respectful silence, Fogstar gestured for them to sit and began to speak.

‘As I stand here before you this evening, I am taking an unshakeable stand on the policy of separate development because it is the only policy which is going