The road not travelled: Tracking love in Frank Anthony’s the journey: The revolutionary anguish of Comrade B

Abstract

The Journey (1991) is a virtually unknown “struggle” novel by Frank Anthony (d. 1993), a senior member of the African People’s Democratic Union of Southern Africa (APDUSA), who was incarcerated on Robben Island for six years. The novel and its author have been elided from South African history as a racialized literary establishment and the defensiveness of the resistance organization of which he was a member reinforced each other in tacit censorship. Anthony’s novel presents revealing insights into the repression of the personal in the anti-apartheid movement, which reflected the “liquidation” of love in leftist discourse of the period. The importance of love, especially romantic love – the highly volatile emotion which is often boundary-breaking and radically transformative – has been recognized in contemporary post- Marxism and critical race theory. Blindness to the potential of love in dominant struggle politics is reflected in the protagonist of The Journey, whose passion for social justice leads, paradoxically, to repression of the empowerment and emancipation of self(lessness) through other(s), enabled by eros. A final version of this article appears in English in Africa 50.1 (Apr 2023): 73–98, DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/eia.v50i1.4