A Tribute to C.J. (Jonty) Driver from the Council of The Caine Prize for African Writing

Jonty Driver, who has died aged 83, was in every way a large and impressive presence on the Advisory Council of The Caine Prize, joining it at its inception and only resigning from it in 2020.  Jonty was a big man physically: this was always the first thing anybody said about him when they first met him.  Within a short while, however, they would be saying he was a big man morally.  He was never afraid to speak his mind, even when he felt that the balance of opinion might be going against him.

Jonty had the right background for speaking up, having served in 1963 and 1964 as president of the National Union of South African Students. It is hard to recall for those who were not alive at the peak of apartheid how exposed a position this was.  Jonty felt that his responsibilities lay to all students, not just those like himself who were white and from a relatively privileged background.  Inevitably he aroused suspicion in the paranoic world of the South African government and its spying agencies.  He was arrested and spent several weeks in solitary confinement.  Never formally charged, he decided on release to leave South Africa and to come to England.  The metaphorical scars of what he had been through, and what he had seen among deprived communities in black South Africa, never left him. Even in old age he felt, by his association with The Caine Prize and with the Beit Trust, that he was paying something back to the continent and to the country which had nurtured him at the expense of so many millions less advantaged.

He was a literary man through and through.  His novel Elegy for a Revolutionary came out in 1969 and is still regarded as a classic exposition of the liberal dilemmas of the day. Is armed conflict justified in opposing a tyrannous regime?   Jonty was the author of five novels in all and went on to write two biographies of South African dissenters, Patrick Duncan and John Harris. 

I suspect, however, that he wanted most of all to be remembered as a poet.  His collections So Far and Still Further bring together most of his major poems written between 1960 and 2020.  They are various in subject, some personal, some public, but always they seem to me to be pressing against the forms that poetry can take, as though he wanted to mould new shapes and possibilities for the art itself.  He was a great believer in the pamphlet poem, such as The Slave-Bell at Doornhoek, which he accompanied with a water colour, ‘a painting and a poem’.   It was from this late work that I quoted at our most recent Council meeting:

                                  ‘The names we gave the places where we lived

                                    (not all that long ago) are changing now,

                                    to what they might have been before we came,

                                    or what we might have wished they would have been

                                    if we had never settled here.   How vain

                                    that we should think we could repair the past

                                    or give that bell another, better voice.’

Jonty was a paradoxical man.  A revolutionary, yet a conservative.  A man horrified by injustices perpetrated by his own class and breed, yet the successful headmaster of three independent schools - Berkhamsted School and Wellington College in England, and the Island School in Hong Kong – which some people might say exist to perpetuate these élites.  He was above all an immensely kind man.  On several occasions my wife and I visited Jonty and his wife Ann at their serene bookish home in east Sussex.  They were a model couple in the manner in which they faced some of the debilities of old age.  Jonty did most of the cooking because he loved to do so.  Anything he embarked on he did with the utmost fastidiousness.  The result was, for example, a perfect salmon mousse, the recipe for which I shall always treasure.  He was a rounded ‘man o’ pairts’, as we say in Scotland. 

And coming back to the Caine Prize, he was always wise and judicious in his counsel. He valued the Prize because it recognises so many voices that might otherwise remain unheard.  It also allowed him to stay connected with the African literary world, in which he had played a major role.  His sister’s partner is J. M. Coetzee.  If I had such a formidable Nobel laureate in my family I would be anxious about anything I wrote, but Jonty was uncowed.  In his way he was no lesser a writer and, like Coetzee, he was one of the greatest sons of modern South Africa.  The Caine Prize should be proud of its links with him and must pass to his widow our sorrow at his passing.

Alastair Niven, London, August 2023

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