Frederick Guy Butler was born in Cradock, in the Eastern Cape, on the 21st of January 1918. He moved to Grahamstown (now Makhanda) to study at Rhodes University, where he completed his Master of Arts degree in 1938. At Rhodes, Butler began cultivating his talents as a poet, writer and academic. He married his wife Jean in 1940 and soon after joined the army to fight in the Second World War.
Butler read Literature at Brasenose College in Oxford after the war, graduating in 1947. He returned to South Africa to take up a lectureship position in the English Department at the University of Witwatersrand. He subsequently moved back to Grahamstown in 1951 to take up a position as a senior lecturer in the Rhodes University English Department.
He became the department head from 1957 – 1987 and remained after retirement as Professor Emeritus until his death. He was awarded honorary doctorate degrees from Rhodes University, the University of Natal and the University of Witwatersrand. He died on the 26th of April 2001, aged 83.
Butler lived during a period of profound change in both the world and South Africa. He witnessed as a soldier the defeat of the Nazis in the Second World War and both the enforcement and dismantling of the Apartheid legislature in South Africa. His three autobiographies capture his life experiences: Karoo Morning, Bursting World, and A Local Habitation.
Along with these autobiographies, Butler worked profusely as an academic and lecturer. His essays and lectures were compiled into a book edited by Stephen Watson in 1994. While his plays allotted Butler early success and recognition in South Africa, it is in his poetry that his academically peculiar and engaging spirit is found.
After returning from the war, Butler completed his first collection of poetry, Stranger to Europe. Though largely war poems, Butler uses the collection to probe questions on why he, whose life knew Europe only through the literature he loved, was called from his rural habitations to fight for a European empire.
This split of being not quite European and not quite African became a significant theme in his poetic works. Take, for instance, his later poem “Myths”. The poems raise questions about the literary relationship between European imagery and African landscapes.
The questions do not seek to favour one over the other. Rather, they seek to wonder how the two co-habit the same space. Recall that he was writing in the height of early Apartheid when these differences were at their extreme. It expresses Butler’s belief in the inevitable syncretism that shall occur between what is categorised as ‘European’ or ‘African’ ways of being.
Such idealistic views were obviously criticised by those whose thinking aligned with the Apartheid regime, but their racist views warrant little engagement to a post-apartheid readership. The criticism of figures like Mike Kirkwood and his term “Butlerism”, whose argument against figures like Butler proves far more interesting to contemporary readers.
“Butlerism” is a term used to describe English-speaking South Africans (ESSAs) who do not “sufficiently acknowledge their complicity, as colonisers, in the racial oppression enforced under apartheid.” (Thurman 39). The term questions to what degree Butler reckons with the English language’s place as a language used during colonisation.
The negative connotations that this term bore to Butler’s writings were only made worse by his projects relating to the collection and publication of 1820s English settler’s diaries and journals – projects that seemed to convey an idealisation of the British colonial project.
Butler’s Leavisite inclinations in his academic work also brought him criticisms of being out-of-touch with the world he inhabited. Yet Butler, too, was an early champion of the importance of teaching South African literature in the classrooms. Two early anthologies of South African Poetry were published under his editorial hands.
In lectures like “On Being Present Where You Are: Some Observations on South African Poetry, 1930 – 1960, ” he forefronts the importance of literature in bringing people who co-habit the same environment together. Though written in English, his poems are filled with examinations of the natures of South African imageries and how such natures posit co-habitations of language and land.
Seen in this light, it can be argued that Butler’s interest in 1820 Settler’s Culture was not to create an idealistic, romantic, or nationalistic myth in a similar vein to the projects of the apartheid government. Instead, it can be seen as a means to historically place ones position in a nation; a means of tracing ones ancestry with the land.
Such ancestry serves the purpose of remembering how one came to inhabit spaces and the language used to create the habitation – a vital need if a future of co-habitation is sought.
Knowing the language of those who formed the spaces you inhabit is equal to understanding the history of their space-making. Whilst such work can be used for nationalistic purposes, it too can be used to liberate oneself from a place without history.
From the 1970s until the end of his life Butler turned his attention towards more academic pursuits. He toyed with the idea of enrolling for a PhD; he wrote a study on Shakespeare’s King Lear that, though unpublished, remains in its entire nearly 1000-page state in the National English Literature Museum (now the Amazwi South African Museum of Literature), one of the many institutes which Butler helped establish.
He helped found New Coin poetry journal. Butler continued playing an active managerial role at Rhodes University across departments. Within the town of Grahamstown, he played significant roles in establishing the National Arts Festival and the Grahamstown Foundation.
Whilst Butler’s influence in the South African literary landscape shall remain in the many fields that he worked in and through the many institutes he helped establish, his poetic works run the risk of falling into disfavour. Ironically, Butler’s poetry reckons with notions of importance and relevance in times of change.
Don Maclennan, a fellow poet and friend of Butler, notes that Butler’s poetry says, “if there are certainties, their credibility depends in large measure on personal belief, since nothing is fixed or certain in this world ridden by time, change and death.”
Butler lived in a world of profound change. Since his death, South Africa, too, has changed. Butler’s poetry offers a unique perspective on how to find personal spaces so that humans and their endeavours can co-habit such changes together.
Works cited:
Maclennan, D. 2005. “The Poetry of Guy Bulter”. English in Africa. 32(2): 39-52.
Thurman, C. 2010. Guy Butler: Reassessing a South African Literary Life. Scottsville. University of Kwa-Zulu Natal Press.
Watson, S. Ed. 1994. Guy Butler: Essay and Lectures 1949 – 1994. Cape Town & Johannesburg. David Philip Publishers.
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Kris Van der Bijl 
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