Are we still human? On writing and humanism, and why history matters

Daily Maverick

10-07-2025

It is easy these days to fall into despair and helpless outrage, to feel utterly powerless, even as some of us march and protest against the conditions of terror and violence that are escalating around the globe.
Easy to despair as, sitting on my couch, hundreds of thousands are being starved, killed, forced to flee; as Donald Trump launches his grand (birthday) military parade; and as I read an interview with Doris Lessing from 1981.
The Nobel Prize-winning novelist spent her formative years in southern Africa, in what was then Rhodesia, a place where she railed against the wrongs of life in a racist and oppressive colonial society.
In the interview, she is asked, 'What can you accomplish with your books?' 'Not much,' she replies.
'Not much,' I respond, sitting on my couch, far away from Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza, the United States. 'Not much,' I say again, looking across at my desk where papers and notebooks are stacked, waiting for me.
Instead, I read further, come to the part of the interview where Lessing speaks of her futile hope that 'our politicians should be human beings… who know, respect, and understand their fellow human beings'.
Human beings. It is difficult not to swear or spit or laugh. Are they human beings, these men in power, doing the things they are doing? Can any of us remain human with these horrors occurring daily?
Why writers and history can matter
This is the despair taking over. But in better moments, I can remember some of the reasons that are given about why people like myself – writers – can matter, why history matters, what we can learn from them both, what they can mean to us all.
Just recently, I have been thinking a lot about humanism, its development, and its connection to writing. Perhaps it is simply an attempt to find something on which to hold – there is a poem by Elizabeth Jennings (no relation) titled, In a Mental Hospital Sitting Room, where she writes, 'there are no lifebelts here on which to fasten'.
Perhaps this essay is no more than a desperate grab for a lifebelt on which to fasten, a reaching out for some meaning, some trick or answer that can be used to drag me/us out of despair.
I'll start a little over 2,000 years ago, near Carthage (in present-day Tunisia, North Africa). It is here that the man who was later known as Publius Terentius Afer (Afer refers to his being from Africa) or simply Terence to the English-speaking world, was born into slavery in roughly 190 BCE.
At some point in his childhood or youth, he was taken to Rome to continue his enslaved existence. However, being handsome and clever, he was fortunate enough to be given his freedom while still a teenager, with the added bonus that his education was not only encouraged, but also paid for by his former enslaver.
Terence used this education to become a playwright, focusing on comedies, ones which are still read and performed to this day.
In one of these plays, Heauton Timorumenos (The Self-Tormentor) a character declares: ' Homo sum, humani nihil a me alimento puto ' (I am human, and consider nothing human alien to me). In context, the line would have been greeted with laughter from the audience since it is a nosy neighbour's response to being asked why he can't mind his own business.
But, as Sarah Bakewell notes in her Humanly Possible (2023), the line sums up an essential humanist belief: that we are all tied up in one another's lives.
To be clear, Terence was not a humanist himself – that philosophy wouldn't develop properly for almost one and a half thousand years, by which time the rediscovered classical texts of Greece and Rome served as models for the new humanist way of life. It was then that Terence's neat phrase was picked up by the Italian humanists and has remained significant in humanistic thinking ever since.
As humanism spread from Italy across Europe, one of the most influential thinkers was the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne, who was such a great admirer of Terence that he had the famous quote written on a ceiling beam in his personal library.
More than that, he found the plays to hold within them 'the movements of the soul and the state of our characters; at every moment our actions throw me back to [Terence].' This was, in his opinion, the value of the written word – books constitute an essential role in enriching our lives through understanding others.
Montaigne found that it was especially in biographies and histories that humans are 'more alive and entire than in any other place'. In other words, it is through books, with details of the past and individuals who have lived, that we come to a greater understanding of what it is to be human, in all its complexity, variation, and confusion.
David Hume
With time, as the Renaissance made way for the Enlightenment, David Hume, a Scottish philosopher, stepped forward. He was a promoter of the need for evidence, and was one of the most unwavering critics of religion in his time.
He did not believe in miracles or the concept of God-given morality. Instead, as a humanist, he believed that our morality lies in our own, human ability to feel sympathy for our fellow man. A noble belief, without a doubt. Yet, in a footnote, he made clear that this morality and sympathy did not apply to Africans, since they were barbarous and inferior with 'no ingenious manufacturers amongst them, no arts, no science'.
Unfortunately, such thinking was not uncommon at the time. In fact, as rationalism took over and the world moved towards a desire to control and classify all things, systems of separation and rankings within those systems began to dominate scientific thinking and filter into the beliefs of ordinary citizens.
Carl Linnaeus
Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus invented the modern classification system which arranges organisms into several categories, from kingdom to species. This became the basis for the universal method of taxonomy that is still in use today. In 1740 he unveiled his maiden attempt at human organisation, comprising four basic groups determined by skin colour: ' Europaeus albus, Americanus rubescens, Asiaticus fuscus, Africanus niger '; that is, European white, American red, Asian yellow and African black.
In 1758, when his Systema Naturae had gone into its tenth edition, he added two further types, namely wild men and monsters. To these he did not ascribe colours, but their addition tells us much about how preconceived notions regarding humankind influenced the system of classification.
Yet, it is important to note that despite these differences in colour and behaviour, Linnaeus was clear that all men were of the same species. His belief was that, in fact, all men were created equal, each one composed of the same basic material, and each with the same capacity for mental and moral achievement.
Anti-slavery sentiment
The idea of all men being created equal persisted, despite the oftentimes simultaneous and contradictory belief in European superiority. Eventually, towards the end of the 18th century, powerful anti-slavery sentiment spread across Europe and North America, as well as the colonies. The suggestion was that all humankind had the same right to freedom, and freedom to pursue their own progress and advancement.
The demand for the abolition of slavery manifested itself in the literature of the time in a multitude of ways, from the moral to the political, to the economic and the anthropological.
One of the most celebrated campaigners for abolition was Frederick Douglass, who escaped his enslavement in Maryland in 1838 and fled to New York. A famous example of the humanism evident in Douglass's thinking appears in a letter that he wrote to his former enslaver, Thomas Auld, on the tenth anniversary of his escape.
Douglass requests that Auld consider how he might feel if the humiliation and abuse Douglass had suffered at his hands had been inflicted upon Auld's daughter. Would the torture have been justified and natural then?
Lodewijk
There is another similar case, slightly earlier and closer to home in Cape Town. In November 1827, an enslaved 18-year-old male named Lodewijk protected his enslaved mother from a beating from the son of a white neighbour. The neighbour, Willem Boonsayer, complained to Lodewijk's enslaver that his son had been assaulted by Lodewijk. He also reported the assault to the authorities.
When confronted, Lodewijk said he had done no more than push the boy away, and he had witnesses to testify that no violence had been done. Even so, he was taken to jail and flogged.
Lodewijk had a petition drawn up by a notary, asking the government to explain how he had transgressed the law by stepping in to protect his mother. 'Though he is a slave,' writes the notary, 'yet he feels the same natural affection towards his mother as Mr Boonsayer can feel for his son.'
In both these pleas, there is a simple request to be seen as human and equal, that same plea which was adopted by the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade: 'Am I not a man and a brother? Am I not a woman and a sister?'
Abolition and colonialism
While the 19th century did see the eventual abolition of slavery across the globe (a slow process, with it occurring formally in South Africa in 1838, for example, but only half a century later in Brazil), a form of slavery or servitude continued in European colonies. This was most notable in Africa, a continent which had been cut up and doled out to European powers in the late 19th century.
As exiled South African writer Alex la Guma observed in his 1981 essay, Walk Among the Multitudes: 'I introduce colonialism because it is obviously impossible to talk about any aspect of African life without mentioning this horrendous phenomenon, which for generations smothered the continent in a stifling blanket of ignorance, poverty and stagnation.'
La Guma was not the only one to speak out against the confines of colonialism and its impact on all aspects and experiences of life. In 1961, Frantz Fanon remarked in The Wretched of the Earth about 'Europe where they were never done talking of Man, and where they never stopped proclaiming that they were only anxious for the welfare of Man: today we know with what sufferings humanity has paid for every one of their triumphs of their mind,' concluding that, 'We do not want to catch up with anyone. What we want to do is to go forward all the time, night and day, in the company of Man, in the company of all men.'
Again, this was the wish of so many in the 20th century: to be seen as equals; not to be tamed and moulded, but to grow and improve together.
Here I return to Montaigne, reminded of his belief that it is through reading about others, as well as other places, that we learn about being human, understanding not only something beyond ourselves, but ourselves as well.
Literature, rather than separating us, brings us together. After all, it is through writing and reading that the speaker in Oswald Mtshali's poem can be
[…] a man Amongst men […] [not] a faceless man Who lives in the backyard Of your house.
I do not suggest that a single poem, nor even a single poet, can change the world just by existing. Literature cannot prevent pain and suffering; it cannot change history and injustice.
But – and this is where its true value lies – it has the potential to create conditions and cultures which facilitate important endings and beginnings, such as abolition, such as independence, such as the end of apartheid, the end of genocides and tyrannies.
In this sense, every writer is a promoter of humanism because their general project is one of understanding others – a project that extends to their readers, uniting us all.
If our politicians cannot be human, let us, at the very least, remain so. Yes, continue to protest, but read and write as well. Educate yourself and others, create a culture in which each person is able to turn to their neighbours and recognise them, irrevocably, as fellow human beings. DM