-
Letteratura
Itala
Vivan
-
- THE
CONSTRUCTION OF
WHITENESS/BLACKNESS
- AND
THE INVENTION OF
MISCEGENATION
- IN
SOUTH AFRICAN LITERARY TEXTS OF THE 1920S
AND 1930*
-
-
In an exploration of the
attitudes taken by different cultures in different
historical periods with regard to the cultural
phenomenon of hybridity, I came across an interesting
chiasm within the domain of South African literature
in the early decades of the twentieth
century.
- The two sides of the chiasm
belong one to the white and the other to the black
tradition, and are formed by four extremely important
novels in the South African literary
genealogy.
- The white novels are God's
Stepchildren by Sarah Gertrude Millin, published
in London in 1924 by Constable, and Turbott
Wolfe by William Plomer, also published in London,
but in 1926 and by the Hogarth Press of Virginia and
Leonard Woolf. The black novels are Chaka by
Thomas Mofolo, published in 1925 at Morija, South
Africa by the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society
(PEMS) in the Sesotho language, and Mhudi by
Solomon Tsikisho Plaatje, published in 1930 by the
Lovedale Press, also in South Africa1.
- Both Millin and Plomer center
their narratives around the issue of relationships
between black and whites, focusing in particular on
the sexual encounter between individuals of the two
different groups and the origination of mixed descent.
Conversely, Mofolo and Plaatjie seem little interested
in such issue, so the chiasm created by the four
authors opens towards radically different solutions to
the problem created by the black/white encounter in
South Africa, while positioning itself along the line
of racial divide and at the very crossways of the
intellectual debate taking place at the time. Thus
such a crossway is also an intersection and takes on a
name of its own, a definition the English language
coined expressly for this purpose -
miscegenation. Such a definition of mixed
sexual relationships bears the stigma of deviancy and
unnaturalness and therefore the brunt of shame and the
consequent horror and punishment.
-
- The early decades of the
twentieth century saw a systematic escalation of
racism in South Africa, while the process of gradual
expropriation of indigenous land and subjugation of
indigenous populations was gaining momentum. After the
conclusion of the Anglo-Boer war (1899-1902), the
influence of the English colonial presence spread all
over the country and established an economic,
institutional but also intellectual hegemony. The
declaration of the Union of South Africa in 1909
brought some improvement to the position of the Boers
in the game of power, but the African populations were
totally excluded from the new pact. Not only so:
within a short time the appropriation of the land by
the European settlers achieved its zenith with the
Native Land Act of 1913. The last signs of organized
resistance were quickly taken care of, as happened in
the case of the Zulu rebellion of 1909 led by the
mythical hero Bambatha and brutally put down, as
witnessed among others by Gandhi himself, who in that
circumstance sided with the British and then bitterly
regretted it, as we may see in his
autobiography2.
- As has been proven by recent
historical research, the takeover by the British
accelerated the total colonization of the indigenous
populations, which were by then needed as free labour
to be recruited in the farms and mines owned and run
by the Europeans. Yet one should not undervalue the
role of the intellectual influence of British culture
in that particular phase of South African history:
including that of British liberal thought as well as
that of evolutionism and eugenetics, and the British
position on the so-called 'native
question'.
- But there were endogenous
colonial elements which greatly contributed to that
view, and, what is more, to that organization of races
which was then to develop as apartheid from 1948
onwards. Saul Dubow reminds us how during that period,
in South Africa out of "two opposing uses of 'culture'
there emerged a third anthropologically influenced
notion of culture, [...] that was to become
part of the legitimising ideology of segregation" and
"was to be found in a policy of racially segregated
development" (Dubow, in Marks and Trapido: 1987, 84).
'Separate development' was the word used as a mask for
'apartheid', while 'miscegenation' had been the
definition meant to implicitly refuse and reject
hybridity. The great war of words began on a note of
extraordinary hypocrisy, accusing the factual reality
of South Africa to be contaminated and hence implying
the implicit idea that salvation might come from
ethnic cleansing, as later advocated by the ideologues
of apartheid.
- In 1924, the white writer
Sarah Gertrude Millin put the following words in the
mouth of one of her characters, the relentlessly
zealous Edith Lindsell:
-
- Things have
been left alone too long. They should have been
stopped hundreds of years ago - hundreds of
years ago. It should have never been allowed to
happen in South Africa that - that white
children should have come into the world with
shame and sorrow in their blood. (Millin: 1924,
271)
-
- God's Stepchildren is,
from beginning to end, a sustained oratorial invective
against racial mixing. Its plot spans several
generations descending from a new sort of original
sin, the marriage of Reverend Andrew Flood to a
Hottentot woman named Silla in a remote village in the
interior of the Cape Colony in the early nineteenth
century. Andrew and Silla produce a number of brown
children, and one of them, Deborah, makes love with a
fair haired Boer and gives birth to Kleinhans. Around
1842 Kleinhans, grown to be a man, dreams he can marry
a white girl, but has to content himself with a
coloured girl called Lena:
-
- Lena herself
showed in her delicacy of feature and clear
yellowish skin her ancestral superiority over
Kleinhans. For all she had the straight, coarse,
black hair and shadowed black eyes of the Cape
girl, and Kleinhans' hair and eyes were light in
colour, it was quite obvious that she was
further removed from the aboriginal than he was.
The Hottentot blood in him expressed itself in
his heavy, triangular-shaped face and wide nose;
but she had the thin little nose, the well-cut
mouth and the oval cheek-line of her Malay
grandmother, her German blood showed in her
paler skin, and her voice, too, was light and
gentle where that of Kleinhans was heavy with
nearness to the African earth.
[...]
- And Kleinhans
[...] learned to forget [...]
that he had once intended to marry a pure white
girl, and that he had been beaten almost to
death for merely speaking to one (Millin: 1924,
127-128).
-
- It is interesting to analyze
the quality of this description. The two individuals
are depicted against the foil of an absolute and
unquestionable pattern of canonic beauty which is
ostensibly white and European. Their (relative)
handsomeness is measured on that meter only, and they
may be defined 'attractive' only insofar as their
features approach a white ideal of beauty. But the
most remarkable thing is that, while on one hand they
are given as an improvement on the 'aboriginal'
ancestor, "a thing like a beast" (Millin: 1924, 240),
on the other they have a new and monstrous quality of
their own , they are "half-caste" (Millin: 1924, 247),
"unnatural creatures" (Millin: 1924, 295; italics in
the text), and their being such acquires an
additionally negative value.
- Millin embraces the theory of
eugenetics and envisages the progress of mankind from
a state of abjection (aboriginal Hottentot) to the
perfection of whiteness (European), but instinctively
refuses to accept the intermediate step of that same
process, the mixed creature, the coloured. It is a
fundamental contradiction in the novel and it creates
a strange and enigmatic tension without relief. The
solution finally adopted by Barry Lindsell, Kleinhans
and Lena's apparently white grandchild, who decides to
leave the society of Europeans and join "his coloured
family" while refusing to procreate, or rather
disowning the child who is already under way, the
fruit of his union with the pure and immaculately
white English wife Nora, is not a real solution, but a
way out of the predicament.
- Barry's is a non-solution
because his child will be born anyway and because his
choice does not erase the offensive presence of
coloured people from the face of South Africa. A
rationally consistent reasoning would rather suggest
the destruction of the impure offspring and the
castration of the violators: in a word, the practices
of nazism. Millin positions her novel one step short
of the final solution advocated by nazism, which by
the way reveals a grotesque aspect in that she was a
Jew whose family had emigrated to South Africa from
Lithuania, and she had only just started to climb the
social ladder.
- Millin's obsession with blood
and its different qualities offers a range of
different justifications. She assumes that individuals
of mixed descent are less intelligent: for instance,
beautiful Elmira, the daughter of Kleinhans and Lena,
who was to become the wife of the old white farmer
Lindsell and give birth to Barry, was sent to a school
for white girls, where she passed for
white:
-
- She was not
as clever at her schoolwork as she had promised
to be when a child. It was as if her brain,
running a race against the brains of white
children, was very quick at starting but soon
tired and lagged behind, so that the time came
when it fell altogether out of the running
(Millin: 1924, 152).
-
- The peculiar slowing down of
the coloured girl's brain is not an exception. The
progenitor of the unfortunate, "degenerate" kin, Rev.
Andrew Flood, had already noticed the same phenomenon
in his offspring:
-
- He had
thought that a child with a white father might
be different. He knew that the native children
arrived at their full capacity very early. At
the age of four or five they were far in advance
of white children of the same age; but at
fourteen or fifteen they would begin to falter,
to lag behind, to remain stationary while their
white competitors went ahead. It seemed to the
missionary as if their minds were unlocked
sooner, but also sooner locked again. He had a
vague theory that it had all to do with the
traditional hardness of their skulls (Millin:
1924, 84).
-
- Here the scientific ideas of
the time provide peculiar reasons for her beliefs. But
the scientific pretext does not prevent us from
reading the terrific violence inscribed in the
narrative, and does not hide the naked truth of the
fact that she assumes that the whole mankind is to be
classified in categories and treated accordingly. The
delirium of taxonomy which lies below the surface was
probably the reason why the novel became so popular in
Germany and was also well received in the United
States where in the '20s and '30s the practice of
lynching blacks was still rife in the South and the Ku
Klux Klan was active and powerful. It is important to
notice that in her categorization Millin puts women at
an 'inferior' level. Women are, following the Bible,
"The weaker vessel" (Ibidem: 215), and
therefore passive and subaltern to males, so that they
can be assimilated to lower caste beings. A typical
example of passive and 'low' behaviour in the novel is
to be found in wild, beautiful Elmira. Desired and
courted by old Mr Lindsell she marries him, submitting
to his arrogant, domineering behaviour, and is
somewhat accepted by the white society, because (as
Millin concludes) money "can make even black blood
golden" (Ibidem: 176).
- The taxonomic fixation of
this writer is again evident in another novel, Mary
Glenn (1925), which is not usually included in the
race fiction of the period. The four main characters
in Mary Glenn, but also the minor figures,
white and black, are all rigidly classified into
social groups distinct one from another and not to be
mixed together. Even among the whites, the standing of
the inhabitants of the colony is far below that of the
English. Mary leaves South Africa for England, where
she marries an Englishman who turns out to be a weak
and ineffectual man. "I wanted to get away from
Lebanon [the colonial town]", she explains to
her mother. "And he was a gentleman. He is a
gentleman. No one in Lebanon has got an accent like
his, or such good manners. [...] he has been
to a public school." (Millin: 1925, 78-79) When very
young, Mary had shown an arrogance which, says Millin,
was not "an appropriate arrogance" (Millin: 1925, 38),
for it did not correspond to her state or rank in
society. Again, the social transgression of a girl who
wants to climb the social ladder acquires a sinful
value and will be duly punished with a tragic
retrocession to an even lower position. In keeping
with this view of life, the Africans who appear in the
book are mere manikins, invariably called 'kaffirs'
and left out of the story: totally otherized by the
narrative economy.
- John M. Coetzee, in his
seminal analysis of Millin's work, states that her
ideas on race are not "a hotpotch of colonial
prejudices but the reflection of respectable
scientific and historical thought, only barely out of
date in her time". (Coetzee: 199, 152) Yet the
identification of blood with race, the obsession with
defilement and its coincidence with sex as the
encounter of two different beings - that is,
the encounter with the other - and the lack of
compassion which she deploys in her narrative, make of
Millin one of the foremost of race writers in the
colonial tradition. The fact that her ideas are
embodied in powerful fictional characters makes them
all the more frightening, for the partition which
separates her from the philosophy of nazism is very
thin indeed.
- In his Preface to the 1986
edition of God's Stepchildren, Tony Voss throws
a useful parallel and illustration by quoting a 1934
essay by the South African R.F.A. Hoernlé
entitled "Race-Mixture and Native Policy in South
Africa":
-
- We can, I
think, recognise three elements within it
[the philosophy which lies beneath the
accepted South African attitude against
race-mixture], which may be conveniently
distinguished as:
- a. the idea
of race purity;
- b. the ideal
of racial dominance;
- c. the ideal
of maintenance of white civilization and culture
[...].
- The argument
[...] assumes that there are distinct
human 'races', or, better, 'stocks'; that these
stocks can be graded as superior and inferior;
that the measure of such superiority and
inferiority is white civilisation, which must be
regarded as the 'highest' so far created by any
human stock and the starting point for all
further advance.
- In short, the
basis of culture is biological, it varies with
the innate qualities of different human stocks.
Culture is a function of race (Voss in Millin:
1924, 8).
-
- Sarah Gertrude Millin became
in her own time the great lady of South African
literature and was widely regarded as the speaker for
the South African cultural world. William Plomer, the
son of English parents, sent to the remote province of
an immense empire to try his luck and ability in the
commercial arena, was and remained an Englishman. But
his novel Turbott Wolfe, published in 1926 when
he was still very young, is strangely imbibed with the
themes of South African cultural debates and steeped
in the beauty of the country he knew well - for a
number of years he lived in a trading post in what is
now known as KwaZulu, indicated in the novel as
Ovuzane - and may well be included in the area of
South African literary tradition where Thomas Pringle
and Rider Haggard also belong: individuals who visited
the colony for contingent reasons but for a while made
their home there and interpreted its pulsions and
images3.
- The book is interesting in
the present context because it centers around
miscegenation as a frightfully transgressive reality
in the milieu of South African colonial life in the
Twenties. It is organized partly as a journal by one
Turbott Wolfe (the writer himself) and a nameless
narrator, Turbott's friend, who exchanges letters with
him and also relates some aspects of the story or
comments on them. Turbott appears in a role similar to
that of Conrad's Marlow, for he has gone into the
darkness of Africa and has seen the horror written on
Kurtz's face. In the opening section there are telling
allusions to 'obscurity': "I felt
obscured"[...] But Turbott Wolfe seemed so
little obscured that..." (Plomer: 1926, 9); "I began
to concern myself with the colour of people's skin.",
and "The obscurity of the man's behaviour"; "the
obscure attractive soul of the African"
(Ibidem, 14-15).
- Such 'obscurity' soon turns
into outright 'blackness' and becomes the hero's main
problem:
-
- There would
be conflict between myself and the white; there
would be conflict between myself and the black.
There would be the unavoidable question of
colour. It is a question to which every man in
Africa, black, white or yellow, must provide his
own answer (Ibidem, 17).
-
- I don't want
you to think that I had ever been really out of
sympathy with the natives: it was simply that
their existence, their blackness, if you see
what I mean, had seemed too much for me
(Ibidem, 28).
-
- Slowly a taboo emerges darkly
into Turbott's consciousness. He likes to look at the
Africans and considers them handsome; he even falls in
love with a splendid young girl - but this is a crime
in the eyes of the white settlers:
-
- I began to
learn the hard lesson that in Lembuland it is
considered a crime to regard the native as
anything even so high as a mad animal. I began
to seek information about the blacks and whites
[...] (Ibidem, 19).
-
- My eye was
training itself to admire to excess the
over-developed marvellous animal grace of each
Lembu individual. [...]I was losing my
balance. I remembered that every civilized white
man, who considers himself sensitive, in touch
with native peoples in his daily life should
hold in his heart an image of the failure of
Gauguin. Was it a failure? I asked myself
[...] . I found myself all at once
overwhelmed with a suffocating sensation of
universal black darkness. Blackness. I was being
sacrificed, a white lamb, to black Africa
(Ibidem, 20)4.
-
- Turbott falls for the
beautiful Nhliziyombi who is presented as an epitome
of purity itself, intact Africa prior to the contact
with Western civilization, missionary work,
contaminating experiences. Nhliziyombi's silhouette is
somewhat exotic, but also the centre of a new
attraction that Turbott experiences as threatening - a
maelstrom:
-
- She was a
fine rare savage, of a type you will find
nowhere now: it has been killed by the missions,
the poor whites and the towns. [...] I
have seen not a little of the natives, and I
have an immense faith in their character. But it
is too late now. The missionaries [...]
took away everything from the natives - all
those vague mysterious savage ways of mind on
which their lives were conducted, often very
honourably and even nobly, certainly with
method, and what on earth did they give them
instead? Example?. No.
[...].
- But I was
telling you about the girl. An aboriginal,
perfectly clean and perfectly beautiful. I have
never seen such a consummate dignity. She was
rather tall and rather a light colour. She used
to wear a piece of black material embroidered
with grass: it was wound tightly round her body
just below the breasts, and fell in straight
folds to her feet. [...] She was fit to
be the wife of an ambassador.
- [...]
Now to tell you the truth, I had been much
afraid of incurring any emotion so violent and
unforeseen as that which seized me the very
moment I caught sight of Nhliziyombi.
[...] From the time that I first went to
Ovuzane I had been at pain to control any
amorous feeling towards the natives, because I
was afraid [...].
- As soon as
had fallen in love with Nhliziyombi I was
afraid of falling in love with her.
[...] She was an ambassador of all that
beauty [...], that intensity of the old
wonderful unknown primitive African life-outside
history, outside time, outside science. She was
a living image of what has been killed by people
like Flesher, by our obscene civilization that
conquers everything. I think if you go into the
question thoroughly you will find that
ultimately, our civilization is obscene
(Ibidem,
30-31).
-
- This long passage registers
the turning point of the enamoured hero's relationship
with Africa: here is attraction and enchantment, but
also the presence of danger, the vortex of a frightful
transgression whose nature soon becomes
explicit:
-
- I suppose you
mean that I was white and the girl was black.
[...] I am too much the humanitarian to
be colour-blind. There was no question of
pigment (I was in love, remember) but there
appeared to be a great forbidding law, like all
great forbidding laws, subcutaneous (Ibidem,
33-34).
-
- The taboo - miscegenation -
is finally revealed. In Turbott's story the mixing of
races blends with the mixing of sexes and increases
fear. Turbott's romantic love affair gives way and
yields to the more earthly story of a mixed couple
formed by a white woman, Mabel, who is depicted as a
sort of amazon, an androginous beauty, and the black
minister Zachary Msomi. Another character comes into
play, Reverend Friston, who supports the mixed couple
and celebrates their wedding, but is also jealous of
the black Zachary and sinks into a nervous breakdown
under the pressure of events. His are the first words
of condemnation of the new union, which also has the
role of achieving a political objective in the
activity of the Young Africa group:
-
- It was one
thing to talk glibly about miscegenation, to
fool about with an idea, and another to find
oneself face to face with the actual happening:
it was the difference between a box of matches
and a house on fire.
- [...]
I could foresee the birth of rivalry between
those two men: the one black, the other white. I
felt myself to be like a scientist who watches
some enormity of nature through a microscope - I
was an entomologist observing the titanic and
elemental lusts of beetles infinitesimal in a
tiny battleground, where blades of grass were
greater than tree-trunks and the dynamics of sex
were rending hearts (Ibidem,
69).
-
- Then this
idea of miscegenation. How can I believe in it?
It is a nightmare. This girl could not really
mean to give herself to an African. She would be
cutting herself clean off her own world.
[...] I am afraid of this miscegenation
(Ibidem, 85).
-
- It is interesting to note
that the discourse touches upon a scientific view of
life where hybridity is synonymous with monstrosity.
The fictional commentators seem to oscillate between
two opposite poles, the one looking backward, towards
evolutionism and the struggle for survival where only
the strong resist and win and where we are in a
universe of hardness and violence, the other open to
the future and envisaging a possible world of harmonic
fusion.
- The pressure and tension
towards such a future are too much for Friston, who
gives in under the effect of a powerful African drug
and has frightening and delirious visions where the
dark cloud of Conradian memory comes back to haunt the
crumbling world of the white man in Africa: "HORROR
was written in the sun. [...] Oh, you slimy
coward! Your God's fear. So is mine. But wait till you
see 'HORROR', my child, written in the sun"
(Ibidem, 88).
- Yet this same man had had
words of peace and love for the couple when he married
them, trying to prove that miscegenation could
succeed:
-
- We have
always insisted that miscegenation is a
misapplied term. Here is a chance for these two
members of ours to prove that it is possible for
two individuals of different races, one white
and the other black, to come together happily
and successfully in the most intimate of
relationships. Let us unite in wishing them
every possible good fortune all their days
(Ibidem, 99).
-
- The scene closes with Mabel
who goes away "in her springing stride" and assumes
the value of a "goddess of the future" - "And her name
was Eurafrica". However the readers know that South
African colonial society is not yet ready to accept
the new vision of life, and this priestess of the
future "is going out to suffer" (Ibidem,
105).
-
- William Plomer intertwines
romantic dreams and utopian visions, dark fears and
forebodings, projecting them on the screen of the
rural Africa he had come to know. He realizes that the
project of Young Africa - with its hints of the new
political directions started first by the SANC (then
ANC), founded in 1912, then by the ICU and the
movement inspired by Marcus Garvey through Klement
Kadalje - was bound to founder on the rocks of
colonial inflexibility and selfishness. And there was
that other aspect of the discourse on the native
question - sheer and brutal racism as exemplified in
an appalling episode related by a white settler, the
unpleasant Soper:
-
- One night..
It was a hot summer's night, with thunder in the
air, and dark. Man, it was dark that night.
Well, these Dutch people had a young governess
with them [...] she was living in an
outside room [...] it was such a hot
night she couldn't sleep, and she came to the
door in her nighdress to get some air. Now there
was a nigger, Jacop, that used to work as a
waggon-driver [...]. He saw the girl
standing at the door. Well, you can guess what
happened. [...] [He] heard the
nigger's voice in the outside room, and looked
in - Well, he didn't make a great fuss. He sent
the girl to the house [...]. He tied the
nigger down to the bed. Then [...] he
came riding down to me. Man, d'you know what we
did? We castrated that nigger. [...] We
kicked the nigger out. Man, talk about rain!
I've never seen such rain as there was that
night [...].
- Wait, that's
not all. After a time the girl was going to have
a child, and the old Romaines kicked her out.
[...] She said she wanted to tell us
that Jacop had gone past her door that night.
She had called him back. She it was, she said,
who was to blame. She had asked him to come in.
She loved him (Ibidem,
74-75-76).
-
- Here again the awful taboo
comes up, surrounded by ugly violence and suspicion.
Sexual encounters are recurrent in 'white' South
African literature in order to interpret the anxiety
weighing on human relationships and to anticipate
threat and revenge.
- In Plomer's story the issue
is defused by the confession of the white girl who
belatedly admits to having invited the black youth
into her room, while in Lewis Nkosi's novel Mating
Birds written in the apartheid years we never know
how things really went, and tend to conclude that
apartheid totally obscures the truth of facts and
prevents us from 'seeing'5.
Still during apartheid years, Arthur Maimane in
Victims told the story of the rape of a white
woman by a black youth and the consequences it
entailed: the rape was decided on the spur of the
moment, born out of idle frustration and hatred,
almost to fulfil the stereotype of the black man
rapist in a moment of raptus6.
- When there is rape, sexual
intercourse takes place forcibly and with violence, so
as to impose on the white world the truth that same
world refuses to accept, the urge to live together,
blacks and whites, and mix in sex but also out of sex.
The interdiction forces the victim of segregation to
implode into rape and destruction.
- One very recent example of
rape in South African fiction is to be found in John
M. Coetzee's Disgrace, where the daughter of
the disgraced professor is gangraped by a group of
blacks in a remote farm where she lives alone. Here
the drive toward rape could be the fact that the young
white woman is a lesbian, and therefore might have
challenged the masculine/feminine roles of traditional
African culture. Her rape is one more case of what
used to be called miscegenation, for she becomes
pregnant and decides to keep the child, almost
indicating a way out of the predicament construed by
the chain of violence with a choice leading to
mediation with the blacks who live around her farm.
She transforms an act of vicious violence into a
purposeful gesture of acceptance leading towards
communication, togetherness and hybridity. Yet there
is also another possible view of her decision: it is
as if she were plunging her whole body into a gulf of
ugliness - at least from the viewpoint of her father
the professor, a white man. A process of hybridization
taking place in such conditions and under such terms
appears as surrender and loss to European eyes - that
is, to taste and social evaluation derived from
colonial standards.
-
- Seen from all points of view,
sexual mixing constantly provides the focal point of
the chiasm formed by these novels. South African
culture finds it extremely difficult to accept the
idea of hybridization in a peaceful way; and this
might well be caused by a remote heritage of colonial
culture and its principle of domination and
subjugation which make it hard to accept diversity on
an equal level.
- Sex, with its twofold
interpretation and binary signification -
miscegenation versus hybridity - is a crossway where
it is compulsory to pass and choose whether to go in
one direction or the other. In the past, South Africa
chose to take the way leading to segregation and
apartheid, and by so doing raped the body of mother
Africa and castrated the African man.
-
- If conversely we take into
account and examine the black arm of our initial
chiasm - the novels by Mofolo and Plaatje - we are
confronted with an entirely different meaning of
hybridity, not identified with sexual mixing, but
directly political, and more broadly speaking
cultural.
- Chaka and Mhudi
are by far the most important among the few first
novels written by Africans in the Union of South
Africa in the aftermath of the South African war. They
are both historical novels set in the 19th century at
the time of the Zulu ruler Chaka and after the Mfecane
wars. Their two authors, Mofolo and Plaatje, were
outstanding intellectuals educated at mission schools
inside the country and intent on analysing and
retelling the past history of their peoples, although
in both cases the historical aim blends with the
fictional purpose of telling a story.
- Mofolo, who was writing in
the Sesotho language, was keenly aware of the double
aspect of his narrative approach when, faced with some
objections to the accuracy of certain historical facts
presented in Chaka, he replied:
-
- I believe
that errors of this kind are very many in the
book Chaka; but I am not very concerned about
them because I am not writing history, I am
writing a tale, or should rather say I am
writing what actually happened, but to which a
great deal has been added, and from which a
great deal has been removed, so that much has
been left out, and much has been written that
did not actually happen, with the aim solely of
fulfilling my purpose in writing this book
(D.Kunene's Introduction, in Mofolo: 1978,
xv).
-
- As to Plaatje, he organizes
his novel in a hybrid form, compounding the dramatic
genre (a play with comic undertones) with the fluidity
and intimacy of an oral tale recounted by the mythical
ancestor Half-a-Crown. This hybrid style allows him to
switch freely and easily between adventurous and
fictional narrative and historical report which comes
to life in the voice of 'true' witnesses.
- The literary approach adopted
by the African writers corresponds to the theme they
deal with - that is, change and transition in African
society in the wake of, or because of, colonial
invasion and occupation. But the changes they are
interested in are not strictly racial. Neither of them
approaches the question of sexual intercourse between
(white) Europeans and (black) Africans, nor in the
mixed blood offspring of such relationships - although
at the time they were writing, South African territory
already contained a sizable population of so-called
coloured people.
- The reasons for this attitude
may be various. First of all, the ideology of
eugenetics and the concept of miscegenation were
typically European constructs, rooted in the
philosophy of the period (and before it). Secondly,
even if the problem of racial taboo in sexual
encounter did exist for them, their Christian
education and Victorian upbringing (not exempt from a
degree of pruderie) certainly forbade them to mention
it, especially considering the fact that both Mofolo
and Plaatje published their novels with missionary
printers and both had great difficulties in being
accepted for publication anyway. To illustrate this
Christian approach, Sol Plaatje has Ra-Thaga remark to
the Boers who assert they are God's chosen people,
"What did Paulus mean [...] when he said to
the Galatians, 'There is neither Greek nor Jew, bond
nor free, male nor female, White nor Black, but are
all one in Christ Jesus'." (Plaatje: 1978,
184).
- The theme of the encounter
between blacks and whites is present in their fiction,
but it is rather a cultural encounter framed within
the power relationship created by colonialism, and an
encounter which marks the downfall of African systems
of government and organization. Not unlike Chinua
Achebe, they wonder what the endogenous reasons were
for the collapse of local civilizations under the
impact of the white presence and invasion.
- Mofolo's Chaka is
centered around the formation of the kingdom of the
Amazulu and the rise and fall of their hero Chaka.
Chaka reaches the utmost of greatness but then becomes
obsessed with power and a prey in the hands of the
doctor and diviner Isanusi who had helped him to 'see'
his future potential and achieve kingship. Once he has
reached the zenith of power, Chaka cannot control his
aggressivity and in order to satisfy his monstruous
thirst destroys his own family, army and people, till
he is murdered by his own brothers. On the point of
death, Chaka addresses his killers with a terrible
prophecy:
-
- You are
killing me in the hope that you will be kings
when I am dead, whereas you are wrong, that is
not the way it will be because umlungu,
the white man, is coming, and it is he who will
rule you, and you will be his servants
(Mofolo:1984, 167).
-
- The dying king foresees the
future of the Zulus and their land: colonial invasion
and subjugation. Such will be the relationship between
Africans and Europeans, and those who do not know this
and keep fighting against each other are but grotesque
puppets of a tragic history which they accelerate with
their deeds.
- Plaatje's Mhudi is set
at a later period and witnesses the arrival of the
Voortrekker Boers in the central region of the
southern continent where, at a place called Taba Nchu
(Black Mountain), they are met by the Barolong and
their chief Moroka. The Barolong had been defeated and
destroyed by the Matabele (Ndbele) led by Mzilikazi,
who is finally overpowered by an alliance of Boers and
Barolong.
- So the picture is that of a
fragment of African history where the whites appear as
one element among others: not yet masters, not yet
colonial rulers. The interchange between the two
groups of people is interestingly analysed and
presented by Plaatje through both historical episodes
of battles and/or alliances, and narrative elements
inserted in the behaviour of historical leaders but
even more of fictional heroes and heroines,
particularly the two central figures, beautiful Mhudi
and her husband Ra-Thaga. The latter is attracted by
the Boers and strikes up a friendship with young de
Villiers and later with his fiancée Hannetjie.
Mhudi, on the other hand, is wary of the Boers in
general and does not like their way of life. She finds
out that they treat their Hottentot servants with wild
cruelty (see the episode retold in Plaatje: 116) and
experiences on herself their domineering attitude
towards Africans, when, while searching for Ra-Thaga,
she joins their party and is automatically treated as
a servant because she belongs to the 'black race'.
From the beginning she had always entertained strong
misgivings about these white people, an "inexplicable
dread that lingered in her mind" (Ibidem, 114),
and up to the end of the story she does not share
Ra-Thaga's confidence in them. The Voortrekkers are
odd creatures for the Barolong because of their guns,
horses, and flowing beards: and the more they get to
know them, the more surprised they are by their
customs, as one can see in the humorous episode of the
public trial (Ibidem, 124) where women also
take part, to the amazement of the Africans. Of course
here Plaatje displays his usual irony and subverts the
exoticism of the eurocentric gaze by making the
Europeans objects of wonder and ridicule to the
Africans.
- The only episode where the
striking diversity of the whites seems to cause a
curiosity bordering on physical attraction among the
African women who see them for the first time takes
place when the two Boers called de Villiers and
Viljoen are sent on a spying expedition and stop at a
village inhabited by Bakwena people, tributaries of
the Matabele and lead by a chief called
Mogale:
-
- Mogale's
people had never seen a White man before, and
the hut in which de Villiers and Viljoen lay
concealed by day was daily besieged by curious
Bakwena. [...] Women found all sorts of
pretext for visiting Tlou's village; and in
order to be admitted to de Villiers' retreat
they came loaded with presents of meat and milk
and vegetables; others brought wild fruit and
honey and de Villers' hostesses and attendants
had a royal time. [...] Such donors
being privileged visitors used to crowd into the
enclosure at the back of the hut where the
strangers sat and ask them all sorts of curious
questions. [...] When their shyness wore
off, their persistent attention became to him so
disagreeable that de Villiers pleaded to be
spared the gentle solicitude of the Bakwena
women; but [...] the fair visitors laden
with presents continued to pour into the place
and to torment the two Boers beyond endurance.
They stroked their hair, they asked them to pull
off their shoes and they counted their toes.
They remarked on the buttons on de Villiers'
jacket and sometimes asked him to unbutton his
shirt. Saving him the trouble at other times,
they personally did the unbuttoning and, baring
his chest, they would ask de Villiers to account
for the contrast between his pallid chest and
ruddy face (Ibidem, 120).
-
- The intricate, meandering
plot of the novel however does not offer any sexual
encounter between Africans and Boers - not to speak of
miscegenation. The focus is on the reciprocal respect
born out of an acceptance of difference. The Barolong
and their chief Moroka had already welcomed some
Wesleyan missionaries who lived peacefully within
their territory; and in the end made a pact with the
Boers in order to overcome the usurper Mzilikazi. Yet
it is already obvious that on one side the technology
of the whites is more efficient (horses, guns, etc.),
and on the other these Boers are ready to trick them
and try to get all their land for themselves after the
victory over Mzilikazi and his Matabele (Plaatje:
1978, 141-142).
- In the end, Voortrekkers and
Barolong will each go their own way - for the time
being. The special friendship linking Ra-Thaga and de
Villiers is sealed by the fact that they learn one
another's language and are therefore able to
communicate and exchange ideas.
- In spite of his exceptional
qualities, Sol Plaatje was a man of his time, a
Lutheran and a child of the British Empire, as he had
shown during the siege of Mafeking (which he described
in a remarkable book), where he sided with the British
against the Boers. He was the result of the cultural
encounter of Africa and Europe at its best: he saw the
immense possibilities which a well balanced
relationship could bring to all in South Africa. But,
as we know, he lived long enough to see the end of his
dream after the promulgation of the Natives Land Act
of 1913 that expropriated the Africans of their land
and he reacted politically by joining the select group
who founded the African National Congress (then SANC)
in 1912.
- The ideological position of
these two early African writers, Mofolo and Plaatje,
shows that at the time there was still every chance of
promoting understanding between the races. But of
course black intellectuals had no political power
whatsoever, and eventually became obstacles to the
creation of a full colonial state, as the history of
the ANC and its élites shows all too well.
Meanwhile the politicization of race, the creation of
a category of whiteness, and the black/white dichotomy
generated the culture of apartheid, giving birth to
all kinds of ideological monstrosities that would
nourish racial prejudices and perpetuate social
taxonomies still present today and actively damaging
the possibility of finding political solutions to the
problems faced by the whole of South African
society.
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