The Season of Whispers is Over: Now the Stories can be Safely Told1
p. 161-187
Résumé
In his article ‘Post-apartheid Literature Beyond Race’, S.S. Ibinga makes several bold–and perhaps premature–claims for what he nevertheless calls the literature of transition, as present-day South African society gradually adapts to new social and cultural structures. He talks of ‘an abrupt shift away from racial focus’ in writing, following the eradication of legalised racial segregation. This paper considers two very different narrative approaches to the healing process in post-apartheid literature, equally powerful, but both emanating from the deep wounds resulting from centuries of racial inequality and violence. The first approach is represented by Sindiwe Magona’s novel Mother to Mother (1998), which purports to be a letter from the mother of a township thug to the mother of the young American aid-worker he murdered; and the second by Zakes Mda’s own brand of magical realism in The Madonna of Excelsior (2002). Magona’s work is based on a true story, which she endeavours to tell in such a way that the reader feels as much understanding and compassion for the aggressor as for the victim, and a cathartic release of grief. Mda’s novel, if it bears any resemblance at all to mourning, then it must be as the most carnivalesque of wakes. He tells the commonplace yet wretched life story of Niki, a young African girl born in apartheid South Africa in the early ‘50s. Niki is the mortar where all the multiple forms of abuse of apartheid are pounded. Yet the story, told with a twinkle in the author’s eye, and seen through the prism of Niki’s buoyant, loving nature, gleams with hope and ends with healing. The paper compares the narrative strategies of the two works, each revealing a new aesthetics, free of the ideological determinism that apartheid literature was accused of, and thus themselves symptomatic of the healing process.
Texte intégral
1In his article ‘Post-apartheid Literature Beyond Race’,2 S. S. Ibinga makes several bold–and perhaps premature–claims for what he nevertheless calls the literature of transition, as present-day South African society gradually adapts to new social and cultural structures. He talks of ‘an abrupt shift away from racial focus’ in writing, following the eradication of legalised racial segregation. I will argue that although the slant on racial questions has indeed radically changed, there has been a loosening of tongues about all previously taboo subjects, and these are inevitably bound up with questions of race as the central pivot of apartheid era oppression. This paper will consider a certain kind of fiction germane to the healing process in post-apartheid literature: the telling of stories that could not be told.
2The new South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission3 (TRC) has set an example which has been praised and emulated throughout the world. Despite the inevitable criticisms, there is no doubt that it achieved a considerable amount of relief, forgiveness and reconciliation on the individual level, through confrontation between victims and perpetrators, allowing the guilty to unburden themselves and the victims to be recognized as such. It benefited from significant national media coverage. It obliged those who had supported apartheid, refusing to see the extent of human rights violations underpinning the regime, to acknowledge their share of responsibility, and vindicated to a certain extent those whose lives had been shattered by rape, murder, torture, detention or forced exile. On a national or community level, in so far as it brought heinous acts of injustice and barbarity out into the open, it no doubt had a cathartic effect too, although it is probably too soon to measure its full political impact in achieving national unity.
3The South African way of life during the apartheid era depended not only on the oppression of the non-white populations, but also on the adhesion of the whites to the National Party’s racist ideology. Whites too were subject to the many restrictive laws and customs, requiring an almost superstitious belief in the Afrikaner creed based on religious dogma.4 Whereas non-whites were kept in line by fear of the impressive array of punishments hanging over them for the slightest transgression, whites, especially rural Afrikaners, maintained extremely puritanical traditions. Not only were sexual or marital relations forbidden across the ‘racial’ boundaries, but extramarital relations were frowned upon long after such mores had begun to change in Europe, not to mention homosexuality, ostensibly abhorred by white and non-white communities alike. In such a climate, it is easy to imagine that child abuse and incest, too, were even more unmentionable than elsewhere.
4In fact, the entire racial doctrine being founded on a myth–that of biological differences between the ethnic groups making intraracial relations a crime or sin against nature–there naturally never was a time in South Africa when men and women did not transgress their own rigid race barriers; indeed it may legitimately be supposed that the very rigidity of those barriers reflected, and perhaps even increased, the temptation to ‘cross over’. Furthermore, it is axiomatic that once laws have been transgressed, inhibitions fall away; so that over-repressive legislation is typically associated with widespread transgression and concomitant hypocrisy.
5Thus, one way or another, life in apartheid South Africa, in all communities, was rife with dark secrets and clandestine goings-on, and often there were complex connections between racial, sexual, social or political taboos, making it even more dangerous to reveal anything at all. There was a culture of secrecy and mistrust such as is inevitably produced within any over-repressive or totalitarian society, where there is no knowing who, among friends, neighbours or family, might be prevailed upon by fair means or foul to betray anyone whose activities might appear suspicious, or with whom they have a score to settle. Not only did people have to hold their tongues about institutionalized violence and police brutality, or ANC5 and MK6 reprisals, but there were all sorts of shameful family or personal secrets that had to be kept for fear of dishonouring the ‘race’, and letting the side down.
6Of the new writing in post-apartheid South Africa, this essay will give particular attention to four novels which deal with the revealing of secrets, a genre which, it will be argued, can play a therapeutic role in the healing of wounds; and within this genre, the writing of one novelist in particular which displays aspects of a new literary aesthetics in South African literature, that I shall argue is also a kind of healing, this time of cultural wounds.
7The novels under scrutiny are: A Duty of Memory by W.P.B. Botha,7 Bitter Fruit by Achmat Dangor,8 The Madonna of Excelsior by Zakes Mda9 and Playing in the Light by Zoe Wicomb.10 It is Zakes Mda’s writing that will be singled out for special attention. Although these novels all deal with topics that figured prominently in the revelations of the TRC hearings,11 none of them are really light-hearted enough to fall into the category Ibinga refers to as ‘honeymoon literature’ that characterised the early years of democracy, celebrating the euphoria of the new ‘rainbow nation’ by underlining the importance of forgiving and forgetting.
8 A Duty of Memory is a searing indictment of the way of life of a rural Afrikaner community during the post-war period up until the early ’Nineties. There are several levels of narration: on the first level, we have the story of Jo Hartzenburg whose English mother came to live with her Afrikaner father on a farm in rural Afrikanerdom after the war. Jo’s childhood is caught excruciatingly between the two languages and two cultures of her parents. Her alcoholic father beats and bullies them all. Her only comfort is in her friendship with Mafimane, her African playmate, the son of her mother’s maid, Lettie. To remove her from her father’s sexual abuse, her mother sends her to Britain to be brought up by her grandparents, and she does not return until thirty years later, when her younger brother Eeben is found in his car with his wife and children, shot to death.
9In counterpoint to the basic narrative, there are extracts of a tape-recording made by the wretched Eeben as well as sections of correspondence from various characters related to Jo. The tape is of prime importance in the structure of the novel, as it tells the secret tale of Eeben’s involvement in Afrikaner paramilitary terrorist activities, and thus becomes imbued with dangerous significance. It reveals how Eeben, a weak runt of a child with homosexual tendencies, is emotionally blackmailed by his schoolfellows into proving his manhood by “neeking queers” (joining them in beating up homosexuals, starting with his own lover), then, in later years, with the same companions, torturing and murdering political adversaries, at home and abroad.
10In this way the reader gradually pieces together with dawning horror a story grounded in xenophobia, violence, alcoholism, child abuse, homophobia, terrorism, madness and murder... unspeakable secrets are skilfully hinted at, barely revealed. They interlock and overlap, finally showing how the separate tragedies of each individual–for there is not one character who finds happiness– all have their source in the brutality inherent in the misguided values, prejudice and intolerance of the God-fearing, human-hating Afrikaner community.
11Ultimately, the novel illustrates how self-defeating and doomed from the outset was the Afrikaner mission to reign as supreme conquerors over the land and its people without mixing, without giving. How violence and brutality breed violence and brutality. Eeben’s word for the general state of affairs, the Afrikaans expression ‘hele gemors’, glosed in the text as ‘a can of worms’, recurs as a leitmotiv throughout the novel. Another expression–a question– recurs towards the end of the tape: ‘What was it all for?’. This is after the arrival in power of the government of national unity, when Eeben takes full stock of his guilt and the wrong-headedness of it all.
12The novel ends with Jo being shot by the Afrikaner terrorists as she tries to hand the police the incriminating tape. In the last part of the tape we heard that Eeben was contemplating giving himself up to the TRC, though fearful of the effect his revelations would have on his children; and that he knew that if his fellow terrorists learnt of it they would eliminate him. Such is the potential danger of the secrets in the tape. We gather that he committed suicide after shooting his entire family, shortly after having recorded this. Jo’s childhood playmate, Mafimane, now a married man with children and still working on the farm, has been summarily executed by the police, falsely accused of having shot his boss Eeben and his family. The journalist and poet Antje Krog has asserted the need for all Afrikaners, including herself, to accept the responsibility and share the guilt for what Afrikaners did in their name. She dedicated her account of the TRC hearings ‘for every victim who had an Afrikaner surname on her lips’.12 At the end of his confessional tape, Eeben expresses a similar sentiment when he says:
We have all of us helped to bring suffering and chaos to the country. It isn’t just communism. Or the ANC. Or the boycotts. It’s we, the Afrikaners, who have helped to bring this country to its knees. It’s we who brought into the world Sharpeville, Thokosa, Khatlehong.... we Afrikaners have looked and caught a glimpse of the people we have become. Not upholders of the law, but criminals. Terrorists. So terrorised by our past, by what the future holds, that we must hide, some in our dreams, some in the chaos we’ve helped to bring about: hiding in the once clear water which we ourselves have deliberately muddied. (A Duty of Memory, 216)
13Although focusing on how apartheid affected the characters’ lives mainly from the sexual perspective, Bitter Fruit by Achmat Dangor shares several characteristics with A Duty of Memory. The dramatic power of both narratives hinges on the revelation of closely-guarded secrets in a context of collective hypocrisy exacerbated by the racist doctrines of apartheid. Whereas the latter dissects the interlocking causes of the tribulations of an Anglo-Afrikaner family, Dangor’s novel lays bare the shameful secrets of another family of mixed origin–this time part Muslim Indian, part ‘Cape Coloured’.13
14Both sets of protagonists experience the ambient racial prejudice, albeit at different levels of institutionalisation: whereas Caroline, the English wife in A Duty, was never accepted by her husband’s Afrikaner community, and her children forbidden to speak English by their father and ostracised by their schoolmates, the Coloured family of Silas, one of the main protagonists in Bitter Fruit, were evicted repeatedly from their successive homes as the areas were declared white14: ‘... his mother’s... nomadic... journey from suburb to suburb, singled out for pursuit, she believed, by the grey-suited men who implemented the apartheid laws’ (Bitter Fruit, 11).
15The atmosphere in both novels is rife with police repression and multiple forms of deviant behaviour and abuse engendered by apartheid policies. The central secret of Bitter Fruit, set in the newly democratic South Africa, is the rape of Silas’s wife, Lydia, by one François Du Boise, an Afrikaner police lieutenant, nineteen years earlier. Silas, an ANC lawyer who has been rewarded for loyal service during the struggle with a prestigious post as legal adviser in the new government, comes across an elderly and much diminished Du Boise by chance in a supermarket. Silas cannot resist mentioning the encounter to Lydia, stirring up a maelstrom of painful memories which lead her first to self-mutilation then, as the novel unfolds, to a profound re-examination of her life and her relationships, culminating in her departure.
16Her adolescent son, Mikey, prying in her diary, unearths not just the secret of the rape, but another, more terrible, concealed within it: that he is actually Du Boise’s son, ‘a child of rape’ (Bitter Fruit, 129). Again, the novel traces the effects of this discovery, which eventually leads him to seek out the Muslim side of the family (even though he now knows that he is not biologically related to them), while at the same time tracking down Du Boise.
17The endings of the two novels are quite different. A Duty of Memory ends with grim closure–the three major characters having died violent deaths–and hardly a glimmer of hope for humanity in sight. However an epilogue has been tacked on,15 set in the post-apartheid era, which laboriously draws together the threads of the tragedy in the form of a series of telephone messages left by Mafimane’s mother Lettie, in South Africa, on the answering machine of Jo’s lover Beth, in London. The author thus contrives to imply that there is new hope burgeoning from the cataclysmic past for the new South Africa. But somehow the grimness of the wasted lives and futile tragedies of the previous pages–of the old South Africa–is too weighty to be so quickly dispelled... there is only as yet ‘a still dark peace’ (A Duty of Memory, 227).
18The ending of Bitter Fruit, on the other hand, opens out into an array of limitless possibilities for each of the two main characters, who emerge triumphant from their respective ordeals, battling with which, we now see, has constituted the bulk of the narrative. Mikey, now calling himself Michael, has embraced Islam, killed his rapist father and is leaving for a new life in India, at least temporarily; Lydia has succeeded in emancipating herself from the fetters of the rape and her marriage, and after a liberating sexual encounter with a young black Mozambican, heads off towards a new life in Cape Town.
19One obvious difference between the two novels, that may explain the stark opposition between the optimistic ending of the one and the doom and gloom of the other (excluding the epilogue), is that of narrative perspective. Bitter Fruit is told from within the new South Africa, whereas the dénouement of A Duty of Memory takes place during the apartheid era, despite the post-apartheid epilogue (and publication date). Comparison of the two would seem to bear out Elleke Boehmer’s observation that the ‘inevitable closings down’ of the narrative endings of the apartheid era will be replaced by ‘the return of endings that allow for new beginnings, for gestative mystery, ... one looks forward to an open-endedness that makes room for new and various ways of thinking about the future’.16
20The revelations upon which the main plots and dramatic structure of each of the two books turn are by no means the only secrets to be brought to light. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, the rigorous restriction of individual liberties required to implement the apartheid regime affected every aspect of life in South Africa. Homosexuality, or crossing over the ‘gender-line’, was taboo in all communities, and was absent from the literature of the apartheid era. It has become a common theme in post-apartheid literature.
21It is given less importance in Bitter Fruit than in In A Duty of Memory, where homosexuality is broached from two angles. On the one hand we are given a bisexual protagonist (Jo) whose lesbian relationship is integrated seamlessly into the narrative. Jo and Beth’s relationship, formed in England, nevertheless remains a secret within the South African context until the epilogue, when we infer that Lettie has been told, after Jo’s and Mafimane’s joint reburial. It is no doubt a sign of liberation that Lettie takes it well: ‘I’m pleased for you and Jo that you were happy’ (A Duty of Memory, 226).
22On the other hand, the horrific homophobic violence that went unpunished in apartheid society is also represented, with the homosexual’s terror of being discovered. The young Eeben has a homosexual friend. The first time they make love they are interrupted by Eeben’s homophobic schoolmates: ‘And so when Draak handed me the cricket-bat and said, Eeben, you bladdy moffie, you’d better donder him or we donder you, I didn’t hesitate’. (A Duty of Memory, 60). In his eagerness not to be taken for a ‘moffie’, Eeben joins in the sport on a regular basis: ‘we must have neeked dozens of queers that way. With crowbars and cricket-bats’ (ibid.).
23In Bitter Fruit, Mikey confides another family secret to Kate, a white friend and colleague of his father’s from a more liberated English South African background, who lives in a lesbian relationship while conducting a secret affair with Mikey. He tells her that his Uncle Toyer had been gay. Although Silas had never mentioned his gay brother, Kate dismisses it as ‘nothing unusual’; but Mikey insists that in the coloured community it is not tolerated: ‘Kate, Uncle Toyer was found with his throat cut, and... he’d been castrated’ (Bitter Fruit, 135).
24This genre of the revealing of secrets deals with pain or secrets endured in silence, fear or shame, but also in terrible loneliness. Such things could be confided in no-one, perhaps not even formulated. Disclosure risks unforeseeable consequences, for oneself and for others. A crucial element of Lydia’s unfolding drama, in Bitter Fruit, as she is forced to confront again her rape, that had been witnessed helplessly by Silas, is that concealed within the bitter flesh of that secret is the kernel, the secret of Mikey’s paternity, that she had shared with no-one. Ironically, because Silas was too insensitive to refrain from mentioning Du Boise, he stirred up a delving into the past which ultimately deprived him of his paternity, his son and his wife. But the story is not Silas’ story, it is Mikey’s and Lydia’s. They were the victims, and it is their wounds that are healed as they work through the trauma.
25Zoe Wicomb is one of several internationally recognized South African authors who have begun to write again since the end of apartheid. She has published two highly acclaimed, highly topical post-apartheid novels, David’s Story17 in 2000, and Playing in the Light in 2006. Although both deal in different ways with delving in the past and the uncovering of truth, it is the second one that will be discussed here, since it shares with Bitter Fruit the narrative kernel of a racially-motivated family secret, and with A Duty of Memory the theme of the hypocrisy and treachery engendered by apartheid.
26At the start of the novel, Marion Campbell is a successful white businesswoman, thirty-something, living in post-apartheid Cape Town, where she keeps a daughterly eye on John, her ageing widowed father. Her relationship with her spirited coloured employee, Brenda, who has a university education (although she keeps this dark) and is about the same age as her, is one of paternalistic benevolence and keeping her in her place. Marion embarks on a quest to discover the identity of Tokkie, the old coloured maidservant she loved as a child.
27The narrative, in so far as it exposes Marion’s thoughts, feelings and dreams, and indicates many multi-layered interpretations, suggests an intriguing psychoanalytical analogy for the quest, unsurprisingly perhaps as it is ultimately a quest for identity. Once she guesses that there is some mystery surrounding her birth, she becomes convinced that she has been adopted. What she finally discovers is that Tokkie was her maternal grandmother and that her parents were ‘play-whites’, that is, coloured people who took advantage of their light skins to pass themselves off as whites, in order to benefit from a better life-style.
28Marion’s shock is of a different nature from Mikey’s when he learns that he is a ‘child of rape’ or Jo’s when she comprehends her violent family history. Here, the protagonist must confront the fact that her parents had chosen to relegate her beloved grandmother, her mother’s own mother, to menial status and forsake their families, indeed the entire coloured community, for reasons that she finds unacceptable and that no longer have currency.
29The knowledge casts a different light on almost every aspect of her life, and jolts her out of her assumptions and complacency regarding her own attitude towards people of different racial categories under the apartheid system. In retrospect, she feels that turning her back on her schoolfriend Annie Boshoff, whose family had been expelled from the white area when her parents had turned out to be ‘play-whites’, was a doubly odious betrayal.
30The narrative strategy adopted by Wicomb differs from those of Botha and Dangor in that there is only one narrative voice–the omniscient narrator’s. Marion’s consciousness is reported with great intimacy, but in the third person. This allows the narrator to provide as close an account of important events in the past–such as Tokkie’s story–as in the present. The other two novels make use, respectively, of the devices of the audio-tape and the diary to reveal the secrets through another voice. In Playing in the Light, Marion’s quest takes the form of a journey, Arthurian style, meeting various characters who contribute to the unfolding of the story.
31The text is cunningly crafted and makes great demands on the reader, in particular through the liberal use of dramatic irony in the first 80 or 90 pages, before the truth emerges, restoring in retrospect their full dramatic impact to many passages or details that passed unnoticed on first reading. For example, there are several allusions to an inexplicable unease, a lack of spontaneity, a guardedness, about each of Marion’s parents, such that she herself has a particularly cautious, even solitary nature: ‘she has never been effusive... she gives little away.’ (Playing in the Light, 75); or to her father’s strange reaction when anyone mentions family: ‘Family! he used to exclaim elliptically, shaking his head and pulling a face that she could not interpret.’ (ibid., 4). There are elusive hints that her father is concealing the facts about Marion’s identity: ‘Ever since Marion can remember, her father has called her his meermin, his little mermaid. Because she was a child of the sea, he said’ (ibid., 22). In a beautifully written passage, Marion observes with horrified fascination a family of rats in her father’s kitchen garden, ending: ‘What kind of life is that–to be burdened with such timidity? To have to overcome so much in order to achieve so little, to be the object of such irrational fear and loathing?’ (ibid., 24). This echoes eerily with hindsight, at the second reading, the reader having in the meantime learned that her parents’ life as whites was a wretched existence, living in constant fear of being caught out.
32The novel has an open ending, bearing out Boehmer’s observations on apartheid and post-apartheid endings, quoted earlier. In the final chapter, Brenda and the emotionally-challenged Marion paddle in the sea together then, back in Marion’s flat, raise their glasses: ‘Brenda laughs. Let’s drink, then, to learning about friendship, she says. We’re all novices when a new person comes along– not so different from falling in love.’ They soon quarrel again, when Brenda says that she is writing Marion’s father’s story; but the implication is clearly that they are on the right path, however long it might be, and that John’s story, too, might yet hold hidden treasures.
33Before broaching the final novel to be discussed in this paper, the only one to have been written by a black South African, let us review some propitious remarks made by the South African author, critic and ANC activist, Njabulo Ndebele, in a talk he gave in the United States in anticipation of the end of apartheid in 1987.18
34Ndebele regretted that South African literature of the apartheid era had been obliged, by social and political imperatives, to mainly adopt a style he called ‘direct exposure’, exposing the living conditions and all kinds of injustice that prevailed for the black majority at the time. It was a style more suited to journalism than fiction, with little attention paid to the niceties of metaphor, form or language.
35He also deplored the absence of orature, or the oral tradition of story-telling, in writing of that period, despite its having been no doubt the only truly South African cultural form that was practised continually and without hindrance. He gave the example of township workers who travelled by train to and from their workplaces in the white areas every day. Crammed into the standing-room only carriages, some would tell stories to entertain the other passengers during the journey. There was no censorship, no obligation to only talk about the injustices of apartheid. They would talk about everyday topics, from everyday life. Love stories, funny stories, satire, stories with a moral... Some, writes Ndebele, were so popular that people would be late for work from waiting to travel in the same carriage as their favourite story-teller.
36Ndebele denounced apartheid’s systematic destruction of African cultures and languages, and called for a revival of African cultural traditions, in post-apartheid writing, and also for writing which took the individual as its central concern, after the long domination of stories which opposed good and bad, strong and weak, or dealt with the struggle to survive. The way the apartheid system reduced people to a combination of numbers and rubber-stamps, with no citizenship, no rights, no freedom, and their daily life to an endless grinding struggle from dawn till dusk; the way it separated husbands from wives, mothers from children, and threw people into gaol for the slightest transgression–it is clear that the individual, the life of the individual, the inner life, were seriously neglected or damaged.
37Our final author, Zakes Mda, born in 1948, is a Xhosa whose father and grandfather were both active in the resistance against colonialism. Mda himself spent thirty years in exile, mainly in Lesotho close to his region of origin in the Eastern Cape. He was thus exposed to two African languages (Xhosa and SeSotho) as well as English and the linguistic pot-pourri of Soweto, where he lived as a child. Mda makes use of his rich cultural and linguistic background in his writing, for which much of his inspiration is drawn from the oral tradition and popular culture, as he explains in his article ‘Babel’s Happiness’.19 He gives this African heritage as the source of the so-called ‘magical realism’ of his novels, which he claims to have been using long before he had ever read any Latin-American literature.
38Mda wrote plays, put on by a travelling theatre,20 during the liberation struggle. They dealt with such apartheid-related topics as deprivation, the destruction of the social fabric and family life and various forms of betrayal; and later, plays that satirised the way religious institutions were used to manipulate people.
39Mda differs from most other black South African writers in that he was able to develop his craft through writing for the theatre during the bleak years when the living conditions of apartheid made writing and publishing almost impossible for blacks. At the same time, he was feeding on the authentic cultures of his country, whether grass-roots or in the townships. He denounced the phoney versions of indigenous cultures that were contrived for the tourists in brightly painted ‘native’ villages which bore no resemblance at all to the lives of contemporary South Africans, even those in the rural areas.
40Thus when circumstances finally permitted him to try writing novels, he already had a style at once his own and specifically South African. Mda’s style of writing and story-telling seems the answer to Ndebele’s wish for a new literature integrating elements of authentic African culture. It is a start to repairing the untold cultural damage done to the black South African people, which has been dubbed ‘cultural genocide’.
41Of the five prize-winning novels21 Mda has published since 1991, The Madonna of Excelsior (2002) has been selected for this essay as it both deals with the revelation of secrets, and is a good sample of the specific characteristics of Mda’s writing.
42The main protagonist is a young African woman, Niki, who lives in Mahlatwetsa Location, a township that provides labour for Excelsior, a little rural town in the Free State, run by Afrikaners. The story centres on the fictional incident of ‘the Excelsior 19’, typical of the apartheid era: in 1971, fourteen young black women living in Excelsior are charged under the ‘Immorality Act’ which prohibited sexual relations between members of different racial groups. The women, with babes in arms, are rounded up and held in prison pending trial, while the five white men who participated in the transgression are not to be charged, having been absolved by the ‘Dominee’ (Dutch Reformed clergyman), on the grounds that they were good Christians led astray by lascivious women, the devil’s agents.
43Niki is one of the accused, and Popi is her coloured baby, who was conceived during the said offence. The book is a kind of family saga, stretching across a quarter of a century, except that one part of the family pretends not to know that the other half exists, for the sake of upholding racial segregation. It covers a period that spans the apartheid horrors of the old South Africa and the teething problems of the new, ending under the fledgling democracy, with Popi and her white half-brother both elected members of Excelsior’s town council. The novel is multi-layered and innovative, aesthetically and thematically, an experimental approach to the healing of cultural wounds, as well as dealing with the revelation of secrets.
44The problems of apartheid are the same ones, seen from a completely different point of view–that of the oppressed African population. This kind of writing by black African writers had not surfaced before the advent of multiparty democracy. What makes it so different from previous black African writing is that it is no longer motivated by urgent political denunciation, nor restricted by the censorship laws and puritanical mores of that era. Niki’s is the voice of the long silenced–it emerges timidly at first, as her character develops through the lessons of experience of men and injustice and motherly love, and blossoms into a strong-minded, forthright personality, hard-working and honest, independent and dignified, beholden to no-one and always ready to put people in their places with a few lashes of her sharp tongue.
45The central secret of the tale stems, then, from the transgression of the Immorality Act.22 Although the events recounted in the novel, taken objectively, amount to a series of infringements of basic human rights clearly due to the institutionalised racism of apartheid, the genius of Mda’s style and narrative techniques is to make light of it all, telling the facts in colourful language full of dry humour and irony, using almost comic-strip characterisation.
46There are no real secrets in the community where Niki lives. It seems that Excelsior is a town where no-one has enough privacy or autonomy to completely keep the lid on anything. The rivality between the black and the Afrikaner communities is exacerbated by resentment on the part of the blacks living in utter deprivation in Mahlaswetswa Township, and nervous anxiety on the part of the Afrikaners who rule and exploit them.
47Niki is not portrayed as a helpless victim. When as a young virgin she is raped by Johannes ‘Hairy Buttocks’ Smit in a sunflower field, it is presented as a result of her naivety and mischievous betrayal of her girl-friends. Once the initial shock and pain are over, she is angry, and confronts her friends indignantly. If she refuses thereafter to acknowledge what happened, it is mainly to deny Smit the satisfaction of having possessed her. When Smit boasts to Niki’s employer, Stephanus Cronje, that he has had her, Cronje becomes titillated. However it is Niki who seduces Cronje, as her vengeance on his wife Cornelia, who had publicly humiliated her by making her strip naked to be sure she was not stealing.
48Here again, she is not portrayed with the pathos normally associated with women abused by their employers in the West, but as making a choice. She keeps the affair secret because by this time she is married to Pule and has a baby, and no more wishes her husband to find out the truth than Cronje wants his wife to know. Even when subjected to threats and beatings in prison, she steadfastly refuses to name the father of her coloured baby. Cronje, meanwhile, made of less stern stuff, shoots himself rather than face the ire of his wife and be shamed before his community.
49Niki tells Pule the secret of Popi’s conception and although it drives him to drink for a while, he eventually forgives her and treats Popi as his own. The widowed Cornelia and Tjaart, her son by Cronje, remain in ignorance. Niki is Tjaart’s nanny and loves him like her own children. Popi herself manages to avoid the secret of her paternity until well into adulthood, 25 years later, at the very end of the book when she is called to the ailing Tjaart’s bedside and he talks of ‘our’ father: ‘Surely you know that by now?’ [says Tjaart]. ‘I have heard whispers’ (The Madonna of Excelsior, 253).
50 The interesting point about how secrets are concealed or revealed in this novel is that for the oppressed black people, concealment does not assume the same grim urgency as it does for the Afrikaners. The French psycho-analyst Serge Tisseron, in his work on family secrets,23 distinguishes between structuring and destructuring secrets–the first sort helps the subject to learn to separate reality from fantasy, while the second impedes this process and damages the developing personality.
51Although there is a disturbing scene where Niki tries to ‘darken’ her baby’s skin colour by roasting her over a fire, the child’s skin heals; but Stephanus Cronje, a leading member of the community in the prime of life, prefers to do away with himself rather than be found guilty of miscegenation. Niki’s reaction to the news of his suicide illustrates her vastly different perception of the secret’s significance: ‘The coward. He has taken the easy way out, she mused.’ (The Madonna of Excelsior, 69). To Niki, Cronje is shirking his responsibility as a father, while to him, the secret holds the power to destroy him socially and politically. The whole structure of apartheid society depended on maintaining the myth of racial superiority and of the ‘abhorrence which the people felt against miscegenation’ (ibid., 98). To Cronje, indoctrinated with the Afrikaner ideology, this responsibility far outweighs any allegiance to the fruit of his loins. What to Niki is a structuring secret, is to the damaged Cronje, quite the opposite.
52The (fictional) case of the Excelsior 19 took on national and international importance, at a time when, after the Sharpeville massacre, the apartheid regime was coming under increasingly critical international scrutiny. Conveniently for the Boers, the case was dropped as the prosecuting witnesses refused to give evidence. We learn that they had been tricked by false promises of money to help bring up their misbegotten offspring. Here again, Mda places in almost comical counterpoint the moral question, from the whites’ point of view, which becomes an international incident and almost brings down the government; and the far more down-to-earth priorities of the black mothers of illegitimate babies.
53Mda’s writing is reminiscent of the late Dambudzo Marechera’s ‘Menippean’ style,24 scattered with elements of carnival, taking liberties with the English language, unobtrusively weaving fragments of serious reflection and political comment in among the narrative passages. Like Marechera, he invents his own structural devices, apparently inspired by theatrical staging or cinematography. In The Madonna of Excelsior, each new chapter begins with a flamboyant description of a painting in the style of the Flemish expressionists, with a predilection for highly colouristic representations of women, donkeys and sunflowers; then the narrative glides imperceptibly, magically, from the figures on the canvas to the characters of the story. Just as, in places, the narrative glides imperceptibly from the plausible to the seemingly incredible, without a wrinkle on the surface of the hermeneutic flow. This is the so-called ‘magical realism’ that Mda prefers to attribute to the African oral tradition and the rich cultural diversity of South Africa.
54The light-hearted touch, colourful language, dry humour, the narrator’s springy style of amusing banter, the affectionate characterisation, the magical realism which blurs the borders between fantasy and reality, all contribute to a portrayal of human tragedy as real and as shocking as any in apartheid South Africa, that reflects the dignified resistance that characterised the black population’s response to decades of oppression and overwhelming injustice. This is indeed a contribution to healing the cultural wounds, incorporating elements of traditional African culture such as ‘ubuntu’, the spirit of humanism embedded in a philosophy which sees all human beings as indispensable, interdependent parts of a whole: ‘a person is a person through other people:
A person with ‘ubuntu’ ... has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished... or treated as less than who they are.” Harmony, friendliness, community are great goods. Social harmony is... the greatest good. Anger, resentment, lust for revenge, even success through aggressive competitiveness, are corrosive of this good. To forgive is not just to be altruistic. It is the best form of self-interest. What dehumanises you, inexorably dehumanises me.... In the process of dehumanising another... the perpetrator was inexorably being dehumanised as well.... Forgiveness gives people resilience, enabling them to survive and emerge still human despite all efforts to dehumanise them.25
55This would seem to be the moral of The Madonna of Excelsior, most clearly illustrated by the ‘Madonna’ herself, Niki, and Popi her ‘child’, as they grow in the face of adversity.
56The ending of The Madonna of Excelsior is quite different from the two types of ending, open and closed, that we have examined. The final chapter ends with Niki and Popi who had been sitting peacefully among the bee-hives, following a swarm of bees–or being followed?–into a cluster of bluegum trees in the distance. ‘Popi, who had been ruled by anger, had finally been calmed by the bees. The bees had finally completed the healing work...’ The image recedes so that we are brought once more to the canvas and the artist who has set the scene for each of the chapters. The speculation about Popi’s life tapers off, as we are told that the artist ‘never knew all these things. His work was to paint the subjects, and not to poke his nose into their lives beyond the canvas.’ In other words, we have reached the end of the fable and must withdraw. It is an open ending in a sense, but the characters have slipped out of the scope of the artist’s canvas or the author’s fiction, like a theatrical evocation of the ritual closing of a child’s book after the bedtime story, signalling that it is time to go to sleep, or the closing of the curtains at the end of a play.
57It should be clear by now that Zakes Mda’s novel is in a totally different category from the first three novels discussed. While also making dramatic use of the revealing of secrets, the novel serves to illustrate that what may seem crucial issues to the oppressors may appear in a different light to people struggling to survive under oppression. In each of the first three novels, there was a ‘hardcore’ secret, a shameful secret, that remained a secret until a point when it was disclosed. The dramatic structure of each novel hinged on that disclosure, whether it was by means of a tape, a diary or a modern-day ‘quest’.
58In Mda’s book, the secret is never really a secret. It is kept from certain key characters, but is common knowledge in both the Afrikaner and black communities. There is a constant shifting of focus, so that the concealment or not of the secret is not always important. In fact, in several cases, the people who stand to be most affected by the secret refuse to hear the information. It is the act of Popi’s conception, rather than who knows about it, that is the maypole round which the different threads of the narrative dance: sexual abuse and oppression under apartheid, the trial of the Excelsior 19, the repercussions of the legal and ideological prison on all the actors not just the blacks, the issues of labour conditions, poverty, miscegenation, censorship, hypocrisy... and still more. The narrative structure does not lead the reader progressively along a suspense-filled storyline in the same way as the others do.
59Before discussing Zakes Mda’s novel, reference was made to Ndebele’s appeal for new, specifically South African, styles and genres, including the integration of African cultural practices into the writing of fiction. We have seen several indications that Mda, at least, has begun to do this, although writing in English. Ibinga predicts that post-apartheid literature will be classified by the language used by the writer. It has been government policy to encourage writing in the nine official African languages–and some writers have published fiction in their native African languages.26
60However, this kind of healing will not happen overnight, as there has to be a demand, a viable market, which means a reading public, which first means training teachers in the languages concerned, before publishers will risk producing such literature. After not just decades, but centuries, of colonial denigration of indigenous languages–some have been effectively eradicated–and of institutionalised neglect, it will be a long hard struggle for South Africa to keep her rich multicultural heritage.
61To conclude, Ibinga’s assertion that ‘race is less and less the principal preoccupation of writers’ (‘Post-Apartheid Literature Beyond Race’) may be true to a certain extent–certainly the authorial voices in all four novels discussed here, although their themes relate to the effects of apartheid legislation and attitudes it engendered, make it clear that segregation is a thing of the past, reflecting a change in attitudes throughout South African society.
62Though race or ethnic identity are central to the four novels, discussed here in the context of the revealing of secrets, their writers deal with other subjects that were off limits in the past: homosexuality and homophobia, domestic violence, the oppression of women, child abuse.
63Other contemporary South African writers have been exploring these and other taboo issues: Sello Duiker in Thirteen Cents27 and Mark Behr in The Smell of Apples28 raise the subjects of street boys and paedophilia, while Sindiwe Magona’s novel Mother to Mother29– a letter from the mother of a township thug to the American mother of the young aid-worker he murdered–or her delightful collection of tales of the lives of ‘maids’ working in white households, entitled Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night,30 are both works which could never have seen the light of day during the apartheid era. Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying31 uses his characteristic light theatrical touch to evoke the tragedy of the high death rates in South African townships, due to poverty, criminality or disease. AIDS is beginning to emerge after decades of damaging silence, for example in the collection of short fiction and poetry entitled Nobody Ever Said AIDS.32A Duty of Memory, David’s Story, The Smell of Apples and Gillian Slovo’s thriller, Betrayal,33 all tell stories of the struggle–the clandestine activities, secrets and betrayals of spies, security policemen and so-called terrorists–as do a considerable number of works of non-fiction published in the wake of the revelations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
64It would be vain to expect so many wounds, so deep, inflicted for so long, to be healed in a short time. Yet if we compare the role of fiction–and particularly this new South African genre of the revealing secrets–to the work of the TRC, it becomes clear that it, too, has a lot to offer, and even some advantages over the painful midwifery of public confession, confrontation and forgiveness.
65This is not to belittle the TRC in any way–it has now been solidly established as a model that will henceforth serve humanity in the aftermath of periods of social trauma and human rights abuses the world over. As Tutu explains in his book, it provides a ‘third way’ with infinite advantages over the other two–Nuremberg-style trials, which risked prolonging the trauma and entrenching separateness by drawing the communities into an interminable cycle of recrimination and punishment; or national amnesia, which could have left the door open to homespun justice, revenge-killings and also perpetuated ill-feeling between groups and individuals (No Future Without Forgiveness, 24 ff.).
66Another down side to the TRC which Tutu mentions (ibid., 231 ff.) is that it was devastating for the members of the commission, who spent months listening to a never-ending stream of pain, horror and inhumanity. They suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome, including, sleep disorders, depression, tearfulness, nervous breakdown, and even marital breakdown. Tutu himself contracted prostate cancer at this time–surely no coincidence? As he says, ‘it may be that we have been more like vacuum-cleaners than dishwashers, and have taken into ourselves far more than we can say of the pain and devastation of those whose stories we have heard’ (ibid., 233).
67The restoration of the individual to the heart of culture and literature may provide a gentler complement to that process. Ndebele34 regretted that the literature of the apartheid era was no more concerned with individual introspection and soul-searching than was apartheid itself (‘Fiction and Society in South Africa’, 82). He was not alone. In a memorable paper,35 his fellow-combatant Albie Sachs, the ANC government’s first Minister of Culture, retracted the ANC’s previous position that culture should be a weapon for struggle, and deplored that there had been no room for ambiguity and contradiction, hidden tensions or love, in apartheid fiction. In the four novels discussed here, as in other contemporary South African novels, the genre of the revelation of secrets provides ample scope to fulfil both these desires.
68For future work on South African literature, at least, the novels examined in this essay open up a new field of critical enquiry and give clear grounds for a theorisation of secrets and their revelation. Psychoanalytical and socio-political perspectives converge, as secrets in the private sphere of life are inextricably bound up with social mores or laws, and vice versa.
69In a totalitarian society such as apartheid South Africa, no-one is allowed any freedom or privacy, since the social order depends on everyone conforming to stringent rules which may go against natural human inclinations. In the underground resistance movements, too, people were required to account for their every move and obey strict rules.
70All this led to an unhealthy culture of surveillance and an exacerbation of the demands of moral rectitude made by the system. In both cases–totalitarianism and clandestine resistance–the culture of surveillance, supposed to guarantee security and enforced by fear, leads to close scrutiny of the individual’s every act... we are not far from the thought police in Orwell’s 1984.
71A theory of the revelation of secrets would no doubt require Tisseron’s distinction between structuring and destructuring secrets, but would also need to account for the effects of revelation. It is interesting to note that by consigning a fact to secrecy, its destructive power when unleashed at revelation may either be amplified, as in the case of Eeben, or Cronje, leading to suicide, or cathartic as in the cases of Mikey and Marion.
72However, the claim that this fiction contributes to healing South African wounds is not to be understood simply as based in the details of each story, but rather on the hermeneutic process of the revelation of secrets, itself. Whether the secret revealed results in death and disaster or a joyful quest for identity in no way diminishes the reader’s satisfaction at the unfolding of the truth. It is the light flooding into all the dark corners of apartheid that is therapeutic.
Notes de bas de page
1 The title of this essay was inspired by a chapter heading, ’A Season of Whispers’, in Zakes Mda’s The Madonna of Excelsior, 2002 (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2004).
2 Ibinga, S. S., ‘Post-Apartheid Literature Beyond Race’, This Century’s Reviews 4.6 (2007). www.thiscenturyreview.com/post_apartheid.html. Retrieved January 2008.
3 In the year after South Africa’s first democratic elections, and in accordance with the final clause of the new constitution, the 17-member Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up to organise hearings, with a view to granting amnesty, on gross human rights violations committed in the course of the conflicts during apartheid. See Krog, below.
4 For an account of the elaboration of this Kuyperian dogma, adopted as ‘mission policy’ by the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa in 1935, see Allister Sparks, The Mind of South Africa (1990. Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2003).
5 A.N.C. stands for African National Congress.
6 M.K. stands for Umkhonto We Sizwe, or Spear of the Nation, the military arm of the ANC.
7 Botha, W. P. B., A Duty of Memory (Heinemann African Writers Series: Oxford, 1997)
8 Dangor, Achmat, Bitter Fruit (Kwela Books: Cape Town, 2001).
9 Mda, Zakes, The Madonna of Excelsior (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux: New York, 2004).
10 Wicomb, Zoe, Playing in the Light (The New Press: New York, 2006).
11 For an account of these hearings, see Antjie Krog, Country of my Skull (1998. Vintage: London, 1999).
12 Krog, Antjie, frontispiece to Country of my Skull.
13 ‘Coloureds’ and ‘Indians’ came under the same grouping in the Population Registration Act of 1950. See Allister Sparks, The Mind of South Africa (1990. London: Arrow Books, 1997): 85.
14 In application of the Group Areas Act, 1950, which enforced the principle of separate racial residential areas.
15 The following quotation from Geneen Roth, When Food is Love cited by W.P.B. Botha at the start of A Duty of Memory, would seem to corroborate the hypothesis that the epilogue did not actually belong to the original text: ‘Wounds are never permanently erased. We are fragile beings, some days we break all over again.’
16 Boehmer, Elleke, ‘South African Fiction in Transition’ in Attridge, D. & Jolly, R., eds. Writing South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 51.
17 Wicomb, Zoe, David’s Story (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2000).
18 Ndebele, Njabulo, on ‘Fiction and Society in South Africa’ in TriQuarterly (1989): 81.
19 See Mda, Zakes, ‘Babel’s Happiness’ www.zakesmda.com/pages/babels_ happiness.html
20 The Marotholi Travelling Theatre, which he founded with his students while teaching at the University of Lesotho from 1985 to 1992, travelled round outlying villages to enable villagers to create plays dealing with their everyday problems.
21 Ways of Dying, 1991; The Heart of Redness, 2000; She Plays with Darkness, 2001; The Madonna of Excelsior, 2002; The Whale Caller, 2005.
22 The Immorality Act (1950) completed the idea behind the Population Registration Act and the Group Areas Act of the same year by outlawing sexual relations between members of different racial groups.
23 Tisseron, Serge, Alternative Santé L’Impatient (Interview), 2001. www. medecinesdouces.com/impatient/280juil01/secret.htm
24 ‘It is no longer necessary to speak of the African novel or the European novel: there is only the menippean novel’ in V. Briault Manus, ‘Words Are Worlds Massively Shrunk–A Stylistic Investigation of The Black Insider by Dambudzo Marechera’, Bulletin de la Société de Stylistique Anglaise 26 (2005).
25 Tutu, Desmond, No Future Without Forgiveness (1999. Rider: London 2000): 35.
26 Sindiwe Magona, for example, has published several works in Xhosa (Author ’s note).
27 Duiker, Sello, Thirteen Cents (Cape Town: David Phillip, 2000).
28 Behr, Mark, The Smell of Apples, 1993 (London: Abacus, 1995).
29 Magona, Sindiwe, Mother to Mother (Claremont: David Phillip, 1998).
30 Magona, Sindiwe, Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night (Claremont: David Phillip, 1991).
31 Mda, Zakes, Ways of Dying (New York: Picador, 1995).
32 Raebotsa, Nobantu et al., eds. Nobody Ever Said AIDS (Cape Town: Kwela, 2004).
33 Slovo, Gillian, Betrayal (London: Virago, 1992).
34 Ndebele, Njabulo, on ‘Fiction and Society in South Africa’ in TriQuarterly (1989): 82.
35 Sachs, Albie, ‘Preparing Ourselves for Freedom’, reproduced in Attridge, D. & Jolly, R., eds. Writing South Africa (1989. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Auteur
-
Vicki Briault Manus
Université Stendhal—Grenoble 3
Is Lecturer in English Linguistics and Postcolonial Studies at the University Stendhal-Grenoble 3 (France). After a doctoral thesis on the phonology of SiSwati, she turned back to textual linguistics and semiotics in the mid-nineties. Her research areas are postcolonial discourse and Southern African literature. Her work has focused on a number of South African writers, especially J. M. Coetzee and Bessie Head, and she has published more recently on two Zimbabwean writers, Dambudzo Marechera and Tsitsi Dangarembga and on several post-apartheid works of fiction. In an extra-curricular capacity, she translates vulgarised works of political economy for the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt (Brussels).
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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