1Post-resistance literature like Zoe Wicomb’s David’s Story contests the language of forgiveness, reconciliation, and national unity around which the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) attempted to construct a post-apartheid non racial democracy. Such literary productions foreground how the counterdiscourse of truth and reconciliation that aims to rectify the discourse of apartheid blocks out other narratives counter to itself.1

2South Africa’s liberation from white racial oligarchy on April 26, 1994 marked the end of apartheid. Though the Anglo-Boer war (1899-1902) eventually led to the Union of South Africa obtaining internal self-governance and being partially liberated from British colonial rule in 1910, it was not until 1934 that the nation achieved full independence with the end of British control over foreign affairs. However, the constitution of the independent nation granted civil and political rights to whites only. In 1948 when the National Party came to power it introduced laws to reinforce this racial segregation.2

3At the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-6–a few years before the South African National Party launched apartheid as an official policy– Nazi leaders had been tried as war criminals.3 As a preventive response to the atrocities of the Second World War, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had been adopted in 1948–the same year as the National Party came to power. Subsequently, in 1960 the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, and in 1962 a Special Committee on Apartheid was created to deal with the racial practices of the Republic of South Africa.4

4However, it was not until 1994 that South Africa gained freedom from racial apartheid, and in its transition to a non-racial democracy some South Africans in the post-apartheid state came to be defined as more ‘authentic national subjects’ than others.5 Through the TRC the anti-apartheid nationalism of the African National Congress (ANC) strove to construct a new South Africa, silencing the testimonials of pain of female ANC activists who were betrayed and tortured by their male peers within the revolution itself. Schaffer and Smith point out: ‘the TRC limited the scope of its activities, placing certain stories inside and some outside its scope.’ Moreover,

attention was directed to killings and murders, abductions and disappearances, and incidents of torture and physical maiming. Vigorous critique of these terms of reference came from women’s advocates who argued early in the process that the focus on abuses of bodily integrity rights limited the purview of the Commission in ways that erased women’s experience of apartheid from consideration [italics my own] and thus limited the history collectively reconstructed through the processes of the TRC.
(Human Rights and Narrated Lives, 68)

5The above critique is a reference to the TRC’s denial of the structural link between socioeconomic deprivation and gender-specific violence against South African women. As Fiona Ross highlights:

Rather than commencing from the historical grounds of the constitution of the subject under apartheid, then, the Commission considered its subject in terms of injury–the violation of particular rights.
(Bearing Witness6, 11)

6The denial of such systemic violence against women also leads to the unproblematized categories of victim and perpetrator. Ross underscores how the categories of violator and victim based on the right to bodily integrity marginalizes the targets of other kinds of apartheid injustice:

Using a notion of even-handedness that presumed that ‘violation’ necessarily produced ‘victims’, the Commission’s work stripped away context and the effects of power by condensing suffering to its traces on the body. The resultant legal person, ‘the victim’, produced through occupation of the signs of injury, has a different relationship to the state and legal systems from other citizens, not least in the abrogation of recourse to the law for redress for criminal and civil wrongs. (12)

7The construction of victim and perpetrator as monolithic identities also silences the internecine violence portrayed in David’s Story that women experienced during apartheid, including but not limited to violations of bodily integrity.

8As the methodological imperatives that define the memory-spaces of the TRC are brought into question, the epistemological violence that has accompanied cataloguing and classification in the South African archive comes to the forefront. The 1998 South African project of Refiguring the Archive paid special attention to the systematic and deliberate destruction of documents in South Africa without intervention from the Archives Commission or the Director of Archives, the discussion being particularly significant since the TRC was trying to reconstruct the past.7 Verne Harris, who between 1996 and 1998 represented the National Archives in a TRC investigation of the destruction of public records, notes: “This investigation exposed a large-scale and systematic sanitisation of official memory resources authorised at the highest levels of government. Between 1990 and [the General Elections of] 1994 huge volumes of public records were destroyed in an attempt to keep the apartheid state’s darkest secrets hidden” (Refiguring the Archive, 135). During raids and bombings of anti-apartheid structures, both inside and outside South Africa, the state also destroyed many other non-public records. Furthermore, “access to the TRC archive itself ‘raises important questions around restriction of access to information, the sanitising of documents and the role therein of government.’”8 (11)

9In response to the state censorship of the archives, the post 1990s saw the emergence of “a transformation discourse” which pushed for the reinvention of the archive for a democratic South Africa (138):

Activists and academics collaborated in conceptualising a “people’s education” in opposition to the apartheid education system.... “Struggle literature” and “struggle theatre”–a discourse of opposition in fiction–flourished. “Alternative” publications and publishers, running the gauntlet of state censorship, provided an evershifting space for oppositional voices. (143)

10It is this genre of literature that David’s Story belongs to. When read as the archive, this kind of apartheid and post-apartheid literature can redefine the heavily censored archival documentation about South African history to lay bare the story of a nation with all its intricacies.

11By offering us a complex instance of women’s experiences during the apartheid regime, David’s Story recasts South African history (his story) from the point of view of the state dominated by men of the apartheid regime as her story which narrates nation-building and its relationship to the women of the nation. The text challenges the TRC’s language of amnesty and unified nationhood. The TRC aimed to re-envision the history of South Africa by foregrounding the stories of prominent anti-apartheid activists whose voices were to be injected into a so-called unified national history at the same time as the TRC denied the voices of other victims of human rights violations in its public history and archive (Harris 2002: 175). Though earlier reports of the torture within ANC camps outside South Africa had already questioned the ideal of the ANC, the discussion of human rights violations of ANC activists by the ANC itself was taboo in the TRC meetings. When Teddy ‘Mwase’ Williams recounted before the TRC how senior ANC camp commanders sexually abused newly arrived female recruits at an ANC camp in Angola in the 1980s, he was asked to confine his report of violations only to those he himself experienced (Harris 2002: 177). David’s Story conveys what witnesses like Williams were not allowed to express. It articulates how post-apartheid South Africa needs to come to terms with itself around untold stories of women that fracture the myth of revolutionary unity against the apartheid regime. In doing so, the novel portrays how the South African Truth and Reconciliation project of post-apartheid nationhood was not founded upon truth, but upon the silencing of alternative narratives of betrayal.

12In March 1996 Beth Goldblatt and Sheila Meintjes spearheaded a workshop called ‘Gender and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ at the University of the Witwatersrand. The workshop led to an in-depth submission to the TRC underscoring the flawed methodology of the gender-neutral truth-finding that the TRC was adopting. This resulted in TRC’s special women’s hearings at Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg.9 Goldblatt and Meintjes later observed:

Lita [or Rita] Mazibuko is one of the only woman to have spoken about sexual violence at the hands of her own MK comrades in Swaziland and Mozambique where she was accused of being an informer.10 (Agenda 1997)

13The authors point to ‘the seeming restriction placed on members’ testimony by the liberation movements’ (‘Dealing with the Aftermath, ’ 12). In an interview with the authors Thenjiwe Mtintso, a senior member of the MK who also headed the Commission on Gender Equality, said that on an organizational level women liberation activists who were raped in the MK camps

do not wish to have their experiences used politically in the TRC where apartheid is equated morally with the ANC’s actions.... [S]ome of these women had chosen [italics mine] to participate in an organizational submission prepared by the ANC rather than come forward individually. (Goldblatt and Meintjes 1997: 12)

14Goldblatt and Meintjes underline the disappointing treatment of such violations in the ANC submission which merely acknowledged gender-specific violence against female comrades by ANC men and went no further than mentioning that the perpetrators had been punished (Goldblatt and Meintjes 1997: 12). The TRC did not release the names of the perpetrators of the abuses in the ANC camps (Goldblatt and Meintjes 1997: 14).

15In Country of My Skull Antjie Krog highlights the silence at the TRC around sexual atrocities:

Although rumors abound about rape, all these mutterings are trapped behind closed doors. Apparently high-profile women, among them Cabinet ministers, parliamentarians, and businesswomen, were raped and sexually abused under the previous dispensation–and not only by the regime, but by their own comrades in the townships and the liberation camps. (239)

16The difficulty of representing sexual brutality, especially when inflicted by one’s own comrades, is most eloquently and ironically brought to life through the comments of Antjie Krog herself. Krog questions the integrity of Mazibuko’s testimony of sexual atrocities: ‘It is a strange testimony. Is this woman with the good-natured face, who speaks of rape as if it is water, who emphasizes the youth of her rapists, nothing more than a prostitute?’ Krog’s cynicism about Mazibuko resounds as she wonders:

And is her sexual history perhaps the reason why Phosa [ANC Executive Committee member] says afterward that he has never heard of Rita Mazibuko or ‘Mumsy Khuswayo’–her code name in the ANC? (242)

17As if in support of her unease with Mazibuko’s testimony, Krog summarizes the TRC’s response to Mazibuko’s story:

The Truth Commission does not utter a single word in Mazibuko’s defense. Not one of the commissioners, not one of the feminists agitating for women’s rights, stands up and says: ‘We respect the right of Rita Mazibuko to tell the truth as she sees it, just as we respect the right of Mathews Phosa to tell the truth as he sees it. But we expect him to do the same.’ (242)

18Responding to the distinction between manly honour and feminine wiles that Krog’s discourse clearly encodes, in her conference paper Jo-Anne Prins has scathingly declared: ‘Krog seems to fall into the patriarchal discourse of rape in response to Rita’s testimony.’11

19David’s Story is an attempt at extricating the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission from the political grip of the post-apartheid state to question its premises from the perspective of a supranational struggle against both racial and gendered segregation.12 Through the characters of militant women like Dulcie and Sally, Zoe Wicomb has resurrected the stories of the women violated by the national liberation movement itself. The complexity of the relationship between the postcolonial past, the post-apartheid present, and the future of South Africa is thus documented through the discursive dissidence of ‘nationless authors’13 who remap tongue-tied stories of national shame, confiscated by the nation, onto the audible platform of a transnational feminist politics. The crucial import of such stories lies in galvanizing a national and transnational readership which acts as witness to oppression and has the capacity to generate justice through the pressure of public opinion. Acknowledging such activist potential of narratives, this paper now studies how literature contests the power of the nation-state to prescribe the identities of the people in terms of national affiliations and highlights the maltreatment of women by diverse agents of tyranny within the premises of the nation. It aims to highlight ways in which ‘literature without nations’14 deterritorializes the narratives of women’s suffering, thus opening up a dialogue between postcolonial narratives of the nation and transnational claims of women’s human rights.

20In David’s Story Zoe Wicomb articulates how fictional literature becomes a more reliable medium for transmitting the historical truth about South Africa than the reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In the preface to the text the female amanuensis recruited by the former ANC activist David to tell his story (history) contends that the fragmentary nature of David’s story ensued from the fact that ‘he both wanted and did not want it to be written’ (1). She adds:

David was simply unable/unwilling to disclose all. He believed it possible to negotiate a path between the necessary secrecy and a need to tell, a tension that caused agitation which in turn had to be concealed, but it drove him to view the story of his life as a continuous loop that never intersected itself. (2)

21The play on ‘unable/unwilling’ captures the stern demands of a revolution against tyranny that in its turn dictated the sacrifice of both the voice and the sexuality of its militants. Attraction in the world of revolution cannot be consummated in physical passion: ‘To indulge in such passion is to betray the cause, and there is far too much of that already’ (137). Appropriating Dulcie’s voice, David speaks for her: ‘Besides, Comrade Dulcie, herself a disciplined cadre, could not possibly have that kind of interest in him, would, like himself, have nipped it in the bud’ (137). In fact, this appropriation/repression of the voice of the woman revolutionary by the liberation movement itself highlights silences in David’s Story that challenge the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s narrative that the apartheid regime produced monolithic categories of victims and oppressors. Cutting across a linear narrative of torture, amnesty, and national unity, these gaps in Wicomb’s text together illustrate a different subset of textual meaning–about the irreconcilable differences within the revolution. Referring to the omissions in the text, the amanuensis tells the reader: ‘David instructs me to remove all references to a special relationship between him and Dulcie’ (137).

22Nonetheless, David’s talkative story about rigorous antiapartheid nationalism and revolutionary choice to privilege duty over passion is contested as Dulcie, in the absence of speech, gropes for words to write down her life. She believes that somewhere such a possibility exists though

she fears for any such writing. Although they come in the early hours she has to be vigilant at all times. Worse than any instrument of torture is the thought of such hard-found words being fingered by them–jabbed, clubbed, defaced into a gibberish that would turn the thing between David and herself into nothing. (198)

23Accepting the fact that as a militant woman she has no claim to private passions, she enshrines her love for David as the secret of the text that she writes, and professes her text to be about a ‘private teenage obsession’, nothing to do with ‘the weighty matters of the liberation movement’ (198). Seizing silence as a mode of refusal to enunciate her passions, Dulcie forges a space of autonomy by standing on its head the repressive silencing of passions that the revolution had enforced upon her.

24In an interview with Hein Willemse, Zoe Wicomb outlines the problematic nature of nationalism that she sets out to expose in all its complexity in David’s Story:

One of the things I am critical of in the novel is the value of military value. Again, how would this have happened without these so-called nasty people who are prepared to take up arms and are prepared to kill. (151)

25Advocating Spivak’s notion of ‘strategic nationalism’, Wicomb underlines the absolute need for a South African nationalism to overthrow the old system of apartheid. However, in a clinching statement about her literary project in David’s Story she asserts: ‘I’m simply interested to know what happens to that nationalism once it’s not needed strategically’ (151). In other words, Wicomb questions the post-apartheid nationalism that proclaims enfranchisement for all and denies the counter-narratives to South African unity that articulate the stories of the dispossessed in the post-apartheid nation. Though David’s story is also Dulcie’s story, the figure of Dulcie cannot be fully articulated in the text just as her story cannot be accommodated at the TRC hearings for it goes outside the scope of the Commission’s prescriptive model of victims and perpetrators. Dulcie’s story would claim the recognition of fault lines along which power cleaved itself between men and women within the revolution itself.

26This unrepresentability of truth and trauma in the lives of revolutionary ANC women is also portrayed in David’s Story in the torture of Dulcie. The depiction of the episode blurs the identities of Dulcie’s torturers, thus leaving the reader in doubt whether Dulcie was tortured by her male peers within the ANC or by the regime. This becomes a deliberate ploy to capture the anomalous treatment that the TRC reserved for the female victims of sexual violence. As Dulcie’s attackers undress her and wave the electrodes, one of them says: ‘Not rape, that will teach her nothing, leave nothing; rape’s too good for her kind’ (178). This underlines the denial of the sexuality of the female militant by the revolution that the text repeatedly highlights though we can never know for sure if Dulcie’s attackers are ANC guerrillas. However, that the revolutionary patriarchy did not hesitate to use the sexuality of female militants as a weapon against them is evident when Dulcie is described as a woman ‘who has turned her muscles into ropes of steel, ’ and ‘who even as an eager girl in the bush wars resisted the advances of those in power, resisted her own comrades, having worked out that fucking women was a way of preventing them from rising in the Movement’ (179).

27Gender violence plays an integral part in the education of the female militant, as is vividly depicted in the guerrilla education of David’s wife–Sally. Though Sally enjoys the water, she performs poorly in her swimming class at the training camp in Mozambique, ‘unable to confess her terror’ as ‘the comrade with his hand under her belly barked his instructions’ (123). As the contingent walks back across the sand he says:

A fuck, that’s what you need, and she saw his bulging shorts and knew that her time had come, as she had known it would come sooner or later, this unspoken part of a girl’s training.... [S]ince she had long forgotten the fantasy of the virginal white veil, it did not matter, she told herself, no point in being fastidious, there were more important things to think of, there was freedom on which to fix her thoughts. (123)

28Fixing thoughts on national ‘freedom’ erases the blatant and violent power divide between men and women in the revolution. Denying the humiliation and pain of betrayal within the movement itself as her own fastidiousness about sexual propriety, Sally excuses the heroes of the revolution because of their devotion to the greater cause of a democratic nationhood. Romantic love between men and women like David and Dulcie gets repressed by the revolution at the same time as violent and unattached passions get unofficially licensed by it.

29The alliance of diverse agents of tyranny against women is a crucial narrative vector in Wicomb’s text that defines the relationship in which women stand with respect to nationalism. In an eloquent statement about this patriarchal alliance, Wicomb draws out the affinities between her revolutionary hero–David–and the eighteenth century European scientist, Georges Cuvier, whose racialization of the natural sciences led to one of the most dehumanizing of scientific spectacles known in history. Saartje Baartman–a Khoi Khoi woman, later known as the ‘Hottentot Venus, ’ became an icon of racial inferiority and primitive female sexuality as Cuvier’s imperialist scientific research into black female anatomy brutally rendered her an object for the European gaze:

For it was not only the spectacular steatopygia [generous buttocks] that she strutted in her cage for all of England and France to giggle at–no, the entire world, thanks to Cuvier, could peer in private at those parts of which no decent person would speak, let alone make drawings.... It was the shame in print, in perpetuity, the thought of a reader turning to that page, that refreshed David’s outrage.
(33)

30Enraged by the thought of another reader’s objectification of the black female anatomy, David nonetheless becomes the voyeur himself. Among six books in his hotel room David chooses Curiosities of Natural History and turns to the reference to Cuvier. David finds

his interest deflected from outrage on Baartman’s behalf to fascination with Cuvier’s mind, with the intellectual life that he imagined for the anatomist.... That Cuvier rejecting the obviousness of form, should have invented a system based on features hidden from view appealed to the guerrilla. (32)

31This enthralled appreciation of the male mind is broken not by David’s empathy with the personal story of a suffering woman, alienated from her people, and displayed naked in a cage before the eyes of the world, but by a South African man’s outrage at Europe revealing the secrets of the black female body. In the process, the body of the Hottentot Venus becomes a terrain of racial struggle between David and Cuvier, as the personal tragedy of the woman who dies as result of constant degradation is lost and she becomes merely the sign of European colonial victory over the black man. In fact, despite the racial animosity, David discerns connections between Cuvier’s racialised system of classification of organisms and the tactics of a guerrilla war that contest racial hierarchy.

32The link between the women of the past and the present as well as the European colonizers of the past and the South African liberators of the present is reinforced in the comparison between Sally and Saartje Baartman and David’s identification with Cuvier. Baartman’s fabled buttocks also become metonymic of women like Sally whose bodies are solely in the service of men:

Steatopygous Sally, turning to the tune of the collapsed springs of the mattress, presses a buttock into David’s thin hip, and offering warmth and well-being that brings a sleep-smile to his lips, does not as yet know of the epithet or its meaning. (16)

33With his influence in the movement David has Sally released from her underground militancy so that she can become the homemaker for David and the mother of his children. Sally is offered the portfolio of a community worker for the revolution, resulting in ‘an emptiness, a hollowness inside as if she had aborted, no miscarried, and a rush of unfamiliar hormones left her listless for weeks’ (14). After she marries David and has a baby boy, Wicomb states that she looks like ‘an emaciated scarecrow of a woman with uneven, vegetal tufts of hair and liverish spots on her brown skin’ (14). The violence with which women’s bodies are appropriated by sanctioned institutions like marriage and colonial scientific research and the ways in which their bodies are transformed into instruments for male benefit at the cost of women’s well-being inextricably connects Sally to Saartje Baartman. This also serves to forge the crucial link between nationalism upheld by marriage and the structures of the family and imperialism bolstered by the infrastructures of scientific rationality, both achieved at the expense of women.

34Thus, the truth about David’s Story can never be told since the truth about David’s Story is also the truth about Dulcie’s story, about Sally’s story, and about Saartje Baartman’s story, all of which contest the claims of South African national unity–of a non-racial democracy of blacks and whites, of men and women, unified in upholding principles of race, gender and class egalitarianism. In the after-word to Wicomb’s text Dorothy Driver summarizes the dilemmas of post-revolutionary representation in two pointed questions: ‘How can we be post-apartheid (in the metaphysical sense) if truth is still “black and white”? Moreover, what kind of world do we live in where love constitutes political betrayal?’ (251)

35The inability of ‘post-apartheid’ nationalism to articulate the truth about the gender-apartheid that was concomitant with racial apartheid literally makes truth stutter across the page. In the sheaf of papers containing notes on his own life that David hands over to the amanuensis he has, ‘having tried and failed’ to erase Dulcie completely from his story, displaced Dulcie ‘by working on the historical figure of Saartje Baartman instead’ (134). However, Baartman’s story also remains unfinished in David’s version–‘a mess, schoolboy scribbles that ought to have been thrown away’ (135). In the version of the amanuensis, David’s story is difficult to retell. Despite the inferences the amanuensis makes from the last page, she does

not quite know how to represent it. It is a mess of scribbles and scoring out and doodling of peculiar figures that cannot be reproduced here. [She]... know[s] that it is his attempt at writing about Dulcie, because her name is written several times and struck out.
(135)

36The beginnings are mapped all over the page, and underscore the possibility of alternative narratives which remain untold. But in this form the fictional literature of David’s story most faithfully captures the truth about TRC as it admits:

Truth, I gather, is the word that cannot be written. He has changed it into the palindrome of Cape Flats speech–TRURT, TRURT, TRURT, TRURT–the words speed across the page, driven as a toy car is driven by a child, with lips pouted as spit flying, wheels squealing around the Dulcie obstacles. (136)

37As the truth about women falters in David’s Story, so does it stutter in the TRC hearings.

38That the TRC denied the existence of gender-apartheid within liberation movements through its silence over the sole testimony of Rita Mazibuko underscores that though post-apartheid South Africa has made a concerted though controversial effort to foster racial amity, when it came to a contest between race and gender justice, as with Dulcie and her real life counterpart Mazibuko, the TRC tilted in favour of racial unity in the new nation at the cost of acknowledging past violations of ANC women by the liberation struggle itself.

39However, texts such as David’s Story facilitate exchanges between the postcolonial and the transnational when they enter global circuits of cultural productions, dissemination, and consumption– interfaces that bring into conjunction public intellectuals like Zoe Wicomb and the forces of global publishing. Once such texts enter the global market, awareness of human suffering is raised through storytelling which establishes a relationship with human rights politics. The aesthetics of ‘literature without nation’ intersects with the ethics of human rights campaigns. The separatism of the domains of politics and literature upheld by conservative thinking within academia breaks down as the interdisciplinary study of literature creates ‘ [h]uman rights platforms and mechanisms [that] make possible a legitimating process of telling and listening that demands accountability on the part of states and international organizations’ (Human Rights and Narrated Lives, 3). Global researchers together with transnational writers generate conferences and seminars that recycle these stories of gender violence to galvanize forums for transnational feminist politics that cut across national identities to contest the power of the state to define women’s loyalties only in terms of the nation-state. These platforms hold accountable the patriarchal structures of the nation-state in pre-revolutionary, revolutionary, and post-revolutionary times. Across national boundaries, these platforms clamour for fair governance of all citizens in the post resistance milieu, and question the asymmetrical organization of post-resistance state power that refuses to provide restorative justice to women violated during the revolution.