The Closest of Strangers - South African women's life writing

Judith Lütge Coullie (ed)

The Closest of Strangers: South African Women's Life Writing Price: R189.95 Editor: Judith Lütge-Coullie Publisher: Wits University Press ISBN: 1868143880 Format: Trade paperback Publication Date: 2004/8 Pages: 320; Illustrated Click here or on the book cover to buy your copy from kalahari.net now!

To vary the pattern of entries on works of fiction in this column somewhat, the present outline describes a compendium put together by the South African academic Judith Coullie, whose collection of English-language “life writing” (extracts from autobiographies and transmitted, recorded or reflected autobiographical accounts, brought together in a single text) is not only fascinating in its diversity and range, but contains a generally even-handed, succinct and reliable history of the country. The editor does not claim to be a historian, however – her sources are clearly acknowledged. The earliest item included in Coullie’s collection recounts an 1895 “trip to Durban” (from Cape Town) undertaken by a family of mixed European settler descent, whereas in the text’s final piece a black woman speaks about living with AIDS in 2000.

Coullie analyses and defends her (well-chosen) title by insisting on the continuing “lack of ordinary social contact” between women of differing racial origins within the South African context and insists that “the testimonies recount no cross-racial sisterhood” (1), since the “intimacy” (mostly in the domestic sphere of the white woman’s home) of such women’s encounters did not allow proximity to override “alienation” (3). On the same page she cites Sindiwe Magona’s summary: “White women could not escape the privilege which their colour bestowed on them. Black women could not escape the discrimination which theirs made them heir to.”

Nevertheless, the editor acknowledges that a lumping together of all black women as victims of the prevailing racial order (and its aftermath) ignores individual self-expressions, achievements and triumphs, and she draws attention to her inclusion of the texts where the latter type of perspective is highlighted. Coullie argues that “life writing during apartheid was more important than fiction” and that this explains “why it was commonly banned” (7). She also draws attention to the information that, prior to the 1960s, “no prose narrative texts in English by black South African women appear to have been published” (7) – a point that tells its own tale.

To give readers some sense of the variety of vivid accounts juxtaposed in the Coullie compendium, I provide examples in the chronological order in which they appear in the text. This will hopefully provide a small glimpse of the point Coullie intends: that evocations of individual female experiences are as much imbued with politics and with the larger social and historical realities and transitions of their time as are the formal generalisations and delineations of social and political history-writing. In the earliest text, for instance, we find a feisty serving-woman, “proud of her slave ancestry”, disdainfully declaring that “if the English are as insipid as their sausages, then … I don’t want to have anything to do with such people” (18)!

Early contributions in the collection range from the humorous voice of such an unknown, colonially renamed women as “Old Sally” (to whom the previous quotation is attributed) to the sober tones of the famous British anti-Boer War campaigner Emily Hobhouse. In the long letter to her mother that Coullie cites, Hobhouse describes two events remarkably resembling contemporary newspaper reports – if one exchanges the participants’ identities, of course. In one, she relays an account by a Boer woman of how a neighbour’s “child of two”, held in her arms, was (accidentally, but with horrendous irresponsibility) shot dead by a British soldier, and in the other, how promised compensation (after the British “burnt earth” policies had cost them their homes and farms) was unpaid or scandalously underpaid to Anglo-Boer War victims (33; 35). One cannot help thinking, respectively, of the child casualties of gang warfare in Cape townships and victim claims identified by the TRC in our time as “echoing” those old patterns with the cruel irony of history.

From the 1920s comes the wonderfully assertive self-praises of a prolific and accomplished Xhosa poet, Nontzizi Mgqwetho – “Peace, Nontzizi, African rivermoss,/ Your poetry goes to the core/ And the peaks of the nation swivel/ As you sway from side to side …” The poet is not above wryly mocking her own ungainly frame and “match-stick legs” in the same poem (65-66 - here, translated from the Xhosa original). Astonishingly, nothing is known about the poet (it seems) beyond what she reveals in her own poetry, but a vital personality shines through her words.

We are given an interesting perspective on the evolution of the apartheid system as observed in 1949 by Bertha Solomon: an MP who had been a leading local “suffragette” and was an advocate of the Supreme Court. “At that stage,” she writes, “apartheid was still only a slogan … Its actual interpretation was to come only later with the appointment in early 1950 of Dr Eiselen as the new Secretary for Native Affairs” (122).

Many of the black women’s accounts in Coullie’s collection were recorded by white women, as were the words of Mpho Ntumya. She notes, however, that talking to the woman recording her words made her “remember many things which I forgot” and was “like looking at an album of photos from my whole life” (127).

Maggie Resha’s testimony, on the other hand, is that of one of the famous leaders of the women’s anti-apartheid struggle – and her description of the organisation and execution of the 1956 South African women’s march is gripping.

Predictably, words that stand out for their uncomfortable, unsparing, searing honesty and lucidity are those of the most famous woman writer included in the collection – Bessie Head. Of the post-traumatic breakdown she suffered not long after reaching the supposed safety of her exile in Botswana, Head writes: “I was living hell itself and did not know or perhaps I only wanted to accept heaven, without pain. Haven’t people done it for centuries and then slaughtered each other? Don’t they say in South Africa that they are Christians?” (230).

Linda Fortune’s autobiography focuses on her childhood in District Six. She evokes the doomed community’s anger and despair by quoting the words of her brother: “‘I wish I had a gun like John Wayne so that I could shoot that guy on the bulldozer,’ Pete hissed” (236).

Another fierce voice of resistance is that of Caesarina Makhoere, an imprisoned black activist, who describes with relish how she and her comrades continued their struggle against oppression even inside jail. For, she explains, “I refuse to be a lady when other people are not ladies. It is too expensive” (276). Even while policemen are beating her up, her comrade joins her in cursing and threatening the cops: “Thandiswa was telling them nonsense through the window; I was telling them nonsense too”, is how she describes their swearing at and threatening the prison guards. She adds: “I told them they were afraid of our brothers on the borders who were giving them hell. They should go to Angola where our brothers would blow them to pieces” (276). Hers is most distinctly the voice of a woman warrior!

Then there is that other war – the battle for survival that so many women are conscripted into. “Dolly” (the only name provided here for a woman who took up prostitution to support her two children) has the following to say:

You know, these days ain’t what they used to be. Today there’s the cops, today there’s the customer who tells you he’s only got R2 on him. I mean, what can you do for that? Today a penicillin injection costs R5. I mean you’ve got to look after your health at the same time.

Since there are these young girls coming up, they don’t pay anymore. They rather tell you, “Get me a young girl.” At times they give you R10, R5, R2. Some of them they just take you and dump you right out in the veld when they’ve had you. Then you are told, “F… off, you black bitch.” And you must just go. Who wants to get hurt? But if you get a chance, once he’s drunk, you just pick-pocket him (293).

Emma Mashinini, a famous trade union activist, gives us the surprised response to her physical appearance of “the Director of Woolworths, Mr Susman” (during strike negotiations): “Oh, my God, this person we fear so much. I thought she was a very big ogre of a person, yet it’s just a tiny giant coming in” (305). She was evidently a tough but disarmingly straight, dignified, fair-minded, articulate and principled representative of her beloved union members. Yet the humiliation and torture to which this gem of a woman was subjected in jail damaged her to a point of collapse – as similar pressures had (before her) affected Bessie Head. Mashinini writes as follows of the serious after-effects of her imprisonment:

Two other bad things were exhaustion and the loss of memory. When I went back to work that first time, in August, I was almost like a cabbage. I, who had always been a very productive person, now had to struggle to keep going. For a long time I felt like this. I felt that although I was free, I was still a condemned person. (308)

Coullie could not omit one of the most famous South African autobiographical texts of recent times: Antjie Krog’s Country of my Skull. In the extract included by the editor, two of Krog’s (own) voices are discernible. The first is the voice of the carefully strategising journalist: “The past has to be put into hard news gripping enough to make bulletin headlines” (351), Krog writes of her assignment to cover the TRC hearings for radio. The second voice is that of the profoundly feeling poet: “It is not so much the deaths, and the names of the dead, but the web of infinite sorrow woven around them. It keeps on coming and coming.” In an image reminiscent of her text’s title, she describes the experience of this feeling as resembling “a wide, barren, disconsolate landscape where the horizon keeps on dropping away” (353) - an abyss of mourning and despair created by what she witnesses at the hearings.

Most fittingly, the final account in the collection is (as I mentioned earlier) a contemporary testimony – the voice of Maria Ndlovu, published previously (in 2000) in Living Openly: HIV Positive South Africans Tell Their Stories. This is how Ndlovu describes the motive and moment that made her decide to speak out:

It was when I went to an HIV clinic and it was so silent and quiet. It was like we were sitting in an electric chair waiting to die and we would not talk or greet as we would in other queues, like the casualty for example, where you would see somebody and you would ask what is happening. It was then that I made up my mind that this needs to be talked about because it is not right to feel as if you are dying when you are not. I want to normalise the situation (371).

Only subsequently do we hear how she contracted the HI virus:

When I was raped, I kept quiet for some time. I spoke more of my HIV status than I did of my rape, and then I thought, “Why am I keeping quiet? Am I protecting the rapist, and why should I?” So I started talking about the way it really is (372).

The many wars and struggles in which South African women have been involved are clearly far from over.

Every reader of Coullie’s anthology will make their own choices of what they consider the most important or memorable details and stories in this “patchwork record” (11) of just over a century of South African history, and have their own complaints about what was incorporated into or omitted from it, wanting some entries longer and others shorter, and so on. For my part I was concerned, for instance, that the generally so scrupulous editing perpetuates the myth (corrected in Eilersen’s biography of the writer) that Bessie Head’s mother was committed to an asylum as punishment for having had sexual relations with a black man (228). On the whole, however, I feel (as I believe most readers will) grateful to Coullie for having assembled this elegant, poignant and immensely worthwhile collection of women’s testimonies – history’s all-too-often unjustly silenced or overlooked witnesses. For this reviewer, the central irritation in writing about this text is the lack of space in which to describe more of its haunting and memorable entries.

LitNet: 04 May 2006

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