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Women Writing Africa: The Southern Region

- edited by MJ Daymond, Dorothy Driver, Sheila Meintjes, Leloba Molema, Chiedza Musengezi, Margie Orford, Nobantu Rasebotsa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2003

Annie Gagiano

Women Writing Africa Although the text discussed in this column is a single volume, it is virtually itself a library - a rich and various anthology of documents, recorded statements, tales, poems and creative writing. Painstakingly collected, researched and arranged, it is as much an excellent reference work of immense historical importance as it is a compendium of moving, sometimes horrifying and generally thought-provoking texts carefully selected by the editors. In the words of the (general) series’ editors, the title of the text is meant to indicate that it provides

a blend of verbal and written forms of expression embodying the experience of African women in envisioning their lives in relation to their societies (xviii). Among the 120 texts included here, each introduced and contextualised by an informative headnote, there is no uniformity of perspective or experience. No attempt to “ essentialise” (Southern) African womanhood is discernible here - the variety of personality, class and experience (not to mention the range of ethnicities) ensures (as the editors say), a

focus less on identity politics than on the processes of identification, counter-identification and dis-identification (xxvi). It is a pity, perhaps, that the editors in their scrupulosity omitted what they themselves refer to as “ the oldest text of all” : “ court testimony from a slave woman in Cape Town in 1709” , on the principle that what was captured in the court record was not this woman’s testimony as spoken (xxiii). They point out, interestingly, that more than half of the texts included from the 1980s and 1990s period are “ orature” , indicating how important this mode of communication remains in women’s lives - and, one might add, suggesting something about the persistent unevenness of “ gender power” in our region. A large number of the texts show individual women’s or female groups’ negotiations with powerful institutions or with power figures (usually male). The editors point out that, in their engagements with particular incarnations of power, women often need to collaborate or at least make use of other instances that may be considered as (or also) oppressive towards themselves. But it is the astuteness, eloquence, dignity and passion for justice that impresses one when one reads many of these statements and documents.

I can, of course, provide no more than a small and inevitably arbitrary selection of examples and references in this column from the much larger and probably better balanced collection that is the published compendium. Among the most fascinating items are two early examples of land struggles by women. One of these concerns the court testimony of Kaatje Nieuwveldt, a woman of Khoikhoi descent, whose involved struggle for land ownership (around 1858) took place within a web of clearly tricky connections with men - ranging from her father Rooiberg (whose role as a rebel had lost him the disputed plot, in the Katberg region) to the magistrate named Meurant who dispossessed her and whose domestic servant she had formerly been, and the British settler Stewart, to whom Meurant had (in contravention of his promise to Nieuwveldt, she claimed) assigned the piece of land. She also had a dispute with another neighbour, a man named Buekkes, whose querulous-sounding complaint against Nieuwveldt for swearing at him and “ saying the farmers only came in here to rob the Blacks” (88) makes her sound as feisty to us as she must have been troublesome to the men with whom she engaged in these disputes. (She lost these cases, of course, given the class-race-gender “ brotherhood” of the time.)

The other land claim comes from a place called Southville, in 1883, and concerns the Xhosa princess Emma Sandile, who had married a Chief called Stockwe. Her husband was killed in the course of a revolt against British rule. She had nevertheless to appeal to the magistrate during her widowhood, writing in her petition to him that “ the people of [Stockwe’s] clan smelt [her] out” (96) after her husband’s death and put blame for his demise on her head. Her request to be granted official ownership of a farm her husband had intended her to have (but which had been seized by a clansman) for herself as well as her five children and her co-wives was granted by the authorities.

Some of the texts in the collection are evocations of the experience of women of earlier times, whose (own) words we do not have. One such document is an excerpt from the beautiful poem “ Krotoa’s Story” by Karen Press, first published in a 1990 collection. The Khoikhoi woman Krotoa, as most readers will know, was named Eva by the earliest Dutch colonists (Van Riebeeck et al.) and lived among them as an intermediary who could translate from and into Dutch and her people’s Khoi language, an ambiguous ambassador who was considered “ civilised” by the Dutch but was held in contempt as having “ reverted to savagery” after her European husband’s death. The poem by Press is a profound and moving text, examining the sorrows and multiple losses experienced by Krotoa, whose thoughts about herself are evoked as follows: “ who is this person Oedasoa has commanded / I have not met her before” (435).

A similar role, less obviously but perhaps as deeply fraught, is played by a Herero woman, Urieta Kazahendike, who “ spoke Dutch, German, English, and Nama” as well as Herero. She is described as “ an invaluable but unacknowledged editor and translator” mediating between Herero and German for the missionary CH Hahn - he earned an honorary doctorate and other accolades for his work, in which Kazahendike’s efforts were (more than likely) swallowed up without adequate acknowledgement. Again one gets the impression (from the letter written in 1861) of the “ accultured” woman as a lonely, isolated figure who, since her education, belongs neither (any longer) to her “ own” people nor to the Europeans to whom she has been so useful.

A much more successful cultural “ return” appears to have been achieved by Noneko (or Hannah) Toney, to judge by her 1875 letters from the Transkei (at that time known as Kaffraria) to her British (missionary) mentor, Anne Mackenzie. About her teaching methods in the girls’ school there, Toney writes: “ I tell them it all in Kafir [Xhosa], and it makes it quite interesting to them. The Kafir [i.e. her Xhosa mother tongue] has all come back to me quite natural” (113).

A dramatic little exchange - as much political as it is cultural, even “ racial” - occurs in the midst of an extract from an Afrikaner woman’s Anglo-Boer War journal, describing the fraught moment when her farm home and the adjacent crops are being destroyed prior to her being taken to a concentration camp:

I asked them why they burnt my food: a man made answer: “ Your husband gives you food” . I said then: “ The devil thanks you for this: My husband has given me food enough - but you have burnt it” . A Kaffir in the service of enemy who stood gazing at the house as it burnt said: “ It is awful” . I remained silent. He said for the second time: “ It is awful” , and added, “ it is sin” . Then spoke I and said: “ Yes, God will punish you for this.” (141). The insistent expression of sympathy from the black man in the reported exchange is as interesting as the equally insistent rejection of that sympathy from the white woman; again one feels with a sort of shudder how uncannily such early texts contain, as it were, the genetic code of future social developments in the region.

There is a harrowing account (again, in court testimony: one of the few fora where, at this time [1908], women’s voices were recorded) from a Shangaan girl called Khami in Zimbabwe, forced by her father and a man who wanted her as his second wife, to get married at the age of eleven. What is remarkable about this brave girl’s testimony (given at age 13) is its evidence of the steadfastness of her sense of the illegitimacy of the patriarchal power structures that enmeshed her. Despite two years of “ marriage” , repeated and violent sexual subjugation (ie violent rapes) by the “ husband” , and her father’s acceptance of lobola from him, she evidently never resigned herself to the role that had been assigned to her. Unfortunately, the records do not show the outcome of the case (her contestation, in court, of the legitimacy of the union).

In contrast with the above dreadful situation one could, for emotional relief, read the justly dignified expression of fulfilled and recognised duty by a woman of royal status, the Swazi queen regent Labotsibeni’s awareness, expressed in her report to the British Resident Commission in her country, that she had successfully concluded her stewardship at the time that her grandson, the late king Sobhuza II, assumed rule. “ All this is governed by our ancient customs,” she declares with admirable cultural confidence to the foreign administrator, “ and I shall remain greater by the influence which my position holds over [the young king] and over the Councils of the Nation” (172).

Less successful and secure than this, evidently, are the aristocratic Batswana ladies who, in 1926 Botswana, appeal to the British High Commissioner for assistance against their ruling male relatives (180-182).

A particularly eloquent petition for women’s rights (of which there are numerous examples in the collection) is the Women’s Charter of the Federation of South African Women of 1954 (236-240), with which one might compare the powerful presidential address by Lilian Ngoyi, an icon of the South African freedom struggle, given to the Transvaal Women’s League (of the ANC) in 1956 (240-44), as well as the moving, morally arresting 1958 piece called “ The Widows of the Reserves” by Phyllis Ntantala (whose husband was the academic and Xhosa novelist AC Jordan) - the latter an essay written with heart-wrenching urgency.

Comparably vivid is such testimony as Winnie Madikizele-Mandela’s, from the time (1975) when she was the imprisoned ANC leader’s wife, in a piece titled “ Detention Alone Is a Trial in Itself” :

Ultimately it means your seizure at dawn, dragged away from little children screaming and clinging to your skirt, imploring the white man dragging mummy to leave her alone. It means leaving the comfort of your home with the bare essentials of life that hardly make life bearable in your cell. It means the haunting memories of those screams of the loved ones, the beginning of that horror story told many a time and that has become common knowledge, yet the actual experience remains petrifying (345). Another “ leader’s wife” (who was also a hero and a leader in her own right) was Nokukhanya Luthuli, who outlived her husband Albert Luthuli by a number of years. The Women Writing Africa compendium includes in full an English translation of a praise poem to her, composed in Zulu in 1993 by Thoko Remigia Makhanya. The headnote says that in “ celebrat[ing] the braveries of 'perception’ and [of] 'building and sustenance of the nation” , the piece resembles other praise poetry by women (and contrasts with the unusual “ male” praise poem “ focused on violence and courage” ) (457). One brief extract from this beautiful, tender poem must suffice here: “ I praise the many-roled woman / Mother, father, wife, teacher, nurse, / farmer, environmentalist and theologian” (460).

In conclusion (and in frustration at being unable to mention more of the many treasures in this 554-page text), it may be said that, not unnaturally, the extracts from the work by established or professional woman writers such as Noni Jabavu, Bessie Head, Lauretta Ngcobo and Yvonne Vera do stand out because of their exceptional skill, eloquence and vivid power, but they do not overshadow the others, and indeed, can be thought to share their light - alluding to the way Vera describes writing:

Writing can be this kind of light. Within it … I travel bravely … into the shadows that this light creates, and in that darkness it is also possible to be free, to write, to be a woman (490). Or as a Setswana initiation song says: “ Womanhood is a hardship / Please help me dig this clay / Womanhood is a hardship” (506-507).

Seeing these clay-diggers and light-bearers at work in this anthology is an unforgettable experience and a most valuable learning opportunity.

LitNet: 25 April 2004

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