And Wrote My Story Anyway

Black South African women's novels as feminism

Barbara Boswell

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781776146208
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Part literary history, part feminist historiography And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women's Novels as Feminism critically examines influential novels in English by eminent black female writers.
Studying these writers' key engagements with nationalism, race and gender during apartheid and the transition to democracy, Barbara Boswell traces the ways in which black women's fiction critically interrogates narrow ideas of nationalism. She examines who is included and excluded, while producing alternative visions for a more just South African society.
This is an erudite analysis of ten well-known South African writers, spanning the apartheid and post-apartheid era: Miriam Tlali, Lauretta Ngcobo, Farida Karodia, Agnes Sam, Sindiwe Magona, Zoë Wicomb, Rayda Jacobs, Yvette Christiansë, Kagiso Lesego Molope and Zukiswa Wanner. Boswell argues that black women's fiction could and should be read as a subversive site of knowledge production in a setting, which, for centuries, denied black women's voices and intellects.
Reading their fiction as theory, for the first time these writers' works are placed in sustained conversation with each other, producing an arc of feminist criticism that speaks forcefully back to the abuse of a racist, white-dominated, patriarchal power.

1

Writing as Activism: A History of Black South African Women’s Writing

Black South African women’s literary production should be understood within the wider political context which, in the period reviewed in this book, was dominated by apartheid. Though colonial South Africa was always racially segregated and marked, as with other colonial societies, by the exploitation of colonised bodies and the decimation of indigenous cultures and history, apartheid ideology became legally entrenched when the white Afrikaner National Party ascended to power in 1948. This chapter surveys South Africa’s history during the twentieth century in relation to black women’s literary production, focusing on the ways in which the apartheid doctrine and its policy of racial segregation affected black women’s lives, both politically and as producers of writing. This history is structured in three broad sections: the segregation era, before formal apartheid (1910–1948); the apartheid era (1948–1990); and the post-apartheid era. For each historical period, I survey the laws and conditions that structured black South Africans’ lives; document women’s resistance to forms of injustice and oppression; and survey the types of literatures black women produced as a result of, and in reaction to, the prevailing political conditions.

While male critics and writers such as James Matthews, Njabulo Ndebele, Michael Chapman and Richard Rive, among others, have created taxonomies of black literary output during apartheid – the Drum School of writing of the 1950s, the protest literature of the late 1950s and 1960s, and Black Consciousness writing of the 1970s and 1980s, others have taken issue with the reductive nature of the concept of ‘protest literature’. Writing in 1991, at the beginning of the transition to democracy, Mbulelo Mzamane asserted the following:

Now more than ever, it has become reductionist to categorise all African literature as protest. Protest literature is writing by the racially oppressed addressed to readers of the ruling class in an attempt to solicit their sympathy and support against discriminatory laws and practices … Protest springs from a feeling of being a ward: it is the activity of apprentices, and it is the action of subordinates who see themselves as such. It is both solicitous and moderate. (In Narismulu 1998, 197)

I follow Mzamane by refusing to neatly situate early black women’s writing within the ‘protest’ category, since the multivalence of their work addresses multiple aspects of black life. In any case, black women writers defy easy categorisation within these androcentric schemas.

Women were largely excluded from publishing in Drum magazine, one of the primary publication vehicles for black journalists and creative writers during the 1950s. Furthermore, black women’s writing straddles the classificatory divide between protest literature – critiqued by Ndebele (1986) as overdetermined by the spectacle of apartheid – and the more nuanced interpretations of black life and interiority characteristic of Black Consciousness writing. Consequently, this book declines to rigidly compartmentalise black women’s writing within certain literary and political periods. Instead, I aim to offer a chronological account of black women’s literary output as informed and shaped by the broad political events of their times.

Black women’s writing during the segregation era: 1910–1948

Although legally implemented during the 1940s and the 1950s, apartheid’s genesis was a series of segregationist laws enacted earlier under British colonial rule. These laws include the South Africa Act passed by the British House of Commons in 1909, which in 1910 established the Union of South Africa. This Union was predicated upon the exclusion of black South Africans from citizenship, as the law which established it removed the limited parliamentary rights that a small section of the black population had held prior to its enactment. White political power was further buttressed by the Natives Land Act of 1913, which made it illegal for Africans to buy or lease land anywhere in South Africa, or live anywhere outside of specially designated reserves. The Act effectively secured over 80 per cent of South African land for whites, who made up less than 20 per cent of the population.

The African National Congress (ANC) became the primary extra-parliamentary opposition to these segregationist policies. Formed as an anti-colonial organisation in 1912 (then known as the African Native National Congress) in direct reaction to the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, the ANC was aimed chiefly at securing political and land rights for Africans who were disenfranchised, and would soon be systematically removed from their land.

During this period a number of male African intellectuals rose to prominence as writers. Sol T Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa, published in 1916, illuminated the devastation wrought by the Natives Land Act. Plaatje later published Mhudi (1930), an epic love story set against the historical backdrop of the war between the Ndebele and Baralong in the early nineteenth century. Written between 1917 and 1920 according to Laura Chrisman (1997), Mhudi was the first novel to be published by a black South African in English, though this would only occur in 1930. A year later, Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka, a translation of the original Sesotho version of 1909, was published. Other prominent black male writers during the earlier half of the twentieth century include SEK Mqayi, JJR Jolobe, HIE Dhlomo, RRR Dhlomo, BW Vilakazi and AC Jordan, who formed part of an educated literary elite closely aligned with the then African Native National Congress (Chapman 1996). These writers were important precursors of, and influences upon, black women writers during the latter half of the century.

Though there was a dearth of published writing by black women during the pre-apartheid era, a number of black women’s works written during this time have been excavated and re-recorded for posterity, thanks to the publication of the anthology Women Writing Africa: The Southern Region (Daymond et al. 2003). In an attempt to retrieve the often subsumed voices of South African women writers, the editors of the anthology gathered various oral and written forms of expression, such as political speeches, petitions, essays, court depositions, as well as oral and published poetry and storytelling. The editors point out that black women who expressed themselves in the public domain, whether in writing or speech, were generally able to do so through their membership of a relatively elite group who had gained literacy through colonial education.

The history of black South African women’s literacy and education is not only complex but also contested. Christian missionaries were the first to offer black women limited access to formal education, steeping them in ideologies of domesticity and femininity, models of womanhood that were often unattainable to these women because of their race (Daymond et al. 2003, 25). Megan Healy-Clancy (2014), in her history of Inanda Seminary, a mission school for African girls, shows how the school was founded by missionaries to provide suitable wives for mission-educated African men – wives who would be good domestic companions as well as mothers. Employment opportunities for these women were, in the late 1800s, confined to teaching or domestic work. An example of the gendered ideologies produced by mission schools is provided in Phyllis Ntantala’s autobiography, A Life’s Mosaic (1993): having grown up to be an intellectual, Ntantala (1993, 30) describes the colonial education she received as a young girl in the 1920s at a school at Colosa in the Eastern Cape as ‘brainwashing’.

Mission education accounts, in part, for what is considered the first publication of a black woman’s writing in South Africa: Adelaide Dube’s poem, ‘Africa My Native Land’, in the Zulu language newspaper, Ilanga Lase Natal (Daymond et al. 2003, 161). Published in 1913, the year of the Natives Land Act, the poem laments Africans’ loss of access to their ancestral land.

In print, the earliest body of poetry by a black woman is the work of Nontsizi Mgqwetho, a migrant from the Eastern Cape to Johannesburg, who, from 1920 to 1929, produced a substantial corpus of poetry in isiXhosa in the Johannesburg-based newspaper, Umteteli wa Bantu. Her poems were overtly political, commenting on politics within the African Native National Congress, and containing appeals for black solidarity in the face of white oppression (Daymond et al. 2003, 176). Translations of her Umteteli poems, collected by Jeff Opland and published in 2007 as The Nation’s Bounty: The Xhosa Poetry of Nontsizi Mgqwetho, marked a radical departure from the oral modes of black women’s composition and expression of poetry.

Black women also published novels and novellas in isiXhosa during the early twentieth century. The earliest of these were Lillith Kakaza’s Intyantyambo Yomzi (1913) and UThandiwe wakwaGcaleka (1914); the latter is the first known novel written by a woman in isiXhosa. Another such work is Victoria Swartbooi’s novella, UMandisa, published in 1934, which emphasises the importance of ubuntu through the coming-of-age story of Mandisa, the protagonist (Daymond et al. 2003, 206). UMandisa has been hailed as a proto-feminist novel: Hoza (2012, 63), for example, reads it as a ‘self-consciously crafted feminist-oriented novel’, while for Daymond et al., it offers an alternative vision of Xhosa femininity – one that prizes education for women over marriage and immersion into patriarchal culture.

Black women’s political resistance during apartheid: 1948–1990

The introduction of formal, legislated apartheid by the National Party in 1948 significantly thwarted the development of a black literary tradition. After coming to power, the National Party government instituted a number of laws that entrenched white economic and political hegemony, disenfranchised all black South Africans, and legitimated the continued exploitation of black South African labour. White economic privilege and political power were entrenched through a series of segregationist laws enacted between 1948 and the early 1950s. The notion of white superiority was central to the ideology and workings of apartheid. The Bantu Education Act of 1953, for example, aimed, in the words of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, to

reform [education] so that Natives will be taught from childhood that equality with Europeans is not for them … Racial relations cannot improve if the wrong type of education is given to Natives. They cannot improve if the result of Native Education is the result of frustrated people who have expectations in life which circumstances in South Africa do not allow to be fulfilled. (In Wheeler 1961, 250)

Other primary laws buttressing apartheid included the Population Registration Act of 1950, which required all South Africans to be classified into four broad racial groups: ‘Europeans, Asiatics, persons of mixed race or coloureds, and “natives” or “pure blooded individuals of the Bantu race”’ (Bowker and Star 1999, 197). The Group Areas Act of 1950 determined where people were allowed to work and live, based on their racial classification. Another key law upholding apartheid was the 1951 Bantu Authorities Act, which created separate homelands or reserves where Africans were forced to live, and dispossessed them of land outside these areas. The 1950 Suppression of Communism Act outlawed the Communist Party of South Africa and gave the government the authority to ban publications supportive of communism. This law became one of the key mechanisms for suppressing information and banning literary and other writing opposed to apartheid, which was automatically classified as supportive of communism.

Black women felt apartheid’s devastation in uniquely gendered ways. In 1952, the government passed what were arguably the two most detrimental pieces of legislation to African women. Commonly known as the ‘pass laws’, the first was the Native Laws Amendment Act, which made it illegal for any African person to be in an urban area for more than 72 hours (‘Effects of Apartheid’, 1980) unless they had legal permission, had previously lived there continuously for more than fifteen years, and had worked for one employer for more than ten years. This law was specifically aimed at bolstering the existing ‘influx control’ policy, which set out to halt the urbanisation of African women by confining them to the rural reserves.

The second such law was the 1952 Natives Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents Act (The Role of Women in the Struggle, 1980). Until this point, South African law required all African men over the age of 16 to carry passes, which legally enabled them to work and move around in urban areas. Contrary to what its name – Abolition of Passes – suggests, the law’s intention was to extend control by issuing reference books containing personal details. It eventually extended the compulsory carrying of passes to African women in 1956. Until this law was passed, African women had been exempt from carrying passes in urban areas. The Union government had once before, in 1913 in the Orange Free State province, tried to impose passes on women, but was met with fierce resistance and was forced to shelve the plan.

The extension of these pass laws to women meant the destruction of African family life, since African men who were needed as cheap labour in the cities now had to leave their families behind in the reserves. The 1952 Act meant that African women could not join or live with their husbands in urban areas. Women were confined to the rural reserves designated ‘homelands’ by the government. There, the apartheid state expected them to survive as subsistence farmers, care for the elderly and their children, and produce future labourers (Meer 1985).

The African National Congress and aligned organisations vehemently resisted all such legislated segregation. In 1952, the ANC and the South African Indian Council initiated the Defiance Campaign in reaction to the amended pass laws and other discriminatory legislation. Politically active black women responded in a gendered way to these apartheid mechanisms and the oppressive structures they produced. Politicised by the two pass law amendments and their implications, black women became increasingly involved in the ANC Women’s League formed in 1943 to involve women more formally in Congress activities. In response to the threat of the extension of the pass laws to African women, women of all races came together in 1954 and founded the Federation of South African Women (FSAW), South Africa’s first autonomous national women’s organisation.

Chaired at its inception by Ida Mntwana, the federation authored the Women’s Charter, whose stated aim was ‘striving for the removal of all laws, regulations conventions and customs that discriminate against us as women, and that deprive us in any way of our inherent right to the advantages, responsibilities and opportunities that society offers to any one section of the population’ (FSAW 1954). In 1956, FSAW initiated the largest women’s protest against the extension of the pass laws to African women. On 9 August 1956, 20 000 women of all races from around the country marched to the apartheid government’s seat of power, the Union Buildings in the capital city, Pretoria. The women’s petition not only opposed the extension of passes to women, but demanded the repeal of all pass laws, including those circumscribing the movements of African men.

In addition to this massive protest, FSAW also initiated key campaigns such as the sustained protest against compulsory passes for African women; bus boycotts, which were successful in lowering transportation costs for workers; and protests against sub-standard housing for black South Africans. With a membership of approximately 230 000, FSAW mobilised women nationally for key demonstrations and campaigns, and placed women’s demands for adequate housing, just labour laws, access to education, and the abolition of the pass system within the framework of the struggle for black political rights. Despite FSAW’s resistance and political action, the South African government continued to issue passes to African women. Given the dire consequences for women if they were found without passes – imprisonment and deportation back to their designated homelands – many had no choice but to acquiesce to the pass laws. However, despite widespread resistance, 75 per cent of all adult African women had, by 1960, been forced to carry passes (Schmidt 1983).

The year 1960 signalled a radical change in the way apartheid was administered, and how anti-apartheid activists responded to the state. While the government regularly imprisoned or banned its most vocal critics, until that year, organisations such as the ANC, FSAW and the ANC Women’s League had been tolerated and allowed to operate as civil society organisations. But on 21 March 1960, apartheid police opened fire on a group of township activists peacefully protesting the pass laws in Sharpeville, killing 69 protestors, including 40 women and 8 children. About 80 per cent of those killed or injured were shot in the back (‘Effects of Apartheid’ 1980). Sharpeville marked a change in the nature of the government’s response to anti-apartheid protesters. The ANC, the main liberation movement, was banned, and many of its leaders arrested under the first State of Emergency declared by the government.

Most of the leaders of FSAW, who were members of the ANC, were also banned, prohibiting them from appearing in public places, addressing groups of people or organising any political activities. Though FSAW itself was never banned, the imprisonment and banning of key leaders meant it could no longer function effectively. The only autonomous national movement for women thus stopped all political activity.

With no political base from which to organise, activist women c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Author’s Preface
• Acronyms
• Introduction: ‘And Wrote My Story Anyway’: Black South African Women’s Novels as Feminism
• 1 Writing as Activism: A History of Black South African Women’s Writing
• 2 Rewriting the Apartheid Nation: Miriam Tlali and Lauretta Ngcobo
• 3 Dissenting Daughters: Girlhood and Nation in the Fiction of Farida Karodia and Agnes Sam
• 4 Interrogating ‘Truth’ in the Post-Apartheid Nation: Zoë Wicomb and Sindiwe Magona
• 5 Making Personhood: Remaking History in Yvette Christiansë and Rayda Jacobs’s Neo-Slave Narratives
• 6 Black Women Writing ‘New’ South African Masculinities: Kagiso Lesego Molope and Zukiswa Wanner
• Conclusion: Towards a Black South African Feminist Criticism
• Select Bibliography
• Index