Apartheid and Racism in South African Children's Literature 1985-1995

Donnarae MacCann, Yulisa Amadu Maddy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135348793
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

While white racism has global dimensions, it has an unshakeable lease on life in South African political organizations and its educational system. Donnarae MacCann and Yulisa Maddy here provide a thorough and provocative analysis of South African children's literature during the key decade around Nelson Mandela's release from prison. Their research demonstrates that the literature of this period was derived from the same milieu -- intellectual, educational, religious, political, and economic -- that brought white supremacy to South Africa during colonial times. This volume is a signal contribution to the study of children's literature and its relation to racism and social conditions.

Part 1

BACKGROUND

Chapter 1

Elements of Apartheid: “Science,” Theology, Government, and Extra-Constitutional Government (The Broederbond)

When social existence is oppressively regulated, the modern world generally objects. Thus legislators resort to various intellectual strategies to justify anti-democratic policies. They must shape their arguments to correspond with the beliefs of the people who keep them in public office, yet their contentions must accommodate world opinion at some minimal level. Until the post-Nazi era, global opinion was not a great problem in South Africa. Western countries enslaved fifteen million or more Africans between 1451 and 1870, and between 1878 and 1914, European control extended over 84.4 percent of the earth’s surface (Pieterse 1992, 52, 76). With this record, the European powers could scarcely take a “holier than thou” attitude toward South Africa. Both at home and abroad “liberalism” sidestepped the ultimate question: equality. This denial of Black/White equality was extensively rationalized in pseudo-scientific studies and rhetoric.

“Science”

At the heart of scientific racism is the belief in race essentialism, whether this belief surfaces in anthropology, biology, psychology, medicine, or criminology. “Essentialism” in this case means the belief that people have “inherent, unchanging characteristics rooted in biology or in a self-contained culture that explains their status. When linked to oppressions of race, … binary thinking [“either/or” thinking] constructs ‘essential’ group differences” (Collins 1998, 277). Historian Saul Dubow (1989) sees a decline in race essentialism following the terrors it induced in the Nazi years, but ironically it gained momentum in South Africa in the post-World War II years. In 1949, in passing the act that outlawed miscegenation, one government official explained:

[It is] scientific to hold yourself aloof from a race with a lower civilisation and less education, and more limited intellectual powers, and of an ethnical type totally different to your own. (quoted in Dubow 1989, 182)

Such ideas had a long history in the “scientific” world, where races were often seen as static creations with permanent cultural and physical elements. Biological inheritances were stressed as the foundation for “natural selection” and the basis for social evolution (ibid, 120). A so-called chain of being with Whites at the advanced end of the chain had been a popular notion since the seventeenth century, and the scientific community in South Africa expanded upon this idea with the publication of The Bantu-speaking Tribes of South Africa in 1937. This work was written by thirteen authors, one of which was the anatomist Raymond Dart. He divided Africa into the “Bush,” “Brown or Hamitic,” and “Negro” races, and his descriptions reveal his “chain” theory with Blacks at the lowest point. He called the Negro skull “infantile in form.” The “Bush” skull was “foetal” and the lower jaw retained “primitive features” (Thompson 1995, 100). According to Leonard Thompson, Dart’s work had a considerable influence on South African textbooks in the twentieth century.

As late as the 1950s, the skulls of Africans were used as evidence of inferiority. A World Health Organization “expert,” Dr. A. Carothers, claimed that the African was equivalent to a European who had experienced a frontal lobotomy (that is, an operation that resulted in psychiatric problems). Thompson reports that the British hired Carothers to supply scientific evidence to use against the Mau Maus, the group challenging British imperial rule in Kenya. Carothers accommodated this political agenda and claimed that Mau Maus were rebelling for their independence because of psychiatric atavism. As a result, the British placed Mau Mau insurgents in special prisons with special “rehabilitation” programs (Thompson 1985, 103–104).

The “science” of eugenics provided practical strategies for preserving a predetermined “racial stock” (i.e., white master race). Eugenics had a tenacious appeal, as seen in 1951 when even the anti-eugenics diplomats who drafted UNESCO documents on brotherhood/sister hood softened their statements under the influence of geneticists and physical anthropologists—scientists who were trying to sustain their notions about biological determinism.

In the realm of public policy, eugenics supporters even opposed medical services to Blacks. The race purists saw medicine as dysgenic to human advancement when used on behalf of indigenous Africans. Throughout the twentieth century commissions, forums, and societies were created to support theoretical racism and encourage segregationist policies. In a range of lectures and essays, Harold B. Fantham (the first professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at the University of the Wiwatersrand) expressed skepticism about democracy and urged a regulated state based on eugenics principles. To refuse to recognize hereditary difference, he said, would produce “uniform or standardised mediocrity” (quoted in Dubow 1989, 133). While serving as president of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science, Fantham sought to influence policy makers by warning against racial intermixing and the development of a Black urban class (ibid, 135).

This fear of intermixing had an equally vocal group of followers among religionists.

Theology

The apartheid of Fantham and others in the sciences was echoed with fervent conviction in religious circles. It was God’s requirement that the races remain separate and that Whites be in charge of non-Whites. This theological backing for White domination was present in Christian denominations generally, but its existence in the Dutch Reformed Church (Die Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk) has had the most extensive influence in South African public life.

The story of the Dutch Reformed Church began with the typical missionary efforts in South Africa—that is, the conversion of Africans was the primary agenda. But when Whites moved into African communities to usurp land rights, they refused to hold Communion with Blacks. Thus the Church Synod in 1857 agreed to accommodate this “weakness of some,” and conducted segregated church activities. In a document to this effect, the church still maintained that “the Synod considers it… according to the Holy Scripture that our heathen members be accepted and initiated into our congregations wherever it is possible” (Ngeokovane 1989, 39). By 1880 the Cape Synod had set up a segregated Mission Church, and soon after the Mission congregations were divided into churches for Africans, Africans of mixed ancestry, and South African Indians. It is significant that these three racial categories were created by the Dutch Reformed Church. Subsequently the same subdivisions remain in place, and their widespread use is understandable, given their early cultural inception.

Before the end of the nineteenth century, references to Holy Scripture changed. Instead of using the Bible as the rationale behind “accepting [heathen members] into our congregation,” Holy Scripture was used to justify segregation. For example, Deuteronomy 7 was invoked, a text describing God’s orders to the Israelites to avoid mixing with their neighbors (Ngeokovane 1989, 46). In 1898, J. F. Oordt expounded on the Cain/Abel story:

According to the Boer idea, the Kaffer, the Hottentot, the Bushman belong to a lower race than the Whites. They carry, as a people only rightly called it, the mark of Cain; God, the Lord, destined them to be “drawers of water and hewers of wood,” as presses subject to the white race. … I do not believe that I go too far when I express my feeling that the Boers as a whole doubt the existence of a Kaffer- or a Hottentot-soul, (quoted in Thompson 1985, 85)

This racist mythology gained in momentum at the close of the Anglo-Boer War in 1902. At that time there were no institutions to embody the newly born Afrikaner solidarity, and the church stepped into this breach. Under these favorable political conditions, the church shifted direction as a public institution and became a significant political movement—one completely intertwined with the policies of the National Party, which was formed in 1914 and came into power in 1924.

In the early twentieth century, Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd (who was minister of “Native” affairs as well as prime minister) explained his belief that Apartheid was an aspect of God’s will:

[T]here is but one way of saving the white races of the world. And that is for the White and non-White in Africa each to exercise his rights within his own areas… .

We have been planted here, we believe, with a destiny—destiny not for the sake of the selfishness of a nation, but for the sake of … the service of a nation to the Deity in which it believes … (quoted in Thompson 1985, 69)

Even before the National Party came into power again in 1948, Church officials met with the then ruling party (the United Party) and urged its minister of “Native” Affairs to adopt church policies: to prohibit mixed marriages, to prohibit any interracial sexual relations, to require segregated residential areas, to make school programs for Africans “suitable for their special character and circumstances” (in other words, to stick to “servitude education” exclusively). These policies and others were given concrete legal form between 1949 and 1953 (i.e., in the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, the Immorality Act, the Group Areas Act, and the “Bantu” Education Act) (Ngeokovane 1989, 44–45). Of ongoing importance is the policy position related to the franchise. In a booklet in 1951 (Basic Principles of Calvinist Christian Political Science), the church’s “Federal Council” stated that “those who have no vote are by no means slaves or oppressed people… . Franchise is a treasure, allotted … only to those who have come of age and can use it responsibly before God. Natives do not meet these requirements. …” It is obvious, says this directive, “that we cannot give the franchise to everyone simply because he is a person” (Ngeokovane 1989, 49).

The Christian Nationalism of South Africa was, according to Saul Dubow, malleable to some degree in its tendencies and politics, but fears about racial degeneration remained a constant. A “pure” race was “to be protected at all costs,” and this, according to G. Eloff (1942) in Rasse en Rasvermenging (Races and Race Mixing), was “a holy pledge entrusted to us by our ancestors as part of God’s plan with our People. Any movement, school, or individual who sins against this must be dealt with as a racial criminal by the effective authorities” (quoted in Thompson 1995, 184.) In short, God was believed to be The Great Divider, and mixing could therefore be rightly termed a morally criminal action. In 1944, S. Du Toit stated in his address “The Religious Basis of Our Race Policy”:

We should not bring together that which God has separated. In pluri-formity [meaning each group should preserve itself] the counsel of God is realised. The higher unity lies in Christ and is spiritual in character. Thus there can be no equalising [gelykstelling] and no miscegenation [verbastering]. (quoted in Dubow 1989, 258–259, emphasis in original)

We will see these notions alluded to in novels for the young when Blacks are “placed” in certain locations by the expansionist Whites. We will see them in stories that infer a “drawers of water/hewers of wood” role for Blacks. And the “apartness” theory plays a prominent role in anti-miscegenation novels.

The selective use of Christian Scripture to explain Apartheid is a throwback to the slave era, when slavemasters and slavetraders invoked Old Testament stories for their own “moral” defense. It was a purely self-serving tactic in the past, and its appearance in modern South Africa is a similarly self-righteous and self-advancing strategy on the part of the White minority. Historically, given the many groups in the world that have labeled themselves “God’s chosen,” one wonders how Afrikaners could fail to have at least a few secret doubts on this score.

Government

The underpinnings of Apartheid included official actions that consolidated its structure. These rules and regulations were legislated in increasingly specific terms after the beginning of the twentieth century. This was long before the era known as the Apartheid era—the time following the National Party’s 1948 election victory. We will summarize here the way “separateness” was a well-developed policy in the early twentieth century, and then enumerate some of the laws passed after 1948.

In 1912 the organization designed to oppose segregationist policies was founded—the African National Congress—but without Black enfranchisement, this counter force could achieve few reforms. In the industrial sector, White control was extensive enough in 1911 to secure White wages in the gold mining industry at a rate 11.7 times that of Blacks. This advantage did not lessen over time but increased to a rate of 14.7 by 1951.

In the area of land distribution, Blacks were allowed only 7 percent of the land base in 1913, and by 1936 this figure had risen to only 11.7 percent. The Native Land Act of 1913 made it illegal for Africans to own land outside the designated “reserves”—a condition forcing Africans to subsist by working for white farmers. Even sharecropping on White-owned land was made illegal. In essence, the “reserves” were simply a labor pool for White industrialists and farmers (Thompson 1995, 164–165).

The connection between race “separateness” and White financial advantage is revealed in one legislative act after another. In 1922 the Apprenticeship Act devised educational requirements that made Black apprenticeship largely impossible. (Even in 1939, less than 30 percent of African children received any schooling at all, and those in school were at mission schools, usually in the primary grades.) In 1923 the Urban Areas Act gave urban authorities (in partnership with the central government) the power to create African “locations,” enforce worker permit requirements, and remove “surplus females” from the “locations” (Thompson 1995, 168–169). In 1924 the Industrial Conciliation Act denied Africans the right to be called “employees”—a move to prohibit Black laborers from negotiating employment rights. When African mine workers called a strike in 1946, twelve Blacks were killed and others were driven back to work at bayonet point. The Chamber of Mines refused to accept any reforms, and pronounced that the “Gold Mining Industry considers that trade-unionism as practiced by Europeans is still beyond the understanding of the Native …” (Thompson 1995, 179–180).

By the time the National Party assumed control in 1948, the systematic repression of Africans was commonplace. But Coloured and Asian groups, as well as Africans, came under tighter restrictions after 1948. That was when D. F. Malan (a former minister in the Dutch Reformed Church) became Prime Minister and brought his extremist, “God’s chosen” doctrine with him. His reading of Afrikaner history implied a divine carte blanche for building a totalitarian system:

The history of the Afrikaner reveals a determination and a definiteness of purpose which make one feel that Afrikanerdom is not...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• A Note about Terminology
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: Background
• Part 2: Novels about Contemporary South Africa
• Part 3: Historical Novels
• Epilogue: The Anti-Apartheid Voices of Karen Press and Beverley Naidoo
• Selected Bibliography
• Index