New Daughters of Africa

by Margaret Busby

  We move out across the Bay of Biscay where the storms lash the sides of the ship and pitch and turn us till we all lie down seasick for three days. Then into warmer waters and warmer days when schools of dolphins appear and swim alongside the ship, a happy squeaking escort that brings our entire passenger group out onto the deck. The crew put up a makeshift canvas swimming pool on the rear deck. I can smell the wet tarpaulin now, filled daily with salty sea water which moves in rhythm with the waves in the huge wide sea, so that we are tossed and showered and bobbed and ducked until we will never again misjudge the power and the perils of the ocean. The missionary children are not allowed to participate in the fun but content themselves instead with standing nearby and staring. I can smell the ship’s ropes and the bleached wooden decks. We find some hessian quoits that we wear as heavy armlets or anklets in our small-girl play, and we sing a Welsh song about a saucepan and a cat that scratches Johnny bach.1 The wooden rails of the ship’s sides taste of the sea. Everything tastes of the sea. “Why do you have to put everything to your mouth, Cha?” Ma is saying. “Ych a fi”.2 I’m not listening, only tasting and feeling.

  There are areas of the boat barred to us. Over the rope boundary we can see oily black pulleys, coils of rope, rusting pieces of machinery and the sailors—rough sailors, the engine wallahs, the deck hands and the cooks and cleaners taking a cigarette or just emerging from the underworld to squint a few minutes daylight. They are on the other side of things from us. They are very different from the smartly dressed officers who change from their blues to tropical whites and from whites-long to whites-short as the voyage takes us towards the Mediterranean. We spend whole days out on the decks, hair fuzzy and free, skin colour changing from pale to mellow browns. And by night we sleep in the belly of the ship lulled to sleep by the hum of the engines and the creaking of the old boat’s aching structure as she rolls with the waves. We are suspended, with the echoes of our forefathers rumbling below.

  Ma is happy on the sea. She prefers to travel this way. She likes these voyages; both the drift and the drive of them are part of her make up, carried along with a helplessness she courted. “Why did you bring me here?” she would demand of Dad in the months to come. Yet this passage was part of her own inner drive to move out from under the claustrophobic pile of slate that was her birthplace. I would come to know her as sacrificer, sufferer, survivor. She had a steel will that had pushed her away from all the chapel goodness, the village small talk, from the purples and the slate greys that invaded her inner landscape. In its wake came a fatalism that she could not shake off. It haunted her. But she was suited to the slow acclimatisation in the space of the voyage. The place between somewhere and elsewhere was so right for her.

  Ma was never good in small spaces. I imagine myself small again, flung back into those snatches of memory that make up my Africa. Just once we fly to Africa and there are goody bags with BOAC written on them for all of us. The insides of Ma’s hands are red and there are beads of sweat sitting quietly on her nose. We are boarding the plane which has a cold grey outside that looks like it will taste of pencil lead. There are lots of waiting people and bags ahead of us and it seems as if there may not be room for us. A woman with a loud English voice says “Excuse me,” and pushes past Ma to the front of the boarding queue. Ma just ups and grabs her by the neck of her blouse and starts to shake her like a piece of washing. “Bloody Sais,”1 Ma says. “Just who do you think you are, Queen of the Cannibals? How dare you. How bloody dare you.” Thumb in mouth, I try to shrink myself into the folds of her skirts. Ma is in a complete rage, shouting and flapping her arms. Beads of sweat have broken out on her top lip too by now. Eventually the captain comes to see what the problem is. “See that one,” she says to him, “She thinks she can treat me like a dog, putting on airs like she’s somebody.” Lots more “How bloody dare you’s” and “Who do you think you are’s” follow before she can be pacified. The captain calls Ma “Ma’am” very slowly. He tells her that they are first timers to the colonies and they don’t know anything about Africa or about coloured people and so she lets it go, for now at least.

  This battle would be part of what we were and what we would be, although I can’t say I knew at that stage of my life what the battle was about. I guessed, like Dad said, it was because Ma was Welsh and she wasn’t taking orders from anybody. But she was beautiful at sea. The cool openness on the decks, her wild beauty matching the elements; the blue of the waves and the blue of her eyes. Africa had called for Dad and now he was calling for her; Kate sweetheart, his love and his mentor. He loved the rhythms and poetry of her thoughts. Her ideas fell together like jazz, the blue notes resonating across the staves with their own logic, defying the predictable sequences and the rudimentary facts. He would not be without the magic that was her. She was shaping him; her mind was his umbrella and beyond this umbrella he dared not step. “Paid poeni Denis bach2 . . . Everything will be fine,” she would say. She provided such spiritual security for him. She was our backbone.

  Behind them they left London. The London of John Nash, Wyndham Lewis and Elgar that very gently nudged them away with all its imperialist assumptions and its contradictions. That London would never be the same after the Picasso exhibition in the V&A took the country by storm, the influences of Africa cutting through the canvases like a knife. A London of immigrants. Sam Selvon’s London; a cold, grey and miserable motherland.

  There had been much pillow talk about the move out to Africa. They had discussed it over and over again, trying to anticipate the future. It could have been different. They could have stayed on in London; things were going well. Dad had a teaching job at the Central School of Art and several major exhibitions behind him with excellent reviews. I have a scrapbook from this time that Ma must have put together. Wyndham Lewis wrote in The Listener about a “brilliant newcomer”—his huge canvases hanging on the walls of the Gimpel Fils gallery bursting with colour and symbolism. Dad had painted Human World. It was magnificent, painted in equatorial reds, yellows, ochres and greens with tree-like people standing and glaring with large threatening eyes as if the Empire might stand up and strike back. It was pure savagery confronting civilisation. When I read the old fragment of The Listener, I saw all those assumptions that pushed them away; all those assumptions that lay deep in the lines.

  In spite of the fact that Denis Williams speaks with an unmistakable Welsh accent, he is a Negro. But because of the Empire-building propensities of the Briton of yesterday he is British for he comes from British Guiana. Georgetown, the capital city, is where he lives. It is anything but the jungle: there are splendid boulevards lined with blood-red trees, a fine hotel (for Sahibs only), a busy port. The Negroes are tennis and cricket playing Negroes; Milton and the other national poet Shakespeare, is what they are brought up on, but especially Milton.

  How could this country have held him with all its double speak? Wyndham Lewis was a Welshman, Ma told us later. “He was the one who said that the coloured men of London were all boxers and sailors and that we should move on,” she said.

  But Ma and Dad rubbed along the edges of a very glamorous London, moving in circles that included Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud and other equally well-known artists. Dad was artist-in-residence at the Slade for a while. He became the interesting chap to have at parties; a curiosity, a poodle, the comfortable stranger. Ma was not so easy. She was Welsh and uncomfortably different. “You’re the English one,” she used to say to Dad, knowing in her heart that she was the real dark stranger.

  Their real life was a small cramped flat in Oxford Road, where Dad hung up his smarty-boy suit on the back of the door at night and set to work painting whilst Ma’s wages from a job in a book warehouse kept them going. At night the West Indian chaps dropped by; Michael Manley, Jan Carew, Wilson Harris, Forbes Burnham were all regular visitors. Gathered in that small space they talked about imperialism, about colonialism and independence. They were the Caribbean writers and artists and future leaders with visions
and big thoughts, not boxers and sailors. They were planning a different world. And the stuff of their talk was the destiny of their own countries and news of Africa and Nkrumah in his fight for independence. That was their struggle; they were not concerned with their position in the motherland. For them the motherland was only ever to be a temporary host, so although they knew the colour bar, they didn’t need to take it on. They knew it was difficult to get lodgings and in many a bar they would be told, “Sorry but we don’t serve you chaps in here.” But it was all very polite; so very polite and so accepted.

  When Welsh and Irish girls came to London looking for work they found the same lodging houses willing to let them in as the coloured chaps. It was Mrs Dovaston who took in Katie Alice and found Denis on Kilburn High Street and invited him back for tea. Ma said Mrs Dovaston’s own granddaughter Josephine was a black girl and that her father had played the piano for Paul Robeson in America. I suppose she liked having coloured people round the house for Josephine’s sake.

  So Ma and Dad became lovers, eventually married and moved on. That’s how we began to learn about movement. It was movement that was home. Home was not a particular place for us in the very early years. Home was Ma. We arrived into an exile; into a state of relocation that was both hers and his. And the journeys were more than physical journeys. They were travels across worlds of thinking, across generations of movements. These boat stories and seascapes, I now know, are part of a collective memory lying buried below the immediate moment . . .

  Makhosazana Xaba

  A South African anthologist, essayist, poet and short story writer who has published two collections of poetry, these hands (2005) and Tongues of their Mothers (2008), and has featured in numerous anthologies. She won the 2014 Nadine Gordimer SALA Short Story Award for her book of short stories, Running and Other Stories (2013). She holds an MA in Creative Writing and is currently a Research Associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research writing a biography of Helen Nontando Jabavu. She worked as a women’s health specialist with national and international NGOs in the areas of women’s rights, gender and anti-bias training and violence against LGBT communities. In 1986, she went into exile where she trained as an MK cadre and a journalist, worked as a broadcaster on Radio Freedom in Lusaka and returned in 1990 with the African National Congress Women’s League. Initially she trained as a general nurse, midwife and psychiatric nurse.

  #TheTotalShutdown: Disturbing Observations

  “Wear black with a touch of red and comfortable shoes.” This was the suggestion placed on the right bottom side of the poster advertising the intersectional women against gender-based violence march planned for 1 August 2018. Black is the colour of mourning for many South Africans, I know; I understood wearing mourning. I was not sure about the significance of the colour red but that was not going to stop me from participating.

  On that Wednesday morning I remembered the suggestion and dressed appropriately: in a flared long-sleeved, polo-necked black dress, black pantyhose, black shawl and black head wrap. My touch of red was my ankle-length fake leather, comfortable boots. I was not preparing for the high-level Pretoria March, where the marchers were planning to hand over the memorandum of demands. I have grown more claustrophobic with age and avoid crowds. I was ready for the lunch-hour gathering in Braamfontein, a few blocks from my office.

  I left the office with a colleague twenty minutes before the start. We walked comfortably in the sunny but cold ever-populated streets and arrived at the rendezvous to find just under twenty people. In no time the numbers had grown, and the singing of struggle songs had begun. We spread ourselves right around the De Korte intersection of four, one-way (westward) lanes and two, two-way north–south lanes. As the cars started hooting with impatience to drive through, we stood aside to let them pass. But the more hooting and speeding we witnessed, the more sense it made to simply block the roads. And, we did.

  As we stood there singing, now blocking all the cars, I was appalled as I witnessed the rampant violence of men. They hooted even louder and for longer. They threatened to drive through us—by now I had taken a position, with others, bang in the middle of the four-lane one-way, De Korte Street. Some drivers opened their windows, screamed and insulted us. The most repeated screams being “Step aside!” and “I want to drive through” and “I have a meeting to attend!” At some point I decided to give the inner circle my back and dared to face these drivers. I wished I had brought my phone so I could take pictures. I looked at them, on all four lanes while holding firmly the hands of my sisters on either side. It was not only the drivers in the front cars just behind us who were screaming, even the ones up to three rows back were doing the same. I spotted only one woman driver who just sat there, with her phone in her hands. I looked at these men in shock.

  The irritation on their faces!

  If irritation could kill . . .

  The anger!

  If anger could enact the disappearance, an instant erasure of an object in front of it . . .

  The shouting!

  If shouting could remove a body and place it where it desires . . .

  The hooting never stopped. Neither did our singing. The grasp on my hands on either side felt stronger. I found that comforting because looking at these drivers, these men, had disturbed me so much I was relieved in the knowledge I was held, firmly, on both sides.

  As I turned around to face the inside of the circle, one young man on rollerblades managed to find his way between two women and, in a macho-look-at-me-style, rollerbladed his way through the circle in a southerly direction. The speed with which he moved made the women just give way for him. They freed their hands, stepped aside and watched him whizz through and down the road. They rejoined hands afterwards.

  I had expected the drivers to respect our protesting presence on the road. I expected them to—if they had not heard of it—turn on their radios and find out why women were on the streets, singing struggle songs, midweek. I expected them then, if indeed they were in a hurry, to call the people they were to meet and let them know they were running late. Listening to the news would have assured them that the demonstration was scheduled to last for an hour. I expected the drivers, these men, to sit in their cars and wait, until the demonstration was over. Instead, we forced them to wait. And they protested as they waited.

  As soon as we cleared the road they put their cars in speeding gears and drove away. Some continued to scream insults at us through the windows. And yes, some were in business suits and ties.

  Such is the violence of men in South Africa.

  In a country some have labelled “the rape capital of the world”, where all forms of gender-based violence—violence against women and girls; sexual violence (including gang rape and rape of elderly women); sexual harassment; intimate partner violence; violence against LGBTIQ+ persons (including “corrective rape” of lesbians); domestic violence; and structural violence—are rife, it seems trite that I should be writing about this observation. The murder rate of women shot up by an alarming 117 per cent between 2015 and 2016/2017 as recorded by Statistics South Africa in its report, Crime against Women in South Africa. This is but one of the numerous shocking statistics about gender-based violence in South Africa.

  But, I continue to expect men in the streets of Braamfontein, Johannesburg, to be civil and behave like decent human beings! Surely there is something wrong with this picture. My denial is no longer justifiable. Why do I expect men who are guilty of the range of violations I list above to behave differently—respectfully—during a lunch hour of an ordinary working day, a Wednesday? What does my hope to humanize them mean? I have lived and experienced violence from men all my life. I was a fool to think that the older I got (read “physically less attractive to men”) the less of a “target” for violence in public spaces I would become. Nothing has changed. It would appear that the default presentation of men in South Africa is violence. I continue to walk the streets and pavements in fear for my life because
now I am a target of a special kind: because I look older.

  The #TheTotalShutdown March by intersectional women against gender-based violence, on 1 August 2018, has been written about; detailed information is easily accessible. Similarly, the demands women made to President Cyril Ramaphosa are firmly on the table. He has been quoted repeatedly as he assured women that the summit (one of the demands) on Gender-Based Violence will be held soon.

  In all my years of feminist activism I avoided working directly on violence against women. The closest I got to it was via two avenues. First, the work we did on women’s health. Second, the poetry I have written. Thankfully, it is now being used at universities in South Africa and I continue to get feedback on how it allows students to speak up. In my firm belief that I do not have the personality to work in the “VAW sector”—as we called in in the 1990s—I have admired and respected women who did, including, more recently, the young women who are standing up, unafraid and ready to face the enemies: our sons, brothers, fathers, uncles, grandfathers and boyfriends.