David's Story

by Zoe Wicomb

  The narrative present of David’s Story is 1991, after the release from prison of Nelson Mandela, which heralded the beginning of the negotiated settlement that would bring an end to white minority rule in 1994. Now, six years after the country’s first ever democratic elections, one hears Wicomb’s voice warning about the future. Wicomb lives in Glasgow, but returns often to South Africa, and in one of her essays she writes movingly about returning in 1994 to vote for the first time in her life. Struck by the peacefulness and patience of the long voting queues, she nonetheless adds: “I also fear for our fragile democracy … why is this so?”3 David’s Story offers something like an answer.

  Since the official abandonment of apartheid, South Africa has been engaged in debate about the meaning of nation and national belonging. South Africans have been forging new political, cultural and ethnic identities through the opportunities provided by democracy and a new constitution, and also the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and amnesty hearings, events with which David’s Story is profoundly, if obliquely, concerned. One subject of debate includes the nature and status of the Khoisan people, and, within them, the Griqua, in whose name are raised questions about ethnic identities felt to have been politically eclipsed in both the old and the new systems.4 This novel’s interest in Griqua history makes it unusual in South African literature. The Griqua, who claim as their original language the Khoi language Xiri (not part of the Bantu linguistic group), have not generally identified themselves with the far more numerous Bantu-speaking indigenous peoples of South Africa,5 and the concerns of David’s Story stand somewhat apart from the black-white antagonisms often focused on in South African history. Moreover, the relation between the Griqua and the more general grouping of “coloured” has been variable and complex. Much of the plot centers specifically on Griqua self-definition rather than on this more general grouping, which, again, has been a more standard focus of South African writing.6

  Simply in these respects, David’s Story is a novel of its time and place. But it also addresses more general concerns. Self-consciously positioned as a postmodernist text, it does not try to simply “give voice” to those who were marginalised, oppressed, and disinherited by colonial and apartheid powers, or to those who may now feel (like the Griqua) that they are still silenced. Instead, David’s Story dramatises the literary, political, philosophical, and ethical issues at stake in any attempt at retrieval of history and voice. It also questions notions of ethnic identity. Rather than striving for the illusion of immediacy, the novel uses a first-person frame narrator to foreground acts of representation and mediation, and adds other angles of narration (David’s, Dulcie’s, and a neutral voice) to unsettle any authoritative access to truth.

  Zoë Wicomb’s novel rises, then, to the challenges of storytelling in our postmodernist and postcolonial times. It uses material from a dubiously documented South African past, which it has fashioned into a narrative not seamless and entire to itself (as an earlier, realist tradition would have it) but fractured and fissured, and self-critical, even self-mocking, both of its own postmodernist play and of its occasional desire to be other than this. Astonishingly, despite a dominating wryness, the novel nonetheless satisfies readerly demands for a story; one might even want to say that it “brings history alive.”

  The novel draws to our attention some crucial questions not only about the South African past but also about its present—questions about responsibility, accountability, political integrity, and truth. It also asks us to think about two current issues, and—if we dare—the relation between them: first, about what happened in the African National Congress (ANC) detention camps; and, second, about the sanctioned treatment of ANC women. It does so without any sense of its own political rectitude, or even of its own moral authority. Its skepticism about political truth and its anxiety about responsibility are, in fact, self-reflexive as well: What kind of truth can fiction tell? Can fiction bring about political change? If not, what is its place in the world?

  Wicomb is the first South African writer to engage with these post-apartheid issues in so focused a way. The historical, political, and ethical reach of this novel places it as a pioneering text of our time. Its critique of some aspects of the struggle against apartheid is launched from a secure sense of the atrocities of the apartheid past, where for decades a minority government presided over a system of violence in the service of political repression (a violence that was usually quite visible even to that part of the white population which might later pretend not to have seen it). The novel insists on the importance of confronting the past—the history of political subordination and accommodation, the history of women’s bodies, the history of slavery—yet also celebrates the stories of courageous resistance that reach back into pre-apartheid days.

  David’s Story is a quintessentially South African novel, but in its literary and other allusions, it not only proclaims itself part of a South African literary tradition (its more obvious precursors are texts by writers as vastly different as J. M. Coetzee and Bessie Head) but also explicitly sees that tradition as a transaction between European imperialist power and a colonised world. Moreover, the novel positions itself on the world stage, alluding to writers as historically and geographically distinct as Laurence Sterne and Toni Morrison. It also brilliantly deepens its own nature as political fiction through its references to the Gothic novel, on the one hand, and the mystery spy thriller, on the other.

  Perhaps the most important, if often also the most subtle, intertextual references made in David’s Story are to Wicomb’s other writing—both her short fiction and essays. Characters seem sometimes to have wandered across texts. For example, Tamieta in “A Clearing in the Bush,” in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, and Deborah in “Another Story”7 are clear antecedents for the magnificent Ouma Sarie in David’s Story. Moreover, Wicomb’s academic essays restage many of her literary concerns and strategies, whether she is engaged in a sharp critique of the political and aesthetic postures of the time, or whether she is celebrating glimpses of literary and political freedom. No reading could better illuminate David’s Story than what she herself says about writing and representation.8

  David’s Story might have been called Dulcie’s story if it had been possible to give voice to a woman like Dulcie, who is—David says—like a scream through his story (134). For David, Dulcie’s is the story that needs to be but cannot be told, just as he finds that truth is a word that cannot be written. She is the unrepresentable body in pain, “a disturbance at this very time of liberation” (177). Her body absorbs and gives back the threats and promises of a violently oppressive and violently revolutionary past, a past that has not yet quite passed.

  The narrator notes acerbically that there is no point screaming if you cannot imagine a possible rescue (134), but David yearns for an order to which a woman like Dulcie might appeal. So, through its skepticism—and even allowing for the element of play and the arch tones—the novel sometimes counters its pervasively bleak political prognosis with pressing questions about the possibilities of truth, love, and social commitment. These possibilities remain before us, hauntingly real, even if their persistence can be as terrifying to us as the endurance of Dulcie’s body—beautiful, grotesque, tortured, and scarred. How do we live, with truth and love, in these violent and hateful times? How has Dulcie survived, and in what form, and at what cost, to herself and to us?

  David’s Story offers us such questions, and others, yet so elliptically and with such rich ambiguity that any critical response to the novel must find itself hard put to follow standard conventions of exposition and analysis. The novel even mockingly incorporates within itself acts of literary criticism which stand alongside the narrator’s (and Sally’s) amateur detective work as vain attempts at some certitude or truth. Much that is said in this afterword needs therefore to be seen as provisional; the provisionality of truth stands as one of Wicomb’s major themes. Historical account, nevertheless, gives us a firmer place to start, befo
re turning to the novel’s relation to literary history, which will complicate the historical contextualization given here.

  THE GRIQUA PAST AND PRESENT

  The Griqua were descended from one of the largest groups (the Grigriqua or Chaguriqua; qua means “people”) of the Khoi people, who were among South Africa’s earliest aboriginal inhabitants, along with the San. Called, respectively, “Hottentots” and “Bushmen” by early travellers, and by recent historians brought together under the general name Khoisan,9 these two groups suffered considerable disruption with the advent of the Dutch and the British colonists in the Cape of Good Hope, as well as with the earlier movement southwards of other African groups. In 1774, the Governor of the Cape Colony approved the following resolution: “[I]n the event of the Hottentots and Bushmen not fleeing from their country, or giving it up on the combined attacks being made, they were to be entirely subdued and destroyed.”10

  In their relations with the colonists, these one-time nomadic pastoralists were left with only two strategies: symbiosis or retreat. Some chose to work for the colonists; others moved into less populated and less inviting parts of the country than those under Dutch occupation. When some travelled north to set up an independent state of their own beyond the Cape Colony, they chose to think of themselves as Griqua, even though they had by that time been joined by runaway—and, later, freed—slaves (brought to South Africa from Madagascar, Mozambique, India, Indonesia, and Malaysia), as well as people of mixed racial origin and a few whites. Moving first through Namaqualand and across the Orange River, they settled in 1804 at Klaarwater, which was renamed Griquastad (Griquatown), recalling an original political independence they were never again able to fully achieve.

  In various ways the Griqua and the Dutch colonists came to follow the same lifestyle. They identified themselves in terms of similar myths—notably, the myth of the Promised Land, and the Great Trek or journey it entailed—and spoke a version of Dutch which would, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, develop into Afrikaans. Both proclaimed themselves Christian. But the Dutch colonists were more and more concerned to identify themselves as white, while the nineteenth-century Griqua embraced a variety of ethnicities. Like the British after them, the Dutch maintained their myth of whiteness largely through the “racial purity” of white women’s wombs, turning a blind eye to white mens’s sexual activity across racial lines. Racial mixture, in contrast, was an acknowledged part of Griquaness.

  David’s Story refers to various actual Griqua migrations and settlements of differing magnitude, and many of the characters in the novel’s historical sections refer to real-life figures.11 Adam Kok I led the eighteenth-century trek to Namaqualand, and the early nineteenth-century settlement in Griquatown and what came later to be called Griqualand West took place under the leadership of Andries Waterboer and Adam Kok II. Then, in the 1860s, there was a massive trek over the Drakensberg to what was then called Nomansland, later named Griqualand East, where Kokstad was founded; this involved some three thousand people under the leadership of Adam Kok III. And in 1922, Andrew le Fleur led about eight hundred Griqua (half of those then living in Kokstad, as well as some from other areas) to the southwestern Cape, settling in Beeswater, quite far south of the region first settled by Adam Kok I. (The Afrikaans name Beeswater literally means “cattle water”—that is, a cattle-watering place. In its English pronunciation, “Beeswater” feeds into the novel’s Gothic theme, with its play on bees and beehives, cells, hexagons, honey, and water.)

  Of particular importance to the novel, too, is the 1917 trek to Touwsrivier in the southwestern Cape, which Le Fleur believed to be rich in mineral deposits. An epidemic of Spanish influenza and a severe drought meant that the settlement (of about six hundred Griqua) largely dispersed during the next four or so years. Le Fleur engaged in various other land-buying schemes. In 1913, for instance, when he was living in Cape Town, he bought a farm from the Logan whose name comes up early in the text in Logan’s Hotel (a real hotel, now called the Lord Milner Hotel, located in Matjiesfontein), and in 1916 he bought land on Welcome Estate, Mowbray Flats, in Cape Town. These farms were lost: the Land Bank (the Land and Agricultural Bank, established in 1912) refused to make loans to “coloureds,” and the mortgage payments could not be met. Among the various smaller treks of the 1920s, the novel briefly signals the importance of Le Fleur’s settlement on Robberg peninsula near Plettenberg Bay in the Cape. In the mid-1930s the group moved inland to Krantzhoek, where Le Fleur died in 1941; Krantzhoek is today known as the “emotional centre” of the Griquas.12

  The issue of land rights for the Griqua was brought to a head by the move to Griqualand East, which came just before the discovery of diamonds in 1867 in Griqualand West. Griqualand West had by then become part of the Orange Free State, a Boer republic, and in anticipation of this trek, Adam Kok III had authorised an agent to sell his land to the Orange Free State government. There still remained in that territory, under the leadership of Andries Waterboer, other west Griqua communities who also owned land. The Boer farmers of the Orange Free State insisted that Kok had sold them all the land, and both to Waterboer’s people and to Kok’s people now further east, the rights to this now highly valued land became of immense consequence. When Griqualand West was annexed by the British in 1871 and incorporated into the Cape Colony in 1880, it was the Boers who were compensated for the diamond-bearing land. To add insult to injury, licenses to mine the land, and even to deal in diamonds, were being granted only to whites. The way was now clear for Cecil John Rhodes (a financier and politician who became prime minister of the Cape in 1890) and his De Beers Mining Company to make their fortunes.

  In 1879 Griqualand East, too, was annexed by the Cape government, the Griqua once again being persuaded to sell—and in other ways losing their land—to whites. This added to the urgency of the action instituted first by Adam Kok’s political heir, Abraham le Fleur, and then by his son, Andries Abraham Stockenstrom le Fleur (later known as Andrew), the paramount chief, or opperhoof, who forms the focus of David’s research. Andrew le Fleur’s fragmentary autobiographical writing—actual historical texts from which Wicomb quotes in the novel—shows how disturbed he was to find the Griqua had “no status as a people,”13 and his desire to establish national status was based at least partly on the recognition by others of a prior Griqua claim to the land. His fight for compensation, or what came to be called the “forty-years money”14 in relation to land rights in Griqualand West, and for the retrocession of Griqualand East either to Griqua or direct British rule, meant he was perceived as an agitator, and he was imprisoned several times.

  Le Fleur was first detained in 1897 for ten months (without being charged), on suspicion of some unrest involving the African tribes of the Bhaca, Hlangweni and others. On the second occasion, in February 1898, a month or so after Le Fleur and his followers had been engaged in a skirmish with a white farmer outside Kokstad, he was given up to the police by the ruler of the Mpondo people, Sigcau, and was sentenced to fourteen years’ hard labour. He had by now become a felt threat to the British. The Cape Parliamentary Papers of 1898 quote his demand, “East Griqualand for the Griquas and the Natives,” which, as the historian Christopher Saunders notes, sounded all too like Joseph Booth’s “Africa for the Africans.”15 Le Fleur was confined first in the Breakwater prison in Cape Town and then on Robben Island. He served only five years of the sentence through a general amnesty decreed by Britain’s new king, Edward VII, and was released in 1903, on condition he not return to Griqualand East. Le Fleur moved to Cape Town, where (from the Winter Garden in District Six)16 he preached temperance and canvassed support for a Griqua Independent Church, finally founded in Maitland, Cape Town, in 1920. He also edited the weekly newspaper Griqua and Coloured People’s Opinion.17

  Then, back in Griqualand East, Le Fleur was arrested in 1920 and charged with theft, forgery, and fraud following complaints by those who had lost land and money through the Touwsrivier scheme. First remand
ed without bail, and spending four months in prison, he was eventually tried over a period of eleven months, finally being acquitted on the grounds that he was a “muddler or a blunderer” rather than a criminal.18

  In 1922, a large group of Griqua under Le Fleur had settled in Beeswater in Namaqualand, but, since the land could barely sustain them, they also worked for whites. With Griqua labour, the white economy flourished; they, on the other hand, struggled against low wages and often succumbed to the drunkenness and alcoholism brought about by the “dop system,” whereby farm labourers were rewarded for their labor with tots of brandy or wine. Any potential political threat on their part was further diminished by Le Fleur’s developing separatism, which echoed a concept proposed by white government officials in the 1920s and 1930s, and, as Wicomb points out, prefigured the later racist policies of the National Party government (78, 150).

  The Beeswater community moved to Kliprand in 1983, the “location” (as nonwhite urban settlements are called) bordering a white town. Echoing a moment in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, Wicomb notes that the modern facilities (clinic, school, running water at the end of each lane) are desirable to most of the community, despite the tall streetlights that attest so crudely to the surveillance that comes with modernity.19 In real-life, too, the apartheid architecture did not, of course, keep the “terrorists” out: settlements in the same region as Wicomb’s Kliprand were immediately visited by members of the newly established United Democratic Front (UDF).20 As we see from the novel, Dulcie and David’s task is to prevail against the Griqua ethnic nationalism Oom Paulse inherited from Andrew le Fleur.

  The novel thus starts to make a set of subtly drawn connections between past and present, through which are produced the novel’s political themes. Among these are references to ethnicity and political representation, and to diamonds and the land.