by Zoe Wicomb
“An emerging democratic order must acknowledge the fact that even within such an order there are power relations at play,” Wicomb wrote in a 1991 essay. “Rather than pursue ‘authenticity,’ a radical culture would engage with such representations … intervene … re-present in ways that explore and challenge power relations.”39 Along these lines, then, Wicomb’s revisionist story of women may be read as a story about women’s bodies returning, which will take us, in due course, to the story about Dulcie returning.
THE HISTORY OF THE STRUGGLE
In 1991, when David Dirkse is thirty-five, it is clear to him and to many others that the South African government will soon change hands. When he visits Kokstad, in Griqualand East, the South African flag flying on the courthouse displays its bands of blue, white, and orange. The flag would change after the first democratic elections in 1994, and the birth of what then Bishop Tutu famously and sentimentally called the “rainbow nation.”
Born in 1956, David would have been twenty in 1976, the “year of Soweto,” and this is why he feels he can speak with authority about “such nonsense” as has entered the general public’s understanding of this revolutionary event. He says that schoolchildren did not burst into “spontaneous rebellion over the Afrikaans language” (79), as suggested by the film Cry Freedom (a film about Steve Biko’s rise as a revolutionary figure). Instead, an underground “military movement orchestrat[ed] the whole thing” (79). Questioning David’s reliability here, the narrator’s view is different: she calls 16 June the day of the revolution against (in part) the Afrikaans word, “the language of oppressors” (35).40
David refers here to Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK; literally, “Spear of the Nation”), established in 1961, the year in which the ANC was banned. This was initially an autonomous guerrilla organisation drawing its members from both the ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP), but it later developed into the ANC’s armed wing. David, like Dulcie, trained as an MK freedom fighter in the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Botswana, and also spent time in Angola, in the camp that later became notorious for its treatment of ANC dissidents, Quatro camp. In 1991, David’s official task is to plan MK’s role during the period of transition: How should the ANC maintain its army while officially dismantling it? Privately, he is investigating Griqua history in an attempt to retrieve its non-racialism, as a corrective both to the direction being taken by the Griqua community (as evident in Oom Paulse’s political stance), and to incipient ethnocentricism in his own political movement, the ANC.
Since the ANC was banned, David and Dulcie’s open political activity is conducted in the name of the United Democratic Front, a political movement launched in 1983.41 The UDF’s specific goal was to coordinate opposition to the National Party government’s constitutional reforms (reforms which the Kliprand community would have largely supported), whereby coloured and Indian groups were given limited parliamentary representation through the “Tricameral Parliament,” made up of three separate chambers which excluded black African voters.
Both the ANC and UDF had proclaimed themselves nonracial. However, there were few formal links between coloured and African areas, and some mutual suspicion based on ethnicity. Similarly, around the time David and Dulcie would have been canvassing in Kliprand, there was intensive debate in the ANC about whether whites, coloureds, and Indians should be allowed to become members of the ANC’s National Executive Committee. Open membership was accepted in 1985, but the disagreement was bitter. Even though it tended to refer largely to Indians and whites rather than coloureds,42 a feared Africanist tendency in the ANC provides a partial context for the suspiciousness among the Kliprand community that David and Dulcie need to overcome.43
In addition, UDF canvassers had difficulty making ANC converts in rural communities, given the readiness to believe National Party promises about secure employment and the possibilities of peace, and the rural mistrust of urban-based organisations, as well as a patriarchal conservatism at odds with the leadership roles sometimes being assumed by women. All the more significant, then, is Dulcie’s capacity to attract the Kliprand community, although her soothing of Oom Paulse might be seen as something of a feminist betrayal.
David’s current task is to go to Umtata, the capital of the Transkei region (one of the so-called Bantu homelands), presumably to consult ANC members there about maintaining an armed force. Here Wicomb interweaves into her political history elements of a mystery spy thriller, much of whose resonance will be lost without an understanding of the reference to the slave in the Glassford painting.
When David visits Glasgow in the mid-1980s, as part of a delegation of black teachers, but also doing underground work as the new commander of an ANC cell, he visits the People’s Palace on Glasgow Green, entering it via its Winter Garden. The Winter Garden, a magnificent glass structure in the shape of a ship’s hull, was built in 1896, a sign of Glasgow’s increasing prosperity through colonial trade. Colonial trade between Europe and the West Indies began in 1707, continuing until the emancipation of slaves and the consequent commercial collapse of the West Indies in the mid-nineteenth century. Glasgow’s prosperity was due largely to its position as the port through which West Indian tobacco and sugar were imported. And in Glasgow’s Clyde Valley, sugar refining became a key industry—sugar refining having been made conveniently illegal in the British West Indies.44
For all its interest in “people’s history,” the People’s Palace bears witness to its own political amnesia regarding the history of slavery and the place of slavery in the economic growth of Scotland.45 This history mockingly reenters the territory of Griqualand East through the borrowed names of Scottish towns, villages, and banks. Some mission-educated Africans even bear Scottish names: Govan Mbeki, ANC and SACP veteran, for example, named after the Scottish missionary, Dr Govan, also bears the name of a Glasgow shipyard.
Nowhere in this novel is the history of slavery more brilliantly shown as both obscured and revealed than in the evanescent slave-face in the Glassford painting, and its extraordinary reappearance in Kokstad’s Crown Hotel. The Glassford painting, which still hangs in the People’s Palace, is a portrait of the family of the legendary tobacco lord, John Glassford of Dougalston (1715–83), painted by Archibald McLaughlin in 1767. Tobias Smollett’s novel Humphrey Clinker (1771) refers to Glassford’s owning twenty-five ships on the high seas, and trading for above half a million sterling a year: he was one of Glasgow’s major traders and bankers, and “one of the greatest merchants in Europe.”46 The family’s new wealth is represented by, among other things, the red clothing and drapes that recall the red cloaks worn by the Glasgow tobacco lords. The painting also includes the figure of a slave (slaves were conventional signifiers of lucrative colonial connections in the artwork of the time)47 whose face reemerges as that of the red-and-black liveried waiter at the Crown Hotel. (The song “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” plays when David first finds the waiter familiar [109].)48 David’s “recognition” returns to him yet another memory, of Angola’s Quatro camp, where he first saw the waiter.
David was at Quatro in 1984, an ANC detention camp near Quibaxe in northern Angola, for dissidents from within the ranks. Constructed in 1979, Quatro acquired its name because of its association with the Fort, the Johannesburg prison whose black section was known as Number 4. Because of his support of the mutineers’ demands for greater democracy in the army, David was placed in solitary confinement, and (it seems) tortured: hence the deep scars on his feet, and the limp. When he remembers the painting at the People’s Palace, he remembers his prison guard thumping his chest: “Imbokodo … [t]he boulder that crushes” (195). This was the name given the ANC security department.
Again, Wicomb draws upon historical facts, though barely hinted at.49 There had been growing tension among guerrillas about the increasing lack of democracy in the ANC. South African guerrillas deployed in Angola wanted to fight in South Africa, against their real enemy, rather than against UNITA, the Angolan rebel army supported by the
South African state. But in an atmosphere of paranoia—exacerbated by the unmasking in 1981 of a spy in the ANC high command—even those who simply wished to discuss general camp problems were often detained on suspicion of espionage. Seven ANC mutineers were sentenced to public execution; others were subjected to political reorientation courses in various Angolan detention camps. Of the eleven mutineers taken to Quatro, one man (Zaba Maledza) died in the punishment cell, through either suicide or execution. Although the ANC’s Stuart Commission attributed blame for the mutiny partly to the excesses of the ANC security department, security personnel continued to act brutally to detainees. In the early 1990s, after the ANC was unbanned, survivors of the mutiny gave damning interviews in the British press as well as in South Africa. In 1992 Nelson Mandela appointed a Commission of Inquiry to investigate these and other complaints by former ANC detainees. More recently, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission heard evidence against the ANC security department, but many feel that the truth still has not been fully disclosed.50
David presents himself as able to come to terms with what he sees as the inevitable violence in revolutionary times. He would have been well aware of cases where guerrillas, captured and squeezed dry of information, would be turned into double agents; or where they would become so-called Askaris, men working undercover for the Special Forces or the police as assassins or saboteurs.51 During the 1980s and early 1990s especially, immunity from prosecution was being offered to those involved in criminal activity in exchange for information about the ANC,52 and covert political activity, whether involving security forces aligned to the NP government or to the ANC, was often intertwined with diamond and other smuggling. David’s anger at Thomas’s offer of engagement in the illicit diamond buying business (called IDB in the text), in exchange for a murder, is to be seen in this context, as is his general suspicion of Thomas and the waiter. His own body bears the marks of the victimised (his tinnitus must partly refer to the practice at Quatro of ukumpompa, blows and claps on inflated cheeks which often caused ear damage), but submission to torture, or the refusal to blow the whistle on it, is tied up in David’s mind with political commitment. In his engagement with memory and truth, David’s story to the narrator both reveals and does not reveal ANC atrocities against dissidents within its own ranks.
Wicomb’s text also subtly alerts readers to the tensions surrounding the history of slavery in South Africa. Slavery has been and is still being largely erased in South African reconstructions of the past; to recall slavery is also to recall a mixed ethnic origin.53 The reference to the changes made to the Glassford painting echoes Le Fleur’s visit to Lord Milner (governor of the Cape from 1897 to 1905) in Cape Town. Confronted by Milner’s engraving of Cape slaves, Le Fleur averts his eyes, just as he elsewhere denies slave heritage in the Griqua past. And then looking at Milner’s portrait of contemporary white leaders, Le Fleur imagines his own figure displacing that of Cecil John Rhodes (149). This moment returns uncannily in the fantasy of his senile years (105, 146), when he believes himself called to be the governor of Rhodesia, which Rhodes had taken from the Matabele in 1890.
In these references to erasure and emergence, the text not only suggests that the mysteries and evasions of present day political and ethnic affiliations may be revealed through a recognition of the historical, colonial past, but also alerts us to the political tensions surrounding acts of memory and ethnic reconstruction. For David, the one-time slave reemerges, as it were, to become known in the present. Whether as an ANC watcher (now) or as an ANC prison guard (earlier), the waiter occupies a position of sinister mastery and control. David’s new memory places himself as victim, and, like the waiter, as a witness to torture, and tethers them both to a past characterised by secrecy and their continued entrapment in a discourse of master and slave. The revealed secret may suddenly speak its various “truths,” to whoever can hear—but as we shall see, memory screens truth as much as it uncovers it.
THE MEMORY OF WOMEN
David’s memory of Quatro releases in him the memory of the terrible things happening to Dulcie “before my very eyes” (201). He does not again refer to what he has recalled. Instead, he is more manic than ever about piecing together Dulcie’s story, as if his narrative engagement might allow him to cover over the truth.
In an interview in 1990, Wicomb said, “I don’t imagine that I would ever have been able to speak and write if there hadn’t been black consciousness, if there hadn’t been feminism.”54 These two ethical-political positions continually interrogate each other in her fiction, each position nudging the other closer to the truth, giving rise to an awareness of the ways in which women’s bodies are used as signs by political or cultural movements that at the same time refuse to hear what women say.
Wicomb went on to note that the national liberation struggle was suppressing gender issues rather than putting them “on the back-boiler,” as contemporary apologists liked to claim.55 Her concern in this novel with the abuse of women comes at a time when gender issues relating to violence against women still receive insufficient political attention (and virtually no political action). Even in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, which were meant to unearth a variety of forms of violence, violence against women was rarely a topic. This was first thought to be because the commission hearings were dominated by men, and special women’s-only hearings were accordingly convened. Yet even at these segregated hearings, few women, and no active female combatants, came forward to testify. Joyce Seroke, one of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissioners and also chair of the Commission for Gender Equality in South Africa, said of these hearings that “we only began to scratch the surface” of the horror, although there were several “gruesome stories of sexual torture and violence.”56
This silence excludes two kinds of stories. First, it excludes the stories of torture perpetrated against women by the South African apartheid security police,57 the implications being that women have been only secondary victims of apartheid (mothers, wives, and sisters of primary victims, who were almost all men), and also that sexual assault against women is less serious than other torture. Wicomb’s novel breaks this silence, not least by casting Dulcie as the commander of an ANC cell. Second, this silence excludes the stories of violence against ANC women by ANC men. Such stories are likely to take some years to emerge.58 Zimbabwe’s second Chimurenga, the War of Liberation, has been over for twenty years, but only recently have women guerrillas spoken of the sexual demands, abuses, and violence they were subjected to as part of military life.59
Insofar as it is a mystery story, this novel sets up as many mysteries as it solves, and it continually plays games with any attempt on the part of the reader-critic to unravel the novel’s “meaning.” Hints in the novel lead us to ask: To what extent is David himself responsible for Dulcie’s death? Is he one of the men in whose nightly visits Dulcie finds it impossible to retrieve her own will, her own desire and voice? “She would not have been surprised to see those hands withdraw dripping with blood” (199). Is this what passes for love?
Despite her refusal to have sex with military colleagues, Dulcie’s body may now be in sexual service to the struggle. She is of course agent as well as object, for we see her washing the blood off her hands. (Handwashings and other cleansings form an important trope through the text.) But does this dual existence mean that some of the questions we pose about David’s political commitment and silence apply to her, too? Are her lover-torturers from the ANC’s security branch or the apartheid state’s? If the text implies that the signs of her torture are like a slave’s branding (19), how would Dulcie’s scars turn into something as miraculous as the living tree that Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved has on her back?60
It is the point of the novel not that such questions might be answered, but that they are posed; hence the novel’s epigraph from Frantz Fanon: “Oh my body, make of me a man who questions.”61 Fanon has been an important influence in black South African thinking, and the foc
us Wicomb gives him here is telling,62 for it reminds readers that a revolutionary stance should include self-questioning. Of course, this epigraph is ironic, too, not least since one sometimes finds in Fanon an idealisation of women similar to David’s.63
If the plea reflects on David as the “man,” it refers sardonically to his displacement onto his body, and from there onto Dulcie’s body (and onto his woman narrator) a critical response to current political orthodoxies and erasures that he himself cannot directly face. If the plea is the narrator’s, or the author’s, the epigraph registers their own imperative to question through the body, which also takes us to Dulcie’s body: if her body is in sexual service to the struggle, is it in sexual service to writing as well? Does the focus on her body mean the loss of her voice?
As the shrewd Ant Mietjie notes at one point, David’s disturbance has to do not just with political commitment and political doubt but with love, with the place of love in the political struggle, and with the place of politics in love. (Sally’s life with David offers a quotidian, less elevated staging of this issue.)
In her critical work, Wicomb has turned to issues raised in Bessie Head’s writing. In Wicomb’s fiction, too, Head stands alongside Toni Morrison as an important literary precursor. Head wrote in her novel Maru about relations between the Tswana and the enslaved and degraded Masarwa (one of the peoples of the San), using the perspective of a marginalised Masarwa woman to interrogate Tswana nationalism, and resurgent nationalism in general.64 Wicomb’s attention has been caught particularly by Head’s interest in the inseparability of the struggle against racial and gender oppression, and by Head’s concern to move beyond “a question of power”65 in conceptualising relations between subject and nation and between women and men. In Maru a woman, and specifically her art, transforms, and then also fails to transform, an inherited patriarchal, racist world.66
