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Mind Your Colour (1981)

Mind Your Colour

(1981)–Vernon February–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

The 'Coloured' Stereotype in South African Literature


Vorige Volgende

Chapter 3
Smelling strangeness1

Sarah Gertrude Millin immortalized the half-caste in South African literature with her God's Step-children (1924). Her most interesting and important books were those dealing with the colour question. Millin was, as she so frankly admitted in her account of the life and death of her husband Phillip (The Measure of My Days, 1955) very preoccupied with the racial situation:2

I had written about colour since I was sixteen. The Dark River - The River of Colour, The River of Life, The Dark River itself, the Vaal River ... Where I lived on the Vaal River, among the remnants of tribes that had fought one another and the Boers in Voortrekker days, I saw drunkenness, disease, hunger and miscegenation; and to talk to these stepchildren of the vote would have been like offering them the cake Marie Antoinette suggested for the poor who had no bread.

Millin was very productive as a writer. She had written seventeen novels, biographies of General Smuts and Cecil John Rhodes and two autobiographies. Her most important novels dealing with the question of miscegenation - a theme of paranoic proportions to her and subsequent writers - are: The Dark River (1919), Adam's Rest (1922), God's Step-children (1924, revised edition 1951), The Herr Witchdoctor (1941, American edition under the title The Dark Gods) and King of the Bastards (1950). Her autobiographical works, The Measure of My Days (1955) and The People of South Africa (1951) provide illuminating material about South Africa.

Miscegenation was of course a theme not solely confined to South African literature. In English literature of the nineteenth century there was periodic interest in the person of mixed origin, the

concentration being on the Eurasian, the half-caste in India (i.e. British India). Many of these Anglo-Indians have enshrined their names in the history books. For example, Derozio, who lived from 1809 to 1833 and who wrote good poetry.3

Mixed breeds have always constituted rather awkward biological by-products of European colonialism. In his unfortunately too littleknown book, Half-Caste (1937), Cedrick Dover presents us with a comparative study of half-caste communities all over the world. And although the book first appeared in 1937, and is therefore outdated in certain respects, it still contains sufficient useful material to be worthy of note within our context.

Dover at one stage draws a comparison between the Eurafrican, as he calls the ‘Cape coloured’, and the Eurasian. He writes:4

And this is not surprising, for the white strains are the same: mainly Dutch, Portuguese, German, French and British. There are Hottentot genes in the Eurafricans, but these are not dominant; there are Bantu genes, but the contributing Bantu groups were themselves previously exposed to Asiatic and other admixture; there are the genes of slaves imported from the mixed but prominently Asiatic populations of Madagascar, Mozambique and Java; there are recent Indian, Chinese, Goan and Eurasian genes. So the Eurafricans have the stature, the brown skin, the oval face, the blackish and often straight hair, and the brown or brownish black eyes of the common Eurasian type. Even their speech reminds one of the Eurasian accent, the somewhat monotonous, sing-song intonation known in India as chee-chee.

His rather small chapter on literature is skimpy yet no less incisive. Of the half-caste in ‘prodigal literature’, as he puts it, he says that he appears as ‘an undersized, scheming and entirely degenerate bastard. His father is a blackguard, his own mother a whore.... But more than all this, he is a potential menace to Western Civilization, to everything that is White and Sacred and majusculed.’5 The half-caste's ability to instill fear into, and send tremors down the backs of the whites, is one which we shall persistently come across in South African literature, notably among Afrikaner writers like Regina Neser and Abel Coetzee.

Rightly Dover observes that the literature concerning the halfcaste was often shrouded in ignorance and subtle propaganda. He gives an extensive list of authors who, according to the critics, are sympathetic to the person of mixed origin but whose final vision of this group is no

less damaging. The works of Alain Lambreaux (Mulatto Johnny), Eugene O'Neill (Emperor Jones), Sarah Gertrude Millin (God's Stepchildren), Paul Morand (Magie Noire), Carl van Vechten (Nigger Heaven), Henry Champly (White Women, Coloured Men), and Joan Sutherland (Challenge), in the words of Dover, all serve to ‘stress the frustration motif, the futility of coloured life, the sanctity and desirability of white womanhood, the unpardonable crime of intermixture and the nobility of declining to extend it’.6 Dover refers to the literature of ‘race and colour as one of smelling strangeness’.7 Miriam, one of the characters in Millin's novel Adam's Rest, refers to colour as a disease which she would rather not catch.8

Abstinence and the refusal to procreate as well as a predilection for seclusion, in some cases even monastic, are such noble motifs found in the works of Millin and Joan Sutherland. Eugenists, anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists and politicians further complicate the picture. The absurdity of the half-breed image reaches comi-tragic proportions in the anecdote cited by Dover when ‘a brown dupe of aggrandisement ... writes to England's leading welfare journal (New Health, June 1935), to enquire if people with his “complaint - the result of mixed marriage” can be sterilized. “I am not too dark”, he says pathetically, “but I dread to think now at 30, should I get married and have children, they might be of much darker colour than I am”.’9 The reply of the editor is hilarious in that he counsels the poor man that ‘unfortunately the law does not permit sterilization on these grounds. You must, therefore, in the present state of the law, be satisfied with the adoption of birth control measures.’9

With such a heavy premium on colour, it is hardly surprising that most half-breed communities suffer from what Freud calls, ‘the narcissism of small differences’, that is, they distinguish expertly between subtle shades of brown or light which is normally not so overtly apparent to the non half-caste.

According to Susanne Howe in her book, Novels of Empire (1949), the Dutch and the French colonials have never found the spawning of half-castes an undue problem. She writes: ‘the French, like the Dutch, feel less called upon than the British to draw the color line in their colonial possessions’. With them, there are ‘no ugly whispers or pointing fingers [to] ruin ... peaceful little idylls with “les brunes” of whatever shade or caste or tribe’.10 Howe's comment on the Dutch reveals her ignorance of the circumstances in the Dutch East Indies during the time of ‘Jan Compagnie’, as well as her unfamiliarity with Dutch colonial literature as such. And since the destinies of the

Netherlands and the Cape became so closely intertwined, it would be interesting to see to what extent the image of the Indo, that is, the Dutch Indonesian half-breed, shows any comparison with that of the ‘Cape coloured’ in South Africa.

The literature referring to the Dutch East Indies is studded with images and terminologies reminiscent of those found in Anglo-Saxon territories. In fact, reading through novels dealing with the Indo, at times one is forcibly reminded of the South African literary scene, and left with just a sneaking suspicion that the inhabitants at the Cape, and the Afrikaner in particular, may have unconsciously inherited a Dutch literary tradition via the East Indies. Njais, Nonnas, Djongos, Liplappen and Sinjos11 walk large in the imagination of many a Dutch author writing about the East Indies. These recall similar terms found in Afrikaans literature, for example: Seun, Boy, Meid, Jong, Skepsel, Outa, and Aia12.

As in Afrikaans literature, the Indo: the person of mixed descent, was portrayed rather unflatteringly. Here too, it was easy to abstract a certain image. The peculiar speech pattern, krompraat (lit. crooked speech, i.e. incorrect usage of the Dutch language), gave rise to giggles and became a source of constant amusement for the totok (whiteman) in the ever-present soos (fraternity), in the tropics. There is also the pathetic attempt of the Indo to imitate. This heavy insistence on imitation, the process whereby children generally acquire their first knowledge, is a notable feature of ‘coloured’ and Indo portrayals. It is no accident that the Indos are derisively called ‘half-bloedjes’ (lit. half-bloods).

The ‘coloured’ is furnished with a guitar, the Indo sentimentally drowned in krongtjong music.13 These half-breeds concentrate on imbibing white values and habits, and it is this disparity between what they really are and what they aspire to only half-heartedly, which gives rise to endless comic scenes. As with the mixed breeds in South Africa, there are heart-rending attempts to forge an alliance with the whites.

Nicolaus de Graaff had already given a rather horrendous picture of half-caste women in his Oost Indise Spiegel (Warnsinck, 1930), although he is no less damaging in his assessment of Dutch women in the East. To state therefore that the Dutch were so much more tolerant in portraying the indigenes in the East, or the half-castes during colonial times, is to regurgitate a well-orchestrated myth which finds its sustenance in historical comparisons of, for example, English and Dutch colonialism, in the process of which the latter appears to be more humane.

The mixed group in the East Indies was certainly not as humanely treated as one is sometimes given to understand. Rob Nieuwenhuys observes in his book Oost-Indische Spiegel: ‘The history of the Indos, the so-called “bastards of Europeans”, as they were officially called at first, has been one of suffering throughout the entire nineteenth century.’14 He says that they were often regarded as ‘unreliable, dangerous and treated as a laughing stock’.15 Not surprisingly therefore, this group thought of itself as ‘pariahs consumed with revenge’.15 Within the East Indies context, all the Dutch writers were ‘totoks’, all were onlookers.

The general picture of the Indo largely corresponds with that of the ‘coloured’. Like the ‘coloured’, the Indo also becomes an object of comic embellishment, whose incorrect usage of the Dutch language (krompraat), whose liberal insistence on bi-labials where one would normally find labio-dentals, and whose tendency to punctuate his speech pattern with onomatopoeic words and use the present tense and stops instead of open fricatives, never cease to amuse.

In this respect, Rob Nieuwenhuys quotes Ten Brink in his Oost-Indische Spiegel who remarked that, as far as the Dutch were concerned, there was ‘nothing more uncharitable, more denigrating ... than the arrogance of the Dutch towards the coloureds .... There seems to be no pleasanter form of amusement than to regale each other on the linguistic faults of the sinjos.’16

Herman, the Indo, in Totok en Indo (1915) by Jan Fabricius, is such a stereotype. He is good at heart, ludicrous, sentimental, responsible for all the laughs on stage, especially through the mixed prattle used by him and his friend Cornelis. The ‘coloured’ in Afrikaans literature is also comically appreciated for his sê goed (literally, say things, i.e. witticisms). Both the Indo and the ‘coloured’ have in the past objected to this stereotyped portrayal by the whiteman. Nieuwenhuys for instance, recalls the protest of the Indo against the play Totok en Indo when it was performed in Surabaya.

The Indo too is made to suffer under his mixed ancestry. The older generation emerges as docile, acquiescent, compliant and long-suffering. After years of service, an old man is usually bought off with a clock. The young ones are rebellious, yet psychologically messed up and consumed with hatred for the whites. They are duped into a situation whereby the fulfilment of their aspirations is frustrated by the one characteristic which is responsible for their peculiar position - their mixed ancestry.

Sam Portalis in De Paupers (1915) by Hans van de Wall, is such an obsequious, docile type. The younger generation express the feelings

of many a half-caste when they fulminate: ‘They say that they want to put us on a par with them, the Europeans.... Believe me, they despise us, because we are brown like the inlanders. Suppose my grandfather was white, then they would have given him some medal.’17 Similar sentiments are re-echoed in Millin's book, God's Step-children, when the half-caste, Deborah, asks in utter exasperation: ‘What is for me, then?’18

There are one or two elements in the South African novel which will not be found in the Dutch counterparts dealing with the Indo. The Dutch East Indies was, after all, still only a colonial possession, and the Dutch were eventually forced to leave and subsist on a longing for ‘Our Indië’ (Our East Indies). The paranoia which characterizes the South African portrayal is absent, as also the over-emphasis on the purity of the blood. Herman, in Totok en Indo is after all, still allowed to vie with the totok, Koeleman, for the hand of Georgina, the administrator's daughter. The mere suggestion of a ‘coloured’ competing for the favour and affection of a white woman, would have had South Africa up in arms, as it did when the Afrikaner writer, Brink, made the ‘coloured’, Josef Malan, sleep with a white woman in his novel Kennis van die aand (1974).

Wine does not seem to be such an essential component in the Indo make-up. But then the East Indies was not blessed with a wine-growing district, such as one finds in the Western Cape. Nor was there, in the East Indies, that peculiar relationship which existed between the farmer and his farm-hand. The ‘tot’ system, as we have already seen, is peculiarly South African.

The South African novel is generally characterized by an absence of any romantic associations or feelings of nostalgia or remorse. The associations are devoid of laughter, although this would be true even in the East Indies setting. The njai was, after all, nothing but a concubine who satisfied the sexual appetites of the totok. There is no folly or any form of spiritual intimacy.

The females in these novels are unprepossessing types, relegated to the animal kingdom, impelled by savagery and physical lust, the jetsam of society. The white males, on the other hand, are without exception degenerates or psychopaths with serious flaws in their characters, from the Reverend Andrew Flood and Coenraad Buys in Millin's works to Pieter van Vlaanderen in Paton's novel. They also live outside the normative structure of their group and group myths. Their offspring is doomed from the start. The attitude is one of Christian ethical norms on the one hand, and heathenism on the other. In the

oeuvre of Sarah Gertrude Millin, there is no noble savage throwback which endows the savage with nobility, beauty and innate innocence. Miscegenation remains sinful.

The English were of course not ignorant of the stories about, for example, the old Nabobs, during the hey-day of colonialism. Susanne Howe comments:19

The cheerfully earthy minds of the time were not squeamish about Anglo-native alliances and their resulting troops of brown children. There were a few such alliances in the early history of the Thackerays in India. But with the rise of Evangelical and middle class morality, the attitude changed. To be sure, a certain amount of liberal feeling about the dark races prevailed after the anti-slavery campaigns of Wilberforce and his cohorts, and after the equalitarian doctrines of the French revolution had swept a few dark-skinned little orphan boys or beautiful and virtuous Indian maidens into the novels of such large-minded radicals - often Unitarians or Quakers - as Amelia Opie, Mary Wollstonecraft, Robert Bage or Thomas Holcroft. But by 1834 when William Brown Hockley is lamenting the situation of these hybrids in the Window of Calcutta, the Half-Caste Daughter and other Sketches, it is clear that Rousseau and St. Pierre and all the ‘Noble Savages’ have lost ground.

Sarah Gertrude Millin was the daughter of a Jewish immigrant from Poland, who came to South Africa in 1888 when she was only five months old. She grew up with colour as an operative factor in her life. Her years on the Vaal River made a lasting impression on her. In her novels, various strands of South African racial life are explored.

Millin drew attention to her work from several quarters. Of her first novel, The Dark River (1919), no less a distinguished short-story writer than Katherine Mansfield remarked:

Running through the book there is, as it were, a low, troubled throbbing note which is never stilled .... This lowthrobbing note is essential to Mrs Millin's novel, and we must be very certain it is there, for though the story plays above and below it, that which gives it significance and holds our attention is the undertone.

The author was deeply, and one could say, sincerely, interested in race relations in her country of adoption. Her work was at least a

departure from the normal literary trend which until the twenties largely ignored the race question. One learns that her sympathies however, were with the ‘Cape Man’, of whom she says that he is:20

the fruit of the vice, the folly, the thoughtlessness of the white man. In the old days - taking one aspect of the matter - there were colonists who, like the Biblical patriarchs or monarchs, had their official and their unofficial households, their white wives and their Hottentot hand-maids. But they used their slave-women as Abraham used Hagar rather than as Solomon used the Shulamite. The association was devoid of lyricism. No Hottentot girl ever preened herself before her white lord, declaiming: ‘I am black, but comely’. When the Abrahams were done with their Hagars, they sent them with their Ishmaels into the wilderness.

Mrs Millin has some damning assessment of the ‘Cape Man’ for whom she is supposed to have such an affection. She did not think well of the intellectual and spiritual capacities of the half-caste. The ‘Cape Man’ emerges as a pitiable creature, at the most a city dweller, comparable to the lower classes of the East End of London, who however, in her view, are still superior to the ‘Coloured’. She writes:21

And yet the less civilised white peasant of Europe is to this extent the coloured man's superior: the blood in him is stronger for advancement. Given the opportunity, the descendant of serfs may be a Tchekov. But the child of colour, unless his colour is attenuated to the verge of vanishing point, does not seem to have in him the ability to rise. It is as if the offspring of the originally mixed unions had, through generations, and through circumscription of life and interbreeding, achieved a definite, inferior, and static race: a race not given to wildness (its mothers were savages, but they were slaves); a race with something old and civilised about it (its fathers were Europeans); a race made up of weak materials and without the capacity for spiritual or intellectual growth. There are some who suggest that mixed breeds, unless replenished in a generation or two with the blood of one of the original stocks, tend to die out.

One would hate to think that this is the reason why ‘sex across the colour line’ is so rife in pigmentocratic South Africa.

Colour was, and is, one of the major metaphors in South African

fiction. At times the theme reaches almost paranoic proportions, like in the Afrikaans novel Hans die Skipper (1929), by D.F. Malherbe, where the white boy involved in a fight is told that only ‘coloureds’ do such things; not people of the white race.

Millin's first novel was appropriately called The Dark River. Here one is confronted with the spiritual and physical aridity of white spinsterdom against the backdrop of ‘coloured’ fecundity. The novel is set in the Transvaal, in the Vaal River diggings, where the authoress had also spent her youth.

An interesting facet is the white fascination with, and envy of, the blacks, who amidst all deprivation seem so much freer and happier than their overlords. Doris Lessing deals with this in her short stories, so does Millin in her novels. The African emerges as an enviable person in a situation which should conceivably call for tears.

The colour theme is an obsession with Millin. The half-caste is a tragic figure, miscegenation is mephistophelian, ‘mixed blood’ is something sinful. The problem is religiously pursued in her novel Adam's Rest, the predominant symbol once more being that of ‘Smelling Strangeness’. The character, Miriam, shows a similar ambiguous attitude towards the blacks. It is partly compounded of revulsion and superiority and partly of envy. She envies the dignity of the African, the nearest Millin can get to endowing black people with at least a savage nobility. Miriam remarks of these half-breeds:22

There must be something wrong at bottom. Look at their ancestry. It means a bad type of white man and a bad type of black woman to begin with. You know yourself, Janet, decent Kaffir women have nothing to do with white men. So that's one thing. Besides, it doesn't matter what it is. I can't work it out, but I have a feeling about colour as if it were a chtching disease - perhaps it is - and I don't want to be near it.

The offspring in Adam's Rest, of the Englishman and the Khoi woman, are true to the general pattern. First, the white progenitor is a misfit who is beyond caring and whose association with his woman is, to use Millin's idiom, ‘devoid of lyricism’. The white man, Mr. Croft, is a ‘blond, stout Yorkshireman without any inherited prejudices against colour, and he had married his half-caste woman without any love and also without any soul-searchings on questions of miscegenation’.23

The children are stereotyped into fair and dark, whereby the overall

tragic implications of such unions are further underlined. The fair ones suffer more than the darker counterparts, being duped into thinking of themselves as part of the superior group in the system of ascribed roles. They are also more schizoid, perpetually haunted by the fear of discovery. Often this paralytic fear is responsible for their impotency, their inability to get sexually involved with women. Anthony's relationships in Gerald Gordon's novel, Let the Day Perish (1952), are practically purified of sexual advances and intimacy. The greater the aspiration, the harder the fall back into the cess pool of colour and of shanty towns and poverty. Again in Adam's Rest we read:24

Miriam was sorry for everyone. For the wretched Kaffirs, - the hopeless bÿwoners, even the aspiring Crofts. Was it, after all, their fault they had black blood in them? How awful it was to be born damned. That boast of theirs - they kept themselves white, how pathetic!

Sarah Gertrude Millin's God's Step-children was the climax of this genre, a tale of miscegenation unparalleled in South African fiction. The Reverend Flood (Millin probably had the missionary van der Kemp in mind here) is an Englishman who decides to marry a Khoi woman, Silla, after an abortive love affair with an English girl. The Reverend Flood's main intention is to prove that all people are created equal in the eyes of God. Right at the beginning, the reader is confronted with one of the key themes in Millin's works (and I am not sure whether one should not even regard it as the main theme). The Reverend Flood is having a conversation with one of the Khoi characters, Calchas, which proceeds as follows:25

‘We are all God's children’, he said.
‘But is God Himself not white?’ asked Calchas.
And, as the Rev. Andrew Flood hesitated for a reply, she made a suggestion:
‘Perhaps, we brown people are His stepchildren’, she said.

One is confronted with various generations of the Flood clan, and the effect of their mixed-bloodedness on their spiritual and moral development. The story ends with the whitest of them all, Barry Lindsell, abandoning his wife and unborn child, by way of expiation for his crime of colour; and for neglecting his people, the ‘coloureds’, to preach (like his first forebear) the message of Christianity to them.

In so doing, he completes the circle. Barry's atonement is also for his great-great grandfather, the Reverend Andrew Flood.

Out of this union between the Reverend Flood and Silla, is born a daughter, Deborah. Flood emerges as a bungling fool, a mockery to whites and Khoi alike, a tragic failure and an incorrigible misfit. Mrs Millin's portrayal of missionaries in no way reflects creditably on this ostensibly liberal breed. Quite early in the novel she clearly indicates that not all the Reverend Floods can stem the tide of heathenism, or expunge such tendencies from the wretched souls of the Khoi. When, for example, Silla's boy is in the throes of death, she is made to resort quite naturally to heathen practices, notwithstanding her marriage and proximity to a man of God, presumably to emphasize her savage nature.

Of the Reverend Flood, Millin writes:26

By the time the Rev. Andrew Flood had been at Canaan for fifteen years he was himself in many ways, a savage. He was dirty and unkempt and wild-looking; he seldom read; he wrote to no one; he knew nothing that was going on in the big world; and it embarrassed him to meet a civilized person.

The daughter, Deborah, who is slightly fairer, is placed with another missionary couple and given the opportunity to attend school. But she also falls prey to stereotyped ideas. She is described as:27

not unintelligent .... She had, as most half-caste children have, a capacity for imitation. She copied the manners and habits - even the gestures and intonations - of Mrs Burtwell. She seemed to learn quickly, too, but only to a certain extent. Inevitably the point would be reached where a solid barrier of unreceptivity would hinder all further mental progress.

Even Mr Burtwell, the white missionary, is made to think that28

a child with a white father might be different. He knew that native children arrived at their full capacity very early. At the age of four or five they were far in advance of white children of the same age; but at the age of fourteen or fifteen, they begin to falter, to lag behind, to remain stationary while their white competitors went ahead.

Deborah is destined for tragedy. She first has an affair with a fullblooded Khoi, much to the disgust of the Burtwells, who attribute it (as does Deborah) to the savage half in her. Later on she has an affair

with Kleinhans, a white man, which similarly displeases the Burtwells and culminates in the young girl's cri de coeur, and what Mrs Millin sees as the extreme dilemma of the half-caste: ‘You say black is not for me; you say white is not for me. What is for me, then?’29

Out of this chance association with the white man, Kleinhans, is born a son, who is fair, a bundle of contradictions and who eventually marries a half-caste from the Cape, whose ‘father had been a German... and [whose] mother a coloured woman, with a little Malay blood in her and a little St Helena blood and the usual incursion of white blood’.30 Unto them is born a girl, Elmira, who is so white that the employers, the Lindsells, resent her presence. She is of course unmasked for the fraud that she is, when her parents visit her in her ‘white’ school during a severe illness. Poor little Elmira then carries the cry of Deborah a little further by pathetically asking her parents: ‘Why did you come?’31

Elmira is now only good enough to consort with, or marry, the old fossil and widower, Lindsell, by whom she bears a ‘white’ son, Barry. She then runs away to Cape Town, only to beget another ‘white’ illegitimate child. Barry is left ultimately in the charge of one of his spinster half-sisters (one of the sexually deprived types in the Millin oeuvre).

This blood saga reaches its climax when Barry is summoned to the death bed of his mother where he is forcibly confronted with his ‘coloured’ ancestry. He then decides to leave his English wife and unborn child to serve his people, like the first white progenitor, the Reverend Andrew Flood.32

‘This is my vow’, he said at last.
‘For my sin in begetting him, I am not to see my child.
And, for the sorrow I share with them, I am to go among my brown people to help them.’

This horror saga is continued in the novel, The Herr Witch-doctor, where the chief characters are the two ‘white’ half-caste brothers, the sons of Elmira. Failure, frustration, tragedy and horror are the operative symbols. The illegitimate half-brother has ironically imbibed all the arrogance of his white father, as a result of which he liberally indulges in ‘sex across the colour line’. His half-brother takes after the founder of their ill-begotten clan, the missionary, Reverend Andrew Flood, and like him, proves ineffectual in living out his creed.

The one character who personifies miscegenation on a large scale in Southern African (Afrikaner) history is Coenraad Buys, the first

white man in the Transvaal. Millin has immortalized him in fiction in her novel, King of the Bastards. Buys had populated the country with a menagerie of black and brown descendants, who still live in the Transvaal to this very day as an independent clan.

In a very illuminating foreword, one of South Africa's Prime Ministers and statesmen, General Smuts, who was a close friend of the novelist writes:33

The story is ostensibly the history of the origins of a very small coloured or half-breed community in South Africa, the Buys family, in the Northern Transvaal, descendants of one white man, Coenraad Buys, and his harem of native women. But in reality, it is much more. It is, in the first place, the story of Coenraad Buys himself, and of his progress like some demigod through the welter of confusion which reigned in South Africa in the latter part of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And, in the second place, we get a picture of South African horror such as has never been painted before.

It is interesting that a man like Smuts, who was to be Prime Minister of South Africa on several occasions, and who was generally respected in the English-speaking world, should have referred to the story as a ‘South African horror’.

The aberration of Coenraad Buys is explained in terms of his mother's four husbands. ‘Sleeping black’ was his way of taking revenge, or so we are given to understand. The way he is whisked out of the story is as undramatic and unconvincing as the attempted psychological explanations of his flaws.

Only Maria, the old Khoi wife, is half-sympathetically drawn, if more for her animal-like attachment to Coenraad and his equally strong affection for her; very much like that of a master for his pet dog, whose unquestioning loyalty sustains when all else is silent. Buys himself is seen against the ‘noble savage’ tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a type more readily found in the novels of Stuart Cloete. In a review of the novel, the Star newspaper of Johannesburg wrote:34

The tall imposing figure of Coenraad Buys is one that flits in and out of the history of the Cape Eastern frontier of 150 years ago - but on the whole more out than in. He was a product of the wild frontier between white and black, a man at odds not only with authority but with the community of which he at first

formed a part ... He might have come to be regarded as the greatest among his people but for one thing: his women were black; his family were the coloured rabble that ended as Buysvolk kept apart from other people in a land of their own.

Coenraad Buys straddles the book like a colossus:35

When Coenraad presently rose, he almost touched the ceiling. He looked - his face and body - majestic. He wore that expression ... which was not so much an outward as an inward smile - an expression of superiority befitting a god.

The book opens with the, all too familiar, tableau of an indaba (council), evoking images of patriarchal Boers during the Great Trek on the one hand, and colourful meetings of blacks on the other. Louis Buys is speaking:36

Look, I said the day I joined the Council, ‘the whites are the conquerors and all is theirs. A man's one hope is among the whites.... The thing for the Buys-volk to do is to get back to the whites’.

The novel starts with the council and ends with one. The final epitaph is by old Michael Buys when he says: ‘Coenraad de Buys. Coenraad de Buys. White Man’.37 The message is rather obvious and tragic, that for the half-breed, salvation can only be gotten, if they join the white man, who however despises them.

Millin's attitude towards miscegenation and the half-caste is reechoed in the works of Stuart Cloete, who was slightly less productive, but no less wellknown. His first novel, The Turning Wheels (1937), has as its major theme the Great Trek, and was on the banned list in South Africa for a long time. The novel is essentially an enchanting story of heroism and love, furstration and jealousy among the Trekkers. His male Boer specimens are colossal.

However, if white South Africa was perturbed by anything, then it was the suggestion and demonstration in Cloete's works, whether covertly or overtly, that the patriarchal Boer Trekker was not only lord of the jungle, but also a lusty sexual animal who sought release with his coloured hand-maid in the process of which he fathered a host of half-breeds. His novel was therefore forbidden fare, although I recollect reading it, as did many others, in those few stolen hours and then returning it to the safe confines of the mattress cover.

Most of the Cloete oeuvre is about Boer history. His second novel, Watch for the Dawn (1939), takes us back to the Slagtersnek rebellion of 1815.38 Subsequent novels deal with other periods, for example The Hill of Doves (1941), set against the Boer War of 1880-1.

Stuart Cloete's male (Boer) characters have a savage, primitive strength. They are awesome, enviable creatures, resplendent in their physical superiority. The Boer Trekker in The Mask (1957) is such a specimen:39

Every day Simon became more attached to Potgieter, who seemed to him the ideal Voortrekker, one of those who went in front, a strong, bold, resourceful pioneer, a wonderful shot and horseman [a man in whom is embodied] all the virtues of the frontier [who is blessed with] muscles that bulged under his shirt ... great thighs that gripped his bay horse ... the grizzled black virility of his beard ... one who would not die but could only be killed in some terrible adventure.

The novelist sees miscegenation as an inevitable part of survival in the wilds, where ‘time was out of joint and no one was his own’ (the white apologia for co-habitation with black and brown people). “Miscegenation”, Cloete says, by way of one of his characters, ‘is proximity.... What went on between Mark Antony and Cleopatra was miscegenation ... the choice [was probably] between miscegenation and death. Death from loneliness, drink or disease, or a combination of all three.’40

Cloete is as damning in his assessment of the non-white as is Sarah Gertrude Millin. To him, the blacks would always be in need of ‘some white direction’. He continues to say that they (the blacks) ‘think they know it all, and are not ready to wait and learn the rest’.41

Millin and Cloete are closer to the Afrikaans novelist tradition in terms of the colour question. Afrikaans literature has generally maintained an eerie silence on this theme. Apart from novelists like Regina Neser, with her almost cherry-ripe evocations of blonde, blueeyed, pink-cheeked arrivals in ‘coloured’ families, and Coetzee's poor attempt to raise the bogey of blood purity, there are few examples which even parallel Alan Paton's Too Late the Phalarope (1953). There is, in South African fiction, nothing comparable to the four books on miscegenation by Edgar Mittelholzer, the West Indian writer, in which the reader is panoramically confronted with ‘the Dutch Adrianson van Groenwegel, with his European intellectuality, restraint

and sexual mores, on the other ... the wild intuitive and uninhibited stock of Kaywana’.42 Possibly the subject was too painful for many an Afrikaans writer, who without exception moved within the group myth. Possibly Calvinism (and the group myth), serves as a greater instrument of, what I would like to call, the violence of uniformity and conformity, which is typical of both the right and the left.

Abel Coetzee's novel, Waarheen vader? (1940), is fairly representative of the fear-psychosis which infects white South Africa at the mere suggestion of a trace of colour in the family. His book is a clarion call for the purity of the tribe and the Aryan blood cult. It is no accident that Dr Dönges43 cited an essay by Olive Schreiner, the novel Kinders van Ishmaël by Regina Neser and Sarah Gertrude Millin's God's Stepchildren in support of his proposed law against mixed marriages in 1949. All these books conceived of mixtures as tragic and sinful products of white and black, and by implication, preached purity of the tribe. Coetzee's story fits into this category.

The story follows the familiar pattern of the ostensibly white family, whose dreams are rudely shattered by the birth of their ‘outwardly coloured’ child. It is a tragedy which initially rumbles subterraneously, and then erupts to cause the general disintegration of the Bastiaans clan. The symbolism employed by Coetzee is gross, overplayed and banal, like, for instance, the overworking of white as a symbol. One stumbles upon the ‘white glare of the light’ and the ‘white calm in the dining room’, which becomes intolerable to the father. The message is rather crudely spelt out, uncouth at times in its grotesqueness and insistence on blood purity.

Millin, Cloete and Coetzee, are all rather conservative in their approach to the colour question, and can only conceive of it in tragic terms. The ‘coloured’ emerges as ‘the fruit of the vice, the folly, the thoughtlessness of the white man’.44

But not all South African authors use this theme in support of the theory of race purity. Some are genuinely liberal in view and exploit the theme to show the wickedness of a system which attaches so much importance to colour, that people are driven to commit suicide. Gerald Gordon's book, Let the Day Perish (1952), is such an empathetic plea for understanding, and, by implication, an indictment against the immorality laws.

On the jacket of his novel, one reads:45

The problem of the Coloured population of South Africa is the most pressing which confronts the world today. Uneasily poised

between the two worlds of white and black, holding their rights on sufferance only, the position of people born of mixed parentage is seldom easy and can often become intolerable.

It is the story of two brothers, the one white enough ‘to pass’, the other, definitely ‘coloured’. But Gordon's novel is not a celebration of the cult of the purity of the blood. Rather, the author uses his material to expose the inhumanity of apartheid.

The whites in his book are portrayed as bigoted and steeped in racial prejudice. Characteristically, one of the white characters is a German with the unflattering name of Hundt. His wife, Ruby, shines through her aridity and non-fecundity. Hundt exploits Mary, the beautiful ‘coloured’ woman, when he helps her realize her dream, that is, to get her son Anthony admitted to a white school. In satisfying his lusts, Mary becomes the symbol of the historical European myth of warm-bloodedness.

George, the white man who spawned these ‘bastards’, is depicted in a way which does not differ markedly from the portrayals of similar types encountered in South African novels. He is the black sheep of the family and has a weak personality.

In Anthony, his ‘white son’, are concentrated all the myths of white ethno-aestheticians. He is blond and handsome, virile and popular, a sportsman of no mean ability - a veritable Apollo. In contrast, his ‘coloured’ brother, Stephen, carries his darkness heavily. He broods, is introspective, frail, and later on becomes a passionate advocate of freedom for his people. This latter trait at least ensures him a certain moral ascendancy over his brother Anthony.

Mary, their ‘coloured’ mother, is beautiful and submissive (she for instance meekly submits to Hundt for the sake of her child). Yet Anthony is still ultimately destroyed. Towards the end of his trial, he undergoes the ultimate degradation a white man can undergo in South Africa, when he admits to a trace of colour in his blood:46

Gentlemen, now perhaps you will understand why I lied to the police. You see, this isn't the first time I have stood in the dock .... We were tried for the acts of our ancestors, were convicted and sentenced to live in a world of prejudice. Even if you acquit me now, that sentence still stands. It stands until my earthly existence comes to a close. With Job I can truly say:‘Let the day perish wherein I was born and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived’.

Although two people are prepared to stand by him, Anthony ultimately chooses to commit suicide. One would tend to judge harshly on such an ostensibly melodramatic exit, were it not for periodic reports in South African papers of well-known farmers (Afrikaners at that), who after being ‘caught in the act’, choose a shameful death in preference to a lifetime of racial prejudice and ostracism.

Gerald Gordon with his Let the Day Perish (1952), Alan Paton with Cry the Beloved Country (1948) and Too Late the Phalarope (1953) and Athol Fugard with The Blood Knot (1963), all portray a realism in which the non-white is at least a victim of the system of ascribed roles.

Paton especially became well known through his Cry the Beloved Country. He is genuinely accepted as a Christian in a country where such breeds are few and far between. He is imbued with, and impelled by, a spirit of liberal humanitarianism and is the one writer in South Africa who has relentlessly preached ‘adjustment and forgiveness’. He has been accused of portraying the African as a good-natured soul by African critics and has also been accused of maudlin sentimentality by Afrikaner critics, notably, P.G. du Plessis. Yet nowhere does Paton's plea for understanding come out so clearly as in his novel Too Late the Phalarope. Here the concentration is on the inevitable sanctions of Afrikaner society which follow such aberrations. Paton has succeeded in building up a picture of human and personal tragedy, during the course of which the insularity of the Afrikaner microcosmos is laid bare with a razor's edge.

Pieter van Vlaanderen, the main character, is both victim and hero, who transgresses his tribe's rule of sleeping with a black woman. His name is scrapped from the family Bible and he himself is proscribed into eternal oblivion. The picture of the dour Calvinist, fearful in the sight of God, but fearless and ferocious in his hatred of those who transgress the ethics of his tribe, is frightening.

The story is rather sympathetically reported through the eyes of an aunt. It is couched in Biblical terms, which imparts to the whole something of a lament, and conveys to the seduction scene a David and Bathsheba aura. Pieter van Vlaanderen, like all such characters, is a dual personality, effeminate, strong and popular, yet tragically doomed. His tragedy, it seems, should be imputed to his strict and authoritarian father, the Biblical patriarch, plucked straight from the Old Testament. Pieter's interest in philately is explained as a feminine protest against the overwhelming emphasis on virility in Afrikaner society. Martin Tucker (1967) draws attention to the

phalarope as a symbol of ‘sexual misplacement’.47 All white authors provide their heroes with such psychological excuses. Their heroes can not simply indulge in their sexual urges or have affairs without having some serious flaw in their character, which is either traceable to the parents or to some awful childhood experience. Even the ‘coloured’ author, Peter Abrahams, in his novel, Path of Thunder, operates well within the tragic, violent and inevitable stereotype of the half-caste.

In the South African setting, ‘trying for white’, ‘playing white’ or being ‘a play white’ and ‘passing for white’ are very operative terms. This is poignantly portrayed in Athol Fugard's The Blood Knot (1963). Since perception is all important in South Africa, the problem of whether a person is really white or ‘coloured’, can at times be enormous. In Fugard's drama, the crux of the problem is revealed in the scene between the ostensibly white and the openly ‘coloured’ brother. By way of bizarre diversion, they decide to act out their racially ascribed roles in society. In the process they get so carried away that the resultant scene is one of wry humour and biting satire. It is however when the outwardly white brother calls his darker counterpart swartgat (black arse), that mere playfulness turns into grim reality. For, in that term, is contained for the ‘coloured’ brother, all the painful and traumatic experiences of apartheid. Shocked into an awareness that they had crossed the institutionalized borders, the two brothers in a chastening scene carry on the following dialogue:48

Zacharias: ‘Morris?’
Morris: ‘Yes?’
Zacharias: ‘What happened?’
Morris: ‘You mean ...?’
Zacharias: ‘Ja’.
Morris: ‘We were carried away, as they would say, by the game ... quite far in fact. Musn't get worried though ... I don't think. I mean, it was only a game ... as long as we play in the right spirit.’

Yet, ultimately, it is the aura of ‘smelling strangeness’ and ‘the futility of coloured life’ which lingers on in all these books. The ‘coloured’ woman will become ‘brown, bronze and comely’ the day South African novelists stop portraying her as a sex object. As long as mixing is looked upon as being sinful, then one will be subjected to the type of novel discussed in this chapter.


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