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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 4
Little sorrow sits and weeps1

In the preceding chapter, we have had an indication of how painful the process of maturation must be for adults in South Africa. Complicated as it already is, this process must be even doubly painful for children and is a double-edge sword in that it also affects the white child. In children then, are to be found all the horrible and traumatic effects of the system of apartheid.

This is sadly portrayed in that oft-cited poem, Incident, by the American black poet, Countee Cullen, albeit in a different context.2

 
Once riding in old Baltimore
 
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
 
I saw a Baltimorean
 
Keep looking straight at me.
 
 
 
Now I was eight and very small,
 
And he was no whit bigger,
 
And so I smiled, but he poked out,
 
His tongue, and called me, ‘Nigger’
 
 
 
I saw the whole of Baltimore
 
From May until December.
 
Of all the things that happened there
 
That's all that I remember.

If the adult half-caste is caught between ‘smelling strangeness’3 and colour as a ‘catching disease’4 then the white and black children are ensconced between ‘painful awareness’ and ‘terrified consciousness’.5 This is excellently illustrated in a passage in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

by Jean Rhys. The ex-slaves are burning down the plantation of the Cosgraves in the West Indies. Annette, in her utter bewilderment, runs to her trusted playmate, a little black girl, for protection and comfort:6

I ran to her, for she was all that was left of my life as it had been. We had eaten the same food, slept side by side, bathed in the same river. As I ran, I thought, I will live with Tia and I will be like her .... When I was close I saw the jagged stone in her hand but I did not see her throw it. I did not feel it either, only something wet, running down my face. I looked at her and I saw her face crumple up as she began to cry. We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass.

Childhood, initiation into adulthood, the process of growing up, are oft-recurring themes in what is sometimes referred to as third world literature. There are, for instance, numerous examples of West Indian writers who have exploited this particular theme. Geoffrey Drayton uses it in his novel, Christopher (1959). George Lamming's In the Castle of my Skin (1953) is largely about the process of growing up and an awareness of the wider world in Barbados. Other examples are Michael Anthony's The Year in San Fernando (1965), Austin Clarke's Among Thistles and Thorns (1965), Vidia Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas (1961), Samuel Selvon's A Brighter Sun (1952) and Ian McDonald's The Humming-Bird Tree (1974).

It is not an accident of fiction that all these writers are from the third world, nor that they write so profusely about children. Children in third world societies constitute an important part of the population. The poor are, after all, prolific in their breeding propensities. Birth control is a moral, ethical or academic matter which weighs heavily on the white mind. Procreation is the only form of creativity and creation allowed to the poor, for in this special realm, the white world cannot impinge. The third world child is not enshrined in his childhood from birth, as is his white counterpart. He cannot at all times rely on that special form of protection from his family, his birth is largely an accident. Right from the start, he is surrounded by the socio-economic conditions of poverty, illiteracy and the vain attempts to survive it all.

From birth, the non-white child in a plural society is already on the threshold of adulthood, with all the attendant problems of the poverty-stricken extended family, crowded rooms and a complete lack of privacy. All too often he is the unwilling spectator of, and witness

to, the sex life of his parents, their frequent spells of inebriation, their numerous bouts of fisticuffs.7 He is confronted with life in the raw at a very tender age. There is no cultural divide between him and the grown-ups. They know as little as he does, and have as little chance as he does to escape it all. Adulthood and adult responsibilities are thrust upon him at a time when he or she should still be indulging in a world of youthful fantasy and dreams. The non-white child is not cocooned in some form of Reynoldsian cherry-ripeness, the romantic cult of childhood, as is the European child.

There is an immediacy about stories focusing on children. Usually these deal with a specific breed of children, who reveal themselves as very sensitive barometers of their environment. Such a child is also spontaneous in his criticism of his world and his society. He is not yet burdened with experience, an overdose of knowledge and prejudices, although little sorrow is already sitting and weeping in his sleep. The child observes things from within his small micro-cosmos and can be very accurate. His vision is somewhat of a ‘God's eye-view’, as the Afrikaner writer Aucamp once called it.

The author must at all times be cognizant of the child's world. Any attempt to impose his world or vision on the child will have a deleterious effect on the credibility of the child vision. As we shall see later on, the South African writer and poet, James Matthews, fails to bring off his story, The Park, precisely because of his overt intrusion at times, as a result of which his ‘coloured’ child becomes a glorified carrier of a political message. In reading through stories concentrating on the black child, one is forcibly reminded of the West Indian novelist George Lamming's warning that ‘colonialism (racialism) has been as much a white experience as a black one’.8

In Afrikaans literature, the ‘coloured’ child pops up as a silent ghost in the backyard of a white mansion, hanging about until his mother, the domestic, has finished her daily chores for the madam and the master. As viewer and viewpoint, the ‘coloured’ child is sometimes used as a means of social protest against a system of racial denial. Of those white and non-white writers who have exploited this theme of the child within the peculiar South African system of ascribed roles, the most outstanding are Dan Jacobson with his Beggar My Neighbour, Elise Muller with Die Peertak (lit. The Pear Branch) and James Matthews with The Park. These three persons represent various strands of the South African pigmentocracy, namely, white Jewish, white Afrikaner and ‘coloured’.

The child theme is usually dealt with from two vantage points: from that of the secure base of the white child, which gradually crumbles into a form of insecurity; or from the insecure base of the non-white child, which leads to a fuller realization of his tenuous position in society.

Ronald Segal, a white South African and an ardent opponent of the system, spells out the position of the whites when he writes: ‘White children in South Africa seem to accept the implications of race as they grow to distinguish shapes and smells and sounds, so that, almost as they begin to speak, they tighten their voices to colour.’9

Of their ‘coloured’ boy, who in reality is a full-grown man, he says: ‘I never thought of him as having any children; he was the Coloured “boy”, ageless, whose condition and function alike were contradicted by the equality of children.’10 He confesses that, as a child, he had tried to dismiss him from his mind but he was always there, ‘a person, human beyond hiding’.10

Segal has, of course, only given painful expression to that shocking realization most South Africans must, perforce, make once in their lives - the black presence in their society.

Dingetjie (lit. Little Thing), the ‘coloured’ girl in Elise Muller's story, Die Peertak (The Pear Branch), contained in her anthology, Die Vrou op die skuit (Woman on the Boat), stands for many a servant child, and is linked umbilically to the black and brown characters of another South African short-story writer, Pauline Smith (see: Platkops Children, 1935, The Little Karroo, 1925, The Beadle, 1926). Smith's Classina, who is black, and Muller's Dingetjie, play out their ascribed roles as child servants, a breed immortalized in the paintings of Cape Dutch Kombuise (kitchens).

Dingetjie sees her world collapsing when white technology impinges on her world of fantasy and glamour. She had been, for example, accorded the singular privilege of shooing away the flies during the Sunday culinary orgies of the white family, with her pear branch. Her task affords her a peep into the white world of ritualized order, glitter and opulence. This is her dream world, belonging as she does to the dispossessed in her country. Yet, ironically, despite this seemingly humiliating and lowly role, she is still one up on the other ‘coloured’ children on the farm, because she is close to the fairyesque world of the whites. In her is therefore concentrated all the pathos and (by inference) the irony, the iniquity of a society which disposes of its vast favours so frugally to the poor.

But essentially this is a story of a little ‘coloured’ girl whose fantasy

world is destroyed because the white family decides to use a spray to get rid of the flies. It is the ‘coloured’ mother who must once again explain white ways and who must cushion her child against the hurt of white society. The story is loaded with implications as are those of Pauline Smith.

Self-discovery for the black and brown child often involves self-destruction. The child that the non-white child discovers is himself. The initiation of the non-white child in South Africa into the adult world is a painful and harrowing process.

Muller's Twee Gesigte (Two Faces) in the same anthology illustrates this beautifully. But here she allows the white child's innocence also to be destroyed. And herein lies the strength of this particular story. The centre of action is the fairyesque world of children, one white, the other ‘coloured’. Muller chooses the arrival of a merry-go-round as the basis for her story. The children's imaginations run riot at the mere thought of the merry-go-round in their village. Katrien, the ‘coloured’ child, is depicted as being precocious both in body and in mind. For white South Africa, she was fast approaching servant status. Yet, she was a mere child, as old as her white friend, Rina. Together Katrien and Rina dream about this momentous event in their lives. On the other hand, there is Rosa, who is also white and fairly well instructed in her ascribed role.

Muller has the ability to evoke the socio-political situation without ever falling into the abyss of didacticism. The children need three pence to have a ride. Katrien knows with the certitude of all her prematureness and ‘colouredness’ that Rina, her friend, would get money from her father. How she, Katrien, would get hers was another matter. In child-like innocence, Rina asks: ‘“Is your father going to ...” She hesitates. She had momentarily forgotten that Katrien's father was dead, that for this reason, Katrien no longer attended school.’11

The world of Rina and Rosa is one of self-assurance and of security. They are already the ritual heirs to their protected world. The park attendant who is normally so friendly with white children, turns into a monster when he has to deal with ‘coloureds’. Rina witnesses the fairyesque world of her ‘coloured’ friend being blown to pieces. To the attendant, Katrien was just another ‘coloured’ who tried to cheat by pretending that she was younger than she was. So he refuses to let her have a ride for the price of a child and forcibly chucks her off the horse. In so doing, he initiates two children, the one white, the other ‘coloured’, into the adult South African world of prejudice and

hatred. Two worlds blown to pieces. A fantasy turned into a nightmare. Only Rosa is left unmoved, selfish as she already is.

Pauline Smith in her Platkops Children confronts the reader with the white child's ‘God's eye-view’ of colonialism. Here too one encounters a breed so facilely exploited in colonial and racial fiction - the warm, understanding and loving servant - who is, ironically, the emotional still point in the white child's life, while the mothers go traipsing around, either running useless charity organizations or simply playing bridge or golf.

One of the best symbolic portrayals is to be found in Dan Jacobson's Beggar My Neighbour. The little white boy, Michael, grows up as an only child in his neighbourhood, firmly imprisoned in the castle of his white skin. But through his protective vizor, two black children manage to thrust themselves, a boy and a gril, who with their pathetically heart-rending and plaintive ‘a stukkie brood’ (lit. a piece of bread) rupture his serene and virginal world. Michael is at first surprised at this intrusion, but then drawn to them because12

the boy was holding one of the girl's hands in his .... He was touched by their dependence on one another, and disturbed by it too, as he had been by the way they had suddenly come before him, and by their watchfulness and silence after they had uttered their customary, begging request.

They follow him home, he orders the servant to give them bread, and is then denied the pleasure of seeing them gobbling it up. ‘He wanted to see them eat it; he wanted to share their pleasure in satisfying their strained appetites.’13 But they withdrew. The cycle is repeated. Symbolically they re-enact their racially ascribed roles. Michael weaves the children into his fantasies which are numerous. Invariably, he is their protector, their guardian angel, their shining knight in armour, rescuing them with the boundless magnanimity of his whiteness.

He gives them a torch one day, shows them an expensive fountain pen which they want, much to his disgust and horror. In the end he wants to be rid of them, tells them to voertsek.14 Jacobson works it to a beautiful, haunting and symbolic ending. Michael falls ill, but cannot rid himself of the children in his half-dream world. The haunting spectre of their black presence is always there like an African tokoloshe.15 At the end of these agonizingly poignant spells, he takes the children into his home, thereby already crashing through one of the barriers of his whiteness. And in a

scene of infinite clarity and tenderness, Michael loses his fear and touches them, realizing at last what they wanted to impart to him:16

Michael looked from the one to the other; and he remembered what he had been doing to them in his dreams. Their eyes were black to look into, deep black. Staring forward, Michael understood what he should have understood long before: that they came to him not in hope or appeal or even in reproach, but in hatred. What he felt towards them, they felt towards him; what he had done to them in his dreams they did to him in theirs.

Here for the first time then, the white boy crashes through his white skin. Before, the children had always squatted outside, waiting for their ‘stukkie brood’:17

And Michael knew that what he had to give them was not toys or clothes or bread, but something more difficult .... He took the girl's face in his hands and pressed his lips to hers. He was aware of the darkness of her skin, and the smell of it, and of the faint movement of her lips, a single pulse that beat momentarily against his own. Then it was gone. He kissed the boy, too, and let them go. They came together, and grasped each other by the hand staring at him.

After his recovery, he looks for them in vain. ‘He saw a hundred, a thousand, children like them; but not the two he hoped to find.’18

James Matthews, on the other hand, writes about the plight of the ‘coloured’ child in more direct, political terms. In the case of his short story, The Park, the ‘coloured’ boy's dream is frustrated by the ‘whites only’ sign at the gate. Ironically, the park attendant, who is ‘coloured’, has the painful task of enforcing discriminating laws against his own people. ‘His voice apologizing for the uniform he wore which gave him the right to be in the park to watch that the little whites were not hurt while playing.’19

The Park comes close to being a political pamphlet, but is saved by the naiveté of the child. At times, the boy does achieve something of the symbolic breakthrough of a Michael in Dan Jacobson's story. But the low-throbbing note of the ‘Rage against the houses with their streaked walls and smashed window panes filled by too many people’,20 is contained within the story with great difficulty. While Jacobson's story may be technically superior, it is the crude reality of the ‘coloured’ boy's existence in the story by Matthews which prevails.

In contrast to these South African short-story writers, there is the Flemish authoress, Mireille Cottenje, who wrote of the plight of a child who was classified as ‘coloured’ while the rest of her family remained white. This may sound an inconceivable dilemma to a European, but it is very real for certain South Africans. Het Grote Onrecht (The Great Injustice) is the story of Sandra Laing,21 a girl of 10 or 11 years who was found to have ‘coloured’ features and blood (sic), and then reclassified accordingly. This meant her leaving her parents, her white environment and white friends and living in a strange, ‘coloured’ environment. Cottenje traces some of the legal, psychological and sociological implications of such an act for the family and the little girl. The book is really intended as a children's story, harrowing and bizarre though the subject matter may be. Everything that happens to little Sandra Laing (her name in real life), is seen through the eyes of her ‘white’ brother. Cottenje avoids some of the pitfalls of straightforward politicization, largely because her language remains fairly simple (and because she does not overtly intrude when referring to apartheid laws).

She is very successful in sketching the atmosphere of captivity and fear which prevails and also the haunting spectre of colour. She fails however to sustain this, especially towards the end when the re-classification is final. She allows the little boy, who is very attached to his sister, to run away with her to neighbouring Mozambique, where they experience some fleeting, but awesome, moments at the border. Here however, officialdom seems to be more benign. The children 'phone their parents in South Africa, who tell them they have decided to emigrate. The crudity of the South African situation, cast in fictionalized form, can sometimes appear even cruder and Cottenje does not avoid this danger towards the end. The running away of the children is too contrived, too improbable to ring true. The treatment of the children at the border of Mozambique is too fanciful. However, it is a slim but laudable attempt to move away from the ‘romantic cult’ of the child.

Running through all these child, ‘God's-eye-views’, is that ‘terrified consciousness’ used to suggest the white minority's sensations of shock and disorientation as a massive and smouldering black population is released into an awareness of its power.22

The dilemma of the child is summed up by O'l Boss in Ian McDonald's The Humming-Bird Tree (1974):23

Two other things add up the thing worse. One is colour, one is white, an' when you is chile that don't matter a ant's tit.

But grow up an' the whole thing cheapen up like the pretties' bird rotting. An' another thing too besides. I say the whole worl' is only a dam little morsel of a place....When you lose you' firs' richness what have you to expan' to?


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