Mind Your Colour

The 'Coloured' Stereotype in South African Literature

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Chapter 5
Sons of Hagar¹

This image of the ‘Cape coloured’ has hitherto largely been distilled from the writings of white South African authors. The pictures which will henceforth be abstracted will be mainly from the writings of non-white authors. Occasional excursions into the works of white authors will still however be functionally necessary from time to time. The ‘Sestigers’, for example, will be dealt with, but then firmly within the argument seen hitherto, that is, white Afrikaner, brown Afrikaner. Some of the ‘coloured’ authors will move within various shades of the well-known syndromes of ambiguity, near-kinship, the practice of ‘playing white’ and race consciousness. Others will indicate the path towards a more broader, non-racial path and constitute what St Clair Drake the American anthropologist calls²

a considerable minority of social scientists who remain cultural relativists, of poets and artists who refuse to abandon the point of view of romantic primitivists; and of relentless social critics...the really creative type of pluralism as opposed to that arising from ethnic differences.

Few ‘coloureds’ write in Afrikaans, despite the fact that the language is fairly widespread among them. Moreover, there are definite signs that many are moving away from the language and even becoming increasingly hostile to it. Only Petersen, Philander and Adam Small have earned places in Afrikaans literary handbooks. Of these, only Petersen has a novel to his credit (although Eddie Domingo wrote one in a similar vein called Okkies op die breë pad).

Petersen was born in Riversdale, the Cape Province, in 1914. His first anthology, Die Enkeling (lit. The Lonely One), was published

1 Sons of Hagar - see Genesis (16:1-16).

2 St Clair Drake, ‘An Approach to the Evaluation of African Societies’, in: Africa as Seen by American Negroes (Paris, Présence Africaine), 34.

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in 1944. Dekker (1947) devoted a very brief note to Petersen's poetry and pointed out that here, for the first time in Afrikaans (officially that is), one is confronted with ‘the curse of a darker hue’. Dekker, however, dismissed Petersen's cri de coeur as being ‘too raw’.³ The critic did not even see fit to supply Petersen with the correct initials (they are given as S.J.). Petersen's novel, As die son ondergaan (lit. When the Sun Sets), appeared in 1945, two years after the radical course adopted by a large section of the ‘coloured’ teachers' organization at Kimberley. The poet and novelist seems to have been very careful to adopt an open political stand, although his poetry is certainly not devoid of extreme bitterness at times. But there is no indication that this bitterness was used to propagate revolutionary changes or encourage political consciousness among the ‘coloureds’. The picture one abstracts, even today, of Petersen the man, is one of the loner, the romantic, who suffers in silence.

Petersen also seems to have preferred accommodation to confrontation. In a sense, his work gained some ‘limited’ recognition, mostly in Afrikaner literary circles. His novel was awarded a prize and also received some critical attention in Afrikaans literary critical handbooks. The socio-realism of a Petersen was sufficiently non-political to be acceptable to various Afrikaner critics. His novel, then, is fully consonant with the peculiar South African tradition. It is one of accommodation of the veld, the mountains, the imposing landscapes. The realism of a South Africa which had just emerged from the Second World War and was already on the threshold of nationalist rule, is hardly noticeable. The rumblings and political soul-searching among ‘coloureds’, culminating in the historic TLSA conference at Kimberley, the establishment of the NEUM and the Anti-CAD, are noticeably absent.

Petersen's novel, As die son ondergaan (When the Sun Sets), is interesting because it deals with the familiar theme in Afrikaans literature of the rural person in an urban setting. The only difference is that he deals with the plight of the ‘coloured’ in the city. Since this is an oft-recurring theme in South African literature, his novel will be evaluated against the works of one or two white and black South African authors. Commenting on Petersen's first novel, Beukes and Lategan (1959³),⁴ after briefly referring to the technical deficiencies, speak of the author's poignant, realistic portrayal of the tragic fate of one of his own people, a young idealistic ‘coloured’ from the rural areas who sinks into the cesspool of the big city. Petersen's novel was but one of many dealing with this theme in Southern African literature. Usually

3 G. Dekker, Afrikaanse Literatuurgeskiedenis (Bloemfontein, 1947), 161.

4 G. Beukes and F. Lategan, Skrywers en rigtings (Pretoria, 1959³), 259-60.

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taking the form of an innocent person from the rural areas who is unable to accommodate his or her longing for a wider horizon, and who eventually leaves for the city where he or she succumbs to vice. The end or downfall of the character is usually tragic, softened or toned down only by an eventual return (catharsis) to the fold. In the South African setting, where race plays such an important role, this has given rise to a rather repetitive and, at times, boring, cycle of the black man in the throes of the wicked city.

Basically, there are three streams. The rural African in the urban novel, of which Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country is a good example. Usually the centre of activity is iGoli (i.e. city of gold, Johannesburg), where many Africans were forced to seek work in the gold mines. Then there is the rural Afrikaner and his loss of innocence in the city (Johannesburg or Cape Town). And finally, the ‘Cape coloured’ from the rural area and his fall from grace, in which the centre of action is invariably Cape Town, the natural habitat of this species. Their crises are sometimes almost similar to those of the Afrikaner youngster, in that they take place within the trinity of Church, language and God.

Nadine Gordimer writes: ‘It is axiomatic that the urban theme contains the classic crises: tribal and traditional values against Western values, peasant modes of life against the modes of an industrial proletariat, and above all, the quotidian humiliations of a black man's world made to a white man's specification’.⁵

Invariably, the reader is confronted with the image of the townsman as opposed to the tribesman, the challenged as opposed to the challenger. At a later stage we shall see that Gordimer is vindicated when she argues that non-white authors are beginning to wipe out such white literary stereotypes.

In writing Turbotte Wolfe (1925, reprint 1965), William Plomer became the first white author to break through a typically indigenous South African literary trend of ignoring the black presence. He was also one of the first to portray the ‘tribal’ African, within the context of the urban setting. Before this, the person of colour never loomed large in South African fiction. Pre-Union literature was generally of an inferior and coarse quality. The notable exception was Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883). But, even with her, there is what Laurens van der Post calls, in the foreword to the 1965 edition, ‘a curious limitation upon her awareness: the black and coloured people of Africa who were with her from birth and far outnumbered the white are not naturally and immediately in it’.⁶

5 N. Gordimer, The Black Interpreters (Johannesburg, 1973), 55.

6 W. Plomer, Turbotte Wolfe (London, 1965), 30.

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Despite Schreiner's later involvement, van der Post observes that; ‘As people in their own individual right, alas! they never walked large in her imagination or understanding’.⁷ For, even in her great novel, The Story of an African Farm, the liberalism that she preaches is heavily diluted by her brief and intermittent treatment of her African characters, who are not allowed to attend the church services on Sundays.

Before 1920, there was very little evidence of a desire to portray a greater South African reality. Plomer's product was therefore a much-needed one, or as van der Post comments in the foreword:⁸

no less remarkable was the steadfastness with which Plomer maintained his own untried view of life around him against that taken for granted by the European community of South Africa. The attitude of white South Africans to their coloured and black countrymen had never before been challenged in depth from their own midst.

Lewis Nkosi comments on novels in the vernacular, as well as those in English as follows:⁹

Most vernacular novels, as well as those written in English, novels upon which we were nourished in our boyhood, worked and re-worked the theme of Jim Comes to Jo-burg in which it was implied that Jim's loss of place in the tightly woven tribal structure and the corresponding attenuation of the elder's authority over him was the main cause rather than the result of the nation's tragedy.

It is for this reason that the educated black inside South Africa objects or at least does so partly to Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country. Paton could not escape his image as erstwhile leader of the, by now defunct, Liberal Party of South Africa. For, to the African, a liberal in the South African context meant, and still means, ‘a white man who believes in redressing political wrongs by constitutional means...[who] accommodates himself to the legislative machinery in the hope that he can use the concession by which he came to occupy a certain position inside the machinery to persuade the oppressor to change heart.’¹⁰ For this reason, Alan Paton's novel Cry the Beloved Country is, according to critics, the prime example of what Lewis Nkosi calls the ‘Jim comes to Jo'burg’ syndrome, with all its peculiar South African imputations. The Reverend Kumalo is found to be unacceptable because he personifies the good healthy life of the reserves, an

7 Ibid., 31.

8 Ibid., 41.

9 L. Nkosi, Home and Exile (London, 1965), 4-5.

10 E. Mphahlele, The African Image (London, 1962), 67.

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‘uncle Tom’ basically. The tenor of the book recalls too vividly for the African, the white man's attempts to retribalize him in the Bantustans. Yet, it is an indisputable fact that no other work of fiction has brought home to the non-South African, the terror of the black man's existence. It is a matter of deep regret, however, that Wulf Sachs's work, first published as Black Anger and later on as Black Hamlet (1947), in which we are introduced to the conflict and the terror of the black individual, is hardly ever referred to.

The urban theme was also well exploited in Afrikaans fiction. Popular magazines like Rooi Rose, Die Sarie Marais and Die Huisgenoot ran lengthy serials by lesser authors flaunting the theme of the virginal Afrikaner boy or girl, fortified initially against any moral decay by the Bible and the Dutch Reformed Church, only to go under in the city. The tone is highly moralistic - honour thy father and thy mother; the lost sheep; the good shepherd; the forgiving parents; heart-rending, tragic.

What Petersen does, then, is in no way a departure from the rather moralistic fiction in Afrikaans. Like many an Afrikaans-speaking person (whether ‘coloured’ or black), he too must have been nourished in his youth on scores of such books. As a poet and teacher of Afrikaans, he in all probability dealt critically with this theme in Afrikaans literature. Being from rural Afrikaans-speaking stock, and later on residing in an urban area, he was excellently placed to exploit this theme. Yet what emerges is rather disappointing, pedestrian at times and tragic in its missed opportunities of wiping out the pitiful portrayal of the ‘half-caste’, as hitherto found in the works of Millin, Cloete and even Gerald Gordon. Although we are in the period of the United Party of General Smuts, the ‘coloured’ was no better off than he is today. He was still an appendage of the white power structure, whose presence was best ignored, whose future was best shrouded in abstruseness or incongruities, or painfully juggled by the rulers in an attempt to fit his group into their system of ascribed roles. In the early forties, there were abortive attempts to establish a Coloured Affairs Department, which was staunchly resisted by a large section of the ‘coloured’ teachers, as was made clear in the preamble, ‘Not a race of slaves’.

Despite the early assurances of General Hertzog and Dr Malan, the way was carefully prepared for the eventual removal of the ‘coloureds’ from the common voters' role. In the Free State and the Transvaal, the ‘coloureds’ never even had a semblance of political rights. It was only at the Cape that certain fringe benefits were offered

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as a sop to both ‘coloured’ and African alike. And it is on this rather slim basis that the so-called great Cape Liberal tradition is built.

Nowhere in Petersen's novel do any of these problems surface. His book becomes even more striking when one contrasts it with the works of one or two South African authors, who also have the urban setting as the main theme.

Now, despite this historical legacy, one finds no such evidence of social realism in Petersen's novel. Instead the story is a fairly straightforward account, differing only slightly from the mainstream of Afrikaans literature. First, one is confronted with a rather peaceful and serene depiction of the village - Petersen seems to be more at home in portraying rural scenes, which are liberally strewn throughout the whole book (1971⁴):¹¹

The gold of ripe quins and purplish blue lucern, perhaps an orange tree or two, is there anything more beautiful?
At a slant behind the village, there is a hill covered with aloes - fiery red horns which flare up when the sun touches them; yellow ones too, velvety like candle flames.

This is in complete contradistinction to the functionality of minute and detailed physical landscapes, as found in La Guma's work, which is there to enlarge the reader's understanding of the moral dilemmas confronting the individual in society, and to arouse indignation. Petersen's lyrical, but simple, prose is beautiful and different from the haunted and proscribed world of the black ghettos of Johannesburg, or the Second Avenues of Mphahlele. For the world of Mphahlele is one of slush and hardships, a world punctuated with domestic quarrels and characterized by the main character's attempts to escape and endure. A prose which Gerald Moore has described as the ‘taste of blood on the tongue’.¹² Mphahlele's world is one where the ‘sound of the bell floats in the air at ten minutes to ten and Black man must run home and Black man must sleep or have a night special permit’.¹³ It is a place with ‘dirty water and flies and children with traces of urine running down their legs and chickens picking at children's stools’.¹⁴ Mphahlele himself admits: ‘I have been moving up and down Second Avenue since I was born and never dreamt I should ever jump out of the nightmare.’¹⁵

The main character in Petersen's novel, Frans Hendricks, is a dreamy, ‘coloured’ man whose aspirations are not fulfilled and whose village is the still point in his life, a nostalgic frame of reference made up of fiery aloes and vast expanse. This tendency to idealize and romanticize

11 S.V. Petersen, As die son ondergaan (Kaapstad, 1971⁴), 1.

12 G. Moore, Seven African Writers (London, 1962), 94.

13 E. Mphahlele, Down Second Avenue (London, 1959), 45.

14 Ibid., 159.

15 Ibid., 159.

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the rural area (the platteland) and the veld, is especially true of Afrikaans fiction. Another is the notion that in order to describe for example, the veld, one should write in Afrikaans.

The Hobson brothers, two Afrikaner writers, express the general opinion when they maintain: ‘English is the wrong language of the veld. After all, there isn't any veld in England, any Karroo and above all any Kalahari’.¹⁶ Petersen, then, is true to the Afrikaans tradition of portraying, on canvas, the awe-inspiring and immense South African landscape.

Apart from a cursory reference to ‘Die Bruinmense’, the novel could have been that of a white author. And in a sense, one should at least admit that this is a departure from the normal pattern of literature conscripted for the victims. His main character is white in his aspirations, his loneliness, his unfulfilled self in the rural area. He is described as someone who already as a toddler was ‘quiet and withdrawn...totally oblivious to everything around him...a dreamer who preferred to roam around in his own inner world’.¹⁷ Frans Hendricks remains a lost soul, a-political in his aspirations, non-revolutionary in his frustrations. We are briefly reminded of the depression which crippled all hopes of achieving his ambition to become a teacher. Then follows the long-suffering role while his brother Jim, and his sister Joyce, become the inheritors of his dreams.

Only occasionally does Petersen provide a glimpse of the ‘colouredness’ of his characters as a component in their tragic make-up when he writes: ‘For which way can they turn? They are the children of Brown people.’¹⁸

The journey to Cape Town is uneventful and livened up only with the introduction of the Cape Malay character -stereotyped into a roguish, comic figure:¹⁹

Short of body, round of stomach, with fat cheeks and a Hitler moustache...Kassiem, a suitcase in both hands, trotting up to the window. He saw the African sitting and his baggy eyes became big. ‘Nei Salie man, aafterol! There's a blienking djoems [a black man] in the compartment. Isn't there a place somwê-else?’

Here for the first time, he gives the reader a comic description of a typical South African realism. But one is also acquainted with that horrible virus of group consciousness. And all through this scene, the main character, Frans Hendricks, remains silent.

Petersen however soon relapses into his old pace, trotting out descrip-

16 Die Huisgenoot, 28 January 1935.

17 S.V. Petersen, As die son ondergaan (Kaapstad, 1971⁴), 3.

18 Ibid., 6.

19 Ibid., 24.

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tive passages which are almost photographically true to life, but devoid of soul and intimacy. The tragi-comic Hanover Street of the ‘coloured’ ghetto, District Six, which in the works of La Guma is such a dramatically lively scene, becomes a tame alley where there is only a frightening lack of space.

Long flash-blacks to the rural environment turn Frans Hendricks into a dull and uninteresting character, overshadowed by lesser ones such as his land-lady, Mrs Lyners, who in her pseudo-sophistication, and in her monologue, maintains, ‘ek is vanaand 'n ientepennit vrou...vra nieman niks...skuld niemand niks’²⁰ (I am Mrs Lyners, an independent woman, ask no one anything, owe no one anything) emerges as the only character of full flesh and blood proportions. She is a woman who occasionally takes unto herself a man, whom she pampers as long as he is loyal: she is pathetically sad in her quasirespectability and is funny in her inflated appreciation and evaluation of herself.

The main character, Frans, continues to dream - at art galleries everywhere.²¹

Last Sunday he stood in the art gallery staring with burning eyes at the life so immortally depicted on canvas. One picture in particular arrested his attention, a picture in a corner of the big hall; just a simple landscape, with blue sky and fluffy white clouds, an outstretched mountain chain, grey shrubs in the foreground and along the farm road, the fiery red aloe horns. Oh! to be able to paint thus, without pause, just paint.

Frans is drawn to Volkwyn without being influenced by him. He does not intrude into the lives of the other people he encounters. When he does intrude, it is the stock situation of unrequited or misplaced love - the deflation of the beautiful and ethereal by the base and the mundane. Unable to stand such lacerations, he wilts, gives in and is ready to succumb. But even in his relationship with the fallen woman, he remains something of a puritan, an emasculated saint turned sinner, yet undefiled, only soiled somewhat. In no way does this derelict of a woman contribute to the hero's understanding of the conditions which produce people like her. Even at the very end, Frans never quite succeeds in becoming truly tragic. By the time he has listlessly dreamt himself out of the novel, his parents are ready to appear on the scene to come and save him from further excesses and from drowning in his romantic illusions. ‘Something in him breaks.

20 Ibid., 44.

21 Ibid., 47.

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Helpless and small he is again. And through his sobs he complains; “Ma...! She...fooled me...!” “Come my child. Tomorrow we are going home”.’²²

Frans Hendricks, the ‘coloured’, is tragic only in so far as tragedy is conceived of as some higher effort which ends in anti-climax and frustration. The novel capsizes in its inability to either attain the stature of the psychological novel (see Nostromo, Ch. IV), or that of social protest (see And a Threefold Cord by La Guma). As die son ondergaan seems to bear out Lewis Nkosi's indictment, that in the work of Afrikaans-speaking ‘coloured’ writers, ‘there are no real fullblooded characters with real blood to spill; no characters whose fighting or love-making has the stench of living people: they are cardboard pieces and cardboard pieces don't spill any blood’.²³

Frans Hendricks represents one facet of South African life as seen by ‘coloured’ authors. It is still a white-oriented picture. This is a pity, for Petersen, the sensitive poet, is deeply conscious of the injustices in his society. The characters still move within a white idiom. Petersen continues a typical South African tradition. One finds it hard to identify with the inner nightmare and conflict, if any, of his character, Frans. This is not the case when one comes across the works of La Guma, for instance. Ambiguity and near-kinship are terms which linger on in respect of Frans Hendricks. This will also be continued painfully in, especially, the earlier utterings of Adam Small.

22 Ibid., 201.

23 L. Nkosi, Home and Exile (London, 1965), 134.