Impaired vision. Portraits of black women in the Afrikaans novel 1948-1988

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Chapter 2
Fact and fiction about South African women

A discussion of the literary response to legislation and events in South Africa during the period 1948-1988 would be incomplete without a discussion of the political, legal, social and economic position of South African women - black and white - and the literary response or non-response to their situation. Rather than give an explanation of the situation of all white women in South Africa which is not as uniform as it would appear on the surface, I shall confine myself to the situation of the Afrikaner woman, since the white female characters in the novels by Afrikaner writers are almost invariably Afrikaners. Although this study concerns itself with the portrayal of the black woman character by Afrikaner authors, I nevertheless find it imperative to include an overview of the portrayal of the Afrikaner woman by these authors in order to explicate the similarities and/or differences between the portrayal of black and white female characters, in addition to finding possible reasons for the dissimilarities, if any, in their portrayal. By juxtaposing the positions of these two groups of women, I hope to present a clearer perspective of the situation of the black woman in an apartheid society, reinforced and entrenched by the writers of Afrikaans novels.

In present-day South Africa, through the system of apartheid, the white minority denies the cultural and linguistic variety amongst themselves and emphasises their being one single group. However, in reality the Afrikaners see themselves as a distinct group while the rest of the white population is broadly referred to as the ‘English-speaking’ sector, irrespective of the fact that this sector comprises British, Jews, Greeks, Portuguese, Italians, smaller groups of Western and Eastern Europeans, and the Japanese who are accorded ‘honorary’ white status by the government. Because of the specific divisions created by apartheid, the position of South African women is far from uniform. The enormous economic, political, cultural and racial cleavages between black and white women form the context in which these women must be studied and in which they are projected by white writers.

To what extent does the literary work capture or reflect the mood and spirit of the authors' own social environment? How are black and white female characters

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depicted by Afrikaner authors and how ‘true’ to real life are these characterisations? What further insights can be gained from this picture in respect of women's contemporary position and their attitudes to it? How explicitly do these authors expose women's situation and can these expositions provide us with a key to a critique of South African society?

In an attempt to arrive at possible answers to the above questions, it is necessary to examine briefly South African women's political, legal, social and economic position before the Afrikaner authors' response to those positions can be examined. Although some parallels exist in the position of white and black women, their status in South African society, their oppression and their struggles for liberation are widely divergent. Of necessity, then, these two groups will be dealt with separately, not least because of the separateness of their situation engendered by the system of apartheid. In dealing with the position of Afrikaner women more extensively than with that of black women, an attempt is made to illuminate more poignantly the inequalities between white and black. In any case, the position of black women in South African society will be revealed from time to time in the ensuing chapters.

2.1. Afrikaner women

Although in many instances it is virtually impossible in the South African context to make a clear distinction between ‘white’ and ‘coloured’ when that distinction is based solely on physical features such as complexion, nose-shape, eyes and hair,^1. I nevertheless use this term as applied in South Africa, i.e. those South Africans of European extraction who have no ‘dark blood’ in their genealogy^2. and who have been classified as ‘white’ according to the Population Registration Act of 1950.

According to the 1985 census, there are 4,5 million whites in South Africa, who constitute 15,6% of the entire population. They are a multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-linguistic and multi-religious group and the only binding factor among them happens to be their ostensibly white skins and Caucasian hair. This is an extremely dubious basis for classification, since the swarthiness of many Jews and southern Europeans as well as the crinkly hair of many a Jew fly in the face of such a classification. Notwithstanding, of the 4,5 million whites, 2,7 million are Afrikaners and since women form about 50% of the country's population, one can safely assume that Afrikaner women form 28% of the white population and only 4,7% of the entire South African population. It is with this tiny fraction of the South African population that I concern myself in this part of the chapter, since, as I have already stated, the white women characters in Afrikaans novels are more often than not Afrikaners.

1. All gradations of skin colour, all hair textures - classified into ‘Negroid’, ‘Asiatic’ and ‘Caucasian’ - all nose-shapes and all eye colours are found among the ‘coloured’ population.

2. Research by for example H.P. Heese (Groep Sonder Grense - 1984) has produced conclusive evidence that a considerable portion of white Afrikaners have ‘mixed blood’ in their veins. Some were so incensed by these findings that they instituted legal proceedings against the researcher, only to be advised by legal counsel that they have no case.

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2.1.1 Calvinism and Afrikaner women

To understand fully the Afrikaner woman's position in society, it is necessary to include here a brief explanation of the religious doctrine on which the entire Afrikaner ideology is based.

Stolid Calvinists who were isolated from the great Enlightenment of the 18th century in Europe, the Boers believed themselves to be the Chosen of God and based this belief on Deut. 14:2: ‘For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God, and the Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all the nations that are upon the earth’ (quoted from Crapanzano 1986:70). In their harsh frontier existence the Afrikaners developed Israeli-like visions of a civilising mission by a chosen people with a destiny in a sea of primitive heathen natives. So fanatical were some of them in this belief and so convinced were they that they were God's Chosen people, that they firmly believed they were led out of Egypt to the Promised Land when they reached a tributary of the Limpopo River and named it Nylstroom.^3. Such ideological fixations were to permeate Afrikaner life and society and ultimately the apartheid regime's policies.

The Afrikaner, W.A. de Klerk, playwright and author of such novels as Die Wolkemaker (1949), Die uur van verlange (1953) and Die Laer (1964), bases his popular book The Puritans in Africa (1975) on the premise that ‘the key to the Afrikaners is Calvinism’ (p. xiv). In the Afrikaner perception, according to De Klerk, apartheid is less of an oppressive tyranny than the necessary result of the divine task ‘to restructure the world according to a vision of justice’, the vocation of ‘a separate nation called by God to create a new humanity’ (p. 233). This familiar reasoning, obfuscating even the profit motive behind the forced labour system, does not explicitly state that it is religion which has provided the Afrikaner with the necessary vision of the black person as fit only for labour. The frontier isolation in which the early Afrikaners found themselves and which led to individual Bible interpretations fostered their unique race attitudes. Unlike the other mainline Christian churches in South Africa (Anglican, Methodist, Catholic) all of which strongly oppose apartheid, the Dutch Reformed Churches have sanctioned apartheid. To support their own position and the government's policy of apartheid, the DRC has sought biblical justification, e.g. I Cor. 12: 12-30; Rom. 12: 4-5; I Cor. 15: 39-41.

From the beginning of the 18th century, white racism has been a constant factor in Afrikaner history, reinforced by discriminatory practices by English-speaking white South Africans. This white racism has been expressed in terms of an ideal segregation and a reality of white domination and black labour. The dichotomy between ideal and reality was reflected in the very Biblical imagery used by the frontier farmers. On the one hand, the black South African was a Canaanite and

3. Antjie Krog in her anthology Jerusalemgangers (1985) satirises this fanaticism in some of her poems.

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thus subject to the ban; on the other hand, he was a son of Ham and thus destined to be a hewer of wood and drawer of water for his white compatriot.

Throughout the period, in public speeches, in parliamentary debates, in press statements and articles, in fact whenever the opportunity presented itself, Afrikaners expressed fears of miscegenation. For example, a cabinet minister, N.J. van der Merwe, stated in a parliamentary debate in 1936 that the Afrikaners' struggle was not to oppress the native or to trample on the ‘coloured’ people but that their struggle was rather to maintain the existence of the white race in South Africa. Political equality, according to him, would inevitably lead to economic and social equality and ‘if you have social equality, you subsequently get mixing of the blood, and the ruin of the white race’ (cited by Moodie 1975:246). This sexual component of white anxiety was expressed through the theme of the Afrikaner woman and her moral purity, a theme exploited by Nationalist policy to instil racial prejudice and even hatred.

However, the Calvinist two-class distinction of the elect and the damned, which supposedly provided the justification for the exclusion of the children of Ham from Afrikanerdom and its myriad of sacred cows, is not the only basis for the racist ideology of the Afrikaner. Rigid racial outlooks are transmitted and reinforced by a religiously justified patriarchal family system. According to Jan J. Loubser in his article ‘Calvinism, Equality and Inclusion’, conformity pressure of authoritarian socialization accounts for the fact that ‘repressed aggressiveness to the strong Afrikaner authority figure could be displaced and projected on the African’.^4. On the part of the Afrikaner woman, this ‘projected aggressiveness’ towards the black man is overshadowed by a profound fear of the black male as a potential rapist, a fear instilled by her menfolk through the glorification of the Afrikaner woman's moral virtue and their obsession with ‘purity’ of race. For this reason, white women on the one hand fear and despise the black male, while on the other, white men wish to annihilate the black male. Paul Hoch states:

Defence of manhood demanded, above all, the defence of the white goddesses of civilisation against the dark, sex-crazed barbarians at the gate, and such fears provided the most explosive fuel for interracial hatred, lynching and war. (Hoch 1979:47)

In the early 1980s, Vincent Crapanzano, an American professor of Anthropology and Comparative Literature, lived among and interviewed several whites, both English- and Afrikaans-speaking, in the Western Cape area where the most ‘verligte’ or liberal Afrikaners are to be found. In his discussions with Afrikaners, the father's position in the family was emphasised time and again and led him to conclude that the head of the family is ‘an authoritarian father who was never to be questioned’ (Crapanzano 1986:74). In his interviews with the Afrikaner

4. Cited by Moodie (1975:14).

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Hennie van der Merwe (not his real name), this issue again surfaced. Hennie told him: ‘“In the Afrikaner tradition you do what your dad tells you...You don't question him. You were to be like him. There is a tremendous identification between father and son. The son puts on a show of masculinity. We have a special word for it in Afrikaans: kragdadigheid...The son must show his potency, his kragdadigheid, before his father. He must show it, but he can't question the father's kragdadigheid”’ (p. 74).

In addition to transmitting and reinforcing rigid racial outlooks and establishing the father's unquestionable position of authority, the patriarchal family system, one of the cornerstones of Calvinism and Scripturally founded, makes the woman the minor, acquiescent, compromising and subordinate figure in the family structure. An Afrikaner woman, Caroline du Preez (not her real name), told Crapanzano: ‘“Women are subordinate to their husbands, and although there is some talk about feminism, no one takes it particularly seriously”’ (p. 162). The Afrikaner woman's role is clearly defined, her perimeters fixed and her morals prescribed by a religion which has become irrelevant and impracticable in the present circumstances of South Africa and the world at large. Apart from her biological reproductive function which must ensure the survival of the Afrikaner nation, it is expected of her to be a ‘good’ wife at all times, to behave herself with decorum according to Afrikaner criteria and to honour the pledge she has made in the marriage vows to ‘honour and obey’ her husband without the latter being expected to do the same.

It is therefore not surprising that the Afrikaner woman was completely by-passed and left out of politics and economics and that she, for her part, was quite content to leave such matters in the able hands of the menfolk. She was quite happy to be the mistress of the household with a number of black servants to rule over in her microcosm. Until quite recently, her only political role was to serve koeksisters (almost like doughnuts but dribbling with syrup), melktert (milk tart) and boeretroos (literally ‘farmer's comfort’, i.e. coffee) at party political rallies or on election day, to churn out metres and metres of boerewors (literally ‘farmer's sausage’) - or rather her domestic servant(s) would - for the celebratory braaivleis (barbeque) afterwards and to pin buttonholes on the aspiring party candidate. The resultant sloth created by her marginalised position and by delegating most of the housework to her servants even inspired someone like Olive Schreiner, who was no adversary of the Afrikaner and less so of the Afrikaner woman, to write of her in The Story of an African Farm (1883) as someone of ‘listless inactivity’ who ‘seems fixed to the chair like a piece of furniture’ and that even ‘the young girls sit with their hands before them as listless as their mothers’.

Because of women's childbearing ability and their ‘traditional’ role of rearing and teaching their children, it is generally accepted that as such they are the bearers

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of their culture. In the case of the Afrikaner woman this role is emphasised and even extended: she is not only the bearer of her culture but more importantly, the carrier of light and civilisation to and in the ‘dark’ continent of Africa. She must therefore at all times be chaste, honourable and be honoured, in short, she must be the epitome of virtue. Matters affecting women worldwide, like the right of women to choose whether they want to have an abortion or not, are not debatable - they are simply excluded from the agenda of the Calvinist churches to which most Afrikaner women belong.

The Calvinist doctrine among some segments of Afrikanerdom does not manifest itself only in the race issue. Racial prejudice is but a facet of a bigot syndrome that includes other outgroups. In this vein, Dutch Reformed Church circles still refer to the Catholic Church, in analogy with the ‘swart gevaar’ and the ‘Rooi gevaar’ (black threat and Communist threat), as the ‘Roomse gevaar’ (Roman Catholic threat). Synods regularly express alarm over statistics that the Catholic Church, comprising approximately 6% of the total population, could become stronger through Southern European immigrants. As recently as 1975 the Cape Synod of the DRC without dissent adopted a motion making an ‘urgent call’ on its members to have more children as a means of ‘combating the growth of the Catholic Church’.^5. Church members are urged not to frequent Catholic institutions such as hospitals, in order to keep uninfected. Women's rights and feminist emancipation have not even become issues of synodal pronouncements.

5. Cited by Moodie (1975:54).

2.1.2 Afrikaner women's struggles and heroism

Despite the bonds of patriarchy and the limitations imposed upon them by their religious doctrine, Afrikaner women nevertheless have a long history of struggle and heroism. However, it must be emphasised that their struggles were not directed at liberating themselves from the pervasive patriarchal oppression or from a repressive regime. Rather, they aspired to fight side by side with their menfolk to ‘tame’ the wild land, to claim it for themselves and their descendants and to preserve their ‘pure’ Afrikaner identity. Afrikaner women's struggles and heroism are most succinctly expressed by two events in South African history which even today are the bases for the sanctification and glorification of the Afrikaner past: the Great Trek, specifically the Blaauwkrantz massacre and the Battle of Blood River (1838) and the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), both of which will be dealt with in some detail. Moodie states:

The sacred history [of the Afrikaner] is made up of two cycles of suffering and death - the Great Trek and the Anglo-Boer War. The suffering and death of women and children at Blaauwkrantz foreshadowed the agony of the concentration camps. (Moodie 1975:12)

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Among the many reasons put forward for the Afrikaner farmers' decision to ‘quit the fruitful land of [their] birth’, the best known are those as expounded by Piet Retief, the Voortrekker leader, in his famous ‘Retief Manifesto’ published in the Grahamstown Journal of 2 February 1837. The most important of these reasons are:

1. ‘...those evils which threaten the colony by the turbulent and dishonest conduct of vagrants, who are allowed to infest the country in every part...’

2. ‘...the severe losses which [the Boers] have been forced to sustain by the emancipation of [their] slaves...’

3. ‘...the continual system of plunder which [the Boers] have ever endured from the Caffres and other coloured classes...’

4. ‘...the unjustifiable odium which has been cast upon [the Boers] by interested and dishonest persons, under the cloak of religion...’
(Adapted from Van Jaarsveld 1971:54)

It is interesting to note that three out of the four most important reasons for the migration of the Boers concern the indigenous peoples of South Africa who have not only been robbed of their land but who have also been systematically eliminated, if not by the Boers' firearms then by epidemics brought into the country by immigrants from Europe, for example the smallpox epidemic which virtually wiped out the San. It is ironic that the Boers should have complained about the ‘severe losses’ which they had been ‘forced to sustain by the emancipation of [their] slaves’, since those very slaves, bought for anything between 60 and 100 riksdalers,^6. had paid for themselves over and over by supplying the Boers with unlimited free labour; yet the Boers expected to be compensated for the loss of such free labour. The fourth reason is directly connected with the indigenes, since the ‘dishonest persons under the cloak of religion’, the missionaries of the London Missionary Society, tried to make them aware of their humanity, to the chagrin of the Boers.

According to De Klerk (1975:33), the worst of the new British colonial policy was ‘the way it interfered with the already generations-old relationships between master and servant’. When the British talked of equality in the Colony and put strict limits on the masters' authority over their servants, the Boers found it abominable as the servants were neither white nor always Christian. Retief's niece, Anna Steenkamp, was so outraged by these British attitudes that she wrote:

And yet it is not so much their [the slaves'] freedom that drives us to such lengths, as their being placed on an equal footing with Christians, contrary to the laws of God and the natural distinction of race and colour, so that it was intolerable for any decent Christian to bow down beneath such a yoke; wherefore we rather withdrew in order to preserve our doctrines in purity.^7.

6. C.F.J. Muller (1969:451) provides a table of conversion from Dutch guilders and riksdaalders into South African rands and cents. According to this table 60 riksdaalders = R24 (plus-minus five pounds sterling) and 100 riksdaalders = R40 (plus-minus eight pounds sterling).

7. Cited by De Klerk (1975:45).

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So, with about 9% of the colony's total white population, i.e. about 6000 people, having joined, the Trek took off in an attempt to establish an independent Boer republic somewhere in the north, far from the jurisdiction of the British. The Great Trek, in itself insignificant when compared to other mass migrations of people, encountered the usual dangers that any expedition into an unknown and unexplored territory would encounter but in the case of the Voortrekkers - as these migrants became known - these were somewhat minimised because they had among their ranks indigenous people as spoorsnyers (trackers), touleiers (wagon-leaders), agterryers (batmen) and a host of other servants, estimated at about 4000 in all, to make their passage less hazardous. The women and children were transported in wagons while the men went on ahead on horseback. Therefore, to suggest that the Voortrekkers made it all on their own across the treacherous Drakensberg is a myth which only Afrikaner history books try to perpetuate.

It was inevitable that the Voortrekkers would encounter on their trek into the interior black tribes who had inhabited the land long before the white man set foot in South Africa. The first of such encounters culminated in a skirmish at Vegkop in Transorangia (the present Orange Free State) on 16 October 1837 when the Voortrekkers attacked the Ndebele. In this battle, Afrikaner women played their part by loading alternate guns for the men. The Boers thought they had defeated the Ndebele but in fact the latter made off with many thousands of the Boers' sheep, goats and head of cattle. A few months later, a commando under Hendrik Potgieter launched a ‘remorseless’ attack on Mzilikazi's Ndebele, killing about 200 of his tribesmen, including many Ndebele women. A year later, once again under the leadership of Potgieter, the Ndebele were once again attacked and defeated, forcing Mzilikazi and his remaining tribesmen to settle beyond the Limpopo River where he founded his new royal kraal and named it Kwa-Bulawayo.

The Voortrekkers could not reach consensus as to the ultimate destination of the Trek. Hendrik Potgieter and Andries Pretorius decided to settle on the highveld of the Transvaal, while Retief and Gerrit Maritz opted for crossing the Drakensberg to settle on the fertile plains of Natal. In Retief's bid to acquire land from the Zulu king, Dingane, threatening him with the wrath of God if he should engage in double-dealing^8. and thus further provoking the Zulu king, Retief and his party of negotiators came to grief when they were overpowered by the Zulu warriors at Mgungundlovu, the royal kraal of the Zulus. The rest of the party was waiting below the Drakensberg between two tributaries of the Tugela River, the Blaauwkrantz and Bushmans Rivers, on Retief's return, unbeknown to them that Retief and his party were killed. In the early morning of Saturday, 17 February 1838, the Zulu impis attacked the Voortrekker laagers. In all about 300 Voortrekkers - men, women and children - and about 250 servants were killed.

8. The colonised's systematic subjugation was effected by among others the colonisers' continual threats of God's wrath coming down on the colonised. Bearing in mind African people's reverence for supernatural powers, it was easy for the colonisers to coerce them into belief and co-operation.

[p. 15]

The scene is described in terms of martyrdom by various Afrikaner historians, for example:

The earth swarmed with thousands of enemies. No human help was possible and even tiny children cried to the Lord and the voice of the people came up to God (Du Plessis n.d.:104)

and

The grass was matted with the noble blood of women, girls, and tiny babes. The wagons were smashed and burned, the earth white with feathers from the bedding. Infants nursing at their mothers' breast were pierced with tens of assegaais - so that both bodies were fixed together. Children were seized by the legs and their heads smashed against wagon wheels. Women's breasts were severed, their bodies mutilated and ravished. Vultures circled over the laager of yesterday; among the dead and the still-smouldering ashes wild animals prowled around - presently to gorge themselves on human flesh. (Preller 1909:152-153)

On Sunday, 16 December 1838 the Voortrekkers took their revenge under the leadership of Andries Pretorius. The Zulus were defeated at the Ncome River which became a river of blood from the fallen bodies of Zulus, and renamed Blood River by the Voortrekkers. South African history books rarely make mention of the pivotal role played by indigenous people who fought on the side of the Boers in securing their victory. Many acts of brutality against the defeated Zulus are reported, resembling in many aspects the brutal acts perpetrated by the security forces against blacks in contemporary South Africa. The Voortrekkers established their Republic of Natalia which was short-lived, for in 1843 the British annexed the territory, thus placing the Voortrekkers once again under British rule. Rather than endure this new abomination, they chose to trek back over the Drakensberg, to Transorangia and Transvaal. The anger and bitterness of the Afrikaner community in Natal resulted in one of the most defiant statements ever made by an Afrikaner woman. Four hundred Voortrekker women, led by Susanna (Johanna?) Smit, wife of the Voortrekker predikant and sister of the Voortrekker leader Gerrit Maritz, presented a petition to the British High Commissioner, Sir Henry Cloete, an anglicised Afrikaner. At this famous encounter Susanna Smit listed their grievances, and ended by saying:

We would rather go barefoot back over the Drakensberg to meet our independence or our death, than bow down before a government which has treated us as the British have done.^9.

As proof of the Afrikaner woman's robust constitution, capacity for work and suffering and unwavering determination, the myth of Afrikaner women having actually crossed the Drakensberg barefoot is maintained and perpetuated in Afrikaner circles. In the late 1970s the Afrikaners of Northern Natal raised

9. Cited by Walker (1982:10).

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a statue to Susanna Smit on the very edge of the Drakensberg escarpment at the spot where Retief had led the Boer wagons down into the promised land. Her feet are bare, her face is turned away from Natal; and that is where three-quarters of the Boer settlers went in 1843, back over the mountains - the way they had come.

As an example of male attitudes towards women in the 19th century, the outcome of the Susanna Smit delegation warrants mentioning: these Voortrekker women asserted that they regarded themselves to be as eligible for involvement in the political future of the territory as their men. Cloete subsequently reported to the Governor at the Cape: ‘I endeavoured (but in vain) to impress upon them that such a liberty as they seemed to dream of had never been recognised in any civil society, ... and that however much I sympathised in their feeling ... I considered it a disgrace on their husbands to allow such a state of freedom’ (cited by Walker 1982:10).

So back over the Drakensberg the Voortrekkers went, only to be afflicted by the British once more. Diamonds and gold were discovered at Kimberley and the Witwatersrand respectively, giving rise to an unprecedented influx of European but mostly British adventurers and fortune-hunters. In 1877 the British annexed the Transvaal Republic, but the Boers won back their freedom in the First War of Liberation (Eerste Vryheidsoorlog) of 1880-1881, ‘by armed force and the might of [their] God’ (Moodie 1975:8). When gold was discovered in 1886, British imperialism once again triumphed. British gold-diggers in the Transvaal Republic demanded the right to vote, Britain intervened on their behalf, but negotiations failed and the Boers took on the might of the British Empire when they declared war on 11 October 1899. By June 1900 both the Orange Free State and the Transvaal had been declared British territory.

The Anglo-Boer War or Second War of Liberation (Tweede Vryheidsoorlog) as it became known, marked the second cycle of suffering and death endured by the Boers. Afrikaner women and children who were found on the farms were driven to the British concentration camps, others fled in agony from the British, only to be rounded up and taken to the ‘murderous women's camps’ (Smit 1917:133). Over 26 000 Afrikaner women and children died in the concentration camps during this war that lasted less than three years. The main causes of death were famine and disease, although there are ostensibly authentic reports that the women and children were fed ground glass by the British in their efforts to ‘wipe out the Boers’ (Smit 1917:133). He continues his description of the suffering of women and children thus: ‘It was as though the people had been forsaken by God ... The moaning and weeping of sick mothers, the crying and pleading of little children dying of hunger in cold tents mounted up to heaven. But in vain’. Moodie (1975:10) states that it was the sufferings of their families alone that caused the Boers to give up the fight and surrender at Vereeniging in 1902.

[p. 17]

The suffering was not yet over. When the First World War broke out in Europe (1914), two of the Afrikaners' most illustrious generals, Botha and Smuts, defected to the British imperialist cause. South Africa was brought into the war on the side of Britain. Afrikaners were expected to join ranks with the people who had been their bitter enemies only fifteen years earlier. A rebellion under the leadership of Generals De Wet and Beyers started with renewed bloodshed not only between Boer and Briton but also between Boer and Boer. The Afrikaner citizen force was called up to crush the rebellion, and the result was much enmity between Afrikaners in the North and those in the South, the latter having largely contributed to the failure of the uprising. One of the martyrs of the rebellion, Jopie Fourie, died before a firing squad on the orders of General Smuts. For Moodie (1975:11), this reaffirmed the theme of Afrikaner suffering, and the ‘sacred period of Afrikaner history’ was brought to an end.

Afrikaner women not only suffered during the Anglo-Boer War, but were engaged in acts of heroism from time to time. The ‘Petticoat Commando’ was a contingent of Boer women spies during the war and must take the credit for some of the victories the Boers gained over the British. After the surrender of the Boers, one of its leading members, Johanna Brandt, declared openly that the struggle had only begun. During the 1914 Rebellion, Gen. De Wet and other leaders were arrested and detained in the Johannesburg Fort. By the middle of 1915, 3000 Afrikaner women gathered in a solemn procession in Pretoria to petition the Governor-General, Lord Buxton, for their immediate release.

Both the ‘Petticoat Commando’ and the 1915 procession by Afrikaner women had one bizarre repercussion in present-day South African history. It was revealed in July 1981 that the former HNP leader, Dr Albert Hertzog, was funding an extreme rightist group with neo-fascist tendencies, the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), and an equally rightist women's group, the Kappiekommando (Bonnet Brigade) in 1982. Dr Hertzog's action was seen as part of an effort to unite the various right-wing groups. Growing right-wing alarm at the way government policy was developing could also be seen emerging in this period by the short-lived, small protest movement among Afrikaner housewives in Pretoria. Incongruously dressed in the boiling Pretoria sunshine in the full regalia of Voortrekker women, replete with large bonnets and full-length skirts, all their costumes were pitchblack. Their most notable protest involved carrying a coffin to the Union Buildings to symbolise what they saw as the murder of the Afrikaner traditions. The invocation of Voortrekker imagery and the use of the term ‘kommando’ were particularly significant. This group has been incorporated into the AWB where they are determined to continue their militant action in order to preserve Boer hegemony and ‘purity’.

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2.1.3 Images of the Afrikaner woman

The Afrikaner woman was the martyr and hero of the Afrikaner ‘sacred’ history. Without wishing to demean or minimise her heroism which all women in all ages have in common when having to protect their children from peril, one has to point out that her woes were the direct result of a situation of war, which came about not entirely without provocation on the part of Afrikaner men. In all conflicts the innocent, invariably the women and children, suffer most. In the case of the Afrikaner woman the suffering was exacerbated because her religious doctrine required or even demanded of her to accept almost passively her husband's decisions, no matter how wrong or right they were. In the dynamic and formative periods in the history of South Africa, women and even less so Afrikaner women, seem hardly to have featured in the surge of events. Those heroes who appear in the history books written by men are all men; the wars fought over land were between men; the decision-makers, the politicians, were all men.

The Afrikaner woman's suffering and heroism were not more significant, more extraordinary or any worse than those of women in other war situations. Yet the mind boggles when one considers the absolute ambivalent position Afrikaner men take towards the woman. On the one hand she is subordinate and banished to the periphery of important events in the Afrikaner political and economic life; on the other hand she is glorified, sanctified and honoured as a prized symbol of Afrikanerdom.

The Afrikaner ‘civil faith’ as Moodie calls it, reserved a very special place of pride for the figure of the Afrikaner woman. ‘If the Afrikaner man was indeed the instrumental agent who worked out God's will in Afrikaans history, the woman provided a deep well of moral fortitude which complemented and even surpassed her husband's more practical exploits’ (Moodie 1975:17). In the struggle against the English, her strength of courage buoyed up the wavering will of her husband, urging him on to further feats. The Calvinist ‘father’ of the Afrikaners, Ds. J.D. Kestell, was reported in Die Burger of 17 December 1929 as having said about the Afrikaner woman:

If we take note of all that the woman has meant in our people's history, then we cannot but recognise that undergirding it all lay a great moral principle. Her influence was consoling and uplifting. The sheer power of the life of our people had its roots in the pure life of the woman. Her influence kept the man from despair.

She not only comforted and sustained her husband in times of crisis, it was because of her willingness (read subjection) to accompany him into the wilderness that the racial purity of Afrikanerdom had been preserved, according to this civil faith. It was to the woman that God had entrusted the task of bearing and raising

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Afrikaner children in the true civil faith. She held the future in trust on behalf of God and her people. Hers was the responsibility of inspiring the younger generation - the hope of Afrikanerdom - with deep love for their language and culture.

The Afrikaner woman in her faith and purity took on certain attributes of the Holy Virgin in Catholicism. She was a symbol of God's grace and intercession in the life of His people. Throughout the bitter Afrikaner struggle for freedom, she provided a haven of gentleness and renewal. The innocence and purity of Afrikaner women and children made the tales of their suffering, at the hands of the Zulus and English alike, all the more atrocious. The suffering of these innocent, righteous victims not only enhanced the analogy to the Passion, the patience and enduring faith of the women in the concentration camps carried a further message for every Afrikaner. According to the Afrikaner eschatology, the coming republic would result from divine, not human action. Thus the role of the faithful Afrikaner demanded patient suffering and watchful waiting in anticipation of the republic which God Himself would call into being. Thus by example the Afrikaner woman taught one of the deepest truths of the civil religion.

Afrikaners gave concrete expression of these images of the Afrikaner woman, specifically in the two monuments in the two capitals of the former Boer Republics. The Voortrekker Monument on ‘Monumentkoppie’ in Pretoria, is the holiest of holy shrines for the Afrikaner, and the ground on which it stands is revered as almost holy. The foundation stone was laid in December 1938, the centenary of the Voortrekkers' victory over the Zulus, and the building completed in 1940. This monument is a vast granite temple visible for miles around. Broad steps lead through a bas-relief oxwagon laager to the main hall. Halfway up, the steps divide to make room for a huge Van Wouw statue of an austere pioneer woman with her two children. Significantly, the two sets of steps lead to the ‘Hall of Heroes’, from which the statue of the Voortrekker woman is excluded. Nevertheless, according to the guide-book, the place of honour is given to the woman because she made everything possible by trekking with her husband, by giving up her home, by bringing her children, by being ready to face sickness and danger in order to bring civilisation to the heart of this black continent. Also, according to the guidebook, the woman suffers but she does not look down. She looks straight ahead. The children do not look back. They look up. Carved on the wall behind this bronze statue, are four black wildebeest, also symbolic. ‘The statue of the Voortrekker Mother and her children symbolises white civilisation while the black wildebeest portray the ever threatening dangers of Africa. The determined attitude and triumphant expression on the woman's face suggest that the dangers are receding and that the victory of civilisation is an accomplished fact’ (the official guidebook).

Just outside Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State is the ‘Vrouemonument’ which bears the simple inscription: ‘Aan onze heldinnen en lieve kinderen; Uw wil

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Geschiede’ (‘To our heroines and beloved children; Thy will be done’) and which was erected in honour of those women and children who died in the concentration camps during the Anglo-Boer War. Within a circular enclosure stands a sandstone obelisk. At its foot is a statue by Anton van Wouw of a bareheaded woman holding a dying child. Another woman in Voortrekker clothes stands beside her staring resolutely out across the Free State veld. On either side of this group are two bas-relief panels. On the left panel, under the caption ‘Voor Vrijheid, Volk en Vaderland’ (‘For Freedom, Volk and Country’), we see women and children entering a concentration camp, herded together and clutching a few paltry possessions. On the right panel is depicted an emaciated child dying in a camp tent with his mother by his side, while the life of the camp carries on around them. Ironically, within the circular enclosure of the monument lie the graves of Pres. Steyn, Gen. De Wet and Ds. Kestell - the ideal Afrikaner statesman, warrior and churchman respectively - and the grave of the English woman, Emily Hobhouse, who concerned herself with the plight of the women and children in the concentration camps.

The Afrikaner woman was similarly honoured on various occasions. During the Day of the Vow celebrations in 1916 at Senekal in the Free State, all the speakers dealt specifically with the topic ‘The Afrikaner Woman’, extolling her virtues and appealing to the modern Afrikaner woman to emulate those sterling qualities of the Voortrekker women. The symbolic Ossewatrek (Ox-wagon Trek) of 1938, the centenary of the Battle of Blood River, likewise honoured the Afrikaner woman. The wagons were baptised at historically significant points en route and given names appropriate to the major themes of the sacred history. Five wagons were named after the legendary Trek heroes: ‘Piet Retief’, the martyr; ‘Andries Pretorius’, the victor of Blood River; ‘Louis Trichardt’, the first Trekker; ‘Hendrik Potgieter’, the early Transvaal leader; and, of course, ‘Sarel Cilliers’, author of the Covenant vow. The other four wagons, celebrating the importance of women and children in the sacred saga, were named: ‘Vrou en Moeder’; ‘Dirkie Uys’, after the 14 year old boy who chose to be martyred alongside his father rather than flee from the Zulus; and ‘Johanna van der Merwe’ and ‘Magrieta Prinsloo’, after the two girls who survived the Blaauwkrantz massacre largely because their mothers had hidden the children beneath their own bodies.

2.1.4 Suffrage

To what extent did the above perceptions of the Afrikaner woman influence the decision to give the vote to white women in South Africa? None!

Given the general situation of women, it is not surprising that the scope forwomen in political work was very restricted. Until 1930 no women in South Africa had the vote and their participation in political parties, both white and black, was very

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limited indeed. Most people accepted that women were first and foremost mothers and, furthermore, that motherhood in some way set women apart from a full and equal participation in all spheres of society.

Until women became a more prominent and active part of the country's labour force, there was little public debate on established assumptions of male superiority. Thus, throughout this time (the early 20th century), none of the major political parties regarded women as an important area for political work and propaganda. In the early years of the 20th century most politicians accepted without much thought that it was ‘unnatural’ for women to meddle in politics. The handful of women who took up the question of women's suffrage were regarded by almost all white politicians as eccentrics at best, dangerous subversives or lunatics at worst.

Much inspired by Olive Schreiner's novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883), with its outspoken rejection of women's inferior standing in society, the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was established in 1889 which established a Franchise Department in 1895 to champion the cause of women's suffrage. In March 1911, suffragists met in Durban to establish a national women's suffrage society, the Women's Enfranchisement Association of the Union (WEAU) to lobby their cause. Their conference drew forth the following editorial in the local newspaper, the Natal Mercury:

We hope the women suffragists have enjoyed their picnic in Durban, but we do not think the political effect of their visit can have rewarded their endeavour, and we cannot pretend that we have any regrets for their non-success.

The white women's suffrage movement was one of the main political campaigns by women in the early 20th century and throws light on their general position in society at the time. Although it stood apart from the great mass of black women, its history has much to tell about the nature of women's organisations in South Africa, as well as the different priorities that have divided white women from black and white English-speaking women from their Afrikaans-speaking counterparts. It illustrates clearly how class and colour divisions have interacted to shape the political consciousness of South African women.

But Afrikaner women played virtually no role in the suffragist movement. The WCTU's Franchise Department was followed by a number of tiny, separate societies that established themselves in all the main urban centres of the country in the first decade of the 20th century. Their membership was small, exclusively white and almost entirely English-speaking. These were to remain the dominant features of the movement throughout its history. The majority of the suffragists were drawn from the privileged strata of society; they had both the education and the leisure to query their restricted role in society; they were energetic and capable

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women, restless for all the opportunities that society offered to their class but denied to their sex.

In 1911 the various local suffrage societies affiliated to form a national body, the WEAU. For the next twenty years this was the premier suffrage organisation in the country, campaigning and lobbying for support through public meetings, press articles and letters, deputations to the authorities, petitions and public statements. Compared to the suffrage campaign being waged by Emily Pankhurst's Union, the South African campaign was a timid affair.

The National Party was prompted in the 1920s to adopt a more flexible attitude towards the question of women's suffrage, mainly because of the sudden influx of Afrikaner women into the cities and into new areas of work. The granting of the vote to women was, however, plainly a political manoeuvre. Unlike in other Western countries where women had to fight a hard and long battle before obtaining the vote, white women in South Africa had the vote practically foisted upon them by the authorities.

In the Cape, the introduction of a ‘non-white’ franchise did not, in the first place, come immediately after the emancipation of the ‘coloured’ population from slavery but had to await the granting of representative government to the colony as a whole. When it was finally granted in 1854, it was on the condition that the franchise be nonracial. Arelatively low property qualification was established that applied to whites and blacks alike. The colonists accepted a political arrangement that gave former slaves and indigenous dependents a potential voice in government, not so much from egalitarian conviction but rather because they saw no threat to their social and political dominance from a colour-blind franchise. By the 1850s, the master-servant laws and the conditions of economic survival had firmly locked most of the emancipated slaves back into their ‘traditional’ role as labourers and servants.

In the 1880s, the low franchise qualifications came under increasing attack, mainly because of the vast increase in the potential African vote resulting from the incorporation or annexation of new territories to the east of the old Cape frontier. For example, the region between the Keiskamma and the Kei River (known today as Ciskei), annexed by Britain in 1848, was incorporated into the Cape Colony in 1865; the Transkei was annexed piecemeal by the Cape Colony in the late 1870s and early 1880s.

Since British politicians representing a minority of the white population were more successful in controlling the African vote than those speaking for the Afrikaner majority, and were allegedly using it to help them dominate the responsible cabinet form of government that had existed since 1872, a new Afrikaner political party - the Afrikaner Bond - provided much of the initial support for

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suffrage restriction. But English-speakers were also becoming anxious about the potential of Africans to outvote the whites; and, with relatively little white opposition, the voting qualifications were raised and tightened in such a way as to deny the ballot to all but a small fraction of the African population within the expanded borders of the colony.

Legislation of 1887 and 1892 increased the qualifications, required that the necessary property be held in severalty rather than communally (thus denying the vote to ‘tribalised’ Africans) and imposed a literary test. But enough blacks were left on the voters' roll to give them the balance of power in several key constituencies. There were no further attempts by Cape colonists to limit the franchise, for with the rise of a genuine two-party system in the 1890s, each party found that its hold on certain key seats depended on African or ‘coloured’ votes.

While the white electorate was broadened in the 20th century, the traditional qualifications or restrictions remained in effect for ‘coloureds’. The first act of overt political discrimination against ‘coloureds’ ocurred when the National Convention of 1908 and 1909 not only failed to extend the non-white franchise of the Cape to the other provinces as it had done in the case of whites, but explicitly barred ‘coloureds’ from sitting in the central parliament.

Finally, women's suffrage became a weapon with which the National Party of Gen. Hertzog, which came to power in 1924, could attack the limited black franchise that still existed. The elimination of the black vote in the Cape had been one of Hertzog's major aims when he took office as prime minister in 1924. The franchise clause had, however, been entrenched in the Union constitution and could not be amended without a two-thirds majority of both houses of parliament. Although Hertzog had a majority of seats in parliament, he did not control sufficient votes to achieve his aims of amending the constitution. Repeatedly frustrated in his attempts to secure a majority, Hertzog then turned to women's suffrage to launch his attack from another direction. In 1930 he piloted a Women's Enfranchisement Bill through parliament that applied to white women only. The outcome was never in question and the bill became law. The following year, property and educational qualifications were eliminated for all whites in the Cape and Natal, thus making it possible for more rural and working-class Afrikaners to obtain the vote. Thus, virtually without having had to lift a finger to gain the vote and without having had the qualifications to vote, Afrikaner women became enfranchised. With this act, Hertzog managed to double the white electorate at one stroke and thereby drastically reduce the importance of the black vote in the Cape.

Although the demand for the enfranchisement of women was an explicitly feminist one, the suffrage movement was a racist movement that ignored three-quarters of the women in the country. The great majority of suffragists placed the protection

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of their privileges as members of the ruling class before the elimination of sexual discrimination. One of the few Afrikaner suffragists, Aletta Nel, made the following comment when asked by the select committee hearing on women's suffrage in 1926 if she favoured extending the vote to black women: ‘As a woman, sir, yes ... but as a South African born person, I feel that it would be wiser if we gave the vote to the European woman only’.

2.1.5 Contemporary position of the Afrikaner woman

After obtaining the franchise in 1930, the Afrikaner woman remained relatively dormant on the political and economic scene. Possessing all the comforts of white, enfranchised, privileged South African women, either she did not feel the compulsion to become involved in politics, or she was so conditioned to being left out that she did not have the confidence to venture into the political and economic arena. As proof of this, one can mention the thin sprinkling of Afrikaner women who were elected to parliament after 1930. The first Afrikaner woman member of parliament was Mrs Denys Reitz and even she suggested in 1936 that women's domestic role should remain paramount in their lives. It was not until September 1989 that the first woman, Dr Rina Venter, an Afrikaner, was appointed to the cabinet, her portfolio being a ‘traditional’ women's area, health.

But in a capitalist, multi-racial society such as that in South Africa, one not only finds the divisions between black and white, but also between black and black, white and white, Afrikaner and Afrikaner. Capitalism engenders a class system, and the emergence of industrialists, economists, entrepreneurs and politicians - encouraged and actively initiated by that bastion of male domination, the ‘Broederbond’ - among Afrikaners created the big divide between the Afrikaner elite, a strong middle class and the working class. As the economy became more sophisticated, the range of subtleties of class membership became more extended.

It was, as incongruous as it may seem, the working-class Afrikaner woman who became politicised. The great majority of women in the clothing industry in the 1920s and 1930s, for example, were young, white Afrikaner women. They were part of a huge townward movement by rural Afrikaners - indigent farmers, sharecroppers, farmworkers and their families - who could no longer make a living out of agriculture. The ‘poor white’ problem had become a major political issue by this time. With their poverty, lack of education and marketable skills, as well as their reasons for migrating to the towns, the ‘poor whites’ did not differ markedly from the thousands of blacks who were making a similar trek from country to town at that time. But as members of the ruling white group, they occupied a wholly different place in the minds of white politicians, town planners, churchmen and welfare organisations. Their poverty, the degraded living conditions, their fraternisation with blacks in makeshift housing schemes on the edge

[p. 25]

of town, were all seen as a direct threat to white hegemony. In 1932 the Carnegie Commission, set up to investigate the ‘poor white’ problem, commented:

Although sexual intercourse between white and coloured exists to a greater degree now than in the past, it is still on the whole the exception, even among poor whites ... Signs are however not wanting that this racial barrier is being broken down, especially where the standard of living of some Europeans is approximating more and more to that of natives. (cited by Walker 1982:62)

The Garment Workers' Union (GWU) grew out of an organisation of garment workers that was formed in 1918. Most of the union's members were young Afrikaner women and some of them went on to become key figures in its organisation, e.g. Katy Viljoen, a prominent organiser in the GWU, and Johanna Cornelius, who became president of the GWU in 1934. What did this spell for the ‘Afrikaner woman’, that hero and martyr of the sacred history? She was now often working in factories side by side with black workers and was being successfully organised into non-racial unions. The Dutch Reformed Churches had to intervene and made a nationwide appeal which urged all ministers ‘to save white civilisation and pure Protestant Christendom; to help our mothers and our daughters who are placed on equal footing with coloureds; to fight the outspoken principles and practices of the GWU which believes in equality between white and non-white (decidedly in conflict with the principles of the Church grounded in God's Word)’ (cited by Moodie 1975:253).

The centenary celebrations of the Voortrekkers' victory at Blood River were being planned at this time and Solly Sachs, General Secretary of the GWU, asked the organisers if a delegation from the union might attend the celebrations in Pretoria. As already stated, most of his members were Afrikaner women who wanted to form part of the various processions in Voortrekker costume. Sachs himself was a Jew and had once been a Communist although he had been expelled from the party in 1931. What also offended Nationalists was that his union was non-racial. The letter he received in reply from the organisers of the centenary celebrations drew attention to ‘the mockery of our national traditions your participation in the Centenary Celebrations will mean’ and continued:

The Afrikaner nation is busy uniting, to mobilise its forces against you and your sort. The thousands of Afrikaner daughters whom you have in your clutches will settle with you ... Our people do not want anything to do with Communists and Jews, the high priests thereof, least of all. The day we Afrikaners begin to settle with you Jews, you will find out that Germany is a Jewish paradise compared with what South Africa will be ... You and Johanna Cornelius, who all day long organise and address kaffirs, will you dare to bring them to the celebrations? They are your fellow workers and ‘Comrades’. We challenge you to come to the celebrations...

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It is significant that the title of Sachs' book, from which the above quotation is taken, is Rebel's Daughters (1957), referring to the young Afrikaner working-class women who rebelled against the sacred history of the Afrikaners by being prepared to share the workplace with all women in South Africa.

South Africa had to wait until 1975 for another Afrikaner woman to have her name written into the history books of the Afrikaners. Adele van der Spuy, chairperson of ‘Aksie 1975’, formed in 1975 to promote full legal and economic status for all South African women, along with two dozen other women, ‘stormed’ the government buildings in Pretoria to try and present a petition on women's rights. She was knocked about in the effort, vilified and ridiculed by the Afrikaans press, notably Die Vaderland and Rapport, by Afrikaner politicians and a great many Afrikaner women. Many Afrikaans-speaking men referred to her only in pejorative terms. She was chairperson of the National Party branch in the Brandeis constituency of Johannesburg and was put forward by her branch as the party nominee for parliament in the election. Her nomination was overridden at a higher party level, no doubt instigated by the ‘Broederbond’, and she did not stand.

Although Afrikaner women have in recent years become more involved in politics, economics and the judiciary, their numbers remain negligible, given their privileged position and sixty years of enfranchisement. A great number of young Afrikaner women go to university and achieve considerable academic success, only to be confined to the household once they get married and have children. Even today, the ideal Afrikaner woman is the one who keeps a spotless, gleaming home (kept spotless and gleaming by the black domestic servant), is a perfect hostess who excels in the culinary art and presents her guests with the most delicious dishes (prepared by the black cook), who involves herself in Afrikaner cultural, religious and social organisations (while the black nanny minds the children) and who adheres to the codes of the Afrikaner civil religion.

2.1.6 The literary response to the Afrikaner woman's position

Having thus considered the position of the Afrikaner woman, the next step is to assess how she is portrayed in the literature of Afrikaans and whether her portrayal is a reflection of the mood and spirit of the authors' own social environment, in this case the social environment of the Afrikaner. Afrikaner authors, men and women, have responded to the position of the Afrikaner woman either by overtly and explicitly portraying that position or, by neglecting to portray that position, implying what the real situation of the Afrikaner woman is.

In a paternalistic society such as that in South Africa, it is to be expected that this paternalism will permeate the artistic and creative projects of the Afrikaners, of which their literary products are the greatest manifestation of patriarchy.

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The majority of Afrikaner authors are men, their central characters are mostly men. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule, as shall be illustrated later, but it can be argued that patriarchy in South Africa has found a very loyal ally in the literature of the Afrikaners, entrenching and encapsulating the inferior position of women as propounded by their Calvinist-based civil religion.

Since the Afrikaans language gained recognition as a fully-fledged and official language in 1925, the early writers in this medium portrayed the Afrikaner woman in an extremely peripheral role, very seldom making it possible for her to move toward the centre of the events. The strong authority figure of the father dominates, the conflict is usually between father and son, thus sketching a completely male world. Even in the few early novels where the female character features prominently, the woman is seen as an appendage of the man, rather than as an individual in her own right. A case in point is Jan van Melle's novel, Bart Nel, in which Francina is continually referred to as ‘Bart's wife’ or ‘the wife of Bart’. Early female authors, for example Audrey Blignault and M.E.R., sketch the daily activities of the woman, the events within her family, thereby emphasising the woman's position in society.

The Anglo-Boer War and the reactions to it formed an important stimulus for literature immediately after 1900. True enough, the poets of that period, in particular Jan Celliers, Totius and Leipoldt, paid tribute in their poetry to the heroism and suffering of the Afrikaner woman during the war. For example, ‘Die Kampsuster’ (Celliers) tells of the sorrow of a dying Afrikaner woman; Totius' anthology By die Monument (1908) is elegiac-epic in tone and form and also deals with the grief of women and children. Perhaps the best exponent of this genre is Leipoldt and his anthology Oom Gert Vertel en Ander Gedigte (1911) uses irony to emphasise the tragic consequences of the war for women and children. The images Afrikaners have formed of the Afrikaner woman are forcefully reflected by these poets. A novelist who also glorifies the Afrikaner woman, is F.A. Venter, especially in his saga about the Great Trek. The heroism and suffering of the Afrikaner woman during the Blaauwkrantz massacre and the Battle of Blood River are extensively depicted by Venter. Throughout the tetralogy the Afrikaner woman's role of bearer of civilisation is emphasised and portrayed. This role is extended in the novel Dark Pilgrim, where the Afrikaner woman is also portrayed as the carrier of the Christian message to the blacks, thus continuing her civilising mission.

It is, however, in the ‘plaasroman’ (farm novel) that the Afrikaners, their culture and their values, are depicted most succinctly, while at the same time depicting the images and status of the Afrikaner woman.

The ‘plaasroman’ was a direct result of the economic situation which prevailed in South Africa at the turn of the century and the consequences this held for the

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Afrikaners. Under the custom of inheritance that was prevalent in South Africa into the twentieth century, every son of a white farmer might expect to inherit a portion of the paternal farm. But families were generally large and the practice of dividing the land would result in inheritances too small to be viable farms. The social problem of the emergence of a class of landless farmers was made more acute in the 1930s by years of poor rainfall, low wool prices and general economic depression. The Afrikaans novel of this period naturally gave extended coverage to the phenomena of strife over inheritance (brother against brother, father against son, widow against children), conflict between farmers and land speculators, the hardening of class boundaries between the landed and the landless, the migration of impoverished rural Afrikaners to the cities, competition between black and white labour on the mines and diggings or on the railways, and the threat to traditional values posed by the city (with its liquor, gambling, prostitution and foreign ways) and by the penetration of novel forms of gratification into the countryside. Faced with what was more and more clearly an epoch in the history of the Afrikaner, Afrikaans novelists responded in diverse ways: they celebrated the memory of the old rural values or proclaimed their durability or elaborated schemes for their preservation; they tracked the forces of change to their origins in history (capitalism), society (the Jews) or the cosmic order (God's will, the indifference of the universe); they denounced the rapacity of the new class of speculators; they satirised the pettiness, selfishness and lack of family feeling of the verengelste (anglicized) urban Afrikaner.

The ‘plaasroman’ portrays almost without exception, primitive figures with strong, earthy emotions, severe religiousness and hardiness; there are strong bonds of attachment between them, the soil and the seasons; their love of the soil borders on almost religious reverence. The ‘plaasroman’ is an uncomplicated genre in which much attention is given to farming activities - the sensuous aspect is relegated to the background; it generally has a chronological structure; for the most part it portrays an idyllic reality in which the cruelty of life does not often feature; political engagement (specifically the racial problem) plays no significant role.

An important aspect of the ‘plaasroman’ is the patriarchal community which it describes: not only is it a community in which the father figure dominates but also in which certain values connected to the father figure dominate, e.g. tradition and the traditional, inheritance and the succession of generations, norms and values which continue to exist and against which the younger generation, in particular, rebel. In this hierarchical community there is no space for the idealistic dreamer because man/woman is delivered to the struggle against cosmic forces. For this reason the main character is often a hero type who is portrayed in a mythical manner. It is therefore not surprising that the woman in these novels has an extremely peripheral role, is oppressed and is doomed to a life of drudgery.

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Of the numerous farm novels written during the period 1920-1940 (those by D.F. Malherbe, Jochem van Bruggen, Johannes van Melle, Mikro, C.M. van den Heever and Abraham Jonker), I wish to refer to only one, Laat Vrugte (1939) by C.M. van den Heever because of its so-called ‘feminist visions’ (Van Coller 1987) and also because the women characters can perhaps be considered as prototypes of the images of the Afrikaner woman in the novels of Afrikaans.

In this novel Sybrand is the main character. He occupies the central position in the action and also in respect of thematic elements. Although initially still subjected to his mother's ‘lewensreg’ (usufruct) of the farm, he soon rules with an iron fist so that almost all the other characters are affected. In the feudal set-up which exists on the farm Boskloof, he gradually alienates all his relatives whom he treats like subjects, especially his lonely wife and his natural heir, Henning.

The women in Sybrand's life are Willa his mother, Betta his first wife and mother of his two children, Maggie his second wife, his daughter Annie, the only female character to whom he shows affection and Maria, his sister, hewn from the same hard rock as Sybrand. Of these women, Willa, Betta and Maggie are perhaps the most representative of Afrikaner women in fiction. Willa, the imperious and uncharitable matriarch, exercises her legal power of the farm with an iron fist. Strong in will and precise in action, she clings obstinately to life and to the farm despite her debilitating illness. Not surprisingly, this brings her in conflict with Sybrand who wishes to run the farm without interference. Bequeathed life-long usufruct over the farm, she exercises her rights mercilessly to claim half of whatever the farm produces. She justifies her refusal to yield up parental authority over a middle-aged son on the grounds that parents who treat their children leniently make them idle and useless and ‘not careful enough of what they have inherited’. This lesson of harshness she learned from her own parents, but its ultimate origin is attributed to the pioneer ancestors: ‘For people who had to clear stretches of bush, build endless kraal-walls, plant stone fenceposts..., there was no time for ... softness’ (p. 38). She is able to justify autocracy on the grounds of duty to the farm and to the ancestors who built it up. She sees herself as the repository of the true values of the ancestors, and sees everyone else as pap (soft). In her own eyes her virtues are hardness and industry, and her great fear is that the farm will fall into the hands of lazy people who will boer agteruit (lose ground). She bears her illness with characteristic Calvinist acceptance of suffering without complaining, hers is a naive belief in the Bible, rigidly adhering to the letter of the law as expressed in the Old Testament.

Betta is quite the opposite of Willa and the true product of the patriarchal society. Her marriage to Sybrand has developed into a loveless union with little communication and intimacy between husband and wife. She is often told to shut up when she ventures to voice an opinion. Her life of lonely household drudgery, oppression, lovelessness and her treatment by her husband as a mere domestic servant,

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result in her premature aging. The narrator suggests that her role of house servant is probably the fate of many Afrikaner women. Betta has lost all interest in life, except in her son. The spiritual oppression and hard work have broken and tamed her, like a tired animal in a yoke. The struggles of the years have stripped her of will power. She is extremely forbearing and compliant and her one significant role is that of conciliator between her husband and son. Like true Afrikaners, she is a committed Christian and longs for spiritual communion with fellow Christians, to the chagrin of her husband. But she is tired of life, she does her work with the silent acceptance of a domestic servant and rebels only when her husband threatens the sole anchor in her life, her son. Her premature death therefore comes as no shock. Betta's weak social position, her oppression, represents the general negation of the Afrikaner woman (p. 69) who has to work, bear children and is doomed to silence.

Maggie's un-Afrikaans name already suggests that she is different, also as far as her morals are concerned, from the other typical Afrikaner women and their rigid value systems. She is portayed as a conniving, scheming and mercenary woman, one whose chief objective is to inherit the farm once she is married to Sybrand and so dispossess the rightful heir. While she was still married to Buks who tragically came to his demise, the gossip-mongers in the district had a field day when there was talk of an adulterous affair between her and Sybrand. Likewise, her adultery with a policeman while she is married to Sybrand, sets the tongues wagging and results in Sybrand's crippling stroke. The field is clear for her to inherit the farm but this is not to be. If the living cannot prevent such an abomination, then the spirits of the ancestors must intervene. The following passage clearly illustrates this:

The dead of Boskloof who had laboured here without cease, whose handiwork stood all around, whose bodies were intergrown with the soil of the farm, shuffled invisible through this house, they were about on the farm, they wanted to preserve it for their blood, they wanted continuity, they wanted to endure in their descendants (p. 302).

For this reason Maggie feels that

the heavy stillness of the farm lay like a motionless reptile on her thoughts, and would slowly drive her to madness. The great farm-stillness in which these people had lived in safety, was outside her, awoke fear in her. She was the intruder who would have to give herself over entirely to the forming forces at work here, or else flee (p. 316).

And flee she does. The silence of the farm has come to be associated no longer with the silence of nature but with the silence of the living dead. The dead want continuity, not because the son is a ‘good’ heir and the new wife a ‘bad’ one but

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because a takeover of the farm by a line of intruders will mean the end of the dead's vicarious life.

The inability and powerlessness of the women, even Willa, to stand up to Sybrand, is time and again illustrated when all they can do is to invoke the wrath of God by the words ‘God slaap nie’ (literally ‘God does not sleep’). Betta utters these words when Sybrand maltreats their son (p. 27); Willa threatens Sybrand with these words when he insists that she moves to town to give him a free hand on the farm (p. 43); his sister Maria likewise threatens him when he refuses to assist her and her husband financially (p. 144); even his daughter, the only person he treats with some regard, threatens him with these words after he had changed his will in favour of his new wife (p. 240).

The ‘plaasroman’ of the 1920s and 1930s exercised a clear influence on some novels of a later period. Echoes of events, motives and characters are found in succeeding Afrikaans farm novels. Etienne Leroux's Sewe dae by die Silbersteins (1962) and especially Een vir Azazel (1964) are subtle variations on the characteristics of this genre. Much of their impact is made by thwarting precisely the expectations of the readers. Also Anna M. Louw's Kroniek van Perdepoort (1975) and Wilma Stockenström's Uitdraai (1976) are thematically and structurally a renewal of this genre; the conflict with concrete forces, e.g. drought, is extended to a conflict with forces in the individual psyche, while the noble love relationship of the old farm novel is perverted (see Chapter 6). Although André Brink's novel, Rumours of Rain (1978), can in no way be categorised as a ‘plaasroman’, much of the action centres around the Afrikaner businessman and entrepreneur, Martin Mynhardt and his attempts to persuade his mother to sell the family farm. Her initial obstinate refusal is based on the fact that she cannot leave the graves of the ancestors.

It goes without saying that the portrayal of the Afrikaner woman by Afrikaner women authors will differ markedly from that by Afrikaner male authors (see Chapter 6).

In this overview of the portrayal of the Afrikaner woman, mention has to be made of André Brink's white heroines, for he is one of the few Afrikaner male authors, if not the only one, to give significant prominence to the woman in his novels. He has often been criticised for creating ‘stereotype’ white female characters, but the truth of the matter is that these so-called ‘stereotypes’ are often juxtaposed with Afrikaner female characters to make the differences between them all the more poignant. His female characters are more often than not non-Afrikaners (e.g. Jessica Thomson in Looking on Darkness; Nicolette Alford in The Ambassador; Bea in Rumours of Rain; Melanie in A Dry White Season), while somewhere in the background lurks the figure of an Afrikaner woman. In The Ambassador, for example, the ambassador's Afrikaner wife, Erika, is portrayed as a morally and

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spiritually sterile person, while his lover, Nicolette, provides him with all the excitement he needs away from his dreary work. It is not only sexual excitement that she provides, but she leads him on various journeys of discovery, including that of himself. The impression is gained that Brink nevertheless has a deep reverence for the Afrikaner woman's value systems. In Rumours of Rain Elise, the wife of the main character, Martin Mynhardt, is house-proud and has impeccable taste; when she is alone with her childhood sweetheart in very favourable circumstances for an ‘affair’, her strong Calvinist upbringing permits her to resist the temptation; on their wedding night she persuades Martin to pray with her for blessings on the imminent consummation of their marriage.

Brink also acknowledges the rebellious nature of the Afrikaner woman who is prepared to defy her father in order to marry the man of her choice, only to be oppressed for a second time by a husband (cf. Alida in A Chain of Voices; Elisabeth in An Instant in the Wind). Another rebel is Hester in A Chain of Voices who, despite the norms and values of her people thrust upon her, still has a deep admiration for the slave Galant. She is effectively contrasted with a prototype of Afrikanerdom, Cecilia, who prays for forgiveness each time after she and her husband had made love (there is hardly any question of ‘making love’ in their relationship - see Chapter 5).

In the above very cursory overwiew of the images of the Afrikaner woman in the Afrikaans novel, I could of necessity refer to only a few novels, my basis for selection being older and modern works of fiction, male and female authors, the ‘plaasroman’ and those set in the urban areas.

2.2 Black women

The collective term ‘black women’ here refers to African, Asian and ‘coloured’ women who were thus classified by South Africa's Population Registration Act of 1950 (abolished in 1991) which made a further classification of Africans into Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, Tswana, etc. ‘Black’ is not so much a colour but a concept which perverts the traditionally negative connotations of this colour. Since, according to the 1985 population census, blacks form 84,4% and women about half of the South African population, we can assume that black women form about 42% of the entire population.

It is not my intention to give a comprehensive view of black women by using headings which would correspond to those used in the first part of the chapter. Some of those headings simply do not apply to black women (e.g. ‘suffrage’); some will need several dissertations to illustrate the full extent of the black woman's struggles and heroism and others, e.g. images of the black woman and

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the literary response to her situation, shall be dealt with in the ensuing chapters. What follows here is a discussion of merely a fraction of the laws which governed the lives of black women for several decades.

2.2.1 Legislation affecting the lives of black women

While it is true that apartheid legislation had devastating effects on all black people, my main concern is its effects particularly on African women in view of the discussion of the novel Poppie Nongena in Chapter 6.

So much has already been written^10. about the effects of South African legislation on African women that to try and repeat all that here would be a futile exercise and an impossible task. A plethora of apartheid laws with all their subsequent amendments and amendments of amendments had as their main purpose the maintenance of white domination. While the full impact of these laws on South African society will take many years of intensive research to grasp fully the damage they have inflicted not only on blacks but on the entire infra- and super-structure of the country, their effects on African women were exacerbated by the inferior or even non-status to which African women were relegated.

The migrant labour system is perhaps the most diabolical when considering how it breaks up family life and reduces women to virtual noughts. The phenomenon of migrant labour is not confined to South Africa - in may parts of the world guest workers leave their country to work in another for a specified period. In South Africa, too, there are workers from other Southern African countries. However, in South Africa migrant labour exists also primarily in a special form as an integral and basic part of the apartheid system. All Africans working outside the bantustans are officially considered to be migrants who leave their own ‘country’ to work in ‘white’ South Africa, a different country.

A division of the family is imposed by migrant labour but it goes even further: the township system is both part and an extension of the migrant labour system for it, too, imposes a divided life on African people. Its adverse effect on family life and social development resides in the fact that men and women who should be playing their part as husbands and wives, as fathers and mothers and as members of the community are absent for long periods, some workers being permanent migrant workers.

The callousness of the government and other Afrikaner institutions towards the effects of migrant labour is illustrated by the following statements:

G.F. Froneman, Nationalist M.P. and later cabinet minister in 1969: ‘Migrant labour is in fact the entire basis of our policy as far as the white economy is

10. See for example the studies done by Bernstein, Meer, Simons, Alexander, Barrett e.a., Cock, etc., all of them non-African.

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concerned ... the African labour force must not be burdened with superfluous appendages such as wives, children and dependents who could not provide service’ (my emphasis).

The then prime minister, B.J. Vorster in 1968: ‘We need them [black people] to work for us but the fact that they work for us can never entitle them to claim political rights. Not now, nor in the future ... under any circumstances’.

A resolution passed at the 1973 Congress of the Afrikaanse Studentebond (Afrikaans Student Federation) demanded that ‘all black women and children in the white areas be shipped back to the homelands and only the men should be left in the white areas for as long as we need them’.

An M.P. in a parliamentary debate, 1964: ‘We do not want the Bantu women here simply as an adjunct to the procreative capacity of the Bantu population’.

The NGK (Dutch Reformed Church) in reply to a letter from the Black Sash in which it was requested to protest against official policy since the church preached the sanctity of marriage and family life, 1974: ‘That families in many cases cannot live together is true but it is also true that they are granted the opportunity to visit each other - provided of course they are willing to comply with the relevant regulations and they do not disregard this privilege’.^11.

The migrant labour system makes it virtually illegal for many African women to live with their husbands and a mockery of family life. Other social effects of the system include illegitimacy (N.B. It is a serious indictment against society to call children born out of wedlock ‘illegitimate’), bigamy, prostitution, homosexuality, liquor abuse, breakdown of parental authority, malnutrition and sexually transmitted diseases.

Closely linked to the migrant labour system and introduced to maintain it are the influx control and pass laws. The system depended on keeping as many women as possible in the reserves. If the whole family becomes part of urban industrial society then the claimed rationale for setting the payment of the male worker at the level of a single man falls away. Thus African women were until recently denied access to the new skills and new relationships of developing capitalism except in insignificant numbers. When they did become wage-earners it was primarily in domestic service and agriculture, where they were not part of the organised labour force.

The only way of trying to make women and their families remain in conditions well below the poverty line was to make it difficult for them to move to the urban areas. For this reason the pass laws were extended to women in 1952 despite courageous efforts by thousands of women from all population groups to make the government change its mind. These laws bore more heavily on women than on men, for women did not only need male consent (consent of the commissioner of the district defined as ‘home’ and consent of the father, male guardian or husband) to leave home or to work in another place, but since 1964 a total ban

11. All cited by Hilda Bernstein (1985:14/15).

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was placed on the further entry of women into the urban areas outside the bantustans except on a visitor's permit.

The official policy of forced removal resulted in more than three and a half million people being forcibly moved in South Africa since 1960 and another 1,7 million still under threat of removal in 1984. The mass removal of population takes various forms. In rural areas tenants have been evicted from white-owned farms and communities forced off land which had been theirs for generations. In towns and cities existing black residential areas have been destroyed and their residents moved into larger, more sharply segregated townships further away from the main centres of employment and often inside bantustan boundaries. People living in unauthorised residential areas (the so-called squatter camps) established in towns and cities in defiance of influx control are under almost constant attack and threat of removal to bantustans.

Also relevant is the government's policy on birth control which in effect is population and fertility control, described in some circles as ‘another kind of genocide’. The position of the NGK, theological and ideological power base of the apartheid regime, was that ‘it is the duty of whites to multiply on the earth’ while ‘the bantu ... could be given the pill with an easy mind ... the morals of the blacks have already sunk so low that promiscuity could not be any greater’. The Minister of Health, Nak van der Merwe, in 1983 blamed ‘uncontrolled breeding’ for the high infant mortality rate among black children and the Director-General of the Department of Health and Social Welfare proposed in 1981 that sterilisation and abortion among black women should be done ‘both on demand and by command’.^12. The family planning drive on which the State embarked since 1974 was called ‘preventative health’, but Barrett e.a. (1985:169) point out that ‘practice shows the concern is not health but politics’.

The Land Acts which were responsible for cramming more than 80% of the population into 13% of the land placed a heavy burden on women. Traditionally the producers of food, they found it increasingly impossible to provide in the needs of their families and extended families. It resulted in many going in search of employment in urban areas or becoming farm labourers on white-owned farms, thus becoming vulnerable to the severest form of exploitation of the workforce. They have few rights, and almost no legal protection against the harsh conditions, are paid starvation wages and often have to suffer the brutality of their bosses.

12. Cited by Bernstein, p. 49.

2.2.2 Patriarchy

The impact of imperial power on an indigenous culture resulted in inferiority being imposed on black people. For the black woman this burden had been trebled by imposing a three-fold ‘inferiority’ on her: her race, class and sex. In addition,

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she suffers under a double patriarchy which has arisen from both the traditions of the old society and the doctrines of the new.

The destruction of precolonial social structures and the denigration of traditional culture were effected by colonialism, giving rise to patriarchy as it exists in contemporary black society. Added to this are the numerous laws of the apartheid regime which condemned African women to the status of perpetual minors, regardless of their age and marital status. Until recently, women could not own property in their own right, enter into contracts without the aid and consent of their male guardians or act as guardians of their own children, and therefore always subject to the authority of men. Thus aided and abetted by the legal system, black men, however powerless themselves against the law, took it upon themselves to assert their authority in all spheres of women's lives.

Yet this was not always the case in traditional society. Women had more rights as regards both their person and property than have been conceded to them by alien courts, as pointed out by H.J. Simons (1968:187). Initiative and the right to act rested with the family rather than the individual. There were clearly defined positions for each member, but the household constituted an integral whole. Neither man nor woman could normally exist outside a domestic group, and the activities of the sexes were complementary and not in conflict. While it is true that women occupied a subordinate position, it is also true that they were not oppressed. Women did not contend with men for power, rank or office because their roles were not competitive. Simons states:

A woman shared her father's or husband's rank. She undertook much of the laborious work in the home and fields, not for an employer but for a family to which she and her children belonged. What she produced or acquired did not become the ‘property’ of her husband. It formed part of a joint family estate which he managed, not in the capacity of ‘owner’, but as head and senior partner (Simons 1968:187/8).

2.2.3 The ‘coloureds’

Of all the black peoples of South Africa, the ‘coloureds’ feature more frequently than the rest in the Afrikaans literature. Afrikaans authors, critics and sociologists will no doubt argue that this is so because the ‘coloureds’ are almost akin to the white Afrikaner as far as their language, religion and culture are concerned; many will profess to have intimate knowledge of the ‘coloured’; few will admit that they share the same ancestry. Be that as it may, the true reasons for their preoccupation and almost paranoic obsession with ‘coloured’ become abundantly clear when the Afrikaans literature is studied and age-old stereotypes applied to the Khoi are persistently appearing with regard to the present-day ‘coloured’.

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For the white establishment it is important that the ‘coloured’ is portrayed in the way it is done in the Afrikaans novel; the mixing of blood produces a degenerate sub-human species; the products of such admixtures inherit only the weak and negative characteristics of the parents; only white people who are weak of character will consort with black people who are equally weak of character to produce an even weaker ‘coloured’. Therefore, miscegenation should be discouraged at all costs, even making it a punishable offence, with no regard for whether the parties involved display a genuine affection or love for one another. With this kind of indoctrination the actual sinister reason for miscegenation is concealed, viz. fear that the white race in South Africa shall dwindle into insignificance or become extinct and the country taken over by a breed of half-castes. What appears to be indicative and symptomatic of the society we live in, is the complete absolution of the (white) male, while all the blame is apportioned to the black woman for bringing about this breed of half-castes.

It must be stated categorically that the term ‘coloured’ is as unacceptable to this writer as it is to the vast majority of black people in South Africa who have been thus categorized. The term is neither neutral nor descriptive, is loaded with negative and political connotations and implies at best impurity and contamination; at worst bestiality. Jakes Gerwel (1988:19) articulates his abhorrence of the term thus:

... the term ‘coloured’ is highly controversial. Especially among intellectuals and para-intellectuals who, according to the law are allocated to this category, there is a continual debate about the existence of such a group. On the other hand, there are those who, even if the existence of an identifiable group is conceded, find the term ‘coloured’ as such unacceptable and even abhorrent ... ‘coloured’ is simply an ugly word. In contrast to other terms, e.g. Xhosa, ‘coloured’ has no cultural content. It actually refers to the breeding history of people: a member of this and that sub-species mated and in the event a ‘coloured’ emerged ... ‘coloured’ is a crude term. The basis of rejection, however, is the whole idea of categorization.

I am using the term ‘coloured’ under duress, mainly to make a distinction between the categories of black as espoused by the apartheid regime, because these groups of people are also treated and described differently according to this false statutory categorization. The term ‘brown people’ (‘bruinmense’) is equally a misnomer, since it refers to skin colour - the entire spectrum of human skin colour manifests itself in the black people of South Africa.

Several sociological, political, cultural and economic studies - regardless of whether they are scientifically sound or not - by white South African and Western researchers have been made of the ‘coloureds’ of South Africa.^13. These range from a sympathetic approach to absolute bias against and censure or condemnation of

13. Of the sixteen studies on ‘coloureds’ I could find, only four are by English South Africans or other Westerners, the rest by Afrikaners which to me is an indication of their obsession with the ‘purity’ of their race.

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this group of people. Most of these researchers include in their study genealogical explanations and definitions of the ‘coloured’ people.

In his study, Segregeer of sterf (Segregate or die), H.J.J.M. van der Merwe (1961:4) explains the genealogical composition of the ‘coloureds’ thus:

The most important contribution to the origin of the coloureds is made by the admixture of Hottentots and the slaves who were mostly of Eastern origin. A section of these bastards migrated into the interior of the country and formed the core of the group which is now known as the Griquas. There are actually four components in the formation of the coloureds: first of all, then, the admixture of Hottentot and slave, then the European admixture and thirdly a thin stream of Bushman blood. In the meantime, more European blood was continually added, mainly from visiting sailors. Fourthly, a considerable amount of Bantu intermixing took place in recent years.

J.S. Marais (1962) similarly identifies four elements which combined to produce the ‘coloured’ people of today, but unlike Van der Merwe, he does not include the ‘Bantu intermixing’. According to Marais, the present-day ‘coloured’ population descended from slaves, Hottentots, Europeans and Bushmen. In all research reports there seems to be consensus about the slave, Hottentot and European strain in the ‘coloured’ people but no consensus about the strength of the various strains. White, Western researchers tend to minimise the strength of the European strain while emphasising the slave and Hottentot strains. Some researchers, notably Afrikaners, even go as far as to view the ‘coloureds’ as descendants mainly of the Hottentots, with a very thin sprinkling of European blood in their veins. Marais (1962:31), however, concludes that ‘it is safe to say that in the Coloured population of today the slave strain is more important than the Hottentot’ and further states that ‘... a considerable amount of “new” European blood has been infused into the Coloured population of the Cape Peninsula by foreigners (soldiers, sailors and others) who for various reasons visited its shores’. It is noteworthy that both Van der Merwe and Marais emphasise the ‘visiting sailors’, thereby not only launching a vicious attack on the ‘coloured’ woman's morals but also reinforcing the stereotype of the black whore who would sell her body to anyone who is willing to pay. Little or no mention is made of the exploitative role of the European male or of the fact that strong and lasting marriage relationships between white men and black women existed before the Immorality Act and the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act put paid to such unions.

Since most researchers emphasise the ‘Hottentot’ element in the origin of the ‘coloured’ people and some even go as far as to suggest that the ‘coloureds’ have inherited only the Hottentot traits,^14. I consider it necessary to include here a brief account of the way these indigenous people were perceived by the early European visitors to the shores of South Africa and how these perceptions have shaped white attitudes and policies towards the ‘coloured’ people of today. Let it be said

14. For example, the Afrikaans author F.A. Venter writes in his novel Die middag voel na warm as (1974) about the ‘coloured’ labourers on the farm of the white narrator: ‘They [the Hottentots], the “most miserable of the human race”, with a speech like the clucking of turkey-cocks, are the ancestors of Pieter Adonis and the others who are helping me today to till the river soil’ (p. 11). He further describes them as ‘the descendants of a race who inhabited the Olifants River valley centuries before the white man came’ (p. 8) and as ‘the pure-bred descendants of their ancestors’ (p. 9 - my emphasis).

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at once that the term ‘Hottentot’ is equally unacceptable to the black people of South Africa as is the term ‘coloured’, for ‘Hottentot’ and its syncopatic derivation ‘Hotnot’ - originally an onomatopoeic word coined by the Dutch for someone with a speech impediment and transferred by Dutch explorers to the Khoi because their language with its numerous implosive clicks sounded like stuttering to the ignorant eurocentric ear - has become an abusive, invective word applied by white Afrikaners to ‘coloureds’, containing in it all the negative images and stereotypes those early explorers passed on to the colonists and which tenaciously persist until the present day.

The tragedy of the modern world is that these and other indigenous peoples could not preserve their observations of the interlopers for posterity by means of the written word, for it would have been more than interesting to compare their and the European perceptions of each other. It is also tragic that the Khoikhoi (‘People of People’ - for that is the name of this race) have virtually been wiped out by the colonisers, if not by their firearms during the wars of dispossession and having been driven into the inhospitable wastes of the semi-desert, then by the genocidal smallpox epidemics brought into the country by seamen and colonists. Never having been confronted with this disease and therefore not having built up a natural immunity against it, the Khoi quickly succumbed, so that what they could orally hand down to their descendants has largely been lost forever. However, through the efforts of historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and other human scientists, the little that has been preserved as well as some oral evidence, are carefully pieced together so that a picture gradually emerges which gives a lie to much of what is commonly accepted as veracious. Another factor which contributed to this one-sided view of the Khoi is the language question. European explorers in general did not deem it necessary to acquaint themselves with the language of the Khoi - or any other indigenous race for that matter - either because they perceived this language to be of an inferior quality and usually compared it to animal sounds (see below) or because they found it too difficult to assimilate. It was left to the Khoi to create a kind of lingua franca, containing English, Dutch and French expressions, to be able to communicate with the Europeans, where such communication existed. Then again, the accounts of such communication must once more be viewed with circumspection, since a one-sided interpretation, misinterpretation and even misrepresentation are not excluded.

The Amsterdam publishing house of Jodocus Hondius must be held largely responsible for the perpetuation of the many existing stereotypes attached to the Khoi and passed on to the ‘coloured’ people of today. Hondius^15. compiled from travellers' reports and published a little book entitled Klare Besgryving van Cabo de Bona Esperança (translated by L.C. van Oordt as A Clear Description of the Cape of Good Hope) in 1652, the same year the Dutch arrived at the Cape to establish a refreshment station. From the mass of impressions these travellers received at the Cape, they already have selected only the most ‘remarkable’ ‘facts’ about the

15. Hondius himself never set foot in South Africa.

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Khoi and Hondius in turn went about as selectively by including in his book only those which would have the most striking impact on the European public. One should bear in mind that many of these so-called travellers never set foot in the Cape but merely copied information from one book to another.

The following observations of the Khoi appear in Hondius' book:

The local natives have everything in common with the dumb cattle, barring their human nature...They are handicapped in their speech, clucking like turkey-cocks ...Their food consists of herbs, cattle, wild animals and fish. The animals are eaten together with their internal organs. Having been shaken out a little, the intestines are not washed, but as soon as the animal has been slaughtered or discovered, these are eaten raw, skin and all ... A number of them will sleep together in the veld, making no difference between men and women ... They all smell fiercely, as can be noticed at a distance of more than twelve feet against the wind, and they also give the appearance of never having washed (Van Oordt 1952:26-28).

Since then, officials and travellers with one accord reinforced these observations. Christopher Fryke, who visited the Cape in 1685, had this to say about them:

...I saw a parcel of them lying together like so many hogs, and fast asleep; but as soon as they were aware of me, they sprang up and came to me, making a noise like turkeys ... I made haste to be gone, because of the nasty stench ... Moreover, some I found at their eating, which made the stink yet more unbearable, since they had only a piece of cow-hide, laid out upon the coals a-broiling, and they had squeezed the dung out of the guts, and smeared it with their hands over one another.^16.

Van Riebeeck referred to them as ‘stinckende beesten’^17. (‘stinking animals’) and other ‘remarkable’ facts about them are repeated again and again in the early records, for example their turkey-gobbling speech, their eating of unwashed intestines, their use of animal fat to smear their bodies, their wrapping of dried entrails around their necks, peculiarities of the pudenda of their women, their inability to conceive of God but most of all their incorrigible indolence.^18. The following are but a few of such descriptions and denunciations:

Jan Nieuhof, 1654: ‘They are lazier than the tortoises which they hunt and eat’.

Volquart-Iversen, 1667: ‘They are a lazy and grimy people who will not work ...
They are idle, and like to sit without doing anything’.

O.F. Mentzel, 1787: ‘They are lazy, idle, improvident’.^19.

‘Idleness’, ‘indolence’, ‘improvidence’, ‘sloth’, ‘laziness’ - these are terms meant to define a Khoi vice. These observations were based mainly on the fact that the Khoi did not practise agriculture. It did not occur to the observers that a lifestyle differing from theirs was unfolding before them; it did not enter their

16. Cited by J.M. Coetzee (1988:16/17).

17. Cited by H.J.J.M. van der Merwe (1961:2).

18. Little mention of Khoi idleness occurs in R. Raven-Hart's summary of travellers' accounts of visits to the Cape before 1652. Only three of the approximately 150 reports mention idleness, deduced from the fact that the Khoi did not practise agriculture.

19. See J.M. Coetzee for an excellent account of the purported Khoi idleness.

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eurocentric thinking which was fortressed against the new, the unique and the different that the Khoi were living in an environment which provided for their physical needs, that their traditional diet of milk, meat and veldkos (forage food) was sufficient for them and their ancestors; neither were they particularly interested in the fact that the Khoi were pastoralists and hunters par excellence, by no means activities to be associated with idleness. Nor did it occur to them that the half-naked state of the Khoi was an expediency against the sometimes unbearable heat of the country (imagine the Khoi's amazement at the settlers' heavy, cumbersome clothing!) and smearing their bodies with animal fat and dung was probably their version of modern-day lotions to protect the skin against the ravages of the sun.

In addition to the Khoi's so-called idleness which the present-day ‘coloureds’ purportedly inherited, their appetite for strong drink, for which they acquired a taste only after the white man had set foot on South African soil, is another stereotype persisting until today. The Khoi readily succumbed to the temptation of strong drink. Never having been confronted with alcohol and its effects, it is not difficult to understand that they must have been curious, bemused and much impressed by a liquid that gave them a false sense of bravado, not realising then that brandy and arrack were the chief inducements offered to chicane them out of their cattle, sheep and land. As late as 1774 the Landdrost of Swellendam was asking his government for 388 cans of arrack to be used in the Hottentot trade.^20. The ‘tot system’ which remains in force until the present day, especially on the wine farms, has its origins in the early days of the settlement. The masters supplied liquor to their servants ‘in part payment of wages... according to the usual practice of the country’.^21. This ‘part payment of wages’ is a misrepresentation. What happened in fact was that these servants were paid entirely in kind: liquor on an empty stomach after a hard day's toiling; a daily meal which the farmers considered suitable for their labourers; a hovel where they could live and from which they could be evicted at the master's whim. Money was seldom if ever considered as payment for their services.

Sympathetic observers of the Khoi and quasi-scientists often blamed their debilitating diet for their ‘sloth’ and inability to think. Peter Kolb, for example, described them in 1719 as: ‘They are, without doubt, both in body and mind, the laziest people under the sun’ and Anders Sparrman said of them in 1783: ‘A dull, inactive ... disposition ... is the leading characteristic of their minds’.^22. In 1823 the Rev. H.P. Hallbeck, Superintendent of the Moravian missions at the Cape, defined the chief weakness of the Khoi character as ‘want of energy of mind by which every good impression, every laudable resolution, is but too soon effaced and forgotten, and he is rendered unable to go through undertakings which require steadiness, perseverence and independence of character’, hence the necessity of missionary stations ‘where he is sure to find good advisers and gradually acquire more strength of mind’.^23. Observations such as these were no doubt fostered by the

20. D. Moodie: The Record, Part III, p. 3.

21. D. Moodie: Records, Part VII, p. 111 and Part XXXV, p. 330.

22. Cited by Coetzee (1988:18).

23. British Parliamentary Papers 50 of 1835, pp. 26, 27.

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Khoi's nomadic, easy-going existence and the inability of the European mind to conceive that a people could have no fixed abode. Being pastoralists is a country where grazing and climatic conditions are erratic to say the least, the Khoi were constantly, under threat of drought, in search of better grazing and waterholes for their fat-tailed, hairy sheep and long-horned cattle.

Perhaps the most persistent stereotypes created about the Khoi by these European observers, concern the Khoi woman. The vicious attacks launched against her sexual mores and character are matched only by those made against slave women both in South Africa and other parts of the Western world where slavery was practised. Admittedly, some of these observers make mention of her industry, for example, Francois Valentijn remarked in 1726: ‘The men ... are ... the laziest creatures that can be imagined, since their custom is to do nothing or very little ... If there is anything to be done, they let their women do it’ and C.F. Damberger (1801) said of them: ‘Perhaps the laziest nation upon earth ... However, the women are very industrious in household affairs’.^24. But for the most part she is described in bestial terms; she is denigrated and verbally abused, while at the same time made the laughing stock of humankind and considered the worst possible insult to womanhood. Van der Merwe (1961:3-4), for example, writes about intermarriage between white colonists and Khoi women in the early days of the settlement:

... these things were tolerated but not encouraged. The involved parties were actually shunned; they were just not persona grata in the social life, and a few of these mixed marriages failed so dismally through the degeneration of the man, for example Rijck Overhagen, that they together with wife and children were packed off to Java. These failures must be ascribed in the highest degree to the lower level of civilisation of the non-white woman who debased her husband to her level (Van der Merwe's emphasis).

Not only were the ‘peculiarities’ of her pudenda^25. and her steatopygiac physical form ridiculed, caricatured and denounced,^26. but in these reports she is also depicted as someone with the breeding capacity of no other animal on earth. Her essential female sexuality is bestial in comparison to that of the European woman; as mother she is likened to those animals who abandon their young soon after giving birth to them. Sander L. Gilman (1986:231) comments on the perceptions of the Khoi woman by European observers as follows:

The antithesis of European sexual mores and beauty is embodied in the black, and the essential black, the lowest rung on the great chain of being, is the Hottentot. The physical appearance of the Hottentot is, indeed, the central nineteenth-century icon for sexual difference between the European and the black ...

24. Cited by Coetzee (1988:18).

25. If one is to believe what is written in the reports of these observers, then one must find it strange that they could write about her genitalia since, according to these reports, the Khoi woman's lower extremities were covered by a kind of skirt made of skin. Can one then assume that they must have had knowledge of the ‘peculiarities’ of her pudenda through sexual intercourse? Or did they base their assumptions on reports of the autopsy performed on Saartjie Baartman?

26. A case in point is Saartjie Baartman who, because of her steatopygia and ‘peculiar’ pudenda, was displayed in many Western European countries, ostensibly for scientists to study these syndromes but more especially to exhibit her to the public, to be stared and gaped at like a zoo animal. A second Khoi woman, also called ‘the Hottentot Venus’ like Saartjie Baartman, was a prize attraction in the nude at a ball given by the Duchess Du Barry in 1829 (see Gilman 1986:232).

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Gilman continues by citing from the work of the French race biologist, J.J. Virey, who postulates that the black woman's ‘voluptuousness [is] developed to a degree of lascivity unknown in our climate, for their sexual organs are much more developed than those of whites’. Virey then cites the Hottentot woman as the epitome of this sexual lasciviousness and stresses the relationship between her physiology and her physiognomy (her ‘hideous form’ and her ‘horribly flattened nose’).

In Hondius' book not much mention is made of the Khoi woman, except to emphasise that she is ‘zeer lelijk van aangezicht’ (‘of extremely ugly countenance’, p. 28) and from the report of P. van Kaarden who visited the Cape in 1608, we learn that ‘daar werde ook vrouwen gevonden met groote borsten en hebben zwart en lelijk hayr’ (‘there are also women with large breasts and ugly black hair’, p. 28). The Khoi woman's breasts - or rather the manner in which they are depicted by these observers - have become objects of much ridicule and a metaphor to emphasise her bestiality, as shall be illustrated in the ensuing chapters. A case in point is a drawing included in the ‘Wit over Zwart’ (‘White on Black’) exhibition held in the Tropen Museum in Amsterdam in 1990 in which a breast-feeding Khoi woman is depicted: the infant is carried on her back, her overlarge, elongated breast is thrown over her shoulder so that the nipple can be within reach of the infant's mouth.

The Khoi woman's sexual mores also come under attack which, together with the emphasis on her breasts, serve as indicators of her essential role, i.e. that of breeder. According to the reports of Matelief and Z. van Regter who visited the Cape in 1608 and 1629 respectively, the Khoi ‘Will sleep together in the veld, making no difference between men and women, their legs crossing one another's bodies...’ (Hondius 1652:30). Yet, although these observers ostensibly had a clear view of the Khoi woman's breasts and pudenda, they also mention in their reports: ‘There are also women with ugly skins tied round their upper bodies and also one skin tied round their lower parts’ (Hondius 1652:30). It is perhaps not too far-fetched to suggest that these observers must have had more intimate knowledge of the Khoi woman's body than they dared to admit.

2.2.3.1 ‘Try-for-white’

When one considers the previously mentioned stereotypes about the Khoi which were transferred to the present-day ‘coloureds’, it is not surprising that the peculiar syndrome of ‘try-for-white’/‘passing for white’/‘play white’ reared its head in South African society. By a concerted and persistent process of indoctrination, propaganda and brain-washing, blacks, in particular ‘coloureds’, were made to feel ashamed of their humanity, their ancestry and the colour of their skin. Some even went so far as to curse their ‘colouredness’, as can be observed in the poetry of, for

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example, S.V. Petersen and the fictitious Derk Booysen in the novel Die Koperkan (see Chapter 3). As stated before, the ‘coloureds’ of South Africa display a remarkable variety of hues and colours, ranging from whiter than white to ebony black. When legislation was introduced in 1950 to separate the various races and ‘coloureds’ categorised as a separate ‘race’ with none of the privileges reserved for whites but still not as badly off as the Africans, it seemed logical for some of the lighter-skinned ‘coloureds’ to have themselves either reclassified as white or to ‘play white’. One should remember that in most cases this was done for purely economic reasons, i.e. they could procure better-paid jobs and transcend the racial barrier to be employed in positions reserved for whites. In a country where upward economic mobility for the black majority is virtually impossible, it is difficult to condemn those ‘coloureds’ who saw ‘passing for white’ as the only means to uplift themselves economically. It must also be mentioned that most of those who could easily pass for white, chose to remain ‘coloured’ out of political loyalty to their compatriots.

Of course, an additional reason for the phenomenon of ‘passing for white’ emerges. In wanting to become like those who have dominated, despised and rejected them, the ‘coloureds’ of South Africa have been behaving like members of many other dominated, despised and rejected groups. It became part of the common experience of certain sections of the colonised peoples during the Western imperial epoch. For some ‘coloureds’ the solution seemed to be ‘passing’ into the white population. But to ‘pass’ is preferable only for relatively few. More generally people have to find other ways of assimilating the dominant view of themselves and of expressing the self-rejection and self-hatred that follows from this. Among black South Africans the forms and modes of this process are endlessly varied. One of the most pervasive of these has been the institution of colour caste which raised ‘whiteness’ to the highest value in all aspects of life. This meant everything pertaining to civilisation, culture, religion and human worth. It became among blacks an intricate system of social, group and personal relationships based directly on degrees of relative darkness and other degrees of physical blackness, i.e. the shape and kinds of features, hair texture, lips and nose which were ‘good’ if they resembled those of whites; ‘bad’ if they did not. In coming to terms with him-/herself, every black person has had in one way or another to cope with the infinity of ways in which ‘white’ is elevated above ‘black’. The association of white and black with light and darkness and the translation of these qualities of light into polarities of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and ‘beauty’ and ‘ugliness’ have taken place in the conventions and languages of many cultures, but in few has this conversion of physical facts into religious and aesthetic values been worked harder than in the South African case.

The process of passing for white is made feasible, in the first place, by the fact that the cultures of the white and ‘coloured’ peoples are very similar; in the second place, by the fact that there are infinite gradations between white and ‘coloured’

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skins and physiognomies, so that it is often not possible to tell from physical features alone to which ‘race’ a particular person belongs. Graham Watson (1972:459), though relative progressive in his thinking about racial assimilation in South Africa, nevertheless deems it fit to mention certain attributes - ostensibly primarily ‘coloured’ traits - which make it difficult for them to pass for white: their ‘rumbustious way of life, ... loyalty to a coon troupe ... and a taste for dagga’. It is clear that Watson bases these assumptions on existing stereotypes about the ‘coloureds’, without taking the trouble of proving the veracity of his sweeping generalisations and without admitting that these self-same traits are characteristic of many whites.

The arbitrary nature of racial classification demonstrates how different members of the same family can be classified disparately for the purposes of legislation and how each member may act over time and in varying circumstances as a member of more than one ‘race’. For many ‘coloureds’ who could pass for white, it meant a schizophrenic situation of being employed during the daytime as a white and living as a ‘coloured’ after working hours. The psychological effects of such a double life are difficult to visualise - the uncertainty, the fear of discovery which would surely lead to dismissal and shame, the deliberate disowning of family and friends in public places. (See Chapter 3 for the ‘futility’ and ‘tragedy’, according to Mikro's novel, of trying to pass for white.)

It would be sorely amiss not to acknowledge the pivotal studies done by Jakes Gerwel and Vernon February on stereotyping in the literature of Afrikaans. Both these scholars have made a valuable contribution to our understanding of the way literature has influenced the political ideology of the Afrikaners. In Gerwel's study one is made aware of how the early Afrikaans novel indirectly but undeniably helped with the ideological conditioning and preparation for apartheid. In his study, Literatuur en Apartheid (1979), he identifies mainly three stereotypes applied to the ‘coloured’ in the early Afrikaans novel: (a) the ‘coloured’ as the ‘jollie hotnot’, image of the sorrowless, comical servant-figure; (b) the ‘coloured’ as coincidental background figure in an agrarian set-up with strong feudal characteristics; (c) ‘the “coloureds” are still children’ where the ‘coloured’ is portrayed as a so-called complete human being but who remains the ‘idealised child’. In Mind your Colour (1981) February focuses on the ‘coloured’ stereotype, but whereas Gerwel concentrates on the Afrikaans novel only, February incorporates different genres - prose, poetry and drama - in the different languages of South Africa into his study. It is about the creation and maintenance of a cultural stereotype and deals with the image forced upon the ‘coloureds’ by South African society, an image which reflects and reinforces the political subordination of the group. His thesis is that literature in South Africa serves as a means of social control and repression.

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While I have gleaned much from the insights of these two scholars, their respective studies reveal two shortcomings: (i) little or no attention is given to the portrayal of the black woman in the works they have studied and (ii) both concentrate on the stereotyping of ‘coloureds’, thereby excluding the portrayal of the other oppressed people of South Africa. There are, however, profound reasons for these omissions: the black woman as a character in the Afrikaans novel prior to the 1950s has never been a factor, except where she fulfilled the one-dimensional role of nanny or domestic servant; characters from the African and Asian population groups likewise did not feature in the Afrikaans novel, except as incidental background figures, until 1958 with Swart Pelgrim and very sporadic after that. Hopefully this study will rectify one of those omissions, viz. the portrayal of the black woman character in the Afrikaans novel after 1948.

2.3 Concluding remarks

The above is merely a very general and broad overview of the situation of white/Afrikaner and black women in South Africa today to give an indication of their widely divergent positions but also to illustrate that both groups are victims of strong patriarchal structures. Even with regard to patriarchy, the motives behind it for each group differ: Afrikaner women must accept and adhere to the authority of the male for that is part of their religious doctrine; black women must accept the authority of both the white and the black male, for it is a political strategy to keep them in positions of servitude.

I have gone into some depth about perceptions of the Khoi and especially the Khoi woman to illustrate in the ensuing chapters that the Khoi/‘coloured’ woman, where she does feature as a character in the Afrikaans novel, cannot and does not escape the treatment meted out to her part-ancestors.