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

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Chapter 3
‘Half the solution’^1.: the period 1948-1959

A dialectical relationship exists between literature and society. Literature does not exist in isolation but is brought about in the context of a society. Similarly, society is not an entity existing in isolation. Solzhenitsyn stated in 1970: ‘The writer is not an outside judge of his compatriots and contemporaries, but an accomplice in all the evil perpetrated in his country or by his people’.

Legislation and events in South Africa have evoked a response in the literature of a particular period with either positive or negative reverberations in the literary world, depending on who the authors and the literary audience are. Literature reacts to social and political conditions by either accepting or rejecting the ideology contained in them. However, the opposite is also true: literature had been used by legislators to justify legislation and to shape political attitudes,^2. for example the Prohibition of the Mixed Marriages Act and the Immorality Act were justified by the then cabinet minister, Dr E. Dönges, by citing extensively from the works of Sarah Gertrude Millin (God's Step-children) and Regina Neser (Kinders van Ishmael), both of whom wrote about the ‘tragic’ consequences of miscegenation, of ‘blood taint’, ‘blood flaw’ and ‘mixed blood’.

In this chapter, I do not wish to give an exposition of the chronological history of the Afrikaans literature but rather my perspective of that literature's response or non-response to legislation and events in South Africa during the period under review.

Periodisation in literature is very often a thorny issue, for it is never easy to ascertain exactly when there are indications of a specific period, trend or genre in literature. Like life itself, literature is an evolutionary process, exhibiting continual shifts in literary phenomena from the centre to the periphery and vice versa. It seems logical to choose 1948 as a point of departure, not so much because it indicates a new trend or new themes in the literature of Afrikaans or because a shift in emphasis had taken place, but for the following reasons:

1. A critic in the English press described Mikor's novel as ‘half the solution’ to South Africa's racial problems, but does not mention what the other half of the solution is,

2. See February, V.A. (1981).

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i	In his study, Literatuur en Apartheid, Jakes Gerwel points out how the early Afrikaans literature up to 1948 had unmistakably aided and abetted the ideological preparation for apartheid;
ii	The National Party came to power after the general election of 1948 and immediately passed a series of laws which institutionalised apartheid;
iii	Although the literary themes remained virtually unchanged after 1948, a new trend does emerge in certain sectors: literature is now used to espouse the merits of apartheid legislation;
iv	1959 indicates an end to this particular literary era since certain Afrikaner authors started to rebel against the stagnant nature of the Afrikaans literary tradition.

3.1 Literary trends

The general election of 26 May 1948 in South Africa brought to power the Nationalist Party, which set about a programme of racial and repressive legislation whose model was the legislation of Nazi Germany. Very soon after assuming power the N.P. rushed through parliament with almsot indecent haste the bulk of its apartheid legislation. With these legislations apartheid was firmly established and institutionalised and every attempt was made to create a white South Africa and to crush any resistance. However, these measures were not left unchallenged by the mass of the people and numerous protest actions took place in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. The government's response was to introduce even more legislation, e.g. the Suppression of Communism Act (1950), giving it extensive repressive powers.

What was the literary response to legislation and events in South Africa between 1948 and 1959? On the Afrikaans literary scene there was a deafening silence about what was happening in the political arena. One should bear in mind that, as staunch Calvinists, white Afrikaners believed (still believe?) unwaveringly that the white races were destined to rule the world and subjugate the dark peoples; that their rulers were chosen by God, ruled by this divine right and that their decisions should therefore never be questioned. Moreover, the measures taken by the apartheid regime safe-guarded them and guaranteed their privileges, supplied them with the opportunities for self-fulfillment and created space for them to accrue material wealth to the detriment of the black masses. By their silence one can therefore conclude that they condoned apartheid legislation.

As before 1948, Afrikaans authors continued their preoccupation with the immorality of urban life, the pernicious effects of urbanisation on Afrikaner morals and the ‘poor white’ question, which gave rise to concerted efforts by the government to eradicate this social problem from white society. The farm novel of the first half of the twentieth century continued to be the favoured genre even

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after 1948, a genre which perpetuated the myth of natural right. The literature of this period is also characterised by the glorification of the Afrikaner past, their heroic struggles against the so-called black barbarians, their untiring efforts to tame this perceived wild land, and their undaunting courage against the British in the Anglo-Boer War. In short, the Afrikaans literature of this period consisted of parochial or local art, small realisms and social issues affecting the Afrikaner.

However, a few Afrikaans authors of this period did venture into the realm of the black peoples of Southern Africa, mainly focusing on their folklore in numerous sketches and short stories. The particular life-style of black people, their history, origin, myths, stories and hunting habits, albeit from a white perspective, became the themes of authors such as Minnie Postma, P.J. Schoeman and G.H. Franz. Minnie Postma focused especially on the tales of the Basotho, involving cannibals, monsters, animals, princes and princesses with love, revenge and death as motives. Schoeman collects a series of widely divergent tales and sketches, among them hunting adventures in Zululand, Swaziland and East Africa, he portrays Zulu and Swazi figures and records legends, fables and moments in their history from their story treasures. He portrays for example in Mboza, die Swazi a young black man who strays from the ancestral path and becomes uprooted as a result of the civilising influence of white schools.^3. In Rook of die horison (Smoke on the horizon) published in 1949, he portrays the pernicious influence of the city of gold on the detribalised black man. Franz too records stories told to him by wise old Basotho men. Perhaps his most important contribution is the novel, Moeder Poulin (1946), in which an old Basotho woman, Mother Poulin, tells by means of flash-backs the story of her life on an idyllic farm where she raises white children, but this peaceful existence is shattered when the Anglo-Boer War breaks out. In the work of these three writers, however, the black person remains a noble savage not to be exposed to white culture as this will have a devastating effect on him/her. What is also striking about their work, is that they have chosen to write about black people beyond the borders of South Africa. It makes one wonder whether this is a conscious attempt to dismiss the blacks of their own country as of little consequence and whether they employ this strategy to circumvent the injustices perpetrated by their own people.

Few white Afrikaans authors responded directly to legislation during this particular period. F.A. Venter portrays in Swart Pelgrim (1958) the negative effects of the ‘white man's cities’ on the black person and delivers an unmitigated plea for the institution of bantustans. In Die Koperkan (1959), Mikro responds to the Prohibition of the Mixed Marriages Act by making an undisguised plea for the retention of this and other apartheid laws. In Ons, die afgod (1958), Jan Rabie tells the story of a ‘coloured’ man who, after spending many years at sea, returns to his birthplace, tries to purchase a piece of land on which to farm because of his love for the place of his origin but is resisted in his attempts to do so by the white farmers of the area. In contrast to Venter and Mikro, Rabie does not plead for more apartheid

3. Cf. in this respect the policy statement made in 1954 by Hendrik Verwoerd as Minister of Native Affairs: ‘There is no place for the Bantu in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour. His education should therefore not mislead him by showing him the green pastures of European society in which he is not allowed to graze’ (cited by Bernstein 1985:77).

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legislation but rather attempts to condemn the effects thereof on the entire population of South Africa. However, the novel abounds with stereotypes about the ‘coloured’, his drunkenness, loose morals, untrustworthiness and dishonesty. Significantly, the literature of this period is marked by the absence of the black woman as a meaningful character.

3.2 F.A. Venter

3.2.1 Venter's oeuvre regarding blacks

In emulation of his predecessors, Venter continues in the Afrikaans literary tradition by choosing an agrarian set-up in which to portray his characters. This also holds true for his black, mostly ‘coloured’ characters, all of whom are utilised as ‘stofferingselemente’ (‘fillers’, Van Rensburg 1987:84), i.e. peripheral figures, those who do the work in the novels.

Venter's entire oeuvre consists of children's stories, short stories, sketches and novels. In contrast to the most important narrative authors of the late 1950s and early 1960s, he does not experiment with new techniques or new material; rather, his work is a continuation and refinement of that which authors before him attempted. This association with older authors also has a bearing upon his later work in which he explores the farming life and the life of the ‘coloureds’ in that milieu, for example Werfjoernaal (Journal of a Farmyard - 1965), an anthology of sketches; Die Rentmeesters (The Stewards - 1969), a novel; Die middag voel na warm as (this title is taken from N.P. van Wyk's poem, ‘Klipwerk’ and can be literally translated as The noonday feels like embers - 1974), a novel in which the author's observations of the life and personal exigence of ‘coloured’ farm labourers are depicted; and Kambro-kind (Kambro Child - 1979), an anthology of sketches.

However, one of Venter's early novels exploring the life of blacks, specifically the African, is Swart Pelgrim (Dark Pilgrim), published for the first time in 1952. This novel is about the experiences of a Xhosa in Johannesburg. Some critics see a similarity between this novel and Alan Paton's Cry, the beloved country (1948) which also deals with the South African ‘colour’ question. Kannemeyer (1983:51) is of the opinion that with this novel together with Die middag voel na warm as, Venter makes his most important contribution to the Afrikaans literature and diverts from the simplistic handling of the subject-matter by most authors before him with his particular approach and the opening up of new areas of human relations for the Afrikaans narrative.

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3.2.2 Swart Pelgrim (Dark Pilgrim) - 1952/1958

3.2.2.1 Introduction

Swart Pelgrim originally appeared in 1952 but a revised edition was published in 1958 in which Venter omits many adjectives, unnecessary imagery and sensational scenes, while the concluding chapter has been rewritten in such a way that the future of the main character and his family becomes bleaker and more problematic. For the purpose of this study, I am using the 1958 version.

One should perhaps include here a brief account of the reception of the novel by white critics at the time of its second publication and even later. My own comments in the ensuing paragraphs shall then determine to what extent they are in agreement with or a direct contradiction of those views.

At the time of its revised appearance, the novel was widely acclaimed by white critics as ‘the kind of book which enriches one's life’ (Die Burger) and ‘a novel ... which rises above the level of present-day literary art’ (G.S. Nienaber). The literary critic of The Cape Times had this to say: ‘Mr Venter's knowledge of Native conditions in the reserves and his understanding of the Native way of thinking make his book at once moving and convincing’. The Star's critic wrote: ‘... the best book that has appeared in Afrikaans with colour as the theme is F.A. Venter's Swart Pelgrim. Venter has no chip on his shoulder. He just gives us what is happening right now - the tragedy and conflict of the Native driven into the big city of the White man’. The reception of the novel further includes opinions such as: ‘The remarkability of Swart Pelgrim lies in the sober articulation of the narrative facts. The writer never chooses sides’ (Die Suidwes-Afrikaner); ‘... the word regains its evocative power... [Venter] masterly succeeds in revealing the essence with single salient strokes’ (Die Volksblad); ‘... Swart Pelgrim is a spectacular milestone on the road of the development of the black man to a multidimensional individual’ (F.I.J. van Rensburg) and J.C. Kannemeyer posits that Venter opens up new areas of human relations for the Afrikaans narrative with this novel.

However, the work is also criticised for its ‘external dramatics, theatrical effects, shallow characterisation and a much too ornate style’ (Kannemeyer 1983:51). Van Rensburg (1987:84) considers it as ‘still stereotypic’ but only as far as the strong graphic language - which is supposedly characteristic of black language usage - is concerned. Significantly, no mention is made of the numerous stereotypes about blacks which are found in the novel.

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3.2.2.2 Title, ‘topicality’ and story

Symptomatic of South African society, the author finds it imperative to give an indication in the title of his novel that it deals with the ‘colour’ question, or at least part thereof. As in Die Koperkan by Mikro but even less subtle, the title of Venter's novel marks and foreshadows colour and its related connotations. The reader, especially if s/he is South African, will immediately relate the title to either a black person or a person/pilgrim to whom all the negative attributes of the colour black is ascribed. The fact that the pilgrim is described as ‘black’, also suggests a certain duality or opposition in the meaning of the title, for a pilgrim is usually one who journeys to a sacred place as an act of religious devotion. If ‘black’ then connotes ‘sin’, ‘evil’, ‘barbarism’, etc., the person referred to in the title cannot possibly be a pilgrim. In addition, the narrative text which follows the title clearly tells of Kolisile's (the pilgrim's) journey to and sojourn in Johannesburg where he is confronted with degeneration and decadence.

Moreover, a pilgrim undertakes his/her sacred journey with the aim of bringing about change for the better in his/her life and in the lives of the people, society or ideology s/he represents. Since the title is usually an ‘empty’ sign which has to be ‘filled in’ by the narrative text following it, the reader expects that the promises made in it shall be fulfilled, ironised or proved wrong.

On the level of discourse, another sombre fact pertaining to South African - and even universal - society at large emerges from the title: the addition of the adjective ‘black’ implies that a pilgrim is usually white (cf. ‘Black Messiah’, ‘Black Prophet’, ‘Black Saviour’, etc.) and that a clear distinction should be made between a ‘pilgrim’ and a ‘black pilgrim’; it implies the vast difference not only between the pilgrims but also between the pilgrimages undertaken: the one elevated and spiritual, the other base and material. According to Ampie Coetzee (1990:26), the ideological message of the novel has never been spelt out by literary critics, viz. that there could be no black pilgrims to the land of the white people in the Verwoerdian era when the novel made its appearance.

The novel is also hailed as ‘topical’, since it deals with ‘controversial’ material, i.e. the colour question in South Africa. A.P. Grové (1961:201) defines ‘topicality’ in literature thus:

A topical novel deals with ‘hot’, often controversial material; it is a book which concerns itself with contemporary (usually sociological, political and religious) problems, problems which fill the newspapers and consequently occupy the thoughts of the readers, problems which can be viewed as a danger spot (‘gevaarkol’) in society.

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A statement such as the above generates questions such as: Is ‘colour’ necessarily controversial and problematic? If so, who or what is or has been responsible for making it controversial and problematic? Does it of necessity have to be a ‘danger spot’ in society? Nevertheless, the novel is described as ‘topical’ insofar that it deals with a black man from the bantustan and his experiences in the ‘city of the white man’. If it is topical, then the author must, in the course of his narrative, choose sides and suggest possible solutions to the ‘problem’. In the course of the discussion in the following pages, we shall have to ascertain whether in fact the author chooses sides (cf. what the critic in Die Suidwes-Afrikaner states) and suggests solutions to the ‘colour problem’.

The story, briefly, is about Kolisile, the young, strong black man who is forced to leave his ‘homeland’ (bantustan) against the wishes of his aging father, to seek employment in Johannesburg and to look for his long-lost brother, Mfazwe, who has also left the bantustan in search of employment, but never returned to his wife and children. In this sense, Kolisile becomes a pilgrim. After the anguish of his first train journey, he arrives with other migrant workers in the ‘white man's city’ and is confronted with the agonies and fears of working deep down in the bowels of the earth to extract gold for the mining magnates. But his main purpose is to find his brother in order to honour the solemn promise he made to his father, and in this strange city he has to undergo the most horrifying and humiliating experiences in his quest to do so. He is for instance mauled and almost killed in a brutal attack by a vicious dog set upon him by its white mistress who sees Kolisile as a potential robber, rapist and murderer when all he wanted was employment ‘on the land’ instead of working in the dank darkness of the mines; he experiences the devastation of a Highveld thunderstorm on a squatter camp, he is confronted for the first time with the effects of the ‘white man's liquor’; he is cheated and shot at by an Indian shopkeeper; he is forced to become involved in gang activities; he loses a leg in a mine accident while trying to save the life of a white man, and many more, which lead him to believe that the ‘white man's city’ is not meant for him and the likes of him; that his place is back in the bantustan where it is ‘safe’. The story clearly is an undisguised plea for apartheid and the ‘homeland’ policy of the government in South Africa.

3.2.2.3 Language

A well-known feature of Venter's prose is the superfluous use of imagery. However, Kannemeyer (1983:53) contends that in this novel it is used functionally to suggest the idiom of the Xhosa and to contribute to a well-knit structure brought about by the circulation of the imagery. On the other hand, as previously stated, the very language used makes the novel stereotypic since it is presented as characteristic of the language of black people (Van Rensburg 1987:84).

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Nevertheless, what is remarkable about the language usage is that Kolisile speaks to members of his own group in his own language precisely as he speaks to Afrikaners in their language. One gains the impression that the author first listened to a Xhosa speaking Afrikaans to Afrikaans-speakers and deduced from his observations that s/he necessarily speaks in the same manner in his/her own language to fellow Xhosa-speakers. Nowhere in the novel a single sentence appears in the original Xhosa, with the result that it is difficult to test whether in fact the speaker uses the same peculiar syntax and ungrammatical use of the definite article when speaking both Xhosa and Afrikaans. Cf. for example the following:

(Kolisile to Afrikaner woman):
I look for the work, Missus; I look for the work here by the soil. By my own land I work also by the soil by the mealie (maize), by the corn ... yes, Missus (p. 33).

It is unrealistic, even far-fetched to expect Kolisile to speak Afrikaans to the other black characters in the novel. Yet, when such conversations take place, the same mistakes occur as when he speaks Afrikaans. Cf. for example the following conversation between Kolisile and the blind man, Mafasoe:

(Mafasoe is the first speaker):
- Kolisile is the rich man ... he wears the new clothes.
- I wear the new clothes, Mafasoe?
- Yes, Kolisile wears the new clothes...Mafasoe he smells the shop in the clothes of Kolisile.
- Mafasoe speaks right ... Kolisile wears the new clothes from the shop.
- The old heart he is glad Kolisile is back. The rushes are finish, and they take Jackson away by the jail. Now Mafasoe does not buy the rushes for the baskets.
- Kolisile buys the rushes for the baskets, Mafasoe. Kolisile works by the soil and he gets the lots of money.
- Kolisile works by the soil?
- Kolisile works by the soil, Mafasoe ... by the big house where there are trees. Kolisile he ploughs again with the ox. Kolisile he ploughs for the rich man by the big land where the mealie is a lot and where the trees stand with the fruit. And there is also the lots of water. And the plough he has the red wheels and the shiny share. He cuts the soil like the knife.

In the two extracts above the author tries to create the impression that a transfer from Xhosa had taken place. This can be seen most clearly in the phrases ‘the work’, ‘the new clothes’, ‘the lots of money’, etc. With regard to Zulu, Coetzee (1988:127) points out that Zulu speakers speaking English (or Afrikaans for that matter) often have difficulty with the definite article, since Zulu has no corresponding lexical form. The same applies to Xhosa as a member of the Nguni family of languages. It is a mistake to conclude that Xhosa and Zulu speakers

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cannot make the semantic distinctions for which English and Afrikaans rely on the article. ‘The work’, ‘the new clothes’, etc. merely reproduce a common mistake made by Xhosas and Zulus speaking Afrikaans or English; it says nothing about Xhosas speaking Xhosa or Zulus speaking Zulu.

In the conversation between Kolisile and Mafasoe it is not unrealistic to assume that it takes place in Xhosa. Yet one notices several features of a Xhosa's speech when speaking Afrikaans. Firstly, the speakers refer to themselves in the third person, Kolisile refers to himself as ‘Kolisile’ and Mafasoe refers to himself as ‘Mafasoe’, instead of the customary first person singular pronoun ‘I’. A certain inconsistency on the part of the author can be discerned, for in the previous extract and once in the above Kolisile refers to himself as ‘I’. Secondly, the third person is reinforced by the use of the third person singular pronoun ‘he’, e.g. ‘Kolisile he ploughs ...’. Thirdly, the second person singular pronoun, ‘you’, is never used, although both first person and second person singular exist in Xhosa. Fourthly, the definite article is once again used ungrammatically. Fifthly, the incorrect use of the preposition ‘by’. Sixthly, what ought to be a statement, is turned into a question, e.g. ‘Kolisile works by the soil?’. This is not an uncommon feature of several languages, where a statement is turned into a question merely by voice inflection, even though the impression is created here that Xhosa speakers do not know how to convert a statement into a true question. Seventhly, the words of the previous speaker are continually repeated by the second. This can be explained by the fact that Xhosa speakers generally have a great respect for those they are speaking to and repeating the previous speaker's words is a confirmation and acceptance of what that speaker has said. Likewise, a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to a question is considered discourteous, with the result that the entire question is often repeated in the answer, e.g. lines 2 and 3 above. It is not an indication of nonsensical repetition.

Another significan aspect emerges. when a white person speaks in his/her own language to a black, the former tries to emulate the speech of the latter. Cf. for example the white woman whose house Kolisile tries to burgle:

‘But you must not take the money by the white people. It's not right. The Big Man up there shall strike you down ... This money is for the blind man to make me the big basket ... Now you must not come again in the night by the white people ...’ (p. 174).

The speaker has already accepted in her mind that the black man cannot understand a different kind of syntax or semantics other than the one he is using when speaking a foreign language. This presumptuousness is fed by the stereotypic image of the black person as having a limited intellect and conveys a certain naiveté, even childishness which reflect on the quality of mind of its speaker.

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3.2.2.4 Focalization

The narrator in this novel is an instance outside the presented world who besides can be categorised as a superior, white narrator from different traces in the text, for example the use of language as explicated above. The character, Kolisile, through whose eyes, mind and reason the story is being observed, is the seat of the novel's focalization process. He is first of all the focalized object by an external focalizer who perceives Kolisile as a model of what the black man ought to be: physically strong, innocent, humble when dealing with whites, gullible, laughing with white teeth when approaching whites and somebody who knows his place.

But Kolisile is also the focalizing subject, or so it appears. The reader is duped into believing that the perceptions of the other black characters are those of Kolisile. This is a case of where the external focalizer (EF) seems to ‘yield’ focalization to a character-bound focalizer (CF), where the vision of the CF is being given within the all-encompassing vision of the EF. Kolisile's (CF's) focalization is embedded in that of the EF and he once again becomes the object of focalization. Focalization here becomes a device of manipulation. This is especially true where the two black women, Miriam and to a lesser degree, Kamala, become the objects of Kolisile's focalization. One gets the impression that the EF watches along with Kolisile, but it is the EF who focalizes through Kolisile, thus making him the focalized object, the focalizing subject and the medium through which it focalizes. Miriam and Kamala, then, conform to the image the dominant race have of black women. At the same time, the real author absolves himself from any blame of being a racist and sexist because, after all, these are a black man's perceptions of black women!

3.2.2.5 The ‘noble savage’ theme

The ‘noble savage’ is usually an African or other aborigine, not quite human but at the same time also not entirely beast, and more often than not male. His outward appearance includes nakedness or near-nudity, splendid physical proportions, virility and brute strength. As far as his personality - if it exists - is concerned, he is usually docile unless provoked, subservient, laughs with white teeth to indicate his willingness to serve, knows his place, cannot articulate his thoughts and feelings save through periodical emotional outbursts and can easily be corrupted when brought into contact with Western civilisation. The idea is that he should remain in his ‘natural’ habitat to protect himself from corruptive influences, which is also the denial of his right to broaden his horizons. Invariably the noble savage who becomes exposed to Western civilisation (religion, culture, education, etc.) finds himself not equal to the task and consequently makes a complete mess of his life. His ‘nobleness’ resides in the fact that he remains docile and subservient; his ‘savagery’ in his inability to absorb the different culture and to adjust to it.

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With regard to South African literature, the ‘noble savage’ theme began with the arrival of the British Settlers in 1820. English writers like Thomas Pringle generally came from the liberal tradition of nineteenth-century England and one expression of liberal thought was the clamour for the emancipation of slaves. According to Es'kia Mphahlele (1987:49), it was also this liberal mind that conceived the ‘noble savage’ whose nakedness suggested innocence and a clean morality.

One of the earliest novels in Afrikaans dealing with the theme of the ‘noble savage’, is Booia (1931) by Jochem van Bruggen, a story of the disappointing life of a black man, Booia (note the significance of the name!), under the influence of the bad elements of white culture. This theme has also been taken up by P.J. Schoeman and G.H. Franz in Mboza die Swazi and Kobus respectively. Both portray the tribal black man who is simultaneously proud and self-conscious but who experiences everything too passively and who cannot interpret his experiences or see them in a wider context. Elsa Joubert, author of The long journey of Poppie Nongena, also exploits the ‘noble savage’ theme when she portrays the young black man, Bonga, in a novel with the same title. In the Afrikaans literature Venter's Swart Pelgrim takes this theme to its pinnacle.

Closely linked to the ‘noble savage’ theme and particularly South African in origin and content, is the ‘Jim comes to Jo'burg’ theme. Sympathy with the uprooted black man in the city is reflected in this theme, for example Peter Abrahams' novels, Son of the city (1945) and Mine Boy (1946). In present-day literature of the African languages this theme is exploited further. Venter's handling of this theme, however, differs markedly from that by black writers, many of whom have actually experienced the traumatic effects of migrant labour or who have been closely associated or influenced by them.

3.2.2.5.1 Race and ethnicity

In contrast to the numerous explicit references to race and ethnicity, especially the physiognomies of the characters in Die Koperkan, we find that Swart Pelgrim's author is more subtle in his handling of this issue and the description of physical racial features is very sporadic indeed. It is significant that when the villains, especially Jackson and Mfazwe, are depicted, racial features such as ‘thick lips’, ‘broad nose’, ‘protruding eyes’, etc. are invoked to reinforce their roguish nature. None of the black characters has a surname (except Miriam, whose surname only emerges when she as the accused is called by the court orderly to take the stand), in keeping with the South African racial pattern according to which blacks are known to their white employers only by a first name. A few references to ‘kaffir’ appear, for example the young white child tells Kolisile that ‘kaffirs’ had stolen their chickens (p. 75) and Kolisile refers to himself as the ‘bad kaffir’ who cannot help himself (p. 94). Towards the end of the novel the miners are described as

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‘swart skepsels’ (‘black creatures’ - pp. 193, 194). If the ‘noble savage’ theme is handled by white writers, it is only logical to expect that issues of race and ethnicity will be brought into play.

Many of the critics lauded Venter for his ‘sympathetic’ approach to the racial issue and Kannemeyer (1983:52) asserts that ‘Venter's novel largely gives a portrayal of a specific black man's reactions to the foreign milieu, while the white man only features where the main character comes into contact with him’ (my emphasis). Kannemeyer continues by stating that the novel consequently acquires a more homogenous character and a more taut line in the portrayal of tribal life as well as life in the squatter camp and of particular individuals, especially Kolisile, within those worlds.

Despite these assertions, the reader is never ever allowed to forget the role of whites in the ‘upliftment’ of black people, in guiding and directing their lives. The paternal white man/woman is ever-present in the story; its authoritative voice and presence cannot be ignored. The manipulative role of the author is once again apparent when he tries to show that the black person - irrespective of how good and talented s/he might be - can never make it on his/her own, has neither the intellect to organise his/her life efficiently, nor is in a position to make wise choices.

It is particularly significant that the advice and guidance given by whites to blacks in this novel do not take cognisance of the fact that the blacks' unenviable position is largely attributable to government policy. The reader is given the impression that blacks are solely responsible for their situation. For example, the following passage tends to ignore the abject poverty brought about by the Land Act of 1913:

He [Kolisile] once again hears the words of the white man: ‘Kolisile, your land is being washed away; the rain ravages your land; you want to harvest too much from your land; you are ploughing in the wrong manner; you are far too many on this land; you will harvest less and less; your people shall face starvation’. He knows the white man is speaking the truth ... he understands the white man's words (p. 8).

Given the fact that the Bantu Education Act of 1953 made provision for separate education and separate educational standards for the different population groups, and given the fact that the most poverty-stricken and disadvantaged people, the Africans, were required to pay for their schooling while free schooling was provided for more affluent people, one finds it particularly incongruous that the following advice is given by a white woman to Miriam:

When Mfenda and Nofenti were still small, the white woman who takes care of blacks said to Miriam: ‘Miriam, you must send your children to school. You must

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let your children learn. You must not allow your children to become bad. You must promise me that you will send them to school until they have gone far’. Miriam stood with her hands folded in front of her and promised that she would (pp. 46-47).

The manipulation and indoctrination of the reader as well as some of the characters is done in such a way that black people actually believe they are bad and unworthy, that their situation is entirely due to their ‘decadent’ way of life. The character, Mafasoe, blinded and crippled at his work place when the dynamite exploded too soon, becomes the mouthpiece for these ideas and endeavours to indoctrinate Kolisile, Jackson and others as he had been indoctrinated. First of all, he is deeply grateful and indebted to the white man who saved his life by rushing him to hospital and the white woman who taught him to weave baskets after he had lost his sight. He tells Kolisile:

‘If the white man had not been good to me that day, Mafasoe would have been dead. If the white woman had not shown Miriam [how to help me], Mafasoe would have been unable to do anything today. Then Mafasoe would have lain here like a fly without wings. But now Mafasoe makes baskets’ (p. 52).

His gratitude and indebtedness lead him to believe that all whites are good and superior and all blacks are to remain in their position of servitude. In his conversation with Jackson, the only dissenting voice in the story, Mafasoe expresses these views. On Jackson's assertion that schooling is a waste of time and money since the white man only teaches black children that he is boss and that black people must work for him, and his further assertion that Mafasoe wants to remain a slave, Mafasoe replies:

‘The white man is boss, Jackson ... I am not a slave, Jackson. The hawkchicken is not the slave of the golden eagle, but the golden eagle is bigger and stronger than the hawkchicken ... The Great Book says we must work for the white man and the white man must look after us. We are all born equal, but we live differently. When the calf is born, it is stronger than the child, but when they are big, the child is cleverer than the calf ... We do not know as much as the white man does, Jackson; therefore we cannot become boss. We make the building bricks, but the white man makes the big house. Can you make the big house, Jackson? No, you can't. But the white man can’ (pp. 68-69).

Mafasoe had been converted to Christiandom and taught by the white man that it had been destined by God that the blacks shall remain in their subservient position and that their wrongs are punishable by God and the State. Furthermore, he is led to believe that it is unnecessary to find ways and means to improve one's own life, for God shall provide in all our needs. When Kolisile, in a fit of rebelliousness, wants to know why Miriam had been arrested, Mafasoe replies resignedly:

[p. 60]

‘The white man takes Miriam away because she did wrong’ (p. 90). On a further question as to how they would cope financially without Miriam, Mafasoe replies in true right-wing religious fashion:

‘I listen to the white man who reads the Great Book, Kolisile. The white man says the Big Man above shall help us. He gives food to the birds. He also gives food to Mafasoe en Kolisile’ (p. 91).

After Kolisile had joined his brother's gang of robbers, his conscience troubles him continually. Time and again he remembers what Mafasoe had told him about the Great Inkosi:

Now he hears again the soft words of Mafasoe: The big lightning and the hail and the rain came because the Inkosenkulu wants to punish the black people for all the things they do wrong, for murdering, for stealing, for the bad beer they are drinking (p. 171).

These words are echoed by the white woman Kolisile tries to rob when she says to him: ‘'The Big Man above shall strike you down'’. Apparently the wrath of God is aimed only at black people and Kolisile, who is portrayed as having difficulty in conceiving of God [cf. for example: ‘He (Kolisile) so much wants to understand as Mafasoe understands, about the Great Inkosi and the Great Book from which the white man reads, but he can't’ (p. 91) and ‘His (Kolisile's) attempts to understand these things are like shooting stars, one moment bright but then dead in the darkness of things he does not understand’], soon becomes convinced that white people's prosperity is due to their ‘high morality’ while black people are doomed to a life of poverty because of their ‘immorality’.

Not only Mafasoe but also Kolisile has a great admiration for the white man whose very presence instills a sense of security. Kolisile's first experience deep down in the mine is traumatic; he is filled with fear and apprehension when it appears to him that he is travelling to ‘the heart of the earth’ (p. 24) in the ‘round thing that is so small’ (p. 23). He feels like a caged animal in the narrow closeness of the mine tunnel. It is only when the two white supervisors appear that his fear somewhat abates:

Two white men look with torches at the round poles that support the layer of rock. Kolisile sees them from the corner of his eye, and he is grateful for their presence, the white men and the strong poles of bluegum. They look so solid and indestructible (p. 24).

Towards the end of the story, Kolisile's gratitude is increased when he is trapped in a rockfall, loses a leg and is rescued by the white doctor:

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His heart is so grateful that he forgets about weeping women, about rocks, about pain. He is very grateful to the white man who has given him life again, life in the sun, on the land where there is grass, life in the light (p. 195).

As already stated, Jackson is the only dissenting voice among the black characters and has to be silenced (he is arrested for inciting the people with his ‘subversive’ ideology). His radical views are in direct conflict with those expressed by Mafasoe: he contends that the country belongs to the workers, that the profits emanating from their labours should be distributed fairly, that the country belongs to the black people and that they therefore should be boss. Mafasoe counters these arguments by asserting that whites have the knowledge, skills and expertise to be boss. His arguments cause Jackson to be silent, because ‘the things the white man taught him to say have now dried up’ (p. 69 - my emphasis). The ‘white man’ in this case is obviously a ‘communist’, the ‘pale white man’ (p. 135) who has been restricted in terms of the security legislation of the country (p. 134), bearing in mind the Afrikaners' fear of and paranoic obsession with communism at the time of the publication of this novel and ever since. What is once again implied here is that the black man is not equipped to think and speak for himself; whatever views he happens to have are a parrot-like repetition of the white man's views. It is also implied that the black man, who daily experiences the humiliations of apartheid, is quite satisfied with the way things are until he is made aware of his position by the white man. the inability to think, to observe critically and to articulate is concomitant with the image of the ‘noble savage’ as projected by the early English writers in South Africa.

3.2.2.5.2 Blacks trying to enter the ‘white man's cities’: ‘futility’ and ‘tragedy’

The story begins and ends with the ‘futility’ and ‘tragedy’ for blacks trying to become part of the urbanised proletariat. Constantly the city Johannesburg is referred to as ‘the white man's city’ (pp. 15, 16, 20, 21, 22, 29, etc.) by the black characters themselves as if to concede that they do not belong there but go to the city to earn some money so that they may return home ‘before the rain falls’ (p. 25), ‘secure in the knowledge that they, before the next harvest has ended, shall return to the hills of their fathers, shall again see their wives and children, shall be able to pay lobola (bride-price) for the woman with the dark eyes’ (p. 23). Already by calling Johannesburg ‘the white man's city’, these characters passively accept the difference between themselves and white people and consequently the policy of segregation which forces them into the bantustans.

Furthermore, every single urban black in the story, with the exception of the disabled Mafasoe, is decadent, evil and corrupt, to suggest that the black person is not equal to the rigours, harsh competition and demands of urban life: Mfazwe, Kolisile's long-lost brother, is a gang leader, owns a brothel and shebeen under the guise of a ‘tearoom’, defrauds his fellow black men and women, assaults, robs

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and kills people to make money; Kaloeti and Mafakoe are two fugitives from the police and depend for their survival on robbing the ‘Koelie’ (Indian) shopkeeper; Jackson is portrayed as a caricature who incites his people to revolt against their poverty, homelessness and third-class status; Miriam is a prostitute and shebeen queen; Kamala is a prostitute; and the main character, Kolisile, soon succumbs to the evil life led by his fellow blacks - he has his first taste of the ‘white man's liquor’; he is trained by his brother's gang to rob and steal; despite the deep love and respect for his wife, Nomosi, he becomes involved in a relationship with Miriam and even sires a child, etc. In addition to suggesting that blacks are unable to cope with urban life, it is suggested that they have neither the mental attributes nor the physical prowess and skills to earn a living other than by committing crime.

The story begins with Kolisile's concern about the deterioration of his land, the poor harvests year after year which cannot supply the needs of his extended family and the puny condition of his cattle. He resolves to go to the ‘white man's city’ to work in the mines so that he and his family may have an income while the land is given time to recover. Like the good son he is, he informs his aging and wise father, called Mbanjwa, of his intention. It is then that the sage reminds him of the tragic consequences for the black man who goes to the city. He himself has lost his youngest son, Mfazwe, to the city and grief has torn him apart. He has seen other young and strong men return broken in body and spirit after a spell in the city. He cites the examples of Zondani's son who had returned minus one eye and one arm lost in a dynamite blast in the mine; of Bikani, who returned with the ‘big cough’ (phthisis) contracted in the mine. When Kolisile appeals to his father that he would not become like that, the old man retaliates:

‘What are you against the city of the white man? You are like the greycat fighting against the tiger. The big city of the white man catches you and strikes you down. Where are all those who lived here? Where are those who were children when you were a child? Where are they? They are gone. And those who have returned, are broken men, like the tree beaten by the hail’ (p. 15).

Nevertheless, Kolisile convinces his father and very reluctantly the old man gives his permission for Kolisile to go. Once in Johannesburg, his ordeal begins, culminating in the mine accident in which he loses a leg. Like the others before him who have returned, Kolisile returns a broken man, both physically and spiritually. His ‘pilgrimage’ to the ‘white man's city’ was futile and tragic, his return devoid of joy: he failed in his mission to bring his brother home; he has to endure the discomfort of walking with an iron leg; his land is even more ravaged than before and his cattle thin and lacklustre; he is a stranger to all those who knew him before he left, even to his own wife and children; he sees how thin everybody had become and his wise old father is no longer alive.

[p. 63]

His disillusionment about the city is exacerbated, because before his departure from the bantustan, he was

... full of expectations about the lots of money and the big lights which turn night into day there in the city where you don't have to lie awake at night and worry about the size of the maize crop and the condition of the cattle (p. 197).

But his different horrific experiences, especially the callous shooting down of protesters by the police, make him ‘yearn for the hills where he was a child and where hatred lies far beyond the horizon’ (p. 152). Once back home and filled with deep gratitude, Kolisile comes to the conclusion that ‘he is back with those who need him’ (p. 199).

In a subtle but nevertheless unmistakable way, the message of this novel is that blacks do not belong in the ‘city of the white man’; that it is safer for them to remain in the reserves set aside for them by the authorities; that although their labour is needed in the city, they should not become urbanised as dire and tragic consequences await those who attempt to become part of the urbanised proletariat.

3.2.2.6 The women

3.2.2.6.1 Peripheral status

Each peripheral character in a novel stands in a particular relationship to the central character, and this relationship determines how far each character stands from the ‘character centre’ of the novel. Among others, it will be connected to factors such as the degree of involvement of such a character in the course of the action, to what extent it determines the development of the central character by influencing his/her decisions and course of life, and the narrating time allocated to it. The relationship may vary from almost equalisation where the interaction is unusually great - where a character can even achieve its own right of existence without having to perform a function only in respect of the central character - to characters who only fill the space. In between these two extremes a whole scale of characters is possible. Those farthest from the character centre will be the characters who, for example, only summon parallels or contrasts to other more important characters, those who only function in side-intrigues and those ‘ficelle’ figures who exist primarily because they perform a certain function and not because they in themselves are important or attain a significant degree of independence. Figures who only fill the space are often to a large extent atmosphere-determining and are only a factor in the course of the adventures of the central character to the extent in which the space plays a role. As such, these spatial figures become part of the intrigue. The further a character moves away from the character centre, the less narrating time is accorded to it and consequently the possibility of

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communicativeness becomes less. If one considers a scale of peripheral characters which may vary from degrees of nearness to degrees of distantness, one must realise that it is a scale that is purely ad hoc for each novel.

Purely on the grounds of the fact that peripheral characters are accorded less narrating time than central characters and their opportunity for reasonably extensive communicativeness consequently less, the chances of ‘roundness’ for these characters are smaller than for the central character. They are often inclined to remain ‘flat’, even to swing to types or caricatures. But the possibility of fullness is not only created by the amount of narrating time and the character's degree of communicativity. It is closely related to the manner in which such a character is integrated in the action and how it reacts to the central character. The nature of its contact with and involvement in the central character plays an important role.

A peripheral character is often involved in the adventures of the central character and sometimes even gives crucial direction to the course of his/her existence, but does not feel itself involved in the experiences of the central character. When, however, it feels itself involved, it gives an indication of a considerable emotional response: another facet of its personality is shown and consequently a possibility for greater fullness. This second kind of involvement, which primarily concerns human relationships, does not imply a more objective role in the intrigue. Certain characters have a determining influence on the central character and are therefore also involved in his/her fate, but they reveal little of that involvement. A certain stratum of their character, of their whole personality, is therefore not revealed, which means that they necessarily forfeit a dimension of their personality.

Women as central characters in the Afrikaans novel have always been a rare phenomenon, if not non-existent. When they do occupy a position near to the centre of the events or the character centre, it is more often than not at least one step behind the central male character. In the case of black women characters, their role has always been even more peripheral than that of white women. One can hardly speak of them as ‘characters’; they can rather be classified as incidental background figures who only appear to serve some function beyond themselves, e.g. representing the social and political milieu in which the main character acts. The status of women characters in the Afrikaans novel can be attributed to (i) the patriarchal society of South Africa; (ii) the political and social divide between black and white and (iii) the capitalist mode of production.

The women in this novel, both white and black, have extremely peripheral roles, with the exception of Miriam. This is Kolisile's story, but because Miriam occupies so much of his thoughts, because so many of his actions are motivated by his love for her and because she has such a pivotal role in his very existence and experiences in the city, a fair amount of narrating time is allotted to her.

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3.2.2.6.2 Miriam, the shebeen queen and prostitute

The satellite story of Miriam and Kolisile is briefly as follows: After Kolisile's horrendous experience with the dog set upon him by its white mistress, he accidentally stumbles in a state of stupor upon the ruin where the two black men, Kaloeti and Mafakoe, hide from the police. After resuscitating him somewhat with liquor, they insist that he cannot stay with them because he is in no state to flee from the police in case their hide-out should be discovered. He is directed to Miriam in the squatter camp where he is sure to find help. On arriving there in such a weak state through loss of blood, he can only stammer the word ‘Miriam’ before losing consciousness. Miriam nurses him with endless patience and care until he is fit enough to work but then she and her blind husband, Mafasoe, invite him to stay with them. Very soon Miriam and Kolisile become attracted to one another and a relationship develops between them. Meanwhile, in typical ‘noble savage’ innocence, Kolisile fails to comprehend Miriam's clandestine movements until much later, when he learns that she brews and sells traditional beer (skokiaan) to augment her income. When she is arrested, he promises that he will take care of her husband and see to it that her children remain at school. It is this promise which Kolisile wants to honour that drives him to earn more money, even by resorting to gang activities in order to pay Miriam's fine and keep her children at school.

The author goes about in a very traditional way in characterising Miriam, that is to say, he uses the strategies of explicit and implicit information. Explicit information is supplied on three levels: by the narrating instance, by other characters and by Miriam herself. Implicit information is exclusively supplied through Miriam's actions and conduct from which the reader has to infer certain character traits according to a process of nomination. In addition to her actions and conduct, information can also be inferred from a description of her appearance and from the presentation of her environment.

Our first acquaintance with Miriam is through another of the peripheral characters, Kaloeti, when he refers the injured Kolisile to her for treatment of his wounds. At this stage, nothing is actually said about her character, except that she also helped Mafakoe when his arm was shot off by the police. One can therefore conclude that Miriam is a kind of Samaritan, is in a certain sense a traditional healer. But already a darker side of her character can be inferred - she is prepared to aid and abet fugitives from the police, thus making her an accessory to the crimes committed.

Then the narrating instance takes over for a considerable time, since Kolisile in whom the novel's focalizing process is seated, loses consciousness. Miriam's environment is the first to be described by the narrating instance. In the squatter camp, with its ‘hideous shelters of hessian and tin and corrugated iron’ (p. 43),

[p. 66]

Miriam's neat hut of reeds and clay is the exception. The squatter camp is furthermore described as ‘lying like a bank of flotsam which has been cast out by the stream of the city - disorderly, filthy, hideous ... Everything lies thrown together in thick chaos as if a corrupt giant tried to build something here’ (p. 44). Not only the living conditions of the dwellers are described but also their activities: drinking beer and making merry; a woman screaming in ecstacy along a footpath; a child crying out his protest against life; an old man dying in a tin shanty without the world knowing about it; men congregating to discuss their criminal activities for the night. With these descriptions the scene is set: the squatter camp and its inhabitants embody all the ills of the world, all the decadence from which the ‘city of the white man’ purged itself, thus implying that the city would be a good place to live in but for the ‘flotsam’ which has entered its sacred portals. Amidst this chaos and decadence Miriam lives: neat, orderly and elevated above the rest. Although one can infer something about Miriam's character from the description of her environment, i.e. the strength of character to maintain her lofty standards even amidst such degradation, one has to question the inconsistencies appearing in these descriptions. First of all, if Miriam is held in such high regard by all and sundry in the squatter camp (see below), then surely her lifestyle would be emulated by those living in close proximity to her! Secondly, as mater familias of her community, she seems to exercise very little influence upon their lives in respect of the neatness, cleanliness and orderliness she values.

The next description by the narrator is of Miriam's external appearance. We learn that she is ‘big and strong; not excessively obese like most women of her race, even though she nears middle-age’ (p. 45 - my emphasis). She has an open, attractive face, she laughs frequently and when she does, it is hearty and joyful so that dimples appear in her full cheeks and her pure white teeth become exposed. She walks with a stately rhythm, she wears a pure white shawl around her shoulders and a brightly coloured headscarf. Men look at her, some curious, others grateful, still others respectful as if she is the goddess of the rain. They whisper among themselves about ‘Miriam, the Samaritan, Miriam the seductive woman, Miriam, the mysterious one’ (p. 45).

The narration is continued when the reasons for Miriam's move to the squatter camp are outlined. Previously she led a decent and contented life in the township in her neat house of bricks and mortar where she and her family could live in relative safety, where she ‘and her kindred race could live in tidy orderliness’ (p. 45). The move to the squatter camp was necessitated by the accident in which her husband lost his sight and was crippled in the lower parts of his body. She had made a solemn promise to the white woman that she would send her children to school; in order to execute that promise, she had to make a decision. She was forced to relinquish her job as domestic servant in a white suburb where she was ‘happy’ (p. 46); she had to leave her children in the care of her brother, Jackson, so that they could attend school in the township; she had to devise ways and means which

[p. 67]

would guarantee a regular income to be able to pay for her children's schooling, while at the same time caring day and night for her disabled husband. To save money on rent, she gave up her home in the township and moved to the squatter camp where she did not have to pay rent.

Here she became the centre of the community. Men and women congregated at night around her fire; deep in the night she is summoned when an old man dies, when a child is in pain, when a young woman goes through the agonies of childbirth, when somebody has been shot by the police, when a child has been beaten up by thugs, etc. In short, she became the heart and soul of the deprived, the degenerate and decadent, a pillar of strength for the masses under hessian and iron.

This is the picture painted of Miriam by the narrator, a picture which in no way can be described as negative; in fact, a very positive picture of Miriam emerges, depicted with sympathy, insight into and understanding of the circumstances which forced her to live as she does. But at this point the external narrator/focalizer yields focalization to Kolisile and the other black characters, so that a different picture, refuting the one painted by the ‘objective’ narrator, emerges. It is more than interesting to note that the narrator, who we have already established as being white and superior, introduces the positive aspects of Miriam's character, while it is left to the black characters to highlight her negative attributes. What can we conclude from that? The external narrator, it seems, wants to retain his ‘objectivity’, wants to give the impression that the black characters' perception of Miriam is not necessarily his, that the “omniscient” narrator does not after all have ‘inside knowledge’ of the lives of another racial group and that this can best be provided by members of that group themselves. This is an attempt to absolve the narrator from any blame of being a racist and sexist.

How do the other characters perceive Miriam? For most of the men who have the pleasure of knowing her, she is beautiful and desirable. When Kolisile regains consciousness after a long time, the first face he sees is that of Miriam, making a pleasing impression on him. It is not long before he desires her with all his heart. Kaloeti calls her ‘Miriam, the beautiful woman’ (p. 97) and experiences a strange yearning for her, for the allure of her full body (p. 101). Likewise, the decadent brother of Kolisile, Mfazwe, calls her ‘the beautiful woman’ (p. 113) who seduced him and then cast him aside, although he, too, still desires her.

Both Miriam's husband, Mafasoe, and her lover, Kolisile, have the utmost admiration for her spiritual and emotional strength. For Mafasoe it is natural for her to take care of those in need, for it is an integral part of her character. His trust in her is unshakeable, and even when Kolisile asks him pertinently whether he is not afraid that other men will take her away from him, he replies:

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‘The men here are good. They do not take Mafasoe's wife. They know Mafasoe cannot see. A man does not take a blind man's wife ... Mfazwe, the son of Mbanjwa, wanted to take her, but Miriam said: “No, I am the wife of Mafasoe, the blind man”’ (p. 65).

Despite these positive perceptions of Miriam, she is nevertheless portrayed as the stereotyped black shebeen queen. Some justification is given for her resorting to this activity as a means of supplementing her income, but then one wonders whether those reasons are valid, i.e. she had to give up her job to look after her husband; after his accident he was no longer a wage-earner. If Miriam could spend so much time taking care of others without remuneration, if she could go out into the streets trying to sell - often unsuccessfully - the baskets Mafasoe makes and staying away practically the whole day, then surely there was no need for her to give up her job?

The emergence of the ‘shebeen queen’ in the urban areas is a direct result of government policy.^4. From the black perspective, Miriam provided a much-needed service as well as earning some money. It is therefore significant that two of the people closest to her, her husband and her brother, do not take kindly to her activity: Mafasoe condemns her and believes she must be punished for violating the laws of the country; Jackson despises her. We learn that she had been arrested several times before on the same charge but was released each time upon paying a fine; this time, however, she is sentenced to six months imprisonment without the option of a fine.

By brewing and selling skokiaan, Miriam is accused of causing men to become ‘mad’, to scream and fight and stab each other (pp. 65, 127). By selling skokiaan, she also invites men and women to congregate at her place and form adulterous relationships with those they meet by chance, i.e. she runs a brothel as well, although it is never stated explicitly. Being desirable and seductive herself, she makes it easy for the men in their drunken state to make advances which she exploits to the full.

Miriam, then, is also portrayed as the stereotyped black whore. Several characters refer to her nocturnal activities, Miriam herself confesses to Kolisile that she paid Mfazwe with her body when he gave her money to keep her children at school. In his innocence, Kolisile is oblivious of the reasons for Miriam's nocturnal disappearances, but still wonders where she goes to at night and where the money suddenly comes from when she returns (p. 53). Later we learn from Mafakoe about ‘the other men who sleep with Miriam’ (p. 99) and from Kamala, Mfazwe's concubine, about Miriam's way of life. When Kolisile approaches his brother for a loan to pay Miriam's fine, it is Kamala who forbids him to do so. She asserts that all those men who sleep with Miriam should come forward to pay her fine.

4. The brewing of traditional beer (called ‘kaffir beer’, ‘Bantu beer’ and ‘sorghum beer’ by the state and various other names by the people themselves) used to be and still is the exclusive domain of women as part of their domestic duties. It is the housewife's responsibility to have traditional beer available in the house at all times, as it is considered an act of hospitality to welcome a guest by offering him beer. This is done to make the guest feel welcome, to improve relations if the guest happens to be a stranger and for the purpose of socializing. In addition and more important, beer is brewed as a libation to the gods at the different thanksgiving and fertility ceremonies and is the only beverage served at wedding feasts, etc. Urban black society tried to carry on this tradition, more so because the different Liquor Acts and Liquor Amendment Acts (e.g. No. 172 of 1961) prohibited Africans anywhere in the country from purchasing liquor. Subsequently, various laws and by-laws were introduced, prohibiting home-brewing, except for particular celebrations for which prior permission had to be obtained from the authorities. The sale of home-brewed beer was strictly for bidden for, according to the government, the effects of drinking the beer were often bloodshed, rioting and vandalism. In an effort to combat home-brewing, the government embarked on a plan to establish beerhalls in the townships, the profits of which (20%) would ostensibly used to improve amenities in the townships and the rest going to state coffers, again ostensibly to be spent on improving conditions for Africans. The institution of beerhalls led to mass corruption and theft by the functionaries, in addition to causing the disruption of family and social life. It is no wonder that in 1976 the beerhalls became the first targets of the youth's wrath.

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Kolisile appeals to his brother that Miriam's and Mafasoe's children have also to be kept at school, but Kamala suggests that the children are probably not even Mafasoe's but those of other men (pp. 115-117).

Then, as previously mentioned, a relationship develops between Miriam and Kolisile, culminating in Miriam carrying Kolisile's child. The fact that the relationship continues in the presence of the blind Mafasoe (the three of them share Miriam's one-roomed hut), is a serious indictment against both Miriam and Kolisile, especially in view of Mafasoe's implicit trust in Miriam and the high regard he has for Kolisile. Taking into account the assertions of both Mafakoe and Kamala - if they are true - as well as Miriam's mysterious disappearances at night, the reader may well wonder whether Kolisile is in fact the father of the child Miriam is expecting.

Once more, Miriam's strong moral fibre as initially espoused by the narrator, becomes questionable. How can the reader reconcile her tender care of and love for Mafasoe with such treachery and callousness? How is it possible that a woman who is sacrificing so much to look after her disabled husband, can betray him so deeply? What does it say about Mafasoe - whose other senses are so much sharper after being blinded, who believes in the ‘Great Book’ and who must have been aware of his wife's and Kolisile's complicity - for allowing these goings-on? Is this action not a direct contradiction of the ‘noble savage’ image projected of Kolisile? One is also bemused by Kolisile's action after being told by Miriam about the child. He leaves Miriam and Mafasoe to return to the mine and ultimately home, without a second thought for the child he has sired.

Several conclusions can be drawn from the portrayal of Miriam. The author obviously has very little knowledge about black society and gives his views about black people as he had been indoctrinated to view them. Despite his ‘sympathetic’ approach to the question of the uprooted black man in the city, he nevertheless manipulates the characters in such a way that the reader cannot but believe that their values are not comparable to those of white people, that they in fact remain bestial in spite of their contact with ‘civilisation’ (cf. the unbridled fornication of Miriam and Kolisile in the same room where the former's husband is present; Kolisile's indifference about the child).

If Miriam, who is described by the narrator as being among the best of the squatter community, reveals herself as a devious, conniving whore, what must be said about the rest of the women in the camp? Obviously, Venter aligns himself to the general Afrikaner/white view that black people in general and black women in particular have neither the skills nor the intellect to earn a living other than by prostitution and ‘criminal’ activities. In addition to trying to prove that they do not belong in the ‘white man's city’, the novel also attempts to show that black women can make no meaningful contribution to the country's economy by entering the labour

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market and can therefore never participate in the democratic processes of government. In this sense, the novel reinforces government policy of keeping blacks in a position of servitude and black women on the bottom rung of the ladder of political, economic and social hierarchy.

3.2.2.6.3 Kamala, the shrewish whore

Kamala, concubine of the gang leader, shebeen and brothel owner, Mfazwe, appears only once in the story, i.e. when Kolisile visits his younger brother for the first time. She is never mentioned by any other character and the observations the reader has of her are those of Kolisile.

She is slim, half Zulu and half Indian, with a beautiful face, shining black hair and large, bright eyes. It is incumbent upon South Africans to notice and describe in racial terms, for it is race and ethnicity which would determine an individual's position in the hierarchy of the country. Being presented as ‘half Zulu, half Indian’ (p. 115), Kamala is immediately categorised as a ‘half-breed’ with its supposedly corresponding decadent nature. Her name, her ‘race’ and her actions characterise her as the outsider or alien in urban black society.

Her open demonstrations of lust and her coquettish ways already embarrass Kolisile, and with disgust he notices how she drinks brandy from the bottle with long and deep gulps. Her ‘alien’ nature - alien to South African patriarchal society - is most clearly visible in her ‘proud rebelliousness’ (p. 119) and the manner in which she dominates Mfazwe's life. The latter admits to himself that her beauty has a hold over him, that he cannot let her go because she satisfies his needs, even though she can never be a wife to him. She fights like a tigress, while her vitriolic tongue is a further indication of the vast difference between her and the way South African women are expected to be.

Being the possessive kind, Kamala lays claim not only on Mfazwe but also on everything he owns: ‘“Mfazwe's money is Kamala's money,”’ she says to Kolisile when he asks his brother for money to pay Miriam's fine (p. 116). Her greatest transgression is when she abuses Kolisile's family, his father for whom he has such a deep love and respect, and Nomati, Mfazwe's wife in the bantustan. With vicious derision of Nomati, who she calls ‘the ugly woman with the thick legs and big feet’ (p. 117) and contempt for Kolisile's father, she displays her bitchy nature and contravenes the moral code of not verbally abusing the relatives of one's adversary. All this becomes too much for Kolisile and he slaps her across the face and punches her in the stomach.

Kamala's most important function is to supply information about Miriam, to further reinforce the picture of Miriam as a prostitute. She must be aware of the earlier relationship between Miriam and Mfazwe and of the latter's continued

[p. 71]

desire for Miriam. She is driven by jealousy to disclose to Kolisile that Miriam ‘sleeps with other men’ and that her children are probably not even Mafasoe's (p. 116).

With the introduction of Kamala into the story, the author tries to kill two birds with one stone. Firstly, he needs the evidence of other black characters to prove that Miriam particularly and black women generally are devious and immoral. Secondly, as a character, however peripheral, Kamala shows herself to be typical of the existing image of the black woman but even more so, for being a ‘half-breed’, she also represents the ‘weaknesses’ in the blood of such people, as explained in Chapter 2.

3.2.2.6.4 Nomosi, the ‘ideal’ black woman

The idea that black people should stay in the reserves where they shall remain undefiled of urban influences, is clearly illustrated in the figure of Nomosi. She is Kolisile's wife and the mother of his children, and portrayed as the direct opposite of the urbanised Miriam and Kamala.

We are left in no doubt about Kolisile's high regard and love for his wife, about his concern for the future of his family and about the pain of parting from them, especially from Nomosi, ‘for whom he had paid with the big lobola and who is now so close to his heart that he can hear her breathing, even when she is far away from him; the beautiful woman with the strong arms, the woman who is quiet and good like a flame that burns brightly’ (p. 9 - my emphasis). This is the charactertrait of Nomosi that is invoked several times: her quietness, calmness and tranquillity.

During Kolisile's agonising first train journey to the ‘white man's city’, it is Nomosi's presence he yearns for, the security of her nearness, Nomosi ‘who had been beside him over the years when he awoke during the night’ (p. 19). In his agony, he finds reassurance when he visualises her, he sees ‘her calm eyes when they talked around the fire ... he yearns for the quiet voice of Nomosi’ and remembers her ‘wordlessness ... and the tranquillity in her eyes’ when he took leave of his family (p. 19). Once in the city, he is plagued by longing which finds expression in his dreams at night and in which he often sees ‘how his Nomosi stares wordlessly across the wide world’ (p. 31). Even in his delirium after having been attacked by the white woman's dog, he is aware of Nomosi, of her eyes which ‘glow vaguely from afar, and he hears the tranquil sound of her voice as if she speaks to him through the rustling of the rain’ (p. 49).

But then Kolisile's adventure with Miriam begins and Nomosi gradually recedes to the periphery of his thoughts. At first ‘he fought against it for the sake of his father and Nomosi and his children, but it did not help. Nomosi is far away and

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Miriam is here with him ... He feels ashamed when he thinks of Nomosi ... but Miriam laughs in the empty space between him and Nomosi ...’ (p. 55). When he returns home and sees Nomosi after a long time, he realises that she is ‘so different from Miriam ... she looks at him with her soft eyes’ (p. 199).

Nomosi never utters a word in the story, neither is she an actor or focalizer. Nevertheless, with this image of the rural black woman, the message becomes clear: in the end, man prefers his wife to be quiet, passive and subservient, although he can sow his wild oats as often as he wishes with more exciting women; for this reason, the black woman should remain in her ‘natural habitat’, lest she becomes corrupted by urban influences; the contrast between Miriam and Nomosi serves to highlight the decadence of the urban black woman while placing her rural sister on a pedestal, according to patriarchal precedents and South African ideology; it is expected of woman to be silently long-suffering, forgiving and supportive of her man, without the latter having the same commitment.

3.2.2.6.5 The white women

All the white characters/figures in the novel remain anonymous, with the exception of the mine engineer, Vermaas. One may argue that this anonymity is due to the fact that the story concerns urbanised black people and their experiences in the city, which therefore makes it unimportant to name the white characters. However, we have already established that these white figures are portrayed as the dominant group, the ones who guide and direct the eternal child, the black person.

Anonymity of characters can be related to the ‘death of character’ (Rimmon-Kenan 1983:29). With reference to the Balzac story, Sarrasine, Barthes concludes: ‘What is obsolescent in today's novel is not the novelistic, it is the character; what can no longer be written is the Proper Name’ (Barthes 1974:95). He continues by saying that when we speak of a character with a proper name, we in fact speak about its figure and not its person, ‘an impersonal network of symbols combined under the proper name. We do not undertake an investigation into the character, but develop connotations; we are not searching for the truth about the character but for the systematics of a (transitory) site of the text’ (p. 94). Hélène Cixous (1974:387) questions the stability and unity of the self, because the ‘I’ is ‘always more than one, diverse, capable of being all those it will at one time be, a group acting together, a collection of singular beings that produce the enunciation’. In connection with the anonymous character, Brink (1987:75) posits that we should be able to speak about ‘a conscious strategy which is used to replace the weight of the character more obviously in the direction of the “mythological” (or the “general”, or the “universal”)’.

In view of the above pronouncements, it is safe to say that the two white women figures, however peripheral their roles are, remain anonymous to function as

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a collection point of white traits, as espoused by the Afrikaner. There is a ring of myth, generality and universality about them.

The circumstances in which Kolisile meets these two women, differ widely but certain similarities can also be extracted. In the first case, Kolisile approaches the white woman for work ‘on the land’ where he shall be more at ease than in the claustrophobic atmosphere of the mine tunnels. He does so willingly, and his approach is friendly, humble and sincere. It has not even entered his mind to harm the woman or her child; all he wants to do is to earn a living in an honest manner. Yet this woman sees him as a potential rapist, robber and murderer and sets her dog upon him. In the second case, Kolisile is forced by his gang boss to burgle the house of the white woman, to kill her if necessary. Kolisile does this with much reservation, but he has to pay off a debt to his brother. The woman awakes to find the burglar in her bedroom and, although her revolver is within her reach, she chooses rather to persuade Kolisile to lead a more honest life.

Both these women represent the wider white community, specifically the white women in general and Afrikaner women particularly. It is, for example, also significant that Kolisile's direct confrontation with whites should be with white/Afrikaner women, if one bears in mind the Afrikaners' protection and elevation of their womenfolk (see Chapter 2). In the case of the first woman, the narrator deems it necessary to justify her irrational action - her husband had been attacked by black men and she remembers the case of the two pensioners brutally murdered by blacks. Nevertheless, this justification is superfluous, for the general white view of blacks is that they are barbaric, brutal and know only the law of the jungle. The Afrikaners' experiences in the frontier wars and at Blaauwkrantz, irrespective of their own brutality, exacerbated their preconceived fear of the black man. For the Afrikaner woman, particularly, the black man is not to be trusted, since he is in a position to rape and flaw her ‘pure’ white blood. It is her duty to keep the white race ‘pure’ and she has been lauded for doing exactly that. Linked to this, is the theory by some Western feminists that the black man suffers from the Oedipus complex by wishing to marry his ‘mother’, the white woman (see Firestone 1979:chapter 5).

In the case of the second woman, the visions of a civilising mission by a chosen people with a destiny in a sea of primitive heathen natives are invoked. The Afrikaner woman is the instrument with which this mission can be accomplished, she is the bearer of light in this dark continent of Africa and it is up to her to instil into black people the fear of God's wrath for their misdemeanours. It is no wonder that Kolisile afterwards speaks of this woman as having supernatural powers, as having an aura about her which places her far, far above the level of the black man.

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3.3 Mikro (pseud. of C.H. Kühn)

3.3.1 Mikro's oeuvre regarding the ‘coloureds’

Mikro is perhaps best known for his Toiings trilogy, entitled respectively as Toiings (1934), Pelgrims (1935) and Vreemdelinge (1944). The central character is a shepherd who, in the true tradition of slavery, is given the name Toiings (Tatters) by his master, Baas Fanie, thereby relinquishing his very identity and humanity. In fact, with this naming a process of dehumanization and emasculation is set in motion and continues throughout the trilogy, so that the superiority of the other may be established. With regard to this naming, Gerwel (1988:137) points out: ‘Already by naming, Toiings is being typed as an inferior and apostate figure; he himself provides the interpretation of his name (in style indirect libre): “He is a bad hotnot (slegte hotnot)... They have given him a suitable name - Toiings. He is as bad as a dishrag or an old, old tattered rag on the rubbish dump” (Toiings, p. 28). The entire Toiings chronicle revolves around the containment of this “slegte hotnot” in him which periodically breaks loose and dominates’. In true Afrikaner and Mikrolian tradition, there is no place in the scheme of things for the dissenting voice. When Toiings' son, Dawid, attempts to break loose from the servitude to which his parents are condemned, he is killed off. Dawid makes a break with the spell of the master and the farm; after an initial reckless lifestyle in the town, he rehabilitates himself in order to acquire honour and independence away from the master, but Mikro apparently cannot grant the descendants of Toiings this emancipation, because in a completely unmotivated and non-functional manner, Dawid meets his demise.

In 1942 Mikro published a further novel of farm life entitled Huisies teen die heuwel (Cottages on the hillside) to which he adds, to the list of enemies of the old rural order identified in the Toiings trilogy - irreligion, lax morals, unbridled use of liquor by both men and women, as well as the impersonal forces of economics and climate - a new and subversive ideology. This ideology arrives on Baas Gert's wine-farm through the agency of a trouble-maker named Moos, the jailbird son of respectable working parents. ‘Every time they let him out of jail he was a harder communist ... back on the farm he lounged about and blew all kinds of ideas into the volk's ears’ (p. 41). The conflict that threatens between Moos and Baas Gert is not allowed to come to a head. Moos is killed in a drunken brawl, the critique of feudal relations he promises to articulate never finds its way into words and by the end of the novel Baas Gert is able to conclude that the failings of ‘his’ volk - mainly work-shyness - are the failings of children, to be corrected with a kindly but firm paternal hand. The killing off of Moos is another example of the baffling and silencing of any countervoice to the voice of the father/farmer.

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3.3.2 Die Koperkan (The Copper Urn) - 1959

3.3.2.1 Introduction

With this novel Mikro makes a complete break with his usual agrarian set-up and focuses his attention on the urban ‘coloured’. As if he discovers for the first time that the Toiings-type he has created is not the only ‘type’ of ‘coloured’ to be found in South African society, he makes an attempt to prove that basically there is no difference between the rural and the urban ‘coloured’. The same traits he ascribes to Toiings can be found in Derk Booysen, especially the ‘Ja-Baas-hoed-in-die-hand’-trait (Yes-Boss-hat-in-hand-trait), although not as overtly discernable as in Toiings; the ‘coloured’ who ‘knows his place’ and the ‘coloured’ who needs the strong, paternal hand of the white man to give guidance and direction to his life. Both Toiings and Derk are symbolically castrated. In addition, as in Toiings and Huisies teen die heuwel, there is no place for the dissenting voice; like Dawid and Moos in the two earlier novels, Frankie in his opposition to apartheid must be killed off. Similarly, as in the Toiings trilogy, Mikro uses the same strategy, i.e. the style indirect libre, to characterise Derk in order to justify the white person's perception of the ‘coloured’, since both Toiings and Derk think of themselves as the white person thinks of the ‘coloureds’.

Mikro has not only been widely acclaimed by white literary critics as the best exponent of literature regarding the ‘coloureds’, but with the publication of this novel he has also been lauded by both the English and Afrikaans press for handling a prickly issue with so much aplomb. The English press had this to say about the novel: ‘The Afrikaner is by and large on the threshold of another way of thinking in South Africa, and it will be books like these that will be remembered as monuments along the road which will ultimately end in a better understanding among the various races in our multi-racial country’ (The Friend); ‘It is a well-knit story, excellently written and told with delicacy and sympathy towards all concerned in it. The views expressed have obviously been arrived at as the result of deep and penetrating thought’ (The Pretoria News); ‘Die Koperkan should be read by every White South African who knows nothing about the tragedy of the Coloureds within a White community’ (The Star); ‘It is significant because it is compassionate. That is half the solution’ (Zionist Record).

The Afrikaans press praised the novel as ‘... a meaningful broadening of our prose, compassionate and poignant at the same time’ (Die Transvaler); ‘The usual complaint is that our writers do not have the courage to embody our country's true problems in the novel. Here we have an honest and sympathetic attempt in that direction’ (Die Huisgenoot); ‘This work pushes the thought to far-off unknown horizons, because even if everybody does not agree with the characters' opinions, everybody will sense and appreciate the topical value of this

[p. 76]

honest novel’ (Dagbreek en Sondagnuus); ‘Mikro has written the book ... with great sincerity, with greater respect for reality than most English novelists and dramatists who have dealt with the same or related themes’ (Die Burger).

This reception of the text by white critics is to be expected, since it subscribes to the ideas of most whites in the 1950s and a fair percentage in contemporary South Africa. Narratologically, however, it is a feeble attempt, a strongly didactic novel which makes a pro-apartheid statement at the expense of a feasible storyline, effective characterisation and functional, motivated action. Many of the events are so unrelated and loose, with only the apartheid message as interconnecting line, that one can hardly speak of a ‘well-knit story’ as the critic in The Pretoria News does.

3.3.2.2 The title, symbolism and story

The title, Die Koperkan, belongs to the author's text as well as to the story text, because this is also the title of Derk's anthology of poems which has the recurring theme of apartheid, more specifically the ‘copper coloured’ people's place in an apartheid society. This double marking is supplemented by the actual copper urn in the display window of a store and which becomes the most important code in the story. It is this copper urn which inspires Derk to name his anthology after it. ‘Copper’ in the title is a very explicit reference to the copper tone of the ‘coloured’ skin. This becomes clear in the very first lines of the story text:

Derk Booysen, the coloured teacher, suddenly stops. The copper urn is still in the display window. In the window mirror of Du Plooy and Van Graan he can see his reflection. He looks at it not because he wants to look - there are surely enough big mirrors in his own home - luxury and ... Derk looks at his big belly, the waistcoat, tie, shirt and then at the copper colour of his skin (p. 7).

We also read in the first few paragraphs of Derk's fascination with the old copper urn which is ‘more brown than yellow’ (p. 7) and which no one apparently wants to buy, for it has been in the display window since the day that Du Plooy and Van Graan opened their store. We can therefore conclude that the author's title refers to the copper urn in the display window and to Derk's anthology, but to what or to who does the title of Derk's anthology refer? Derk equates himself with the copper urn, so does the implied author and so does the real author. The fact that the title belongs to two different texts - prose and poetry; an author's text and a fictional text; one written by white and one written by brown; etc. - is an indication of the duality not only of Derk with his ‘white spirit’ within his brown skin but also of the entire ‘coloured’ population who, as expressed in the story, belong neither here nor there. Ilsa Touwa, the little white girl, desires with all her heart to have enough money to buy the copper urn for the old ‘coloured’ woman

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whom she calls Même Katryn. In her innocence, she too equates the old copper urn with a ‘coloured’.

The all too obvious symbolism of the copper urn is placed from time to time in juxtaposition to the symbolism of the alabaster vase which once formed part of the merchandise in the store and which had since been bought by a beautiful, well-dressed white woman. Like the copper urn, the copper skin is cursed and can only bring doom to those who possess it (cf. Ilsa's gift to Même Katryn when it was too late; tragedy strikes Derk's family at the time when the copper urn comes into his possession). The copper urn in the display window is ‘old and dented’ (p. 7), it is ‘battered and dirty’ (p. 9) and it is ‘crooked’ (pp. 8, 14, 55). Now that it has been used and abused, neglected by its different owners, nobody wants it. Even if it is polished to shining glory, it shall remain imperfect; even if the ‘coloured’ acquires all the cultivation and ‘polish’ of white civilisation, s/he shall remain non-white - that is the unmistakable message the author intends to bring across.

The opposition between the copper urn and the alabaster vase not only forms the theme of one of Derk's poems (God has willed both, i.e. the white race and the brown race), but also the imperfection of the one is continually placed in opposition to the perfection of the other. They can never be the same, neither in appearance nor in composition (perhaps one should also bear in mind that alabaster is chiefly European in origin while copper is essentially an African raw material). Obviously, the author did not have in mind the warm, friendly glow of copper in contrast to the cold, hard and impersonal qualities of alabaster.

The novel, briefly, is an attempt to embody the grim conditions which arise as a result of the apartheid legislation, in the experiences of the ‘coloured’ teacher and poet, Derk Booysen. The characters become simply mouthpieces for certain ideas and the novel itself becomes an undisguised plea for apartheid. The story mostly concerns Petro who is about to marry a white man who is completely unaware of her true background and who is fiercely opposed to ‘miscegenation’. Her impending marriage causes Derk much grief, not because he is opposed to her marrying a white man but because it would mean that he would no longer have access to her, that his pet daughter would be lost to him forever. Derk and his family are castigated and ostracised by the ‘coloured’ community because of his obvious preference for white company and his propagation of the apartheid ideology.

3.3.2.3 Language

The next bit of text after the title is the motto, an extract from a poem written by Derk Booysen and a sombre indication of what is to come:

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'n Vader het twee seuns gehad,

 

'n witte en 'n bryne;

 

Sê die bryne: Gee datlik myne

 

en ek gaan saailint op my pad.

 

(A father had two sons,

 

a white one and a brown one;

 

Says the brown one: Give me mine immediately

 

and I'll go silently on my way.)

Obviously a parody on the parable of the Prodigal Son, this poen is presented in the so-called ‘skollie’ language (‘gamat-taal’, the author calls it - p. 76) of the ‘coloured’ people of the Western Cape, so called by white Afrikaners who view it as a gross violation of ‘their’ language. This motto together with the language in which it is written is intended as a further indication of the ‘uncultured’ nature of the ‘coloureds’, besides being a direct and explicit plea for the ‘coloured’ to accept his/her fate silently, passively and unprotestingly. One cannot ignore the implicit meaning of the motto: the prodigal son (‘brown one’) is decadent and degenerate and his only hope of salvation is by turning to the father (white man) for guidance, thus condemning himself to eternal serfdom.

Admittedly, most of the characters use what the Afrikaners prefer to call ‘Algemeen-Beskaafde’ (‘generally civilised’) language; Derk writes most of his poetry in this ‘civilised’ language and only when he attempts writing protest poetry does he use the Western Cape dialect. Likewise, his son, Frankie, fiercely opposed to and outspoken about his opposition to apartheid, writes protest poetry in this dialect and uses it in his speech to taunt his father. The vegetable vendor, Jafta, and the few incidental ‘coloured’ extras who are intended to represent the larger ‘coloured’ community, are the only ones who consistently use this dialect, but then Mikro displays a phonetical and syntactical ignorance of their speech. Jafta's speech - and by implication that of the average ‘coloured’ - is limited and simplified and his range of intellection and feeling is by implication correspondingly limited and simplified. Furthermore, this particularised rendering of speech may have been intended for a well-defined reason, i.e. to create a comic effect, thus reinforcing Gerwel's thesis of the ‘Jollie Hotnot’ stereotype. It conveys in addition a certain naiveté, even childishness, which reflects on the quality of mind of its speaker and the ‘coloured’ people in general.

The forms of address in this novel are of particular interest. Given Derk's status in the community, he is portrayed in his relationships and dealings with whites as the ‘idealized child’ (Gerwel). He consistently addresses Louis Beeg in the third person as ‘Professor’ and the very formal second person pronoun ‘u’ (‘Thou’), usually reserved for addressing one's parents or elders. In contrast, Beeg addresses him as ‘jy’, the more familiar second person form of address used for equals or

[p. 79]

those below the social status of the speaker. Even more striking is Derk's conversation with the publisher, Floors Roux, who, incidentally, is introduced to him by Louis Beeg as ‘mnr. Roux’. Once again, Derk addresses him as ‘u’ or ‘meneer’ (Sir), while he addresses Derk as ‘Booysen’, without the customary courteous addition of ‘meneer’. Even the drunken, degenerate white man, Gys Touwa, addresses him as ‘Booysen’ or ‘jy’, while he addresses Touwa as ‘meneer’ (p. 140). While Louis Beeg addresses Derk as ‘jy’ or by his first name, he shows considerable more courtesy to Derk's white daughter by addressing her as ‘juffrou’ (‘Miss’). In Derk's dealings with people from his own group, we observe the same phenomenon. He addresses members of his staff and the parents of pupils at his school by their surnames, e.g. John Orlep (staff-member) and Freek Voster (parent of one of his pupils) are addressed simply by their surnames: ‘Orlep’ and ‘Voster’. This is a highly unlikely form of address by a school principal, since it is part of the code of conduct in the teaching profession to address colleagues and parents alike courteously. Derk displays even less courtesy when dealing with the run-of-the-mill people among the ‘coloured’ population (cf. for example his manner of speaking to Jafta, the petrol attendant, Même Katryn).

These forms of address have definite functions: firstly, they illustrate the vertical and horizontal divide and compartmentalisation which characterise South African society; secondly, they are intended to make the reader aware of the social stratification which exists among the oppressed people, i.e. those who are oppressed can only assert themselves as full human beings by in turn further oppressing the oppressed. They are intended to show that class consciousness, segregation and stratification are part and parcel of the human condition, and not only peculiar to white South Africans. Thirdly, asymmetry of address which usually marks disparity of status between interlocutors is by no means a phenomenon confined to Afrikaans, as J.M. Coetzee (1988:130) points out. But social disparity is more usually reflected in the opposition of familiar to formal second person: the opposition of second person to third person would appear to mark a social divide that is felt to be particularly wide or else - in an authoritarian, patriarchal culture - a disparity of status much like that between parent and child.

Significantly, when Derk Booysen attempts to articulate by means of poetry his opposition to the inequalities which came about as a result of apartheid, he uses the Western Cape dialect. But his white critic, Louis Beeg, his white publisher, Floors Roux, and his white daughter, Petro, object to his protest poetry on the grounds that these poems are ‘blemishes’ (p. 56) on an otherwise good anthology; they are representative of ‘ugly, horrible things’ (p. 136) within Derk and they illustrate an ‘impure sound’ (p. 131) in his verse. Frankie also articulates his resistance to apartheid in poetry and also uses the Cape dialect. It is left to Petro, instigated by Louis Beeg who arrogantly decides what is good and what is bad for the ‘coloured’, to destroy Derk's poems on apartheid, thereby aiding and abetting

[p. 80]

the process of emasculation of the black male which characterises Mikro's oeuvre. It is also Petro who tears up Frankie's resistance poetry. As in the case of Frankie who had to die because of his dissidence, so too the black man's protests must be stifled, silenced, destroyed. But that is not all: this destruction of Derk's and Frankie's verse also symbolises the attempted destruction of a culture which has developed independently of white South Africans, the destruction of a language which is accessible to all and which has become the language of the protesting masses.

3.3.2.4 Focalization

External focalization is a convenient strategy to portray the black character as perceived by a superior white narrator and focalizer whose ideology is dominant and therefore more readily acceptable to (white) readers and critics.

‘Narrative with external focalization’ (Genette 1980:189) is where the hero performs in front of us without our ever being allowed to know its thoughts or feelings. The events are seen from the outside by a character or narrator who is in fact not a participating witness of the events. Such a narrator also does not comment on the events. This, however, does not prevent the narrator from being subjective. Mieke Bal (1985:100) states that it is possible to try and give an ‘objective’ picture of the facts, but this would involve an attempt to present only what is seen or perceived in some other way. In that case, all comment is shunned and implicit interpretation is avoided. She points out that perception is a psychological process which is strongly dependent on the position of the perceiving body. The degree to which one is familiar with what one sees also influences perception. (How familiar are white authors in South Africa with the conditions, cultures, traditions, etc. of black people?) Many factors influence perception, so that attempting to achieve objectivity is a futile exercise. Among those factors is the psychological (and I may add the ‘ideological’) position towards the focalized object, in this case the black woman character.

Genette (1980:191) points out that external focalization with respect to one character could sometimes just as well be defined as internal focalization through another. This ambivalence (or reversibility) is equally noticeable when the witness is not personified but remains an impersonal, floating observer. In recent years it has become more and more ‘fashionable’ in the Afrikaans literature to have an external focalizer as well as a character-bound focalizer, where the character is black, to give credence to the white, superior external focalizer's image of the black character. This is especially true of Petro's perception of the ‘coloureds’. She and the external focalizer/narrator articulate her feelings towards this group of whom she is irrevocably part: ‘“I shall never, never be happy among the coloureds,”’ she says (p. 17) and the external focalizer endorses this: ‘She will never be able to

[p. 81]

marry one of her own people’ (p. 68). She and the external focalizer stop short of giving reasons for this abhorrence of the ‘coloured’ people but it is not difficult to infer those reasons. Given the fact that most if not all people aspire towards upward social mobility, one can conclude that she and the EF view the ‘coloureds’ as crude and uncultured, that living among them or marrying one of them would involve a lowering of social, economic and political status; in short, the ‘coloured’ is anathema to her and by implication to the white, superior EF.

To repeat, it is generally believed that the EF is objective, non-partisan, but is that really the case? Rimmon-Kenan (1983:82,83) points out that verbal indicators of focalization may betray the attitude of the focalizer. She states: ‘The overall language of a text is that of the narrator, but focalization can “colour” it in a way which makes it appear as a transposition of the perceptions of a separate agent’. Naming and addressing are such verbal indicators, as I have shown in the sub-section on language. When the EF in Mikro's novels continually refers to the ‘spul’, ‘tros’ or ‘broedsel’ (‘caboodle’, ‘bunch’ or ‘brood’) children of ‘coloured’ women, one cannot but see that as a value judgement, which may refer either to their promiscuity or their stereotyped role of breeders or both.

An external focalizer may perceive an object either from without or from within. In the first case, only the outward manifestations of an object are presented. As an example take the earlier Afrikaans novels which have led to the entrenchment of existing stereotypes about blacks by only observing the outward actions of a black character and interpreting them according to a dominant value. In Die Koperkan Derk - and by implication the narrator-focalizer - thinks of his fellow-‘coloureds’ in this vein:

Oh, many coloureds blame the whites for their backwardness, poverty and diseases. He knows better. What did Jafta do when he had a windfall? Immediately went and bought a radiogram instead of nutritious food and good clothes. What does the labourer do with his wages? Liquor for the weekend. Apparently they are quite happy to live like that (p. 78).

Not only does Derk think of these people as the ‘other’ and thus distancing himself from them, but he also reinforces age-old stereotypes applied by the colonials to the indigenous people. In addition, he attempts to interpret their outward actions according to his values (and those of the narrator-focalizer) without trying to find the underlying causes of such actions. This is but one of the numerous examples illustrating the fact that Derk is only the mouthpiece for the author's views, for if he had been a credible character and an educated man, as we are told, then he would have been less harsh in his criticism of the average ‘coloured’ and would have attempted to seek the reasons for their actions in the sustained, relentless process of oppression, domination and dehumanisation the ‘coloureds’

[p. 82]

and other black groups have been subjected to ever since the white man set foot in South Africa.

When Rimmon-Kenan discusses the ideological facet of focalization (1983:81), it serves to endorse the above view even further. The ‘norms of the text’ are presented through a single, dominant perspective, that of the narrator-focalizer or external focalizer. She goes on to say that if additional ideologies emerge in such texts, they become subordinate to the dominant focalizer, thus transforming the other evaluating subjects into objects of evaluation. The ideology of the narrator-focalizer is usually taken as authoritative, and all other ideologies in the text are evaluated from this higher position. In Die Koperkan the external focalizer focalizes the ‘merits’ of apartheid and the idea that the ‘coloureds’ should refrain from trying to be incorporated into the white community. An opposing ideology is presented by Frankie, Sarah and Orlep, all of whom have to ‘bite the dust’, so to speak: Frankie is killed by white thugs because of his rejection of apartheid; Sarah, still a minor and dependent on her parents, has to toe the line and conform to her father's obvious preference for apartheid; Orlep, a state employee, is threatened with dismissal if he continues his ‘subversive’ activities.

What are the other features of external focalization which white writers use to their advantage when portraying black people? Since the black character then becomes the object of focalization, the image we receive of it is determined by the focalizer. This focalized object need not be a character - it can be the living surroundings of the black character, an event, etc. We are then presented with an interpretation of the elements which is far from neutral. For example, Derk's physical environment is sharply contrasted to that of the rest of the ‘coloured’ people. We learn that Derk and his family live in an ‘opulent house’ (p. 13), while the physical surroundings of the ‘coloured’ group area are described as ‘the backstreets of Salt River ... noise; shuffling of feet; the odour of garlic; swearing and jostling’ (p. 7); the houses are ‘smaller and dirtier, the pattern of the houses is exactly the same... untidy little gardens and filthy curtains’ (pp. 9, 10). The emotive value of the adjectives puts paid to any idea of neutrality.

As Bal points out, the object of focalization may be perceptible but in some cases it may be visible only inside the head of a character and only those who have access to it can perceive anything. The EF is in the best position to have access to these non-perceptible objects and to interpret them. The EF can therefore extensively describe the thoughts of the focalized, while other characters are unaware of them. It is therefore easy to use and manipulate the thoughts of the object by means of external focalization and to manipulate the reader in the process to choose sides.

There are cases where the EF seems to ‘yield’ focalization to a character-bound focalizer. What is really happening, is that ‘the vision of the character-bound

[p. 83]

focalizer is being given within the all-encompassing vision of the external focalizer’ (Bal). In fact, the EF always keeps the focalization in which the focalization of a character-focalizer may be embedded as object. The EF can also watch along with a person, without leaving focalization entirely to a character-focalizer. This gives rise to double or ambiguous focalization, which makes it difficult to decide who actually focalizes: the EF on the first level or the character- focalizer on the second.

The EF has the added advantage of having a bird's-eye view of the presented events - it is situated at a point far above the object(s) of its focalization. It can yield a panoramic view or a ‘simultaneous’ focalization of things happening in different places. It has at its disposal all the temporal dimensions of the story as well (past, present and future). It has unrestricted knowledge, it knows everything about the represented world and always knows more than a character-focalizer. The EF also has the advantage of penetrating the consciousness of the focalized and consequently has the privilege of manipulating that consciousness to conform to its own ideology, as is amply illustrated in the case of Derk Booysen.

There are traces of variable internal focalization in the story, but it is so loose and sporadic that it becomes of little importance. When it does take place, it is only to show that the brown skin is a scourge and that apartheid is the only solution for the problems of the ‘coloureds’. Then, of course, there is the EF who makes no bones about its contention that white is beautiful and black ugly and who yields focalization to other characters in order to manipulate them to think likewise. Cf. for example:

Alet Booysen does not look like a coloured woman. The hair is long and wavy and rustbrown while the face is almost white but the eyes are black. At the age of fifty she is still beautiful. (pp. 12-13)


(Derk to Petro, his ‘white’ daughter): ‘Let me look at you. Do you know how terribly beautiful you are?’ (p. 17)


Frankie Booysen is eighteen, tall and dark-skinned with redbrown frizzy hair, slightly flat nose, high cheekbones and thick lips. He is the ugliest of Derk's and Alet's children. (p. 22) - emphases mine.

The focalized is largely Petro who, because of her white skin, is seen through the eyes of her father, her fiancé and other whites who are unaware of her true ‘identity’, as being chaste, cultured, intelligent, beautiful and sincere, someone with a ‘developed taste’ for the arts (p. 45), someone of ‘noble disposition’ (p. 46). But she is also the focalizer and the objects of her focalization are the ‘coloureds’ in comparison to the whites. The EF manipulates several ‘coloured’ characters to invoke the so-called Biblical message of separation between the races, among them Derk and the old woman, Même Katryn.

[p. 84]

3.3.2.5 Race and ethnicity

In South Africa, as in other parts of the world where heterogenous populations are to be found, groups are distinguished by physical and cultural characteristics. Race and ethnicity is, for the underdogs at least, a liability. Situations of conflict, invidious discrimination, exploitation, oppression and deprivation are explained by those who dominate them as in some sense inevitable or natural. Whether the exploited and oppressed group is defined racially or ethnically, racism is present on the level of ideology.

Since the phenomenon of ‘passing for white’/‘try-for-white’ does exist and both the dominant and dominated are conscious of its existence, and since the transcendence of the racial barrier is not viewed very kindly by the white dominant class, it follows that an individual's physical features are constantly under heavy scrutiny when that individual shows the faintest trace of not entirely belonging to the white race. The main concern is that such a person would, in the process of procreation, pass on the ‘black’ genes to its offspring, thereby threatening the ‘purity’ of the white race which in any case is a fantasy and which science declares has no validity whatsoever, as pointed out by, among others, Phillip V. Tobias (1961: 32-35).

For his story, Mikro creates a ‘coloured’ family consisting of the parents, Derk and Alet Booysen, and their four children, Petro, Hayward, Frankie and Sarah. With a complete disregard for the laws of genetics, Mikro creates a father and mother who both have ‘white blood in their veins’, with the father ‘more brown than yellow’ and the mother who ‘does not look like a coloured woman’. (One wonders what a ‘coloured’ woman looks like!). But their children display a remarkable deviation from genetic theory: Petro is fair-haired and fair-skinned and her physical features do not show the slightest indication of her ‘coloured’ ancestry; Hayward resembles his father and has inherited his copper-brown skin; Frankie is dark-skinned with woolly hair and Sarah is ‘even darker than Frankie’ (p. 31) - one white-skinned and three dark-skinned offspring of an almost white mother and a brown-skinned father is truly a violation of genetic veracity. Significantly, the two members of the family who most resemble whites are also given typically Afrikaner names, Alet and Petro (Petronella), and, combined with their typically Afrikaner surname, their assimilation and acceptance into the white community, especially that of Petro, is facilitated. The deformation of the Afrikaner name, Dirk, to ‘Derk’ is a clear indication that he does not belong to either Petro's or his other children's category. Likewise, his other children have obviously non-Afrikaner names which, together with their obviously ‘coloured’ physical features, effectively exclude them from the privileged class, in addition to suggesting that they do not conform to the moral values Petro, and by implication the entire Afrikaner population, subscribe to.

[p. 85]

Petro, the ‘coloured’ woman who can easily ‘pass for white’, is carefully scrutinised by the external narrator (EN) who, in addition to being a superior, white observer, is also a self-styled expert on race biology. Explicit information is given about Petro's race and ethnicity, for example, the EN describes her as resembling ‘... a white person even more than Alet. She has fair hair, a fair skin and it's only the high cheekbones which would betray her ancestry to an expert, that, and the slight bluish tint under the fingernails’ (p. 13). Later, by means of the stream of consciousness technique, Derk thinks of his daughter in the same vein: ‘Petro's facial features betray no sign of her ancestry. Perhaps only the faint bluishness under the fingernails’ (p. 35). One would think that ‘bluishness under the fingernails’ is a feature of a dark-skinned person!

In fact, every ‘coloured’ character in the novel is described in terms of race and ethnicity. Petro looks upon herself as a white person, for example: ‘... to herself she is white. And indeed she is ... Is she not white of skin and white in upbringing, speech, everything?’ (pp. 47, 48). And again: ‘I am white, I have had a white education and I carry the identity document of a white person’ (pp. 67, 68) and by her own admission, she ‘thinks like a white’ (p. 68). She and the EN observe a young woman working in the same building as her and reveal her repugnance of the ‘coloured’ race: ‘In her building works a girl who is as tall as she is but the skin is dark-blue and the hair that of a bastard. She shudders’ (p. 68 - my emphasis).

This repugnance of the ‘coloureds’ is further reinforced by different narratological strategies which dupe the reader into believing that the views expressed are those of the ‘coloureds’ and not necessarily those of the real author. For example:

‘Alet thinks: I shall make sacrifices. Petro will not be able to live among our people again. Grant her the opportunity’ (p. 16);


(Petro to her father): ‘“I shall never, never be happy among the coloureds”’ (p. 17);


(Derk to Louis Beeg): ‘“She will never marry a coloured ... rather remain unmarried”’ (p. 20);


(Petro to her fiancé): ‘“I can only love someone with intellect”’ (meaning her white fiancé - p. 45);


EN: ‘She will never be able to marry one of her own people’ (p. 68).

One has to infer from the above excerpts that Petro (and the EN) view the ‘coloureds’ as some kind of sub-human species but paradoxically so strong that they might infect, pollute or flaw the white race. Brushing aside the fact that white people were responsible for creating a race of ‘coloureds’, Mikro continues in the true Sarah Gertrude Millin tradition - though not as overtly - of ascribing to this group of the people all that is demonic in life.

[p. 86]

Why this over-emphasis on race? There are still some, like Mikro, who maintain that race determines all social and mental activities and therefore culture and civilisation generally. This view had its origin in the days of slavery, when slaveowners answered those who wished to abolish slavery by suggesting that slaves were ignorant and illiterate because of their race (and not because they were denied schooling facilities!). It is easy to deny a subservient people the benefits of civilisation and then to describe them as uncivilised. The resulting idea of racial superiority and inferiority has been carried to absurd extremes to the present day at the hands of racist anthropologists and politicians.

3.3.2.6 ‘Futility’ and ‘tragedy’ of trying for white

The unmistakable message of this novel, over and above the propagation of the apartheid idea, is a serious warning to ‘coloureds’ that trying for white is a futile exercise which could only end in tragedy. Even those who can easily pass, must realise that they carry the ‘blood flaw’ which surely will be passed on to their offspring should they consort with white partners. It is all right for this ‘blood flaw’ to be passed on from ‘coloured’ to ‘coloured’, but to infest the white race in this manner is a mortal sin and the most serious of crimes. Moreover, a life of suffering and subterfuge awaits those who have the audacity to cross the racial barrier, as Petro had to discover.

Despite Petro's Christian upbringing, she is forced into a life of lies by informing her fiancé that she has no living relatives and that she can never have children because of her ‘haemophilia’. The impression is given that her life is a complete vacuum: living among ‘coloureds’ is unthinkable; living among whites causes stress and fear of discovery of her true identity. The inner conflict that is consequently engendered causes not only unhappiness but confusion, deception and feelings of guilt as well. She wants to live as white, she is prepared to sever all relations with her family in order to pursue a life which would give her all the advantages of being white and which would enable her to marry the man of her choice. Yet, in a letter to her parents she states: ‘My mind and my conscience tell me that I may not marry a white man’ (p. 15). The question arises to what extent her mind and conscience had been manipulated by the EF, because in the end her ‘mind and conscience’ triumph over her selfish interests as her little adventure among the white community abruptly and in an unmotivated manner comes to an end.

At the heart of the matter is the suffering and tragedy of leading Petro's kind of life, which must serve as a deterrent for any ‘coloured’ having aspirations to pass for white. In the already mentioned letter to her parents all her confusion, fear and unhappiness filter through, so that her father prays: ‘Take Petro in Thy eternal arms and carry her with Thy love. What must she do, Lord? ... [T]here is

[p. 87]

pain in my heart because of Petro's suffering, because of Petro's suffering...’ (p. 17). Every meeting between Petro and Sas, her fiancé, is a demonstration of this suffering, of fear (p. 46), of loneliness because of her secret (p. 47) and the hopelessness of her situation. Her unhappiness results from her ‘outsider’ position in the white community in which she can never be completely integrated, not because the white community would not accept her as one of them, but because of her own guilt and the realisation that she would ‘sin’ against them and do them an injustice by marrying Sas. Happiness can only be attained by returning to her people where she belongs. The invocation of the Biblical message of separation between the races as interpreted by the Afrikaner, the ‘tear-jerking’ story, the advocation by none other than some of the ‘coloured’ characters of apartheid as the only solution for the ‘coloured problem’, all these and other strategies are used to convince the ‘white coloureds’ of the ‘futility’ and ‘tragedy’ of trying for white.

Appearing nearly twenty years after Mikro's novel, i.e. in 1976, Bartho Smit's drama, Die Verminktes (The Maimed) explores the same theme of ‘futility’ and ‘tragedy’ when the white woman, Elize, commits suicide after she had discovered that her lover, Frans, has ‘dark blood’ in his veins.

3.3.2.7 The women

3.3.2.7.1 Peripheral status

What is said about the peripheral character in 3.2.2.6.1 also applies here. With regard to Die Koperkan, we notice that Mikro departs from this tradition by ‘promoting’ a woman who to all intents and purposes is white but remains ‘coloured’ because she carries the ‘blood flaw’ in her veins, to a position very near to the centre of the events. Although Petro is not the main character, she is nevertheless the axis around whom everything revolves. This appears to be anomalous with Mikro's oeuvre regarding ‘coloured’ people, especially ‘coloured’ women, but the reasons for this departure from tradition soon become apparent. The author's intention is to advocate an idea; in addition to the authoritative voice of the external narrator, mouthpieces must be found to promote that idea and who better than two representatives from the ‘coloured’ community who have attained the level of white ‘civilisation’ to fulfil that role, whose views must be considered as reliable affirmations of the idea?

3.3.2.7.2 Petro

As stated before, Petro is placed in a different context and category than the rest of her family already by naming. The very traditional Afrikaner name of Petronella (together with an Afrikaner surname) distinguishes her from the other members of her family and facilitates her assimilation into Afrikaner society, bearing in

[p. 88]

mind the Afrikaner's suspicion and distrust of aliens, albeit white. In her case, one can hardly speak of analogous naming as a means of characterisation as expounded by Hamon, for her name does not reveal a character-trait but rather serves to place her in a social and political milieu concomitant with the racial classification she has assumed.

A character's physical surroundings (room, home, street, town) as well as its human environment (family, social class) are often used as trait-connoting metonymies (Rimmon-Kenan, 1983:66). The relation of contiguity is frequently supplemented by that of causality. Petro leaves her family home in Cape Town - a city with the reputation of being by far the most lax in implementing the apartheid legislation (cf. pp. 99-102) - and moves to Pretoria, administrative capital of the country and heimat of conservative Afrikaners. This is in agreement with what Graham Watson (1972:464/5) asserts: ‘To facilitate the process of passing (for white), Coloureds will ... often move from the town or province where they are known ... [T]hey must move in order to establish themselves as White’. The move to Pretoria is well thought out. This is only one of two cities in South Africa, the other being Bloemfontein, where the race laws have been stringently applied in addition to those, e.g. curfew for blacks, instituted by the city councils themselves. The move to Pretoria must surely rank as one of the severest tests for Petro to live and work among conservative Afrikaners such as her fiancé, Sas Stulle, and her white friends. One can assume that this is a conscious attempt by the author to reinforce her difference.

Petro's room in the private hotel is tastefully furnished, with an original Frans Oerder and a Van Gogh print. From her fiancé we learn that she has a ‘developed taste in music’ (p. 45), for she listens to the music of Schubert and Mussorgsky; we are told by the EN that she reads classic English novels. Her circle of friends comes from the Afrikaner elite, her fiancé is the architect son of a retired judge of the Supreme Court, ironically someone whose task it had been to enforce apartheid legislation.

The metonymic relation between external appearance and character-traits is a powerful resource in the hand of many writers, even today. One should distinguish in this connection between those external features which are grasped as beyond the character's control, such as height, colour of the eyes, etc. and those which at least partly depend on him/her, like hairstyle and dress. While the first group characterises through contiguity alone, the second has additional causal overtones. Mikro has already demonstrated his use of these resources in the creation of Toiings, and now he attempts to use it again in characterising Petro, this time to extol the character's virtue and to suggest her elevated social class. The external narrator-focalizer sees and describes her in the following manner:

[p. 89]

Petro weighs 123 pounds, is 5 ft 7 inches tall and has the measurements which any fashion model would envy her, as well as her walk. Her legs are well-filled and the skirt she is wearing has a slit so that the pure white lace of her petticoat flashes with every step. (p. 39)

We are also told by the EN that she is beautiful, that men stop to stare at her (p. 39). Her father praises her beauty (p. 17), Sas considers himself a very lucky man to have such a beautiful yet chaste fiancee (p. 45) and even John Orlep, the anti-apartheid activist, acknowledges her beauty (p. 70). However, we are not told what exactly constitutes her beauty, except that she has a fair skin and fair hair and the body proportions of a model. One must therefore conclude that it is her whiteness that makes her beautiful, the author's strategy to legitimise the contention that white equals beauty and virtue.

Petro herself admits that she hardly knows her own family, except her father who she came to know mainly through his poetry and letters written to her. She therefore relates better to him, not least because he shows traces of ‘culture’ as interpreted by whites, and comes to the conclusion that he ‘should never have had a brown skin’ (p. 47). Ever since Petro had started her schooling, she had been separated from her family - weekends and school holidays were spent with her white friends and their families; should she run accidentally into one of her family members, she had to disown them. Her schooling and university education exposed her to white culture and values. One of the many anomalies of this novel is the implication that Petro's finesse is entirely due to her white education while we are told repeatedly about the refined lifestyle of Derk and his family, Derk's aspirations to live like white people and his white spirit within a brown skin. Given these circumstances, Petro would have acquired the same values in her parental home as those she acquired from her white education, but once more the reader must be led to believe that even the best of ‘coloured’ lifestyles are not on a par with those of whites. Moreover, in view of Petro's lack of knowledge about her own family and the ‘coloured’ population at large, one finds it difficult to comprehend her dislike of them, save to infer from it that a process of indoctrination had been/is set in motion to view the other as the beast and the white woman as the beauty.

3.3.2.7.3 Alet, Sarah and Même Katryn

Not much is told about the rest of the women characters in the novel. Very little narrating time is allocated to them and their degree of communicativeness is far less than that of Petro. They simply become incidental background figures who chiefly fill the space, i.e. the milieu of the ‘coloureds’, in which the main character, Derk Booysen, acts. Especially in the case of Alet and Sarah, their main function is only to summon contrasts to Petro, but no parallels.

[p. 90]

In true Afrikaner tradition, Alet is portrayed as the dutiful wife of Derk Booysen, beautiful, an object to be displayed and admired. Intellectually she is not her husband's equal and this disparity is also manifest in their marriage. Derk isolates himself from the rest of his family, not only physically when he buries himself in his study, but also ideologically when he apparently is the only one who endorses the Afrikaner's views on apartheid. This inevitably leads to a degree of estrangment between husband and wife and it is not surprising that Alet sides with her children in their opposition to apartheid. The only time she stands up to him is when she confronts him with the inequalities brought about by apartheid but, like a dutiful wife, she is indoctrinated - in an unconvincing manner - to think as he does.

Even less is known about Sarah, except that she is the youngest child of the family, is a student at a teachers' training college (no university education for her!), has a good alto voice but more importantly, that she is the ‘darkest’ of the Booysen family. Like her brother Frankie, she is fiercely opposed to the policy of apartheid and since Derk suspects she has been influenced by her ‘communist’ friend, John Orlep, he forbids her to see him again. Every member of the family is unhappy and the cause of their unhappiness is linked directly or indirectly to Derk. Sarah is shunned by her erstwhile best friends because her father is selling out the ‘coloured’ people.

In a side-intrigue we meet the character Même Katryn, as she is called by the little white girl, Ilsa Touwa who finds comfort and love in her simple home. Katryn is ‘planted’ in the text with no other function but to promote the apartheid idea. Since she is old, a staunch Christian and respected by her community, she becomes the ideal mouthpiece for the author's ideas. Like Derk, she also invokes the Biblical message of separation between the races, for she tells Ilsa: ‘“The Lord has made us white and brown. The brown ones must live with the brown and the white ones with the white”’ (p. 61). Katryn and her husband do not believe that their children should further their education, the reason being that ‘books make people evil - the Bible says so’ (p. 62). While Derk listens to this kind of logic, he silently wishes that all his people could be ‘as naive as Katryn’, for with this kind of person one could start building something, not with John Orlep and his ilk (p. 63). In his own naïveté, Derk fails to acknowledge the true reasons for this lack of motivation on the part of Katryn and her husband. Once again, blame for the ‘coloured’ people's ‘backwardness’ must be apportioned to their own lack of ambition and not to their socio-political and economic position which effectively exclude them from a decent education.

3.3.2.7.4 Silences in the text with regard to ‘coloured’ women

What is most important in this entire diatribe about the novel, is what the text cannot and would not articulate, especially with regard to the ‘coloured’ women

[p. 91]

characters. It is imperative to examine those ‘strategies of exclusion ... and litanies of evasion’ (J. Hillis Miller: Deconstruction and Criticism, p. 15), to speak about the literary work instead of just repeating what it says, to enable us to go beyond the work and explain it, to say what it does not and could not say. We are all aware that the speech of the book comes from a certain silence which makes explication and not merely interpretation of paramount importance.

Bearing in mind the popular view among some well-known Western feminists that the Western woman is as oppressed and marginalized as the black male (e.g. De Beauvoir), one has to conclude that the black woman is then by implication the lowest on the scale of the human species, not only concerning oppression and marginalization but also the views held about her. From the silences in Mikro's text, one can conclude that he subscribes to and reinforces the view of black women's position on the human scale. We have already established that Petro's white skin and white education place her in a category other than that of the black women in the story; also that scant information is supplied about the other women. From these facts alone one can already infer several dichotomies between white and black in the text.

The most apparent of these dichotomies is implied in the narrating time allocated to Petro in comparison to that allocated to the other women. This per se is not a pointer to her superior position, since centre or periphery is not necessarily an indication of superiority or inferiority. But Petro's prominent traits, her exceptional qualities, are defined by the external narrator, the most authoritative voice in the text; likewise, the mediocrity and even ‘backwardness’ of the other women are defined by the EN. The reader is thus implicitly called upon to accept those definitions.

When one takes into account the period in which this novel was published and the then relative absence of the black woman as a meaningful character, one has to examine the motives behind Mikro's choice of an ‘almost white’ woman as a near-central character when the theme of the novel is ostensibly the justification of the apartheid policy, as well as the ‘futility’ of trying for white. As far as this novel is concerned, a few conclusions can be drawn from this: (a) the whiter the skin, the nearer a character can move to the centre of events and the more ‘acceptable’ it becomes to the intended reader; (b) the choice of an ‘almost white’ woman is designed to show the vast differences on several levels between white and black women, which would subsequently reinforce the existing negative view of the latter; (c) the black woman is one of those ‘necessary evils’ of society, to be tolerated but not to be given a status equal to that of the white woman. By once again relegating the black woman to the utmost periphery, her status in society becomes apparent.

[p. 92]

A second observation is the binary opposition of black and white and the concomitant attributes of darkness and light. Here we have a ‘white’ woman in opposition to ‘coloured’ women, which already says much in the South African context. Petro's near-perfection, her beauty, virtue, high moral values are time and again extolled, not only by the narrator but also by those who come into contact with her. If she is beautiful because she is white, then one is led to conclude that Sarah, her sister, who is described as the ‘darkest’ of the family, must be ugly, although it is not said. Everything Petro is, the ‘coloured’/black women are not. One further example will suffice: the narrator-focalizer observes the ‘pure white lace’ of Petro's petticoat (p. 39), from which we may infer her cleanliness of body and mind; when Derk pays a visit to one of the incidental ‘coloured’ women in the story, he immediately observes her dishevelled appearance of ‘tousled, unkempt hair and a dirty face’ while inside the house he is greeted by ‘stuffy fumes’ (p. 115). If Petro's external appearance reflects her ‘noble disposition’ (p. 46), then surely this ‘coloured’ woman's untidy appearance must reflect quite the opposite.

The cultured, civilised, refined and educated Petro could only attain this position because her white skin enabled her to break the restrictions placed upon black people. But that is not enough. Her aspirations are to make a complete break with the ‘coloured’ community and what they represent in her perception. She tells her father: ‘“I dream far beyond my circle, very far”’ (p. 17). Obviously she has in mind the ‘perks’ that go with a white skin and are denied to black women: the best education the country can offer, self-determination and self-empowerment. Again the ‘silence’ of the text virtually shouts at the reader: black women have not attained her level of development and never shall. A telling example of this is when her mother, Alet, also white but not quite as white as her daughter, admits to her husband that she does neither understand his intellectual arguments about the ‘merits’ of apartheid (p. 51), nor is she as intelligent as he (p. 108). Petro is the only one of the women characters who fully grasps the ‘merits’ of apartheid - telepathically she communicates with her father: ‘You are the only one who always understands me. I also understand you, your ideals and ambitions ... Mamma never understood, or Sarah or Hayward or Frankie’ (p. 46); Derk in his failure to communicate with his wife, his other children and the rank and file of his community, intimates that they have neither the intellect nor the inclination to understand him and his ideas - the only one who does, is Petro (cf. p. 79), thus implying that she is the only one with intellect.

The strongly emotional question of religion, particularly Christianity, is also invoked to demonstrate the dichotomy of black and white, nature and culture, barbarism and civilisation. The age-old distinction between civilisation and barbarism rested solely upon the one group having adopted the Christian faith while the other has not. In the South African case this was and still is no less the basis of the distinction made between black and white and subsequently the purported

[p. 93]

basis of the apartheid policy. On several occasions we are told by the EN, by other characters and by Petro herself of her ‘Christian upbringing’, her Christian conscience and her Christian virtues, of her ‘irreproachable character’ (p. 20), of her ambition to become a missionary (ostensibly to christianise the blacks!). Everything that is noble and admirable is concentrated in the Christian faith and consequently in Petro. Hatred is an alien emotion to her, she can only love her fellow human beings, as we are told by Derk:

God wants him (Derk) to love his fellow humans but also to have great need of love. Petro too. Petro has always loved her fellow humans. Of course she loves Sas Stulle very much. How can it be otherwise? Love and Petro are twins. (p. 64)

One gains the impression that Derk raised only one of his children, Petro, in the Christian faith, for his other children do not attend church (Hayward); Frankie refuses to become a member of the Dutch Reformed Church and says that after 2000 years of religion, the whites are still as resentful and intolerant as before (p. 51); they shall probably appropriate the very best, the ‘goulden haáp’ (golden harp), once they get to heaven; Sarah, as disillusioned as Frankie with the white man's religion, also believes they will take the best, the golden streets, and leave the copper ones to the ‘coloureds’. When her father admonishes her for ridiculing ‘his God’, she retaliates: ‘“But we do not have one, Dad. It's the white people's God!”’ (p. 76). Furthermore, Petro sees Frankie's death as retribution for his ‘sin’ of hating white people, that ‘abominable, ugly hatred’ he harboured and which found expression in his protest poetry. In Petro's perception these poems express ‘nothing but unbridled hatred’ and she prays to God to forgive Frankie (p. 143). Like Derk, Petro misinterprets Frankie's attitude as hatred for whites instead of hatred for the system of apartheid because of the wide chasm that has developed between Derk and his brown children on the one hand, and Petro and her siblings on the other. Significantly, both Derk and Petro put the blame for Frankie's death on his ‘hatred’ for the whites. Derk tells Petro: ‘“Hatred is a poisonous snake. Frankie hated the whites, and hatred generates hatred”’ (p. 129). The same must then hold true for both Alet and Sarah, for both silently admit that at times they hated Petro because of Derk's obvious favouritism, his love for Petro and his preoccupation with her and her suffering to the exclusion of his wife and other children. Petro's Christianity as interpreted by the Afrikaner, once again elevates her to a position far above that of the black woman. She considers it her selfimposed task, like the missionaries of old, to ‘uplift’ the ‘coloureds’, and in a very arrogant fashion which illustrates the polarisation between her and her family, she decides: ‘The coloureds need me’ (p. 128).

The most important of these dichotomies is reflected by silences and strategies of exclusion rather than by explicit definition or even implicit information. This concerns the question of procreation and miscegenation. Miscegenation results in a race of ‘half-breeds’ who, because of their half-white origin, may claim

[p. 94]

assimilation into the white community and the rights they have appropriated for themselves. The ‘purity’ of the white race which they use as an argument to justify their superiority and hegemony, will be placed in jeopardy and the material benefits they reap will be diminished.

The motive behind Mikro's choice of an almost white woman as the main female character in his novel, now becomes even more apparent. She carries in her veins the ‘blood flaw’, but everything in the text points to her being poised for marriage to a white man and passing on the ‘blood flaw’ to their offspring. But then, her strong moral values prevail and she confesses in a letter to her fiancé her true origin which precludes marriage. Having made the conscious choice of terminating the relationship, she must have realised that she will be exposed to the white community for what she really is, tarred and feathered and finally cast out of the staunchly conservative Afrikaner laager. So who to turn to? The decision is taken out of her hands, for the untimely, unmotivated and non-functional death of her brother is the deus ex machina which wrenches her from a predicament which could have had unpleasant results. She returns to Cape Town and her family of whom she still thinks in terms of ‘the coloureds’.

What does the text fail to articulate? Petro is being held up as an example to all other ‘coloured’ women who, like herself, can pass for white. Her ‘noble disposition’ restrains her from deceiving her fiancé into believing she is white, it prevents her from ‘polluting’ the white race with her dark genes, it enables her to make her contribution to maintaining their ‘purity’, all of which are highly commendable characteristics. But by Mikro's process of exclusion and evasion, the black woman becomes the target of severe condemnation for already having brought about a race of ‘half-breeds’ who are so degenerate that they can only be viewed with repulsion. The irony is that the black woman is held solely responsible for this state of affairs, that the white male is completely exonerated from blame for his part in creating this race of ‘half-breeds’, that she is either elevated to a plane far above that of the Virgin Mary in the number of immaculate conceptions she experiences or debased to the level of the amoeba who can procreate asexually. It then follows that her sexual mores also come under attack, for if she is prevented from legally marrying a white man, she can still illegally and immorally (cf. the Immorality Act) copulate with as many white men as she wishes.

To conclude, Mikro's so-called sensitive novel is as insensitive to the ‘coloureds’ in general and to the black woman in particular as are his earlier novels in which he attempts to portray this group of people. As stated before, the novel itself is narratologically a feeble attempt and not worth discussing but is included in this dissertation to demonstrate that it is works like these that contribute to the continued oppression and marginalization of women in general and black women in particular by the very images they project and which are used by legislators and others in positions of leadership to justify unjust practices.

[p. 95]

3.4 Concluding remarks

In my discussion of the two novels representing the earlier period of apartheid rule, I may have seemed to digress from the topic I am dealing with, but I consider it necessary to establish the general mood and thinking of the Afrikaners during the period, to ascertain to what extent, if any, this mood and thinking have changed when dealing with the later periods.

As already stated, the black woman as a meaningful character in the earlier novels is non-existent. In both novels discussed above, the black woman is either the helper or opponent of the main character who in both cases is a black male. Therefore, not much can be said about the characterisation of the black woman in these novels, since not much characterisation takes place in the novels themselves, in keeping with the devalued status of the black woman in the South Africa of the 1950s and even the 1990s.

The assessment of novels such as the two discussed above as ‘half the solution’ to South Africa's racial problems, seems to be exactly the opposite of that. In both these novels conscious attempts are made to portray blacks as sub-human and black women mostly as the eternal whore. If that is termed ‘half the solution’, the other half of the solution should then surely be the complete annihilation of the black population?