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

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Chapter 6
Women's voices since 1976 and Poppie Nongena's dubbed voice

So far, the Afrikaner male perspective of the black woman has been examined. This chapter attempts to look at how women are portrayed by women, more specifically how Afrikaner women portray black women with the emphasis on Elsa Joubert's novel Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena.^1. It would seem strange that women's voices in the Afrikaans literary canon should be left for last but the truth of the matter is that, while Afrikaner women writers^2. have been no strangers to the Afrikaans literary scene, their work reveals an absence of black women characters of significance until 1978.

This chapter will attempt to illustrate the vast differences between Afrikaner male and female authors in their portrayal of the black woman. These differences are not only attributable to the distinctive style, themes, language, etc. which ostensibly characterise women's writing but also to the particular situation which characterise women's lives in South Africa: the ‘maids and madams’ situation; the powerlessness of the white woman in the face of white male domination for which she can find only some compensation by exercising power over her black employee; the advantage the white woman has over the black woman, not only in the sense of the employer-employee situation but the advantages legislation has given her but denied her black counterpart. In all societies women from all sectors experience a commonality which goes beyond the distinctions of class and race - they are mothers or potential mothers and as such discriminated against because of this gratuitous function which effectively excludes them, at least for a while, from full participation in human endeavour.

In this chapter, I shall give an overview of how some Afrikaner women portray black women and thereafter examine Elsa Joubert's portrayal of an African woman. This is perhaps the most important factor of Afrikaner writing after 1976: whereas prior to that date the black characters in the Afrikaans novel had been mainly ‘coloured’, the African as a meaningful character emerges only after 1976,^3. the obvious reason being the shock and bewilderment brought to the white establishment by the youth revolt.

1. The novel will henceforth be referred to as Poppie Nongena to include both the Afrikaans and English versions.

2. I am using the term ‘women writers’ despite the outcry against this categorization. Antjie Krog (1989:41), for example, posits that it is ‘mean-spirited and naïve’ to speak of ‘women writers’. Similarly, Sankie Nkondo protests against the term in her paper ‘Women writers: a separate entity’ presented at the Victoria Falls Conference in 1989.

3. Venter's novel Swart Pelgrim was among the first Afrikaans novels to have an African as central character but then a male.

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A considerable portion of this chapter shall be devoted to an examination of the reception of Joubert's novel by white critics and how my views correspond to or differ from theirs. Such a discussion shall have the purpose too of illustrating the ‘validity’ of white critics' views and the discounting of those of blacks when a novel written about blacks is reviewed. For a long time the only ‘acceptable’ currency in respect of literary criticism has been that of whites: they wrote about, thought, spoke and criticised on behalf of blacks.^4. This is especially noticeable in the case of white and black women, since the latter have been discriminated against so severely that their development, education, participation in life as a whole have been seriously curtailed by the powers that be. White women have consequently taken it upon themselves to speak and think on behalf of their black counterparts. How successful or otherwise they have been in their attempts may emerge from the following pages.

In the examination of novels in the previous chapters the emphasis was on how black women characters are portrayed. The major difference in this chapter is how a black woman perceives herself. Again, one has to be careful of taking everything Poppie says about herself on face-value - the situation is far from that simple.

4. A case in point is the conference on women and gender held in Durban in January/February 1991.

6.1 Women's voices in the Afrikaans literary corpus

Since the recognition of Afrikaans as a fully-fledged language and its introduction as one of the only two ‘official’ languages of South Africa, the literature of Afrikaans was largely a male literature. For a very long time the only women who gained recognition as poets were Elisabeth Eybers, Olga Kirsch and Ina Rousseau, the former two having left the country to pursue their literary careers elsewhere. As for prose and drama there was a dearth of women practitioners on the Afrikaans literary scene. Admittedly, a few women ventured into the area of prose in the 1940s, the most well-known being M.E.R. (pseudonym of M.E. Rothman), Audrey Blignault, Elise Muller and Alba Bouwer. Their sketches and stories are characterised by small realisms concerning the household, domestic work and children. This is not surprising since it reflects the norms of Afrikaner society in the first half of the twentieth century. In her prose, Minnie Postma focuses especially on the tales of the Basotho involving cannibals, monsters, animals, princes and princesses with love, revenge and death as motives. Indeed, the sound of women's voices was a rare phenomenon and when it did appear sporadically, it was overshadowed by male writing of the same period.

Elise Muller is best known for her novels Die vrou op die skuit, Die wilde loot and Van eensame mense in which she continues the realistic-psychological direction started in her novels of the 1940s. Significant in her stories is the severe censure

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to which Afrikaner women who have transgressed the norms of their society are subjected (Die wilde loot).

However, it was not until the 1960s that a great surge of women's narrative entered and made an impact upon Afrikaner writing. The emergence of Afrikaner female novelists during this period is of cardinal importance, since the impression is often created that the Sestigers comprised of male authors only. Most of these women already wrote short stories and sketches in the 1950s. Anna M. Louw, novelist, dramatist, writer of short stories and travelogues, published her novel, Die onverdeelde uur with its strong patriarchal overtones in 1956. This was followed in 1963 by a novelette in English, Twenty days that autumn, which deals with the unrest in the black townships of Cape Town after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 and which portrays white people's reactions to the crisis. But, like some of her male contemporaries, she concentrates on the heroic history of the Afrikaner in the novels Die banneling: die lyfwag (1964) and Die groot gryse (1968), both dealing with the life of Paul Kruger. She is perhaps best known for her family saga, Kroniek van Perdepoort (1975) which traces the fortunes and misfortunes of the Afrikaner Lotriet family over several decades. This ‘plaasroman’ (farm novel) - a prominent feature of Afrikaner writing in the 1920s and 1930s - is thematically and structurally a renewing intervention on the genre; the conflict with concrete forces is extended to a conflict with forces in the psyche, while the noble love relationship of the old farm novel is perverted.

Kroniek van Perdepoort is a parody on patriarchy and Afrikaner values and in which the inevitable downfall of a family through the influence of evil forces, the seven deadly sins, is depicted. The archetypal Afrikaner patriarch, Koos Lotriet (Koos Nek, because of his haughtiness), already dead for fifteen years, continues to exercise a strong influence on his family, especially his four sons. It is mainly in the portrayal of the wives of these four sons that the author parodies the males. For example, the eldest son, Jan Pampoen, is a weakling, a failure in life and would rather escape from reality with its tough demands than to face up to it. He blames his situation on his wife Letta, someone beneath his station and who embodies his entire hell. She is ‘Evil personified’ (p. 107); later when she laughs at his threats to commit suicide, he says to her: ‘All the devils in hell laugh like that’ (p. 217). Kobus, another son, comments that he and his brothers are married to ‘noughts’, simply because they have married women beneath their status. The irony of Kobus' statement is that in their relationships with their marriage partners, each of these women accentuate the sins of their husbands and illustrate how deviance not only destroys the self but also those who live in close proximity to the deviant person. Needless to say, not one of these marriages is happy.

After publishing a whole series of travelogues and short stories, Elsa Joubert ventured into the world of the novel in the 1960s (see 6.3.1). Like her predecessors, Henriette Grové continues in the tradition of the Afrikaner family saga, although

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she is better known for her radio plays. Under the pseudonym of Linda Joubert she published the epistolatory novel Meulenhof se mense in 1961, with sinister old-world characters living under a cloak of secrecy and in an oppressive atmosphere, a tradition she continues in Die laaste lente (1962). Berta Smit uses Sestiger elements like the interweaving of story levels and anti-chronological sequences to illustrate the Christian's struggle in the world in the novels Die vrou en die bees (1964), Een plus een (1967) and Die man met die kitaar (1971).

After having made her debut as a poet of considerable standing in the Afrikaans literature [e.g. the anthologies Vir die bysiende leser (1970), Spieël van water (1973) and Van vergetelheid en glans (1977)], Wilma Stockenström turned to narrative art after 1976. With her novel Uitdraai (1976) she makes a challenging debut as writer of prose precisely because of the renewal it brings to the genre of the farm novel and because it debunks the concept of the mythical ‘purity’ of the Afrikaner woman. On the farm Uitdraai, lives the intelligent, educated and attractive owner Flip, the product of a forbidden relationship between an Afrikaner woman and a ‘coloured’ labourer on the farm. Flip's mother, vilified and castigated by the Afrikaner neighbours, was driven to suicide and Flip reared with loving care and protection by his maternal grandparents who also left their viable farm to him. In his humane efforts to care for his domestic servant and her sick child, the neighbours once again speculate that he co-habits with a ‘coloured’ woman, for is it not ‘in his blood’? The irony is that the daughter of his staunch Afrikaner neighbours, Cornelie, falls madly in love with him, actually seduces him when he is most vulnerable and finds herself pregnant. Rather than give birth to another ‘bastard’, the Afrikaner seamstress of the town with full co-operation of Cornelie's mother, performs an abortion to preserve Cornelie's purity. In pristine white she later marries another farmer and the purity of the next generation is guaranteed.

This novel is followed by Eers Linkie dan Johanna (1979). The simple yet complex figure of Linkie dominates the first half of the book: Linkie the singer who performs in nightclubs and dance-halls, the bulimic eater, the man who always grimaces - the deeply tragic person whose world, however small, gains a much wider meaning within the framework of the book. Then there is Johanna, who functions both as a commentary on and an explanation of Linkie. 1981 saw the publication of another Stockenström novel, Die kremetartekspedisie (see 6.2), followed in 1987 by Kaapse rekwisiete set in the world of theatre and with a definite feminist content.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s women's writing in Afrikaans continued to increase in boldness, often rejecting the traditional norms and values imposed on Afrikaner women. What clearly emerges from their work is how they differ from their male counterparts in their portrayal of female characters. Examples are Jeanne Goosen in Om 'n mens na te boots (1975) and Louoond (1987);

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Eleanor Baker in Wêreld sonder einde (1972), Splinterspel (1973), Monica (1978) and 'n Geslote boek (1981); Lettie Viljoen in Klaaglied vir Koos (1984) and Marie Heese in Die uurwerk kantel (1976). Stories are often told from a woman's perspective, the main character is often an emancipated Afrikaner woman and there are even suggestions of lesbian relationships in some of these novels.

Dalene Matthee's ‘bush’ trilogy, viz. Kringe in die bos (1984), Fiela se kind (1985) and Moerbeibos (1987) have a historical framework and, although they deal with the lives of people in the Knysna forest in the nineteenth century, British colonial rule at the Cape and all its ramifications permeate the novels and the lives of the characters, as well as making an indictment against the colonial power for raping the land by destroying the indigenous forest and making almost extinct the Knysna elephants for their tusks.

The above is merely a selection of writing by Afrikaner women. The main purpose was to illustrate the progress - quantitatively as well as qualitatively - that has been made in this area of Afrikaner writing. However, in their new-found emancipation these women writers often demonstrate a kind of introspection and preoccupation with their own ‘freedom’, once again forming a tight little laager within the laager of Afrikaner exclusivity, while turning a blind eye to the greater South African reality, thus confirming the general mechanism of public vs private and male vs female.

6.2 Overview of white women depicting black women

Throughout almost the entire period of apartheid rule the black woman as a character in the novels by Afrikaner women remains a strikingly absent unit, something which appears to be inconsistent with the ‘reality’ in which many black and white women find themselves, i.e. working in close proximity to each other, sharing domestic work, together raising the white woman's children, sharing the same physical surroundings for most of the working day and both being victims of patriarchy. Of course, the black woman appears occasionally in stories as a one-dimensional figure lurking in the background but seldom as a character who changes or causes to change the course of events or who herself undergoes change. For most of the time she is the non-speaking, non-focalizing figure who speaks only when spoken to and whose interior life remains a closed book to the reader. The very fact that black and white women have so much in common and therefore ought to be able to forge close bonds, makes the absence of black women in Afrikaner women's writing all the more bemusing for the outside observer and all the more a confirmation of how effectively Afrikaner ideology has permeated their artistic products.

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While Afrikaner male authors have attempted during the first thirty years of apartheid rule to portray black women, albeit often in peripheral and stereotyped roles, Afrikaner women have displayed a singular reluctance to do so, even though the factors described above place them in a better position to give a more balanced view of black women (cf. for example Nadine Gordimer's assertion). One is inclined to attribute this neglect to craven indifference on the part of Afrikaner female authors but one has to go back into time to find the reasons for this deliberate exclusion of blacks from their writing. Afrikaner ideology and images of Afrikaner women by Afrikaner men have already been dealt with extensively in Chapter 2, and all that remains to be said here is that the ingrained attitude towards blacks originated in the European dictum that placing ‘civilised’ and ‘savages’ on equal footing would be ‘contrary to the laws of God and the natural distinction of race and colour’.^5. It was especially the task of the Afrikaner woman to keep her race pure and any contact with black men and women would constitute a threat to that purity. It would seem that this ideology spilled over into the artistic products of the Afrikaner woman as well.

A forerunner of white women writers depicting black women is undoubtedly Alba Bouwer in her Stories van Rivierplaas (1957). Recalling memories from her childhood, the adult narrator devotes a large portion of her narration to the old Basotho woman who was employed as domestic servant on their farm but who fulfilled so many roles in the narrator's life: nanny, story-teller, disciplinarian, surrogate mother and teacher, in short, she was ‘mammy’ or ‘Aunt Jemima’ of Gone with the Wind fame. Nevertheless, Ou-Melitie - as she was called by white children and adults alike - despite her nurturing role in the lives of the white children, had absolutely no power or authority over them. The reader as well as Ou-Melitie are never allowed to forget or ignore the authoritative voice of the ‘madam’.

The Afrikaans literary world had to wait more than twenty years after Alba Bouwer's contribution for another black woman to make it into the annals of Afrikaner literary history. With the novel Poppie Nongena (1978) Elsa Joubert made a quantum leap into the world of international narrative art and with this single work she exonerates Afrikaner women from blame for excluding black women from their work (see 6.3).

Joubert's novel is followed by Wilma Stockenström's Die kremetartekspedisie (1981), translated into English as The expedition to the baobab tree. Vastly different from Joubert's novel in almost all aspects (style, language, genre, structure, narration and focalization, for example), they have one feature in common: both novels have as their protagonist a black woman. Stockenström's novel tells the story of an anonymous slave woman who, after undertaking a doomed expedition with her penultimate owner to the ‘city of rose-quartz’, finds herself left to her own devices after the other members of the expedition party either desert or

5. Anna Steenkamp, Piet Retief's niece, formulating the reasons for the Voortrekkers' decision to trek.

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abscond or die. After much hardship she finds shelter in a hollow baobab tree where she spends the rest of her days and manages to survive with the help of the ‘little people’ (possibly the Khoisan). It is from this tree that she herself undertakes various inner expeditions, consisting of her experiences as a slave and her journeys of reminiscence. These ‘journeys’ at the same time encompass all the other expeditions undertaken in the story and in the text.

In the novel we have an example of retrospective first-person narrative, with the slave woman both narrator and focalizer; she is in fact the only focalizer, without the intervention of a narrating instance outside the represented events, without a shift in focalization - in fact, this narrative is an example of what Genette terms ‘fixed internal focalization’. Of course, signs of the ever-present implicit author can be detected, especially in the language used by the slave woman. Afrikaner critics find it incongruous that a slave woman can use such poetic language that is ascribed to her, but once again the implicit author intervenes, to demonstrate that elaborate, sophisticated thoughts are not bound to a specific culture, race or language. This is especially true for this narrative which takes on the form of an interior monologue from beginning to end.

Since this is a restrospective narrative, the slave woman's experiences are articulated in an anti-chronological sequence, switching from present to past to present frequently. The reader has to deconstruct the text in order to reconstruct the slave woman's life from her childhood to her imminent death. As an old woman, her thoughts sometimes wander, concretised by the order and frequency of the narrated experiences in the text.

Although this novel does not deal specifically with contemporary South African conditions, a straight line can nevertheless be drawn between the experiences and situation of the slave woman (e.g. her status as a mere ‘labour unit’, the exploitation of her body by her different owners) and the situation of the black woman in present-day South Africa.

Another novel with a black woman as a functional character and which had a considerable impact on Afrikaner literature, is Dalene Matthee's Fiela se kind (1985), translated into English as Fiela's child. This is the story of Benjamin Komoeti/Lucas van Rooyen. A three-year old white child, Lucas van Rooyen, disappears in the dense Knysna forest and is never found. Very late one night a three-year old white child is found crying outside Fiela Komoeti's house. She takes him in, rears him and cares for him as if he were her own. Could this child be Lucas? But the distance between the Knysna forest and the Langekloof where Fiela lives with her family is great, apart from the dangerous mountains which have to be crossed before getting there. Is it possible for a three-year old child to cover that distance, to find his way out of the forest and to cross such treacherous mountains all on his own? Nevertheless, two white census inspectors discover this

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white child living among ‘coloureds’ and immediately set in motion a process to reclaim this child and restore him to his ‘rightful’ parents. The relentless machinery of the law even resorts to fabricated evidence to get this child away from the ‘coloureds’, even though no natural mother could have cared better for Benjamin than Fiela did. She puts up a tremendous fight, courageous, strong and determined, but as a member of the colonised and a ‘coloured’ she is powerless against the mighty law. Benjamin/Lucas is ‘given’ by court order to the lazy, struggling, slovenly Van Rooyens but he retains the dignity, conscientiousness, honesty, neatness and thrift Fiela has inculcated. Meanwhile, Fiela makes several journeys on foot across the forbidding mountains to Knysna in a bid to get Benjamin back but is threatened with arrest if she tries to intervene in the processes of the law. She never gives up hope that one day Benjamin will return to her, which he does.

The story is told by a narrating instance and the focalization is almost exclusively external. Fiela is perceived by the EN in a very favourable light, someone with immense strength of character who has faced the disappointments and sorrows of her life with dignity and the conviction that she has nothing to be ashamed of. When she fights to retain Benjamin, the true strength of her character is revealed, in her words, actions and thoughts which the EF penetrates time and again. This is indeed a reversal of the traditional manner in which the black woman character is perceived.

However, while it is true that a few novels confront the South African actuality with regard to the black woman [e.g. Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena, Die muur van die pes (Brink) and to a lesser extent Louoond (Jeanne Goosen)], novels by Afrikaner male as well as female authors in which a black woman character features prominently, generally have their setting in the remote past of African/South African history, for example, Keas in Die groot anders-maak (Rabie, circa 1730), Ma-Rose in Houd-den-Bek (Brink, 1824/5), the slave woman in Die kremetartekspedisie (Stockenström, circa 1400-1834) and Fiela in Fiela se kind (Matthee, circa 1870). Do these authors consciously circumvent the reality of the present South African situation by presenting a world which no longer exists? By so doing, are they trying to prove that the invidious situation of the black woman in present-day South Africa is a legacy from the colonial past and that blame should rather be apportioned to the colonisers and not to apartheid rule?

6.3 Elsa Joubert

From those women writers who have depicted a black woman character I have chosen Elsa Joubert, especially for her novel^6. Poppie Nongena. Just two years after the youth revolt - with its profound effect on the mothers of the nation - shook

6. The author herself refers to this work as a ‘novel’, thus implying a fictional element, despite her own claim that it is ‘true’.

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South Africa and the world at large, this novel made its appearance, tracing the trials and tribulations of a black woman from her birth up to and including the youth revolt of 1976. The publication of the novel, while memories of 1976 were still fresh in the minds of all concerned and while political upheavel in South Africa had reached a scale never before experienced, was well-timed, for its impact upon the literary world at the time was far greater than it would be today. The fact that Joubert and other Afrikaner women authors have apparently been oblivious of the plight of black women until 1976 has simply been ignored in the accolades the novel received.

6.3.1 Joubert's oeuvre regarding blacks and ‘preparation’ for the novel

Elsa Joubert made her debut as a writer mainly in the travelogue, especially reporting on her travels through Europe, East and North Africa. The first in which she depicts the life-style of blacks are the travelogues Suid van die wind (1962) in which she recounts her visits to Mauritius, Réunion and Madagascar; Die staf van Monomotapa (1964) which is a report on her visit to Mozambique and Die nuwe Afrikaan (1974) dealing with her visit to Angola. Kannemeyer (1982:316) points out that time and again there is ‘a socio-political approach and motive behind her travels through the African countries, because she especially wants to establish how the different countries deal with the problem of race relations and the conflict between different cultures’. He goes on to say that her travelogues reveal a particular sensitivity to atmosphere, especially the ‘fermenting, oppressive sphere of Africa’. A close connection can be seen between the portrayal of Africa, the relationships between people and the conflict between cultures in her travelogues and three novels with which Joubert makes her contribution to the so-called ‘literature of commitment’.

The first of these novels is Ons wag op die kaptein (1963), translated as To die at sunset (1982) with its setting in Angola, spanning only one day in which a group of whites is held hostage by a band of black guerillas in Northern Angola. The novel is described as one in which ‘white and black, friend and foe, in a kind of realisation of shared guilt and alliance are driven towards each other’ (Grové 19:210). The oppressive tropical atmosphere of Africa is again invoked in the novel Bonga (1971). The novel basically deals with the coming together of two people, Bonga and Inacia Maria from the world of ‘partly primitive half-castes’ (‘halfbloede’ they are called by Kannemeyer 1982:318) at Massangano and the relatively civilised white community at Tete respectively. Bonga has the overwhelming desire to free himself from his (dark) background and to rise to the light which he finds in his obsessive interest in the church and the white woman, while it is precisely the sensual, primitive and bestial in Bonga which attracts Inacia Maria to him. Kannemeyer (1982:319) assesses this novel as giving a ‘satisfactory account of the development of a primitive person and his growth to the light of

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civilisation, while the whole presents a compelling Africa variation on the centuries-old theme of the conflict between two cultures, lifestyles and families’. The third of these ‘committed’ novels is Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena (1978).

In an article entitled ‘Die ontstaan van Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena’ (1987:253-256), Joubert herself provides an explanation of how this novel originated and how she made preparations for it. She admits that the ‘immediate cause’ was the 1976 revolt but adds that the origin of the book, however, goes back much further. Her travels through African countries, bringing about an increase in her love for and interest in the greater Africa, are part of that preparation. She observed the patterns of co-existence between black and white in the countries she visited and how colonialism was doomed. While travelling through Africa and reporting as a journalist and novelist, she ‘unconsciously’ made her preparations for the novel Poppie Nongena. She states:

I have in different ways tried to learn about the life of black people around us, in the cities and in the rural areas. I visited Transkei, Venda, Ciskei and had interviews with teachers, business people, professors at the Universities of Umtata and Turfloop, and students. I visited schools, clinics and the courts. I had conversations with traditional leaders and ordinary people firmly rooted in their traditions, I visited witchdoctors and attended meetings of old men. In Soweto, in Langa, Nyanga and Guguletu the same... Witchdoctors in Nyanga and Soweto even more powerful than those in the rural areas. I have had discussions with young people and writers, have read their work, also the work of writers who have fled the country or whose work was banned (Joubert 1987:254 - my translation).

Very commendable, one would say, especially for one who had been ‘blind and deaf in (her) own country’ (Joubert 1987:254) but significantly Joubert does not mention whether or not she has had the opportunity or made conscious attempts to meet with the real leaders of the people and not only the government puppets in the bantustans; also significant is the emphasis on her visits to witchdoctors. Obviously Joubert's statement reveals naïveté and the assumption that after her visits she had ‘inside knowledge’ of the lives of blacks (cf. for example her statement: ‘Almost every scene Poppie mentioned, I knew myself’, p. 255).

6.3.2 Poppie Nongena (1978)

The novel has been widely acclaimed both in South Africa and abroad, mainly for the reason that it is ‘breaking the silence’ (Lenta 1984:147-157) which for so long characterised the lives of black women. Here the life of one black woman with the fictitious name of Poppie Nongena is revealed to the South African population at large but especially to the white reading public who until then had been oblivious of the black woman's travails or who wilfully shut their eyes and ears to the pictures and cries coming from that direction. Indeed, Elsa Joubert has to be commended

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for her courageous attempt to expose the plight of Poppie which purportedly assumes universal dimensions.

However, the tragic fact remains that the majority of African women in South Africa is severely disadvantaged in almost all spheres of human life: uneducated or with very little education, unskilled or semi-skilled through no fault of their own. These women, as indeed all black people in South Africa, were socialized by the colonisers into believing that white is best and beautiful, with the result that white models in lifestyle, beliefs, language, culture, etc. became the goals to be aspired to. In the process, a systematic and not always too subtle indoctrination of the black woman, more than the black man, executed itself, especially since the black woman as domestic worker is in closer contact with and more exposed to white values than her male counterpart. As mother, she inevitably will socialize her children in the same manner, thereby causing a vicious circle of indoctrination.

The questions inevitably generated in the mind of a fellow black South African woman with regard to Poppie are: What kind of black woman is presented to the reading public? To what extent has she been influenced or even indoctrinated by her various white ‘madams’? What kind of questions was asked of Poppie by the interviewer, bearing in mind Joubert's admission that the information extracted from Poppie came in the form of ‘question-and-answer sessions’ (Joubert 1987:255) and bearing in mind Joubert's journalistic background which does not preclude the asking of ‘leading’ questions, a certain amount of bias and the use of manipulative techniques? Also bearing in mind the vast cleavages between the interviewer (Joubert) and interviewee (the black woman who was to become Poppie) - one in a position of power and dominance, the other powerless and oppressed; the one privileged, middle-class and white, the other disadvantaged, proletarian and black; the one safely cocooned and emotionally strong by her very whiteness and privilege, the other broken, demoralised and helpless - the question also arises whether the information extracted is a true reflection of what Poppie really felt and suffered. Let us not forget that power relations in South Africa have often been responsible for the dominated group, in order not to antagonise the group that assumes hierarchy over them, telling the dominant exactly what the latter wants to hear and believe. Finally, bearing in mind that Joubert by her own admission has done ‘extensive research’ into the lives of black South Africans, one is inspired to ask with Dabi Nkululeko:

Can an oppressed nation or segments of it, engaged in a struggle for liberation from its oppressors, rely on knowledge produced, researched and theorized by others, no matter how progressive, who are members of the oppressor nation? (Nkululeko 1987:89).

The above questions are mainly generated by the fact that the story is presented as ‘true’. In the ‘Vooraf’ of the Afrikaans version the author states:

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This story is based on the facts which I have gathered concerning the life of Poppie Rachel Nongena nee Matati. It is a true story, but for obvious reasons the names of the people have been changed. The book does not attempt to give a total image of the political and social events of the past forty years concerning the rural, urban and resettled black people. It only attempts to describe one family's experiences during that period as reliably as possible. Nothing is therefore added which has not been experienced by Poppie and her family members themselves (my translation).

The ‘To the reader’ in the English translation reads somewhat differently. There the author states:

This novel is based on the actual life story of a black woman living in South Africa today. Only her name, Poppie Rachel Nongena, born Matati, is invented. The facts were related to me not only by Poppie herself, but by members of her immediate family and her extended family or clan, and they cover one family's experience over the past forty years.

In one of her many interviews Joubert stated later that from the mass of information she had to make a selection. While it may be true that ‘nothing is added’, the question remains: How much is omitted?

In the ensuing pages an attempt shall be made to construct a picture of the protagonist as presented in the text and to reconstruct that portrait according to the perceptions and ideology of another black woman, myself. Let it also be said that my argument is neither with the merits or demerits of the novel according to Western literary theory (by which criteria it has been evaluated by white critics), nor is it my purpose to demean the value of the book in a volatile South Africa. My only aim is to look at Poppie, who has been looked at mainly through white male and female as well as black male eyes, from another perspective. In my discussion and assessment of Poppie I shall of necessity reveal a certain ambivalence. While her story is a deeply moving one and while as a fellow black woman - though not oppressed and marginalised to the same extent as Poppie - I can fully empathise with her, I nevertheless find Poppie, the way she portrays herself and the way she is being portrayed ambivalent to say the least, as shall be made clear in the course of the chapter.

6.3.2.1 Title of the novel and naming

The title of the original Afrikaans version of the novel is Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena and of the subsequent English translation by the author herself The long journey of Poppie Nongena. Already in these two titles a fundamental semantic difference can be observed: ‘swerfjare’ (literally ‘roving/roaming/wandering years’) becomes ‘long journey’, thus obfuscating the roving nature and

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focusing on the length (plus-minus 40 years) of Poppie's journey. In any case, in both instances the emphasis is on Poppie's journey(s).

In the English paperback edition the title is drastically shortened to simply Poppie, thereby taking the focus away from the journey motif and pinpointing on the protagonist herself. The omission of Poppie's last name from this title puts her in absolute focus to the exclusion of everything else; it also signifies the rejection of a patriarchal system whereby a married woman takes on the name of her husband (the extra-textual information supplied in both the Afrikaans and English versions is that her maiden name is Matati; the titles name her as Poppie Nongena). This shortened title may also be an indication of the ‘maids and madams’ situation in the novel whereby maids are known only by their first name or some substitute which is easier on the tongue. Bearing in mind that Poppie's given name is Ntombizodumo (= young girl from a generation of great women) this conclusion does not seem to be too far-fetched. In connection with the naming of maids by their madams, Jacklyn Cock (1980/1989:117) posits that it is another ‘technique of depersonalisation’. In her research about the maids and madams situation she found that

The extent of this depersonlisation is illustrated by the fact that only 10 per cent of the employer sample knew their servants' full Xhosa names. Several habitually called their servants by standardised names, such as ‘Cookie’ or ‘Sissie’.

In connection with Miriam Tlali's novel Muriel at Metropolitan (1975), Margaret Lenta (1989:241) observes that ‘the difference in status between black and white women... is marked by the way in which they are addressed, the whites being Mrs Stein, Mrs Kuhn, Mrs Green, while Muriel is always called, as are domestic servants, by her first name’. The same holds true for Poppie and her different employers and the various white officials she has to contend with. The name ‘Poppie’ (little doll), even extended to a form with the double diminutive ‘Poppietjie’, was given to her by her grandmother as an expression of love and caring. Ironically this very name assumes dire properties and signifies much of her situation as Poppie's story unfolds. Henriette Roos (1983:145) points out that Poppie is a doll, a plaything in the hands of bureaucratic powers, her powerlessness against legal and social systems and Margaret Lenta (1984:150) considers the name Poppie as ‘sadly prophetic of her helplessness against those who will control her adult life’.

The name Poppie, in addition to signifying her ‘powerlessness’ and ‘helplessness’, assumes even more sombre connotations when considering how Poppie perceives herself and how she is portrayed by the unidentified narrator: an inflatable little doll who collapses with every pin-prick, only to be patched up, reinflated, pricked and then collapses again (see 6.4.2.10). The name ‘Poppie’ can

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be considered as prospective of her role as reproducer of producers in a society where the zero value of the African woman is somehow conveniently abolished when it is expected of her to provide producers of cheap labour in her children. Bearing in mind that a doll is a copy, a false reproduction of a woman, an object to be possessed, then Poppie's situation becomes reflected in her name: lifeless, unfeeling, dispensible, a commodity which can be discarded at will.

The title(s) of the novel and the naming of the main character also suggest the ambivalence which characterises Poppie's existence and her self-perception. She was given two English names as baptismal names, Rachel Regina (Rachel = ewelamb; Regina = queen); her Xhosa name is Ntombizodumo and when she married Stone Nongena her in-laws named her Nonkosinathi (= the Lord is with us). She is called by her English name ‘Rachel’ by her different employers and only her close relatives call her by the name ‘Poppie’, thus a private and intimate code. It becomes clear why this private name is used in the title instead of Poppie's more public name ‘Rachel’. This reportage is a penetration into the most private and intimate aspects of the main character's life; the title highlights her helplessness and zero value.

The title(s) have implications for the narrating process as well. Expectations aroused by a narrating procédé of a first-person narrative are soon quashed when considering these titles - they imply that a narrator/EN is about to tell Poppie's story, for if Poppie narrates her own story then surely the title will not refer to her in the third person. The narrating process is of crucial importance in this novel and will be examined in 6.4.2.3.

6.3.2.2 Reception of the novel

The novel, described by Henriette Roos (1987:3) as a ‘success story’ which indeed it is, was reviewed by the foremost literary critics in South Africa's major and lesser newspapers, women's magazines, political, literary and sociological journals and generated literary discussions by academics at mainly white universities, while the general public reaction to it was on a scale rarely matched only perhaps by that to André P. Brink's novel Kennis van die aand. The wide publicity surrounding the book was mainly in the form of accolades and to try and give a comprehensive account of its reception is almost impossible and definitely not the main purpose of this chapter. The book has been translated into the major European, including Eastern European languages, it was scripted for the stage and published as a drama in 1984. In 1982 it was performed as a highly successful musical in New York. During 1979 alone the book was awarded the Louis Luyt, C.N.A. and W.A. Hofmeyr prizes and in Britain it was awarded with the Royal Society of Literature Prize.

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The following views are those of white women and black and white men; significantly, I could not find a single review by a black woman. For Elize Botha (1980:428-431) the most successful aspect of the novel is the portrayal of the main character Poppie and for André P. Brink (1980:141-143) the remarkability of the novel lies in its ‘stylistic presentation...its amazing understatement... and a vision of human bondage’ which is perhaps the ‘ultimate sense of this poignant book’. Jakes Gerwel (Oggendblad, 28.02.79) isolates the technical experimentation and historical basis of the novel in his assessment but does not view it as an unqualified success, since he disputes the presentation of events in the final section of the novel (‘The Revolt of the Children’). Gerrit Olivier (1979:12-22) has many problems with the novel, especially regretting the ‘lack of order’ which leads to a ‘disorderly and fragmented’ work and views the ‘confused and confusing narrative perspective’ as unnecessary and slovenly. He nevertheless sees Poppie the character as a ‘township Mutter Courage’. In Richard Rive's reply (1980:57-60) to Olivier's review, he emphasises the ‘universal’ aspect of the novel and praises Joubert for successfully ‘cutting away the floss and penetrating to the very core of the situation of the ordinary Black in South Africa’.

The views quoted above are all from academics. However, literary critics in the press tend to go overboard in their reviews. For example, in some circles the novel is seen to be an indictment against Afrikanerdom and an account of the demise of the Afrikaner. Professor Viljoen, interviewed by Die Volksblad, 11.04.79, objected to the picture of the Afrikaner in the novel. He states: ‘Most Afrikaners experience it as an indictment, whereas Poppie has never had any cause to feel aggrieved. If the Afrikaner had not done so much for her she would never have developed a longing for civilisation. She would never have enjoyed this in her original primitive condition’.

One particular facet of the reception of the novel by white critics is their ‘urgent and systematic attempts to depoliticise the work’,^7. for example: ‘The book is furthermore no political accusation. It is also not a sociological report. It is a work of literature in which lived perception and experience are given a convincing, artistic and lasting form’ (Audrey Blignault in Beeld, 20.11.78). Colin Melville in The Star (01.10.80) claims that politics do not enter the entire discourse and the literary critic of The Argus, O.D. Wollheim stated on 14.03.79 that the sensation which the book has caused could not be attributed to its political implications, but to its deeper, literary quality. Lynne Burger in the Eastern Province Herald of 17.04.79 emphasises that the novel's honesty is apolitical, while Maureen Pithey in The Cape Times (07.08.80) claims that the book is never political. Even André P. Brink suggests that the greatness of the work lies in the achievement of not lowering the literary to the level of South African politics, but rather by purifying and refining the socio-political, the author transforms it into literature proper (Rapport, 03.12.78 and 1980:143). Jan Rabie praises the book for the way in which it reveals the ‘authentic voice of black working people’ and reveals that

7. David Schalkwyk (1986:186). Most of the examples I have cited are taken from his article, since it was difficult for me in the Netherlands to have access to press reviews on South African literature.

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this ‘authenticity’ stems from its lack of political character: ‘In this book black Afrikaners speak with their own authentic voices, poor working-class people with no political motives, no racial hatred, only intent on obtaining a pass, keeping the family together somehow, keeping alive somehow’ (The Cape Times, 06.12.78).

Even more surprising are the author's views in this regard. Repeatedly in several interviews and reports she regrets the fact that some people have read the work as a political text. In an interview with Pat Schwartz of the Rand Daily Mail (04.01.79) the author states: ‘The point is, it is not a political book. I wrote it because the theme was one that interested me. I wanted to bring across the person as a human being. and that is as far as my interest goes’. Die Oosterlig (09.03.79) reported that ‘politics is not her (Joubert's) motive’ and Dene Smuts in Fair Lady (11.04.79) claims that ‘the book is working the way it should - on the human level ... the political debate does not concern her (Joubert)’. Joubert was determined to keep a careful watch over the reproduction of her text into other forms in order to control its political thrust. Of offers to film the work in 1981 she said: ‘I want to keep a close watch on the production because it is not my intention to make a political statement’ (The Star, 18.06.81). Any political motivation, she claims, would have turned it into a mere ‘pamphlet’: ‘Poppie is a human novel that goes beyond the boundaries of politics’ (The Sowetan, 18.07.81). She wants it to be judged as a literary work, not a political one (The Natal Mercury, 06.05.80) and, all in all, she would prefer the book to be left to ‘speak for itself’ (Rand Daily Mail, 04.01.79). White critics have depoliticised the novel to such an extent that Beeld (22.03.79) claims most readers read it as a religious novel while the work is also praised for its ‘universality’.

In contrast to these attempts by white critics to universalise Poppie's story the few blacks who wrote reviews insist on its particular, local and political character. A reviewer in the black newspaper Post (04.03.78) states: ‘This book is political. It cannot be anything else’. Aggrey Klaaste of The Sowetan (20.07.81) writes: ‘We don't have to be told the story of Poppie Nongena. We live it’ and a reviewer in the Evening Post (09.02.79) expresses amazement at claims that the work has ‘opened the eyes of whites’. S/he writes: ‘Poppie is in 1000 musty Black Sash files. She is part of the experience of all white South Africans. She washed their dishes and clothes, served them at table, swept their floors, looked after their children’. One of the few newspaper reviews already referred to and which addressed the novel in political and social terms is the one by Jakes Gerwel in Oggendblad of 28.02.79.

David Schalkwyk's well-argued essay in which he insists that the novel be read as a political statement - even though I fully agree - and his numerous examples of how the novel has been depoliticised by white critics bring me to an important anomaly, even ambivalence. Yes, Joubert and the white critics are quite correct in stating that this is not a political novel. Joubert has gone to great lengths to make

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it clear that she had no political motives when writing the book, and this is clearly illustrated when reading the novel. Poppie, her relatives and the unidentified narrator stand particularly aloof from the reality of South African legislation which, in the final analysis, is solely responsible for Poppie's situation. All of them, with the exception of Jakkie, display a singular naïveté and Joubert's contention that she ‘wanted to bring across the person (Poppie) as a human being’ (how else does a novelist bring across his/her human characters?) smacks not only of paternalism but is also an admission that the black women has never been seen as ‘a human being’ but merely as a labour unit. By this very admission Joubert denies that this ‘human being’ is bruised and battered by political forces and would rather create the impression that her situation is brought about by other forces beyond her control. The nearest she gets to blaming political forces for Poppie's situation, is in the implied condemnation of the children's revolt.

One wonders whether the novel would have been as well received if the protagonist were a political activist who experienced the same traumas as Poppie, and not the apolitical, long-suffering woman Poppie is made out to be, if she were more outspoken in her criticism of the forces responsible for her fate. One wonders whether the story would have been told at all - a black political activist would certainly not have sought a white Afrikaner to whom to tell her story. Would Joubert have dared to tell the story of such a woman?

The only conclusion I can come to from the author's statements regarding the non-political content of her book added to which is the very explicit statement in the ‘Vooraf’ of her novel that ‘nothing has been added which had not been experienced by Poppie and her family members themselves’ is that Joubert reveals a double agenda. On the one hand she makes sure that she does not antagonise the white establishment - who are the implied readers of this novel - by treading on ‘safe’ terrain, i.e. by choosing and portraying a main character who is as politically naive as the author herself; on the other hand this novel would reveal her ‘compassion’ and ‘understanding’ of the plight of black people - especially at a time when it was ‘safer’ for whites to gain the trust of black people - thus giving her some credibility among black readers and internationally. Bearing in mind that every reading is a rewriting of the text and also bearing in mind the author's injunction that the book ‘must be allowed to speak for itself’, my intention is precisely that, i.e. to allow the book to speak for itself to a black woman who would interpret it from her perspective and experiences in apartheid South Africa.

6.3.2.3 Narration and focalization

Before considering these very important aspects of Poppie Nongena, it is necessary to first establish whether it is fact, fiction or faction and secondly to briefly explain

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the structure of the novel, for both these aspects have a crucial bearing on the narrating process and focalization in the novel. All these aspects are so closely linked to one another that it is difficult to separate them, with the result that the following paragraphs may show a certain amount of overlapping.

The work has been described by different critics as a ‘reportage’, ‘documentary fiction’ or simply ‘documentary’ and as ‘faction’. It may also be classified as an example of ‘New Journalism’ which refers to a series of works appearing after 1965 and in which journalistic facts, scenes and situations are presented in a literary form and as coherent whole. Truman Capote coined the term ‘non-fiction novel’ when he referred to his work In cold blood (1965). When considering the information provided in the ‘Vooraf’/‘To the reader’ of Joubert's work - i.e. ‘facts I have gathered’, ‘a true story’, ‘actual life story’ - then it can be all these things, but when the author herself calls her work a ‘novel’ (English paperback edition) and a ‘story’, then descriptions like ‘reportage’ and ‘documentary’ can immediately be excluded from the discussion for a fictional element is then brought into play. The term ‘faction’ would then seem to be the most appropriate description of the work.

If we assume that this is a true-life story told as a novel, i.e. ‘faction’, then we have to take into account the criteria for such a novel. David Lodge (1980:27-28) formulates these criteria as follows:

This means more than selecting and ordering the narration of events with an eye to effects of suspense and ironic juxtaposition; and it means more than evoking atmosphere, setting and character by an artful selection of synecdochic details; it means above all presenting events as they were perceived and reflected upon by the people involved, rather than from the detached perspective of a historian.

It would seem that Joubert's novel fulfils these criteria, but then Lodge also prefers an absence of the author's personality from the text and stylistic self-effacement. Once again, it can be said that Joubert's novel fulfils this criterion for she tells her story very largely within the constraints of the linguistic registers of the people involved. Where Joubert's novel differs from Lodge's criteria, is when she overtly signals her presence in the text by using declarative tags such as ‘Poppie tells’, ‘says Poppie’, etc., i.e. signalling the presence of an external narrator, and when this EN uses the very linguistic registers of the characters in narrating parts of Poppie's story. We acknowledge that absolute truth is never attainable in human affairs; but the basic contract the non-fiction novelist makes with his/her readers, the guarantee that his/her story is based entirely on verifiable sources, does enable him/her to exert over them the spell of the classic realistic novel. In Joubert's case she has undoubtedly succeeded in exerting this spell over her white readers.

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The external and internal structure of the novel are inextricably linked to the narrating process. Since several critics^8. have dealt at length with the structuring of the novel, I shall confine myself to only the main aspects of its structure.

Externally the novel is clearly divided into seven parts with 83 sub-sections: Part I ‘Upington’ (10); Part II ‘Lamberts Bay’ (11); Part III ‘Cape Town’ (10); Part IV ‘Poppie's Pass’ (15); Part V ‘The Ciskei’ (14); Part VI ‘The People of the Land’ (9) and Part VII ‘The Revolt of the Children’ (14). The expectations raised about a journey and its roving nature in the title are confirmed by these headings in the author's text, in addition to indicating a strict chronological order in the narrated events (N.B. In the Afrikaans version the chronology is even more explicitly indicated in the headings, e.g. Part I ‘Poppie's Childhood in Upington’; Part II ‘Poppie's Teenage Years and Marriage at Lamberts Bay’, etc.). Externally the novel therefore reveals a clear relationship to the internal structure. Although Poppie's story unfolds chronologically, Marisa Mouton (1984:14-20) identifies a definite two-fold structure. According to her, in Parts I-IV which she calls Period A, one perspective, that of Poppie, dominates. This period ends with a crisis in Poppie's personal life as is indicated by her words: ‘What can you do, if you can't go one way any more, then you take a road the other way’ (p. 192). The start of Period B (Part V-VII) is indicated by the words: ‘the old life fell away from her’ (p. 195), intensified by the symbolism of the train: ‘the coaches on half the train were hooked off and pushed back and shunted on to a new line, when the train whistled in a new way and jerked the newly-hitched wagons to life behind him’ (p. 195). During this period Poppie's life and that of her family members is characterised by uncertainty about the future. Towards the end of this period Poppie finds herself in a greater crisis than at the end of the previous period. While mainly her personal life was put into focus during Period A, the entire community of which she is part is in turmoil in Period B.

When reading the first sentence of the text, ‘We are Xhosa people from Gordonia, says Poppie’ (p. 11) and the subsequent two pages of narrative, the impression is created that we are reading the story of Poppie's life as told by Poppie herself to an anonymous listener. Very soon, however, a third-person varied with first-person narrative clearly emerges. We can therefore conclude that there are in fact two texts combined into one text: a Poppie text told in the first person by an acting personage and an anonymous text told in the third person by a non-acting, non-participating anonymous narrator. The narration continually switches from first person to third person, often in the same narrated event, for example:

For Poppie there was no more schooling because she had to look after mama's new baby who had been born while they were away. Mama went to work in the factory and brought the child to Poppie ... From her ninth year Poppie took care of the children mama had by buti Mbatane ... I looked after mama's children until I was thirteen, because at thirteen the factory took children to work as cleaners (pp. 47/8).

8. Critics who have dealt extensively with the structuring of the novel are for example Marisa Mouton, Henriette Roos, Gerrit Olivier, C.N. van der Merwe, Lijphart e.a.

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Janssens, Lijphart and Van Ijzeren (1981:57-66) have carefully analysed this narrating process and have come to the conclusion that plus-minus 68,5% of the story is told by this unidentified narrator, while Poppie's contribution is a mere 29,5% and that of the other members of her family about 2%. Joubert herself explains the reason for the anonymous narrator appropriating more than two-thirds of the narration as follows:

At first I thought of using the transcripts from the (audio)tapes unaltered but after trying that I realised it would not work. It was boring and there was no link between or development in events. The book was to be more than a factual account. After that, I had the story told by an omniscient third-person narrator but that, too, did not work. It was once again a white person telling the story from the outside. It did not convince as authentic. I tried to let first Poppie narrate and then me but our narrating styles were too different. Ultimately I succeeded in telling the story in her narrating style, her ‘key’. In the book the perspective shifts from Poppie to a (external) narrator to dramatisation of events in order to combat monotony and uniformity (Joubert in an interview with Die Volksblad, 11.04.79 - my translation).

Joubert states further: ‘After many trials I decided on an alternation of first-person and third-person narration. The former to emphasise the authenticity, the latter to speed up the narrating time and to give perspective’ (Joubert 1987:255). Janssens e.a. (1981:62) comments on this strategy in Part I of the novel as follows: ‘The reader, namely the white reader, must be captivated by the book so that he would not immediately dismiss it as monotonous and difficult to identify with’. They also justify the third-person narration in Part III (the 1960 unrest) thus: ‘If this part were narrated mainly by Poppie, then the chances are great that the white reader would dismiss her account of the events as too subjectively high-lighted from a black perspective’ (my emphasis). From the comments by both Joubert and Janssens e.a. one is left in no doubt that the book was written for a white audience, but the most telling instruction one can draw from these comments is that white readers should not be put off, bored or antagonised by Poppie's ‘subjective’ experiences.

Of significance too are the parts narrated by the unidentified narrator but still focalized by either Poppie or members of her family. This narrating instance introduces the reader to the customs and traditions of the Xhosa (once again implying that the reader is a non-Xhosa). When Poppie is forced to make her home in Cape Town and confronted for the first time with pass problems, ‘sleep-in’ employment, the increasing turmoil in the townships, the death of Mr Mfukeng, it is again the anonymous narrator who takes over. Poppie's most traumatic and intense emotional experiences are not narrated in the first person but by the uninvolved third-person narrator, for example the strikes following the Sharpeville massacre, Poppie's submission to the forces of the law, her lonely life after having been forcibly removed from Cape Town and resettled in Mdantsane,

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the funeral of her husband and the death of her grandchild. Clearly, Poppie's emotionalism and subjectivity - accusations often levelled at black women as if they were two of the seven deadly sins - must be contained and the only way it can be done, is for this uninvolved anonymous narrator to take over the narration.

What we have here, is a quite unusual and intricate form of focalization. Poppie, as the experiencing self, focalizes the events which so dramatically affect her life; in this sense she is an internal focalizer or focalizing subject. But she is also focalized by members of her family (and to a lesser extent by some of the white officials she encounters), thus becoming the focalized object. Poppie narrates her experiences and her vision of those experiences to an anonymous listener; she is therefore both narrator and focalizer. She narrates her experiences and her vision of those experiences to members of her family as well, who in turn focalize Poppie's focalization of those experiences and who then narrate Poppie's experiences, her focalization, their focalization of Poppie's focalization to the unidentified listener who narrates all that in the book. This can be termed multiple or variable internal focalization but I wish to term it layered internal focalization, where a layer has to be peeled away each time to get to the essence of Poppie's life and experiences. With the removal of each layer, another facet of Poppie's life is revealed. It is especially Poppie's mother (mama), her brother Mosie and his wife Rhoda who narrate Poppie's experiences and their focalization of those experiences to the unidentified listener. For example, when Poppie learns that her son Bonsile and one of her daughters had been detained by the police, her collapse is focalized and narrated to the listener by Rhoda:

Rhoda poured some medicine into a glass and gave it to Poppie. She had never seen her sister-in-law like this. It was as if her face had melted, as if the cheeks and the corners of her mouth could not stop trembling and would lose their form. But there are not tears. A little spittle runs from the corner of her mouth (p. 353).

However, the opposite happens more often. Poppie's relatives relate their experiences and their focalization of events to Poppie who in turn focalizes their reactions and then relates everything to the listener. Sometimes this focalizing process becomes difficult to decipher, especially establishing who tells what to whom and whose vision is given, for example:

Baby was the first to meet up with it [the children's revolt]. She went to the post office in Nyanga with Katie's child on her back. I went to phone, she told mama later, I was waiting at the telephone booth when the school children came along, pushing and shoving me aside. I heard them phoning from the telephone booth: We want to talk to the School Board, they said. They must have got through because I heard the money clinking and one was more eager to grab the mouthpiece than the other, I heard them say: We don't want to learn Afrikaans no more, we don't want Bantu education no more. Everyone grabbing the phone said the same thing till the time was up

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Auk, what is this thing you are doing? I asked one of the children I knew, but he cheeked me: Shut up, sisi, you'll get hurt.

The same night they burned down the Nyanga post office. She saw the smoke rising from the school as well. She hid in the house, keeping the children with her, for she remembered the warning: You'll get hurt, sisi. But the next day she went back to see what had happened. The post office windows were smashed and the roof and woodwork burnt out, inside it was still smouldering, it stank of burnt rubber and paint, torn-up papers lay in heaps in the gutters and the road. The telephone had been pulled from the wall of the burnt-out booth. She picked it up from the gutter by its cord, it swung from her finger till she threw it from her. And the nylons drove up and down the streets, slowly (pp. 306/7).

In the above extract Baby experiences and focalizes the start of the revolt in Nyanga. She relates everything to her mother (mama), who in turn relates it to Poppie who relates it to the unidentified listener who narrates it to the reader. Apart from the distortions which usually occur when a story is related by one person to another to another to another, as is the case in the above extract, one also has to take cognisance of the bias and limitations resulting from the author's use of the device of focalization.

Returning to the bit of author's text before the main text in which she states that ‘nothing is therefore added which Poppie and her relatives have not experienced themselves’, one is puzzled by the anonymous narrator's penetration of the thoughts of mainly white people whom Poppie encounters. Surely Poppie could not have known what they thought and therefore could not have related these thoughts to the unidentified listener. For example, Mrs Retief the social worker comes to see Poppie after the birth of her second-last child and observes Poppie's appearance: ‘She looked at Poppie once again: Poppie's face had grown darker, the hollows of her eyes were nearly pitch-black, she looked neglected, the house was dirty ... Mrs Retief didn't believe Poppie could be like this ... Poppie seemed dazed and uncomprehending, afraid to leave the safety of the pondokkie, the four walls that enclosed her like the shell of a snail’ (p. 160); when Poppie nearly collapses in the street, a passing white woman ‘would have liked to help, but was unsure whether the black woman was drunk or not’ (p. 184); the white man at the pass office ‘sees her eyes on his face, expressionless. Her mouth does not move to talk. He sees the heavy body’ (p. 156); Mr Stevens at the pass office ‘looked down at her body, at the uncomfortable arms, the swollen face’ (p. 182); the white conductor on the train ‘knew their (displaced people's) type. It was not the first time he had to put people from the Cape off at Arnoldon, people who had no idea where they were going. They were like a stone you picked up in one place and put down in another. His face showed nothing of his feelings, but he seemed to pity them’ (pp. 196/7). This manipulative strategy is used with the clear intention of informing the (white) reader that white functionaries and people show compassion for Poppie's situation.

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6.3.2.4 Journey motif

Journeying to and fro is an important element of Poppie's existence and gives clear indications of the ways Poppie perceives herself, how she is perceived by others but most importantly, how she is forced to perceive herself by the anonymous embedding narrator.

Henriette Roos (1983:141-144) recognises in Poppie Nongena the traditional epic convention, which can be traced back to the classic epic with its strict structural and thematic pattern, and motivates her assertion by mentioning the title of the novel, the family-tree scheme provided, the entire first chapter and the beginning of chapter 2. The indication of Poppie's place in the genealogical chain clearly shows a relationship between her roving years and those of heroic figures since Odysseus, according to Roos. The emphasis on the narrating act, the oral transmission from generation to generation of their journeying on far-flung roads until the end approaches is, according to Roos, present from the first sentence of the novel to the last. The sustained chronological, strict lineal narration unfolds according to personal as well as general human life-stages: birth, youth, marriage, motherhood, growing old, death.

Roos continues by stating that, since his/her birthplace has been left behind because of subjugation to powers of fate, the epic hero's journey is a search for a destination which could be a new fatherland, a regaining of the old home, an alternative to an era left behind. She even goes as far as viewing the roving Aeneas with his child holding his hand and Odysseus who towards the end of his journey allows his son Telemachus to take over, both as ‘predecessors’ of Poppie, wanderers who after many journeys attain knowledge and learn that their initial hopes were untenable. The desired destination is not reached nor is happiness achieved but an acceptance is finally accomplished.

I have quoted Roos extensively in the above two paragraphs, for she either wilfully ignores or misses the point of Poppie's enforced journeys, in addition to applying a Western European narrative tradition which effectively ‘confiscates’ Poppie's story. True enough, epic heroes more often than not are forced on their peregrinations because their circumstances have become so unbearable that remaining would mean deprivation and ultimately certain death. But they are nevertheless left the choice of either staying or leaving. Something Roos also seems to lose from sight is that Poppie can in no way be equated with epic heroes like Aeneas or Odysseus who are either rulers or of divine descent and who are forced to wander through ideological differences between them and their adversaries. Poppie is but one of millions who are equally forced into exile in their own country and without the option to stay. However bad her circumstances are, she is not offered any choice in the matter and forced to even worse conditions.

[p. 200]

When we look again at the implications of a physical journey, especially from a (black) woman's point of view - i.e. enforced travel, escape from someone or something, a political quest, a journey in the psyche of the travelling self, a quest for (self-)knowledge, a flight from stereotypes, from the confines of a racist, patriarchal society and not least from the bonds of being a woman - then it would seem that none of them applies to Poppie. On the contrary, some of them are precisely the causes of Poppie's condition of being knocked about like a lifeless doll.

From her earliest childhood, tied to ouma Hannie's back, Poppie's life has been characterised by numerous smaller wanderings in which her grandmother, brothers and she were scrimping and scrounging for some kind of livelihood, journeying to collect food, firewood, dung and bones to sell to the Jew. Her schooldays were likewise a to and fro: Upington, Putsonderwater, back to Upington, Doringbaai, Lamberts Bay, all these journeys necessitated in the cause of survival. After her marriage to Stone Nongena, it is patriarchy that forces her to go to ‘Kaffirland’ - a journey ‘from Lamberts Bay by bus to Graafwater, by train to Cape Town. They stayed over the day in Cape Town and caught the evening train. The next night at one o'clock they changed trains at Stormberg, for Burgersdorp, and at Burgersdorp they walked over the high bridge to catch the train to Aliwal North and at Aliwal North they changed trains for Lady Grey ... At sunset of the fourth day, they arrived at Sterkspruit and took the bus to Herschel’ (p. 77) - to meet her in-laws but more importantly to be initiated into the customs and traditions of the Xhosa. Then back to Lamberts Bay, only to be confronted with the full impact of South African politics. One should take note of the remarkable fractured sequences of Poppie's physical journeys (by bus, train and on foot, changing modes of transport frequently) to understand how fractured and fragile her existence is.

Forced out of Lamberts Bay by the Group Areas Act, Poppie and her family find themselves in the comfortless surroundings of the black townships and squatter camps of Cape Town. In addition to trekking from one shack to another, they drift from one job to another, often having to catch two buses and a train to get to their place of employment in the white areas. In order to hold down a job, get somewhere to live or enrol their children at a school, they had to be in possession of a pass, but a catch twenty-two situation arises: without a job, no pass; without a pass, no job. It is in her attempts to procure a pass that Poppie has to undertake numerous journeys, often lasting for most of the day, to the pass offices which ironically are situated in the white areas.

Poppie's forced removal from Cape Town to Mdantsane in the Ciskei also means the breaking up of her family once again, the increasing insecurity of her children, Poppie's concern for their future and for her husband left behind in Cape Town, an increasing deprivation and a deterioration in her health.

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6.3.2.5 A ‘feminist’novel?

It has been suggested that Poppie Nongena is a ‘feminist’ novel which attempts to demonstrate the black woman's oppression and her fight against that oppression, for example David Schalkwyk (1989:259) points out that the first two sections of the novel indicate ‘the patriarchal system which operates in the lives of black women within their own families and received cultural traditions’ and goes on to say that ‘a systematic subordination of women is immediately evident’. Margaret Lenta (1984:149) posits that the novel demonstrates another fact, ‘widely recognised yet seldom reflected on in South Africa: it is that the society in which urban blacks live is woman-centred’. It is not the aim of this section to invalidate such claims but rather to take account of at least two factors before coming to any conclusion about the purported feminist content of the novel.

The first factor that has to be examined within the framework of feminism and how it applies to Poppie's situation is how this movement/philosophy is interpreted by black women and where they put the emphasis. Perhaps it is rather unnecessary to include here an exposé of black women's views on feminism, almost like Poppie who time and again has to explain African customs and traditions to the implied white readers. However, it is incumbent upon me to cite black women extensively in order to gain clarity about the difference in the interpretation of this movement/philosophy by black and white women in the South African context.

I wish to begin by citing the understated view of a black male in respect of the relationship between black and white women: ‘It is the undeniable truth that all is not well between black and white in South Africa as a whole, but it is worse between black and white South African women’ (Mutloatse 1981:4).

Miriam Tlali prefers Alice Walker's term ‘womanist’ to the widely-accepted term ‘feminist’, the term ‘womanist’ having been coined to describe the particular character of the black woman's struggle against gender oppression.^9. Tlali reiterates her commitment to racial issues: ‘The real problem is not so much a question of sexism as it is a question of power ... (women's) liberation is bound absolutely with the liberation of the whole nation’ (Tlali 1989). On Tlali's comments, Cecily Lockett (1989:284) states: ‘In Tlali's life, as in the lives of all black women in South Africa, race is the overwhelming issue ... for such women racism and sexism are perceived as linked issues and their form of feminism arises from their acceptance of their roles as wives and mothers and supporters of their men in a political context. They wish for greater recognition and greater opportunities but do not wish to alienate their men in what is perceived as a common struggle against racial oppression’. Lockett's choice of phrase already puts paid to any idea of a common sisterhood between black and white women.

9. Alice Walker 1984: In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, The Women's Press, London.

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Not a creative writer but a political activist and stalwart of the women's movement, Frene Ginwala states: ‘In South Africa, the prime issue is apartheid^10. and national liberation. So to argue that African women should concentrate on and form an isolated feminist movement, focusing on issues of women in their narrowest sense, implies African women must fight so that they can be equally oppressed with African men ... Women's liberation in South Africa cannot be achieved outside of the context of the liberation struggle. And the question of women's liberation will only be taken up to the extent that women are involved in national liberation’ (Ginwala 1986).

Deeply conscious of their oppression and marginalisation, several younger black women, mostly academics, have formulated their concept of feminism. Sibongile D. Nene^11. states in an unpublished paper:^12.

(The black woman's) knowledge world encompasses elements that are in perpetual conflict with one another: a western middle-class male-oriented knowledge world with its so-called objective validation mechanisms and methodologies that often obfuscate and distort her existential life experience; her difficulty in discovering and holding onto a universal sisterhood with her white counterparts on the one hand and her raised consciousness about the overarching problem of racism which she shares with her black brothers whilst simultaneously being unable to overlook the male chauvinism which males, regardless of race, stand accused of by both history and human sense (Nene 1991).

In another unpublished paper, Kedibone Letlaka-Rennert^13. states:

In South African literary circles, gender subordination is focussed on and targeted as a joint form of oppression that both Black and White women can fight against. Such a focus however ignores the existence of yet another form of oppression within the female gender, that of racial subordination (Letlaka-Rennert 1991).

Similarly and yet on a different level, Sisi Maqagi^14. challenges Cecily Lockett's statement ‘We (white women) will have to develop a more sympathetic womanist discourse for considering the work of black women’:

Her prescriptive suggestion ... will be as effective in silencing the works of black women as are ‘current feminist paradigms’. the very fact that the discourse will be a ‘sympathetic’ one indicates that it will not have arisen from within. The word ‘sympathetic’ seems to suggest some kind of tolerance for something that is not quite up to the mark. The impulse to assume initiative becomes apparent again when she definitively asserts that ‘it is our (white women's) place as educationally and institutionally privileged critics to listen to their (black women's) voices as we formulate approaches to their work’. This assertion puts white women in the patriarchal position of ‘self’ and black women in the powerless position of the ‘other’, where the ‘self’ is the rational power that systematises and arranges into a coherent whole the chaos of the ‘other's’ unschooled views of art (Maqagi 1990:23).

10. Most apartheid legislation has since been removed from the statute books.

11. Sibongile D. Nene 1991: ‘Black Feminism: The Dilemma and the Dialectic’. She lectures in the Department of Sociology of the University of Zululand.

12. It is significant how few papers by black women in South Africa are published, either because they do not have access to publishers or because of a lack of funds or because their work is not considered ‘up to standard by the mainline publishing houses.

13. Kedibone Letlaka-Rennert 1991: ‘Women's Oppression and Power Relations in the Act of Writing’. She is attached to the Health Psychology Unit of the University of South Africa.

14. Sisi Maqagi teaches in the English Department of Vista University on the Zwide campus.

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On the other hand, Zoë Wicomb^15. challenges the now defunct notion that national liberation should come before women's emancipation. The fight against apartheid is not only a fight for racial equality but implicit in racial equality is liberation from the double patriarchy black women are subjected to. Wicomb states:

In South Africa the orthodox position whilst celebrating the political activism of women, is that the gender issue ought to be subsumed by the national liberation struggle ... I can think of no reason why black patriarchy should not be challenged alongside the fight against Apartheid (Wicomb 1990:37).

The second factor which has to be considered, more on the level of the South African context but unmistakably symptomatic of South African society and all its ramifications, including literature, is the ‘dialogue’ at present taking place between black and white women. A case in point is the historic conference entitled ‘Women and Gender in South Africa’ held in Durban in January/February 1991.^16. The aim of the conference was to take a closer look at especially black women's position and their liberation. The facts are: (i) Of the over 300 women and men who participated, 30 women were black; (ii) Of the sixty-three papers read in eleven sessions, only three were read by black women. The contribution of Gcina Mhlope, a talented black story-teller, poet and playwright was billed on the programme as ‘entertainment’ instead of giving her recognition for her literary contributions.^17. The input of a fourth black scholar was added as the conference proceeded; (iii) While the focus of most of the discussions was black women, it seems anomalous that so few black women were invited to participate. Some explanation was proffered for this discrepancy, viz. invitations had been sent through university departments and other institutions of learning because the organisers were planning a highly academic conference. All this demonstrates a lack of feminist consciousness about economic and social inequality in the South African context.

With regard to this conference, Nontobeko Mofokeng^18. who attended the conference observes:

The existing academic/activist dichotomy needs redressing. We cannot afford to encourage a gap between the theory of women's oppression and practical efforts to correct it. Theory cannot be formulated in abstract but has to be located within the experiences of women.

Another observer at the conference was a Dutch academic attached to the University of Utrecht, Renée Römkens:^19.

When I entered the conference room on the first day I was very much surprised by the domination of white South African academic women. 90% of the attendants of the conference were white. A substantial part of the Black women who were there, were coming from other Southern African countries in the region ...

15. Zoë Wicomb teaches in the English Department of the University of Western Cape and is the author of You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town.

16. The conference was held in January/February 1991 with its main aim to discuss black women's oppression.

17. Gcina Mhlophe has to date written ‘Sometimes When it Rains’ (1988); Where is Sandile (1985), a play based on her life; a novel The Queen of the Tortoises (1990), in addition to being a talented performer and artist.

18. Paper read at a seminar on feminism, 13 April 1991, organised by the South African Cultural Community in Amsterdam. Nontobeko Mofokeng is a community worker for the South African Council of Churches and is at present doing research at the University of Bradford.

19. Paper read at the seminar on feminism, 13 April 1991.

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Still I feel the issue is not only a matter of being a minority in a quantitative sense. It also reflected a deeply rooted dominance of white academic, cultural and political traditions that define what kind of knowledge is considered valid enough to be included in academic debates like these.

The two black academics who presented papers both criticised in their papers the claim of a ‘common sisterhood’ among black and white women in South Africa, asserting that

As much as Black feminism allows for the debate on the ‘women's question’ it cannot be lured into the dangers of another imperialism - that of Western feminism - at the expense of all that African culture and society can offer as part of Africa's pride among the family of nations (Nene 1991).

and Letlaka-Rennert posits

Whilst the historical value of White women's documentation of Black women's struggles must be acknowledged as an essential and brave initial step, it is time for a shift to occur. For this to happen both Black and White women have to effect movement (1991).

In an article widely criticised by white women academics,^20. Dabi Nkululeko (1987:89) accuses white progressive researchers of continuing ‘to show reluctance to abdicate their self-assigned leadership role ... and often fail to recognise the potential inherent in oppressed and exploited peoples to liberate themselves and to write their own history’.

Returning to the claim that Poppie Nongena is a ‘feminist’ novel, it will be extremely ridiculous to completely refute that claim because in the first place it is a novel written by a woman about a woman and would inevitably have some feminist overtones. Secondly, since both author and main character are victims of strong patriarchal structures it is to be expected that a measure of criticism of those structures will surface from time to time.

My first concern with an unreserved proclamation of the novel as being ‘feminist’, is in the area of gender studies and relations. Several Afro-American as well as European feminist critics emphasise that the gender code ‘structures the differences according to the division between men and women on which the thematic network (is) based. The distinction between men and women is thus declared significant; this is the very foundation of the code ... The gender code is not a priori polemic or dualistic. To keep in mind one sexual group is not to oppose another; it is to see the differences that separate them. To a certain extent, the presupposition of polemic is itself rooted in a sexist ideology, for it proclaims the significance of each sex for the other to be permanent and total’ (Bal 1985:111 - my emphasis).

20. For example, Cecily Lockett (1990:14/15).

[p. 205]

Yet Poppie displays a consistent sexist attitude in her appraisal of the men in her family, including her husband. In Chapter 3 I have already mentioned that emasculation of the black male is endemic of white South African writing. In this novel the black male is similarly systematically declared impotent, an endangered species who cannot live up to the rigours of modern urban life and who is declared inadequate as a parent and who fails in his attempts to support wife and children. The first indication of the ‘annihilation’ of the black male is Poppie's narration about her male ancestors: her great-uncle Jantjie died in the Boer War, significantly helping the Boers in their attempts to defeat the British; her grandfather George Williams died in the Big 'Flu of 1918, ‘the plague that the Lord sent us’ (p. 11), leaving ouma Hannie to rear eight children single-handedly; oompie Domani died in the First World War, again assisting imperialist powers to continue their programme of oppression; her own father Machine Matati is representative of the ostensibly irresponsible nature of black men, for he ‘didn't look after us well. He left on a Saturday morning and went to the office in Upington and joined up for the war, the war of 1939. He was sent away as a lorry-driver to Egiputa in the north and never came back to us at all’ (p. 13). Poppie's mother told her grandmother that ‘the father of her children was no more. He had died in the war. Other people in the location said: But the war is long since past, and Machine Matati is pushing a new bicycle^21. down the street of Mafeking ... He never looked after my children like a father should ... I have no tears to weep for Machine Matati’ (p. 33). Even the younger males of Poppie's family are portrayed as up to no good, for example her two half-brothers, Pieta (killed by gangs because of his own involvement in gang activities) and Jakkie who had to flee the country because of his involvement in the children's revolt.

Poppie's lineage is traced almost entirely through the female line and stories of her ancestry are delivered to her by her mother, grandmother and aunts, often referring to her great-grandmother grootouma Kappie. Here, too, the female ancestral presence forms an essential part of the family's continued existence. However, the male line is almost completely ignored and the only information we have are scant references to Poppie's father and his clan-name.

Although Poppie's uncles help in bringing up Poppie and her brothers in the absence of their father, they are likewise emasculated, even to the extent of being portrayed as caricatures, especially oompie Pengi. If, as Jakes Gerwel submits, the ‘coloured’ male is portrayed in the early Afrikaans narrative as the ‘jollie hotnot’, then oompie Pengi is most certainly portrayed as the ‘jolly Kaffir’, a cretinous figure whose entire life apparently consists of drinking, swearing, tap-dancing, singing and playing his guitar. The most vivid recollections Poppie has of him are his drunkenness, stealing his mother's possessions to buy liquor, robbing her of the rent money he collected from the tenants and setting his mother's house on fire. The result of all this is that he lands in jail after his own mother laid charges of arson against him and when he reappears in Poppie's life, he is a sick,

21. At the end of the Second World War, those black men who fought ‘for king and country’ were compensated for their trouble with a new bicycle and a greatcoat to be worn in the searing heat of a South African summer.

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prematurely old and broken man in hospital, a ‘tiny, wrinkled little man in the big bed under the grey blanket’ (p. 150), who has wasted his life, whose only child had been taken away from him because his wife could no longer tolerate his kind of life.

With regard to oompie Pengi and his mother's actions, Margaret Lenta has this to say: ‘When Hannie expels her favourite son Pengi ... from the family because he burnt down the house when he was drunk, we realise that she combines a sense of responsibility to the family as a whole with a perceptive love for each individual’ (Lenta 1984:150). She says this in defence of her statement that family life in the townships is woman-centred but she obviously fails to see how Pengi and the other men in Poppie's life are systematically made impotent, how the silence about their situation is maintained in the novel.

Poppie's brothers, too, with the exception of buti Mosie, soon fall prey to liquor and its devastating effects on the poor. They lose their families in the process, are involved in drunken brawls and often emerge seriously injured, lose their selfrespect and generally their value as human beings (cf. for example pp. 56-59 and 61-62 for Poppie's narration about Plank and pp. 114-117 about Hoedjie). The only positive aspect of their drinking, according to Poppie, is that ‘they were full of fun when they were drunk. Tata-ka-Bonsile liked their joking. He was a quiet man, but he was fond of his brothers-in-law and their light-hearted, fooling, joking ways’ (p. 117). Again the happy-go-lucky black man without a care in the world.

With reference to patriarchy, Poppie displays a particularly ambivalent attitude: on the one hand she rebels against the system which further oppresses her; on the other hand she allows herself to be subjugated and is intent upon conducting herself according to the impositions of patriarchy.

Against the background of patriarchy described in 2.2.1, Poppie's situation in a patriarchal society must be seen, especially with reference to her marriage to Stone who represents traditional society and Poppie who represents urban black society and the conflict which it generates. First of all, Poppie's problems in procuring a pass are ascribed to the fact that she married Stone who came from Herschel in the Ciskei and therefore officially not a ‘citizen’ of South Africa. Even before the pass problems, Poppie's family were not too keen on her marrying Stone: ‘At first we were dissatisfied that our little sister should marry a man from Kaffirland’ (Mosie, p. 69); ‘I told you you would have trouble when you married a man from the raw country’ (Poppie's step-father, p. 140); ‘You would go and marry a raw Kaffir’ (Poppie's mother, p. 156); ‘It's the fucking people of the land ... they must leave go of you’ (Poppie's brother Plank, p. 261).

The only time Poppie reveals some ‘feminist’ tendencies is when she shows a measure of resistance to patriarchy. Her loyalty towards and caring of Stone who

[p. 207]

she sees as ‘a nervous man ... nervous about his job and about me and the children, and about himself’ [p. 117, N.B. In the Afrikaans version he is consistently referred to by Poppie as a ‘mannetjie’ (little man) which could be an expression of love but also of his diminished status in her eyes] places a heavy burden on her. Gradually she becomes the sole breadwinner and decision-maker in her family because of Stone's illness. The conflicts between her and her in-laws and ‘the people of the land’ increase.

During Poppie's first visit to her in-laws, she experiences the strangeness of traditional Xhosa customs which turns into derision and even contempt for them. Poppie narrates and focalizes this first visit:

They (her in-laws) asked me how it went with my parents. I kept quiet, my husband spoke to his people. He sat on a chair, because he's a man. He didn't sit on the side of the hut where I was sitting, he sat with the men. Where I was sitting was the side of the women. My father-in-law's sisters and sister-in-law and wife who had been taken up into the family's beliefs could sit with the men. But newly-married women aren't allowed there and they may not greet the father-in-law by hand ... I was scared of the strange people and didn't look around too much, for the hut looked so dark and frightening, lit only by a tin lamp standing near the dishes. It was a horrible place, I'm not used to such houses. But I kept quiet because my ma had taught me how to behave myself with my in-laws (p. 78).

Throughout her marriage, the raising of her children until she reaches the end of the road, there are constant conflicts with her husband's family who want to appropriate her children to help them on the land; the conflict about her husband wanting to take their son Bonsile out of school temporarily to assist him and his family to ‘fetch back his brothers who have passed by’ (= the death rites, p. 216); the conflict about where Stone should be buried, about Bonsile's initiation and about Thandi who apparently has the gift to thwasa (= talking to the ancestors). Save for Bonsile's initiation, Poppie refused to allow her in-laws to dictate to her. Yet, when she is haunted by bad dreams, the only explanation she can find for them is that her opposition to her in-laws' wishes should be amended. This she does by sending Bonsile to be initiated ‘in the land’ and by allowing her daughters to go and assist her ailing mother-in-law. Very gradually Poppie's fight against patriarchy turns into unwilling and eventually into voluntary participation in the traditions and customs of her husband's family.

Although Poppie's love and concern for her husband are never in doubt, and although she grudgingly acknowledges his status as head of the family, he nevertheless diminishes in her estimation as a provider, brought about by his illness. She becomes increasingly incensed by his jealousy, his insistence on consulting witchdoctors, his reluctance to completely adhere to Western religion and his partiality for his own family and their customs. However, she seldom voices her

[p. 208]

feelings about these aspects to him and would rather discuss them with her relatives and relate them to the unidentified listener.

What is of particular interest is Poppie's unreserved acceptance of the patriarchy of the white male. It would seem that she is unaware of the double patriarchy to which she is subjected. Although she has little contact with white men save those officials at the pass offices, the reader is nevertheless given some indication of her attitude especially to Mr Steyn. She has great admiration for this Mr Steyn who is ‘a believer, religious man, a man of much faith ... a man to talk courage into you’ (p. 169), the one whose duty it was to inform Poppie that she had to leave Cape Town and go to the Ciskei. Her admiration for him stems from the fact that he told her: ‘If it is the Lord's will that you stay, then you will stay, and if it is the Lord's will that you go, then you will go’ (p. 169), so much so, that she even equates Mr Steyn with God's saving grace: ‘When the devil is on your tracks, then the hand of the Lord comes to you and takes your hand. As Mr Steyn took her hand’ (p. 170). In contrast to Poppie's low esteem for the men in her family, Mr Steyn assumes God-like proportions in her perception.

Another factor which causes one to doubt the ‘feminist’ content of the novel, is Poppie's intolerance and lack of understanding of other black women who are as oppressed and as marginalised as herself. When people are equally oppressed - even though they may have their personal differences - they tend to show solidarity with one another, more especially when dealing with a member of the oppressor class. In the case of women, their common suffering draws them closer together and, in Angela Davis' (1990:12) words, ‘we must always attempt to lift as we climb’. Poppie's only identification with other black women is restricted to members of her immediate family and perhaps one close friend, Mamdungwana. Her sisters-in-law are interlopers and immoral, the wives of her uncles are generally bad women who are not worthy of their husbands, even though Poppie herself acknowledges the deviance characterising the lives of the male members of her family. Even worse is her condemnation of women if they happen to be ‘coloured’ or half-Xhosa, half-coloured and her several references to the ethnic features of ‘coloureds’. Yet it is Muis, ‘half-coloured, half-Xhosa ... that thin girl with the legs like sticks, I can't stand her’ (p. 138) and married to Poppie's brother Hoedjie, who comes to her rescue when she is on the verge of a breakdown. Similarly, Poppie dislikes Rhoda, wife of her brother Mosie. She ‘couldn't take it that Rhoda wore long trousers the first time that buti Mosie brought her home’ (p. 175), that she sits on the sofa reading a book while Poppie had to do the cooking, that ‘she thinks she's better than us’ (p. 175). It is also Rhoda who comes to Poppie's assistance when she collapses after hearing that her children had been detained.

Not unexpectedly though it still leaves a black reader bemused, is the high regard Poppie has for two white women, the young unnamed missionary and Mrs Retief,

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the social worker [a third white woman ought to be included, namely the author, to who a black woman ‘who would become Poppie Nongena ... bruised and battered after her experiences of the unrest in Nyanga East’ (Joubert 1987:254) poured out her story]. When considering Poppie's racial prejudice, sexism, intolerance of other black women and elevation of whites, especially when juxtaposed with the views expressed by black women as cited at the beginning of this section, one is left in no doubt as to the extent of her indoctrination at the hands of the very people who oppress her. Add to that the fact that her only real fight is against patriarchy, then one is convinced of how complete her indoctrination has been. A ‘feminist’ novel?

6.3.2.6 ‘Maids and Madams’^22.

It has often enough been asserted by white middle-class women that one of the areas in which blacks and whites can have real knowledge of each other is the work situation.^23. This view is challenged by Margaret Lenta with regard to white women employers and black women employees when she posits:

Yet the mutual ‘knowing’ which occurs between employer and servant is of a particular kind which involves as much - perhaps more - wilful ignorance as knowledge. The intimate knowledge which the employee has of the employer's private life is something which she is required to conceal, while the employer, though she admits her employee into her home, must deny her the status of a family-member and usually refuses or neglects to find out about her life and obligations elsewhere (Lenta 1989:238).

Lenta continues by saying that the legal and social divisions between black and white in South Africa reinforce the power of the employer and weaken the position of the employee, who must frequently suffer injustice and exploitation at the hands of her madam. Already in 1980 Jacklyn Cock came to the same conclusion:

The situation of black and white women in South Africa presents a challenge to any oversimplified feminist notion of ‘sisterhood’. That challenge is sharpest in the institution of domestic service where the wages paid and the hours of work exacted by white ‘madams’ from their black ‘maids’ suggest a measure of oppression of women by women (Cock 1980/1989:1).

‘Real knowledge’, ‘wilful ignorance’ and ‘a measure of oppression’ are but part of the story of the situation of domestic workers. It is significant how - even with the best of intentions - these white women who can only base their conclusions on observations and a questionable type of interview, underplay the situation between black and white women in their relationship of employee and employer.^24. Black women speaking and writing about their experiences as domestic workers are indeed rare. Ellen Kuzwayo, though she has never been a domestic worker but

22. This heading is taken from the title of Jacklyn Cock's study on the situation of domestic workers and their white employers.

23. For example Nadine Gordimer, in a TV interview; cited by Lenta.

24. See for example Bernstein, Barrett e.a.

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a social worker in close contact with domestic workers, has this to say about their situation:

Indeed, some of the leading white men and women in this country (South Africa) are the products of the ingenious hands and minds of the black ‘nurse’, ‘nanny’ or ‘mother’ who has been, and still is, underpaid for one of the outstanding responsible human services: that is, bringing up children. This is a task she has undertaken with pride, responsibility, love, loyalty and respect for both the child and the parents. Yet how has she been rewarded? (Kuzwayo 1985:23/4).

The ‘maids and madams’ situation is depicted in a few works of South African fiction, mainly by white, English, female novelists.^25. Two examples from a black woman's perspective are the novels Muriel at Metropolitan (1975) by Miriam Tlali and Another year in Africa (1980) by Rose Zwi.^26. As far as Afrikaans fiction is concerned, even less appears in which the ‘maids and madams’ situation is highlighted. Of course, even in the earliest Afrikaans novels the black servant is part of the milieu, a mere caricature and always seen from a white perspective. In recent Afrikaans narrative we have an example in Louoond (literal translation ‘Luke-warm oven’) by Jeanne Goosen in which the domestic worker Anna acquires some bargaining power when she becomes politicised, but in the main the story deals with the hang-ups of the white central figure.

In Poppie Nongena the ‘maids and madams’ situation is inextricably linked to the labyrinth of bureaucracy which characterises the lives of black people and closely intertwined with the entire story of Poppie's life and travails. It is almost as if this facet of her life is a side-issue, played down considerably in the narrative. Yet Poppie's different employers and different experiences under them cannot be seen in isolation from her general situation. The author's advice that ‘the book must be allowed to speak for itself’ apparently does not take into account Poppie's feelings - the impression is created by Poppie herself and the anonymous narrator that Poppie accepts her treatment at the hands of her white ‘madams’ passively and unfeelingly. Her stoic silence and phlegmatic attitude towards her suffering virtually shout at the reader.

The journey motif which is dominant in the narrative, also applies to Poppie's working life: journeying from one place of employment to another, charring (i.e. working for different ‘madams’ on different days of the week), the different modes of transport used to get to her place of employment, the long, laborious journeys from the squatter camp to the elite white suburbs. In another sense, the journey motif is manifest in her thoughts going forth and back to her family whose welfare depends on her being employed.

Leaving aside Poppie's employment as a child-labourer - iniquitous and exploitative as it is - in a fish-processing factory at Lamberts Bay, Poppie has had several

25. For example Sheila Roberts and Nadine Gordimer.

26. In Muriel at Metropolitan Muriel is not a domestic worker but employed as saleslady-secretary-bookkeper-tealady-cleaner etc. in a furniture store with mainly black clientele. She becomes the butt of two white women employees' (Mrs Kuhn and Mrs Stein) wrath, ridicule and bulllying, even though she is as good, if not better, at her work than they. The domestic worker Dora in Another year in Africa must carry the blame for everything that goes amiss in the Jewish household where she is employed. Gittle, the Jewish grandmother who has to keep an eagle eye on her, apparently subscribes to the often-quoted notion South African white ‘madams’ have of their black ‘maids’ in the household: ‘Nothing is kaffir-proof’ when referring to breakages in the home wrongly or rightly attributed to the clumsiness of the maid.

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employers during her stay in Cape Town, not including those for whom she charred or who are not mentioned by name. Her first domestic job was at a plant-growing nursery with an unnamed madam as a ‘sleep-in’ in Constantia, ‘first by bus and then by train and then by bus’ (p. 98). On her one afternoon off per week, the journey from and back to her place of employment would take almost the entire afternoon, leaving her with only half an hour to spend with her family. The never-ending drudgery of housework; the low wages (six pounds per month); her being the only sleep-in woman employee in a compound for several male employees, thus making her vulnerable to further abuse and exploitation; one hour's rest in the afternoon; huge bundles of washing done by hand in a stone-tub outside and a ‘madam’ who stands behind her like a slave-driver, all these and more resulted in Poppie becoming ill. The white woman's comment is: ‘You can't be sick here, you must go to Nyanga, I'm too busy to look after a sick person...work has never made anybody sick’ (p. 100). One of the few times Poppie expresses her feelings with regard to her employment is when she says: ‘It hurt me very much when she said that...’ (p. 100). If, as has been asserted, the novel is a demonstration of ‘understatement’, then surely Poppie's understatement of her feelings (to a white person) reveals the extent of her oppression.

A succession of employers follows, inter alia Mr Pullen with his invalid wife in Bellville, Mrs Graham in Bishopscourt, Mrs Stevens, Mrs Scobie, Mrs Robson and Mrs Swanepoel. Of some Poppie gives more information than of others but in each case exploitation and insensitivity to her situation are dominant features of their treatment of her. For example, when her husband is hospitalised for tuberculosis, she can only visit him on her Sunday afternoon off while working for Mrs Scobie - since the family usually had a protracted Sunday lunch and Poppie's work in the kitchen would not end before three o'clock, it meant that her visits to tata-ka-Bonsile (= father of Bonsile) would be cut to a few minutes to enable her to return to her sleep-in job in time. This resulted in her husband becoming suspicious and even accusing her of seeing another man. When she had to apply for another extension to her pass, it meant more trips from one pass office to the next, necessitating her absence from work and for which she is severely scolded by her employer. When her grandson Vusile dies, Poppie is two days late for work and Mrs Swanepoel's only reaction to her explanation is: ‘I am sorry, Rachel ... I brought back a lot of washing from the seaside house. But don't try to do everything at once’ (p. 338).

All these and many more form part of Poppie's daily existence but several factors of which the ‘madams’ are ignorant or ‘wilfully ignorant’ until articulated by Poppie, emerge from the narrative and exacerbate her - and by implication that of her family members - suffering. Most important is that a vicious circle of disadvantage executes itself in the lives of black domestic workers. As a child, Poppie had to be taken out of school to mind her step-brothers and -sisters; as a mother who has to work to keep her children from starving, she herself takes

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her own children and her step-sister out of school to mind her younger children. At one stage these young children had to stay at home all by themselves, locked into the shack which is home to Poppie and her family. The physical danger the children are exposed to as well as the temptation to roam the streets and making themselves vulnerable to all kinds of social evils are of no concern to the employers, as long as their children are cared for by the maid.

Something which is never articulated in the novel is the lack of protection or security for domestic workers: no maternity leave, unemployment fund, sick fund, pension fund, in short, an absolute denial of the domestic worker as a vital part of the labour force and therefore of the economy of the country. The fact that these women facilitate their employers' entry into the labour market or set them free to pursue other activities, does not seem to be a factor worth considering. Yet, ironically, they are regarded as wage-earners and therefore subject to the rules and regulations governing all workers. A case in point is when Poppie's husband is declared unfit for work with Poppie nearing the end of her pregnancy and a meagre disability grant given to the family. But as soon as Poppie was able to go back to work, this grant is stopped.

Poppie's employment - as is the employment of all Africans in the urban areas - is entirely dependent upon her ability to obtain a pass. This involves numerous trips to and long waiting hours at the pass offices which are situated in white areas. The possibility of being fired from her job for trying to get a pass precisely to hold down her job is a very real one. Each time Poppie's pass would be extended for a week, a month, three months and once for six months and each time she had to make the same journey several times, had to stand in long queues all day for several days at a time in order to retain her job, only to be accused of irresponsibility and even laziness by her employers. Just two weeks before the birth of her fourth child, Poppie again had to apply for extension, and again had to make the trip to Standard House by bus and train:

Because of the rain, there were no long queues of people waiting outside in the street. All had pressed inside the building to get out of the wet, and were crowding the passages. She pushed in through the door and was shown where to join the end of the queue. The people moved forward inch by inch, for long stretches of time the queue did not move at all. Poppie tried to wipe the wetness from the shoulders and sleeves of her coat. The coat was mohair, bought second-hand from Mrs Scobie. It was too small for her and pulled over the shoulders ... The rain had soaked through the coat and down her back ...(p. 154/5).

6.3.2.7 Poppie's religion

One of Poppie's most lasting memories of her upbringing by ouma Hannie which undoubtedly had a profound effect on her, is her grandmother's deeply religious

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life. Ouma Hannie was a ‘God-fearing woman’ (p. 16) who ‘never went to bed without saying her prayers’ (p. 17) and who woke up at five o'clock in the morning to pray, waking the members of her household to pray with her. She owned a Bible although she could not read but she loved to sing hymns. Her house was a ‘Christian house ... God's house’ (p. 33) which she would not allow to become defiled by Pengi's drinking or swearing or the isangoma's (female withcdoctor) influence brought into the house by Pengi. Anything which differed from her Christian values is ascribed to the devil, for example she blames Pengi's drinking on ‘the devil eating his heart’ (p. 45) and the fact that he ‘cast away his church’ (p. 46); ‘the swear words, the unholy thoughts’ came from Pengi's stomach and not his heart. From a very early age ouma Hannie took Poppie and her brothers to church with her and enrolled them in the Sunday School. Indeed, ouma Hannie's upbringing of her children and grandchildren set them on a firm path. Another feature of ouma Hannie's religion, is how she effectively combined Xhosa tradition with Christianity, for instance insisting that her daughters be married in the Xhosa tradition (the payment of lobola by the bridegroom, the arranging of the marriage by the families of the prospective bride and bridegroom) which Poppie describes as ‘marriage by force’ (p. 12): ouma Hannie ‘wasn't at rest till they were married with lobola money, as well as in church’ (p. 13). Poppie insists that although they were church-goers, ‘the Xhosa people kept strictly to their own traditional Xhosa beliefs as well’ (p. 41).

In contrast to ouma Hannie's stability, also in her church-life -she remained with the Methodist Church until her death - her children and grandchildren drift from one denomination to another, Methodist, Ethiopian, Anglican, Catholic, Dutch Reformed Mission and Zionist, which is not only symptomatic of the superstructure which governs their entire existence but is also another manifestation of the journey motif which operates on different levels in the text and in Poppie's life. The different mission schools which Poppie and her brothers attended also reflect the drifting nature of their lives. Partiality to a religious denomination is reflected by subtleties such as Mosie's assertion that he ‘wasted (his) time at the Catholic school ... (he) couln't get ahead, it was just play school. Then ouma sent (them) to the Dutch Reformed Mission school ... (he) carried on till (he) reached standard five ...’ (p. 48).

Poppie's forced removal from Lamberts Bay also necessitates a forced move from her church. Soon after arriving in Cape Town and after moving house several times, Poppie joins the Nyanga Holy Cross Church of the Anglicans, already having moved to the Anglican Church in Lamberts Bay when her husband decided to become Anglican rather than Methodist: ‘Tata-ka-Bonsile made me leave the Methodists, she often complained ... and now I go on my own to the Holy Cross, because he has no more spirit left for his church’ (p. 109). Indeed, the church becomes Poppie's anchor in the uncertain township life as well as in the instability brought about by the myriad of laws affecting her life. In deep crises,

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her only comfort is in the church, and this is reiterated by Poppie time and again: ‘The church is my mainstay, Poppie thought. As long as I remain true to the church, the Lord will be with me’ (p. 172). Separated once more from her kinsfolk after her eviction from Cape Town, ‘the church was her comfort’ (p. 221) and ‘only in the church did she find comfort’ (p. 223).

The anaesthetizing effects of her religion are best illustrated by two phases or incidents in Poppie's life. When her pass can no longer be extended and her forced removal from Cape Town is imminent, Poppie finds much comfort in the words of the white official at the pass office, Mr Steyn. With this sword hanging over her, Poppie finds much comfort in his words but also in the church, even to the extent of equating Mr Steyn with the Lord. That Sunday in church, the preacher's words had such an effect on Poppie that she

felt her soul was thirsting for the words she was hearing. Her soul drank in the words, she could scarcely remember them separately, they had sunk deep down into her soul. Only now she understood fully. She felt her heart grow big and strong. She wanted to tell of this blessing, it swelled up in her bosom, she wanted to sing it out to the congregation. When the singing started and her voice rose with the rest, it was as if she was being released from everything pent up within her breast, as if she had found peace in this release. Her body started swaying slowly from side to side, her eyes closed, her voice climbed above the rest (p. 170/1).

Significantly, the hymn the congregation is singing at the time is ‘Jerusalem, my happy home’ and Poppie ‘was standing before the throne of the Lord, singing these words that He might hear her ... she felt her head wet with sweat, as if a fever had been broken ...’ (p. 171).

The second example is when Poppie is already in Mdantsame in the Ciskei and her fears, grief, loneliness and pain can only be relieved through her religion which acts like a powerful drug on her agitated state:

Christmas and New Year passed, having no meaning for her. Only in the church did she find comfort. She spent nights singing, she would come home from church in the early morning, with hoarse voice and inflamed eyes, to throw herself on the bed and sleep, leaving the cooking and housework to the girls (p. 223).

Poppie's main concern for her children is that they should have a good education at all costs and be brought up in church. Like ouma Hannie did with her, she takes her children with her to church, inculcates admirable moral values but very often she becomes rather obsessive and coercive in keeping them on the straight and narrow. It is especially with her two teenage children, Bonsile and Thandi, that she uses coercion to get them to go to church when she finds out that their values differ from hers. ‘She could force (Bonsile) to come to church with her’ (p. 223)

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because she had to pay a big amount in ‘damage money’ (= money paid by the parents of a young man to the parents of a young girl when the former fathered a child). Poppie had to beat Thandi to get her to church, in addition to threatening and warning her about the influence of the amafufunyana spirits, i.e. hysterical spirits:

They entered your body and dwelt in your belly. At parties they took hold of you, especially if you were a young married woman or young girl, and made you leave your body so that they could speak from your belly. It was an evil thing if it took hold of your child, it forced her to leave school, and put an end to her learning ... It is the spirit of the devil that goes into the people, the seven demons the Bible tells us about (p. 222).

Once again, Poppie displays an ambivalence in her character. On the one hand she is a committed Christian; on the other she firmly believes in other supernatural powers which her very Christian faith rejects. She believes in the power of the amafufunyana spirits; she believes as firmly in the Bible which warns about the ‘seven demons’ of which the amafufunyana spirits are one.

A telling feature of Poppie's religion is that she often seeks the causes of the abominations dominating her life in herself, in her ‘sinfulness’ and own human failings. Whenever she experiences a crisis in her life, she ascribes it to past sins she had committed. The most clear example of this is when she learns that her children had been detained by the security police and she cries out: ‘What have I done wrong, where have I sinned?’ (p. 353) and again: ‘Lord, Lord, where, at what place, did I turn from your path?’ (p. 355).

Although it is implied that Poppie belongs to a women's group of her church (e.g. the women wearing purple blouses, p. 172), no mention is made either by Poppie or the EN of the activities of such a group. It is a fact that religion, particularly Christianity, is an important factor in bringing women together. Fatima Meer (1987:22) points out that the church ‘cradled the most prolific African women's organisation, the Manyano’ and goes on to say that

The Manyano bonds African women in the urban areas drawn from a diversity of tribes giving them an identity manifested in distinctive uniforms, selfconfidence and security. In the depressed townships where men as the main bread-winners often have neither the means nor the will to respond to women's needs, and the State turns its back on them, the Manyano serves as a welfare pool. It organises stokvels or saving clubs, rotating among members the benefit of the capital accumulated each month to help with such emergencies as school and university fees, down payments and demands from creditors... It funnels grievances which though unintellectualised are expressed ‘intuitively’ as rooted in racism. ‘White people do these things to blacks’; ‘They happen because whites make them happen’.

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Yet, if Poppie indeed belongs to such a group, its influence is either completely lost on her and therefore not worth relating to the unidentified listener, or in the selection of material for the novel the author did not deem it necessary to include the vital mobilising effects of such an organisation on black women.

Karl Marx^27. states:

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Jeffrey Marishane^28. states that the historical materialist approach should be adopted in order to understand the role of religion dialectically

both as a form of apology and sanction for the status quo and the powers that be on the one hand, and as an inadequate response by some people drawn from the ranks of the popular masses to the unbearable situation of oppression, exploitation, poverty and disease in the face of seemingly invincible forces on the other.

Marx's assertion has a ring of validity to it when considering Poppie's situation. Her religion has the effect of desensitising her to her own plight and the mass of South Africans; in fact, her unquestioning adherence to her Christian faith is precisely the aim missionaries and capitalist powers had in mind when they set out on their ‘civilising missions’ to bring the ‘light’ of Christianity to the ‘darkness’ of the African heathens. The oppressed must bear their suffering with cheerfulness for the Lord knows best; suffering in this life is the precondition for entering the Kingdom of Heaven; oppression and its related suffering is the will of the Lord who loves all His creatures. The oppressed are taught to sit back with folded arms, impassively awaiting liberation from their suffering which would come from the Lord Himself. Although most black people can see through and reject this kind of indoctrination, this is the message in Die koperkan, Swart Pelgrim, Die groot anders-maak and now in Poppie Nongena but this time the protagonist herself propounds those views, showing how successful and complete her indoctrination had been.

27. Karl Marx: ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law’ in Marx, Karl and Engels, Friederich: Collected Works, Vol. 3, p. 175.

28. Jeffrey Marishane 1989: ‘Prayer, Profit and Power’, unpublished research paper under the auspices of the Govan Mbeki Fund, University of Amsterdam.

6.3.2.8 ‘Mutter Courage’

Although this novel has at various times and by various critics been described as a perfect example of ‘understatement’ (e.g. Jakes Gerwel, André P. Brink, Henriette Roos), certain aspects of Poppie's life are given so much emphasis - for example Poppie's religious life so that some critics even describe the novel as a ‘religious novel’; the isolation of only two elements of the children's revolt, viz. their loss of respect for their elders and the myth of the so-called black on black

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violence - that in my opinion there is no question of ‘understatement’, rather of over-emphasis to illustrate that Poppie, as a true Christian, loves her enemies and to discredit the positive aspects of the children's revolt which was but one remarkable event in the long history of the people's resistance.

Gerrit Olivier (1979:12) describes Poppie as a ‘township Mutter Courage’ (my emphasis), thereby displaying an overt paternalism. It cannot be denied that Poppie, as indeed all mothers when they have to protect their children, shows great courage in the face of all the invincible forces mobilised against her and the millions of black people generally. But she also displays an alien (for black mothers) form of partiality for her own children, even going as far as to wish that Jakkie would be arrested so that her children could be left in peace, being grateful that her children are not in Cape Town when the revolt spreads to that city, hoping that the unruly children would be severely taken to task by the security forces.

Despite Olivier's claim and despite Poppie's courage, she is nevertheless portrayed as someone who succumbs to pressure time and again. If all the black women had to collapse as often as Poppie does, then an even sadder picture of black society would emerge. A few examples will suffice.

The extra-textual information supplied by the author that the black woman who was to become Poppie Nongena arrived at her doorstep in a state of collapse after her experiences of the children's revolt in Nyanga East, already says much about the character Poppie. How many mothers' children were not detained? Even worse, how many mothers saw their children shot dead or tortured by the police and how many mothers until now are uncertain whether their children are alive after having had to flee the country? If all of these mothers had gone to white women to pour out their stories, I am afraid that there would not have been enough white women to listen.

In the story, the first example of Poppie's several breakdowns is provided after her forced removal from Cape Town, her family and her husband, becomes an accomplished fact, added to which is the fact that she had just given birth to her last child: ‘But Poppie did not have joy in the child ... She lay on her bed with a bitter feeling in her heart against her husband who had brought this thing upon her with his illness...’ (p. 158). Mrs Retief observes her depression and total devastation, and so does the much-maligned Muis: ‘She looked around her. Poppie's house had a different feel, nothing was clean and bright the way it was the first time she came there, the bed hadn't been made, the blankets on which the children slept just kicked to one side ... the smell of birth was still in the bedroom’ (p. 161).

Again in connection with her pass, Poppie breaks down a second time, this time in a queue at the Native Affairs offices in Observatory: ‘A nausea rose in her, she had difficulty in lifting her feet ... Poppie held on to a lamp post with both hands,

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spasms passed through her body, tearing at her, her legs were shaking, the spasms rose, pushed up from her belly, her mouth opened, colourless slaver dribbling out of the corners, then her gullet jerked uncontrollably, and she doubled up retching. Not much came out, mostly bile’ (p. 184). A white woman offers to help, although she is unsure whether Poppie is drunk or not.

Loneliness, fear and a sense of futility take hold of Poppie the first night she and her children spend in Mdantsane and brings her to near-collapse: ‘She heard someone groaning ... But before fear took hold of her, she realised that it was she herself who was groaning. It was her own body giving voice to her pain. She tried to still the sounds, but her body started shaking, like someone with fever’ (p. 203).

Poppie collapses completely when she is informed that her children had been detained. Her sister-in-law Rhoda notices how her face ‘has melted’, the trembling of her face, spittle running from the corners of her mouth (p. 353).

With these examples I am not trying to prove that Poppie is not a Mutter Courage; on the contrary, all the forces of evil against her must inevitably culminate in one form of breakdown or another. However, the purported ‘understatement’ of the novel becomes an overstatement of Poppie's several collapses, in order to suggest that Poppie and the likes of her are not equal to the rigours of urban life; that she and the likes of her should have remained in the reserves where they are accustomed to a ‘simple’ life (cf. in this respect Swart Pelgrim where the message is clearly that the ‘white man's cities’ are not meant for black men and women alike, that they become degenerate; only, in Poppie's case, she is not portrayed as a shebeen queen or prostitute).

6.3.2.9 Poppie's politics

Two important events in the long history of resistance to apartheid legislation are included in Poppie's story: the 1960 mass demonstrations against the Pass Laws which resulted in the massacres at Sharpeville and Langa, and the youth revolt of 1976. These events mark important stages in Poppie's life and have a profound effect on her - the 1960 event marking her ‘introduction’ into township life; the 1976 event catalysing her into taking Ciskei papers and therefore completely succumbing to the pressures of the apartheid regime. In a certain sense, these two events are crucial in illustrating her non-political, a-political or even depoliticised stance which generated the white critical applause for the novel.

The Sharpeville massacre marked the end of an era of non-violent protests in South Africa, and the violence which accompanies the upheavel in the black townships of Cape Town is mainly focalised by Poppie and some of her family members. A significant feature of their narration is their unwillingness to become

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involved in the people's struggle. For Poppie, the ‘trouble (was about) the passes and the permits when we visit Langa. And for a pound a day wages’ (p. 120) and when she is informed about a meeting where township residents are to discuss their grievances, her reaction is: ‘Well, forget about this meeting, my buti’, for ‘she's not complaining. She has a pass and her ma has one, and each of her brothers’ (p. 120). Similarly, Major's advice to Mosie when they are inadvertently caught up in the unrest, is also very significant: ‘We must get away from here, buti. We're not of the Cape people, let's keep ourselves outside of their trouble’ (p. 122 - my emphasis). This statement is indicative not only of the attitude of Poppie and her family members to the aspirations of the struggling masses, but also of the entire attitude of the book. Moreover, Poppie and her family seem to be satisfied with their situation but an especially sombre aspect of their attitude is the fact that they appear to be oblivious of the fact that they are being oppressed.

In addition, Poppie's choice of phrase (and that of the EN) when describing the events in the black townships already clearly implies her attitude. For example, she describes one of the leaders of the revolt who was not afraid to express his views in public, a university student by the name of Kgosana, as: ‘he had a reputation for saying terrible things at the meetings’ (p. 130); the EN informs the reader that ‘The second week of the strike the hate and death came to Poppie's street’ (p. 126).

Any situation of unrest or war goes hand in hand with the most brutal atrocities on both sides of the opposing camps but these are usually abrogated to a certain degree when considering the cause in which they are perpetrated, as has been so clearly illustrated time and again in world history. Therefore, for Poppie and her relatives to condemn the violence out of hand and not to see or refuse to see in what or whose cause it is perpetrated, is particularly tragic, especially when no such condemnation of the violence perpetrated and instigated by the police is forthcoming. A case in point is the killing of a white journalist as related to Poppie by Mosie and the narration about Mr Mfukeng's death. Once again, the emphasis is on the ‘savagery’ of these incidents, once again there can be no question of ‘understatement’ for both are described in detail with scant references to police brutality. For example, in Mosie's relation of the killing of the white journalist (p. 123), 33 lines are devoted to the description of what transpired and only five to police action, and then only to describe how they came to the journalist's assistance. Nearly four pages (pp. 126-129) of narration are devoted to a description of Mr Mfukeng's death and only three lines to the role of the police who once again are portrayed as humane. The glaring absence of the police when the so-called black-on-black violence takes place is similarly not condemned by any of the actors.

This systematic discrediting and denigration of the people's struggle continues throughout the narrative and is another reflection of how it is discredited in real

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life by those whose interests are in serious jeopardy. It is once again Poppie who gives voice to ideas and observations which are rife in the white community: ‘The feeling against the black police was fierce. From that year, 1960, people started murdering the police, because they were reckless. If they saw a black policeman walking alone, they killed him’ (p. 129); ‘I have seen a lot of ugly things but this was the first time that I had seen people kill somebody with their bare hands ... It was the worst thing I have seen, when they killed Mr Mfukeng...’ (p. 130). She condemns the children's loss of respect for their elders which, for her, is another negative outcome of the ‘strike’ (p. 132), as well as the strikers' rejection of God and the destruction of church buildings. It is left to her brother Plank to articulate somewhat simplistically black people's resistance to the church during this time: ‘God, sisi, what'll I be doing in a church? They take you like a chicken and pluck all the feathers round your arse hole. And I am not for this bare-arse business’ (p. 125).

Very significant of all this is the highlighting of the negative aspects of the 1960 revolt with almost no mention of the role of the forces responsible for the situation. The impression is being created that black people's struggles are barbaric affairs, with the law of the jungle the only one known to them. Not once in this part of the narrative is the cold-blooded murder of black people by the police mentioned, not by Poppie, not by her relatives, not by the EN. The South African as well as the non-South African reader who has no knowledge of the events of 1960, will read this narrative as another indisputable proof of black people's barbarism. Is it coincidence that these parts are narrated mainly in the third person, by an EN who to all intents and purposes is ‘blind and deaf’ to the South African situation?

After 1960, black women's involvement and participation in the struggle for liberation increased dramatically despite the repressive measures taken by the state to silence democratic forces. Fatima Meer (1987:25) states: ‘The militancy of the African women has moved in a continuous stream throughout the century’. When one reads the accounts of African women's struggles, their heroism and courage in fighting those laws which placed such a burden upon themselves and their children [cf. for example Fatima Meer (1987) and Hilda Bernstein (1985)], when one looks at the list of black women detained, tortured, restricted, murdered in detention and banned during those turbulent years, then one has to come to the conclusion that this ‘militancy’ and fierce struggle were either completely lost on Poppie or that the EN and by implication Joubert have not deemed it necessary to include it as part of Poppie's story.

The sixteen years between 1960 and 1976 left Poppie completely unaffected or failed to contribute to her politicisation; if anything, she has retrogressed so much that even those brief flickers of political awareness she displayed during the 1960 upheavel have disappeared altogether, despite all her humiliating experiences in

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connection with her pass, despite her forced removal to an area which had never been her home. Her narration of the events of 1976 is similarly a focus on the negative aspects thereof, once again two aspects being highlighted: the children's loss of respect for their elders and the so-called black-on-black violence. It was especially the mothers of black children who suffered because of events in South Africa - they saw their children abused, tortured, detained, shot to death; they lost their children when many fled to safety; it was their children's suffering that catapulted them into more militancy, as explained by one of those who had to seek refuge elsewhere:

Even initially, during the peaceful demonstrations, parents supported the pupils. But what really thrust the parents into action was the brutal police killings ... Nobody expected the cold-blooded murder of young children. So besides their solidarity with young people they were angered - and their hatred and rejection of the whole system came to the surface. They were completely with the students in their militancy.^29.

This view is corroborated by none other than Poppie's brother Mosie when he relates to her how parents supported their children during the meeting called to inform parents about their grievances and to assess their stand on the situation. The parents agreed to march with their children to the police station to demand back those who had been arrested, and Mosie tells Poppie:

The children were now satisfied. They said: Mothers and fathers, you can go home now. This meeting was due to us not knowing where you stood. Now we know you are standing with us (p. 321).

Yet Poppie remains strangely aloof from everything, even to the extent of accusing some of her family members of siding with the children. She askes Mosie whether he is on the side of the children, to which he replies: ‘I'm not on the side of the police’ (p. 313). It grieves her that those close to her could get involved in ‘the trouble’ for she ‘had no heart for what was happening in the location. It seemed to her that Mosie and Johnnie and Jakkie and everybody else was stirring up a trouble that would get too big for them to control’ (p. 313). She sees Jakkie's involvement in the revolt as ‘wasting his life’ (p. 325), even hoping that he would be arrested: ‘Let it be that he has been arrested, that this matter can come to an end, she now prayed. So that we can have some peace, so that my children need not be brought into all this’ (p. 352). For Poppie the revolt was something ‘out there’ fought by ‘them’. At the height of the revolt her grandson Vukile is killed by a stone thrown by one of the ‘Witdoeke’ (= white headcloths, referring to the migrant workers in the hostels aided and abetted by the police to fuel violence in the townships), and Poppie's reaction in addition to her stoic acceptance is: ‘For what, I thought, all this for what?’ When she collapses at the end after hearing that her children had also been detained, she remembers how she

29. Nkosazana Dlamini, formerly Vice-President of the South African Students' Organisation (SASO), speaking of the events of June 1976 in New York, March 1977. Cited by Bernstein (1985:103).

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thought about the revolt: ‘let the other mamas' children collect the troubles, let them burn the houses here in the city and throw stones and let them be shot and beaten up’ (p. 353).

With regard to Poppie's politics, in fact to her world-view on several issues, one should perhaps refer to the remarkable similarity between Joubert's novel and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Angela Davis writes about the latter novel which also enjoyed a very favourable reception and rallied a vast number of people to the abolitionist cause:

Yet the enormous influence her book enjoyed cannot compensate for its utter distortion of slave life. The central female figure is a travesty of the Black woman, a naïve transposition of the mother-figure, praised by the cultural propaganda of the period, from white society to the slave community. Eliza is white motherhood incarnate, but in blackface - or rather, because she is a ‘quadroon’, in just-a-little-less-than-white-face (Davis 1982:27).

Although Poppie is not a ‘quadroon’ in the true sense of the word, she is nevertheless so much indoctrinated with white ideas on a variety of issues (e.g. her politics, religion, ‘feminism’) that one can describe her as a mirror-image or projection of the implicit as well as real author but in blackface. In the same way Eliza is oblivious to the general injustices of slavery, so Poppie is oblivious to the injustices of another kind of slavery brought about by apartheid. In the same way Stowe ‘miserably fails to capture the reality and the truth of Black women's resistance to slavery’ (Davis 1982:29), so Joubert miserably fails to articulate the countless acts of heroism carried out by black South African women and their fierce resistance to apartheid. Once more, with Angela Davis' permission, I shall quote her in a somewhat adapted form to tie the situation of female slaves to the position of contemporary black South African women:

The Poppies, if indeed they exist, are certainly oddities among the great majority of black women. They do not, in any event, represent the accumulated experiences of all those women who are abused and exploited, work for and protect their families, fight against apartheid, and who are tortured and restricted, but never subdued. It is these women who pass on to their female descendants a legacy of hard work, perseverance and self-reliance, a legacy of tenacity, resistance and insistence on sexual equality - in short, a legacy spelling out standards for a new womanhood (adapted from Davis 1982:29).

6.4 Concluding remarks

An entire dissertation needs to be devoted to Poppie Nongena by a black South African woman, and not just a mere chapter. In the above, I could of necessity select only a few aspects which are problematic to me and which obfuscate even

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further the painful reality of the black woman's situation in apartheid South Africa.

While Lenta and Schalkwyk claim that the novel is a ‘break in the silence’ about black women's lives, it is for me a further silencing of the full extent of the black woman's oppression but not only that - Poppie, the author, the EN, the entire book impose a silence on the manner in which, with the limited resources at their disposal, black women have heroically resisted apartheid and all its demonic ramifications to the extent that they are prepared to sacrifice their lives for the freedom of their descendants.

Of course, Poppie is a tragic figure who demands the sympathy of all (not only white) readers. Her experiences, her suffering and her absolute powerlessness in the face of the law may move one to tears. But my sympathy for Poppie is generated not only by her situation but more importantly by the fact that she is a poor, naïve, misguided figure who is completely indoctrinated by the very system that oppresses and silences her on three levels but also on a fourth level: the novel itself. My problem is especially with the manner in which Poppie is portrayed by methods of selection, exclusion and manipulation. Especially the manipulation of characters and readers by means of focalization poses a problem. The novel is an attempt to portray the black woman as a ‘poppie’, a mindless doll, a resigned, unprotesting and fatalistic figure who gives up the fight for survival without resistance. Poppie's relatively easy submission to the authorities is a complete abrogation of the bitter struggle black South African women are engaged in.

For me, Poppie does not portray herself - she is being portrayed by a subjective anonymous narrator who goes to great lengths to focus on the negative aspects of black lives brought upon them, it would appear in the novel, by themselves and not those brought upon them by government policies. Only those aspects of Poppie's life which make her an innocuous figure in the eyes of whites are highlighted.

The only conclusion I can come to with regard to Poppie, is that her voice is dubbed in the text. What she relates to the unidentified listener and what is then narrated in the book seems to me to be two different stories, mainly through the external narrator's appropriation of so much of the narration and its focalization on what is related. One wonders whether the real person who became Poppie in the novel has had a chance to read the book and assess how she is portrayed.

My advice to Joubert and all those white reviewers who have proclaimed the book such an unqualified success would be that they take another peep through the murky windows of their history to find the true causes of the black woman's unenviable situation and then to change their perspective from essentially white to essentially colourless in a country doomed to extinction by the very policies so clearly propounded in the book.