The closest of strangers: South African women's life writing

Originally Published:20060401.

Judith Lütge Coullie. The Closest of Strangers: South African Women's Life Writing. Johannesburg: Wits UP, 2004. 386 pp. ISBN 1-8614-388-0, R190.

It is a good and valuable exercise to read these vignettes of South African women over the last century and into the new millennium. For what the editor, Judith Lütge Coullie, has done is to allow these voices to "speak" for themselves, to articulate for the compatriot and the cross-border reader the evolution of South Africa from an insignificant, middling southern African country to a mid-level regional economic and political player. The eclectic selection done decade by decade is astonishing to read, as the evolution of a contested country and terrain is stenciled on the psyche of the writers. Importantly, the autobiographical subjects offer fascinating insights into the lives of the historical subjects, and one way in which this text proves its timeliness is by juxtaposing what the autobiographical subjects relate about a particular era and what we think we know of South Africa at the time from sometimes dry and polemical historical tomes. Through a close reading, one gets the personal history as it is played against the background of the larger, more reified political contestations.

Starting in 1895, when two of the regions in the contested country were under English law and jurisdiction (the Cape Colony and Natal), coexisting with two landlocked "free" Boer Republics (the South African Republic and the Orange Free State), Coullie meticulously charts the life writings of women in these colonies up to and including the democratized space that South Africa attains in 1990 and following. How a warped society shapes its subjects, and how such autobiographical subjects are experienced as displayed selves, becomes the heart of the text. The period of "1895 to 1910: The Birth of South Africa" opens with that violent birth of a country in which the settlers contest supremacy. The fascinating vignette writings of Sarah Raal and Emily Hobhouse in particular serve as a template to view the interspersing of womanhood-from-a-state-at-arms-Sarah Raal's alter ego in the text is Caesarina Kona Makhoere of the 1976 Student Uprising era. Significantly, many of the life writing entries in the text strain to reconcile themselves to the parameters of this template. Literary creation becomes the vehicle by which these voices discover and unpack their individuality, and we are made to view the country through the prisms of race, class, language, political affiliation, region, religion, and in some instances, ethnic orientation. In effect, the writers use the genre to "try and reverse the conditioning process in order to free themselves, through reassessment of their entire growth and development, of their mental subjugation, to make their consciousness" (Watts 115).

As Coullie notes in her Introduction, it is important that such disencumbrance be seen against the backdrop of colonialism as it intersected with sexism. The codification of customary law by colonial authorities, for example, was generally disadvantageous to African women. For countless black women, racism and its attendant land appropriation, along with forced adaptations to capitalism and notions of western individualism, resulted in extreme economic and emotional insecurity. As black men were emasculated by racism, and as large numbers were increasingly unable or unwilling to engage in stable, responsible relationships with women and children, male exploitation of women and girls escalated in frequency and degree. In white communities, men who learned and perpetuated a sense of their inalienable right to dehumanize black South Africans often felt that they had a similar right over women. Thus the oppression of women, although unequally imposed, was never confined to any particular racial group, and the brutalities of the gross infringements of human rights that apartheid bred necessarily seeped intoand continue to sour-gender relationships in this country (10).

We need to note at the outset the differences in approaching life writings by men and women, particularly white writers of the genre. As Sidonie Smith notes, men write essentially to prove a life lived to the full, coming out of the traditions of the Enlightenment Project, which engages in a literal psychological journey arising from being forever tested, forever conquering as an agent of history, forever acting with unimpeachable intentions in an inexorable need to "civilize" the world:

Politically, the enlightenment self is aggressively individualistic in its desires and liberal in its philosophical perspective. The French Revolution with its cry for liberty, equality and fraternity; the philosophical systems of Locke and Rousseau with their emphasis on empiricism and the experience of the individual's senses as originary loci of knowledge; the self-absorption of Romanticism and its preoccupation with subjective experience; the economic and political shift from aristocratic to bourgeois power; the progressive tendencies of Darwinism, particularly social Darwinism; the consolidation of Protestant ideology with its emphasis on the accessibility of God to individual prayer and intercession; all these phenomena coalesced to privilege the self-determining individuality of desire and destiny. (8-9)

Smith further explains that the universalizing tendency of such writing undergirds male life writings. And it is this essential difference that isolates yet allows for a nuanced image of womanhood to emerge-from domestic spaces, educational institutions, the rarified halls of Parliament, prison cells, and ultimately from that suturing of the wounds of the past as enacted in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission post-199 5, when the liberated voices finally reconfigure the manner in which South African history has shaped women life writings. In this instance, the text, while not making the point as emphatically as Jill Conway, does in fact substantiate her observation:

The history of women's autobiographical writing in Europe and its offshoots underlines the extent to which experience is both shaped by gendered difference and subject to the same economic and cultural forces which influence the shape and style of male narratives. To begin with, women inherited a different tradition from classical antiquity and early Christianity than the one which shaped St. Augustine's consciousness. Classical antiquity provided only the myth of the Amazons of the female heroic action and saw the image of the physically powerful female as monstrous rather than admirable. (11)

Coming to the specificities of The Closest of Strangers, an important observation that Coullie made in her 1994 doctoral thesis with regard to who qualifies as "a South African" is pertinent here. Regarding post-colonial identities, we need to grapple with the baggage of the post-colony and its implications in identity-formation. Coullie notes that:

The term 'South African' is used rather loosely here to include autobiographies by people who were born in South Africa as well as those who were born elsewhere but who define themselves as South African or describe their experiences in South Africa. In such cases, 'South African' refers to the second aspect of the genre's defining nomenclature, viz. bios (life), where texts deal with the lived experiences of the author/narrator/protagonist while living in South Africa (never overlooking the arbitrariness of this geographical legacy from colonialism). My reading of these texts as a body of 'South African' writing seeks to reaffirm the indissoluble links between all who were subject to this national nightmare, whether categorised as members of the oppressor or oppressed classes and also to contribute-in spite of cogent arguments against the use of such arbitrary historical demarcations-to the reclamation of a (diverse) national identity which is important in the healing process of nation-building. It is well to bear in mind that very many of the autobiographers were denied South African citizenship when they wrote their texts. (10)

This would then explain the title to this collection of life writings, as she herself acknowledges in the Introduction: ". . . in the light of the historical rifts between South African women, the title, The Closest of Strangers, may appear naive" (1). These strangers are close in that while they may share the same domestic, work, or educational spaces, they are part of a deep historical and political divide which made them alien to one another. Add to this, that while Coullie acknowledges that Black South African women still had to learn the rudiments of "life writing," the text does make a significant contribution in foregrounding the previously unacknowledged instances of self-identification in oral communities through the genre of the praise poems, izibongo and izihasho (as opposed to izithakazelo, the clan names) in isiZulu, one of the more prominent languages of South Africa and widely spoken in the Kwazulu-Natal Province where Coullie lives and teaches. Coullie specifically mentions that "self-representational practices employed by South African women encourage us to consider not only what has been said, but also how it has been said" (7). I will return to this point later.

For readers unacquainted with South African political history, I believe Coullie provides a very useful Introduction, and for each period, a concise and articulate overview of each era and a pithy summary of each text as it was then shaped and lived. Beginning with the "1895-1910: The Birth of South Africa" era, till the section "1990 to 2000: The New South Africa" era, Coullie meticulously selects writings that are coterminous with the eras being described by the autobiographical subjects. This allows for an easy as well as fascinating reading of each section, as the reader combines "official" history with "personal" narrative. Nor does Coullie shy from more contentious issues raised by the obsession with "race" and racism: she makes it clear in the Introduction that "Also worth commenting on is the large number of autobiographical accounts by white women that fail to demonstrate any real antipathy to racism, or even to document it as a defining feature of their social context" (5). In this regard, one cannot be astonished, having read the sectional summary, to find such a view as expressed by the late Marike de Klerk (nee Willemse), the wife of F. W. de Klerk, the last President of apartheid South Africa:

Like most educated and Christian Afrikaans children . . . I calmly accepted that black women sat on the floor, instead of chairs or benches in white homes; that black people died illiterate; that coloured people differed from me. . . . I live in my environment and they in theirs, I thought as did most children in my class. (343, emphasis in the original)

Coullie is particularly thoroughgoing in documenting the fact that "European" (read "of Caucasian extraction") women life writers had very little to comment on about their compatriots or their way of life. In effect, anyone looking for a synergy of sisterhood across race, class, or ethnic boundaries and chasms would do well to read the more political and politicized eras of the South African state to discern any evidence of what South Africans call toenadering(reconciliation). These eras begin with the 1950 to 1959 era (titled "Apartheid Escalates"), and go on through to the 1980 to 1989 period (titled "The 'Turmoil'"). Here the reader is confronted with attempts to challenge the might of the state as it seeks to prevent at all costs any manner of crossracial sisterhood, resulting in organized acts of defiance, in extra-parliamentary bodies, and in allowing for the "human face" of women such as Frances Baard, Maggie Resha, Lillian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Ruth First, Hilda Bernstein, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, and Patricia Nxumalo to shine. The earlier significant struggles of trade unionist Pauline Podley resulted in these extra-parliamentary pressures leading to the unprecedented Women's March organized by the Federation of South African Women to the seat of power in Pretoria, the Union Buildings, on August 9th, 1956. Even the then Prime Minister, J. G. Strydom, refused to meet the delegates, demonstrating women power in the face of extreme provocation-the insistence that women carry reference books! It remains the finest hour of South African women's organized action, and is rightly consecrated in the national psyche as a public holiday. One cannot also miss the lifelong commitment to human rights and humane existence of Helen Suzman (nee Gavronsky) during the various apartheid administrations. As a lone United Party Member for Houghton, Johannesburg, she impaled countless racists with her acerbic, unremitting opposition to apartheid, and her entry in this text is a crucial addition to the role of women in a male-dominated space. A fascinating but regrettable omission in this text, and in the space Suzman made her turf, is the life writing of Ray Alexander (born Rachel Alexandrowich on December 31st, 1913, in Varaklan). A lifelong communist, she was a trade unionist of note who managed to stun the nationalist government of 1953 by being elected to Parliament as a "Native Representative" of the Western Cape Division. She was, however, never to take her seat. The Nationalist government passed a law to prevent any known communist from sitting in parliament, a law that became popularly known as the Suppression of Ray Alexander Act (Scanlon 79).

Hitherto, political action and concomitant sisterhood were largely marginalized, confined to public spaces such as doctors' consultation rooms ("Dr. Goonam"), or to the trusty employer of the ever-faithful servant ("Katie Makanya," the female opposite of Hamilton Naki). In Dr. Goonam's case, a defiance of class and gender is apparent when, denied a chance to study medicine in the country, she chooses the free academic air of Scotland to acquire her qualifications, and returns to practice among the locals. Her autobiographical accounts in Coolie Doctor are drawn with wry humor and studied self-effacement, making her an important voice in the era of unbridled sexism and race and gender discrimination. Tellingly, the "Other Side" of the pernicious divide bespeaks of a self-assured, persistently white middle class existence of women who go to higher education institutions to meet and "marry well," the classic dodge of the establishmentarians and the very last of the virgins, as reflected in Lyndall Gordon's Shared Lives. Gordon and her contemporaries were, in effect, the real beneficiaries of successive apartheid governments, acting the role of "Serene Highnesses" that aggressive male Eurocentricism had carved for them. The salubrious environment in which they lived and loved, much like Marike de Klerk's, was the acme of indolence and a trouble-free existence. One thus discerns, by way of comparison, the veracity of Coullie's earlier observation: "self-representational practices employed by South African women encourage us to consider not only what has been said, but also how it has been said" (7). As hope of a mixed society receded in the suppressive atmosphere of the early Sixties, Gordon chose what was to become a quintessential South African social phenomenon-flight and the obscurity of city living: "In the mid-to-late '60s, I used to wander along Broadway or Madison Avenue, looking for my generation, which seemed to have vanished, as Rose had vanished, into marriage and motherhood" (172).

Less well documented but significant nevertheless are the praise poems, diary entries, and ghostwritten autobiographies of black South African women. These vignettes reveal a profound truthfulness to the tenacious nature of identity formation, identification, and the rootedness an identity provides for the illiterate practitioners documented here. While the first autobiographical account by a black South African woman is rightly ascribed to Noni Jabavu's Drawn in Colour and The Ochre People from the 1960s, followed by such lovely memoirs as Ellen Kuzwayo's Call Me Woman (1985) and Phyllis Ntantala's A Life's Mosaic (1992), Coullie makes a point of showing self-representation in a more grounded sense of self-in-society in the izibongo of Majele, Mcasule Dube, and Mahalise Mkwanazi. Such praises, as Coullie notes in a 1999 article, do not need to convey a linear, quantified sense of history in which causality and secularist logic predominate because in unadulterated South African cultures there is no scission between knowledge and belief, the secular/material and the religious, as there are in settler culture. . . . [T]he hailing of the subject in praise poetry thus carries a significance beyond an obvious social recognition. The subject of the poem is defined, identified, recognized, named adjectivally for living auditors and the ancestors. The subject is situated in an almost unpunctuated stream of time, from the past of the ancestors to the future generations who may invoke the subject through the performance of the praises. The whole subject-physical, psychological and spiritual-is hailed. A person is not construed in terms of Western separation of technologies of mind and body and soul (represented in the largely incompatible and highly specialized disciplines of psychology, medicine and theology). Individual southern cultures conceive of being as a continuous state. (75-76)

These praise poems, therefore, become autobiographical sites of self-knowledge, communal connectivity, and continuity. The paucity of these offerings should not detract from the important function praise poems continue to play in suturing southern peoples to their communities and environments. There are also the ghostwritten life writings of Maureen Sithole, Madlomo Lugogo, and Dolly, published as part of an ongoing academic engagement with communities, which "afforded white academics or literacy workers the opportunity to defy apartheid's insistent denial of the individuality of its victims; in publicizing the life stories of apartheid's oppressed, they asserted the importance of their lives and exposed the cost of apartheid in everyday, human terms" (284). The book from which these are garnered, Working Women: A Portrait of South African Women Workers (1985), remains a durable monument to scholarship's ability to expose the lies of an oppressive society, in the same mold as the self-authored entry from To My Children's Children (1990) by writer Sindiwe Magona. This documentation of ordinary lives serves, too, to restore the dignity of the subjects stripped by deliberate illiteracy, poverty, and oppression, giving the text one of its chief strengths.

Aside from some unfortunate omissions which Coullie herself acknowledges in her choice of texts, her collection is in this sense a truer attempt at providing a century of representation of women's lives, and the entries about Emma Mashinini, Anne Paton, AnnMarie Wolpe, Bessie Head, Mamphele Ramphele, Charlene Smith, and Maria Ndlovu paint a fuller picture of the evolution of the South African society in all its contradictions and (un)certain futures. As a country born of violence, it has nurtured some extraordinary women whose contribution to the culture of human rights is immeasurable, demonstrating yet again the tenacity of its citizens to claiming "a right to life" that goes beyond the pietistic discourse of reconciliation, reminding us that to write is to become: i write from beneath the foot of time's perforated stagger

& as these scrawls or scrolls hasten into their air or earth slaves pile into the sky up & beyond the sun our spears call for surer rends fire calls out for other roars besides handshake storms cry out for other songs besides repose

-Seitlhamo Motsapi

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