COMPLETE SCHOOL PROJECT TOPICS & MATERIALS :
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Chapter One
Introduction
1.1 Background to the Study
The African American and winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in literature Toni
Morrison, speaks eloquently of what she calls “a sense of rootedness”(339). What Morrison is referring to, is the gut sense of belonging to a common tradition of historical sensibility that binds writers of different background and different ideological leanings. For the African-American writers, the legacy of slavery, the throes of racial oppression, and the macabre paradox of Jim Crow politics in a free democratic society constitutes the background of that common tradition.
Morrison contends that for the African writer, his sense of rootedness is defined by his belonging to an ethnic and cultural group together with the sense of identity which it fosters and which invariably conditions his creative imagination. Writers like Achebe have the Igbo cultural tradition, Ngugi—the kikuyu/Gikuyu culture, P’bitek—the Ugandan Acoli tradition Kane—the Islamic tradition of the diallobe.
For Bessie Head, however, Morrison suggests that there is this inordinate sense of detachment from the African cultural tradition because of the intervening forces of apartheid in her native South Africa. She does not share in the ancestral sensibilities of an African homestead because she has not been allowed to develop root in any tradition.
The issue is her nativity; Bessie Head bore the burden of a double illegitimate birth: in 1937 she was conceived out of wedlock and, in apartheid argot, across the colour bar. Simply by being born, she transgressed the racial and gender edicts of her society, a deviance that portended the torments of her later life. In her thirteenth year, Head learned that the man and woman whom she had presumed to be her parents bore no biological relation to her. That year, the South African state removed her from foster parental care and placed her in an orphanage. It was only then that her origin was revealed to her and quoting Susan Gardner:
I was born on the 6th July 1937 in the Pietermaritzburg hospital….The reason for my peculiar birth place was that my mother was white, and she had acquired me from a black man. She was judged insane and committed to the mental hospital while pregnant(95).
Head’s mother, Bessie Amelia Emery, came from an upper-class white South African family renowned for breeding racehorses. The family’s professional preoccupation with eugenics may well have compounded their deep-seated racial prejudices, when their daughter, on the rebound from a failed marriage, flouted racial and class taboos by entering into a sexual liaison with a black stable hand. When she fell pregnant, her parents had her locked away in a mental asylum on grounds of, in the words of Randolph Vigne, of “premature senile dementia” (65). Emery gave birth to Head in the asylum and, six years later, in 1943, committed suicide there. Head never met her mother, nor did she ever learn the name of her father, who fled the Emery estate without a trace. By the age of thirteen, Head had known four sets of parents: her biological parents; the Afrikaans foster parents who returned her a week later because she looked “strange”. According to Gillian Eilersen, “did the delicate little fingernails have a brownish tinge? Were the wisps of hair too curly? The child is coloured, in fact quite black and native in appearance”(9); the mixed-race foster parents into whose care she was delivered, and the South African state which, acting in loco parentis, removed the young girl from these second foster parents and placed her in an orphanage, as a ward of the state. Thus, from an early age, Head came to experience the family not as a natural form of belonging but as an unstable artifice, invented and reinvented in racist terms, and conditional upon the administrative designs of the nation-state. Elizabeth Odhiambo opines that:
…for writers like Kane, Achebe, Laye, Soyinka and others the knowledge emerging and experienced by them is anchored in shared collective tribal and ethnic identity. For Head on the other hand, the emergent knowledge is one constructed on the knife-edge categories of race, otherness and crippling alienation, a fact which discourages any kind of affinity or sympathetic rootedness(45).
Her estrangement from tradition placed her under relentless pressure to improvise a sense of community and ancestry, in her life and writing alike. Sandra Paquet, in her analysis of Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Hurston and Tar Baby by Toni Morrison, emphasizes the necessity of “knowing oneself in ancestral terms” (508).
Caroline Rooney has portrayed Head’s novel, A Question of Power, as situated at the “crossroads of dispossession” (118) – a phrase that could be readily applied to her work as a whole.
The circumstances of Head’s birth are not the only forms of marginality she has to contend with: as a first generation coloured, an orphan, a changeling, a refugee, a certified “mad woman”, and a single mother, she led a profoundly disinherited life on almost every front. Moreover, as a so—called coloured woman engaging with rural themes in Southern Africa, Head wrote without the sustenance of any literary lineage. Many of the fundamental criteria for social membership—notably those of family, race, and nation—characteristically assume or involve the authority of blood-lineage. Because Head’s relationship to all these categories was so radically and traumatically liminal, she could never live the illusion of their naturalness. As such, her work offers radical insight into the contingencies underlying efforts to secure membership or exclusion from society on grounds of nature or ancestry.
There are demographic groups in South Africa—whites four million as at the height of apartheid. These whites are sub-divided into two subdivisions; the greater percentage refers to those that have Dutch ancestry, the Afrikaners. The second subdivision comprises the English and other European whites, including the Jews. The second group is the coloured comprising off springs of interracial marriage, Asians—South Koreans, Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis—and finally the Blacks, the original owners of the land (25-30 million). Racially, Bessie was a member of the Cape Coloured community. While the statutory definition of coloured under apartheid has shifted over time, they have been persistently riven with contradictions. The state has variously sought to demarcate the category coloured on the basis of descent, percentage, physical appearance, language preference, cultural criteria, and general acceptance by the community. Of all the racial groups circumscribed by apartheid legislation, coloured have been most frequently represented through layered negotiations. The Population Registration Act of 1950, for example, defined a coloured as, in the words of Balibar and Wallerstein, someone “who in appearance is obviously not white or Indian and who is not a member of an aboriginal race or African tribe” (74). And yet she never felt a part of the community because for reasons of geography and gender the coloured community was never available to her as a secure ground for identity. Head was raised in a Natal missionary orphanage in a largely Indian environment, some thousand kilometres from the epicentre of coloured culture in the Cape. She moved to the Cape in 1960 at the age of twenty-three, but struggled to fit in. In an unpublished interview with Cecil Abrahams:
As a newcomer to the Cape, I thought I had found the ideal place for my mixed race soul. But I quickly and painfully learned that if you were not fully grounded in the colour brown, you would have to be excluded from the community’s business and be ready to endure insult (4).
Head’s sense of familial and racial estrangement was intensified by the fact that, until the age of forty-two, she was also denied the moorings of nationality. Her first twenty-seven years were spent in South Africa as a disenfranchised coloured woman, and the next fifteen in Botswana where citizenship was withheld from her, forcing her to live as a stateless refugee. Thus Head’s identity was circumscribed on familial, racial, and national fronts by disinheritance, illegitimacy, and rootlessness.
In the face of these circumstances, her writing and life in the Botswanan village of Serowe were distinguished by an unremitting need to reconceive herself outside the natural matrix of familial, racial, and national traditions that formed the very grounds of her ostracism. Head’s prose is peopled largely with two types: characters whose sense of belonging is an unsettled precarious achievement rather than a birth right and characters who risk or forfeit their inherited privileges by breaking with confining traditions.
The Historical Background of South African Existential Reality
The principle and dynamics of the racist apartheid ideology may not be understood in full if one fails to understand the historical factors that gave rise to it. South Africa was colonized by the English and Dutch in the seventeenth century. “Apartheid”, an Afrikaans word meaning in the words of Megan Shore, “the state of being apart,” (36) was a system of racial segregation in South Africa enforced through legislation by the National Party (NP) governments, the party from 1948 to 1994, under which the rights of the majority black inhabitants were curtailed and Afrikaner minority rule was maintained.
Its history dates back to 1652, according to Barnabas Okolo, “when Jan Van Riebeeck, an official of the Dutch East Indian Company, in search of a “refreshment depot” for company ships sailing on the Indian route, arrived at and settled in the
Cape of Good Hope”(30). By1688 there were already six hundred non-official European settlers, mainly farmers around the Cape and from then onwards, in the words of Eric Walker, “the number kept increasing steadily, and conflicts with the indigenous Khoisan people over territory had started” (38).The number of these immigrants was increased further by the influx of French Huguenots as well as whites of German extraction, as the years went by. In 1795, the British in the quest for colonies all over Africa, seized and annexed the Cape. Political and military conflicts between the Dutch settlers and the British over South African territory became rife.