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  YOU CAN’T GET LOST IN CAPE TOWN

  Women Writing Africa

  A Project of The Feminist Press at The City University of New York

  Funded by The Ford Foundation

  Women Writing Africa is a project of cultural reconstruction that aims to restore African women’s voices to the public sphere. Through the collection of written and oral narratives to be published in six regional anthologies, the project will document the history of self-conscious literary expression by African women throughout the continent. In bringing together women’s voices, Women Writing Africa will illuminate for a broad public the neglected history and culture of African women, who have shaped and been shaped by their families, societies, and nations.

  The Women Writing Africa Series, which supports the publication of individual books, is part of the Women Writing Africa project.

  The Women Writing Africa Series

  ACROSS BOUNDARIES

  The Journey of a South African Woman Leader

  A Memoir by Mamphela Ramphele

  AND THEY DIDN’T DIE

  A Novel by Lauretta Ngcobo

  CHANGES

  A Love Story

  A Novel by Ama Ata Aidoo

  HAREM YEARS

  The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, 1879–1924

  by Huda Shaarawi

  Translated and introduced by Margot Badran

  NO SWEETNESS HERE

  And Other Stories

  by Ama Ata Aidoo

  TEACHING AFRICAN LITERATURES IN A GLOBAL LITERARY ECONOMY

  Women’s Studies Quarterly 25, nos. 3 & 4 (fall/winter 1998)

  Edited by Tuzyline Jita Allan

  ZULU WOMAN

  The Life Story of Christina Sibiya

  by Rebecca Hourwich Reyher

  Published by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York

  The Graduate Center

  365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

  New York, NY 10016

  feministpress.org

  First Feminist Press edition, 2000

  Copyright © 1987 by Zoë Wicomb

  Introduction copyright © 2000 by Marcia Wright

  Afterword © 2000 by Carol Sicherman

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Originally published in 1987 in the United Kingdom by Virago Press, London, and in the United States by Pantheon, New York. This edition published by arrangement with Little, Brown.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wicomb, Zoë

  You can’t get lost in Cape Town / Zoë Wicomb ; historical introduction by Marcia Wright ; literary afterword by Carol Sicherman.—1st Feminist Press ed.

  p. cm. — (The women writing Africa series)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN: 978-155861-915-9 (e-book)

  2. Coloured people (South Africa)—Fiction. 2. Young women—South Africa—Fiction. 3. Cape Town (South Africa)—Fiction I. Title. II. Series

  PR9369.3.W53 Y6 2000

  823—dc21

  99-053119

  This publication is made possible, in part, by a grant from The Ford Foundation in support of the Feminist Press’s Women Writing Africa project. The Feminist Press is grateful to Florence Howe, Joanne Markell, Caroline Urvater, and Genevieve Vaughan for their generosity in supporting this publication.

  CONTENTS

  Historical Introduction

  Marcia Wright

  Bowl Like Hole

  Jan Klinkies

  When the Train Comes

  A Clearing in the Bush

  You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town

  Home Sweet Home

  Behind the Bougainvillea

  A Fair Exchange

  Ash on My Sleeve

  A Trip to the Gifberge

  Glossary

  Literary Afterword

  Carol Sicherman

  HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION

  Although You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, Zoë Wicomb’s portrait of a young coloured1 woman’s coming to age in apartheid-ruled South Africa, spans the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, this episodic novel is not a period piece. Indeed, to grasp the complex consciousness of those known in the twentieth century as the Cape Coloured people, one must reach back not just fifty years, but to a time far anterior to apartheid. What is more, this portrayal of one young woman’s life and expanding awareness is highly relevant to the present, when the struggle in South Africa is defined not by race-led laws but rather by class aspirations and economic disadvantages that carry forward a history of vulnerability.

  Wicomb’s protagonist, Frieda Shenton, and her immediate family resolutely defy easy categorization, even when the characters themselves indulge in stereotyping. The Shentons are exceptional among coloured people in Little Namaqualand, an impoverished, semiarid area beyond the rich wheat farms and vineyards north of Cape Town. With respect to their neighbors, the Shentons are well educated and, invested in social improvement, proud of their growing command of the English language and of their patrilineal name-giver, a Scot. Frieda’s father, a primary school teacher, is recognized as a local notable, above the “commonality,” while Frieda’s mother has something more equivocal in her identity: Griqua parentage.2 Mrs. Shenton has embraced the ideal of the “lady” and continually warns her daughter against compromising behavior. The young and then mature Frieda must cope with and transcend essentially conservative anxieties that feed the stereotypes purveyed by her mother, which reveal a perspective prevalent among the coloured petty bourgeoisie. In telling Frieda’s story, Wicomb explores class, race, gender, and culture across a wide register.

  LITTLE NAMAQUALAND

  The social arena in Little Namaqualand into which Frieda is born encompasses a confusing array of identities. These identities fall short of being ethnicities, that is, coherent groups claiming a common ancestry. Rather, individuals carry or are assigned identities that may be fragments of their ancestry but bespeak stereotypical behaviors or features. A preliminary understanding of the roots of these various identities will enrich appreciation for Wicomb’s work, which restores coloured experience and history as it contextualizes, revises, and humanizes it. Wicomb does this on a personal scale, bringing forth characters who—albeit in sometimes oblique ways—comment on, align themselves with, or represent various indigenous and settler groups, ranging from the indigenous Namaqua to the coloured Griqua to the white Boers and British. You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town depicts not only the strong cultural hold of these identities but also their limits and shifting nature, as well as the painful history of colonization, displacement, and apartheid that accompanies them.

  The Namaqua of Namaqualand were among the groups of Khoikhoi, the indigenous African pastoralists encountered by the Dutch in their initial settlements at the Cape in the mid-seventeenth century. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Namaqua group of Khoi had yielded to the incoming Basters (literally meaning hybrid), mixed-race groups of frontierspeople.3 The absorbed Namaqua surface in Wicomb’s work through Skitterboud, the servant who figures in “A Fair Exchange.”

  Of all these mixed-race frontierspeople, by far the most prominent were the Griqua, a group substantially involved in the nineteenth-century northward extension of Cape colonial culture. In the early 1800s, patriarchally led settlements of Basters moved north of the Orange River, beyond the limits of th
e Cape Colony, where they exercised greater political autonomy while seeking to maintain their economic and cultural ties to the Cape Colony. The name Griqua was adopted at one of the key settlements, Klaarwater, renamed Griquatown “because, ‘on consulting among themselves they found a majority were descended from a person of the name of Griqua’, that is, from the eponymous ancestor of the Khoikhoi clan, the /Karihur (‘Chariguriqua’).”4 The Griqua leadership and following continued to be materially oriented toward the Cape Colony, Christian and literate in aspiration, but hardly united among themselves. By the twentieth century, the Griqua had long passed their prime as frontierspeople. Some were dislodged from commercial sheep farming in the Orange Free State by white farmers. Others, in what became annexed as the northern Cape, were ultimately forced to emigrate east, extruded by the forces of capitalism and colonial authority that accompanied the exploitation of the diamond fields. A remnant of Griqua later journeyed to Little Namaqualand, where they added to a sparse, heterogeneous population occupying a space of very little economic potential.

  Another identity that figures in the milieu of Little Namaqualand is that of the Boers, later called Afrikaners, who had been settling in this marginal environment from the eighteenth century onward. Boer was a term current before Afrikaner, but subsequently often used by the British to suggest a poor white element and a generally backward culture. Under apartheid, which specifically climaxed an Afrikaner Nationalist campaign to elevate their volk, Boers were regarded by the disenfranchised as a privileged group. Even as poor whites, they belonged to the political master class. For Mrs. Shenton, however, the word is still loaded with class distinctions; Boers lacked the refined quality of the more “civilized” British.

  These identities and their accompanying stereotypes consolidated—particularly during the apartheid regime—in a brittle cultural and economic hierarchy, positioning Africans as the lowest group, with Indian and coloured groups then following, and privileging white European settlers. This hierarchy plays out, in overt ways, within given groups. Frieda’s coloured classmate Henry Hendrikse, for example, who has dark features and who knows the Xhosa language, is disparagingly referred to in the beginning of the work as “almost pure kaffir” (116). Later in the work, after black resistance has surfaced, Henry’s roots are not to be easily dismissed. Frieda’s acquaintance with Africans is slight, but she is presented as fascinated by the difference of indigenous people, who are distant and alien even as they occupy the same space. Henry Hendrikse remains an intentionally unclarified character, although evidently a “registered Coloured.”

  In fact, for over a century, Western-acculturated Xhosa people had been settled in the northwestern Cape, brought in purposefully by the colonial authorities to serve as a buffer community against the raiding “Bushmen.”5 Other Xhosa immigrated in association with the London Missionary Society, and even more as workers on the railway and in the copper mines that had boomed and then failed in Little Namaqualand in the mid-to late nineteenth century.

  It is worth recalling that from 1853 on, in the Cape Colony, civil rights were theoretically shared equally by men, regardless of race, if they were materially qualified. White legislators acted to stem the increase in the black electorate. One means was to build a dualism, with the Transkei as a native territory politically excluded from the rest of the Cape Colony. Even where the “colour-blind” constitution prevailed, the threshold of qualifications was raised, especially in the 1890s. In 1936, new enrollment of Africans ceased. The process of disenfranchisement would be completed under apartheid.

  UNDER APARTHEID

  You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town illuminates the interplay of these identities not only in Little Namaqualand but in Frieda’s expanding world. The novel, set and written during apartheid, also dramatizes how politically charged and changing these identities can be. Wicomb considers the ambiguous role of many coloureds, oppressed by whites and yet susceptible to the promise of state-granted privileges that guaranteed them protection from competition for employment from the even more oppressed Africans coming from desperate conditions in the Transkei and Ciskei of the Eastern Cape.

  The barrage of apartheid legislation passed after the National Party came to power in 1948 aimed to achieve total segregation. One of the very first laws was the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949). In 1950, in remorseless succession, came the Group Areas Act, authorizing racially exclusive areas of residence and removals to effect them; the Population Registration Act, categorizing all South Africans into four primary “racial categories”: “White,” “Coloured,” “Indian,” and “Bantu”; and the Immorality Act, prohibiting sex between the races. Clearly the ideologists aspired to control the most intimate relationships, leaving no sanctuary in private life. Anyone associating beyond the prescribed racial boundaries became criminalized.

  In one of the most aggressive, explicitly political steps taken in the first years, the apartheid regime introduced a bill to exclude coloured voters from parliamentary constituencies in the Cape Province. The colour-blind franchise had legitimated an exaggerated sense of the “civilized,” as opposed to the uncouth or culturally “other.” Such a system of franchise had discriminated against unpropertied Boers, as well as ordinary coloured or African subjects. The determination to purge the non-white electorate, first by excluding the Africans and then disenfranchising coloured voters, had been an explicit program of certain Afrikaner Nationalists from the time of the unification of South Africa in 1910. Although the Cape franchise was constitutionally “entrenched,” requiring a two-thirds majority of the parliament to alter, that majority in the all-white parliament was achieved in 1935 for the purpose of disqualifying Africans on the basis of their race and ethnicity.

  The proposed coloured exclusion precipitated a constitutional crisis; only in 1956 were parliamentary objections about the exclusion and judicial appeals defeated.6 Most politics had been urban based: the franchise issue would not have aroused the largely apolitical community Wicomb evokes in Little Namaqualand. Unlike Africans and Indians, before 1950 coloured people were not required to carry identity passes and, consequently, did not share in the attendant tradition of resistance.7 In the 1950s, however, the coloured population came under a similar administrative overrule, that of the Coloured Affairs Department, a parallel to the Bantu Affairs Department. The draconian combination of the Population Registration and Group Areas Acts circumscribed their freedom to own property within their province.

  The Group Areas Act as implemented in the 1960s and 1970s displaced urban-dwelling people from historically mixed residential areas, to be confined in putatively homogeneous townships. During the thirty-four years from 1950 through 1984 in the Cape Province, only 840 white families were moved, compared with 65,657 coloured families.8 In You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town several episodes reflect the herding of people into coloured townships in Little Namaqualand. The references are somewhat veiled, but removals inflect the portrait of Auntie Truida in “Jan Klinkies” and the defeat that weighed on Mr. Shenton when he had to move, “to be boxed in” in a coloured village (29). In the book, this forced retreat is converted into a hope for the future when the small proceeds from the sale of the Shenton’s former home are invested in Frieda’s two years of education at an Anglican secondary school, enabling her to matriculate and move on to the University of the Western Cape (UWC).

  In fact, the UWC would become a hotbed of Black Consciousness, a movement of young activists who had grown up under apartheid, led by such people as Steve Biko. Established under provisions of the Extension of University Education Act of 1959, the UWC was apartheid-defined as for coloureds only. Frieda is wry about the limited consciousness she possessed at the time of the boycott of memorial services for the April 1966 assassination of Prime Minister Verwoerd, who was, among other things, chief architect of the racially defined education system. Frieda suggests that the huddle of young men behind the school boycott was not deeply politicized.

  In 1
973 students suddenly exploded, moving away from the muted protest described in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. Black Consciousness developed the polarity of white versus black as the epitome of the struggle, and aligned Indian, coloured, and black South Africans in common struggle. UWC students bonded with their peers in other nonwhite universities, declaring on June 5, 1973, in their first major manifesto:

  We reject completely the idea of separate ethnic universities because it is contrary to the historic concept of a university—that of universality—but are forced by the laws of the land to study at the [coloured] University of the W. Cape. . . .9

  They pointed out the inequities in pay between white and coloured teaching staff and the overwhelming preponderance of white lecturers (seventy-nine) over black lecturers (twelve). They concluded that the institution was run by Afrikaners for Afrikaners, which is to say that it provided employment for Afrikaners who were Nationalist clients committed to the regime. In the first flush of radicalization, the UWC students rejected Afrikaans, although it was their mother tongue, in favor of English. Later thinking brought them to repossess Afrikaans as a language of liberation.10

  Frieda’s love affair with the English language and literature is her passport to the wider world, specifically Britain. Living in Britain from 1972 to 1984, she is removed from the main cut and thrust of the confrontations of students and of an increasingly aroused populace with the enforcers of apartheid.

  The egalitarian stance of the UWC manifesto might have rooted the students in a tradition of South African political dissent that advanced equality and unity, as manifested, for example, by the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), which since 1943 had followed a Marxist line independent of the South African Communist Party. A movement attractive to schoolteachers, it had recruited a few Indians, Africans, and whites, as well as coloureds. A revived Unity Movement, however, failed to capture the mood of the times. The students drew on Black Consciousness. The movement contained elements of spontaneity, impatience with structural analysis, intolerance of compromising elders, and great heroism. Black became a metaphor for nonwhite, a very suitable one for a struggle against the white racist regime.