David's Story Read online

  WOMEN WRITING AFRICA

  A Project of The Feminist Press at The City University of New York Funded by the Ford Foundation and The Rockefeller 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

  COMING TO BIRTH

  A Novel by Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye

  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

  THE PRESENT MOMENT

  A Novel by Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye

  TEACHING AFRICAN

  LITERATURES IN

  A LITERARY ECONOMY

  Women’s Studies Quarterly 25, nos. 3

  & 4 (fall/winter 1998)

  Edited by Tuzyline Jita Allan

  YOU CAN’T GET LOST IN CAPE TOWN

  A Novel by Zoë Wicomb

  ZULU WOMAN

  The Life Story of Christina Sibiya

  by Rebecca Hourwich Reyher

  Published in 2001 by The Feminist Press at the City University of New York

  The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016

  www.feministpress.org

  Copyright © 2000 by Zoë Wicomb

  Afterword copyright © 2000 by Dorothy Driver

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or used, 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.

  Poem on page 159: “The Dance of the Rain” (1921, revised 1959) by Eugene Marais. English translation copyright © 1968 by Jack Cope. Published in The Penguin Book of South African Verse, edited by Jack Cope and Uys Krige (London: Penguin Books, 1968). Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Jack Cope.

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows: Wicomb, Zoë.

  David’s Story / Zoë Wicomb; afterword by Dorothy Driver.

  pcm. (Women Writing Africa Series)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-55861-913-5

  1. Coloured people (South Africa)—Fiction. 2. Racially mixed people—Fiction. 3. Political activists—Fiction. 4. South Africa—Fiction.

  I. Title. II. Series

  PR9369.3.W53 D38 2001

  823

  00-052829

  This publication is made possible, in part, by grants from The Ford Foundation and The Rockefeller Foundation in support of The Feminist Press’s Women Writing Africa Series.

  Publication of this book is a lso supported by public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  The Feminist Press would also like to thank Mariam K. Chamberlain, Johnnetta B. Cole, Florence Howe, Joanne Markell, and Genevieve Vaughan for their generosity in supporting this book.

  Printed on acid-free paper by Transcontinental Printing

  111009080776543

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Genealogy

  Prefaces

  David’s Story

  Cape Town 1991

  Kokstad 1991

  Kokstad 1917

  Beeswater 1922

  Kokstad 1991

  Cape Town 1991

  Kokstad 1991

  Cape Town 1991

  Beeswater 1922

  Kokstad 1991

  Cape Town 1991

  Cape Town 1991

  Cape Town 1991

  Afterword

  Glossary

  About the Feminist Press

  My final prayer:

  O my body, make of me always a man who questions!

  Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

  PREFACE

  This is and is not David’s story. He would have liked to write it himself. He has indeed written some fragments—a few introductory paragraphs to sections, some of surprising irony, all of which I have managed to include in one way or another—but he was unwilling or unable to flesh out the narrative. I am not sure what I mean by unable; I have simply adopted his word, one which he would not explain. He wanted me to write it, not because he thought that his story could be written by someone else, but rather because it would no longer belong to him. In other words, he both wanted and did not want it to be written. His fragments betray the desire to distance himself from his own story; the many beginnings, invariably flights into history, although he is no historian, show uncertainty about whether to begin at all. He has made some basic errors with dates, miscalculating more than a hundred years, which no doubt is due to the confusing system of naming centuries; but then, as I delighted in the anachronism, he was happy to keep it.

  David’s story started at the Cape with Eva/Krotoa, the first Khoi woman in the Dutch castle, the only section I have left out. He eventually agreed to that but was adamant about including a piece on Saartje Baartman, the Hottentot Venus placed on display in Europe. One cannot write nowadays, he said, without a little monograph on Baartman; it would be like excluding history itself. And perhaps he is right, although I do believe it a pity always to be gazing into a dim and hallowed past as they do in the Old World—that curious name for Europe—refreshing themselves on the mustiness of things. There is also the question of literary research. I doubt whether he had read the numerous poems and stories about Baartman; otherwise a shrewd person like David who believed in shortcuts would surely have quoted the existing texts. And in his eagerness to historicise, to link things—his own life with the lives of Baartman and the Griqua chief—he made a mess of the dates and lost a century. This bungling, however, gives quite the wrong impression of David, who was conscientious and methodical; it was simply that he did not take the project of writing as seriously as perhaps he should have done.

  In our discussions about events in his life, he did not encourage questions, or rather, he left many direct questions unanswered. Which is not hurtful if one considers oneself purely as amanuensis. We have never been close friends—possibly his very reason for choosing me as collaborator—although we have since developed a curious, artificial intimacy. I would hate a reader to think that my failure to provide facts, to bridge the gaps in the narrative, has something to do with the nature of our relationship. Or with my gender. David was simply unable/unwilling to disclose all. He believed it possible to negotiate a path between the necessary secrecy and a need to tell, a tension that caused agitation which in turn had to be concealed, but it drove him to view the story of his life as a continuous loop that never intersected itself. I confessed to being unequ
al to the task, to not understanding such a notion of telling or for that matter of truth, to having a weakness for patterns, for repetitions and intersections; but he insisted that my views did not matter. If there is such a thing as truth, he said, it has to be left to its own devices, find its own way, and my role was simply to write down things as he told them. All he needed was someone literate and broadly sympathetic to the liberation movement; my prattling, as he called it, about meaning in the margin, or absence as an aspect of writing, had nothing to do with his project, and as for understanding, he had no expectations of me. David believed it possible to father his text from such a distance.

  I am, in a sense, grateful for the gaps, the ready-made absences, so that I do not have to invent them, but I take no responsibility for the fragmentary nature of this story. I am, as David outlined my task, simply recording. Aesthetics, he said, should be left to the so-called artists, to the writers and readers of fiction. There is no need to fret about writing, about our choice of words in the New South Africa; rather, we will have to make do with mixtures of meaning, will have to rely on typographic devices like the slash for many more years, he predicted. Some may call him a philistine, but it is a label that he would willingly accept. For my part it is comforting to know that my occasional flights of fancy, my attempts at artistry, would not be detected by him: proponents of plain writing are notoriously vague in their definitions of that category.

  It is a matter of some concern to me that David has not read all of the manuscript, although he was happy with what he saw and made only minor amendments in the interest of accuracy. It was much later, during the final draft and with an anxious publisher breathing down my neck, fearing that historical events would overtake us, that I took liberties with the text and revised considerably some sections that he had already approved. I can only hope that I have not disappointed him in any way.

  David wanted the following to be the last words of the text, but I have, for reasons which may/may not become clear in the course of the narrative, transferred them to this position, where I hope they will serve another function.

  Nkosi sikilele iAfrika—God Bless Africa

  Viva the Struggle, Viva!

  Ouma Sarie has hobbled down the hill bold as you please, smiling to herself at her own boldness, but the world had changed, it was mos the New South Africa, and she’d just ask, just say plainly, Listen, I hear you people put in a new foyer, jazzed up the whole place, as the children used to say, and I’ve come to have a look. This is also my place: for fifty years I worked here in this grand Logan Hotel, and the old Farquhars will tell you there was no better worker in all those years, not a single day off and all the girls under me just so sharp-sharp. And scraping together her palms in a dry rustle by way of showing the sharpness of her girls, that’s just what she said to the woman with the cropped blonde hair. Which is now something, ’cause how often do you think you’re going to say one thing and it comes out the other side as something quite different, something quite wrong. But no, she just said it straight, and the young woman smiled with Oubaas Farquhar’s skew smile, which really spoiled her looks. Ouma would have known her as one of the straw-haired girlies who’d get under a busy person’s feet with nuisance questions of Sarie this and Sarie that, although she could not be sure, what with hair these days coming out of bottles. The woman said politely, You go ahead Mrs. Meintjies, and we shall be most interested to hear your verdict on the blah blah big-words. Still, very nice she was, and left Ouma Sarie in the hallway to inspect at her leisure the renovations, the brand new plush chairs, the rag-painted walls, and the newly stuck-on cornice with its fancy thistle pattern.

  My word, she sighed, her hands on her hips as she craned her neck to look at the ceiling, a picture of heaven with gilt-edged clouds and angels swarming like bees. What a funny idea of fixing up the place; this was no modernisation, the foyer now was ancient as the Bible, and the pictures on the parchment-coloured walls looked as if they’d been rescued from a fire, though she could have sworn that some were the same portraits of the old gentlemen with their horses. She folded her hands in the deep small of her back to admire, like any guest, the gleaming hallway of the Logan. The floor made her smile with pleasure: the same old tiles of blue and white and terra-cotta, all laid out in the geometrical pattern that repeated itself, over and over. How she used to linger over them in the olden days with her rag of Cobra polish and lose herself in the triangles and squares and rectangles, and forget her troubles. Not that there has ever been such a thing as forgetting your troubles; the very moment of thinking that you’ve forgotten them, the demons would rush in, and you’d regret not savouring for longer the moment before remembering, impossible as that might have been—but then thinking is a business that drives you mad. And in those bad old days there was no such thing as thinking things through; there was only thinking yourself into knots and endless sums of rands and cents.

  Checking for dust, Ouma Sarie ran an expert eye along the window ledge, along the pretty blue leaded glass, but glad as she was about everything being nice and clean, about the things that had been left, she was disappointed. She had imagined the place airy and modern, brightly painted, and as for the cornice, well, what a business it would be keeping that clean. No, altogether it would be too much work, and just thinking of it made her tired, so tired that she sank into an antiquish velvet armchair—ag, the sort of thing even she wouldn’t have in her old-fashioned house. She used to always make a turn in the hallway, look up at the ceiling of wooden squares and triangles that dear God had clicked so neatly into each other, before slipping off into the disorder of her world. Then she would hurry through the green gardens, averting her eyes from the fountain decorated of all things with naked figures in stone, and through the brush until the garden petered out into the karroo that would not acknowledge its presence, that loudly and abruptly announced itself as the stony karroo, where the grey scrub of the veld would have nothing to do with the greenness.

  The walk down the hill had taken it out of Ouma Sarie; she found herself drifting off in the chair, and so, not remembering to say something to the nice young woman, she hurried out as of old, through the garden, into the veld, and towards the clump of houses behind the ridge, out of sight of the hotel. Towards the newly whitewashed, wobbly-lined rectangles of a child’s drawing, their flat roofs sloping backwards to a wall considerably lower than the front: the steek-my-weg location of unmistakably coloured country houses, the houses of farm labourers. These houses have blind backs with no windows. The door, more or less centred at the front, is divided horizontally, so that in the evenings a person could rest her folded arms on the latched lower half and watch the daylight slipping into dark. On either side of the door the unglazed windows with wooden shutters, sometimes just one, like a postage stamp, but she had insisted on another. And above, on the right, an apologetic chimney from which smoke curls all year long.

  In the smart black dress with white apron and cap—the Logan Hotel always looked well after its staff—she would halloo up to the house where young girls sat with legs spread around their game of ten-stones-in-the-hole. They were coloured girls; they wore the cut-off ends of stockings—or rather those modern panty hose—on their heads to flatten their hair, swirled smoothly around the skull after a punishing night in rollers. They pored over stones raked nimbly with fingers out of a hole in the earth, returned some with the heel of the hand, raked and returned, made split-second judgments on which to leave behind, so that there was no pause between raking and returning. Their tilted, stockinged heads were those of guerrillas deliberating over an operation. The karroo wind whipped up little whirls of dust from which their hair was well protected. They leapt up from their clandestine game as Ant Sarie, the enemy-general of games, approached, shouting commands, so that, pulling the stockings rebelliously over their faces, the girls scattered to the tasks of sweeping, collecting eggs, and emptying forgotten pisspots.

  Ouma Sarie rubs her eyes as she sinks into a chair
. If only she had known at the time to thank God for her good fortune, but who could have imagined trouble overtaking her like that, one day the children playing ten-stones in the yard and before you blink they’re out there in the terrible world of fighting, as if she hadn’t done her best to bring them up as Christians. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, to have her child called a guerrilla, a word sounding so like baboon that it took her back, right back to the day she and Joop arrived in the district. When they put down their bundles under the eucalyptus trees in front of Baas Hennie’s shop and the little Saartjie, her first, oulik as anything, scrambled off her back and practiced her crawling right up to the stoep where she giggled and babbled into the face of the oubaas, who said, Better take away the little baboon, otherwise it’ll get trampled underfoot. Kindly, she supposed, but she should have known then that it was an omen, that the girl should have been kept on a short leash. Ag, she wouldn’t dwell so on the past if it weren’t for Joop being dead and gone. It would be so nice for him to know that everything turned out alright in the end: that the girl, the apple of his eye, is alive, that she, Sarie, is now an ouma, and that everything is busily settling down. That the Boers have all these years kept Mandela clean and fresh on the island so that when everything had gone stinking rotten, there was someone clean and ready to take things in hand. Yes, everything is going to be just so nice-nice, rubbing her palms together—and it is the very scraping sound that makes her bolt out of her chair. This is no his time for brooding; she would go to Cape Town, go and see the children, because it’s pure longing for her little ones that’s given her such a turn, and before that she’ll go back to see the nice young woman, say the right things about the foyer looking grand and make some excuse about rushing off like a mad old thing. And she casts an appreciative eye over her own modernisation, the glazed windows and the lovely patterned lino that looks just like a photo of the Logan foyer. No, she smiles, the bad old days of dung floors are over.

  This is no place to start. But let us not claim a beginning for this mixed-up tale. Beginnings are too redolent of origins, of the sweaty and negligible act of physical union which will not be tolerated on these pages and which we all know comes to nought but for an alien, unwilling little thing propelled damp and screaming into this world to be bound in madam’s old, yet still good, terry cloths.