David's Story

by Zoe Wicomb

  David’s take on Le Fleur is that he was a sellout to want a separate homeland for a separate Griqua race, thus participating in an ideological line that would cohere with apartheid policy. An essay in Le Fleur’s Griqua and Coloured People’s Opinion, 11 December 1925, claims “dat ons een volk is, dan sal daar drie nasionaliteite in die land wees, nl. die Bantoe, die Grikwas en die Witman” (“that we are one people, then there will be three nationalities in the land, viz. the Bantu, the Griqua and the Whites”). Instead of identifying with Bantu speakers, Le Fleur was hostile towards the ANC, founded in 1912 as the South African Native National Council (SANNC) and generally proclaimed as a nonracial movement.21 In contrast, the National Party, entrenched in 1948, developed its racial legislation first under the term apartheid and then, from the early 1960s, separate development. (The latter term was used to justify, often retrospectively, the retribalisation process behind the institution of the Bantu “homelands,” the racially differentiated educational system launched from 1952, and the total removal, by 1956, of all remaining nonwhites from the common voters’ roll.)

  Wicomb shows that under Oom Paulse, too, leader of the Kliprand Council, the Griquas supported what the National Party government started calling in the late 1980s gradual reforms (130). Following Le Fleur’s strategies as a Griqua nationalist who struck bargains with the government of the time, Oom Paulse also adopts, as did Le Fleur in his latter days, the fundamentalist talk with which Afrikaner Christian Nationalism, via its Calvinism, was associated. Here, as elsewhere, Wicomb’s text makes a set of deft movements between a critique of apartheid government and of current Griqua thinking, which sometimes draws in colonial government policies as well. Wicomb suggests, furthermore, that Le Fleur’s paranoid labelling as “Communist” those who disagree with him echoes National Party government attitudes, expressed especially in the way the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950 was used to silence and imprison many non-Communist opponents of apartheid. In addition, his institution of hard labour as a means of control is specifically likened by the text to the quarry digging and futile rock-crushing deployed by the Robben Island prison authorities, which refers back to the representation of his own convict days under the British colonial government, and also to the actual imprisonment on Robben Island of later political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela.

  David’s politics, on the other hand, lead him to fight for the nonracial democracy promised by the ANC. His interest in Le Fleur breeds suspicion, some of his fellow activists seeing his research as a sign of his own incomplete political allegiance to the liberation movement, perhaps even as treachery, given the Griqua refusal to identify as “black.” But they miss the nuances of his interest in mixed ethnicity and the attempted finesse of his political activism: for him, the Griqua separatism which develops under Andrew le Fleur and continues into his own times is indeed problematic, and its betrayal of the black political community is one he works hard to reverse. It is important to stress, then—for an understanding of the novel’s contemporary political theme—that the Le Fleur David is striving to recover is the figure uncorrupted by racism. Hence David’s enormous pleasure and relief at hearing one of the Kokstad veterans recall Le Fleur’s slogan: “East Griqualand for the Griquas and the Natives!” (138). David needs this recuperated, nonethnic Le Fleur as a model to live by, and as a model for present-day Griqua and others, given the (actual) tendency to turn back to the past to find a model for the future.22

  Thematically, past and present are drawn together through references not only to ethnicity and political representation but also to land rights, closely bound up with national identity (and a still unresolved issue in the politics of reconciliation).23 When David discusses among his new acquaintances in Kokstad Le Fleur’s efforts to retrieve land which the Griqua in Griqualand East had been duped into selling, the text takes the opportunity to hint at the political connection across two temporalities: there is, both then and now, “no beating those white skelms” (138). The novel’s major signifier here is diamonds, which are used in the text in more ways than can be noted here. Diamonds may be forever, as the double agent Thomas Stewart says, but they represent a valuable resource stolen, in effect, from the Griqua, and in the story’s contemporary account they are used to tempt David into a reactionary illegality. Diamonds also take on symbolic value through David’s informing Thomas of the word’s etymology: the Greek a-damas, that which cannot be conquered or tamed. They stand as an analogue to, and sometimes as a corrupt substitute for, the Griqua national symbol, the kanniedood (literally, “can’t die”) plant, with its stacked triangular leaves.24

  For much of his Griqua history, David’s major sources (and ours) have been written histories, which turn to the newspapers of the time and also to Le Fleur’s own writing. But these accounts are incomplete: to them must be added the stories told to David by his mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, custodians of an oral tradition. It is through the stories of women (by women and about women) that another set of connections opens up between the past and the present, and looking at the text’s reinvention of history through the stories of women will allow us to consider the narrator’s suggestion that David may be using his interest in Griqua history to displace a memory of the more recent past, and even of what is happening in the present.

  REINVENTION OF HISTORY

  In its general details, Wicomb’s account is historically faithful.25 But David and his narrator together construct a startling, fertile, fictional connection between Le Fleur genealogy and the “father of biology,” Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), professor of animal anatomy at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. Although it is in 1688, well before Cuvier’s existence, that Madame la Fleur, a Protestant Huguenot, leaves France for the Cape to escape the French Catholic persecutions, David playfully makes her Cuvier’s housekeeper, “the good woman being lifted out of her period and grafted onto the wrong century” (35). If we are determined, as good but orthodox critics, to withstand the text’s scornful rejoinder to those who “find meaning” in this historical disjuncture (35), we may consider the domestic connection to signal that Madame la Fleur’s son Eduard is Cuvier’s illegitimate son.

  With a century being erased between Eduard’s arrival soon after 1688 and Andries’s birth in 1867, Andries/Andrew le Fleur is made the grandson of Eduard la Fleur (and thus Cuvier’s great-grandson, perhaps). David’s own heritage is multiply complicated through this genealogical fiction: Andrew le Fleur’s secret union with David’s great-grandmother, Antjie, makes David’s grandmother, Ouma Ragel, Le Fleur’s illegitimate child, so that David himself might be a Cuvier descendent. This will later allow us to ask about what David inherits.

  An additional effect of Wicomb’s genealogical reinvention is to stress Andries’s connection with a French Huguenot line, thus rendering Griqua ethnicity even more complicated than it already is through its local intermixtures. Historically, Abraham le Fleur, Andries’s father, was the son of a French missionary and a woman from Madagascar,26 so through her fiction Wicomb re-establishes the truth of his racially mixed heritage. Using the Dutch name Andries, Wicomb further hybridises the European part of the Griqua heritage, and when, later, Andries Anglicises his name, the text signals the co-implication of Englishness in his developing racial exclusivism. His new name also stands as a neat literary allusion to the fictional figure, Andrew Flood, created by Sarah Gertrude Millin in her notoriously racist 1924 novel, God’s Step-children, to be the progenitor of the Griqua race.27

  Wicomb’s major reinvention involves the stories of women. The available written histories give scant information about the role of women in Griqua history, and the real-life figures Lady Kok and Rachel Susanna Kok are but briefly referred to. Wicomb gives the younger of the two (her name is now spelled Rachael) a good deal of fictional space, and also creates for the Beeswater sections the characters Antjie, Ant Mietjie, and Ouma Ragel.28 Where history is silent, myth often speaks, and Wicomb’s reinvention of hi
story needs to deal with a current mythification involving two early South African women, Krotoa/Eva and Saartje Baartman. She confronts through these women the shameful attitudes to body shape that pervade racist South African thinking: as the narrator says, “steatopygia” is the word “that has set the story on its course” (17).

  Lady Kok became the wife of Adam Kok III after the death of her husband, his brother, Abraham Kok, in the manner of many African rural patriarchal communities. Tellingly, besides being the object of his discourse on body shape, which Wicomb uses as an epigraph, Lady Kok is described in William Dower’s 1902 history The Early Annals of Kokstad and Griqualand East as “sociable and talkative” among those with whom she shared “the Griqua tongue” but “shy and taciturn” with others, especially whites.29 Histories also tell us that Rachel Susanna Kok, daughter of one of Adam’s relatives, Adam Muis Kok (muis means “mouse”), was appointed as successor to Adam Kok III, with Lady Kok acting for her until she came of age. (Rachel’s father was killed in 1878 in the Griqua rebellion against the proposed British annexation of Griqualand East.) It was not standard for women to take such positions. A contemporary historian points out that Britain’s Queen Victoria must have provided a model,30 but Wicomb offers an African model as well, through her reference to M’Ntatisi (38), regent in the 1820s and 1830s of the Batlokwa. (The Tlokwa clan was part of the Sotho; ba means “people.”)

  Rachael Susanna’s inclusion in the story gives Wicomb the opportunity to stress both the woman’s own authority and her wifely submission: that she passes to Le Fleur the staff of office passed to her by Lady Kok means that his political power is dependent on her. (The staff of office, symbol of political authority, was granted to Adam Kok I by the Dutch East India Company at the Cape.) Wicomb also provides through Rachael Susanna some sharp ironic critique of Le Fleur. Important in the Kokstad and Beeswater sections is her habit of singing in order to cover awkward political moments, but only later—in the narrative of Kliprand—will this kind of strategy open out into a fuller vocalisation of women’s own agency and strength: Ant Mietjie’s singing allows Dulcie’s political intervention to be heard.

  Rachael Susanna finds the idea of nation “an unhealthy and accommodating business,” and is not silenced (at least not immediately) by the fact that her husband gives her a new name, Dorie, “with which to face this idea” (63). She is particularly repelled by his obsequious letters to General Louis Botha and General Hertzog. Botha, the first prime minister after the Act of Union in 1910, was the man ultimately responsible for the 1913 Natives Land Act, which deprived the indigenous people of most of the land. Hertzog, prime minister from 1924 to 1939, was the man responsible for removing the Cape African franchise. Rachael Susanna’s repulsion signals her identification with the larger African community, rather than just Griqua or coloured.

  In terms of the events of the novel, rather than the voices drawn in to narrate it, the most sustained inclusion of women is through Le Fleur’s invention of the tradition of the Rain Sisters. Le Fleur chooses five Rain Sisters—Antjie and four others—from the most steatopygous women of Beeswater, “shaped by God into perfect vessels for collecting and carrying back radical moisture from the rain-soaked Cape peninsula” (153). Thus the text not only gives the (impossibly difficult) rainmaking position to women, whereas in the San antecedents rainmaking was performed mostly by men, but also accords steatopygia a new meaning in myth and history.

  David’s memory is haunted by women. In one of his many contradictions, he complains that there are too many women in the story, yet depends on their storytelling, whether for the historical facts and myths they provide or for their critique or for his own emotional stability. He not only chooses a woman as his narrator but also includes as part of his search for truth the restoration of stories about women—and for him, Krotoa and Saartje Baartman are crucial.

  Krotoa (renamed Eva by the Dutch) is the first Khoi woman represented in the writing of early Cape Dutch settlers.31 In or soon after 1652, she was employed in the castle as a servant by Maria de la Quellerie, the wife of Jan van Riebeeck, governor of the Cape. Krotoa later became an emissary between the Dutch and the Khoi. Her marriage in 1664 to a Danish explorer, Pieter van Meerhoff, brought them several children, which—along with her mastery of several languages and her skill as an interpreter—should have put paid to the theories of the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist Linnaeus that the Khoikhoi were genetically inferior to Europeans.32

  Saartje Baartman (1789–1815 or 1816) was a young Khoi woman taken to Europe in her early twenties as an ethnological museum exhibit, advertised as the “Hottentot Venus.”33 Displayed in a cage in London’s Piccadilly and elsewhere, she suffered an early death, whereupon her brains, genitals, and skeleton were put on display at the Musée de l’Homme, the Museum of Mankind, in Paris, for about 150 years. (They were removed to a back room only about fifteen years ago.) The scientist in charge of the French exhibition was Georges Cuvier.

  Despite David’s protests, the narrator leaves his story about Krotoa out of the text. She agrees to include his story about Saartje Baartman, but does not. And then she does not—untrustworthy indeed!—honor his request to remove references to his love for Dulcie. What should we make of the distance the narrator sets up between David’s and her own story, and what are the connections between Krotoa, Saartje Baartman, and Dulcie, in David’s story?

  As David’s narrator mentions, Saartje Baartman has been the subject of numerous stories and poems in South African writing.34 Her representation has also been the subject of intense recent debate.35 Members of the newly established Khoisan Movement in the Cape claim her as an icon, deploying her as a figure through whom they might discard identification as coloured (and as part of the Bantu-speaking indigenous groups). In a similar initiative, the Griqua National Conference asked the French Foreign Ministry in 1995 to return her remains, for a local burial. Likewise, there have been various recent representations of Krotoa, in which she is sometimes positioned as a “founding mother.”36 Although Krotoa and Saartje Baartman are playfully both included and excluded in the text, the narrator’s decision to erase David’s stories about them flies in the face of these current ethnic identifications. As regards Saartje Baartman, the narrator suggests David is ignorant of the politics of representation, and is naïve to suggest—in his own narrative of nationalism—that she “belongs to all of us”; the narrator makes a sharp retort about the meaning of “us” (135).

  There is, too, something David does not come to understand about his relation to women. He is able to interrogate Le Fleur’s racism but learns nothing from his attitudes to women. He neither asks himself about his own choice of a woman narrator, nor stops himself from trying to silence her, and he comes to no understanding about his obsession with Dulcie. Moreover, the novel suggests David has inherited a longstanding attitude towards women.

  Eduard’s eyes are inherited from his mother—emerald green European eyes that are passed down the family line to trouble David Dirkse so.37 And then Eduard is close enough to Cuvier (whether or not he is Cuvier’s biological son) to see his ethnological collection, and either adopts or inherits what Wicomb presents as Cuvier’s complex gaze on Khoi women’s bodies, a fundamentally fragmenting gaze that manages its desire only through reordering it as contempt. Boldly, then, Wicomb establishes a connection between past attitudes to women and those of the present, whatever the racial affiliation.

  Specifically, nineteenth-century attitudes to Saartje Baartman are echoed in the schoolboy behavior towards Dulcie (“they rhymed her blackness with her cunt” [80]). While Dulcie fights back in such instances, she is passive against the men who come to her at night. In another kind of example, Sally’s underground political career tells its own nasty story about the “unspoken part of a girl’s training” (123). There is a particularly tricky Wicombesque irony here: her trainer says sex with him will relax her, and it does, but just when we are compelled, as readers, to accede to this diff
icult suggestion, we are shown Sally’s body dissolving—relaxation to the point of disappearance, perhaps. As Wicomb puts it elsewhere, Saartje Baartman’s story reproduces itself “in puzzling distortions.”38

  Women’s bodies are still the objects of an intermingled desire and disdain. David’s interest in the past, and his (often ambivalent) belief in the possibilities opened up by women’s storytelling, are simultaneous indications of his desire for truth, of his need for models to reconstruct the present, and of his inability to confront aspects of the present—specifically, the ANC treatment of women, and a world where “fucking women was a way of preventing them from rising” (179). Part of what remains untold in his account, then, is his connivance in the processes of idealisation, brutality, and silencing, manifest in his own occasional idealisation and silencing of women, his (possible) actual behavior towards Dulcie, and his refusal to face her fate.

  Whereas current debate about Saartje Baartman refers to the need to rebury her body parts on home ground, Dulcie’s body refuses burial. Dulcie’s is the unwritten, pressing story of our times. Dulcie’s story is a story of what has not yet been said about violence and betrayal, political commitment and love, about writing and representation and truth. For David, Dulcie remains at a stage of unrepresentability, not least because certain aspects of her treatment cannot be faced, since facing them would force him to confront his own past not only as victim but also as victimiser. Thus the notion of the unrepresentable, so fashionable a concept in postmodern and postcolonial debate, is deconstructed in Wicomb’s text: it is given a historical context and a political force. The narrator’s partial exclusion of the stories of Krotoa and Saartje Baartman offers a comment on the difficulties of telling Dulcie’s story, and, in turn, Dulcie’s story invites us to reinterpret Krotoa’s and Saartje Baartman’s—to make them less tidy, less readily comprehended.