David's Story

by Zoe Wicomb

  12. Edgar and Saunders 220.

  13. Le Fleur qtd. in Edgar and Saunders 203. Le Fleur’s manuscripts are to be found in the Natal Archives and in the Cape Archives.

  14. The term derived from the belief that forty years after an agreement made in 1848 between the Griqua and the British Cape government, the Griqua would either recover possession of three million acres of land ceded to the British or be compensated for their loss (Dower 119–120).

  15. Saunders’s editorial notes in Dower 166.

  16. The Winter Garden was the name of a building in District Six, whose ground floor was used as a hall for church meetings and dances. District Six, once a mixed-race community close to Cape Town city center and the docks, was declared a white group area in 1966, and subsequently demolished. Restitution is now underway. The District Six Museum is an important research resource whose website can be found at www.districtsix.co.za. In “Shame and Identity,” Wicomb addresses the mythologising of District Six (94–96).

  17. Griqua and Coloured People’s Opinion, edited by Le Fleur, includes carefully detailed agricultural budgets that project a dream not only for Griqua prosperity but also “a happy future for all” (27 Feb. 1925). It runs notices of Le Fleur’s countrywide tours, and exhortations about controlling the youth, especially through organisational structures for girls, and about the importance of “handcraft” (manual work) rather than book-learning for “our race [to become] industrious and self-supporting” (7 Feb. 1925). It is also worth noting that in its frequent reprinting of correspondence between Le Fleur and officialdom, some letters pass through P. Wicomb, secretary for the Griqua office in Cape Town.

  18. Cape Times 30 Sept. 1921; qtd. in Edgar and Saunders 214.

  19. In “When the Train Comes” in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, Frieda Shenton says: “We packed our things humming. I did not really understand what he [her father] was fussing about. The Coloured location did not seem so terrible. Electric lights meant no more oil lamps to clean and there was water from a tap at the end of each street” (30).

  20. A recent history of the UDF notes that several trips were made to the West Coast and Namaqualand in the early 1980s by Cheryl Carolus and two male colleagues. Carolus was secretary of the Regional Executive Committee, and a leading figure in the United Women’s Organisation. See Jeremy Seekings, The UDF: A History of the United Democratic Front in South Africa, 1983–1991 (Cape Town: David Philip; Oxford: James Currey; Athens: Ohio UP, 2000) 82.

  21. Some early African leaders addressed the possibility of equitable land segregation. While they knew that a fair division was unlikely under European hands, and were suspicious of the way land segregation was deployed to abolish direct political representation, it is noteworthy that even their entertainment of this idea was later used to discredit them within the ANC. See Peter Walshe, The Rise of African Nationalism in South Africa: The African National Congress, 1912–1952 (London: Hurst; Berkeley & Los Angeles, U of California P, 1970) 54.

  22. For example, the GNC currently sees itself as retrieving the basic values of past Griqua communities, offering the following statement: “[I]n die bruinman se soëke na sy siel moët daar weer gekyk word na dit wat ons voorouers vir ons nagelaat het, om daarna voort te bou op die pad wat ons in die nuwe bedeling van ons land moët loop.” This translates literally as follows: “[I]n the brown man’s search for his soul we must reexamine what our ancestors left behind for us, and then build upon it on the road we have to take in the country’s new dispensation.” Tellingly, its somewhat free translation by one of the Griqua conference delegates uses the word identity for soul, and takes pains to stress the notion of a model from the past: “[I]n the brown man’s search for identity it is critical that we go back to the lessons of our fathers and grasp at the values which were such an endemic part of the Griqua community” (Bank 6–7).

  23. In 1995 the GNC sent a memorandum to then president Nelson Mandela asking for the return of all Griqua land. Their claim is complicated by the fact that the Land Rights Act of 1994 refers primarily to the restitution of land removed from South Africans by the 1913 Land Act, whereby 87% of the land was reserved for whites. For additional information, see Steven Robins, “Transgressing the Borderlands of Tradition and Modernity: Identity, Cultural Hybridity and Land Struggles in Namaqualand (1980–1994),” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 15.1 (1997) 23–43. The webpage for the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights can be found at www.restitution.pwv.gpv.za.

  24. The kanniedood plant (tech. Gusteriah) is a small genus of the lily family closely related to the aloe, and grows only in the western and southern Cape regions. Known as “Khoisan rice,” its flowers are edible, and its swollen roots provide water. It is represented on the Griqua flag as a national emblem. Richard Lee, at the Khoisan Identities Conference, noted: “This is a true survival plant like the people that it commemorates … It shelters under thorny Karoo bushes and camouflage to avoid grazers, small pieces of the leaves will take root and produce new plants and that is what I see coming out of this gathering. We are taking root and producing new plants” (Bank 47).

  25. The historical texts cited in these notes provide information not fitted into this afterword. Wannenberg records, for example: “[Le Fleur’s] mission in life is said to have been revealed to him on May 9, 1889 when, while searching for his father’s donkeys in the veld, a voice told him to reunite the ‘dead bones of Adam Kok’ as a people” (186).

  26. Edgar and Saunders 201.

  27. Sarah Gertrude Millin, God’s Stepchildren (1924; Johannesburg: Donker, 1986). The original title uses a hyphen: God’s Step-children.

  28. The continuing importance to the Griqua of oral tradition recounted by women, and of women as figureheads, is attested to by the following comment: “The Grand Lady of Griqua oral history is ‘Volksmoeder’ [Mother of the Nation] Dollie Jones of Krantzhoek, only remaining child of Die Kneg [God’s servant, the name for Andrew le Fleur]. Nearly in her eighties, she has a vivid memory of, and can relate incidents in the lives of her ‘oupa,’ Adam Muis Kok, and other great men in the finest detail” (R. K. Belcher, “From Literature to Oral Tradition and Back Again,” in Richard Whitaker and E. R. Sienaert, eds. Oral Tradition and Literacy: Changing Visions of the World [Durban: Natal U Oral Documentation and Research Centre, 1986] 269). Rachel Susanna le Fleur was president of the Griqua Women’s Christian Association, established in 1920. See supplement to Griqua and Coloured People’s Opinion, 10 July 1925, which refers to her simply as Mrs. R. S. Le Fleur. An unpublished essay by Sophie van Wyk, referring to Ragel Susanna le Fleur, notes her status as the Crown Mother of the Griqua (cited Bank 245, 252), as does Belcher (267). Other women in Wicomb’s novel may be based on historical figures. Antjie is possibly derived from Annie Jood, in real-life the wife of Abraham le Fleur, and Andrew le Fleur’s mother. The Rain Sisters are possibly based on the famous Griqua choirs established by Andrew le Fleur in 1919 (Wannenburg 187, Belcher 268). Lady Kok is also referred to as Margaret in historical accounts, as in the genealogy on page vi.

  29. Dower 57.

  30. Halford 128.

  31. See G. M. Thom, The Journal of Jan van Riebeeck 3 vols. (Cape Town & Amsterdam: Balkema, 1952–1958). For further information about Krotoa, see Elphick 106–10 et passim; Christina Landman, “The Religious Krotoa (c. 1652–1674),” Kronos: Journal of Cape History 23 (1996) 22–35; V. C. Malherbe, Krotoa, Called ‘Eva’: A Woman Between (Cape Town: Centre for African Studies, U of Cape Town, 1990); Julia Wells, “Eva’s Men: Gender and Power in the Establishment of the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–74,” Journal of African History 30 (1998) 417–437.

  32. One of the Dutch officials of the East India Company, Johan Nieuhof, decides on this basis to call her “white”: “It has been found by experience that a girl who was reared from her birth among our folk in the Castle, and grew up there, was as white as an European woman.” (R. Raven-Hart, ed. Cape of Good Hope 1652–1702: The First Fifty Years of Dutch Colonisation a
s Seen by Callers [Cape Town: Balkema, 1971] 19.) But after her husband’s death, she was said to prove through a life “irregular … adulterous and debauched” that “nature … again rushes back to its inborn qualities” (obituary; qtd. in I. Schapera, ed. The Early Cape Hottentots [Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1933] 125).

  33. See the film directed by Zola Maseko, Life and Times of Sara Baartman—The Hottentot Venus, Film Resource Unit (fru@wn.apc.org), 1998. See also Sander Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985) 204–242.

  34. For some of these, see Stephen Gray’s chapter in Southern African Literature: An Introduction (Cape Town: David Philip; London: Rex Collings, 1979) 38–71. Entitled “The Hottentot Eve,” Gray’s chapter refers to both figures, Krotoa/Eva and Saartje Baartman.

  35. See Yvette Abrahams, “The Great Long National Insult: ‘Science’, Sexuality and the Khoisan in the 18th and early 19th Century,” Agenda 32 (1997) 34–48; and “‘Ambiguity’ is My Middle Name: Research Diary about Sarah Baartman, Myself and Some Other Brown Women,” unpublished paper delivered at the African Gender Institute, U of Cape Town, 6 August 1996; also at Gender Equity Unit, U of Western Cape, 26 September 1996. Abrahams argues that white critics like Gilman re-enact in their interest in Baartman’s representation the strategies of white colonial eugenics. She also claims Baartman as Khoisan, and, through her, establishes her own Khoisan rather than coloured identity. For a different view, see Zimitri Erasmus, “Same Kind of White, Some Kind of Black: Living the Moments of Entanglement in South Africa and its Academy,” in Barnor Hesse, ed. Un/Settled Multiculturalism(s): Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions London: Zed Press, 2000) 187–207. Erasmus argues that Abrahams uses Saartje Baartman to turn away from a part-white heritage that needs to be claimed and dealt with (187–189). For Wicomb’s discussion, see “Shame and Identity” 91–93.

  36. For recent representations of Krotoa, see Karen Press, Bird Heart Stoning the Sea, Krotoa’s Story, Lines of Force (Cape Town: Buchu Books, 1990); and Trudie Bloem, Krotoa-Eva: The Woman from Robben Island (Cape Town: Kwela, 1999). For discussion of other representations, see Carli Coetzee, “Krotoa Remembered: A Mother of Unity, A Mother of Sorrows?”, in Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee, eds. Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa (Cape Town: Oxford UP, 1998) 112–119. Coetzee argues that contemporary Afrikaner writers have started to claim Krotoa as their foremother in order to gain “what seems like legitimate access to the new rainbow family,” despite the general denial of nonwhite ancestry among the Afrikaners (114–15). She turns to Abrahams’ representation as preferable. Yvette Abrahams: “Was Eva Raped?: An Exercise in Speculative History,” Kronos: A Journal of Cape History 23 (1996) 3–21. Wells, however, has argued that Krotoa should not be seen as unambiguously a victim.

  37. At the Khoisan Identities conference, Chief Joseph Little, self-styled leader of the Hancumqua grouping of the Griqua, drew attention to his own green eyes: “[In England and Ireland] some of the people said that I would have a tough time proving that I’m a Khoi met die groën oë and die haakneus [with the green eyes and the hook nose]. But it’s something that is in the blood, it’s in my line, ek kan ook oor die lyn gespring het and Whitie gespeel het [I too could have jumped over the line and played Whitey]…. I thank God that it didn’t happen because we have eventually found each other” (Bank 7).

  38. Wicomb, “Shame and Identity” 92. Saartje Baartman’s reemergence is suggested partly through the repetition of names: Sally, Sarie, and Saartje or Saartjie are all diminutive forms of Sarah. Wicomb goes on to say: “I adopt her as icon [in this essay] precisely because of the nasty, unspoken question of concupiscence that haunts coloured identity, the issue of nation-building implicit in the matter of her return, her contested ethnicity (Black, Khoi or ‘coloured’?) and the vexed question of representation” (93).

  39. Wicomb, “Tracing the Path from National to Official Culture,” in Philomena Mariani, ed. Critical Fictions: The Politics of Imaginative Writing (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991) 248, 250.

  40. See Stephen Ellis and Tsepo Sechaba, Comrades Against Apartheid: The ANC and the South African Communist Party in Exile (London: James Currey; Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1992), whose analysis combines the views of David and the narrator, but tends more to the latter: “It is generally agreed that the 1976 rising was spontaneous and that it was sparked off in the first instance by the language issue…. It is also true that individual ANC or Communist Party members still living inside South Africa had contacts in Soweto and may have been in touch with small groups of participants…. But such contacts were only of minor importance in accounting for the turn of events. Few of those who took to the streets of Soweto seem to have had more than the most rudimentary awareness of organisations such as the ANC, the PAC [Pan African Congress] and the Communist Party.… [T]he nationalist organisations had been eclipsed since they were forced into exile sixteen years earlier” (83). David claims ANC authority over the children.

  41. Part of the UDF’s success was that it was a movement rather than an organisation, loosely affiliated to a large number and variety of organisations including trade union organisations, on whose behalf it offered a sense of unified and widespread resistance. It had massive popular support. Banned in February 1988, it continued under the guise of the Mass Democratic Movement, and then, at the end of 1989, courageously and unilaterally declared itself unbanned. It was partly in response to the increasing strength of public opposition, in the UDF/MDM as well as the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), that the government unbanned the ANC early in 1990, released Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners, and entered the process of the “negotiated settlement” that led to democracy in 1994.

  42. Ellis and Sechaba 148.

  43. African UDF activists were sometimes critical of the disproportionate influence wielded by Indians and coloureds in Western Cape branches, with Western Cape UDF activists sometimes expressing anxiety about African nationalist tendencies. See Seekings 20, 78–80.

  44. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944; London: Andre Deutsch, 1964) 75–76. For information about nineteenth-century Glasgow, see Sir James Bell and James Paton, Glasgow: Its Municipal Organisation and Administration (Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons, 1896).

  45. C. Duncan Rice argues that the critique of slavery developed by the Scots in the 1760s sat uneasily with their commitment to economic growth, and that Scottish humanitarians were interested less in the plight of enslaved Africans than in the theoretical issue of how to balance economic growth with political liberty. “Archibald Dalzel, the Scottish Intelligentsia, and the Problem of Slavery,” Scottish Historical Review 62.2 (1983) 122, 134.

  46. Tobias Smollett, Humphrey Clinker (1771; London and Glasgow: Collins, 1954) 249.

  47. David Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth-Century English Art (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1987) 85.

  48. The song’s title is used in the headnote to a recent essay on the Glasgow tobacco lords, whose full text reads: “Smoke gets in your eyes—but it also made the fortunes of the Clydeside merchants who shipped in the golden leaf from the New World and transformed Glasgow into an international commercial centre.” See Tom Devine, “The Tobacco Lords of Glasgow,” History Today 40 (May 1990) 17. Pipe puffing, often represented in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, was used in Hogarth’s paintings as a satirical reference to colonial exploitation (Dabydeen 86). There is no real-life Crown Hotel in Kokstad; there was, until recently, a Royal Hotel, which was built and opened in about 1880 by a man known as “Yankee Wood,” according to Dower an African American who had been mixed up in illicit diamond deals in Kimberley (117–118). The name “Crown” recalls the British crown, with its (stolen) Griqua diamonds.

  49. For information about Quatro, see Ellis and Sechaba, especially 132–136; 192. See also “Inside Quadro
[sic],” Searchlight South Africa 2.1 (1990) 30–68. This article contains a long report by ANC guerrillas on camp conditions: Bandile Ketelo et al., “A Miscarriage of Democracy: The ANC Security Department in the 1984 Mutiny in Umkhonto We Sizwe,” 35–65. The writers refer to prisoners being instructed to sing in order to drown the noise of screams. They also say that released prisoners had to sign documents committing them to silence. In the interest of exemplifying David’s position vis-à-vis the ANC, and also of stressing the political courage of David’s Story itself, it is worth noting that one of the authors of Comrades Against Apartheid uses a pseudonym; the book’s introduction tells us that although “Tsepo Sechaba” is critical of some of its practices, he remains faithful to the ideals of the ANC, something like David, perhaps.

  50. The Truth and Reconciliation Report was presented to Nelson Mandela, then President of South Africa, on 29 October 1998. It can be found at www.truth.org.za. Just before the presentation, Thabo Mbeki, then deputy president, made application to the Cape High Court to prevent publication, on the grounds that the report contained inaccuracies about the ANC. Subsequently, the ANC was quoted as saying that the attempt of the TRC to establish “a new jurisprudence governing the conduct of warfare” was “comical, irrational and absurd” (Weekly Mail & Guardian, 29 October 1998). Nelson Mandela, however, backed the findings, saying that nobody could deny the deaths in ANC detention camps, although he reiterated that the war against apartheid had been just.