You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town
Read You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town Online
Authors: Zoë Wicomb
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, 1879â1924
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
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.â1st Feminist Press ed.
p. cm. â (The women writing Africa series)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-155861-915-9 (e-book)
2. Coloured people (South Africa)âFiction. 2. Young womenâSouth AfricaâFiction. 3. Cape Town (South Africa)âFiction I. Title. II. Series
PR9369.3.W53 Y6 2000
823âdc21
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
You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town
Although
You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town
, Zoë Wicomb's portrait of a young coloured
1
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.
L
ITTLE
N
AMAQUALAND
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 whoâalbeit in sometimes oblique waysâcomment 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 the 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, âon 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 (âChariguriqua').”
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 consolidatedâparticularly during the apartheid regimeâin 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.
