You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (2 page)

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.

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 1973 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. . . .
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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.
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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.

When in 1983 a new Tricameral Parliament provided for a separate chamber where coloureds would legislate on their “own affairs,” several parties offered candidates. The strongest was the Labour Party, essentially the voice of the most skilled and organized coloured labor unions. Coloured voters stayed away from the polls in these elections, which extended franchise to coloured and Indian voters but excluded Africans. Many coloured voters were made aware by the active campaign of the United Democratic Front (UDF) of the falsity of democracy when racial segregation remained intact.
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Frieda returns from Britain after a twelve-year absence still politically naïve, as are most of her friends (with the exception of her friend Moira) and certainly her family,
who are still defined by their localities and histories in South Africa. She encounters once again the depth of coloured acquiescence.

Wicomb published this book originally in 1987, three years before the end of apartheid, while state violence and insurrection were at a height. Close readers of
You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town
at that time would have been cautioned and perhaps less surprised than many political observers when, in the months before the 1994 general elections, the coloured voters moved from “undecided” to support of the National Party, which courted them as part of an enlarged constituency of Afrikaans-speakers. They delivered the Western Cape provincial government to the old Afrikaner ruling party, while in most other provinces the African National Congress swept the elections. Peter Marais, one of the victorious candidates, wrote of his personal sense of identity:

              
My language, Afrikaans, provides the first indication of where I am located because many things flow from language. My religious affiliation is another feature of my identity. . . . As a
bruin man
(brown man) of Griqua and Afrikaner descent, I do not wish to have another “bruin man” telling who I am; or that I am nothing. On the contrary, I am something. I am a Griqua with Afrikaner blood.
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It is apparent from such a testimony that Griqua in the new South Africa was becoming an ethnicity around which to mobilize. The eventual political alliance of Griqua cultural chauvinists, however, is not a foregone conclusion. In the last chapter of the novel, Wicomb dramatizes this shift in perspective; the Griqua suddenly enjoy a more
positive valence. Wicomb questions the politics of ethnicity as much as the rigid racism of apartheid.

R
ESPECTABILITY AND
C
OLOR

At the heart of the ambiguity for coloured peoples are the implications of their mixed ancestry and two sorts of prejudice: prejudice against them because of color and prejudice against such women in particular as (presumptively) available for sexual liaisons. These markers are inflected differently across time and circumstance.

Mixing in the seventeenth century occasionally involved visible and highly placed persons. Detailed examinations are now being made of the life of the late-seventeenth century Khoikhoi woman Eva, the protégé of and interpreter for the first Dutch governor, wife of a company official, and, finally, a mother in reduced circumstances. Her Khoi name, Krotoa, is adopted by those who promote her as the foremother of the new South Africa.
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In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some other marriages between white men and Khoi or coloured women were solemnized in church. A few descendants of these marriages became citizens, burghers, with full civil rights.
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For example, among the leadership in colonial coloured resistance was the Reverend James Read, Jr., the son of a London Missionary Society missionary and a Khoi-descended woman.
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That the Dutch East India Company imported and owned slave retainers whom it housed collectively in Cape Town, however, created a very different situation. Cape Town has been called “the tavern of the two seas,” the port where vessels bound for or returning from the Far East called for provisions and respite. The slave lodge became a place to find partners in casual sex and children were born
with anonymous fathers, some of them European sailors. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, German soldiers brought in as mercenaries by the Dutch East India Company added to the mixture by making country marriages. By the time the British took over the Cape Colony in 1808, “free people of colour” were of many shades. There were a number of slaves of mixed parentage, and increasing ambiguity as to whether the “tame Hottentots”—Khoi within colonial society or grouped around mission stations—were melting into the same category. With the abolition of slavery and other degrees of formal servitude, the process of acculturation accelerated. In the Cape Colony, the civil rights of free people were equal. Contracts between masters and servants, however, put the servant in a weak position. And most coloureds were servants. On farms, with arrangements dating from the days of slavery, the domestic privacy of laborers' families was minimal. The Cape Marriage Order of 1839 provided for the regularization of marriage and induced a flow of couples to the churches.
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An example of deep prejudice within colonial society has been given by Pamela Scully through the case of Anna Simpson, the wife of a laborer who in April 1850 brought rape charges before the circuit court. The defendant confessed and was sentenced to death, only to have the sentence commuted because of white citizens' protests that Anna Simpson was coloured: “The woman and her husband are Bastard coloured persons, and that instead of her being a respectable woman, her character for chastity was very indifferent.”
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On the score of respectability, in the eyes of white moralizers, women of color were lacking unless proven otherwise.

The impoverishment of the majority of those considered
to be coloured resulted from their lack of capital and ability to secure and retain land, their indebtedness, and the failure of wages to rise in real terms. It has been reckoned that pay for coloured workers did not improve relative to the cost of living between the 1840s and the interwar period.
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There may have been some real increases in the 1940s and 1950s, but they were stalled and reversed as the full effects of apartheid took hold. Coloured wages declined steeply relative to white wages. Declining real wages affected women as well as men in the formal economy; women had to work ever harder, by whatever means, to meet their household needs. The attitude of the canteen worker Tamieta at the University of the Western Cape in “A Clearing in the Bush” reflects many women's aversion to the risk of lost employment, as well as compromises of respectability.