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This article was downloaded by: [University of Stellenbosch] On: 07 August 2012, At: 03:02 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rscr20 White lies, white truth Georgina Horrell a a  Department of English, University of Cambridge, Version of record first published: 16 Dec 2009 To cite this article:  Georgina Horrell (2009): White lies, white truth, Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa, 14:2, 59-71 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/18125440903461812 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

Georgina Horell White Lies White Truth

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  • This article was downloaded by: [University of Stellenbosch]On: 07 August 2012, At: 03:02Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

    Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies inSouthern AfricaPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rscr20

    White lies, white truthGeorgina Horrell aa Department of English, University of Cambridge,

    Version of record first published: 16 Dec 2009

    To cite this article: Georgina Horrell (2009): White lies, white truth, Scrutiny2: Issues in EnglishStudies in Southern Africa, 14:2, 59-71

    To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/18125440903461812

    PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

    Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

    This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.

    The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representationthat the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of anyinstructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primarysources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings,demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly orindirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

  • ARTICLES59 Unisa Press pp 59-71scrutiny2 14(2) 2009: issues in english studies in africa

    ISSN: Print 1812-5441/Online 1753-5409DOI: 10.1080/18125440903461812

    White lies, white truth

    Confession and childhood in white South African womens narratives

    GEORGINA HORRELLDepartment of English

    University of Cambridge [email protected]

    Abstract

    Within and through texts written in English by white women both before and since the opening of the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a process of confession has been enacted. The TRCs amnesty hearings heard no submissions from English-speaking white women as perpetrators. However, the telling of stories about the self, autobiographically inflected stories significantly stories of childhood, of mothers, of innocence and guilt presents a different truth. This confessional writing (photographic collections, short stories, poetry and novels) is filtered through the rose-tinted hues of a child-like self and managed via the defence identity of the traditionally innocent: the figure too young to be held fully culpable. Furthermore, this identity is often framed and nurtured by the deeply ambivalent figure of the maid or nanny. Within many of these texts, the figure of the black woman becomes a cipher for perceived and acknowledged injustice but also a source of privileged information, a native informant who contributes significantly to the white childs political awareness. It is to this figure that the narrator returns in order to construct a moment of confession and reparation. Indeed, the tale of the maid becomes key to the narrators liberal stance, and ultimately crucial to a post-apartheid white identity.

    Yes, they have a story to tell. Its setting is in the interstice between power and indifferent or supportive agency. In that interstice, the English speaking South African has conducted the business of his life. Now he was indignant and guilty; now he was thriving. This no-mans land ensured a fundamental lack of character. With a foreign passport in the back pocket of the trousers, now they belong now they dont. When will they tell this story? (Ndebele 1998: 26)

    In his essay, Memory, metaphor and the triumph of narrative, written in 1998, Njabulo Ndebele notes that there may

    be an informal truth and reconciliation process under way among the Afrikaners (Ndebele 1998: 24). He is referring to novels like Mark Behrs The smell of apples (1996) and

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    Jeanne Goosens Not all of us (1992) (both originally written and published in Afrikaans). There was not, he notes, an equivalent and crucially necessary process under way among bleeding-heart, English-speaking liberal South African[s], who [have] no understanding of why [they are] hated so much when [they] sacriced so much for the oppressed. Far from understanding that they had played an equally deadly, imprisoning role not merely because collectively they did not act to bring an end to Apartheid and its atrocities, but also by means of their condescending platitudes by which, Ndebele points out, they massacred hundreds of thousands of souls they were blissfully unaware that they should take their places before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Indeed, Ndebele insists,

    the guilt of English-speaking South Africans is as extensive as that of the Afrikaners. The latter were the primary agents. Their resulting self-confidence rendered them collectively insensitive. On the other hand, the guilt of the English-speaking South African was prone to greater moral agony, to more wrenching agonies of conscience. Those who had no power remained with their consciences, while those who had it died from within. Let all the stories be told. (Ndebele 1998: 27)

    Michiel Heyns, in his article, The whole countrys truth: confession and narrative in recent white South African writing (2000: 42-66) considers confessional narrative in contemporary white writing, asking whether and in what sense confessional ction comes to terms with South African culpability. I would argue that Heyns does not satisfactorily answer Ndebeles challenge, as the writers he considers are primarily Afrikaans writers (some of whom have been translated into English).1 Interestingly, however, Heynss own (English) novel, The childrens day (Heyns 2002), tells a tale of guilt, culpability, desire and absolution through the eyes of an adolescent boy during the apartheid years of the sixties. Heyns himself thus enacts a narrative that which

    traces truth and reparation through the visceral joys and agonies of a childs coming of age. I shall argue that much guilty, confessional writing of white, English-speaking women (and men)2 is ltered through the rose-tinted hues of a child-like self. Guilt is negotiated and managed via the defence identity of the traditionally innocent: the gure too young to be held fully culpable. Furthermore, I wish to argue that this identity is often framed and nurtured by the deeply ambivalent gure of the maid or nanny, who is at once comfortingly strong and ultimately vulnerable. Within many of these texts, the gure of the black woman becomes a cipher for perceived and acknowledged injustice but also a source of privileged information, a native informant who contributes signicantly to the white childs political awareness. It is to this gure that the narrator returns in order to construct a moment of confession and reparation. Indeed, the tale of the maid becomes key to the narrators liberal stance, and ultimately crucial to a post-apartheid white identity.

    There has been in recent years a proliferation of texts, autobiographies as well as autobiographical texts presented as novels, which narrate white southern African stories from a profoundly personal angle, texts that resurrect childhood in order to construct a present truth. This is a new phenomenon. As Judith Ltge Coullie points out, during Apartheid, when writers like Ezekiel Mphahlele and Bessie Head were examining the meaning of being black, most whites were simply being (Coullie 2002: 232). A short list of autobiographically inected novels written by white women would include Margaret Fullers autobiography Dont lets go to the dogs tonight (2002),3 Gillian Slovos Every secret thing (1997),4 Jo-Anne Richards novel The innocence of roast chicken (1996), Barbara Trapidos thinly disguised autobiography Frankie and Stankie (2003), Diane Awerbucks Gardening at night (2003), Sarah Pennys 7KH EHQHFLDULHV(2002),5

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    Rosamund Hadens The tin church (2004), Carolyn Slaughters Before the knife (2002), Susan Manns One tongue singing (2004) and Rachel Zadoks Gem squash tokoloshe (2005).6 In this article I shall comment on a small sample of womens post-apartheid texts: Sarah Pennys 7KH EHQHFLDULHV, a poem by Isabel Dixon, some non-ctional narrative by Melissa Steyn as well a text which crosses the boundaries of genre, Jillian Edelsteins photographic narrative of the Truth Commission, Truth and lies (2001).

    The Truth and Reconciliation Commissions amnesty hearings heard, in fact, no submissions from English-speaking white women as perpetrators. Indeed, as Jacqueline Rose reports, Of the 7128 applications for amnesty received by the Commission only 56 were known to come from women. Under apartheid, the message would seem to be, there is very little women were guilty of(Rose 2003: 221). In her address to the Special Hearings on Women at the TRC, Thenjiwe Mtintso referred to women who supported the armed forces of the South African Apartheid state, who sent packages to the boys on the border, pointing out that their supportive roles as wives, lovers and sisters rendered them guilty. She insists on the necessity for white women to acknowledge this culpability. [I]t is not okay, she says, that they do not come forward and talk about the role they played (The TRC report, Vol. 4: 313).

    Whilst white women may not have had cause to confess to acts amounting to an offence or a delict in respect of which amnesty can be granted (The TRC report, Vol. 4: 313),7 within considerations of the state described by the term beneciary, there is clearly much to confess. White women may not have been accused of gross human rights violations killings, abductions, torture and severe ill-treatment, but they undeniably beneted from a society regulated by Apartheid. As Gillian Slovo asks in her article about the TRC in New humanist,

    But what of those other South Africans the vast majority of the white community who, although they might not have been actively involved and even if many deny it, were witness to what happened, beneted from it and who were in that way, complicit?(Slovo 2003: 20). At a remove from the apparently silent majority, Beth Savages victims submission to the TRC, her plea to meet that man that threw that grenade in a attitude of forgiveness in the hope that he could forgive (her) too for whatever reason, provides a lone but remarkable example of a white womans desire to confess, albeit somewhat obliquely, to complicity with the apartheid regime (TRC transcripts, http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/trccom.htm, 12 March 2009).

    In this article I argue that in the proliferation of novels and non-ctional texts written in English by white southern African women writers texts which negotiate the interstices of ction, non-ction and autobiographical truth Ndebeles desired restoration of narrative and Mtintsos sisterly act of narrative contrition is taking place: stories are being told.

    Words and pictures

    We need not have worried. People definitely did want to tell their stories. They had been silenced for so long, sidelined for decades, made invisible and anonymous by a vicious system of injustice and oppression. However we were distressed that not many white people came forward. Those who did were remarkable people. (Tutu 1999: 82)

    Shaming can be collective, a part of public contrition when a whole section of the community the former beneficiaries of South Africa, for example are required, and at least partly acknowledge the need to apologise for themselves. You dont need to have been a torturer (indeed the torturer may be the least likely) to feel ashamed. You can simply feel that you walked away or did not do enough in a hateful world. (Rose 2003: 1)

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    Jillian Edelstein, photographer and author of the book, Truth and lies: stories from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, describes her compulsion to record, photographically, the proceedings of the Commission by referring to her upbringing as a privileged white child in Johannesburg. In the foreword to her book she traces the development of her talent to the sense of frustration and guilt that arose as a result of her early awareness of white South Africas oppression of the black population. She had believed at the time (the early 1980s) that her camera was wielded as weapon of protest against the apartheid state:

    I became a press photographer in the Johannesburg area at the beginning of the 1980s. Growing up white in apartheid South Africa entitled one to massive and instant privileges. It led to complicated emotions among them anger and guilt. Photography was a way, for me, of channelling those emotions. At the time I believed that by pointing a camera at security police, or at the Casspirs (armoured personnel carriers) cruising the townships, or by documenting clashes between protestors and riot police I might help to change the situation in our country. (Edelstein 2001: 12)

    Having left South Africa to study in Britain in 1985 disillusioned by her failure to impact the situation positively but also driven by a desire to further her career as a photographer Edelstein returned over a decade later to capture images of a process that interrogates the past she left behind.8 Her pictures speak or rather, shout the narratives revealed by individuals at the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. One such picture, that of Joyce Mtimkulu sternly clutching the remains of her son (his hair, which fell out as a result of poisoning by the South African security forces), also provides the evocative cover of journalist and poet Antjie Krogs powerful account of the hearings, Country of my skull (1999). Gillian Slovo, author of the TRC novel Red dust (2000) and daughter of state-murdered activist, Ruth First, is thanked

    in the acknowledgments and provides a glowing endorsement for the back cover of Edelsteins book. These cross-textual links suggest a sense of psychological community: a community of white women who are passionately caught up in the activities of the TRC and the society whose stories it has released, and who reect this passion in textual representations and enactments.

    Although most of the pictures and accompanying text in Edelsteins book have very little overt autobiographical content, there is one photograph taken during one of the photographers trips to South Africa during the time of the hearings which accompanies an account that is at once nostalgic and confessional, a declaration of guilt and a plea for innocence. It is a photograph entitled Robben Island. The image is taken from one of the boats which offers trips out to the island from the tourist-centred Cape Town Waterfront and features Cape Towns shoreline; the banner of the Robben Island boat blowing across the top of the picture. Edelsteins accompanying diary excerpt, however, is a tale taken from when she was a little girl:

    Robben Island31 December 1997

    When I made this my first trip to the Island it was with mixed emotions one of which was guilt, a common white South African theme. For years as a little girl growing up in White suburban Cape Town, I would look forward to Friday nights when we used to have dinner in Sea Point with my grandparents. From their balcony I would stare across the expanse of ocean all the way to Robben Island, a dark dot on the horizon. My earliest political memory is of my parents hiding Gertie, my black nanny, and her boyfriend, Ben, while the police were raiding homes searching for illegal migrant workers those who were not carrying their passes, the document which the Blacks referred to as the dompas. These were the result of an inhuman piece of legislation designed to keep tabs on the movements of the black populace all the time. An early photograph shows me snug and secure, smiling as I straddle Gerties chunky shoulders. I adored her and the fear

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    of that raid and the thought that Gertie might disappear from my life began to make me understand a little of what politics was about. I certainly knew that Mandela was imprisoned on the Island but at that time I must have been about five or six years old my concerns were centred on the Cadburys slab my grandfather used to give us children every Friday night. (2001: 62)

    This entry is a somewhat deceptive, murky mixture of reection, narration, information and confession. Indeed, the literary nature of much of Edelsteins text transgresses the overt intention of the author to report or record the functioning of the TRC, primarily by photographic image so that the book enacts as well as presents multiple representations and readings, and is indeed a border-crossing text. It is questionable, for example, that this is simply a diary extract: the keen awareness of a potentially uninformed reader in her explanation of the dompas raid is an obvious reference to an anticipated international audience. The extract also provides an ambivalently expressed insight into the privileged childhood alluded to by Edelstein in the extract from the foreword, and into the inter-racial relationships engendered within such a childhood. Signicantly, at the heart of this piece, signalling Edelsteins early political awareness, is the gure of the black maid, or nanny. Gertie would almost certainly have had an African name, unknown, it seems, to the writer. On the one hand, Gertie is adored: she provides a representation of the nurturing black mother with whom the child is snug and secure; on the other, she is a vulnerable black servant, who must be hidden and protected. When questioned about Gertie in interview, Edelstein said, She wasnt in my life for a very long time. But there is something about her and this other man Ben that I remember very strongly. Very strongly. And I think it was her physical presence that really held me. I remember that. And I think that intrinsically and intuitively from a very young age I knew and understood the pathos of this woman. And for me she represented every woman

    who had had to leave her children. I think its a disgusting system. I think its appalling (Edelstein 2003). Edelsteins vehemence at this point indicates, I suggest, a certain unease, a note of guilty protestation. Her ardent tones signify a desire to clarify her awareness of Gerties suffering whilst simultaneously obscuring the fact that it was her family who beneted from the nannys pain.

    Edelsteins liberal white family, it seems, went to some lengths to subvert the laws of apartheid, which demanded that black men and women live in appointed areas, allowing black people to stay in white areas for work purposes only and only with possession of the required passes. Cheap black labour, particularly that of black women, in fact signied potential liberation for white women. Whilst their homes were cleaned and their children nursed by black women, white women were free to pursue careers. There is a case for arguing that white womens liberation within employment in southern Africa was certainly aided, if not bought by black womens pain. Furthermore, as Judith Rollins suggests in her book about domestic servants and their employers in the U.S.A.,

    The employer benefits from the degradation (of domestic work) because it underscores the power and advantage of being white and middle class.

    And the employer simultaneously contributes to the continuation of gender subordination in the society: by hiring another woman to do her work, she solves the problem of the tediousness of housework and (if she is employed) of women having the double duty in a way that does not challenge patriarchal ideas of appropriate womens work.(Rollins: 1985, p. 184)

    Subversion of the law of apartheid may have helped Gertie, to a point, but ultimately within the perimeters of the apartheid system Gerties white employers remained the primary beneciaries of Gerties presence in their home.

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    It is to the domesticated black gure of the nanny that Edelstein turns in order to resurrect a personal past innocent of the racist inscriptions of apartheid South Africa. The writer confesses that whilst she feels guilty about her past privilege, she was, after all, but a child, easily seduced and understandably preoccupied with childish treats. And furthermore Gertie, representative of the oppressed, both accepted and mothered her. Thus the black mother becomes the means by which the adult white woman both confesses her complicity and appeals against her conviction.

    It is also signicant that the photographic image which this diary extract accompanies conjures up notions of both political imprisonment and leaving, or escape: the view is of the wake of the boat and beyond it, Cape Town. I would like to suggest that Ndebeles implicit accusation of desertion (With a foreign passport in the back pocket of the trousers, now they belong now they dont) is one that many of the writers I have referred to would take seriously. Edelsteins confession, her statement to the Commission, is prompted by an image of distance and departure as is her book. As she says in her introduction to Truth and lies and reinforces in her interview, the project to cover the TRC was born out of an urgency created by a sense of loss, of alienation from home, as much as it was by a perception of historical signicance. Edelsteins book is an extraordinary collection of images images which narrate a past and represent a present South Africa, in stark yet provocative detail.9 The gripping, shocking and poignant portraits of people associated with the Truth Commission were acknowledged by the South Africas High Commissioner to London as a valuable service to the nation.10 The narration which runs, in a sense, behind the text, behind the camera, and through the extracts from Edelsteins diary renders it more than a testimony of the Commission however. The book is also a channelling of the guilt

    expressed by the photographer in both the above extracts. It is, in effect, an additional submission to the Commission.

    Telling stories

    Edelstein is by no means the only writer to write about the attractive, desirable and reassuring physicality of the black woman. In Sarah Pennys novel, 7KHEHQHFLDULHV, the initially un-named black cleaner, the siesie, becomes the gure of nurture, of comfort within a world of exclusive self-interest and harsh intolerance.

    The teenage protagonist, Lally, becomes traumatised by her observations of cruelty meted out by men and boys in the boarding school she attends. The narrative unfolds the gradual politicization of her consciousness through the exposure of a particular model of white masculinity. The boys at her school, as in other South African schools at this time, are socialised (most obviously via the explicitly violent army cadet training programme) into a form of masculinity which regards itself as the defender of white civilisation in Africa. This is ultimately expressed through the turning over to the special (police) force of a young black man (who subsequently disappears). Lally rst becomes aware of the siesie when the woman attempts to comfort her as she (Lally) weeps over an incident of bullying she has observed.

    What is stressed in the narrative is that the communication that the girl shares with the woman is essentially wordless: communication of Kristevas semiotic, of the Mother mucus, smells, indistinguishable sounds and the comfort of the body.

    The siesie is plump in pale blue overalls and a white doek. She wears socks and battered tennis shoes and as she wipes and tips the bins into her black bag she hums a ditty to herself. With the siesie in the room, Lallys panic subsides some moreUnexpectedly the

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    woman walks over towards her bed, sits down on it and puts both her arms around Lally. Lally is shocked. It is in her mind to struggle to pull herself away from the womans African-woodsmoke smell mixed with the odours of Brasso and Jik when she realises she is crying. Not even just crying, bawling as if she were a child, like she used to cry in her mothers arms over some accident or disappointment before she came away to school. The siesies overall front is quickly smeared with mucus and tears but she continues to rock Lally and sing the ditty. Lally doesnt speak Xhosa they dont learn it at school and the workers on her parents farm are Afrikaans-speaking coloureds but the words of the song seem to be reassuring. (Penny 2002: 57)

    This intimacy forms the basis for a largely unexpressed bond between Lally and the black woman who comforts her. However, the white girl is ashamed by the urgency of her own need, shamed by knowledge of the black womans plight under apartheid. Unavoidably mixed into the childs moment of nurture is the panic of her adolescent awakening, the understanding of a system of Law and cruelty.

    And she is embarrassed that she is crying over these things because the black people have problems of the most daunting nature the little urchins in town bending their arms against their stomachs and holding out their grimy hands for coins, the women going door to door with strained drawn faces asking to be allowed to do the washing. (Penny 2002: 57)

    Lally is placed by her narrator in a position of guilty knowledge she is the silent observer of Sipho Qhashanes capture, late at night. This, in addition to her association with the boys mother, Nomda Qhashane, the siesie who comforts her earlier in the novel, renders her position ultimately intolerable, so that later, on completion of high school, she leaves South Africa, eeing the consequences of her privilege and the burden of her guilty political awareness. She is effectively Memmis coloniser who refuses, who would prefer to be on the other side of the divide between

    the oppressed and the oppressors, but has apparently no way of crossing that border (Memmi: 1990). It is Lallys whiteness that marks her as a member of the dominant culture, despite her desire to evade it. Her collusion with the system of apartheid is one of silence, apathy and powerlessness.

    Signicantly, it is as a result of her relationship with the black woman, the cleaner at her boarding school, that Lally nally returns to South Africa to face a post-apartheid future. As Lally sits aged 35 in a Brighton tearoom, she picks through a pack of photographs images of her past. It is a photograph of herself and her friend at age 15 that nally releases Lallys silence about her encounter with apartheids horror and which enables her to begin a letter to the Truth Commission. Crucially, the photograph includes an image in the background which may or may not have been her siesie, the mother of the boy she saw abducted by the Security Police during the State of Emergency.

    The siesie has her back turned to the camera. Lally cant tell which siesie it is hers or another. The siesie is just a blue overall, a blue doek, slippers, a plump bottom, stout smooth brown forearms and calves. (Penny 2002: 198)

    The image evokes musings about motherhood: the black womans as well as Lallys own potential motherhood; and about loss. Once again, however, it is the stout, comforting physicality of the black mother that the narrative circles around; her strength is foregrounded in contrast to Lallys anorexic, eln childlikeness. This novel is thus a legitimating narrative, a tale that focuses on the shared powerlessness of the vulnerable/strong black woman and innocent/guilty white girl. It is in effect a plea for reparation which is both forgiving and recuperating; as much a cry of confession as a desire for a formerly denied inclusion.

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    Whereas it is knowledge, awareness of the harsh realities of South Africa which drive the protagonist in Sarah Pennys novel away from her home, other writers suggest that it is only as adults perhaps only in the light of the proceedings of the TRC that they are made cognizant of the full tyranny of the state apparatus. In the plaintive words of one woman writing to a letters column in a magazine, in response to Antjie Krogs work, most of us can say that we have honestly been totally ignorant of these atrocious happenings. They werent printed in newspapers, so how could we know?(Femina, 1998: 6). She concludes that, unlike herself, Krog had rst hand experience of peoples pain. It is, of course, almost certain that this woman would have spent many hours in the same house as a black domestic servant.11 In her record of a series of interviews with Eugene de Kok, commanding ofcer of apartheid death squads, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela suggests that white South African bystanders were able to ignore brutality against blacks because it was being carried out in secret, in that other world. Everyone engaged in an apartheid of the mind, in psychological splitting. It was only when the truth came out into the open that some felt they could no longer live with it (Gobodo-Madikizela, 2003: 109). What is extraordinary is that many white women were able to effect this splitting despite the intimacy of shared living and work spaces in their homes.

    It is thus to this quotidian gure, the household servant, that writers turn in order to illustrate the gap between their own reality and that of black women. In Vantage Isobel Dixon writes of the fraught, oppressed lives of the women who ordered her safe, happy childhood world. This is the sister poem to every twenty-six seconds in which a white women speaks of her fear of rape. In an interview in November, 2002 (Cambridge), Dixon pointed out that Vantage was written after every twenty-six seconds upon the realization that

    it would be grossly inadequate to write of a white womens fears without reecting upon the hardships of black women. The guilty result is a poem about the past, about the mother gure who was strong but vulnerable. Dixon does not claim to have known her, to have known her life she was but a child and knew only safety. The vantage point from which she speaks is that of informed and indebted adult.

    But hush, thats not the whole of it.Im thinking as I learnedback then with blinkers on. What Im forgetting hardly ever knew are passbooks, curfews, tsotsiswaiting to waylay the maids, the pittance that theyve earnedas they walk back after a dayworn down by other peoples dirt. (Dixon 2001)

    The notion that the child hardly ever knew is a persistent refrain throughout these narratives of childhood. In fact, not knowing is placed in an uneasy and disjointedly articulated balance with subconsciously knowing or coming to know. Whereas, in narratives written during apartheid, black and white writers emphasised the anomalies of the suppression of knowledge and elision of identity inherent in the maid-madam relationship, the narratives I consider in this article suggest that the child is in some way aware or that she certainly becomes aware of the guilt-fraught and iniquitously exploitative nature of relationships between black and white women in South Africa. Frequently, this coming of age for the young girl is facilitated by the black nanny/mother. Margaret Lenta elucidates the problematics of knowledge in the domestic sphere under apartheid:

    [T]he mutual knowing which occurs between employer and servant is of a particular kind which involves as much perhaps more wilful ignorance as knowledge.(Lenta 1989: 239)

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    She suggests that not only was the domestic servant privy to much that she was prohibited from commenting on, but the white employer deliberately refused to acknowledge the servants life beyond the borders of the white home. The maid marked the border between safety, order and cleanliness, and the dangerous disorder of black lives in the townships. It was, it seems, imperative to maintain that division. Sue Marais, commenting on white womens writing under apartheid asserts that these writers, frequently writing in the rst person, convey a sense of nebulous, if persistent, guilt The madams in these texts display relationships of pervasive ambivalence towards and misunderstanding of what they perceive to be a refractory and inscrutable or unreadable other a notion of alterity (Marais, 1999: 85).

    Mothers and sisters

    It is often in the contrasting of white mothers with black nannies that desire for the ideal, forgiving and embracing mother is revealed. The white mother of Sarah Pennys protagonist, for example, is a pale and insubstantial gure in the narrative who allows her child to remain at the boarding school which ignores her anorexia. She is represented primarily as a voice on a telephone line, unable to assert herself within her role as mother; even to the extent that, as she reveals to Lally later, she is unable to insist that her daughter attend the local primary school for coloured children rather than be sent to the white boarding school. Within their writing, white women hint at desired reparation to the black mother, as well as white womens urgent need for the restoration of relationships with black women.

    Melissa Steyns legitimating opening chapter to her sociological work on whiteness similarly thrusts forward the notion of a reparative relationship with black women. The sociologist offers two encounters with black

    maids as pivotal to her own position and vital to her anti-racism work. The rst records the writers childhood experience and wavers between dis-ease and desire:

    I know that moments that seemed insignificant have had a lasting effect on me. One such moment was the first time I ventured into our maids room one afternoon as a little girl. I suppose I was curious and feeling bold. A white child just knew that one was not supposed to go into their places. The inside of her room was certainly strange to me its musty smell; the inside walls only roughly plastered; the extreme frugality compared with our house, which it adjoined. The bed was raised on bricks to thwart any attempts the tokoloshe (a small impish man who in African belief can cast spells) may make to get at her while she slept. She sat holding her daughters hand while we chatted, exchanging some asides in Xhosa to her child.

    Shes a real mother. Intimations of depth to her personhood, of a life quite separate from our home that I unquestioningly assumed to be all that defined her, broke into my consciousness. Drawn by this sense of an alternative world that she protected, of a subtle yet profoundly subversive knowledge that I now secretly shared, I subsequently spent many hours in her room.(Steyn 2001: xiii)

    Thus, on one level, the black woman is exotically other: she superstitiously raises her bed in order to avoid spirits and her room smells strange; on another level the woman is seductively a real mother. Whilst Steyn says she acknowledges the womans separate life through this encounter, she is simultaneously drawn to desire a sustained, signicant, albeit somewhat guilty, relationship with her. The child claims the right to move between mothers, between worlds across borders. She is enabled to cross over, beyond the boundaries of the civilized white world and into the alterity of the servants room.13 It is her childhood that apparently places her in a position of innocent, unencumbered neutrality in the struggle between races. It is precisely to this moment of uneasy and ambivalent nurturance by the racial other that Steyn returns

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    in order to establish her present neutrality. It is from this position that she will negotiate the right to engage in reparation.

    In the second recorded encounter, Steyn sets up a narrative moment which further positions her adult self in rejection of white patriarchy again, via the body of a black mother. Forbidden by her husband to go down to the labourers cottages on their farm in order to assist a coloured woman beaten up by drunken husband, she refuses to comply. Once again, she transgresses borders and steps into the realm of the other:

    I stood in her shack for a long time. Her slightly retarded eighteen-month-old child, naked except for a torn vest, sat on the mud floor, swaying to and fro and moaning softly. The childs unconscious mother lay on a bare mattress, covered by a dirty blanket. My very existence seemed anchored upon this womans misery. As I cleaned her wounds, my stomach churned with a sense that so much was so desperately wrong. (Steyn 2001: xv)

    As an adult woman, Steyns anti-apartheid, anti-racist position is initiated and endorsed by her reparative nurturance of this abject gure of black/coloured womanhood. The coloured childs unappealing vulnerability, together with the squalid conditions in the shack evoke a sense of repulsion, or abjection in the writer (my stomach churned), which is translated immediately into guilty obligation: the so much that was so desperately wrong is recognized within the parameters of her responsibility, on her (and her husbands) farm. Her own, necessary rejection of patriarchy (she indicates that her boer husband had been abusive and dominating), her very existence, hinges upon her empathy with the more abject, further oppressed position of the woman in the shack. Refusing patriarchal white dominance, she steps into a role which declares sisterhood with the woman before her. The implication of Steyns legitimating narrative is that the resurrection of the black mother is in some

    way constitutive of a further claim to allegiance with black women in the face of dominant white narratives of oppression. In the light of this opening chapter to Steyns sociological work, it is thus signicant that the writer ultimately celebrates what she refers to as the hybridizing narrative in South African whiteness, as that narrative which is most likely to engender hope for whites. Furthermore, the writer herself points out that it is likely to be the moment of agonized splitting in white psyches, precisely brought about by key encounters and relationships with nannies and childhood friends that will prove to be most productive for developing hybridity. Thus the conict and ambivalence developed in the white child cared for by the oppressed black nanny may well be the psychological ssure that permits a grafting on of the features necessary for white survival. Steyns ideal postcolonial identity is that which embraces the creolised, the multiple, the blurred boundary the many shades of brown that constitute the human race. (Steyn 2001: 169). Whites identities must become postcolonial spaces, she insists. It may well be that it is precisely via black nannies motherhood that these spaces might be sought.

    Furthermore, perhaps it is at least partially for these reasons that white womens postcolonial, post-apartheid confessional writing gestures persistently towards a desire for sisterhood in the new South Africa. Under apartheid, feminist studies were corseted by material and ideological rifts between white and black women. In the words of Nadine Gordimer,

    the white man and the white woman have much more in common than the white woman and the black woman, despite their differences in sex. The basis of color cuts down to the old issue of prejudice and the suppression of blacks of both sexes, to the way they are forced to live. Thats why womens liberation is, I think, a farce in South Africa. A black woman has got things to worry about much more serious than these piffling issues. (Gordimer 1984: 19)

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    Largely Western notions of womens liberation appeared to be of relevance to white women only and their freedom from patriarchal structures frivolous in the face of the crippling inequalities experienced by the black population. Indeed, Sindiwe Magonas narrator in Joyces Story (in the collection of maids narratives, Living, loving and lying awake at night) pushes the issues to a further level of complicity in oppression, pointing out that Feminism in this country has been retarded, in part, by this paternalistic attitude of white women towards black women. How can I be a sister to my father, the white woman?(Magona 1991: 42). In addition, the very ideologies underpinning South African society, entrenched by law, dictated that liaisons of signicance across the colour bar were abnormal, if not dangerous. As Cherry Clayton points out, however, the domestic sphere was an arena in which women met in intimate proximity:

    Black and white women are thus forcibly separated and yet they meet most often in the complicit area of the domestic power struggle. This fact determines the South African variant of womens struggle and of feminist criticism. To many black women, white women are experienced as, and often are, oppressors and not sisters. (Clayton 1989: 4)

    For white feminist women writing in the ten years since the rst democratic elections in South Africa, there is an ideological and ontological imperative that drives them to negotiate peace with the past, a confession inextricably linked to the black mothers who nurtured them. Remembering through these mothers, it seems, offers hope for fusing a Western-derived discourse of universal human rights and a white feminism with the frequently quoted African sense of ubuntu expressed in the proverb: A person is a person because of other people. It is thus most precisely within Thenjiwe Mtintsos hug and kiss, the embrace of feminist solidarity, that the white women writers I have considered

    seek a space from which to hope, a space from which to imagine personal and social reparation. Furthermore, the confessions of these white women their white lies and their negotiations with the truth are delivered by means of the midwifery of the black mothers who nurtured them.

    Notes1 For example, Goosens Not all of us (translated by

    Andre Brink, 1992). This novel is, like the others I shall consider, a novel of childhood.

    2 I shall discuss womens writing in this article, but it is worth noting that there are a number of white mens texts that similarly seek a reparative moment within an autobiographical/semi-autobiographical narrative of childhood. See also Christopher Hopes Heaven Forbid. London: Macmillan, 2001and Troy Blacklaws Karoo Boy Cape Town: Double Storey Books, 2004. J.M.Coetzees autobiographical Youth performs a very different narrative, however; its narrator resolutely unforgiving of the young self, and ruthlessly, self-reflexively critical (London: Secker and Warburg, 2002)

    3 A more recent publication is Fullers shocking adult autobiographical tale Scribbling the Cat. Travels with An African Soldier in which she further exposes the violence and horror of whiteness during the Chimurenga.

    4 This is, of course, overtly autobiographical.

    5 Her earlier book, The Whiteness of bones, is overtly autobiographical and is an African travelogue. Penny somewhat plaintively describes her awakening to her own stark whiteness during her stay in Harare: This black/white thing, this man/woman thing I wanted these divisions to be myths only, but they would not become myths. Africa is a continent of polarisations. To the black mass I am the enemy. For the first time in my life, I was essentially aware of myself not as a young woman, but as a young white woman (Penny 1997: 118).

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    6 Zadoks magical realist novel, successfully published in the UK, is autobiographically inflected. As she admitted in interview, she was examining [her] own upbringing (Russouw 2005: 3).

    7 Special Hearing on Women.

    8 Interview: Jillian Edelstein, London, 11 September 2003. Edelstein goes on to say: I certainly would never have said that I was an ostrich with my head in the sand. What I did not have was the courage to pick up arms. I just was not born to be a revolutionary . I was born to be a very good messenger. And I think that was part of my choice because it was choice: chocolate or vanilla, you choose. And I did choose to leave. And it was very, very painful.

    9 During an exhibition of Edelsteins TRC photographs at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, in March 2004 (as part of The Letters Home Festival) there were complaints from members of the College that the pictures were too disturbing. The photograph which attracted most criticism was that of perpetrator, Dirk Coetzee who is portrayed holding his pistol, carried for self-defence.

    10 Letter written to Edelstein, by the High Commissioner, Lindiwe Mabuza, 2000

    11 Judith Rollins writes of the similar invisibility of domestic servants, particularly black women, in America. She denotes this state as one of a non-person: that of a subordinated figure who commands no respect (Rollins, 1985, p. 210)

    12 Marais suggests that writing about maids by white women during apartheid years did not in fact cross this boundary, but stressed the divisions of domestic space into the (white) house as opposed to the servants quarters, the realm of the other. (Marais, 1999, p. 85)

    Works cited

    Awerbuck, Diane. 2003. Gardening at night. London: Secker and Warburg.

    Behr, Mark. 1996. The smell of apples. London: Abacus.

    Blacklaws, Troy. 2004. Karoo boy. Cape Town: Double Storey Books.

    Clayton, Cherry. 1989. Introduction. In: Clayton, Cherry (ed.). Women and writing in South Africa: a critical anthology. South Africa: Heinemann Southern Africa.

    Cock, Jacklyn. 1989. Maids & madams: a study in the politics of exploitation. London: The Womens Press.

    Coullie, Judith. 2002. The incredible whiteness of being. Alternation 9(1):226-237.

    Dixon, I. 2001. Weather eye. South Africa: Carapace Poets, Snailpress.

    Edelstein, Jillian. 2001. Truth and lies. stories from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. London: Granta.

    Fuller, Alexandra. 2002. Dont lets go to the dogs tonight. London: Picador.

    Fuller, Alexandra. 2005. Scribbling the cat. travels with an African soldier. London: Picador.

    Gobodo-Madakizela, Pumla. 2003. A human being died that night. A story of forgiveness. Cape Town: David Phillip.

    Goosen, Jeanne. 1992. Trans. Andre Brink. Not all of us. Strand: Quellerie.

    Gordimer, Nadine. 1984. A conversation with Nadine Gordimer. Salmagundi 62 (Winter):19.

    Haden, Rosamund. 2004. The tin church. Cape Town: David Phillip.

    Heyns, Michiel. 2002. The childrens day. Cape Town: Jonathan Ball.

    hooks, bell. 1992. Black Looks Boston: South End Press.

    Hope, Christopher. 2001. Heaven forbid. London: Macmillan.

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    Horrell, G A. 2003. Interview with Jillian Edelstein, London, 11 September.

    Jooste, Pamela. 2003. People like ourselves. London: Doubleday.

    Krog, Antjie. 1999. Country of my skull. London: Vintage.

    Lenta, Margaret. 1989. Intimate knowledge and wilful ignorance: white employers and black employees in South African fiction. In: Clayton, Cherry (ed.). Women and writing in South Africa: a critical anthology. South Africa: Heinemann Southern Africa: 238-251.

    Marais, Sue. 1999. The dolls house or the house of the father? Maja Kriels Interrogation of the maid/madam theme in Original sin and other stories. English in Africa, 26 (1):81-106.

    Magona, Sindiwe. 1991. Living, loving and lying awake at night. Claremont: David Philip Africasouth New Writing.

    Mann, Susan. 2004. One tongue singing. London: Secker and Warburg.

    Memmi, Albert. 1990 (1965). The coloniser and the colonised. London: Earthscan Publications.

    Ndebele, Njabulo. 1998. Memory, metaphor and the triumph of narrative. In: Nuttall, Sarah and Carli Coetzee (eds). Negotiating the past: the making of memory in South Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Penny, Sarah. 2002. The beneficiaries. Johannesburg: Penguin Books.

    Penny, Sarah. 1997. The whiteness of bones. Johannesburg: Penguin Books.

    Rose, Jacqueline. 2003. On not being able to sleep: psychoanalysis in the modern world. London: Chatto and Windus.

    Richards, Jo-Anne. 1996. The innocence of roast chicken. London: Hodder Headline.

    Russouw, Sheree. 2005. Waitressing author turns tables. Saturday star, 19 November:3.

    Slaughter, Carolyn. 2002. Before the knife. London: Black Swan.

    Slovo, Gillian. 2000. Red dust. London: Virago.

    Steyn, Melissa. 2001. Whiteness just isnt what it used to be: white identity in a changing South Africa. New York: State University of New York Press, SUNY series.

    The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report. Vol. 4. 1999 (1998) London: Macmillan Reference Ltd.

    Trapido, Barbara. 2003. Frankie and Stankie. London: Bloomsbury.

    Tutu, Desmond. 1999. No future without forgiveness. London: Rider.

    Zadok, Rachel. 2005. Gem squash tokoloshe. London: Pan.

    Contributors biography

    Georgina Horrell teaches at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of Homerton College. She has published a number of articles on southern African writing and was co-organiser of the international Letters Home festival and conference featuring contemporary South African writers and scholars (St Johns College, Cambridge, 2003).

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