Literature as laboratory: Hilda Kuper's factional representations of Swaziland

Abstract

Anthropologists have long recognised the intersections between factual and fictional representations of other cultures, and have actively engaged in producing imaginative cultural translations alongside ethnographic accounts. This resulting ‘blurring of genres’ has also been investigated by anthropologists, but often at the expense of the imagined subject and the social, political, and cultural forces at work in the literary versions. Hilda Kuper's literary expression attests to how an anthropologist can negotiate the boundaries of science and art to produce a literature of protest that acknowledges the larger project of writing back to empire, engages with South African apartheid, and intervenes in the representation of Swaziland by earlier colonial and travel narratives by producing alternative visions that at once affirm and critique custom and tradition. At the same time, her fiction and drama betray the tensions at work in the ethnographic imagination.

Keywords:

• anthropology
• ethnography
• protest literature
• Swaziland
• South Africa

Notes

The act of speaking for others is, of course, highly problematic. As a white southern African intellectual, Kuper's attempt to give voice to oppressed black South Africans is also entangled in a hegemonic western discourse. In an earlier article (Vincent 2000), I explored the various slippages in Kuper's A Witch in My Heart as her avowed cultural relativism gives way to the denial of the reality of witchcraft when she translates the witch into metaphor. Here, however, I am thinking of the claim made about South African literature in The Empire Writes Back: ‘Clearly all Black writing and, to some extent, that white writing which opposes apartheid … functions as protest. But, since all writing in South Africa has obvious and immediate political consequences, it must explicitly engage in resistance to the oppressive regime in order fully to avoid acquiesence [sic]’ (Ashcroft et al. 1989:84).

My recent article in English Academy Review expands on issues raised in this paragraph (see Vincent 2011).