Beloved Countries: Labour, Landscape and the Politics of Conservation in Three Novels from KwaZulu-Natal

Abstract

Lauretta Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die (1990) chronicles the lives of a group of rural South African women as they struggle against both the black and white patriarchies in which they are enmeshed and the dire environmental conditions in which they live. However, critics have tended to focus substantially more on Ngcobo’s interest in women than on the novel’s rural setting, the environmental problems that define it, or the longer literary history of which the novel is a part. This article re-examines And They Didn’t Die in order to show, in one vein, how the struggles that Ngcobo narrates are oriented towards environmental as well as gendered forms of justice. But the article also puts And They Didn’t Die in dialogue with both Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) and Jonny Steinberg’s Midlands (2002), two texts set in the same part of KwaZulu-Natal, in order to examine a problem important to ecocriticism both in South Africa and beyond: namely, the relationship between environmental history and literary form. As I show, while And They Didn’t Die both draws on and re-imagines the conventions that guide Paton’s novel in order to construct its account of black rural life, the novel also opens up a series of conflicts that reverberate long after the time in which it is set.

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Loren Kruger, Jennifer Wenzel and Chandani Patel, all of whom provided invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

Notes

¹ While some of South Africa’s reserves were vast tracts of land set off from areas of white settlement, KwaZulu itself was broken into numerous smaller allotments that were often contiguous with white farms. The intimate spatial ecology that results is a key part of And They Didn’t Die, as well as Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) and Jonny Steinberg’s Midlands (2002), the two other texts at issue in this essay. On the geography of KwaZulu, see J. Butler, R. Rothberg, J. Adams, The Black Homelands of South Africa: The Political and Economic Development of Bophutswana and KwaZulu (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1977), pp. 15–17.

² L. Ngcobo, And They Didn’t Die (New York, Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1999), p. 1.

³ ‘Jezile’ means ‘disappointed one’, a fitting name for the character who endures struggle after struggle in the text. Thanks to Loren Kruger for her explanation of Ngcobo’s naming choices.

⁴ See W. Beinart and C. Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa: Politics and Popular Movements in the Transkei and Eastern Cape (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987), and A. Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 33.

⁵ Both Steinberg and his publisher present Midlands as a work of straightforward investigative journalism, though there are many reasons to read the text as a blend of fact and fiction. The book makes it clear that the names of people and places have been changed to protect the identities of Steinberg’s interlocutors; one informant turns out to be a blend of two people who helped with Steinberg’s research; and Steinberg routinely reports verbatim the content of conversations at which he was not present. For more on the veracity of Steinberg’s account as journalism, see C. Walker, review of Midlands, by Jonny Steinberg, Transformation, 52 (2003), pp. 96–8. For the details surrounding the murder on which Midlands is based, see Anonymous, Unequal Protection: The State Response to Violence on South African Farms (New York, Human Rights Watch, 2001), pp. 219–21.

⁶ Ngcobo’s focus on the plight of women left behind in rural areas by South Africa’s migrant labour systems gives her text a close affinity with Phyllis Ntantala’s essay, ‘The Widows of the Reserves’. Like And They Didn’t Die, ‘The Widows of the Reserves’ takes up the loss, deprivation and despair experienced by women essentially abandoned in the reserves by a labour system that made making a living and sustaining familial relationships all but impossible. For Ntantala’s essay, see ‘The Widows of the Reserves’, in M.J. Daymond et al. (eds), Women Writing Africa: The Southern Region (New York, Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2003), pp. 248–52. For a comprehensive account of the place of women in the struggle against apartheid, see C. Walker, Women and Resistance in South Africa (London, Onyx Press, 1982).

⁷ See, for instance, G. Farred, ‘“Not Like Women at All”: Black Female Subjectivity in Lauretta Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die’, Genders, 16 (Spring 1993), pp. 94–112; and M.J. Daymond, ‘Afterword’, in Ngcobo, And They Didn’t Die, pp. 252–6.

⁸ ‘Slow violence’, for Rob Nixon, names ‘a violence [that] occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’. One of the key arguments of this article is that, for Ngcobo, conservation in rural South Africa functions in precisely the way that Nixon’s account of slow violence suggests – as a means of making Zulu farming practices untenable, and thus undoing the links between Ngcobo’s rural women and the land. See R. Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 2.

⁹ See A. Vital, ‘Situating Ecology in Recent South African Fiction: J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals and Zakes Mda’sThe Heart of Redness’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 31, 2 (2005), pp. 297–313.

¹⁰ On the fraught relationship between ecocriticism and environmental history, see H. Bergthaller, ‘Introduction: Ecocriticism and Environmental History’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 22,1 (2015), pp. 5–8; and G.D. Wood, ‘Introduction: Eco-Historicism’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 8, 2 (2008), pp. 1–7.

¹¹ Daymond acknowledges the similar settings of And They Didn’t Die and Cry, the Beloved Country, but maintains that Paton is not a significant influence on Ngcobo’s work. This article reads the two novels intertextually in order to demonstrate a much closer relationship than Daymond suggests. See Daymond, ‘Afterword’, p. 253.

¹² Though the fictional Sigageni and the real city of Durban are actually no more than two or three hours apart, And They Didn’t Die magnifies the experience of distance considerably in order to emphasise the cruelty of the system that prevents women from accompanying their husbands to the cities while they work.

¹³ Ngcobo, And They Didn’t Die, p. 3.

¹⁴ See N. Ndebele, ‘The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 12, 2 (1986), pp. 143 –57.

¹⁵ Farred, ‘Not Like Women’, p. 98.

¹⁶ Aran S. Mackinnon notes that, given the constraints imposed by land segregation in rural South Africa, ‘the male Zulu domain of cattle-keeping managed to survive far better than the predominantly female domain of agriculture’, which suffered as a result of the increasing degradation of farmland in the reserves. See A.S. Mackinnon, ‘Chiefs, Cattle and “Betterment”: Contesting Zuluness and Segregation in the Reserves’, in B. Carton, J. Laband and J. Sithole (eds), Zulu Identities: Being Zulu Past and Present (Durban, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008), p. 251.

¹⁷ As Fred T. Hendricks suggests, a key goal of the initiatives put into place after the Betterment Proclamation of 1939 was the ‘stabilisation’ of rural populations so as to stem the tide of black South Africans trying to move to the cities. In other words, at its core Betterment sought to impose white land-management practices in black areas in the hope of enabling South Africa’s reserves to sustain the massive numbers of people forced to live in them. See F.T. Hendricks, ‘Loose Planning and Rapid Resettlement: The Politics of Conservation and Control in Transkei, South Africa, 1950–1970’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 15, 2 (1989), pp. 306–25.

¹⁸ Ngcobo, And They Didn’t Die, p. 1.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Beinart and Bundy explain that opposition to mandatory cattle-dipping – funded largely by a tax paid by poor farmers themselves – in the rural Transkei in the 1910s was so fierce that some tanks were attacked and burned, with one actually blown up using dynamite stolen from a road construction project nearby. See Beinart and Bundy, Hidden Struggles, p. 192.

²¹ A.S. Mackinnon provides a succinct analysis of the importance of cattle to the Zulu homestead economy in ‘Chiefs, Cattle and “Betterment”’. See also W.D. Hammond-Tooke, ‘Cattle Symbolism in Zulu Culture’, in Carton, Laband and Sithole (eds), Zulu Identities, pp. 62–8.

²² Ngcobo, And They Didn’t Die, p. 106.

²³ See L. Ngcobo, Cross of Gold (New York, Prentice Hall Press, 1981), p. 1.

²⁴ Ngcobo, And They Didn’t Die, pp.78–9.

²⁵ Ngcobo references ‘Betterment schemes’ directly at multiple points in the novel. See Ngcobo, And They Didn’t Die, pp. 44, 51. On the history of Betterment in South Africa, see C. de Wet, Moving Together, Drifting Apart: Betterment Planning and Villagisation in a South African Homeland (Johannesburg, University of Witwatersrand Press, 1995).

²⁶ Ngcobo, And They Didn’t Die, p. 65.

²⁷ Ibid., p. 46.

²⁸ Ibid., p. 43.

²⁹ While Coetzee’s animal turn is only tangentially related to the history of apartheid, and while Mda’s narrative elides the years of apartheid in its entirety, And They Didn’t Die foregrounds the slow violence of apartheid in a way that makes the struggles of rural South African communities in the apartheid years impossible to ignore. For writers like Coetzee and Mda, in other words, the turn towards the environment comes only after the end of what The Heart of Redness pointedly terms ‘the middle generations’ – the years of British colonialism and subsequent apartheid rule – while, for And They Didn’t Die, the struggle for environmental justice is a fundamental part of anti- apartheid activism as narrated in the text. See Vital, ‘Situating Ecology’, p. 313, and Z. Mda, The Heart of Redness (New York, Picador, 2003), p. 3.

³⁰ Paton’s famous line is also the title of John Lambert’s chapter on the environmental history of colonial Natal: J. Lambert, ‘“The Titihoya Does Not Cry Here Any More”: The Crisis in the Homestead Economy in Colonial Natal’, in S. Dovers, R. Edgecomb and B. Guest (eds), South Africa’s Environmental History: Cases and Comparisons (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2002), pp. 48–60; Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country, pp. 33–4.

³¹ Byron Caminero-Santangelo provides an extensive analysis of Cry, the Beloved Country and its relationship to the pastoral in Different Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice and Political Ecology (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2014), pp. 75–132.

³² J.M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1988).

³³ Paton does provide some account of the futility of women’s labour in the opening of the novel, when we read that ‘[d]own in the valleys women scratch the soil that is left, and the maize hardly reaches the height of a man’. In this moment, however, the reader is effectively in the position of the elder Jarvis looking down on Ndotsheni from the richness of his well-irrigated farm – Paton’s use of perspective, in other words, reinforces the difference between white and black areas that the scene might otherwise be read against. Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country, p. 34.

³⁴ Ngcobo, And They Didn’t Die, pp. 5–6.

³⁵ Ibid., p. 18.

³⁶ On this point, see Coetzee, White Writing, p. 7.

³⁷ Ngcobo, And They Didn’t Die, p. 6.

³⁸ Ibid., p. 106.

³⁹ Ibid., p. 58.

⁴⁰ Ibid., p. 59.

⁴¹ Ibid., p. 60.

⁴² Farred provides an extended account about the ambivalence of ‘tradition’ in the novel in ‘Not Like Women at All’.

⁴³ According to Williams, a ‘working country is hardly ever a landscape. The very idea of landscape implies separation and observation’. See R. Williams, The Country and the City (New York, Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 120.

⁴⁴ Ngcobo, And They Didn’t Die, p. 129.

⁴⁵ Ibid., p. 20.

⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 137.

⁴⁷ Though now spread throughout South Africa, jacaranda trees originated in South America and the Caribbean. The lush bounty of Collett’s farm thus suggests not only the deeply unequal social and environmental conditions that govern life in Sigageni, but the transnational history of the environment at issue in the text. On the jacaranda and its history, see A.W. Gentry and W. Morawetz, ‘Bignoniaceae: Part II (Tribe Tecomeae)’, Flora Neotropica, 25, 2 (1992), pp. 51–104.

⁴⁸ Ngcobo, And They Didn’t Die, p. 139.

⁴⁹ Steinberg’s book was awarded the Sunday Times’ Alan Paton award in 2003. For the quote, see J. Steinberg, Midlands (Cape Town, Jonathan Ball, 2002), p. 3.

⁵⁰ Ibid.

⁵¹ Ibid., p. 54.

⁵² Ibid., pp. 4, 76.

⁵³ Ngcobo, And They Didn’t Die, p. 235.

⁵⁴ Ibid., p. 226.

⁵⁵ Ibid., p. 242.

⁵⁶ J. Steinberg, Midlands: A Very South African Murder (New York, Jonathan Ball, 2002).

⁵⁷ Another feature that Midlands shares with Cry, the Beloved Country is the remarkably masculine world that it presents – the key figures in each text are all male, with women appearing mostly in the guise of grieving mothers, both black and white.

⁵⁸ Steinberg, Midlands, p. xi.

⁵⁹ Ibid., p. 18.

⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 29.

⁶¹ Ibid., pp. 84, 168–70.

⁶² For all his care in changing names and places, a cursory overview of farm murders from KwaZulu-Natal in 1999 makes the true names of people and places easy to discern. On this point, see note 4.

⁶³ On this episode in South African history, see J. Guy, Remembering the Rebellion: The Zulu Uprising of 1906 (Durban, University of Kwazulu-Natal Press, 2006).

⁶⁴ Steinberg, Midlands, pp. 227–31.

⁶⁵ Ibid., p. 16.

⁶⁶ Ibid., p.10.

⁶⁷ Cherryl Walker notes that while land reform remains a symbolically powerful project in South Africa, it never occupied an especially high place on the ANC’s plans for transforming the country after apartheid. See C. Walker, ‘The Limits to Land Reform: Rethinking “The Land Question”’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 31, 4 (2005), p. 806.

⁶⁸ Steinberg, Midlands, p. 19.

⁶⁹ Ibid., p. 254.

⁷⁰ See Coetzee, White Writing, and J. Foster, Washed with Sun: Landscape and the Making of White South Africa (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008).

⁷¹ Coetzee, White Writing, p. 7.