Writing Roots in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

What are the benefits and drawbacks of the popular practice of writing Alex Haley-style Roots narratives—and making roots claims more broadly—in post-apartheid South Africa? This article explores this question through special attention to two South African neo-slave narratives. The first, Botlhale Tema’s The People of Welgeval (2005), is a contemporary version of Haley’s classic that reveals the benefits of genealogical narration particularly in repairing individual trauma and addressing the vexing problem of land redistribution. The second, Yvette Christiansë’s Unconfessed (2006), can be read as text that challenges both the literary model and the psychological and social projects I associate with Haley and Tema, as it foregrounds the gaps or cracks present in such acts of recuperation and focuses on a kind of pain than cannot be assuaged or made up for. I argue that, taken together, these novels concerned both with historical slavery in South Africa and its legacy in the democratic present help us to move beyond a longstanding “roots”/ “routes” dichotomy to understand what roles each term plays for individuals grappling with racial oppression and where, how, and why the terms fold into each other.

Keywords:

• South Africa
• roots
• slavery
• land claims
• post-apartheid culture
• Yvette Christiansë
• Botlhale Tema

Notes

¹The author thanks Meg Samuelson, Tina Steiner, Simon van Schalkwyck, Jennifer Malec, Kathryn Lachman and Tim Watson for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

²David Chioni Moore’s article “Routes” provides an invaluable analysis of the reception and significance in the United States of Haley’s novel and the miniseries made from it, and serves as a kind of recuperation of the text. The following paragraph draws on Moore and also Watson, “Ordering the Family.”

³The government refused to screen Roots as late as 1984, when they blocked it from being aired on the Bop-TV station designed specifically for the “homeland” of Bophuthatswana. See Alan Cowell, “South African Whites Seek Black TV,” New York Times 1 August, 1984. For information on the popularity of the novel Roots in South Africa, see “Roots: A S. African Bestseller,” Washington Post 30 May 1977.

⁴Nixon describes the politics of allowing television into South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, suggesting that the Afrikaner National Party, the party of apartheid, finally approved state-controlled television technology in 1976 in order to use it as a tool for upholding an exclusionary and conservative vision of the nation (76).

⁵Caryle Murphy, “Rage, Tears Meet Roots in South Africa,” Washington Post 27 May 1978.

⁶The USICA apparently avoided having the film censored by failing to submit the film to the censors. The government “decided not to do anything about it rather than create a diplomatic incident.” See “Roots in South Africa,” Newsweek 15 May 1978.

⁷I am indebted to Isabel Hofmeyr for this point.

⁸A partial list of fictional and autobiographical or semi-autobiographical texts that could be called post-apartheid “roots narratives” includes Darryl Accone All Under Heaven: The Story of a Chinese Family in South Africa (Claremont, David Philip, 2004); Maja Kriel Rings in a Tree (Cape Town, Kwela, 2004); Aziz Hassim, The Lotus People (Johannesburg, STE, 2003) and The Revenge of Kali (Johannesburg, STE, 2009); and Ronnie Govender, Song of the Atman (Johannesburg, Jacana, 2006). Also fundamentally about narrating roots, though tending to emphasize mixture and impurity, are novels like André Brink, Imaginings of Sand (New York, Harcourt Brace and Co., 1996); Anne Landsman, The Devil’s Chimney (New York, Soho, 1997); Achmat Dangor, Kafka’s Curse (Cape Town, Kwela, 1997); Elleke Boehmer, Bloodlines (Cape Town, David Philip, 2000); Zoë Wicomb, David’s Story (New York, Feminist Press, 2001); Etienne van Heerden, The Long Silence of Mario Salviati (New York, Regan Books, 2002); and Zakes Mda, The Heart of Redness (New York, Picador, 2003). A spectacular real-life Roots narrative from post-apartheid period is that of Ebrahim Manuel, who purports to have located his long-lost ancestors in Indonesia and even participated in what Worden describes as a “Roots-style reunion with inhabitants of his ancestral home” in 1999—an experience that led to his story being featured in international exhibitions in Jakarta and Amsterdam (Worden 35–6). The exhibition catalog for the Amsterdam exhibition, Group Portrait South Africa: Nine Family Histories, contains an extended narrative chronology of this experience (Faber 168–75). Manuel has used the publicity generated by these narratives to construct what scholars consider questionable land claims to different parts of the Western Cape (Worden 35–6). The relation between roots narratives and land claims will be discussed in more detail below.

⁹One might point, for instance, to the importance of genealogy to the Afrikaners of the separatist colony Orania, or the uses of “essential” Colored Nationalism for political and material gain criticized by Zoë Wicomb.

¹⁰See Worden (31–3) for more on the politics of building the Iziko Slave Lodge museum and other memorials in Cape Town and on wine farms throughout the Western Cape. Worden also points (at 33, note 40) to the musical theater shows Rosa (1996) and Ghoema (2005) as well as the performances Salaam Stories (2003) and Cargo (2007).

¹¹For one example of an article that uses the text as a springboard for historical analysis, see Andrew Manson and Bernard Mbenga, “The Evolution and Destruction of Oorlam Communities in the Rustenberg District of South Africa: The Cases of Welgeval and Bethlehem, 1850s-1980,” African Historical Review 41.2 (2009): 85–115.

¹²I refer here to the 19th century geography of South Africa. After the conquest of the indigenous peoples and prior to the 1910 Union, what we now call “South Africa” was a collection of British colonies, such as the Cape Colony, and independent Boer (Afrikaner) republics, like the South African or Transvaal Republic, which will be discussed below.

¹³Tema’s choice to label her the experience of her ancestors as “slavery” is potentially controversial since, since, as Meg Samuelson pointed out in a personal communication, a debate exists in South Africa about the similarities and differences between slaves and inboekelinge. Nevertheless Tema is adamant on this point, and in this paper I follow her terminology.

¹⁴Coombes discusses the importance and eventual sidelining of the Slave Route Project within ANC cultural policy in the immediate post-apartheid period (204). See also Ward and Worden. Program goals are transcribed from the memorandum entitled “International Day for Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition,” ANC news brief, 14 August 2000, available online at http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/20/041.html.

¹⁵See for instance the conclusions of the BBC’s Crossing Continents program on “South Africa’s disputed land,” available on-line at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programs/crossing_continents/7493060.stm. Walker draws attention in particular to the failure of restitution in the Northern Cape. While insisting on recognizing the positive aspects of the work of the Land Claims Commission, she suggests that the underlying narrative that links restitution of land to dispossessed communities with sustainability and development needs to be reconsidered, since the return of land in particular has not been shown to provide a stable source of community development (16–24).

¹⁶I am indebted to Simon van Schalkwyck for this formulation.

¹⁷For a reading of the complications in Beloved, see Peterson (2006).

¹⁸For Christiansë’s explanation of the colonial court documents on which Unconfessed is based, see her “Author’s Note.” Toni Morrison has been a particularly influential author vis-à-vis contemporary South African writers, as Stéphane Robolin points out in the case of Zoë Wicomb (299). Margaret Lenta writes that “[t]he most obvious influence on Christiansë…has been Toni Morrison’s Beloved” (106). I should note that most articles on Unconfessed reference the connection between these two texts, but the only more extended discussion of their relationship I have seen to date is Lenta.

¹⁹Christiansë herself uses the term “love song”; see her “Author’s Note.”

²⁰As will become clear below, this Foucauldian genealogy is set up and in Samuelson’s view comes to replace traditional genealogy. For another example of the play of traditional and Nietzschean-Foucauldian genealogy in contemporary South African literature, see Bystrom (231).

²¹On the amelioration laws, see also Lenta, who argues that they made slave conditions worse (3).

²²Along with upholding racist and sexist distributions of power within particular families, and as Timothy Watson (paragraphs 11–12) persuasively argues, the discourse of genealogy popular in England and its colonial territories in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries played an important role in shaping the emergent science of anthropology, and thus the racial justifications for late imperialism that arose from it in the mid- to late- nineteenth century.

²³See Samuelson (“Lose” 45; “Castaway”) for an alternate reading of this passage as an attempt to “mar[k] slavery’s ongoing recurrence,” especially in terms of its continual reproduction within shattered family structures.

²⁴Lenta describes Sila’s recovery of pre-slavery memory is one of the most powerful aspects of the novel (103).

²⁵Celia Britton, in an analysis of the politics of Glissant’s ouevre, suggests that Glissant’s critique is aimed mainly at the colonizers rather than newly post-colonial nations (4). At the same time, Glissant clearly expresses his view on Haley’s project in the passage cited as an epigraph to this article, and further develops his preference for non-exclusionary claims in a passage that will be explored below.

²⁶See Joseph R. Slaughter for an illuminating discussion of the politics of plagiarism accusations. Slaughter raises the question of why borrowing from the classics is called “intertextuality” in modernist European works but “plagiarism” when the author is African (277–9). See also Moore (9).