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CIAO DATE: 06/03
Foreign Policy
Apartheid‘s Long Shadow
By Eva Hunter*
Midlands
By Jonny Steinberg
259 pages, Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2002
The Madonna of Excelsior
By Zakes Mda
268 pages, Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 2002
South Africa‘s ongoing obsession with crime, race, and the relationship between the two is highlighted in two recent bestsellers by two very different authors: Jonny Steinberg, one of the country‘s best investigative journalists, and Zakes Mda, one of its most established novelists. Both books, each with its own distinct style and approach, illuminate how South Africa‘s rural communities are faring post-apartheid and provide contrasting views of the country‘s continuing transition. In Midlands, Steinberg researches the 1999 murder of a white farmer in impoverished KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. Mda‘s fourth novel, The Madonna of Excelsior, is based on actual events in a one-street town of the Free State called Excelsior, where five white men and fourteen black women were arrested in 1971 for violating legislation that forbade sex between blacks and whites.
Recent news stories from Zimbabwe about the confiscation of white farms have made headlines, but Midlands is a dramatic reminder that racial tension in South Africa has also erupted in conflicts over rural land ownership. Cattle theft is endemic in poor ex-homelands like KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, where 24,000 head were stolen in 2001; murders of white South African farmers and their families have taken place in the country at an average of three or four a week since 1997. Steinberg examines one of those murders, investigating who killed Peter Mitchell in the spring of 1999 and why. Mitchell was shot in the back of the head as he was running toward his father‘s irrigation fields. Nothing but his gun was stolen, eliminating robbery as the motive. Steinberg deduces the victim fell prey to a revenge attack by local black peasants directed at the young man‘s father, Arthur Mitchell.
Inside the country, politicians, church leaders, and even the flamboyant flag urge citizens to see themselves as part of a “rainbow nation.” From outside, South Africa has earned praise for its transition to majority rule. Steinberg‘s book rightly flies in the face of facile optimism and uncritical nationalism. Conservative estimates place unemployment at 40 percent, AIDS and violent crime are rampant, and the gap is widening between the wealthy (some of whom are now black) and the poor. As the United Nations Development Programme reported in 2000, approximately 45 percent of South Africans live in absolute poverty. One of the poorest provinces, KwaZulu-Natal has 63 percent poverty; the Free State, the setting for Mda‘s novel, has 54 percent. Further, blacks in non-urban areas are more likely to be unemployed. Steinberg argues that the black youths murdered Mitchell “to push the boundary back,” to regain land that previously belonged to them. He targets white readers when he warns that the farm murders hint at “a host of unsettled scores we had brushed under the carpet.”
Yet even when one considers the tension in KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, as Steinberg himself points out, there is something particular rather than representative about the Mitchell murder. Steinberg concludes that Peter‘s father, Arthur, had precipitated the crime by introducing new rules to his farm. For example, the elder Mitchell decreed that each family on his land should have no more than five head of cattle, thus making it impossible for families to pay lobola (dowry). Without resources for lobola, sons wouldn‘t be able to marry, and lineages would die out. His rules heaped fresh fear and humiliation upon a poor local populace who had a history of quarrels with the previous white owner. But Mitchell sees the murder in a different light—as part of a campaign by the African National Congress to drive white farmers off the land. “This is a terrorist war,” he tells Steinberg.
The author‘s account is relatively evenhanded. Since whites seem more comfortable talking to another white person, Steinberg is able to explain thoroughly the farmers‘ difficulties. Yet he emphasizes that whites are not the predominant victims of South African crimes. Examining a list of bodies in the local police mortuary, he discovers that, apart from Peter Mitchell‘s murder, “Violent death in [this] district belongs to young unemployed black people. It happens like clockwork every weekend.”
Mda‘s The Madonna of Excelsior makes clear that one should not view all of South Africa through the prism of KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. Mda depicts a platteland (country) town that is markedly more peaceful, with a cohesive black community. The author has won South African and African awards for his previous novels. But this work is his finest to date, and, like Steinberg‘s book, it is selling briskly in South Africa. The Star newspaper reported that The Madonna of Excelsior is one of the most successful South African books in recent years, selling 2,000 copies in the first couple of days of the book‘s release.
His novel explores the infamous 1971 case in which five pillars of the Afrikaner community and fourteen black women were charged with violating apartheid‘s Immorality Act. The charges were dropped at the order of then Prime Minister Johannes Vorster, who thought exposing such miscegenation would have been “bad for the country.” Mda interviewed some of the black women involved in the case, as well as their mixed-race descendants. The main characters of his novel—Niki (the eponymous madonna), her “coloured” daughter Popi, and her son Viliki—are composites of these women and their children. Mda focuses on two main periods: from 1965, when a white farmer first raped Niki, to the trial in 1971 and then from 1994 when apartheid ended to 2000. Throughout the book, each of the characters faces a challenge. Niki struggles to heal herself of the bitter pain of being raped by two white men and abandoned by her black husband. Popi must learn to see the beauty in the straight hair and blue eyes inherited from her white father. And Viliki must overcome his resentment of the father who deserted his family.
Mda‘s characterization of the local populace is masterful. His grasp of small-town, apartheid society makes it possible to understand why, during apartheid, one of the white men charged committed suicide and another, a minister, attempted it. He reveals how mortified the wives of the white men are when they hear their husbands have cheated with black women and how delighted the black women are at humiliating their white madams. Writing of the post-apartheid period with his usual good-humored yet shrewd satire, Mda shows that some whites are unable to relinquish their sense of superiority. In one scene, Popi argues for a new library in the town council, but she is met with hostility from a white National Party member: “People who don‘t pay for services do not deserve a library. In any event, black people have other priorities. A library will be a white elephant. It‘s like casting pearls before swine.” But Mda also highlights the unthinkable shift that some whites have made: They sit on the town‘s council chamber with new black members and defer to a black mayor.
Mda‘s three recent novels are all strongly fact based, but they also all assert the value of the aesthetic in the life of South Africa‘s black people. Likewise, the author‘s black characters in The Madonna of Excelsior are much more than merely victims; they are able to find redemption and to heal themselves. Mda leaves readers with quite a different impression of black life than Steinberg does. But Mda does sound a warning: A diehard right-wing Afrikaner speaks in the novel of the sense of betrayal felt by the young men of the volk (Afrikaner nation), who were sent out to die in the struggle against the liberation movements—the struggle their elders have now jettisoned.
Unlike the blacks of KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, Excelsior‘s black community does reasonably well after 1994, even if not all those entitled to housing receive it, as black authorities reserve benefits for themselves and their families. Mda targets not the new leaders‘ inexpertness or their disagreements over policy, but the corrupt practices of some, as well as the lack of discernment of those who vote for them.
Although their choice of leaders is not always wise, rural South Africans have demanded changes in land rights and agricultural policy in three elections. The Draft Communal Land Rights Bill, introduced in parliament in 2002, is intended to transfer ownership from the state to communities living under traditional leaders. In that same year, new laws aimed at promoting the interests of black farmers went into effect, although new farmers do not get much support.
Both books suggest that, despite changes unimaginable even 20 years ago, some depredations of apartheid continue to cast a long shadow. As one of Steinberg‘s informants puts it: “Something terrible has happened to the youth. They still think they are soldiers, but there is no war to fight. Soldiers without a war are bandits.”