Cape Town in Contemporary South African Literary Imagination

1. Cape Town in Contemporary South African Literary Imagination Kata Gyuris African Globalities – Global Africans 9-10 June, 2016

2. Introduction • Retracing one segment of Cape Town’s racial history as represented in literature: • Yvette Christiansë’s Unconfessed (2006) • André Brink’s Philida (2012) • Richard Rive’s ‘Buckingham Palace’, District Six (1986) • Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples (1993) • Cape Coloured identities • An extremely heterogeneous Capetonian ethnic group (population over 4,700 000 in 2014) http://beta2.statssa.gov.za/publications/P0302/P03022014.pdf • Comprehensive chronology and continuity: from slavery to the later apartheid era

3. Slavery’s Legacy in South Africa • Can be traced back to the arrival of Dutch settlers in the middle of the 17th century • Often interpreted as the precursor of the later apartheid system but up until quite recently it has masqueraded in a cloak of silence • Despite the fact that historiography has known of and has dealt with the issue of slavery, this knowledge and self-recognition has failed to enter public consciousness and public discourse (Baderoon 94), cf. the South African Indian diaspora’s delayed recognition of their painful legacy as indentured slave labourers • Healing and recovering from the trauma is still in progress -> in literature, it took until the late 20th century and early 21st century for writers to be able to conceive of slave narratives, and for South African audiences to be able to process them

4. Yvette Christiansë’s Unconfessed (2006) • South African slavery as heavily gendered(Morris 401) • The novelsrevisit real lives of slave women • The story of the slave woman Sila van de Kaap, sentenced to death in 1823 for the murder of her infant son (fathered through rape by her slavemaster); her sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment on Robben Island • The author relied extensively on archival court reports when she retraced Sila’s life from the time she was kidnapped from her native Mozambique to her death in prison • No unified narrative, instead, a series of first-person fragments from which the reader must (re)construct Sila’s story • DoesChristiansë actually reappropriateSila and her story by constructing Sila’s narrative from various discourses that are not her own (court documents, testimonies, etc.)? (Morris)

5. André Brink’s Philida(2012) • Brink re-interrogates his slave-holding family’s history • The novel is set a few years before the abolition of slavery (1834) • Brink also did research about Philida with the help of Tracey Randle • The novel starts with Philida setting out on a journey to Cape Town in order to meet the slave protector and to deliver a complaint against her master’s son, Frans • Brink backtracks Philida’s movements through the Western and Eastern Cape but also does more than this -> He supplants the map with her body: • “the thing that really remember is my body. Everything leave its mark there. Some you can see, others you can’t, but they all there. Burns and cuts and bruises. The scrape marks on my knees and my elbows and my heels, all kinds of marks.” (Brink 14) • Refining instead of reappropriating their voices

6. An Iconic Place of Memory: District Six • District Six, a predominantly coloured slum in central Cape Town • The money given to slaveholders for agreeing to the terms of abolition was used to build District Six -> its first inhabitants were the newly emancipated slaves (Layne 54) • Various inhabitants with a real sense of community: • Miss Mary and her brothel • Winsor Park (a group of petty criminals) • The Jungles (three Muslim brothers) • the Knights (a Christian family) • 1966: Group Areas Act declared the district a white area-> everything was bulldozed off, inhabitants moved to Cape Flats which became a hotbed of coloured gang violence (Roshan 93-94)

7. An Iconic Place of Memory: District Six • ”District Six is like an island […] an island in a sea of apartheid. The whole of District Six is one big apartheid, so we can’t see. We only see it when the white man comes and forces it on us, when he makes us see it – when the police come, and the council people and so on – or when we leave the District, when we leave our island and go into Cape Town or to Sea Point or come here to Kalk Bay. Then we again see apartheid. I know the District is dirty and poor and a slum, as the newspapers always remind us, but it’s our own and we have never put up notices which say ”Slegsblankes” or “Whites only”. They put up the notices. When the white man comes into the District with his notices he is a stranger, and we come out of the District he makes us realise that we are strangers.’” (Rive 96-97)

8. The District Six Museum – A Symbolic Force

9. Apartheid Ideology Deconstructed • The Smell of Apples takes place after District 6 was demolished • The fragility of identity and ideology -> A child’s perspective – early indoctrination • Implied narrator (Rajiva 87) • “Mum is sick and tiredof reading in Die Burger about the Coloured boycotts and the savage goings-on at the Coloured University on the Flats.” (Behr 32) • “Dad says the history of the Afrikaner, also the Afrikaners from Tanganyika and Kenya, is a proud history. […] Uncle John said that the Coloureds will never be able to say that we did to them what the English did to the Afrikaners.” (Behr 38) • Apartheid as physically repulsive (cf. Marlene van Niekerk)

10. Conclusion • The continuity of violence from slavery to apartheid often remains unnoticed on a personal level • This pool of texts shows various mnemonic processes that attempt to reconstruct, reinterpret or even supplant existing or non-existing histories of (coloured) identities • Literature as a way of mediating a lack of historical insight

11. Works Cited • Behr, Mark. The Smell of Apples. London: Abacus. 2011. • Brink, André. Philida : A Novel. London: Harvill Secker. 2012. • Christiansë, Yvette. Unconfessed: A Novel. Cape Town: Kwela Books. 2006. • Gabeba Baderoon, "The African Oceans – Tracing the Sea as Memory of Slavery in South African Literature and Culture,” Research in African Literatures 40, no. 4 (Writing Slavery in(to) the African Diaspora) (2009). • Valmont Layne, „The District Six Museum: An Ordinary People’s Place,” The Public Historian 30, no. 1 (2008). • “Mid-year Population Estimates 2014,” Statistics South Africa, accessed June 4, 2016, http://beta2.statssa.gov.za/publications/P0302/P03022014.pdf • Rosalind C. Morris, “In the Name of Trauma: Notes on Testimony, Truth Telling and the Secret of Literature in South Africa,” Comparative Literature Studies 48, no. 3 (Special Issue Trials of Trauma) (2011). • Jessica Murray. “When ‘Good’ Mothers Kill: A Representation of Infanticide,” Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity, no. 76 (Family Politics) (2008). • Jay Rajiva. „The Seduction of Narration in Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples,” Research in African Literatures 44, no. 4 (2013 Winter). • Rive, Richard. ‘Buckingham Palace’, District Six. Introduction by Robin Malan. Cape Town: David Philip Publishers. 1996. • Tony Roshan Samara, Cape Town After Apartheid. Crime and Governance in the Divided City. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. 2011.

12. Thank you for your attention! gyuriskata@gmail.com