You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town

YOU CAN'T GET LOST IN CAPE TOWN

Women Writing Africa

A Project of The Feminist Press at The City University of New York

Funded by The Ford Foundation

Women Writing Africa is a project of cultural reconstruction that aims to restore African women's voices to the public sphere. Through the collection of written and oral narratives to be published in six regional anthologies, the project will document the history of self-conscious literary expression by African women throughout the continent. In bringing together women's voices, Women Writing Africa will illuminate for a broad public the neglected history and culture of African women, who have shaped and been shaped by their families, societies, and nations.

The Women Writing Africa Series, which supports the publication of individual books, is part of the Women Writing Africa project.

The Women Writing Africa Series

ACROSS BOUNDARIES

The Journey of a South African Woman Leader

A Memoir by Mamphela Ramphele

AND THEY DIDN'T DIE

A Novel by Lauretta Ngcobo

CHANGES

A Love Story

A Novel by Ama Ata Aidoo

HAREM YEARS

The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, 1879–1924

by Huda Shaarawi

Translated and introduced by Margot Badran

NO SWEETNESS HERE

And Other Stories

by Ama Ata Aidoo

TEACHING AFRICAN LITERATURES IN A GLOBAL LITERARY ECONOMY

Women's Studies Quarterly
25, nos. 3 & 4 (fall/winter 1998)

Edited by Tuzyline Jita Allan

ZULU WOMAN

The Life Story of Christina Sibiya

by Rebecca Hourwich Reyher

Published by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York

The Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

New York, NY 10016

feministpress.org

First Feminist Press edition, 2000

Copyright © 1987 by Zoë Wicomb

Introduction copyright © 2000 by Marcia Wright

Afterword © 2000 by Carol Sicherman

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Originally published in 1987 in the United Kingdom by Virago Press, London, and in the United States by Pantheon, New York. This edition published by arrangement with Little, Brown.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wicomb, Zoë

You can't get lost in Cape Town / Zoë Wicomb ; historical introduction by Marcia Wright ; literary afterword by Carol Sicherman.—1st Feminist Press ed.

p. cm. — (The women writing Africa series)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN: 978-155861-915-9 (e-book)

2. Coloured people (South Africa)—Fiction. 2. Young women—South Africa—Fiction. 3. Cape Town (South Africa)—Fiction I. Title. II. Series

PR9369.3.W53 Y6 2000

823—dc21

99-053119

This publication is made possible, in part, by a grant from The Ford Foundation in support of the Feminist Press's Women Writing Africa project. The Feminist Press is grateful to Florence Howe, Joanne Markell, Caroline Urvater, and Genevieve Vaughan for their generosity in supporting this publication.

CONTENTS

Historical Introduction

Marcia Wright

Bowl Like Hole

Jan Klinkies

When the Train Comes

A Clearing in the Bush

You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town

Home Sweet Home

Behind the Bougainvillea

A Fair Exchange

Ash on My Sleeve

A Trip to the Gifberge

Glossary

Literary Afterword

Carol Sicherman

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION

Although
You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town
, Zoë Wicomb's portrait of a young coloured
¹
woman's coming to age in apartheid-ruled South Africa, spans the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, this episodic novel is not a period piece. Indeed, to grasp the complex consciousness of those known in the twentieth century as the Cape Coloured people, one must reach back not just fifty years, but to a time far anterior to apartheid. What is more, this portrayal of one young woman's life and expanding awareness is highly relevant to the present, when the struggle in South Africa is defined not by race-led laws but rather by class aspirations and economic disadvantages that carry forward a history of vulnerability.

Wicomb's protagonist, Frieda Shenton, and her immediate family resolutely defy easy categorization, even when the characters themselves indulge in stereotyping. The Shentons are exceptional among coloured people in Little Namaqualand, an impoverished, semiarid area beyond the rich wheat farms and vineyards north of Cape Town. With respect to their neighbors, the Shentons are well educated and, invested in social improvement, proud of their growing command of the English language and of their patrilineal name-giver, a Scot. Frieda's father, a primary school teacher, is recognized as a local notable, above the “commonality,” while Frieda's mother has something more equivocal in her identity: Griqua parentage.
²
Mrs. Shenton has embraced the ideal of the “lady” and continually warns her daughter against compromising behavior. The young and then mature Frieda must cope with and transcend essentially conservative anxieties that feed the stereotypes purveyed by her
mother, which reveal a perspective prevalent among the coloured petty bourgeoisie. In telling Frieda's story, Wicomb explores class, race, gender, and culture across a wide register.

L
ITTLE
N
AMAQUALAND

The social arena in Little Namaqualand into which Frieda is born encompasses a confusing array of identities. These identities fall short of being ethnicities, that is, coherent groups claiming a common ancestry. Rather, individuals carry or are assigned identities that may be fragments of their ancestry but bespeak stereotypical behaviors or features. A preliminary understanding of the roots of these various identities will enrich appreciation for Wicomb's work, which restores coloured experience and history as it contextualizes, revises, and humanizes it. Wicomb does this on a personal scale, bringing forth characters who—albeit in sometimes oblique ways—comment on, align themselves with, or represent various indigenous and settler groups, ranging from the indigenous Namaqua to the coloured Griqua to the white Boers and British.
You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town
depicts not only the strong cultural hold of these identities but also their limits and shifting nature, as well as the painful history of colonization, displacement, and apartheid that accompanies them.

The Namaqua of Namaqualand were among the groups of Khoikhoi, the indigenous African pastoralists encountered by the Dutch in their initial settlements at the Cape in the mid-seventeenth century. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Namaqua group of Khoi had yielded to the incoming Basters (literally meaning
hybrid
), mixed-race groups of frontierspeople.
³
The absorbed
Namaqua surface in Wicomb's work through Skitterboud, the servant who figures in “A Fair Exchange.”

Of all these mixed-race frontierspeople, by far the most prominent were the Griqua, a group substantially involved in the nineteenth-century northward extension of Cape colonial culture. In the early 1800s, patriarchally led settlements of Basters moved north of the Orange River, beyond the limits of the Cape Colony, where they exercised greater political autonomy while seeking to maintain their economic and cultural ties to the Cape Colony. The name
Griqua
was adopted at one of the key settlements, Klaarwater, renamed Griquatown “because, ‘on consulting among themselves they found a majority were descended from a person of the name of Griqua', that is, from the eponymous ancestor of the Khoikhoi clan, the /Karihur (‘Chariguriqua').”
⁴
The Griqua leadership and following continued to be materially oriented toward the Cape Colony, Christian and literate in aspiration, but hardly united among themselves. By the twentieth century, the Griqua had long passed their prime as frontierspeople. Some were dislodged from commercial sheep farming in the Orange Free State by white farmers. Others, in what became annexed as the northern Cape, were ultimately forced to emigrate east, extruded by the forces of capitalism and colonial authority that accompanied the exploitation of the diamond fields. A remnant of Griqua later journeyed to Little Namaqualand, where they added to a sparse, heterogeneous population occupying a space of very little economic potential.

Another identity that figures in the milieu of Little Namaqualand is that of the Boers, later called Afrikaners, who had been settling in this marginal environment from the eighteenth century onward.
Boer
was a term
current before
Afrikaner
, but subsequently often used by the British to suggest a poor white element and a generally backward culture. Under apartheid, which specifically climaxed an Afrikaner Nationalist campaign to elevate their
volk
, Boers were regarded by the disenfranchised as a privileged group. Even as poor whites, they belonged to the political master class. For Mrs. Shenton, however, the word is still loaded with class distinctions; Boers lacked the refined quality of the more “civilized” British.

These identities and their accompanying stereotypes consolidated—particularly during the apartheid regime—in a brittle cultural and economic hierarchy, positioning Africans as the lowest group, with Indian and coloured groups then following, and privileging white European settlers. This hierarchy plays out, in overt ways, within given groups. Frieda's coloured classmate Henry Hendrikse, for example, who has dark features and who knows the Xhosa language, is disparagingly referred to in the beginning of the work as “almost pure kaffir” (116). Later in the work, after black resistance has surfaced, Henry's roots are not to be easily dismissed. Frieda's acquaintance with Africans is slight, but she is presented as fascinated by the difference of indigenous people, who are distant and alien even as they occupy the same space. Henry Hendrikse remains an intentionally unclarified character, although evidently a “registered Coloured.”

In fact, for over a century, Western-acculturated Xhosa people had been settled in the northwestern Cape, brought in purposefully by the colonial authorities to serve as a buffer community against the raiding “Bushmen.”
⁵
Other Xhosa immigrated in association with the London Missionary Society, and even more as
workers on the railway and in the copper mines that had boomed and then failed in Little Namaqualand in the mid-to late nineteenth century.