ABSTRACT
The study examines the influence of the existentialist themes in the novels of Bessie Head. Various studies have been done on the works of Bessie Head, especially with particular focus on the concept of identity, the exilic consciousness and on literary commitment, but none has analyzed, let alone subjected Maru, When Rain Clouds Gather and A Question of Power to the existentialist interpretation. The objective of this study is to explore the tremendous accuracy with which Bessie Head show- cases the conflict between the individual and society. The apartheid system has attacked the identity of Head’s characters and this informs the existential sensibility so discernible in her oeuvre. The study adopts the analytical research design. The data collected through content analysis is coded according to thematic concerns, the mode of characterization and the vision of the author. The findings reveal that being and becoming influence her commitment as reflected in her choice of characters that like her are cast in the in-between space. These characters shuttle between points of inclusion and exclusion. The quest for a universal identity that defies definition of race or tribe is shrouded in shackles of prejudice enshrined in the traditional outlook which must be dismantled in order to attain total liberty. However, this dream is encumbered with a lot of challenges thus reflecting the difficulty of erasing cultural differences. In conclusion, the novels are discussed from a largely existentialist perspective of hope in a utopian society.
Chapter One
Introduction
1.1 Background to the Study
The African American and winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in literature Toni Morrison, speaks eloquently of what she calls “a sense of rootedness”(339). What Morrison is referring to, is the gut sense of belonging to a common tradition of historical sensibility that binds writers of different background and different ideological leanings. For the African-American writers, the legacy of slavery, the throes of racial oppression, and the macabre paradox of Jim Crow politics in a free democratic society constitutes the background of that common tradition.
Morrison contends that for the African writer, his sense of rootedness is defined by his belonging to an ethnic and cultural group together with the sense of identity which it fosters and which invariably conditions his creative imagination. Writers like Achebe have the Igbo cultural tradition, Ngugi—the kikuyu/Gikuyu culture, P’bitek—the Ugandan Acoli tradition Kane—the Islamic tradition of the diallobe.
For Bessie Head, however, Morrison suggests that there is this inordinate sense of detachment from the African cultural tradition because of the intervening forces of apartheid in her native South Africa. She does not share in the ancestral sensibilities of an African homestead because she has not been allowed to develop root in any tradition.
The issue is her nativity; Bessie Head bore the burden of a double illegitimate birth: in 1937 she was conceived out of wedlock and, in apartheid argot, across the colour bar. Simply by being born, she transgressed the racial and gender edicts of her society, a deviance that portended the torments of her later life. In her thirteenth year, Head learned that the man and woman whom she had presumed to be her parents bore no biological relation to her. That year, the South African state removed her from foster parental care and placed her in an orphanage. It was only then that her origin was revealed to her and quoting Susan Gardner:
I was born on the 6th July 1937 in the Pietermaritzburg hospital….The reason for my peculiar birth place was that my mother was white, and she had acquired me from a black man. She was judged insane and committed to the mental hospital while pregnant(95).
Head’s mother, Bessie Amelia Emery, came from an upper-class white South African family renowned for breeding racehorses. The family’s professional preoccupation with eugenics may well have compounded their deep-seated racial prejudices, when their daughter, on the rebound from a failed marriage, flouted racial and class taboos by entering into a sexual liaison with a black stable hand. When she fell pregnant, her parents had her locked away in a mental asylum on grounds of, in the words of Randolph Vigne, of “premature senile dementia” (65). Emery gave birth to Head in the asylum and, six years later, in 1943, committed suicide there. Head never met her mother, nor did she ever learn the name of her father, who fled the Emery estate without a trace. By the age of thirteen, Head had known four sets of parents: her biological parents; the Afrikaans foster parents who returned her a week later because she looked “strange”. According to Gillian Eilersen, “did the delicate
little fingernails have a brownish tinge? Were the wisps of hair too curly? The child is coloured, in fact quite black and native in appearance”(9); the mixed-race foster parents into whose care she was delivered, and the South African state which, acting in loco parentis, removed the young girl from these second foster parents and placed her in an orphanage, as a ward of the state. Thus, from an early age, Head came to experience the family not as a natural form of belonging but as an unstable artifice, invented and reinvented in racist terms, and conditional upon the administrative designs of the nation-state. Elizabeth Odhiambo opines that:
…for writers like Kane, Achebe, Laye, Soyinka and others the knowledge emerging and experienced by them is anchored in shared collective tribal and ethnic identity. For Head on the other hand, the emergent knowledge is one constructed on the knife-edge categories of race, otherness and crippling alienation, a fact which discourages any kind of affinity or sympathetic rootedness(45).
Her estrangement from tradition placed her under relentless pressure to improvise a sense of community and ancestry, in her life and writing alike. Sandra Paquet, in her analysis of Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Hurston and Tar Baby by Toni Morrison, emphasizes the necessity of “knowing oneself in ancestral terms” (508). Caroline Rooney has portrayed Head’s novel, A Question of Power, as situated at the “crossroads of dispossession” (118) – a phrase that could be readily applied to her work as a whole.
The circumstances of Head’s birth are not the only forms of marginality she has to contend with: as a first generation coloured, an orphan, a changeling, a refugee,
a certified “mad woman”, and a single mother, she led a profoundly disinherited life on almost every front. Moreover, as a so—called coloured woman engaging with rural themes in Southern Africa, Head wrote without the sustenance of any literary lineage. Many of the fundamental criteria for social membership—notably those of family, race, and nation—characteristically assume or involve the authority of blood-lineage. Because Head’s relationship to all these categories was so radically and traumatically liminal, she could never live the illusion of their naturalness. As such, her work offers radical insight into the contingencies underlying efforts to secure membership or exclusion from society on grounds of nature or ancestry.
There are demographic groups in South Africa—whites four million as at the height of apartheid. These whites are sub-divided into two subdivisions; the greater percentage refers to those that have Dutch ancestry, the Afrikaners. The second subdivision comprises the English and other European whites, including the Jews. The second group is the coloured comprising off springs of interracial marriage, Asians—South Koreans, Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis—and finally the Blacks, the original owners of the land (25-30 million). Racially, Bessie was a member of the Cape Coloured community. While the statutory definition of coloured under apartheid has shifted over time, they have been persistently riven with contradictions. The state has variously sought to demarcate the category coloured on the basis of descent, percentage, physical appearance, language preference, cultural criteria, and general acceptance by the community. Of all the racial groups circumscribed by apartheid legislation, coloured have been most frequently represented through layered negotiations. The Population Registration Act of 1950, for example, defined a coloured as, in the words of Balibar and Wallerstein, someone “who in appearance is
obviously not white or Indian and who is not a member of an aboriginal race or African tribe” (74). And yet she never felt a part of the community because for reasons of geography and gender the coloured community was never available to her as a secure ground for identity. Head was raised in a Natal missionary orphanage in a largely Indian environment, some thousand kilometres from the epicentre of coloured culture in the Cape. She moved to the Cape in 1960 at the age of twenty-three, but struggled to fit in. In an unpublished interview with Cecil Abrahams:
As a newcomer to the Cape, I thought I had found the ideal place for my mixed race soul. But I quickly and painfully learned that if you were not fully grounded in the colour brown, you would have to be excluded from the community’s business and be ready to endure insult (4).
Head’s sense of familial and racial estrangement was intensified by the fact that, until the age of forty-two, she was also denied the moorings of nationality. Her first twenty-seven years were spent in South Africa as a disenfranchised coloured woman, and the next fifteen in Botswana where citizenship was withheld from her, forcing her to live as a stateless refugee. Thus Head’s identity was circumscribed on familial, racial, and national fronts by disinheritance, illegitimacy, and rootlessness.
In the face of these circumstances, her writing and life in the Botswanan village of Serowe were distinguished by an unremitting need to reconceive herself outside the natural matrix of familial, racial, and national traditions that formed the very grounds of her ostracism. Head’s prose is peopled largely with two types: characters whose sense of belonging is an unsettled precarious achievement rather
than a birth right and characters who risk or forfeit their inherited privileges by breaking with confining traditions.
The Historical Background of South African Existential Reality
The principle and dynamics of the racist apartheid ideology may not be understood in full if one fails to understand the historical factors that gave rise to it. South Africa was colonized by the English and Dutch in the seventeenth century. “Apartheid”, an Afrikaans word meaning in the words of Megan Shore, “the state of being apart,” (36) was a system of racial segregation in South Africa enforced through legislation by the National Party (NP) governments, the party from 1948 to 1994, under which the rights of the majority black inhabitants were curtailed and Afrikaner minority rule was maintained.
Its history dates back to 1652, according to Barnabas Okolo, “when Jan Van Riebeeck, an official of the Dutch East Indian Company, in search of a “refreshment depot” for company ships sailing on the Indian route, arrived at and settled in the Cape of Good Hope”(30). By1688 there were already six hundred non-official European settlers, mainly farmers around the Cape and from then onwards, in the words of Eric Walker, “the number kept increasing steadily, and conflicts with the indigenous Khoisan people over territory had started” (38).The number of these immigrants was increased further by the influx of French Huguenots as well as whites of German extraction, as the years went by. In 1795, the British in the quest for colonies all over Africa, seized and annexed the Cape. Political and military conflicts between the Dutch settlers and the British over South African territory became rife.
One of the salient incidents in the history of apartheid in South Africa, apart from the numerous bloody ethnic wars, is the historic “Great Trek” which was a political movement embarked upon by the Afrikaner farmers in 1836 to rid themselves of the encroachment of the British as well as to secure enough land for pasture. Prominent among the grievances of the Afrikaners, which are also what constitutes the germ of the apartheid policy, was the relative equality of treatment meted out alike to the Afrikaners and the blacks, by the British administration. The Afrikaners thus dreamt, according to Leo Marguard, of an “independent republican state in which there would be no equality between black and white” (9).The inward movement of the Afrikaners was met with stiff resistance from the indigenous Zulus, Swazis, Xhosas, Tswanas, Sothos, most of who had elaborately organized kingdoms complete with standing armies, but they all eventually fell to the superior arms of the Afrikaners. The discovery of diamonds in the area of the present-day Zimbabwe and Malawi escalated the conflict between the Afrikaners and the British imperialists as both groups went into the scramble for Southern Africa with renewed vigour, culminating in a major Anglo-Boer war of 1899.The Afrikaners were to secure many concessions at the treaty that ended the war, one of which was the recognition of the equality of the Afrikaners’ language with English. These conflicts and their accompanying victories had a tremendous psychological boosting effect on the Afrikaners and played a crucial role in moulding their character. The racist character of the Afrikaner attitude came to the fore clearly in the words of Okolo, “both in 1902 and 1909 during the National Conventions of the four self-governing South African colonies, which ended with a final accord passed by the British Parliament known as the South African Act of 1909 and which paved the way for the Union of South
Africa by 1910” (30). During the convention, the Boer colonies, namely, Transvaal and Orange Free States, refused to grant franchise to the non-European peoples in spite of the franchise that the latter enjoyed under the colonial British in the Cape Province and by the Act of 1909.This juridical denial of the non-whites of voting and of being voted for in the 1910 constitution was thus the first act in the entrenchment of white racial domination in South Africa.
With the enactment of apartheid laws in 1948, racial discrimination was institutionalized. Race laws touched every aspect of social life, including a prohibition of marriage between non-whites and whites, and the sanctioning of “white-only” jobs. In 1950, the Population Registration Act required that all South Africans be racially classified into one of three categories: white, black (African), or coloured (mixed decent). The coloured category included major sub-groups of Indians and Asians. Classification into these categories was based on appearance, social acceptance, and descent. Non-compliance with the race laws were dealt with harshly. All blacks were required to carry “Pass Books” containing fingerprints, photo and information on access to non-black areas.
In 1951, the Bantu Authorities Act established a basis for ethnic government in African reserves, known as “homelands.” These homelands were independent states to which each African was assigned by the government according to the record of origin (which was frequently inaccurate). All political rights, including voting, held by an African were restricted to the designated homelands. The idea was that they would be citizens of the homelands, losing their citizenship in South Africa and any right of involvement with the South African Parliament which held complete
hegemony over the homelands. From 1976 to 1981, four of these homelands were created, denationalizing nine million South Africans. Nevertheless, Africans living in the homelands needed passports to enter South Africa: aliens in their own country.
In 1953, the Public Safety Act and the Criminal Law Amendment Act were passed, which empowered the government to declare stringent states of emergency and increased penalties for protesting against or supporting the repeal of a law. The penalties included fines, imprisonment and whippings. In 1960, a large group of blacks in Sharpeville refused to carry their Passes; the government declared a state of emergency. The emergency lasted for 156 days, leaving 69 people dead and 187 people wounded.
The practical result of all these legislations has been the entrenchment of racial inequality and victimization, rendering the indigenous majority unstable and isolated. The aim of the “Pass Laws,” for instance, is to create a permanent state of paranoia in the blacks, and to condition them to fear and insecurity. The migrant labour system imposed on them breaks down the cohesion that family co-habitation engenders. Okolo’s analysis supports this assertion when he says that:
…other effects of (migrant labour) system on the African and non-white population generally, are well-known. Such problems as the breakdown of the African family life due to the migrant system, the extreme poverty of Africans and the non-whites groups… frustrations and antagonism caused by lack of respect, absence of adequate amenities and opportunities, the enforced separation of people of different races, the economic imbalance, e.t.c are all inherent in the apartheid system (54).
The creation of Bantustans is to force blacks into these economically depleted zones and another ruse to keep them backwards in all areas of endeavour. The black man is not free to choose his life style. He is not free to raise a family and have an organic relationship with it devoid of spells of forced separations, or is he free to develop his physical, intellectual, moral and religious life as fully as he would. Above all, he is subject to a gamut of penalization, such as banning, confinements, detention, police assaults and spells of imprisonment for the least infringement of the apartheid decalogue. In the words of Horrell, et al, for example, “between June 1969 and June
1970, 380 persons were tried for infringing laws relating to the production of identity documents by Africans’’ (142). According to Patrick Wilmot:
…between 1960-67 there were 4.5 million pass laws convictions and
120,000 convictions for refusal to be ejected from land or for strikes. Between 1952 and 1967, 1,000,000 strokes were impose on 200, 000 victims; in 1970 the police shot and killed 54 people and wounded 149, and 356 people died in prison. From June 1976 in Soweto to the time of writing (November 1976) over 600 Africans have been killed by the police, and the killing continues. If, as Fanon says, colonialism is violence in its natural state, apartheid represents the most perfect form of colonialism in the history of the world (10).
The viciousness of the system can also be seen in the famous Sharpeville massacres of 21st March, 1960 in which, according to Wilmot, “sixty-nine blacks were shot dead, and one hundred and eighty-six others wounded” (9). Still the most
gruesome of these massacres was to take place in July 1976 in which over six hundred school pupils protesting the imposition of Afrikaans language as a compulsory subject of study were cold-bloodedly murdered.
The composite effect of all these legalistic restrictions and brutalities is that the blacks exist as unfulfilled, frustrated, and alienated people, driven totally by forces outside their control. According to Wilmot:
Apartheid is a system of racial discrimination built atop an immense foundation of economic exploitation, political repression and cultural obliteration, established and maintained by ruthlessly organised and executed violence of European against Africa (xi).
As a system, the components of apartheid reinforce each other, interpenetrate each other, and make the end product of its operation more intense and fulsome in humiliation and terror. Apartheid as an evil policy sparked, according to Tom Lodge, “significant internal resistance and violence, and a long arm trade embargo against South Africa” (20). Since 1950s, a series of uprising and protests was met with banning of opposition and imprisoning of anti-apartheid leaders. As unrest spread and became more effective and militarised, state organisation responded with repression and violence. Along with the sanctions placed on South Africans by the international community, this made it increasingly difficult for the government to maintain the regime.
Apartheid reforms in the 1980s failed to quell the mounting opposition, and in
1990 according to the British Broadcasting Coporation News: 2 February 1990
President Fredrick Willem de Clerk began negotiations to end apartheid, culminating in multi-racial democratic elections in 1994, won by the African National Congress under Nelson Mandela.
This malaise in which the oppressed are trapped in South Africa is perhaps no better expressed than by one of the concepts that run inter alia in Bessie Head’s works, “existential issues”, which is generally perceived as a condition of estrangement and disharmony characterized by an absence of a milieu that is conducive for harmonious living. Head’s treatment on power relationships as they inform or are informed by exile identities seeking to subvert the nation are the particular concern of her novels, and the conclusions to these issues vary in progression from novel to history.
Head always wanted to be able to treat her characters as humans rather than people belonging to any racially—determined ideologies. This desire to have each person transcend racial loyalty, became, according to Huma Ibrahim, part of the exilic consciousness expounded by Head” (62). It was this profound commitment to humanity that constituted the fundamental basis of her focus in all her novels, short stories, and histories.
Definition and Analysis of Key Concept
This study will attempt a definition of my central concept—Existentialism in all its manifestations and move on to list the key themes. These themes in turn are to be investigated as they connect the writings of Bessie Head. There has never been a general agreement on the definition of existentialism. The term is often seen as a
historical convenience as it was first applied to many philosophers in hindsight, long after they had died.
According to Steven Crowell, defining existentialism has been relatively difficult. A central proposition of Existentialism is that existence precedes essence, which means that the most important consideration for individuals is that they are individuals – independently acting and responsible, conscious beings (existed) – rather than what labels, roles, stereotypes, definitions or other preconceived categories the individuals fit (essence). The actual life of the individual is what constitutes what could be called his true essence instead of there being an arbitrarily attributed essence others use to define him. Thus human beings, through their own consciousness, create their own values and determine meaning to their lives. It is often claimed in this context that people define themselves, which is often perceived as stating that they can wish to be something—anything, a bird, for instance – and then be it. According to most existentialist philosophers, however, this would constitute an inauthentic existence. Instead, the phrase should be taken to mean that people are defined only insofar as they act and that they are responsible for their actions. For example, someone who acts cruelly towards other people is, by that act, defined as a cruel person. Furthermore, by this action of cruelty, such persons are themselves responsible for their new identity (cruel persons). This is as opposed to their genes, or human nature, bearing the blame. Existentialism therefore, may be defined as the philosophical theory which holds that a further set of categories, governed by norms of authenticity, is necessary to grasp human existence. Although a highly diverse tradition of thought, seven themes can be identified that provide some sense of overall unity. These themes include: Dread, Alienation, Absurd, Freedom, Commitment,
Nothingness, and Existence. These themes can then provide us with an intellectual framework within which to discuss the novels of Bessie Head within the history of existentialism. Our strategy is to stress Bessie Head’s connection with these key existentialist concerns, which we introduce above. The themes come together in her work, although uncomfortable in the wake of apartheid, Head was nevertheless the very model of a public intellectual, writing tens of short pieces for public dissemination and taking resolutely independent and often controversial stand on major political events. Her writings are most clearly existentialist in character.
1.2 Statement of the Problem
Various scholars have studied Bessie Head’s works with particular focus on the concept of identity, and exilic consciousness and came up with varied views. Cecil Abrahams, for instance, opines that the circumstance of Head’s birth propels her search for identity that led to existential themes in her writing. Corwin Mhalahlo, explores the perceived intricate relationship that exists between constructed identity, discrimination and violence as portrayed in Bessie Head’s trilogy from varying perspectives, including aspects of coloniality, materialist feminism and liminality. His major concern is with the affinities that exist between identity, discrimination and violence. Along the lines, John, La Rose examines the element of being and totality in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power. He argues that while Marxist criticism may be instructive in its provocation of materialist literary analysis, these readings may obfuscate pertinent discursive issues of individual ontology. The present study closely relates to La Rose’s in that it too, revolves around the question of being and becoming and how this informs individual commitment. La Rose’s view is also pertinent in that it recognises the need for further studies of Head’s work from varied perspectives; the
difference is that his argument is limited to A Question of Power only. Adding to the debate, Ikenna Dieke argues that Head’s Maru, more than A Question of Power, distils the very essence of her creative enterprise laced with an overriding concern for an investigation into the enigma of human prejudice. This is against Lloyd Brown who argues that “A Question of Power represents a touché in Head’s literary achievement” (175). Huma Ibrahim regards the novel as the most important work in the novelists attempt to navigate the troubled waters of transnational identities and her exilic consciousness which she calls Head’s “point of engagement”(125).
From the above instances, it is evident that various studies have been conducted on Bessie Head’s works. A lot may have been done about the writings of Bessie Head, but to the knowledge of this researcher, there is little or no evidence of the exploration of existential themes in her works, especially in the three novels. Bessie Head is one of the African writers to have dealt with existentialism in her fiction. In this respect, her novels, When Rain Clouds Gather, Maru and A Question of Power attain a tremendous accuracy in showing the conflict between the individual and the society. The problem which this research recognizes, therefore, is that as all great writers, Bessie Head’s life and work has been examined by each generation of critics. But none has examined existentialism as a large topic in her novels and devoted an entire development of it.
1.3 Scope of the Study
The study is confined to the writings of Bessie Head. With respect to the writings of Bessie Head, this research work focuses on the three novels of Bessie
Head. The area of search is limited to investigating the themes of existentialism as it affects the socio-economic life of the characters and the vision of the writer.
1.4 Objectives of the Study
The general objective of this study is to subject the novels under consideration to the existentialist theory. In specific terms, to explore the tremendous accuracy Bessie Head has shown in using the themes of existentialism to demonstrate the conflict between the individual and society, and to provide possible interpretations of her novels based on adhering or violating the themes of absurdity, authenticity, alienation, freedom, dread and trembling.
1.5 Significance of the Study
Existential perspectives are found in literature to varying degrees since 1922. Authors composed literature that contained, to varying degrees, elements of existential or proto-existential thought. Bessie Head is one of the African writers to have dealt with existentialism in her fiction. This study will therefore expose the reader to the deeper knowledge of Bessie Head’s fiction guided by the existential theory. This is because; being alive challenges our basic needs and calls into question the meaning and the structure of our existence. Head’s selected fiction, with its windows into the thoughts and feelings of the characters it portrays allows us a glimpse into the minds of the characters. This study will be important to prospective researchers as it will provide reliable information to guide their further search. Also
through the knowledge of the close kinship between the individual, society and the whole domain of existence, critics and interpreters alike will experience an enrichment of their experience. Analysts and readers alike will also benefit as new findings from Bessie Head has become a subject attracting increasing attention especially since her tragic demise in 1986. The fact that every conceivable bit of earlier writing is being published is a testimony to the increasing recognition of the complexity of Head’s writing.
This material content is developed to serve as a GUIDE for students to conduct academic research
PROJECTOPICS.com Support Team Are Always (24/7) Online To Help You With Your Project
Chat Us on WhatsApp » 07035244445
DO YOU NEED CLARIFICATION? CALL OUR HELP DESK:
07035244445 (Country Code: +234)YOU CAN REACH OUR SUPPORT TEAM VIA MAIL: [email protected]