Imagined selves, (un)imagined marginalities

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Imagined selves, (un)imaginedmarginalitiesDorothy Driver aa Department of English , University of Cape Town ,Published online: 24 Feb 2007.

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Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2, June 1991

Review Article

Imagined Selves, (Un)imaginedMarginalities

DOROTHY DRIVER(Department of English, University of Cape Town)

Mary Benson, A Far Cry: The Making of a South African (Viking, London,1989).

Emma Mashinini, Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life: A South AfricanAutobiography (The Women's Press, London, 1989).

Caesarina Kona Makhoere, No Child's Play: In Prison Under Apartheid (TheWomen's Press, London, 1988).

In the South Africa of today white women are said to need 'to write themselvesback into a history' which black South Africans have claimed as their own: the so-called black experience has an 'authenticity' unavailable to its white counterpart.1

However crude and problematic such dichotomising may be, the threeautobiographies under review conform to this social maxim, anxiously, in the caseof Mary Benson, confidently, in the case of Emma Mashinini, and assertively, inthe case of Caesarina Makhoere. But of course the fact that women classifiedAfrican have no vote in this country's government must rest alongside anyideological position taken on 'nativeness' or 'natural' belonging: whatever theirsupposed 'authenticity', then, they are meant to be mute and invisible as politicalsubjects. The autobiographies written by Mashinini and Makhoere present astruggle for political voice and political visibility; despite the difficulties put intheir paths and however extreme the anguish of their accounts, they generallyarticulate themselves through the recognition that they, as black South Africans,are part of the future of this country. In one interesting exchange with a SpecialBranch officer, who asks nastily if she has not found a better country to live in,Mashinini asserts: 'I said I was born here and that it was my country and I intended

1 Anissa Talahite, '"Woman" Under Apartheid', Southern African Review of Books, August-October 1990, pp. 8-9.

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338 Journal of Southern African Studies

to stay here'. Makhoere also takes her South Africanness for granted, and in theprocess denies it to others: 'we shall take the country and give it to the people,where it belongs'. Benson, on the other hand, engages explicitly and at length with'the making of a South African', which refers to the achievement, through politicalcommitment, of a particular moral or spiritual state: becoming a 'true' rather thansimply a 'white' South African.

Autobiography is a notoriously difficult genre to define: it changes in differenthistorical and cultural contexts, it can take on a variety of organising structures,and it can pursue a variety of autobiographical intentions.2 Traditionally, whatmakes a piece of writing autobiographical is the obvious and intentional conflationof author with narrator. But however enticing the Cartesian 'I write, therefore Iam', the conflation is no more than an illusion: the nature of 'self — not least inthe act of self-writing — is incoherent, unknowable, and endlessly deferred.

In the case of colonised cultures, as in this country, autobiography has oftenbeen read in terms of its function as 'psychic survival', giving form and meaningto a sense of selfhood that the disruptions of racism have threatened.3 The focus onself is in such cases seen less as a striving after the unique 'truth' of the individualthan as an assertion of this self's humanity: the individual life as exemplary of asocial truth about those intended to be mute and invisible as subjects. Similarly,for women writers the autobiographical act is often seen to provide a space withinwhich the female subject may develop a sense of self prohibited in a male-dominated culture,4 again with exemplary intent. At certain historical moments,then, these two minority investigations (black, female) assert identity, agency andautonomy as a political gesture, which necessarily entails resisting theproblematisation of 'self. This, at least, is one way to approach the question raisedby the publication of these three books in the late 1980s, all of whichanachronistically suppose a straightforward mimetic relation between reality andwriting, and present the narrative subject as the stable signifier of a real authorialself.

Although readers generally expect the genre to provide 'a field within which thetask of self-imagining and self-evaluation is understood to take place',5

autobiographers do not necessarily call attention to the act of self-construction,perhaps not dramatising the act of remembering, nor even engaging in theedification of the 'maturing' self. Yet in all autobiographies, it must be noted, aself is imagined. This is so not simply because of the use of the novelistic devicesof dialogue, characterisation, flashbacks and so on, features which 'fictionalise' the

2 See, for example, Francis R. Hart, 'Notes for an Anatomy of Modern Autobiography', inNew Directions in Literary History ed. Ralph Cohen (Johns Hopkins University Press,Baltimore, 1974).

3 William L. Andrews, 'In Search of a Common Identity: The Self and the South in FourMississippi Autobiographies', The Southern Review, 24. 1 (1988), pp. 47-64, and N. W.Visser, 'South Africa: The Renaissance that Failed', Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 11, 1(1976), pp. 42-57.

4 Virginia Woolf's Moments of Being, is a classic example.5 Elizabeth W. Bruss, Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 13.

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Imagined Selves, (Un)imagined Marginalities 339

life, nor simply because the notion of self is always defined by a set of socialconventions and even ideological demands. What needs stressing above all is thatthe imagined self is determined by the act of writing. In the words of Paul de Man,'we assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces itsconsequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographicalproject may itself produce and determine the life?' This means that whatever theautobiographical subject does 'is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of his [her]medium'.6

Among the technical demands of self-portraiture of interest in these threeautobiographies under review, none is so compelling as the fiction that props upthat word ' I ' . In autobiographies generally, variations in personal stance areconventionally tidied up into a before-and-after scenario, with the 'mature' narrator(the narrating self) looking back on the errors of a younger (experiencing) self, andthus establishing an autobiographical distinction between narrative present anddramatic past. In these three South African autobiographies, the narrative subjectsorganise themselves in markedly different ways, differences most evident in the usemade of the customary split between narrating and experiencing selves, and,correspondingly, in the part played by self-evaluation. These differences, I arguebelow, as I look at each text, are dependent on immediate and obvious polemicalneeds. But, as my reading will go on to suggest, the particular fiction by which theI is produced produces, in turn, its own peculiar effects in the construction, in eachcase, of the South African subject.

A Far Cry

Benson's autobiography is about white political involvement in the 1950s and1960s. After a brief introduction to the childhood and adolescence of oneincreasingly eager to live an 'eventful' life, the autobiography opens with Bensonat twenty-one, and casts forward first to the Treason Trial of 1956, the RivoniaTrial, and the trial of Bram Fischer, and subsequently to the period when Benson,after being put under house arrest, her passport confiscated and her books banned,went into exile in Britain.

Although Benson presents her younger self as typical of white South Africans inher racial prejudices, she was unusually enterprising in pursuing her destiny as shesaw it at the time: the destiny of a 'born celebrity-hunter', whose desires wereshaped by Hollywood. Her shift into political engagement was precipitated by Cry,the Beloved Country, which, she says, 'crashed open the mould in which my whiteconsciousness had been formed'. Still eager for a 'purpose' in life, but now given aparticular direction, Benson offered to work without pay for Michael Scott, whowas engaged in a campaign to shift the British Labour government from supportingSouth Africa at the United Nations. Of particular importance were the land rights of

6 Paul de Man, quoted in Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art ofSelf-Invention (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N. J., 1985), p. 185.

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the Hereros against South African division and dispossession. Benson's first majortask was to help Hosea Kutako and his colleagues prepare their deputation andmake their journey from South West Africa to the United Nations at a time wheneven the Institute of Race Relations believed the UN had acted illegally in invitingthem. The invitation was hard enough to obtain; as it turned out, the Hereros wererefused travel permits, and the little public interest Scott and Benson had managedto whip up came to an end. Benson uses this occasion to introduce what will be arecurrent theme in her book: the unacknowledged but effective complicity of Britainand the United States of America with apartheid South Africa. The direction her lifeshould take had now become clear to her: extensive lobbying in Britain and theUnited States in an attempt to encourage economic sanctions and forestall civilwar.

Benson's political role also took the form of writing. She bore witness, as ajournalist, to a set of brutally unjust political and pass-offence trials, some ofwhich would otherwise have been unnoticed by the wider world, and she engaged inthe important and often dangerous practice of historical reconstruction:commissioned to write a history of the ANC, she aimed to record South Africanhistory 'from recollections of individual lives, from people's opinions of each otherand, of course, from what it meant to be black'. While black history is not aprimary focus of the autobiography, it is not ignored: in one of the manycompelling moments of the book, 'the servants' in Johannesburg clang sticksagainst telegraph poles each New Year's Eve, 'a clamorous assertion of their blackpresence in those white suburbs'.

In order to effect a sharp and decisive dissociation from what she sees as hertypical white upbringing, Benson deploys the temporal vantage point available tothe first-person narrator, where the narrator is 'split' into younger and maturerselves, with the older self looking back and critically assessing her past self. Herpresent moral/political status absolutely depends on this kind of dissociation, henceits visibility in the text. Lessons are learnt about racial disgust, disenfranchise-ment, and mass geographical displacement: South African social evils which findtheir analogy for Benson in European anti-Semitism. Rhetorically this analogy iscrucial: the mature narrator laments the failure of the younger self to draw thenecessary connections, even in the midst of her work to rehabilitate people madehomeless in Germany and Eastern Europe, and she also points out that among theSouth African pro-Nazi extremists was 'a man who would one day be PrimeMinister'. Concomitant with the split between younger and older selves, then, isthe split between her mature self and many other white South Africans: thepolitically committed versus the inhuman. Attending a trial in the Eastern Cape,Benson witnesses with shock and loathing the callous and deeply cynial attitudes ofthe defence lawyer and the prosecutor as they collude against the accused.Measuring her distance from such South Africans, she establishes clear moraldivisions, then. But there are other divisions which require a more carefulnegotiation.

In the 'old familiar South Africa' Benson's political associations arousedmisgiving or hostility among her friends and acquaintances, while they meant she

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was automatically trusted in the '"new" world' — the world of the dispossessedHereros, the ANC leadership, and the African community more generally. But this'new world' does not become her proper domain. In the 'old familiar' world, alsocalled 'my other world', Benson consciously leads a 'strange double-life', diningwith friends and spending Sundays in and out of their pools, yet finding she can nolonger feel 'unalloyed affection' for those who condone apartheid.

However, this life is 'double' to Benson not because of Vorster et al, but becauseshe is friends with men like Athol Fugard, despite the class snobbery she had beenbred into, and Bram Fischer, about whom her frivolous friends merely engage in'idle speculation', whereas she herself secretly protects and acts for him. Needing toconstruct a community of South Africans among whom she can find identity,Benson deploys Fugard's and Fischer's own differences not from these friends,however, but from Afrikaners: Fugard is one whose love for the land is not at allthe 'shrivelling' passion of the Afrikaner, and Fischer is a renegade Afrikaner but atrue South African.

Yet even in this constructed community of committed South Africans, 'double-life' threatens. Although Benson often enters situations of danger, she decides notto provide a safe house for Isaac Heymann, a friend and colleague of Fischer's alsoon the run, because she fears jeopardising her friendship with Fugard, who isstaying with her at the time. In other words, even her extremely close friendshipwith Fugard opens itself up to division. Similarly, her political beliefs and those ofFischer are markedly different: 'Come over to us, Mary!' he urges, 'Be a part ofsomething great, be with the people'. But her mind goes 'blank' when Fischer triesto explain dialectical materialism.

Despite the clear-cut oppositions set up in the text, then, between mature andimmature selves, and between progressive South Africans and the rest, there is acontinual sense that further divisions are being kept at bay. The potential doublingof her 'strange double-life' needs continually to be curtailed, and restored to thataltogether simpler dualism: those who work against versus those who work for thestatus quo. At unguarded moments, in her self-presentation, some unspeakableconfusions sneak into the text. For instance, it is the voice of a 'white' rather than'true' South African narrator who claims that Paul Kruger would give coffee 'toanyone who came along', and who fails to pass comment when her already 'mature'experiencing self asks the black person who opens Fischer's door to her, 'Is themaster in?'

Benson's self-construction in terms of gender is similarly duplicitous. Her bookassigns roughly half its chapter titles to the names of men. In a sense her politicalrole is a supportive or mediatory one — besides being friend and contact to Fischerbefore and after his passage underground, she was secretary at different times toMichael Scott, Tshekedi Khama and Albert Luthuli, as well as for the TreasonTrial Defence Fund — but these positions need not have screened her independentand increasingly courageous political activity. For one of its most dramaticclimaxes, the narrative organises itself around the events leading up to Fischer'ssecond arrest and sentencing, which entails the chronological displacement ofBenson's departure into exile. Even her personal story follows the tracks of her life

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with men: as friend or as lover or would-be lover, always to men (her friendshipswith women, Ruth First for instance, are scarcely mentioned), and as a father'srather than a mother's daughter. She often needs to be seen taking up aconventionally feminine stance, as towards Scott, for example: 'I tidied him upand, when his back was turned, gave his ankle-length coat to charity'.

Yearning 'somehow to combine love and a normal [i.e. open rather than secret]sexual relationship with that elusive "purpose" in life', Benson indicates that herlife lacked the fulfilment she desired. Alan Paton had written to her in 1950, 'Ifwhat you want is marriage, I wish you all fortune; but if it's something else, Idon't think you realise yet that you'll have to pay for it'. The patriarchal world,reproduced here by the unwitting Paton, refuses 'all fortune* to women who wantsomething other than marriage. Benson obediently represents herself as splitbetween the 'masculine' and the 'feminine' — 'the drive towards political action,my lecturing and lobbying, seemed to represent the masculine element in mynature, pleasing Dad, delivering the goods' — but, as in the construction of apolitical self, needs to force this division: 'pleasing Dad' is hardly masculine.

Heroic daydreaming in women often results in their attaching themselves inservice to powerful or pioneering men, so that they are seen to fulfil themselves innurturing or caretaking roles. While Benson looks ironically at her desire forheroism, relating it to the world of glamour, and while she scrutinises her need foridols and heroes, which she ties to Jung's Brunnhilde theory (a daughter spellboundby a father's love), she interrogates the gender base neither of her desires, nor herchoice of action, nor indeed her self-presentation.

Earlier I referred to minority investigations in autobiographical writing, and theirresistance to modernist interrogations of self. Benson is not conscious of herself asa woman marginalised in a male-dominated culture, and, technically, as a whiteSouth African, she is part of a minority culture only in the sense that she risksbeing politically marginalised in the future rewriting of South African history.Betraying certain anxieties about political marginalisation, even within her carefulconstruction of political opposition, her text compensates both by ignoring itsown questions about the marginalisation of women and by mirroring, through theapparent stability of gender divisions, the binary terms within which she tries toknow herself as political subject.

While Benson's self-construction is unsettled from inside her own text, it is alsoimplicitly interrogated from outside, through the perspectives provided byMashinini and Makhoere, at least as regards the distinction between committed andother South Africans. Benson's political activities were motivated by a threefolddesire: to assist 'the West' in 'taking a temporary loss now rather than losingeverything in [a communist] future'; to show black South Africans that whites toowere engaged in the struggle and thus to help prevent a counter-racism fromdeveloping, black against white; and to bring about a change in government bypeaceful means. On the first point, Mashinini's class analysis offers a differentversion of profit and loss: multinational companies benefit from apartheid, andcushion themselves against the eventuality of black liberation and the fairerdistribution of the country's wealth. On the second point, from Makhoere's

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perspective, counter-racism has already become necessary to black survival. Third,as regards armed struggle, revolution is justified for Makhoere not becauseeconomic sanctions failed to put an end to the pass laws, group areas and so on,but because the entire structure of white dominance in South African society needsto be reversed. Speaking against armed resistance, Benson names sanctions as 'theobvious civilized form of action', but she does this in a chapter which deals withthe State's brutal uncivilized response to the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe,already established because of the failure of nonviolent action. Mashinini, bycontrast, expresses a deep moral horror at a regime that calls ordinary union activity'terrorist' but then fails to scrutinise its own tactics of terror in upholdingcapitalism.

These fundamental contrasts — regarding race, class, and arms — crystallise inthe different ways Benson, Mashinini and Makhoere relate to the ANC's FreedomCharter. In her coverage of the Treason Trial Benson focuses on the Defence'sargument that the Freedom Charter was not a document of communism, as chargedby the State, but rather the expression of the natural aspirations of the majority ofthe people. She does not address its economic proposals. However, Mashinini andMakhoere, who both explicitly engage in political struggle in its name —Mashinini in trade union activity and Makhoere in Umkhonto we Sizwe —emphasise its economic radicalism. Mashinini says, 'when I listen to the FreedomCharter ... just for those few moments I take heart that it will all come true, thatthere will be houses for everyone, schooling, prosperity, everything we need'.Makhoere says, 'Most houses in Mamelodi ... are small; they do not comply withthe Freedom Charter where it says, "There shall be houses, security and comfort.'"It is to some extent against the vision provided by white South African liberalismthat Mashinini and Makhoere speak, then. Another difference between them andBenson lies in the greater care they take to construct a coherent South Africansocial model, in their case black.

Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life: A South AfricanAutobiography

Mashinini's book, like Benson's, ranges over the larger part of an adult life, andengages with the political development of the autobiographical self. The first partdeals initially with the ways Mashinini tries to juggle her existence as a youngwife and mother with her life as a factory worker, and then moves to her tradeunion activity as a factory supervisor and shop steward, finally leading into herduties as secretary of CCAWUSA, the Catering and Commercial Allied Workers'Union of South Africa, which she helped found. The second part is devotedprimarily to the five months spent in detention as a consequence of this activity,first under Section 22, later under Section 6, mostly in Pretoria Central, 'a placefor people who have been sentenced to death'. In its final chapters, the book dealswith the lingering effects of this period of detention in which death is so constantlyand insidiously threatened: given these effects, release from prison could be nothingmore than 'a kind of freedom', as the title of one chapter puts it.

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Mashinini's parents divorced when she was about 15, she had to leave schoolbecause money was tight, and she married at 17 because, she says, she had no otherplace to be. While she sees class exploitation under apartheid as the cause of herparents' divorce (specifically, the hours her father had to work as a dairyman, in themidst of grinding poverty), her own divorce is not given such an explanation.There were, of course, quarrels about money, but the reference to the hours herfather had to work is matched by a reference to the hours she had to work, as if shetakes on the role of father as well as mother. Even when her children were still soyoung that she should have been at home to care for them, she left the house before5 a.m. and returned at 7 p.m. In the evenings her second job began, bathing andfeeding the children, cooking for herself and her husband, chopping wood, fetchingwater, attending to the laundry, cleaning the house. Her husband generally camehome some time after he stopped work, and would simply sit and read the paper.Mashinini's contempt is unrestrained: 'sometimes I would wonder if he reallyunderstood what he read, or if he just knew that the white boss sits when he comeshome, and reads his newspaper'. But any white or middle-class model of behaviourstops here. 'There was no time to sit and laugh and talk. No time and no energy.Even going to church, trying to cope with catching them, getting them to wash,finding their socks, always shouting. Only on the way there, walking out of thathouse and holding their hand — I think that was the only loving time I had withmy children. Just holding their hands and walking with them to church'.

The domestic story ceases as the narrative shifts into Mashinini's trade unionactivity: a story of courage, enterprise, diligence, and growing success. Under hermanagement, CCAWUSA gave its workers reduced working hours, an increase insalary, medical aid and pension funds, and confinement leave for women, andfought against unhealthy conditions, physical abuse in the workplace, and unfairdismissal. Mashinini herself developed a confidence and strength of purpose. But inprison this is stripped from her. She was made to feel like an animal in a cage, andan object of contempt. 'You're fat, Kaffir meid', one policeman says to her; thereare other insults, as well as threats. As she listens to the sounds made by theprisoners awaiting execution, the police laughingly tell her it is she they are goingto kill.

This threat gives birth to its own uncanny echo when Mashinini glimpses theposter 'Detainee Dies in Cell' on her way to John Vorster Square. Her strangelydisplaced fear begins to articulate itself during a family visit, when, noticing thather sister-in-law is sad, she records, 'I didn't want to ask her why. I thought aboutthe detainee who had died in the cell'. The unknown death obsesses her until itbecomes 'a torture and a hell to me'. In that complicated coincidence of repressionand surfacing by which trauma is both dealt with and known, this death feels likeher own. When she finds out the truth — that her friend and co-worker Neil Aggettwas the victim — she suddenly urges the black warders to bring her a newspaperwhence she discovers that there are 'many of us inside here. It made me feel braver.I all of a sudden just gained strength'.

From this moment on Mashinini is able to manoeuvre at least a half-turn awayfrom death. She becomes more active, tidying her cell, making demands, asserting

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Imagined Selves, (Un)imagined Marginalises 345

herself. But the change is partial, barely concealing her bitter longing for the mostobvious way in which to end imprisonment: 'There was no chair for me, not evento burn myself to death'. Profound damage has already been done by the threats, theextended solitary confinement, the lack of family contact, and the miserable diet: 'Ididn't know any longer how to recognise myself. She suffers extreme anxietyabout any pain and offence she might have caused her family and friends, and, whenshe hides a photograph of her granddaughters under the blankets that serve as amattress, she feels she is squeezing the life out of them. Now, instead of fearingthat she will be killed by a policeman, she is engaged in killing herself, as she putsit, piling on herself the insults and threats once delivered by others.

It is precisely this psychological moment that Black Consciousness addresses.When Mashinini came out of detention, thinking, 'Now, what is left of me?', sheread Kuzwayo's Call Me Woman and felt inspired to write her own story.7

Mashinini reconstructs herself in the act of writing, whose particular reconstructiveprocess has already been mapped for her through the mode of self-assertion madeavailable to Kuzwayo by the philosophy of Black Consciousness.

Mashinini belongs to the same generation as Kuzwayo: born in 1929, she waseducated before Bantu Education came into effect, and racial segregation becameentrenched while she was growing up: she experienced her first forced removal in1936. Like Kuzwayo, but more selfconsciously and even more anxiously, and thusmore interestingly in my view, Mashinini produces something of a conduct book,negotiating a set of values which have changed from one generation to the next.8

According to the book's emphases, her political education received its majordirection from Black Consciousness (she only briefly mentions the education inclass analysis apparently received from Ray Altman and Morris Kagan), one ofwhose necessary effects has been a suspiciousness towards and rejection of allconnected with the world of white authority. This suspiciousness is borne partlyfrom incontestable empirical knowledge — Depo-provera, for instance, was bannedon the North American and European markets but made easily accessible to blackSouth African women — and partly from a survivor's instinct no longer to takeone's measurement from whites. Mashinini notes that Black Consciousness heraldsthe end, for example, of the skin lightening creams she used as a young woman, ofthe wearing of wigs, and of the process whereby the negatives of photographs werechemically lightened. But while she inhabits the position constructed under BlackConsciousness ('Now black consciousness has saved us from hating the colour ofour skin'), she also recalls an earlier position: 'In all the nineteen and a half years Iworked at Henochsberg's I was never once asked to sit down. You just accepted thatthat was the order of the day when you spoke to the white boss — standing, inuniform, hands behind your back, completely deferential'.

7 Boitumelo Mofokeng, quoted in M. J. Daymond and Margaret Lenta, 'Workshop on BlackWomen's Writing and Reading', Current Writing, 2 (October 1990), pp. 74-75.

8 For fuller discussion, see Dorothy Driver, 'M'a-Ngoano O Tsoare Thipa ka Bohaleng —The Child's Mother Grabs the Sharp End of the Knife: Women as Mothers, Women as Writers',in Martin Trump, ed. Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture(Johannesburg: Ravan, 1990), pp. 225-255.

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What is the textual purpose of recalling this distance? First, and most obviously,the gap between narrating and experiencing selves is exploited in order to presentthe mature self (as constructed under Black Consciousness) as stronger than theyounger self, not black as the negative or other of white, but black as white'santagonist, now in moral if not political ascendency. Second, this particularpositional distinction offers itself as a paradigm for Mashinini's second maturation.In prison, she is thrown back on negativity, on absence of self, in a way in whichone subject-position, terrifyingly, seems to cancel another:

There were times when I would believe them, that with all that manpower I mustbe a very dangerous person. And then again I would not believe them, but wouldsee that I was helpless, like a child, and that even to go to the toilet wasbeyond my powers in that room, because I must ask, and wait for permission tobe allowed, and then someone must escort me.

Into this absence, again, the voice of Black Consciousness speaks:

At first this was very embarrassing for me, but after a time I managed to makemyself see that it was the white women warders who should feel humiliated, tohave to watch me wipe my bottom.

What was humiliating to her was now humiliating to them. And, in a similarturn, out of the contradictory set of positions assigned her — I am dangerous /1 ama child — comes a recognition of the confusion not of her own identity but ofthose in apparent command. What is frightening about them is now their stupidity,not their insistence on hers:

Sometimes it would depress me very much, the waste of these working people,with more education just handed to them than we blacks could get with all ourstruggles — for what? To sit there in a room learning nothing, doing nothing,always questioning and never understanding what they were being told. It isfrightening. Very frightening.

This is the crucial reversal made by Black Consciousness. That the voices ofblack South Africans have not hitherto been heard means (in a crucial underliningof Benson's point) not that they are voiceless but that their antagonists have beendeaf, 'always questioning and never understanding'. Mashinini thus dramatises herdevelopment through Black Consciousness: she reveals the process of self-construction by standing outside it, momentarily, first as a younger (white-constructed) self and then as the humiliated self in prison, who re-enacts both theabjection of and the development away from that younger self.

Interestingly, while the positioning of a self outside Black Consciousnesspermits the re-enactment of that developmental process, it also opens up theinterrogative space available to the distanced or marginal self. Given their differentattitudes to the environments that bred them, Benson and Mashinini make differentuse of this space. Partly, Mashinini uses it to buttress Black Consciousness and

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her place in it. First of all, given that Black Consciousness rejects the identityconstructed under apartheid, and with it 'white' values as well, certain values neededfor black South Africans must now be politically cleansed. When Mashininiwishes to promote slimness, she hastens to say that 'we want to be healthy andlook good as people — not as white people. Many young black people are veryslim ... They take exercise, where we just worked and didn't have enough moneyfor food, let alone sport'. Slimness, hitherto 'white', needs to be claimed as 'black'as well, and in that way approved.

But slimness is also, as Mashinini's rendering suggests, associated with aparticular class, a class which knows leisure, and does not need to fight hungerwith sugar. Mashinini glosses over that complication here, but elsewhere sherefuses to abide by the race-class conflation ordained by South African society, forshe claims as her own the right to have glass crystal in her house, for instance, andcarefully justifies her desire to drive and possess a BMW. Her pride in a clean andtidy house is put in such a context, too: the more the South African system deniessuch privileges to black South Africans, the more vehemently Mashinini claimsthem. These claims exist alongside a continual drive to dissociate herself from thesymbols of the white 'bosses', as if to say that the desire for comfort and forluxuries is not evidence of co-option. One of her cautionary mottoes about therelation between shopsteward and boss — '"Never accept a cup of tea" because it iscapitalist versus worker, and the worker is not equal' — is extended into a debateabout whether workers should accept the offer of shares: 'only when we are paidmore than breadline wages and have a surplus — only then will we decide toinvest, and then we will be the ones to decide how'. The subject-position assignedthe black worker is refused in two ways, then — as a figure for whom luxuries areprohibited, and as a pawn in the hands of the employer — the latter strategyundercutting the potentially negative implications of the former.

In one case, however, Mashinini takes up that marginal space in order to launcha different investigation, for she questions the culture of violence bred underapartheid and nurtured by Black Consciousness as well. Sometimes she simplyblames apartheid. Yet she also approves the words of a Sowetan journalist:'Something is happening in our community and instead of trying to come to gripswith it, we continue to find the usual scapegoat, apartheid'. Particularly troublingto her is the death of her son-in-law, murdered, in effect, because he was seen aspolite and well-dressed and therefore 'other' when he tried to intervene in a crowdkilling. Mashinini's own careful assertion of the right to be well-dressed, alongsideher refusal to be made 'other' by any process of co-option, reads as an attempt tostave off the brutality of such an attack, and to complicate and renegotiate thesimple reversals implied by Black Consciousness, in its popular formulations atleast.

The text offers other, more obvious complications to the black/white, good/baddichotomies. Referring to a journalist who hounds her and a doctor who looks afterher, she notes that the former is black, and the latter white. And when blackwomen go out on strike for a white woman who had been demoted, Mashinini is

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heartened by this glimpse of a post-apartheid South Africa, contradicting an earlierassertion: that white women do not have 'breadline' problems.

Most interestingly, Mashinini's entry into the question of women'ssubordination is through being positioned as black. In one instance, as notedabove, she sees her husband acting like a 'white boss' to her. In another, she hitshard at the official attitudes towards women expressed by the CCAWUSA andCOSATU leadership: just as she had been used by white employers as a token, sotoo she finds herself used by male trade unionists: a safety valve 'just to patch upwhat [they] have done wrong'. Thus Mashinini's recognition of herself as part of aminority culture in one respect ushers in her recognition of marginality in anotherrespect, too. Not very differently from Benson, in general terms, whose adoption ofa marginal position in a racist white South Africa threatens to open up other waysof being marginalised (in relation to the worlds of Fugard and Fischer, forinstance), but is then resolved partially by not setting gender at odds with itself,Mashinini also pulls back. Like Kuzwayo before her, she specifically refuses to'expose the dirty linen in public', a metaphor which neatly conflates women'sdomestic and social roles (women in charge of the laundry, women in charge of thesecrets of male abuse).

Mashinini's particular autobiographical risk has been to reproduce within herolder self those dangerously propinquent polarisations — the white-constructed andblack-constructed selves — and all the more riskily to claim aspects of the SouthAfrican self some hold to be defined as white. Despite the occasionalacknowledgement of her marginal social position as a woman, she does not care toclaim feminism as a space for black South African women. Makhoere, as we willsee, strategically avoids marginality of all kinds, and adopts for herautobiographical act a speaking voice in which the potential distinction betweenmature and younger selves is altogether denied.

No Child's Play: In Prison Under Apartheid

Makhoere's book, which ranges over a shorter period than Mashinini's (belongingto the child's generation, rather than the mother's), is almost entirely devoted to herfive-year sentence under the Terrorism Act for recruiting for Umkhonto we Sizwe,along with a previous year of detention, intensive interrogation, and solitaryconfinement. If Makhoere found it easier than Mashinini to withstand thesystematic humiliation and threats afforded her in prison, this was perhaps partlybecause she was, finally, formally charged, and was able, sooner than Mashinini, tosee herself as part of a well-defined prison community which she recognised as acommunity of heroes, thus proudly taking her self-definition from them.

For the most part, Makhoere's first period of detention was spent at PretoriaCentral, and the second, when the formal sentence began, at Kroonstad andKlerksdorp. She spent this time in single cells, permitted neither visitors norreading material for the first two years. At first, meeting other political prisonersand in particular Dorothy Nyembe, sentenced to fifteen years for sheltering MKsoldiers, Makhoere feels that 'if people are able to stay strong for this length of

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time [as Dorothy Nyembe did], five years is just child's play'. Her title No Child'sPlay is not only a reminder that Makhoere, as a 'child' of 1976, has been deprivedof the play that should belong to childhood, but it is also one of the very fewsignals of recognition in this unselfconscious text that staying strong had its cost:five years was not, after all, 'just child's play'.

The book is about her active antagonism towards what she calls 'the apartheidregime' and 'the apartheid gods', first outside and then inside prison. Outsideprison, before recruiting for MK, she was engaged in the Soweto school boycott.Inside prison, despite being constantly moved in an attempt on the part of theauthorities in an attempt to block her connections with other prisoners, she foughtto establish a unified black front against white prison rule, politicising criminals aswell as drawing together political prisoners, and above all working against thedifferential treatment on grounds of different race-classifications.

On one of the occasions when she is in the isolation section, with the windowpanes painted white so that she cannot see out, and with no reading material, andvirtually no chance of hearing the voices of others, she becomes convinced, likeMashinini before her, that she is going to be killed. She becomes depressed, andalso angry. Whereas Mashinini speaks of directing anger into 'a constructivedialogue', Makhoere needs to retain and fuel it: 'this anger helped me to be strong'.Her way of being heard and recognised — her fight against mutedness andinvisibility — is, simply, to say No. She says No at every turn. The variousmeans of resistance, particularly the hunger strikes, are all deeply necessary to hersense of herself as a warrior against apartheid. Given that her intended focus is herrefusal to give in, the dramatic direction of her narrative is always towards survival:the survival of a fighting spirit which refuses to bow down under the systematicdehumanisation dealt it both outside and inside prison. The self Makhoereconstructs is stubborn, stalwart, belligerent, and at no time given to self-doubt. Inthe struggle against apartheid, as she wages it, there is structurally no place for thekind of scrutiny that leads Mashinini to investigate ways out of dehumanisationbeyond Black Consciousness's process of reversal.

Reversal is Makhoere's consistent strategy. When a priest comes to the prison,and prays in Setswana, 'May our hearts be humbled which are in hell', Makhoerethenceforth refuses to attend church services, and says to the authorities, 'You goand tell the priest that he must pray to all the apartheid gods that they must changetheir hearts' (my emphasis). When a psychiatrist comes, 'I suggested that sheattend to the apartheid gods, not to me'. These responses make perfect sense.However, any progression beyond the retorts of reversal are consistently inhibitedin Makhoere's account. She says: 'When I think of [solitary confinement inKroonstad prison], that hatred starts up again. I am trying to outgrow it'. But thenshe adds, 'I don't think I will change in this respect'. She also says: 'To be honest,looking at the situation, I personally think blacks in South Africa have all theright to hate; but because we are human we have to live together in peace — wemust work together'. Then she adds: 'We can only do that when we get rid of theevil system of apartheid, totally and forever'. Her interest remains in the struggle,not what will come after it.

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Makhoere particularly wanted her No to reach beyond the prison walls. This ispartly achieved through the publicity following her attack on a warder she callssimply Mbomvana, meaning the red one: a blonde Afrikaner who could pass, notesMakhoere, 'for a rugby scrum-half. Makhoere's initial intention was retaliation:Mbomvana had asked two male warders to haul Makhoere out of her bath one dayand beat her up. Now, to the ululation of the common-law prisoners, and therejoicing of the other political prisoners, Makhoere and a fellow prisoner stabMbomvana with a set of mathematical instruments with 'long, sharp needles': 'wewanted to kill her, there and then. Let us kill her and then they can hang us.Because we have had enough of her. We assaulted her for a long time, stabbing herin the face, on the head, on the body, all over. She was bleeding on to the passagefloor. After we had satisfied ourselves we went back to our cells'.

Much the same narrative energy invests this scene as a murder Makhoere hearsabout and reports: a domestic worker and two friends fatally assault and then 'boil'an old woman in a hot bath before taking all her money. Such episodes are to beread in the context of protracted, systematic and subtly multi-faceted violence onthe part of white South Africans against black. What also needs saying is that onelooks for, and does not find, the kind of scrutiny Mashinini brings to bear onbrutality. The shifting of tense from past to present closes off any of the potentialdistance between narrating and experiencing selves in which this scrutiny mighthave occurred: 'Let us kill her ... We have had enough of her'. In Makhoere'saccount generally, narrating and experiencing selves are rarely split, leaving nospace for the self-criticism or character development that autobiography and otherfirst-person narration typically invite, and that Benson and Mashinini, to differentdegrees, deploy. This does not mean that Makhoere's narrative refuses to inhabitthe dramatic present — there are numerous gnomic utterances (statements aboutgeneral conditions) — but that the narrative past is not accorded its pastness: theyounger self is not distinguished from a maturing self. Moreover, Makhoere'sconstruction of a speaking voice, largely through her frequent address to the reader,generally imitates the kind of colloquialism which typically evades inner, privatereflection: 'And when I got there, guess what happened. I was taken to theisolation, straightaway'.

For full success, Makhoere had hoped that a charge of assault would be laidagainst the wardress Mbomvana. But, after legal mismanagement, the case wasdropped, so that Makhoere's narrative instead has to present not Mbomvana'spublic trial outside the walls but her own punishment for assault within. Thenecessary capitulation on Makhoere's part — 'According to prison rules andregulations you cannot appeal against the sentence. So I just served it' — isundercut by the sentence that follows — 'But I want to make it clear that thismatter is not yet finished' — the sudden use of the present tense again collapsingthe distance between narrating and experiencing selves, so that the gap opening upto disappointment and failure is instead sealed over, as it were, with determination.

It is worth looking more closely at the contours of Makhoere's determination.Without suggesting an inevitable connection between her celebration of violenceand Black Consciousness philosophy, it is clear that her strategy for psychic

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survival is the fundamental strategy of Black Consciousness: she systematicallyreverses the Manichean self-other dichotomies formerly controlled by whiteauthorities, and assumes the ascendant position, whereby the white antagonist takesthe place of 'other', and 'other', correspondingly, becomes 'white'. When a warderis unsympathetic, for instance, she 'had an Afrikaner mentality, although she wasblack'. What cultural analysis Makhoere offers is reserved for 'them': 'It is better,it is part of being human, to know the difference between right and wrong. Andthey are wrong'. In a reported conversation about target practice between Makhoereand a warder called Erasmus, Makhoere discovers that the warder is quite prepared toshoot at black people, 'if necessary'. It is then that Makhoere chooses to say: 'Themonster urged by hatred was running loose in southern Africa. The cry for justicethat landed me inside these prisons was the same one I was to face when I cameout. What kind of human beings were these?'

'What kind of human beings were these?' The singular kind (a common SouthAfricanism) is instructive here: eliding the differences between her whiteantagonists, Makhoere sees them as a single 'monster'. But her question leads inanother direction too. In a talk given in 1982 on femininity and narrative JulietMitchell, a feminist marxist psychoanalyst and literary critic, spoke about the waysociety may try to change its social structure and the values it lives by, yet all tooeasily disrupts the old only within the terms already provided. She concludes: 'I donot think that we can live as human subjects without in some sense taking on ahistory; for us, it is mainly the history of being men or women under bourgeoiscapitalism. In deconstructing that history, we can only construct other histories.What are we in the process of becoming?'9 The question she ends with, in itscontext an anguished cry rather than a straightforward inquiry, voices my uneaseabout Makhoere's book, not least because it is a question her book makes itselfincapable of asking.

It is symptomatic of Makhoere's presentation of self that gender is not inquestion, for it would open up division not only within the black communityMakhoere needs to construct but also within her concept of self. Besides the sexistreferences to Mbomvana — 'I was afraid to imagine how she would throw [her thinboyfriend] around in her fits of anger' — she rigorously maintains the masculine-feminine divisions of the patriarchal symbolic, choosing to see herself asinhabiting the masculine rather than, as Benson does, as straddling these twopositions. Makhoere is like 'the sisters who threw away the kitchen apron for coldsteel in their hands — the hands which are capable of caressing and loving, oh sowell'. Her terrain is the terrain of oppositional discourse, in which either one poleor another may be inhabited. Femininity is weakness, and so is grief. When theprison authorities tell her about her father's death, they 'expected her to weaken, toturn hysterical, to crack into pieces'. Instead, Makhoere retorts: 'Aaiiee, what can Ido?'

9 Juliet Mitchell, Women: The Longest Revolution (London: Virago, 1984), p. 294.

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Conclusion

Earlier in this essay, I used three references to the Freedom Charter to point to aparticular difference between Mashinini and Makhoere, on the one hand, and Bensonon the other. These references also bring out a difference between Mashinini andMakhoere which a racial perspective would repress. Makhoere is unfailinglyconfident about the future, the promise given in the Freedom Charter being used asa constant beacon and the measure against which the present is dismissed: 'Mosthouses in Mamelodi ... are small; they do not comply with the Freedom Charterwhere it says, "There shall be houses, security and comfort'. Any potentialuncertainty is dispelled by means of the Freedom Charter as a rallying cry ('a lutacontinua' also peppers the text) and sanguine claims: 'black people are going torule South Africa tomorrow'. Mashinini on the other hand positions herself not aspassive recipient of the words but as one who recognises her construction underthem: 'when I listen ... just for those few moments I take heart'. Mashinini isolder than Makhoere. While her doubts may simply mean she is more circumspect,and may also point to the fact that she has been educated in a different era, whichgives her a perspective on the Black Consciousness that Makhoere inhabits, theyalso reveal the kind of interest in her own self-construction that necessarily placesher outside it, in an interrogative position.

Why am I promoting this interrogative position, which I also refer to above asself-doubt? In work done on the construction of the cognitive subject under classand gender oppression, Monique Wittig argues that only when one becomes awareof the ways one has been constituted as a social subject does one become acognitive subject. It is impossible for women to constitute themselves as subjectswithout engaging in that process of abstraction, for they would otherwise remainunthinkingly within the categories of sex and gender, simply mouthing theirassigned positions. Wittig does not argue that asserting one's position within aparticular class militates against individual subjectivity: on the contrary, one needsto recognise oneself as a member of a class for that process of abstraction tooccur.10 Although she does not engage with the multiple organisations of thehuman subject, her comments may usefully be extended to refer to race as well.The human subject takes up various subject-positions along intersecting andcounter-directional social axes, endlessly slipping from one subject-position (black/white, masculine/feminine, working-class/middle-class) to another, in so far asthese positions are defined, which means an endless dis-placement of self, leadingnot to mutedness and invisibility but instead towards the knowledge of self-in-the-world which is made possible from a position of marginality, even if onlytemporarily conceived. The social dangers of marginality are obvious, and for eachshift made a compensatory gesture is called for. Yet writing, unless it simplymouths already defined social positions, continues to produce the restlessmovements of self in relation to 'other'.

10 Monique Wittig, 'One is Not Born a Woman', Feminist Issues (1981), pp. 47-54.

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Imagined Selves, (Un)imagined Marginalises 353

Marginality in autobiography is conventionally ratified in the narrating-experiencing self split, and as such provides an apparent stability for theautobiographical I. Self-evaluation is not, as I have noted, a generic requirement,although its absence can produce a particularly repressed and repressive effect. As Ihave argued through the case of Benson, the use of a mature self looking back on apast self involves its own repressions, in order to fix in position the vagaries ofpresent and past, self and other, and even the conventional split whereby a marginalperspective on the self might be constructed is not always easy to control. I haveargued that in A Far Cry the temporal distance between narrating and experiencingselves plays a crucial part in the central theme, 'the making of a South African'. Inorder to present herself as another kind of white South African, Benson needs to beseen discarding the earlier self — the 'typical white South African' — asconstituted under the ideology of apartheid. Along with this temporal organisation,and directed by a novelistic desire to give shape to her life, Benson succumbs to thepatriarchal organisation of gender, producing her life as politically fulfilled and yethollow as well; her personal sacrifice to the struggle for justice.

In Mashinini's autobiography, too, the self rejected is the self constructed underapartheid ideology, but Mashinini is careful not to extend this further, and so theconventional split is put to minimal use: radically rejecting the past self wouldusher in a more general critique of the cultural past, which Mashinini appears towish to avoid. She constructs her narrative partly around the tragedy of her 'death'in detention. On the one hand this 'death' translates itself into an anxiety soabiding that she has a physical relapse each November, in commemoration of herfirst arrest, and on the other it screens the death of her daughter Penny, about whichshe cannot speak. Only to an extent, then, is her precarious process of self-construction stabilised or contained by her version of the temporal split, the selfbefore and after Black Consciousness.

In Makhoere's account, the temporal distance between narrating and experiencingselves is not only almost always avoided, but the convention itself is also oftentransgressed (past and present suddenly blurring in the narrator's account). ForMakhoere, the past is not in question: her eyes are constantly on the present as it isbeing hastened towards the future. Self-questioning seems to be politicallyinappropriate, as does a critique of the Black Consciousness that structures herthinking.

If there is a difference here that one might generalise into a difference betweenwhite and black at this particular moment in history, so is there also between thetwo generations: unlike Makhoere, Mashinini risks a degree of self-interrogation,vulnerability and cultural critique that places her in partial affinity with Benson,although her sense of self is not consciously constructed around it, as is Benson's.Marginality, for Makhoere, does not exist, and neither does self-doubt. In afrightening way she remains 'in prison under apartheid', to quote her subtitle, evenwhen she is apparently free.

The three texts, taken together, construct a web of contrasting perspectives andintersecting marginalities, together making up a fuller picture of what it is to be aSouth African these days than any single text can. Midway through her book.

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Benson quotes from Brecht's poem, 'An die Nachgeborenen' (To Posterity), inoblique interrogation of her own rejection of the armed struggle, and in recognitionof the pathos of the fighter's position. Given this essay's interest in marginalpositions from which the act of interrogation continually springs, it is fitting toend with Brecht's poem, and thus with yet another critical position:

... We wentThrough the wars of the classes, despairingWhen we saw only injustice and no rebellion.

And yet we know:Hatred even of crueltyDistorts the features

Anger even at injusticeMakes the voice hoarse. Alas, weWho wished to prepare the ground for kindnessCould not ourselves be kind.

But you, when the time at last does comeAnd man can care for humanityDo not judge usToo harshly.

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Imagined selves, (un)imagined marginalities