Abstract
Despite having been celebrated for autochthonous renewal, Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother (1998) and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness (2000) perpetuate ontological discourses of ubuntu that uphold patriarchal forms of national community. In these discourses of personhood, men function as subjects entitled to “moral arrival” whilst women are represented as women-in-community. Women are never in positions of authority. Consequently, neither men nor women can become fully human in the manner proposed by ubuntu in these texts.
Narratives of origin, autochthonous renewal, and indigeneity were celebrated in the transition to democracy in South Africa; more specifically, as Siphokazi Magadla and Ezra Chitando suggest, “this recovery can be seen in the attention that Ubuntu has received in [the first two] decades of democratic consolidation” (2014: 176). Yet less attention has been paid to what it means to be a man and a woman within this context, or “how we should ‘do’ the relations between men and women” (Magadla and Chitando, 2014: 177). Feminist scholars including Rita Barnard (2004), Elleke Boehmer (1998), Helen Bradford (2008), Ania Loomba (1998), Anne McClintock (1995), and Meg Samuelson (2004, 2007, 2009) recognize that the nation is built upon gendered exclusions. In addition, there is a general consensus among feminist critics that post-apartheid fiction retrieves and rewrites figures of women from the past as redemptive narratives; this is an androcentric discourse (Barnard, 2004, 2007; Bradford, 2008; McClintock, 1995; Mazibuko, 2009; Samuelson, 2004, 2007, 2009). In these narratives, ownership of the female body is conferred to men and patriarchal versions of autochthony and African Renaissance are celebrated. Ontological discourses of ubuntu might contribute to and uphold these patriarchal forms of national community.
The commonly accepted meaning of ubuntu is: “a person becomes a person through others”. This implies a sense of belonging and indeed, moral responsibility. Scholars generally agree that ubuntu is specific to Africa or the people of Africa; not only is it understood as a collective consciousness but ubuntu is simultaneously viewed as both philosophy and ontology (John Mbiti, 1991; Mnyaka and Motlhabi, 2009; Martin Prozesky, 2010; MB Ramose, 2002). 1 In practice, however, ubuntu is complex. Static re-inventions of tradition prove problematic for nation building and can induce violent forms of belonging. For example, as Sanders explains, the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) rested on ubuntu as the assertion of the significance of black experience as a tool for mobilization (2002: 163). Similarly, Michael Eze argues that the corporeal foundations of blackness that gave ubuntu socio-political power in the transition to democracy relied on a preoccupation with a static understanding that was dependent on a singular black experience and the exultation of the black race as a matrix in and of itself (2010: 92). These complex social and historical formations of South Africa’s nationalist agenda risk normalizing fundamental oppositions; at best, ubuntu emerges as idealistic. Such uncertainties underpinned the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and expose the manner in which ubuntu might enable gendered polarizations. Both Dorothy Driver and Meg Samuelson argue that the TRC delimited female agency. For Driver, the BCM relied on women as the “bearers of national culture” which laid the ground for the deployment of ubuntu through the TRC; here the TRC denied that “women-in-community were women-in-themselves” (2005: 293). Such oppositional “gendered patterns”, as Samuelson argues, “consolidated the national narrative of sacrifice and redemption” (2007: 161). It follows that, in this context, ubuntu — as a tool for a cohesive social and moral order — worked to legitimize the oppression of women and upheld a patriarchal ideology. The wider post-apartheid literary landscape reflects this trend and demonstrates, as Driver argues, that neither women nor men can become “fully human in the manner proposed by Ubuntu” (2005: 292). The following novels, for example, uphold the “moral arrival” of men: Niq Mhlongo’s Dog Eat Dog (2004), and Way Back Home (2013), Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001), K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents (2000) and The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001), Kgebetli Moele’s Room 207 (2006) and The Book of the Dead (2009). Indeed, female writers of a similar generation elevate the emergent female subject in the “new” nation. This can be seen in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City (2010), Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut (2007) and Evening Primrose (2016), and Zukiswa Wanner’s The Madams (2006). In spite of this, female characters are predominantly valued in domestic and familial terms: here, women’s issues emerge as “moral issues” in terms of Hassim’s notion of “soft” politics (1991: 66). In many ways, post-apartheid fiction replicates the “moral arrival” of women in the TRC: “ubuntu is to be bestowed by women, but not on women as well” (Driver, 2005: 292). The violence of these distinctions can be understood through Leonhard Praeg’s version of “ubuntu as lived-praxis”. Here, objections to gendered oppositions “present as an all-destroying act of ontological betrayal, a threat to existence […] with the understanding of difference as violence” (Praeg, 2014: 42). It seems that women who contradict oppositional gendered patterns of national community — embodied in patriarchal versions of ubuntu — pose a threat to social and moral order. Despite David Attwell’s claim that Mother to Mother and The Heart of Redness “represent high water marks in the definition of black historical and cultural identity” through the authors’ representations of the prophetic movement of Nongqawuse and the emergence of democracy, these novels risk legitimizing the control and oppression of women (2005: 10). Both Magona and Mda perpetuate ontological discourses of ubuntu that replicate patriarchal forms of national community. This is achieved through an appeal to a unanimous past and the homogenization of tradition that sustains fundamentally oppositional gender distinctions; these gendered patterns then consolidate the separation of gender and nation in these texts (Driver, 2005; Eze, 2010; Samuelson, 2007; Yuval-Davis; 1997). Consequently, the concept of a homogenous black historical and cultural identity works — as a force — to delimit black female agency. Here, men function as subjects entitled to “moral arrival” while the “moral arrival” of women is disavowed; women are always women-in-community and seldom women-in-self. The reader is left with the contradictions of ubuntu as a force for social cohesion in the text. The authors do not resolve these issues.
Mother to Mother
Magona’s novel is written in letter form and responds to Amy Biehl’s murder in Gugulethu in 1993. Biehl was an American scholar who was stabbed to death by black protesters. These young men were later pardoned by the TRC under the mandate of restorative justice because their actions were viewed as politically motivated. The Biehls also chose to forgive the perpetrators. In the novel, Mandisa writes to Biehl’s mother, a white American woman, and details her experience of the events that led up to and beyond Amy’s death; Mandisa struggles to accept her son’s culpability in Amy’s murder. I argue that Magona blames Mxolisi’s actions on an imagined black community. Their connection to the community is based on an ontological understanding of African being and belonging: ubuntu. This homogenous historical and cultural identity works to limit both Mandisa and Mxolisi’s agency — in different ways. The novel characterizes both Driver (2005) and Samuelson’s (2007) criticisms of the TRC: Mandisa performs gendered subjectivities as the bereaved mother and this pattern consolidates the national narrative of sacrifice and redemption. Although Samuelson (2007) states that Magona critiques patriarchy, she maintains that Magona does not idealize traditional notions of communal unity embodied by ubuntu. For Samuelson, Mother to Mother “offers a more nuanced picture of the past than the one emerging from the confines of the TRC’s quasi-judicial, quasi-religious, nation-building mandate”, critiquing patriarchy to reveal “the gendered schisms and fault lines in romanticised notions of communal unity” (2007: 166–168). You could say that Magona questions the contingency of black historical and cultural agency. For example, Magona illustrates how difficult it is for Mandisa to negotiate her humanity as a young women in a patriarchal clan, but Magona does not reject the notion of a homogenous black identity. This contradiction is embodied in the relationship between Mandisa and her grandfather. Tato’s narrative of the relationship between the amaXhosa and colonial past homogenizes tradition and appeals to a unanimous past where women are never women-in-self but always women-in-community. His dialogue with the past perpetuates ontological discourses of ubuntu and gender divisions. Mandisa upholds this discourse in contemporary Gugulethu. Consequently, Magona’s narrative does not resolve gender divisions that continue to constrain female agency. Barnard argues that Magona “implies that the killers are purely victims of circumstances — the products of apartheid’s soul-numbing ghettoes” (2007: 143). Barnard goes on to explain how Magona represents the apartheid struggle as having expanded community obligations so that these “no longer referred to local, kinship-based and visible communities of metaphysical locality, but rather to larger imagined communities of political practice” (2007: 52). For example, Magona explores the devastating impact of forced removals on the community. In these “new” communities people are mostly disconnected. Even so, Magona points to ubuntu as the reason for chaos:
Our children fast descended into barbarism. With impunity, they broke with old tradition and crossed the boundary between that which separates human beings from beasts. Humaness [*ubuntu], took flight. It had been sorely violated. It went and buried itself where none of us would easily find it again. (Magona, 1998: 96)
For Magona, ubuntu seems to be an inner spiritual state or foundation. She highlights the moral breakdown of the youth and blames the older generation who “failed to nurture [the youth] into the higher ideals of humanity” (1998: vii–iii). These metaphors illustrate Mnyaka and Motlhabi’s suggestion that individuals who pursue self-interest can be described as “akanabuntu”, which means to lack ubuntu, or as “akongomtu hase motho”, which refers to someone who is not a person, not human (2009: 60). In part, Mandisa and Mxolisi embody these failings and appear to lose their ubuntu because of Mxolisi’s crime. They become “lepers” in the community (1998: 248). For the most part, Mxolisi is forced into hiding and Mandisa is ostracized by the wider community. However, there are contradictions to Magona’s ubuntu. Significantly, this discourse begins in the relationship between Mandisa and her grandfather. Tato is endowed with authority as the imbongi poet. Through an appeal to a unanimous past, his teachings imply that Biehl’s murder was an ontological inevitability committed by Mxolisi:
Burning hatred for the oppressor possessed his being. It saw through his eyes; walked with his feet and wielded the knife that tore mercilessly into her flesh. The resentment of three hundred years plugged into his ears; deaf to her pitiful entreaties. My son, the blind but sharpened arrow of the wrath of his race. (Magona, 1998: 263)
Political action, it seems, relies on the assumption of a static and singular black experience that is used to induce violent forms of African being and belonging (Eze, 2010). Magona’s concept of “chance” reiterates this message in the closing lines of the novel: if Mxolisi hadn’t committed the crime, then another black youth would have; if Amy hadn’t been a victim, then another white student would have been the victim. The subject position of women in the discourse of national community further complicates this issue. In “Mandisa’s lament”, for example, Mandisa is refused agency bearing witness in a TRC-style Women’s Hearing. Mandisa apologizes for her son’s actions and propitiates before God contingent upon, as Anne Whitehead suggests, “specific social, material, and political conditions” that “she cannot be easily extracted or abstracted from” (2012: 188). In particular, Samuelson traces the subject position of “Mother-Witness” to argue that Magona “both reproduces and subverts the grand narrative of nationalism” (2007: 161). For Samuelson, “like the TRC, the narrative proposes the humanist values of ubuntu as central to the reconstruction of post-apartheid South Africa” — without idealizing these values (2007: 167). Yet Magona’s later insistence on ubuntu as lived-praxis challenges Samuelson’s argument: disloyalty to a homogenous black identity is perceived as a threat to the existence of black agency in the novel (Praeg, 2014). Failure to carry out the murder of Amy Biehl appears to be linked to black personhood or ubuntu. Hence, the negation of Amy Biehl’s murder appears to represent the possibility of a threat. For example, Linda Biehl and Mandisa’s relationship depends upon Amy and Mxolisi’s ontological connection: “Your daughter. The imperfect atonement of her race. My son. The perfect host of the demons of his” (Magona, 1998: 251). Mandisa and Mrs Biehl are equally bound by this: “We were not asked whether we wanted it or not. We did not choose, we are the chosen” (Magona, 1998: 251). As Mandisa reaches out to Linda Biehl as “sister-mother”, she claims that they are “bound in this sorrow” (Magona, 1998: 251). Lastly, Linda Biehl and Mandisa’s narrative of belonging reiterates Tato’s metaphor of the heart which extends this ontological claim further: Mrs Biehl’s heart is also “torn” (Magona, 1998: 248). This ontological discourse is authored by men. Tato teaches the “truth” of the amaXhosa past. He focuses on how colonialism destroyed the humanity of the amaXhosa and passes this on to Mandisa. Consequently, according to Tato, the amaXhosa are bound by the need to restore their humanity or ubuntu: “How does one run away from the heart, one’s own or that of another?” (Magona, 1998: 220). Barnard argues that Magona seems to suggest that Biehl was responsible for her own death because she failed to see that she didn’t belong in the townships: “that her efforts to cross boundaries were ill-advised — a sign, in fact, of her privilege and unwarranted moral self-satisfaction” (Barnard, 2007: 143). More so, this image of Biehl as the stranger stresses static representations of black cultural and historical identity. Mandisa states that Amy Biehl “paid for the sins of the fathers and mothers who did not do their share of seeing that [her] son had a life worth living” (Magona, 1998: 4). She claims that Mxolisi’s actions are a “fact of blackness […] with which to burn down the world” (Magona, 1998: 97). These images engender violent forms of national belonging, illustrated by Amy’s death and other forms of community violence addressed in the novel, including incidents of necklacing within the Gugulethu community. Magona continues to risk essentializing culture through Tato’s national narrative of sacrifice and redemption; in particular, the discourse of Nongqawuse and the amaXhosa Cattle Killing. This discourse is embedded in Tato’s “symbolic economy of nationalism” and further illustrates the male authorial role; here, women function metaphorically to “bear men’s messages through their bodies and are firmly discouraged from seizing the tools for writing themselves” (Samuelson, 2009: 243). Magona makes both Mandisa and Nongqawuse mouthpieces for Tato’s version of history. Mandisa reiterates Nongqawuse’s prophecies in contemporary Gugulethu: “Nongqawuse had but voiced the unconscious collective wish of the nation: rid ourselves of the scourge” (Magona, 1998: 262). This statement matches up to Mandisa’s view of Mxolisi’s crime in Gugulethu: Biehl’s death was the result of “the enactment of the deep, dark, private yearnings of a subjugated race” (Magona, 1998: 220). Both statements constitute an imagined homogenous community authored by men where women are scapegoats for male desire. Interestingly, Magona chooses four women to lend Mandisa some form of redemption at the end of the novel. Her neighbours arrive at her door to offer her consolation and reaffirm her personhood. These women uphold notions of community. Lindiwe states that “we are people who come to each other’s homes when there is a reason” (Magona, 1998: 250), and Mandisa claims that hope lies in the work of “churches and other groups working with young people and grown-ups. Helping” (Magona, 1998: 251). Women occupy domestic and familial spaces in this narrative, as Hassim (1991) states; an argument also presented by Samuelson who suggests that Magona “inserts her character into a subject position that authorises women’s speech, but limits its authority to the domestic domain” (2007: 167). Women must guard the morality of the youth without having the authority to confer ubuntu upon others. To a large extent, Magona does not provide a convincing criticism of the historical and ideology forces that work to limit black women’s ability to exercise agency in South Africa.
The Heart of Redness
Much scholarly criticism has celebrated the text’s autochthonous renewal (Bell, 2009; Dannenberg, 2009; Mzamane, 2009; Sewlall, 2017; Wenzel, 2009). On the other hand, Samuelson states that Mda casts women as “vessels for the messages of men, and [that] they speak loudest through their bodies, which stand in symbolic contradiction to the novel’s efforts to inscribe time as tangled and heterogenous” (2007: 80). Therefore, claims of origin and telos are problematic, as Samuelson argues: “the novel’s deployment of autochthony is troubling both in terms of its investment in the figuration of women as mothers and in the extent to which it untangles the text’s temporality” (2007: 67). Similarly, Gail Fincham acknowledges that Mda’s “project risks androcentrism and essentialism in the gendered representation of the prophetess Nongqawuse in the nineteenth century and her reincarnation, Qukezwa, in the modern chronotype” (2009: 202). To extend this argument further, I propose that Camagu’s journey to personhood and his eventual “moral arrival” are gendered. Barnard, for example, argues that Mda expresses power and privilege in the novel by “degrees of mobility”; however, these social exclusions are also gendered (2007: 162). Mda resolves Camagu’s “sense of incongruity and out-of-placeness”, as Barnard describes it, through an ontological discourse of ubuntu that directs Camagu’s “moral and value judgements” (2007: 162). His transformation from “stranger in his own country” to feeling at “home” (and married) is enabled by three women. NomaRussia, Xoliswa, and Qukezwa perform a cathartic function to help him to speak with his ancestors (living–dead) and renew his faith in indigenous tradition (Mda, 2000: 31, 319). They allow Camagu to “return” to a unanimous past that culminates in his marriage to Qukezwa — a reincarnated version of Nongqawuse, the girl-child prophet. Embedded in the narrative of the amaXhosa Cattle Killing, Camagu journeys through familiar gendered patterns that consolidate a national narrative of sacrifice and redemption. Mda abandons the agency of black women to ensure Camagu’s recovery and the salvation of rural Qolorha from the casino developers. Mda achieves this mostly through the sexualization of his female characters. Hypnotized by NomaRussia’s beauty, Camagu travels to Qolorha to find her. Here, he meets Qukezwa and Xoliswa, who complete his love triangle. Qukezwa is a traditionalist who respects the land of her ancestors and indigenous tradition including that of the Khoikhoi and the amaXhosa. She is a modern day Nongqawuse: one of the elders “mutters his wonder at the source of Qukezwa’s wisdom when she is but a slip of a girl” (Mda, 2000: 216). Xoliswa is a modernist; she is the headteacher of the local school and, in the eyes of the community, she has little respect for indigenous amaXhosa traditions. These diverse women symbolize Camagu’s ongoing crisis of representation, as McClintock argues: whether in is his dreams (wielding a panga) or in his imagination, women embody the land that Camagu eventually conquers. He arrives in Qolorha-by-Sea as the stranger; this metaphor conjures up images of the colonizer. Like the colonized land, these women rise up and threaten to madden the intruder (McClintock, 1995). This metaphor can be extended further to Camagu’s role as slave master. On his journey to personhood, he inscribes black females into a narrative of racial degeneration; he conquers them to establish his moral worth. NomaRussia is the first woman in service of Camagu’s ubuntu. He cannot conceive of her beyond her beauty which he describes as “hearthly” (Mda, 2000: 30). She catches his attention at first sight; he feels “breathless” and ashamed of “the pangs of his famous lust” that attack him (Mda, 2000: 30). Threatened by her beauty, he reduces NomaRussia to an ethereal maternal figure. She becomes a “mothering spirit”, able to “comfort him and heal his pain” rather that satisfy the “shame he has to live with” (Mda, 2000: 30). Unable to contain NomaRussia, he places her “nearer to God” in the “green hills, towering cliffs and deep gullies of a folkland dreamland” (Mda, 2000: 27, 30). Interestingly, NomaRussia reintroduces Camagu to the prophetess Nongqawuse, who represents another woman crushed under the patriarchal discourse of national belonging. NomaRussia is the catalyst that triggers Camagu’s autochthonous renewal.
The maid comes next: Camagu admits that he raped his former maid “through coercion”. She is described as a “frumpy country woman” (Mda, 2000: 30–31) whose lack of beauty is also a threat and appears to warrant his abuse. The narrator insists that in
Camagu’s case it was not rape, or so he comforted himself when shame confronted him, for the servant encouraged it. She saw it as a chance of making more money from the master. (Mda, 2000: 31)
He rapes “the humble servant again and again”, and states that “there is something about servitude that seems to set the crotches of men of Camagu’s ilk on fire”; it is “the same urge that drove the slave-master […] to a night of wild passion with the slave girl in the slave quarter or in the fields” (Mda, 2000: 30). There is no explicit evidence that Camagu feels remorse. Rather, Mda insists that women enfeeble men and undermine their morality.
NomaRussia reappears in Camagu’s “very messy dreams”: he is the river and she is the water, as he asks her to climb up his “lusty mountains” (Mda, 2000: 66). These sexual dreams continue through Qukezwa. Camagu claims that Qukezwa invokes his lust and “defiles” his dreams. He ejaculates on her while riding horseback together (Mda, 2000: 103). Hilary P. Dannenberg argues that Camagu’s “sensual response to Qukezwa’s singing” shows Qukezwa’s position of power over Camagu in the local Qolorha context (2009: 188). Fincham states that Mda gives Camagu “mystical, erotic dreams about rivers” which “play a crucial role in his achievement of identity and his eventual incorporation into the Qolorha-by-Sea community”. For Fincham, Camagu’s sexual dreams and his connection to Qukezwa are “ultimately for healing, for she teaches him to understand himself and his new environment” (2009: 197, 200–201). Yet, Qukezwa is described as untameable, loose, and uncivilized. Like the maid, she also represents the idle native: indolent, lazy, and wanton (McClintock, 1995). Although, as Dannenberg suggests, she may rise up “to a superior position in the novel’s character constellation” because of her “knowledge and authority concerning the natural environment” Camagu remains in a position of power over her (2009: 186).
Qukezwa may be “the guardian of a dying tradition” but her authority is always in service of Camagu’s “moral arrival” (Mda, 2000: 195). Qukezwa’s body, Bradford (2008) submits, figures authorial desires in a different respect: she is redeemed from a symbol of prostitution to the virgin mother and functions symbolically as the nation reclaimed and redeemed through recovery of an authentic cultural tradition. Like NomaRussia, Qukezwa must also be mystical. She gives birth to an abiku child through a miraculous virgin birth. This is a point made by Mazibuko, who argues that Mda’s women are “symbols and agents of a spiritual renaissance, operating at the margins of an overtly materialist and male-dominated discourse” (2009: 116). The birth of Camagu’s son crowns this discourse: at the end of the novel, Heitsi echoes his father’s desire to live in the village. Unlike his mother’s people, Heitsi is afraid of the sea. As he pulls away from his mother, he shouts that he belongs in the “man village” and not in the sea (Mda, 2000: 320). Xoliswa is also a threat but she endangers the community by rejecting “redness”; she sees tradition as “disgusting” (Mda, 2000: 260). Xoliswa is described as the nameless “poor girl” of “exceptional beauty” who grew “too greedy and selfish” (Mda, 2000: 43). As a result, she is punished and forced to bear the scars of her ancestors. Here, Xoliswa’s self-interest is seen as an ontological betrayal. She threatens the “the assumption of interdependence (the priority of ‘unity’)” so that her difference becomes a form of violence (Praeg, 2014: 42). Her ancestor’s flagellation becomes her flagellation. Here, the “the notion of liability, or responsibility [in a traditional African worldview] is intensified to result in an understanding of the self crucially as an agent of cultural continuity”, argues Carrol Clarkson (2014: 170). Xoliswa embodies Clarkson’s “agent of cultural continuity” (2014: 170). Like Nongqawuse, Xoliswa is the community scapegoat. She is also someone to be pitied. The “sadness in her eyes”, for example, encourages Camagu’s protection (Mda, 2000: 100). She is banished as a “lost cause” — a decision enforced by her father (Mda, 2007: 261). By the end of the novel, Camagu has married Qukezwa. As the symbolic reincarnation of the girl-child prophet Nongqawuse and the self-proclaimed granddaughter of Saartjie Baartman, Qukezwa is his necessary choice. She symbolizes African authenticity. She provides closure: Camagu has returned to a state of ubuntu. He appears to have saved her through marriage. There is no fear that she should become a spinster and her father is freed from complaints about her “will” or sexual deviance. As Loomba states: “the self-fashioning of the nationalist male thus required his fashioning of his wife into a fresh subservience” (Loomba, 1998: 221). On that account, Camagu’s choice of partner maintains what Ilze Keevy describes as hegemonic masculinities, and “utilises violence to control female behaviour to ensure chastity, to promote abstinence, to control copulation and to deny the existence of sexual violence in Africa” (2014: 71). In this traditionalist discourse, Keevy insists that “women play a central but inferior role” (2014: 70). As is the case of Xoliswa, a woman who can’t be “saved” is punished. Zim’s mistress, for example, is blamed and penalized for her infidelity. The lives of these women are undercut by Nongqawuse, whose prophecies, as Samuelson argues, concern “the sexual indiscretions of promiscuous men”; a part of her prophecy that has been largely ignored and “displaced in Mda’s novel” (2007: 74). Zim’s own unfaithfulness, for example, is not questioned in the novel. In fact, it is euphemized: he is allowed to drink “occasionally from the forbidden well” (Mda, 2000: 43). NoEngland and his mistress, on the other hand, are infantilized. While Zim sits under the tree, his mistress finds an igqirha to make him fall in love with her (Mda, 2000:43). NoEngland also turns to traditional medicine: she makes Zim’s mistress see “the moon” where “things come in gushes, like water from a stream” (Mda, 2000: 44). Mda mystifies the female body and suggests that women are dirty and leaky. A leaky female body, as Samuelson argues, suggests “a conception of female authorship as disruptive, its meaning unstable as it spills out uncontrollably, and its effects disastrous” (2007: 75). In addition, when MamCirha learns that her sexual desires are unwelcome, she says that while her husband was away “she would lie on her stomach for two hours while the urge slowly burnt itself away” (Mda, 2000: 201). For MamCirha, masturbation is something women do not do. Mda restrains her sexuality. From this perspective, morality is overshadowed by the patriarchal demands already mentioned by Keevy. Overall, Mda presents problematic and unhelpful representations of black women and ubuntu.
Conclusion
More recent fiction by younger black authors reinforces patriarchal discourses of ubuntu. Lindanathi’s “moral arrival” in The Reactive (2016) upholds indigenous tradition: he must be circumcized to become a man in the traditions of his ancestors. As in The Heart of Redness, it is necessary that Lindanathi return to his rural community to restore his ubuntu. This process follows the death of his younger brother: Lindanathi injects himself with HIV/AIDS to avoid the circumcision process that killed his younger brother, but he also does this out of guilt. Like Camagu, Lindanathi’s journey to personhood or ubuntu is gendered: men occupy positions of power and privilege. His uncle, for example, has the authority to bring Lindanathi home and help him to complete the amaXhosa initiation process. In comparison, the women in his life are silent or absent. His mother and his aunt hardly feature on this journey. Neither does Ntshanga appear to challenge sexualized stereotypes. Rather, he uses women to numb his feelings of unbelonging: Cecelia is too weak to confront her dying mother, so she uses drugs and sex to medicate her pain. This sexualized narrative (between the two) occupies Lindanathi during his time in the city. He uses her to pass the time and deaden his own regrets. Finally, Esona seals Lindanathi’s personhood when she requests that he “fuck [her] like a new man” and when, later, “on her knees on the kitchen floor, Esona releases [him]” (Ntshanga, 2016: 160). Like Mda, Ntshanga’s female characters must be in positions of subservience and servitude. When these women are not reduced to flesh, they are transformed into mothering figures. After sex, Lindanathi tries to imagine Esona as his mother. These are ambiguous representations of female agency as men restore their ubuntu. Similarly, Mohale Mashigo’s The Yearning (2017) keeps the significance of indigenous tradition alive as Marubini learns to become an indigenous healer. In particular, Mashigo’s narrative prizes the position of female indigenous healers. Nevertheless, from the outset, The Yearning establishes gender divisions and these challenge Mashigo’s efforts to esteem the subject position of indigenous healers in contemporary South Africa. According to Mashigo, women have purpose and agency in motherhood; this is their primary and most fulfilling function. At the start of the novel, for instance, Marubini claims that “a new mother knows her purpose when she holds her baby within her and in her arms for the first time” (Mashigo, 2017: 1). By comparison, “a man’s work has its purpose in death, as part of his legacy” (2017: 1). In the context of childbirth and childrearing, Mashigo implies that it is acceptable that men have little responsibility. Her father, for example, abandons the family to deal with his own demons. It is equally worrying that Marubini needs her brother, Simphiwe, to direct her path: she blindly follows him towards ubuntu and chooses to believe in his guidance, “no matter where his puddle may lead” (2017: 181). It is unclear why she needs a male guide who appears to know more than her. In the reverse, men appear to enable the “moral arrival” of women in The Yearning as protectors and guardians of culture. Marubini is not allowed to know the truth of her past; rather, Jabu must carry his daughter’s pain after she is raped. The pain is Jabu’s burden, and he is “the owner of the hurt”, with a duty to “guard it and never let it spread further” (Mashigo, 2017: 142, 147). This idea is not far removed from Tato who in Mother to Mother claims to enlighten Mandisa whilst oppressing her autonomy. Ultimately, Marubini does not free herself; instead, her father claims: “You are free now” (Mashigo, 2017: 177). Stripped of her agency, Mashigo returns Marubini to motherhood. Here, hope lies in the birth of her new child and not in her own capacity for change — just as hope in Mother to Mother lies in a force beyond Mandisa’s control. While the female protagonists in Mother to Mother and The Yearning are both strong and independent, these women still appear lost without their men. In closing, the texts discussed in this article do not present characters’ viewpoints in wholly uncritical ways; these authors do create characters who are aware of their flaws and moral shortcomings. Still, the degree to which these literary representations essentialize tradition is worrying. Female agency in these novels is left wanting, which further problematizes the maxim “I am a person through others” as gender violence persists in the country.
