Obituary: Elsa Joubert (1922–2020)

The South African author, Elsa Joubert, died of COVID-19-related causes on 13 June 2020, at the age of 97. Her death marked the end of a long and distinguished career, during which she gained the reputation of tackling difficult issues and probing boundaries seemingly set in stone.

The writing career of Joubert, who always wrote in her mother tongue Afrikaans, played itself out in three phases. She started off in the 1950s by writing travel books, a genre she would still use from time to time in later years. In the early 1960s she moved to writing fiction, publishing some of the most influential novels and short stories in Afrikaans literature. When she was in her eighties she turned to the genre of autobiography, publishing three books in which she chronicled her own life and times.

Joubert published her first travel book, Water en Woestyn (Water and Desert), in 1956. It told the story of her first trip though Africa at the age of 26 and describes her departure by boat from Cape Town in the following words:

And with the first noticeable plunge of the boat, I become conscious of something like a lightheadedness. That which bound us to the land has been cut through. Now family, friends and work, security, everything that I know, have been left behind. What lies ahead is as dark as the night through which the ship is breaking (Joubert, 1956: 5; my translation).

It was the year 1948, a few months before the National Party would come to power in South Africa, and she was on her way to Mombasa, from where she would travel to Cairo over land. Even at this early stage the book gave an indication what the enduring constants of Joubert’s oeuvre would be: the desire to explore the unknown and the urge to break out of the secure but also claustrophobic world of her Afrikaner upbringing. It also heralded her enduring fascination with Africa and her consistent efforts to find her place on the African continent as the descendant of European settlers. The concluding words of her second travel book, Die verste reis (The Furthest Journey), which dealt with her experiences in post-war Europe in 1948 and 1949, are often quoted as indicative of another sentiment that guided her writing: “The furthest journey that one can undertake is the one from one human being to another, through the heart” (Joubert, 1959: 160; my translation).

Joubert would eventually publish five more travel books, three of which dealt with trips in Africa. Suid van die wind (South of the Wind) described a trip to the islands of Mauritius, Madagascar, and Réunion (1962), Die staf van Monomotapa [The Staff of Monomotapa] focused on a visit to Mozambique (1964), and Die nuwe Afrikaan (The New African) told of a journey through Angola (1974). In each of these accounts she dealt with the histories and racial politics, rather than the touristic attractions, of the regions she visited. The importance of travel for her lay in the fact that, as she once said in an interview, even though you have to take yourself along, “you always bring someone else back” (see Botha, 2002).

It has been argued that women writers of the past often entered the discursive space of “high literature” via genres less valued in that domain, for example genre fiction or autobiographical genres such as travel writing. It is also said that travel writing provided many women with the opportunity to move out of the sphere conventionally reserved for them to become subjects with agency. Whether this applies to Joubert’s work or not, it is abundantly clear that her travel writing provided her with the inspiration and material for a fictional exploration of certain themes and issues.

Her first novel, Ons wag op die kaptein (translated as To Die at Sunset in 1982), was only published in 1963, when she was already well established as a travel writer. The novel is set on a plantation in Angola and paints the fraught co-existence of a Portuguese settler family and their Angolan workers in the face of a guerilla attack. The novel Bonga (1971) builds on Joubert’s trip to Mozambique and is set in the nineteenth century, again exploring the complex relationship between an indigenous community and Portuguese settlers in a remote part of this country.

The most outstanding accomplishment of Joubert’s fictional oeuvre is undoubtedly her novel Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena, published in 1978, and translated as The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena in 1980. In this novel the Afrikaans-speaking Xhosa woman, Poppie Nongena, gives an account of her life under apartheid in the 1960s and 1970s. She tells of her childhood years in the Northern Cape town Upington, where Afrikaans was the lingua franca. From here the narrative follows her migration from one place to another and back, as dictated by the apartheid laws of the time. The text culminates with her account of the 1976 political riots in Cape Town and the despair resulting from the efforts to keep her family safe. The book was both a literary and commercial success: the Afrikaans original and its English translation were reprinted several times within the first months after publication. It has also been credited with opening the eyes of white South Africans, especially Afrikaners, to the structural violence apartheid inflicted on black South Africans. It was adapted into a stage play that was performed in several cities around the world in the early 1980s, and made into a film, starring Clementine Mosimane, in 2019.

Speaking about the origins of the novel in an interview (Botha, 2002), Joubert said that the decolonization of Angola in the 1970s made her acutely aware of the fact that she knew very little about the lives of her fellow South Africans who lived in apartheid townships and homelands. She realized that it had become imperative to educate herself by travelling through her own country. She thus embarked on an intensive process of research, visiting several homelands and townships such as Soweto in Johannesburg and Langa, Nyanga, and Gugulethu in Cape Town. She went to black schools, sat in maintenance courts where women applied for child support, visited pass offices where black South Africans had to apply for permission to work in white areas, and attended the hearings of the enquiry into the 1976 riots. When she met the domestic worker Ntombizodumo Eunice Ntatsa, she thus felt prepared to interview her and record her story in Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena. Ntatsa shared in the profits generated by the book, but her identity was kept secret at the time of publication in order to protect her and only became known later.

The book did not escape its share of controversy. Anne McClintock (1995: 311) criticized the packaging of the book as a novel rather than collaborative autobiography, referring to the “scandal of hybridity” surrounding it. She wrote that

the narrative itself expresses a far more complex hierarchy of relations than its packaging suggests, and [that] much of the greater value and interest of the book lies in the way these shifting imbalances of power — the paradoxes and ambiguities arising from its doubled authorship, the contradictions between the two women’s relation to apartheid — are integrated into the texture of the narrative itself.

On the other hand Valerie Lucy Graham (2014: 182) argued that Joubert’s manuscript and notes, which only recently became available to researchers, reveal that Joubert experienced a “strange antipathy” and deep discomfort during the process of interviewing her informant and writing up her experiences: “It is as if the more ‘Poppie’ seems to have told Joubert about her life, the more devastating became the writer’s feelings of complicity in the system devised by her own people, and this realisation grew like a cancer, spreading with no cure in sight”. Graham credits Joubert for eventually overcoming her disquiet and creating “a text that reflects her own position, rendering her ‘class’ as complicit in the suffering of a black Afrikaans-speaking woman who lived under the crushing system of apartheid” (2014: 185).

Joubert went on to publish two more novels, two short story collections, and two novellas. Especially noteworthy among these is the novel Missionaris, published in 1988 and translated as The Hunchback Missionary in 2014. It tells the story of a minor historical figure, the hunchbacked Dutch missionary Aart van der Lingen, who travelled to the arid interior of South Africa in the early nineteenth century. It is an attempt to capture the mindset of a man who undertook this arduous spiritual journey despite his own frailties and lack of understanding. The other high point of Joubert’s career as a novelist was Die reise van Isobelle, published in 1995 and translated as Isobelle’s Journey in 2002. It is a family saga that represents three generations of Afrikaner women living through the main events and many turning points in South African history, ending with the country’s transition to democracy in 1994. Centrally placed is the character, Isobelle or Belle, who undertakes a journey through Africa in the late 1940s in the same way that Joubert did. A traumatic experience in Kenya, where she falls in love with an Indian man who is killed by a group of British soldiers, leaves her bereft and disillusioned with Afrikanerdom when she experiences at first hand the devastating impact of racial prejudice. She never recovers from the incident and lives most of her life in an almost catatonic state of depression. She barely acknowledges those around her, including her activist daughter Leo in whom the novel’s hope for a post-apartheid future lies.

The final part of Joubert’s writing career was invested in the writing of an autobiography in three parts. The first of these texts,’n Wonderlike geweld (translated as A Lion on the Landing), was published in 2005, when the author was 83 years old. It gives an account of the first 26 years of her life and ends with her departure on the journey through Africa. It tells of her formative years in an Afrikaner family and community, her passion for the language Afrikaans, and her unquestioning participation in the surge of Afrikaner nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s. It provides ample evidence that Joubert used her own experience as a young girl, overwhelmed and seduced by the spectacle of nationalism, as material for her novel Die reise van Isobelle. The second autobiography, Reisiger published in 2009 (translated as A Daughter of Africa), likewise confirms that her own experience of falling in love with an Indian man while travelling through Kenya and her subsequent disenchantment with Afrikaner nationalism, provided the inspiration for the portrayal of the character Belle in Die reise van Isobelle. Reisiger also recounts how she found a new spiritual and intellectual home in the community of leftist writers who were members of the Afrikaanse Skrywersgilde (Afrikaans Writers Guild).

Joubert’s autobiographical project was completed with the publication of Spertyd (translated as Cul de Sac) in 2017, when its author was 95 years old. The text engages with the theme of old age, but also retrieves memories from the past in order to address the political questions that had always driven Joubert as an author. Looking back on her experience of South African history and the notion of Afrikaner identity, it is only her loyalty to the Afrikaans language that remains standing in this searing scrutiny of herself and the Afrikaner nation.

In the final instance Joubert considered herself an African writer. Because of her desire to be part of Africa she derived great joy from the fact that Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena was included in the list of Africa’s 100 best books of the twentieth century. Of this she said: “With the acknowledgement of African languages on the list and Afrikaans, next to Arabic, the first to be mentioned, I felt more than ever that I have come home among the writers of the continent. For me this is a form of liberation” (Botha, 2002; my translation).

One of the outstanding features of Joubert’s body of the work is the honesty and integrity with which she questioned herself and her fellow Afrikaners. The unremitting desire to interrogate herself and the validity of her own existence by undertaking the journey into the unknown, whether in the form of another country or another person, is what makes her one of the most important South African writers of her time.