Ngcobo, Lauretta 1931–

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Lauretta Ngcobo 1931-

South African novelist, editor, and children's book author.

INTRODUCTION

Ngcobo is a South African novelist whose work articulates her long-standing concern with economic, social, and political justice. Reviewers maintain that her novels are imbued with her own experiences struggling against the injustices of the apartheid system in South Africa in the second half of the twentieth century. Ngcobo is lauded for her ability to provide a much needed voice for black South African rural women, who battle economic forces, social customs, and oppressive political policies with passion and dignity in their fight for equality within a patriarchal and racially discriminatory Africa.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Ngcobo was born in 1931 in rural Ixopo, South Africa. Born during the apartheid era, she grew up experiencing racial discrimination and became politically active as a young woman. She was a member of the Pan-African Congress, a political group that was banned by the white South African government. Her husband, Abednego, was a founding member of the Pan-African Congress and was subsequently imprisoned for several years. Because of her political activities and her fight against the government's apartheid policies, she too became a target for South African security forces and narrowly escaped arrest. In 1963 she fled with her three children to Swaziland and stayed briefly in Tanzania and Zambia before immigrating to London in 1969. She found work as a teacher in London and decided to settle there. Alienated from the struggle back home, she began to write a novel that explored her experiences as an activist. Her first novel, Cross of Gold, was published in 1981. She is also the editor of a 1987 anthology entitled Let It Be Told, which contains essays by black British women writers including Marsha Prescod and Julie Pearn. In 1990 Ngcobo's second novel, And They Didn't Die, was published. A year later Ngcobo returned to South Africa, where she became a member of the KwaZulu-Natal Provincial legislature.

MAJOR WORKS

Ngcobo's fiction is informed by the turbulent political situation in her native South Africa and her participation in the political and social movement to end the discriminatory policies of apartheid. In her first novel, Cross of Gold, she touches on the role of black women in the struggle in South Africa. The novel opens with the shooting of a political activist, Sindisiwe Zidoke, as she tries to escape to Botswana with her young sons. Surviving the shooting, Sindisiwe is motivated to become a freedom fighter; her actions, however, lead to her violent death at the hands of government security forces. The story then shifts to the story of her son Mandla, who continues the fight against apartheid. By the time of her second novel, however, Ngcobo was ready to more fully explore the heroism of black rural women in the struggle against apartheid and confront the conflicting economic, political, and cultural forces that shaped the South African black female experience during that era. In And They Didn't Die Jezile, a rural South African black woman, is beset by political and cultural forces; not only must she deal with the oppression of apartheid, she must also conform to cultural mores that dictate her obedience to her husband, Siyalo, as well as to her meddling mother-in-law. When a crippling drought and other economic factors force Siyalo to work in the city—and only return home for two weeks out of the year—the couple's relationship is threatened not only by the distance, but by Jezile's inability to conceive a child during his brief stays. While visiting her husband in Durban, Jezile witnesses the political activism of urban women as they fight for better living conditions and fair wages and feels a sense of kinship with them. When Siyalo is arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison for stealing milk to feed their starving child, Jezile is forced to take a job as a domestic servant in a white household and is subsequently raped by her white employer. Now pregnant, she returns to her village, but is disowned by her in-laws for bearing the child of a white man. When a soldier breaks into her house and attempts to rape her daughter, S'naye, Jezile kills the soldier and must face the consequences of her actions. Ngcobo has also written a children's book, Fiki Learns to Like Other People (1993).

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Ngcobo's novels have attracted critical attention for their poignant and compassionate depiction of the challenges and suffering of black South African women under the repressive apartheid system and traditional South African patriarchal customs. Critics trace the development of Ngcobo's portrayal of the female characters in her novels as evidence of the novelist's own growing racial and feminist consciousness: in her first book, Cross of Gold, she killed off her female character, Sindisiwe, because she found it difficult to view African women as capable of effecting change; by her second novel, And They Didn't Die, she was able to more fully develop a strong, if not tragic, female protagonist who undergoes her own brave journey toward political and social activism, even if it comes at great cost. Ngcobo's inability to sustain a female protagonist in Cross of Gold is viewed by critics as an accurate reflection of the privileged role of men in the struggle against apartheid. Other commentators note that her fiction also addresses the economic disempowerment and cultural dislocation imposed on the black population, particularly black rural women, by industrialization, colonialism, migrant labor, and the apartheid system.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Cross of Gold (novel) 1981

Let It Be Told: Essays by Black Women in Britain [editor] (essays) 1987

And They Didn't Die (novel) 1990

Fiki Learns to Like Other People (juvenilia) 1993

CRITICISM

Cherry Clayton (essay date 2000)

SOURCE: Clayton, Cherry. "Rural Women and African Resistance: Lauretta Ngcobo's Novel And They Didn't Die." In Postcolonizing the Commonwealth: Studies in Literature and Culture, edited by Rowland Smith, pp. 115-32. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2000.

[In this essay, Clayton maintains that And They Didn't Die presents a characterization of a strong rural woman, Jezile, who faces a series of racial, sociopolitical, cultural, and economic forces that work against her and other South African women.]

How was it that laws were so clear cut, when the lives they governed were so muddled?
—Ngcobo 1991:226
The hand that rocks the cradle should also rock the boat.
—South African women's slogan

Culture, Ideology and Representation

Debates about the relationship of culture, ideology and the politics of literary representation are complex. Frantz Fanon wrote in Toward the African Revolution that the process of industrialization camouflaged racism: "the perfecting of the means of production inevitably brings about the camouflage of the techniques by which man is exploited, hence of the forms of racism" (1967:35). These essays evoke the spirit of the 1958 Accra conference on African strategy and unity as a historical unravelling of the 1884 Berlin conference, which carved up continents in the name and spirit of European imperialism. Fanon goes on to say that "The advent of peoples, unknown only yesterday, onto the stage of history, their determination to participate in the building of a civilization that has its place in the world of today give to the contemporary period a decisive importance in the world process of humanization" (1967:146). A black South African writer, Lauretta Ngcobo, echoes this thought when she says: "there is another victory to be won, if South Africa is to be restored to her space in Africa. The cultural battle. There is no other place in the continent which is less African than South Africa" (1994:570).

The humanist discourse which emerges in relation to the decolonization of Africa now co-exists with a deconstructive discourse which problematizes cultural identity, critiques the development and enlightenment paradigms for Africa, and insists on contradiction and difference in the cultural articulation of African and Afro-American identities.¹ Henry Louis Gates, Jr., argues that the heritage of each black text in a Western language is "a double heritage, two-toned" and that writers of African descent "occupy spaces in at least two traditions: a European or American literary tradition, and one of the several related but distinct black traditions" (1984:4). While "the very act of writing has been a political act for the black author (Gates 1984:5), the structure of the black text has been repressed and treated as if it were transparent (Gates 1984:6). Black people have always been "masters of the figurative"; saying one thing and meaning another has been "basic to black survival in oppressive Western cultures" (Gates 1984:6).

Critics working within African and Afro-American feminism have also wanted to stress repetition and revision in black women's texts. Barbara Johnson, writing on Zora Neale Hurston, argues that Hurston's protagonist needs to "assume and articulate the incompatible forces involved in her own division. The sign of authentic voice is thus not self-identity but self-difference" 1984:212). Houston Baker, Jr., situates narration within "a world that is itself constituted by a repertoire of ‘stories’" (1984:224). Susan Willis, writing on Toni Morrison, says that "sexuality converges with history and functions as a register for the experience of change, i.e. historical transition" (1984:263). Morrison, like Ngcobo, "develops the social and psychological aspects that characterize the lived experience of historical transition" and its consequences, "the alienation produced by the transition to wage labour" (Willis 1984:265). Domestic service constitutes only a marginal incorporation as wage labour, and in Morrison's fiction "individual genealogy evokes the history of black migration and the chain of economic expropriation from hinterland to village, and village to metropolis" (Willis 1984:265). Individual differences between women function to test the social dynamic within the group and society at large (Willis 1984:279). Jane Bryce, discussing African women's writing in a "post-Negritude, post-colonial reading of culture" suggests that recent writing is marked by a "self-conscious disjunction" (1994:619) between tradition and modernity. African women writers' use of English and of the novel genre "may be seen as an implicit assertion of distance from the nostalgia for origins, a recognition of the need for a revisioning of culture and their relationship to it from a postcolonial perspective" (Bryce 1994:620-21).

When Lauretta Ngcobo contextualizes her own literary production, she also points to multiple, often conflicting allegiances. Born in 1931 in rural Natal, she was forced to flee South Africa in 1963 after persecution by the South African government and police harassment.² Her husband was in the first executive of the Pan-Africanist Congress, a radical group that broke away from the African National Congress in 1959 and organized the pass resistance that led to the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. He was sent to jail along with people like Sobukwe (leader of the PAC) and Mandela. Ngcobo's husband was involved in the lengthy Treason Trials which began in 1956. He was then in prison between 1960 and 1963, and a militant activist until 1969, when the couple eventually settled in England with their three children, and where Lauretta began her first novel, Cross of Gold (1981), a novel in which she found it difficult to keep her female protagonist alive as a focal centre (Hunter 1994:102). Sindisiwe dies because at the time "death and destruction" were all-pervasive; "such has been the history of our struggle in South Africa" (Hunter 1994:107). At the time of writing her first novel Ngcobo found it difficult to see African women as capable of effecting change:

In South Africa … a black woman is oppressed by law, which has calcified around the old traditional customs. Under the Natal Code, for instance, a woman is a perpetual minor who cannot perform at law even when her husband is dead. She's equally incapacitated socially, economically, all round.
(Bush 1984:7)

Ngcobo has also expressed ambivalence about feminism and the freedom that Western women aspire to, while being agents of racial oppression themselves, whether in South Africa or England: "I am not referring to the structure of institutionalised power, but to the yoke of daily injustice, to the bitterness of everyday living" (Vivan 1989:111). She calls attention to a range of levels of oppression and draws a comparison between oppression by African men and white women: "through our man we feel the weight of the system, as well as that of law and tradition. An analogous thing happens to us in respect of the white woman: it is through her that a variety of oppressions befall us" (Vivan 1989:112). Yet she acknowledges that white women have won rights which will benefit African women after democratization. This has been the case in South Africa, where women represented in Parliament now constitute 33-1/3 percent of the total, moving from 130th in the world to 10th place (Davis 1994:587).

In attempting to define her place in relation to Western and African traditions, Ngcobo admits that "Our women are caught up in a hybrid world of the old and the new; the African and the alien locked in the struggle to integrate contradictions into a meaningful new whole" (Ngcobo 1986:82). African women had been cardboard figures in a written tradition that created contradictory images of idolized mothers and the realities of wifehood.³ The oral tradition, though she cites a moving instance of its performance by her grandfather at her own birth, also "extolled the virtues of humility, silent endurance and self-effacing patterns of behaviour for our girls" (Ngcobo 1986:81). During her growing years and education she was made to feel marginalized in the educational system (35 women to 500 men when she attended university) (Ngcobo 1986:85). At school and university she observed the cultural clash between rural and city ways and people: "I began to feel a disfigurement of outlook, a mutilation within" (Ngcobo 1986:85). This may account for the strong presence she gives to rural women, and their powers of resistance, in her later novel, And They Didn't Die, in which the title signals defiance and survival.

In her autobiographical writing, essays and interviews Ngcobo relates the fragmentation of cultural traditions to political processes, especially industrialization and migrant labour. The introduction of scripted literature divided society into an educated elite and an uneducated mass, and became a source of alienation. The system of migrant labour "altered beyond recognition the structures of our societies" and affected women who had traditionally played a prominent role in the transmission of oral literature (Ngcobo 1986:84). Urbanization in the gendered form of migrant labour for men "created … hardened divisions between men and women" (Ngcobo 1986:85). The story of And They Didn't Die, which relates the different but politically inflected trials of an African couple, Jezile and Siyalo, sundered by multiple factors deriving from poverty, migrant labour, political activism and prison, customary law and gendered oppression, becomes the vehicle for conveying this process of "hardened division" between the sexes. The stories of their different trajectories into city life, patterns of disillusionment, economic struggle and politicization, become representative stories illuminating the complex intersections of capitalism, race and gender in South African life and their effects on rural people.⁴ Ngcobo's self-positioning in relation to literary traditions is also complex, acknowledging hybridity and multiple affiliations. She acknowledges her special feeling for Thomas Hardy's fiction, and this may have affected her creation of dignified rural people who are crushed by political and economic conditions as if by fate, and the passing away of rural communities (Vivan 1989:106). She has also mentioned the attraction of the novel form: "The only form that I get on well with is the novel, but I want to capture the feel of South Africa at this particular time of transition" (Daymond 1996:85). However, she feels that her emphasis on one central character and action is derived from an African tradition:

our folklore which always pivots around the story of an individual, an important person of our tradition. The importance of the plot is created around one single character…. Each character has a certain gamut of options, which are drawn from an objective reality, even if it is then partly invented in the story.
(Vivan 1989:109)

Thematically African novels are restricted, because topics like land or factory ownership have no relevance, so the themes of European fiction become "arid, senseless, useless material" (Vivan 1989:110). "The black writer is forced to limit himself to a few themes which deal with a society scarred by poverty and restrictions" (Vivan 1989:110). But there is a broader theme of historical suffering: "the fundamental themes which are for us of common interest, and ask for an answer to the feelings of our people" (Vivan 1989:110).

In her introduction to Miriam Tlali's Footprints in the Quag (1989), Ngcobo traces the movement in black South African writing from a literature of cultural assimilation to protest. As literature tried to deal with industrialization and migratory labour, writers were bewildered: "These writers were faced with the paradox of creating or fashioning a new indigenous character, while the dynamics of the situation pointed to the destruction of the culture in which that character had to be rooted and flourish" (Ngcobo 1989:xi). The consolidation of white power with the Union of the provinces in 1910 "marks the Africans' first awareness of themselves as an oppressed people" (Ngcobo 1989:xii). A new spirit emerged dramatically in the 1970s and within that mood Miriam Tlali "writes from the heart of those turbulent cities" (Ngcobo 1989:xv), expressing "the wounds sustained in the collapse of our societies" (Ngcobo 1989:xvii), especially through women's eyes. As a result, Tlali tends to see tradition as a salvation for African people, whereas Ngcobo is much more critical of African custom. With regard to political purpose, Ngcobo says that her writing is "a social/political comment": "I believe books by the oppressed people can, ever so subtly, restore the desire for freedom and the will to achieve this" in the face of the psychological introjection of colonial images of inferiority (Bush 1984:8).⁵

Rural Women, Gender and Racial Politics

In And They Didn't Die Ngcobo's purpose was to show "how country women cope and resist the pressures of the law, how the laws of the country disadvantage them" (Bush 1984:6). Rural women, the traditional food producers, have been without tilling and land tenure rights. Yet women have often rallied to oppose injustice: they fought against the imposition of passes in the late 1950s; against the problem of dipping their dying cattle (dipping tanks were introduced to control disease), and the government's policy of building beerhalls for men, while not providing facilities for child care (Bush 1984:8). Multiple grievances led to defiance by women, erupting in different regions of Natal in 1959. About 1,000 women were arrested. These events, the context for the first section of the novel, record the emergence of "a vast new political constituency. No understanding of the radicalisation of black politics in those years would be complete without a knowledge of the emergence and behaviour of this constituency" (Lodge 1983: 150).⁶ Jezile's husband is in Durban while she struggles with her mother-in-law's persecution for her infertility. Siyalo is politicized in Durban by the evidence of social injustice, overcrowding and exploitation of labour, and is soon identified as a troublemaker. During Jezile's visit she experiences the humiliations of her husband's hostel life, but is also given a glimpse of the activism of urban women who storm the beerhalls in protest. She feels a bond with city women: "how similar their situations were" (Ngcobo 1991:30).

Historical activities by the ANC Women's League are represented in a woman doctor and leader, Nosizwe, who illuminates aspects of political leadership during the build-up of popular resistance. The problems of traditional lifestyles are illustrated by Jezile's friend Zenzile, who dies in childbirth. We see the contradictions of Jezile's life and her growing awareness of her husband's involvement in an African patriarchal system. The difficulties of parenting are shown when both parents are imprisoned for periods of time. The contradictions of government policy, destroying rural communities while trying to preserve them artificially, are shown in intimate detail, as are impossible economic conditions in the countryside.

In the second phase of Jezile's life she is incorporated into urban domestic service while her husband is in prison. The transition from a fairly stable though distant family life to a single-mother household suggests the contradictions of human sexuality and family life in rural and urban South Africa. Jezile is accused by her mother-in-law (the custodian of customary law) of infidelity when she returns pregnant from a brief prison sentence. After Siyalo's prison sentence she is drawn into a single women's culture which supports her. She takes on domestic service in a white household and is then raped by her employer, who sends her home with the child to protect himself from arrest. Once back in the village she is disowned by her in-laws for having mothered a "white" child. After Siyalo's release from prison he claims his daughters, but he and Jezile are separated by customary law. The compounded force of racial oppression and customary law is vividly illustrated in these ironic plot twists.

In the last, compressed section of the narrative, Jezile and her children move through the turbulent political clashes of the 1976 countrywide insurgency and the emergency period of the mid-1980s. Jezile's daughter Ndondo becomes a political activist and flees the country. Her son Lungi, the child of mixed race, becomes a leader at his coloured school and is paralyzed from the waist down in a police shooting incident. When her daughter Ndondo visits her secretly during the emergency period, a soldier storms their house and attempts to rape Jezile's other daughter, S'naye. Jezile kills the soldier. Jezile now goes to her husband with an account of her own rape by her employer and they realize that at the moment of a possible reunion they will be sundered by another prison sentence. The final scene is complex in its evocation of a historical abyss, the abyss of the combined historical damage of industrialization, the apartheid system and racialized sexual abuse: "He swung around to face her, carnage in his mind, and looked at her wordlessly, penetrating those eyes, mind to mind, heart to heart. Together they drifted back in reverse into a vortex beyond recovery, in a kind of falling away" (Ngcobo 1991:245). This ending also counters any emancipatory or enlightenment narrative, constituting a critique of the liberal ideology which sees modernization as inevitably progressive.⁷ Ngcobo's narration during the transitional period in South Africa thus involves a memory of the complexity of historical damage to individuals, the family and the collectivity of the oppressed. Her novel is an implicit answer to the question Said poses as central to a decolonizing imagination: "How does a culture seeking to become independent of imperialism imagine its own past?" (Said 1993:214).

While the narrative moves toward a violent crisis and sense of historical loss, the seizing of subjectivity by those who have traditionally been seen as objects and a "subordinate race despised by all" (Wicomb 1992:18) manifests "the material reality of people's lives" in a way which Wicomb calls moving beyond "the legacy of victims" (1992:15). Ngcobo's novel demonstrates a complex relationship between social structures and subjectivity, particularly in Jezile's fully rendered consciousness as she struggles with the changing political and cultural contexts that surround her, with what Belinda Bozzoli calls "the changing material world" as "a decision-making existential being" (Bozzoli with Nkotsoe 1991:236). The novel is well suited to displaying the tension between internal and external struggles, conflicts between generations and genders. And They Didn't Die is thus anti-essentialist in effect, recognizing, like Foucault, "the manifold structures of power" with their varied forms and multiplicity of "localized resistances and counter-offensives" (Escobar 1984-85:381) and thus also recognizing that "women, far from being powerless, are agents in their own fates" (Udayagiri 1995:161). In Jezile's successful defence of her daughter's body the materiality of women's oppression is recognized and partly resolved. Female sexuality mediates systems of power, but the generational progression from Jezile to S'naye shows how self-defence is the lesson of female experience. In defending her daughter, Jezile defends herself in an action that testifies to the consciousness-raising she has undergone in both racial and gender politics.

Discourse, Labour and African Renewal

Ngcobo has argued that in South Africa women's quarrel is primarily with the state, and that this differentiates their feminist struggle from many others (Bush 1984:8). Because of her characters' involvement in radical political action her fiction could be said to be part of the discourse of the Pan-Africanist Congress. Graham Pechey characterizes two counter-texts to the Freedom Charter of 1955 and its broad universalizing humanism: the Pan-Africanist Congress and Black Consciousness (1994:28). The PAC critique of 1959, he argues (the point in time where Ngcobo's second novel begins) "is founded in an anti-modernist narrative that reduces everything to a story of repossession" (1994:28). And They Didn't Die could be said to participate in this anti-modernist discourse and in the radical politics of the PAC, but it feminizes this discourse and offers a critique of liberal discourse and earlier women's writing in South Africa by revisioning key tropes. Instead of the seduced and abandoned white settler women who characterize the novels of Olive Schreiner and Pauline Smith, and whose stories are played out in terms of white settler hegemony and patriarchal social codes for settler women, Ngcobo's protagonist Jezile is politicized by multiple forms of gender and racial oppression to the point of militancy and an act of violence. Seduction is replaced by rape, indicating the structural and personal violence the state inflicts on African women, and their economic and personal vulnerability in domestic labour.⁸

The liberal use of the adoptive situation in Schreiner's novel From Man to Man (1926), where a white woman adopts the child of her husband's liaison with a coloured servant, is also revised when Jezile bears a coloured child from her employer's rape and the child becomes an activist in radical clashes with the state and the military. This situation allegorizes the national situation: European interbreeding with an indigenous and slave population produced the people whose partial alliance with Black Consciousness helped to oust them from power. Ngcobo's reworking of this narrative trope inverts Sarah Gertrude Millin's notorious use of mixed blood as the sign of laxity and degeneration (see Coetzee 1988). The revised adoptive family evokes the spirit of non-racial resistance that marked the 1980s in South Africa and the rise of associations such as the United Democratic Front.

And They Didn't Die thus evokes the existential dimension of the cultural dislocations, land expropriations and economic disempowerment imposed by colonialism, industrialization and migrant labour. By appropriating narrative, one of the forms of cultural control, and subverting it to oppositional purposes, South African writers circulate new histories, in this case making rural women's consciousness in previously "hidden struggles" available to new readerships (see Beinart and Bundy 1987). The intersections of customary law, African patriarchy and apartheid legislation are revealed in the detailed emotional texture of family life.⁹ The destructive personal effects of migrant labour are graphically presented: sexual loneliness, enforced adultery, arrest for those politicized in the cities, the degradation of the physical and social environment, "a hopeless patchwork of effort, determination, and failure" (Ngcobo 1991:221; see Ramphele 1991). The slow collapse of subsistence agriculture is the context of the opening chapters, and the women's grievances are related to the extension of influx control legislation in the Bantustan (homeland) policy designed to prevent permanent African settlement and thus political franchise in the cities (Walker 1982).

At the same time the novel provides a fictional record of the construction of patterns of resistance and solidarity, the ways in which currents of freedom rippled through rural communities and in moments of private reflection and understanding:

she knew she had taken a decision that she should have taken ages before. Nobody would ever take that power away from her—not his mother, not her own mother, not anyone. Both mothers had had such a hold on her precisely because they had never had that power over their own lives.
(Ngcobo 1991:11)

The lifting of women's local resistance to new levels is shown in the prison experience of the village women:

Then suddenly, somewhere in the deepest part of that jail, they heard a different kind of song. It pierced the prison air and shattered the silence of the vast corridors. The women in the cells listened for a few moments. Then they knew it was Nosizwe. They picked up her song and sang it with gusto. Her song was not a hymn, it was a political song that throbbed in the gut. Their voices returned to them full of strength and defiance. They grew strong and threw off the feeling of inadequacy that had gripped them.
(Ngcobo 1991:100-101)

The links between the 1950s decade, which Ngcobo describes as the beginning of "political confrontation with the oppressor" (1989:xii), and thus of a new type of literature, and the township uprisings of the 1970s and 1980s are telescoped in the last section of the novel, in the story of Jezile's children (see Mzamane 1985). Ngcobo's position within the generation of writers produced by Sharpeville and its political contexts is unique, as Mzamane has pointed out, because she carries to an English-speaking audience the rural experiences and subjectivities usually produced in indigenous languages or in the liberal, patriarchal, morally recuperative format of Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country (Mzamane 1985:40). The English language and the multi-generational realistic family saga are adapted to become the vehicles of a South African narrative of dispossession and resistance. Ngcobo adopts the documentary devices of incorporating political speeches, lists of grievances, historical dates and protests, devices that have been central to historical fiction and its use by South African novelists such as Nadine Gordimer (see Clingman 1986:187-88). Rural families living on the reserves are made into what Raymond Williams calls a "knowable community," shaped by a novelist "in such a way as to give it identity, presence, ways of reusable articulation" (Williams 1990:165-82).

Ngcobo's insistence on a cumulative plot movement toward an act of violent retaliation against sexual violence suggests the role played by gender awareness in black South African women's writing, and its relationship to State violence and the aftermath of colonialism (see Head 1977; Mvula 1988; Qakisa 1988; Tlali 1989). The conclusion of the novel, while evoking solidarity between Jezile and Siyalo, also draws the limits of the body as metaphor.¹⁰ The body, writes Jean Comaroff, is "a tangible frame of selfhood" which "mediates all action upon the world and simultaneously constitutes both the self and the universe of social and natural relations of which it is a part" (1985:6-7). The South African legacy is still immured in forms of violent control and aggression inflicted on women (Hansson 1991). The tragic "vortex" that concludes the novel is an index to the semi-occlusion of rural African predicaments in the mass migrations to the cities, under apartheid, and in the emergence of an educated, urban African elite.

The story Ngcobo tells is also the story of African women's labour: "the country women are the backbone of the South African superstructure" (Bush 1984:8). They maintain homes for absent husbands, supplement meagre wages, produce and raise the next generation of workers (Bush 1984:8). The labour of serfs generally, as J. M. Coetzee has pointed out, was elided in the late-nineteenth-century South African pastoral. The rural labour of African women has been doubly elided in white South African fiction, except for occasional glimpses, such as the one we get in Gordimer's July's People (1981), which is in a displaced futuristic setting. Ngcobo makes visible what Njabulo Ndebele calls "the unacknowledged presence of Black labour and the legitimacy of the political claims based upon that labour" (1994:4). The differentiated process of labour incorporation for men and women, and the different costs, are detailed within a family setting which is repeatedly shattered by punitive state interventions.

Ndebele has pointed out that the role of literature in the crisis of transition is not an easy one: "It throws up a problematic of its own within the broad cultural crisis" (1994:9). Ngcobo's novel, written within that crisis, looks backward and forward, finding an avenue "in the history of the survival culture of the people" (Ndebele 1994:8). Though And They Didn't Die, as Eva Hunter has argued, works within a broad framework of historical and social referentiality (Hunter 1994:120), subjectivity is shown as constructed within what Benita Parry calls "antagonistic forces and heterogeneous signifying practices, solicited and situated by conflicting ideological addresses" (Parry 1994:22). These ideological addresses include radical PAC politics, racialized gender violence, anti-apartheid activism and a critique of customary African law. Ngcobo's novel is a form of anti-pastoral that looks backward over fifty years to Sol Plaatje's noble Barolong couple, Mhudi and Ra-Thaga, embedded in visionary pastoral romance. The insistent narrative focus on Jezile and her shifting subjectivity "affirm cultural identity as a new and insurgent subjectivity that has been fought for and reconstructed in the process of struggle" (Parry 1994:22). The story Ngcobo tells in And They Didn't Die is the story of what cannot afford to be forgotten in the construction of a democratic future for South Africa. Ngcobo is in accord with Fanon's pan-African vision when she writes of the relationship between South Africa and the rest of Africa: "Where the white government sees state barriers, we see gates, not to enter and pillage or encroach on other people's territories but to enter in good will, and together with fellow Africans we shall create a new impregnable African Continent" (Ngcobo 1991:199).

Notes

1. Mridula Udayagiri writes that "development has been a problematic concept, because it perpetuates unequal relations in the global economy, and ignores perceptions of progress that may be very different from those of policy-makers" (1995:160). She also suggests that theories of development and underdevelopment "remain firmly anchored in emancipatory paradigms that emerged in the Age of Enlightenment" (1995:160).

2. Biographical details are taken from the interview by Robert Bush (1984:5-8).

3. Zoe Wicomb says ambivalent social attitudes towards women are rather like those that characterize writing itself: "the consecration of women as virgins or mothers or other fetishization of Woman which at the same time allows women as human beings to be treated with contempt" (1994:574).

4. Margaret Daymond writes in her introduction to South African Feminisms that the essays in the collection "begin to uncover a history of complicity between apartheid ideology and the patriarchalism of nineteenth-century Calvinism, tracing an overlap between the institutionalisation of racial ‘apartness’ and masculinist epistemology" (1996:x-xi).

5. Carol Boyce Davies describes African feminism as "a hybrid of sorts"; there is "a struggle against women's own internalised oppression" (Boyce Davies and Graves 1986:241). For Ngcobo this struggle clearly took place over time in her increasing confidence in representing rural women's lives in fiction.

6. Brian Worsfold gives an excellent account of the political context for the novel in his article on Ngcobo in Altered State: Writing and South Africa (1994).

7. Ngcobo had been pressured by her first publisher, Longmans, to add an optimistic epilogue to Cross of Gold (Bush 1984:7).

8. Jackie Cock (1987) discusses the South African domestic worker as one instance of the "trapped worker."

9. Customary law offered forms of protection but at the cost of the woman's loss of autonomy in communally identified functions within marriage and childbearing (see Nhlapo 1991). Independence, migration and incorporation into urban wage labour brought a new set of problems, economic insecurity and often a neo-colonial repackaging of patriarchy (see Jochelson 1995; also Cheater and Gaidzwana 1996).

10. Grant Farred cites the inscriptions on the body of forms of male power, and discusses different sites of oppression and resistance in his article on And They Didn't Die (1993).

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SOURCE: Floyd-Thomas, Stacey M., and Laura Gillman. "Subverting Forced Identities, Violent Acts, and the Narrativity of Race: A Diasporic Analysis of Black Women's Radical Subjectivity in Three Novel Acts." Journal of Black Studies 32, no. 5 (May 2002): 528-56.

[In the essay below, Floyd-Thomas and Gillman offer a detailed analysis of the development of radical subjectivity among the black female characters of three novels: Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven, and Ngcobo's And They Didn't Die.]

This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.