The settler farm in literature

If you come from Southern Africa you surely are aware of the over-powering presence of the farm. The endless stretches of wheat, cotton or tobacco lands that go from where you are “until you wonder whether the vehicle you are travelling in is still moving or not.” It might be legitimate to argue that “the farm” in Southern Africa constitutes a socio-geographical “type”. The “farm novel” or “plaasroman” is a special novel form in Southern African literature (in both African and non-African languages.) This is generally a novel partly or wholly set on a commercial farm. The farm novel of Southern Africa is vibrant and it reproduces itself with minor variations. In South Africa there is Olive Schreiner’s iconic novel called The Story of An African Farm. There is also J M Coetzee’s novel of 1977 called In the Heart of the Country. Set on a karoo farm in the Western Cape, the novel is based all the way on Magda and her relations with her widowed father. But what is more critical are her relations with the black farm worker called Hendrik. He brings her black bride called Anna and Magda’s father manipulates and fornicates with the black girl. After deep contemplation over race relations, Magda shoots her fornicating father for it. After a lot of fights and a war of wits, Hendrik rapes the white girl Magda and begins to visit her room every night for less forced sexual intercourse, breaking the standing black-white divide. When white men from nearby farms turn up looking for Magda’s father, Hendrik and Anna flee fearing that they will be blamed for his death. In Zimbabwe alone the key examples are Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing and Chenjerai Hove’s Bones. Although there is a stretch of thirty-eight years between the publication dates of Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing (1950) and Chenjerai Hove’s Bones (1988), the two novels, for various reasons lend themselves to comparing and contrasting. Both The Grass Is Singing and Bones are about effects of the white Rhodesian “farming regime” on the black and white psyche. In both texts the white settler farm is a form of “frontier” as it draws indigenous labour, pitting it against the vigorous white farm system. More important is the fact that the functions and representations of facets of the farm (like the field, the farm-house, the compound, the houseboy, the baas boy etc) in Bones are more or less as they are in The Grass Is Singing. Different physical spaces and positions on the farm tend to dramatise modes of relations between the settler farm owner and the black workers and that drama ultimately reflect on the larger settler state. Often the farm is a silent and subtle miniature colonial state. For the settler farmer the farm is perceived as a personal property and space that should be mastered in order to eke out a living. For Slatter and Dick in The Grass Is Singing and farmer Manyepo in Bones, the farm is a potentially viable alternative to the working class life of the metropole. However the fact that the farm is a later-day acquisition, long distances away from one’s indigenous country and environment is an idea that remains at the back of the settler’s mind. The farm remains psychologically external to the settler’s nature. It is therefore almost natural with Mary Turner to be wary of the dark African nights and to be challenged by the “waiting” African bush: “Then a strange bird called, a wild nocturnal sound, and she ran back suddenly terrified, as if a hostile breath had blown upon her from another world, from the trees.” Her husband, Dick can just never make the farm productive. He is a consistent failure with both the crops and livestock. He therefore becomes the laughingstock of the farming community. The African land, the environment and the elements seem to alienate Mary and Dick and they cut a very pathetic picture of whites destined to decline gradually into hell. They become a bad example of white settler community especially as these two begin to win genuine sympathies of the ‘stinking natives.’ In the Heart of the Country the white man is riled less by her rape but more by the idea that she has been raped by a black woman who reserves the right and pleasure to abandon a white woman to enjoy his black woman as if he has not tasted white woman’s intimacy. In Schreiner’s The Story of An African Farm, for example, the independent white lady, Lyndall, attempting some “philosophic” talk, speaks thus about an African who passes by: “Well, let me see,” she said, closing her book and folding her hands on it. “There at the foot of the kopje goes a kaffir, he has nothing on but a blanket; he is a splendid fellow-six feet high, with a magnificent pair of legs…he is going… and I suppose to kick his wife with his beautiful legs when he gets home. He has a right to; he bought her for two oxen. There is a lean dog going after him, to whom I suppose he never gives more than a bone from which he has sucked the marrow; but his dog loves him as his wife does.” For the black farm labourer the farm is a lived irony. It is a familiar but perverted territory. Although the farm is situated in a familiar territory, it remains external to the black man’s nature because it is organised for purposes outside his indigenous philosophy. The black labourer on the farm is consistently uneasy with both the farm and the white-master. In Bones Murume rehearses his monologue (with Manyepo) and he is clearly perplexed by the way the farm regime emasculates a “real” African man: “You say we smell of things you do not understand, we lie, we are as lazy as children… do you think we are children with all this beard on our faces? Have we, the men, not made our wives pregnant and have the wives not become pregnant after we have slept with them?” This uneasiness is derived from Marume’s powerlessness in familiar territory turned foreign. He becomes unfamiliar even to himself. Marume represents varieties of invisibility. Mary’s series of houseboys in The Grass Is Singing are an equally uncomfortable lot. The first one is nervous, cannot understand Mary, carries himself stiffly, overly attentive and is “as scared as a dog”. The next “boy” is overly familiar without having to look at Mary. The whiteman’s sjambok, his big boot, his dog, his gun and his horse define farm labour as unfree. These “tools” make a distinction between the powerful and the powerless. In the case of farmer Slatter in The Grass Is Singing the sjambok is bought long before the plough. When Mary wields it, when Dick is ill, the sjambok stands for unquestioned sexless authority. The sjambok assumes a communication mode between man and beast. That is why when Moses, in his anger, behaves as if he might hit back, Mary is taken aback. In Bones Janifa the young girl can see through the farm regime. She reminisces: “Farm people talk a lot. They say there is very little to talk about on the farm except Manyepo’s latest victims, those he has beaten or kicked in front of their own wives or children.” The farm-house represents white power and comfort. It is a miniature metropole away from the metropole. In The Grass Is Singing, part of the agony and embarrassment of the Turners is the realisation that they cannot afford a dwelling befitting the image of real whites. However, regardless, the transfer of Moses from field labourer to houseboy is considered promotion. It is an invitation to closer proximity with power and civilisation. In Bones Chisaga the cook is considered very privileged because he works in the white man’s house. He knows that he stands a better chance with women in the compound as he: “…washed and cleaned myself so that I smell the smells of white men. I even took a few of the smelling things which Manyepo’s wife uses so that you can see how far I am from the days when we came here to sell ourselves like cattle at the market.” However, considered closely, the promotion from the field to the house is to come closer to power but never having to get any. It is also to come close to seeing the ordinary humanity of the powerful whites without being allowed to partake of that humanity. Reading The Grass Is Singing, one feels that the text points at the idea that there is something unusual about Moses looking deep into the ordinariness of colonials. And precisely for that reason, Moses subsequently gets into trouble. He attempts to join the house indeed and that is his tragedy. The labourer’s compound is the antithesis of the farm-house. Seen through Mary’s eyes, the compound is a grotesque settlement: The huts were closely clustered over an acre or two of ground. They looked like natural growths from the ground, rather than man-made dwellings. It was as though a giant black hand had reached down from the sky, picked up a handful of sticks and grass and dropped them magically on the earth in the forms of huts. The farm compound is a camp, a very temporary site with minimum comfort. Hastily built, and as a rule – far away from the farm-house, the compound defines the workers’ relationship with the system. The worker is thoroughly needed but viciously secluded. The compound, like the urban “location” is a mutilated imitation of the African village. Its dictates are that the original dignity of the African village is not possible under a capitalist mode. The baas-boy or the foreman is a very rememberable image in the farm novel. This character is a kind of go-between between the exploiter and the exploited. He is a convenient tool. He “interprets” order and policy to those of his kind for a fee. Sometimes he does not communicate the order as given or the resistance as it really is. He can be a trickster thriving on being ambiguous. However in most cases he is just like the houseboy, Chisaga, abusing those of his kind mercilessly. Bones and The Grass Is Singing clearly expose settler colonialism to the core as a system whose facets are meant to control the native in order to be able to create wealth. It is no accident that in all liberation discourse the farm is referred to more frequently than the mine and town as the heart of colonialism. Of course the two novels contrast sharply in some aspects. Whilst Lessing’s is a story written from the point of view of Europeans in Africa, Hove’s is about Africans on the white man’s farm in Africa. Even the titles themselves are well grounded in contrasting literary regimes. Lessing’s novel derives its title ‘the grass is singing’ from a line in T.S. Eliot’s modernist poem of the 1920s called The Waste Land. Suggested in that poem is a Euro-modernist view that human relations are in turmoil, confused and confusing. Philosophically Lessing’s novel portrays the relationship between Moses and Mary as mystical and beyond understanding. Hove’s Bones derives its title from what Shona orature claims to have been Nehanda’s last words at the moment of her execution for leading the 1890’s wars of resistance! “You will kill me but one day my bones will rise.” Bones is therefore deliberately anchored in a fair amount of Africanness. It refuses to be a novel only but a people’s story. While The Grass Is Singing proceeds in modernist complexity and standard English, Bones burdens the English language with African thought patterns, idioms and proverbs. In fact it is on record that Bones won the Norma Award in 1989 largely for its Afrocentric narrative style. Although Lessing is clearly sympathetic towards the African characters, she does not claim to know them. She paints them as unknown, distant and withdrawn characters of a culture that could be legitimate but very different from hers. Lessing cannot get to their thought patterns and cannot make them historically true. This all adds up to the mystery called Moses. However Hove’s black characters come in their variations. There are the accommodationist like the foreman Chiriseri and cook Chisaga. There are those of passive resistance like Chatora and Muringi and those given to open resistance like Marita’s son. Here are characters whose motives we are allowed insight into. Hove creates a community and not caricatures. However, profound as Hove’s Africans are, there is, sadly something belittling about them. They are too groomed in victimhood to be useful. Even their knowledge and use of Shona proverbs is not liberating as they use these to justify their own state of servitude. For instance Marume thinks that it is normal for settler Manyepo to exploit and taunt him because “a chief’s son is a commoner in other lands.” Marume is a pathetic victim, a small man in a big world. Janifa’s desire and yearning for the pastoral are misplaced. She fails to see that the farm is a site for exploitation and not the seat of romanticism like the country of the good old days. Marita, the central character is almost portrayed as a very simplistic revolutionary in a big world. She is too stupid to chart a way forward or to understand her circumstances in dialectical ways. Outside literature, the farm has found itself at the centre again in Southern Africa. The ‘land issue of Zimbabwe’ is clearly about the redistribution of farm land. The notion (in Zimbabwe, South Africa and Namibia) that liberation is equals redistribution of land is not accidental. The settler farm has, for a long time become the image of the seat of settler power in Southern Africa. The land is touted therefore as the reason why nationalists went to war. Memory Chirere