Author Zoe Wicomb gave this rare interview to David Robinson of the Scotsman and gives us a glimpse of life as a mixed-race person under apartheid.
Zoe Wicomb, South Africa-born but living in Glasgow for the last 11 years, is a writer of rare brilliance. On the cover of her latest book, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison and double Booker winner JM Coetzee compete to eulogise her work. She’s formidably intelligent: ‘A mind like a steel trap’, says the head of the Scottish Arts Council’s literature department, ‘one of the brightest people you could meet.’ She is, according to the pupils she has taught creative writing to at Strathclyde University, where Wicomb holds a professorship, a peerless and inspiring teacher.
Yet the chances are that you won’t have ever heard of her, because this is the first British newspaper interview she has ever given. For the 30 years she’s lived in Britain, that’s the way she liked it, and to be honest, it probably still is.
Zoe’s third book Living In The Light, is one of the most convincing novels I’ve read all year. If she’s going for the title of Scotland’s greatest unknown novelist, it’s hers on a plate.
Zoe Wicomb was born in Namaqueland, a hot, arid region on the southern fringes of the Namib desert, in 1948. The good life of white South Africa was a long way from this sparsely populated scrubland, and the nearest whites lived 20 miles away, in the town which also had the nearest shop. (Not that, as coloureds, the Wicombs were allowed to enter it, only being served from a hatch round the side). Her Afrikaans-speaking parents wanted the best for their children, something more than working in the nearby gypsum mine or as a domestic servant, which were the only local jobs going. Speaking English – as no-one did for 200 miles around – wasn’t an automatic free pass to a better life, but it was a better bet than anything else.
Secondary school meant Cape Town, where she moved to live with her aunt. A school for coloureds, followed by a university for coloureds, where she learnt about such great non-coloureds as Chaucer, Johnson, Shakespeare and Hardy. And where, for the first time, Zoe caught sight of her first “play-whites”. ‘There was a family living across the road from us, and one day they just disappeared. Our neighbours said, ‘They’ve left. They’ve turned white’. This happened all the time’
‘It’s an odd phenomenon, the play-whites,’ says Zoe. ‘We don’t even know how many of them there are. There’s no discourse, nothing in the library, because officially they don’t exist. Yet the truth of the matter, because of their history, is that many Afrikaners are mixed race. Even Verwoerd [the founder of apartheid] had a wife who looked African.’
Because skin colour is so variable even within the same family, legal definitions of whiteness were absurdly tortuous. ‘A white person,’ the government decided in 1950, ‘is someone who in appearance obviously is or is generally accepted as a white person, but does not include a person who, although in appearance obviously a white person, is generally accepted as a coloured person.’ Mrs Verwoerd presumably counted as white not because she looked it but because enough people could agree that she actually was.
‘The weird thing,’ says Zoe, ‘was that there was this legislation for racial purity at the same time as the whites were tacitly boosting their own numbers by allowing some people to cross over.’
3 Comments
Good, but where were people to go to to find accommodation, etc. as the Coloured Schools and Areas were overcrowded already?
I do not begrudge anybody of trying to find the better for themselves or for their children at all, which ever place they may go to seek it in or from.
We should be thinking about helping each other instead of criticizing the ones who venture elsewhere to exist or try to succeed and also give a thought for how difficult it all is for those very ones who manage to do so, especially without any moral or financial support.
To each his own choice of why.
HAPPINESS IS A SOFTLY SPLASHING FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH IN A WISE OLD HEART.
HAPPINESS IS VAST AND AWESOME AS THE OCEANS, YET AFTER A DROUGHT, IT IS PRECIOUS AS LIQUID GOLD, CUPPED IN OUR HAND, SO AS NOT TO LOOSE A DROP.
May we also not forget that there are certain racists among the Coloured people too, who used to say that we with our blonde and blue-eyed parents or children, “moet daar by die wit mense gaan bly.”
Hence it was not easy for them or us either.
There is only one race in South Africa,also known as the Afrikaner volk and it is made up of people from Holland and and Indonesia , and other eastern colonies that the Dutch colonized,so it all started or began in 1652 when Jan Van Riebeck and his crew of sailors and their Indonesian wifes or bed sleepers landed on the shores of South Africa,and those that did not have a partner married into the local tribes that inhabited the Cape at the time ,and so was born the Afrikaner Volk.So the historical fact is that the so called wit Afrikaner and the so called Bruin mense of Bruin Afrikaners are in fact blood brothers and sisters,and that is historically true and no one can deny that