A Daughter’s Legacy
by Pamphilia Hlapa
(University of KwaZulu-Natal Press)
Pamphilia Hlapa’s first novel is supposedly a work of fiction. However, so much about the book, not least the writer’s unrelenting, heavy-handed style, seems blatantly autobiographical.
A Daughter’s Legacy is quite palpably an insider’s tale of growing up in an abusive and denialist society. In it Hlapa, whose forte is women’s issues and personal growth, recounts a traumatic journey into womanhood, but leaves aesthetics aside in favour of reliving protagonist Kedibone’s ordeal in harrowing detail. The result is that the reader feels like nothing more than a sounding board.
Kedibone, much like the author, grows up in a rural village in the northern reaches of South Africa. We are not told this explicitly, but the language spoken there, Sepedi, gives this away. Kedibone is the apple of her mother’s eye, although she cannot pay much attention to her daughter as she is preoccupied with furthering her own education. Kedibone’s father is a migrant worker who will soon drift away, leaving her mother to raise the children single-handedly.
Her mother can hardly cope and, as the sexual abuse of her fragile daughter mounts, the culture of silence that dominates the landscape drives a wedge between them. It all comes to a head when Kedibone is an adult and a mother, desperately seeking a catharsis from all the pain she has suppressed. Her pain, she argues — and this is also hinted in the title of the book — is the result of her name, which means “I have seen enough” in Setswana.
Many of the considerations that would go into crafting a work of the imagination — like constructing fluent dialogue and creating detailed characters and settings — have taken a back seat here to what reads like Hlapa’s stream-of-consciousness sermonising.
In her eagerness to raise awareness about the power imbalances that still prevail in many South African communities and their crippling effects on many young women, Hlapa has made the mis-take of assuming a mono-tone, partisan voice that seems to rebuke all men. In doing so, she might well have alienated the very readers and constituency that are most in need of engaging with the book’s issues.