Dark thunderclouds: ‘Maru’ by Bessie Head, who had a white mother and a black father, is part autobiographical in that a main character in the book, a teacher raised by a missionary, is San and experienced discrimination in Botswana. Photo: George Hallett/Gallery MOMO
It’s an ideal literary quiz question: which Southern African writer’s publisher requested as a second novel an African version of The Catcher in the Rye?
Preposterous perhaps, but no surprise. The Northern gaze sometimes cannot bear the harsh glare of Southern realities, the dryness, the dust, the drought, life in parched landscapes waiting for rain, expectant when rain clouds gather. Those last four words could be worked into one of the fine South African cryptic crossword puzzles by George Euvrard that this newspaper now publishes.
Shorn of crossword application, the words are a clue to the identity of the writer burdened with being an African JD Salinger. When Rain Clouds Gather was published in 1969 by Victor Gollancz, the publishing house that under its eponymous founder had done so much after World War II to bring the works of emigré writers to the attention of the world. It is difficult to imagine Gollancz, who died in 1967, asking for an Africanised rite-of-passage novel modelled along or paying homage to The Catcher in the Rye.
Yet that is what his successors asked of Bessie Head after the success of her first novel, When Rain Clouds Gather. Her response was boldly, beautifully, starkly diametric: the slim but not slight Maru. Published in 1971, it is on the surface a story of intersecting friendships, loves and rivalries played out through the lives of two women and two men. These four characters form two love triangles of the most complex and subtle nature and it is part of the novel’s work to resolve two sets of three into two of two.
Maru (dark thunderclouds) is the “future paramount chief of a tribe”, the leader in “a remote inland village named Dilepe” in Botswana. His best friend Moleka (one who tries; “close friend”) and he work together and are existential and ideological rivals, though their differences are almost sublimated by their long friendship and familiarity.
Still, the contrasts are fundamental and unbridgeable. As Maru contemplates: “He knew from his own knowledge of himself that true purpose and direction are creative. Creative imagination he had in over-abundance. Moleka had none of that ferment, only an over-abundance of power.”
One day a new school teacher arrives in Dilepe, the young Margaret Cadmore. She has come by her name and surname because of the act of an English woman of those very names, the wife of a missionary who prises an infant from the dead grasp of a San woman and raises the child in her own home. The young Margaret had to negotiate a forbidding situation. Her age-mates and fellow pupils resented her for the ties to their school principal, the older Margaret, but they hated her for being San. She was pinched under the classroom seat and there was no classmate who would sit next to her.
Here it’s essential to note that Head — daughter of a black father and white mother — does not hold back in using the full vitriolic range of South African and Southern African racist abuse. Contemporary readers given to being affected by such language — absolutely accurate in time and place and vital to an understanding of the characters and motivations in the book — must brace themselves for passages like the following.
“If they caught her in some remote part of the school buildings during the playtime hour, they would set up the wild, jiggling dance: ‘Since when did a Bushy go to school? We take him to the bush where he eat mielie pap, pap, pap.’”
Head does not flinch from using the k-word and n-word, as well as “Bushy” and “Bushman”. Had she not done so it would have been shirking reality and betraying her own struggles as well as those of Margaret. Much of what Margaret thinks and some of what she says and does in defence against vile racist attacks stems from Head’s own bitter lived existence.
In the terminology of today, Maru might in part be considered auto-fiction: a story drawing on the author’s life, peopled by a combination of characters fictional and real, the latter with names changed but nonetheless discernible to those in the know. So it is that Head speaks through the following reflection by Margaret: “No one by shouting, screaming or spitting could un-Bushman her. There was only one thing left, to find out how Bushmen were going to stay alive on the earth, because no one wanted them to, except perhaps as the slaves and downtrodden dogs of the Batswana.”
Here, for some, realisation will dawn. The Batswana kept San people as slaves. Margaret has grown up reviled and even now, despite being the top student teacher in her class, has to confront prejudice about the San. Head conveys all this in an exquisitely spare passage when one of Margaret’s colleagues, Dikeledi, Maru’s sister, asks about the Cadmore surname.
“Is your father a white man?” asked Dikeledi.
“No,” she said. “Margaret Cadmore was the name of my teacher. She was a white woman from England. I am a Masarwa.”
“Dikeledi drew in her breath with a sharp, hissing sound. Dilepe village was the stronghold of some of the most powerful and wealthy chiefs in the country, all of whom owned innumerable Masarwa as slaves.”
In Setswana, Masarwa is a derogatory term for the San. Of all the racial epithets in the book, none has its visceral and shattering effect. It is the vile counterpart to the acceptable Mosarwa used in Botswana today.
The reader can discern the equivalences for Head, who left South Africa on a one-way passage in 1964 and lived in Botswana as a refugee for 15 years before finally being granted a Botswanan passport. Her life in the village of Serowe was demanding: her son was taunted as a “Bushman” and she wrote her lyrical, poignant and sometimes unbearably painful novels in her hut at night by the light of a precariously placed candle.
Dikeledi (tears) is not only in love with Moleka but, in her brother Maru’s grand and visionary designs, is destined to be Moleka’s wife. This despite Moleka being a serial philanderer. But those hopes and neatly laid plans are shattered by Margaret’s arrival because Moleka falls in love with her.
A man of power but not eloquence, Moleka does not speak his love to Margaret but conveys it by glances, kind actions and what can best be described as an atmospheric empathy that the very sentient Margaret picks up on. Theirs is an undeclared love that comprises two-thirds of the triangle with Dikeledi.
The other triangle is made up of Moleka, Margaret and Maru. Always, Maru has had the good of his sister and his great friend in mind and that longstanding sentiment is bolstered and resorted to when Maru finds himself drawn to Margaret. Again, with her exquisite sensitivity to people and emotions, Margaret is able to commune with Maru. But not directly: they share Maru’s dreams and Margaret’s paintings, in both cases one creating, the other receiving.
What seems to make Maru’s love difficult to believe is that he has San slaves. Here is yet another major point of friction with Moleka, who has tried to show the village that Batswana and Masarwa are equals, going too far in the eyes of elders and villagers by sharing his food and eating implements. Maru, however, has a surprise solution for the situation and most of all for the reader.
In the matter of dreams conceived and transmitted by Maru, and experienced and interpreted by Margaret, and of Maru’s grand visions of the best possible futures for the three people he loves, the novel is both fable and myth. Fable in the sense of a story not necessarily probable in an incident that is made to instruct and myth in the sense of a tale with veiled meaning.
In all, Maru is an astonishing achievement that grows better with each reading. What Head wrote of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart applies equally to her own masterpiece: “When I first read this beautiful book, I was in absolute despair. I needed to copy the whole book out by hand so as to keep it with me. It is more than a classic; there is just no book on Earth like it. All the stature and grandeur of the writer are in it.”