NONI JABAVU

In a prefatort note to her book [Drawn in Colour, 1960], Noni jabavu wtites that she belongs to "two worlds with two loyalties; South Africa where I was born and England where I was educated", but her book makes it clear that she belongs to a third that is shared by the very few. It is a world where distinguished African families like the Jabavus made a bid to join Africa to what Basil Davidson has called "the mainland of humanity" through education, religion, and a genuine affinity for Victorian-Edwardian liberalism. Not many South Africans, black or white, will recognize this world as their own present-day one, but I cannot think of anyone who could fail to be interested in this account, both overt and oblique, of what it was like. The book tells of things that happened in our time, of course; yet the voice comes unmistakably from one of those big rooms in the rambling Jabavu house where family pictures, all mutton-chop sleeves and whiskers, look down on the comfortable solid furniture where dignified elders in navy serge suits and watch-chains sit discoursing with exquisite, interminable courtesy on the finer points of Xhosa orthography.

-Nadine Gordimer, "From the Third World", Contact, April 16, 1960.