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NONI JABAVU |
| Although Noni Jabavu is the name by which she is known internationally, it is important to recognize that her full name was Helen Nontando Jabavu. There is a deep historical and psychological need on her part to evade the actualities and realities of modern life. Even her date of birth is not certain since it is variously given as 1919 or 1921. It would seem that Noni Jabavu has never wanted to be historically positioned with regard to her national identity and the formation of her cultural sensibility. Her two books, Drawn in Colour (1960) and The Ochre People: Scenes from South Africa (1963), written early in her literary career, which are brilliant and fascinating by any measure, would seem to indicate that she preferred positioning herself in the contradition of dialectical unity: simultaneously being an African and a European, tracing her origins in both England and South Africa when in fact she was not a child of mixed parentage. The reason for this positionless positionality is that whereas New African intellectuals, writers, political leaders of her generation, be it Ezekiel Mphahlele or Jordan Ngubane or Nelson Mandela or Nadine Gordimer have had to negotiate the historical divide between tradition and modernity, Noni Jabavu felt the need to reject wholeheartedly what she perceived to be tradition in order to embrace modernity. To others, in the context of Africa, modernity and tradition were complexly interwoven and consequently inseparable from each other, to her, they were irreconciable hostorical tendencies. In this Noni Jabavu is very similar to R. V. Selope Thema who made a comparable historical gesture: the intellectual and emotional affinities between them are real. Although they were born nearly 40 years apart (he in 1886), Selope Thema’s unpublished autobigraphy written in the late 1930s, Out of Darkness: From Cattle-Herding to the Editor’s Chair, could be taken for all intents and purposes as cartographing the historical premisses of the spiritual journey of Noni Jabavu. When it is remembered that R. V. Selope Thema in his autobiography recalls in dramatic and emotional terms of his encounter at age sixteen or eighteen in his home district of Zoutpansberg with Elijah Makiwane (1850-1928) who had come to Northern Traansvaal from Lovedale in Alice to proselytize for Christianity and modernity, the connections between Noni Jabavu and him are profoundly historical. It was the modernity exemplified by Elijah Makiwane that compelled Selope Thema to leave ‘barbarism’ and ‘darkness’ and align himself with ‘civilization’ and ‘enlightenment’ by embarking on a long journey to Lovedale to seek a modern Christian education. Elijah Makiwane was a central figure of the Xhosa renascence of 1880s which grappled with the historical meaning of modernity. Makiwane was a member of the Lovedale Literary Society and the Native Educational Association both of which were founded around 1879. Other members included Walter B. Rubusana, Pambani Jeremiah Mzimba, Isaac Wauchope, John Tengo Jabavu (Noni Jabavu’s grandfather). Makiwane wrote important intellectual, historical and political essays in John Tengo Jabavu’s Imvo Zabantsundu newspaper about the imperativeness of the African people making an entrance into modernity. John Tengo Jabavu was the first African in South Africa to own his newspaper. These intellectual descendants of Tiyo Soga were the founding moment of modern African intellectual culture in South Africa. D. D. T. Jabavu (Noni Jabavu’s father) sought to disseminate this intellectual culture in the country through the many decades he spent as a teacher at Fort Hare College (later a University). D. D. T. Jabavu was the first African academic to hold a chair in South Africa. The importance of Noni Jabavu in all of these complicated intellectual relationships is that she represents a termination of a particular Xhosa intellectual tradition whose origins are locatable in Tiyo Soga. It is Elijah Makiwane connects both Noni Jabavu and R. V. Selope Thema to each other by the kind of modernity he exemplified. The seemingly inexpicable power of Noni Jabavu’s books on their appearance in the early 1960s is demystified when they are situated within intellectual tradition as its terminating point. When Drawn in Colour was published, it enthused two major South African intellectuals, Z. K. Matthews and Nadine Gordimer. Z. K Matthews sketched a gallery of fascinating New African intellectual portraits in Imvo Zabantsundu from June 3rd to November 20st, 1961: the portraits stretched from John Knox Bokwe through John Langalibalele Dube to Solomon T. Plaatje. This is what Z. K. Matthews had to say about Noni Jabavu: “Helen Nontando Jabavu, now internationally known as Noni Jabavu, is the second eldest daughter of the late D. D. T. Jabavu, the eldest having died in infancy in Fort Hare. Helen received her primary education at the Lovedale Practising school, but when she completed her primary school education her parents decided to send her to the United Kingdom for her further education [she was fourteen years old]. . . . On two ocvcasions when she came to South Africa, she has done so in tragic circumstances. On was on the occasion of the death of her mother and the second was to attend the funeral of her only brother Ntengo---who had been killed in Johannesburg when he was about to complete his studies at the Medical School of the University of the Witatersrand. It was after her return from her brother’s funeral that she wrote the book Drawn in Colour in which she describes her experiences in Southern Africa and Uganda where she made an extended visit to her younger sister, Alexandra, then married to a Maganda [a Ugandan], whom she had met when he was an undergraduate at Fort Hare. This first book by Noni Jabavu has been favourably reviewed in many quarters, although naturally it has also its critics. All who read it will agree that it is a remarkable book in it the writer shows herself to be a keen observer and her comments [on] people and places in Africa reveal a degree of perception and maturity which was unsuspected even by her friends. Her comparison of African customs and usages in South Africa with those of Uganda, in which she naturally shows less sympathy for the latter than for the former, has, it is reported, made her very unpopular in Uganda and elsewhere in East Africa. But to the extent that she has attracted such wide attention, she has shown what African women are capable of doing in this sphere. It is to be hoped that many others will emulate her example ans so swell the ranks of African woman authors” (Imvo Zabantsundu, July 15, 1961). It perhaps needs to be pointed out that Z. K Matthes took the chair vacated by D. D. T. Jabavu through retirement in 1946. Nadine Gordimer, who is slightly younger than Noni Jabavu and commenced publication of her novels and short stories before Jabavu in the mid 1950s, is one of the great African woman authors who has swelled the ranks of the African genius. Nadine Gordimer’s extraordinary review of Drawn in Colour in Patrick Duncan and Alan Paton’s Liberal Party’s newspaper Contact in 1960 demands and compels extended quoting: “In a prefatory note to her book, Noni Jabavu writes that she belongs to ‘two worlds with two loyalties; mSouth 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 liker 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. . . . Almost every book I can think of, written by an African, is concerned with the lack and emptiness that bedevil the life of the Westernized black man or woman; this book---without benefit of a self-conscious negritude or tub-thumping nationalism---takes for granted a startling fulness of life brought about quite naturally by a synthesis of African and Western ways, in spite of everything. Noni Jabavu may seem oddly out of touch with the raw moment. . . . Her book will not attract the disapproval of the censors in South Africa. Its gentle candour, its warmth toward things South African---my country, right or wrong---its recognition of an old bond of understanding and loking between the Africans and what she stolidly, non-nonsensely calls ‘the Boers’---these will meet with official approval. Yet I would call this book, from a Nationalist point of view, the most dangerous yet written. For its author is that creature from space, that unheard-of impossibility in the concepts of apartheid, an African who has managed quite effortlessly to master and make her own the white man’s way of life, and that part of her book (an immensely civilized book that never raises its voice) which deals with South Africa reveals how beautifully the two cultures dovetail, and how, in the really important events like birth, marriage and death, they modify and complement each other, the West bringing reason and an enlightenment of custom in keeping with the technological and scientific context of the modern world, Africa bringing a psychological understanding of man’s emotional needs. . . . Halfway through the book the scene shifts to East Africa, where Noni Jabavu visited her sister, who was married to an African barrister in Uganda. A lyrical humour informs the description of a discovery that will be a common one in the Africa of the future, but about which little has been written so far. Africans from different parts of the continent are as foreign to each other as are the different white nationalists who share th continent of Europe. The feeling of oneness is mostly a political one of reaction against whiteness. . . . Noni Jabavu was horrified as any American tourist by East African plumbing; her English liberal education plus her Xhosa conceptions of the dignity of the individual filled her with forthright if well-bred indignation at the status of women; she was exasparated by ‘African time’, which meant that well-meaning hosts always saw to it that she arrived too late to witness ceremonies that they had urged her not to miss. Baganda customs---social and sexual---proved so foreign to her sister that she divorced her Ugandan husband and returned to South Africa. So does the book. . . . Certainly his [Professor Jabavu] daughter has written a unique book, a true original. There are a dozen things to commend it that I realize I haven’t even mentioned, though they gave me as much pleasure, in the reading, and almost as much to think about as the themes. Noni Jabavu’s ear, for example---she nets every nuance of our South African English speech, and she is able to convey, in English, the subtle complexity of Bantu languages in a manner that makes it all as miraculously clear as a glass of water. No one has ever been able to do this, for me, before. Then there is her way of moving through the familiar landscape: the villages and houses we know too well to see, anymore---until suddenly there they are, new, blinding, through her awareness of them. She is often a clumsy writer, but she has style; one feels it comes direct from life, where, undoubtedly, she has a great style, too. She has written, probably without knowing it, certainly without trying for it, since that is the only way such a wonder can be accomplished, an organic book. It is grown, rather than put together. Such books are rarities” (“From the Third World”, Contact, April 16, 1960). Such brilliant and penetrative criticism within the then emergent African criticism was truly a rarity. This serious critical appreciation of Noni Jabavu was part Nadine Gordimer’s engagement with the historicalness of Africa in some of the essays assembled in The Essential Gesture (1988), Writing and Being (1995), Living in Hope and History (1999), as well as that milestone of African literary criticism, The Black Interpreters (1973). In the last forty years since this review appeared, no evaluation of Noni Jabavu has appeared, practically none has been written, that can compare to Gordimer’s critical passion. Even in a book where one would have expected Noni Jabavu to be seriously mentioned, let alone a considered appraisal of her, South African Feminisms ([ed.] M. J. Daymond, 1996), she is conspicuous by her absence. Gordimer who is usually criticized, rightly in my opinion for the absence of feminisms in her cultural and political engagements, in this instance, completely outdoes the South African feminists who are so critical of her. It is possible that this may be changing given that in a conference on Women Writers in a Multilingual Society, which took place about three months ago in Alice, South Africa, it is reported that Noni Jabavu was honored (“Conference honours Noni Jabavu”, Dispatch Online [based in East London], January 12, 2001). Perhaps one reason accounting for this absence is that Noni Jabavu is so difficult to place in South African intellectual and cultural history. She, like Nadine Gordimer, belongs to the Sophiatown Renaissance literary generation. She, like Bessie Head, has not as yet been considered within this cultural movement. She may turn out to have been one of its major exponents. One of the critical questions concerning Noni Jabavu, is that like R. V. Selope Thema, after a brilliant intellectual and literary beginning, the last forty years have been unproductive! | |