Books | A past that continues to linger in the present
This book represents a high point in my journey with Noni Jabavu. I first read about her in 2009 when I began writing for the Daily Dispatch.
But I felt a sense of unease because people were responding to me as though I was exceptional, as there were so few black women occupying the public discourse and opinion pages at the time. It wasn’t good enough for me that most black women found expression in church, as I had seen in my childhood. I eventually found a copy of The Ochre People by mistake, in a library at a monastery on the edge of Makhanda, while on a visit for a writing retreat.It was only years later that I could find copies of both of Jabavu’s books in what felt like a serendipitous moment in a store for antique books in Johannesburg.
I hope to write about Frieda Bokwe Matthews’ writing in the same newspaper, alongside Rilda Marta, as their writing is an example of how women wrote about the ways in which they occupied the world. What did it mean for a young preteen girl to refer to General Jan Smuts as Oom Jannie and describe him as a “jolly old man; he talked non-stop”?
When I see the expanse of gated communities and secured complexes in the suburbs and I hear about the racism that continues unabated in schools that retain a white majority, I am reminded of the question she poses in the column Far different north, in December:Today the question still begs: What are white South Africans protecting themselves from?
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