Drawn in Colour, by Noni Jabavu

[p024] Evoluee Drawn in Colour: African Contrasts. Noni Jabavu. John Murray, 18s. Noni Jabavu is an African aristo- crat. The Jabavus are one of those numbered African families in South Africa who, as products of the mis- sionary-liberal tradition, have for three generations had access to edu- cation, the professions and property. Her father, Professor Jabavu, most mild of moderate men, was the favourite, and frequently the only, exhibit at the inter-racial gatherings of the Institute of Race Relations and the Joint Council of Africans

[p025] 104 and Europeans. Designated by the liberals as a responsible leader, he was more widely known as a filmy. collaborator of the administration. Miss Jabavu’s book has the stamp of this inheritance, which is compli- cated, or perhaps complemented, by her marriage to an, English gentle- man, Michael Cadbury Crosfield, and her assimilation to his milieu. <A propitious background? This book, which records her re- actions on returning to South Africa, after an absence of many years, and her stay in Uganda, is a mixture of occasionally accurate descriptions, superficial judgments, women’s-jour- nal philosophy, whimsy and aston- ishing anti-black racial prejudice. The result is distressing, and the style, never literary and often tasteless, conforms with the ultimate triviality of her outlook. Only when she translates direct from Xhosa are there. touches of poetry in the writing; but the tones of this tongue have not per- meated and enriched her own prose. Her responses to East Africa would not disgrace the most pukka mem- sahib. She finds the colour of East Africans (black as sin), their smells, and their customs in food and sex. repulsive. Apparenily they actually do prefer squalor and filth. And really, one must assume that the edu- cated African dons the garb of West- ern culture’ with as little grace as would an orang-utang the robes of a medieval monarch. Indeed these East Africans must be an infinitely inferior breed. About South Africa, she is equally irritating. While she does well to puncture the myth of the tolerant, humane Englishman, she blows a new bubble, that of the rough, crude but warm Afrikaner (Boer), sin- cerely paternalistic towards the Afri- cans. Her comments on the coloured people (of so-called ‘mixed’ descent) are distasteful: she speaks of a coloured man as being ‘. like many of them unbelievably silly. . Such an attitude is not accidental, for Miss Jabavu quaintly remains an African tribalist. Her inordinate pride in her clan is nar- tow and Inudicrously anachronistic. Only the ruling class and a few very backward Africans foster tribal divi- sions and prejudices. Her preoccu- pation with the history of tribal mi- grations and conquests could. if ap- LABOUR REVIEW— October-November, 1960 proached in a more systematized manner, be valuable. In her hands it remains the vacuous pastime of a little woman, rather like tatting or embroidery. Miss Jabavyu spent most of her lime in the ancestral home at Mid- deldfrift, in the Eastern Cape Pro- vince, and the picture she paints of tranquillity and plenty is manifestly unrepresentative. How can she write thus when the same area has seen bitter peasant struggles, in which the participants have suffered banishment and even death? For a work which has pretensions to new insight into the complex problem of South Africa, it is singu- larly shoddy. No, more, it is repre- hensible. The falsifications which spring from narrow, shallow observa- tions, will satisfy only that ever- growing school of ‘Africa’s friends’, who would blur the liberation Struggle in veils of sentiment. be- cause they so fear its nakedness. To the altar of their lost cause a small offering has been brought, whose meagreness is in no way enriched because borne by a black hand. BENITA TEPER. Strong Men