Black and Female: Essays

Black and Female

by the same author

NERVOUS CONDITIONS

THE BOOK OF NOT

THIS MOURNABLE BODY

Black and Female

Essays

Tsitsi Dangarembga

GRAYWOLF PRESS

Copyright © 2022 by Tsitsi Dangaremgba

First published by Faber & Faber Limited, London

The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Significant support has also been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

Published by Graywolf Press

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www.graywolfpress.org

Published in the United States of America

Printed in Canada

ISBN 978-1-64445-211-0   (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-64445-212-7   (ebook)

First Graywolf Printing, 2023

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022938623

Jacket design: Kimberly Glyder

To my mother, Susan Ntombizethu Dangarembga

To my sister, Rudo Dangarembga

And to Sheri and Ines, whose journeys demanded much that is unspeakable

Contents

Introduction

Writing While Black and Female

Black, Female and the Superwoman Black Feminist

Decolonisation as Revolutionary Imagining

Notes

Acknowledgements

Introduction

I am an existential refugee. I have been in flight since I left the womb, and probably before, given the circumstances I was born into and the effect of these circumstances on my prenatal environment.

At the time I was born, my parents lived in Murewa District, an hour and a half west of Harare, where they both taught at Murewa High School. The high school was located at a mission established by an American Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) missionary in 1909. I was born in a hospital at Nyadire, another AME mission a hundred-odd miles from where my parents worked, located in the extreme north-east of the country. By the time I was born, the same church, whose headquarters were and continue to be in the United States of America, had merged with two other Methodist denominations to form the United Methodist Church (UMC). My parents were staunch members.

The country itself, Southern Rhodesia, was still a British colony then, albeit a self-governing one, a status that had been achieved in 1923. As a result, the colony had its own parliament, civil service and security services, which answered to the settler administration, and not to the British government, as previously had been the case. Today, opinions about the nature of British colonial policy at the time differ. Izuakor tells us how the official colonial policy of the European settlement of Kenya, adopted in 1902, resulted in an increase of the European population from approximately one dozen in 1901, to 9,651 in 1921, against roughly 2.5 million Africans, and that despite this preponderance of African people, a system of European paramountcy was entrenched.¹ Whaley, on the other hand, argues that the policy of supremacy of African interests was the guiding principle of all British colonisation on the continent, with Rhodesia being the exception.² Whaley’s assertion relies on a white paper issued by the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, the Duke of Devonshire, whose purpose was to shift paramountcy in the British African colonies away from the colonialists to the African population, and on three key pieces of Rhodesian legislation, which he refers to collectively as the Constitutional Documents, that entrenched separation of races. The white paper was issued in 1923, the same year that Southern Rhodesia was granted responsible government. According to the constitutional arrangements agreed upon between Britain and her colony that opened the way for this responsible government, Britain retained the right to intervene in the colony’s legislative affairs, particularly in the case of ‘native’ affairs. In reality, however, it did not act to counter the white supremacist tendencies the colony soon exhibited.

Racist legislation enacted less than a decade after Southern Rhodesia became self-governing included the segregationist Land Apportionment Act of 1930. This Act divided the colony into ‘European’, ‘Native’, ‘Undetermined’, ‘Forest’ and ‘Unassigned’ areas. In addition to these divisions, the act prohibited Africans from purchasing land in European-designated areas. This might not have been punitive had the act provided for sufficient purchase land to meet the needs of the African population, which was not the case. Unjustifiably – except by the tenets of white supremacy – Africans in the country were afforded the right to purchase land without competition from the settlers in only 7 per cent of the country. This was to become an abiding grievance in the African population, and ultimately a primary cause of the Zimbabwean anti-colonial armed struggle that began in April 1966 with a battle in Chinhoyi, a small town roughly a hundred miles north-west of Harare. The conflict escalated into a bloody guerrilla war that raged on until a settlement between the nationalists and the Rhodesian government was reached at the Lancaster House Conference at the end of 1979.

After 1923, space and body continued to frame access to rights in Rhodesia, in spite of the British government’s right to intervene. The country became a quasi-state with invisible internal boundaries that were consolidated into fact by legislation. The cities were generally seen as European territories. Africans, who resided in special African areas – the townships – came to be regarded very much as immigrants in these areas. Effectively, certain areas of the country were rendered both symbolically and legally white, a convergence that excluded the presence of unregulated black bodies in these areas. Conversely, the spaces where Africans were allowed some mobility – which included the reserves and locations on the outskirts of the urban areas – were ideologised as primitive, backward and underdeveloped, containing people who belonged to the category ‘other’. The control necessary to keep these two realms of existence separate was exercised both officially and unofficially.

A pass system had been introduced to the country almost immediately after colonisers arrived in the area that is now Harare in 1890, while actual pass certificates were introduced in the 1930s. Rhodesians referred to these early colonisers as the Pioneer Column. This column was an army of some five hundred white men raised by Cecil Rhodes through his British South Africa Company (BSAC). Their purpose was to annexe the country they marched into for the British Crown. Cecil Rhodes himself was prime minister of the Cape Colony, in the south-west of what is today South Africa, from 1890 to 1896. Pass laws had been introduced into the Cape Colony in 1760 by the Governor Earl Macartney, an Anglo-Irish colonial administrator and diplomat, in order to control the movement of slaves in the colony, and were subsequently extended to prevent African people from entering the area. In introducing the pass laws to the newly annexed territory on arrival, Rhodes continued an entrenched British tradition of segregation.

Passes are tantamount to a kind of internal passport system. In the beginning, Rhodesian pass laws applied only to African men. The pass book that African men, and then women in urban areas, came to be obliged to carry stipulated where an African could work, where they could live and whom they could marry. My father was a man who, by the law of the land, was obliged to carry such a pass book in the country where he was a citizen. Control of physical mobility was a crucial tactic in Rhodesian white supremacist strategy. My mother told me of an incident in which, as a secondary school student in the 1940s, having returned to her family home in the Eastern Highlands for the holidays, she took a trip to nearby Umtali town, as it was then known, although it is now called Mutare. As she walked through the streets, a group of white youths struck her and pushed her from the pavement into the gutter.

Physical mobility and access to land were not the only areas of African life that the Rhodesian settler government controlled. Education was another such area. After the 1923 grant of responsible government, the colony turned away from the South African model of education that had been practised up until then, to prioritise high standards of secondary education, with a view to giving their children life opportunities similar to those enjoyed by British youth. On the other hand, government schools for Africans initially confined themselves to teaching agricultural and industrial skills. The first academic secondary school for African youth was opened at