Maru a pula

Unearthing the meaning of ‘wording’ in African novel writing.

In African customs and heritage, names are not meaningless. They do not exist just for the mere sake of naming nor do they emanate from nowhere. Names carry sentiment, value and knowledge. In fact, names portray a particular message for reasons only known by those who give the name(s) themselves.

Here we go down in unearthing one of the most enthralling novels, a novel that was written by one of the most complex women writers of her time, Mme Bessie Head. Bessie Head was born during the apartheid era, went to become one of the few women to work for the Drum magazine. Among her colleagues in the newsroom were Can Themba, Nat Nakasa and Lewis Nkosi to mention a few. This is a story written with a very complicated narration, a story whose characters bring to bear the harsh realities of black life, a life of misery and anguish. If anything, through this novel, readers begin to ask themselves at what point does one really get to establish their own identity. I say this with moderation of course because for me it was not an easy journey having to decide which character I related to the most, and which character I favoured the most.

Either way, someone else would also question is it important to even have a favourite character in any novel? My answer is of course in the negative. It is not a must. But that is besides the point.

My journey with this novel is more about breaking my quell to read and complete reading Bessie’s work. You would ask yourself why is that the case? My response might completely surprise you.

If like me, you are interested in the Drum generation of South African writers, a group of writers that I personally deem as ‘the most free-spirited of South African writers’ who wrote at the peak of apartheid South Africa, whom were not scared to speak against power. You would definitely not complete a conversation about the Drum generation of writers without the mention of Bessie Head. Her personal story is a fascinating as the novels she has written. Having written three novels, Maru, When Clouds Gather and The Question – all three are easily regarded as seminal feminist texts.

Now, let’s get into the business of the day. Let’s indulge in the poetics of analysis. I title this review as Maru a pula – the clouds of the rain because of my appreciation of african customs. Not only that but also because the novel itself engages with the metaphor of rain being a medium of nourishment, a source of life and cleansing. That is precisely my reading of the novel. This is obviously at the level of the obscure, at a philosophical level. I hope my not so expansive analysis will explain why this title.

As I move into my analysis, I gravitate toward Maru: the polemic of a ‘apartheid erasure’, and this is the reason why:

Try to question yourself: what really is apartheid erasure, what form, shape or colour it is, it has none of the above. If anything Bessie Head in composing this novel, delves into the capacity of writing a story based on her personal life. Having been “born as crime” under the apartheid rule, at a time when the marriage between black folk was white folk was completely an unacceptable. A crime at worst. In her novel therefore she structures her story around the ‘newsroom’.

The newsroom basically is the staff room. If you have read this novel you will understand what is meant by that, if not touché. Generally the novel is composed of fascinating characters of mixed personalities with quite amusing persona, all of whom make the novel extremely nauseating if you understand what being taken for fool means.

A character by the name of Maru appears to be the king of the castle, he treats his subordinates like a nobody but as the story unfolds he gets dethroned. All along he thought he is the only smart guy in his circle, only for him to collapse. That is the tragedy of this novel.

To make things simplistic, let us undergo the linear unprogressive way of text analysis since it is the most basic thing to do. Academic literary review apparently to some people is meaningless simply because they assume to know more. Otherwise, those of us who put in the hours to script, narrate and keep the literary space intact, we continue to deconstruct texts as we see it fit.

Maru, a man of Steel, he behaves exactly like his totem, he does not let any “Tom, Dick and Harry” to do as they please in his presence. In fact he gives zero fucks. He doesn’t care at all. Maru had his comrades, and his second in command was Moleka whose sister is fondly in love with Maru. It is for this reason that Maru and Moleka were so tight as compatriots, sharing a serious camaraderie – one that semblances that of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, really true compatriots.

On the other side of “the road” is a different cabal under the hospice of Ranko. This is a man of no values wanting to dethrone Maru from his prestigious marriage with Dikeledi, a woman who made the entire villagemen to wisp their “windscreens”, so if you wish to read the novel with a pleasing appetite, I suggest that you pay attention to the extreme plot twists that transpire in this canonical text.

The story takes place in some fiction village located in Bots called Dilepe, Margaret Cadmore is a women from a foreign country so it turns out that within the unfolding story, she arrives in Botswana as an outcast. Since she is not of the lineage of the Batswana, she proudly maintains her identity of being ‘a woman of colour’, only to be unjustly regarded as a “Masarwa” (a derogatory label that was used at the time to refer to woman of colour). She nonetheless, lives her live unapologetically sane as a woman of colour despite being treated with disgusting approach by the people of Dilepe village.

Over a couple of time that she spends in that foreign land she eventually manages to immense herself into the livelihood of this foreign land that she finds herself in. Over a some time, some people opt to associate with her, especially Ranko, Semana and others.

Now, in the novel, because it is set in Apartheid South Africa, and Maru, set in Botswana where Bessie Head wrote it; at the time this novel was among the many banned novels since Pik Botha’s lowlife men and women were obsessed with surveillance of black people’s lives. Assuming that they were less of, an absolute rubbish kind of “apartheid mentality”, as it were. Today, indeed we are not under the doom of Botha’s government. However when reading this novel and situating it at the time it was written, the sheer aggressive and painstaking narration of this text says it all. That Margaret Cadmore and George Cadmore were obsessed in creating conflict among black people noting that due to some “ethnic diaconfiguration”, a tact would be to always falsify each of these people’s perceptions of one to the other, realising that they would squabble within their very own grouping.

Moleka and Maru were complete hero’s among their cluster, this is because they were “think-alikes”, a poetic saying in English states: “great minds think alike”, so they would in every circumstance withhold each other’s views, constantly so, despite any unforeseeable differences or disagreements. They always stuck to each other’s positionality.

So as the novel unfolds, we meet Ranko who is the enemy of Maru since he wanted to take his woman from him and he kept not withholding instructions he received from other gentlemen from the village, going out of his way to undermine Maru’s decisive instructions and command.

What then happens is a mystery, Maru makes his efforts known in the village by means of finding a teaching job for his wife, and ensuring that she does not get disturbed there not even by Ms Cadmore.

Maru did not take light the idea of being undermined by what some would term as “village boy” (as it is told in the novel, herdboy basically). The plot twist though is that Margaret Cadmore, always held a particular view about black people just the same way that black people had very indifferent and unwelcoming attitude toward one another, things of sheer stupidity – tribalistic ideas are quite of no value given that they give birth to nothingness. Just vile thoughts of lust decorated in a form of either envy or pretense love one whose structure is baseless. It is a phenomenon in my view that has no base at all. It has no foundation whatsoever, one that reconciles or rather reflects a humongous construction building being held tightly together by a solid foundation, “tshimologo”. The beginning of a beginning whose end is ultimately rested on the bases of its structuring. In other words, a long lasting binding companionship.

Based in the village of Dilepe, the story goes on that eventually Maru gets married with Dikeledi and he sends his ‘forces’ to kill Ranko. Bessie Head was ahead of her time in writing this novel simply because it captured the violence among men, on a daily stats on the man-to-men killings are very strenuous.

At the end of the day, in her writing, Bessie Head always questioned the structure of violence not at the peripheral level or at the surface level. She was never about the tip of the iceberg. In her writing, she always questioned the structure and the superstructure. Hence, when you read her other writings including The Question of Power and When Clouds Gather, you begin to understand her writing to not only be superficial not even close to that.

Her writing is that of critiquing the inequalities of the era she lived. It is no wonder then that many African feminists, writers and poets that are her successors in the literary discipline continue to be inspired by her approach in writing with a slithering, critical and cut throating approach.

In terms of her other novels including When Clouds Gather and Question to power, one cannot escape the reality that those particular texts where of her own biographical journey and somewhat telling in that she bequelled the idea of living, surviving and writing in a foreign land, considering that Bots was not being her place of birth. She only lived there because she was in exile. That was where she went in hiding since the government of the time was anti-her journalism career similar to how most journalist that worked with her went into hiding, some sadly died in exile. However, given that Bots was an independent state during her writing, it cannot be ignored then that her writing career reached astute heights simply because she could write freely without any form of intimidation, threats and surveillance.

Writing at a time of speculations, threats and sickening surveillance must have been really a frustrating persuasion altogether simply because the writer is unable to traverse his or her tapestry due to “fear of intrusion”. Fear of intrusion in this sense refers to one’s writing being intercepted and decoded – but since Bessie came from a serious school of thought as far as journalistic and scholarly persuasion, she was ever fearless, bold and unapologetic, a goddamn critique.

The role of writer is to ordinarily and in-ordinarily speak against the powers that be. Question the superstructure, expose it and condemn it whenever the need arise without any fear whatsoever.

A fearful writer is not writer at all. What is there to fear when death itself is the means to an end, and an end is the ultimate price for a writer that write what needs to be told. 

Now, going back to the metaphorical lens, it can be said that in dealing with the effects of racism, tribalism and sexism, the novel manages poignantly to demonstrate the unintellectual basis of these biases. There is no form of thought and reasoning that justifies these vile meausures (i.e. racism, bigotry, sexism and violence). At a metaphorical level it can therefore be said that in the novel, Head manages to insanely delineate the manner in which some of her characters being a representation of a bigger idea – what would often be regarded as macrocosm. Maru has two elements into his persona – the rain and the clouds. As for Moleka, he symbolises the thunderstorm because of his demeanor and ways of doing things, and yet the two are close of friends. The only issue is that they are in love with the same woman, Margaret, but at some point Maru finally wins her over, whilst Moleka goes on to marry Dikeledi.

But, the interesting thing in how Bessie Head tries to critique racism, she reveals that no matter from where racism emanates itself from, by its very nature, it is an unforgivable damn animal. As such, Margaret’s role in the novel becomes an interest feature in that she all by herself constantly endure racial prejudice from the Batswana since many of the people both at the school and the people of Dilepe kept giving her crazy attitude.

As such, through Margaret having married Maru, she slowly gets integrated into the village life of the Batswana and all of a sudden becomes the impetus for change in two interesting yet decisive ways.

First, by symbolically reuniting Moleka with his heart; second, by withholding herself from him so that he could unite with the efficient, unprejudiced, and power-mognering Dikeledi. This is to say that it appears as if Margaret was not forceful at all as far as her methods were concerned. Weirdly too, she was even unaware of them therefore making her being the symbolism and catalyst for change even more intriguing. In other words, Margaret was unconscious of her role and this in my view speaks to the inevitability of the effected change that she managed to gradually effect in Dilepe through her quiet moves. By her efforts, “the wind of freedom” (126) enters the space of the Masarwa tribe, the “dark airless room in which their souls had been shut for a long time” (126).

Elsewhere, Alan Ramón Ward argues that told that before going any further, “Maru’s representation as cloud must be considered as it relates to the possibility that Maru and Moleka represent two parts of the same character before Margaret’s appearance: Maru representing the heart, Moleka representing the self without the heart”.

What Ward is alluding to here speaks to the possibility of associating Maru with clouds (mara a pula, my emphasis) becomes a reading of him being like the clouds that need force to produce rain. Whilst Moleka symbolically representing a force that needs substance, the cloud, their relationship is emphasises by these polarised differences. Making it more magically when reading their friendship – two friends being in love with the same woman, quite tragic at the same time.

Hence, once cannot run away from the deep rooted meaning of the Setswana idiom being at play in this novel in that Maru is “indeed that banking of clouds” that is unable to “release its beneficial downpour.”⁵ 

Hence, we cannot downplay the use of indigenous knowledge systems in this novel as it seriously and carefully plays with the ideation of idiom and metaphor. Maru a pula. The cloud and rain in most african knowledge systems have a great meaning.

_{Credit: Peter Kevin Solness/Fairfax Media/Getty Images}

Read more of her novels: When clouds gather (1968); Maru (1971) and The Question of Power (1973)