– This book was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2012
SURESH RAMPHUL
South Africa. 1832. It is the year before slavery is abolished and slaves are emancipated though their freedom will be followed by four years of indentured servitude. Philida has borne four children. Two are no more. One child is Lena, the other is a three-month-old baby. The father is François Brink, the son of her master Cornelis Brink. It is eight years now since they have been carrying on an affair in the bamboo copse. The historical fiction (Harvill Secker, Random House, London, 2012) is partly factual and largely imaginative. It focuses on a female slave’s desire for freedom, the abuses of owners against their slaves, the punishment meted out to runaway slaves, the subjugation of women slaves, and their utter helplessness against their masters’ absolute power. In a brilliant multiple-viewpoint narrative, the author gives us an insight into the physical and emotional journey of a slave who considers that “It’s not much of a life I had at Zandvliet, with the beatings and the knitting and the working day and night and always doing what other people tell you to do and everything else.” (p 12)
Freedom
One Saturday in November 1832 Philida walks from farm Zandvliet to Stellenbosch near Cape Town to complain with the Slave Protector against François Brink. On numerous occasions he has made promises to buy her freedom for sexual favours and now he is backing out as he is about to marry a wealthy white girl. They also want to sell her and her children. She has risked her life in coming here but there is nothing else she can do. She knows that “it’s not the law that speak the last word in this land” (p 12). She has been warned that those who return after filing their complaint are “beaten to death or they get hanged upside down or they get starved to death, and there’s no cock that crow about it, no dog that dare to bark. There’s many ways to kill a cock or a dog or a slave” (p 12). Her bravery immediately engages our attention. Right from the first pages we know there will be trouble ahead.
Cornelis advises his son to tell the Protector, in case he enquires, that the children are not his but belong to two slaves from the next farm. He cannot allow his name to be dragged through the mud. He calls everyone to watch the humiliation of Philida. He orders her to undress and lie down flat on her back on the flogging bench and asks two slave boys hired from the farm in the neighbourhood to take turns to rape her. They hesitate but his whiplash draws stripes of blood from their buttocks. Philida lies there “exposed like a lamb brought to slaughter” (p 46). François watches, pained, but cannot intervene. The father is the owner and he has the right to do what he likes. The whiplash in his father’s hand wields an undisputed power. Philida takes the situation as it comes because the owner’s words are final.
To the Protector, François lies: he knows nothing about the slave woman; she belongs to his father so how can he promise her freedom; he is not her children’s father. He says “Philida whored with any man who came along.” (p 49) He accuses her of shaming the family. We see the extent to which the society is male-dominated, for the Protector will give credibility to his words rather than to Philida’s. François knows that he has lied himself straight into hell yet is not courageous enough to face the truth. His ego, his status as a white and his fear do not allow him to rescue Philida. Philida discovers a bitter truth: she is only a slave, “I am never the one to decide where to go and when to go. It’s always they, it’s always somebody else. Never I.” (p 62) Her life is controlled by others. A master bought her, after all.
Runaway slaves
Francisca was a slave who could not take the beatings anymore. The Ounooi (lady the house) beat her every day with knotted ropes or firewood. She is beaten at sunset to punish her for what she did wrong during the day, at sunrise for what she will do wrong the day ahead. She took it meekly because of her children. Dominee Schute had promised her freedom; he never kept his word. He had two children with her. One day her two children were sold. She will never see them again. She fled with a slave called Klass. They were outlawed. To survive, they broke into houses. They stole two sheep and got caught. The punishment: Klass is tied to a pole and his back is shredded with cane, then sent to Robben Island for 10 years to do hard work. Two other men accomplices were burnt with irons and had their legs chained.
Philida recalls a story: a woman slave had run away shortly after her arrival. This was before the Brinks took over the farm. The owner went after her, caught her and “chopped her feet” (p 33). She died. And there was the slave who was caught lying with the Nooi (the master’s wife) of the farm when the owner was absent. He was taken back to the Fiscal and was made to run back all the way behind the horse. They made him “sit on a long rod stuck up his backside, nine days before he died, without food or water” (p 33).
Philida learns that her own mother Farieda had run away. She was brought back by a commando. The soles of her feet were peeled with a sharp knife. She tried fleeing again but died from over-bleeding. Philida is sold to a new owner, Meester de la Bat. One day, a forty-year-old man arrives. He was a slave here. He had absconded. The formality demands that he be beaten before he can begin life again. A heavy workbench with rusty iron rings in the legs is brought out. The man, Floris, is tied with thongs from the stable. Everybody is invited to watch. The master has to show his authority. His wrists are tied. The owner asks a slave to beat him. The latter refuses, for he fears Allah’s punishment. So Floris is left like that for a whole night.
Auction
The wine business of Cornelis is not doing well. He will be bankrupt soon. That’s why he wants his son to marry into a rich white family. He considers Philida as a threat to his plan. He thinks, “She’s making the water murky for all of us” (p 132). She needs to be sold. Her children will be sold too like skins and ostrich feathers and cattle. At Worcester slaves are sold. A bidder instructs a maiden to lower the top of her dress so that he can see more of her. Is it strictly necessary? The Commissioner wants to know. The bidder says he needs her for breeding purposes and “he must make sure she is properly equipped for the task” (p 160). Philida is standing on a table. A prospective buyer puts his stick between her ankles and starts pushing up the seam of her dress. People are sniggering. He bends to pick up his stick and she stomps on his fingers. There is a commotion. Later the Commissioner summons her and tells that she shouldn’t have stepped on a leading farmer’s fingers in public. She must know her place. She says he had no right to do what he did. The man had said that he was only inspecting before buying. “You’re a slave,” says the Commissioner, meaning that whatever happens, you have to keep quiet and bear it. The system is such that an owner can do what he wants and the slave woman has no say.
It is towards the end that we know that François (Frans) wanted to drown one of the babies, KleinFrans, like he does with kittens and puppies. Philida smothered him in her arms to save him from a life of slavery. The child is very much alive in her mind, in her breath. Slave infanticide was “regrettably not uncommon” (p 307).
Freedom means that now, at least, Philida can have shoes on her feet. However, no freedom can ever wash away the pains and horrors of slavery perpetrated by those blinded by their sense of power.