Aibileen and Poppie

In August 2009 on a night flight between Cape Town and Amsterdam, I sat next to a woman engrossed in a book on her lap. Throughout, she kept her reading light on. I noticed a sepia photograph on the cover showing two black women chatting to each other; one of them was wearing an apron and a white cap, and she stood next to a pram with a white child in it. The title of the book was The Help, and the author Kathryn Stockett. Just before we landed at Schiphol airport, my neighbour told me how deeply moved she was by what she had been reading. Although The Help is situated in the 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi, it had starkly reminded her of the ‘servant situation’ in South Africa: of the women who had cared for her and of those who had helped her to raise her own children.

In December I was back in Cape Town again, and in book shops everywhere I noticed piles of The Help; Exclusive Books had awarded the novel its annual Boeke Prize. The American novel with the domestic worker Aibileen as its main character was touching the hearts and minds of thousands. Not since Elsa Joubert's The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena (originally published as Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena, 1978) had a novel with a black protagonist so captured the imagination of South African readers. The movie version of The Help was an even bigger success, drawing crowds comparable to those that had flocked to see the play Poppie thirty years before.

Some two years later, in February 2011, Ablene Cooper accused Kathryn Stockett of having stolen her story. Cooper had for years been a servant in the household of Stockett's brother. Stockett fiercely denied the accusation and had to publicly confront important questions regarding appropriation: the right of an outsider to speak for or write on behalf of ‘the other’.