Ukubonwa nokungabonakali: Noni Jabavu’s absent-presence and present-absence

In Women and Writing in South Africa: A Critical Anthology, edited by Cherry Clayton, Clayton traces the genealogy of women and writing in South Africa. The anthology features writers such as Olive Schreiner, Bertha Goudvis, Pauline Smith, Sarah Gertrude Millin, Doris Lessing, Martha Quest, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Elsa Joubert and Miriam Tlali. There is also a chapter about orality and writings by garment workers. The book was published in 1989 and admittedly leaves out many black women writers who had already been published, such as Ellen Kuzwayo who is mentioned in the introduction. I use this book as a starting point to explain Noni Jabavu’s erasure, as she is merely a footnote in this collection and, by extension, in South Africa’s literary history.

In the chapter in the book about Miriam Tlali’s work, written by Cecily Lockett, she is acknowledged as ‘the first black woman in South Africa to publish a novel – Muriel at Metropolitan—in the early 1970s’. Jabavu appears as a footnote to clarify why Tlali is considered a first. Lockett explains in the footnote that ‘similar claims might be made for Noni Jabavu, who published The Ochre People in 1963 in London; however Jabavu’s work is autobiographical and does not present itself as fiction’. What is curious in this footnote is the implicit privileging of fictional writing over nonfiction writing such as Jabavu’s memoirs. More importantly, only one of Jabavu’s books is referred to. Drawn in Colour: African Contrasts, which was published in London in 1960, is excluded, and there is no acknowledgement that The Ochre People was published in South Africa in 1982. The fact that Jabavu published her book while staying in London also seems to disrupt the anthology’s positioning of her as a writer, as well as her position as a pioneer. It seems that she cannot be seen as a South African writer in this anthology because her book is published abroad, and the fact that she had been estranged from South Africa poses a problem about claiming her as a South African writer.