Most South African "What were you doing during Apartheid?" books are a yawn. In my ignorance, I thought Kathie might be such a book. My first surprise was that it had been written in 1951, yet only published in 2008. My second surprise was my discovery of the author, Dora Taylor. What a remarkable person, and what a remarkable book. I am looking forward to reading her other two posthumously published books:
Don't tread on my dreams which is a collection of short stories, and
Rage of Life which is set in Sophiatown.
Dora Taylor came to South Africa in the 1930s from Scotland, and worked as a literary critic, writing for The Cape Times and other newspapers and magazines. A socialist, a member of the Non-European Unity Movement and a friend of IB Tabata, she soon became a thorn in the side of the Nationalists who eventually engineered her exile in the sixties. She is probably best known for her book The Role of the Missionaries in Conquest, published under the pseudonym of Nosipho Majeke which was a play on her name Dora (gift) and her maiden name of Jack, and means "Jack's gift" in Xhosa. Her leftist views (she called herself a Trotskyite) earned her the suspicion and hatred of "the establishment" in South Africa and in England, which was probably why her books were never published in her lifetime. What an impact they would have made if some publisher had had the courage to publish them in the fifties, sixties or seventies. Now we read them and marvel at this Scottish lady who wrote with such insight and courage at the height of the racist madness and the fear of Communism in South Africa and the whole of the western world.Kathie, the novel, is not as the blurb blurts out, only about a little "coloured" girl who has to watch while her mother and grandmother engineer that her lighter-skinned sister becomes accepted as a "white" in South African society - a profoundly demeaning process. That is one thread in a remarkable story of emerging black intellectual leadership (could the character of Paul Mangena have been drawn from Mandela?) and the horrors that colonial dominance wrought upon the psyche of the "non-whites" of South Africa. Powerful stuff
Written in the slightly flowery way of the 1940s and 1950s (probably she was attempting to make the novel palatable to the reading public sixty years ago) the novel is still very readable.
Click here to read The Role of the Missionaries in Conquest online.
Woodlands book no 2314 Kathie by Dora Taylor - belongs to Sue K.
