SOURCE: Feurle, Gisela. “‘Welcome Robinson Crusoe, Welcome!’: The Story Re-Told by a Female Voice from Africa in Bessie Head's Botswana Village Tales.” In Across the Lines: Intertextuality and Transcultural Communication in the New Literatures in English, edited by Wolfgang Kloos, pp. 141–49. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998.

1 INTRODUCTION

I shall be dealing with my topic from two angles: first, by interpreting Bessie Head's story “The Wind and a Boy”¹ and the intertextuality involved; secondly, by discussing some aspects of the reception of this text and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.

My focus on reception is based on my teaching experience and (self-) observation. I read texts of African literature—among others short stories of Bessie Head—in a course with students at the Oberstufenkolleg in Bielefeld, making intercultural understanding an explicit topic. During my stay in Zimbabwe in 1995, I read some of these texts again with Zimbabwean students in order to find out more about the reception and understanding of African literature.

My approach to reading and interpreting African literature in the Bielefeld course implied—besides textual interpretation—reflection on our reactions to the texts, on our cultural backgrounds and experiences, on our images of Africa and Africans. I think cultural self-reflexivity, change of perspectives and critical awareness of eurocentrism and its discourse, combined with background information on the African context and the author concerned, are necessary for intercultural understanding and the interpretation of African literary texts.

2 BESSIE HEAD'S “THE WIND AND A BOY”

“The Wind and a Boy” tells the story of a boy (called Friedman after the friendly foreign doctor in the hospital) who grows up with his grandmother Sejosenye in the Botswana village of Ga-Sefete-Molemo. There is a close relationship between grandmother and grandson right from the beginning. Growing up, Friedman becomes one of the typical village boys who live according to their own rules and feel as free as the wind. He is, however, also different from them: he is a boy who knows his own mind, and someone who is beautiful like a “graceful gazelle with large, grave eyes”; although he becomes mischievous and a nuisance in the village, the villagers regard him as better than the others. His grandmother Sejosenye, still an impressive figure at her age, had also had a flaming youth. She is a woman who can plough and is hard-working—being the envy of all the women in the area. She tells her grandson “all those stories of hunters, warriors, emissaries of old” and—“given to dreaming herself”—sometimes sings him a little song. A certain “quaint little song” is always “well received” by Friedman; “a little light would awaken in his eyes.” She would sing: “Welcome Robinson Crusoe, welcome! How could you stay so long away, Robinson, how could you do so?” As a girl, Sejosenye had spent a year at a mission school, where she had made a slight acquaintance with the ABC and one, two, three, four, five and the little song. “Yet Robinson Crusoe lived on as a gay and out-of-context memory of her school days.”²

Friedman asks her if this was a special praise-poem song for Robinson, and if he was loved by his people because he did great things for them. Sejosenye confirms this, and as the boy wants to know what exactly Robinson had done for his people, she tells him her story, “making it up on the spot.” “They say Robinson was a hunter who went by the Gweta side and killed an elephant all by himself.” And she tells Friedman how this happened, how brave and courageous he was in defending himself against the elephant. He gave the elephant to the people; there was something for all of them “in the great work Robinson did.” Friedman is deeply impressed by the story, and says: “Grandmother, one day I am going to be like that. I am going to be a hunter like Robinson Crusoe and bring meat to all the people.” Friedman wants to hear more. “The stories awaken a great tenderness in him.” In his everyday boyish activities and games, he acts out the role of Robinson, who is “touchingly in aid or defence of the people.” One day Friedman expresses this “awakened compassion for life” as follows: when his grandmother orders him to kill the mice that have invaded the huts because of a great storm, Friedman protests, as the mice have come for shelter, and puts them into a box to take them back to the field. He becomes more and more devoted to his grandmother and concerned to help her in any way. One day she sends him to the shops with his new bicycle—a gift from his mother from town. As he is peddling along the road, a truck hits him, drags him along at a crazy speed. The boy is dead, the pretty face “a smear along the road.”

When Sejosenye learns of her grandson's death, she says: “Can't you return those words back?” In the hospital she starts talking and singing to herself, and soon dies. The village people of this “timeless sleepy village” discuss the incident from all sides until it is understood:

The driver of the truck […] belonged to the new, rich civil-servant class whose salaries had become fantastically high since independence. They had to have cars in keeping with their new status; […] they were in such a hurry about everything that they couldn't be bothered to take driving lessons. And thus progress, development, and a preoccupation with status and living-standards first announced themselves to the village. It looked like being an ugly story with many decapitated bodies on the main road.³

3 DEFOE'S CRUSOE: INTERPRETATION, RECEPTION, AND EFFECT

The reference to Robinson Crusoe in Sejosenye's story triggers off some associations, images, or memories of Daniel Defoe's novel—if it is known to the reader. Some of the Bielefeld students—but not all—could remember some fragments: Crusoe's shipwreck, the fact that he lived on an island, Friday—“a boy” on the island who learns everything from Crusoe. One student remembered that she had admired Crusoe a lot when she was young because he was able to do everything on his own. Another student said he saw Crusoe and Friday as examples of the colonizer and the colonized.

The importance of Robinson Crusoe as a canonical text of European culture is immense. Ian Watt describes it as one “of the great myths of Western civilization.”⁴Robinson Crusoe has been interpreted as representing not only English merchant capitalism (or capitalism in general) but human civilization as such, as opposed to nature.⁵ Crusoe subjugates nature and repeats the ‘developmental stages’ of hunting and gathering, agriculture, and artisanship. Only after having completed this process does he encounter the nameless savage, saving him from his people, the cannibals. Crusoe makes him his slave, giving him the name Friday and ‘civilizing’ him, teaching him how to work (for him) and educating him, by liberating him from his ‘primitive beliefs’ and converting him to Christianity. Friday acknowledges the supremacy of his new master.

Since its appearance in 1719, the novel has been read by countless people, young and old; it has been re-written in numerous versions, especially for young people and with a didactic purpose.⁶ Philosophers, educationists, writers, and economists have referred to the novel: Rousseau, for instance, regarded it as the ideal book for his Émile, and Karl Marx mentioned it in the context of his theory of value. The German-Swiss ‘Robinsonade’ became a genre in its own right. Robinson Crusoe has been used as illustration or inspiration for such topics as civilization, labour and wealth, economic and religious individualism, the development of capitalism, colonization, and empire-building.

The story is bound to have left some traces deep in the minds of its readers; in the context of the colonial and imperial experience and discourse⁷ it has contributed to creating conscious or subconscious conceptions and images of the European ‘Self’ and the ‘Other,’ the indigenous peoples of Africa and the Americas. Helen Tiffin sees Robinson Crusoe (like Shakespeare's Tempest) as “part of the process of ‘fixing’ relations between Europe and its ‘others,’ of establishing patterns of reading alterity.”⁸ The conceptions and images contribute to cultural structures of eurocentrism or racism in our minds, implying a dualistic view of the world: Robinson/Friday, white/black, civilization/primitiveness or barbarism, culture/nature, rational/emotional, science/magic, masculine/feminine. The concepts in this system are seen as binary oppositions, with the first pole representing the supremacy of the Western world (or, if applied to gender relations: of men).⁹

By discussing Defoe's story and what we remember of it in my literature course, I was able to put into practice the approach described above: to reflect critically on eurocentric, dualistic and hierarchical conceptions and constructions and to become aware of how they were created in us (and still are being created). And it was an African literary text that, by means of its intertextuality, provoked this urge to be concrete and personal. One student, for example, who re-read the children's edition of Robinson Crusoe he found at home, was now quite shocked about the way Robinson and Friday were portrayed. He had not been aware of this before; it had seemed ‘normal’ to him.

4 COUNTER-DISCOURSE IN POST-COLONIAL WRITING

The function and effect of this kind of text in Europe make up one side of the coin; Helen Tiffin and Stephen Slemon both underline the function of such a canonical European text at the colonial periphery. It “becomes an important part of material imperial practice”: ie a means of cultural domination through the colonialist educational system. “It continually displays and repeats, for the colonical subject, the original capture of his/her alterity and the process of its annihilation, marginalization, or naturalization.”¹⁰ ‘Writing back’ to this is a mode of cultural resistance.

Various discursive strategies in post-colonial literatures and their subversive qualities have been described.¹¹ One is canonical counter-discourse, the re-writing of the European ‘master-texts’ (like Robinson Crusoe). Writing back to Crusoe means ‘writing back’ to the whole discursive field within which such a text operated and continues to operate in post-colonial worlds.

4.1 BESSIE HEAD'S COUNTER-DISCOURSE

I'd like now to interpret in detail what Bessie Head's counter-discourse implies: how she is ‘writing back’ to Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.

What strikes one first is that Defoe's story is ‘re-told’ as part of the African oral tradition, and by a woman, an African woman. Sejosenye's storytelling represents the oral tradition that remembers the past and has a strong impact on the present and future, as can be seen from Friedman's reaction to the story. Bessie Head's view of the African oral tradition had been shaped by her experience: Living in exile in Botswana after fleeing from South Africa, she finds roots for black identity there; for her, Botswana “kept alive the portrait of ancient Africa.”¹² Orature—as the counterpart of literature—is one means of doing this. Its importance is conveyed in contrast but also in parallel to Defoe's classic foundational novel. At the end of Joachim Campe's late-eighteenth-century Crusoe-book, the children say: “We want to be like Robinson”¹³—who is a morally perfect hard-working puritan—and so does Friedman: only, he is referring to the African Crusoe constructed by his grandmother Sejosenye.

Head inserts the female storyteller, who tells her own story. Among all the other traditional stories she tells, she is making up a story including her utopia. which is taken up by Friedman. Her belief in the power and reality of words is later also shown when she says “can't you take these words back?” in order to annul Friedman's death. She spends the rest of her days singing and talking to herself, “as if still desperately hoping to substitute her own story for someone else's version of progress.”¹⁴

4.2 WHAT REMAINS OF ROBINSON CRUSOE?

All that, ironically, remains of the important canonical text of ‘Western civilization’ is the name of its hero and the “quaint little song.” The effect of this text and its conceptions during Sejosenye's brief mission education seem to be negligible—only the song remains. The latter is presented as a song welcoming Crusoe to England on his return after twenty-eight years, although, according to Defoe's text, there was no welcome at all for him. Sejosenye appropriates the song and the name Robinson for her own purpose, labelling it a praise-poem song, a genre of orature in southern Africa, thereby demonstrates her independence of colonial discourse.

I think the irony is twofold: first, the absurdity (but probable reality) of African kids singing a welcome song for Robinson at the mission school; secondly, the failure or inversion of the purpose of this text as an element in colonial education.

When asking the students of a Form 3 class in Zimbabwe if they had ever heard anything about Robinson Crusoe before, there were only about four out of 26 who had. Two remembered the name only. One girl remembered reading a booklet at primary school with the story of Robinson Crusoe: “He was on an island, had goats and drank their milk. He had a worker called Friday.” This reception can, of course, not be seen as representative, but the situation of Robinson Crusoe—being an out-of-context-memory, just as for Sejosenye, or no memory at all for many people—is certainly true in the African context. On the other hand, Robinson Crusoe is in any case still a story that is relatively widely read. In the bookshops in Zimbabwe I found the abridged and simplified version in the Junior Series of the College Press: “Stories to Remember” (suitable for non-native speakers of English)—first published in 1965, reprinted nearly every year, sometimes twice a year. The impression I saw had been printed in Zimbabwe in 1994, with reprintings yearly since 1988.

Still, a question that may be asked is: what remains of the quotation if the ‘pre-text’ is not known? I think, in any case, that the dimension is important for the author and for those readers who do know it or are acquainted with some of its ideas. Furthermore—as I propose to show—there are other dimensions in Bessie Head's counter-discourse that are independent of this.

4.3 ‘WRITING BACK’ TO COLONIAL AND AFRICAN DISCOURSE BY CONSTRUCTING A DIFFERENT STORY

The level of reception can be regarded as an additional background factor when interpreting further details of Bessie Head's counter-discourse as unfolded through Sejosenye's story.

There is no explicit changing or adding of aspects of the story or of point of view in order to present a critical version, or a ‘dialogue’ with the pre-text.¹⁵ As already mentioned, nothing remains of the pre-text but the name of the hero, and of the (invented) song only the friendly welcome by the people. Sejosenye tells her own story, constructing her Robinson on basis of her assumptions, the British Robinson remaining wholly implicit.

Slemon highlights parody as the essential textual strategy of post-colonial counter-discourse: parodic quotation of the imperial text sets itself up in opposition to the interpellative power of colonialism.¹⁶ I think the textual strategy here can't be called a parody in the strict sense of the word, but a parodic (rather: ironical) quotation that emphasizes the originality of her story.

For readers who know or remember the pre-text, the reference to Crusoe not only stimulates the above mentioned images and conceptions and critical reflection on these, but also challenges an interpretation via comparison. Sharper contours, extra depth, but also ambiguity are the result. The reader is activated, stimulated to reflect on his or her mode of reception and associations, to change perspectives, and to look for the message implied via the intertextuality. The reading process is implicitly accompanied by the question “what is different?” but also by a state of ambiguity about whether this is really the appropriate question.

At first glance, there is no Friday in Sejosenye's story—or, as I prefer to see it, Crusoe and Friday are integrated in one person, both in the story told by Sejosenye and in the boy Friedman, who admires the African hero Robinson and dreams of being a leader like him. He is Crusoe and the emancipated Friday at the same time (cf. also the names Friedman/Friday), and also—as the end of the story suggests—Friday the victim.

Sejosenye's Robinson is a great hunter who helps the people, an individual characterized by bravery and courage but integrated into the community and working on its behalf. This contrasts with the individualism, solitude, egocentricity, and hierarchy within Defoe's Crusoe. The Crusoe-personality which Friedman adopts shows compassion for life and cares for nature (an example is the incident with the mice)—contrasting with the philosophy of developing capitalism in the eighteenth century with its conquering and exploitation of nature.

A keyword for Bessie Head's Robinson is “tenderness”—Sejosenye's stories awaken “a great tenderness” in Friedman (unfortunately, this is wrongly translated as “große Gefühle,” big emotions/sentiments, in the German version). In my first reaction as a reader, “tenderness” was a surprising and unexpected term. Usually stories of heroes and great leaders are expected to arouse other feelings: admiration of strength, power, heroism, fighting and winning, and so forth. Tenderness and love, characteristics mostly associated with women according to the socio-cultural construction of femininity, become qualities of the ‘new man’ who loves and cares for the community. In some of Bessie Head's other stories as well, the ‘new man,’ filled with tenderness and emotions, can be found as a utopian element: Paul Thebolo in “The Collector of Treasures,” or Sebembele in “The Deep River,” for example.¹⁷

One important element of Bessie Head's counter-discourse is to do away with dualism and binary oppositions: both Crusoe/Friday and all the oppositions such as civilized/primitive associated with it, and masculinity/femininity. The critical counter-discourse is thus not only directed at the discourse of colonialism or apartheid but also at that of African society with regard to gender. Head not only creates “a new kind of man” but also, in some of her stories, inserts women into the oral traditions that she uses as material in her fiction, giving women a voice and importance; Sejosenye is but one example.

I think it is important to note that although Sejosenye is depicted as a strong African woman who has roots and a vision, there is no essentialist idealization. She is humorously shown in her contradictions and common sense. The missionaries' work had some effect on her, as she is one of the “old churchgoers,” although apparently not a very strict one, since “some of the songs she sang to Friedman passed as her bedtime prayer.”

4.4 ‘WRITING FORWARD’

Bessie Head unfolds a vision of a future that gets its support from the past, in which people find their identity in the community, in which women play a crucial role and a new type of man has developed. This vision is closely linked with her life in the Botswana village, as an exile from apartheid South Africa, torn by the suffering of black people, of violence and racism, with her own experience of uprootedness and shaken identity. Botswana, which she experienced as a country less destroyed by colonialism, was for her a place “where it is possible to dream”—in contrast to South Africa—“a peaceful world of black people dreaming in their own skins.”¹⁸ It was not so peaceful anymore, however: …

Friedman and the utopia he represents get killed off; as a consequence, so is Sejosenye—by ‘progress and development’ put into practice by the new élite in the independent African country. This class within post-colonial society is characterized by self-centredness and a lack of solicitude towards others, the importance of personal wealth and status, the implementation of technological development as a destructive force: Thus the truck driver in the story represents the counter-values of Sejosenye's and Friedman's vision and can be associated with the line leading from Defoe's Crusoe to late capitalism and modernism. This version of progress and development is predicted to be “an ugly story with many decapitated bodies on the main road.” Story and reality are one again, just as in Friedman's dream and behaviour. It is the community that discusses and interprets the meaning of the “ugly story.”

Actually, it was this aspect, and the irony implied, that turned out to be difficult for the Zimbabwean students to understand; for them, progress and development represented positive values only.

5 COUNTER-DISCOURSE AND REFERENCE TO REALITY

The dual agenda that Slemon states for post-colonial literature¹⁹ can be found in Bessie Head's fiction: on the one hand, textual resistance to (neo)colonial rhetoric in the form of counter-discourse; on the other, reference to a political and social reality, to principles of cultural identity and survival. Head's discursive practices are “politically situated” (Tiffin), the ‘site of communication’ Botswana/South Africa in the Seventies and after.

Being aware of this can help readers to explain and analyze the complex multidimensionality of Bessie Head's writing, the multifold counter-discourse used to put forward her values and vision.

Bessie Head is not only ‘writing back’ to the colonial ‘master text’ Robinson Crusoe, but also to the African tradition and its oral history and orature. Furthermore, she is also ‘writing back’ to the ugly story of the ‘progress’ of the new élite in post-colonial society. She is referring to both of these discourses and to the social and political reality in question. And she is, in fact, also ‘writing forward’ with regard to both.

Despite the shocking ending and grim outlook of the “ugly story,” what (also) remains is Sejosenye telling her own Crusoe story, “dreaming in her own skin.”

Notes

1. Bessie Head, “The Wind and a Boy,” in The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village Tales (London: Heinemann, 1977): 69–75.

2. Head, “The Wind and a Boy,” 72.

3. Head, “The Wind and a Boy,” 75.

4. Ian Watt, “Robinson Crusoe,” in Daniel Defoe: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Max Byrd (Twentieth Century Views; Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976): 51.

5. See Karl-Heinz Kohl, Entzauberter Blick: Das Bild vom Guten Wilden und die Erfahrung der Zivilisation (Berlin: Qumran, 1983): 37–38.

6. For example, Joachim Heinrich Campe, Robinson der Jüngere: Lesebuch für Kinder (1780), ed. Dieter von Richter & Johannes Merkel (Sammlung alter Kinderbücher 1; Munich: Weismann/Frauenbuch, 1977).

7. See Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993).

8. Helen Tiffin, “Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (London/New York: Routledge, 1995): 98.

9. See Renate Nestvogel, “Kann die Aufrechterhaltung einer unreflektierten Mehrheitskultur eine Aufgabe öffentlicher Erziehung sein?” Zeitschrift für Pädagogik (Beiheft 23 1988), and Peter Martin, Schwarze Teufel, edle Mohren: Afrikaner in Geschichte und Bewußtsein der Deutschen (Hamburg: Junius, 1993).

10. Tiffin, “Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse,” 98; see also Stephen Slemon, “Modernism's Last Post,” in Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, ed. Ian Adam & Helen Tiffin (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991): 4.

11. Tiffin, “Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse,” and Slemon, “Modernism's Last Post.”

12. Bessie Head, A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings, ed. Craig MacKenzie (London: Heinemann, 1990): 72.

13. German-language culture, perhaps because of the prevalence of a juvenile readership for the Robinsonade, has appropriated Defoe's character as a type on more ‘familiar’ terms than the originary Anglo-Saxon culture.

14. Dorothy Dover, “Reconstructing the Past, Shaping the Future: Bessie Head and the Question of Feminism in a New South Africa” in Black Women's Writing, ed. Gina Wisker (London: Macmillan, 1993): 173.

15. See J. M. Coetzee, Foe (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986).

16. Slemon, “Modernism's Last Post,” 4.

17. Bessie Head, “The Deep River: A Story of the Ancient Tribal Migrations” and “The Collector of Treasures,” in The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village Tales (London: Heinemann, 1977): 1–6, 87–103.

18. Bessie Head, A Woman Alone, 72.

19. Slemon, “Modernism's Last Post,” 5.

20. Abridged extract from Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: U of California P, 1957): 85–92.

Works Cited

Campe, Joachim Heinrich. Robinson der Jüngere: Lesebuch für Kinder (1780), ed. Dieter von Richter & Johannes Merkel. Sammlung alter Kinderbücher 1. Munich: Weismann/Frauenbuch, 1977.

Coetzee, J. M.. Foe. London: Secker & Warburg, 1986.

Driver, Dorothy. “Reconstructing the Past, Shaping the Future: Bessie Head and the Question of Feminism in a New South Africa” in Black Women's Writing, ed. Gina Wisker (London: Macmillan, 1993): 160–87.

Head, Bessie. “The Wind and a Boy,” in The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village Tales (London: Heinemann, 1977): 69–75.

———. A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings, ed. Craig MacKenzie. London: Heinemann, 1990.

Kohl, Karl-Heinz. Entzauberter Blick: Das Bild vom Guten Wilden und die Erfahrung der Zivilisation. Berlin: Qumran, 1983.

Martin, Peter. Schwarze Teufel, edle Mohren: Afrikaner in Geschichte und Bewußtsein der Deutschen. Hamburg: Junius, 1993.

Nestvogel, Renate. “Kann die Aufrechterhaltung einer unreflektierten Mehrheitskultur eine Aufgabe öffentlicher Erziehung sein?,” Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, Beiheft 23 (1988).

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus, 1993.

Slemon, Stephen. “Modernism's Last Post,” in Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, ed. Ian Adam & Helen Tiffin (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991): 1–11.

Tiffin, Helen. “Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (London/New York: Routledge, 1995): 95–98.

Watt, Ian, “Robinson Crusoe,” in Daniel Defoe: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Max Byrd (Twentieth Century Views; Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976): 51–59.²⁰