Shop clerk whose anger forged a novel
MIRIAM Tlali, who has died in Johannesburg at the age of 83, was the first black woman novelist in South Africa.
Her first novel, which she wrote in 1969, was based on her time as a clerk at a furniture store in downtown Johannesburg during the height of apartheid.
It expresses as never before the despair and the thousand daily humiliations and frustrations endured by black women, who had no rights and were at the mercy of white employers.
Tlali, born in Doornfontein, Johannesburg, on November 11 1933, was an exceptionally bright student who matriculated at the age of 15 only to find her intellectual and literary ambitions thwarted by the double whammy of being black and a woman.
She managed to enrol for a BA at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she was not exactly welcomed with open arms by her lecturers or white fellow students.
Then tighter apartheid laws were introduced which made it impossible for her to continue there. She went to study at the Pius XII University in Lesotho, but left because of financial difficulties.
And so she wound up at the furniture store in Johannesburg, where she was forced to eat daily helpings of humble pie dished up by largely patronising, unthinking and intellectually inferior whites who never let her forget that they were doing her a massive favour by paying her a salary.
She decided she couldn’t take it any more and chose to stay at home in Soweto, being a fulltime mother to her children and pretty much full-time nurse to her sick mother-in-law.
She released her boiling frustration and anger and sense of thwarted ambition every night by writing about it. Night after night, hour after hour, she hammered away at an old Remington typewriter. And gradually, painfully, uncertainly, her first novel emerged.
She didn’t have to dig too deep for her subject matter. It was about “my restlessness”, she said in an interview when she was famous and translated around the world.
“The things I learned about the kind of life that we had to lead, our poverty, everything about us. I wrote that.”
She wrote about the degrading conditions in which black women lived. About how influx control hampered their opportunities to get a job and lead a half-normal family life. About how the law gave spiteful white bureaucrats almost unlimited power over their lives. HARD SELL: Miriam Tlali studied at university but financial constraints drove her to seek work at a Johannesburg furniture store at the height of apartheid
No black woman novelist in South Africa had ever written this stuff before. If they did, it was never published. Which, as Tlali discovered, would have been no surprise.
Completing her manuscript in 1969 turned out to be far from the end of the story.
White publishers, as they all were at the time, were not interested in bringing out the work of an angry black woman writer that was as critical of the apartheid state as her book was. Even if they were interested, it was simply not worth it to risk antagonising the government.
Those who bothered to read it at all returned it to her saying, “Sorry, we can’t publish this.”
Her manuscript collected dust for five years before it was published by Ravan Press. And Ravan only did so after removing parts it thought would offend the censorship board.
Tlali told how she returned to her “matchbox house in Soweto”, locked herself in her room and cried. “Five whole chapters had been removed,” she said. “Also paragraphs, phrases and sentences. It was devastating, to say the least.”
She was also depressed about the title, Muriel at Metropolitan. She only agreed to have it published under that title because her mother was dying and she wanted her to see the novel in print before her death.
In spite of the cuts, the novel was quickly banned. But it took off overseas. Forty-five editions were published between 1975 and 2005, and it was translated into three languages.
In 2004, it was reissued with the title she’d always wanted, Between Two Worlds.
In 1980, she published her second novel, Amandla, about the 1976 Soweto student uprising. It was inspired by Steve Biko’s black consciousness philosophy and informed throughout by a strong, unflinching feminism that tackled for the first time the issue of sexual violence against women in the anti-apartheid struggle.
Student leader Pholoso, the hero of Amandla, names the scourge of sexual molestation as a reason why more women are not participating in political activity.
In 1989 came Footprints in the Quag: Stories and Dialogues from Soweto, which exposed the generally unacknowledged scale of domestic violence, rape and sexual harassment in Soweto.
It was no surprise that Tlali became a member of the Women’s National Coalition, which advocated for the inclusion of women’s rights in South Africa’s constitution in the runup to the first democratic election in 1994.
Tlali was a resident writer at Iowa State University in 1978 and at Yale in 1989.
Among numerous awards, she received the presidential award, the Order of Ikhamanga (Silver), in 2008.
She is survived by two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Her husband, Stephen Lehutso, died in 2001. Her son Moses died in 2004 and her daughter Molebogeng died in 2012. — Chris Barron
It expresses the despair and thousand daily humiliations endured by black women