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STARTED thinking about The Woman Next Door in 2012. My grandfather passed away and I travelled with my family to Barbados for the funeral. My grandmother and I shared a bed. I remember spending time with her and thinking of her and my grandad, thinking of what it might be like to have lived with someone for over 60 years and then suddenly they aren’t there. This was the catalyst, although the final story has almost nothing to do with my grandparents. Instead it became a meditation on what it is to be old — from the start I knew my characters would be octogenarians — and to have more life behind you than you have ahead. I kept pulling at this thread and my characters began to emerge. Not only had they lived long but I realised they were people who were unfulfilled. This lack of satisfaction was further confounded by their considerable wealth and career successes.
With characters, there are a few things that arrive whole and clear in the imagination and endure through the process of writing, there are other things that are present but get pruned and still there is much that one must mine for. I first envisaged Hortensia and initially I paid attention to the failed love story. I knew there would be infidelity but I imagined her as someone who, instead of leaving, had stayed and grown harder. I saw her trailing her husband and his lover, watching them have sex, I saw her 80-something-year-old self as callous but for a valid reason — she is brokenhearted. Hortensia begged for a combatant and so Marion arrived. Through her I was interested in looking at what it is like to have lived through apartheid as a white South African and have done nothing — not even in the privacy of your own thoughts — to resist it. This is Marion.
Cape Town was always the site. A
Why this book, and why now?
In the early ’80s, I studied the history of science at Harvard with palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould. I learnt how science is shaped by its social and political context and how racism affected the work of certain scientists in the past. I put together a book proposal in 2013. As I began my research, I saw the stories I was unearthing were of relevance to all of us today.
Why did scientists reject Darwin’s theory that humans evolved in Africa?
When Darwin wrote about this theory in 1871, European scientists had just begun the search for ancient fossils in an effort to understand human evolution. They had found Neanderthal fossils in Germany in Picture: VICTOR DLAMINI precious corner of Constantia that I would invent. This provided the opportunity to, however subtly, consider the violence in Cape Town’s history which, I feel, is mostly sanitised. So I wanted to have a very quiet sense of horror about this perfect place.
My intent was to conduct an experiment into our own humanity borne through an understanding that we couldn’t come to grips with ourselves without spending considerable time in the mire, without upsetting one another, without looking at the things we’d rather ignore. I’ve had a chance to engage with a few readers who have commented that they found the protagonists “unlikeable”. Apart from my aversion to that way of categorising people (in books and in life) I instead have a different relationship to Hortensia and Marion. I feel cautioned by their hard lessons and heartened by the minuscule steps they take to move even just an inch from the rigid positions they’ve held onto — like rafts — all their lives. In them I see myself as well as the possibility, even with no sensible map, of hope. — Yewande Omotoso 1856 and later in Belgium, France and Croatia. Many European scientists perceived societies outside of Europe as less evolved. The concepts of a hierarchy of race, and white superiority were at play. These assumptions affected where they focused the search . . . none of them were looking in Africa. This is really, at its core, what the book is about. Part One explores the ways colonial thinking affected scientists in the late 1800s through to the 1930s. What influenced Robert Broom? What decisions did Raymond Dart make at the time? Part Two reveals some of the ways World War 2 and apartheid shaped thinking in the 1940s through to the 1980s and introduces Dart’s successor, Phillip Tobias. Part Three follows scientists who have been influenced by the social and political changes under way in South Africa in the 1990s up to the present.
What was the most disturbing thing you uncovered?
The most disturbing was finding out about a woman named /Keri-/Keri who lived with her family in the Kalahari in the 1920s and ’30s. Dart led a Wits expedition to the Kalahari in 1936 and met /Keri-/Keri as part of his research to understand the “Bushman” anatomy, which he believed would provide him with a clue towards understanding human evolution. He referred to them as “living fossils”. Even before /Keri/Keri passed away in 1939, Dart arranged for her skeleton to be brought to Wits to become part of the Raymond Dart Human Skeleton Collection. I tried to find out more about her and her family, her life and death. The entire painful story conveyed that Dart, and other scientists at the time, treated human beings as specimens.
For 50 years, while /Keri-/Keri’s family and community were decimated and dispersed, her skeleton remained on a shelf in the collection. In the late ’80s or early ’90s, her skeleton went missing. It is not clear if it was stolen, or misplaced. For over six decades, at the Department of Anatomy at Wits Medical School, /Keri-/Keri’s body cast stood on display.
What were your biggest challenges in writing the book?
One major challenge was the absence of information in the archives. There are a number of people that I read about — Saul Sithole, Daniel Mosehle and George Moenda, for example — technicians working in the field of palaeoanthropology in South Africa — who were largely unacknowledged for their contributions. I wanted to share with the reader about their lives and their perspectives on the science of human origins. However, in most cases, I found dead ends and very little documentation.