Things left undone in colonial Eastern Cape

(Penguin) is a deep and poignant novel, a timely read in this time of accelerated, deliberate decolonisation. It is also nearly the 200th anniversary of the arrival of the 1820 Settlers in Port Elizabeth; they came to the eastern Cape Colony as a colonial strategy to calm that contested area where trekboere and white settlers encroached on Xhosa territory. Over a century, nine frontier wars were fought here, in what is now the Eastern Cape province. They ended in 1879, but the effects are still with us.

The story is set in the period just after the Cattle Killing, up to the end of the last war, roughly 1851 to 1879. Stephen Malusi Mzamane, a starving child, is found at the roadside by a missionary who happens to see him. After the Cattle Killing the direst famine overtakes the Xhosa people and Mzamane senior brings his older son to the missionary as well. This is Mzamo (who refuses ever to answer to his Christian name, Saul) and these two siblings are educated and destined for life in the Anglican church. Their father, formerly a counsellor to a chief, goes to break stones on the colony’s new roads.

Poland writes Malusi/stephen and Mzamo, these Ngqika boys at the mission, into vivid, believable characters. Stephen is clever, dependable and devoted, whereas Mzamo is taller, more agile and confident, and the brightest boy in the school. Their destinies diverge, then join up again.

The novel is written around a journey Stephen makes, at the end of the last war, when many missions have been burned and fear rules the Eastern Cape, to take news of his brother’s death and to settle his affairs. Using flashbacks, Poland gives us the lives of the Mzamane brothers in colonial Grahamstown, Fort Beaufort, Port Elizabeth, and out on the missions that are many days of travel away from towns.

She also tells of Stephen’s years in Canterbury, England, where he trains as a missionary.

In this novel, endorsed with a shoutout from the current Anglican

Archbishop, Thabo Makgoba, Poland does not shrink from showing us the Anglican church of that era, in which some clergy, in their zeal to convert the Xhosa, and in support of the project to control them, even thought the Cattle Killing was a “blessing in disguise”. Most, but not all, the clergy were racist, classist and convinced of the superiority of everything English.

While studying in Canterbury Stephen makes close friends with Albert Newnham, and they expect to be posted together to a mission in the Eastern Cape. In this often serious novel, Albert is the jester, of cheerful disposition and affectionate to Stephen. It is to Albert’s mission at Indwe that Stephen is making the long journey to settle Mzamo’s affairs, and to consult his dear friend. What happens there is the last straw for Stephen.

A daily confessional prayer in the Anglican church services refers to sins of omission: “... we have left undone those things which we ought to have done”. There are many of these in this novel, with heartbreaking results.

Poland weaves an informed and sensitive story, showing the devastation caused by colonial arrogance and ignorance, and saying much that needs to be acknowledged. It is beautifully written, with real love of the Eastern Cape landscape, people, cattle and ancestral traditions of all kinds. — Jane Rosenthal