Out of the Mouths: Voices of Children in Contemporary South African Literature

Abstract

THERE IS BENJAMIN KOMOETIE and Nina in Dalene Matthee's novel Fiela se Kind or Fiela 's Child (1986), Lyndall, Waldo, and Em in Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm (1883), the five year-old Popie in Zakes Mda's The Madonna of Excelsior (1992). ' The list of South African fiction in which narrative is woven either through or around a child protagonist is extensive. But perhaps a more interesting exploration is to question why it is that writers often use children as vehicles of narration, or as the main protagonists in the story-telling process.The title of this essay is inspired by the following passage in an essay entitled Mr Hudson's Childhood (1918) by Virginia Woolf:Between or behind the dense and involved confusion which grown up life presented there appeared for moments chinks of pure daylight in which the simple, unmistakable truth, the underlying reason, otherwise so overlaid and befogged was revealed. Such seasons, or more probably seconds, were of so intense a revelation that the wonder came to be how the truth could ever again be overcast, as it certainly would be overcast directly this lantern-like illumination went out.2The quotation suggests that the voice of the child functions as a shaft of light in a world of obscurity. How much more pertinent is this shaft of light when shone on, and in, the Conradian 'dark continent', particularly in South Africa with all its trauma. Far from being undeveloped, as I will discuss further on, the child's view is often seen as one of clarity.Is it that the purity of a child's vision is refreshingly simple when juxtaposed to the shifting complexities of evolving societies? Does the juxtaposition serve to add drama, if not shock value, to the horror of a traumatic context? And what place is there in narratives set in conflicting societies for the unabashed wonder that the child embodies, the legitimized capacity for the magical that buoys up a world weighed down by postmodern malcontent? From a psychological perspective, is it the vulnerability of a child that draws the reader deeper into the story, into that part of him or herself that the infant mirrors, whether it be destructive or creative? Or the honesty?In this essay, I will adopt a 'zoom lens' approach, by briefly contextualizing the topic against some very general historical perceptions of children, literary and psychological, before homing in on more recent literature, first in Africa and then South Africa. (I should point out that from this framework it becomes clear that the scope of this topic exceeds far beyond the constraints of this essay.)Throughout history, viewpoints on the role of children have varied dramatically. In the introduction to the book Infant Tongues: The Voice of the Child in Literature, the editors note that Aristotelian anthropology considers children to be undeveloped human beings,3 while Augustinian theology saw the child as a synecdoche for fallen human nature in general.4 They note that Dante's work is typical, with children left in limbo, without any place to go, as Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven will only accommodate fully developed souls. Interesting to note is that long after the time period that accommodated this thinking came another perspective on the dark side of childhood, with the 1954 William Golding classic, Lord of the Flies? in which an aeroplane crash-lands on a coral island, and the survivors, a party of schoolboys, find themselves cast away in ideal surroundings. In it, the reader observes the well-brought up little boys reverting to savagery, as they hunt for food and fight for survival. Their idyllic existence is threatened, not by any external danger, but by their own inner natures and desires.The South African writer Damon Galgut's first novel, A Sinless Season,6 published a little later in 1982, explores similar themes. In it, three friends who turn to crime at a very young age are sent to a reformatory. At first, the reformatory is a microcosm of the South African world outside, pristine, ordered, civilized. …