THE WHITE KUDU
By Gisela Hoyle
Pp 266, Picnic (2009), price. £9, 99

Dr Sarvajit Mukerji
Dept of English
University of Allahabad

The White Kudu is a book worth returning to. Multi-layered and richly nuanced, it narrates the story of a fractured land –South Africa, and the fierce passions it is capable of arousing. The intriguing word in the title, Kudu refers to a species of curly antlered deer native to the Karoo, the region where the land and the sands merge, on the margins of the Kalahari. ‘The white Kudu’ is a myth of the San people, the original inhabitants of the inhospitable Kalahari. The story of the white kudu yearling, who fell in love with a star maiden but lacked the will to follow her into her own land, haunts the two geologists who come into Abelshoop at the behest of the Lefika Mining Company and leave behind a trail of destruction, both on the land that they dig and trench and the on lives of the women they love and leave.

Abelshoop, ‘with none of the cosiness of a village’, Pniel, ‘where Joshua wrestled with the Angel’, Wonderfontein, where the wonderful Radcliffe sisters live – names we give to places we love. Overshadowing them all the Witkopje, with its dazzling white quartz rock face painted with the kudu. The land is almost a character in the novel with the different characters representing various attitudes to it. Adam Vermeulen, the patriarch of Pniel can see the writing on the wall. It is time to sell off the land he has inherited from his forefathers. He knows that the white farmers have no chance in the land claims, and that henceforth he and his children must live as exiles on the land of their birth. He sees in the Lefika Mining Company a chance to do something for impoverished Abelshoop, for a mine would bring jobs and prosperity to the region. His son Abraham sees this as a betrayal both of his rights ‘to work the land’ as the legitimate heir of Pniel, and the interests of the white farmers who have their back to the wall. When his wife Esther is seduced by Hunter, Lefika’s geologist, his world explodes. For Lefika the land exists for exploitation to the hilt. It is a financial proposition for enriching the company while making the right, politically correct noises and gestures. Abelshoop may benefit, but that is merely a side effect, often called the ‘top down’ model in corporate parlance. White men, all. Yet the land belongs only to herself, irrespective of the people who love or wrestle with her, inscrutable and searingly beautiful, hiding within her womb the treasures and secrets that that men crave.

Hendrik’s link with the land is perhaps the oldest off all – he is of the San people. His ancestor, Kara/Tuma lies buried in the sands, the foetal position symbolically linking birth with death. Yet there is no possessiveness in Hendrik. In the skies above dwells the star maiden, the bird that flies there, is his ‘little sister ‘and on the land dances the white kudu, linking the ‘real’ and the ‘dream’ in one simple melody. Even his willed death is a celebration. With his death ends the wisdom of a people who knew how to live with and not on the land. Now their history and wisdom lingering on tantalizingly in the scattered rock painting in the desert have to be reconstructed by sensitive archaeologists like Sharon Shackleton. But she and Joshua Hunter must shed their selves and enter into new avatars before they can even attempt it.

That they can even glimpse this vanished world is a saving grace for the novel that otherwise veers dangerously towards a certain essentialism – the white men with their obsession to have and to hold, versus the ‘golden’ Bushmen, Hendrik, Klaas or Janine, non-acquisitive and wisely passive.

The greatest triumph of the novel is that it has the vision to look beyond the suffering of persons and peoples in a fractured land, towards healing – amazing, in a first novel. But perhaps one must experience the state of suffering before one can get even a glimpse of the way out –in sharing or transcendence or faith or whatever. And then comes the promised rejuvenating rain, for the exiled, longing kudu can go home at last.

WHEN THE TURACO CALLS
By Gisela Hoyle

Synopsis of When the Turaco Calls

Growing up in a large family in Apartheid South Africa is a complicated business for bright and precocious Marta Reben, especially once she meets Ishmael, a boy who lives in the Knysna Forest, near her home, beyond the loving care and restrictions of her missionary life. Their friendship grows despite the forces working against it: separate schooling, separate beaches and all the other cruel divisions of 70s and 80s South Africa.

Increasingly bewildered by the social disruption of rising unrest on the one hand and the strained normality her family maintains in its midst, Marta clings to Ishmael and their ‘land of the Turaco’ forest play-ground, where local legend tells that the warning call of the Knysna Loerie (Turaco corythaix) keeps the animals safe from harm.

It is only when Ishmael must be sent to a boys’ reformatory; her brother is publically beaten for trying to burn the school down and her mother becomes seriously ill that their friendship finally falters and Marta must face the very real political and social tensions against which even talismanic feathers hold no power.

When she moves away to university she meets the charming Callum and the sophisticated Pierre and they, alongside involvement with student political movements and her studies in Literature convince her that her childhood world was ignorant, even barbaric and the best thing she can do is forget the ‘superstitions’ of the forest, the loerie and the sea, which had been so vividly real for her as a child.

However, when her family must move from that same childhood home, because the European missions are withdrawing from a country torn apart by political violence, she feels she must go back and help. As the country hovers between civil war and democracy, she discovers that she is not the only one who has come back to the haunts of her childhood in search of something true and lasting in an unjust world.