Kunapipi XXVI:2

MARGARET LENTA
Postcolonialism in an Anti-Colonial State: Unity Dow and Modern Botswana

Until Unity Dow began to write, almost no Batswana writers of fiction had produced books which reached the world outside, and the reasons for this were partly cultural and partly material. Botswana has more than a century’s history of defensive resistance to influences from the other states of southern Africa. The lack of investment in infrastructure and education before independence has also played a role in enforcing literary silence. When the Bechuanaland Protectorate became independent in 1966, there were a few miles of tarred road and three high schools in the whole country. Industry was almost non-existent, and commercial enterprises were few, typically small-scale and confined to the informal sector. In these circumstances the only literary voice which reached the outside world was that of a South African exile, Bessie Head, who is not my present subject,1 and whose writings were subject to the objection, justified or not, that they lacked the authenticity of the indigene’s account.
Dow’s novels, Far and Beyon’ (2000) and The Screaming of the Innocent (2001), offer her interpretation of a small national society whose members differ greatly in their lifestyles, and are widely dispersed in geographical placing. Though the persons and events of her novels are fictional, her tone makes it clear that she would claim that the circumstances — the AIDS epidemic, the corruption of the police force, the occurrence of ritual murder, the habit of concealment — are real parts of modern Botswana. So, presumably, are the kinds of positions occupied by her heroines, who with effort and determination make their way to positions where they are entitled to power and influence. In interpreting the society in which she lives, Dow joins a tradition of southern African writing, in which the most famous practitioner is Nadine Gordimer, whose ‘history from the inside’ (Clingman 1986) has offered an understanding of South Africa’s recent past and present to many readers. Clingman acknowledges the problems of such writing:

Gordimer is caught up in the midst of the processes she is attempting to depict. At the same time as she engages with history she is moulded by the patterns and forces she must try to assess. As much as she is an observer of the life around her, she is still a social participant in what she observes. If hers is a ‘history from the inside’, that is to say, it is not only privileged but also confined by its ‘inside’ position. (2)

This must be equally the case for Dow, with the extra condition that she is deeply involved in public life, who has on occasion taken a public and oppositional stance as regards national policies.2 Nevertheless, Clingman’s claim that ‘fiction deals with an area of activity usually inaccessible to the sciences of greater externality: the area in which historical process is registered as the subjective experience of individuals in society’ (1986 1) is significant in Dow’s case. Her subjectivity is of two kinds: the novels as a whole present the vision of a single Batswana woman, ‘confined by [her] “inside” position’; and in the course of the works the perceptions and judgements of particular subjects are offered to the reader. These subjective understandings are essential to the moral-historical purposes of the works, since the imaginative recreations of individual thought processes reveal what their society is at pains to conceal.