Africa’s White Women

Abstract

The place of Africa’s white woman is ambivalent. Often called the oppressed oppressor, she is not a protagonist in her own right. Yet history tells of her crucial contribution to Africa’s freedom struggle. Frantz Fanon says black men believe being loved by her is to be loved “like a white man” and so be white. Doris Lessing’s “poor white” man’s bored wife wants sex with the houseboy. Nadine Gordimer portrays her as a pale, insipid counterpart to African women’s vital beauty pictured in terms disturbingly similar to those characterizing noble savages. In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace African men inflict “corrective rape” on her. Black African writers portray her more compassionately. Ngugi wa Thiong’o speaks of “the reduction of white women to nothing.” In Peter Abrahams’s works she joins Africa’s freedom struggle yet becomes the victim of an African freedom fighter’s ruthless exploitation. Mariama Ba depicts her as mercilessly exploited by her black African husband who proves his manhood through her even as he secretly appropriates her resources for his own purposes. South Africa’s people’s poet Mzwakhe Mbuli acknowledges her among the women who helped free Africa, and continue to make a contribution. Zanzibari writer Abdulrazak Gurnah returns her to Eastern Africa to discover her own roots, to listen to the stories told by those her ancestors once ruled. This paper explores the identity and place of white women as depicted in African literature.