On Zoë Wicomb's You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town

To read Zoë Wicomb's You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town without understanding what apartheid did to childhood is to read it with one eye closed. The apartheid state classified children at birth into four racial categories: White, Asian, Black, and Coloured, the last being people of mixed ancestry. These categories were not administrative fictions left in bureaucratic drawers; they determined everything. Infant mortality rates for white children were comparable to First World countries. For Black children, they were comparable to the most extreme cases of poverty in the developing world. White South African children were wrapped in a kind of selective ignorance by media censorship and state-managed education; they grew up knowing almost nothing of the existential realities of the country they lived in, separated not only by fences but by the barriers erected in their minds against what was framed as 'antichristian' and 'anti-national' thinking.

For Black and Coloured children, apartheid worked differently: the promotion of negative ideas about race operated as a structural mechanism for reducing self-esteem, pushing acceptance of inferiority, passivity, and servility. Kimberlé Crenshaw's observation that we often discuss race inequality as separate from inequality based on gender, class, and sexuality, missing how some people are subject to all of these simultaneously, captures the condition of Black women in South Africa precisely: they bore a triple burden of oppression in which gender, race, and class infused and reinforced each other. Marginalisation on the basis of appearance compounded this further, with tools like the pencil test and the classification of hair and facial features used to determine where someone fell in the racial hierarchy. The Group Areas Act of 1950 forced people of colour out of developed urban areas; pass laws controlled movement; interracial marriages were banned. Between 1984 and 1986 alone, 312 children were shot dead by the police, 11,000 detained without trial, 173,000 held in police cells.

Wicomb's book emerges from this world. It is loosely based on her own experiences. The protagonist, Frieda, is a Coloured, English-speaking girl in an Afrikaans-speaking area who wins a place at the University of Cape Town, which opens a dilemma that the book never fully resolves: what does self-realisation mean when the self has been constituted by a social order designed to prevent it? You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town lies within the long European tradition of the Bildungsroman, the novel of self-realisation, but the categorisation is incomplete. Wicomb has added elements that make the genre uncomfortable with itself. The protagonist eventually moves abroad and returns to South Africa years later carrying an ambivalent relationship towards her country of birth. The ambivalence is not a flaw in the character; it is the point.

Wicomb and V.S. Naipaul share a kind of origin. Both come from parts of the world with unique histories of settlement, colonisation, and exploitation. Both travelled to Britain, where they studied and eventually became published authors. Both books track the narrator's development from childhood through adulthood through episodic narratives of coming to terms with a postcolonial identity. The comparison is instructive but also limiting: Naipaul's ambivalence ultimately resolves into a kind of rejection of the colonial periphery, while Wicomb's is more genuinely unresolved. The "realities of power and authority" are what make these texts possible, as the comparison suggests, but Wicomb's book is less willing to settle.

The Eurocentrism that structures both the apartheid system and the literary tradition Wicomb works within is worth examining directly. Eurocentrism, understood as the tendency to assess and evaluate non-European societies through the cultural assumptions and biases of European thought, shapes the book's very conditions of possibility: its language, its implied audience, its linear storytelling tradition. Under apartheid, the government imposed systematic obstacles on the way of Black and Coloured children learning English. The apartheid education system boosted the prestige and position of white-speaking children while limiting the opportunities of African children, and Eurocentrism functioned like a conveyor belt producing a certain kind of modernity that had no space for Frieda's particularity.

Georg Simmel's concept of the Tragedy of Culture offers another frame for reading the book. Human culture, for Simmel, is a dialectical relationship between objective culture (shared human products in societies: religion, art, literature, philosophy) and subjective culture (the individual's creative and intelligent ideas). The tragedy arises when the excess of objective cultural products overwhelms the individual's subjective capacity, generating a kind of cultural alienation. In Wicomb's world, the Coloured search for identity takes place inside a harshly hierarchical society whose objective culture was built by and for white Europeans. Progression in modernity meant an excess of those objective products being transferred into a 'wilderness' of social and psychological experiences that did not fit them. Wicomb does not resolve this; she ruptures it. The generic ambivalence of the book, its self-doubt about whether it can tell its own story, its disruption of the Bildungsroman's linear arc of development and resolution, is not a failure but a deliberate formal argument: that linear progression is itself a Eurocentric inheritance, and that the correct response to an incomplete categorisation is an incomplete form.