Maru

4 ideas

1. Masarwa teacher in Dilepe village

   Margaret Cadmore is a San (Masarwa) orphan whose mother died giving birth. A British missionary woman raised her, gave her own name, and educated her partly as an experiment in whether environment outweighs origin. When Margaret arrives to teach in the Botswana village of Dilepe and openly says she is Masarwa, the school principal and local elites plot to drive her out, while the chief-designate Maru and his friend Moleka both fall in love with her. The novel ends with Maru giving up the chieftaincy to marry her and leave the village.

2. Oppression replicates downward through every tier

   Groups that are despised by those above them tend to secure their own dignity by finding someone below them to despise. In the novel, the Tswana, who are looked down on by white colonials, treat the San as subhuman slaves and use the same contempt and language that is used against them. For this reason, being a victim of racism does not protect a group against practicing it. The hierarchy survives because each tier gains status from the one beneath it.

3. Refusing to pass exposes latent prejudice

   Margaret could be mistaken for a mixed-race 'Coloured' person and accepted, but she names her despised identity herself. Because she declines the protection of ambiguity, the community can no longer keep its prejudice polite and deniable. It has to act on it in the open, where it can be seen and resisted. The cost of this honesty falls on the individual who claims the identity, but it also removes the cover that the bigotry depends on.

4. Elite defection opens the oppressed's imagination

   When a person at the top of a hierarchy publicly crosses its boundary, as Maru does by abandoning the chieftaincy to marry a Masarwa woman, the effect reaches the whole subordinated group. It shows them that the order they took as permanent can be broken, and the novel describes this as a door opening on the airless room where their souls were shut. The lens also shows the limit of such acts: the liberation comes through a powerful man's personal choice and his possessive love, not through the oppressed acting for themselves.

Save and mark ideas in the app