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COPYRIGHT 2007 Indiana University Press
ABSTRACT
Disease, most often imagined in the past as an external invasion of bacteria or viruses, can also be imagined as "dis-ease," a set of political, economic, and social imbalances that disturb the well-being of people's lives. Today, these imbalances would be termed psychological and psychosomatic diseases, but in a colonial arena, such as early twentieth-century South Africa, these forms of disease were inadvertently perpetuated and ignored. In addition, certain somatic diseases, such as tuberculosis, introduced into South Africa by the Europeans, had unforeseen and often fatal effects on the health of the natives. Tuberculosis, especially, became a peculiarly raced disease. Peter Abrahams fictionally recreates this area of colonial history in his 1946 novel, Mine Boy, which presents us with characters who negotiate the uncertain and often tragic terrain of colonial introduced and induced diseases. In particular, characters confront and deal, as best they can, with somatic, psychological, and psychosomatic diseases in ways that highlight the racist society of colonial South Africa.
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A striking example of the effects of colonization, and especially with respect to the diseases it brought, can be seen in the case of South Africa. For instance, until the mid-nineteenth century, tuberculosis (hereafter TB) was unknown, and there is "much evidence to suggest that TB came to southern and central Africa with white colonisers" (de Beer 3). Before then, people had enough food, were healthy, and were not cramped into overcrowded spaces. Clearly something changed this situation. Gold was discovered on the Witwatersand in 1886, and the history of South Africa changed dramatically as did the history of TB (de Beer 3). The disease was introduced into South Africa by the Europeans at the end of the nineteenth century when miners from Europe flocked to the gold mines to get rich quickly; mining conditions exacerbated the proliferation of this insidious disease, which killed thousands of black South Africans. Today, TB is still one of the biggest killers of blacks in South Africa. (1) Other forms of disease appeared too. Due to the increasingly racist structures of the South African colony, psychological and psychosomatic diseases were common among the native population although the authorities never acknowledged these conditions as diseases.
Pinpointing a definition of disease is no easy matter as the very structure of the word "dis-ease" implies multiple kinds of disturbances that may not all be somatic. Traditionally, in the Western world, disease has been thought of as a bodily contraction of a bacterium or virus, or a condition induced by a genetic disorder or mutation, or the result of a malfunctioning organ. But it should be noted that "dis-ease" can manifest in somatic, psychosomatic, or psychological forms. Indeed, modern Western medicine has, since the latter part of the twentieth century, broadened the definition of disease to describe "any state, organic or psychic, real or imaginary, that disturbs a persons sense of well-being" (Dubos 32). Most important, many Western physicians now realize that when treating a "dis-eased" person, they must take into consideration, in addition to the somatic or physic disturbances, the social factors with which the patient lives, a practice, ironically, long used by traditional African healing systems. It appears, then, that disease is a somewhat slippery concept that could be induced by a plethora of lived conditions and could, perhaps, be defined in the following manner. Disease is a state of being that causes considerable, and often debilitating, distress that may result in a somatic, psychosomatic or psychological disorder; whatever the form of the "dis-ease," the disease itself disallows the sufferer the continuation of life as it was experienced before the affliction.
To a large extent, disease is a social phenomenon. Imbalances in social structures, imbalances that create abject poverty for some, have severe repercussions for people's health and actually create ideal conditions for many diseases. That is, disease does not just happen; it is caused by social, political, and environmental conditions, most notably where those conditions are in a state of flux. "Without question," states Rene Dubos, "nutritional and infectious diseases account for the largest percentage of morbidity and mortality in most under-developed countries, especially those just becoming industrialized" (36). Few would dispute this, but equally few realize that, in some countries, nutritional and infectious diseases remain the largest killers of certain segments of society long after industrialization is the norm. Social structures that allow abysmal poverty and malnutrition to continue are responsible for the contraction and spread of infectious diseases. Even if afflicted members of such societies could afford medical treatment for their diseases, they would have to return to their malnourished, poverty-stricken lives and be re-infected, and the cycle would continue. As Cedric de Beer observes, "[T] he spread of disease is not random" (12). Undernourishment and poverty are therefore the etiological agents for many somatic diseases, among them malaria, tuberculosis, worm infestations, gastro-intestinal disorders, and protein deficiency. It is a fact that "all the drugs in the world will prove almost powerless in the face of poverty, unemployment and social misery." The cures for social diseases require not only drugs but massive overhauls of the economic and political conditions of those victims most affected (de Beer 12).
Sadly, in racist societies, these social diseases are the status quo. Blaming the victims for their diseases and allowing the poor economic conditions to continue is a particularly virulent form of racism, and racist social structures are especially responsible for promoting all the forms of "dis-ease," somatic, psychosomatic, and psychological. Colonial societies are, by definition, racist. In the nineteenth century, European colonizers inadvertently introduced into their colonies Western diseases, for which the colonized people had no resistance, and then enforced social systems that ensured that these diseases continued to spread and kill. Colonizers introduced more than microbes; they brought with them customs that profoundly disturbed the colonized people's nutritional habits and traditional ways of life, which, in turn, created extra stress and set up conditions for all the forms of disease.
The tragedy and the repercussions of social diseases in South Africa, diseases that can trace their etiologies directly to the racist, colonial society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, are sensitively portrayed in Peter Abrahams's 1946 novel, Mine Boy. Before I begin my critique and for the sake of readers who may not be familiar with the novel, I here provide a brief plot summary.
Set in Johannesburg in the 1940s, Mine Boy is the story of a political coming of age for Xuma, the black South African protagonist. Xuma, a young man from the country, arrives in Malay Camp, a slum area of Johannesburg populated by black, Coloured, and Indian South Africans, in search of lodgings and work, specifically mine work. He is taken in by Leah, who runs a shebeen, and meets the other inhabitants of her house. (2) They are an old woman, Ma Plank, a drunken old man, Daddy, and two younger men, Joseph and Dladla, Leah's lover. Later, he meets Eliza, Leah's niece, with whom he falls in love, and Maisy, her friend. This community becomes Xuma's family. On his second day, while out walking with Joseph, Xuma experiences his first shocking encounter with the white world. A police van arrives on the scene; white policemen emerge, and Joseph tells Xuma to run. Not understanding why, Xuma stays. A policeman walks up to him and strikes him with his stick, and the astonished Xuma knocks the policeman unconscious, and then runs. The next day, Xuma meets another of Leah's friends, Johannes, a black mineworker, who offers to help him find a job on the mines. Johannes is boss boy for his white boss, Chris, and he suggests to Chris that Xuma become the boss boy for Paddy O'Shea, an Irishman, also known as the "Red One." Paddy takes an instant liking to Xuma and hires him as boss boy, a privileged position as he will be in charge of a group of black mineworkers. In the beginning, Xuma is discouraged by the monotony of the job and the grueling labor, but he works hard and gains the respect of Paddy and of his own workers who learn to trust him implicitly. He experiences first hand the appalling working conditions of the black miners and is confronted by the tragedy of tuberculosis. Xuma finds a room of his own (boss boys do not have to live in the mine compounds), settles down, has a brief passionate affair with Eliza before she leaves, becomes close to Maisy, who loves him, helps Leah in her business, and is puzzled at first by the friendly overtures of Paddy, but later accepts them. Paddy, a liberal thinker, believes that Xuma represents the future black South African: strong, dignified, and capable of great achievements in the modern world. When Xuma and Paddy report a mine safety hazard, the white mine engineers ignore it, and a few days later Xuma arrives at work to find that disaster has struck. The weakened tunnel that Xuma and Paddy had reported had collapsed and Chris and Johannes had manually held it up while their men escaped, but now they are trapped underground....
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