Hove is anxious to portray Marita not only as the proverbial victim of the exploitative colonial practices, but also of the patriarchal attitudes of African society. Marita's tribulations predate her arrival at Manyepo's farm. As a peasant wife in the so-called "Reserves", she suffers untold miseries when she fails to conceive. She is branded a village witch -- "a hen that ate its own eggs". Her dreams about marital bliss and motherhood are shattered early in her life, more so when her husband is dutifully advised by the community to marry another woman who can safeguard the name of her husband by producing sons. Marita becomes a pariah in a community which, ironically, is already marginalized by the forces of history. When he ultimately succeeds in having a son, fate does not allow her to relish the joys of motherhood. Her only son leaves the farm and becomes a guerrilla fighter, thus reducing her again to a childless woman. Compounding this particularly painful and personal dilemma is the destitution which afflicts the majority of Blacks. She can only survive as a labourer on Manyepo's farm. In fact she is described as part and parcel of the exploitable natural resources for Manyepo. As readers, her plight reminds us of Granny's famous speech in Their Eyes were Watching God:
Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything so far as Ah been able to flnd out. May be its some place way off in de ocean where de black man Is ln power but we don"t know nothing but what we see. So de white man throw down de load and tell the nigger man to pick it up. He pick it up because he have to but he don"t tote it. He hands it to his womenfolk. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.
There is no doubt that the author's intention is to portray through Marita's life-experiences a character whose capacity to suffer seems infinite. Apart from being a lonely and isolated figure labelled a witch for her apparent barrenness, Marita is subjected pitilessly to back-breaking toil, only to receive derisory food rations since she does not have children on the farm. The grave and persistent deprivations allotted her in life amount to an affliction which is worsened by the tensions and anxieties brought about by her son's disappearance. Unfortunately, her husband's indifference to her overriding emotions about her son almost amount to a callousness which she has to suffer. lt is not surprising that she can only share her tormented and tortured existence with a fellow woman, Janifa. Murume is too timid, too brutalized by history to be able to offer comfort to anyone.
Her singular misfortunes do not, however, succeed in undermining her self-respect and dignity as happens to most characters on the farm. lt is as if her capacity to endure hardships related to gruelling manual labour has been enhanced by her earlier personal tribulations in the Reserves. She even has the guts to challenge the slave- driving foreman at whom she lashes mercilessly with her blunt but truth- telltng tongue: "What is the white man's loin cloth saying today? Has the wblte man wetted his loin cloth so much that it has the courage to drip its wetness on us? Go away and listen to your baas's insults." As a result of her defiant and persistent efforts, the workers are granted respite from the merciless toil. Indeed Marita becomes an unofficial spokesperson for all the workers and she does that at the risk of losing her job!
What seems to account for Marita's courageous disposition is a kind of radical innocence, an inviolable spirit in her which refuses to be overwhelmed by the brutal pervasions associated with colonialism. She possesses a simple, down-to-earth but unassailable sense of what is right and wrong and, as such, she has a certain raw strength which can be identified as an aspect of the rock-like integrity of the self that is sometimes associated with the peasantry. Marita enjoys a certain rugged moral authority which is conspicuously absent in all the male characters on the farm. Consequently, her husband remains in his own insecure and self- interested manner attached to her; even Chisaga, in his childlike, self- centred and predatory manner, gravitates towards her. She also radiates a certain warmth and passionate sincerity, so much that she becomes a mother-substitute-cum-sister to Janifa. In other words, Marita is an embodiment of the kind of spirit which most of the Black people unconsciously come to admire.
Closely related to Marita's moral authority is, of course, her allotted role as the outstanding underdog of history to whom anything that can go wrong in a lifetime happens. It is as if Hove sets out to create a singular woman character in African fiction, an African version of the legendary Sisyphus who is forever carrying the burdens of history with all the pain and suffering which that role entails. Certainly the raping of Marita by government soldiers amounts to a gratuitous abuse which exacerbates the plight of her overworked body and tormented spirit. Yet what remains of Marita after all the ravages of history have left their mark on her is that defiant spirit, that which is essential, the Bones which metonymically are the bedrock and which cannot be destroyed. Nonetheless, despite her heroic attributes, she remains a fundamentally problematic character.
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