Maru

A missionary and his wife Margaret Cadmore rescue and raise a baby found near the body of her dead mother on the side of the road. They name the baby Margaret Cadmore. The novel’s ostensible protagonist, Margaret’s thoughts and feelings center around survival rather than on being a strong and empowered woman. She falls in love with Moleka, a man she senses would never marry her because of her ethnicity, and endures without ever speaking of her love for him. She is not a striver for social change, nor is she a powerful personality.

Margaret, when living in Dilepe as a teacher, experiences a true love for Moleka:

There were half suns glowing on the horizons of her heart. It was Moleka. Now and then she would pass him in the village. She could quite clearly see that he made a secret of the matter but his eyes glowed like the early morning sunrise when he glanced at her briefly. The strange thing was that the love aroused no violent emotions but blended in with the flow and rhythm of life in Dilepe. It was something to be accepted, painlessly, because there was no question of who loved whom. She thought: ‘He will never approach me, because I am a Masarwa.’ And it was something her whole way of life had prepared her for. Love and happiness had always been a little bit far away from life as other people lived it. (69)

Margaret never quite achieves happiness, except inside herself. All of her relationships are broken by her love for Moleka; she loses Dikeledi’s friendship, and Maru treats her alternately with overwhelming love and respect or hatefulness.

Margaret Cadmore, a woman of much energy and strict moral principles, takes the infant Margaret into her home as an “experiment,” because she believes that nature does nothing to shape a child while nurture is “everything” (8).

Head establishes the character of Margaret Cadmore as a crusader for social and racial justice:

It is preferable to change the world on the basis of love of mankind. But if that quality be too rare, then common sense seems the next best thing. Margaret Cadmore, the wife of the missionary, had the latter virtue in over-abundance. It made her timeless, as thought she could belong to any age or time, but always on the progressive side. It also made her abusive of the rest of mankind, because what is sensible is simpler than what is stupid. She had a temperament—high-strung, nervous, energetic—that made her live at the speed of a boat shooting over the rapids. (7)

Margaret Cadmore, senior, raises Margaret to embody her energy, common sense, and vigor for engaging the world. Margaret also receives an excellent education. For Margaret, senior, Margaret embodies an “experiment,” by raising a Masarwa who could improve the lives of her people. However, Margaret finds that she is powerless to affect change, and she is lucky that the village of Dilepe simply ignores her rather than trying to get rid of her or even to kill her. 

A chief of a kingdom, Moleka acts as he pleases. His life-long, close relationship with Maru is destroyed when Margaret Cadmore comes to teach in Dilepe. Both men fall in love with Margaret, with Moleka instantly becoming a changed man in regards to his many casual love affairs. He analyzes his new feelings for Margaret, noting that “[w]ith the woman there were no distractions at all. He had communicated directly with her heart. It was that which was a new experience and which had so unbalanced him” (21). Additionally, he says that “[s]omething killed the old Moleka in a flash and out of one death arose, in a flash, a new Moleka” (21).

This change in Moleka does not make him a better person, however. He still professes to Maru that Maru will never get Margaret, and undermines his own love for Margaret by sleeping with Dikeledi and making her pregnant. Later, he makes Dikeledi suffer when he returns to his old ways of sleeping around both in Dilepe and his mother’s village. Through his own weakness, he robs himself of happiness, realizing that Dikeledi loves him completely while he has only chosen the “next best” woman in the world out of fear of Maru’s power (4).

This change in Moleka’s attitude and his striving to be a better, more honest and authentic person, brings about the ruination of his relationship with Maru.