Professional Documents
Culture Documents
POSTCOLONIAL/SLAVE MEMORY
IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA
Acknowledgements
v
Acronyms
vii
Endnotes
214
References
223
Index
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My birth family, who have always supported and loved me, are truly
Qamata’s greatest gift. My parents, Dambile and Thato, insisted that
intellectual independence, generosity and living with integrity are standards
worth living by. Lebohang, Vuyokazi and Melisizwe, my siblings, are ‘my
constant’: they celebrate my triumphs, apparently know ‘everything’ about
me and teach me humility. Graham Huggan, my doctoral supervisor, read
several drafts in this book’s earlier lives. I am grateful for his humour,
time and vision. Graham and Stephan Klasen provided fine intellectual
leadership at the first International Interdisciplinary Postcolonial Studies
Graduirtenkolleg, which allowed for exchanges that would not have
happened otherwise. Desirée Lewis and David Dabydeen inspire me and
broaden my world in more than a million ways. The financial support of
the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the Bavarian government
is hereby acknowledged for enabling the original study. Antje Schuhmann,
Rumana Hashem, Fatmata Lovetta Sesay, Nina Engelhard, Thulani Khanyile,
Tirop Simatei, Helene Strauss, Zine Magubane, Zimitri Erasmus, Yvette
Abrahams, Vanessa Ludwig all went well beyond the call of collegiality,
friendship and kinship. They shared their own work, time and much more.
Marion and Peter Schuhmann became my family in Munich, and I owe Antje
a debt of gratitude I can never repay for sharing them with me. Angelo Fick,
Christopheros Campbell, Pandora Ndungane, Putuma Patrice Gqamana and
Kaizer Nkosi allowed me to feel connected to something bigger and more
beautiful all the time. Oya and Ajda Ataman, Kimberley Yates, Jane Poyner,
Michele Barzey and Jo-Anne Strauss offered much needed diversions. This
book benefited tremendously from Thembinkosi Goniwe’s and Gabeba
Baderoon’s insights, comments and criticism, without which this would be a
much poorer book. Its weaknesses are all mine. I am grateful to my teachers
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Acronyms
vii
This book goes to print on the eve of South Africa’s sixteenth democratic
anniversary. What is Slavery to Me? examines how the South African
imagination conceives of, constructs and interprets itself at a time of
transition, and how slavery is evoked and remembered as part of negotiating
current ways of being. The new dispensation came to symbolise the
Africa’s entry into democracy at the end of the armed struggle against
apartheid (this had involved all Southern African countries in one way or
another) meant new geopolitical identifications became possible’ (2002:
155). Shortly after the advent of the new democracy, the much written
about TRC was inaugurated as a forum to decipher the immediate past
under apartheid, and to mark the beginning of a process of shaping a new
democracy. An explicitly mnemonic exercise, the TRC was a response to
the invitation to imagine ourselves anew posed by the first democratic
election. As Kader Asmal (1994: 5) reflected about the imperfectly
inventive TRC process:
ways in which the questions posed in my book both link with and diverge
from those of Cullen’s speaker. Like Cullen’s persona, I am interested in
how the languaging of historic slavery in at once intimate and overtly
political ways functions in the post-apartheid imagination. In other words,
I am concerned with the textures of the imaginative project of claiming
slave ancestry in an era long after slavery’s end.
Unlike Cullen’s speaker, I also want to probe the extent to which
any memorying of slavery needs to be an engagement with the multiple
shifts which accompanied enforced, and self-proclaimed, identities under
and following on from conditions of enshacklement. Self-definition,
and an ongoing attempt to refashion ways of dealing with the historical
consciousness of the past, remains tricky. Where Cullen’s speaker is a ‘me’
clearly descended from slaves, I am also concerned with how claiming
slave ancestry matters today for white communities whose identities were
predicated on disavowal of such ancestry.
Uncovering memory and history demands a critical attentiveness to
the uses of the past to negotiate positions in the present. In this regard it
is inseparable from postcolonial debates. The absence of published slave
narratives by Dutch and British slaves was seen to confirm the slaves’
inadequacy. Further, studies of South African slavery within the discipline
of history are as recent as the 1980s (Worden & Crais 1994) and this
has contributed to the general disregard demonstrated for that particular
moment in history, until recently.
Slavery was practised in the Cape between 1658 and 1838. The Dutch,
and later the English, transported slaves from South East Asia, East African
islands (such as Mauritius and Madagascar), as well as the East African
and southern African hinterland. The descendants of these enslaved
people would later officially be classified ‘coloured’ in apartheid South
Africa. For the purposes of this book, slavery, colonialism and apartheid
are seen as moments along a continuum, and not as separate, completely
distinct, and mutually exclusive periods. However, a continuum suggests
those whose egos extend into the past for a sense of completion
emphasize the importance of the ancestors or those of the past
who are believed to give meaning to one’s present existence. This
view may be likened to a helix in which, while there is a sense of
movement, the helix at the same time, turns back upon itself and
depends upon the past from which it springs to guide and determine
its nature; the past is an indispensable part of the present which
participates in it, enlightens it, and gives it meaning. (Pennington
1985: 125, emphasis added)
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11
Thus locked into bodily signification, Others were not ‘merely emblematic
representations of the [Empire’s] most cherished ideals but also actively
deployed as somatic technologies’ of patriarchal empire building
(Ramaswamy 1998: 19). Using Saul Dubow’s (1995) earlier work, Cheryl
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Hendricks (2001) has argued that the status of the Khoi as ‘the missing
link’ between animals and people was not a separate project from the one
which saw Sarah Bartmann put on display in Europe in the nineteenth
century. For Abrahams, the fascination with Khoi women’s genitalia,
more specifically the fabrication of ‘the Hottentot apron’, was central to
the development of scientific racist discourses. The work of these three
scholars further demonstrates the direct links between the Khoi body
generally but, more specifically, the Khoi woman’s body and the language
of scientific racism (Abrahams 1997).
There is a large volume of work which further explores the connections
between slave women whose bodies were inscribed in terms of
‘miscegenation’ and ‘racial mixing’ and who were represented as deviant,
contagious and shameful. Male slave bodies were further rendered in
terms of the dangerous, ravenous male phallus when they were of African
origin, or as volatile noble savages capable of great violence if they were
of Asian origin. Vernie February’s (1981) study established the links
between the literary stereotypes of coloured characters and the ways in
which Khoi and slave bodies were inscribed during British and Dutch
colonialism in South Africa. The connections between the bodily branding
of these historical subjects and some of the associations of shame for their
coloured descendants were later developed by Zoë Wicomb. Wicomb’s
theories in this regard have been engaged in multiple ways and responded
to variously, as will become clear in Chapter 1.
Attitudes to the ‘mixed-race’ slaves were recorded by historians such
as G.M. Theal on the eve of manumission; he argued that these were
‘deserving of freedom, but the change was not beneficial to “pure blacks”’
(in Saunders 1988: 27). Later, the descendants of these slaves were to be
the ‘beneficiaries’ of Coloured Preferential Employment policies in the
western Cape because apartheid positioned them in terms of an in-between
identity, a biologically based hybridity which at once made them superior
to blacks and inferior to the same because of their ‘lack of culture’.
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14
A note on terminology
There are growing discussions within South African historical studies on
whether the distinctions made by the VOC (Vereenigde Oost-Indische
Compagnie) between forms of unfree labour (slavery versus indentured
servitude) had any materiality beyond the law books. My approach is
informed by the work of historians such as Yvette Abrahams (1997,
2000) who have demonstrated that, legal definitions notwithstanding, the
conditions of the Khoisan were very similar to those of legally called
slaves. The same applies to definitions of Bartmann as slave rather than
as contracted worker. In this book, I read Krotoä and Sarah Bartmann as
slaves both because of such scholarship, but also because the bulk of the
primary texts under analysis represent them as such.
Secondly, the differences between ‘native’, ‘slave’ and ‘Khoi’ were
significant in the past, and these categories only appear similar after
the benefit of various political developments, among them the Black
Consciousness Movement. Since my concern is with how the past is made
sense of in the present, I am less concerned with the detailed nuances of
their differences historically, than with the fact that memory uses the lens
influenced by a range of political movements and insights. Therefore it is
memory that blurs what would have been sometimes stark differences a
few centuries ago, because memory operates now and not in the past.
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Shifts in identification that have been taking place under the sign
of whiteness since the end of minority rule can be ascribed, in part,
to the fact that previously sanctioned stagings of whiteness are
increasingly registered as untenable in the everyday post-apartheid
inter-racial encounter. (Strauss 2006: 179)
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them), and the voice becomes one in search of a new ear, a new
genealogy into which she can write herself; because for her it has
become impossible to speak any longer only in the language of the
fathers. (Coetzee 2001: 688)
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work of the Hesses in the 1970s, ‘a father and son team of historians’
who demonstrated that ‘the present-day Afrikaners had a high percentage
of Khoi and slave ancestry’; their work ‘was angrily dismissed by many
Afrikaner intellectuals and political leaders’ (Coetzee 1998: 119).
Clearly, what Coetzee and Samuelson analyse in literary texts is part of
the Afrikaner response to the destabilisation of identity that accompanies
transitional political periods. For Afrikaners, the end of apartheid marked
the loss of the security ensured by membership of the dominant group,
and a scramble in the new dispensation for new positions to inhabit. The
appropriation of Krotoä is not a deconstructive movement away from an
ideological location whose feasibility waned, but rather a battle for power.
It marks sudden awareness of a shift from ‘a culture of authority to a culture
of justification’ (van der Walt 2000: 59). A culture of justification is a
means to survive without significantly questioning the tenets of apartheid
thinking. It is not the response invited in the work of Strauss and Steyn on
which I opened this chapter. Such a culture invents a different language to
maintain structural power at a time when previous claims to power have
lost state backing.
A similar impetus can be read into other tendencies within conservative
Afrikaner politics, as evident in a speech made by a representative of the
New National Party (NNP) in 2002. During the transition period from
apartheid to democracy, the National Party was renamed the NNP in
anticipation of its move from apartheid party in power to an opposition
party in a democratically elected Parliament. In her speech on 27 April
2002, South Africa’s National Freedom Day, the public holiday which
marks the anniversary of the first democratic election in 1994, NNP Member
of Parliament Anna van Wyk admitted that ‘almost all’ white people in
South Africa have a slave ancestry, arguing that this was a ‘well-known
fact’ and maintaining that slaves left a ‘good legacy’, citing buildings, and
asserting that ‘this should be celebrated’. 3 Her address was delivered in
Cape Town outside the South African Cultural Museum, the historic Slave
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[a] central feature of the relationship between the knower and the
known is that the knower exercises control over the known. The
external world, the things to be known, are conceived as passive,
not in the sense of being inactive, but in the sense of being reactive
rather than self-initiating. They are, therefore, subject to prediction
and often manipulation.
The known in this instance becomes both Krotoä and the ‘well-known
fact’ that van Wyk evokes above. Krotoä is the known through her
domestication and the claim to intimacy suggested by her new status
as ‘foremother’. The ‘well-known fact’ becomes truth merely through its
confident assertion as such by powerfully positioned individuals who
speak with institutional authority.
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[u]nlike the English or the French we can’t return home. On this very
soil of Africa we must either stay or perish with our history, culture
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and directed by Ramola Naidoo. The women whose lives and lineages
are traced in this film lead to the highest, most privileged of Afrikaner
families. These slave women were sold to commanders and generals at
the Cape in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In her review of the
documentary for the Daily Dispatch of 1 July 2000, Barbara Hollands
remarks:
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because she has lived actively as white all her life, has been assumed to be
and read as white, and has participated in South African society as such.
Her refusal to engage the interruption suggests that she acknowledges her
distance from being Black as due to lived experience.
These fashionable and opportunistic white appropriations of Blackness
in South Africa trivialise precisely what they ostensibly celebrate. In
conflating Africanness, Blackness and linked identities with the presence of
an aboriginal African woman and/or slave ancestor, they depoliticise race
and ahistoricise power relations. They undermine the discursive social and
political constructions of racial identification. In this manner, attempts
by progressive white and Black South Africans to meaningfully come to
terms with the country’s racial past in order to forge forward are thwarted.
Reconciliation becomes impossible because there is no acknowledgement
of a past of conflict, violence and white collective privilege. In the midst of
a progressive drive towards imagining new ways of claiming agency (Steyn
2001), and of a growing body of scholarship that interrogates whiteness
(see Nuttall 2001; Posel 2001; Reynolds 1994; Steyn 2001; van Rooyen
1994), these denials of its existence are appeals to victimhood. They are as
much about erasure as dominant white identities were during apartheid:
there is no history to make sense of, no reconciliation to participate in,
no engagement with white privilege for those who have ceased to be
white. In contrast, forced into a different kind of usefulness and servitude,
Black women historical subjects are trapped in the same relationship with
white South Africans who have repressed their support of apartheid by
forgetting whiteness in ways that mask its historic and ongoing effects.
This trendy Blackness is particularly troubling when viewed in relation to
notions and responses to colouredness in contemporary South Africa. Black
South Africans who were labelled and classified coloured in the various
subdivisions of that category registered in colonial and apartheid discourse
as ‘half-caste’, ‘bastard’, ‘God’s step-children’ (after Sarah Gertrude Millin’s
1924 novel of the same name) and their bodies were regarded as deviant,
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