What is Slavery to Me?. Pumla Dineo Gqola
public discussions and controversies reveal that although there are groups of Blacks who can always be subsumed under that label, coherence does not mark the spot where these people reside. The certainty ends with being able to claim that name. What lies beyond that is silence about what else constitutes b/Black identity, and resistance to acknowledging the connections between this silence and the internal division within the ranks Erasmus (2000) and Erasmus and Pieterse (1999) use as examples. They justly critique the tendency to question coloured people’s position within Blackness/Africanness at all and thus deny them unconditional entry into even this very small certainty.
My reservations about Erasmus’s (and Erasmus and Pieterse’s) reading of internal Black insecurities do not diminish the courageous and insightful ways in which she continues to theorise colouredness and its various entanglements in contemporary South Africa. Nor do they detract from the urgency of the project she charts, which forces a more nuanced engagement with national identities that are always differentially racialised, gendered and marked by class, among others. Her work continues to echo Amina Mama’s reminder that:
we are formed out of contradictions and yes we do have to live with them and with ambivalence and they need not necessarily be resolved, although at some level you know extreme contradictions are uncomfortable. A sense of well-being is not about being not contradictory; it is about being able to live comfortably with one’s contradictions and to be tolerant of ambivalence. (in Magubane 1997: 22)
In order to attain a state where it is possible to live comfortably with these tensions and ‘be tolerant of ambivalence’, wounds need to be reopened and attended to. The processes by which the sores are focused on require penetrating honesty and initiative. For Erasmus, they begin with an insistence on claiming coloured, African and Black identities simultaneously and participating in what those categories describe. In this manner she challenges other Blacks/Africans, and specifically blacks, to go to that dangerous place where it is no longer possible to, through self-censure, disown what else they are. There are parallel processes of difficulty in identifying along ethnic lines for all Black subjectivities. Apartheid legislation and violence have made it difficult to assert a progressive position within Blackness in ways that are not construed as ‘tribalist/ethnicist’, just like they made identifying as coloured complicated for those who reject that terminology. In opening up studies of coloured identities to progressive signification, she challenges other Blacks to reconceptualise the specific identities we dare not name except under heavily policed circumstances. This full project can be undertaken when we take Adhikari’s warning of avoiding analyses predicated on coloured exceptionalism. Taking the dynamic agency within coloured identities seriously requires an accompanying attentiveness to the complementary complexity and contestations which characterise other Black subject positions.
Relationships to a history of classification as coloured vary. The path outlined by Erasmus above presents one alternative. A second alternative can be glimpsed through an analysis of the synthesis of Black and African identities by the !Hurikamma Cultural Movement (!HCM), whose membership identifies as Khoi and Brown. This self-identification is informed as much by the rejection of the label ‘coloured’ as it is by its proximity to other varieties of Blackness and African identities. It is also an engagement with a history of dispossession and enslavement. Section 1 of the Constitution of the !HCM (1993) defines its membership as only open to those:
who are descended from the Khoi-Khoin (or Mens-Mens) and the slaves brought here from St Helena and Indian Ocean Islands, and who share a common history, culture and identity and pledge their alliance only to their Khoi ancestors, and who, because of their identity and history, have been deprived of their birthright, namely their right to their land, language, history, culture and freedom.
Central to the identification is the valuing of Khoi ancestry, itself a move that is in conversation with history in varied ways. This is particularly true given representations of Khoi/San peoples as backward and undesirable, or disappeared, which retain currency even today. In this respect, although the racial identification of the !HCM appears linked to that of the KWB, there is a marked difference. The valuing of Khoi and slave ancestry already participates in discursive terrain outside of, and partly subversive of, the colonial valuing of a hierarchy of races. By foregrounding the choice to identify with that part of their ancestry which has been most debased, the !HCM’s engagement with history and memory is politically antithetical to that of the KWB. That both should appear so similar is only stressed by the commonality of B/brownness. At the same time, the exclusion of other African histories is telling and echoes some of the purity contained within the KWB’s self-definitions.
The conceptualisation of b/Brownness gestures towards adverse political effects. Where the KWB, with its foregrounding of a ‘pure brown’ coloured race, echoes and allies with the right-wing AWB’s insistence on racial purity as preferable and self-determination as necessary for these ‘minorities’ in light of the ‘hostile black’ government, the !HCM is clearly in conversation with other political traditions in South Africa. The !HCM chooses not to articulate a ‘purity’, and indeed demonstrates a lack of interest in this project. The mere foregrounding of slave and Khoi ancestry as a starting point demonstrates the !HCM’s lack of interest in engaging with racist discourses of miscegenation by asserting purity. Rather, what is seen as central to the identity ‘Brown’ for the !HCM links to historically, socially and culturally constructed events and experience. The focus is on ‘language, history, culture and freedom’ as birthright in as much as this was disrupted through dispossession, genocide, slavery and apartheid.
Additionally, section 3.1 of the !HCM’s Constitution states that one of the objectives is to ‘restore in Brown people a pride in the culture of their forebears’. The intertextual political references here are multifold. First it is an engagement with the discourses which inscribe the relationships of those previously classified ‘coloured’ with shame when a relationship with their past is uncovered. In the place of the shame Wicomb observed, the !HCM intends to put ‘pride’. It appears, then, that the !HCM recognises that the current relationship that people descended from the enslaved and Khoi people have with their past is characterised by shame. To choose to participate in a project which disarticulates this shame is to embark on a task of restoring pride and disavowing shame. This emphasis on pride resonates with the discussion of Wicomb’s and Dabydeen’s shame earlier. The !HCM’s stress on pride links with other liberatory Black discourses in South Africa, such as the Black Consciousness Movement, and globally. The installation and reinscription of pride challenges the historic processes of humiliation. However, where other anti-racist Black movements foreground pride through inclusion, the !HCM’s paradoxical exclusion gestures to other ambiguities about adjacent South African subjectivities.
The !HCM targets Khoi ancestry as its focus, not through an explicit negation of other foreparents who were also enshackled, but by prioritising the Khoi forebears in ways that implicitly deny the unnamed excluded others. It is an impulse which roots itself in African reality through accessing a stabilised indigeneity. In this respect, discursively, the processes of self-definition, backward- and forward-looking as they are like Pennington’s helix, access the past through Pan-African liberation discourse. At the basic linguistic level this is echoed in the emphasis on the combination of descent and choice of loyalty to Africa. This echoes parts of Pan-Africanist ideology globally, but it also distances itself from these same ideologies.
The !HCM project is imaginative as much as it is recuperative. The Constitution sets out specific ways in which to use cultural and artistic production as grounds through which to participate in achieving the position of pride. This is because, according to the Preamble to the !HCM Constitution, ‘culture is an integral part of our struggle to reclaim what is rightfully ours’.
These conversations with other liberation traditions which addressed themselves to the liberation of Black and African people globally permeate the remainder of the Constitution. That the connections are most markedly to Black Consciousness and Pan-African politics cannot be incidental given the prominence accorded to the cultural activities of the !HCM. Given the context set out in the founding document, it seems facile to assume that the mere use of the same word, brown/Brown, allies it to the KWB or other similar movements in straightforward ways. Attention to the use of language, which it to say the self-representation