What is Slavery to Me?. Pumla Dineo Gqola
is closely tied up with both identity and knowledge. Indeed, it is difficult to know what ‘being English’, or indeed French, German, South African or Japanese, means outside of all the ways in which our ideas and images of national cultures have been represented. Without these ‘signifying’ systems, we could not take on such identities (or indeed reject them) and consequently could not build up or sustain that common ‘life-world’ which we call culture.
To extend Hall above then, ‘being b/Brown’, like ‘being c/Coloured’ can only mean in relation to how it is framed, and functions politically in the terrain of culture. Identifying as Khoi, African, Black and Brown simultaneously has several effects which serve to regulate the workings and meanings which ensue from self-representation in this manner. These meanings also participate in the necessary politics of interrogating colonialist and apartheid definitions of the descendants of slaves, whilst interrogating trajectories of self-representation. They are simultaneously grounded in and informed by Black Consciousness thinking and open up its silences and ambiguities for (re)interpretation. It is a narrow reading which reads the !HCM as wishing away history. The project is premised on the fact that members of this group, who claim all of the identities outlined above, are descended from slaves. Theirs is therefore not an ahistorical position since the chronological trajectory of this identity is foregrounded.
Rather, it is the meanings which ensue from this history which are contested. In other words, to the questions, ‘What does it mean to be a descendent of slaves for your racial politics today?’ and, ‘Who does it make you?’ the proponents of this view respond with a redefinition of how to inhabit Blackness in a post-apartheid South Africa: by identifying as b/Black, African, Brown and Khoi all at the same time. Thus, this legacy is interpreted in ways which are in accordance with the anti-racist projects of this location. They challenge not only racist labels but also conservative ideas about who can count as black (and within that, Khoi) and Black in contemporary South Africa. This space draws attention to the limitations of thinking about an anti-racism which influences the relationship people previously classified as ‘coloured’ have with not only a racist trajectory but also with liberation politics in South Africa.
Here the expressions of ‘deformation, masking and inversion’ in their application have the subversive potential to:
demonstrate that forces of social authority and subversion or subalternity may emerge in displaced, even decentred strategies of signification. This does not prevent these positions from being effective in a political sense, although it does suggest that positions of authority may themselves be part of a process of ambivalent identification. Indeed the exercise of power may be both politically effective and psychically affective because the discursive liminality through which it is signified may provide greater scope for strategic manoeuvre and negotiation. (Bhabha 1994: 145)
First, identifying as Khoi in the context of the !HCM rejects the belonging to a third race marked ‘coloured’ in colonial and apartheid legislation. This is conscious anti-racist work that goes further than drawing attention to this appellation, as was necessary through the use of ‘so-called coloured’. To engage with that history of naming is to participate in a particular kind of anti-racist practice which privileges colonial inscription. It entails a ‘talking back to’ as part of the larger initiative of contesting identity. The politics of dis-identification with ‘colouredness’ rejects a stance of talking back to and moves instead to a project of self-definition. It establishes a distance from such white supremacist forms of framing this identity and at the same time it disses and deconstructs them. This move to rename the self echoes earlier Black Consciousness rejections of ‘non-white’ for Black. For Black Consciousness activists in South Africa, ‘non-white’ represented a negation which had attendant materiality. Consequently, there were immeasurable gains to be made from moving from a positive definition. To identify as Khoi and Brown for the !HCS echoes this and stems, then, from the same political urgency. The postcolonial memory imperative cannot be about just addressing the problematics of historical location; it also needs to be mindful of what lies ahead.
In his inaugural lecture for the interdisciplinary Postcolonial Studies Graduiertenkolleg of the University of Munich on 25 January 2002, Homi K. Bhabha spoke eloquently of what he explores in his forthcoming book as ‘political aspiration’, which participates in ethical and textual interpretation as well as positionality vis-à-vis enactment and entitlement. For Bhabha, ‘aspiration is not utopian, but imbued with the present imperfect and emerges from the desire to survive, not the ambition for mastery’. He goes further to discuss the meanings of the ‘present imperfect’ as mindful and informed by ‘non-resolvable ambiguities’. Although I could find no published version of this address, Bhabha articulated similar sentiments in his interview with Kerry Chance (2001: 3), where he asserted: ‘I think it is our intellectual responsibility to understand that the ground beneath our feet is a shifting, sliding ground, and to try to actually take account of that.’ Mindfulness to the shifting grounds informs the kinds of critical vocabulary we develop so that the cultural sites we read inform our cultural texts, rather than being the space on which we apply pre-crystallised lenses.
I find Bhabha’s theorisation of the aspirational particularly helpful to think about the activity of this space racially. In not being utopian the participants of this society are unwilling to frame their behaviour in terms of the binaries of utopia and its necessary other, dystopia; or the accompanying tropes of either racialised as ‘pure white’ or as ‘pure African’. Centring survival is to emphasise and celebrate slave agency. It is to deny the violence of slavery and colonialism complete power over the body of the colonised and/or enslaved. In Patricia Williams’s terms, to assert Khoi identity in the manner of the !HCM is to claim Black will. Rather than highlighting the position of the colonised and/or enslaved, it focuses on her/his activity – her/his survival – and celebrates this. It is to think about this ancestry as invested with agency, as humans living under constant physical and epistemological attack who survive genocidal attempts, and not as property. It is an invitation to rethink the position of people as slaves, a descriptive confinement, which is necessary for the fallacy of Black anti-will which is the ‘description of master-slave relations as “total” ’ (Williams 1991: 219).
To root a self-identification as Khoi, B/black, Brown and African in the face of previous classification as ‘coloured’ is to assert the presence of will in the lives of the ancestors who were objectified – dehumanised as property. This self-definition contests what it means to be descended from people who were property. Williams (1991: 217), in the essay ‘On Being the Object of Property’, declares:
Reclaiming that from which one has been disinherited is a good thing. Self-possession in the full sense of that expression is the companion to self-knowledge. Yet claiming for myself a heritage the weft of whose genesis is my own disinheritance is a profoundly troubling paradox.
Self-representation as Khoi, African, Brown and B/black is a way of engaging this history of erasure and disinheritance. It is not the path of claiming a reshaped colouredness since the word is deemed irredeemably implicated in the aforementioned history of racial terror and genocide. It is to contest the narrative of the disappearance of the Khoi from the political, social and physical landscape of South Africa. It is anti-racist in privileging the excavation of the subaltern’s voice not just in the present but also in the past. This is an example of postcolonial mnemonic work in practice. The enslaver’s and coloniser’s force does not need any help: it is the hegemonic power which silences the subaltern. The !HCM’s self-construction does not deny the given: that those (previously) classified coloured feature in colonialist and apartheid discourse as the result of ‘racial mixing’ and constitute a ‘third race’ at once privileged (preferential treatment legislation) and ‘inferior’ due to ‘lack’ (without culture, ‘barbaric’, ‘bush’). Nor is it informed by a refusal to mediate the dominant circulatory discourses on race which are responsible for the instances of their somatic reading as ‘coloured’ in accordance with the conservative meanings of that category.
Thus, foregrounding Khoi identity is not to pretend that these racist discourses do not exist, but to choose a particular self-positioning in relation to them. It is to contest the racist academic and popular discourses which declare that Khoi and San identities are vacated spaces.