What is Slavery to Me?. Pumla Dineo Gqola
a history, something to be interpreted. It also forces the remainder of the Black South African populace, regardless of which identity they prioritise or how they mediate their position within Blackness and in relation to Africa, to contend with what it means to celebrate identity. It forces the question of what it means politically to celebrate a history of survival. It is to assert, in the words of the old slave song, ‘we are here because we are here’ and to invite an interrogation of the untidy meanings we attach to survival.
In its political assertion, therefore, the !HCM does not deny history, but foregrounds it by contesting the meanings which ensue from it whilst underlining that historically its members are not invested with enough power to deny history in a way which would make any political sense, given that they must continue to live in a country and a world in which notions of ‘racial hybridity’ retain currency. So that even as the members self-identify as Khoi, Black and African, and as Brown instead of coloured, the possibility remains to be read and interpreted, through the signs mythologised as evidence of classification, as ‘coloured’, ‘mixed-race’ and so forth. The political imperative adopted by the members of this society does not gesticulate towards a mystical wholeness, but contests dominant discourses about the constitution of all South African racial identities. Such identification also draws attention to shifting meanings in ways akin to those of other western Cape Black anti-racists, examined in Chapter 4, who claim post-apartheid the very diasporic identity they disavowed as anti-apartheid activists.
The !HCM’s self-definition is to assert agency in the face of this changing political landscape, to insist on a self-representation which is more than somatic, but one which revolutionarily claims will and psychic presence. It shifts the terms of the debate and the terrain of race and self-representation in a democratic South Africa where, because the country cannot be an island cut off from the rest of the world or from its own past, there are always colonial discourses circulating.
It recognises the fact of multiple histories, diverse ancestry and therefore creolity even as it chooses to stress specific African ancestry. The choice of which ancestor to foreground is neither arbitrary nor unique. Most people with a known varied ancestry prioritise one with whose name to identify themselves. Whilst it has become almost mandatory in cultural studies to lay claim to the always already hybrid forms of all cultural production and identity formation processes, the case of the !HCM poses challenges for the meanings attached to this declaration. Dutch and British slaves forced to work in the Cape were captured from a variety of locations in South (East) Asia, East Africa, as well the South African interior. Those from the interior were mainly Khoi and/or San.
The !HCM insists on claiming and prioritising its Khoi legacy, rooting itself within an African history not just because of physical location. It can participate in other histories of Africa located elsewhere and also informed by slavery, but the premise must be different because it is not diasporic but continental. Identifying as Khoi declares !HCM entry into a specific African identity through means other than geography and sociology, although these are not completely eliminated either. It is thus not only a political assertion but a shifting of the terrain and a signalled rejection of the terms of participation in African identity spelled out by white South Africa – that is, birthright – because Khoi suggests links with the African world and other indigenous people as another kind of claim to African identity. It is to acknowledge that claiming an African identity for people of African descent in South Africa is always a process accompanied by contestation and denial, that it is a declaration of will in choosing an association with this particular continent.
The decision to identify as Khoi challenges the narrowness of conservative definitions of who can people the space labelled ‘African’. Brown identity within !HCM parlance and its relationship to emancipatory language, among other things, marks it as different from Afrikaners who pretended to be ‘racially pure’ and premised their identity on the suppression of African foreparents. It is not premised on ‘racial purity’.
Further, it does not claim a position of privilege as its entitlement because of where it is. It broaches the difficult terrain, like Erasmus’s theorisation of colouredness, of identifying what else these subjects are in addition to and in proximity with always being Black and African. In other words, it is ‘aspirational and does not aspire to mastery or sovereignty’, in Bhabha’s (2002; see also Chance 2001) terms. It remains subversive because it is empowering to the concrete historical subjects who assert this identity without alienating others who are less powerful. It is also an anti-essentialist position because it destabilises all the categories it is in conversation with and draws attention to the processes of racial identity formation. By claiming this allegedly vacated space, it does not displace anybody else, even as it questions how indigeneity is constructed, and in this very action contests the vacancy of the identity ‘Khoi’. It challenges the lie of successful Khoi and San extermination by posing the question, ‘How can there be at once no Khoi people alive and there be thousands alive who identify as such?’ It works also as an alternative to ‘coloured’ because it chooses an indigenous African trajectory of naming over a colonially imposed one. It chooses to be Khoi instead of ‘mixed’. It therefore does not negate that others may inhabit colouredness differently and reclaim it, but this is not its political imperative.
Resistance to articulations of Khoi and San identities in contemporary South Africa is problematic. It tends to lump all these very different articulations together. In this manner those who question the ability of Khoi people to identify as such avoid addressing the specificities of each and betray contemporary (internalised) racist notions of what we expect a Khoi or San person to ‘look’ like. Much of the anxiety over the choice of ‘Khoi’ over ‘coloured’ stems from a hypocritical relationship that many South Africans have with Khoi identities. Thus, in spite of the assertion of all cultures’ dynamism, predominant concepts of the Khoi are as timeless people trapped in space. To be Khoi is to appear as ‘Bushmen’ in some tourist brochures, or as naked ‘Hottentots’ running around in the desert. The problem posed by progressive articulations of Khoi and San presence and identities is that they unsettle the belief that the somatic holds the key to meaning-making. This lie has been central to South African society in relation to race for over three centuries.
CONCLUSION: THE KHOI–COLOURED CONTINUUM IMAGINATIVELY RENDERED
The capacity to live with difference is, in my view, the coming question of the twenty-first century. (Hall 1999: 42)
I speak appropriating all the knowledge that interests me, that is accessible to me, and that can help me and my territory to deal with new emergent realities, since I am also a new and emergent reality. (de Torro 2002: 117)
The above demonstrate the complexity in contesting meanings which attach to identities that apparently cannot be inhabited progressively. There are charges that in a post-apartheid South Africa, given the rejection and problematisation of the label ‘coloured’ during the liberation struggle, it can only be racist to reclaim it (now). Similarly, it is argued that laying claim to Khoi identity is a denial of history of ‘mixing’ and an aspiration towards ‘purity’ and authenticity. Therefore, in crude terms the first is denounced for apparently ‘not being Black enough’, while the latter is seen to aspire to a Blackness that is ‘too authentic’. These readings are equally problematic for they read these subjectivities within the confines of the very discursive binaries that are rejected by those who claim ‘coloured’ or ‘Khoi’ identities, in the manner analysed above. Indeed, an attentive examination of the two articulations discussed above reveals that ‘[r]ather than expanding the category of “real” blackness, they suggest that if all identities are discursively produced and under negotiation, then all identities are inauthentic’ (Smith 1998: 67).
The challenges of fashioning new identities in a democratic South Africa include being able to move away from the few ‘safe’ spaces of racial identification that Black South Africans could inhabit under apartheid. Given the recent demise of the systems of violent state-sponsored racist terror which ended with apartheid, it is not difficult to see why exploring racial identity anew is a daunting task for South Africans. Black Consciousness gave us a Black skin to be proud of and one through which to contest the shame associated