What is Slavery to Me?. Pumla Dineo Gqola

       INTRODUCTION

       TRACING (RE)MEMORY, THINKING THROUGH ECHOES OF COLONIAL SLAVERY IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH AFRICA

      Meaning is constructed out of [a] multiplicity of voices and positions. (Boyce Davies 1994: 162)

      When they ask of you tomorrow

      I will tell them that you are alive

      everywhere inside of me

      especially where I love myself

      more than you did

      where I love myself

      almost as much as you did (Mashile 2008: ll. 25–31)

      I have a multiple identity. There is no crisis. There is a kind of delight as well as a kind of anguish in jumping from one identity to the next. It’s like electrons which have their own energization circles. Sometimes they jump from one to the next and release an enormous amount of energy; then jump back to another circle: little electrons jumping. That is not a crisis. That is a delight and poignancy, and hopefully a release of energy. (Dabydeen in Birbalsing 1997: 195)

      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 promise of freedom and multiple beginnings: individually and collectively, 27 April 1994 was an invitation to envision ourselves differently than we had up until that point.

      The three quotations with which I begin this chapter, and book, capture some of the complexities that accompany being invited to imagine ourselves anew. Carole Boyce Davies conceives of meaning as weaving together layers and moving targets at the same time, something she also refers to as ‘migratory subjectivities’. Rhyming with Boyce Davies, the extract from Lebogang Mashile shows how a sense of self is shaped from dealing with abstraction and remnants in the psyche which ensure that yesterday lives in tomorrow, whilst the fantasy of the future shapes what is possible today. Finally, David Dabydeen’s statement stresses the work inherent in identity: energetic, creative, playful and difficult at the same time.

      The three quotations capture what Thembinkosi Goniwe (2008) means when he invites us to think about apartheid and post-apartheid as simultaneously connected and oppositional. Such an approach allows us to see the shifts between apartheid and post-apartheid realities not in terms of rupture – even as we recognise what has changed – but also in terms of association. Put simply, we are both free and not entirely free of apartheid. These meanings rub up against each other and inflect our lives in material ways.

      This new country, post-apartheid South Africa, is a site of affirmation, where speaking begins and silencing ends. It is also marked by contradictions where the textures of this newness remain contested, questioned and are constantly being refashioned. Contradiction is complexity, creative inflection, play and newness; it is akin to Dabydeen’s ‘delight and poignancy’.

      In the public imagination, this opening up of identifications and imagination on future selves was tied to the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as well as to the rainbow nation metaphor (Gqola 2001a). Dorothy Driver has observed that, ‘South 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:

      [n]o international models were relied upon in South Africa, because there were none that could apply. Each mode of negotiations had to be invented at each stage. This took time but towards the end had been pretty well developed. It was a case of learning on the job.

      As explicit processing of the apartheid past took shape through the valuation of narrative, we saw the inauguration of what Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee (1998) would later describe as the memory industry in South Africa.

      In late apartheid, Njabulo Ndebele (1990a) commented on the challenges facing South Africans as we prepared for a democratic order. He had suggested that these difficulties would pertain specifically to dialogue on relationships with the past, and would engender new valuation and valuable systems, especially in the arena of narrative and the mind’s eye. The power differentials which were given structural legitimacy under apartheid would influence the ascendant tendencies of compromise, crises of culture, and emergent responsibilities. In other words, Ndebele pre-empted what Goniwe would observe post-apartheid. Using a series of examples from media coverage that year, Ndebele suggested that in 1990 the tone being set was one predicated on a facile negotiation in the terrain of economics, where white business would make certain declarations which would then be seen to work as actualisation of equity, resulting in what he called ‘epistemological confusion’. Further, the roles of the imagination in the era immediately after apartheid would doubtlessly explore some of the stickier parts of these processes.

       WHAT IS SLAVERY TO ME?

      This book presents the findings of the first full-length examination of slave memory in South Africa, drawing on the current vibrant discourse on memory started by examinations of the TRC and overall transition in South Africa, most notably Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee’s Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa (1998). While the bulk of memory studies in South Africa have focused on apartheid – and within that, specifically on the TRC proceedings – and a few have ventured into late colonialism, this study departs significantly from this trend by focusing specifically on slave memory and the uses of evoked slave pasts for post-apartheid negotiations of identity.

      Zoë Wicomb (1996, 1998), the celebrated writer and scholar of South African literature and culture, lamented the absence of folk memory of South African slavery even in the Western Cape, where the bulk of the slave population lived between 1658 and 1838, and where the majority of their descendants continue to live. Historian Robert Ross (1983) questioned the same when he noted that the only residue of this era in South African history lies in court records. These court records offer us a mere glimpse of what slave life was like for the enslaved. As I have argued elsewhere (Gqola 2007), thinking about such lives in academic memory studies today requires a multilayered approach to the fragments that survive. It also necessitates tracing some of the inheritances that remain in our societies from theirs, even if such traces reside in ‘modes that do not easily give up the stories’ (Nzegwu 2000: n.p.), where historical consciousness is masked by later generations as a matter of survival. This is how it is possible for Wicomb (1996, 1998) to lament the absence of slave memory among ordinary people. At the same time, my initial study (Gqola 2004), which this book extends and revises, as well as Gabeba Baderoon’s (2004) doctoral work make the argument that slave memory is evident in various sites in post-apartheid South Africa.

      This book is interested in tracing the processes through which South Africa’s slave past moves from the obscured to the well recognised. It is important