What is Slavery to Me?. Pumla Dineo Gqola
Later in the same year (1998) of Wicomb’s lamentation, the South African Cultural Museum, close to Parliament and surrounded by monuments, would attract attention which led to its renaming as the Slave Lodge. The plaque in front of this building which marks the historic location of the slave tree would become more visible. This part of Cape Town would also be the site of Gabeba Abrahams’s archaeological dig in April 2000, a collaboration between academics and public institutions which welcomed and, at times, invited the participation of the public. However, as Gabeba Baderoon (2003), Capetonian poet and scholar of Muslim identities, has subsequently observed,1 while many people knew that they were of slave descent, the particularities of this were unknown, so that it is only ‘recently, intersecting with international dynamics about slave histories, reparation, slave routes’ that they could surface. It is possible, for example, that only then did many of the artists exhibiting at the renamed museum themselves recognise the significance of their surnames being ‘January’ or ‘Jacobs’.
My book title paraphrases the first line of Countee Cullen’s much analysed poem, ‘Heritage’. In that poem, Cullen seeks to make sense of the conflicting ways in which Africa has relevance for him as an African American, descended from enslaved Africans. The poem’s speaker makes sense of the various ways in which Africa remains both important to his politico-psychic identity and elusive mythologised site. There are many 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 linearity, which is undermined by the working of memory and ideology. In order to capture both the linkages across time suggested by the image of a continuum, as well as to complicate the ways in which these periods are embedded in each other and beyond, other models for thinking about memory are discussed in detail later in this chapter.
I am concerned in this book with expressions of this slave memory as recent phenomena, enabled in part by the onset of democracy, and therefore the end of the repression which started with slavery. Questions are asked about the relationships of entanglement between the forms of memory found and the timing of their public rehearsal. Some of the practices examined pre-date the onset of democracy but undergo some form of alteration during this moment, which I read as significant. It is important that the implications and nuances of these alterations be unpacked.
My analysis draws extensively from postcolonial theories on race, identity, diaspora, subalternity and hybridity. It is indebted to African studies debates, postcolonial theorisation on identity and is grounded in feminist theory. Theoretically, it engages closely with the vast terrain of memory studies which currently traverses academia in interdisciplinary ways. This study, then, is in conversation with various strands of academic research on South African identities: historical research on slavery; sociological and interdisciplinary explorations of racialised identities in South Africa; the processes of memory and narratives of nation; and interdisciplinary research on the clustering of race and gender identities historically.
The debate on the meetings and divergences of history and memory has grown increasingly interdisciplinary,2 and perhaps it is less urgent to rigidly establish a distinction between history and memory than it is to participate in locating and distinguishing between different sources and modes of historical authority.
The relationship of historiography to memory is one of containment: history is always part of memory whilst history delineates a certain kind of knowledge system within the terrain of memory. Put differently, whereas memory is a shadow always hovering and governing our relationship to the present and the future, history is the art of recording and analysing this consciousness of the past (Anthony 1999). Memory resists erasure and is important for the symbols through which each community invents itself. It requires a higher, more fraught level of activity to the past than simply identifying and recording it (Poitevin & Bel 1999). The latter is especially true when related to slave and colonial memory, and is best formulated by Toni Morrison’s wordplay with activity and reassemblage in her ‘re-memory’ or ‘memorying’, where events and knowledge are ‘memoried’, ‘memoryed’, ‘remembered’ and ‘re-memoried’. Morrison’s word range implies a much wider field than simply collection, recollection and recalling, and is itself a commentary on the (dis)junctures between memory and history, working as it does not only against forgetting but also what I call ‘unremembering’. Whereas both forgetting and unremembering are inscribed by power hierarchies, unremembering is a calculated act of exclusion and erasure. Forgetting, on the other hand, is the phenomenon lamented by Wicomb.
Toni Morrison (1987) evokes ‘literary archaeology’ as a way of speaking about her work, especially Beloved, in her essay ‘The Site of Memory’. Morrison explains that this calls for ‘imagining the inner life’ of a slave and conceptualising ‘history-as-life-lived’, which is about ‘giving blood to the scraps … and a heartbeat’ (1987: 112; see also City Limits 31 March–7 April 1988: 10–113). This is the work she refers to as ‘rememory’. Recognising that history is always fictional, Morrison’s rememory is a reminder that it is not over for those ‘who are still struggling to write genealogies of their people and to keep a historical consciousness alive’ (Chabot Davies 2002: n.p.).
Rememory invites the creative writer or artist to ‘journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply’ in order ‘to yield up a kind of a truth’ (Morrison 1987: 112). This filling in, recasting, relooking, reformulating (both of memory and history) outside historiography is Toni Morrison’s rememory. It is a necessary project because ‘[t]he past is only available through textual traces’ and these are necessary in order to re-humanise the ‘disremembered and unaccounted for’ (Chabot Davies 2002: n.p.).
In line with Morrison’s theorisation above, much academic writing on memory focuses on precisely its refusal to remain distantly in the past; such scholarship insists instead that memory has an ever-presence which is mutable. The refusal to stay in one place suggests roaming qualities closer to a cyclical model than the linear one conventionally conjured up by continuum. Patricia J. Williams (1991) had conceptualised slave memory as a shadow which hovers above the present and influences it in unpredictable ways (also see Anthony 1999); Nkiru Nzegwu (2000) has theorised memory’s mobility since it is always open to relocation across aesthetic and temporal planes; Guy Poitevin and Bernard Bel (1999) write of memory as somewhat cyclical; and Tobias (1999) insists on viewing memory as not only differentiated but also fragmentary.
Even