What is Slavery to Me?. Pumla Dineo Gqola
L. Pennington’s (1985) conceptualisation of memory as a helix. She noted:
those whose egos extend into the past for a sense of completion emphasize the importance of the ancestors or those of the past who are believed to give meaning to one’s present existence. This view may be likened to a helix in which, while there is a sense of movement, the helix at the same time, turns back upon itself and depends upon the past from which it springs to guide and determine its nature; the past is an indispensable part of the present which participates in it, enlightens it, and gives it meaning. (Pennington 1985: 125, emphasis added)
In other words, memory resists the tenet of much academic history that the past is complete and in need of analysis, contextualisation and explanation because ‘in order to use the past in their daily lives [people] must create and recreate open-endedness in their experiences’ (Thelen 2002: 5). The South African context has an active tradition of probing the relationships between memory and history, within the academy, the heritage sector and in public discourse.4
Studies focusing on texts charged with the project of creatively rendering a slave past that cannot physically be remembered entail an analysis of how memory is negotiated in artistic production and other imaginative spaces, such as that of explicitly recasting identity. Paying particular attention to the language and structure of the texts, these studies examine the stylistic and ideological representation of slave characters and of the institution of slavery itself. Necessary questions about the choice of memories re(-) presented and the manner of this portrayal are foregrounded. Some of the loci for the production of memory in the representations of the slave psyche are probed, where memory is understood as a collective process, paying attention to creative engagements with this space. Furthermore, given the theorisation of multiplicity as complexity within postcolonial discourse, the role of contradiction within this exercise of memory needs unpacking.
The project of memory creates new ways of seeing the past and inhabiting the present. When slavery is ‘forgotten’ or unremembered, the connections between slavery and current expressions of gendered and raced identities are effaced (Hesse 2002). Slave memory studies ‘invite a questioning of the relations between what is forgotten and what is remembered’ (Hesse 2002: 164).
Postcolonial memory recognises that slave pasts cannot only be addressed through ‘abolitionist, curatorial, or aesthetic memories’ (Hesse 2002: 165) since it is not concerned with slavery in the past, but with the ongoing effects and processing of that historical consciousness. It is concerned with how the haunting shadow of the past conceived by Williams, and the helix-shaped memory Pennington writes about, shape today’s experiences. Like Hesse, then, ‘[w]hat I call postcolonial memory takes the form of a critical excavation and inventory of the marginalized, discounted, unrealized objects of decolonization and the political consequences of these social legacies’ (Hesse 2002: 165).
Postcolonial memory as critical activity recognises that imaginative forms partake in a general landscape of cultural production constituted in and through language. It is the nuances of such narratives that I am interested in reading here as slave memory increases in visibility in post-apartheid South Africa. Like the broader field of postcolonial studies, postcolonial memory assumes that all production is permeated by and implicated in relations of power, and investigates the articulations of this power as well as the ways in which it is negotiated through various texts. These critical tools are used to read public cultural, literary, televisual, filmic and visual material against the larger debates they are shaped by, and which they in turn shape.
Postcolonial and revisionist representation engages analytical tools which are attentive to the networks of repressive depiction since they are methodologically disposed to probe the historical and social specificities of oppressive definitional structures. This is because:
[p]ostcolonial theory has emerged from an interdisciplinary area of study which is concerned with the historical, political, philosophical, social, cultural and aesthetic structures of colonial domination and resistance; it refers to a way of reading, theorising, interpreting and investigating colonial oppression and its legacy that is informed by an oppositional ethical agenda. (Low 1999: 463)
The imperative of postcolonial memory studies is to recognise heterogeneity in the concrete historical subjects who were enslaved, rather than confining them to sameness and anonymity, in keeping with colonial epistemes. It thus becomes possible to resist participation in ‘an epistemology … conceived purely in terms of a total polarity of absolutes’ (Ndebele 1994: 60; see also Figueroa 1996).
GENDERING POSTCOLONIAL MEMORY
David Dabydeen reminds us that the ‘Empire was a pornographic project; it wasn’t just economic or sociological or a political project, it was also a project of pornography’ (in Dawes 1997: 220). Yvette Abrahams (1997), too, has posited that the ‘great long national insult’ was a gendered corporeal project. Dabydeen’s and Abrahams’s cues are of utmost importance because apartheid and slave memory are often considered engagements with race. Although feminist scholarship has challenged this assumption successfully, such scholarship has often been as response to initially muted explorations of how pasts are gendered. Feminist historians of colonial and slave eras in southern Africa continue to challenge the erasure of women slaves, but also how slavery was a gendered project (Y. Abrahams 2000; Bradford 1996; Magubane 2004; van der Spuy 1996).
What might it mean to chart a field from the onset in ways that critically engage with how gender works alongside other axes of power? I am concerned with what new meanings are inevitably covered when we ask questions differently, as are the central tenets of postcolonial (and) feminist scholarship (Gqola 2001b). Elleke Boehmer (1992: 270) has demonstrated how representations of the slave body in colonial slavery:
offered important self-justifications. For what is body and instinctual is by definition dumb and inarticulate. As it does not itself signify, or signify coherently, it may be freely occupied, scrutinized, analyzed, resignified. This representation carries complete authority; the Other cannot gainsay it. The body of the Other can represent only its own physicality, its own strangeness.
Thus locked into bodily signification, Others were not ‘merely emblematic representations of the [Empire’s] most cherished ideals but also actively deployed as somatic technologies’ of patriarchal empire building (Ramaswamy 1998: 19). Using Saul Dubow’s (1995) earlier work, Cheryl Hendricks (2001) has argued that the status of the Khoi as ‘the missing link’ between animals and people was not a separate project from the one which saw Sarah Bartmann put on display in Europe in the nineteenth century. For Abrahams, the fascination with Khoi women’s genitalia, more specifically the fabrication of ‘the Hottentot apron’, was central to the development of scientific racist discourses. The work of these three scholars further demonstrates the direct links between the Khoi body generally but, more specifically, the Khoi woman’s body and the language of scientific racism (Abrahams 1997).
There is a large volume of work which further explores the connections between slave women whose bodies were inscribed in terms of ‘miscegenation’ and ‘racial mixing’ and who were represented as deviant, contagious and shameful. Male slave bodies were further rendered in terms of the dangerous, ravenous male phallus when they were of African origin, or as volatile noble savages capable of great violence if they were of Asian origin. Vernie February’s (1981) study established the links between the literary stereotypes of coloured characters and the ways in which Khoi and slave bodies were inscribed during British and Dutch colonialism in South Africa. The connections between the bodily branding of these historical subjects and some of the associations of shame for their coloured descendants were later developed by Zoë Wicomb. Wicomb’s theories in this regard have been engaged in multiple ways and responded to variously, as will become clear in Chapter 1.
Attitudes to the ‘mixed-race’ slaves were recorded by historians such as G.M. Theal on the eve of manumission; he argued that these were ‘deserving of freedom, but the change was not beneficial to “pure blacks”’ (in Saunders 1988: 27). Later, the descendants of these slaves were to be the ‘beneficiaries’ of Coloured Preferential Employment policies in the western Cape because apartheid positioned