What is Slavery to Me?. Pumla Dineo Gqola
the same because of their ‘lack of culture’.
DEPARTURES: IMAGINING SLAVE MEMORY
The excavation of slave memory and spaces seen as the repositories for such memories is part of the general project of memory-making in South Africa. It is implicated in some of the shortcomings of the greater effort even as it forces the analysis of the terrain to engage with the past in more complex ways. This is evident in the various explicit links between public memory rehearsal and the making of nation. Yet the segment which deals with the rendering visible of slavery and colonial history questions some of the tools used to interpret and shape the new nation. It draws attention to the contestation of race, identity and language in the contemporary South African topos by opening up many of the taken-for-granted categories for revision. There have been shifts from initially rare examinations of a past of enslavement as integral to memory in South Africa to a flourishing exploration of this phenomenon in literary texts. Thus, slave rememorying is entering the terrain of nation-building and therefore the consciousness of the larger South African populace.
Laura Chrisman (2000) has noted and demonstrated, with outstanding dexterity, the manner in which, although helpful, many of the core theoretical concepts in postcolonial literary studies are inadequate when reading the nuances pertaining to literary imaginative projects which address colonial south(ern) Africa. For Chrisman, ‘ “writing back to the centre,” “mimicry,” or “hybridity” do not adequately account for the formal, linguistic and ideological textures’ of some of the literature under study, and this is particularly so when the texts are treated as ‘historically specific’ (2000: 208).
Language then becomes a challenge in the crafting of memory and the creation of a future, more equitable country at every level beyond the legislative. Neville Alexander further suggests that the only plausible way out is possible when there is an effort to ‘invent a new discourse involving a new set of concepts that is more appropriate to the peculiarities of South African history, seen in the context of world history’ (2001: 83).
The unpredictability of memory, and the ambiguities of a conceptual vocabulary that functions well elsewhere, are central to the exploration of representations of slave memory. It links with Pennington’s helix model in its emphasis on movement and many possible directions. Another similarity pertains to its ability to move in several directions at once, turn upon itself, a living organism influenced by forces in its environs. These forces shape direction, speed of movement, and growth. Pennington offers refreshing perspectives on the dynamic movement within memory politics and the identities which stem from those processes.
A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY
There are growing discussions within South African historical studies on whether the distinctions made by the VOC (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) between forms of unfree labour (slavery versus indentured servitude) had any materiality beyond the law books. My approach is informed by the work of historians such as Yvette Abrahams (1997, 2000) who have demonstrated that, legal definitions notwithstanding, the conditions of the Khoisan were very similar to those of legally called slaves. The same applies to definitions of Bartmann as slave rather than as contracted worker. In this book, I read Krotoä and Sarah Bartmann as slaves both because of such scholarship, but also because the bulk of the primary texts under analysis represent them as such.
Secondly, the differences between ‘native’, ‘slave’ and ‘Khoi’ were significant in the past, and these categories only appear similar after the benefit of various political developments, among them the Black Consciousness Movement. Since my concern is with how the past is made sense of in the present, I am less concerned with the detailed nuances of their differences historically, than with the fact that memory uses the lens influenced by a range of political movements and insights. Therefore it is memory that blurs what would have been sometimes stark differences a few centuries ago, because memory operates now and not in the past.
Thirdly, the label ‘Cape Malay’ is not without problems/limitations when used in the context of the descendants of slaves living in the Western Cape of South Africa. Some of the problems which attach to this terminology are discussed later in this book. I retain its usage here for an assortment of reasons. I find it more useful than ‘Muslim’ for clarity, given that all large Muslim communities in South Africa are diasporic and participate in diaspora in ways which do not necessarily have to do with the particular slave trade I discuss here. I use ‘Cape Malay’ and ‘Capetonian Muslim’ interchangeably, after Baderoon’s (2004) introduction of the latter into academic discussions of historic formations of such identities. The inaccuracies which remain after my retention of the marker ‘Cape Malay’ notwithstanding, it is one of the clearest referents available to discuss the section of the population whose artistic and cultural production I am concerned with here.
In a linked manner, I use a capitalised ‘Black’ to refer to the anti-apartheid definition of Blackness which emerges out of the Black Consciousness Movement. In other words, the capitalised Black refers to those people who would have been classified ‘Indian’, ‘coloured’ and ‘black’ under apartheid. I retain the small caps ‘black’ to refer to Black people sometimes codified as ‘African’, racially speaking, in South Africa.
While it has become customary to insist that we need to move beyond race markers in South Africa, I see this project as premature given the continued ways in which race continues to matter in South Africa in social, political and economic ways. Identities marked as race have also taken on added meanings in addition to, and other than, those bestowed through slavocracy, colonialism and apartheid. Part of the anti-racist and postcolonialist critical project needs to take these meanings seriously rather than placing them under erasure and denying the agency with which they were invested with new, conflicting meanings by subjects thus classified, and self-identifying, over 350 years. To identify as Black in its various gradations, therefore, is always more than simply rehearsing ‘an archive of one’s victimisation’, to borrow Dabydeen’s formulation (in Binder 1997: 172).
Chapter 1 enters into this debate by examining the ways in which coloured and Khoi identities, as formulated in recent years, are an engagement with a slave history. The chapter investigates the implications of colonial and slave rememory for racialised identities among the descendants of slaves, in South Africa specifically. I explore how this activity within the ‘rememory landscape’ works to disrupt some official national and historical narratives. It focuses specifically on debates around coloured identities and Khoi self-identifications. Reading coloured articulations alongside their Khoi counterparts, the chapter analyses the manner in which slave foreparentage is used to fashion a variety of positionings in relation to a history which classified the descendants of slaves ‘coloured’. Finally, it suggests ways in which readings of Khoi self-identification and some articulations of coloured identity may be seen as complementary and as partaking in related projects.
The second chapter explores literary representations of slaves and colonised subjects. It examines contemporary imaginative rewritings of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This examination is informed by an engagement with the centrality of southern African women’s bodies in the generation of knowledge, scientific racism and sexuality, because indeed ‘[e]veryone knows it is virtually impossible to talk candidly about race without talking about sex’ (West 1993: 120). Focusing specifically on contemporary Black feminist engagements with colonial representations of Black women from southern Africa, it analyses a series of written texts which address themselves to the difficulty of representing Sarah Bartmann. The texts include Dianne Ferrus’s poem ‘I Have Come to Take You Home’, which ultimately convinced the French Parliament to return the remains of Sarah Bartmann to South Africa in 2002; Zoë Wicomb’s (2000) refusal to represent Sarah Bartmann in her David’s Story; some of the challenges unpacked by Yvette Abrahams, pre-eminent Khoi historiographer and Sarah Bartmann’s biographer; and Gail Smith’s writing on the process of fetching Sarah Bartmann’s remains from Paris as part of the film crew making a documentary on Bartmann’s return (Mail & Guardian 12 May 20025).
In Chapter 3,