What is Slavery to Me?. Pumla Dineo Gqola
by Cooper. One lens which illuminates this comparison is the theorisation of Black will and anti-will under conditions of enslavement by Patricia Williams.
Williams (1991) argues that slavery is predicated on the absence of Black will so that the perfect Black person becomes one without a will. An enslaved person is rendered object only because s/he becomes owned, therefore property, a thing. One of the basic assumptions about humanity, especially in the Judeo-Christian narrative, is the presence of spirit/intention, in other words, willpower. When the slaves are equated to other inanimate objects, or to non-human animals, this is a move which denies humanity. If what distinguishes human beings from other beings in the living world is this spirit/agency/will, the enslaved people cease to have will. This is in keeping with the construction of the enslaved as only corporeal in colonial discourse. For Williams, this leads to the conclusion that under conditions of slavery the perfect white person is the opposite of the perfect Black one: one with will. A reading of the variety of ways in which coloured subjects participate in an imaginative project in relation to their identity is the ultimate assertion of the presence of will and humanity in the concrete historical subjects who were enslaved, as well as those descended from them. This variety of articulations, in James Clifford’s (2001) sense, testifies to the heterogeneity of the historically enslaved as well as to their survival. In other words, it testifies to the strength of this will.
It becomes important not to read these articulations as exclusively related to or overdetermined by their relationship to whiteness and discourses which sought to inscribe this in terms of ‘racial purity’. A sensitive postcolonial engagement with these processes is attentive to their proximity to anti-apartheid discourses on Blackness as well. It is mindful of Zine Magubane’s (1997: 17) caution that:
[i]f we are looking at multiplicity and hybridity from a South African perspective, as important as it is to historicise, acknowledge, and celebrate our multiple identities, it is equally important to acknowledge the political gains that ‘totalising discourses’ like black nationalism have been able to effect. We need to understand the way in which speaking from an essentialised position can be a site of political power as well.
The recasting and meaning-making processes of Blackness in liberation movement discourses have been analysed at great length. The scholarship which has participated in this project has unearthed the ways in which discourses of Black nationalism, especially as proposed by the Black Consciousness Movement, relied on a unified Black experience rather than on physiognomy. While it is important to draw attention to the manner in which the unifying gestures of many Black nationalist and anti-colonial movements policed Blackness, and to recognise the thorny character of this monitoring, it is crucial to recognise that the effect of this unity was a direct contribution to the successes of activism.
At a time when Black people were routinely subjected to racial terror, suppressing a realistic engagement with heterogeneity within led to two contradictory effects. First, it silenced certain experiences of Blackness and was not attentive to the difference that gender, sexuality, class, ‘ethnicity’,1 geographical location, and so forth, made. In this manner, it was implicated in oppressive tendencies and systems. The second effect realised the establishment, in so far as was possible under apartheid, of a ‘safe’ space to identify those who were in positions of collaboration with the state. Given that this was an issue of survival, the fiction that politics could be read from immediately observable behaviour meant that political affiliation was signified in a series of identifiable actions. These notions of what ‘authentic’ Blackness is did not successfully eliminate diversity within, but theoretically made it more possible to negotiate the delicate terrain of who could be trusted in relation to apartheid resistance and who not. They were a fiction which bore directly on imprisonment, torture and state-sponsored murder. To recognise the second as beneficial is not to justify the existence of the first impulse, nor is it to participate in the argument that discussions of gender, class, sexuality, location and so forth could be rightly postponed until the moment of liberation from colonial/slave/apartheid oppression. This argument remains nonsensical even when we recognise that the onset of democracy has enabled a different quality of exploration.
Heeding Adhikari on avoiding coloured exceptionality, what happens when we recognise that:
Coloured identities are neither inherently progressive nor inherently reactionary. Instead articulations of coloured identity are resources available for use by both progressive and reactionary social movements. These movements are more likely to articulate to reactionary movements under some circumstances. (Erasmus & Pieterse 1999: 184)
Erasmus has, in a variety of fora, foregrounded the possibilities which exist for claiming coloured identity and inscribing this as a progressive space. She has repeatedly suggested that to assert a coloured identity can have a variety of implications with divergent ideological impetuses. In ‘Re-imagining Coloured Identities in Post-apartheid South Africa’, which serves as introduction to her book on coloured identities in Cape Town, she argues in favour of reading coloured subjectivities as a dynamic presence with attendant tensions and contradictions. Locating colouredness ‘as part of the shifting texture of a broader black experience’ is important (Erasmus 2001a: 14). Her argument is anchored through four parts, to which I will briefly turn before I analyse their greater significance.
First, she suggests that rather than continuing to interpret coloured identities in terms of ‘race mixing’ or thinking of them as being invested with a special hybridity, they should be read in their own context and this is one which needs to seriously engage history. This will enable a processing and thinking of them as ‘cultural formations born of appropriation, dispossession and translation in the colonial encounter’ (Erasmus 2001a: 16). The presence of historical significance suggests, in Erasmus’s first position, that the current assertions and activity within coloured collective subjectivities cannot be decoded with merely an eye to the present. These formations make sense, then, only when read as memory activity in conversation with, responding to and processing events of the past as a crucial part of imagining and inventing the present.
Her second pillar advances an argument for viewing colouredness through processes of creolisation where oppression was operational. This recognition will be unproductive if it then denies the agency of communities under attack to reshape and make new meanings for their lives and trajectories. Thus, although slavery, colonialism and apartheid cannot be left out of the equation, using them to assert that these systems of violence were wholly constitutive of these communities is dangerous. It is to be complicit in the denial of Black will; it is to be blind to the obvious demonstration of agency by coloured subjects.
As colouredness becomes reshaped and rethought, the discomfiting constituents of this identity need to be courageously opened up. Thus, this position requires from coloured subjects an acknowledgement of the contradictions that characterised the identity ‘coloured’ in colonial and apartheid discourse. Given that colouredness was framed as existing between white and black/African, and that subjects thus classified did not always resist this positioning, the role of complicity should be acknowledged; so too should the privilege that accorded to being coloured, especially in the Western Cape where the presence of preferential employment legislation placed certain categories of jobs outside the reach of other Blacks. Erasmus (2001a: 16) notes:
[c]oming to terms with these facts is one of the most important and difficult challenges for coloured people. Coloured, black and African ways of being do not have to be mutually exclusive. There are ways of being coloured that allow participation in a liberatory and anti-racist project. The task is to develop these.
Finally, she calls for a self-reflexive engagement with the variety of ways of inhabiting African and Black identities by unfixing the meanings attached to them. This is only achievable with the destabilisation of those positions within Blackness/Africanness which are seen to have assumed ‘moral authenticity and political credibility’ (Erasmus 2001a: 17). Asserting that a progressive coloured politics necessarily requires discomfort, she resists the position of identifying only as Black, seeing this as a safety net which ‘denies the “better than black” element of coloured formation’ (Erasmus 2001a: 25).
Erasmus’s propositions have immense implications for thinking through specifically coloured but also more broadly Black cultural and