INDIGENOUS RELATIONS Art and Modernity in South Africa Julie L. McGee, University of Delaware In 1997 UNESCO included in its Memory of artist Pippa Skotnes. This publication, Claim to the the World Register an archive best known as the Country: The Archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek Bleek Collection and described thusly: (2007), continues Skotnes’s scholarly and artistic inquiry into the lives of the Lloyd and Bleek The Bleek Collection consists of papers family and their informants and was preceded of Dr W.H.I. Bleek (1827-1875), his by Skotnes’s Sound of the Thinking Strings (1991) sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd (1834-1914), his and the controversial exhibition (with catalogue) daughter Dorothea Bleek (1873-1948) Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushman (1996). and G.W. Stow (1822-1882) relating to Skotnes’s latest exhibition and accompanying their researches into the San (Bushman) catalogue, Unconquerable Spirit: George Stow’s language and folklore, as well as albums History Paintings of the San, launched in November of photographs. Bleek developed a 2008 at Iziko South African Museum in Cape phonetic script for transcribing the Town, centers on Lucy Lloyd and the geologist/ characteristic clicks and sounds of the ethnographer George Stow in connection to Stow’s !Xam language which is used by linguists rock painting studies. Sustained and legitimized by to this day. Although some of the exhibitions, publications, and national museums, material was published by Lucy Lloyd universities, and archives, these projects have and Dorothea Bleek, a great deal remains provided privileged reinscriptions of archival unpublished. The material provides materials gathered during an era of cultural an invaluable and unique insight into plunder of South Africa’s indigenous heritage by the language, life, religion, mythology, colonial forces. Skotnes’s scholarly and artistic folklore and stories of this late Stone contributions to contemporary conceptualizations Age people.1 of South Africa’s earliest inhabitants are immensely valuable. Her appropriation of San The Bleek Collection does indeed offer many heritage is deeply infected by her scholarship on invaluable lessons, chief among them being how the San and most particularly Bleek, Lloyd, and Western constructions of modernity are imbedded Stow’s interpolations of the San and early rock art in tropes of prehistory and indigeneity and painting. Her publications and exhibitions offer wedded to proclamations of science and salvage. rich and at times competing layers of analyses Robert Gordon has suggested the archive be that seem to position her as a keen, insightful seen in the context of South Africa’s “incipient and detached observer-scholar and then again as scientific nationalism.”2 The Bleek Collection a romanticizing dramaturgist and scenographer. was recently published in a lavish volume and To this end, there are parallels with the endeavors accompanying CD ROM, edited by scholar and of Bleek and Lloyd and renewed courtship with Critical Interventions 3/4, Spring 2009 INDIGENOUS RELATIONS 115 Figure 1. Garth Erasmus in his Brakenfell Studio, 2005. Photo: Jurie Senekal. the constructions of Western modernity through larger interrogation of African modernity. Two and against African indigeneity. observations are set forth herein; frstly, that in Can artistic “appropriations” of indigenous terms of “indigenous,” modernity and prehistory cultural forms deconstruct or at the very least (or the premodern) are codependent; and second, interrogate the constructed modernities imposed that those artists who appropriate indigenous upon the term “indigenous”? This essay considers cultures through a lens of “critical extinction” a single artist’s — Garth Erasmus — relationship risk reproducing a paradigm of Eurocentric to contemporary conceptions of indigeneity in modernity. South Africa (Figure 1). It is guided by two key While South Africa is the self-proclaimed questions: How are contemporary understandings cradle of humankind,3 the indigenous people of and perceptions of indigeneity bound up in southern Africa have long been imagined as living the “what” and the “when” of South African examples of prehistory.4 The continued display of modernity; and Is indigeneity a trope of modernity, the dioramas of non-Eurocentric and if so, whose modernity? Historicizing the South African tribal [sic] groups that include naming and appropriation of indigenous cultures life casts situated in historicized environments at in South Africa offers critical insight into the the Iziko South African Museum perpetuates this Research 116 McGee view. European derogation and marked them as a The prehistory has and continues to play a lesser race, between human and beast.10 European seminal role in South African national identity.5 illustrations of Cape inhabitants rendered them Indeed, in South Africa, constructions of variously as savage, wild, exotic, and indolent.11 modernity are contingent upon prehistory Khoisan is a blended term that, in its contemporary narratives as much as they are on the premodern. use, acknowledges the mutual fates of the Khoi According to Robert Gordon, “While [South and San peoples of South Africa, displaced and Africa’s frst peoples] have been socially marginal, greatly decimated by European colonization. symbolically they were [and are] central to a As with “Bushmen,” revived popular and civic number of different ideological constellations.”6 usage has not dispelled debates about proper In the European “age of discovery,” assumed links nomenclature and land right claims, nor eased, in between “modern savages” and stone-age peoples Skotnes’ words, the “tangled lines of inheritance of Europe were common. “Modern savages” were that characterize Khoisan identity today.”12 “found” at the “uttermost ends of the earth” and Artist and San scholar Pippa Skotnes suggests the South African Cape represented just such a that, “The final dispossession of the Khoisan place.7 Voyages to these distant parts represented came with their assimilation into Afrikaner life a kind of time travel for which Europeans “made and their classifcation along with others of (as the crucial substitution of space for time.”8 the state perceived it) ‘mixed blood’ as ‘Cape But for European settlers living in proximity Coloured.’”13 to the indigenous peoples of South Africa, the The dispossession of these indigenous mythologized temporal distance became a critical peoples by European settlers suggests that the replacement for spatial distancing. European Khoisan problematic is not easily positioned under modernity was produced by the collapse and the themes of Africa and modernity although distortion of time such that simultaneous presents both are critically present. Notwithstanding were rendered chronologically distant and through their long history of social, political, and cultural such reductive exercises, a process of “othering” engagement with Bantu peoples, the indigenous was begun. peoples of southern Africa are and have been South Africa’s earliest inhabitants are repeatedly situated apart from black Africans commonly called the Khoikhoi (KhoiKhoi) and the for ideological, economic and political gain .14 San, the former cast as pastoralists and the latter The indigenous people are treated very much as hunter-gathers. Although movement among like the “discovered” hominid fossils used to the early inhabitants and between these modes support claims that South Africa is the “cradle of living took place, modernist narratives created of humankind.” They are located within “Africa” separate myths and derogatory names — the but as relics of “prehistory” are considered not Hottentots and the Bushmen — for the Khoi per se “African” i.e. “black African.” The issue in and the San, respectively.9 Distinguishing hunter- question here is specifcally the African identity gatherers from pastoralists served the ideological, and modernity of white South Africans, which unilinear trajectory of cultural evolution, and was contemporaneous yet deemed superior rather secured the San’s place as first primitives. The than parallel to other modernities within the same clicks that dominate the languages spoken by location.15 To quote one noted South African the Khoi and the San were the subject of early archaeologist, “All people who populate the world Critical Interventions 3/4, Spring 2009 INDIGENOUS RELATIONS 117 today are descended from people who originated of primitivism — the vestigial Adam. in Africa […] The San or ‘Bushmen’ of southern There is still some of the primitive Africa are descended from those individuals who man in all of us, and we as Europeans stayed at home and did not emigrate to seek their were perfectly justifed in taking what fortunes elsewhere.”16 we wanted from our ancestors, and I South African archeological studies long looked upon the Bushman as rather a served two mythic constructs. First, that the minor form of this big background, prehistory evident in southern Africa could be because the white people had ancestors sequenced back to Europe and second, that South who had lived in caves, and [there are] Africa’s prehistory was indelibly linked to the San, white people within civilization living a modern/contemporary ethnically designated primitive and simple lives today and they group who were seen as living relics of southern still retain something of that outlook Africa’s prehistory.17 As archaeologist Nick which the artist admires. I am going into Shepherd poignantly argued, colonial archeology