Shackled Memories and Elusive Discourses? Colonial Slavery and the Contemporary Cultural and Artistic Imagination in South Africa Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktogrades der Philosophie an der Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität München vorgelegt von PUMLA DINEO GQOLA München, 2004 1 Vorgelegt am 09. Oktober 2003 Disputation am 23. Januar 2004 Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Graham Huggan Zweitgutachter: Prof. Dr. Berndt Ostendorf ii Abstract Much has been made about South Africa’s transition from histories of colonialism, slavery and most recently apartheid. “Memory” as a descriptive features quite prominently in the definition of the country’s reckoning with its pasts. While there has been an outpouring of academic essays, anthologies and other full length texts which study this transition, most have focused on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). This study links with that research in its concern with South Africa’s past and the meaning-making processes attendant to it, but reads specifically memory activity which pertains to colonial slavery as practiced predominantly in the western Cape for three centuries by the British and the Dutch. Theoretically, the thesis engages closely with the vast terrain of interdisciplinary memory studies which characterises the Humanities and Social Sciences. It reads memory as one way of processing the past, and interprets a variety of cultural, literary and filmic texts to ascertain the particular experiences in relation to slave pasts being fashioned, processed and disseminated. The project studies various negotiations of raced and gendered identities in creative and other and other public spaces in contemporary South Africa, by being particularly attentive to the encoding of consciousness about the country’s slave past. Most usefully, many theorists of memory, Toni Morrison and Dorothy Pennington among them, suggest that this consciousness of the past, and the activity it engenders, is best thought of in shapeshifting forms. Morrison’s rememory, and Pennington’s helix-shaped memory are useful for the reading of creative performances of slave memory thematically and temporally. The introduction opens the inquiry by surveying various strands and themes of the collective memory and history debates of previous decades. In this regard, this beginning is concerned less with pinpointing the exact differences between memory and history, an arguably impossible task given the contestation around the definition, than with ascertaining the locations of specific forms of historical consciousness in the creative imaginary. Much of the material surveyed across disciplines attributes to memory, and popular historymaking, a dialogue between past and present whilst ascribing sense to both the eras and their relationship. In this sense, then, memory is active, entailing a personal relationship with the past which acts as a mediator of reality on a day to day basis. iii Chapter one analyses the larger memory process in South Africa over the last nine years since the onset of democracy. In the nation-building exercise the relationship between the sites of historical consciousness from different eras finds expression in dissonant localities. Why is it, for example, that so little is known publicly about enslavement as one of the formative systems of a modern South Africa? At the same time, the larger processes of memory-making, mostly linked to the TRC, have engendered a variety of explorations into the possible meanings and experiences of past eras. It also left other experiences as unspeakable. This chapter unpacks the manner in which the narration of apartheid atrocities enabled the excavation of slave presences, together with a questioning of why this unearthing of slave rememory has been so belated. Chapter two reads some of the ways in which a slave past enters into current discourses through which racial identities are being reformatted and renegotiated. It examines the manifestations of this opening up of identity which Kopano Ratele has suggested carries the possibilities of freedom. The chapter reads three processes through which racial belonging is refashioned. First, it analyses the various strands of the project which can be seen to deconstruct the legacy of white racial purity claims until recently. I argue that although superficially the location of indigenous Khoi and slave ancestry within the lineages of apartheid’s ruling families to work similarly to the now widespread white South African laying claim to an indigenous foremother, these nonetheless carry different implications. The differences are uncovered through paying attention to how context alters the ensuing meanings and ends to which they work. It then proceeds from this to examine some of the activity within the terrain of coloured identities. Under previous governments, coloured subjects were legally trapped in discourses of racial mixing. In the western Cape, the communities are descendents of enslaved peoples. The chapter demonstrates how two impulses, one to re-inhabit colouredness as an identity that is historicised and worked through; and another which disclaims it in favour of a Khoi indigeneity with admitted slave foreparentage, work to very similar ends. To the extent that coloured identities and Khoi assertions are inhabited in a variety of ways which jarring political effects, the chapter focuses on two specific collective articulations of these identities. iv Chapter three analyses representations of Sara Bartmann, the most famous slave and Khoi woman from South Africa. The section addresses itself to representations of this particular subject based on the proliferation of academic, literary and filmic material globally which seeks to represent her. Immortalised under the slur “Hottentot Venus” she has been made to function as icon for a variety of ends since enslavement, transportation to Europe and exhibition in London and Paris, her dissection, and the preservation of her brain and genitalia by France’s foremost anatomist of the nineteenth century in the name of science. The chapter is concerned with the fraught politics of representing her in ways which do not recreate earlier nineteenth century, and more recent misguided twentieth century, tropes which objectify her b y placing her outside history. Given that most of the material which references her name, usually as “Hottentot Venus” uses her as illustration for someone else, how do narratives which dissociate themselves from this legacy represent her? In this chapter three literary texts are read as charting a variety of representations of Bartmann which suggest refreshing alternatives. I argue here that they partake in Black feminist representation politics. The fourth and final chapter examines the crevices of memory, and how it links with representations of diaspora for the descendants of slaves in the western Cape. Diasporic sensibility finds exploration as theme among those descendants of the enshackled who identify as “Cape Malay” or “Cape Muslim”. Also classified coloured in the previous dispensations, these identities cluster around slave foreparentage transported from South East Asia. This section of the thesis analyses various environments where memory signals a diasporic articulation. Given that memory is seen to “linger in forms which do not easily give up the story”, as Nkiru Nzegwu asserts in the introduction, various texts are read to work the service of processing diasporic memory. In this chapter, visual installations, the visibility and negotiations signalled through “Cape Malay food”, and the sense of belonging signalled through Islam as “high cultured” religion in the first novel on slavery written by a descendant of slaves in South Africa, are read for ways in which they link to a making sense of slave pasts for these communities. The emerging pattern also points to the manner in which a sophisticated flirtation with diaspora is able to, at the same time, anchor in another locality. The Cape Malay/Capetonian Muslim diasporic artistic activity read here complicates some of the standard, taken-for-granted, tenets v of diaspora theory, and most of its meanings are only uncovered when an assortment of diasporic theoretical tools are brought to bear on the texts. In the conclusion, the findings of the various chapters are brought together with a view to examining the emerging, larger picture. The primary material examined betrays a high level of intertextuality, and resists casting itself in modes which suggest “purist” readings. This appears particularly apt for interpreting the crevices of memory, a project which itself is always complex, and in helix-fashion moving forwards at the same time that it looks in on itself. The ending makes the contribution of this study to studies on the memory process explicit, and finds its timing opportune as the democracy matures and possibly embarks on another stream of projects. This accident of timing will clearly have implications for the study of memory processes in contemporary South Africa. Finally, it suggests some “absences” in this project, the first full-length examination of the terrain of slave re-memory in contemporary South Africa, and concludes by suggesting evolving configurations, as slave memory becomes more public, for future scholastic investigations. vi Pumla Dineo Gqola Dphil Dissertation Title: Shackled Memories and Elusive Discourses? Colonial Slavery and the Contemporary Cultural and Artistic Imagination in South Africa Submitted: 09 October 2003 German summary Es ist