Chapter 1 Chapter 2

Notes Chapter 1 1. This process is, however, not a one-way process insofar as one can employ historical tissues of contemporary circumstances to reread and reinterpret a [past] historical culture, ritual, or event. 2. “Postcolonialism” is not the same as post-colonialism. Post-colonialism (hyphenated) refers to “after Colonialism,” a period or condition of life at the end of colonialism. Postcolonialism, on the other hand, is the theory that attempts to understand the post-colonial condition. Postcolonialism involves the challenge or the attempt to decolonize the mind from its ideological prison. 3. Kant is very much influenced in this imperative by Jesus’ teaching in Mtt 7:12: “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the law and the prophets.” Chapter 2 1. See, also Appiah (1992:264). 2. No culture is static. Culture evolves, it develops, and it is open and dynamic. Cultural evolution is what happens when a worldview mutates and adapts other worldviews. Sometimes, it enlarges and sometimes it sheds its roots. 3. The search for neutrality ignores context, as it is universalistic and impartial. This approach in my view denies the subject of history a representation, a voice, a presence and subjectivity. 4. Code quotations taken from Mamdani 1996:63–71. 5. This term originally refers to an enclosure for cattle or livestock located in an African homestead (collections of houses of extended family of relatives). In the course of South Africa’s colonial history, it ceases to denote animal pen and became used as a general reference to a homestead. 6. This trend continues with the union of South Africa in 1910 where section 147 of the Union’s act gave the governor general absolute control of native affairs. 7. Pre-1994 South Africa offers an analytical point of reference to understand the relationship between power and authority. Where power is defined as an ability to control, influence actively or passively the action of others, authority may be defined as power transformed into right—the right to exercise such power. In other words, when power gains legitimacy, an acceptance so to speak, 194 NOTES it is essentially transformed into authority. A powerful state is not necessarily legitimate if it does not fulfill the barest minimal condition to gain legitimacy. It might be able to control the action of its people, but it is still illegitimate. Based on this, apartheid government was powerful but illegitimate state for it did not fulfill the barest minimal condition on which to gain legitimacy. In the section that follows, one notices how through different concessions, attempts were made by the apartheid regime to gain acceptance. 8. It ceases to be a case of racial segregation, but extends to the quality of being human. Since what is “white” only is legislatively allowed to be bet- ter, the derivative implication is that these are essentially more human than others. 9. Race and ethnicity are not synonymous. Race is a human construction and invention and neither a biological nor a scientific fact. “Race” is also a political construction at the service of an ideology or interest group. “Race” emerges through the social and historical process of racialization. Racism becomes an ideology that promotes discrimination against certain people on the basis of their perceived “racial” differences and maintains that these constructions of “races” are objective, fact and neutral (see McLeod 2000:110–111). “Race” is an imagined, constructed sociohistorical fantasy and not a biological fact. Racism in my view is a psycho-social deception, it simply smacks of “cognitive incapacity”to look beyond our mindsets. 10. The Consumerist impulse suffered by middle class black South Africans in postapartheid SA lend credibility to the regeneration of an existential oblit- eration suffered during apartheid capitalist racialism where wealth or access to material resources defined one’s humanity. Many blacks in an attempt to reconstitute their subjectivity embarked on a pilgrimage of change from “being to having”, where having is symbolized by material goods to show for it and synonymous to an actualized subjectivity. The tragedy being that it is humanity or subjectivity on a borrowed credit! Most of the goods so acquired are usually on credit (see Chapter 5). 11. This Trek was led by Piet Retief in the 1830s to escape the worsening economic conditions and worsening debt in the Cape peninsula. According to Worden (2000:14), “it provided the symbolic images crucial to the ethos of Afrikaner nationalism”. Yet, this trek differed significantly from trekkers of earlier gen- erations. The early trekkers were disenchanted with the land tenure system introduced by the Cape government but most significantly about the socioeconomic implications of admitting freed slaves and khoikhoi servants as freeman, “on equal footing with Christians, contrary to the laws of God and the natural distinction of race and colour” (Worden 2000:14). The last clause will deter- mine the emergence of Black Theology in Chapter 4 to challenge this kind of biblical distortion and racist Christianity. 12. The cruelty of the passes is not only the restriction of movement, largely, one need to consider the wider psychosocial impact on pass bearers: bro- ken homes, husbands and wives separated from each other, institutionalized depersonalization, etc. NOTES 195 Chapter 3 1. Psychoanalysts will have a field day trying to understand the neurotic power play of Adolf Hitler and the rationality of German populace in the 1930s. At the rise of Hitler, Germany was at its worst socioeconomic meltdown in recorded history. Germany not only lost out in WWI, they were also made to pay repara- tions, a move that eroded not only the national pride but also heighted acute poverty and worst inflation in history. This was the context in which Hitler emerged and the people were desperate to believe in anything, in anybody who could make them stand up as Germans even for a narcissist psychopath like Hitler. In this way, the Nazi leadership is in some way, a millennial movement. It is no wonder that many ordinary Germans referred to Hitler as Mein Führer, literally, a word that evokes a sense of divine leadership. 2. The Greek term, Παρoυσια´ or Latin adventus literally translates as the Second Coming. This is essentially the core teaching of Christian eschatology on the last days before the second coming of Christ. In the Bible, references to the Parousia will be found in Matthew 24.27, 25:31, Romans 2:5–16, 14:10, 1Cor. 4:5, 5:10, 15:23, 2Thess.1:5, 2:1–9, et cetera. 3. Parousian-Christian influence: traditionally, although the Xhosa believe in ancestral worship and Qamata [ancient Xhosa- Ukqamata] (the creator), the latter being an influence of Christianity, they do not believe in the resurrection of the dead nor in reincarnation. 4. The actual number of casualty varies and different accounts give different numbers. Some would put the numbers of the dead as 163 and 129 wounded (cf. Hunter 1961:565; Switzer 1990:75) 5. Biko (2004:85, 24) quotes Jaspers at length in his attack of white South Africans for their complicity in apartheid: The very fact that those disgruntled whites remain to enjoy the fruits of the system would alone be enough to condemn them at Nuremburg. Listen to Karl Jaspers writing on the concept of metaphysical guilt: “[T]here exists amongst men, because they are men, a solidarity through which each shares responsibility for every injustice and every wrong committed in the world and especially for crimes that are committed in his presence or of which he cannot be ignorant. If I do not do whatever I can to prevent them, I am an accomplice in them. If I have risked my life in order to prevent the murder of other men, if I have stood silent, I feel guilty in a sense that cannot in any adequate fashion be understood juristically or politically or morally ...That I am still alive after such things have been done weighs on me as a guilt that cannot be expiated”. Chapter 4 1. For example, Galatians, 3:28 where St. Paul had written, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. 196 NOTES 2. Irrational in this context must be qualified for there exists certain leverage of rationality within this “irrational” particularity. The logic of the irrationality is that apartheid was a system legitimized through a discourse of continuous self- deception usually justified by nascent pseudo-Christian ethics of “separateness”. One would say it was a logic of rational-irrationality. 3. The Newspaper citations in this section are culled from Hugo (1988). Chapter 5 1. One example of such synchronic and diachronic difference is that apartheid emphasized “separateness,” maximum exclusion of the “other,” what I have described as a diachronic isolationism. The French policy of assimilation, which stimulated négritude, emphasized a synchronic relationship. French colonies were extensions of the French Empire with residents of cities such as Dakar, St. Louis, Goree, Rufisique becoming “citizens” of France. Some of these “citizens,” such as Senghor, went as far as becoming permanent members of the French parliament. 2. Note the use of ubuntu to characterize the quality of blacks in contrast to whites by Hilda Kuper as early as 1964. 3. Rene Girard does offer very insightful study on the theory of scapegoatism. 4. I owe this information to Ms. Melody Ngcuka, a University counselor. 5. Professor Michael Neocosmos who protested against this misdemeanor is “white”. Chapter 6 1. It need be mentioned that most of the militant defenders of ubuntu were largely white South African academics such as Augustine Shutte, D.J.

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