Chapter 1 Confronting the Past: On the Anthropology of Ethics ! Trauma in Archives ! It is the summer of 2013 February. After ordering a cool drink at the Spur in Vereeniging, I sat at the table in the middle of a restaurant, waiting to do an interview with my past. About six weeks before I had discovered that my father had been one of the subjects of my study while doing archival research in the William Cullen Library at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. I was looking at the violent events that led to the Zone 7 shooting in Sebokeng when I came across his name, Tilly Bojosi, alongside his brother’s name, Ismael Bojosi. In the archive they are part of a gang, or at least many in the community are convinced they are. A gang that was unleashing all forms of terror on local activists. After a long period of soul searching, I decided to look for him and request an interview, to talk to him about the 1980s and his role in the violence thereof. ! So I sat, waiting for this man, a man I knew very little about. Up to this point we had only spoken a few times, totalling a little over 30 minutes, since I was born. In December of 2003, I had just finished matric1. In fact, it was the day after matric results had been published in national newspapers and my name had appeared with an exemption, meaning that I had qualified for admission to university. A person came home, greeted my grandmother and said that my father was up by the street corner and requesting to see me. I replied asking why he sent someone and had not come himself. The man simply said he was passing the message, but he thought I should go. I asked my grandmother what she thought and she told me to go and hear what he had to say. I protested, saying that it is a sign of disrespect to wait at the street corner and send a person when he could have come himself. My grandmother explained to me that he could not come himself because custom dictated that if he did, he would have to be led by his own elders. I conceded and went to see him. ! He congratulated me on passing matric and asked what was next for me. I then told him that I had applied to the University of Witwatersrand for a degree in Social Sciences. He asked me if I would be staying at the university, to which I replied in the affirmative. He then lamented that I should not move into student residence, that instead I should continue to stay at home and travel every day because there was too much drug abuse at varsities. At this stage, I got very irritated. How could this person, who was a complete stranger to me, think I could do drugs when I got to varsity? He asked me if I could drive and if I had a driving license. I replied that I did not know how to drive. He went on to imply that he would see what he could do. ! 1 Matriculation (‘matric’) exams are the final examination for high school students in South Africa, and determine eligibility for college or university entrance. "1 We moved to a conversation about my being a faithful Christian, who is always at church. In a very sarcastic tone, he rhetorically asked why I attend church so much. In a firm, but not overly excited, tone I replied that it was because God was the only father I knew. This, I suspect, accelerated the end of the conversation. In less than ten minutes our meeting ended, on the street corner, next to his car. I walked back home as he drove off. ! Now we are in 2013. It had been 10 years since that last encounter. It had also been 27 years since 1985, the year of my birth, and I would turn 28 in just a few months. He was an absent father to me, but a father nonetheless. A married man with two children in his immediate family. He was a businessman who lived at the tipping edge of black middle-class life, in a previously whites only town, when many blacks continued to live in the black townships of apartheid times. ! Over the years, the impression I held on to is that I found him very hard to converse with. He seemed almost smooth, but in a very unsettling way. Always in a hurry, often to fix the relationship, perhaps so that he did not have to account for the past – his absence in my life and what it may mean. ! Coincidentally, before delving into each of the pages of the Peace Corps archive which documented incidences of violence in the Vaal and other areas, I received a call from a strange number. This was in January, the second day of that month. It was him on the other end of the phone. He was asking for a meeting in an attempt to reach out after many years of having not spoken at all. This is how I got to save his number, mostly in an attempt to make sure I did not take his calls again. ! And so it happened that when I did call, his reaching out was focused on mending relations. I explained that I was doing school work, a PhD to be precise. “I came across a painful story of you and your brother which I really would like to speak to you about”, I told him. I remember these words clearly, because I had rehearsed them in my head many times before. “I do life history interviews”, I said, and I told him that this means “we start from when you were born right to the present because that allows me to situate the period I may be interested in within a much richer history of your life”. I added that I understood that we have an unfinished business and if he would like us to discuss that first I would be amenable. Also if he would not like to speak about it at all, again, I would understand and would never hold it against him. ! Perhaps knowing that it was related to my school work, he agreed. I still could sense though, as we arranged where to meet, that he was trying to kill two birds with one stone – he wanted to mend relations between us. My predicament was – What do I do with this interview? Here I came as a student: do I conduct the interview whilst controlling him not to use it to recruit me into his life, and speak of reconciliation? These questions troubled me in the depths of my "2 soul. Was this work a way and a platform to do this? Frankly, I thought to myself, I had made peace long ago with his absence and the fact of my rejection by his family and his mother. I might risk undoing this peace I had realised, and doing so during a PhD project that should be finished soon. ! When I turned eleven, my mother sat me down to explain that my father had deserted me. I remember that evening in Evaton, the township where I grew up, when she came to explain to me. She sat down and, by candle light, she began to narrate the story. She told me that when she fell pregnant with me, my grandmother and her brothers went to my father’s family home to present the matter of the pregnancy. Upon their arrival, they were rejected and told never to come back again. I never thought about what age my mom was until I had to interrogate this past in 1996; she was 30 years old, and I was 11. In 1984 when she conceived me she was only 18. ! My grandmother never forgets the rage of my father’s mother and how harsh she was to my family delegation. She tells me “they never even allowed us into the yard”. In humiliation, they came back home and that was the end of it. I came to know this story when I was 11 years old. I grew up to accept that I do not have a father, like many in the townships. Nevertheless, I am older now, and this is a struggle that I can choose not to get into, a burden I can choose not to carry. ! I did once, like any child would, wish that he could recognise me, come for me, integrate me into his family, as I came to hear and know about that family. I came to know that he lived a much better life than my family did, that his children went to better schools. I came to know this when I was in primary school, not from him, but from those who knew him and would discover that I was his child. Once, in 2002, I made national news when I won a national speech contest; my face appeared on TV and in newspapers. When I went to a tuck-shop not far from home, some men were sitting outside in a group. One of them told me that they recognised me from a newspaper picture. They asked me who my father was and I said, “Well he is not in my life, but his name is Tilly Bojosi.” The man exclaimed his surprise, asking how Tilly could desert a child like this.