Race Otherwise

Forging a new humanism for South Africa

Zimitri Erasmus

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781776140589
• eBook ISBN: 9781776141852
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Minority Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Three tensions to consider in the making and unmaking of race In Race Otherwise: Forging a New Humanism for South Africa Zimitri Erasmus questions the notion that one can know 'race' with one's eyes, or through racial categories and or genetic ancestry tests. She moves between the intimate probing of racial identities as we experience them individually, and analysis of the global historical forces that have created these identities and woven them into our thinking about what it means to be 'human'. Starting from her own family's journeys through regions of the world and ascribed racial identities, she develops her argument about how it is possible to recognize the pervasiveness of race thinking without submitting to its power. Drawing on the theoretical work of Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter and others, Erasmus argues for a new way of 'coming to know otherwise', of seeing the boundaries between racial identities as thresholds to be crossed, through politically charged acts of imagination and love.

1

This Blackness

Instead of denying history and fabricating a totalising colouredness, ‘multiple belongings’ can be seen as an alternative way of viewing a culture where participation in a number of coloured micro-communities whose interests conflict and overlap could become a rehearsal of cultural life in the larger South African community where we learn to perform the same kind of negotiations in terms of identity within a lived culture characterised by difference.

ZOE WICOMB
‘Shame and identity: the case of the coloured in South Africa’, 1998

... the meaning and significance of whiteness (and blackness) within a given polity at a given time [matters] ... why. take the dominant [meaning] to be definitive .

MICHAEL J. MONAHAN
The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity, 2011

MY BLACKNESS IS SUPPOSEDLY visible only because I do not ‘look white’.¹ But, in some parts of West Africa I am called white. My blackness is ambiguous because I am not black Black or black African. These descriptions are increasingly used to distinguish between formerly colonised South Africans with different historical relationships to this region and its colonial past. I am (more often than not) not considered African in South Africa. I am still called ‘Coloured’.² In the Western and Eastern Cape provinces ‘what I am’, racially speaking, is seldom questioned. In Limpopo, Gauteng and Mpumalanga, the northern provinces of the country, I am asked which tribe and which country I am from. In parts of Europe I am assumed to be from a Caribbean island. African-Americans are surprised to find that I was born and live ‘in Africa’. People from different parts of the world ask ‘what mix’ I am. Which would you prefer? Salt and vinegar or cinnamon and sugar? Neither one of my parents was black Black. Neither one of them was white White.³ I am not half-and-half.

FAMILY STORIES

The anthropologist Tim Ingold borrows the term ‘meshworks’ from Henri Lefebvre to refer to reticulate lines of journey, not ‘networks’ or lines of ‘getting-there’ that connect points as destinations (Ingold 2007: 81-84, 2012: 206). Some of my own sensibilities are beautifully expressed in his writing:

Launched upon the tides of history, we have to cling to things, hoping that the friction of our contact will somehow suffice to countervail the currents that would otherwise sweep us to oblivion ... in holding on to one another – lies the very essence of sociality ... Nothing can hold on unless it puts out a line, and unless that line can tangle with others. When everything tangles with everything else, the result is what I call a meshwork. To describe the meshwork is to start from the premise that every living being is a line or, better, a bundle of lines [a knot]. (Ingold 2015: 3)

Like all families, mine is a bundle of lines. A bundle of story lines. A bundle of journey lines. South Africa’s colonial history is at their core. Its ‘meshworks’ – produced by the interconnected processes of modernity and coloniality – met in the southern African region and made waves of community that tangled in the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The latter is suggestively renamed ‘the Afrasian Sea’ by Michael N. Pearson (2007), a scholar of the Indian Ocean, to express the movement of communities between Africa and Asia that dates back to the first century CE. From these oceanic perspectives, the landscape and mindscape at the tip of the continent are thresholds between the two oceans; between the unrecorded lives sustained, changed and sacrificed by these seas; between circuits of ideas; and between circuits of lived experience and of possibilities.

My mother’s maternal grandmother was from St Helena Island. My mother told me that her paternal grandfather wore a kuffiya, a form of headdress worn by Muslim men in parts of the world, on his deathbed. He came to South Africa from Java with his parents, who were Muslim. Their surname changed from Abdurahman to Adriaan. When this change happened remains unclear. This resonates with the formation of Muslim communities at the Cape (later classified ‘Malay’), which dates back to 1860 with the arrival of indentured labourers and traders from South Asia (Baderoon and Green 2012: 166). These routes make up the contours of the underside of South Africa’s modernity and its history of conquest, indenture and slavery at the early Cape (Dooling 1994; Ross 1983; Shell 1994; Worden 2007). I was shown photographs of a maternal great-aunt who was described as a boere tannie (Dutch aunty). She was called Cousin Snow and lived in the northern region of the Cape Province. My paternal grandfather was of the KhoiKhoi, people considered indigenous to South Africa. This is a diasporic history of cross-currents, of slavery and various forms of unfree labour, of vrijzwarten (free black people), of inboekseling (apprenticed labour), and of Dutch settlement. It is a history of creolisation: processes by which ways of living and forms of community – for the most part (but not only) born of struggles against violent power – are forged in order to survive and to remake histories. These histories are intertwined in ways that do not obliterate social differences and they suggest several possibilities including complicity and resistance (not necessarily separate acts); domination and reciprocity; and various forms of intimacy and of distance. This diasporic history gestures towards fragments of multiple, mostly unknown elsewheres: historic, geographic, religious, cultural and epistemic elsewheres. St Helena Island, the South Atlantic Ocean, Islam, the Indian Ocean, the Cape before colonial settlement and the Netherlands are among these and possibly other unknown elsewheres.

My family’s stories are one response to a question posed by the literary scholar and poet Gabeba Baderoon: ‘What do the two oceans tell us?’ They show that the oceans ‘tell us about history’; about the ways in which ‘the individual relation to the sea is weighted with history’; about the ways in which ‘the register of the private can open a path to history’ (Baderoon 2009: 93-96). Histories of the North Atlantic have had a preponderant influence on scholarship about race because of its place in the birth of capitalist modernity as a world system based on the trade in African slaves (see Gilroy 1993). But, for scholars in the humanities and social sciences who study southern Africa, this is changing. The historian and scholar of literary studies Isabel Hofmeyr (2007) explicates the ways in which historiographies of the Indian Ocean query theoretical assumptions premised on black Atlantic motifs. In her overview of these historiographies she notes some of the differences between the Indian and the North Atlantic Oceans: the slave trade in the Indian Ocean was predominantly female, not male; this was trade in household, not plantation slaves; distinctions between slaves and ‘free’ people, between indentured labourers and settlers, and associations of race with slavery were not as pronounced as in the North Atlantic. Convicts and lascars (seamen) were among these ‘forms of unfree labour’, an important analytic device (according to Hofmeyr) for understanding the Indian Ocean. Equally important for Hofmeyr is the variety of free migrants – which included independent traders and mainly Muslim clerics and pilgrims – who crisscrossed this ocean.

The Indian Ocean can be thought of as an emergent epistemic space – a domain of lived experience that is configured by interconnected histories; by the exchange and movement of people, things and ideas; and by the circulation of technologies, communities and institutions; it is a space that enables critical inquiry into normative ways of knowing. In the words of John C. Hawley, a professor of English, ‘the Indian Ocean world offers a philosophical challenge to the hegemony of Western modernity’ (2008: 5). Hofmeyr (2007) notes the ways in which this domain troubles racialised and binary notions of the slave as African and the free person as European; the ways in which it questions clear and stable divisions between slave and free person, and in so doing, reveals complex meanings of freedom, un-freedom, settler, diaspora, race and agency. This approach to Indian Ocean histories reopens several questions: who is a settler; who is a slave; who was dispossessed of land and livelihoods, and by whom; what were the limits, if any, on colonial power; and who was involved in the making of modernity, and in anti-colonial struggles. Hofmeyr suggests that the circulation of ideas across the Indian Ocean produces a conception of colonialism as more about ‘a contestation of universalisms’ than about local encounters with global forces. This complex and layered texture of Indian Ocean histories is part of the bundle of spoken and unspoken lines that make up my family’s stories.

The anthropologist Daniel Yon (2007) examines the other ocean-side of this threshold – the spatially vast South Atlantic oceanic world. Like scholarship on the Indian Ocean, his work suggests that the South Atlantic Ocean, and specifically St Helena Island, can be thought of as an emergent and critical epistemic space. Its ‘flux and fluidity [can be] invoked as a contrast to an Apartheid world that insists upon fixity’ (2007: 144). This troubles taken-for-granted ideas about race-making, race-mixing, and about inevitable links between place/nature and race/culture. These links are expressed in what became a universal racial taxonomy premised on theories about the origin of permanent differences among humans as a species – Africa/Negroid, Asia/Mongoloid, Europe/Caucasoid.

Yon (2007) draws on moments in the history of St Helena Island – including its early entanglements with the Cape Colony and with the Indian Ocean – to highlight the multiplicity and movement of people to and from the island, which he describes as a meeting place for the Indian Ocean, Europe, the Americas, Africa and South and East Asia. From 1502, this island was inhabited, for shorter or longer periods, by Portuguese exiled and convalescent soldiers from its colony, Goa; by British colonists; by slaves from Africa and the Indian Ocean islands; and by indentured labourers from China. Yon notes the ways in which these flows, temporary landings, emigrations and meetings trouble and sometimes rearticulate the Cape’s iteration of Eurocentred modernist politics, which welded together race and place to produce a discourse of roots and origins (2007: 148-60). He refers particularly to the period from the emigration of St Helenians to Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East London, Durban and Port Nolloth in the late nineteenth century (when the significance of the island as a hub declined) through to the dawn of official apartheid in 1948. My grandmothers’ parents were, in all likelihood, among those who emigrated from the island to various parts of the Cape during this time, and whose offspring were later classified under apartheid as ‘of mixed-St Helena race’ (2007: 157) and as Coloured.

Hofmeyr and Yon show that St Helena Island and the port city of Cape Town at the Cape of Good Hope are two historical nodes in these ocean spaces through which people, ideas and goods circulated. These nodes, like slave and trading ships, tack the two oceans into a quadrangle of meshworks – bordered by the Americas, Europe and Africa to its southern tip – in the south (Yon 2007). The meshworks are at the centre of my family history, and they are an important part of the history of southern Africa because of its position as a threshold between the two oceans, not because of the region as a bounded territory.

LIVING INSIDE APARTHEID

Frantz Fanon, the revolutionary intellectual from Martinique, saw apartheid as ‘an emblematic instance ... of the colonial condition’ (Sekyi-Otu 1996: 2), a condition for which racialisation is a fundamental ordering principle. From the mid-seventeenth century, British and Dutch colonial regimes at the early Cape instituted racialised legal status groups such as ‘slave’, ‘Khoi’ and ‘free burgher’ (Hendricks 2001; Keegan 1996; Reddy 2000). These regimes and their legalities were incubators for South Africa’s subsequent social orders of segregation and for apartheid’s racial classifications. Apartheid flattened South Africa’s complex entanglement with Indian and South Atlantic Ocean histories into a racial category – Coloured. By its logic my family and I, like all people it classified Coloured, were destined to a particular place in the material and social world. In the parlance of the dominant, this place was somewhere between the undeserving and supposedly backward bottom social layer who were tribal subjects, and the deserving tutored top, its full citizens. Following the work of the philosopher Enrique Dussel (2013: xix-xxii), this social positioning – like that of the tribal subject – can be described as a form of ‘exteriority’: a positioning outside of hegemonic discourse(s) which is constituted as incommensurable difference (Escobar 2013: 40). The exteriority of people classified Coloured is specific because of their complex positioning. To be Coloured is to be outside of whiteness and of European-ness. It is to be inside of non-whiteness and non-European-ness. To be Coloured is to be outside of hegemonic ideas about what it means to be African. These ideas conflate blackness with African-ness. To be Coloured is to be outside of hegemonic ideas about what it means to be Black.

Apartheid prescribed the way one could be and who one could become in the world. In the narrow sense of ‘becoming’, my father qualified with a Junior Certificate (under the apartheid education system, a certificate issued two years before the completion of the matriculation examinations) and hoped to become a lawyer. He found work as a clerk in a lawyer’s office. For him, this job was a beginning. The combined effects of his interest in the law spurred by the loss of his father’s title deed to land in the Karoo town of Willowmore, of apartheid’s racial exclusions, and of the meagre assets of his rural parents meant that he eventually settled for joining the South African Police force. This was the closest he could come to being an officer of the law.

My father’s livelihood touched my youth in complex and painful ways. These were the 1970s and 1980s – the height of apartheid and of resistance to it. My early teenage years began in 1977, just after the 1976 Soweto uprisings. Some of my peers who perceived me as politically untrustworthy called me an impimpi – one who informs police of anti-apartheid sentiments and activity. This shaming prompted me to ask why my father had to be a policeman. I remember my mother’s response: ‘My child, if your father was not a policeman, you would have no food to eat, and no shoes on your feet.’

I was not aware that senior and influential members of the South African Police did not trust my father. One night – I was alone with my mother while he was on the night shift – police parked across the road and shone their vehicle lights into my parents’ bedroom window for a sustained time, waking my mother and me. In the 1970s and 1980s this was an especially mild act of intimidation in comparison to the routine torture, imprisonment and police brutality to which many South Africans were subjected. The narrative in my family was that my father’s loyalty to the South African Police was in doubt because, unlike most of his fellow officers, he refused to carry arms on his person, he refused to shoot and to order other officers to shoot at protestors during township rallies and unrest.

If one were uncritically to accept this narrative, perhaps this was a way in which my father held onto humaning in the midst of a job and a life that involved dehumanisation. I remember that he was never armed. However, as a young child, I knew that he had access to a firearm. One day I saw him retrieve it from the casing of our upright piano. Its shape could not be hidden by the wrappings of yellow dusting cloths. His facial expression showed that I was not meant to witness this act. I do not know why he retrieved it. Everything about my father’s job was either unspoken or mentioned in hushed tones. The family narrative about my father suggests his subtle defiance of the policing system. Yet, at Gelvandale Police Station, my father worked his way up the ranks from an officer ‘walking beat’ (on foot patrol) in his early twenties, to become captain and station commander of Bethelsdorp Police Station a few years before his retirement at fifty-five. This leaves me grappling with the ways in which he would have been complicit with the policing system. Few black men were promoted to such high office during apartheid.

Situated about twenty kilometres north-west of Port Elizabeth, Bethelsdorp was established as a mission station for Christianised KhoiKhoi in the early 1800s. It was one of the London Missionary Society’s oldest missions, which served as a reservoir of cheap labour for adjacent farms as well as a military base from which to crush ongoing anti-colonial resistance by independent KhoiKhoi and Xhosa-speaking communities (Majeke 1952). The police stations at Gelvandale and Bethelsdorp – where working class communities resided – were institutions for people classified Coloured and living in townships designated for Coloureds, as stipulated respectively in the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act No. 49 of 1953 and in the Group Areas Act No. 41 of 1950. In The Atlas of Apartheid, the geographer A.J. Christopher writes about the ways in which these Acts, their predecessors and accompanying apartheid laws racially demarcated life and space. He provides an alarming, yet experientially real, architectural plan of the post office in Steytlerville, a small Karoo town near Willowmore where my father was born and grew up. The plan shows racially separate public entrances, service counters and service staff (Christopher 1994: 143-44). These socio-political ramifications of the personal are localised expressions of the coloniality of apartheid power. The four tightly knit coordinates of this matrix of power are the regulation of labour, of the economy, of nature and of space; control over gender and sexuality; authority embodied in the state and the military; and control over inter-subjectivity and knowledge (Mignolo 2013: 3; Quijano 2000).

Port Elizabeth, the city of my birth, is inscribed with this power. In the fifteenth century ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Appreciations
• Abbreviations and acronyms
• Foreword: Rehumaning our times, or love in a time of hate
• Prelude
• Illustrations follow page 100
• 1. This Blackness
• 2. A Conversation
• 3. The Look
• 4. The Category
• 5. The Gene
• 6. Beginnings
• 7. Open Closure
• Notes
• References
• Index