Ties that Bind

Race And The Politics Of Friendship In South Africa

Jon Soske, Shannon Walsh, Sisonke Msimang, Stacy Hardy, Lesego Rampolokeng, T. J. Tallie, Franco Barchiesi, Bridget Kenny, Daniel Magaziner, Neelika Jayawardane, Tsitsi Jaji, Mosa Phadi, Nomancotsho Pakade, Molemo Moiloa, Nare Mokgotho, Frank B. Wilderson, Shannon Walsh, Jon Soske, Shannon Walsh, Jon Soske, Jon Soske, Shannon Walsh, Sisonke Msimang

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781868149698
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Minority Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

What does friendship have to do with racial difference, settler colonialism and post-apartheid South Africa? While histories of apartheid and colonialism in South Africa have often focused on the ideologies of segregation and white supremacy, Ties that Bind explores how the intimacies of friendship create vital spaces for practices of power and resistance. Combining interviews, history, poetry, visual arts, memoir and academic essay, the collection keeps alive the promise of friendship and its possibilities while investigating how affective relations are essential to the social reproduction of power. From the intimacy of personal relationships to the organising ideology of liberal colonial governance, the contributors explore the intersection of race and friendship from a kaleidoscope of viewpoints and scales. Insisting on a timeline that originates in settler colonialism, Ties that Bind uncovers the implication of anti-blackness within nonracialism, and powerfully challenges a simple reading of the Mandela moment and the rainbow nation. In the wake of countrywide student protests calling for decolonisation of the university, and reignited debates around racial inequality, this timely volume insists that the history of South African politics has always already been about friendship. Written in an accessible and engaging style, Ties that Bind will interest a wide audience of scholars, students and activists, as well as general readers curious about contemporary South African debates around race and intimacy.

1: THINKING ABOUT RACE AND FRIENDSHIP IN SOUTH AFRICA

JON SOSKE AND SHANNON WALSH

Writing in 1896, Olive Schreiner, arguably the most radical critic of imperial policy of her day, argued that a racial apocalypse could be averted only if South Africa’s white population ruled the country in the spirit of friendship, ‘a course of stern unremitting justice is demanded from us towards the native ... we [must] raise him & bind him to ourselves with indissoluble bonds of sympathy and gratitude’. By tying the responsibilities of colonial governance to the cultivation of an unbreakable emotional bond, Schreiner articulated a vision of friendship that served as both an instrument and outcome of the civilizing mission, replacing a precarious rule of violence with the cultivation of a ‘native’ subjectivity that was bound by affection and gratitude to the (former) colonial master.¹ Strikingly, a similar rhetoric can be found in the writing of white South Africans ranging from the segregationist Jan Smuts to the liberal author and politician Alan Paton, from apartheid ideologues of the 1950s to the young nonconformist Patrick Duncan. In the 1930s and 1940s, a social scientific version of this language developed under the sponsorship of the European-Native Joint Councils movement and the South African Institute of Race Relations. Whether articulated as a civilizing mission, separate development, or racial equality, each of these projects made claims on the emotional life of the colonized, and envisioned its outcome as generating bonds of affection between black and white. A history of colonial power in South Africa must therefore incorporate a genealogy of the language and practices of friendship.

At the same time, friendship is often understood to transcend the sphere of politics. Circulating affections and desires create connections that are not easily mapped onto existing power relations. Friendship can crystallize almost instantly both practices that resist structures of oppression and those that enable them: intimacies and complicities. This volume explores friendship as a mode of liberal colonial power, while still holding on to possibilities for insurgent, transgressive, and subversive friendships. How did the (generally homosocial) framework of colonial friendship function to police other forms of desire and articulate the gender dynamics of white settler society? How did African intellectuals, spanning from the work of S. M. Molema in the 1920s to Steve Biko in the 1970s, develop a critique of colonial friendship? How did the rhetoric, symbolism, and imagery of the liberation struggle attempt to subvert or reconfigure the expectations of friendship as a racial script? To what extent do languages and practices of solidarity — both during the anti-apartheid struggle and within the contemporary South African left — build on earlier visions of racial friendship? How has literature and art served as a space to disrupt the emotional economy of colonialism or experiment with alternate models of love and intimacy?

Writing from a diverse range of disciplinary, theoretical, and political perspectives, the contributions to this volume bring South African debates into conversation with three currents of scholarship developed in other contexts. First, we engage with a new generation of scholarship in settler colonial studies, critical race theory, and indigenous studies. These literatures, albeit in ways that differ significantly, have placed the ‘structure of settlement’ (Wolfe 2006) and the very definition of the human at the center of debates over core ideas of political theory: nation, civil society, sovereignty, citizenship, and recognition (Burton 2011; Byrd 2011; Simpson 2013; Stoler 2002). We consider ways in which the idea of the South African nation, both historically and following the 1994 transition, presupposes the structures of settler society — expressed in the project of ‘civilization’ or liberal civil society — and normalizes the underlying violence of whiteness. Second, we engage in a dialogue with queer theory and postcolonial feminism regarding the role of affect and intimacy in the operation of power. By looking at affect we bring a lens to the libidinal and emotional forces that circulate in often-invisible ways between and through how people relate to one another. Third, we reflect on the critique of solidarity that has emerged across a number of locations, including African American feminist activism and Palestinian studies. In developing such concerns, we read the question of nonracialism, an idea often treated as uniquely South African, within an international set of debates regarding over-identification, appropriation, and the denial of privilege. Several chapters struggle with what anthropologist Audra Simpson (2014) describes as refusal: the ethical and political rejection of the gift of friendship, a refusal that includes rejecting what is deemed good, rational, and sensible by a given social order. Finally, this volume asks: what forms of love, friendship, and mutuality can emerge from the rupture created by the failure of civil society, and solidarity, as universalizing projects?

Until the last decade or so, most scholarship on race in South Africa focused on the grand architecture of segregation or ideologies of white supremacy (Posel, Hyslop, and Nieftagodien 2001). By placing the question of friendship at the center of South African cultural life, past and present, this volume examines how power operates within everyday social relationships. These are not only historical questions. In a country profoundly divided by race, class, and gender-based violence, these issues are central to almost any discussion of South Africa’s present. Interrogating friendship as a political space is not meant to hollow it out or stiffen the emotional and intimate flows that make friendship dynamic and hopeful. To the contrary, the chapters in this volume keep alive the promise of friendship and its possibilities, while also investigating what Lisa Lowe (2015: 18) calls the ‘political economy of intimacies’, in which affective relations are not only personal and interior, but also an essential part of the social reproduction of power.

There is no universal position from which to define a politics of friendship in South Africa. Friendship must be understood in the dynamics between diverse African cultures of affiliation as well as the complex formation of subjectivities that occurred through settler colonialism, indigenous genocide, African land dispossession, slavery, and Indian indenture. ‘Friend’ is an English language word and the valence of English, especially when tracking histories of affect and intimacy, should never be treated as neutral. Each of South Africa’s languages has its own lexicon for describing and performing social bonds and their emotional entailments. In isiZulu, to take one case, many expressions for friendship invoke or crosshatch with other relationships: umngani obalulekile (an important friend), untanga (a friend of the same age), umkhozi (one who is close to the heart). The use of kinship as a vocabulary of friendship, for example the Afrikaans word boetie, sometimes ties personal intimacy to the community created by a shared way of inhabiting a language. The history of friendship in South Africa is also the story of these idioms and their multidirectional translations.

Given those caveats, considering friendship as a central site of the political in South Africa is crucial for a few reasons. First, it helps return historicity to race and its production through the lived experiences of evolving subjectivities. As such, the chapters in this volume are interested in mapping the overlapping genealogies of liberal colonialism, discourses of affection, and the bonds of intimate ties as they relate to settler colonial governance, the codifying of racial difference, white supremacy, and anti-blackness. Second, the ties of friendship are manifest from liberal colonial projects of the nineteenth century to the apartheid security police, but they also can be found between comrades in the underground, as intimate personal and political networks were essential to the clandestine nature of anti-apartheid activities (O’Malley 2007; Soske 2012). The bonds of loyalty, as well as the scars of betrayal, continue to be present in the everyday debates of political life in South Africa (see Hardy and Rampolokeng this volume; Dlamini 2014; Lewin 2011). So too, there are times when friendship is an essential space for subversion, improvisation, and resistance: a place where alternative subjectivities and ‘affective communities’ can flourish (Gandhi 2005).

Finally, friendship underlines the intersection between affect (the ability and potential to affect and be affected) and the very constitution of politics. Affect is not a fixed object that can be easily mapped and studied: it is a potential and a relation, found in circulations, intensities, and emotions that pass from body to body. Said simply, affects are experiential states (ranging from arousal to trauma) that are situated within social worlds and that bring bodies in relation with other bodies (Ahmed 2010; Massumi 2002). In South Africa the folding together of affect and the political can be seen, for example, when looking at the evolving public precepts and strictures around sexuality and romantic intimacy: from early racist panics over the black ‘peril’ to white women going back to the 1920s, to the policing of intimacy, romance, and sex across race with the successive ‘immorality’ laws of 1927, 1950, and 1957, to the HIV pandemic in the 1990s, which posed a range of questions around intimacy, sex, and desire that burst open the private space of the bedroom into the public arena of political life (Epprecht 2008; Fassin 2007; Walsh 2009). Mark Hunter’s (2010) work brilliantly maps the geography of intimacy in South Africa in which love, sex, and gender identities are entwined with economic questions such as unemployment and poverty in the context of everyday realities of AIDS. While sex and its psychic, political, and social implications have been the focus of investigations into the dynamics of power (Burns 2007, 2012; Cole and Thomas 2009; Epprecht 2004; Posel 2005), the familiar bonds of friendship have received less critical investigation. Sex and modes of intimacy that were policed by the apartheid state possessed more transparent coordinates with which to track oppression and resistance than do the shifting and illusory bonds of friendship that often slip from view. Accounting for these conflicting, interwoven, and entangled spaces of intimacy and affection as they relate to political life is central to this volume.

As an increasingly rich body of literature demonstrates, friendship has long served as a privileged form for understanding political relations. In one sense, friendship reflects an attachment to the political: it is a desire for ‘non-sovereignty’, giving up independence for interconnection with others (Berlant 2011). Yet unlike familial, contractual, romantic, or professional relationships that assume prescribed obligations, the basis of friendship — especially as it has been understood across European cultural history — is a mutually given affection and respect for the other’s autonomy (Silver 1989). As a result, philosophical and popular discussions often circle around a subversive paradox. While friendship exemplifies the pleasures of social life (and in some discourses society itself), it nonetheless remains radically dependent on the open-ended commitment of two individual wills. Debates over friendship have repeatedly centered on both its universal character — the possibility of an ethical commitment that truly escapes from personal interests and instrumentalism — and the question of who has the capacity for this universality (Caine 2011). Beginning with Aristotle’s Ethics, a canonical concept limited the highest form of friendship to the virtuous subject: he who has the freedom and autonomy to enter into a relationship of true reciprocity.² Friendship between elite men thus was a way to define the borders of ethical life — the mode of life, unlike the woman or slave, to which Aristotle attributed universal value. As Jacques Derrida argues, this construction of friendship is one of political exclusions: it is phallocentric and rooted in concepts of brotherhood, family, territory, and (in later writers) the nation-state (1997).

Such exclusions are particularly acute in the context of settler colonialism, which privileges certain subjects and cultures as worthy, rational, civilized, and human, while simultaneously marking and distinguishing those who are deemed unfit or disallowed. In such a context, prohibitions and edicts around social relations are ways to reinforce and deepen social divisions in everyday life. As Lowe (2015) has argued in relation to British colonialism across four continents, the liberal idea of freedom and emancipation distinguished both those who were deserving of freedom and those who were unfree based largely on the construction of racial difference. Racialized bodies are expected to embark on a gradual (and ultimately endless) path of development toward full freedom, subjecthood, citizenship, and, it follows, the capacity for friendship. Social relations of affiliation thus become a central site for this production of difference. This politics of friendship is less about how friendship has been understood as an interior or personal space shared between two people and more about a model of affiliation as a mode of governance and a process of social control...