VOLUME TWO 2010 THE JOHANNESBURG SALON - JWTC ...

THE JOHANNESBURG SALONVOLUME TWO 2010Edited by Lara Allen and Achille Mbembe

© 2010, The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and CriticismCopyright in the volume as a whole is vested in the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC),and no part may be reproduced in whole or in part without the express permission, in writing, of both theauthors and the publishers.The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the JWTC, its trustees, members of the Council ordonors. Authors contribute to JWTC publications in their personal capacity.First published by the JWTCwww.jwtc.org.zaDesign and Typesetting — The LibraryTechnical development — Black SquareAn intiative of the University of the WitwatersrandMade possible by funding from the Prince Claus Fund

ContentsEditorialCosmopolitan FreedomsLara Allen 1Circulations ≈ FormsThe Circulation of Forms and Forms of CirculationArjun Appadurai 5Death and MemorialisationSouth-south GothicIsabel Hofmeyr 11Wilson MootaneJoni Brenner 14Life, Death and PortraitureJoni Brenner 17The Post-Mortem PortraitDavid Bunn 20DenialApartheid / apartheid / [ ]Saree Makdisi 24

XenophobiaSarkozy’s Law: the institutionalization of xenophobia in the new EuropeDominic Thomas 35Alien LandscapesKim Berman 41Dislocation and Collaboration: recent prints by Kim BermanPamela Allara 44South-North Arts InequalitiesCrickets in the postcolony. A conversation on musicClare Loveday and Yara El-Ghadban 50Capturing ‘The Spirit of Africa’Syned Mthatiwa 57Fallen Leaders, Broken Dreams?Why is Thabo Mbeki a ‘Nitemare’?Mark Gevisser 62King of DreamsDamien-Adia Marassa 70Africa and RedemptionAfrica and the Night of LanguageAn Interview with Achille Mbembe by Annalisa Oboe 76

In Commemoration of Jean-Marc ElaJane I. Guyer 82Two Discourses and an EventAinehi Edoro 86Crime-shaped CitiesOn some assumptions about the banality of crimeJuan Orrantia 92

Compagnie Le Corps Indice 1Photo: Le Corps Indice(Wikimedia: GNU Free Documentation License)what is involved is a special and deliberate effort toproduce an Indian viewer whose pleasures are identifiedwith these formal properties, apart from anyspecific stars, themes or settings.Or take the ways in which MacDonald’s has founda particular set of market niches in different countriesin East Asia (a process beautifully documentedby James Watson and his colleagues in a book calledGolden Arches East).Or consider the ways in which the lower ends ofthe computer-literate labor force in a society like Indiahave grasped the relationship between literacy,record-keeping and the service industry, creating awhole set of practices around the transcription ofmedical notes for doctors in L.A. and New York.Or consider the ways in which human rights discourseas well as environmental discourse is beingannexed by indigenous people’s movements.Or consider the discussions that are now emergingworldwide about “critical regionalism” in archi-tecture in connection with the emergence of newvernaculars. These discussions at the level of thedisciplines are efforts to channel the flow of specificarchitectural fashions, opportunities and debatesinto a higher order discussion about the disciplineof architecture itself, as it finds itself in different discoursessurrounding other forms such as housing,planning and conservation, for instance, which arethemselves circulating forms and labels susceptibleto new appropriations.These thoughts suffice, I hope, to open the possibilitythat the circulation of forms – nations, novels,derivatives, documentaries, markets, rights – isthe process through which locality is produced asa negotiated structure of these interactive forms,within which various products, contents, messagesand structures take material form. In short, localityis the product of the contingent shaping of globallycirculating forms into nodes for the lower order processthrough which actual content is produced, perhapsthrough the dynamics of hybridity, syncretismand the like.But this view of the circulation of forms is notsufficient to take us back to the question of comparisonand connectivity with which we began. Makingthat argument, requires us to consider the forms ofcirculation, the obverse of the circulation of forms.The Forms of CirculationCirculation itself has some formal properties. Theseproperties have something to do with the circuitsthrough which circulation occurs, the speed withwhich it occurs and the scale on which its effects arefelt.Not everything moves through the same circuits: humansmove in boats, ships, trains and cars; pictures,words and ideas through a variety of circuits, whichnow include cyber-paths of various kinds; technologiesmove through complex mixtures of old and newtechnologies, as we can clearly see in the containerized,depopulated working of the most modernports, such as Rotterdam. Blood circulates throughcertain circuits, money through others, arms, drugsand diseases through yet others. The panic about theSARS virus shows us how intimately these variouscircuits are imbricated with one another.Speed is another property that shapes the circulationof different forms. It is an element of theforms of circulation. The invasion of Iraq is a studyin the uneven speed of a host of messages, materials,manpower, mediated images and weaponry.Spatial scope is another key formal feature of circulatoryprocesses. Linguistically mediated formstend to have certain geographies and produce effectsover certain terrains. Visually and electronically mediatedforms can have a much larger reach in the eraof the cell-phone, the Internet and the digitalizedimage.In my own earlier work, I suggested a schemeof scapes to try to capture the fractal dynamics ofthe globalizing world: ideoscapes, technoscapes,mediascapes, ethnoscapes, financescapes. I wouldnow argue that we need to see these scapes as momentarysedimentations of various circuits of circulation.By suggesting that finance, ideology, media,technology and ethnicity are not just things whichmove, I had wanted to open up the possibility thatthey are also shaped by expectations, aspirations,horizons and the like, which, being contingent, willalways yield new inflections and diacritics. I furthermoretried to suggest in my earlier work that the relationshipbetween material forces and ideas couldTHE CIRCULATION OF FORMS9

Female Afghan police officers qualification 2010Photo: U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Sarah Brown; U.S.federal government, public domain.be more deeply explored if we moved beyond fixedmodels of locally separable configurations of baseand superstructure to a less deterministic sense ofthe relationship of how material flows are mediatedby subjects and projects.Today, by bringing up the forms of circulation,I want to propose that these various scapes, whichalso sediment the inevitable heterogeneity of globalization,are in fact forms of circulation, with differentcircuits, speeds and spatial reach. Thus circulationnot only involves the movement of forms, but itselfis characterized by formal properties, whose indeterminate,open-ended interactions, also greatly affectthe conditions under which locality is produced.I offer a few examples to make this argumentmore vivid. Consider the training of M.B.A.’s in differentparts of the world. Or consider the movementof AK-47’s. Or consider the movement of the AIDSvirus. In each case, the unevenness of the formalproperties of circulation creates unexpected conjunctureswhich we characterize, in some sense, aslocal.Here then are some provisional conclusions. In orderto look at how locality is produced in a globalizingworld, we need to consider both the circulationof forms, which I have stressed, and the forms of circulation.In fact, what we need to move towards isa theory that relates the forms of circulation to thecirculation of forms. Why should we care? Because itmay tell us something, in the end, about why universitiesmove less swiftly than AK-47’s and why “democracy”is a more esteemed element of the Americanpresence in the world than McDonalds.And where does comparison come into all this? Ibegan by suggesting that we cannot any more separatethe problem of connectivity from the problemof circulation. We have some pretty good understandingsabout the logics of connectivity. We areless advanced in our understanding of the logics ofcirculation, and so I have tried to push forward somesuggestions in regard to circulation.To really take on the challenges of comparison ina context characterized both by high degrees of connectivityand of circulation, we need to understandmore about the ways in which the forms of circulationand the circulation of forms create the conditionsfor the production of locality, as a site, a contextand a container for the negotiation between forms.Only then can we come up with a robust theory ofmixtures, hybrids, and other fused practices, whichrecognizes that forms precede and enable products.Localities, in this view, are temporary negotiationsbetween circulating forms, and are thus not scalarsubordinates of the global, but the main evidence ofits reality.This is an excerpt of a keynote lecturedelivered on September 28, 2007, at aConference on “Loose Canons”, New YorkUniversity, Department of Media, Cultureand Communication.10The Salon: Volume Two

South-south GothicA haunting tale of suspense featuring a cemeteryin the punjab, boer prisoner of war graves,cold war neo-medievalism and much moreIsabel Hofmeyr(University of the Witwatersrand,South Africa)Isabel Hofmeyr goes in search of an intentionalmonument: a Boer prisoner of war memorialcenotaph. She finds an unintentional memorialhaunted with contradictions that address multiplepasts and presents.Photo: Courtesy Isabel Hofmeyr ©At first glance, the words ‘Boer’ and ‘Punjab’ havelittle in common. Imperialism perhaps, but notmuch else. In the popular imagination, Boers belongin South Africa and the story of Afrikaner nationalism.The Punjab belongs to British India and thenorth-west frontier.A recent trip to Ambala, five-hours-drive north ofDelhi, to locate the graves of Boer prisoners of warproved otherwise and realigned my sense of timeand space.Ambala (Umballa in the colonial lexicon) was agarrison town and one of 17 sites in India in whichthe British interned POWs taken in the Anglo-Boerwar of 1899-1902 (or South African war as it’s nowknown). Having expected a quick three month engagementor ‘tea-time war’ (as Fleet Street dubbedit), the British had made no provision for holdingcaptives. The hostilities of course dragged on; numbersof captives mounted. Reluctant to tie up theirsoldiers guarding POWs and wary of the securityrisk such camps would pose, the British turned to awell-worn solution – the empire as gulag. In India,many of the POW camps were in cantonment areas(permanent military stations), the enemies of empireinterned in a controlled imperial space.Over the course of the war, the British militaryauthorities shipped some 24,000 POWs to campsin Bermuda, St Helena, Ceylon and India. In SouthAfrica at least, the case of Ceylon POWs has alwaysbeen well-known. The case of India, less so. I hadbeen half-aware of it, having first encountered it doingwork in the early 1980s on Gustav Preller, thevisual architect of Afrikaner nationalism. In goingthrough his papers, I realized that he had been heldas a POW in India but I had bracketed this off asseparate from my investigation into the inventionof Afrikaner nationalism. Preller was held in Bangaloreand thanks to daily parole conditions was ableto join the local library.The expedition to Ambala to find the POW gravescomprises myself and historians Nonica Datta andPhoto: Courtesy Isabel Hofmeyr ©PK Datta from Delhi University. Nonica is a notedhistorian of the Ambala region, and through hercontacts has had made arrangements for us to visitthe cemetery of St Paul’s church. PK is an astutehistorian of transnationalism and has written a remarkablepiece on the reception of the Anglo-BoerWar in India. Zaheda Mohamed a film-maker fromSouth Africa and a cameraman accompany us to filmthe outing.The picturesque ruins of St Paul’s, a colonial neo-Gothic church stands alongside the Ambala AirforceSchool. The ruins of the church resemble a site ofromantic contemplation and could be straight out ofsouthern England. The remains are however of morerecent provenance, the church having been bombedin the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965.An agitated guard at the gate insists we can’t en-SOUTH-SOUTH GOTHIC11

Photo: Courtesy Isabel Hofmeyr © Photo: Courtesy Isabel Hofmeyr ©ter without formal permission. We are referred tothe airforce headquarters down the road but meetwith no success. We retreat and return to the churchto await its pastor, Rev SM Bhatty.After showing us around the old manse, whichnow functions as the church, Rev Bhatty takes usto the 23 acre cemetery, much of it overgrown. It’srather like looking for a needle in a haystack; wehave no ideas where the Boer POW graves might be.We wade increasingly disconsolately through thewaist-high grass. I am all for giving up but Nonica,our angel of history urges us on.I know we are looking for a small cenotaph, a memorialauthorized by the Smuts-Botha governmentof 1910. Under pressure from the Boer war veterans,cenotaphs were erected wherever Boer POWs haddied. In the parlance of South Africa’s first Uniongovernment, it’s a gesture of reconciliation.Across the undulating grass, I spot two cenotaphs.The first yields nothing. I wade towards thesecond. The vegetation covers most of the plinth butpeeking above the grass-line I see the name ‘Van Aswegan’.I know we’ve found the graves.The cenotaph itself carries the names of 20 Boerswho died in the Ambala camp. It records their names,town of origin and date of death. An inscription inEnglish and Dutch records that 20 Boer POWs havebeen buried in the vicinity of the cenotaph. Virtuallyall of the original graves have disappeared. Only onesmall headstone remains, inscribed in Dutch.For South Africans, reading a roll of Afrikaansnames (De Jager, Van der Merwe, Cronje, Fourie,Pienaar) in the Punjab (present day Haryana) isbizarre, estranging and nostalgic. Zaheda spots thename HJ Pienaar from Bethulie. Her grandmotherwas a Pienaar from the same town and the monumentunexpectedly becomes part of her family archive.For me, the monument evokes memories of hearingabout the war as I grew up in high apartheidSouth Africa. In public the war had been a yawnworthystaple in the school syllabus, part of thearsenal of Afrikaner nationalism. Yet, the war alsohaunted private spaces. Many South African homescontain objects associated with the war: purses,brooches, boxes made in the POW or civilian concentrationcamps, or plates and ornaments said tohave been buried to save them from the depradationsof advancing Boer or British forces.My earliest sense of the war was associated witha narrow-necked white vase (bearing an Englishcountry scene) which was said to have been buried. Iendlessly used to scrutinize the vase to see if I couldfind any dirt on it. Another source of Boer war narrativecame from my maternal grandmother who hadbeen interned in a concentration camp as a child.Like all war stories, hers emerged at odd and unpredictablemoments, bizarre and jagged shards whoserepetition could never smooth their violent edges.One story told how British guards had gathered upeveryone’s pets and bayoneted them. A Pekingesedog managed to crawl back, its entrails dragging behindit.This Boer war ‘stuff’ was generally mentallyboxed and consigned to the domain of Afrikaansand Afrikaners, ‘their war’ and ‘their history’. Formost white Anglo-South Africans, this distance waseasy to maintain: Englishness signified cultural confidenceand class superiority from whence one couldsnigger at the crass ways of Afrikaners.The world in which I grew up was slightly different:half-English, half-Afrikaans with the English partgaining the upper hand through urbanization and‘verengelsing’ (anglicization). The Afrikaans side offamily life was both loved and hated. Bodily humourand jokes were expressed in Afrikaans. Pleasurablefarm holidays took place with Afrikaans relatives.Back in the English city, things Afrikaans were am-12The Salon: Volume Two

ivalent and soiled: associated with a lower socialorder, treated as a proxy for the apartheid order,subject to patronization, satirization or contempt.Internally, it produced a dance in which one had simultaneouslyto patronize and satirize part of oneself.To read the Boer names in Ambala Cantonmentwas to revisit these semi-forgotten private and publichistories from a radically different angle.In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boymmakes a distinction between an intentional and unintentionalmonument. Intentional monuments recuperatesingle strands and single events in historyand seek to rise above time and mortality. Unintentionalmemorials are about uncertainty, the unpredictabilityof change, unexpected juxtapositions,and colliding time schemes.To see the cenotaph in St Paul’s cemetery was towitness the beginnings of an unintentional memorial.The people and war it records now mean almostnothing in Ambala. In 2005, the Archeological Surveyof India which oversees the St Paul’s graveyardreported ‘discovering’ the Boer POW graves. In India,they have become ruins on the border of recordedtime, passing into an archive of opaque ancientnesssevered from the present.Yet, our visit re-inaugurated them into the present,even if only briefly. My interest in the gravesemerges from growing academic connections andprojects between South Africa and India. As wehead towards a post-American world, links acrossthe Indian Ocean and the global south more generallyhave become ever more important. Some of themore obvious lateral linkages (third worldism, anticolonialsolidarity, non-alignment) have long beenstudied. Yet, there are many more obscure or offcentreconnections that are less known.the graves offer a perspective from which toconfigure the shards and wreckages of many pastsThe histories they open up are discordant, unpredictable,quirky. For Nonica, the graves raised thequestion of what the Boer presence might meanin the memory of Ambala town and cantonment.Also, as she asked, what fragments of Ambala travelback to South Africa? (Some clearly do – at leastone building and a farm in South Africa get namedUmballa). For PK, the cenotaph spoke of connectedhistories, of the role of the Boer war in Indian nationalism.For me, the graves offer a perspectivefrom which to configure the shards and wreckagesof many pasts. In St Paul’s cemetery, British imperialism,anti-colonialism, Afrikaner nationalism andapartheid become embedded in a landscape shapedby Partition, the Cold War and their consequences.None of these histories are over; instead their spectralafter-effects continue to accumulate in differentparts of the world. In a moment of unforgettablesouth-south gothic they become visible in a cemeteryin what was once the Punjab.Photo: Courtesy Isabel Hofmeyr ©SOUTH-SOUTH GOTHIC13

Wilson MootaneJoni Brenner(University of the Witwatersrand,South Africa)On the 19 th of January, 2010, Wilson Mootanedied. Joni Brenner, who painted and sculpted hisface for seventeen years, relates the story of hislast hours.Wilson in the studio, 2002.Photo: Courtesy Joni Brenner ©Anne Stanwix, a friend, and a profound and deeplyrespected doctor, had made all the arrangements forWilson to be admitted to her clinic at the JohannesburgHospital at 8 am on Tuesday the 19th of January.She’d managed to retrieve the Edenvale hospitalrecords from October, and planned to do some furthertests to see what was making Wilson so ill, sosore, so weak; to try and see why he had such severeanaemia and desperately low haemoglobin.My partner Scott and I drove out that Mondaymorning to Senotlelo in KwaNdebele to fetch Wilsonand his wife Francina. They were expecting ussometime around 8 am. We’d agreed to go in Scott’scar because it was bigger and stronger than mine,and we left at 5 in the morning. About 8 kilometersfrom Wilson’s home, we stopped briefly on the sideof the road, after which the car would not re-start.Stuck on an unnamed road, between two unnamedroads, we called the AA to come and rescue us. Theysaid it would take them an hour and would cost4500 Rands. We said ok. I called Wilson to tell him.He was waiting; he was disappointed; but I assuredhim we’d get there – just a little later than planned.About five minutes later a red Cell-C mini-bus taxipulled up. A man got out. I was nervous, not knowingwhether he was stopping to hurt or help us.He said, “My name is Sidney, are you people alright?”We said we were alright, but the car wasn’t: itwouldn’t start. We asked him to help us jump-startthe car. It worked, and we exchanged a few wordsexpressing our deep gratitude, and set off for Senotlelo,marvelling at this Good Samaritan experience.Wilson and Francina were ready and waiting.They had been ready since 7. Wilson stood up andwalked quite strongly to the car – using a stick, butnonetheless quite strong. We travelled well, if anxiously,back to Houghton in Johannesburg, andI walked Wilson and Francina upstairs to Scott’sapartment. Wilson made a point, despite his weakstate, of greeting and conversing briefly with Tony,the security guard at Houghton Heights. It was alwayshis way.Leora Maltz, who was doing some research atWilliam Kentridge’s studio around the corner, wasstaying with me. This had been arranged some timebefore. So Scott, Leora and I slept at my place; Wilsonand Francina were at Scott’s across the road.Wilson was exhausted from the trip, and quiteweak. We agreed he should rest. I was to get somegroceries for the evening meal and then pick themup at 7am to go to the hospital. Though they weretired, I left feeling it would all be alright. I was relievedand grateful that Anne would be looking afterWilson, and that she would take over the next day.I had told Wilson to pack a few things as Anne hadsaid she would probably admit him for a few days todo the tests.When I got to Scott’s apartment at 7.05 the nextmorning, Francina and Wilson were not waiting forme, ready to go, as I had expected. Francina saidthey had not slept at all; that Wilson had complainedof sore legs all night. Wilson was dressed, but lyingon Scott’s bed.“Come Wil, let’s go, I said. “Did you pack somethings? Because you might stay a few nights.”He looked at me with wide eyes and protested,“I’m not staying there. You said we would discuss it.You never said for sure I’d stay.”He’d got a fright, and I felt bad.“OK lets go and see what the doctor says”, I relented.He was struggling to put his jacket on.“Leave the jacket”, I suggested. “It’s warm and youdon’t need to be smart.”But, as it turns out, his Book of Life and other documentsneeded for the hospital were in the jacketpocket.“Where is my cap?” he asked, quite loudly.He put it on, struggled to stand up, and when hestarted walking he was disorientated.14The Salon: Volume Two

“Which way must I go?” he asked at every doorway.“Where is the lift?” he enquired when we were rightin front of it.I was worried.We eventually got out of the lift, and he started walkingdown the lobby, but he was stumbling and unstable.He lurched towards the red velvet couch andkind of collapsed.“Take it easy my love,” I urged: words he’d so oftensaid to me as I struggled with various paintings andsculptures in the studio. I phoned Scott:“You’d better come right now; I can’t manage to takeWilson in the car on my own; I don’t think he’ll makeit.”I called the ambulance to come immediately.I sat with Wilson.I held his wrist; I felt his pulse very rapid; I touchedhis face, and I cried softly, “Wilson, stay with us.Stay with us.”I felt his pulse grow faint; I felt it stop. I lifted hishead and my mouth said, “Wilson. Wilson! Stay!”But in my mind I said, “Just go. Go well.”And he was gone.Just quietly stopped breathing. There was no deathrattle. No drama. Just me and Francina on eitherside of him, crying; and quietly and respectfullywatching from the corner, Tony, the security guard.There was no death rattle. No drama.The paramedics arrived after twelve minutes, whichis not bad for 7am traffic, but he was already gone:his head back, his jaw dropped, and orange colouredooze on his lip. Anne had said that he had no haemoglobin,and severe anaemia. She’d said she was surprisedthat he hadn’t gone into cardiac arrest or hadheart failure. Maybe this orange ooze was the colourof his blood: no red blood corpuscles. No pulse.Wilson looking at one of his portraitsPhoto: Courtesy Joni Brenner ©He died of anaemia and we had no way of knowingwhat had caused it; what in his system had failed. Iwished I’d paid more attention when he told me hewas in the Edenvale hospital, but he’d just said hisfeet were sore and the doctors had said it was arthritisand had given him pain meds. He’d be homesoon, he said. I didn’t think much more about it.He’d been to the studio three months earlier whenhe seemed fine: we’d worked hard, and as usual. Buthis deterioration was rapid. He stopped coming tothe studio. He complained of pain in his feet. When Iasked to see him on my return from an overseas triphe told me he couldn’t walk, he wasn’t eating muchand that he was in KwaNdebele. When eventuallyhe allowed me to visit him in KwaNdebele, a weekbefore the end I was frightened by his frailty. LaterI learned from Anne that he’d been tested at Edenvalefor prostate cancer, for TB and for various otherthings. He’d been much worse than he’d let on. Itseemed the doctors had run out of things to test for.His ECG was a flat line. The paramedics moved hisbody onto a gurney and took him in the same lift upto Scott’s apartment and laid him on the couch, coveredin a white sheet. That was their main role, andI was grateful because it’s hard to move a dead bodyrespectfully. They didn’t charge us anything, thoughthe operator had asked whether I wanted a governmentor private ambulance, and that for someonewithout medical aid, a private ambulance would costanything from 1500 to 3000 Rands.The ambulance service had notified a funeral parlour,and these people arrived within minutes to offertheir services: 7500 Rands to take the body tothe mortuary, prepare it, put it in a coffin and transportit back to Senotlelo. We said we would wait forWilson’s family to arrive and to make arrangements.They waited outside and hovered – to my mind, liketow-truckers – for a few hours.In the meantime, Peter arrived. He was Wilson’snephew; his brother’s child. He spoke with Francina,who speaks hardly any English, and who wasonly recently reconciled with Wilson after long yearsof bitter feuding. She had been caring for him for thepast weeks in Senotlelo. She had asked Peter to getto her quickly because there were only these whitepeople around. Wilson had a lot of white friends,some of them very high powered.wilson motane15

Then Wilson’s son Stephen arrived. He looks exactlylike Wilson. The Mootane genes are strong. Solomonthe last-born, only twenty, looks like Wilson too. Thefamily decided to get a funeral services from Senotleloto come and collect Wilson. They came at 2.30pm. They were respectful, and caring; a different orderaltogether from the tow truckers outside. Deathis a business.Sitting around the dining room table at Scott’sdrinking tea, Stephen said, “I heard you people hadtrouble with your car yesterday, what happened?”We told him the story, and when I got to the partwhere the red Cell-C minibus pulled up, Stephenasked, “Was it Sidney?”We were all stunned.“How do you know Sidney?” I asked.Stephen replied, “He’s my best friend.”some people orchestrate their own deaths andmake sure that things happen in a particular wayAmid her medical explanation Anne commentedthat some people orchestrate their own deaths andmake sure that things happen in a particular way. Ithink Sidney was part of the plan, making sure wegot to Wilson. I think Wilson wanted to die in thecity; he was an urban man. I think people feel discardedor put out to pasture when they are returnedto the homelands, to remote villages. Wilson’s boys,Stephen and Peter, told us that when they saw thatWilson needed to be taken care of – that he could nolonger look after himself in Alex, and that Olivia, hismost recent love in Alex had gotten a job and was nolonger there everyday – they had taken a decision totake Wilson back to KwaNdebele. But Wilson had sostrongly resisted this that in the end, they said, theyhad had to mix two sleeping tablets into his food, toget him into the car and back home. I was horrified.But it’s also funny. So he was kidnapped!Johannesburg ... a place where he had beenindependent, agentive, confident and happyBut I think Wilson wanted to die in the city: in Johannesburg,a place he knew better than anyone Iknow; a place where he had been independent, agentive,confident and happy. He did not want to die inthe hospital. I like to think that Wilson wanted to diewith me at close by. That it was his last gift to me,to allow me to be at his side. To feel the last breathsmove out of him; to help him to leave. I think Leorawas part of the plan because had we been leaving forthe hospital from my apartment, Wilson would havedied on the floor in the parking garage, there beingno couches in the lobbies of Roxdale Mansions. AndAnne, though she didn’t get to treat Wilson, was thecatalyst that got him to Johannesburg, to be withme, and to be in his city.It’s been seventeen years that I have painted andsculpted Wilson’s face, and just recently, his body.It’s been a deeply formative relationship for me. Ithas been an uncomplicated relationship. His arrivalat my studio nearly every Sunday is why I have madewhat I have over the years. His presence, his life, hasenabled my own. I think everything was how it wasmeant to be. I wanted to say to Wilson that he diedwell because I really think he did.16The Salon: Volume Two

Life, Death andPortraitureJoni Brenner(University of the Witwatersrand,South Africa)Visual artist Joni Brenner’s oeuvre is dominatedby portraits of one man. Here she offers someinitial thoughts how his death changes thesignificance of her works.It is all passing which is the only reason forwanting to preserve it.- Denton WelchThe connections between life, death and portraiturehave preoccupied me and shaped my artistic practicefor many years. Recently these inter-dependantrelationships collided and exploded in my world.I’ve worked with one model, almost weekly, forseventeen years. He’s more or less been the onlysubject I’ve had as an artist: He, and the work I’vedone with two skulls that sit in my studio. His nameis Wilson Mootane and his presence and life has fundamentallyshaped and enabled my own life and mywork.On the 19 th of January this year, he died; andhe died in my arms. His death was quite sudden. Ihad often thought that someone dying in one’s armsmust be an awful and terrible thing, but having hadthe experience of being with Wilson in that moment,I have come to see it as his last gift to me; that event– or crisis – seemed to honour and give particularsignificance to our long relationship, and to ourWritten2009, oil on sandstone, sprayed supawood, Perspex, 31 x 61 x 3.5cmPhoto: Courtesy Joni Brenner ©many years of work together.The critic Michel Leiris once said, in reference tothe sculptor Alberto Giacometti, that there are momentsthat may be called crises and these are theonly ones that count in life. His comment makessense when you see how a crisis changes everything.Over the years, in analysing and discussing mywork and its relationship to the portraiture genre,I have spent much time saying that my work is notabout a specific individual – though portraits haveto be of course. But I have asserted that my workreflects rather on a broader set of ideas about humanity,mortality, transience; that my choices ofmaterial embody these broader ideas. And they do:unfired and therefore vulnerable clay (sculpturesthat can crumble and become dust again); malleableplasticine with the potential to be changed, to continueevolving; the melt-able fragility of wax; graniteand marble stone with their references to memorialtombstones, and their longevity and durability, andthe contrasting way in which stone makes the oilpaintings on them seem so mortal – all these evocativemetaphors for the fragility of life, for its transience,for our need to preserve it and to remember.But this recent crisis has brought me to see thatthe images I make most definitely are of an individual;they are of Wilson, every one of them. Andthey are inter-subjective portraits – of both him andme; co-produced in the sense that they would not bepossible, would not have happened, without both ofLife, Death and Portraiture17

The world was silent when we died2009, (detail), oil on granite, sprayed supawood plinth,160 x 30 x 3cm.Photo: Courtesy Joni Brenner ©us being there. They are of us, and they mark his life,and mine. In more general terms they attest to theimportance of human bonds and shared realities.They are of us, and they mark his life, and mine.The seventeen years of portraits I have made of WilsonMootane are in some senses a biography of afriendship, and of an intimacy of a particular kind.I worked from Wilson’s head again and again; everytime as if for the first time, repeatedly looking andtrying to capture the specific and the general, theexact and precise, and the fugitive or mobile. WhenWilson was there, I found I had an amazing energyto work, to produce images in a range of mediumsand in various sizes. I always felt I was just beginningwith him, wasn’t anywhere near finished. Onlyvery recently, in August and September 2009, did Imove my attention to his torso.Just after Wilson’s funeral I began reading JamesLord’s biography of Giacometti, in which he writesthat, “For twenty years [Giacometti] had been obsessedwith life’s frailty. Now it presided over hiswork. In a very real sense, it became his work. ‘I alwayshave the impression or feeling’, [says Giacometti],‘of the frailty of living beings, as if at any momentit took a fantastic energy for them to remainstanding, always threatened by collapse. And it is intheir frailty that my sculptures are likenesses’.In November a selector for the Johannesburg ArtFair came to my studio and chose three portraitscompleted earlier in 2009. After Wilson’s death inJanuary the portraits suddenly took on an entirelydifferent, and renewed, significance. To be honest, Ifelt reluctant to let them go. And although they areimages that I think have a robust life-force, imagesthat have in some way absorbed or subsumed Wilson’s‘fantastic energy’, I decided to complete twoof the works by framing them in ways that connectto the event of his death. Written, I framed with anequal sized blank black panel attached to the paintingat the right. It seemed to me to signal an end tothe life that is so present in the left panel. The paintingis also quite calligraphic, the central group ofscripted marks approximately forming an ideogram,which is why I titled the work ‘Written’, a word thatalso alludes to the biblical notion of being writteninto the book of life.The second image I titled: The world was silentwhen we died, a phrase borrowed from ChimamandaAdichi Ngozi’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun, a bookset during the Biafran war in Nigeria. The phraseevokes for me, on the one hand, the tremendous humanloss and pain that goes unacknowledged and,on the other hand, the significant way in which theworld is altered or affected by these same losses.I mounted this portrait on a thin black board thatevokes the body at the same time as it alludes to amemorial post.They are portraits that suggest – perhaps moreso than others that I have made – the coterminouspresence of life and death. They are about loss, butthey are mostly about life, and presence.A version of this piece will appear in the journalVisual Communication.18The Salon: Volume Two

The world was silent when we died2009, oil on granite, sprayed supawood plinth,160 x 30 x 3cm.Photo: Courtesy Joni Brenner ©Life, Death and Portraiture19

Sitting for the Post-Mortem PortraitDavid Bunn(University of Chicago, USA and University ofJohannesburg, South Africa)Engaging the work of Joni Brenner, David Bunnreflects on loss; the relationships between theportrait, the funerary mask and the face of thecadaver; and the liquid nature of Objects.The dead have left us – irreparably; yet we must ofcourse also leave them, for our own health’s sake.Not to do so, entails a fate worse than death: thatcondition of ghostly provisionality, of melancholicstuttering, in which the self cannot disconnect fromits lost object. “Thus,” said Freud, in his most famousgloss of this condition in Mourning and Melancholia(1917), “the shadow of the object [falls]upon the ego”.To resist the continued appeal of the recentlydead, in other words, the mourner has to performan act of replacement, and hence also of representation,transferring libidinal attention to a new object.Yet the very act of representing a lost object (aself that is now gone, lost to the senses, but whichcontinues to assert itself in the experience of loss)is profoundly complex. In art that has tried to cometo grips with traumatic loss and the presence of thecorpse, that same difficulty has generated a varietyof sub-genres: elegy, dirge, memorial, kaddish, andthe like.How do we look into the face of the dead? What willsave us?How do we look into the face of the dead? What willsave us? Johannesburg artist Joni Brenner has hada philosophical interest in the problem of death,representation, and portraiture spanning severaldecades. At the core of this interest is the figure ofthe funerary portrait, where the truth implied in thelast dying moments of personhood is confronted ina representation. One of Brenner’s most significantpainterly statements is a meditation on the “Maskof Agamemnon.” This is the name that HeinrichSchliemann gave to the crumpled golden deathmask he found adorning a royal skull in a burial sitein what he took to be historical Troy. For Brenner,the visible crushing is not just the evidence of theweight of the earth on the metal visage over time.It is itself exemplary of that force which seizes andshakes all attempts at naturalistic portraiture.I have been interested in Joni Brenner’s work formore than a decade. Returning to it now, and viewingit in parallel with her two essays mourning thedeath of Wilson Mootane, I am forced to confrontthe ways in which my own experience of the corpsehas fuelled my changing understanding of such art.* * *One of the first cadavers I encountered was that ofSteve Biko. Not unexpectedly, this was an event thatchanged my life. I had met Biko briefly while a studentat Rhodes in Grahamstown, and after the shockof his death, I and a number of workers and activistfriends travelled by bus to King William’s Town forthe funeral. This cannot be a tale told in any detailMask of Agamemnon by Joni Brenner, 2001.Photo: Courtesy Joni Brenner ©now; nevertheless, in that stadium, with thousandsof people in the colours of the banned Black Consciousnessorganisations, ringed with police forces,with Biko’s infant son held aloft from time to time,the body of the dead activist displayed in an opencoffin played a profound role.Thinking back on it, Biko’s corpse appeared formany of us, I think, to shimmer between two states:that of the evidentiary trace, and of the icon. In anera of apartheid without real archives, or justice, orthe law, the sheer fact of the autopsied body seemedto speak out unanswerable accusations to the Stateand the world. Circulating past the open coffin withthousands of other mourners, I stared briefly atBiko’s stitched and crumpled face, with the familiarlittle birdlike mouth and the gap-toothed smile nowrigid.All about us, and from that moment on, the processesof iconographic conversion were at work: imagesof Biko breaking his chains were already manifeston T-shirts and posters held aloft.20The Salon: Volume Two

In his essay ‘Drawing a Veil’, Colin Richards haswritten very movingly on the impact of the imageof Biko’s autopsied body, a body he studied whileworking as a medical illustrator. It is an image thathas echoed famously through the work of Paul Stopforth,Ezrom Legae, Sam Nhlengethwa, and Richardshimself.My own experience on that day prepared me, insome ways, for the many horrifying encounters I wasto have over the next decade of apartheid violence,confronting the tortured and broken bodies litteringthat era. Yet even though Biko’s was a profoundlypolitical body, a body always-already mediated byiconographic processes, something else lingers forme in the memory of my staring into his coffin. I canonly describe this something else as the experienceof the face of the corpse as such.In retrospect, I cannot tell whether the emotionalshock of my encounter (as distinct from its politicalimpact) with Biko’s cadaverous face is somethingthat actually took place then, in 1977, or whether itis later traumatic events that have reached back intime to remake the earlier experience, in that mysteriousprocess of deferred psychic revision Freudcalls nachträglichkeit.* * *More than a decade after Biko’s funeral, the suddendeath of my mother and father changed my understandingof mortality; it also had a retroactive effecton my early experience of the stare of the corpse. Mymother died first, and in a state of keening despair, Iwent to view her body in the mortuary in Braamfontein,off Jorrisen Street in Johannesburg. Of coursenothing could have prepared me for what I wasabout to see, nor can I report with accuracy – evennow – on what happened. I went in to the mortuaryviewing room expecting to be shored up by experienceof political deaths in the late 1970s and 1980s.This was not one of those. I had expected to see mymother on a cool slab, clad in white. Instead, whatlay before me, it seemed, was a kind of dry arthropodhusk, like last season’s cicada casings.When the familial corpse appears to us directly,unmediated, unrepresented, the horror of the Realstares back. Shocking encounters such as these havethe potential to work backwards, re-rendering allpast experiences of death. So the face I see before menow, in memory, may not the face of Steve Biko inthe manner I remembered it months after the event.It has changed, perhaps, because of the psychic contentthat attaches to all such instances in the wake ofthe death of my mother.The problem, therefore, in working with representationsof the dead, is that one wishes to honorthe departed, while remaining outside of their clammyembrace.Representing the dead, in memorials, elegies, orpainting, requires not only some sign of their presence,some post-mortem “facture” if you like, butalso a fundamental separation. However, the newlydead are seldom happy with this solution, and thereis a great, death-driven struggle that takes place inthe lives of those who survive. This is the terrain ofthe Freudian death-drive, in which the corpse seemsto call out against representational displacementand tries to hold the mourner in a kind of unchangingembrace associated with melancholic trauma.In the case of my mother, I had imagined enoughtime had passed now for the power of the familialcorpse to have waned. In writing this short meditation,however, I have suddenly become conscious ofhow even my own academic research began to circlecentripetally around deathly representations in thepenumbral decade after her passing.The problem of the corpse and representationcontinues to be a subject of my practical research itseems; it still drives me from place to place in myresearch on land claims based on gravesites in SouthAfrica’s national parks.* * *Imagine a Lowveld morning in the Kruger NationalPark. We are walking through glittering, chest-highgrasses. We are looking for a grave. Guided only bythe memory of the old man who had once lived here,before the forced removals of the apartheid era, weare sweeping the grass that is now heavy with thecombined weight of autumn seed and dew.What I see suddenly before me now is not obviouslya grave. Yet it is a very common feature inthe fieldwork I have been doing: an almond-shapedmound of rocks with a half hidden dome at one endinstead of a visible headstone. Many decades ago, itseems, some family member placed an upturned claypot at the head of the grave, and took care to puncha hole in it, thus rendering it useless. It is a formulaI have seen repeated many times in the burial siteswe have found: rusted duck-egg-blue enamel teakettles, old potjies, tin mugs, earthenware beer pots,all with deliberate punctures.This symbolic transformation of the domestic object,from use to uselessness, removes it from the domainof commodity exchange, while retaining tracesof the owner’s aura. As a representational act, therefore,this kind of grave practice is part of the processSitting for the Post-Mortem Portrait21

Grave marked with deliberately damaged pot,Kruger National Park.Photo: Courtesy David Bunn ©of separation we call mourning, which maintains anintimate link to the habitus of the deceased yet simultaneouslymanages the memorial object so thatit remains a signifier and does not reenter the worldof use. There can be no reappropriation of the objectby a jealous neighbour or witch bent on evil.* * *The occasion of Joni Brenner’s new work, and heressays on the death of her friend and studio modelWilson Mootane, have taken me on a looping conversationabout the face of the cadaver in my ownexperience. Links between death, representation,and desire have been at the heart of the work of thisJohannesburg artist. Hers has been a long philosophicalmeditation on the meaning of the genericportrait, and frequently in her studies the portraitand funerary mask approach each other.For seventeen years, Brenner worked with thesame studio model, Wilson Mootane, reducing portraitlikenesses of his face, his profile, the back of hishead to quantum whorls of impasto brushstrokes.Likeness, in these works, is captured throughgestural associationsLikeness, in these works, is captured through gesturalassociations: impossibly deep, sculptured oilpaint, plasticine, clay, and a variety of malleable mediathat change and fray over time. But because consciousnessand reciprocal recognition in the form ofthe face were her main themes, until very recentlyBrenner never really painted the body directly. Instead,it was implied indirectly, often in the framingand support of the work itself. Early paintings likethe pure white Stele (2001) or the fiery Posts (2001)locate the zone of the face on a six-foot-high plinthor obelisk of colour, roughly equivalent to the body.Some of Brenner’s most fabulous works are meditationson funerary emblems like the crushed goldenmask I referred to earlier. But without questionthe greatest influence on her argument is the famouscache of Fayoum funerary portraits from the Romanperiod in Egypt. These provided her with a rich fieldof experimentation. We now know from Brennerthat her Fayoum (2002) is a double portrait (unrecognizablyso) of Wilson Mootane in wax. When I firstwrote about this work some years back, I thought ofit as a commentary on identity, curation, and museology:the deathly, waxy pallor doubled the museumagainst the morgue. Now, I must say, returning tothe Brenner’s paintings made in the shadow of WilsonMootane’s death, I think they have more to dowith the liquid nature of Objects.When Freud or Melanie Klein or Winnecottspeak about internal “Objects”, they have in minda domain of intersubjective experience in which thephenomenal experience of other people is dramatizedin the internal, signifying systems of the self.Our earliest childhood fantasies about others areoften about incorporation: consuming and internalizingthe Other in a fantasy of introjection. For onebranch of psychoanalysis, lovers are thought to exemplifythis principle of regression and incorporationin the early moments of their relationship: theydesire to be one indistinguishable, eroticised agglomeration.The most sublime meditation on thisprinciple may be found in Emily Bronte’s WutheringHeights, where the Byronic Heathcliff cannotgive up the dead Catherine. Instead, when he dies,he will leave instructions for the sexton to removethe sides of his dead lover’s coffin and interpolate hiscorpse between that of hers and her husband’s. Thetwo lovers will rot and liquefy into one thing.To see the self as a state, as well as an internalobject, is a perspective that Joni Brenner has beenevolving for some time. She has evolved it, moreover,in a strangely driven dialogue with her onlymodel, Wilson Mootane. Part of what has been atstake all along, moreover, is Wilson’s blackness andher whiteness. Somatic contrasts have been part ofthe complicating argument all the time, and thereis a kind of eroticism in the Pygmalion-like engagementof artist and model in their 17-year relationship.(Interestingly, there are parallels here with thework of other Johannesburg artists, in the 1990s“history paintings” of Penny Siopis, for example,which also depends on the artist’s long relationshipwith Dora, her sitter.)Finally, though, as Brenner admits in her essaysin this volume, the face of death has also always22The Salon: Volume Two

It is as though the logic of the portrait has onlynow been allowed to complete itself in Brenner’swork, to be uttered, as it were, as an act of identityrather than philosophical abstraction. This senseof completion plays itself out in the two works ofmourning for Wilson: Written, and The World WasSilent. In both, the addition of support elements toexisting portraits (a black panel in the former, makingup a left to right logic, and an adamantine plinthin the latter, forming a vertical body) brings the argumentto a close.It is as though a sheet had been lifted on thecorpse for a while, and is now allowed gently todrop. To stare into the hollow face of the cadaver, itseems, may cause us to remake our worldly philosophies;with enough time, and rendition, however,that stare may become more bearable.Fayoum by Joni Brenner, 2002Photo: Photo: Courtesy Joni Brenner ©been a partner in the relationship. The only otherhuman object that has been an artistic subject forher in the past two decades is a skull that she haspainted repeatedly.The ancient Fayoum death portraits speak volumesabout the relationship between death and representation.They consist of a naturalistic but conventionalizedencaustic wax portrait on limewoodlaid as a final ground over the shriveled, mummifiedcorpse. Representation guards us against the appealof the death instinct, and nudges us out of the cycleof melancholic repetition, away from the horror vacuiof the corpse.But there may be another way of seeing it. In hisbook The Gaze of Orpheus Maurice Blanchot comparesthe moments of Orphic obscurity in lyric poetryto “the strangeness of a cadaver”. Once it is uncannilyrepresented, in other words, the skull beneaththe skin may be a rich source of poetic complexity.This connection with the strangeness and liquidityof the dead, and our representational mourning, hasdriven much of the argument in Brenner’s recentoeuvre. Before now, she has insisted that her workis not ‘portraiture’ per se, but a dialogue with thatgenre. It is interesting to me that at the very momentof the death of her principal model, her position haschanged. She allows that the beautifully obscure,Orphic works she has produced in studio dialogueswith this man are in fact portraits of him, because,in the wake of his passing, and as though time mayflow backwards, they have a presence and fullnessthat was not there before.Sitting for the Post-Mortem Portrait23

Apartheid /apartheid / [ ]Saree Makdisi(University of California Los Angles, USA)Blankes/Nie Blankes. Jewish/non-Jewish. Thereare contemporary Israeli laws equivalent to allthe major aspects of South African Apartheidlegislation, and these are enforced with extremeviolence. The most insidious difference betweenthe two systems of discrimination, asserts SareeMakdisi, is that Israel and its many influentialsupporters deny that such unequal separatedevelopment is in any way racist, an assertionpremised on the repudiation of the existence – letalone the rights – of 11 million Palestinians. Howis this possible: this total refusal to entertain thefacts and the evidence, reason, law and basicprinciples?Among the highlights of my recent trip to South Africawere a tour of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburgand a visit to the downtown neighborhoodof Fordsburg with my close friends Hanif and SalimVally (who grew up there during the Apartheidyears – an experience that committed them both tothe cause of justice), as well as a walk through thenearby half-demolished neighborhood of Fietas.Like Sophiatown in Johannesburg and DistrictSix in Cape Town, Fietas was largely cleared of itsnon-white population in the 1970s (some of its formerresidents were forcibly relocated to Lenasia,others to Eldorado Park) and then methodically demolished.Its eerie, grass-grown, open spaces todayDouble StandardPhoto: Carlos Latuff(copyright free, Wikimedia Commons)stand as stark reminders of the city’s violent past;as reminders that under certain circumstances townplanning, charting and zoning are immediately violentactivities: for all its apparent innocuousness,bureaucracy can be as destructive as any bomb.What happened in Fietas certainly testifies to that:rather than adjusting planning to lived reality, realitywas forced into adjustment with planning, wholefamilies were forced to move and a neighborhoodwas smashed to pieces.The violence of bureaucracy and of racist logic isof course one of the central themes of the ApartheidMuseum. Of all the exhibits, the one that I foundmost striking was probably one of the most visually24The Salon: Volume Two

Hate speechPhoto: Carlos Latuff(copyright free, Wikimedia Commons)innocuous: a list, adorning one wall, of the variouslaws and regulations that constituted South Africa’ssystem of Apartheid. That wall, and some of theother exhibits, really brought home to me the extentto which South African Apartheid continually registereditself in the verbal and visual field throughendless plaques, signs, words, laws, names, classifications– an endless series of binaries constructedaround the ultimate “Blankes / Nie Blankes.” One ofthe most compelling facts about South African Apartheidis that it was not just an invisible or inscrutableor anonymous logic: it dared to have a proper name,after all; it insisted on calling attention to itself in itssystem of explicit signs, labels, markers – on everybus, at the entrance to every bathroom.There was, of course, no way for me to contemplateSouth African Apartheid without contemplatingits relevance for understanding the situation inIsrael/Palestine today. For anyone who has beento Palestine, the grass-grown wasteland of Fietaslooks familiar for good reason: it has its counterpartin every grass-covered ruin of every one of thehundreds of towns and villages in Palestine whosepeople were driven from their homes in 1948 becausea racial logic dictated that they should not livein a space supposedly decreed (by God and/or theUnited Nations) to another people; in every windsweptwasteland of Gaza where many of those samerefugees’ homes were once again bulldozed by theIsraeli army to clear lines of sight and make roomfor free-fire zones; and in every corner of occupiedEast Jerusalem where Israeli bulldozers have deliberatelyand methodically demolished Palestinianfamily homes in a vain attempt to maintain the idealratio of Jews to non-Jews in the city’s population(72 to 28, if you are interested in the details) thatwas determined by city planners in the 1970s – andhas been sustained ever since by denying Palestinianresidents of the city permits to build, bulldozingtheir homes when they build anyway, and strippingthem of their residency status and expelling themfrom the city whenever possible. Two thousand, onehundred and sixty-two Palestinian Jerusalemiteshave suffered this fate since 2003 alone: expelledto the West Bank suburbs and denied the right toreturn to the city of their birth, while Jewish arrivalsfrom Chisinau, London, Melbourne and Brooklynwho have never set eyes on Jerusalem take theirApartheid / apartheid / [ ]25

Abbey Road, Israeli versionPhoto: Carlos Latuff(copyright free, Wikimedia Commons)place.It has become commonplace to casually use thelanguage of apartheid to refer to the forms of discriminationthat Israel maintains in the occupiedterritories: two different transportation networks,two different housing systems, two different educationalcomplexes, even two different legal and administrativesystems for the two populations, Jewishand non-Jewish.Exactly the same discriminatory logic is at workacross the 1949-1967 armistice line inside Israel itself,however. And for all the resistance that applyingthe term to the occupied territories still generatesin certain quarters, it is even more difficult tostage a rational conversation about the system ofapartheid at work inside pre-1967 Israel. Most of Israel’ssupporters in Europe, America, Australia andSouth Africa, and even some of its liberal critics –the ones who accept that the system of separationthat Israel has imposed on the occupied territoriesmay have crossed a certain line – adamantly refuseto countenance the possibility that there is any systematicform of racism in the would-be Jewish state:for them, the 1975 UN General Assembly Resolutiondenouncing Zionism as a form of racism – the onlyUN Resolution to have been subsequently annulled– was itself a form of racism.When it is leveled at Israel, then, the charge ofapartheid generates not counter-argument backedby counter-evidence, but rather walls of sheer stonydenial, if not inarticulate eruptions of blind rage. Itis a stunning fact that, to this day, mainstream politicians,journalists and many ordinary citizens inthe US and elsewhere, even South Africa itself – Iwitnessed this myself while delivering my February2010 lecture at Wits – refuse to engage in argument,evidence, facts, on this issue. “The Jewish peopleknow what it means to be oppressed, discriminatedagainst, and even condemned to death because oftheir religion,” said Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of theUS House of Representatives, in an attempt to contestthe primary assertion of President Carter’s 2006book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid (which even explicitlyexempted Israel within its pre-1967 bordersfrom its analysis, restricting itself to the occupiedterritories). “They have been leaders in the fight forhuman rights in the United States and throughoutthe world,” continued Pelosi. “It is wrong to suggestthat the Jewish people would support a governmentin Israel or anywhere else that institutionalizes ethnicallybased oppression, and Democrats reject thatallegation vigorously.”Such a refusal to enter into a rational argument,and to fall back on the equivalent of superstition26The Salon: Volume Two

is not restricted to the US. “If you’re going to labelIsrael as Apartheid, then you are also … attackingCanadian values,” said Canadian MP Peter Shurmanin a recent angry denunciation of Canadian universities’annual Israeli Apartheid Week, which was condemnedby the parliament in Ottawa. “The use of thephrase ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’ is about as close tohate speech as one can get without being arrested,and I’m not certain it doesn’t actually cross over thatline,” Shurman said.Nor are such forms of denial restricted to politicians.Here, for example, is the Washington Postcolumnist Richard Cohen: “The Israel of today andthe South Africa of yesterday have almost nothing incommon. In South Africa, the minority white populationharshly ruled the majority black population.Nonwhites were denied civil rights, and in 1958,they were even deprived of citizenship. In contrast,Israeli Arabs, about one-fifth of the country, havethe same civil and political rights as do Israeli Jews.Arabs sit in the Knesset and serve in the military,although most are exempt from the draft. Whateverthis is – and it looks suspiciously like a liberal democracy– it cannot be apartheid.”I have known for some time, of course, that, nomatter how many times columnists like Cohen repeatthe statement that “Israeli Arabs,” that is, Palestiniancitizens of Israel, have the same civil andpolitical rights as do Israeli Jews, that simply is notthe case: blind recitation may be comforting, but itdoesn’t actually transform reality. What I learnedfrom my trip to South Africa, however, is that theparallel between the two situations (South Africa onthe one hand and the occupied territories and Israelon the other) is much more extensive than is normallyadmitted in public discourse, though there arealso some notable differences.One thing I learned on my trip is that every singlemajor South African Apartheid law that I saw onthe wall of the Johannesburg museum has a directequivalent in Israel today.non-Jews, although they can be citizens of the state,are explicitly not members of the “nation”The Population Registration Act of 1950, which assignedto every South African a racial identity accordingto which he or she had access to (or was denied)a varying range of rights, has a direct equivalentin the Israeli laws that assign to every citizen ofthe state a distinct national identity, on the basis ofwhich various rights are also accessed (or denied).According to Israeli law, there is no such thing asIsraeli nationality: as the High Court put it in the1970s, “there is no Israeli nation separate from theJewish people”. So Jewish citizens of the state areclassified as having “Jewish nationality”, but non-Jews, although they can be citizens of the state, areexplicitly not members of the “nation”, that is, Jewsall over the world, whether they want to be affiliatedwith Israel or not, whose state Israel claims to be.As a result, the national identity of the Palestiniancitizens of Israel – who constitute 20 percent of theactual rather than merely the ideological populationof the state – is denied and erased at everyinstitutional level. Unlike Jewish citizens, who arerecognized as having a national identity, Israeli lawmethodically strips Palestinian citizens of their nationalidentity and reduces them to mere ethnicity,which is why the state invented the term “Israeli Arabs”to refer to them. (That term is never used torefer to the Arab Jews who make up a considerableproportion of Israel’s Jewish population – the realPoster for the Israeli Apartheid Week 2009Photo: Carlos Latuff(copyright free, Wikimedia Commons)Apartheid / apartheid / [ ]27

Israeli Arabs – because of course in their case Israelwants to erase their Arab identity and absorb themas Jews. Whereas in the case of Palestinian citizensthe reverse holds true: they can’t be absorbed asJews, so their indigestible Arabness is emphasized).Of course, this linguistic evasion serves a purpose:it is what enables otherwise rational peoplelike Richard Cohen or the editors of major newspapersto use Israel’s own discourse to buy into thestate’s erasure of Palestinian identity in total unawarenessthat that is exactly what they are doing,and to come out at the other end miraculously sayingthat the state treats all its citizens equally: theact of discrimination is invisible because it is inscrutable.How, after all, can you acknowledge that Israeldiscriminates against its Palestinian populationwhen there is no such thing? What Palestinians?There are no Palestinians inside Israel, only “IsraeliArabs”. But that’s the point: the denial, the erasure,the act of discrimination, is already there before theutterance is made: there is no language for it; it cannotbe spoken.How … can you acknowledge that Israeldiscriminates against its Palestinian populationwhen there is no such thing?Indeed, this above all is what so markedly distinguishesIsraeli apartheid from South African Apartheid:whereas the latter insisted on giving itself aname and drawing attention to itself through endlessverbal and visual cues, the former seeks to elideand cover over the forms of racism that it embodiesjust as fully. Those who support racism in Israel cando so in total freedom from having to reckon withthe fact that that is what they are doing. It is the ultimateexample of what David Theo Goldberg hasrecently theorized as “racism without racism”. Thisis, in short, one of the most brilliant uses of interpellateddenial and erasure that has ever been put intopractice in the world. Although, like so many thingsin Israel (for example, building Independence Parkon a Palestinian cemetery in Jerusalem, or inventingthe legal category of the “present absentees” to referto Palestinians who were driven from their homes in1948 but remained within the borders of the state,or landscaping the West Bank wall from the Israeliside so its true scale is obscured and diminished), itis a purely unintended brilliance, and hence not reallybrilliance at all, but rather yet one more instanceof the mind-boggling forms of denial at which Israeland its admirers are so proficient; indeed, on whichthe liberal Western admiration of Israel depends forits very existence.At the end of the day, the South African white, irrespectiveof her ideological position, had to look atthe sign saying “Blankes / Nie Blankes” and affiliateherself accordingly: an awkwardness the ApartheidMuseum in Johannesburg reenacts very effectivelyat its entrance. The Jewish Israeli, and the supporterof Israel overseas, is never forced into that confrontation,never has to make that choice – it’s done forhim before language: the racism is predigested andrendered inscrutable. Jewish Israelis and admirersof the state can say that Israel treats all its citizensequally not so much because they do not realize thatdiscrimination operates at the level of nationalityrather than at the secondary level of citizenship, butrather because, unlike white South Africans, theyare spared from having to reckon with that realization.They are allowed, and they allow themselves, tosee right through it, to indulge in the misrecognitionof a reality that is actually staring them in the face,to continuously misrecognize the facts when someoneelse insists on tabulating, documenting and presentingthem – if not to erupt in blind resentful furywhen the facts are pushed at them too insistently.Stripping Palestinian citizens of their nationalidentity is not only merely degrading, however. InIsrael, various fundamental rights – access to landand housing, for example – are attendant upon nationalidentity, not the lesser category of mere citizenship.Thus, Jews who are not citizens actuallyhave more rights than citizens who are not Jewish;in no other country on earth do racially privilegednon-citizens enjoy greater rights than citizens andresidents.Jews who are not citizens actually have more rightsthan citizens who are not Jewish.Hence, the Group Areas Act of 1950, which assigneddifferent areas of South Africa for the residential useof different racial groups, has a direct equivalent inthe system of regulations that determine access toland inside Israel (and inside the occupied territoriestoo, of course, but here I am talking about Israelwithin its pre-1967 borders). Palestinian citizens ofthe state are excluded from residing in officially designated“Jewish community settlements” or “Jewishrural settlements” organized into rural councilsthat control the vast majority of the land in Israel.Indeed, they are barred from living on land held by“national institutions” such as the Jewish NationalFund (JNF), almost all of it Palestinian property violentlyexpropriated by the new state after the ethniccleansing of Palestine in 1948. Nowhere, in fact,is the extent and institutionalization of this kind of28The Salon: Volume Two

discrimination more glaringly obvious than in thepronouncements of the JNF, which advertises itselfas “the caretaker of the land of Israel on behalf ofits owners – Jewish people everywhere”. This institutionnot only acknowledges but proudly justifiesits long-established record of discriminating againstPalestinian citizens by pointing out that it “is not apublic body which acts on behalf of all the citizensof the state. Its loyalty is to the Jewish people andits responsibility is to it [that is, the Jewish people]alone. As the owner of JNF land, the JNF does nothave to act with equality towards all citizens of thestate.” Moreover, it points out, “Israel’s Knesset[that is, parliament] and Israeli society have expressedtheir view that the distinction between Jewsand non-Jews that is the basis for the Zionist visionis a distinction that is permitted,” and, indeed, thatits allocation of land to Jews alone “is in completeaccord with the founding principles of the state ofIsrael as a Jewish state and that the value of equality,even if it applies to JNF lands, would retreat beforethis principle.”As a result of all the forms of discrimination withwhich they must contend as non-Jews living in thewould-be-Jewish state (would-be in spite of the continuingnon-Jewish, Palestinian presence), some 10percent of the Palestinian citizens of Israel live todayin “unrecognized villages” which predate the existenceof the state by decades or centuries yet do notappear on any official maps. They are therefore notconnected to the national power grid, the nationalwater distribution system, the phone network, themail system: they do not officially exist – other thanthe fact that all the homes in these villages are slatedfor demolition because they exist on land that thestate retroactively zoned as agricultural, there being“no residences” there, after all. Here again the samelogic of profound denial of denial is at work: how canyou deny the circumstances of life in villages that accordingto the state do not officially exist in the firstplace? There is literally nothing to deny!The Bantu Education Act of 1953, which createda separate and unequal educational system for blackSouth Africans, has a direct equivalent in the administrativeprocedures that have created separateand unequal educational systems for Jewish andnon-Jewish citizens of the state of Israel (and againthe same thing goes for the occupied territories too).The bare statistics say it all: the state provides 1,600subsidized day-care centers, for example, but only25 of those are in Palestinian towns. Only 4,200of the 80,000 Israeli children under four years oldwho attend day care are Palestinian, though had thatnumber been in proportion to the actual population,it would have been over 20,000. After day care,Israel invests more than three times as much on aper capita basis in a Jewish student than it does ina non-Jewish (that is, Palestinian) one. The state’scurrent list of the 553 towns and villages granted toppriority for education excludes all Palestinian townsinside Israel other than four villages. There are 25special art schools for Jewish children, and none forPalestinian children – citizens of the state all. Andat the higher levels of its school system, Israel opensfar more curricular tracks to Jewish students than toPalestinian ones. As a result of all these forms of discrimination,and nakedly discriminatory entranceand matriculation procedures – and despite the factthat Palestinians traditionally place great emphasison their children’s education, a fact attested to bythe disproportionately large numbers of Palestiniansamong the Arab intelligentsia – a far greaterproportion of Jewish students make it through highschool, get accepted to university, and graduate.Only 10 percent of Israel’s university students arePalestinian, for example, though proportionatelyspeaking it ought to be double that number. Only 3percent of its Ph.D. students are Palestinian. Only1 percent of its university lecturers are Palestinian.And the list goes on. South Africa’s Prohibitionof Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 has its equivalentin the Israeli laws prohibiting Jews from marryingnon-Jews (again, there is no proscription in languagethat announces this prohibition as such, butthere is no institution of civil marriage in Israel, soJews are only allowed to marry other Jews, and thenonly according to Orthodox religious law); the Natives(Urban Areas) Consolidation Act of 1945 andthe Black (Native) Amendment Act of 1952 that requiredblack South Africans to carry passes and regulatedtheir access to urban areas have equivalentsin the various Israeli laws regulating and controllingthe movement of Palestinians – but not Jews– within the occupied territories and between andamong the occupied territories, Jerusalem and Israel;the Public Safety Act of 1953 has an equivalent inthe Israeli military regulations permitting the longtermdetention without trial of Palestinians (but notJews, who are protected by Israeli civil law) in theoccupied territories – a cumulative total of 650,000Palestinians have been held prisoner by Israel since1967, about 20 percent of the entire population; thePromotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1952and the Bantu Homelands Constitution Act of 1971have an equivalent in the Oslo Accords’ creation ofa so-called Palestinian Authority to manage the affairsof Palestinian (but not Jewish) residents of theoccupied territories.Apartheid / apartheid / [ ]29

and linguistically disappeared into the category of“Israeli Arabs,” so they don’t count; 6 million Palestinianscontinue to live in the exile that was violentlyforced on them in 1948 by Israel, which continuesto deny their legal and moral right of return; andso they don’t count. That leaves only the 4 millionor so Palestinians in the occupied territories – andthey have the blessings of an illusory autonomy (orat least the talk about one day having autonomy)and the collaborationist Palestinian Authority andits hopelessly compromised and politically bankruptleadership. At face value, the situation may not looklike a minority oppressing a majority, but that is exactlywhat is going on.there are today 11 million Palestinians and 5 millionIsraeli JewsMandela on Israeli apartheidPhoto: Carlos Latuff(copyright free, Wikimedia Commons)Indeed, just as South Africa created Transkei,Ciskei and Bophuthatswana in order to artificiallydelete as many blacks as possible from South Africa’sown population registry, Israel maintains pockets ofthe West Bank and all of Gaza as holding pens forthe land’s non-Jewish population, while settling therest of the territory with its own population in orderto be able to have its cake and eat it too: to absorbthe land (settling it) but not the people, and henceto maintain the claim that it is a Jewish state whilekeeping to a bare minimum the number of non-Jewswho officially live within the state – and hence toperpetuate the fiction that it does not disenfranchisethe majority of the land’s population that is Palestinian.Of course Israel disenfranchises the land’sPalestinian majority: there are today 11 millionPalestinians and 5 million Israeli Jews. Israel’s manipulationof populations and territories, however,obscures as much as possible these material circumstances:1 million Palestinians are citizens of IsraelThe fact that Israel has held – while stubbornly refusingto resolve the status of – the occupied territoriesfor over four decades, or two thirds of its ownexistence as a state, belies the discursive provisionalityof the territories’ status. Israel has colonized,planted, partially developed the West Bank and EastJerusalem; it has settled half a million of its own citizensthere; it has extended its own laws there; it usesthe aquifers and airspace there every single day. Inpractice, Israel has annexed the West Bank; only inname has it not done so. And the only reason it hasnot done so is because only the pretense that theWest Bank (like Gaza) is somehow exterior to thestate allows Israel to maintain a fiction at the level oflanguage that is belied by the material reality. Thisallows, for example, Richard Cohen to come alongand say, well, yes, there may be discrimination inthe West Bank, “but it is not part of Israel proper,”30The Salon: Volume Two

Apartheid: then and nowPhoto: Carlos Latuff(copyright free, Wikimedia Commons)so it doesn’t really count – and anyway that territorywill eventually be the “heartland” of a Palestinianstate (something that has been talked about for almosttwo decades, half as long as the West Bank hasactually been occupied, without it making the slightestbit of difference on the ground: for example, thecolonist population has essentially tripled since thefirst so-called peace talks in 1991).There are, of course, major differences betweenapartheid inside Israel and Apartheid in South Africa.I have already pointed out one of the major differences:the legibility of South African Apartheid andthe relative illegibility – inscrutability – of Israeliapartheid. Nowhere in Israel or the occupied territoriesis there a sign that baldly says “Jews Only.”The racism is practiced in practice rather than inlanguage. That’s what enables supporters of Israelto engage in the endless equivocation and hair-splittingto which they are so often reduced in defendinga form of racism that denies that that is what it is.For example, to the charge that there are two differentroad networks in the West Bank, one for Jews(connecting colonies to each other and to Israel) andone for non-Jews, the retort (one that is routinelydeployed by Israeli hasbara and propaganda outfitsin the US and Europe, such as CAMERA, whose capacityfor linguistic contortionism is so extreme thatit is almost comical) is invariably to insist that onenetwork is reserved for all Israeli citizens, not justJewish ones. In the most narrowly literal sense – atthe level of language that has ceased to function aslanguage because it no longer conveys meaning, becauseit is not meant to – that’s true. On the otherhand, only Jews live in the West Bank colonies (Palestinians,whether they are citizens of Israel or not,aren’t allowed to live there because they are not Jewish),so in practice if not in name one road networkis set apart for Jews.Again, as with so many other things, what’s inplay here is a form of denial that can’t bring itselfto acknowledge itself for what it is. It is by staringso obsessively at language, not seeing the absentmeanings because they are not conveyed in languageApartheid / apartheid / [ ]31

– “where does it say ‘Jews only’?” – that supportersof Israel allow themselves to avoid recognizingthe material reality: there does not have to be a signsaying “Jews only” in language in order for Jewsonly to use the road in practice. Unlike Apartheidin South Africa, what we see in Israel is racism thatavoids language; racism without a proper name, or,in Goldberg’s formulation, racism without racism.That doesn’t make it any less racist, however.Another difference: the system of Apartheid insideSouth Africa, for all its violence and viciousness,was not quite as relentless as the system that obtainsinside Israel and the occupied territories. The movementof blacks in South Africa was controlled, notbanned altogether, as is the case, for example, withthe movement of Palestinians in and out of Gaza,which Israel has sealed off from the world for overfive years now. The South African government dispatchedCaspar armored cars and soldiers with riflesinto Soweto – not heavy tanks, Apache helicoptersfiring Hellfire missiles and F-16s dropping one-tonbombs on people. For all its horror, the SharpevilleMassacre would – though this is of course not to diminishit or the human suffering that it represents– hardly stand out in a list of Israeli massacres ofPalestinians extending from Deir Yassin and Tantrain the 1940s to Kufr Qassem, Rafah, and Khan Younisin the 1950s to Sabra and Shatilia in the 1980s toNablus and Jenin in the 2000s to Gaza in 2008-9.There is nothing like a precedent for Israel’s 2008-9assault on Gaza in the entire history of Apartheid inSouth Africa: the murder of one out of every thousandpeople; the destruction of tens of thousands ofhomes at one go; the cutting off of vital supplies offood, medicine, fuel and construction materials toa population composed – as Gaza’s is – largely ofchildren, condemning them to malnourishment; thegloating in print, for all the world to see (though notfor it to make a difference), as the Israeli Harvardfellow Martin Kramer did recently, that the reductionof population by siege and malnourishment willalso reduce the number of “redundant young men,”and hence reduce the threat that Gaza poses to Israel.Veterans from the anti-Apartheid struggle inSouth Africa who visit Israel and the occupied territoriesconsistently say the same thing. “It is worse,worse, worse than everything we endured,” notedMondli Makhanya, editor-in-chief of the SundayTimes of South Africa, after a recent visit to Palestine.“The level of the apartheid, the racism and thebrutality are worse than the worst period of apartheid.The apartheid regime viewed the blacks as inferior;I do not think the Israelis see the Palestiniansas human beings at all.”And that of course is the major substantive differencebetween South African Apartheid and Israeliapartheid. There is a world of difference between inferiorityand dehumanization: it is the difference betweenexploitation and annihilation. As the ApartheidMuseum in Johannesburg makes very clear, inSouth Africa the system was designed to enable theexploitation of black labor, to use black people’s laborpower to work in houses, offices and gold mines,but deny them equal rights: for the white elite tohave its cake and eat it too. The Israeli system is notabout exploitation of Palestinian labor: labor fromthe occupied territories is now totally irrelevant tothe Israeli economy, having been made up for by recentimmigrants from the former Soviet Union andthe supply of cheap workers from southeast Asia enabledby global circuits of exchange. It is, as it has alwaysbeen, about the removal of one population andits replacement by another, a process that began butdid not end in 1948, and that continues to this dayevery time a Palestinian home is demolished in Jerusalem;every time a Palestinian family is expelledfrom the ghost town that is central Hebron; everytime a Palestinian Jerusalemite is stripped of herresidency papers and expelled from the city of herbirth; every time a Palestinian family is shatteredand broken because of an Israeli law that was institutedin 2003 that prevents a Palestinian in Israel orJerusalem from marrying and living with a spousefrom the occupied territories, even though of coursea Jewish Israeli can marry a Jewish colonist fromthe West Bank and they can live together whereverthey please. When a similar law was proposed at thepeak of Apartheid in South Africa in 1980, it wassummarily dismissed by that country’s high court asan unacceptable violation of black people’s right tofamily. Israel’s high court upheld that country’s newlaw in 2006.In a word, as I have put this in other contexts:south African Apartheid was biopolitical in nature– concerned with the management and administrationof living black labor; Israel’s is, to borrow thephrase that Achille Mbembe has elaborated so effectively,necropolitical – concerned with the destructionand erasure of Palestinians: something that everyPalestinian resists every single day, if only by theact of stubbornly continuing to exist.This necropolitics depends crucially and absolutely,however, on the system of inscrutability andinvisibility that allows Israelis and the supportersof Israel to go on practicing and endorsing a vulgarand violent form of racism without having to reckonwith and acknowledge the fact that that is precisely32The Salon: Volume Two

what they are doing. I have argued in other contexts– most recently in my Critical Inquiry article aboutthe construction of a so-called Museum of Tolerance(really a kind of shrine to Zionism) right on top ofthe ruins of the most important Muslim cemetery inJerusalem – that there are two main forms of Zionismin practice today: a hardcore Zionism which wesee at work in, for example, the pronouncements ofAvigdor Lieberman, Israel’s current Foreign Minister,who has made an open call for the expulsion ofIsrael’s Palestinian citizens the platform for his recentmeteoric rise in Israeli politics, which involves akind of brutal honesty; and a softcore Zionism – thedominant one still – whose adherents are, by virtueof the linguistic and historical and emotional shortcircuitsI have described here, spared from havingto reckon with and honestly acknowledge that whatthey support is a racist enterprise; it is only on thebasis of that very inscrutability, in fact, that they cango on supporting it. This is the kind of Zionist positionthat says for example, in all innocence, that it isanti-semitic to criticize Zionism because it only representsthe Jewish people’s right to have a nationalhomeland like every other people.a softcore Zionism … whose adherents are …spared from having to reckon with and honestlyacknowledge that what they support is a racistenterpriseIn asking so insistently why Jews should be deniedthe same right that every other people have, the softcoreZionist depends on the emotional short-circuit Ihave discussed here to mis-recognize the very questionshe is asking: for the flip-side of the same questionis not whether Jews have a right to a homeland– it’s whether that right cancels out the Palestinianpeople’s own right to a homeland (and the answerto that question is “no”). Only by concentrating soobsessively and self-absorbedly on the recto of thequestion does the softcore Zionist avoid having todeal with its verso and with the indelible fact thatthere is not, there never was, and there never willbe, a way to create a Jewish state in Palestine withoutdenying or negating the Palestinian claim to thesame land and the historical rights attendant on thatclaim. Rather than making the denial of Palestinianrights an explicit component of her ideological position– as the hardcore Zionist does – the softcore Zionistremoves that denial from her field of vision, ineffect denying that there is anything to deny to beginwith. And as I said earlier the strength of Israel’s systemof apartheid is that it is structured in such a waythat it never ever makes the great mistake of SouthAfrican Apartheid by forcing people to confront thenakedness and vulgarity of its racism. So they cansupport it and go on thinking of themselves as virtuous,ethical and progressive, technologically chic,friendly to animals and kind to the environment.Where does this leave Palestinians and thosewho advocate their rights?There are, I think, two immediate conclusionsfrom this discussion. One point is this: the reasonnegotiations between Palestinians and Israelis sooften seem so futile is that the whole point of the linguisticshort-circuits and forms of denial of denialthat I have been discussing here is to forestall negotiation,or at least to bypass and render unapproachablethe core of the conflict between Zionism andthe Palestinians. The great strength of a racism thatexists outside of language – that exempts itself fromlanguage – is that it is also quite impervious to language:every attempt to point to it and say “that’s theproblem” will be met with the perfectly sincere reply“what problem?” What racism? What villages? Whatroad network? What Palestinians? This is a structuralcomplex for which there is no resolution at thelevel of language and hence diplomatic negotiation(let alone negotiation between two totally unequalparties). Hence the manifest futility of the attemptsto end this conflict by raising consciousness amongIsraelis or supporters of Israel around the world, orappealing to their better instincts: the sheer stubbornrefusal to acknowledge reality is demonstratedevery single time lectures on Palestinian rightsaround the world are met with that wearily familiarwall of solid denials and that total refusal to entertainfacts, evidence, reason, laws, principles – if notactually eruptions of inarticulate fury – to which wehave all grown so accustomed.The second point is that it should be even moreobvious than ever that, in view of the system ofapartheid in place in Israel and the occupied territories– a system of apartheid that is inseparablefrom the project to create and maintain the pretenseof a monocultural state in what is fact a profoundlyheterogeneous land – there can be no peaceful andjust resolution of the Zionist conflict with the Palestiniansuntil the attempt to replace one people withanother, to impose a monocultural identity on amulticultural country, is abandoned and its institutionscompletely dismantled. Creating a Palestinianstatelet in the West Bank alongside an Israel whoseclaim to Jewishness would be reinforced in a twostatesolution would do little for West Bankers, lessfor Gazans, nothing for the refugees and their descendants,and less than nothing for the Palestiniancitizens of Israel, whose status as reviled non-JewsApartheid / apartheid / [ ]33

would become even worse. Only the creation of ademocratic and secular state in all of historic Palestine,in which Israeli Jews and Palestinians – allof them, the ones now under occupation, the onesliving as second-class citizens of Israel, and the refugeesof 1948 and their descendants, whose right ofreturn is absolutely beyond question – can live asequal citizens can resolve this conflict once and forall.privileged groups don’t abandon their privilegesjust because that’s the right thing to doFrom these two conclusions a third follows aswell. A just peace will not come about by merelypleading with, or trying to persuade, Israeli Jews todo the right thing and abandon and dismantle theracist system that endows them with privileges whiledenying Palestinians fundamental rights. All theclosest historical precedents to this conflict – aboveall South Africa – remind us that privileged groupsdon’t abandon their privileges just because that’s theright thing to do or because they are made to feelbad about enjoying those privileges; they abandonthem only when they have no other choice. This caseis no different: a just peace fundamentally requiresnonviolent outside pressure to be brought to bearon Israel; which is why for so many people of goodwill around the world, and for so many Palestiniansthemselves, the growing BDS (boycott / divestment/ sanctions) movement is a source of such hope.34The Salon: Volume Two

Sarkozy’s Law: TheInstitutionalizationof Xenophobia inthe New EuropeDominic Thomas(University of California, Los Angeles, USA)Examining the new policy ramparts of FortressEurope, Dominic Thomas finds the ratificationof racial intolerance, the enabling of exploitativelabour practices, and increasingly extreme legal‘security measures’; all of which culminate in‘round-ups’ and ‘camps’ ominously reminiscentof one of the darkest passages in Europe’s recentpast.France’s hyper-president, Nicolas Sarkozy, assumedthe presidency of the European Union on 1 July2008 under acrimonious conditions triggered by the13 June 2008 Irish ‘no’ vote on the Lisbon Treaty.Nevertheless, France was able to obtain virtually immediateconsensus on two significant and connectedinitiatives: the European Union Pact on Migrationand Asylum, and the Union for the Mediterraneanproject. Closer scrutiny of these French prioritiesprovides interesting insights into broader debateson the contested parameters of a European identity.Recent developments in Europe shed new anddisquieting light on the original organizing principleof the European Union, according to which the EUwas to become a ‘family’ of democratic Europeancountries. EU membership has continued to grow(adding new members in 2004 and 2007) and thisgrowth has been accompanied by the liberalizationof internal frontiers. These measures have also coincided,however, with heightened concerns overborder control and the vulnerability of ‘FortressEurope’. At the same time, assertions of nationalsovereignty have taken on an increasingly shrill andreactionary intensity, raising important questionsabout belonging, cohesiveness, and the sanctity ofthe original structuring aspirations and objectives.France has, historically, played an extremelyimportant role in defining EU identity, and policiesand measures concerning migration and securityprecede the Sarkozy administration. In the ThirdAnnual Report on Migration and Integration, published2007, the EU emphasized the point that the“integration of third-country nationals is a processof mutual accommodation by both the host societiesand the immigrants and an essential factor in realizingthe full benefits of immigration.” However,French determination to impose and extend a keydomestic policy agenda item throughout the EUzone must be understood as the outcome of electoralcampaign promises made by then-candidate Sarkozyto his extreme right-wing constituencies. Pollsconducted during the 2007 French presidentialelections revealed that a majority of Sarkozy supportersbelieved there were “too many immigrantsin France”. In turn, this has resulted in a shift awayfrom policies concerned with the integration of migrantstowards an emphasis on protecting its ‘own’citizens from migrants through more restrictivelaws, regulations and restrictions.The politics of ‘co-development’The creation in 2007 of the new Ministry of Immigration,National Identity, Integration and Co-Developmentessentially completed a project NicolasSarkozy started as minister of the interior (2005–07). In that capacity, he had already made the fightagainst illegal immigration a priority, resulting indramatic increases in expulsions during both thisperiod (35 921 in 2005; 34 127 in 2006; and 20 411during the first six months of 2007, a 19% increaseover the similar period in the previous year) and inthe last couple of years. Under the leadership of hisclose friend and political ally, Brice Hortefeux, thenew ministry has endeavoured to capitalize uponthe widespread belief that national identity has beeneroded. For example, DNA testing was proposed asa ‘scientific’ way for ‘foreign families’ to prove theirties to France, but instead has served to supportprevalent assumptions that visible minorities andimmigrants belong to a distinct social configuration,outside the dominant order of things. Likewise, reformsto immigration policy have overlapped withthe consolidation of extreme right-wing positionsin Europe or at the very least their mainstreamingby right-wing political parties; calls for increasedborder control, heightened security, and the expansionof police powers have become routine in manyEuropean countries. The new preoccupation withborder security, while reviving discussions on Europeanidentity and integration, have encouragedmonolithic interpretations of history that fail toaccount for the fact that European populations aremore intimately related to non-European ones thansome European people wish to believe.Sarkozy’s Law35

European populations are more intimately relatedto non-European ones than some European peoplewish to believe.The structure of the new French ministry is organizedaround four main priorities: chosen/selectiveimmigration based on certain skill sets; the fight overillegal immigration, the introduction of integrationcontracts (comprising language proficiency testsand a commitment to respecting Republican valuesand ideals); and measures aimed at co-developmentpartnerships with sending countries. The key objectivehas been to reduce dramatically family-relatedimmigration (that is, reunification) in favour of economicmigration (that is, exploitation).To this end, domestic policy and foreign policycan no longer be decoupled, since they unambiguouslyconcern both facets of immigration: namely,the dynamics of internal race relations and policiesaimed at controlling the entry of migrants intoFrance. Naturally, these mechanisms reinforce existingparadigms concerning the criminalizationof poverty in the banlieue, and these have beentransferred to economic models that essentializethe criminality of immigrants. These labels emergeas inseparable components of the illegal migrant’s‘clandestine’ status in the EU, a presence that istherefore assumed a priori as a ‘risk’ factor, whilealso being structured around comfortable andshared negative representations. (A similar trendapplies to the United States, where immigration discoursehas moved away from seeing it as a positivehistorical phenomenon to viewing it as an undesirablecomponent of globalization.)The politics of ‘co-development’, meanwhile, essentiallyreproduce age-old patterns of labour acquisitionin the global South; all that has changed is thatthe coordinates of human capital exploitation haveshifted from the healthiest and the strongest (slaves)to the best and the brightest (employees). Brice Hortefeuxdefends this dimension, arguing that thesemechanisms do not entail a ‘brain drain’ but rathera ‘circulation of competence’. This position entailsconsideration neither for the nature of neo-colonialrelations and the circumstances that trigger migration,usually in the guise of perilous Mediterraneancrossings whose recalibration echoes an earlier middlepassage, nor for the broader uni-directionality ofthe process of labour circulation. In fact, France hasbeen actively establishing quotas with African-sendingcountries, agreeing for example on 25 February2008 with Senegal to issue ‘competence and skillscards’ to young Senegalese workers in return for assistancein fighting illegal immigration, improvingborder control, and streamlining the process of repatriatingillegals (similar deals are being pursuedwith Benin, Congo Republic, Gabon, Morocco, Togoand other countries).these mechanisms do not entail a ‘brain drain’ butrather a ‘circulation of competence’Before looking at the ways in which the French governmenthas sought to extend these policies to theEU, it is important briefly to consider earlier EUinitiatives. According to the ‘Freedom, Security andJustice’ page on the EU’s ‘Justice and Home Affaires’website, in October 1999, EU leaders at a EuropeanCouncil meeting in Tampere, Finland: “called for acommon immigration policy which would includemore dynamic policies to ensure the integration ofthird-country nationals residing in the EuropeanManifestation des sans-papiers du 30-09-06Photo: Flickr/Alain BachellierUnion. They agreed that the aim of this integrationpolicy should be to grant third-country nationalsrights and obligations comparable to those of citizensof the EU. The European Union is keen to promoteeconomic and social cohesion throughout itsterritory. As such, integrating third-country nationalshas become a focal point of the European Union’simmigration policy. ”36The Salon: Volume Two

For many years, EU leaders have underscored theimportance of fostering prosperity, solidarity andsecurity alongside immigration. These guidelineshave been both augmented and redefined, however,under the aegis of the new European Union Pact onMigration and Asylum, presented to the EuropeanCouncil of Ministers of Home Affairs/Interior andJustice on 7 and 8 July 2008 in Cannes, France.Brice Hortefeux underlined the imperative ofachieving uniformity among the disparate nationalmechanisms currently in place and the need to regulatelegal immigration and asylum policy concerningthird-country migrants (that is, any person whois not a national of an EU member state). Proposedmeasures were targeted at developing a commonand coordinated policy, one that would endeavourto harmonize approaches to legal and illegal immigration:the first to proceed through a EuropeanBlue Card Scheme designed to address internal labourshortages, the second to be controlled througha newly integrated series of ‘security measures’, consistingof deportation, detention, expulsion, regularization,repatriation, return directives. Approved inprinciple in July, these measures were voted on atthe October 2008 EU summit meeting.In some cases, at least, these tougher regulationshave been counterproductive. In recent years it hasbecome harder for immigrants to achieve regularization;expulsions are accompanied by a five-year banfrom the EU, which, rather than solving the initialproblem, merely ensures the illegality of returnees;many workers find themselves reduced to the statusof illegals when they are made redundant; and, finally,‘returning’ illegals to third-party states merelytransfers their status, vulnerability and problems toanother space. At the same time, the kinds of eco-nomic disparities long observed in the global Southare also increasingly in evidence in the economicallyprosperous regions of the North; riots in France duringthe autumn of 2005 underscored the class andracial marginality of disadvantaged populations.Without papers, or rightsEconomic migrants, faced with these new pressures,have recently become increasingly vocal in their demandfor social and political rights. ‘Illegals’ aroundthe world are slowly beginning to emerge from thedubious ‘safety’ of legal invisibility, and have begunto press more directly for public representation.During April and May 2008, several French businesses(with support from the CGT and other tradeunions) went on strike to support the illegal workersknown as the sans-papiers, and called for regularization.This action also served to counter popularmisconceptions and stereotypes concerning illegals,bringing attention to the ‘legal’ work they performand contributions they make, but also signaling thedangers of restrictive employment laws in exposingworkers to exploitative employment practices thatEuropean workers would find unacceptable.EU laws designed to punish abusive employersexist, notably Article 5 of the Charter of FundamentalRights that concerns the Prohibition of slaveryand forced labour: (i) No one shall be held in slaveryor servitude; (ii) No one shall be required to performforced or compulsory labour; (iii) Traffickingin human beings is prohibited. The European Courtof Human Rights in Strasbourg is also committed toprotecting human beings from slavery, servitude andforced or compulsory labour. Nevertheless, abusivepractices have been widely tolerated, and extensivelydocumented. As Hugo Brady reports in a briefingDes Papiers Pour TouTEsPhoto: Flickr/William Hamondocument on EU Migration Policy on the Centre forEuropean Reform website: “The Commission estimatesthat there are around 8 million illegal immigrantsin the EU, and that this number increases by500,000 to 1 million every year.… These workers aredrawn to Europe mainly by the knowledge that theycan find work illegally in the construction, agriculture,cleaning and hospitality industries. Many endSarkozy’s Law37

Anti Sarko Manifestation des sans-papiers du 30-09-06Photo: Flickr/Alain Bachellierup doing under-paid or dangerous work.”In L’espresso, on 4 September 2006, FabrizioGatti (recipient of a 2006 award ‘For diversity –against discrimination’) provides a compelling accountof the glaring failure of the EU to addressexploitative labour practices. Gatti equates currentemployment conditions with slavery: “In order topass a week undercover amidst the slave labourersit is necessary to undertake a voyage that takes onebeyond the limits of human imagination. But this isthe only way to report on the horrors that the immigrantsare forced to endure .… They’re all foreigners;all employed as so-called ‘black workers’, thename used to describe illegal, untaxed and underpaidwork scams .… Down here they also ignore theConstitution: articles one, two and three, as well asthe Universal Declaration of Rights.”Considerable disparities persist in the EU concerningintegration and the required degree of adherenceto national codes and values. The Unionfor the Mediterranean (in effect the culmination ofthe Barcelona Process that began back in 1995) wasagreed on 13 July 2008 in Paris, and signed by the27 EU members and 43 non-EU countries (exceptLibya): it extends both the economic and the socialpriorities of the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum,while simultaneously promoting the circulationof goods but not people. (France’s support for theUnion for the Mediterranean project and its implicitposition that Turkey’s proper role should be confinedto this body rather than the EU itself, serves asa strong indicator as to what they will be prepared toaccept in terms of future EU membership.) Effortsat defining a common or shared European identityhave been informed by such categories as desirableand undesirable subjects, and Eurosceptics and repeated‘no’ votes (France, the Netherlands, Ireland)have also contributed to feelings of dis-identificationalongside rising xenophobic tendencies aimed atnon-EU members. The very concept of ‘integrationcontracts’ reveals the degree to which the Frenchauthorities continue to subscribe to and embrace along-held belief that such a European identity eitherexists or can be achieved. What is less clear isthe degree to which any such identity will dependon an increasingly rigid polarization of ‘insiders’and ‘outsiders’, on the increasingly paranoid resentmentthat divides privileged members of the ‘familyof democratic European countries’ from their extra-European cousins.Repeated attempts have been made to connectthe fight against illegal immigration to a discourseof human rights concerned with the protection ofvulnerable subjects from fraudulent traffickers andemployers. Abundant evidence of growing insensitivityto migrants demonstrates their ineffectiveness,as do the findings of demographers who havedemonstrated Europe’s long-term need for cheaplabour. Instead, obsessive concern with the apparentneed to delineate a European identity in a newly‘uncertain’ global landscape has encouraged legislatorsto approach immigration exclusively in termsof security and economic policy, without adequatemechanisms for ensuring that basic standards ofequality and justice apply to the new global migrantworking class. The resulting dehumanization of migrantsand their characterization as economic burdens(immediately scapegoated during downturnsin the global economy) have made it easier to expelthem and to dissociate such harsh measures fromany reference to the migrants’ own experience. Additionally,the commitment to a dramatic reductionof family reunification in favour of the economic migrationneeded to build a more cohesive ‘Europeanfamily’ ignores and occludes the collective migrationexperience over a much longer historical time frame.If more attention were paid to this history, debatesabout European identity and singularity would beless distorted and short-sighted.38The Salon: Volume Two

‘New Europe’, old historyIn the absence of such attention, questions aboutthe nature of ‘Europeanness’ are difficult to address.Current talk about the emergence of a newEurope remains exceptionally vague. EU memberstates have denounced evidence of ultra-nationalismand human rights abuses in countries seekingEU membership, but do not always adhere to thosestandards themselves. Proposed measures in Italy tofingerprint and register Gypsies (communities whowere previously expelled by Mussolini in the late1920s and subsequently exterminated during theSecond World War), along with the similar treatmentof Roma populations in Portugal, France andelsewhere, are a case in point. European immigrationpolicy increasingly depends on multilateral andnon-reciprocal Euro-Mediterranean agreementsand partnerships that serve to restrict populationmovements and duplicate age-old historical patternsof exploitation and uneven exchange.EU subsidies and biased trade policies ensurethat ‘co-development’ policies serve largely toperpetuate African poverty.French–African relations were conceived from thebeginning in terms of racist and culturalist supremacy,and they continue to shape patterns of neocolonialdomination and exploitation that contributedirectly to the very problems of destitution andemigration that France bemoans. EU subsidies andbiased trade policies ensure that ‘co-development’policies serve largely to perpetuate African poverty.EU immigration policies pay obsessive attention tothe problems associated with poverty in the globalSouth, yet, as Philippe Bernard revealed in an articlein Le Monde on 26 June, 2008, for every migrantwho tries to move illegally from Africa to an OECDcountry there are more than four people who migrateillegally from one African country to another (4 millionand 17 million people respectively). AlthoughEurope has been and remains actively complicit inthe destitution of large parts of Africa, the defendersof Fortress Europe cannot directly govern thebehaviour of the people they exclude. As Bernard asserts:“In spite of all the obstacles, xenophobia andexpulsions, when one considers the multiple formsof migration, Africans emerge as the most mobileinhabitants of the planet”.A speech delivered by President Sarkozy in Senegalin July 2007 (‘The tragedy of Africa is that theAfrican has never really entered history…’) drewliberally on racist stereotypes recycled from colonialtimes. Much of the language used to describetoday’s clandestine and ‘illegal’ immigrants was firstdeveloped, in the nineteenth century, in response tothose indigènes of Algeria or the Ivory Coast whostubbornly refused to appreciate the virtues of theFrench mission civilisatrice. Today, as Mauritanianfilmmaker Med Hondo argues in Ibrahima Signaté’sbook Med Hondo: Un cinéaste rebelled: “seeing Africanschained together like criminals prior to forcefulrepatriation is a spectacle that does little to honourthose states who claim to embrace the rights ofMan and democratic ideals. Nothing is worse for aperson than humiliation. This has become the dailylot of immigrants in the countries of the North.”Drawing on more recent historical memories, theFrench government has also established target figuresfor the expulsion of illegal migrants that haveresulted in often arbitrary rafles (round-ups) ofsubjects – a term that evokes the 1942 rafle du Veld’Hiv, for starters, which led to the deportation ofFrench Jews to Nazi concentration camps.The transhistorical connection to these ‘camps’turns out to be all the more compelling today as adirect consequence of the toughening of immigrationpolicy. Not only have border control mechanismsbeen enhanced as a way of managing theexternal perimeter of Fortress Europe and lockingthird country nationals out – but these measureshave been accompanied by a dramatic increase in‘camps’ throughout the European Union in the guiseof detention zones, deportation centers, and refugeeholding areas locking third country nationals in.Europe cannot afford to ignore such antecedentswhen its leaders have recourse to terminologyand procedures of this kind. The racial profiling of‘insiders’, the return of biology and race, rising Islamophobiaand anti-Muslim sentiment, the demonizationof asylum-seekers – all these measuresare directly related to the most troubling sequencesin European history. Any searching genealogy of theEuropean family yields a lesson, first and foremost,on the institutionalization of xenophobia.A version of this article first appeared in theBritish magazine Radical Philosophy (Number 153January-February 2009), and is reproduced herewith kind permission.Sarkozy’s Law39

"The encampment" in Europe and around the Mediterranean SeaCountry of European Union 1Candidate Country to the European UnionCountries covered by the European NeighborhoodPolicy (ENP), associated with an action plan(1) Iceland, Norway and Switzerland aren’t in EuropeanUnion, but they have integrated Treaty Schengen legislation.Open campClosed campIRELANDUNITED KINGDOMNorthSeaNETHERLANDNORWAYDENMARKSWEDENBalticFINLANDESTONIALATVIASeaLITHUANIA* For France, the map shows only the zones d'attentes (waiting zones) usedregularly for detaining foreigners entering the territory.** Migrants subject to removal orders are often detained in special sectionsof prisons. There are 23 such places in Switzerland which can not be allshown on this map : Appenzell, Bâle (2), Bern, Chur, Dornach, Einsiedeln,Gampelen, Glarus, Granges, Mendrisio, Olten, Saignelégier, Schaffhausen,Schüpfheim, Sissach, Solothurn, Sursee, Thônex, Widnau, Zug, Zürich (2)Migreurop don't have datum for Egypt, Macedonia, Montenegro and Syria. ForByelorussia and Russia, informations are incomplete.BYELORUSSIARUSSIAmigrants waiting for admissionGERMANYmigrants about to be deportedChannelCalaisPOLANDmixes of the two abovementionedfunctions of examining admission and deportationinformal places and camps located in the suburbsof big citiesThe word “encampment” is borrowed toBarbara Harrell-Bond.PORTUGALFRANCE*ParisUKRAINEMOLDAVIAHUNGARYSWITZERLAND** AUSTRIARUMANIACROATIAB. H.Black SeaITALYSERBIABULGARIAMONTENEGRORomeIstanbulGEORGIAAZERBAIDJANARMENIASPAINPatrasBilecikTURKEYAnkaraVanIRANAtlanticOceanRabatCasablancaTangerOujdaFezAlgiersTunisGREECEMALTAMediterranean SeaCYPRUSSYRIALEBANONBeyrouthIRAQMOROCCOALGERIATUNISIATripoliISRAELPALESTINEJORDANSAUDI ARABIALIBYAEGYPT0 200 400 600 800 1000 kmMAURITANIAMALITamanrassetNIGERDatums : European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment /UNHCR http://www.unhcr.ch / ; The conditions in centres for third country national (detention camps, open centresas well as transit centres and transit zones) with a particular focus on provisions and facilities for persons withspecial needs in the 25 EU member states. For Bulgaria : Red Cross, Bulgarian Helsinki Committee ; Croatia : RedCross, Croatian Law Centre ; Serbia : Groupe 484, Gracanicka 10, Belgrade ; Algeria : Association "Rencontre etdéveloppement", Alger ; Liban : FIDH. For Rumania, Morocco and Turkey, investigations conducted by members ofMigreurop.“The Encampments” in Europe and Around the Mediterranean SeaPhoto: Courtesy http://migreurop.org/IMG/pdf/L_Europe_des_camps_2009.pdf.)40The Salon: Volume Two

Alien LandscapesKim Berman(University of Johannesburg, South Africa)For visual artist and activist Kim Berman thexenophobic violence that ripped through SouthAfrica in 2008 was a horror, a disgrace, andmarked the end of an ideal. She discusses herresponses as a print-maker to the violence and itsaftermath.In May 2008 South Africa erupted in a wave of xenophobicviolence. Black African people from countriesother than South Africa were designated as‘other’ using the pejorative term amakwerekwere.The extreme violence, which included burning victimsalive, killed sixty two people and displacedthousands. The authorities responded by roundingup foreign nationals and moving them, ‘for theirown protection’, into tented encampments in outlyingareas. After six months the inhabitants of thesecamps were forced back into the communities thathad ejected them so aggressively, where they againfaced marginalisation and the threat of violence.Many were deported back to their countries, otherssimply ‘disappeared’.For many South Africans the devastating attacks,and the State’s response, was a painful reminder ofthe oppression and violence of the apartheid era. Itre-opened the wound of that trauma in the nationalpsyche, revealing it as unhealed. It dashed the notionof a ‘Rainbow Nation’, a trope introduced byArchbishop Tutu that was so often quoted in theimmediate post-apartheid period to celebrate togethernessdespite difference: inclusionary commu-Winter Camp 1, White River (Monotype)Photo: Courtesy Kim Berman ©Alien Landscapes41

nity. It betrayed the ideal of ubuntu (‘I am becauseof you’), and diverted South Africans away from thedemocratic society imagined in the writing of theConstitution.Over the past two decades across the globe, genocideresulting from policies of ethnic cleansing hasprovided the world with its most difficult lessonsince the Holocaust: the loss of our humanity. SouthAfrica tasted this bitter, de-humanising experienceduring the xenophobic violence in 2008, which damagedthe dream of a society that promised to protectand safeguard human rights for all its people.Like many of my fellow citizens, I was devastatedby the destruction of ideals that were struggled for,at such cost, for so long. As an artist I sought visualmetaphors through which to process the trauma. Iturned, as I have done in much of my work, to landscapein order to explore disconnection and the conceptof the alien or ‘other’.First I created a series of etchings comprising alandscape constructed from the splicing together oftwo unconnected spaces into a co-joined but disjunctivespace. The United Nations white refugee tentstemporarily provided for the dispossessed on theedge of South Africans cities became a stark symbolof the nation’s failure to accommodate diversity.The etchings, drawings, and monotypes in thesecond series of work are inspired by seeminglyunrelated landscape images that I photographedaround the time of the xenophobic violence. In Juneof 2008, rural areas close to the town of White Riverin Mpuma langa province were consumed by vastforest fires. It was necessary for farmers to revivetheir badly damaged exotic fruit orchards by drasticallypruning down the trees and painting themwhite with lime in order to protect the exposed barkInvasive Alien (Monotype)Photo: Courtesy Kim Berman ©42The Salon: Volume Two

from the sun and possible disease. For me the fieldsof white amputated trees in regimented rows visuallyenacted the predicament of the alien; the shameful,drastic marking and control of the other. Exploringthis imagery through a range of visual art techniquesoffered me a way of processing and exploringboth the fragility of South Africa’s democracy, and ofintegrating and accommodating radical dislocationinto a deceptively ordinary landscape.In my work, landscapes have always provided ametaphor for South Africa’s transitions as a country:even in a poisoned, burnt, or smoke-filled landscape,the light on the horizon sparks the energy andhope for the cycle of change and imperative of renewal.Both of these series are set in the winter of2008: they speak of a stark, sterile, dry, cold, empty,white, regimented aftermath of earlier fire, violenceand chaos. But winter is part of a cycle, and its momentdoes pass.These works were created for the exhibition“Dislocated Landscapes”President’s Gallery, Massachusetts College of Artand Design, USA, September 2009.They will be exhibited at Art on Paper (AoP),Johannesburg, in August 2010.Alien Landscapes43

Dislocation andCollaboration: recentprints by Kim BermanPamela Allara(Brandeis University, USA)Throughout her oeuvre Kim Berman has soughtto witness and process South Africa’s traumasthrough landscape, suggests Pamela Allara.‘The landscapes Berman created in response toxenophobia in South Africa are sterile with whiteddislocation and regimented emptiness.’Dislocated Landscapes I, 2009.Etching on Steel, 11.8 x 35.4Courtesy Kim Berman © Private collectionKim Berman’s series of prints from 2009, DislocatedLandscapes are deeply felt responses to theviolent xenophobic outbreaks in May 2008 thatshook South African society to its core. As Bermancommented in the exhibition brochure, “This periodseemed to betray many of the fundamental valuesof community, inclusion, participation and ubuntu,and took South Africans further away from thedemocratic society we imagined for ourselves whenthe constitution was written in the 1990s.” Characterizedby stark renderings of the white United Nationstents in the hastily organized ‘refugee’ campsoutside of Johannesburg, the prints speak to the victims’devastating losses and isolation, as well as tomemories of past injustices.In contrast to these images of physical and psychologicaldislocation, the collaboration in the fallof 2009 among three Boston-based organizationson a project involving two exhibitions and a majorlecture engaging Berman’s work demonstrated themany benefits of creative cooperation, both institutionaland artistic. The tripartite program consistedof: “Proof + Legacy” in the Sandra and Philip GordonGallery at the Boston Arts Academy, an exhibitof prints by members of the Artist Proof Studio; theBeckwith lecture by Berman, “Artists as Activists”at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts; and Berman’ssolo exhibition “Dislocated Landscapes” inthe President’s Gallery at the Massachusetts Collegeof Art and Design.Although the collaboration among these institutionswas sparked by Berman’s close connectionsto Boston, it paralleled her own working methodsas well, for her artwork is inseparable from her activism,teaching and scholarship. In the outreachprojects she has founded over the past decade anda half (Artist Proof Studio, founded in 1991; PaperPrayers for AIDS Awareness, initiated in 1998; andPhumani Paper, handmade paper for poverty alleviation,from 2000), Berman has demonstratedthat her belief in the power of creative thought andprocesses to transform lives is justified. A substantialnumber of the graduates of Artist Proof Studio,including Nelson Makamo, Molefe Thwala and PhillemonHlungwani now have successful careers, andincreasingly the predominately female members ofthe Phumani Paper small craft enterprises are beginningto provide support for themselves and theirfamilies. But the programs’ real successes are moreintangible, and lie in the increased confidence andempowerment of all of the participants, whether ornot they also reap substantial financial rewards.Yet Berman’s own art work, even when collaborative,avoids depicting or representing her involvementwith the enterprises that have required somuch of her attention and energy. Rather, although44The Salon: Volume Two

grounded in direct observation, her work serves as avehicle to ruminate more broadly on the emotionaltemperature, so to speak, of her country as a whole.For Berman, history and culture are rooted in the locusof human habitation: the landscape, and specificallythe broad, sparsely-vegetated plains, the highveld,on which Johannesburg is located, providesthe terrain from which to assess the nation’s struggleswith its ongoing challenges and traumas. In allof her work, Berman begins with a literal source,the photographs she took while traveling outsideof Johannesburg, and then expands those initialnotes into a theme that is explored through a suiteof prints. Just as prints are a multiple medium, so isBerman’s use of multiple images on a single theme ameans to investigate her chosen metaphors, and toavoid simplistic or didactic statements.Landscape as a genre in the history of western artcan be said to coincide with the history of colonial intrusioninto South Africa, beginning with the Dutchin the mid-17 th century. For her part, Berman’s engagementwith the South African landscape could besaid to have its stylistic origins in the French romantic-realisttradition of Courbet and Millet. For example,in “Women of Madibogopane” (1993), Bermanreference Millet’s field hands in order to representrural women envisioning a route out of poverty duringSouth Africa’s transition to democracy. Strippingthe residual sentimentality from Millet’s ‘peasant’trope, and substituting for it a small group of womanwith the central figure raising her arm as if salutinga flag, Berman presents an unambiguous picture ofa country looking forward to its future. In this earlywork, created during her employment with the Boston-basedfoundation, Fund for a Free South Africa(now the South Africa Development Fund), the useThe Women of Madibogopane, 1993.Collograph and drypoint, 18” x 26”Courtesy Kim Berman © Private collectionof collograph, essentially the printmaking version offrottage, provides a highly textured foreground thatcontrasts with the generalized silhouettes of thesesoon-to-be citizens.Although the works in the Dislocated Landscapesseries do not employ collograph, all of them have apronounced foreground texture, a device that servestwo opposing purposes: on the one hand it providesa grounding for the viewer, who enjoys the momentaryillusion of standing in the space. On the otherhand, because the brown-ochre reeds and leaves arefrequently uprooted and unidentifiable, the illusionis abruptly broken. The view is made unfamiliar,and the viewer disabused of any genuine sense ofbelonging.The Dislocated Landscapes employ this dialogueof belonging/distancing to respond to May 2008 xenophobicattacks on immigrants by those ‘citizens’who deemed themselves ‘real’ South Africans, nomatter how recently they had arrived. “Go Homeor Die Here”, the terrifying threat shouted at immigrantsduring the horrific episodes of violence,was hardly a viable option for the people who wereuprooted and displaced. There was no home to goto those who were raped, beaten or murdered duringthe outbreaks, nor for the nearly 80,000 ejectedfrom their vulnerable flats or ‘informal settlements’.These former domiciles were located not only in Alexandratownship in Johannesburg where the uprisingsbegan, but also in Diepsloot and the East Randin Gauteng, and other provinces: KwaZulu Natal,the Eastern Cape and the Western Cape.In his contribution to a very revealing volumeon the violence titled Go Home or Die Here, EricWorby notes that the xenophobia constituted a vehementrejection of the Constitution’s declarationthat “South Africa belongs to all who live in it”, the‘Rainbow Nation’ appeared suddenly to dissolve,and “the supposedly slain beast of ethnic nationalism[was] resurrected in the fertile terrain of povertyand inequality.” The ongoing poverty and depravationof the South African black majority in the‘new’ South Africa had precipitated a masculinistresponse: [young] men struck out at those who werenot responsible for their situation out of frustrationand anger at those who were. Those former neighborswere no longer humans: they were now amakwerekwere,aliens.The encampments were non-places, uncanny intheir utter distance from anything that could beidentified as home.Many thousands of the displaced, whether theywere legal or illegal immigrants, or even South Africancitizens who did not happen to know the isi-Zulu word for ‘elbow’, were taxied from their formerDislocation and Collaboration45

John’s Storyas told by Kim BermanMembers of Artist Proof Studio, Xenophobia, 2008. Mural,1 m. x 40m., Noord Street Taxi Rank, Newtownhomes to overcrowded churches and civic centres,and from there to hastily organized UNHRC (UnitedNations High Commission on Refugees) tent cities,away from danger, and equally removed from anypossibility of recovering their former livelihoods.The encampments were non-places, uncanny intheir utter distance from anything that could beidentified as home. After the violence had subsidedsomewhat, and the displaced had been dispatchedto these temporary internment camps, NGO’s, includingthe Centre for the Study of Violence and theArt Therapy Center in Johannesburg, set up supportservices in the UN’s shelters. Shortly thereafter, artistsfrom Artist Proof Studio provided additionalhelp for refugee children by holding art classes intwo of the centres near Johannesburg: in the townof Boksburg and at the Rifle Range at Roodeport.Kim Berman organized and coordinated these efforts,and, significantly, the Dislocated Landscapesseries resulted not from secondhand news reports,but from the firsthand interventions that Bermanfacilitated and to which she traveled.Similarly, the Artist Proof Studio volunteerswere themselves motivated by the Studio’s directexperience with xenophobia. A studio graduate,John Taouss, originally from Rwanda, was one ofthe displaced: his apartment was set alight and all ofhis belongings destroyed. While some of the ArtistProof Studio artists worked with displaced children,others worked with Taouss to develop and executeJohn survived the genocide in Rwanda. He and hissister managed to escape by stepping over the deadbodies of his family and others in the killing fields.John crossed through the countries of Tanzania,Malawi, and Mozambique and trekked throughSouth Africa’s Kruger National Park into the provinceof Mpumalanga. He was working on a buildingcrew in the town of White River, building thenew Artist Press Print workshop, when he met theartist Judith Mason. One day John found the courageto show Judy his sketches. She was impressed,and every day after building, John worked withher. When the building contract was complete Judycalled me to let me know that she wanted to sponsorJohn to study at Artist Proof Studio. He completedhis third year at the Studio in 2007, and managedto sell much of the work on his final-year exhibition.A few months later John became a victim of xenophobicattacks on his home in the Pretoria townshipof Mamelodi. All his belongings, along withthe stock for his clothing business were destroyed.His dream was shattered. I invited John to sharehis story with the incoming Artist Proof Studio students.They were deeply moved, and for the nexttwo weeks John facilitated the making of a communalvisual narrative of his story. He worked withgroups of students to produce eight drawn panelsthat narrated his journey. On the 10 th of December2008, Human Rights Day, the visual expression ofJohn’s story was launched on a 40 meter long publicmural outside the Johannesburg Art Gallery inthe busy Noord Street taxi rank.46The Salon: Volume Two

Dislocated Landscapes #4Etching with Monoprint, 15.75” x 38.5”Courtesy the Kim Berman ©a 40 meter-long public mural about his devastatingexperience. Titled “Xenophobia” the mural is locatedat the taxi rank across the street from the JohannesburgArt Gallery.Thus Berman’s Dislocated Landscapes are adistillation of her experiences in working collaborativelyto help alleviate the crisis, as well as her privatereflections on the broader implications of thosetraumatic events. Some way outside Johannesburg,the earth around the two encampments appears especiallyfallow and arid, and the inhabitants of thetents look like incorporeal shadows.Several months earlier, Berman had traveled toWhite River in Mpumalanga with a former student,Thabang Lehoybe, to record the damage caused bythe devastating forest fires in the region. Together,they produced a suite of prints, Through the ForestFires: An Mpumalanga Journey (2008).Returning to the region alone in June 2008, theburnt fields evoked the camps Berman had recentlywitnessed and inspired the second part of the DislocatedLandscapes series. Both the vacant tents andthe burnt trees are metaphors for Berman’s initialreaction to the camps: the absence of any sense ofwhat the notion of ‘home’ usually implies (stability,safety, belonging) for the immigrants in their newstatus as refugees. Seen together, these works speakto and of a country whose ideals have been rippedapart to reveal the quotidian desperation of its inhabitants.Seen together, these works speak to and of a countrywhose ideals have been ripped apart to reveal thequotidian desperation of its inhabitants.As a group, the Dislocated Landscapes are characterizedby barren, isolated ‘no-man’s-lands’, oftenhemmed in with barbed wire fences that claim ownershipby faceless authorities, all the while enclosingemptiness. Whether the viewer is confronted byrows of white refugee tents, or by tree stumps paintedwith white lime, the land itself is consistentlysplit apart -- bifurcated into rocky slopes on one sideand by low, dry brush on the other. For example, therows of tubular white tents in the panoramic “DislocatedLandscapes I” are clamped into the ground atthe left edge of the visual field, where they remainstatic and marginalized. In the distance, the fragilelaundry lines are indications of the near futilityof establishing a foothold in this barren realm. Thedivided, desiccated fields and hollow tents conveyunrelieved desolation and hopelessness. Unable toadequately sustain life, the tents, in the end, moreclosely resemble burial shrouds than they do shelters.Indeed, according to United Nations’s Refworldwebsite, the people deposited in the camps complainedthat the winter cold and inadequate food andwater were causing illness, and they tried to warnothers not to consent to come there. Even worse,when the camps began to be dismantled in October2008, Amnesty International stated on this websitethat little action had been taken to assure thesafe reintegration of the refugees into their formerresidences, noting that “violence against displacedpersons attempting to return to local South Africancommunities continues, in particular against Somalinationals, with police failing to accept that thesecrimes are part of a continuing pattern of xenophobicattacks.”At first blush, Berman’s virtuoso draftsmanshipand use of stark, nearly monochrome vistas recallWilliam Kentridge’s gest ural charcoal drawings, asboth are firmly rooted in the European expressionisttradition. Of course, both artists, having been bornin and continuing to live in Johannesburg, know theDislocation and Collaboration47

Kim Berman and Thabang Lehoybe, Through the Forest Fires:An Mpumalanga Journey V, 2008.Drypoint with monoprint, 15.4 x 33”Courtesy Kim Berman © Private collectionhighveld well and employ it as a main protagonist intheir work. But apart from a self-consciously ‘European’approach to the subject that is expressive ofthe difficulties of representation in the South Africancontext, for both artists the landscape is withoutquestion a metaphor across which a traumatic historyhas been endlessly written, rewritten, buried andexhumed. As such, it is a landscape that refuses toopen itself to the ‘pathetic fallacy’ of spiritual solace.For example, in Berman’s large monoprint “RifleRange I, Roodeport” [fig. 6] the roiling sky and motionlesstents contrast the stasis of a world withoutoptions with the turbulence that has led to this endpoint.Moreover, the title ensures that it is impossibleto miss the irony of setting up a refugee campfor the targets of violence in a former military riflerange, while the smoldering log makes a similarlyclear point about the aftermath of the violence. Inan interview about her almost editorial approach inthis work, Berman expressed her admiration for theunblinking landscape photographs of David Goldblatt.Although Berman’s style could hardly be termedphotographic, because she begins with the photographsshe takes on location, her works do referenceRifle Range I, Roodeport. 2009.Monotype, 31.25 x 42.5”Courtesy the Kim Berman ©South Africa’s important documentary photographictradition, with its emphasis on witnessing. Her debtto the photographers who recorded the extent of theNational Party’s crimes against humanity duringthe Apartheid era is apparent when comparing theRoodeport landscape with early works by Goldblattsuch as “The place to which the government wantedthe people of Oukasie to move: Lethabile RemovalCamp, Transvaal, 30 November 1986”. As in Berman’setchings and monoprints, the black lines ofelectrical wires in Goldblatt’s image arbitrarily scorethe space like knife blades; while a blank, sunlesssky dwarfs the shacks lining the empty road, whichcuts a diagonal swath through the composition. Inreferencing such symbolic devices in the DislocatedLandscapes series, Berman deliberately parallelsthe xenophobia crisis with the forced removals ofthe past, a subject Berman addressed in her ownwork at that time.In all of the Dislocated Landscapes, white is sug-The place to which the government wanted the people ofOukasie to move: Lathabile Removal Camp, Transvaal, 30November 1986. Black and white photograph.Photo: Courtesy David Goldblatt ©gestive of the prospect of death. After the 2008 firesin Mpumalanga that annihilated the source of muchof the country’s fresh fruit produce, the farmerslimed the stumps of the burnt fruit trees to protectthe exposed bark and permit new growth. For Bermanthe amputated white trees were a visual metaphorfor the alien. The gesticulating boughs in themonotype Alien Landscapes: White River II bringto mind Goya’s “Disasters of War” (1810-1820), inwhich tree limbs and mutilated bodies are intertwined.Berman’s bone yards are condensed, bitterdepictions of the aftermath of pain, the cries ofthe dispossessed literally erupting from the soil andfreezing into surface gestures. Spilling awkwardlytoward the viewer, the stumps are like grave markersin an abandoned cemetery, literal dead zones.Among the most affecting of the DislocatedLandscapes works in the President’s Gallery at Mass48The Salon: Volume Two

After the Removals, Dobsonville, 1994.Drypoint with collograph, 35 x 29 “Courtesy the Kim Berman ©Art was the nearly abstract monoprint “Purged I”.Gone are the bone-like trees, the shroud-like tents,the spiked barbed wire and the darkened skies: all ofthe symbols of dispossession. Rather, the vista providesevidence only of the human activity of clearingthe land: two fields of felled branches sweep back toa stand of what could be either leafless bushes or aline of saplings, their delicate limbs lit by a rosy lateafternoon or early morning sky. Are the frail saplingsa rebirth of the resolute stance of the “Womenof Madibogopane?” Or, is the cut and piled undergrowtha metaphor for the dismantled camps, whichleft the refugees with nowhere to go? Berman’s actionsas well as her words (see her article in thisvolume) would favor the optimistic interpretation,despite the bitter, sorrowful tone of the series as awhole.But this series cannot be understood simply as alinear narrative ending on a note of hope. Berman’smetaphors for the powerful emotions elicited by theevents of May 2008 and afterwards are not reducibleto any one interpretation or argument. Becausethese landscapes do reference a specific moment ofpolitical crisis, they require the viewer to contemplatehow they relate to what has come before and toimagine their implications for the future. That futureneed not be characterized by the descriptive terms Ihave used here for the Dislocated Landscapes. Thevistas depicted in this series are stark and barren,to be sure, but they are also beautiful: the expansivespaces and broad horizons provide the viewer withthe room to connect mentally with past violenceas well as with future restitution. In her Beckwithlecture at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts onSeptember 23, 2009, Berman quoted the followingchallenge from Maphele Ramphele’s 2008 bookLaying Ghosts to Rest: “The question each one ofus must ask every day is whether we are giving thebest we can to enable our society to transcend thepresent and become its envisaged self. ” The ghostlyinhabitants of Dislocated Landscapes are far fromlaid to rest, but if they do not offer transcendence,they do demand from each of us a felt response thatpotentially may lead to action.This essay is edited and excerpted from a longerreview submitted to the journal African Arts.Alien Landscapes, White River II, 2009.Etching, 20 x 24”Courtesy Kim Berman ©Purged I, 2009.Monotype, 31.25 x 42.5”Courtesy Kim Berman © Private collectionDislocation and Collaboration49

Crickets in thePostcolony: AConversation on MusicClare Loveday and Yara El-Ghadban(University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa,and Université de Montréal, Canada)A Johannesburg-based composer and a Montréalbasedmusicologist discuss the barriers to entryfaced by non Euro-American composers whoattempt to access the ‘gated community of Westernart music’.Every aspiring composer, for better or worse,is born in a context, is attached to a territory,and has to come to terms with Western artmusic’s long genealogy of forefathers. In theAnxiety of Influence (1973), Harold Bloomargues that every writer targets a work ofart which he then attempts to exorcise, so hemay demonstrate his capacity to overcomeits power over him, to overcome the anxietyof influence. But the weight of History isunbearably heavy. Each ‘insect’ that attemptsto detach itself from the stem risks death.– Canadian composer, Amsterdam 2006.Dear Clare,MontréalMarch 3 rd , 2010In this memorable interview from my fieldwork oncontemporary Western art music, the ‘insects’ thecomposer was referring to were young composersfrom former colonies of Europe that are tryingto make it in the world of Western art music. Thechoice of the word ‘insect’ – to portray their relativeinsignificance in the face of Western history and tradition,but also to put into perspective the enormityof the challenges that they have to overcome – stayedwith me all through my subsequent fieldwork.I, myself, was introduced to Western art musicand studied it in that most of postcolonial situations:A Palestinian refugee taking classical pianolessons with an Indian teacher in a catholic school ina tiny Arab Emirate – Dubai, no less! – that was embarkingon a race to beat the West at its own game byleapfrogging into globalized capitalism! This partlyexplains my fascination with all those young musiciansin the world who graduated from Westernconservatories in their countries, only to travel toWestern Europe and North America, the uncontestedcentres of that tradition, to seek recognition andmembership in the gated community of Western artmusic.I obsessed over the word ‘insect’, desperately tryingto find a positive turn somewhere beyond thedisparaging image of a tiny, insignificant creature.I eventually came up with the image of the cricket,producing an annoying sound when alone, thatturns into music when in groups. Music and soundsproduced through friction, by rubbing the hind legstogether, seemed to capture in my view the tensionthat underpins Western art music-making in a postcolonialcontext. So insect it is, but not any insect! Orso I thought. As my research came to an end, I concludedmy study on a rather pessimistic note, highlightingthe architecture of indifference on which laythe foundations of Western history in general andespecially Western art music.a musical tradition that has consistently refused torecognize difference, and the role that it has playedin the making of its own historyHow do you acquire recognition, as a composer fromthe South, in a musical tradition that has consistentlyrefused to recognize difference, and the role that ithas played in the making of its own history? This isthe question that has preoccupied me all through myresearch. How have these issues, in your experienceas composer, played out in South Africa?YaraDear Yara,JohannesburgMarch 9 th , 2010I am intrigued by the postcolonial beginnings ofyour musical journey. I detect in those words theslight sense of bewilderment you must have feltas a child at finding yourself in a warp of time andspace, caught between countries, races, cultures andeconomies. You seem still to feel this, all these yearslater, living in Canada. The musician left the colony,but the colony didn’t leave the musician, perhaps?How surprising for me to discover that Canadiancomposers also struggle with their musical identity.From South Africa, Canada seems peaceful, safe,functional, and immensely wealthy (everything is50The Salon: Volume Two

elative); very different to the chaotic, strife-laden,desperately unequal South Africa that is my home.It is important, and humbling, to realise that composersin Canada can also struggle with identity andfeelings of inadequacy.We do indeed risk death if we detach ourselvesfrom our stem; but even clinging on is not completelywithin our power. One swat of the Northern hand,and we are dislodged. This mighty hand comes innumerous forms, including economic ones, thatshould not be underestimated. These include: thewithdrawal of funding that provides access to education,performers, commissions; prohibitively expensivefees for competitions that also sometimesrequire technology many composers here simplycannot afford; the cost of visas and the obstacles createdby the countries issuing them.The first step in gaining recognition is gettingyour voice heard. Competing with composers whohave access to far better resources is only one smallpart of this; the cost and difficulties composers hereface in getting access to the Northern fields are ofteninsurmountable. That musicians and music administratorsin the North are sometimes astonishinglyblasé and insensitive with regard to these, is well illustratedby an experience I had in 2008. I was tryingto take The Collision Project, a work of mine forthree performers and car wreck, to the InternationalSociety of Contemporary Music’s (ISCM) WorldMusic Days festival in Vilnius, Lithuania. One ofthe performers was Zimbabwean and I had been advisedthat it was unlikely he would be given a visa. Iinformed the festival organisers whose response wasthat I should apply through the Lithuanian embassyin Hungary. Hungary??? When did they last lookat a world map? Did they even know what getting aPoster for a performance of The Collision ProjectPhoto: sourced from nathanielstern.com, under CC licencevisa was about? I had to raise the funds for the trip,and the festival organisers were annoyed when Icouldn’t come up with the money. “In total this projectbudget I see is no bigger than 4000 Euros,” I wasbriskly told. 4000 Euros is an astronomical amountof money. It is more than many South Africans earnin a year. I was furious. This is not an internationalsociety, I raged to anyone who would listen, but adeveloped world society that had no understandingor concern for the difficulties faced by composersfrom the South. Did they know how difficult it isto get funding in a country with far more pressingneeds (like AIDS, T.B., basic housing), or how longit takes to fly to Europe, and how expensive it is forus just to get around once we are there?? But whatcould I do? Should I risk alienating myself from theISCM by kicking up a fuss and, in the process, potentiallymake things difficult for other South Africancomposers? Instead I clung quietly to my stem like agood cricket and sat silent (but fuming).The Collision Project being performed in The Substation, WitsUniversity, 2006.Photo: sourced from nathanielstern.com, under CC licenceWhat is also revealing about this interactionis the organiser’s extraordinary ignorance of theSouth, never mind South Africa. This is not unique,of course, and anyone living in the South will haveexperienced this. But what irks is that it is simplyassumed that composers from the South are aufait with the European world, particularly its musicand culture. A saxophonist in Vienna, for example,was contemptuous when he realised I did not knowthe Xenakis saxophone quartet. Composers fromEurope would be appalled if I did not know aboutStockhausen, Stravinsky, or Schönberg, to name buta few composers from the 20 th century. They mayknow of African composers living in Europe whohave ‘made it’ in Western terms, but how many ofthem can name even two African composers livingin Africa? How can composers from the South evenbegin to seek recognition in such an enclosed andignorant field?Acquiring recognition in the Western art mu-Crickets in the Postcolony51

sic field is no mean feat. Gaining recognition in theSouth African field is also a challenge, where composerssnarl and squabble over negligible resources.It is surprising that such a small field can generateso much tension. The personal vendettas and professionalrivalries are legendary as few composerscompete for limited recognition in terms of commissionsand writing for few interested and capableperformers, with few performance opportunities.Most opportunities have to be forged by composersthemselves; they are not ‘given’. Possibly becauseof these limitations, art music composition tends tobe clustered around tertiary education institutionsscattered around the country; jobs at these institutionsthus bring power and prestige and, because ofthis, are another site of bitter fighting and conflict.The fragility of the stalks we cling to, and thepotentially aggressive crickets surrounding us inour little patch, may explain why so many composershere long for European structures, formality,and systems of measurement. These are tangible,familiar and offer some kind of imagined security.Compositional ability in South Africa tends to bemeasured in this way. If you can write in a particularstyle, or using particular systems of composition,your ability can be assessed (or, more importantlyfor the composer, recognised). This approach, tome, fails to recognise one of the advantages of composinghere: surely we should be weighed down lessby the western art music tradition than composersin, for example, Vienna? Surely we should be moreprone to risk-taking? Sadly, in many cases, the oppositeis true: those composers who do take creativerisks are often treated with suspicion. Their worksare, after all, much more difficult to measure. Possiblybecause of this, many here hang onto outdatedstyles and modes of composition, clinging to whatis familiar and measurable, improving their craft ofcomposition, but producing the same kinds of worksover and over again. The international fields are oftenviewed, at a distance, as gloriously perfect – weare a little group of crickets in a scrubby corner lookingout at what we perceive to be a field of corn, resplendentwith lush green leaves and strong stems.There is an ongoing sense of running after what wedo not have.There is another dimension to our complicatedrelationship with the North, more subtle and insidious.This is best illustrated by a project instigatedby a renowned contemporary music ensemble basedin Europe. They selected four European composers,who they commissioned to write works for theensemble after living for a month in selected cities– chosen because they are cultural melting pots.The objective was that the works should reflect, inwhatever way the composers chose, their host city.The composers duly arrived in South Africa, and Iinteracted with three of them. Two of these composers’only musical interest seemed to be in hearing‘traditional African music’; they had decided beforearriving that this was the influence their compositionsshould show. This was Africa; where were thedrums and marimbas? These composers showed nounderstanding that culture here, as anywhere, developsand changes; they could only see South Africaas they imagined it had been seen by the earlyEuropean settlers. They were not interested in themusic modern Johannesburg has to offer, so the vibrantlyenergetic, multi-cultural environment theywere staying in seemed to pass them by. The messagewas clear: the musical world of Johannesburghas no value in Northern eyes.No feedback was ever sent to South Africa. I onlyknew the works were eventually performed in Europe(and possibly the other cities in the project, althoughI could not get confirmation of this) becauseI maintained contact with one of the composers.Those of us who had donated a great deal of timeand effort to welcoming these composers and showingthem the city were, not surprisingly, annoyed.Where was the give and take? Had they ever consideredhaving composers from the South living inEuropean cities and writing works to represent theirimpressions? Clearly not. So what are we: providersof the musical toy box for the lofty Europeans toscratch around in? Our city, our home, was treatedlike a kind of musical dip, a source of exotic accoutrementsto decorate what really matters: Europeanart music by European art music composers to beplayed by European ensembles, showing us ignorantAfricans how it should be done.For the first time, I really understood the term‘postcolony’. I experienced the helpless fury at havingsomeone rich and clumsy assess my culturalworld, find it unimportant and invalid, but takingaway little bits and pieces to show his/her chums inthe big green corn field. I was astounded, not only bythis patronising attitude, but also by the fact that Idid not challenge it properly. I realised later that, althoughI felt uncomfortable, I am so used to bowingbefore the Great European Tradition that I assumedmy discomfort was misplaced. I came to understandwhat this small interaction represented in a largerworld; this unchallenged cultural prejudice – thelast colonial outpost – helped to explain the senseof inferiority experienced by many South Africancomposers. How can we possibly be as good as ourNorthern counterparts when we believe we are not52The Salon: Volume Two

learning in and experiencing the centre, the heart ofculture, the place of intellect and real music? (Youwould be horrified to know how rigorously this is reinforcedat numerous tertiary institutions in SouthAfrica, but that is another subject for another time.)I experienced the helpless fury at having someonerich and clumsy assess my cultural worldIn the face of this kind of prejudice, how can SouthAfrican composers who write neither like Northerners,nor trade on their ‘Africaness’ by overtly includingAfrican elements in their work, hope for recognitionin the North? (These ‘African elements’ are yetanother topic for another conversation.) It is hardlysurprising, then, that many composers here look outat the big corn field beyond their limiting borders,and long to be part of it and recognised in it.This all sounds completely hopeless. But thereare wonderful things about composing here. Forthe moment, however, I will stay with the North/South relationship. In spite of all the problems andprejudices I mention, I have had some good experiences.I recently submitted a work to a competition(emptying my bank account to pay the fees) and wassuccessful. My work for 12 saxophones, Duodectet,is being performed at the ISCM’s World New MusicDays Festival in Sydney in May. I have now forgiventhe ISCM just a little bit for the Vilnius debacle,partly because there is some kind of grim consolationin knowing it will cost Europeans even more tofly to Sydney than it is costing me!I should also say that I have encountered someperformers who have been open and receptive tomusic that may be atypical. My double saxophoneconcertante Blink was received favourably in Viennaby some of the musicians and organisers involved inits’ performance, although this seemed to come assomething of a surprise to them. They described thework as ‘different’, which it is certainly when playednext to the very serious, highly structured Germanicmusic of many Viennese composers. Perhaps theywere a little surprised that this difference didn’tsound overtly African?I could go on and on. But I think for now I’ll stopand listen to the flock of Red-billed Wood-Hoopoescackling in a nearby tree.ClareDear Clare,MontréalMarch 17 th , 2010I cannot tell you how much what you express hereresonates with what composers I’ve worked withhave told me. If I may summarize your insightsa bit, I think you bring up a number of extremelyimportant issues. First of all, economic power dynamics;second, issues of mobility / immobility ina unilaterally globalized world; third, the aestheticsof formalism and how it might reflect questions ofrecognition, legitimization, but also a quest for therelative security of form and structure when one istrying to express oneself through a medium that isalien or alienating. And of course the last issue isthat of representation, meaning the representationof the Other.Unfortunately space and time won’t allow me togo through all of these important issues extensively.We need to talk some more and on many more occasions!But let me focus on a couple of them.First, economics, because while critical analysesof Western art music have been able to highlight thecultural hegemony, reductionist representationsand power politics that underpin this music that isstill so enveloped in a discourse of transcendence,the question of economics remains somewhat untouched:An Argentinean composer I met during myresearch was very clear about what he thought theNorth / South divide in terms of Western art musicwas all about. It has nothing to do with culture,identity, or even politics, and everything to do withmoney and infrastructure. He summed it up likethis: “Why am I living and composing in Amsterdaminstead of Argentina? Very simple. Who is goingto perform a contemporary music piece in BuenosAires? Nobody! There are simply not enough ensembles,venues, or patrons for this kind of music,especially if it is experimental in anyway.” Anothercomposer, this time speaking of why Canadian composersfeel obliged to leave their country in order topursue their music careers, put it in the followingwords: “The field of contemporary music in Canadais too small. Take one too many steps and you simplyfall off the edge of the world.” That is why, inmost peripheral countries, as you said, institutionsbecome very important. They are there to providea sense of solidness to a shaky cultural scene. Theyprovide cover. Hardly anyone can survive beyondthe institutions that are built for this kind of music,unless they leave the country all together. And thatbrings us to the question of cultural policy which isoften put forward as a solution for all these problems.In the province of Québec, where I live, the publicfunding of contemporary Western art music restsmainly on the requirement to train future generationsof musicians and composers; in other words,Crickets in the Postcolony53

on education and musical pedagogy. This criteria isdesigned, on the one hand, to remedy contemporarymusic’s lack of public appeal, and on the other, tobuild a home-grown Western art music traditionfrom the ground up, in which today’s young musiciansand composers potentially become tomorrow’scanonical figures, providing Québec with itsown local repertory and national musical heritage.This strategy is part of a larger cultural policy thatleans heavily on education as a form of nation-building.Québec maintains a strong separatist movementwhich is, nevertheless, continually offset, inthe public sphere, by a potent identity discourse ofambivalence and in-between-ness, resulting fromits attachment, both to Europe as a former Frenchcolony, and to North America, as part of Canada.During my research, I looked at the impact ofthese policies and identity politics on those whohave dedicated their lives to contemporary music.Their experiences led me to conclude that culturalpolicy that was developed to promote contemporarymusic has, paradoxically, contributed to itsincreasing marginalization. Thanks to the focus oneducation, there are more composers and musiciansgraduating than ever. However, that has led to anunbalanced investment in funding programmes forcommissions and first compositions designed especiallyfor all these young music graduates. The resultis an ever-increasing number of music works beingproduced, but not enough funds to ensure their performanceand broadcast beyond their premiere concerts.As one composer who has been on both sidesof the funding system has told me, the music disappearsalmost as quickly as it appears leaving no tracein the public’s collective memory!The second issue I want to get back to you on is thisamazing insight you give about the attraction of formalismor well-established styles and aesthetics forcomposers in South Africa. Here again, I see parallelswith the works of other ‘Southern composers’ Ihave worked with. One Brazilian composer had builthis whole music work based on the proportions ofthe Golden number, while the Argentinean composerbuilt his work using very strict serial techniques.According to literary critic Raymond Williams,the engagement with musical form among composersat the peripheries of European and North Americanmetropolises is something that is anchored inthe larger history of the avant-garde movement andthe role that immigrant or exiled composers playedin its development. In his book, The Politics ofModernism: Against the New Conformists (1989),Williams argues that the avant-garde movement ismostly the product of immigrant musicians’ experiencesof alienation in European metropolises: “Themost important general element of the innovationsin form is the fact of immigration to the metropolis,and it cannot too often be emphasized how manyof the major innovators were, in this precise sense,immigrants. At the level of theme, this underlies,in an obvious way, the elements of strangeness anddistance, indeed of alienation, which regularly formpart of the repertory.”Reading this was a revelation to me. Not only didit bring home the fact that Western art music hasalways developed through encounters with the Other,but also the fact that this Other is subsequentlyerased from its official historical narrative as an activecontributor to its making.Western art music has always developed throughencounters with the OtherWilliams portrays the European metropolis of thebeginning of the 20 th century as this big black holethat had the capacity to suck in difference and diversityinto an amalgam of miscellaneity. A miscellaneitythat produced new forms of strangeness andalienation that translated, according to him, intothe first innovative experimentations of the avantgarde:“Thenew relationships of the metropolis …forced certain productive kinds of strangeness anddistance: a new consciousness of conventions andthus of changeable, because now open, conventions.…The preoccupying visual images and stylesof particular cultures did not disappear, any morethan native languages, native tales, the native stylesof music and dance, but all were now passed throughthe crucible of the metropolis which was … no meremelting pot but an intense and visually and linguisticallyexciting process in its own right, from whichremarkable new forms emerged.”Elsewhere he notes: “At the same time, withinthe very openness and complexity of the metropolis,there is no formed and settled society to which thenew kinds of work could be related. The relationshipswere to the open and complex and dynamicsocial process itself, and the only accessible form ofthis practice was an emphasis on the medium: themedium as that which, in an unprecedented way definedart.… This emphasis on the medium, and onwhat can be done in the medium, became dominant.Moreover, alongside the practice, theoretical positionsof the same kind… [on] the new aesthetics ofsignificant form and structure, rose to direct, to support,to reinforce, and to recommend.”54The Salon: Volume Two

What he intends by medium here, is the aestheticobjet, meaning pure linguistic or musical materialand forms. In his own complicated style, Williams isbasically making the same argument as you are; thatis, form, for those who feel excluded or marginalizedbecomes a security blanket, and in this case, contemporarycomposers are doubly motivated to clingto form since it has been canonized through the institutionalizationof avant-gardist ideology in musicschools and conservatories. So it becomes very hardto resist form, since it simultaneously provides legitimacy(you demonstrate that you know the stylesthat have been canonized), it gives you somethingsolid to hang on to musically, and it provides a senseof marginal security. Isn’t it ironic that this avantgardistideal was the product of the alienation ofother ‘Others’?form, for those who feel excluded or marginalizedbecomes a security blanketSo the question that I always end up arriving atwhen I have this conversation with contemporarycomposers is this: Why? Why choose Western music,why Western ART music and why the tougher,more exclusive world of CONTEMPORARY Westernart music? Why, I have asked the composers timeand time again, do you want to be part of this club?This might be an unfair question, since many saythat they do not see themselves as composing in aspecific repertory or genre of music, but simply ascomposing. Others also tell me that they simply considerthis music as being part of their heritage anddo not see themselves as outsiders wanting in, eventhough they are treated that way.But I can’t help but wonder what led them to takeThe Collision Project being performed in The Substation, WitsUniversity, 2006.Photo: sourced from nathanielstern.com, under CC licencethat particular aesthetic route when other optionsare available. Why go into an institution instead oflearning by playing in music clubs? (I’m thinkingabout how city music developed in Johannesburg.)Why seek that recognition in those specific conditions,for example by participating in contemporarymusic competitions?YaraDear Yara,JohannesburgMarch 19 th , 2010This is all so interesting, and it is good to know thatmy experience, here on the bottom bit of the Africancontinent, is not unique. Indeed, it seems thatall composers except those in Europe or the U.S. experiencethis. With a shift in our perception (thereare probably more of us than them), the ‘Othering’would reverse. What a titillating thought!But to answer your final question. Yes, indeed,why choose such an underfunded, status-obsessed,piranha-infested, and downright difficult profession?I think it is partly the challenge. It is also so interestingto ask difficult questions of my professionand my field (which has made me very unpopular attimes). I do not ever want to be complacent aboutwhere I live and what I do. Living in a complicatedcountry may have something to do with that. Butperhaps if I lived in Australia, for example, I woulddo it too, just to keep myself on my toes. It is thesame question that could be asked of any academic:why go into a profession that is demanding, underpaidand often politically fraught? I am sure theanswer would be the same: because the hoped forrewards are worth the sacrifices.There is a deeply selfish side. Writing this musicis hard. Each time you set about composing a work,you have to think about what you want to say. Youask: Why am I writing this work? What am I saying?How much consideration should I give to thevenue in which it is being premiered? Do I want theplayers to enjoy playing it, or do I want to challengethem? How can I make the audience think differentlyabout these instruments / players / venues / musicalparameters, and so on. The questions are hard.Crickets in the Postcolony55

Answering them is harder. Composing ‘art music’takes a long time. Every note is considered, everypulse, every dynamic, every articulation. It is long,difficult work. And every now and then you get itright. You write a work that seems to hit something,that indefinable ‘it’ that excites the players, maybesome of the audience too. The music takes on a lifeof its own, sparkles and giggles, runs up and downthe walls, pulls you in and pushes you about. Andin those very rare moments, it is as though you havereached out and touched the face of God. It is utterlyextraordinary. Have you ever wondered why so fewmusicians in the art music world are religious? Nowyou know.I worked for many years in a more commercialenvironment. I played in theatre shows, worked oncruise ships, wrote jingles. It was fun, but my goodnessit was boring after a while. I was bored with thecocaine-sniffing clients, the greed of the commercialworld, the ‘creative types’. I simply could not envisagemyself working this way indefinitely.Your comment that some do it because it is partof their heritage took me by surprise. I had neverthought of it as part of a heritage, certainly not inSouth Africa where frankly this particular heritageis an embarrassment. It is quite odd to think of artmusic composition in such an uncomplicated culturalspace.You ask: Why seek that recognition in those specificconditions, for example by participating incontemporary music competitions? I cannot talkfor my colleagues. The only reason I enter competitions(and I have only entered three, only one whichI had to pay for), is in an effort to get my works performed.To write specifically for competitions is, Ithink, madness. The last competition I entered wasan attempt to get a ridiculously big work I wrote fortwelve saxophones performed. Why did I write thislong, technically and musically demanding work fortwelve saxophones when I know full well that SouthAfrica does not have twelve good enough saxophoniststo play it? I was in that slightly deranged stateone gets in towards the end of a doctorate, and Ineeded a whopper of a work, a great big swagger toshow off how much I knew. Hence Duodectet, andmy only serious investment in a competition. Was itworth it? I’ll tell you after the performance.Do I want to be part of the club? Yes and no. I dowant to be part of it, but as the composer I am. I amnot interested in adjusting to fit in. I did not do thathere, in this tiny little puddle, and yet have managedto make a space for myself. I am a South African. Iam a composer. I am allowed to be contrary.ClareThe only reason I enter competitions ... is in aneffort to get my works performed.56The Salon: Volume Two

Capturing ‘TheSpirit of Africa’Syned Mthatiwa(University of the Witwatersrand,South Africa)Syned Mthatiwa interrogates the politics underpinningliterary competitions and compilations inAfrica. Whose voices get to define contemporaryAfrican literature and experience? Whose do not?Why? And what might be the consequences?Africa and her affairs have provoked the imaginationsof many people over the years, both within Africaand beyond. Books of varying length and qualityhave been published about one or more aspects ofthe enigmatic continent and her people. While someof these manage to capture something essentialabout the continent others contain blatant lies anddistortions of the truth about life in Africa. For theuncritical reader driven by curiosity about the exoticisedcontinent, these may pass as true accountsof African life and experiences. True, the more thanepic problems that afflict the continent (famine, civilwars, floods and disease, for instance) provide fertileground for the breeding of lies and half-truths bylocal or foreign reporters, academics, and ordinarytourists hoping to make a name for themselves anda quick buck to go with it. Many such writers havegone on to become ‘experts’ on Africa, regardless ofthe fact that the Africa they know is but a small cornerof the continent that they return to on the occasionalsafari or sabbatical leave.Cover of Basket of Leaves: 99 Books that Capture the Spirit ofAfricaHowever, not every would-be commentator or storyteller has the opportunity to tell his or her storyhowever good or truthful. Factors associated withthe politics of publishing (such as the financial statusof the writer, how well connected s/he is, and thebusiness prospects of his or her manuscript) determinewhose story gets to be heard. The usually whiteforeign journalist or tourist who is financially secureand is connected to one or two publishers may findit easy to get their distorted views and half truthsabout Africa and Africans into print; while the local,hardly known, poor black African wishing to correctsuch distortions may very well find him or herselflabouring in vain. Who wants to believe a barely literateblack African?Granted, there are foreign writers whose writingshave painted a tolerably acceptable picture of Africa,and whose efforts have resulted in the mitigation ofsuffering of many Africans. The efforts of such writersdeserve commendation. But these are only rareexceptions to the rule.There are African writers too whose voices havebeen heard. But with regard to some of these, toooften the profiteering aspect of publishing comes toplay an unenviable part. Because the risky venturethe publishers undertook to publish the unknownAfrican writer has proved lucrative as, contrary totheir fears, the book managed to sell, the publishersreturn to the now famous writer for more stories,even when he (and they are usually male) hasnone further to tell. This has resulted in publicationof trash by famous writers which sells nevertheless,while brilliant works of writers who have not yetmade a name are suppressed. I am left wondering towhat extent has this publishing gimmick impactedon the flow of stories about life experiences in Africaand the canonisation of literary works from thecontinent?Another publishing gimmick is the tendency tothrow the curiosity-arousing term ‘Africa’ into booktitles to boost sales. Such books claim to be representationsof this or that aspect of African experience:African culture, African writing, African music,African politics, the spirit of Africa ... the listCapturing ‘The Spirit of Africa’57

goes on and on. Such books provoke a wide rangeof questions such as: What is African culture? Whatis the spirit of Africa? To what extent can a book berepresentative of African writing? Can an anthologytruly be representative of African writing? Canany single publication, fiction or otherwise, capturethe so-called ‘spirit of Africa’? These are broad anddifficult questions and I will not pretend to providesufficient answers here. However, in what follows Iattempt to address these questions and attendantones, however tangentially, by examining two anthologiesreleased three years ago that purport torepresent the creative spirit of Africa.I begin my examination with Geoff Wisner’s ABasket of Leaves: 99 Books that Capture the Spiritof Africa (2007), followed by the Caine Prize for AfricanWriting’s 7 th Annual Collection, Jungfrau andOther Short Stories (2007).The American book reviewer, editor, and writerGeoff Wisner’s volume A Basket of Leaves: 99 Booksthat Capture the Spirit of Africa is an example of abook whose grand claim in the title does not standthe test of close scrutiny. Wisner, a tourist-scholarwho spent six months on a volunteer programme inZimbabwe, felt that he had, at the end of that briefperiod, read enough books about Africa written byboth Africans and non-Africans that captured “thespirit of Africa” – whatever that means – to makehim an expert. He, like many tourists before him,felt the need to answer the call to write a book thatwould act as a starting point for fellow tourists wishingto know the literary works from and about differentAfrican countries. The result was his Basket ofLeaves published by Jacana in 2007; an ambitiouswork that offers brief reviews of the books he readand a list of suggestions for further reading.Reading the volume one quickly begins to suspectthat the claim made on the blurb that the book “providesa literary tour of the best-written, the most interestingbooks to come from every country in Africa”is deliberately misleading. The books reviewed in ABasket of Leaves are not the (only) most interestingbooks. The question begs: Interesting to whom? Certainlysome of the books discussed are of no or littleinterest to me. Besides, some of them do not necessarilycome from African countries – in the sensethat they were not written by African nationals. Theauthors of the ninety-nine books also include Caribbeans,Americans, and Europeans, both black andwhite. Many of the books are simply about some Africancountries, and in some cases only make passingreferences to the African countries they are saidto be about. Wisner tells us in the introduction that“Bruce Chatwin’s The Viceroy of Auidah describesnineteenth-century Dahomey, now Benin. AncientCarthage, the scene of Flaubert’s Salammbô, is inmodern-day Tunisia.” It does not require extraordinaryintellectual prowess to realise that Dahomey isnot the same as Benin, and Carthage is not the sameas Tunisia.The publication dates of certain of the books andthe blatant racism inherent in some of them heavilycompromise the claim in the book’s subtitle: 99Books that Capture the Spirit of Africa. For instance,with regard to Richard F. Burton’s First Footstepsin Africa (1987, but first published in 1856), Wisnersays, “Burton’s descriptions of the people he travelledamong are punctuated with outbursts of scathingcontempt” (my emphasis). Several of the bookswere published as far back as the nineteenth or eveneighteenth centuries, and some of these were writtenby expatriates, explorers, and colonialists withCover of Jungfrau and Other Short Storiesa jaundiced and one-sided view of Africa. For instance,the French writer Jacques-Henri Bernardinde Saint-Pierre’s Journey to Mauritius (2003) wasfirst published in 1773. In what sense, then, couldsuch works be said to capture the so-called spiritof Africa? And what spirit of Africa would they becapturing? The spirit of ancient, pre-colonial andcolonial Africa or that of post-colonial, twenty-firstcentury Africa? (The problematic nature of the ‘post’notwithstanding).58The Salon: Volume Two

While A Basket of Leaves does indeed provide, “somesense of the rich literature on Africa” (or much betterliterature on particular countries in Africa), andmay lead the curious-minded “to read some of theextraordinary books” Wisner “discovered on [his]literary journey around the continent”, as he hopesit would, the volume does not offer much insight toa present-day would-be visitor in terms of learningabout a particular African country. Not least becausesome of the works are products of imagination (fiction)that, if not read carefully, might end up generatinga peculiarly distorted view. I cannot help feeling,therefore, that the volume’s subtitle is a publicitystunt intended to attract the attention of curiouswould-be readers intent on discovering somethingabout the proverbial “dark continent”.the fact that some of these books were writtenby unrepentant racists means that no clear andpositive image of Africa can emergeInterestingly, Wisner seems very much aware of theweakness of his selection system that, by his ownadmission, “can be criticised on various grounds.”He singles out racism as a problem in some of thebooks, but considers them worthwhile all the samebecause the authors do “also have something valuableand original to say.” What valuable and originalthings they say, and valuable to whom, the readeris evidently supposed to guess. Besides, racism, inhis view, “has been a devastatingly powerful forcein shaping Africa and there may be something to belearned from its different varieties.” Be this as it may,I argue that the fact that some of these books werewritten by unrepentant racists means that no clearand positive image of Africa can emerge. The secondweakness with his selection system that Wisner iscautious about is the fact that there are many otherbooks that deserved inclusion but are unknown tohim. True. There are “many excellent writers” thathe is ignorant about, writers “who write in one of thehundreds of indigenous African languages, not tomention French, Portuguese, or Arabic.” But no onewould expect him, or anybody else for that matter,to know all African writers and their works, or everysingle work about any one African country.To be fair, the book is not a complete failure.Although the reviews are very brief and rather simplistic,and the quotations from the books at the endof each review serve very little, if any, purpose, thevolume could function as a passable starting pointfor beginners wishing to know about literary worksfrom and about different African countries. The listof suggestions for further reading is perhaps themost helpful contribution in this regard, especiallyfor literary scholars or other interested readers. Thisnotwithstanding, the book’s significant weaknessand half-truths make me wonder whether it wouldhave been published had it been written by an African?For a publisher whose stated aim is to “publishwork from some of the most imaginative and clearthinkingminds of our time”, what was Jacana’s motivefor issuing a book of such ambiguous value?Enough about A Basket of Leaves, a volume compiledby an overly enthusiastic would-be Africanistexpert. Let me now turn to Jungfrau, a short storyanthology whose stories were selected by ‘experts’in the field of African literature. Does this anthologyfare any better in showcasing Africa’s creative talentthan A Basket of Leaves? To what extent can Jungfraube considered representative of the “creativespirit” of Africa? Where do the anthology’s strengthsand weaknesses lie?The seventh collection of short stories of TheCaine Prize for African Writing, titled Jungfrau andOther Short Stories, carries seventeen stories fromfifteen authors. The first five include the winningshort story of the Caine Prize 2006 (“Jungfrau,” thetitle story of the collection) by Mary Watson, plusthe other four shortlisted submissions by writersfrom places as far apart as South Africa, Kenya, Nigeriaand Morocco.The remaining twelve short stories are productsof a Celtel Caine Prize African Writers’ Workshopthat was held at Crater Lake near Naivasha in Kenya.Like the Caine Prize stories, the workshop storiesrepresent writers from different parts of Africa:North to South, East to West. For reasons that arenot clear to me, two East African and two SouthernAfrican countries dominate representation in thecollection. There are four stories from Kenya andtwo from Uganda, and seven stories from SouthernAfrica (five from South Africa, with Mary Watsonand Darrel Bristow-Bovey contributing two storieseach, and two from Zimbabwe). Is this because Kenya,Uganda, South Africa and Zimbabwe have thegreatest number of Caine Prize entrants or the bestshort story writers on the continent? Whatever thecase might be, there seems to exist a need to correctthe imbalance of representation by country in literaryanthologies of African writing, a problem whichseems to continue unchecked. While it is impossibleto have writers from all countries in Africa representedin a collection of this nature, multiple voicesfrom far flung corners of the continent would give usmore of the multifarious experiences the continentoffers.Capturing ‘The Spirit of Africa’59

Given the fact that the Caine Prize claims to representthe best writers across Africa (the blurb doesnot shy away from claiming that much), it would notseem unreasonable to expect the best from Jungfrau.Besides, being a collection that carries storiesfrom different writers, one might also expect a diversityof themes, styles or approaches to the genre.The collection does not disappoint in this regard: itcontains short stories that reveal various life experiencesin Africa (good and bad: the ups and downs oflife in postcolonial states), as well as African writers’mastery of the short story genre. Most of the storiestouch on pertinent issues in Africa today.Mary Watson’s deservedly winning story (“Jungfrau”– maiden/virgin) earned praise from the CainePrize judges’ Chair, Dr. Nana Wilson-Tagoe, whorightly considers it, “a powerfully written narrativethat works skilfully through a child’s imagination tosuggest a world of insights about familial and socialrelationships in the new South Africa”. The storyclearly shows the disparity between appearance andreality, between what people claim to be and whatthey really are.In “The Last Trip” Sefi Atta tackles the problemof drug peddling and trafficking that affects manycountries in Africa today, although the story focuseson her home country, Nigeria. It’s possible that Attahad in mind the case of the Nollywood star HassanatTaiwo Akinwande who fell from grace after being arrestedfor trying to smuggle into the UK “92 wrapsof high-quality cocaine” that she had swallowed. Africa’slegendary poverty and destitution, and sometimessheer greed, have led some Africans to actas middlemen and carriers for international drugbarons in drug syndicates involving several countriesand continents. Some of these drugs are consumedright within the African continent; in countriessuch as South Africa the problem of drug abusehas reached epic proportions. Atta’s story thereforetouches an issue that is of great concern across thecontinent.Darrel Bristow-Bovey dramatises the sense of insecurityfelt by many Johannesburg residents as aresult of violent crime in his “A Joburg Story”. Theprevalence of violent crime, which induces a senseof insecurity in the majority of citizens, is a burningissue in South Africa today. As is the HIV/AIDS pandemic,the subject of Elizabeth Pienaar’s ironicallytitled story “Rejoice”. In this work Pienaar addressesthe twin issues of denialism and misconceptionsabout HIV and AIDS that have led many victimsof the HI virus to premature graves. The narrativepresents an illegal immigrant from Zimbabwe who,on developing full-blown AIDS suspects that he hasbeen cursed by someone who is jealous of his bighouse. He refuses to go to hospital, despite his employer’sinsistence that he should. He later returnshome to Zimbabwe where he succumbs to death,which could have been postponed had African beliefsystems not clashed so violently with Westernscience on HIV and AIDS. Until recently denialismcharacterised the South African government’s positionon HIV/AIDS: an infamous insistence that HIVdoes not cause AIDS. The government saw AIDS asa result of poverty and poor nutrition rather than avirus; a position that had dire consequences for thelives of victims of the virus.The consequences of failed leadership in postcolonialZimbabwe are the subject of Tinashe Mushakavanhu’s“Postcards”, which, true to the title, is inpostcard style. While some citizens stay home toface rising poverty and hunger, those who manageto escape into exile have their black racial identitythrust into their faces as they are forced to endureracialism and individualism in western host countries.No doubt the writers of these stories, and othersrepresented in the collection, tell tales that are ofgreat concern in many countries in today’s Africa.However, it is important to bear in mind that someof the narratives are very specific to the writer’s particularcountries, and to guard against the temptationto regard any one writer as a spokesperson forAfrica. Africa is a large continent, and it is dangerousto assume that a problem identified in one countryor region affects the whole continent.it is important ... to guard against the temptation toregard any one writer as a spokesperson for AfricaThe standard of the contributions to Jungfrauleaves no doubt that the Caine Prize and the sponsorsof the 2006 and 2007 Celtel Caine Prize AfricanWriters Workshops are playing an important role inencouraging writing in Anglophone Africa, therebyhelping to take African writing to new and greaterheights. The annual collections of stories selectedfrom the Cain Prize that have been published so farhave helped showcase the quality of writing from thecontinent, and allowed African writers to tell theirstories to a wider audience.The downside of these publications, though, isthe continued over-representation of some countries,and the resulting silence from others, usuallythe poorest on the continent. The anthologisationof the results of the competition, along with outputfrom the workshop, infers that the selection is basedon quality of writing across Africa. In fact the selectionmay very well be strongly influenced by the fact60The Salon: Volume Two

that the organisers of the Cain Prize African Writers’Workshop and the business interests of Celtel,co-sponsors of the event, for three successive yearssaw Crater Lake in Kenya as a perfect venue for theevent. Arguably the continued privileging of writersfrom certain countries where access to opportunitiesis easier as producers of the best, and thereforecanonical, literature in Africa should be addressed.The two publications discussed here share onething in common: the claim to showcase stories fromand about Africa. The one carries 99 books from andabout Africa, while the other has seventeen storieswritten by Africans from eight countries. The qualityand content of the former reveals that it claimsmore than it can offer, while the dominance of somecountries in the latter paints a rather skewed pictureof the quality of short story writing and publishingon the continent.Surely it should be possible to select and ultimatelycanonise the continent’s literature in a moreequitable and representative manner?Capturing ‘The Spirit of Africa’61

“Why is Thabo Mbekia ‘Nitemare’?”Mark Gevisser(Writer-in-residence, University of Pretoria,South Africa. Gevisser is the author of ThaboMbeki: The Dream Deferred. He lives betweenGauteng and Paris, and is working on his nextbook.’)Inspired by a satirical play by Tsepo wa Mamatu,Mark Gevisser wonders whether blaming ThaboMbeki for all that is wrong in South Africa isn’t apolitically expedient strategy to evade what shouldbe acknowledged as a far broader communalculpability. The players, on and off the stage, suggestthat Mbeki’s legacy may be more complex andmore important than much contemporary publicdiscussion suggests.In October 2009, I was invited attend a performanceof Mbeki and Other Nitemares, a play written anddirected by Tsepo wa Mamatu, and performed byhis students at the Wits University Theatre. The playwas an unsettling mix of two genres: in part a biographicalnarrative of Thabo Mbeki’s life, in part anacute satire of contemporary South African politics.On the one hand there was almost-sentimental nostalgiafor Mbeki’s biography; on the other a hardedged(and often very funny) fury – not just at Mbekihimself, but at the politics unleashed by his downfall.The play expands the few days it took Mbeki toresign after he was “recalled” into a Lear-like eternity,wherein Mbeki is faced with the consequences ofhis actions and his audience is to confront its collusionwith the politics of power as represented by thecurrent-day ANC. At its climax, the play’s auteurfigure,a middle-class youth leader, confronts theaudience from within a literal cage. His words carrythe ambivalence of the iconic freedom song SenzeniNa?: “What have we done to deserve this?” but also“What have we done?”The play itself becomes the escape-vehicle withwhich the writer and his cast free themselves fromthe constraints of their own political heritage, by articulatingan agency and identity beyond allegianceto the ANC. And in so doing, they force their audienceto confront – as Mbeki’s downfall has – the realitythat we are ruled not by saints, but by flawedmen who are subjective beings rather than nobleavatars of struggle, and who act in their own interestsrather than, necessarily, those of their people.Such consciousness appears to be Mbeki’s greatest –unwilled – legacy to South Africa: he seems to haveushered us into a very necessary coming of age; anera of realpolitik where we find ourselves unshackled,at last, from the redemptive fantasies of the liberationera.And yet, when chatting with the cast for a coupleof hours afterwards, over drinks in the Wits Theatrebar, I came to understand more deeply another elementof Mbeki’s legacy; one which suggests a continuationof the redemptive impulse in South Africanpolitics. I was sitting in a circle with the best blackstudents that one of South Africa’s best universitieshas to offer – all of them manifestly critical thinkerswith a deep social conscience – and I was struck bythe passion that the subject of my biography arousedin them. Mbeki had recently come to speak at Wits– his first major public address since his downfall– and they had, of course, gone to hear him. TheirScene from Mbeki and Other Nitemaresby Tsepo wa MamatuPhoto: Courtesy Sally Gaule ©account of the experience was a brush with greatness,and they all articulated a deep distress at whathad befallen him, even as they understood it to be aconsequence of his own actions.One of them spoke about how Jacob Zuma had “loweredthe bar” set by Mbeki, and all saw Zuma’s victoryas a consequence of the law of diminishing returns:South African political leadership on a downhillslope. They were by no means supporters of thenew opposition Congress of the People (COPE), andmany of them had voted for the ANC. But they wereall – as defined by their current circumstances, ifnot by their provenance – indisputably membersof a black elite. And as I sat with them, I felt thatI was touching something profound: how importantMbeki has been to the formation of this class inSouth Africa, with his emphasis on self-reliance andexcellence; with his deep commitment to the notionthat South Africans, and particularly black South Africans,had to be “world class”.62The Salon: Volume Two

Too often Mbeki’s critics forget, when decryingthe way Black Economic Empowerment created afew black millionaires but left everyone else in thedirt, about the tens of thousands of black peoplewho entered the middle class as a consequence ofhis policies: not Ramaphosas or Sexwales, but bankclerks and copywriters, medics and accountants.Certainly, these include a fair number of unqualifiedcivil servants who grow fat on corrupted tenders andteachers who care more about their salaries than thesocial good, but they also encompass an entire generationof people represented by the cast of Mbekiand Other Nitemares: young, educated South Africanswho strive towards an excellence and a criticalindependence that is the very safeguard of any democracy.Even if forced to abandon formal politicsby the likes of Julius Malema and the lack of a viablealternative, the young men and women sitting roundthe table with me will run South Africa in the future:its banks, its media, its mines, its parastatal utilities,its universities, even its trade unions.young, educated South Africans who strive towardsan excellence and a critical independence that is thevery safeguard of any democracyLike Lear’s daughters, they may grieve or rageagainst or even plot against their capricious father,but they are nonetheless Mbeki’s Children. Weshould thank him for them – even if, at the sametime, we castigate him and his government for havingpaid too little attention to a new Lost Generationthat came of age, unemployed and uneducated,alongside them.* * *Scene from Mbeki and Other Nitemaresby Tsepo wa MamatuPhoto: Courtesy Sally Gaule ©“It was clear that if South Africa’s fragile new democracywas to be saved, Mbeki had to go.” Thuswrites the author RW Johnson in his book SouthAfrica’s Brave New World, claiming that there wasunusual consensus on this matter in 2008, fromTony Leon on the right to Jeremy Cronin on the left.Xolela Mangcu reflected a conventional wisdom,then – certainly among intellectuals and professionals– when he wrote in his book, The DemocraticMoment, that “this country is in the muck it is in becauseof Mbeki’s actions.”Was Mbeki really such a threat to South Africandemocracy that he had to be removed from office –through the wielding of one-party-state power – sixmonths before the end of his term? And even if theinstances Mangcu cites are indeed worthy of censureand even legal action was South Africa really “in themuck”?Certainly, Mbeki failed, many times – not least inhis inability to reflect upon himself and his actionspublicly and critically; a shortcoming of intellect asmuch as of statesmanship. He followed a devastatinglymisguided approach to AIDS. He was unableto square African foreign policy (particularly in thecase of Zimbabwe) to his high ideals of an AfricanRenaissance. He was unable to staunch corruptionand patronage (particularly at local level) despitemuch high minded talk on the subject. He was insouciantabout the criminal justice system exceptwhen it concerned his allies and opponents withinthe ANC. He tended towards grandiose policies thatwere often unrealistic. He re-racialised the SouthAfrican political discourse and accused those whodisagreed with him of racism if they were white,or of Uncle-Tommery if they were black. He confusedelite capital accumulation (“BEE”) with socialtransformation. He subverted democratic process toprosecute his own intra-party political battles, andto defend an indefensible arms deal that became thepoisoned well of South African politics. He was unable(or unwilling) to present himself and thus hisgovernment as approachable and responsive. Thisled to a high-handedness that submerged the democraticmoment into the very worst of the ANC’s hierarchical(some might say “Stalinist”) political traditions,and brought upon South Africa the reactivepopulism of the Jacob Zuma era.At the root of much of Mbeki’s political personalitywas a disconnect; a prickly and defensive mienthat prevented him from listening to reason if itmeant changing his mind; that contracted ratherthan expanded our national sense of possibility andthus provoked anxiety rather than encouraged hope.Mbeki’s leadership style fused Leninist vanguardismand nationalist defensiveness: “I know what’sbest for my people, so please do not question me.”Both strands to this political identity have their“Why is Thabo Mbeki a ‘Nitemare’?”63

Scene from Mbeki and Other Nitemaresby Tsepo wa MamatuPhoto: Courtesy Sally Gaule ©roots in his psychological and ideological history,but they are not his entire political being. He wasboth “Sussex Man” and “Moscow Man”, and hiscommitment to the values of liberal humanist democracywere perpetually jockeying for prominencewith his redemptive Africanism and his vanguardistinstrumentalism. The interplay of these three ideologieswrought much damage, but much creativitytoo. At their worst, they enabled Mbeki to think thathe could challenge the might of the pharmaceuticalindustry and scientific orthodoxy by making his ownway through the evidence; at their best, they enabledhim to imagine the post-apartheid state that madethe space for Tsepo wa Mamatu and his extraordinarystudents at the Wits School of Arts.The truth is that Thabo Mbeki designed much ofthe negotiated settlement that spared South Africa adescent into bloody civil war. He presided over a periodof unprecedented growth and totally unexpectedstability by steering both a new government anda highly vulnerable economy smoothly through theturbulent waters of a political transition and a globaleconomic crisis – even if he failed dismally to bringmany of his comrades along with him. He forged aliberal democratic state founded on the principlesof an open society – even if his own practise sometimescontradicted these. He mastered the details ofgovernment when almost everyone else was eitherstar struck by the “Madiba magic” era or stunned bythe magnitude of the task ahead. His governmentdid not just hold things down: it significantly improvedthe South African infrastructure and its taxbase, and in so doing reduced poverty through socialgrants and service provision even if it could notstimulate the economy in such a way as to combatunemployment.He forged a liberal democratic state founded on theprinciples of an open societyUltimately, Mbeki changed the face of South Africain several significant and indisputable ways, even ifthe effects of these changes are open to debate. Histwin policies of aggressive affirmative action andblack economic empowerment, implemented duringa period of economic growth, created a vibrant newblack middle class – numbering a fraction of a percentilewhen the ANC came to power in 1994 and estimatedby 2008 to be anywhere between 300 000and 2 million people, out of a total population of50 million. Some analysts blame the Mbeki governmentfor encouraging – as Brian Pottinger puts itin his book The Mbeki Legacy – “the growth of thedependency society”: Pottinger sees the “baleful”effect of this not only among welfare recipients butalso among middle-class blacks, many of whom arerecipients of state largesse due to affirmative action.But even if the growth of this class did not have the“trickle down” effect into black society imagined byMbeki and his financial managers in the mid-1990s,Mbeki and Other Nitemares alone is evidence thatthis growing class – with its premium on excellenceand independence – is one of the best possible insurancesSouth Africa has in the defense of its democracy.The area around which there is most contention,when it comes to Mbeki’s legacy, is that of economicpolicy. He and his financial managers insistthat they stabilized the economy in 1996 with theirGrowth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR)policy, staving off a crash that would have forcedthe country to take out the begging bowl before theInternational Monetary Fund. They cite, as evidence,the unprecedented era of economic growthover which Mbeki presided, the dramatic increasein the efficiency of tax collection, and the fact thatby 2004 South Africa was able to spend more percapita on social services than any other developingcountry. But despite the fact that there was a steadydecline in unemployment from 1999 until the recessionof 2009, it remains unacceptably high, and thiswas one of the strongest contributing factors to thecrime rate, against which the state has been largelyineffective: South Africa remains one of the mostviolent countries in the world. And despite the factthat, as the office of the Presidency’s website shows,almost all key indicators show the country to bebetter off at the time Mbeki left office than it waswhen he arrived, South Africa has slipped on manycredible international scales, including the UN’sHuman Development index. Reasons proffered forthis slippage include the dramatic decline of themanufacturing sector, ineffective regulation, inef-64The Salon: Volume Two

ficient health and education services despite massiveexpenditure, the increasing skills shortage, thecollapse of local government (particularly in smalltowns), and the collapse of the criminal justice system.These are massive deficits, not small bumps ina road, and they provide a dark negative image tothe prosperity and promise reflected in the promotionof the country during the 2010 World Cup. Thefact that these two images coexist side by side is evidencethat the Mbeki government left South Africa amore unequal place than it found it, even if it is notas poor as it as was.Could any government have done better, in SouthAfrica, in the years following 1994, given the job,given the circumstances? Who knows what a Hanipresidency or a Ramaphosa presidency would havelooked like, and how they would have dealt with thedifficult situations that often brought out the worstin Mbeki? Writing just over a year after Mbeki leftoffice, it still seems premature, to me, to pronouncedefinitively on his legacy. All we can do is begin toset up a table of deficits and benefits as I have doneabove – and as I have done, in more detail, in theepilogue to the second edition of Thabo Mbeki: TheDream Deferred. But it does seem apt – even urgent– to consider the question of why the former SouthAfrican president has been so consistently vilified,as if he has come to carry all the sins and shortcomingsof the generation charged with shepherdingSouth Africa into liberation.* * *Thabo Mbeki promised a certain kind of Africanleadership and failed to deliver it. So much of theanger against him has been at a man who seemedunable to live up to his own exacting standards ofdemocratic practise; standards he codified andspent millions of South African tax money peddlingto the rest of the continent as the African Peer ReviewMechanism. I have lost count at the number ofSouth Africans who have said to me: “Whatever elseI thought of Thabo Mbeki, I at least thought he wasclean. I was wrong.” Or: “Whatever else I thought ofThabo Mbeki, I at least thought he was a democrat.Now I don’t believe that either too.” Nothing – noteven his AIDS policies (which at least were well-intentioned)– did more damage to Mbeki’s reputationthan the evidence of his willingness to corrupt theorgans of state, and his determination to hold ontopower, in 2007.His government’s meddling in the case againstformer the police chief Jackie Selebi is even moredamnable than its meddling in the case against JacobZuma: first, because the evidence was stronger,and second, because in the case of Selebi, Mbeki’sconduct amounted to protecting an allegedly corruptpolice chief in bed with criminals against a demonstrablyclean chief prosecutor. In the firing ofZuma, as in his AIDS policy, the argument couldhave been made at least that he was acting in whathe believed to be the public interest. But with hisgovernment’s victimisation of Vusi Pikoli, the NationalDirector of Public Prosecutions who decidedto charge Selebi, there could be nothing more atstake than the protection of a crony, at a time whenSelebi’s political support was important to Mbeki.Then, with his quest for a third term as president ofthe ANC, Mbeki revealed to the nation his personalhunger for power; this might have been more acceptableif it had not, for so long, been so vigorouslydenied. In comparison, Zuma’s own bodily appetitesScene from Mbeki and Other Nitemaresby Tsepo wa MamatuPhoto: Courtesy Sally Gaule ©seemed small beer.Mbeki was meant to have been the supreme rationalist;the technocrat who could save South Africa.And if he was not always transparent or pleasant,some comfort could be taken, at least, in the beliefthat he was a master strategist who knew how towield power effectively. If his response to the AIDScrisis compromised that notion by revealing him assomeone who saw himself more as a prophet-inthe-wildernessthan a pragmatist (it took him fiveyears to accept that his position was doing irreparabledamage) then his ham-handedness around thecharges against Jacob Zuma put paid to it entirely.If his intention was to dispatch with Zuma, it hadthe opposite effect: it made him Zuma a victim, amartyr, and it gave him a cause. If Mbeki was such askilled operator, how could he not have seen that thedecision to announce publicly that there was primafacie evidence against Jacob Zuma without charginghim would backfire? The answer, as in so manyother of his political missteps – such as the coup plot“Why is Thabo Mbeki a ‘Nitemare’?”65

allegations against Cyril Ramaphosa, Tokyo Sexwaleand Matthews Phosa – must be found somewhereelse: in his personal anxieties about power, so atodds with the public persona, built over decades ofbeing the ANC’s suave propagandist, of being a manat ease in the world.The brilliance of his opponents was to identify –and to exploit – these weaknesses. Using the samevanguardist mode in which Mbeki was schooled butdeploying it more effectively, Zuma’s supportersidentified a latent dissatisfaction within the ANC,and sparked an anti-establishment rebellion out ofit. Mbeki’s victimisation of Zuma, allegedly becausehe was both ambitious and uneducated – “not presidentialmaterial” – became symbolic of the way somany people felt left out, or left behind; denied aseat at the banquet of victory.For many reasons, not least the country’s earlyindustrialisation and thus its proletarian history,South Africa’s politics are driven by a particularlyacute sense of aspiration; a sense that people canalter a prescribed destiny. While this energy gaveSouth Africans the perseverance to struggle for decadesagainst apartheid and the imagination to forgea new democratic society, it also generates the byproductof perpetual grievance. This is the labourmovement’s great gift to the South African democracy,for it counterbalances the feudal fatalism oftribalism, and ensures that the ANC does not installa Mugabe, a Moi, an Mbeki-for-life, a Zuma-for-life.But it also ensures chronic dissatisfaction with thosewho have more than you do: the rich, the powerful.Within the post-liberation ANC, such discontentwas (perhaps necessarily) repressed by the first generationof leadership; by Mandela, by Mbeki, andby Zuma. Once the pantheon splintered and theleadership itself started fighting with one another,permission was implicitly granted to complain; tocampaign, again.permission was implicitly granted to complain; tocampaign, againCentral to the campaign to oust Mbeki, then, wasa pivotal notion in post-liberation politics: that theleader must represent the oppressed against theoppressor; that he is their candidate against “TheMan”, even if he is, simultaneously, “The Man” himself.This requires an almost impossible double-act:even as you need to prove to voters that you can dispenselargesse and offer access to power, you have toconvince them too that you are in fact being electedto challenge this power on behalf of the ordinary, thedown-trodden, the left-behind. Mbeki’s nativist politicswere, in part, an attempt to play this double-act,and the sharpest evidence of his failure at this rolewas his descent into AIDS-dissidence through hisfight against Big Pharma: his misguided protectionof Africans against the profiteering multinationalsdumping their toxic medication on them was, in nosmall part, a defence against the accusation that hewas a neo-liberal who had “rolled over” for big businessand international capital.Jacob Zuma’s ticket to power – and thus out ofjail – was, of course, that Thabo Mbeki was “TheMan” and that the rest of us (like Zuma himself)were the victims. As is now common cause, Zuma’scampaign drew together a coalition of the “walkingwounded”; comrades who had in one way or another-beenalienated or sidelined by Mbeki. The perceivedinjury to Jacob Zuma became a symbol of theinjury to them all, and was the vehicle for their successfulcoalition: all they had in common (beyonda membership of the ANC) was a shared loathingfor Mbeki. Their only glue was that they were all setagainst “The Man”; if Mbeki ceased being the villain,they risked disintegration. There was thus valuablepolitical capital in assigning the mistakes and theexcesses of the first fifteen years of ANC governmentprimarily to Thabo Mbeki.Certainly, the Zuma administration has been admirablycandid in acknowledging problems Mbekihad for so long underplayed or denied – from adisastrous new education curriculum, to the crimerate, to the AIDS epidemic. But with a couple ofnotable exceptions, Zuma and his executive haverefrained from expressing any kind of regret, or culpability,for the failed policies they are endeavoringto replace. This is a consequence of the difficult situationin which they find themselves: most of themwere, after all, leaders of both the Mbeki-led ANCand the Mbeki-led government. And so, while thebasic education minister Angie Motshekga was appropriatelylauded for her courage in signing the“death certificate” of Outcomes Based Education(OBE) in November 2009, she was amnesiac aboutthe role that her party and she in particular – as aprovincial minister for education – had played inpromoting this, perhaps one of the signal failures,of the Mbeki era. And while Jacob Zuma has entirelyrehabilitated the government AIDS programme byproviding the political leadership so sorely lackingunder Mbeki, he has failed to account for his complicityin the Mbeki AIDS fiasco, when he was in factthe member of government responsible for AIDSpolicy and perfectly placed to counter Mbeki’s ownobduracy during his deputy-presidency should hehave so chosen.66The Salon: Volume Two

Scene from Mbeki and Other Nitemaresby Tsepo wa MamatuPhoto: Courtesy Sally Gaule ©In both of the above cases, one could counter thatthe implementation of substantive change is farmore meaningful than a chest-beating ‘mea culpa’,particularly when the latter might result in destructiveblame-throwing. But taking responsibility isan essential part of democratic governance: notonly does it give the electorate its due respect (it isone of the practises that transforms subjects intocitizens) but it also enables policy-makers to lookcool-headedly at why a situation developed in thefirst place. An “AIDS Truth Commission” – real orsymbolic – might reveal, for instance, the extent towhich Mbeki’s anti-medical nativism spoke to, andout of, the broader denialism in South African society.To acknowledge this is not to exonerate himfrom culpability, but to understand his own denialismin context, and thus to be able to develop policyto counter it.In November 2009, as I was drafting this essay,the Young Communist League of South Africa – avibrant component of the ruling ANC alliance – suggestedthat a judicial commission of inquiry withprosecutorial powers be appointed to determinewhether Mbeki was “guilty of mass killing” due tohis AIDS policies. The YCL was responding to an extraordinaryadmission by the health minister, AaronMotsoaledi, that Mbeki’s AIDS policies were directlythe cause for the doubling of AIDS death figures from1997 to 2008. Citing the Western Cape, where antiretroviralmedication was made available duringthis period and the trend was reversed, the ministersaid bluntly that an “abdication of the fight againstAIDS” had led directly to the death rate: “Our attitudetoward HIV/AIDS put us where we are.”taking responsibility is an essential part of democraticgovernanceA fascinating public debate ensued. While the ANCdistanced itself from the YCL call and most commentatorswrote that prosecuting Mbeki would beneither viable nor helpful, many concurred thatMbeki was morally – even if not criminally – liablefor the AIDS deaths. This position was put most cogentlyby Frans Cronje of the South African Instituteof Race Relations in the November 2009 issue ofSAIRR Today. He made a critical point: given thatneither the ANC nor parliament ever censured Mbeki,“what is often described as Thabo Mbeki’s AIDSpolicy would in fact be better described as the ANC’sAIDS policy. When the ANC did remove him fromoffice it was over a simple power play in the rulingalliance suggesting that the party saw an internalpower squabble as more serious than the deaths ofso many of its supporters.”The Business Day columnist Jacob Dlamini putit stronger on 3 December, 2009: it was “fraudulentand downright inaccurate to personalize SA’s governmentfailing on the AIDS front and pretend itwas all the work of one man”. Dlamini urged againstblaming Mbeki “for everything that has gone wrongin this country”, reminding readers that Zuma hadbeen entirely complicit not only in Mbeki’s AIDSpolicy, but in South Africa’s economic policy, in thedeployment of incompetent officials, and much elsebesides.The following week, Jonny Steinberg took the argumentfurther in Business Day: the demonizationof Mbeki into a “national ogre”, he wrote, ignoredthe context in which made his decisions. Steinberghighlighted the dystopia that the ANC inherited, andhow deeply the new rulers were affected by the factthat they did not have the power to effect change accordingto the blueprints they had been designingfor decades; that, instead, they found themselvesgoverning a country characterized by joblessness,crime and illness about which they could do little.Mbeki voiced this despair and anguish; following hisfall, Steinberg suggested, the anger at Mbeki was anational expunging of the former president’s “visibledisenchantment, his dark brooding, his sensethat things were out of joint”: “We have made himan ogre, I think, because we wish that what has departedwith him is a country ill at ease with itself. Itis wishful thinking indeed.”Steinberg’s piece drew a sharp response on 11December from another Business Day columnist,Eusebius McKaiser, who accused both Steinberg– and me, as Mbeki’s biographer – of committinga profound moral “mistake”: “excessive contextualizingcan lead to this kind of unintended exonerationof political and moral wrongdoing.” While worksuch as my own might help us to understand Mbeki,“Why is Thabo Mbeki a ‘Nitemare’?”67

McKaiser continues, “understanding does not displaceblame. Too many people died because of hisneedless self-indulgence, absent father or not. Mbekiearned the ogre tag. It certainly was not thrustupon him.”Steinberg’s article was characteristically criticalabout Mbeki, with sharp judgments on how the formerpresident abused his powers of office, mismanagedthe government, was blinded to an epidemic,and projected his own dislike of his people onto theWest. The very fact that McKaiser reads the articleas an exoneration proves Steinberg’s point: that thedemonization of Mbeki, in the period following hisdownfall, was driven by emotional considerationsrather than an empirical assessment of Mbeki’s legacy.It was as if … South Africans had charged him withnothing less than the custody of their dreamsIn the Sunday Independent, on 21 September2008, I wrote that if Thabo Mbeki’s removal frompower in 2007-8 was something of a regicide, thiswas because the ruling African National Congressceded so much power to him that the only way toclaim it back was to decapitate him – metaphorically,of course. Certainly, Mbeki might have earnedthis fate because of his own regal behaviour. Butwhat is remarkable about so much commentary onMbeki after his fall is the extent to which it cedesto him, precisely, the power for which it purportsto critique him: it creates of him a demonic fetishfor all that was poisonous, or ineffective, or mendacious,in South African public life.In the run-up to Polokwane, in late 2007, I wrotein the introduction to my biography that whilemany of the criticisms of Mbeki were legitimate andhealthy, “the pitch of the discourse often seemed fueledby a sense of anger and betrayal leveled at someonewho had been vested with a responsibility fargreater than mere executive office. Suddenly, Mbekibecame a lightning rod for so many frustrations. Itwas as if, by voting him into office, South Africanshad charged him with nothing less than the custodyof their dreams – and with every violent crime, withevery unemployed high school graduate, with everyAIDS death, he stood accused of shattering them.”At the time of writing this essay, two years later –and over a year after his dismissal – this seems truerthan ever.* * *Since my biography was published, the vast majorityof emails I have received have come from one particulardemographic group: black students and youngprofessionals. Here is a fairly representative example:“Thank you for your book. I feel I have learnedso much about the Great Man. He remains my inspiration.I am what I am because of him.” Or another:“The man is incredible, and his mind a monument offorce, without parallel within the current leadership.It is so easy to be charmed by his sober, thoughtfulpersona, and perhaps as an artist there is nothingwrong in finding yourself at loss for words, yearningand wishing to describe a feeling that words will diefor.”If so many public voices in South Africa seemedto have a vested interest in keeping Thabo Mbekibad, then many of my correspondents seemed tohave a vested interest in keeping him good. Or, insome cases, in longing for the good that was thereuntil it went bad: “I still don’t understand [whathappened to Mbeki]. It seems to me like he was corruptedby absolute power. Terrible. I had prayed andhoped that we would be different, but I guess look atMugabe.”What sadness there is in that “we”, for it is an acknowledgementof the end of South African exceptionalism;a coming to terms with the fact that “we”are just like everyone else: we produce our Mandelas,we produce our Malemas. We are no longer ‘theworld’s greatest fairytale’, but rather a messy andunpredictable democracy with a deep history of conflictand history to overcome, run by flawed and selfinterestedmen rather than saints and heroes.Thabo Mbeki carries the aspirations of a generation– Mbeki’s Children – on his shoulders. As oneof my correspondents put it about his own work:“One of my pet projects is this question of blacknessand capacity. I guess what I am saying is, I dare notfail.” “Blackness and capacity” was, more than anything,Mbeki’s own ‘pet project’. “I dare not fail” washis credo: it drove him and it warped him. He transferredthis quest for achievement and excellence– perhaps it is accurate to call it a neurosis – to ageneration of young people, and it has defined manyof them. And yet Mbeki himself failed: according toJacob Zuma and his comrades, according to XolelaMangcu, according to RW Johnson and EusebiusMcKaiser and so many others.The crisis generated by this allegation is significant.For some, his assassins are Judases and hemust remain good: many of these young men andwomen formed the urban backbone of the COPEgroundswell, and although their numbers weresmaller, their fervent support for Mbeki matchedthat for Zuma by his supporters. Mbeki, like Zuma,68The Salon: Volume Two

The cast of Mbeki and Other NitemaresPhoto: Courtesy Sally Gaule ©tif, capturing in its rhythms (Langston Hughes’ brilliance,not my own) all the nostalgia and all the anguishof the play and its performers. “Perhaps this,then, is why Mbeki has become such a “Nitemare”,even for those, like Tsepo wa Mamatu and his players,who readily admit his greatness. He urged thefirst generation of post-apartheid black professionalsand intellectuals to define themselves, to followtheir dreams rather than the destinies laid out forthem by three centuries of oppression. And yet hisstory forces them – forces us all – to come to termswith a paradox about freedom: even if democracyrequires us to act, there will always be limits to ouragency.was constructed as a class warrior, but it would be acaricature of his supporters to describe them solelyas being interested in protecting the privilege of theirclass; in holding the barbarians at the gate. Rather,particularly in the light of a Zuma portrayed as atraditionalist and misogynist, Mbeki spoke to theirquest for excellence and achievement; their creativity;their cosmopolitan aspirations. For others(including, by their own acknowledgement, manyof his harshest critics in the media) he is bad preciselybecause he has let the team down: a profoundsense of betrayal drives their anger. And for othersstill – such as Tsepo wa Mamatu and his cast – hisdownfall has prompted an identity crisis, and begunthe process of cleaving them from the mother-movement;a process that cannot but eventually reshapeSouth African politics, even if COPE is a washout.I have been struck, after the publication of mybook, how the expression “a dream deferred” hasentered the South African political vernacular; it ranthrough Mbeki and Other Nitemares like a leitmo-A version of this article is forthcoming in the bookMbeki and After, edited by Daryl Glaser, publishedby Wits University Press.“Why is Thabo Mbeki a ‘Nitemare’?”69

King of Dreams:Dreamworld vs. Utopia and the SonicTemporality of King’s Two BodiesDamien Marassa(Duke University, USA)Shadowed by the specter of destruction thatincreasingly characterizes our contemporarypredicament, what can we learn from MartinLuther King? Is it not more important than ever to‘have a dream’ of a better, more just, more equalworld; and to live and act today so as to makesuch a vision a radical imperative, as opposed toan unreachable utopian fantasy?In this vexed moment in the triumphant life of globalcapital an ironic counter-image is coming into view:the potential destruction of the human race by processesof its own agency. This ghastly vision projectsitself across a historical landscape of nuclear ColdWar imaginaries supplanted by the competing anxietiesof environmental degradation and large-scalebio-political instability. If half a century ago Malrauxobserved that while 19th century Europe hadwitnessed “the death of God,” its post-World WarTwo crisis had presaged the occasion for the samecommunity to ask itself “whether, today, man [sic]is not dead.” Pursuing this type of reflection mightprove relevant for investigating the condition of humankind’scontemporary relationship to the possibilityof its own “imminent death” under the signand temporality of globalization. The inaugurationof such a global object for thought might well seemneedlessly morbid until one considers the implicationsof the “Hegelian” concept of which Blanchotspeaks where “[d]eath alone allows me to graspwhat I want to attain.” Through the necessary encounterwith the extreme limits (and thus the ‘totality’)of its being in the irreducible fact of its mortality,the individual, collective, social, and indeed globalsubject enters into consciousness of its own historicity.In such a global awareness, the measure of life’sfinitude yields the possibility of tracing life’s relationto meaning, filling consciousness with dreams andaspirations. It is in the process of such a becomingsubject that we gaze in the reflecting pool of MartinLuther King’s life and words, as the figure of an heroicresponse to the self-destructive violence of modernity,but also as the subject of a life lived underthe continual the threat of death.In 1955, at the very beginning of his participationin the Montgomery Bus Boycott, when asked ifthe death threats that he received as a result of hisleadership caused fear, King responded that it wasnot his own life he was concerned about but “thetriumph of a cause.” In his celebrated “Drum MajorInstinct” sermon, where he describes the desire inherentin every human being to be recognized andvalued by society, King acknowledges first the darkersides of human ambition and their effects on theworld. Continuing in strikingly personal tones onthis theme, King urges his listeners to harness thispower to motivate lives of service to humanity as hehad become empowered to do: “Yes, if you want tosay that I was a drum major,” he intones, “say that Iwas a drum major for justice; say that I was a drummajor for peace; I was a drum major for righteousness.”Notably he embellishes on these phrasings ina style that brings us deeper into the poetics of hisPainting of Dr. Martin Luther King by Joel NankinPhoto: Reginald Patterson ©, courtesy the photographerlanguage than one might expect from the effects ofpublic speech. “And that’s all I want to say,” he continues,“if I can help somebody as I pass along, if Ican cheer somebody with a word or a song, if I canshow somebody that he’s travelling wrong, then myliving will not be in vain.” These words are, in fact,lyrics to the hymn “If I Can Help Somebody”, popularizedby Mahalia Jackson.Acknowledgement of the afro-sonic and phonographicmateriality of King’s language amplifies theaudibility of his poetic voice and the rhetorical effectsof his speech. The supplementary nature of theoral that splices (the “ordinary speech” of printedtranscription onto the aural palimpsest of traditionalAfrican American devotional music) enacts acut on the denotative register of signification to producesong in the moment of speaking, to articulatedream in place of sight. As his utterance continuesit is not only by means of what Blanchot describesas “ordinary language” that King addresses the con-70The Salon: Volume Two

Dr. Martin Luther King, JrPhoto: Dick DeMarsico ©US Library of Congress, public domaingregation, but through strikingly literary utterancethat collapses and expands the rhetorical boundariesbetween poetry, speech and song: “If I can do myduty as a Christian ought, if I can bring salvation toa world once wrought, if I can spread the messageas the master taught, then my living will not be invain.” In the next movement, King proceeds to improviseover the form of the hymn by extemporizingon the hypothetical, and indeed inevitable, momentof his future absence, and in expressing his wishesfor how his legacy should be memorialized, makesa curious distinction between worldly accomplishmentsand altruistic strivings. Preferring not to havementioned that he has an astounding number ofpersonal awards, honors and recognitions, and suchempirical historical accomplishments, he requeststhat his commemorators, instead, say of the intentionof his actions, and of the attempt to diffuse himselfout into the world through the performance ofthe following inexhaustible tasks, that “Martin LutherKing, Jr., tried to live his life serving others …tried to love somebody.… I tried to … serve humanity.”This sense of the meaning and merit of life asfound in the interstitial expanse between historicityand mortality brings to mind the testimony ofone participant in the civil rights movement whoexplains that “what Dr. King gave us, what StokelyCarmichael gave or Malcolm X gave, what everybodygave us, whether you agreed with them or not,the energy of that time and the goals we were allaspiring to … is what it was all about at its best. Atits worst was when we did nothing.” In these commentsmusician and activist Harry Belafonte identifies“goals” and aspirations as the “best” thing aboutthe Civil Rights Movement and these energies ofaction with the “worst” state of affairs, the passivityof doing “nothing.” It is significant here to note thatKing saw his vision for America as “deeply rooted”in a transhistorical palimpsest of designs for a socialworld of freedom and justice for all. One might thusask the question of what King’s example remains toteach us about how to live with ancestors, spirits andheritages (as bearers of dreams) in this portentousmoment in history.Looking closely at a few key moments in King’spublic speeches, I argue that what we must retain– more importantly than the formal organization ofany cause or political mobilization, and more imperativelythan any form of historical accomplishmentto which his legacy might conduce – can be foundin his ability to dream in the face of death, and inthe threat of annihilation to recognize the promiseof the eternal. At a time in which it has perhapsnever been more difficult to conceive of an alternativeto the current world system, it has also neverbeen more important, or more radical as it is nowto dream, to imagine, to create differently. And yetso much of the discourse that critically evaluates thecomplex and multiple strivings for radically differentsocial orders, by virtue of utopian characterization,seems to impute to these endeavors the inefficacyof fantasy.it has also never been more important, or moreradical as it is now to dream, to imagine, to createdifferentlyFredric Jameson, for example, asserts in his majorstudy on utopia, Archaeologies of the Future, that,“the best Utopias are those that fail the most comprehensively”insofar as they can “at best … servethe negative purpose of making us more aware ofour mental and ideological imprisonment” to reallyexistinglife conditions. The entire dreamworld thuscharacterized as utopian therefore becomes evaluatednot only as being incapable of realization, butis valued if at all in the very terms of its impossibility,valued as a negative psychological resource forits utter absence of worldly value. Though the word‘utopia’ derives from the ancient Greek for “no”and “place,” the term enters the modern vernacularthrough the coinage of Sir Thomas More in hisfictional work, so influential on later generic formsof speculative fiction, satire and political theory,elaborately titled A Fruitful and Pleasant Work ofthe Best State of a Public Weal, and of the New IsleKing of Dreams71

Called Utopia. Jameson identifies the condition ofpossibility for the founding of utopia as the “closure”achieved by the digging of a “great trench betweenthe island and the mainland and which alone allowsit to become Utopia.” Observation of this Manicheanstructure dialogically affirmed by utopia’s hermeticself-enclosure would then be, for Jameson, a wayof asserting the distinction between what he callsthe reality “of our mental and ideological imprisonment”and the fictional or “literary” genre of utopianfantasy the dissolution of which bears the redemptivefeature of revealing hegemonic claims on thepresent.Yet, if King recognized a space such as Jamesondescribes utopia, this enclosure was for him a dystopia.If he saw an island separated by a great trenchfrom the mainland it was the “lonely island of povertyin a midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity”on which African Americans had been stranded;if there was an “elsewhere” that King observed itwas the cramped “corners of American society” inwhich African Americans were “in exile” in their“own land.” That is to say that, if there existed a selfenclosedisle of utopia for King, this was not the goalof his striving, but rather the nightmarish historicityof the corruption of the American dream by the evilsof racism from which the present must extricate itself.For King, the dream would mean the oppositeof utopia so constructed – it would mean recognitionof the mutuality of reality and dream, of islandand mainland, of self and other.In King’s acceptance speech for the Nobel PeacePrize delivered on 10 December 1964, he claimedan “audacity to believe that peoples everywhere canhave three meals a day for their bodies, educationand culture for their minds, and dignity, equalityand freedom for their spirits.” This dream was neithera utopia in the sense of a programmatic “[en]closure” of a new world set off from an old, or a liberalreformist aspiration to gloss the existing order,but a radical commitment to, and living involvementin, the temporality of a dream to be understood asin the process of unfolding, of realizing, of arriving.Neither ahistorical eschaton nor whimsical fantasy,King experienced this dream as an affective phenomenonmanifest in both mind and body, whoseontological status was more contingent upon personalbelief and individual action than the calculusof historical probability. In this same speech, Kingspeaks of his “abiding faith in America and … thefuture of mankind,” yet punctuates his acceptanceof the award through the emphasis of a refusal “tosubscribe to the idea that the ‘isness’ of man’s presentnature makes him morally incapable of reachingup for the eternal ‘oughtness’ that forever confrontshim.” In the structure of this phrasing alone can beseen the juxtaposition of a distinct set of two ontologicalconditions and correspondent temporalitiesin King’s critical formulation.this dream … was more contingent upon personalbelief and individual action than the calculus ofhistorical probabilityIf King begins by acknowledging historicity in “the‘isness’ of man’s present nature,” he proceeds byasserting that this temporality is “confronted” by acommensurate force in excess of historical realitythat he calls “eternal ‘oughtness.’” In this formulation,King describes the foundational ontology ofhuman life as composed not only of the temporalityof past experience, but also as constituted by thehistoricity of human potential for change. This capacity,emerging out of the historical contiguity of“man’s present nature,” manifests itself, then, notas a nebulous future moment which ought eventuallybe realized beyond the horizon of lived experience.Rather, this condition of “the eternal ‘oughtness’that forever confronts” humanity, and thereforeperpetually suffuses, each moment of humanexistence, is itself a presence within the experienceof everyday life. Such a formulation of the simultaneouspresence of “isness” and “oughtness” in thereality of “man’s present nature” in King’s formulationsheds light on what Walter Benjamin labored todescribe as “a conception of the present as the ‘timeof the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianictime,” and brings us to the discussion of whatJacques Derrida has theorized as l’avenir.The temporality of concern for Derrida is not thatspace that will come to pass “tomorrow, later, nextcentury,” but the arrival of a future that “is totallyunexpected.” For Derrida, “the real future” is not theprogrammatic extension of causes and effects suchas the rising of the sun or the arrival of a train onschedule, but rather, “that which is totally unpredictable… the Other who comes without my beingable to anticipate their arrival.” Thus, the “real future”is “l’avenir … that coming of the Other whenI am completely unable to foresee their arrival.” Areading of Antonio Negri’s articulation of the ‘tocome’further illuminates the salience of King’s coinage“the eternal ‘oughtness.’” For Negri, “the eternalis the common name of the materialist experienceof time,” that is ‘time’ as the ultimate site of contestationover the question of dreamworld vs. utopia(within even a Marxist theory of history). Negri arguesthat the “eternity of matter reveals itself as tem-72The Salon: Volume Two

poral intensity, as innovative presence; and the fullpresent of eternal time is singularity. ‘Singular’ and‘eternal’ are,” thus, “interchangeable terms; their relationshipis tautological. Whatever has happened iseternal; it is eternal here and now. The eternal is thesingular present. In materialism ethical experienceis the responsibility for the present.”One might speak, then, of the way in which thisresponsibility of ethical experience comes into human“experience … for the present” as the encounterwith “eternal ‘oughtness,’” that is, with the to-comewhich, one might even say, haunts the entirety ofhuman being, the very “isness” of human historicity.Thus, rather than proving the incompatibility of thisMarxist ontology with a valuation of the philosophicalpoetics of King’s speech, we arrive at the vindicationof the former by the latter insofar as Negri arguesthat “[i]n materialism, ethical experience” functionsprecisely in the structure of this relation to temporalitybeing “always faced with the immeasurableand the opening of the eternal to the to-come.” Asthe question becomes one of mapping the encounterbetween the temporality of the “to come” as “oughtness”and the present tense of the to be as “isness,”we return to Jameson’s beleaguered identification ofUtopia as “a literary form,” this time to cull ratherthan abjure his insights. For though King’s dreammay at base prove not to be utopian in the structureimplied by the frivolity of fantasy or the superfluousnessof wishful thinking, there is indeed, as we haveseen, a literary feature of the language in which thedream is articulated, transmitted, and performedthat bears resemblance to Jameson’s identificationof utopia as “a literary genre.” For on the one hand,if we are to accept as true what Jameson calls “thegreat empiricist maxim” that maintains “nothing inthe mind that was not first in the senses,” we mustalso concede nothing in experience that was not firstin history.That is, if we are to accept this formulation inour heuristic of evaluating future-striving socialmovements as utopian, we must concede that both“eternity” and its “oughtness” are incapable of themoral reach of humanity’s “isness.” And even if weare tempted to side with Jameson over King on thisproposal, which might arguably provide for a morepragmatic historiography, it must be asked to whatextent we are prepared to articulate the phenomenologicalboundary of the senses. Upon what rostrumdo we stand when we dare to speak of a sensoriumuninformed by the operations and inheritances ofdreams? In other words, even the acceptance of “thegreat empiricist maxim” – if we can be persuadedto consider it great – raises questions as to the relationshipof embodied experience to the life of themind. It should appear as no accident therefore,that in the discourse of Martin Luther King onemight encounter a quintessential challenge to thisempiricist rubric in the language of his own publicspeech. Indeed, in King’s final public act, his ultimateformal utterance invokes and animates a bodyof phenomenal experience embodied in traditionsof evangelical prophecy, a collective assemblage oforal historiography and annals of future-orientatedgenerational cultural production that aggregatescomplex histories of African (American) Diasporicresistance, epistemology and self-creation. Here Iam attempting to describe the inestimable historicalredolence and contemporary urgency of the lastline of King’s final sermon, delivered on April 3 1968at the Bishop Charles Mason Temple in Memphis,Tennessee: “Mine eyes have seen the coming of theglory of the Lord.” The phonographic ur-text of thisutterance which directly cites “The Battle Hymn ofthe Republic,” itself a source of New Testament references,functions as a sort of discursive bed trackover which King’s ministerial vocals layer a genealogyof Western thought culminating the aporetic dilemmasof Ancient Greece in the crises of a humanismfacing the radical limit of its boundary.Having surveyed a vast expanse of historical timein the course of his sermon, King most portentouslyidentifies his present moment of human experienceas the most covetable moment in history to bea participant, yet punctuates this by restaging thesomewhat familiar claim and ancient prophecy ofa ‘promised land.’ “It’s all right to talk about ‘longwhite robes over yonder,’ in all of its symbolism,” hesays “[b]ut ultimately people want some suits anddresses and shoes to wear down here! It’s all right totalk about ‘streets flowing with milk and honey,’” hecontinues, “but God has commanded us to be concernedabout the slums down here, and his childrenwho can’t eat three square meals a day. It’s all rightto talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God’spreacher must talk about the new New York, thenew Atlanta,” etc. From this (re)state(ment) of ontologicalpriorities it is clear that the ethics of “oughtness”unfolds from the tension between the twostate(ment)s above; “the fierce urgency of now,” encounteredin confrontation with the eternal “whichperpetually confronts [us].”It might more appropriately be remembered thatthe words to the hymn that ended King’s final sermonwere merely the last audible vocalization givenby King at that engagement, given that the entiretyof his spoken words were not amplified sufficientlyto be archived in the surviving recording. HavingKing of Dreams73

Martin Luther King leaning on a lecternPhoto: Marion S.Trikosko ©US Library of Congress, public domainyet to gain all there is from what is audible in King,and to thus gain all we ought to from the tenor ofhis voice, we strain to incline our ears to the silencesand silencing of King’s extemporaneous creations.We return, then, to the aural and historical recordin devout attention to King’s insistence on the phenomenalimportance of seeing in the way that wehave been referring to as ‘dream.’ Indeed in this insight,foresight is the vision of a “dream deeply rootedin the American dream” on the horizon of whosevisibility “his truth is marching on.” The dreamtimeof King’s poetics manifests in his last words the realityof a literary and historical space of realization.Not only has he “seen the coming of the glory of theLord,” he had done so with his own eyes, and is hereto speak about it.In tones of indefatigable courage King pauses on thesubject and advent of his own death, declaring: “itdoesn’t matter with me now… because I’ve been tothe mountaintop. And I don’t mind.” This claim toexperience is of the utmost relevance here. “And He’sallowed me to go up to the mountain,” he famouslycontinues. “And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen thepromised land.” Indeed, this conviction, the conversionof this certitude into faith, this sight into vision,bespeaks the quality of a composure that hundredsof thousands of people joined King in expressingduring the tribulations of the civil rights movement.Significantly, in his ode to Marx, Derrida describesthe Communist Manifesto not just as a revolutionarydocument but as a “real event” interpolated in historybetween the legendary specter of Communismand its ultimate incarnation in “the universal CommunistParty.” The notion of a human labor(time) asthe translative material of a dream that is to come, aspecter that begins by coming back, reintroduces usto the structure of historical production in MartinLuther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. The convictionthat proximity to such a specter adjures Kinginforms the auspiciousness he declares on that dayof his speech’s delivery, which would “go down inhistory as the greatest demonstration for freedom inthe history of our nation.”One might even submit that the greatness of thisday was constituted not merely by the sheer volumeof activist-participants who thronged the nation’scapital for the March on Washington of August28, 1963, but precisely by the manner in which thedreams that contributed to such a movement wereannounced and performed. Reviewing the score ofKing’s speech in the sonic temporality of an ancestralvoice singing across the landscape of half a centurywe come into contact with not just the legacy ofa historical heritage, but the urgent responsibility ofa global calling. The now world-renowned refrain of“I have a dream” delivered in the speech by whichdominant discourse has been given to commemorateKing without shedding light on what it mightmean for King to dream, to dream like King calls outto our attention today in its temporal emphasis inthe variation less often quoted: “I have a dream today!”to dream like King calls out to our attention … inthe variation less often quoted: “I have a dreamtoday!”The importance of this transition cannot be overstated.Upon closer examination, not just of the transcript,but of the sonority of his speech, the stress ofthe words falls not on a rhetorical emphasis of thefuturity of this awaited day. Rather, his intonationstressed the message that “today” was the objectconnecting him to the dream he found in his possession.The temporal manifestation of this dream thenappeared, in the moment of his verbal discourse, notonly as a personal, imaginary or spiritual resource,but as the historical unfolding of a “real event” everybit as poetic and lyrical as social and political. Returningto Derrida’s reading of Marx, we encounterthe striking similarity between the rhetorical operationin the opening salvo of The Communist Manifestoand the declarative gesture of King’s “I Have aDream” refrain.According to this analysis, at the moment inwhich Marx can speak of a specter haunting Europe,the specter of Communism has already become his(and Europe’s) inheritance. He now, already has a74The Salon: Volume Two

dream. Or more appropriately, in the case of bothMarx and King, one might speak of a dream havinghim. From the pen of Marx flows the speechact that introduces a movement, an event, a dreaminto history and the workings of human consciousness.What holds for Marx here holds true for Kingas well in the performance of his speech on August28, 1963, speaking in the present ‘now’ of his “dreamtoday!” We might therefore follow by saying, withDerrida, that the “future is not described, it is notforeseen in the constative mode; it is announced,promised, called for in a performative mode.” Thedream thus imparted in the “performative mode” ofKing’s speech requires a faithful listening to the sonicvocabulary of his utterances in which is recordedthe historical evidence not just of historical accomplishments,but of discursive, poetic, and literarystrivings to live despite the portents of death. For ifthis “learning to live … remains to be done,” as Derridahas described, “it can happen only between lifeand death. What happens between [the] two … canonly maintain itself with some ghost, can only talkwith or about some ghost. So it would be necessaryto learn spirits.”what dreams we are willing to allow to possess usand to what extent we will allow ourselves to beseized upon by a dreamIt seems, then, that there are two Kings we might callto memory, two modes of living with his legacy thatmight both faithfully reflect how he wished to be rememberedand express his ontological state(ment)s:the King of actions and the King of dreams. The former,archival body familiarized to us by the officialaccount of the empirical effects of King’s presencein the world is commemorated on a day of nationalrecognition. Yet, without questioning the veracity orappropriateness of commemorating King’s momentouscontribution to world history through materialsymbols like the Nobel Peace Prize, we focus our attentionand attune our hearing to the afrosonic, phonographic,literary qualities reverberant throughoutKing’s language the way he lived through the actionsof his life the striving toward that “eternal ‘oughtness’which perpetually confronts him.” Thus, thequestion that may now befall is no longer one of howor when we may encounter our mortality, or even ofwhat we may yet dare to dream, but precisely of whatdreams we are willing to allow to possess us andto what extent we will allow ourselves to be seizedupon by a dream. To question thus in the midst ofan engulfing global crisis empowers us not only tocite King’s speeches or recast the phonetic legacy ofhis memory in novel terms, but to learn to live withthe specters, voices and oralities of a global inheritance.This call strikes us as a far more encouragingvocation than that arising out of a utopian discoursewhich seeks hopelessly for the affirmative by way ofnegation exemplified in the furtive Jamesonian endorsementof “anti-anti-Utopianism.” Dispensingwith such quixotic enclosures we open to the affirmativeresonance of a tradition which calls us, in thewords of Langston Hughes, to “hold fast to dreams.”May we so consent then, even in the face of death,not only to the holding or being held, to the possessingor being possessed, but to the living with and beinglived by dreams.Crowds surrounding the Reflecting Pool, during the 1963 Marchon WashingtonPhoto: Warren K. Leffler, US Library of Congress, public domainKing of Dreams75

Africa and the Nightof LanguageAn Interview withAchille Mbembe(University of the Witwatersrand,South Africa)ByAnnalisa Oboe(University of Padua, Italy)This interview with Achille Mbembe started inVenice in March 2008 and continued for sometime in the form of a conversation about thepersonal and intellectual routes that have ledhim to become one of the most original voices incontemporary culture and thought. Mbembe isperhaps best known internationally for his Onthe Postcolony. Originally written in French, thisbook has been translated into Italian and English.Other translation projects in German and Spanishare under way. On the Postcolony has become alandmark in the field of African studies, togetherwith a number of related articles and interviewspublished in prestigious journals. Mbembe’swork is a sustained and at times critical dialoguewith the French philosophical tradition, with thepostcolonial theory of Anglo-Saxon origin, andwith black diaspora thought in the United States.It also creatively engages with literature, musicand contemporary art.Annalisa Oboe: You were born and grew up inCameroon, spent time in Paris as a student, thenleft France for the USA as a young scholar. Later youwent back to Africa to work, first in Dakar and thenin Johannesburg, while still spending part of theyear in America. What is the relationship betweenyour personal intellectual history and the complexgeographical coordinates that subtend your training?Achille Mbembe: I was born in Cameroon where Ispent my childhood. I grew up in a community whereeach home was by definition a home for others. Bythe time I arrived in Paris in my early twenties, I wasvery much a self-confident and optimistic character,having undergone nothing I could describe as an upheaval.I got a PhD in history at the Université deParis I-Panthéon Sorbonne and a DEA in politics atthe Institut d’études politiques de Paris. I then leftfor the United States where I taught for a numberof years at Columbia University and the Universityof Pennsylvania, and spent a year at The BrookingsInstitute before returning to Africa - first to Dakar,Senegal, and then on to South Africa where I nowlive and work while continuing to teach in Americaat Duke University once a year.Many African scholars and intellectuals dreamabout the Old World. As I just told you, I made theexact opposite choice. I arrived in South Africa afterhaving travelled the distance of the Atlantic Triangle- from my country of birth to France, from France toAmerica, and from America back to Africa. South Africais now my center of gravity, my watchtower ontothe global world, the primary location of my politicaland intellectual reflection. I cannot tell you how longthis will last.Of my country of birth, I should say that I havenot been living there for more than a quarter of acentury. But I still remember its name and careabout its fate. In fact, not so long ago, one could stillfind its arts of cursing in the underneath of whateverI wrote. I should nevertheless confess that of late, Ihave only been able to speak about it by stammering– in the manner of forced speech. Because of theemotive distance that now separates me from mybirth place, I no longer find its name and addresseasy to grasp. I find it harder and harder to come togrips with the place where I was born.Not so long ago, one could still find my countryof birth’s arts of cursing in the underneath ofwhatever I wrote. Of late, I have only been able tospeak about it by stammering…But although I have kept moving along the Atlantictriangle and although I inhabit the rifts of each sideof the triangle, I do not belong to any of these sidesin the strict sense of the term. I am a native of neitherSouth Africa, France or the United States. I ama citizen of nowhere in particular. But nor do I definemy condition as that of an exiled or of a nomad. Belongingto nowhere in particular, I have become myown home, a portable house I take with me whereverI happen to find a roof. I have to find a center that isnot tangible, some form of interiority that gives mea sense of inner stability amidst the turbulence andvagaries of where life takes me. This state of permanentmotion and fugitiveness has become an importantdimension of the way I think.Oboe: What are the most important moments inyour intellectual growth, the encounters that were76The Salon: Volume Two

Ash and Lightning above an Icelandic VolcanoPhoto: NASA (public domain)crucial to your intellectual exploration and thinking?Mbembe: The Bible and to a certain extent Christianityhave exercised the single most crucial influenceson my intellectual itinerary. In any case theyare the structuring mental landscapes against whichthe formative years of my life as a scholar unfolded.By Christianity, I do not mean the Catholic Church,its dogmas, its moral formalism and the ideologicalfunctions it has played throughout history – especiallyin the colonial world.In a heartless world, religious misery as denouncedby Marx is a fact. But for me not only isreligion ineradicable, the Church and the Bible arenot the same. And a world without religion or musicwould be simply dreary, un-poetic and unimaginative.In my mind, Christianity is first and foremosta master-image and it is as such that I owe it a profounddebt. It is an inward sound, a certain aestheticsand a politics. For me, the oneiric power of Christianityderives from the enchanting idea that closurecan be overcome; that the question of our genealogycan never be settled once for all and therefore thenotion that our biography can be written is somewhatludicrous.In the New Testament I encountered an amazingand colorful human world of sensations – hunger,thirst, funerals, misery and joy, wine changed intowater, all the spirituous matter from which theseeds arise.I started reading the New Testament when I was ayoung boy. In the New Testament, I encounteredan amazing and colorful human world of sensations– hunger, thirst, funerals, misery and joy, winechanged into water, festivals and loafs of bread, thesick being healed, singing, titillation, all the spirituousmatter from which the seeds arise. But the arrestingscenes that truly grabbed my imaginationwere always those of the crucifixion and resurrectionof Christ. That early on in my life I learnt to takeseriously what we can call the “the gift of life” – inthis case the event of the ‘Son of Man’ absorbing theworld and being absorbed by the world at the momentof his death, at the border of his life – this isa direct result of my encounter with Christianity. Ithink most of my critique and writing of Africa hasbeen up to now an endless commentary on the dramaof crucifixion and the hope for resurrection; onwhat it means to perish - the encounter with an irrecusableboundary that tells us about the essentialconnection between death, life and freedom; abouthow to shape the world within the self in order tore-emerge on the other side of life.So part of what I took from Christianity is that inorder to come to terms with the reality of the Crossin our history and confront head on the other face ofthe shadow, the nearness, the immediacy, the hereand-nowof the shadow in which our being is immersed,we have to try as much as possible to shapethe world within our inner self. Radical politics, inthis sense, is inseparable from spirituality and aesthetics– the need to transform oneself, to push oneselfinto the upper circles of creation, to break freefrom that which is frozen. We have to do this withour eyes always open to what lies ahead, what is yetto come, that which is coming far ahead, if not lifewill remain only a terrifying statue, an empty ornament,the sign of nothing substantial – inexpressiveand unmelodic, pointless calculations and purethingness. Therefore the task of critique is to witness.And to witness is to overcome a static pictureof the world so as to be able to feel the pulse of life,to penetrate to the core of life – that which is alwaysahead of us.To a certain extent, the originary spirit of mymodel of reading is to be found in the story of the‘Son of Man’ who, having assumed a human shape,sheds through death the thingness in which he hadbeen enclosed, allowing therefore a previously unsuspectedreality to rush in, a previously unsuspectedEvent to happen. That is what made me dreamas a young boy. The concern with the last days, withthe End – eschatology – and the final Judgment didnot move me at all. I was not pious. Maybe that iswhy I always try to write in a way that makes feelingssonorous, with hard rhythms and at times somberprofundity many have mistaken for pessimism.This is also what explains that at the core of mywork, there is a certain kind of restlessness, a certainsense of immediacy, urgency and a quest for a certainAfrica and the Night of Language77

quality of interiority without which politics is nothingbut repetition without difference. I now believethat at the source of this restlessness is something Itook from Christianity – the urge to distrust the sterilepower of the merely existent, of that which caneasily be crushed. Let’s call it an ethics of presenceand detachment, an availability to the Essential.This having been said – and to remain within thestrictures of the theological language I have been using– I still have to properly interrogate the possibilityof resurrection as such, of a remainder to come,of another form of life to be. I long hoped that theSouth African experiment would help me move mywork in that direction, along the lines of a meditationon the conditions of re-emergence from theshadows, from ellipsis – a politics of possibility.Oboe: Given these theoretical premises, how do youexplain the fact that your published work has oftenbeen accused of pessimism (or Afro-pessimism),with particular reference to On the Postcolony?Mbembe: Only those who have read my work carelesslyor without a philosophical – or even theological– disposition can characterize it as “pessimistic”.I come from a tradition in which “to think” (penser)is the same as “to weigh” (peser) and “to expose”.To think critically is to work with the faultlines, toget in touch with the chaotic touch of our world, tobring it to language, to write its singular plurality.In any case, the relationship between critique andpessimism is very complex and critical pessimismis not capitulation. It is endless vigilance. In orderto reimagine the political and ethical realms, weneed to think together devastation and transformation,darkening and awakening, the night comingfrom below and the light that undoes the world ofthe shadows – dialectically, in a double movement.I do not pretend to substitute or to speak for anyoneexcept myself. I believe that what matters is tothink ethically, sincerely and responsibly. As far asAfrica is concerned, a measure of our sincerity is forinstance whether we succeed to write about humanexperience in this region of the world without trivializingit or provoking misplaced empathy or contempt.Take for instance Frantz Fanon who is very mucha primary interlocutor in On the Postcolony. Hispedagogy is to first dwell in the dark night of negation,facelessness and objecthood in order preciselyto better break through into the chaos of light. Forme, we recognize the moment of pessimism whenthe layers of the past and the world of the presentfall into the void, that is, a place that is not a place.We recognize the moment of pessimism when weare facing a structural inability to release language,to experience freedom and eroticism. I have tried towrite as a man who knows how to enjoy life and whotakes it for what it is, with fervor, joviality and evenjubilation, but also with grief. I have also tried to notshy away from its shallowness, and at times its lackof a kernel – the elemental materiality of the there is.We have to get out of the petrified systems andlanguages in which certain traditions of socialscience inquiry have imprisoned Africa.Let me finally add that there are themes that cannotbe evaded if we want to confront what it meansto write Africa after colonialism. We might be unchained.But we are still not free. We are still not theself-made self decolonization was supposed to gestureto. We are confronted in the present with situationswhere to be alive simply means a blind will tosurvive; and the cost of blind survival is to kill anybody,to kill one’s own. If we want to reflect criticallyon the borders of life and the drama of being, onwhat it means to be alive today, then we have to getout of the petrified systems and languages in whichcertain traditions of social science have imprisonedAfrican experience.I would be a pessimist, even a nihilist if – followingwith what I just told you about the confrontationwith the Cross of our history – I was a proponentof a kind of sacrificial-death theology or if my voicespoke in the tone of self-righteous hatred – someonewho is bitter, resentful and consumed by the will forrevenge.There is a huge amount of bad faith going onwhen we convince ourselves of our powerlessnessin order to hide the truth that we are in fact lookingfor an excuse to accommodate the mess of ourworld, some of which is of our own making. That’snot the spirit that underlies my work. It is, rather,the firm hope that one day, we will be able to destroythe powers which hold a negative sway on our life.But I don’t believe that these powers will be destroyedin some kind of big bang, once for all. Theywill be destroyed through a work of incessant creation,through a long series of dots it is our task toput together. This will necessarily be the case becausehuman creation is, by definition, perishable.There won’t be a New Heaven and a New Earth onemorning. To believe that this will ever be the case isto buy into mysticism. In the meantime, to write isto perform disruption.Oboe: How would you define your encounters with78The Salon: Volume Two

Eruption at Fimmvörðuháls at duskPhoto: Henrik Thorburn (Wikimedia Creative CommonsAttribution 3.0 Unported license)French and American culture and intellectual traditions?What did they contribute to your work?Mbembe: I received a fairly classical education, inthe humanities. I studied Latin for instance. I readHomer and Herodotus at a fairly young age. I amvery familiar with ancient Greek history, mythsand philosophy. Don Quixote, French classics suchas Molière, Racine, Corneille and later Balzac,Baudelaire and others were part of my secondaryschool curriculum. For the ‘baccalauréat’, I had tostudy Sartre along with Césaire and Cheikh HamidouKane, after having been introduced earlier toSoyinka, Mongo Beti, Ferdinand Oyono or EskiaMphahlele.But some of the master-images that have influencedmy life as a scholar are actual places and citiesthat became the vehicle for intellectual effervescence.I arrived in Paris at a time when the city waspushing its working population from the center tothe ‘banlieues’. The deprived classes – among whomthere was a sizable number from France’s ex-colonies– formed an immense cordon around the welloff. In the early 1980’s, the intellectual scene wasstill dominated by powerful figures such as MichelFoucault, Fernand Braudel, Claude Lévi-Strauss,Jean-Pierre Vernant, Paul Veyne, Cornelius Castoriadis,Raymond Aron, Jacques Derrida, Michel deCerteau. I have been very much influenced by postwarFrench thought and culture – Merleau-Ponty,Bataille, Blanchot, Klossowski, all of whom I read bymyself.But if in Paris I had been introduced to the Frenchtradition of abstract universalism, it is in New Yorkthat I was able, for the first time, to enter into contactwith the global world. For instance, New Yorkallowed me to realize how the French version of universalismexpressed itself in a language that was, inthe end, quite narcissistic, monocolored and provincial.As a city and as a movement of the mind,I was literally seduced by New York. For the firsttime in my life, I could distinctly hear the clamoringof worlds, the rustling echoes of that juxtapositionof races and nations and ethnicities the Senegalesepoet Léopold Sédar Senghor had spoken of. I couldsee the swarms of peoples and colours, hear the cacophonyof voices and sounds.Here I encountered far more than in Paris anAfrican counterpart in the African-American. African-Americanshad been the city until the draftriots of 1863 when working-class Irish rampagedthrough their small neighborhoods, forcing them toflee to Brooklyn. They started coming back aroundthe mid-1860s mostly from the South; then in largenumbers in the 1910s, with an influx from the WestIndies. By that time Harlem was well on its way tobecoming the cultural capital of what Paul Gilroyhas called “the Black Atlantic”. Now, I too wantedto be a full participant in that long epiphany. Duringmy years in New York I would go to Harlem to buyblack radical literature and black music, to listen tostreet preachers or to watch a performance at theApollo Theater. It is there that I first saw a performanceby Fela Anikulapo-Kuti.Oboe: The “Black Atlantic” is at the heart of thecritical investigation and the artistic production ofmany African-American scholars and artists, and ofsome African and Black British intellectuals who dialoguewith America. What is your relationship withthe “black canon” that finds its roots in the thoughtof W.E.B. Dubois, Marcus Garvey, Alain Locke, andcontinues today through the more recent contributionsof Mudimbe, Diawara, Appiah, Gilroy, Masilela…Mbembe: This is a very complex archive and I cannotpretend to have mastered it in any comprehensivemanner. For historical reasons, its canon hasbeen, and is still, dominated by “Western blacks” –the descendants of African slaves in the New World.A new African diaspora – of which Valentin Mudimbe,Kwame A. Appiah, Ato Quayson and manyothers are distinguished members – is now forcefullycontributing to this archive, in line with thetransnational character of this tradition.In this field, Paul Gilroy has been my teacher.Reading him, I have understood the history ofthe Black Atlantic to be one of “being-toward-theworld”– a history that keeps throwing us back tothe question of freedom, to what goes by the nameof freedom.Less well known are thinkers such as FabienAfrica and the Night of Language79

FimmvörðuhálsPhoto: Flikr/Ulrich LatzenhoferÉboussi Boulaga or Jean-Marc Éla. They both belongto a tradition of critical thought that owes adebt to that master-image we have called Christianity– which by the way has been the object of asustained critique in their respective thought. Ihave found their work extremely fruitful, almostas fruitful as a certain lineage of Jewish thought Iam personally attached to – the line that goes fromFrantz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Blochto Jacques Derrida.Oboe: In your thinking about Africa and throughAfrica you use a combination of analytical tools, productivelystraddling the disciplinary boundaries ofhistory, philosophy, politics and critical theory. Literatureand the arts also offer useful inputs. In Onthe Postcolony, for example, they come into focuswhen you deal with contemporary time in the postcolony,and the references are to Sony Labou Tansiand Ahmadou Kourouma, but also Amos Tutuolaand Ben Okri. Of course the choice of authors isrelevant here – death and the shadow line betweendeath and life, the confusion of the two realms, ishighlighted in your discourse and in theirs. Do youthink the arts are able to talk about Africa today inways that other disciplines cannot? What is the placeof African literature and aesthetics in your work?Mbembe: This is a very troubled period of our historyin Africa. The sensory – but also aesthetic –meaning of this moment is best captured by art andliterature, music, dance and religious praxis. Fromthese genres, I have learnt that there is a sensoryexperience of our lives that encompasses innumerableunnamed and un-nameable shapes, hues andtextures that “objective knowledge” has failed tocapture. These genres tell us about how ordinarypeople laugh and weep, work, play, pray, bless andcurse, make a space to stand forth and walk. Theyalso document the everyday consciousness of thefinite, vulnerable and mortal character of our existence,the excess energies generated by our societiesand their attempt at being born again to the world.Art and literature, music, dance and religious praxishave given a space and a voice to the structures ofaffirmation and negation in our experience and providedus with the language and conceptual frameworksto describe this experience as an affirmationof a universal human condition. This is the reasonwhy I have been interested in them. For me, they arenot simply aesthetic and psychic practices. They arealso intellectual and even philosophical acts.Sony Labou Tansi taught me that there is somethingjarred, something flagrantly perverse, somethingpornographic in the way power is exercised inthe postcolony.Literature and music in particular are also practicesof desecration. From Sony Labou Tansi for instance,I have learnt more about power than I could havefrom any political science treatise. More than anybodyelse, he shows that perversion is the force properto power and its body in the postcolony; that thereis something jarred, something flagrantly perverse,something pornographic in the way in which poweris exercised in the postcolony. In fact, in its formand content, power is fundamentally a disjunctivestructure, a form of transgressive disjunction. It isLabou Tansi who taught me about the link betweenpower and grammar – the fact that power is oddlyverbose, a convoluted speech; or that it likes speakingfrom underneath a skirt (le jupon), in a uniquecoming together of theology and pornology, mimeticargumentation and syllogistic pantomime and how,because of its intrinsic ambiguity and equivocity, thebody more than anything else destabilizes all formsof domination. I owe him one of the core theses ofOn the Postcolony – the conviviality of the oppressorsand the oppressed.More fundamentally, what attracts me to theseforms is that each involves a paradoxical and attimes risky play with limits – both the limits set bymoral or political categories and those that shapelanguage and style, thought and meaning. I say“risky” because a major feature and the quiet forceof African aesthetics is the way it apprehends humanexistence, finitude and possibilities. Classical Westand Central African sculpture, for instance, tends tosee every moment or instant of human existence asboth entirely fortuitous and at the same time utterlysingular. In Amos Tutuola for instance, existence isonly ever a repetition of fortuitous instances. It is80The Salon: Volume Two

made up of points of intensity that are never stablebecause they are perpetually caught up in a play ofrepetition and non-identity. In fact, identity itself isonly established at the very moment of its dissolution,through acts of extreme exposure, dispossessionand repossession. There is nothing that couldresemble a linear history. Whatever the case, in thebest traditions of African literature, art and music,existence is always in excess of thought. Existenceis in fact an impossible object of thought. It can onlyenter the realm of thought in the mode of a parody,analogy or endless permeability.Oboe: At the heart of your writing is the need to rethinkAfrica through the variety of experiences thatconstitute the archives of African life and knowledge.What are the most promising ways and routesto this end?Rethinking Africa is at one a political, an ethical,aesthetic and intellectual project. It is also a complex,irritating and exhilarating enterprise. Part ofthe difficulty in rethinking Africa has to do with thecrisis of language. When it comes to matters African,it is almost always as if our language were afflictedby a hole right at its center. Let’s call it “the night oflanguage”, the sleep of language. Our language almostalways seems to hollow out the human experienceit is called upon to represent, that is, to bring tolife. Until we resolve this crisis of language, we willnot be able to bring Africa back to life.When it comes to matters African, it is almostalways as if our language is afflicted by a hole rightat its center. Let’s call it the night of language.In any case, writing the world from Africa, this ishow I understand the project of theory and criticism– to bring back to life that which is asleep, thatwhich has been put to sleep; to bring back to life thatwhich is threatened by the forces of the night.It appears to me that to rethink Africa in theworld, we will have to regenerate language itself,expand the dictionary, confront the question of thearchive, and allow for as many forms of criticism aspossible – prophetic, apocalyptic, pictorial, musical,poetic, oneiric. Multiple languages will have to bebrought to bear on the task of bringing Africa backto life in contemporary theorizing.Oboe: From this viewpoint, living in post-apartheidSouth Africa must have given you the possibility tosee the birth of new expressive modalities, the experimentingwith new languages. What do you thinkof the recent South African experience, and what isyour position in relation to the country’s situationtoday?Mbembe: Intellectually, I have found the South Africanexperiment to be crucial in my understandingof the world we live in. I am very grateful to SouthAfrica for what it has given me. It is here that I started,for the first time, to seriously think about whatthe “African modern” or African forms of worldlinesscould actually look like. It is also here that Istarted, for the first time, to seriously think aboutthe future – or futurity – as a political question. Iquickly realized that the future cannot be interrogatedfrom the point of view of the political unless ourmanner of interrogation simultaneously opens thepossibility of reinvention of our sense of the past; oflanguage itself, and therefore of praxis. Interrogatingthe future makes sense insofar as it helps us toreflect critically on some figure of the present – thepresent as that vulnerable space, that precarious andelusive entry-point through which, hopefully, a radicallydifferent life might make its appearance. Butthere is no future without hope – the hope that wemight bring this radically different temporal life intobeing as a concrete social possibility, as a systemictransformation in the logic of our being-in-commonas human beings.What strikes me now is the liquid character bothof the present and of the future, their dizziness, theirmirage-like qualities, and the weakness in our gripon the future in particular. And I wonder whetherthere is a direct relationship between the liquidityof the present and the overwhelming feeling, rightnow, in South Africa, of the elusiveness of the future.I see many people yearning for – I would not say areturn to the past – but something they could recognizeas stable, as commonsensical. People are yearningfor some sense of tangible certainty and solidity,some originary simplicity, something unmixed,somehow pure. They know from experience that theend of apartheid and the advent of democracy havenot provided this simplicity. If anything, democracyhas made life even more complex than before. It alsostrikes me that many live their life as if the presenthad betrayed them; as if democracy, the law, theConstitution and the future altogether had betrayedthem. And I wonder how we can interpret this shatteringexperience and the turn to an everyday politicsof expediency rather than to a demanding, disciplinedpolitics of hope, of principle and possibility.Africa and the Night of Language81

In Commemorationof Jean-Marc ElaJane I. Guyer(Johns Hopkins University, USA)For Jean-Marc Ela and his generation ofpostcolonial Christian intellectuals in Cameroon,achieving redemption and meaningful spiritualitydepended fundamentally on acknowledging thevalue of the everyday practices of pagan villagelife. This also provided a mechanism of vigilanceagainst destructive external forces.“Sentinel. what of the night?”- Isaiah 21:11I want to devote this appreciation of the life of Jean-Marc Ela to the Christianity of Ela himself and hisgeneration of Cameroonian clergy-scholars; andto end with a request for illumination. Scholars ofChristian history in Africa have written about particularmeldings of Jesus with Africa: Lamin Sanneh,Valentin Mudimbe, and others. Certainly there havebeen famous scholar-clergy in other Central Africancountries. But it perhaps bears naïve rediscovery,in the context of Cameroon. When I was living inYaoundé between 1974 and 1977, figures within theCatholic clergy were amongst the most outspokencritics of the political status quo, the most revolutionaryabout the future, and – to be dwelt on here –the most deeply appreciative of the ‘pagan’ religionsof the past. Many interpretations of Christianity inAfrica have allied it with missionary zeal, colonialrule and the hegemonic westernization of spiritualJean-Marc ElaPhoto: courtesy Boston Collegeand symbolic life. But, as Lamin Sanneh suggests forthe biblical translations themselves, some peoplecreated a profound intimacy between the ancientreligion of the Near East and the ancient religionon the African South. Ela was one of these. As theCameroonian clergy replaced the last French bishops– such as the much-feared Monseigneur Graffin– in the mid-twentieth century, they developed theirown liberation theology and their own deep connectionbetween the messages of the Book and the magicsof the forest.[these scholars] created a profound intimacybetween the ancient religion of the Near East andthe ancient religion on the African SouthI never knew Jean-Marc Ela personally, althoughI read his book L’Afrique des Villages as I workedthrough my own studies of village economy. I did,however, know some of Ela’s friends and colleagueswho were based in Yaoundé: Catholic clergy EngelbertMveng, Theodore Tsala and Isidore Tabi;and I eventually came to know the work of devoutlay scholars who worked in Cameroon around thattime: Philippe Laburthe-Tolra, Frederick Quinn,Bernard Fonlon. They all seemed to create not justa kind of aesthetic syncretism of Pagan Africa andthe Bible (in the liturgical music, for example), but adeeper sense of connection that seems more generalin Equatorial Africa than anywhere else. PerhapsFather Placide Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy (originalpublished in 1949) is its most famous exposition.But the work of Wyatt MacGaffey (Kongo PoliticaCulture, 2000) on much earlier scholar-clergy inthe same region suggests a much longer and deeperhistory. It would take more study to discover itswellsprings and explore its many modes, over time.This short piece cannot do justice. I simply alludeto two of the clearer convergent streams of thoughtand expression in Cameroon, and end with a realizationthat emerged in the process of composing thisintervention.First, Jean-Marc Ela refers to one well-travelledconjuncture of Africa and Christianity in the forcefulwords of his 2006 address to Boston College, aCatholic University (http://frontrow.bc.edu/program/ela).The message about the increasing marginalizationand impoverishment of Africa in hisbook l’Afrique des Villages (1982) had been almostentirely expressed in secular terms. The epigraph tothe book is a quote from a peasant: “Nobody paysattention to what we say. No-one listens to us. Weare there to wait at their door. Those who have pa-82The Salon: Volume Two

Cover of Jean-Marc Ela’s book Guide Pédagogique de formationa la recherche pour le développement en Afriquepers pass in front … taken care of …. For us nothing.”In his lecture, twenty-four years later, speaking to aCatholic audience, Ela identifies that empty-handedand voiceless waiter-in-line with the impoverishedand endangered of ancient Israel, with the poor ofthe Gospel, and with Golgotha itself. In our owntimes, he argued, Africa, “offers the opportunity forus to witness the depth of full communion with thepromise of the Kingdom, in its historical journey”(emphasis added). Today is just as compelling as thefirst century C.E. The poor of Africa are as in needof liberation of body and spirit as the downtroddenof ancient Palestine under the Roman Empire. Thenafter exploring that parallel, along with the imperativesand, indeed, opportunities for service and redemptionthat flow from it, Ela ends the lecture almostabruptly, with a reference to the Hebrew Bible(or the Old Testament). He terminates with a questionfrom the book of the Prophet Isaiah: “Sentinel,what of the night?” (‘Sentinel’ is the French translation;the word is translated as ‘Watchman’ in theKing James Version in English). By the context, weunderstand that Ela is alluding to the vigilance thatGod commands to be set up before the advancing attacksfrom Babylon and Assyria: a “whirlwind froma terrible land” (as it says in the book of Isaiah).So here in his lecture at a Catholic university,Jean-Marc Ela calls the Christian to do two things:to serve the poor, especially in Africa; and to cultivatevigilance against threatening whirlwinds advancingfrom terrible places. The first is familiar.It The latter, I think, is much less so, and plumbstowards the depths of mutuality between Pagan andChristian sensibility.Ela calls the Christian to … serve the poor … and tocultivate vigilance against threatening whirlwindsadvancing from terrible places.So, vigilance offers a second and less familiar senseof convergence, and one that is less explained byEla himself in his lecture. It is left to us to do thelooking. As I searched for a more tangible sense ofhim I found this quotation from his 1998 volumeInnovations Sociales et Renaissance de l’AfriqueNoire: “Endogenous knowledges, which are systemsof meaning, must be seen at the same time as artsof living according to an internal logic which strictlyunifies, in a sort of trinity, knowing, doing and being.”How can a priest value an internal logic to Paganarts of living and represent it as a trinity? Thisgeneration of clergy-scholars clearly loved the spiritualroots of African daily life, which in theory mighthave taken them far, and in other directions altogether,from monotheism, a personal savior and the“historical journey” of the gospel. But their workssuggest that it was not a stretch or a struggle to overlaythe two trinities. It was Engelbert Mveng whowas writing a history of Cameroun from a Camerounianangle. It was Theodore Tsala who collected upMinkana beti: Beti proverbs. It was Isidore Tabi whowrote an appreciative memoir on indigenous marriage,created a Beti form of exorcism for his parishioners,and built an African grotto for service andpilgrimage. And it was Jean-Marc Ela, philosopher,sociologist, theologian (as we read from the cover ofL’Afrique des villages) who moved from a scholarlycenter to a village in the pagan north of Cameroonin 1971 to live his Christian life. That move – back,out, up and into spiritualities of Africa – was verymarked, and – in a way, for scholars – perhaps puzzling.How does it work?How can a priest value an internal logic to Paganarts of living and represent it as a trinity?We can be pedestrian textual analysts for a whilehere and ask, in terms of scholarly artisanship:Where do they begin their arguments? One strikingtheme in all these works that I have in my collection,is that they start from material life. In L’Afrique desVillages, Ela immediately puts aside any yearningfor an authentic African Golden Age, then starts hisown exposition of le monde rural with the colonialcrops: on the second page of Chapter One, we readof groundnuts, cacao, coffee, bananas, oil palm. Thewhole analysis of colonial impoverishment startsfrom there.In Minkana beti, Tsala opens his collection ofproverbs with the chapter on Techniques and theTowards a Liberating Critique of Power83

Millet beer in Rhumsiki, Far North Province, CameroonPhoto: Amcaja (GNU Free Documentation License)Wikimedia CommonsNatural World, starting with Costume et Parure,what Mauss would have called Techniques of theBody. He moves on to habitat, food and meals,fields, animal husbandry, hunting and fishing. Part2 is devoted to society: chiefs and notables, womenand so on. Spiritual life as a separate topic is not representedin this collection. It is as if he approachesthe spiritual through the material. “Food and Meals”is by the far the longest chapter. Nearly every proverbuses meals to refer to relationships and humancharacter: Some of the proverbs require a wholeparagraph to get from a succinct reference about atangible food, or a moment in a meal, to an explanationof its meaning and use. A four-word proverbinvokes two styles of eating from a communal potof fresh maize soup: plunging one’s spoon into themiddle of the hot soup, versus scraping the coolingand drying soup at the edges. This refers, Tsala tellsus, to two ways of answering a question: straightforwardlyor by indirect steps. Four words invoketwo whole styles of addressing things, perhaps twotemperaments or sometimes two strategies: that is,a multiplicity of possibilities.One could go on with these astonishing materializationsof philosophical and ethical subtleties. Idid once meet Tsala and talked to him, one-on-one.But at that time I knew neither how to “plunge intothe soup” nor linger at the edges in posing questionsabout how the practices and turns of phrase of apagan life could become such an urgent and compellingtopic for his Christian life and work. This isnot a clergyman’s exploration of indigenous religion“so that we can know better how to change it”. Thisproceeds from a question: how does the African villageoisimbue the moments, phases, and actions oflife with small-poetic and expansive-cosmologicalmeanings? As Ela wrote for Savoirs Endogenes,Christian and Pagan arts of life seem, for these clergy-scholars,at some level all-of-a-piece, fully compatible,all falling under a sign of manifestation andblessing.Moving from crops to food, and now to the wondersof the African natural world: I want to mentionhere Isidore Tabi’s grotto. Tabi was a contemporaryof Ela who went south into the forest instead of northto the mountains. When Houphouet Boigny built thecathedral at Yamassoukrou on the model of St. Peter’sin Rome, he defended its extravagant Europeanmimetics against African aesthetic criticism with aquestion: Why can’t Africa have anything beautiful?Tabi, by contrast, found a natural wonder in his ownparish south of Mbalmayo. It was a gigantic rock orboulder, just sitting on the forest floor, resemblingthe planet in Le Petit Prince. A giant forest tree wasgrowing from the top, lianas hung down, and thesmooth exposed surfaces were washed and stainedby the rain. Tabi cleared an amphitheater aroundit, built an altar, set up Stations of the Cross in theforest edges, and proceeded to hold classic Catholicservices, in his vestments, in its shade. He thoughtit worthy to become a pilgrimage site, so miraculousdid it seem.This materiality of spirit – from crops to food to naturalwonders – seems striking. “Watchman, what ofthe night?” is a question that contains an injunctionto look at the material world, to sense its presenceeven in the dark, to pay attention to its signs andto place oneself in time and space according to itsmessages. The question goes directly to the soup inthe pot: not to its congealed edges, to be tasted cautiouslyand contemplated timidly.When I started writing this piece, I had just listenedfor the first time to Jean-Marc Ela’s voice (online) as he pronounced Isaiah’s words “Sentinel,what of the night?”, in English, at the end of his sermon,almost out of the blue and with no followinginterpretation. Clearly he considered its relevanceto the condition of Africa to be self-evident. Then Iremembered the full page obituary I had kept fromthe January 26 th 2009 edition of Le Messager – theCameroonian Catholic newspaper – that describedhis remains returning home to Ebolowa from Vancouver.It was by Achille Mbembe, in tones heavywith grief, and entitled “Le veilleur s’en est alle”:(The watchman has left us). The text continues: “Hewho, during half a century, made himself our tirelesswatchman (veilleur) and who, without respite,exhorted us to rise up and walk, he who had givenhis life to deciphering the night and discerning thesigns of an awakening dawn, is no more.” I had comeacross the article while waiting in a ministry officein Yaoundé and managed to confiscate it. I looked,84The Salon: Volume Two

now, at the astonishing parallel and wondered moredeeply about its meaning. I later asked Mbembe toexplain the French verbs, with whose resonances Iwas not familiar: guetter la nuit et scruter l’aube. MyConcise Oxford French Dictionary defines guetter as“to watch for; to be on the lookout for; to lie in waitfor; to keep an eye on”, implying an acute sense ofpotential dangers. Scruter also implies attentiveness:“to search, to scrutinize, to pry into, to investigate”.In his answer, Mbembe extended the literalsecular meanings of the watchman’s job of deployingall his senses to note the slightest signs of life,to feel how time was passing, to make note of anysurprises. And then he added spontaneously: the‘night’ refers also to the occult and its forces, forceswhose reality certainly Tabi also would have sensed,for his exorcism ritual. The sentinel; the watchman;le veilleur: they all evoke a particular sensory as wellas political attentiveness to a world of many activeforces: some deepening the night, others bringingwhirlwinds from terrible lands, and others heraldingthe dawn.in what kind of self-implication in the worlddo apparently non-consonant ‘beliefs’ becomemutually reinforcing and compelling forces for life?It is only with Jean-Marc Ela’s death that I have feltprovoked to repose a question that puzzled me overthirty years ago: in what kind of self-implication inthe world do apparently non-consonant ‘beliefs’ becomemutually reinforcing and compelling forcesfor life? Vigilance of the senses goes deepest in thenature of the watchman, who cultivates the modesof “knowing, doing and being” through which spiritualworlds attain fullness and consonance with eachother. Reading Ela’s work again, we can try to imaginehim at work in his parish. I am very fortunate tohave spent time with Isidore Tabi in his village andto have discussed Beti culture with Theodore Tsala.Through them, I can try to bring to an imperative reacquaintancewith Ela’s wider work a sense of thatgeneration’s grounding of religious ideas and sensibilitiesin an enduring acuteness to the qualitiesof the local, the tangible, the evocative phenomenalworld.This piece was first presented as part of aroundtable in commemoration of Jean-Marc Ela ata meeting of the African Studies Association, Nov22nd, 2009.Towards a Liberating Critique of Power85

two discourcesand an eventAinehi Edoro(Duke University, USA)Cut loose from the colonial ‘discourse ofcontingency’, challenges Ainehi Edoro; and alsofrom the communitarian cul-de-sac producedby the ‘discourse of continuity’ propagated bymany post- and anti-colonial thinkers. The way toconceptualise a radically new and cosmopolitanAfrican future is to mobilize Badiou’s notion of theEvent.In the essay, “The Novelist as Teacher”, published inhis collection Hopes and Impediments (1988), ChinuaAchebe narrates the story of an African schoolboy who, when asked to write a poem, wrote aboutwinter even though he meant to write about the Harmattan,a West African trade wind responsible for adry and dusty season that begins almost simultaneouslywith winter in the northern temperate regions.When asked why, the boy said that writing aboutHarmattan would make his friends call him a bushman.This is Achebe’s conclusion regarding the incident:“Now, you wouldn’t have thought, would you,that there was something shameful in your weather?But apparently we do. How can this great blasphemybe purged? I think it is part of my business as a writerto teach that boy that there is nothing disgracefulabout the African weather, that the palm-tree is a fitsubject for poetry.”What is this “great blasphemy” that needs tobe purged? Speaking shamefully of one’s weatherseems hardly to be the crucial object of concern. Orone could ask: what is so sacred about the Africanweather that bringing the European weather to itsvicinity constitutes irreverence? But, clearly, thecontention here is not about the weather, but aboutan act of irreverence that poses a threat so great thatAchebe makes its purgation his artistic objective. Ido not want to make too much of lexicology, yet abrief look at one of the grounds on which an act iscalled a blasphemy can help set the stage for analyzingthe key assumption at play in Achebe’s remark tothe school boy. An act is termed blasphemous when,for example, it intrudes impiously on the sacred or onan entity of sovereign unity that, in itself, is groundenough for values and judgments. From this definition,we can surmise that one of Achebe’s assumptionsis that there used to be a time when the Africanworld, validated by itself, was ground enough forjudging everything from beauty to knowledge. However,at some point, things changed. As the schoolboy found out, the African world had lost its placeas a foundational unity on which identity could beformed. Something else – call it modernity, call itcolonial encounter, call it the European world – thatcame from the outside had to be added onto the Africanworld to validate it. Is the “great blasphemy”then modernity? It is probably not modernity assuch, for if it were, Achebe would not think to eraseit. Far too much is at stake in modernity for its erasureto be desirable. Instead, the blasphemy is thatof which modernity is the sign: the loss of Africa as afounding unity or as an irreducible first term.During the decades of fervent anti-colonial efforts,this purging of blasphemies, falsifications,misrecognitions, and alienation was a major part ofa much larger venture to establish the worldliness ofAfrica. This broader project of asserting the continent’sworldliness was driven by the impulse to orientAfrica towards what, in his 2000 book BetweenCamps, Paul Gilroy calls, “the idea of a cosmopolitanfuture.” It is a project that is very crucial andthat is still ongoing. As Wole Soyinka notes in thepreface of Myth Literature and the African World,it is a given that Africa is a member (based on itsself-standing uniqueness) of a universal world ofman, myth and history. That Africa “possesses … incommon with other cultures, the virtue of complementarity”,is a truth that ought not to be open fordebate. Soyinka, Achebe, and many other anti-colonialand post-nationalist thinkers sought to imaginean African future in which Africa addresses, and isaddressed by, others. However, because of the waythese intellectuals visualized this future, it remainedlargely imaginary and did not serve as an effectiveforce for radical change. How is this the case? Whatwere the limits of some of the tasks around whichan African cosmopolitan future was imagined? Howmight it be that classic African discourse on modernitygestures more towards a communitarian imaginationof Africa’s future than a cosmopolitan one? Ifwe choose to understand the future in the Blochiansense as that which holds the unexpectedly and radicallynew, how is it that the conventional narrative ofAfrican modernity falls short in envisioning a revolutionaryfuture for Africa?how is it that the conventional narrative of Africanmodernity falls short in envisioning a revolutionaryfuture for Africa?A good way to begin is to return to Achebe’s recommendationof purging. In rendering modernity in86The Salon: Volume Two

terms of blasphemy, Achebe had already begun theprocess of purgation. But how so and in what sensedoes modernity blaspheme? Understood as thetrump card of colonialism, as the living testament toEuropean cultural creativity, as proof of the claimedcontingency of the African world, modernity is perceivedas blaspheming against an African world assumedto have once possessed an autonomous andfounding unity. This understanding of modernity isclearly responding to the discourse colonialism. Oneof the ideologies of empire is the European prerogativeover time such that the appearance and realityof other worlds as historical entities are perceived ascontingent on an encounter with Europe. Perceivedas the culture whose origin precedes, supersedesand is destined to assimilate all others, Europe residesat the center of a natural totality, governed bya fixed deterministic order of time. From that standpoint,the cosmopolitan entity called Africa can beassimilated into the stream of European history asa radically new invention of European cultural creativity,while modernity is held up as the incontestableproof of this view. This narrative of Africa’s modernityconstitutes a regime of discourse that I termthe discourse of contingency.Narratives of modernity are generally preoccupiedwith the past because at base they entailquestions about origins. So in order to counter thediscourse of contingency, African critical discoursesought to provide a different account of time througha discourse of continuity. This is where the preoccupationwith history that characterises classic anticolonialthought comes from. The need to reset thetime of Africa’s beginning cuts across the ideologicaldivisions internal to anti-colonial and post-nationalistthought. The Romanticism of negritude, theliberal humanism of Achebean realism, Soyinka’smythopoetics, and Cabral’s Marxism can be seen asdifferent ways of organizing political tasks aroundthe counteraction of an African world contingent onthe colonial encounter. Most importantly, where thecolonial discourse of contingency fused the emergenceof the African world with the gift of modernity,the African discourse of continuity wanted topry the two apart. The aim was to prove that, eventhough modernity reconfigured the geographical,cultural, political and economic significance of theentity called Africa, the fact that an African worldpreceded the advent of colonialism and modernity isincontrovertible. This temporal readjustment formsthe basis on which the anachronism inherent in theterm “pre-colonial Africa” is politically significant.in order to counter the discourse of contingency,African critical discourse sought to provide adifferent account of time through a discourse ofcontinuity.Modernity rather than the African world becomesthe figure of the new for it not only comes after butalso comes from outside. This equation will becomesignificant in addressing the limitations that characterizedthe ways in which Africa’s future was visualizedin anti-colonial discourse. But first lets us brieflyattend to the ways in which the blameworthiness ofmodernity was asserted, and why this assertion wasparadoxically crucial to the business of absolvingAfrican modernity of its transgressive attachment tocolonialism. As advertised on its back cover, one ofthe major accomplishments of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’srecent book, Something Torn and New: An AfricanRenaissance (2009), is that it, “traces the arc of Africa’sfragmentation and restoration amidst the globalhistory of colonialism and modernity”. The image ofmodernity as fragmentation is an old and familiarfigure for portraying the discontents of modernity inAfrican literary criticism. In an earlier piece, an essaytitled “The African Writer and His Past,” Ngũgĩuses an image of modernity as wreckage, which ismore bodily, and therefore, more striking. In this essay,modern Africa, in its violated form, is a body stolen,battered, and then bartered for “thirty pieces ofsilver”. Modernity as blasphemy, as fragmentation,as disfigurement, as post-apocalyptic wreckage: allthese metaphors of discontent attempt not merelyto point out the failures of modernity as imaginedby western discourse, but to assert the necessity oflooking elsewhere for grounds on which Africa canaddress its future. If the West did not invent Africa,and if its modernity has resulted in cultural and politicaldisaster, how can its vision inspire a design forAfrica’s future? More importantly, continuity of Africa’sown temporal order is established by inscribingmodernity into a continuous movement of timeorganic to Africa. Despite their political uses, however,these representations of modernity portray Africa’spresent merely as a dismembered transfigurationor a spoiled copy of a lost unity.these representations of modernity portray Africa’spresent merely as a dismembered transfiguration ora spoiled copy of a lost unity.Disavowing modernity as the other against whichthe truth of Africa’s self is identified is only partiallyhelpful, since modernity continues to assert itselfas an indispensable ground for Africa’s worldliness.As Anthony Appiah points out his book In My fa-SOUTH-SOUTH GOTHIC87

ther’s House (1992), how do you do away with thesuspicion that African identity is partly the productof a gaze that comes from the outside? One way tosolve this puzzle could be to set about disclosing allthat is enduringly endogenous about modernity andadapting all that is left, which means all that is new,into this framework of the familiar. Wole Soyinka, inMyth, Literature and the African World, presentsa compelling argument about what makes Africantheatre African. He claims that the bases on whichone can legitimately speak of an African theatre, andby extension an African world, can be located withinan African metaphysical and cosmological matrix.This argument is part of Soyinka’s objective, as expressedin the preface of the book, to show that someof the so-called grand values of modernity, “are alreadycontained in or can be elicited from the worldviewand social structures of [the African] people.”Soyinka is, here, appealing to what Achille Mbembecalls the “insider’s discourse”, that which is assumedshould, “always be trusted to produce a better truth”of what Africa is to itself and to the Other.Or consider the common assumption that themodern African writer is a transfiguration of thevillage, tales-by-moonlight story teller. Achebe contributedimmensely to this invention of the storytelleras forerunner of the modern African writer.Drawing from Lionel Trilling’s construction of themodern self that emerged in Europe during the 18 thcentury, Achebe levels a critique against the individualheroic performance of artistic identity thathe ascribes to the west, calling instead for sociallyorientedartistic practices. Achebe, however, is fullyaware that the individualizing force of modernity heis critiquing also inscribes the very being of his ownartistic practice in writing. In fact, the individualizingforces of modernity that fashions the villagestoryteller – the figure of Achebe’s socially-embeddedartist – into the modern African writer are thesame productive forces that invest the writer withthe social power that grants him involvement in theproject of reconstructing modernity as authenticallyAfrican. But by invoking the image of the storytelleras the figure of a different and more ethical artisticperformance of power, Achebe shifts the ground onwhich writing is a productive cultural instrument.Achebe wants to argue, it seems, that the efficacyof writing as a technology for transacting culturalmeaning is not specified by its modernity, but by theuses and performance of the social power it represents.Consequently, by replacing the image of thewriter as a solitary hero with the socially-orientedstoryteller, Achebe re-inscribes writing – the posterchild of all that is new about modernity – into thediscourse of continuity.Viewed as a modern but miscarried re-inventionof something superior, and as a bad copy of somethingthat precedes it, African modernity is perceivedas always signalling the presence of that which it cannever restore to its founding unity. Reclaiming Africanmodernity therefore revolved around the identificationand interpretation of the signs and traces leftby the world that once was, and still is, repressed undercultural fragmentation induced by colonialism.In the terms of Alain Badiou, as mentioned in SaintPaul: The Foundation of Universalism (2003), thediscourse of continuity centers on the “requisition ofsigns” and on “testifying to transcendence by exposingthe obscure to its deciphering”. As a hermeneuticsof memory, the discourse of continuity insiststhat the more we can show how much of the oldworld still inhabits the new, the more we can masterall that appears slippery, alien, transgressive, andlethal about the new. But as Paul Gilroy argues inBetween Camps (2000), even though a “hermeneuticsof memory” functions as an interpretive tool ofcultural and political meaning in projects of racialretrieval, it is useful mostly for communitarian endsand is not viable for modes of addressing the futurethat aspires towards the cosmopolitan.the discourse of continuity ... is useful mostly forcommunitarian ends and is not viable for modesof addressing the future that aspires towards thecosmopolitan.Attempting to snatch modernity from the delegitimizinghands of colonialism is an immense projectof subject construction. The superstructure of anyrevolutionary initiative is the construction of a newsubject. And the philosophy of history that groundsa revolutionary discourse often provides clues tothe nature of the desired subject. For example, thediscourse of continuity relies on subjects who cantraverse worlds separated by history, which is itselfassumed to be instantaneously intelligible. Since thecolonial encounter, despite its cataclysmic effects,left behind signs of the old dispensation and survivorsable to interpret these signs, shuttling betweenboth worlds is assumed to be possible through themediation of interpretive processes.This assumption is well illustrated in Achebe’snovel No Longer at Ease where he replicates in amodern setting the dreams and anxieties that propelledthe drama of his earlier work Things FallApart. Olakunle George, in his recent book RelocatingAgency: Modernity and African Letters (2009),makes an interesting point about a particular charac-88The Salon: Volume Two

être ou ne pas être...Photo: Flickr / Alain Bachellierter that links both novels. Recall Nwoye, Okonkwo’sson, who rebels against his father’s wrong-headedparochialism so that he can embrace the worldlinessof a Christian and British milieu. Sixty years afterAchebe’s fin de siècle drama of Africa’s apocalypticencounter with the West, Nwoye reappears as a modernversion of Okonkwo: parochial and intransigentin his refusal to accept his own son’s cosmopolitanimpulse to marry a woman from a tabooed caste. Infact, there is a moment in the text when Nwoye recallslife before modernity in order to leverage hisargument for preserving tradition. George arguesthat Nwoye’s aspiration to secularize the tribal godsof his father, Okonkwo, through Christianity is notentirely interchangeable with Obi’s cosmopolitanimpulse to de-criminalize the taboo on his intendedmarriage. Whether we agree with George or not, it isclear enough that the underlying assumption madein likening all three characters in both novels is thatboth worlds are actuated by parallel anxieties anddreams. The consequence of this assumption is that,despite the cataclysmic intervention of colonialism,Okonkwo, transfigured as Nwoye, can somehow stillfeel at home in modernity, traced through with theparallel anxiety of losing a hold on tribal culture,an anxiety tied to the parallel and errant dream ofworldliness. Nwoye is the figure of continuity becausehe is the survivor who can not only remember,but can also use this memory to interpret, modernity.He is also the subject of continuity who, throughmemory, can reach into the depths of history whileanticipating events far into the future.in accounting for the present through the past, thediscourse of continuity is actually an argument forAfrica’s capacity to address its own future.Nwoye, however, is serving as the link to somethingelse. As the figure of continuity, Nwoye connects theworlds of Okonkwo and Obi, and as such it becomespossible to imagine that Okonkwo, in a sense, anticipatedObi – the figure of Achebe’s own historical moment.The question I am posing here is: yes, Achebeimagined Okonkwo, but would Okonkwo have beenable to imagine Achebe? The answer would be yesif there is any validity in the notion that Okonkwo’spre-colonial world and the Obi-Achebe modernworld are mutually intelligible, or that Okonkwo canimagine Achebe’s world the same way Achebe canimagine his. What though if we affirm otherwise?What is the consequence of imagining Okonkwo andAchebe as inexorably separated by an unbridgeablechasm of non-recognition?Underneath all this preoccupation with the pastis an attempt at visualizing Africa’s future. In otherwords, in accounting for the present through thepast, the discourse of continuity is actually an argumentfor Africa’s capacity to address its own future.As loss or as a lack, African modernity is constantlybeing projected towards a future of self-identification.One problem with this mode of imaging thefuture, however, is that even though it gestures towardswhat is yet to come, it is, in reality, merelyoscillating between a present of lack that needs tobe overcome because of a particular moment ofloss in the past and a future that fulfils the desirefor completeness. In making this point, I am relyingon a rather fascinating distinction that FrederickJameson makes between Jean Paul Sartre’s andErnst Bloch’s conceptions of the present. In Beingand Nothingness, Sartre sees the present as a permanentspace of anxiety, tension, contingency, andemptiness. Bloch’s present is similarly conceivedas a space of insufficiency, incompleteness, hollowness,and blankness. What is different is the specificway in which the present actuates the future. ForSartre, the experience of loss that plagues the presentand the dream of self-identity in the future areboth valid only for the present so that, as Jamesonnotes, the future is thought of, not in terms of theradically new, but in terms of overcoming an intolerablepresent. Whereas, in Bloch’s philosophy of thefuture, the insufficiency of the present does not requirethe future to be an overcoming of the present;instead, the insufficiency of the present underminesits capacity to specify or serve as ground for the future.This way, the absolute newness of the future ispreserved.This conception of the future is instructive firstbecause it shows how, although well-intentioned,the impulse to purge modernity of its blameworthinessby assimilating the new into a discourse ofSOUTH-SOUTH GOTHIC89

continuity devolves into a dream of self-recognition.Secondly, unable to imagine a future for Africa thatis not weighed down by a present traced through bythe past, the discourse of continuity cannot grantAfrican modernity the Promethean image of thenew as that which is radically revolutionary. In asense, African modernity could never be innocent.It could never be encountered with complete affirmation.It is always having to justify itself againstan accusing unity, the loss of which it is a sign of.Whatever is legitimately new is assimilated into thepre-established framework of continuity, whereasthe radically new is cast out because it is redolentof colonialism and its errant modernity. The future,therefore, can only be apprehended from the standpoint of vindication, redress, and self-recognition.This understanding of the future is limited becauseit is grounded on what Gilroy calls a “corrective orcompensatory” understanding of modernity.During a recent celebration at Duke University ofthe twentieth year since the publication of V.Y. Mudimbe’sInvention of Africa, Achille Mbembe posedthe following set of questions in a lecture: “Whatconstitutes the truth of Africa’s self; the truth Africaoffers about herself; the truth by which Africa mightbe known and become recognizably human?... Is itpossible to imagine ‘recognition’ not as the processby which Africa is able to return to what it was (areturn to self), but as constitutive loss – a loss thatforecloses upon the past in an irreversible way; aloss that makes any possibility of return to the pastutterly impossible because from now on, the onlyway to account for ourselves is precisely through amediation that takes place outside us, which doesnot mean that they are not of our own making?” Ingathering together the different strands of my argument,I want to attempt a response to Mbembe’sprovocation regarding ‘recognition’:How can the truth of Africa’s self be articulatedwithout the nostalgia or accusation of a lost unity?How can we formulate a different calculus of politicaltasks around recognition as a metaphor for imaginingthe future? And this is important: how can weessentially ‘forget’ the past without undermining thepolitical uses of cultural memory, our pre-colonialpast, and the violence of colonialism? Fundamentally,I am asking: how can we redefine the politicallanguage we use in articulating African modernityand its future?how can we redefine the political language we usein articulating African modernity and its future?Alain Badiou’s concept of the event provides thegrounds on which I argue that the question is notreally about Africa’s past and the memory we haveof it as such, but to what extent the past is allowed todecide what Africa means to itself and to the world.Seeing the emergence of an African world as anevent could be a step towards imagining Africa as aradically new beginning. What is most staggeringlyinnovative about Badiou’s philosophy of the event,from my standpoint, is that it opens the possibility ofapprehending newness by being indifferent to whatcame before. As an occurrence, the event is fleeting,contingent, and non-axiomatic. Because it cannotbe guaranteed by any system of knowledge, viewedfrom within any totalizing standpoint, the event appearsillegal and meaningless. An example of thiswould be the Greeks dismissing of Christ’s resurrectionas a fable, or the Judaic authorities seeing theChrist-event as blasphemous. In its flickering andnon-verifiable appearance, the event’s only meansof survival is in being named and circulated, first bysubtracting it from any rigid discursive enclosures,and then declaring one’s fidelity to it. Indifferencedoes not mean that one ceases to engage with thepre-evental world but that, because the meaning accruedfrom the event is not specified by what camebefore it, it is possible to perform a radical temporalshift: that is, to imagine the event as inaugurating anew beginning.the meaning accrued from the event is not specifiedby what came before it, it is possible to perform aradical temporal shiftIn his book Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism,Badiou observes that Paul did not witnessthe life, death, and resurrection of Jesus firsthand,and that he refuses to submit Christ’s resurrectioneither to the scrutiny of Greek philosophy (which hedismisses as the foolish things of the world), or to thevalidation of the Mosaic Law. How, then, could Paulpossibly have created the Christian subject and renderedChristianity universal having thus rejected thetwo major discursive fields out of which the Christeventemerged? To rephrase the question withinmy own context of concern: how can we apprehendthe worldliness of Africa, render the African subjectuniversal, and orient it towards a cosmopolitan futurewithout having recourse to a hermeneutics ofmemory? How might the spectre of an invented modernity,a lost unity, and a falsified image cease tobe a source of anxiety and a compulsion towards awill-to-truth?A radical assumption Badiou is making is that themeaning that accrues from an event is not dependent90The Salon: Volume Two

on the cause of the event, neither is it affiliated to thesite on which the event occurs. In other words, theevent remains undecidable in relation to its contextof occurrence. One of Badiou’s favorite examples ofan event is the French Revolution. As Gabriel Rieraexplains in his volume Alain Badiou: Philosophyand its Conditions (2003), “Badiou wants to thinkabout what makes the French Revolution ‘French’even though France neither gave birth to it nornamed the event-character a revolution.” Likewise,to insist on a discourse of continuity is to refuse tosee how the appearance of the African world and theconstruction of Africa as a universal idea could nothave been decided or anticipated by either the precolonial“African” world or the colonial establishment.Rather, it is in putting the name of the eventin circulation by declaring ones fidelity to it that theevent is not only rendered to universal truth but alsomade effective in creating subjects. This is preciselywhy constructing African modernity as an eventcould be productive for imagining an African cosmopolitanfuture. As an event, the emergence of the Africanworld is pulled out of the rigidity of a totalizingpast, an act that loosens the communitarian hold onhow African imagines itself and is apprehended byothers. Also, as subject of the event, one does nothave to bear witness to the founding unity of a preeventualAfrican world, or possess empirical proofof a world that came before. The reason for this issimple. There is no subject of the event before theevent. It is by naming and affirming fidelity to theevent that the subject is created, not by establishingconnection to the pre-eventual world that precedesthe event.As an event, the emergence of the African worldis pulled out of the rigidity of a totalizing past, anact that loosens the communitarian hold on howAfrican imagines itself and is apprehended byothers.From this standpoint, we can see why Okonkwo –burdened with anxieties and dreams of modernity– is an anachronistic figure. It is probably not veryhelpful to go as far as saying that Okonkwo is notan African, or that his world is not Africa; yet it isimportant to acknowledge that the world Okonkwoinhabited could not have anticipated, or have decided,the terms on which a particular world cameto be named Africa. Neither is the colonial discourseof contingency tenable on these grounds. Despite itsfunction as some kind of cause, the colonial encounterdid not decide or specify the manner in whichAfrica constitutes its identity. It is on these groundsthat I am sympathetic to Soyinka’s notion that thecolonial factor is incidental to the creation of the Africanworld.SOUTH-SOUTH GOTHIC91

On Some Assumptionsabout the Banalityof CrimeJuan Orrantia(University of the Witwatersrand,South Africa)Gazing into the en-walled, electric-fenced gardenof his new house in suburban Johannesburg, JuanOrrantia longs for the vibrant, crammed, bustlingstreets of his home city, Bogotá. There crime andthe fear it induces has been met with an aggressivereclamation of public space. What would Mockusdo in Johannesburg?In Notes from a Fractured Country, Johannesburgbasedwriter Jonny Steinberg writes how, when hevisited Bogotá in 2006, he was struck by the sight ofstreets and sidewalks full of people, bustling cafésand parks full of activity in one of the most crimeriddencities of the world. Compared to the wideavenues with small sidewalks and usually empty ofpeople that one finds in the middle class suburbsof Joburg, the vibrancy he found outside his hotelroom provided a sense of liveliness that one doesenvy. Fifteen years ago, Bogotá was ranked as oneof the most dangerous cities of the world. So neighborhoodscrammed with people in parks, streets,shops, cafes and clubs marked a sense of transformationthat made the visitor feel at ease. But he alsonoted that surrounding these lively people were highnumbers of armed men and women, military, policeor private security blending into the surroundings.I wonder then, if his feelings in my city were like amirror image of my own feelings in his.When I first arrived in South Africa people oftenasked how I found Joburg. And then, the crimequestion usually came about. I found that locals expresseda certain sense of relief when I said I wasfrom Bogotá. It was as if I had, and shared, a set ofexperiences that would make me better off here; asif I had some kind of survival kit for crime that gavepeople a sense of comfort in the fact that I was somehowprepared to live in such a place. It seemed asif being from Bogotá had provided me with an apparentknowledge that allowed me to walk to certainplaces; to move around with a sense of precautionthat would separate me from the more naïve foreignerscoming from ordered societies in the north.I knew how to walk and look around and be on mytoes all the time, and actually get away with it. Still,it wasn’t long until my apparent crime kit was debunkedby a banal sense of encroachment. I beganto feel frustrated by things like reduced mobility,self-imposed restrictions, and even the rejection ofa style of urban architecture and its charms that hadinitially caught my attention.* * *I was raised in a house in the outskirts of Bogotá,where we lived for thirteen years before making themove to the city. It was a little piece of land, whichgave one a sense of living in a more rural environment,away from the city but still close to it. Call it akind of suburbia in the making, where middle classchildren like me would walk along the dirt road everyafternoon to buy fresh milk from the neighbor,a peasant woman whose name I have now forgotten,dressed as she was in the woolen poncho wecall ruana. But soon enough the place became morepopulated – for lack of a better term to describe arural process of gentrification – and it wasn’t longbefore the place was reached by the criminal activitiesof the city.In the early afternoon of a school day I rememberseeing a car coming into the driveway. As I camedown the stairs to see who it was, I ran into a manin a cheap suit with a machine gun in his hand. Forwhat it’s worth, my first impression was that he remindedme of a bodyguard, like the many I was soused to seeing all over the place, hanging out in theentrance of fancy apartment buildings or drivingtheir Toyota’s like maniacs. As I stared at the gun inhis hand, the man made me walk to the living room.He was quickly joined by more men, who made mesit in a chair where they tied me up. They statedthey were undercover agents. They said my dad wasa drug dealer and were there to register the house.That is when Felix, the man who lived with us andhelped us with the garden, turned to me and said,“Juan, don’t listen to them, they’re robbers”. Themen made Felix shut up, and to make sure, threwa bed cover over him. I was tied up with my father’sneck-ties to the collar of my dog while we heardthem rambling around, packing things up and thenrushing out. A few hours later the police came andconfirmed this was the work of a band of thieves thathad been on the loose for a few months now. Theywere known for the use of false identity cards thatidentified them as members of the State’s securityagencies, the same rap on drug dealers being usedagain and again to break into houses in the lightof day. It was this incident that made my parentsconsider that it was time to leave the outskirts and92The Salon: Volume Two

make the move to an apartment building in the city.Because, when one is used to hearing about crime,when one is used to living with it, one can ignoreit, until one day it just catches up with you, shakingyour insides like a slap on the face.But, were incidents like this one – formative experiences,so to speak – that years later would allowme a certain aura or capacity to traverse otherspaces of crime? Why then, did I feel so uncomfortablewhen I settled in Johannesburg and moved tothe very popular suburb of Melville, attracted by itscharming houses, the restaurants of 7 th Avenue andtheir funky crowds? Suddenly I found myself settingthe alarm every night like my father used to, lookingat the silent living room and hiding from the shadowsof trees on the window moving slowly.Suddenly I found myself setting the alarm everynight like my father used toEvery morning I would look out into the garden, acute little enclosed space, and watched it transforminto a jungle of cat piss, bird shit and mold for lack ofcare due to my own disinterest in such matters. Thislittle enclave of hominess adorned by its own rosebush and lemon tree, surrounded by electric wires,a gate and a heavy and slightly crooked old woodendoor, was a small version of an architecture forblissful enjoyment that is far removed from my visionof what domesticity should be like. No wonderthe garden quickly became covered in leaves and tallgrass, more of a muddy plot in its raw form than atamed English version of nature. My former trainingin Bogotá had not provided the tools for the enjoymentof garden leisure amidst the walls and barbedwire of a crime-ridden city. Neither was I willing toendure the meetings and social gatherings that ourBolivar Square panorama in BogotaPhoto: Martin St-Amant(Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence)landlady invited us to when the growing crime inour street called for community action. The multiplesigns of the security companies and their emergencynumbers covering the green of our garage door weremore of a nuance than a relief. I just wanted to beleft alone to my own space, preferably from an upperfloor where I could observe the effervescence ofa city bubbling under my gaze. Was this simply apathyto social solidarity, to the suburban sense of agood neighbor? What had my tools prepared me forinstead?Growing up in the eighties was my classroom. Ifyou know Colombia for its violence, this was whenit was making the real bloody headlines. The finaldecade of the eighties and the early nineties were,by far, one of the most tumultuous moments of Bogotá’shistory. Back then it was a city of six millioninhabitants growing rapidly as it received hundredsof people each day. Many of them were coming fromthe rural areas, forcefully displaced by the violenceaffecting the country for decades. Others were flowingin from smaller cities in search of better economicfutures, as companies and multinationals filledthe offices of a growing financial sector in the city.But in Bogotá the flows of capital were also beginningto materialize through the effects of the drugtrade, which heavily influenced a boom in construction,commerce and finances, as well as politics, ethicsand every other aspect of Colombian society.As a teenager my friends and I walked to concertsin stadiums, sometimes drunk and irresponsible,traversing spaces where we could be muggedto say the least. We left parties at 4am, intoxicatedand sweaty, sometimes drifting through the darknight, its yellow lights casting shadows on many apasserby. Life went on, but eventually it would beinterrupted by a criminal act. Because things happenedjust like that. I remember an afternoon whenmy friend Juliana and I were off to a funeral. As thelight was about to turn to red, our car was rapidlypassed by two men on a motorcycle. We saw themapproach the car ahead of us, which was being followedby a bodyguard escort. In a split second wesaw the man pull out his gun, stop, shoot repeatedly,and drive off. Juliana and I just said “Fuck! Drive onand let’s get the hell out of here”. At the funeral welater learned the victim was a senator, and that shelay in hospital recovering from her wounds.On Some Assumptions about the Banality of Crime93

This was a time of many political murders, carbombs and kidnappings related to the drug wars.The sound of a bomb was ingrained in the bodiesof my generation. We heard so many of them, andfelt the windows tremble so many times; it’s hardto forget that loud and deep boom that resonatessilently across the city. But Bogotá was no Beirut.Such events were scattered in time, and the city wasnot a ruin. There was, however, an ever-presentthreat, a constant sense of being harassed by a wayof life that had to factor in the possibility of criminalacts. Different forms of violence and historicaltrajectories merged into the growing effects of a citylike Bogotá and its levels of petty crime. The rates ofhomicides were skyrocketing, becoming one of thehighest in the world. A sense of fear and imminentchaos slowly began to parade the streets. Should wego to the movies or the dance clubs, or rather avoidpublic places? Some parents forbade their children,but only for a few weeks, because then the calmwould return, and life would go on; until the nextblast, the next assassination, or the next kidnapping.Social life in the public sphere eloped in a circle ofcontinuity, a dance of interrupted rhythmic proportionsbetween fear and its defeat, for which we wereall slowly learning the steps.A sense of fear and imminent chaos slowly began toparade the streetsBut Bogotá also provided the stage for many othertransformations taking place in Colombia, not onlyviolent ones. It was the setting for a new politicalmovement that would generate the 1991 Constitution– one of the most liberal Colombia has ever hadwith regards to laws on the discourse of tolerance,and cultural and sexual diversity. Mega events likeRock al Parque (Rock at the park) were becominglandmark events in Latin America, as was the theatrefestival, and a growing web of public librariesdesigned by famous architects. It was this convolutedatmosphere of fear and the growing possibilitiesof change and hope, that slowly taught us to live withthe palpable effects of narcotraffic and its violence,the materialization of corruption, and the eliminationof what, back then, people called the loss of valuefor life. Such circumstances led some to imaginereal possibilities for change. The sense that fear andchaos were on the loose, and hence needed to be setback in track, was taken as a real matter of concern.Thus came Mockus.Antanas Mockus was elected mayor of Bogotá in1995, and later served another term in early 2000.His proposal, coming from his own career as anacademic in philosophy and as Rector of the UniversidadNacional, produced two special traits thatwon him the election to what is Colombia’s mostimportant political seat after the Presidency. First,he represented an anti-politics, that is, he did notcome from or follow the political apparatus; rather,his political premises were inspired by philosopherssuch as Habbermas and opposed traditional bipartisanthinking. And second, as Rector of the UniversidadNacional – the largest and most importantpublic university in the country – he had proven thathe could engage and negotiate intolerance, violenceand other attributes that many people imaginedcharacterized the university. As urban anthropologistsAustin Zeiderman and Andres Salcedo havewritten, Mockus represented an alternative wayout of the disorder and chaos of the city, based onacademic thinking that privileged knowledge, themethodological tools of measurement believed tocharacterize the ‘hard sciences’, and philosophicaland social science approaches designed to analyzeand understand societal transformation.a set of minimal rules of coexistence that wouldlead to citizens’ self regulationMockus’ program developed the idea of antidotes tothe urban lifestyle that we had become accustomedto. This is how the idea of recreating a new socialpact, where citizens would be in control of theirown actions, was developed. The program came tobe known as cultura ciudadana, and was premisedon the slogan la vida es sagrada, life is sacred. Oneof its main proposals consisted of the learning of aset of minimal rules of coexistence that would leadto citizens’ self regulation. The project was set forthbased on the combination of measures of controland vigilance, put in practice through a series ofsymbolic and performative actions that would leadpeople to a more rational, and less aggressive, senseof being in the city. The theater for this program wasthe public sphere. Mimes and other performativeactions, together with public restrictions on alcoholconsumption for example, invited citizens to occupyand share the streets based on an ethic of an individuallycontrolled sense of responsibility and community.This growing culture of civility and self-controldid actually lead to a reduction in homicide statistics:these decreased from around 80 per 100,000inhabitants at its peak in 1993, to 22 per 100,000inhabitants in 2004. Such facts improved people’sperceptions of Bogotá considerably. It benefitedthe city and its image, with positive repercussions94The Salon: Volume Two

for foreign investment and the like. A particularlynotable effect was the transformation of the publicsphere: sidewalks were enlarged, parks fixed up,more concerts and outdoor activities were offered,all inviting people to walk the city, to take to thestreets and live life outside. These changes were alsoaccompanied by an increase in security companiesand in the numbers of police agents patrolling avenuesand parks; because it was not the private spaceof the house that was the focus of protection, it wasthe street.it was not the private space of the house that wasthe focus of protection, it was the streetHowever, the taking of the streets also followed historicallines of segregation. Many of the initiativesfirst imagined by Mockus, but especially those elaboratedby his successor Enrique Peñalosa, involveddislocation and forced removal of street dwellersand drug addicts, mostly people outside the neoliberallogics of consumption that came with the enjoymentof the public sphere. The city’s reoccupationwas accompanied by tacit forms of exclusion basedon the idea of potential threats. Historical lines werethus redrawn in order to keep some at a safe distance.I clearly remember the incident of private securitybouncers who blocked access to poor peoplecoming from the southern parts of the city, as theywanted to “enter” the perimeter of a trendy parkwhere an ice-skating rink and a huge Christmas tree,crowned with the logo of a cell phone company, hadbeen set up. And still, despite these measures andsome of their problematic implications, the idea ofa democratic public sphere has to a certain degreebeen developed. As years have gone by the number“Eje ambiental”, BogotáPhoto: Darina (GNU Free Documentation License)of public and free events continue to grow alongthe streets. There are by now established activitiessuch as the weekly closing of certain main avenuesfor the public enjoyment of pedestrians and bicycleriders. And at Christmas time the main avenues areovertaken at night by thousands of people of all classbackgrounds walking to the parks with their littleones, enjoying the light decorations.As a result of years that have seen booms in construction,an increasing population which has madeBogotá a city of almost eight million people, and theeffects of decades of policies directed at reducingcrime and increasing security, the urban architectureof Bogotá has long abandoned the 1970s housesand the mellow ambiance of a suburban atmosphere.Rows and rows of ochre colored brick apartmentbuildings rise over the streets, where peoplewalk and run frantically, constantly gathering incoffee shops, stores, parties, marches and protests.Some of these buildings are now gated communities,and despite a growing tendency towards the evolutionof suburban-like enclaves in the outskirts, life inBogotá is mostly lived on the streets. Every day onecan see and feel bodies strolling and shouting alongsidewalks, walking under smog-stained buildings,forming layers of people and things amidst armedmen.* * *Jonny Steinberg’s reflection on his own visit to Bogotáends with him stating that in Johannesburg themiddle class has not really lived an urban life. Heblames the colonial influence based on cheap laborand land, and its desire for enjoyment within clubsand residential gardens. This legacy has then beencoupled with the American inspiration of highways,the celebration of the car and the geometric designsof a landscape defined by sprawling suburbs. The resultof such processes, he says, is an empty publicspace. And in such an empty space, my crime-riddenbackground, or at least my apparent training in it,doesn’t seem to fit.My history has made me addicted to the streetand the pavement, to the vertigo of cityscapes fromthe top of a building, to a sense of individualitywhere bodies are much closer to each other, wherehouses with big gardens, nicely mowed lawns andgood neighbors are but a thing of the past. The desirefor the street sometimes hits me, producingfeelings of entrapment, suffocation and frustration.I was apparently prepared to engage an everyday lifenot devoid of crime. I had the proper training. ButI miss the streets so dearly, the flows of buses, eventhe toxic fumes, flowing around all across the city. IOn Some Assumptions about the Banality of Crime95

Bogota pleinPhoto: Iijjccoo (GNU Free Documentation License)miss the narrowness, the fast pace of bodies almostcolliding and barely running into each other, evenif this requires the constant clutching of my walletand bag.If there are lessons to be learned from theseimpressions on similarly divergent histories, I stillwonder what Mockus would do in Johannesburg –especially now that he is running for President ofColombia, and is only second in the polls. I wonderwhether, or why, the focus on the street is so importantfor a sense of urbanity. During my last visit toBogotá just a few months ago, I heard a lot of complaintsthat people’s perception of security was decreasing.I also read an article that reported how insome middle class neighborhoods people were beingrobbed by a gang posing as members of the State’sundercover security agencies. But despite the statisticsand the ongoing reports on crime in my ownneighborhood in that city, I recently received imagesof people protesting on the street against the riseof crime. So, when I saw another statistics-basedSunday is Cycling day in downtown BogotaPhoto: Flickr/MacAllenBrothersarticle declaring that the average amount of greenspace per person in Bogotá is a meager 4.9%, whilethe World Health Organization recommends at least9%, I was left wondering about my own reactions togarden care in Joburg and its status as one of thegreenest cities in the world.How crime and cities define each other is an openendedprocessI have since then left the Melville house, and nowenjoy the bustle from Indian and African familiesthat gather by the dozen on Sundays at the parkaround the corner, as well as sounds from activitiesat the cultural center across the street fromour place. I have discovered that I am quite good atdriving on the left, that plantains exist in the stallsof busy Yeoville, and I am learning of the differentcultural pockets, artistic events, the diversity in Africanfashions, and the crossings of intellectuals ofall races that together make of this city what SarahNuttall and Achille Mbembe have called an elusivemetropolis. But I still struggle with the emptystreets paraded by the Tactical Unit patrol cars andthe constant changing of the guard in my complex. Imiss the sense of proximity that relies on the crowdin the city as a whole. The feelings produced by theoutreaches of the banality of crime-ridden historiescreates a pot of emotions that get tangled in my dailyactivities. How crime and cities define each other isan open-ended process that has shaped my own desiresfor the street as much as it has the different trajectoriesof urban formations. So I am letting myselfbe reached by the silent commotion and vibrancy ofa city that I am yet beginning to absorb, even if fromthe window of my partner’s car.96The Salon: Volume Two