Читать книгу Reflecting Rogue - Pumla Dineo Gqola - Страница 8

I was born in December 1972, and so that makes me a child deeply shaped by the cultures of the 1970s and ’80s, as I moved through childhood. It also means that I was 21 when I voted for the first time in 1994.

When I speak to my students, and to some young people, whose childhood was in the 1990s and the 2000s, I recognise the incomprehension of how hopeful 1994 was, what a relief to have an opportunity to think of ourselves differently than we had under apartheid. It may be a gap that is simply impossible to bridge in comprehension. And that gap makes post-apartheid failures so devastating, not because nothing has changed – for this is simply not true – but because too little has changed in ways that expand the vision of what is possible, and too much has changed in directions that should have remained unrealisable. Everywhere, and increasingly, there are reminders of missed opportunities to create the country we dreamt of as I entered adulthood.

I borrow the phrase of normalising freedom from Njabulo Ndebele, writer, cultural theorist and leading academic, who uses it to express the move away from simply gaining freedom to being able to fully experience the range of what freedom means. Ndebele coins the phrase “the difficult task of normalising freedom” for the new South Africa: political freedom was achieved and yet this achievement continues to be contaminated by – and intertwined with – various continuing forms of unfreedom: economic marginalisation, gender-based violence (within which I include homophobic violence), as well as the ascendance of newer forms of policing and surveillance.

In the lead up to 27 April 1994, the African National Congress election campaign material included a poster of smiling Nelson Mandela in a black, brown and gold shirt surrounded by children of different skin and hair colours, themselves clothed in vibrant colours. The shirt was in the style of what would later be known as the Madiba shirt. The children around him look relaxed and some have the recognisably strained “photo smile” that many young children often adopt. A green banner with white writing at the top promises “A better life for all”. Running horizontally across the bottom are four squares, one each for the letters ANC, the ANC flag, a passport photograph of a smiling Mandela in dark jacket, white shirt and grey tie, and a giant X. The bottom is a strip from an election ballot.

Each time we saw it in 1994, we knew it was a poster selling a dream we had waited too long to see materialised. However, it was also a poster that spoke without irony in the specific race language we were invited to vote ourselves away from. It looked like one of those billboards, posters and magazine adverts for United Colours of Benetton: a range of people with different skin tones and other signifiers of race clad in colourful clothing, arranged so that their bodies touched slightly, against a white backdrop. The most important message in those ubiquitous Benetton print advertisements, as in the “A better life for all” advert, appeared uncluttered in white font on crisp green background. The poster represented “all” through visual markers of difference that suggested embodied race classification. Yet, at the time, the promise in the poster made little sense when materiality was considered. How could the lives of white beneficiaries of apartheid be (further) improved, rendered “better” under a post-apartheid ANC-led government?

The slogan seemed partly informed by the tensions and fears of Black retribution, the spectre of swartgevaar had been one of the cornerstones of apartheid narrative. Such a slogan could allay white voters’ fear of Black people; assure them that Black people would not kill them in their sleep and confiscate their property once in power.

The poster connected voting for the ANC to creating a better life for all South Africans. The banners visually frame the smiling, reconciliatory Mandela – eliding the terrorist Mandela around whom swaartgevaar coalesced and absenting Mandela the beloved revolutionary on the island. Yet, for most Black voters, it was the revolutionary Mandela we placed our faith in, and wanted to see as President. Remembering a past not too long ago when he was deemed the most dangerous man to apartheid South Africa, so dangerous that just saying his name was criminalised, and his photograph unpublishable, we relished the idea of voting for our terrorist president in the bright light of day. As his pictures were suddenly everywhere from 1990 onwards, I remembered the excitement I had felt with a few schoolmates in 1986 on our way to our boarding school, Inanda Seminary, when a Durban newspaper had flouted legal restriction and published his image on the front page. The excitement resided in knowing how dangerous having access to that shared copy was, before the Special Branch had managed to confiscate and ban all copies. We sat huddled around that image, imagining that he still looked like he had when the picture had been taken. A group of teenagers huddled around a newspaper page trying to memorise his face. I realise now that I failed dismally at that task, and it could have been a photo of anybody really.

Nonetheless, the possibility of Mandela, the mysterious uber-revolutionary superhero of our childhood, as President of our country was so intoxicating that we imagined all the questions being raised about the televised negotiation process, about the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) and other aspects of the nation-anticipated, by those less trusting of the ANC, would be resolved under a new government.

Gazing at this poster, these memories and desires were projected onto the central figure. However, this is not what the poster suggests. Rather, the Mandela of the election poster is a grandfather Mandela. His much-cited longing for children’s voices and the sight of children while incarcerated is suggested in the poster’s image. That is the only link – and a very tenuous one – to his imprisonment evoked in the poster. In other words, we can remember his prison experience only for the longing he had for children, his own and others. The poster is his promised delivery from this decades-long yearning. However, the metaphor does not hold. He cannot be compensated for the loss of time with his children, as individual narratives from his various children will remind us before and after we vote.

Yet both Mandela as terrorist and revolutionary Mandela are remembered by different segments of the electorate; some just have to work harder to hold on to an image of Mandela that resonates. The contrast between the grey, smiling Mandela and the bright-eyed children also speaks to a future.

If children are the face of the new South Africa that we had to imagine in early 1994, the relationship to our past was not entirely clear. We had to think of race as colour (superficial difference) but not of race as power (i.e., the racism of the past and present). In other words, the invitation to Black audiences was one of escape, a counterintuitive one. However, wanting to escape from apartheid was something radical movements had long taught us to do. We grew up on the slogan “freedom in our lifetime”, even though everywhere around us was evidence of the power of a brutal apartheid state. Indeed, what made it possible for the oppositional slogans “each one teach one” and “freedom before education” to co-exist in the 1980s was this capacity to imagine the impossible as inevitable. To even entertain, as a young Black person under apartheid, that freedom was so urgent that it would arrive in your youth provided you gave the struggle your all. That you would still have time for education after was immersion in the counterintuitive. In my late twenties, a chosen family member, himself Caribbean and Black British, would ask me how it was possible to live through apartheid and keep pushing through. Coming from a person whose life’s work is humanising enslaved and indentured people from previous centuries, rendering their contribution to British and global culture visible, it was a hard question. In some senses, he knew the answer. In another, telling him we heard “freedom in our lifetime” so much that we believed it was Greek to him. It was counterintuitive given what he knew about the power of the apartheid state and its allies in Reagan’s America, Thatcher’s Britain, Israel and the dishonest European banks that bankrolled Pretoria.

So, when the poster invited us to make an imaginative leap, this was an exercise we were so accustomed to, we missed how the ends had shifted. The future suggested in the poster is not a post-race, post-patriarchal, post-capitalist one. It is an innocent future that matters, a co-created future that rests on innocence, innocence from racism as institutional violence too, which is to say an invisibilisation of racism. The poster suggests a future where quality of life transcends race as power, even as it evokes race as colour in its visual vocabulary.

The “better life” rests on the bright faces of the children around Mandela and on the voters prioritising them and the future, muting the past. It requires that we believe a future free of institutionalised white supremacy is possible if we vote ANC, and in that moment it still is. It is discursively compelling and visually arresting. But many of us will vote for revolutionary Mandela because of the very past and present of white supremacist wounding that the poster avoids. Our memory will exceed the call to aspiration. We will take the imaginative leap that we are well-trained in biographically, and that has been a crucial part of being Black in the world, transmitted across generations; enabling us to survive slavery, genocide, conquest and now, at last, apartheid.

That was March 1994.

I wrote the first, shorter version of this chapter in March 2015, a few weeks away from the anniversary of the first South African election. I fleshed it out two years later for inclusion in this book. Anniversaries are not just cause for celebration; they can also be moments to pause and reflect. I was twenty-one years old, four months into my second degree when I voted in 1994. Much ink has been spilt on what this moment meant for many who could vote legally for the first time. The snaking voting queues have become as iconic as pictures of Mandela with children, beyond that first one. We have been told repeatedly of how virtually no violent crimes were reported on that day and we imagine optimistically that none were committed that day. Given the constant onslaught that apartheid was on the body and psyche, and with these kinds of narratives and visual prompts, it is understandable why aspirational tags such as the “miracle” or “dream” transition gained currency.

Escape.

Newness.

Relief.

Possibility.

Even as I revise the chapter extensively in April 2017 – sceptical of the vision on that poster, aware of how prophetic its most dangerous promise was, having barely mentally survived the brutality with which #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall were met – still, with heart and head overflowing with disillusionment at contemporary South Africa’s devastating Black poverty and maddening misogynist violence, there is a little spark of nostalgia for 1994; for what we could have been, for what we hoped for. It is a devastating awareness, this living memory for who we were in April 1994.

Hope.

Rising to the occasion, Archbishop Desmond Tutu would dub us “the rainbow children of God”, in a phrase I have revised my stance on many times since the 1990s. Initially raging against it as obscuring race by reducing it to mere difference without hierarchy, I have come to wonder, after Gayatri Spivak’s work on how the centre mutates and appropriates radical critique in order to sustain itself, about whether it is not useful to distinguish between what Tutu coined and how it moved into the mainstream parlance.

Given Tutu’s consistent opposition to apartheid terror, his treatment by the apartheid state as a dangerous person, why is it so hard to imagine that Tutu was referencing rainbow as exists in global Black thought? What if it is not Tutu’s formulation but its appropriation into rainbowist nationalism that is dangerous? When Ntozake Shange, African American feminist poet, essayist, activist and novelist, wrote the iconic choreopoem For colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow was enuf, a text that remains a global Black feminist classic several decades on, “rainbow” was not avoidance of race, difference and the violence of hierarchy. It was a direct confrontation of violent hierarchy, an attempt to imagine how difference might work for a decolonial project of recognition. When the LGBTI movement embraces rainbow metaphorically, it is a gesture that refuses co-option, erasure and a deliberate political move to try to make difference link with freedom rather than annihilation. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition emerged out of an unapologetic civil rights investment, confronting rather than avoiding difference, and attempting to create a world in which difference was not divisive. It is an ambitious project.

Tutu’s biography suggests that he was gesturing intertextually to these diverse traditions of investing rainbow with meaning. However, he did not have full control over how that concept would travel. Increasingly, I wonder whether Tutu’s rainbow is an attempt at remaking, not avoidance or flattening of difference. He has remained a most troublesome figure for the project of rainbowism – seeming to be its biggest proponent in giving it a language, and heading its most powerful instrument, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), but also constantly undermining the premises of the rainbow nation: its gender power, its deepening poverty, its violent masculinist leaders, corruption, criticising not only the easy-to-fault presidents, but Mandela too on a few counts. He repeatedly breaks rank to endorse reproductive choice and same-sex marriage, in ways that complicate his position as (retired) Archbishop. His refusal to hold his tongue post-apartheid is why he was derisively dubbed “Deputy Jesus” by former South African Commissioner of Police Bheki Cele. On a lighter note, I have often wondered whether it is not the exact task of an Archbishop to (aspire to) be even more like Jesus than ordinary Christians.

Regardless of what Tutu intended by “rainbow nation”, its absorption into post-apartheid nationalism flattened the hierarchy and institutional violence encoded in difference, instead of transforming it. Later still, we would be invited to aspire to “unity in diversity”. Unity has always been a double-edged sword for the marginalised, and the transformation of the “rainbow” into “unity in diversity” cemented the avoidance of difference, the deferral of justice for apartheid’s victims. And apartheid’s victims were not just those who fell into the narrow category defined by the TRC. Violence victimises its targets. Black people may be survivors, but they were also apartheid’s victims.

Not all of us were euphoric in the 1990s. Indeed, even as we voted on 27 April 1994, many Black people deliberately withheld their votes in painful, principled refusal to accept the negotiated settlement. At the risk of being seen as the misguided renegades who would not come to the celebratory table, they insisted that real power was not transferring hands, that too much had been compromised at the negotiating table, that the nightmare that was apartheid would continue in a different guise. They resisted the nation mythmaking, they kept their eyes firmly on race as power and rejected race as colour as alibi for injustice.

I remember how much tension there was in many families, how devastating it was to see the low Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) showing at the polls even as many PAC members had publicly announced they would not participate. To watch the uncontested ANC wins in PAC strongholds, to see the even lower polling of Azanian People’s Organization (AZAPO), mixed some bile into the results of that first election for many of us, even if these were not parties we chose to vote for.

Many years later some of these renegades’ children, along with many children of willing voters, “born-frees”, deferred their own first vote. Race, racism and the state of Black life, had everything to do with this refusal on both counts. It is unsurprising that the refusal to vote by increasing numbers of eligible South Africans is readily dismissed across media and political parties as “apathy” or the “sign of a maturing democracy” resonant with voting patterns in some global North countries. This too is a refusal to confront the failure of the reconciliation myth, of unity in diversity and of rainbowism.

In the Black public sphere, public intellectuals had long dubbed the national narrative “reCONciliation”. Lizeka Mda and Christine Qunta published remarkably similar critiques of the violence and injustice of the reconciliation and rainbow nation motifs in 1996. Several senior Black journalists (many of whom have subsequently changed course) received tongue-lashings from then Deputy President Thabo Mbeki for their critical distance from the official narrative, and many did not mince their words in response to him in various editorials as well as on the pages of Tribute. Later in the same decade, Xolela Mangcu cautioned against the projection of apartheid racism on generals, colonels and select politicians, reminding us of the everydayness of racial violence under apartheid. Such insistences on taking race as power were as unfashionable in media and academia then as they are today.

Yet, fashionable or not, these rejections of nationalist narratives explain why we have a society that seems further away from “A better life for all” in 2017 than it did in 1997. This glossing over difference rather than systemic change has emboldened the worst kinds of violence. This is why we have constant explosions of naked racism now, why Helen Zille, an opposition party leader, can make an argument for the gains of colonialism. This is what the last two decades have enabled by negating the need for accountability, atonement and justice: racial harassment has moved from the hidden or individual to brazen articulation in public spaces, while Black poverty remains transmitted across generations.

The early detractors from the rainbow nation mythology underlined the value of linking race to justice as the way to undo the legacy of race. They required an interrogation of white power, recognising that pontificating on the social constructedness of race does not mitigate white supremacist violence. Such statements about constructedness very often invisibilise racism, stressing the need to focus on accent and nuance at the expense of pattern.

Today, it is not hard to recognise that rather than transcend race, white supremacist violence is gaining ground. Knowing that race is not “real” is no protection against racial harassment and extreme violence. White epistemic and economic power is entrenched in the economy, land ownership, language dominance and the academy. I have been in meetings where colleagues voiced the kind of naked white supremacist statements that they would have disguised a decade ago, where colleagues laughed as someone spoke of the bludgeoned, shot at, displaced bodies of student activists on our campus, where colleagues who previously argued against all forms of violence insisted that militarised campuses, tear gas canisters thrown into teaching and administrative buildings, and bullet wounds on our students’ bodies were unavoidable, and necessary to ensure that, unlike the University of Cape Town, our academic calendar concluded in December 2016.

Outside of government, the most powerful institutions in corporate and higher education have remained stubbornly resistant to transformation of culture or numbers.

The return of white supremacist violence to the sphere of the spectacular is everywhere evident from the resurgence of older notions of race, once again taking a grip on the popular imagination. The peers of the children around Mandela continue to live highly raced lives. Their race and inherited class position is more likely to determine whether they can afford school fees and are able to graduate, than their aptitude. Each challenge to how race works to exclude in the academy is met with statistics that show that university undergraduate enrolments are demographically representative. But this information is deceptive. The real answer lies in the demographics of who graduates, when, and with(out) student debt.

Every year we lose some of our best students because of inability to afford education. For many years, academics have complained of students passing out in class, sleeping in libraries, under stairs and “squatting” in friends’ rooms, of students who live on popcorn because it is filling and the only thing they can afford. The private food vendors on campus make food unaffordable. Some of the people I was a student with in the 1990s at UCT have no idea how different and unaffordable campus life is. They assume that our students’ residence fees include all meals, as ours did and that the university offers a range of affordable food options in canteens. These are the many ways in which race continues to matter. Students who travel for three hours on public transport to attend an eight o’clock class are more likely to be Black and poor/working class than not. At their most brilliant, they remain at a distinct disadvantage. This is not “just” class at play. It is not just the legacy of apartheid. It is the failure to create a different society with opportunities to be free of poverty. Students in my first year class in 2017 were born in the second year of democracy. They are younger than the children around Mandela on the poster I started with.

Avoiding race power has led not to the disappearance but to emboldened racism – institutional and individual.

A group of young white men who were either babies or not yet born in 1994 forced Black labourers to consume urine on camera at an institution of higher learning in the Free State, while another group at the same institution assaulted a Black fellow student a few months later. At a different institution in the Northern Cape, white students raped a Black student who has a white mother.

Closer to home, teachers separate students into Black groups and white groups for teaching in a school in Gauteng; Black parents have to go to court to force transformation of the governing body at an Eastern Cape private school and to ensure the teaching of isiXhosa at the same institution.

At Wits University, the campus newspaper reports that young white women racially harassed and threatened to assault a student who questioned their mocking of a Black academic’s pronunciation. In the Western Cape a domestic worker is assaulted in the suburb in which she works because the white man who assaults her “mistakes her for a prostitute” and “snapped […] as a result of having these people in our area”.

Perhaps the neighbourhood-watch crew that has issued labourers in one suburb with green access cards in order to keep out those who do not belong there has the same idea. In the same province, a vice chancellor of a prestigious South African university defends his institution’s failure to hire significant numbers of Black staff and its negligible numbers of senior Black academics through statements so baffling it is not clear how they are to elicit sympathy for the institutional choices. “We” had one African woman professor two years ago but she left. It takes an average of twenty years from PhD to full professorship. “We” are not the only ones.

It is an exhausting list even as it is the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The dream of a miraculous democracy has turned into a nightmare. It is unlikely to be moved by the rhetoric of social construction, ubuntu and further mythologisation of diversity under the guise of race as colour. In the official public political sphere, we are beginning to see the emergence of a new grammar of resisting racial terror, one that disrespects the regimented conventions of academic and parliamentary protocol. As one “born-free”, Model C educated, Black radical with two Wits degrees pointed out in a conversation on everyday racism and investor confidence recently “if the country has to collapse first for us to own it, then so be it. It may be a mess we need to build from scratch, but let it be.” Another similarly located Black radical challenged “you keep telling us that we are worlds away from apartheid, so tell those of us who were not alive in the ’70s and ’80s, how is it different? Why are you not angrier?”

It is a good question.