Carli Coetzee

Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa

Nations as well as individuals are in many ways the sum of their memories, which are shaped by perception as much as by events. This collection of essays by South African academics looks at the ways the country is dealing with its past, a complex mixture of colonialism, slavery, apartheid, struggle, and guilt. The emphasis is on how that past is being perceived and moulded in the post-apartheid era.

'They Never Wept, the Men of my Race': Antjie Krog's Country of my Skull and the White South African Signature

Antjie Krogs Country of my Skull is a text that, in terms of the audience to whom it is addressed, heralds a new direction in writing by white South Africans. The addressee of this text is twofold: Krog directs her work at both her traditional Afrikaans-speaking audience, and at a new audience by whom she wishes to be accepted. In this article I discuss two trends in the text. On the one hand, Krog actively distances herself from her heritage and Afrikaner background. On the other hand, she acknowledges that she can never acquire a voice that does not contain traces of this past and heritage. The voice in the text is highly self-conscious, with Krog calling to her Afrikaans-speaking audience to witness her distancing herself from them. This is done in an attempt to enter what she calls the country of her skull, a country into which she wishes to be invited by black South Africans. The text indicates that, for Krog, this imagined entry is, as yet, not a possibility.

‘The One That Got Away’: Zoë Wicomb in the Archives

This article examines the role of reading and readers in the work of Zoë Wicomb. It discusses the uses made of printed material such as archives, newspapers and letters in the body of work, and argues that Wicomb uses these documents to interrogate notions of originality, origins and stability. In Wicombs work, printed texts are often being cut, or lost, or changed. This lack of trust in the fixed, original version of a text is a recurring theme in Wicombs work, and the issues raised in her fiction are of interest to all users of South African archives, as well as to those interested in archival theory and practice.

Accented Futures: Language Activism and the Ending of Apartheid.

1. Against translation, in defence of accentedness 2. There was this missing quotation mark 3. Njabulo Ndebeles ordinary address 4. Thembinkosi Goniwes eyes 5. A history of translation and non-translation 6. The copy and the lost original 7. He places his chair against mine and translates 8. The multi-lingual scholar of the future 9. A book must be returned from the library from which it was borrowed 10. The surprisingly accented classroom Concluding remarks

To Refuse Containment, To Resist Translation

This essay is concerned with translation in situations of linguistic or social inequality. Its focus is South African English and it relationship to the other South African languages. Its argument is that much of the translation work done in South Africa serves to extend and confirm monolingual privilege. Translation in official contexts in South Africa tends to happen into English, out of other South African languages, and the labour of translation is performed by heteroglots for the benefit of monolingual English-speakers, who are able to remain monoglot since the work is performed by someone else. A further inequality of this situation is the fact that monolingual South Africans tend to be English-speakers, and tend to be the beneficiaries of racially and linguistically determined privileges. When translation takes place out of other South African languages into South African English, this monolingual privilege can be confirmed and extended. The essay concludes that a refusal to translate out of African languages into South African English may be necessary in order to destabilize the hegemony of English.

“Being invited into the teacher’s home”

Mark Sanders stages the argument of his book Learning Zulu: A Secret History of Language in South Africa as an Oedipal romance, troping on the terms “mother tongue” and “language of the breast” (ulimi lwebele, the Zulu term for the language one learns on first coming into speech).1 In this book, there are many parents (screen mothers, real mothers, adoptive mothers, unknown fathers, forgiving as well as unforgiving fathers), and many teachers who act as language-giving parents. The acquisition of a language as an adult, argues Sanders, makes one again like a child at the mother’s breast. There is a crucial difference, though, between learning an additional language as an adult, and the coming into language as symbolic system for the first time as a child. When one acquires an additional language as an adult, you do not experience this dramatic fall into what Lacan called the Law of the Father. When Sanders learns Zulu as an adult he is not learning at the (father’s or) mother’s breast, but instead in an Oedipal response against the fathers, white and non-Zulu-speaking, whose apartheid-inspired lives and ideologies made it difficult for him to learn Zulu.2 The secret history of the title alludes to the history of similar attempts at being foster-parented at the breast of the parent/teacher who can teach the adult learner Zulu. Not all of these learners, we realize along with the author, are white South Africans. An insight that comes late in the book – in the reading, but also in the argument – is that the secret history of white learners of Zulu is no longer the significant secret history.3 But before we come to these other secret learners, Sanders acquires a number of siblings, fellow learners at the breast, with whom he has rivalrous relationships for the attention and praise of the parent/teacher. Each chapter can be read as a conflict staged with one of these siblings, to be the good (the best) student, the one who deserves praise, and the one whose learning can make reparation for the injustices of the apartheid past. One rival we encounter early on is the white male instructor in the Xhosa language laboratory session at the University of Cape Town.4 This sibling, about whom we read that he speaks Xhosa like someone who learnt it at the breast, remains unnamed. Anyone who studied Xhosa in the Western Cape in the 1990s can recognize him easily, though, and will recall the (other) mother tongue speakers of Xhosa who stood at the back of the lecture hall

Afro-Superheroes: Prepossessing the Future

In ‘Popular Arts in Africa’, published in 1987, Karin Barber made passing reference to the syncretic use made of Marvel Comic superheroes alongside figures from Twi folktales, in comics produced in Accra and Kumasi in the 1970s (1987). In these comics, Marvel superheroes and folklore figures, she wrote, have in common their special powers, and a past that stretches beyond the lives of everyday Ghanaians. In the explosion of these figures into the lives of ordinary people, their special powers offer political transformation and access to an otherworldly (sometimes, but not always, ancestrally supported) ability to change this world. The increasing visibility of African superheroes (or what Adilifu Nama has termed so memorably ‘Super Blacks’, 2011) might look, from a certain point of view, like evidence of the increasing infiltration of transnational consumerism into youth cultural forms in African contexts. The papers in this collection on Afro-superheroes argue the opposite: Afro-superheroes, the authors show in their analysis of their often arresting material, are embedded in contemporary political and social contexts and provide us with ways of understanding the emergent present.

All Tickets Please, or How Cinema Histories of South Africa Can Stop Re-Enacting the Racialised Past

This brief paper originated as a response to a special themed workshop held at Birkbeck College, University of London, the contributions from which are featured in this Part Special Issue on ‘South Africa on Film’, together with a fifth paper by Vivian Bickford-Smith. In it, I plot some trajectories for the interdisciplinary study of South African cinematic and film histories. The arguments are influenced by the archival turn in literary studies and recent work on re-enactment in historical studies, as well as by new understandings of audiences, pleasure and resistance. Film studies, I suggest, must of necessity be inter-disciplinary, and reception histories can create new archives that may complicate our racialised understandings of the past and of media histories. Indeed, the challenge to scholars of South African cinema is how to avoid replicating the racialised divisions that characterise the production and consumption of film, and to this end, new archives need to be constituted, and new ways need to be developed to interpret the archives we already have. This special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies includes five new papers on topics related to cinema and film in South Africa, which are representative of some new trends in this field. South African film does not lack for historians or histories. Since the publication of Thelma Gutsche’s The History and Social Significance of Motion Pictures in South Africa, 1895–1940, in 1972, a number of histories have appeared. What is striking in these works is how much agreement there is about what constitutes the canon of South African cinema. The existing histories typically follow a chronological line of development, and tend to include early on a chapter on De Voortrekkers, the first major epic made in South Africa and a significant film in the history of the country’s cinema. It is a film that has been seen by very few living South Africans, yet which for many years in the twentieth century was screened annually on 16 December as part of the commemorations for the central battle between Boer emigrants and Zulu (‘the Battle of Blood River’ – now known as the Ncume River Battle)

Visions of Disorder and Profit: The Khoikhoi and the First Years of the Dutch East India Company at the Cape

(1994). Visions of disorder and profit: The Khoikhoi and the first years of the Dutch east India company at the cape. Social Dynamics: Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 35-66.

Home, family and intimacy in recent writings on and from South Africa

In recent works on intimacy and home in South Africa, scholars question the assumptions about where ‘home’ ends, and who counts as ‘family’. In calls for curriculum change and the transformation of the university (discourses that were about access for both black students and black faculty), these questions of affiliation and ‘home’ have played a prominent role. In the student protest movement of 2015 and 2016, for example, a recurring discourse was to invoke ‘our mothers, the domestic workers’. This was partly an attempt to forge links between the students’ demands and those of casualized cleaning and catering staff on campus, but the invocation of ‘our mothers, the domestic workers’ also underlined the lineage of the university as one associated with ‘the big house’ and many black students’ feelings of being tolerated, at best, in spaces that historically did not imagine them as full citizens, but instead as marginal to the home that is South Africa.