Gabeba Baderoon

The African Oceans—Tracing the Sea as Memory of Slavery in South African Literature and Culture

This essay traces images of the Indian and Atlantic oceans in South African literature and art for their evocation of the countrys history of slavery. I argue that turning ones gaze to the sea recovers evidence of slave lives otherwise erased from folk memory, as well as the decisively modern character of slave practices subsumed behind picturesque portrayals of the Cape. The essay reveals an alternative modernity crafted by enslaved people in practices of language, religion, and food culture in South Africa. The approach taken in this article follows studies by Pumla Gqola and Cheryl Hendricks on discourses of slavery and sexuality, Noeleen Murray on the meanings of slave burial sites, and Martin Hall on colonial architecture in mapping the profound influence of slavery and slave resistance on South African culture. The theme of the two oceans in South African literature, art and the practices of Malay food constitute a subversive archive that testifies to the presence and subjectivity of enslaved people at the Cape, and takes its place among African memories of slavery.

‘This is our speech’: voice, body and poetic form in recent South African writing

In recent years, different South African literary genres have revealed writers’ innovative efforts to name subjectivities and experiences that have been erased by legacies of colonial and sexual violence. By analysing the poem ‘Tongues of Their Mothers’, the novel Unconfessed and the play Reclaiming the P…Word, this essay traces a shift away from realistic representations of the physical and symbolic violence to which Black women’s bodies have been and continue to be subjected. Arguing that an emphasis on violence can unwittingly re-inscribe invasive acts and representations, this article shows how poetic strategies and registers can be used to write Black women’s bodies into alternative modes of visibility. Through a complex interplay of silence and reclamation, the texts unflinchingly confront the legacies, meanings and forms of sexual violence in South Africa, while also conveying new understandings of their histories and the languages that support them. Poetic language provides a powerful means of naming ubiquitous, naturalised and erased violence, and is also shown to offer regenerative ways of configuring the resilience, authority and pleasures of those usually seen only as the bodies onto and through which dominant subjects’ desires are violently inscribed.

Surplus, excess, dirt: slavery and the production of disposability in South Africa

ABSTRACT Centuries before apartheid, South Africa was fundamentally shaped by 176 years of slavery, a period of racialised and gendered brutality that lasted from 1658 to 1834. Enslaved people were brought to the Cape by the Dutch East India Company from African and Asian territories around the Indian Ocean, and eventually came to constitute the majority of the population of the Colony. Françoise Vergès (2005) asserts that slavery in South Africa generated “processes of disposability” that transformed enslaved people and indigenous Africans, the majority of the population, into “surplus” and expendable objects. The scale of this expendability is difficult to discern today because of the invisibility of slavery in conceptions of the country’s history. In this article, I use the lens of “dirt” to render such “processes of disposability” visible. I do so by analysing two texts in which African bodies are portrayed as filthy, menacing and contaminating – the novel Unconfessed and a television advertisement titled “Papa Wag Vir Jou” (“Daddy’s Waiting for You”) – which I situate within a discussion of South Africa’s extraordinarily high rates of incarceration and sexual violence. I point to the seamless continuity in industrial levels of imprisonment employed by the colonial and the modern South African state.

Animal likenesses: dogs and the boundary of the human in South Africa

ABSTRACT The dog is a charged and powerful symbol in South Africa. Racialized canine invective played a formative role in colonial efforts to dispossess Africans of land. However, the symbolic meanings of dogs in South African culture range far beyond insult. Recent portrayals of canines have turned suggestively, if equivocally, from denigration toward signalling post-apartheid racial authenticity. To reflect on this shift, I draw on academic and popular writing about dog–human relations in South Africa, among them political discourse, popular media, tweets and the use of ‘animal likenesses’ in the essay ‘The Year of the Dog’ by Njabulo Ndebele, the novel Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee, and a series of photographs of Africanis dogs by the artist Daniel Naudé. Through this examination, I consider the ambivalent emblem of the dog beyond the framework of either abuse or authenticity, to consider it as a barometer of critical shifts in notions of race in South African culture.

‘The sea inside us’: narrating self, gender, place and history in South African memories of the Hajj

1 How do Muslims in South Africa recount the experience of pilgrimage? This paper considers the genre of oral and written South African hajj narratives and reflects on the insights they hold about Muslim subjectivity and history in South Africa. Pilgrimage is a complex theme, or, as Barbara Cooper (1999) phrases it, ‘the hajj presents an immensely complex “ethnoscope” of human movement of tremendous historical depth’ (p. 103). In this article, I take a literary and historical rather than sociological or quantitative approach to the topic of the hajj and examine one of the earliest published accounts of the hajj from the Cape – that of Hajji Mahmoud Mobarek Churchward, who performed the hajj in 1910, along with oral testimonies about pilgrimage by ship in the 1950s and recently published accounts of pilgrimage by Na’eem Jeenah and Shamima Shaikh (2000), Rayda Jacobs (2005) and Rashid Begg (2011). In my analysis I consider the nature of the self and the voice, the relation of the spiritual to the quotidian, and the place of South Africa and South Africanness in these accounts. The article reveals that South African pilgrimage narratives are deeply compelling as an autobiographical practice and as an historical archive. They relate the universality of Islamic religious observance with the particularity of South Africa’s political and social realities in a seamless and illuminating nexus. I therefore argue that the hajj narrative as literary form offers new insights about the relation of the sacred and the profane, nation and religion, and gender and authenticity in South African Muslim life.

Regarding South African Images of Islam: From the Picturesque to Pagad and After

ABSTRACT In this article I trace the trajectory of images of Islam in South Africa from the tradition of the picturesque mode that had developed in the Cape during the colonial period when Muslims slaves constituted a significant part of the population of the colony, and were portrayed as submissive and compliant with the wishes of the slave-owning dominant society, to contemporary images of Islam in South African media, literature and art. The article analyses portrayals of the vigilante group Pagad in the South African media in the mid 1990s, accompanied by photographs of men masked by Palestinian scarves and characterised as militant and alienated, and argues that this starkly anachronistic set of images eventually constituted a new idiom for representing Islam in South Africa. I draw on interviews with journalists in the mainstream and Muslim media in South Africa to assess the impact of the Pagad stories on contemporary representations of Islam in the country, and end the article by considering the richly varied views of Islam evident in South African literature and culture in the twenty-first century.