Helena Pohlandt-McCormick

‘I Saw a Nightmare . . .’: Violence and the Construction of Memory (Soweto, June 16, 1976)

The protests on June 16, 1976 of black schoolchildren in Soweto against the imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in their schools precipitated one of the most pro-found challenges to the South African apartheid state. These events were experienced in a context of violent social and political conflict. They were almost immediately drawn into a discourse that discredited and silenced them, manipulating meaning for ideological and political reasons with little regard for how language and its absence—silences—further violated those who had experienced the events. Violence, in its physical and discursive shape, forged individual memories that remain torn with pain, anger, distrust, and open questions; collective memories that left few spaces for ambiguity; and official or public histories tarnished by their political agendas or the very structures—and sources—that produced them. Based on oral histories and historical documents, this article discusses the collusion of violence and silence and its consequences. It argues that—while the collusion between violence and silence might appear to disrupt or, worse, destroy the ability of individuals to think historically—the individual historical actor can and does have the will to contest and engage with collective memory and official history.

The Speaking Crow or ‘On a clear day you can see the class struggle from here’? (Career Girls, 1997)

By the late 1980s, the class struggle in South Africa had taken on a decidedly national character with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU, formed in 1985) and the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) becoming increasingly politically and nationally significant. As the opening ten minutes of Simon Gush and James Cairns’ video Red shows, through the narration of Thembaletu Fikizolo (a NUMSA shop steward), Mercedes Benz (SA) (hereafter Mercedes), located in the small port city of East London had been the target of repeated industrial action. But such action at the plant in East London had also been marked by tensions between NUMSA and the South African Allied Workers Union (SAAWU), reflecting a core working class political debate between what was known as ‘shop floor’ and ‘community’ unionism. By the middle of August 1990, both industrial action and the tensions between the unions had almost brought ‘the company to its knees’ (Ian Russell, Red). At this critical moment, arguably both at Mercedes and in Red – an hour into the film component of the installation – the film cuts to Fikizolo and, in a move typical of Simon Gush, shifts from the physical and political concern with work to the space and time when people are not working ... leisure time.

THE GRAVES OF DIMBAZA:: TEMPORAL REMAINS

This chapter takes as its starting point a formulation of liberation, read as inaugurating the non-racial as constitutive of the postapartheid social. Or perhaps, stated somewhat differently, liberation (as the ‘after’ of 1994) is understood as having seemingly prepared the ground for the capacity to move beyond the always already racial individuation of the social (see Van Bever Donker). Yet liberation also holds within it the folds of a particular materialism and framing discourses of both class and of socialism, as well as how these conceptualisations are sutured to those of race and nation. Materialism and concepts of class also of course function internal to the logic of capitalism, although they are there repressed even as capitalism imagines itself as antithetical to the politics of socialism and the Left. A central proposition to emerge from this is how race and class are stitched together in various formations of disciplinary (history, psychology) and instrumental reasonings (systems of governance), and in a politics of resistance, and are seen to define apartheid (and anticipate the postapartheid), ranging from the Native Republic Thesis and Colonialism of a Special Type (CST), to those of racial capitalism. In these formulations, often bracketed as the ‘race–class debate’, three central suppositions for defining the apartheid social can be discerned: (i) race is always already individuated by the imperatives of class; (ii) race is read as irrational and ‘false consciousness’, and its false irrationalities can be disclosed through class struggle and resistance; and (iii) class will enable the disappearance of race through the modern figure of the worker (and a non-racial modernity). Read from a different vantage point, what remains of the social of apartheid – of race – are fragments, legacies and inheritances that continue to refuse or withhold this non-racial modernity even as the promise of a socialist answer has dissipated. We wish to add another provocation to this assemblage through a recent engagement seeking to refigure the South African bantustan as constitutive of a South African ‘empire’, thought simultaneously as a dependent space in which the South African state commanded sovereignty, (despite its ‘independence’), and as a theoretical concept to re-examine the unexpected wider, global trajectories of race. This has two components.

Red Assembly: East London Calling

Wedding at Cana, completed in 1563, filled the entire rear wall of the Palladian Refectory of the Monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, placing through its formal depiction the architectural space in which the monks and their guests dined en abîme. In 1797, after the occupation of Venice, Napoleon seized the painting as spoils of war. Because of its size, the work was dismantled, cut up and re-assembled for the Louvre, where it still hangs today.

The graves of dimbaza and the empire of liberation

This paper focuses on the ambiguous, contradictory and montaged space of Dimbaza in the former Ciskei bantustan of the Eastern Cape, figured simultaneously as homeland resettlement village, betterment rural township, decentralised industrialisation showcase, site of political banishment, international symbol of apartheid difference and as graveyard of the racially discarded, among others. Drawing on empire as the dependent space to command sovereignty, the paper considers Dimbaza in terms of South African empire. While it is suggested that as a means to re-figure the South African political, the bantustan may be read as a mark of a South African empire ‘project’, the paper is more concerned to ‘think with empire as a theoretical concept’. The paper draws on the elements of knowledge susceptible to being assembled by historical imagination – written documents, letters in the International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF) Collection, contemporary testimonies, and visual sources (including the important film documentary Last Grave at Dimbaza) – and which constitute or resist the native/racial/ethnic/African subject (and thus are seen to exemplify the racial spatial command of the sovereign). We assemble these in relation to seemingly antagonistic historical formulations, particularly ‘colonialism of a special type’ and the politics of exile and liberation. We propose that, rather than returning us to South African ‘empire’ as a totality, the term offers us multiple singularities that allow us to consider the imaginative formulation of the ‘empire of liberation’ as a dependent space that continues to command sovereignty within the ‘native question’.