Khatija Bibi Khan

The Kaiser's Holocaust: the coloniality of German's forgotten genocide of the Nama and the Herero of Namibia

The oft-quoted number of six million Jews who perished in the tragic event of the German Holocaust is probably approximately the same number of Africans who were killed in the Congo under King Leopold II, alone. This same number is much less than the total number of Africans who died as a result of direct and indirect colonial policies in Africa. Furthermore, Africans who lost lives during the Trans-Saharan and Trans-Atlantic slave trade are several millions more than the number of Jews who lost lives in the German Holocaust. To put it this way is not at all to minimize the suffering of the Jews. It is an attempt to reveal the unequal workings of the geopolitics of knowledge production because the catastrophe on Africans or blacks is hardly described as a holocaust in academic scholarship. This tendency to diminish the pain of Africans is not accidental; it reveals the devious workings of the phenomena of the coloniality of power. This paper uses and thinks with Olusoga and Erichsens book, The Kaisers Holocaust (2010), to manifest the features of the coloniality of power. The paper argues that in The Kaisers Holocaust, military expeditions by German colonists that led to direct colonial rule over the Nama and the Herero constitute the first aspect of the coloniality of power. The conditions of starvation and overworking enforced on the Nama and the Herero, which led to the extermination of these African populations, make up the second aspect of the coloniality of Germanys power. And, how the mass murder of the Nama and the Herero in particular, and the brutal killings of Africans in colonial Africa are reported and have come to be described as massacres, or genocide and not holocaust demonstrates the manifestation of the third pillar of the coloniality of power in European scholarship that names Africans as less human or Other.

Reading the Zimbabwean National Anthem as Political Biography in the Context of Crisis

Summary The aim of this article is to render thinkable the idea of reading the Zimbabwean national anthem, Simudzai Mureza weZimbabwe, as a political biography. Biographies are peoples lives narrated by others. However, the act of writing the lives of the nation in the form of an anthem, and then projecting these experiences as epitomising the lives of the individuals within the nation, is in fact marked by a disjuncture. This happens because by their very nature, acts of narrating individual or collective identities should always be viewed as approximations of that lived reality. Furthermore, national anthems as wish lists are based on some selected themes deemed of national importance by others and not everybody. This problem is at the heart of reading the Zimbabwean national anthem as a political biography. This article argues that if it is remembered that the lyrics of Simudzai Mureza weZimbabwe were composed by a literary figure, and selected and adopted by the Government of Zimbabwe, amongst other compositions, then there is reason to believe that there are, from that competition, some versions of the national anthem that were turned down, whose lyrical content Zimbabweans may never come to know of. Read from this “subversive” perspective, the Zimbabwean national anthem is a political biography “complete in its incompleteness” or incomplete in it completeness.2 2The formulation that a text says more in what it does not say than in what it says suggests that there cannot be any text that can claim to be total, whole, or complete. For further elaboration of this concept see Macherey (1978).

Constructing nationalist masculine identities: heroism and legitimacy in Joshua Nkomo's 'The Story of my Life'

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to use the issues of legitimacy and heroic identities as a focus to demonstrate the inextricability of the form and content of a text. First, the article briefly outlines Joshua Nkomos biography, then it examines the self-narration in his memoir, The story of my life (2001). To a lesser extent and for comparative purposes, Edgar Tekeres, A lifetime of struggle (2007) is discussed. Both writers were instrumental in building an independent Africa. In this article, the interplay between the imagination of the public and the imagination of the narrators, resulting in complicity with or rejection of the masculine identity created in the narration, is interrogated. Secondly, the workings and role of memory in life narratives are analysed. Characterisation in autobiography is also examined by interrogating motives in political action and self-report, setting, relationships, embodiment, genealogy and heredity, socio- economic background and historical forces, educational background, individual will and self-assertion.

Gangsta tales, culture, Christianity, American Islam and the re-formation of Muslim identities in black American hip-hop music: Scarface

Abstract This paper explores the role of the religion of Islam as a site from which black American singers have drawn cultural resources to mould enduring identities of the self and black community. The paper explores some songs by Scarface, the black American artist who has accepted religious hybridity as the condition of possibility for emerging personal and collective black communities’ identities in a globalised cultural context. The songs of Scarface have been sampled because they all proclaim a relation with Islam, whether in practice or through the songs created. Therefore, purposive sampling has been used as the method or unit of analysis. However, there is also the academic debate to be addressed in the paper, and this relates to how religion has structured and filtered the experiences of American hip-hop artists; its converse also relates to how the singers have selectively appropriated some concepts from Islam and transformed them in their composition to arrive at new levels of defining the self within the black communities using the cultural and spiritual grip provided by Islam and Christian values.

Decolonising the ‘epistemic decolonial turn’ in women's fiction: Tsitsi Dangarembga's She No Longer Weeps (1987) and Federico Garcia Lorca's Dona Rosita the Spinister (2008)

The aim of this article is to participate in the debate on the ‘epistemic decolonial turn’ that is popularised in Latin America, and has found succour in some African universities despite the fact that its origin is in Western Europe. The article does not intend to be exhaustive of all the orphic dimensions to this debate; rather, we intent to raise questions on the suitability and timing of the introduction of this debate in Africa and Latin America because we think that this debate could very well be another form of intellectual structural adjustment programme being imposed, time without end on Africa and Latin America by western and North American intellectuals. We are aware that we are implicated in furthering the debate by our very participation in it. However, the article intents to reveal the aporetic narratives within the debate as conducted in Africa and Latin America. The article uses the works of Tsitsi Dangarembgas She No Longer Weeps (1987) and Federico Garcia Lorcas Dona Rosita the Spinister (2008). If anyone protests that our primary sources are few, we are the first to answer in the affirmative, but argue humbly that we do not need 100 novels to show that a theoretical ‘turn’ such as is implied in the auspicious phrase ‘epistemic decolonial turn’ is an ideological position, in transition, not finished, unsettled, work-in-progress that is bound to produce narratives that are more fractured than the stabilised ‘turn’ implied in the term. Multiple turns can be imagined and authorised from unexpected cultural sites when ‘decolonial turns’ are conceptualised as self-reflexive. A reading of Dangarembgas She No Longer Weeps (1987) set in Zimbabwe and Lorcas Dona Rosita the Spinister (2008) – another dramatic text but – set in Granada requires that the ‘epistemic decolonial turn’ be ‘decolonised’ because the concepts excessive privileging of formerly colonised mens theoretical voices threatens to occlude and then generalise on the voices of women in the Third and First worlds by projecting these voices as ideologically even. The article argues that the coloniality of power can inhabit the structures of feeling of the very intellectuals seeking to further the debate, about which the ‘decolonial turn’ is meant to be effected in the name of ordinary people. To argue in this manner is not to succumb to reckless despair; it is to caution against reckless theoretical hope overzealously displayed by some African academics who uncreatively import the debate into Africa, forcing Africans to fight an intellectual war which may not – after all – be a war that Africans have chosen for themselves.

Signifying the monkey: rhetorical modes of expressions in African American music: the case of KRS-One

Abstract This article analyses the language techniques, styles and musical rhetorical devices that KRS-One uses when he manipulate Islamic cultural symbols in his songs. The question of musical style and the uses to which literary language is deployed in songs distinguishes the African American traditions from many other world cultures. Coming from slavery, black people leant too early that it was possible to compose the features of their language and manipulate their cultural symbols in such ways that one linguistic voice seemed to placate the plantation owners, while another subversive register was embedded in specific language usages that the dominant power could not always detect and then police. The language of this music is broad and its range encompasses the deployment of strategies of call and response, battling, alliteration, assonance, dissonance, exhortation/proclamation, allegory, narrative, referencing time, space, historical dates and signifying. Each of these techniques or musical styles creates its own meanings that questions master narratives whether these are the racialised discourses of white America, the self-destructive politics of crime within African American communities or the quest for alternative values in embracing Muslim identities. It will be demonstrated that the particular attention that KRS-One gives to his use of language is meant to serve ideological functions. Style in the music of KRS-One is not used for the sake of simply showing his mastery of the rhetorical strategies available in the popular culture within black American communities.

Girls of War and Echoes of Liberation: Engaging Female Voices through Chimurenga Songs about Zimbabwe’s Armed Struggle

ABSTRACT Scholarship on war songs in Zimbabwe tends to emphasise male-centred discourses that ignore the role of female combatants’ views and voices of the struggle in “narrating the nation” (with H. K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration, 1990). The aim of this article is to restore female voices by female combatants to convey their own realities about Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle. Although there are many songs sung by women about the armed struggle, this article samples three songs to demonstrate that women used different methods to raise people’s political consciousness through the power of song. The songs to be textually analysed are “Zvinozibwa neZANU” (“Only ZANU knows about it”); “Tora Gidi Uzvitonge” (“Take the gun and liberate yourself”) and “Kugarira Nyika Yavo” (“To defend their country”). This article will demonstrate how women singers broke the silence by fighting in the liberation of Zimbabwe through the gun and the song.

SOUTH AFRICA IN THE CINEMATIC IMAGINARY: THE STORY OF A WHITE YOUTH IN SKIN

The rapid production of films of diversity in post-1994 South Africa has unfortunately not been matched by critical works on film. Part of the reason is that some of the films recycle old themes that celebrate the worst in black people. Another possible reason could be that a good number of films wallow in personality praise, and certainly of Mandela, especially after his demise. Despite these problems of film criticism in post-1994 South Africa, it appears that some new critics have not felt compelled to waste their energy on analysing the Bantustan film – a kind of film that was made for black people by the apartheid system but has re-surfaced after 1994 in different ways. The patent lack of more critical works on film that engages the identities and social imaginaries of young and white South Africans is partly addressed in SKIN – a film that registers the mental growth and spiritual development of Sandra’s multiple selves. This article argues that SKIN portrays the racial neurosis of the apartheid system; and the question of identity affecting young white youths during and after apartheid is experienced at the racial, gender and sex levels.

‘VOICES’, MEANING AND ‘HETEROGLOSSIA’ IN PRISONERS OF HOPE (1995)

The documentary film Prisoners of Hope (1995) is a heart-rending account of 1 250 former political prisoners in the notorious Robben Island prison in South Africa. The aim of this article is to explore the narratives of Prisoners of Hope and in the process capture its celebratory mood and reveal the contribution that the prisoners made towards the realisation of a free South Africa. The documentary features interviews with Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, Ahmed Kathrada and other former inmates as they recall and recount the atrocities perpetrated by defenders of the apartheid system and debate the future of South Africa with its ‘new’ political dispensation led by blacks. A textual analysis of Prisoners of Hope will enable one to explore the human capacity to resist, commit oneself to a single goal and live beyond the horrors and traumas of an oppressive and dehumanising system.

“Breakthroughs”: Engaging Literary “Voices” of Women Writers from the Southern African Region

Summary The aim of this article is to critically engage women’s oral and literary productions from the southern Africa region. This article is christened “breakthroughs” for several reasons. First, it should be taken as a major breakthrough for women of southern Africa to have grouped together and speak with one “voice” by offering new and “fresh” ways of writing a variety of histories and narratives against the backdrop of the suffocating discourses of colonialism, neocolonialism, patriarchy, racism and sexism. The second breakthrough is derived from the desire of women to redress the imbalance in southern African literary and historical anthologies and accounts, given that writing and performing were and still are generally associated with men. Thus, writing and performance in this article are taken as “political” statements that women are making in the process of telling their stories rather than remaining cloistered in male-sanctioned discourses. The third breakthrough is located within the Pan-African spirit informing the “Women Writing Africa Project”, which draws exclusively from women’s experiences in West Africa, North Africa, East and southern Africa. Although this article purposively sampled the literary works of some women included in Volume I of the project, it is hoped that the analysis of the selected literary works shall be treated as one of the “major breakthroughs” in which works written “only” by women are brought under the academic spotlight.