Babel Unbound: Rage, Reason, and Re-Thinking Public Life 9781776145898, 9781776145904

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BABEL UNBOUND

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BABEL UNBOUND RAGE, REASON AND RETHINKING PUBLIC LIFE

EDITED BY LESLEY COWLING AND CAROLYN HAMILTON

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Published in South Africa by: Wits University Press 1 Jan Smuts Avenue Johannesburg 2001 www.witspress.co.za Compilation © Editors 2020 Chapters © Individual contributors 2020 Published edition © Wits University Press 2020 First published 2020 http://dx.doi.org.10.18772/22020055898 978-1-77614-589-8 (Paperback) 978-1-77614-593-5 (Hardback) 978-1-77614-590-4 (Web PDF) 978-1-77614-591-1 (EPUB) 978-1-77614-592-8 (Mobi) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978. Project manager: Simon Chislett Copyeditor: Alison Lockhart Proofreader: Lisa Compton Indexer: Tessa Botha Cover design: Hothouse Typeset in 10 point Minion Pro

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Lesley Cowling and Carolyn Hamilton1

CHAPTER 1 Rethinking Public Engagement — Carolyn Hamilton

and Lesley Cowling 

CHAPTER 2 Tracing Public Engagements in Visual Forms

— Carolyn Hamilton, Litheko Modisane and Rory Bester 

CHAPTER 3 Media Orchestration in the Production of Public Debate

— Lesley Cowling and Pascal Newbourne Mwale 

CHAPTER 4 Fluid Publics: The public-making power of hashtags in digital

public spaces — Indra de Lanerolle 

CHAPTER 5 ‘Now We See Him, Now We Don’t’: The media and the

‘Black Pimpernel’ — Litheko Modisane 

CHAPTER 6 Archive and Public Life — Carolyn Hamilton  CHAPTER 7 Iconic Archive: Timbuktu and its manuscripts in public

discourse — Susana Molins Lliteras 

CHAPTER 8 The Politics of Representation in Marikana:

21 40 64 88 105 125 144

A tale of competing ideologies — Camalita Naicker 

183

CHAPTER 9 Art-Rage and the Politics of Reconciliation — Nomusa Makhubu 

215

CHAPTER 10 Anger, Pain, and the Body in the Public Sphere — Anthea Garman 

239

CONTRIBUTORS INDEX

261 265

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

B

abel Unbound has its roots in the Constitution of Public Intellectual Life Research Project, which ran from 2004 to 2008 at the University of the Witwatersrand, and the Media and Public Debate project, a student research focus in the Wits Journalism programme. The book drew on the ideas and research developed in the collaborative work of the core group of Public Intellectual Life, which consisted of Rory Bester, Lesley Cowling, Anthea Garman, Carolyn Hamilton, Litheko Modisane, Pascal Mwale, Alan Finlay and, in its first phase, Yvette Greslé and Windsor Leroke. The four-year project was supported by Atlantic Philanthropies and the generous engagement of many Wits colleagues – most especially, Isabel Hofmeyr, Shireen Hassim and Leon de Kock. The Wits Journalism student researchers of the Media and Public Debate project, supervised by Lesley Cowling and Carolyn Hamilton, also shaped our thinking by contributing to scholarship on the topic. They included Nikiwe Bikitsha, Nazeem Dramat, Rebecca Kahn, Refiloe Lepere, Itumeleng Mahabane, Philile Masango, Taryn McKay, Vuyo Mthembu, Sibusiso Nkomo, Favour Nunoo, Shirona Patel, Nomzamo Petje, Magali Reinert, Henk Rossouw, Rehana Rossouw and Kenichi Serino. We benefited also from productive discussions in the Archive and Public Culture Research Development Workshop at the University of Cape Town and from the comments of our anonymous reviewers. The book project received financial support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Research Foundation and the research offices of the universities of Cape Town and the Witwatersrand.

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Introduction Lesley Cowling and Carolyn Hamilton

I

t has been an article of faith in modern societies that in order to live together, we need to talk to one another. The premise is that, through dialogue, communities can mediate different needs, solve pressing problems, decide on leaders and come to some consensus on issues that confront collective life. Public life is rich with activity: arguments expertly laid out in formal arenas, spectacles that unsettle our taken-for-granted convictions, and nuanced cultural engagements designed to provoke reflection. But this imagined foundation for how we live collectively seems to have suffered a dramatic collapse. All over the world, dialogue seems impossible across partisan politics and religious divides. Many societies appear to have lost the capacity to solve problems through talk – whether deciding on responses to international crises, such as climate change, human rights abuses and nuclear proliferation, or resolving local issues closer to home. This situation has evoked global confusion and alarm, with analysts unable to fully explain the multiple disruptions to public life. The future of public discussion as a mediating force in society cannot be taken for granted. And the stakes are high. Arguably, the greatest challenge of our times is how we address the global climate emergency in this context, a problem that requires collective engagement and decision-making on a global level. Political philosopher Achille Mbembe delineates the end of a world in which the articles of faith of modern democracies have held sway. For Mbembe, politics is increasingly a street fight in which reason and facts matter less and less: ‘Whether civilisation can give rise to any form of political life is the problem of the 21st century.’1 Such concerns are becoming the substance of public conversations about a crisis that prevails across much of the world. Information, evidence and facts needed to inform decisions and choices cannot be relied upon. Indeed, the recognised spaces of political life seem largely to have been ceded to global capitalism: states, their sovereignty eroded, are everywhere ‘captured’ by economic interests. ‘Capture’ refers to the reach of power into democratic institutions in order to make them vehicles to advantage political cronies and elites, rather than the broad ‘people’.2 The media, for so long considered the fourth estate of political life, are

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BABEL UNBOUND

overrun with stories of scandal, corruption and celebrity diversions, and swamped by a deluge of untested information and algorithmic data. In many societies, there is indignation, anger and outrage flowing from experiences of deep inequality in situations in which the underlying moral order promises formal equality.3 The idea of society existing for the mutual benefit of individuals and based on a presumption of equality has long dominated global social imaginaries of how we live together. ‘Exactly what is meant by equality will vary, but that it must be affirmed in some form follows from the rejection of [the pre-democratic] hierarchical order.’4 There is, however, a contradiction at the heart of modernity in that the free market, with its focus on the maximisation of profit, works against the realisation of an egalitarian society. The extent of the failures in how we mediate collective life shows how crucial it is to understand the workings of the taken-for-granted and ever-present processes of public engagement, in all their multiple and sometimes unrecognised forms. Public engagements can, for instance, include expert discussions on health, gender and equity policies – the classic ‘public debate’ with its links to citizenship and democracy and the requirement for informed argument – but also social media battles over whether to vaccinate your child, protests against rape by women baring their bodies or photographic exhibitions and performance art. In many societies, the very terms of debate about collective life are being contested. This has been starkly visible in global protests in the last decade, from the Occupy movement in the United States to the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) in France.5 In South Africa, the #RhodesMustFall movement inaugurated what became a national demand for a free, decolonised, quality education in 2015 and 2016.6 Student protesters made a point of challenging not only what the universities were doing in terms of curriculum and hiring policies, but also the terms on which debate and discussion could take place in and about the university. Where the universities sought to insist that debate should take place in designated forums, with points raised, listened to and argued with, protesters asserted that these forums were governed by white cultural norms, conventions and assumptions that prejudiced them and dismissed their concerns. Similarly, student movements in the United States have actively contested what discussions can take place in classrooms, through requests for trigger warnings on potentially upsetting content and tactics such as the circulation of recorded footage of lecturers on social media. Race and gender concerns – and issues of identity – are key to these contestations. In many cases, the very archives that are used to establish the histories that underpin contemporary analyses are challenged. Many youth and social movements across the globe have disengaged from what they see as captured establishment processes, such as the ‘mainstream media’, 2 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:55:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Introduction

elections, debate and negotiation. This was evident in the rise of the Occupy movement, which described itself as ‘a leaderless resistance movement’ – ‘the 99 percent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent’.7 The loose association of diverse local groups that made up the movement shared concerns about how global corporations, political elites and financial systems disproportionately benefit a minority and shape outcomes that make a mockery of the very notion of democracy. The hallmark of the Occupy movement was the strategy of physically occupying spaces of power, such as the financial district in New York, rather than opposition through dialogue and debating. We have seen this repeated across the world (for another example, the gilets jaunes) and yet have little understanding of how such public engagements arise, how they play out and what they contribute. Amid these disruptions, the old ways of mediating collective life – through public discussion of one kind or another – seem to be falling away, overtaken by a new order of public spectacle, combativeness, hate speech and even violence. Autonomous media networks operate as ‘echo chambers’ or ‘filter bubbles’, in which information and opinions targeted to the participants’ entrenched beliefs are circulated.8 In the current ‘post-truth’ environment, cherry-picked data and misinformation are used to achieve political outcomes. However, there are also strong attempts by various institutions and the established media to push back against this trend. These features of the contemporary condition have elicited much comment and a flurry of research on issues such as social media practices, fake news and Internetbased political interference, as well as how they fuel populist movements and enable new forms of popular protest and direct action. This book takes a step back from concerns about current social media ills and their political effects to examine critically the underlying dynamics of public engagement and how they operate, both in the now and over a longer stretch of history. In so doing, it does some of the groundwork necessary to begin to think in new ways about active, thoughtful, diverse participation in political and public life. Among the multiple approaches that attempt to theorise public discussion, the concept of the public sphere has been compelling in its evocation of a circle of citizens debating the way forward for a nation. Jürgen Habermas was a foremost exponent of the idea of öffentlichkeit – perhaps best translated from the German as ‘publicness’ – as an enabling process of democracy, a space between the people and the state in which public opinion is formed.9 In his configuration, citizens of nations and of the world debate – in public – issues important to their communities, express their concerns, marshal evidence and arguments to persuade others and hold the powerful to account. 3 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:55:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Regarded as an enabling process of democracy, the idea of the public sphere has animated a wide range of social processes and underpinned many state institutions. Some argue that the system of democracy depends upon it. As Geoff Eley pointed out in 2002, it has long provided a key rationale for the operations of civil society: ‘In contemporary discourse, “the public sphere” now signifies the general questing for democratic agency in an era of declining electoral participation, compromised sovereignties, and frustrated or disappointed citizenship. The term is called upon wherever people come together for collective exchange and expression of opinion, aiming both for a coherent enunciation and the transmission of messages onward to parallel or subordinate bodies.’10 Habermas later became a proponent of deliberative democracy, the idea that problems can be solved by ‘the better argument’ and that certain kinds of debate are crucial to the process of discussion.11 However, as has been vividly demonstrated across the world, the ideal does not live up to its promise. Discussion does not necessarily lead to solutions; public opinion does not necessarily influence the state; collective exchange does not result in the exertion of democratic agency. On closer inspection, the very concept of the public sphere seems inadequate to capture the range of discussions and public engagements that go on in contemporary democracies and their entanglement in operations of power. The notion of the public sphere, with its focus on debating forums, proves to be a narrow lens on how ideas emerge, develop form, gather charge and spread. This book widens the focus to include the workings of public engagements in other settings and forms, looking at the ways in which ideas move and how the networks in which they circulate are produced. To understand the dynamics, we try to get up close and track the circulation of ideas, big and small, in action in social and political life. This approach allows us to describe processes that seem instrumental to recent developments – the apparent collapse of what has long been thought of as the public sphere. The idea of the public sphere was theorised on the back of European historical developments and political philosophy, and emerged as a normative ideal in the development of those democracies. The chapters in this volume offer alternative ways of thinking about publicness in contemporary society, which are theorised from outside Europe and the United States, but are relevant well beyond the authors’ specific locations, mostly in southern Africa. What we offer is not just a set of ‘southern’ facts glossing ‘northern’ theory, but fresh theorising based on events, experiences and thinking that differ significantly from those – mostly from Europe– that gave rise to public sphere theory. *** 4 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:55:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Introduction

This book extends the initial work by a research project, the Constitution of Public Intellectual Life, which ran from 2004 to 2008 at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.12 In the early 2000s, the utopian romance of liberation and reconciliation that had characterised the first decade of the new South African democracy had given way to an acrimonious discourse of exclusions: questions of who was an ‘authentic’ citizen, who had the right to speak, and about what, dominated (and inhibited) public discussion. These debates – fuelled by the combative presidency of Thabo Mbeki, Nelson Mandela’s successor – were marked by suspicion, ad hominem attacks and assumptions of bad faith. South African public deliberation seemed to be increasingly corralled by the very institutions set up to facilitate it.13 Simultaneously, President Mbeki’s self-conscious intellectualism and his insistence on criticising the established figures and forms of public discussion raised takenfor-granted processes of public engagement for consideration.14 The researchers in the Constitution of Public Intellectual Life were interested in what these manifestations could mean for South Africa’s democracy and the ideals of public discussion that underpinned it. The project investigated the conditions that promoted or disabled complexity in public deliberation in South Africa. The research was informed by the need to grapple explicitly with the challenges of extreme inequality and legacies of racial discrimination – which had seen the centuries-long sidelining of black intellectual publics – in a democracy founded on an idea of social equality.15 This resulted in a conference in 2008 and two volumes of the journal Social Dynamics in 2009 and 2010.16 The articles on a range of engagements and forms (talk radio, documentary photography, debates on witchcraft, museums, anti-privatisation forums, discussions of samesex equality) recast questions of publics and the operations of public deliberation within the context of a post-colonial state. The research findings showed the limits of notions of the public sphere and counterpublics, and drew attention to the range of elements at play in convening – or corralling – what was imagined as the public sphere, in the process excluding certain voices and forms of engagement and foregrounding others. They also revealed the extensiveness of other forms of public engagement circulating in and out of, and beyond, the constrained public sphere. The research drew attention to the ambiguity and mobility of these public interventions.17 A decade later, we have the advantage of a longer view. We can see how analysis of the workings of public intellectual engagement and public discussion in the early 2000s prefigured what is needed for investigating public engagement, not only in South Africa, but also globally. Indeed, it is the contention of this book that many of the processes of public engagement that we currently think of as new were 5 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:55:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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operating before the mid-2000s, but were contained by the overarching dominance of the institutions and operations of what is imagined as ‘the public sphere’. In this volume, we ask how ideas about mediating collective life emerge, gather force, become potent, enforce or challenge the status quo, hibernate, disappear or get routed. We look at how this has happened historically and how it is happening now. We draw primarily on insights and materials from Africa for their capacity to speak to global developments. Concepts and methods first developed by the Constitution of Public Intellectual Life emerge as useful to the analysis of publicness elsewhere. The exercise in theorising the southern African experience in the 2000s proved prescient in revealing the extent of the ‘capture’ of public engagement. It continues to be productive in generating insights into activity beyond the imagined public sphere and its linked counterpublic spheres. In certain cases, the value of theorising off ‘southern’ conditions lies in how that focus highlights features of publicness shared with Europe and the United States, which are less visible in those contexts and are sometimes passed over, but which emerge in a sharply etched way in former colonial and settler societies such as South Africa. The Constitution of Public Intellectual Life grappled with, and moved beyond, the Habermasian notion of the public sphere as a space between the people and the state in which public opinion can be formed. Although the notion of public sphere operationalises public institutions, media, legal jurisprudence and national protests, the unitary space that the term ‘public sphere’ conjures in the imagination dissolves when looked for in the physical world. And, all the time, ‘offstage’ as it were, other processes of publicness are taking place, other concerns are being mobilised for debate. The Constitution of Public Intellectual Life project thus abandoned the ‘public sphere’ as a static spatial concept, paying attention rather to how ideas and public engagement move, sometimes gathering enough potency to burst into wider significance, sometimes coalescing in spaces or forms, sometimes part of media that constitute publics. Rather than a ‘sphere’, with its connotations of a unitary and fixed physical space, the project conceptualised publicness as a capillaried network in which ideas are constantly circulating. The first four chapters of this book lay out the key concepts and theoretical moves that underpin its arguments, while the chapters that follow demonstrate how notions of publicness and public engagement play out in both historical and contemporary circumstances. The book does not aim to be comprehensive in its coverage of the spaces and forms of contemporary public engagements. Rather, its combination of conceptual and methodological discussions and case studies offers an opportunity for rethinking and theorising public activity. It is our hope, as editors, that the book 6 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:55:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Introduction

provides an analysis of public engagements and their dynamics which is so urgently needed today to rethink the mediation of collective life. The opening chapter by Carolyn Hamilton and Lesley Cowling locates the public sphere as a normative idea at the heart of how democracy is imagined to work. The power of the public sphere as an imaginary can be seen in the ways in which ideas of civil society and the public sphere have been crucial to global experiments in democracy, which surged after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. As Dilip Gaonkar writes of that time: ‘If civil society was made up of nongovernmental institutions that create a buffer between the market and the state, the idea of the public sphere seemed to identify and promote those institutions that were crucial for the development of democratic debate and will formation.’18 The chapter argues that what is imagined as the public sphere is actively convened in a way that shapes the nature of public deliberation and the extent of this convening is what drives counterpublic positioning. Because the public sphere is a key social imaginary, people whose issues are marginalised in the core sphere constitute themselves into counterpublic spheres in order to have an impact in the core public sphere. But ideas of the public sphere and of counterpublics can be conceptually limiting, obscuring how engagements move across time and space, and the processes by which ideas are launched, circulate and are engaged with in public life. Engagements can appear to take place in spheres – whether unitary or subaltern, or even multiple ‘sphericules’ operating separately from each other – but when they are tracked, they are seen to be working in wide-ranging, networked ways.19 Our purpose in this book is not to overturn ideas of spheres and counterpublic spheres, but to bring to the fore networks of circulation of ideas across time and space, in order to grasp what they effect, and how they in turn are affected, and to understand what this means for public engagement. This book identifies forms of engagement that happen well beyond what is imagined as the public sphere or as a counterpublic sphere. It shows how the concept of circulation, drawn from Michael Warner, opens up public engagement and the creation of publics for analysis.20 Such ‘publicness’ involves a complex set of processes. The first chapter argues that publicness is by nature moving and dispersed, circulating through networks, fragmenting into ‘capillaries’ and sometimes thickening into nodes of public engagement. The idea of ‘capillaries’ references Michel Foucault’s notion of capillaries of power for a reason.21 If we are to understand the function of public discussion as a form of democratic engagement, we need to grapple with issues of power. An important proposition of this book is that any analysis of publicness must cross fields and intersect disciplinary approaches in order to grasp the complexity 7 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:55:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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of what is at play. The second chapter, by Carolyn Hamilton, Litheko Modisane and Rory Bester, exemplifies this in the way it describes networks of engagement that cross not only in and out of what have been conceptualised as spheres (the public sphere, counterpublic spheres and subaltern spheres), but also fields (the media field, art field, cultural field, and so on). It shows how visual forms, such as films, documentary photographs and exhibitions, contribute to public debate, revealing how they extend beyond so-called public spaces of cinemas, exhibition venues and discussion panels, engaging with many who never enter those spaces. Such forms create, and then flow along, capillaries of public engagement that criss-cross multiple terrains, in a manner radically different from how the deliberative operations of a public sphere are conventionally conceptualised. Chapter 2 develops a methodology for tracking the circulation of both the visual forms and the many ways in which they are taken up over time. It shows how such forms constitute publics and operate in public life in ways not readily recognised by theoretical approaches focused on written texts and news media, as well as those that deal with audiences or reception. It is an implication of this chapter that its insights are not confined to visual forms, but that they apply equally to verbal forms. Looking deliberately at the circulation of ideas in the 1980s and 1990s, before the rise of the Internet age, chapter 2 reveals capillaries of engagement in action that challenge arguments about informal webs of engagement being the result of new media forms of communication. It is one of a number of chapters with substantial historical reach that are helpful in offering perspectives on claims about what is actually novel in contemporary developments concerning publicness and what is now either simply more obvious or more vexed. The concepts of the public sphere and counterpublic sphere outlined in chapter 1 are essentially ideas about how public deliberation works now, even though it is acknowledged that such spheres have their own histories and change over time. In the established literature, these concepts are typically described using spatial metaphors, as rounded and inclusive, or scattered into separate sphericules, or as spaces for communication.22 By way of contrast, chapter 2 offers conceptual and methodological tools for looking at how, across time, certain engagements take shape beyond what their initiators might have imagined, changing in the process and shaping public life. The variety of processes involved exceed the boundaries of any static deliberative public spheres at any particular points in time: public life is always shaped both by its specific histories and future possibilities. The approach thus focuses attention on the temporalities of publicness. The chapter’s long historical reach allows for a conceptualisation of the ways in which ideas germane to the mediation of collective life move in and out of archival states. This invites 8 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:55:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Introduction

theorisation of the relationship between archive and public discourse beyond the limited notion of history servicing political agendas. The chapter thus inaugurates the distinctive focus of the volume of paying attention to both the (multi-) mediatisation of public deliberation and the role of archives in public discourse. In relation to current crises, the production and circulation of fake news and the manipulation of public opinion have come under intense scrutiny. A host of new studies and investigations have identified a variety of ways in which covert agents or commercial interests – operating online – shape public discussion.23 Commentators have flagged the diminished gatekeeping power of established news media, and the rise of competing social media forums, as the cause of many current ills in public discourse.24 Media research has also shown changes in the business model of news organisations, in how journalists function and in how audiences are constituted. Chapter 3, by Lesley Cowling and Pascal Newbourne Mwale, argues that the so-called mainstream media are still influential in shaping both the dynamics and content of public discussion in ways that are not well understood. A subject little discussed in journalism scholarship is how opinion, analysis and the dynamics of debate are produced. For the most part, analyses assume that the same procedures and processes produce news as produce opinion or commentary, both in traditional news products and online journalism. Chapter 3 probes these assumptions, showing how forms of media production create interventions in broader public discussions, set the agenda for what is discussed and, importantly, shape how it is discussed. Cowling and Mwale argue that normative perspectives on public deliberation direct the established media to provide a space for debate in society and allow the participation of a range of diverse voices and views – in effect, to operate as an organ of the convened public sphere – and that many media still operate according to those norms. The chapter shows that senior journalists take this on as an important responsibility and opinion, analysis and debate are actively produced through the routines and processes of newsrooms. This means not only allowing a range of issues, voices and positions into media debate, and excluding others, but also paying direct attention to the dynamics of how the debate takes place, a process the chapter characterises as ‘orchestration’. Orchestration, and the way newsroom gatekeepers and routines generally shape the dynamics of debate, have previously been little recognised in the journalism literature. Chapter 3 shows that orchestrating in particular ways produces certain kinds of public discussion, sometimes coming close to fulfilling normative ideas of ‘debating’ in a rational, critical way. Orchestration also constitutes publics, excluding some sectors of society and certain ideas, in ways not taken into account by public sphere theory or media scholarship. On the other hand, a failure to orchestrate can lead 9 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:55:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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to what Mwale has called ‘babelisation’, a form of talk that has people talking over and at each other and that fails to address the issue under discussion in a substantive way.25 Babelisation is often cacophonous, confusing and disabling of discussion. Sometimes the cacophony benefits no one, but at other times it can assist certain parties to be heard or allow something entirely new to move into view, noisily constituting new publics and even new lines of deliberative activity. The chapter thus argues that how opinion is produced facilitates certain kinds of debate and, over time, the routine production of opinion and debate creates publics. The Internet and social media platforms have been significant over the last 20 years in enabling new publics to be formed and creating possibilities for audiences formerly on the receiving end of opinion to participate in discussion. In chapter 4, Indra de Lanerolle argues that the many technologies now incorporated into social life not only create new publics and allow new voices to be heard, but have also created different public practices, sometimes at the expense of other kinds of practices. Mass communication, traditionally operating as public, and interpersonal communication, thought of as private, now interact in an unstable relationship to each other. Exploring the role of ‘hashtag publics’ in the #FeesMustFall student movement, he highlights what he terms ‘fluid publics’ and suggests that this fluidity requires us to consider stepping beyond thinking of publics and counterpublics to looking for the ebbs and flows of publicness in the networked life of individuals and groups. In chapter 5, the first of a series of chapters that help us to gain a historical view of the dynamics of publicness, Litheko Modisane shows that the kinds of features of publicness De Lanerolle identifies in contemporary social media have long been constitutive of publicness. He does this through a discussion of the media and Nelson Mandela as the ‘Black Pimpernel’ and how Mandela shifts in and out of public view through the media. He shows that the production and circulation of ideas about Mandela – the ‘Mandela myth’ – can be traced to the late 1950s and early 1960s, not the late 1970s as, he notes, is often claimed. Specifically, this chapter explores how press presentations of Mandela as the elusive Black Pimpernel, as sometimes larger than life and as sometimes absent – ‘now we see him, now we don’t’– generated extensive public discussion. This mediation of Mandela, uneven though it was, and his relative absence from public life, reinforced the power and reach of his persona. Modisane alerts us to the way in which issues of pressing public significance coalesce around public figures. These figures, while often important political actors in their own right, can also operate as devices for the staging of public discussions about broader issues. As the Black Pimpernel in the press, Mandela became a point of seepage between racially separated black and white deliberative publics, each 10 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:55:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Introduction

curtailed in their activities by repressive legislation in late 1950s and early 1960s South Africa. Modisane marks how apartheid negated blackness to the point of reproducing it as a sign of absence. He shows how a double absence – the absence constituted by apartheid’s negation of blackness as well as the specific absence from public life at this time of the fugitive Mandela – entered Mandela into the imagined public sphere that apartheid reserved for white citizens. The chapter thus develops the counter-intuitive point that absence can generate publicness – and indeed public potency – just as surely as presence. Using the racially exaggerated conditions of apartheid, Modisane not only contributes a historical case study to an understanding of the nature of wider global absences of black life in the social imaginary of the public sphere. He also reveals something of how the presence of absence becomes a mode of breaching powerful public sphere exclusions. It does this in a manner that resonates with and offers a theoretical foundation for understanding how the presence of absence has moved issues of race, racism and blackness into the heart of contemporary public deliberation. The public potency of absent presences resonates with the concept of incubation put forward in chapter 2. This concept recognises how hidden, cloistered or stored things, in one form or another, can in fact be active and even powerful in public life. The act of caching is an endorsement of the thing stored as being of potential future worth. The forms of storage are multiple: publication in books, e-records of various kinds, status-laden art and other collections and, most overtly, in archives. While commentators have had much to say about the role that media play in public deliberation, the role of archives and records and what they do in public life is surprisingly under-theorised. Against the backdrop of contemporary debates about the nature of truth and facts in public debate, chapter 6 grapples with the role of archives and records as arbiters of truth and their relationship to public discourse. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, archives have lost their status as neutral repositories, their capacity to authorise certain forms of knowledge and not others coming under fierce scrutiny. Challenges over the credibility of many established archives and other forms of records feed the politics of the current post-truth era and the way in which that politics engages with the past. The chapter uses three case studies – Mandela’s prison archive, the long history of the manuscript of a classical text (Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things) and the record of the narrations of a nineteenth-century African in KwaZulu-Natal (Socwatsha kaPhaphu) – to think about how archives operate in public life. It theorises the relationship between archives and public discourse, whether in the 11 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:55:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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form of absent or present archives. Rather than seeing archives as either neutral repositories of fact or the products of political bias, Carolyn Hamilton elucidates the role of archives in shaping public, political and academic discussion, and the role of public, political and academic discussion in shaping archives. Whereas for a long time archives have been understood to be banks of evidence drawn on to support or refute claims in debate, Hamilton posits a different understanding of the relationship between archives and deliberative activity, one of mutual constitution across time of archives and public, political and academic discourse and practice. Challenging long-standing assumptions about archives as inert storehouses, Hamilton positions them as key actors in the constitution of public life. The remaining chapters speak to critical issues raised in the opening chapters, some drawing on the methodology set up by chapter 2, some combining concepts from across the chapters, some using the current context to think about future possibilities, a number looking at historical cases in their own right and others exploring historical depth in even the most contemporary instances. In chapter 7 Susana Molins Lliteras focuses on a particularly ancient archive, the iconic African manuscript collection in Timbuktu, Mali. This chapter attends to how archives other than those of ‘Western civilisation’ have functioned in public life in the past and the role they play in contemporary public deliberations. In the same way as the discussion in chapter 6 of the records about Socwatsha kaPhaphu draws attention to deliberative processes and networks of communication that existed in sub-Saharan Africa prior to European colonialism, chapter 7 foregrounds the existence of a long-standing and geographically extensive Islamic public domain. The chapter sets itself the task of understanding the role of the Timbuktu archive as an international and African cultural treasure and as the object of attack by the al-Qaeda-linked rebels in 2012. Molins Lliteras offers a detailed account of the complex dynamics of the manuscripts’ multiple roles in public life, dating back to the 1200s. She looks at how the manuscripts themselves, as well as ideas about them, were mobilised across centuries in determining what collective life looked like, conferring status on some people and denying it to others, substantiating claims about identity and sustaining long-distance networks and relationships, garnering in the process enormous public potency. The Timbuktu archive is still used to enable conversations about local identities, a wider African identity and African epistemologies, and is under attack because of its potency and for its promise of always opening to alternative narratives beyond any prevailing orthodoxy. The final three chapters focus on forms and modes of contemporary public engagements. In chapter 8 Camalita Naicker draws attention to the mobilisation of an entirely different kind of archive, an archive of past political praxis, 12 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:55:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Introduction

in contemporary public engagement. She focuses on the 2012 massacre of 34 mineworkers at Marikana, South Africa, and its aftermath. The chapter tracks the public life of this event to reveal how the political discourse and practice of the miners was reframed by the press and by academics. The miners and their concerns were entered into public discussion first via media coverage of the protest action, strike and massacre and, secondly, through activists and academics who wrote papers and made documentaries about these events and their subsequent effects. The mining communities were made visible through the narratives of the news media that picked up on sensational and dramatic elements, such as the use of what are termed traditional weapons and medicines (muti), and then by academics, who inserted the story into a larger narrative of worker struggles, eliding aspects such as the use of muti and the symbolic practice of ‘going to the mountain’. Naicker shows that two forms of collective action were not seen by the media or academics and were then not made visible and discussed in public life. The first of these concerns how the miners organised themselves when they felt their union was no longer representing them, drawing on legacies of protest engagements, with deep roots in what was for a long time the underdeveloped, rural, ethnic homeland of the Transkei. The second form of collective action is how the women of Marikana subsequently organised themselves and the kinds of community and political structures they set up in the area. This chapter argues that the case of the Marikana miners demonstrates the extent to which certain kinds of protest and publics are excluded from the convened public sphere and even counterpublic forums, which seem unable to recognise and accommodate ways of addressing social issues outside liberal public sphere approaches. Naicker thus offers a glimpse of what Cowling and Hamilton conceptualise as a sequestered public sphere, characterised by vital forms of engagements and attempts to mediate collective life through reference to matters deemed, in the convened public sphere, to be irrelevant and atavistic in contemporary democratic politics. In chapter 9 Nomusa Makhubu examines how ‘art-rage’ confronts both the limits of an inherited archive and the boundaries of an authorised public sphere. The chapter engages with the raw sentiment of racial exclusion in South Africa that has been cloaked by post-liberation rhetoric of reconciliation, diversity and inclusiveness. Makhubu looks at the kinds of reconciliatory decisions that were taken about existing symbols and art in public spaces in the early post-1994 years and at how the politics of reconciliation have since come under review. She details how student leaders first sought, unsuccessfully, to engage the university in discussion about the artworks on display and about racial alienation in the institution. Angry student demonstrations in 2015–2016 then targeted public visual symbols and eschewed 13 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:55:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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university proscriptions on the subject and on the conduct of debate. Focusing on protests and actions concerning the University of Cape Town’s art collection, the chapter argues that the art that is contested and the art that is created to contest become potent discursive sites for the uneasy discussions and unconfronted truths about post-apartheid South Africa. In the final chapter, Anthea Garman notes that South Africa is going through a moment of political rupture, not so much with the apartheid or colonial past as with the immediate democratic past, which has failed to deliver on its promises. The resulting battles that have played out in public, Garman contends, are marked by a generational divide, wide use of social media to enter debates, a focus on who says what and why, intersectionality, the privileging of experience and emotions in discussion and demands for redress. These approaches, Garman argues, do not add up to a simple rejection of certain views, but a repudiation of established ‘regimes of truth’ that underpin what is sayable and who can say it. As with the preceding essay on ‘art-rage’, chapter 10 draws attention to evasions of the forms of convening public sphere activity and to rejections of accepted modes of the orchestration of debate. Garman suggests that an emphasis on listening, rather than a right to speak, can be a powerful contribution to public engagement. The last three chapters describe the mutability of protests and their associated public interventions, as groups that formed around the issues have dispersed, fragmented into contesting groupings, mutated into different forms of protest, or moved into the mainstream and were absorbed. The unexpected emergence of such public interventions, their ability to dominate attention and take centre stage, and then their seemingly mysterious disappearance, indicate how fluid and unpredictable contemporary public engagements can be. However, in certain instances, such contestations draw attention to specific issues that fail to attract attention in the convened and counterpublic spheres, sometimes getting them onto the public agenda. The fragmentation of the student groups of 2015–2016 into a number of contesting groupings arguably kept alive an ongoing conversation about race, gender, class and identity concerns.26 The collected chapters in this volume remind us of the range and extent of normative ideas about debate and deliberation: as having facing protagonists, as rational-critical, as backed up by agreed-upon forms of evidence and as taking place in an identified set of locations, recognised debating forums of various kinds. They also indicate how hegemonic understandings of deliberative democratic processes are being challenged in ways that extend well beyond what is imagined as the public sphere, or even any counterpublic spheres. However, looking at public engagement 14 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:55:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Introduction

across a long sweep of history, the chapters also indicate that what may appear at first to be features of public engagement specific to contemporary times were in fact present and important in earlier times. To make this point is not to ignore processes of change in the dynamics of public discussion, something that the long view also enables us to identify. The chapters in this book look in new ways at how what goes as fact in public deliberation is established and contested. In showing us how the media orchestrate debate, and how particular records of the past are shaped and reshaped, mobilised or eschewed in processes of public engagement, the chapters move beyond normative ideas of the impartiality of media, of records and of knowledge to understand their imbrication in public processes and political struggles. In so doing, they offer a perspective on the violent reactions of insurgent publics in denigrating media, burning archives and shutting down campuses, a revolt against the carefully convened public sphere and its claim to be the site of the mediation of collective life. Where the imagined public sphere suggests a central arena, with the attention on citizens actively deliberating, this book shows that absences, silences, listening, pauses, incubations, engagements not only through words but also through visual images and even bodies, networks of circulation both prescribed and uncharted, manual and web-enabled – and a host of other activities beyond any acknowledged public sphere – are critically important aspects of how we engage in the mediation of collective life. It is a contention of this book that this is not a new phenomenon, though the conditions that make it stand out so sharply are new. The inherited imaginary of the public sphere, with its emphasis on publics debating the way forward for their particular societies, bounded by the national formations in which they operate, and making decisions based on shared information, still propels a range of state processes and institutions. As Charles Taylor has noted, the idea of the public sphere knits together disparate discussions through the understanding of the participants that they are involved in a greater, collective discussion, which has a bearing on their collective life.27 However, at this moment of social and political rupture, participants may no longer accept that they are part of a greater, collective discussion or that a shared moral order exists. ‘When people are expelled from their old forms, through war, revolution, or rapid economic change’, breakdown occurs. To find their way, societies must transform their practices and connect them to new principles so as to have a viable social imaginary.28 It is no longer possible to proceed without paying close attention to the ruptures of collective engagement currently under way. This book suggests that we need to reimagine public deliberative activity, understanding it as a range 15 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:55:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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of sometimes unpredictable processes in capillaried networks that reach far beyond local and national concerns, processes that are no longer dominated by established institutions or bound by legacy conventions and processes. The public engagements once excluded from or contained by the convened public sphere have burst into visibility, actively competing with the old order and changing the ways we think public debate should operate. This is ‘Babel unbound’. Multiple forms of publicness range across the globe. And it is more important than ever for us to understand them.

NOTES Achille Mbembe, ‘The Age of Humanism is Ending’, Mail & Guardian, 22 December 2016, accessed 22 October 2019, https://mg.co.za/article/2016-12-22-00-the-age-ofhumanism-is-ending. 2 In South Africa, the term ‘state capture’ refers to state institutions being increasingly controlled by business interests and political cronies close to the ruling party. 3 On equality, see Charles Taylor, ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’, Public Culture 14, 1 (2002): 91–124. On anger, see Pankaj Mishra, The Age of Anger: A History of the Present (London: Allen Lane, 2017). 4 Taylor, ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’, 92. 5 See http://occupywallst.org and https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/03/ who-are-the-gilets-jaunes-and-what-do-they-want, accessed 22 October 2019. 6 Sandy Ndelu, Simamkele Dlakavu and Barbara Boswell, ‘Womxn’s and Nonbinary Activists’ Contribution to the RhodesMustFall and FeesMustFall Student Movements: 2015 and 2016’, Agenda 31, 3–4 (2017): 1–4. 7 See http://occupywallst.org, accessed 22 October 2019. 8 See Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You (London: Penguin, 2011); and Seth Flaxman, Sharad Goel and Justin M. Rao, ‘Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Online News Consumption’, Public Opinion Quarterly 80, S1 (2016): 298–320. 9 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 301. 10 Geoff Eley, ‘Politics, Culture, and the Public Sphere’, Positions 10, 1 (2002): 219–236. 11 Lincoln Dahlberg and Eugenia Siapera, ‘Introduction: Tracing Radical Democracy and the Internet’, in Radical Democracy and the Internet: Interrogating Theory and Practice, ed. Lincoln Dahlberg and Eugenia Siapera (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 8. 12 This book draws on ideas and research developed in the collaborative work of the core group of the Constitution of Public Intellectual Life Research Project and the continuing work of the Public Life of Ideas Network. See http://www.apc.uct.ac.za/apc/projects/ constitution, accessed 22 October 2019. 13 Carolyn Hamilton ‘Uncertain Citizenship and Public Deliberation in Post-apartheid South Africa’, Social Dynamics 35, 2 (2009): 355–374. 14 See ANC Today online at http://www.anc.org.za/docs/anctoday/2005/at02.htm#art1 and http://www.anc.org.za/content/anc-today-volume-5-no11-0, accessed 30 January 2018.

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For scholarship on black intellectual life in the colonial and apartheid eras, see Khwezi Mkhize, ‘To See Us as We See Ourselves: John Tengo Jabavu and the Politics of the Black Periodical’, Journal of Southern African Studies 44, 3 (2018): 413–430. Conference: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Public Sphere: South African Democracy at the Crossroads, University of the Witwatersrand (2008); Social Dynamics 35, 2 (2009) and Social Dynamics 36, 1 (2010). Carolyn Hamilton, Lesley Cowling and Isabel Hofmeyr, ‘Introduction’, Social Dynamics 35, 2 (2009): 346. Dilip Gaonkar, ‘Towards New Imaginaries: An Introduction’, Public Culture 14, 1 (2002): 2. Todd Gitlin, ‘Public Sphere or Public Sphericules?’ in Media, Ritual and Identity, ed. Tamar Liebes and James Curran (New York: Routledge, 1998), 168–174. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002). Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 39. Peter Dahlgren, ‘The Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication: Dispersion and Deliberation’, Political Communication 22, 2 (2005): 148–150. A William and Flora Hewlett Foundation report reviews scholarship on six topics: online political conversations; consequences of exposure to disinformation online; producers of disinformation; strategies and tactics of spreading disinformation; online content and political polarisation; and misinformation, polarisation and democracy. The report cites more than 340 studies, as of March 2018. See Joshua A. Tucker et al., Social Media, Political Polarization, and Political Disinformation: A Review of the Scientific Literature (Menlo Park, CA: William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, 2018), accessed 12 January 2019, https://hewlett.org/library/social-media-political-polarizationpolitical-disinformation-review-scientific-literature/. A number of in-depth journalistic investigations have also detailed covert and commercial interests operating online. See, for example, Craig Silverman, ‘How Teens in the Balkans are Duping Trump Supporters with Fake News’, BuzzFeed News, 3 November 2016, accessed 13 January 2019, https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-becamea-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo?utm_term=.flPZEnRRa#.vbmW27EEp; Daniel Swislow, ‘The Distributed Denial of Democracy: Coming Together to Address Antidemocratic Trolling and Disinformation Online’, Medium, 9 November 2016, accessed 13 January 2019, https://medium.com/@dswis/the-distributed-denial-of-democracy23ce8a3ad3d8; and Laurence Alexander, ‘Social Network Analysis Reveals Full Scale of Kremlin’s Twitter Bot Campaign’, Global Voices, 2 April 2015, accessed 13 January 2019, https://globalvoices.org/2015/04/02/analyzing-kremlin-twitter-bots/. See, for example, Katherine Viner, ‘How Technology Disrupted the Truth’, The Guardian, 12 July 2016, accessed 28 February 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/ jul/12/how-technology-disrupted-the-truth. Pascal Newbourne Mwale, ‘The Babelisation of Debate on GM Maize via the Media in Southern Africa in 2002’, Social Dynamics 36, 1 (2010): 112–121. For more on the student movements and their dynamics, see Ndelu, Dlakavu and Boswell, ‘Womxn’s and Nonbinary Activists’ Contribution’; Musawenkosi Ndlovu, #FeesMustFall and Youth Mobilisation in South Africa: Reform or Revolution? (London: Routledge, 2017); and Leigh-Ann Naidoo, ‘We Shall Not be Moved or Led Astray: The Emergence of the 2015 Student Movement’, New Agenda 60 (2015): 12–14. Taylor, ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’, 113. Taylor, ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’, 99. 17 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:55:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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REFERENCES Alexander, Laurence. ‘Social Network Analysis Reveals Full Scale of Kremlin’s Twitter Bot Campaign’. Global Voices, 2 April 2015. Accessed 13 January 2019. https://globalvoices. org/2015/04/02/analyzing-kremlin-twitter-bots/. Dahlberg, Lincoln and Eugenia Siapera. ‘Introduction: Tracing Radical Democracy and the Internet’. In Radical Democracy and the Internet: Interrogating Theory and Practice, edited by Lincoln Dahlberg and Eugenia Siapera, 1–16. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Dahlgren, Peter. ‘The Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication: Dispersion and Deliberation’. Political Communication 22, 2 (2005): 148–150. Eley, Geoff. ‘Politics, Culture, and the Public Sphere’. Positions 10, 1 (2002): 219–236. Flaxman, Seth, Sharad Goel and Justin M. Rao. ‘Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Online News Consumption’. Public Opinion Quarterly 80, S1 (2016): 298–320. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Gaonkar, Dilip. ‘Towards New Imaginaries: An Introduction’. Public Culture 14, 1 (2002): 1–19. Gitlin, Todd. ‘Public Sphere or Public Sphericules?’ In Media, Ritual and Identity, edited by Tamar Liebes and James Curran, 168–174. New York: Routledge, 1998. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. Hamilton, Carolyn. ‘Uncertain Citizenship and Public Deliberation in Post-apartheid South Africa’. Social Dynamics 35, 2 (2009): 355–374. Hamilton, Carolyn, Lesley Cowling and Isabel Hofmeyr. ‘Introduction’. Social Dynamics 35, 2 (2009): 345–347. Mbembe, Achille. ‘The Age of Humanism is Ending’. Mail & Guardian, 22 December 2016. Accessed 22 October 2019. https://mg.co.za/article/2016-12-22-00-the-age-ofhumanism-is-ending. Mishra, Pankaj. The Age of Anger: A History of the Present. London: Allen Lane, 2017. Mkhize, Khwezi. ‘To See Us as We See Ourselves: John Tengo Jabavu and the Politics of the Black Periodical’. Journal of Southern African Studies 44, 3 (2018): 413–430. Mwale, Pascal Newbourne. ‘The Babelisation of Debate on GM Maize via the Media in Southern Africa in 2002’. Social Dynamics 36, 1 (2010): 112–121. Naidoo, Leigh-Ann. ‘We Shall Not be Moved or Led Astray: The Emergence of the 2015 Student Movement’. New Agenda 60 (2015): 12–14. Ndelu, Sandy, Simamkele Dlakavu and Barbara Boswell. ‘Womxn’s and Nonbinary Activists’ Contribution to the RhodesMustFall and FeesMustFall Student Movements: 2015 and 2016’. Agenda 31, 3–4 (2017): 1–4. Ndlovu, Musawenkosi. #FeesMustFall and Youth Mobilisation in South Africa: Reform or Revolution? London: Routledge, 2017. Pariser, Eli. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You. London: Penguin, 2011. Silverman, Craig. ‘How Teens in the Balkans are Duping Trump Supporters with Fake News’. BuzzFeed News, 3 November 2016. Accessed 13 January 2019. https://www. buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trumpmisinfo?utm_term=.flPZEnRRa#.vbmW27EEp. Swislow, Daniel. ‘The Distributed Denial of Democracy: Coming Together to Address Antidemocratic Trolling and Disinformation Online’. Medium, 9 November 2016. Accessed 13 January 2019. https://medium.com/@dswis/the-distributed-denial-of-democracy23ce8a3ad3d8. 18 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:55:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Introduction

Taylor, Charles. ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’. Public Culture 14,1 (2002): 91–124. Tucker, Joshua A., Andrew Guess, Pablo Barberá, Cristian Vaccari, Alexandra Siegel, Sergey Sanovich, Denis Stukal and Brendan Nyhan. Social Media, Political Polarization, and Political Disinformation: A Review of the Scientific Literature. Menlo Park, CA: William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, 2018. Accessed 12 January 2019. https://hewlett.org/ library/social-media-political-polarization-political-disinformation-review-scientificliterature/. Viner, Katherine. ‘How Technology Disrupted the Truth’. The Guardian, 12 July 2016. Accessed 28 February 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jul/12/howtechnology-disrupted-the-truth. Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2002.

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CHAPTER

1

Rethinking Public Engagement Carolyn Hamilton and Lesley Cowling

I

n 2002 Charles Taylor identified the public sphere as one of three social imaginaries that constitute modernity. The idea of the public sphere, he argued, knits together discussions in a range of locations – a newspaper report, a discussion in a coffee shop, a radio debate – through the understanding of the participants that they are involved in a greater, collective discussion.1 Discussion in a notional public sphere is seen as a key process through which a society can mediate collective life. Such public engagement is the focus of this book. However, we approach the public sphere not as a theory about how public deliberation takes place, but as an established, normative concept and ideal in society, a value-laden organising principle: how people imagine public debate works, thus shaping ‘actual’ discussion. The notion of the public sphere is closely tied to ideas of democratic practice – in particular, the conception of deliberative democracy, which ‘revolves around the idea that … problems concerning the organization of life in common can be resolved through the force of the better argument: through people coming together and deliberating upon the best way to resolve particular disputes’.2 Seen in that way, public engagement is more than the cut and thrust of myriad interactions in society; it is crucial to the operations of democracy. This leads us to ask, in the first section of this chapter, what work the idea of the public sphere and related notions (public, public opinion and counterpublic) do in the world. Approaching the public sphere as an idea that animates social processes and institutions allows us to flag some of the forums that, taken together, present as if

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they are a unitary public space for discussion. They perform a sort of front-of-stage set of public engagements that appear to fulfil the ideal of the public sphere and, indeed, important debates happen in these forums with consequences for society. However, how these debates happen is subject to all sorts of constraints. We set out the ways in which this assemblage of public engagements – what we have called the ‘convened public sphere’ – is shaped in particular ways by the operations of power.3 What is widely referred to as the public sphere is a domain of interaction that is convened in particular ways that shape deliberative outcomes. The convening of a nominal main arena for deliberation marginalises a variety of other engagements. In certain circumstances, this prompts the emergence of alternative discussion communities. We see organisations, processes and operations positioning, or being positioned, as if they are outside the convened public sphere but with an eye on the public sphere. Some of these take the form of counterpublic spheres of the kind identified by theorists such as Nancy Fraser.4 Yet, even when taken together, these two ways of positioning for public engagement – public sphere and counterpublic sphere – occlude a wider and more heterogeneous set of interactions. Beyond the idea of a central public sphere and its facing counterpublics are the public spaces that are not readily recognised as arenas of engagement and appear to be operating separately from both mainstream forums and one another. These include the subaltern publics that Fraser points to, which are unable to access the main arena because of their disenfranchised position in societies, and sequestered publics – discussed below – which have historically been conceived of as beyond the imagined public sphere. In addition, theorists of the media and the Internet have identified the existence of online enclaves that appear connected only to their participants and noted what they call the ‘fragmentation’ of the public sphere. However, even these refinements of the notion of the public sphere rely on metaphors of fixed space. They miss the shifting and moving nature of public engagements over time and space. To understand the sprawling, uneven and sometimes explosive interactions that appear to take place offstage, we conceptualise publicness as a capillaried network in which ideas are constantly circulating, sometimes within closed circuits, sometimes coalescing in sequestered spaces or forms, sometimes gathering enough potency to burst into wider significance and sometimes part of media that themselves constitute publics. The circulation described is not simply the shuttling of ideas along already laid-down tracks, but the movement of forms that create networks as they act in the social world.5 The notion of circulation allows the complex processes of various public engagements to be tracked well beyond conventional public sphere spaces. It shows how publicness is, by its very nature, moving and dispersed, circulating through 22 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Rethinking Public Engagement

networks that criss-cross fields and media, fragmenting into ‘capillaries’ and sometimes thickening into nodes of public engagement. We examine how convened public spheres, counterpublic positioning, isolated publics and capillaried networks operate in intersecting ways, as well as the dynamics among them. In so doing, we generate a clutch of concepts and methodologies that enable us to grasp how public matters come under discussion both in relation to and outside of the classical mode of rational, critical debate that is the cornerstone of democratic processes.

THE IDEAL PUBLIC SPHERE The public sphere idea of a space between the people and the state is neatly characterised by Shireen Hassim as a ‘virtuous’ space in which citizens contest among themselves according to the ‘rules of the game’.6 Normative ideas of the public sphere draw on Enlightenment conceptions of public opinion and publics, particularly Immanuel Kant’s public use of reason and Jeremy Bentham’s ideas of public opinion as a check on the state.7 What Jürgen Habermas called öffentlichkeit, translated from the German as the ‘public sphere’, but more properly ‘publicness’ or ‘publicity’, articulates a compelling ideal for democratic discussion and debate in society.8 Habermas notes that öffentlichkeit first appeared in the eighteenth century, but was little used until the nineteenth century. He argues that ‘if the public sphere did not require a name of its own before this period, we may assume that this sphere first emerged and took on its function only at that time, at least in Germany’.9 Put another way, if there is no word for it, there is no concept of it, and if there is no concept, it does not exist in the material processes and spaces of society.10 Habermas’s account shows how the meanings of concepts of publicness, publics and public opinion shift over time and suggests the ways in which concepts and social practices co-create one another. It is important to hold this fluidity in mind when examining contemporary forms of publicness. Habermas sets up a relationship between concept and practice that indicates that notions of the public are inextricably woven into the actual functions of society.

THE PUBLIC AS SOCIAL IMAGINARY The upsurge of democratic movements across the world in the 1980s, and attempts to account for their emergence, prompted researchers at the Chicago-based Center 23 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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for Transcultural Studies to explore the idea of imaginative ‘world-making’ power. They conceptualised this process as a ‘social imaginary’, ‘an enabling but not fully explicable symbolic matrix within which a people imagine and act as a worldmaking collective’.11 Social imaginaries are ‘ways of understanding the social that become social entities themselves, mediating collective life’.12 These entities include people’s self-understandings, the ‘first-person subjectivities that build upon implicit understandings that underlie and make possible common practices’. As Taylor elaborates: ‘The social imaginary is not a set of ideas; rather it is what enables, through making sense of, the practices of a society.’13 The public sphere is a key social imaginary for society. For Taylor, the way in which society is imagined is based on an assumed moral order; in contemporary times, built on ‘mutual benefit … whose members are fundamentally equal’.14 This is different from previous eras, in which it was accepted that social arrangements were structured according to hierarchies, as in the feudal era.15 Taylor argues that the modern moral order has produced three major mutations: the market economy, the public sphere and self-governing people.16 He notes that a ‘public sphere can exist only if it is imagined as such. Unless all the dispersed discussions are seen by their participants as linked in one great exchange, there can be no sense of a resultant “public opinion”. ’17 Furthermore, he argues, breakdown occurs in society when people’s collective practices cannot connect to a viable social imaginary.18 Taylor’s critical conception of the public sphere is different from the notion in its everyday usage, which implies a stable and pre-existing arena consisting of institutions, forums and debates. Rather, as a social imaginary, the public sphere propels and animates vital societal processes and institutions. The idea of publicness is powerful, then, because of the work it does in the world. However, the core literature on the public sphere has relatively little to say about the actual operations of power in public engagement. The literature does not tackle the question of how the outcomes of public sphere deliberations come to influence the state and other forces in society and how powerful forces may influence (or even capture) public discussion. It also fails to come to grips with the nature of public engagement in situations where global markets are driving social inequality, despite equality being laid out as the underlying moral order of democratic societies.

THE CONVENED PUBLIC SPHERE In established democracies, the notion of informed public deliberation is fundamentally affirmed and overtly performed in all sorts of ways. Indeed, it is modelled 24 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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at the heart of the formal arrangements of democracy. The range of forms of the institutional enabling of public deliberation is often held up as a mark of a successful democracy. However, the forms that are vaunted as enabling discussion simultaneously convene public deliberation in circumscribed ways, sometimes to the point of corralling and constraining deliberation. Parliaments are conceived of as debating spaces at the heart of a democracy, with codes of conduct, rules of procedure, question and answer, which ensure that the elected representatives of the people all get a turn to speak on matters of concern. Debates on government policy, proposed laws and topical issues are designed to assist members in reaching an informed decision on a particular subject. The debates are captured in a variety of forms of public record, such as the Hansard official record in the United Kingdom or the Parliamentary Monitoring Group in South Africa, set up in 1995 by three advocacy organisations because there is no official record publicly available of the more than 50 South African parliamentary committees. In some countries, parliamentary debates are televised live. They are widely reported on in the media and subjected to public commentary and review by outside experts. Many democracies also have institutional arrangements for the entry into parliamentary discussion of the views of non-elected members whose experience and knowledge is specially valorised, such as the House of Lords in the United Kingdom (which consists of bishops, hereditary peers and those appointed for life as a reward for public service) or the House of Traditional Leaders in South Africa (consisting of three traditional leaders per province, appointed for five years). In this way, the formal arrangements give additional weight in the spaces of national debate to special interests and sectors. The issues debated by these houses are likewise much reported and commented on. In addition, the organisation of government departments and ministerial portfolios has an impact on the framing of public discussion and on who is licensed to intervene. For example, when Cannes and other French towns banned the burkini swimwear worn by some Muslim women, the minister for women’s rights weighed in. Laurence Rossignol said the swimwear was ‘hostile to diversity and women’s emancipation’.19 This intervention may have been very different had she been a minister of minority rights. The existence of particular ministries for special issues actively positions them to intervene in controversies they see as falling into their area of attention. Beyond the formal arenas of government, a plethora of policies and institutional arrangements seek to foster public deliberation and shape public opinion. For example, many public museums are funded by government, but operate at arm’s 25 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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length from government, charged with preserving and presenting various materials in the public interest. Once the final authorities on what they presented, museums in contemporary society increasingly play a role in facilitating public discussion, assuming the functions of a forum.20 Museum practitioners routinely anticipate controversy, actively reaching out to marginalised communities and hosting discussions. Universities are another kind of institution understood to have a special responsibility to foster discussion, in the first instance within the academic community, but also in public life. Universities regularly host public lectures, panel discussions and other public events concerned with topical matters. Participation in public life is often built into the government funding they receive. In South Africa, community engagement is identified as a core responsibility of the universities, alongside research and teaching, and is a measure of success.21 In the United Kingdom, the national Research Excellence Framework is designed specifically to assess the impact of research outside of academia. ‘Impact’ is defined in the Research Excellence Framework as ‘an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia’.22 These forms of public responsibility refer to the dissemination of expert knowledge, based on solid research, into public life; the process also entails engagement in policy debates and offering views on controversial matters. More difficult to explicate is the way in which the university as the home of philosophy accepts a special responsibility to think through the most fundamental issues involved in what it is to be human together, to have knowledge, to employ reason and to assert values. A host of entities, such as public broadcasters, communication regulators, media freedom watchdog bodies, conflict resolution and mediation organisations, and special interest bodies, have mandates to participate in policy discussions and to lobby on issues in the public interest. The news media are thought to have a particular responsibility to inform publics and facilitate debate, a privileged position that is entrenched in the operations of many democracies. Media organisations, collectively, are a site for public discussion and for reporting on debates in society. The media’s role is complicated by their being charged with facilitating debates while simultaneously reporting on them. The media also occupy a double position of being privileged observers of the operations of government as well as positioning themselves as ‘watchdogs’ that hold the state accountable on behalf of the people. In some societies, the media’s responsibilities to facilitate debate are regulated in the sense that there can be sanctions by regulatory bodies for speech considered to be beyond the pale. In cases where there is little regulation, pressure from audiences and advertisers can push media into line. 26 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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The notion of the importance of appropriate public debate is underscored by the existence of institutes and centres designed to foster public deliberation and to train citizens in reasoned public engagement, notably in the United States.23 Debating societies flourish in schools, where they are regarded as important training grounds that empower people to participate in public and political life.24 The United Nations and many states fund global debating contests between students from countries across the world. The existence and activities of all of these bodies persuade citizens of the robustness of the public sphere as the enabling space of democratic opinionmaking and choice. What is less recognised is how such policies, organisations and institutions do not merely enable but also shape, weight or even corral public debate in certain ways. We find it useful to speak of the convened public sphere as a way of recognising these multiple interventions, compromises, constraints, exclusions and their effects. The term ‘convened’ draws attention to what is being brought together into the space of the public sphere and in what forms. By implication, this opens up the question of what is not drawn in, or is sidelined. The notion of a convened public sphere thus encourages scrutiny of the systems and institutions responsible for the convening and analysis of how they operate. The centres that aim to foster public deliberation and train citizens in reasoned public debate explicitly set out rules, conventions and principles to which debate should adhere. The media present a more complex case, at once operating with clear guidelines (such as giving equal space to both sides of an issue) and taken-forgranted professional norms that produce debates in certain forms, as chapter three in this volume shows. Chapter 3 – titled ‘Media Orchestration in the Production of Public Debate’ – introduces a range of other concepts, among them ‘orchestration’ and ‘babelisation’, that usefully help us to grasp how debate and discussion are shaped by the processes of media production. Not all the outcomes of public sphere engagements are the result of reasoned consensus. In practice, the valorising of diversity often leads to the guaranteeing of specific cultural rights against the thrust of rational public deliberation. Such outcomes are often the result of compromises negotiated among parties, special interest groups and public administrators, with the public included only sporadically in this circuit of power. The establishment in South Africa of the House of Traditional Leaders, mentioned above, is one such compromise. In such situations, variant cultural values may prevail, some of which are not readily reconcilable with the values of a constitutional democracy. The persistence of arranged marriage, child brides or female genital mutilation in parts of Africa and Asia is at odds with protections for women and children in democratic bills of rights, but such practices 27 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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are allowed as an expression of traditional culture. The collective understanding on which much thinking around the public sphere is built, in practice, proves elusive. The sheer range of entities that self-consciously assume responsibility for issues of public concern – from freedom of information organisations to sex worker lobby groups – crowd the space between the people and the state that is the imagined public sphere. Their presence appears to guarantee that the people are having their say. In the congestion, however, public deliberation is constrained in multiple ways, giving rise to effects that are these entities’ ostensible purpose to mitigate. These include how established bodies develop an expertise, and media savvy, far greater than that of ordinary members of the public, thus weighting debate in their favour. Their presence and adeptness also paradoxically enables, even licenses, public apathy, conveying a sense that the issues are being taken care of beyond the reach of politicians. All these entities are actively promoted and funded by interest groups of one kind or another, and there are powerful forces at work in establishing a presence in the space conceived of and operationalised as the public sphere, which ensure that debate happens in the way preferred by the interest groups. Entering the convened public sphere already filled with enabled throngs of expert and savvy entities is not a matter of course. The formally educated, learned intelligentsia, well versed in the rules and conventions of the public sphere and often drawn from the ranks of political and financial elites, may readily engage in a debate or offer a critique of a position. Social inequality, however, excludes many from participation in the formal public sphere, while organic intellectuals are often involved in processes of deliberation and critique that take place outside of the circles of an established intelligentsia. The idea of the convened public sphere helps us to understand the widespread loss of faith in the effectiveness of public deliberation, particularly when the public sphere is seen to be actively corralled. In new democracies emerging out of previously authoritarian arrangements, the moral order to which Taylor refers is not taken for granted, as it is in many established democracies, but is the object of direct attention. In such situations, the front-of-stage public sphere has to be inaugurated. This requires an overt process of internalising rules and conventions, rather than the unquestioned following of them, and the cultivation of relevant normative values. In such situations, the rules and exclusions are more likely to be queried; the terms of debate are themselves contested, as student protests in South Africa have demonstrated in recent years. The critical scrutiny of democracy that takes place in new democracies allows convening and corralling to be clearly seen more readily than in established democracies. Fault lines in the operations of democracy are not confined to the Global South. They have also begun to appear in the world’s oldest democracies, as the 28 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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bitter post-2016 election polarisation in the United States, repeated protests at the G7 and the World Economic forums and the Occupy movement show. In these contestations, the rules and conventions that envisage public discussion as rational critical debate, and that facilitate the operations of the convened public sphere, are identified as operations of power and there are multiple forms of rebellion. In the process these breakaway forms themselves shape the dynamics and conventions of public engagement.

BEYOND THE CONVENED PUBLIC SPHERE In the public sphere literature, questions of power are often addressed through the concepts of counterpublics and, more specifically, subaltern counterpublics. Fraser argues that the notion of a unitary public sphere does not capture the complexity of ‘actually existing democracies’, which have systemic inequalities and, in some cases, heterogeneous collections of peoples.25 This means that there may be many competing interests that cannot be resolved. Instead of a multiplicity of competing voices operating on terms of equality in a unitary public sphere, there are always, she argues, subaltern counterpublics struggling to be heard and powerful publics that dominate the deliberative space.26 In Fraser’s conceptualisation, there are always multiple publics in relations of domination, subordination and contestation. Fraser suggests that counterpublics are desirable because they provide spaces for participants to express themselves, to formulate and try out counter-discourses and to avoid being appropriated into consensus. The notion of subaltern counterpublics helps us to understand how, under certain circumstances, marginalised groups in society position themselves in relation to a mainstream public sphere – being at once, as Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge suggest, oppositional and public.27 Positioning as counterpublics, the participants engage among themselves, often within global networks, physically and virtually, in public meetings, on electronic mailing lists, in research institutes and policy forums. The last decade has seen the rise of global protest groups that operate through social media, such as Avaaz, 350.org and Change.org, actively working to position themselves as global opposition to global powers, such as Monsanto, and nation states in global forums. Some of them take the opportunity to focus within their own ranks, confining themselves to discussions with like-minded individuals and, in the course of that counterpublic positioning, building up momentum that later propels them into mainstream debates or enables them to engage in these debates. Such groups are significant 29 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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participants in public deliberation. However, prevailing arrangements seek to draw them into the convened public sphere that pushes continually for consensus. Fraser highlights the point that the official public sphere not only rests upon but is also constituted by significant exclusions. For the most part, commentators and theorists have focused on the exclusions of women, LGBTQIAP+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual/aromantic, pansexual, plus) communities, sex workers, and so on. These groups constitute counterpublics with an eye on how to enter their concerns into the discussions of what is understood to be the public sphere – that is, with the aim, at some point, of discursive contestation in relation to the operations of democratic politics. Where a counterpublic is a domain for the formulation of narratives that position as alternative or oppositional to the convened public sphere, there are also publics that are separated from both the convened and counterpublic spheres. For example, in societies where sectors of the population have distinct historical and cultural experiences, or religious experiences, matters related to these experiences and their legacies may be the subject of deep interest, active discussion and even heated debate within that sector, but not in others. Their concerns might be deemed irrelevant to contemporary democratic politics, atavastic or retrogressive. We find it helpful to think of these groups as ‘sequestered publics’. Unlike counterpublics, sequestered publics do not imagine themselves as building up momentum in order to be able to engage in the unitary public sphere, but as self-contained domains of discussion. A case in point would be active discussions about historical clan identities and connections and ancestral matters that have long enjoyed attention in areas such as KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, largely outside any formal historical debates, historical studies, heritage initiatives or political arrangements. It is productive to pay attention to the circumstances under which sequestered publics may begin to position as counterpublics – that is, entering their concerns into the convened public sphere. In the KwaZulu-Natal case mentioned above, clan histories have become important in challenges to the dominance of the Zulu royal house and its land claims. Their logics and concerns constitute a challenge to a forensic approach by the courts to land and chiefship claims and have become important in the way in which the South African democracy seeks to mediate collective life. The concerns of sequestered publics may be mobilised opportunistically by populist politicians seeking to build support by tapping into such concerns, even if retrogressive. Or they might contribute to discussions of possible values and practices inspired by historical precedents or religious beliefs as part of the critique of the failure of liberal democracy.28 30 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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People who participate in sequestered public discussions may find it problematic that they do not see their concerns reflected in what goes as the mainstream public sphere. Under such conditions, a sequestered public sphere may begin to operate as a counterpublic, providing opportunities for the participants to build up momentum and seek ways of entering their concerns into the convened public sphere, often through dramatic public interventions. In South Africa, student protests, beginning with the 2015 campaign for the removal of the statue of the arch-colonialist Cecil John Rhodes, drew attention to the way the university education system was rooted in a limited Western archive. This operated to negate values of social and cultural life rooted in historically African ideas, values and forms of knowledge that still govern many communities across the country. The dramatic student protests created an opening for public discussion about inherited African values of listening to and learning from others, accommodating strangers and finding the consensus needed to hold society together. The protests provoked reflection on how to mediate collective life in South Africa. The student protests demonstrate how discussions that have taken place for centuries in sequestered publics may burst into the mainstream at certain moments, propelled by changing circumstances. Just because discussions are taking place offstage, it does not mean that they may not find their way into wider public discourse. Media theorists have recently noted that the growth of the Internet seems to have created many publics separate from mainstream discussion (in some cases by choice) and from one another. Todd Gitlin noted in 1998 that the Internet ‘enriches the possibilities for a plurality of publics – for the development of distinct groups organized around affinity and interests’, which he called ‘public sphericules’.29 However, he asked whether this ‘scatter’ of publics increases the likelihood of divides that cannot be breached, of citizens unable to reach across social and ideological differences to solve social problems. Others have subsequently researched online publics that operate in enclaves and noted that the technologies of the Internet turn the spaces of discussion into ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’, where no dissenting views can enter.30 Whereas sequestered publics operate offstage, the entities positioned as counterpublic implicitly accept the normative protocols of the public sphere while seeking to influence or oppose its dominant concerns. Certain activities of these kinds of (potential or actual) counterpublic spheres lead to direct engagements in the central arena. In other cases, counterpublic sphere concerns are marginalised and are not taken up in the convened public sphere. In the pursuit of political and public purchase, participants in marginalised public spheres may turn to strikes and other forms of direct action. There is evidence, then, of both viable and compromised counterpublic sphere activity. 31 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Despite all this variation, the concepts of public and counterpublic spheres are not sufficient to describe the manifold ways in which ideas are debated. For one thing, these spheres are described in spatial terms: rounded and inclusive, or scattered into separate globules or as spaces for communication.31 However, we would argue that it is not possible to grasp fully publicness and its effects without understanding how fluid public engagements are and how they move beyond the boundaries of any static deliberative space and change over time.

CAPILLARIES OF PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT The idea of the public sphere thus excludes a multitude of interactions that do not fit the conventions of how public discussion should take place or the designated arenas for such discussion. These interactions fall outside the very definition of public sphere, or even of a counterpublic sphere, which operates in terms of the imaginary of the public sphere. Tracking ideas and forms that begin life offstage and seeing the ways they sometimes burst into wider significance, and how they may eventually enter the convened public sphere, leads us to reconfigure publicness as a capillaried network. In this shifting web of connections, ideas are constantly circulating. Michael Warner’s notion of circulation of texts that create networks as they move in the social world gives impetus to this reconfiguration. Crucially, he describes publics as imaginative relationships between strangers, created in relation to a text or discourse.32 Warner’s critical conception of publics is different from the concept in its everyday usage, in which ‘the public’ is imagined as an established body. Warner’s public only comes into being in relation to a text (broadly defined as anything from an actual piece of writing to a performance or a media talk show). But where Warner is concerned with the constitution of publics, we place the spotlight on processes of consideration, assessment, engagement and debate, the wide set of dynamics that produce public engagements. Our conceptualisation of capillaried networks of public engagement is also informed by Michel Foucault’s theorisation of power and his configuration of a social totality that is not made of massive structures (state/people) pushing against each other, but is articulated through much more fragmentary ‘spidery’ webs and constituted by discourse and by social practice. For Foucault, power is not simply ‘repressive’, but is ‘productive’. He says: ‘What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network that runs 32 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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through the whole social body.’33 In other words, where there is the power to take things away, there are also mechanisms bent on ‘generating forces, making them grow and ordering them’.34 One of these is ‘the power of the norm’, which does not punish infractions so much as require individuals to ‘measure up’ to certain standards, which are internalised, embodied in the modern subject.35 The idea of productive power resonates with the concept of the social imaginary as a concept that propels collective world-making. Both can be seen in the enactment of the convened public sphere, which by its existence makes certain kinds of discussion possible, while simultaneously occluding or discrediting others. Foucault’s vision of discourse as multilayered, and as shifting and moving texts and practices, focuses our attention on what are often small operations of power, which can gather potency in society. Observing practice up close can deliver insights into how this happens. Although not all public engagements are about power in the political sense, they are always potentially important sites of power, however micro, because of their connections to the social imaginary of the public sphere and its potential to produce effects. A discussion between two mothers about the reactions of their children to a vaccine may be simply the sharing of their maternal experiences. However, combined with a medical article proposing that vaccines cause autism, a broader distrust of science and the pharmaceutical industry, and a popular campaign against vaccines by a celebrity, such debates can scale up into wider significance that eventually requires policy interventions on a global scale. This issue is currently debated in health ministries, has been taken up by the World Health Organization and may become the subject of legislation – it has emerged into the convened public sphere. The offstage engagement that began life as a private discussion in the intimate domain of the family – a domestic recess, as it were – becomes public, in the lay understanding of the term, and has sufficient impetus to command wide attention in society. The convened and counterpublic arenas are therefore not separate spaces from the mass of public interactions that appear to operate outside their domain and according to different rules. But how engagements seemingly outside begin to move in capillaried networks, stack up and eventually emerge as issues of public significance is a complex process. Approaches such as Foucault’s theory of systems of thought, Warner’s concept of circulation, and social imaginary theory provide useful insights into theorising publicness, but in order to track it in operation, we need to describe the processes we have identified and develop conceptual tools capable of elucidating them. The example of the vaccine controversy points to a thorny conceptual issue that shows up in any scholarship on publics and public discussion. In the convened 33 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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public sphere, publicness is understood to be pre-existing and served though the creation of institutions and policies. Similarly, counterpublic engagements, by virtue of their positioning in relation to the convened public sphere, instantiate publicness. However, outside of these arenas, the multiple conversations and interventions that go on in society all the time can only be recognised as ‘public’ when they gather a certain weight and momentum, what Litheko Modisane terms ‘public critical potency’.36 The idea of public critical potency allows for an important distinction in analysing public engagement and publics. It permits us to hold on to the social significance that attaches to discussion in the convened public sphere, while allowing for the messy world of interactions out of which important public engagements may emerge. The notion of public critical potency enables us to identify engagements when they have moved out of relatively sequestered circulation to wider social significance.37 The matter of how public engagements gather public critical potency – how they move through capillaries into wider significance – is theorised and discussed in detail in chapter 2. Public events can be a key trigger, whether in the form of carefully curated exhibitions or incendiary protests, but what chapter 2 shows is that how ideas travel, crossing mediums and fields of practice, turns out be central, as does media take-up in multiple forms. What start out as ideas expressed in, say, artworks, or concerned mothers’ discussions about vaccines, may not adhere to any of the convened public sphere expectations of reasoned discussion on significant questions. They may deal with issues that are not readily accommodated in the convened public sphere, being too radical, subversive, reactionary, subjective, emotional or threatening. The circulation of ideas into other fields – an artwork into a book of literary essays or the domestic vaccine concerns into pharmaceutical controversies – may cause the ideas to be picked up more widely and in different ways by others. Chapter 2 calls this process ‘take-up’. The accumulation of numerous interactions – a concatenation of engagements – contributes to their public critical potency. Through intersection with debates in other fields, or through media take-up, such ideas are transformed into forms of active public deliberation in which rational-critical discussion can occur, though it might not always be decisive. In some cases the core ideas continue to occupy a central place, while in other instances the debate turns on the operations of power involved in or underpinning the core ideas – that is, the debate takes an explicitly political turn and may erupt into the public sphere. Sometimes public engagements build up and course in the capillaries of discussion, sometimes quite explicitly avoiding, or explicitly rejecting, the convened public sphere or even a counterpublic positioning. This resistance to the convened 34 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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public sphere, we suggest, happens most dramatically in moments of social and political rupture when the participants no longer accept that they are part of a greater, collective discussion and a shared moral order is no longer assumed to exist. This is a feature of a great deal of contemporary discussion that happens, at least at first, in relatively closed discussion circuits, facilitated by self-reinforcing internally referential social media webs. To make this point is not to claim that capillaries of debate have replaced the public sphere. It is to argue that capillaries of debate have always been a feature of what is understood to be the public sphere, as well as of counterpublic positioning, but they emerge more squarely into view when the social imaginary of the public sphere falters. In the current era of global tectonic change, many of the institutions traditionally charged with facilitating public debate in democratic societies have lost their dominance. New platforms now orchestrate different forms and modes of public discussion. Yet certain legacies of engagement in the public sphere persist. What this may mean for public life is not yet clear. A close focus on the organisations and sectors charged with conducting and facilitating public discussion, as well as the myriad alternative modes of public discussion, is necessary in order to understand the implications for how societies face and discuss the challenges of mediating collective life. Recognition of the convened nature of what is understood as the public sphere, as well as of the existence of capillaried and constantly shifting networks of public discussion, requires us to approach issues of public engagement with a new set of analytical concepts and new methodologies. The two chapters that follow introduce a series of concepts that help us to get to grips with how convening takes place, as well as with the dynamics of the circulation of ideas well beyond the imagined public sphere. Our approach of looking, up close, at how discussions are taking place reveals a conundrum for contemporary times: in the face of these kinds of changes, what happens to the ideal of a central space in which the citizens of a country can debate and decide on the way forward? Will the engagements in the capillaried network ever stack up sufficiently to draw wide public attention to the concerns being expressed there so as to allow the debate to take place in the mode of the ideal – a society debating its issues with a view to moving forward? The increasing balkanisation, polarisation and babelisation of public discussion visibly playing out in the United States is a cautionary tale. It suggests that there is a need to hold on to some forms of the convening of public discussion, while being alert to any tendency to exclude or obscure certain engagements. These questions are further complicated by the growth of global publics and public engagements. The extent of global crises around certain issues – climate change, trade and migration – is so great that being able to speak and hear each other across national boundaries becomes paramount, 35 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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requiring much more than a resort to reasoned debate in international forums. However, if normative ideas of public discussion expect dialogue to contribute in some way to the solving of joint problems, or the mediation of collective challenges, the enormous expansion of the imagined public sphere simultaneous with the proliferation of public engagements presents as much risk as opportunity. Many commentators have decried the decline of public discourse and worry about the fragmentation of the public sphere.38 The contributions to this volume invite us to examine not only whether the processes and operations of the convened public sphere are collapsing, but whether the social imaginary itself is disappearing. The evidence for the convening and, some would say, capture of public discussion by established interests seems to be increasing everywhere. In response, people are no longer convinced of the robustness of the public sphere; thus, its effectiveness as a powerful imaginary enabling the practices of a society – in particular, the mediations of collective life – collapses. However, deliberative activity, distributed or dispersed, continues, sometimes in new forms, but also in long-established forms previously consigned to the margins. If, as Taylor argues, the public sphere has been foundational to the imagined order of modern society, the question is whether new forms of public engagement will come to occupy the imagined space of public discussion, or whether the changes in the imaginary inevitably reshape the ways in which democratic societies mediate collective life.

NOTES

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3



4



5



6 7



8

Charles Taylor, ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’, Public Culture 14, 1 (2002): 113. Lincoln Dahlberg and Eugenia Siapera, ‘Introduction: Tracing Radical Democracy and the Internet’, in Radical Democracy and the Internet: Interrogating Theory and Practice, ed. Lincoln Dahlberg and Eugenia Siapera (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 8. See discussion of ‘convening’ in Carolyn Hamilton, ‘Uncertain Citizenship and Public Deliberation in Post-apartheid South Africa’, Social Dynamics 35, 2 (2009): 355–374. See Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 109–142. See Isabel Hofmeyr, ‘Circulation and Public Spheres’, Social Dynamics 36, 1 (2010): 135–138. Shireen Hassim, ‘Framing Essay’, Social Dynamics 35, 2 (2009): 348. For a discussion of Kant’s and Bentham’s ideas on publicness and the public sphere, see Slavko Splichal, ‘In Search of a Strong European Public Sphere: Some Critical Observations on Conceptualizations of Publicness and the (European) Public Sphere’, Media, Culture and Society 28, 5 (2006): 699. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), xv.

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Habermas, Public Sphere, 3. Lesley Cowling, ‘Saving the Sowetan: The Public Interest and Commercial Imperatives in Journalism Practice’ (PhD diss., Rhodes University, 2015), 44. 11 Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ‘Towards New Imaginaries: An Introduction’, Public Culture 14, 1 (2002): 1. 12 Gaonkar, ‘Towards New Imaginaries’, 4. 13 Taylor, ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’, 91. 14 Taylor, ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’, 99. 15 Taylor, ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’, 92. 16 Taylor, ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’, 92. 17 Taylor, ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’, 113. 18 Taylor, ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’, 99. 19 Aline Gerard, ‘Interdiction du Burkini: Pour Rossignol, “Procéder par Amalgame n’est Jamais Utile” ’, Le Parisien, 16 August 2016, accessed 29 May 2018, http://www.leparisien. fr/politique/proceder-par-amalgame-n-est-jamais-utile-16-08-2016-6043833.php. 20 See Duncan Cameron, ‘The Museum, a Temple or the Forum’, Curator: The Museum Journal 14, 1 (1971): 11–24. See also Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer and Steven D. Lavine, eds, Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press in association with the American Association of Museums, 1992). 21 See debates about the meaning of this as a core responsibility in the South African Council on Higher Education publication Kagisano 6, January 2010, accessed 22 January 2020, https://www.che.ac.za/sites/default/files/publications/Kagisano_No_6_ January2010.pdf. 22 ‘REF Impact’, 19 February 2016, accessed 29 May 2018, http://www.hefce.ac.uk/rsrch/ REFimpact/. 23 See, for example, the Center for Public Deliberation, University of Colorado (http://cpd. colostate.edu/about-us/what-is-public-deliberation/); the United States of America’s National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (http://ncdd.org); the International Association for Public Participation (http://www.iap2.org/?177); the Center for Democratic Deliberation, Penn State University (http://cdd.la.psu.edu); the Kettering Foundation, Dayton, Ohio (https://www.kettering.org); the New England Center for Civic Life, Franklin Pierce University (https://franklinpierce.edu/institutes/neccl/); and Public Agenda, New York (https://www.publicagenda.org); all accessed 29 December 2016. 24 On the public understanding of the value of debating training, see Alex Clark, ‘Why Debating Still Matters’, The Guardian, 6 August 2016, accessed 29 December 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/aug/06/why-debating-still-matters. 25 Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’, 121. 26 Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’, 123. 27 Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 28 See, for example, the essays in Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan van Antwerpen, eds, The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 29 Todd Gitlin, ‘Public Sphere or Public Sphericules?’ in Media, Ritual and Identity, ed. Tamar Liebes and James Curran (New York: Routledge, 1998), 173. 30 See Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You (London: Penguin, 2011); and Seth Flaxman, Sharad Goel and Justin M. Rao, ‘Filter Bubbles, Echo 9

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Chambers, and Online News Consumption’, Public Opinion Quarterly 80, S1 (2016): 298–320. Gitlin, ‘Public Sphere’; Peter Dahlgren, ‘The Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication: Dispersion and Deliberation’, Political Communication 22 (2005): 148–150. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 74–76. Michel Foucault and Paul Rabinow, The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 61. Our notion of capillaries of public discussion resonates with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s work on how new ideas emerge in the sciences. They conceptualise the multiple and non-hierarchical entry and exit points in the spread of ideas as ‘rhizomatic’, notably the nomadic way in which this happens (A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi [London: Continuum, 2004]). Our project does not deal with the emergence of ideas per se, but with publicness and public discussion. However, the veined aspect of the capillary metaphor allows us to see what happens when aspects of what they would conceptualise as the rhizomatic spread of ideas accumulate publicness and begin to be channelled in particular ways. Recognising the contingent and sometimes opportunistic emergence of these capillaries allows us to understand that while they are not predetermined, what happens in the process is the development of a form of noticeable routing. Foucault and Rabinow, Foucault Reader, 56. Foucault and Rabinow, Foucault Reader, 94. Litheko Modisane, South Africa’s Renegade Reels: The Making and Public Lives of BlackCentred Films (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 79. Modisane demonstrates this in his analysis of a number of South African films in Renegade Reels. See discussion in Frank Farmer, After the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics, and the Citizen Bricoleur (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2013), 5–6.

REFERENCES Cameron, Duncan. ‘The Museum, a Temple or the Forum’. Curator: The Museum Journal 14, 1 (1971): 11–24. Clark, Alex. ‘Why Debating Still Matters’. The Guardian, 6 August 2016. Accessed 29 December 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/aug/06/why-debatingstill-matters. Cowling, Lesley. ‘Saving the Sowetan: The Public Interest and Commercial Imperatives in Journalism Practice’. PhD diss., Rhodes University, 2015. Dahlberg, Lincoln and Eugenia Siapera. ‘Introduction: Tracing Radical Democracy and the Internet’. In Radical Democracy and the Internet: Interrogating Theory and Practice, edited by Lincoln Dahlberg and Eugenia Siapera, 1–16. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Dahlgren, Peter. ‘The Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication: Dispersion and Deliberation’. Political Communication 22 (2005): 148–150. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Continuum, 2004. Farmer, Frank. After the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics, and the Citizen Bricoleur. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2013.

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Flaxman, Seth, Sharad Goel and Justin M. Rao. ‘Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Online News Consumption’. Public Opinion Quarterly 80, S1 (2016): 298–320. Foucault, Michel and Paul Rabinow. The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Fraser, Nancy. ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’. In Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun, 109–142. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar. ‘Towards New Imaginaries: An Introduction’. Public Culture 14, 1 (2002): 1–19. Gerard, Aline. ‘Interdiction du Burkini: Pour Rossignol, “Procéder par Amalgame n’est Jamais Utile” ’. Le Parisien, 16 August 2016. Accessed 29 May 2018. http://www.leparisien.fr/ politique/proceder-par-amalgame-n-est-jamais-utile-16-08-2016-6043833.php. Gitlin, Todd. ‘Public Sphere or Public Sphericules?’ In Media, Ritual and Identity, edited by Tamar Liebes and James Curran, 168–174. New York: Routledge, 1998. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. Hamilton, Carolyn. ‘Uncertain Citizenship and Public Deliberation in Post-apartheid South Africa’. Social Dynamics 35, 2 (2009): 355–374. Hassim, Shireen. ‘Framing Essay’. Social Dynamics 35, 2 (2009): 348–354. Hofmeyr, Isabel. ‘Circulation and Public Spheres’. Social Dynamics 36, 1 (2010): 135–138. Karp, Ivan, Christine Mullen Kreamer and Steven D. Levine, eds. Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press in association with the American Association of Museums, 1992. Mendieta, Eduardo and Jonathan van Antwerpen. The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Modisane, Litheko. South Africa’s Renegade Reels: The Making and Public Lives of BlackCentred Films. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Negt, Oskar and Alexander Kluge, eds. Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Pariser, Eli. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You. London: Penguin, 2011. Splichal, Slavko. ‘In Search of a Strong European Public Sphere: Some Critical Observations on Conceptualizations of Publicness and the (European) Public Sphere’. Media, Culture and Society 28, 5 (2006): 695–714. Taylor, Charles. ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’. Public Culture 14, 1 (2002): 91–124. Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2002.

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CHAPTER

2

Tracing Public Engagements in Visual Forms Carolyn Hamilton, Litheko Modisane and Rory Bester1

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ormative understandings of public debate mostly associate it with the written texts or the back-and-forth of debating interlocutors making rational arguments. However, visual forms also occasion and animate public engagements. This chapter lays out a methodology for tracking the circulation of visual forms involved in public deliberative activity and the various kinds of ‘take-up’ they engender. The chapter offers a conceptual vocabulary for the description of what is involved and the methodology can readily be applied to written texts. It is particularly useful in relation to visual forms because, without such a methodology, it is difficult to grasp the impact of visual forms on processes of public engagement beyond how they are received by audiences. The visual forms we deal with here are forms that have entered circuits of public engagement. Whether individual creative works or a collection of items, such as an exhibition or a book of images, they are forms that have some kind of ‘charge’ linked to their aesthetic or affective dimensions and that gain further force in the course of their public lives. In other words, we are concerned with those forms that garner what Litheko Modisane terms ‘public critical potency’.2 This refers to the capacity of visual forms to precipitate public critical engagements, through the interplay among their form, content, genre and the conditions of their circulation.

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Although Modisane’s original use of the term was with reference to film, public critical potency can be seen in other public engagements. The surfaces and form as well as the (sometimes changing) media propel their ideas into ever-widening arcs of public life. These aspects of visual forms are part of the agency located in the form, part of the ‘stickiness’ which certain cultural and art forms develop over time, attracting repeated engagement long after their initial distinction has dissolved.3 Visual forms are of particular interest for a number of reasons: they are able to engage with matters that are repressed or not easily articulated in a society, revealing things that may not otherwise be readily apparent. Often visual forms raise issues that may be unsayable in words. They have a capacity to dwell in the contradictions that many other kinds of public interventions are under pressure to eliminate. They can entertain ambiguity and many potential meanings and interpretations and set aside relentless searching for fact and reason. The circulation of visual forms may yield totally contradictory outcomes and fail to offer clear conclusions. They are typically persuasive and can be harnessed to positions across the political spectrum.4 They can be ignition points in public discussions or richly fuelled interventions. The 2018 film Black Panther and Childish Gambino’s music video This is America, also 2018, offer recent cases in point. Such forms participate in a thickly visual world with a multiplicity of sites and temporalities of public engagement, as well as fragmented conversations about public matters. Images, material items and even linked aural elements call into being publics with various kinds of literacies, sometimes quite different from the kinds of literacies involved in public engagements based in scriptural forms. However, as they move out into wider circulation, often changing media, they may come to involve further kinds of literacies. Visual forms are often rendered marginal to the designated spaces of public deliberation and are exported to the specially demarcated zones of art or cultural critique or entertainment. This kind of separation is vividly reflected in the division of newspapers into main sections (comprising news, commentary and opinion – the stuff considered vital to the formation of public opinion) and art and entertainment supplements. This separation evacuates these visual forms of a recognised capacity to fulfil critical functions in public and political life. This is partly because of a cluster of ideas about the arenas of art and culture as, variously and even contradictorily, leisure, consumerist and commercialised, and/or esoteric and specialist, confined to initiated experts and elites. Field theory provides pointers for us in our attempt to look across the acknowledged deliberative spaces of politics and the media, and the sequestered, 41 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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specially demarcated zones of art or cultural critique. For Pierre Bourdieu, fields are ‘social microcosms, separate and autonomous spaces in which works are generated’.5 The concept of fields allows us to look at the structure of a specific social space in which a work, a concept or an intervention is formed or moves, according to the conditions of that field. This chapter examines how visual forms may cross fields, garnering public critical potency in the process. The ideas and issues generated around visual forms may get taken up in new forms, often in increasingly textual ways, that themselves cross fields. The concept of capillaried forms of public engagement, set out in chapter 1, allows us to hold a view of networks of engagement that cross not only in and out of what have been conceptualised as spheres (the public sphere, counterpublic spheres and subaltern spheres), but also fields (the art field, cultural field, media field, and so on). We argue that the public lives of the visual forms we are concerned with and their contribution to processes of public engagement extend well beyond so-called public spaces of cinema and exhibition venues or discussion panels, engaging many who never enter those spaces. We focus on the circulation of both the visual forms themselves and of the many kinds of take-up that they generate in order to bring into view something of this ‘well beyond’. This methodology allows us to factor into our analysis both regular rhythms in circulation, such as the weekly airing of a television series, and the effects of periods of heightened activity as well as archival pauses, publication interludes and other lulls. In addition to field theory, we draw inspiration from Gérard Genette’s bookbased concept of paratexts to grasp the variety of devices and conventions, both within (‘peritexts’) and outside (‘epitexts’) of the form, which ‘mediate the book to the reader’.6 Peritexts include ‘titles and subtitles, pseudonyms, forewords, dedications, epigraphs, prefaces, intertitles, notes, epilogues, and afterwords’.7 An epitext is ‘any paratextual element not appended to the text within the same volume but circulating, as it were, freely, in a virtually limitless physical and social space’.8 The spatial flexibility of the paratexts – their presence within and outside the book – means that they operate between the world of the book and its circulation. The visual forms that are the focus of this chapter often have peritexts and epitexts. Further texts may be triggered by engagement, resulting in what Michael Warner terms a ‘concatenation’ of texts (and visual forms as well) through time, which create publics.9 The full extent of the perambulations and mutations of the form, and of its take-up, may be too multiple and too minute to identify. Some aspects – such as the discussion of a film or video in conversations at a dinner or in a mini-bus taxi – are ephemeral, leaving no physical traces. Yet even such fugitive expressions contribute to public critical potency, often with effects for ensuing textual manifestations. 42 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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The publics of a visual form are thus not restricted to those who encounter it first-hand. They include those who may never have seen it. Such publics come into being in the wake of the engagements that the visual forms, their peritexts and secondary texts stimulate through their circulation. Our approach draws on Warner’s insightful conceptualisation of a discursive public, an entity convened through ‘texts and their circulation’.10 This public is ‘conjured into being by discourse in order to enable the very discourse that gives it existence’.11 It is ‘an ongoing encounter for discourse’.12 Our focus on the many, often extended, publics constituted in and through visual forms and textual circulation, rather than in spaces, differentiates our approach from much public sphere theory. It also marks off our approach from reception theory, which focuses on the intellectual and creative activity of the viewer or reader interacting with texts or visual forms, as well as from audience studies, visitor analyses at museums or consumption studies. Circulation, we argue, can be further analysed by dividing it into four components: production, entry, take-up and archivality. We show how these phases work through a series of examples that have been in circulation for an extended period of time. Our long-term examples allow us to recognise that capillaries of public deliberative activity pre-date contemporary forms of webbed electronic media. Historical examples further afford us a degree of reflective distance and the necessary depth of perspective to forge theoretical and methodological tools that can be used to illuminate the dynamics of contemporary interventions whose public lives are developing up close around us, often in highly charged and pressing ways.

PRODUCTION Certain visual forms are intentionally produced with qualities that invite public engagement. Much that is designated ‘art’ and forms of cultural critique that assume an aesthetic form seek to provoke forms of contemplation or create critical disturbance. Often, a provocation to critical thought is the result of the intentions of the producer and may be achieved formally. Different media have different capacities in this regard. Critics have written volumes about how these forms achieve this aesthetically in ways that contribute to their public critical potency. We address a different but complementary issue: we are concerned with highlighting the ways in which some of these visual forms are pre-positioned to enter circuits of public engagement, how they make their case engaging and convincing and how they develop charge and accrue public force. 43 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Photographs, films, short videos and exhibitions, among other things, can be important acts of visibility. Images captured in photographs or on film can be interventions that make subjects evident that are otherwise out of view. The act of visibility is taken to mean a two-part act that encompasses making visible and being visible in photographic or filmic form. For example, David Goldblatt’s Some Afrikaners Photographed overtly confronted the place of Afrikaners in the politics of race and difference in South Africa.13 A hardcover book of 81 black-and-white photographs, it sparked considerable debate at the time of its publication in 1975, the height of the apartheid era. Not surprisingly, much of the original public debate centred on the images of Afrikaners made visible in Goldblatt’s photographs. Within the photographic community, Goldblatt was acclaimed for a ‘bare’ aesthetic, first in On the Mines (1973) and then in Some Afrikaners Photographed. In these books he photographed people and spaces in ways that were at once austere and intimate, invariably quiet and always revealing. Goldblatt’s aesthetic often drew comparisons (sometimes critically) to the Depression-era documentary photographers in the United States, such as Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. A more hostile response came from outside the art community, from Afrikaner nationalists driving a vision of commercial and industrial modernity that found no echo in Goldblatt’s quotidian images. Here, his aesthetic ‘bareness’ was read as something altogether more ugly.14 The photographs in Some Afrikaners Photographed did not, however, seek to be definitive in their representation of a community and culture. In his introduction Goldblatt wrote: ‘For a while, I thought of photographing the Afrikaner People. It took time to understand that for me such a project would be grossly pretentious and probably impossible to achieve in any meaningful sense – in any case it is not what I wanted.’15 The photographs establish a relationship between the visibility and invisibility that was largely the consequence of the divide between a visible urban centre and an invisible rural periphery in South Africa in the 1960s (when the photographs were taken). Goldblatt repeatedly articulated a lack of interest in what he saw as the contrived and inauthentic renderings of urban Afrikaner identities, arguing that they were overly present in particular kinds of constructed ways that too often had the effect of making other identities invisible. By showing poor and marginal Afrikaners, the photographs both make a case for what they show and challenge hegemonic ideas about Afrikaner identity. In photographs and in film, a testatory power is often added to the visibility as a result of the reality effects particular to these media. In the case of the Goldblatt photographs, positioned as documentary, the images witness or document what was there. Documentary films share this characteristic. But even fictional films 44 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Tracing Public Engagements in Visual Forms

partake of reality effects. The coalescing of music, sound, language, narrative, space and time that gives a semblance of the ‘completeness’ of experienced reality is specific to film. In other words, film commands an array of visual and aural competencies that enable an active modelling of life. The appearance of ‘real’ life in film gives it the power to ‘capture’ the imagination of viewers, especially when its content is local and highly recognisable.16 Exhibitions of collected materials – real things – can also engage in making visible, likewise harnessing forms of testatory power. This ‘reality effect’ allows critical interventions in these media to call into being publics who are not versed in the specialist literacies of art and culture. The reality effect often coexists with the aesthetic effect of these forms, where the making visible has intended aesthetic ambitions. Through various acts of aesthetic virtuosity these forms are made to stand out in particular ways. They have the potential to make viewers pause in time and space, even engross them in an extended period of contemplation. For the intended effect to draw in viewers, the ‘aesthetic’ needs to be recognised or ‘found’ in the forms (even if the artist never intended it). This aesthetic common ground can lead to an affective experience for the viewer. Producers do far more to ready a visual form for public engagement than simply arrange, frame and present their images and objects for an intended effect and a hoped-for public response. Sometimes the readying is confined to the studio or exhibition space, but often it entails complex negotiations and processes with the world outside of the production space. In the case of the now iconic 1988 film Mapantsula, this involved pre-shooting and pre-launch political strategising in relation to both the apartheid state and the liberation movements. An overtly anti-apartheid film about a petty gangster, Panic, set in the context of 1980s anti-apartheid protest, it openly countered apartheid hegemony. It also destabilised moral and political certitudes about revolutionary consciousness in an anti-apartheid context, actively challenging anti-apartheid heroic visions and inviting protagonists and observers to reflect critically on the political struggle. The gangster narrative challenged these certitudes by inserting a morally repugnant figure at the centre of the film. Panic proved difficult for the film’s politicised viewers, who would have preferred a noble protagonist. The gangster angle, which institutes the disturbed expectation that is the critical heart of film, was initially a tactic to get a false script past the censoring apartheid state.17 Although the script changed, the final draft retained important elements of the original gangster genre. The exigencies of the anti-apartheid political atmosphere compelled the film-makers to seek political legitimacy for their project. They found it in the 45 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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underground political structures, the exiled African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC). This ensured a relatively smooth shoot in Soweto and set the scene for an equally free international circulation of the film. At the same time, it defined the film’s publicness in terms of the anti-apartheid struggles and enhanced its public critical potency because of its relationship with the discursive space of the anti-apartheid struggle. The organisations also protected the film against the opinion of some activists that its international circulation undermined the objectives of the cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa. In the case of Mapantsula, the readying of a film for entry in the public domain exceeded not only matters of form, but even the cultural field from which it emanated. The ways in which visual forms are actively readied for launch in the public domain may happen through the interventions of the artist or producer and sometimes of an entire production team. These interventions geared towards public life may shape the visual form from its point of original conceptualisation. They are also present in the particular format chosen by the producer for its presentation, whether a YouTube clip, magazine, book, gallery exhibition, and so on. A range of paratexts (themselves to varying degrees visual, though almost always more based in words than the primary product) may be developed to frame the product at the time of launch. The visual form may be prepared for entry into public life from deep within the cultural field of its origin or from the outer edges, looking for or anticipating engagement from the media or the political public sphere, as was the case in Some Afrikaners Photographed and Mapantsula. As we have noted, the concept of fields allows us to look at the structure of a specific social space in which a visual form is produced or moves, according to the conditions of that field. The visual forms we are focusing on are produced in cultural fields that require the producer to do certain things in order to achieve recognition within that field. Bourdieu highlights the achievement of distinction and the processes by which the producer is consecrated within the field. Many artists and film-makers are sharply aware of these conditions and make their works accordingly, readying them for engagement in that field, seeking to achieve distinction and consecration. Much of the aesthetic virtuosity of their work is shaped by these conditions. Critical engagement within the field is a part of these field processes and the launching of a visual form usually happens within a field. But Goldblatt’s photographs of Afrikaners and Mapantsula both achieved engagement beyond the cultural field. Mapantsula straddled both the cinematic field and the political field. A product of collaboration between its makers and political organisations, the insertion of the film within the political field was predestined. Yet the dynamics of this insertion could not possibly be predicted. 46 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Bourdieu recognises movement of producers across fields, arguing that those who accumulate capital within a field can ‘convert’ that capital into a form acknowledged as valuable in other fields.18 Bourdieu is especially interested in how the individual producer accumulates capital when field-crossing by the producer takes place. We, on the other hand, are interested in tracking what happens to the visual form, as it gains impetus from its accumulations in one field, and then jumps into another field, as in moving from the cultural field into the political, a shift sometimes facilitated by the generation of secondary texts. While we give considerable attention to fieldjumping, we nonetheless recognise that some forms, and the ideas they instantiate, cross fields when their producers do. In addition to the processes of field-crossing by producers, soliciting agents may also play a role in facilitating both field-crossing, as described by Bourdieu, and field-jumping, as discussed in our examples. In some instances, the initial point of public engagement and the subject to be engaged through a visual form are firmly established by an intermediary agent who solicits a commissioned work, such as photographs on a designated subject for a particular magazine, or a television series on a particular theme destined for a predetermined viewing slot. In such cases the commissioned visual form is meant to speak to a public already addressed, and hence constituted, by the particular gallery, magazine or television slot. The soliciting agents typically seek out producers of art or cultural visual forms whose thoughts and works are likely to be of interest to that pre-existing public. Soliciting agents are also alert to the value of producers who will shift or expand the pre-existing reader- or viewership of a medium. To do this, the soliciting agent may invite field-crossing by a producer. In 1994 the celebrated rebel-poet Antjie Krog was solicited first to take up the editorship of the alternative Afrikaans publication Die Suid-Afrikaan and then invited to head the radio team to cover the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Her literary credentials in challenging congealed positions of the Afrikaner establishment and her brave handling of affect were recognised by the solicitors as powerful attributes and credentials for journalism in a time of massive social change. Where work is solicited in field-crossing conditions, the producer may elect to meet the new field’s expectations by focusing on something easily recognised or articulated in the new field even if s/he imports characteristics of the original field. Alternatively, the producer may exceed or subvert characteristics of the original field, focusing on something alien or shocking in the new context. In other words, the field-crosser may seek to meet the needs of an already existing public, such as the listeners of a radio station, in ways that match the station’s own form of address or s/he may seek to stimulate and extend public engagement by subverting the expected form of address. 47 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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As Anthea Garman has shown, Krog’s journalism was infected with the hallmarks of her poetry and her politics, subverting aspects of professional journalism: ‘Anglicisations, slang, graphic descriptions, sympathetic tone of voice, and an insistence that listeners face the horrors being unearthed, were so evident in her reports that national radio editor Franz Krüger had to deal with complaints that Afrikaans-language stations did not want to use them.’19 Sometimes, however, it is not the producer who crosses fields, carrying ideas from the one field into the other, but the visual form itself, or it may be conveyed via a secondary text. Sometimes this field-jumping is a result of active commissioning. The photographs published by Goldblatt in 1975 as Some Afrikaners Photographed were originally solicited in 1964 by the editor of a design- and style-conscious society magazine, The South African Tatler, as two photo essays. The initial photo essay was intended to be part of a larger project on ‘The City Volk’, in which this aspirational ‘English’ magazine assessed the significance of Afrikaner advances in the business world and the attitude of the National Party government to the mining industry.20 Goldblatt’s interest, however, was not in extrovert expressions of Afrikaner power in the centre, but in the quiet ordinariness that remained invisible on the peripheries. The first photo essay, ‘People of the Plots’, thrust onto the elegant pages of Tatler the poverty and marginality of Afrikaner smallholders living on the fringes of urban Johannesburg. In the second essay, ‘Bosman’s Bosveld Revisited’, Goldblatt expanded on the popular storyteller Herman Charles Bosman’s fictional evocation of Afrikaner attachment to the land, with a photographic testimony from the remote Marico district (the setting of Bosman’s stories) that documented a form of South African identity unfamiliar to the readers of Tatler. Goldblatt’s photographic rendition of Bosman’s fiction challenged the consignation of Bosman’s work to the space of the imagined, making the fiction visible via the veracity of the photographs’ own ‘truth’.

LAUNCHING VISUAL FORMS AND UNLEASHING PUBLIC CRITICAL POTENCIES Inaugural public events – premieres, exhibition openings, book launches, and so on – play a distinctive role in the way a visual form develops critical potency. These events are often occasions of face-to-face assembly and are conventional practices within the arenas (art world, film world, and so on) in which they figure. Rory Bester has argued that the space of exhibition – we might add film premiere, book

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launch, and so on – is particularly significant in activating the critical potency of a visual form. He terms this role for the exhibition ‘pollinate’.21 In part, the pollinate effect of a launch event in public debate flows from the interventions and designs of the producer of the visual form and the event production team. In as far as possible, the exhibitor, film-maker or author, sometimes in collaboration with a production team, prepares the work for entry into the spaces of engagement afforded by the exhibition, premiere or launch. But on opening night, conventions for a time take control of the public life of the visual form. The first of these is that the occasion convenes a public within a shared space, with their attention focused collectively on the visual form at hand, participating in interchange about the object and the ideas it generates. The event further prompts inaugural critical engagement focused on the work in the form of the speeches and the conversations and reviews that follow the event. The pollinate effect also flows from the particular conventions of launch events – advertisements, press releases, speeches, reviews by critics, interpretation by docents, catalogue essays, academic commentary, and so on. The point we wish to emphasise here is that these activities do more than simply promote or sell the visual form. They activate potential critical potency. However, our work shows that public engagement is most animated when the form, or the event, jumps fields, commanding the attention of commentators outside the cultural field, occasioning public outcry or official protest, sparking investigations by journalists, and so on. Such developments precipitate rippling forms of wider engagement within but also, significantly, beyond the field in which in the inaugural event occurred and in which the visual form was produced. In 1996, the artist-curator Pippa Skotnes excavated from the basements of the South African Museum copies of resin casts of the body parts of San (people historically termed ‘Bushman’) made in the early twentieth century. She used them for her exhibition Miscast, where they were shown alongside invasive anthropometrical photographs of the period, archival photographs of San executions and of trophy heads held in other museums. The exhibition reached across fields, transporting so-called ethnographic material, notably from the neighbouring natural history museum, into the art gallery and constituted an occasion of dialogue about a controversial ‘Bushman’ diorama made up of the cast figures, on display in the natural history museum. Miscast was, thus, a critical intervention in the field of museum practice, an occasion of archival and collection exposure. The artist-curator engaged in a dramatic act of making visible a brutal colonial inheritance, attested to not only by the photographs as documentary proof of atrocities, but also by photographs as 49 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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objects from the past preserved into the 1990s, which bore witness to the violence of the historical photographic practice itself. This point was echoed in the casts as evidence of the violation that was the body-moulding process. The aesthetic and affective dimensions of the exhibition worked to powerful effect. Carefully lit and placed to allude to the Last Supper, 13 yellowed, translucent body casts were viscerally evocative of both past lives and objectified body parts, chillingly offset by a central circle of rifles. The headless casts made visible and attested to not only a shameful, effaced past, but also, as the response to the exhibition revealed, the persistent marginality of San people and a San inheritance in post-apartheid South Africa. Public exposure of the copies of casts of naked body parts in the exhibition was regarded by some viewers as a shocking testament to a past practice, but was received by others as a repeat violation: ‘[T]o show these things here is just as bad as the people who did these things long ago.’22 The art gallery hosted a discussion forum, which resulted in intense and heated debate that opened up questions and issues that extended well beyond what the artist-curator addressed – a vivid example of the way the public critical potency of a visual form is not dependent on the producer’s intentions.23 The curator of an exhibition such as Miscast does much to ready the exhibition for public display, positioning it for engagement in a particular way, through the formal composition of the exhibition, the development and highlighting of themes, as well as in all the many forms of accompanying texts. A significant feature of the positioning of Miscast was the location of the exhibition outside the ethnographic institution, the South African Museum, from which the casts had been exhumed, and inside an art space, the pre-eminent, neighbouring, South African National Gallery. Another feature was the framing of the exhibition by a large-letter peritext centrally inscribed on the gallery wall, a quote from the anthropologist Greg Dening, describing the consequence of the first encounter between native and stranger: There is now no Native past without the Stranger, no Stranger without the Native. No one can hope to be mediator or interlocutor in that opposition of Native and Stranger, because no one is gazing at it untouched by the power that is in it. Nor can anyone speak just for the one, just for the other. There is no escape from the politics of our knowledge, but that politics is not in the past. That politics is in the present. In the case of Miscast, in the early post-apartheid context in which whites speaking for, or representing, black people was especially contested terrain, active positioning by the white curator was itself a charged matter and, along with the forms of visibility 50 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Tracing Public Engagements in Visual Forms

the exhibition employed, this caused intense controversy over and above the issues of violence in the past the exhibition foregrounded. Debates that are confined within established fields, such as the art field, follow a field-bound script. When the forms and linked ideas jump fields, the script is open for negotiation. The visual form transfers accumulated capital from the original field into the new field and typically accrues media power. Once out of the art field, the debate can become subject to new forms of scrutiny and corralling. In the case of Miscast the values of the nation were mobilised in contesting or imposing silences, with Skotnes marked out as a white curator speaking for Khoisan descendants and historically marginal communities, and the exposure of past violence interpreted as an act of repeated violence in the present. The phenomenon of jumping fields reminds us that the visual forms, and the ideas they instantiate, are subject to engagements that stem from the intricate social and political relations of which they are a part. Such engagements may not necessarily lead to a desired outcome. Rather, they are likely to give birth to varied ways of understanding social and political relations, the outcome of which may make possible new strategies of relating to power in all its forms. Pollinate effects are typically, but not exclusively, confined to inaugural events. Face-to-face events later in the public life of the form can also deliver pollinate effects. The 1959 film Come Back, Africa, made by independent American filmmaker Lionel Rogosin, in collaboration with Sophiatown intellectuals Lewis Nkosi, Bloke Modisane and Can Themba, exemplifies these effects. A powerful statement about black modern life, the film was too radical for an apartheid South Africa organised around the idea of rural Africans living in tribal homelands. It was not circulated in the country at the time of its release and, despite winning international awards and gaining considerable critical attention, the film remained confined to marginal venues overseas. However, it was shown almost 30 years later in South Africa at the 1988 Weekly Mail Film Festival and at the launch of the Workers’ Library, two events that acted as latter-day pollinates, inaugurating delayed processes of preview, review and political commentary. While certain genres or formats are ephemeral or specific to a site, event or time (exhibitions and radio interviews, for instance), others (podcasts, books and videos, for example) are portable, mobile and enduring. The object forms, and sometimes the inaugural events, can circulate and persist as a result of their re-orchestration in, translation into, or commemoration in other forms or media, such as catalogues, published books of photographs, published scripts, DVD or video versions of films and, of course, digital items. These transactions and format conversions mediate the original object form and facilitate its mobility. The publication of Mapantsula: The 51 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Book, which integrated interviews and critical commentaries with the screenplay of the film, was an instance of this shift.24 Such shifts are another way that visual forms cross fields, circulating in and out of galleries, cinemas and homes, moving from elite spaces into more quotidian ones, and again onwards, criss-crossing public and counterpublic spheres. While this mobility makes the public critical potency of certain visual forms hard to pin down for study, it contributes significantly to their ability to evade corralling or shutdown. The public life of the original visual form does not exist in neat correspondence with the circulation of linked forms that it launches or spawns. We term the dynamic interplay between the original visual form and the linked forms that it generates ‘take-up’.

TAKE-UP AND PUBLIC CRITICAL POTENCY The immediately post-inaugural-event public life of the visual form and its circulation over time is usefully distinguished from the emergence and circulation of epitexts and second-generation texts that flow out from the original work, although over time they often exist in continuous, mutually constituting interaction. The mutually constituting role of ideas, visual forms and take-up can be better discerned with a longer historical lens. This allows us to recognise that public critical potency is an effect not confined to an immediate political reaction to a controversial art or cultural form. When Mapantsula premiered in 1988, it was almost immediately banned for general viewership and video distribution. The banning by the apartheid state and the careful prior political positioning of the film by the film-makers as endorsed by the liberation movement constituted the film’s initial publicness, causing it immediately to exceed the boundaries of structured cinema space and to enter into novel forms of circulation. Inscribed with the urgency of political liberation, Mapantsula was viewed, often clandestinely, by an astonishing range of people – from prisoners on Robben Island, who had their own copy, to audiences in remote rural areas.25 The film was shown at the 1988 Weekly Mail Film Festival, organised jointly with the Anti-Censorship Action Group (ACAG), in the section ‘Cinema of Resistance’. The festival inflected the film with its own agenda, leading to reviews framed by the festival and by censorship issues. The film entered numerous international circuits and was invited to Cannes. It was soon lodged in university libraries and became prescribed viewing in film studies classes. In 1991 it returned to South Africa for wider release. We see then that, despite its failure to draw a major distributor, the film as cultural object circulated 52 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Tracing Public Engagements in Visual Forms

widely nationally and internationally, exceeding both the country’s borders and the boundaries of the cinema. In the meantime the film generated a host of epitexts and secondary texts. It was reviewed in the alternative South African press. In the pages of the political journal Sechaba, an official ANC publication with an underground circulation, political exiles debated its significance, wrestling with the way in which it destabilised the certitudes of the struggle.26 Their texts, in turn, were read across the organisation and beyond by many who did not see the film, but who nonetheless confronted the problem presented by the black anti-hero, Panic. It gave rise to debates about the nature of South African film culture and appropriate representations of black identity.27 Also in 1991 the Congress of South African Writers (COSAW), an affiliate of the ANC-aligned United Democratic Front, published Mapantsula: The Book. Made up of the script of the film and an interview with the director and writer, the book was positioned as part of an effort to develop indigenous cinema and public engagement around film. Graced with a back-cover blurb by the eminent American film-maker Spike Lee and framed with a preface by prominent ANC cultural activist Mongane Wally Serote, the book also had an introduction by the editors, who were COSAW members, Jeremy Nathan and Matthew Krouse. Mapantsula: The Book was unprecedented in South African film culture. The book served to position the film as anti-Hollywood and anti-apartheid, but also foregrounded issues about the role of film culture in the political terrain, the problems of a future burdened by the legacies that are Panic’s and issues around the representation of black identity. For the progressive cultural ‘movement’ in South Africa, COSAW in particular, Mapantsula became a template for making authentic South African films based in the people’s struggles against apartheid and the forms of social inequalities it engendered. Its particular aesthetic form facilitated this. There is in Mapantsula an undeclared clash between the bourgeois convention of aesthetic transcendence and rebellious self-representation of the lumpenproletariat. By not conforming to the straitjacket of moral uprightness, the latter’s postures, language and dress as presented in the film can be said to represent an autonomous and resonant aesthetic convention. This convention has a historical singularity that, when viewed from the perspective of the quotidian landscape of poverty and protest in the film, is not inimical to viewers’ identification with and encounter with the potentially critical import of Mapantsula. The film is also peppered with affective moments that appeal to viewers’ sense of judgement and identification including, for example, the emotive reaction by Mamodise on finding out about her son Panic’s murder at the hands of police. Here, anti-apartheid politics were 53 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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transformed into deeply personalised experiences that were fertile for the film’s public critical potency. The public engagements spawned by the film were not confined to its viewers, but travelled outwards as the film circulated, generating new debates and secondary texts of many different kinds, which called new and varied publics into being. The film had effects in cultural and academic circles, affecting discourse on film-making, and the discursive horizons of struggle politics. All of these developments, well beyond the initial field-jumping moment, contributed to its public critical potency. As we follow the visual form, we see various kinds of texts generated in response to it, addressing or calling into being publics of their own. Actively discriminating between reviews, news items, critical writing, scholarly research, books on the visual form, blogs, and so on makes visible the phenomenon of field-jumping and its wider effects. Certain of these texts are field-bound epitexts and secondary texts that flow from the inaugural moment and continue over time (for example, reviews, critical writing, repackaging for secondary sales, and so on). We thus see that there are multiple ways in which a producer may invest a form with potential public critical potency and multiple ways that the field in which it is launched prime the form for further potency. When the visual form jumps fields, as Mapantsula did from its inception, by entering directly into the political realm, it gains a further charge. Still further effects follow from the kinds of subsequent developments that we delineate here. Our focus on visual forms shows how the forms flow along deliberative capillaries. In some cases they even constitute the capillaries before them. These capillaries criss-cross multiple terrains, in a manner radically different from how the deliberative operations of a public sphere are conventionally conceptualised. We have seen that some of the fields in which such ideas travel are self-contained and not squarely in what is recognised as the main public sphere. They are beyond the politically sanctioned limits of public discourse. In some instances, an artistic frame allows a politically dangerous idea to find a form of refuge in the esoteric, disguise, symbols, metaphors, and so on. As we have seen in the case of the Sophiatown intellectuals speaking in Come Back, Africa, these can be strategies in the face of vulnerability that enable articulation of that which is otherwise unsayable. This has the further effect of allowing the affective a place in public engagement. Acknowledging the need to recognise trauma and to institute redress in a post-repressive regime moves the scope of public engagement in South Africa beyond the rational-critical. Post-repressive regimes typically open up the formal public sphere to recognition of the affective dimensions of victimhood. But postrepression moral certainties can be inhospitable to other affective dimensions, such 54 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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as the negotiation of self by former rulers that go beyond the recognition of guilt, or complicity, leading to their being consigned to places outside the convened public sphere.28 Art, film and other forms, such as novels and autobiographies, return such difficult issues to the official public sphere via the deliberative capillaries we have identified.

INCUBATION AND ARCHIVALITY When Goldblatt’s Some Afrikaners Photographed was published in 1975, it generated much controversy. While some publications refused to cover the book, in others it elicited vibrant critical reviews. Interestingly, however, it failed commercially and was remaindered for an insignificant R2.50 before finally being pulped. In 2007 the photographs were republished as Some Afrikaners Revisited. This was an acknowledgement by the photographer, contributing essayists and the new publisher that there remained not only aesthetic virtuosity but also critical potency in the conversation that had begun with the original publication decades earlier. The republication reveals that Goldblatt’s ruminations incubated in the field of ideas, even as they were rejected or neglected. To some extent, they were able to exist in the field of ideas because of their containment in a book, which kept them collated and present over time. The book form allowed them to continue quietly pulsing in the public domain, refusing to evaporate. Among South African photographers and aficianados, Goldblatt’s book production is legendary, partly because he so consistently installed his bodies of work into book forms. And as his international profile rose steadily, following his solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the late 1990s, interest in his work also increased. His original books, now in limited supply, quickly became highly desirable collector’s items, fetching up to R10 000 each.29 The republication came at a time when the authenticity of Afrikaner citizens within the new South Africa, and especially their privileged and emotional relationship with the land, was a charged and contested matter. Some Afrikaners Revisited entered the affective and the disavowed firmly into public discourse in the form of an archival fragment. Similarly, the book produced by Skotnes to accompany the exhibition Miscast kept its issues alive in the public domain.30 Skotnes’s book production of elements of the archive of San people is also substantial,31 and has been augmented by her prodigious work in digitising and making available online the Bleek and Lloyd archive of /Xam, !Kun and Koranna materials.32 The books and, increasingly, digital archives register by their existence the presence of the uncomfortable, unresolved questions of the post-apartheid nation. 55 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Films likewise pulsate in the archive. Come Back, Africa had only a small circulation at the time of its release. But all the time it lay in the archive, seemingly forgotten, it too incubated new powers. The effects of the film’s reappropriation lay in the combination of its resonance with its contemporary publics’ concerns and its aesthetic innovation. The film’s showing at the Workers’ Library Book Fair gave a historical perspective to the workers’ identities. Importantly, the film ‘authenticated’ its representation of early apartheid in a way that informed contemporary antiapartheid discourses. In addition, Come Back, Africa’s aesthetic signature is inscribed on its form, a fusion of documentary stylistics with a fictional narrative. The film’s visuals of Sophiatown and its surrounds and its use of non-professional actors constitute its neorealist aesthetic. The fictional narrative is wedded to the visual and sonic milieu underwriting Come Back, Africa’s compulsion to document, giving it a sharp historical distinctiveness. In addition to the realistic signposts of place and time, the aesthetic appeal of Come Back, Africa lies in its depiction of the social landscape, the dramatisation of suffering and the documentation of public debate by historical figures, which draw the viewer to the realistic world the film depicts. The inclination to rely on the visual power and historical proximity of film to events is a mark of its public discursive authority. Not only did the return of the film authenticate contemporary politics through historical reference, but it did so with two additional archival aspects that added further dimensions to its public life. The film functioned as an archival fragment of a marginal history and an outlawed culture, recording the images and voices of Sophiatown intellectuals, and a slice of South African life in the late 1950s. Its visuals are frequently used as a source for the social and cultural history of Sophiatown. The movie Drum (2004) by Zola Maseko incorporates a shebeen scene, which is imported from Come Back, Africa. Here, a Miriam Makeba archetype, Dara Macala, sings a number that Makeba sang in the earlier film’s shebeen scene, an intertextual link between the two films. This homage to the film as a record of the cultural history of Sophiatown also intimates its role as an archive of black modern urban life. Most recently, an online platform, Jazzuary, has paid homage to the film as resource for countering political hardships of black modern life: ‘This movie confirms that African jazz was not just about entertainment, hip swaying, head bopping or the sax and the bass; it was what kept hope alive for the men and women who left a legacy and went on to conquer the world stage. Their jazz, its unique heartbeat through the streets of Sophiatown, did not allow their spirit to be broken.’33 It is possible to see in this attention to the film, and its availability as archive of cultural convergences, a history made in sonic beats. 56 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Tracing Public Engagements in Visual Forms

Towards the end of the apartheid era and currently, a small but significant wave of thinking around national cinema in South Africa emerged. For example, in 1991 the film scholar Ntongela Masilela challenged scholars to think about Come Back, Africa from the perspective of national cinema.34 Masilela proposed a national cinema that would be charged with instituting a shift from the exclusionary cinema of the apartheid era to a new one in which the social effects of national politics would be acknowledged. For him, Come Back, Africa stood as a model of a future national cinema in South Africa. Although Come Back, Africa was initially intended as a cinematic challenge of an actually existing repressive state, Masilela’s reflections point to its contemporary recuperation as a salient medium for reflecting on national cinema. Its scenes of a deliberative black literati now serve, albeit inadvertently, as visual documentation of a public sphere that was historically denied visibility. Drawing attention to scholarly engagements as a distinct form of the film’s publicness challenges the conventional bracketing off of scholarly commentary from public engagement. The saliency in drawing attention to expert publics rests with their capacity to consecrate certain films as historically and aesthetically paradigmatic. Furthermore, in giving considered extensive attention to the film, academic commentary calls scholarly publics into being. These scholarly publics include young film-makers of the future and in this way ideas of critical import flow into and out of the academy. This point is not confined to film; it applies equally to all the various kinds of visual forms discussed in this chapter. The archival aspects we have highlighted lend an extra dimension to the publicness of these forms. The point is counter-intuitive, for the periods of dormancy we have drawn attention to, on first pass, seem to be the opposite of what we might mean by public. However, it is an implication of the argument we are making that the kinds of critical potency the forms developed before entering an archival state were of an order that ensured them an archival future. In making this point, we draw on Carolyn Hamilton’s understanding of the notion of archive as coming into play when an item is deemed worthy of preservation and thereby gains an apparatus of preservation. This can be institutionalised, as in the case of the acquisition of an item by an archive, or it might happen in an informal setting.35 The degrees of publicness involved vary according to the setting. It may be only residual or potential in the case of an archive of personal memorabilia carefully preserved in a trunk by an avid moviegoer. Or it may be substantial, as in the case of the libraries that hold archival copies of the magazines in which Goldblatt’s photographs first appeared and the archives that competed for his collection, the many international and local institutions from which Skotnes drew 57 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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the components of the Miscast exhibition, the archive from which Come Back, Africa was excavated, and the archives that hold copies of Mapantsula, as well as the many libraries and archives that house the various books associated with each of these forms, and the array of paratexts and secondary texts arising from them. In these latter settings, in particular, the materials exist as public resources, actively selected in preference to countless other possible contenders for costly preservation and thus positioned for further take-up under the sign of the archive. In this way, archival preservation is a contribution to their publicness and an augmentation of their status.

TRACKING PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT The challenge in tracking the circulation of visual forms and the take-up they engender is following how, in the course of their lives, these forms and a host of linked texts accumulate and lose intellectual and political weight in their socio-political contexts and the prevailing dynamics of circulation. A long view shows that the dynamics of the circulation of visual forms and their linked texts change over time, responding to developments in new media and technologies, new or changing literacies, shifting political contexts and changing compositions of possible publics. A visual form can accumulate a history that it carries forward in time that is part of its meanings, which contributes to its effects and significances and constitutes its publicness. Potent public interventions change form, shift media and enter new debates. Over time, they make contributions to and shape public discussions and are themselves reshaped by those discursive developments and by intervening events.36 Recursive and sometimes even dialectical dynamics emerge as a feature of the public potency of visual forms. The point also applies, of course, to ideas expressed in written texts. This chapter reveals something of the ways in which spaces of culture and the aesthetic can be used as sites from which to speak by those whose concerns are rendered marginal in the formalised spaces of the public sphere. When visual forms turn issues that are usually sidelined into matters of public discussion, they challenge the kinds of power that keep such matters out of the convened public sphere. Indeed, they confront the hegemonic understanding of the public sphere in classical liberal democratic theory. The circumstances of forms and the ideas they instantiate change over time and, through field-crossing and capillary action, certain marginal concerns attract attention, garner power and enter debate. But the many spaces of art and the cultural are not confined to the expression of marginal concerns. In many cases, these are elite spaces, commanded by cognoscenti. 58 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Field-jumping – say, from the art field into that of the media – can see ideas break out of what are set up as the special, elevated spaces of high culture, cafe society or the academy, to become part of the mental landscape of a large range of ordinary people. In recent years wide publics and transnational networks of circulation are facilitated by new media and Internet connectivity. While our historical examples make limited reference to the specific opportunities these developments afford, they allow us to offer a methodology that readily lends itself to adaptation when dealing with new media. This chapter reveals something of the processes by means of which relatively complex ideas, propositions and arguments reach and engage public attention. It offers a methodology for tracking and analysing publicly potent visual forms, introducing a set of concepts, such as pollinate, field-jumping, take-up and capillaries, which allow us to get at the dynamics, circuits and institutions of circulation. However, we do not wish to suggest that production, launch, take-up and archivality constitute a model for the circulation of publicly potent visual forms and the issues they generate. Circulation of the kind we are interested in is infinitely diverse and always a larger process than its traces to which our analysis is hostage. Where Warner conceptualises ‘a public’ primarily as called into being by a text and existing only by virtue of its imagining, this chapter has developed a further perspective on public engagement by charting the accumulation of the public potency of visual forms, across texts and media, through pollinates, within take-up, into and out of archives. This perspective extends significantly Warner’s idea of a ‘concatenation’ of texts. It extends it through time, embraces the circulation of art and cultural visual forms and offers an account of their capillary action across fields. These forms of engagement escape the constraints of a convened public sphere, dominated by matters of the nation state and rules of engagement, enabling varied discussion of post-national matters. More than that, the capillaries are themselves transnational, as these visual forms and their associated texts travel in global circuits. Whereas Warner’s notion of concatenation suggests links in a continuous chain, our analysis of the public potency of certain visual forms reveals instances of muteness, abeyance and incubation. Our methodology enables us to conceptualise public engagement in ways different from the public sphere/subaltern public sphere formulation, a domination/resistance binary or high culture/popular culture opposition. Rather, we see how potent forms can traverse cultural divides; straddle elite and popular, mainstream and marginal settings; shift genres and media; cross and jump fields; transit time; and constitute before them the capillaries of their own flow. 59 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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NOTES

This chapter draws on the authors’ previous work. See Rory Bester, ‘David Goldblatt’s Making Visible: Photographic Strategies of Rumination, Orchestration and Circulation’, Social Dynamics 36, 1 (2010): 153–165; Rory Bester, ‘Writing Photography’s Archive of Apartheid: Theories and Methods for Understanding the Work of David Goldblatt’ (PhD diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 2015); Carolyn Hamilton, ‘Uncertain Citizenship and Public Deliberation in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, Social Dynamics 35, 2 (2009): 355–374; Carolyn Hamilton, ‘The Public Life of the Archive’, book manuscript in preparation; Litheko Modisane, ‘Movie-ng the Public Sphere: The Public Life of a South African Film’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 30, 1 (2010): 133–146; and Litheko Modisane, South Africa’s Renegade Reels: The Making and Public Lives of Black-Centered Films (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Some ideas were developed in research by the core group of the Constitution of Public Intellectual Life Research Project – Rory Bester, Lesley Cowling, Anthea Garman, Carolyn Hamilton, Litheko Modisane, Pascal Mwale, Alan Finlay and, in its first phase, Yvette Greslé and Windsor Leroke. This chapter is one of a cluster of linked essays emanating from the project and its successor, the Public Life of Ideas Network. 2 See Modisane, ‘Movie-ng the Public Sphere’, 133. 3 In exploring the agency of the visual form, we are aware of the large body of work on object agency, most notably, Bruno Latour’s theorisation of object agency – see, for example, Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds, Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005) – as well as the ideas of scholars like Alfred Gell – see Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) – and Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction’, in The Social Life of Things, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–63. We are also aware of Elizabeth Edwards’s argument that the semiotic and iconographic analysis of photographs needs to be augmented by an analysis of the ‘material and presentational forms of photographs’; see Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Material Beings: Objecthood and Ethnographic Photographs’, Visual Studies 17, 1 (2002): 67–75; see also Patrick Maynard, The Engine of Visualization: Thinking through Photography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). 4 For example, in the wake of the popular South African television drama series Yizo Yizo (1999), which showed explicit images of violence, reports of copycat behaviour by some youth appeared in the press. One such report was of a gang-rape incident in Leslie Township near Secunda in the Mpumalanga province. The delinquent group called itself Yizo Yizo. McKeed Kotlolo, ‘Yizo Yizo Copycat Gang Rapes Girl’, Sowetan, 27 April 1999. For reports on other incidents, see Mike Siluma, ‘Yizo Yizo Nightmare Must Stop’, Sowetan, 23 April 1999; F.B. Andersson, ‘Intertextuality and Memory in Yizo Yizo’ (PhD diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 2004), 293. 5 Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 181. 6 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), xviii. 7 Genette, Paratexts, xviii. 8 Genette, Paratexts, 344. 9 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 66. 10 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 66. 1

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Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 67. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 90. 13 David Goldblatt, Some Afrikaners Photographed (Johannesburg: Murray Crawford, 1975). 14 For example, when some of Goldblatt’s photographs of Afrikaners were published in Camera magazine in 1969, it provoked a front-page article in the Afrikaans newspaper Dagbreek en Sondagnuus, with the headline ‘Bloed sal kook oor dié foto’s’ (Blood will boil over these photos). According to the article, the photographs were ‘shocking and extremely insulting for the Afrikaner’ and the unnamed author called for action to be taken against Goldblatt. See David Golblatt, Some Afrikaners Revisited (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2007), 18. 15 Goldblatt, Some Afrikaners Photographed, 7. 16 Modisane, Renegade Reels, 180. 17 Oliver Schmitz and Thomas Mogotlane, Mapantsula: The Book (Fordsburg: Congress of South African Writers, 1991), 23, 31. 18 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 17. 19 Anthea Garman, ‘Antjie Krog, Self and Society: The Making and Mediation of a Public Intellectual in South Africa’ (PhD diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 2009), 159. 20 Michael Godby, ‘David Goldblatt: The Personal and the Political’, in David Goldblatt: Fifty-one Years, ed. Corinne Diserens and Okwui Enwezor (Barcelona: MACBA, 2001), 407–425. 21 Rory Bester, ‘Writing Photography’s Archive’, 297. 22 Forum comment, 14 April 1996, by a visitor from Smitsdrift camp for displaced Kalahari San, cited in Pippa Skotnes, ‘ “Civilised off the Face of the Earth”: Museum Display and the Silencing of the /Xam’, Poetics Today 22, 2 (2001): 316. 23 See the discussion of curatorial anticipation and its limits in the Miscast exhibition by Shannon Jackson and Steven Robins, ‘Miscast: The Place of the Museum in Negotiating the Bushman Past and Present’, Critical Arts 13, 1 (1990): 69–101. 24 Schmitz and Mogotlane, Mapantsula. 25 Jacqueline Maingard, ‘New South African Cinema: Mapantsula and Sarafina’, Screen 35, 3 (1994): 238; Schmitz and Mogotlane, Mapantsula, 47. 26 Ralph Mzamo, ‘Review: Mapantsula’, Sechaba 23, 7 (1989): 31–32; Thando Zuma, ‘Another Look at Mapantsula’, Sechaba 24, 1 (1990): 26–27. 27 For examples, see Modisane, ‘Movie-ng the Public Sphere’, 141–145. 28 On the convened nature of the public sphere in South Africa, see Hamilton, ‘Uncertain Citizenship’. 29 These include Some Afrikaners Photographed; On the Mines (Cape Town: Struik, 1973); In Boksburg (Cape Town: The Gallery Press, 1982); Lifetimes: Under Apartheid (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986); The Transported of KwaNdebele (New York: Aperture, 1989); and South Africa: The Structure of Things Then (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1998). 30 Pippa Skotnes, ed., Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1996). 31 Pippa Skotnes, Landscape to Literature (Cape Town: Centre for Curating the Archive, 2011); Pippa Skotnes, Rock Art Made in Translation (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2010); Pippa Skotnes, Unconquerable Spirit: George Stow’s History Paintings of the San (Johannesburg: Jacana Media; Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008); Pippa Skotnes, Claim to the Country: The Archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek (Johannesburg: Jacana Media; Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007). 11 12

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Pippa Skotnes, The Digital Bleek and Lloyd (Cape Town: Llarec Series in Visual History, University of Cape Town Press, 2005); see also http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/ (14 000 image and text pages), accessed 26 September 2019. 33 See ‘Jazz on Film: Drum’, Jazzuary, 23 December 2015. Accessed 16 June 2018, http:// jazzuary.fm/jazz-on-film-drum/. 34 Ntongela Masilela, ‘Come Back Africa and South African Film History’, Jump Cut 36 (1991): 61–65. Accessed 26 September 2019, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/ onlinessays/JC36folder/ComeBackAfrica.html. 35 Carolyn Hamilton, ‘Backstory, Biography and the Life of the James Stuart Archive’, History in Africa 38, 1 (2011): 319–341. 36 Hamilton, ‘Backstory’.

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REFERENCES Andersson, F.B. ‘Intertextuality and Memory in Yizo Yizo’. PhD diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 2004. Appadurai, Arjun. ‘Introduction’. In The Social Life of Things, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 3–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Bester, Rory. ‘David Goldblatt’s Making Visible: Photographic Strategies of Rumination, Orchestration and Circulation’. Social Dynamics 36, 1 (2010): 153–165. Bester, Rory. ‘Writing Photography’s Archive of Apartheid: Theories and Methods for Understanding the Work of David Goldblatt’. PhD diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 2015. Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Translated by Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Edwards, Elizabeth. ‘Material Beings: Objecthood and Ethnographic Photographs’. Visual Studies 17, 1 (2002): 67–75. Garman, Anthea. ‘Antjie Krog, Self and Society: The Making and Mediation of a Public Intellectual in South Africa’. PhD diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 2009. Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Godby, Michael. ‘David Goldblatt: The Personal and the Political’. In David Goldblatt: Fifty-one Years, edited by Corinne Diserens and Okwui Enwezor, 407–425. Barcelona: MACBA, 2001. Goldblatt, David. In Boksburg. Cape Town: The Gallery Press, 1982. Goldblatt, David. Lifetimes: Under Apartheid. London: Jonathan Cape, 1986. Goldblatt, David. On the Mines. Cape Town: Struik, 1973. Goldblatt, David. Some Afrikaners Photographed. Johannesburg: Murray Crawford, 1975. Goldblatt, David. Some Afrikaners Revisited. Cape Town: Umuzi, 2007. Goldblatt, David. South Africa: The Structure of Things Then. Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1998. Goldblatt, David. The Transported of KwaNdebele. New York: Aperture, 1989. Hamilton, Carolyn. ‘Backstory, Biography and the Life of the James Stuart Archive’. History in Africa 38, 1 (2011): 319–341.

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Hamilton, Carolyn. ‘The Public Life of the Archive’. Book manuscript in preparation. Hamilton, Carolyn. ‘Uncertain Citizenship and Public Deliberation in Post-apartheid South Africa’. Social Dynamics 35, 2 (2009): 355–374. Jackson, Shannon and Steven Robins. ‘Miscast: The Place of the Museum in Negotiating the Bushman Past and Present’. Critical Arts 13, 1 (1990): 69–101. Kotlolo, McKeed. ‘Yizo Yizo Copycat Gang Rapes Girl’. Sowetan, 27 April 1999. Latour, Bruno and Peter Weibel, eds. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Maingard, Jacqueline. ‘New South African Cinema: Mapantsula and Sarafina’. Screen 35, 3 (1994): 234–243. Masilela, Ntongela. ‘Come Back Africa and South African Film History’. Jump Cut 36 (1991): 61–65. Accessed 26 September 2019, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/ onlinessays/ JC36folder/ComeBackAfrica.html. Maynard, Patrick. The Engine of Visualization: Thinking through Photography. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. Modisane, Litheko. ‘Movie-ng the Public Sphere: The Public Life of a South African Film’. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 30, 1 (2010): 133–146. Modisane, Litheko. South Africa’s Renegade Reels: The Making and Public Lives of BlackCentered Films. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Mzamo, Ralph. ‘Review: Mapantsula’. Sechaba 23, 7 (1989): 31–32. Schmitz, Oliver and Thomas Mogotlane. Mapantsula: The Book. Fordsburg: Congress of South African Writers, 1991. Siluma, Mike. ‘Yizo Yizo Nightmare Must Stop’. Sowetan, 23 April 1999. Skotnes, Pippa. ‘ “Civilised off the Face of the Earth”: Museum Display and the Silencing of the /Xam’. Poetics Today 22, 2 (2001): 299–321. Skotnes, Pippa. Claim to the Country: The Archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek. Johannesburg: Jacana Media; Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007. Skotnes, Pippa. The Digital Bleek and Lloyd. Cape Town: Llarec Series in Visual History, University of Cape Town Press, 2005. Skotnes, Pippa. Landscape to Literature. Cape Town: Centre for Curating the Archive, 2011. Skotnes, Pippa, ed., Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1996. Skotnes, Pippa. Rock Art Made in Translation. Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2010. Skotnes, Pippa. Unconquerable Spirit: George Stow’s History Paintings of the San. Johannesburg: Jacana Media; Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2002. Zuma, Thando. ‘Another Look at Mapantsula’. Sechaba 24, 1 (1990): 26–27.

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CHAPTER

3

Media Orchestration in the Production of Public Debate Lesley Cowling and Pascal Newbourne Mwale

I

n recent times, the established news media have been increasingly accused of being biased towards liberal elites.1 In many countries across the world the ‘mainstream media’ have been accused of peddling the political agendas of powerful interests and misrepresenting the news, a charge that has become a truism on the Internet, repeated by people on both the left and the right. United States president Donald Trump has drawn on these sentiments to dismiss traditional news media as ‘fake news’ and he regularly leads crowds in chants of ‘CNN sucks’. This marks a significant moment in the waning of established media as the preeminent producers of news and opinion, with implications for their role in public life. The decline of media dominance, according to Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, began in the 1990s, when Internet websites began to break stories and promote views that ‘old school’ media were wary of,2 such as a report by a news blog, The Drudge Report, about former US president Bill Clinton’s affair with an intern. ‘The proliferation of outlets diminishes the authority of any one outlet to play a gatekeeper role over the information it publishes,’ Kovach and Rosenstiel noted at the time.3 Eighteen years later, the massive global networks of Facebook, Twitter and Google dominate the distribution of journalism and the established media have arguably ceded control over the circulation of news.

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The media’s power to control what kinds of discussions take place in society has been undermined by covert agents infiltrating the new technologies of distribution and publication. In 2017, more than half of web traffic came from bots – programmes built to do automated tasks.4 Some of these have been ‘weaponised’ for geopolitical ends, as foreign powers and politically connected individuals target public discussions and spread misinformation to influence public opinion.5 This new context, dubbed a ‘post-truth environment’, in which facts follow opinion rather than the other way around, is the result, some commentators argue, of the established media losing control over what information and opinion enters the public domain. Senior editor at the Guardian, Katherine Viner, wrote an impassioned long piece in which she argued that the challenge was ‘to establish what role journalistic organisations still play in a public discourse that has become impossibly fragmented and radically destabilised’.6 However, the ‘old media’ have not been completely sidelined and now actively operate in social networks. Traditional news media have some of the biggest sites online; for example, Britain’s liberal newspaper the Guardian, the American New York Times and broadcaster CNN are among the top ten most popular news sites globally.7 After the 2016 elections in the United States, the New York Times saw its subscriptions soar,8 as did the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. In a sea of new and untried sources of information, they have positioned themselves as the custodians of old-style, credible journalism. Established media thus still have considerable influence and remain important to the workings of public discussion. This chapter looks critically at the multiple ways that traditional news media have historically facilitated public discussion and how they continue to produce (and constrain) forms of public engagement. The production of news has long attracted scholarly attention and the phenomenon of fake news has recently become the subject of multiple research studies. The chapter focuses on a related but little studied process, the production of opinion and debate by the media. Opinion and analysis are understood to be a vital part of the media’s offerings, an idea that has deep normative roots in democratic imaginaries. Opinion is produced by media organisations on a regular schedule alongside news content. We term this aspect of media production the ‘production of debate’ and investigate it through a number of South African and African studies. These studies demonstrate that debate production is not simply a process of letting speakers and issues into an imagined arena for discussion, but is also directed at managing the dynamics of discussion, a process we conceptualise as ‘orchestration’.9 The chapter also explores discussions that seem to go nowhere, conceptualised by Pascal Mwale as ‘babelisation’.10 These concepts offer useful ways to understand how media debate is produced and what 65 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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the implications are for public engagement. They are potentially productive for the analysis of debate in social networks and help us to consider the different forms of debate produced across both ‘old’ and ‘new’ media.

THE MEDIA IN PUBLIC LIFE One way to make sense of the contemporary role of established media in public life is to consider them as significant contenders in the political sphere. From the earliest days of democracy, journalism has played a powerful role in politics. The revolutionary who sparked an attack on the Bastille with an incendiary public speech, inaugurating the French Revolution, was a journalist, Camille Desmoulins, who published pamphlets to promote his revolutionary views.11 His friend Maximilien Robespierre, who later executed him, wrote extensively in political pamphlets. Early political journals, according to Jürgen Habermas, were important constituent elements of the eighteenth-century public sphere, feeding into and triggering debates in spaces ranging from the coffee shops of Britain to the evolving parliaments of Europe.12 Over the years, the role of journalism has expanded and deepened. Most democracies now uphold the ideal that the news media are crucial to public discussion by enshrining media freedom in their constitutions and regulatory frameworks. Many governments also affirm the importance of the media in facilitating public discussion and diverse views through initiatives such as public broadcasting. Media have thus been an important component of what chapter 1 terms the ‘convened public sphere’: that set of institutions, policies and processes that selfconsciously inhabit, or are carefully positioned in the space of, public debate; and both produce and constrain what is discussed. Our studies of journalists’ attitudes demonstrate that they believe that the media provide a space in which issues important to society can be aired. Some scholars have argued that established media form a political institution in society.13 The institutional status comes from a range of factors, especially the media’s privileged access to a range of institutions, such as parliaments, and the laws that protect them in their reporting. The media operate in a terrain where political moves can be made through them (such as revelations about politicians and the state), which makes them players in the political realm. In addition, government departments regularly make announcements to the media that are not made directly to their parties and organisations, thus making media a vehicle of state communication. Historically, the established media have had the power to set the agenda for what citizens consider important societal issues and to frame those 66 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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issues in particular ways. Political actors are oriented towards media reports and are under pressure to take note of and answer them. Partly as a consequence of these powers, the established media have come under fire for being too close to the political establishment and reproducing the interests of the ruling classes. Early Marxist theorists lump the media into the category of ideological state institutions, along with educational establishments and the church.14 Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, in a radical critique published in 1988, outline a set of ‘filters’ they argue turn American journalism into propaganda for the state, rather than news – the propaganda model.15 Critical political economy approaches have long highlighted concerns about the ways commercial factors shape media output; in particular, how advertising skews media focus towards affluent audiences.16 In South Africa, the established media’s complicity with the former apartheid regime, and the business interests that benefited from it, continues to affect their credibility, while more recent scholarship has shown that they are still inclined to sideline the concerns of marginalised and poor communities.17 In other democracies, the established media’s closeness to political power and their orientation towards elites is thought to have contributed to the hostility of marginalised communities towards them. Yet there is a contradiction at the heart of the discussion about the media as an institution because the sector is made up of a multitude of varied and disparate publications and broadcasters, which may have very different audiences and influences. In the United States, powerful media have emerged in the last 20 years that represent the views of the so-called alt-right. They characterise themselves as oppositional to what they call the ‘liberal mainstream media’, such as the New York Times and CNN. The media sector in the United Kingdom has traditionally hosted both right-wing tabloids and left-leaning newspapers, which have represented different interests and political positions. South African media, historically, spoke to different communities in different languages, representing the aspirations of white Afrikaans-speaking, white English-speaking, and black communities, sometimes in English and sometimes in vernacular African languages. As Lynette Steenveld has noted, journalists constructed a professional identity that combined their journalistic work with their loyalty to their communities.18 Thus, the similarities of media outlets coexist alongside distinct differences. In South Africa, long before the creation of online ‘echo chambers’ – the co-creation by individual consumers and algorithms of flows of news and opinion through social media that reflect their beliefs – different communities consumed different media.19 These various factors ask us to think critically about the complex ways the news media facilitate public discussion and the extent to which they allow – and 67 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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produce – forms of public engagement. Journalism scholarship has often considered how the media set the agenda for what is considered important in society and has identified newsroom processes and journalistic practice as crucial to the production of news. These theoretical approaches, however, generally prioritise news content. Very little scholarship, outside South Africa, deals specifically with opinion in the media, particularly the ways in which debate is produced. However, many scholarly approaches offer useful insights into media influence on public opinion and influences on media from other players, and provide an important context for understanding the production of debate by the media.

SHAPING PUBLIC OPINION In the era of mass media dominance, media effects theory established that what the media thought was important the public thought was important. This effect was proved over and over again in the second part of the twentieth century, after a study in Chapel Hill in the United States showed that the media set the agenda for the public by prioritising certain issues over others.20 There was a caveat, however: the media were much less successful at changing attitudes. As Bernard Cohen asserts, the press cannot tell people what to think, but ‘is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about’.21 Early agenda-setting found a high degree of similarity of agendas across the news sources surveyed, pointing to a tendency for the media to have a shared understanding of what was newsworthy and what were important public issues. This strengthened the agenda-setting effect. The advent of the Internet, with the potential to fragment audiences across myriad diverse sites, threatened to weaken the agenda-setting power of established media. However, research by Maxwell McCombs as recently as a decade ago showed that traditional news media still dominated audiences in the online environment and that there was a high degree of consistency of agendas across these media.22 Agenda-setting theory expanded beyond its initial insight to encompass a wide range of questions: Why is information about certain issues available to the public, but not information about other issues? How are such issues ‘framed’ and ‘primed’ in editorial content? If the media set the agenda for the public, then who sets the agenda for the media? And how do these various actors gain access to media spaces? James Dearing and Everett Rogers defined agenda-setting as ‘inherently a political process’, an ongoing contest between ‘issue proponents’ to gain public attention via the media, often with the intention to influence policy.23 An issue is defined 68 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Media Orchestration in the Production of Public Debate

in agenda-setting as a social problem, linked to politics through the potential for policy intervention or government action, and often the focus of conflicting views. Studies on how media agendas are set are useful for understanding what topics enter media discussion and how they do so. For example, celebrities can attract attention to social problems, an insight that has been used to good effect in promoting behaviour change around public health issues such as HIV and AIDS prevention and treatment. But there are limitations to agenda-setting research. Like much journalism scholarship, agenda-setting does not separate news from opinion in its analysis of influence. As a consequence, agenda-setting does not go beyond an examination of issues and how they are framed, to look at how debates in the media are conducted – the dynamics of debate. But the actual workings of public engagement are crucial for the kinds of discussion and publics that are produced in society. In addition, agenda-setting research tends to focus on issues that fit normative ideas of public debate – in particular, issues characterised as problems facing society, such as drug abuse, HIV and AIDS, crime, and so on. Thus, agenda-setting research brackets out the multitude of engagements that happen ‘outside’ the convened public sphere. As chapter 1 shows, any engagement can, under certain circumstances, gain significant public attention. Media attention is often a crucial factor in propelling certain ideas or debates from subaltern or sequestered spaces into public notice. However, agenda-setting research tends to pay attention to issues once they have already moved into the media sphere, not looking at those that do not make it onto the agenda. In thinking about public engagement, we would argue, what does not make it into the media is as important as what does. The issue-based focus of agenda-setting research limits how the theory engages with the media’s broader influence on public engagement, beyond the mechanics of how an issue may travel. Agenda-setting scholarship has also been complicated by the rise of social networks as the distributors of information and opinion. The agenda-setting effect is premised on the formerly closed shop of journalism and its power over what enters into the media as a societal issue. In the current environment, the news agenda can be set by a range of competing sources, which complicates previous theories about the ways in which opinion and analysis are produced. And yet, as the established media position themselves in this new environment as self-consciously credible and responsible producers of information and debate, it remains important to understand the processes by which they do this. Our approach is to think through how journalism is connected to ideas of the public sphere and how the media configure their role in relation to that norm. Chapter 1 accepts that the public sphere is a social imaginary, ‘an enabling but not fully explicable symbolic matrix within which a people imagine and 69 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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act as a world-making collective’.24 For social imaginary theorists, social and collective agency is mobilised through ideas of the public sphere. This is also true of journalists. Risto Kunelius and Laura Ruusunoksa argue that journalists connect imaginatively to the world though their idea of their professional role. This ‘professional imagination’ describes the ‘collective potential of agency inherent in the professional culture of journalists’.25 Journalists’ professional imagination is what links them to larger social imaginaries such as the nation, democracy and the public sphere, and thus to other members of society. Furthermore, it provides them with a professional identity that connects journalism practice to the idea of the public interest and the belief that their role is to serve the public, especially by holding the powerful accountable in its name. Media power is also its capacity to create publics – a kind of influence beyond the scope of traditional media effects theory. Publics, according to Michael Warner, are an imaginative relationship between strangers, created in relation to a text or discourse. His ‘public’ can include individuals on an alternative website, citizens reading reputable newspapers or individuals following a hashtag on Twitter. The individuals who form a public do not have to know each other or be in the same city or country.26 This is a crucial addition to theories of media influence because it allows us to consider how publics can be created by media content. Lesley Cowling and Carolyn Hamilton take this a step further by arguing that publics, and their particular styles of engagement, form not only in relation to texts, but also in relation to the repeated media production of texts: talk shows, opinion pages and Internet sites of analysis and discussion.27 Such publics can be mobilised in connection with political events or socialised into particular ways of conducting discussion.

THE PRODUCTION OF MEDIA DEBATE It is important to note that opinion, analysis and debate are actively produced by news media and embedded into their daily and weekly schedules. The separation of analysis and opinion from news content has been an established practice in journalism since objectivity became an issue for news media in the 1920s and 1930s.28 In print newsrooms, opinion and analysis are placed on pages designated as ‘comment’. Broadcasters set aside airtime for current affairs programmes and talk shows (although, with the rise of talk radio and 24-hour news channels, commentary and news have become increasingly intertwined). Despite this visible separation, the production of opinion is closely connected to the production of news and the agenda for debate is largely set by what is on the news agenda. 70 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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The extent to which news propels certain issues into media debate was demonstrated through Kenichi Serino’s analysis of the South African Sunday Times in 2008. For example, the first leader (the official editorial of the newspaper) was always linked to at least one news story in the same edition, often high on the agenda of the newspaper. In one edition, a leader on gang violence in Cape Town followed five news stories in preceding pages related to the subject.29 A flagship current affairs programme on South African public radio showed a similar link between news and debate; the morning radio news show AM Live was always followed by an hour of discussion with studio guests and listeners calling in (‘The After Eight Debate’). The choice of items for discussion was generally ‘topics with legs’ that arose from the news segment.30 Only occasionally were the topics not directly linked to news events, but to more general societal issues. The mapping of newsroom routines shows how closely the production of debate is linked to the production of news. The Sunday Times, like most newspapers, relied on a set of editorial meetings to drive the decision-making for the week’s opinion and analysis pages. News conferences took place twice a week, the first on Tuesday, when story ideas were discussed, and the second on Thursday, when the news sections were being firmed up. Both were immediately followed by the leader conference, in which a small group of editors and senior journalists met to discuss and decide on the week’s opinion. The leaders and the opinion pieces generated in-house or commissioned from outside commentators thus could not help but be strongly influenced by news events. At AM Live, the topics for discussion were decided at the same meeting that decided on the news line-up. Media content is thus constructed through the production process, which is itself structured by meetings, production milestones and deadlines. This set of processes and roles in production cycles is widely adhered to across newsrooms. Simon Cottle argues that a focus on the routines of production has ‘emphasised how news [is] an organisational accomplishment’ and the journalist is a cog in the wheel of production.31 The decision-making in the production process is informed by shared news values, which mostly comprise a dramatic mix of conflicts, problems and violent events, but tend to underplay intractable long-term social problems or complex, slow-burning issues. Such a fixation on news can heighten anxieties about society, especially societies in transition, rather than engaging citizens in considering how to deal with challenges. The production of opinion and debate in the established media is thus inextricably bound to the processes of the production cycle at broadcasters and newspapers. This has consequences for public engagement, as media outlets are constantly producing issues and ideas for public consideration, which are shaped by the circuit of production in newsrooms and the decisions along the way. 71 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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FROM GATEKEEPING TO ORCHESTRATION Those who make the decisions in the newsroom work cycle – the ‘cogs’ – are key to the production of opinion, analysis and debate. This raises a range of questions about the decision-making: How do the journalists decide on the issues for discussion and how these issues should be approached? How do they determine the positions to be represented and on what criteria? Who selects the individuals to represent any demarcated group and how does that selection take place? Who decides how many sides to the story there are and what positions are explicitly excluded? And how are particular personalities, such as weekly columnists and talk show hosts, selected and mobilised to orchestrate discussion? In sociological approaches to news, media decision-makers have been described as ‘gatekeepers’, opening or closing editorial ‘gates’ to let information through or to keep it out of publication.32 This implies a great deal of individual power in selecting and rejecting news items, with gatekeepers able to make decisions based on individual preference.33 Yet studies have demonstrated that different individuals are inclined to make the same news selections. The gatekeepers employ a professional set of values and understandings to make decisions. They are socialised into the gatekeeper role through the newsroom context of deadlines, technical processes, organisational culture, professional ideologies and, of course, news values.34 In this sense, news is ‘socially constructed, elaborated in the interaction of the newsmaking players with each other’.35 Journalists who go through formal education or on-the-job training are schooled in professional modes of news reporting that require independence and ‘fairness and balance’. This is the ‘impartial’ model employed for reporting news, in which various opposing protagonists are given a voice and the right to reply. In old-school newsrooms, journalists produce news and related content, such as feature stories, and do not have much to do with the opinion pages. Only when they are moved into senior decision-making positions, or are made editors of opinion and analysis sections, do they produce opinion. They do this by transporting across from news reporting the core values of fairness and balance, protagonists’ right to reply and the protocol of remaining impartial themselves. They are also socialised into opinion decision-making by the customary practices of their peers and seniors and they make collective decisions based on largely shared values. According to Serino, editorial decision-makers at the Sunday Times believed in the importance of the media’s role in facilitating public discussion and operated with an awareness of South Africa’s transforming social and politically volatile environment. The Sunday Times saw itself as ‘the highest court in the land’, 72 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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selecting the most serious issues facing society and choosing columnists who could speak to those issues.36 Serino’s Sunday Times study shows that opinion and analysis at the newspaper was a consequence of the senior editors’ understanding of what debate is. Similarly, the AM Live team had a notion of debate that, in many respects, resonated with the normative ideas of the public sphere conceptualised by Habermas.37 The ‘rules’ of debate were followed by the presenter, who ‘conducted’ the debate in ways that resonated with normative ideas of rational discussion. Producers of opinion sections had an explicit rationale for what went into their pages: at the Sunday Times, they pointed to the need to present new perspectives or to set out arguments rather than personal opinions. Articles supporting the death penalty or HIV and AIDS denialism, for example, would generally not be published because the editors felt these would simply restate old arguments that had been made many times before.38 There was also a concern not to publish anything ‘destructive’ or untrue – for example, claims that condoms did not prevent the spread of HIV. Opinion, the editors said, should be based on facts. They affirmed that they would not publish hate speech, although they might report on it. Some journalists also showed considerable attachment to the idea of the public and the public interest, to the point of intervening in debates that might be divisive or resisting any attempts to silence them. At the small but influential weekly the Mail & Guardian, editors intervened when a debate by legal protagonists about a judge’s spat with the Constitutional Court became so polarised that it seemed to threaten the stability of South Africa’s judicial system. The editors brought the discussion back to a foundational principle: the rule of law and the Constitution should be supported. Such instances ‘are crucial to understand how the media see their role as active protagonists in the debate, both as an advocate, and as an agent capable of building unity’.39 At AM Live, the debate hour specifically included guests who disagreed on an issue.40 Sometimes the presenter played devil’s advocate, taking the opposite position to a guest or a caller. However, although the debate encouraged robust discussion, there was also a tendency for people on the show to seek solutions, looking for points of agreement.41 The presenter also coached callers on making cogent points, answering challenges and following distinct lines of reasoning, and pushed them beyond expressing unsupported opinions. The presenter contextualised issues, introduced experts and mediated their inputs to make them accessible to listeners. Decision-makers at these media organisations, usually senior editors, thus took their role as facilitators of public debate seriously, upholding the idea that all views should be aired and all issues of importance to society should be represented. This professional ethos was not particularly different from the gatekeeping that 73 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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takes place at news organisations. The research discussed above, however, showed a major difference in decision-making in the production of debate: senior editors or producers felt a responsibility to intervene in the dynamics of debates to ensure that they took place according to certain rules and conventions – a process of orchestration. The gatekeeping concept, applied to the production of opinion and analysis, is to imagine journalists letting speakers and topics into an arena for discussion and then allowing them free rein to express their views. Gatekeeping thus does not cover key practices in media that are directed at the dynamics of debate, which seek to facilitate (and constrain) the ways in which the discussion takes place. The concept of orchestration is thus crucial to understanding how debate is constructed in media forums and the ways in which it plays out. Part of the orchestration process is to apply limits to discussion and editors and journalists have a set of ideas about what is not permissible. Certain kinds of public engagement – such as hate speech, profanity, personal threats, obvious falsehoods and vulgarity, now common on the Internet – would generally be ruled out. The research also showed that there were some differences in ideas and practices of publicness, which were debated among media producers in the meetings that formed part of the production process. The differing approaches of various media created different debating styles and dynamics, which set the pattern for audience expectations of how discussion and engagement takes place. The repetition of the dynamics over time drew together publics and modelled the ways in which discussion and engagement takes place. In South Africa, the AM Live audience participated in a different style of public engagement than those who listened to the more opinionated talk radio of 702 and CapeTalk, a commercial broadcaster, although they may have talked about similar topics. In media production, then, publics come into being in relation to the active orchestration of media producers and the kind of public that arises is created by the forms of production employed by those producers.42 Here we see Charles Taylor’s point exemplified: publics exist through the collective imaginings of the participants, who understand themselves as acting within it.43 Where Warner notes publics forming in relation to a text that circulates, the South African research demonstrates that media publics form in relation to repeated media programming or content. Furthermore, these publics may continue to engage as long as the media continue to produce discussion. For the decision-makers, their imagined role is more than just allowing proponents to participate. It involves actively orchestrating their discussion over time.

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WHO SPEAKS? Editorial decision-makers do not simply select the topics for inclusion in opinion and debate forums, but also the commentators and columnists who address them. They do this in a way informed by long-standing conventions. Alistair Duff identifies the now defunct New York World as the first newspaper to introduce an ‘op-ed’ page – the pages directly abutting and opposite the official newspaper ‘editorial’ – in the 1920s.44 These pages – sometimes whole inserts – are now standard in most newspapers and convene a variety of views by a diverse set of writers. Broadcasters, though historically more recent, also produce a range of discussion and debate programmes or call on commentators for their views. Opinion writers in the press fall into two categories. The first are commentators on a specific issue, selected by opinion editors to address the issue from different perspectives. The second are the regular columnists, whose writings appear episodically, mostly weekly. Regular columnists can be specialists, who write on sports, legal matters, health and finance. Then there are the commentators who write on what are considered the issues of the day. These can come from institutes or universities, often associated with the fields of political studies or social sciences. Newspapers and broadcasters may often call upon particular expert commentators for their input and analysis of news reports. These commentators thus become recognisable household names and some may attain the status of ‘public intellectuals’ (often writers, such as Wole Soyinka, Arundhati Roy, Gabriel García Márquez, Ta-Nehisi Coates and South African Sisonke Msimang). Finally, there are the columnists whose status and position derives from their journalistic experience, often as political reporters or editors. This political ‘punditocracy’ (as Duff dubs them) can be seen in newspapers all over the world, particularly in the Anglo-American press and in South Africa. In Britain, Duff notes, ‘columnists are a key part of a paper’s overall personality’.45 Political columnists generally have a distinctive writing style and are bold in their opinions. Their function, Duff argues, is to clarify and interpret events. They are both insiders (by virtue of their connection to political elites) and outsiders (because of their position in media). In apartheid South Africa, Sowetan editor Aggrey Klaaste became highly influential through his weekly column, which he used as a space of discussion with a black township public. He has been widely credited with promoting ‘nationbuilding’ in the run-up to the country’s transition to democracy.46 Intellectuals and experts have an important role to play in public discussion by framing and introducing issues for debate. Many commentators are drawn from the

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ranks of established elites – in Britain, they are often ‘cantankerous males of fairly mature years’.47 In South Africa, the media have actively attempted to transform the historically white coterie to include more black commentators and women. The importance assigned to commentators in the media was demonstrated by contestation at the South African public broadcaster in 2006 over who should be allowed to speak on their programmes and the attempts by managers to blacklist certain commentators critical of government.48 Generally, commentators and columnists are not trained in the art of opinion writing, although some may have journalism experience. They also do not receive much guidance or instruction from the editors who have engaged them. There is an assumption that a columnist will automatically understand the conventions of opinion and analysis in the media, which speaks to how taken for granted the social imaginary of the public sphere is. Columnists have a great deal of freedom of expression. An invited commentator may be asked to produce an opinion on a particular issue, be given a word count and be edited, but will not be told what position to take. Regular columnists have even more leeway in the writing of their columns, including selecting their topics. Even columnists who are controversial and skate close to the edge of what is permissible in public discourse are rarely interfered with in the production stage.49 Occasionally, however, commentators have been fired as a result of public outrage about their columns, a curious situation in which the media organisation has allowed the offending commentary to appear, but acted to punish the commentator afterwards. For example, Sunday Times satirical columnist David Bullard described black South Africans as living in barbaric conditions before colonialism. The column went to print, but caused a public outcry, which led to the newspaper dropping him as a columnist.50 Similarly, the enfant terrible of the alt-right, Milo Yiannopoulos, had to resign from Breitbart News after he appeared to endorse sex between young boys and older men.51 The outrage and the media’s response indicate what particular societies consider the boundary of what is permissible in the convened public sphere.52 Freedom of expression is by no means the only principle in play in debate in the media and columnists who cannot be trusted to observe the line between free speech and public outrage do not remain employed by the established media.

DYNAMICS AND FORMS OF DEBATE Orchestration describes a process through which the media select topics for discussion and actively address the dynamics of debates in order to facilitate engagement 76 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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with the issues of the day. Their programming attracts a regular audience, which comes to expect certain styles of discussion that, in many cases, resonate with the norms and expectations of the convened public sphere and its processes. In certain instances, however, debates seem to go nowhere, or become, as Guardian editor Viner says, ‘impossibly fragmented and radically destabilised’.53 Mwale has conceptualised such debates as ‘babelisation’, a Tower of Babel situation in which the various speakers cannot or will not understand the other view and talk past each other.54 Proponents do not engage with the arguments of those opposing their views and the debate descends into a stalemate of restated positions and disengagement from critical arguments. In order to understand how orchestration and babelisation operate in the dynamics of public engagement, it is useful to draw on theories of rhetoric to analyse the moves in the debate, how the proponents engaged and in what ways. The study of the moves and effects of debate is an ancient enquiry, dating back to the work of the Greek philosopher Aristotle.55 Aristotle’s rhetoric contains at least three types of devices: logos (the appeal to the intellect or mind, involving logic, numbers, explanations or facts); ethos (the appeal to conscience, ethics, morals, standards, principles or values); and pathos (the appeal to the heart, emotions, sympathy, passions or sentiments). This three-part typology is useful because it allows for an identification of some of the elements of the debate, showing how participants use moves that are characteristic of logos, ethos and pathos, both together and separately. These devices are used to persuade in argument and can be seen in all types of debates in the media. Other rhetorical devices can be seen operating in babelisation. Although babelisation may seem to be a falling apart of discussion because of a lack – insufficient or inadequate orchestration or the evasion of orchestration – analysis of such stalled debates identifies a number of processes at play. Mwale’s wide-ranging study of media debates on genetically modified foods in four African countries in 2002 identified four basic rhetorical moves in babelisation: ‘reframing’, ‘sidestepping’, ‘telescoping’ and ‘silencing’.56 The term ‘reframing’ is used to refer to instances in which the same event, issue or phenomenon is viewed from a different perspective, so that some aspect of the phenomenon emerges in a different light or can be read differently. In other words, the issue is engaged with in such a way that its key concern is converted into something else. Examples of this abound on social media. In one instance, a story was circulated worldwide about a white American athlete who had raped an unconscious woman and received a six-month sentence. The issue was how sexual abuse against women is not taken seriously by the American justice system. After some days, the issue was taken up in a different way: the athlete’s sentence was compared 77 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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to the 15-year jail term received by a black athlete convicted of a similar crime. This reframing succeeded in making the issue a race question, rather than a gender issue. The term ‘sidestepping’ refers to a feature in the debate characterised by the fact that, having confronted a challenging obstacle, a significantly important topic or significant new information, a participant in the debate ‘steps aside’, leaves the original path where the obstacle or challenge is located and goes on a parallel path. (Where sidestepping does not occur, the participant takes on the challenge, explores it and thus clears the path.) The topic and broad frame of the sidestepper remain the same as that of the participant to whom s/he is responding, but the sidestepper does not engage with the specific argument being put forward. For example, in debates about genetically modified maize at the Johannesburg Earth Summit in 2002, the South African president, Thabo Mbeki, raised the point that using genetically modified seed would make African farmers dependent on global companies because the seed did not germinate and they would have to buy new seed every year. A response by a Canadian journalist did not engage with the issue of economic dependency, but decried the influence of Western activists that was causing African countries to reject perfectly safe food. Many such responses failed to deal with the concern raised by Mbeki and others of economic dependency.57 A related move in the genetically modified debate at the time was ‘telescoping’ – when participants narrowed down the scope of debate to one particular issue, dwelling on it for some time and in some detail, thereby pushing aside wider, complex issues. Mwale notes that the focus of the discussion narrowed to concerns about the safety of genetically modified foods, whereas a range of related concerns – hunger, contamination, international trade, food security, consumer rights, genetically modified seed, intellectual property rights and patents, and corruption – were not addressed. This had the effect of pushing the political and economic issues aside and privileging a scientific approach – science was ‘ring-fencing’ the issue, being ‘inhospitable’ to the political, which was trying to ‘gatecrash’ the controversy. Unlike the three previous rhetorical moves, ‘silencing’ refers to a phenomenon that occurs at the level of media coverage, rather than in the debate itself. Silencing is when there is no continued coverage; it is as if what was debatable is now no longer up for discussion. Thus, the issue no longer surfaces in media coverage. Silencing can occur because media producers responsible for facilitating debate may think all the positions and views on the issue have been aired and there is no further gain in restating them until a new development arises. (We see this in the Serino interviews with Sunday Times editors, who noted that there was no point in revisiting the debate over the death penalty because there was nothing more to be said.) 78 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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These four rhetorical moves have the effect of disabling a debate, leading to a slippage of communication, as the case of the debate on genetically modified foods demonstrated. These moves described by Mwale are not the only strategies that can disable debate; there are others, such as refusing to engage or protagonists taking the position that it is not their role to educate someone on issues related to race or gender. Yet it is useful to be aware of the rhetorical tactics that Mwale outlines because they present as if they were responses to the positions in the argument. The babel of voices thus assumes the appearance of vibrant public engagement in the media, but there is no critical engagement with the issue. In normative theories of the public sphere, debate ends when disagreement is resolved, having probed the issues and pursued them to their highest level of complexity. In Habermasian public sphere theories, resolution of disagreement in order to arrive at mutual understanding is the goal of public debate. The critical aspect of the rational-critical public discussion proposed by Habermas requires participants to analyse issues, views or claims of arguments. To be critical is to deal with a subject in such a way as to transcend the surface and probe the underlying substance of the issues. In the case of the genetic modification debates, except for some moments of engagement and activism, southern African newspapers simply relayed opinions, not intervening in some participants’ tactics of non-engagement. They let the reframing and sidestepping go unchecked and sometimes allowed silencing and telescoping. At various points of the coverage, threads deliberately set towards the political failed to be developed; key issues or topics were blurred; the unfolding of major themes around the political challenge posed by the introduction of genetically modified crops in the region fell away. Diversity of opinions or visibility of participants in debate or any other genre of public deliberation was not enough for critical engagement. Mwale’s study asks whether this is the result of a lack in orchestration by media decision-makers, or ‘fractional orchestration’, in which the decision-maker’s role is simply to select the issue and allow various protagonists space to address it. This raises the question of whether babelisation is always the result of a lack of orchestration by media producers, resulting when journalists act as simple gatekeepers (what he calls ‘relay mediation’). In this model, the dynamics of the discussion are largely left to the participants and the media professionals do not engage with the interchanges at all. It is not clear that such a lack of orchestration inevitably leads to babelisation. The participants in a discussion could conceivably choose to engage in a rational-critical manner or in other ways that move the debate forward. Yet it does seem clear that orchestration is necessary to shift a babelised debate out of stalemate 79 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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towards a fuller engagement with the issues. This is an important question for the contemporary era, when many debates now unfold in spaces where there is minimal orchestration. Our concepts, orchestration and babelisation, thus appear to be companions, but they differ in that orchestration refers to the acts of media producers in facilitating and regulating the dynamics of debates, whereas babelisation is the consequence of rhetorical moves in a debate and can be analysed in terms of the moves. Orchestration of the type practised at AM Live and the Sunday Times, discussed above, is not elaborated across all news media into a set of shared professional values and practices, codified into ethics or explicitly taught as a necessary skill in journalism education and newsrooms. Rather, it is developed in specific sites of production through reference to and awareness of normative expectations of the media to facilitate public debate in society. It may also be that certain kinds of issues – complex issues of science, technology and economics, for example – are beyond the knowledge of the journalists facilitating the debate and so they do not have the confidence to intervene. In a sense, although there may be broad similarities across media debates, orchestration and babelisation are specific to the sites and contexts in which they take place. In certain cases, an issue may attract reframing because interlocutors read it through the prism of ongoing debates in society, such as race, absorbing it into a feature of these concerns. Earlier, we referred to the example of a rape story being reframed as a race issue when the difference in punishment between a black rapist and a white rapist was highlighted. In a South African case, the television drama Yizo Yizo, commissioned by SABC Education to create awareness of problems in South African schools, attempted to stimulate debate about black schools in township areas and model potential solutions. In the news media, however, the discussion about the show was affected by a set of issues beyond the remit of the programme’s agenda.58 These were issues of representation (its limits, its veracity) and black identity, rather than the problems in South African schools. Yizo Yizo had produced an array of accompanying texts to go with the drama, to stimulate debate about issues that faced schools, but this focus was lost in the discussion about whether the television drama stereotyped black masculinities or negatively portrayed black communities. The Yizo Yizo case vividly demonstrates the practical difficulties in entering concerns into public discussion via the media. The fact that styles of debates and publics can shift so radically across media sites demonstrates the power of media production. Depending on how journalistic professionalism is applied, debate can be tightly orchestrated with a vision of a public that brings that public into being. Alternatively, debates can be allowed to unfold in a gatekeeping mode that leaves the dynamics to the participants, with the 80 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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potential for babelisation or for opinionated talk. This illuminates a conundrum at the heart of the normative role of media in public engagement: for a rationally debating public to come into being, a high degree of orchestration is needed. With orchestration, however, comes the entrenchment of certain kinds of dynamics of debate imagined by the producers as appropriate. This excludes many issues, voices, communities and styles of public engagement.

THE CREATION OF PUBLICS Although ‘the public’ tends to be seen by journalists as a pre-existing entity, which then reacts to the debate topic they supply, this chapter shows that publics emerge through the active orchestration of media producers. As Warner has argued, publics exist by virtue of their imagining and come into being in relation to particular texts and the circulation of those texts.59 In the media, publics come into being in relation to different kinds of production – for example, the production of AM Live, the opinion sections of the Sunday Times and the Mail & Guardian, or the nationbuilding public Klaaste called into being through the pages of the Sowetan in the 1990s. The kind of public debate that takes place is constructed by the operations and practices that produce the debate, and the public that forms in relation to the debate – or the ongoing programme that produces the debate – can only exist in the way it does through the orchestration of media producers. These publics exist through the imaginative connection of their members, who understand themselves as participants, whether they engage or just observe. A public cannot be operationalised until a form of orchestration, based on an imagined set of dynamics of discussion, occurs. Historically, the media have been tied in to the convened public sphere, their primary role in public engagement to produce the debating publics in an apparently unitary national arena that can discuss social concerns and weigh in on public policy. This has been both their strength and their weakness. By positioning themselves as the space of engagement for ‘The Public’ and constructing it in certain ways, the established media have ruled out other potential publics and styles. These now emerge in myriad ways through the mediations of online technologies and their networks, contesting the old ways of doing things and convening a range of alternative publics and concerns. Although these new developments threaten the pre-eminence of the established media as the foremost orchestrator of public engagement, they also offer potentially productive forums for engagement that could feed back into the media and the convened public sphere. Yet many of the established 81 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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media still hold on to the ideal of creating a space for reasoned discussion based on credible information. This has become an ideal to be fought for, but also a marketing tool to attract potential audiences. The success of this project remains an open question. The established media may continue to command attention as the dominant producers of public discussion and publics in the old-school mode, or a new generation of publics may ebb, flow and fragment across the wide, new landscape of digital media, bringing changes to the old imaginaries that cannot yet be foreseen.

NOTES

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2



3 4



5



6



7



8



9

The terms ‘establishment media’ or ‘mainstream media’, although often not defined in discussion, seemingly refer to commercial news media that have longevity, such as the New York Times or the Washington Post, or powerful and far-reaching broadcasters, like CNN, according to definitions in Wikipedia and Urban Dictionary. In South Africa, the term ‘mainstream media’ has been used for newspapers such as the Star and the Citizen, the public broadcaster (SABC), and commercial talk radio and television. For the purposes of this chapter, such media are referred to as ‘the established media’. Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, Warp Speed: America in the Age of Mixed Media (New York: Century Foundation Press, 1999), 12. Kovach and Rosenstiel, Warp Speed, 7. Adrienne LaFrance, ‘The Internet is Mostly Bots’, The Atlantic, 31 January 2017, accessed 28 February 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/01/bots-botsbots/515043/. President Barack Obama noted during the 2016 US election campaign that in the new context of social media ‘everything is true and nothing is true’. Quoted in David Remnick, ‘Obama Reckons with a Trump Presidency’, The New Yorker, 28 November 2016, accessed 28 February 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/28/ obama-reckons-with-a-trump-presidency. Articles in established media decrying the new ‘post-truth environment’ have proliferated; see, for example, Farhad Manjoo, ‘How the Internet is Loosening Our Grip on the Truth’, The New York Times, 2 November 2016, accessed 28 February 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/03/technology/ how-the-internet-is-loosening-our-grip-on-the-truth.html. Katherine Viner, ‘How Technology Disrupted the Truth’, The Guardian, 12 July 2016, accessed 28 February 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jul/12/howtechnology-disrupted-the-truth. ‘ Top 15 Most Popular News Websites’, eBizMBA, July 2017, accessed 30 March 2018, http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/news-websites. Michael Barthel, ‘Despite Subscription Surges for Largest U.S. Newspapers, Circulation and Revenue Fall for Industry Overall’, Pew Research Center, 1 June 2017, accessed 30 March 2018, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/01/circulation-andrevenue-fall-for-newspaper-industry/. The concept of ‘orchestration’ in relation to media debate was first set out in Lesley Cowling and Carolyn Hamilton, ‘Thinking Aloud/Allowed: Pursuing the Public Interest in Radio Debate’, Social Dynamics 36, 1 (2010): 85–98.

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Pascal Newbourne Mwale, ‘The Babelisation of Debate on GM Maize via the Media in Southern Africa in 2002’, Social Dynamics 36, 1 (2010): 113. 11 Violet M. Methley, Camille Desmoulins: A Biography (New York: Dutton, 1915), 58–74, accessed 6 May 2018, https://archive.org/details/camilledesmoulin00meth. 12 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 72–73. 13 Timothy E. Cook, Governing with the News: The News Media as a Political Institution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 14 Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London: Monthly Review Press, 2001). 15 Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988). 16 See Adrian Hadland, Lesley Cowling and Bate Felix Tabi Tabe, Advertising in the News: Paid-for Content and the South African Print Media (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2007); Lesley Cowling, ‘The Rising Sense of Unease’, Rhodes Journalism Review 24 (2004): 34–35. 17 Herman Wasserman, Tanja Bosch and Wallace Chuma, ‘Voices of the Poor are Missing from South Africa’s Media’, The Conversation, 22 January 2016, accessed 28 May 2018, https://theconversation.com/voices-of-the-poor-are-missing-from-south-africasmedia-53068. 18 Lynette Steenveld, ‘The SAHRC’s Enquiry into Racism in the Media: Problematising State-Media Relationships’, Ecquid Novi 28, 1 & 2 (2007): 109. 19 Seth Flaxman, Sharad Goel and Justin M. Rao, ‘Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Online News Consumption’, Public Opinion Quarterly 80, S1 (2016): 298–320. 20 Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw, ‘The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media’, Public Opinion Quarterly 36 (1972): 176–187. 21 Bernard C. Cohen, The Press and Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 13. 22 Maxwell McCombs, ‘A Look at Agenda-Setting: Past, Present and Future’, Journalism Studies 6, 4 (2005): 545. 23 James W. Dearing and Everett M. Rogers, Agenda-Setting (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1996), 3. 24 Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ‘Towards New Imaginaries: An Introduction’, Public Culture 14, 1 (2002): 1. 25 Risto Kunelius and Laura Ruusunoksa, ‘Mapping Professional Imagination’, Journalism Studies 9, 5 (2008): 663. 26 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 74–76. 27 Lesley Cowling and Carolyn Hamilton, ‘The Public Life of Reason: Orchestrating Debate in Post-apartheid South Africa’, in African Intellectuals and Decolonization, ed. Nicholas M. Creary (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012), 96. 28 Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978). 29 T. Kenichi Serino, ‘The Origin of Ideas in “the Paper for the People”: Research into How the Sunday Times Chooses Topics and Commentators for Its Opinion Pages’ (MA thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 2009), 36. 30 Cowling and Hamilton, ‘Thinking Aloud/Allowed’, 89. 31 Simon Cottle, ‘Media Organisation and Production: Mapping the Field’, in Media Organization and Production, ed. Simon Cottle (London: Sage, 2003), 14. 32 See Pamela Shoemaker, Gatekeeping (London: Sage, 1991). 10

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D.M. White, ‘The “Gate Keeper”: A Case Study in the Selection of News’, in Social Meanings of News: A Text-Reader, ed. Daniel A. Berkowitz (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1997), 63–71. 34 Shoemaker, Gatekeeping. 35 Michael Schudson, ‘The Sociology of News Production’, in Social Meanings of News: A Text-Reader, ed. Daniel A. Berkowitz (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1997), 16. 36 Serino, ‘Origin of Ideas’, 50. 37 Cowling and Hamilton, ‘Thinking Aloud/Allowed’, 90. 38 Serino, ‘Origin of Ideas’, 74–77. 39 Magali Reinert, ‘Judge Hlophe in the Mail & Guardian: Issues of Race and Transformation in Public Debate’ (Honours diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 2009), 34. 40 Cowling and Hamilton, ‘Thinking Aloud/Allowed’, 89. 41 Cowling and Hamilton, ‘Thinking Aloud/Allowed’, 89. 42 Cowling and Hamilton, ‘Public Life of Reason’, 96. 43 See chapter 1 for a discussion of this point, contained in Charles Taylor, ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’, Public Culture 14, 1 (2002): 113. 44 Alistair Duff, ‘Powers in the Land? British Political Columnists in the Information Era’, Journalism Practice 2, 2 (2008): 231. 45 Duff, ‘Powers in the Land’, 232. 46 Lesley Cowling, ‘Building a Nation: The Sowetan and the Creation of a Black Public’, Journal of Southern African Studies 40, 2 (2014): 325–341. 47 Jeremy Tunstall, Newspaper Power: The New National Press in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), quoted in Duff, ‘Powers in the Land’, 232. 48 Lesley Cowling, ‘The SABC and the “Blacklist” Controversy: Debate about Debate’, Rhodes Journalism Review 27 (2007): 62. 49 Serino, ‘Origin of Ideas’, 68–69. 50 Lesley Cowling and Carolyn Hamilton, ‘Producing Media Debate: Journalistic Practice and Public Discussion’, Ecquid Novi 32, 3 (2011): 52–53. 51 Edward Helmore, ‘Milo Yiannopoulos Resigns from Breitbart News over Pedophilia Remarks’, The Guardian, 21 February 2017, accessed 27 September 2019, https:// www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/21/milo-yiannopoulos-resigns-breitbartpedophilia-comments. 52 After David Bullard, South African columnists Eric Miyeni and Kuli Roberts were fired in 2011, Miyeni for an attack on editor Ferial Haffajee and Roberts for offensive remarks about ‘coloured’ culture. See Deon de Lange and Sibusiso Nkomo, ‘Sowetan Columnist Sacked’, IOL, 2 August 2001, accessed 27 September 2019, https://www.iol.co.za/ news/politics/sowetan-columnist-sacked-1110109; and Nicola Jones, ‘Fired for Going Too Far’, The Witness, 8 August 2011, accessed 27 September 2019, https://www.news24. com/Archives/Witness/Fired-for-going-too-far-20150430. See also ‘Kuli Roberts Apologises for Column’, News 24, 1 March 2011, accessed 27 September 2019, https:// www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Kuli-Roberts-apologises-for-column-20110301. 53 Viner, ‘How Technology Disrupted the Truth’. 54 Mwale, ‘Babelisation’, 112. 55 Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric: The New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2008); Francis Connolly, A Rhetoric Casebook (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959). 56 Mwale, ‘Babelisation’, 113. 57 Pascal Newbourne Mwale, ‘Questioning Genetically Modified Maize: A Case of Public Debate in the Southern African Media (1997–2007)’ (PhD diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 2012), 193.

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Litheko Modisane, ‘Yizo Yizo: Sowing Debate, Reaping Controversy’, Social Dynamics 36, 1 (2010): 122–134. 59 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 74–76.

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REFERENCES Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: Monthly Review Press, 2001. Barthel, Michael. ‘Despite Subscription Surges for Largest U.S. Newspapers, Circulation and Revenue Fall for Industry Overall’. Pew Research Center, 1 June 2017. Accessed 30 March 2018. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/01/circulation-and-revenue-fallfor-newspaper-industry/. Cohen, Bernard C. The Press and Foreign Policy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963. Connolly, Francis. A Rhetoric Casebook. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959. Cook, Timothy E. Governing with the News: The News Media as a Political Institution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Cottle, Simon. ‘Media Organisation and Production: Mapping the Field’. In Media Organization and Production, edited by Simon Cottle, 3–24. London: Sage, 2003. Cowling, Lesley. ‘Building a Nation: The Sowetan and the Creation of a Black Public’. Journal of Southern African Studies 40, 2 (2014): 325–341. Cowling, Lesley. ‘The Rising Sense of Unease’. Rhodes Journalism Review 24 (2004): 34–35. Cowling, Lesley. ‘The SABC and the “Blacklist” Controversy: Debate about Debate’. Rhodes Journalism Review 27 (2007): 62. Cowling, Lesley and Carolyn Hamilton. ‘Producing Media Debate: Journalistic Practice and Public Discussion’. Ecquid Novi 32, 3 (2011): 52–53. Cowling, Lesley and Carolyn Hamilton. ‘The Public Life of Reason: Orchestrating Debate in Post-apartheid South Africa’. In African Intellectuals and Decolonization, edited by Nicholas M. Creary, 83–101. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012. Cowling, Lesley and Carolyn Hamilton. ‘Thinking Aloud/Allowed: Pursuing the Public Interest in Radio Debate’. Social Dynamics 36, 1 (2010): 85–98. Dearing, James W. and Everett M. Rogers. Agenda-Setting. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1996. De Lange, Deon and Sibusiso Nkomo. ‘Sowetan Columnist Sacked’. IOL, 2 August 2001. Accessed 27 September 2019. https://www.iol.co.za/news/politics/sowetan-columnistsacked-1110109. Duff, Alistair. ‘Powers in the Land? British Political Columnists in the Information Era’. Journalism Practice 2, 2 (2008): 231–244. Flaxman, Seth, Sharad Goel and Justin M. Rao. ‘Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Online News Consumption’. Public Opinion Quarterly 80, S1 (2016): 298–320. Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar. ‘Towards New Imaginaries: An Introduction’. Public Culture 14, 1 (2002): 1–19. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. Hadland, Adrian, Lesley Cowling and Bate Felix Tabi Tabe. Advertising in the News: Paid-for Content and the South African Print Media. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2007. Helmore, Edward. ‘Milo Yiannopoulos Resigns from Breitbart News over Pedophilia Remarks’. The Guardian, 21 February 2017. Accessed 27 September 2019. https://www.theguardian. com/us-news/2017/feb/21/milo-yiannopoulos-resigns-breitbart-pedophilia-comments.

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Herman, Edward S. and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon, 1988. Jones, Nicola. ‘Fired for Going Too Far’. The Witness, 8 August 2011. Accessed 27 September 2019. https://www.news24.com/Archives/Witness/Fired-for-going-toofar-20150430. Kovach, Bill and Tom Rosenstiel. Warp Speed: America in the Age of Mixed Media. New York: Century Foundation Press, 1999. Kunelius, Risto and Laura Ruusunoksa. ‘Mapping Professional Imagination’. Journalism Studies 9, 5 (2008): 662–678. LaFrance, Adrienne. ‘The Internet is Mostly Bots’. The Atlantic, 31 January 2017. Accessed 28 February 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/01/bots-botsbots/515043/. Manjoo, Farhad. ‘How the Internet is Loosening Our Grip on the Truth’. The New York Times, 2 November 2016. Accessed 28 February 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/03/ technology/how-the-internet-is-loosening-our-grip-on-the-truth.html. McCombs, Maxwell. ‘A Look at Agenda-Setting: Past, Present and Future’. Journalism Studies 6, 4 (2005): 543–557. McCombs, Maxwell and Donald Shaw. ‘The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media’. Public Opinion Quarterly 36 (1972): 176–187. Methley, Violet M. Camille Desmoulins: A Biography. New York: Dutton, 1915. Accessed 6 May 2018. https://archive.org/details/camilledesmoulin00meth. Modisane, Litheko. ‘Yizo Yizo: Sowing Debate, Reaping Controversy’. Social Dynamics 36, 1 (2010): 122–134. Mwale, Pascal Newbourne. ‘The Babelisation of Debate on GM Maize via the Media in Southern Africa in 2002’. Social Dynamics 36, 1 (2010): 112–121. Mwale, Pascal Newbourne. ‘Questioning Genetically Modified Maize: A Case of Public Debate in the Southern African Media (1997–2007)’. PhD diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 2012. Reinert, Magali. ‘Judge Hlophe in the Mail & Guardian: Issues of Race and Transformation in Public Debate’. Honours diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 2009. Remnick, David. ‘Obama Reckons with a Trump Presidency’. The New Yorker, 28 November 2016. Accessed 28 February 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/28/ obama-reckons-with-a-trump-presidency. Richards, Jennifer. Rhetoric: The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2008. Schudson, Michael. Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers. New York: Basic Books, 1978. Schudson, Michael. ‘The Sociology of News Production’. In Social Meanings of News: A TextReader, edited by Daniel A. Berkowitz, 7–22. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1997. Serino, T. Kenichi. ‘The Origin of Ideas in “the Paper for the People”: Research into How the Sunday Times Chooses Topics and Commentators for Its Opinion Pages’. MA thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 2009. Shoemaker, Pamela. Gatekeeping. London: Sage, 1991. Steenveld, Lynette. ‘The SAHRC’s Enquiry into Racism in the Media: Problematising StateMedia Relationships’. Ecquid Novi 28, 1 & 2 (2007): 106–126. Taylor, Charles. ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’. Public Culture 14, 1 (2002): 91–124. Viner, Katherine. ‘How Technology Disrupted the Truth’. The Guardian, 12 July 2016. Accessed 28 February 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jul/12/howtechnology-disrupted-the-truth. 86 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2002. Wasserman, Herman, Tanja Bosch and Wallace Chuma. ‘Voices of the Poor are Missing from South Africa’s Media’. The Conversation, 22 January 2016. Accessed 28 May 2018. https://theconversation.com/voices-of-the-poor-are-missing-from-south-africasmedia-53068. White, D.M. ‘The “Gate Keeper”: A Case Study in the Selection of News’. In Social Meanings of News: A Text-Reader, edited by Daniel A. Berkowitz, 63–71. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1997.

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CHAPTER

4

Fluid Publics: The public-making power of hashtags in digital public spaces Indra de Lanerolle

… hereby tongues are known, judgement increaseth, books are dispersed, the Scripture is seen … times be compared, truth discerned, falsehood detected … and all … through the benefit of printing. Wherefore I suppose, that either the pope must abolish printing or he must seek a new world to reign over; for else, as this world standeth, printing doubtless will abolish him. — John Foxe, ‘The Invention and Benefit of Printing’ [Digital technology] can flatten organizations, globalize society, decentralize control, and help harmonize people … there is a parallel … between open and closed systems and open and closed societies. In the same way that proprietary systems were the downfall of once great companies, overly hierarchical and status-conscious societies will erode. — Nicholas Negroponte, ‘Being Digital’

J

ohn Foxe, one of the first best-selling authors of the modern printing age, was convinced that printing would end the power of the papacy, just as Nicholas Negroponte, one of the champions of the digital age, believed that the Internet would challenge the nation state and other hierarchies. Three centuries apart, they were both writing at times of revolutionary changes in communications tech-

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nologies. The certainties they share with regard to the direct social and political consequences of these changes appear, from the perspective of the twenty-first century, unjustified. The pope is still with us, as is the nation state. Changes in publicmaking, by which I mean how ideas are made public and how they circulate, and how these changes transform political power, are often complex, subtle and do not move in a single direction. However, printing did change the processes of publicmaking in the seventeenth century, just as digital communications are changing public-making in the twenty-first century. In this chapter, I discuss some of these sometimes subtle changes in publicmaking, examining one recent and prominent example of digital public engagement in South Africa: the #FeesMustFall campaign of university students demanding free education. The new (and newly visible) practice of adding hashtags to online communications is a complex act of public-making. It is highly fluid compared to the previously dominant processes of mediated public-making. The Internet, including social media, is sometimes described as if it is a ‘space’ distinct from and in contrast to other public spaces – a ‘virtual sphere’.1 However, this is to misunderstand the practices of digital public-making. Public engagements online take place in a constantly fluid set of digital public spaces. Scholars interested in the public sphere and political communication have recognised that recent changes in communicative practices are significant to understanding how publics and public spaces are constructed and connected.2 Much attention has been given to the use of social media by protesters during the Arab Spring to put their issues on the global agenda and to call attention to their cause.3 A host of studies in the last few years have examined the role of social media and the Internet in political polarisation, disinformation and propaganda,4 with attendant implications for public engagement in democracies. Many have explored how these practices are changing how publicness is mediated, examining changes or challenges to the role of mass media in creating or maintaining public spaces, some with excitement, others with fear.5 More recently, some scholars have begun to consider how digital communications, and social media in particular, may be changing the ingrained approaches and processes for public engagement, creating, as Zizi Papacharissi suggests, ‘affective publics’, which are connected by sentiment as much as by values or ideas.6 This chapter is informed by but does not aim to revisit those broader discussions. It focuses on a few of the specific communicative practices that have emerged in the use of social media – in this case, Twitter – and how these enable certain forms of engagement in one time and place. My hope is that the specificities considered here may illuminate larger questions concerning acts of digital public-making. 89 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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To consider such questions assigns a powerful social significance to technology – one most people appear to share, although it is highly contested in the academy.7 This is difficult terrain, where many different academic traditions converge, often with opposing assumptions about causes and effects.8 However, what is becoming clearer to many in, for example, the debates about social network platforms and their roles in recent elections and referenda is that technologies are not characterless. In the words of technology historian Melvin Kranzberg: ‘Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.’9 Technologies have particular affordances – ‘those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used’.10 Any technology, from a chair to a mobile phone, has a limited range of uses and these affordances enable and encourage certain practices, including public-making practices, while disabling and discouraging others.11 As a new infrastructure – physical, economic and social – the Internet has changed the dynamics of mediated communication and the landscape of mediated public spaces in South Africa, as it has across much of the globe. This has been described as a ‘communication revolution’.12 It was foreseen before the Internet was even created: American political theorist Ithiel de Sola Pool predicted more than 30 years ago the convergence, on electronic networks, of four of the major communications infrastructures of the twentieth century – print, post, broadcasting and telephony. The Internet represents the merging of the private point-to-point systems of telephone and post with the public mass communications systems of newspapers, radio and television.13 Through this convergence process, the boundaries between (public) mass communications and (private) interpersonal communications have been blurred. They exist on the same communication networks and infrastructures, and the extent to which a message is private or public is now, at least partly, controlled or calibrated by the creator and/or the receiver of the message – a shift from the binary to the continuous. This phenomenon and affordance, which Manuel Castells calls ‘mass self-communication’, is new.14 The extent to which this mass self-communication is – or can be – globalised is also new, changing the geographies of publicness. The changes in publicness that this new infrastructure affords – changes that are still ongoing – are complex. To the extent that there are new public spaces created, these have not just added to or replaced existing spaces. There is an ongoing reconfiguring of publicness itself. There are three key aspects to this reconfiguration: first, who gets to speak in public; second, how extensive these publics are; and, third, the broadening of who can form or shape publics and how quickly these publics are formed and then dissolve. Access to publics and the changes in the geographies of publics have been widely discussed. How digital or ‘networked publics’ are now 90 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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formed – and what I describe as the fluidity of these networked public spaces – deserves much more attention.15

THE ‘FORMER AUDIENCE’ AND PUBLIC SPACES One obvious change that the Internet has enabled in South Africa and elsewhere is the growth in the number of people who can claim to have a public voice without (solely) relying on the mass communication networks of television, radio and print. Some members of ‘the people formerly known as the audience’, to use Jay Rosen’s formulation, have moved from being members of publics to generators of public texts – from listeners to speakers.16 We can find these new voices over a broad range of the fields that print, television and radio categorise and label as distinct: news, drama, entertainment, and so on. On YouTube, South African video bloggers, vloggers, including Casper Lee, Suzelle and Moshe Ndiki, reach audiences ranging from the tens of thousands to millions. Content from major (and global) music, film and television distributors and content producers is also present on YouTube and often reaches even larger audiences.17 The same holds true in the public spaces dedicated to more political and nationally focused ideas. In South Africa, there is now a vibrant online (only) journalistic media (including Daily Vox, Daily Maverick, GroundUp, The Con Mag and The Conversation Africa). These publications have audiences that are generally small in comparison with the online audiences of the major print and broadcast media (such as News24, TimesLive, eNCA and SABC). As in the case of the alternative press of the late apartheid period, a number of these publications position themselves explicitly as both alternatives to and critiques of mainstream mass media.18 Similar to the alternative press of the 1980s, some of them (Daily Vox and GroundUp, for example) place great emphasis on enabling new voices to become public.19 There may be significant limits to the extent to which people shift from members of a public to producers of public texts. For some years, research on participation in network public spaces has found that only a small minority contribute content, with an even smaller minority contributing most of that content.20 Wikipedia, the most widely known and probably the most cited example of online user-generated content,21 had more than 300 million users in September 2015, but only 70 000 active contributors.22 According to Wikipedia, just 2 000 contributors accounted for half of all the English-language pages.23 This has led some scholars to conclude that digital media will not break the concentration of twentieth-century mass 91 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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communication systems. Indeed some have argued that this tendency is built into the network structure of the Internet. Albert-László Barabási, for example, argues that the network structure of the World Wide Web makes it inevitable that ‘the rich get richer’ – highly connected sites with large audiences attract more audiences, as a result.24 This is not only a matter of quantity. There are more texts and thus more publics, but in many cases these are counterpublics – explicitly marking themselves off against a dominant wider public and recognising their own marginality.25 As the editor of one of these alternative publications argues: ‘Media might be changing, and the voices are far more diverse than ever before, but mainstream media still owns the narrative, driving diversity to the crowded, but murky periphery.’26 These publics also do not exist in isolation. There are relationships and some movement between the mainstream and the periphery. The editor of the online Daily Vox, Khadija Patel, was appointed in October 2016 to the editorship of the Mail & Guardian, a print newspaper. Casper Lee has recruited American film and music stars Justin Timberlake and Anna Kendrick to appear in his videos, and Suzelle has segued from YouTube to television adverts for a major South African retailer and her own broadcast television programmes. These are all examples of ‘new convergences and mutations’ between traditional media and networked public-making.27

THE GLOBALISATION OF PUBLIC SPACES The other significant change in the affordances of networked communication concerns the geographies of public space. Mass media distribution has always had a strong relationship to national and sub-national geographies. Broadcasting has been licensed on national or sub-national bases. Print media has traditionally been geographically limited by distribution systems. This did not mean that there were no global flows. The Internet and social media did not start the globalisation of public spaces, but the global flows of ideas have changed, though not in a single direction. As Castells argues: ‘Not everything or everyone is globalized, but the global networks that structure the planet affect everything and everyone.’28 Television, in particular, introduced in South Africa in 1976, brought American, British and other international content into living rooms while at the same time carefully policing which South African voices were included. While newspapers in South Africa have been tied to the geography of cities, television has been national and, as elsewhere, has become increasingly transnational.29 The Internet is 92 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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globalising in its platforms and tools, such as Facebook, Twitter and Google. It has also removed or reduced substantial barriers to the globalisation of communication, the most important of which may be cost. Unlike postal or telephone services, distance does not influence the direct cost of communicating on the Internet. It has not abolished the territoriality of public spaces, but it has interacted with other aspects of globalisation – migrancy and mobility – to enable new cultural flows.30 An analysis of the entire Facebook network, conducted in 2011, demonstrates that out of 54 countries with more than a million Facebook users, South African Facebook users were most connected to ‘friends’ in countries with strong migratory links from colonial to present times: the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, Ghana and the United Arab Emirates.31 Substantial parts of the publics of the South African digital alternative media are found in other parts of the world. Stories by writers on Conversation Africa at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, for example, are read more in the United States than in South Africa and more read in Poland than in Kenya.32 Arjun Appadurai suggests that just as print technologies allowed the imaginaries of nations and national cultures, electronic media has allowed many more transnational imaginaries – around religion, politics and popular culture.33 This has not created a global village nor has it reversed the trend of some countries, largely in the Global North, to dominate the traffic in ideas. While global conversations are possible, the pattern of who speaks and who listens is being repeated online.34 Indeed, within South Africa, these alternative media now compete for voice with the global media of the BBC and the New York Times, something that their print counterparts in the 1980s were protected from. In the face of this ‘globalisation from above’,35 Appadurai has argued that for most people, participation in shaping public engagement is often limited to choices of consumption, although there is significant agency in these choices.36 Papacharissi, examining digital public spaces within Jürgen Habermas’s framework of the public sphere, argues that the ‘electronic public sphere’ is exclusive and elitist, ‘not terribly different from the bourgeois public sphere of the 17th and 18th centuries’.37 Christian Fuchs, analysing social media and the public sphere from a political economy perspective, argues that the ownership and business models of social media limit its ability to mediate an effective public sphere.38 These critiques highlight the continuities between the mass media that have played a dominant role in public-making in the last century and the social media and other digital platforms that are now emerging. However, what is missing in these accounts is any fine-grained examination of the affordances of digital media or the practices of public-making that these affordances allow. Large numbers 93 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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of the ‘former audience’ have become active, not only as producers, but also as distributors – sharers of ‘spreadable media’.39 In this role, they participate in a fluid process of co-creating the public spaces these ideas inhabit. This is a new form of ‘network power’ from below.40 However, this distributive public-making power is much more tenuous and fluid than the distribution processes that preceded the network age.

THE PUBLIC-MAKING AFFORDANCES OF HASHTAGS Although social media platforms vary in the ways they work and can be used, there is one common action they all enable – ‘sharing’. Sharing is an act of distribution distinct from producing or consuming media. Sharing uses social network mechanisms in order to distribute content – text, photos, video or sound. In the case of Facebook, for example, content can be shared with ‘friends’, individually or collectively. On Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or YouTube, to ‘like’, ‘retweet’ or in other ways share a piece of content (a page or a message) is a communication in its own right, but it is also an act of distribution – of making (more) public – since it may make it more likely for that content to be seen by others. On many social media platforms, the way in which an action will influence how others who are connected to your network will see the content you have shared is not transparent, as it depends on proprietary and unpublished algorithms that determine what content appears and does not appear to any given individual. Individuals who constitute publics for texts have always had some ability to extend and shape the publics for these texts – through recommendation, for example, or by lending a book or a recording. But the affordances of social media have altered this practice in two important ways: it has made it much easier and scalable and it has made the process more visible. Perhaps the emblematic embodiment of this new power in constructing these fluid public spaces is the hashtag, which started on Twitter and is now also used on other social media platforms. The Twitter hashtag was an innovation that Twitter users created in 2006 in order to ‘tag’ content to make it easier to find. Unlike other forms of online sharing, it is not an action done to a message (such as ‘liking’), but is a part of the message itself. It is also different from other distributive acts online in that it can operate independently of the network of connections of ‘friends’ and ‘followers’. The user who first proposed it already understood that it could serve multiple semantic and indexal purposes,41 adding meaning to a message while also classifying it. The hashtag now commonly does this in three distinct ways. First, it is a fluid and open classification system that organises content on the platform, 94 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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improving the effectiveness of searches. Second, it carries meaning in its own right. Third, it provides context for the remaining content of the message. Put another way, the Twitter hashtag enables users to create an idea, to contribute to the curation of ideas and to construct or grow the public for that idea. This public-making power is distributed among the hashtag-maker and others – the hashtag creates a temporary public that individuals come to either by actively joining (searching) or because people they follow (or the people they in turn follow) have done so. These ‘hashtag publics’ may have lives of a few days or years.42 They may have members counted in the tens, thousands or millions.

THE FLUID PUBLICS OF #FEESMUSTFALL The student movement generally known as Fees Must Fall provides a recent and significant example of how hashtag publics are formed. For much of 2015 and 2016, #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall (and their derivatives, such as the abbreviation #FMF) were prominent hashtags in South Africa. Like #BlackLivesMatter and #BringBackOurGirls, they were also the names of social movements or campaigns. The #FeesMustFall campaign started in October 2015, when a group of students at the University of the Witwatersrand blocked the entrances to the university to protest an announced increase in student fees: ‘We needed to show every member of the Wits community what the doors to higher learning being closed meant.’43 According to one of the participants at this initial protest, the students began discussing a name for their campaign that morning while they blockaded an entrance to the university. They discussed various options, including ‘Wits fees should fall’, ‘will fall’ and finally settled on ‘must fall’. One reason ‘must’ won out over ‘should’ was brevity – an important consideration on Twitter: ‘must’ was only four characters long.44 The campaign grew very quickly with shutdowns at many South African universities and large marches to Parliament and to the president’s office. #FeesMustFall was the top news-related hashtag in South Africa in 2015, according to Twitter.45 In October 2015, over two weeks at the beginning of the campaign, almost 100 000 people sent or shared content using the #FeesMustFall hashtag,46 communicating in a new public space which may have included many times that number of readers. It is not possible to count the number of people who constituted the publics for all these messages, but it is likely to have been millions. What were these 100 000 people doing? Some of them were creating new messages. But all of them were in some way or another playing roles traditionally understood as being the roles of the managers 95 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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of mass media systems and spaces. They were gatekeeping – making decisions about which messages to spread and which not to. They were agenda-setting, amplifying one discussion over others. They were also doing something more fundamental – they were constructing (or co-constructing) a public space for these messages. As one of the activists put it: ‘The hashtag was the most powerful networking tool.’47 However, as figure 4.1 shows, this public-making power was highly distributed. The activists in the #FeesMustFall movement did not have control over its use and were not the most influential voices in spreading the reach of the discussion. @RhodesMustFall, the Twitter account of the RhodesMustFall Collective

Figure 4.1:  Visualisation of Twitter users sending or sharing tweets with #FeesMustFall hashtag in October 2015. The size of each node represents its influence measured by the number of interactions (e.g. likes, retweets or replies). (From Findlay, 2015) 96 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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at the University of Cape Town, and @Wits_SRC, the Wits University Student Representative Council account, were both influential, but reporters in media organisations were also central in constructing the publics for the debate. The student leaders were well aware of the complexity of managing or directing the public space they had initiated. Their own use of the #FeesMustFall hashtag was sometimes aimed at the much smaller public of the student community – for example, to call people to an action or to discuss and debate issues with one another.48 At other times, it was aimed at influencing narratives of their actions as portrayed in the mass media. The ability to reach beyond media intermediaries and address a public directly mattered to the students as a way to counter what they saw as false media narratives. In trying to address these multiple publics they faced ‘context collapse’ – the difficulty that each public could be present at the same time.49 It is also worth noting that these publics included people who joined the public space of the hashtag in order to criticise or abuse the students, sometimes with racist comments. ‘Whether we have control of it is a debatable question; sometimes we do and sometimes we don’t.’50 This fluidity (in both time and space) seems new in comparison to the mediated public spaces of newspapers, television and radio with which the Internet and social media are still intimately connected. In its newness, it may also be a challenge to existing configurations of mediated public space. There are rhythms or flows to mass-mediated public spaces (the daily newspaper, the evening news bulletin) that organise the public, but also help to shape the social imaginary of that public.51 Walter Benjamin has argued that the technologies of print reproduction challenged the ‘aura’ of an artwork and that ‘what is really jeopardized … is the authority of the object’.52 We could describe mass media as having created an aura of primacy in defining ‘the public’. Indeed, as recently as 1994, Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt could assert that if ‘the citizenry is to play a role in a democracy then it needs access to an institutionally guaranteed forum in which to express their opinions and to question established power … the media now constitute the major forum for political communication’.53 But networked publics undermine this aura in multiple ways. As the management of the New York Times identified in 2014, while reading of their stories was increasing, visits to the homepage were declining.54 In other words, while the voices of the New York Times were reaching more people than before, the New York Times’s power to construct its own public as a stable entity was shifting towards its ‘former audience’, who were now curating its content themselves as part of fluid publics made by its readers, as well as by other linked texts. When looking at figure 4.1 from this perspective, we can see that while mass media outlets such as @ewnreporter and @enca had significant voices in the hashtag publics of 97 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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#FeesMustFall, they faced the same challenges of fluid publics that the student activists did. Their stories could and did reach this public, but it was a public they did not shape alone. Maybe most importantly, as a result of this distributed publicmaking, they no longer had the exclusive role of curating or gatekeeping the shape and form of the discussion that took place within that public. This fluidity is not only in the construction of publics but between the different senses of public that Michael Warner identifies – the public of the public sphere, the multiple publics that stand in relation (subordinate or contesting) to the public and the many publics that come into existence around texts.55 Nancy Fraser points to an irony of Habermas’s original conception of the bourgeois public sphere: a ‘discourse of publicity touting accessibility, rationality, and the suspension of status hierarchies is itself deployed as a strategy of distinction’, which excluded many others through status hierarchies.56 In South Africa, this irony has been noticed and contested within and beyond media over many years. The #FeesMustFall activists’ critiques of mass media and their attempts to construct their own hashtag publics were only the latest example of this contestation. The alternative media of the 1980s often saw themselves in opposition to mainstream media.57 The ruling party and others have continually critiqued South African media, especially newspapers, on the basis of ownership, editorial stance and inclusivity.58 The publicness of the #FeesMustFall hashtag was an intervention in and contributor to the public. It was a counterpublic and it was one of many publics.

HASHTAG PUBLICS AND PUBLIC-MAKING FROM BELOW I have argued that in hashtag publics, we find new fluid forms of public-making and new distributions of network power in how they come into being. As Fraser argues, there are always multiple publics and multiple public spheres, in different relations of domination, subordination and contestation.59 The example of #FeesMustFall, along with its many counterparts – from #Occupy to #MeToo – serves to suggest that while contestation in the formation of public spaces is not new, the affordances of the Internet and social media have brought changes to the processes by which these contested publics emerge and interact. On social media platforms such as Twitter, mass media institutions are not the hosts of the public spaces, but only contributors to their formation. Partly as a result, the gatekeeping, agenda-setting, framing and other disciplinary roles the mass media traditionally played are being distributed and globalised in new ways. Of course, activists are not the only ones using these affordances to gain some role in public-making. Advertising agents, 98 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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politicians and many others are also doing so. Because of this redistribution of the power of public-making, the process is becoming more complex and more complicated for any group or institution to manage or engage with, as the initiators of the #FeesMustFall public understood very well. The fluidity of this process seems significant for debates and framings of how the Internet and social media are changing, and may continue to change, public spaces and public engagement. It suggests that we should pay more attention to the ‘fourth dimension’ of public spaces: how long they last and how they diffuse and dissolve over time. Such rhythms have always existed in mass media – audiences and readerships do ebb and flow on television and for newspapers. But digital social media make these much more visible and allow for them to be tracked and investigated in new ways. In addition, the distributed power of forming publics appears to have led to this process speeding up. If public-making is indeed becoming more fluid, to the point where its fluidity is a vital characteristic of networked publics, this seems to undermine (or at least greatly complicate) the metaphors that scholars have used to discuss public engagement and discourse and civic life since Habermas. An agora, a space or a sphere (or even many spaces or many spheres) in which certain kinds of civic engagement happen, implies some kind of continuity and some shape. Fluidity suggests a dynamic instability where these spaces themselves are in constant flux. Lesley Cowling and Carolyn Hamilton in chapter 1 of this book conceptualise a flow of ideas in ‘capillaries’ that ‘sometimes thicken into nodes of public engagement’ and so enter into what they describe as the ‘convened public sphere’ – an assemblage of processes and places that is recognised collectively as a space where public debate takes place. As they usefully point out, this space can be something more than a normative ideal. It is a social imaginary that enables us to believe (or act) in the possibility of sharing ideas towards common projects of shaping the world we live in. But the fluid publics discussed in this chapter threaten to dissolve even the metaphor of ‘capillaries’. The fluidity is not what flows in the capillaries. The capillaries themselves are liquid. The student activists who initiated the hashtag public of #FeesMustFall wanted to gain a voice in the convened public space, but they also wanted to lead discussions in their own community and, at the same time, to curate the conversations in these publics. They were aware of the contradictions in trying to do all this simultaneously in overlapping and overflowing spaces, the dimensions and shape of which they could influence, but not control. Very few network forms are stable or can be accurately visualised as elegant spheres or any other ideal forms. Networked publics are fuzzy, messy, distributed publics, in which the distinctions between off stage and on stage, and between the 99 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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convened public sphere and many other public spaces, are ambiguous and unstable. The students experienced this ambiguity and instability, but it did not stop them engaging within this dynamic in acts of public-making. The concept of fluid publics offers one way of conceiving of the efficacy and value of public engagement that avoids ‘the public’ either dissolving altogether into Walter Lippman’s ‘phantom public’,60 or being disambiguated and fixed to the point of sclerosis. The concept of fluid publics draws our attention from the noun to the verb – from the ideal public to dynamic acts of public-making.

NOTES

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Zizi Papacharissi, ‘The Virtual Sphere’, New Media & Society 4, 1 (2002): 9–27. See Peter Dahlgren, ‘The Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication: Dispersion and Deliberation’, Political Communication 22, 2 (2005): 147–162; and Terje Rasmussen, ‘Internet and the Political Public Sphere’, Sociology Compass 8, 12 (2014): 1315–1329. For example, Eltantawy and Wiest argue that social media played an ‘instrumental role’ in the success of the protest in Egypt. Nahed Eltantawy and Julie B. Wiest, ‘Social Media in the Egyptian Revolution: Reconsidering Resource Mobilization Theory’, International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 1207–1224. A William and Flora Hewlett Foundation report finds numbers of studies on six themes: online political conversations; consequences of exposure to disinformation online; producers of disinformation; strategies and tactics of spreading disinformation; online content and political polarisation; and misinformation, polarisation and democracy. The report cites more than 340 studies, as of March 2018. Joshua A. Tucker et al., Social Media, Political Polarization, and Political Disinformation: A Review of the Scientific Literature (Menlo Park, CA: William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, 2018), accessed 12 January 2019, https://hewlett.org/library/social-media-political-polarization-politicaldisinformation-review-scientific-literature/. For an example of authors who view the changing media environment with excitement, see Jay Rosen, ‘The People Formerly Known as the Audience’, PressThink, 30 June 2006, accessed 7 June 2018, http://www.archive.pressthink.org/2006/06/27/ppl_frmr.html; and Dan Gillmor, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2006). For an example of an author who responds to these changes with fear, see Cass Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Zizi Papacharissi, Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Sally Wyatt, ‘Technological Determinism is Dead; Long Live Technological Determinism’, in The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Edward J. Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch and Judy Wajcman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 165–180. Pablo Boczkowski and Leah A. Lievrouw, ‘Bridging STS and Communication Studies: Scholarship on Media and Information Technologies’, in The Handbook of Science and

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Technology Studies, ed. Edward J. Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch and Judy Wajcman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 949–977. 9 Melvin Kranzberg, ‘Technology and History: “Kranzberg’s Laws” ’, Technology and Culture 27, 3 (1986): 545. 10 Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 9. 11 Nick Couldry, ‘Theorising Media as Practice’, Social Semiotics 14, 2 (2004): 115–132. 12 Manuel Castells, Communication Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 55. 13 Ithiel de Sola Pool, Technologies of Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 14 Castells, Communication Power, 55. 15 Danah Boyd, ‘Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life’, in Youth, Identity, and Digital Media, ed. David Buckingham. John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 119–142. 16 Rosen, ‘People Formerly Known as the Audience’. 17 Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (Oxford: Wiley, 2014), 42. 18 Keyan Tomaselli and P. Eric Louw, The Alternative Press in South Africa (Denver: Academic Books, 2001). 19 Khadija Patel, ‘Youth is Wasted on the Young, but Let’s See How we Can Work with Them’, Rhodes Journalism Review 35 (2015): 81–83. 20 Steve Whittaker et al., ‘The Dynamics of Mass Interaction’, in From Usenet to CoWebs: Interacting with Social Information Spaces, ed. Christopher Lueg and Danyel Fisher (London: Springer, 2003), 79–91. 21 Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 70. 22 ‘About Wikipedia’, Wikipedia, accessed 29 October 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Wikipedia:About. 23 ‘List of Wikipedians’, Wikipedia, accessed 29 October 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_article_count. 24 Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life (New York: Plume, 2003), 79–92. 25 Michael Warner, ‘Publics and Counterpublics’, Public Culture 14, 1 (2002): 49–90. 26 Patel, ‘Youth is Wasted on the Young’, 82. 27 Burgess and Green, YouTube, 42. 28 Manuel Castells, ‘The New Public Sphere: Global Civil Society, Communication Networks, and Global Governance’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 616, 1 (2008): 81. 29 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 30 Appadurai, Modernity at Large. 31 Johan Ugander et al., ‘The Anatomy of the Facebook Social Graph’, Computing Research Repository (2011), accessed 2 October 2019, https://arxiv.org/abs/1111.4503. 32 ‘Institutions’, The Conversation, accessed 1 November 2016, https://analytics. theconversation.com/africa/institutions/university-of-the-witwatersrand-894/global/ dates/20131008/20161101. 33 Appadurai, Modernity at Large. 101 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Ethan Zuckerman, Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013). 35 Arjun Appadurai, ed., Globalization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 19. 36 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 6–7. 37 Papacharissi, ‘Virtual Sphere’, 14. 38 Christian Fuchs, ‘Social Media and the Public Sphere’, tripleC 12, 1 (2014): 57–101. 39 Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2018). 40 Castells, Communication Power, 43. 41 Chris Messina, ‘Groups for Twitter; or a Proposal for Twitter Tag Channels’, Factory Joe, 25 August 2007, accessed 2 October 2019, https://factoryjoe.com/2007/08/25/groupsfor-twitter-or-a-proposal-for-twitter-tag-channels/. 42 Nathan Rambukanna, ‘FCJ-194 From #RaceFail to #Ferguson: The Digital Intimacies of Race-Activist Hashtag Publics’, The Fibreculture Journal 26 (2015), accessed 2 October 2019, http://twentysix.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-194-from-racefail-to-ferguson-the-digitalintimacies-of-race-activist-hashtag-publics/. 43 Fasiha Hassen, Fees Must Fall student leader, from the author’s notes of a seminar on #FeesMustFall and the media, University of the Witwatersrand, 1 March 2017. 44 Hassen, Fees Must Fall student leader. 45 ‘Top Twitter Trends for 2015’, Tech Central, 7 December 2015, accessed 9 February 2018, https://techcentral.co.za/top-twitter-trends-in-sa-in-2015/61889/. 46 Kyle Findlay, ‘The Birth of a Movement: #FeesMustFall on Twitter’, Daily Maverick, 30 October 2015, accessed 1 February 2018, https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/201510-30-the-birth-of-a-movement-feesmustfall-on-twitter/#.Wog98JNuYWp. 47 From the author’s notes of a workshop on #FeesMustFall and uses of technology, University of the Witwatersrand, March 2017. 48 Tanja Bosch, ‘Twitter and Participatory Citizenship: #FeesMustFall in South Africa’, in Digital Activism in the Social Media Era: Critical Reflections on Emerging Trends in SubSaharan Africa, ed. Bruce Mutsvairo (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 159–173. 49 Alice E. Marwick and Danah Boyd, ‘I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience’, New Media & Society 13, 1 (2011): 114–133. 50 Hassen, Fees Must Fall student leader. 51 Warner, ‘Publics and Counterpublics’. 52 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2010), 3. 53 Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt, Talk on Television: Audience Participation and Public Debate (London: Routledge, 1994), 11. 54 ‘New York Times Digital Innovation Report’, accessed 30 May 2018, https://www.scribd. com/doc/224332847/NYT-Innovation-Report-2014. 55 Warner, ‘Publics and Counterpublics’. 56 Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, Social Text 25/26 (1990): 56–80. 57 Tomaselli and Louw, Alternative Press in South Africa. 58 Herman Wasserman, ‘Globalized Values and Postcolonial Responses: South African Perspectives on Normative Media Ethics’, International Communication Gazette 68, 1 (2006): 71–91. 59 Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’. 60 Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (London: Routledge, 2017).

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REFERENCES Appadurai, Arjun, ed. Globalization. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Barabási, Albert-László. Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life. New York: Plume, 2003. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2010. Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Boczkowski, Pablo and Leah A. Lievrouw. ‘Bridging STS and Communication Studies: Scholarship on Media and Information Technologies’. In The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, edited by Edward J. Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch and Judy Wajcman, 949–977. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Bosch, Tanja. ‘Twitter and Participatory Citizenship: #FeesMustFall in South Africa’. In Digital Activism in the Social Media Era: Critical Reflections on Emerging Trends in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by Bruce Mutsvairo, 159–173. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Boyd, Danah. ‘Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life’. In Youth, Identity, and Digital Media, edited by David Buckingham, 119–142. John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Burgess, Jean and Joshua Green. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Oxford: Wiley, 2014. Castells, Manuel. Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Castells, Manuel. ‘The New Public Sphere: Global Civil Society, Communication Networks, and Global Governance’. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 616, 1 (2008): 78–93. Couldry, Nick. ‘Theorising Media as Practice’. Social Semiotics 14, 2 (2004): 115–132. Dahlgren, Peter. ‘The Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication: Dispersion and Deliberation’. Political Communication 22, 2 (2005): 147–162. De Sola Pool, Ithiel. Technologies of Freedom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Eltantawy, Nahed and Julie B. Wiest. ‘Social Media in the Egyptian Revolution: Reconsidering Resource Mobilization Theory’. International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 1207–1224. Findlay, Kyle. ‘The Birth of a Movement: #FeesMustFall on Twitter’. Daily Maverick, 30 October 2015. Accessed 1 February 2018. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2015-10-30the-birth-of-a-movement-feesmustfall-on-twitter/#.Wog98JNuYWp. Foxe, John. ‘The Invention and Benefit of Printing’, c.1563. Accessed 1 October 2019. http:// media.bloomsbury.com/rep/files/Primary%20Source%206.5%20-%20Foxe.pdf. Fraser, Nancy. ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’. Social Text 25/26 (1990): 56–80. Fuchs, Christian. ‘Social Media and the Public Sphere’. tripleC 12, 1 (2014): 57–101. Gillmor, Dan. We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2006. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Kranzberg, Melvin. ‘Technology and History: “Kranzberg’s Laws” ’. Technology and Culture 27, 3 (1986): 544–560. 103 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Lippmann, Walter. The Phantom Public. London: Routledge, 2017. Livingstone, Sonia and Peter Lunt. Talk on Television: Audience Participation and Public Debate. London: Routledge, 1994. Marwick, Alice E. and Danah Boyd. ‘I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience’. New Media & Society 13, 1 (2011): 114–133. Messina, Chris. ‘Groups for Twitter; or a Proposal for Twitter Tag Channels’. Factory Joe, 25 August 2007. Accessed 2 October 2019. https://factoryjoe.com/2007/08/25/groups-fortwitter-or-a-proposal-for-twitter-tag-channels/. Negroponte, Nicholas. ‘Being Digital: A Book P(review)’. Wired, 1 February 1995. Accessed 2 October 2019. https://www.wired.com/1995/02/negroponte-27/. Norman, Donald A. The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books, 2013. Papacharissi, Zizi. Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Papacharissi, Zizi. ‘The Virtual Sphere’. New Media & Society 4, 1 (2002): 9–27. Patel, Khadija. ‘Youth is Wasted on the Young, but Let’s See How we Can Work with Them’. Rhodes Journalism Review 35 (2015): 81–83. Rambukanna, Nathan. ‘FCJ-194 From #RaceFail to #Ferguson: The Digital Intimacies of RaceActivist Hashtag Publics’. The Fibreculture Journal 26 (2015). Accessed 2 October 2019. http://twentysix.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-194-from-racefail-to-ferguson-the-digitalintimacies-of-race-activist-hashtag-publics/. Rasmussen, Terje. ‘Internet and the Political Public Sphere’. Sociology Compass 8, 12 (2014): 1315–1329. Rosen, Jay. ‘The People Formerly Known as the Audience’. PressThink, 30 June 2006. Accessed 7 June 2018. http://www.archive.pressthink.org/2006/06/27/ppl_frmr.html. Sunstein, Cass. Republic.com 2.0. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Tomaselli, Keyan and P. Eric Louw. The Alternative Press in South Africa. Denver: Academic Books, 2001. Tucker, Joshua A., Andrew Guess, Pablo Barberá, Cristian Vaccari, Alexandra Siegel, Sergey Sanovich, Denis Stukal and Brendan Nyhan. Social Media, Political Polarization, and Political Disinformation: A Review of the Scientific Literature. Menlo Park, CA: William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, 2018. Accessed 12 January 2019. https://hewlett.org/library/ social-media-political-polarization-political-disinformation-review-scientific-literature/. Ugander, John, Brian Karrer, Lars Backstrom and Cameron Marlow. ‘The Anatomy of the Facebook Social Graph’. Computing Research Repository (2011). Accessed 2 October 2019. https://arxiv.org/abs/1111.4503. Warner, Michael. ‘Publics and Counterpublics’. Public Culture 14, 1 (2002): 49–90. Wasserman, Herman. ‘Globalized Values and Postcolonial Responses: South African Perspectives on Normative Media Ethics’. International Communication Gazette 68, 1 (2006): 71–91. Whittaker, Steve, Loen Terveen, Will Hill and Lynn Cherny. ‘The Dynamics of Mass Interaction’. In From Usenet to CoWebs: Interacting with Social Information Spaces, edited by Christopher Lueg and Danyel Fisher, 79–91. London: Springer, 2003. Wyatt, Sally. ‘Technological Determinism is Dead; Long Live Technological Determinism’. In The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, edited by Edward J. Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch and Judy Wajcman, 165–180. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Zuckerman, Ethan. Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection, MA. New York: W.W. Norton, 2013. 104 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:56:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

CHAPTER

5

‘Now We See Him, Now We Don’t’: The media and the ‘Black Pimpernel’ Litheko Modisane

When it comes to speech acts Mandela works best when he is an absent cause. — Simon Gikandi, ‘Nelson Mandela: The Absent Cause’

A

fter being acquitted of high treason on 29 March 1961, Nelson Mandela went underground. In May of the same year, Mandela, then secretary of the All-in African National Action Council, organised a stay-away in protest of the declaration of South Africa as a republic. A warrant for his arrest was issued on 24 May and he was charged with organising the national protest. In the hostile and antiblack terrain of the early 1960s, and prior to his long incarceration, Mandela was already becoming a public figure and symbolic legend. He referred to this legend in his autobiography, as well as the moniker he was given: ‘the Black Pimpernel’.1 Although it is not clear when this was first used, Mandela attributed it to the press during his underground years.2 This small but significant attribution points to the role of the press in the evolution of the legend. Taking a cue from his reference to the press in the popularising of the Black Pimpernel, this chapter examines a selection of press interviews, reports, articles and images of and about Mandela during his underground years: April 1961 to August 1962.

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In this period Mandela disappeared from public view, only clandestinely emerging with select groups of people. Admittedly, in the preceding decade Mandela had enjoyed the attention of the media, notably of Drum magazine. Avid photojournalists Peter Magubane and Alf Khumalo of Golden City Post, Drum and then Rand Daily Mail, as well as Jürgen Schadeberg and other, uncredited photographers in Drum, had produced images of his early years.3 However, the scale of media interest soared in his underground years. This occurred against the background of an increasingly repressive state − a burdensome time for political reportage. In the wake of the Sharpeville massacre, the Union of South Africa’s government tightened its hold on local media and severely restricted reporting on anti-apartheid organisations and personalities. The General Law Amendment Act No. 76 of 1962, known as the Sabotage Act, made it difficult for the press to report on political activities without being accused of incitement. Although the law, which accorded the state wideranging powers, was passed just a few months before Mandela’s arrest in Howick, the spirit of its objectives was already in place from the time of the first state of emergency in 1960, promulgated after the Sharpeville and Langa tragedies.4 Though he was on the run and publicly absent, Mandela drew public attention in ways that gainsaid his enemies’ intent to circumscribe his freedom. Mandela’s underground years are not only about a political life under siege, but are also reflective of the exceptional ways in which this life was rendered public. His relations with the press constitute a particular and remarkable way of being public without being visible and free. Consequently, they invite considerations of the signifying power of textual and visual renderings of absence. There are two particular things that contributed to what has come to be called the ‘Mandela myth’ (his being cast in mythological terms beyond ordinary political agency and in messianic overtones that overreach his mortal abilities): his silence as a result of his incarceration and narratives about him. As Rob Nixon points out: ‘By banning the publication of Mandela’s images, quoting him or citing his ideas and those of his banned organisation while he was imprisoned, his jailers, the apartheid state, assumed that if media visibility opened the door to fame, invisibility would shut it.’5 Nixon argues that instead ‘they created a gigantic photo opportunity in reverse. Mandela became an off-camera phenomenon and his silence grew more eloquent than words.’ However, media interest in him at the time of the Rivonia Trial and until 1990, when he was released from prison, muted the power of his silencing. Nixon was writing about Mandela’s period of incarceration on Robben Island (1964–1982), when the silence was the effect of imprisonment. Nixon’s approach must lead us to ask how we can understand Mandela’s self-imposed relative absence prior to the 1962 event of his capture and later lengthy incarceration. 106 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:57:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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As an underground political figure, Mandela was not silenced, as he found ways of projecting himself to imagined publics through press statements and he was thoroughly reported on by the press. Sometimes he appeared in person at political meetings, notably the Pietermaritzburg conference in 1961, which was his last public speech in South Africa, and abroad at the Pan African Freedom Movement for East, Central and Southern Africa in Addis Ababa in 1962. Thus, silence is not always representative of the circumstances of Mandela’s actual public absence. The value of Nixon’s thesis lies in its surfacing of counter-intuitive ways in which Mandela acted or was made to act publicly. Remarkably, Mandela’s absence from the public sphere is on its own constructively open to rhetorical manoeuvre in the form of narratives. The political scientist Tom Lodge ascribed the influence of Mandela to ‘stories enacted by him and told about him, and the particular power of those stories to reach a multiplicity of audiences inside and beyond South Africa’.6 Therefore, if the state silenced Mandela by imprisoning him and banning references to him, in the fullness of time narratives would recuperate him in ways that embellished even the most mundane aspects of his life. After Nixon and Lodge, we are compelled to consider narrative and absence as methodologically operative terms in the making of the Mandela legend. While absence is a negative term implying emptiness, longing and passivity, narrative connotes plenitude, curiosity, imagination and activity. But the events of Mandela’s life, and his own understanding of their meanings, compel us to consider the cohabitation of this contradictory tension and its promise of analytical depth. In his reflective excursion on the underground Mandela in relation to photography and music, Simon Gikandi asserts that he is struck by Mandela’s ‘ability to transcend his social and political circumstances and enter the public space as an image’.7 Gikandi concludes that the photographs of Mandela as a Thembu prince (which appeared in press at the time of his trial) and guerilla-in-training attest to his abilities to control his image and offer the world an ‘alternative image of the self in public space’.8 Gikandi’s dissection of Mandela as a self torn between the private and public spaces, and forced by history to present an alternative public image, is an interesting proposition of Mandela as an effect of his images at a time when he could not always publicly present himself. While Gikandi refers to the photographic image, it is possible and necessary to invoke another sense of the image: the imaginative excess attendant on the various signifying acts in public that were ascribed to and sometimes instigated by the absent Mandela. There are indications that it was ‘paradoxically, from underground that he [Mandela] became chief spokesman for his people … more famous in the shadows than he had ever been in broad daylight’.9 107 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:57:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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The absence of public figures in repressive conditions ought to be viewed not simply as a disabling state, but as a powerful resource in the making. It is significant therefore to inquire into the ways in which the media represented Mandela and the effects of representation on his legendary status. Scholars have not made explicit the formative influence of his shadowy life in the making of his mythical or symbolic status. However, I argue that the production of Mandela’s symbolic status began in the period of his fugitive years and not the late 1970s, when the African National Congress (ANC) saw it fit to personify the anti-apartheid struggle around him. His incarceration was preceded by events that prefigured his stature and public sympathy. The imagination of Mandela in the form of a trickster figure, the Black Pimpernel, surreptitiously entering and exiting public life at will, defined and shaped his public image. The suggestive and highly dramatic charge of this elusive figure guides my reflection on the play of Mandela’s absence and presence. While he was absent from public life, it was the stories of Mandela’s elusiveness – sometimes with reference to this trickster and other times not – that kept Mandela’s image afloat. My objective is to develop a perspective on the role of the media, particularly the press, in the production and consolidation of Mandela’s symbolic status, under circumstances that did not favour this development. This allows an exploration of the interplay between actual public absence and ‘media presence’ of a historical figure and provides a way to think about the publicness of public figures in the conditions of their absence. This mediation of Mandela, uneven though it was, and his relative absence from public life have mutually reinforced the power and reach of his persona in the public imagination precisely because he was not always actually publicly present, but circulated through mediated channels. The analysis of the representation of Mandela in the press and of the symbolic meanings that accrue to him in the process allows me to examine the capacity of the press to consecrate him. Consecration is a ‘field theory’ term introduced by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Applied to the media, it denotes ‘the power to name an event, person, or idea as worthy of wider consideration’.10 Cognisant of the press as a specific field of influence, especially at a time when there was no competition with television, I approach it as a consecrating agent in the making of the Mandela myth. If the Mandela myth was generated in the media and fuelled by select acts by Mandela, important questions about the publicness of the myth’s formation are raised. In the light of Mandela’s absence in the period under investigation, to what extent are the media of this time responsible for his accrual of political capital and the constitution of ‘his’ public? Media are public in structure and intent. They carry content with the express purpose of making it public. However, the public invoked exceeds the anonymous and widely dispersed readership of newspapers. As Michael 108 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:57:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Warner has argued, the public is a discursive space that is brought into being by the making, circulation and engagement of texts, ‘conjured into being by discourse in order to enable the very discourse that gives it existence’.11 Thus, for the public to be supposed, co-presence is not required – that is, the actual presence of discursive agents in public communicative acts. Consequently, anyone who picks up a circulating text and engages with it in whatever way forms its public. In this model, discursiveness invoked by circulating texts and their engagement is the ultimate threshold of the theoretical configuration of the public. While this model of the public allows me to hold in view the mediated absence of Mandela, it also calls for an inquiry into the nature and capacities of such publicness. Mandela rationalised his decision to go underground thus: ‘Under apartheid, a black man lived a shadowy life between legality and illegality, between openness and concealment. To be a black man in South Africa meant not to trust anything, which was not unlike living underground for one’s entire life.’12 Mandela’s reference to apartheid as the author of black people’s shadowy and illicit existence is an eloquent register of the signifying competence of apartheid to render profoundly doubtful their social presence. Built on an anti-black racial foundation that cast black people outside of civil society, apartheid negated blackness to the point of reproducing it as a sign of absence. This absence was not simply absence of the black body but, more pertinently, absence of the black body in plain sight. This signification of blackness as absence suggests that blackness was physically available to the white apartheid gaze as a bodily mass, but unavailable as individuated and socially relational beings. Deprived of social value, while prevailing as superexploited excess labour, black people, as Mandela suggests, negotiated a shadowy life that made their presence ambiguous. With this ambiguity in mind, I approach Mandela’s actual absence from the public sphere as being beyond the actually existing condition of racialised absence. It was not simply a revitalisation of what was already in place. It must, of necessity, be appreciated in terms of what I suggest was ‘absence in presence’, or as Gikandi puts it, ‘absence/presence’.13 Mandela’s absence was over and above his existential absence as a black person, an absence that called attention to itself through mediating channels – Gikandi again: ‘He is there because he is not there.’ Without the press, Mandela’s absence would not have gained the public traction it did, as it was his principal way of announcing his presence and, by the same logic, called attention to his absence. In brief, Mandela was, while in hiding, absent in a double sense – already absent as a black person and now productively absent as a political activist, with a singularly strategic capacity to contest his absence by insisting on his presence in the public sphere. 109 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:57:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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The ideal nature of the public sphere as open and indiscriminate was contrary to the apartheid configuration of social and political space in which black people were denied a voice. The public sphere in South Africa was racialised to the extent that it excluded black people by rendering them publicly invisible. Mandela’s shadowy life highlighted the already existing imaginary of a white public sphere in South Africa. The profundity of Mandela’s absence becomes clear when considered in its performative dimensions as a mediated condition. By reporting on Mandela, and even allowing him to represent himself through statements, the press called apartheid’s bluff and present(ed) him, made him present. White newspapers, such as the Star, Sunday Express and the Rand Daily Mail – vehicles of the white public sphere – featured him. Against the conventional regimes of racialised exclusion, the public sphere featured Mandela – not only as a subject, but also as opinion-maker. Interestingly, this intimated black presence in the white public sphere subverted its racialised imaginary. Mandela’s entrance into the white public sphere requires a focus on the mostly English newspapers, as it is through them that the transformative effect of the Black Pimpernel into presence and not shadow occurs.14 The papers – most prominently, the Star, Rand Daily Mail, New Age and Sunday Express – as well as the journals Contact and Fighting Talk, carried articles of varying lengths on Mandela and his activities. The latter three have a larger archive of articles on Mandela in this period. This is primarily because they were ideologically positioned as anti-apartheid, and New Age, in particular, was heavily biased towards the ANC. Two particular events, the Pietermaritzburg conference in April 1961 and its goal − the general strike planned for the end of May of the same year − became synonymous with Mandela. As the only publicly named member of the organising committee of the All-in African National Action Council, Mandela was unavoidably at the centre of these events, which naturally attracted public attention to him: ‘He became the most wanted – and yet the most fully publicized leader of the campaign.’15 While the media’s investments in the political public sphere, and perhaps their readers’ interest in Mandela’s story, motivated their coverage of the events and attention to Mandela, his own efforts as an actively engaged politician cannot be dispelled. Ever aware of the importance of the press for his cause, Mandela courted it. His dealings with journalists at this time were risky affairs. Charles Bloomberg, the political reporter on the Sunday Times, met Mandela, but never reported on him.16 In spite of the risks involved, Benjamin Pogrund, the reporter for the Rand Daily Mail, often met Mandela while he was in hiding.17 However, Pogrund did not have editorial control of the final reports, sometimes leading to embarrassing outcomes. One such outcome concerned the general strike. By Mandela’s own admission, the 110 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:57:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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strike was a relative success. Yet, and to the embarrassment of Pogrund, the Rand Daily Mail reported it as a failure.18 Because of his reportage on the strike and other plans of the All-in African National Action Council, Pogrund was nearly jailed for not revealing his sources.19 By not revealing Mandela as a source, Pogrund elected to safeguard Mandela and himself from police harassment. If ANC activist Michael Dingake’s assessment of the mainstream English press at the time is anything to go by, the report can be understood in the light of the Rand Daily Mail’s uncertain position in relation to the strike. According to Dingake, ‘in the atmosphere of conflict between white sentiments and interests, the opportunistic English press gave the campaign unaccustomed publicity. Nelson Mandela was interviewed from time to time and his statements about the objectives and the scale of the campaign were given good coverage.’20 However, ‘as the day of the referendum approached and as the general stoppage of work loomed ominously nearer, the English press reports became less enthusiastic and subtly sceptical of the idea of and likely success of the general-strike action. During and after the strike the reports became more subjective and more inaccurate.’ Dingake’s analysis allows us to see that Mandela’s relations with the press were a complex affair, as the press did not always respond favourably. Even so, Mandela was silently present in the press reports, but absent as actual referent. While his presence was textually achieved, this did not fulfil the state’s desire to have access to him. Consequently the reports were − by proxy of the legal woes that journalists faced, the state’s suggestive insistence that Mandela was a source and the unfolding anti-apartheid organising − a pronounced impression of his public presence. The full statement of the Pietermaritzburg conference was carried in various alternative newspapers and journals, including the left-leaning monthly journal Fighting Talk (2 April 1961) and the Liberal Party-supporting fortnightly Contact (6 April 1961). In Fighting Talk, Mandela contributed a follow-up statement on the conference.21 From April to September 1961, Mandela became a household name to the readers of Contact. In its report on the Pietermaritzburg conference, Contact included Mandela’s view of the National Party and his gratitude for the United Front’s successful campaign at ensuring South Africa’s expulsion from the Commonwealth.22 In its review and support of the conference, Contact issued an editorial on 4 May 1961 expressing qualified support for Mandela and the committee organising the conference: ‘In the past we have had our differences with Mr. Mandela and even today we do not identify ourselves with everything that he stands for. But that is not the point.’23 It is notable that the editorial registers the journal’s differences with Mandela while appearing to be obligated to acknowledge him and accord him space. 111 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:57:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Alongside the editorial was an article on the conference by Peter Brown of the Liberal Party openly campaigning for support of the conference. On its front page, the same issue lured the reader with a bold one-liner: ‘Mandela’s Statement to “Contact” ’ – which appeared on page 3. The title of Mandela’s statement, which was obviously tailored for Contact, read: ‘Exclusive Statement to “Contact” ’; and, below it, the bolder line: ‘Mandela Calls: “Deliver the Knockout Punch” ’. No doubt designed to publicise the political position of Contact on the strike and the conference, the edition also played on Mandela’s boxing pastime, which underscored his confrontational stance, as words such as ‘knockout punch’ attest.24 By presenting him in terms of exclusivity, and affording him a special platform, Contact affirmed Mandela’s political legitimacy and made him publicly visible over and above his committee and organisation. Furthermore, by acknowledging Mandela, Contact attested to his appeal across differing ideological bases, fully present as a speaking person, not a negated black. Between the conference and the build-up to the general strike, the media footprints of Mandela assumed forms other than the written word. The May 1961 Fighting Talk featured a full-colour visual imprimatur of Mandela’s larger-thanlife face and part of his physique. A faint text on the background describes the image, which was obviously of a different gathering: ‘Nelson Mandela Speaks for a New National Convention’. Mandela did not issue a statement nor was the edition about him, yet he appeared in a bold visual on the cover of the journal. In the image, a formally dressed Mandela’s upper torso is superimposed above a mass meeting. He is clearly speechifying. Interestingly, the lower part of his body seems to disappear below in the midst of the masses. The effect here is an affirmation of his mass appeal. The visual occupies a large portion of the cover. It is not clear why the journal would have Mandela on its cover without his contribution or a piece on him. However, the arresting visual was a bold contradiction of his absence, visually conjuring him up while he was on the run. It stands to reason that this was a declaration of the journal’s support of Mandela in a way that made mockery of his fugitive status while affirming his political legitimacy. Increasingly, then, the image of Mandela both assimilated and surpassed the political events of which he was one of the organisers. He became the indexical vehicle through which events were foregrounded and described, gaining him prominence in the process. A secret interview that took place in the build-up to the general strike is a notable example. Conducted by the journalist Peter Hazelhurst, the report of the interview appeared on the second page of a Sunday Express newspaper on 11 May 1961. The report, titled ‘Hideout Interview with the Most Wanted Man: Native Leader 112 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:57:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Says “Violence is Out” ’, also featured a small profile of a smiling Mandela in the upper corner of the page with a caption in bold: ‘Man under Cover’. In the interview Mandela gave assurances to white South Africans that there would be no violence on the day of the 31 May demonstrations and that they were not targets of the campaign. He explained the aims of the National Action Council and promised future campaigns until the National Party government was ousted. Hazelhurst inserted himself in a dramatic narrative reminiscent of action films, alive with the dangers of meetings with an outlaw. While the article begins with him being bundled into a car and closes with his being dropped off after the interview, the real narrative action centres on Mandela. Though absent from public view, here he was framed as an actively engaged and present figure. This interview and its dramatic style, as well as Mandela’s promise of a startling statement on 27 May, are evidence of this. Not only does Mandela come across as a particular kind of character in a drama, but he is also expected to continue this act beyond the date of the interview. The readers must therefore follow him as he confronts the government on newspaper pages, insisting on his public presence in spite of being forced to go into hiding. Sold as supposedly dangerous by the state, the absent figure of Mandela inhabits the pages of Sunday Express as a conscientious and formidable opponent of the apartheid government. Here was an action hero who gave assurances to white South Africans – the textual target of the report − of his lack of racial enmity. The report added to the mystery of his absence, the dramatic spin that seemed calculated to spark the reader’s interest. By the end of the report, the reader is overwhelmed not only by Mandela’s amiability, but also, importantly, by the significance of his voice in anti-apartheid politics and his reliability as a peace broker. Consequently, the rhetoric of Sunday Express, helped by the profile visual of Mandela, titillated the reader’s desire to know him. Freed of the National Party government’s narrative about him as a peril to the stability of the state and maintenance of peace, Mandela became identifiable with its very opposite. Importantly, the interview dramatised the conditions of its making. In the interview, Hazelhurst tells the reader that he met Mandela, ‘underground leader of the National Action Council and guiding spirit behind the May 31 demonstrations’, under hidden circumstances. Blindfolded and placed on the floor of a car, Hazelhurst reports that he was driven around until he lost his sense of where he was. When the blindfold was removed, ‘sitting in front of me was Nelson Mandela, the most wanted man in South Africa’. The article certainly captures the danger and adventure of meeting Mandela in a way that is reminiscent of his Black Pimpernel legend. 113 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:57:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Hazelhurst’s action-packed profile fits Mandela’s memory of his underground years: During those early months, when there was a warrant for my arrest and I was being pursued by the police, my outlaw existence caught the imagination of the press. Articles claiming that I had been here and there were on the front pages. Roadblocks were instituted all over the country, but the police repeatedly came up empty-handed. I was dubbed the Black Pimpernel, a somewhat derogatory adaptation of Baroness Orczy’s fictional character the Scarlet Pimpernel, who daringly evaded capture during the French Revolution. I would even feed the mythology of the Black Pimpernel by taking a pocketful of ‘tickeys’ (three penny pieces) and phoning individual newspaper reporters from telephone boxes and relaying to them stories of what we were planning or of the ineptitude of the police. I would pop up here and there to the annoyance of the police and to the delight of the people.25 The reference to ‘the people’ points to the significance of the mythology of Mandela’s invincibility as a source of his legend. It is important to note that as the press espoused this mythology, a captive audience lay in wait: ‘Stories about his escapades were told throughout the country, and people took to calling him the Black Pimpernel. The stories about Mandela followed the classic form of the little guy outsmarting the giant. They embarrassed the government and heartened blacks. Meer notes “the black public was thrilled at the adventure Mandela had created”. ’26 An example of the textual function of the Black Pimpernel as a proxy for Mandela’s legend can be gleaned on the pages of New Age. An unnamed Ethiopiabased correspondent of New Age reported Mandela’s movements abroad in the journal’s 8 February 1962 edition. Titled ‘Nelson Mandela in Addis Ababa – Will Return on Completion of Tour’, the article says: ‘Mr. Nelson Mandela, underground resistance leader from South Africa, eluded the police net thrown to catch him in the republic and has reached this capital to attend the top-level conference of all South, Central and East African countries now being held there.’27 The easiness with which the article lists names of prominent African politicians – presidents of independent Africa  – as being Mandela’s peers is notable. Not only was Mandela becoming a pimpernel, but he was also becoming seen as the recognised leader of the people. Mandela, the action hero of Sunday Express, is the ‘native leader’ in the Star of 12 May 1961. In a profile article based on an interview of Mandela with the title ‘Lawyer Mandela Prophesies – This is the Start of the Head-on Clash’, the Johannesburg daily lays out Mandela’s leadership role and provides a colourful biography of the man. 114 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:57:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Above the article, a profile image of a smiling Mandela beckons the reader. The words ‘NELSON MANDELA … a powerful frame’ caption the image. For emphasis, a small separate section of the profile has the words ‘He is not anti-White’ visibly inscribed above a brief explanation of Mandela’s politics of race. Noting the difficulties of identifying the ‘dominant leaders of the native masses’ as a result of the ‘bannings, exile and imprisonment of one leader after another’, the Star sought to identify ‘which man in particular is destined to become their leaderin-chief ’. It pointed to Mandela as such a leader. It is interesting that even though he was underground, Mandela was the natural choice of the Star for leadership of black people. The introduction of the profile is worth reproducing at some length: ‘Today Mr. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, secretary of the African National Council and chief organizer of the threatened anti-republic demonstrations timed for the end of this month, has assumed the mantle of official spokesman for the Native people. But even Nelson Mandela does not regard himself as a leader except in the sense that he is available to act and speak on their behalf.’28 Thus, if Mandela is recognised as a ‘native leader’, it is because of his opposition to anti-whiteness and his achievements that are captured in the substantive political biography. The profile, which is peppered with quotes from Mandela, opens with his pastoral beginnings, membership of what it calls the ‘Tembu “Royal House” ’, formal education, his youth league years and political activities in the preceding decade. It is notable that the title identifies Mandela as a lawyer – thus positioning him in the formal sense of social and professional respectability. This is a highly positive introduction and support of Mandela by a large national daily, of a man who was already being sought by the state. Apart from being indicative of the extent of Mandela’s media footprint, it is also reflective of the Star’s recognition of him as a leader. The words ‘Lawyer Mandela Prophesies’ appear to be equally applicable to the newspaper as it fervently broadcast Mandela’s selfless acts on behalf of black people and his future role as their leader. Mandela’s profiles in both the Sunday Express and the Star show that in spite of being underground, he was in reality part of a positive presence in the media scene of the English-language press. It is notable that these newspapers were hardly openly political and could be said to be a part of the media status quo, yet it is these publications that presented Mandela as peace broker and leader. Between May and July 1961, Mandela made regular appearances in New Age. The attention the newspaper accorded him is notable since he was practically absent from its coverage of the Treason Trial from 1956 to its conclusion at the beginning of 1961. This was perhaps the result of Mandela’s long banning order, as newspapers 115 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:57:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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were not allowed to quote a banned person. New Age anointed him ‘the recognised leader in South Africa today’.29 It stands to reason that the sudden attention on Mandela was a natural consequence of the newspaper’s deep involvement with the ANC and Mandela’s tireless work towards the general strike. According to James Zug, ‘New Age functioned as an indispensable part of the ANC underground.’30 Interestingly, it is in New Age that Mandela’s ‘Letter from Underground’ was first published.31 Of the articles focusing on Mandela and his work, a profile feature by reporter Beata Lipman stands out. The profile reads like an introduction of the man to its reading public. Tracing his political career to his student days at Fort Hare, the New Age profile points out his physical attributes: ‘He is a man alive with energy, a six footer whose well-cut suits fail to hide the broad chest and strong arms of an athlete; a man normally quiet-spoken and calm, and yet who cannot enter a room or a hall anywhere without everyone immediately becoming aware of him. He vibrates life.’32 The hagiographic tone of the paper gives eloquent testimony to its intent – a holistic personification of an energetic and committed Mandela.33 The feature draws the readers’ attention to Mandela’s natural build, attire and mannerisms, emphasising his strength, humility and vibrant personality. In doing so, the feature seems to be driven by a desire to rationalise as obvious Mandela’s leadership qualities. It is interesting that as a political paper New Age would focus on the physical attributes of a public figure. It would appear that the paper is attesting to the actual presence of Mandela as a person who was meant not to be present, a negated black. New Age subverted the erasure of blackness in the racialised public sphere by conjuring into being Mandela’s physical presence in its projected public sphere. This celebratory focus is alive to the effect of appearance in the attempt to strike a chord with the public. This becomes clear when considered against the backdrop of the established genre of the Drum man, a figure charged with an assured masculinity, introduced by Drum magazine in the late 1950s and 1960s.34 This figure, sashaying between family man and public man in the guise of Mr Drum, was a combination both of the family man and later of a public man, discharging public duties with other men of public status. As a Drum man therefore, Mandela was made out to be a model of the modern African, defined by an urban and suave outlook and as much at home in fashion magazines as he was on political platforms. This celebrity ‘man’ was also not alien in another important space – that of the family: ‘Nelson Mandela, who has decided that freedom in South Africa is by far more important than the pursuit of a career in law, grew up as a member of the Tembu Royal House in Pondoland. Yet he is one of the most simple and straightforward men I have met. Here is no 116 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:57:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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arrogance, no royal haughtiness.’35 The feature, which bears the hallmarks of an electioneering campaign pamphlet, embellished Mandela’s attributes with a gravitas that contradicted his status as a fugitive. It subverts the figure of the fugitive with one of a humble man, a true political leader. Accompanying the text are separate images of his besuited profile and that of his happy wife Winnie Mandela with their children Zindziswa and Zenani. The images complete the political mythography in which Mandela the athlete and politician is also a committed family man, who has sacrificed his family position for freedom. Family is the angle of the feature, which is titled ‘Mandela Family Fights Apartheid’ and under it ‘Wife’s Brave Acceptance of Nelson’s Decision’. The presentation of Mandela via the trope of an innocent family unit under siege is the ultimate refusal to castigate him. This points to several rhetorical ends. The New Age presented a familial and acceptable public image of Mandela. The idea of the family man, forced to ‘abandon’ his understanding wife and children in the pursuit of freedom, was a resonant one for activists and a reading public that was aware of the political dynamics in Mandela’s disappearance. This angle stressed the need to sympathise with the man. Furthermore, the rhetorical effect of the image of the family man who is humble and a figure of royalty is a powerful counterpoint to his demonisation as a fugitive figure. When Mandela was arrested, the Rand Daily Mail announced, with dramatic flair: ‘ “Black Pimpernel” was the Most Wanted Man in South Africa: Mandela is Arrested’.36 Patrick Keatley, the Commonwealth correspondent for the Guardian, reported in an article titled ‘South African “Pimpernel” Arrested’ that ‘by seizing the man who has become known as the “Black Pimpernel of South Africa”, the authorities have immobilized their most dangerous political opponent and put an end to a security mystery which has embarrassed the special branch of the South African police for the past 15 months’.37 This reference to Mandela as the ‘most dangerous political opponent’ makes the newspaper’s reportage almost sensational in that it repeated exactly the manner in which the state was likely to describe Mandela, thereby legitimising its hostility towards him. However, the invocation of bravery appears to cancel the negativity of sensationalism: ‘His most daring feat since going into hiding was to emerge in February at the conference in Addis Ababa of the Pan African Freedom Movement for East, Central and Southern Africa when the ANC was recognized by other African Nationalist parties and given full membership.’38 The tone of the reportage is an interesting, almost a transparent ‘visibilising’ of Mandela’s chivalry. This is further corroborated by another suggestive statement regarding the mystery and power in Mandela’s underground identity and political presence: ‘It is impossible to say how many times Mr. Mandela has slipped in and 117 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:57:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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out of South Africa during the past year, but rumour has it that he has been to many parts of Africa on a series of trips.’ This statement is innocent enough, yet it carries richly suggestive elements of mystery and the elusiveness of truth about Mandela in phrases such as ‘slipping in and out unnoticed’, ‘impossible’ and ‘rumour’. While he slipped in and out, his legend was gaining traction in ways that, in retrospect, would surpass his wildest imagination. The press reports on Mandela illustrate the media’s unusual fixation with a political figure who did not enjoy the authority of the head office of his organisation and was under siege. That he had no prior extensive media presence makes the growing media interest in Mandela a distinctive moment in his political biography. The instances of Mandela’s appearance in the 1961–1962 press constitute a rich resource of his presence in the public imagination. But they also hide the complexity of his relations with the press, which were not as singularly and continuously neat as it may at first appear. In the first instance, newspapers did not always represent Mandela accurately, despite the fact that he kept them apprised of developments. The Rand Daily Mail’s reportage about the planned general strike is a case in point. And in an earlier edition, the Rand Daily Mail editorial framed the strike in an ominous undercurrent of impending violence.39 The risks involved in the press interviews with Mandela are another noteworthy layer of their relations. That the press wrote about Mandela at all, or openly revealed him as a source of their articles, appears in retrospect a remarkable feat. A further layer of his relations with the press involves his own performance of mystery as the Black Pimpernel, calling newspapers from public telephone booths in imitation of his eponym. Though at times ambiguous, the press gleefully relished the mystery and can be said to have colluded with him in keeping it alive. The shift in Mandela’s circumstances, from a prominent public man to a fugitive figure who assumed different guises as a matter of survival and strategy, delivered him to the signifying apparatus of the printing press. Genre and troping are principally implicated in this signification. The genre of the feature article is notably rich in its appraisal of Mandela, the man, and his ideas. It is here that we see signifying tropes in operation. These include bodily, sartorial, social stature and familial tropes. With regard to bodily tropes, the exploitation of his physique as an index of power is captured in descriptors like ‘powerful frame’, ‘a six footer’, ‘broad chest’ and ‘strong arms of an athlete’. Interestingly, there is also the sense that his body exceeded mere appearance and discharged regal presence – as Lipman of the New Age admiringly implied. His dress sense is also a notable addition to the bodily rhetoric. As a patrician of the Thembu clan, Mandela is presented as being just a step away from taking the mantle 118 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:57:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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of the ANC presidency. The implication of such reports is that the royal status of Chief Luthuli, then president of the ANC, made it natural for Mandela, another royal, to succeed him. Another notable trope is the image of the family man, which is invariably in all the profile articles. Here, masculinity, humility and affability are emphasised. Interestingly, the family trope is powerful as it draws the reader to themes of loss and longing, the bravery and fortitude of his wife, Winnie Mandela, who was left to fend for her family, but nonetheless understood her husband’s resolve. These tropes are also applicable across genres. The cover page of Fighting Talk, where an image of Mandela speaking in public and an attentive crowd appears, dramatises precisely the attributes of Mandela as leader that are ultimately aligned to the ideal image that emerges across various publications. Clearly, the press reports were not merely dry, routine articles, but richly suggestive contributions that employed wit and symbolism. To the extent that the articles, images and reports on Mandela, especially the feature articles, are illustrative of a largely affirming mediation of him, this surfaces active framing by the press. Stories were not only written for informative purposes, but also for producing meanings about Mandela. The resultant effect was the layering of the man’s image with signs, making of him – an object of thick signification – a site of multiple images consolidated into an ideal public personality. The traffic of signs bearing meanings about Mandela signals his consecration by the press in a remarkably short period of time. The press consecrated him as a political figurehead of the black liberation struggle and a political presence in the imagined (hitherto white) public sphere. As an agent operating in the political field, Mandela accumulated symbolic capital from the signifiers of his personality and success that were generated by the press – which constituted another field. According to Bourdieu, symbolic capital refers to the ‘acquisition of reputation for competence and an image of respectability and honourability that are easily converted into political positions as a local or national notable’.40 This reputation is consequently a form of ‘power granted to those who have obtained sufficient recognition to be in a position to impose recognition’.41 The resources commensurate with prestige, such as Mandela’s nobility and profession as a lawyer, the emphasis on co-extensiveness of his physical build, sartorial sense and amiability all constitute his symbolic attributes. The presentation of the police failure to capture Mandela and of him as ‘the Black Pimpernel’ also layered his symbolism. The consecrating role of the press had the effect of anointing him as legitimate political leader of the entire anti-apartheid movement. Mandela was no longer the mere political figure, but a figurehead of something beyond the immediate confines of 119 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:57:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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his own political organisation. In this way, the press made it possible for his symbolic capital to be converted into political capital. Furthermore, the coverage of Mandela’s political activity was so wide as to cut across publications of ideologically opposed persuasions and in ways that affirmed his projects. The concerns of the liberal and leftist presses would thenceforth rise or fall with his emergence and influence of the body politic. Thus the emergence of Mandela through the role of the press contributed to a collapse of the exclusionary public sphere in South Africa, as he became a site of engagement beyond the ANC and its aligned organisations. That Mandela’s public influence intensified in his absence is a remarkable aspect of his legend. In the political public sphere physical absence is akin to exile. It connotes silence and censorship, the absolute negation of freedom. Nonetheless, in Mandela’s case, this does not seem to have occurred. In his Black Pimpernel years, the growing legend of the man reversed the insistent passivity of an actually absent body. As an absentee activist, Mandela did not and could not circulate, except in the underground. It would seem that in its relations with an absent fugitive who secretly supplied it with information, the press picked up Mandela’s absence and circulated it as a presence. The negative quality of absence of black people in H.F. Verwoerd’s South Africa, and Mandela’s own absence, was brought into combat with connotations of presence in the form of the implied normalcy of journalistic contact with present subjects. So even before consideration of an interview or article, Mandela’s relations with the press implied his special public presence. As an absent figure, who was also a subject of rumour and very likely embellishments by the oppressed, his enemies and his admirers, Mandela loomed large in the public imagination. This suggests that the press had a receptive readership, with some or most readers accustomed to his experiences as a black man. This state of affairs was fecund for his absence to be cast positively as both necessary and attractive to a public hungry for Mandela’s dispatches. What this means is that in picking up Mandela’s absence, in considering his absence as a condition of reportage – and in the case of the overtly politicised press, its meaning for the militant readers − the press was obliged to evacuate the absence of its emptiness, hopelessness. The dialectic of absence and presence found grounds for its unfolding. The press projected in the published images, tales of valour and invincibility against the oppressive state proxies of Mandela’s presence. The circulation of these proxies made Mandela an effect of written and photographic representation. The Mandela who emerged in the press pages was therefore made public, achieved publicness through a dialectical process. However, we should note that publicness is not complete without engagement of the texts themselves. The press certainly 120 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:57:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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invited engagements and projected Mandela in that spirit. By writing about him and representing him, the press projected a public, called a public into being that by its nature as a discursive entity engaged Mandela’s image. This engagement was guided in the main by the press’s construction of Mandela away from the state’s demonic image of him. The contestation of Mandela’s image fed into the already existing contestation of state policies, making it likely for Mandela to be the preferred image. As an absent text, Mandela constitutes an interesting point of both disappearance and emergence in the condition of his making. By being cited through press releases, articles and other forms, Mandela gained publicness that belied his actual absence. As a result of the mediation of his persona, ideas and circumstances by the press, it can be argued that Mandela’s absence was transmuted into a positive charge – a presence. Saturated by his images and updates, by proxies of his presence, the publicness of Mandela points to the importance of absence as resource for the signification of presence in repressive conditions. It follows, then, that the generation of texts in the formation of publicness can occur without the instigation of Mandela as a primary text. Mandela’s absence was thus fertile ground for his production as the legend that we have come to call the Mandela myth.

NOTES 3 1 2



4

7 5 6



8 9

Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (London: Hachette Digital, 2013), 41. For Mandela’s qualified reference to the press, see Mandela, Long Walk, 41. See, for instance, Magubane’s images of Mandela with ANC Youth League leader Peter Nthite in Drum, 1955 (Baileys Archive); Mandela with women plaintiffs outside Alberton Magistrates Court, Drum, June 1955; Mandela sparring with Jerry Moloi, Drum, September 1952; Schaderberg’s image of Mandela during the Defiance Campaign, Drum, August and October 1955. The police harassed New Age sellers and reporters such as Govan Mbeki and Brian Somana during 1961 and 1962. See James Zug, The Guardian: The History of South Africa’s Extraordinary Anti-apartheid Newspaper (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press; Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2007), 207–210. Rob Nixon, ‘Mandela, the Media and Messianism’, Transition 1 (1991): 44. Tom Lodge, Nelson Mandela: A Critical Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), x. Simon Gikandi, ‘Nelson Mandela: The Absent Cause’, Journal of the African Literature Association 19, 1 (2016): 9–17. Gikandi, ‘Nelson Mandela’, 11. Anthony Sampson, Mandela: The Authorised Biography (London: Harper Press, 2000), 144. See also Noor Nieftagodien’s comment: ‘The truth is Mandela only really became very significant as the Black Pimpernel. Even as a Volunteer in Chief of the Defiance Campaign, he was still a secondary player in relation to people like Walter Sisulu and others. 121 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:57:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Now he becomes the public face of the struggle.’ Quoted in Charl Blignaut, ‘Madiba and the Myth Machine’, City Press, 9 December 2013, accessed 10 December 2017, https:// www.news24.com/Archives/City-Press/Madiba-and-the-myth-machine-20150430. 10 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Social Space and Symbolic Power’, Sociological Theory 7, 1 (1989): 14–25. 11 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 67. 12 Mandela, Long Walk, 41. 13 Gikandi, ‘Nelson Mandela’, 14. 14 For the purposes of this chapter, I have selected prominent English newspapers, which I combed for contributions by or on Mandela. I am aware that this is a limited selection, but it does provide a fairly representative picture of mainstream and alternative press. 15 Rusty Bernstein, ‘Mandela: Man of the Resistance’, Sechaba (July 1982): 20–23. 16 John Matisonn, God, Spies and Lies: Finding South Africa’s Future through Its Past (Vlaeberg: Ideas for Africa, 2015), 23, 33. 17 Benjamin Pogrund, War of Words: Memoir of a South African Journalist (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000), 20, 96–99. 18 ‘Quiet on the Rand: Few Reports of Intimidation in the Townships’, Rand Daily Mail, 30 May 1961. 19 Pogrund, War of Words, 97. 20 Michael Dingake, My Fight against Apartheid (London: Kliptown Books, 1987), 66. 21 Nelson Mandela, ‘Nelson Mandela on the Pietermaritzburg Conference: The Struggle for a National Convention’, Fighting Talk 15, 3 (1961): 3. 22 ‘The Full Text of the Resolution of Pietermaritzburg All-in African Conference, held on March 26 and 27, 1961’, Fighting Talk 15, 3 (1961): 5. 23 ‘Full Text of the Resolution of Pietermaritzburg All-in African Conference’, 5. 24 Robin Farquharson, ‘Exclusive Statement to “Contact” ’, Contact 4 (May 1961): 3. 25 Mandela, Long Walk, 41. 26 Joanne B. Ciulla, ‘Searching for Mandela: The Saint as a Sinner Who Keeps Trying’, in Authentic Leadership: Clashes, Convergences and Coalescences, ed. Donna Ladkin and Chellie Spiller (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013), 152–175. 27 ‘Nelson Mandela in Addis Ababa – Will Return on Completion of Africa Tour’, New Age, 8 February 1962. 28 ‘Lawyer Mandela Prophesies − This is the Start of the Head-on Clash’, The Star, 12 May 1961. 29 ‘A Call to Africans’, Rand Daily Mail (editorial), 18 May 1961. 30 Zug, The Guardian, 197. 31 Nelson Mandela, ‘Letter from Underground’, New Age, 29 May 1961. 32 Beata Lipman, ‘Mandela Family Fights Apartheid: Wife’s Brave Acceptance of Nelson’s Decision’, New Age, 13 July 1961. 33 Lipman (1928–2016) often told me that her family once harboured Nelson Mandela in their Johannesburg house during his underground years (personal conversations, 1999). This close affinity between Mandela and Lipman, and very likely other New Age staff, may have partly informed the paper’s editorial policy towards Mandela and his family. 34 According to Lindsay Clowes, between the 1950s and mid-1960s constructions of black masculinity in Drum shifted from a focus on males in terms of their familial relations and obligations to their homosocial public relations outside the home. See Lindsay Clowes, ‘To be a Man: Changing Constructions of Manhood in Drum Maga122 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:57:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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35 36

39 37 38



40



41

zine (1951−1965)’, in African Masculinities: Men in Africa from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present, ed. Lahoucine Ouzgane and Robert Morell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 89–108. Lipman, ‘Mandela Family Fights Apartheid’. ‘ “Black Pimpernel” was the Most Wanted Man in South Africa: Mandela is Arrested’, Rand Daily Mail, 8 August 1962. Patrick Keatley, ‘South African “Pimpernel” Arrested’, The Guardian, 9 August 1962. Keatley, ‘South African “Pimpernel” Arrested’. For this fear-driven and patronising slant, see ‘A Call to Africans’, Rand Daily Mail (editorial), 18 May 1961. Shortly after the front-page negative article about the strike, Pogrund apologised to Mandela and explained that it was an editorial decision, for which he was not responsible. Mandela understood. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 291. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Social Space and Symbolic Power’, Sociological Theory 7, 1 (1989): 23.

REFERENCES Bernstein, Rusty. ‘Mandela: Man of the Resistance’. Sechaba (July 1982): 20–23. Blignaut, Charl. ‘Madiba and the Myth Machine’. City Press, 9 December 2013. Accessed 10 December 2017. https://www.news24.com/Archives/City-Press/Madiba-and-themyth-machine-20150430. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Bourdieu, Pierre. ‘Social Space and Symbolic Power’. Sociological Theory 7, 1 (1989): 14–25. Ciulla, Joanne B. ‘Searching for Mandela: The Saint as a Sinner Who Keeps Trying’. In Authentic Leadership: Clashes, Convergences and Coalescences, edited by Donna Ladkin and Chellie Spiller, 152–175. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013. Clowes, Lindsay. ‘To be a Man: Changing Constructions of Manhood in Drum Magazine (1951−1965)’. In African Masculinities: Men in Africa from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present, edited by Lahoucine Ouzgane and Robert Morell, 89–108. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Dingake, Michael. My Fight against Apartheid. London: Kliptown Books, 1987. Farquharson, Robin. ‘Exclusive Statement to “Contact” ’. Contact 4 (May 1961): 3. Gikandi, Simon. ‘Nelson Mandela: The Absent Cause’. Journal of the African Literature Association 19, 1 (2016): 9–17. Keatley, Patrick. ‘South African “Pimpernel” Arrested’. The Guardian, 9 August 1962. Lipman, Beata. ‘Mandela Family Fights Apartheid: Wife’s Brave Acceptance of Nelson’s Decision’. New Age, 13 July 1961. Lodge, Tom. Nelson Mandela: A Critical Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Mandela, Nelson. ‘Letter from Underground’. New Age, 29 May 1961. Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom. London: Hachette Digital, 2013. Mandela, Nelson. ‘Nelson Mandela on the Pietermaritzburg Conference: The Struggle for a National Convention’. Fighting Talk 15, 3 (1961): 3. Matisonn, John. God, Spies and Lies: Finding South Africa’s Future through Its Past. Vlaeberg: Ideas for Africa, 2015. Nixon, Rob. ‘Mandela, the Media and Messianism’. Transition 1 (1991): 42–53. 123 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:57:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Pogrund, Benjamin. War of Words: Memoir of a South African Journalist. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000. Sampson, Anthony. Mandela: The Authorised Biography. London: Harper Press, 2000. Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2002. Zug, James. The Guardian: The History of South Africa’s Extraordinary Anti-apartheid Newspaper. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press; Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2007.

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CHAPTER

6

Archive and Public Life Carolyn Hamilton

I

n public discussions, archives and records – concerning everything from past genocides to the bases of claims to citizenship or the tracking of disease regimes – play a significant role in establishing what is understood as the truth about a matter. Relied on to expose fictions and misuses of power, archives are also criticised for biases, omissions and inaccessibility, and for underwriting the views of those with power. Indeed, archives are currently a topic of increasingly heated public exchanges and sites of purposeful political intervention – being actively inaugurated, burnt down and much more between those poles. They are an important site of contestation in public life. Focusing on the operations of power in and around archives, and tracking the role of archives in public discussion in three very different case studies, this chapter examines the dynamics of how archives come in and out of public view, gaining and losing things in the process. While preservation is at the heart of any archival project, this chapter argues that archives are not inert. They are forged and changed in political and public conditions, as well as through academic engagement. In turn, archives shape and change political, public and academic discourses and practices. Going beyond questions of the bias or otherwise of archives, and theorising archives and public discourse as mutually constitutive over time, the chapter offers a fresh perspective on heated contemporary debates about the role of archives in public life.

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ARCHIVE(S) It is useful to establish how the term ‘archive’ is being used, since, depending on usage, different things come into view. Sometimes it is invoked as an epistemological term, as in the pompous phrase the ‘archive of Western civilisation’ or, more critically, as used by Michel Foucault in his notion of the archive as ‘the law of what can be said, the system of statements or rules of practice that give shape to what can and cannot be said’.1 Both of these instances, from almost opposite points of view, raise the issue of the way in which ‘archive’ is shot through with questions of power. At other times it is used to refer to the repositories of material that can be drawn on, most typically as evidence, but also as inspiration for, say, a creative work. Cultural theory, subaltern inquiries and certain kinds of community projects have widened the scope of the term dramatically to include many forms that are not in repositories, but can be drawn on as evidence in support of an argument or a political position, as a resource for a contemporary design or for many other purposes. In these contexts anything from a grave to graffiti on a wall becomes an archive, as do old people in the role of custodians of memory. The act of naming something as an archive confers a certain status on the material concerned, drawing attention to its potential to attest to, or at least to show something about or from the past. A key notion that conventionally sets a limit on applications of the formal appellation ‘archive’ – notably distinguishing institutions from living social practices – is the idea of the archive as a place that captures and immobilises its contents for posterity, expressed in the ubiquity of the idea of dust as an archival metonym.2 Landscape, graffiti, oral accounts and cultural repertoires of all kinds are often used as archives and even sometimes interpellated, or hailed, as archives in a powerful form of subaltern challenge. However, in evidentiary-oriented practices these materials continue to be distinguished from items in archives, until they are accorded a preservatory apparatus that involves some form of ‘freezing’ and sequestration, or protective recording as in digital preservation. Such preservatory apparatus is invariably extremely expensive, especially when it is undertaken in perpetuity. For the most part, preservatory apparatuses of this kind remain out of the reach of the subaltern, the marginal and the poor. To call some things archives, and to use them as archives, is not sufficient to gain for them the status of those things that are invested with a preservatory apparatus with posterity in mind. Without the preservatory apparatus, the materials concerned are treated as protean, changeable, open to manipulation – in short, unreliable. In any evidentiary paradigm – a land claims court, for example – they are thus rendered forensically vulnerable.3 126 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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SEEMINGLY CLOISTERED SPACES For the most part any sense of archive as public is confined to ideas of national or state archives as being the public record – that is, the record of government that is available for public consultation. Thus ‘Public Record Office (PRO)’ was the name of the national archive service of the United Kingdom from 1838 until 2003, when it was merged with the Historical Manuscripts Commission to form the National Archives. In practice across much of the world, however, access to state archives of this kind is limited in a variety of ways. In the case of the British PRO an earlier restricting 50-year rule (under a 1958 Act) and a subsequent 30-year rule (under a 1967 Act) were abolished with effect in only 2005. Even then, some records (such as census records embargoed for 100 years) remain closed for longer periods. Furthermore, many government records are subject to extensive security measures, including encryption. Most members of the public are unaware of the nature and extent of the records subjected to these controls and the nature and extent of the security measures until they are breached, as in the various Wikileaks exposés.4 Added to legislation and policies that keep certain records out of the public domain are a host of protocols that screen potential public use. These include requirements that those wishing to consult records present letters of introduction or some or another form of credential, sometimes months in advance of the consultation. This kind of screening, involving varied and sometimes astonishing criteria, prevails in many private archives. In some instances, the researcher, once admitted, is prohibited from copying items or even taking notes. While there are archives that make a principle of ensuring the widest possible public access to their holdings, as well as civil society activist archival projects that use freedom of information legislation to draw cached documents out into the public domain,5 both of these are pointed public-oriented reactions to the status quo – that is, reactions to the prevailing situation of a myriad of archival restrictions of various kinds. Conventionally, ‘archives’ are understood as cloistered spaces, where stuff is packed away and safely stored. If not actively sealed off from public scrutiny, there their treasures wait, accumulating dust until, perchance, a lonely (and duly accredited) researcher arrives. Then, through publication, they might appear fleetingly in small-print footnotes consigned to the end of a book. In archival storage, the stuff is apparently rendered inert, or as inert as possible, by preservation professionals. Archives hardly seem to be central to the swirl of public debate. 127 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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THE PUBLIC POWERS OF ARCHIVES This chapter takes a somewhat different tack.6 Firstly, it argues that the presence of an archive is invariably a power-laden assertion in public life. The presence of an archive in any one area or on a particular subject confirms in public life the claim of that area or subject as having a history worth preserving, investigating and reinvestigating, in perpetuity. The act of holding materials in spaces publicly proclaimed as ‘archive’, and demanding for the materials the elaborate and expensive apparatus of preservation, is a claim to a particular status.7 Similarly, if the archives, or a body of records that would normally have an archival trajectory, are cached out of public sight and access in some kind of alternative setting, the act of caching itself changes the status of the body of materials and is an intervention in public life. An extreme case of this is top-secret national intelligence archives, whose records are fed covertly into public life in order to shape public discussions in ways that are hard to trace. The suppression of an archive, itself an oblique confirmation of presence, is also a power-laden assertion. In the apartheid era, Nelson Mandela’s prison archive was a prominent and striking example of this.8 The power of archives is more clearly revealed when they are deliberately destroyed. Instances of destruction are a lot more common than one might think, given how many people react with outrage at what seems exceptional, inexplicable or wanton. Nor is this a recent phenomenon. Over thousands of years, such destruction has been wreaked on mausoleums, graves, statues and artworks, as well as conventional documentary repositories. The first Chinese emperor, Qin Shi Huang, reputedly ordered the burning of materials considered subversive to the unity he imposed on China, a process that was repeated in the twentieth century during the Cultural Revolution. Similarly, with the spread of Islam into Central Asia that began in the eighth century, many Buddhist statues, libraries and paintings were damaged and destroyed.9 In 1562 Spanish conquistadores wilfully destroyed the Maya codices of the Yucatán.10 In 1992, during the war between Abkhazia and Georgia, incendiary grenades were thrown into the Abkhazian State Archives, causing the destruction of a vast array of materials.11 In the same year, the bombardment of the National Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina left ‘black, sooty, still hot butterflies – books and papers aflame, the library’s treasure … flying around and falling over distant parts of the city’.12 In 2016 in South Africa, the struggle for a decolonised system of education saw first an attempt to raise for critical discussion the choice of artworks on display on the campus of the University of Cape Town and then the burning of a number of works during student protests (see chapter 9). The list of such occurrences across various times and places is endless. Wherever 128 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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institutions or assemblages are positioned to attest to the truth of a past – almost always upholding in the process the ideas of some people and not others, justifying positions held by some and not others – contestation ensues. Across the world, governments that fund and philanthropists who endow major custodial institutions – such as donors who fund Wikileaks through PayPal and the Wau Holland Foundation – as well as tiny archival projects in civil society animated by activist energies, understand the political power of institutions of custody. Arsonists who burn down institutions, or pirates who hack into online holdings, also understand their power. The point about political power holds, regardless of whether one supports a particular custodial entity or finds it abhorrent. The establishment – indeed, the very existence – of an archive, or even a stored item in an archive-like setting, is a political act and an intervention in public life, as is its neglect, disestablishment or destruction, as well as any effort at caching in secret.

THE DYNAMISM OF ARCHIVES Secondly, this chapter argues that far from being immobilised and rendered inert in repositories, archival materials are dynamic, undergoing losses and gains of all kinds, being relocated, reclassified, relabelled, recontextualised, revalued and much more besides. Sometimes changes in the environment precipitate changes to the record. Sometimes the record precipitates changes in the environment. When we start to consider change in relation to the archive, much more activity comes into view than we might initially suppose.

NELSON MANDELA’S PRISON ARCHIVE The suppressed, then celebrated, and subsequently challenged prison archive of Nelson Mandela – prisoner and documents similarly locked up and then freed – demonstrates the point about change in a vivid way, and does so in a manner that situates these changes in shifting political and public frames.13 Prison authorities and the wider security establishment with whom the apartheid prison authorities interacted compiled a remarkably detailed and comprehensive record of every aspect of Mandela’s incarceration and his contact with the wider world. Mandela, a trained lawyer, was himself an avid documenter, with a profound sense of the importance of the record. He was responsible for generating many of the materials that make up his prison archive, carefully crafting each item as 129 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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a targeted intervention in the official record. This immense body of documentation produced by the authorities, by Mandela and by many who engaged with either party in relation to the prisoner (family who wrote letters, cadres who smuggled materials, lawyers who intervened) was the subject of dogged apartheid bureaucratic attention. In the process it underwent many changes, gaining and losing material, being both sequestered out of the public eye and an object of considerable public interest. During his incarceration, letters written by Mandela were censored by the authorities, sometimes redacted and sometimes typed out by them, but omitting whole sections. Versions were catalogued and stored. Some were overstamped, had sections highlighted and annotated. Letters received were likewise copied, censored or had sections physically excised. Some simply disappeared, including the 10 000 birthday cards sent to him by British anti-apartheid campaigners in 1978. The archive later became the subject of curatorial attention by the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s Centre for Memory, which is concerned with the preservation and curation of the archive pertinent to Mandela. The Foundation positions itself as seeking to use that archive in pursuit of social justice, as expressed in its vision for a ‘society that remembers its past, listens to all its voices and pursues social justice’.14 In this later phase of its life in being actively engaged by the Centre for Memory, the prison archive has continued to undergo changes. I draw attention to these many changes across time and argue that Mandela, the authorities, the Centre and other players sought, in various ways, including acts of omission and commission, to use the archive to effect particular things in public life. Changes in the public, political and academic spheres, in turn, effected changes in the archive. At the time of his release, the bulk of the incarceration record was scattered across the departments of Correctional Services and Justice, the Police Service and the National Intelligence Agency. Although publicly unavailable, the prisoner’s security record could be assumed to exist by those outside of the security establishment, though formal tools for its location were scarce. Such records were not designed for public consumption and the apartheid state was assiduous in suppressing information about the prisoner – so much so that, on the eve of his release, there were no recent photographs of Mandela and little sense of what he would look like. In the run-up to the first democratic elections in 1994 the security establishment undertook a wide-ranging records disposal exercise that purged the official record of evidence that could incriminate apartheid officials. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) team calculated that in just three months in 1993, 44 tons of documents from the National Intelligence Service were destroyed.15 It is not clear what might have been destroyed then that would have been relevant to Mandela. When, after a vigorous public campaign, the surviving government records relating 130 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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to Mandela were finally deposited in the National Archives, they were manifestly depleted, disorganised and disintegrating. The Centre for Memory then intervened in an attempt to effect changes, especially in the organisation and conservation of the papers in the National Archives. The Centre arranged for the recuperation of the dispersed and missing elements of the official record of the famous Rivonia Trial (1963–1964), which resulted in Mandela’s prison sentence, and for its digitisation. But the Centre did more. Its prominent interventions with regard to the prison archive effectively brought about the expansion of the archive, as their public campaigns called out lost or fugitive elements, or invited new framings for old material. The establishment of the Centre’s project on the opening of Mandela’s prison archive was an explicit move of reversing the act of confinement, of both the prisoner and the record of his imprisonment. This was realised in the 466/64: A Prisoner Working in the Garden exhibition in 2004 and the publication of a book, A Prisoner in the Garden: Opening Nelson Mandela’s Prison Archive, produced by a team of writers, in 2005.16 These public events precipitated recognition of the losses that the archive had undergone and resulted in additions. As the exhibition was being prepared, the archive began to accrue new elements, including a collection of over 30 photographs taken on Robben Island in the course of a government-organised visit to the island of a group of journalists in 1977. This also led to the recovery of film footage of the visit that had never been catalogued or used by the South African Broadcasting Corporation.17 The public events precipitated further returns to the archive. At the opening of the exhibition on 21 September 2004, two notebooks taken from Mandela when he was in prison, containing original drafts of 79 letters composed by the prisoner, were returned to him by an ex-security policeman, Donald Card. The notebooks had been sent by the prison authorities to Card for decoding and Card had held on to them, never returning them to the authorities. The shifts in Mandela’s status in public life, from surveilled prisoner to lead negotiator in the run-up to the political transition, and from negotiator to state president, from president to honoured figure, later frail elder and, most recently, compromised reconciler, all affected the archival record of his incarceration, creating at each point new opportunities for revealing material and new occasions for suppressing things. These changes occurred alongside changes in the archive actively implemented by the Centre for Memory, such as initiatives for the recovery of items and for the publication and display of materials, as well as campaigns for social justice through archival engagements. Explicitly drawing inspiration from Mandela’s reconciliation praxis, the Centre began work in using archive and memory for reconciliation 131 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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dialogues. The changing records shape the public understanding of Mandela just as surely as changing public understandings of Mandela shape the records concerned. Similarly, changing political discourses across time shaped these records and the records affected political discourses. Mandela’s documented interactions with his warder Christo Brand (including a thoughtful letter about the warder’s personal future that Mandela wrote to Brand’s wife during his incarceration), as well as Mandela’s invitations to his warders to attend his inauguration, prefigured national discourses of reconciliation and then, retrospectively, became some of the cited ‘iconic’ facts that proved it. These discourses of reconciliation, in turn, led to greater and greater engagement with the warder records, and indeed with those of ex-security policeman Donald Card, to the point where their records enter, or are foregrounded, in the archive. This led another of Mandela’s warders, James Gregory, to publish a book (Goodbye Bafana: Nelson Mandela, My Prisoner, My Friend, 1995), on which a poignant Hollywood film (Goodbye Bafana, 2007, starring Joseph Fiennes) was based, purportedly documenting his personal relationship with Mandela. In the case of warder Gregory, the claims of a close relationship were disputed, with reference to various forms of evidence. The controversy around these claims in turn prompted Mandela’s official archivists at the Centre for Memory to pay closer attention not only to Gregory’s claims, but also those of Brand, and a third warder who kept out of the limelight, James Swart. The Centre commissioned author Mike Nichol to undertake an investigation and added his findings to its website.18 In the case of the ex-security policeman Donald Card, his donation of the notebooks to the Centre for Memory at a handover event afforded the policeman an entry into the valorised Mandela archive, enabling him publicly to reposition himself as an agent of reconciliation. As Prisoner in the Garden indicates: ‘It was a story tightly controlled by Card through the tale of how he came by the notebooks, an account placed on record at the handover event and containing only minimal reference to his work with the Security Police.’19 At the handover event, however, Mandela’s fellow prisoner Ahmed Kathrada drew attention to the fact that Card had given evidence at the Rivonia Trial 40 years earlier, which had resulted in Kathrada, Mandela and others’ incarceration. This prompted the Centre to identify details of the allegations of horrendous and systematic torture of activists by Card at the time of the Rivonia Trial and to incorporate these in the story of the making of the prison archive.20 We see then how developments in public life – inaugural spectacles, books, films and controversies – are shaped by the archive and in turn shape the archive. In 2013 two academics undertook research into Card’s life history and published a detailed account of his activities in a leading historical journal.21 Their account 132 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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spanned his involvement in incidents of racist assault at high school, decades of brutal policing and a range of attempts that continued deep into his old age to claim he had a clean record. The attempts included his self-promoting involvement in his biography, Tangling the Lion’s Tale: Donald Card, from Apartheid Era Cop to Crusader for Justice, by Cornelius Thomas. The journal article writers judged the biographer as having produced a complicit account, although they welcomed his complication of standard liberation narratives.22 They also took at aim at the Foundation’s book on the prison archive. Their accusation was that the book constructed an image of Card as a reconciler, in return for the donation of the notebooks, which they termed, in charged political language, ‘a bargain of collaboration’.23 The journal article claims that the account in Prisoner in the Garden of how Card offered the notebooks to the archive, and how Mandela received them, was an act of sanitisation extorted by Card in exchange for the notebooks. The journal article’s accusations are themselves interventions in the public life of the archive. However, a narrow trade over archival goods was not necessary to precipitate a performance of reconciliation by Mandela: this was script he was ever willing to enact. (Whether it was wise to do so is another question altogether.) Had the academics asked the Foundation about any conditions stipulated by Card, they would have discovered that he asked only to meet Mandela in person to hand over the notebooks. The notebooks did, however, offer a newsworthy occasion that reconciliation-oriented Mandela rose to. It was also played masterfully by Card. The media lapped it up. Card was neither the first nor the last to exploit such opportunities to shape the record. To draw attention to how the record was used in shaping a public image in the way that the Foundation’s book did is not the same as endorsing the activity involved. Rather it is to open it up for review.24 It is to track how archival gains and losses shape developments in public and political practices and, indeed, academic practices and in turn are shaped by those developments. In the widespread protests that have erupted since the mid-2010s in South Africa, the discourse of reconciliation has come under sustained attack and its icon, Mandela, has been criticised ‘for selling out’. The secrecy that has long surrounded the precise negotiations that led to the transfer of power from a white minority government to a democratically elected one in 1994 fuels ideas about secret deals entered into by Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) to protect white economic power. Mandela’s willingness to forgive members of the security establishment has been widely questioned. All of this creates pressure for the records of the negotiation to be placed in the public domain, foregrounding how the archive is used, ignored and expanded in the roil of politics. 133 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Mandela is the subject of ongoing academic research. In 2017 in the University of Cape Town library, for instance, there were slightly over three metres of books shelved at 968.092Mand. In 2008, Oxford University Press published Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction, as part of its Very Short Introductions Series. The Mandela Introduction joined introductions to nationalism and neoliberalism, Muhammad and Newton, among some 500 other topics, indicating his status as someone a knowledgeable person should, or might want to, know something about.25 Similarly, in 2014, The Cambridge Companion to Nelson Mandela was published, listed under Philosophy, Religion and Culture.26 In both cases, carefully vetted academic experts offer insights, research and evidence into all aspects of their topic, Nelson Mandela. Significantly, The Cambridge Companion is less about what Mandela did or did not do and more about his effects on discourse and practice, on and in public life, directly and in multiple mediated ways. This point is reflected in the fact that across the entire book there is a mere handful of references to archival sources. Most of the footnotes cite published material. This a vivid example of the way in which public forms, such as the much-cited Mandela autobiography and publications by the Nelson Mandela Foundation, such as Prisoner in the Garden, themselves become a form of archive, rendering slippery the often taken-for-granted distinction between archival items and publications, and recognising the swirl of circulation in which they both operate. Mandela is, of course, a world-renowned public and political figure. His archive is a concentrated point of charged engagement and, in this case, the mutually constituting relationships across time of archive and public, political and academic discourses and practices are dramatic ones. I now turn from an archive in the political spotlight to consider one in the epistemological spotlight, which is itself not without political charge.

LUCRETIUS’S ON THE NATURE OF THINGS In his 2011 prize-winning book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern Stephen Greenblatt traces the story of the 1417 discovery by a manuscript hunter, Poggio Bracciolini, of a lost poem on a dusty shelf in a remote monastery. The lengthy poem (some six volumes) was by Lucretius, the Roman poet and philosopher known for his work on the tenets of Epicureanism. With the collapse of the Roman Empire, libraries and academies shut their doors and for centuries monasteries became virtually the only institutions that cared for old manuscripts. They reproduced them by copying, so as to ensure their preservation. The monks undertook this task because they were required by monastic discipline to read daily, but 134 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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not to discuss what they read. Dutiful reading caused much wear and tear and the copying allowed worn manuscripts to be replaced. Greenblatt does not make much of the changes involved in the copying, but complex understandings of the political, public and earlier scholarly dynamics underlying these changes are slowly emerging in the published literature, though often outside mainstream medieval scholarship and in work concerned with archives.27 There were signs of the existence of Lucretius’s manuscript, and references to it in other texts meant that when Poggio stumbled upon On the Nature of Things in the monastery in southern Germany, he recognised the significance of his find. Let us turn now to how Greenblatt represents this moment: ‘Ordering his scribe to make a copy, he [Poggio] hurried to liberate it from the monastery. What is not clear is whether he had any intimation at all that he was releasing a book that would help in time to dismantle his world.’28 This is the beginning of the ‘swerve’ of the book’s title. The core propositions of Lucretius’s manuscript were that the universe functions without the aid of gods (no wonder monks were not allowed to discuss what they might be reading and no wonder the church took custody of such materials, locking them up in the monasteries) and is made of very small particles in motion, endlessly colliding and swerving in new directions. Greenblatt argues that the return of this manuscript into circulation changed the course of history, shaping modern secular, scientific and rational thought. Contending that this recovered manuscript fuelled the Renaissance – influencing, among others, Botticelli, Galileo, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Freud, Darwin, Einstein and even Thomas Jefferson – Greenblatt provides a riveting account of how Lucretius’s work was brought back into circulation in Renaissance Europe. His thesis is that it inaugurated the eras that followed of scientific inquiry into how the universe is made and underwrote the idea of universal knowledge that ensued. Greenblatt’s book is not without its critics, notably those who resist the idea that a single event had such a huge effect. Those debates are of interest for all sorts of reasons, but for the purposes of this chapter what I wish to draw attention to are the dynamics around the dusty, and then dusted-off, manuscript. The first point concerns the energies that ensured that it was sequestered out of public life for hundreds of years. Here we see again, as in chapter 2, an item pulsating in archival seclusion. Even when part of a large body of ‘lost’ and dangerous classical texts, its existence could be predicted and it could be actively searched for when the environment changed.29 Poggio was, in fact, a papal emissary and his search was part of the papal assembly of a library of classical texts, in what was a change of direction for the church in a changing world. The contextual shift caused a change to the archival item and it, Greenblatt argues, then precipitated the swerve to modernity. If not 135 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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as all-determining as Greenblatt’s account suggests, it is sufficient to illustrate the point that an archival item can cause both epistemological and public and political changes, and in turn be affected by them. The finding of On the Nature of Things, like the story of Mandela’s prison archive, alerts us to the closet public life of many archives. The nature of the suppressions that underlie such secrecy – direct in the case of the prison archive, discreet in the monastery cache – are multiple, and I turn now to yet another case.

SOCWATSHA KAPHAPHU Between 1897 and 1922, James Stuart, for a long time an official in the Native Administration of the southern African colonies of Zululand and Natal, made extensive – in places seemingly verbatim – notes in a mixture of English and isiZulu of his conversations with Socwatsha kaPhaphu, an active participant in and commentator on the political and administrative affairs of his day and in the past. The notes of these conversations were part of a much larger corpus of material, consisting of similar conversations that Stuart had with almost 200 other individuals. When in 1922 Stuart left the region to settle in England, he took his many notebooks with him. In the 1940s, Stuart’s widow, Ellen, sold his papers to Killie Campbell, an established Africana collector in Natal. Campbell later bequeathed her home and her collections to what was then the University of Natal and the whole became the university’s Killie Campbell Africana Library. In the 1960s, following decolonisation in much of Africa, historians began to make extensive use of oral traditions to illuminate the history of the area before European colonialism. Previously, they had largely steered clear of oral traditions, which they viewed as unreliable because of faulty memory, mutability in transmission and their propensity to be altered in changing political situations, in contrast to archives which were understood to have the virtue of being rendered inert through preservation. In 1970 two historians at the University of Natal, Colin Webb and John Wright, recognised the value of the huge body of oral material recorded so carefully by Stuart and began work on editing, translating and annotating the material for publication. They arranged the material under the names of Stuart’s main interlocutors and published these alphabetically. The first volume appeared in 1976, with five further volumes appearing between then and 2014, when S was finally reached, and the words of Socwatsha entered (or, more accurately, re-entered) public life, albeit refracted through Stuart’s recording methods, rearranged, edited and translated by Webb and Wright. 136 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Thus, not only was this material accorded the expensive apparatus of preservation for posterity in the Killie Campbell Africana Library, but it was published and presented in public as an archive, The James Stuart Archive of Recorded Oral Evidence Relating to the History of the Zulu and Neighbouring Peoples.30 This sixvolume publication has effected a ‘swerve’ of its own. Through its naming of itself as archive, its discursive extensiveness and the multiple commentaries on it, the published archive, and the handwritten originals on which it is based, facilitate serious research into the long-neglected early history of the region. The James Stuart Archive offers researchers an opportunity to explore the kinds of political discourses, concepts and practices that existed before the advent of European colonialism, as well as the role of African knowledge workers in the making and circulating of knowledge in the colonial era. All of these topics are of pressing concern to intellectuals interested in challenging key aspects of the production of knowledge about the long past that took place before and into the colonial and apartheid eras.31 The Socwatsha component of the published volumes stands out from the rest by its sheer extensiveness, on its own making up about a twelfth of all the material published in the six volumes. Keen interest in who Socwatsha was, what he had to say, how he said it, why Stuart chose to interview him, and did so repeatedly and so extensively, saw Wright then undertake research into all of these questions, publishing his findings in a 2015 journal article.32 In 2016, this led to the Socwatsha material being chosen from among the full corpus for an online experiment in linking the edited published text directly to the handwritten originals.33 In all sorts of ways, then, the Socwatsha component of the archive has achieved extraordinary public exposure, shaping the way in which users of the larger body of materials recorded by Stuart understand and use the other materials in this collection. The record of Socwatsha’s conversation with Stuart is of interest in its own right because of the way in which it demonstrates that Socwatsha was no mere relayer of handed-down oral traditions. Many of the conversations were more than recording sessions. A number of the encounters were deliberative occasions, in which Socwatsha and Stuart, and a range of other people, grappled with the issues of the day as they affected the newly colonised inhabitants of Natal and Zululand, agreeing on and debating points about the past and about how deliberation was happening under colonial rule.34 This is perhaps most notably captured in Socwatsha’s comment, ‘Talking (ukukuluma) should not be bought (tengwa’d) – lawyers appearing in native cases’.35 Equally important is how Socwatsha depicted the ways in which ideas about the changing presents and the relevance in them of the past were discussed in the region in the eras before European colonialism, offering a window on early African deliberative processes. These include accounts 137 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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of how people were assembled to deal with disputed chiefships, the limits and occasions of public discussion, processes of public acclaim and accusation, and how the substance of these discussions was communicated and discussed by others, often in the form of attributed first-person dialogue.36 As it turns out, however, Socwatsha’s ideas and words had long been in circulation in public life. In March 1914 Stuart met the one of the most popular British novelists of the time, Henry Rider Haggard, who was on a visit to South Africa. Stuart introduced him to one of his key interlocutors, Socwatsha kaPhaphu, from whom Haggard obtained much of the historical background that went into his hugely popular novels, notably Finished, published in 1917.37 The ideas of Socwatsha, radically reshaped by Haggard, went on to form aspects of popular international perceptions of the region before European colonialism, in English and in translations.38 It is pertinent to note that Socwatsha was also an important source of oral history for Carl Faye, a senior official in the Natal Native Affairs Department, in his revision of the Index to the Natal Tribes Register, published in 1923.39 In these early publications Socwatsha was acknowledged only in passing. In other places, his effect was greater, yet wholly unrecognised.40 In 1921 and 1922 Stuart and Socwatsha had long sessions, with Stuart recording again, though in greater detail, stories that had previously been narrated to him by Socwatsha. The stories then appeared, without attribution to Socwatsha, as 18 chapters, across 5 readers in isiZulu, which Stuart put together for educational use. The books were prescribed reading in African schools in Natal from the time of their publication in the early 1920s to the 1940s, influencing the understanding of the past by their many readers, a generation of educated Africans and a handful of white scholars interested in such texts. In some instances, they were also drawn on in almost verbatim form by other writers.41 For example, Socwatsha’s accounts shaped a foundational work of reference on the history of the region, A.T. Bryant’s Olden Times in Zululand and Natal, published in 1929. Using a close reading of Bryant, together with the texts of the isiZulu readers and Stuart’s notes of his conversations with Socwatsha, Wright has shown that Bryant used at least seven of the Socwatsha narrations published in the readers to inform the narrative and the clan histories that he published in Olden Times. Wright further pinpoints at least two of Socwatsha’s accounts published in the readers as forming the basis of parts of UShaka, an account of the life of Shaka published in 1937 by the journalist and author Rolfes Dhlomo. Wright also notes that Dhlomo may well have used some of these materials in his books about subsequent Zulu kings.42 UShaka was widely read, both by schoolchildren and Zuluspeaking intellectuals, remaining in print until at least the 1980s. 138 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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At the time, black intellectuals such as Dhlomo struggled to gain access to archival institutions because of racial discrimination. The fact that their accounts of the past were often presented as literary forms – novels, plays and poems – rather than history, shows a form of subaltern tactics designed to subvert the panoply of devices used to deny black South Africans a history. But their works were not simply imaginative acts. They were grounded in texts such as Socwatsha’s narrative, as well as within a wider body of inherited cultural materials, an archive only now being hailed as such.43 For South African students concerned with the decolonisation of knowledge and the challenging of the universalism of Enlightenment thought, texts of lost ideas such as the Socwatsha record hold the promise of effecting a contemporary ‘swerve’ out of the trajectory of the ‘archive of Western civilisation’ and a change in the archive as ‘the law of what can be said, the system of statements or rules of practice that give shape to what can and cannot be said’.

ARCHIVES AS ‘EVIDENCE’ Archival collections are reframed and refashioned over time, both affected by and resistant to the ebb and flow of reinterpretation, and in turn affecting interpretation. Thus it is that the archival object charts a course over time, lived in a continuous relationship with an ongoing, changing context, sometimes exerting a form of agency and sometimes itself being acted upon. The particular claim of archives to be open to investigation and reinvestigation, in perpetuity, undergirds the continuousness of this relationship. This chapter elucidates some of the ways in which archives and public, political and academic discourses and practices shape and reshape each other across time, and how this process is constituted and contested. The archival subject lives a public life, sometimes in the deliberative spotlight and sometimes reclusively, but even in its reclusiveness always saturated in public significance. Paradoxically, the seeming antinomies, archive and public, are mutually constituting and archives are a dynamic part of public life. A recognition of how archives and public are interlinked in processes of change across time does not signal the end of archives as some would have it, both those who seek a future unfettered by a biased record and those who worry that challenges to the authority of archive signal the end of the pursuit of truth. Rather, archives, understood as particular kinds of productions that in all likelihood have changed over time in response to changing conditions, are not failed sources of evidence. 139 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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They have much to offer in the pursuit of what might and might not be marshalled as evidence, so long as their role in public life is grappled with in a critical fashion. To recognise this point is to open up to the possibility of debate in which ‘hard’ evidence does still count, in fact is critical to serious discussion of any matter. However, such evidence is not a factual nugget mined from the archive, but a piece of evidence considered in relation to its own biography. To fail to recognise this point is to place archives in a (public) position where they are arbiters of what is and is not knowledge, rather than to understand them as one among other forms of custodial practice, subject to public and political pressures and changes, as well as themselves agents in precipitating changes, in a similar way as many varied other custodial practices. To fail to recognise this point is to make the archive vulnerable to immolation and to fan the fires of fake news.

NOTES

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Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh, eds, Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002), 9. See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Harper, 1972), 79–134. Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002). ‘Forensic’ is a word with roots (etymologically, ‘of or before the forum’) in the same classical frame as ‘democracy’, ‘public’ and ‘archive’. The Greeks organised contests for speakers that developed debating skills rooted in the use of evidence, which they believed central to democracy. In Roman times forensis was used to refer to the presentation of a case, often criminal, before a group of public individuals in the forum. Wikileaks positions itself as ‘an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking’. Stephen Moss, ‘Julian Assange: The Whistleblower’, The Guardian, 14 July 2010. See, for example, the National Security Archive in the United States, founded explicitly to check rising government secrecy, whose achievement includes the preservation of some 220 million electronic records, as a result of the archive’s White House email lawsuits in terms of the Freedom of Information Act, accessed 3 October 2019, http:// nsarchive.gwu.edu/nsa/the_archive.html. See also the work of the South African History Archive, accessed 3 October 2019, http://www.saha.org.za/about_saha/freedom_ of_information_programme. In making these points I am mindful of Jacques Derrida’s foundational understanding that there is no political power without control of the archive: ‘Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: effective participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.’ Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 4, fn 1. See Achille Mbembe, ‘The Power of the Archive and Its Limits’, in Refiguring the Archive, ed. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michelle Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002), 19–26.

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Nelson Mandela Foundation, A Prisoner in the Garden: Opening Nelson Mandela’s Prison Archive (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2005), offers a full account of the history of the official record of Mandela’s incarceration, its formation, suppression and the struggle to open it up to public scrutiny. 9 Another example is the sacking of the Nalanda University complex in India (the most renowned repository of Buddhist knowledge in the world at the time) by Turkic Muslim invaders in 1193. 10 Michael D. Coe, Breaking the Maya Code (London: Thames & Hudson, 1992). 11 Irving Velody, ‘The Archive and the Human Sciences: Notes towards a Theory of the Archive’, The History of the Human Sciences 11, 4 (1998): 1–16. 12 Ivan Lovrenović, The Hatred of Memory: In Sarajevo, Burned Books and Murdered Pictures (New York: New York Times, 1994), cited in Martin Hall, ‘Blackbirds and Black Butterflies’, in Refiguring the Archive, ed. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michelle Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002), 333. 13 In the section that follows I draw closely on Prisoner in the Garden. I was a member of the writing team assembled by the Foundation to produce a draft text. Final manuscript production was undertaken by the Foundation. 14 Accessed 3 October 2019, https://www.nelsonmandela.org/content/page/about-thecentre-of-memory1. 15 Nelson Mandela Foundation, Prisoner in the Garden, 51. 16 Nelson Mandela Foundation, Prisoner in the Garden, 65. 17 Nelson Mandela Foundation, Prisoner in the Garden, 86–87. 18 Accessed 3 October 2019, https://www.nelsonmandela.org/content/page/nelson-mandelaswarders; https://www.nelsonmandela.org/uploads/files/NelsonMandelasWarders.pdf. 19 Nelson Mandela Foundation, Prisoner in the Garden, 111. 20 Nelson Mandela Foundation, Prisoner in the Garden, 115. 21 Leslie J. Bank and Andrew Bank, ‘Untangling the Lion’s Tale: Violent Masculinity and the Ethics of Biography in the “Curious” Case of the Apartheid-Era Policeman Donald Card’, Journal of Southern African Studies 39, 1 (2013): 7–30. 22 Bank and Bank, ‘Untangling the Lion’s Tale’, 12–13. 23 Bank and Bank, ‘Untangling the Lion’s Tale’, 14. 24 Indeed, the journal article writers themselves were guilty of a misrepresentation. In direct support of the claim that Prisoner in the Garden was doing the work of sanitising Card, the article quoted a line from the book: ‘In restoring the books to their author, the other old man set right a past wrong’ (99). The sentence undoubtedly seems to endorse an image of Card as setting the past to rights. What the journal article inexplicably failed to note is that immediately after this, Prisoner in the Garden makes it quite clear that this was not the view being promoted by the book, stating explicitly: ‘That is how the media reported the event [and] ... had the media attempted to tease out the archival threads entangled around the event they might have drawn the public’s attention to the meaning of “archives for social justice” ’ (emphasis added). 25 Accessed 3 October 2019, https://global.oup.com/academic/content/series/v/veryshort-introductions-vsi/?cc=za&lang=en&. 26 Rita Barnard, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Nelson Mandela (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 27 See, for example, Ludolf Kuchenbuch, ‘Das Archiv: Jenseits der Einzahl’, in Laute, Bilder, Texte: Register des Archivs, ed. A. Lüdtke and T. Nanz (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2015), 125–134.

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Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), 50. 29 As was the case with Mandela’s prison archive, its existence could be anticipated, even when heavily suppressed and securitised. 30 Colin de B. Webb and John Wright, eds, The James Stuart Archive of Recorded Oral Evidence Relating to the History of the Zulu and Neighbouring Peoples (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 1976–2014), six volumes. 31 See Carolyn Hamilton and Nessa Leibhammer, eds, Tribing and Untribing the Archive: Identity and the Material Record in Southern KwaZulu-Natal in the Late Independent and Colonial Periods (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2016), two volumes. 32 John Wright, ‘Socwatsha kaPhaphu, James Stuart, and Their Conversations on the Past, 1897–1922’, Kronos 41, 1 (2015): 142–162. 33 ‘The Five Hundred Year Archive’, accessed 3 October 2019, http://www.apc.uct.ac.za/ apc/research/projects/five-hundred-year-archive. 34 Webb and Wright, James Stuart Archive, Vol. 6, Socwatsha ka Papu, 28–30 36–37, 117. 35 Italics indicate words recorded by Stuart in isiZulu. Webb and Wright, James Stuart Archive, Vol. 6, Socwatsha ka Papu, 52. See also Socwatsha’s observations on the fomenting of public opinion in the run-up to the 1905 uprising and on information networks, notably 52–53, 55. 36 Webb and Wright, James Stuart Archive, Vol. 6, Socwatsha ka Papu, 3, 34, 43–44, 73, 92–93, 97, 145–146, 162–163. 37 Carolyn Hamilton, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Invention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 161. 38 For a detailed discussion of Haggard’s effect on popular and public perceptions of the region before European colonialism, see Carolyn Hamilton, ‘Authoring Shaka: Models, Metaphors and Historiography’ (Phd diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1993), chapter six. 39 Paul la Hausse, Restless Identities: Signatures of Nationalism, Zulu Ethnicity and History in the Lives of Petros Lamula (c.1881–1948) and Lymon Maling (1889–c.1936) (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2000), 31, fn 86, cited by Wright, ‘Socwatsha kaPhaphu’, fn 109. 40 Unless otherwise indicated, the discussion of the textual offspring of Socwatsha’s narration relies on Wright, ‘Socwatsha kaPhaphu’. 41 In a draft prepared for the publication of the praises of Zwide, which was not ultimately included in the sixth volume of The James Stuart Archive, John Wright and Mbongiseni Buthelezi noted that the praises of the early Ndwandwe king Zwide, as rendered by Socwatsha, make up, slightly reordered, lines 11 to 20 of the 20 lines of the praises of Zwide as published by Trevor Cope in Izibongo, Zulu Praise Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 129. These 20 lines are reproduced without attribution in Christian Themba Msimang, Kusadliwa Ngoludala (Pietermaritzburg: Shuter & Shooter, 1975), 404–405. 42 On the Stuart readers more generally as the bases for the Dhlomo novels, as well as those of Cyril Nyembezi, see David Rycroft and Abednego Ngcobo, The Praises of Dingana (Durban: Killie Campbell Africana Library; Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1988), xii, 44, 45, as well as the discussion in Hamilton, Terrific Majesty, 162–164. 43 Hamilton, Terrific Majesty, 186–189. 28

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REFERENCES Bank, Leslie J. and Andrew Bank. ‘Untangling the Lion’s Tale: Violent Masculinity and the Ethics of Biography in the “Curious” Case of the Apartheid-Era Policeman Donald Card’. Journal of Southern African Studies 39, 1 (2013): 7–30. Barnard, Rita, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Nelson Mandela. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Coe, Michael D. Breaking the Maya Code. London: Thames & Hudson, 1992. Cope, Trevor. Izibongo, Zulu Praise Poems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. New York: Harper, 1972. Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011. Hall, Martin. ‘Blackbirds and Black Butterflies’. In Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michelle Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh, 333–361. Cape Town: David Philip, 2002. Hamilton, Carolyn. ‘Authoring Shaka: Models, Metaphors and Historiography’. Phd diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1993. Hamilton, Carolyn. Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Invention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Hamilton, Carolyn, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh, eds. Refiguring the Archive. Cape Town: David Philip, 2002. Hamilton, Carolyn and Nessa Leibhammer, eds. Tribing and Untribing the Archive: Identity and the Material Record in Southern KwaZulu-Natal in the Late Independent and Colonial Periods. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2016, two volumes. Kuchenbuch, Ludolf. ‘Das Archiv: Jenseits der Einzahl’. In Laute, Bilder, Texte: Register des Archivs, edited by A. Lüdtke and T. Nanz, 125–134. Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2015. Mbembe, Achille. ‘The Power of the Archive and Its Limits’. In Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michelle Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh, 19–27. Cape Town: David Philip, 2002. Moss, Stephen. ‘Julian Assange: The Whistleblower’. The Guardian, 14 July 2010. Msimang, Christian Themba. Kusadliwa Ngoludala. Pietermaritzburg: Shuter & Shooter, 1975. Nelson Mandela Foundation. A Prisoner in the Garden: Opening Nelson Mandela’s Prison Archive. Johannesburg: Penguin, 2005. Rycroft, David and Abednego Ngcobo. The Praises of Dingana. Durban: Killie Campbell Africana Library; Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1988. Steedman, Carolyn. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Velody, Irving. ‘The Archive and the Human Sciences: Notes towards a Theory of the Archive’. The History of the Human Sciences 11, 4 (1998): 1–16. Webb, Colin de B. and John Wright, eds. The James Stuart Archive of Recorded Oral Evidence Relating to the History of the Zulu and Neighbouring Peoples. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 1976–2014, six volumes. Wright, John. ‘Socwatsha kaPhaphu, James Stuart, and Their Conversations on the Past, 1897–1922’. Kronos 41, 1 (2015): 142–165.

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CHAPTER

7

Iconic Archive: Timbuktu and its manuscripts in public discourse Susana Molins Lliteras

O

n the morning of 28 January 2013, just before the Franco-Malian recapture or liberation of Timbuktu after ten months of rebel occupation,1 the mayor of the city, Hallè Ousmane, reported from his exile in Bamako that the Ahmed Baba Institute – home to thousands of African Arabic manuscripts – had been burnt by departing rebels. He had no other details. Thus, rumours about the burning of ‘the library of Timbuktu’ and more than ‘25 000 of its ancient manuscripts’ were born and spread like wildfire, making front-page headlines in the international media. Newspaper, radio and Internet reports spoke of the ‘barbaric’ nature of the ‘destruction of precious world heritage’, with clear undertones of a ‘clash of civilisations’ discourse. This was another proof of ‘Islamist’ depravity, of the irreconcilable differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’, of the ‘threat’ to the values of the civilised world from the ‘monsters’ with whom no dialogue is possible. In addition to the initial reports, images soon began to surface. Alex Crawford, a Sky News journalist who was there with the French forces, aired footage from the new Ahmed Baba archive building, built by the South Africa of Thabo Mbeki’s African Renaissance era. Impactful images showed empty manuscript preservation boxes thrown on the floor, burnt leather pouches and a pile of ashes, as an ‘Ahmed Baba worker’ narrated the utter destruction imparted by retreating insurgents. At the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project’s office at the University of Cape Town,2

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colleagues and I spent days responding to the frantic calls of journalists from all over the world. We advised caution in the light of unconfirmed reports and tried to clarify some questions about the manuscripts and their history: ‘No, we don’t deal with scrolls; the majority of the manuscripts probably date from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onwards and, as strange it may sound, the content of the manuscripts belongs to the categories of the classical Islamic-Arabic intellectual tradition.’ Internally, we insistently reached out to our colleagues in Timbuktu – those who remained, as the majority had left the city for the capital, Bamako, during the occupation – who for the previous eight days had suffered communications, electricity and water blackouts. We analysed the available footage, noting the small pile of ashes, inconsistent with the burning of thousands of manuscripts, as reported, and established that the ‘Ahmed Baba worker’ interviewed was in fact a local tour guide well known to us for sourcing Tuareg jewellery, but with little knowledge of the manuscripts. Finally, we were able to communicate with Dr Mohamed Diagayeté, from the Ahmed Baba Institute, who, reporting from Bamako, was able to confirm that the majority of the manuscripts of the Institute were, at the time of the occupation, stored in the old archive building, which was still intact. Piecing together confirmed information, we began to speak against the media frenzy and panicinducing reports, which, nevertheless, had already left their mark and cast the conversation in a very particular way – this was a clear, black-and-white case of a ‘clash of values’, leaving little room for ambiguities or questions. Over the next few days, fragments of reliable information about the fate of the Timbuktu manuscripts began to surface through different sources, slowly proving the previous rumours baseless. By this time, though, the surge in media attention about Timbuktu had almost disappeared, just as suddenly as it materialised. The Institute’s personnel confirmed that over 10 000 manuscripts stored in the underground vault of the new Ahmed Baba Institute building – which the insurgents had made their headquarters, where they had lived for about ten months – were still intact. The images of destroyed boxes and ashes belonged to the conservation and digitisation units in the upper part of the building, which were ransacked. Eventually, an estimated 4 000 manuscripts stored in those areas were declared ‘missing’ – and currently their fate, as well as their exact number, is still unclear, although there have been reports of some manuscripts being sold in the city and even in refugee camps as far away as Mauritania. In the following weeks, more spectacular new reports emerged of the colossal ‘smuggling’ operation that had taken place during the occupation, when hundreds of thousands of Timbuktu’s manuscripts, belonging to both the public Ahmed Baba Institute – old building – and to numerous private collections, were transported to 145 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Bamako under perilous conditions. Again, this story captured the imagination of multiple publics, witnessing an explosion of media reports, interviews with those responsible and eventually two journalistic books and a documentary recounting the tale.3 This time, the narratives depicted heroic librarians from Timbuktu – likened to the ‘Monuments Men’ who saved treasures from the Nazi regime – willing to sacrifice their lives for their ‘precious treasures’, which are ‘the world’s heritage’, and who were framed in the discourse of ‘good Muslim vs bad Muslim’.4 Thus, the eruption of the manuscripts of Timbuktu to the forefront of public discourse about the world’s cultural heritage scene was inserted into a narrative of ‘precious cultural heritage in peril’, which prevails to this day. Soon, however, in closed circles, academic as well as local, questions about the operation began to arise. Were the manuscripts in Timbuktu in real danger during the occupation, as the large majority that remained were still unharmed? Was it really possible that the movement of thousands of manuscripts out of Timbuktu went undetected by the insurgents, when everyone leaving the town was thoroughly searched? What was the real monetary cost of the operation, its sources and possible geopolitical trade-offs? Finally, and more directly, now that many manuscripts were in Bamako – where the climatic conditions are very humid – what was to be their fate? These questions arose amid the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO’s) fundraising efforts and conferences of experts; high-level, multi-state deliberation meetings; crowd-funding campaigns to ‘save’ the manuscripts; the awarding of distinguished accolades for those involved – honorary doctorates and city medals, among others – and acrimonious group emails and H-net threads exchanged by different actors. It was soon clear that certain questions could not be raised in some circles, that the timing of the release of the news of the operation was deliberate and that even the rumours of the burning of the ‘library of Timbuktu’ had not been contradicted by those in the know. There was much at stake in these public engagements, for both local and foreign actors, as well as librarians, archivists, academics, state bureaucrats and private foundations. The question then arises: why and how did the manuscripts of Timbuktu – a dusty little town on the edge of the Sahara – erupt with such force in the headlines of global media and in the centre of public engagements on questions of world heritage? Context here is essential: Timbuktu has recently become synonymous with a very specific type of heritage, of a pre-colonial written tradition in sub-Saharan Africa, associated with the manuscript legacy of Muslim West Africa – although an older association of the city as an impossible-to-reach, almost mythical location still lingers in popular imagination. In recent decades, the African Arabic written legacy of West Africa has popularly become known in public discourse as the ‘Timbuktu 146 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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archive’, whether as a source for the history of the region in the pre-colonial and colonial periods or contemplated as a heritage phenomenon in the present. In some ways, the Timbuktu archive has recently become the ‘iconic archive’ used to signify indigenous African writing and knowledge production before the advent of colonialism. This iconic archive has also assumed the status of ‘world heritage’ in the present. Nevertheless, there exists in many European languages a much longer and entrenched association with Timbuktu, as implied in the phrase ‘from here to Timbuktu’: going to the most remote or unreachable destination, existing only in the imagination. Critically, this connotation is rooted in a much larger racist discourse on Africa, as a continent devoid of history and indigenous knowledge production. As this kind of colonial discourse gradually started to be debunked, the continent was redefined as the seat of oral history and ‘even in the case of the written legacy of Africa in Timbuktu, the popular view is that the authors of the works were “outsiders”, “Arabs” ’.5 Thus, as ideas about the historicity of Africa, the essentiality of its orality and the rediscovery of its written heritage have changed over time, so too has the Timbuktu archive undergone several reincarnations in the public imaginary. So where do these two Timbuktus – the iconic archive of written heritage and the mythical location – meet and how has the image of the city been transformed in and through public discourse and engagements? At different times, the Timbuktu archive has been positioned – and claimed – in public discourse in various ways, by various players and publics in a complex geopolitical and ideological game. Nowadays, to Africans and Africanists, it is proof of African civilisation and historicity, claiming for it the status – and benefits – of world heritage. To Muslims – African and otherwise – it is another example of the achievements of Islamic culture that need to be revived, especially in the face of current Islamophobia. To Western publics, invested in the exploration and scholarship of an exotic distant society, it is world heritage to be researched, protected from ‘extremists’ and preserved – including opening their access to the collections. To some local actors – manuscript librarians, researchers and family collectors – vying for limited resources and attention for their archives, the manuscripts offer authentication of evidence-based claims (on land claims, historical disputes and postcolonial identities, for example), as well as lessons for the present, including peaceful conflictresolution strategies and nation-building initiatives, seen as alternatives to ‘failed’ Western models.6 Although each of these publics, their imaginaries and public discourses are relatively distinct at some moments, they also merge and overlap at others, in the present and more distant past. Each of these publics lays claim to the ‘Timbuktu archive’ differently, though in some respects in relation to each 147 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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other, thus exemplifying the entwinement and mutual co-production of popular imagination and scholarly and political discourse. Thus, the Timbuktu archive has accumulated a ‘public potency’ that has something to do with the circulation of ideas about the archive, the accrual and recognition of its status by different publics at different times, and of claims and counterclaims made on its behalf.7 This chapter concentrates on aspects of the history of the Timbuktu archive that elucidate its public potency. By analysing the changing publicness of the Timbuktu archive from the distant past through the era of European exploration and colonialism to the present, it shows how its mobilisation determined ideas of collective life and engagements at different points in time. Understanding the manuscripts of Timbuktu as an iconic archive is a useful entry point into the untangling of and reflection on the changing and evolving narratives of this archive in particular – and the archive more generally – in public discourse and their mutual co-production.

TIMBUKTU IN THE PUBLIC: THE DISTANT PAST Timbuktu was a powerful idea as much as a place, its texture and weave to be shaped by each man who heard the tale. To popes and kings who needed money and reinforcements, it was the mythical kingdom of Prester John; to merchants it was a great centre of commerce with streets paved with precious metal and gemstones embedded in every wall; to politicians it was the capital of a great Central African Empire; and to scholars it was a place of learning whose priceless manuscripts would solve the mysteries of the age. — Frank T. Kryza, The Race for Timbuktu

Timbuktu was established in the twelfth century and became an important commercial centre early on, mainly as a result of its strategic position on the edge of the southern Sahara and at the top of the Niger Bend, effectively a bridge between the savannah and forests to the south and the area to the north of the desert extending to the Mediterranean coast.8 Known as the ‘place where the camel met the canoe’, Timbuktu’s public prominence is intimately linked to its role as a commercial hub, in particular the trade in gold that originated from the mines to its south, which was transported through the Sahara to the East and Europe by the famed ‘caravans of gold’.9 Thus, the development of the idea of Timbuktu – both in Western and Muslim public imaginaries – began soon after its establishment as a commercial centre. Although it is difficult to establish its origins with exactitude, it can be traced to several historical moments and texts and their circulation, and the circulation of and engagement with ideas about them. 148 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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The first of these is only indirectly related to Timbuktu itself, but was crucial in the development of its myth. It centres on the well-known pilgrimage of the Malian ruler, Mansa Musa (r.1312–1337), to Mecca in 1324–1325, accompanied by thousands of slaves and soldiers, wives, officials and, of course, gold. It was said that ‘one hundred camels each carried one hundred pounds of gold’.10 During his famous stop in Cairo, Mansa Musa was reputed to have performed many acts of charity, which were still being discussed and commented on years after his visit – both in the Islamic world and in Europe. So much gold was spent in the markets of Cairo that the gold market collapsed and the after-effects rippled well into the next century. On his return from the pilgrimage, Mansa Musa passed through Timbuktu, effectively annexing the town to the Malian state. He brought the famed Andalusí poet Abu Ishaq al-Sahili (c.1290–1346) back with him and, while in Timbuktu, the latter is credited with designing and erecting a royal residence, as well as the Great Mosque (Djinguereber).11 Mansa Musa’s extravagant pilgrimage prompted different public imaginings around the world. Arabic accounts of this pilgrimage, recorded as one of the major events of 1324 by the chroniclers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – such as al-Maqrizi, Ibn al-Dawadari and al-Umari – can be credited with fuelling the early image and discussions of Mali and Timbuktu among both Muslim and Western publics.12 Al-Umari explicitly states that Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage was a point of public discussion in Cairo: ‘From the beginning of my coming to stay in Egypt, I heard talk of the arrival of this sultan Musa on his Pilgrimage and found the Cairenes eager to recount what they had seen of the African’s prodigal spending.’13 In the West, the public repercussions of the pilgrimage are best illustrated by the famous map known as the Catalan Atlas, produced in Majorca in 1375 and attributed to Abraham Cresques, a Jewish book illuminator and map-maker. The atlas, thought to have been presented as a gift to King Charles V of France, includes a large image of Mansa Musa on the map, shown sitting on a gold throne with gold accessories, suggesting that legends of his wealth and power circulated through Christian Europe well after his pilgrimage. The accompanying caption reads: ‘This black Lord is called Musse Melly and is the sovereign of the land of the negroes of Gineva [Ghana]. This king is the richest and noblest of all these lands due to the abundance of gold that is extracted from his lands.’14 In addition, Timbuktu appears on this map as Tenbuch, demonstrating its growing prominence in this early period. Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage can be seen as political advertisement of his power and wealth, which had the desired effect of making the Malian state – and indirectly Timbuktu – its riches and its status known to both Muslim and European publics. In Timbuktu, Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage inaugurated the city’s religious 149 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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links with the Islamic heartland, which were to continue throughout the next few centuries. This recognition, along with the wide circulation of the texts and maps that recounted the pilgrimage, even traversing – or ‘field-jumping’ – linguistic and cultural barriers, accumulated over time to inaugurate the public potency of the idea of Mali, and later Timbuktu, in different parts of the world.15 The travellers The first written mention of Timbuktu (as Tunbuktu) was by the famed North African traveller Muhammad Ibn Battuta (1304–1369) in his Rihla, or travel account. It is likely that he heard of Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage in Cairo and thus decided to visit Mali himself in what was his last journey (1352–1354), after having travelled through much of dar al-Islam (house/abode of Islam, referring to places of Muslim majority rule) of the time – from China to India to East Africa.16 Although seemingly not very impressed with the city itself – he mentions Timbuktu only in passing, referring to al-Sahili’s grave and an anecdote about Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage – Ibn Battuta’s journey is significant, as he was the first of many travellers and later explorers drawn to the city and the region by its fame.17 The account of his travels did not acquire widespread renown in the Islamic religious public domain, as he was not considered much of a scholar and some suspected him of telling lies.18 However, he was later cited by local Timbuktu historians when compiling their histories of the region, thus demonstrating the relative circulation and availability of his work.19 Much later, in the nineteenth century, during the apogee of European exploration of Africa – which also witnessed a renewed European interest in older Arabic travel accounts and the ‘rediscovery’ of Arabic manuscripts – Ibn Battuta’s Rihla gained widespread renown. An abridged version was first edited, translated and published in English in 1829 by the polyglot orientalist Samuel Lee,20 although his translation was considered inaccurate by the French scholars who published a critical edition of the complete Arabic text, accompanied by a French translation, in four volumes from 1853 to 1858.21 Even later, the Rihla was also widely utilised by Africanist historians in the 1960s and 1970s to reconstruct the history of the Mali state,22 exemplifying how the circulation of this text over the longue durée contributed to the growing force of the image of Mali and Timbuktu in multiple contexts. By contrast, a text that was central to the construction of the idea of Timbuktu in the Western public and scholarly imaginary is the work of the Andalusian émigré, writer and diplomat al-Hasan al-Wazzan, known in the West as Leo Africanus 150 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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(c.1494–1554). At the age of 17 (sometime between 1506 and 1510) he accompanied his uncle on a diplomatic mission to Songhay from Fes and may have made another journey a few years later. Afterwards, he was captured by Sicilian corsairs, presented to Pope Leo X and baptised, and then remained in Italy in the papal court. His Della descrittione dell’Africa, completed in 1526, was first published in Italian in 1550 and was soon translated into French, Latin and English. Its principal focus is Mediterranean Africa, but it also contains a description of parts of the Sahara and the West African Sahel. It is in this widely circulated work that we find the following description of Timbuktu and its citizens: ‘There are numerous judges, scholars and priests, all well paid by the king, who greatly honours learned men. Many manuscript books coming from Barbary are sold. Such sales are more profitable than any other goods.’23 Africanus also writes extensively about the riches of the city, of Songhay and its rulers, thus inaugurating a new chapter on the idea of Timbuktu in the Western public imaginary: the combination of a city of gold with one of knowledge and books. In a way, Africanus confirmed the reports that had started with Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage. Rumour was now considered fact and an image of Timbuktu crystallised in Europe for the next 300 years. Africanus’s work exemplifies another crucial moment in the accumulation of public potency for the Timbuktu archive, not only in the distant past, when it was circulating in medieval Europe in several languages, but also later, when it was republished. It was taken up in later periods, becoming an inspiration for the geographers and explorers of the nineteenth century and even later, becoming evidence of Timbuktu’s and Africa’s status and historicity for the Africanist historians of post-independence Africa. Even in the present, the text has field-jumped to another public, exemplified by local Malian historians, manuscript experts and local researchers who frequently cite his work in their articles. In Timbuktu his name is recorded on plaques marking tourist – yet another distinct ‘field’ discussed later on – spots in the city, among those of European explorers and other local scholars. Thus, through the circulation, take-up and field-jumping of Africanus’s text, the Timbuktu archive accrued yet more public visibility and status over an extended period of time. Timbuktu’s ‘golden age’ While Africanus’s work circulated only in Europe in the medieval period, when he visited Timbuktu in the sixteenth century, the fame and status of the city was at its height in the region and in the wider Muslim world. Timbuktu had gained widespread prominence in the Muslim/African public imaginary as an intellectual 151 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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capital already in the fifteenth century, in particular during the so-called intellectual golden era of Songhay rule (1468–1591). Scholars, students and books circulated to and from the city to other Islamic centres of learning, in the wider region and further into the Maghreb and Egypt. Books were always an important part of the local culture and manuscripts were sold and copied from early on. The famed local chronicles of the seventeenth century, the Tarikh al-Sudan and Tarikh al-fattash, report that Askiya Dawud, who reigned from 1549 to 1582, established public libraries and had calligraphers copying books for him.24 Furthermore, a characteristic feature of the scholarly elite was the establishment of personal libraries, a passion that has persisted to the present day. Ahmad Baba (1556–1627), one of Timbuktu’s most celebrated scholars, is reported to have said that his personal library of more than 1 600 volumes was one of the smaller collections among the city’s scholars.25 The notion of a ‘personal’ library, however, may provide an erroneous sense of these collections belonging exclusively to the private domain. More accurately, these collections, despite being the private property of individual scholars, were often shared with other scholars and students; the mobility of books is widely attested through readership notes, commentaries and multiple marks of possession on many manuscripts.26 Thus, personal scholarly collections operated within a wider network of scholarly culture, built on knowledge transmission practices common to the region. All contributed to the publicness of the Timbuktu archive at the time. Significantly, academics have noted that Timbuktu’s wealth did not necessarily translate into political ambitions or political imaginings that would extend beyond the city itself.27 Contrary to early reports, like that of Africanus, it was never the capital of any state nor did it have a local ruling family. While scholars have long debated its supposed ‘independence’ from seats of political power, it is clear that Timbuktu self-identified as a centre of Islamic knowledge. The city built its status through the cultivation of scholarship and its fame was fostered through its scholars and networks of scholarly exchange: ‘In several ways medieval Timbuktu imagined itself to be participating in metropolitan Islamic culture, thereby collapsing the vast space separating itself from the Islamic heartland.’28 This imagining of the city in terms of a wider Muslim public was accomplished in several ways: through its emphasis on Islamic scholarship, through its scholarly, Sufi and trade networks, and through ceremonies of pilgrimage and investiture, designed to cement its status as an Islamic city both at home and abroad.29 Echoing Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage and its impact, the crucial pilgrimage in this period was that of Askia Muhammad (c.1443–1538) in 1497, which, besides proliferating accounts of its splendour, culminated in his investiture as the deputy of the Abbasid 152 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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caliph of Cairo to rule Songhay. Askia al-Hajj Muhammad, the pilgrim king, as he was henceforth known, was thus legitimised as an Islamic authority in the eyes of the Timbuktu scholars. He cultivated a special relationship with them and was one of their greatest benefactors. The scholars, while maintaining their cherished independence, sang his praises in their writings.30 The seventeenth-century Timbuktu chronicles It was precisely the seventeenth-century chronicles of Timbuktu that portrayed both the idealised image of Askia Muhammad as the ‘friend of scholars and pious king’ and the self-conscious identity of the city of Timbuktu as a centre of Islamic scholarship. Significantly, both chronicles were written after the city had been conquered by Morocco, which led to the flight and exile of many of its scholars. The two chronicles thus construed the period before that event as something of a golden age, very much a retrospective construction that ‘reflects the crystallization of the city’s self-consciousness, a sense that Timbuktu had acquired a distinctive identity that had been forged by men, mainly scholars, whose memory was now deemed worthy of preservation’.31 As Paulo de Moraes Farias has argued, the chronicles constitute a new literary genre and produced a unified historical narrative of the different states of the Sahel. They represent a political and intellectual project on the part of their writers, who centre Timbuktu as an intellectual and moral capital.32 Thus, this accrual of status further cemented the public potency of Timbuktu, with consequences that would determine the course of its history for the next period. Timbuktu’s fame, strategic location and especially Songhay’s control of the lucrative caravan trade all contributed to the Moroccan conquest of 1591, initiated by the Saadian ruler of Morocco, Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur. Timbuktu’s golden era was abruptly halted with the conquest and its intellectual and commercial importance gradually began to decline. One of the victims of this subjugation was Ahmad Baba, who was exiled with his entire family to Morocco (1593–1608) and much of his extensive library destroyed.33 However, illustrative of Timbuktu’s fame and status in the Muslim public domain is that while Ahmad Baba was under house arrest in Marrakesh, his house became a renowned centre of learning, attracting students from all over North Africa. In fact, this was the most prolific period of his scholarly career, and when he returned to Timbuktu after being released by al-Mansur’s son, his fame, and with it the city’s, had spread even further.34 Despite the decline of the city through conquest, economic hardship and the exile of scholars, its image in public discourse acquired further status and might. 153 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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TIMBUKTU IN PUBLIC: THE AGE OF EUROPEAN EXPLORATION AND THE COLONIAL PERIOD What did Europeans know of Timbuktu after the conquest of Songhay? At the time, a tremendous amount of wealth was sent to Morocco, annual tributes continued for a while afterwards and there were special displays of wealth when the commanders of the Moroccan forces returned to their country. One such occasion was reported by an English merchant in Marrakesh, Jasper Tomson, reinforcing the established image of the unending wealth of Timbuktu.35 The circulation of these stories about the city and its growing myth in popular discourse can be seen through its slippage into literature. The British poet George Chapman (c.1559–1634) wrote of the city in 1596: ‘Deep in the lion-haunted inland lies a mystic city, goal of high emprise.’36 By the seventeenth century, the myth of Timbuktu had accrued substantial public currency in Europe, fuelling the desire of merchants and adventurers to visit the city. The attraction was concentrated in the desire for gold, which would be transformed into something else by the period of the European exploration of Africa in the nineteenth century. Early merchants and explorers In fact, this desire had begun much earlier, in the thirteenth century, with a few enterprising Italian merchants attempting the trip, one of the first being the Genoan Antonio Malfante (c.1409–1450), who made it as far as the oasis of Tuat in 1447. Staying with a rich merchant who had lived for 30 years in Timbuktu, he sent back fantastic reports of the wealth of city.37 Here, we see the beginnings of the emergence of the idea of the race to be ‘the first European to reach Timbuktu’, which would reach fever pitch in the nineteenth century. In this early period, it is not clear how many people actually accomplished the journey, nor were all news reports arriving from Timbuktu as grand as the most circulated and those that gained traction in public and scholarly discourse. For example, in 1469, an Italian merchant named Benedetto Dei (1418–1492) claimed to have reached Timbuktu and sent a four-line report back to the Florentine commercial house he represented, notifying them that he was in Timbuktu, ‘a very dry country. There is much business there in selling broad cloth, serge, and woollen fabric like that which is made in Lombardy.’38 It is noteworthy here that ‘banal’ reports about Timbuktu, such as this one, need to be dug out of historical sources in dusty archives by present-day historians, as they did not circulate in the public discourse about Timbuktu at the time. The name Dei, unlike Malfante and 154 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Africanus, is little known in the contemporary narrative about Timbuktu and its manuscripts. Besides the private enterprises of Italian merchants, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries witnessed a more state-sponsored approach to reaching Timbuktu, when the Portuguese kings funded efforts to reach the city from the West African coast they were exploring. After hearing stories from local traders about the gold and salt trade centred at Timbuktu – demonstrating the regional circulation of news about Timbuktu within Africa – several unsuccessful attempts were made to reach the city.39 However, Portuguese interest only lasted about a century, after which it was abandoned as ‘the risks were too great, the costs too high, there was a good trade in gold and slaves along the coast, and there were easier and richer worlds to conquer in Asia and America’.40 Similarly, in the centuries that followed, the energies of other European states were directed to areas more accessible than the interior of Africa. There were a few private ventures that failed to reach Timbuktu. European activity in this period reveals the crucial importance of information about Timbuktu emanating and circulating from sources on the African continent, as well as the inauguration of another key trope of the city, the question of its inaccessibility. Similarly, it shows that the take-up and revitalisation of the Timbuktu myth in the European imagination and public discourse is intimately linked to events in Europe in the nineteenth century, particularly the so-called ages of exploration and colonialism. Meanwhile, in the centuries that followed its gradual independence from Morocco, Timbuktu was beset with severe hardships and abrupt changes in political administration, and intellectual activity waned considerably. Many scholars, and their manuscript collections, relocated to elsewhere in the region.41 As recent scholarship demonstrates, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, intellectual production gradually shifted from urban centres such as Timbuktu to rural, mobile scholarly lineages, widespread in areas such as present-day Mauritania and later northern Nigeria and central Mali.42 This change was known and understood by the regional African Muslim public, as scholars, students and books circulated according to different networks and patterns than in the past. European ‘age of exploration’ It seems that parallel to the economic and intellectual decline of Timbuktu, its myth in the West increased, as less reliable information reached Europe and fewer people visited the city. This is best illustrated by the establishment in London in 1788 of the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa (known as the African Association), a private club with the explicit mission of discovering 155 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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the origin and course of the Niger River and the location of the ‘lost city of gold’, Timbuktu.43 From 1788 to 1804, the African Association funded seven expeditions to the West African interior, most of which ended in death or failure. Thus, as more time passed, Timbuktu’s status in Europe reached its height and was revived in the public imaginary as a mythical city of gold and learning, culminating in the European age of exploration in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Much has been written about the European exploration of Africa, its links with the Enlightenment’s scientific spirit of encyclopaedic knowledge-gathering and as a forerunner to the colonial domination of the continent. For the purposes of this chapter, we see that in the West, as Isabelle Surun argues, ‘Timbuktu becomes a pole of attraction in the European imagination, a place of “condensation” that concentrates the qualities of an entire continent. One can thus consider that the way in which one evokes Timbuktu then makes it the synecdoche of an Africa to be explored.’44 Thus, Timbuktu, publicised as the greatest of the hidden cities of the world yet to be uncovered by Europe, became one of the focal points of European exploration of Africa, capturing the public imagination in unprecedented ways and fuelling competition among European states to see who would be the first to reach the mythic city. The British government sponsored several official missions, taking over the efforts of the African Association – which merged with the Royal Geographic Society in 1831 – and similarly France, through the Geographical Society of Paris, announced in 1824 that it would give a gold medal and a substantial monetary prize to the first person to discover and return from Timbuktu to tell the story. Exploration, intimately linked to European commercial pursuits, by trying to find and name the geography of Africa was a way to control and contain the continent. The most well known of the early expeditions was that of Scottish explorer Mungo Park (1771–1806), who, under the auspices of the African Association, ‘discovered’ the course of the Niger River in 1796. Park returned nine years later as the head of a large expedition, which was to be his last, with the intention of sailing down the Niger, ‘discovering’ its outlet and reaching Timbuktu. After losing many of his men to disease, Park failed to reach Timbuktu, either stopping only at its port on the Niger at Kabara or getting into a skirmish with local Tuareg outside the city. He died further down the river, without returning to recount his tale.45 In the following years, several missions and outlandish schemes all ended in failure, producing accounts in Europe that claimed to be first-hand descriptions of the city, but which contained misinformation and wild speculation.46 These failures to reach the city and the circulation – or lack thereof – of both false and failed accounts fuelled the potency of the myth of Timbuktu even further. 156 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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The public impact of the circulation of these ideas about Timbuktu in Europe is exemplified by the poetry competition organised by Cambridge University in 1828, with the theme ‘Timbuctoo’. Budding poets eagerly participated in the contest, whose winner would receive ‘the Chancellor’s Gold Medal’, singing the praises and mysteries of the romanticised city. In the end, the contest was won by Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892), who would later become the well-known poet. His winning poem reflects some of the ideas about Timbuktu publicly circulating at the time, such as comparing Timbuktu to Atlantis and describing it as an ‘Imperial El Dorado roofed with gold’.47 The first European explorer of the period to reach Timbuktu was the Scotsman Alexander Gordon Laing (1794–1826) in 1826. However, after a stay of five weeks, he was killed a few days after his departure from the city. In a convoluted tale, typical of the period, conspiracies surrounding his death and the disappearance of his journals with a full account of his travels only increased the public interest in Europe in the myth about Timbuktu. In the end, only a letter he sent from Timbuktu to the consul at Tripoli survived, in which he stated that the city had met all his expectations in every respect except in size.48 Explorers’ encounters with Timbuktu The ‘honour’ of reaching Timbuktu and going back to Europe to recount the tale was attained by the Frenchman René Caillié (1799–1838), who arrived in Timbuktu in 1827. The moment of euphoria when he first saw Timbuktu in the distance soon changed to disappointment when he entered the city: I looked around and found that the sight before me did not answer my expectations. I had formed a totally different idea of the grandeur and wealth of Timbuctoo. The city presented, at first view, nothing but a mass of illlooking houses, built of earth. Nothing was to be seen in all directions but immense plains of quicksand of a yellowish white colour. The sky was a pale red as far as the horizon; all nature wore a dreary aspect, and the most profound silence prevailed; not even the warbling of a bird was to be heard. Still, though I cannot account for the impression, there was something imposing in the aspect of a great city, raised amid sands, and the difficulties surmounted by its founders cannot fail to excite admiration.49 Nevertheless, despite Caillié’s disillusionment with the city, or maybe because of it, his account was labelled a fraud by many in Europe, particularly in Britain, and 157 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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the attraction and strength of the image of the city continued unabated. It was the German explorer-scholar Heinrich Barth (1821–1865), more than 20 years later, who would corroborate the information that Caillié had given about Timbuktu, while also substantially transmuting its image. Barth was educated in classics at the University of Berlin and was fluent in French, Spanish, Italian, English and Arabic. Early in 1850, he set out from Tripoli across the Sahara on a British-sponsored expedition to the Western Sudan. He explored the area south and south-east of Lake Chad and mapped the upper reaches of the Benue River and reached Timbuktu in 1853, where he remained for six months before returning to London.50 His enormous work, Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa in the Years 1849–1855, was published both in German and English in 1857–1858. It established what would become the new identity of Timbuktu in the West through a historical survey of the city and the wider region, collecting Arabic manuscripts dating from the Songhay and Moroccan periods. Importantly, Barth was the first to copy and translate sections of Tarikh al-Sudan, offering the first historical account of the region based on written sources.51 Barth insisted on the Islamic character of Timbuktu, reflecting on the endogenous self-image of the city propagated by the chronicles of the seventeenth century and disseminating the fact that it was never the capital of an empire and that it never played a leading political role, contrary to what had long been believed. According to Barth, Timbuktu’s wealth could now be quantified in terms of Islamic knowledge and the numbers of books or manuscripts of the city’s scholars were provided as concrete evidence: ‘Áhmed Bábá himself, the author of the history of Songhay, who gives a long list of learned natives of Negroland, may serve as a fair specimen of the learning in Timbúktu at that time. He had a library of 1 600 books.’52 In this way, in the face of a lack – in terms of wealth, gold and material splendour – the image of Timbuktu in public discourse was transformed into another type of wealth; this time historical wealth, in the form of books or, more specifically, Arabiclanguage manuscripts. Yet, as De Moraes Farias argues, Barth also inaugurated a particular scholarly ‘reductionist’ reading of the chronicle tradition of Timbuktu, rendering local scholars as mere receptacles and transmitters of ‘raw’ information, instead of understanding the politico-social motivations of Timbuktu’s chronicle genre as whole.53 With Barth, the idea of Timbuktu was transmuted in a substantial manner in the European imagination. As Surun puts it: ‘The splendour of Timbuktu is not an illusion, but it belongs to the past. It can only be grasped through the historical inquiry. From geographical, the myth has become historical.’54 Thus, during the European age of exploration in the nineteenth century, the public discourse about Timbuktu in the West was reborn through the narrative of 158 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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explorers. It became a heroic destination, a playground for national pride, in a way the horizon of human action and force over nature.55 However, despite the circulation of the explorers’ accounts of Timbuktu in the public domain, the accumulation of direct knowledge about the city, its architectural forms, its history and its inhabitants did not succeed completely in imposing a new image of Timbuktu: ‘The emergence of a scientific discourse does not sound the death knell of the expectation provoked by the mythical representation, decidedly uncontrollable, whereas the feeling of disappointment, shared by all travellers, cannot make its way into the collective memory and shake the myth too firmly anchored in the representations.’56 Explorers’ experience, travel writings and new historical and anthropological knowledge did not abolish the myth of the city, but rather contributed to its continued potency in the public imaginary. The object of exploration became a project defined in terms of desire: desire to reach a place, to see it, to account for it and to give it an exact place on the map of the world. At the same time, the project of exploration was linked to scientific discourse, at least a discourse bearing knowledge; thus, a paradox was created, bringing desire, knowledge and myth together.57 In this way, the idea of Timbuktu in public and scholarly discourse entered a new phase in its life, which was to be further developed at the end of the nineteenth century with the colonial conquest of Timbuktu by the French. At this point, the city became only a site of past glory, historical in that way, in a sense ‘affirming’ the incoming European ‘superiority’. The colonial encounter By the time the French took the city in 1894, Timbuktu was no longer synonymous with unimaginable wealth, although it remained a popular symbol of exoticism, remoteness and now a new historicity. However, just as the myth had changed character with exploration, it was to be further developed in this colonial phase. This was exemplified in the writings of the French journalist Félix Dubois (1862–1945), who stayed in Timbuktu in 1896, soon after the French captured the city, and gave an account of his journey titled Tombouctou la mystérieuse (Timbuktu the mysterious), setting the scene for a further reincarnation of the myth of the city and the beginnings of its orientalisation.58 Like Caillié, Dubois’s first impression on arriving in the city was one of bitter disappointment and discouragement, prefiguring the eclipse of the myth. Dubois explicitly questioned the illusion he was under, speaking of a ‘mirage’ attributed to the ‘sun, that terrible illusionist’, which is accompanied by ‘the collapse of all the prestige that the name of Timbuktu evokes in the mind of a European’.59 Yet, 159 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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beyond this disappearance of the dreamed city, a new reality gradually took shape under the eyes of the traveller, bringing back a more or less restored image of the city. The force of the myth was ultimately stronger and Dubois would not resign himself to less. Indeed, a few pages later, his discouragement fades: ‘The despairing spectacle of the arrival, which my memory had preserved, and which I believed to be ineffaceable, faded away, gradually dissipating. A secret was definitely hovering over Timbuktu, the Mysterious. I had eyes that saw. A very different vision emerged softly, becoming clearer. Finally, the great, rich and literary city of the legends appeared to me very clearly.’60 However, Dubois’s Timbuktu goes beyond the historical myth of the Islamic city prefigured in Barth. After describing and decrying a dilapidated city, he leads his reader into the house he occupied, where he received many inhabitants whose stories he collected. It is through those stories that the splendour of Timbuktu is revived and its degradation explained. Dubois asserted that the inhabitants of the city, prey to the looting and exactions of the Tuareg, deliberately resolved to conceal their wealth and prosperity; thus the ruin of the city, more than mere appearance, was a self-imposed disguise, hidden from uninitiated looks, a well-kept secret that Dubois understood, which authorises him to call Timbuktu ‘the mysterious’.61 Dubois’s vision of the city has another important aspect linking the splendours of its past to those he hoped would be resurrected in the future. This future is entrusted to the colonial power, France, which has just taken possession of the city, to whom he assigns the mission of repairing that which has been destroyed.62 This new colonial myth of the revival of the city is envisaged through construction of a trans-Saharan railway, which would become the new caravan of gold of the great desert. Although this colonial fantasy was never realised, it speaks to the new turns the Timbuktu myth acquired as it circulated through time. While Dubois’s work is a celebration of the newly conquered French Sudan, his celebrative tone and explicit support for the French mission civilisatrice (civilising mission) in Africa should not lead to a dismissal of his work as irrelevant or as a simple travelogue. Dubois can be considered a pioneer of European philology in Timbuktu, which already had a long local Islamic tradition in the region. His work began to popularise this tradition to a wider European audience. He inspected several works in manuscript form and was greatly impressed by the local scholars and their libraries, saying: ‘The scholars of Timbuktu were, to use a word which might seem a bit strange when applied to blacks, bibliophiles, and in the most beautiful meaning of the word.’63 During the months he spent in Timbuktu, Dubois collected a lot of information on the written heritage of Timbuktu, thanks to his collaboration with local scholars 160 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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– which was crucial, as he was not fluent in Arabic. He corrected some of Barth’s misconceptions and errors regarding the authorship of Tarikh al-Sudan, for example, while deliberately collecting both written and oral accounts from his interlocutors. In his writings we encounter for the first time one of the now famous proverbs from the Sudan: ‘Salt comes from the north, gold comes from the south, and silver from the white man’s country, but God’s words, learned things, nice stories and tales, can only be found in Timbuktu.’64 This proverb, popularised by Dubois in Europe, illustrates the metamorphosis of the image of Timbuktu through his particular methodology of combining oral and written sources, while also emphasising its ‘mysterious’ qualities, which now accumulate onto the pre-existing image of the city. Moreover, the popularisation of the proverb in the present – through tourist postcards, local Arabic calligraphic art and captions in picture and academic books – has been taken up by local actors, highlighting the multiple, intertwined networks through which ideas about Timbuktu were and are circulated and how they gain traction over time. For Western publics, Barth and Dubois were responsible for major transmutations of the image of Timbuktu into a historical city of manuscripts, yet still shrouded in mystery. At the same time, we can also perceive their influence in the beginnings of the coming together of the different images and ideas of Timbuktu into an amalgamation of endogenous and exogenous visions – African, Muslim and European – which would become dominant in the post-independence era. This impact is best illustrated through two seemingly contradictory yet coexisting trends or tropes that began to emerge strongly about Timbuktu: the ‘disappearance’ and ‘reappearance’ of its manuscripts – relating to visions of loss and mystery – and the research and popularisation of ‘knowledge’ about them, concerning ideas of the historicity and later the heritage of the city. The ‘disappearance’ and ‘reappearance’ of manuscripts During the colonial period, a direct consequence of the occupation was the loss or disappearance of manuscript collections, recalling Dubois’s claim of the ‘hiding of secrets’ of Timbuktu. This was not the first time, nor the last, that the city’s manuscript collections would be damaged, lost, removed from Mali or destroyed. In fact, one could easily suggest that instability, change and multiple transformations characterise the lives of many of these manuscript collections. In this period, the fate of the Fulani reformer Umar Tall’s (1797–1864) collection of manuscripts is indicative. After the conquest of his capital, Ségou, under his son, the French seized his collection and transported it to Paris, where it is still found to this day at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, under the appellation of Fonds Archinard, after 161 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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the commander of the French army – and general commander of French Sudan – who conquered the city.65 According to local manuscript experts, as a consequence of this policy, many manuscripts were hidden or buried during the colonial period, assigning some to oblivion, while others resurfaced much later.66 At the same time, the colonial period also witnessed the creation of new manuscript collections through the prospecting efforts of colonial administrators and agents, such as the small collection of the agronomist George de Gironcourt (1878– 1960) during his mission in French Sudan in 1911–1912 and now housed at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.67 Parallel to these European-initiated examples, in this period the case of Ahmad Bularaf (1864–1955), bibliophile, collector and merchant-scholar, is also significant. Originally from Morocco, he arrived in Timbuktu in 1904 and started book collecting and trading, establishing an extensive scholarly and trading network. Reportedly, his library had a manuscript conservation unit, a place for copyists and for checking copies and a unit for making covers for loose leaves.68 Bularaf ’s letters to booksellers from Fes to Cairo, Kano and Beirut illustrate the intricacies of his network, which included book authors, owners of texts, copyists, intermediaries between authors and copyists, and middlemen in the movement of the objects from point of origin to Timbuktu.69 His example also demonstrates the overlap of networks during this period, as Bularaf made use of the colonial postal system, for example, as well as the amalgamation of influences, since the ‘explosion’ of his manuscript library coincided with the growth of printed books reaching the Sahel. Thus, Bularaf can be regarded as a transitional figure: a ‘modern’ pioneer, both revitalising and conserving the manuscript book arts of Timbuktu, as well as a mediator in the network of the manuscript book as an object, to be produced, collected and conserved.70 Tellingly, Bularaf is remembered in Timbuktu as an inspiration for other archival ventures in the present and as an example of an ‘indigenous’ initiative, which exemplifies the fusing of different resources – local manuscript crafts, Muslim merchant and scholarly networks, and European infrastructure – to begin to form a new version of Timbuktu and its manuscript legacy. During the colonial period, the editing and translation of local texts into European languages also began, in particular the local historical chronicles by French orientalists such as Octave Houdas, whose manuscripts and copies were brought back by colonial administrators.71 These sorts of activities, inaugurated by Barth and Dubois, reinforced the idea of a historical Timbuktu, rich in books and history. The orientalist historicising discourse about the city was accompanied by colonial anthropologising renderings of the region as the seat of Islam noir (black Islam) and its associated racist and othering discourses.72 162 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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The impact of the editing and translation of Timbuktu’s historical chronicles cannot be underestimated. It inaugurated the academic study of Timbuktu as a ‘historic’ city, as it could now enter European scholarship through its written sources. At the same time, this ‘discovery’ of the chronicles resulted in increased attention to the manuscripts of Timbuktu, both scholarly and more popular, leading to increased efforts to collect, gather, conserve and translate/edit manuscripts. The impact of the editions also reverberated within the local scholarly networks of Timbuktu. For example, there is evidence of production – through copying, an established local/Islamic scholarly practice – of new manuscript copies of the French edited versions of the chronicles, which themselves incorporated a number of manuscript copies.73 Thus, the way ideas about Timbuktu circulated through networks in multiple directions had a direct and indirect impact on Timbuktu and its manuscripts, as well as on how they could be studied and discussed. The Timbuktu of tourists During the early twentieth century, the image of Timbuktu was fixed in most Westerners’ minds as Dubois’s Tombouctou la mystérieuse, and what European and American visitors to Timbuktu in the 1920s and 1930s found most striking was the town’s apparent independence from ‘Western civilization’.74 William Seabrook was able to write in 1931 that Timbuktu ‘is, I believe, the only city in the whole wide world which has none of the banal blessings, or curses, of what we choose to call “white civilization” … Despite its wireless station and air-field, it remains isolated, medieval, Moslem, selfsufficient.’75 Similarly, anthropologist Horace Miner’s aim in his 1940 study of Timbuktu was ‘to provide a picture of primitive urban life’.76 Timbuktu was therefore a potent symbol of a place independent from and far beyond a destructive modern world. This image gained particular resonance after the First World War, helping to explain why it appeared so frequently in different kinds of writing in the 1920s and 1930s.77 Marco Aime argues that during the colonial period, the French saw Timbuktu as a burden, having lost all importance and being far from everything. Yet it could not be abandoned because of the weight of its myth.78 Timbuktu was seen as a work of art and, as such, had to be protected and preserved more in its mythical imagination than in the daily life of its inhabitants: ‘Thus was born the Timbuktu of the tourists, who are often disappointed by the city, but who can always affirm that they went there because this place has colonised our imaginary, that of the Westerners, so much that Timbuktu still has enough force to give rise to suggestions of post or pseudo-explorers.’79 Through this link between present-day tourism and colonial exploration, a revived image of Timbuktu is cast, the Timbuktu of travel 163 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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books, born of all these different visions; the Timbuktu of writers who admit decadence and disappointment, but who glimpse under the decay of the city the power of history.80 The Timbuktu of tourists still lives on in this imaginary. But in the eyes of the tourist, the historic city and historical objects such as manuscripts lose their political value and become universal heritage.81 Thus, the idea of the city and its manuscripts as world heritage brings us to the present. In a sense, Dubois’s Tombouctou la mystérieuse comes full circle, as this name is taken up in the present by locals to designate the city for tourists and researchers alike.

THE TIMBUKTU ARCHIVE AND PUBLIC DISCOURSE IN THE PRESENT Timbuktu was recast and re-envisioned as a research destination after Malian independence in 1960, with the new impetus of nationalist historiography and Africanist impulses and discourse. The government of Mali instituted the Ahmed Baba Centre for Documentation and Research in Timbuktu in 1973. The origins of the centre go back to a meeting convened by UNESCO in 1967, when planning its multi-volume history of Africa, at which a resolution was passed calling on the government of Mali to establish a centre for the preservation of Arabic manuscripts in Timbuktu. The centre was built primarily with funding received from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and immediately began collecting manuscripts.82 It is significant that both the Western world, represented by UNESCO, as well as the Arab and Muslim world (under ISESCO, the Islamic UNESCO, and ALECSO, the Arab UNESCO) recognised at this point the historical significance of Timbuktu and its manuscripts as world heritage, pledging logistical and financial support for their conservation and preservation. The city received UNESCO World Heritage status in 1988 for its role as a ‘thriving centre of scholarship instrumental to the spread of Islam in Africa … its three notable mosques and one of the world’s great collections of ancient manuscripts’.83 Once again the image of Timbuktu in public discourse was recentred on its historical legacy and that of its manuscript archive, but this time under the umbrella of ‘world heritage’. Under its first director, Dr Mahmoud Zouber, a local historian trained at the Sorbonne, the Ahmed Baba Centre began a very successful campaign to acquire manuscripts, concentrating firstly on Timbuktu and then extending to the rural areas, thus effectively creating a new collection and library. A young manuscript expert, Abdel Kader Haidara, was made prospector in 1984. Thanks to his influential local scholarly family background, he was able collect a significant number of manuscripts 164 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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over the next 20 years. He would sometimes pay US$200 for a single-page document and sometimes US$300 for a complete manuscript. The value of the manuscripts varied, but generally history manuscripts were the most valuable, followed by ornate manuscripts, complete works that were very old, works of local scholarship, historical and political correspondence and, lastly, undated and anonymous manuscripts. The manuscripts at the Ahmed Baba Centre were sourced from all over Mali and as far as the borders of Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Guinea, Niger, Algeria and the Ivory Coast.84 By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Centre was renamed the Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research, to refocus its aims on education, training and research on the manuscripts.85 The collection then held about 30 000 manuscripts, 9 000 of which were catalogued by the al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, a London-based, Saudi-funded organisation focused on cataloguing Islamic manuscripts from all over the world.86 South Africa and the Ahmed Baba Institute At this point, the South African intervention in the Ahmed Baba Institute becomes significant, as a manifestation of the growing power of the idea of Timbuktu and its manuscript archive in public discourse, not just in the Western and Muslim worlds, but also elsewhere in Africa. Its most visible manifestation was the state-of-the-art new building of the Ahmed Baba Institute, officially opened with great fanfare in 2009. It was the product of a bilateral agreement between the South African and Malian governments, which began in 2001, after former South African president Thabo Mbeki’s visit to Timbuktu. The building was one of several conditions of the agreement, all of which aimed to promote the conservation, research and education around the manuscripts as African heritage.87 Mbeki set up a special project in his office, the South Africa-Mali Manuscripts Project, to counter racist discourses of an ‘Africa without history’ and as part of a larger vision of what he termed the ‘African Renaissance’. As Shamil Jeppie explains, ‘Mbeki’s argument is that the revival of the continent is clearly necessary and this is not possible without Africans engaging in regional and continent-wide coordination and exchanges to transform their conditions. The intellectual and cultural exchanges are as important as the political and economic collaboration needed to strengthen African capacities.’88 The task of the presidential project was to train Malians in manuscript conservation and to build a new, stateof-the-art archive facility in Timbuktu to house the thousands of manuscripts of the Ahmed Baba Institute. As the project gained widespread publicity in the media after its fundraising efforts, the Timbuktu manuscripts were increasingly regarded 165 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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in the public as the repository – the ‘archive’ – of written African history on the continent. The reappropriation and revalorisation of the African past, of its history and its memory, formed a crucial part of the African Renaissance vision. There was a will to establish the truth about the pre-colonial past and to restore and acknowledge African contributions to human civilisation.89 Thus, the insertion of the ‘Timbuktu archive’ into this public discourse about history was not surprising. As De Moraes Farias argues, the Sahel has always been a place for the formulation and reformulation of notions of African identity, since as a region it offers concrete proofs of the historical richness of Africa and thus has great symbolic value.90 Mbeki in his ‘African Renaissance Statement’ (13 August 1998) drew on the iconic value of Timbuktu: ‘As we recall with pride the African scholar and author of the Middle Ages, Sadi of Timbuktu, who had mastered such subjects as law, logic, dialectics, grammar and rhetoric, and other African intellectuals who taught at the University of Timbuktu, we must ask the question – where are African intellectuals today?’91 The language of the discourse refers as much to the past as to the present. The idea of ‘renaissance’ implies a process of greatness-decay-recovery in the present, which always runs the risk of mystifying the past.92 In incorporating Timbuktu to the ‘African Renaissance’ discourse, much of its uniqueness is masked by the homogeneity of the rhetoric.93 For example, the notion of the ‘University of Timbuktu’ used by Mbeki in his speech and widespread in public discourse obscures the unique nature and traditions of higher knowledge production and transmission in the region, which were not institutionally centred, as medieval European universities were, nor based on the Islamic model of pious endowments (waqf) attached to mosques in the other Islamic regions.94 It seems that the model of higher Islamic education widespread in Timbuktu and the West African region was based on a network of (sometimes mobile) scholars and the learning circles organised around them, perhaps sharing a common ‘core curriculum’. Each teacher would specialise in a certain field or book and transmit the diplomas individually and not through an institution.95 The emergence of the ‘family libraries’ Although Mbeki’s cultural and economic vision no longer wields much political influence, its after-effects in public life are still experienced in South Africa, elsewhere on the continent and in the wider world. In particular, the instantaneous equation of Timbuktu with the ‘archive’ of written knowledge from the continent is one of its central repercussions. This is further illustrated through the example 166 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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of the private, family libraries of the city, which are also indicative of the changing publicness of the ‘Timbuktu archive’ over time and its incarnations as heritage in present-day public discourse. Since the mid-1990s and the democratisation of the Malian state after decades of authoritarian rule, there has been an explosion of private manuscript collections/libraries in the town, from 2 such libraries in 1999, to 5 by 2004, to 21 in 2008.96 The most recent count, by Abdel Kader Haidara in 2011, brings the number to an astounding 408, in Timbuktu and surrounds, although it is not clear how many of these are manuscript collections and how many are manuscript libraries, or what is actually meant by this semantic difference.97 What is the current definition of these manuscript libraries given by their directors or founders? Firstly, they always emphasise that they are private, in other words, the private property – as opposed to state or even pious endowments – of a particular family or even of a particular member of a family. Thus, all decisions regarding a collection, its fate, upkeep and accessibility, depend on the director of the specific library. Supposedly, there are no restrictions or guidelines that can be imposed upon the collections by external parties, such as the state, donors or international bodies such as UNESCO. However, at the same time, ‘world heritage’ status is claimed for these collections, for their safeguarding, protection and of course funding.98 These collections are therefore granted ‘public’ status through the notion of ‘world heritage’, in the sense that their perceived value and contribution to human history propels them into the public domain, making these collections the subject of public engagements and contestation by different actors. This tension and perceived contradiction between the Timbuktu archive as both private property and world heritage demonstrates the multiple claims and engagements made on its behalf by various actors and its changing publicness – from the personal scholarly libraries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which operated through scholarly networks and publics, to modern private collections, inserted into the public, global discourse of world heritage. Local family librarians emphasise their property rights over the manuscripts as objects that confer upon them intellectual status as well as potential sources of revenue. At the same time, however, by claiming world heritage status for the manuscripts – and seeking donor funding on those terms – they cast their collections into the public domain, thus necessitating the negotiation of questions such as public access to the manuscripts in both digital and physical form. Currently, all the many Timbuktu libraries only allow physical access to the manuscripts in situ under special conditions – research permits for the Institute and individual negotiations for the private libraries. Both public and private libraries have some manuscripts available in a digital format, but do not always make them available through open access, although there 167 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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is always a promise to strive for that goal in the future. This policy brings them into conflict with researchers and funders, especially from the West, who often insist upon unfettered access and question access restrictions. This cohort often lays claim to the Timbuktu archive on the basis of disseminating knowledge or accountability. African researchers encounter similar barriers if they do not belong to the scholarly or lineage networks of the directors of the libraries with access to international funding. The great disparity that exists among the libraries – in terms of resources, facilities, cataloguing, conservation and digitalisation capabilities  – differentiates the libraries and collections to a greater extent than the question of their official status as public or private. The fraught and contradictory nature of claims on the Timbuktu archive as simultaneously private property and world heritage demonstrates the fluidity of definitions and the changing publicness of the Timbuktu archive over time. Another significant aspect of the private manuscript libraries is that they are considered the collection of a particular family, which usually traces its ancestry to a well-known scholar of the past.99 This assumption, however, is not necessarily substantiated by the few studies conducted on collecting in the region, which paint a more complicated picture.100 Many of these family libraries illustrate multiple trajectories of dispersion of the collection, and subsequent phases of reunification, and additional collecting, not necessarily through a simple line of direct descent. Nevertheless, the categorisation of ‘family collections’ continues to support the lineage and network-based claims on the manuscripts of Timbuktu. Questions of manuscript numbers Another central trope around the Timbuktu archive in the present is its ‘outstanding wealth’ in manuscripts, which evokes the force of the mythical ‘Timbuktu of gold’ that still endures in its public image. This translates into heated controversies around the actual numbers of the manuscripts of Timbuktu. To understand what is at stake in the public debate about numbers, it is important to first understand the different ways the libraries and collections were/are formed and continue to increase their numbers. As discussed previously, one of the founding principles of the state repository, the Ahmed Baba Institute, was prospecting and the purchasing/ trading of manuscripts in the city and other villages, which continues to this day. This is clearly a major source for the augmentation in the number of manuscripts, which centre in Timbuktu, even if they do not necessarily emanate from the city. The private collections illustrate other strategies of manuscript augmentation and collection. For example, the Fondo Kati, one of the largest private collections 168 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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in Timbuktu, which was reunited through the purchases of its director in the late 1990s, first reported a collection of 3 000 manuscripts in the early 2000s. By 2008, the number had increased to 7 026 and in 2012 to 12 714.101 However, the increase was not the result of purchasing new manuscripts for the collection, but rather the way the manuscripts were counted at different points in time, emphasising the changes in the ways the collection was conceptualised and publicised by its director. This particular collection is constructed around the marginalia on its manuscripts allegedly written by generations of family members. Thus, the initial 3 000 manuscripts represent the number of manuscripts that contain marginalia purportedly belonging to members of this family, which increased when the director decided to also count the manuscripts that accompanied those of the family he purchased in lots. Finally, the current number of over 12 000 includes manuscripts that have nothing to do with the so-called historical collection, which he purchased himself for their particular interest or in order to sell them to purchase more manuscripts of the Kati family, if more ever surface.102 This example illustrates the multiple networks through which manuscript collections in Timbuktu navigate, as well as the redefinitions of notions of the libraries as ‘family collections’ and their changing form and publicness over time. The trope of the wealth of Timbuktu’s manuscripts – condensed in the debate about its numbers – exploded in the public in the aftermath of the 2012 crisis in northern Mali, when a great number of manuscripts were removed from Timbuktu and transported to Bamako. The number of manuscripts now found in Bamako is the subject of intense disagreement, provoking heated engagements and even resulting in questions about the definition of ‘a manuscript’. Haidara – director of one of the largest private libraries in Timbuktu, the Mamma Haidara Library, and president of the Sauvegarde et Valorisation des Manuscrits pour la Défense de la Culture Islamique (SAVAMA-DCI), an umbrella body of private libraries – is largely responsible, with the funds of the European and American governments and foundations, for the ‘smuggling’ operation.103 According to Haidara, there are approximately 300 000 manuscripts in Bamako, which were transported in 2 400 metal chests from Timbuktu, in which many of them remain.104 However, this number is what had previously been approximated as the total number of manuscripts extant in the whole region of northern Mali, including the 50 000 or so deposited in the state collection. The 300 000 manuscripts in Bamako do not include those of the Ahmed Baba Institute in their count – although approximately 26 000 of them were also moved to Bamako during the same operation – and only include some, not all, of the private libraries of Timbuktu, 35 of them to be precise. Of those, the largest collection is that of the Mamma Haidara library, which 169 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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by Haidara’s own count as late as 2011 contained 9 000 manuscripts.105 The other private collections, substantially smaller, all contained under 1 000 manuscripts. Thus, the question has to be asked: how was the 300 000 manuscript figure arrived at? Are one-folio letters and commercial documents classified as single and separate manuscripts in the same manner as other voluminous texts? There seems to have been a significant shift in the classification and counting of the manuscripts, adding to the controversy around the numbers. The issue of numbers is crucial in centring and condensing the importance of the African Arabic manuscript legacy on Timbuktu exclusively, to the detriment of other towns in Mali, West Africa and the greater region. This ‘Timbuktu-centrism’ in the public imaginary is anchored by the potency of the idea of Timbuktu itself, as developed and reimagined over time, from city of gold to Timbuktu ‘the mysterious’, to Timbuktu, pinnacle of the written heritage of Africa. This has multiple implications, from the concentration of foreign funds for the Timbuktu manuscripts to a Timbuktu-centred tendency in research. Moreover, media attention is showered on Timbuktu and its manuscripts, while similar manuscripts in Mauritania or northern Nigeria, for example, relatively well conserved and researched, receive scant attention. After the post-2012 crisis and the exile of the manuscript collections to Bamako, this issue was further exacerbated by public discourse. With the perceived threat of ‘Islamic extremism’, the idea of precious heritage in peril gained traction, with Timbuktu declared a threatened world heritage site and copious media attention devoted to the fantastic story of the ‘smuggling’ of the manuscripts to Bamako. Questions of access All the libraries include making the collections accessible to researchers and the wider public as one of their main aims.106 However, access to the manuscripts does not necessarily follow established procedures, but is often random and situational, leaving researchers or members of the public to negotiate it in multiple ways. When the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project started working in Timbuktu in the early 2000s, the state repository had a very unco-operative director, who made access to the manuscripts complicated. Thus, the project negotiated with Haidara the digitisation of 100 manuscripts, which was completed without much difficulty. As the Mamma Haidara Library started to attract more international partners and donors, accessibility became increasingly difficult as other players – with greater financial pull – entered the field. In the case of the Fondo Kati, for example, I had to build a relationship of trust with the director for more than a year before I was even allowed 170 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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to look at the manuscripts. Even then, there was no question of digitisation. Only with the 2012 crisis did the situation change: with the gripping fear of loss and with the majority of the collection stored in metal trunks and dispersed in the villages of the Niger Bend, I was given permission to digitise ten manuscripts that were located in Bamako from the time of an exhibition a few years before and an additional four, which were smuggled out of Timbuktu in 2012.107 The question of access does not apply only to foreign researchers. Local manuscript researchers undergo similar experiences, but their constraints are sometimes expressed differently and determined by personal relationships, networks, and genealogical or scholarly claims to prestige and access to resources. For example, many of my colleagues in Mali had never seen any of the manuscripts of the Fondo Kati; only Haidara, who helped with the initial classification of manuscripts of the collection, had read these manuscripts. Other private collections were easily accessible through their personal and scholarly networks. While official access to the Ahmed Baba Institute’s manuscripts often depended on the current director’s whims, friends and colleagues working at the Institute often shared access through other means. These examples illustrate how multiple factors – geopolitical context, availability of funds, changing players, scholarly and lineage networks – redefine the question of access to the manuscripts at different moments in time, thereby impacting on public debate. The definitions of private/family libraries, manuscript numbers and access to the collections are some of the issues obscured during the sporadic but intense attention of the media to the manuscripts of Timbuktu, in addition to geopolitical events in the region. As Jean-Louis Triaud describes: ‘The recent media exposure is doubleedged. It brings greater visibility to these collections, stimulates the commitment of states and donors, while raising the local stakes. The manuscripts of Timbuktu become the subject of ostentation, of urban distinction, of “business,” of geopolitics. The huge numbers invoked places this heritage even more into a market logic, of outbidding or even of trafficking. This scholarly heritage becomes capital with which to make money in different ways.’108 Iconic archive The Timbuktu archive has again become both mythical and iconic, and again reshaped its context and publics. This new ‘myth’ has developed in the last decade or so around the manuscripts of Timbuktu and its libraries, fuelled by this romanticised ‘rediscovery’ in the international media, echoing the ‘discovery’ narrative of the nineteenth-century European explorers. Triaud has demonstrated 171 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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how the circulation of highly inflated numbers in relation to the manuscripts of the city functions more as a symbol and serves to sensitise the public and motivate funding for the libraries. However, the estimations of these numbers ‘that grow as a rumour in the desert’ have contributed to the construction of a new legend, the rebirth of the African Renaissance in another form, exemplifying the strength of the Timbuktu archive as the iconic archive of African written knowledge.109 The potency and the publicness of the Timbuktu archive emerged over the longue durée through the accumulation, circulation, field-jumping and take-up of ideas and texts about Timbuktu and its manuscripts by various actors. The Timbuktu archive operates not so much as an archive in the normative sense of ‘record-keeping, historical facts, truth’, but is presented as evidence for certain understandings of African, Islamic and Arabic culture at particular times across its history. These understandings are contested at different times by different groups and publics. In the West, the image of Timbuktu became the myth of an African El Dorado early on, thanks to the circulation and take-up of texts and images, fuelling the desire of explorers to visit the city. The desire to ‘discover’ the city and the disappointments of its encounter led to the take-up of an endogenous image of the city, emphasising its production of Islamic knowledge. This idea was propagated by the local historical chronicles, themselves written as attempts to make sense of Timbuktu’s past and grant retrospective significance to its scholarly culture and particular lineages in the wake of the decline of the city after the Moroccan conquest. From this point, the ‘wealth’ of Timbuktu could be quantified in the numbers of manuscripts the city contained. Colonial conquest brought another layer to the mix – the ‘mysteries’ of Timbuktu, whose glory belonged to the past, but could still be revived or relived, either through colonial intervention for the French, or field-jumping into the present through tourist and neo-exploration narratives. The Timbuktu archive thus amalgamated claims and counterclaims made on its behalf that moved through various networks, fusing into a new myth. Thus, this historical examination of the changing publicness of the ‘Timbuktu archive’ exemplifies the mutual constitution across time of archives and public, political and academic/scholarly discourse and practice. The new myth condenses in its publicness popular associations of Timbuktu as a ‘mysterious’, quasi-mythical entity and Timbuktu as the iconic archive of African written history. Timbuktu’s iconicity is related to its unique place as an intersection of worlds, influences and imaginations – African, Islamic and Western. It claims for itself a foundational place alongside Athens and Rome in modern consciousness, which obliges us to take it seriously. Yet, as Carolyn Hamilton reminds us, ‘iconicity’ in the archive is both a source of power and contestation: 172 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Iconicity is never simply celebration; it is the product of public desire in the face of a lack. As with rock stars and football legends, the archive is both buoyed up by public engagement and assailed in the public eye. Its publicness is advanced by the febrile debates in scholarly journals and other fora over its status and value as an archive. And with this escalation in its publicness, an iconic archive fills the archival space, often overdetermining it, making it hard for us to think outside of it, beyond it and into that which it, by its lustre, throws into shadow.110 These shadows were foregrounded during the crisis in northern Mali, when the Timbuktu archive exploded into the forefront of public engagements through a discourse of heritage in peril. The accompanying publicity and debates affirmed certain narratives, occluding or silencing others. In the West, Timbuktu was rediscovered yet again, reaffirming its potency, first through a narrative of burning of books by Islamist extremists, the ‘barbarians’ of the moment. This was followed by the salvation narrative of the smuggling operation, thereby repositioning certain African Muslims on the ‘right’ side of history. In the process, the Timbuktu archive was claimed as part of ‘our’ shared heritage, which needs saving from both ‘extremists’ and those who prevent access to the manuscripts. For the Muslim world, Timbuktu was reincorporated into multiple networks, such as through the global foundations of oil-rich countries, as well as scholarly and even ‘terrorist’ linkages. The Muslim claim on the Timbuktu archive becomes a vindication of the Islamic sciences and its systems of knowledge production, both in the past and the present. Finally, in Africa, the moment served for the continent to lay claim to its place in world history, highlighting indigenous knowledge production in the past, but also to reclaim the role of this knowledge to solve current local needs, from developmental to political. This enabled engagements on local identities, a wider African identity and African epistemologies as alternatives to exclusively Western models. Thus, the iconic Timbuktu archive filled archival and public space because of its potency, but in its shadows lies the promise of always opening to alternative narratives beyond any prevailing orthodoxy.

NOTES

1

There were multiple forces with separate aims that occupied Timbuktu in April 2012: initially members of the secular Tuareg separatist group, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), fighting for an independent northern Mali. They were later pushed out by – some members merged with – the ‘Islamist’ militant Ansar 173 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Dine, led by a former Tuareg leader, Iyad Ag Ghali, aiming to establish ‘Sharia’ rule in northern Mali. Other insurgents, such as members of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQMI) and of the Malian Arabs’ Azawad National Liberation Front (FLNA), also played a prominent role during the occupation. 2 The ‘uct’ in the organisation’s name is italicised to denote the University of Cape Town affiliation. See www.tombouctoumanuscripts.org, accessed 10 October 2019. 3 For the books, see the more sensationalist The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts by Joshua Hammer (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016) and the better-researched The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu: The Quest for This Storied City and the Race to Save Its Treasures by Charlie English (London: Harper Collins, 2017). The documentary, partially funded by UNESCO, is Jean Crépu, Sur la Piste des Manuscrits de Tombouctou (France: Ladybirds Films, 2014, 52 minutes). 4 Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004). 5 Shamil Jeppie, ‘Re/discovering Timbuktu’, in The Meanings of Timbuktu, ed. Shamil Jeppie and Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2008), 13. 6 See, for example, Larry Childs, ‘Manuscripts for Peace in Mali’, Cultural Survival (June 2003), accessed 9 May 2019, https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/culturalsurvival-quarterly/manuscripts-peace-mali. 7 See chapter 2 for a discussion of public critical potency. 8 The origins of the city are still unclear and there is scant archaeological evidence for earlier settlement. See Timothy Insoll, ‘Timbuktu the Less Mysterious?’ in Researching Africa’s Past: New Contributions from British Archaeologists, ed. Peter Mitchell, Anne Haour and John Hobart (Oxford: Oxbow, 2004), 81–88. 9 This was popularised by the classic, groundbreaking book by Edward William Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1995), first published in 1958. 10 Al-Marqrizi, cited in Said Hamdun and Noël King, Ibn Battuta in Black Africa (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1994), 123–124. 11 John O. Hunwick, ‘An Andalusian in Mali: A Contribution to the Biography of Abū Ishāq al-Sāhili, c.1290–1346’, Paideuma 36 (1990): 59–66. 12 See Nehemia Levtzion and J.F.P. Hopkins, Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 13 Al-Umari, cited in Levtzion and Hopkins, Corpus of Early Arabic Sources, 269. 14 http://www.cresquesproject.net/catalan-atlas-legends/panel-iii, accessed 10 October 2019. 15 See chapter 2 for a discussion of field-jumping. 16 Hamdun and King, Ibn Battuta, 1–11. 17 Hamdun and King, Ibn Battuta, 63–64. 18 The concept of a ‘public religious domain’ might seem counter-intuitive from a Western perspective, where religion in the modern era has been assigned to the private sphere, but as many scholars of Islam have argued, the distinction between the private and the public spheres in Muslim countries is often blurred, the spaces much more fluid and interconnected. However, it has been argued that the notion of a ‘religious public sphere’ expands this concept and suggests ways in which it has changed over time, ‘linking diverse communities in a common social imaginary’. Miriam Hoexter, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Nehemia Levtzion, eds, The Public Sphere in Muslim Societies (New 174 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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York: SUNY Press, 2002), 8. See also Dale Eickelman and Armando Salvatore, ‘Public Islam and the Common Good’, Etnográfica 10, 1 (2006): 97–105; and Hamdun and King, Ibn Battuta, 5–6. 19 See, for example, John O. Hunwick, trans. and ed., Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: Al-Sa‘dī’s Ta’rīkh al-Sūdān down to 1613 & Other Contemporary Documents (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 1–12. 20 Samuel Lee, trans., The Travels of Ibn Battuta: Translated from the Abridged Arabic Manuscript Copies, Preserved in the Public Library of Cambridge (London: Oriental Translation Committee, sold by J. Murray, 1829). 21 Charles Defrémery and Beniamino Sanguinetti, trans and eds, Voyages d’Ibn Batoutah, four volumes (Paris: Société Asiatique, 1853–1858). 22 Hamdun and King, Ibn Battuta, 8–10. 23 Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire, 281. 24 Octave Houdas and Maurice Delafosse, trans and eds, Tarikh el-Fettach, ou chronique du chercheur, par Mahmoud Kâti ben El-Hadj El-Motaouakkel Kâti et l’un de ses petits-fils (Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1964; originally published 1913), 177. 25 Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire, lxi. 26 Susana Molins Lliteras, ‘A Preliminary Appraisal of Marginalia in West African Manuscripts from the Mamma Haïdara Collection (Timbuktu)’, in The Arts and Crafts of Literacy: Islamic Manuscript Cultures in Sub-Saharan Africa, ed. Andrea Brigaglia and Mauro Nobili (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017): 143–177. 27 Richard M. Eaton, ‘Imagining the Metropolis on the Islamic Periphery: Commerce, Scholarship, and Architecture in 15th c. Bidar and Timbuktu’ (paper presented at the conference ‘The Imagination of Politics and the Politics of Imagination’, Hyderabad, India, 22–27 February 2009). 28 Eaton, ‘Imagining the Metropolis’, 7. 29 Eaton, ‘Imagining the Metropolis’, 7–8. 30 John O. Hunwick, ‘Secular Power and Religious Authority in Islam: The Case of Songhay’, Journal of African History 37, 2 (1996): 175–194. 31 Eaton, ‘Imagining the Metropolis’, 9–10. 32 Paulo F. de Moraes Farias, ‘Intellectual Innovation and Reinvention of the Sahel: The Seventeenth-Century Timbuktu Chronicles’, in The Meanings of Timbuktu, ed. Shamil Jeppie and Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2008), 95–107. 33 Mahmoud A. Zouber, Ahmad Bābā de Tombouctou (1556–1627): Sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris: G-P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1977), 13–33. 34 Zouber, Ahmad Bābā, 38–70. 35 Richard L. Smith, ‘The Image of Timbuktu in Europe before Caillié’, Proceedings of the Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society 8 (1985): 16–17. 36 Tor A. Benjaminsen and Gunnvor Berge, ‘Myths of Timbuktu: From African El Dorado to Desertification’, International Journal of Political Economy 34, 1 (2004): 36. 37 Smith, ‘Image of Timbuktu’, 13–14. 38 Smith, ‘Image of Timbuktu’, 14. 39 Benjaminsen and Berge, ‘Myths of Timbuktu’, 35. 40 Smith, ‘Image of Timbuktu’, 14. 41 Michel Abitbol, Tombouctou et les Arma: De la conquête marocaine du Soudan nigérien en 1591 à l’hégémonie de l’Empire Peul du Macina en 1833 (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1979); and Elias N. Saad, Social History of Timbuktu: The Role of Muslim Scholars and Notables, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 175 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Charles C. Stewart, comp., Arabic Literature of Africa, Volume V: The Writings of Mauritania and the Western Sahara (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 1–17. 43 William Sinclair, ‘The African Association of 1788’, Journal of the Royal African Society 1, 1 (1901): 145–149. 44 Isabelle Surun, ‘La découverte de Tombouctou: Déconstruction et reconstruction d’un mythe géographique’, L’Espace géographique 31, 2 (2002): 132. Unless otherwise stated, all translations from the French are mine. 45 Smith, ‘Image of Timbuktu’, 17. 46 Frank T. Kryza, The Race for Timbuktu: In Search for Africa’s City of Gold (London: Harper Collins, 2006), 52–99. See, for example, the controversial and discredited account by Simon Cock, ed., The Narrative of Robert Adams, a Sailor Who Was Wrecked on the Western Coast of Africa, in the Year 1810, Was Detained Three Years in Slavery by the Arabs of the Great Desert, and Resided Several Months in the City of Tombuctoo (London: J. Murray, 1816). 47 Benjaminsen and Berge, ‘Myths of Timbuktu’, 36. 48 Kryza, Race for Timbuktu; Smith, ‘Image of Timbuktu’, 20. 49 René Caillié, Journal d’un voyage à Temboctou et à Jenné dans l’Afrique centrale (Paris: Anthropos, 1965; originally published in 1830), 301. 50 Mamadou Diawara, Paulo F. de Moraes Farias and Gerd Spittler, eds, Heinrich Barth et l’Afrique (Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2006). 51 Paulo F. de Moraes Farias, ‘Barth, fondateur d’une lecture réductrice des chroniques de Tombouctou’, in Heinrich Barth et l’Afrique, ed. Mamadou Diawara, Paulo F. de Moraes Farias and Gerd Spittler (Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2006), 215–225. 52 Heinrich Barth, Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa: Being a Journal of an Expedition Undertaken under the Auspices of H.B.M.’s Government, in the Years 1849–1855, five volumes (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1857–1858). 53 De Moraes Farias, ‘Barth’. 54 Surun, ‘Découverte de Tombouctou’, 138. 55 Marco Aime, ‘Les déçus de Tombouctou’, Cahiers d’études africaines 1–2, 193–194 (2009): 513–523. 56 Surun, ‘Découverte de Tombouctou’, 143. 57 Surun, ‘Découverte de Tombouctou’, 132. 58 Félix Dubois, Tombouctou la mystérieuse (Paris: Flammarion, 1897). 59 Dubois, Tombouctou la mystérieuse, 234. 60 Dubois, Tombouctou la mystérieuse, 238. 61 Surun, ‘Découverte de Tombouctou’, 140. 62 Surun, ‘Découverte de Tombouctou’, 142. 63 Dubois, Tombouctou la mystérieuse, 327. 64 Dubois, Tombouctou la mystérieuse, 314. 65 Graziano Krätli, ‘West African Manuscript Heritage at a Crossroads: Dust to Digital or Digital Dust?’ Anuari de Filologia Antiqva et Mediaevalia 5 (2015): 41–66. 66 Abdel Kader Haidara, ‘The State of Manuscripts in Mali and Efforts to Preserve Them’, in The Meanings of Timbuktu, ed. Shamil Jeppie and Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2008), 265–269. 67 Mauro Nobili, Catalogue des manuscrits arabes du fonds de Gironcourt (Afrique de l’Ouest) de l’Institut de France (Paris: Istituto per l’Oriente; Rome: C.A. Nallino, 2013). 68 Shamil Jeppie, ‘History for Timbuktu: Ahmad Bul‘arāf, Archives, and the Place of the Past’, History in Africa 38 (2011): 401–416. 42

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Shamil Jeppie, ‘A Timbuktu Bibliophile between the Mediterranean and the Sahel: Ahmad Bul‘arāf and the Circulation of Books in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’, Journal of North African Studies 20, 1 (2015): 65–77. 70 Jeppie, ‘Timbuktu Bibliophile’. 71 Octave Houdas, trans. and ed., Tarikh Es-Soudan par Abderrahman Ben Abdallah Ben ‘Imran Ben ‘Amir Es-Sa‘di (Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1981; originally published in 1913). See also Houdas and Delafosse, Tarikh el-Fettach; Octave Houdas, trans. and ed., Tadhkirat al-nisyān fī akhbār mulūk al-Sūdān (Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1981; originally published 1913). 72 See, for example, Vincent Monteuil, L’Islam noir: Une religion à la conquête de l’Afrique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964). For an analysis in relation to one of the translators of the Timbuktu chronicles, see Jean-Loup Amselle and Emmanuelle Sibeud, eds, Maurice Delafosse: Entre orientalisme et ethnographie: l’itinéraire d’un africaniste (1870–1926) (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1998). 73 Mauro Nobili and Mohamed Shahid Mathee, ‘Towards a New Study of the So-Called Tārīkh al-fattāsh’, History in Africa 42 (2015): 37–73. 74 Owen White, ‘The Decivilizing Mission: Auguste Dupuis-Yakouba and French Timbuktu’, French Historical Studies 27, 3 (2004): 542–568. 75 William Seabrook, Air Adventure: Paris-Sahara-Timbuktu (London: G.G. Harrap, 1933). 76 Horace Miner, Primitive City of Timbuctoo (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1965), viii–ix. 77 White, ‘Decivilizing Mission’, 566. 78 Aime, ‘Déçus de Tombouctou’, 513. 79 Aime, ‘Déçus de Tombouctou’, 514. 80 The list of travel books about Timbuktu is too numerous to list, but a sample from the last two decades includes Anthony Sattin, The Gates of Africa: Death, Discovery and the Search for Timbuktu (London: Harper Collins, 2003); Kira Salak, The Cruelest Journey: 600 Miles to Timbuktu (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2004); Tom Fremantle, The Road to Timbuktu: Down the Niger on the Trail of Mungo Park (London: Robinson Publishing, 2005); Rick Antonson, To Timbuktu for a Haircut: A Journey through West Africa (Toronto: Dundrum, 2008); and Kryza, Race for Timbuktu. In addition, ‘literary’ works have also been inspired by the public idea of Timbuktu, such as Paul Auster’s Timbuktu (New York: Henry Holt, 1999) and Timbuktu, Timbuktu: A Selection of Works from the Caine Prize for African Writing 2001 (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2003). 81 Aime, ‘Déçus de Tombouctou’, 519. 82 John O. Hunwick, ‘CEDRAB: The Centre de Documentation et de Recherches Ahmad Baba at Timbuktu’, Sudanic Africa 3 (1992): 173–181. 83 See http://whc.Unesco.org/en/list/119, accessed 10 October 2019. 84 Hunwick, ‘CEDRAB’. 85 Muhammad Ould Youbba, ‘The Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Islamic Studies and Research’, in The Meanings of Timbuktu, ed. Shamil Jeppie and Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2008), 287–301. 86 Sidi Amar Ould Ely and Julian Johansen, eds, Handlist of Manuscripts in the Centre de Documentation et de Recherches Historiques Ahmed Baba, Timbuktu, five volumes (London: al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, 1995–1998). 87 Jeppie, ‘Re/discovering Timbuktu’. 69

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Jeppie, ‘Re/discovering Timbuktu’, 8. Lydia Samarbakhsh-Liberge, ‘L’African Renaissance en Afrique du Sud: De l’utilité ou de l’utilisation de l’histoire?’ in Afrocentrismes: L’histoire des Africains entre Égypte et Amérique, ed. François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar, Jean-Pierre Chrétien and ClaudeHélène Perrot (Paris: Karthala, 2000), 381–400. 90 Paulo F. de Moraes Farias, ‘Tombuctu, a África do Sul, e o Idioma Político da Renascença Africana’ (paper delivered at the FUNAG-IPRI African Seminar, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2 March 2007), 6–7. 91 Thabo Mbeki, ‘The African Renaissance Statement of Deputy President, Thabo Mbeki’, Gallagher Estate, 13 August 1998, accessed 15 February 2012, http://www.dfa.gov.za/ docs/speeches/1998/mbek0813.htm. 92 De Moraes Farias, ‘Tombuctu’, 17–18. 93 De Moraes Farias, ‘Tombuctu’, 17–18. 94 Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire, liv–lxiii. 95 Bruce S. Hall and Charles C. Stewart, ‘The Historic “Core Curriculum” and the Book Market in Islamic West Africa’, in The Trans-Saharan Book Trade: Manuscript Culture, Arabic Literacy and Intellectual History in Muslim Africa, ed. Graziano Krätli and Ghislaine Lydon (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 96 Ismaël Diadié Haidara and Haoua Taore, ‘The Private Libraries of Timbuktu’, in The Meanings of Timbuktu, ed. Shamil Jeppie and Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2008), 271–276. 97 Abdel Kader Haidara, ‘An Overview of the Major Manuscript Libraries in Timbuktu’, in The Trans-Saharan Book Trade : Manuscript Culture, Arabic Literacy and Intellectual History in Muslim Africa, ed. Graziano Krätli and Ghislaine Lydon (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 241–264. 98 See Haidara, ‘Overview’; Diadié Haidara and Taore, ‘Private Libraries’. 99 Haidara, ‘Overview’. 100 See Jeppie, ‘Timbuktu Bibliophile’; Susana Molins Lliteras, ‘From Toledo to Timbuktu: The Case for a Biography of the Ka’ti Archive, and Its Sources’, South African Historical Journal 65, 1 (2013): 105–124; and Susana Molins Lliteras, ‘The Making of the Fondo Ka’ti: A Family Collection in Timbuktu’, Islamic Africa 6 (2015): 185–191. 101 Molins Lliteras, ‘From Toledo to Timbuktu’. 102 Molins Lliteras, ‘From Toledo to Timbuktu’. 103 See Haidara, ‘State of Manuscripts in Mali’; and http://www.savamadci.net, accessed 10 October 2019. 104 D. Bondarev et al., eds, Safeguarding the Manuscripts of Timbuktu (Hamburg: Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, 2017). 105 Haidara, ‘Overview’. 106 Haidara, ‘State of Manuscripts in Mali’. 107 Susana Molins Lliteras, ‘ “Africa Starts in the Pyrenees”: The Fondo Kati, between al-Andalus and Timbuktu’ (PhD diss., University of Cape Town, 2015). 108 Jean-Louis Triaud, ‘Tombouctou ou le retour du mythe: L’exposition médiatique des manuscrits de Tombouctou’, in L’Afrique des savoirs au sud du Sahara (XVIe–XXIe siècle): Acteurs, supports, pratiques, ed. Daouda Gary-Tounkara and Didier Nativel (Paris: Karthala, 2012), 220–21. 109 Triaud, ‘Tombouctou’, 208. 110 Carolyn Hamilton, ‘Backstory, Biography, and the Life of the James Stuart Archive’, History in Africa 38 (2011): 339. 88 89

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REFERENCES Abitbol, Michel. Tombouctou et les Arma: De la conquête marocaine du Soudan nigérien en 1591 à l’hégémonie de l’Empire Peul du Macina en 1833. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1979. Aime, Marco. ‘Les déçus de Tombouctou’. Cahiers d’études africaines 1–2, 193–194 (2009): 513–523. Amselle, Jean-Loup and Emmanuelle Sibeud, eds. Maurice Delafosse: Entre orientalisme et ethnographie: L’itinéraire d’un africaniste (1870–1926). Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1998. Antonson, Rick. To Timbuktu for a Haircut: A Journey through West Africa. Toronto: Dundrum, 2008. Auster, Paul. Timbuktu. New York: Henry Holt, 1999. Barth, Heinrich. Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa: Being a Journal of an Expedition Undertaken under the Auspices of H.B.M.’s Government, in the Years 1849–1855. Five volumes. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1857–1858. Benjaminsen, Tor A. and Gunnvor Berge. ‘Myths of Timbuktu: From African El Dorado to Desertification’. International Journal of Political Economy 34, 1 (2004): 31–59. Bondarev, D., M. Jacoby, M.L. Russo and D. Schröter, eds. Safeguarding the Manuscripts of Timbuktu. Hamburg: Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, 2017. Bovill, Edward William. The Golden Trade of the Moors. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1995. Caillié, René. Journal d’un voyage à Temboctou et à Jenné dans l’Afrique centrale. Paris: Anthropos, 1965. Childs, Larry. ‘Manuscripts for Peace in Mali’. Cultural Survival (June 203). Accessed 9 May 2019. https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/ manuscripts-peace-mali. Cock, Simon, ed. The Narrative of Robert Adams, a Sailor Who Was Wrecked on the Western Coast of Africa, in the Year 1810, Was Detained Three Years in Slavery by the Arabs of the Great Desert, and Resided Several Months in the City of Tombuctoo. London: J. Murray, 1816. Crépu, Jean. Sur la Piste des Manuscrits de Tombouctou. France: Ladybirds Films, 2014, 52 minutes. Defrémery, Charles and Beniamino Sanguinetti, trans. and eds. Voyages d’Ibn Batoutah. Four volumes. Paris: Société Asiatique, 1853–1858. De Moraes Farias, Paulo F. ‘Barth, fondateur d’une lecture réductrice des chroniques de Tombouctou’. In Heinrich Barth et l’Afrique, edited by Mamadou Diawara, Paulo F. de Moraes Farias and Gerd Spittler, 215–225. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2006. De Moraes Farias, Paulo F. ‘Intellectual Innovation and Reinvention of the Sahel: The Seventeenth-Century Timbuktu Chronicles’. In The Meanings of Timbuktu, edited by Shamil Jeppie and Souleymane Bachir Diagne, 95–107. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2008. De Moraes Farias, Paulo F. ‘Tombuctu, a África do Sul, e o Idioma Político da Renascença Africana’. Paper delivered at the FUNAG-IPRI African Seminar, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2 March 2007. Diadié Haidara, Ismaël and Haoua Taore. ‘The Private Libraries of Timbuktu’. In The Meanings of Timbuktu, edited by Shamil Jeppie and Souleymane Bachir Diagne, 271–276. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2008. 179 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Diawara, Mamadou, Paulo F. de Moraes Farias and Gerd Spittler, eds. Heinrich Barth et l’Afrique. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2006. Dubois, Félix. Tombouctou la mystérieuse. Paris: Flammarion, 1897. Eaton, Richard M. ‘Imagining the Metropolis on the Islamic Periphery: Commerce, Scholarship, and Architecture in 15th c. Bidar and Timbuktu’. Paper presented at the conference ‘The Imagination of Politics and the Politics of Imagination’, Hyderabad, India, 22–27 February 2009. Eickelman, Dale and Armando Salvatore. ‘Public Islam and the Common Good’. Etnográfica 10, 1 (2006): 97–105. English, Charlie. The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu: The Quest for This Storied City and the Race to Save Its Treasures. London: Harper Collins, 2017. Fremantle, Tom. The Road to Timbuktu: Down the Niger on the Trail of Mungo Park. London: Robinson Publishing, 2005. Haidara, Abdel Kader. ‘An Overview of the Major Manuscript Libraries in Timbuktu’. In The Trans-Saharan Book Trade: Manuscript Culture, Arabic Literacy and Intellectual History in Muslim Africa, edited by Graziano Krätli and Ghislaine Lydon, 241–264. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Haidara, Abdel Kader. ‘The State of Manuscripts in Mali and Efforts to Preserve Them’. In The Meanings of Timbuktu, edited by Shamil Jeppie and Souleymane Bachir Diagne, 265–269. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2008. Hall, Bruce S. and Charles C. Stewart. ‘The Historic “Core Curriculum” and the Book Market in Islamic West Africa’. In The Trans-Saharan Book Trade: Manuscript Culture, Arabic Literacy and Intellectual History in Muslim Africa, edited by Graziano Krätli and Ghislaine Lydon, 109–174. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Hamdun, Said and Noël King. Ibn Battuta in Black Africa. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1994. Hamilton, Carolyn. ‘Backstory, Biography, and the Life of the James Stuart Archive’. History in Africa 38 (2011): 319–341. Hammer, Joshua. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016. Hoexter, Miriam, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Nehemia Levtzion, eds. The Public Sphere in Muslim Societies. New York: SUNY Press, 2002. Houdas, Octave, trans. and ed. Tadhkirat al-nisyān fī akhbār mulūk al-Sūdān. Paris: AdrienMaisonneuve, 1981. Houdas, Octave, trans. and ed. Tarikh Es-Soudan par Abderrahman Ben Abdallah Ben ‘Imran Ben ‘Amir Es-Sa‘di. Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1981. Houdas, Octave and Maurice Delafosse, trans and eds. Tarikh el-Fettach, ou chronique du chercheur, par Mahmoud Kâti ben El-Hadj El-Motaouakkel Kâti et l’un de ses petits-fils. Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1964. Hunwick, John O. ‘An Andalusian in Mali: A Contribution to the Biography of Abū Ishāq al-Sāhili, c.1290–1346’. Paideuma 36 (1990): 59–66. Hunwick, John O. ‘CEDRAB: The Centre de Documentation et de Recherches Ahmad Baba at Timbuktu’. Sudanic Africa 3 (1992): 173–181. Hunwick, John O. ‘Secular Power and Religious Authority in Islam: The Case of Songhay’. Journal of African History 37, 2 (1996): 175–194. Hunwick, John O., trans. and ed. Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: Al-Sa‘dī’s Ta’rīkh al-Sūdān down to 1613 & Other Contemporary Documents. Leiden: Brill, 2003.

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Insoll, Timothy. ‘Timbuktu the Less Mysterious?’ In Researching Africa’s Past: New Contributions from British Archaeologists, edited by Peter Mitchell, Anne Haour and John Hobart, 81–88. Oxford: Oxbow, 2004. Jeppie, Shamil. ‘History for Timbuktu: Ahmad Bul‘arāf, Archives, and the Place of the Past’. History in Africa 38 (2011): 401–416. Jeppie, Shamil. ‘Re/discovering Timbuktu’. In The Meanings of Timbuktu, edited by Shamil Jeppie and Souleymane Bachir Diagne, 1–17. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2008. Jeppie, Shamil. ‘A Timbuktu Bibliophile between the Mediterranean and the Sahel: Ahmad Bul‘arāf and the Circulation of Books in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’. Journal of North African Studies 20, 1 (2015): 65–77. Krätli, Graziano. ‘West African Manuscript Heritage at a Crossroads: Dust to Digital or Digital Dust?’ Anuari de Filologia Antiqva et Mediaevalia 5 (2015): 41–66. Kryza, Frank T. The Race for Timbuktu: In Search of Africa’s City of Gold. London: Harper Collins, 2006. Lee, Samuel, trans. The Travels of Ibn Battuta: Translated from the Abridged Arabic Manuscript Copies, Preserved in the Public Library of Cambridge. London: Oriental Translation Committee, sold by J. Murray, 1829. Levtzion, Nehemia and J.F.P. Hopkins. Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Mamdani, Mahmood. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. New York: Pantheon Books, 2004. Mbeki, Thabo. ‘The African Renaissance Statement of Deputy President, Thabo Mbeki’. Gallagher Estate, 13 August 1998. Accessed 15 February 2012. http://www.dfa.gov.za/ docs/speeches/1998/mbek0813.htm. Miner, Horace. Primitive City of Timbuctoo. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1965. Molins Lliteras, Susana. ‘ “Africa Starts in the Pyrenees”: The Fondo Kati, between al-Andalus and Timbuktu’. PhD diss., University of Cape Town, 2015. Molins Lliteras, Susana. ‘From Toledo to Timbuktu: The Case for a Biography of the Ka’ti Archive, and Its Sources’. South African Historical Journal 65, 1 (2013): 105–124. Molins Lliteras, Susana. ‘The Making of the Fondo Ka’ti: A Family Collection in Timbuktu’. Islamic Africa 6 (2015): 185–191. Molins Lliteras, Susana. ‘A Preliminary Appraisal of Marginalia in West African Manuscripts from the Mamma Haïdara Collection (Timbuktu)’. In The Arts and Crafts of Literacy: Islamic Manuscript Cultures in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by Andrea Brigaglia and Mauro Nobili, 143–177. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017. Monteuil, Vincent. L’Islam noir: Une religion à la conquête de l’Afrique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964. Nobili, Mauro. Catalogue des manuscrits arabes du fonds de Gironcourt (Afrique de l’Ouest) de l’Institut de France. Paris: Istituto per l’Oriente; Rome: C.A. Nallino, 2013. Nobili, Mauro and Mohamed Shahid Mathee. ‘Towards a New Study of the So-Called Tārīkh al-fattāsh’. History in Africa 42 (2015): 37–73. Ould Ely, Sidi Amar and Julian Johansen, eds. Handlist of Manuscripts in the Centre de Documentation et de Recherches Historiques Ahmed Baba, Timbuktu. Five volumes. London: al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, 1995–1998. Ould Youbba, Muhammad. ‘The Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Islamic Studies and Research’. In The Meanings of Timbuktu, edited by Shamil Jeppie and Souleymane Bachir Diagne, 287–301. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2008.

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Saad, Elias N. Social History of Timbuktu: The Role of Muslim Scholars and Notables, 1400– 1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Salak, Kira. The Cruelest Journey: 600 Miles to Timbuktu. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2004. Samarbakhsh-Liberge, Lydia. ‘L’African Renaissance en Afrique du Sud: De l’utilité ou de l’utilisation de l’histoire?’ In Afrocentrismes: L’histoire des Africains entre Égypte et Amérique, edited by François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar, Jean-Pierre Chrétien and ClaudeHélène Perrot, 381–400. Paris: Karthala, 2000. Sattin, Anthony. The Gates of Africa: Death, Discovery and the Search for Timbuktu. London: Harper Collins, 2003. Seabrook, William. Air Adventure: Paris-Sahara-Timbuktu. London: G.G. Harrap, 1933. Sinclair, William. ‘The African Association of 1788’. Journal of the Royal African Society 1, 1 (1901): 145–149. Smith, Richard L. ‘The Image of Timbuktu in Europe before Caillié’. Proceedings of the Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society 8 (1985): 12–22. Stewart, Charles C., comp. Arabic Literature of Africa, Volume V: The Writings of Mauritania and the Western Sahara. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Surun, Isabelle. ‘La découverte de Tombouctou: Déconstruction et reconstruction d’un mythe géographique’. L’Espace géographique 31, 2 (2002): 131–144. Timbuktu, Timbuktu: A Selection of Works from the Caine Prize for African Writing 2001. Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2003. Triaud, Jean-Louis. ‘Tombouctou ou le retour du mythe: L’exposition médiatique des manuscrits de Tombouctou’. In L’Afrique des savoirs au sud du Sahara (XVIe–XXIe siècle): Acteurs, supports, pratiques, edited by Daouda Gary-Tounkara et Didier Nativel, 201–222. Paris: Karthala, 2012. White, Owen. ‘The Decivilizing Mission: Auguste Dupuis-Yakouba and French Timbuktu’. French Historical Studies 27, 3 (2004): 542–568. Zouber, Mahmoud A. Ahmad Bābā de Tombouctou (1556–1627): Sa vie et son œuvre. Paris: G-P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1977.

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CHAPTER

8

The Politics of Representation in Marikana: A tale of competing ideologies Camalita Naicker

O

n 16 August 2012, South African police opened fire on striking mineworkers at the Lonmin Platinum Mine at Marikana near Rustenburg in the North West province of South Africa, killing 34 workers. The Marikana massacre has been seen by many as signalling a turning point in South African politics. The mineworkers were shot after they had occupied a mountain near the mine and embarked on a ‘wildcat strike’ for a living wage of R12 500. Early media reports presented the strike as inter-union rivalry between the relative newcomer, Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), and the older government-aligned National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). However, journalists and academics later found that the mineworkers had organised themselves and most were still members of the NUM at the time. It was also later revealed that several days before the massacre, around 10 August, the mineworkers had collectively approached the mine management, seeking a wage increase and bypassing the union bargaining structure. They were turned away by management, who told them to approach their union. They did so the next day, with fewer people. When they approached the offices of the NUM at Lonmin, two NUM officials opened fire on their own members and, many believed, killed two people.1 Thereafter, the miners armed themselves with pangas, knobkerries and sticks, and moved to occupy a nearby mountain. On 12 August, they again tried

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to march to the NUM offices. This time, about 150 strikers had a run-in with two Lonmin security guards, one of whom was murdered by a smaller group of men. Two more security officers were killed during another confrontation on the same day between strikers and a larger group of security guards. When the security guards began to fire rubber bullets at the workers, they stormed the group of security men, overpowering and killing two, setting their vehicles alight and taking their shotguns. Later that evening, another person was killed in a confrontation between strikers and other people and more vehicles were burnt. On Monday, 13 August, a production manager was killed on his way to work by striking miners; it is believed he was stabbed to death by knives and pangas. That evening there was a clash between the police and strikers and five people were killed, including two police officers. News of their deaths and pictures of the policemen were circulated to policemen around the country. On 14 August, the body of an ‘informer’ was found. He had been stabbed to death and parts of his body had been cut off. In all, by 16 August, ten people had been murdered. On the mountain, the mineworkers began to organise themselves and elect their own representatives, who came to be known as the ‘five madoda’ (‘men’ in isiXhosa). Their request was that the CEO of Lonmin, Ian Farmer, come to the mountain to hear their grievances and then they would return to work. This did not happen. On 16 August, heavily armed police Nyalas, Hippos, ambulances and mortuary vans arrived in Marikana. After several attempts by the presidents of the NUM and AMCU to persuade the mineworkers to leave the mountain failed, police began circling the mineworkers with barbed wire. The miners began to move off the mountain slowly and in song and it was then that the police opened fire, killing 34 people within minutes. This chapter considers the representations of Marikana by the media and the academy. It argues that these institutions have struggled to grasp the event of Marikana and the forms of political action taken by the men’s and women’s movements at Marikana and translate them into language and concepts that are recognisable through liberal or Marxist discourses.2 This is symptomatic of how, as Carolyn Hamilton and Lesley Cowling argue in chapter 1, the public sphere is convened: these institutions ‘do not merely enable, but also shape, weight or even corral public debate in certain ways’. The debates around Marikana have been convened in such a way that political engagement is seen as purely representative – that is, as expressed through individual membership in liberal institutions such as trade unions, political parties or other representative bodies. As a result, anything outside of these discourses is ignored, regarded as incoherent or relegated to the realm of the cultural. 184 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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In the case of the striking miners, the media depicted their actions as ‘wildcat strikes’ and cast them as rural traditionalists, predisposed to violence, thus relegating them to the realm of the pre-political. In the case of the women’s movement, the media neutralised the women’s actions by recasting them in the language of rights. At the level of discourse, the media do the work of depoliticisation, which denies the mineworkers and women in Marikana a political voice. Furthermore, in some sections of academia, the mineworkers are presented as harbingers of a new trade union insurgency and a renewal of hope for a socialist project in South Africa. In this discourse, violence on the part of the mineworkers, intimidation, the use of muti and communing on the mountain disappear.3 Instead, the brutality of the state and capital are foregrounded, which abstracts the strikes and massacre into a discourse premised on the universality of the ‘working class’ and its revolutionary nature. Although these activists actively engaged with women in Marikana on the ground, the women’s actions were curiously missing from the dominant narrative, which the academics were instrumental in producing. In fact, political practices employed during the strikes encompass long historical trajectories of resistance by male mineworkers, who come largely from Xhosa communities in the Eastern Cape, and the women’s movement created new spaces of resistance after the killings. This chapter attempts to offer alternative understandings of how different forms of political practices and different spheres of power converge, meet and overlap in popular politics at Marikana.

REPRESENTATIONS OF MARIKANA AND THEIR LIMITS When the news that police had massacred 34 mineworkers in Marikana reached the rest of South Africa, there was disbelief among the poor and working class. In the days following the massacre, the country exploded with ‘wildcat’ strikes, not only across the mining industry, where the NUM struggled to retain members who were dissatisfied, but also across a diverse range of industry: transport, agriculture, manufacturing, nursing, and so on.4 While many in the financial sector focused on the effects the massacre would have on South Africa’s fragile and precious metallinked economy, the massacre had several important political consequences.5 It caused a huge rift in the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the largest federation on the continent, which had been forged and remained unified since 1986 and is one of three partners in the country’s ruling Tripartite Alliance.6 It gave rise to solidarity protests among university students, who held #RememberMarikana protests and #WeAreAllMarikana sit-ins, and a Marikana 185 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Support Campaign was initiated by academics and activists, who launched it from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. It also gave rise to a number of land occupations that have been named after Marikana. What was remarkable about the reportage in the mainstream media on the massacre, and the strikes that preceded it, is its formulation as a ‘wildcat strike’ in the absence of union involvement. Outside of the institutional form of striking workers wearing union T-shirts, carrying placards, toyi-toyiing and singing refurbished struggle songs, the media homed in on rural migrant labourers from the former Transkei, who were clad in blankets and wielding traditional weapons. They also, the media quickly discovered, were said to have used muti before they violently ‘provoked’ an attack from the police, who supposedly acted in self-defence. This moved the reportage into a different terrain, where the ‘curious’ features of the labour strike became primary. Immediately after the event, 270 mineworkers were charged with murder, many while in hospital receiving treatment for their wounds.7 Following pressure from social justice organisations and others, retired Supreme Court of Appeal Judge Ian Farlam was called upon by President Jacob Zuma to chair a commission of inquiry, where evidence was heard in order to apportion blame and responsibility, where necessary. The Marikana mineworkers were denied Legal Aid, which was only extended to the widows of the deceased and their children (a point to which I return later in this chapter).8 Instead, private law firms and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) specialising in legal services stepped in to represent the workers. At some point their chief counsel, a stalwart of the anti-apartheid movement, Dali Mpofu, ran out of funds to represent them. Nevertheless, the commission continued, with an anonymous witness, Mr X, appearing for the police to give evidence about the use of muti at the mountain. The headlines that followed were incredible by any measure: ‘Marikana Men Queued for Muti’; ‘Marikana Men Stripped Naked, Sprinkled Muti at Koppie’; ‘Cops Knew of Marikana Muti’; ‘Marikana Inquiry Told Human Tongue, Chin Used for Muti’. The last article was accompanied by a picture of a mineworker whose extended tongue licks the blade of a big bush knife.9 Many commented in the media that the belief that muti would prevent them from being shot by bullets was absurd, but it was also why they were so emboldened when confronted with the barrel of a gun. What quickly became evident from the media reports were three interrelated assumptions that underpinned them. The first assumption in the media was that the mineworkers had embarked on a ‘wildcat’ strike – a relatively unorganised and unprotected strike related to an inter-union rivalry between the NUM and AMCU, devised to bring instability to official bargaining structures.10 The second assumption was that the mineworkers had provoked an attack from the police, 186 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

The Politics of Representation in Marikana

which had led to the subsequent massacre. The third was that the mineworkers had taken muti and it had made them more aggressive, which explained why they had provoked the police.11 The picture that developed was of muti-crazed, rural traditionalists who had little respect for formal institutions like union bargaining structures. The absence in the mainstream media of a serious discussion about how the workers had organised themselves and why they occupied the mountain allowed an old apartheid trope of a ‘third force’ to emerge, in relation to AMCU.12 The commission report states that police intelligence reports compiled on the following day are incorrect in attributing the injuries suffered by the two men to ‘inter union rivalry’ and saying that the strikers were AMCU members, a fact that had long before been asserted by the mineworkers themselves.13 Jane Duncan argues: ‘The early press coverage of the Marikana massacre provides a case study of how reporting can become system-maintaining, by failing to take workers’ voices seriously.’14 She assesses the failure of the media to deal effectively with the strikes and subsequent massacre outside of official frameworks like interunion rivalry or, from a business perspective, a loss in economic stability. Duncan contends that coverage of Marikana amounted to ‘pack journalism’, a phenomenon, especially in the age of digital media, in which journalists tend to rely on easily available, accessible and validated news sources, usually from government, big business or think tanks. In this highly competitive environment journalists are reluctant to perform the more laborious tasks of seeking out less ‘trusted’ and on-the-ground sources and going through the various processes of validating them. In this commercial configuration the media quickly become upward-looking ‘mouthpieces of the rich and powerful, reproducing the official versions of events, and silencing the voices of the workers as rational, thinking beings with their own stories to tell’. The failure of the media to speak to workers is illustrated in Duncan’s study in which she notes that in over 153 articles surveyed immediately after the massacre, only 3 per cent of those articles spoke directly to mineworkers about the strike and subsequent massacre. Of those 3 per cent, the majority were questioned about muti. Overall, Duncan calls the reporting on Marikana an ‘editorial failure’. Herman Wasserman has echoed these sentiments, arguing that the mainstream media’s ‘privileging of rationality in political process and the exclusion or devaluation of other modes of expression by citizens could be seen from the outset in the coverage of the event’.15 Like Duncan, his observations support the idea that coverage was ‘system-maintaining’ and largely drawn from official and authoritative sources. The police, mining companies and politicians are seen as rational authorities, while the mineworkers are represented as inchoate, emotional and irrational. Yet, the narrative that emerged from the most authoritative sources, those in the 187 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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ruling Tripartite Alliance, was not just of emotional and irrational mineworkers, but rather, and more sinisterly, of criminality. This introduced a new layer of malicious intent, which positioned the police as victims of merciless strikers, and contributed to shaping media reports, which became more and more sympathetic to corporate interests and government policing practices. The secretary general of the South African Communist Party (SACP), Blade Nzimande, described strikers’ actions at Marikana as ‘criminal’. Nzimande’s response was in fact a defence of Cyril Ramaphosa, at the time a board member at Lonmin, now president of the African National Congress (ANC) and of South Africa, and, in 1982, the first president of NUM. According to Dali Mpofu, leading the defence for the mineworkers, Ramaphosa sent emails to Lonmin management and government officials on the eve of the massacre, characterising the strikes as ‘plainly dastardly criminal acts and must be characterised as such’ and calling for ‘concomitant action’.16 President Zuma took a month to speak publicly about the violence used by the police at Marikana. He did not apologise, but seemed to apportion blame equally, saying: ‘It has become so easy for police to shoot and kill people and for the people to protest with spears and pangas.’17 Gwede Mantashe, former chairperson of the SACP and then secretary general of the ANC, was a proponent of this position immediately after the massacre. When he addressed the special national executive meeting in September 2012, he said: ‘The ANC must unashamedly support COSATU unions when they are under siege, and take an active interest in the welfare of workers broadly.’18 A few months ago we witnessed a strike at Impala Platinum, during which five people were killed. During the Aquarius-Ikhwezi strike in the same area, six workers died. All these violent strikes were organised by the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), a rival to the NUM. In the present Marikana strike, 10 people were killed in the days preceding August 16: two policemen, two security guards and six workers, mainly NUM members. The modus operandi in the current Marikana strike can be described as organising by coercion.19 David Bruce has argued that the report of the commission of inquiry, released three years after the massacre, has as a ‘key framing argument … that violence by the strikers “created” the situation at Marikana’.20 One of the conclusions of the report is: ‘Whilst there exist adequate mediation and negotiation channels to enable issues to be resolved in matters of protests, strikes and stand offs, it might be a salutary lesson, for the citizens of this country to take away from Marikana, that the taking 188 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

The Politics of Representation in Marikana

up of arms and the resorting to violence is neither constructive nor appropriate in protecting and enforcing one’s rights.’21 The official line of criminality taken by the media comes from government and members of the ruling Alliance, who seemed invested in propagating that the strike and subsequent massacre was the work of an outside agitator misleading the mineworkers, who were quick to resort to violence to solve their problems. In this version of events, meaning is mapped onto the strikes through pre-given signifiers, in which strikes, in the South African middle-class social reality, come to signify violence and criminality. In the case of Marikana, this narrative of strike, violence and criminality is combined with the element of muti. Unable to see the use of muti as part of the social world of the mineworkers, journalist Banele Ginindza writes: Depending on who you speak with at Marikana, the reasons for the isolated murders stem from pure criminal elements, livestock disputes, tribal conflicts, taxi wars and lovers’ quarrels gone awry. But for NUM, the killings of its members are all laid at the door of AMCU, with some macabre details. ‘Those two security guys killed before the massacre were mutilated for muti, their lips were cut off and used in a ritual cleansing by AMCU members,’ the NUM shop steward said straight faced. The talk of muti has certainly done the rounds, including that a majority of the miners killed at the koppie a year ago had believed themselves to be invincible after undergoing some rituals with muti allegedly provided by sangoma Alton Joja.22 While some may dismiss the easy reference to an inter-union rivalry as attempts by government and NUM officials to deliberately cause confusion, it reveals a common feature of the South African mainstream media, which views popular protest as ‘uncivil’ and ‘barbaric’. In 2015, for example, in a series of articles reviewing the Civic Protest Barometer in the Daily Maverick, journalist Niki Moore says it ‘might be the most accurate way of finding out just how many of our mobs are on the rampage at any given time, for any given reason’.23 This language is pervasive: in Cape Town, a reporter describes people being evicted as ‘small armies of rioters, carrying rocks and makeshift shields, [who] kept police under constant attack’.24 Peter Bruce, editor of Business Day, called the mineworkers at Marikana ‘a 7,000-strong band of armed and angry miners’.25 Former premier of the Western Cape Helen Zille has referred to people who come from other provinces seeking employment in the Western Cape as ‘refugees’ and residents of the Western Cape frequently refer to people from the Eastern Cape who live in shacks at the peripheries of the city as ‘invaders’.26 The latter are a part of a broader phenomenon of racial attacks that litter the public comments 189 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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sections of online news platforms, leading at least one media outlet to close down their comments section.27 Wasserman, too, links Marikana to a more general trend in the South African commercial media, which, he argues, often fail to ‘facilitate participation of citizens in democratic life’.28 For Wasserman, Marikana is another iteration of the way in which popular protest is often framed in the technical language of ‘disruptions’, ‘unrest’ and ‘disturbances’ to the normal functioning of middle-class life, rather than an attempt to participate in meaningful acts of citizenship.29 It was only after investigative journalist Greg Marinovich and academic Peter Alexander, with a team of researchers, visited Marikana a few days after the massacre that a different story began to emerge.30 It was soon uncovered that the police attacked the workers first.31 Several survivors of the massacre spoke about a second killing site, where police gunned down fleeing mineworkers, including those who tried to surrender, in what were called ‘summary executions’.32 It also then emerged that the NUM had opened fire on its own members ten days before the massacre and that the majority of the striking mineworkers were disgruntled members of the NUM and had not, at the time, joined AMCU. Rather, they had organised themselves into ‘independent worker committees’ – a salient part of the story that went unnoticed by the media initially.

MARIKANA AND THE ACADEMY If these discoveries were supposed to stimulate new inquiries into the organisation of the mineworkers on the mountain, and uncover the rationale behind it, a rather strange reformulation occurred instead. For some in the academy, ‘the spirit of Marikana’ was seen as part of a reawakening of a new trade union insurgency.33 For others, it was a triumph of the working class.34 In these discussions, a different treatment of the ‘curious’ features of the strike occurred. Far from being seen as the irrational other, ‘cultural artefacts’ of the strike disappeared, with few notable exceptions,35 while the anti-capitalist revolutionary subject emerged, even if not yet fully conscientised or proletarianised. For example, in an article titled ‘Embryos of Working-Class Power and Grassroots Democracy in Marikana’, Thapelo Lekgowa and Luke Sinwell begin by stating: ‘The formation of a workers’ committee is an act of power by the working class. It has shaken capital by advancing far beyond trade union bureaucracy.’36 However, they continue: ‘At the risk of being ultra-critical of their exercise of working class power, [the strikers’] main demand has been for more money, not less capitalism or the formation of a workers’ party … The challenge posed to anti-capitalist forces is to embed their ideas within the consciousness of the strikers while simultaneously enabling the strikers to lead them.’37 190 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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The evident paradox that emerges for these authors is that while Marikana has pointed to the contradictions inherent in capitalism, it has not managed to fully conscientise the workers in terms of a more institutional form of politics: the party. What did materialise from the research during those crucial days following the massacre is that the workers had formed independent worker committees, in which they had organised themselves as a collective and had chosen their leaders using democratic practices. The worker committees, as these scholars refer to them, and the people who are chosen to speak on behalf of them were called the five madoda, literally meaning ‘five men’ in isiXhosa. The five madoda appear regularly in the literature and media reports on Marikana. They were seen as the representatives of the workers and part of the independent worker committees. In the interviews with researchers who visited Marikana immediately after the massacre, one miner remarked: ‘You see my brother, five madoda is the word used by the police. They said they wanted the five madoda, that is the language they used. And that is the language we use in the mines.’38 The five madoda were elected from the already existing committee and could be rotated at any time. They were the negotiators and, on 14 August, they requested that the employers come to the mountain to speak to them, but if necessary they would go to them. Alexander et al. note: ‘The respect workers had for the five madoda, their counsel and elected representatives, is marked by workers kneeling 20 metres in front of police vehicles as the five men went forward to negotiate on behalf of everyone. This has become a hallmark feature of the Marikana strikes.’39 What is striking about the election of the five madoda is the various selection criteria that foregrounded the experience of migrancy, rather than solely leadership in industrial action and wage-negotiation skills, which sets it apart from the usual trade union caucusing style of election seen perhaps in secondary industry. Five madoda sometimes ‘carries the connotation of self-selected or traditional leadership thus implying a certain “backwardness”, in contrast to trade unions’.40 However, Alexander et al. go to great lengths to insist that the mountain committee and five madoda are evidence that ‘the workers operated through an elected and representative workers’ committee, one typical of well-organised modern strikes’.41 There are three observations to be made about such an assertion. First, much energy seemed to be expended on insisting upon the ‘modernity’ of the strikes, which appears to cast trade unions as the pinnacle of political expression or democratic formation. Second, the corollary to this is that the idea of political modernity should not be a habitation for a plurality of political forms, but rather divergent forms should be translated into language and concepts that are palatable to liberal and Marxist sensibilities. This is not to deny that workers would have brought into this praxis their experience as 191 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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trade unionists and worker leaders, but rather to point out that asserting these are the only political tools they relied upon is to miss a number of alternative political forms. Third, this interpretation, as Alexander et al. acknowledge, does little to interrogate the connotation of ‘traditional leadership’, as opposed to trade unionism, a tension that remains unaccounted for. Rather, Alexander et al. refer to the events that occurred at Marikana as the ‘unfettered praxis of the working class’.42 What is striking about Luke Sinwell and Siphiwe Mbatha’s book, The Spirit of Marikana: The Rise of Insurgent Trade Unionism in South Africa, published after Alexander et al., is that it seeks to define the spirit of Marikana that emerges from the massacre and explains how a group of engaged activists and academics sought to intervene in the politics of Marikana through direct action, in order to facilitate the spread and potency of this spirit. Sinwell describes how the Marikana Support Group, the brainchild of these activists, came to have this name. The chapter titled ‘The Spirit of Marikana is Born’ provides a brief history of the Marikana Support Group, explaining that after the massacre, a number of ‘left-wing’ organisations arrived in Marikana. Two of these organisations, the Democratic Left Front and the Democratic Socialist Movement, ‘provided support for the mineworkers’ struggles while simultaneously seeking to build an anti-capitalist alternative rooted in the rank and file of both worker leaders and communities’.43 Both sought to tap into pre-existing networks of worker leaders in the platinum belt. On 20 August, the provisionally named Justice Now for the Marikana Strikers and Communities held a picket outside the Gauteng South African Police Services office. Initiated by some members of the Democratic Left Front, the Marikana Solidarity Campaign was born by setting up a Facebook group, with the support of some academics, people in the NGO sector and professional activists. The Marikana Support Group produced 2 500 posters with the new name of the organisation, the Marikana Solidarity Campaign. The organisation acted quickly and decisively and the posters included the names of the 34 mineworkers who had been killed less than two weeks earlier. However, the workers did not approve and rather became angry with the face of the campaign. They told Bheki Buthelezi, a local organiser and activist associated with the Marikana Support Group, to ‘go back with these posters and change the name solidarity, instead put “support” because the [name] “solidarity” is in line with the name of another union … so now if you hand over these things you are breaking up the relationship that we wanted to build with you’. The name was eventually changed to Marikana Support Campaign.44 While this kind of solidarity work can be seen as admirable, it also points to unintended consequences, as outlined above: imposing solutions that often stem from decisive action on the part of outsiders, rather than working towards a mutual 192 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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understanding that can build sustainable and participatory forms of solidarity. Moreover, reading these strikes purely through the lens of the universality of the working class can mean that while a considerable amount of important work on leadership styles and life histories of some of the strike leaders has emerged, this is read only as a challenge to the inertia of trade unions and the possibility of a resurgence of worker power. Left unaddressed is that unevolved trade unionism increasingly lacks the capacity to adjust to new climates of growing casualisation, mine and factory closures, and mounting levels of informality and unemployment in a local and global neoliberal economy. This further demonstrates the limits of this body of work to take seriously the life-worlds of workers. In a hostile and precarious environment, while trade unions like the NUM pander to big business, workers look to politics by other means. Until 1982, during both colonialism and apartheid, mineworkers were not allowed to join democratic trade unions and were used to representing themselves and their grievances, officially through induna systems in the ethnically segregated hostels, or by presenting themselves to their employer directly in what Dunbar Moodie has called the ‘the moral economy of the mines’.45 The lack of consideration given to these systems of representation in the previously mentioned body of work on Marikana fails to take seriously one of the most important components of the mining industry in South Africa: the history of migrancy and the persistence of this legacy into the present.46 Also ignored is that while academics have referred to independent worker committees, the mineworkers themselves called them ‘mountain committees’. The tensions of the rural and urban are not worked out in the academic writing, nor is there any mention of violence or muti. Whereas the media foregrounded the irrationality, violence and backward superstitions of uneducated and rural mineworkers, the academics evacuated the strike of all violence, superstition and rural connection, presenting in its place the rational universal worker, entrenched in socialism and fighting for the renewal of revolutionary trade unionism. There was a particular kind of framing on both fronts and if the ‘radical’ academics accused the media of not taking the organisation of the mineworkers seriously, they too seemed to foreclose the space for alternative narratives, informed by the experience of the mineworkers and their community, to emerge.

MARIKANA, MOUNTAIN COMMITTEES AND THE MPONDO REVOLTS Elsewhere I have argued, with Sarah Bruchhausen, that the strike at Marikana bore a marked resemblance to the history of rural resistance in the Transkei, particularly 193 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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the Mpondo revolts of the 1960s, in which peasants revolted against corrupt chiefs, met on mountains and organised alternative networks of governance that came to be called mountain committees or iKhongo.47 We argued that while most commentators were linking Marikana to Sharpeville or the Soweto Uprising, aside from the feature of state violence, the urban protests bore little resemblance to what happened at Marikana. Furthermore, the fact that most of the miners were rock drill operators, who had, for over a century, come from Mpondoland, meant that many would have either experienced the revolts as children or heard about them from their parents.48 That the mineworkers went to the mountain should be seen as significant. During the Mpondo revolts, like Bulhoek Mountain in 1921, the mountain was seen not only as a space of refuge and a good vantage and look-out point, but also as a sacred and religious space, exclusively for men, to communicate with the ancestors and gods and perform prayers sometimes involving muti, especially during times of war.49 The koppie was referred to by the mineworkers as thaba – ‘mountain’ in isiXhosa, ‘despite its underwhelming height’.50 One mineworker’s comment was that on the mountain they had been eating together and making a fire together, and it was like home.51 Micah Reddy’s study demonstrates that leaders were elected for their negotiating skills in recreational spaces, the community and the workplace and one of the most prominent elements in selecting the five madoda was their ability to ensure safe passage home for the bodies of dead mineworkers.52 Many were chosen on their previous experience of dealing with difficult situations, assisting in emergencies in the places where migrants came from – Swaziland, Mozambique, Lesotho and the Eastern Cape. Duties would include alerting families of the deceased, collecting funds to give to the families, organising logistics of funerals, transport for other miners, leave from work, and so on.53 One of these leaders who had proven himself was Mgcineni ‘Mambush’ Noki, or ‘the man in the green blanket’, who was killed during the massacre. Mambush ‘had obtained his nickname from a Sundowns’ soccer player named “Mambush Mudau”. He was chosen since he had organised soccer games and always resolved minor problems in the workplace. He was particularly well known for having a mild temperament and for his conflict-resolution skills both at the workplace and at his home in the Eastern Cape.’54 The initial mountain committee had quite clear requirements of its members, a calm temperament and the ability to maintain ‘peace and order’ being chief among them. When this committee was expanded to include more members, more responsibilities were added: 194 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Mineworker 3: The committee, you see was very big at that time. And they were there ones in front of us, and we choose these men [the five madoda]. We [already] had a committee. The committee made sure there was peace and order, and they were looking after us. We already had that committee, only it was not just the five madoda. When you go on a strike you have people who are able to control people; not to do, as other strikes [do when] people mess up and damage stores and beat people, things like that. So those people were able to control people in that way. It was the first time [we had this committee] because the union that we thought will represent us, did nothing for us. Then we thought that we should choose some members from our workers to do that, because the union was not doing their jobs anymore.55 It is here that we can locate the committee firmly outside the ambit of the union, as well as the reasons why the mineworkers constituted themselves in this way. Noteworthy here also is that it was the first time, according to this interviewee, that they had experienced such failure from the union and decided to go it alone. This meant not just a disavowal of the corrupt union, but also, on a visceral level, a disavowal of its political form. When trade union bargaining structures had broken down and failed the mineworkers, they sought other modes of politics, which have been obscured, obfuscated and silenced in most other narratives. The mountain committees of the Mpondo revolts emerged from within a widespread resistance to the implementation of the apartheid state’s betterment and rehabilitation schemes in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as the introduction of the institution of Bantu Authorities in 1951 (and its associated symbols of influx control, the extension of the pass system to women and the migrant labour recruitment bureaux). Many argue that ‘the Mpondo revolts can be understood as the most important event within a historical sequence of political resistance in the rural areas of South Africa’.56 The resistance to these policies has been widely documented. Govan Mbeki, in 1964, argued that, despite fence-cutting, burning of land certificates, and restrictions and relocations being shunned, there was a wellorganised network of mountain committees, which began to set up alternative governance structures when they felt their leaders could no longer be trusted and the chieftaincy system had become ‘bastardised’.57 The mountain committees had organised an alternative structure to collect the taxes meant for the Bantu Authorities and, at the height of the nine-month open revolt, the huts of many corrupt chiefs were burnt, including Chief Madikizela’s, whose daughter Winnie (later the wife of Nelson Mandela) had sheltered the rebels in her own hut. Perhaps the decline of legitimacy was no more evident than in 195 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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the figure of the paramount chief of Mpondoland, Botha Sigcau, whom many people considered a usurper, and whose more militant and anti-apartheid brother, Nelson Sigcau, should have been the rightful heir. In a meeting in September 1957, thousands of Mpondo people rejected Bantu Authorities, Bantu Education and rehabilitations at a meeting in Bizana, demanding that ‘Botha Sigcau should publicly declare whether he was the head of the Pondo tribe or the bootlicker of Verwoerd’.58 Sigcau left the meeting to cries of ‘Umasiziphathe uya Kusebenza sifile’ (Bantu Authorities will operate over our dead bodies). By the early 1960s, the mountain committees began to form when people called mass meetings in the Bizana district, where they appealed to the magistrate to come and hear their grievances. The reply was that the gathering was illegal and should cease at once. Tom Lodge argues that, unlike in other rural areas, in eastern Mpondoland ‘the traditional political structure was completely discredited and consequently dissatisfaction was unlikely to cohere around any representative of the old order’ and that people ‘were compelled to create new leadership structures’.59 This insight highlights that the Mpondo revolts represented a moment in which people were creating something new, an alternative form of politics and political community not based on the traditional political structure or modern nationalism, civil society and party politics.60 By May 1960, the intaba (mountain) movement had a constituency of over 180 000 members and was ‘establishing itself as an alternative political authority to the prevalent order, assuming, for instance, the functions of the chief ’s courts in settling land allocation matters’.61 What should be noted also is that this was largely a ‘peasants’ revolt’, as the subtitle of Mbeki’s book suggests. The revolts were organised by poor, uneducated peasants and migrant workers, who were not part of the small elite of teachers, nurses and others in the professional class, who were not sympathetic to the rebels. Although Mbeki is at pains to make a link between the iKhongo and the ANC, there is no link to support this. In fact, there is evidence from Rowley Arenstein, a Durban-based lawyer who tried to get the ANC to help the rebels with legal aid, that the ANC viewed the rebels with suspicion.62 A massacre at Ngquza Hill on 6 June 1960 saw the revolts brutally crushed by the apartheid state when police in helicopters dropped tear gas and smoke bombs on thousands of people gathered on the mountain between Bizana and Lusikisiki, while police vehicles approached on land. Mbeki says: ‘The Africans raised a white flag to show that their meeting was a peaceful one, but police suddenly emerged from the bushes surrounding the meeting-place and fired into the crowd … No-one knows how many people were massacred that day but the bodies of 11 people were found, and 23 people were arrested after the meeting on a charge of “fighting” . ’63 196 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Jonny Steinberg writes that when Botha Sigcau was flown to Ngquza Hill in a helicopter, a white policeman put a rifle in his hands and said: ‘Whether we end this rebellion or not is your decision. We can do nothing if you cannot fire the first shot. Botha Sigcau thought for a while, took the rifle from the white man, aimed at the rebels below, and fired the first shot. It hit a man in the chest and killed him. That is how the massacre began.’64 What is striking about these moments of violence is that they are underpinned by the threat posed by the rebels to the very system that was supposed to keep them in check. It was not just the uprising that worried the apartheid state, but that the rebels had called apartheid’s handmaiden, the Bantu Authorities, into question by inventing a popular praxis that was outside the realm of the institutional. A remarkable resonance with the way in which peasant insurgents called for corrupt chiefs’ huts to be burnt down during the Mpondo revolts is exemplified in the songs of mineworkers at Implats, next to Marikana. ‘Watsh’ umuzi ka Zokwana’ (NUM president Senzeni Zokwana’s house is burning) was a refrain used to denote the continued downward slide of the NUM at the mine.65 This political imagination must be understood, like all moments of autonomous politics, not through its failure to institutionalise itself, but rather the commentary it makes on histories that privilege grand narratives and the political forces and institutions that often constitute this history. Elsewhere I have argued that the rural praxis invoked in the mountain committees had not just emerged at Marikana unchanged from the revolts in 1960s, but was carried through changing modes of resistance on the mines since colonialism and apartheid.66 Dunbar Moodie (with Vivienne Ndatshe) has shown in his studies of gold miners in South Africa that forms of consensus-building were a regular feature of migrant worker meetings on the mines. Miners would often present themselves in the hundreds and occupy the front lawn of mine managers’ homes until they came out to speak to them.67 On one occasion, 200 migrant rock drill operators on strike at Western Deep Mine in 1973 gathered on a hilltop near the mine and demanded to talk directly to mine management.68 Consensus-building was also used as a tool to avoid factions among workers and the mass meeting became a feature of worker culture because of low levels of literacy and limited resources to organise. Sitting together, debating, talking and searching for consensus for several hours before decisions were taken is often characterised as a feature of Xhosa political culture, which, as Sakhela Buhlungu notes, baffled young white trade unionists when the practice was introduced and used in the unions in South Africa.69 With the election of the mountain committee along these lines, and a democratic praxis deeply inflected by cultural and political practices that had evolved 197 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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over more than 100 years, one could argue that an alternate political praxis had developed and with it all the means for securing the R12 500 monthly wage. This included, at various points, the use of muti, intimidation and violence. That the strikers used muti is not merely because, as Dali Mpofu put it at the commission of inquiry, the muti users ‘are entitled to it. We cannot judge people by our own upper class standards. The fact that they believed that muti would protect them is similar to people who believe prayer would protect them.’70 Just as very staunch Christian believers may engage in a whole set of social, economic and political practices that stem from their religion, the fact that strikers used muti cannot only be reduced to its religious and separatist signification. Rather than being seen as working class, archaic or within the realm of rights discourse, it should be seen as part of the praxis that was being invoked at Marikana, which reflected in many ways the belief in other modes of sociality and politics alongside commonly held ideas about union membership and political parties.

THE WOMEN OF MARIKANA The introduction of family life on the mines after the lifting of influx control in 1986 and the formation of communities of women and children around mines has been largely unacknowledged in labour literature.71 In addition, the social reproductive labour of the women and children who form part of the new mining communities remains outside dominant narratives. Through their own decisive actions, the women of Marikana were able to organise themselves into a movement to push back against police brutality after the massacre. Unwilling to accommodate the various raids when police banged down doors, shot through shacks and beat people as part of an ongoing attempt to uncover information, weapons and hidden strikers, the women of Marikana decided to march against police brutality. In 2012, the Rustenburg High Court twice overturned an attempt by the municipality to ban their march for peace and against police brutality in Marikana.72 The women were able to go ahead with their protests with the help of the Marikana Support Campaign. If the media had focused on the irrational and violent nature of the strikers, the women’s organisation received a different kind of treatment in the news reports. Firmly within the ambit of the legality and comprehensive sphere of human rights discourse, in September 2012, an article titled ‘Rights Group Slams Marikana Police’ outlined the various ways in which Marikana women were threatening legal action after the Rustenburg municipality had banned their march.73 Another article, titled ‘The Incandescent Women of Marikana’, argues that the women ‘will 198 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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march as they have marched before, to create a space in which they will be heard, to create a space in which state violence against women, against poor working women, against poor working women’s communities, will end. They will march for peace, they will march for justice, they will march for the incandescent power of their own voices, stories, visions, songs, lives.’74 Although the article mentions the rage of the women, this is tempered by the final, conciliatory line, ‘perhaps incandescent rage will light a path away from death and murder, will light a path to justice’. Another article stated in 2012: ‘Marikana women have held a peaceful protest on Saturday following a decision by the North West High Court.’75 An article with the headline ‘Marikana Women Hold Peaceful Protest’ appears, despite the fact that the women had been denied the right to march.76 Even the state broadcaster SABC posted an article on its website that stated: ‘A women’s group, Marikana Women in Solidarity, have condemned intimidation of women and children in the mining area near Rustenburg in North West.’77 When Nomzekhelo Sonti, a founding member of the Marikana women’s organisation Sikhala Sonke (We Cry Together), wrote a play animating the role of the women in Marikana during and after the strikes, the play received widespread attention and endorsement.78 There are various other examples that show that there is a validation given by the media to the peaceful marches of the women, their organisation and activities, which are often accompanied by quotes from or interviews with the women or large blocks of text from their press statements about the local and unlawful banning of their planned marches.79 The women are seen as rational and reasonable poor subjects who are being brutalised by police and denied the right to march and yet still respond peacefully. They are treated as legitimate victims and their rights-based discourse is easily digested by and through the mainstream media. This was reflected in the distinction, mentioned earlier, that Legal Aid made between the supposed inherent criminality of the mineworkers, as told by government, and the women and children of the mineworkers who were the victims. Legal Aid’s decision was later found by the High Court to be ‘irrational and inconsistent’ with the Constitution.80 I am not implying that this should this be considered erroneous or problematic. That the women marched is true, that through their own actions, determination and organisation they were able to force themselves upon the stage of history and refuse to be silenced as part of the community of Marikana in a highly male-dominated, patriarchal narrative and lived reality is extremely important. With their marches and protests, the women were able to enter the public domain and shatter many previously held assumptions about the role of women on the mines solely as sex workers or beer brewers. This is exemplified in the film Strike a Rock by Aliki Saragas. 199 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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However, this is not what the news reports focused upon. Little was said about the other kinds of organising the women were doing, or the fact that the majority of the women believed the men were justified in their strike for higher wages, or that many women had now taken the place of their husbands, fathers and brothers underground in order to make money for their families.81 Nor is it what academics wrote about. Not content merely with hailing Marikana as a victory for the working class, they also directly intervened in the political processes of the women. Rosalind Morris juxtaposes two images from Marikana: one where several women from Marikana are holding well-made printed placards that read, ‘Don’t let the police get away with murder’, with ‘Marikana Support Campaign’ written underneath it; the other a picture of mineworkers carrying knobkerries, holding a big piece of cardboard with a barely visible handwritten scrawl, which says in Fanakalo, ‘We want money, R12 500’.82 She writes of the image of the women: The organisational title of the ‘Marikana Support Campaign’ that appears below the message summons and evacuates the concept of signature. We are therefore left to ask, is the campaign the author of these words? If so, in whose name does it speak? In whose voice? What happens when a mass of people enters a public sphere, to actualise their right to ‘have a voice,’ only to speak in a manner that lacks the particularity that we associate with the very concept of voice?83 In many of the academic accounts and in Rehad Desai’s film Miners Shot Down, women are completely absent, as is any acknowledgement of the women’s organisation Sikhala Sonke. On 16 August, many of the men who escaped the mountain had fled bloody and wounded, out of fear of the police, into the shack settlement below. In Nkaneng, women used whatever they could find to treat the sick and wounded, organised food parcels, received donations from local businesses, mostly owned by Somalis, and instituted marches against police brutality.84 Sikhala Sonke would become one of the most influential political bodies in Marikana in the coming years. If academics and activists did not recognise its significance straight away, certain politicians most definitely did. Sikhala Sonke was formed in August 2012, during the strikes when the men were on the mountain. The women’s movement was involved in the ANC-aligned South African National Civic Organisation and worked closely with ANC councillor Paulina Masuthlo, who was shot by police in Marikana soon after the massacre and died in hospital under suspicious circumstances. However, after the massacre there was a deep distrust of the ANC and its institutions, and increasing tensions between 200 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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police and the residents of Marikana led residents to close off the settlements and resort to other modes of policing and justice.85 The women’s movement continued to grow its political presence because of the women’s ability to organise across a wide network of people and to draw on resources from NGO and activist sectors. Struggles around land, access to housing and services like water and electricity and rape counselling for young women also form part of their organising and awareness-raising activities in Marikana, in addition to creating stokvels (savings groups) and contributions to food production in the settlement. Their activities were quickly detected by Julius Malema, one of the first political leaders to visit Marikana after the strikes in 2012, at the precise moment he was being expelled as the chairperson of the ANC Youth League. Marikana, says Malema frequently, is where the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), the party he now leads, was born. The EFF would soon become a new opposition party and the third-largest political party in South Africa. By 2014 Nomzekhelo Primose Sonti, the leader of Sikhala Sonke, had become an MP for the EFF and another leader, Wendy Pretorius, would become the EFF ward councillor in 2016. Nomzekhelo’s yard in Marikana was home to a brightly painted caravan with EFF logos and slogans. The late Tholakele ‘Bhele’ Dlunga, one of the leaders of the 2012 strikes, had previously lived in her yard and served as EFF chairperson in Marikana and as shaft steward and safety officer for AMCU. Bhele was also a priest in a small independent Zionist church, known for its fusion of Christian beliefs with African traditional and cultural beliefs and practices. Thus, as much as people have opted for formal and institutionalised structures of representational politics, there is still an eclectic mix of political modes and strategies. Rather than see the mix as contradictory, people brought differing political practices into the branch politics of the EFF. For the women of Marikana, the EFF was seen as a structure that could give national articulation to their struggles for land and services and their assertion that they were also South Africans, rather than an ethnically circumscribed group with limited rights. Although Sikhala Sonke, with the help of organisations like the Marikana Support Campaign in Johannesburg, used the court to fight both the councillor and the municipality with success, their knowledge of the inner workings of local government is limited. Their struggles have subsequently moved out of the courts and into the council chambers. One of the Marikana women, Thumeka Magondwana, explaining why they prefer this way of doing politics and why she wants to take a course in local governance, told me: ‘You see, people here they don’t do things in the proper way. I want to prepare myself. Even the community, they always choose people they like, or if you are their homeboys or your clan name. I want to 201 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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be matured in politics and to do things the proper way.’86 The use of, and perhaps preference for, this mode of politics is perhaps one of the reasons that the women are able to occupy a specific kind of representational space in the media and mainstream political sphere that evokes a different kind of conversation and treatment from that afforded to the mineworkers. Many of the women I spoke to immediately after the massacre were members of Sikhala Sonke and expressed their unhappiness about the way in which the media had covered the massacre and the mineworkers. This added to the difficulty of my being able to speak to people in Marikana at all since they are highly distrustful of journalists, researchers and outsiders. Far from their politics being seen as complementing and providing legitimacy to the struggles of the strikers, the women are separated out from the struggles of the men and framed as victims who just want peace in their community. As Morris notes, they are also furnished with explicit political messages and slogans from outside activists – the same group who had earlier printed the posters that had angered mineworkers. What requires further investigation is the fact that women’s organising has taken on a different mode of politics to that of the men on the mountain. The domain of rights and institutional politics is where women in Marikana feel they can take on leadership roles and influence powerful decisions and this is itself a comment on the patriarchal forms of the more male, kinship-based modes of politics. The assertion by the women that everyone should be considered equal citizens, which they feel is circumvented through their Xhosa ethnicity and its relation to the Tswana traditional leadership in the area, should not be understated either. The idea of ‘the proper way’ may illustrate a shift in organising, where ‘formal’ politics is seen as necessitating a turn away from independent organising and towards a vertical structure of organisation where access to and knowledge of local government is viewed as superior to forms of organisation based on elected people who are liked and trusted through home networks.87 Tasneem Essop, in her observation of EFF branch-level politics in Marikana, notes that there was a ‘solid representation of women in the EFF’ because of the presence of Sikhala Sonke and also that there was ‘a core group of women who appeared to do most of the administrative, logistical and political work in the organisation’.88 However, she also provides evidence that the EFF at branch level provided a vehicle for the men, who bring their own political practices into the branch. Especially contested were the ways decisions were made, which challenged the structured processes of the EFF. Essop notes that while at the level of national and regional politics the EFF has been associated with a lack of democratic procedures, at the branch meetings a different kind of politics revealed itself. Whereas meetings organised by regional officials were characterised by low levels of participation and strict protocol, 202 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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the meetings of the branch ‘were relatively informal and allowed ample space for discussion and decision-making based on gaining consensus rather than an outright majority. The meetings did not follow strict protocols but flowed according to points that needed to be discussed in the meeting. It was evident from interviews with participants that members of the organisation felt that they had space to raise their views and that decision-making would take their views into consideration.’ Clearly, then, there are other forms of politics in play here. Essop argues that this kind of democracy is borrowed from the democratic processes of the NUM and also from the ANC Youth League. However, she asserts that the Marikana branch is different from the EFF nationally – which is a product of the ANC Youth League. While trade union democracy has a long legacy in many unions, notably the Metal and Allied Workers Union, the NUM, especially in the former homelands, cannot claim to have such a radically democratic history. Essop suggests that ‘informal practices’ are what deepens democracy at the branch level, where there is the opportunity for members to persuade each other, but she also contends that ‘in general, and even outside the Marikana branch, the party, at the very least, insists on formal democratic procedures. These are often complicated by informal practices that alter the meaningfulness of such formalities.’89 I would argue that analysing these practices purely through institutional politics, expressed through the union or the party to the exclusion of other histories in which these ‘informal’ political practices are historically rooted, does not provide a holistic picture. Far from the EFF emerging as the absorber of popular movements, Essop’s research shows that the EFF is not, as it is represented in many current discourses, the active recipient of the women’s movements, or new AMCU members, but rather there is serious contestation over what the space represents and how it can be co-opted as a vehicle for popular political action, which entails within it its own political idioms and practice. It points to a way in which popular politics in Marikana, and I would argue in South Africa more generally, is a space in which many political practices with varying historical roots meet, as people attempt to broaden their own political spheres of influence. Rather than being seen as anachronisms within a larger, more liberal democratic structure, these diverse political practices should alert us to the messiness of popular politics.

SOME CONCLUDING THOUGHTS While the media failed in its reportage of mineworkers on the mountain because their mode of politics fell outside the ambit of liberal practices like the bargaining 203 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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structure of a union, they have been able to comprehend, via the same liberal media framework, the political actions of women in Marikana. The women’s marches and peaceful protests are ensconced in the discourse of human rights and represented as appeals to public conscience and endorsed as a ‘legitimate’ mode of politics. In both instances, the media consistently do the work of depoliticising the actions of the men and neutralising the political actions of the women, constantly reducing their actions to a form comprehensible and readable through the dominant language of liberalism, which privileges individual human rights over other forms of collective politics. The media play an active role in shaping public opinion about who gets to be the legitimate subject of politics and how forms of dissent should be expressed. In the academy, the strikes are presented as occurring in a cultural vacuum, divorced from a greater political culture. In this literature the violence of the police and the independence of worker committees as an anti-capitalist force are foregrounded; the mineworkers appear peaceful and muti is a peripheral or nonexistent issue, while the women are curiously absent. The media and the academy are constantly engaging in practices that actively shape the opinions of some publics. These practices, undergirded by very particular ideas of how political dissent should be organised and expressed, have their own histories and genealogies. As a result, these institutions are severely limited in their scope and tools for analysing events of this kind. Far from creating spaces in which ideas about democracy and political praxis can be seriously challenged and thus thought anew, the dominant public sphere corrals or excludes different and differing discourses of politics, constantly reading them as ‘other’ and therefore outside what is regarded as respectable and recognisable politics. This approach, which relies on narrow ideas of the political praxis and discourse appropriate in the public sphere, will always meet its explanatory limit in the popular politics that emerge, in this instance at Marikana, and the 100 years of political, economic and spatial history that accompany it.

NOTES

1

The fleeing mineworkers had seen two people fall to the ground when they were shot and kept running, assuming that they were dead, as they later told some journalists. However, the men did not die and were taken to hospital. This is contested. See Jared Sacks, ‘Marikana Prequel: NUM and the Murders That Started it All’, Daily Maverick, 12 October 2012, accessed 15 November 2012, http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/ opinionista/2012-10-12-marikana-prequel-num-and-the-murders-that-started-it-all/.

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For an excellent discussion on liberalism, its foundational logic – which encompasses both rationality and racism – and the way this has come to form the dominant understanding of politics in the nation state today, see Dominico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counterhistory (London: Verso, 2011), whose framing I use here. Losurdo argues that liberalism is viewed as an ideology chiefly concerned with the liberty of the individual and securing this liberty, and that the fathers of the American Revolution and resultant liberal thought firmly believed they had created the best version of constitutional democracy on earth. At the same time, these precise liberties were founded on the exclusion and subjugation of the slave population, of which most of them were owners. Thus Losurdo reveals the great myth of liberty at the root of liberal constitutionalism and the ways it includes and excludes certain people and forms of practices into what he calls the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’ spaces in order to propagate and rationalise itself. Muti is traditional medicine, usually prepared by sangomas (traditional healers). In the case of Marikana, Sangoma Alton Joja, from Bizana, Mpondoland, was contacted to prepare the muti and accused of using human tissue to do so. See Greg Marinovich, Murder at Small Koppie: The Real Story of the Marikana Massacre (Cape Town: Penguin Random House, 2016), 87. S. Stone, ‘NUM to Seek Separate Marikana Review’, Daily Dispatch, 17 September 2012; Devon Maylie and Peter Wonacott, ‘South Africa Police Step up Efforts against Protesters’, Wall Street Journal, 16 September 2012, accessed 18 September 2012, https:// www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390443720204578000232367198490. By 5 September, Lonmin was recording a dismal 6.5 per cent attendance of staff across all its shafts, causing Business Report to print that ‘some analysts believed the company would have to resume production by Friday [7 September] or shut its facilities down’. Quoted in Sipho Hlongwane, ‘Lonmin: Marikana’s Near Total Stay-Away’, Daily Maverick, 5 September 2012, accessed 5 September 2012, https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/ article/2012-09-05-lonmin-marikanas-near-total-stay-away/. The Tripartite Alliance is formed by the ANC, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and COSATU (of which the NUM is an affiliate). The ANC is supposed to be the vehicle for delivering more social security for the working class, embodied by COSATU and ideologically bound by the SACP. Mandy de Waal, ‘Marikana Survivors May be Charged with Murdering Own Comrades’, Daily Maverick, 30 August 2012, accessed 1 September 2012, https://www.dailymaverick. co.za/article/2012-08-30-marikana-survivors-may-be-charged-with-murdering-owncomrades/. The mineworkers, with the help of the Marikana Solidarity Campaign, laid charges against the police for torture. See Greg Marinovich, ‘Tide is Turning against Police as Miners Lay Charge of Torture’, Daily Maverick, 5 September 2012, accessed 5 September 2012, https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-09-05-marikana-tideis-turning-against-police-as-miners-lay-charge-of-torture/. Legal Aid South Africa v. Magidiwana and Others (2015), ZACC 28. Photo by Kevin Sutherland, in TimesLive, 11 March 2013, accessed 11 March 2013, https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2013-03-11-marikana-inquiry-toldhuman-tongue-chin-used-in-muti/. Susan Njanji, ‘Lonmin Tragedy Lays Bare Violent Inter-Union Rivalry in SA’, Mail & Guardian, 25 August 2012, accessed 1 September 2012, https://mg.co.za/article/201208-25-lonmin-tragedy-lays-bare-violent-inter-union-rivalry-in-sa. ‘Muti Made Strikers Aggressive’, News24, 21 August 2012, accessed 22 August 2012, http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Muti-made-strikers-aggressive-miner205 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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20120821; Erin Conway-Smith, ‘South Africa: Striking Miners Thought They Were Invincible after Taking Muti’, Global Post, 21 August 2012, accessed 22 August 2012, https:// www.pri.org/stories/2012-08-21/south-africa-striking-miners-thought-they-wereinvincible-after-taking-muti; Naledi Mailula, ‘Cops Knew Marikana Miners Used Muti’, Mail & Guardian, 23 April 2013, accessed 16 May 2013, https://mg.co.za/article/201304-23-cops-knew-marikana-miners-used-muti; Gabi Falanga, ‘Marikana Mr X Claims Miners’ Muti is Making Him Sick’, Mail & Guardian, 20 June 2014, accessed 20 June 2014, https://mg.co.za/article/2014-06-20-marikana-mr-x-claims-miners-muti-is-makinghim-sick; ‘Marikana Miners Used Human Tissue for Protection’, Destiny Connect, 11 March 2013, accessed 12 March 2012, http://www.destinyconnect.com/2013/03/11/ marikana-miners-used-human-tissue-muti-for-protection-2013-03-11/; ‘Muti Made Miners Aggressive – Report’, Iol Business Report, 21 August 2012, accessed 13 May 2018, https://www.iol.co.za/business-report/economy/muti-made-miners-aggressivereport-1366656; Sibongakonke Shoba and Isaac Mahlangu, ‘Muti Protected Miners’, TimesLive, 19 August 2012, accessed 13 May 2018, https://www.timeslive.co.za/sundaytimes/lifestyle/2012-08-19-muti-protected-miners/. 12 The ‘third force’ was used during late apartheid to signify an outside agitator that mobilises people against the state. 13 David Bruce, ‘Summary and Analysis of the Report of the Marikana Commission of Inquiry’. Document prepared for the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution, 12 August 2015, accessed 15 October 2019, http://www.casac. org.za/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Summary-and-Analysis-of-the-Report-of-theMarikana-Commission-of-Inquiry.pdf, 16. 14 Jane Duncan, ‘The Role of the Media in Perpetuating a Divided Society’ (paper presented at the annual Steve Biko Seminar, Durban University of Technology, Durban, 21 September 2012). 15 Herman Wasserman, ‘Marikana and the Media: Acts of Citizenship and a Faith in Democracy-to-Come’, Social Dynamics 41, 2 (2015): 379. It should be noted that I do not agree with Wasserman’s sentiments here, since he seems to propose that other modes of political expression are not rational. 16 See ‘Cyril’s Chilling Marikana Email’, City Press, 23 October 2012, accessed 24 October 2012, http://www.citypress.co.za/news/cyrils-chilling-marikana-email-20121023/. 17 Thando Mgaga, ‘Zuma Finally Speaks out on Marikana Shooting’, TimesLive, 12 September 2012, accessed 12 September 2012, https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/southafrica/2012-09-12-zuma-finally-speaks-out-on-marikana-shooting/. 18 Gwede Mantashe, ‘Defend Cosatu Unions’, Sunday World, 16 September 2012, accessed 30 September 2012, https://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/sundayworld/20120916/281629597466338. 19 Mantashe, ‘Defend Cosatu Unions’. 20 Bruce, ‘Summary and Analysis’, 20. 21 Quoted in Bruce, ‘Summary and Analysis’, 20. 22 Banele Ginindza, ‘The Ghost of Five Madoda has NUM in Rustenburg Shivering’, The Mercury, 15 August 2013, accessed 15 October 2014, https://www.pressreader.com/ southafrica/themercury/20130815/282200828563823; emphasis added. 23 Niki Moore, ‘The Civic Protest Barometer, Episode One: Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics’, Daily Maverick, 16 March 2015, accessed 16 March 2015, http://www.dailymaverick. co.za/article/2015-03-16-the-civic-protest-barometer-episode-one-lies-damn-liesand-statistics/; Niki Moore, ‘The Civic Protest Barometer, Episode Two: So What is a 206 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Public Protest?’ Daily Maverick, 17 March 2015, accessed 17 March 2015, http://www. dailymaverick.co.za/article/2015-03-17-the-civic-protest-barometer-episode-two-sowhat-is-a-public-protest/. 24 Murray Williams, ‘Running Battles Rage across Cape’s Marikana’, IOL News, 22 August 2014, accessed 22 August 2014, http://www.iol.co.za/news/crime-courts/runningbattles-rage-across-capes-marikana-1739718. 25 Peter Bruce, ‘The Thick End of the Wedge: The Editor’s Notebook’, Business Day Live, 20 August 2012, accessed 25 August 2012, http://www.bdlive.co.za/opinion/ columnists/2012/08/20/thethick-end-of-the-wedge-the-editors-notebook. 26 ‘Zille’s Refugee Comments “Inhumane”: Eastern Cape ANC’, TimesLive, 24 March 2012, accessed 24 March 2012, https://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2012-03-24-zillesrefugee-comments-inhumane-eastern-cape-anc/. 27 ‘Editorial: We Tried, We Really Did’, Daily Maverick, 11 January 2016, accessed 11 January 2016, https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2016-01-11-editorial-we-tried.we-really-really-did/. 28 Wasserman, ‘Marikana and the Media’, 379. The solution is often presented in the form of digital media and the broadening of both media platforms and access to them (Duncan, ‘Role of the Media’). However, new plans for multiplex communication in South Africa have shown that commercial interests will be privileged. More than 70 per cent of the multiplexes will be set aside for commercial use, compared to 3 per cent for community use, ‘which clearly makes nonsense of the policy requirement for three tiers of broadcasting’. Morris and Wasserman also argue that the digital media age is more an imaginary of democratic participation than a solution to the different kinds of voices and forms of language practised in South Africa. Rosalind C. Morris, ‘Mediation, the Political Task: Between Language and Violence in Contemporary South Africa’, Current Anthropology 58, 15 (2017): S123–S134; Wasserman, ‘Marikana and the Media’. 29 Wasserman, ‘Marikana and the Media’, 376. 30 See Greg Marinovich, ‘The Murder Fields of Marikana’, Daily Maverick, 8 September 2012, accessed 8 June 2018, https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-09-08-themurder-fields-of-marikana-the-cold-murder-fields-of-marikana/#.WzyeuxIzaRs. 31 This was a long and contested debate. See Greg Nicolson, ‘Who Shot First?’ Daily Maverick, 29 November 2012, accessed 29 November 2012, https://www.dailymaverick. co.za/article/2012-11-29-marikana-who-shot-first/#.WiZhs7T1WRs. 32 See Duncan, ‘Role of the Media’; Wasserman, ‘Marikana and the Media’, 379; Sacks, ‘Marikana Prequel’. 33 Luke Sinwell and Simphiwe Mbatha, The Spirit of Marikana and the Rise of Insurgent Trade Unionism in South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2016). 34 Peter Alexander et al., Marikana: A View from the Mountain and a Case to Answer (Johannesburg: Jacanda Media, 2012). While this book was an important contribution to the argument that miners were fleeing when the police opened fire, it views the strikes at Marikana as a ‘triumph of the working class’ and its victorious tone sometimes seems to miss the horror of the stories told by the mineworkers themselves. 35 For instance, Crispen Chingono’s work does take some of the cultural elements seriously, which he formulates as cultural symbolism. See Crispen Chingono, ‘Marikana and the Post-apartheid Workplace Order’ (Working Paper 1, Society, Work and Development Institute, 2012). Suren Pillay has an excellent discussion on the under-theorisation of the migrant labourer in South Africa outside of the universal worker subject, which is at the centre of Alexander et al., View from the Mountain. See Suren Pillay, ‘The Marikana 207 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Massacre: South Africa’s Post-apartheid Dissensus’, Economic and Political Weekly 48, 50 (2013): 32–37. See also Micah Reddy, ‘Unrest on South Africa’s Platinum Mines and the Crisis of Migrancy’ (Master’s thesis, Oxford University, 2013). Reddy’s thesis speaks about the process of choosing worker leaders according to their abilities to fulfil social and cultural roles, among them the assurance of a proper burial and safe passage of bodies back to the Transkei if a mineworker died underground. Thapelo Lekgowa and Luke Sinwell, ‘Embryos of Working-Class Power and Grassroots Democracy in Marikana’, Amandla! 28/29 (December 2012): 24. Lekgowa and Sinwell, ‘Embryos of Working-Class Power’, 25. Alexander et al., View from the Mountain, 104. The appearance of the five madoda at Impala Platinum mines in neighbouring Rustenburg, during a six-week strike earlier in 2012, shows obvious links to other spaces of worker action on the platinum belt. The workers’ committee at Implats was part of a broad strike that quickly led to the demise of the NUM at the mines. Here too, people had elected representatives to negotiate on their behalf outside of union structures. The respect that workers showed for the five madoda at Marikana was clearly neither unique nor isolated. Alexander et al., View from the Mountain, 31. Alexander et al., View from the Mountain, 31. Alexander et al., View from the Mountain, 31; emphasis added. Alexander et al., View from the Mountain, 12. Sinwell and Mbatha, Spirit of Marikana, 55. Sinwell and Mbatha, Spirit of Marikana, 61. Dunbar Moodie makes this argument with reference to the practices of workers and mine managers on South African gold mines following E.P. Thompson’s formulation of ‘the moral economy of the English crowd’ in the nineteenth century. See Dunbar T. Moodie and Vivienne Ndatshe, Going for Gold: Men, Mines, and Migration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 86. An induna was part of the compound system created on South African mines. An induna, or ‘headman’, was usually an unelected worker appointed by the compound manager, and who received higher wages and privileges to manage the grievances of mineworkers who lived in ethnically segregated hostels. There was a brief attempt at unionisation in the form of the African Mineworkers Union in 1946, but this did not last long and was mostly unsuccessful. See Moodie and Ndatshe, Going for Gold. Moodie and others have shown that historically migrant labourers worked on the mines to retire to rural homes and villages by sending as much as 70 per cent of their salaries as remittances back to rural areas, which were increasingly impoverished. The practice of remittances continued even after influx control laws were lifted in 1986 and many women and children moved to mining communities. Many mineworkers continue to be drawn from historical areas of labour, the former reserves, such as Mpondoland and the greater Transkei area. Many were the sons of mineworkers and had not finished school, or could not read and write. After apartheid ended, the compounds were ethnically desegregated and, in an effort to compensate for the low levels of new accommodation and family housing, the mining companies began to offer living-out allowances. This was a small amount of money, a portion of which was usually sent home and a portion retained to rent rooms made of tin or to get materials to build a shack. This led to the mushrooming of shack settlements around the mines and a shift in the spatial configuration. Many workers preferred living in shacks, where they had privacy, rather than sharing compound rooms with up to 16 people. They could now enjoy family life, which included women, children, youth and livestock, all previously absent on the mines. However, ethnic segregation

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persisted ‘unofficially’ through the delineation of land and houses via traditional authority and ethnicity. While some workers could access housing through the local state, migrant labourers could not. Thus migrancy has continued largely unabated. 47 Camalita Naicker and Sarah Bruchhausen, ‘Broadening Conceptions of Democracy and Citizenship: The Subaltern Histories of Rural Resistance in Mpondoland and Marikana’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies 34, 3 (2016): 388–403. 48 Rock drill operators had initiated the strikes at Marikana and on neighboring mines a few months prior to the massacre. They are the people who drill at the rock face directly, and the grievance at Marikana stemmed from the fact that, having no assistants, which was usual practice, they were doing the job of two people, but being paid one salary. Furthermore, their work is seen as the most dangerous and labour-intensive, as the drills they operate are hand-held and very heavy. 49 Enoch Mgijima, who preached the end of European domination and believed that the day would come when Europeans would be swept into the sea and African people would be free, led the Israelite movement, combining African beliefs with Christian ones. Mgijima and the Israelites clashed with police several times between 1918 and 1920 after they began to occupy Ntabelanga, a mountain in the Bulhoek district, because he believed that God wanted them to meet there. In May 1921, the police opened fire on people gathered on the mountain, after Europeans began to complain about the ‘squatters’ and their anti-white sentiment; 163 Israelites were killed, and 125 were wounded. Mgijima was excommunicated from the American parent church because of his ‘politics’. Bulhoek is near Queenstown in the Eastern Cape. See Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest: Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 563–564. 50 Marinovich, Murder at Small Koppie, 83. 51 Alexander at al., View from the Mountain, 33. 52 Reddy, ‘Unrest’. 53 This is also noted in Alexander et al., View from the Mountain, 11. 54 Alexander et al., View from the Mountain, 10. 55 Alexander et al., View from the Mountain, 105. 56 Matthew Chaskalson, ‘Rural Resistance in the 1940s and 1950s’, Africa Perspective 1 (1987): 5. 57 Govan Mbeki, South Africa: The Peasants’ Revolt (Middlesex: Penguin, 1964). 58 Mbeki, Peasants’ Revolt, 119. 59 Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa since 1945 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983), 282. 60 Naicker and Bruchhausen, ‘Broadening Conceptions’. 61 Lodge, Black Politics, 279. 62 William Beinhardt, ‘The Mpondo Revolts through the Eyes of Leonard Mdingi and Anderson Ganyile’, in Rural Resistance in South Africa: The Mpondo Revolts after Fifty Years, ed. Lungisile Ntsebeza and Thembela Kepe (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2011), 111. 63 Mbeki, Peasants’ Revolt, 121. 64 Jonny Steinberg, ‘A Bag of Soil, a Bullet from on High’, in Rural Resistance in South Africa: The Mpondo Revolts after Fifty Years, ed. Lungisile Ntsebeza and Thembela Kepe (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2011), 233. 65 Kwanele Sosibo, ‘Emboldened “Five Madoda” Issue Fresh Wage Demands’, Mail & Guardian, 28 September 2012, accessed 28 September 2012, https://mg.co.za/ article/2012-09-28-00-emboldened-five-amadoda-issue-fresh-wage-demands. 209 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Camalita Naicker, ‘Marikana: Taking a Subaltern Sphere of Politics Seriously’ (Master’s thesis, Rhodes University, 2013). Moodie and Ndatshe, Going for Gold, 90. Moodie and Ndatshe, Going for Gold, 245. Sakhela Buhlungu, ‘Rebels without a Cause of Their Own? The Contradictory Location of White Officials in Black Unions in South Africa, 1973–94’, Current Sociology 54, 3 (2006): 441. Jonisayi Maromo, ‘Mpofu Rubbishes Marikana Muti Claims’, IOL News, 12 November 2014, accessed 12 November 2014, http://www.iol.co.za/news/special-features/mpofurubbishes-marikana-muti-claims-1779322. See Camalita Naicker, ‘Worker Struggles as Community Struggles: The Politics of Protest in Nkaneng’, Journal of Asian and African Studies 41, 2 (2015): 157–170. See Jane Duncan and Andrea Royeppen, ‘Inside Rustenburg’s Banned Protests’, Daily Maverick, 7 May 2013, accessed 7 May 2013, https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/.../201303-07-inside-rustenbergs-banned-protests/. Theo Nkonki, ‘Rights Group Slams Marikana Police’, Eye Witness News, 23 September 2012, accessed 30 September 2012, http://ewn.co.za/2012/09/23/Rights-group-slamsMarikana-police. Dan Moshenberg, “The Incandescent Women of Marikana’, Women in and beyond the Global, 21 September 2012, accessed 21 September 2012, http://www.womeninandbeyond. org/?p=1418. ‘Marikana Women Hold Protest’, IOL Business Report, 30 September 2012, accessed 1 November 2012, https://www.iol.co.za/business-report/economy/marikana-women-holdprotest-1392767. ‘Marikana Women Hold Peaceful Protest’, News24, 29 September 2012, accessed 29 September 2012, http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Marikana-women-holdpeaceful-protest-20120929. ‘Marikana Women Solidarity March Not Given Permission’, SABC News, 23 September 2012, accessed 23 September 2012, http://www.sabc.co.za/news/a/854c3e804cd265a8978 2d7b007bdd4aa/Marikana-Women-Solidarity-march-not-given-permission-20120923. Greg Nicolson, Khadija Patel and Thapelo Lekgowa, ‘When Theatre Met the Marikana Massacre’, Daily Maverick, 21 August 2013, accessed 21 August 2013, http://www.dailymaverick. co.za/article/2013-08-21-when-theatre-met-the-marikana-massacre/#.UpSywo0WEy4. Duncan and Royeppen, ‘Inside Rustenburg’s Banned Protests’. Legal Aid South Africa v. Magidiwana and Others (2015), ZACC 28. See Asanda Benya, ‘The Invisible Hands: Women in Marikana’, Review of African Political Economy 42, 146 (2016): 545–560. Morris, ‘Mediation’, S130. Fanakalo is a mixture of mainly English and isiZulu used on the mines. Morris, ‘Mediation’, S130. For a more detailed discussion of the beginning of the women’s movement, see Naicker, ‘Worker Struggles’. Many people in Marikana told me in 2014 and 2015 that they no longer allow the police to enter the settlement and many people have resorted to forms of vigilantism to order the settlement. Interview with Thumeka Magondwana, September 2014. This is particularly significant because of my previous work on the political organisation of mineworkers through memories and modes of politics that have more rural

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inflections and different historical implications. For more discussion on how leaders were chosen on the mountain, and the political significance of the mountain itself, see Naicker, ‘Taking a Subaltern Sphere’; Saraj Bruchhausen, ‘Understanding Marikana through the Mpondo Revolts’, Journal of Asian and African Studies 50, 4 (2014): 412– 446; Reddy, ‘Unrest’. 88 Tasneem Essop, ‘Populism and the Political Character of the Economic Freedom Fighters: A View from the Branch’, Labour, Capital and Society 48, 1&2 (2015): 230. 89 Essop, ‘Populism’, 234.

REFERENCES Alexander, Peter, Thapelo Lekgowa, Botsang Mmope, Luke Sinwell and Bongani Xezwi. Marikana: A View from the Mountain and a Case to Answer. Johannesburg: Jacanda Media, 2012. Beinhardt, William. ‘The Mpondo Revolts through the Eyes of Leonard Mdingi and Anderson Ganyile’. In Rural Resistance in South Africa: The Mpondo Revolts after Fifty Years, edited by Lungisile Ntsebeza and Thembela Kepe, 91–114. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2011. Benya, Asanda. ‘The Invisible Hands: Women in Marikana’. Review of African Political Economy 42, 146 (2016): 545–560. Bruce, David. ‘Summary and Analysis of the Report of the Marikana Commission of Inquiry’. Document prepared for the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution, 12 August 2015. Accessed 15 October 2019. http://www.casac. org.za/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Summary-and-Analysis-of-the-Report-of-theMarikana-Commission-of-Inquiry.pdf. Bruce, Peter. ‘The Thick End of the Wedge: The Editor’s Notebook’. Business Day Live, 20 August 2012. Accessed 25 August 2012. http://www.bdlive.co.za/opinion/ columnists/2012/08/20/thethick-end-of-the-wedge-the-editors notebook. Bruchhausen, Sarah. ‘Understanding Marikana through the Mpondo Revolts’. Journal of Asian and African Studies 50, 4 (2014): 412–446. Buhlungu, Sakhela. ‘Rebels without a Cause of Their Own? The Contradictory Location of White Officials in Black Unions in South Africa, 1973–94’. Current Sociology 54, 3 (2006): 427–451. Chaskalson, Matthew. ‘Rural Resistance in the 1940s and 1950s’. Africa Perspective 1 (1987): 5–6. Chingono, Crispen. ‘Marikana and the Post-apartheid Workplace Order’. Working Paper 1. Society, Work and Development Institute, 2012. Conway-Smith, Erin. ‘South Africa: Striking Miners Thought They Were Invincible after Taking Muti’. Global Post, 21 August 2012. Accessed 22 August 2012. https://www.pri. org/stories/2012-08-21/south-africa-striking-miners-thought-they-were-invincibleafter-taking-muti. De Waal, Mandy. ‘Marikana Survivors May be Charged with Murdering Own Comrades’. Daily Maverick, 30 August 2012. Accessed 1 September 2012. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/ article/2012-08-30-marikana-survivors-may-be-charged-with-murdering-own-comrades/. Duncan, Jane. ‘The Role of the Media in Perpetuating a Divided Society’. Paper presented at the annual Steve Biko Seminar, Durban University of Technology, Durban, 21 September 2012. 211 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Duncan, Jane and Andrea Royeppen. ‘Inside Rustenburg’s Banned Protests’. Daily Maverick, 7 May 2013. Accessed 7 May 2013. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/.../2013-03-07inside-rustenbergs-banned-protests/. Essop, Tasneem. ‘Populism and the Political Character of the Economic Freedom Fighters: A View from the Branch’. Labour, Capital and Society 48, 1&2 (2015): 212–238. Falanga, Gabi. ‘Marikana Mr X Claims Miners’ Muti is Making Him Sick’. Mail & Guardian, 20 June 2014. Accessed 20 June 2014. https://mg.co.za/article/2014-06-20-marikanamr-x-claims-miners-muti-is-making-him-sick. Ginindza, Banele. ‘The Ghost of Five Madoda has NUM in Rustenburg Shivering’. The Mercury, 15 August 2013. Accessed 15 October 2014. https://www.pressreader.com/ southafrica/themercury/20130815/282200828563823. Hlongwane, Sipho. ‘Lonmin: Marikana’s Near Total Stay-Away’. Daily Maverick, 5 September 2012. Accessed 5 September 2012. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-0905-lonmin-marikanas-near-total-stay-away/. Hunter, Monica. Reaction to Conquest: Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa. London: Oxford University Press, 1961. Lekgowa, Thapelo and Luke Sinwell. ‘Embryos of Working-Class Power and Grassroots Democracy in Marikana’. Amandla! 28/29 (December 2012): 24–25. Lodge, Tom. Black Politics in South Africa since 1945. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983. Losurdo, Dominico. Liberalism: A Counterhistory. London: Verso, 2011. Mailula, Naledi. ‘Cops Knew Marikana Miners Used Muti’. Mail & Guardian, 23 April 2013. Accessed 16 May 2013. https://mg.co.za/article/2013-04-23-cops-knew-marikanaminers-used-muti. Mantashe, Gwede. ‘Defend Cosatu Unions’. Sunday World, 16 September 2012. Accessed 30 September 2012. https://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/sundayworld/20120916/281629597466338. Marinovich, Greg. Murder at Small Koppie: The Real Story of the Marikana Massacre. Cape Town: Penguin Random House, 2016. Marinovich, Greg. ‘The Murder Fields of Marikana’. Daily Maverick, 8 September 2012. Accessed 8 June 2018. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-09-08-themurder-fields-of-marikana-the-cold-murder-fields-of-marikana/#.WzyeuxIzaRs. Marinovich, Greg. ‘Tide is Turning against Police as Miners Lay Charge of Torture’. Daily Maverick, 5 September 2012. Accessed 5 September 2012. https://www.dailymaverick. co.za/article/2012-09-05-marikana-tide-is-turning-against-police-as-miners-laycharge-of-torture/. Maromo, Jonisayi. ‘Mpofu Rubbishes Marikana Muti Claims’. IOL News, 12 November 2014. Accessed 12 November 2014. http://www.iol.co.za/news/special-features/mpofurubbishes-marikana-muti-claims-1779322. Maylie, Devon and Peter Wonacott. ‘South Africa Police Step up Efforts against Protesters’. Wall Street Journal, 16 September 2012. Accessed 18 September 2012. https://www.wsj. com/articles/SB10000872396390443720204578000232367198490. Mbeki, Govan. South Africa: The Peasants’ Revolt. Middlesex: Penguin, 1964. Mgaga, Thando. ‘Zuma Finally Speaks out on Marikana Shooting’. TimesLive, 12 September 2012. Accessed 12 September 2012. https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa /2012-09-12-zuma-finally-speaks-out-on-marikana-shooting/. Moodie, Dunbar T. and Vivienne Ndatshe. Going for Gold: Men, Mines, and Migration. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

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Moore, Niki. ‘The Civic Protest Barometer, Episode One: Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics’. Daily Maverick, 16 March 2015. Accessed 16 March 2015. http://www.dailymaverick. co.za/article/2015-03-16-the-civic-protest-barometer-episode-one-lies-damn-liesand-statistics/. Moore, Niki. ‘The Civic Protest Barometer, Episode Two: So What is a Public Protest?’ Daily Maverick, 17 March 2015. Accessed 17 March 2015. http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/ article/2015-03-17-the-civic-protest-barometer-episode-two-so-what-is-a-public-protest/. Morris, Rosalind C. ‘Mediation, the Political Task: Between Language and Violence in Contemporary South Africa’. Current Anthropology 58, 15 (2017): S123–S134. Moshenberg, Dan. ‘The Incandescent Women of Marikana’. Women in and beyond the Global, 21 September 2012. Accessed 21 September 2012. http://www.womeninandbeyond. org/?p=1418. Naicker, Camalita. ‘Marikana: Taking a Subaltern Sphere of Politics Seriously’. Master’s thesis, Rhodes University, 2013. Naicker, Camalita. ‘Worker Struggles as Community Struggles: The Politics of Protest in Nkaneng’. Journal of Asian and African Studies 41, 2 (2015): 157–170. Naicker, Camalita and Sarah Bruchhausen. ‘Broadening Conceptions of Democracy and Citizenship: The Subaltern Histories of Rural Resistance in Mpondoland and Marikana’. Journal of Contemporary African Studies 34, 3 (2016): 388–403. Nicolson, Greg. ‘Who Shot First?’ Daily Maverick, 29 November 2012. Accessed 29 November 2012. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-11-29-marikana-who-shot-first/#. WiZhs7T1WRs. Nicolson, Greg, Khadija Patel and Thapelo Lekgowa. ‘When Theatre Met the Marikana Massacre’. Daily Maverick, 21 August 2013. Accessed 21 August 2013. http://www. dailymaverick.co.za/article/2013-08-21-when-theatre-met-the-marikana-massacre/#. UpSywo0WEy4. Njanji, Susan. ‘Lonmin Tragedy Lays Bare Violent Inter-Union Rivalry in SA’. Mail & Guardian, 25 August 2012. Accessed 1 September 2012. https://mg.co.za/article/201208-25-lonmin-tragedy-lays-bare-violent-inter-union-rivalry-in-sa. Nkonki, Theo. ‘Rights Group Slams Marikana Police’. Eye Witness News, 23 September 2012. Accessed 30 September 2012. http://ewn.co.za/2012/09/23/Rights-group-slamsMarikana-police. Pillay, Suren. ‘The Marikana Massacre: South Africa’s Post-apartheid Dissensus’. Economic and Political Weekly 48, 50 (2013): 32–37. Reddy, Micah. ‘Unrest on South Africa’s Platinum Mines and the Crisis of Migrancy’. Master’s thesis, Oxford University, 2013. Sacks, Jared. ‘Marikana Prequel: NUM and the Murders That Started it All’. Daily Maverick, 12 October 2012. Accessed 15 November 2012. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/ opinionista/2012-10-12-marikana-prequel-num-and-the-murders-that-started-it-all/. Shoba, Sibongakonke and Isaac Mahlangu. ‘Muti Protected Miners’. TimesLive, 19 August 2012. Accessed 13 May 2018. https://www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times/lifestyle/201208-19-muti-protected-miners/. Sinwell, Luke and Simphiwe Mbatha. The Spirit of Marikana and the Rise of Insurgent Trade Unionism in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2016. Sosibo, Kwanele. ‘Emboldened “Five Madoda” Issue Fresh Wage Demands’. Mail & Guardian, 28 September 2012. Accessed 28 September 2012. https://mg.co.za/article/2012-09-2800-emboldened-five-amadoda-issue-fresh-wage-demands.

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Steinberg, Jonny. ‘A Bag of Soil, a Bullet from on High’. In Rural Resistance in South Africa: The Mpondo Revolts after Fifty Years, edited by Lungisile Ntsebeza and Thembela Kepe, 231–242. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2011. Stone, S. ‘NUM to Seek Separate Marikana Review’. Daily Dispatch, 17 September 2012. Wasserman, Herman. ‘Marikana and the Media: Acts of Citizenship and a Faith in Democracy-to-Come’. Social Dynamics 41, 2 (2015): 375–386. Williams, Murray. ‘Running Battles Rage across Cape’s Marikana’. IOL News, 22 August 2014. Accessed 22 August 2014. http://www.iol.co.za/news/crime-courts/running-battlesrage-across-capes-marikana-1739718.

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CHAPTER

9

Art-Rage and the Politics of Reconciliation Nomusa Makhubu

A

rt in South Africa has become a site of intense and visceral race and class political antagonisms. It has catalysed debate, contestation and public discussion. In particular, public art and statues that echo the agonies of colonial and apartheid South Africa have sparked black public outrage and its proverbial opposite, white indignant anger. Art appears to have become a conduit for channelling frustrations with elusive reconciliation, the patronising expression of rainbowism and the impossible public dialogue about transforming post-apartheid South Africa. The discourse about art in public spaces, it would seem, becomes a proxy for other issues. After students removed a prominent statue of colonialist Cecil John Rhodes from the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2015, Rhodes Must Fall activist and student Ntokozo Dladla noted that the visual environment (buildings, art and statues) of the campus had become the ‘focal point’ for the raising of wider political issues: ‘The systems and the processes in place here have worked in such a way to exclude us from feeling as though we are part of this university. We feel alienated … The statue just dramatises those feelings.’1 This feeling of profound alienation not only characterised many students’ experience of campus, but also the zeitgeist of an inequitable post-1994 South Africa, which still resembles racially partitioned apartheid South Africa. On 15 February 2016, a protest based on student housing on the UCT campus took the form of the installation of a shack at the foot of the Jameson steps, on

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Residence Road, near where the Rhodes statue stood. When the university management demanded that the shack, dubbed ‘Shackville’, be removed from the road where it interrupted traffic flow, students refused. The university management sent police and private security to demolish the shack and disperse the crowd. This exacerbated the situation and, in anger, protesting students retaliated by gathering paintings from nearby residences (Fuller and Smuts halls) and burning them in the square near Residence Road. Some of the students, referred to as the Shackville Five, were arrested. During their court hearing, these students called the intervention of installing a shack on campus an ‘artistic form of protest’.2 Public outrage, notably from self-identified white alumni who felt under siege, moved many to publicly break their affiliations with the university. Since a majority of the works in nearby residences that were burnt were portraits of previous (predominantly white) luminaries of the institution, the Shackville event was labelled as ‘whiteness burning’ in The Economist.3 This event triggered anger, disdain, frustration and pain, and, most notably, a sense of shock over the forms of universitysanctioned brutal violence meted out on students who were involved. The accretion of emotive publics, or what Zizi Papacharissi terms ‘affective publics’ – ‘the networked public formations that are mobilized and connected or disconnected through expressions of sentiment’ – characterise much of South Africa’s political transition into decentralised democratic governance.4 The ‘impossible dialogues’, or what former president Thabo Mbeki typifies as ‘the reality of national sickness’ stemming from ‘fragmented national discussion’, foments antagonism.5 To understand the role that creative forms of protest play in opening up and uncloaking underlying racialised rage and the fault lines of racial segregation that engender alienated civic engagement and separate and materially different ‘publics’, I use the term ‘art-rage’. I use it to focus on the notion of art as a battlefield.6 Art-rage – the centring of collective affect derived from potent meanings in public art – is a significant public feeling that lies at the core of collective politics and social organisation. Using art as proxy, art-rage is symbolic. Art and its representations of society are a stand-in for political ideals and societal ills. In South Africa, art-rage reveals the predicament of reconciliation rhetoric, which draws attention to the unreconciled separate publics created through apartheid policies and sustained through post-apartheid neoliberalism. I explore artrage through a focus on the Shackville events and the specific artworks by Diane Victor, Breyten Breytenbach and Willie Bester, which were subsequently removed from public display as a response to Shackville.

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Creative protest shows that while South Africa has transitioned to democracy, it has failed to create the preconditions for ongoing, meaningful and equitable public engagements. It has failed to recognise the structures of feeling – a phrase deployed by Raymond Williams to indicate the articulation of a ‘pattern of impulses’ and relationality of space and environment to the politics of belonging and social justice.7

SYMBOLICALLY SPEAKING: PUBLIC IMAGERY AND FEELING South Africa, as a new, ‘unified’, post-apartheid nation, was birthed through spectacular re-enactment of violence and emotion. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), established in 1996 with the objective of healing the wounds of the past, saw scenes of re-enacted torture methods broadcast on television. This was coupled with footage of the faces of mostly black mothers, fathers and spouses weeping as they listened to testimonies. By the year 2000, when the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation was founded, South Africa had become accustomed to spectacular public displays of shock, anger, sadness and woundedness. Public hearings of the murders and bombings of people, many of them activists – for example, the Cradock Four (Matthew Goniwe, Fort Calata, Sparrow Mkhonto and Sicelo Mhlauli), the Gugulethu Seven (Mandla Simon Mxinwa, Zanisile Zenith Mjobo, Zola Alfred Swelani, Godfrey Jabulani Miya, Christopher Piet, Themba Mlifi and Zabonke John Konile), the PEBCO Three (Port Elizabeth Black Civic Organisation members Sipho Hashe, Champion Galela and Qaqawuli Godolozi) – were part of public ‘cathartic practice’ that would enable people to forget and move on.8 This was, conceivably, the first major symbolic gesture in post-apartheid South Africa that was received publicly through a saturation of emotionally charged imagery. Aimed at bridging apartheid fault lines and constructing a non-segregationist democratic public sphere, the TRC and other public symbolic gestures by Nelson Mandela (such as visiting the widow of Hendrik Verwoerd, who was the architect of apartheid, and attending the 1995 Rugby World Cup, a sport that was, at the time, symbolic of racist Afrikaner nationalism) were aimed at settling emotions of hurt, rage and vengeance. The first few years of democratic South Africa spawned a mass of empathetic images with the hope that this would eventually subdue heightened emotions about the injustices of apartheid and facilitate the creation of common narratives. In the deeply fragmented, post-Mandela society, the TRC is often viewed, in retrospect, as the smoke and mirrors of restorative justice. It is seen by many as a mirage of

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democracy that spectacularised the agony of mostly working- and lower middleclass black people, but veiled the unchanging injustices that materialise from the structural conditions of apartheid residential segregation, sustained through the legacy of racial labour policies and neoliberalism. The TRC is defined by Catherine Cole as ‘the transition from authoritarian to democratic rule’ that ‘occupied a liminal space between performance and the law’.9 Behind the curtain of forgiveness remain the socio-cultural habits of racism. As Musawenkosi Ndlovu puts it: ‘The new South African-ness began to wear off … the historical socioeconomic structural conditions of inequality, punctuated by race and patriarchy, were being reproduced through new neoliberal policies.’10 Considering negative perceptions of the TRC spectacle, it is curious that in the current student art-based protest or creative protest across South Africa since 2015, the symbolism of the TRC hearings, of pre-1994 anti-apartheid activism, resurfaces. This can be seen in the campus housing protest in 2016, Shackville and the creative protest that continued after the shack was dismantled. For example, five black plastic bags, made to look like body bags, representing dead bodies, with square academic caps, reminiscent of images of apartheid massacres, were placed where the protest took place. There was also, broadly, the call for a Shackville TRC, advocating restorative justice, rather than the punitive justice characterised by the criminalisation of protesting students, as well as the harsh and disproportionately excessive force against them by private security personnel and police. Much like the Gugulethu Seven and the Cradock Four of the TRC hearings, students who were involved in campus housing protests styled themselves as the Shackville Five. This eerie spectre of apartheid-era conflict, of spectacular anti-black violence, is presented by students as a sobering visual reminder that the placatory reconciliation of the TRC has sustained habitual racism through keeping racial publics separate but artificially cordial. It evokes what Richard Iton sees as a ‘potent afterlife, mocking persistence, and resurgence – rather than remission – of coloniality: the state that is “there and not there” at the same time’.11 Creative protest creates moments of encounter and unfettered confrontation. It creates conflictual publics, as it should. As Adam Haupt notes: ‘The expression of pain and anger … and the politics of disruption also need to be recognised as essential to functional public spheres.’12 The old question – what to do with the visual signifiers of a violent imperial history of colonialism and racial segregation in South African public spaces – has remained unresolved. In the early post-apartheid years, it was no coincidence that the study of public memory, heritage and visual symbols boomed. In the construction of a common national narrative, responses to the visual landscape of South Africa were conflicted or, as Annie Coombes suggests, ‘forms of visual and material 218 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Art-Rage and the Politics of Reconciliation

culture dramatized the tensions involved in such a momentous shift while at the same time contributing to the process of transformation itself ’.13 Art and statues in public spaces provoked deep emotional responses from different sectors, but for the state they served as sites for the pursuit of political and economic agendas: For the previously marginalised black majority, heritage is presumed to signal empowerment: the valorisation and preservation of their cultural beliefs and values; the honouring of their heroes and contributions; the authentication of their neglected stories and memories; the official acknowledgement of their suffering and sacrifices. Members of the white minority, motivated by anxieties over disempowerment and alienation, tend to demonstrate a strong emotional attachment to contested facets of their embattled heritage, even if they no longer identify with the specific symbolic values each of these represent. For the state, heritage is arguably an opportunistic means to fulfil the social needs of the electorate, while simultaneously fostering the political goals of nation-building, reconciliation and unity, as well as promoting the economic imperatives of development, employment creation and income generation, mostly through tourism.14 As Sabine Marschall shows, in the early post-apartheid years there were few radical positions regarding the symbolism in the visual landscape of South Africa. In pursuit of a peaceful transition and to ‘gain international respect’, most political parties opted to keep existing public art, statues and monuments.15 It was also considered, according to Marschall, ‘a wise economic decision to prevent “rocking the boat” with international investors’. The African National Congress (ANC) were vague in their stance towards the visual signifiers of the old order. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s thesis on symbolic capital, Marschall points out that the ‘respecting [of] the symbolic markers of the old order’ was a political and economic strategy in ‘the accumulation of symbolic capital’. The Pan Africanist Congress, a black nationalist party that splintered from the ANC in the late 1950s to establish a more radical position against white supremacy, regarded ‘culture as the ideological reflection of the social, political and economic situation in a country’ and surprisingly took a position that colonial and apartheid visual signifiers should remain to show a history of oppression.16 A radical stance, Marschall notes, was taken by the United Democratic Movement MP Tommy Abrahams, who stated that what is needed is ‘a total break with the racist past’ and ‘there is no place in a new South Africa for the existing symbols’.17 Prioritising a peaceful transition, the visual landscape of a divided South African public remained, but was supplemented by memorials that commemorate 219 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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deaths of anti-apartheid activists and massacres of the black population (most notably those that featured in the TRC), such as the sculpture designed by Brett Murray to memorialise the Trojan Horse Massacre in Athlone, or the Gugulethu Seven Memorial in Gugulethu by Donovan Ward and Paul Hendricks. This, presumably, would create a visual landscape reflective of democratic pluralism. However, this pluralism seemed to sustain the geopolitical divisions in South Africa: with few exceptions, existing public art and statues celebrating white victories remained in areas that were historically reserved for white South Africans and public art and statues portraying the liberation struggle in areas that were historically demarcated as black townships. Rather than creating cultural pluralism, the post-1994 resolution for transforming the visual landscape, therefore, operated along apartheid segregation lines to avoid stirring up racial tension. It placated different racial groups, rather than transforming historically sequestered publics into publics of equal participation, albeit adversarial. In her discussion of democratic pluralism, Chantal Mouffe asserts that ‘a recognition of pluralism implies a profound transformation in the symbolic ordering of social relations’.18 She argues that ‘the liberal illusion of a pluralism without antagonism’ is what is left when ‘relations of power and antagonisms’ are erased.19 Mouffe calls for a transformation from antagonism, ‘the struggle between enemies’, to agonism, ‘the struggle between adversaries’.20 In the case of South Africa, leaving the symbolic markers of the old order worked only temporarily to suppress what Mouffe calls ‘conflictual consensus’ internally. Rather than constructing social relations of equal adversaries, it reinforced the conditions that sustain antagonistic social relations. There is a deep emotional investment in different forms of art in public, which has become, as Coombes suggests, ‘a focus for symbolic transactions’ and represents the suppressed conflictual debate about justice.21 It should be no surprise that the rise of ‘fallism’ was catalysed in the contestation of art in public spaces, triggering public debate within and outside of an institution that is itself a stubborn monument to a segregated and violent past. It is the continuous negotiation of ‘conflictual consensus’ that is crucial.22 The art-rage conflicts discussed below stem from the kinds of art and visual symbols that constitute the visual environment that has made it impossible to have public dialogue and challenge the sense of alienation.

HOME PLACE: SHACKVILLE AS DISCURSIVE PUBLIC SPACE Although Shackville was not necessarily perceived by most as an artwork, it created a visual juxtaposition of the colonial imaginary embodied in the university’s 220 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Art-Rage and the Politics of Reconciliation

neoclassical architecture with the destitution, represented by the shack, that many of the university’s workers and students live with. Consider the location of a shack in front of Jameson Hall, renamed Sarah Baartman Hall, a declared ‘heritage’ building that is part of the UCT heritage trail. Jameson Hall was named after a war criminal and lieutenant to Cecil John Rhodes, Leander Starr Jameson.23 The way that the neoclassical architecture of the hall contrasted with the shack posed a symbolic conflict, illuminating the separate racialised publics of post-apartheid South Africa. Seen as the architecture of informal settlements where ‘squatters’ reside, shacks are considered, by the wealthy, to be an eyesore. The shack, however, has become a typical feature of South African urban landscapes and is deeply emblematic of the division between races and socio-economic classes, or divided publics. Made from corrugated iron and found materials, shacks are a result of race-based economic and labour dynamics in South Africa. Shacks are often explained as the resourcefulness of people in urban black townships who cannot afford housing or await public housing. Following apartheid policies of separate development, townships were built on the margins of cities, far from economic hubs, to house black labourers who worked in white areas. Townships are still exclusively black, badly serviced and treated as dumping grounds. Since the shack elicits the paradox between the formal (the university) and the informal, it demonstrates how manipulable the meanings of propriety, heritage and legitimacy are. It was not only the exterior of the shack in relation to its surrounding that was visually potent, but also what was evoked by the interior. Shackville as a gathering space was also a discursive space. For members of the university who experience the university visual environment as racially alienating, there is generally not an architectural counter-language to the neoclassical architecture. A shack is not only a symbol of poverty and informality, but for many South Africans it is also a home. It is the site where ideas are shaped, discussions happen and social relations are forged. Writing about homeplace as a site of resistance, bell hooks asserts: ‘Despite the brutal reality of racial apartheid, of domination, one’s homeplace was one site where one could freely confront the issue of humanization, where one could resist … black women resisted by making homes where all black people could strive to be subjects, not abject objects, where we could be affirmed in our minds and hearts … where we could restore to ourselves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public world.’24 Shackville, had it not been demolished, could have been a space to enable a composite visual environment to understand and discuss what was being articulated about the experience of artworks, a space capable of conveying the general feeling of being at home on campus and broadly in an alienating South Africa. Shackville 221 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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might have been a platform for negotiation, for debate and discussion. It might have been the ‘popular response to official discourse’, an indication of the shifts in structures of feeling.25 Shackville demonstrated an understanding of the relationship between the exercise of power and symbolism in spatial, architectural and visual remainders and reminders. Targeting the institutional culture and the habits of apartheid, it engaged with the deep fragmentations of campus publics that make ‘rational’ dialogue impossible. It confronted the divided publics of British imperialism, Afrikaner nationalism and the distancing of the created nations of the Bantustans. Towards the end of 2016, students called for a Shackville TRC, with the slogan #BringBackOurCadres. Although many of the students’ demands were met, including the in-sourcing of the cleaning, gardening and security workers, suspensions and expulsions that students faced for their actions during protest prevented them from returning. After finally reaching an agreement, the Institutional Reconciliation and Transformation Commission was established. The return to the reconciliation rhetoric by the students subverted the TRC, in that it alluded to the deferment of equal adversarial social relations through the suppression of feeling, and demonstrated the way in which habitual racism has been sustained through keeping different publics for different races.

MAKING PUBLICS: ART IN PUBLIC PLACES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN Writing in 2014, prior to the Rhodes Must Fall movement and the removal of the Cecil John Rhodes statue, Ramabina Mahapa, at the time the Student Representative Council president, gave a telling account of the visual environment on the UCT upper campus. He asserted: ‘There is little from UCT institutional symbolism that says “Black child be proud of your upbringing and who you are” . ’26 Mahapa lamented the way in which the visual environment set up a racial hierarchy, differentiating the experience of public spaces on campus. He defined this experience as follows: As you walk in the UCT Oppenheimer Library, you are met with a portrait of a naked white man, on his lap is a black woman, they seem to be having sexual intercourse … One level up, you see a metal sculpture of the naked Sarah Baartman. As you turn to your right, you will be met with another portrait depicting a black woman sitting on what I assume to be a rock with her three children in their underwear in a plastic basin bathing – the 222 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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surrounding is of a poor dwelling. As you continue with your tour around UCT walking into the Otto Beit building, coming from the food court on your left, you will be met with a portrait of a bull. Inside it is a black man with his genitals exposed, beside the bull is a little white girl and an Afrikaner man. If you go to middle campus, you will see several black painted sculptures also with their genitals out … At the entrance of the new Chemical Engineering Building there is a portrait depicting the poor settlements of what seems to be Khayelitsha or Langa. In the university … rarely will the portraits on the walls depict something demeaning or humiliating of white people.27 Mahapa pinpoints some of the artwork that would later be at the centre of debates about artworks at UCT. Among these were Breyten Breytenbach’s Hovering Dog, Willie Bester’s Sarah Baartman and Diane Victor’s Pasiphaë, which I discuss in more detail later. These artworks eventually featured in the list of problematic works that the Student Representative Council presented to the Artworks Task Team – a university committee that was set up as a response to the Rhodes Must Fall movement and the need to change the university environment. After Shackville, where portraits and a few artworks were burnt, these specific artworks became the most controversial among others that were taken down. Mahapa observed that two themes dominated the art display at UCT – namely, black poverty and black (male) nakedness. This, he argues, ‘reinforce[s] the inferiority complex of the black student while concurrently reaffirming the superiority complex of the white student’. The issue, as Mahapa shows, is not with individual artworks, but ‘with the message the collective paintings are saying about someone of my pigmentation’.28 Adding to this was that artworks were placed, often in an ad hoc manner, in different public and semi-public spaces across different UCT campuses. In other words, the display of artwork on the campus was driven by acquisition tastes and choices, rather than a coherent, socially responsive curatorial impulse. To give some context about the collection, UCT has a decentralised and publicly accessible collection. Artworks are displayed not only in access-controlled areas, but also in open public areas. The collection is managed by the Works of Art Committee (WOAC), which decides on acquisitions and handles the curatorship and administration of artworks across campus. With a relatively small collection of over 1 600 artworks (exclusive of plaques, statues and monuments), the buildings and outdoor public spaces are ornamented with a variety of paintings, sculptures, commissioned portraits, photographs and installations. Artworks in this collection have been acquired since 1911, comprising donations, loans and acquired and commissioned works. The collection spans the colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid eras. 223 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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As early as 2007, Eva Franzidis pointed out problems related to the display of artworks at UCT. She observed that ‘the actual site of artworks often plays a huge role in the way in which the art operates within the space, and influences the way it is received by its particular public’.29 Franzidis, and later in 2015 Jessica Brown, showed how the collection was modelled on Euro-American institutional collections. Franzidis pointed to the principle of the WOAC, ‘whereby one percent of the budget of all new buildings is spent on the acquisition of art works … echoing the principle adhered to by many American academic institutions’.30 Brown stated that the art collection at UCT was ‘conditioned by a habit of colonial deference, in which UCT modelled its art collection, as a symbol of gentility, after the accoutrements of older universities, in a European tradition’.31 Entrenched in its former acquisition policy was the inclination to acquire works by artists who studied at UCT and staff members or associated affiliates. Since its establishment, the WOAC had not been widely representative and, as Franzidis asserted, had been constituted by internally elected ‘white, middle-class, and middle-aged’ members.32 The collection thus gained a particular ‘public’ with vested interests. The broad public dialogue that has often been sought in relation to the collection has attracted, unsurprisingly, many responses from, predominantly, the descendants of the former white majority of the institution, who are otherwise a minority in South Africa. As UCT is a historically white university, it is no surprise that at the time of the protests, 72 per cent of the artworks in its collection were by white artists and 53 per cent by male artists.33 Artworks by staff and students at the Michaelis School of Fine Art dominated the collection, with individual staff members, former WOAC members and staff affiliates having up to 16 artworks each while other artists had between 1 and 5 artworks. The collection also faces a conundrum – one that makes frank public conversation seem impossible. The accumulated images of black suffering during apartheid that were meant to aid the struggle internationally alongside the hoard of images and monuments celebrating imperial victory, intelligence and triumph create a particular feel to the university’s art collection, specifically in how it is displayed. The artworks of white liberal artists who sought to represent black suffering, black pain and black endurance under apartheid to garner international sympathy are now part of the collective message of black poverty and suffering that Mahapa lamented. The collection is thus a reflection of liberal racism or what Haupt refers to as liquid racism, where ‘old and new forms of racism are articulated with valid [social] concerns’.34 During the apartheid years, these images served the purpose of showing the sadistic nature of the apartheid government to an international audience and helped to generate international outrage against apartheid. In his account of the 224 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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situation, former vice chancellor Max Price argued that although these artworks were ‘intended … as ammunition in the struggle against apartheid, if you are a black student born well after 1994 what you see is a parade of black people stripped of their dignity and whites exuding wealth and success’.35 He asserted that ‘even if you know the historic context of the photos, a powerful contemporary context may overwhelm this, leading you to conclude that the photos are just one more indication of how this university views black and white people’. Empathising with the students, he said: ‘It is not difficult to see why black students would say: “This is not simply art that provokes. This art makes me deeply uncomfortable ... the university surely doesn’t care about my feelings.” ’ The collective message that Mahapa pointed to is carried not only in the artworks that are displayed, but also in the architectural feel, the experience or feeling of space, of a predominantly white university. This suggests a specific ‘structure of feeling’, to use Williams’s cultural hypothesis. At UCT, the numbers of black students and staff may have increased since 1989, but the social experience of racial and economic exclusion has remained resistant to change.36 Structures of feeling, Williams suggests, ‘can be specifically related to the evidence of forms and conventions – semantic figures – which, in art and literature, are often among the very first indications that a new structure is forming’.37 Art, specifically in institutional collections, thus becomes the central site for the emergence of new structures of feeling. Mahapa’s article and subsequent contestations of artwork and public symbols on campus were not the first time that the collection sparked outrage, but the university rarely took up the opportunities for inclusive dialogue and debate. In relation to its conflicted history, Franzidis states that the ‘information board for Jameson Hall was defaced, with the name “Leander Starr Jameson” underlined in red, with an arrow pointing to the words, “RACIST MASS MURDERER!” ’38 Several artworks over the years have been a site where those conflicts manifest. Outdoor sculptures by artists such as Gavin Younge have been, as Brown notes, ‘daubed with spray-paint’ since the late 1980s, while works by Gabriel Clarke-Brown ‘were deliberately defaced with ballpoint pen’.39 Brown observes that ‘staff reaction was one of outrage that “intellectual debate and discussion had been violated by this destructive response”, and the artist, in turn, conveyed his own dismay at the “injustice of the event in an academic environment, where rights and freedoms were enshrined” ’.40 Further, she pointed out that ‘the destruction of art tends to elicit particularly emotional dialogue’. After the removal of the imperialist Cecil John Rhodes statue in 2015, the university leadership recognised that the experience of the visual environment of the university, its symbolism, created a rift between students and staff members from different racial groups and made the feel of the campus alienating to many. 225 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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In response, it set up an Artworks Task Team, among other task teams (such as the one for renaming buildings) – an intervention to mediate and find solutions to contested artworks, plaques and statues. The Artworks Task Team was mandated (1) to audit, assess and analyse statues, plaques and artworks on campus that may be seen to recognise or celebrate colonial oppressors and/or that may be offensive or controversial; (2) to seek comment and opinion from members of the university and other interested and affected parties on these issues; and (3) to formulate proposals for new statues, plaques and artworks.41 It was meant to create and facilitate dialogue about what to do with the current display of artworks, statues and plaques. It was also meant to deal with the conflicting responses from members of a university steeped in racial tensions. The task team could only make recommendations to the university and the WOAC. It was not empowered to take any kind of action. The work of the task team required cautious approaches to the intense sentiments about how artworks seemed to reinforce stereotypes of race and gender on campus. Before the task team could complete its work, the Shackville events resulted in the removal of a number of artworks, including those that were discussed by Mahapa in 2014. The removal of artworks was largely blamed on the racially diverse Artworks Task Team and was decried as censorship by critics such as photographer David Goldblatt.42 Over the years, however, artworks had been objected to and moved and removed, often discreetly, in response to various contestations and controversies, but this was never previously deemed to be censorship. In some ways, it can be argued that the rage against the removal of artworks was mostly resistance to the appointment of a task team, which had a different racial composition to that of the WOAC and seemed to represent a different sense of ‘public’. In fact, the removal of artworks following the burning of artworks during the Shackville protests was not the responsibility of the Artworks Task Team, which had no authority in that regard, being empowered only to make recommendations to the university. Various parties removed artworks distributed across campuses for safekeeping, fearing that there might be further damage by protesters. The WOAC also took steps towards taking down the artworks that Mahapa described in 2014 and were on the list that the Student Representative Council presented to the university’s Artworks Task Team for further deliberation. In the media, the taking down of artworks for safekeeping and the engagements with the list of ‘offensive works’ were conflated and seen as censorship. This public discourse portrayed black protesting students as backwards and bent on destroying ‘white’ art. Some who responded by email to the Artworks Task Team started their contributions with the words: ‘As a white man, I …’ Articles that were published expressing rage about censorship operated with often simplistic notions of race: 226 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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that somehow, all artworks by white artists were being taken down, mainly as a result of demands by black students and academics. Authors such as John Laband considered the questioning of visual symbols on campus to be ‘racist’ and ‘antiwhite’ and as a move away from ‘the principles of reconciliation’.43 Since the majority of works on the campus were by white artists, the composition of the collection makes it easy to deduce that works that are being taken down were mostly by white artists or those thought to be white by the sound of their names. In my opinion, the overwhelming defensiveness in the media that positions the previously white public spaces of UCT as untouchable and incontestable, as framed within the ‘principles of reconciliation’, is precisely what inhibits equal participation in public discussions. Nominal transformations of space, such as those suggested by Mahapa, aimed at making all users of UCT’s public and semi-public space feel welcome, are often dismissed as a threat to ‘whiteness’. Untransformed colonially designed spaces evoking racist views hinder so-called rational equally adversarial public debate. The outbursts of rage by artists such as David Goldblatt are a case in point. Having enjoyed local and international recognition for his photographs, Goldblatt is regarded as a liberal photographer who ‘would neither join a political organisation – because he was not a “joiner” – nor allow his work to be used “by either side of the struggle” for propaganda purposes’.44 His participation in exhibitions that were organised by Afrapix – an activist photographers’ collective established in 1982 producing what came to be known as struggle photography – positioned his oeuvre as radical. In response to the Shackville protests, Goldblatt made the publicly symbolic gesture of moving an archive of 18 boxes of his prints, negatives and other digital items from UCT to Yale University. In an interview, Goldblatt was asked about ‘the rights of an artist to represent another race’ and he stated: ‘We’re human beings – fuck it … we need to be able to talk and think of each other … that’s the nature of human interaction.’45 For Goldblatt, the only solution was to ‘remove every piece of art from campus’ or facilitate a ‘series of exhibitions and public discussions on colonial art, post-colonial art, and what should be considered permissible’. Elsewhere, he asserted: ‘Differences are settled by talk. You don’t threaten with guns. You don’t threaten with fists. You don’t burn. You don’t destroy. You talk. These actions of the students are the antithesis of democratic action.’46 Although Goldblatt called for public discussion, his actions seemed barely amenable to discussion. It was as if to say: do it my way or face the consequences. So, the notions of public discussion are imagined differently and often without consideration of separated sense of public space. Art-rage results from this chasm. 227 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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TALKING WALLS, SILENT SCULPTURES Diane Victor, Pasiphaë (2001–2003) A large charcoal and pastel drawing, titled Pasiphaë by Diane Victor, which was logistically impossible to remove because of its scale and frame, was among the artworks on the list later seen to have been censored by the university. It was boarded up. This strategy, it was hoped, would provide the space to engage with the work, the site for dialogue where people could write what they thought and this would then inform the process of reconfiguring the collection. Over time, the board covering the artwork became a discursive space – a ‘talking wall’ – with various statements posted and inscribed on it. A sticker of the ANC logo, but using old apartheid regime colours, was pasted on the board, evoking the sentiment that structurally not much has changed and indicating continuities between apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. There were also small posters with the words ‘expelled’, ‘interdicted’, ‘suspended’ and ‘social death’, which refer both to the artworks and to the punitive justice against protesting students. The words ‘does this offend you’ are those of a project at Michaelis through which students engage with other historical representations of Pasiphaë in relation to this work. Pasiphaë, in simple terms, is a drawing depicting a black farmworker, standing next to a young white girl, reining a bull. Inside the bull is the limp body of a naked black man. In Mahapa’s description, the black farmworker is defined as ‘an Afrikaner’ and in other media accounts as ‘a farmer’. This drawing is based on Greek mythology, in which Poseidon curses Pasiphaë, the daughter of the sun god Helios. This curse arouses in Pasiphaë sexual desire for a bull that belongs to her husband. She enlists the services of an artisan, Daedalus, who carves a wooden sculpture resembling a cow for her. Using this as disguise, Pasiphaë copulates with the bull and gives birth to the Minotaur. In the drawing by Victor, Pasiphaë is represented by the little girl. Inside the bull with which Pasiphaë copulates is an image of a prostrate naked adult black man. In her explanation, Victor asserts that ‘originally the artwork didn’t feature the black man inside the bull but [the figure was] added in an effort to make a more obvious connection to the myth of Pasiphaë and the young girl’s sexual awakening’.47 An article about the covering up of the artwork says that ‘if people actually knew what was being depicted in her artwork she imagines that it “wouldn’t be seen as particularly offensive” ’ since the artwork ‘was made specifically to be provocative to the white male farming community’. One would imagine that this provocation would be evoked, not by the representation of two black males set in a sexual 228 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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situation with a young white girl, but by the representation of white farmers. The black men are not represented as virile and masculine, but as feeble and powerless, whereas the girl wears a mischievous smile on her face while whimsically pulling at the hem of her transparent dress. The polemics sparked by this work do not lie in the seemingly feminist approach of female sexual awakening as a way to provoke the often-conservative male farming community, but in its representation of race and the difference in age between Pasiphaë and the black males. If the myth is to be taken as the conceptual framework, the young white girl is not just conquering men, but also overpowering, through the intimation of sex, enfeebled black men. In this drawing, there is a constant unsettling vacillation between who is the victim and who is the perpetrator (to use the language of the TRC). Consonant with Mahapa’s observation, this work, although aimed at engaging with the conservative male farming community, represents two vulnerable black men, the one a farmworker and the other naked and powerless. To push Mahapa’s argument further, the images of vulnerable black people in the collection are like raw materials for the psycho-social dynamics of white South African communities. Breyten Breytenbach, Hovering Dog (1985) Similarly, in Breyten Breytenbach’s Hovering Dog, although the work was intended as a comment on white communities, its message was conveyed through the debasement of black bodies. On the UCT artworks database, the work is defined as a painting that ‘explores the undercurrents of the South African psyche through a personal and surreal symbolism. This work may be an exhortation to white South Africans to break out from their self-made boundaries (swimmer bursting from picture frame) in order to free themselves from the paralysing effects their attitudes have on the progress of ordinary life (suspended dog). The playful lovers behind the scenes may suggest that the strictures of racial identity can be transgressed without fear.’48 Hovering Dog is an image of a tricoloured beagle with an erection, suspended by ropes. Above the dog is a painting of a white male swimmer, gasping for air as he breaks through the water’s surface. His arms stretch beyond the canvas. Off-centre is a couple, a naked white male holding a white mask to the face of a naked black woman sitting on his lap, who holds a black mask to his face. In this painting, the white male swimmer seems to signify orgasm and the black female seems to be visually associated to, as though she herself is, the suspended dog. The tricoloured beagle, an English breed, with the colours white, black and brown can be seen to be symbolic of the classificatory racial categories of apartheid. 229 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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The portrayal of psychosis and fear of white South Africans to ‘break boundaries’ is done through the hypersexualised representation of the black female body whose position in the composition seems paralleled to the suspended dog. Considering Mahapa’s observations, this would be part of the larger collective message of the publicly displayed art at UCT. This work was made in 1985, during the first state of emergency declared by the apartheid government. The Immorality Act, passed in 1950, which deemed interracial sex criminal, was only repealed in 1985. A work like this, under the apartheid regime, would have been seen as politically transgressive. Known for Afrikaans literature more than for his art, Breytenbach was exiled by the apartheid government for his transgressive books. However, he responded to the removal of his painting at UCT with public outrage in the media. In various articles, Breytenbach sought to ‘convey [his] sentiment of disgust’ and announced that he would ‘strongly urge all South African artists, researchers, recorders of public life etc., and as well those of foreign origin whose products may end up at South African universities, even if inadvertently so, to make absolutely sure your work is not allowed to be acquired, loaned or otherwise used by South African universities’.49 Breytenbach continues that there is ‘no guarantee it will survive the orgies of destruction these institutions foster and no responsibility or accountability (let alone preservation) will be forthcoming from the ethically and aesthetically spineless but oh so glib “collaborators” running the universities’. The insults hurled in the media were a display of anger, but barely indicated interest in discussion and unearthing of underlying issues. Willie Bester, Sarah Baartman (2000) Unlike the works by Victor and Breytenbach, Bester’s Sarah Baartman sculpture was not removed or completely concealed, even though it was mentioned by Mahapa and featured on the list. It was not damaged. Instead, it was dressed in a white sarong and headwrap, to give Sarah Baartman her dignity as a mother. The first robing of this sculpture happened in 2015, initiated by black women students. The robing was removed later that year. In 2016, on 9 March, during the first anniversary of the Rhodes Must Fall movement, its members carefully curated a series of art installations, itinerant performances and interventions, leading the crowd of spectators to walk from Bremner Building to the Centre for African Studies gallery. On the way to the gallery, one of the interventions involved the ceremonial dressing-up of Bester’s Baartman sculpture, this time in black robes. It remained this way for over a year, during which time Bester was invited by a new WOAC to deliberate on the artwork and the robing. 230 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Bester, however, publicly expressed that he was frustrated with the discussions and, condemning censorship, the artist maintained that he only saw this intervention as vandalism. In January 2018, the robing was removed by a retired librarian, William Daniels, in defence of the conservative views renouncing the interventions of the Rhodes Must Fall movement. In response, the Black Academic Caucus Women’s Collective robed the sculpture again in batik fabric in March 2018. In the wave of expressions of outrage in the media, which portrayed the first and second robings as censorship rather than a visual dialogue, Bester’s work became a key example of what was constructed as the ignorance of UCT. It was argued that students who did not know the artist assumed that he is white, given his Afrikaanssounding name. In discussions facilitated by the newly constituted WOAC in 2018, students emphasised that they were not responding to the artist’s race, but rather to yet another example of the humiliation, abjection and debasement of black bodies in the art that is on campus. Bester’s oeuvre is characterised by the use of scrap metal and found materials. The masculine, heavy metal appearance of Baartman in this work is interpreted by Janell Hobson as ‘an industrialised hybrid’ that ‘appears robotic, refuelling the industrial wastes of class and inequity’.50 This work, on permanent display in the main library, has been celebrated as a work that divulges the poverty and suffering in black and coloured townships in its amassing of metal debris – the leftovers of industrial labour. The artist describes it as a sculpture that became instrumental in the broader call for Baartman’s remains to be returned to South Africa. Since it was purchased, however, this sculpture has been controversial. Its acquisition in 2000, Brown notes, ‘ignited controversy’ with its ‘highly volatile’ subject matter. The WOAC was divided on the purchase of the artwork and, once it was acquired, it was placed in the science and engineering section in the library. In 2001, a public debate titled ‘Celebration or Scandal?’ was ‘staged on Monday the 30th of April, in the Centre for African Studies, organised by the African Gender Institute, Centre for African Studies and the UCT Women’s Movement’.51 Bester was invited ‘to elaborate on the ideas behind the work and hear the disparate public responses that it has generated’ and scholars such as Yvette Abrahams and Amina Mama participated.52 Although discussions about the debasement of black, female bodies were held, the location of the sculpture remained the same. The perpetual nakedness of Baartman and the imperial gaze to which her body and her sexuality have been eternally subjected symbolises the dehumanisation of black women in general. This sculpture has repetitively been the site on which symbolic wars are waged. However, once again, the image of the black body becomes the site of struggle and the locale for racial affectivity. 231 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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EMOTIVE POLITICS: ART, PAIN AND RAGE The thematic similarities of these works underpin the problems of the collection. They are similar in their representation of black abjection, bestial sexuality and the dislocation of repressed sexual desire under racist regimes. The controversies surrounding the UCT collection and its display signal the general retreat from equal-participation debate. For those with vested interests in the UCT art collection, a challenge to the conventional way in which things have been done in the university is often treated as a threat that will shift the seemingly stable ground of power. For protesting students, in an institution where racism is rife, rational debate is not possible because the views of the marginalised have, for a long time, fallen on deaf ears. Frustrated with not being heard, militant creative protest has become a platform for frank engagement. In response to protests in South Africa, whether in universities or elsewhere, the focus has often been on the ‘irrational’ outrage and anger of (mostly black) protesters, perceived as an ‘uncultured’ inability to converse or negotiate. Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall protests have been criminalised. Leigh-Ann Naidoo points out that ‘university managements, under the orders of largely lily-white senates and councils, continue to waste time criminalising, victimising and, even more problematically, ignoring students’.53 The notion that South Africa is the ‘protest capital of the world’, where protests ‘happen mostly in black townships and informal settlements’, is often used with the acknowledgement that ‘the crisis represents the forcible exclusion of many black working class households from democratic institutions, largely because of their inability to afford socio-economic goods’.54 However, it is also mostly used by conservatives in the media to imply that the black population in South Africa has a culture of protest from the anti-apartheid struggle years, which means that people resort to ‘irrational habits’ before entertaining any form of dialogue. This short-sighted approach to understanding the politics of anger overlooks the lack of responsive governance, specifically in black townships where dialogue and public participation does not necessarily lead to resolutions. Images of protest in which things are burnt or, as is sometimes reported, ‘a group of people “singing and dancing” … involved in intimidatory behaviour: mock charges, verbal threats or threatening gestures’ are generally broadcast as characteristically black.55 In general terms, imagery, or the representation of a culture of protest, is part of the racist construction of ‘angry blacks’ as uncontrollably violent and whites as civil. The rise of the phrase ‘black pain’ in global anti-racism protests stems from the realisation that often black bodies are seen to be insensate – a perception used to normalise brutality against black people. Debra Walker King points out, in her 232 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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discussion of David Morris’s The Culture of Pain (1991), that the ‘Enlightenment view of the “natural savage” … claims black people, being savages, do not feel pain as do white people’.56 As many placards in students’ protests proclaim: ‘Black Pain is a White Commodity’. This view saturates current racial politics and racial violence. It establishes that rational public debate cannot take place when people are not regarded as equal and where there is no empathy or understanding of what are considered irrational emotions. Emotions therefore lie at the core of current race politics: being emotional is political. As James Baldwin so aptly puts it: To be a Negro [to be black] and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. So that the first problem is how to control that rage so that it won’t destroy you. Part of the rage is this: it isn’t only what is happening to you, but it’s what’s happening all around you all of the time, in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference, the indifference and ignorance of most white people.57 Outrage, generally, as an aesthetic, signifies an unreconciled place in the modern racist world.

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF ART One cannot transform society without transforming the art and culture it creates and consumes every day. Art is invested with deep meanings of belonging, group identity, patriotism and social values. The questions that must be asked in relation to the UCT collection and debates it has generated must be hard-hitting questions about the kinds of art the university values and collects, and for what purpose. It seems futile to institute conciliatory dialogues about art when the issues raised through art are those plaguing post-apartheid South Africa (such as continued racial and class segregation). Art in this context is inherently conflictual, given the segregated social conditions in which it is produced and consumed. It is deeply political because it catalyses emotive politics. The issue with the UCT collection is not only with the kinds of artworks acquired, but also with their display and location, which are mindful of the spatial politics of racial segregation and what they mean for how a place is experienced by different racial groups. Art reflects the inherited antagonistic conditions in South Africa that reinforce continued conflict. 233 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:58:19 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Since 2015, the call for decolonisation has been engaged with at a symbolic level: through understanding the expression of power in the buildings one occupies, the symbols one internalises, the images one sees, as the fuel of the social imaginary. What is being challenged is as material as it is abstract. The burden of race in South Africa intensifies amidst cacophonous rage. The rage felt by many South Africans who can no longer withstand the harsh circumstances that they are forced into has been translated into creative protest. As a rhetoric of reconciliation resurfaces, as it did in the Shackville protests, to forge spaces for agonistic dialogue, the public sphere is confounded by the politics of affect. If this art – in this case, the shack – was not met with police violence, might it have enabled the dialogue that is seen to be impossible? Could the university recognise the shack as a formal space for intellectual exchange and as a discursive space? Since it would have, even if momentarily, transformed the divisive spatial politics symbolised by the university architecture, might it have created the kinds of mediatory public spaces we so yearn for?

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Ntokozo Dladla in Paul Herman, ‘Rhodes Must Fall: Students Have Their Say’, News24, 2 April 2015, accessed 8 April 2018, https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/ Rhodes-Must-Fall-Students-have-their-say-20150402. See http://www.justice.gov.za/sca/Judgements/sca_2016/sca2016-159ms.pdf, accessed 9 April 2018. ‘Whiteness Burning’, The Economist, 18 February 2016, accessed 10 April 2018, https:// www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21693278-students-are-throwingcolonial-art-pyre-whiteness-burning. Zizi Papacharissi, Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 125. Thabo Mbeki, ‘Let the People Speak: Why We Need a National Dialogue’, Daily Maverick, 5 May 2017, accessed 11 July 2017, https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/201705-05-let-the-people-speak-why-we-need-a-national-dialogue/#.WhRQj62ZP6A. The term has also been used by Elizabeth Fullerton in Artrage! The Story of the BritArt Revolution, where she engages with the notoriety of sarcastic Young British Artists (called YBAs), who made transgressive art. Elizabeth Fullerton, Artrage! The Story of the BritArt Revolution (London: Thames & Hudson, 2016). Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with the New Left Review (London: New Left Books, 1979), 159. Sabine Marschall, Landscape of Memory: Commemorative Monuments, Memorials and Public Statuary in Post-apartheid South Africa (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 73. Catherine Cole, Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), ix. Musawenkosi Ndlovu, #FeesMustFall and Youth Mobilisation in South Africa: Reform or Revolution? (London: Routledge, 2017), vii.

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Richard Iton, The Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 135. 12 Adam Haupt, ‘Liquid Racism: Possessive Investments in Whiteness and Academic Freedom at a Post-apartheid University’, in The Intersections of Whiteness, ed. Evangelia Kindinger and Mark Schmitt (London: Routledge, 2019), 94. 13 Annie Coombes, History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 1. 14 Marschall, Landscape of Memory, 1. 15 Marschall, Landscape of Memory, 29. 16 Marschall, Landscape of Memory, 25. 17 Marschall, Landscape of Memory, 26. 18 Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000), 18. 19 Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 20. 20 Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 102–103. 21 Coombes, History after Apartheid, 14. 22 Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 103. 23 Jameson became prime minister of the Cape Colony (1904–1908) even though he had been tried and arrested for the failed attempt to overthrow the Transvaal government, termed the ‘Jameson Raid’ (1895). 24 bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 2015), 42. 25 Ian Buchanan, A Dictionary of Critical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 455. 26 Ramabina Mahapa, ‘Little at UCT Saying “Black Child be Proud” ’, Cape Argus, 15 July 2014, accessed 9 April 2018, https://www.iol.co.za/capeargus/little-at-uct-saying-blackchild-be-proud-1720099. 27 Mahapa, ‘Little at UCT’. 28 Mahapa, ‘Little at UCT’. 29 Eva Franzidis, ‘Hidden Treasures in Ivory Towers: The Potential of University Art Collections in South Africa, with a Case Study of UCT’ (Master’s thesis, University of Cape Town, 2007), 6. 30 Franzidis, ‘Hidden Treasures’, 5. 31 Jessica Natasha Brown, ‘Ethics of the Dust: On the Care of a University Art Collection’, (PhD diss., University of Cape Town, 2015). 32 Franzidis, ‘Hidden Treasures’, 16. 33 These statistics are recorded in the Artworks Task Team report, accessed 11 April 2018, http://www.uct.ac.za/downloads/email/Artworks_Report_to_Council.Feb2017.pdf. 34 Haupt, ‘Liquid Racism’, 88. 35 Max Price, ‘A Subtle Kind of Racism’, News24, 16 July 2017, accessed 31 May 2018, https:// www.news24.com/Columnists/GuestColumn/a-subtle-kind-of-racism-20170716-2. 36 Shose Kessi and Josephine Cornell, ‘Coming to UCT: Black Students, Transformation and Discourses of Race’, Journal of Student Affairs in Africa 3, 2 (2015): 1–16. 37 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 133. 38 Franzidis, ‘Hidden Treasures’, 35. 39 Brown, ‘Ethics of the Dust’, 144. 40 Brown, ‘Ethics of the Dust’, 146–147. 41 Artworks Task Team report, accessed 11 April 2018, http://www.uct.ac.za/downloads/ email/Artworks_Report_to_Council.Feb2017.pdf.

11

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Robin Scher, ‘ “I Will Not Compromise about my Work”: David Goldblatt on Artistic Freedom, Censorship, and Moving His Archive out of South Africa’, ArtNews, 23 June 2017, accessed 13 July 2017, http://www.artnews.com/2017/06/23/i-will-notcompromise-about-my-work-david-goldblatt-on-artistic-freedom-censorship-andmoving-his-archive-out-of-south-africa/. 43 John Laband, ‘Toppling Statues, Burning Books and the Humanities in South African Universities’, Journal of the Helen Suzman Foundation 76 (2015): 18. 44 See http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/national-orders/recipient/david-goldblatt-1930, accessed 13 July 2017. 45 Scher, ‘David Goldblatt’. 46 Natalie Pertsovsky, ‘South Africa: Here is the List of Art Destroyed on UCT’, AllAfrica, 9 June 2017, accessed 13 July 2017, http://allafrica.com/stories/201706090891.html. 47 Ashleigh Furlong, ‘Prominent Artwork Covered up at UCT’, GroundUp, 8 April 2016, accessed 2 August 2017, https://www.groundup.org.za/article/prominent-artworkcovered-uct/. 48 See http://www.irmasternmuseum.org.za/uctcollection/view_subod.asp?pg=cmdh& cmdh_opt=pub_results&strSearch=fldDisplayName&opt=rslt1&strCollID=&frmQue ry=Breyten%20Breytenbach, accessed 24 October 2019. 49 Pertsovsky, ‘List of Art Destroyed on UCT’. 50 Janell Hobson, Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2005), 78. 51 Brown, ‘Ethics of the Dust’, 158, 160. 52 Brown, ‘Ethics of the Dust’, 158–159. 53 Leigh-Ann Naidoo, ‘We Shall Not be Moved or Led Astray: The Emergence of the 2015 Student Movement’, New Agenda 60 (2015): 13. 54 Carin Runciman, ‘SA is the Protest Capital of the World’, IOL News, 22 May 2017, accessed 7 July 2017, https://www.iol.co.za/pretoria-news/sa-is-protest-capital-of-theworld-9279206. 55 David Bruce, ‘Violent Protests Entrenched in SA’s Culture’, Mail & Guardian, 14 February 2014, accessed 28 July 2017, https://mg.co.za/article/2014-02-13-violentprotests-entrenched-in-sas-culture. 56 Debra Walker King, African Americans and the Culture of Pain (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 8. 57 James Baldwin, ‘The Negro’s Role in American Culture: Langston Hughes, Nat Hentoff, Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin’, Black World/Negro Digest XI, 5 (1962): 81. 42

REFERENCES Baldwin, James. ‘The Negro’s Role in American Culture: Langston Hughes, Nat Hentoff, Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin’. Black World/Negro Digest XI, 5 (1962): 80–98. Brown, Jessica Natasha. ‘Ethics of the Dust: On the Care of a University Art Collection’. PhD diss., University of Cape Town, 2015. Bruce, David. ‘Violent Protests Entrenched in SA’s Culture’. Mail & Guardian, 14 February 2014. Accessed 28 July 2017. https://mg.co.za/article/2014-02-13-violent-protestsentrenched-in-sas-culture. Buchanan, Ian. A Dictionary of Critical Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

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Cole, Catherine. Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Coombes, Annie. History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Franzidis, Eva. ‘Hidden Treasures in Ivory Towers: The Potential of University Art Collections in South Africa, with a Case Study of UCT’. Master’s thesis, University of Cape Town, 2007. Fullerton, Elizabeth. Artrage! The Story of the BritArt Revolution. London: Thames & Hudson, 2016. Furlong, Ashleigh. ‘Prominent Artwork Covered up at UCT’. GroundUp, 8 April 2016. Accessed 2 August 2017. https://www.groundup.org.za/article/prominent-artworkcovered-uct/. Haupt, Adam. ‘Liquid Racism: Possessive Investments in Whiteness and Academic Freedom at a Post-apartheid University’. In The Intersections of Whiteness, edited by Evangelia Kindinger and Mark Schmitt, 87–104. London: Routledge, 2019. Herman, Paul. ‘Rhodes Must Fall: Students Have Their Say’. News24, 2 April 2015. Accessed 8 April 2018. https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Rhodes-Must-Fall-Studentshave-their-say-20150402. Hobson, Janell. Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 2005. hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 2015. Iton, Richard. The Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Kessi, Shose and Josephine Cornell. ‘Coming to UCT: Black Students, Transformation and Discourses of Race’. Journal of Student Affairs in Africa 3, 2 (2015): 1–16. King, Debra Walker. African Americans and the Culture of Pain. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. Laband, John. ‘Toppling Statues, Burning Books and the Humanities in South African Universities’. Journal of the Helen Suzman Foundation 76 (2015): 15–21. Mahapa, Ramabina. ‘Little at UCT Saying “Black Child be Proud” ’. Cape Argus, 15 July 2014. Accessed 9 April 2018. https://www.iol.co.za/capeargus/little-at-uct-saying-black-childbe-proud-1720099. Marschall, Sabine. Landscape of Memory: Commemorative Monuments, Memorials and Public Statuary in Post-apartheid South Africa. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Mbeki, Thabo. ‘Let the People Speak: Why We Need a National Dialogue’. Daily Maverick, 5 May 2017. Accessed 11 July 2017. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/201705-05-let-the-people-speak-why-we-need-a-national-dialogue/#.WhRQj62ZP6A. Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso, 2000. Naidoo, Leigh-Ann. ‘We Shall Not be Moved or Led Astray: The Emergence of the 2015 Student Movement’. New Agenda 60 (2015): 12–14. Ndlovu, Musawenkosi. #FeesMustFall and Youth Mobilisation in South Africa: Reform or Revolution? London: Routledge, 2017. Papacharissi, Zizi. Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pertsovsky, Natalie. ‘South Africa: Here is the List of Art Destroyed on UCT’. AllAfrica, 9 June 2017. Accessed 13 July 2017. http://allafrica.com/stories/201706090891.html. Price, Max. ‘A Subtle Kind of Racism’. News24, 16 July 2017. Accessed 31 May 2018. https:// www.news24.com/Columnists/GuestColumn/a-subtle-kind-of-racism-20170716-2.

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Runciman, Carin. ‘SA is the Protest Capital of the World’. IOL News, 22 May 2017. Accessed 7 July 2017. https://www.iol.co.za/pretoria-news/sa-is-protest-capital-of-the-world9279206. Scher, Robin. ‘ “I Will Not Compromise about my Work”: David Goldblatt on Artistic Freedom, Censorship, and Moving His Archive out of South Africa’. ArtNews, 23 June 2017. Accessed 13 July 2017. http://www.artnews.com/2017/06/23/i-will-notcompromise-about-my-work-david-goldblatt-on-artistic-freedom-censorship-andmoving-his-archive-out-of-south-africa/. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Williams, Raymond. Politics and Letters: Interviews with the New Left Review. London: New Left Books, 1979.

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CHAPTER

10

Anger, Pain and the Body in the Public Sphere Anthea Garman

S

outh Africa is going through a moment of powerful political rupture. This rupture is not so much with the apartheid or colonial past as with the immediate democratic past, which has failed to deliver on its promises of equality for all and lacks a credible rupture with the apartheid past. South Africa’s rate of protest since 1994 has been alarmingly high, underlining how dissatisfied people are with the post-apartheid condition and how little they trust the process of waiting for government to deliver on its promises.1 Although students at formerly black universities have been protesting for years, since 2015 university students on other campuses have joined this rumbling revolution and explicitly made ‘decolonisation’, racism and dealing with the past very much part of the protest discourse.2 While these sites of protest and struggle are crucial for understanding the dissatisfaction with the continuance of the apartheid past, the public sphere is as serious and important a site of struggle for agenda-setting and new ways of knowing, talking, paying attention and getting a hearing. All speech works from a regime of truth. According to Michel Foucault: ‘ “ Truth” is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements. “Truth” is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A “regime” of truth … The

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political question, to sum up, is not error, illusion or alienated consciousness or ideology; it is truth itself.’3 Within the current political battles (for recognition and attention, for education, for proper services, for full citizenship and humanity), we also see a battle to change the regimes of truth that enable speech, to outlaw some types of speech and introduce others. We also see a powerful resurgence of racist, misogynist, fascist speech rooted in an older regime of truth (which until now has been somewhat silenced by the regimes of ‘constitutional democracy’ and ‘human rights for all’). Importantly, the often unspoken rules of engagement in the public sphere – which have relied on common-sense notions of allowing everyone a voice, ‘playing the ball, not the man’, ‘raising the quality of the argument, not shouting louder’, and so on – are being tested strenuously. Under these conditions, it seems that either critical rationality must fall or we must find very different ways of making arguments and persuasive statements, and hearing and listening. The imbrication of the operations of the present public sphere in the apartheid and colonial pasts has to be interrogated. The persistence of civilising governmentality must be assessed. And attunement to the positionality of speakers and listeners with widely varying experiences, knowledges and power must become an important consideration. The debates that go on in the South African public domain are primarily a battle over regimes of the sayable. If one pays attention to what is said on social media – primarily, but also in the agenda-setting, mainstream media – one hears young, black activists and intellectuals directly addressing the sayable and the unsayable and setting new terms for debate by speaking overtly about the how of the debate. This is evident in, for example, Thando Mgqolozana’s 2015 challenge to the ‘white’ literary establishment in South Africa about its race-biased structures, evident particularly in publishing companies and their outputs and in its pre-eminent spaces of talking – literary festivals.4 In addition to powerful, new, young voices demanding space and time, we also see strong statements about what these new voices will not be doing. They will not educate those who do not work to understand the new terms of engagement and its topics. They will not reassure those who find the new style of engagement abrasive or overly angry or unsubstantiated or unreasonable. They will not respect the old rules of engagement that demand deference to certain styles embedded in another regime of truth. Certain features have become evident in the South African public sphere (and these are echoed in other parts of the world where such contestation is happening): • A generational rift between the young and older activists. The usual deference and respect accorded to struggle heroes/veterans is suspended. For example, in a radio discussion involving apartheid-era activist Nomboniso Gasa and 240 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:59:35 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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•

•

•

•

•

•

present-day activist Wanelisa Xaba on CapeTalk 702, each accused the other of lack of respect and listening.5 Another example is the Economic Freedom Fighters’ (EFF) style of engagement in Parliament, with their strategies of dressing as workers, in red, their use of songs and their persistent use of house rules to interrupt proceedings. Extensive use of social media (particularly Twitter and Facebook), not only to organise and make declarations, but also to make news. (It is noteworthy that the university shutdown of October 2015 was almost entirely broadcast as news via Twitter, with weekend newspapers playing catch-up after five days of activity.) Notably ‘black Twitter’ has reached South Africa (after its emergence in the United States), indicating that a certain style and certain communicators are being recognised as devising and owning a public intellectual intervention.6 A strong focus on seizing the control and power over who says what and how. For example, in 2016, Rhodes University first-year student Mishka Wazar told Radio 702 host John Robbie on air that as a white man he could not express an opinion about the furore over hairstyles going on among black pupils at Pretoria Girls’ High (discussed in more detail later in this chapter).7 A powerful intersectionality consciousness with overt acknowledgement of the important concurrent positionalities of sexual orientation, gender, race and dis/ability, as well as class (which in this new iteration of struggle is not just the lens of analysis, but often another aspect of positionality or a takenfor-granted condition of blackness that it remains poor and still oppressed).8 A renewed ‘feminist’ consciousness with a powerful local, African inflection, which results in a challenge to ‘white’ feminism and its assumption of the simple solidarity of womanhood.9 An acknowledgement of embodied existence and experiences of pain, accompanied by statements of pain, rage and affect, which often also refuse to engage in evidence-based reasoning. There is an assumption of generational pain, illtreatment and exclusion.10 Rejection of disembodied, unaffected ways of knowing, which seem removed and theoretical and do not concern themselves with the feelings and lived realities of their subjects. This accusation is made particularly about researchers and theorists based at universities. The code word for this form of paraded knowledge is to ‘anthropologise’ situations and people.11 This hearkens back to the moment when the discipline of anthropology had to deal with its form of knowledge production on ‘natives’, which was based on and dependent on colonial-era expansion and control. 241 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:59:35 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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• Aesthetic and affective responses. Thierry Luescher’s research on the Must Fall movements points out that this is a very important dimension of these protests and that it is both ‘emotive and aesthetic’.12 He points to the performance by student Sethembile Msezane when the Cecil John Rhodes statue was being removed from the University of Cape Town (UCT) campus;13 the Shackville protest, also at UCT; the Luister documentary at Stellenbosch; and the renaming of spaces and buildings across campuses.14 As Nomusa Makhubu points out in chapter 9, aesthetic responses also demand that the political be seen clearly in the overtly aesthetic. In this light, Mgqolozana’s challenge to literary festivals is to see their imbrication in ways of being white and ‘civilised’ in South Africa and to undo their unquestioned pre-eminence in the literary field. • Demands for redress and restitution, which return us to the injustices and legacies of the colonial, pre-apartheid era. For example, at a book launch at the Amazwi South African Museum of Literature (formerly the National English Literary Museum) of Bridget Hilton-Barber’s account of being jailed for being an anti-apartheid activist, Student Comrade Prisoner Spy, an audience member asked why the author did not address the land issue in her memoir of white student activism in the 1980s. This style of engagement is not new; it has been gathering force over a number of years.15 These demands, behaviours and positions are used to insist that the public sphere open up again to new voices, new topics and new styles of representation.16 This can be seen as a thoroughly good thing because such an opening up to other voices enlarges and includes, thereby making the democratic space more useful, more viable, more possible of being owned by everyone. But, more insistently and importantly, these demands and behaviours also unsettle the public sphere’s powerful reliance on a particular rational-critical modus operandi, with its powerful adherence to logos (the argument, the statement) over ethos (the person/ positionality from which the statement comes). Some of the tactics used to unsettle the politics of the present also strike at the foundations of not only the public sphere, but also knowledge generation and consolidation based on rational, evidential techniques in the academic sphere. What we can know in a shared, accepted way is critical to making decisions, creating community, holding to social compact (rather than using force) and deciding on the shared future. The shifts and ruptures in what is sayable in the South African public sphere at the present moment deserve attention, as they enable us, again in Foucault’s words, to attempt a ‘history of the present’.17 Instead of judging the present through the 242 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:59:35 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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solidified narratives and fears of the past, we need a fearless look at how underlying regimes of truth are being challenged and changed by a new generation of activists and intellectuals stepping into the public domain. Such an examination not only looks into the what and how of statements made publicly, but also at who is operating in the public domain – who is speaking, who is silent and, very importantly, how to listen and create spaces and platforms for attention and attentiveness.

IDEAS, ARGUMENTS, STATEMENTS: THE BODY AND POWER – MAKING THE CONNECTIONS In David Garland’s 2014 essay on Foucault’s use of archaelogy, genealogy and the ‘history of the present’, he points out that Foucault tested a number of methods in order to better understand the phenomena of the present. He shows that Foucault’s pragmatic refining of methods across a number of sites of study was about understanding how power works, how power and knowledge are entwined and how this complex is enacted/inscribed on the human body.18 For Foucault, there is no thought, statement or idea without its connection to power and its effect on the body. Foucault studied prisons, for example, in order to show in a crude and obvious way how power is enacted in a disciplinary way on the human body so that knowledge can be extracted and codified. But the larger insight is that disciplinary techniques are deeply embedded in all facets of our societies. Power and knowledge are entwined as techniques (in what Garland calls ‘insidious power-knowledge relations’) and the bodies that feel the brunt of these incursions are the least advantaged in our societies and the most disciplined/administered so that they conform. It is useful to revisit these methods and understandings in the light of the present forceful foregrounding of the black (and often female) body in the public domain as a counter to disembodied statements. If we draw on Foucault’s methods and insights about governmentality, we have the means to connect – and deconstruct – the relationship between the goings-on in the public domain and the exercises of power that are felt as body blows by those challenging the present regime of truth, which disingenuously says that all South Africans have a voice and will be heard – as long as their arguments are logical and truthful. In between the protests of #FeesMustFall in October of 2015 and the protests against the costs of higher education in September 2016, the university where I work (Rhodes) experienced a major rupture in April 2016 with the appearance of a list of 11 men’s names on social media called simply #RUReferencelist. This list had no traceable author and no explanations. Within minutes women who had been 243 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:59:35 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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sexually assaulted by men on the list had gathered to demand that some of the men living in residence on campus be ejected from their rooms and that the university arrange for them to stand trial for their crimes. That action and the university reaction (insisting that the men be left alone unless formal charges were laid by the women and then accusing the women of ‘kidnapping’) led to a week of academic shutdown. Barricades were laid, women students stood at the entrance to campus baring their bodies, and intense staff and student meetings were held over the simmering issue of rape culture and impunity. While the university sought a court interdict against protests and initiated a task team investigation into its inability to deal effectively with sexual harassment, assault and rape, and lectures resumed as normal, the issues raised continued to spill over with intense anger in public forums. One public event that descended into acrimony and chaos was organised by the deputy minister of higher education, who had initiated a countrywide visit of campuses to speak about sexual assault in August 2016. The meeting at Rhodes was disrupted, at first silently with placards, but then loudly and forcefully, so that the speakers were unable to talk. Throughout the year protests dealing with rape culture were led by young, undergraduate women, articulate in feminist and intersectional theory and uncompromising in their demands for recognition of their embodied blackness and femaleness and the injustice of their abuse and pain. Their statements resonate with and echo the #FeesMustFall protesters, who made calls for ‘decolonisation’ of knowledge and teaching. The #RUReferencelist protest and its messy and unsatisfying aftermath (there is little resolution to the real, intractable problem of how men exercise their power on women’s bodies in a society like ours where even universities cannot devise creative solutions that stick) showed, in a way that #FeesMustFall did not, the dangerous lived experience of being female and black. The fact that all this took place in an environment that prizes and prioritises respect for knowledge and adherence to evidence-based reasoning is not coincidental. When protests erupted at Pretoria Girls’ High School about acceptable hairstyles, they illuminated the connections between the form of governmentality in the new South Africa, its ‘Model C’ schools and cultural assimilation – out of which many of the young women protesters have come into the university education system. Black pupils in these schools describe proscriptions about hair, dress, language, accent and other behaviours, which have a totality reminiscent of apartheid. This is more than the obsession of some schools to regiment all pupils into standards of neat and orderly behaviour. Certain pupils are being ‘civilised’ by these means, revealing that underlying these proscriptions is a governmentality rooted in the ongoing coloniality of power. Talal Asad says: 244 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:59:35 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Within the modern world which has come into being, changes have taken place as the effect of dominant political power by which new possibilities are constructed and old ones destroyed. The changes do not reflect a simple expansion of the range of individual choice, but the creation of conditions in which only new (i.e. modern) choices can be made. The reason for this is that the changes involve the re-formation of subjectivities and the re-organisation of social spaces in which subjects act and are acted upon. The modern state – imperial, colonial, post-colonial – has been crucial to these processes of construction/destruction.19 Those affected are reacting not only to practical situations, but also to the form of governmentality enacted on their bodies. For the protesters the body-knowledgepower connection is a daily, lived experience and they are alienated and enraged.

RETHINKING ETHOS The imagined public sphere is putatively and primarily about talking, arguing, debating and persuading, but if knowledge-power is enacted on the body, then all this hot air has vehicle, form, effect and affect. The much-vaunted reasonableness and rationality that are crucial components of the public sphere cannot then be separated from forms of power-knowledge that operate across society in disciplining ways. To return to the incident when first-year university student Mishka Wazar was interviewed by John Robbie on 702 as a former Pretoria Girls’ High pupil: Robbie told Wazar that schools need rules and uniformity, and that cleanliness and conformity are key components of school life, regardless of race or gender or time. Robbie was activating that same power-knowledge regime and considering it a reasonable and desirable exercise on the bodies of young, black women. Robbie also asserted his right to hold an opinion based on a generalised understanding of freedom of expression, regardless of his subject position. Wazar dismissed both claims, rejecting the regime of truth he was activating and pegging him to a subject position that had no right to assert a view because as a white male he is not subject to that exercise of power on his body. While it seems that such a response is a refutation of the dialogic nature of the public sphere and the right to a voice, it is clear that the first-year student had read and understood better the power-knowledgebody-opinion nexus than the experienced radio host. The ability to read situations in this way and to intuitively connect them with the pain inflicted on the body for South Africans of colour can be further understood 245 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:59:35 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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with some help from political theorist Susan Bickford. In her book Dissonance of Democracy, she talks about categories of people who are treated as ‘whats’ instead of ‘whos’. Referring to the work of Hannah Arendt,20 Bickford says of liberal democracies: ‘The paradox of plurality lies in the fact that each human being is a unique “who” – yet every human being shares this quality of uniqueness ... human plurality means that we are both undeniably distinctive, and inescapably more than one … Plurality is a central condition of human existence, and yet it is fragile; it can disappear under conditions of tyranny, mass society, or anytime the public realm and its attendant political equality is supplanted or destroyed.’21 The condition of post-repressive, post-colonial countries like South Africa is that alongside this desire to incorporate everyone into a liberal democratic space of individual freedoms and agency is also the persistence of the practice of disciplining the newly enfranchised into ‘proper’ behaviours that correlate with the dominant behaviours of the past. As Bickford puts it: ‘Instead of being plural, unique individuals, they are interchangeably alike, with identical and predictable needs – in effect, a mass. And so … the activity appropriate to the social realm is not action or speech, but administration – the bureaucratic process by which we find efficient means to already determined ends.’22 In South Africa, the very successful bonding of classes of people into whats (‘the black masses’, ‘the majority’, ‘the poor’, ‘the rural’, as well as ‘women’ and ‘youth’) in the apartheid period, for the purposes of both repressive governance and resistance, persists into the present in attitudes, media texts and politics. I would argue that the public performances and statements we see now are responding to that ‘whatness’ by showing – and demanding recognition – that this persistence of disciplinary power refuses to allow certain people to take up the kind of agency that marks them as whos. By insisting on a breaking of the familiar ‘what’ categories, we are challenged to let new actors, agents or whos emerge, so that they can define their own subjectivities, classes or groups and their own programmes and engagements. This understanding of the active, speaking ‘who’, the ethos, comes from Bickford’s use of the Aristotelian idea that persuasion in public discussion rests on three ‘proofs’ – the character of the speaker (ethos), the disposition of the listener (pathos) and the strength of the argument (logos).23 This three-part formulation is helpful in seeing that a new generation of young black intellectuals, who are also university educated, base their public contributions in the ethos of the speaker first – as Wazar did – and the pathos of the listener second, if at all (Robbie was probably treated more as a hostile witness than a listener). The new style of engagement also entails an abandonment of the hallowed idea of the logos as the critical core of any statement or argument in public, and the only proof of credibility. The performance 246 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:59:35 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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of a legitimate ethos for the speaker entails much more than a rational argument; it rests primarily on personal experience (which might also be inherited, generational experience) and the demonstration of affect.

RETHINKING PATHOS, RECEPTIVITY AND ATTUNEMENT Notable too is the calling into public space of a new type of listener and a sidelining of speakers and listeners previously highly privileged in a public space that accommodated their ideas, concerns and styles of engagement. This has resulted in the conundrum in South Africa that it is often white men who find themselves ignored or told to be quiet in public debate, to the extent that this particular group has become the litmus test for whether the principle of freedom of expression (a constitutional right) is being flouted. Where are we to turn for help in dealing with this complexity (which is evidenced when the most powerful social group globally feels threatened and turns to the Constitution to protect itself from those who socially and economically have much less power)? Recently a number of thinkers, perplexed by the persistent inequities and shortcomings of democratic states, have taken issue with a core idea of democratic theory, that protection of voice is the crucial component in securing freedom, choice, subjectivity and a check on unbridled power.24 In dealing with inequity, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, misogyny and the cultural annihilation of indigenous groups, these theorists ask whether the listening intention is more important in the workings of democracy and public deliberation than the much-vaunted, highly prized and protected expression of voice. This approach shifts the terrain in powerful ways and opens up possibilities of analysis and understanding. In her discussion of ‘listening and political action’, Kate Lacey takes issue with the idea that listening is essentially a passive exercise and therefore not suited to the active world of politics: ‘Listening is at the heart of what it means to be in the world, to be active, to be political … Listening tends to be taken for granted, a natural mode of reception that is more passive than active, but listening is, I would argue, a critical category that ought to be right at the heart of any consideration of public life.’25 Lacey then considers the excess of attention given to the idea of ‘voice’ and the attempts to protect freedom of expression. She argues that by contrast ‘the presence of a listening public is simply assumed, and no special freedoms or protections are afforded to the act of listening’.26 The critical corollary to listening is understanding and this is also taken for granted and not given enough political attention: ‘The figure of the listener is a shadowy one in political theory.’27 247 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:59:35 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Lacey is arguing, as others have, that theoretically the notion of listening must be taken out of the realm of the implicit and into the realm of the explicit.28 As a former radio journalist, Lacey uses her knowledge of sound and language to show that the modern public sphere is historically rooted in the development of ‘print culture, capitalism, nationalism and the Enlightenment’, in which the public was constituted as a ‘reading public’.29 The consequence was that not only was reading privileged over hearing, but speaking has been treated in law as a property attached to an individual and therefore the only right (in this context) to be defended and protected: ‘The speech act as “self-expression” was conceived as a product to be circulated and exchanged in the free marketplace of ideas. The act of listening could not be conceptualised in this way, could not belong to an individual subject … the defence of the freedom of speech as a property right could not, then, be extended to embrace the freedom of listening or the freedom of communication more broadly.’ The inability to concretise listening and pin it down in law means that a very important facet of its value for public life, sociality and civil speech has been ignored. But listening ‘is concerned precisely with guaranteeing the context within which freedom of expression can operate as communication’.30 Jim Garrison says: ‘Western modernity’s stress on “rational” self-assertion through the autonomous individual who has the right to speak and be heard, ironically enough, devalues listening and listeners. The irony is felt far more by the oppressed than the oppressors, and by those from cultural traditions that place a great value on listening … much of what claims to be democratic, equal and empowered dialogue, the right to speak and be heard, is really a conduit metaphor monologue.’31

EAVESDROPPING AS A RHETORICAL TACTIC: A SIDE NOTE At this point, I would like to take a step back from the argument I am making to add a note about position and methodology. Many of the situations I describe in this chapter I have been witness to or party to in some way. Many involve people I have been watching, interviewing and taking note of in order to further my understanding of the features of the South African public sphere – the way people talk and the way they point to or act out of an underlying regime of truth or governmentality. Listening theory has become a very important theoretical tool for me to unpick these situations. But in order to make sense of my own complex positioning and choices, I want to outline a research stance that is offered by Krista 248 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:59:35 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Ratcliffe, a feminist scholar interested in the value of rhetoric. Ratcliffe is keen to harness the power of listening for the purposes of illuminating hidden or invisible power dynamics and she puts forward the concept of ‘eavesdropping’ as a way to do this. Her argument rests on resisting the modern dictionary definition of eavesdropping, as illicit listening for private purposes, for an older etymology that literally means listening from under the eaves of a house, or from the ‘edge’, ‘margin’ or ‘border’.32 Ratcliffe suggests that ‘standing outside, in an uncomfortable spot, on the border of knowing and not knowing, granting others the inside position, listening to learn … [is] a rhetorical tactic of purposely positioning oneself on the edge of one’s own knowing so as to overhear and learn from others and, I would add, from oneself ’.33 She continues: ‘Such a tactic is needed because in our daily exchanges we are too often … seduced into identifying with the main characters of cultural discourses.’34 Eavesdropping is a way of positioning so that one is not addressed directly, but paying attention to an interchange from the side. Ratcliffe suggests that such a side position allows one to identify discourses and listen for ‘(un)conscious presences, absences, unknowns’.35 It also allows the eavesdropper to hear ‘over the edges of our own knowing, for thinking what is commonly unthinkable within our own logics’. I have a powerful sense of recognition when I read Ratcliffe’s words on eavesdropping as I realise that this a method I have used for decades, beginning when I was a journalist and trying to understand more than simply to report. It has continued as a practice into my life as a researcher. I have often deliberately inserted myself into situations where complex issues are being discussed so that I can know more than just the content of the interchanges (which could be picked up from transcripts or videos and audio), but can also feel and experience the atmosphere of interaction, the bodily positions, the verbal registers and facial cues. Actually hearing the words enables a seeing that is much richer (as Ratcliffe points out).36 This position is somewhat akin to what Susan Booysen calls the ‘scholar-activist’ position, but is more strongly embodied in the research of someone like Leigh-Ann Naidoo, who is both a doctoral student involved in the #FeesMustFall movement and a commentator on it.37

EAVESDROPPING ON A FRACTIOUS DEBATE In July 2016, the National Arts Festival held a public debate at Think!Fest on the costs of South African higher education. Judge Dennis Davis, a law professor at 249 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:59:35 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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UCT and a well-known moderator of public debate, was chairing. On the panel were Dr Enver Motala from the University of Fort Hare; Dr Sizwe Mabizela, vice chancellor of Rhodes; Dr David Fryer, economics lecturer at Rhodes; and activist Lindsay Maasdorp, spokesperson for Black First Land First.38 Maasdorp’s input went straight to the core issue that most preoccupies black speakers in the public sphere: ‘Who is in the room?’ and ‘Who is on the panel?’ he asked. He concluded: ‘The people affected are not in the room.’ At question time, the first person to speak said: ‘This panel does not represent #FeesMustFall, which was led by women; it doesn’t represent the financially excluded students and the women sacrificing their bodies. Ask students who shut down the universities, what are you thinking?’ Speakers from the floor refused to confine themselves to an economic discussion about the cost of higher education. They insisted that continuing oppression and land redistribution be brought into the discussion. These statements underline the point made above about the ethos of the speakers needing to be legitimately rooted in both experience and affectedness. Shortly after this, the entire event came to a screaming impasse in response to a white, male speaker, Mark Oppenheimer. He began by giving his name (a requirement made by Davis for those wishing to speak) and then, in response to the murmured reaction to the name ‘Oppenheimer’, he said: ‘Yes, I’m from the Oppenheimer family that oppressed most people in this room.’ Maasdorp (supported by others in the audience) began to shout: ‘You do not have a right to speak. You will not speak. You will respect us.’39 Davis admonished: ‘Everyone has a right to speak.’ He dissolved the gathering shortly afterwards. The event organisers (which included me as the convenor of the 2016 event) were subsequently blamed by proponents of freedom of expression for their failure to protect voice, and in particular Oppenheimer’s voice.40 But if probing questions are asked about the capacity of the powerful (white, educated, employed, male) at the event to play the role of discerning listeners, then the lack becomes evident, and Oppenheimer’s lack of attention extremely clear. As one woman in the audience had commented before he stood up: South Africa is a racist country that oppresses black people, and now we are treating this space as if it’s going to open up possibilities for black people to think through their problems, but sitting with the very same people who created the problems … colonialism, violence and genocide, taking away land … we are trying to frame some sort of raceless debate in a racist society … exclusion from freedom is about black people, about us, who grow up in townships … we are talking about our own lived experience, but you 250 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:59:35 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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do not have that experience … until we are truthful about the history of this country then this is a waste of time.41 This, and other statements of the same kind, came before the explosion around Oppenheimer’s attempt to speak. He did not give consideration to the presence of a historical context and the weight of it borne by people present before he spoke. This shucking off of the responsibility to listen, and the over-prioritisation of voice, exacerbates the charged nature of many public discussions in South Africa. Listening, Andrew Dobson concludes, ‘is therefore a site of contestation’.42 The central issue, which underlies all debate, argument and engagement now in South Africa’s public sphere, I would suggest, is not so much about whether voice is being adequately protected, but whether privileged, educated and advantaged people can listen in the ways that are being demanded of them. Can a John Robbie hear a Mishka Wazar without feeling that his rights to freedom of expression are being taken away? Can he use his secure, powerful subject position to pay attention? Or is his subject position, with its insistence on its own right to voice, an impediment to such listening? Can he pay attention to the exercise of power-knowledge on the bodies of young, black women? And what would happen if he does? Lisbeth Lipari addresses the interpersonal situation that occurs frequently in interchanges such as this in the public domain by calling the encounter and the response of the person with power a ‘hosting’.43 She says: I don’t have to understand, although you may feel ‘understood.’ I don’t have to translate your words into familiar categories or ideas. I don’t have to ‘feel’ what you feel, or ‘know’ what it feels like to be you. What I do need to do is stand in proximity to your pain. To stand with you, right next to you, and to belong to you, fully present to the ongoing expression of you. Letting go of my ideas about who you are, who I am, what ‘should’ be. I let all that go, and stay present, attending, aware.44 This might sound overly psychologically demanding for public situations. But if we return to Bickford’s focus on logos-ethos-pathos, this hosting/listening is an ‘attunement’ (a word used by Lipari) to the ethos of the speaker. It is more than just paying attention to the words and argument. It also requires the listener to pay attention to where the words are coming from, who embodies them in the sense of bearing their weight and pain. It can also be understood as an attunement to the pathos or disposition of the listener – again, an attentiveness to the positionality of the one(s) hearing. While such hosting very seldom takes place with sensitivity and 251 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:59:35 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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thoughtfulness in many of the fractious, aggressive and complicated interchanges that now characterise public and mediated spaces in South Africa, there is no doubt that there is wisdom and usefulness in approaches that attend to the inequitable exercise of power on different speakers and listeners.

RETHINKING LOGOS Also important is a reconsideration of logos, or the very grounds of the normative public sphere, discursive rationality. These challenges to critical rationality question the violence of language, the belief that statements can be disembodied, the negation of power dynamics, the silencing that the accepted forms of ordered engagement trade in, the differential access various people have to voice, opinion, mediums of expression and attentive reception. There are some important points to be made about our general, common-sense understandings of making statements and arguments. Firstly, even though we have learnt techniques of appearing to be calm, rational and unemotional, Bickford says that Western discourses about emotion are ‘ambivalent and multivalent’ in that there is an assumption of a struggle between reason and emotion as a chaotic force and that reason must dominate emotion. But there is also a strand of recognition that ‘emotion signifies a fully alive and committed way of being in the world, and emotional experience is the fundamental element of genuine human selfhood’.45 Bickford is concerned with showing that rationality and thought do not work without feeling and affect. It is important to state and restate this as a factor in considerations of critical rationality because expressions of anger are so often characterised as irrational, uncivil and therefore to be discounted or policed. The placard waved by a [white] academic staff member at the #RhodesMustFall protests at UCT in 2015, ‘Don’t raise your voice, improve your argument’, sounds reasonable enough on the surface, but it was received as aggressively condescending and dismissive of expressions of legitimate anger by protesters. It implied also that those who are angry have no rationality (rather than that the angry statements might have been without merit). This is dangerous territory as it works alongside racist and misogynist assumptions that logos cannot come out of the mouths of certain kinds of people. Secondly, words and arguments are often in themselves violent, with consequences for the disempowered, and this possibility does not diminish because the statements are based on evidence or highly rational – often quite the contrary.

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Lipari uses religious sources to insist that ‘listening-thinking’ and ‘thinking-being’ are the only ethical ways to make arguments and engage in knowledge production. Neither can be separated from lived experience and situated reality. Ultimately what Lipari wants to achieve is ‘listening-being’, a state that enables encounters with alterity – ‘a listening that does not merely tolerate but openly embraces difference, misunderstanding, and uncertainty, and invites entrance to a human communication and consciousness beyond discursive thinking, to dwelling places of understanding that language cannot, as yet, reach’.46 Her position reminds us that while many wordsmiths and generators of knowledge strive for precision in their use of language, nevertheless words do not entirely and ultimately capture the range of human experiences and knowledges. Words do fail and our intellectual efforts to cover up this failure often go hand in hand with our education-induced suspicions of intuition and strong emotion. The excess of attention to logos-based rationality results in prioritising words over people; valuing the construction of a sentence more than its impact or effect; treating an argument, to some extent, as independent of its speaker and its listeners; treating statements as disembodied, anthropologised, abstracted, decontextualised, dehistoricised and intellectualised. This attitude lacks care, ignores the violence of words, does not offer recognition to Others, dismisses history, pays no attention to power, lacks self-reflection and disregards pathos, making the listening invisible, rather than crucial for dialogue, and the listener unimportant. Emphasis on the primacy of rational argumentation is often linked to the manner of delivery (the rhetorical devices used) and the insistence that there is a social talking code that must be adhered to so that speaking does not become overly personal or rude. This social code is often expressed as ‘civility’ (the connection to ‘civilising’ as an intention that arises out of a persistent form of governmentality is not coincidental). Deborah Eicher-Catt argues that we need to make distinctions between authentic and inauthentic civility and between maintaining ‘the common good’ and what she calls ‘the good of the common’.47 Her analysis of civility rests on a semiotic and phenomenological understanding of the power differentials between participants and their Others in public spaces. She says: ‘There can be … a dominating effect to the enactment of civility, because civility regulates behaviour at a public level … civility defines the interpersonal boundary between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour in a given public situation through the process of setting up rules that necessarily include and exclude … There is no denying that civility can be used as a tool of power.’48 Civility, as an idea to regulate public speech, often operates to silence and discipline. It can also erase the asymmetries between participants. The idea of the

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common good does the same work, as those with power determine what constitutes that ‘good’ – usually understood as achieving consensus or an actual decision or agreement, or as maintaining order. Eicher-Catt asks the fundamental question here: ‘Common for whom?’49 She believes that the aim of public discussion should rather be to create a commons among participants, a far more difficult aim than protecting the expression of opinions and arguments. This is what she calls ‘communicative labour’ because it involves recognising power differentials; recognising the positions, differences and identities of Others; and respecting the difficult work involved in creating spaces that make such recognitions overt.

SOME DIFFERENT REFERENCE POINTS So what would it look like if in this fractious, game-changing moment we were to reorganise our instances of publicness and argumentative encounters around some very different poles? I would like to suggest some alternative reference points: • Attentiveness to who is in the room, and who bears the brunt of disciplinary power. • Explicit listening, which takes account of differential power and puts the burden to listen on those who have the most access to voice. • Awareness of the historical weight of statements. • Calling out statements embedded in regimes of truth or a colonial governmentality, which are in need of revision or abandonment. • The need for those who suffer the disciplining power to be afforded possibilities to speak as they need/want to and to be heard with attentiveness. • A recognition that the use of affect is an important component of such speaking. If we made these objectives explicit, we might be emboldened to move away from the arid and worn-out notions of the supremacy of the disembodied, rational argument, the putative equality and capacity of every speaker, and adherence to ‘freedom of speech’ as a regulating, non-negotiable principle. This is not an acceptance that ‘identity politics’ now rules our public debates, which is how much of this difficulty is dismissed, without careful analysis of the challenges being posed. This approach is a careful reconsideration of the practice of prioritising logos over ethos and pathos, and the costs of that adherence. Resting on her study of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Eicher-Catt uses an interesting term to better capture who should be seen, heard and recognised in these moments of encounter, the ‘speaking/listening body-subject’.50 She argues 254 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:59:35 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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that we need to move away from an understanding of public discussion as ‘only content-oriented – the place where differences about topic/issues are negotiated in such a way that the conversation keeps going’ and focus on creating the capacity for ‘communal existence’.51 This can only be done, in a world full of fractious difference infused with painful history, by paying more attention to the ‘who’ than to the word. This ‘who’ is both a speaker and a listener, both a subject and a body. When we hold those four capacities in tension and act on them as axiomatic, we have more chance of actual dialogue, actual understanding and real social change.

A DIFFERENT WAY OF LISTENING AND BEING I began this chapter by noting that there has been a furious battle in the South African public domain over what is sayable. But there is no doubt that the identity of certain speakers has also become dubious. Instead of concluding that a new form of intolerance is at work, based on crude identity politics, and that the remedy is to hold fast to the constitutional provisions of freedom of expression and ride out the storm, I am arguing for a different way of seeing the public sphere and behaving in our interactions with one another. This entails, firstly, going back to Aristotle (via Bickford) to insist that statements can never stand alone without their speakers and listeners to interpret them; and, secondly, understanding that statements are always embedded in regimes of truth (there is no such thing as a free-floating opinion or idea) and that several regimes of truth are operating simultaneously, but also that some regimes of truth are oppressive and need to be rejected. I am insisting also that listening and hearing are highly devalued and are probably more important than speech as an instrument to recalibrate public discussion and social belonging.

NOTES

1 2

3 4



Julian Brown, South Africa’s Insurgent Citizens (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2015). For a detailed discussion on the student ‘revolution’, see Leigh-Ann Naidoo, ‘We Shall Not be Moved or Led Astray: The Emergence of the 2015 Student Movement’, New Agenda 60 (2015): 12–14; Susan Booysen, ‘Introduction’, in Fees Must Fall: Student Revolt, Decolonisation and Governance in South Africa, ed. Susan Booysen (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2016), 1–20; Musawenkosi Ndlovu, #FeesMustFall and Youth Mobilisation in South Africa: Reform or Revolution? (London: Routledge, 2017). Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 133. ‘ “Look at Yourselves – It’s Very Abnormal”: Thando Mgqolozana Quits South Africa’s “White Literary System” ’, BooksLive, 18 May 2015, accessed 5 June 2018, http://bookslive. 255 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:59:35 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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co.za/blog/2015/05/18/look-at-yourselves-its-very-abnormal-thando-mgqolozanaquits-south-africas-white-literary-system/. 5 ‘What is the Rhodes Must Fall Movement?’ Primedia, accessed 26 February 2016, https:// soundcloud.com/primediabroadcasting/what-is-the-rhodesmustfall-movement. 6 ‘#RainbowNation: The Rise of South Africa’s Black Twitter’, Christian Science Monitor, 7 March 2013, accessed 5 June 2018, http://www.csmonitor.com/World/ Africa/2013/0307/RainbowNation-The-rise-of-South-Africa-s-black-Twitter. 7 ‘John Robbie Lambasted over Pretoria Girls High’, eNCA, 29 August 2016, accessed 5 June 2018, https://www.enca.com/south-africa/702-radio-host-takes-the-heat-aftercomments-on-pretoria-girls-high-racism-allegations. 8 See Sandy Ndelu, Simamkele Dlakavu and Barbara Boswell, ‘Womxn’s and Nonbinary Activists’ Contribution to the RhodesMustFall and FeesMustFall Student Movements: 2015 and 2016’, Agenda 31, 3–4 (2017): 1–4. 9 Ndelu, Dlakavu and Boswell, ‘Womxn’s and Nonbinary Activists’ Contribution’. 10 Ndelu, Dlakavu and Boswell, ‘Womxn’s and Nonbinary Activists’ Contribution’. 11 See Think!Fest, ‘Student Voices Dominate Hashtag Protest Discussion’, 6 July 2016, accessed 30 July 2019, https://thinkfest.wordpress.com/2016/07/06/student-voicesdominate-hashtag-protest-discussion/; and T.O. Molefe, ‘Cowardice and Courage’, 21 May 2015, accessed 30 July 2019, https://tomolefe.tumblr.com/post/119519005388/ cowardice-and-courage. 12 Thierry Luescher, proposition 9 in ‘The New Student Movement in South Africa: From #RhodesMustFall to #FeesMustFall’, accessed 30 July 2019, http://www.hsrc.ac.za/en/ departments/education-and-skills-development/student-movement. 13 ‘Performance Artist Lifts Her Wings in Protest at Cecil Rhodes Statue Removal’, Face 2 Face Africa, 15 May 2015, accessed 5 June 2018, https://face2faceafrica.com/article/ sethembile-msezane-cecil-rhodes; and ‘Elle Meets Sithembile Msezane’, Elle, accessed 5 June 2018, http://www.elle.co.za/elle-meets-sithembile-msezane/. 14 My notes from his talk at Rhodes University on 9 March 2016. 15 Naidoo, ‘We Shall Not be Moved’. 16 I say ‘again’ because over the centuries who can speak in public about what topics and how has been an ongoing project alongside the various iterations of the political struggle for emancipation. Anthea Garman, ‘The “Refeudalisation” or the “Return of the Repressed” of the Public Sphere?’ Ecquid Novi 32, 3 (2011): 4–18. 17 David Garland, ‘What is a “History of the Present”? On Foucault’s Genealogies and Their Critical Preconditions’, Punishment and Society 16, 4 (2014): 365–384; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977). 18 Garland, ‘History of the Present’, 376. 19 Talal Asad, ‘Conscripts of Western Civilisation’, in Dialectical Anthropology: Essays in Honour of Stanley Diamond, ed. Christine Gailey (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1992), 337. 20 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 21 Susan Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 59. 22 Bickford, Dissonance of Democracy, 72. 23 Susan Bickford, ‘Emotion Talk and Political Judgement’, Journal of Politics 73, 4 (2011): 1028. 24 Bickford, Dissonance of Democracy; Jennifer Reilly Bluma, ‘Weaving Ropes with the Desert Fathers: (Re)Inventing Rhetorical Theory as Silence and Listening’, International

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Journal of Listening 30, 3 (2016): 134–150; Nick Couldry, ‘Rethinking the Politics of Voice’, Continuum 23, 4 (2009): 579–582; Kate Crawford, ‘Following You: Disciplines of Listening in Social Media’, Continuum 23, 4 (2009): 525–535; Tanja Dreher, ‘Listening across Difference: Media and Multiculturalism beyond the Politics of Voice’, Continuum 23, 4 (2009): 445–458; Kate Lacey, Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013); Lisbeth Lipari, ‘Listening, Thinking, Being’, Communication Theory 20, 3 (2010): 348–362; John Tebbut, ‘The Object of Listening’, Continuum 23, 4 (2009): 549–559; Herman Wasserman, ‘Journalism in a New Democracy: The Ethics of Listening’, Communicatio 39, 1 (2013): 67–84. 25 Lacey, Listening Publics, 163. 26 Lacey, Listening Publics, 165. 27 Lacey, Listening Publics, 167. 28 In particular, Couldry, ‘Rethinking the Politics’; Dreher, ‘Listening across Difference’; and Bickford, Dissonance of Democracy and ‘Emotion Talk’. 29 Lacey, Listening Publics, 169. 30 Lacey, Listening Publics, 169. 31 Jim Garrison, ‘A Deweyan Theory of Democratic Listening’, Educational Theory 46, 4 (1996): 432. 32 Krista Ratcliffe, ‘Eavesdropping as Rhetorical Tactic: History, Whiteness, and Rhetoric’, Journal of Advanced Composition 20, 1 (2000): 90. 33 Ratcliffe, ‘Eavesdropping’, 90. 34 Ratcliffe, ‘Eavesdropping’, 90. 35 Ratcliffe, ‘Eavesdropping’, 91. 36 Krista Ratcliffe, ‘Rhetorical Listening: A Trope for Interpretive Invention and a “Code of Cross-Cultural Conduct” ’, College Composition and Communication 51, 2 (1999): 203. 37 Booysen, ‘Introduction’, 4. 38 Think!Fest, ‘Free Education, Free Speech and Responsibility’, 11 July 2016, accessed 5 June 2018, https://thinkfest.wordpress.com/2016/07/11/free-education-free-speechand-responsibility/#more-4345. 39 ‘National Arts Festival’s “ThinkFest” Shows How Whites Still Own Everything’, Black Opinion, 7 July 2016, accessed 5 June 2018, http://blackopinion.co.za/2016/07/07/ national-arts-festivals-thinkfest-shows-whites-still-everything/. 40 Mark Oppenheimer, ‘Free Speech: A Vanishing Right’, Rational Standard, 18 July 2016, accessed 5 June 2018, https://rationalstandard.com/free-speech-vanishing-right/. 41 Think!Fest, ‘Free Education’. 42 Andrew Dobson, Listening for Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 41. 43 Lipari, ‘Listening’, 350. 44 Lipari, ‘Listening’, 350–351. 45 Bickford, ‘Emotion Talk’, 1026. 46 Lipari, ‘Listening’, 360. 47 Deborah Eicher-Catt, ‘A Semiotic Interpretation of Authentic Civility: Preserving the Ineffable for the Good of the Common’, Communication Quarterly 61, 1 (2013): 1. 48 Eicher-Catt, ‘Semiotic Interpretation’, 11. 49 Eicher-Catt, ‘Semiotic Interpretation’, 11. 50 Eicher-Catt, ‘Semiotic Interpretation’, 8. 51 Eicher-Catt, ‘Semiotic Interpretation’, 15.

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REFERENCES Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Asad, Talal. ‘Conscripts of Western Civilisation’. In Dialectical Anthropology: Essays in Honour of Stanley Diamond, edited by Christine Gailey, 333–351. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1992. Bickford, Susan. The Dissonance of Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Bickford, Susan. ‘Emotion Talk and Political Judgement’. Journal of Politics 73, 4 (2011): 1025–1037. Bluma, Jennifer Reilly. ‘Weaving Ropes with the Desert Fathers: (Re)Inventing Rhetorical Theory as Silence and Listening’. International Journal of Listening 30, 3 (2016): 134–150. Booysen, Susan. ‘Introduction’. In Fees Must Fall: Student Revolt, Decolonisation and Governance in South Africa, edited by Susan Booysen, 1–20. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2016. Brown, Julian. South Africa’s Insurgent Citizens. Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2015. Couldry, Nick. ‘Rethinking the Politics of Voice’. Continuum 23, 4 (2009): 579–582. Crawford, Kate. ‘Following You: Disciplines of Listening in Social Media’. Continuum 23, 4 (2009): 525–535. Dobson, Andrew. Listening for Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Dreher, Tanja. ‘Listening across Difference: Media and Multiculturalism beyond the Politics of Voice’. Continuum 23, 4 (2009): 445–458. Eicher-Catt, Deborah. ‘A Semiotic Interpretation of Authentic Civility: Preserving the Ineffable for the Good of the Common’. Communication Quarterly 61, 1 (2013): 1–17. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon, 1977. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Garland, David. ‘What is a “History of the Present”? On Foucault’s Genealogies and Their Critical Preconditions’. Punishment and Society 16, 4 (2014): 365–384. Garman, Anthea. ‘The “Refeudalisation” or the “Return of the Repressed” of the Public Sphere?’ Ecquid Novi 32, 3 (2011): 4–18. Garrison, Jim. ‘A Deweyan Theory of Democratic Listening’. Educational Theory 46, 4 (1996): 429–451. Lacey, Kate. Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Lipari, Lisbeth. ‘Listening, Thinking, Being’. Communication Theory 20, 3 (2010): 348–362. Luescher, Thierry. ‘The New Student Movement in South Africa: From #RhodesMustFall to #FeesMustFall’. Accessed 30 July 2019. http://www.hsrc.ac.za/en/departments/ education-and-skills-development/student-movement. Molefe, T.O. ‘Cowardice and Courage’. 21 May 2015. Accessed 30 July 2019. https://tomolefe. tumblr.com/post/119519005388/cowardice-and-courage. Naidoo, Leigh-Ann. ‘We Shall Not be Moved or Led Astray: The Emergence of the 2015 Student Movement’. New Agenda 60 (2015): 12–14. Ndelu, Sandy, Simamkele Dlakavu and Barbara Boswell. ‘Womxn’s and Nonbinary Activists’ Contribution to the RhodesMustFall and FeesMustFall Student Movements: 2015 and 2016’. Agenda 31, 3–4 (2017): 1–4. Ndlovu, Musawenkosi. #FeesMustFall and Youth Mobilisation in South Africa: Reform or Revolution? London: Routledge, 2017. Oppenheimer, Mark. ‘Free Speech: A Vanishing Right’. Rational Standard, 18 July 2016. Accessed 5 June 2018. https://rationalstandard.com/free-speech-vanishing-right/. 258 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 10:59:35 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Ratcliffe, Krista. ‘Eavesdropping as Rhetorical Tactic: History, Whiteness, and Rhetoric’. Journal of Advanced Composition 20, 1 (2000): 87–119. Ratcliffe, Krista. ‘Rhetorical Listening: A Trope for Interpretive Invention and a “Code of CrossCultural Conduct” ’. College Composition and Communication 51, 2 (1999): 195–224. Tebbut, John. ‘The Object of Listening’. Continuum 23, 4 (2009): 549–559. Think!Fest. ‘Free Education, Free Speech and Responsibility’. 11 July 2016. Accessed 5 June 2018. https://thinkfest.wordpress.com/2016/07/11/free-education-free-speech-andresponsibility/#more-4345. Think!Fest. ‘Student Voices Dominate Hashtag Protest Discussion’. 6 July 2016. Accessed 30 July 2019. https://thinkfest.wordpress.com/2016/07/06/student-voices-dominatehashtag-protest-discussion/. Wasserman, Herman. ‘Journalism in a New Democracy: The Ethics of Listening’. Communicatio 39, 1 (2013): 67–84.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Rory Bester is an independent researcher and writer. He is a former associate professor of art history and deputy head of the Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Recent curatorial work includes A Short History of South African Photography (Fotografia Europea, Reggio Emilia, 2017), 50/50 (New Church Museum, Cape Town, 2015–2016) and Rise and Fall of Apartheid (ICP, New York, 2013). Bester’s research interests include photographic histories, theory and practice, contemporary South African art and notions of artistic and creative research in academic work. Lesley Cowling is an associate professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where she co-ordinates the Master’s and PhD programmes in the journalism department and teaches media theory and creative writing. She is also an associate researcher at the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the University of Cape Town. Her research focuses on the relationship of media to South African public life, with a particular focus on journalism forms, such as longform reporting, opinion, analysis and debate, and their role in creating publics. She has worked as a journalist, soap opera writer and media consultant. Indra de Lanerolle is the director of the Journalism and Media Lab at Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct, Africa’s first lab dedicated to media and journalism innovation. He is a visiting researcher in the journalism and media department of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where he teaches television and video journalism, media entrepreneurship and theories of new media. His research focuses on Internet and mobile technologies and their roles in media, governance and public life. His recent work includes a study of mobile use among low-income South Africans and technology innovation in civil society organisations. Indra has produced television series and feature films in South Africa, the US and the UK. His work has been recognised with a Peabody Award, an Emmy nomination and the Japan Prize.

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Anthea Garman is a professor in the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University, where she teaches writing and editing, long-form journalism and multimedia storytelling. She leads Licence to Talk, a project funded by the National Research Foundation, and is a member of the Andrew W. Mellon-funded research project Media, Digitality and Sociality. Garman is the author of Antjie Krog and the Post-apartheid Public Sphere: Speaking Poetry to Power (2015) and co-editor (with Herman Wasserman) of Media and Citizenship: Between Marginalisation and Participation (2017). Carolyn Hamilton is the South African Research Chair in Archive and Public Culture at the University of Cape Town. Her research interests encompass the limits and possibilities of archives, the nature of public discourse and the way the two intersect. Currently she is working on how this intersection affects understandings of the history of southern Africa before European colonialism. Her previous publications include a number of journal articles, chapters and books, as well as edited collections, including most recently the two-volume Tribing and Untribing the Archive: Identity and the Material Record in Southern KwaZulu-Natal in the Late Independent and Colonial Periods (2016) and Uncertain Curature: In and out of the Archive (2014). Nomusa Makhubu is a senior lecturer in art history at the University of Cape Town and a practising artist. She is the recipient of the ABSA L’Atelier Gerard Sekoto Award (2006), the Prix du Studio National des Arts Contemporains, Le Fresnoy (2014) and was first runner-up in the Department of Science and Technology’s Women in Science Awards (2017). Makhubu was a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and an African Studies Association Presidential Fellow in 2016. In 2017, she was a Mandela-Mellon Fellow at the Hutchins Centre for African and African American Studies, Harvard University. She is a member of the South African Young Academy of Science and the chairperson of the Africa South Art Initiative. Her research interests include African popular culture and socially engaged art. Litheko Modisane is the author of South Africa’s Renegade Reels: The Making and Public Lives of Black-Centred Films in South Africa (2013). He teaches in the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the University of Cape Town. His research interests include African and African-diaspora cinema, African television drama and African literatures. He is also interested in the role of cinema in the public spheres of colonised and formerly colonised societies.

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Contributors

Susana Molins Lliteras is a post-doctoral fellow based at the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative and the historical studies department at the University of Cape Town and African Studies Association Presidential Fellow for 2019. For the last decade, she has been a researcher and co-ordinator at the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project. She is the author of the forthcoming book Archive on the Margins: The Fondo Kati and the Production of History in Timbuktu. She has published extensively on the archives of Timbuktu and on the social history of a West African Sufi movement in South Africa. Pascal Newbourne Mwale is the co-author of Critical Thinking and Reasoning Skills: An Introduction to Logic (2016). He is a senior lecturer in the philosophy department at Chancellor College at the University of Malawi. His research interests include public understanding of science, science communication, the media, applied ethics and critical theory. Camalita Naicker is a lecturer in the historical studies department at the University of Cape Town. Her research focuses on popular politics in contemporary histories of land and labour struggles in South Africa. She has written on the Marikana massacre, #FeesMustFall, and gender and ethnicity in the trade union movement.

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INDEX

A Abrahams, Tommy 219 academic representations of Marikana 184, 185, 190–193, 200, 204 access to Timbuktu manuscripts 167–168, 170–171 affective publics 89, 216, 234 see also anger; emotion/affect African Association 155–156, 156 African National Congress (ANC) debates around Mapantsula 53 and Nelson Mandela 108, 133 reactions to Marikana massacre 188 response to Mpondo revolts 196 stance on apartheid-era symbols 219 students’ critique of 228 African Renaissance 165, 166, 172 Africanus, Leo 150–151 Afrikaners depicted in artworks 223, 228 depicted in Goldblatt’s photography 44, 46, 48, 55, 61n14 Mandela’s symbolic gestures towards 217 vision of modernity 44 agenda-setting in Fees Must Fall movement 96 role of media in 66–67, 68 theory/research of 68–69 Ahmed Baba Centre for Documentation and Research 164–165 Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research 144, 145, 145–146, 165–166, 168, 169, 171

Al-Hasan al-Wazzan (Leo Africanus) 150–151 Al-Sahili, Abu Ishaq 149, 150 Al-Umari 149 Alexander, Peter 190, 191, 192 alienation 215, 219, 220, 221, 225, 245 AM Live (radio) 71, 73, 74, 80, 81 anger Baldwin’s comments about 233 in contestations over artworks 215, 216, 226–227, 230, 234 as essential to functional public spheres 218 expressed in public forums 244 often characterised as irrational 232, 252 over intensification of the burden of race 234 resulting from deep inequality 2 see also art-rage; emotion/affect apartheid era art works as opposition to 224–225 black townships in 221 blackness as absence in 109, 110, 116, 120 contestation around ongoing symbols of 31, 215, 218–219, 242 creation of separate publics 216 murders/bombings of people 217 and people as ‘whats’ instead of ‘whos’ 246 repression of media 106 see also South Africa

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Appadurai, Arjun 93 architecture of UCT 221, 225 archival collections overview of 125–126 /Xam, !Kun and Koranna materials 55 challenges to credibility of 2, 11 as cloistered spaces 127 contribution of preservation to publicness 57–58 dynamism of 129 as ‘evidence’ 139–140 of films 56 James Stuart Archive 136–139 and Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things 134–136 Mandela’s prison archive 129–134 public powers of 128–129 see also libraries; manuscripts; Timbuktu archive archivality of visual forms 43, 56–58, 59 Arenstein, Rowley 196 Aristotle 77, 246, 255 art field emotional investment in forms of public art 217–220 media’s separation of visual/news sections 41 public engagement around 43, 51, 55 as site of contestation 215 art-rage around UCT’s public art collection 222–231 expressed in UCT’s Shackville protest 215–216, 218, 220–222, 226, 227 as expression of rage over the burden of race 234 has become platform for frank engagement 232 as a significant public feeling 216 as symbol of failed meaningful public engagements 216–217, 232 see also student protests Artworks Task Team 223, 226, 226–227 Asad, Talal 244–245 Askia Muhammad 152–153 Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) 183, 184, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 203

B Baba, Ahmad 152, 153, 158 see also under Ahmed Baba babelisation 10, 35, 65, 77, 79, 79–80, 80–81 Baldwin, James 233 Bamako (Mali) 145, 146, 169–170, 170, 171 Bank, Andrew/Leslie (journal article) 132–133, 141n21, 141n24 banning of films 52 of publication of Mandela’s images 106 of swimwear in France 25 Barabási, Albert-László 92 Barth, Heinrich 158, 160, 161, 162 Benjamin, Walter 97 Bester, Rory 48–49 Bester, Willie (Sarah Baartman) 222, 223, 230–231 Bickford, Susan 246, 252 Black Academic Caucus Women’s Collective 231 black body art depictions of 222–223, 228–230, 230–231, 231 impact of power-knowledge relations on 243, 245 negated under apartheid 109, 110, 116, 120 seen as insensate 232–233 black intellectual voices former sidelining of 5 Mbeki’s search for 166 as new voices in SA public sphere 240–243, 246–247 black pain 224, 232–233, 241, 251 Black Panther (film) 41 ‘Black Pimpernel’ (Mandela) 105, 108, 110, 113–114, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121n9 see also under Mandela black students feelings of alienation 215 and inferiority complex of 223 objections to being ‘civilised’ in schools 244, 245 Price’s comments about 225 see also art-rage; student protests black Twitter 241

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Index

black women depicted in artworks 222–223, 229–230, 230–231 homeplace as site of resistance 221 and sexual violence on Rhodes campus 243–244 see also gender; race; women Bloomberg, Charles 110 body impact of power-knowledge relations on 243, 245 see also black body books about films 51–52, 53 about Marikana 192 about Nelson Mandela 131, 132, 133, 134, 141n24 as accompaniment to exhibitions 55 as contribution to publicness of Timbuktu archive 152 as enduring object form 51 launches of 48–49, 242 of photography 44, 48, 51, 55 return issues to official public sphere 55 on SA history 138 The Swerve (Greenblatt) 134, 135–136 see also texts bots 65 Bourdieu, Pierre 42, 46, 47, 108, 119, 219 bourgeois public sphere 93, 98 Bracciolini, Poggio discovery of On the Nature of Things 134, 135, 136 as papal emissary 135 Brand, Christo 132 Breitbart News 76 Breytenbach, Breyten (Hovering Dog) 223, 229–230 Britain see United Kingdom broadcasting see television broadcasting Brown, Jessica 224, 225, 231 Brown, Peter 112 Bruce, David 188 Bruce, Peter 189 Bryant, A.T. 138 Bularaf, Ahmad 162 Bullard, David 76 Buthelezi, Bheki 192

C Caillié, René 157–158 Cambridge Companion to Nelson Mandela 134 CapeTalk (radio) 74, 241 capillaried networks of publicness/public engagement entrance into convened public sphere 99 and Foucault’s theorisation of power 7, 32–33 impact of fluid publics on 99–100 pre-date forms of electronic media 43 publicness as capillaried network 6, 22–23, 32–36, 38n33 of visual forms 42, 54, 55, 58, 59 see also public engagement; publicness capital Bourdieu’s concept of 47, 119, 219 Mandela’s accrual of 108, 119, 120 Card, Donald 131, 132–133, 141n24 Castells, Manuel 90, 92 Catalan Atlas 149 censorship 52, 130, 226, 226–227, 228, 231 Centre for Memory (Nelson Mandela Foundation) 130, 131, 131–132, 132, 133 Chapman, George 154 China 128 Chomsky, Noam 67 cinema see films circulation allows for tracking of public engagements 22–23 and concepts of public critical potency and take-up 34, 40, 42, 52–55, 58 four components of 43 may yield contradictory outcomes 41 and production of networks of circulation of ideas 4, 7, 15 Warner’s notion of 7, 32, 42, 43, 59, 70, 74, 81, 94, 109 see also capillaried networks of publicness/public engagement civil society 4, 7, 109, 127, 129 civility in public speech 253–254 Clarke-Brown, Gabriel 225 267

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CNN (Cable News Network) 64, 65, 67, 82n1 Cohen, Bernard 68 Cole, Catherine 218 collective life issues confronting 1 and mediation of via debate 3, 15, 21, 24, 30, 31, 35, 36 and need for understanding of public engagement 2 role of Timbuktu archive in determining 12, 148 colonialism and contestations around art 215 French conquest of Timbuktu 159–163 columnists 75, 76 Come Back, Africa (film) 51, 54, 56, 57, 58 commentators 71, 75, 75–76 commission of inquiry (Marikana) 186, 187, 188–189, 198 commissioning of visual works 47 communications systems 90, 91–92, 93 Con Mag 91 Congress of SA Trade Unions (Cosatu) 185, 188 Congress of SA Writers 53 consecration (Bourdieu) 46, 108, 119, 119–120 consensus-building 197–198 Constitution of Public Intellectual Life 5, 6 Contact (journal) 110, 111, 112 convened public sphere and debates around visual forms 55, 58, 59 debates in SA 25, 27, 54–55, 184–185 and exclusion/foregrounding of voice 5, 22, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 204 issues around freedom of expression 76 media as important component of 66–67, 81–82 norms and expectations of 77 overview of public engagement in 24–29 as social imaginary 99 times of resistance to 34–35 and understanding of publicness 33–34 see also counterpublic spheres; public sphere

Conversation Africa 91, 93 Coombes, Annie 218–219, 220 costs of communication 93 Cottle, Simon 71 counterpublic spheres overview of 29–32 and capillaries of debate 33, 34 hashtags as intervention in 98 instantiation of publicness 34 recognition of own marginality 92 as response to marginality of issues 7, 22 see also convened public sphere; public sphere Cowling, Lesley 70, 99, 184 Cradock Four 217, 218 Crawford, Alex 144 credibility of archives 2, 11 of media 65, 67, 69, 82 rationality in debate as proof of 246 Cresques, Abraham 149 culture differing views on 219 and failure of cultural pluralism 220 D Daily Maverick 91, 189 Daily Vox 91, 92 Daniels, William 231 Davis, Dennis 249–250, 250 Dawud, Askiya 152 De Moraes Farias, Paulo 153, 158, 166 De Sola Pool, Ithiel 90 Dearing, James 68 debate as form of consensus-building 197–198 importance of debating societies 27 and media production of 65–66, 70–71 see also public engagement decolonisation of education 2, 31, 128, 139, 234, 239, 244 see also student protests Dei, Benedetto 154–155 Della descrittione dell’Africa (Africanus) 151

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democracy conception of deliberative democracy 4, 21 consensus-building as form of 197–198 equality as moral order of 24 involves protection of voice 247 parliamentary debate as form of 25 and people as ‘whats’ instead of ‘whos’ 246 in post-apartheid SA 5, 216–217, 217–218, 220 public engagement crucial to operations of 7, 21, 24–25 and public sphere, exclusion of discourses in 204 and public sphere, terms of debate within 28–29 and public sphere’s enablement of 3–4, 7, 21, 27 rational debate as vital to 23 role of media in 66, 97 and state capture 1, 16n2 in trade unions 203 see also political sphere Democratic Left Front 192 democratic pluralism 220 Dening, Greg 50 Desai, Rehad 200 destruction of records 15, 128–129, 144, 145, 173 Dhlomo, Rolfes 138–139 Diagayeté, Mohamed 145 dialogue see under public engagement digital media age 207n28 digital public engagement overview of 88–91 from audience to generators of debate 91–92 globalisation of public spaces 92–94 and hashtag publics 94–100 see also internet; social media digitisation of archives /Xam, !Kun and Koranna materials 55 Mandela’s prison archive 131 Timbuktu archive 170, 171 Dingake, Michael 111 diversity of opinions/voices 79, 92 and valorisation of 27

Dladla, Ntokozo 215 Dlunga, Tholakele ‘Bhele’ 201 Dobson, Andrew 251 documentary films 44 drawings Diane Victor’s Pasiphaë 223, 228–229 see also art-rage Drum (film) 56 Drum magazine 106, 116, 122n34 Dubois, Félix 159–161, 162, 163, 164 Duff, Alistair 75 Duncan, Jane 187 E eavesdropping 248–249 echo chambers 3, 31, 67 Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) 201, 202–203, 203, 241 Eicher-Catt, Deborah 253, 254, 254–255 electronic media 43, 93 see also digital public engagement electronic public sphere 93 Eley, Geoff 4 emotion/affect affective publics 89, 216, 234 around injustices of apartheid 217 expressed in public debates 233, 241, 245, 247, 252, 253, 254 important dimension of student protests 242 as pathos 77 as significant public feeling 216 of visual forms 40, 45, 50, 53, 54–55, 55 see also anger @enca 97–98 epitexts 42, 52, 53, 54 equality in society 2, 24, 233 Essop, Tasneem 202, 203 ethos, concept of 77, 242, 245–247, 250, 251, 254 European age of exploration 154–159 @ewnreporter 97–98 exhibitions 466/64: A Prisoner Working in the Garden 131 as ephemeral/site-specific 51 as important act of visibility 44, 45 Miscast (Skotnes) 49–51, 51, 55, 57–58 269

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exhibitions (Continued) of photographs 55, 227 and public critical potency of 40, 48–49 see also visual forms in public engagements exploration, European age of 154–159 F Facebook 64, 93, 94, 192, 241 see also social media fake news (misinformation) 3, 9, 64, 65, 100n4 Fallist movements see Fees Must Fall movement; Rhodes Must Fall movement family libraries (Timbuktu) 166–168 Farlam, Ian 186 Faye, Carl 138 feelings see anger; emotion/affect Fees Must Fall movement 95–97, 97–98, 99, 99–100, 232, 242, 244 feminism 241, 244 fictional films 44–45 fields field-jumping of Timbuktu texts 150, 151, 172 field theory 41–42, 108 movements of visual forms across fields 46–47, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 54, 59 Fighting Talk (journal) 110, 111, 112, 119 films about Marikana 199, 200 Black Panther 41 Come Back, Africa 51, 54, 56, 57, 58 Drum 56 as important act of visibility 44 Mapantsula 45–46, 46, 52–53, 53–54, 58 return issues to official public sphere 55 testatory power of 44–45 see also visual forms in public engagements fluid publics of Fees Must Fall movement 95–97, 97–98, 99, 99–100 fluidity of public engagements 14, 22–23, 32, 99 Fondo Kati 168–169, 170–171, 171

Foucault, Michel 7, 32–33, 33, 126, 239–240, 242, 243 466/64: A Prisoner Working in the Garden (exhibition) 131 Foxe, John 88, 88–89 France banning of Muslim swimwear 25 colonial conquest of Timbuktu 159–163 exploration of Africa 156 social movements in 2, 3 Franzidis, Eva 224, 225 Fraser, Nancy 29, 30, 98 freedom of expression and act of listening 247, 248 and right to a voice 241, 247, 248, 250, 251, 254, 255 and writings of columnists 76 freedom of the media 66 Fuchs, Christian 93 funding and access to Timbuktu archive 168 of custodial institutions 129 of public museums 25–26 G Gambino, Childish 41 Gaonkar, Dilip 7 Garland, David 243 Garrison, Jim 248 Gasa, Nomboniso 240–241 gatekeeping 9, 64, 72–74, 79, 80–81, 96, 98 gender and contestations around art 222–223, 226, 228–229, 229–230, 230–231 as factor in public debates 2, 77–78, 79, 241, 244, 245 see also women genetically modified foods debate 77, 78, 79 Genette, Gérard 42 Gikandi, Simon 105, 107, 109 gilets jaunes (yellow vests) 2, 3 Ginindza, Banele 189 Gitlin, Todd 31 globalisation global protests 2, 2–3, 28–29, 29–30, 232–233 global publics 35–36

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of public spaces 92–94 Goldblatt, David photographs of Afrikaners 44, 46, 48, 55, 57, 61n14 response to Shackville protest 226, 227 Goodbye Bafana: Nelson Mandela, My Prisoner, My Friend (Gregory) 132 Google 64, 93 government records 127, 130–131 see also archival collections graffiti 126 Greenblatt, Stephen (The Swerve) 134, 135–136 Gregory, James 132 GroundUp 91 Guardian 65, 117 Gugulethu Seven 217, 218, 220 H Habermas, Jürgen 3, 4, 6, 23, 66, 73, 79, 93, 98 Haggard, Henry Rider 138 Haidara, Abdel Kader 164–165, 167, 169, 170, 171 Hamilton, Carolyn 57, 70, 99, 172–173, 184 hashtags as complex act of public-making 89 formation of publics in Fallist movements 95–97, 97–98, 99, 99–100 public-making affordances of 94–95 as public-making from below 98–100 see also Twitter Hassim, Shireen 23 hate speech 3, 73, 74 Hazelhurst, Peter 112–113 Hendricks, Paul 220 heritage differing views on 219 heritage buildings 221 of Timbuktu archive 144, 146, 147, 164, 167, 170, 173 Herman, Edward 67 Hilton-Barber, Bridget 242 Hobson, Janell 231 hooks, bell 221 housing protests 215–216, 218 Hovering Dog (Breytenbach) 223, 229–230

I Ibn Battuta, Muhammad 150 imaginary see public imaginary; social imaginary Impala Platinum mines 188, 208n38 incubation 11, 15, 55–56, 59 indigenous knowledge production 147, 173 Institutional Reconciliation and Transformation Commission 222 internet allows for formation of new publics 10, 31, 59 and ‘fragmentation’ of public sphere 22 and globalisation of public spaces 92–94 impact on established media 64, 68 impact on public engagement processes 89, 90, 99 no orchestration of debate 74 as ‘virtual sphere’ 89 see also digital public engagement; social media Islam achievements of Islamic culture 147 colonial othering discourses around 162 and destruction of records 128, 173 distinction between private/public spheres 174n18 as ‘threat’ to values of civilised world 144 Timbuktu as a centre of Islamic knowledge 146, 152–153, 158, 164 vindication of systems of knowledge production 173 see also Muslims Italian merchant explorers 154–155 Iton, Richard 218 J Jazzuary 56 Jeppie, Shamil 165 journalists gatekeeping vs orchestration of debate 79–80, 80–81 meetings with Mandela 110–111, 112–113, 114–115 production of news vs opinion 72 271

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journalists (Continued) ‘professional imagination’ of 70 see also media; news media K Kathrada, Ahmed 132 Keatley, Patrick 117 Khoisan 49–50, 51, 55 Khumalo, Alf 106 Killie Campbell Africana Library 136 King, Debra Walker 232–233 Klaaste, Aggrey 75, 81 knowledge-power relations 243, 245 knowledge production 147, 155, 166, 173, 241, 253 Kovach, Bill 64 Kranzberg, Melvin 90 Krog, Antjie 47, 48 Krüger, Franz 48 Kryza, Frank T. 148 Kunelius, Risto 70 L Laband, John 227 Lacey, Kate 247–248 Laing, Alexander Gordon 157 language and emphasis on rationality 253 violence of 252, 253 leaders (newspapers) 71 Lee, Casper 91, 92 Lee, Samuel 150 Legal Aid (Marikana) 186, 199 Lekgowa, Thapelo 190 liberalism 204, 205n2 libraries destruction of 128 France’s collection of Timbuktu’s manuscripts 161–162 impact of collapse of Roman Empire on 134 in Timbuktu 152, 153, 158, 160, 162, 166–168, 169, 169–170, 170–171 see also archival collections; manuscripts; Timbuktu archive Lipari, Lisbeth 251, 253 Lipman, Beata 116, 118, 122n33

listening as African value 31 attunement to positionality of speakers/ listeners 240, 251–252 as critical category in public life 247–248 devalued by stress on rational debate 248 eavesdropping as rhetorical tactic 248–249 Eicher-Catt’s concept of ‘speaking/ listening body-subject’ 254–255 and freedom of expression 247, 248 as instrument to recalibrate public discussion 255 Lipari’s concept of ‘listening-being’ 253 moving from listeners to speakers 91 must take account of differential power 254 and the pathos of the listener 246, 253 as a site of contestation 251 see also voice(s) literary festivals 240, 242 Livingstone, Sonia 97 Lodge, Tom 107, 196 logos, concept of 77, 242, 246, 252–254, 254 see also rationality in debates Lonmin Platinum Mine 183, 184, 188 Lucretius (On the Nature of Things) 134, 135, 136 Luescher, Thierry 242 Lunt, Peter 97 M Maasdorp, Lindsay 250 Magondwana, Thumeka 201–202 Magubane, Peter 106 Mahapa, Ramabina 222–223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 229 Mail & Guardian 73, 81 mainstream media definition of 82n1 see also media; news media Malema, Julius 201 Malfante, Antonio 154 Mali French conquest of 159–163 knowledge production in 155 problem of ‘Timbuktu-centrism’ 170

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public potency of idea of 150 setting up of Ahmed Baba Centre 164 texts used in reconstructing history of 150 see also under Timbuktu Mamma Haidara Library 169, 169–170, 170 Mandela, media representations of and complexity of relations with the press 118 and consecrating role of the press 108, 119, 119–120 dramatic announcements of arrest by police 117 as figure absent from public life 106, 107–108, 108, 109–110, 111, 112, 113, 120, 121 making of the ‘Mandela myth’ 105, 106, 107, 108, 113–114, 117–118, 118, 120, 121n9 signifying tropes in operation 118–119 during trial/incarceration of 106, 107, 108 during underground years 105–106, 107, 108, 109, 110–117, 117–118 Mandela, Nelson gestures of reconciliation 217 prison archive 129–134 Mansa Musa 149, 149–150, 150, 151 Mantashe, Gwede 188 manuscripts during Mali’s colonial period 161–163 in public/personal libraries 152, 158, 166–168 ‘rediscovery’ of Arabic manuscripts 150 South Africa-Mali Manuscripts Project 165 Tombouctou Manuscripts Project 144–145, 170, 174n2 see also archival collections; libraries; Timbuktu archive Mapantsula (film) 45–46, 46, 52–53, 53–54, 58 Mapantsula: The Book 51–52, 53 marches by Marikana women 198, 198–199, 199, 200, 204 in support of Fees Must Fall 95

Marikana strike/Massacre background to 183–185 academic representations of 184, 185, 190–193, 200, 204 formation of mountain committee 191, 193, 194–195, 197–198 media reports on 183, 184, 185, 185–190, 203–204 resemblance to Mpondo revolts 193–194 Marikana Support Campaign 185–186, 192, 198, 200, 201 Marikana Support Group 192 Marikana women 185, 198–203, 204 Marinovich, Greg 190 Marschall, Sabine 219 Marxist theory 67 Maseko, Zola 56 Masilela, Ntongela 57 mass media alternatives to/critiques of 91, 95–96 distribution of 92 and redistribution of public-making power 98–99 shaping of public opinion by 68 shaping of public social imaginary 97 see also media; news media Masuthlo, Paulina 200 Mbatha, Siphiwe 192 Mbeki, Govan 121n4, 195 Mbeki, Thabo comments on genetically modified foods 78 and ‘impossible dialogues’ 216 involvement in Timbuktu archive 144, 165–166 questions around processes of public engagement 5 Mbembe, Achille 1 McCombs, Maxwell 68 media and creation of publics 81–82 as fourth estate of political life 1–2 from gatekeeping to orchestration 72–74 and orchestration of debate 9–10, 35, 74, 76–81 and production of debate 65–66, 70–71 273

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BABEL UNBOUND

media (Continued) role in public life 66–68 role in shaping public opinion 68–70 and spread of misinformation 3, 9, 64, 65, 100n4, 156 voices of commentators/columnists 75–76 see also Mandela, media representations of; mass media; news media; news media (SA); radio; social media; television broadcasting media effects theory 68 memorials 219–220 Mgijima, Enoch 209n49 Mgqolozana, Thando 240, 242 Michaelis School of Fine Art 224, 228 migrant labour 186, 193, 195, 196, 197, 208n46 Miner, Horace 163 Miners Shot Down (film) 200 mineworkers in post-apartheid SA 208n46 rock drill operators 194, 197, 209n48 see also Marikana strike/massacre Miscast (Skotnes) 49–51, 51, 55, 57–58 misinformation (fake news) 3, 9, 64, 65, 100n4, 156 modernity Afrikaner vision of 44 contradiction at the heart of 2 Greenblatt’s swerve to 135 and idea of the public sphere 21, 36, 248 of Marikana strike action 191 Modisane, Litheko 34, 40–41 monasteries 134–135 Moore, Niki 189 Morris, Rosalind 200 Mouffe, Chantal 220 mountain committees formed by Marikana mineworkers 191, 193, 194–195, 197–198 in Mpondo revolts 194, 195–196 movies see films Mpofu, Dali 186, 188, 198 Mpondo revolts 194, 195–197 Murray, Brett 220 museums book launches at 242

role in facilitating public discussion 25–26 and Skotnes exhibition 49, 50 music videos 41 Muslims banning of swimwear in France 25 claims on Timbuktu archive 173 discourse of ‘good vs bad Muslim’ 146 see also Islam muti, use of 185, 186, 187, 189, 194, 198, 204, 205n3 Mwale, Pascal Newbourne 10, 65, 77, 78, 79 N Naidoo, Leigh-Ann 232, 249 national archives 127, 128, 131, 140n5 see also archival collections; Timbuktu archive National Arts Festival debate 249–252 National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) democratic processes of 203 failure to persuade workers to leave mountain 184 mineworkers’ dissatisfaction with 183–184, 185, 195, 197, 208n38 opened fire on members 183, 190 pandering to big business 193 and rivalry with AMCU 183, 186, 188, 189 Ndiki, Moshe 91 Ndlovu, Musawenkosi 218 Negroponte, Nicholas 88, 88–89 Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction (OUP) 134 Nelson Mandela Foundation Centre for Memory 130, 131, 131–132, 132, 133 networked publics 90–91, 92, 97, 99, 99–100, 216 see also digital public engagement networks of engagement see capillaried networks of publicness/public engagement New Age 110, 114, 115–116, 117, 118, 121n4 New York Times 65, 67, 82n1, 93, 97 New York World 75

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news media accusations of bias towards elites 64 coverage of Timbuktu 144–145, 145–146, 146, 170 and geographies of public space 92 impact of internet on 64, 68 as important component of convened public sphere 66–67, 81–82 as major forum for political communication 97 online media 65, 91 and public as discursive space 108–109 responsibilities to facilitate debate 26 separation of analysis/opinion from news content 70 separation of visual/news sections 41 youth/social movements’ disengagement from 2–3 see also mass media; media; radio; television broadcasting news media (SA) aimed at different audiences 67 in apartheid years 106 coverage of contestations around UCT’s art collection 226, 227, 230, 231 coverage of Marikana strike/massacre 183, 184, 185, 185–190, 203–204 coverage of Marikana women’s protests 185, 198–199, 199, 200 critiques of 98 factors affecting credibility of 67 and globalisation of public spaces 93 lack of understanding of politics of anger 232 new black voices in 240 see also Mandela, media representations of news, social construction of 72 Nixon, Rob 106 Noki, Mgcineni ‘Mambush’ 194 Nzimande, Blade 188 O Obama, Barack 82n5 objectivity 70 Occupy movement (USA) 2, 3, 29, 98 öffentlichkeit (Habermas) 3, 23 On the Mines (Goldblatt) 44

On the Nature of Things (Lucretius) 134, 135, 136 online news media 65, 91 online public engagement see internet; social media opinion writers 75–76 see also public opinion Oppenheimer, Mark 250, 251 oral traditions 136, 147 orchestration of debate 9–10, 35, 74, 76–81 ownership of social media 93 P paintings art-rage around Hovering Dog 223, 229–230 burning of UCT paintings 216, 226 defacement of UCT paintings 225 destruction of Buddhist paintings 128 Mahapa’s comments about UCT paintings 222–223, 223 see also art-rage Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) 219 Papacharissi, Zizi 89, 93, 216 paratexts 42, 46, 58 Park, Mungo 156 parliamentary debates 25 Pasiphaë (Diane Victor) 223, 228–229 Patel, Khadija 92 pathos, concept of 77, 246, 247–248, 251, 253, 254 peritexts 42, 43, 50 photographs archival collections of 57 and concept of public critical potency 40 by David Goldblatt 44, 46, 48, 55, 57, 61n14, 227 as important act of visibility 44 of Mandela 106, 107, 130 taken on Robben Island 131 testatory power of 44 see also visual forms in public engagements play (Marikana women) 199 plurality of humans 246 275

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BABEL UNBOUND

poetry about Timbuktu 154, 157 discovery of On the Nature of Things 134, 135, 136 Pogrund, Benjamin 110–111 police interventions in campus protests 216, 218, 234 killed by mineworkers 188 killings during Mpondo revolt 196–197 killings of mineworkers 183, 184, 186–187, 188, 190, 204 portrayal in news media 187, 188 shooting of ANC councillor 200 women’s protests against brutality of 198, 199, 200 political capital 108, 120 political columnists 75 political sphere apartheid configuration of 110, 120 battle to change regimes of truth 240 forms of politics around Marikana 201–203, 204 media as fourth estate of 1–2 media’s role in 66–67, 97 and re-organisation of social spaces 245 see also democracy Portuguese explorers 155 potency see public (critical) potency power-knowledge relations 243, 245 Pretoria Girls’ High School 244, 245 Pretorius, Wendy 201 Price, Max 225 print technologies 88, 89, 93, 97 Prisoner in the Garden: Opening Nelson Mandela’s Prison Archive (NMF) 131, 132, 133, 134, 141n24 private libraries (Timbuktu) 166–168 production of media debate 65–66, 70–71 propaganda 67, 89, 227 protests global 2, 2–3, 28–29, 29–30, 232–233 SA’s high rate of 232, 239 see also art-rage; student protests proverbs (Sudanese) 161 public (critical) potency of absent presences 11

of Timbuktu archive 148, 150, 151, 153, 156, 159, 170, 172, 173 useful in analysis of public engagement 34 of visual forms 40–41, 42, 46, 48–49, 50, 52, 54, 55, 57, 58 public engagement alternative reference points for 254–255 Aristotle’s rhetorical devices in 77, 246 around Timbuktu 147–148, 158–159, 164–173 and concept of babelisation 10, 35, 65, 77, 79, 79–80, 80–81 contained by overarching dominance of public sphere 5–6 contemporary ruptures of 15–16 within convened public sphere 24–29 counterpublic sphere engagement in 31 does not always lead to resolutions 4, 232 fluidity of 14, 22–23, 32, 99 as form of democratic engagement 7, 21, 24–25 growth of global publics 35–36 longitudinal view of 14–15 as mediating force in society 1, 2, 3, 35 multiple forms of 2 normative ideas of 14, 36, 40, 69, 240 normative role of media in 80, 81 as potentially important sites of power 33 shaping of limited to choices of consumption 93 works in wide-ranging/networked ways 7 see also capillaried networks of publicness/public engagement; digital public engagement; listening; rationality in debates; visual forms in public engagements public engagement (SA) as acrimonious discourse of exclusions 5 around UCT’s art collection 215, 224, 225, 226–227, 231, 232, 233 around visual forms 44, 50, 53, 54, 57 debates within convened public sphere 25, 27, 54–55, 184–185

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does not always lead to resolutions 232 and exercises of power in 243 extent of the ‘capture’ of 6 failure of meaningful/equitable engagements 217 home as discursive space for 221 impact of divided publics on 222, 226–227 and ‘impossible dialogues’ 216 issues around speaking vs listening 249–252 making space for new voices 240–243, 246–247 need for new ways of engagement 239, 255 and rethinking ethos 245–247 and rethinking pathos 247–248 public imaginary of Mandela 107, 108, 110, 114, 118, 120 of Timbuktu 146, 147, 147–148, 148–149, 151, 151–152, 156, 159, 161, 170 public libraries 152 public-making definition of 89 of hashtags 89, 94–95, 96, 98–100 of mass media/social media 93–94 of technologies 90 public opinion Enlightenment conceptions of 23 formed in the public sphere 3, 6 manipulated via fake news 9, 65 opinion writers 75–76 and power over who says what and how 241 in relation to the state 4, 23 requires viable social imaginaries 24 shaping/influencing of 25–26, 41, 68–70, 204 public powers of archives 128–129 public sphere bourgeois public sphere 93, 98 constituted as a ‘reading public’ 248 as debating forum 3, 4, 15, 24, 27, 73 electronic public sphere 93 as enabling process of democracy 3–4, 7, 21, 27 expressions of emotion essential to 218

‘fourth dimension’ of 99 fragmentation of 22, 36 Habermas’s notion of 3, 6, 23, 66, 73, 79, 93, 98 as key social imaginary 7, 15, 21, 23–24, 36, 69–70, 76, 99, 245 multiple publics of 29, 97, 98, 146 Muslim distinction between private/ public spheres 174n18 normative ideas of 4, 21, 23, 73, 79, 245, 252 and operations of power in public engagement 24 and overarching dominance of institutions/operations of 5–6 religious public sphere 174n18 right to have a voice in 200, 245 as site of mediation of collective life 15, 21 in South Africa 110, 116, 120, 234, 239, 240–243, 250, 251, 255 see also convened public sphere; counterpublic spheres publicness archival preservation as contribution to 57–58 can be generated by absence 108, 109, 120–121 of #FeesMustFall hashtag 98 impact of social media on 89 instantiated via counterpublic engagements 34 multiple forms of 16 ongoing reconfiguration of 90 and orchestration of debate 74 as pre-existing in convened public sphere 33–34 of the Timbuktu archive 148, 152, 167, 168, 169, 172, 173 as translation of idea of öffentlichkeit 3, 23 of visual forms 46, 52, 57, 58 see also capillaried networks of publicness/public engagement publics affective publics 89, 216, 234 created around visual forms 41, 42–43, 45, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59 created by media content 70, 74, 80–82 277

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BABEL UNBOUND

publics (Continued) created in relation to circulation of texts 7, 32, 42, 43, 59, 70, 74, 81, 94, 109 fluid hashtag publics 95–100 global publics 2, 2–3, 29–30, 35–36, 232–233 insurgent publics 15 internet creation/formation of 31, 91–92, 93 multiple publics 29, 97, 98, 146 networked publics 90–91, 92, 97, 99, 99–100, 216 reading vs listening publics 248 sequestered publics 30–31, 220 in South Africa 5, 30, 216, 218, 220, 221, 222 subaltern publics 22, 29, 126, 139 of Timbuktu archive 146, 147–148, 149, 161, 171–172 R race and construction of ‘angry blacks’ vs ‘civil whites’ 232 and contestations around art 215, 216, 222–223, 223, 224–225, 226, 226–227, 228–231 and contestations around heritage 219 as factor in public debates 2, 77–78, 79, 241 and failure of cultural pluralism 220 intensification of burden of 234 racial publics/public sphere in SA 110, 116, 216, 218, 221 and rejection of ‘anthropologising’ people 241 see also entries under ‘black’; entries under ‘white’ racism and assumptions about rationality 252 and attempts at ‘raceless debates’ 250–251 global anti-racism protests 232–233 ongoing in SA 215, 218, 222, 224, 232 as part of students’ protest discourse 239 radio AM Live 71, 73, 74, 80, 81

CapeTalk 74, 241 Radio 702 74, 241, 245 rage see anger; art-rage Ramaphosa, Cyril 188 Rand Daily Mail 106, 110, 110–111, 117, 118 rape 77–78, 243–244 Ratcliffe, Krista 248–249 rationality in debates as cornerstone of democratic processes 23 Habermasian notion of 79, 98 impact of divided publics on 222, 227, 232 linked to forms of power-knowledge 245 need for reconsideration of logos 252–254 normative ideas of 40, 73, 240, 242, 245, 248 rebellion to idea of 28–29 requires equality between people 233 requires high degree of orchestration 81 see also under public engagement rationality vs irrationality, media’s portrayal of 187–188, 193, 198, 199 reading publics 248 reception theory 43 records destruction of 15, 128–129, 144, 145, 173 government records 127, 130–131 see also archival collections Reddy, Micah 194 reframing of debates 77–78, 79, 80 religious public sphere 174n18 Research Excellence Framework (UK) 26 rhetoric, theories of 77, 246 Rhodes Must Fall movement (UCT) 2, 31, 95, 96–97, 215, 223, 232, 242, 252 Rhodes University 243–244 right-wing media 67 Rihla (Ibn Battuta) 150 Rivonia Trial 106, 131, 132 Robbie, John 241, 245, 246, 251 rock drill operators 194, 197, 209n48 Rogers, Everett 68 Rogosin, Lionel 51

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Index

Rosen, Jay 91 Rosenstiel, Tom 64 RUReferencelist 243–244, 244 Ruusunoksa, Laura 70 S SABC (SA Broadcasting Corporation) see South African Broadcasting Corporation San people 49–50, 51, 55 Saragas, Aliki 199 Sarah Baartman (Bester) 222, 223, 230–231 Schadeberg, Jürgen 106 sculptures art-rage around Sarah Baartman 222, 223, 230–231 defacement of 225 as memorials 220 see also art-rage Seabrook, William 163 Sechaba 53 sequestered publics 30–31, 220 Serino, Kenichi 71, 72–73, 78 sexual violence 77–78, 243–244 Shackville protest (UCT) 215–216, 218, 220–222, 226, 227 sharing via social media 94 sidestepping of debates 77, 78, 79 Sigcau, Botha 196, 197 Sikhala Sonke (We Cry Together) 199, 200, 201, 202 silencing of debates 77, 78, 79 Sinwell, Luke 190, 192 Skotnes, Pippa (Miscast) 49–51, 51, 55, 57–58 social construction of news 72 social imaginary and call for decolonisation 234 as concept that propels collective world-making 33 and ideas about society 2 public sphere as key imaginary 7, 15, 21, 23–24, 36, 69–70, 76, 99, 245 shaped by rhythms of mass-mediated public spaces 97 transnational imaginaries 93

social media allows for formation of new publics 10 allows for globalisation of public spaces 29–30, 92–93 creation of echo chambers 3, 31, 67 distribution of content via sharing 94 Facebook 64, 93, 94, 192, 241 as form of public engagement 2 impact on established media 64 impact on processes of public engagement 89, 99 limited ability to mediate an effective public sphere 93 new black voices in 240, 241 Obama’s comment on truthfulness of 82n5 potential for agenda-setting 69 and redistribution of public-making power 98–99 reframing of debates 77–78 see also digital public engagement; internet social movements 2, 2–3, 28–29, 29–30, 232–233 see also student protests society and equality of people 2, 24, 233 social life of art 233–234 social talking code 253 Socwatsha kaPhaphu 136, 137–138, 139 soliciting agents 47 Some Afrikaners Photographed (Goldblatt) 44, 46, 48, 55 Some Afrikaners Revisited (Goldblatt) 55, 61n14 Sonti, Nomzekhelo 199, 201 South Africa and the Ahmed Baba Institute 144, 165–166 community engagement as core responsibility of universities 26 and globalisation of public spaces 93 ongoing racism in 215, 218, 222, 224, 232 and post-apartheid transformation of 5, 216–217, 217–218, 219–220, 228, 239, 246 as ‘protest capital of the world’ 232, 239 public sphere in 110, 116, 120, 234, 239, 240–243, 250, 251, 255 279

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BABEL UNBOUND

South Africa (Continued) publics in 5, 30, 216, 218, 220, 221, 222 and TRC 130, 217, 217–218, 218, 222 writings of columnists 75, 76 see also African National Congress (ANC); apartheid era; art-rage; entries under Mandela; entries under Marikana; news media (SA); public engagement (SA); student protests South African Broadcasting Corporation 76, 80, 82n1, 91, 131, 199 South African Museum 49, 50 South African Tatler 48 Sowetan 75, 81 Star 82n1, 110, 114–115 state archives 127, 128, 131, 140n5 see also archival collections; Timbuktu archive state capture 1, 16n2 statues 31, 128, 215, 219, 220, 225, 226, 242 Steenveld, Lynette 67 Steinberg, Jonny 197 Strike a Rock (film) 199 strikes see Marikana strike/massacre structures of feeling (Williams) 225 Stuart, James 136, 136–137, 138 student protests aesthetic/affective responses in 242 around black pain 233 around housing 215–216, 218 as challenge to universalism of Enlightenment thought 139 Fees Must Fall movement 95–97, 97–98, 99, 99–100, 232, 242, 244 and focus on ‘irrational’ anger of protestors 232 as important site of struggle 239 media’s lack of understanding of politics of anger 232 response of white academic staff to 252 Rhodes Must Fall movement 2, 31, 95, 96–97, 215, 223, 232, 242, 252 in support of Marikana mineworkers 185–186 in USA 2 see also art-rage; protests

subaltern publics 22, 29, 126, 139 subaltern spheres 42, 69 Sudanese proverbs 161 Sunday Express 110, 112–113, 114, 115 Sunday Times 71, 72–73, 76, 78, 80, 81 Surun, Isabelle 156, 158 Suzelle 91, 92 Swart, James 132 Swerve, The: How the World Became Modern (Greenblatt) 134, 135–136 symbolic capital 119, 120, 219 T talk radio see radio Tarikh al-fattash 152 Tarikh al-Sudan 152, 158, 161 Taylor, Charles 15, 21, 24, 36, 74 technologies 90 telescoping of debates 77, 78, 79 television broadcasting Cable News Network 64, 65, 67, 82n1 and globalisation of public spaces 92 SA Broadcasting Corporation 76, 80, 82n1, 91, 131, 199 separation of analysis/opinion from news content 70 TRC re-enactment of apartheid violence 217 Tennyson, Alfred 157 texts epitexts 42, 52, 53, 54 formation of publics in relation to circulation of 7, 32, 42, 43, 59, 70, 74, 81, 94, 109 impact of internet/social media on 91, 92, 94 paratexts 42, 46, 58 peritexts 42, 43, 50 role in public debate 40 see also books The Con Mag 91 The Conversation Africa 91 The South African Tatler 48 The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (Greenblatt) 134, 135–136 This is America (music video) 41 Thomas, Cornelius 133

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Index

Timbuktu archive as African Arabic written legacy 146–147 emergence of private family libraries 166–168 enables conversations about identities 12 as ‘iconic archive’ 147, 148, 171–173 and manuscripts, access to 167–168, 170–171 and manuscripts, questions around numbers of 168–170 public discourses around 147–148, 164–173 public potency of 148, 151 publicness of 148, 152, 167, 168, 169, 172, 173 and rebel occupation of city 144–146, 171, 173, 173n1 as world heritage site 144, 146, 147, 164, 167, 170, 173 see also archival collections; libraries; manuscripts Timbuktu city distant past 148–153 age of exploration 154–159 colonial period 159–163 tourism in 163–164, 177n80 Tombouctou la mystérieuse (Dubois) 163, 164 Tombouctou Manuscripts Project (UCT) 144–145, 170, 174n2 tourism (Timbuktu) 163–164, 177n80 trade unions AMCU 183, 184, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 203 Cosatu 185, 188 use of consensus-building 197–198 see also National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa (Barth) 158 Triaud, Jean-Louis 171, 171–172 Trojan Horse Massacre (sculpture) 220 Trump, Donald 64 Truth and Reconciliation Commission 130, 217, 217–218, 218, 222 truth, regimes of 239–240, 243, 245, 248, 254

Twitter creation of new publics 70 extensively used in SA public sphere 241 role in circulation of news 64 see also hashtags; social media U United Kingdom exploration of Africa 156 national archive service 127 parliamentary debates 25 Research Excellence Framework 26 right-wing and left-wing media 67 writings of columnists 75, 76 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization 146, 164 United States babelisation of public discussion in 35 emergence of right-wing media 67 importance of public debates 27 social movements in 2, 3, 29, 98 student movements in 2 universities criticised for tendency to ‘anthropologise’ situations/ people 241 Rhodes University 243–244 role in facilitating public discussion 26 University of Cape Town Rhodes Must Fall movement 2, 31, 95, 96–97, 215, 223, 232, 242, 252 Tombouctou Manuscripts Project 144–145, 170, 174n2 see also art-rage University of the Witwatersrand Constitution of Public Intellectual Life project 5, 6 Conversation Africa 93 Fees Must Fall movement 95–97, 97–98, 99, 99–100, 232, 242, 244 launch of Marikana Support Campaign 185–186 UShaka (Dhlomo) 138 V vaccine controversy 33 Victor, Diane (Pasiphaë) 223, 228–229 281

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BABEL UNBOUND

videos as enduring object form 51 as important act of visibility 44 music videos 41 vloggers 91 see also visual forms in public engagements Viner, Katherine 65, 77 violence of language 252, 253 Mantashe’s comments about ‘violent strikes’ 188 in Marikana massacre 183–184, 188, 188–189, 190, 193, 204 in Mpondo revolts 196–197 sexual violence 77–78, 243–244 during student protests 216, 218, 234 TRC hearings on apartheid 217 visual forms in public engagements overview of 40–43 incubation/archivality of 55–58 launches/entry of 46, 48–52 production of 43–48 take-up/critical potency of 52–55 tracking public engagement 58–59 vloggers 91 voice(s) differential access to 252 Eicher-Catt’s concept of ‘speaking/ listening body-subject’ 254–255 enabled by internet/social media 91 exclusion/foregrounding of 5, 22, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 204 new voices in SA public sphere 240–243, 246–247 in news reporting 72, 81, 92, 187 normative conditions imposed on 243 and obligation to listen to 254 and particularity associated with 200 right to a voice 245 and right to freedom of expression 241, 247, 248, 250, 251, 254, 255 see also listening W Walker King, Debra 232–233 Wall Street Journal 65 Ward, Donovan 220

Warner, Michael formation of publics in relation to texts 7, 32, 42, 43, 59, 70, 74, 81, 109 identification of different senses of public 98 Wasserman, Herman 187, 190 Wazar, Mishka 241, 245, 246, 251 We Cry Together (Sikhala Sonke) 199, 200, 201, 202 Webb, Colin 136 Weekly Mail Film Festival 51, 52 white artists (SA) dominate UCT’s art collection 224, 227 opposition to apartheid through artworks 224–225 see also art-rage white people challenged over apartheid injustices 242 and challenges to ‘white’ feminism 241 and challenges to ‘white’ literary establishment 240, 242 emotional attachment to heritage 219 indifference towards black anger 233 lack of capacity to listen to other voices 250, 251 and principle of freedom of expression 241, 245, 247 response to student protests 252 and superiority complex of 223 see also under race Wikileaks exposés 127, 140n4 funding of 129 Wikipedia 91–92 Williams, Raymond 217, 225 women homeplace as a site of resistance 221 issues around sexual violence 77–78, 243–244 of Marikana 185, 198–203, 204 see also gender worker committees (Marikana) 190, 191, 193, 204 Works of Art Committee (WOAC) 223, 224, 226, 230, 231 Wright, John 136, 137, 138

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Index

X Xaba, Wanelisa 241

youth movements 2–3 YouTube 46, 91, 94

Y yellow vests (gilets jaunes) (France) 2, 3 Yiannopoulos, Milo 76 Yizo Yizo (TV drama) 80 Younge, Gavin 225

Z Zille, Helen 189 Zouber, Mahmoud 164 Zug, James 116 Zuma, Jacob 186, 188

283 This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 11:05:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

This content downloaded from 137.158.158.62 on Tue, 12 May 2020 11:05:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms