Decolonising the neoliberal university : law, psychoanalysis and the politics of student protest 9781000427530, 1000427536, 9781000427561, 1000427560, 9781003198581, 1003198589

Table of contents :
Cover
Endorsements
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of contributors
1. Overcoming Hamlet – notes for a future
2. The Legacy
3. We still have not broken the code
4. The university now: What it will have been for what it is becoming
5. Within the time of the aftermath
6. “Lock your doors!”, or “the beginning of after”
7. The queer in decolonial times: Rhodes Must Fall and (im)possibilities in times of uncertainty
8. A change in, but not of, the system
9. On the materiality of #MustFall protest: Shame, envy, and the politics of spectacle
10. An untimely meditation on a time “out of sync”
11. Thoughts on the planetary: An interview with Achille Mbembe
12. The afterlife
13. Protest, play and the failure of haunting in the land (sometimes) called Australia – a response to Jacqueline Rose
14. Afterword
Index

Citation preview

‘Decolonising the Neoliberal University: Law, Psychoanalysis and the Politics of Student Protest is a tightly arranged set of responses to Jacqueline Rose’s lecture, “The Legacy,” given at the University of Cape Town in 2017, in the wake of the #Rhodes Must Fall and #Fees Must Fall protests. Rose confronts her audience— and, now, her readers—with the question of what it would mean to deny a movement, particularly one that extends the lessons of black consciousness, an unconscious. The volume as a whole poses the question of what psychoanalysis can bring to the decolonisation of the university. In enabling dissensus over questions concerning the university to come, the volume is a triumph’ — Dr Ross Truscott, Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape. ‘This collection offers us a profound gift, the gift of continuing a conversation. The conversation it models for us is interdisciplinary and inclusive, bringing in the wisdom of leading scholars and activists some of whom have been deeply implicated in and affected by the student protests and their aftermaths. This book is a superb example of what socially engaged academic debate may look like – how it may open new doors in our ways of seeing and being in this complex, challenging and dis-jointed time. It will be an invaluable resource for scholars and activists wishing to engage with issues of social injustice and transgenerational trauma surfaced through the local South African student movements, as well as the global #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements’ — Dr Kim Wale, Senior Researcher, South African National Research Chair (SARChi) in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma, Stellenbosch University.

Decolonising the Neoliberal University

Taking the postcolonial – or, more specifically, the post-apartheid – university as its focus, the book takes the violence and the trauma of the global neoliberal hegemony as its central point of reference. Following a primarily psychoanalytic line of enquiry, it engages a range of disciplines – law, philosophy, literature, gender studies, cultural studies and political economy – in order better to understand the conditions of possibility of an emancipatory, or decolonised, higher education. And this in the context of both the inter-generational transmission of the trauma of colonialism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the trauma of neoliberal subjectivity in the postcolonial university. Oriented around an important lecture by Jacqueline Rose, the volume contains contributions from world-renowned authors, such as Judith Butler and Achille Mbembe, as well as numerous legal and other theorists who share their concern with interrogating the contemporary crisis in higher education. This truly interdisciplinary collection will appeal to a wide range of readers right across the humanities, but especially those with substantial interests in the contemporary state of the university, as well as those with theoretical interests in postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, gender studies, cultural studies, jurisprudence and law. Jaco Barnard-Naudé is Professor of Jurisprudence in the Department of Private Law, University of Cape Town.

Decolonising the Neoliberal University Law, Psychoanalysis and the Politics of Student Protest Edited by Jaco Barnard-Naudé

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Jaco-Barnard Naude; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Jaco-Barnard Naude to be identified as the author[/s] of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. and by Birkbeck Law Press Birkbeck Law Press is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-90372-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-05654-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-19858-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003198581 Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

List of contributors 1 Overcoming Hamlet – notes for a future

ix 1

JACO BARNARD-NAUDÉ

2 The Legacy

27

JACQUELINE ROSE

3 We still have not broken the code

43

VJ COLLIS-BUTHELEZI

4 The university now: What it will have been for what it is becoming

49

SARAH NUTTALL

5 Within the time of the aftermath

60

JUDITH BUTLER

6 “Lock your doors!”, or “the beginning of after”

66

PIERRE DE VOS

7 The queer in decolonial times: Rhodes Must Fall and (im)possibilities in times of uncertainty

77

LWANDO SCOTT

8 A change in, but not of, the system

93

KARIN VAN MARLE

9 On the materiality of #MustFall protest: Shame, envy, and the politics of spectacle

103

WAHBIE LONG

10 An untimely meditation on a time “out of sync” BENDA HOFMEYR

111

viii Contents 11 Thoughts on the planetary: An interview with Achille Mbembe

122

ACHILLE MBEMBE

12 The afterlife

137

JOEL M MODIRI

13 Protest, play and the failure of haunting in the land (sometimes) called Australia – a response to Jacqueline Rose

149

JULIET ROGERS

14 Afterword

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JACQUELINE ROSE

Index

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Contributors

Jaco Barnard-Naudé is Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Law Faculty. From 2020 to 2021, he was a Research Professor in the Free State Centre for Human Rights at the University of the Free State. He is a past recipient of the UCT Fellows’ Award and held a Newton Advanced Fellowship (awarded by the British Academy) in the Westminster Law & Theory Lab at the University of Westminster School of Law from 2017 to 2020. Jaco holds a B2-rating from the South African National Research Foundation (NRF) and is also a past Honorary Research Fellow of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London. He publishes widely in the fields of Jurisprudence, Law & Literature, Spatial Justice, Queer Legal Theory, Contractual Justice After Apartheid and Transitional Post-Apartheid Justice. Jacqueline Rose is Professor of Humanities and Co-Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London. Internationally known for her writing on feminism, psychoanalysis, literature, and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, her books include Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne (editor with Juliet Mitchell and translator) (1982), Sexuality in the Field of Vision (1986), The Last Resistance (2007) (both included in the series Verso Radical Thinkers), The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991), States of Fantasy (1996), The Question of Zion (2005), Women in Dark Times (2014), Mothers – an essay on love and cruelty (2018), and the novel Albertine (2001). She was the co-editor (with Saul Dubow) of a new edition of Wulf Sachs’ Black Hamlet (1996). States of Fantasy and The Last Resistance have formed the basis of musical compositions by the acclaimed young American composer, Mohammed Fairouz. A Jacqueline Rose Reader was published in 2011. On Violence and On Violence Against Women will be published by Faber in the UK and Farrar Straus Giroux in the USA in Spring 2021. A regular writer for The London Review of Books, she is a co-founder of Independent Jewish Voices in the UK and a Fellow of the British Academy. Victoria J Collis-Buthelezi is Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). She specializes in black literary and intellectual history of the Caribbean, Africa and the African Diaspora. She sits on the editorial board of Peter Lang’s book series on Race and Resistance in the Long

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List of contributors Twentieth Century and is a member of the editorial collective at Small Axe. She is a research associate at the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University and the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS) at UJ. Her work has been published in Small Axe, Callaloo and the UK Journal of Art and the Humanities.

Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies and Director of WiSER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is the author of Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Postapartheid, editor of Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics, and co-editor of many books including Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa; Senses of Culture; Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis and Loadshedding: Writing On and Over the Edge of South Africa. Her work is widely cited across many disciplines. In 2016 she was an Oppenheimer Fellow at the DuBois Institute at Harvard University. For eight years she has directed WiSER, the largest and most established humanities institute across the Global South. Judith Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Program in Critical Theory at the University of California at Berkeley. She publishes widely in the fields of philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis, and gender theory. Her most recent book is The Force of Nonviolence (Verso, 2020). Pierre de Vos is the Claude Leon Foundation Chair in Constitutional Governance in the Department of Public Law at the University of Cape Town. He is a queer constitutional law scholar whose works focus mainly on the ways in which South Africa’s apartheid past impacts on the way in which the constitutional text is interpreted and enforced in the present, and is the co-editor of the book South African Constitutional Law in Context (published in 2014 by Oxford University Press). He is also a public commentator on legal and socio-political issues in South Africa, and the author of the blog Constitutionally Speaking (which is syndicated by the Daily Maverick). Lwando Scott is a senior lecturer at the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape. Lwando was an Innovation in Science Pursuit for Inspired Research Fellow at Ghent University in 2016/17. He was awarded the Yale-Fox Fellowship at Yale University in 2013/14. Lwando’s current research focus is on what he loosely terms “queering the postcolony”. In developing this concept of “queering the postcolony”, Lwando is looking to incorporate, engage, challenge, and stretch concepts such as decolonisation, sexuality (queerness), gender, culture, and futurities within the post-colonial South African context. Lwando’s work is interested in expansive definitions/ formulations of Africanness. Karin van Marle joined the Department of Public Law, University of the Free State in February 2019 where she teaches Jurisprudence and Legal Interpretation. Before joining the UFS she worked as professor in the Department of

List of contributors

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Jurisprudence, University of Pretoria where she taught Jurisprudence for 20 years. She is a fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) and an adjunct professor at Southern Cross University in Australia. Her research falls within the broad field of law and the humanities and involves critical theory, feminist theory and jurisprudence. Her work on post-1994 jurisprudence engages with the crisis of modernity and a rethinking of law and legal theory along the lines of fragility, finitude and a “giving up of certitudes”. She is an ethical feminist and her research and writing are inspired by and embedded in feminist theory. She has published widely in the field. Recent publications include “Ubuntu-feminism – Tentative reflections” (with D Cornell) (2015) Verbum et Ecclesia; “Post-1994 jurisprudence and its coming of age stories” (2015) No foundations; “Mandela in/ and Pretoria” (2015) Image and text; ‘“Welcoming’ other ways of being and knowing” (2017) Feminists@law; “Modernities and the making of worlds” (2018) Law and Literature 11–27; ‘“Life is not simply fact’: Aesthetics, atmosphere and the neolibeal university (2018)” Law and critique 293–310. Wahbie Long is a clinical psychologist and associate professor in the Department of Psychology, and the director of the Child Guidance Clinic, at the University of Cape Town. He has held research fellowships at Durham and Harvard and has published widely on the history, theory and indigenization of psychology. His new book, Nation on the Couch: Inside South Africa’s Mind (Melinda Ferguson Books, 2021), explores the application of psychoanalytic theory to social and political life in South Africa. Benda Hofmeyr is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pretoria (UP) where she has been teaching since 2007. Her research interests fall within the broad ambit of contemporary Continental philosophy (especially thinkers following in the wake of Heidegger with emphasis on post-structuralism and phenomenology) with an enduring fascination for the inextricable entanglement of the ethical and the political. Within the context of both her teaching and research, she reflects on the entanglement of European and non-Western, especially post-colonial African philosophy and the possibility of a dialogue across these divergent yet fundamentally intertwined traditions of thought. For more information about her research and publications, visit: www.benda hofmeyr.com Achille Mbembe is Research Professor in History and Politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER), University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He is the author of On the Postcolony, Critique of Black Reason and, most recently, Necropolitics. Joel M Modiri is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Jurisprudence in the Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria. His research and teaching interests relate to critical race theory, Black political thought and African philosophy. His current projects intersect under two umbrellas: Azanian critical theory and constitutional abolitionism.

xii List of contributors Juliet Rogers is an Associate Professor in Criminology at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is a trauma theorist specialising in psychoanalysis and law. She was previously a trauma therapist and has been an Australian Research Council Fellow researching remorse and political trauma, in the context of communities in military and political conflict. She has published extensively on post-conflict emotions in the context of Northern Ireland, South Africa and the colonial encounter called Australia.

© Mail & Guardian 2020 (published by permission of the Mail & Guardian, 2021)

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Overcoming Hamlet – notes for a future Jaco Barnard-Naudé

Introduction If there is one diagnosis on which the contributors to this collection concur, then it is that – to say it with Shakespeare’s Hamlet – “the time is out of joint”. The subject matter of this collection – student protest in the South African postcolony – makes the words that follow Hamlet’s famous diagnostic all the more relevant: “oh, cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right”. For was it not that the student protesters of 2015 and onwards saw themselves as born to set right the time that they had diagnosed as out of joint? Whether or not these protesting students cursed the “spite” that they were born to set it right, they nonetheless positioned themselves as indeed born to do so (which, as Jacqueline Rose indicates in her lecture that opens this collection, meant that they were precisely not the “born free” generation which they had been made out to be). At the same time as we posit an analogy between Hamlet and the student protestors, we cannot but be aware of the critical limits of such an analogy. Moreover, one cannot but be aware that it borders on the heretical, and is probably contrary to the very spirit of the “decoloniality” advocated by the protests, to suggest a correspondence between, on the one hand, Hamlet as one of the most canonical characters in all of Western literature, and, on the other, student protesters in the postcolony. From the point of view of many in the student movements, Hamlet and indeed the entire Shakespearian legacy decidedly represent, in one or another way, the (colonial) past – and it is against the very presence of this past in the postcolonial now that these protesters revolted. This critical awareness indeed raises the question of how, despite the commonality that the time is out of joint for both, Hamlet (not simply as character, but as metaphor of a certain Western subjectivity) is different from the subjectivity that fuelled student protesters in the postcolony. My sense is that the longstanding engagement of psychoanalysis with Hamlet sheds a unique light on this difference. In what follows, I want to traverse some of the psychoanalytic reading of Hamlet in order to show how the student protest movements of our time challenge a mode of Western (legal) subjectivity that is pervasive in our contemporary societies. Relying on Jacqueline Rose’s lecture and by way of introducing this collection, I will argue that this subjectivity fundamentally concerns DOI: 10.4324/9781003198581-1

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the question of the future in its dimension of the à venir, the incalculable yet necessary “to come” of justice and democracy. In taking this path in / as introduction, I want to light on aspects of the psychoanalytic backdrop, as I see it, to South African protest and, specifically, to the student protests that erupted from 2015 onwards. This psychoanalytic backdrop provides one frame amongst many through which it is possible to read contemporary student protest, Rose’s lecture and the responses that are contained in this collection. My argument here will be that the psychoanalytic frame is indispensable in so far as it concerns itself with the dark heart of colonial power. Because student protest assembled under the signifier of “decolonisation”, it is worth considering the internal, psychic and often unconscious aspects of colonial-apartheid power if we are interested in the decolonisation of the South African condition. As we shall see, the psychoanalytic backdrop which I sketch in this introduction fundamentally concerns the place of melancholia in the psycho-affective world of the South African nation and, particularly, in the psycho-affective world of what I call the subject “supposed to protest.” There can be no denial that in South Africa this is the subject racialised as Black – it is, moreover, the subjugated and oppressed Black subject, past and present. Melancholia is, in turn, in the history of psychoanalysis in South Africa, deeply imbricated, as we shall see, with the figure and psychoanalytic epistemology that have turned on readings of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in a colonial setting – a setting in which, as we will see, Hamlet becomes “Black Hamlet.” As I conclude in this introduction, it is far from coincidental that this volume, alongside the student protestors, proclaims that the time is out of joint. In taking over this Hamletic credo, this volume and, more importantly the student protests about which it writes, can be understood as responding to a particular framing of Black subjectivity under colonial-apartheid, past and, no doubt, present. In this context, I will argue that it is crucial to distinguish – in strong terms – between the subjectivity of Hamletism and the protest subjectivity that forms the subject matter of Rose’s lecture. A key question that will emerge here concerns how we might understand “the time is out of joint” differently when it is no longer the credo of a Hamlet, but is taken over by protest. In other words, I am interested here in the ways in which student protest can be said to contest and overcome the Hamletic condition. As we shall see, in South Africa the Hamletic condition at the level of the collective is / was not a choice – it is / was an essential component in the psychic subjugation perpetrated by colonial-apartheid power. As such, it was structurally imposed. Hamlet and protest subjectivity have in common the question of how one relates to a traumatic past, a past which possesses for the subject the power to render present time “out of joint”. In this sense, they both carry the burden of a history which is being silenced and/or denied. Protest subjectivity therefore shares with Hamlet the truth of not being “born free” – the category often used to discredit the student protests as inappropriate for a post-apartheid generation. Rose’s lecture can be seen as a sustained critique of such a notion. As she so powerfully contends in her lecture, to be born free is not to be born at all.

Overcoming Hamlet – notes for a future

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The essential difference between Hamletist subjectivity and protest subjectivity is the way in which that subjectivity’s relation to a traumatic past unfolds and informs its orientation to present and future time. Protest subjectivity, I argue, is essentially captured by the phrase on the placard shown in the frontispiece of this collection: “We are not looking for our own struggle. We’re fighting an old one”. To say that “we are not looking for our own struggle” is to say that we have already found our own struggle, our mandate in the Other – what Lacan defines as the pre-existing Symbolic order to which all human subjects belong; and to say that “we’re fighting an old one” is, further, to say that that struggle is located in the past which is now brought into relation with the temporality of both the present (“we’re fighting”) and the future. It is in this way that protest subjectivity distinguishes itself from Hamletism, for Hamletism may also not be looking for its own struggle – it has found it already – but, I will argue, stands for the idea that we are precisely not fighting “an old one”, but rather something that belongs to a very different temporality of historical memory and change. To substantiate this claim, I will now turn to the psychoanalytic readings of Hamlet, beginning with Rose’s own reading.

Hamlet In an earlier essay on Hamlet, Rose (2005) was primarily concerned with the femininity that structures the play. I want to leave this femininity to one side in order to focus instead on Hamlet’s relationship to death as loss. Before doing so, it is important for our purposes to point out that Rose (2005, 124) begins her reading of Hamlet by noting that it is the play which has “been celebrated as the birth of the modern, post-Renaissance, conception of man” and that Freud described it as an emblem of “‘the secular advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind”’. Further in this regard, Jacques Lacan (2019, 273) makes the point that what gives Hamlet its “highest dramatic value” is that he is “a mode of discourse”.1 This point of departure indicates to us that what is at stake in Hamlet is not simply one or another character trait, but indeed modern, Western, subjectivity as such. This is why Hamlet is worthy of analysis if we are interested, as I am here, in a problematisation of that subjectivity with a view to outlining a post-modern subjectivity which distinguishes itself from its predominant form in the West.

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If this essay repeatedly, even predominantly, finds in Lacan an explanatory recourse, it is because it is in Lacan’s work that we so manifestly encounter the two subjectivities at issue in the subject matter of this contribution. First, there is Lacan’s (2019) sustained engagement with Hamlet in Seminar VI (see the discussion of this engagement below). Second, it cannot be denied that Seminar XVII (Lacan 2007) was at least in part formulated as a response to the student protests of 1968 in France. Famously, Lacan (2007, 207) diagnosed the students as hysterics, told them that they were “aspiring” to a Master and added that they would “get one”. Whether or not one agrees with this diagnosis and declaration on Lacan’s part, the fact remains that his work remains highly relevant when it comes to the psychoanalytic understanding of both Hamlet and student protest.

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To proceed, then, to the question of Hamlet’s repression, we can note from Rose’s analysis the description that it is represented in the action of the play as essentially a buffoonery – Hamlet is so overwhelmed by the affect he is experiencing in relation to the events surrounding the death of his father that his only reaction is a buffoonery which “can find no outlet in art” (Rose 2005, 126). Hamlet, then, is a subject incapable of sublimation. Linked to this buffoonery, Rose notes, with reference to Lacan’s essay on Hamlet, that at the heart of the play we find a shamefully inadequate mourning which “is the trigger and then constant refrain of the play” (130). Rose describes mourning in this context as that process by way of which “death is given its symbolic form and enters back into social life” (131). Yet, paradoxically enough, if this mourning is shamefully inadequate in Hamlet – his mother’s “o’er hasty marriage”, his uncle’s rapid ascension to his brother’s throne – Hamlet’s mourning is excessive (he “wears black, stands apart and mourns beyond the natural term” (Rose 2005, 131)). But this mourning fails in its very excessiveness. If mourning as regulator of social life becomes “overstated”, she suggests, it could tip over into its very opposite and begin to look like what it is designed to “hold off”. In the context of mourning, that opposite which mourning is designed to hold off is melancholia and Rose accordingly notes how Freud diagnosed Hamlet as both a melancholic and a hysteric (133). In his Mourning and Melancholia, Freud (2005) famously argued that melancholia is a response to loss which is opposed to mourning. Whereas mourning releases the cathexis in relation to the lost object, the melancholic is unable to do so, thus erecting a psychic crypt for the lost object within the ego. Later, in The Ego and the Id, Freud will describe this process as the transition from object libido to narcissistic libido. In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud (2005) distinguishes between melancholia and mourning by identifying melancholia as a pathology and mourning as a “normal affect” (203). Melancholia and mourning describe psychic responses and/or reactions to the experiences of loss: “of a beloved person or an abstraction taking the place of the person, such as fatherland, freedom, an ideal and so on” (203). Freud thus describes melancholia as “a profoundly painful depression, a loss of interest in the outside world, the loss of the ability to love, the inhibition of any kind of performance and a reduction in the sense of self” (204). Above all, mourning is distinguished from melancholia by one trait, namely that in mourning the “disorder of self-esteem is absent” (204). And this is the case because, as Freud famously puts it: “In mourning, the world has become poor and empty, in melancholia it is the ego that has become so” (206). In melancholia “the shadow of the object” (Freud 1957, 249) falls upon the ego and the ego is henceforth judged “as though it were an object, the forsaken object”. Melancholia, quite simply, represents a loss of the ego, whereas mourning is the loss of the love object. Taking his cue from Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok (1986), Jacques Derrida (1977) takes this argument further. Melancholia, he argues, corresponds with the process of incorporation: I identify with the object lost in reality in such a way that I deny its loss. (Freud (1957, 249) writes of a “substitution of identification for object-love”.) I interiorise the object in such a way that I keep it alive

Overcoming Hamlet – notes for a future

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in me, refuse to release my “libidinal” investment in it and, consequently, refuse to mourn the lost object as lost because, for me, it is not “really” lost. The paradox of incorporation is that, by refusing to accept the actual death of the lost love object, I do not keep the dead alive in me. In other words, the tragedy of melancholic incorporation is that the ego refuses to mourn: I pretend to keep the dead alive, intact, safe (save) inside me, but it is only in order to refuse, in a necessarily equivocal way, to love the dead as a living part of me, dead save in me, through the process of introjection, as happens in socalled ‘normal’ mourning. (Derrida 1977, 71 (emphasis added)) As Derrida so pointedly remarks: “[I]ncorporation is a kind of theft to reappropriate the pleasure-object” (72). Melancholic incorporation, then, is failed introjection, introjection proper is associated with mourning, because in introjection, the libidinal investment in the object is withdrawn and the object is interiorised in such a way that it does not become a living dead part of the ego. Where the process of mourning works through loss and allows us to move on to form new attachments and re-engage with life, melancholia thwarts our re-engagement with life; it leaves us paralysed in the loss, closes off the future and prevents us from moving on. (Walker 2004, 116) The melancholic state is accompanied by grief, nostalgia and always “the feeling of loss – a loss of direction ensuing from the collapse of a project or horizon for action” (Arditi 2003, 81). Hamlet is the quintessential melancholic – a character who is overwhelmed by the losses that he has experienced and who can respond to these losses only in terms of a certain buffoonery, a certain excess of mourning which turns out to be no mourning at all. Lacan (2019) argues that “Hamlet proceeds by the pathway of mourning, but it is a type of mourning that is adopted in the narcissistic relationship that obtains between m, the ego, and the image of the other” (288). In this statement, Lacan is pointing to the precise character of melancholia as a narcissistic formation. Melancholia as this narcissistic relationship between the ego and the image of the other, is uniquely characterised by a relationship to knowledge. What causes Hamlet’s despair is not only that he knows that his father is dead, but also the fact that he knows that his father knows that he is dead (Aristodemou 2018, 121). The reason why this knowledge causes such despair is because it fundamentally touches upon Hamlet’s desire as a subject – he has lost the father, the psychic object who occupies the place of cause of his desire and he knows that this is the case, even while he denies his knowledge (of loss). At the level of affect, this loss plays, as we shall presently see, an important part in his pathology as a melancholic.

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How might we understand the narcissism of melancholia in relation to the sentence with which I began: “the time is out of joint”? In the discussion above, we have seen that the melancholic’s relationship to time is particularly one that turns her towards a fixation on the past in such a way that the future is closed off. As Arditi (2003, 81) puts it, in melancholia the notion of a “project or horizon for action” is foreclosed. Along similar lines, Lacan (2019, 323) remarks that for Hamlet “the appointment [rendez-vous] always comes too soon and so he postpones it” and, elsewhere, Lacan indicates that the play’s dramatic action unfolds in “constant equivocation” (332). Ultimately, then, the reason why Hamlet represents modern subjectivity is because of the analogy between the doubt that underlies all Hamlet’s symptoms and the doubt that is central to the Cartesian subject as the subject of modernity. As Indira Ghose (2010, 1014) remarks: “[w]e are all Hamlets, anxiously cross-examining ourselves about our authenticity.” This means that Hamlet’s (and thus the melancholic, Cartesian subject’s) primary relationship to time is that of delay or procrastination – putting things off. In short, the melancholic cannot bear to keep his appointment with the Other who occupies the place of Symbolic Law. Lacan (2019, 324) adds to this the consequence that Hamlet’s action has “no object[ive],” not merely gesturing at the fact that Hamlet has no aim, but rather also at the fact that, as a melancholic, Hamlet does not treat the love object as irretrievably lost but rather incorporates it, through identification, to become a living dead part of his ego – to say that the melancholic Hamlet has “no object[ive]” is to echo Freud’s determination that the melancholic substitutes identification for object love. Simply put, Hamlet’s procrastination is a result of the fact that he “does not know what he wants” (Lacan 2019, 324) and he “does not know what he wants”, because at the level of affect the status of the love object is for him irredeemably unresolved. In the play, this irresolution is represented by the very fact that the dead father appears as a ghost (ie as living dead) and in this sense is thus, for Hamlet, represented as not “really” dead. This is regardless of the fact that Hamlet knows that his father himself knows that he is dead. Hamlet’s inability to act is fundamentally caused by his affective relationship to this knowledge, namely the fact that he refuses to accept it. Emphasising the correspondence between Hamlet and the modern subject, Maria Aristodemou (2018, 110) refers to the work of Guy Trobas, who has argued that “the depressed modern subject […] rejects unconscious knowledge”, triggering ‘“a conflict with knowledge that can reach a point of true epistemic anorexia”’. This is why whatever Hamlet does or does not do, it cannot be characterised as him fighting (with) the “old one” who is his dead father. Instead, Hamlet quite placidly takes his instructions from that dead father – on whose mandate, as will become clearer below, he acts and does not act throughout the play. To this extent, he remains within his dead father’s remit, unable to mourn or relinquish that remit, until the bitter end. When Lacan (2019, 324) argues that “Hamlet is always operating on the Other’s time” but that this time is nonetheless ever only his “own time”, he is referring to the narcissistic fact of the melancholic, namely that the lost love

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object (and thus its time) is incorporated into the ego with the consequence that operating on the Other’s time is for the melancholic always already an operation only in the terms and ambit of his own, egoic time. As Lacan (315) puts it: “the subject always seeks to find his moment [heure] in his object” and because Hamlet has no “object[ive]” he cannot find his moment. In the play, this operation on the Other’s time which is nonetheless Hamlet’s own time is exemplified in the scene where Hamlet finds Claudius praying after the play scene (Lacan 2019, 316). This scene presents the perfect opportunity for Hamlet to kill Claudius, because Claudius is completely absorbed and distracted by the fact that he has just had in the play scene a re-presentation of his abominable actions in relation to Hamlet’s parents. However, instead of taking action at this opportune moment, Hamlet stops “because it is not the right time” (316). And it is not the right time, because, as Lacan says, it is not the right time vis-àvis the Other: to kill Claudius at that point would be “too good for him and too bad for Hamlet’s father. It would not sufficiently revenge the latter’s death because, owing to Claudius’ repentance in his prayer, salvation might be open to him” (316 (emphasis added)). From this we can clearly see that Hamlet is driven by the Other’s time as his dead father’s time. This is nonetheless his time, because it is the time of the dead object that has been resurrected in his ego through identification. Hamlet is thus precisely not fighting “an old one”, but rather obeying the “old one” and, of course, ultimately, its time. Thus, for the melancholic-as-Hamlet it is not that the time is “out of joint”, but rather that my time is out of joint When Hamlet utters the words “oh cursed spite,” Lacan argues, he is referring to “what he is bitterly disappointed about”, namely the fact that “time is unjust to him, or what he can designate as injustice in the world” (344 (emphasis added)). And it is in relation to this out-of-joint time, his time, that Hamlet is unable to act. He may recognise that he has been born to set the time right, but he immediately goes on to curse the fact that he was borne to “set it right”. In other words, Hamletist melancholia’s relation to present and future time, to the time of setting it right, is an extreme reluctance and even a condemnation of that time. The melancholic subject does not willingly or resolutely take on the symbolic mandate which is delivered to her by the past of a traumatic event. If anything, the melancholic subject prefers not to act, because the melancholic is fixated upon the unresolved status of the lost object, this past event of trauma, itself incorporated into the ego through identification. Rather than dealing with the real consequences of the loss in trauma, how they affect the present and the future and, ultimately, how they demand a directed course of action, Hamlet prefers not to act. A similar failure, we will see, precipitated the student protests in South Africa. The paradoxical upshot of this is that, properly speaking, the melancholic has no death drive, if we understand the death drive to be that ability of the subject to go beyond the pleasure principle. The melancholic is ruled by the pleasure principle in the sense that her “satisfaction” derives from her fixation upon the unresolved status of the love object. The melancholic knows, certainly knows, on one level, that the love object is lost, but at the level of the affective attachments of the ego,

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the love object is resurrected and as resurrected, the libido is not withdrawn from it but transformed from object-libido to narcissistic libido (Freud 1961, 30). This causes, as we have seen, a disastrous relationship with present and future time, because the melancholic can relate to such time only in terms of delay, inaction and extreme apathy.

Black Hamlet If I have paused at and focused on Hamletist subjectivity – as pathologized modern subjectivity – it is in order to contrast it with the kind of post-modern or perhaps “un”-modern subjectivity that we find in protest, and to argue that this latter subjectivity represents a significant overcoming of the prevalent post-struggle, postcolonial “modern” subjectivity that, in Higher Education in South Africa, showed a significant measure of inertia and apathy in the years before 2015 and as such, could be characterised as a particular form of Hamletist subjectivity. But before we delve into protest subjectivity as post-Hamletist subjectivity it is necessary to note that the earliest engagement of psychoanalysis with the South African subject supposed to protest, is precisely through Hamlet. I am referring, of course, to Wulf Sachs’ book Black Hamlet (published in a new edition by Saul Dubow and Jacqueline Rose in 1996) in which Sachs psychoanalysed, for a period of two and a half years, the healer-diviner whom he called “John Chavafambira” and whom he had found in a Johannesburg slum. Crewe (2001, 418) provides a succinct summary of the project of Black Hamlet, while also pointing to the problematics: Sachs tries to inscribe the South African native subject in the colonial global imaginary of 1930s psychoanalysis. At the site of colonial encounter, however, the attempt increasingly seems like one in which an ill-fitting template is imposed on political and cultural realities it cannot encompass. In that sense the text becomes both self-problematizing and assimilable to postcolonial critiques of a colonizing psychoanalysis. Initially, Sachs identifies similarities between John Chavafambira’s biographical/ family circumstances and those of Hamlet. Bertoldi (1998, 242) succinctly summarises these similarities as follows: both are born to a family of power and leadership; the death of both their fathers occurs under mysterious circumstances (John suspects that Charlie his uncle has poisoned his father, in a repetition of Claudius’s murder of Hamlet’s father); and the uncle marries the mother in both cases. Sachs makes clear that John is infatuated with his mother Nesta, just as Hamlet is unable to separate himself from Gertrude. Like Hamlet, John is unable to form successful relationships with women. Finally, according to Sachs, John’s devotion to medicine arises from the desire to usurp the position of his uncle.

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The analogy soon reaches beyond biographical similarity to the level of psychopathology when Sachs begins to identify within John symptoms characteristic of Hamletism: “a universal phenomenon symbolising indecision and hesitancy when action is required and reasonably expected” (Bertoldi 1998, 242). Sachs thus sketches John, the colonised subject, as a subject supposed to protest. “In both Hamlet and John”, Sachs writes, “there existed a conflict between duty to custom and tradition and repressed inner desires; this unconscious conflict led in both to a loss or deficiency of will power” (Sachs 1996, 241). Sachs therefore used the Hamlet analogy to describe and to explain, from within the perspective of Western epistemology – from within psychoanalysis – a Black subjectivity that is unable to revolt in the face of all justification for it. Yet, by way of the application of Hamlet to John, Sachs was able to claim “not only that John is like any other (‘white’) South African in psychological terms, but, perhaps even more interestingly […], that he is in fact fundamentally a ‘modern man’” (Bertoldi 1998, 243). For as Crewe (2001, 424) astutely points out, for Sachs to speak of “delay or irresolution” ie of Hamletism is, in this context, unavoidably to raise “the question of problematic or compromised agency in general”. This means that Sachs in fact deployed psychoanalysis as a “discourse of justice” (Rose as quoted in Bertoldi (244)) vis-à-vis John, because to use a discourse in a way that claimed in the 1930s that the black subject was just like any other white subject, was to deploy that discourse in the name of (racial) justice. Moreover, as Rose (1996, 40) remarks in the introduction to the 1996 edition, by calling his study Black Hamlet, Sachs “inadvertently acknowledges that ancestry, lineage, dead fathers, and ghosts are the touchstones of psychic well-being, that the individual suffers – fails at one level to be constituted as individual – when her or his sense of inheritance and continuity is out of joint.” Black Hamlet raises the problematic of the universal applicability of the Oedipus complex (Crewe 2001, 417; Bertoldi 1998, 242). However problematic the universal application of Oedipus may be, the fact is that the psychoanalytic approach has nonetheless been enlisted by critics of colonialism to analyse the problematic of colonial relations. As Frantz Fanon – who famously called the Oedipus complex into question in relation to African society – wrote: “only a psychoanalytic interpretation of the black problem can lay bare the anomalies of affect that are responsible for the structure of the complex” (as quoted in Bertoldi 1998, 237). Yet Fanon’s affirmative remark should perhaps best be made to stand in the qualifying light of a more cautionary remark such as Crewe’s (2001, 431): “Without its universalizing problematic, psychoanalysis would be nothing, yet only in submitting itself to the mediation, reflection, and self-alienation on which Fanon insisted can it negotiate its own transition from a colonized to a postcolonial world”. As it turns out, Sachs was able in Black Hamlet to subject psychoanalysis to just such a “mediation” and “reflection”. From the start, Sachs recognised that there was an essential difference between Hamlet and John, that John was and was also not a “black” Hamlet:

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Jaco Barnard-Naudé In Hamlet’s case, as shown by Shakespeare, the weakness is localised to the one question of killing the uncle; in John’s case it was more generalised, for there were many other factors, as we have seen, which were responsible for this inertia and lack of decision. (Sachs 1996, 241)

These other factors, as Bertoldi writes, are fundamentally related to “the nature of a racist, colonial society – that is, the political / social situation of South Africa in the 1930s” (Bertoldi 1998, 245). They are factors bounded up with “the sociopolitical realities of living in a racially segregated capitalist society, built on the exploitation of cheap black labour” (245). In fact, as Bertoldi (246) reads him, Sachs recognised that John’s conflict arose from nothing other than the fact that he was forced by this society to lead a psychically double life which was “caused by the strain of reconciling competing moral codes, religious beliefs and modes of life” as someone who was brought up in a rural setting and had later in life become subject to an urban existence within this fundamentally racist society. Further, as Bertoldi has suggested and Crewe intimates in the quotation above, psychoanalysis has limited application in the actual resolution of John’s conflict. When it came to the resolution of John’s conflict, psychoanalysis ran out, as it were, and Sachs, the white man with resources and power, intervened in the real circumstances of John’s (poor, Black, exploited) life. Bertoldi (245) suggests that “Sachs’s material involvement in the form of financial assistance and transport to [John’s] family kraal” triggers a resolution of Oedipus in actual and not psychoanalytic terms. As Crewe (2001, 420) also pointedly concurs: “It is only as a supporter and interlocutor, not as a Freudian psychotherapist, that Sachs has been able to assist John”. Bertoldi (1998, 254) suggests that these facts point us to a different reading of Black Hamlet, one in which the application by Sachs of Hamlet to John should be read in a way that not only reveals that the cause of John’s problems are in fact “the nature of a racist, colonial-type society” (245), but also that the book is “the case study of two different social orders ‘within the mind of a single person’. We find here a conflict between a public, communal, ancestral and collective Oedipus, and a modern internalised super-ego with its immanent Oedipus” (254). Put differently, “[w]hat we have in Black Hamlet is nothing less than a difference and conflict between a modern form of power and a ‘pre-modern’ social formation where the super-ego requires external social and cultural resources” (253). If this is the case, as Bertoldi convincingly suggests, then the application of Hamlet to John marks a radical ethical gesture, for it provides an account of the devastatingly traumatic impact of colonialism on the psychic life of the indigenous person – an impact which manifests as the Hamletism that Sachs identified in John. Bertoldi’s argument on this score warrants careful attention. He begins this argument by quoting Rose to the effect that we find in Black Hamlet an account of personhood “bereft once outside its collectively or ancestrally sanctioned domain” (Rose as quoted in Bertoldi 1998, 254). Bertoldi (254) then goes on to argue that the modern social formation is characterised by a conflict between the bond and

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the contract. The bond is characterised by filial ties, obligations and duties “assigned according to age and social rank” (254). In the time of the bond, Oedipal conflict is resolved differently from the way in which it is resolved in the time of the contract, which marks the imposition of the modern form of power in which the resolution of Oedipus requires the production of the internalised superego. “In short”, Bertoldi writes, “modern social formations organise their cultural transmission […] through the production of individual psychological subjects no longer in need of external control” (254). However, argues Bertoldi (1998, 254 (emphasis added)), “an unjust modern state such as a colonial society or apartheid South Africa” relies on a “preservation of the disjuncture” between the two aforementioned social formations: bond and contract, a social order regulated by reciprocal relations versus one regulated by external control. As such, it cannot produce, as Sachs recognised, the very modern subject that it enjoins, and this is so “for structural reasons – reasons to be found in an exploitative regime that seeks to prevent the dissolution of the ‘pre-modern’” (Bertoldi 1998, 255). This last point in Bertoldi’s argument – and its reference to “structural reasons” – should be understood incisively, for I do not agree that the problem of racist society is / was simply a matter of seeking to prevent the dissolution of the pre-modern as such: in as much as it can be accepted that the colonial-apartheid regime sought to prevent the dissolution of the “pre-modern”, its injunction to modernity was at the same time an injunction precisely to dissolve the “pre-modern” as a source of morality and of ethical life (in other words, critical aspects of its structure). Thus, the regime only sought to preserve those structural aspects of the “pre-modern” which could be harnessed in furtherance of its exploitation of the Black subject (the system of chieftainship under apartheid here comes to mind). And, in turn, this was so for the “structural” reason of the exploitation of Black labour that such a preservation could ensure and on which the regime fundamentally depended for its continuation. Stated differently, colonial-apartheid sought to entrench the ideology that the superego can only come into being through the imposition of Western modernity – it consistently sought to dissolve the so-called pre-modern’s capacity to be a different, alternative source of psychic individuation. Yet, at the same time, colonial-apartheid, firmly holding in place the pre-modern’s aspect of heteronomy – its unquestioning obedience to an “old one” we might say – structurally prevented the colonised subject’s ascension to the very modernity that it enjoined. The point is that the prevention of the dissolution of the “pre-modern” by colonial-apartheid was a desperate attempt to keep the “pre-modern” as colonially conceived in place, while at the same time preventing the ascension to “modern” subjectivity through Western modernity. This left the Black subject in a position of being subjected to two worlds with one author (colonial-apartheid), neither of these worlds offering a path to psychic individuation. While it is true that, in John Chavafambira’s case, Oedipus was resolved in actual terms through Sachs’ interventions, this cannot be said generally of the Black subject under colonial-apartheid. For colonial-apartheid constructed the Black subject as incapable of psychic individuation, incapable of “personhood” and the maintenance of the conflict between the world of the bond

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and the world of the contract was a critical aspect of this construction. In truth, the racist society of colonial-apartheid exploited a Manichean distinction between contract and bond to the effect that, as Drucilla Cornell and Stephen Seely (2016, 104) have argued, an “enforced psychosis” prevailed in this society – “enforced” psychosis because, to put the matter succinctly, the Black subject is “constantly being ‘burst apart’ and reassembled by the colonizer at the deepest physical and psychic levels”. What we can come to understand incisively, then, from Bertoldi’s analysis of Black Hamlet is that it is colonial society that is designed to induce Hamletism in the indigenous subject. It does this by subjecting the Black indigenous subject to the injunctions of two worlds at once, two worlds that are not simply fundamentally at odds in terms of how Oedipal conflict is (supposed to be) resolved, but rather two worlds that do not offer the Black subject a passage to “personhood”. For Bertoldi, citing Chatterjee, this points postcolonial critique to an analysis of “the co-presence and continued conflict of communal, feudal and modern modes of power in colonial and post-colonial societies” (Bertoldi 1998, 255). But perhaps beyond such an analysis, stands the need to locate how colonial power in its structural aspects ceases upon the Manichean distinction between bond and contract in order to enjoin a particular, debilitating psychic condition, the point being a critical aspect of the well-known critique that an essential part of colonisation is the colonisation first and foremost of the mind. On this score, Black Hamlet becomes an indictment of colonial and apartheid South Africa and of the colonial-apartheid society in general as a “psychopathological” society (254). Accordingly, the Hamlet analogy holds, but it holds with a difference in where the stress falls. For the emphasis is now not so much on the characterological similarity as it is on the analogy in terms of space or setting: thus, what is “rotten” in the state of Denmark becomes that which is rotten in colonial society and colonial relations generally. The “prison” that is Denmark in Hamlet, becomes the “prison”, for black subjectivity, of colonial-apartheid society in Black Hamlet. As Bertoldi remarks: “The Renaissance space of Hamlet and the colonial space of Black Hamlet, is that space ‘where the reinvention of the self and the remaking of the social are strictly out of joint’” (255). With reference to the concerns voiced in this collection, the time that is “out of joint” for Hamlet becomes the space that is, for black subjectivity, so read, out of joint – the time and the space of the persistent coloniality of social relations only now in a time designated by history as “post”colonial, as if coloniality did not persist in it but was over and done with (see, in general, Spivak 1999).

Overcoming Hamletism: protest subjectivity and a discourse of anxiety hysteria In his later work, specifically The Ego and the Id, Freud (1961, 28) thought of melancholia as the resurrection, through identification, of the lost object within the ego as a signal contribution to ego formation. As Tammy Clewell (2004) puts it, Freud comes to realise that it is only through internalising the lost object

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through “bereaved identification” that the subject as such comes to be: “Freud collapses the strict opposition between mourning and melancholia, making melancholy identification integral to the work of mourning” (61). The outcome of this revision of the distinction between melancholia and mourning is that, for Freud, grief work may well be interminable. What this means for subjectivity is that Freud realised that melancholia is part of all subjectivity, that there is no subject who is not, at least to a certain extent, melancholic. As a result, and as has been suggested above, we can expect that Hamletism, to one or another degree, will be found in and will form part of every subjectivity. However, Hamletism as a dominant subjective pathology will of course not prevail in all subjectivity. In other words, all of us are to one or another extent Hamlet, but all of us are not predominantly governed by a Hamletist subjectivity. And this is precisely what colonial-apartheid sought to achieve: the governance of the Black subject through the imposition of Hamletist subjectivity. To underscore the psychoanalytic diagnosis of the structural Hamletism of colonial-apartheid society vis-à-vis Black subjectivity, is not to under-estimate or disregard the long and proud history of struggles of protest and revolt during the colonial-apartheid period. Rather, it is to emphasise that structural Hamletism was an essential mechanism of control in colonial-apartheid’s arsenal of subjugation and oppression. Quite clearly, many black people in South Africa during the colonialapartheid period were able forcefully and powerfully to reject and overcome the extent to which the regime relied on the enforcement of Black Hamletism (the latter is something to which the literature often enough refers to as “repression” (Badat 1999, 1)). Black student politics, specifically, played an enormous role in this rejection and overcoming. As Saleem Badat (1999, 92) has written, the priority of the South African Students Organisation (SASO), formed in 1968 on the basis of Steve Biko’s “black consciousness”, was precisely to rouse “blacks from a state of apathy, fear and feelings of inferiority to one of active agents of history”. The armed struggle against apartheid, coupled with the many instances of protest, from the 1952 Defiance Campaign, to the Congress of the People adopting the Freedom Charter in June 1955, to the women’s march of 1956, to the anti-pass demonstrations of 1960, to the Soweto uprising of 1976, to the United Democratic Front (UDF) and related mass action of the 1980s, all testify to the extraordinary courage and spirit of action of Black people in the face of all the odds and all the dangers that came with opposing a violent minority government backed by a considerable police force and well-equipped military power. Thus, viewed against the backdrop of the regime’s reliance on a structurally enforced Hamletism, the history of protest and opposition against colonial-apartheid becomes all the more powerful, extraordinary and monumental. My aim, then, is to draw attention to Black Hamletism in the spirit of a memorial (Snyman 1998, 317) underscoring of the full pernicious reach of colonial-apartheid power vis-à-vis Black subjectivity, precisely in order to throw into relief exactly how significant the many instances in our history of overcoming that Hamletism has been. At the same time, and as part of this spirit of memorialism, let us also note that Sachs’s Black Hamlet “attempts to understand how an ‘ordinary’ African felt

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and thought in everyday life” (Bloom 2004, 253) and thus, in emphasising Black Hamletism I am interested in at least partially accounting for the experience of ordinary South Africans who bore and continue to bear the brunt of the colony / postcolony’s structural inequities in everyday life.2 Having sounded this proviso in relation to the colonial-apartheid history, we come to a consideration of Black subjectivity in the postcolony. My wager in this regard is that there is every reason to expect a great reliance by “post”-apartheid Power on, and thus a great prevalence of, Hamletism. This is because, the “structural” reasons conducive to Black Hamletism in South Africa have survived into the new South Africa and in some ways they have even been exacerbated. As Adam Habib (1997, 30) warned in 1997, the post-apartheid government’s “failure to address the material interests of the black population could generate widespread apathy within this segment of South African society”. Former President Thabo Mbeki (1998, 68) famously described post-apartheid South Africa as “two worlds in one country”. Mbeki was referring to the two socio-economic worlds – the world of affluence versus the world of poverty – that continue to be defined, structured, along racial lines in South Africa; but these two worlds also point at other ways in which South Africa is, in socio-cultural terms, a country of two worlds, a country in which the world of the bond and the world of the contract are still made to co-exist with each other in relation to Black subjectivity and are made to co-exist in a relation of high tension. Moreover, the colonial construction of the world of the bond vis-à-vis the world of the contract has remained in “post”-apartheid South Africa. The imposition of living according to the imperatives of these two worlds at the same time – and the “structural” nature of this imposition – represents perhaps the most enduring legacy of colonial-apartheid. The pervasive subjection of the Black subject at once to two cultural, social and socio-economic, worlds is particularly pronounced in the case of Black student subjectivity, because the university is (and has increasingly become) the quintessential setting where the two worlds are forced into an irresolvable tension with each other (a situation brilliantly rendered in novelistic terms in Niq Mhlongo’s Dog Eat Dog (2004)). It is in the postcolonial university that modern subjectivity is enjoined while, at the same time, it is made structurally difficult, if not downright impossible, for many Black students to attain. It is in the neoliberal postcolonial university that the world of the bond survives in its colonial construction. What this means psycho-affectively is that the space of the postcolonial university is the fertile breeding ground for Black Hamletism and my sense is that the relative 2

It is significant to note that there are, in addition to Black Hamlet, at least two other important literary works in which the idea of a structural Hamletism is sketched without invoking Hamletism in so many words. One of them is Miriam Tlali’s Between Two Worlds (2004) (with its telling title, the book was originally published in 1975 as Muriel at Metropolitan presumably because Tlali’s publishers thought that the book would be banned if it bore this more “political” title – the novel was nonetheless banned under the 1975 title). The other example is from post-apartheid literature, Niq Mhlongo’s Dog Eat Dog (2004), in which the main character is a student who has constantly to negotiate between the worlds of the postcolonial university and the world of the post-apartheid township.

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quiescence of students in the years between 1994 and 2014 is to a great degree reflective of the extent to which the structures of the postcolonial / post-apartheid university successfully ensured the prevalence of Black Hamletism on the part of students. As an academic in the Law Faculty at the University of Cape Town, I recall in this regard the many conversations I had in the years between 2004 and 2014 about what we then called student “apathy” (Wale 2015). Many academics who were concerned about the slow pace of transformation in South African universities and about the situation of Black students in particular in relation to such an untransformed state, wondered, in many instances quite vocally, about the reasons why students were not revolting in the face of such overwhelming cause for it. However, outside the university it became clear during these years that, more and more, Black subjectivity was no longer prepared to be resigned to a Hamletism that existed under the banner of the “rainbow nation” in the years immediately following the formal dismantling of apartheid. This became clear to such an extent that by 2013 South Africa was dubbed the “protest capital of the world” (Bianco 2013). This designation of the postcolony as “protest capital” strongly reflected the extent to which the post-apartheid regime’s reliance on structural Hamletism was beginning to come undone. All over the country, marginalized Black people settled on protest as one of the primary mechanisms of communication with a State which they experienced as not simply failing them but as indeed abandoning them to the gross inequities of a neoliberal political economy – a political economy that exhorted them to market participation but failed to equip them with the basic conditions necessary for access to this very market. To put it differently, Black subjectivity in the last 15 years or so has been increasingly prepared to proclaim its opposition to being subjected to the imperatives of two colonially constructed worlds in one country. At the psycho-affective level, South African literary critic Shane Graham (2015, 64), accurately diagnosed the situation when, in 2015, he commented that the most apt single word to characterize the South African cultural affect in the twenty-first century is “anxious”. It is, accordingly, no coincidence that when the affect of anxiety spilled over into the student protest movements from 2015 onwards, these movements took up the plight of the socio-economically and socio-culturally marginalized world, proclaiming a strong solidarity with the working class and the poor. It is also no coincidence that the student protests proclaimed a strong allegiance to indigenous culture and affirmed it as an indelible source of ethical life, drawing out its emancipatory power and thus rejecting the colonial construction of this world as “premodern”. In many ways the #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) movement’s coagulation around the emblematic image of imperialism – the statue of Cecil John Rhodes in pride of place at the University of Cape Town’s Upper Campus – and around the trope of colonialism and the signifier of “decolonisation”, were symptomatic of the desire to resolve the unbearable tension between two life worlds with which Black students are confronted on a daily basis in the postcolonial university. This desire to resolve the tension was, I think, fought along two primary fronts. First, the retrieval and affirmation of indigenous knowledge and culture in an effort to

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overcome colonial-apartheid’s bastardised version of it (the structurally imposed world of the bond). Second, the condemnation of everything that colonial-apartheid modernity held dear, including most importantly for my purposes, the ideology that it is only through Western modernity that psychic individuation is possible. In so many ways, students contested the apparently emancipatory content of the world of the contract, while also rejecting apartheid’s version of the world of the bond, turning instead to a renewed and revivified customary law which it diametrically opposed to apartheid’s “native laws”. Many students who were at the forefront of the #RMF and #FeesMustFall (#FMF) movements were poor, Black students, often the first generation in their family to attend a university. Many of these students also come from or have close ties to indigenous communities in which the bond – as living customary law, not simply as external authority – takes precedence over the contract in terms of the resolution of conflict, Oedipal or otherwise. Students who are confronted with modernity and modern subjectivity in the postcolonial university obviously do not leave this “other” world behind – they (are continually forced to) inhabit both these worlds at the same time and to negotiate the unbearable tensions that come with living in two worlds at once. In her contribution to this collection, Karin van Marle raises Svetlana Boym’s notion of the off-modern as a possible way out of the impasse that confrontation with Western modernity in the African postcolonial university brings for many students. Van Marle quotes Boym to the effect that “reflective nostalgia” opens the space for a critical engagement with the past, which I read as inescapably the past of the imposition of the imperatives of two worlds at once, the past which is always already surviving in the postcolonial present. Boym remarks that in the off-modern tradition there is room for reflection and longing, for estrangement and affect. I want to align this notion of the “offmodern” with what I have identified as the shared diagnostic, which reads as a shared protest, across the pieces in this collection – that the time is out of joint. I think that being “off-modern” and its commitment to reflective nostalgia can be (and perhaps has already been in the student protest movements) a productive way of engaging the out-of-joint time. For one thing, the reflective nostalgia of the off-modern makes room for and thus explains the prominence of mourning – as opposed to melancholia – in student protest modalities.3 3

Ross Truscott and Maurits Van Bever Donker (2017, 29) have intimated that the student movement could be understood as melancholic. “Much of what is routinely called ‘black anger’”, they write, “can, too […] be framed as melancholic”. The itinerary of melancholia that Truscott and Van Bever Donker follow leads them to link melancholia, through the work of Giorgio Agamben, with invention and, relying on the work of Ranjana Khanna, they affirm Black melancholia in the postcolonial condition. This is not the occasion to dispute Truscott and Van Bever Donker’s reliance on the affirmative power of melancholia, indeed there is much in it with which I agree. This chapter, however, aims to show that an imposed melancholia with a history that reaches into colonial-apartheid power structures, remains as a trauma that will have been dealt with and that complicates any (ostensibly easy) affirmative reliance on melancholia in contemporary critical theory.

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Jacques Derrida (1995, 18) has argued that “the essential pathology of mourning”, not melancholia, lies “inhumed” in Hamlet’s statement that “the time is out of joint”. In this, Derrida draws a link between mourning and the out-of-jointness of time to the degree that mourning becomes essentially a matter of a certain relation to time. My sense is that the mourning in protest, or protest as mourning, represents a significant form of being “off-modern” and in a way that overcomes the melancholic stasis of Hamletism in favour of the “reflective [and perhaps also reflexive] nostalgia” of the off-modern. As such, this mourning-protest is critically related to a different way of being with time and being with the past. Student protestors’ modus operandi – their tactics – were overtly geared at the creation of an ethico-political interruption or a caesura in the Other’s time, the time of Symbolic law, if we understand the Other’s time for the moment here as the time of the neoliberal Big Other in the postcolony. Student protestors did not, like Hamlet, hesitate to act or put off action when opportunity presented itself for such action. In short, student protest, unlike Hamlet, refused to wait, insisting that the time to act was now, and then passing into demonstrative action without consideration for their own (narcissistic) time. In her contribution to this collection, Judith Butler calls this the operation “within the time of the aftermath”, which she also describes as the time of the “rupture after the rupture”. The two most prominent (some would say “spectacular”) instances of this operation of student protest authentically in terms of the time of mourning as opposed to the time of melancholia came in the form, first, of the removal of the colossal statue of Rhodes from its pride of place on the UCT Upper Campus and, second, in the installation of a shack in the middle of a main access road to the University from the freeway during the 2016 #Shackville protests (Petersen & Albert 2016). These could both be understood as interventions that were explicitly geared not only at “fighting an old one”, which Hamlet failed to do, but indeed at the interruption of the smooth neoliberal time of the postcolonial state, harnessed as it is to the imperialism and colonialism that remains in it as a present past. In other words, the student protestors created a caesura in the narcissistic time of the neoliberal postcolony. Other, no less important, illustrations that student protest operated in the terms of what could be called the time of “a justice to come” (Truscott & Van Bever Donker 2017, 31), came in the form of the interruption – and often disruption – of scheduled meetings, in the shutting down of entire campuses and in protest marches taking routes that stopped traffic on busy freeways. All of these could be regarded as instances during which students demonstrated to the country their diagnosis not only that the time was out of joint but indeed that they – the so-called born frees – in fact took themselves seriously as born to set the out-of-joint time right. Moreover, because protest time was a relation with time as the time of justice, it meant that the protests were not just insistent upon action in the present, in the “now”, but were at the same time affirmatively orientated towards that part of the future to which the remainder of justice belongs. This remainder of justice is the justice that is always still left to be done, the part of justice which cannot, or cannot fully, be done in the present moment of the day. For as Derrida (1990, 969) so aptly remarks: “Justice remains, is yet, to

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come, à venir, it has an, it is à-venir, the very dimension of events irreducibly to come. It will always have it, this à-venir, and always has.” It is also, as Rose suggests in her lecture, this future perfect tense in which is located the true experience of psychoanalysis: “not what I once was and am no more (repression), nor what I still am in what I once was (repetition), but what I will have been for what I am in the process of becoming”. As Rose goes on to suggest, “this formula of disjointed, generative temporality”, “might also do for the political time in which South Africa is living.” For these reasons, I have in previous work (Barnard-Naudé 2017) explained that one could understand student protest as hysterical discourse in the precise Lacanian sense, namely as demonstrating a social link between a subject and their Master which hinges on a ceaseless interrogation of the Master and of masters in general (Lacan 2007, 14). I want, then, tentatively to suggest here that in this reading of hysteria, student protest could be read as significantly overcoming the paralysis and indecision of melancholic Hamletism. As such, student protest confronts postcolonial time with a new (or renewed) subjectivity that addresses the ghostly out-of-joint-ness of time for which the master’s discourse in the postcolony is responsible. Lacan understands the Hysteric as the subject who has the power to unmask the discourse of the Master (Voruz 2007, 175). This is the case primarily because the Hysteric is “a subject impossible to pin down to the signifier which tries to fix it, name it, assign it a place” (Lacan 2007, 143). This aspect of hysterical discourse was prominent in the student protesters’ refusal – as protesters – to be pinned down to the pre-ordained positions that the master’s discourse of the university assigned to them, precisely as “merely” students. During the #RMF protests, for instance, students took the matter of their education into their own hands when they occupied the UCT’s Bremner Building, rechristening it as Azania House, and convening a programme of academic seminars themselves (Mohajane n.d.; Herman 2015). For Lacan, the Hysteric remains the subject of desire and of desire as remainder. Ragland (2006, 85) remarks that she “lives castration at the surface of her life and discourse”. Through her ceaseless interrogation of the Master, the Hysteric finds an Other that lacks. Salecl (2000) argues that the subject can only answer to this lack in the Other with her own lack. Now, in Lacan’s structure of hysterical discourse, the address of the Hysteric to the Master, always produces knowledge. This relationship between hysterical discourse and the production of knowledge through a correspondence between lacks, has also been highly visible in the university’s space in the aftermath of protest: all over the curriculum, reforms have been instituted on the basis of a production of knowledge about what the Master lacks: in essence, “decolonisation” (see Jansen 2019). In addition, this production of knowledge has taken place on the basis of what the decolonisation of knowledge meant for the very production of knowledge in the university (that which the student, at least ostensibly, lacks by virtue of being a student). Yet, at the same time, this production of knowledge in relation to decolonisation has not and can never be the final answer in terms of a response to the Hysteric’s ceaseless interrogation of the Master – the point is that whatever knowledge the

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Master produces, it is and can never be enough, precisely because the Hysteric is driven by the exposure of the Master’s lack to which she responds with her own. In the discussion of Hamletism above, I mentioned that the melancholic cannot be regarded as having a death drive, because she is ceaselessly fixated upon the unresolved status of the lost object and takes her “pleasure” in this fixation which takes the form of an identification. As a subjectivity that overcomes Hamletism in significant ways, student protest subjectivity seems to me to be radically different in this regard as well. Here we need only to recall the many ways in which students went well beyond the pleasure principle in exposing themselves to police and private security brutality, arrest and the possibility of violent encounter with security forces in general. In these encounters, students did not hesitate to put themselves “on the line” in a way that stands in stark contrast with the comfort, safety and pleasure of bourgeois life in South Africa. One could even go as far as suggesting that there is a certain jouissance in protest itself, that is, even in cases where it does not involve violent encounter. This is the case because, as hysterical discourse, protest goes beyond the pleasure of comfortable, complacent or obedient discursive exchange. As discourse, it is a challenge which issues a challenge, one that is at once and in fact several challenges; it strains the discursive space, pushes it to the very limits of what it can accommodate, demands that it responds differently. This is what I understand Rose as saying when she emphasises in her lecture “a form of radical understanding that can be politically transformative without, in the words of Dudu Ndlovu, […] ‘collapsing the space.’” In doing so, protest discourse goes beyond the melancholic pleasure of resigned and fixated discourse about a past trauma that ultimately remains unaddressed. In short, protest discourse takes seriously the injunction delivered to Horatio in Hamlet: “thou art a scholar, speak to it”. Along these lines one could also add the many artistic interventions in relation to the protest movement and that grew out of them. The live art installations at the Rhodes plinth, for instance, testify to an ability in these movements to sublimate in a way that turns jouissance into art in the form of what has been called the “performative ‘black fantastic’” (Nuttall 2019, 56). It is, however, this very energetic aspect of the movement that provides occasion also to sound a word of caution. As I suggested in previous work (Barnard-Naudé 2017), a hysterical discourse that is fuelled by anxiety can arrive at one of two destinies for the subject: acting out or the violent passage à l’acte. If anxiety is always a signal of the imminent deconstitution of the subject, the “irruption of an overwhelming part of the real”, then anxiety can be “an infallible guide for a possible new truth” (Bosteels 2006, 142). This is the power of anxiety. Salecl (2004, 28) writes about this power in anxiety as follows: “it creates a state of preparedness so that the subject might be less paralyzed and surprised by the events that might radically shatter his or her fantasy and thus cause the subject’s breakdown or an emergence of a trauma”. This is the resolution of anxiety through acting out. “The demonstrative accent in any acting out is”, writes Lacan (2014, 123), “its orientation towards the Other”. We can conclude, then, that acting out remains within the discourse of the Hysteric as fundamentally an address to the Other. As Žižek (1991, 139, emphasis added) writes:

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Jaco Barnard-Naudé acting out is an attempt to break through a symbolic deadlock (an impossibility of symbolization, of putting into words) by means of an act, even though this act still functions as the bearer of some ciphered message. Through this act we attempt (in a ‘crazy’ way, true) to honor a certain debt, to wipe out a certain guilt, to embody a certain reproach to the Other, etc.

I would venture here that the forms of intense engagement in protest tactics (sitins, seemingly endless meetings with management and other university structures, vigils, covering up the Rhodes statue and other statues, as well as defacing them, disruption of lectures, shut down of entire campuses, mass action at the seat of government in Pretoria, etc) and the artistic sublimation that I describe above, all constitute demonstrative forms of “acting out” in this sense, because in them the accent clearly still falls on the “orientation towards the Other”. There have been, and will continue to be, instances where the discourse of the anxious Hysteric does not have this effect. These are instances where protest is accompanied by what might seem to be “senseless”, violent and even violently suicidal gestures, moments where the resolution of anxiety amounts to “the moment when the real kills, rather than divides, the symbolic” (Bosteels 2006, 142), when anxiety lets the existing order be only as “a dead order” (Bosteels 2006, 142). This moment designates the passage à l’acte. Lacan’s imagistic language is instructive here: unlike “acting out,” passage à l’acte designates the moment when the subject “rushes and topples off the stage, out of the scene” (Lacan 2014, 115). As Žižek (1991, 139) explains: “The ‘passage to act’ entails […] an exit from the symbolic network, a dissolution of the social bond”. Of these moments there have been vivid examples in the postcolony. In service delivery protest, they take the form of looting and arson, often of the affected community’s already severely constrained resources such as schools (Baccus 2016). In the student protests, I would argue, they have taken the form of what Pithouse (2016) describes as a “turn to burning”: setting alight libraries, residences, computer laboratories, transport buses and cars, a lecture hall, works of art and administrative offices. The 2016 iteration of the #FMF movement saw a heightened prominence of these characteristic features of the passage à l’acte. In this reading, as Pithouse (2016) suggests: “The turn to burning is not a sign of a productive new militancy. On the contrary it is symptomatic of the current weakness of the movement”. With reference to the frame I have been using in this contribution, I would suggest that passage à l’acte represents a painful return to melancholic subjectivity. Here we only need to recall that Hamlet ends in a passage à l’acte which may avenge the father, but that costs Hamlet his life and that thus renders the act of justice ultimately useless. As one commentator remarks of Hamlet’s end: “he delays until, knowing his own death to be imminent, he lashes out in hopeless brutality” (Lane 1988, 284). On the other hand, such a reading risks feeding into the pathologisation of protest whose violence, as Rose argues, can become the only way of speaking a denied and muffled legacy of historical pain.

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The correspondences of contemporary student protest When, on 9 March 2015, Chumani Maxwele, a UCT student activist, emptied a toilet of human excrement on the colossal statue of Rhodes, located at “the focal point” of the university’s iconic Upper Campus on the Devil’s Peak slopes of the world famous Table Mountain range (Price 2015; Hodgkinson & Melchiorre 2019), commentators rushed to dismiss this action in the most pejorative of terms. It was only later that the media and these commentators noticed that Maxwele’s action occurred against the backdrop of an established practice of post-apartheid protest action involving human waste. Thus, Maxwele ensured that his intervention would register as the latest instalment in this contemporary, post-struggle correspondence of protest as one of the primary forms of communication with a neglectful and debilitated State (Maxwele’s act of throwing human excrement at the face of Power was thus not the first, nor would it be the last (as Wahbie Long relates in his chapter in this volume) in contemporary protest action.) Thus, while Maxwele’s act was arguably calculated at providing another instalment in an ongoing history of protest action in “post”-apartheid South Africa, his was also an act that simultaneously triggered a series of dramatic nationwide student protests that reached further back into South African and world history (what Truscott & Van Bever Donker (2017, 32) refer to as “far older struggles”). Thus Maxwele managed to establish a correspondence with the Soweto uprising protests of 1976 in apartheid South Africa, with the student protests of the second half of the twentieth century elsewhere in Africa, with the mid-1960s protests on American campuses and, of course, with the May 1968 protests in France (which, as different as it was from contemporary student protests, remains a paradigmatic instance of students fighting for justice). All of these, drawn out of the darkness of the past and re-presented in the glaring light of the postcolonial “now”, thus were made to function as so many instances in a long correspondence which held, over the years, that “the time is out of joint”, remains out of joint and that perhaps will have concluded that the time that remains is always out-of-joint time. As it happened, this sense of ongoing correspondence about the time out of joint, was dramatically magnified and vivified after Maxwele’s action. The #RMF protests and the nationwide #FMF movement that followed later in 2015, and recurred in 2016 and in 2017 to a more limited extent, permanently altered the landscape of South African Higher Education. The movements gave birth to an unprecedented iteration of student protest discourse, articulating, as we have seen, its overall demand as “decolonisation” (Hodgkinson & Melchiorre 2019). Aligned to a novel ideology of so-called “fallism” and a mobilization strategy that relied almost exclusively on social media, the South African movements soon became the templates of new student movements internationally, notably at Oxford University where the local #RMF movement agitated (ultimately unsuccessfully) for the removal of the statue of Rhodes in front of Oriel College (Chaudhuri 2016).

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On 8 April 2015, the UCT Council resolved permanently to remove the Rhodes statue from its “pride of place” on the Upper Campus (Price 2015). By the afternoon of the next day, it was, amid a vast crowd and “festive atmosphere”, unceremoniously hoisted off its plinth and transferred to an undisclosed storage space, hidden out of sight (BBC 2015). By the end of 2015, the #FMF movement had succeeded in securing a 0% tuition fee increase for the 2016 academic year. The increasingly highly controversial Zuma government simultaneously appointed a fees commission to investigate the viability of free higher education in South Africa. In the course of this rapid succession of events, the normalized crisis in South African Higher Education, which had been apparent since the early 2000s, had suddenly acquired a new intensity. A sustained sense of emergency, if not, from time to time, a fully-fledged state of emergency, prevailed on most university campuses from the end of 2015, where drawn-out discussions between students and staff on the untransformed, colonial state of the university, its staff and the curriculum, alternated with sporadically violent clashes between protesters, on one side, and police and private security forces, on the other; while negotiations to end shutdowns and complete the academic year lasted into the small hours of many mornings. In the midst of these events, the question of the legitimacy of violence in the quest for decolonisation, emerged as a central topic in the national debate. At some universities, different versions of what are nonetheless the hallmarks of a state of emergency endured and were arguably in the process of becoming normalized. In the aftermath of these nationwide student protests, many campuses have become permanently securitised spaces. In the course of this period, scholarly attentions have become pre-occupied with thought and interventions that aim not only to understand, but also to resolve this unprecedented and highly charged state of affairs. When, in 2016, the main aim of the decolonisation demand shifted from a moratorium on fee hikes to free higher education, the Heher Fees Commission recommended (in a report leaked to the press after a long delay in its official release) a cost-sharing model to fund higher education in South Africa (Presence & Mahlati 2017). By the end of 2017, President Zuma, shortly before vacating the seat of power, abruptly announced free higher education for poor and working-class students (Areff & Spies 2017). In a move that was widely regarded as part and parcel of his failed attempt to ensure a victory for his faction in the ANC elections that took place shortly thereafter, Zuma left the South African Treasury - which had been kept in the dark - scrambling for the budget to keep his promise in an already “downgraded” macro-economic environment (Menon 2018). In the spirit of the renewed focus on and intensification of the crisis in Higher Education in postapartheid South Africa, the University of Cape Town invited Professor Jacqueline Rose to deliver the Vice-Chancellor’s Open Lecture on 16 March 2017. The title of Rose’s lecture was billed as “The Legacy, or what I have learned from you”. From the outset, Rose indicated that she was more interested in presenting the lecture as a further instalment to the national and international conversation, rather than as a stand-alone piece in the manner of a

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traditional lecture. To reflect this intention, the organisers invited Dr Victoria Collis-Buthelezi to formally respond to the lecture as part of the organised event. Rose’s lecture and Collis-Buthelezi’s response intended to both contribute to and open further lines of enquiry in the ongoing debate. In the spirit of continuing this conversation in a manner akin to the “free association” method which lies at the core of psychoanalysis, this collection brings together ten further responses to Rose’s lecture. These responses hail from a wide range of interdisciplinary scholars in the Humanities, both in South Africa and abroad. These responses are as varied as they are similar in terms of the concerns they share, as congruent in terms of their diagnoses as they are divergent in terms of what is to be done. The responses offer analysis rather than prescription, suggestion and interpretation rather than manifestos. In this way, the responses can be seen to be part of the memorial orientation towards the past, an orientation out of which loss and cost is commemorated, while at the same time the injunction to learn from history is reiterated. We intentionally also included what we consider one lateral or “sideways” response, in the form of an interview with Achille Mbembe. Although this contribution does not directly reply to Rose’s lecture it can nonetheless be read as a parallax reply to many of the issues raised in the lecture and in the other contributions. Like many of the other responses, it also illustrates the way in which the national or local concerns have a much wider resonance in international and even global questions of our age. As such, it gives new purchase to Jacques Derrida’s famous statement in Specters of Marx where, in reference to South Africa, he (1994, xiv (emphasis added)) writes: the historic violence of Apartheid can always be treated as a metonymy. In its past as well as in its present. By diverse paths (condensation, displacement, expression, or representation), one can always decipher through its singularity so many other kinds of violence going on in the world. At once part, cause, effect, example, what is happening there translates what takes place here, always here, wherever one is and wherever one looks, closest to home. With this collection, we hope to re-open old questions about – to name only a few – the relationship between psychoanalysis and the law, about the universality of psychoanalysis, about the trauma that has been confronted and the trauma that is yet to be confronted, about inter-generational transmission and generational difference, about exclusive identitarian commitments in social movements and solidarity across lines of division in those movements, about the vicissitudes of neoliberalism in the postcolony and about the potential of decolonisation as a counter to its hegemony. At the same time, we hope that this collection will raise new questions in old debates as well as spark new debates within the context of existing ones. Ultimately, the aim is to keep the correspondence going, in the hope that some therapy, healing and enhanced understanding might arise both from the instance of the linguistic exchange itself as well as from the way in which such exchanges might generate for their reader new or revitalized

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possibilities of thought, action and being which is always a question of beingwith. If, ultimately, the question is “to be or not to be”, then this collection challenges us to reconsider the conditions of possibility of both the being and the not being-with; and to consider anew the stakes of taking up arms against the “sea of troubles” that face us as the “post”-colony advances further into this precarious century.

References Abraham, Nicolas & Torok, Maria. 1986. The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy. Translated by Nicholas Rand. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Arditi, Benjamin. 2003. “Talkin’ ‘bout a Revolution: The end of mourning.” Parallax 9 (2): 81–95. Areff, Ahmed & Spies, Derrick. 2017. “Zuma announces free higher education for poor and working class students.” News 24, December 16. https://www.news24.com/ SouthAfrica/News/zuma-announces-free-higher-education-for-poor-and-workingclass-students-20171216. Aristodemou, Maria. 2018. “To be or not to be a (dead) father.” Journal of International Dispute Settlement 9: 103–122. Baccus, Imraan. 2016. “Understand the burning of schools in #Vuwani.” The Mercury, April 19. http://www.iol.co.za/mercury/understand-the-burning-of-schools-in-vuwani2023671. Badat, Saleem. 1999. Black Student Politics, Higher Education and Apartheid: From SASO to SANSCO, 1968–1990. Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council. Barnard-Naudé, Jaco. 2017. “‘She reigns and he does not govern’: The discourse of the anxious hysteric in post-apartheid South Africa.” Law and Critique 28(3): 267–287. BBC. 2015. “Rhodes statue removed in Cape Town as crowd celebrates.” BBC News, April 9. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-32236922. Bertoldi, Andreas. 1998. “Shakespeare, psychoanalysis and the colonial encounter: The case of Wulf Sachs’s Black Hamlet.” In Post-colonial Shakespeares, edited by Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, 235–258. London: Routledge. Bianco, Silvia. 2013. “South Africa: The ‘protest capital of the world’.” The South African. Accessed 13 May 2017. http://www.thesouthafrican.com/south-africa-the-protestcapital-of-the-world/. Bloom, Leonard. 2004. “On Wulf Sachs’s Black Hamlet”. Psychoanalysis and History 6(2): 253–264. Bosteels, Bruno. 2006. “Alain Badiou’s theory of the subject: The recommencement of dialectical materialism.” In Lacan: The Silent Partners, edited by Alain Badiou, 115– 168. London: Verso. Chaudhuri, Amit. 2016. “The real meaning of Rhodes Must Fall.” The Guardian, March 16. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/16/the-real-meaning-of-rhodesmust-fall. Clewell, Tammy. 2004. “Mourning beyond melancholia: Freud’s psychoanalysis of loss.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association 52(1): 43–67. Cornell, Drucilla & Seely, Stephen D. 2016. The Spirit of Revolution: Beyond the Dead Ends of Man. Cambridge: Polity. Crewe, Jonathan. 2001. “Black Hamlet: Psychoanalysis on trial in South Africa.” Poetics Today 22(2): 413–433.

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Derrida, Jacques. 1977. “Fors: The Anglish words of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok.” Translated by Barbara Johnson. The Georgia Review 31(1): 64–116. Derrida, Jacques. 1990. “Force of law: The ‘mystical foundation of authority.’” Cardozo Law Review 11: 920–1045. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1995. “The time is out of joint.” In Deconstruction Is / In America, edited by Anselm Haverkamp, translated by Peggy Kamuf, 14–38. New York: NYU Press. Freud, Sigmund. 2005. On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. London: Penguin. Freud, Sigmund. 1957. “Mourning and Melancholia.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume XIV, translated and edited by James Strachey, 237–258. London: The Hogarth Press Limited. Freud, Sigmund. 1961. “The Ego and the Id.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume XIX, translated and edited by James Strachey, 1–68. London: The Hogarth Press Limited. Ghose, Indira. 2010. “Jesting with death: Hamlet in the graveyard.” Textual Practice 24 (6): 1003–1018. Graham, Shane. 2015. “The entropy of built things: Postapartheid anxiety and the production of space in Henrietta Rose-Innes’ Nineveh and Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City.” Journal of South African and American Studies 16(1), 64–77. Habib, Adam. 1997. “South Africa – The Rainbow Nation and prospects for consolidating democracy.” African Journal of Political Science / Revue Africaine de Science Politique 2(2): 15–37. Herman, Paul. 2015. “Rhodes Must Fall: Students have their say.” News24, April 2. http s://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Rhodes-Must-Fall-Students-have-their-say20150402. Hodgkinson, Dan & Melchiorre, Luke. 2019. “Africa’s student movements: History sheds light on modern activism.” The Conversation, February 18. https://theconversa tion.com/africas-student-movements-history-sheds-light-on-modern-activism -111003. Jansen, Jonathan, ed. 2019. Decolonisation in Universities: The Politics of Knowledge. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 2007. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller and translated by Russell Grigg. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Lacan, Jacques. 2014. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book X: Anxiety. Edited by JacquesAlain Miller and translated by A.R. Price. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lacan, Jacques. 2019. Desire and its Interpretation: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VI. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller and translated by Bruce Fink. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lane, Jessica. 1988. “The poetics of legal interpretation.” In Interpreting Law and Literature: A Hermeneutic Reader, edited by Sanford Levinson and Steven Mailloux. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Mbeki, Thabo. 1998. “South Africa: Two nations.” In Africa: The Time has Come: Selected Speeches. Johannesburg: Tafelberg and Mafube. Menon, Sunita. 2018. “Zuma’s free education promise left Treasury with ‘no choice’.” TimesLive, 22 February. https://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2018-02-22-zumas-freeeducation-promise-left-treasury-with-no-choice/.

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Mhlongo, Niq. 2004. Dog Eat Dog: A Novel. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Mohajane, Amohelang. n.d. “The movement and Sara Baartman”.’ https://saraiamtara. wordpress.com/rhodes-must-fall/. Nuttall, Sarah. 2019. “Upsurge.” In Acts of Transgression: Contemporary Live Art in South Africa, edited by Jay Pather and Catherine Boulle. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Petersen, Francis & Albert, Wanelisa. 2016. “How Shackville started a war.” City Press, 21 February. https://city-press.news24.com/Voices/how-shackville-started-a-war-20160219. Pithouse, Richard. 2016. “The turn to book burning in South Africa.” Africa is a Country. http://africasacountry.com/2016/09/the-turn-to-burning-in-south-africa/. Accessed 14 May 2017. Presence, Chantall & Mahlati, Z. 2017. “Fees can’t fall, cost-sharing more feasible – Heher Report” IOL, 13 November, https://www.iol.co.za/news/politics/fees-cant-fall-costsharing-more-feasible-heher-report-11983186. Price, Max. 2015. “Rhodes statue should be moved – Max Price”. Politicsweb, March 18. https://www.politicsweb.co.za/politics/rhodes-statue-should-be-moved–max-price. Ragland, Ellie. 2006. “The Hysteric’s truth.” In Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII. Edited by Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rose, Jacqueline. 1996. “Introduction—Part Two.” In Wulf Sachs, Black Hamlet, 38– 67. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. Rose, Jacqueline. 2005. Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London: Verso. Salecl, Renata. 2000. “Something where there should be nothing.” Cabinet 1. Accessed 14 May 2017. http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/1/nothing.php. Salecl, Renata. 2004. On Anxiety. London: Routledge. Sachs, Wulf. 1996. Black Hamlet. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. Snyman, Johan. 1998. “Interpretation and the politics of memory.” Acta Juridica: 312–324. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tlali, Miriam. 2004. Between Two Worlds. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Truscott, Ross & Van Bever Donker, Maurits. 2017. “What is the university in Africa for?” Kronos 43: 13–39. Verhaeghe, Paul. 1995. “From impossibility to inability: Lacan’s theory of the four discourses.” The Letter 3: 76–99. Voruz, Véronique. 2007. “A Lacanian reading of Dora.” In The Later Lacan: an Introduction, edited by Véronique Voruz and Bogdan Wolf. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Wale, Kim. 2015. “Fallism for what.” https://africasacountry.com/2015/10/afterthe-reawakening-of-south-african-student-activism-where-to-next. Walker, Kathryn. 2004. “The tragedy of interruption.” Critical Sense, Spring: 115–145. Žižek, Slavoj. 1991. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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The Legacy1 Jacqueline Rose

During the past year and more, I have been receiving a steady flow of information – news articles, commentaries, leaflets, statements, official and unofficial, counter-statements – from the University of Cape Town (UCT) and beyond about the protest campaigns that have been taking place in universities across South Africa since March 2015. In this I have been indebted to a number of people from within the student movement, to legal scholar Jaco Barnard-Naudé, as well as more broadly to international scholars and writers with stories deeply entwined in South Africa such as Gillian Slovo and Drucilla Cornell, to the writing of Pumla Gobodo-Madikezela, in-depth analyst of the lasting traumas of the nation, and many more. I arrived in South Africa from Great Britain which, as the mainly white metropolis of empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has much to answer for in relation to the torn fabric of South African history. The 1913 Land Act, an act of sheer theft initiated by the British which laid the ground for segregation and then apartheid, would be a good enough place to begin, not least because the unresolved question of land – its still cruelly unequal distribution – is at the heart of the continuing struggle in South Africa, one of the most enduring and troubling legacies of the past. In fact, my family were all Jewish migrants from Poland who travelled, under various forms of persecution and duress, to what was felt then to be something of a haven in the United Kingdom (UK). Nonetheless, it is from this distance, and with this sense of historic responsibility and privilege, that I found myself immersed in the stories of the protests that have erupted across the educational landscape of South Africa – protests which were initially precipitated by, but which speak to, and have drawn so much more than, education in their train. As I read The Daily Maverick, The Daily Vox and The Conversation, they seemed to me to constitute an alternative university space of their own. From their pages 1

“Political Protest and the Denial of History – South Africa and the Legacy of the Future” from On Violence and on Violence Against Women by Jacqueline Rose. Copyright © 2021 by Jacqueline Rose. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US/Canada/Philippines/open market distribution) and Faber and Faber (throughout the World excluding the United States of America, its territories and dependencies, the Republic of the Philippines and Canada).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003198581-2

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I heard voices speaking, analysing, protesting, voices calling for colloquia, dialogue, workshops, debates, for a form of radical understanding that can be politically transformative without, in the words of Dudu Ndlovu, Black Radical Feminist and Fallist who has chaired many meetings, “collapsing the space” (Thebus n.d., 60). That suggestive formula gave me pause. I read her as calling for a space that somehow holds across the fractures and fault-lines it must also expose and create, a space that emerges from a message of brokenness in both declaratory and imperative mode, a statement of fact and intent: this is already broken, this must break. Or in the words of Petrus Brink, farm worker and activist from Citrusdal, a township in the Western Cape, interviewed by Simon Rakei in the student issued pamphlet, Pathways to Free Education, “This is … this is … this is really not working” (Rakei n.d., 20). Brink is a member of the food sovereignty campaign, and the forum for workers, farm dwellers and migrants, just one of the groups to whom the student protests have reached out and who have reached out to those protests in turn. I have been struck by how far building solidarity nationally and internationally across struggles stands out as a key aim of the protests: the campaign against outsourcing, the challenge to the hierarchy between manual and intellectual labour, the call, issued by Brian Kamanzi amongst other students, for a socially responsive University which would offer asylum to fellow African and diasporas across the globe (a call which, in the face of Trump’s assault on migrants and refugees, not to speak of the UK’s own inhuman policies, has surely never felt more relevant) (Kamanzi 2016a). So how to move forward without forfeiting either the disruptive force of Brink’s deceptively simple statement (“this is really not working”), or the space for dialogue and understanding – without collapsing the space? Or to put it another way, can politically motivated rage be generative, can it erupt and move us forward in the same breath? In her Ruth First memorial lecture on “Violence and Rage,” delivered in August last year, Leigh-Ann Naidoo spoke of the “violent, pathological” inequality which scars the nation (Naidoo 2016). When Lovelyn Nwadeyi addressed the top two hundred South Africans selected by Mail & Guardian last June, she described the time as “disjointed, out of sync, plagued by a generational fault line that scrambles historicity” (Nwadeyi 2016). “Pathological,” “plagued” – these are powerful, evocative, words. One of the things I will be suggesting in what follows is that the protests, together with the outpouring of commentaries, have raised the relationship between affect and politics to a new level of understanding. As a young woman in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was part of the student protests in Oxford and Paris. In fact, shortly before going to Oxford as an undergraduate, I had taken the last plane home out of Paris in May 1968 before the airports shut down, to the accompaniment of headlines: “La France s’écrase” – “France is crumbling.” If the campaigns in South Africa evoked for me memories of those moments – the same hyperbole of destruction thrown at the protests (after all France did not crumble or fall apart in 1968) – the worlds could also not be more different. Up to that time, Oxford, had been a site of unadulterated privilege, more or less untouched by questions of race, gender and

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class. Today it seems fair to ask if, or how far, any of that, at a deep level, has really changed? Taking their cue from UCT, students at Oxford initiated their own Rhodes Must Fall campaign last year, demanding first and foremost the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes from its prominent position at Oriel College as founding father and benefactor. Having first agreed to consider this demand, the College Management revoked their offer when various alumni threatened to withdraw their donations and/or disinherit the college in their wills. A major donor, whose legacy was rumoured to be in the region of £100,000 was reported to be “furious.” “Rhodes will not fall” was the front page headline of the right-wing Daily Telegraph daily newspaper which could barely conceal its elation at this climb-down (Espinoza and Rayner 2016). There is an irony here. After all, it was Britain that was one of the first countries to import into the African continent the brute force of capital whose continuing sway in post-apartheid South Africa is the cause of so much that is broken today. It was, then, somehow hideously appropriate that, faced with the petulant omnipotence of money, the Oxford University Management should, without a trace of historic self-consciousness, so promptly and cravenly buckle. Those who defended the presence of the statue on the grounds that it needed to remain as part of historical debate, or who argued more bluntly that students wishing to take it down rather than engage in such civilised discussion had no place at Oxford and should seek their education elsewhere (Oxford’s Chancellor no less), or that one of the main student organisers disqualified himself from any protest since, as a Rhodes scholar, he was indebted to Rhodes, of course never for one minute raised the question of the ongoing histories of material exploitation, of global capital shunted around an increasingly unequal world, in which the monies before which they prostrated themselves might be embedded. As a young student, I was the beneficiary of a free state-provided education. Like many in the UK, I have watched appalled as the right to education free at the point of entry, a key demand of the protests, has been systematically dismantled, while an increasingly instrumental version of learning, wedded to “impact” and quantifiable forms of knowledge in tune with the calculations of capital, has spread across universities. That these fees impact disproportionately on the disadvantaged goes without saying (a manageable loan for the middle class being an insurmountable debt for the poor). So it seemed to me crucial to start by expressing my solidarity with the basic demand – whether in the form of free education for all or free education for the poor which has also been a subject of debate. I have witnessed the deleterious effects on the house of critical thought of any whittling down of that fundamental right in the so-called free world. * I have given my lecture this evening the title of “The Legacy.” My question, which the reality in South Africa so sharply helped and obliged me to focus, is: what, in moments of historical crisis, is being passed down from one generation to the next? In a struggle which is also a reckoning with the past – as all political

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struggles may be, but this one surely is – what both can, and cannot, be borne? What do we not want to know about the past? What do we not want to know about ourselves? In everything I read, the word “free” has been central, first in the context of the demand for free education, and then again in the concept of the “born-free,” the term applied to the generation born after the legal and political dismantling of apartheid in 1994. When the journalist, Eve Fairbanks, visited South Africa to investigate the protests for the London Guardian in November 2015, she was driven from the airport to UCT by a 50-year-old black man from the township of Langa who, without prompting, told her how he had reacted when his 14year-old son had asked him what apartheid had done to him: ‘“I don’t want you to know about the past,’ he responded angrily, ‘you are free of all that!”’ (Fairbanks 2015). Sociologist Xolela Mangcu told her that he tries to avoid conversations about black history with his daughter who is attending a privileged mainly-whites school: ‘“I’m afraid of how she’ll process it. How she’ll relate to her friends. So I haven’t had the courage to do it’.” The historic and persisting division between black and white must not be spoken. I assume he fears that if he told her, she would from that point onwards see her white school friends only through the lens of apartheid and that she would hate them. At their most simple, both these parents were simply expressing the desire of all parents for their children to have a better life, a desire raised to the highest pitch in South Africa. But they also carry a subliminal message or instruction: This is not your story, do not harp back to or think about it, forget. Such an injunction is impossible for any human to obey, and in fact coils the recipient even more tightly in the rejected legacy of the past. During the course of her investigation, Fairbanks found that many people who expressed outrage about the police killings at Marikana were more hesitant and wary in response to the student protests, a difference she read, not just in terms of the greater quotient of violence of the former, but also in generational terms. There is a history in relation to the miners, whose demands harked back to the days of apartheid when their brute exploitation was the hallmark of the regime (that their condition is still so appalling underscores the persisting, class and race inequalities of the nation). Whereas the students, the “born frees”, often privileged – as in the UK the most deprived never make it to university in the first place – “were not supposed to feel that degree of historical pain.” “How South Africa’s youth turned on their parents’ generation” is the title of Fairbanks’s article. The present crisis in South Africa seems, therefore, to be driven by a logic, or rather illogic, of generational time: disjointed, out of sync. According to Nwadeyi (2016), the term “illogical” – to which I will return – has more than once been thrown at the protesting students in order to discredit them. “The challenge of being young in South Africa,” Nwadeyi observes, “perhaps, is having a past that you can never know enough about and having a future that was prescribed for you by those who themselves weren’t sure of what that future would look like.” This formula stood out for me. It defies the normally understood temporal state of things while also touching on the limits of human knowledge.

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Neither the past nor the future, I read her as saying, can be fully known. The passage from the one to the other, which is the time we are living, can therefore only be hesitant, messy and unsure (Leigh-Ann Naidoo’s lecture had the title: “The anti-apartheid generation has become afraid of the future”). However much we yearn to know the past, our legacy, like the psychoanalytic unconscious one might say, escapes our mental grasp. The problem therefore is not just denial, but the false mastery it tries to exert on what will be, and on what has gone before. But, although the past is not fully knowable – or rather for that very reason – it is no less part of who we are, shadowing the future it beckons. One cannot control the future any more than one can leave the past behind. We cannot, ever, just wrap the events of history under our belts and move on. Or in Nwadeyi’s words again, “Young and old we are now being forced to deal with the ghosts of our very present past.” The legacy of the born-frees is the “present past.” Their task, although they will not be thanked for it, is to bring back to the surface what the previous generation, in sway to unspeakable anguish – what psychologist Chabani Manganyi already described in the 1970s as “chronic, silent, secret anguish” – thought, prayed, was buried and done with (Manganyi 1977, 65). Refused employment in South African universities on grounds of political activism, Manganyi left South Africa to take up a post at Yale University in the US. “You and your society,” he says as he walks out on his therapist, “have exhausted the revolutionary possibilities of your life,” “You will never know what my people have to go through in the land of their birth” (44). Manganyi was apartheid’s exile. He describes himself as a “pilgrim turned refugee in search of a gaping grave” (6). It is of course different now – how different, to what extent, and in what ways is the question. But this new generation were not meant to rise up against today’s iniquities: the racially unequal dispensation, the crushing of the poor under the weight of a lawless, criminal capitalism which Sampie Terreblanche (2012, 20) traces back to Reagan’s licensing of the transnational corporations across the world in the 1980s, notably into the global south (a move he describes as “pure madness”); the stranglehold of the Mineral Energy Complex, or Fossil-Centric Capital Accumulation in Patrick Bond’s phrase, over South Africa’s economic development including, as students have pointed out, many University Electrical Engineering Departments; the deal struck by the ANC to secure political victory at the cost, many argue, of a potentially more radical economic agenda, an agenda which could not be included in the historic agreement with the National Party of 1994 when, as I was often told during my visit, a white army ready to provoke a civil war was standing at the door; the ambiguity – although this is contested – of the Constitution’s property clause; and most crucially for the universities, the incomplete project of decolonisation, which democratisation has not secured (it is a central contention of this campaign that decolonisation has barely begun) (Ntsebeza 2007). To put it most simply, the next generation were not meant to cry foul, or claim that apartheid had not ended, or that their future was blighted by a past that had not gone away. They were meant to embody a new ideal of progress – but not of course the distorted version of progress against “barbarity” through

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which the colonisation of Africa had historically been justified. None of which is to deny in any way the radical, in many ways revolutionary, constitutional, political, legal, transformation of 1994, nor the human struggles of those who made it possible. For Hannah Arendt – who post-Trump has shot into the best-sellers lists in the US – the idea of progress was dangerous in so far as it allows rulers of the present dispensation to pretend that everything is just fine when it is not, and provides a license for those in power to rule the world (a critique she mounts most forcefully in her essay on “Lying in Politics” written in the midst of the Vietnam War (Arendt 1972, 1–48)). It also robs the people of their inalienable right to history by relegating history to a backwater, casting a smokescreen over the past. In her article for the London Guardian, Fairbanks (2015) reported that in the mid-1990s, the government’s curriculum-redesign committees eliminated history as a standalone subject, folding it into “human and social sciences.” During a previous visit to UCT in 2013, Jane Bennett of the Humanities Department and Gender Institute told me that even in humanities departments, history – above all South Africa’s immediate and still pressing history – was becoming harder and harder to teach. These protests have been about enduring racial discrimination, poverty and inequality. But it has also seemed to me that it is this deal, or no-deal, with history, a history that implicates the young so profoundly and which will not go away, that has raised the temperature, precipitated the rage, made the situation feel at moments unmanageable. * As I continued reading, it struck me that in South Africa of all places this surely makes no sense. The ancestors revered in African culture are there to remind us that no-one is ever born free – as is understood far better and more deeply than in the metropolitan Western world which I come from. African communal life, writes Mogobe B. Ramose in his 2001 article “An African perspective on justice and race,” “consists in a triadic structure of the living, the living-dead (the supernatural forces) and the yet-to-be-born” (Ramose 2001). I note that the yet-to-be born do not arrive from nowhere like visitants from a new world, but are cyclically folded into the triad. They can no more redeem their past than transcend or forget it. Legal and feminist scholar, Drucilla Cornell, has vividly described the extraordinary complex reckonings, the forms of obedience and disobedience, of anger and teasing humour, which the transgendered sangoma, Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde, whom she met in KwaZulu Natal, conducts with her ancestors, female and male (Cornell 2014, 141–147). Cornell lived and set down the deepest roots in South Africa for many years. The legal implications of this way of thought, which both she and Ramose draw from the African ethic of uBuntu, specifically in relation to temporality, are farreaching. “To the African,” Ramose writes citing Kéba M’Baye of the International Court of Justice, “there is nothing so incomprehensible or unjust in our system of law as the Statute of Limitations, and they always resent a refusal on

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our part to arbitrate a suit on the grounds that it is too old” (Ramose 2001). (Can an ancestor who has survived the death of the body be too old?) (Cornell 2014, 206). The Statute of Limitations is unjust because it enshrines in law the repudiation of the past. “The African believes,” M’Baye insists, “that time cannot change the truth” (Ramose 2001). Nothing is over. You pay tribute to the past and usher in your future by remaining open to a conversation, however difficult and tetchy, with those who were here before you (in fact you are commanded to do so). As I understand it, this temporal dimension of honouring the forebears, is the companion and complement to the expansiveness of uBuntu towards others, which was the reading of the term with which I had been most familiar. Perhaps, then, I found myself wondering, it is the poverty of insight in Western culture as regards these forms of frail but indomitable linkages across time, that can help explain why psychoanalysis, which has been central to my own work, erupted, unwelcome, into Western thought which has been so less attuned to, indeed mostly pathologizes, the idea that we are blessed by the voices of our foremothers and forefathers still guiding and chiding us in our heads. For psychoanalysis, nothing perishes in the mind. As subjects we are always haunted. Struggling for a suitable analogy, Freud compared the mind to a city whose every layer of history existed simultaneously, every earlier stage persisting alongside the later stage that has arisen from it (Freud 1957, 285). Seen in this context, psychoanalysis is a counter-history, channelling what we have repressed into a future struggling to find its own knowledge (Freud always insisted that the patient, rather than the analyst, holds the key to her or his unconscious truth). Writing after the Second World War in the 1950s, the British psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott wrote of a patient who had gone looking for a piece of his lost past in the future, the only place he might possibly hope to find it (Winnicott 1974). This is the future perfect tense in which the experience of psychoanalysis unfolds: not what I once was and am no more (repression), nor what I still am in what I once was (repetition), but what I will have been for what I am in the process of becoming (Lacan 1977, 86). It occurred to me that this formula of disjointed, generative temporality, which comes from the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, might also do for the political time in which South Africa is living. Above all, our most fiercely guarded self is a palimpsest, peopled by those who have struck a chord, for better or worse, deep inside our hearts (Rose 2004). It is the primary task of analysis to uncover these hidden histories which inhabit us, prompting and fleeing our consciousness in one and the same breath. For psychoanalysis, for uBuntu – if you will allow me for a moment to make the bridge – the idea of being born free is meaningless. To be born free is not to be born at all. As I was trying to understand this more deeply in relation to today’s struggles in South Africa, I lighted on the distressing story with which Pumla GobodoMadikizela opens her recent edited collection, Breaking Intergenerational Cycles of Repetition: A Global Dialogue on Historical Trauma and Memory, which began as a Conference at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein in 2012 and was published as a book last year (Gobodo-Madikizela 2016, 1–11). A group of girls between seven and ten years old, “not yet born when the event they were enacting took place”, re-staged an act of necklacing from

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1980s South Africa in the township of Munglisi in the Eastern Cape, an act which they could not have witnessed and which their parents most likely would not have talked about. “It was strange, even surreal,” she writes, to see a group of young girls seven to ten years old, laughing and cavorting in the streets of Munglisi, the same township that between 1986 and 1988 had been the scene of so much misery, a tinderbox of inflamed emotions against the inhumanities of apartheid. But that was before the children were even born. The squeals and cries were the very embodiment of joy. They looked like little tender shoots of foliage – little blades of life – poking out from under the cooled lava of the township once utterly devastated by apartheid’s volcano. (Gobodo-Madikizela 2016, 1 (emphasis added)) Note the repetition: “not yet born,” “before the children were even born.” Only the idea of an unconscious legacy transmitted through the generations – what psychoanalysis terms “transgenerational haunting” (Abraham 1987) – can, I think, help us to grasp what then unfolded so shockingly before her eyes. As she watched, the ringleader took on one by one all the roles of this saga – bystander, driver of the vehicle from which the tyre is seized, perpetrator and victim. Then, slowly but surely, she relinquished all roles but the last, pretending to strike a match as if the baying crowd of executioners had forced her to set herself alight, flailing and waving her arms, until her screams faded to a whimper and she lowered herself to the ground where she “died.” It was a ghoulish performance, a memory of violence – of which this child can in fact have had no memory – enacted with glee. Gobodo-Madikizela suggests the children, in time honoured fashion, were using their play in order to try and master something as intolerable as it was unspoken (violence as child’s-play). What struck me was, first, the sheer detail of the enactment – every component of the awful hidden memory carried deep inside the body of this child. In fact, this accords with today’s neuroscientific concept of epigenetics which allows for one generation’s lived experience, even when unspoken, to slip into the blood stream of the next. And then the fact that, for all the frantic circulation of parts, it was the role of dying victim that finally claimed her. Any mastery was therefore as perverse as it was self-defeating, since it could only proceed by snuffing out the life of the chief player – the mistress of ceremonies – of her own deathly game. So, this story seems to say, it is when memory is buried or silenced by one generation that it erupts at its most virulent in the next. You cannot “grass over the past,” a Xhosa expression which I also take from the writing of Gobodo-Madikizela (2001, 29). These tender shoots of foliage poking out of the cooled lava of a devastating history were faced with only two options: ending their own lives or killing; setting themselves on fire or placing a burning necklace around somebody else’s neck. Critics of RMF (Rhodes Must Fall) and FMF (Fees Must Fall) who have accused the university protests of being too “visceral” would do well to look here. As would those who have accused the movement of illogicality, or of being unreasonable or of rejecting conventional notions of reason, of going too far, not playing by the rules of

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the game (what or whose game? we might ask). It is as if affect, or unreason, instead of forming a constituent part of being human, were a slur on the political scene, like a dirty smudge on a scrubbed and scrupulously clean white plate. There is, however, nothing reasonable about the dispensation of the world we are living in today, a world in which – to take just one recent example – Michael Flynn, before he had to resign as National Security Adviser, could tweet: “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL” (“rational” in capitals), a tweet he did not delete after his appointment. I have a Palestinian friend who, appalled as the rest of us by the election of Donald Trump in the US and Brexit in the UK, is nonetheless noticing that people who have not wanted to acknowledge the dire, steadily worsening, predicament of her oppressed people over decades, are at least now picking up that there is something wrong in the world, that, to repeat the words of Petrus Brink, “this is really not working.” What is reasonable in an unreasoned world? A world in which – to cite Manganyi again – the oppressed are expected to sport a “mask” of sanity to veil the inhuman reality of their subordination, while pretending that the future and prosperity of the mask “depends upon a negation of the past”? (Manganyi 1977, 20; 44). (He could be talking about today.) The more you claim to own the house of reason in an unjust world, the louder and messier the clamour will come in reply. After Frantz Fanon, who has been much returned to and debated at this time on campuses during the protests, Manganyi is interested in what exploitation, racial inequality, and oppression under colonialism do to the human heart, especially in the form of their denial. In his remarkable 1977 meditation, Mashungu’s Reverie, part memoir, part fiction, Manganyi called, in response to such crushing of body and soul, for a psychic space of “violent reverie” – two terms not normally found together but which could be a perfect description for the game of the Munglisi girls. This is a space of the deepest self-knowledge, where he encounters the most frightening aspects of himself: the “incubated beast,” a “killer … demanding recognition,” the fantasy of “killing and being killed” (again the resonance with the enacted fantasy of Munglisi is striking) (Manganyi 1977, ii; iii; 43). Manganyi shares with Fanon a belief in the infinite complexity of who we are. Under conditions of extreme oppression, Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, “you are forced to come up against yourself” (Fanon 1961, 249–250). “We are forever pursued by our actions… Can we escape becoming dizzy? And who can affirm that vertigo does not affect the whole of human existence?” (Fanon 1961, 203). Engaged as they both were with the most uncompromising reckoning with injustice, neither Manganyi nor Fanon, I suggest, are interested in false innocence, in a white-wash of the mind. In the midst of the Algerian war of independence, Fanon treated victim and torturer alike. “You must therefore weigh as heavily as you can upon the body of your torturer,” he wrote in the chapter on the mental disorders of colonialism, “in order that his soul, lost in some by-way, may finally find once more its universal dimension” (Fanon 1961, 238). In discussions of Fanon as the revolutionary thinker he surely is, this call for radical empathy is rarely talked about. There is a violence in the human heart, perhaps implanted, but certainly hugely aggravated, by social injustice and cruelty. And there is a violence in the world

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which buries its own ruthless logic deep inside the norm, and nowhere more so than when it boasts – vainly in a violent, unfree world – its own commitment to freedom. At the end of his Preface to Mashangu’s Reverie, Manganyi, with remarkable prescience, cites these lines from French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “We must remember that liberty becomes a false ensign, a ‘solemn complement’ of violence … as soon as it becomes only an ideal and we begin to defend liberty instead of free men” (Manganyi 1977, iv). He then continues to cite words that chillingly anticipate and resonate with the neo-liberal order under which so much of the world, including South Africa, continues to suffer: “An aggressive liberalism exists,” Merleau-Ponty states, “which is a dogma and an ideology of war … Its nature is violent, nor does it hesitate to impose itself through violence in accordance with the old theory of the secular arm” (Manganyi 1977 iv). Rather than calling for reason as the only acceptable face of protest, therefore, we should be exposing how reason, masquerading as sanity, can itself be a form of violence and the bearer of unspeakable crimes. In the midst of the Algerian war, Fanon treated a 21 year old student whose lucidity, he realised, “precisely by its rationalism” was a decoy. A mask of sanity, it was her way of trying to cover over the anguish she experienced at the funeral of her father, a high-ranking civil servant who had thrown himself into the “Algerian man-hunt with frenzied rage” (Fanon 1961, 222–223). His death allowed, or rather forced her, to rip the cover from her own reasoned illusion and to fully recognise the violence of state power. There comes a moment, Freud suggested in the midst of the First World War, when the people realise that the state has outlawed violence to its citizens, not because it wants to abolish it, but because it desires to monopolise it “like salt and tobacco” (Freud 1957, 279). The journalist Margie Orford, known in South Africa as the “queen” of crime fiction, and also former chair of PEN South Africa, has publicly stated that, since the Marikana massacre when the state fired on the workers in the name of capital, she has felt unable to write in this genre, since crime writing depends on being able at least to foster the illusion that the arm of the law is on the side of justice (Orford 2013, 220–229). It makes for a “very different plot, a very different country,” Orford writes, “when the moral centre of one’s world can only exist outside state institutions” (Orford 2013, 229). Already in her 2009 crime novel, Daddy’s Girl, she found herself exploring a “feral society… in which the very institutions and individuals that should protect the vulnerable, are criminal” (Orford 2013, 227). It is Orford who has also named the systemic violence against women in postapartheid South Africa “serial femicide,” (again you do not need me to rehearse the statistics). I understand the issue of gender has been the subject of sometimes acrimonious dispute during these protests, including the side-lining and isolation of Black Feminist organising blocs and, in one case brought to my attention, sexual violence (Kamanzi 2016b). In her address, Lovelyn Nwadeyi (2016) started by channelling her remarks to those among the black women recipients of the award “who identify as women”: “We cannot live our lives in fear of rapists neither should we live our lives in the kind of reductionism that forces us to make ourselves smaller”. There is the deepest link between racial and sexual

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oppression. In Mashangu’s Reverie, which is also a sort of unhappy love story, Manganyi tracks the line from his own political impotence and rage – his “chronic, silent, secret anguish” – to the obsession, the over-excitement, the casual disregard and denigration with which women are treated by himself and his African male friends exiled in America, where “whoring” is a replacement for the lost struggle, and, even thousands of miles away, “the South African gloom gathered slowly around them. Like a bad dream” (Manganyi 1977, 22). There is no political struggle that is not fed by and does not rebound on the social arrangements of gender and sexuality. Tackling the oppression of women can never be some kind of political afterthought. There is no politics without affect and fantasy. The idea that this struggle has “recycled” emotions back into politics where they do not belong, is, for me, meaningless, however high the temperature has been raised (in fact for me, the silencing of affect is the cause, not the solution, to the problem). There is no politics that does not tap into the subterranean core of who we are, no politics without the nightmare and the dream. * For South Africa, the dream was of course, not just freedom, but reconciliation, the latter to be effected through the manifold pathways of truth. That was the challenge and the new dispensation intended to create a better world. The answer in protest has been that you can have neither freedom nor reconciliation in a world which still disproportionately oppresses the blacks and the poor (on this the pages upon pages of statistics circulated by the campaigners, which again you do not need me to rehearse, have been eloquent). But as I hope you will have sensed from what I have said so far, there is as I see it another element – no less powerful and not finally detachable from the rest – which is the enduring obduracy with which historic injustice is registered and stored in the deepest annals of the mind. So, for the last part of this lecture, let me cast my net wider and move away from South Africa before returning here at the end, as I light finally on two literary texts which have helped me think through these dilemmas. Published last year to enormous acclaim, Hisham Matar’s The Return (2016) recounts his search for knowledge of his father who disappeared in 1995 and was almost definitely killed by Gaddafi’s henchmen in the notorious Abu Salim prison massacre of dissidents in 1996. The search seems interminable, endlessly thwarted by the remnants of Gaddafi’s fallen regime – no truth commission to solve the enigma or to lay the historic ghost to rest. What matters, however, is not the outcome of a search, which is in fact allowed some type of closure by the end of the book, but the process, and what it teaches him about the cunning ruse of the perpetrators, the gamble they take on the malleability of the human spirit in the face of the most corrupt, deadly, forms of political power. As the news about the massacre started to dribble out into the open, the threatened grief was so intense that no one really wanted to know (unrelenting as he was in his search, Matar realises that this is no less true of himself). “Power,” he writes, “must know this … Power must know that, ultimately, we would rather not know” (Matar 2016, 247).

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“Power must believe, given how things proceed, that the world was better made for the perpetrator than for those who arrive after the fact, seeking justice, or accountability or truth.” This, I know, has been one of the critiques of the South African Truth Commission, that so many of the perpetrators have lost nothing and got off scot free. As they try “to make reason of the diabolical mess,” the bereaved, the witness, the investigator and the chronicler rush every which way, “like ants after a picnic, attending to the crumbs” (Matar 2016, 247). And yet, as time rolls on, and the chance of ever fully knowing what happened, dwindles with every passing day, something happens to bring the thwarted, agonised, past – a past on the brink of extinction – back to life: “the point from which life changed irrevocably, comes to resemble a living presence, having its own force and temperament” (Matar 2016, 248). It is for me one of the most powerful evocations of what Nwadeyi described as the “ghosts of our very present past.” In the face of impossible knowledge, the mind retreats. But that very same mind is also the place where such knowledge finds its most palpable, endlessly beating, incarnation. Matar is, I think, writing about forms of psychic endurance, for better or worse, to which no truth commission could possibly expect to be equal. And he is writing about the perpetrator for whom – against every fibre of our being, every impulse to justice – the world, we are shockingly told, is “better made”: “The world was better made for the perpetrator than for those who arrive after the fact, seeking justice, or accountability or truth.” It is this mortal gamble of the perpetrator that provides the link to my final text, the award-winning South Korean writer Han Kang’s Human Acts (2016) also published last year, and which unexpectedly allowed me to make the link back to South Africa. I read the novel on the recommendation of Gillian Slovo, when I told her about this visit and the difficulty I was having trying to think of the process of reconciliation and whether, as the protests might be taken to assert, history would judge that reconciliation had finally failed. She suggested that Han Kang’s book might be helpful on that topic in relation to the healing of the past. What followed I was utterly unprepared for. Human Acts is, I can truly say, one of the most disturbing novels about atrocity – if not the most disturbing – that I have ever read (the Zimbabwean writer, Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins would be another). It tells the story of the massacre of students in the southern city of Gwang-ju in the summer of 1980 at the command of Chun Doo-hwan, the army general who had replaced the dictator, Park Chung-hee, the previous year. Using the excuse of rumoured North Korean infiltration, Chun had extended martial law across the whole country, closed universities, banned political parties and further curtailed freedom of the press, provoking mass student demonstrations in response. This is a novel of extraordinary courage that spares you nothing – the translator, Deborah Smith, describes the immense difficulty she had faced with the constant slide between “corpse,” “dead body,” “dead person” and “body” (Kang 2016, 2). It begins with a young girl volunteering to lay out the bodies – corpses, dead persons – for identification in the morgue. She is looking for her brother, pretending he is one of hundreds of students to have gone missing, although, as we slowly

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uncover, she was there with him when he was gunned down at the demonstration and saw him die. For me, one of the novel’s worst moments comes when a young woman, the victim of sexual torture – it is crucial that this is a novel written by a woman – is asked by an academic researcher to “face up to those memories,” “to bear witness,” so she, the investigator, can write her report. The victim responds by repeating the question: “Is it possible to bear witness to the fact? …” before recounting in harrowing detail what was done to her (Kang 2016, 274). With this format of question and its chilling counter-reply, it seemed to me that Han Kang had found the perfect literary form for reluctantly disclosed knowledge, for memory and its repression in one and the same voice. As I waded through the unredeemed agony of this novel, it slowly dawned on me that I had misunderstood what Gillian Slovo was telling me, and that reconciliation and healing were the last thing that this novel was about: “What is humanity?” “Some memories never heal,” “‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ I forgive nothing and no one forgives me” (Kang 2016, 100; 140; 158). When I expressed my bafflement to her, she then generously directed me to the open letter she had recently written, partly in response to Kang’s novel, to her dead mother, the anti-apartheid activist, Ruth First, who, as you all will know, was murdered by a letter-bomb in Maputo, Mozambique in 1982 (Slovo’s letter is available on the web-site of the UK Arts organisation, Artangel, originally as part of their “Inside Prison” project of 2016) (Slovo 2016). What Han Kang’s novel had confronted her with, she wrote in the letter, was the perpetrator. She then recounts a story, which she heard many years after her mother’s death, of a young woman who, like First, had been detained and tortured, in this case not just mentally but also physically and for longer periods of time. Arriving in Maputo, she found herself describing her experiences to First because of her unique quality of listening and the way she asked questions (unlike the blunt investigator in Kang’s novel). And then, when the woman reflected that her torturers could not have possibly known what they had done and still be human, First unhesitatingly replied: “They knew exactly what they were doing.” So, I understood, the point of Han Kang’s novel, what I should have picked up above all else, was the title – Human Acts – its unflinching depiction of what human beings, in the fullest knowledge of what they are doing, are capable of. As the novel itself tells us, this is the hardest issue to face: the question – “What is humanity?” – appears inside a book on the student movement in lines that were scored through by the censors (Kang 2016, 100). “You were able,” Slovo addresses her mother, “to tell this victim that her torturers had done what they did to her deliberately and your words helped release her from their thrall.” This is not reconciliation, but it is a way of confronting impossible knowledge. That was, she told me, what she had seen in Kang’s novel. You have given me my lecture, I said. And yet – and I end with this – there is a thread running through the novel which says something else, not counter to the horror, but which grows out of it, like tender shoots of foliage or blades of life poking out from the cooled lava of an atrocious history, to evoke Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s poetic description of the girls from Munglisi once more. We are inside the mind and body of

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the dying brother, dumped from the back of a lorry with a pile of other corpses – it is here that the ambiguity of “corpse,” “body,” “dead person” comes into its own – when he feels a presence, “that breath soft-slip of incorporeal something, that faceless shadow, lacking even language, now, to give it body” (Kang 2016, 51). It is an intangible, barely imaginable, form of connection between two bodies, one dead, the other not quite alive: “Without the familiar bulwark of language, still we sensed as a physical force, our existence in the mind of the other” (Kang 2016, 52). “My shadow’s edge became aware of a quiet touch; the presence of another soul” (Kang 2016, 53). I can assure you that this is not a flight into false lyricism or religious sentiment. It is rather a form of linkage across space, bodies and time (Nwadeyi’s “ghosts of our present past” again, or perhaps ancestors on the cusp of being born). Perhaps, in a world of such cruelty, human and inhuman, the only place where we can envisage such utopian being – the idea of really existing, without let or discrimination, in the mind of the other – is the world of the dead. Or else in the fleeting moments of recognition between those who have survived, but only if they are able to look fully at each other without the faintest intent of wiping the shadows from the other’s face: “As we each enquired how the other had been, something like transparent feelers reached tentatively out from our eyes, confirming the shadows held by the other’s face, which no amount of forced jollity could paper over” (Kang 2016, 131). I see these transparent feelers, the breath soft-slip, the touching at a shadow’s edge, as this novel’s answer to the rigidity of the bodies in the morgue. In such moments, I read it as saying, only if we entertain our ghosts will we have the remotest chance of moving forwards into the next stage of historical time. So what, to conclude, is the tentative message I have hoped to convey in my lecture tonight? To hold in the mind what is hardest. To acknowledge that the past has not gone away. Write it, breathe it, because we already are doing so. Stare straight in the eye of the perpetrator still at large, who knows, but takes no responsibility for, what he has done (weigh on the body of the torturer, as Fanon would say). Above all, do not blame those who erupt because they were burdened with an injunction to transcend history, an impossible demand that can have no place in any attempt to build a better world. In the end what I have heard most loudly in these protests is a plea to the previous generation, to all of us, which might go something like this: Re-open your minds, even if, perhaps especially if, it means returning to where you never wanted to tread once more. Not least because that is where we, the next generation, are still living. None of it has gone away. Such knowledge is the only path to understanding, and the only path to justice. That, finally, is what I have learnt from you. March 16, 2017

References Arendt, Hannah. 1972. “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers”. In Crises of the Republic, 1–48. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.

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Abraham, Nicolas. 1987. “Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology.” Critical Inquiry 13: 287–292. Cornell, Drucilla. 2014. “Rethinking Ethical Feminism through uBuntu.” In Law and Revolution in South Africa – uBuntu, Dignity, and the Struggle for Constitutional Transformation. New York: Fordham University Press. Espinoza, Javier and Gordon Rayner. 2016. “Rhodes Will Not Fall.” The Daily Telegraph, 29 January: 1. Fairbanks, Eve. 2015. “How South Africa’s Youth Turned on their Parents’ Generation.” The Guardian, 18 November: 21. Fanon, Frantz. 1961. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin. Freud, Sigmund. 1957. “Thoughts for the Time on War and Death”. In Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol XIV. Edited and translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla. 2001. “Memory and Trauma.” In Truth and Lies – Stories from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Edited by Jillian Edelstein. London: Granta. Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla. 2016. “Introduction – Breaking Intergenerational Cycles of Conflict.” In Breaking Intergenerational Cycles of Repetition: A Global Dialogue on Historical Trauma and Memory. Edited by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela. Berlin, Toronto: Barbara Budrich. Kamanzi, Brian. 2016a. “#FeesMustFall: The Eye of the Hurricane.” Daily Maverick, 10 October. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2016-10-10-feesmustfall-theeye-of-the-hurricane/. Kamanzi, Brian. 2016b. “Decolonising the Curriculum: The Silent War for Tomorrow.” Daily Maverick, 28 April. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2016-04-28decolonising-the-curriculum-the-silent-war-for-tomorrow/. Kang, Han. 2016. Human Acts. Translated and introduced by Deborah Smith. London: Portobello. Lacan, Jacques. 1977. “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis.” In Ecrits. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock. Manganyi, N. Chabani. 1977. Mashangu’s Reverie and Other Essays. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Matar, Hisham. 2016. The Return. London: Random House. Naidoo, Leigh-Ann. 2016. “The Anti-apartheid Generation has Become Afraid of the Future.” Mail & Guardian, 17 August.https://mg.co.za/article/2016-08-17-leigh-annnaidoo-delivers-compelling-speech-at-ruth-first-memorial-lecture/. Ntsebeza, Lungisile. 2007. “Land Distribution in South Africa: The Property Clause Revisited.” In The Land Question in South Africa: The Challenge of Transformation and Distribution. Edited by Lungisile Ntsebeza and Ruth Hall. Cape Town: HSRC Press. Nwadeyi, Lovelyn C. 2016. “Lovelyn Nwadeyi’s Empowering Message: The Onus is on us to Disrupt the Status Quo.” Mail & Guardian, 29 June. https://mg.co.za/article/ 2016-06-29-we-all-have-agency-and-we-must-use-it-to-disrupt-the-status-quo. Orford, Margie. 2013. “The Grammar of Violence: Writing Crime as Fiction.” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 25(2): 220–229. Rakei, Simon. n.d. “Community and Struggles and the Tactics of Land Occupations in Conversation with Petrus Brink.” In Pathways to Free Education: Strategy and Tactics 2: 19–23. https://constructingsolidarities.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/pathways-to-free-educationpamphlet-volume-2.pdf.

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Ramose, Mogobe B. 2001. “An African Perspective on Justice and Race.” Polylog: Forum for Intercultural Philosophy 3. https://them.polylog.org/3/frm-en.htm. Accessed 1 June 2020. Rose, Jacqueline. 2004. “Introduction.” In Mass Psychology and Other Writings, by Sigmund Freud. Translated by J. A. Underwood, vii–xlii. London: Penguin. Slovo, Gillian. 2016. “Artists and Writers in Reading Prison.” Artangel. https://www. artangel.org.uk/project/inside/. Accessed 4 September 2016. Terreblanche, Sampie. 2012. Lost in Transformation – South Africa’s Search for a New Future since 1986. Johannesburg: KMM Review Publishing Company. Thebus, Rouen. n.d. “In Conversation with Dudu Ndlovu: Useful Tips when Chairing Plenaries/Meetings.” In Pathways to Free Education: Strategy and Tactics 2: 60–61. Winnicott, D.W. 1974. “Fear of Breakdown.” International Review of Psychoanalysis 1:103–107.

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We still have not broken the code VJ Collis-Buthelezi

“… what, in moments of historical crisis, is being passed down from one generation to the next? In a struggle which is also a reckoning with the past – as all political struggles may be, but this one surely is – what both can, and cannot, be borne? What do we not want to know about the past? What do we not want to know about ourselves?” “… that it is this deal, or no-deal, with history, a history that implicates the young so profoundly and which will not go away, that has raised the temperature, precipitated the rage, made the situation feel at moments unmanageable.” “… democratisation without decolonisation.” —Jacqueline Rose, “The Legacy, or, What [She has] Learnt from You[/Us]”

When I was first asked to respond to Jacqueline Rose’s 2017 Vice Chancellor’s Open Lecture, the above lines stuck most with me. In South Africa, there had / has been, as Rose puts it, “democratisation without decolonisatison.” The mass movement that swept the university campuses from 2015 through 2017 were the result of this. Rose spoke to us about time, the logic/illogic of generational time, history, the recognition of the centre no longer holding, of the need for a new future to be dreamt. It is also about “impossible knowledge” as she terms it, rather than reconciliation. Because what is reconciliation if we are reconciling across disparate and different facts, archives, narratives, and histories? (Allow me to return to this later.) But as I suspect Rose might herself acknowledge—necessary as these are, they are now no longer emerging or emergent claims in South Africa. They have become what we have learnt. In her lecture she references Petrus Brink, the farmworker and activist quoted in Pathways to Free Education—a pamphlet series published by several folks based in Cape Town who represent various collectives of the RhodesMustFall and FeesMustFall movements that have come together with the crescendo cry of “This is not working”, “holding the space” and that we inhabit the “present past” (Rakei n.d., 19). So what do we do with this “impossible knowledge”? The answer Rose offers seems to be to let history back in, to recognize that 2015 opened the door for a post-transition narrative that makes reckoning, accounting, being held responsible not so much possible, but necessary. At the time that I gave this response, standing on the Middle Campus of the University of Cape Town almost two years since the cry for Rhodes to fall was DOI: 10.4324/9781003198581-3

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heard I was struck by the realisation that not only is the cry for Rhodes to fall still necessary, but it has itself now entered the annals of history. It is no longer a cry just of our present, but of our (albeit recent) past. That is not to say that Rhodes has well and truly fallen, or that fees have fallen or that the colonial, neo-liberal orders of knowledge that structure our institutions have fallen. If only it were so easy. The statue has been removed to parts unknown. Fee increases were frozen at one point, only to come back at another, and we are likely to have more prevarications on this point now and in the time to come. But the basic order remains more or less the same. White privilege remains and seeks allies. We have not yet exited the old order that engendered the conditions of possibility for this moment. What I mean by this is that the work of reconceptualising and building anew is still being done, but after several years, the facts have been made, archives are being assembled, narratives set down, and histories produced—Haitian scholar MichelRolph Trouillot (1995) says that these are the four crucial stages of the production of history in which silences can emerge. Elsewhere, I have been concerned with how this often results in the emergence of leader-heroes at least in the studies of black intellectual and activist radical histories in which I am most interested. And this requires that a future researcher stumble upon a lost document or a name, a trace really, to begin the counter-narrative. What this means is that even Rose’s response is predicated on a set of “facts” that we already know are curated because this is how the process works; always already power is being reinscribed. But that I will leave for another time. What we now know (and I will not qualify this with a perhaps), what we now know is that Transformation—by 2015, a euphemism “for righting racial, gender, economic and other inequities in higher education, both in terms of access to university and curriculum content” (Collis-Buthelezi 2016, 68)—came to South African universities with a twin: neoliberalism. In the 1997 Higher Education Act, “redress of past inequalities” was meant to be integral to the formula for financing the sector,1 but the state was not expected to be the only funder of higher education as a public good. While some funds would be allocated by the minister as the state’s representative there was also the expectation of alternative streams of funding, including donations/endowments from private and corporate persons, institutional fundraising, loans, investments, services rendered, income from students and staff for housing, etc. This transfiguration of the South African university into a corporation at the same time that it was meant to transform itself for its own sake as well as in service of the transformation of society is not unique to South Africa; by 1997 neoliberalism had spread through much of the postcolonial world in the form of structural adjustment programs (I might add that neoliberalism was certainly alive in the policies of the former colonial world). By the end of the twentieth century, cries like that of the thenJamaican prime minister hopeful, Michael Manley’s, 1976 “we are not for sale” had been broken—we might use Sylvia Wynter’s “nigger-broken” from her as 1

See the 1997 Higher Education Act.

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yet unpublished tome started in the 1970s, Black Metamorphosis (Kamugisha 2016, 132). Though “we are not for sale” (Manley 1976) was central to Manley’s vision for Jamaica and part of his successful campaign bid, by 1977 Jamaica was a signatory to an IMF loan (as many other postcolonial nations in the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa and Asia), which made neoliberalism a fact of postcolonial and black life and began to reshape the horizon of black revolutionary possibilities. The limits to black revolt of the neoliberal capture of the imagination of black liberation, a liberation for which South Africa came to be a major battlefront, is key to the history or the logic/illogic of generational time of which Rose speaks, Nwadeyi’s “past present.” Because if we follow Wynter, “the black revolt … is the most radical of all revolts because it aims at the code” that is “the black/white code [which] is the central inscription and division that generates all the other hierarchies” (Kamugisha 2016, 137). As Mosa Phadi and Nomancotsho Pakade (2011, 288) show in their chapter, “The Native Informant Speaks Back to the Offer of Friendship in White Academia”, these strange bedfellows of transformation and neoliberalism in South Africa have resulted in “short-termism and corporatisation in institutions of higher learning” (that is, neoliberalism) becoming an alibi for the perpetuation of antiblack racism in such spaces. And here I have Aaron Kamugisha’s definition in mind; that is, that antiblack racism is the term that we give to “[b]lack suffering … an overlooked phenomenon of our contemporary world, angrily denied by many, [black suffering is] a victim of a version of historical amnesia and bad faith” (Kamugisha 2016, 135). But as Phadi and Pakade suggest, “the neoliberal rationale” as the reason for why things are as they are “fails and denies the opportunity to come to grips with the dominance and privileges white academics [but let us say whiteness] have[/has] enjoyed within the very system of neoliberalism” (Phadi and Pakade 2011, 300). Put another way, the neoliberalization of universities in South Africa produced a set of silences in the production of their histories. In this way the South African university has become a sphere [in which] friendship between white and black becomes a space of ‘complicities and intimacies’ tied to the historical matrix of roles that place the native informant as a cultural interpreter before she can be seen as a consumer or creator of knowledge. (300) Phadi and Pakade work off Shahnaz Khan’s 2005 notion of the native informant as the research object who learns to represent herself in the process of being represented by the white academy (Khan 2005, 2017–2033). Khan works from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s 1999 A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a Vanishing History of the Present, in which the native informant is she who is subaltern, the autochthone—in this way the native informant of which Phadi and Pakade speak is what Spivak might term the native informant as a product of the postcolonial subject. In Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, the Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995, 26) contends that

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VJ Collis-Buthelezi [s]ilences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history).

For Trouillot “history is the fruit of power” and “any historical narrative[,] is a particular bundle of silences” (xix; 27). What we learnt then is that before 2015 the historical narrative that held most sway was that South Africa is a rainbow nation that had reconciled its past of racial inequity, even if class transformation was slow. Some might have said and still say that blackness is no longer a relevant or necessary category of identification and its invocation is tantamount to baiting a civil war or politics of distraction. In fact, corruption is the author of despair in this republic. Hear me clearly: I am not suggesting that corruption does not exist as a real problem. What I am pointing to here is that most important for us to understand in terms of this pre-2015, transition historical narrative, is what Trouillot (1995, 23) would deem the congealing of this narrative as “history as social process” or how history works rather than what history we get. In this way we see that post-apartheid corruption becomes a visible fact as it renders silent apartheid and pre-apartheid violations. In other words, the pre-2015 “deal with history” in the main sold antiblack racism as a thing of South Africa’s past. Antiblack racism may shape the present material conditions, but antiblack racism was not produced and reproduced in the present. Rhodes could sit on the plinth, but that did not mean the racial order of all that he surveyed from the mount of UCT to the Cape Flats reflected the present, living racial order. But antiblack racism is built into the code that is South Africa, a code that neither 1990, 1994 nor the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) had broken. 2015 shattered that vision of a post-race/post-racism South Africa as our present for both those who benefit from the code and those whose lives are lived in spite of it, alongside it, those of us who are non-norms (Wynter’s term) but whose “underlife” is necessary for it to continue. But if 2015 has shattered the notion that we live in a post-race/post-racist society, where are we now? I want to challenge Rose on her reading of Nwadeyi’s “ghosts of our present past” as a moment that “say[s], only if we entertain our ghosts will we have the remotest chance of moving forwards into the next stage of historical time.” Rather I wonder if it is not so much about “the next stage of historical time” and “forward movement,” but an experience of history as social process, as a moment about the how of history making and less the “what’s next?” Here I want to lean on the recent work of Christina Sharpe and Michelle Wright both of whom in different ways are doing something with time and black experience. In her book, In the Wake (2016), which began as an article on the state of black studies in 2014, Sharpe issues a clarion call for black studies as “wake work”, despite how derided the black experience sometimes is in certain academic logics. In this “wake work,” black experience would also be a knowledge from

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which to theorize, from which to remember those lost to the “racial calculus and arithmetic” that orders modernity and has for many centuries, and from which to remember those still living. Wright (2015) on the other hand asks us to rethink blackness and time in relation to physics, in Physics of Blackness. While her most explicit argument is against the dominance of what she calls Middle Passage epistemology—the overdetermination of black experience and oppression by the narratives of the transatlantic slave trade—what she is invested in is making and “holding the space” for multiple, coterminous phenomenologies of blackness. That blackness happens in epiphenomenal times that are not always causally linked, even if related. In other words, that the demand for a new set of futures for how we break the code is not a failing or a rejection of foremothers or forefathers, but a taking hold of the current space/time of blackness. It is not the when and where of blackness in the South Africa of 1990, 1994 or of the TRC. It is here and now and it requires that we reexcavate our sources and our archives, and re-read our narratives and histories for the hidden traces. For Wright this is also about disentangling the hypervisibility of particular masculinist and heteronormative leader-hero narratives that obscure the place of women in resistance (frontline activism as well as knowledge production) and ask many of us to hold our breath for the big revolution to be completed. Future time, in other words, can be a precarious continuum on which to set our hope. Holding the space demands altering the structures of knowledge production: who is the assumed producer or subject and who is the implied object. That is the work of breaking the code: naming it, which 2015 brought into our central line of sight, understanding it and rearticulating the university as one of the sites from which to break it. We must stay in this uncomfortable not-reconciliation, where “‘they’ like to sit in the back of bakkies” in extreme heat and in cages. Only here can we attend to where such an assertion comes out of; that it is not simply a farmer’s utterance. It is not one that should put antiblack racism on the farmer and the farmlands so that the city becomes exempt and ahistorical. Antiblack racism is deeply imbricated in spaces of supposed “upward mobility and liberal meritocracy” and as much alive in “the liberal consensus” as in “white capital” (Sithole 2020, 8; 225). The unperturbed racial hierarchy such a statement belies is also ever present in homes, on campuses, in offices. We must move into it, occupy it in order to break the code so as to dream new futures. I want to say that this is an imperative for black studies in South Africa. Such black studies, such “wake work” must make visible the production of histories of blackness and whiteness in this corner of the globe, itself a progenitor and an inheritor of the “racial calculus” we continue to inhabit.

References Collis-Buthelezi, Victoria. 2016. “‘The Fire Below’: Towards a New Study of Literatures and Cultures (in English?) A Letter from a Literary Scholar in a South African University in Transition.” Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 15 (1): 67–78.

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Government of the Republic of South Africa. 1997. Higher Education Act 101 of 1997. https://www.gov.za/sites/default/files/gcis_document/201409/a101-97.pdf Kamugisha, Aaron. 2016. “The Black Experience of New World Coloniality.” Small Axe 20 (1 (49)): 129–145. Khan, Shahnaz. 2005. “Reconfiguring the Native Informant: Positionality in the Global Age.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30 (4): 2017–2033. Manley, Michael. 1976. We Are Not for Sale. Kingston: Editorial Consultants. Phadi, Mosa and Nomancotsho Pakade. 2011. “The Native Informant Speaks Back to the Offer of Friendship in White Academia.” In Ties that Bind: Race and the Politics of Friendship in South Africa, edited by Shannon Walsh, Jon Soske, Sisonke Msimang, Stacy Hardy, Lesego Rampolokeng and T. J. Tallie, 288–307. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Rakei, Simon. n.d. “Community and Struggles and the Tactics of Land Occupations in Conversation with Petrus Brink.” In Pathways to Free Education: Strategy and Tactics 2: 19–23. https://constructingsolidarities.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/pathways-tofree-education-pamphlet-volume-2.pdf. Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Charlotte, NC: Duke University Press. Sithole, Tendayi. 2020. The Black Register. London: Polity Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a Vanishing History of the Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Cambridge: Beacon Books. Wright, Michelle. 2015. Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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The university now What it will have been for what it is becoming Sarah Nuttall

Jacqueline Rose insists that we confront, in as acute and politically redolent a way possible, the question of what and how we know. For her, what we can know draws us, insistently, to the question of what we don’t (want to) know, as well as to what we can learn, if we listen closely enough, from the historical experience of others (“what I learned from you”). If what is knowable may be shaped by the transmission of trauma across generations, so we find the force of who we, and others, are through a psychic life that has already arrived before we know it to be there. In her work, historical experience and/as psychic life configure themselves with a temporal complexity that is exhilarating because it feels to be true. In such a form of understanding, we are both right inside the very specificity of South Africa today, and beyond it, in a reservoir of reflective knowing that reaches into a widening gyre of time and place.

(Un)freedom Rose poses these questions about the terms of historical understanding in response to student movements at South African universities between 2015 and 2017. She draws us to the question of how we listen and what we hear across generations – and to how we learn to know the difference in what it is that a younger generation, in politically charged and performative moments like these, is saying. In our most nuanced and best forms of listening and reflection, as psychoanalysts suggest to us, but which historians often underestimate, we hear how intergenerational trauma finds a way to speak in the present – and thus how the past finds its own future, not just as repetition but as reinvention. While the psychic life of history draws its forms, most often, from legacies of brokenness, there is no such thing as the break. This is the substance of Rose’s argument. The legacy of the born-frees (the generation born after 1994 in South Africa) is “the present past” – in other words, the past in the present, the version of the past that presents itself in the now. To be “born-free”, Rose argues, in what is perhaps the most striking formulation in her lecture, “is not to be born at all”. In other words, it is to be born without a past, in a state of inhuman transparency, lost to the density of the states that make, and break, selfhood as such, including political selfhood. In relation to the latter, it is to be denied a past, the DOI: 10.4324/9781003198581-4

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capacity to be haunted in the present, as, for example, a putatively democratic sociality marginalises the affective force of what has gone before. The “bad self” of the social forces its way through the “good self” of political transition and this often messy yet decisive shift carries a deep, and affective, historical truth. Extrapolating from this, we could say that what has been left aside, such as the past one is most in need of in the present, is not disempowered: it is always the container of undisciplined energies, energies gained from their very position of having been left aside. These energies, recaptured by new social actors, are reinvested in acts of political upsurge, as what was taken to be desegregation turns, with a libidinal and often furious energy, into decolonisation (Nuttall 2018). Notions of reconciliation – as a way of confronting the trauma of history and in particular the multiple fractures in our society, foremost amongst them, race – are marginalised and notions of, amongst others, “anti-blackness” or “critiques of whiteness” are foregrounded as the most productive ways to rethink the possibility of history itself. It is the libidinal – the bodily and the performative – that drives forward the critique in a knowing denunciation of a disembodied rationality that refuses the full force of historical feeling. Rose’s argument is highly conceptually coherent, deeply attentive to the voices of students themselves and extraordinarily attuned to the scarring wrought by growing inequality in the neo-liberal era. One of the questions her powerful lecture poses, and one that I would like to build on and confront more fully here, is what this reading of historical time and the psychic life of history might mean for the institution of the University. South African universities have been universities in transformation, and have been engaged in a politics of reparation and change, since the end of apartheid. They have also been highly contested terrains. Student movements have produced an accelerated insistence on a renewed engagement with the traumatic aftermaths of the apartheid university in the post-apartheid period. In the first set of moves, this political insistence has been applied to its statues, the names of its buildings and halls, its artworks, its curricula, a renewed focus on who occupies university structures and how, on whose behalf and to what ends, and the economic abuse of its workers. In a second wave, it has been applied to the University’s fee structures, its accommodation provisions – and its food banks for hungry students. These important struggles have all operated along the timelines of a redistributive logic deeply invested in social justice. So it is that we can talk about the struggle for what I have called elsewhere the redistributed university, in these senses (Nuttall 2019). Moreover, these symbolic and material redistributions are identified as able to offer political, personal and psychic relief to those who inhabit, but feel marginalised by, the University’s cultures and traditions, its distribution of resources, its belated forms of ‘Africanness’. Here the production of the new, and the basis of a powerfully perceived psychic repair, is externalized onto its more material manifestations. I want to be part of an institution in which I recognize myself, in which I feel I can breathe, black students in particular have said, repeatedly. At times, the need for recognition and for decolonisation is intricately attached to the expression of antagonism and of “breaking” (or, in the case of some of the University of Cape Town’s artworks, burning).

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All of this enables us to think of the University as a traumatogenic institution, laden with psychic time, within, despite and alongside its attempts at reparation and change, its redistributive logics, its agendas of transformation. Such an institution might also become, or intersect with, the toxic university, the place where antagonism replaces any attempt at repair and relationships become poisonous, injurious, permanently unsafe. Might the University be one of the only kind of institutions which can generate a direct theoretically and politically informed engagement with socially directed forms of anger – while also being fully alive to the problem and possibility of its own destruction?1 Writing about South African student movements, and articulating key lines of critique they have offered, Rose adds that none of this is to deny “in any way … the radical, in many ways revolutionary, constitutional, political, legal, transformation of 1994, nor the human struggles of those who made it possible”. Yet of course at some level it is. Certainly student movements in South Africa adopted this position. If we are to understand and confront the time of the University (“what time is it?”, student leaders would ask, in their attempt to name and shift the historical moment, and to make of it their time) then we have to hold open the chasm. If an older generation recalls apartheid as a certain form of living fact, a younger one lives apartheid as felt trauma. For the former, the after apartheid and its promise that race could no longer be taken as the criterion by which life could be measured, its promise of freedom in this sense from legislated racism – remains, powerfully, or in fragments, as a living order of what South Africa, in its temporal and psychic complexity, is becoming.2 For the latter, the time of the present is shaped by a refusal of the after apartheid, by the sense of being unfree in a state of apparent political freedom – the ongoing and even unbearable paradox of the trauma of freedom which has played itself out so explicitly in this country.3 For Rose, notions of “freedom” are ultimately and importantly of little interest to psychoanalysis (nor to the African ancestral, including Ubuntu itself, she argues) – nor, by implication to any developed notion of political selfhood: their temporal density of too thin a texture to be of any use to sustained thought, politics and the ongoing demand for radical social change. I think that holding in tension a richly psychoanalytically inflected and more materialist analysis, we might arrive at a slightly different place. If freedom (from the past) is never a state that we reach and so holds little political or philosophical 1 2

3

I formulated this question in my essay “The Shock of the New Old” (Nuttall 2019). This promise of freedom can be associated with the word “remains” in two senses: it remains as a part, if a contested one, of who and what South Africa is, to itself; secondly, it can be taken, in the aftermath of 20 years of democracy, as itself now part of the remains of the past, so contested has it become, especially after that 20year anniversary, 2014. There is, too, a further dimension to this hauntingly difficult temporal, psychic and historical paradox. That is, that to experience a certain form of political freedom from what went before may be to experience trauma. Or that those who have not gone through trauma are unlikely to fully experience what political freedom might mean.

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traction, ultimately, then we must also necessarily note the stubborn political and psychic attachment (perhaps addiction) that one finds and feels again and again in South Africa, to the idea that things can be struggled over and changed; that politics can work to produce a different state of things; and that a more free state than the state of the present can be gained. This powerful sense of historical agency, this memory of profound political struggle resulting in significant social change, surely suggests that one of the legacies of the past is a powerful sense of the future. It suggests moreover, in this other and different sense, that there is no such thing as the break.

(In)equality Rose’s lecture points to precise and located as well as enduring questions about the self and the social, the inside and the outside – not least of the University itself. Questions which in earlier decades were posed about the individual and the collective are now posed in relation to the psychic life of the self within contexts of institutionalized inequality, including structural racism. How, and on what terms, has the university been taken as a retreat from the social, dependent on its outsiderness for what it has been to itself? Citadel, place of asylum from the social, enclave or network of sociality? Here, there are two arguments, both very convincing, to be considered. On the one hand, one could say that at many, though not all, South African universities now, including the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), it is impossible to be fenced off from the social, in all its conflictual modes: student hunger, the need for shelter, the lack of money, and sexual violence. Student movements have both pointed to and insisted on this social reality, and brought with it a new and generational force of critique. This is very different from universities, many of them in the North though certainly not exclusively so, which can and do close out the poor. Marked by a tendency towards indifference, they have almost no relation to the social – or to an outside that doesn’t seem to matter any longer – and they deploy and produce, as Tom Looser (2012) has observed, delimited notions of world. Here, the poor are in fact superfluous.4 A related but different argument is that when South African working-class black students in particular enter the university, especially the wealthier liberal universities and most particularly the University of Cape Town, they truly encounter inequality in its distilled sense for the first time, and in a particularly traumatic way. Here, the university is a pressure cooker of the social to a degree that it produces new levels of trauma. As Wahbie Long (2019, 12) has written: “it is in the University that deprivation emerges as the political ideal of equality collides with the social reality of inequality”. Many black students, that is, come up against white privilege for conceivably the first time, or the first time in such close proximity. In addition, for Long, it works the other way, too: as much as the elite university can leave black 4

See Looser (2012). We need to note on this score that of Africa’s more than 800 universities, more will soon be private than public, citadels of sorts in a broader public university landscape.

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students with feelings of alienation, “my reading is that Fallist rage originates in prior humiliations” (11), adding that these are (mis)recognitions that are raced, classed and gendered in complex ways “in a terrain where shame is hardwired into the chronicity of everyday and structural violence” (11). In this sense, “a decolonial form of praxis is sought that will privilege the lived experiences of the oppressed here and around the world” (10). There are deep and enduring questions, then, of what is brought to the University, what is left aside and what is experienced for the first time inside its terrain. Student movements have forced open these debates, and Rose’s lecture has helped to articulate their political and psychic force. To this question of what and where the inside and the outside are, we could note that the crises at universities in South Africa have played out especially in the humanities not only because the humanities enable certain forms of critique but because they attract the largest number of black students while also, especially in recent times, being undervalued and viewed as one of the most dispensable parts of the University. At many universities, the humanities occupy the oldest, least glass covered buildings, have the least resources and face increasing contestation of the value of critique as such. These are spatially charged and racially inflected questions which are inhabited equally, as Jacqueline Rose helps us so vividly to see, by psychic time, as forceful as the material structures of the university itself. What is the relationship between the university, the prison and the house? These iterations of what a university is to itself assume and offer different trajectories of what it is and how we (can) know. In a letter to Winne Mandela, incarcerated in Kroonstad prison in February 1975, Nelson Mandela (2010, 211) wrote that “the cell is an ideal place to get to know yourself, to search realistically and regularly the process of your own mind and feelings”. This practice of interiority was attached to the idea that a fundamental freedom comes with getting to know the inner self, distinct from the collective, outer self often demanded by political struggles lived on the ground.5 Yet this freedom took place in a prison cell – a space, that is, that was capable of jeopardizing Mandela’s personhood as such.6 Hence the engagement with the inner self, and its hard won freedom, is, in this powerful South African iteration, closely associated with cell life, with the prison itself. Put differently, this suggests that in the South African political psyche, there are complex and difficult attachments between psychic freedom, the struggle for political freedom, the project of a university and the institution of the prison.7 5 6 7

It was also a way of saving his life, and resisting his captors, by constituting himself as a knowing self, against the devastating forcefield and exposure of solitary confinement. For an extended discussion of this point, see Nuttall and Mbembe (2014). We could consider that Mandela’s late views on how we might build something else by becoming someone other than whom we were before, conceived of in his island prison turned university, and central to the humanist notion of non-racialism, offers us the question, the challenge, of the redistributed self. Student protesters, and the millenial subjectivities which they shape and are shaped by, insist that ‘I am not you, and you are not me’, in refusal of the humanism that has not been able to undo racism, sexism, homophobia and inequality in the present.

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On the other hand, we could think of the historical relationship between the university and the house. Sisonke Msimang (2018, 90) writes about Winnie Mandela’s banishment to the town of Brandfort while Nelson Mandela was on Robben Island, addressing her biographical subject in the second person: the conditions in which you live in this place of banishment are desolate and bare – but no more so than the conditions of your neighbours, who have committed no crime and are not serving any penal sentence. Your banishment is thus a metaphor: it speaks to the banishment of all black South Africans; your sentence is a mere reflection of the collective conditions of black people. Those who are outside prison walls “are simply in a bigger prison. […] only the apartheid government could banish someone to a place where others live not as prisoners but as ordinary black subjects” (Msimang 2018, 90). Perhaps in thinking about the South African university today we might see two key iterations, both historically distinct and yet at times overlapping, between what it has meant to itself. One invokes the university as ivory tower, cut off from the ordinary social, and related in a powerful interpolation to the island prison or indeed the prison university that Robben Island became for Mandela and his comrades. This would include historical legacies shadowed by the conundrum of the freedom to think in the most unfree circumstances; the idea that imprisonment of various kinds can and do produce self-revelation, including the seclusions often assumed to be most productive for producing knowledge as such; that a university has often been a place of the withdrawn social, operating akin to an island or a prison, a place of exclusion – but also, potentially and in some instances, as a place of refuge and even asylum. Secondly, there is the iteration of the University that is more porous to what used to be taken to be its outside. By drawing this so-called outside in, often through activist and specifically student struggles, an important assertion is made that the University, in order to come home to its future self, must embrace the category of what is felt and experienced, the lived experience of exclusion, the house of the ordinary black subject. In elaborating on these questions below, and engaging with Rose’s central claims, I turn first to a consideration of the aftermath of the protests, nearly three years on; and secondly, to the insistence on the life of the body and its affects that has driven a powerful and sustained critique of the colonial and neo-liberal university.

Aftermath The statue has gone. Jameson Hall has been renamed Sarah Baartman Hall; Senate House is Solomon Mahlangu House. Zuma’s last act as President was to announce free education for the poor, in part as a re-election bid. But it is the even poorer, it now appears, who will have to bear the cost. UCT has 3000 art objects, and has undergone a process of re-curation. (When) does this crucial

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act of symbolic transformation become a smokescreen for material change? At Wits, workers have been insourced, earning better salaries and the option to send their children to the university. In this, the price of a more just institution has been partially paid. Yet still, inequality grows and haunts this institution. There is, too, the argument that the university is not a state. How much can it (still) do, to change the terms of its outside-inside – of the social as such? The depressive position, drawn on by a number of colleagues and friends during the protests, as a racially charged position drawn from a US-based Afropessimism, often seemed the best response. Three years on from the protests certain forms of symbolic, material and political repair have been undertaken, though there is so much more to do – nor might repair be the language of lasting redistribution. There is, too, much more to say about the emerging and changing race-class configurations underpinning the psychic lives of students entering universities today. One of the issues which students have pointed to insistently, and which Mark Hunter (2019) writes about in his recent, excellent book on South African schools, is the notion of an embedded institutional culture of whiteness, despite and even not always map-able directly onto, white people as such. Hunter (10) refers to this as “white tone” and his historical rendering of this concept is powerful for thinking about universities too. Hunter argues that desegregation in its first phase, from the 70s to the 90s, related to the ability to be assimilated (into white English culture). It happened through black children’s increasing social mobility – and the vast majority of white parents at those schools voted in support of it. After democratic transition, this concept was replaced, he argues, with a new era in which a racialised marketplace was structured around the production of “white tone”: that is, the idea that whiteness can be disentangled from skin colour and can be bought and sold. Part of neo-liberalism, it was about the buying of prestige – a de-racialisation without a de-whitening of privilege (198–199). This was despite the fact that in most of the formerly white schools he was looking at, black students were in the majority. Race is not withering away in the school system, despite de-racialisation, Hunter concludes. The rapid growth of a black middle class both undermines and upholds aspects of whiteness (Hunter 2019, 206). Schooling desegregation nurtures a multi-racial English-speaking middle class but excludes millions of South Africans from formal work; white tone is always changing but by implication always there; poor people are gaining more educational qualifications but remaining distant from the worlds of social and economic power. There has been a state redistribution of funding to poorer schools in the democratic era, almost all children are in school in South Africa and by 2017 65 per cent of schools were nofee paying schools. Yet many schools have poor facilities and weak connections to formal work, he shows. Inequality not only remains; it reigns supreme. Wits University, where I work as an academic, is today made up of a student body which is 85 per cent black, and an academic staff contingent that is 52 per cent black and 53 per cent female. In school by Grade 6, children learn the history of apartheid, of political struggle and resistance, of legacies of white

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supremacy, they visit the Apartheid Museum, and they receive anti-racism policies that they are expected to understand and abide by in some detail. Notions of epistemic injustice, to draw on a term from Miranda Fricker’s (2007) work, are beginning to be attended to: the idea that young people need to actively be helped to find the language within which to express the thing that they know and experience but can’t always name. All of this and still: the struggle remains, the shadows fall. The decolonial impetus towards changing everything, founding a different kind of institution altogether, be it the university or the school behind it, falters and lives in an ongoing state of change and very often, new crises. Rose refers in her lecture to those sites, during student struggles, that operated akin to alternative universities – gatherings, on and offline, of communities of thought, invested in reading and learning differently, and in a de-colonial vein. I am reminded of colleagues who, expelled from Turkish universities which no longer subscribe to academic freedom, have set up versions of what they call the off university in Berlin. Here, they reconvene, and rethink collectively what it was that they really wanted from a university in the first place. Or is it better, in conditions where one can, to stay in, to confront the dark heart of what is at stake, and to continue to invoke or to concede to the performative powers of assembly, as Judith Butler (2018) has termed it? Is the way to redefine the past, and remake an institution, to harness, in Rose’s words, the future perfect tense: [this is] what I will have been for what I am in the process of becoming?8

Assembly, affect, politics I have found it useful, listening to Rose’s lecture, sitting in my office at Wits thinking and feeling my way into the University as it is now, reliving the protests as I witnessed them day after day just down from my office, in Solomon Mahlangu House and the Wits Great Hall, to read Judith Butler and her argument with Hannah Arendt. Butler argues that it matters that bodies assemble; that embodied form forces us to rethink reigning notions of the political; and that there is an “indexical force of the body” (Butler 2018, 9) a performative “right to appear” (11) that asserts and instates the body in the midst of the political field and demands a more liveable set of conditions. Rereading and reflecting upon her earlier work, Butler writes that if performativity was then considered linguistic, we should now consider how bodily acts become performative. For Arendt, Butler notes, the body, and the sphere of economic need, belonged to the private sphere and not the political domain. “But what about the possibility that one might be hungry, angry, free and reasoning?”, Butler (2018, 47) asks. The body, in Butler’s reading, is less an entity 8

Rose invokes the work of the British psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott who writes of a patient who, in the aftermath of the Second World War, “had gone looking for a piece of his lost past in the future, the only place he might possibly hope to find it”. Rose identifies this as the future perfect tense: “not what I once was and am no more (repression), nor what I still am in what I once was (repetition) but what I will have been for what I am in the process of becoming”.

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than a living set of relations – it cannot be fully dissociated from the infrastructural and environmental conditions of its living and acting. Assembled in public, the body makes a claim to liveability, and interrogates how the conditions of precarity are differentially distributed. Arendt’s notion of politics as the space of appearance is a bodily space in Butler’s reconfiguration. The power of assembly is the power to open up time and space outside the “established architecture” (75). The use of technology, as in the hand-held phone, effectively implicates the body. Part of what a body does is to open onto the body of another (149): this is a queering process because it is based less on identity than alliance. What Arendt describes as the background of politics becomes its explicit object. It is our dependency and interdependency, Butler argues finally, that accounts for the relation between precarity and performativity – in the name of the liveable. Butler’s argument is useful for making the change from a notion of thinking as disembodied to a notion of a thought process that is based in the experience of the body and its fight for its own conditions of liveability. Much of what I have discussed above, and much of what Rose argues for in her lecture, has to do with the question of politics and/as affect. Rose refuses, rightly, to pathologize student protesters or to subscribe to what she terms the “hyberbole of destruction”. She argues deeply for an understanding of affect and/as politics as generative of thought and change. Neither Rose, in this lecture, nor Butler tackle the question of violence in a sustained way. Butler (2018, 187) addresses this question in only two lines in a book of over 200 pages: “My strong view”, she writes, “is that assemblies of this kind can succeed only if they subscribe to principles of non-violence”. Principled, embodied acts of nonviolence are what she insists upon, if the politics of assembly is indeed to work productively. Rose tackles those who dismiss student protests as investing in the rituals of destruction that belong to anarchic and often racist histories of resistance. In her work on fire as a historical tool of protest in this country, Jessica Breakey (2017, 19) observes how many commentators on the left in South Africa “refuse to engage the fire, deeming it a form of non-politics”. Reflecting on the “resurrection” of the politics of fire during the student protest movements of 2015 and 2016, she recalls the words of UCT student poet Siyabonga Njica which became such a clarion call amongst protesters of her generation: “There will come a time when the history pages will burn/and the ashes/will be used/to build bridges” (cited in Breakey, 16). On the one hand she traces fire as a language of the oppressed (the burning of passbooks in the National Defiance Campaign of the 1960s, the burning of public libraries and municipal buildings in 1976; necklacing as a death sentence by fire, embedded in rituals of purification of supposed spies; the fire-centred politics of Abahlali)9 – on the other, the opening of fire by police, meeting burning with wounding and sometimes killing. 9

Abahlali baseMjondolo is a shack dwellers movement that uses popular politics to campaign against evictions and to promote public housing, better living conditions and a bottom up approach to democracy (see Chance 2015, 396). It was founded in Durban but spread outwards to other shack locations across South Africa. Many of its protests are against the lack of electricity provision by the state and the shack fires that result. Fire is often used in street protests called by Abahlali (406).

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In 2016 in particular, on (and off) university campuses across South Africa, students set fire to libraries, to buses, to paintings, to constructed shacks, to campus bookstores. Police fired rubber bullets, and wounded the bodies of students who were turning and fleeing. Breakey (2017), writing from her own position inside the student movement at the time, recalls how many times students, virtually alight (or lit) with their own anger, would say “Let’s just burn it all, let’s just burn everything and start again” (59). Other commentators on the left such as Richard Pithouse (2016) argued that “the proclamation that violence or fire holds any element of redemption is distinctly millennial and emphasizes the weakness of the student movement”. The politics of shutdown, as Breakey observes too, was a political mirroring of a university perceived to be frozen in time, characterized by too little change, too much “changelessness”: time would then be mimetically frozen in place, as protesters brought the university to a standstill. In this temporal standoff, many fires were lit, and burning and wounding ensued. Not so, many would say, that the resource-scarce African university could easily rebuild itself; have the resources to survive. Not so, others would say, never should police be allowed on campus, and bodies will always be more important than buildings. The entanglement of fire, burning to ashes, death, regeneration, life and politics takes us to a rawness and darkness that ventures even further beyond necessary critiques of the hyberbole of destruction pointed to by Rose. A libidinal politics of rage and pain is also in many instances a politics of burning and/to ashes and the fire may surely be greater next time. A more literal destruction is one that insists on going beyond or refusing the notions of a reparative humanism or radical empathy that Rose invokes in her argument,10 although it may be true that we cannot eventually and in the interregnum do without these profound vocabularies of psychic and political repair. We might in the end have barely yet begun the work of knowing and understanding the university as a university, as neither a prison nor a house but as something else instead. Here we might think vividly and with care, and in tribute to Jacqueline Rose’s strikingly profound intervention, about what it will have been for what it is in the process of becoming.

10 Here Rose references work on the deep fracturing of the South African psyche in terms of “reparative humanism”, citing Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s work. She refers in her lecture to Fanon who treated victim and torturer alike. “You must therefore weigh as heavily as you can upon the body of your torturer”, Fanon wrote, “in order that his soul, lost in some by-way, may finally find once more its universal dimension”. Yet this is not what student movements have had in mind (nor the “Fanon” they have drawn upon): the critique of humanism, and the approach of the TRC to a coming to terms with the trauma of the past has been forcefully rejected, and broken from. These tensions stay with us; they are not resolved.

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References Breakey, Jessica. 2017. Writing From Inside the Fire: Reflections on the Fire-Centred Politics of the 2015/6 South African Student Movements. M.A. Thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Butler, Judith. 2018. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chance, Kerry. 2015. “‘Where There is Fire there is Politics’: Ungovernability and Material Life in Urban South Africa”. The Journal of Anthropology 30(3): 349–423. Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla and Chris van der Merwe. 2008. Narrating Our Healing: Perspectives on Working Through Trauma. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Hunter, Mark. 2019. The Race for Education: Gender, White Tone and Schooling in South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Long, Wahbie. 2019. “Shame, Envy, Impasse and Hope: On the Psychopolitics of Violence in SA”. WISER seminar, University of the Witwatersrand. https://wiser.wits.ac.za/ system/files/seminar/Long2019.pdf. Looser, Tom. 2012. “The Global University, Area Studies and the World Citizen: Neoliberal Geography’s Redistribution of the ‘World’”. Cultural Anthropology 27(1): 97–117. Mandela, Nelson. 2010. Conversations with Myself. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Mandela, Nelson. 1995. Long Walk to Freedom. Boston, MA: Back Bay Books. Msimang, Sisonke. 2018. The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela. Cape Town: Jonathan Ball. Nuttall, Sarah and Achille Mbembe. 2014. “Mandela’s Mortality”. In The Cambridge Companion to Nelson Mandela, edited by Rita Barnard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nuttall, Sarah. 2018. “Upsurge”. In Acts of Transgression: Live Art in South Africa, edited by Jay Pather and Catherine Boulle. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Nuttall, Sarah. 2019. “Afterword: The Shock of the New Old”. Social Dynamics 45(2): 280–285. Pithouse, Richard. 2016. “The Turn to Book Burning in South Africa”. Africa is a Country, April 15. https://africasacountry.com/2016/09/the-turn-to-burning-in-south-africa.

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Within the time of the aftermath Judith Butler

It feels to me to be a formidable task to respond to Jacqueline Rose’s elegant and trenchant lecture, “The Legacy”, and to reflect further upon the crucial questions it poses. Rose’s lecture reflects the depth of her ongoing engagement with South African literature, culture, history and politics and her affiliation with the struggle for racial justice. Among the issues she raises for us to consider are the relationship of psychoanalysis to history, the persistence of trans-generational haunting in South Africa, and the relationship of the student protest movement to late capitalism and neoliberalism. Rose reads the #RhodesMustFall movement as articulating the judgment of farm worker Petrus Brink that “this is really not working.” The “this” is an indefinite referent, but resounds with several referents’ social realities: the ongoing colonial structure of the university, but also to the massive problem of poverty as well as the failure of the constitutional negotiations of 1994 to address the radical need for the redistribution of wealth. There are of course different ways of understanding the “post” of post-apartheid. We would be wise to follow Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1990) who has suggested on numerous occasions that the “post” retains its reference to the colonial and even marks the space and time of its furtive continuation and displacement. And yet, how do we think this space-time in which the demand for revolutionary change has emerged in a new form? When, for instance, in a country such as Argentina, the transition to democracy was declared after the dissolution of the last of the dictatorial regimes, a new view took hold that democracy had now been achieved or, that it had, at least, begun. It was supposed to be a new time, a time of the new. Hence, textbooks and major media outlets talk about “the beginning of democracy in Argentina” as if it could be dated to the election of Raúl Alfonsín in 1983. And yet, what followed were a number of governments in which practices and people associated with dictatorship along with forms of revisionism resurfaced within the very time of democracy. And now the assaults on the Conti Memory Center by the Macri government, the effort to arrest and even to disappear political dissidents, and the failures of parliamentary democracy all raise the question of when precisely the time of dictatorship ended. Dictatorship can end on a chronological date, but that does not mean that those who were complicit with that regime do not still harbour its passions, DOI: 10.4324/9781003198581-5

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memories, and commitments; and it does not mean that dictatorial practices cannot re-appear within the supposed time of democracy (Goñi 2016). The analogy is not a simple one, but the student movements in South Africa, including #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall, have rightly declared that the revolutionary dismantling of apartheid was seriously incomplete, and that now is the time – the urgent time – to complete that revolution. The revolution that concluded with the dissolution of the regime in 1994 did not dismantle a colonial educational system that fails to include even Black studies as a discipline. That revolution left unaddressed the need for the redistribution of land following upon land theft and occupation under apartheid. It left not fully addressed / unaddressed informal forms of segregation, including the division of universities between “traditional black” and “white”. It did not confront well enough the condition of black poverty. The fee hikes betrayed the promise of a free education, but did it not draw the contours of a larger betrayal? Where is the equality, freedom and justice that was promised by the revolution? The split between legal and economic equality upon which the 1994 overthrow of apartheid relied introduced a rupture into the sense of historical time. The break with apartheid did not bring about substantial equality. The formal equality was surely revolutionary, but it carried with it a promise it could not fulfil. Indeed, the “formal” character of legal equality functions as a kind of promissory note that does not always deliver when the operative sense of the term in the economic sphere is “market freedom”. Is economic equality yet to come? What meaning does legal equality have under conditions when economic inequality intensifies along racial lines? It is not falsified, but proves insufficient. The fee hikes clearly highlighted the structural racial inequality in income levels, reserving an education mainly for those who could pay. The advent of the neoliberal model that figures the university as a consumer option rather than a public entitlement, increasingly run by labour practices that outsource its services and undermine unions, gave rise to at least three sorts of concerns: the first has to do with the broken promise of free education under neoliberalism; the second has to do with the colonial aspirations of the university’s offerings – its disciplines, its texts, its canons. A third political claim quickly formed as well: why has the university, often understood as an open space, if not a sanctuary, become a site for security forces, trained in military methods, to block student movements, disrupt their organizing, scatter their assemblies, and fault their expression? It is, of course, one kind of claim to demand entrance to the university regardless of the ability to pay; it is another kind of claim to demand that the university come to reflect the concerns, the history, and the culture of the publics it serves and to give way to a restructuring that not only relieves its curriculum of a colonial legacy, but develops a critical understanding of both apartheid and colonial power through critical texts from black and postcolonial intellectual traditions. That the education available for a prohibitive fee was one that reflected and reproduced colonial values and disciplinary canons compounded the reasons for outrage: locked out for financial reasons (in an economy that reproduces structural racism)

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from an institution whose colonial values and practices remain largely uncontested was a virtual recipe for a student uprising. One could concur with the view that the revolutionary dismantling of apartheid has not yet come to completion and conclude that social transformations must continue but in a gradualist mode and through existing institutions and established political parties and pathways. But another view, widely shared in the student movements as I have understood them, has been to claim that the revolution is not finished and that the revolution must continue, including the tactics, sometimes violent, of the anti-apartheid struggle. Sometimes assisted by an afro-pessimist view that structural racism has a firm grip on time and that the notion of progress is an alibi for the reproduction of racism, some students understood themselves to be continuing the struggle, insisting that there is no meaningful temporal distinction between the decades of apartheid rule and the current moment. Leigh-Ann Naidoo, in her Ruth First Lecture of 2016, argues that those drawing on afro-pessimism were the ones “who at least have the decency to recognise the ways in which the present remains captured by the violence of the past” (Naidoo 2016). Time figures centrally in all of these positions (which are, of course, not fully or exhaustively represented in the sketch I offer here). Rose cites Naidoo on the problem of time as it emerges for the student movements, a time out of sync, a disorientation within a sense of historical time that gives rise to a profound sense of historical disorientation and to the question: what time is it? The fee hikes constituted a broken promise on the part of the state to offer affordable and accessible education. But, of course, the sense of the broken promise turned out to be much larger than the fee hikes themselves. The broken promise to fully dismantle apartheid and to throw off the colonized condition spawned an acute critique of the national myth of progress, a term that has come to be associated with the expansion of neo-liberalism at the expense of social and political freedom. A promise, as Nietzsche tells us, is a speech act which uttered at a given moment in time binds the speaker to “stand security” for a future that will realize the actions prefigured by the promise itself. And yet, the future implied by the promise of freedom and equality is repeatedly postponed or clearly reversed, which means that the revolutionary claim of 1994 appears not only incomplete, but undermined or withdrawn, and the term “post-apartheid” becomes a cover for a continuation of stark racial inequalities and colonial power and functions as complicitous with that power. The “post” remains profoundly implicated in the colonial, as Spivak has repeatedly argued, but how it breaks and how it remains tied have to be understood in context. Although South Africa has been after apartheid with the dissolution of that regime 27 years ago, signified by the establishment of one of the most progressive constitutions in the world, the breakdown of segregation in many domains of civil society, apartheid still lives on within the time of aftermath. This is one of the main points about historical time that emerges from these movements. Apartheid remains the name for one form of power under which people continue to live, especially young people who do not understand themselves as living in a new day. If a rupture

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is still required, it is because the rupture of 1994 did not fully arrest the various ways that apartheid continues in the university, in unequal land and wealth distribution, in the tactics of securitized police on campus. As Naidoo (2016) puts it: throughout the student movement, of course, across the country, emerged a politics of land, which is an invocation of an older Pan Afrikanist politics, but put to use as a critique of post-apartheid reconciliation. ‘Izwe Lethu!’ [Our Land!] began as a quiet call in the movement, but has become emboldened, energising a politics of redistribution that slashes into the history of white capitalism as much as into the ANC’s class project, and calls out towards a more just future. The rupture that surely happened in 1994 and that no one can deny, that momentous upsurge of freedom that shook the world as the brutal apartheid regime fell, introduces a time in which certain other ruptures were yet to happen. The promise was kept and the promise was unfulfilled, or it was overtly broken. All of these claims bear truth. They happened when formal equality was guaranteed under the law but explicitly prohibited from translating into economic equality (Khadiagala et al. 2018). The split happened then and there, constituting, we might say, a wound that would outlive the revolutionary moment. From the moment that formal and economic equality were severed from one another, two temporalities were unleashed: a narrative of progress, but another in which “free markets” and privatization colonized the meaning of economic advance, leaving increasing numbers of people in conditions of racialized precarity. Jacqueline Rose asks, “what, in moments of historical crisis, is being passed down from one generation to the next?” On the one hand, she points out, there is the injunction to forget about the past that is bound up with the imperative to affirm the new day. On the other hand, there is something in the history of trauma that remains unthinkable, something that “escapes our mental grasp”. Both that obligatory forgetting and traumatic non-recovery of memory operate together in what Rose calls “a logic of generational time.” The uprising of students defied the narrative of “progress […] they were meant to embody.” Rose’s use of embodiment here is, I believe, quite significant. For that ideal of progress had become the instrument of a repression both of what could be recalled and what could not, one that is registered at the level of the body, its viscera, and surging up in the embodied action of protest.1 The repressed seeks to find its way toward an articulation, an unconscious legacy gets passed down, which means it is not from the start fully aware of what drives it, and yet still makes the valid demand to be heard. And to the degree that the body is at the centre of this struggle, bodies occupying buildings or standing firm against security forces 1

The many debates about Fanon during this time attest to the importance of embodied life in these protests, as does the feminist organizing focusing on body politics, including performance art, and solidarity networks against rape. I take this moment to express my gratitude to the students, faculty, and staff at Witwatersrand University who, in May of 2016, engaged me in conversation on Fanon.

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trained in military methods, the form of resistance is also structured by gender and sexuality. Is the task to renew a wounded masculinity, or is it necessary to oppose the systemic character of racism and violence against women, foregrounding the way that women of colour become the site of heightened vulnerability and resistance? Rose warns us that “there is no politics that does not tap into the subterranean core of who we are, no politics without the nightmare and the dream.” This does not mean that we despair of deliberate politics, but only that we understand protest as, in part, the staging of trauma and its call for repair, and the importance of the nexus of aesthetics and politics, the work, for instance, of the Handspring Puppet Company that demonstrates the necessity and the possibility of world making on the site of unthinkable massacre (Taylor 2009; Handspring Puppet Company n.d.). Perhaps every conscious political action has to be accompanied by a reverie that opens us to the past we cannot fully think precisely in order not to repeat it uncritically. Perhaps what is critical in this scene is not only a heightened form of consciousness, but a way of marking a history that is not fully tellable. If, as Rose argues, the task is to know what humans are capable of – including torture and slaughter without shame – we have to pass out of this world into one where the spatial and temporal coordinates are not so familiar so that we might return to this world more fully awake, and more fully capable of dreaming. We pass out of that configuration of time and space in order to grasp how time has congealed into a repressive surface from which something still grows, and space has been divided in ways that continue the legacy of apartheid and expose the fissures that prefigure its undoing. Naidoo (2016) refers to the student generation as “plagued by a generational fault line that scrambles historicity.” Those protests were an explicit and conscious refusal of the obstinate narrative of progress, but less fully conscious is the need to return to a history still unresolved, possibly irresolvable because, as trauma, not fully thinkable. It is passed along between generations but never as a fully thematized event or history. That very need to return exposes the limits to what is voluntary: it is the push and pull of traumatic history as it takes shape as countervailing bodily motions, gestures, perhaps drives. And yet, to rephrase the paradox that Rose is keen to underscore, the tide that draws a generation backward also pulls it toward another sense of futurity. That one may well revive a sense of revolution, a revolving that is a returning but also a breaking open. That may be a citation of a revolutionary call that ruptures with apartheid and colonial rule anew – a rupture after the rupture – recalling what is not yet repaired, including the irreparable, to bring it into a sensuous form wrought from that elsewhere, the very nexus of aesthetics and politics, that which, scrambling historicity, reverberates in the old/new call for justice.

References Goñi, Uki. 2016. “Blaming the victims: Dictatorship denialism is on the rise in Argentina.” The Guardian, August 29. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/29/argentinadenial-dirty-war-genocide-mauricio-macri.

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Handspring Puppet Company. n.d. http://www.handspringpuppet.co.za/. Khadiagala, Gilbert, Sarah Mosoetsa, Devan Pillay, Roger Southall and Samuel Kariuki, eds. 2018. New South African Review 6: The Crisis of Inequality. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Naidoo, Leigh-Ann. 2016. “Leigh-Ann Naidoo: The anti-apartheid generation has become afraid of the future.” Mail & Guardian, August 17. https://mg.co.za/article/2016-0817-leigh-ann-naidoo-delivers-compelling-speech-at-ruth-first-memorial-lecture/. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1990. The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Edited by Sarah Harasym. New York: Routledge. Taylor, Jane, ed. 2009. Handspring Puppet Company. Johannesburg: David Krut Publishing. http://www.handspringpuppet.co.za/our-work/talks-and-publications/ handspring-puppet-company-book/.

6

“Lock your doors!”, or “the beginning of after” Pierre de Vos

It is late October 2015 and I am sitting in my office at the Law Faculty of the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa, writing a newspaper article in which I develop an argument in favour of disruptive protest. As I type away, I become aware of a low murmur, a humming sound in the distance. The sound grows louder. Singing protestors are making their way from Upper Campus, and will soon reach my office in the Wilfred and Jules Kramer Law Faculty building (named after wealthy benefactors)1 on Middle Campus. A WhatsApp message arrives from a colleague, alerting staff that student protestors are on their way. “Lock your doors!” it urges. The previous week I had to turn back from the gates of the university one morning because students were blocking several entrances to the university campus and disrupting lectures. This morning, I reached my office by using a back road, driving past “Glenara”,2 the Vice Chancellor’s stately mansion, before parking – away from any possible protest action – behind the international student residence, All Africa House. My comfortable office overlooks Upper Campus on the slopes of the majestic Table Mountain. When I look up from my computer screen, I notice heavy clouds rolling down the slopes of the mountain. Usually that means rain is on its way. Earlier in 2015, after students occupied the main administration block (which they symbolically renamed, Azania House) and after sustained mass protest, the university removed a statue of Cecil John Rhodes from its plinth on the main square on UCT’s Upper Campus. The continued presence of the statue was largely a symbolic manifestation of a much more systemic and deep-seated frustration and anger on the part of many students who feel that not enough has changed, despite the end of apartheid more than 20 years ago. No wonder then that the removal of 1 2

The Building is named after Wilfred and Jules Kramer who made a generous gift to the University with the express aim of funding a new building. See Cowen and Visser (2004, 89). The house stands on land that was part of one of the first farms established by Dutch colonisers. The farm was called Hollandsche Tuin and was “granted”, so a University document informs me, by Jan Van Riebeek in 1657. In 1881, part of the land was sold to L.A. Vincent, a merchant, who chose the name Glenara. The architect responsible for designing the house was A. W. Ackerman (who designed Cape Town’s Central Station), and the building cost £6000.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003198581-6

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the Rhodes statue has not ended the student protest. Protestors are demanding radical change at the university under the broad banner of decoloniality. They also – in solidarity with students across South Africa – demand free education for all. UCT charges the highest fees of any university in South Africa and although the fee (about R30 000 or 1700 pounds) might sound modest to the average middle-class individual from the global North, the vast majority of South Africans (a disproportionate number of them black) cannot afford to pay these fees. Students are also angry that the university has taken disciplinary action against three fellow students accused of assault and vandalism, allegedly committed during an earlier protest. They demand a blanket amnesty for all offences committed during the protest. Classes have been suspended for several days now. The university administration had no way of keeping the university open without ordering the mass arrest of students. But because many of us lecturers strongly opposed this move, lectures remain suspended while the administration tries to negotiate with students. I sit in my spacious office and, while the singing gets louder, I type the following: Mass demonstrations are a potent weapon in the hands of people who, as individuals, have little power and are seldom listened to or heard by those in power. It is exactly because such protests cause inconvenience and disruption (and sometimes limit the rights of others) that they are noticed and may have an impact. In many instances we will have to ask whether the rights of some not to be inconvenienced or not to have their lives disrupted should take precedence over the rights of others to take part in an effective protest. In many cases the interests of one group will have to yield to the interests of another (De Vos 2015). As the students slow their pace outside my window, I look out to see if I spot any familiar faces. Some of the protesting students must have attended the May 2015 gathering of black law students where students shared stories about the difficulties they experience as black students in the Law Faculty. At that meeting students spoke about a profound feeling of alienation, of feeling that the cards were stacked against them, of not being seen – really seen – of feeling that they do not count or count less. Some students pointed to the simple fact that white students share similar social backgrounds to the white lecturers who dominate the law school. This often gives white students a sense of ease and familiarity when interacting with lecturers, tutors and often the curricula itself. As a result, black students shared that they often felt that their white peers were able to more readily develop a rapport with white lecturers, as white lecturers found it easier to relate to white students (Lorenzen, Malusi and Minofu 2015).3 3

The authors are all former law students at the UCT Law Faculty.

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Two years later, Jacqueline Rose – in a lecture delivered in the very Kramer Law Building – would say that protests like those which had occurred at UCT and on campuses across South Africa confront us with the problem of how to move forward without forfeiting either the disruptive force unleashed by the protest, or the space for dialogue and understanding – without collapsing the space. But what the students were complaining of at that earlier meeting and one of the reasons they were now protesting and singing outside my office, was that many of the black students felt there was no space to collapse at all and therefore no possibility for real dialogue – at least not for a dialogue that would allow everyone to feel they are being heard, where painful and uncomfortable questions could be asked and where those cloaked in institutional power are prepared to engage in a respectful and serious way with those who feel left out. Students are singing a melancholic call-and-response song and (sentimental fool that I am) my eyes flood with tears. I don’t understand the isiXhosa words, but it feels as if the song – beyond the meaning of words – urges me to let go of my tightly wound thoughts and meticulously crafted sentences; to escape my prison of words; to leave my office; to go outside and become one with the crowd and the feelings expressed in the song: a song full of pain and anger, yearning and resolve. I do not join the students outside. This protest is not my story to write; surely (but is it really “surely”?) it is also not a story I should insert myself into as a main protagonist. Instead, I turn away from my computer screen and re-read the WhatsApp from my colleague before typing an angry response to reprimand her for her message. But I delete my words before I press the send button. What would it help, apart from signalling my supposed superior political insight and empathy? Instead, I turn back to the computer screen; my door remains open and unlocked. For a fleeting moment I mourn for the man sitting in front of my computer: because I am too awkward and shy and ambivalent to join the students outside; because I cannot help myself and remain who I am; because I am white and male and privileged and I suspect that (despite what I may usually tell myself) I am implicated in the anger (even hatred, perhaps?) and pain coming from the singing crowd; because I am stuck in my comfort zone, consoled by my ability to produce “reasoned” prose which I believe will – over time at least – allow me to figure out things and impose a kind of order on a situation that feels out of order (as if my situation – our situation as lecturers and students – has not always been out of order and as if it will not continue to be out of order long after the protest subsides). I take a deep breath. Enough with the pity party. The words I type out on my computer are deliberately stripped from any signs of passion, feeling or vulnerability: I happen to think that the Fees Must Fall protest – advancing the constitutional right to higher education and the right against unfair discrimination – was morally just and that the disruptions caused to the academic programme by the peaceful protests were outweighed by the right of protestors to be heard. This is not always an easy call to make. The more drastic and prolonged the disruption and the less important the cause, the more difficult it will be to decide which right should yield.

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The protesting students have moved on and the sound of their singing is fading away. Another day awaits in which they will keep busy with the work of occupying Azania House and – in the language some of the students use on Twitter – will continue to “conscientize” each other. Despite being holed up in my office, I am not completely oblivious to what is happening in Azania House. Apart from following the Twitter streams of various groups and various protesting students, I receive some occasional hints of what is happening from L, who teases me when I tell him how many boring meetings of the Teaching and Learning Committee and other university committees I had attended in the very room in what students now call Azania House. L arrives home every night with flushed cheeks, fresh from another day of non-stop seminars and political discussions with other protesting students. His PhD thesis on same-sex marriage will have to wait for now. “We come and go now at Azania House as we please,” he tells me and laughs. “Before the protest started, I had never even been inside that building.” I smile. “I guess it has always been a symbol of university authority,” I tell L, hoping he would tell me more, but he is reluctant to give me a blow by blow account of the happenings at Azania House. Although he never says this, I suspect his reluctance is based on the fact that – as a professor – I am automatically perceived as having one foot in the opposition camp. But as always, we continue to have intense discussions about the ideas and concepts we are struggling with. Now the ideas are mostly those that originate from the discussions coming out of Azania House. Even on the nights when he arrives home late, we do not go to sleep immediately. After eating the leftovers that I had carefully covered with another plate to keep it warm (just as I later saw his mother do with the leftover food in her small house in KwaZakhele in Port Elizabeth) L pours us each a glass of wine, which we sip in bed while talking about the creativity that disruptive protest can unleash, and about the place of queer theory in a protest movement. L reads the protest as a moment of queer revolt, or, as he says, “of black queers speaking back to power”. He laughs. “Yes, reading my Foucault and my queer theory is coming in handy in these revolutionary times.” We both laugh. “But seriously,” L says, “I really feel the queers and the feminists are fighting against institutional power. And it is everywhere.” He rolls his eyes, showing me that he is parodying the faux-revolutionary language beloved by some of the student activists. Especially the men. When I press him on this, I am surprised to hear that he sees the fight as being just as much with fellow activists as with the university administration. “Jesus, some of those men are so macho and so full of male bravado; it is as if they are radiating testosterone! And you should hear their howls of protest when they are called out on their male privilege. Because black men cannot have privilege.” He laughs. “Then some of us sashay in there with our nails painted red – I mean, have you seen how tight my skinny jeans fit me – and suddenly these men discover they are not as progressive as they think they are. So predictable.” He empties his glass and suddenly he looks tired. “Sometimes it feels like the same old bullshit – just in new packaging.”

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It’s probably in this period that the Trans-Collective is born at UCT. One night, L lets slip that the debate on the creation of gender-neutral bathrooms at Azania House had been particularly bruising. But the next night he reports that new signs have gone up earmarking one of the toilets as a gender neutral bathroom. It is a few days after I receive this news that we have our first argument about the protest. Maybe not a full-on made-for-tv argument. But an argument nevertheless. L is home early, and he is cooking dinner while I am doing the dishes. We are both in a good mood and a bit giddy. L pours a second glass of wine for each of us and wonders aloud what will happen next. Will the government and the university give in to the demands of students? If they do, what happens then? Can they afford to offer free education to all? What should be done to the professors who live in a nineteenth century colonial intellectual bubble? How are we going to get professors to engage with feminism and queer theory when we know they are going to claim their academic freedom is being infringed? And what about the future of the university? Will it become a place we would want to work at? “Well,” I shrug to demonstrate my good intentions; to show that I know this is not my story to write. “Who knows? But in the end,” I say, while making scare quotes in the air with my soapy dishwasher hands, “‘like Saturn, the Revolution will devour its children’”.4 L looks at me sharply. “You are already looking for the dark cloud behind the silver lining,” he complains. “Is this not willing into failure a movement you claim to admire?” I feel on the defensive, so I attack: “The queer position might well require you to be critical, even to turn away, from the movement taking shape in Azania House,” I say tartly. “Were you not the one who told me that some of the male protestors have been arguing that feminism was a Western import and that it should be rejected?” L nods. “Ja, there is that crap,” he says. “but that’s not the whole story.” We go back and forth. But, for the moment, the argument remains unresolved. In-between all of this, I am trying to write an academic article on the constitutional right to protest. As all lectures have been suspended, I have enough time on my hands, but the article is not getting off the ground. It is difficult to maintain the fourth wall between academic and audience. I contemplate writing the whole damn thing in the first person, but who would publish that? I struggle on and conjure up some paragraphs:5 Many citizens in South Africa feel that they have no political voice, and that the government will not take their complaints seriously unless they take part in collective protest action to draw attention to their complaints. This is not surprising as South Africa is a one party dominant democracy: the governing ANC has enjoyed electoral dominance and continues to win free and fair 4 5

Reportedly this was famously said by Jacques Mallet du Pan, but although I knew the quote, I did not know when I quoted it to L, who had said it. See Kennedy (2002, 113). The article would eventually be published as De Vos (2018).

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elections with all other parties lagging far behind. Because of this electoral dominance, institutions have become less responsive to the needs of voters. Moreover, South Africa is also a profoundly unequal society. In a political context in which democratic institutions are already unresponsive to the needs of individuals (because of the pathologies associated with one party dominance), those who lack social or economic power find it particularly difficult to draw attention to their concerns and to have a political voice. All this leads to a situation in which groups of people (especially those from marginalised and poor communities) resort to the “politics of spectacle”7 – including disruptive and violent protest and the destruction of property during such protests (Lor 2013, 359–372) in an attempt to have their voices heard. Exercising their right to protest allows individuals, acting together, to make their voices heard in order to challenge the power of powerful elites. Such protests can also help civil society groups to build support for their causes and to mobilise public opinion in order to ensure more responsive and accountable government from those who were elected to serve the people (De Vos and Freedman 2014, 550). Arguably, the larger the protest and the more disruptive in nature, the more likely that the protest will have some impact. But as some disruptions resulting from protest will impact on the rights of others, a tension arises between respecting the right to protest as expansively as is possible, while also respecting the rights of others. While I am writing this in my relatively quiet office, lecturers, administrative staff and students at UCT are all living this tension. Some protesting students have been arrested, others fear the violence from the police or private security called in by the university administration. From non-protesting students I constantly receive emails asking about the November examination: will it take place; will it cover all the work mentioned in the course outline; when will classes resume? I have no answers. Staff tempers flare. I overhear two colleagues shouting at each other about whether it was justified to call the police onto the campus. “What,” shouts one, “should the university do when students break the law and vandalise things and when they don’t want to engage in reasoned negotiations?” As my colleagues shout at each other I read up on protest in South Africa, but much of this is already familiar to me. The literature is replete with claims that South Africa is one of the most protest-heavy countries in the world, with protest 6

7

See Choudhry (2009, 1–85). Whether South Africa can indeed be characterised in this manner has been the subject of intense debate. See Southall (1994, 629–655; 1998, 443–469; 2001, 1–24; 2005, 61–82); Giliomee (1998, 128–142); and Friedman (1999, 97). The argument here is that in order to attract the attention of politicians and bureaucrats who are not responsive to the needs of the population (because of the lack of real political competition), communities revert to the “politics of spectacle”, including taking part in extreme forms of public protests that include the destruction of property and violence. See Cottle (2008, 853–872, 864) and Posel (2014, 32–54).

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at the local level most dominant because, so I read, municipal officials and politicians consistently fail to consult with the communities they serve (Booysen 2007, 23–24; Atkinson 2007, 60–65). (“Lock your doors!” I think ruefully.) Various authors argue that protests occur where engagement fails (Booysen 2007, 21–27),8 where institutions fail to provide participatory spaces where real interaction can take place and where differences in power do not reinforce the power of some over those who must remain silent, angry, excluded (Atkinson 2007, 60–65). What happens when – to begin with – protestors feel there is no space to collapse? These protests are based on the assumption that citizens have a right to be seen and heard, but that representatives are failing, not necessarily that the system of local government is illegitimate. Protesters have mostly used the institutional spaces within local government first before engaging in protests (Van der Westhuizen 2016, 86). The black students who gathered in May 2015 in the Kramer Law Building to complain about their alienation would all have clicked their fingers – as the protesting students have a habit of doing to show their agreement – if I had read out these sentences to them. But judging from what some of my colleagues are saying, the protest has not really made them more willing to create a space for dialogue. Maybe that would come later? I find temporary solace in the nice, dry, measured, tone of my legal writing and plod on: The right to assemble, to demonstrate, to picket and to present petitions is guaranteed in section 17 of the South African Constitution.9 The right to freedom of assembly is viewed as a central right in South Africa’s constitutional democracy. According to South Africa’s Constitutional Court it “exists primarily to give a voice to the powerless”, including “groups that do not have political or economic power, and other vulnerable persons”. Protest, said, the court, also provides an outlet for the frustrations of marginalised and vulnerable groups. “This right will, in many cases, be the only mechanism available to them to express their legitimate concerns. Indeed, it is one of the principal means by which ordinary people can meaningfully contribute to the constitutional objective of advancing human rights and freedoms. This is only too evident from the brutal denial of this right and all the consequences flowing therefrom under apartheid.”10

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Apart from promoting participation in the political processes, the right to demonstrate and protest also develops each individual’s unique personality. This is because our personalities do not develop in isolation. Instead, they develop in the context of groups. Assemblies for cultural, educational, religious, sport and recreational purposes, therefore, may be as important as assemblies for political purposes. Because of its importance, South Africa’s Constitutional Court has said that this right should be interpreted expansively. “It would need some particularly compelling context to interpret this provision as actually meaning less than its wording promises. There is, however, nothing, in our own history or internationally, that justifies taking away that promise. […] This means that it is appropriate to proceed on the basis that section 17 of the Constitution means what it generously says.”11 A year passes. My article on disruptive protest is not yet completed. Much else has changed in the subsequent year. The gender neutral signs at Azania House are the first to come down. This happens towards the end of 2015. In February 2016, protesting students build a shack on campus as a symbol of the housing crisis at the university. When it becomes clear that the shack will be demolished, students remove various historic works of art from adjacent buildings and set the paintings alight. A university shuttle bus and a car is also set alight and the police arrest several protestors. Police and private security eventually overpower the protesters and tear down the shack (Furlong 2016). The Vice Chancellors’ office is petrol bombed that same night. Protest action and class disruptions continue on and off throughout the year. For many weeks towards the end of 2016 all classes at the university remain suspended. L is busy working feverishly to complete his PhD dissertation and (along with many other queer, trans and feminist activists) he has stepped back from active involvement in the protest movement, directing his energies elsewhere. “I don’t have time for all that toxic masculinity,” L says, when pressed. When protesting students sing protest songs outside my office window, I click my tongue in irritation, and as I do so I think that if student protestors could see me now they would respond as one person: “You have the luxury to click your tongue at us while you continue sitting in your office and enjoying the benefits of this institution. We don’t.” Nevertheless, I do not contemplate joining the singing students. In any case, because I publicly criticised the burning of art works by some students, I know that if they saw me now, some of the protestors will shout at me and chase me away because of what they see as my betrayal (De Vos 2016). When protesting students repeatedly set off the building’s fire alarm, I close my door to escape the noise. The WhatsApp messages now occasionally call lecturers down to the second floor of the Kramer Law Building to form a human chain in front of the library. Just in case, we are told. And because books are irreplaceable (but not as irreplaceable as human beings, I think). Students and staff alike are traumatised, scared, and angry. During this time, if asked, I might have ventured the opinion that the space for dialogue at the University had 11 Garvas 2013, para 52.

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been collapsed. Nothing could be said – although much is shouted. Besides, no one would listen. Can a space collapse if people believed it was not there to start with? This is one way of telling the story of student protest at a relatively affluent university in South Africa in the second decade of the twenty first century: a promising, beautifully disruptive, moment which soured when the “revolution” – led by power-hungry patriarchs – started devouring its own children. But it is not the only way to tell this story. If you look beyond the narrow two-year period that frames the first telling of this story, and ask the critical question of what was possible before and what became possible after, you might be able to imagine a different ending – at least to this particular rendition of the narrative. In this time we now sometimes call after (but is it ever after?), it is possible to imagine a colleague – either the colleague who warned us on WhatsApp to lock our doors or one of her friends – walking into my office and asking me to lend her a book she heard me talking about in the tea room. She is confused, she says, and uncertain. For many months she has found it difficult to sleep. When she falls asleep, she suffers from nightmares but when she wakes up, she can never remember what haunted her dreams. She looks at me in an embarrassingly earnest way. Much of what she took for granted before has melted away. She repeats this a second time: It has all melted away. She gestures to imitate water or sand escaping through her fingers. It is more difficult for her to imagine herself and those with a similar experience of the world than her (she means those who are white, upper-middle class, and English speaking – although she avoids naming these categories, because, I imagine, she has trained herself not to) as standing at the centre of the world, at the centre of its knowledge and its culture. She is getting to know her students in an entirely different way, she tells me. I look at her impassively. “Girlfriend, I think, ‘it is a bit late in the day’.” But I say nothing. Smugness, after all, is not an attractive quality. As she continues, she absentmindedly brushes imaginary dust from my desk. This is so difficult, she says (smiling uncertainly). But perhaps it is also more rewarding. She looks suddenly shy and self-conscious when I take down a slim paperback volume from my bookshelf and hand it over to her. The fat white letters on the black background suggests that this might be a self-help book (Diangelo 2018). As she walks down the passage, I turn back to my keyboard and type the following words into a blank document: “idea for a piece on the disruptive power of protest. Title: ‘the beginning of after’”.

References Atkinson, Doreen. 2007. “Taking to the streets: Has developmental local government failed in South Africa?” In State of the Nation: South Africa 2007, edited by Sakhela Buhlungu, John Daniel, Roger Southall and Jessica Lutchman, 60–65. Cape Town: HSRC Press. Booysen, Susan. 2007. “With the ballot and the brick … The politics of service delivery in South Africa.” Progress in Development Studies 7(1): 21–32.

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Choudhry, Sujit. 2009. “‘He had a mandate’: The South African Constitutional Court and the African National Congress in a dominant party democracy” Constitutional Court Review 2: 1–85. Cottle, Simon. 2008. “Reporting demonstrations: The changing media politics of dissent.” Media, Culture & Society 30(6): 853–872. Cowen, Denis and Daniel Visser. 2004. “The University of Cape Town Law Faculty: A history 1859–2004”. https://www.uct.ac.za/usr/about/intro/history/Register_of_ BuildingNumbersAndNames_2015-09-15.pdf. De Vos, Pierre, and Warran Freedman, eds. 2014. South African Constitutional Law in Context. Cape Town: Oxford University Press South Africa. De Vos, Pierre. 2015. “#FeesMustFall: On the right to mass protest and the use of force by police.” Constitutionally Speaking, October 26. https://constitutionallyspeaking.co. za/feesmustfall-on-the-right-to-mass-protest-and-the-use-of-force-by-police/. De Vos, Pierre. 2016. “On arson, police violence and student protest in a constitutional democracy.” Daily Maverick, February 25. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinio nista/2016-02-25-on-arson-police-violence-and-student-protest-in-a-constitutionaldemocracy/. De Vos, Pierre. 2018. “The constitutional limits of disruptive protest: The case of student protest in South Africa.” Zeitschrift für Menschenrechte / Journal for Human Rights 12(1): 64–86. Diangelo, Robin. 2018. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Friedman, S. 1999. “No easy stroll to dominance: Party dominance, opposition and civil society in South Africa.” In The Awkward Embrace: One Party Domination and Democracy, edited by Hermann Giliomee and Charles Simkins, 97–126. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. Furlong, Ashley. 2016. “Rhodes Must Fall protesters burn UCT art.” GroundUp, February 17. https://www.groundup.org.za/article/rhodes-must-fall-protesters-destroyuct-artworks/. Giliomee, Hermann. 1998. “South Africa’s emerging dominant-party regime.” Journal of Democracy 9(4): 128–142. Kennedy, Deborah. 2002. Helen Maria Williams and the Age of Revolution. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Lor, Peter J. 2013. “Burning libraries for the people: Questions and challenges for the library profession in South Africa.” Libri 63(4): 359–372. Lorenzen, Johan, Thamsanqa Malusi and Kevin Minofu. 2015. “On being black in UCT’s law faculty.” GroundUp, May 6. https://www.groundup.org.za/article/ being-black-ucts-law-faculty_2907/. Posel, Deborah. 2014. “Julius Malema and the post-apartheid public sphere.” Acta Academica 46(1): 32–54. South African Transport and Allied Workers Union and Another v Garvas and Others. 2013. (1) SA 83 (CC). Southall, Roger. 1994. “The South African elections of 1994: The remaking of a dominant-party state.” Journal of Modern African Studies 32(4): 629–655. Southall, Roger. 1998. “The centralization and fragmentation of South Africa’s dominant party system.” African Affairs 97 (389): 443–469. Southall, Roger. 2001. “Opposition in South Africa: Issues and problems.” Democratization 8(1): 1–24.

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Southall, Roger. 2005. “The ‘dominant party debate’ in South Africa.” Afrika Spectrum 40(1): 61–82. Van der Westhuizen, Christi. 2016. “Democratising South Africa: Towards a ‘conflictual consensus.’” In Das Ende des repräsentativen Staates? Demokratie am Scheideweg – The End of the Representative State? Democracy at the Crossroads: Eine Deutsch-Südafrikanische Perspektive – A German–South African Perspective, edited by Henk Botha, Nils Schaks and Dominik Steiger, 75–102. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH.

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The queer in decolonial times Rhodes Must Fall and (im)possibilities in times of uncertainty Lwando Scott1

Introduction The challenge contained in the prompt put forward by Professor Jacqueline Rose, “can politically motivated rage be generative, can it erupt and move us forward in the same breath” enables us to think of the possibilities created by the fractures of the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) movement. In this regard the RMF movement is but an instigator, a point of departure. This is articulated poignantly by Achille Mbembe (2016, 32) when he notes, Rhodes Must Fall was an important and necessary moment. The movement has won a tactical battle. But the struggle is only starting. It has revealed numerous lines of fracture within South African society and has brought back on the agenda the question of the de-racialization of this country’s institutions and public culture. The de-racialisation of South Africa’s institutions refers to the undoing of the whiteness of South African institutions – to upend the white supremacist culture that privileges European ontology and epistemologies while simultaneously ignoring or even denigrating indigenous knowledge systems and ways of being. The process of de-racialisation in South Africa is not a project that exists in isolation, it is intricately linked to other struggles such as gender and sexuality. In this chapter, I am interested in queer possibilities created by the RMF movement and what those possibilities mean for African queerness in this decolonial moment in post-apartheid South Africa. In the beginning of RMF at the University of Cape Town (UCT), the students occupied the Bremner Building, the administration building of the university where the Vice-Chancellor’s office is located. The year was 2015 and the Vice-Chancellor was Dr. Max Price. I was a PhD candidate at UCT when RMF began and I was caught in an intermediate state of writing thesis chapters and participating in protest action. On one of my stopovers at the Bremner Building during the occupation – which was temporarily 1

Lwando Scott acknowledges the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) of the University of the Western Cape (UWC) for the fellowship award that facilitated the writing of this chapter.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003198581-7

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named “Azania House” – I witnessed an exchange about the gender designation of the bathrooms in the occupied building. The conversation came about because some students, the black womxn who were part of what was becoming the RMF movement, identified as transgender and demanded that some of the bathrooms be designated gender neutral. The transgender students proceeded to make “gender neutral” bathroom signs for one of the bathrooms in the building. The Christian identifying, cis-heterosexual female student who was also part of the RMF movement was not comfortable with gender neutral bathrooms, stating that she didn’t want to share bathrooms with “men.” So, here were two black students who agreed that Rhodes, the statue in pride of place at UCT, Must Fall, but disagreed – or at the very least were ambivalent about – the signage of the bathrooms in the Bremner Building. While I didn’t know it at the time, this moment was indicative of the hostility and the noninclusive environment that would increasingly characterise the RMF movement in relation to gender and sexuality “dissidents” within it. The above-mentioned exchange, and the makeshift “gender neutral” signs that I subsequently saw on the bathroom doors, excited me about the queer potential of the RMF movement. I was enthusiastic to such an extent that I wrote a blog post about it titled “The inclusion of sexuality, gender, transgender issues in the #RhodesMustFall movement” (Scott 2015). My excitement, however, was short lived. My excitement was short lived because during the RMF protests gender and sexuality as modes of thinking and sights of struggle were silenced, as is often the case with race related upheavals in South Africa led by men (Orton 2018; MacLean 2004). The import of the silencing of gender and sexuality dissidents in the RMF movement was profound for me, because here we were trying to dismantle oppressive regimes of the past, embodied in the statue of Cecil John Rhodes, yet at the same time the gender and queer struggles were being grossly negated. The renaming of the Bremner Building to Azania House was no small matter, considering the politics of building and street names in post-apartheid South Africa (Duminy 2014), also captured in newspaper headlines (Patel 2019; Phakeng 2019; Evans 2018). Many students expressed pride in occupying the Archie Mafeje Room where congregations took place during the occupation. In the 1960s, Archie Mafeje was appointed as a senior lecturer at UCT, but his appointment was reversed because of apartheid laws in South Africa (Ntsebeza 2014; 2016). At the time, the removal of Mafeje sparked protests at UCT and in 1968 there was a 9-day occupation of Bremner Building, not dissimilar to the occupation of the same building in 2015. Against the backdrop of the Majefe controversy, the occupation of Bremner was read as symbolic of a new new South Africa, of a post post-apartheid. During this time this new new South Africa, often termed “Azania”, represented a future that students in RMF were dreaming about. It represented a yearning for a different political landscape where blackness would be more completely free. With the resistance to including gender and sexuality struggles in RMF what I was seeing was a new new South Africa that was being constructed with the “masters tools” (Audre Lorde) of patriarchy and black male chauvinism that

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prioritised race struggles at the expense of gender and sexuality. What makes this even more ironic was that the language of intersectionality became a dominant part of the rhetoric deployed by the RMF movement, but was scarcely being practiced when it really mattered, namely when gender and queer struggles were at stake. What became apparent was the invisibilisation of gender and sexuality, the significance being that the new new South Africa, Azania if you will, like the old one, would not see or prioritise gender and sexuality. This is no small matter considering the movement’s urgent demand to decolonise the university and society more broadly. While the quest for decolonisation was pertaining particularly to the university culture and its curriculum, decolonisation has consequences beyond the steps of the leafy university at the bottom of the mountain. The question then becomes, what does decolonisation look like when it centres the gender and queer struggle in its various guises? Can we talk about decolonisation without talking about African queer struggles for selfhood and dignity? What happens when the decolonial project is articulated in limited ways that prioritise predominantly male black cis-heterosexual subjectivities? Even more importantly, what are the ways in which African queerness can inform decolonisation? From where I stand, a decolonial future is a necessarily queer future. Despite the struggle to be included in the RMF movement, gender and sexuality dissidents managed to use the fractures created by RMF for political gains. As powerfully demonstrated by Khadija Khan (2017), black queer womxn and gender non-conforming individuals refused to be silenced by dominant black male voices in the RMF movement. Khan (2017, 112) argues that “Black queer womxn and nonbinary people constituted leadership within both movements (RMF and Fees Must Fall), contrary to many existing articles and narratives, and were actively addressing and resisting the country’s historically androcentric and heteronormative social activism environment.” Furthermore, Khan’s (2017, 111) piece includes a photograph of one of the demonstration signs during the RMF protests that reads “Dear history, this revolution has women, gays, queers, and trans. Remember that.” It makes sense then that it is during this time that the Trans-Collective was formed at UCT. The Trans-Collective is a group of transgender students and gender dissidents who were part of the RMF movement but were a breakaway social movement in order to centre transgender needs and to advance a transgender agenda at UCT. The Trans-Collective has led to the establishment of the Trans University Forum, which includes all 26 universities and universities of technologies in South Africa. The RMF student movement thus created fractures, openings, fissures, where movements like the Trans-Collective could form and place demands on the black-student-led movements, and also make demands of the university. This chapter is interested in the fractures that led to the creation of gender and sexuality dissidents within the RMF movement which then led to other disruptions beyond the movement. I contend that while the student movements moved to silence gender and sexuality within the movement, the fractures that the movement created were rhizomatic, they were uncontrollable, and so the

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gender and sexuality dissidents were able to unsettle the status quo. Both as disruptors as part of RMF, and also as disruptors within RMF, these queer disruptions were important precisely because they were driven by gender and sexuality dissenters. Khan (2017, 119) sums it up perfectly when she argues “Queer womxn and nonbinary leadership in SA’s 2015–2016 student protests hold great importance for the historical trajectory of liberation movements and the struggle for all black bodies’ freedom.” There was something about the very nature of the RMF movement, about its radical instability, which created the potential for all kinds of movements with unintended consequences. In a sense the RMF movement is a multiplicity in the Deleuze-Guattarian sense, springing from multiple parts/positions/people with disparate ideas of what the movements should/could/would be. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2005, 245) describe a multiplicity as consisting of different elements but “defined not by the elements that compose it in extension, not by the characteristics that compose it in comprehension, but by the lines and dimensions it encompasses in ‘intension.’” I contend that applied to the RMF movement, RMF is a perfect multiplicity because the movement couldn’t be defined by the elements that composed it. The movement was an assemblage of different stakeholders within and from outside the academy – a multiplicity that made a qualitative difference. “Deleuze and Guattari refer to life’s production of ‘lines of flight’, where mutations and differences produce not just the progress of history but disruptions, breaks, new beginnings and monstrous births” (Colebrook 2001, 57). There were many lines of flight from the RMF movement – lines of flight of students who started out strong but became ambivalent about the politics of the movement post the removal of the Rhodes statue; students who supported the movement but were not active in it; of course, the gender and sexuality dissenting students were also a line of flight from the movement – a clear line of flight that culminates, as it were, in the establishment of the Trans-Collective. Regardless of the original intention of the RMF movement, once formed it became a multiplicity sprouting in a rhizomatic fashion into uncontrollable movements and deterritorializations. The consequences of these could not be predicted or measured, and therein lay its power, both for enriching possibilities and for destruction. In the following sections, I explore the writings of Deleuze and Guattari (2005) to make sense of the RMF movements and the (im)possibilities it contains.

Rhodes Must Fall as a multiplicity of assemblages The idea of the rhizome emphasises infinity, which suggests a radical instability and warrants us to reimagine the constructions of social life, and in this case the RMF movement. I would premise then in a Deleuze-Guattarian logic, there are myriad ways of reading the RMF movement; that we could conjugate the movement to mean many things, and that my chapter on queering the RMF moment is but one of many ways of seeing this movement. In order to develop this point, I rely on Deleuze and Guattari’s (2005) epic work, A Thousand Plateaus. To think with Deleuze and Guattari is to move beyond philosophy and

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in my case social science and humanities as just an academic exercise, to ways of enhancing social life. Deleuze and Guattari (2005, 25) think with the concept of the rhizome and argue that a rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb ‘to be,’ but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and… and… and…’ This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb ‘to be.’ The emphasis here is on the indeterminacy of the beginning and end, and fixated on ideas of in betweenness and intermezzo, which is a movement away from the idea of God or being as modes of understanding the world. The rhizome helps us to question pyramid structures of thinking and binaries that are the hallmarks of the Enlightenment. Unlike a pyramid or a tree structure of organising thought, the rhizome prioritises rootlessness. In fact, the chapters contained in this very volume are a multiplicity in the various ways they read what RMF means. The concept of multiplicities used in various ways by Deleuze and Guattari (2005) is instructive if we take seriously how they define “multiplicities” as an assemblage of different parts to form a whole. Deleuze and Guattari (2005) regard these different parts that form from multiplicities as “lines of flight.” Attached to the rhizomatic idea of infinity is the idea of “becoming.” In the Deleuze-Guattarian sense, the idea of becoming is more concerned with experience and through this the constant mutation that we are involved in as living creatures. According to Deleuze and Guattari (2005, 239) becoming is a rhizome, not a classificatory or genealogical tree. Becoming is certainly not imitating or identifying with something; neither is it regressing progressing; neither is it corresponding, establishing corresponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation or producing through filiation. Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, ‘appearing,’ ‘being,’ ‘equalling,’ or ‘producing.’ The concept of becoming can be captured in the process of how a seed becomes a flower. A flower starts out as a seed, in order for the seeds to become a flower, the seeds need soil, water, enough sun, and through the interaction of all of these in a process called photosynthesis, the seed becomes a flower. The flower “becomes” through the interaction of all of these various stimuli. Deleuze and Guattari prioritise the process of the flower becoming. So, what are the consequences of thinking with Deleuze and Guattari, what does it mean to think through with the lens of becoming, assemblages, rhizomes, and multiplicities in order to not only make sense of RMF but to think about the decolonial queer futures that gender and sexuality dissidents were fighting for in demanding a place in the movement?

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If we consider Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas about rhizomes, multiplicities, and assemblages, then we have a powerful set of interventions to think about RMF. We begin to see some of the ways in which RMF missed an opportunity to make an inclusive radical movement that takes into account the multiplicity of blackness. RMF was dominated by a culture of hypermasculinity, a characteristic that is emblematic of social movements in South Africa. Therefore, an inclusive radical movement necessitated a disinvestment in hypermasculinity. The hallmarks of hypermasculinity, patriarchy and heteronormativity, ensured that RMF missed an opportunity for expansive politics. A politics that in true intersectional fashion would take into account gender and sexuality, and various other axes of difference that intersect with blackness. The RMF movement can nonetheless be viewed as a multiplicity of assemblages where apartheid history, post-apartheid inequalities, educational inequalities, and untransformed institutional cultures come together in an explosive moment. The RMF movement is an offshoot with no clear beginning and no real end, because even though Chumani Maxwele is seen as the initiator of RMF by throwing faeces on the Cecil John Rhodes statue, the seeds of the RMF moment were planted over generations in response to colonial and apartheid violence. It is the weight of history that detonates in the RMF movement, because as we all know the RMF movement was more than just about the statue of Rhodes, but about the history of oppression in South Africa, which includes everyday racism and racist institutional cultures entrenched at places like UCT. These structures resolutely fail to take into account the post-colonial and postapartheid lived realities of black students, the continued poverty adversely affecting black South Africans, the untransformed university curriculum – including the epistemic violence of colonialism and apartheid that foreclosed certain ways of thinking, that narrowed the intellectual horizons by insisting that only some kinds of thought and some ways of being in the world were legitimate, even normal. It is helpful to keep in mind that “assemblages are in constant variation, are themselves constantly subjected to transformations” (Deleuze and Guattari 2005, 82). So, all of South African history, all of the accumulated anger and frustration of black generations finds expression in the moment of assemblage when Chumani Maxwele throws human excrement on the Rhodes statue and RMF as a movement is, for all intents and purposes, formed. However, RMF is not an isolated movement or event – it is an offshoot from the history of UCT specifically. On previous occasions black students at UCT had objected to the presence of the statue of Rhodes and had demanded its removal. RMF is not the first time that students have wanted Rhodes to be removed from campus. University management treated these earlier calls with no sense of urgency or seriousness. This was a university management response that is indicative of the untransformed racist culture of the university that didn’t/doesn’t prioritise the experiences of black students and workers at UCT, because for black people Rhodes embodied/embodies the oppression of black people and is a figure that is associated with white supremacy and black dispossession.

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In 1999 Melissa Steyn and Mikki Van Zyl published their study appropriately called “Like that statue at Jammie Stairs”: Some student perceptions and experiences of institutional culture at UCT in 1999. In this study, students talked about their experiences at UCT and how the university was unwelcoming to black students and black culture and of how the continued existence of the Rhodes statue was indicative of this. What I am trying to demonstrate here is the assemblage and the consequent multiplicity that is the RMF movement. It is not an isolated ahistorical movement but is linked to historical processes generally in South Africa and specifically at UCT. RMF is a movement that mutated in front of our very eyes being conjugated by various stimuli like responses from management, the responses from security police, the involvement of non-university people, and the involvement of political parties. The RMF movement was really the perfect multiplicity, because as Deleuze and Guattari (2005, 249) put it “a multiplicity is defined not by its elements, nor by a centre of unification or comprehension. It is defined by the number of dimensions it has; it is not divisible; it cannot lose or gain a dimension without changing its nature.” Perhaps the most obvious dimension or becoming of the RMF was how it mutated and became the Fees Must Fall (FMF) movement, in some ways using the same strategies as RMF, certainly building on the momentum established by RMF, and gaining national support in consequence.

Queer becoming in times of uncertainty According to Colebrook (2014, 25) becoming is a destabilizing notion that privileges “coming-into-being over determination.” It is a concept developed against essential ideas of being but prioritises process and creativity. Becoming, “thought in its opposition to normativity and essence, has always underpinned standard notions of the political, the ethical, and the aesthetic” (Colebrook 2014, 25). Becoming in a political sense is a call to practice politics in a way that is not rule oriented and prescriptive, but open to new ideas of freedom. Becoming in an ethical sense demands of us and our politics a realisation that one self-actualises over time and learns over time how to be creative in the fashioning of a selfhood against predetermined notions of being. Becoming through the aesthetic or through art is essential in enabling multiple readings into political life, understanding that some things you can’t see, and that imperfections are an opportunity for a different view. The concept of becoming developed by Deleuze and Guattari (2005) has been popular in the social sciences and humanities, including in queer studies, but popularity can be dangerous, and Colebrook (2014) warns that it is more than just an idea of repeats, but rather a force to undermine normativities. The idea of becoming is propagated by the idea of “becoming-woman” or that of “becoming-animal.” Deleuze and Guattari (2005, 105–6) argue, the problem is never to acquire the majority, even in order to install a new constant. There is no becoming-majoritarian; majority is never becoming.

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Lwando Scott All becoming is minoritarian. Women, regardless of their numbers, are a minority, definable as a state or subset; but they create only by making possible a becoming over which they do not have ownership, into which they themselves must enter; this is a becoming-woman affecting all of human-kind, men and women both.

Becoming is productive. It is not a stable entity but a moving one. Becoming is anti-binary and anti-order but privileges an infinity of conjugations whose results cannot be predicted or measured in advance because the conjugation depends on the momentary combination of the facts. Becoming challenges stable notions of being and how it privileges man/men and how this not only limits us on a relational level but has contributed to the destruction of the planet. The RMF movement, then, is a becoming. The Trans-Collective that is borne off the RMF movement is a becoming. As becomings, both the RMF movement and the Trans-Collective were not stable entities but were characterised by a radical instability. Even as RMF members tried to assert a dominant race and “racial progress only” narrative to the movement, they couldn’t stop the line of flight, the becoming of the Trans-Collective. The assertions of Deleuze and Guattari (2005, 106) are pertinent here that minorities, are objectively definable states, states of language, ethnicity, or sex with their own ghetto territorialities, but they must also be thought of as seeds, crystals of becoming whose value is to trigger uncontrollable movements and deterritorializations of the mean or majority. I want to focus on the last part of this quote because it is important, how minorities are seeds that prompt multiplicities and deterritorialized states. Becomings are creative and dynamic because they are encounters of difference where different stimuli meet and produce a different reality for both the encountering and the encountered. In fact, both the encountered and the encountering are simultaneously doing both. The RMF movement can also be described as minoritarian. It is a movement that comprises of black students who are culturally, racially, and financially marginalized at UCT. In the becoming then, the RMF movement can be seen in the same vein as “becoming-women” and “becoming-animal” as it acquired different, uncontrollably different, movements – movements that, in the beginning of this chapter, I called fractures, openings, and possibilities. The TransCollective is one such becoming from the multiplicity that is the RMF movement. What becomes ironic, however, is how the RMF movement over time begins to resist its own becoming, when it rejects gender and sexuality as modes of thinking in the movement, thereby rejecting gender and sexuality struggles. This rejection reterritorializes the RMF movement from its deterritorialized state, one that it assumed when it first formed. The rejection of gender and sexuality dissidents is an adoption of a majoritarian state. There is no becoming majoritarian. Deleuze and Guattari (2005: 291) assert that “man is majoritarian par excellence,

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whereas becomings are minoritarian; all becoming is a becoming-minoritarian. … In this sense women, children, but also animals, plants, and molecules, are minoritarian.” Simply put, the RMF movement reverted back to patriarchal domination, transphobia, and homophobia as they silenced gender and sexuality dissidents. In other words, the RMF movement, in resisting its own becoming, became invested in the pyramid or tree structure of organising life, wedded to essentialist ideas about race, gender and sexuality and the intersection of these. Because the RMF movement was mostly made up of black students, the patriarchal tendencies were being performed by black males, and in some instances supported by black conservative Christian women. This reterritorialization of the RMF movement immediately compromised its standing as a legitimate movement that could represent the needs of all black students. Ultimately, then, it turned out that RMF’s reterritorialization took the form of exclusive “majoritarian” interest in racial progress as it particularly pertains to black cis heterosexual men. The reterritorialization of the RMF movement is captured succinctly by the social media quotes that were doing the rounds during this time, quotes like “black men are the white people of black people”, and even more succinctly, “black men want to replace white men in dominating others”. These became the mantras of those who remained committed to a becoming-minor of the movement by pushing back against the patriarchal tendencies of black men within RMF. While the concept of “intersectionality”, originally conceptualised by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991), was part of the RMF movement’s language, it was used in a limited fashion. While the black men in the movement were aware of how race intersects with class and the cultural consequences of this particularly at the university, they were blind to other intersections. Ironically, the RMF movement’s conceptualisation of race and the racial problem was limited and built on racists’ ideas about a singular blackness. Throughout history this singular blackness has been articulated through what Achille Mbembe (2001, 1) calls a “negative interpretation.” Here we would be wise to remember Chimamanda Adichie’s (2009) warning about the dangers of a single story. The articulations of blackness in the RMF movement were singular, only seen through the prism of black men. Through the rejection of gender and sexuality dissidents within the RMF movement, complex race/gender/sexuality intersections were denied. Blackness was rendered uncomplicated, reduced to a singular narrative – the black cis-normative narrative. This is problematic considering colonial history’s role in the negative construction of black sexuality in South Africa, indeed in Africa. This is a colonial history that institutionalised the obliteration of sexual and gender diversity in different parts of the African continent, a diversity that has since been heavily documented (Sandfort and Reddy 2013; Bond 2016; Victor, Nel, Lynch, and Mbatha 2014; Epprecht and Nyeck 2013). The RMF movement’s articulations of blackness relied on colonial understandings of gender and sexuality in Africa, colonial understandings that have been substantially critiqued by evidence of the history of all kinds of genders and sexualities in Southern Africa (Makofane 2013; Murray and Roscoe 2001; Moodie 1988).

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The tardy use of intersectionality in the RMF movement does not mean that intersectionality as such loses its power, indeed it remains a useful way to understand the stratified lives of South Africans. The idea of intersectionality is complementary to the Deleuze-Guattarian idea of the segmentary. Deleuze and Guattari (2005, 208) argue that “we are segmented from all around and in every direction. The human being is a segmentary animal. Segmentarity is inherent to all the strata composing us. Dwelling, getting around, working, playing: life is spatially and socially segmented.” What arises out of the RMF movement’s fragments is a necessity to think along the lines of segmented selves, in other words the many different parts that make up ourselves. As people we are composed of different aspects, we are formed of different parts, and it defeats our decolonial politics to frame blackness or black people, or black demands as simply just black as if we do not have a complicated genealogy of experience visà-vis our genders and sexualities. The simplification of our blackness robs us of the ways we can demand more from ourselves, but also from the social movements that are supposed to represent us, like the RMF movement. Seeing ourselves as segmented and using the power of our segmentation for greater good is the radical politics we should be engaged in and, dare I say, it is the politics of the future. The Trans-Collective is a becoming because a becoming can be initiated by anything. In fact one could say a becoming is initiated by everything, in that as you breathe and live until you die you are involved in a process of becoming in which you are constantly shifting from one form to the next affected by what you eat, where you live, where you work, familial relations, political upheavals, etc. Deleuze and Guattari (2005, 292) argue that “we can be thrown into a becoming by anything at all, by the most unexpected, most insignificant of things. You don’t deviate from the majority unless there is a little detail that starts to swell and carries you off.” The Trans-Collective was that swell that carried off and started a transgender movement at UCT. The Trans-Collective embodies a queer ethos that is committed to advocating for gender non-conforming, nonbinary, and transgender people at UCT. It embodies queerness, because it expresses a politics against heteronormativity, respectability, patriarchy, and centre people who are marginalised. It is a movement that has since destabilised hegemonic normativities at UCT. For instance, the movement has consistently called for the university to establish gender neutral bathrooms all over campus. The Trans-Collective is probably most famous for their disruption of the exhibition launch of the one-year anniversary commemoration of the RMF movement, organised by prominent members of the RMF movement and the Centre for African Studies (Omar 2016). The Trans-Collective was protesting the marginalisation of queer people in the RMF movement and argued for an intersectional approach. The mantra that carried the Trans-Collective during this protest was the paraphrased version of Flavia Dzodan’s (2011) quote that “the revolution will be intersectional, or it will be shit.” It is safe to conclude that the Trans-Collective was much more radical than the RMF in its demands for a better South Africa, because their demands didn’t just focus on a small subset of

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black people but included the marginalised within the margins. The queer politics that were side-lined in the RMF movement were inserted by the TransCollective into their disruption of the exhibition on the anniversary of RMF, an exhibition that did not include trans people. It makes sense, then, to understand the disruption of the exhibition as a form of queering it. Such queering is necessarily a becoming and as Verena Conley (2009, 24) argues ‘queering’ in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari goes beyond a simple insertion of a gay subject in an existence society. The philosopher and the analyst champion queering as becoming so necessary for the continual invention of terms such as women and homosexuals. In this sense the Trans-Collective was involved in a process of queering the race struggle in the RMF and at the university. When the Trans-Collective disrupted the RMF exhibition launch, they smeared red paint on the exhibited materials, they laid their bodies down on the passageway leading to the exhibition, and they dared the exhibition attendees walk over them. This was powerful because the queer struggle, particularly the transgender struggle is partly a struggle about the body, and society’s regulation of gender non-conforming bodies. The protest strategy of laying bodies down is not new in South African queer politics. In 2012, the One in Nine black feminist group famously disrupted Johannesburg Pride by laying their bodies down demanding a decommercialized, political, and inclusive Pride (Scott 2017). The tactics of the Trans-Collective were well placed in the history of queer disruption in South Africa demanding dignity, to be heard, and to be seen. The Trans-Collective has continued to assert and make visible transgender bodies and politics, non-binary individuals, and gender nonconforming people at UCT. In May 2019 the collective held an exhibition at the Centre for African Studies titled “No Freedom for Trans People”. Through this exhibition, the collective reclaimed the exhibition space that they were excluded from. The involvement of gender and queer dissidents in the RMF movement, the breakaway of the Trans-Collective from the RMF movement, and our collective post-mortem of the RMF movement, necessitates that we interrogate what we mean when we talk about decolonisation. What does decolonisation mean for queer people? What is the place of the queer in decolonial times?

The queer in decolonial times Out of the RMF movement came the call for decolonisation. The call was for the decolonisation of UCT as an institution – the removal of the statue of Rhodes was part of this, but also the decolonisation of the curriculum that is taught at the university. The call for decolonisation is not new, a point that was repeatedly made by Achille Mbembe at the height of the RMF protests, that South Africa can learn from other parts of the African continent that have gone through similar decolonisation upheavals. Mbembe’s intervention needs to be taken seriously if we are to avoid some of the pitfalls that some previous

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upheavals fell into, but, most importantly, if we are to avoid the narcissistic exceptionalism and naval gazing tendencies of South Africans. Since the RMF movement, decolonisation has been a topic of conversation in and out of the university as we are all trying to figure out what the call for decolonisation means. In reading and engaging Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Decolonizing the Mind, Mbembe (2016, 35) argues that “decolonization is not an end point” but actually the start of a new struggle. This is profound for us in that it demands that we imagine what the decolonised future will look like. What will be the content of the decolonised South Africa, indeed Africa, that we are summoning? How will we know that decolonisation has been achieved? For my politics, and in the context of this chapter, what does decolonisation mean for queerness and its myriad manifestations in South Africa and beyond? What is the place of the queer in the decolonial moment? I argue for a queering of the postcolony and suggest that the queer is already in decolonial futures because decoloniality necessitates a decolonisation of sexuality. There can be no real decolonised South African, indeed African future, without interrogating the “homosexuality is unAfrican” ethos that was built on colonial racism and penal codes. In many ways queer people have been involved in decolonising sexuality through a sustained critique of colonial laws and how they projected European anxieties about African sexualities (Tamale 2011; Matebeni 2011; Morgan and Wieringa 2005; Epprecht 2009; 2005; Amadiume 1987). The scholarship that has been engaged with the decolonisation of sexuality has been engaged in a constant critiquing of “homosexuality is un-African” sentiments, borne from European heteronormative constructions of gender and sexuality that have become the norm even in African contexts. In some ways the branching off of the Trans-Collective from the RMF movement hoists itself onto a decolonising train that was already moving. The Trans-Collective is, from this point of view, a mutation from the history of the sexuality movement that was led by Simon Nkoli and Beverly Ditsie. In this way, the Trans-Collective is a contemporary reminder that the revolution was not just about race and racial progress, but it was also about gender and sexuality and a myriad of other struggles. This is a point that was made by Nkoli in 1990 at the first Johannesburg Pride March when he noted, I am black, and I am gay. I cannot separate the two parts of me into secondary or primary struggles. In South Africa, I am oppressed because I am a black man and I am oppressed because I am a gay man. So, when I fight for my freedom, I must fight against both oppressions… All those who believe in a democratic South Africa must fight against all oppression, all intolerance, all injustice. (Ditsie and Newman 2002) The remark demonstrates Nkoli’s awareness of intersectional politics, even when he never referenced them as such. The Trans-Collective in 2016, like Nkoli in 1990, are fighting against the dominant cis-heterosexual idea that the revolution is about race and racial progress only. Furthermore, the disarticulation of sexuality

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from race necessitates interrogation because it has political consequences for queer people in South Africa. The disarticulation is an exercise of power, used by cis-heterosexual Africans to marginalise queer Africans. This is articulated profoundly by Joanne Barker (2017, 11): their disarticulation (of sexuality) from race and ethnicity or law and politics is a regulatory tool of power and knowledge. Such discursive practices suppress the historical and cultural differences that produce what gender and sexuality mean and how they work to organise history and experience. In whichever way you look at it, the call for decolonisation is concerned about the future. Decolonisation is a quest to imagine a different future for black people in South Africa, a future that is not preoccupied with the European (read white) gaze. The Trans-Collective and other queers add to this the call for a future that is without homophobia and transphobia. In this then, a decolonised future South Africa is a queer South Africa. There is no decolonised South Africa without the freedom of queer people. In this then, if the future is decolonised, it is already queer. The TransCollective is a present instantiation, a present assemblage and a present becoming of a decolonised queer future. In any case, the domain of queerness is in the future because it is a quest for a just world that does not negate people’s peculiarities as they imagine themselves sexually and otherwise. This is a world that is not yet here, it is a world that we are yearning for, summoning it quietly but sometimes vigorously. It serves us best to remember that queerness itself is an “identity without an essence” (Halperin 1995, 79) and that it lends itself readily to Deleuze-Guattarian rhizomatic conjugations that will lead to all kinds of future possibilities. José Muñoz (2009, 1) articulates this succinctly when they argue that “queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.” In this then, it is not possible to imagine a decolonised future without queerness.

Conclusion In this piece I answer Jacqueline Rose’s prompt about whether politically motivated rage can be generative in the affirmative. The gender and sexuality dissidents within the RMF movement generated the Trans-Collective, and along with it an insertion of queer politics in post-apartheid struggles. Indeed, [a]lthough great violence took place within activist spaces with regard to queerness, womxness, and the deconstruction of the gender binary, and although there is struggle to come, the existence of these bodies in the public movement narrative is an instance of revolution. (Khan 2017, 119) What comes out of the Trans-Collective split from the RMF movement is a need to queer the postcolony. For the most part queerness and queer people are not seen as

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part of the postcolony. In this, the articulations of freedom in the postcolony have been short-sighted. The Trans-Collective asserts queerness, particularly transgender people, non-binary people, and gender non-conforming people in the postcolony. This is not a small matter. The Trans-Collective has had a serious impact in the ways that people at the university and beyond think about non-normative bodies and identities and their place in institutions. The call for gender-neutral bathrooms, and their subsequent installation, is a major victory for the Trans-Collective, not only because it forces the university to create safe spaces for transgender people and other non-conforming bodies to have spaces to relieve themselves, but also because they have challenged dominant ways of knowing in the institutional culture. The place to pee becomes an important sight of epistemological questions involving architecture, grounds and building management, and entire university faculties. In this way, the call for gender-neutral bathrooms is a destabilising call that unsettles the complacency of a university that is too sure of itself. It is a call demanding that more has to be done to accommodate those who have historically never been thought of as belonging to the university space. The formation of the Trans-Collective has ushered in a new era of activism at UCT and in many ways has brought UCT into the twenty-first century. UCT is yet to appreciate the phenomenon that was/is the Trans-Collective. I suppose it is only in the decolonised queer future that UCT and those involved in the RMF movement will understand the power of the “line of flight” that was the Trans-Collective.

References Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2009. The Danger of a Single Story. Video. https://www. ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en. Amadiume, Ifi. 1987. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. London: Zed. Barker, Joanne. 2017. “Introduction”. In Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, And Feminist Studies, edited by Joanne Barker, 1–44. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bond, Johanna. 2016. “Gender and Non-Normative Sex in Sub-Saharan Africa”. Michigan Journal of Gender and Law 23(1). http://repository.law.umich.edu/mjgl/vol23/iss1/2. Colebrook, Claire. 2001. Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge. Colebrook, Claire. 2014. Sex After Life: Essays on Extinction, Volume Two. Michigan: Open Humanities Press. Conley, V. A. 2009. “Thirty-Six Thousand Forms of Love: The Queering of Deleuze and Guattari”. In Deleuze and Queer Theory, edited by Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr, 24–36. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2005. A Thousand Plateaus. 1st ed. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Duminy, James. 2014. “Street Renaming, Symbolic Capital, and Resistance in Durban, South Africa”. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32(2): 310–328. doi:10.1068/d2112. Dzodan, Flavia. 2011. “My Feminism Will Be Intersectional or It Will Be Bullshit!”. Tiger Beatdown. http://tigerbeatdown.com/2011/10/10/my-feminism-will-be-intersectionalor-it-will-be-bullshit/.

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Epprecht, Marc. 2005. Hungochani: The History of a Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa. Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Epprecht, Marc. 2009. Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS (New African Histories). Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Epprecht, Marc, and S. N. Nyeck. 2013. Sexual Diversity in Africa: Politics, Theory, and Citizenship. Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Evans, Jenni. 2018. “UCT Renames ‘Jammie’ Memorial Hall to Sarah Baartman Hall”. News 24, December 13. https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/uct-renam es-jammie-memorial-hall-to-sarah-baartman-hall-20181213. Khan, Khadija. 2017. “Intersectionality in Student Movements: Black Queer Womxn and Nonbinary Activists in South Africa’s 2015–2016 Protests”. Agenda 31(3–4): 110– 121. doi:10.1080/10130950.2017.1396011. MacLean, Barbara Hutmacher. 2004. Strike a Woman, Strike a Rock: Fighting for Freedom in South Africa. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Makofane, Keletso. 2013. “Unspoken Facts: A History of Homosexualities in Africa”. Culture, Health & Sexuality 15(sup1): 114–116. doi:10.1080/13691058.2012.732749. Matebeni, Zethu. 2011. "Exploring Black Lesbian Sexualities and Identities in Johannesburg”. PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand. Mbembe, Achille Joseph. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mbembe, Achille Joseph. 2016. “Decolonizing the University: New Directions”. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 15(1): 29–45. doi:10.1177/1474022215618513. Moodie, T. D. 1988. “Migrancy and Male Sexuality on the Southern African Gold Mines”. Journal of Southern African Studies 14(2): 228–256. Morgan, Ruth, and Saskia Wieringa. 2005. Tommy Boys, Lesbian Men and Ancestral Wives: Female Same-Sex Practices In Africa. Auckland Park: Jacana. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Murray, Stephen O., and Will Roscoe. 2001. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Ntsebeza, Lungisile. 2014. “The Mafeje and the UCT Saga: Unfinished Business?”. Social Dynamics 40(2): 274–288. doi:10.1080/02533952.2014.946254. Ntsebeza, Lungisile. 2016. “What Can We Learn From Archie Mafeje About the Road to Democracy in South Africa”. Development and Change 47: 918–936. Omar, Yusuf. 2016. “Trans Collective Stops RMF Exhibition”. UCT News, March 10. https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-2016-03-10-trans-collective-stops-rmf-exhibition. Orton, Bev. 2018. Women, Activism and Apartheid South Africa: Using Play Texts to Document the Herstory of South Africa. Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing Limited. Patel, Aisha Dadi. 2019. “UCT to Rename More Buildings”. The Mail and Guardian, April 4. https://mg.co.za/article/2019-04-04-uct-to-rename-more-buildings. Phakeng, Mamokgethi. 2019. “Naming of UCT Buildings”. UCT News, March 29. https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-2019-03-29-naming-of-uct-buildings. Sandfort, Theo G.M., and Vasu Reddy. 2013. “African Same-Sex Sexualities and Gender-Diversity: An Introduction.” Culture, Health & Sexuality 15(sup1): 1–6. doi:10.1080/13691058.2013.797218. Scott, Lwando. 2015. “The Inclusion of Sexuality, Gender, Transgender Issues in the #Rhodesmustfall Movement”. Blog. Queer Consciousness, April 11. http://queer consciousness.com/the-inclusion-of-sexuality-gender-transgendered-issues-in-therhodesmustfall-movement/.

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Scott, Lwando. 2017. “Disrupting Johannesburg Pride: Gender, Race, and Class in the LGBTI Movement in South Africa”. Agenda, 31(1), 42–49. doi:10.1080/ 10130950.2017.1351101. Simon And I. 2002. [film] Directed by Beverly Ditsie and Nicky Newman. Johannesburg. Steyn, Melissa, and Mikki Van Zyl. 1999. “‘Like That Statue at Jammie Stairs’: Some Student Perceptions and Experiences of Institutional Culture at the University of Cape Town In 1999”. University of Cape Town. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/7569. Tamale, Sylvia. 2011. African Sexualities: A Reader. Cape Town: Pambazuka Press. Victor, Cornelius J., Juan A. Nel, Ingrid Lynch, and Khonzi Mbatha. 2014. “The Psychological Society of South Africa Sexual and Gender Diversity Position Statement: Contributing Towards a Just Society”. South African Journal of Psychology 44(3): 292– 302. doi:10.1177/0081246314533635.

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A change in, but not of, the system Karin van Marle

Introduction I had the privilege to attend Jacqueline Rose’s Vice-Chancellor’s address in March 2017 in Cape Town. 2015–2016 were years of protest and turmoil at South African universities that again underscored not only that the pace of transformation since the early 1990s was too slow but also that the change in many cases amounted to what Drucilla Cornell (1993) aptly names evolution – a change in the system but not a change of the system – rather than radical transformation that has the potential to change not only systems but also individuals within systems. When I read Rose’s address more than a year later, the student protests although not totally diffused, were more or less stilled, mostly because of the successful securitisation and militarisation of university campuses in South Africa. The university where I was working at until January 2019, introduced a system through which entrance to the university is controlled by a system of capturing everyone’s biometrics. The gates of learning will open only under the strictest of conditions. The notion of the university as a public space has been thwarted. On the level of governance politics, Cyril Ramaphosa replaced Jacob Zuma as president. While working on this response, the state capture hearings are ongoing, bringing to light many stories of corruption so vast that they bring one to many moments of despair about the human condition as such but also the state and future of this country. The student protests made the term “decolonization” almost a household one that is now on everyone’s lips. Recent shifts in academic discourse have shown that the notion still needs to be worked out and given specific content. The main contestation that came to the fore more strongly after the student protests, is that of the Constitution; ranging from a total rejection to demands for amendment. The thrust of the argument from a decolonial perspective is that the 1994 Constitution did not bring about and does not support decolonization; and that ongoing conquest is both constituted by and constitutes post-1994 constitutionalism (Madlingozi 2018, 520) An interesting book published in 2018, brought a new angle to the debate on the Constitution and constitutionalism that provoked responses, agreements and disagreements. In the book, titled The Land is Ours. South Africa’s First Black Lawyers and the Birth of Constitutionalism, Tembeka Ngcukaitobi makes two main arguments: Firstly, that black lawyers appropriated and employed DOI: 10.4324/9781003198581-8

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Western knowledge and specifically Western law in a way that sometimes undermined colonial power and secondly that the roots of the Constitution are home grown, that the Constitution as a product of revolutionary struggle against colonialism can be regarded as a decolonial instrument. Tshepo Madlingozi (2018, 518) argues that “this book can be apprehended as a counter-argument against calls for the decolonisation of the South African legal system, the Constitution and indeed the extant polity.” Madlingozi distinguishes a decolonial critique of the Constitution from liberal and mainstream critical perspectives. He explains that the analyses emanating from these two positions amounts either to an institutional critique or an immanent one and that neither of the two call for the abolishment of the Constitution and thus seek a post-Conquest Constitution. Dennis Davis (2018, 359) in a reflection on this debate distinguishes between “promoters” of the Constitution and the “denigrators” of it. Davis is quite clear about the extent to which the constitutional project so far failed to restore humanity, did not distribute resources in a radical and effective way and also did not engage in the much needed deconstruction of the legal system. At the same time, he is clear that the Constitution itself does not prevent any of these things. He (372–373) suggests an alternative model drawing on Justice Froneman’s judgement in Daniels v Scribanti (2017 (4) SA 341 (CC)) in which he gives an unambiguous recognition of historical injustice and suggests a re-configuring of ownership and property and an acceptance of the changes brought about by the Constitution. Rose doesn’t address the issue of the Constitution directly but many of the themes highlighted by her relate to what is at the heart of the challenges to and debates on the Constitution. In my short response I draw on the themes invoked by Rose that most pertinently speak to recent work that I have been reading and writing. First, the issue of endurance, how the student protests also mirrored a protest from a younger against an older generation. Secondly, a theme that runs throughout her talk, that of time and in the words of one of the students how neither the past nor the future can be known fully. Drawing on a recent work of Stewart Motha (2018), I try to engage a notion that I suspect is present in Rose’s piece and also in the minds of students – that of belonging. Central to the contestations over the Constitution is the phrase “South Africa belongs to all who live in it.” The contestation of course is not only about the fact that South Africa has never, also not after the formal change in the mid-1990s, belonged to all who live in it; but it is also about the strong belief that South Africa shouldn’t belong to all who live in it and that all of us living in South Africa should not belong. For me, Rose raises important questions about the university and the space of the university and the extent to which a traditional concept of reason failed and will fail the needs of young people struggling with making lives in South Africa. What could a notion of Ubuntu-feminism, and in particular a reading of Ubuntu in spatial terms bring to bear on a university space? What could an aesthetic education and its insistence on bodily presence and affect disclose for the present and futures of universities in South Africa? I end with reference to observations made by Lewis Nkosi on postmodernism and its disparate influence on black and

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white South African writing. Could the notion of Svetlana Boym’s “offmodern” be of any value in re-thinking university spaces and curricula, but even more in our continuous process of becoming, belonging, responding to enduring violence?

Endurance Rose mentions the “unresolved question of land” as a starting point in her address and aptly describes it as “one of the most enduring and troubling legacies of the past.” Themes that relate directly to the legacy of land are of course enduring social injustice that, together with the issue of unequal distribution of land, rendered the process of reconciliation mute. A strong theme in her address is the cluster of issues about generations, the past, memory, history and, underlying it, time. In explaining the title of her address, “The Legacy”, she raises pertinent questions: What, in moments of historical crisis, is being passed down from one generation to the next? In a struggle which is also a reckoning with the past – as all political struggles may be, but this one surely is – what both can, and cannot, be borne? What do we not want to know about the past? What do we not want to know about ourselves? These are questions that will haunt the South African society in its struggle to become “post” apartheid. Rose regards the “present crisis in South Africa” – that at the time of her address may have meant mainly the student protests, but two years later include the ongoing contestations over the Constitution and the cynicism about Mandela and fellow struggle icons – as one “to be driven by a logic, or rather illogic, of generational time: disjointed, out of sync.” Rose draws on Lovelyn Nwadeyi whom she reads as saying that “neither the past nor the future … can be fully known.” Generational struggle is not new. Lewis Nkosi describes the response of his generation to Alan Paton’s character Stephen Kumalo as “a war between generations – the older generation, which looked forward to fruitful changes under the Smuts government, and the young who saw themselves beginning their adult life under a more brutal apartheid regime” (Nkosi 2016, 20). For Nkosi, the 1950s were significant, because these years “spelled out the end of one kind of South Africa and foreshadowed the beginning of another” (20). During the 1950s, protest, voicing dissent, was still possible, but Sharpeville and the killing of many on that day brought all of this to an end. Nkosi writes that “the decade of the fifties was the most shaping influence of our young adulthood” (21). I wonder how those who were students during the time of the #RMF and #FMF protests, will regard this decade when looking back decades from now. Of course different students becoming different adults living different lives will remember the protests differently. The protests also played out differently at different campuses. There were students who actively protested against the protests, whether from a conservative minority rights position or a liberal rights position. At many campuses I

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think there was a big group of students who remained passive and distant from what was going on. But even within the group of students who protested there were vast differences, ranging from those who remained committed to seeking for a solution, to talking to university managements, to those who rejected any possible resolution. In particular, in conversations about the academic year students had different takes. What was interesting was how generational tensions played out in front of our eyes when parents who were part of the struggle at universities under formal apartheid joined some of the meetings in an attempt to convince students not to give up hope on a possible outcome. Hannah Arendt (2003, 270) in her essay, “Home to roost” quotes Faulkner: “The past is never dead, it’s not even past” and observes that “the world we live in at any moment is the world of the past.” Protest on South African campuses after 2015/2016 in a way is a manifestation of these observations. I agree here with Arendt (270) that “it is true that the past haunts us; it is the past’s function to haunt us who are present and wish to live in the world as it really is, that is, has become what it is now.” Exactly how this haunting will play out for the students of 2015/2016 and thereafter remains to be seen.

Time A strong theme in Rose’s address that ties with generations, memory and history is that of time. I have referred to the notion of time being disjointed and want to recall David Scott (2004) who in a work on the Haitian revolution makes the statement that in many countries going through processes of decolonisation, even though people emancipated themselves, they were nonetheless conscripted by modernity, by western ways in which to be modern. In the Haitian Revolution, slaves emancipated themselves based on the ideas and ideals of the French Revolution. Scott engages with CLR James’s The Black Jacobins and shows how the Haitians longed for, wanted to be freed from, the same thing. In light of the Haitian Revolution and James’ writing on it, Scott suggests that instead of relating to the past/present in romantic terms, which involves a simplistic and linear passing of time, one should consider the past and present rather in tragic terms that underscore contingency, chance and catastrophe. Scott reads the protagonist of the Haitian revolution, Toussaint Louverture, as a tragic hero. In a book in which he focuses on the Granada revolution, Scott (2014) continues this argument. His reflection on time corresponds with what Rose writes: Time, in short, has become less yielding, less promising than we have grown to expect it should be. And what we are left with are aftermaths in which the present seems stricken with immobility and pain and ruin; a certain experience of temporal afterness prevails in which the trace of futures past hangs like the remnants of a voile curtain over what feels uncannily like an endlessly extending present. (6)

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Scott draws on an interpretation by Giorgio Agamben of Walter Benjamin’s understanding of time. Benjamin distinguishes between empty and homogenous accounts of time related to the notion of progress and the ecstatic, momentous and untimely time of the messianic coming (2014, 7). For Scott, Agamben’s reading of Benjamin entails that the distinction between the experience of time and the expectations of history have been relinquished, resulting in a homogenous exclusion of unpredictability. Agamben supports the notion of gnostic time as “an incoherent and unhomogeneous time, whose truth is in the moment of abrupt interruption when man (sic) in a sudden act of consciousness, takes possession of his (sic) own condition of being resurrected” (2014, 8). Scott also recalls Derrida’s engagement with time in Spectres of Marx (1994) – his description of a “haunting presence of ruined time”, “messianicity without messianism” and a “justice-to-come” (2014, 9). Themes prominent in the work of Derrida and in Scott’s investigation that haunts also the South African context, are the notions of an “out-of-jointness of the present”, “the loss of a communist revolution as horizon for political emancipation” and “the relationship between the modern longing for revolution and the hope for social, political and economic justice” (9). Scott emphasises the relation between Agamben and Derrida’s visions of time – in contrast to a traditional model of linear, homogenous, teleological time, Derrida supports the notion of a “disjointed” time that disrupts the reliability of chronological time. He insists on an “a-temporal futurity” that could allow future times that will not be limited to any form of ontological time. “If we adopt this perspective, he suggests, futures will always be open – yet undecidable and heterogenous” (Scott 2014, 10). I read in Rose’s careful account of the student protests, a tension between the concept of time held by university managements, on the one hand, and that of the students, but also between generations, on the other. As Rose points out, the triadic relationship between the living, the living-dead and the yet to be born, found in Ubuntu, disrupts a traditional linear model of time.

Belong(ing) Stewart Motha, in a recent work, Archiving Sovereignty (2018), draws on David Scott’s distinction between anti-colonial longing and postcolonial becoming. For Motha “anticolonial longing refers to the persistence of the aspiration for national sovereignty as the decolonized horizon. A model of law and politics imposed by an imperial imagination then stands in for a decolonizing aspiration” (2018, 5). Motha’s project is to try and make sense of ways to address sovereign violence by not relying on traditional approaches of “ethno-liberation as the desired future.” He relies on the notion of “the archive of the present” for his own work on the Indian Ocean as space where much violence and dispossession continue. Could we read the student protests as an “archive of the present” or at least a central part of it in South Africa? Motha (2018, 110) titles his chapter on South Africa, “Belongers”. He carefully reflects on the question “who is a belonger?” and considers the “juridical,

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epistemological, and ontological archive of belonging. What would it mean to become a belonger? What are the archives of belonging?” (112). Motha engages with South African poet and writer Antjie Krog’s (2009) work titled Begging to be Black and reads it as “an attempt to share an onto-epistemology of becoming.” He interprets Krog’s work as an exploration of “the possibility of white people becoming otherwise, belonging differently, in South Africa” (125) Responding to Krog’s interaction with the notion of becoming minor he reads it as “the possibility of the emergence of a critical being capable of challenging both African and Western philosophical and political paradigms” (Motha 2018, 128). Motha places “being-becoming” as an “epistemic and ontological problem at the heart of decolonization and transformative politics” (128) He reads Krog together with the work of Mogobe Ramose, a South African philosopher most known for his work on Ubuntu and for his critique of South Africa’s turn to constitutional supremacy. Reading Ramose against Scott’s framing of “anti-colonial longing”, Motha argues that his call for the restoration of the sovereignty of African people is “caught between this anti-colonial struggle and a postcolonial potential that his own account of ubuntu conveys and opens” (129). As noted above, Rose also engages Ramose’s work on Ubuntu. Motha sees in Ramose’s work on Ubuntu the potential for South Africans to move closer to each other. At the same time his call for the recovery of a lost sovereignty stands in the guise of Scott’s anti-colonial longing. Krog is seeking for a way to understand, but Motha asks rightly “whether the sanctity of whiteness or its philosophical extensions can be undone at the level of understanding?” (133).

Space Rose observes that those involved in the student protests “seemed to … constitute an alternative University space of their own.” She reads them as calling for a space “that can be radically transformative without”, quoting the words of Black Radical feminist and Fallist Dudu Ndlovu, “collapsing the space.” For Rose she means “a space that emerges from a message of brokenness in both declaratory and imperative mode, a statement of fact and intent: this is already broken, this must break.” She refers also to Brian Kamanzi’s call for “a socially responsive University.” I understand Rose’s concern here as how to go on after the protests – what to do with the energy, the anger, how to move forward? She writes: “can politically motivated rage be generative, can it erupt and move us forward in the same breath?” She highlights the extent to which the protests and the discourse around them raised “the relationship between affect and politics to a new level of understanding.” In a piece on Ubuntu-feminism, co-authored with Drucilla Cornell, we started to reflect on what Ubuntu-feminism might entail, but also reflected on Ubuntu in terms of spatiality. I briefly recall our tentative argument here, to think if Ubuntu in spatial terms can disclose anything about the space of the university after the protests. How could Ubuntu as spatial notion respond to the relationship between affect and politics? Our aim was to consider if and to what extent Ubuntu might

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be another way of thinking about spatiality. Under the term “the spatial turn” we understand a shift to become conscious of place; of “one’s sense of situatedness in space, as well as spatial divisions, partitions, and borders” (Cornell and Van Marle 2015, 14). We further describe it as: “a turn to the world itself, towards an understanding of our lives as situated in a mobile array of social and spatial relations that, in one way or another, need to be mapped” (17). Ubuntu has been described as a philosophy about how human beings are intertwined in a world of ethical relations. This intertwinement invokes spatiality. Inter-relatedness and relationality that are inherently part of Ubuntu, immediately call forth notions of spatiality. Feminist geographers have been concerned with spatial politics for many years.1 For our purposes of thinking about Ubuntu-feminism and spatiality, social relations, but also time, are central. Ramose’s description of the triad temporal relation in Ubuntu between the living, the living-dead and the yet to be born, and our reading of Ubuntu as always already spatial, means that the notion of space-time is relevant. The ethical aspiration of living together in a shared world and of being embedded in relationships, always already imply a certain simultaneity and multiplicity of both spatiality and temporality. Could such an understanding of the multiplicity of space-time assist with pushing generational struggle forward, with keeping radical transformation open without collapsing the space? As indicated above, Motha (2018, 129) sees in Ramose’s philosophy of Ubuntu “a fluidity – the possibility of movement towards another, more just dispensation.” In the piece on Ubuntu-feminism, we recalled Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’s (2010, 199) description of the radical call for spatial justice as: “the demand for a plural, emplaced oneness, the firm position of the body in space and the consequent thematization of the world, including the disorientation, the multiplicity of directions, the simultaneity of movement”. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’s understanding of spatial justice derives from the idea of the “lawscape”, which differs significantly from more traditional concepts like distributive or social justice (2014, 175). Spatial justice as contemplated by Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, does not involve “processes of consensus, rational dialogue, renegotiation of territory, demos, agency, or even identity formation” that are the main features of distributive or social justice (175). This understanding of spatial justice assisted us in thinking about Ubuntu as spatial and, in particular, how the ethics of Ubuntu could disclose possibilities for justice. Within the context of Rose’s address, then, I am interested to think about university spaces in terms of Ubuntu. Rose responds to the extent to which student protesters have been described as illogical and unreasonable. She writes that “there is […] nothing reasonable about the dispensation of the world we are living in today […] what is reasonable in an unreasoned world”. I have 1

Gillian Rose notes that for many feminists patriarchy, by distinguishing between “feminine” and “masculine” spaces also linked them to certain activities. “Gender difference was … seen as inscribing spatial difference” (1993, 1). Doreen Massey (1994), in introducing a volume on gender and space, describes space as, amongst other things, the realm of the dead, simultaneity, multiplicity, place, world and home.

100 Karin van Marle considered recently to what extent students protesting invoked rights and if rights were not invoked more forcefully by those trying to still the protest by asserting their right to security, dignity, to be taught in Afrikaans and more (Van Marle 2019). Relying on Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) notion of the “right to the city”, I argued for a right to the university that goes beyond mere formal and substantive equality. Lefebvre (1996, see also Butler 2012) distinguished between habitat and inhabitance, the former including mere structural housing where the latter includes how one lives in a place including the right to live politically, to dissent and contest when and if necessary. If Rose writes about an alternative university space, then perhaps the notion of a right to the university that affirms inhabitance could be a start. Reflecting on the extent to which universities have been captured by neoliberal ideology and, as Ben Anderson frames it, neoliberal affect, I relied recently on the work of Gernot Böhme (2017) on atmosphere as a possible way to counter it (Van Marle 2018). Böhme responds critically to the way in which neoliberalism excludes bodily presences and affect. He is concerned with interpersonal communication and how a specific mode of communication produces a common atmosphere. Böhme emphasises the relational and bodily aspects of communication and ultimately the importance of interpersonal atmospheres for the possibility of communication. Jürgen Habermas’s “theory of communicative action” is invoked as an example of a communicative model that excludes “interpersonal atmosphere” that could lead to the impression that subjects are independent from the way they express themselves and that the expression of others does not affect them in any way. This corresponds for me with the expectations held by university managements during the protests criticising students for being “irrational” and “emotional.” Böhme (116) explores the possibilities of “aesthetic humanist education” under the conditions of technical civilization and aesthetic economy. The human features associated with conditions of technical civilization and aesthetic economy are objectivity, punctuality, functionality, mobility and fungibility. Atmospheres, on the other hand, emphasise “the spheres of felt bodily presence” and can create meaning – atmospheres are not only something that is felt but something that can be produced by specific material conditions. My reason for invoking “atmosphere” here, is to think with Rose about the state of South African universities after the protests and to underscore her plea to “re-open” our minds, to “acknowledge that the past has not gone away.”

‘Off-modern’ Let me end by returning to Krog’s struggle to question, to expand, maybe to debunk Western epistemology and ontology in our quest to become minor. The call for the transformation of the curriculum has been central to the student protests. In the faculty where I worked until the end of January 2019, the issue of the transformation of the curriculum has given rise to the harshest of fights, battle lines being drawn, phrases such as “over my dead body” invoked.

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I left that faculty in despair that much of what we’ve attempted to do will now fall to the wayside in the face of nostalgic calls for what we’ve done in the past to be brought back. Svetlana Boym (2001) warns against how a certain nostalgia, one that she calls restorative nostalgia, could limit and subdue critical thinking. She notes also how often this longing for a return to a past is also an imaginary one, one that never really existed. Boym argues that there is room for a reflective nostalgia, one that engages with the past in a critical manner. She links this with the notion of “offmodern” and explains that in the “off-modern tradition, reflection and longing, estrangement and affect go together” (xvii). This notion of “off-modern” is significant also for debates on the curriculum. A critical engagement with Western modernity and the consideration of African and Southern modernities are, or should be, at the heart of re-thinking the curriculum. In this regard, Lewis Nkosi (2016, 109) makes observations in an essay on “Postmodernism and black writing in South Africa” that I think are quite telling for current reflections on epistemologies. He distinguishes between black writing’s “urgent need to document and to bear witness” and white writing’s “capacity to go on furlough, to loiter and to experiment”. The latter of course is associated with playing around with postmodern approaches. Nkosi responds critically to those who regard this split as a “positive sign of cultural diversity and richness” and reads it rather as “a sign of social disparity and technological discrepancy”. He holds that: “In a post-apartheid South Africa, it is clearly a cause for embarrassment. It exists on the one side as a reminder of historical neglect and the impoverishment of black writing and, on the other, of cultural privilege” (109–110). These remarks echo in a way Motha’s response to Krog that understanding alone will not be enough to challenge white sanctity. Nkosi makes two interesting observations that I want to repeat. Being aware of the risk of being accused of supporting a linear version of history, he considers if black South African writers may want to engage further with modernism before they become postmodern. But then he also asks with reference to Amos Tutuola’s novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), if one can be postmodern without knowing it? Nkosi (2016, 125) doesn’t make a final call about the value of postmodernism and argues that it may be “disabling” for certain political positions but at the same time also “potentially subversive and discomposing”. For me, Boym’s notion of “off-modern” described above, discloses possible ways in which to engage questions on epistemologies. It is different from both anti-modern and anti-postmodern and seeks to revisit the unfinished critical project of modernity (see Van Marle 2016, 117 and Motha 2018, 148). It could also underscore, to end with Rose, that “reason [is not] the only acceptable face of protest” and disclose “how reason, masquerading as sanity, can itself be a form of violence and the bearer of unspeakable crimes.”

References Arendt, Hannah. 2003. Responsibility and judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books.

102 Karin van Marle Böhme, Gernot. 2017. Atmospheric architectures: The aesthetics of felt spaces. London: Bloomsbury. Rose, Gillian. 1993. Feminism and geography. The limits of geographical knowledge. Oxford: Marston Book Services. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The future of nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Butler, Chris. 2012. Henri Lefevbre: Spatial politics, everyday life and the right to the city. London: Routledge. Cornell, Drucilla. 1993. Transformations: Recollective imagination and sexual difference. New York: Routledge. Cornell, Drucilla and Karin van Marle. 2015. “Ubuntu feminism.” Verbum et ecclesia 36 (2): 1–8. http://dx doi.org/10.4102/vev36i2.1444 Davis, Dennis. 2018. “Is the South African Constitution an obstacle to a democratic post-colonial state?” South African Journal on Human Rights 34(3): 359–374. Krog, Antjie. 2009. Begging to be black. Cape Town: Random House Struik. Lefevbre, Henri. 1991. The production of space. Oxford: Blackwell. Lefebvre, Henri. 1996. Writings on cities, edited by E. Kofman and E. Lebas. Oxford: Blackwell. Madlingozi, Tshepo. 2018. “South Africa’s first black lawyers amaRespectables and the birth of evolutionary constitution. A review of Tembeka Ngcukaitobi’s The Land is Ours: South Africa’s First Black Lawyers and the Birth of Constitutionalism.” South African Journal on Human Rights 34(3): 517–529. Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, place and gender. Cambridge: Polity Press. Motha, Stewart and Honni van Rijswijk. eds. 2016. Law, memory, violence: Uncovering the counter-archive. London: Routledge. Motha, Stewart. 2018. Archiving sovereignty. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Ngcukaitobi, Tembeka. 2018. The land is ours. South Africa’s first black lawyers and the birth of constitutionalism. Cape Town: Penguin Books. Nkosi, Lewis. 2016. Writing home. Lewis Nkosi on South African writing, edited by Lindy Stiebel and Michael Chapman. Scottsville: UKZN Press. Ramose, Mogobe. 2007. “In memoriam: Sovereignty and the ‘new’ South Africa.” Griffith Law Review 16(2): 310–329. Rose, Gillian. 1993. Feminism and geography. The limits of geographical knowledge. Oxford: Marston Book Services. Scott, David. 2004. Conscripts of modernity: The tragedy of colonial enlightenment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Scott, David. 2014. Omens of adversity. Tragedy, time, memory, justice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Van Marle, Karin. 2016. “Counter-archive as staging dissensus.” In Stewart Motha and Honni van Rijswijk, eds. Law, memory, violence. Uncovering the counter-archive, 116–139. London: Routledge. Van Marle, Karin. 2018. “‘Life is not simply fact’: Aesthetics, atmosphere and the neoliberal university.” Law and Critique 29: 293–310. Van Marle, Karin. 2019. “A ‘Right’ to the university.” Acta Academica 51(1): 109–124.

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On the materiality of #MustFall protest Shame, envy, and the politics of spectacle Wahbie Long

Two assumptions In her Vice-Chancellor’s Open Lecture titled The Legacy, Jacqueline Rose attempts to shed light on the student protests that erupted across the South African higher education landscape in 2015 and 2016. Drawing chiefly on a psychoanalytic register, her focus on the historical past is conspicuous. She speaks variously of a “present past”, “a history… which will not go away” and of “transgenerational haunting”. In a lecture spanning a little over fifteen pages, the words “history,” “generation” and “past” appear seventeen, twenty-one and twenty-seven times respectively. Even the title of her lecture—The Legacy—orients the audience towards that which has gone before. Rose’s emphasis on the not-now is necessary in the world of classical psychoanalysis. But other sociological tools and psychoanalytic orientations enable quite different readings of the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) and Fees Must Fall (FMF) movements. The relational perspective, for one, offers the prospect of a more present-centred analysis: instead of focusing on the lingering influence of the “ghosts” of the past—Rose deploys this word at several points in her lecture—it deals with ruptures located very much in the present, traumas enacted repeatedly in social encounters that are structurally unequal. That there are indeed apparitions intruding on the present cannot be denied, yet certain observations become impossible when the material realities of the present are passed over—which Rose appears to have done. To be fair, she has not overlooked current injustices entirely—she notes that “[t]hese protests have been about enduring racial discrimination, poverty and inequality”—but the explanatory weight she confers upon the past renders the present virtually epiphenomenal. She contends accordingly—in the next sentence— that “it is this deal, or no-deal, with history, a history that implicates the young so profoundly and which will not go away, that has raised the temperature, precipitated the rage, made the situation feel at moments unmanageable” (added emphases). Rose’s primary thesis is that the unresolved trauma of history explains student rage. It is seemingly an innocuous claim—yet it contains two crucial premises that are not only determining of her entire argumentative arc but also warrant scrutiny in themselves. The first premise is that the legacy of apartheid explains student anger. The problem with this assumption is not that it is mistaken because it is DOI: 10.4324/9781003198581-9

104 Wahbie Long obviously correct: the problem, rather, is that it is obviously correct. That the horrors of a relatively recent past can be inherited by succeeding generations is so selfevidently true as to forfeit all explanatory power. It would be more helpful to reflect on the material conduits through which that trauma continues to be transmitted, that is, to identify the links in a causal chain that does stretch back— undoubtedly—to the colonial and apartheid past. Rose never does that, however, referring instead to the “neuroscientific concept of epigenetics which allows for one generation’s lived experience, even when unspoken, to slip into the blood stream of the next”. The transmission of trauma—as I shall attempt to demonstrate—is not only less mysterious but also more concrete than that. Rose’s second assumption is that rage was the primary driver of the student protests. She mentions the word several times in her lecture, never more gravely than when asking whether “politically motivated rage can be generative”. Admittedly, rage does appear to be a suitable descriptor: when students rampage around campus torching buildings and vehicles, shutting down classes, and assaulting their professors and fellow learners, the inevitable conclusion is that something must have enraged them. In his memoir on the FMF movement at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Adam Habib (2019) also assumes that “rage” was what the students felt—if the title of his book, Rebels and Rage, is anything to go by. But if one is to acknowledge the existence of an unconscious, then “the simple is never but the simplified” (Bachelard, quoted in Bourdieu 1989, 24). It is precisely because of its extremity that rage should not be taken at face value, that it deserves psychoanalytic interpretation. Among psychotherapists, the observation that it is simpler to be angry than it is to be hurt is even something of a banality. Rose, however, never asks what lies beneath the rage: though she describes psychoanalysis as “counter-history”, affect, like history, can also be repressed.

Relative deprivation and protest action One of the drawbacks of Rose’s focus on history is that she does not situate student protests within the broader context of South Africa’s current socioeconomic malaise. It is crucial to note, for example, that the country is often described as the “protest capital of the world” (Alexander 2012)—a fact not unrelated to its standing as the second-most unequal nation on earth in terms of Gini coefficients for income distribution (Burns 2011). Some social scientists place income inequality in a causal relationship with protest action, regarded as one possible consequence of relative deprivation. Indeed, violent protests in South Africa appear to instantiate this very phenomenon, that is, a “rebellion of the poor” organized typically around service delivery issues (Alexander 2012). As relative deprivation theory predicts, these protests occur less frequently in poorer, rural provinces where there are virtually no services: in rural areas where almost everyone is poor, there is no culture of social comparison. But in urban areas where opulence resides alongside squalor, there is every reason for the dispossessed to feel frustrated and angry. Here is Marx’s (1849) description of the situation:

On the materiality of #MustFall protest 105 A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself [sic] more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls. Yet the psychological calculus at play involves far more than feelings of discomfort and dissatisfaction. In liberal bourgeois democracies such as South Africa—where the disparity between (legal) social equality and (actual) social inequality could not be starker—poor and working-class people are especially vulnerable to being shamed. Not only must they confront the perversity of being guaranteed the right to a life of dignity while being denied the social and economic resources that such a life requires, they also have to steel themselves against a class contempt so ubiquitous that even small children are not oblivious to its workings (Elias 2000). Of course, the shame of relative poverty can be metabolized in different ways: the underclass can submit to the regnant ideology of meritocracy by working “harder” in pursuit of what they imagine a good life to be; they can become its victims by telling themselves they never got anywhere in life because they lacked all “badges of ability” (Sennett and Cobb 1972, 62); or they can reject the meritocratic terms of reference altogether by committing acts that range from civil disobedience to delinquency instead. Regardless, the shame that permeates the affective underground of the poor and working classes is ultimately devastating. Their familiarity with disrespect produces an inner resentment that wears the beleaguered self down. Felt initially as shame, the resentment is eventually externalized in order to compensate for a crippled sense of agency (Tangney et al. 1996). Mindless violence erupts as the victims of structural inequalities proceed to tear apart not the authorities but one another (Fanon 1963/2001). Resentment towards the power establishment is displaced onto vulnerable substitutes and, in the South African instance, that means women, children, refugees, and black men in particular. The rate of violent deaths is five times the world average, the murder of women is six times the global average, half-a-million rapes are perpetrated against women and children each year, and xenophobic violence breaks out repeatedly, with income inequality and male youth unemployment surfacing as the major correlates for murder and serious assault (Coovadia et al. 2009; Seedat et al. 2009). As for those moments when shame pushes through unavoidably into consciousness, substance use proves an effective anaesthetic (Dearing, Stuewig, and Tangney 2005; Wiechelt 2007). South Africa has one of the highest rates of alcohol consumption in the world and—with alcohol misuse strongly associated with acts of violence—it is unsurprising that this country has the fourth-highest rate for drug-related offences in the world (Burns 2011).

106 Wahbie Long Operating inside this psychosocial matrix of shame and resentment, structural violence in South Africa has begotten a “common-sense of violence” that has now been normalized in a country manifestly at war with itself (Bourgois 2001). Typical of modern, industrialized economies that are rife with inequality, the social fabric has been torn apart little by little with a climate of fear, envy and resentment taking hold instead (Wilkinson and Pickett 2010). In the meantime, by “turning people against each other, the class system of authority and judgment-making [has gone] itself into hiding; the system [has been] left unchallenged as people enthralled by the enigmas of its power battle one another for respect” (Sennett and Cobb 1972, 150). These are the contradictions of class society: in a world where the wealthiest eight men own more than the poorest 3.6 billion, liberal outrage becomes focused less on the poverty of half the people on the planet than on the under-representation of women of colour among the super-rich.

Shame and envy in higher education Rose does not describe in any detail the social problems afflicting post-apartheid South Africa, nor does she examine the educational landscape in which the country’s so-called “born-frees” are immersed. The result is—again—an analysis of student protests that asserts the relevance of history but with minimal consideration given to the current realities through which that history is inevitably refracted. According to the World Economic Forum (2014), for example, young South Africans receive the worst math and science education anywhere in the world. Less than half of schoolgoers who begin Grade 1 will go on to finish Grade 12, with most of them exiting in the second- or third-last year of formal schooling (Rusznyak 2014). Of the 70 000 learners who will then apply for admission to higher education institutions, two-thirds cannot cope with the demands of universitylevel instruction (Cliff 2015), more than half of those who are admitted never graduate, and less than 5 percent of African and coloured students will succeed at all (Macfarlane 2013). The split in the country’s schooling system dictates that a miniscule proportion of students will have been prepared adequately for the demands of a tertiary education. A privileged few will have attended private (or semi-private) schools in the leafy suburbs with no more than 25 learners to a class, experienced and resourceful teachers, as well as excellent technological, sporting and cultural facilities. But for the large majority who could not afford anything other than government schools, they will have contended with class sizes in excess of 50 learners, demoralized and poorly skilled teachers, and inadequate extracurricular facilities—all set against the background chaos of life in the townships. By the time these students enter one of the country’s elite universities, they will have been miseducated for 12 years of their lives. They are frequently the first from their communities to make it to university, they have to manage the additional pressure of knowing that dozens of family members will be relying on their first graduate pay checks (what is known locally as “black tax”), and they struggle to make ends meet while paying for an education whose price is rising faster than

On the materiality of #MustFall protest 107 parental salaries back home—all while negotiating the identity conflicts that are typical of young adulthood. When poor and working-class students arrive at elite institutions such as the University of Cape Town (UCT), they possess little to none of the social capital that lubricates the path to educational success. They discover soon enough that their hard-earned national senior certificate—which made them eligible for a university education—is practically worthless in these rarefied spaces. Struggling with the endless academic demands and an unsettling sense of racial alienation, the institutions that promise them a life of dignity are experienced as enormously shaming. Whereas privileged students appear to adjust to university life as though it were the most natural thing in the world, impoverished black students conclude that the suffocating logic of the university must be the colour white. Soon enough, critiques of institutional culture precipitate calls for the “decolonization” of the curriculum. It does not matter that “decolonization” functions here as an empty signifier—the university must be decolonized, period. In Kleinian terms, it is possible to symbolize the elite university as the nourishing breast. It is, after all, the repository of intellectual knowledge, material resources, and social capital—and it is at once gratifying and frustrating. For structurally disadvantaged students, that is, the persecutory anxiety of the paranoid-schizoid position must set in as shame-filled experiences with the university continue to mount. “We can’t breathe!” the Fallists end up exclaiming as they start to rail against the institution that was once a source of pride. Their shame switches to envy (Orange 1995)—not as a manifestation of the “death drive” but as an intersubjective phenomenon sustained by the relentless repetition of asymmetrical social encounters (Hoggett, 2018). In keeping with the predictions of relative deprivation theory, the born-frees never protested during the 12 years of their inferior schooling because they shared a common fate. It was only on encountering privilege on university campuses that the invidious social comparisons began, with shame bursting through as envious rage. Indeed, the rawness of this envy was never more visceral than when disaffected UCT students proceeded to dump bins containing human faeces into lecture theatres. In a literal expression of anal sadism, here was Klein writ large: attacks on the breast continued until “it [became] bad by being bitten up and poisoned by urine and faeces” (1975, 186). The university started to implode, the collective self of the protest movement splintered, the envy intensified, and the protests threatened to spiral out of control. “We shall destroy this place regardless,” the protestors seemed to be saying. When Habib (2019) tried to set up a poll on whether to reopen Wits, the protestors took him to court in an attempt to prevent the vote. More than three-quarters of the Wits community ended up supporting the proposal to recommence classes, but Habib would have to call in the police to ensure the survival of the academic project.

The politics of emotion and the politics of spectacle Rose offers several reflections on the evolving relationship between affect and politics. She notes how the conflict between the university establishment and

108 Wahbie Long the student movement had been cast unfairly as a battle between reason and unreason: It is as if affect, or unreason, instead of forming a constituent part of being human, were a slur on the political scene… There is, however, nothing reasonable about the dispensation of the world we are living in today… What is reasonable in an unreasonable world? My own understanding of the issue, however, is not that critics were asking for the evacuation of emotion from politics but that they interpreted Fallist rage as involving—at least to some degree—the performance of affect. Habib writes about a phenomenon he calls “the politics of spectacle”: disingenuous, stage-managed attempts by minority groups to take control of the political discourse on campus. In particular, he describes the duplicity of some student activists and far-left academics—he caricatures them as “the Pol Pot brigade” (2019, 24)—who acted obnoxiously in public while attempting to curry favour with him in private. Rather than regard such self-aggrandizing behaviour in terms of political expediency, however, I would argue that the dramatic excesses of Fallism were entirely consistent with unconscious reaction formations, which are habitually overdone (Hall 1954). Student rage, for example, was so unyielding that it had a compulsive quality about it—another hallmark of the reaction formation—that no matter what was on the bargaining table, the protestors would end up raging against the university authorities. In tragicomic fashion, Habib (2019) details the extraordinary lengths that management would go to in order to accommodate the demands of student leaders only for the latter to change their minds—repeatedly at the eleventh hour. Habib’s political explanation for the protestors’ unpredictable conduct is that their strings were being pulled by their political masters. My reading of the situation is primarily psychological: just as Nietzsche claimed in his Genealogy of Morals that the benevolence of Christian morality was, in effect, a reaction formation—the term he used was ressentiment— so, too, the Fallists’ open disdain for the university establishment conceals a hidden enchantment. Without a viable academic vision of their own, the protestors find themselves in a predicament not dissimilar to the Fallist who studies at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship—because the Enlightenment values they abhor are the same ones their intellectual ambitions compel them to revere. Rose identifies the potential for callousness when reason becomes instrumentalized: “we should be exposing how reason, masquerading as sanity, can itself be a form of violence and the bearer of unspeakable crimes”. At times, however, the Fallists did themselves no favours by appearing to valorize unreason—as when one student activist earned herself international notoriety for suggesting that “science must fall.” Habib describes the incident of a Fallist academic at Wits keeping him waiting for half-an-hour. When Habib explained that he would no longer be able to hold the meeting—he had given prior notice that he had another engagement to attend—the lecturer suggested, in Habib’s words, that “punctuality was a bourgeois sensibility” (2019, 12). I am also reminded of a Fallist colleague

On the materiality of #MustFall protest 109 objecting to the underpayment of tutors in the Faculty of Humanities at UCT: she did not seem to appreciate that the moratorium on annual fee increases combined with rising student numbers had material consequences. Rose is correct that the dice are loaded, that the terms of reference in university culture exist in a field already constellated by specific power relations. But the lack of pragmatism and the dogged refusal to create and endorse a common language of engagement serves no one in the end. Just as politics without affect must be a politics of trivialities, affective politics without reason resembles little more than the self-serving signalling of virtue.

Concluding thoughts When Rose delivered the Open Lecture in March 2017, the FMF protests were still ongoing. What I would regard as a compelling but ultimately incomplete reading of the student movements was to some extent unavoidable: in 2017, there was (and still is) no epistemological high ground—and certainly not while the dust had yet to settle. Admittedly, the dust continues to swirl two years later: academic life in South African universities remains plagued by feelings of paranoia, aggression and alienation. Perhaps we are witnessing the medium- to long-term fallout from the protests despite an uneasy truce between students, faculty, and the executive continuing to hold. Alternatively—given the rapid turnaround between one student cohort and the next—the anomie in the air may reflect the uncertainty of a new generation of young South Africans that has stumbled onto the university scene after a great battle, only vaguely aware of the traumas of the last four years and haunted—to use Rose’s term—by ghosts of a recent vintage. In the meantime, it is critical that more voices are heard that will enhance our understanding of the most significant upheaval in higher education in the postapartheid era. The most disturbing aspect of the protests was the cowing of critical intellectual voices who chose to either pander or remain silent—rather than profess as professors are meant to do. I disagree with Rose’s view that “the next generation were not meant to cry foul, or claim that apartheid had not ended, or that their future was blighted by a past that had not gone away” (2017, 6). Young people are supposed to protest, to disrupt, to rebel—unfortunately, this time around it is the elders who have abdicated. The ideological dishonesty, career opportunism and moral cowardice on display has been nothing short of staggering. That is surely what happens when the academic project starts to unravel not for intellectual but partisan reasons. One can only hope for better.

References Alexander, Peter. 2012. “A massive rebellion of the poor.” Mail and Guardian, April 13. https://mg.co.za/article/2012-04-13-a-massive-rebellion-of-the-poor. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1989. “Social space and symbolic power.” Sociological Theory 7(1): 14–25. Bourgois, Philippe. 2001. “The power of violence in war and peace: Post-Cold War lessons from El Salvador.” Ethnography 2(1): 5–34.

110 Wahbie Long Burns, Jonathan K. 2011. “The mental health gap in South Africa—A human rights issue.” Equal Rights Review, 6: 99–113. Cliff, Alan. 2015. “Moving beyond the educational blame game in South Africa.” The Conversation, July 20. https://theconversation.com/moving-beyond-the-educationalblame-game-in-south-africa-43071. Coovadia, Hoosen, Rachel Jewkes, Peter Barron, David Sanders, and Diane McIntyre. 2009. “The health and health system of South Africa: Historical roots of current public health challenges.” Lancet 374: 817–834. Dearing, Ronda, Jeffrey Stuewig, and June Price Tangney. 2005. “On the importance of distinguishing shame from guilt: Relations to problematic alcohol and drug use.” Addictive Behaviors 30(7): 1392–1404. Elias, Norbert. 2000. The civilizing process: Sociogenetic and psychogenetic investigations. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Fanon, Frantz. 1963/2001. The wretched of the earth. London: Penguin. Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and rage: Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Jeppestown: Jonathan Ball. Hall, Calvin S. 1954. A primer of Freudian psychology. New York: World Publishing Company. Hoggett, Paul. 2018. “Ressentiment and grievance.” British Journal of Psychotherapy 34(3): 393–407. Klein, Melanie. 1975. Envy and gratitude and other works 1946–1963. New York: Free Press. Macfarlane, David. 2013. “Damning CHE report into university performance.” Mail and Guardian, August 20. https://mg.co.za/article/2013-08-20-damning-che-report-in to-university-performance. Marx, Karl. 1849. “Wage labour and capital.” Neue Rheinische Zeitung, April 5–8 and 11. Translated by Friedrich Engels. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/ 1847/wage-labour/ch06.htm. Orange, Donna M. 1995. Emotional understanding: Studies in psychoanalytic epistemology. New York: Guilford Press. Rusznyak, Lee. 2014. “South African education still fails many 20 years after apartheid.” The Conversation, May 7. https://theconversation.com/south-african-education-still-fa ils-many-20-years-after-apartheid-22069. Seedat, Mohamed, Ashley van Niekerk, Rachel Jewkes, Shahnaaz Suffla, and Kopano Ratele. 2009. “Violence and injuries in South Africa: Prioritising an agenda for prevention.” Lancet 374: 1011–1022. Sennett, Richard and Jonathan Cobb. 1972. The hidden injuries of class. London: Faber & Faber. Tangney, June Price, Patricia Wagner, Deborah Hill-Barlow, Donna Marschall, and Richard Gramzow. 1996. “Relation of shame and guilt to constructive versus destructive responses to anger across the lifespan.” Journal of Personality & Social Psychology 70(4): 797–809. Wiechelt, Shelley A. 2007. “The specter of shame in substance misuse.” Substance Use & Misuse 42(2–3): 399–409. Wilkinson, Richard and Kate Pickett. 2010. The spirit level: Why equality is better for everyone. London: Penguin. World Economic Forum. 2014. The Global Competitiveness Report 2014–2015: Full data edition. Geneva: World Economic Forum.

10 An untimely meditation on a time “out of sync”1 Benda Hofmeyr

Genealogy as critique In the last few decades – especially in a time in which there has been growing global sensitization to the traumatizing othering and effacement of others by colonialism and the persistence thereof in neo-colonial and “post”-colonial guises – growing numbers of philosophers have underlined the glaring incommensurability between Kant’s universal moral theory, with its inspiring Enlightenment ideals of human autonomy, equality and dignity, on the one hand, and his racism, on the other.2 It might therefore come across as exceedingly misguided or even untimely to start a critical reflection on who we are today in our so-called postcolonial present(s) by revisiting Kant’s 1784 response to the question posed by the German periodical, Berlinische Monatsshrift: Was ist Aufklärung? I nevertheless beg your indulgence and venture this brief “untimely meditation”, for as Foucault pointed out in his 1984 essay by the same name, it was Kant who approached the question of a philosophical consideration of the present in a way that deviated in an instructive way from previous attempts. For Kant, a critical interrogation of one’s own present is not an attempt to find how it diverges from the past following some dramatic event, nor is it an interrogation of the present to unearth signs of a forthcoming event, or of a point of transition toward the dawning of a new world (Foucault 1984, 33). Here Kant makes no mention of “origins”, “progress” or “the internal teleology of a historical process” as in his other texts on history. His exclusive concern is with contemporary reality. Enlightenment, for Kant, is a “modification of the preexisting relation linking will, authority, and the use of reason” (34). One’s will should be guided by the use of reason even if it finds itself in opposition to authority. For Kant, this is not only an ongoing task but also an obligation; and as an obligation that risks critiquing authority, it requires immense courage. It is a matter of questioning authority not in principle (which would risk anarchy in presenting oneself 1

2

This response consists of selected excerpts from my essay, Hofmeyr (2017). The title references Lovelyn Nwadeyi’s description of our time as “disjointed, out of sync, plagued by a generational fault line that scrambles historicity” quoted by Professor Rose in the lecture. Cf. Nwadeyi (2016). See for example, Eze (1997, 103–140).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003198581-10

112 Benda Hofmeyr as ungovernable), but of not merely relying on authority – as a matter of principle. Foucault words it as follows: “how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them” (Foucault 1978 in Lotringer 2007, 44). Across the globe divergent geographical locales have borne historical testimony to the exigency of the continuous and ever renewed interrogation of particular historical presents – and how our relationship to our present affects the relationship that we have with ourselves. Foucault referred to this Kantian obligation as “a historical ontology of ourselves”, i.e. “a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying” (1984, 115). The South African present is not unique in being a “postcolony” in which re- and neo-colonial tendencies persist, but a genealogical survey of its history throws particularly conflictual lines of dissent into relief. More precisely, genealogy seeks to engage with history not as discipline or science [Historie], but as event(s) and hence it embarks upon the excavation of the Entstehungsgeschichte [history of the moment(s) of emergence] of such events.3 A history of the moment(s) of emergence does not seek to uncover the point of origin or a teleological progression, but critically engages a present locale in the midst of an effective history,4 in which the effects of the past remains effective of the present in unpredictable and indeed untimely ways. The moment(s) of emergence is therefore not to be understood as a culmination, or the final term of a historical development. Instead, “they are merely the current episodes in a series of subjugations” (Foucault 1971, 99). Almost all of South Africa’s peoples came from elsewhere; almost none is left that can rightfully claim to be autochthonous. All of its peoples descended from the north either by land or by sea – all of them have blood on their hands, the colonialists’ hands undoubtedly the bloodiest. The first white settlers found the native hunter-gatherers and tribespeople under threat from the southwardly migrating Bantu peoples. In the subsequent colonial and apartheid pasts the hands of lighter hues were far bloodier than others, whereas in the more recent and immediate pasts, hands of all complexions have become indistinguishable in the dirt and disgrace that stain them. Mzansi5 is not Graceland,6 to be sure; Mzansi is the place of incessant disgrace whose perpetrators belong to all races, all colours, all socio3 4

5 6

Cf. Nietzsche (1874, 57–124) as well as Foucault (1984, 76–100). According to Foucault’s reading, Nietzsche refers to wirkliche Historie in opposition to traditional history. The former should be understood as an historical tracing that “deals with events in terms of their most unique characteristics, and their most acute manifestations”. As such an event is “the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power” (Foucault 1971, 88). isiXhosa for the country of South Africa (literally meaning ‘south’). The isiZulu variation is Mzansti. Paul Simon’s 1986 LP, Graceland, was recorded in Johannesburg with local musicians during the time of the international anti-apartheid boycott. His hope was that art could transcend politics at the risk of undermining the anti-apartheid cause. The lyrics portray Graceland as a place of hospitality and of good will.

Untimely meditation on a time “out of sync” 113 7

economic positionalities. It is a place and time of pervasive civil disgruntlement with persistent inequality and injustice, a time of direct and structural violence, of stagnating social, political and economic developments, of irrational politics and the fragmentation of society. Foucault described such scenarios as the age-old reversals of forces, the usurpation and re-usurpation of power, “the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it, a feeble domination that poisons itself as it grows lax, the entry”, he says (1971, 104), “of a masked ‘other’”. To my mind, a critical interrogation of our historical present, which is also simultaneously a historico-critical analysis of who we are in this present, should bring us face-to-face with this “masked other”, not in an attempt to unmask the other, since “the other” is not the problem. The scourge that we are up against is the very process of othering. Put differently, unmasking the other does not and cannot stop the perpetual emergence of others by way of othering. In fact, and far more sinister, is the genealogical insight that the source(s) of othering is itself irremediably other, inaccessible, not to be located, nor experienced, but ever festering. If we are to believe Nietzsche, the philosopher as genealogist nevertheless retains the task – perhaps not despite of, but because of this fatalism – to ascertain how to engage with history so as to serve life. If history is to serve life, history itself cannot but be untimely, not of this time, ahead of its time, for the future – both diachronous and synchronous: through time, yet at this same time, concurrently (cf. Nietzsche’s 1874 essay, the second of the Untimely Meditations titled, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” in Nietzsche 2007, 57–124). To have a sense of the past that serves the present involves not only memory but forgetting, or forgetfulness of the past for the sake of life in the present. If the past is to be forgotten for the present to be tolerable, we are dealing with repressed trauma – the very domain of psychoanalysis. Given the senselessness of the eternal return of the same traumatizing processes of othering that seems to hold the key to a critical understanding of our present, which might allow for the right measure of remembering and forgetting so as to serve life, the role of repressed trauma requires closer interrogation. To this I shall return shortly, but let us first turn to our present.

Burning rage “South Africa burns with rage!” This message dominated local headlines in the recent past. The economy is failing and structural inequality prevails. The widespread frustration with the Zuma government eventually led him to resign after being recalled by the African National Congress (ANC), but the new administration is eons away from proving to be the deus ex machina of the disgraced ruling political party. South Africa has not only been dubbed

7

As poignantly depicted by J. M. Coetzee in his 1999 novel, Disgrace, which won the Booker Prize. The author was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature four years later.

114 Benda Hofmeyr “the protest capital of the world”,8 but the very nature of the protests especially between 2015–2017 signalled a kind of fury not seen since the anti-pass protests preceding the Sharpeville-massacre in 1960 – being given to violence, general lawlessness and destruction. The many reasons for the protests include housing allocations and service delivery issues, municipal demarcation, xenophobia, labour related demands and unemployment, water shortages and cost of electricity, land related issues like evictions and forced removals, quality of school education, university fees, corruption and crime.9 The senseless violence of the protest actions reeked of desperation and frustration: the most telling perhaps was the self-flagellating burning of busses and schools. South Africa was literally, and still is figuratively, burning with rage.10 A persistent leitmotif in the discourse of rage of especially the so-called bornfree generation was that the ruling “liberating” party failed them because the legacy of apartheid – considered to be the third in a series of subjugations (following slavery and colonialism) – seems to be insurmountable (cf. Mbembe 2001, 3). The pressing task at hand, from a genealogical point of view, is to try to understand why the fury that fuelled the fires – so emblematic of this rage – is so irate at this particular historical juncture.

Traumadeutung: Signs of trauma? Achille Mbembe (2001) has attempted to think through the unique situatedness and positionalities of those living in the postcolony as gleaned from African modes of self-representation. For the first modern African thinkers, liberation from servitude was equivalent above all to acquiring formal power and making their own decisions autonomously. Importantly, Mbembe notes, the fundamental question, that is, “how to renegotiate a social bond corrupted by commercial relationships (the sale of human beings) and the violence of endless wars”, was considered secondary (9). Mbembe argues that in the postcolonial African quest for identity and power, one of the key categories mobilized to this end was the figure of the African as a “victimized subject” (my emphasis): at the heart of the paradigm of victimization we find a reading of self and the world as a series of fatalities. In African history, it is thought, there is neither irony nor accident. Our history is essentially governed by forces beyond our control. The diversity and disorder of the world, as well as the open character of historical possibilities, are reduced – in an authoritarian manner – to a spasmodic, unchanging cycle, infinitely repeated in accord Wikipedia n.d. calls South Africa “the protest capital of the world” referencing the following article: Rodrigues (2010). 9 Most of these issues still fill our daily news feeds. 10 It remains to be seen how long the lull in the outspoken disgruntlement following Zuma’s replacement by the Ramaphosa administration will last. It is but a matter of time, I fear, before something gives again given the scale of the pervasive socioeconomic crises in the country.

8

Untimely meditation on a time “out of sync” 115 with a conspiracy always fomented by forces beyond our reach [. …] Ultimately, the African is supposed to be merely a castrated subject, the passive instrument of the Other’s enjoyment … […] Under such conditions the imagination of identity is deployed in accord with the logic of suspicion, of denunciation of the Other and of everything that is different: the mad dream of a world without Others. (Mbembe 2001, 10–11) Mbembe further argues that the primary effect of slavery, colonization, and apartheid was to divide African societies against themselves. This division opened the way for Africans to participate in victimizing their own people. The neurosis of victimization and impotence in the face of it, then leads to a xenophobic persecution mania (masking a profound desire for recognition and vengeance) (cf. 11). As a result and in support of this construction, a diabolical couple is fabricated: the enemy – or tormentor and incarnation of absolute wickedness – and the victim, full of virtue and incapable of violence, terror, or corruption (11). A false dichotomy is created between the self and the other by attempting to oust or “other” the other. What Mbembe seems to be arguing here is that this conscious suppression of the traumatizing external other is symptomatic of the unconscious repression of the traumatizing internal other. I’ll get to this point shortly. How can we break with this defunct and worn out mode of thought, asks Mbembe (2001, 16). To be sure, thinkers such as Mudimbe (1988; 1994) have tried to deconstruct tradition (and thereby Africa itself) by showing the latter to have been invented. Others, such as Appiah (see especially Appiah 1992) have attempted to problematize the very notion of a definitive “African identity” by acknowledging the fact that identity is always in a state of becoming and indebted to diverse genealogies, including traditions inherited from colonial history (Mbembe 2001, 16–17). These attempts, however, do not wholly satisfy Mbembe. Once slavery, colonization, and apartheid have been acknowledged as factual events that have structured, for Africans, a certain experience of the world and of themselves; and once it is acknowledged that these events are subject to several simultaneous interpretations that constantly derail any attempt at attributing any definitive meaning to these archives, the genuine philosophical labour of sense-making can commence. The one lacuna in African scholarship, which Mbembe points out, has to do with the work of memory. Properly speaking, there is no African memory of slavery. What memory there is, is distinctly coloured by diffraction. Figments circulate and are invoked mainly to arouse feelings of culpability in the Other while at the same time evading the weight of the peculiar responsibility incumbent upon Africans themselves in the element of tragedy – which is not the only element – in their history (Mbembe 2001, 19). Mbembe maintains that at best, “slavery is experienced as a wound whose meaning belongs to the domain of the psychic unconscious” (19). What remains unsaid, unacknowledged, and perhaps even unthought in existing recollections is that troubling aspect of the crime that directly engages their own responsibility:

116 Benda Hofmeyr For the fate of black slaves in modernity is not solely the result of the tyrannical will and cruelty of the Other – even though the latter is wellestablished. The other primitive signifier is the murder of brother by brother. (Mbembe 2001, 20) What is being obscured is the fact that the rapacity of capitalism at the root of the slave trade was concomitant also with murders within the family (fratricides). Continental Africans were not only sold into slavery, but sold into slavery by Africans to European slave traders. This repressed reality means that the manner and degree of inflicted trauma, subjugation, and treachery suffered on the two sides of the Atlantic were anything but the same. More importantly, it implies that the appeal to race as the moral and political basis of solidarity among “Africans” flounders in the face of the founding fratricides of the slave trade. In a lecture presented in 201611 Mbembe reiterated this point. He argues that things might have changed in South Africa, but they have not changed enough in the sense that the vacation of previous forms of injustice and inequality has ushered in new forms of injustice and inequality that lay bare the painful elision at the heart of slavery, colonization, apartheid, and racism. The fact that slavery was not only the fault of those who bought slaves, but also that of those who sold slaves and built their kingdoms on the revenue generated in this way. The fact is that colonization and apartheid cannot exclusively be explained based on the logic of us vs. them, black vs. white, autochthonous vs. allochthonous, settlers vs. natives, because the “we” is internally divided against itself, which is of course also the basic insight that the apartheid regime missed (and which therefore became more foregrounded with the fall of apartheid): keeping us and them apart does not address the internal divide. On the face of things, as noted and might be expected, the burning rage displayed by the new generation seems to be linked to the fundamental disillusionment of what post-liberation lived freedom actually means, what it ended up amounting to more than two decades after the fall of apartheid. What has dawned with unambiguous clarity is the realization that the former national liberation movement has become a ransacking organization more invested in profit than in the pressing need to alleviate the fate of the poorest of the poor. If the original trauma of slavery (fratricide) did indeed remain repressed, or at least unthought or unassimilated into the popular imagination, it could explain why the present trauma of the post-liberation ANC’s self-enrichment and other-betrayal, the forsaking of the most vulnerable, resulted in such violent, burning rage. For as Žižek explains, both Freud and Lacan contend that traumatic events that we undergo in the present owe their properly traumatic impact to the way a pre-existing traumatic “psychic reality” (the Real) is aroused through it. Trauma has always already occurred (cf. Žižek 2008, 10–11). 11 Keynote address titled, “Franz Fanon and the Politics of Viscerality” presented at the Franklin Humanities Institute, at Duke University, on 27 April 2016.

Untimely meditation on a time “out of sync” 117 Put differently, we are bearing witness to the post-traumatic stress disorder of a generation, which expresses the always already character of the trauma (cf. Malabou 2012, 227). This explains the seemingly inexplicable: the mass social psychosis or communal suicide evident in the irrationality of school burning shrouded under the pretence of legitimate protest action – a sign of a community that has lost its collective mind. If service delivery is at the heart of the demarcation grievances, why burn the most valuable symbol of service to any community, as Tinyiko Maluleke (2016, 24) rightly asks. It exposes this generation as a wounded generation at war with itself (cf. ibid.).

Victim or agent? The ethical question at the heart of this discussion bears on the position of the “patient” – in this case, the born-free student, towards the traumatic situation. As Verhaeghe puts it: Either one considers the patient as a mere victim of an external agent, which means s/he is entitled to help and support; or one considers the patient not solely as a victim but as someone with an impact of his or her own, even with a limited form of choice. (Verhaeghe 1998, 88) When this question is raised within a political context, patients will more often than not be considered as victims and survivors. Within a (modern) clinical context, on the contrary, clinicians tend to choose the second approach. Analysts will stress the necessity for emotional distance, that is, for taking your distance from the all too supporting role. The taking away of responsibility from the patient is even considered by some as one of the major therapeutic mistakes. It is argued that it remains the patient’s responsibility to understand what and how things happened to him/her, and to choose what attitude will be assumed in relation to the trauma.12 These ideas reiterate the original Freudian position on the so-called “Neurosenwahl”, (cf. Freud 1919, 317–326) i.e. the choice of neurosis. This choice is precisely the factor that makes psychotherapy possible. The first response implies a complete determinism and thus therapeutic pessimism, even fatalism: the patient has become what he had to become, due to his/her traumatic experiences. The second response, on the other hand, implies a minimal element of choice and implication for the subject, which is precisely the minimal condition for change. Hence the fact that Lacan stresses the “future anterior” in contrast to the “past tense”: “I will be what I am now through my choice”, instead of: “I am what I already was”. Choices made now will determine the future of the subject. In the present context, what is termed “choice” is

12 Verhaeghe explicitly mentions two American psychiatrists, Judith Herman and James Chu, as proponents of this view (cf. Verhaeghe 1998, 88).

118 Benda Hofmeyr the impossible double-bind of the patient-subject’s “auto”-nomy: the delineated freedom always already determined by a law not of his/her making.

Genealogy as cure What are we today then? What are we today in relation to the rage of the present generation of students that we face in our lecture halls, in relation to so many #MustFall campaigns, to so many protest actions, in the face of excruciating political and economic precarity? What are we today in relation to a wounded generation at war with itself? Our students, our children, our youth are part of a generation split between the appeal, “Can’t you see we’re burning?” and the demand for autonomy: we no longer want to be delivered over to a world not of our making, we want – no, we demand to choose for ourselves. Split-subjects caught in the double-bind of their thrownness; racked with the trauma of recurring betrayal by brothers and others alike, and the responsibility they demand but cannot possibly assume for their own future and fate. As educators, and as those who are themselves determined by the collective guilt of slavery, colonialism, apartheid, and racism, we might feel inclined to assume the patriarchal role of aid workers, to empower those victimized by circumstances not of their making, forsaken by their own liberators, in the recognition that we are dealing with a generation that has become what it had to become by virtue of their traumatic circumstances. Or we could heed the advice of the psychoanalyst who insists on distancing oneself from an overly supportive role. This is not to be mistaken for an acquittal or a renouncement of responsibility. We as the previous generation(s), as parents, as educators are irrevocably inscribed in and implicated by the politics of trauma. We therefore find ourselves in the quintessential Levinasian double-bind of an impossible responsibility: a responsibility that we cannot renounce, without “murdering the Other”, yet cannot assume without risking re-enacting the patriarchy so emblematic of colonialism and apartheid and thus their continued disempowerment and victimization. We have blood on our hands, yet “the child is not dead”.13 The child demands freedom and justice; the child demands political accountability; the child demands a future. This is the generation whose present is marked by a trauma to which it has no access. If the trauma has been repressed it has not properly been lived. From a genealogical point of view, what is at stake is not properly a past but a moment of arising. Access to such a moment can only be obtained by returning to the point where it was covered over and neutralized by tradition. Tradition serves as a form of solidification or canonization that bars access to actual historical sources. Put differently, we have to return to the point where 13 A line from a poem by South African poet Ingrid Jonker. It was written in Afrikaans, and later translated into English as “The Child Who was Shot Dead by Soldiers in Nyanga” and published in Black Butterflies (2007). Nelson Mandela read the poem in the original Afrikaans, during his address at the opening of the first democratic parliament on May 24, 1994. The English translation is available online (Jonker n.d.).

Untimely meditation on a time “out of sync” 119 the split occurred between what is conscious and the unconscious, between history as science [Historie] and history as event [Geschichtlichkeit] (cf. Agamben 2009, 105–106 citing Melandri). Agamben too – like Lacan – notes the peculiar temporal structure of this excavation. Beyond memory and forgetting what is sought is a past that can only be experienced in its future. The trauma that will have been – repressed trauma’s peculiar temporal structure is that of a future anterior. Furthermore, this trauma that will have been stands between the traumatized (generation) and its access to the present. Finally, I have come to a point where I can venture a response to the problem, which prompted the foregoing meandering line of investigation: what is the cause and effect of our present understood as a time “out of sync”? Put differently, what is trauma to the future? What we have been able to ascertain is that trauma is untimely. It belongs not to the past, but blocks its victims from gaining access to their present. A repressed traumatic event is therefore not past but contemporaneous with the present. Its recovery requires the genealogical excavation of the sources of history [Historie] as discipline in order to reanimate history as event [historicality or Geschichtlichkeit].14 In such a way, the traumatic event, which was repressed, can be experienced for the first time in its future. Trauma has not just always already occurred (Lacan), but due to its repression trauma will have been. In Nietzschean terms, the genealogical unlocking of the will have been might be conceived as an engagement with history for the sake of life. From a genealogical point of view, it is not so much a restoration of a previous event or stage as Freud would have it, but a decomposition and overcoming of a past trauma to disarm it as over-determinative of the future that follows.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2009. The Signature of All Things: On Method, translated by Luca D’Isanto with Kevin Attell. New York: Zone Books. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1992. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi, ed. 1997. Postcolonial African Philosophy. A Critical Reader. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Foucault, Michel. 1971. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In Paul Rabinow, ed. 1984. The Foucault Reader, 76–100. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel. 1978. “What is Critique?” In Sylvère Lotringer, ed. 2007. The Politics of Truth: Michel Foucault, trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter, 41–82. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).

14 A distinction originally made by Heidegger (2001) in Being and Time in 1927. See, for example, 381: “The proposition, ‘Dasein is historical’, is confirmed as a fundamental existential ontological assertion. This assertion is far removed from the mere ontical establishment of the fact that Dasein is the basis for a possible kind of historiological understanding which in turn carries with it the possibility of getting a special grasp of the development of historiology as a science”. See especially Division II: Section V: “Temporality and Historicality” (424–455).

120 Benda Hofmeyr Foucault, Michel. 1984. “What is Enlightenment?” In Sylvère Lotringer, ed. 2007. The Politics of Truth. Michel Foucault, trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter, 97–120. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Freud, Sigmund. 1919. [1913]. Totem and Taboo. Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. A. A. Brill. London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd. Freud, Sigmund. 1917. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. https://eduardolbm.files. wordpress.com/2014/10/a-general-introduction-to-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud.pdf. Freud, Sigmund. 1958. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XII (1911–1913): The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works. Translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-analysis. Heidegger, Martin. 2001. [1927]. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. Hofmeyr, A. Benda. 2017. “‘Mother, Can’t You See I’m Burning?’ A Few Remarks on Our Time” (in Afrikaans: “‘Ma, kan Ma dan nie sien dat ek aan die brand is nie?’ Enkele opmerkings oor wat ons vandag is”). Tydskrif vir Geesteswetenskappe 57(1): 114–125. Hofmeyr, A. Benda. 2019. “What is Trauma to the Future? Reflections from our (Post-) Colonial Present.” In Elvis Imafidon, ed. 2019. Handbook of African Philosophy of Difference: The Othering of the Other. New York: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-3-030-04941-6_21-1. Jonker, Ingrid. 1994. Collected Works [in Afrikaans]. Cape Town: Human & Rousseau. Jonker, Ingrid. 2007. Black Butterflies. Translated by Antjie Krog and André Brink. Cape Town: Human & Rousseau. Jonker, Ingrid. n.d. “The Child is Not Dead.” https://allpoetry.com/The-child-is-notdead (accessed 15 August 2020). Kant, Immanuel. 2007. [1784]. “Was ist Aufklärung?” In Michel Foucault. The Politics of Truth, edited by S. Lotringer & L. Hochroth, 7–20. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Lacan, Jacques. 1979. [1964]. Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. London: Penguin. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1979. [1961]. Totality and Infinity. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1991. [1974]. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1985. [1982]. Ethics and Infinity. Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1987. Collected Philosophical Papers. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Malabou, Catherine. 2012. “Post-Trauma. Towards a New Definition?” In Tom Cohen, ed. Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change. Volume 1. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, pp. 226–239. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/ 10539563.0001.001/1:12/–telemorp…-theory-in-the-era-of-climate-change-vol-1? rgn=div1;view=fulltext. Maluleke, Tinyiko. 2016. “A People at War with Themselves”. Mail & Guardian, May 13–19: 24. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. “African Modes of Self-Writing”. Identity, Politics and Culture 2 (1): 2–39. Mbembe, Achille. 2016. “Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Viscerality”, keynote address delivered at the Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University, on 27 April 2016. Online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lg_BEodNaEA.

Untimely meditation on a time “out of sync” 121 Mudimbe, Valentin. Y. 1988. The Invention of Africa: Prognosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Mudimbe, Valentin. Y. 1994. The Idea of Africa. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1874. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” In Untimely Meditations, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, pp. 57–124. London: Cambridge University Press. Nwadeyi, Lovelyn C. 2016. “Lovelyn Nwadeyi’s Empowering Message: The Onus is on Us to Disrupt the Status Quo”. Mail & Guardian, June 29. https://mg.co.za/article/ 2016-06-29-we-all-have-agency-and-we-must-use-it-to-disrupt-the-status-quo. Rodrigues, Christopher. 2010. “‘Black Boers’ and Other Revolutionary Songs”. Mail & Guardian Thoughtleader. April 5. http://thoughtleader.co.za/chrisrodrigues/2010/04/ 05/on-revolutionary-songs/. Verhaeghe, Paul. 1998. “Trauma and Hysteria within Freud and Lacan.” The Letter: Lacanian Perspectives on Psychoanalysis 14: 87–105. Wikipedia. n.d. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_in_South_Africa. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. “Descartes and the Post-traumatic Subject.” Filozofski vestnik 29(2): 9–29.

11 Thoughts on the planetary An interview with Achille Mbembe Achille Mbembe

This interview was conducted in Bergen, Norway on November 31, 2018 in connection with Professor Achille Mbembe’s keynote address at the Annual Holberg Debate at the University of Bergen by Torbjørn Tumyr Nilsen of the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen. An early Norwegian version of the interview was first published by Klassekampen on December 1, 2018. The transcript had been edited, footnoted, referenced and amended for clarity by Sindre Bangstad, Research Professor, KIFO (Institute for Church, Religion and Worldview Research) in Oslo, Norway. Achille Mbembe has revisited the transcript and substantially amended it where necessary. It is now published with his consent. TORBJØRN: In April 2017 the Rhodes statue fell in South Africa at the University of Cape Town. How did you interpret that event? MBEMBE: For those who are not aware of who we are talking about, Rhodes was a privateer. He was a ruthless actor in the mercantile expansionism that characterized nineteenth-century settler colonialism in the southern part of Africa. Through political alliances, sheer brutality and expediency, he carved out for himself a huge chunk of South Africa’s mineral wealth, in particular diamonds in Kimberley and gold in the Witwatersrand. He bestowed some of the land he had grabbed in Cape Town to the university which, in return, erected a statue in his honor on the steps of one of its main buildings. Rhodes prefigured the extraction and privatization of ill-gotten wealth that neoliberalism today has pushed to a refinement unseen in the history of humankind. He was a precursor of the type of predatory economic system and plutocratic politics at work in most parts of the world today, the results of which are the raping of the biosphere and the destruction at a massive scale of the basic conditions of life on Earth. I interpret the toppling of his statue as a small, symbolic victory, in the long and protracted struggle for universal justice. TORBJØRN: So there is a lineage from Rhodes to the neoliberal order we see today? MBEMBE: There is an explicit kinship between plantation slavery, colonial predation and contemporary forms of resource extraction and appropriation. In each of these instances, there is a constitutive denial of the fact that we, the DOI: 10.4324/9781003198581-11

Thoughts on the planetary 123 humans, co-evolve with the biosphere, depend on it, are defined with and through it and owe each other a debt of responsibility and care. An important difference is the technological escalation that has led to the emergence of computational capitalism in our times. We are no longer in the era of the machine but in the age of the algorithm. Technological escalation, in turn, is threatening to turn us all into artefacts – what I have called elsewhere “the becoming-black-of-the world” – and to make redundant a huge chunk of the muscular power capitalism relied upon for a long time. It follows that today, although its main target remains the human body and earthly matter, domination and exploitation are becoming increasingly abstract and reticular. As a repository of our desires and emotions, dreams, fears and fantasies, our mind and psychic life have become the main raw material which digital capitalism aims at capturing and commodifying. During Rhodes’ times, the exploitation of black labor went hand in hand with a virulent form of racism. Contemporary capitalism still relies on racial subsidies. But the technologies of racialization have become ever more insidious and ever more encompassing. As the world becomes a huge data emporium, tomorrow’s technologies of racialization will be more and more generated and instituted through data, calculation and computation. In short, racism is relocating both underneath and at the surface of the skin. It reproduces itself via screens and mirrors of various kinds. It is becoming both spectral and fractal. Otherwise, as far as the toppling of Rhodes’ statue is concerned, my argument has always been that the statue should have never been there in the first instance. TORBJØRN: As a symbol? MBEMBE: Yes, as a reminder of the various crimes this cruel man committed in his attempt to deny black people any right to a human future in South Africa. As a reminder, too, of the cynicism with which he tried to launder his ill-gotten wealth under the guise of philanthropy. But a proper critique of Rhodes’ style of predatory economics and plutocratic politics cannot be limited to South Africa alone or to the confines of a specific nation-state. The project he served was colonial and imperial. Its horizon was not South Africa-centric. Ultimately, Rhodes is the symbol of the double damage capitalism in its racial, colonial and imperial form inflicted upon humankind and upon the biosphere. Such should be the starting point of any critique of Rhodes which strives to avoid the pitfalls of national chauvinism. TORBJØRN: At the Holberg Debate at the University of Bergen tomorrow, you will discuss social movements through history. How will you describe this social movement, compared to for example the student movements in the late 1960s? MBEMBE: These are two different events. They are happening at two different historical moments in two different places. I am not even sure that contemporary protagonists have any knowledge or memory of what happened in 1968. If my understanding is correct, one of the goals pursued by the decolonization movement in South Africa is to unbundle what is perceived as a structure

124 Achille Mbembe of repetition, an old racial order which keeps donning the mantle of the new in its attempt at masking its degeneracy. In this context, to dismantle “whiteness” implies the awakening to self-knowledge and the reshaping of institutions inherited from a brutal past. In this sense, the decolonization project is both a critique of institutions and a critique of knowledge. The actual question is whether in this instance, such a critique has been articulated in a way that is intellectually and politically compelling. Indeed, with the drive towards the automatization of existence, contemporary social movements operate in a context characterized by huge changes in human experience. It is not only that the economy is becoming the eminent site of the new struggles for life. It is also that people and things, nature and objects, we are all increasingly at risk of being transformed into artefacts. Many of these changes are partly enabled by the technological escalation represented by ubiquitous computing. A major consequence of this “great transformation” is that the human of the first quarter of the twenty-first century is not exactly the human of the late 1960s. The modes of individuation are not the same. Nor are the forms of subjectivation or its content. The complex entanglement of the human and the technological so typical of our age has deeply transformed the ways in which cognitive processes unfold, how people dream and what kind of change they dream about, in short how the political is configured and experienced. In assessing the qualities and properties of contemporary mobilizations, we must therefore factor in the impact of media technologies on the formation of political subjectivity. Striking in this regard is the apparent shift from a politics of reason to a politics of experience, if not of viscerality. In the eyes of many, personal experience has become the new way of being at home in the world. It’s like the bubble that holds the foam at a distance. Experience nowadays trumps reason. We are led to believe that sensibility, emotions, affect, sentiments and feelings are the real stuff of subjecthood and therefore of radical agency. Paradoxically, in the paranoid tenor of our epoch, this is very much in tune with the dominant strictures of neoliberal individualism. It is also in line with the ongoing reconfigurations of the relation between technology, reason and other human faculties. Whatever the case, this has given rise to ambiguous forms of collective mobilization most of which we shouldn’t romanticize. Behind the mask of radicalism, there is something fundamentally ambivalent in the political discourse of decolonization when, for instance, the injunction to decolonize goes hand in hand with high tolerance for xenophobia or the desire to control and defend what amounts to inverse racial borders. There is something fundamentally debilitating when subaltern resistance politics is limited to an endless performance of purity and self-righteousness, or to a competition about who has suffered the most on the spiraling scale of victimization. The same pathos is to be found in most debates on curriculum reform, on what we must or must not read and why, in short, on how to reconfigure or redesign the archive. Although fought in the name of equality and justice,

Thoughts on the planetary 125 some of these mobilizations might end up re-enacting a sectarian logic of enclosure, underpinned as they are by flawed notions of identity, gender or culture as spaces of protection and immunity, as borders which allow for a closing-off from “those who are not as radical as us”. Finally, a number of these mobilizations grant a pre-eminent status to notions of self and experience. The idea according to which self and experience – or for that matter radical agency – must now be found in the intimate microspheres of everyday life must be subjected to a thorough critique. Too often, it is presumed that our intimate interiorities, our moods, our states of mind are “safe spaces”, the only spaces immune to racism and neoliberal intoxication. In fact, under contemporary conditions, there is no longer any “zone of being” that is free from “contamination”. The political cannot be reduced to the painstaking management of emotionally safe spaces and shared atmospheres. Radical agency is not about the sharing of boundaries. It is about de-borderization. It is simply not true that unless I have undergone the exact same experience as the other, I know nothing about his or her pain and should simply shut up. Insofar as to be human is to open oneself up to the possibility always already there of becoming (an)other, such a conception of self and identity is by definition anti-human. The political in our time must start from the imperative to reconstruct the world in common. For the idea of decolonization to have any purchase at a planetary scale, it cannot start from the assumption that I am purer than my neighbor. TORBJØRN: By using the term ‘planetary scale’ here, I take it that you see this decolonization movement as important also on a global scale? MBEMBE: I am arguing that for the idea of decolonization to truly become a political, theoretical or aesthetic force on a global scale, a number of conditions must be met and a lot of work still needs to be done. For the time being, it is mostly a legitimate aspiration and, in some unfortunate instances, a compensatory discourse. Decolonization never meant the return to some egosphere or to some elective self-image that would procure a stable identity, protection, safety and security and eventually immunity to an embattled self. The search for safety and immunity and the fear of risk so typical of this age is not at all part of, say, Frantz Fanon’s decolonization lexicon which is all about undergoing a trial, or even facing an ordeal. Furthermore, historically the expansion of colonialism had to do with the broader question “Who is it that the earth belongs to?”. That was the key question underlying colonial conquest and imperial expansion since the fifteenth century. With the partition of Africa in the nineteenth century, European powers had decided that the earth in its entirety belonged to them. They were its true owners and they could occupy lands that were populated by foreign people. They could exploit these lands as well as the people who had always inhabited them, thereby carving out spheres of influence each of them had control over.

126 Achille Mbembe To a large extent, colonial expansion was a planetary project. Although driven in large part by national states and national business companies, it mostly had to do with the re-allocation of the earth’s resources and their privatization by those who had the greatest military might and the largest technological advantage. This is why in its most historical sense, decolonization is by definition a planetary enterprise, a radical openness of and to the world, a deep breathing for the world as opposed to insulation. TORBJØRN: And cynicism? MBEMBE: And cynicism of course. And racism. Because racism is in the DNA of colonialism. There is no colonialism that doesn’t entail a huge dose of structural racism. And there is no colonialism neither that is not driven, let’s say, by some form or another of a genocidal impulse. This genocidal potential can be actualized or it might not, but it is always there. It is there as Hannah Arendt shows in her own work on race and bureaucracy. This genocidal potential was put to work in the Americas, in Australia, it was put to work by the Germans in Namibia. So it is always there. Because where there is racism, this genocidal potential exists. Where there is racism, being-in-the-world is the same thing as being-against-others. The latter are treated as a threat against which one’s own existence must be defended. At all cost if necessary. TORBJØRN: Some would then argue that there are still colonial or postcolonial structures operating in the neoliberal project. Would you say that there is then still a genocidal potential? MBEMBE: Perhaps more than at any other moment in our recent past, we are increasingly faced with the question of what to do with those whose very existence does not seem to be necessary for our reproduction; those whose mere existence or proximity is deemed to represent a physical or biological threat to our own life. Throughout history, and in response to this question, various paradigms of rules have been designed for human bodies deemed either in excess, unwanted, illegal, dispensable, or superfluous. One historical response has consisted in putting in place spatial exclusionary arrangements. Such was, for instance, the case during the early phases of modern settler or genocidal colonialism in relation to Native American reservations in the United States, island prisons, penal colonies such as Australia, camps and even Bantustans in South Africa. Two late modern examples are Gaza and the encaging of migrant children in the context of the ongoing planetary war on mobility. Gaza and the encaging of migrant children might well prefigure what is yet to come. In the case of Gaza, control of vulnerable, unwanted, surplus or racialized people is exercised through a combination of tactics, chief among which is modulated blockade or molecular strangulation. A blockade prohibits, obstructs, and limits who and what can enter and leave the Strip. The goal might not be to cut the Strip off entirely from supply lines, infrastructural grids or trade routes. The Strip is nevertheless relatively sealed off and strangulated in a way that effectively turns it into an imprisoned territory. Comprehensive or relative

Thoughts on the planetary 127 closure is accompanied by periodic military escalations and the generalized use of extra-judicial assassinations. Spatial violence, humanitarian strategies, and a peculiar biopolitics of punishment all combine to produce, in turn, a peculiar carceral space in which people deemed surplus, unwanted, or illegal are governed through abdication of any responsibility for their lives and their welfare. But as I have intimated, there is another, early twenty-first century example, which consists in waging new forms of wars, which can be called wars on speed and mobility. Wars on mobility are wars whose aim is to turn discounted bodies into borders. They generally begin by turning into dust and piles of ruins the milieux as well as means of existence and survival of vulnerable people thus forced to flee in search of a refuge. These kinds of wars against milieux and ecosystems rendered toxic and uninhabitable are not accidental. They are methodically programmed and conducted. Such milieux and ecosystems are sites of experimentation of new weapons. The targets of this kind of warfare are not by any means singular bodies, but rather great swathes of humanity judged worthless and superfluous. TORBJØRN: Can you elaborate a bit more on that? MBEMBE: Let me put it differently. Nowadays the project is to render as many people as superfluous as possible. The novelty is the production at a massive scale of discounted bodies, a residual humanity that is akin to waste. With our entry into a new climatic regime, this process will only intensify. As the global conditions for the production and reproduction of life on Earth keep changing, population politics at a planetary level will increasingly become synonymous with excess and waste management. In terms of the future geopolitics of our world, populations will be more and more treated not only in the Darwinian terms of sexual selection, but also within a utilitarian and biophysiologico-organic framework. Take a place such as South Africa where a very high percentage of the total population is unemployed. This is not because there is no “work as such”. This is not because people do not want to work. In fact, here as elsewhere in Africa and other parts of the global South, almost everything remains to be done. The amount of work needed in order to create a better life for all is incalculable. But the structure of the economy doesn’t really need us all. Nor does it need our time. It doesn’t really need every single body, all of our muscles or energies or even the bulk of our social and collective intelligence. And this will be more and more the case in the future, as we move to a phase of human history in which only that which is computable counts. As we speak, many bodies already fall beyond the scope of calculation. Unless we reinvent the terms of what counts and in the process resignify what value stands for as well as the procedures of assigning value, of measuring value, of exchanging value, things won’t change. These are some of the key questions any decolonization project worthy of its name has to address if the injunction to decolonize is to be more than a mere ideological phantasm. TORBJØRN: Back to the debate on decolonization: There was a heated debate in Norway, during the summer of 2018, about the

128 Achille Mbembe decolonization of academia. How can #RhodesMustFall in South Africa be relevant for universities worldwide? MBEMBE: The need for a critical re-appraisal of the relationship between knowledge, power and institutions is not an exclusively South African preoccupation. In South Africa, the term “decolonization” is one way in which concerns about “deracialization” are expressed. The imperative to “deracialize” is also valid for Europe, for the United States, for Brazil and for other parts of the world. The emergence of new varieties of racism in Europe and elsewhere, the reassertion of global white supremacy, of populism and retro-nationalism, the weaponization of difference and identity are not only symptoms of a deep distrust of the world. They are also fostered by transnational forces capable of making that same world inhospitable, uninhabitable and unbreathable for many of us. All of this is of course important. But part of what truly frightens me is the recolonization of various fields of knowledge by all kinds of determinisms. What frightens me is the active confusion between knowledge and data, the reduction of knowledge to information. It’s the idea that the world is a matter of numbers and the task of knowledge is to handle quantities. Furthermore, it’s the belief that the best way to generate information is with computers and that which is not computable does not exist. It’s the creeping sense that the computer is our new brain. In such a context, “to decolonize” must start from the assumption that knowledge cannot be reduced to computational information processing. There is therefore a massive need to recover the ability to think. And for me, knowledge is on the verge of being reduced to a reified metaphor. As a result, we are witnessing almost everywhere a tremendous impoverishment of thought. TORBJØRN: In the Norwegian debate on decolonization, one of the demands from the young student activists was to have a more global curriculum. What’s your take on that? MBEMBE: Right now we are literally assaulted by forces that want to retreat from the world and rebuild a certain idea of the nation, of the community, of identity and difference that is premised on the capacity to determine who belongs, who must be excluded and shouldn’t belong, who can settle where, why, how and for how long. Such forces are preoccupied with the erection of all kinds of borders and how they must be policed. They buy in the dream of a “pure” community, a community of people who look the same and act the same. They are sustained by the belief that we can go back to the past because the past is, in truth, our future. Let me just call it the dream of apartheid. There is another dream, maybe not unrelated to the first. As I have just highlighted, it’s the dream of reducing knowledge to calculation by computers. In fact, it’s the dream of reducing everything to calculation and explaining everything from within biological and neurological strictures. A planetary library, archive or, for that matter, curriculum is one whose strategic project is to understand the incalculable and the incomputable. It can only be based on the will to go beyond cognitivism. I am not against calculation or mathematics.

Thoughts on the planetary 129 Nor am I against computation. I am simply saying that neither calculation, nor mathematics, nor computation are sufficient for explaining life. It can’t be enough to do correct mathematics. Once we have done correct mathematics, we still need to determine what this exercise implies for the life of beings. Pushed to a certain level, correct mathematics alone impoverish thought and destroy theory. Otherwise, we only have one world. We might dream about colonizing Mars or Venus or other unknown planets in the future, but for the time being that is not part of our actuality. We only have one world, one solar system and for this world to last as long as possible and for this solar system to not calcinate life as such, we need to become a bit more intelligent and wiser. This Earth is our shared roof and our shared shelter. Sharing this roof and shelter is the great condition for the sustainability of life on Earth. We have to share it as equitably as possible. And in any case our lives, here and elsewhere, have become so entangled, that trying to separate them will require a tremendous amount of violence. It will require a lot of violence to disentangle humanity from itself and from the rest of the living species. And therefore, especially in the face of the kinds of ecological challenges we face, it is absolutely important to reinvent forms of life in common that go beyond the requisite of the nation state, ethnicity, race, religion, and so on. A curriculum that takes seriously such concerns is absolutely necessary. TORBJØRN: And you see these two forces visible in the debate on the composition of the curriculum? MBEMBE: Yes I do. I would go further and argue that to design a truly planetary curriculum implies salvaging whatever remains of reason as a shared human faculty. To be sure and in view of its own history of violence and unreason, reason must be reformed. But I cannot possibly see how, without it, we can adequately answer one of the most urgent questions that will haunt the human race in this century – the question of life futures. For a long time, we have been concerned with how life emerges and the conditions of its evolution. The key question today is how it can be repaired, reproduced, sustained and cared for, made durable, preserved and universally shared, and under what conditions it ends. Overall, these debates about how life on Earth can be reproduced and sustained and under what conditions it ends are forced upon us by the epoch itself, characterized as it is by the impending ecological catastrophe and by technological escalation. I am not sure that they can be properly answered from a purely market logic perspective that addresses life as a commodity to be manipulated and replicated under conditions of volatility. On the other hand, there is a shifting distribution of powers between the human and the technological in the sense that technologies are moving towards “general intelligence” and self-replication. Over the last decades, we have witnessed the development of algorithmic forms of intelligence. They have been growing in parallel with genetic research, and often in its alliance. The integration of algorithms and big data analysis in the biological sphere does not only bring with it a greater and greater belief in technopositivism and modes of statistical thought. It also paves the way for regimes of assessment of the natural

130 Achille Mbembe world, and modes of prediction and analysis that treat life itself as a computable object. Concomitantly, algorithms inspired by the natural world, and ideas of natural selection and evolution are on the rise. Such is the case with genetic algorithms. As Margarida Mendes (“Molecular Colonialism”) has shown, the belief today is that everything is potentially computable and predictable. In the process, what is rejected is the fact that life itself is an open system, non-linear, and exponentially chaotic. I keep raising these issues because they are not unrelated to a problematique of “decolonization” that would not be a mere ideological phantasm. In fact these issues may be symptomatic of a truly momentous event we might not be willing or ready to contemplate. Reason may well have reached its final limits. Or in any case, reason is on trial. On the one hand, it is increasingly replaced and subsumed by instrumental rationality when it is not simply reduced to procedural or algorithmic processing of information. In other words, the logic of reason is morphing from within machines and computers and algorithms while the human brain is being “downloaded” into nano-machines and all kinds of devices. As we are increasingly surrounded by multiple and expanding wavefronts of calculation, all we are willing to ask from it is to detect patterns or to recover artifacts whose existence is derived from financial models built on technologies of miniaturization and automation. As a result, techne is becoming the quintessential language of reason, its only legitimate manifestation. Furthermore, instrumental reason, or reason in the guise of techne is increasingly weaponized. Life itself is increasingly construed via statistics, metadata, modeling, mathematics. If my description of current trends is accurate, then one of the questions a planetary curriculum must ask is the following: What remains of the human subject in an age when the instrumentality of reason is carried out by and through information machines and technologies of calculation? The second is: who will define the threshold or set the boundary that distinguishes between the calculable and the incalculable, between that which is deemed worthy and that which is deemed worthless, and therefore dispensable? The third is whether we can turn these new instruments of calculation and power into instruments of liberation. In other words, will we be able to invent different modes of measuring that might open up the possibility of a different aesthetics, a different politics of inhabiting the Earth, of repairing and sharing the planet? TORBJØRN: But what about those who are concerned about losing texts from canonized European theorists and thinkers in this process? MBEMBE: I am talking about expanding the archive, not excising it. For this to happen, it must be clear to all that the European archive alone can no longer account for the complexities, both of history, of the present, and of the future of our human and other-than-human world. What we all inherit are the archives of the world at large. Not just one kind of archive. For me this is a matter of common sense. I am in favor of expanding the archive, reading the different archives of the world critically, each with and against the others. There can’t be any other meaning to a planetary curriculum.

Thoughts on the planetary 131 TORBJØRN: In all fields? MBEMBE: In all fields. Naturally. In any subject that has any impact whatsoever on the future history of the world and of life. Or let me put it this way: I feel sorry for any young person who might go through the Norwegian educational system without ever having learned anything about Africa, Asia or China, without having read any African, Indian or Chinese novel or poetry, or without having studied any African, Japanese or Chinese thinker of note. I am deeply sorry for that person. His or her situation makes me genuinely sad. For it is a kind of mental self-amputation, a form of active or passive rejection of the world. The purpose of a planetary curriculum would be to cure our souls from such human inflicted ills. TORBJØRN: In the debate in Norway the demand for a more global curriculum was labelled by detractors as a campaign for “identity politics.” How do you see this argument? MBEMBE: It is a mischaracterization of what is at stake. Because that is not what it is. Actually, it is not about identity politics, it’s about the challenges we spoke about earlier. It is about how we locate ourselves in the world today. In a world that has to be sustainable, that has to be built in common. It has nothing to do with the dream of apartheid. There is a critique of “identity politics” that is a right wing critique. It usually comes from those forces that have used the trope of identity precisely to oppress and exclude certain people, to racialize and dehumanize them. Identity politics has historically been used the most by those who were keen to stigmatize different “races”, those who in the first place did not believe in our common humanity. They worshipped difference, which they weaponized. The drama is that the people who were thus objectified and pushed aside, unfortunately embraced these prejudices and internalized them, as Frantz Fanon and many others have shown. In their attempt to reclaim a voice, they ended up defining themselves in the terms of the “difference” to which they had been assigned. So when we say “identity politics”, we have to know exactly what is the historical genealogy of this term, and who is practicing it. Those who are practicing it are, for instance, those who, when a black African lands at an airport in Norway, in the midst of a group of many other people, select exactly that person and racially “profile” him or her. To talk about a planetary curriculum has nothing to do with racially profiling people or texts or archives. It has to do with bringing as equitably as possible everybody, every person and every text, every archive and every memory in the sphere of care and concern. It has to do with proximity as opposed to insulation, with the invention in common of a shared inside, a shared roof and a shared shelter. TORBJØRN: Did “racial profiling” happen to you at a Norwegian airport? MBEMBE: For many people of African descent traveling in the world today, these are regular occurrences. I don’t want to say more than that. But since you opened that door, it seems to me that identity politics and other forms of the politics of difference, that is the new opium for the masses.

132 Achille Mbembe By expressing myself in this way, I am in no way trying to hurt many people who, today, must still fight to reclaim a voice or to recover a face we can truly identify as a human voice and a human face. What I mean is that in this age of globalized capitalism, identity is increasingly used both as a weapon to further brutalize the weakest in our midst and as a leverage to claim a status of pure or authentic victim. To have been brutalized or to have been victimized, in turn, is increasingly seen as the most potent way to claim one’s rights or one’s access to care, justice, redress or reparation. The question I would like to ask is why is this the case? In the conditions of our times, what are the reasons why vengeance or vengefulness is increasing confused with justice? Is it because we have reached a point where the form of capitalism we live in, the kind of technological progress we have achieved, are no longer compatible with liberal democracies? The two figures of identity politics I have highlighted will not save liberal democracy from its deadly entanglement with neoliberalism and retro-nationalism. We can direct as many people as we want to the things that ultimately don’t matter – who is wearing a burka in public, who is sporting a Muslim beard, those foreigners who steal our jobs and “our women” and corrupt our culture – such subterfuges won’t address what is at the core of the present malaise worldwide. They will only accentuate the present distress that many people feel, inflame negative passions and pave the way for brutalism. TORBJØRN: Also in your own country Cameroon you see these forms of identity politics? MBEMBE: In Cameroon in particular, a similar pathos surrounds the question of identities and languages inherited from colonialism. One of the ongoing disputes is about who is more British than French or more French than British. It is totally absurd. Having said that, the question we need to ask is the following: Why is it that various struggles for selfhood and common rights necessarily express themselves in these exclusionary idioms? Why are they not conducted in terms other than those that merely mimic the very categories of oppression? Why do people keep colluding with the forces that objectively work against their own material self-interest? What are the forms of compensation or enjoyment they derive from what appears to be self-servitude? TORBJØRN: What is the solution then? MBEMBE: We need to develop a better understanding of what we are up against and throw out a number of old assumptions. This can’t happen if we do not recover the faculty of critique, re-educate our desires and rehabilitate reason as a key faculty for any project of freedom or emancipation. Reason is under siege, reduced as it is to its instrumental dimension. It is being replaced by technicism on the one hand and all forms of negative passions on the other hand. I am of course aware of the violent and tragic histories of reason and not only in our part of the world. So maybe it is more a matter of reforming reason than anything else. Maybe it’s about educating reason to cohabit with other faculties. But I cannot see how we can possibly dismiss reason wholesale without deeply damaging the category of truth itself. I deeply believe that

Thoughts on the planetary 133 democracy cannot survive in the absence of reason, that we cannot share the world, repair it or properly take care of life in the absence of a reformed notion of reason, one that marries thinking, feeling and projecting. TORBJØRN: Another critique of the decolonization movement in Norway was that this was smelling of “American campus activism” – and that it was therefore not relevant for a Norwegian context. MBEMBE: A proper critique of the decolonization movement must be well informed. I myself have produced a number of critical observations relating to this project. It is true that there is a circulation of tropes, concepts and categories between activists in the United States and activists in the rest of the world. In the South African case, it is true that the movement has at times been tempted to rely wholesale on concepts and modes of action drawn from the African-American experience or lexicon, in particular insofar as the critique of race or even gender is concerned. This probably has to do with South Africa’s own inability to theorize its own historical experience, to speak to its potential universality. This having been said, but to our Norwegian friends, I would simply say this. On matters of decolonization, you should invent forms of student activism relevant to your specific context. But to deny the necessity of decolonizing is part of what Sartre characterized as “bad faith”. TORBJØRN: But underlying that argument is probably the idea that the Norwegian universities are not connected to colonialism such as other universities in other countries might be. MBEMBE: Throughout our conversation, I have tried to offer a theory of decolonization that is as expansive as possible. Norway is not an island in the world. Norway is entangled with the rest of the world and has to respond to the address the rest of the world is putting to it. And it has to take this address very seriously, just as South Africa has to respond to the address that is put to her by the rest of the continent, by other parts of the world. That is how we will salvage reason and build a world that is sustainable. TORBJØRN: To what extent are our knowledge systems of today still determined by colonialism or oppression? MBEMBE: We need to develop a broader understanding of “colonization”. Knowledge systems worlwide are still underpinned by the logic of value extraction. In fact, knowledge as such is increasingly designed as the principal means for value extraction. Colonization is going on when the world we inhabit is understood as a vast field of data awaiting extraction. Colonization is going on when we throw out of the window the role of critical reason and theoretical thinking and we reduce knowledge to the mere collection of data, its analysis and its use by governments, military bureaucracies and corporations. Colonization is going on when we are surrounded by so-called smart devices that constantly watch us and record us, harvesting vast quantities of data, or when every activity is captured by sensors and cameras embedded within them. This is what colonization in the twenty-first century is all about. It is about extraction, capture, the cult of data, the commodification of human capacity for thought and the dismissal of critical reason in favor of programming.

134 Achille Mbembe These are some of the issues the decolonization project has to embrace if it is to be more than a slogan. Now more than ever before, what we need is a new critique of technology, of the experience of technical life. For all kinds of reasons. What we are witnessing, whether we see it or not, is the emergence of an entirely new species of humans. It is not the human of the Renaissance, or of the eighteenth century, nor the human of the early or mid twentieth century. It’s an entirely different species of human which is coupled with its object. The distinctions we used to make between the human and the object are no longer entirely valid. Because nowadays there is no human being without its prosthesis. Our environment is not only saturated with all kinds of technological devices. In fact, we spend most of our lives living with or through screens. This experience has very serious implications in terms of the new natures of cognition, in terms of how we perceive things and reality itself, in terms of what it is that we know or must know, in terms of how we know what we know, in terms of the distinction between fact and fiction, matter and substance or in terms of the monopolization of thought within technical infrastructures. For “decolonization” to be more than a slogan and be given an edge, we need to attend to these shifts particularly in relation to the Anthropocene as well as in relation to the reticular nature of computational technologies and the “softwarization” of our existence and that of every other living entity on Earth. We must resist the push to reduce knowledge to what can be bought and sold and reinvent the category of “relevance”. This can only happen if we put a renewed emphasis on the questions of “ends”, and not only of “means”. Saying this, I am fully aware of the fact that our world is going through a period when nihilism is lurking, brutalism is the new norm and the desire for an Apocalypse is not far. TORBJØRN: Recently you have also been writing about what you call “savage objects”. What does it mean that these objects are still in the possession of European museums and how can restitution be done in practice? MBEMBE: This is a complex question that has been thoroughly studied by Felwine Sarr and Benedicte Savoy. Together they have produced a compelling report on these matters and I would advise anyone who is concerned about the ongoing presence of African objects in Western museums to read it. I have been trying to relate the call for restitution to broader questions of debt, reparation and universal justice. In precolonial systems of African thought, restitution was an obligation in the case that a conscious, malicious and deliberate act of violation was undertaken on another’s life. The most damaging wrongs were considered those causing harm to one’s “vital force”. In contexts such as these, where life was fragile, or was liable to being diminished, every attack on the integrity and life force of being, human or any other entity, however slight, merited restoration. The damages or injury could be calculated in economic terms. But in the last instance, damages, injury or loss were assessed according to a measure of the value of life. In line with this philosophy, veritable restitution is therefore one that participates in making reparations to life. The law subtending it is more

Thoughts on the planetary 135 person- than property-oriented. Wherever material damages and interests came into play, the only sense they had was to undertake that restoration of life. Ultimately, no real restitution could occur without what we must indeed call avowal, that is to say, the capacity to tell the truth. From this viewpoint, to restitute was part of an unconditional duty – part of the infinitely irrecusable thing that is life, all life, of that form of debt that was the debt of truth. The truth is that Europe took things from us that it will never be able to restitute. We will learn to live with this loss. Europe, for its part, will have to take responsibility for its acts, for that shady part of our shared history which it keeps denying or of which it has sought to divest itself. The risk is that by restituting our objects without giving an account of itself, it concludes that, with the restitution complete, our right to remind it of the truth is removed. If new ties are to be woven, Europe must honour the truth, as the truth is the teacher of responsibility. This debt of truth cannot be erased as a matter of principle. It will haunt us until the end of times. Honouring truth comes with the commitment to learn and remember together. As Edouard Glissant never ceased to reiterate, each of us needs the memory of the other. This is not a matter of charity or compassion. It is a condition for the survival of our world. If we want to share the world’s beauty, he would add, we ought to learn to be united with all its suffering. We will have to learn to remember together, and this doing, to repair together the world’s fabric and its visage. Restitution will always be partial. There are irreparable losses that no compensation can ever bring back – which does not mean it is not necessary to compensate. To have compensated, does not mean to have erased the wrong. To compensate, as Kwame Anthony Appiah underlines, is about offering to repair the relation.

References Appiah, Anthony Kwame. 2004. “Comprendre les reparations. Reflexions preliminaires.” Cahiers d’etudes africaines 1: 173–174. Arendt, Hannah. 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books. Bangstad, Sindre. 2018. “Decolonizing the Academy.” Africa Is A Country. April 9. https:// africasacountry.com/2018/09/decolonizing-the-academy. Glissant, Edouard. 2006. Une nouvelle region du monde: Esthetique 1. Paris: Gallimard. Goldberg, David. 2018. “Conversation: Achille Mbembe and David Goldberg on Critique of Black Reason”. https://www.theoryculturesociety.org/conversation-achille-mbembeand-david-theo-goldberg-on-critique-of-black-reason/. Accessed 17 August 2020. Mbembe, Achille. 2016. “The Society of Enmity.” Radical Philosophy 200(1): 23–35. Mbembe, Achille. 2019. “Future Knowledges and Their Implications for the Decolonization Project.” In Decolonisation in Universities. The Politics of Knowledge, edited by Jonathan Jansen. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2017. Critique of Black Reason. Translated by Laurent Dubois. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

136 Achille Mbembe Mbembe, Achille. 2020 [2011]. Out of The Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization. Translated by Daniela Ginsburg. New York: Columbia University Press. Olusoga, David and Caspar W. Ericksen. 2011. The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism. London and New York: Faber & Faber. Sarr, Felwine and Bénédicte Savoy. 2018. “The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward A New Relational Ethics”. Translated by Drew S. Bank. Paris: Ministére de la Culture. Available at: http://restitutionreport2018.com/sarr_savoy_en.pdf.

12 The afterlife Joel M Modiri

Even though the captive flesh/body has been ‘liberated’, and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter, dominant symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, show movement, as the human subject is ‘murdered’ over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise. (Spillers 2003, 208) “[T]he problem of historical representation is how to represent [the] ghost. (Trouillot 1995, 147) The listening mind is disturbed by memories from the past. So much time has gone by, and still there is no sweetness here. (Armah 1969, 67)

I Reading and re-reading Jacqueline Rose’s essay “The Legacy”, three critical impression points emerge most sharply: (1) the generative capacities of affect – rage, loss, pain, horror, hope, love – in political struggle; (2) the psychic life of historical trauma; its recurring manifestations and transgenerational inheritances and (3) the endurance of historical time, or what Rose captures in the acknowledgement that “the past has not gone away”. This paper attends to the last of this trifocal itinerary and is concerned with the themes of temporality, memory, continuity and justice that Rose invokes throughout her essay. Rose’s text is replete with instructive signposts in this regard: “lasting traumas of the nation”; “torn fabric of South African history”, “continuing struggle”, “enduring and troubling legacies”, “ongoing histories”, “historic and persisting division”, “enduring obduracy”. Through these textual signposts, Rose registers her observation of post1994 South Africa as the locus of a pressing political and intellectual struggle over an outstanding justice; an incomplete or unrealised – perhaps even stillborn – liberation. DOI: 10.4324/9781003198581-12

138 Joel M Modiri This struggle centers around the problem of political time / political temporality which is the impetus for this writing. I wish to reflect on time as a crucial site of contestation in the present South African conjuncture – by which I mean to refer to the question that Rose herself poses, namely how much “at a deep level, has really changed” in the wake of colonial-apartheid? Both this question and the manifold answers it invites demarcate a fundamental set of tensions over how to think about and reckon with the unliveable histories of violence, oppression and dehumanisation without which the very idea of South Africa would not, could not, exist. One finds broadly two ways of thinking about these histories. On the one hand, a protocol of optimism narrating South Africa’s unfoldment in teleological terms, of triumph and progress, a story of a “miracle nation” which, even if still imperfect, overcame the apartness of the past and remade (or is remaking) itself under the signs of democracy, equality, and freedom. Rose joins many others in noting the waning purchase and coherence of this narrative in the face of undeniable empirical markers of a riven and disharmonious social fabric punctuated by persisting racialised distributions of power, vulnerability, and (quality of) life. On the other hand is a narrative of failure and delayed rupture – where the founding historical injustice is still in motion even if in disguise. This critical protocol insists on a present that is continuous with its past, where the division between past and present itself comes into interminable crisis, where the time of conquest and apartheid is a living presence, compounding and intensifying with the passage of time. My own contribution in what follows is not only to adduce theoretical support for this second historical sensibility but to argue more generally for serious and greater attentiveness to the problem of political temporality and historical time in South African legal, political and social theory and practice.1 To be sure, the insistence on the continuation and intensification of the founding violence of colonial-apartheid is not only a matter of analytic or theoretical import. It is profoundly ethical and political as well insofar as it bears upon a social order and a social bond still in need of repair, restoration, and reparation(s). The first stanza of Sindiwe Magona’s poem “The More Things Change” puts its finger on the urgency of the problem at hand: South Africa I have loved you all life long. But April 1994 is but a dim dream today. Twenty years is more than enough. I can’t stand the waiting. I can’t feed on empty promises. South Africa when will we end the internecine? (Magona 2011, 101) 1

For two different theoretical accounts of political temporality and historiography, see Scott (2004) and Bevernage (2012).

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Magona is placing in a poetic register a general sentiment or sensibility concerning the failures and limits of the post-1994 constitutional transition which we could radicalise further by way of an engagement with critical theoretical discourses. Central to critical theoretical conceptions of continuity is the notion of a “past” that actively trails, saturates and constitutes the present, calling attention to the material and symbolic reproduction of historical structures of domination (coloniality and white supremacy) and orders of violence. Among some provocative exemplars, one could selectively single out Ann Laura Stoler’s notion of “imperial durabilities” and “colonial recursions” (2016, 3), Lorenzo Veracini’s “settler-colonial present” (2015); George Lipsitz’s “changing same” (2018), Tshepo Madlingozi’s “neo-apartheid” (2017), Mvu Ngcoya’s “hyperapartheid” (2015), Grada Kilomba’s “the wound of the present is still the wound of the past” (2008, 95) as well as Jared Sexton’s framing of “persistence in and as permutation” (2011, 6). While advanced in different vocabularies and speaking to different geohistories, each of these framings of continuity assert a dynamic and uneven rather than static or auto-repetitive conception of historical inertia: it is less that nothing has changed or that everything is still the same, but rather that the prevailing paths and visions of change not only fail to reckon with and dismantle resilient historical formations but are also unable to satiate the capacious “freedom dreams” (Kelley 2002) of those oppressed dissident communities identifiable in shorthand as the “damned of the earth” (Fanon 1961). Put in yet other terms, the argument for continuity recognises changes and discontinuities in the form and mechanics but not the force of oppressive social orders (see Stoler 2016, 24–30). In this sense, these framings confound and resist any attempts at (easy) periodisation and historical closure while also staging the tension Michael Hanchard refers to between “black memory” and “state memory” (2008, 45–62). As Hanchard (2008, 46–49) explains, black popular memory is a “horizontally constituted” archive of collective experience whose major impulse is to keep alive and visible those repressed and denied histories and peoples across multiple spatio-temporal zones of the black life-world. State memory on the other hand is a “vertically constituted” project of ordering the nation through forgetting, erasure and strategic representations of an official past. Moreover, whereas black memory addresses itself to the historical catastrophes and entanglements signified largely under the sordid sign of race (Hanchard’s list includes racism, slavery, reparations, nationalism, anti-colonial struggle and migration as prominent themes), state memory is organised by the imperatives of unity and consensus. Black memory in other words is a long memory, a critical memory which neither forgives nor forgets as it seeks to “make claims in contemporary life about the relationship between present inequalities and past injustices” (Hanchard 2008, 48). In the South African context, the intergenerational interregnum unfolding across universities and public spaces is one expression of a new set of historical actors, political subjects and cultural workers definitively parting ways with the “sentimental education” (Spillers 2003, 93) engendered through “post-apartheid” mythologies and tropes of national unity and historical transcendence (the “rainbow nation”, “Madiba magic”, “truth and reconciliation”, “the best constitution in the world”, “a better life for all” to name a few). The overloaded signifier of “1994” has much to

140 Joel M Modiri answer for here of course, not only for its promulgation of a false and premature story of freedom and reconciliation but also for the general de-radicalisation of public consciousness and imagination on the problematic of race and liberation in particular. The critique from the view of black memory nonetheless goes beyond the falsity and reversals of the “1994 moment” and draws us towards the longue-durée of the foundational violence of colonial conquest, slavery, dispossession and racial capitalism and the ensuing social and psychic arrangements constituted, preserved and remade throughout South Africa’s long unfolding history. As I read them, then, the flashpoints of protest and currents of dissent characterising recent South African history are symptomatic of a larger instability in the coherence and possibility of the very idea of “South Africa” as a political community and social order. We are reminded that “South Africa” as political, social and psychic-discursive territory finds its beginnings in the constitutive exclusion of blackness and Black people from human community (see Magubane 1996). Speaking of continuity, endurance, and persistence at this level then suggests that this founding of South Africa as a racial and racist polity has installed a political ontology and political economy of conquest at the level of material structures of power, levers of human valuation and dominant ideologies which did not come to an end with the formal abolition of apartheid but rather underwent an evolutionary adjustment and reorganisation of its logics and predicates (see Modiri 2018; Madlingozi 2017). In this figuration of South Africa’s political temporality, the injuries and injustices of colonial-apartheid do not fade, diminish or decline with the passage of time; but rather increase, accumulate and compound (see Westley 2005, 85) – deepening rather than relaxing the founding antagonism. This temporal condition presents us all with the makings of a veritable social and conceptual upheaval for which an imaginative and honest reckoning is the only way out. The compelling refrain (“this is really not working”) of Petrus Brink which Rose recalls in her essay is more vividly reiterated by Napo Masheane in her poem “South Africa (You’ve Lied to Me)”: South Africa I listen to your unfinished prayer I see how your dreams have nowhere to land I see how they are stuck inside matchbox shacks How they hang on washing lines behind big fences South Africa how can you be a third and first world Divided only by the tongue? (Masheane 2011, 118)

II The scene of post-1994 South Africa that Rose sketches under the title of “The Legacy” is one overwrought by the unbearable weight of its history and present

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of ongoing racial unfreedom and non-belonging. But Rose is deploying the notion of legacy in two interconnected senses: The first sense I have discussed so far relates to the still-fractured South African social order, the continuation, endurance and intensification of colonial-apartheid power relations and affects (parenthetically, one cannot shake the reservation that “legacy” seems a rather tepid formulation to capture what is at stake, gesturing as it does towards a weak notion of continuity associated with terms such as remnants, leftovers, loose ends and dust clearing). The second reference to legacy is more powerfully subversive of teleological accounts of temporality. Here, legacy invokes the inheritance of the dreams, the nightmares, the labours and the losses of our ancestors and elders, the reclaiming of anti-colonial, black radical, feminist and queer political and intellectual traditions of previous generations to initiate new struggles and new inquiries. This second sense of legacy is profoundly tied to the onto-epistemic mission of the Black radical tradition in the specific sense formulated by Cedric Robinson. In his pathbreaking tome, Black Marxism (1983), Robinson reroutes the material, social and ideological foundations of the Black radical tradition away from Western radicalism and back to African history, culture and experience (Robinson 1983, 112, 189). In his account of the epistemological grounds of this tradition, Robinson isolates the primacy it accords to the metaphysical over the material; the priority given to “structures of the mind” (ideology, consciousness and also the “supernatural, sacred and poetic”), as the vital element of the tradition’s historical articulation (Robinson 1983, 168–170). As he describes the core onto-epistemic protocol of the Black radical tradition: “The renunciation of actual being for historical being; the preservation of the ontological totality granted by a metaphysical system that had never allowed for property in either the physical, philosophical, temporal, legal, social, or psychic senses” (Robinson 1983, 168). This understanding of the historical fortunes and struggles of Black people calls attention to the emplotment of an insurgent historical agency (until now defamed in the discourses of the Master as an improper historical subject – “savage”, “inferior”, “criminal”) into a long line and memory of living and living-dead forebears. By taking “historical” rather than “actual” being as the focal point of the revolutionary horizon and by reading liberation struggles in terms of the preservation of the “ontological totality” of a natal community, we are introduced to a concrete collective being and collective consciousness that is being sustained through time, across the generations, by its progeny. This in turn displaces the presumed finality of death, upsets the conceits of presentism and linear time and also disputes both the unified and deconstructed Subjects of Western thought. Here is Robinson again at greater length on the foundations, origins and horizons of the Black radical tradition: [I]t was the ability to conserve their native consciousness of the world from alien intrusion, the ability to imaginatively re-create a precedent metaphysic while being subjected to enslavement, racial domination, and repression. This was the raw material of the Black radical tradition, the values, ideas,

142 Joel M Modiri conceptions, and constructions of reality from which resistance was manufactured. … But it was the materials constructed from a shared philosophy developed in the African past and transmitted as culture, from which revolutionary consciousness was realized and the ideology of struggle formed. (Robinson 1983, 309) For Robinson, the Black radical tradition inscribes a historical sensibility and cosmology “informed by the Africanity of our consciousness” that is animated by an ongoing protest against the inhumane racialist transgressions of Western civilisation against Black personality and its kin throughout the “Global South” (Robinson 1983, 308). The Black radical tradition’s long-standing repudiation of assimilationist visions and Eurocentric frameworks of “freedom” as well as its claim to liberation(s) beyond and against mere “economic empowerment” and “representivity” within a liberal capitalist order count among the key positions emerging from this tradition of protest. Long denounced by Kwame Nkrumah and Frantz Fanon among others as “neocolonialism”, the specious conversion of the pariah and non-being into the figure of consumer, celebrity, CEO, millionaire or, in a word, “the first Black…” not only degrades the meaning of liberation, but also offends the historical Spirit of the revolutionary traditions of African and Africandescended peoples. In radical contrast, an entire re-making of the social and symbolic order and the fashioning of new subjectivities and relations is the ceaseless mandate that the Black radical tradition, its architects and actors, has taken up over the centuries as its regulative ideal and historical mission. There is an umbilical connection here with what Mogobe Ramose has outlined as a key pillar of an African understanding of law (Ramose 2003, 572) or what he elsewhere calls an ubuntu conception of law (Ramose 2001). Taking a position against the doctrine of extinctive prescription, Ramose explains that African law holds that “molato ga o bole”, meaning that a debt, feud, injury or dispute does not expire with the passage of time (Ramose 2001). Rather, until and unless equilibrium and harmony by way of redress and restoration have been established, the historical injustice shall remain the basic and fundamental problem. The central occasion for Ramose’s challenge is what he has long pointed to as the “constitutionalisation of injustice” set in motion by the democratisation process in 1990s South Africa (Ramose 2003, 573). In this regard, Ramose has offered to a new generation of oppositional intellectuals a conceptual apparatus with which to name and see the silent political and juridical scandal of the putatively “new South Africa” – namely, the problem that the constitutional transition and the constitution itself are predicated upon a faulty ethical, philosophical and material basis which is ultimately consistent with the maintenance of the historical results of colonial conquest and its regimes of social, economic, cultural, and epistemic violence (see also Ramose 2007 and Dladla 2018). From this view, Rose’s co-location of “1994” with the words “radical” and “revolutionary” strikes this reader as an untenable conflation that is markedly out of place in the overall emotive topography of her essay and the interlocutors it engages.

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III “What does it mean to defend the dead? To tend to the Black dead and dying: to tend to the Black person, to Black people, always living in the push toward our death? It means work.” (Sharpe 2016, 10, my emphasis). These two senses or articulations of “legacy” (one concerned with the endurance and persistence of colonial-apartheid and the other with the ontological and cosmological primacy accorded to historical being and to the living-dead) come together in the question of political responsibility and political action and fidelity to ongoing struggles for justice and liberation. Avery Gordon reflects that the call to reckon with the ghost binds haunting to futurity (Gordon 2011). Gordon posits what she calls an “emergent rather than fatalistic conception of haunting” distinguished by its production of a “something-to-be-done” (Gordon 2011, 2). Whereas haunting is conventionally treated as “aberrant mourning, traumatic paralysis or dissociative repetition” (Gordon 2011, 3), an emergent conception of haunting yields a “socio-political-psychological state when something else or something different from before, feels like it must be done, and prompts a something-to-be-done” (Gordon 2011, 2–3). This “something-to-be-done” also carries an immanent radicalisation and a certain urgency to move “towards eliminating the conditions that produce the haunting in the first place” (Gordon 2011, 5). Gordon further posits that haunting is also a “critical analytical moment”, creating “conditions that demand re-narrativisation” (Gordon 2011, 3). Gordon’s “emergent” conception of haunting adds a diacritical point here by gesturing towards a way of thinking about continuity that does not simply register traumatogenic returns or archaic repetitions but rather marks a historical and social condition of openness to historical and as-yet-unknown alternatives to a present experienced as unliveable. These alternatives go by multiple names – “free higher education”, “economic freedom in our lifetime”, Black Lives Matter, decolonisation, liberation, abolition – but they are united by their re-articulation of historical demands that cannot be redressed by a logic of reform or a narrative of redemption. It is also no accident but an effect of the poetry of historical movement that the contemporary elaboration of these alternatives proceeds by way of a philopraxis that brings the living and the living-dead into presence in the same field of political and intellectual signification and conversation. We need not look past the risks, fissures, and limits of earlier iterations of these political movements (anticolonial (inter-) nationalism, socialism and black radicalism in particular) to take seriously the ethical and political challenges being posed by these experiments in “worldmaking” and their espousal of an absolute, which is to say uncompromising, principle of nondomination as the basic term of a renewed social order and human relations (see Getachew 2019, 2). For those of us called to the vocation of scholar, teacher and intellectual located at the borders and “undercommons” (Harney and Moten 2013) of the University, what could this irruption of radical imaginaries now circulating South African and global discourses mean specifically for oppositional scholarly practice? If one speculatively ventured an answer, one might derive the following topics and

144 Joel M Modiri trajectories in the unravelling and reimagining of the canonical knowledge practices and modes of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences (and possibly beyond): 1

2

3

4

5

The challenge to face up to the interminable contradictions thrown up by the accumulation of a multi-century history now laid bare by its many empirical referents (antiblack social relations, femicidal gendered practices, crushing socio-economic suffering, cultural imperialism) might invite greater self-awareness and courage across the colour-line relating to the epistemic distortions arising from historical-social dominance on the one hand and the exigency of reclaiming intellectual sovereignty on the other; Attentiveness to the materiality of ongoing and repressed pasts may put pause on optimistic and redemptive analytical orthodoxies (non-racialism, human rights, liberal universalism, cosmopolitanism, neutrality, objectivity; historicism) and draw out of self-identified critical scholars the vulnerability and labour required to respond to the epistemic gaps and archival aporias resulting from the “fall” of the dominant episteme (in a word, whiteness and its cradle, Europe); The incredible and “unthinkable” vastness of the African and Black archives, here and in diaspora, may come to be unleashed in their full revelatory power taking shape as both critical-negative incisions and exposures but also emancipatory reconstructions of institutions, disciplines, canons, methods, and pedagogies; The fraught relationship between theory and practice may acquire greater clarification even if it remains unresolved in the final instance as the domains of scholarship and of activism broker a productive tension conducive to the elaboration of a two-fold programme for the radicalisation of public consciousness and the general “trans-substantiation” of the entire social and psychic order; Through the invocation of a long history of conquest as the foundational and basic problem of (in)justice, a comprehensive and ambitious interrogation of the name, historical formation and polity of “South Africa” and its ethical and political legitimacy may become once more legible and audible in the space of discursive possibilities.

To turn again to his teachings, Ramose invokes the title of Don Mattera’s book Memory is the Weapon (Mattera 2009) in an argument, following Congolese theologian Benezet Bujo, against a “memoryless” knowledge (Ramose 2019, 64). Focusing specifically on philosophy in its broadest sense, Ramose declares as the title of his paper that “a philosophy without memory cannot abolish slavery” (Ramose 2019, 60). Ramose develops this argument as part of a critique of a social morality that conceals and suppresses historical truth (Ramose 2019, 60). The suppression of historical truth is evident in the fact that “History is ‘his-history’” and that this partial account of the human condition derived from Western civilisation’s subjugation of the rest of the world is “yet to be our story” (Ramose 2019, 62). Thus for Ramose, a

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remembering philosophy or a “philosophy of memory” is an ethical necessity for Africa. As he muses further: [A]n African philosophy of and with memory is a philosophy that remembers pre-colonial Africa as a significant dimension of the contemporary community of the peoples of Africa and the peoples of Africa in the diaspora … Furthermore, an African philosophy of and with memory is a philosophy that takes the trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonization seriously as a means to recognize and respect the martyrs of freedom for the African peoples on the one hand, and to interrogate the meaning of that freedom in the present existential conditions on the other (Ramose 2019, 64). In these passages, Ramose also returns to the connection between epistemic justice (a history retold on the terms of African and African-descended peoples) and historical and social justice more broadly. Indeed, Ramose postulates that a philosophy of memory (what he comes to call a “memorial philosophy”) is a precondition for any just future. He gestures towards an even longer sense of memory and history, of a world before European colonization and enslavement, a knowledge of freedom that animates the continuing struggles for black liberation across the world. Yet a philosophy of memory for Ramose has its sights set on the concrete question of freedom today. And in a way, the question of what does it mean to be free relates to the question in the epigraph of this section: “what does it mean to defend the dead?”. Christina Sharpe aptly provides one answer to this question (“It means work”) but I would add another: It means to continually refuse to accept the permanence and irreversibility of the historical results of settler-colonialism and white supremacy. Through this refusal, the possibility of giving South Africa an altogether different “name” may be brought into being. Lebo Mashile’s poem “The Dead Living” addresses, in the opening of each stanza, four provocations rendering “South Africa” a problem for and of thought: South Africa You do not have a name … South Africa Can you hear the song of the dead … South Africa Your aspirations asphyxiate me … South Africa The dead do not die. (Mashile 2011, 120–121)

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IV These reflections attempt a conversation with Rose’s thinking on legacy in the historical, socio-political and psychic life of the place imposed on its native inhabitants as “South Africa”, while also thinking against the limits of that notion, disassembling it from the angle of black critique and black memory. Saidiya Hartman’s (2007) notion of “the afterlife” stands out from this view as carrying the imaginative depth for holding the work undertaken here as it brings together continuity and memory, past and present, life and death, historical time and political futurity. Formulated in the context of racial slavery and global anti-blackness, “the afterlife” indexes “a type of living on that survives after a type of death” (Sexton 2012), a realm in which an essential aspect of the subject or entity’s identity and consciousness continue to reside after the apparent death of the body of that subject or entity. “The afterlife” names the violent structures and ruined social bonds created and sedimented by a centuries-old political ontology and political economy that continue to imperil and devalue blackness and black lives (Hartman 2007, 6). It confirms that “then and now coexist: we are coeval with the dead” (Hartman 2002; 759). Crucially, the concept, term and idea of “the afterlife” derives its narrative energies and discursive intuition from critical race theory’s insight that economies of racial power reinvent themselves rather than terminate in temporal and political shifts. It also represents a black popular sensibility arising from the daily experience of the re-inscription and intractability of the legal, political, cultural, affective, psychic, epistemic and aesthetic structures of colonial-apartheid at the inter-subjective and structural levels. In the afterlife of colonial-apartheid, settler-colonialism (unfolding in earnest from 1652) and the negotiated settlement (consolidated in 1994) assume a disturbing unity as points of historical correlation rather than opposition. In “the afterlife”, we no longer have access to the conceits and illusions of a reconciled, non-racial and liberated South Africa that “belongs to all who live in it”. In “the afterlife”, the centuries-old African encounter with European colonialists echoes out incessantly into the present and lands its blows on the bodies and minds of this living generation as it did previous generations with no signs that it will spare those yet to come. Under such radically non-ideal circumstances, no ending could ever be enough.

References Armah, Ayi Kwei. 1969. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. London: Heineman. Bevernage, Berber. 2012. History, Memory and State-Sponsored Violence: Time and Justice. New York: Routledge. Dladla, Ndumiso. 2018. “The Liberation of History and the End of South Africa: Some Notes Towards an Azanian Historiography in Africa, South.” South African Journal on Human Rights 34(3): 415–440. Fanon, Frantz. 1961. Les Damnés De La Terre. Paris: Maspero.

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Getachew, Adom. 2019. Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gordon, Avery F. 2011. “Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity.” borderlands 10(2): 1–21. Hanchard, Michael. 2008. “Black Memory versus State Memory: Notes Toward a Method.” Small Axe 12(2): 45–62. Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions. Hartman, Saidiya. 2002. “The Time of Slavery.” South Atlantic Quarterly 10(4): 757–777. Hartman, Saidiya. 2007. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kelley, Robin. 2002. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical imagination. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Kilomba, Grada. 2008. Plantation Memories: Episodes of Everyday Racism. Munster: Unrast Verlag. Lipsitz, George. 2018. “The Changing Same.” Social Identities 24(1): 16–20. Madlingozi, Tshepo. 2017. “Social Justice in a Time of Neo-apartheid Constitutionalism: Critiquing the Antiblack Economy of Recognition, Integration and Distribution.” Stellenbosch Law Review 28: 123–147. Magona, Sindiwe. 2011. “The More Things Change.” In Letter to South Africa: Poets Calling the State to Order, edited by Various South African Poets, 101–104. Cape Town: Umuzi. Magubane, Bernard. 1996. The Making of a Racist State: British Imperialism and Union of South Africa 1875–1910. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Masheane, Napo. 2011. “South Africa (You’ve Lied To Me).” In Letter to South Africa: Poets Calling the State to Order, edited by Various South African Poets, 117–119. Cape Town: Umuzi. Mashile, Lebogang. 2011. “The Dead Living.” In Letter to South Africa: Poets Calling the State to Order, edited by Various South African Poets, 120–121. Cape Town: Umuzi. Mattera, Don. 2009. Memory is the Weapon. Grant Park, Johannesburg: African Perspectives Publishing. Modiri, Joel M. 2018. “Conquest and Constitutionalism: First Thoughts on an Alternative Jurisprudence.” South African Journal on Human Rights 34(3): 300–325. Ngcoya, Mvu. 2015. “Hyperapartheid.” Journal of Narrative Politics 2(1): 37–46. Ramose, Mogobe B. 2019. “A Philosophy Without Memory Cannot Abolish Slavery: On Epistemic Justice in South Africa.” In Debating African Philosophy. Perspectives on Identity, Decolonial Ethics and Comparative Philosophy, edited by George Hull, 60–72. Oxon: Routledge. Ramose, Mogobe B. 2001. “An African Perspective on Justice and Race.” Polylog. http://them.polylog.org/3/frm-en.htm. Ramose, Mogobe B. 2003. “I Conquer, Therefore I am the Sovereign: Reflections Upon Sovereignty, Constitutionalism and Democracy in Zimbabwe and South Africa.” In The African Philosophy Reader 2 ed, edited by P.H. Coetzee and A.P.J Roux, 543–589. London: Routledge. Ramose, Mogobe B. 2007. “In Memoriam: Sovereignty and the ‘New’ South Africa.” Griffith Law Review 16: 310–329. Robinson, Cedric. 1983. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

148 Joel M Modiri Scott, David. 2004. Conscripts of Modernity. The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sexton, Jared. 2012. “Ante-Anti-Blackness: Afterthoughts.” Lateral 1. https://csalateral. org/issue/1/ante-anti-blackness-afterthoughts-sexton/. Sexton, Jared. 2011. “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism.” InTensions 5: 1–47. Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Spillers, Hortense. 2003. Black, White and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2016. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Veracini, Lorenzo. 2015. The Settler Colonial Present. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Westley, Robert. 2005. “The Accursed Share: Genealogy, Temporality, and the Problem of Value in Black Reparations Discourse.” Representations 92: 81–116.

13 Protest, play and the failure of haunting in the land (sometimes) called Australia – a response to Jacqueline Rose Juliet Rogers When I read Jacqueline Rose, when I listen to her, the effect is always the same. I find myself inhabited by scenes, seemingly not related, but somehow always in conversation. The fragments of the world she has witnessed, in whatever form, come to haunt my waking thoughts. Pieces. Ideas. Moments. All searching for homes in the order of politics, in the order of law, in the order of language. They rest, unsettled. Not quite fitting in the locations I want to place them. In this dialogue, with the scenes she’s evoked, I am again haunted. What does it mean to be haunted? Reminding us of Freud’s thoughts, Rose tells us that as subjects we are always haunted. As she says a certain “transgenerational haunting” means there is no freedom of thought. We are limited by the industry of our desires, choreographed by the limits of our parents, our kin, and, not mutually exclusively by the world of politics and the politics of the world. Her world, the world Rose collects for this talk, is framed in the pains and struggles of South Africa. Largely. A world struggling to forget and remember all at once. In this world I have seen these struggles writ large, and writ in stone, on the wall of Freedom Park in Pretoria where the name of every person (who can be recalled) who ever fell in every battle is inscribed in stone, on stones that piece by piece become a wall; a wall that weaves around the gravel and the grass. Freedom Park. Folding in on itself and away again across the grounds, encircling a space with a flame. Nothing more. The wall and the flame try to do the remembering for all, perhaps to let the world forget, perhaps to give freedom to the minds of those who would otherwise have to do the remembering. At the conference when I first encountered South Africa – the conference in Bloemfontein that Rose refers to – I heard two young women speak passionately about the need to let themselves forget, to let others remember. These were the not-quite-not “born free” white women (I am unsure how they might classify themselves, if at all) but one of them, lamenting the overwhelming legacy of apartheid used an Afrikaans phrase to say that when she encountered people she wanted to “forget what I know about you and forget what I know about me”. It was a plea for freedom, of sorts. This young woman’s remark and Freedom Park are two types of answers to the questions Rose evokes. How do we think about the legacies of the past as they impact violently on the bodies of those who endured them? How do we think of DOI: 10.4324/9781003198581-13

150 Juliet Rogers these legacies for those who were not born? What should be remembered? What must the children of injured generations learn? What parts of memory must be inserted to ensure we know there is an imperative to remember, that, as she quotes Petrus Brink, it is known by all that “this is really not working”, and what must be allowed to be forgotten to prevent the “collapsing of space”, in the words of Dudu Ndlovu as a collapse of radical possibilities? In short, as she summons “what must be borne” such that it allows for the past to exist, and the future to be allowed a measure of…let us call it freedom? They are two types of paths toward something which resembles neither the “collapsing” nor the lack of recognition that something is really not working, both these paths require memory, even if, like the young women above, they must remember to forget. There is no freedom in memory, or in language, and the wall in Freedom Park, at least, is no palimpsest, however. It seems to strive to keep the memory in stone, while leaving a future-South-Africa to find the freedom to create new memories. A quality that supposedly inhabits the generations born after the fall of apartheid, the “born frees”. But, “to be born free is meaningless” Rose tells us. The palimpsest, like our minds, is “[O]ur most fiercely guarded self … peopled by those who have struck a chord, for better or worse, deep inside our hearts.” That striking, those people, that guardedness of ourselves, mean freedom is always wound around the wounds of our pasts (the words eerily overlapping as if to remind us of the binding nature of trauma). That freedom is only present in the cracks between the impacts, the names of the dead in the past, in walls or in flesh. Sometimes as pain, sometimes as anger, sometimes both, sometimes neither. The wall does what flesh cannot. It has no heart. It is stone. Cold and unchanging. But perhaps that is where the memories of war need to rest. Eventually. A wall of names cannot be erased by anything other than the violence of war. Or perhaps the violence of nature. Even the violence of art or/as graffiti can only point towards what was there before. And hence we need not tend to such words or walls, or wrench our hands and fists trying to remember things that we’ve trusted to the untrustworthy substance called memory. The wall, perhaps, does part of the work of mourning that Freud so definitively told us was preferable to melancholia; which seems to be without work. But I beg to differ, or I beg to be allowed to be unconvinced. Melancholia has its place. And this place, the place where melancholia can do its work, I venture, is in its presentation in law, if only as a memorial to the violence it has done. My conceited claim to such a seemingly pessimistic (albeit ambivalent) position is because I am a white, not quite not, Australian. And in that place – the place that Tim Rowse (1993, 129) calls, “the ongoing colonial encounter called ‘Australia’1” – melancholia also has a place, at least for a time. Because there is something in this country that cannot yet be completely lost and should not be lost. For white people, it haunts and it should haunt. There are some things that should not be worked through or laid to rest. There are some things that should not be forgotten. Not yet, because they must be remembered for their violence, for the violence of 1

That I will refer to as “australia” hereafter.

Protest, play and the failure of haunting 151 the chords they struck, the damage they did. They cannot be allowed to rest. In the words of Raimond Gaita (2019), sometimes we – the colonisers as “we” – fail to be haunted, and we should be. A failure that is no small violence. And that haunting, I venture, requires the industry of melancholia as a kind of stage for the violences of the past to be seen, to be witnessed, to be remembered. In this humble response to Jacqueline Rose’s evocative discussion of what she has titled, “The Legacy”, I want to use her thoughts and her gently laid out path to consider the questions of memory, of melancholia and of the political and personal failure of haunting that is the violence of colonial australia. A country and a colonial people that I believe remain (at least) 30 years behind South Africa in that country’s endeavours to be adequately haunted by what white people (for lack of a better name – see Hage (1998)) do and have done. Thirty years behind, but still in dialogue. Still puzzling over the moralities of an apartheid that white australia enjoyed and continues to enjoy. In thinking on this work of haunting I cannot help but be wounded, in the most important of ways, by the current blacklivesmatter protests, renewed by the killing of George Floyd in the US and renewing protests over what are called deaths in custody in australia – as the persistent murdering of Indigenous men, women and non-binary people in colonial prisons. I will draw on Indigenous scholars in Australia who have informed my understandings of the distinct relations of memory and of haunting that plague western thought and colonise the lawful spaces of encounter with Indigenous peoples, and I will remember my times in South Africa and draw on the work of scholars from that place who have helped me remain haunted. And always, I rely on Freud and Lacan.

Part I – the body that remembers In a recent public lecture titled “Sleepwalking through Privilege and Oppression?” Raimond Gaita (2019) commented on the experience of his childhood in Australia. A young boy with migrant parents, one of whom would not endure the pains of her own experiences and died at her own hand. Gaita’s gentle and poignant memoir, Romulus My Father (1998), for which he is well known in Australia and beyond because of its beauty, its success as a book and then as a major film, documents the pains and also the intense joys of his youth. It is set, however, on Indigenous land, as was his childhood. A land that has the quality of another character, or even another protagonist in his book and beyond. His depiction of the land is evocative and it is alive, but alive with what? When Gaita spoke of this work and of his return to this country in recent times, he spoke of having not been aware of the presence of Indigenous people on the land, of not having been aware of how they were treated, how they were persecuted, how they were all but extinguished in the practices and policies of consecutive governments in australia. Speaking of his return to that land he said, “I failed to be haunted”. The failure of haunting is a feature or a symptom of colonial settler states, and their inhabitants. In my less than adequate time and experience of South Africa I would say that this might be a symptom of white South Africa also. The reactions to the Home for All campaign, started by a number of prominent white South

152 Juliet Rogers Africans in the post TRC era – as a campaign to extend the work of the TRC into equity of resources – is testimony to this. 1000 white people signed on to Home for All. One could suggest that the rest of the 8 percent (the number of the population that might be called “white”) failed to be haunted by the legacy of apartheid. Understanding this failure to be haunted, in psychoanalytic terms, as Rose does, requires understanding the political and legal nature of transgenerational haunting in colonial states. And Freud can hold our clammy, anxious hands as we walk this path, at least part of the way. Haunting first requires loss, or rather a return of that which was believed to be lost. The ethereal, ghostly presence of what was pushed aside, destroyed or murdered; “things hard to recount or even to remember, the results of a violence that holds an unrelenting grip on memory yet is deemed unspeakable” as Gabriele Schwab (2010, 1), in her discussion of the Holocaust, so helpfully captures. What makes them hard to recount or even to remember, as Freud tells us, is guilt. Guilt at what we had or have done and continue to do in the present. In the ongoing colonial encounter called Australia, the guilt of colonisation, the guilt for efforts at extermination, and the guilt over present destruction, is excruciating, but important. Guilt repeats upon us and law – as policy and policing – endeavours to secure this repetition. In Lacan’s terms it repeats because one “can never be careful enough” (1977, 61). And this careful repetition can be violent indeed. As I write, the killing of George Floyd in the US has produced the burning of the streets of Washington DC and beyond, and that smoke has filled and fired the voices of protestors in cities in Australia, where so many Black people die at the hands of the state – police and policies in similar measure. Protest cannot expunge guilt, but the industry of anger can relieve it for a moment, as a kind of act of vengeance on the perpetrating state. That is, protest can relieve the violence of the care of repetition of policy (see Razack 2015) and policing, if only for a moment. These protests are not the “collapse” that Rose remains alert to, but a clear indication that “things are not working” in australia, as in South Africa and in most posts that remain of the (post)colonial empire. Protest is the symptom that provides the path to that diagnoses. Protest speaks. For whatever else it may be, it is voice. Guilt, however, despite the protest, is caught in Lacanian terms, in the shadows of the signifier. It cannot be eradicated by the careful repetition of state violences. Guilt endures. And perhaps it will never be protested or policed away. This is in part because it frames the terms of all possibilities of protest, in australia through the guilt of the colonial encounter. This encounter, that began the years of genocide and then the years of white benefits of that genocide (see Wolfe (2014)), is a kind of text-book reproduction of the work of the primal horde in Freud’s discussion of “Group Psychology”, and it is in this resonance that we can find some dialogue with law as a practice of haunting, and indeed of melancholia. In Freud’s myth (and we must remember that it is his myth)2 the killing of the primal father, he who had access to all, ownership of all and was the only one to exercise desire in the horde, is said to result in a guilt that would demand the 2

I have discussed the particular cultural inclinations of the “myth of the primal horde” and its racial/racist resonance that defy its universal application in Rogers (2017).

Protest, play and the failure of haunting 153 institution of law. Law, being the codification of guilt as a limiting of the violent desires to steal from, to dominate, to destroy others. In Freud’s terms we cannot feel otherwise: Homini Homo Lupus (1961, 111). In Australia the British invasion in 1788 that would become the (unsuccessful) genocide of Indigenous peoples (Moses 2004; Moreton-Robinson 2000) and the (unsuccessful) attempts to decimate Indigenous nations in that land (Pascoe 2014; Watson 2014), would result in the reification and – like Freud’s primal father3 – the deification of “australian law”. As Dorsett and McVeigh document so well, australian law would become “just so”; as australian law in which a question of the violence of origin or the inconsistencies of doctrine would be erased in memory (Dorsett and McVeigh 2002; Rush 1997; Rogers 2017). Invasion, as “structure not event” (in Patrick Wolfe’s well-rehearsed terms), and then colonisation as jurisdiction, rendered a circular form of legitimacy that foreclosed on the memory of law’s origins; producing both a psychotic kind of unity of law over the land, and a particular form of memory, a definitive collapse of any kind of freedom or what I will call play, between the law as knowledge (objet petit a in Lacan’s terms, 2007) and the land as relation (Watson 2014). It is this collapse of signification that will return us to Rose’s questions: “What do we not want to know about the past? What do we not want to know about ourselves?” But crucially, “… what both can, and cannot, be borne?” In any attention to the exercise of jurisdiction over land, over bodies, over memory, there are questions of politics worthy of the name. These are questions of the imperative to bear the play of signification that does not allow for a determination of what the land means, and who the people upon it, are. In the context of australia, memory is borne in flesh, and in the bodies of the dead (Rush 1997) as one effort to render the law and the invader–Indigenous relationship inanimate. Memory in this form employs and exploits those that were killed in the invasion and its subsequent industries in a “failure of haunting” of the white people who inhabit the terrain of australian law. Memory in australia is thus not etched in stone, it is resignified in order to recode the meaning of that stone, or, that land. And as Indigenous people know well, there is no shifting that meaning without protest. Many, many years of protest. In psychoanalytic terms, the guilt of invasion qua genocide, as the guilt of any desire that produces murder – as per the primal horde – choreographs the trajectory of loss and longing always in the proximity of procurement and of prohibition. The presence of Indigenous people, however, is a reminder and an accusation of what desire can do, of what procurement has done.4 The accusation, that is the presence 3 4

“the primal father was not yet immortal, as he later became by deification” Freud (1920, 124). As I write this, I think of the many earlier Australian films that positioned the haunting presence of a black Indigenous man – usually the celebrated actor David Gulpillil – at the edge of the central scene, permeating the landscape and at times the protagonist with his “black ways”. In more recent films – Samson and Delilah (2009) being the most prominent – the figures of Indigenous young people, surviving the decimation of land and law, stands as accusation to white australia as necessary to bear.

154 Juliet Rogers of Indigenous people and of Indigenous law, must be borne. And, as I will explain, it is helpfully borne through a kind melancholia that does not dissipate or get worked through as mourning. It must remain as a haunting. To be haunted, politically and legally, is an industry of melancholia, I believe, and not of mourning. Mourning, Freud has told us, requires that “[e]ach single one of the memories and expectations is brought up and hyper-cathected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it” (1917, 244–245). This is the activity one would recommend to a person who has lost someone, or some sense of themselves. The old life and self must be mourned, Freud tells us, or the subject will experience an “hallucinatory wishful psychosis”, which does not sound appealing at all! In one sense we can say that this industry of hyper-cathexis is an important part of a coloniser’s process. To realise that they/we were not the “settlers”, the “pilgrims”, the “saviours” and later the “protectors” who came upon a distant land and civilised it for the better. To grieve their goodness is important for the possibilities of building any kind of relationship with others. I would concur with other scholars that any individual identity fixation on oneself as “good” must be mourned in the face of this thing we call history, that must sometimes be relied upon. Scholars writing on the importance of saying “sorry” for the crimes of the past in nations described as Australia, Canada, the US and South Africa, recommend such a mourning process for the goodness of western imperialist projects and their genocidal outcomes.5 Guilt, they say, is not helpful. But, from one point of valency, I disagree. Guilt and melancholia are bedfellows, and they are also the foundations for haunting. They are both brittle, inflexible, stone-like. Guilt is a legal category which denotes, at least in western legal terms, responsibility. And mourning is a necessary relinquishing – a detachment of the libido – from the lost object; let us call that lost object “australia”. As Freud notes of the successful process of mourning: “[n]ormally, respect for reality gains the day.” But, reality gains the day?! Who would want that? How awful for those for whom that reality is dispossession, disenfranchisement, overpolicing, daily persecution and death. Protest, and particularly protest of black deaths in custody – framed in the energies of the George Floyd protests and blacklivesmatter – is precisely a protesting of that reality. As Gaita has helpfully noted, if there is to be a true reckoning with the invasion of “australia” then perhaps there can be no “australia” at all. To understand the need to disrupt reality in a psychoanalytic sense I want to juxtapose Freud’s veneration of a particular reality with Dori Laub’s (1992, 69) description and proscription for a recovery from traumatic events: a therapeutic process – …of re-externalising the event – has to be set in motion. This … can occur and take effect only when one can articulate and transmit the story, … Telling thus entails a reassertion of the hegemony 5

Others will say that this very ‘goodness’ is the problem itself. See Muldoon (2017) and Ahmed (2004) for a thoughtful discussion on this problematic in the context of Australia.

Protest, play and the failure of haunting 155 of reality and a re-externalization of the evil that affected and contaminated the trauma victim. The important components to this re-externalisation is the already receptive form of a “hegemony of reality”. Without this, the story can be told – everyone can “utter” as Gayatri Spivak (1996) has noted – but the story cannot be transmitted (not everyone can “speak”). Transmission requires the conditions for receipt. It is the creation of these conditions that, one could argue, all protest – RhodesMustFall, blacklivesmatter, #metoo – are reaching for, or demanding. And violence – including violent protest – as psychoanalysis can readily explain, is the effort to create reality – a particular reality – in another; including in a regime.

Part II – the play of reality Reality’s reassertion is the project of protest as revolution, it is not the project of reform. But I do not want to go so far as to glamorise the “hallucinatory wishful psychosis” that Freud saw as the potential symptom of the melancholic. I want to take protest gestures to the brink of a diagnosis of melancholia and just tip them over a little, not too far, by bringing protest, melancholia and haunting into dialogue with law and memory. Let’s return to guilt and law in Australia, via Freud. In this particular colonial encounter the efforts to kill off Indigenous people, by white people (put simply), required the instantiation of law. Not because the land required law (it already had that and now this is well documented for white folk – Pascoe 2014, Watson 2014) but because the colonisers found themselves in a state of nature in which the only salvation was sovereignty, Hobbesian sovereignty – as Schmitt (1996, 97) describes “fear brought atomized individuals together, a spark of reason flashed, and a consensus about security emerged”, and there is little more frightening to white colonisers than a veritable heart of darkness filled with desert and the desires of unknown others. The problem with colonisation, however, is that the fear is interminable when the genocide fails. Not fear of retribution6 but fear of what we can do to each other. This is emphasised or we could say somatised in the desperation to fortify the body of the nation as unified (“to make [insert colonial state here] great again!”). Or as Lacan wryly exposes “the energy we put into all being brothers [after the killing of the primal father] very clearly proves that we are not brothers” (Lacan 2007, 114). Let us call this energy, the instantiation of the nation, and let us call the reality that we are not brothers, protest. How then, as Rose prompts us, do we contemplate a space between the “collapse” of dialogue and the realisation that “this is not working” through protest? Or how can protest, which provokes the guilt of the killing of the 6

Although there is certainly that – being “forced in the sea” being one narrative in South Africa, and others – like the constant reference to “what happened in Zimbabwe to whites” – resonating more with the primal scene.

156 Juliet Rogers primal father, be borne? I want to now think on the play of protest as a mechanism of (libidinal) detachment and (libidinal) attachment at the same time. That is, protest as a destruction of the “respect for [the old] reality” and a re-enactment of the loss of the nation. I will think on this through the idea of protest as play, in the psychoanalytic sense of play as re-enactment, repetition and working through. On the 6 June 2020 protestors took to the streets of capital cities in australia in the tens of thousands. They were protesting the death of George Floyd in the US, they were protesting with blacklivesmatter in the US, and for blacklivesmatter in australia, and they were protesting because of the resonance of both George Floyd’s death and because the call for black lives to matter in australia is painfully resonant. Indigenous people die in prisons or at the hands of police, and at the hands of policy and practice in australia in alarming numbers (Cunneen 2006; Aitkinson 2002; Watson 2014). The response to the protests was violent at every level. First the organisers were refused permission in several states on the grounds of “public health” (COVID related issues). Then the protests evoked a massive police presence. Adorned in full riot gear – batons and shields – police surrounded and pushed protestors back into walls, stations and doorways. In short, white people got treated like black people, for a moment. Or the police-state – that black people face every day – reared its head and performed the violence of everyday state practices for Indigenous people. In short, it put police and state oppression on the stage. Let’s call the practices of the police in these moments a performance of a “hallucinatory wishful psychosis” by the state. As if the problem of protest over black deaths in custody was a law and order problem, and not a political, historical and jurisdictional legitimacy effect, the perpetration and guilt for which the state must reckon. I do not suggest that that psychosis was remotely disturbed by the presence of protestors, but that what was disturbed was any fantasy on the part of white protestors (including those that stayed home for COVID health concerns), that the state would act otherwise when faced with the blackness of its history (in every sense). That is, what white people protesting could see (and briefly experience) was that the brotherhood of law, was particular, convenient, arbitrary and violent. This was melancholia for the unification of genocidal white law, staged for all to see.7 Any experience of police repression was no enduring reality for white protestors – they could go home and feel that the police supported them in every other way (if the need arose to call for help individually). But it was a re-enactment, a performance, a play whereby the very efforts of the state to be careful enough to suture the state to the state of australia, as such, meant that the conditions for the production of so many deaths in custody could be witnessed.8 And 7

I have written before on the importance of the violence of a non-remorseful perpetrator being witnessed by an audience who does not know the realities of oppression, of state sanctioned violence and of torture. There are resonances here with the performance of state violence, witnessed as such. See Rogers (2016).

Protest, play and the failure of haunting 157 witnessing is the point here. For how else do we create the conditions to demand a change in the “hegemony of reality”, through which the stories of life and loss that plague colonial worlds and are etched on the bodies of those subject to this colonisation, can be transmitted, if not to be haunted, in the flesh, by what we witness? How else might the names of the dead be etched in stone if we do not first create the conditions for this memory as memorialising? How else might we remember not to forget? There are two paths to think on these questions, and I’ll conclude by evoking them both, with no conclusion. One is to contemplate Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s recollection, recalled by Rose (and here we are in layers of haunting), of the child in Mlungisi, and her play-acting of a necklacing. As Gobodo-Madikizela describes, it was a game, which “may well have been a way of transforming the unspoken memory of it into something more accessible and less fearful for the girls” (2016, 2), to allow its transmission in Laub’s terms. And this, indeed, is the work of play (as opposed to the work of theatre, perhaps) when it allows the star of the show to oscillate between roles. The girl performing the roles of victim, perpetrator, bystander, assistant, audience – herself ambivalent about the centrality of the action – in an already complex political scene of victim/perpetrator-on-victim/perpetrator violence, as one legacy of apartheid. This game stages just one scene of the violences of the past that, in Rose’s idiom, has struck a chord deep inside this girl’s heart. The other is best considered through the painful poem on the killings by the British Army in Derry on the 30 January 1972, in the event known as Bloody Sunday. The poem, ‘And I Wasn’t Even Born’ by Killian Mullen and Sharon Meenan (2008, 80) is a work of memory as repetition. I remember people happy and the confidence of that morning … I remember live fire. A pool of blood… I remember thirteen coffins. Black flags. I remember a young woman with an old face. The funerals. I remember my father crying hot angry tears. I remember the lies. And I wasn’t even born.

8

We could juxtapose this with the 2007 “apology” to the stolen generations by former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. This apology, this acknowledgment, which mentioned neither justice nor money, gave no indication of the violence of the contemporary state.

158 Juliet Rogers Here, in the poem and the game are two types of memory, both transgenerational, both etched in the experience of their narrator/protagonists. Both play with the possibility of truth, and the truth of memory. Both introduce a hallucinatory wishful psychosis as a lens over history. This then is the undermining of the careful significations of memory that suture reality to that of state narration. It is a reetching in the stone-like memory of the state. The second, perhaps more melancholic for reality than the first, but neither refusing to remember. Neither collapsing nor adhering to the functionality of the conditions of their production. In these linguistic and playful performances there is leverage, and for a brief moment we might call that the freedom to remember, as the freedom to be haunted. And this is a freedom that requires a capacity for transmission, or in other terms, a capacity for recognition that this [insert colonial state here] really is not working.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Aitkinson, Judy. 2002. Trauma Trails, Recreating Song Lines: The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia. Melbourne: Spinifex Press. Cunneen, Chris. 2006. “Racism, Discrimination and the Over-Representation of Indigenous People in the Criminal Justice System: Some Conceptual and Explanatory Issues”. Current Issues in Criminal Justice 17(3): 329–346. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 10345329.2006.12036363. Dorsett, Shaunnagh and Shaun McVeigh. 2002. “Just So: ‘The Law Which Governs Australia is Australian Law’”. Law and Critique 13: 289–309. https://doi.org/10.1023/ A:1021200520452. Freud, Sigmund. 1917. “Mourning and Melancholia”. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914–1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, translated and edited by James Strachey, 237–258. London: The Hogarth Press Limited. Freud, Sigmund. 1961. “Civilisation and its Discontents.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XXI, translated and edited by James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press Limited. Freud, Sigmund. 1920. “The Group and the Primal Horde.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XVIII. (1920–1922), Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, translated and edited by James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press Limited. Gaita, Raimond. 1998. Romulus, My Father. Melbourne: Text Publishing. Gaita, Raimond. 2019. “Sleepwalking Through Privilege and Oppression?” Public lecture delivered at Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, 18 September 2019. Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla, ed. 2016. “Introduction.” In Breaking Cycles of Repetition: A Global Dialogue on Historical Trauma and Memory. Toronto: Barbara Budrich Publishers. Hage, Ghassan. 1998. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in Multicultural Society. Sydney: Pluto Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1977. Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York, London: Norton & Company.

Protest, play and the failure of haunting 159 Lacan, Jacques. 2007. Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. New York, London: WW Norton & Company. Laub, Dori. 1992. “Bearing Witness”. In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. New York: Routledge. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2000. Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Aboriginal Women and White Feminism. Australia: University of Queensland Press. Moses, Dirk. 2004. Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian Society. New York: Berghahn Books. Muldoon, Paul. 2017. “A Reconciliation Most Desirable: Shame, Narcissism, Justice and Apology” International Political Science Review 38(2): 213–226. https://doi.org/10. 1177/0192512116641318. Mullan, Killian and Meenan, Sharon. 2008. “And I Wasn’t Even Born.” In Harrowing of the Heart: The Poetry of Bloody Sunday, edited by Julieann Campbell and Tom Herron, 80. Derry: Guildhall Press. Pascoe, Bruce. 2014. Dark Emu. Broome, Western Australia: Magabala Books. Razack, Sherene. 2015. Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody. Toronto, Buffalo and London: Toronto University Press. Rogers, Juliet B. 2017. “Is Psychoanalysis Universal? Politics, Desire, and Law in Colonial Contexts”. Political Psychology 38(4): 685–700. doi:10.1111/pops.12437. Rogers, Juliet B. 2016. “Rethinking Remorse’”. In Breaking Cycles of Transgenerational Trauma: A Global Dialogue on Historical Trauma and Memory, edited by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela. Toronto: Barbara Budrich Publishers. Rowse, Tim. 1993. After Mabo: Interpreting Indigenous Traditions. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Rush, Peter. 1997. “Deathbound Doctrine: Scenes of Murder and Its Inheritance.” Studies in Law, Politics and Society 16: 71–100. Schmitt, Carl. 1996. The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and the Failure of a Political Symbol, translated by George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Schwab, Gabriele. 2010. Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. New York: Columbia University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1996. “Interview”. In The Spivak Reader, edited by D. Landry and G. Maclean. New York: Routledge. Watson, Irene. 2014. Aboriginal Peoples, Colonialism and International Law: Raw Law. London: Routledge Glasshouse. Wolfe, Patrick. 2014. Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race. New York: Verso.

14 Afterword Jacqueline Rose

At the time of the student protests in South Africa, which is where this book begins, nobody was anticipating a global pandemic. Nor, I think, did anyone foresee that the crisis to follow would bring those protests so urgently back to the forefront of public consciousness. When African-American George Floyd was killed on the streets of Minneapolis in May 2020 by a white policeman who was filmed kneeling on his neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, Black Lives Matter took to the streets across the world. It was just one of many instances which put paid to the illusion – the split-second cherished belief – that the pandemic would be the great equaliser. Instead of which, the pre-existing racial and social fault-lines of the times, in their ugliest incarnation, were if anything being exposed more acutely than before. One of the most powerful moments following the killing was when UK protestors pulled down the statue of seventeenth-century slave-dealer Edward Colston, and dumped it in Bristol harbour. Colston’s wealth had played a key role in the prestige and prosperity which had allowed the city to flourish. By means of their act, the protestors were proclaiming that the legacy of slavery was unfinished; its tentacles still reached into the heartbeat, the embedded structures, the ongoing injustice of the modern world. The allusion to ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ was explicit. Weeks later, Oxford University students secured approval from the governors of Oriel College for the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes from the façade of the building. Two years before – modelling their protests on the South African example – they had failed to persuade them to do so. (The university has since refused to act on the governor’s decision.) In her famous study of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt describes how Rhodes propelled the British into the African continent, persuading the government that the “expansion and export of the instruments of violence was necessary to protect investments, and that such a policy was a holy duty of every national government” (Arendt 1979, 203). Rhodes believed the Anglo-Saxons were the “first” race, with the God-given right to rule the world. ‘“Expansion is everything,’” he once said, “‘I would annex the planets if I could”’ (Arendt 1979, 124). At a time of vicious resurgence of white racism, the fight over Cecil Rhodes and what he stood for shows no signs of abating. If anything, its political import has increased. “Not only is the cry for Rhodes to fall still necessary,” writes Victoria Collis-Buthelezi in the opening essay here, first delivered in response to the lecture I delivered at UCT in DOI: 10.4324/9781003198581-14

Afterword 161 2017, “It has itself now entered the annals of history. It is no longer a cry just of our present, but of our (albeit recent) past”. Which does not mean – far from it – that this key moment of resistance and political struggle can, any more than apartheid itself, be archived or relegated to the backwaters of history. What is the time of political agency? This is one of the questions that emerges from these powerful, often challenging essays. What moment are we living in historical time? Were the protests addressed to the past, towards an unresolved history, or are they better understood as existing in the urgency of the now? Is the issue an incomplete – or even as Joel Modiri suggests, a “still-born” – liberation that has betrayed its promise of an equal and non-racialised world? Are we always, and perhaps especially in relation to South Africa, dealing with what went before: “the unliveable histories of violence, oppression and dehumanisation without which the very idea of South Africa would not, could not exist”? Or, should we rather be pressing hard on the resistant present, staying in this “uncomfortable notreconciliation,” where a farmer can still say of his black workers: “‘they’ like to sit in the back of bakkies in extreme heat and in cages” – a statement, Buthelezi insists, which cannot be relegated as throwback to the farm but which, under the yoke of neo-liberalism, is to be found, “ever-present, in homes, on campuses, in offices.” Is the priority, in the teeth of such unabated anti-black racism, to take “hold of the current space/time of blackness … move into it, occupy it, in order to break the code”? In which case, the time we are living in is – or surely should be – “the here and now.” The past is a nightmare, the future too “precarious [a] continuum on which to set our hope.” As I read these essays, finding it harder and harder to come down on one side or the other, it started to feel as if this continuing struggle – perhaps any struggle – can only exist somewhere between these different modalities or interstices of political time; somewhere inside the future perfect tense of psychoanalysis – “what I would have been for what I am in the process of becoming” – which I evoke in the lecture and which is picked up by several of the contributions here. In the place, for example, of the “aftermath” where, with reference to the Granada revolution, Karin van Marle describes a present “stricken with immobility and pain and ruin,” and yet out of which something wholly unanticipated can be born. Or, “the beginning of after,” words which Pierre de Vos found himself typing into his keyboard as he sat in his university office while the campus protests raged outside his window – protests to which he had mostly given unwavering support, as he does in this moment once more. Or Saidya Hartman’s “afterlife”, cited by Modiri, a call to memory of racial slavery and global anti-blackness, “a type of living on that survives after a type of death.” Or the possibility, evoked with reference to the artistic energy of the Johannesburg Handspring Puppet Company by Judith Butler, “of world-making on the site of unthinkable massacre.” (Her essay is also called “Within the time of the aftermath”.) In each case, the emancipatory moment grows out of the horror it struggles to repudiate. Janus-faced, it looks back and forwards in time, echoing Walter Benjamin’s famous angel of history, face turned towards the past, as catastrophe piles “wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet” (Benjamin 1968, 259).

162 Jacqueline Rose Alerting the world to the extent of the wreckage, the protests could at the same time be seen as calling for a more hopeful realignment of the fragments of political time. “How” in the words of Benda Hofmeyr, “to engage with history so as to serve life?” For Jaco Barnard-Naudé who has made the dialogue of this book possible, Hamlet’s lament that “the time is out of joint” is the refrain of the protests and its commentators, and again in many of these essays. But with a crucial qualification. Hamlet suffered from a melancholic inability to act, which BarnardNaudé characterises as “Hamletism,” a trope all too often laid across the subjectivity of the black African by their colonial masters. It is the rejection by the protestors of that image – the black as inadequate, ineffective, disposable – which allowed them politically to seize the day. Seen in this light, the “disruptive power of protest” – the words typed by De Vos as the title of the essay he plans to write – becomes the de-colonial act, because of the force with which it repudiates the Western reading of the African mind. In Barnard-Naudé’s introductory reading, the agency of the protestors, their commitment to social justice, flies in the face of colonial attempts to subordinate black subjectivity to the (Shakespearean) protocols of Western thought, to “the full pernicious reach of colonial-apartheid power”. To put it at its most simple, faced with the disjointed unreason of the world, Hamlet could not act; the students revealed to the world that they can. Protest brings change. Efforts to suppress protest, as we have seen in America under Trump, in Hong Kong, Belarus, India and Brazil, to cite a few chilling examples, simply means that the revolt intensifies. The only other option for a state on the defensive – a state which Arendt would define as increasingly conscious of the illegitimacy of its own power – is a form of dictatorship which sanctions state violence in order to bring protests, however civil and peaceable, to an end (Soweto, Sharpeville) (see Arendt 1970, 50–54). The Rhodes Must Fall students were “alerting” the nation, to cite again the Black African woman with whom I found myself in conversation on the plane to Cape Town in March 2017. Their voices would surely be heard. To this extent, these essays bear witness to an at least partial success. As Sarah Nuttall describes, the statue was removed, Jameson Hall is now Sarah Baartman Hall, Senate House has been renamed Solomon Mahlangu House. Since 1994, there has been a significant state redistribution of funding to poorer schools. Some universities, notably in the North of the country, continue to be more or less out of the reach of all but the wealthiest students, but the student body at the University of Witwatersrand where Nuttall teaches is 85 percent black; workers are being insourced – a key demand of Rhodes Must Fall, and then Fees Must Fall – and they now have the option to send their children to the University. The University, she suggests, has become more “porous,” more receptive to what were previously seen as purely external matters which it did not fall upon the University to register, let alone redress. Today, universities are finding it harder and harder to fence themselves off from “the social in all its conflictual modes,” from hunger to sexual violence. All of which can be seen as steps towards the “redistributed University” which she has laid out as one of South Africa’s most urgent political tasks today (see Nuttall 2019 280–285). In one of this collection’s most optimistic essays, Lwando Scott describes how the formation of the Trans

Afterword 163 Collective at UCT put the question of LGBT+ rights firmly on the university and wider political agenda, challenging the dominance of the protests by “cis” black masculinities, making room for the “marginalised within the margin,” and irrevocably shifting the vocabulary of freedom (even if the naming of gender-neutral bathrooms on campus was, at the time, short lived). And yet … despite the sense of unstoppable momentum, the material disparities remain etched in bold across the nation (how to place queer and economic emancipation on the same level of urgency, give them their equal due, is one of the most pressing questions of the hour). Despite a partial redistribution, facilities in the schools are poor – less than half of pupils make it to the final grade – and the path from improved education into formal work still remains closed to the many. “Inequality not only remains; it reigns supreme,” writes Wahbie Long. Taking issue with my focus on the legacy of the past, Long lists the piled-up travesties of South Africa in the present: women, children, refugees and black men as the scapegoats for political anger, the rate of violent deaths in the country five times the world average, half a million rapes perpetrated against women and children each year, xenophobia on the rise. The gulf between legal equality and social inequality could not, he states, be “starker.” This in itself is an emotional tinder box as those worst affected by such a fraudulent dispensation become vulnerable to being shamed. “My reading”, Long states in an earlier essay, “is that Fallist rage originates in prior humiliations” (Long cited by Nuttall). Only 8 % of whites signed up to a campaign started after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in favour of extending its work into the re-distribution of resources. The rest of the population “that might be called ‘white’”, comments Juliet Rogers, “failed to be haunted by the legacy of apartheid.” Today, a shadow has fallen across 1994, tarred with the brush of historic, above all economic and social, compromise, from which all these tragedies have flowed. On the constitution, opinion remains split – between those who see it as a decolonial instrument born out of struggle, and those for whom, in failing to redistribute resources, it has, at least so far, failed to restore full humanity to all. Seen in this light, my use of the words “radical” and “revolutionary” with reference to the transformations of 1994, become, for Modiri “an untenable conflation.” As Achille Mbembe pointed out some while ago: “This is the only country on Earth in which a revolution took place which resulted in not one single oppressor losing anything” (Mbembe 2015). “Where,” asks Butler, in a lament that runs like a dark thread through all these essays, “is the equality, freedom and justice that was promised by the revolution?” To this extent, the collection is a tribute – whether subdued or enthusiastic – to the students’ ability to give voice to an ongoing crisis that needed, that still needs, to be heard. The point is not, however, states Modiri, that “nothing has changed or that everything is still the same.” “Rather,” he continues, “that the prevailing paths and visions of change not only fail to reckon with and dismantle resilient historical formations but are also unable to satiate the capacious ‘freedom dreams’ of those oppressed dissident communities identifiable in shorthand as the ‘damned of the earth’.” What is beyond doubt, and has if anything become clearer since the first

164 Jacqueline Rose euphoric moment of the protests in March 2015, is that these demands – these freedom dreams – cannot be contained either by “a logic of reform or a narrative of redemption.” Dreaming is key – also appearing throughout these essays as a refrain. The ruling elite, writes Leigh-Ann Naidoo, whose 2016 Ruth First Memorial lecture has been central to my understanding, “have lost the capacity to dream us, to move us, into a new time” (Naidoo 2016). We have to enter a new world of our own making, Judith Butler suggests, and only then return to this one more fully awake and also, “more fully capable of dreaming.” Way beyond the cliché that reality did not live up to the dream (a common put-down in the aftermath of struggle), dreaming takes up its place as one of the ways that a political subject makes sense of the world around her; or rather makes sense of – strips the cover from – the lack of sense that it makes. Mbembe’s appeal to critical thought and reason against the mess of injustice must, for me, be placed in the context of a world which increasingly forecloses on mental freedom and where power has come close to subordinating reason to its own inhuman, instrumental, aims. It is central to my reading of this historic moment of protest that the language of the inner life found new voice, and that the struggle took on an added dimension under its pressure. To my first question: “what is the time of political agency?” we might therefore add another: “What is its psychic time?” “A new cultural temperament is gradually engulfing post-apartheid, urban South Africa,” Mbembe wrote in 2015 at the outbreak of the protests, “in truth a psychic state more than a political project in the strict sense of the term” (Mbembe 2015). This is perilous ground for any political subject to tread. As Freud (1961, 189) once stated, the unconscious “is a knife that cuts both ways” or “a stick with two ends” (he was referring to the misuse of psychoanalysis in the courtroom). As Naidoo reflects, the youth of the country were first accused by the apartheid generation of political apathy (shades of Hamletism), only to find themselves, in the heat of the protests, characterised as “misguided, uninformed and mad” (Naidoo 2016). Something “visceral” (Mbembe), “libidinal” (Nuttall) – a struggle saturated with and driven by anxiety, desire and dreams – came to the surface of political life. “It is the libidinal,” writes Nuttall, by which she means the bodily and the performative “that drives forward the critique in a knowing denunciation of disembodied rationality that refuses the full force of historical feeling.” The affective charge of politics winds up a notch when an oppressed group hits the limits of what is tolerable, especially – I argue – when the world around them seems in denial of the continuing injustice of a society which had promised a new dawn. Or perhaps even more – hence the level of anguish propelling the protests – when it delivered one form of freedom, the end of apartheid, whilst, barely before the historic transformation could be welcomed, before the ink was dry, allowing the racial and economic fault-lines of the old dispensation to re-entrench themselves once more. What is being talked about, or is needed, Modiri suggests without a trace of hyperbole, is nothing less than a general “‘transubstantiation’ of the entire social and psychic order.” I think this is why, on the one hand, these protests have increasingly been recognised as vital to modern-day understanding of political struggle – its promise

Afterword 165 and its perils – and why, on the other, they seem to have provoked such fear. By March 2017, when I arrived to deliver my lecture in Cape Town, sympathy with the protestors at the senior levels of the University was in steep decline. In subsequent correspondence, Max Price, UCT Vice-Chancellor at the time, suggested that my lecture had legitimated student rage and anger (it was rather an attempt to understand it, I replied). I was, he stated, insufficiently alert to “other agendas” likely to have been at play, though these remained unspecified (the implied suggestion that protest has been co-opted or infiltrated is a classic mode of dismissal) (Max Price to J Rose, 22 March 2017; Rose to Price, 23 March 2017). Perhaps it was, then, inevitable, given the psychoanalytic focus of my thinking, that the psychic dimension should appear on both sides of this debate (indeed a knife that cuts both ways): in the reference to hysteria which Barnard-Naudé, via Jacques Lacan, reads as a form of psychic and political truth against the false authority of the master, a way of breaking a symbolic deadlock; but then again, I admit to being unprepared for the vocabulary of “mass social psychosis,” and “envious rage” – as they make their appearance at moments in the language of critique (Hofmeyr, Long). Pathologizing protest, not least because of the false authority it bestows on the diagnostician, had been the last thing on my mind. Instead, as I see it, psychoanalysis erodes fraudulent forms of unity and authority, as they appear in the mind, and no less in the power over life and land wielded by the lethal pseudo-innocence of the state. Drawing on her Australian heritage, Rogers describes the “psychotic unity of law over land.” Police action against the protests was the “performance of a ‘hallucinatory wishful psychosis’” aimed at reinstating white privilege. The students, on the other hand, she suggests with deceptive simplicity, were engaged, in the “effort to create reality.” They were using every means at their disposal in the fight for a better world. “Protest,” she writes, “is the symptom that provides that path to … diagnosis.” This puts psychoanalysis on the road to freedom. In these fierce debates, one moment stands out, seeming to polarise positions like no other, and that is fire. “Burning rage” appears here as a repeated epithet, with the implication that anger is only legitimate on condition that is neither threat nor danger, not really anger we might say – that it does not overheat itself. De Vos is the only contributor to describe with care the events, which came to be known as “Shackville,” that led up to the protestors burning MA artwork, including the first such submission by a black candidate. The authorities were about to demolish the shack they had paid for and installed on the University premises to cause maximum disruption and draw attention to the post-apartheid deprived, not to say inhuman, living conditions of the townships. “South Africa,” writes Hofmeyr, “was literally, and still is figuratively, burning with rage.”. And not only South Africa. “The killing of George Floyd in the US,” writes Rogers, “has produced the burning of the streets of Washington DC and beyond, and that smoke has filled and fired the voices of protestors in cities in Australia, where so many black people die at the hand of the state.” Fire we might say is the most eloquent symptom of an unjust world – think James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963) or more recently, Naomi Klein’s On Fire – The Burning Case for a New Deal. “Our house is on fire,” Klein concludes her introduction, “and this should come as no

166 Jacqueline Rose surprise. Built on false premises, discounted futures and sacrificial people, it was rigged to blow from the start” (Klein 2019, 53). Finally, to make time for, or even rest ones hopes in, the moments that rock the boat, go too far, dismantle the coercive reason of the world, is not to give up on the possibility of critical thought, but to enhance it. It is not to “valorise unreason,” (Long,) or to diminish the place of reason in challenging forms of authority that cannot see beyond their own fraudulent power (Hofmeyr). One thing these protests and their aftermath have taught me, is that in the sphere of political resistance, the antithesis between reason and rage, thought and affect, is a false one. You can be “hungry, angry, free and reasoning” (Butler, cited by Nuttall). For psychoanalysis, it is only when you start to question the rationale of your life, the logic on which you thought it relied, that radical change becomes possible. On condition that you do not try to brush aside or forget the weight of the past on the present. Intensity, psychic and political, must be granted its place at the negotiating table of nations – its presence no longer seen as distraction or damage, but a path to insight, a sure sign that the house is already on fire and the world is not working.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1970. On Violence. New York: Harcourt. Arendt, Hannah. 1979. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt. Baldwin, James. 1963. The Fire Next Time. New York: Dial Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations. Edited with an introduction by Hannah Arendt. New York: Harcourt. Freud, Sigmund. 1961. “Dostoyevsky and Parricide”. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. Klein, Naomi. 2019. On Fire – The Burning Case for a Green New Deal. New York: Allen Lane. Mbembe, Achille. 2015. “The State of South African Political Life”. Africa is a Country, September 19. https://africasacountry.com/2015/09/achille-mbembe-on-the-sta te-of-south-african-politics. Naidoo, Leigh-Ann. 2016. “The Anti-apartheid Generation Has Become Afraid of the Future”. Mail & Guardian, August 17. https://mg.co.za/article/2016-08-17-leigh-annnaidoo-delivers-compelling-speech-at-ruth-first-memorial-lecture/. Nuttall, Sarah. 2019. “Afterword: The Shock of the New Old”. Social Dynamics 45(2): 280–285.

Index

Abahlali baseMjondolo movement 57fn9 Abraham, Nicolas and Torok, Maria 4 Abu Salim prison, massacre (1996) 37 Adichie, Chimamanda 85 African law, Ramose on 142 African National Congress (ANC) 31; one party dominance 70–1 Afro-pessimism 62 “the afterlife”, Hartman 146, 161 Agamben, Giorgio 119; on gnostic time 97 alcohol consumption, South Africa 105 Alfonsín, Raúl 60 algorithms: genetic 130; and intelligence 129–30; and reason 130 Anderson, Ben 100 anti-colonial longing, and postcolonial becoming 97 anti-pass demonstrations (1960) 13 antiblack racism 46; Kamugisha on 45; pervasiveness 47 anxiety: acting out 19–20; power of 19 apartheid: continuation of 62–3; dismantling of (1994) 30, 60; as felt trauma 51; and Land Act (1913) 27; as metonymy 23 apartheid legacy, South African student protest 103–4 Apartheid Museum 56 Appiah, Anthony Kwame 115, 135 Arditi, Benjamin 6 Arendt, Hannah 56, 162; “Home to roost” 96; “Lying in Politics” 32; politics as spatiality of appearance 57; on progress 32; on Rhodes 160 Argentina 60 Aristodemou, Maria 6 assembly: power of 57; right to 72 atmospheres, and bodily presence 100

Australia: British invasion (1788) 153; colonial 151; guilt of colonisation 152; haunting 151, 154; Indigenous deaths 151, 153, 155; melancholia 150 Azania House (Bremner Building) 66, 69, 78; gender-neutral bathrooms 70, 77, 86, 90 Badat, Saleem 13 Baldwin, James, The Fire Next Time 165 Barker, Joanne 89 Barnard-Naudé, Jaco 27, 162 becoming: Colebrook on 83; Deleuze and Guattari on 83–4; identity as state of 115; instability 84; minoritorian 84–5; as process 161; as queering 87; #RhodesMustFall movement (#RMF) as 84; and self-actualisation 83; Trans-Collective 84, 86 belonging 97–8 Benjamin, Walter 161; on time 97 Bennett, Jane 32 Berlin, off university 56 Bertoldi, Andreas 10, 12; on Black Hamlet 10–11 Biko, Steve 13 black: anger, and melancholia 16fn3; consciousness 13; male chauvinism 79; poverty 61; studies 47, 61 Black Hamlet: Bertoldi on 10–11; colonialapartheid power 12; and Oedipus complex 9; summary 8 Black Hamletism: enforcement 13; and neoliberal postcolonial university 14–15 Black Lives Matter 160; protests 151 black memory v. state memory, Hanchard 139 black queer womxn, Khadija Khan on 79, 80

168 Index Black radical tradition, Robinson on 141–2 Black student subjectivity 14, 19 black students 16; alienation at university 52–3; Law Faculty 67 Black subject, enforced psychosis 12 Black subjectivity 9, 14 blackness, spatiality and time of 47 bodily presence, and atmospheres 100 the body, Butler on 56–7 Böhme, Gernot 100 bond, and contract: co-existence 14; conflict 10–11, 11–12, 16 Bond, Patrick 31 born-free generation 17, 30, 31, 49, 106, 107, 149; meaninglessness 150 Boym, Svetlana, off-modern notion 101; on reflective nostalgia 16, 101 Breakey, Jessica, on fire as protest tool 57, 58 Bremner Building see Azania House (Bremner Building) Brexit 35 Brink, Petrus 35, 43, 60, 140, 150; food sovereignty campaign 28 buffoonery, Hamlet (character) 4, 5 Butler, Judith 17, 161, 163; on the body 56–7; on non-violence 57 Cameroon, identity politics 132 University of Cape Town 50, 52, 107; decolonisation call 87; protests 27; Trans-Collective 70, 79 capitalism: computational 123; criminal, Terreblanche on 31 cell, freedom in 53 Chavafambira, John: Hamlet (character): differences 9–10; similarities 8–9 Hamletism 9, 10; and role of psychoanalysis 10 Clewell, Tammy 12–13 code, South Africa 46, 47 Colebrook, Claire, on becoming 83 Collis-Buthelezi, Victoria 23, 160–1 colonial legacy, South African universities 61 colonial-apartheid power 2; Black Hamlet 12; and the colonised subject 11–12; continuation 141; and melancholia 16fn3; objective 13; persistence of 143; and Western modernity 11 colonialism: and current knowledge systems 133; and genocidal impulse 126; and ownership of the earth 125–6

colonisation: and fear 155; guilt of, Australia 152; see also decolonisation colonised subject, and colonial-apartheid power 11–12 Colston, Edward, pulling down of statue 160 communicative action theory, Habermas 100 computation, knowledge as 128 Conley, Vera, on queering 87 Conti Memory Center 60 contract, and bond; co-existence 14; conflict 10–11, 11–12, 16 Cornell, Drucilla 32; on evolution 93 Cornell, Drucilla and Seely, Stephen 12 counter-history, psychoanalysis as 33 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 85 Crewe, Jonathan 8, 9 critique, genealogy as 112–13 cure, genealogy as 117–18 curriculum: planetary 129, 130–1; South African student protest 100; transformation, need for 129 Daniels v. Scribanti 94 Davis, Dennis 94 De Vos, Pierre 161 decoloniality 1 decolonisation: demand for Cape Town University 87; and the future 89; global 125; key issues 134; meaning 88; and queerness 79; sexuality 88; South Africa 2, 123–4; and student activism 133; see also colonisation Defiance Campaign (1952) 13 Deleuze-Guattarian idea, of the segmentary 86 Deleuze-Guattarian multiplicity: definition 80; #RhodesMustFall movement (#RMF) as 80 democracy, and reason 133 demonstration, right to 73 deracialization: global need for 128; South Africa 77 Derrida, Jacques: on apartheid as metonymy 23; on incorporation 5; on justice to come 17–18; on melancholia 4–5; on mourning 17; out-of-joint time 97; Specters of Marx 23, 97 despair, Hamlet (character) 5 Ditsie, Beverly 88 dream, and reality 164 Dubow, Saul and Rose, Jacqueline 8 Dzodan, Flavia 86

Index 169 ego, and ego loss, melancholia 4 ego formation, and melancholia 12 enlightenment, Kant on 111 envy, and shame 107 equality, and inequality 52–4 evolution, Cornell on 93 experience, politics of 124 Fairbanks, Eve 30, 32 Fallism 21, 108 Fanon, Frantz 142; on Oedipus complex 9; The Wretched of the Earth 35 fear, and colonisation 155 fee hikes, South African universities 61, 62, 67 #FeesMustFall (#FMF) movement 16, 20, 22, 34, 68, 162 femininity, Hamlet 3 fire, as protest tool 57–8, 73, 114, 165 First, Ruth 39 Floyd, George, killing of 151, 152, 154, 155, 160, 165 Flynn, Michael 35 food sovereignty campaign, Petrus Brink 28 Foucault, Michel 112, 113 freedom: in a prison cell 53; promise of 62; and unfreedom 49–52 Freedom Charter (1955) 13 Freedom Park, Pretoria 149, 150 Freud, Sigmund: on Hamlet 3; killing of primal father 152–3; on layers of the mind 33; on melancholia 4; on mourning 154; Mourning and Melancholia 4; The Ego and the Id 4, 12 Fricker, Miranda 56 the future: decolonial queer 79, 81, 88, 89, 90; decolonised 89; and melancholia 5, 6, 7, 8; openness of 97; and the past 31, 33, 49, 52, 56fn8, 119, 128; precarity of 161; and a promise 62; and remainder of justice 17–18; and time to be 2 future anterior 119; Lacan 117 Gaita, Raimond: Romulus My Father 151; “Sleepwalking through Privilege and Oppression?” 151 Gaza Strip, blockade 126–7 gender and sexuality, in #RhodesMustFall movement (#RMF) 79–80, 84 gender-neutral bathrooms, Azania House (Bremner Building) 70, 77, 86, 90

genealogy: as critique 112–13; as cure 117–18 genocidal impulse, and colonialism 126 Ghose, Indira 6 Glissant, Edouard 135 Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla 40, 157; Breaking Intergenerational Cycles of Repetition 33–4 Gordon, Avery 143 Graham, Shane 15 guilt: and melancholia 154; persistence of 152; and protest 152; and responsibility 154 Gwang-ju massacre (1980) 38 Habermas, Jürgen, communicative action theory 100 Habib, Adam 14, 107, 108; Rebels and Rage 104 habitat, inhabitance, difference 100 Haitian Revolution, Scott on 96 hallucinatory wishful psychosis 154–6, 158, 165 Hamlet (character): buffoonery 4, 5; Claudius, failure to kill 7; colonial setting 2; death 20; despair 5; John Chavafambira: differences 9–10; similarities 8–9 Lacan on 3; lack of object 6, 7; loss 5; mourning 4, 5; operating on Other’s time 6–7; out-of-joint time 7; procrastination 6; and psychoanalysis 1; and student protest 1; and Western subjectivity 1, 6 Hamlet (play): equivocation 6; femininity 3; Freud on 3; passage à l’acte 20; Rose on 3, 4; see also Black Hamlet Hamletism: John Chavafambira 9; protest subjectivity, distinction 3; and subjectivity 13, 162; see also Black Hamletism Hanchard, Michael, black memory v. state memory 139 Handspring Puppet Company 64, 161 Hartman, Saidiya, “the afterlife” 146, 161 haunting: Australia 151, 154; as “critical analytical moment” 143; emergent conception 143; and loss 152; “something-to-be-done” production 143; transgenerational 149, 152 Heher Fees Commission 22 Higher Education Act (1997) 44 Hofmeyr, Benda 162, 165

170 Index Home for All campaign, South Africa 151–2 homini homo lupus 153 Horatio (character) 19 Hunter, Mark 55 hyper-cathexis 154 Hysteric, the: interrogation of the Master 18; and knowledge production 18; Lacan on 18 identity, as state of becoming 115 identity politics 131, 132; Cameroon 132 incorporation process: Derrida on 5; melancholic 4–5 Indigenous deaths, Australia 151, 153, 155 inequality: and equality 52–4; South Africa 71, 104; and violence 105; University of the Witwatersrand 55 inhabitance, habitat, difference 100 injustice, constitutionalisation of 142 intelligence, and algorithms 129–30 intergenerational transmission, Rose on 63 interruptions, South African student protest 17 intersectionality, #RhodesMustFall movement (#RMF) 79, 85, 86 James, CLR, The Black Jacobins 96 Johannesburg Pride 88; disruption by One in Nine black feminists 87 justice: epistemic 145; to come, Derrida on 17–18 Kamanzi, Brian 28, 98 Kamugisha, Aaron, on antiblack racism 45 Kang, Han, Human Acts 38–9 Kant, Immanuel: on enlightenment 111; universal moral theory 111 Khan, Khadija, on black queer womxn 79, 80 Khan, Shahnaz, native informant notion 45 Klein, Naomi, On Fire–The Burning Case for a New Deal 165 knowledge: as computation 128; impossible, Rose on 43; recolonization of 128 knowledge colonisation, and knowledge production 18 knowledge production 47; and the Hysteric 18; and knowledge colonisation 18 knowledge systems, and colonialism 133 Krog, Antjie, Begging to be Black 98 KwaZulu Natal 32

Lacan, Jacques: future anterior 117; on Hamlet (character) 3; on the Hysteric 18; on melancholia as narcissism 5; on passage à l’acte 20 land, politics of 63 Land Act (1913), and apartheid 27 land redistribution: failure 61; Rose on 95 Laub, Dori, on recovery from trauma 154–5 law see African law Lefebvre, Henri 100 LGBTQ+ rights, and Trans-Collective 162–3 liberty, Merleau-Ponty on 36 lines of flight, #RhodesMustFall movement (#RMF) 80, 90 Long, Wahbie 52, 163 Looser, Tom 52 loss: Hamlet (character) 5; and haunting 152; and melancholia 5 love object, loss of, mourning 4 Madlingozi, Tshepo 94 Mafeje, Archie 78 Magona, Sindiwe, “The More Things Change” 138 Maluleke, Tinyiko 117 Mandela, Nelson, on the cell for selfknowledge 53 Mandela, Winnie 53; banishment to Brandfort 54 Manganyi, Chabani 31; Mashungu’s Reverie 35, 36, 37 Mangcu, Xolela 30 Manley, Michael 44, 45 Marikana massacre (2012) 36 Marx, Karl, on relative poverty 104–5 Masheane, Nepo, “South Africa (You’ve Lied to Me)” 140 Mashile, Lebo, “The Dead Living” 145 mass demonstrations, South African universities 67 Matar, Hisham: on power 37–8; The Return 37 Maxwele, Chumani 21 M’Baye, Kéba 32–3 Mbeki, Thabo 14 Mbembe, Achille 23, 77, 85, 87, 163, 164; interview with 122–35; on slavery 115–16; on victimization 114–15 melancholia: Australia 150; and black anger 16fn3; and colonial-apartheid power 16fn3; Derrida on 4–5; and ego formation 12; and ego loss 4, 12;

Index 171 as narcissism, Lacan on 5; Freud on 4; and the future 5, 6, 7, 8; and guilt 154; and loss 5; mourning: distinction 4; integration 13; project foreclosure 6; South Africa 2; and subjectivity 13 melancholic: identification 6; lacking death drive 7; and time 6 melancholic incorporation 4–5; failed introjection 5 memory: philosophy of, Ramose on 144–5; as repetition 157; transgenerational 158 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, on liberty 36 Mhlongo, Niq, Dog Eat Dog 14 mind, layers, Freud on 33 minoritorian: becoming 84–5; women 84 Modiri, Joel M. 161, 164 Motha, Stewart 94, 99; anti-colonial longing, and postcolonial becoming 97; Archiving Sovereignty 97 mourning: Derrida on 17; Freud on 154; Hamlet (character) 4, 5; loss of love object 4; melancholia: distinction 4; integration 13; and out-of-joint time 17; as protest 17; Rose on 4 Msimang, Sisonke 54 Mudimbe, V.Y. 115 Mullen, Killian and Meenan, Sharon, ‘And I Wasn’t Even Born’ 157 multiplicity of assemblages, #RhodesMustFall movement (#RMF) as 80–3 Muñoz, José 89 museums, Western, restitution of African objects 134–5 Mzansi 112–13 Naidoo, Leigh-Ann 64; on politics of land 63; Ruth First memorial lecture 28, 62, 163 narcissism, melancholia as 5 National Defiance Campaign 57 native informant notion, Khan 45 Ndlovu, Dudu 28, 98, 150 necklacing 57; enactment 33–4, 157 neoliberal ideology, university 100 neoliberal postcolonial university, and Black Hamletism 14–15 neoliberalism: exclusions 100; in postcolonial world 44, 45; South African universities 45, 61

newspapers 27 Ngcukaitobi, Tembeka, The Land is Ours 93 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind 88 Nietzsche, Friedrich: Genealogy of Morals 108; “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” 113; on a promise 62 Njica, Siyabonga 57 Nkabinde, Nkunzi Zandile 32 Nkoli, Simon 88 Nkosi, Lewis 94; on the 1950’s 95; “Postmodernism and blackwriting in South Africa” 101 Nkrumah, Kwame 142 non-violence: Butler on 57; see also violence Nuttall, Sarah 162, 164 Nwadeyi, Lovelyn 30, 36, 38, 95; on out-of-joint time 28; on the present past 31, 45, 46 Oedipus complex: and Black Hamlet 9; Fanon on 9 off-modern notion: Boym 101; and reflective nostalgia 16 One in Nine black feminists, disruption of Johannesburg Pride 87 Orford, Margie, Daddy’s Girl 36 othering 113 out-of-joint time 1, 2, 12, 62, 119, 162; Derrida 97; and mourning 17; Nwadeyi on 28; Rose on 18 Oxford University, #RhodesMustFall movement (#RMF) 21, 29 Pakade, Nomancotsho 45 passage à l’acte: Hamlet (play) 20; Lacan on 20 passbooks, burning of 57 the past: and the future 31, 33, 49, 52, 56fn8, 119, 128; as non-past 96; and the present 139; redefinition 56; see also present past Pathways to Free Education 43 Paton, Alan 95 patriarchy, #RhodesMustFall movement (#RMF) 85 performativity, and precarity 57 Phadi, Mosa 45 Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas, on spatial justice 99 Pithouse, Richard 20, 58

172 Index politics: of experience 124; of reason 124; of spectacle 71, 108; see also identity politics population politics 127 post-modern subjectivity 3 postcolonial becoming, and anti-colonial longing 97 postcolonial critique 12 postcolonial world, neoliberalism in 44, 45 postcolony, queering of 88, 89–90 power, Matar on 37–8 precarity: of the future 161; and performativity 57 the present, and the past 139 present past, Nwadeyi on 31, 45, 46 Pretoria, Freedom Park 149, 150 Price, Max 77, 165 procrastination, Hamlet (character) 6 progress: Arendt on 32; myth of 62 project foreclosure, melancholia 6 promise: of freedom 62; Nietzsche on 62; and the future 62 protest: and guilt 152; jouissance in 19; mourning as 17; see also South African student protest protest subjectivity 2; Hamletism, distinction 3 protest tool, fire as 57–8, 73, 114 protests, University of Cape Town (UCT) 27 psychoanalysis: as counter-history 33; persistence of 33; role in John Chavafambira’s conflict 10 queer theory 69 queering: as becoming 87; Conley on 87; of the postcolony 88 queerness: and decolonisation 79; as ideality 89; and #RhodesMustFall movement 77, 78; Trans-Collective 86, 89 race: school system 55; sexuality, separation 88–9 racial: hierarchy 47; profiling 131 rage: burning 116, 165; and reason 166; South African student protest 104 Ragland, Ellie 18 rainbow nation, South Africa 15, 46 Ramaphosa, Cyril 93 Ramose, Mogobe B. 98, 99; on African law 142; “An African perspective on

justice and race” 32; philosophy of memory 144–5 reality: creation of, and violence 155; and the dream 164 reason: and algorithms 130; and democracy 133; politics of 124; and rage 166; techne as 130; as violence 36; and will 111 recolonization, of knowledge 128 reconciliation, South Africa 37, 43, 50 reflective nostalgia: Boym on 16, 101; and off-modern 16 relative deprivation theory 107 relative poverty: Marx on 104–5; and shame 105 repetition, memory as 157 resentment, and shame 105 responsibility, and guilt 154 reterritorialization, #RhodesMustFall movement (#RMF) 85 Rhodes, Cecil John 15; Arendt on 160; toppling of statue 17, 21, 66–7, 122, 123, 160 #RhodesMustFall movement (#RMF) 15, 16, 18, 34, 43–4, 60, 160; as assemblage of stakeholders 80; as becoming 84; as Deleuze-Guattarian multiplicity 80; as departure point 77; gender and sexuality within 79–80, 84; insourcing of black workers 162; intersectionality 79, 85, 86; lines of flight 80, 90; as multiplicity of assemblages 80–3; Oxford University 21, 29; patriarchy 85; and queerness 77, 78; reterritorialization 85; and segmented selves 86; single narrative 85 Robben Island 54 Robinson, Cedric: Black Marxism 141; on Black radical tradition 141–2 Rogers, Juliet 163, 165 Rose, Jacqueline 1, 9, 19, 49, 68; on intergenerational transmission 63; on Hamlet (play) 3, 4; on impossible knowledge 43; on land redistribution 95; legacy notion 141; on mourning 4; on out-of-joint time 18; “The Legacy, or what I have learned from you” 22–3, 29–30, 43, 95, 103, 137 Rowse, Tim 150 Sachs, Wulf, Black Hamlet 8, 13–14 safe spaces 125 Salecl, Renata 18 Schmitt, Carl 155 school system 106; race 55

Index 173 schools, no-fee paying 55 Schwab, Gabriele 152 Scott, David: on the Haitian Revolution 96; on time 96–7 Scott, Lwando 162–3 segmentary: Deleuze-Guattarian idea 86; pervasiveness of 86 segmented selves, and #RhodesMustFall movement (#RMF) 86 self-actualisation, and becoming 83 sexuality: decolonising 88; race, separation 88–9 #Shackville protests 17 shame: and envy 107; and relative poverty 105; and resentment 105 Sharpe, Christina 145; In the Wake 46 Sharpville massacre (1960) 95, 114 slavery: fratricidal 116; Mbembe on 115–16 Slovo, Gillian 38, 39 social capital, and educational success 107 social reality, and student movements 52 “something-to-be-done” production, haunting 143 South Africa: alcohol consumption 105; code 46, 47; Constitutional Court 72, 73; decolonisation 123–4; deracialization 77; Hamletic condition 3; hidden histories 33; Home for All campaign 151–2; inequality 71, 104; melancholia 2; post-apartheid 14; rainbow nation 15, 46; reconciliation 37, 43, 50; unemployment 127; violence 106 South Africa Higher Education, emergency 22 South African Constitution (1994): book about 93–4; as decolonial instrument 94, 163; false hopes 139–40, 163 South African student protest: apartheid legacy 103–4; curriculum transformation 100; forms of 17; interruptions 17; psychoanalytic backdrop 2; rage as primary driver 104; using fire (2016) 58 South African Students Organisation (SASO) 13 South African Truth Commission 38 South African universities: colonial legacy 61; fee hikes 61, 62, 67; humanities crisis 53; mass demonstrations 67; neoliberalism in 45, 61; as prison 54; student demands 67; transformation 50 Soweto uprising (1976) 13, 21

spatial justice, Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos on 99 spatiality: alternative university 98; and time, of blackness 47; turn 99; Ubuntu 98–9 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 60, 155; A Critique of Postcolonial Reason 45 state memory v. black memory, Hanchard 139 Statute of Limitations, injustice of 32–3 student activism, and decolonisation 133 student demands, South African universities 67 student movements 51; and social reality 52 student protest: forms 17; and Hamlet 1; as Lacanian hysterical discourse 18; see also South African student protest subjectivity: and Hamletism 13, 162; and melancholia 13; see also Black student subjectivity; black subjectivity symbolic law 6 techne, reason as 130 Terreblanche, Sampie, on criminal capitalism 31 time: Benjamin on 97; generational tensions 97; gnostic, Agamben on 97; and the melancholic 6; Scott on 96–7; see also out-of-joint time Toussaint Louverture 96 Trans University Forum, Trans-Collective 79 Trans-Collective: becoming 84, 86; Cape Town University 70, 79; disruption of #RMF commemoration 86–7; and LGBTQ+ rights 162–3; mantra 86; queerness 86, 89; Trans University Forum 79 transformation 45; South African universities 50 trauma: felt, apartheid as 51; intergenerational 49; recovery from, Laub on 154–5; untimeliness of 119; Žižek on 116 Trobas, Guy 6 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 44; Silencing the Past 45–6 Trump, Donald 35 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 46, 152, 163 Tutuola, Amos, The Palm-Wine Drinkard 101

174 Index Ubuntu 32, 33, 98; spatiality 98–9; and the university 94, 99–100 Ubuntu-feminism 94, 98–9 unemployment, South Africa 127 unfreedom, and freedom 49–52 United Democratic Front (UDF) 13 university: and alienation of black students 52–3; neoliberal ideology 100; and Ubuntu 94, 99–100; see also South African universities Van Marle, Karin 16, 161 Van Marle, Karin and Cornell, Drucilla 98–9 Verhaeghe, Paul 117 victimization, Mbembe on 114–15 violence: against women 36; and creation of reality 155; and inequality 105;

reason as 36; South Africa 106; see also non-violence Western modernity, and colonial-apartheid power 11 white tone concept 55 will, and reason 111 Winnicott, D.W. 33, 56fn8 Witwatersrand University 52; black majority 55; inequality 55 women: minoritarian 84; violence against 36 women’s march (1956) 13 World Economic Forum 106 Wright, Michelle, Physics of Blackness 47 Wynter, Sylvia 44–5; Black Metamorphosis 45 Zuma, Jacob 22, 93; resignation 113 Žižek, Slavoj 20; on trauma 116