For Hannah Arendt, 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 licence for those in power to rule the world (a critique she mounts most forcefully in her essay ‘Lying in Politics’).20 It can also be said to rob 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 Guardian, Fairbanks 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. Today this story is still unwelcome. It is only recently that some of the hidden, often horrific, tales of apartheid – of secret policemen and state spies – have started to be told.21 These protests were about enduring racial discrimination, poverty and inequality. But it also struck me that it was this deal, or no-deal, with history, a history that implicates the young so profoundly and which will not go away, that raised the temperature, precipitated the rage, made the situation feel at moments unmanageable.
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In South Africa of all places this way of dealing with the past surely makes no sense. The ancestors revered in African culture are there to remind us that no one is ever born free – something understood far better and more deeply than in the metropolitan Western world. In his 2001 article ‘An African Perspective on Justice and Race’, South African philosopher Mogobe B. Ramose described African communal life as consisting ‘in a triadic structure of the living, the living-dead (the supernatural forces) and the yet-to-be-born’.22 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. You cannot redeem your past any more than you can 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, healer and diviner Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde, whom she met in KwaZulu Natal, conducts with her ancestors, female and male.23 The legal implications, specifically in relation to temporality, of this cross-generational way of thought – which both she and Ramose draw from the African collective ethic of uBuntu, for which to be human is to exist through and for others – are far-reaching. ‘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 our part to arbitrate a suit on the grounds that it is too old.’24 Can an ancestor who has survived the death of the body be too old?25 The Statute of Limitations is unjust because it enshrines in law the repudiation of the past (its use to block rape complaints on the grounds that they happened too long ago has become a notorious part of the legal landscape in the US and the UK). ‘The African believes’, M’Baye insists, ‘that time cannot change the truth.’26 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. Though it receives far less attention, this temporal dimension of honouring the forebears is the companion and complement to the openness towards others which is the most familiar understanding of the term uBuntu.
Perhaps, then, it might be fair to conclude, 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 erupted, unwelcome, into Western thought, which has been so much less attuned to, indeed mostly pathologises, 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 layers of history all exist simultaneously, every earlier stage persisting alongside the later stage which appears to have buried it or left it behind.27 Seen in this context, psychoanalysis is a counter-history, channelling what we have repressed from the past forward 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, D. W. Winnicott described 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.28 This is the future perfect tense in which, for Lacan, the experience of psychoanalysis unfolds, as we have seen before in relation to modernist writing which also undercuts the dominant temporal logic of the West: what I will have been in the process of what I am becoming.29 This formula of disjointed, generative temporality might, I suggest, also do for the political time in which South Africa has been 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 heads.30 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 – for a moment to permit the bridge – the idea of being born free is meaningless. To be born free is not to be born at all.
In the opening essay of her collection Breaking Intergenerational Cycles of Repetition: A Global Dialogue on Historical Trauma and Memory, South African psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela tells a distressing story which might cast light on this idea of history in time (the Historical Trauma and Transformation Centre which she directs is the subject of the chapter that follows here).31 A group of girls between seven and ten years old, ‘not yet born when the event they were enacting took place’, restaged an act of necklacing from 1980s South Africa in the township of Mlungisi in the Eastern Cape. Necklacing involved the killing of suspected collaborators whose bodies were encircled by a burning tyre. It was 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,
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to see a group of young girls seven to ten years old laughing and cavorting in the streets of Mlungisi, 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.32
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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’ – 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, as if every component of the awful hidden memory was carried deep inside the body of this child. In fact thi
s accords with today’s neuroscientific concept of epigenetics which allows for one generation’s lived experience, even when unspoken, to slip into the bloodstream of the next.33 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 also from the writing of Gobodo-Madikizela.34 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 Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall who accused the university protests of being too ‘visceral’ would do well to look here. As would those who 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 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 Michael Flynn, before he had to resign as Trump’s national security adviser in February 2017, could tweet: ‘Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL’, a tweet he did not delete after his appointment (nor as far as I know after he subsequently resigned). A Palestinian friend, appalled as so many by the presidency 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. To repeat the words of Petrus Brink, ‘this really is 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’?35 Writing in the 1970s, 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. Manganyi is interested in what exploitation, racial inequality and oppression under colonialism do to the experience of being human, especially in the form of their denial. In his remarkable 1977 meditation Mashungu’s Reverie, part memoir, part fiction, Manganyi, in response to such crushing of body and soul, called 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 Mlungisi 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 fantasy enacted by the girls in Mlungisi is striking).36
Manganyi shares with psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon a belief in the infinite complexity of who we are (Fanon, a key figure in post-colonial studies worldwide, was much debated on South African campuses during the protests). Under conditions of extreme oppression, Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, ‘you are forced to come up against yourself.’ ‘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?’ Engaged as they both were with the most uncompromising reckoning with injustice, neither Manganyi nor Fanon was interested in false innocence, in a whitewash 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.’37 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 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 striking prescience, cites 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.’ He then continues to cite words that chillingly anticipate and resonate with the neoliberal 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.’38 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 twenty-one-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’.39 His death allowed her, 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’.40 Margie Orford appeared in the last chapter as one of the journalists who wrote most powerfully on the trial of Oscar Pistorius. Known in South Africa as the ‘queen’ of crime fiction, she has publicly stated that, following the Marikana mining massacre of 2012, 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. 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.’ 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.’41
It is Orford who has also named the systemic violence against women in post-apartheid South Africa ‘serial femicide’. The issue of gender was the subject of sometimes acrimonious dispute during the protests, including the sidelining and isolation of black feminist organising blocs and, in one case brought to my attention, sexual assault.42 In her address, Lovelyn Nwadeyi started by channelling her remarks to those among the black 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 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. Even thousands of miles away, ‘the South African gloom gathered slowly around them. Like a bad dream.’43 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 the struggle of the students has ‘recycled’ emotions back into politics where they do not belong is, for me, meaningless, however high the temperature has been raised (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.
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For South Africa, the dream was, of course, not just freedom but reconciliation, the latter to be effected through the manifold pathways of truth.44 That was the challenge and the new dispensation which was 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 black people and the poor (on this the pages upon pages of statistics circulated by the campaigners were truly eloquent). But there is another element – no less powerful and not finally detachable from the rest – which is the enduring obduracy with which historic injustice is registered in the deepest annals of the mind. Throughout this book, literary writing has been presented as the place where these annals have been stored, a record of deep history, and a rejoinder to what the worst of history can do, from Nagaland, to Belfast, to Haiti and the UK. So finally, I turn here to two literary texts which have helped me think through these dilemmas, first casting my net wider, away from South Africa, before returning there at the end.
On Violence and On Violence Against Women Page 27