Race and Racism: Lexical Vigilance

Posted on January 26, 2016 by Angelo Fick

In Zoë Wicomb’s “Another story” (1990), a fictional academic visits a relative to research the ‘reality’ behind the story another writer had written about their family in the first half of the twentieth century.  Wicomb’s invented historian wants her aunt to fill in the gaps, tell the family’s side of the published novel, and reveal the truths beneath the misrepresentations of Sarah Gertrude Millin’s God’s Stepchildren (1924), a book steeped in biologistic (mis)understandings of racialised difference.

The short story invites its readers to think about the role of language as the exercise of power in the construction of ‘race’, and in the deliberate political elaboration and explaining away of racist inequality: “Lexical vigilance was a matter of mental hygiene: a regular rethinking of words in common use, like cleaning out rotten food from the back of the refrigerator where no one expects food to rot and poison the rest”.

Mmusi Maimane, leader of the official parliamentary opposition, the Democratic Alliance, has issued a call to South Africans to overcome racism.  It is a well-intentioned call.  In many respects, it is a necessary and timeous gesture, while also obvious: the whole post-apartheid South African project was meant to overcome racism; in the first days of 2016 we have been reminded how much ‘unfinished business’ we have left undone, and for too long.  That we are still struggling with racism in these ways at this late date is both unacceptable, and hardly surprising.  And again, that Maimane wishes us to ‘hate no more’ (to invoke the title of gifted ‘Drum’ journalist Arthur Maimane’s book) is admirable; how he and his party propose to lead such a process may need rethinking.

When we speak and write about ‘race’, too often too many are mired in equating ‘race’ with ‘skin colour’.  The lessons of anti-racism learned in South Africa in the wake of the Black Consciousness Movement, along with its echoes through the United Democratic Front, and the reflection of such material political struggles in the critical race theories which informed the academic study of ‘race’ and racism in the 1980s, across disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, should not be forgotten or dismissed.

Similarly, the lessons offered by comparative studies of ‘race’ and racism in critical race theory across a variety of political spaces internationally, should bear on our own analysis of the phantom of ‘race’ and the blight of racism in post-millennial South Africa.  If we do not learn from history, our own especially, we are bound to repeat its mistakes, and worse, what was tragic before, will now become farce.  Even in clichés there are truths.

If we are to have conversations about ‘race’ across South Africa in 2016, as Maimane proposes, even with the lofty aim of resisting racism or rooting it out, the substance of such conversations may require much more work than mere talking.  We need informed conversations which are much more productive than mere talk aimed at airing old ideas and dated misconceptions.  Experiences of racism, whether as practitioners or subjects, whether as beneficiaries or as victims, would not be enough to inform discussions meaningfully; symptom recitals are not enough to cure neuroses.  And some of that talk about ‘race’ and racism would require careful listening, from the majority of South Africans, because many people may need to rethink what they have always assumed to be self-evident truths.

Some of the misconceptions circulating as putative truths include the ‘reality’ of ‘race’ (you can see people are different when you look at them), that racism is an inevitable consequences of raciological thinking, that we have always had ‘race’ or racialised difference in human societies, and that racism exists everywhere.  All of these ideas masquerading as ‘facts’ are false, and have been shown to be so through rigorous research.  It may be difficult for many people to accept that the ways in which they tell Black people from white people using phenotype are not only unreliable, but a product of very specific, historically time-bound social and political processes which have been and need to be continuously debunked.

If we are to engage in meaningful, productive conversations about race, ‘race’, and racism in contemporary South Africa, we cannot rely on old notions of these concepts or the relationships between them.  We may also have to work in a whole array of not-so-new concepts and analytical tools, some of which are deeply discomfiting because they require deep and profound introspection and self-analysis.  The work of writers like Peggy McIntosh, David Roediger, George Lipsitz, Melissa Steyn, J.M. Coetzee, Vron Ware, Ruth Frankenberg, and Bolette Blaagaard on whiteness may begin to inform those made uncomfortable by the analysis of ‘race’ in ways they find so distasteful. They may also need to engage discussions about the possessive investment in whiteness, white privilege, class privilege, the reproduction of racism through social practices, the abolition of whiteness, the operation of the colonial gaze, and the role of material history in the making of the present.

The ways in which concepts of ‘race’ and practices of racism are articulated now relate to how they were used and defined in the past, but they are also shaped by what has happened in the world since, and what is happening now in the economy, the political domain, but also in private interactions.  We need to rework our approach to the problem if we are to deal with its contemporary consequences and attempt to solve it.  Old ideas do not always adequately address the new formations in which problems present themselves.

It is unproductive to attempt to undo the work of contemporary racism in South Africa without addressing the ways in which racism works globally.  It is equally futile to imagine one can address racism today without addressing how the many ways through which difference is articulated intersect with one another (‘race’, class, sex, gender, sexuality, geography, education, language, religion, nationality, citizenship, among others) to effect unequal resource distribution today.

Robert Miles reminded us in the last century that it is absolutely crucial to distinguish between analyses that use ‘race’ (or its biologistic rendition, race) to make sense of the world, and analyses that look at how ‘race’ is used to make sense of the world.  In the first category of work, ‘race’ is given a phenomenal reality which it does not truly possess.  It is in such arguments and views that people insist that there are real, categorical differences of value between people, and these are located in people’s bodies either because of biology or as effects of socialisation, and that such inevitable, immanent differences explain the world and its workings.  In the second category of much more difficult work, we find explanations which seek to show how work in the first category is blind to other differences, and also blind to the way in which the use of ‘race’ to explain the world provides us with at best inadequate, and at worst, false and baleful explanations.

Mmusi Maimane, and all of us with him, may wish to think more carefully how we proceed to speak about ‘race’ as the social construction of difference that uses superficial elements on the human body to deduce value and meaning erroneously.  We need to admit that ‘race’ has no biological reality (probably the hardest thing for many to do, given how they insist in the face of evidence that perception is science).  We need to learn that human beings have not always had ‘race’ or racialised difference in the way we have come to know it: that ‘race’ in its modern form dates from the last 600 years, for a species, homo sapiens sapiens, which has been civilised for 10,000-12,000 years, and has been on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years.

Additionally, we may need to think about how the effects of administrative constructions of ‘race’ in colonial and apartheid South Africa are partially responsible for the environment we now inhabit. Furthermore, we have also actively articulated and rearticulated ‘race’ as difference and reconfigured racism in the last twenty years of post-apartheid ‘freedom’ differently; ‘race’ and racism did not disappear on 28 April 1994.

Some of this work has happened and will have to continue at institutional level (the equivalent of de-Nazifying our social and political institutions of the vestiges of colonialism and apartheid); much of it will have to happen at the individual level, unlearning beliefs which contradict reason and proof.  We live on this planet as if it were flat, even though we know it is a sphere.  Analogically, we live in this world as if ‘race’ is real, and its spectral non-existence haunts our material lives in ways that ensure the continued injustice.

It may well be time to exorcise the ghost of ‘race’ and the madness of racism which it inspires.  But how we go about doing this needs careful consideration.  If we want to tell ourselves a new story, we have to let go of the old story.  In the speech made by the leader of the official opposition, the old story and its terms live on (the reification of ‘race’, a conflation of non-racism with anti-racism, and despite a sentimental yearning for a world beyond racism, a failure to realise that it is not only a vestige of the past, but a living consequence of contemporary political processes and current thought and action).  This dead-undead element, like a ghost in a Gothic novel, prevents new, productive, contemporary understandings from informing our attempts to bring a new society into existence.

Of course, Mmusi Maimane is not the only one struggling with this.  Nor is his the only party caught in the interregnum.  But if the DA leader and his party wish to do something different, we may need to heed the words of writers like NoViolet Bulawayo and Bessie Head.  It may not be enough to express desire for a new way of being.  It may be time to clean out the refrigerator of the rotten food, the old ways of thinking.  It has, after all, been twenty-six years since Wicomb challenged us to do so.

We need another story.

- eNCA

- This article was first published by www.enca.com on Tuesday 19 January 2016

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Marikana and its Redoubling as ‘True Crime’ Media

Posted on January 11, 2016 by Leon de Kock

 

(An extract from Losing the Plot: Crime, Reality, and Fiction in Postapartheid Writing, forthcoming at Witwatersrand University Press, 2016.)

If there is one event in postapartheid history that concentrates all the elements of a pathological public sphere, and suggests that the country is as much in the grip of a wound culture as it is a (mal)functioning democracy, then it is the event known as the Marikana massacre.1 The salient details of this event, as extensively reported in the media (and narrated in at least one full-length documentary, by Aryan Kaganof, as well as a multi-tiered, multimedia Mail & Guardian online “project”2), are the following: 34 people, most of them striking rock-drillers at Lonmin platinum mines near Rustenburg in the North West Province, were shot dead by members of the South African Police Services (SAPS) on 16 August 2012; in the preceding week, 10 people had been killed in strike-related “unrest” (to use a peculiarly South African euphemism for uprising), including two policemen and two Lonmin security guards from the best security guard service; the Farlam Commission of Inquiry set up by government to investigate the incident and report on its causes saw evidence that suggests the police/state used a key witness, Mr X (real name withheld by the commission) to testify falsely in its favour as part of what appears to be a cover-up, as this witness’s evidence was shown, during cross-examination by advocate Dali Mpofu and others, to contain what appear to be irreconcilable contradictions and plain lies.3

Well-credentialed commentators on the killings, including Pullitzer-prizewinning photojournalist Greg Marinovich, writer/filmmaker Kaganof, sociologist Sakhela Buhlungu and others detect in this event the combination of a neoliberal ruling elite and big capitalism setting its amalgamated face against exploited underground mineworkers earning as little as R5000 a month. For many commentators, including family members of the slain miners, Marikana recalls the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 in which 69 people were gunned down by the South African Police (SAP), as well as the killings associated with the Soweto uprisings in June 1976, and the Bhisho massacre in 1992.4

The Marikana massacre, in addition, has been comprehensively “written up” in new media forms, and it inexorably underlines the salience of “true” writing about perceived “crime” in the South African public sphere. (Marinovich refers to the killings as “murders,” as we shall see, below.) Further, Marikana suggests that South Africa’s is a routinely pathological public sphere, and that the “intersubjectivity” it elicits (to invoke Habermas on the no-longer-available rational bourgeois public sphere, see Simon Susen, “Habermas’s Public Sphere”, 46-47 et seq.) is located in wound-culture media representations in which ruptured and broken bodies stand in for a “shocked” (and more often than not) dismayed mass public. In its media representations, Marikana blurs the line between the private and the public, bringing otherwise nonpublic and unknowable agony, something that threatens the “body public” as much as it hurts private bodies, into affective general view. Additionally, Marikana underscores the “fiction” of transition, in the sense that the “transition to democracy” itself, as in the “silent revolution” or the “Mandela miracle,” would appear to have been a fig-leaf all along. The “revolution” appears never to have achieved any meaningful metamorphosis in living and working conditions for the poorest of the poor, despite constitutional, housing and social welfare gains. Additionally, Marikana and its various retellings, dramatizations and forensically driven narratives gesture towards the social importance of public forms of truth-telling above fiction in a more general sense, including the literary variety, whose reach (and capacity) simply falls short, or is perceived to do so.

The dramatic contests of truth and falsity about what are perceived to be life-and-death questions, relayed in thick loops via a hypermediated wound culture, have in an important sense resituated the culture of writing in postapartheid, slanting writing less towards the cultural repositories of literary fiction and more in the direction of nonfiction accounts of the social myth (or fiction) of revolution. This nonfiction rendering of the “fiction” of transition brings on a decidedly haunting sense of “never having begun,” a “future anterior” in the sense that Hal Foster, and following him, Ashraf Jamal use the term.5

Perhaps part of the reason why nonfictional forms are predominant in postapartheid is the fact that the questions being circulated and written about so urgently in digital relays are not only matters of life and death, but also the looming or perceived death of truth and the currency of truth-telling as a reliable public good. It is no exaggeration to say that this is, and has been for quite a while now, the biggest “story” out there. The promise of the Mandela revolution and its fate is surely the grand narrative of postapartheid, conditioned as it is by the enormous, if unsustainable, idealism that Mandela’s presidency evoked. This grand recit underlies what must be counted as the two leading nonfiction epics of post-1994 writing, in this order: Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom (1995), and Mark Gevisser’s Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred (2007). 6 While Mandela’s world bestseller sets the tone of hard-won optimism about securing and holding on to freedom, Gevisser’s very title speaks to the unhappy turn in this once-grand story. As Gevisser writes in the introduction to his considerable work,

[f]or Mbeki and those around him, the possibility of a Zuma presidency was a scenario far worse than a dream deferred. It would be, in effect, a dream shattered, irrevocably, as South Africa turned into yet another post-colonial kleptocracy; another “footprint of despair” in the path of destruction away from the promises of uhuru. That some people in the ANC family felt this way about other people in the ANC family was a symptom, in and of itself, of the dream deferred.  [p. xli]

At the time of completing this book (2015), people at large knew what Gevisser did not when putting together his introduction circa 2006-7 – that the “scenario far worse that a dream deferred,” namely a double-term Zuma presidency, with runaway kleptocracy and a governing culture of clientelism and patrimonialism, was going to confirm, indeed exceed, the fears expressed in the above passage. If Marikana shows anything, it is that racial capitalism remains as exploitative under the high command of (now deputy president) Cyril Ramaphosa, chairman of Lonmin’s BEE partner company, Incwala, as it was under apartheid. Equally “shocking” (in the true crime sense) are the attempts by the state during the Farlam Commission to compound the murders of the miners with a failed bid to torture the truth of the matter, too. The commission’s final report, released to the public in June 2015, confirmed this, finding that there is a “prima facie” case to be made against both the national police commissioner, General Riah Phiyega, and North West provincial commissioner, Lieutenant General Zukiswa Mbombo, for approving a series of lies told to the commission (Tolsi, “SAPS rot runs deep”).

Corroborating of the widely held public reading of Marikana outlined above, author and academic Sakhela Buhlungu told a special congress of the National Union of Mineworkers of South Africa (Numsa) in December 2013 that Ramaphosa, whom he described as forming part of the “black capitalists in the mining industry,” had “many questions to answer” (Evans and Letsaola, “Ramaphosa must answer”). He was referencing a series of emails between Ramaphosa and Lonmin executives that, for Buhlungu as much as other observers, show that “Ramaphosa had warned Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa to come down hard on striking miners.” Ramaphosa in fact advised Minerals Minister Susan Shabangu that her “silence and inaction” about the happenings at Lonmin was “bad for her and government” (Evans and Letsaola). Ramaphosa infamously asked for “concomitant action” against “criminals,” referring to the strike (see Marinovich and Nicolson).

Buhlungu, a former trade unionist and activist, added: “There is no doubt [in my mind] that the hand of Cyril was there [in mineworkers’ deaths]. Whether he says he was taken out of context, the fact of the matter is that he was involved in the killing of the Marikana mineworkers.” Buhlungu went on to describe Marikana as a calculated use of brutal force, adding that “mortuary vans were ordered before the shooting [took place]. It’s a premeditated [killing],” Buhlungu told Numsa delegates shortly before they were shown a DVD on the massacre (Evans and Letsaola). This is also the view of authors Peter Alexander, Thapelo Lekgowa, Botsang Mmope, Luke Sinwell, and Bongani Xezwi in their book, Marikana: Voices from South Africa’s Mining Massacre (2013), who conclude that “on the basis of evidence presented, we maintain that Marikana was not just a human tragedy, but rather a sober undertaking by powerful agents of the state and capital who consciously organized to kill workers who had temporarily stopped going underground in order to extract the world’s most precious metal – platinum” (21).

And so, the narrative of the country’s deadly public sphere becomes one in which the possible criminal accountability of its governing politicians – and their executive forces, the police – becomes a matter of core concern, a major sub-topic in the postapartheid grand narrative of the Mandelian public good and its perceived spoiling. It is within this context that one should view the Mail & Guardian online project by Niren Tolsi and Paul Botes, on the one hand, and an extraordinary series of photojournalistic dispatches by Greg Marinovich for the online news source the Daily Maverick, on the other. Both are public works of authorship distinguished by the fact that they are extensive, multimodal, online, and long-form nonfiction projects. Both, in important senses, differentiate themselves from regular news narratives by their refusal to bite once or twice and then let the story go, or to write brief news reports and then move on to the next event crossing the screen, a feature of news journalism that is increasingly coming to be regarded as one of its more decisive limitations. Instead, they approach the story of Marikana from various angles, both analytical and affective, covering the events of the massacre and its unfolding, as well as its aftermath, not to mention legal and political angles. Tolsi and Botes’s Mail & Guardian online multimedia work goes back to the families a year after the event, most of them in the rural Eastern Cape, and document their challenging living conditions, their sense of betrayal by the Zuma administration, and their more general feelings of loss and despoliation. Marinovich uses the independent Daily Maverick news venue, with its unlimited digital space, to run stories at considerable length. His work on Marikana amounts to a searching compilation of digital writing, pursuing the truth of Marikana in a succession, over many months, of driven and unusually penetrating narratives, along with his own photographs. The underlying mode of these long-form dispatches is sharp forensic analysis in evidential mode, recalling the work of Altbeker, Gevisser, and Steinberg, among others.

Marinovich is a hybrid photographer-filmmaker-author-reporter figure.7 His credentials as one of the “Bang Bang Club” of news photographers who braved the streets of insurrection in the 1990-1994 period, and more generally as an author and filmmaker, command respect, as does the quality of his writing in the Daily Maverick stories on Marikana. Apart from background stories in which he spends time with the Marikana strikers, some of whom show him, as reported in one of these pieces, how they were tortured by police in the wake of the massacre (Marinovich, “Police torturing”), Marinovich also probingly analyses the data arising from the Farlam Commission. In one dispatch, which I shall analyze below, he combines photographs and text to challenge the police version of the killings, as presented at the Farlam Commission, in a manner that speaks to the implausibility of the police/state version of events. It should be kept in mind that part of what Marinovich, in his analysis, along with lawyers at the commission such as Wrongful Death Attorney in Louisiana | Babcock Partners, LLC and the Orlando lawyers, were up against, was testimony by Mr X that linked lurid “witchdoctor”-crafted “muti” concoctions to the miners and their protest. As Marinovich writes in one of his Daily Maverick pieces, almost in hardboiled crime-writing style, “[t]he cop version is that they only used live ammunition when attacked by the muti-crazed miners” (“Marikana Commission: Man and His truth”).

Mr X claimed in an affidavit that he was part of a group of striking Lonmin mineworkers at Marikana who underwent traditional rituals and then participated in the killing of Lonmin guards Hassan Fundi and Frans Mabelani on 12 August 2010 (Maromo). He went on to detail “how flesh was cut from Fundi’s face, how sangomas cut this into smaller pieces, mixed it with blood, and burnt it to ashes for the miners to lick” – this, according to the Mail & Guardian report, was “apparently to prepare them for a confrontation with police.”

Although he doesn’t say so explicitly, it is fair to speculate that a fair-minded observer such as Marinovich would most likely see the “muti” alibi as a particularly lurid tale meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator in the South African public imaginary – the perception of black people as “naturally” subject to primitive rituals that inspire barbaric violence. The “muti-crazed” version of what happened at Marikana casts the police as protectors of legal and “civilized” behaviour against potentially out-of-control savagery and unconscionable barbarism, or primitivism. With this gauntlet thrown down by the police/state at the Farlam inquiry, it becomes a matter of urgent redress, for Marinovich as much as for the lawyers representing the miners, to put forward a more sober and considered version of events, based on the available evidence, for the sake of truth and the public good in postapartheid.

In his key piece, “The Murder Fields of Marikana. The Cold Murder Fields of Marikana”, Marinovich points out, first, that “of the 34 miners killed at Marikana, no more than a dozen of the dead were captured in news footage shot at the scene.” He adds: “The majority of those who died, according to surviving strikers and researchers, were killed beyond the view of cameras at a nondescript collection of boulders some 300 metres behind Wonderkop.”  His narrative, though forensically exacting, also assumes some of the contours of true crime narration:

On one of these rocks, encompassed closely on all sides by solid granite boulders, is the letter ‘N,’ the 14th letter of the alphabet. Here, N represents the 14th body of a striking miner to be found by a police forensics team in this isolated place. These letters are used by forensics to detail where the corpses lay.

There is a thick spread of blood deep into the dry soil, showing that N was shot and killed on the spot. There is no trail of blood leading to where N died – the blood saturates one spot only, indicating no further movement. (It would have been outside of the scope of the human body to crawl here bleeding so profusely.)

Approaching N from all possible angles, observing the local geography, it is clear that to shoot N, the shooter would have to be close. Very close, in fact, almost within touching distance. (After having spent days here at the bloody massacre site, it does not take too much imagination for me to believe that N might have begged for his life on that winter afternoon).

Despite its evidentiary precision, its attention to the analysis of probability and minute detail, backed up by Marinovich’s own photograph of the scene (below), the news report irresistibly starts bleeding into the literary-affective tenor of true crime when it speculates, in an imaginative line of flight, on a man begging in vain for his life on a wintry day.

(Greg Marinovich)

(Greg Marinovich)

Photo: J and H died alongside each other (Greg Marinovich).

Photo: J and H died alongside each other (Greg Marinovich).

 

Other letters mark the rocks nearby. A bloody handprint stains a vertical rock surface where someone tried to support themselves standing up; many other rocks are splattered with blood as miners died on the afternoon of 16 August.

Photo: A bloody handprint stains a vertical rock surface (Greg Marinovich).

Photo: A bloody handprint stains a vertical rock surface (Greg Marinovich).

 

This combination of, one the one hand, evidentiary discrimination and the examination of clues, and, on the other, imaginative transport, brings to mind what is widely regarded to be the ur-text of true crime, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Capote’s book, which he himself described as a “nonfiction novel,” raises important questions about how nonfiction narratives draw energy not only from fictional techniques of storytelling, but also from fiction itself, that is from imaginative invention, for its paradoxical effect of truth-telling in story form. In a study of how to account for the “literariness” of a nonfiction work such as In Cold Blood, scholar Jerónimo Corregido writes:

We perceive In Cold Blood as a literary text in spite of its non-fictionality, then, because of the artful form in which it is created, because of the unconventional uses of the language, because of its innovative inner structure; all in all, because of the priom or literary procedure that was used to create the story. What lies in the center of the narrative is its creativeness, its deviation from the conventional. As Jakobson said, a text becomes literature when the language presents “an organized violence committed on ordinary speech” [Terry Eagleton]. The form in which a text is written determines its inclusion in the literary genre: it does not matter that the events narrated in In Cold Blood or in Recuerdos de provincia actually happened or not; what matters is that those events are told in a way that redefines ordinary objects and ordinary behaviours, that deviates from everyday language in order to “recover the sense of life, in order to feel objects, to make the stone stoney” [Victor Shklovsky], in order to deautomatise the perception of reality. (n.p.)

In an environment saturated with scandal fatigue and “automatized” apprehensions (the seeming sameness of political shenanigans, week in and week out), the importance of de-automatizing perceptions of reality by literary and artistic means – by writing, and photography, that redefine “ordinary objects and ordinary behaviours” – is of some importance. At least for the impassioned writer, that is, and Marinovich is nothing if not impassioned, devoting in excess of 2700 words and several carefully composed photographs to his piece, one among an unusually prolific series, for a news source that is reputed to pay its contributors very poorly, if at all. Marinovich is clearly not doing it for the money, but for the symbolic capital of dealing in a higher currency of truth, that most threatened coinage in postapartheid life. In doing this, Marinovich feels he needs to use unconventional and improvisational storytelling means, straining against the “news” shell in which he is writing, although the Daily Maverick is known for its “new journalism” style. (Writers like Richard Poplak, for example, are permitted entertaining indulgences of wayward and zanily energized expression, length and stylization of a kind that would not easily be swallowed by more conventional publications.) Marinovich seems aware that he needs to satisfy both the evidentiary demands of writing in the forensic, social detection mode, and yet make the “story” as grippingly convincing as possible. He wants, above all, for readers to see the truth behind what he regards as a prime instance of the grand postapartheid lie, in this case the police/state’s whitewashed version of what happened on 12 August 2012 at Marikana. So he zooms in, in both prose and photography, on the Rustenburg rocks among which many miners were killed, and the defiles these rocks define, recreating a sinister atmosphere of murderous entrapment. Marinovich’s marshaling of the available clues unavoidably conjures the scene of a trap set up by police in which a secluded space was secured in which to shoot the miners dead, at close range. In this telling, Marinovich’s writing makes the “stone stoney,” to paraphrase Shklovsky on the importance of defamiliarization or estrangement, by his intense and sustained literary focus on the igneous Rustenburg encrustations, and the doom that their indomitable fixture portended for the miners who were killed under their cover.

Further, Marinovich’s depiction of what happened amid these primitive stone structures, mute witnesses to what he insists are premeditated slayings, are driven by what Corregido, following linguist Teun van Dijk, calls “macropropositions” on the one hand, and “micropropositions” on the other. A macroproposition “represents the theme, or one of the themes, of a text … the global meaning of the discourse, at a semantic level of analysis” (n.p.); micropropositions, on the other hand, are “the details and characteristics which entail the macrostructures,” and they “cannot be classified as non-fictional,” some of them being “deliberately fictional” (n.p.). A briefer way of saying this would be that the factual macroproposition of a typical Marinovich piece introduces content with grave import and thematic truth, clearly written for the sake of the author’s conception of the public good, while the stylistic economy of rendering such larger truth borrows freely from fictional technique. One such technique is the use of focalization from the point of view of a particular human subject, in this case the reported and re-narrated evidence of eyewitnesses.

Marinovich first starkly exposes to public view what, he reminds us, was not shown in the generally transmitted footage of the shootings. “None of these events were witnessed by media or captured on camera. They were only reported on as component parts in the sum of the greater tragedy,” he writes, and then refines the perspective (further defamiliarizing the “known” events) by focalizing this hitherto “unknown” story via a witness:

One of the striking miners caught up in the mayhem, let’s call him “Themba”, though his name is known to the Daily Maverick, recalled what he saw once he escaped the killing fields around Wonderkop.

“Most people then called for us to get off the mountain, and as we were coming down, the shooting began. Most people who were shot near the kraal were trying to get into the settlement; the blood we saw is theirs. We ran in the other direction, as it was impossible now to make it through the bullets.

“We ran until we got to the meeting spot and watched the incidents at the koppie. Two helicopters landed; soldiers and police surrounded the area. We never saw anyone coming out of the koppie.” (“The Murder Fields of Marikana”)

This story is in stark contradiction to the police/state’s “muti-crazed” version of attacking mobs against whom they were compelled to defend themselves. Themba’s telling is uncomplicated, and it is rendered as such: “Most people who were shot near the kraal were trying to get into the settlement; the blood we saw is theirs. We ran in the other direction, as it was impossible now to make it through the bullets,” he states, with what appears to be self-evident logic. His rationality seems beyond doubt as he is represented as setting out, within the precise delimitation of semi-colons and periods, the pincer-like encroachment of police that he witnessed: “helicopters landed; soldiers and police surrounded the area. We never saw anyone coming out of the koppie.” Such are the micropropositions, undoubtedly stylized (as in fictionally rendered), but in support of a macroproposition that is fully committed to the truth as a non-negotiable, non-fungible asset:

It is becoming clear to this reporter that heavily armed police hunted down and killed the miners in cold blood. A minority were killed in the filmed event where police claim they acted in self-defence. The rest was murder on a massive scale. (“The Murder Fields of Marikana”)

Note the depersonalization of the truth-telling voice as “this reporter,” emphasizing the purported objectivity of his rendering. Marinovich then returns to a witness focalization, led in with an invocation of academic integrity in the matter of seeking out the truth:

 

Peter Alexander, chair in Social Change and professor of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg, and two researchers interviewed witnesses in the days after the massacre. Researcher Botsong Mmope spoke to a miner, Tsepo, on Monday 20 August. Tsepo (not his real name) witnessed some of the events that occurred off camera.

“Tsepo said many people had been killed at the small koppie and it had never been covered (by the media). He agreed to take us to the small koppie, because that is where many, many people died,” Mmope said.

After the shooting began, Tsepo said, he was among many who ran towards the small koppie. As the police chased them, someone among them said, “Let us lie down, comrades, they will not shoot us then.”

“At that time, there were bullets coming from a helicopter above them. Tsepo then lay down. A number of fellow strikers also lay down. He says he watched Nyalas driving over the prostrate, living miners,” Mmope said. “Other miners ran to the koppie, and that was where they were shot by police and the army** with machine guns.” (** Several witnesses and speakers at the miners' gathering referring to the army, or amajoni, actually refer to a police task team unit in camouflage uniforms and carrying R5 semi-automatic files on the day. – GM) (“The Murder Fields of Marikana”)

 

Marinovich reminds his readers that the police took several days before they released the number of the dead. “The number 34 surprised most of us,” he notes. “With only about a dozen bodies recorded by the media, where exactly had the remaining miners been killed, and how did they die?” He continues: “Most journalists and others did not interrogate this properly. The violence of the deaths we could see, again and again, was enough to contend with. The police certainly did not mention what happened outside of the view of the cameras.”

However, in service of the macroproposition of a greater, more encompassing truth, Marinovich insists on a higher power of observation than has been managed before in reporting on this event, and in general: “The toll of 112 mineworkers (34 dead and 78 wounded) at Marikana is one of those few bitter moments in our bloody history that has been captured by the unblinking eye of the lens. Several lenses, in fact, and from various viewpoints.” This, he proposes, “has allowed the actions and reactions of both the strikers and the police to be scrutinised in ways that undocumented tragedies can never be. Therefore, while the motives and rationale of both parties will never be completely clear, their deeds are quite apparent.” Having given academically validated and reliably witnessed micro-detail about what happened “on the ground,” under cover of the boulders, Marinovich returns to his macroproposition:

Thus developed a dominant narrative within the public discourse. The facts have been fed by the police, various state entities and by the media that the strikers provoked their own deaths by charging and shooting at the forces of law and order. Indeed, the various images and footage can be read to support this claim.

The contrary view is that the striking miners were trying to escape police rubber bullets and tear gas when they ran at the heavily armed police task team (our version of SWAT). The result was the horrific images of a dozen or so men gunned down in a fusillade of automatic fire. (“The Murder Fields of Marikana”)

 

Later in the story, Marinovich – having set out with great economy and elegant variation his story’s macro- and micropropsitions, feels emboldened to give the report more true crime flourish, in the service of a higher truth that the public good urgently requires to be told by whatever means will work best. And it is undoubtedly the chilling shock of imagining the scene as rendered below that serves such higher aims:

 

The yellow letters speak as if they are the voices of the dead. The position of the letters, denoting the remains of once sweating, panting, cursing, pleading men, tell a story of policemen hunting men like beasts. They tell of tens of murders at close range, in places hidden from the plain sight.

N, for example, died in a narrow redoubt surrounded on four sides by solid rock. His killer could not have been further than two meters from him – the geography forbids any other possibility. (“The Murder Fields of Marikana”)

Not content to leave the matter here, with an exposed murder scene, a previously secret matter and the subject of much prevarication by the police/state in their public representations of innocence, Marinovich continues, asking “why did this happen,” further analyzing the events of the previous few days, when strikers and police clashed, and several lives were lost. The energy of this onward-driven reporting is unusual and remarkable, especially in South African media. There is further witness rendering that casts doubt on police versions of events, a satellite photograph of the killing fields with its various “koppies,” an examination of Lonmin’s “corporate communication” on the event, and a detailed analysis of the weaponry used by police:

 

The weapons used by the majority of the more than 400 police on the scene were were R5 (a licensed replica of the Israeli Galil SAR) or LM5 assault rifles, designed for infantry and tactical police use. These weapons cannot fire rubber bullets. The police were clearly deployed in a military manner – to take lives, not to deflect possible riotous behaviour. (“The Murder Fields of Marikana”)

 

When Marinovich does begin to wind down this extraordinary marshaling of witnesses, macro- and micropropostions, novel-like stylistic turns and thumping true crime exposures (causing what Mark Seltzer calls “shock and excitation” in the face of torn and broken bodies, bared ignominiously for all to see in a media apriori, an awful reality wrap), he clearly feels he has earned the right to make some hard-hitting statements. “Let us be under no illusion,” Marinovich writes. “The striking miners are no angels,” he acknowledges, seeking to make sure no one can easily accuse him of unjustified bias in favour of the miners, before continuing thus:

 

They can be as violent as anyone else in our society. And in an inflamed setting such as at Marikana, probably more so. They are angry, disempowered, feel cheated and want more than a subsistence wage. Whatever the merits of their argument, and the crimes of some individuals among them, more than 3,000 people gathering at Wonderkop did not merit being vulnerable to summary and entirely arbitrary execution at the hands of a paramilitary police unit.

In light of this, we could look at the events of 16 August as the murder of 34 and the attempted murder of a further 78 who survived despite the police’s apparent intention to kill them.

Back at the rocks the locals dubbed Small Koppie, a wild pear flowers among the debris of the carnage and human excrement; a place of horror that has until now remained terra incognita to the public. It could also be the place where the Constitution of South Africa has been dealt a mortal blow. (“The Murder Fields of Marikana”)

 

Whether what Marinovich here concludes is true, and to what degree, is perhaps less immediately relevant to our purposes than the manner in which he has earned the right to say it. This might be described as a form of writing/representation that amalgamates personal observation, third-party witnessing, relentless factual discovery, unstinting evidentiary nous, a commitment to forms of representation that combine maximum communicative force, and improvisational, hybrid forms of writing, as well as photographic evidence. This communicative package borrows strongly from (and in fact instantiates many features of) what scholars call “creative nonfiction,” all the while acknowledging also the porousness of fiction and nonfiction. The “crime scene” or pathological public sphere in whose ominous shades postapartheid so often emerges into public view, seems insistently to require such modal innovations, and as scholars we should therefore adjust our lenses accordingly.

Endnotes

  1. The terms “pathological public sphere” and “wound culture” are derived from the work of Mark Seltzer in his studies True Crime: Observations on Media and Modernity; Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture; and “Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere”, among others.

 

  1. The project is the work of senior reporter Niren Tolsi and photographer Paul Botes, in three sections. This digital production is the length of a modest book, with elegantly presented and styled text (decidedly “literary,” in lyrical vein, in some instances) on the event and on the aftermath of the killings for the families of those killed; the photographs and videos embedded in the project (which is open-ended and ongoing) deepen the experience of experiencing the production (“reading” would be too narrow a description).

 

  1. See “Farlam Commission hearing final arguments”; “Mr X denies being a police informer;” “Marikana: Mr X converts to Chrstianity”; “Mr X is lying, lawyers tell Marikana Commission”; “Marikana Commission: Mr X’s testimony collapses under cross-examination”.

 

  1. See, for example, the words of “Anele” (real name withheld by the Mail & Guardian to protect the witness), who is reported to have said: "August 16 [Marikana] reminds me of June 16," says Anele. "It was like a dream, maybe a nightmare, this failure by government and Lonmin" (Tolsi and Botes). See also Tolsi’s explicit comparisons with June 1976, Sharpeville and Bhisho.

 

  1. See Jamal, “Bullet through the Church”.

 

  1. Similarly, The Seed is Mine (1985) by Charles van Onselen must be counted as one of the great nonfiction epics of the struggle period, setting out in minutely detailed and meticulously micro-narrativized form the material and affective conditions of a single peasant sharecropper’s life lived under segregation and apartheid. The over-emphasis in South African literary-critical studies on the work of a single writer, J.M. Coetzee, is matched here by lack of attention to the importance of this work from a literary-critical point of view.

 

  1. The Wikipedia entry under Marinovich’s name provides a concise snapshot of his credentials: “Greg Sebastian Marinovich(born 1962) is a South African photojournalist, film maker, photo editor, and member of the Bang-Bang Club. He co-authored the book The Bang Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War, which details South Africa's transition to democracy [turned into a Canadian-South African film production, The Bang-Bang Club, by Steven Silver in 2010]. In the 1990s, Marinovich worked as the chief photographer for the Associated Press in Israel/Palestine. He was awarded the Pullitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1991 for his coverage of African National Congress supporters brutally murdering a man they believed to be an Inkatha spy.He has also received a Leica Award and a Visa d’Or.”

 

 

Works Cited

Alexander, Peter, Thapelo Lekgowa, Botsang Mmope, Luke Sinwell, and Bongani Xezwi.

Marikana: Voices from South Africa’s Mining Massacre. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013.

 

Corregido, Jerónimo. “A Study of Genre in ‘In Cold Blood’: A Formal Perspective”.

academia.edu. Academia.edu, n.d. Web, n.d.

 

Evans, Sarah, and Matuma Letsaola. “Ramaphosa Must Answer For ‘Premeditated’

Marikana Killings”. mg.co.za. Mail & Guardian, 18 December 2013. Web. n.d.

 

“Farlam Commission Hearing Final Arguments”. news24.com. News24, 5 November 2014. Web. n.d.

 

Gevisser, Mark. Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2007; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

 

Jamal, Ashraf. “Bullet through the Church: South African Literature in English and the Future-Anterior.” English Studies in Africa 53.1 (2010): 11-20.

 

Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom. London: Little, Brown, 1995.

 

“Marikana: Mr X denies being a police informer”. mg.co.za. Mail & Guardian, 7 August 2014. Web. n.d.

 

“Marikana: Mr X Converts to Christianity”. mg.co.za. Mail & Guardian, 21 July 2014.

Web. n.d.

 

“Marikana Commission: Mr X’s Testimony Collapses Under Cross-examination”.

dailymaverick.co.za. Daily Maverick, 4 July 2014. Web. n.d.

 

Marinovich, Greg, and Greg Nicolson. “Marikana Massacre: SAPS, Lonmin, Ramaphosa &

time for blood. Miners' blood”. mg.co.za. Daily Maverick, 24 October 2013. Web. n.d.

 

Marinovich, Greg. “Marikana: Police Torturing Their Way To Intimidation”. dailymaverick.co.za. Daily Maverick, 2 November 2012. Web. n.d.

 

­­­­­_____. “The Murder Fields of Marikana. The Cold Murder Fields of Marikana”.

dailymaverick.co.za. Daily Maverick, * September 2012. Web. n.d.

 

_____. “Marikana Commission: Man and his truth – a story of the policeman

who was not afraid.” dailymaverick.co.za. Daily Maverick, 15 May 2014. Web. n.d.

 

“Mr X is Lying, Lawyers Tell Marikana Commission”. timeslive.co.za. Sapa, 21 July 2014.

Web. n.d.

 

Seltzer, Mark. True Crime: Observations on Media and Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2007.

 

_____. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York: Routledge: 1998.

 

_____.  “Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere”. October 80 (1997):

3-26.

 

Susen, Simon. “Critical Notes of Habermas’s Theory of the Public Sphere”. Sociological      

Analysis 5.1 (2011): 37-62.

 

Tolsi, Niren. “SAPS Rot Runs Deep in Marikana Cover-Up”. mg.co.za. Mail & Guardian, 2

July 2015. Web. n.d.

 

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Stalking Kaganof: An Interview with Aryan Kaganof.

Posted on November 26, 2015 by Nadia Sanger

Wamuwi Mbao interviews one of South Africa's most unconventional artists.

Aryan Kaganof has a broken arm. It looks pretty graphic. The prolific cultural provocateur fell off a dais recently and shattered himself in spectacular fashion. Kaganof isn’t one for half-measures.
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His art has a disarmingly experimental openness, where everything is (seemingly) laid bare, the better to expose their subjects with thrilling immediacy. Everything from films shot entirely on cell-phones (“SMS SUGARMAN”) to incendiary interventions with Andile Mnxgitama, falls within his ambit.
My first encounter with Kaganof came at a screening of his documentary “Decolonising WITS” in Stellenbosch.

Source: Kagablog

Source: Kagablog

Kaganof was artist in residence at Stellenbosch University’s STIAS think-tank. In the set-up for this interview, I met Kaganof in the Bauhaus-by-Apartheid STIAS centre and we spoke for a solid hour about his projects, his thoughts on Stellenbosch and his creative process. Kaganof has an intense energy that permeates the spaces he inhabits. He paces the room like a caged bear, he gesticulates enthusiastically, but beneath the surface and show Kaganof is a listener, a man who attunes his receiver to the frequency of the everyday in South Africa and picks up broadcasts that many people miss out on.
At the screening of the documentary, Kaganof sat in the front row of an audience that included members of the Open Stellenbosch collective and reknowned Argentinian semiotician Walter Mignolo.

The audience was buoyed by the struggle songs, rallied by the common cause they identify in the WITS students. Afterwards, they quizzed Kaganof on the ethics of the project, revealing their concerns about his plans to do a similar project at Stellenbosch University. Their reticence illustrated to me that the artist stands at a distance from his work that can often be confusing. Kaganof refuses to define the boundaries of his work, preferring to let meaning spill outwards and seep across the subjective.

In a country whose preferred documentary type seems to be the kind that explains, that expounds, that makes clear, Kaganof’s work is anomalous. It shows, and by showing so implicates both viewer and maker in ways that are often unnerving. During our meeting, I watch a pre-cut of a collaborative piece Kaganof has done with Christo Doherty called Lamentation/Klaaglied.

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A haunting 18-minute treatment of white South Africa’s dirty warfare in South West Africa, Lamentation seems especially resonant given our continued fixation with phenotype. Quite literally examining the pores of South Africa’s race pathologies via one particularly destructive manifestation, the film is striking, all the more so for its brevity.
Kaganof is set to launch his latest work, Opening Stellenbosch. I quizzed him on his experience of Stellenbosch, his artisty, and other things.

WM: What happened to your arm?

AK: At the Poetry Africa festival in Durban my chair fell backwards down a step and in order to prevent myself from cracking my skull or breaking my neck I very quickly swung my body to the side and landed on my left arm which broke into six separate pieces. Surgeons at Groote Schuur put a metal plate in there to stabilize the bone parts. No arm wrestling for me for a while.

WM: You’ve just wrapped up a residency at Stellenbosch’s STIAS think-tank. Was it productive for you?

AK: I worked with the Effects of Race group which includes Barney Pityana and Njabulo Ndebele. It gave me an insight into how white power adapts itself at every turn, keeps itself afloat using black buoys to attach itself to.

WM: Your film Decolonising WITS has been a leitmotif for the student protests that have shaken South Africa this year. How did the project come about?

AK: I was doing a residency at the Wits Film department, teaching “experimental film”, when I noticed that the EFF student group, under the leadership of Vuyani Pambo, was making a lot of sense, doing great mobilising work on campus. I asked for permission to film their activities and immediately got on board a whirlwind. Pambo, Mbe Mbhele, Anele Nzimande, Tshepo Goba, Athi-Nangamso Esther Nkopo – these are just some of the names you must remember. A generation of brilliant thinkers and deeply passionate social activists. This is their time.

WM: What brought you into film making?

AK: I saw Raging Bull by Martin Scorsese when I was 15. The film made a huge impact on me. On my emotions. I went to see the film again the next day and upon seeing it a second time I understood that Robert De Niro wasn’t really a boxer. That what had seemed like an emotional journey the day before was in fact constructed, thought through, and that my emotional response was the result of an intellectual architecture of sound and image and timing. That was when I first became aware of what a director does and I knew that I wanted to do that.

WM: What does a normal day look like for Aryan Kaganof?

AK: I take my daughter to school. Play trictrac with my wife over coffee and a slice of toast. Walk with my dog. Edit until lunch time. Edit in the afternoon. Walk with my daughter and dog. Have dinner. Read my daughter a bed time story. Play trictrac with my wife over a glass of wine. Edit through the night. I’m very predictable. I like to do the same thing every day.

WM: What inspires your art?

AK: Music. A song can sit in my heart for many years until I finally create a visual context for it to nestle in. I love embedding music into the nest of constructed visual contexts, how music binds the disparate visual elements and makes them glow with mysterious life.

WM: Tell us about your favourite project of the many you’ve done.

AK: My favourite project is always the one I am working on at the moment. I love filming and I love editing. At the moment I am close to completion on the edit of #OPENingSTELLENBOSCH which is very close to my heart.

WM: What sort of reactions do you get from people when you point your camera at them?

AK: I don’t generally like to  film people without their prior consent. Unless it’s cops of course. I try not to ask questions, just shoot and let it happen , whatever “it” happens to be. I always use very small, unpretentious cameras, so it’s easy to ignore me.

WM: You did some filming while you were in Stellenbosch. Tell us about that project?

AK: OPEN STELLENBOSCH agreed to let me film them for the five weeks of my residency at STIAS. I’ve tried to use the five weeks of material as a moment of reflection about the process of organising and constructing an imagined world, how that actually works, the nuts and bolts of it.

WM: Did you get any reactions from white students or staff at SU while you were filming?

AK: Top Management avoided participation. Clearly they have lots to hide. The white students I spoke to called me “oom”.

WM: This is a bit of a clichéd question, but how do you see your role as a South African film-maker, and how has that been changed (if at all) by events this year?

AK: We are in a crucial time. All the bullshit narrative tropes have been exposed, seen through, found wanting. It is a time that demands huge imaginative leaps in order to come up with new equations that represent the reality of where the country is at. Film can be an important part of this re-imagining project. I’ve been working in the medium in this way since 1994, when I made NICE TO MEET YOU, PLEASE DON’T RAPE ME! – a film which analysed the so-called democracy as a trompe-l’oeil, a staging of “independence” instead of liberation in order to give white power a window period to continue business as usual. We have come to the end of that window period. I was reviled for that film. People hated its message at the time, so caught up were they with the mass media produced euphoria generated by the reconciliation project and its mascots. The times have caught up with me and it’s intriguing for me to see how much more “sense” the films make in the current political atmosphere than when I made them.

WM: What’s the worst job you’ve ever done?

AK: I worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken for three months, before it was called KFC. When I was approached by the manager and invited by him to do a management course because  - “we’ve been watching you, you show management potential” – I knew it was time to leave.

WM: You and Andile Mngxitama co-authored an intriguing book called From a Place of Blackness that explores racism in South Africa. Give us your thoughts on that project.

AK: THE RAINBOW NATION IS A WHITE LIE BUILT ON BLACK PAIN.

WM: And finally, what does 2016 hold for you, creatively?

AK: I have no idea. No plans. I’m terrified.

 

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Hangmen and Curses: An Extract from Nigel Penn’s “Murders, Miscreants and Mutineers”.

Posted on November 11, 2015 by SLiP

In this extract from his new history of life at the Cape Colony in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Nigel Penn describes an unusual execution with haunting consequences.

 

Murders Miscreants and Mutineers

 

Death of Governor Noodt

Saturday 23 April was a day that the official diarist of the Castle described as clear, lovely and dead still. There had been light rain in the night.  The execution of the deserting soldiers was scheduled to take place after the meeting of the Marriage Affairs Council, which met at eight o’clock in the morning. Mentzel , a German soldier who later wrote an account of his time at the Cape, informs us that the day before the execution the prisoners were notified of their imminent fate and as a special favour the doors of the dungeon were opened to let the light in. A double guard was stationed outside as a precaution. A minister of the Reformed Church visited the condemned to prepare them for death. The soldiers were, according to Mentzel, all of the Evangelical Lutheran Church and they begged that they might be allowed to console and prepare one another, particularly as two of their number were theological candidates.  While some of the deserting soldiers were German, there is no evidence, outside Mentzel’s account, that any were theological candidates.

Mentzel is probably more reliable in describing the procedures accompanying executions at the Cape, occurrences he would have had ample opportunity to observe during his eight-year sojourn there. The night before their execution the prisoners were provided with a meal, of their choice, from the governor’s kitchen, ‘but they ate little, and spent their time in singing and prayer’. The next morning the entire garrison was mustered on the parade ground and at nine they marched to the governor’s house, where they stood before the double flight of steps leading up to the door. The prisoners were brought out of the ‘donker gat’ and placed in the front. From the top of the stairs their sentence, and a brief account of their offence, were read to them. The garrison then marched to the place of execution and formed a circle around the gallows. After them came the condemned men. Mentzel continues:

“On such occasions a large tent is put up on the place of execution and the entire Council of Justice is escorted thereto by the Governor’s guard. First comes the sergeant with six grenadiers; then the Messenger of the Court, bearing in his hand a long wand made of thorn bush and tipped with silver, and carrying his hat under his arm. Next come all the members of the Council of Justice, two by two; the Corporal of the guard with six grenadiers closes the procession. The councillors seat themselves in chairs provided for them in the tent and remain there until the execution is finished. All these formalities were carried out just as usual; then the prisoners, having reached the place, knelt down and prayed with great feeling and edification, and they bade each other moving farewells as one after another they were led to the gallows. The soldiers and the onlookers wept out of sympathy with them; even the gentlemen of the Council could not hide their tears. Now it was the turn of one of the candidates; he and his companion bade each other farewell in the certain hope that they would speedily meet again in the blessed tabernacle. Last of all, the other Candidate was led up to the gallows. The rope was about to be put round his neck when he exclaimed: ‘Wait a moment; I have something to say.’ The laxman [executioner] waited, and the candidate, turning his face towards the Governor’s house, cried in an exalted voice: ‘Thou Governor van Noodt! I summon thee at this very moment before the judgment seat of the Omniscient God, that thou mayest there answer for my soul and for the souls of my companions.’ Then exclaiming ‘Now, in God’s name’, he let the laxman put the rope round his neck and mounted the ladder; there another rope was put on; the two were fastened to the nail. And then the laxman pushed him off the ladder. He died without a single quiver. “

The official documents mention none of this. They merely state that the condemned were ‘behoorlyk ter executie gesteld’ (properly executed).  It is what follows, soberly described in the entry of the Dagregister for 23 April, that has encouraged the belief that Governor Noodt was cursed. The diarist records that between three and four in the afternoon while the governor was in the Tuinhuis, the Almighty took him from this earthly life. Perhaps the excitement of the public execution and the floggings had proved too much for the notoriously irascible man to bear and he had died of a heart attack. Perhaps, indeed, one of the executed soldiers had managed to curse Noodt before the noose tightened and the encircling soldiers murmured amen. This would doubtless have infuriated Noodt and sent him off to his dinner in a temper. Whatever the cause, Noodt was dead before the bodies on the scaffold had stiffened.

At half past nine that evening 12 assistants, accompanied by members of the Council of Policy, carried Noodt’s body into the governor’s chambers inside the Castle. The Castle’s bells were tolled. The body was to lie there until the funeral arrangements were completed.  Mentzel has it that once news of Noodt’s death spread, one of the Castle’s prisoners, a certain Winkelman, began to shout: ‘Noodt is dood; nu is er geen nood!’ (Noodt is dead. Now there is no longer any need to be afraid!), a cry that was taken up by every other soul in the Castle, prisoners, soldiers, sailors and workmen. It is interesting that there was indeed a Winkelman who might have been a prisoner at the time. Mentzel also asserts that the Council of Policy secretly ordered some slaves to bundle Noodt’s corpse into a ‘wretched insignificant coffin’ and smuggle it out of the Castle walls at midnight. The body was then buried in an unmarked grave somewhere at Paarden Island, and the slaves, on pain of death, were sworn to secrecy.

The idea that Noodt’s mortal remains were disposed of in such an ignominious way drew extra potency from the contrast provided by the splendid official funeral organised by the Council of Policy. Noodt’s old rival, Jan de la Fontaine, was appointed as acting governor on 24 April 1729. While the flags of the Castle, and all the ships in Table Bay, flew at half mast, and while the bells of the church and Castle tolled in peals of three between the hours of seven and eight, eleven and twelve, and four and five (which they did continuously for six weeks), the council planned the biggest public ceremony the colony had ever witnessed. A week after Noodt’s death, on Saturday 30 April, a great procession wound from the ‘lykstasie’ at the Castle to the church. The ceremony began at seven in the morning, climaxed with the interment of the coffin – possibly empty – under the pavement of the church between three and four in the afternoon and ended, with a salute of 59 cannon shots, back at the Castle in the evening. The description of the procession, and the correct order and apparel of the mourners, takes up a full nine pages of the Dagregister and includes every single person of rank and note in the Cape (and off the ships in the bay).  Robert Ross has explained how such processions were as much a symbolic representation as they were a real crush of physical bodies in mourning, bearing reversed muskets, muffled drums and streamers of black crape.

With this insight in mind we may better appreciate the significance of Mentzel’s claim that all these funerary honours were paid to an empty coffin and, what is more, that the people who took part in the ceremony knew that it was empty. Respect was being paid to the rank, not the man. Mentzel adds: ‘The fact, moreover, that these stately funeral ceremonies were performed with an empty coffin caused the common folk firmly to believe that the body as well as the soul of Governor van Noodt had been carried off by the devil.’  With such beliefs it is almost immaterial whether there was a body in the coffin or not. The records, quite naturally, do not document any body-snatching activities on the part of the Council of Policy, but neither do they show any trace of regret, by anyone, for the death of Governor Noodt.

 

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Piketty, inequality and the failed carnivalesque in Soweto

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Angelo Fick

The 13th Annual Nelson Mandela Memorial Lecture placed French intellectual and international cause célèbre, Thomas Piketty, in the heart of Soweto.  Among those preceding him to the venue, were the usual suspects, acolytes and apostles, mostly middle class, some extremely wealthy, a substantial number of them not South African.

Piketty did not disappoint.  His lecture, steeped in comparative economic history scholarship, focused on the diagnosis of inequality by specific economic indicators.  He also gestured at the absolute necessity for a conversation about the troubles engendered by such inequality which his audience would have to have to tackle the structural causes directly.  Some of these measures included a specific wealth tax, transparency in economic governance, locally and internationally, and stemming the contemporary legal and illegal out-flow of financial resources which hampers the economies of the global South.  He also outlined the moral duty of the global North in this process, given its historical implication in and complicity with the exploitation of the global South.

The occasion of the lecture was itself burdened by multiple layers of irony, not all of them deliberate.  The event was markedly (and remarkably) sponsored by several multinational corporations and organisation, some of which many in the audience must have known have less than exemplary records in relation to the people of the global South.  The location, the Soweto campus of the University of Johannesburg, is situated within sight of the very effects of the massive inequality of resource allocation and opportunity distribution in contemporary South Africa.

Piketty was not required to remind his audience that they lived in the most unequal society in the world.  Perhaps it was the force of his habits as an intellectual, to notice things, which prompted him to do so; though it hardly took much to see what was obvious.  The gap between the lives of the majority in attendance, and the lives of the country’s demographic majority beyond the gates and across the road from the university campus, could not easily be ignored by those who queued in the sun to enter the hall.  But then, perhaps for some the event was less about learning something about their immediate surroundings, or about themselves and their implication in and complicity with its vicissitudes, than about confirming already existing beliefs, or about being seen.

The audience applauded Piketty for his remarks about the extreme income inequality which sets South Africa apart from even its BRICS partner, Brazil, and his observations about the incapacitation of the poor through sub-standard education.  On both of these issues, one was reminded of the work of Mamphela Ramphele (present in the audience) on poverty in apartheid South Africa: what distance have we travelled (or not) from apartheid, that crime against humanity for which there were neither criminals, nor criminalised beneficiaries; apparently the receipt of stolen goods, material or symbolic, is only criminal on an individual level.  And while his critique of the privatising of education also drew approval, though it was hard to imagine that everyone in the audience sent their children to public schools.

And in that applause and seeming approval lay much of the paradox of the lecture as a phenomenon.  The very income inequality Piketty was concerned with was exemplified in the contrast between the audience attending the lecture, and the majority of the people living on the far side of the fence separating the campus from the neighbourhood: German luxury cars, and a collection of elites in the front row, middle class intellectuals and cultural workers behind them, and hoi polloi, somewhere else. For most assisting to such lectures is the closest you'll ever be to extravagant cars. A few of those in the class- and ‘race’ marked majority were there, either working as security guards, handing out water to cool down the attendees, and afterwards, picking up the litter left by those who hurried out to fill their bellies at the buffet and quaff down expensive wine.

While the content of Thomas Piketty’s talk was serious – his anti-comparison of the (non)demise of post-Revolution France’s Ancien Régime with the (non)demise of post-apartheid South Africa’s white dominated economic elite was both instructive and productive – the context always teetered hysterically on the edge of farce.  How does one seriously engage inequality when the ostentatious display of inequality frames that discussion?  How do we begin to engage, seriously, the need to break the cooperative relationships between global South governments and State functionaries, and the governments and multinational corporations of the global North, in a scene sponsored by those who cooperated in the making of this structural inequality which pockmarks post-millennial South Africa?

It all felt like something out of V.S. Naipaul’s oeuvre, or the less palatable moments in the work of Evelyn Waugh.  Awash in the layers of un-ironic postcolonial self-parody, one cringed at the contrast between the topic Piketty was addressing – the nature of inequality in this society, and how to address it to avoid the consequences such inequality has historically led to – to an audience which exemplified the problem, yet applauded the proposed solutions in a space framed by the agents of the structural inequality.

In the last millennium it was said that postmodernists did everything in quotation marks, with a certain irony, so that when confronted with the epistemological and structural violence consequent to their beliefs and actions, they could step aside and claim they were being ironic, they had not meant it that way.  In this millennium, perhaps postmodernism has subsumed the postcolonial condition.  Perhaps the audience at the Piketty lecture were listening ironically, living ironically, and inhabiting their privilege amid deprivation which ensures the inequality their ways of being require, with postcolonial irony.  Perhaps we needed an aerobatic display instead of musical numbers at the end, skilled pilots who could sky-write giant quotation marks.

Somewhere between the stage and the auditorium, between Piketty’s utterance and the audience’s reception of it, something got lost in translation.  How else to explain the vulgar contradictions between believing in the necessity of overturning the unequal distribution of resources (material and cultural) in the most unequal society on the planet, and then celebrating that gap with the very symbols of that gap, the conspicuous consumption of expensive wine and food, the display of luxury vehicles, in a scene fenced off, neatly, from the realities of the majority of South Africans beyond the gate?

Between the folks in attendance who were the 10% who hog 65% of the income, while the 89% beyond the gates make do with the rest, were the 1% of underpaid labourers who guarded us, and then picked up our litter and cleaned up after us.  We were performing the substance of the lecture while assuming we were there to learn how to resolve it.

In that sense, the Piketty lecture was a failed instance of what Mikhail Bakhtin called the ‘carnivalesque’, a space in which the rules could be suspended for a specific period, to show how unjust the status quo was, only for everything to return to ‘normal’ and for the power suspended during the carnival to reassert itself, often with greater authority and force.  For the duration of that hot Saturday afternoon in Soweto, despite the content of Piketty’s talk, the rules of inequality which structure South African society were not even suspended for the audience.

© eNCA

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