Race Otherwise: Forging a new humanism for South Africa

Race Otherwise

Forging a New Humanism for South Africa

Zimitri Erasmus

Published in South Africa by:

Wits University Press

1 Jan Smuts Avenue

Johannesburg, 2001

www.witspress.co.za

Copyright © Zimitri Erasmus 2017

Published edition © Wits University Press 2017

First published 2017

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All photographs in the section following page 100 are from the author’s collection. Unless otherwise indicated, they have been reproduced from photographs of the original black and white prints taken by the historian Jenny Gordon in order to preserve them. All images remain the property of the copyright holders. The publishers gratefully acknowledge the publishers, institutions and individuals referenced for the use of images. Every effort has been made to locate the original copyright holders of the images reproduced here; please contact Wits University Press in case of any omissions or errors.

Map of Dutch and British imperial trade and travel routes redrawn from an original map by James Cheshire, University College London, using data by CLIWOC. Maps of Port Elizabeth Group Areas adapted from Glenn Adler, ‘Render unto Caesar: The central state, local government and struggles over segregation in Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage, 1948-1962’. Seminar paper presented at the Institute for Advanced Social Research, University of the Witwatersrand, 18 September 1995.

Project manager: Karen Press

Copy editor: Karen Press

Proofreader: Inga Norenius

Indexer: Marlene Burger

Cover and book design: Fire and Lion, South Africa

Map design: Andrea Rolfes

Typesetter: Fire and Lion, South Africa

Printed by ABC Press

To my mother, Maria, and my father, Benjamin.

To their stories, of which I know too little.

Contents

Appreciations

Race Otherwise: Forging a New Humanism for South Africa is a small contribution to the significant work of the Apartheid Archive Project established in 2008. This project is dedicated to the collection and analysis of ordinary South Africans’ narratives of everyday experiences of racism under apartheid. While formally housed at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, it is a transnational, trans-institutional and interdisciplinary project.

I walked a ‘long way through the chairs’ (Travis Lane 1993) with these pages. For most of the first half of my life, words were wounds. The late Gerrit Huizer, my doctoral supervisor at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, helped me heal words and love them. The late Vernon February, my host at the Afrikastudiecentrum, University of Leiden, introduced me to him.

Dan Ncayiyana is the ‘archangel’ who stood next to me. Crain Soudien, Pamela Nichols, Garth Stevens, Kira Erwin, Walter Mignolo, Njabulo Ndebele, Nina Jablonski, Lewis Gordon, Catherine Walsh, Barnor Hesse and Peace Kiguwa read drafts and gave me their thoughts. I thank them.

Renee van der Wiel brought me books I never knew existed. She walked with me through the creative process.

Paul Gilroy gave me guided reading that changed my scholarly life. The W.E.B. Du Bois Institute provided a time of reflection. The Academic and Non-Fiction Authors Association of South Africa provided much needed initial funding and encouragement for this writing project. Norman Duncan, Nazeema Mohamed and Tawana Kupe were instrumental in bringing me to the University of the Witwatersrand. The Wits Transformation Office and its Carnegie Equity Fund, administered by Hugo Canham, invited me into the warm and vibrant embrace of Wits University in 2011. Sharon Moonsamy welcomed me warmly into the Emthonjeni Centre. At the University of Cape Town, Danie Visser, Crain Soudien and David Cooper kindly put my scholarship before their institutional desires. The Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study gave me concentrated quietude and a whole new scholarly community. Without the patience and generosity of the Faculty of Humanities Research Committee and the Mellon Programme for Advancing the Professoriate at Wits University, my way through the chairs would have been longer.

Thank you to members of my family who kindly assisted with information about the photographs reproduced here. SunMedia, Sage, Berghahn Journals and Transformation kindly permitted the reproduction of parts of previous publications.

Marion Wertheim, Shireen Ally, Crain Soudien and Zetu Makamandela-Mguqulwa gave me courage when I needed it. I also thank my friends Rejane Williams, Tanya Chan-Sam, Edmarie Pretorius, Srila Roy, Bridget Kenny and Laurel Baldwin-Ragaven. Special thanks to Pervaiz Khan for long conversations, for sharing literature, delicious meals, laughter, tears and more.

Monica Seeber weighed each word and sentence for its meaning. The book is here because of Roshan Cader and Veronica Klipp of Wits University Press. I extend my gratitude to the anonymous readers for their valuable commentary. I am especially honoured by the reader whose incisive scholarly critique urged me to reconceptualise the initial manuscript. Some of the detailed information about my family pictures comes from the family genealogy on geni.com, managed by Herbert Walton. I am privileged to have had the meticulous editorial attention of Karen Press.

Zimitri, Johannesburg, 2017

Abbreviations and acronyms

FOREWORD

Rehumaning our times, or love in a time of hate

SOUTH AFRICA, AS MANY close observers of its inner workings know, is a place of contradiction. It has long been so. Given the country’s obvious racial history, the contradiction is at some levels perfectly comprehensible. But it is not without its puzzles. While the chasm between those with privilege and those without it has a racial character, belying this situation and giving it its less than legible obviousness are the continually confounding ways in which a number of factors work prior to, behind, alongside of and after ‘race’. They have the effect of calling us to pause each time we explain what the problem of South Africa is all about. How one makes sense of race is what drives Zimitri Erasmus’s Race Otherwise: Forging a New Humanism for South Africa. She writes with a searing commitment to being human. It is a text which continues in that distinctive South African tradition of engaged non-racial and anti-racist scholarship. Critical about that tradition is its refusal to take anything for granted – to never, in the first instance, work with social experiences at their surface level, and, in the second, to never apologise for the desire to understand life more deeply. It is about understanding the contradictions which surround race, but also how to live in relation to it. This approach produces, and I shall return to this below, what Erasmus describes as a ‘double politics’, the challenge of how to begin to work with the realness and unrealness of race.

Race Otherwise arrives at a time when we, as South Africans, find ourselves in this global hotspot of contradiction, adrift in all kinds of ways. Characterising this aimlessness, most troublingly, is the onset of a political and moral waywardness in our relationships with one another. These relationships are, paradoxically, the very areas of sociality around which we have begun to project for ourselves, in the community of the world’s people, a kind of legitimacy, a right to speak, on issues of social difference and equality. Legitimated by the figures of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, South Africa presents itself to the world as a model of how to deal with the ugly global legacies of racism. Tolerance and dialogue have hallmarked this model.

In the past few years conditions in the country, and particularly the persistence of poverty and inequality, have placed this legitimacy in question. While it is true to say, and this is reflected in recent elections and voting patterns, that sizeable proportions of South Africans have a desire to work together across their social, cultural, religious, racial, class and gender differences, there is a sufficiently large and significant proportion of the population that is no longer prepared to accept the explanations of politicians for the unsatisfactory conditions in which they find themselves. Their anger has largely, as might be expected, taken racial form. There have been groupings and movements which have sought to engage and work with this dissatisfaction in different ways. Interesting analyses, to make the point clear, are beginning to emerge about social class and how the nature of South African society has changed since 1994 with the rapid explosion of what has come to be called the black middle class. This development has produced an empirical reconfiguration of the social structure of South Africa. It has objectively changed the dynamics of power in the country. But it is the workings of race, including the ways in which class has impacted on race, that correctly need careful explanation. They need to be carefully worked with because there is no gainsaying that race, and the deeply embedded habits and beliefs which surround race – the hidden conceits, the over-determining aesthetics of attitudes such as whiteness and all the unarticulated ways in which notions of superiority and inferiority condition our lives – continue to inflect social experience in South Africa. In this, sophistication and care of analysis are a priority. They are a priority because every situation in which difference manifests itself in the country has to be carefully assessed and worked with. If truth be told, what is happening will not always be self-evident. Race will regularly be an issue. But it also, in some instances, may not. Invoking it, consequently, as the default explanatory variable is not always helpful. The explosion of vituperative talk in South Africa from all sides of the so-called racial spectrum has to be a matter of concern. Instead of providing direction, it often ignites, as Frantz Fanon (1980: 8) presciently said, ‘fervour’. He went on to say, ‘I do not trust fervour ... Every time it has burst out somewhere, it has brought fire, famine, misery and ... contempt for man.’ In the unedifying heat of this fervour, the country has been witness to and participated in reckless and insensitive talk. Contempt by some for others is the order of the day. Contempt constitutes the substance of much argument. Simply going by what is in the media, South Africa has been thrust back into a fraught racial stand-off. Its credentials as a modern model of how to manage its historical racial differences are under direct challenge.

Race Otherwise is, against the vituperation, an attempt to get to the heart of the South African puzzle of race. It is an attempt to do racial analysis differently in South Africa. It follows in a small line of new texts, including Gerhard Mare’s (2014) Declassified: Moving Beyond the Dead End of Race in South Africa, to take the question of race as a question to be understood and explained rather than as a self-explanatory framework of analysis. Several years in the making, Race Otherwise brings together the full amplitude of Erasmus’s thinking about how race works. It operates at both the visceral and the cerebral levels and tunes into registers both personal and social. It draws on sociology, history, psychoanalysis and genetics. It is not without indignation, and not, thereby, insensitive to emotion and particularly to the anger inside South Africa, but it seeks to move beyond the vituperative to a level of argumentation which is profoundly intellectual. It is an intellectuality, however, that is not afraid of questions of affect. Eros and love, Erasmus urges, are not separable from the hard work of thinking.

Race Otherwise makes several contributions to our understanding of race. One of the most critical is Erasmus’s recovery of Sylvia Wynter’s explanation of the ideological process involved in defining what it means to be human. She shows how a sequestration of the idea takes place through its exclusive location in a biological and supposedly scientised explanation that places human beings in a hierarchy of worth and value. European men at the top of the evolutionary tree and Africans at its base – culture and nature, as Wynter explains, fused in an irrefutable logic. Erasmus uses this explanation carefully to show how problematic ideas of whiteness are and, significantly, all their derivative invocations such as blackness which arise simply in direct response to the totalising conceits of whiteness. Building on this, the book also makes a distinct contribution to discussions of mixed-ness and hybridity and the ways they come to be constituted through the authority and durability of ideas of whiteness.

One of the most powerful contributions that this work makes is in its approach to thinking about the ‘factoid’ of race – its realness and unrealness. This approach comes together in what Erasmus describes as a double politics. The idea, introduced at the beginning of the book, deserves a great deal more attention. At its heart is the simple syllogism that race matters in our lives but that it has to be undone. Her double politics is woven into the making of the text. At every step of her engagement she acknowledges its presence and significance. This is the first order of its politics. This politics requires an understanding of how it is instantiated into and produces real effects, including effects of kinship and solidarity. She uses many deeply personal illustrations in the text to show how affinity and connectedness, including her own sense of blackness, are given material and psychological effect as a result of this. This produces the politics of emplacement with which she and all of us have to struggle, all the time. She is urging that we should never deny this. But she urges, in a second politics, that we should never allow ourselves, ultimately, to be determined by race. Her appeal is to the practical and actual experience of creolisation through which human beings explore new possibilities for being beyond the imposed inscriptions on their bodies.

In the climate in which South Africa finds itself, Race Otherwise is a powerful new resource. It can be read at many levels. It can be read for the simple appeal it makes to our common humanity. Erasmus provides countless illustrations of the irreducible logic of what we as human beings have in common. I want to suggest, however, that the work be read, deliberately, at the more challenging level of what we understand by race. I ask that each of us begin the reading by acknowledging to ourselves what our understandings of race are. I ask that we, each of us, think clearly about what our starting propositions are, to acknowledge how we think about belonging, connectedness, and most significantly, ‘my people’. Who ‘my people’ are, to be helpful, could range from biological to cultural understandings of race. I am asking that we take these into an engagement with Erasmus and that we deliberately test our understandings of these most basic feelings in our lives. If we do this, we honour her appeal to what she calls ‘humaning’. This ‘humaning’ is the capacity to think. We must not be afraid to do this.

Crain Soudien

Cape Town

April 2017

I want to inhabit, walk around, a site clear of racist detritus; a place where race both matters and is rendered impotent.

TONI MORRISON

‘Home’, 1997

And it is for my own time that I should live. The future should be an edifice supported by living men ... I consider the present ... something to be exceeded.

FRANTZ FANON

Black Skin, White Masks, 1986

I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.

ANAIS NIN

The Diary of Anais Nin, 1966

Prelude

I have never lived, nor has any of us, in a world in which race did not matter. Such a world, one free of racial hierarchy, is usually imagined or described as dreamscape ...

But ... I prefer to think of a-world-in-which-race-does-not-matter as something other than a theme park, or a failed and always-failing dream ... I am thinking of it as home ... a suitable term because ... [it] domesticates the racial project, moves the job of unmattering race away from pathetic yearning and futile desire; away from an impossible future or an irretrievable and probably non-existent Eden to a manageable, doable, modern human activity.

TONI MORRISON

‘Home’, 1997

... the grammatical form of the human is not that of the subject, whether nominal or pronominal, but that of the verb.

TIM INGOLD

The Life of Lines, 2015

RACE MATTERS. IT MATTERS because of the meanings we give to it. How and why race has come to matter, and how and why we continue to make race matter, has to do with ways in which history, power and politics shape the frames within which meaning is made, contested and renegotiated.

The foundation of the enduring effects of race lies in the racialisation of what it means to be human. The human is not ontologically given in a way that is independent of the mind. We create our human-ness as we open ourselves up in the interactive presence of other sentient and non-sentient beings. We forge our human-ness in the midst of changing social forces and power relations (historical, cultural, political, psycho-social, scientific and economic) and over the duration of our lives. These constellations of social forces produce particular interpretive frames and practices with which we make meaning of the human. If becoming human is something we do with other humans and with other sentient and non-sentient beings, then, in the words of Tim Ingold, ‘to human is a verb’. Where there are humans, ‘what goes on is humaning’ (Ingold 2015: 115-20).

Humaning is a different activity from humanising. To human is a lifelong process of life-in-the-making with others. To humanise is to impose upon the world a preconceived meaning of the human (Ingold 2015: 115-20). There is no one way of humaning. There is no perfect way of going about it. Humaning is a social and cultural practice which we constantly hone. Humaning as praxis is historically and contextually specific.

Pre-modern European ways of seeing continue to shape conceptions of human difference in the West and in worlds formerly colonised by Europe. The manner in which these ways of seeing linked cultural practices to genealogy can be understood as antecedents to conceptions of race – or protoracial conceptions – that were recrafted over time. The use of skin colour and ancestry to make social distinctions among humans circulated prior to the onset of modernity. However, the violence of the first colonial conquest of the Americas in 1492 ushered in a long history of turning these pre-modern ways of making social distinctions into technologies of disciplinary power that permeate European constructions of the Other and Eurocentric ways of knowing. The modern idea of race – a composite of skin colour, ancestry, culture and geography – is key to these technologies of power. From the nineteenth century racialised hierarchies of the human were naturalised by Western science and reinscribed into the juridical, economic, administrative, knowledge and symbolic realms of societies structured in terms of colonial dominance (S. Hall 1980). In the Western imagination, European Man came to personify the human. European modes of humanising – by way of its civilising mission – came to dominate the world. Thus, the relationship between processes of racialisation and the emergence of dominant conceptions of what it means to be human is constitutive. As from the nineteenth century race is the code through which one knows what it means to be human, and through which one experiences the effects of this meaning (see David Scott’s interview with Sylvia Wynter, Scott 2000: 183).

This book is less about racism as a structure of power and more about specific processes of racialisation, namely, processes of making meaning that are framed by the history and the politics from which this structure of power emerges. In this book I challenge three normative ways of knowing integral to practices of racialisation: the look, the category and the gene. I grapple with ways one might think about the inside of racialised social life as a space from which new arts of coming to know and new arts of making meaning can emerge. All of us live in amongst racialised structures of social meaning. We cannot be outside, above, or beyond the past and the present. Nor can we be outside, above, or beyond race. Because we are embedded in a racialised world, its ways of seeing and its injustices can be apparent to us, and we can be inspired to change it.

I take up a challenge offered by the writer Toni Morrison. For her, the racial house we live in does not have to be ‘a windowless prison’. Nor should we wait