Reflections on fire as postcolonial metaphor of rupture

KEYWORDS:

• Jagger library fire
• Rhodes Must Fall
• metaphor
• rupture
• decoloniality
• colonial memory
• postcolonial ambiguities

It is intriguing that the events of 2021, when a ball of fire ate up the Jagger Library at the university currently known as the University of Cape Town (UCT), happened when calls for the decolonisation of education and the university were still fresh across its campuses. Juxtaposed with the decolonial moment of the Rhodes Must Fall student movement, the inferno could be likened to a late item in the youthful explosion of revolutionary chutzpah. If the fire was a living natural force out of lockstep with campus politics, it also came to signal, for some, a moment of reckoning with colonial memory, and for others, a profound loss of invaluable knowledge. The fire was a moment brimming with postcolonial ambiguities marked by stark choices between – on the one hand – embracing the future rid of colonial influence or parts of it and – on the other – the mourning of material loss by which many had wrestled with the pasts and the presents of knowledge production about Africa. I wish to reflect on the Jagger fire as an historical and symbolic rupture in our postcolonial encounters with colonial memory and epistemic imaginaries of the future.

In April 2021, the JW Jagger Library suffered the fate of being in the way of runaway fires descending from the slopes of Table Mountain. Established in the 1930s and contemporaneous with, if not commissioned to, the service of the colonial libido dominandi, the library is a product of its time. Incidentally, its birth also coincided with the second wave of the “Cult of Rhodes.” According to Paul Maylam, this cultic euphoria around Cecil John Rhodes, a colonial white supremacist and rapacious capitalist, was characterised by the erection of “monuments, statues and buildings in his honour in many locations in southern Africa … [and] the production and dissemination of a plethora of hagiographical publications and paraphernalia celebrating Rhodes and his imperial ideals” (cited in Knudsen and Andersen 2019, 240). Parts of these memorabilia would, in time, be called into question by students at the UCT.

The Jagger Library has, over the years, evolved into a treasured site of African Studies archives. It held invaluable material, including arguably the biggest collection of African films on the continent. Its demise in the post- “Fallist” conflagrations on university campuses in South Africa was epochal.¹ Great events are characterised by how they mark time, enforce deep contemplation and throw into sharp relief chasms in settled historical relations. The Jagger Library fire is one such event. It disrupted deeply the normal or ordinary operations in learning and research at the university. A neutral, naturally occurring destructive event is hardly reconcilable with the Fallist radical optics on what is deemed to be a Eurocentric curriculum and undeclared university culture hostile to African ways of knowing. Yet, it is an event that cannot be ignored; nor can it be located outside of the political events engulfing the University since 2015. Consideration of the fire as a heightened moment of reckoning with the past – whatever can be remembered of it – and of the future – that is yet to be announced – is a useful entrée into the discourse of what a decolonial vision of knowledge production and archival curation ought to be. The dynamic symbolism and effects of the Jagger Library fire on the current attempts to reimagine the entire spectrum of knowledge production, cultivation and preservation inform the following reflections.

Fire is primarily a chemical reaction with lasting material effects on nature. These effects reach their full bloom when fire is uncontrolled and becomes destructive. The subjection of the Jagger Library to the inferno that destroyed most of its invaluable archives, some irreplaceable, affected learning, teaching and research in theretofore unimaginable ways. As a film and television studies lecturer, I could no longer take a brisk walk to the library across the street to collect DVDs for my classes as most were destroyed by fire. Here was a library and archival depository bristling with veritable articles, obliterated by flames within hours. This loss affected the teaching programme of the Centre for Film and Media Studies, forcing instructors to find creative ways of acquiring the set films. The loss is a reminder of the vulnerability of archives and the responsibility of the teaching and library community to guard against consequences of uncontrolled eventualities. The loss has forced the film and media teaching cohort to reflect on how to move forward in ways that are less susceptible to material weaknesses. The answer is digitisation, a project that is coterminous with renewed efforts at aligning the library with the decolonial turn in knowledge production and stewardship.

Ironically, it is precisely its destructive attribute that makes fire the ultimate threshold in the human symbolic cosmos. Conventional wisdom has it that fire is a sign of renewal, new beginnings, rebirth. In the terrain of symbolism and politics, fire can be positively exploited. It is used for rhetorical suggestion, to drive impassioned emotions towards change and to effect transformation through destruction of oppression and domination. Films such as Ramadan Suleman’s Fools (1998) use fire as a metaphoric device of expiation for the abusive main character. In the field of politics, Black radical rhetoric often expresses the desires to “burn the plantation” as a way of attaining genuine liberation, and even to destroy the world. Fire can also be weaponised in multiple ways to effect a change in unhappy relations. From the Shackville protests at UCT to the campuses of the Universities of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) and Witwatersrand (Wits), fire has been relied upon as a tactic of disruption and enforcement through destruction. Fire can be, and has been, a vehicle of drawing attention to students’ needs and demands. Universities in South Africa have drawn criticisms as citadels of Eurocentric ethos in their curricula, culture and indifference to Black students’ suffering. This was especially pronounced in the Fallist period when students called for the decolonisation of the curriculum and demanded a material end to the continued presence of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes. Radicalised and uncompromising in their neo-Fanonian vision, students adopted a revolutionary praxis, including fiery destruction of what they perceived to be vestiges of colonial and apartheid material. In 2016, during the “Shackville protests,” students burned several artworks which they deemed problematic, on the basis of their representations of Black subjects. That some of the works were authored by anti-apartheid artists mattered less. Their protest was informed by multiple issues such as the representations of Black subjects in states of nakedness across the artworks, and the over-representation of white artists in the university’s art collection. The University’s Artworks Task Team also pointed out what it deemed to be the “cumulative effect” of biases in the artworks and “the lack of a considered curatorial policy” as being responsible for “negative feeling amongst some students and staff” (Artworks Task Team 2017, 3).

If deliberate burning of property constitutes a direct and unambiguous register of protest, a fire that occurs “naturally” outside of human agency, appears to be without bias – it is just an unfortunate event in time that occurs suddenly and without a known course. It is a rupture, that is, a sudden event of great magnitude in scale and swiftness. By these natural virtues, rupture marks time and transforms the experience of history into a known “before” and an “unknown” and undetermined “after.” Bruce Mazlish proposes that we think of ruptures in terms of discrete breaks: “a major cut in the continuity of the past. Against the view of the human past as marked by continuity, ruptures mark abrupt change” (2011, 32). With rupture then, history is shorn of a recognisable trajectory and enters an undisciplined terrain of fluctuating occurrences and relations. Yet the age-old human vice of anthropocentricity is not receptive to natural unpredictability. Nor does it embrace vacuums in intellection of what surrounds it. It follows then that rupture piques human alertness to change, ignites the species’ desire to arrest the chaos at its centre and provokes contemplation about the future. The decolonial attitude in the students’ praxis can also be understood through the prism of rupture – a desire to break away from the coloniality of dominant epistemes – in the sense of uprooting the ethos and structure of Eurocentric knowledge regimes. Through the radical break in the relatively “secure” continuity of the Library, the fire illumines the importance of its reconstitution, and with the urgency demanded by the situation, throws open the question of what it means to decolonise the archive and the University. At this point, the intricacies of rethinking the past, in terms of a rupture with a decolonial future, are immediately put to the test. The difference, here, between continuity and discontinuity presents a simmering tension in the sense that it (dis)locates the certainty with which the relationship between the past, the present and the future can be approached as discreet phases of biased memory, or as challenges of their framing in such terms. In other words, where does the coloniality of knowledge and its decoloniality begin? The moment of recognition of archival loss by fire constitutes a limit case in how decolonial optics measure the value of lost articles against the compulsion to transform through destruction of perceived or real colonially oriented knowledge, or retaining by contextualisation and/or alienation.

Considering the destroyed articles, the distress, the scale of loss in financial and other material ways, natural fires evoke postfacto are reactions that illumine the material and symbolic value of what is lost. However, loss must be owned and mourned in human terms – there is no loss without its human manifestations and spiritual costs. As such, the Jagger Library must have its mourners. Inevitably, the identity of the mourners must reveal the rationale underlying the mourning, as it cannot be taken for granted that what is mourned is similarly shared. The very manner by which the Jagger fire erupted challenges reflection about change with regards to existing relations of knowledge stewardship and production, the agency and agenda of such production, and the principles upon which they are based. As it disrupts continuity in the history of the Jagger Library, the fire – as rupture – also imposes demands on the future. What does this rupture mean for the imagination of the new library – designed and equipped for the decolonial futures? What would be included and excluded in it? What would the curation of its archives look like? The answer lies in the openness with which knowledge stewards, curators and academics approach the question of knowledge and decoloniality. It is in this openness that the problematic of locating the end of coloniality and beginning of decoloniality can be best navigated, and hopefully resolved. Whatever answers are arrived at, they must be informed by the ways in which knowledge is curated without recourse to the dogma of the innocence of archives.

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Litheko Modisane

Litheko Modisane is the author of South Africa’s Renegade Reels: The Making and Public Lives of Black-Centred Films (2013, Palgrave Macmillan). Modisane’s scope of interests includes film and archive, heritage, representations of Nelson Mandela in film and repertoires of sartorial representations in the contemporary political public sphere in South Africa.

Notes

1. “Fallist” is a reference to the clarion call of students’ demands for the removal of the statue of Rhodes, “Rhodes must Fall” and, later, the provision of free education for poor students: “Fees Must Fall”