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Abstract
This article will argue that Zakes Mda’s 2007 novel Cion stages a dialog, one where two “Souths” – South Africa and the American South – speak to one another and give a critical voice to an under-acknowledged history of transatlantic discursive exchange on race and racial governance. Mda’s fictional South African critique, of an America still struggling with the cultural and political legacies of slavery, gestures towards a history of exchange between the two countries that in many ways is representative of a more global dialog on racial segregation during the first half of the twentieth century – of which both southern (US) segregation and apartheid are seminal examples. Moreover, this article explores various conceptualizations of race as well as the governance of racial relations as they have been articulated through ecological imaginaries, and especially between South Africa and the Southern United States over the course of the twentieth century. In this article, I argue that not only can apartheid (as well as pre-apartheid segregation) be rethought of as part of a global conversation on race and thus less as a South African anomaly, but also that the United States through its examples of various racialist technologies was highly influential across the colonial and apartheid worlds.
Notes
1 Mamdani, “Settler Colonialism: Then and Now,” 13.
2 The transnational comparison of these two nations is critically important precisely for the ways in which the nationalist rhetorics of each have defined both respective countries according to paradigms of both isolationism and exceptionalism.
3 For instance, see Domosh, “Selling Civilization.”
4 Goyal, “African Atrocity, American Humanity.”
5 Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, 146.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., 144.
8 Ibid., 146.
9 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 18.
10 Goyal, “Introduction: Africa and the Black Atlantic,” ix.
11 Quoted in Goyal, “Introduction: Africa and the Black Atlantic,” ix.
12 Goyal, Ibid.
13 Mda, Cion, 66; parenthetical quotations to follow.
14 Goyal, “The Pull of the Ancestors.”
15 Evans, Blacks and Whites in Southern States, v.
16 All this becomes explicit later in Evans’s volume in a section entitled “Two schools,” where he compares the racial ideologies embedded in the practices of both Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. Tuskegee, for Evans, provided an educational and socially pragmatic model of separate development through the validation and training of “race knowledge.” Race education was something thought to be key to the further formation of separate development plans in South Africa by Evans and others. There is a formidable literature in this area of race relations and educational plans. See for instance Brookes, A South African Pilgrimage (1977) and The History of Native Policy in South Africa (1927). See also Loram, The Education of the South African Native (1931). Loram’s works remain important for their insight into the South African liberal imagination and how it conceived of the entanglement between education and race policy in the early twentieth century. For more specific studies of the impact of Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee model on South Africa, see Harlan, Booker T. Washington: Volume 2, and Rich, “The Appeals of Tuskegee.”
17 Evans, Blacks and Whites, 1; emphasis mine.
18 Ibid., 4; emphasis mine.
19 Ibid., 270.
20 Ibid., 275.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., 281.
23 Fredrickson, White Supremacy, 289. For Fredrickson, southern-style segregation differs from proto-apartheid separate development along cultural lines. Southern blacks, Fredrickson claims, were, “despite all the discrimination and de facto or de jure segregation and disenfranchisement, much more integrated into the white-dominated society and culture then most Africans have ever been in South Africa … It [Jim Crow segregation] was more of a problem of how to erect a set of barriers to the social and political inclusion of a population group that was by the nineteenth century willing and able to participate in a common society.” There are multiple historical factors which problematize Fredrickson’s claim: the increased urbanization of South African blacks over the twentieth century (which Fredrickson admits only in a footnote), as well as the fact that his study does not have the luxury of a post-apartheid perspective.
24 Evans, Blacks and Whites, 281.
25 Ibid.
26 Welsh, The Rise of and Fall of Apartheid, 52.
27 See for instance Dubow, Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa. See also Giliomee, The Afrikaners, and “The Making of the Apartheid Plan.” The latter offers a slightly more apologetic version of this relationship.
28 Miller, “Science and Society in the Early Career of H.F. Verwoerd,” 646.
29 The American social science scene Verwoerd witnessed was a discourse influenced particularly by Taylorism and the sociology of “scientific management,” which was popular with the American business and political sectors at the time, and complicit in fueling America’s fervor for social engineering during the early twentieth century.
30 Verwoerd, Separate Development, 4.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Glissant, Poetics, 143.
34 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 18.
35 Ibid.
36 Goyal, “The Pull of the Ancestors,” 147.
37 This is an eco-critical mode of history writing that bears resemblance to a turn within postcolonial writing/studies towards “ecocriticism.” There is a productive comparison to be made here between Mda’s storytelling, memory-holding sycamores, and Michelle Cliff’s locating of the island of Jamaica “During the periods in which history was recorded by indentations of rock and shell” (Cliff, Abeng, 3). However, I believe Mda’s point is not merely a historiographical one. Rather, the ecological, in Mda, becomes the site of creolization; of mixing between forms (memory, history, etc.).
38 Glissant, Poetics, 146.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.