Rewriting the Colonial Gaze? Black Middle-Class Constructions of Africa in Sihle Khumalo’s Travel Writing

Abstract

Guided by autobiographical, travel, and life writing theories in general, this article examines Sihle Khumalo’s travelogs to argue that contemporary ways of knowledge production about Africa are overdetermined by the continent’s violent encounter with the other. Khumalo’s construction of the self in relation to Africa is informed by imperial travelogs and his newly acquired middle-class status. The self that emerges in Khumalo’s narratives is socially constructed despite the author’s assumption that he possesses a bounded self that solitarily constructs knowledge about the continent. Therefore, the Africa that emerges out of Khumalo’s travelogs is filtered through hegemonic discourses that dictate in advance how he writes the continent.

Keywords:

• Africa
• gaze
• Khumalo
• middle class
• self
• South Africa
• travel

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the reviewers who made insightful suggestions on how to improve this article. I would also want to thank Bevelyn Dube who edited an earlier version of this article and Priyanka “Kimmy” Shivadas who proofread and edited the latter version of the document.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Rainbow Nation My Zulu Arse is Khumalo’s latest offering recording his travels around South Africa.

2 Mbembe and Nuttall “Writing the World,” 348.

3 The first trip and its resultant narrative seem to be partly inspired by the American travel writer Paul Theroux whom Khumalo acknowledges. He writes about his “burning desire to see with [his] own eyes the present state of Africa—a bit like Paul Theroux, who did the trip in reverse overland and wrote Dark Star Safari” (Dark Continent 13).

4 In a satirical piece titled “How to write about Africa,” Binyavanga Wainaina advises African writers to present Africa in stereotypical terms if they want to gain international acclaim.

5 Seizer, “On the Uses of Obscenity,” 230.

6 Seizer, “On the Uses of Obscenity,” 229.

7 Seizer, “On the Uses of Obscenity,” 230.

8 Mintz, “Standup Comedy,” 77.

9 Hållén, “A Personal Quest,” 370.

10 Harris, a black American who explored Africa from Tunisia to South Africa, wrote his experiences in Native Stranger: A Blackamerican’s Journey into the Heart of Africa.

11 In his 1998 speech to the United Nations, the then - South African deputy president Thabo Mbeki explicitly connected what he termed the need to have African renaissance with the fifteenth-century kingdom of Timbuktu.

12 Hållén, “A Personal Quest,” 370.

13 Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life-Writing, 98.

14 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 10.

15 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 10.

16 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 54.

17 Hållén, “A Personal Quest,” 369.

18 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 48.

19 The 2015 Rhodes Must Fall movement (RMF) which resulted in the removal of Rhodes’s statue from the Upper Campus of the University of Cape Town is implicated in this postcolonial desire to decouple African knowledge production from all symbols of imperialism. However, Francis Nyamnjoh calls this victory “a costly illusion” because “completeness” sought by these activists is impossible.

20 Hållén, “A Personal Quest,” 365.

21 Mbembe and Nuttall, “Writing the World,” 348.

22 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 59.

23 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 54.

24 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 43.

25 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 260.

26 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 38.

27 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 42. Emphasis added.

28 Ndlovu argues that the prison autobiographical narratives he analyses help the reader “see that the self is not autonomous and transcendent, and that it is not constituted through a lonely process of introspection, but rather at the intersection of the material world, the individual mental capacity, and an indefinable spiritual entity” (16).

29 Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography, 3.

30 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 14.

31 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 56. A shebeen is a South African township house where alcohol is often illegally sold throughout the day and is also associated with prostitution.

32 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 56.

33 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 187.

34 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 66.

35 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 75.

36 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 165.

37 Gunning, “Anti-Racism,” 29.

38 Machirori, “Who Can Speak for the African Experience?” n.p.

39 Krenčeyová, “Who is Allowed to Speak about Africa?” 10.

40 Nyamnjoh, “From Publish or Perish to Publish and Perish,” 334.

41 Krenčeyová, “Who is Allowed to Speak about Africa?,” 9.

42 Krenčeyová, “Who is Allowed to Speak about Africa?,” 9.

43 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 74.

44 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 13.

45 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 13.

46 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 183.

47 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 178.

48 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 167.

49 Mbembe, “African Modes of Self-Writing,” 240.

50 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 11.

51 Canham and Williams, “Being Black,” 32.

52 Canham and Williams, “Being Black,” 24.

53 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 10.

54 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 59.

55 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 73.

56 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 166.

57 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 11.

58 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 10.

59 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 11.

60 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 30.

61 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 11.

62 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 22.

63 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 165.

64 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 237.

65 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 58.

66 The Immorality Act, 1927 (Act No. 5 of 1927), amended in 1950 prohibited sexual relations between white people and people of other races.

67 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 71.

68 Zakes Mda’s historical novel, The Madonna of Excelsior, shows how white Afrikaner men used power and force over black female bodies.

69 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 37.

70 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 188.

71 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 190.

72 Chennells, “The Authority of Presence,” 98.

73 Chennells, “The Authority of Presence,” 98.

74 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 172.

75 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 31.

76 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 34.

77 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 34.

78 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 28.

79 Hållén, “A Personal Quest,” 368.

80 Tomsett, “Positives and Negatives,” 6.

81 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 7.

82 Guillaume, “Travelogues of Difference,” 136.

83 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 9.

84 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 175.

85 Ang, “The Curse of the Smile,” 37.

86 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 161.

87 Wilson, “Forget Human Rights,” 13.

88 Canham and Williams, “Being Black,” 23.

89 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 260.

90 Coetzee, “Sihle Khumalo,” 62-75.

91 Coetzee, “Sihle Khumalo,” 63.

92 Coetzee, “Sihle Khumalo,” 63.

93 Beckett, Radical Middle, 88.

94 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 44.

95 Lacan, “Of the Gaze as Object,” 99.

96 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 43.

97 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 43.

98 Baas, Imagined Mobility, 169.

99 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 16.

100 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 17.

101 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 202.

102 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 59.

103 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 63.

104 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 60.

105 Khumalo, Dark Continent, 72.

106 Spivak, “Subaltern Studies,” 214.

107 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 88.

108 Mbembe, “Ways of Seeing,” 12.

109 Hållén’s, “A Personal Quest,” 376.

110 Mbembe and Nuttall, “Writing the World,” 351.

111 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, xii.

112 Lejeune, “The Autobiographical Contract.”