Khadi - Written on the Body: A Visual Journey into Slavery at the Cape

abstract

This visual essay is an exploration of slave women’s herstories deploying what Audre Lorde (1982) calls bio-mythography − to creatively imagine unrecorded herstories through art-making. Discovering my home was once a slave lodge, whose history had been artfully deleted, and realising the absence of a meaningful archive of slave women’s lives, I felt pressed to creatively engage with herstories of slave women at the Cape. Honouring slave herstory in the intimate space of home powerfully connects the personal and the political for me. This body of work, Khadi is an engagement with the politics of place, gender, race and culture, responding both to my African heritage, my Indian descent, and viscerally, to the place I call home, and its herstory, through the medium of sculpture. While the sculptures were an organic outflow of creative expression, I am indebted to the intellectual contributions of feminist scholars working on slavery at the Cape from different vantage points. These scholars and creatives include Gabeba Baderoon, Pumla Dineo Gqola, Floretta Boonzaier, Nadia Davids and Berni Searle, all of whom, in one or another way, engage with the Cape’s buried history of slavery and how it connects to our present.

keywords:

• slavery
• sculpture
• South Africa
• colonialism
• India
• feminist art
• Cape

Notes

1 Khadi refers to Indian hand-spun, handwoven cotton cloth. The word also refers to ‘links’, ‘linkages’ ‘connections’, ‘bonds’.

2 Tracing the earlier history of the slaves who lived here including during the Dutch colonial period, has proven more complex. The Dutch slave records are hand-written in ‘old Dutch’ in now-faded ink, made light over time, requiring substantially more time and resources for legibility and translation, than the British Slave Registers.

3 The play was first performed in 2017.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarita Ranchod

SARITA RANCHOD is a feminist researcher, sculptor and writer. Creatively and professionally, she is interested in the frontiers of freedom. Her sculptural work seeks to articulate Black beauty and herstory through an appreciative Black feminist lens. She considers her sculpture-making as a radical political act of occupying space in solid form, and articulating voice creatively, particularly in contexts where Black womanhood has historically been made invisible, deemed irrelevant, or actively silenced. Living with a disabling pain condition resulting from a freak accident in 2003, she has an embodied, visceral understanding of the transformative power of creativity for healing, and integrates these lessons into her work. Her writings have been published in mainstream media such as the Mail & Guardian, Huffington Post and City Press, and in journals such as Agenda, Feminist Africa and the Rhodes Journalism Review. Her memoir-style essay, ‘Border Crossings’, was published in a Commonwealth Writers Anthology of African Creative Non-Fiction, Safe House. Email: [email protected]