Post-apartheid melancholia: negotiating loss and (be)longing in South Africa

ABSTRACT

This paper reads contemporary South Africa through the lens of melancholia and situates the experience of loss at the heart of social entanglements in the country. It argues that the purchase of melancholia lies partly in the fact that the problem of disarticulated and disenfranchised loss is common to post-apartheid modernity in general. It suggests that post-apartheid melancholia is a resultant effect of the country’s fraught engagement with loss and (be)longing. It also notes that post-apartheid melancholia is a result of structural traumas and moral anguish that have not been worked through. This paper shows how melancholia manifests in the different modes of attachments to, and identifications with victimhood; it explains why each identity group lays il/legitimate claims to victimhood in South Africa. In addition, this paper conceptualises post-apartheid melancholia along racial and generational lines. That is, it examines the ways in which personal testimonies and meditations shed light on the prospects of white, black and intergenerational melancholia in post-apartheid South Africa. In all, this paper argues that melancholia is an affective structure of the everyday life in post-apartheid South Africa which – if we are not quick to pathologise it – may help combat hurried attempts at closing the door on the past.

KEYWORDS:

• (Be)longing
• loss
• melancholia
• post-apartheid
• South Africa

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to colleagues who read and commented on an earlier draft of this paper: Eric Worby, Palesa Nqambaza, Manosa Nthunya, Louise Bethlehem, Moshibudi Motimele and Refiloe Lepere. I am also grateful for the conversations that followed my presentation of an earlier draft of this paper in an internal seminar at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (WISER). I deeply appreciate the members of the “Busting the Myth of White Genocide in South Africa” initiative for helping me to make sense of the complicated terrain of whiteness in South Africa. Finally, I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their rich engagement with the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Suleiman (2006) in Crises of Memory and the Second World War refers to the 1.5 generation as different from the born-after (or, in the context of apartheid, born-free) generation because they were alive during an (atrocious) event even though they may be too young to have an adult understanding of what was happening.

2. In Freud’s ([1917] 1953) “Mourning and Melancholia,” he uses the terms “acting out” and “working through” as synonyms of the mourning and melancholia respectively. He notes that the two concepts are two different ways of responding to the experience of loss. According to Freud, while mourning takes place in the conscious mind, melancholia happens in the unconscious. Freud also notes that while mourning is a healthy process of grieving a loss, melancholia is pathological because the melancholic person is grieving for a loss they are unable to fully comprehend. However, in a bid to repurpose Freud’s ideas for the study of ethics and history, LaCapra (1998) describes “acting out” and “working through” as interconnected rather than differentiated modes of coming to terms with a traumatic past.

3. 1976 is a memorable year in the history of South Africa. It is regarded as the year of the Soweto Uprising. In that year, many black students across South Africa protested against apartheid oppression and were met with fierce police brutality which led to the death of many.

4. Khanna (2003) argues that haunting is a symptom of melancholia.

5. It is interesting that much of the recent reflexive works about whiteness in South Africa are written by white women. White men tend to write about the broader category of race. This, in a sense, supposes that there is a gendered side to white melancholia in South Africa.

6. Whiteliness, according to Taylor (2004), involves “a commitment to the centrality of white people and their perspectives..”

7. In their book Racecraft: The Soul of inequality in American Life (2014), Karen Fields and Barbara Fields invite us to think about race and racism as witchcraft as a way of understanding its recalcitrance in the American culture.

8. The website by the name “Busting the Myth of White Genocide” (https://www.bustingthemyth.com/) dedicates itself to fact checking claims of white genocide or white farm murders in South Africa. From most of the fact checking they did, they reached the conclusion that there is no white genocide agenda going on in South Africa and that most of the farm murders (which affect South Africans of all races) are a result of a general situation of violence in the country. Also, for a report on white genocide claims, see https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2018/11/africa/south-africa-suidlanders-intl/.

9. Swart Gevaar is an Afrikaans phrase for “black danger.” It was term used by many whites during apartheid to refer to the perceived security threat of black people.

10. Steyn (2004) describes “white talk” as any discourse by white people that is resistant to transformation in South Africa.

11. Rich (1979) describes white solipsism as the tendency of white people to “speak, imagine and think as if whiteness describes the world.”

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Sakiru Adebayo

Sakiru Adebayo is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus. He obtained a PhD in African Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (WISER). His monograph, Continuous Pasts: Frictions of Memory in Postcolonial Africa, will be published by the Univerisity of Michigan Press in Spring 2023.