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Abstract
The article has three movements. First, it draws out some of the contours of historical trauma suffered by Black and Brown people in South Africa since the 17th century as “bodily and psychic wounds.” Second, the article argues that 1994 did not signal the end of racial domination in South Africa but rather, marked the advancement of racial domination in new and nuanced techniques hidden in place sight. Third, the article attempts to imagine what freedom, as a way of living beyond of a liberal democracy framework, might look like in South Africa from the psychological perspective of Black and Brown people.
Acknowledgments
Initial work for this article was made possible through a post-doctoral fellowship at the Historical Trauma and Transformation Research Unit, Stellenbosch University, South Africa. I would like to thank Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela for offering me the material resources to research and write this essay.
Notes
1 Thabo Mbeki, Africa—The Time has Come: Selected Speeches (South Africa: Tafelberg Publishers, 1998), 71–72.
2 By “Black and Brown” I am referring to that category of people who were defined by the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) “as those who are by law or tradition politically, economically and socially discriminated against as a group in the South African society and identify themselves as a unit in the struggle towards the realisation of their aspirations.” Steve Biko, I Write What I Like (London: Heinemann Press, 2004), 52. BCM designated this category of people as “Black,” a political rather than a racial category of collective identification and political struggle against apartheid. In this article I use “Black and Brown” and “Black” interchangeably.
3 Anthony Bogues, Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire and Freedom (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2010), 40.
4 Bogues, Empire of Liberty, 39.
5 George Fredrickson, White Supremacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 36.
6 W. P. van Schoor, “The Origin and Development of Segregation in South Africa.” Paper presented at the A.J. Abrahamse Memorial Lecture, Cape Town, SA, October 5, 1951.
7 Ibid.; Paul Maylam, South Africa's Racial Past: The History and Historiography of Racism, Segregation, and Apartheid (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001).
8 Maylam, South Africa's Racial Past.
9 Ibid.
10 South Africa's Racial Past, 119; Buhle Zuma, The Social Psychology of Self-Segregation: The Case of University Student Friendship Groups (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Cape Town, 2013), OCLC (859523756).
11 Maylam, South Africa's Racial Past, 119–120.
12 van Schoor, “The Origin and Development of Segregation in South Africa.”
13 Frederick Johnstone, Class, Race, and Gold: A Study of Class Relations and Racial Discrimination in South Africa (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976).
14 Ibid.; and van Schoor, “The Origin and Development of Segregation in South Africa.”
15 van Schoor, “The Origin and Development of Segregation in South Africa.”
16 Anne Bonds and Joshau Inwood, “Beyond White Privilege: Geographies of White Supremacy and Settler Colonialism,” Progress in Human Geography, 40, no. 6 (December 2016): 719–720.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., 716.
19 Ibid., 716.
20 Maylam, South Africa's Racial Past.
21 Bogues, Empire of Liberty, 39.
22 Francis Wilson and Mamphela Ramphele, Uprooting Poverty: The South African Challenge: Report for the Second Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and Development in Southern Africa. (New York: W.W Norton, 1989).
23 “Fantasmatic” is a psychoanalytic term whose most lucid outline I draw from Claudia Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (New York: Oxford University Press,1998), 50. The fantasmatic is a,
…“structuring action” or a recurring pattern of an individual’s fantasies that “lie[s] behind such products of the unconscious as dreams, symptoms, acting out, [and] repetitive behaviour”. The fantasmatic is not only an internal or masked thematic that determines a subject’s unconscious associations; it is also a dynamic formation that seeks conscious expression by converting experience into action. For as the subject attaches unconscious fantasies to new experiences, she or he reproduces pleasure by copying “patterns of previous pleasure.”
24 Derek Hook, (Post)apartheid Conditions: Psychoanalysis and Social Formation (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013).
25 Zuma, The Social Psychology of Self-Segregation.
26 Hook, (Post)apartheid Conditions, 54.
27 Bogues, Empire of Liberty, 45.
28 Ibid., 46.
29 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 112.
30 Bogues, Empire of Liberty, 46.
31 “DA Charges Zille over Colonialism Tweets, ” Al Jazeera, April 2, 2017, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/04/da-charges-helen-zille-colonialism-tweets-170402160030644.html (accessed October 14, 2018), emphasis in the original.
32 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philocox, (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 96.
33 Lewis Gordon, An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 86.
34 Bogues, Empire of Liberty, 46.
35 William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: Dover Publications, 2004), 1.
36 Abdul JanMohamed, The Death-Bound Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
37 Lewis Gordon, “Through the Hellish Zone of Nonbeing. Thinking through Fanon, Disaster, and the Damned of the Earth,” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5, no.1 (2007): 11.
38 “Slave Rebellion at the Cape led by Louis of Mauritius. Over 300 Slaves and Khoi Khoi Servants from Outlying Farms Marched on Cape Town Demanding their Freedom,” South African History Online, October 2, 2016, http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/slave-rebellion-cape-led-louis-mauritius-over-300-slaves-and-khoi-khoi-servants-outlying (accessed May 1, 2017).
39 See Adam Habib, South Africa’s Suspended Revolution. Hopes and Prospects (Johannesburg, South Africa: Wits University Press, 2013); Herbert Adam and Kogila Moodley, The Negotiated Revolution. Society and Politics in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Johannesburg, South Africa: Jonathan Ball, 1993); Sampie Terrblanche, A History of Inequality in South Africa, 1652–2002 (Scottsville and Sandton, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press and KMM Review Publishing, 2012); John S. Saul, A Flawed Freedom. Rethinking Southern African Liberation (Cape Town, South Africa: UCT Press, 2014); Moelesti Mbeki, Architects of Poverty.Why African Capitalism Needs Changing (Johannesburg, South Africa: Picador Africa, 2009).
40 Biko, I Write What I Like, 68.
41 James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage International, 1993), 12.
42 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham, intro. Robin D. G Kelley (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 42.
43 On protests for basic human need see: Laura Grant, “Research Shows Sharp Increase in Service Delivery Protests,” Mail & Guardian, February 12, 2014, http://mg.co.za/article/2014-02-12-research-shows-sharp-increase-in-service-delivery-protests (accessed February 2, 2017); Ed Cropley, “Informal Settlements Ablaze with Disenchantment,” Mail & Guardian, February 8, 2014, http://mg.co.za/article/2014-02-08-informal-settlements-ablaze-with-disenchantment (accessed February 2, 2017). For the killing of miners in Marikana see John Mkhize, “Police Fire on Marikana Miners, Several Dead,” Sowetan, August 16, 2012, http://www.sowetanlive.co.za/news/2012/08/16/police-fire-on-marikana-miners-several-dead (accessed February 2, 2017); Thabiso Thakali, “Marikana Massacre,” Saturday Star, December 18, 2012, http://www.iol.co.za/saturday-star/marikana-massacre-1.1442562#.Uee6p40weCk (accessed February 2, 2017); Miners Shot Down. Directed by Rehad Desai. Cape Town: Uhuru Productions, 2014.
44 Rebecca Davis, “Crisis, What Crisis? Minister Under Fire as Social Grant Saga Heats Up National Assembly,” Daily Maverick, March 15, 2017, https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2017-03-15-crisis-what-crisis-minister-under-fire-as-social-grant-saga-heats-up-national-assembly/#.WNj7UBiw2Rs (accessed March 20, 2017); Andries Du Toit, “The Real Risks Behind SA’s Social Grant Payments,” Business Day, February 21, 2017, https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/2017-02-21-the-real-risks-behind-sas-social-grant-payment-crisis/ (accessed February 25, 2017).
45 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 204.
46 Biko, I Write What I Like, 101.
47 Ibid., 102.
48 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 235–37.
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Buhle Khanyile
Buhle Khanyile is a Senior Research Specialist in the Education and Skills Development Unit of the Human Science Research Council, South Africa. He is a young scholar and student of society with an interest in postcolonial studies, human consciousness, artificial intelligence, robotics, and questions of freedom. His thinking and writing is located in interdisciplinary enquiry. He sees his emerging work as “creative nonfiction scholarship” targeted at audiences within and beyond the academic community.