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Reframing the black subject ideology and fantasy
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Okwui Enwezor
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Third Text 40, Autumn 1997 21
Reframing the Black Subject
Ideology and Fantasy
in Contemporary South African Representation
Okwui Enwezor
In the house adjacent to the one in which I live
in a suburb of Johannesburg, my Afrikaner
neighbour makes it a duty, every weekend and
on public holidays, to unfurl on his flag pole,
the blue, white and orange colours of the old
South African nation. Like all symbols of
nationalistic identification, this particular flag
raises very paradoxical emotions in people,
each of which — mortification or nostalgia —
invariably arrive with grave consequences on
the direction which South Africa, seem
irrevocably plunged. While it has become quite
rare today to find a South African of any race
who was not either a staunch supporter of the
African National Congress or an anti-apartheid
activist, my new neighbours have in very stark
terms welcomed me into the side of a South
African political and social debate that is not
easily addressed in public. They have done so
by making it very clear on which side of the
ideological plane their allegiances lie. From the
look of things, it seems nothing has changed for
these people and thousands of others like them
who still persistently dream of the return of the
old nation. So nostalgia, cleansed of very
poisonous memories endures, and is thus
justified in the almost fatalistic clinging to a
relic of racism. In many ways this defiant usage
of an old nationalist symbol, with its
undisguised history and terrifying con-
sequences, is nothing new. It has companions
in the recent fascist revivalism that has
engulfed Europe in the aftermath of the cold
war with the return of swastikas and Nazi
symbolism, and the more enduring history of
the Confederacy flag in the southern United
States.
Reading this image in the uneasy light
which governs South Africa’s return to the
ranks of modern nations, the flag display
reveals, and at the same time masks, certain
anxieties around the transition from apartheid
to a representative, tolerant, liberal democracy.
As I write this, I am listening to the wind snap
the stiff cloth and colours of the fading flag. I
am fascinated by that sound, by the rituality of
the owner’s forlorn hope. However, my South
African companion is less enamoured of my
fascination with that ideological prop of
longing, the lost dream of a fallen nation whose
haunted past is very much part of the present,
a sentinel that echoes the ambivalence and the
desires of both the new South African nation,
and the fantasy of a time fast fading with the
bleached tricolour of the old flag. However
hopeful one may sound in articulating the
22
novelty and newness of South Africa, we must
constantly remind ourselves that, while nations
may disappear, the ideologies which feed and
sustain them, and which form the foundational
basis of their creation, are more difficult to
eradicate. For they are imaginatively
reconstituted by using the surplus resources of
their enduring myths as banners to rally
adherents.
Thus in late 1996, two years after the legal
fall of apartheid, it is hardly revealing to
observe that racism and racial suspicion remain
rampant realities of the new South African
state. We can hear it in the resplendent,
undisguised accent of those anxious voices
who still await the owl of Minerva to return
with the news that the experiment was a
failure: the ‘natives’ are simply ill-prepared to
run a functioning, well-oiled state. In pointing
out the above, I am less interested in the
fraught political context out of which these
issue than I am in using the questions which
they raise to examine issues of representation
in a culture which has lived for generations
with racist stereotypes as one of the most
prevailing attitudes amongst members of its
social polity. To sketch out the image fully, I
want to begin with two analogous depictions
that run synchronously: Baas and Massa, Kaffir
and Nigger, The Hottentot and the auction
block, Jim Crow and apartheid. These analogies
sketch out an ideological pattern that runs
through the histories of both the United States
of America and South Africa.
Their uncanny resemblance, however, is not
an accident. For they are both founded on
blackness as anathema to the discourse of
whiteness; whiteness as a resource out of which
the trope of the nation, nationality and
citizenship is constructed, and everything else
that is prior is negated, defaced, marginalised,
colonised. By thinking analogously of the two
systems of whiteness as official policy, and as a
mechanism of bureaucratic normality, I want to
extrapolate from the cultural text of the United
States to make a commentary on the fascinating
usage, in post-apartheid representation, of the
African body as subject and prop in both the
political and cultural expressions of the ‘New
South Africa1.
This retrieval of the black figure from the
debased image bank of the former apartheid
state is not surprising at all. Nor is it
necessarily new; it is parcelled in the speech act
of a ‘nation’ emerging from one of the most
traumatic experiences of the twentieth century:
the long, terrible, insomniac night of apartheid.
Dialectically, what one encounters within this
scripted and representational presence is a
nation seeking a new identity, and thus new
images, new geographies, boundaries with
which to ballast its strategic and mythological
coherence and unity as what has come to be
known, popularly, as the Rainbow Nation. To
put it bluntly, such a search is clearly related to
how differently whiteness and its privileges is
presently conceived, interpreted, translated
and used to access the code of a disturbed sense
of South African nationality. Thus to examine
the charged descriptive detail and what strikes
at the mortal heart of the ‘New South Africa’ —
multilingual, and hopefully, multivocal — is to
keen one’s ears to the new uses and revindi-
cation of whiteness (in very subdued and
barely registered forms) as an idiom of cultural
identity, that is, as a renewed and authoritative
presence in the country’s iconographical text.
II
Although today the word ‘identity’ has lost the
lustre of its discursive currency, especially as
multicultural and postcolonial discourse come
under persistent academic attack, it would
seem that South Africa has arrived belatedly to
such contestations. Yet, it might be worth
adding that in reality everything about South
Africa in the last fifty years has often been
defined along this axis. Thus its belatedness,
could justifiably be seen from the position of its
rearguard position vis-à-vis how identity up
until recently had been bounded to the archaic
formulation of w.hiteness as a nationalistic
desire.
To be WHITE in many senses is an
ideological fantasy. In discursive terms, it is a
fantasy framed in the old mode of nationalist
address (pursued with brutal efficiency by old
apartheid ideologues), the arena in which all
kinds of ideological longings converge, and are
recovered in terms of a specific socio-political
agenda and historical formation. Such an
agenda and formation have often been
replayed in the charged territory of racial
pathologies, the kind which Benedict Anderson
in Imagined Communities described as “the
magic to turn chance into destiny”. This in turn
is invested with symbolic signs and positive
values of origin, space, and a sense of who
23
occupies that space, who owns it, who lords
over it, and for whose benefit it is worked. In
the specific example of South Africa, as in the
American model, the identity of whiteness
binds itself to the exclusionary politics of
national discourse. Who is included or ex-
cluded from that body politic and on what
terms is their admittance or exclusion ratified?
Until recently in South Africa, as typified by
Germany’s jus sanguinis ethnic policy, citizen-
ship (nationality) was a special animus that
carried the Calvinist symbol of whiteness. For it
not only declaimed belonging from the position
of exclusion, it effectively rendered millions of
the indigenous population persona non grata.
Under such definition, to challenge the sanctity
of whiteness, to represent it adversely, either in
writing or image-making, to question the
Calvinist ethic of racial purity on which it is
founded, is to court terrible reprisals (brutal
beatings, ban orders, jail, solitary confinement,
exile, death) or to be cast out of the inner
sanctum of the broederbond. And nowhere is the
ideology of this racial fundamentalism more
potently manifested, especially around the
shaping of national identity, than in the arena
of sports and visual arts: modes of culture
which, according to Edward Said’s definition in
Culture and Imperialism, occupy the realm of
pleasure and leisure, albeit coarsened by brutal
exclusion and primitive racial determinism.
For years, because they were neither citizens
nor persons with any national affiliation, black
South Africans were never offered the
opportunity to participate in the corporate
body of national sports, let alone to represent
such a body or speak on its behalf. Sports had
simply become a purified zone, the hallowed
ground upon which white supremacist imp-
ulses traded its currency. In art, the museums
of South Africa, in their attempt to redress the
imbalances of the past, are paying the price for
their telling neglect and exclusion from their
collections of work by African artists. Because
of this neglect, an intensified activity of
gobbling up any work of art made by ‘black’
artists has picked up both within public and
private institutions in the last ten years. But
since the pragmatic value of everything that
defines the sense of the old South Africa
derived from the interregnum of white
nationalism and black resistance, both in
images, popular iconography, literature,
language and religion, it goes without saying
that, to speak authentically about the nation, to
render the exactitude of its character, to probe
its borders and alleviate its insecurity, to draw
it into light through all kinds of signifying
devices, the birthright of such utterance (which
included speaking on behalf of the ‘native’)
ultimately belonged to the white interlocutor.
Ill
But what is it exactly, that makes whiteness
such an exorbitant space of subjectivity, as the
argot of unimpeachable and irrefutable
testimony of the knowledge of the colonised
native? With whiteness, one can hazard saying
— though this might imply an essentialist
projection or even a prejudicial marking — that
its tropes can be related to what Claire Kahane,
following psychoanalytic theory, has written of
as “object relations theory”. She writes that,
“Object relations theory assumes that from
birth, the infant engages in formative relations
with — objects — entities perceived as separate
from the self, either whole persons or parts of
the body, either existing in the external world
or internalised as mental representations”.1
Is this then how the Other is invented and
assigned his place on the margins of the nation,
in the wilderness of incommensurability? Here
the Hottentot Venus, whose supposedly
horrendous looking vagina is now preserved in
formaldehyde in a museum in France, and the
black man on the auction block, as objects of
denigration, become props of this ideological
fantasy, the degenerative sketch from which
whiteness stages its purity. These two historical
scenes in which the black body has been
tendered as display, reproduce the abject as a
sign of black identification. Thus, the Hottentot
Venus and the black man on the auction block
signal a kind of black genitalia abjection,
products of a white masochist enjoyment, of
black sexuality in its most debased form.
Although today these are thought of as
things of the past, in reality they remain
perversely lodged in popular culture texts, in
films, novels and art. In films the fantasy is of
the menacing black criminal and prostitute. In
contemporary art, we have Robert
Mapplethorpe to thank for furthering the
illusion of the black body as an object of
enjoyment and spectacle, in short for helping
restore it to an aesthetic state of grace. On this
account, Olu Oguibe has noted succinctly, that
“the introduction of digitalization in our time
24
has sanitized erasure and transformed it into a
messless act, and the object of the obliterative
act now disappears together with the evidence
of its own excision, making erasure an act
without trace”.2 No doubt some of these acts are
also constantly played out in the resurgent
emergence of the black subject as a popular
image in all forms of representation in contem-
porary South Africa.
In the post-apartheid moment of national
reconciliation, reconstruction and unification,
we have heard so much of the militant black
subject who wants to change everything and
remake the nation in the illusory image of black
identity. Conversely, another enduring popular
image has emerged of the sulking white subject
who harbours fantasies of an ethnic white
volkstaat, and failing that, either emigrates to
Australia or stays behind, and bitterly
complains about how things have changed.
Both images are not fallacies. They represent
the polar axes around which the terms of
transition are being negotiated. But they are
both founded on how notions of whiteness
have often constituted the terms of national
identity and citizenship’ and must now either be
amended or attenuated and deconstructed in
order to reconstitute the new image of the
nation as something neither white nor black,
but ‘a rainbow of multiple reflections’. Hence,
to speak through the territory of both the old
and new South African nation and the
intersection of black and white subjectivity
within their iconographie lexicon, might it be
possible to begin with the question of the abject,
so as to delineate what binds the subject of the
nation to both its object of desire and
disavowal, its internal unity, its frame of
stability and to that which disturbs it, calls it
into question, sets it adrift?
As part of the experience of apartheid, it
could be related that the primal symptom of
whiteness was always in relation to that broad
category, in which large groups of people were
reproduced in the image of the abject, that
which Julia Kristeva defined as what “disturbs
identity, system, order. What does not respect
borders, positions, rules”.3 Frantz Fanon relates
this to that moment when a young white child
shrinks in horror and terror into her mother’s
arms, and points to a black man in a public
space as some kind of defilement, a mark of
excess, an abcess sprung fresh in the temporal
imagination. “Look, a Negro”, screamed the
child. Here the Negro becomes an object of
fetishistic fascination and disturbance to both
the spatial and temporal order. There is both a
demand for the repression of his presence and
his objectification, so as to mark out the divide
that separates his polluting presence from the
stable environment of whiteness: the enclosed
suburbia in which he is forever a stranger, a
visitor. Within South Africa, the Pass Laws,
Separate Amenities Act, Bantu Education Act,
Group Areas Act, etc, were the mechanisms
employed to cleanse territories coveted by
whites of the scourge of blackness. Part of this
schematic trace of the abject as a transgressor of
borders and rules is especially disturbing,
because the abject seem so wholly reproduced
in the image of the criminal, the fugitive, the
trespasser. This point was so necessary in the
construction of South African identity,
regimented as it was in a colour-coded system
of appreciation, value and worth, of which the
ideological fantasy of whiteness becomes what
everything is measured against, whether as
resistance or aspiration.
Thus the racism which instituted,
incorporated and structured apartheid can be
said to have been accommodated first by what
Edward Said noted in his elaborate study of
Orientalism as an ontological and epistemo-
logical distinction between the settler
population and the indigenous populations.
These distinctions, which lie at the root of the
colonial project, worked on the premise of two
inventions: one, on the ontological description
of the native as devoid of history, and two, on
the epistemological description of the native
subject as devoid of knowledge and subjec-
tivity. On each account, the colonial territory
grows more expansive as the imaginary map
drawn from the two distinctions opens further
a corporate body of interests in which the
native now exists in direct competition for its
resources — material, history, representation —
which culminates in resistance and sets in
motion the process of decolonisation.
But for this sense of competition to grow
into an ideological struggle, it must first be
imagined as imperilling either the profitable
position of the settler or putting at even greater
risk the interests and benefits that accrue from
his superiority, that is to say, his race, language,
culture, history, knowledge, etc, the authority
with which he narrates history; in short,
whiteness. This is the crucial point where
African subjectivity and white interests seem to
intersect in the contest of the meaning of
25
identity in post-apartheid South Africa. It
appears that the struggle for this meaning
hinges on who controls the representational
intentionality of the body politic, especially its
archive of images: symbolic and literal.
The colonized man is an envious man. And this the
settler knows very well; when their glances meet he
ascertains bitterly, always on the defensive, ‘They
want to take our place’. It is true, for there is no native
who does not dream at least once a day of setting
himself up in the settlers’ place*
Fanon’s astute observation of the Manichean
universe inhabited by the opposing factions of
black and white, and the competing narratives
of the native and settler, bears some unadorned
truths and demands some attention, if at least
cursorily. Surely, the black South African is
envious of the position of the white South
African, who has always deigned, and seen it
as natural, to speak on his behalf, for his
presence, history, socio-political position and
place within South Africa. Surely the colonised
man is an envious man. For he wants to write
his own history, to retrieve his own body from
the distortive proclivities of white represen-
tation. Even though on this account, he is no
less willing to succumb to certain ideals of
ethnicity, to ideological fantasies of blackness
to tell his story.
It doesn’t matter under which guise it is told
(whether it is in the recuperation of the
mythological essence of the omnipotent King
Shaka as a noble warrior fighting colonial
incursions on territories that belong rightfully to
Africans) as long as it connects with some
atavistic sense of destiny. In other words he
wants to take the place of the settler. And he is
no more willing to give up that dream than the
settler is willing to concede that key ideological
position. For in their historical relationship, the
settler always feigns to know his native better
than the native knows himself. It is this crucial
position that the white South African, who has
always been in control of how the eyes see and
perceive the African, is not yet ready to give
up. Hence, in recent South African represen-
tation, the ideological battle seems to be over
the control of the black body, its frame of
analysis, the projection site in which its image
is refreshed with the new insight of a suddenly
untroubled social relation. But according to
Fanon the two zones are opposed.
If, as Stuart Hall suggested, “identities are the
names we give to the different ways we are
positioned by, and position ourselves in, the
narratives of the past”, what happens when
suddenly the narratives of white representation
of Africans are challenged by a black counter-
narrative that seeks to exclude how African
subjectivity have been positioned by and
within white South African narratives? It is no
secret that in the aftermath of emancipation,
that it is precisely the terrain of the “narratives
of the past” that is today the most fiercely
contested. As we all know, for the greater part
of European presence in South Africa, the
spectres, the haunted and historic memory, the
glow, the consciousness, the metaphorical
speech of European identity has stood solidly,
for half a millennium, on a nationalism of white
supremacist ideology; the workaday speech
which in the faded glory of the fallen apartheid
republic signals a desire still unfulfilled, a
speech act currently being unlearned in the
space of representation, and within the transi-
tional haze of political and social transfor-
mation. If no articulate voices have been heard
in this din, it ought not be surprising, partic-
ularly if one listens within earshot of the
contrapuntal narrative of the ‘native’s’ often
marginal and scatological agitation to be heard,
and the hardened habit of the settler not to
listen at all. At present an impasse exists.
Two years after the official demise of
apartheid, Nelson Mandela and the majority of
South Africans — black and white — have tried
nothing less than a reinvention of their once
divided country, a new South African identity
attempting to shed the wool of its racist past.
The drive for this new entity is the emergence
of a new nation, from one that lived in isolation
and mutual suspicion, in competition and as
adversaries, to one today described as the last
miracle of the century. Part of the formidable
repertoire of images with which the nation has
attempted to heal itself is framed in the
iconographical technicolour of the ‘Rainbow
Nation1, a term coined by Desmond Tutu to
describe the multicultural population of South
Africa. One’s understanding of the ‘Rainbow
Nation’ has less to do with its mythic
26
dimensions, the uneasy air of ambivalence
which visits its every invocation, than with the
pragmatic politics of reconstruction which it
seeks to articulate, a reborn but new nation-
alism. But no one in full honesty believes the
‘Rainbow Nation’ to be a long term project.
Rather, it is a project of accommodation, of
armistice, in the absence of which competition
between the various members could again
erupt into civil strife. Along this thinking, Rob
Nixon has noted that “much the strongest
current of nationalism in South Africa — that
represented by the ANC — is inclusive, non-
racial, and premised on a conciliatory unity,
not an enforced ethnic homogeneity”.5 But the
critics of the ‘Rainbow Nation’, easily ignore
this fact.6 In this regard, one casts an uneasy
glance at the direction of KwaZulu Natal,
where the cauldron of Zulu nationalism
bubbles.
On this note, I want to suggest that
nationalism, whether framed in the sectional
rhetoric of Zulu nationalism, in the volkstaat of
Afrikaner nationalism, in the settler colony of
generic whiteness as an essential way of being,
or blackness as a revolutionary discourse of
decolonisation, has always been an inextricable
reality that frames South African identity.
There is no better way to acknowledge this
sense of factionalism than in the different
responses to the ‘Rainbow Nation’ concept,
particularly from a white community which
suddenly finds itself a minority, and
potentially the underlings of their former
African vassals. And nowhere has this recent
resistance been more fierce than in a represen-
tational terrain still dominated by highly
literate, but nonetheless unreflexive white
cultural practitioners unblinkingly intent on
representing black subjectivity at the margins
of cultural and aesthetic discourse. Unmoored
from what they have always known, that is, the
privilege of unquestioned whiteness from
which everything is refracted, the Rainbow
now seems a motley reflection of images alien
to the old sensibility. Very simply, the Rainbow
either opposes or seems antagonistic to
whiteness. The Rainbow as what “disturbs
identity, system, order. What does not respect
borders, positions, rules” has made artistic
practice a volatile and transgressive act of
realpolitik, for it has suddenly made South
Africans clearly aware of how different,
culturally, ethnically and linguistically they are
as a ‘nation’. No longer is that hardened
position of binaries, black/white, settler/
native, coloniser/colonised, etc, tenable.
VI
This calls into question what images in a
decolonising South Africa should look like, and
who has the right to use which images, and
what the authorising narrative ought to be. If
decolonisation is, as Fanon noted, “the meeting
of two forces, opposed to each other by their
very nature”, or if one might add, linked by
mutual suspicion, is it possible to suggest that
the recent conference, amongst Afrikaner
intellectuals in Stellenbosch, Western Cape, in a
bid to form an organisation that will promote
Afrikaans language and culture, could be
linked to an opposition to the ‘Rainbow
Nation’? Some of the derisive, perhaps even
naive mockery of the ‘Rainbow Nation’, on the
very level of their ideological promotion of a
wounded whiteness, could be related as
separatism under disguise. At least it seems to
suggest that. Judging from the recent
convulsive events around the world, this kind
of nationalism has persistently made its bid by
invoking a certain particularity, by investing its
images with a sense of uniqueness, a manifest
destiny without which the desire and destiny of
the national entity withers. To be potent, the
object of nationalist discourse has to see itself as
endangered, on the brink of extinction, in need
of special protection and reparation.
This is what was so disturbing to some of my
black South African colleagues about the
Stellenbosch conference. Not least because
some of its most prominent advocates, such as
the writer Breyten Breytenbach, have strong
liberal credentials in the leftist politics of South
Africa, and were staunch anti-apartheid
activists. Even so, the Stellenbosch conference
was not a display of unanimity on the meaning
of what ostensibly may be perceived, as
Afrikaner chauvinism rearing its ugly head
again. Some of the attendees of the conference,
such as the poet Antjie Krog, who has written
brilliantly and movingly in the Weekly Mail &
Guardian about the harrowing testimonies to
the Truth and Reconciliation Committee
chronicling past human rights abuses during
the political struggle against apartheid, were
uneasy about the implications of such a
gathering, and made an attempt to distance
themselves from any suggestion of reviving
27
Afrikaner nationalism.
To encounter this debate as it unfolds in the
disjunctive, uneasy peace of the ‘New South
Africa’ is to admit the unfinished business of
the transformation of the apartheid state and
the huge task of decolonisation. It is also to
acknowledge and enumerate the fragility of the
post-apartheid nation. For here, the question
that could be asked of the Stellenbosch
colloquium is: What exactly is it about the
‘Rainbow Nation’, barely two years into reunifi-
cation, that makes Afrikaners so uneasy about
their prospects as an ethnic minority in South
Africa? Is this response — the inability of a
once dominant white culture to deal with its
diminished role and sense of superior
entitlement in the cultural and political life of
the nation — a preamble to a resurgent
Afrikaner nationalism that is caught so well in
the shadow of the Voortrekker monument in
Pretoria? Can one assume that such a
colloquium, however well meaning, is not a
pretext for the rallying of the troops below
from above?7
I want to return to how today this fantasy
again images the black subject in the old and
warped frame of the apartheid era as lack,
representing him at the liminal point of his
defeat. That is, his story, as spoken through the
transitional identity of post-apartheid contem-
porary representations, is narrated in the past
tense, as if the narrators want to stop history; as
if everything about the black subject resides
only in his pre-linguistic period, in the residue
of his diminished state as subject, prior to his
act of speech, fixed in his eternal silence. Of
course these narratives are cleverly couched in
a manner that appear to recover the essence of
a black subjectivity suppressed during
apartheid.
So while the Stellenbosch conferees enum-
erate within listening distance of the nation, the
mythological space of the ‘Rainbow Nation’, the
site from which Mandela’s daydream takes its
fait accompli, attempts to steer a different
course, a course in which all ethnicities are
recognised as ‘equal’, perforce of the recently
ratified constitution. Could one even suggest
that in participating in what is seen as chest
thumping and the projection of the robust and
exemplary characteristics of Afrikaner speech
and subjectivity during a difficult period of
reconciliation, that the conference seemed not
only ill-advised, but arrogant? And in the face
of testimonies of horrible apartheid crimes
made to the Truth and Reconciliation
Committee that was set up to investigate the
murderous policy of the old regime, does this
portend a larger lack of sensitivity and account-
ability to victims of Afrikaner domination? In
mounting a drive to promote Afrikaans in such
a short space of time, in a volatile period of
reconciliation, could these intellectuals be
accused of lapsing into a form of amnesia and
disavowal of historical memory, characteristic
of the holocaust deniers in post-Nazi Germany?
And finally could this drive for the promotion
of Afrikaans as special and endangered be seen
as a need to shore up and maintain the
dominance of a disproportionately minority
Afrikaner culture in post-apartheid South
Africa, that some of these progressive white
intellectuals are still staying with that old
image of the ‘native’ entrapped in muteness?
VII
Perhaps there is a difference between what the
colloquium staged, and what the artist
attempts in employing the image of the African
subject to come to terms with what South
Africa was, what it is today, and what it could
become. But why am I unconvinced by the
remonstrative gestures of those artists who
sentimentalise African images, who persist
with those images that are devoid of conflict, of
the quietly suffering but still noble African?
Since he can’t speak for himself, he is spoken
for. I want to believe in the sincerity of these
gestures, to think that the whiteness of the
artists is beside the point.
And I want to believe even less in any kind
of analogy to that mindset, which on the other
hand, still persists with that old business of
serving up African culture as spectacle and
source of reassuring, harmless entertainment.
But my faith seems so forbiddingly racked by
doubt. We easily deceive ourselves, believing
that the dividing line of racial discourse is not
as baited as it once was. Today, the spectacles
of yesterday have returned. They form the most
resourceful and formidable examples of
representation which have recently made their
appearance in the booming South African
tourist industry. In what are described as
cultural villages throughout South Africa, so-
called old African customs are being staged for
mostly white audiences, in exclusive holiday
resorts. In Lesedi Cultural Village in Guateng
28
Province, tourists have their choice of which
African fantasy they may sample. Depending
on your taste, you can sample Zulu dancing, in
which pot-bellied ferocious looking men in
leopard skins prance and stamp around a
bright burning fire, a sight which could only be
described as a performative ethnographic
surrealism. Or you can partake in an authentic
Xhosa, Pedi or Sotho domestic scene, replete
with the visible iconographical marks of those
cultures. It seems in this retrieval of African
customs from a besmirched ethnographic
cupboard, only those aspects of African culture
which entertain are presented. Such are the
images of Africans which are beginning to
enter the archival bank of the new South
African nation.
Of all such cultural villages, Kagga Gamma,
a space that does double duty as a game park in
the Western Cape, is perhaps the most
primitive. At Kagga Gamma, the so-called
endangered Bushman has been reinvested as
the entertainment and put on display. His
brief? To put in a performance daily, which
could live up to or approximate, as it replays
the essence of his authenticity, certain colonial
fantasies and representations of his nomadic
hunter and gatherer past. For something a little
more than subsistent wage, he is given a leather
loin cloth, bows and arrows and in full view of
the paying guests at Kagga Gamma, performs
the task which most defines that aspect of his
‘authentic’ past.
VIII
Perhaps a headline in a New York Times article
in early 1996, which reported on Kagga
Gamma, captured the tragedy of this form of
representation. The headline read: ‘Endangered
Bushman Finds Refuge in a Game Park’. Even
after the fall of apartheid, the temptation to
retrieve the ‘native’ in his full ethnic regalia
remains in representations which attempt to
address the notion of difference and otherness
as forms of critique of those images. While such
a critique may be the primary intention of the
works, the irony is that most of them uncrit-
ically end up seduced by their fascination for
the abject figure and docile bodies of African
men, women and children. Homi Bhabha
captures this quite well when he writes that:
An important feature of colonial discourse is its
dependence on the concept of ‘fixity’ in the
ideological construction of otherness. Fixity, as
the sign of cultural/historical/racial difference in
the discourse of colonialism, is a paradoxical
mode of representation: it connotes rigidity and
an unchanging order as well as disorder,
degeneracy and daemonic repetition. Likewise
the stereotype, which is its major discursive
strategy, is a form of knowledge and identifi-
cation that vacillates between what is always ‘in
place’, already known, and something that must
be anxiously repeated…8 (my emphasis)
This anxious repetition finds itself inscribed
again and again in the almost obsessive usage
of old photographic images of Africans or in
the ethnographic, tourist postcards depicting
near-naked African women in a state of
colonial arrest. The resulting work is redolent
of a time past, if not one quite vanished. But it
is the over-familiarity, and brazen usage of the
photographs, many of which were
undoubtedly found in curio shops, that attracts
one’s attention. The subjects, it seems, are
attractive because of their anonymity and
existence at the margins of history. They have
no names, thus they pose the least emotional or
ethical threat, and the distance between them
and the artist offers a gratifying contextual
licence to do with the images as one chooses.
Thus Penny Siopis turns the ubiquitous
ethnographic postcard of ‘native’ women into
large Cibachrome prints, then paints over them
and drapes them with assorted paraphernalia,
syringes, medical catheters, etc. The surfaces of
the large photographs have been clearly
worked on for effect, some parts highlighting
and other parts covering or erasing certain tell-
tale and problematic areas, an effect that recalls
what Olu Oguibe has called the scarred page.
By sentimentalising her images, Siopis turns
them into over-aestheticised vessels for
pleasurable consumption, untroubled and
available. The images are just rendered as banal
texts, as objective in their depictions as their
usage as sources of art. The turn-of-the-century
photograph of the doleful looking boy in a suit
and hat and carrying an ostrich egg, Boy with
Ostrich Egg, is one such image, that forms the
larger repertoire of Siopis’ fairly extensive
incursions into this arena of racialised
representation. The image has been recoloured
blue and decorated with vertical borders of
baby shoes. It is pure visual candy. The image
says very little about the photograph, or who
29
Penny Siopsis, Boy with Ostrich Egg
the little boy is or the artist’s relationship to the
image. Instead what we are given is an
aesthetic which reveals a curious ambivalence
towards its subject as a social being and-the
historical impediments that frame his
reception within the strategic restaging of
African identity through the ghostly outline of
its faded form.
Along the same spectrum, Wayne Barker
puts such images on display at the
Johannesburg Art Gallery as indigents, foils to
the young artist Piet Pienaar’s more revealing
critique of identity, stereotype and essen-
tialism. Günther Herbst appropriates them as
30
ethnographic kitsch symbols of the ‘natives’
western desire.
On the obverse side of this discourse is
photographer Santu Mofokeng’s ongoing
project Black Photo Album/Look at Me:
1890-1950, a meditation on black desire and
what it means to be black under colonial
domination. Rather than make aesthetic
interventions on the images to prove a point
as author, he has instead, except for restoring
the images, left the photographs as they are.
In this sensitive recovery of the private
history of black families from the colonial
period and leading u p to the early stages of
apartheid, Mofokeng has ostensibly upset the
apple-cart, in turn redeploying the archival
images of black identity for the recovery of
historical memory. By emphasising the
historicity of the subjects who occupy the site
of his exhaustive study, Mofokeng has
painstakingly searched out the often elusive
biographies of the sitters and their families.
Their names form part of the larger task in
what these images suggest for future usage.
Perhaps it is best to listen to Mofokeng on this
account. He writes that:
These are images that urban black working and
middle-class families in South Africa had
commissioned, requested or tacitly sanctioned.
They have been left behind by dead relatives,
where they sometimes hang on obscure parlour
walls in the townships. In some families they are
coveted as treasures, displacing totems in
discursive narratives about identity, lineage, and
personality. And because, to some people,
photographs contain the ‘shadow’ of the subject,
they are carefully guarded from the ill-will of
witches and enemies… If the images are not
unique, the individuals in them are… When we
look at them we believe them, for they tell us a
little about how these people imagined
themselves. We see these images in terms
determined by the subjects themselves, for they
have them as their own.*
What is clearly evident is Mofokeng’s
intention and insistence that the subject be
seen as a person possessing a history, identity
and desire. However, it must be understood
that far from drawing a positivist sketch of
noble Africans, Mofokeng is attempting to
tease out an often elusive sense of black
complexity in racialised discourse. Cast neither
in the splintered light of deformity
Mofokeng, Moduetha and Maria Letsipa, silver bromide print.
Refer to the caption below for Maria’s background story.
There is little information about her husband Moduetha.
They came from the Orange Free State.
Photographer unknown, area 1900s.
Mofokeng, Ouma Maria Letsipa and her daughter, Minkie Letsipa.
Albumen print.
Maria was born to a family of ‘inboekselings’ in Lindley, Orange
River Colony now called Orange Free State. Inboekseling loosely
translated means forced juvenile apprenticeship in agriculture.
Her family became prosperous livestock and grain farmers at the
turn of the century. The image belongs to the Ramela family of
Orlando East. This information was supplied by Emma Mothibe.
Photo: Scholtz Studio, Linley. Orange River Colony c. 1900s.
31
Mofokeng, Cleophas and Martha Moatshe, albumen print.
Cleophas and his wife Martha hail from Boshoek where
he was a moderator in the break-away Anglican church.
He died in 1923 from ‘drie dae’ influenza. This inform-
ation is from Moatshe from Mohlakeng, Randfontein.
Photographer: Unknown, Boshoek circa 1900s.
Mofokeng, Moeti and Lazarus Fume, silver bromide print.
Biographical information is not known to our respond-
ant, Emma Mothibe. The image belongs to the Ramela
family of Orlando East, Soweto.
Photographer unknown.
nor in the pathos of a curative nostalgia, his
project provides us with an ethical sense of
African agency, at least one of the ways it
could be used imaginatively.
On the same level, Willie Bester’s
multimedia constructions carry the liminal
images of the fight against apartheid with a
brutal realism and situates the black body in
the realm of his political struggle and social
resistance. He fashions a critique in which the
black subject is able to speak, to threaten, to
be angry, and unbowed within the temporal
and spatial history of South Africa. On the
other hand Lien Botha memorialises that
body’s absence by fragmenting it, squaring it
into a close-up in such a way that what we
are offered are her sad eyes and mouth,
simply an authentic image of suffering. In
Krotoa’s Room, she lights votive candles to the
eternalisation of the object position of black
people in South African history, signing her
images, perhaps unknowingly, with the pure
mark of the mute African, on whose behalf
the metaphoricity, rather than the commen-
surability of her subjectivity, is pleaded for
by another, by a surrogate voice. Botha’s use
of the black image recasts another stereotype,
of the eternally grateful, eternally noble
native, who, despite the most horrendous
deprivation and dehumanisation, is
incapable of hurting a fly.
For here, to represent the black subject like
Bester does, in the violent midst of his
struggle for emancipation from servitude and
denigration, would be to pick up another
slur, which is his enduring image as the
uppity nigger, the smart-alecky kaffir, the
rebellious native, the runaway, the maroon,
the terrorist. It is this sense of radicality that
made one of Ralph Ellison’s characters in
Invisible Man defiantly declare, “Black is…
black ain’t”. For while the dominant trope
and discursive address of the black subject by
these artists is predicated on their overde-
termined sense of familiarity of African
identity, a sense thoroughly evoked by what
Susan Vogel, to her eternal damnation, called
“intimate outsiders”, the black subject
continues to elude the primary task of such
discourse. A mode of discourse which seeks
the normalisation of the power role of
whiteness, as capable of historicising black
desire, which the white artists today assign
themselves.
32
Willie Bester, The Soldier, 1990, mixed media, 162 x 61 x 40 cm
IX
Such a position of power could be found in the
much discussed exhibition ‘Miscast:
Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen’,
curated by the artist Pipa Skotness at the
National Gallery of South Africa in Cape Town,
in April 1996. The exhibition, according to
Skotness, was mounted to reveal the horrors
which the ‘Bushman’ had suffered in southern
Africa, at the hands of white settlers and
Africans alike. In the exhibition Skotness
assigned herself the role of historian, perhaps
even custodian, of ‘Bushman’ history, so much
so that not one African was invited in the
catalogue of more than 15 white contributors to
comment on a history in which Africans
themselves are implicated. And neither was
there a section in which the ‘Bushman’ was
called to testify on his own behalf. Instead we
get to hear his ‘voice’ only through the
anecdotal voiceover of the white anthropol-
ogists commissioned to carry out the research
which Skotness believes to be great material for
exhibition in an art museum. As James Clifford
has observed, “one increasingly common way to
manifest the collaborative production of
ethnographic knowledge is to quote regularly
and at length from informants… Quotations are
always staged by the quoter and tend to serve
merely as examples or confirming test-
imonies”.10
It is not however, the paternalistic framing of
the ‘Bushman’ as a gentle, misunderstood
creature hunted to extinction, in a commentary
embellished by what Clifford calls “redemptive
modes of textualisation”, that disturbs the frame
of this project. What disturbs the congruity of
the frame is Skotness’ attempt to make out of
this history an artistic project. It seems as
though this exhibition represented an
opportunity for her to leap, full figured, into the
arena of installation art.
Accompanying this creative exercise in
curatorship is an attempt to stage authenticity
through the métonymie presence of objects. So
all through the gallery, Skotness had ransacked
various ethnographic storerooms and in the
process came up with musical instruments,
bows and arrows, bits of ethnic paraphernalia
such as bead work, old colonial photographs
and old cameras (placed all around the room,
surveillance style), anthropological documents,
dissecting instruments in lit glass cabinets, and
numerous shelves bearing cardboard boxes of
33
concealed information of ethnographic
expeditions (at least that’s what the captions on
the boxes suggested). She had moulds of
decapitated body parts of the ‘Bushman’ cast in
wax and displayed on pedestals.
Then, along two huge walls, she constructed
a gridded mural of photocollages of the
‘Bushman’, in which she had interspersed and
juxtaposed the photographs of various white
people with those of the ‘Bushman’. Perhaps
the most interesting aspect of this juxtaposition
was the disjunction created between the white
subjects and the ‘Bushman1. Many of the
photographs of the ‘Bushman’ gave one the
eerie feeling of looking at images of police mug
shots, thus tinting one’s perception with the
idea of staring at the faces of either criminals or
condemned people. But what staged this
disjunction so dramatically, was how totally at
ease the white faces were in the panels, and
how forbiddingly morbid the black ones. This
did not so much blur the line between the
hunter and hunted, between the coloniser and
colonised, as it highlighted them, with quite
surprising perversity.
Unaware, perhaps, of this perversity, is how
the employed images have escorted her into the
charnel house of an entirely submerged social
history of photographic representation. That is,
insofar as we are dealing with the archive as a
signpost pointing to how difference and
otherness are constructed through
photographic practice. For what we were
confronted with in the panels were two socially
constructed positions of knowledge in pitched
battle: the white man and the ‘Bushman’. But
Skotness’ archive of images “contains
subordinate, territorialised archives: archives
whose semantic interdependence is normally
obscured by the ‘coherence’ and ‘mutual
exclusivity’ of the social groups registered
within each”.” As one wandered through the
rooms, bludgeoned by a didactic relativism
which at times seemed an act of ironic self
mockery, I was forced to ask what this
exhibition was all about. What was the
exhibition actually saying, and to whom was it
addressing its message? Certainly not to the
‘Bushman’ who, to the surprise of the curator
and the institution, upset the cart by rejecting
the message of the exhibition.
Part of the reason for this rejection was their
refusal to recognise the body casts, and most
especially the linoleum carpet embossed with
photographic likenesses of their images, which
Skotness had commissioned, as forming any
kind of knowledge of their history or world.
That we as viewers were invited, and often
times acquiesced, actually to perform this
reenactment, to walk or trample upon the
abject figure of the ‘Bushman’ was most
disturbing. But it was the ‘Bushman’s’ complete
rejection of the carpet that was the most
memorable and damning event of the
exhibition. Invited as special guests to the
exhibition opening, the invitees were horrified
at the sight of their images embossed on the
linoleum carpet and refused to walk on it,
effectively vitiating Skotness1 attempt to serve
as the sympathetic interlocutor of their history,
indeed as their historian.
If we hold on to this critique, we will observe
how Skotness’ tactic as curator of this
postmodern ethnography, took the role of a
dilettante, neither ethnographer nor historian,
neither member of the clan nor confidante nor
intimate outsider. In her obsessiveness to raise
emotional hackles (as if all we need do is think
about the ‘Bushman’ with our hearts rather
than heads), she neglected to take into account
that her voice as the authority of history might
indeed be contested by the very people she was
attempting to recuperate. It is indicative of the
ethical blinkers familiar to all redemptive
colonial errands that her allegedly exhaustive
consultation with the ‘Bushman’ community
failed to alert her to the potential violation they
may feel towards her work. For in reproducing
this diapositive image of blackness, in which
the historical memory of the ‘Bushman’ was
desacralised and appropriated for a kind of
colonialist exegesis, Skotness repeated the act
of arrest of the native subject at the moment of
his faU.
This refusal by the ‘Bushman’ to assist in the
production of a distorted view of ‘his’ history
indicates certain stances of oppositionality that
sometimes are enacted by repressed groups in
the face of misrepresentation. Bell hooks relates
that the African American experience of
repression under slavery, had produced in
them “an over-whelming longing to look, a
rebellious desire, an appositional gaze. By
courageously looking [they] defiantly declared:
‘Not only will I stare, I want my look to change
reality’. Even in the worst circumstances of
domination, the ability to manipulate one’s
gaze in the face of structures of domination that
would contain it, opens up the possibility of
agency”.12 It was this failure to contain the gaze
34
Roger de la Harpe, A Young African Girl Displays Traditional Zulu
Head-dress, postcard, published by Art Publishers (Pty) Ltd
Durban, Johannesburg, Cape Town
Penny Siopis, South African Postcard 2,1995, laminated photocopy,
oil paint, plastic medical objects, 114 x 76 cm
of the ‘Bushman1, that caused the level of
discomfort which still reverberates in the halls
of the South African National Gallery.
It would seem that Skotness, as often is the
case with white representations of African
history, had assumed that as spectators, we all
see the same thing, and thus believe that our
gazes are constituted and therefore affirmed
and defined by the same regime of looking.
Such an assumption is not only simplistic, but
reductive as well. As Manthia Diawara has
suggested, under such a position, “the
dominant reading compels the Black spectator
to identify with racist inscription of Black
character”.13 However, difficulty and anxiety
arises when the gaze of the black spectator is
accounted for, and ends u p . challenging
representations which the white community
might have deemed irrefutably conclusive.
Therefore, when looking at white represen-
tations of African identity, we must allow that
positions of spectatorship be recognised,
particular in a racist society, as always
conditioned by the economy of racialised
interpretation, as well as desire.
It is the lack, therefore, and non-recognition
of the place of the black spectator as an
affirmed and enabled participant in the act of
looking that burdens the work of the young
artist Candice Breitz. In her ‘Rainbow Series’, a
body of work which reminds one of Hannah
Hoch’s photomontages, particularly the
ethnography series from around 1919, Breitz
explores the tension that exists in the discursive
territory of the ‘Rainbow Nation’ as they are
rendered in the pornographic depiction of
white women and the doubly coded depiction
of the black female body, framed by both
35
Candice Breitz, from the Ghost Series, 1994-96, white-out,
postcards and dbachrome, 152.4 x 101.6cm
pornographic and ethnographic desire.
Breitz stages this mise-en-scène through that
most inimitable form of hybridity, collage, the
errant pastiche of irresolvable miscegenation.
She began by pulling images of white women
from pages of porn magazines. Then she cut,
ripped and collaged them with the most stereo-
typical images of bare-breasted and bare-footed
South African black women, in ‘ethnic’ garb (in
this case Ndebele blankets, beaded aprons,
brass leg ornaments and beaded jewellery),
taken from those tourist postcards familiar to
frequent safari fliers. These crude joinings,
some of which conflate the bodies of
prepubescent black children with those of
leering and sexually exposed white women are
meant to enact an analogy of equal relationship
and compatibility at the site of representation.
The analogy being the equation of colonial
ethnographic capture of the black body as the
same as pornographic capture of white women.
For example, the body of a young smiling girl,
with barely sprouting breasts, and carrying a
large pumpkin on her head was collaged to the
faceless body of a squatting white woman wea-
ring nothing but white shoes and socks and
baring her vagina to us.
Another particularly striking image is a
photograph of a ghostly pale Breitz reclining,
odalisque style, like Manet’s Olympia, and
holding a cardboard cutout of a black woman’s
face, which partially frames and conceals her
face. It is interesting that Breitz is represented
full figured, while the black woman is rendered
as a mask, a simulacrum to white feminine
subjectivity. What are we to make of this
degenerate form of African womanhood —
without body, with-out name, the image of an
image — except to see it as an object with which
white femininity acquires its fullest enjoyment
as subject? .And what is it that Breitz is saying
here that is of real interest to the African
woman? Is she saying that this woman lives in
the same temporal zone as the white woman?
That they are both on the same level, as naive
victims of masculine violence?
However, the props of.Breitz’s argument
begin to wobble exactly on this level. She just
simply cannot or is unable to tell us just what
makes these images congruent, as forms of a
charged and cohesive discourse of race,
femininity, ethnography, pornography, the
‘Rainbow Nation’, and the complex web of
entanglements that further undermine her
thesis. A discursive absurdity, the images are
often spliced and scanned through the
computer to produce large seductive
Cibachrome photographic prints. It seems that
she is just too much in a hurry to show both her
unimpeachable feminist credentials and her
equally enlightened liberal sympathy towards
the much abused African woman. Despite her
effort to prove irrefutably that the bodies she so
solicitously uses for her misguided narrative do
indeed cohere, and do indeed accuse and
reproach Mandela’s ‘Rainbow Nation’, the
black body speaking through Fanon’s
amanuensis arrives with a jarring retort to say:
“You come too late, much too late. There will
always be a world — a white world — between
you and us.”14
While such a Manichean scheme might
irritate, what Fanon seems to be saying, that
Breitz either missed or ignored, is the fact that
36
not even gender could so suddenly bind
together black and white women’s bodies as
equal partners against patriarchy in post-
apartheid South Africa. For white women must
first recognise their own complicity in
constructing the African subject as such. The
vehement responses to this work by African
women in South Africa and in the United States
bear this out. The measure of this opposition to
an all knowing, non-complicit whiteness in
South Africa, is written within the dialectic of
an empowered black feminine presence in the
‘New South Africa’. What white representation
disavows or disallows, through what Toni
Morrison has called the stressed absence, black
women aim to reify through a questioning and
empowered voice. Perhaps to some ears, the
ring of hostility to the oblitera ti ve act (whiting
out, ghosting, decapitation, etc), the
unwelcome overfamiliarity, bordering on
ownership of the black body, the smug attitude
towards lecturing those who have borne quite
severely the sentence of these kinds of
titillating attentions, might seem too harsh.
Inasmuch as the ‘Rainbow Series’ has been
critically praised by the white establishment,
with the protestations of African viewers
dismissed as reactionary and emotional, such
critical praise blissfully ignores that in Breitz’s
need to valorise and shift emphasis to the
recognition of difference as the most plausible
counteractive force to the homogenisation of
South African identity by the ‘Rainbow Nation1
ideology, her work easily neglects the fact that,
under apartheid, white women fought against
African women. They failed to address the vast
chasm that still separates black women from
white women in South Africa, socially,
economically, and in access to educational
opportunities. These critics have either looked
askance, or peremptorily dismissed, the
objections of African women and the traumatic
experiences of violation which images such as
Breitz’s new series reenacts for them, and
which has been tendered for public display and
consumption in the plush living rooms of white
collectors. The principal responses either
infantilise the African objection, or simply
dismiss it as black hysteria. Perhaps one should
neglect, as not being of critical importance, the
comment of a black South African woman
friend, who told me at Breitz’s exhibition, how
ashamed she was of her body. After seeing it
depicted as it was she commented, rather
ruefully, “is this the way they still see us”. To
understand this comment, it is important to
note that white women metaphorically
sodomised and pornographicised black women
by using their bodies as functional objects of
labour, as domestic workers, as maids and
nannies and wet nurses.
However, in issuing this injunction against
Breitz’s questionable representation of black
women, one must not dismiss it merely by
casting it in the ethical mind swamp of colonial
mimicry. Nor simply damn it as another form
of racist stereotype masquerading as liberal
civilising mission. Bhabha provides a cogent
example of how one may think of work of this
nature. He writes that:
To judge the stereotyped image on the basis of a
prior normativity is to dismiss it, not to displace
it, which is only possible by engaging with its
effectivity, with the repertoire of positions of
power and resistance, domination and
dependence that constructs colonial identification
subject (both coloniser and colonized).15
My mind is called to attention here by an
anecdote from bell hooks which encapsulates
the sense of a narrative in which the black
subject remains vividly etched on the margin,
and is made secondary to white female desire.
In the sudden discovery of the reciprocal
relationship between the black domestic
worker and her white mistress and employer,
we are alerted to their common cause as equal
partners as fighters against the castigating
authority of the patriarchal ‘Rainbow Nation’.
Is it possible to read this situation as a glaring
lapse, or is this a strategic discourse of
whiteness that Breitz is constructing? Surely
one must allow that the subjectivity and desire
of white women is much attached and closer to
white patriarchy and its desubjectivisation of
both black men and women. Even in her
submissive position, the white woman still
does those colonial errands which denigrate
black men and women, partly as a member of
the tribe, partly to make the white fathers of the
Broederbond happy.
Let us hear hooks’ voice on the matter, so as
to enlarge the spectrum with two questions,
one by Freud and the other by Fanon, which
confront the two worlds out of which feminine
subjectivity projects in South Africa. Hooks
relates an account that appeared in the
newspaper USA Today which reads: “The
Jefferson County Commission voted not to
37
remove a courthouse mural of a white female
plantation owner, looming over black men
picking cotton”.16 She notes that the subject of
the mural relates to how white femininity
performs within white patriarchy to further
marginalise the black subject, in an act of
incestuous impulse, that she calls “Doing it for
Daddy”. Writes hooks in her critique of the
mural, “No doubt the white woman in this
mural is also doing it for daddy; performing an
act of domination [of the black body] that she
hopes will win his approval and love.”17
This act of doing it for daddy, which hooks
also refers to as the search by white women
within patriarchy “to find ultimate pleasure,
satisfaction, and fulfilment in the act of
performance and submission”,18 is one crucial
disjunctive element not at all accounted for in
Breitz’s work. Read in the shadow of this
discourse, Freud’s question, ‘What does wo-
man want?’, and Fanon’s archly patriarchal
counter, ‘What does the black man want?’
loom quite large. For in each instance of the
questions, it is the black woman that is
disavowed, lodged in the lowest register of
articulation. This aspect fascinates me, for the
intersection of Freud and Fanon’s questions
as a description of the black woman’s
utter otherness could be interpellated to
the kind of attention devoted to bisect-
ing, colouring, whiting, ghosting out,
morphing, collaging of the
black figure within the field ___
of representation. These acts
seem to have the com-mon
desire of enacting fantasies of
whiteness, in which the black
figure again returns for
mediation as an anathema, as a
hollow presence: seen and unseen.
Despite the sincerity of the artists who have so
far brazenly maintained a relationship in their
work with the black body, there is a certain
over-determination that accompanies their
gestures. They seem to neglect the fact that the
black form is as much a grotesque bearer of
traumatised experiences as it is the abject
vessel of race as a point of differentiation. More
than alerting us to how the stereotype fixes its
objects of desire in that freeze-frame of realism,
as prior knowledge, the work of these artists
exacerbates it by replaying the stereotype,
perhaps unconsciously, as if it had always been
factual. The problem with this kind of work is
that it is so fixed on the body, that it neglects to
account for the more crucial psychic split
which positions black and white bodies in
polarities of worth and value. By seeking to
merge them, albeit forcibly, and taking as
licence the fact of their
whiteness, they repeat
Candice Breitz, from the Rninbow Series, 1996
38
that act of surrogacy which emphasises the
subject’s muteness and silence, while embell-
ishing their own positions as the voices of
reality, as the vocal integers of truth.
While this attention, which grew out of the
need to sate white liberal conscience in a fragile
post-apartheid culture, persists, African artists
have conversely adopted a contrary attitude
towards the self-same body. There is very little
usage of that figure in their work. Instead we
encounter it as a suppressed presence, abstrac-
ted and exorbitantly coded with the semiotic
speech of détournement, a kind of shift of
emphasis from its representational ‘realness’ to
a metaphorical search for its lost form.
But in pointing out some of these problems,
are we not again fetishising identity as
something that wholly belongs to and can be
used only by a particular group? And am I not
again reiterating that postcolonial litany of the
wounded black subject, caught in the mesh of
white, European displacement, who must again
be either protected or spoken for? The fact that
I am an African does not in itself absolve me
from this quandary. Despite such dilemmas,
what will be the implication of remaining silent
on the matter? In proposing a re-examination of
certain facts lodged in the iconographical heart
of South Africa, in a delimited forum of
whiteness as a nation unto itself, ought we not
admit also that it is the reappropriation of
blackness by Africans as a nationalistic
Aubrey Elliot: Zulu Tribe – South Africa: Young unmarried Zulu girl
in front of a typical Zulu grass hut, wearing a traditional beadwork
grass skirt. The Zulu Tribe being the biggest tribe in South Africa.
Copyright: Hillex Iitho Candice Breitz, from the Rainbow Series, 1996
39
emblem, as a fantasy of the coherence of
African identity, that has set u p the apposi-
tional measures against the ‘Rainbow Nation?
But I remain sceptical of there being any
possible resolution to the problems raised by
these issues. I question the wisdom of enacting
any kind of representational corrective through
a recourse to ‘positive’ images of blackness. For
identity must never be turned into a copyright;
an antinomy in which ethnicity through group
reckoning stages its authenticities and retains
exclusive user rights of its images. To do so
would be to fetishise identity, to render it into a
totem, a token of mythology, an ideological
fantasy. Moreover, we would miss the vital
lessons which inform the complex motives of
usage and reasons why we resist such usage of
Candice Breitz, from the Whiteface Series, 1996,152.4 x 101.6cm
images. The predicament into which one is
thrown, then, is how to imagine identity in the
present tense of South Africa’s transitional
reshaping and reconstitution of its reality;
between authenticity and stereotype. For
everything seem so haunted by this paradoxical
affirmation of origin and a disavowal of past
histories. Within all that, what needs interro-
gation is usage of any fixed meaning of
blackness as an ideology of authenticity, or
whiteness as a surplus enjoyment of
superiority. Whatever the orientation,
whatever the signifying strategies of usage,
either to mask whiteness or to valorise falsely
an atrophied and immobile black identity, we
would do well to heed Aimé Césaire’s refusal to
fix blackness in any stable meaning. Césaire, in
his seminal epic Cahier d’un retour au pays natal
(Notebook of a Return to my Native Land),
wrote in one of the most moving lines of his
poem that:
my négritude is neither tower nor cathedral
it takes root in the red flesh of the soil
it takes root in the ardent flesh of the sky
What Césaire is articulating here, far from
being a fantasy of blackness, is an enunciatory
proposition of heterogeneity, in which he casts
aside all those fantasies which fetishise
blackness in such a way that it loses its human
dimension. My négritude is neither tower nor
cathedral. Black is, black ain ‘t: are there any more
succinct ways to begin the delimitation of those
fantasies which abjectionally mark the black
subject than to start with those two ideas of
unfixed blackness, burgeoning into the
expansive site of heterogeneity? I want to end
with this question, because the relationship of
the white or black artist to the black body is
indeed paradoxical. And the less anxiously
repeated the image, the better the opportunity
to find an ethical ground to use its index as a
form of discursive address, for radical revision,
as well as to unsettle the apparatus of power
which employs it as a structurally codified
narrative of dysfunction.
1 Claire Kahane, ‘Object Relations Theory’, in Feminism
and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, Basil
Blackwell, Oxford, 1992, p 284; quoted by David Sibley
in Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the
West, Routledge, London and New York, 1996, p 5.
2 Olu Oguibe, ‘Art, Identity, Boundaries’, Nka: Journal of
Contemporary African Art, Fall/Winter 1995, p 26.
40
3 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection,
trans. Leon S Roudiez, Columbia University Press,
New York, 1982, p 4.
4 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans.
Constance Farrington, Grove Press, New York, 1963, p
39.
5 Rob Nixon, ‘Of Balkans and Bantustans’, Transition, No
60, Oxford University Press, 1993, p 25.
6 While on the surface the challenges to the ‘Rainbow
Nation’ as a unitary polity might seem like a defence of
pluralism, difference and heterogeneity, in reality they
seem to recast a neo-conservative stance which echoes
the divisive Bantustan policy of separate development
of the apartheid regime. For what the critics fear and
have failed to admit, at least explicitly, are the
prospects of whiteness in an overwhelmingly ‘black’
South African country. Hence, the maintenance of
ethnic, racial and linguistic faultlines seem the best
check against an encroaching Africanisation of South
Africa. In fact, the extreme right wing have ceased on
such arguments and fears of Africanisation to demand
an outright white Bantustan (homeland) for
Afrikaners, and the Inkatha Freedom Party has
adopted the neo-biologism of Zulu ethnicity to make
an appeal for what its leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi
has dubbed the ‘Yugoslav option’ for KwaZulu. See, in
addition, Rob Nixon’s brilliant essay (ibid) for a more
in depth study of these contestations.
7 This issue was echoes by Mahmood Mamdani, the
Tanzania-born chairperson of the Department of
African Studies at the University of Cape Town. In the
discussions that surrounded the conference, Mamdani
had asked whether the desire to form an organisation
to promote Afrikaans was not an attempt “by the
privileged but displaced section to recruit foot soldiers
from its less fortunate cultural cousin to strengthen a
bid to retain some privileges and regain others?”
Neville Alexander, one of the speakers at the
conference, also placed himself at a distance from the
nationalistic intonation which aspects of the conference
carried by insisting that “if people want to form this
kind of movement to protect a specific language, they
must accept the consequences”. But the entire debate,
as it relates to the concept of the multicultural universe
of equal access of all cultures of the ‘Rainbow Nation’,
was phrased most effectively by Antjie Krof who
stated “that if this meant standing shoulder to shoulder
with Afrikaners whose motives were anti-government,
anti-ANC, anti-truth commission and anti-nation
building, then she would have none of it”. All quotes
taken from ‘Afrikaans takes a wary step into the
future’, an article by Chris Barron, in the Sunday Times,
December 8, 1996, p 8.
8 Homi Bhabha, Location of Culture, Routledge, New
York and London, 1994, p 66.
9 Santu Mofokeng, ‘Black Photo Album/Look at Me:
1890-1900s’, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art,
Spring 1996, p 54.
10 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth
Century Ethnography, Literature and Art, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, 1988, p 50.
11 Allan Sekula, The Body and the Archive’, in The
Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, (ed)
Richard Bolton, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1989, p
347.
12 bell hooks, ‘The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female
Spectators’, in Black American Cinema, (ed) Manthia
Diawara, Routledge, London and New York, 1993, pp
288-289.
13 Manthia Diawara, ‘Black Spectatorship: Problems of
Identification and Resistance’, in ibid, p 213.
14 Fanon, op cit.
15 Bhabha, op cit.
16 bell hooks, ‘Doing it for Daddy’, in Constructing
Masculinity, (eds) Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis and
Simon Watson, Routledge, New York, 1996, p 99.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.