In this moment it appears increasingly clear that the growing levels of inequality and the tensions in national politics in the South African context are igniting a new era of post-Apartheid voices.  These are the rising voices of a youth who are increasingly distrustful of “rainbow nation” doctrines and talk of neo-liberal racial democracy. In what has quickly become a historic wave of student-driven protests at the University of Cape Town, an unprecedented level of widespread debate, conversation, and tactical demonstrations have taken hold of the atmosphere and imagination of countless participants across the country and now across the globe.

The protests focussed around the calls for the removal of a statue of the imperialist megalomaniac and renowned “philanthropist”, one Cecil John Rhodes. Rhodes was an avid businessman whose accumulated wealth stemmed largely from mining in Southern Africa, and he was also the colonial driver instigating the creation of the Rhodesian territory. The protest actions, since their inception, have demanded the removal of the statue along with firm commitments to address worker rights, curriculum and several other issues that have been laid out in full in a petition presented by students, workers, and staff.

The real catalyst for the international attention was born from a controversial demonstration, in the second week of March 2015, beneath the figure of Cecil John Rhodes perched on his throne, gazing dreamily at the still vastly unequal city from his timeless ivory tower, the University of Cape Town. The demonstration, calling for the statue’s removal, reached its climax when one protester, Chumani Maxwele, threw a bucket of faecal matter over the statue.

This spurred action and attracted a great deal of attention in both online and offline spaces.  The responses varied from damning condemnations to overwhelming support and mass mobilisation resulting in marches, petitions, open letters and hundreds of opinion pieces in national popular media outlets in particular.

On Friday the 20^th of March, a procession under the banner of the slogan “Rhodes Must Fall” was led from the main campus down to the University administration building, Bremner, were the Vice Chancellor’s office is located. Midway through the address the student driven contingent occupied the administration building and took up residence in a historic room named the Archie Mafeje room. In 1968 this room was occupied by hundreds of students at the university protesting an intervention from the then South African government that sought to rescind Mafeje’s appointment to the African Studies department, as a senior lecturer. Archie Mafeje, hailing from Ncobo in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, had studied and taught at the University of Cape Town while engaging in political activism and providing insight into fighting for the plight of Africa and its people. He went on to teach and work at the University of Dar Es Salaam before moving to work in The Hague, before finally returning to South Africa to continue his work developing social science research in the South African context.

Bremner building was quickly renamed by the student driven mass movement to “Azania House” invoking the spirit and legacies of the Black consciousness movements in South Africa in the 1970s. Azania house has become the center of operations for the social movement who have declared their unwillingness to move until the demands, particularly the removal of the statue, are met.

On the evening of Tuesday the 24^th of March in an address delivered by a cohort of black academics from the University of Cape Town, testimonials were given describing the difficulties around being a black staff member within the institution, and practical suggestions and dreams for “transformed” university spaces were shared in the lively, packed room, intermittently infused with protest songs and dances that served to raise spirits and refocus strength in the wake of the heaviness of the topic at hand.

Consistently over the days that followed, the collective occupying Azania House orchestrated protests and performance art demonstrations across the campus, interrogating the legacy of colonialism and how it is memorialised on campus. In a particularly powerful piece popularly titled Saartjie Baartman, a collective of artists left from Azania House and walked through the campus in chains, black paint and diapers, moving towards a sculpture on Baartman located in the University library.

SaartjieBaartman // Man walking with Chains. Photo credit: UCT Rhodes Must Fall

As the media attention, both national and international, continued to lock its gaze on the unrelenting “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign, the broader debates in and around the movement continued to drive for changes beyond the physical fall of the statue. Azania House, in the evenings that followed March 24^th, has been home to guest lecturers presenting on various issues and the Archie Mafeje room in particular continues to be a space generating intellectual debate, art in various forms, and conversations regarding alternative educational pedagogies in ways that have been rarely seen on the University campus.

These lectures and dialogues have provoked a conversation regarding changes in the curriculum of key interest areas within the University that have consistently marginalised Afro-centric views, thoughts and teachings. This was particularly discussed in the Politics, Psychology, English literature, Philosophy and History departments, respectively.  Much debate surrounded revisiting the disagreements within the university that led to the departure of Professor Mahmood Mamdani in 1999, former AC Jordan chair of African Studies at the University of Cape Town and a world-renowned post colonial scholar. Dialogue on the conditions surrounding Mamdani’s departure, approached in his paper “Teaching African in Post-Apartheid South Africa”, has provided a useful, tangible foundation from which this movement can begin to address specific curriculum deficiencies, particularly emphasising on how issues centered around the African continent are dealt with.

Another noteworthy trend stemming from the debates and conversations facilitated at the University has been the leadership shown by black women, and in many cases, black queer women. Several declarations and efforts have been made to ensure that the spaces and actions remain intersectional and develop through that lens going forward, which at present is no easy feat as issues continuously battle for priority.

International solidarity from other Universities outside of South Africa continues to flurry in, notably kicked off with protest action at from a radical collective located in Oxford University calling for the fall of Rhodes and for the “Decolonisation” of education.  The Black Student Union of the University of Berkley, California, issued a statement in solidarity and several other student groups in Universities in the region continue offer solidarity as the movement continues to pick up steam.

Oxford Student Protest. Photo credit: Ntokozo Qwabe 

De NieuweUniversiteit – vooreendemocratischeuniversiteit
Solidarity to the students of UCT. Photo credit: De NieuweUniversiteit – vooreendemocratischeuniversiteit

Within South Africa, universities across the country have responded to the chants echoing from the University of Cape Town. Protest action in Rhodes University, located in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, has reinvigorated conversations around the existing institutional culture in these universities and drawn connections to the symbolic, continued, existence of names, statues and sculptures left over from the colonial and Apartheid eras of South Africa. Debate has ensued about how these artifacts and names reflect the continued exclusion of different epistemologies of thought, different races, classes and gender based oppressions.

Notably, in Durban, at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, a statue of King George V has been defaced with paint as the ripples of anti-colonial rage continued to make waves on the East coast of South Africa. This campus, as with many university spaces in South Africa, is no stranger to protest, and this recent wave of student action locates itself within a broader conversation across the nation that seeks to apply pressure on the political imagination of the present day.

King George V vandalised, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. Photo credit: Ntokozo Qwabe

Protest action, demonstrations and various other forms of activism continue to take place to varying degrees at many of the other universities across the country. Within the context of South African universities, an unbroken line of organized protest from the days of Apartheid has continued to characterise this landscape as groups of students and workers alike fight for improved worker rights, more inclusive University spaces, and progressive admissions policies tailored to meet the appetite for redress.  Concerns addressed include the limited financial backing and the lack of academic support measures for students, particularly students previously disadvantaged by the effects of the Apartheid system, and identification in part by using race as a proxy for disadvantage. These issues of debate, among many, remain firmly present in the mind, hearts and motivations driving many who now march under the banner of “Rhodes Must Fall.”

The removal of the statue, while largely symbolic, has been an appropriate rallying cry by which to tangibly address the practical implications of so called “transformation”, redress and the re-imagination of what the role and function of an African University should be.  The success of the removal of the statue will illustrate an important step in the ability for social movements under this banner to physically effect change in their environment. This process of physical change in the university space will begin to provide concrete, tactile shape to the intangible changes and transformations in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Indeed, several civil society organisations, notably the Marikana Support Group, and Equal Education have issued statements of support with the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign, citing the need for critical introspection and declaring their rejection of the oppression and exfoliation that the legacy of Rhodes in many ways embodies.

In the broader political climate of South Africa, leading up to the elections in early 2014 the country witnessed the rise of a new player in the political landscape, the Economic Freedom Fighters. The party locates itself as a radical, militant economic emancipatory movement whose political discourse lies squarely on the “left”.  Their introduction has come at a time when the legacy of the “rainbow nation” project has begun to wane as the country grows increasingly vocal in its desire to improve basic services, infrastructure, and social mobility and reduce corruption and exploitation. The party, while controversial in its tactics and engagements, has injected energy into public discourse and popularised a language against inequality that has undoubtedly affected how many young South Africans are framing the understanding of our concerning levels of inequality.

The series of protests, demonstrations and conversations that have been re-invoked with vigour allowing a revitalization of post-colonial thought and discourse into the popular public domain across South Africa, and more broadly across many countries at this moment, illustrate the fading dreams of miraculous peaceful transitions from colonies to independent states. Only time will tell whether this wave will give way to fatigue or grow and change into broader movements, and whether institutions and organisations will take these conversation to different levels of engagement. If we can be certain of one thing it is this: a change is going to come.

The post “Rhodes Must Fall” – Decolonisation Symbolism – What is happening at UCT, South Africa? appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

The well-known artist’s warmth, kindness, and humility caught me by surprise. I was younger by nearly six decades, but he patiently listened all the same as I introduced myself, and briefly explain that I was in South Africa to work in the arts. A glimmer of a smile appeared on the face of the elder artist as he offered some words about the art scene in his Cape Town. When he finished, he nodded and turned toward a waiting friend. He then paused and turned back, saying: “Here, take my card and we’ll talk some other time. I’d like you to come visit and see my artwork.” Turning the card over in my hands. For a moment my young self was surprised to find only a street address and telephone number; my reflex was to look for an email address to which I could write. When I looked up again, Clarke’s spry frame was heading into the theatre. We just met, and Clarke’s warmth went beyond a simple welcome as he invited me to share his vision of South Africa.

Before continuing, I should note the stimulus for my meditations here is Clarke’s passing in April of 2014. Born in 1929 in Simon’s Town, The Group Areas Act moved him to Ocean View in 1973, and he lived and worked there until his passing. Clarke is best known for his paintings and prints of the daily life of Cape communities, but for decades he also quietly produced collages, handcrafted concertina books and poetry.

Clarke’s biography is astounding. The artist was relocated in the forced removals from Simon’s Town to Ocean View. He began his artistic career as part of community arts programs, and his sense of community and he maintained his commitment to public arts programs and social engagement, for many decades. Whereas most other now well-known artists of colour fled South African oppression, Clarke remained in the country. For instance, Gerard Sekoto thrived in France while Clarke survived in Cape Town. Clarke has engaged notions of ‘space’ for many years. The artist’s commitment to live and produce from his home base is a decision that is both personal and political.[1] It was from South Africa that Clarke developed and nurtured global community. These networks are both physical and conceptual, and the artistic engagement motivated active dialogue with artists internationally, among artists of colour in particular.

Since Clarke’s transition, several thoughtful eulogies have appeared. Emile Maurice marks the artist’s status as ‘elder statesman’ while Mario Pissaro is more direct in his description: “Peter Clarke was, indeed is, a giant.”[2]These authors (and others) offer broadly panoramic surveys of the different modalities in Clarke’s life and artwork, and Pissaro is especially attentive to the criteria and modes of interpretation that are employed to historicize Clarke’s activities. Indeed, it is difficult to overstate Clarke’s impact on histories of South African visual art.

Clarke’s work has appeared in several major exhibitions that solidify the artist’s relevance on both popular and critical levels. Clarke had been exhibiting work since the 1950s, and in 2011, Patricia Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin produced a major retrospective exhibition and book on Clarke’s work. The venue of the South African National Gallery and its production by Standard Bank Johannesburg makes the project a definitive comment on Clarke’s oeuvre. In 2013, Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town held an exhibition and produced a catalogue of Clarke’s work, and in the same year Riason Naidoo and Tessa Jackson curated the first major exhibition of Clarke’s artwork in the United Kingdom at INIVA.[3]

In this brief reflection I shall be adopting a less panoramic viewpoint, and setting aside some important insights relayed by others, for example, Clarke’s mood that day in 1956 when he decided to be a full-time artist, or the specific ways in which the German Expressionist art movement influenced the artist’s style. Instead, I shall be focusing upon more theoretical issues in Clarke’s history and reception.

I would like to introduce Clarke’s unique position as an artist, including his impact on the development of critical discourse over decades. The artist’s long life afforded him reciprocal vantage points, shaping a historically informed awareness of the present day. Within the scope of this brief essay, I can do little more than gesture at the wider context that I believe to be necessary in formulating Clarke’s impact. I should say my tactic is to give some weight to what this impact might mean as a demonstration of visual culture in South Africa, of looking and being looked at, of spectacle and spectatorship, and the staging of the quotidian. I also make no apology for discussing the essential drama of black life, and what any of this has to do with the quintessential modernity of Clarke’s practice. I hope this viewpoint will provide an alternative way of framing the biographical picture that others have, quite rightly in my view, judged to be important.

Peter Clarke

My attempt to reflect on the vibrantly beautiful pictures of Clarke’s oeuvre immediately refracts in the glare of South African historical fact. The advent of Apartheid in 1948 merely ‘hardened’ a model for white minority rule in Africa that derived from nineteenth century British colonial policies—including the removal of African families from their farms; segregating spaces in cities; restrictions on mobility, sexual freedom, and economic rights of non-white South Africans, including the Pass Laws Act of 1952, which formalized the mandatory reference book identity document.[4] The catalogue for Clarke’s 2013 exhibition “Just Paper and Glue” points to this history; the second page pictures Clarke’s identity document issued in 1989, complete with photograph and biographical details. As a collage element, the inclusion of this fragment points to the legacy of the legal, psychological and social effects of the colonial era. What is more, it underscores the longstanding impact of these effects on daily life and interactions between people, going so far as to shape the space of imagination.

Space is materially and conceptually paramount in Clarke’s artwork, and the artist addresses the concept through a variety of media. Early pictures included views of his surroundings in Simon’s Town and the ocean shoreline. Clarke’s catalogue of landscape paintings provides literal examples of the artist’s concern with space. Clarke notes: “One idea, one project I’d like to see take shape is: I’ve always been interested in space, you know, space, space, space, and also in what happens in space, a space like this…”[5] The consistent genius in Clarke’s “space of imagination” may be its ability to depict and metaphorize at once. Gavin Younge picks this up with an incisive observation about Clarke’s “Haunted Landscape” (1976), describing it as a picture that represents a ‘landscape of the mind.’[6]

In an artwork made in gouache and collage titled “Afrika which way” (1978), the landscape view is interrupted and blocked by a white wall covered in graffiti. The space is divided in thirds, against dark grey clouds, in the upper left and right, a blue sky at dusk mingles with magentas, purples and blues. Hovering in the upper right of the scene, above the dividing wall, a setting vermillion circle is collaged over the clouds and placed above the wall. This picture is overtly political—the graffiti references Africa’s liberation leaders including Amílcar Cabral, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta and Julius Nyerere – and attacks the Cold War that was tearing southern Africa apart. Clarke comments:

Among the various laws that were put into place by the apartheid government was the Group Areas Act, whereby they would remove black people out of town in order to create separation between one group and another. So that people in Simon’s Town, people who had been there for a very very long time, people who’s parents had been born there, grandparents and so on and so on, they were given this order that they would have to move out, and they were in fact moved out of town… And so I became interested in this thing about graffiti, protest, space.[7]

A black dog trots along the fence as if to exit the scene, and in the vibrant, warm hued foreground, a young black man holds a birdcage from which two white doves fly. In this landscape, text and collage are in the mid-ground—at the center—of the image.

The iconography of these details matter to the (un-isolatable) formal properties of Clarke’s artwork, yet here my move is to establish some procedures to trace a relationship between Clarke’s longstanding admixtures of picture and text, visual practice and community outreach, and a courtship with conventional visual forms of European modernism as it consistently appears with local and necessarily black African (and Diasporic!) subject matter. This brief essay will only preview the wider context necessary in formulating such an issue. Here I give some weight to specific, if diverse points, but place the main emphasis on understanding the overall logic that links Clarke’s oeuvre to vital moments, concepts, meanings, and historical legacies.

From the fifteenth century the region posed an environmental conundrum to Europeans. From the early, dismissive assessments of the Portuguese to the Dutch colonizers of the region from 1652 to 1799, to the British controllers from the nineteenth century, the form and concept of the landscape was a problematic inheritance, as much so as the indigenous populations found therein. The Cape came to be populated by a mixture of indigenous inhabitants and colonists that spoke European languages but—because of unique cultural exchanges and makeshift colonial lifestyles—refused to act out the modes of life expected of them as ‘Europeans’. After 1880, the region was propelled into industrialization and by the geopolitics of imperialism transformed into an autonomous, modern society.

Closely related to the geopolitics of industrialization was the emergence of aesthetics, an attempt to develop a consequential science of appearances and imagination. The practice mediated the emergence of the modern representation, and initiated a shift in art away from the poetic tradition of classical mimesis toward “abstraction” and “non-representation.”[8] This is the bare minimum we need to note that to think about ‘landscape’ and ‘environment’ is to be concerned with describing “something there,” which is one among many questions of representation, the same methods that mediate the construction of imagined communities, nations, and personal identities. Geographic territory defines national identity through two distinct ways of understanding: internally, how the national community is imaginatively linked to the land; and externally, how the community is delimited in relation or in contrast to other groups in proximity.[9] Put another way, there is a direct link between space, land, territory, community and identity.

During the twentieth century, the preoccupation with finding some kind of psychic accommodation with the land became a defining feature of white South African nationhood. Apartheid’s ‘hardened’ model for white minority rule in Africa extended nineteenth century British colonial policies that included the removal of African families from their farms; segregating spaces in cities; restrictions on mobility, sexual freedom, and economic rights of non-white South Africans—black people—of various skin colours. Fred Moten insists the history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist such debilitating restraints on the imagination, and Clarke’s visions provide specific examples.[10] Clarke’s artwork offers ways of seeing how race and power have been legitimized and naturalized by everyday practices and experiences. Here, the basic point is that ideas about space and place are embedded in and produced by modern and transnational networks of knowledge and discourse, and Clarke’s wisdom allows us to see this movement.

In returning to “Afrika Which Way,” herein is a demonstration of visualizing landscape to invoke space, but also to use of text and collage as forms that execute disruptions of the established order. Clarke states this plainly:

I’m interested in recycling of materials, trash, leftovers, etcetera. I like to think in terms of the world being cleaned up and so I am doing my little bit for the process by making use of stuff that should be dumped, or is dumped and then retrieved, and so on. So I’ve made lots of use of collage… so its making use of waste materials in other words… what else?[11]

Collage in the usual meaning involves the pasting on of scraps that originated beyond the studio, in the store or on the street. The French noun coller means literally to glue or to stick. Collage method impacted the formation and elaboration of the art historical style known as Cubism. There was composite imagery before the twentieth century, but the appearance of collage in European modern art was substantially new.[12] Collage is linked to notions of indecency, paradox and perplexity—as “impurity by any other name,” and this technique of pasted paper had a special and profound part to play in the expression of the Modern sensibility in Europe and beyond—a sensibility tuned to matter and “capital” in the modern city.

Returning to historical fact: early papiers collés heralded in the Spanish artist Picasso’s involvement with “African art.” Picasso’s surrealist and cubist works are described as representations of representation. They are, like language, structured by means of arbitrary signs ‘circulating’ within a system of opposites. In collage, even when the imported object is still whole (a newspaper clipping, for instance), it has to join another surface where it does not strictly belong. Things happen in this transfer. A new relationship is enacted between the ‘low’ culture of newspapers and magazines, and the ‘high’ culture of professional art. This relationship is ‘inappropriate’. The collage method, then, delivers visual and conceptual encounter. Indeed, something happened in the explosive encounter between the European artist and the Trocadéro museum in Paris where non-Western artifacts were displayed and stored.

The collage method pulls the viewer in different temporal, conceptual and material directions when looking at the picture. This matters to Clarke’s artworks because this perspicacious feature articulates a vibrant modernity—of the discarded, unwanted, or overlooked as much as that which is kept, cherished or convenient. Collage in the fine arts allows viewers to see that it is somewhere in the gulf between the bright optimism of the official world and its degraded material residue, that many of the exemplary, central experiences of modernity exist. The fissures that open from a foreclosed universality, a refusal of humanity, a heroic but bounded expression, is black creative production.

Clarke’s use of collage and text begin to extract a new horizon of possibilities from within the moral and epistemic contours of a “postcolonial” present. Clarke inserted himself into the evolving discourse of modern African art during the 1960s.[13] Whereas Picasso used collage to escape narrative imagery, Clarke fills his scenes with text and signifying marks, situating them in space.[14]  Such a process that orients and situates our selves in space while coming to know the surrounding environment seems indispensible to the recognition of the self as a self.

Modernity’s fragments, some suggest, are its history, its residue, what is left over when consumption has ended for the day, when trading and exchange have ceased and the people have gone home. The production of blackness is a feature of the extended movement of modernity’s specific upheaval. It is a strain that pressures the assumption that personhood (personal biography) is the equivalent of subjectivity.[15] Put another way: since the colonial era, black South Africans have been portrayed as commodities who spoke—as laborers who were commodities before, as it were, and the abstraction of labor power from their bodies continues to pass this material heritage on, across conceptual divides that separate slavery and “freedom” in time and space.[16] These ideas may be placed in metaphorical relation to an artwork Clarke describes:

I have a feeling that in a space like this, If there is an air current coming in from that window or another source, and then another, and there is a current coming in from somewhere else, like over there, what we can’t see is what is happening with these particular streams of air. I have a feeling that if colour could be introduced into these streams, different colours, it would be visible, we would be able to see what was happening in these different streams, we would be able to see movement.[17]

Clarke’s work offers an opportunity to see movement in our aesthetic-political present. On the one hand, it asks what is demanded of a practice of postcolonial, postapartheid creativity. On the other, it asks what postcolonial creativity’s demand on this present ought to be.

Assuming, as I do, that the answers to these queries are not transparently self-evident and not adequately covered by the dominant vocabularies of the art historical, cultural and political realms we currently inhabit, Clarke’s artworks are one way of beginning to formulate responses to such questions.[18] Clarke’s oeuvre prompts us to see movement, to ask how, and with what conceptual resources, do we begin to extract a new yield, a new horizon of possibilities, from within the moral and epistemic contours of our present moment, and beyond.

The post Peter Clarke: Meditations on Space, Place and Movement appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

*****

“To my compatriots, I have no hesitation in saying that each one of us is as intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country as are the famous jacaranda trees of Pretoria and the mimosa trees of the bushveld… a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world” (Nelson Mandela, 1994).

Vistas is a visual project about landscape featuring paintings by Raél Jero Salley and photographs by Jared Thorne.

The artwork focuses on land, farm, territory and ways of seeing in contemporary South Africa. Vistas is interested in land’s relationship to culture, and the exhibition appears with the legacy of the Native’s Land Act of 1913 in mind.

Salley’s paintings approach landscape from different directions. ‘To landscape’ is an active process of making space into place. It involves intersections between historical, aesthetic and concrete forms.

Thorne’s photographs question the ways in which the contrasting demographics of the neighboring Western Cape suburbs Kraafontein and Brackenfell depict the new South Africa.

In articulating a post apartheid vision of the South African landscape, the exhibition challenges romanticized visions of the ‘Rainbow Nation’, and seeks to provoke questions how such visions and views have expanded or collapsed.

By juxtaposing paintings and photographs, Vistas highlights practices of visual representation while looking toward the boundaries, horizons and possibilities of contemporary landscape.

The post Vistas: A Visual Project by Raél Jero Salley & Photographs by Jared Thorne appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Writing in 1961, on the eve of both Algeria’s independence and his death, what will become his seminal work, Les damnés de la terre, Frantz Fanon characterizes the colonial world as two zones or compartments opposed to each other in their very nature. He describes that the one zone, is “strongly built…all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly-lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt”. He continues in the same temperament with the added bonus of naming the inhabitants: “The settler’s town is a well-fed town, an easy-going town; its belly is always full of good things. The settlers town is a town of white people, of foreigners.” While on the side zone; that of the negro or native “is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there…they die there; it matters little not where, nor how. It is…without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other…the native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of light…a crouching village…of niggers and dirty arabs.”

Consistent with Fanon, French-Algerian existentialist, Albert Camus writes in 1953: “Poverty increases insofar as freedom retreats throughout the world and vice versa…The oppressed want to be liberated not only from their hunger but also from their masters.” Fanon’s sheer description of the geopolitical disparities – one of affluent existence and another of desolation, outlines not only colonial structural differences as such, but how the very orchestrations, determine experiential and existential realities. Fanon also notes that these cartographic domiciles produce inequalities, differing subjectivities and are self-cancelatory. The settler looks, from the hills of his well-lit town, with scorn and pomposity at the degenerate plight of the colonized native. The state of the desecrated existence of the colonized gives and sustains the colonizer’s humanity. Which is to say the symbolic weight of the colonizing being is constructed by and through the defilement of the colonized subject. The very well being of the master is the causal connection to both lack of freedom and the hunger that characterizes the colonized subject.

So there is something intrinsically relational between place and being. The common dictum that we are made by our dwellings becomes relatively plausible. The colonial machine produces subjects according to spaces. The designated colonial spatial positions, literary or figuratively, are built with their inhabitants in mind. Frank Wilderson III bolsters this point when he says: “Here the Absence of cartographic Presence resonates in the libidinal economy in the way Black “homeland” (in this case, the Ciskei) replicates the constituent deficiencies of Black “body” or “subject.” The Black “homeland” is a fated place where fated Black bodies are domiciled. It is the nowhere of no one. But it is more—or less—for “homeland” cartography suffers from a double inscription. The “homeland” is an Absence of national Presence drawn on the Absence of continental Presence; a Black “nation” on a Black “continent”; nowhere to the power of two.”

French philosopher Alain Badiou explains that when Marx argues that the proletariat has no being; he means it has no political presence. In the world Fanon diagnosed to have been characterized by “compartments” the logic is the same: “you are rich because are white, and you are white because you are rich.” This differential becomes the ‘dividing line’ as Seyki Otu would call it that separates between political and apolitical subjects. The color of one’s body determines the space and experience one aught to have – one’s access to life itself. This unrepresentability of others doesn’t mean, as Badiou also argues, that these others don’t exist – they do, however paradoxical their form of existence might be. This form of appearance, with all its formal presence as living bodies, “if we consider the world’s rules of appearance, the proletariat does not exist.” If the political subject aught to live in a place of decent living, spacious, secured and brightly lit streets, as a la settlers’ place, the apolitical subject, deserves can be found in nightmarish zones of depressive poverty, unsanitary streets and squalor like townships, shacks and favelas. Thus in this case the relation between place and people, land and native, colony and colonized or ghetto and blacks, is tautological. That is when one sees a black person automatically one sees a tableau vivant of township life.

Wasn’t this the intended mission of the 1913 native land act, to reduce blacks to nonexistent entities by dispossessing them off their land, labour and being? Today we live through the cracks of a legacy of colonial dispossessions. Even though there are no instruction boards designating separate amenities and laws that insist on the humiliation of the blacks, the lingering face of suffering remains unabashedly racialised. Thus the places in which blacks stay in the post 1994 situation remain to bare the already anciently prescribed “zone of nonbeing.” Though there are relative changes in the successive generations of black dwellings, from homeland to city, and the various types of settlements in city life, what has changed is neither the racialised colonial settlement nor its still degrading conditions. However, what has changed is the proximity of these spaces, getting closer and closer to places of employment – white spaces. More than the convenience for the working population to be closer to work, these proximities instead of showing an imaginative rupture from colonialism, force us to still re-read Fanon’s wager. This is because the “line” Fanon spoke about becomes over-emphasized and the two realities, wedged. Or rather the so-called inclusion of the black subject into the democratic plane, shows its fallacious mendacity. The black rather becomes in this arrangement included as excluded. Its inclusion doesn’t rupture with the structural exclusion of the colonial enterprise, but seeks to blur it or render it obsolete and natural.

There are many such spaces where the opulent towns stare in their cold gazes the “yelping noise” of black poverty. This pattern can be argued to repeat itself in the standard official ideological move of ‘reconciliation without justice’ between the oppressed and oppressor. Whereas before bodies were separated not only from entering the same spaces and entrances, but also were barred from meeting physically. In the age of multiracial South Africa the exteriorities of legal sectarianism has vanished but the core problematic which reproduces racially structured inequalities has remained intact. This game of corporeal meeting was at the heart of the 2010 soccer world cup state propaganda. The juxtapositioning of apartheid separation and post 1994 ‘rainbowness’ were used as psychological strategies to create a false consciousness of an imaginary leap into a different moment. That is, it cemented the assumptive idea that a rupture with our colonial past was made. This revelation is merely a superficial gesture of concealment of the rapacious structurally necessary inequalities.

Curators like Okwui Enwezor in the early years after 1994 were quick to pronounce how art could show the lingering binaries – of excluded/included, black/white etc., however one aught to ask whether art actually did this? Or whether the art world was any separate from this ‘compartmentalized’ world? Sport and other cultural activities were and still are hopefully propagated as conduits that will close the dichotomy while the very dichotomizing machine persists in its usual project. The antinomies of post apartheid South Africa still need us to raise the old uncomfortable questions of ‘the system’, the settlers/natives, the land, exploitation, white supremacy and so forth. It is burdensome to talk of freedom while bondage is still the burning reality amongst the oppressed. It remains problematic to talk of the rainbow nation or the biblical phrase of ‘love thy neighbor’ if the architectures of adjacent neighborhood is overdetermined by the persistence of undying legacy of inequality and systemic differentiality. In fact the recent explosions and mass protests, including the scandalous pota pota (shit spilling) riots in Cape Town CBD are indicative of the persevering nature of anti-black racism as a structuring logic. They become not only clues of an either vanishing or nonexistent liberated country, but also rather the safe existence of colonial legacy as a spectral force in a different form. They urge us to ask questions about dignity and security. They ask us to mark some distance from the misleading romanticization of the ghetto and glory that comes with suffering. Most importantly they must encourage us to say “no!” Or as Fanon would say: “There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born.”

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Our nation’s mourning after his passing impacted the South African psyche in strange and unexpected ways. On the one hand the nation knew that Mandela’s death was imminent; on the other, when word was received of his passing, there was a tangible sense of loss. We as a people found a gap of unimaginable size in our consciousness, one that would probably never again be filled in our lifetime. Particularly for South Africans, Nelson Mandela represented the fiction that comprised the core foundation of our modern nation state. Who are we without our symbol of justice, dignity, equality, freedom, humanity?

Mourning Mandela has again united South Africans as they pay tribute to the father of our modern nation. However, unlike gatherings of a similar magnitude that occurred during the earlier years of democracy, Mandela’s passing coincides with the country ushering in almost 20 years of democratic rule. Gatherings during the Mandela era heralded signs of hope and a vision of creating a society built on the foundation of dignity. Yet, democracy has not brought with it the accompanying elements of justice and equality, as South Africa has quickly become the most unequal country in the world. We have become accustomed to the regular spurts of protest action, which appear to have increased with escalating violence over recent years. While these past days have been largely celebratory, there also seems to be a looming feeling in the air that this may well be the last occasion that South Africans unite in common humanity.

“Madiba magic” has allowed South Africans the privilege to overlook our inadequacies. Each faction of society can genuinely identify with some aspect of the man Mandela was. The visionary leadership and wisdom of the African National Congress (ANC) liberation movement, which cautiously strategised South Africa’s revolution, housed a leadership that listened to the heartbeat of the country’s oppressed people and was able to unite them in spite of the barriers that apartheid attempted to impose on them. This leadership responded quickly and effectively to the needs of its people. It pushed ideological boundaries and resorted to force where necessary, yet remained firm in its ideals. Most importantly, the ANC instilled in its members and followers the identity of global citizenship and an understanding that the struggle against apartheid was in solidarity with all of the world’s oppressed people. Through literature, music and art, dignity was reclaimed despite the apartheid regime’s every attempt to rip it away. The message transcended the distance that eventually separated the movement from its leadership.

Nelson Mandela was indeed a complex man. He was a patriarchal Xhosa chief, yet an ardent advocate for gender equality; a traditional family man who supported gay rights; and a commander in chief that understood the need for armed resistance in the quest for peace and justice. He was a rare example of the essence of human rights activism, a man who had the ability to separate the personal from the political in the fight for a unified and democratic South Africa.

However, as a young South African who grew up amid the country’s liberation movement, I am both saddened and angered that the complexities of Mandela as a fellow human being who was diverse in his identity, have been largely overlooked in order to appease a political agenda. The image of the awe-inspiring, all forgiving grandfather has also absolved those who previously benefitted from apartheid and continue to do so, as well as the elite few who gained substantially from the transition to democracy and who have avoided interrogating the depths of their privilege. The promise of wealth redistribution articulated in the Freedom Charter for which millions of South Africans sacrificed their lives has thus been halted in preference of maintaining power by all means possible. Part of Mandela’s purpose in forgiving his oppressors was to free them from the burden of guilt imposed by a system that effectively denied white people their dignity too. And yet, many have interpreted this act to mean that apartheid no longer bears any relevance to the development of modern day South Africa.

History has a tendency of being whitewashed as holders of authority pursue the maintenance of power. As the face of the ANC, both locally and abroad, the image of Nelson Mandela was always carefully crafted by the party leadership in order to achieve the specific objectives of the time. His identity became inseparable from that of the movement and from his vision for South Africa and the world – a remarkably selfless act that has escalated a mortal human being to super human status. It is the nature of this sacrifice that resonates deeply with me as an individual who is now able to forge my destiny on my own terms. Thanks to the sacrifices of others, I am completely in control of and responsible for the choices I make as I embark on my own journey towards my life’s purpose.

South Africa now moves into the post-Mandela phase. It presents an opportunity for the country to set its own path inspired by the teachings of Mandela, but without the accompanying pressure of having to live up to the world’s expectations. The structural fissures that have emerged and somewhat deepened as a legacy of apartheid now need to be unapologetically addressed. Mandela’s message of forgiveness cannot be mistaken as forgetting all of the horrors of the country’s past. Ironically, the pride that comes with being a product of the Mandela generation has also resulted in many South Africans assuming a position of arrogance, as Mandela’s legacy is manipulated to maintain the status quo. A rising prevalence of South African exceptionalism with regards to the rest of the African continent, in addition to entrenching the positions of an elite minority at the expense of the country’s millions who remain oppressed in poverty, are cause for concern.

There needs to be acknowledgment that without economic liberation and the attainment of basic rights for all, we cannot develop a society based on the foundation of human dignity. If the socio-economic barriers that currently prevent the majority of South Africans from living a dignified life are not adequately and effectively addressed, Mandela’s image, as well as his teachings, will sadly become irrelevant and ultimately forgotten.  At a recent interfaith memorial service hosted by the Nelson Mandela Foundation, ANC veteran Tokyo Sexwale stated:

“Now that the prophet’s lips are sealed and his body is about to enter the ground, which of his disciples will step forward and speak out for human rights, freedom, equality and social justice?”

South Africa, stand up.

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