salon vol4 final

8/3/2019 Salon Vol4 Final

1/147

VOLU

MEFOUR2

011

Edited by Lara Allen and Achille Mbembe

THE JOHANNESBURG SALON


2/147

2011, The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism

Copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC),and no part may be reproduced in whole or in part without the express permission, in writing, of both theauthors and the publishers.

The opinions expressed do not necessarily reect those of the JWTC, its trustees, members of the Council or

donors. Authors contribute to JWTC publications in their personal capacity.

First published by the JWTCwww.jwtc.org.za

Design and Typesetting The LibraryTechnical development Black Square

cOVER iMAGE

Representations and Shadows: Learning digital camera by Joe Athialy

Flikr: Joe Athialy

An intiative of the University of the Witwatersrand

Made possible by funding from the Prince Claus Fund


3/147

cONTENTS

DEMOcRAcy AS A cOMMUNiTy OF LiFE Achille Mbembe

FANON AND THE VALUE OF THE HUMANPaul Gilroy 11

ARE TROUT SOUTH AFRicAN? OR: A POSTcOLONiAL FiSH?Duncan Brown 19

iS MONEy THE LANGUAGE OF THE HEART? LESSONS FROM LiMPOPOBjark Oxlund 22

THE cOLLEcTOR OF ARTCobi Labuscagne 27

cOSMOPOLiTANiSM FROM BELOw: SOME ETHicAL LESSONS FROM THE SLUMS OF MUMBAi Arjun Appadurai

SHARiNG THE PiE iN TiMES OF HUNGER: A TANA TALELara Allen 44

THE iNcALcULABLEFaisel Devji 50

A ViEw OF NORTH AFRicA FROM SOUTH AMERicA: A cONVERSATiON wiTH RAL ZiBEcHiCrista Cielo 53

UNA ViSTA DE LAS REVUELTAS NORTEAFRicANOS DESDE SUDAMRicA: UNA cONVERSAciN cON RAL ZiBEcHiCrista Cielo 59


4/147

EVERyTHiNG SOLiD MELTS iNTO THE STREETRal Zibechi 65

THiS iS NO TiME TO BE GiVEN TO DiSTRAcTiONRal Zibechi 67

THE ARAB REVOLTS AND STRATEGic THiNkiNGRal Zibechi 69

THE REVOLUTiONS By ORDiNARy PEOPLERal Zibechi 71

THE MODERN TiTANic. URBAN PLANNiNG AND EVERyDAy LiFE iN kiNSHASAFilip De Boeck 73

wHy ZANZiBAR REEkSElizabeth Godfrey 83

THE MiRAcULOUS LiFEBrian Goldstone 85

NOSTALGiA FOR THE FUTURE: TOGO AFTER THE cOLD wARCharles Piot 101

iN SEARcH OF THE BORDERJo Ractliffe 106


5/147

5DEMOcRAcy AS A cOMMUNiTy OF LiFE

DEMOcRAcy AS A cOMMUNiTy OF LiFE

Achille Mbembe(University of Stellenbosch)

What might be the conditions of a radical, future-oriented politics in contemporary South Africa?

Interrogating the salience of wealth and property,

race and difference as central idioms in theframing and naming of ongoing social struggles,Achille Mbembe investigates the possibility ofreimagining democracy not only as a form ofhuman mutuality and freedom, but also as acommunity of life.

Preliminary observations

During the last quarter of the twentieth century wehave witnessed the development of modes of ethi-cal reasoning which dealt with the difcult ques-tion: what is the human or what remains of thehuman or even of humanism in an age of vio-lence, fear and torture; war, terror and vulnerability.Propelled by the repetition of violent events and hu-man-made catastrophes and disasters, this critiquehas profoundly shifted the manner in which we usedto dene law and life, sovereignty and the political.

It is now understood that if life itself has become the

prime medium for exerting power, power in turnis fundamentally the capacity to control and redis-tribute the means of human survival and ecologicalsustainability.

Some of these forms of political and cultural cri-tique are not simply paying incidental attention tothe religious. A number of secular intellectuals have

moved beyond a time, not so long ago, when gen-eration after generation of leftist revolutionariesdenounced religion as a force of alienation which

threatened human freedom. To a large extent, thisnew critique has also taken the form ofwitnessing.As has long been the case in black radical intellectualtraditions, to witness is the attempt to disrupt anddestabilize the prevalent order of things. The taskof the witness is to reopen the emancipatory pos-sibilities which, as a consequence of the structured

blindness and collective self-deception of the age,are in danger of foreclosing the future. Propelled bythe belief that history can be made possible again,late 20th-century forms of critique have posited the

pursuit of truth as a form of struggle in and of itself.Furthermore, the turn to the politico-theological has

been the cornerstone of a renewed drive to expandour denition of the human and to re-imagine

democracy as a community of life life itself un-derstood as a relentlessly regenerative force andpossibility.

The emergence of late 20th-century forms oftheologico-political critique has coincided with ourdisjointed world experiencing a radical uncertainty.This sense of uncertainty particularly affects threedomains of social life: one, the nature of historicalpraxis; two, the categorical foundations of experi-ence; and three, the moral economies of signica-tion. We no longer have ready-made answers to such

fundamental questions as: Who am I? Who is myneighbour? What should we do with our (former)enemies? How should we treat the migrant, the asy-lum seeker, the stranger or the prisoner, the widowand the orphan? Can we forgive the unforgivable?

What is the relationship between the quality of per-sons on the one hand and material wealth, poverty,hunger and disease on the other? Is there anythingthat can be considered to be so priceless as to be im-mune from sacrice? If the possibilities of utopian

thinking have receded, what are the conditions of aradical, future-oriented politics in this world and inthese times?

what are the conditions of a radical, future-orientedpolitics in this world and in these times?

Africa is a particularly revealing site from which toreframe these renewed interrogations of the hu-man, of life and of possibility. Here, under con-ditions of slavery, colonization and apartheid, brutal

forms of dehumanization have raised, in the stark-est terms possible, the political and moral dilemmasof human difference. A racially exclusive ideologicaldiscourse in the heyday of conquest and occupa-tion, humanism was predicated on the belief thata difference of colour was a difference of species.Race in particular did not simply become a crucial,

Abstract

Flickr: mikebaird


6/147

The Salon: Volume Four6

pervasive dimension of colonial domination andcapitalist exploitation. Turned into law, it was alsoused as a privileged mechanism for turning black lifeinto waste a race doomed to wretchedness, degra-dation, abjection and servitude.

This is why, in their effort to vindicate their race, black intellectuals devoted most of their energiesdrawing complex portraits of themselves as actors in

the history of humankind. As a result, two perspec-tives have historically dominated modern Africandiscourses on the human. The rst a substan-tivist perspective that used blackness as a strategicconcept in a broader economy of self-afrmation

and reinvention ended up giving priority to anontology of difference. To the colonial negation of

black humanity, it substituted a narrative of blackcollective identity born of a common historical ex-perience of subjugation and suffering. But even in

the most radical forms of black self-assertion, raceconsciousness was always a transitional move on theway to universal or planetary humanism. Althoughalways keen to provide a full account of the lived ex-perience of the black as Fanon put it, the second apolitical and future-oriented perspective sought tomove away from racialism and toward seeing eachhuman being as only a human being in a futureshared community. Such a community was usuallyenvisaged as a community of life, freedom and pos-sibility. It included everyone equally and was pro-

duced through struggle.Today, questions concerning the place of race

in capitalism and capitalisms intrinsic capacity togenerate the human as waste are being raisedanew, at a time when radical shifts can be observedin the way neo-liberalism operates. In many places,the Continent is witnessing the consolidation of

rapacious and predatory modes of wealth extraction.As Jean Comaroff writes, a new scramble for Africa isunderway. Many of the investments currently beingmade irt with forms of deregulation that pave the

way for criminal economic transactions trade inblood diamonds, contraband substances, protectedspecies, sex workers, toxic dumping. Privatization is

being carried out in the midst of acute levels of ma-

terial deprivation. Both the logic of privatization andthat of extraction are underpinned and buttressed by

various processes of militarization. In order to raiseprotability levels, capital and power manufacture

wars and disasters, feeding off situations of extrem-ity which then allow for indirect forms of privategovernment of which humanitarian interventionsare but the most visible. Where access to wage laboris still a remote possibility, it is more and moreembedded in a logic of disposability.

The human in the South African context

Whether there is anything which is still to be re-discovered or to be reanimated from the term thehuman takes on a paradoxical resonance in con-temporary South Africa. With the end of apartheid,South African culture and society was confronted

with the urgency of engaging in afrmative politicsin lieu of the politics of destruction of the years ofracial segregation. Afrmative politics entailed the

production of social horizons of hope. At the sametime, it meant resisting both the inertia of the pres-ent and the nostalgia of the past. To reconstruct

what centuries of racial brutality had destroyed, abalance had to be found between the mobilization,actualization and deployment of cognitive, affectiveand creative possibilities which had not so far been

activated, along with a necessary dose of opposition-al consciousness.

Critical humanism in this new context would havemeant a persistent commitment to the possibilitiesand powers of life. There is substantial evidence thata return to the question of the possibilities and pow-ers of life as a precondition for the reconstitution ofthe human in politics and culture was recognized

as a matter of ethical and political urgency duringthe rst decade of democracy. During this decade,

South Africa became a model of how to dismantle aracial mode of rule, strike down race-based frame-

works of citizenship and the law while striving tocreate racial equality through positive State action.The post-apartheid State fostered a normative proj-ect with the aim of achieving justice through rec-onciliation, equality through economic redress, de-mocracy through the transformation of the law and

the restoration of a variety of rights, including theright to a dignied life. This normative project wasenshrined in a utopian Constitution that attempts toestablish a new relationship between law and societyon the one hand and law and life on the other, whileequating democracy and the political itself with theethical and the just. This Constitutions underlyingprinciple is ubuntu or human mutuality. It prom-ises a transcendence of the old politics of racial dif-ference and an afrmation of a shared humanity.Underpinning the Constitution is the hope that, af-

ter centuries of attempts by white power to containblacks, South Africa could become the speech-act ofa certain way ofbeing-in-common rather than sideby side.

This drive to re-humanize society and cul-ture and to institutionalize a new political com-munity that denes itself as an ethical community


7/147


is nevertheless unfolding against various odds.Perhaps to a degree hardly achieved in the rest of theContinent, the human has consistently taken on theform ofwaste within the peculiar trajectory race andcapitalism espoused in South Africa. Traditionally,

we speak of waste as something produced bodilyor socially by humans. In this sense, waste is that

which is other than the human. Traditionally too, we

speak of the intrinsic capacity of capitalism to wastehuman lives. We speak of how workers are wastedunder capitalism in comparable fashion to naturalresources. Marx in particular characterizes capi-talist production as thoroughly wasteful with whathe calls human material just as it is with mate-rial resources. It squanders human beings, livinglabour, squandering not only esh and blood, but

nerves and brain, life and health as well, he writes.In order to grasp the particular drama of the humanin the history of South Africa, we should broadenthis traditional denition of waste and consider

the human itselfas a waste product at the interfaceof race and capitalism. Squandering and wasting

black lives has been an intrinsic part of the logic ofcapitalism, especially in those contexts in which raceis central to the simultaneous production of wealthand of superuous people.

Today, this logic of waste is particularly drama-tized by the dilemmas of unemployment and dispos-ability, survival and subsistence, and the expansion

in every arena of everyday life of spaces of vulnera-bility. Despite the emergence of a solid black middleclass, a rising superuous population is becoming a

permanent xture of the South African social land-scape with little possibility of ever being exploited

by capital. Only a dwindling number of individualscan now claim to be workers in the traditional sense

of the term. How to govern the poor has therefore become one of the biggest moral questions facingthe nascent democracy. Behind policy debates onwelfare and service delivery loom fundamentalethical choices that will determine the nature of theSouth African experiment in democracy ques-tions of how to right historical wrongs; what is therelationship between personal or collective injury

and larger problems of equality, justice and the law;hunger and morality; owning and sharing; or eventruth, hope and reconciliation. The urgency of thesenew moral dilemmas is such that, for the democraticproject to have any future at all, it should necessarilytake the form of a conscious attempt to retrieve lifeand the human from a history of waste.

How to govern the poor has become one ofthe biggest moral questions facing the nascentdemocracy.

Wealth and property

Meanwhile, wealth and property have acquired anew salience in public debate. They have become thekey, central idioms to framing and naming ongoingsocial struggles from imagining the relationship between the good life to redening value itself;

from claims of citizenship, rights and entitlementsto the denition of the forms of property and the

economy itself (whether we should nationalize ornot); from matters of morality to those of lifestyleand accountability.

The centrality of wealth in the moral discourseconcerning the human is not new. In various partsof pre-colonial Africa, discourses on the human,or, on humanity almost always took the shape and

content of discourses about wealth, personhoodand social multiplicity. Traditional denitions of

wealth usually encompassed people, things andknowledge.

People, that is, other human beings, were notonly the most important unit of measurement ofultimate value. They also formed the material basisor infrastructure of human life. People consistedof interpersonal dependents of all kinds wives,children, clients and slaves. As Jane Guyer argues,they were sought, valued, and at times paid for at

considerable expense in material terms. Kinshipand marriage especially were critical componentsof accumulative strategies. But wealth also coveredtraded goods, including the imported goods broughtfrom elsewhere. Things could be personalized ob-

jects. Goods could be functionally interchangeable with human beings who in turn could in certain

Future Doorway 1: Masiphumelele # 3

Flickr: Frames-of-Mind


8/147


respects be objectied or converted into clients or

followers. Wealth embodied in rights in people re-

mained a persistent principle of African social andmoral life even in the midst of the various shifts in-duced by the slave trade and colonialism. Knowledgeon the other hand was understood as an ever shiftingspectrum of possibility. Jane Guyer makes it clear

that it was highly valued, complexly organized andplural by denition. There was no social organiza-tion of kinship and material life that did not depend,to some extent, on a regime of distribution of knowl-edge the arts, music, dance, rhetoric, spirituallife, hunting, gathering, shing, cultivation, wood-

carving, metallurgy. If certain forms of knowledgewere specialized, controlled and monopolized by asmall cadre of experts or a secret society hierarchy,other forms of knowledge were conceptualized as anopen and unbounded repertoire. This unbounded-ness made it possible for such forms of knowledgeto be widely distributed throughout the society andamong many adepts on the basis ofpersonal capac-ity or potentiality.

Indeed, African pre-colonial discourses on thehuman allowed for personal differentiation or sin-gularity. It was believed that certain qualities livedin the individual from his or her birth; which heor she had no need for magic to arouse althoughthere was always the indispensable need for magi-

cal rites to conserve these. Personal abilities couldbe augmented, conserved and actualized within theperson, making that person a real person, recog-nized as such by the community. Each individualpersons power was itself a composition.

That some of these old tropes might still beat work in current controversies on wealth and

property should not be entirely excluded. But thatwealth, poverty and property have become essentialto the self-understanding of South African society

after liberation should also be read against a longhistory of black dispossession. In the new phase offrontier accumulation made possible by the 1994negotiated settlement, they have become the newidioms for political and normative arguments about

what should be the proper relation of people tothings; what should be the proper relation of people

to each other with respect to things; how muchproperty is enough for one person and how much istoo much; how much enjoyment is justiable espe-cially for the opulent in an environment where hun-ger and debasement are all too real for many. It isthis tension between what looks like an unstoppablelogic of unproductive excess on the one hand andon the other, a logic of scarcity and depletion that is

turning wealth and property into dramatic sites ofcontestation.

that wealth, poverty and property have becomeessential to the self-understanding of South Africansociety after liberation should also be read against along history of black dispossession

Wealth and property also operate as means of regu-lating access to resources that are scarce for someand plentiful for others. They are the main means

by which life chances are assigned to different kindsof persons at a time when pockets of wealth andprivilege are proving hard not only to account forand even less so to control, but also hard to subjectto some form of accountability and redistribution.Furthermore, as Arjun Appadurai observes, the lifeof the poor has become a strenuous effort to pro-duce, if not a sense of stability, then something likepermanence in the face of the temporariness or vola-tility of almost all the arrangements of social exis-

tence. Indeed, one of the most brutal effects of neo-liberalism in South Africa has been the generaliza-tion and radicalization of a condition of temporari-ness for the poor. For many people, the struggle to

be alive has taken the form of a struggle against theconstant corrosion of the present, both by changeand by uncertainty.

Future Doorway 2: Walkway with Koi pond

Flickr: designestates


9/147


In order to reanimate the idea of the humanin contemporary South African politics and culture,there is therefore no escape from the need to reect

on the thoroughly political and historical charac-ter of wealth and property and the extent to which

wealth and property have come to be linked withbodily life. If what distinguishes the South Africanexperiment from other such experiments elsewhere

in the world is the attempt to establish a new rela-tionship between law and life while equating democ-racy and the political itself with the ethical and the

just, then we have to ask under what conditions canthis project of human mutuality result in a broaderand more ethical commensality.

Race and difference

Another major challenge to any re-imagination ofthe human in contemporary conditions is race.South Africas democracy asserts the equality of allhuman beings and seeks to derive powers of govern-ment from the consent of the governed. Yet, this is ademocracy founded on deep and entrenched formsof racial dispossession and inequality inheritedfrom a past of racial brutality. The countrys entiremodern history is spliced around and fractured bythe question of the relationship between its parts

whether they should exist alone, separate, or wheth-er they should exist with other parts, together. This

dialectic between with and withoutplayed itself outdramatically during the years of apartheid. It is be-ing played out again, in no less dramatic fashion,

between those with and those without property.The end of apartheid has not resolved the old ques-tion of difference. It has simply shifted the terms ofthe difference and of the dispute. In order to make

decisions about issues of distribution and sharing insuch a way that the social body does not turn againstitself, the new democracy must nd an adequate lan-guage of claims, liabilities, or debts a proper lan-guage to keep putting forth the demand for justice,compensation, redress, restitution and reparationour history places before us.

The end of apartheid has not resolved the oldquestion of difference. It has simply shifted theterms of the difference and of the dispute.

To these challenges must be added yet another, rep-resented by the stranger in our midst. In contem-porary South Africa, undocumented or illegalmigrants are people whose fundamental rights arein jeopardy. They are halfheartedly protected in theconnes of the national territory where they reside.

Post-apartheid South Africa has inherited a longtradition of a politics of separation. For centuries,this country was ruled according to that principle to physically separate itself from all kinds of otherhumans; the refusal to share the same space withthese other humans or to live with them.

Worldwide, a global regime of walling is fast con-tributing to the manufacturing of entire categoriesof unwanted people of which the illegal migrant,the undocumented worker, and more and more therefugee and the asylum seeker, are the prototypes.

This global regime is characterized by the differen-tial treatment of individuals, groups or communities

with respect to movement or circulation. This differ-ential treatment raises, at a deeper level, questionsabout the way in which the quality of being humanas such is instituted in a globalized society; the wayin which the quality of being human becomes once

again categorized and hierarchized so that its selec-tive reproduction can be controlled; so that somehuman beings can be hunted by the police of certainStates and their freedom of circulation subjected tomassive controls and restrictions.

The gigantic inequality with regard to the rightof circulation and the mobility of persons nowadaysconstitutes a transnational social relationship in andof itself. It is fuelled by an anthropological crisis ofthe category of the human person as a universalcategory. It is also at the roots of new, global formsof racialization, in the name of security.

The category of the future

The human is another name for the future. In thepolitical history of South Africa, the future has al-

ways been the term by which the struggle to producea meaningful life has been named. What gave thecategory of the future its power was the hope that

South Africa, Johannesburg: Future in ames (waste disposal)

Flickr: kool_skatkat


10/147


we might bring into being as a concrete social pos-sibility a radically different temporal experience;that a systemic transformation in the logic of our so-cial life and in the logic of our being-in-common ashuman beings might happen as a result of historicalpraxis.

For many, the process of producing life now tendsto take the form of a struggle to make it from today

to tomorrow, and to cross the boundary from todayto tomorrow can no longer be taken for granted. Infact, it has become eminently hazardous, risky. To

be alive is to constantly be at risk; to constantly haveto take risks because the penalty for not taking risksis to not be able to make it from today to tomorrow.

As the possibility of the Event recedes, South Africais faced with the liquid character both of the pres-ent and of the future, their dizziness, their mirage-like qualities, the weakness in our grip on the future.

We should wonder whether there is a direct re-lationship between the liquidity of the present andthe overwhelming feeling of the elusiveness of thefuture and therefore the apparent foreclosure ofany plausible form of radical politics. In fact, manylive as if the present, democracy, the law and theConstitution, had unexpectedly betrayed them.

What consequences this feeling of betrayal entailsfor our imagination of the future is far from having

been properly assessed. On the one hand, it mani-fests itself via the constant re-apparition of the past

in almost every single act that aims at bringing a dif-ferent future into being. On the other hand, it is as iffor many people too much has changed and yet notenough has changed. There is a feeling (especiallyamong the poor) that they are now not merely de-prived of wealth and power, but even of life possi-

bilities as such. Throughout the entire society, there

is a widely shared belief that in order to further onesclaims, it might be better and more efcient to re -sort to violence rather than to invoke the law. Thisaccelerated turn to an everyday politics of expedi-ency rather than a demanding, disciplined politicsof principle is fuelled by the inability to open free-dom onto the un-chartered territories of the future.

Many have the feeling that they might never re-

ally fulll their lives; that their lives will always besomewhat truncated; that these lives will neverachieve the status of lives that are accounted for,inhabited as they are by a ghost. Beyond the rep-etition of dead paradigms, any new form of radicalpolitics will have to deal with this ghost in life, thepain of disappointment and the sharp experience ofdefeat, of palpable powerlessness and dashed hopes.

Many have the feeling that they might never reallyfulll their lives

The period after apartheid is a period of reconstruc-tion and redesign. The challenge ahead is nothingless than the re-foundation of democracy as a com-munity of life. The end of apartheid, just as decolo-nization in other parts of Africa, has opened the doorto internal partition. It has not entirely resolved thequestion of difference; of how to make decisionsabout issues of redistribution and sharing. Yet theneed to experiment with new forms of ethical rela-

tions has never been as acute as now. The questionthis country is therefore facing today as yesterday isunder what conditions can South Africa re-imaginedemocracy not only as a form of human mutualityand freedom, but also as a community of life. In orderto confront the ghost in the life of so many, the con-cepts of the human, or of humanism, inherited

from the West will not sufce. We will have to take

seriously the anthropological embeddedness of suchterms in long histories of the human as waste.


11/147

11FANON AND THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN

FANON AND THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN

Paul Gilroy(London School of Economics)

Why should we care about humanism: rejectedas it has been so virulently in the academy andthe media, co-opted into the service of western

military secularists, while simultaneously beingrendered empty and compromised by UNESCO-style liberalism? In order to achieve what SylviaWynter calls humanisms re-enchantment, PaulGilroy argues for a return to the non-racial, anti-colonial, and ultimately reparative humanismarticulated by Franz Fanon unfashionablethough this may be in many contemporaryscholastic circles

All forms of exploitation resemble one another.They all seek the source of their necessity insome edict of a Biblical nature. All forms ofexploitation are identical because all of them areapplied against the same object: man. Whenone tries to examine the structure of this or that

form of exploitation from an abstract point ofview, one simply turns ones back on the major,basic problem, which is that of restoring man to

his proper place

Colonial racism is no different from any otherracism. Anti-Semitism hits me head-on: I amenraged, I am bled white by an appalling battle,

I am deprived of the possibility of being a man.

Fanons preparedness to speak in humanitys nameis a striking feature ofThe Wretched of The Earth

but his humanism has proved to be a tricky subject.It is discussed only rarely. I would like to considerit because there are ways in which his argumentstowards what I want to call a reparative humanism(congured by the overcoming of colonial statecraft

and its racial orders), can help with contemporarypolitical problems. In particular, his distinctive g-

ure of the human is able to illuminate some of thedifcult issues that derive on one side, from the post-colonial politics of multiculture/alterity and on theother, from the belligerent civilisationism that haslately come to dene our geopolitical predicament.

Exploring that gure of the human is deepened

by a degree of familiarity with the French intellectual

and political scene in which the discussion origi-nally unfolded, but the currency ofThe Wretched ofThe Earth shows that the signicance of these is-sues extends beyond that historic setting. I cannotreconstruct that debate in its entirety now, thoughI should say that it involved arguments about phe-nomenology, subjectivity, corporeality and tempo-rality that were conditioned by and addressed to the

aftermath of war against the Nazis, which left Francefractured, and also to the immediate context of thenew war with the Vietminh that began in 1945 justas French Foreign Legion was moving into Stif,Guelma, Kherrata and other Algerian towns to exactpunishment for the pro-independence sentimentsevident among soldiers returning from Europesbattleelds the Thiaroye problem. These different

wars were the catalyst for the complacent anti-hu-manism Fanons arguments repudiated. The natureof the connection between them was the trigger forFanons reections on the human framed by the po-litical morality of anticolonial resistance.

Several other aspects of Fanons work related tothis distinctive humanism have proved equally un-timely and perplexing. They too are usually passedover. His non-immanent critique of race (whichis presented, among other things, as a problem ofmodern political ontology) is fundamental. It coun-terpointed a vociferous attachment to the idea thatthis humanism was novel. Like his early identica-

tion of what he called the real dialectic betweenmy body and the world, that claim has usually ei-ther been ignored or, more usually, treated as anembarrassment.

The original formulation of this authentic, dia-lectical possibility arose in a difcult passage from

Black Skin White Masks that repays careful study.

The Entrance

Flickr: alphadesigner


12/147


13/147


the longer term, these battles contribute to what shedescribes as humanisms re-enchantment, a processthat in Jamaica had been dominated by the creative,Ethiopianist reworkings of Unescos poetics by rootsartists like The Abyssinians, The Heptones andBurning Spear.

the need to reformulate the human in both human

rights and humanitarian intervention has initiateda deeper conict than Fanon was able to imagine

The avowed antihumanists who voiced the posi-tions that shape todays campus common-sense,have bolstered unsympathetic interpretations ofFanon masquerading as critiques from the left. Hiscommitments appear to be founded on nave or in-completely thought-through positions that spill overinto empty, compromised humanism of the Liberaland Unesco varieties and remains far too xated on

the redemption rather than the provincialisiation ofEurope. So far, that absurd verdict has not been test-ed by any exposure to critiques of racial hierarchy,colonial conquest and imperial power.

During the era of decolonisation and indepen-dence, debate on the boundaries of the human wasconditioned by the aftermath of the recent struggleagainst Hitlerism. However, then as now, it was nei-ther respectable nor polite to focus on the constitu-tive potency of racism and to analyse Nazi statecraft

as the governmental implementation of racial hy-giene directly connected to the genocidal history ofcolonial domination inside and beyond Europe.

Old, mid-twentieth century rules still prevail inthe abstracted world of scholastic, anti-humanism.The vestigial disciplinary forces mustered by fas-cisms philosophical apologists do not sanction any

uncomfortable, reexive consideration of their own

relationship to the political ontology of race celebrat-ed and afrmed by the likes of Heidegger, Schmitt

and the other colossi of contemporary, scholastictheory. However, the continuing inuence of those

gures helps to make Fanons reparative, anti-racist

humanism, like the politics of national liberation,appear facile. If Nazism was, after all, not radicalevil but rather a trace of metaphysical humanismthat reveals the problems with all humanisms, few

brave souls will be prepared to plead guilty to hu-manisms folly. Marxian philosophical anthropologyhas travelled in different directions and a whole va-riety of feminist pronouncements has raised ques-tions about the relationship of gendered categoriesto humanity (and citizenship) as well as to the pros-pects of trans- and post-humanity after the end ofour species natural evolution.

Why then should we care about humanism? a termthat has lately been hijacked and monopolised bymilitant secularism of the Richard Dawkins type,a dismal formation that is studiously indifferentto the postcolonial re-conguration of our world

and signicantly refuses to make any gesture

that might compromise its view of Islam aswhat Dawkins on his website recently called anunmitigated evil.

How debates over the human and its limits becamelinked to the struggle against racial hierarchy and tothe political ontology of race are not issues of interestto civilisationist secularism or scientistic caricaturesof Enlightenment. To follow Fanons lead, we mustdo what they refuse to do and use intimate familiar-ity with Europes continuing colonial crimes and theraciology and xenology that sanction them to orientourselves. Then, we may ask how a reguration of

humanism might contribute to Europes ability to

acknowledge its evolving postcolonial predicament.Its relationship with migrants, refugees, displacedpeople, denizens, racial and civilisational inferiorsand others judged infrahuman whose lives have no

value even when they fall inside the elastic boundsof the law. This is an urgent matter. The problemsassociated with it have only been augmented by the

Frantz Fanon

Flickr: dsinteret


14/147


way that security now saturates our fading politicalinstitutions. Here in the city of Vico, we cannot denythat these debates have a long and important his-tory. Edward Said mapped a good deal of it towardsthe end of his bookBeginnings where, for a tanta-lizing moment, he placed the legacies of Vico andFanon in counterpoint.

we may ask how a reguration of humanism mightcontribute to Europes ability to acknowledge itsevolving postcolonial predicament

That difcult, challenging agenda supplied some-thing like a spine to Fanons projects. In developingit, the starting point I favour, requires that we locatethe desire to reassemble humanism in relation to hisanalysis of the alienated modes of social interactionthat derive from the racialisation of the world andthe Manichaean requirements of the colonial order

which underpins it.We must then consider Fanons demands for a

new humanism as a key aspect of the non-immanentcritique of merely racialised being-in-the-world thathe gradually elaborates. His humanism should beunderstood as a vehicle for the reconstruction of that

broken world and the undoing of its characteristicforms of alienation. In other words, his humanismis not a residue of, or throwback to, the nineteenth-century debates over philosophical anthropology

that preceded the emergence of a scientic anatomi-sation of capitalist domination and its human cost.

We depart from that agenda when we place racialhierarchy, racial epistemology and the political on-tology of race at the centre of a self-consciously post-colonial and rmly cosmopolitan analysis. We may

then begin to appreciate that humanism, as Fanon

denes it, introduces new problems. There is an op-portunity or perhaps an obligation to re-engage/re-enchant the human. It can be dened by the twenti-eth-century context in which the racial nomos that

was established in the process of European imperialexpansion was still, steadily being overthrown.

One duty alone: That of not renouncing myfreedom through my choices.I have no wish to be the victim of the Fraudof a black world.My life should not be devoted to drawing upthe balance sheet of Negro values.There is no white world, there is no whiteethic, any more than there is a whiteintelligence.There are in every part of the world men whosearch.I am not a prisoner of history. I should notseek there for the meaning of my destiny.I should constantly remind myself that thereal leap consists in introducing inventioninto existence.In the world through which I travel, I amendlessly creating myself.I am a part of Being to the degree that I go

beyond it.Franz Fanon:Black Skin, White Masks

This non-racial, anti-colonial, reparative humanismwas licensed by the open antipathy to racism thatframed it as well as by its detailed, critical grasp ofthe damage done to ethics, truth and democracy bythe racial discourses that could not be undone even

by the grotesqueries Fanon in Black Skin, WhiteMasks dismissed as the fraud of a black world.

The liberating decolonisation to which he con-tributed so much is still far from complete thoughthe terms of its legitimation have been redened on

one side by the political rhetoric of humanitarian-ism and the articulation of human rights and on theother by a sequence of neo-imperial conicts over

scarce resources: energy, water, minerals etc. many

of which have pronounced the tacit re-racialisationof the world in civilisationist terms: a monolithic,despotic Islam is now posed against a simplistic im-age of Europe as the West.

This old fantasy now comes in two avours:

post-secular Christian or secular Enlightened. Theracialisation of the human circulates through the

Memories of Hope in the Age of Disposability

Flickr: Truthout by Jared Rodriguez


15/147


conicts it feeds, sometimes with unexpected con-sequences. Part of the explanation for its durabilityresides in the fact that postcolonial relations, strug-gles and wars are no longer narrowly conned to the

post-imperial powers. NATOs expansive new role,like the ISAFs war in Afghanistan and the globalcounterinsurgency that accompanies it, make all the

contributing military forces into postcolonial actorswhether or not they see themselves as having beenbeneciaries of earlier colonialism. More than that,

there is a high degree of historical and geographicalcontinuity between the wars of imperial decolonisa-tion and todays global counterinsurgency campaign.

there is a high degree of historical andgeographical continuity between the wars ofimperial decolonisation and todays globalcounterinsurgency campaign.

The smart power supposedly being deployed hasmoved on from the airwaves. It includes what thehead of the world bank once casually called face-

book diplomacy. The infowar aspires to completecontrol of visual culture and through that mastery,to command of human imagination and dreams-cape. We should therefore concede the growing in-adequacy of older critical approaches based uponthe too simple distinction between being seen and

being invisible. Instead, we must appreciate theneed to contest the terms of visibility and the po-litical, legal and economic conditions within whichparticular regimes of seeing can be reproduced. Thespectacular is only one of these.

Let us recall also that the US government be-came aprivate client of the satellite imaging corpo-ration whose digital eyes covered Afghanistan. The

war conducted remotely by means of drones has been outsourced to Xe corp. The Human-TerrainSystem now ensures that anthropologists are em-

bedded alongside warriors and info-warriors inthe latest sequence of doomed military adventures

which are novel only in being warranted by the lib-eral goal of redeeming gender equality.

Europes vulnerable gays and young women areto be protected with cluster bombs, depleted ura-nium shells and a new system of banking basedon mobile phones that can double as cameras andscreens for photographing yourself instead of circu-lating video clips of the latest war crimes and collat-eral damage. A May 2010 dispatch by Nathan Hodge

from the Afghan frontline posted on www.wired.com captured this situation neatly:

Things reached a chaotic peak when soldiersspotted a young man with a neatly trimmedgoatee, apparently snapping photos with a cellphone camera. They stopped him, made surethe pictures were deleted from his phone and

digitally scanned his irises and ngerprints witha BATS (Biometric Automated Tool Set) scanner.The young man was not detained, but now he wasin the system.

The proliferating digital products of what one oftheir architects calls armed social work cannot beconsumed innocently. One more recent example ofthese convergences and continuities sufces here. It

centres, unsurprisingly, on torture and its recurrentutility in ghting the new kinds of conict that re-

specify the human in some rather antique culturesof impunity. The torturer becomes hostis humanigeneris but torture is rebranded and routinised,spun and banalised in the networked patterns of amilitary diplomacy that we cannot escape.

torture is rebranded and routinised, spun andbanalised in the networked patterns of a militarydiplomacy that we cannot escape.

The Arab Spring highlighted how the old colonialdouble standards rooted in Victorian racial theory,are still operating. The UN resolution justied inter-

vention to protect civilians while the same civilianswere being bombed by their European champions.The unsustainable repression in Libya and Syria

was sharply distinguished from the bloody events

Helicopters, Pentagons

Flickr: Truthout by Jared Rodriguez


16/147


underway in Bahrain where US and British strategicinterests specied a different geopolitical ethics.

The securitocracy of that gulf state had beendesigned and implemented by a highly-decoratedBritish security-policeman, Ian Henderson, whohas been repeatedly and consistently accused of

being a brutal torturer both during the Kenyanemergency and in subsequent litigation as well as

in Bahrain where he earned the nickname TheButcher of Bahrain for the steel and energy with

which he organised the governments response tothe 1990s revolt (see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2002/jun/30/uk.world).

The revolting crimes of which Henderson has been accused are played down, justied and gar-landed with owers in a self-serving memoire

(Man Hunt In Kenya) he penned in 1958 with theassistance of the Conservative politician, PhilipGoodhart. What Hendersons career as a hammerof subversion and national liberation in Africa andthe Gulf tells us now about the political geographyof Europes postcolonial statecraft cannot be adju-dicated here. However, his text has other uses, notleast of which is its guration of the ambiguities in-trinsic to racial hierarchy. For example, he describes

what he takes to be the characteristic features of hismany encounters with MauMau prisoners capturedduring Kenyas emergency while hunting for theKikuyu leader Dedan Kimathi. Kimathi, like Fanon,

had served in a European army ghting against theaxis powers. Here is Henderson:

I often saw terrorists a few moments after theircapture. Some would stand there wide-eyed,completely speechless, and shivering violentlyfrom shock and cold. They would think of the

moment of death, and that moment seemed verynear. Others would be past the stage of thinkingat all. Mad with shock, they would shout andstruggle or froth at the mouth and bite the earth.Under these circumstances it was not easy toremember that they were fanatics who hadenjoyed killing children and slitting open thestomachs of pregnant women. They were savage,

vicious, unpredictable as a rabid dog, but becausethey were now cornered, muzzled, powerless, andterried, one felt like giving them a reassuring

pat.

There is much to say about this passage and thetext from which it has been extracted. Of course,the deeper ambiguities in its presentation of the na-tive as savage, primitive and effectively infrahuman,

belong to the moral prescriptions associated withsystems of racial classication in general. I have ad-dressed those issues before. (In Between Camps Iargue: The distinct order of racial differentiation ismarked by its unique label, by the peculiar slippage

between real relations and phenomenal formsto which it always corresponds, and by a special (a)moral and (anti)political stance. It has involved notonly reducing nonwhite people to the status of ani-mals or things, but also reducing European peopleto the intermediate status of that lowly order of be-ing somewhere between human and animal that can

be abused without the intrusions of bad conscience.)Now, my attention is caught by Hendersons hintthat reducing the enemy to an animal creates aconfusing range of different obligations and moralpressures in the mind of his capturer cum tor-turer. Similar material can be found in the recordof Africans and Caribbeans captured on European

battleelds by the Nazis or shot down and incarcer-ated by them in POW camps where their fellow pris-oners may also have sought the comforts of racialhierarchy and segregation as partial compensationfor their loss of freedom.

For all the self-evident character of race as natu-ral difference, the boundary lines between humanand infrahuman, human and animal, human subject

and object are not in the least bit obvious. Even, orperhaps especially, those who monopolise violencehave to specify and determine that boundary in adifcult psychological setting where torture, castra-tion and other highly sexual acts of brutality had tocompete with a reassuring pat as the most appro-priate outcome.

Though Hendersons impunity has been sanc-tioned repeatedly by several different sovereignpowers, a complex and multi-sited sequence of liti-gation has arisen from this case as a result of apply-ing the contemporary legal standards dened indi-rectly by the language of human rights and the con-cept of crimes against humanity. This interventioncontinues to move slowly through the upper reachesof postcolonial Britains judicial system.

I must note that, apart from the effects that thesecases have on the litigants and governmental actorsinvolved, it is clear that they also impact upon ournations understanding of its colonial history anddeeper still upon the idea that British people have

of themselves as a political body imbued with ci- vilised values. David Anderson, an Oxford profes-sor of African politics who specialises in the Kenyanemergency recently told the BBC that a new batchof previously secret les about to be released by the

government as a result of the continuing court ac-tion would prove to be of enormous signicance.


17/147


He continued:

These are a set of selected documents withheldfor their sensitivity. We will learn things theBritish government of the time didnt want us toknow. They are likely to change our view of somekey places (their release) will clarify the lastdays of Empire in ways that will be shocking for

some people in Britain.

According to a damning internal review carriedout by Anthony Cary for the Foreign Ofce, these

documents were regarded as a guilty secret andsimply hidden (http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/britains-secret-colonial-les/). How they came

to be secret and how they acquired the capacity toshock people to this rare extent, raises a number ofquestions that deserve detailed historical answers

beyond those I offered inAfter Empire. Here too,part of what is really shocking, is the way that dis-turbing instances of inhuman brutality can generatea painful acknowledgement of where the boundariesof the human should fall the same lesson that isnot being learned in the Mediterranean at this verymoment (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/08/nato-ship-libyan-migrants)

disturbing instances of inhuman brutality cangenerate a painful acknowledgement of where the

boundaries of the human should fall

Following the classic contours of debate with regardto the human, a second instance of how the humanis being contested in post- and neocolonial kindsof political and juridical conict can be helpful. It

relates to the future rather than the past. I want to

suggest that Fanons sense of how colonial conict

marks out new denitions and boundaries for the

human can be applied to the new technological, le-gal and moral environments involved in the deploy-ment of robotic military systems.

The US-manufactured General Atomics

Reaper is currently the RAFs only armedunmanned aircraft. It can carry up to fourHellre missiles, two 230kg (500lb) bombs,

and 12 Paveway II guided bombs. It can y

for more than 18 hours, has a range of 3,600miles, and can operate at up to 15,000 me-tres (50,000ft).The Reaper is operated by RAF personnel

based at Creech in Nevada. It is controlledvia a satellite datalink. Earlier this year,David Cameron promised to increase thenumber of RAF Reapers in Afghanistan fromfour to nine, at an estimated cost of 135m.The MoD is also funding the development

by BAE Systems of a long-range unmannedaircraft, called Taranis, designed to y at jet

speeds between continents while controlledfrom anywhere in the world using satellitecommunications.

Richard Norton-Taylor and Rob Evans,Observer, 17 April, 2011

Automated and autonomous weapons will oper-ate without immediate human control in changingcircumstances deemed too complex and rapid to beamenable to human decisions. Peter Singers bookWired for War provides an excellent introduction

to this topic. Though Britains Ministry of Defencecurrently has no intention to develop systems thatoperate without human intervention in the weapon

command and control chain, it chose to spell outrelevant legal and ethical issues in a recent brief-ing note: The UK Approach to Unmanned Aircraft

Systems which was prepared for senior ofcers in allbranches of the military service by the MoD think-tank, the Development, Concepts and DoctrineCentre (DCDC):

Detainee/Oblivion

Flickr: Truthout: by Jared Rodriguez;

Adapted: electron, habaneros


18/147


There is an increasing body of discussion thatsuggests that the increasing speed, confusionand information overload of modern war maymake human response inadequate and that theenvironment will be too complex for a humanto direct . The role of the human in the loophas, before now, been a legal requirement which

we now see being eroded, what is the role of

the human from a moral and ethical standpointin automatic systems? Most work on this areafocuses on the unique (at the moment) ability thata human being has to bring empathy and moralityto complex decision-making. To a robotic system,a school bus and a tank are the same merelyalgorithms in a programme and the engagementof a target is a singular action; the robot has nosense of ends, ways and means, no need to knowwhyit is engaging a target. There is no recourseto human judgement in an engagement, no senseof a higher purpose on which to make decisions,and no ability to imagine (and therefore takeresponsibility for) repercussions of action taken.This raises a number of questions that will needto be addressed before fully autonomous armedsystems are elded . The other side of the

autonomy argument is more positive. Robotscannot be emotive, cannot hate. A target is aseries of ones and zeros, and once the decisionis made, by whatever means, that the target is

legitimate, then prosecution of that target ismade mechanically. The robot does not carethat the target is human or inanimate, terroristor freedom ghter, savage or barbarian. A robot

cannot be driven by anger to carry out illegalactions such as those at My Lai.

Automated and autonomous weapons will operatewithout immediate human control in changingcircumstances deemed too complex and rapid to beamenable to human decisions.

In his recent work, Achille Mbembe has approachedthese and related dilemmas through a meditation on

what appears to be their animating political theol-

ogy. It has assembled new forms of theologico-po-litical criticism and turned to the ethico-juridical inorder to answer the unsettling effects of a radicaluncertainty prompted less by civilisational conict

and technological transformation than the steadyreordering of the world that has been consequentupon its decolonisation. He continues:

... we no longer have ready-made answers to suchfundamental questions as: Who is my neighbour?

What to do with my enemy? How to treat thestranger or the prisoner? Can I forgive theunforgivable? What is the relationship betweentruth, justice, and freedom? Is there anythingthat can be considered to be so priceless as to beimmune from sacrice?

It is difcult to see how the history of race as politi-cal ontology, aesthetics and techn; of racism and itsracial orders, can be made to count as part of howthis crisis is to be answered. However, once again

Fanon can help us with that difcult work. Indeed,his approach to the human and, in particular his -nal alignment of self and humanity in the transcen-dence though not the redemption of Europe remainssuggestive. Perhaps it is best to say that approachingthe human outside of the alienated and alienatingcongurations demanded by Manichaeism delirium

and the racial-corporeal schema can contribute to Wynters re-enchantment and what we might callthe healing or reparative element in Fanons think-ing. That proposal, in one form or another, has beena goal common to every major political thinker ofdecolonisation and racial democracy. All of themturned in that direction seeking ways that art, cul-ture, science, music, war or technological expertise

could enforce a mode of human recognition that hadbeen consistently denied and thwarted. Fanons isthe loudest clearest voice in that unhappy congre-gation for precisely the reasons that irritate the un-assailable conventions of identity politics and itssophist tribunes.

Fanon had begun his rst book by warning his

readers that its truths were not timeless. From thestart, he emphasized that the racial order of the col-ony would bring out the very worst in anyone whoselife was distorted by its founding mirage. All of theshadowy actors populating the epidermalised

world stood to lose something precious because ra-cial hierarchy delimited their humanity and deplet-ed the psychological well-being of perpetrator and

victim alike. Of course, those different parties (dom-inant and subordinate, coloniser and colonised)

were not affected in exactly the same ways, but thedamage done to both of them appeared in compli-mentary, relational forms. It always involved sig-nicant losses at the human level where the decay of

species life that had been prompted by imperialism,opened up a path towards authentic, human history.

I hope that the unfashionable, reparative human-ity he afrmed might start to appear less facile in the

context of global emergencies arising outside of thehistoric dualities of colonial power reconstituted asthe foundation for contemporary securitocracy.


19/147

19ARE TROUT SOUTH AFRicAN?

ARE TROUT SOUTH AFRicAN? OR:A POSTcOLONiAL FiSH?

Duncan Brown(University of the Western Cape, Cape Town)

Gazing at a river from the window of his writingretreat, yrod and ybox to hand, Duncan Brown

wonders what sh reveal about the historicalborders of indigeneity, about legitimacy in thelandscape, about belonging in the postcolony.

Where trouts the size of salmon throng the creeksRoy Campbell. The Wayzgoose (1928).

In a discussion with his colleagues on the breakfastshow of the national radio station 5FM about indi-geneity and national symbols, and what could char-acterise the indomitable South African spirit, theDJ Gareth Cliff asked the newsreader Mabale Moloiwhat sh was to be found in every piece of freshwa-ter in the country. Trout, she answered. Cliff cor-rected her, saying that it was the humble, hardy andalmost indestructible barbel, which can cross landand survive drought by burying itself in mud for pe-riods when the water dries up completely, which heclaimed (semi-ironically) was a worthy emblem. Asthere are rapidly-increasing numbers of trout farmsaround Gauteng where 5FM is based, and trout are

widespread in the waters (and tourist literature)of Mpumalanga, which is a prime leisure area forGautengers, Molois error may be understandable.

It does, however, raise interesting questionsabout sh and their place in the landscape and the

national imaginary. In this piece, which is fromthe Introduction to a book-length project, I focus

specically on the introduction of trout to South

Africa, and debates about their continued pres-ence here. There have been many studies which useanimal and plant species herrings, cod, salmon,horses, cattle, maize as ciphers in the writing ofeconomic histories. While I refer to the economics oftrout at various stages, this is not my focus: rather Iam interested, in line with my background as a liter-ary studies scholar, in the cultural and social issuesaround species like trout in South Africa, and more

broadly the place of that which is termed alien in

the postcolony.

I am interested in the cultural and social issuesaround species like trout in South Africa, and more

broadly the place of that which is termed alien inthe postcolony.

Several exotic sh have historically been imported

into South Africa: various carp species; largemouth,smallmouth and spotted bass; bluegills; rainbowand brown trout; and with less success, or more lim-ited range, some salmon species and golden trout(largely into stillwaters in Mpumalanga as unusualtrophy species). Twenty alien sh species are re-puted to have been introduced. Of these species, the

carps, basses and trouts have adapted best to localaquaclimates, and become an integral part of thesport of recreational angling in the country (and to alesser extent subsistence angling, some of it illegal),sustaining between them a host of magazines devot-ed entirely to their pursuit. The carp notwithstand-ing the 5FM newsreaders assumptions to the con-trary has established itself across the length and

breadth of the country, and the complexities of itscapture (involving patience, jealously-guarded andhotly-debated recipes for baits of various textures,colours and scents, and apparently a great deal of

beer) becoming almost a national pastime, especial-ly in inland areas. In some circles, the carp probablyhas the unofcial status of national sh (the galjoen

actually having this ofcial status). To complicate

matters, while Cliffs answer about the omnipres-ence of barbel is correct, the species known as thesharp-toothed catsh (Clarias Gariepinus) is a vo-racious predator which, while indigenous to parts ofSouth Africa, does not occur naturally in waterways

across the subcontinent, to which it has neverthelessspread partly through human intervention withdevastating consequences for endemic sh species:

the Western Cape is a case in point.There are two major species of trout in South Af-

rica: the brown trout (Salmo Trutta), which is in-digenous to Europe, parts of Asia, and Morocco, and

Fishing the Lourens

Photo: Courtesy Tracey Brown


20/147


21/147


22/147


iS MONEy THE LANGUAGE OF THEHEART? LESSONS FROM LiMPOPO

Bjarke Oxlund(University of Copenhagen)

Much has been written about transactional sex,gender and power in South Africa, while too little

has been done to examine the meaning of moneyand exchange in intimate relations. Bjarke Oxlundargues that there is a lesson to be learned fromhis ethnographic studies in Limpopo; namely thatin true mutuality romance and nance tend to

intertwine.

Doing away with dirty money and pure love

In most capitalist societies money usually standsfor alienation, detachment and the impersonal soci-ety. We therefore nd it difcult to embrace money,

which is seen as belonging to an impersonal sphere.The supposedly alienating capacity of money as ageneralized means of exchange is therefore also whatis behind the tendency to insist on a grand divide be-tween the altruistic sphere of pure love and the stra-tegic and calculative realm of rational economics.Too often money is understood as the root of all evil,as death, and as a means of exchange that erodes thecommunity basis of peoples lives. In short, money

has a bad name. In their edited volume,Money andthe Morality of Exchange, ethnographers MauriceBloch and Jonathan Parry have done a good job ofshowing that money is not necessarily impersonal,transitory, amoral or calculating. As they point out,it is particularly in Europe that monetary exchangelinked to sexual or familial exchange is either seen as

immoral or becomes a source of humour. Similarly,in an essay titled Marginalia: Some AdditionalNotes on the Gift, Pierre Bourdieu writes that it isexactly because the economic eld has been consti-tuted as a separate eld that westerners have been

so successful at dividing passion and interest. It isthus business and economic culture not money it-self that require us to suspend ordinary humanityto keep the personal and the impersonal apart.

Curiously, just as in the economic eld, the no-tion of love is often singled out and placed in a sepa-rate sphere. Pure love is thus understood to belongto a sacred realm untouched by the breath of death

that money supposedly carries with it. Love me fora reason and let that reason be love was a truismthat was often cited by students who organised aweekly Lovetalk show at the Turoop Campus of the

University of Limpopo in South Africas northern-most province, when I did eldwork there in 2006

and 2007. This proverb in many ways speaks to the

changing semantics of love in seventeenth-centuryEurope, where according to German sociologistNiklas Luhmann the autonomy of intimate rela-tions was established and raised to the level of re-ection, which meant that it became possible to jus-tify love simply by stating that one was in love.

Yet, another proverb that I picked up from theLovetalk shows in Limpopo was one that spoke di-rectly against the autonomy and separate status oflove and relationships, since it reads: A successfulman is a man who can earn more than a womancan spend, while a successful woman is a woman

who can attract such a man. The reiteration of this

saying was a rather obvious testimony to the inter-twining of romance and nance, since, in relation-ships among students (and between students andoutsiders), it was common for there to be an under-current of material and immaterial exchange. Loveand money thus tend to become intertwined in oneframework, in which commodities are transformed

Female members of the University of Limpopo Lovetalk Group

(2006)

Photo: Courtesy Bjarke Oxlund

Male members of the University of Limpopo Lovetalk Group

(2006)



23/147

23iS MONEy THE LANGUAGE OF THE HEART?

into gifts and expressions of emotion, while money becomes a vehicle for the expression of genderedidentities. To view material exchange in relation-ships as a tangle of emotion, things and power per-mits an appreciation of the combined agency of bothmales and females, as is clearly evidenced by the ex-tensive vocabularies used to describe the differencesin status and value of lovers and sexual partners.

A successful man is a man who can earn more thana woman can spend, while a successful woman is a

woman who can attract such a man.

Ubuntu and bridewealth

At the University of Limpopo students speak eu-phorically about the right one and romantic loveone minute, only to talk about additional lovers andmaterial exchange the next minute. The different

concepts that students use to designate a variety ofrelationships of love and sex are all related to ma-terial exchange and socio-economic status. Duringmy ethnographic eldwork I quickly learned that

it is enormously important for students to be inone or more relationships of love or sex, since it isthrough these relationships that one most signi-cantly enters into the social process of becoming aperson. The Southern African maxim of ubuntu/botho stipulates that the individual has to realize

his or her self through relationships of mutuality,which in the view and praxis of the Limpopo youthsI worked with is dened as the exchange of both ma-terial and immaterial stuff. This also means that re-lationships of love and sex are understood as open,uid social processes rather than as xed categories,

and that the material exchanges that take place in

these relationships have an important bearing onthe emerging gendered identities of both giver andreceiver.

In South Africa, the well-documented traditionof lobola (bridewealth payments) should alert anyanalyst to the importance of material exchange inrelationships of love and sex. In his seminal workon bridewealth, Wives for Cattle (1982), the South

African anthropologist Adam Kuper showed howthe system of marriage rests on the ineluctable prin-ciple of reciprocity, where Cattle were exchangedfor wives, wives for cattle. Kuper argued thatamong the Sotho-Tswana each gift necessitates afresh counter-gift, the exchanges of wives-for-bride-

wealth-for-wives-for-bridewealth ideally stretchingfrom generation to generation, which implies a cer-tain open-endedness in the exchange process overtime. In lobola practices there is no nality becauseit is a lifelong process of development and becom-

ing. Today, lobola is usually paid in money ratherthan cattle, and one of my interlocutors summonedup the huge lobola that he and his kin would have topay for his girlfriend should they take their relation-ship to the next stage: Close to a hundred thousand[Rands]. She is cute, man. Shes a woman. Shes

worth a lot. [] Like shes intelligent. Shes studyingcomputer science. She is pretty. Yeah those thingstogether they are expensive.

Many male students were quite worried about

lobola payments, and this was often a point of heat-ed discussion between male and female students.Outside one of the main halls at the University ofLimpopo, somebody had painted a grafti message:

Lobola, aish!!!. Since aish is a common exclama-tion indicating surprise, worry or sorrow, I suspectthat the grafti was the work of a male student, and

that it indicated the difculty that many a young man

experiences in raising the funds required to marrythe woman he desires. On many occasions, I have

witnessed girls provoking youths over the enormous

lobola payments that they would urge their fathersto demand for them in view of the fact that they

were educated and thus had the prospect of earningmoney for the rest of their lives. An alternative in-terpretation of the grafti message may be that it is,

instead, the work of a young woman who has dif-culty marrying a boyfriend of no means. Either way,the message highlights how important material ex-change is for the forming of the conjugal bond andfor many other bonds for that matter. For instance,

one female student said to me: My uncle loves me;he sends me money.

Towards a reciprocity of love and money

The French sociologist Marcel Mauss famously ar-gued in The Giftthat the giving of an object creates

Grafti found outside one of the lecture halls



24/147


an inherent obligation on the part of the receiverto reciprocate the gift. The range of exchanges thatresult from this obligation is potentially endless be-cause the individual gift can never be fully recovered,and the mutual obligations therefore come to formthe basis of human solidarity. Given the signicance

attached to giving and sharing under the moral idi-om ofubuntu/botho, the South African context calls

for attention to be given to the obligation to give inthe rst place. Thus, early 20th century ethnogra-phers stressed the entitlements to gifts, hospitalityand assistance that were held by kin among blackSouth Africans. Actually, Mauss himself recognizedthat the obligation to give is no less important thanthe obligation to reciprocate, although his famous

book mostly focused on the latter. It seems perhapsa minor detail, but I hold that, as an idiom for lo-cal morality, ubuntu/botho includes the imperativeto be generous and that in many respects the obli-

gation to give therefore features more prominentlythan the obligation to reciprocate. Overall, thesedynamics resonate with Bourdieus observation thatgenerosity is not an individual calculus, but formspart of the habitus. According to Bourdieu, the ma-

jor characteristic of the gift is therefore its ambigu-ity, which emanates from the pretence of generos-ity that is followed by the logic of the obligation toreciprocate (1996). This leads Bourdieu to concludethat it is the time lapse between the gift and the

counter-gift that makes it possible to mask the in-herent contradiction.

ubuntu/botho includes the imperative to begenerous and the obligation to give thereforefeatures more prominently than the obligation toreciprocate

It is therefore not surprising that the temporal di-mension and the explicitly negotiated transaction

was a determining factor in how students at theUniversity of Limpopo responded to my questionsabout how they would dene prostitution. They ex-plained that the immediacy and the specicity of the

transaction is how prostitution sets itself apart fromall other short- or long-term relations. Therefore, I

would like to advocate an interpretive approach thatfocuses on the reciprocity not just of romance andnance, but also of the exchange of love, sex and

materiality. Firstly, a focus on reciprocity enableslove, sex and relationships to be viewed as phenom-ena that are always in process, rather than xed and

commoditized entities. Secondly, the concept of rec-iprocity opens up a path to the exchange of every-thing, from care and comfort, kisses and body uids,

presents and money, SMSs and love letters, to aca-demic support and sexual pleasure.

The right one and the other ones

My interest in the overlapping idioms of romanceand nance was initially sparked by a familiarization

with the ourishing township lingo of consump-tion-based metaphors of lovers and relationships.The ideal marriage partner is known as the regte,

Afrikaans for the right one. Informants translatedthis as a steady boyfriend or girlfriend in English.

You may keep a regte in your home area, while at thesame time engaging in more or less steady relation-ships on campus. Alternative concepts offered by themale students for the right one were: the madam,mother of the nation, the number one, the rst

lady or the Mercedes. The less steady relations areknown under a variety of concepts and metaphors,

the main ones being course pushers, cherries (makh-wapheni), cheese-boys and cheese-girls, ministersand chickens. The different partner concepts are notmutually exclusive, and the statuses of relationshipsare uid and vary over time, which ties in with an

understanding of relationships as always in process,developing and becoming.

In the literature on transactional sex one can

detect a gendered assumption being made aboutwho is the giver and who is the receiver. Yet, it isquite possible for the gendered expectations of re-lationship exchanges to be reversed because of thegreater socio-economic status of the girl. Indeed,in some cases, female students were better off thantheir male peers in terms of money because theycame from families with resources, and sometimes

because they were dating older business men. Thelatter came to campus in their vehicles to pick up thegirls in order to take them to town or the local mall,

where they would provide for them. Meanwhile,many of the male students dated younger girls fromthe secondary schools in the surrounding townshiparea, who were easier to impress with petty cash andtheir status as university students. Paradoxically,even though there was a fairly equal distributionof wealth within the student community itself, in a

way both male and female students produced the in-equality in their relationships by intentionally going

with persons of a different age and socio-economic

status than themselves. This asymmetrical view ofrelationships in no way made up a totality, since forboth male and female students it was not uncom-mon to have relationships both on and off campus.Further, in the education context of campus, aca-demic skills and knowledge also became important


25/147

25iS MONEy THE LANGUAGE OF THE HEART?

as social capital and entered into the dynamics ofrelationships.

Course pushers, cheese-boys and ministers

The most frequently evoked partner category at theUniversity of Limpopo was probably that of a coursepusher, which refers specically to the university

context in which this study takes place. At rst I un-derstood the concept exclusively as a relationshipbetween a rst-year female student and a second- or

third-year male student, who could show her aroundon campus and help her out with her academic as-signments and preparations for exams. Accordingto other, later explanations, I came to understandcourse pushing as a more equal exercise in termsof gender dynamics. Since opportunities for leisuretime activities on campus were minimal, many stu-dents claimed that campus life was so monotonous

that they needed to have a course pusher to be ableto cope. This implies that the emphasis is on satis-fying each others emotional, physical and materialneeds while trying to move ahead with ones stud-ies. At the University of Limpopo as in most otherplaces I would argue it is often difcult to divide

one need from the other at all sharply, and conse-quently the different relationship categories came tobe overlapping and uid.

The trends concerning reciprocity in relation-

ships were most vividly conrmed by the allego-ries used by some of the female students when theytalked about their male providers. The most com-mon concept was that of a Minister: the Ministerof Transport (often a taxi-driver or somebody witha car), the Minister of Telecommunications (theone who can buy airtime for the cell phone), the

Minister of Finance (the one who dishes out cash) orthe Minister of Education (the one who assists withacademic work, or a boyfriend who is a lecturer).

Another widely used metaphor is that of the chicken,which refers to men who can be plucked for food or

other daily necessities. Female students would oftenrefer to the need for the three Cs: a car, cash and acell phone (sometimes clothes), which has also beennoted by other scholars in South Africa.

Quite often, students would also talk about an-other gure beginning with a C namely that of

the cheese-boy or the cheese-girl. In a literal sense,the concept of the cheese-boy refers to young menfrom well-resourced backgrounds who could af-ford to eat cheese for breakfast if they so chose. In

his relationships there will be a clear emphasis onmaterial exchanges, since he can afford to take hisgirlfriends to the local mall and spoil them at cafsand at the cinema. On campus a cheese-boy usuallytakes on the more moderate role of someone whohas everything in his room a PC, a TV, a stereo,as one male student phrased it, but it can also be

someone who has the means to buy airtime vouch-ers for his girlfriend (which may eventually makehim the Minister of Telecommunications). In mostdescriptions cheese-boys sound like supercial guys

who only take an interest in image and material con-sumption, and who spend their resources in waysthat will provide access to sex and add symbols ofstatus to their social standing. Nonetheless, many

youths talk of the image of a cheese-boy with envy intheir voices, and even more complain that their poorsocio-economic status makes it difcult for them to

get a girlfriend because the girls have become so ma-terially demanding.

Not everybody agrees that there is such a personas a cheese-girl. To some, though, a girl who is welloff in socio-economic terms automatically becomesa cheese-girl in a relationship involving love or sex.

According to a somewhat stereotypical account ofthe cheese-girl, she does not live up to prevailing

standards of beauty and is slightly marginal in socialterms, since girls are supposed to be normal andsubservient, while guys must have status and achieveprominence. Therefore it is potentially emasculatingfor a guy to date a cheese-girl, but that does not nec-essarily mean that it is a bad thing after all. Three ofthe male students whom I knew claimed to have dat-ed cheese-girls and that it was good. Furthermore,they said that their male peers fully understood andaccepted their activities due to the comforts of love,

respect and material benets that they enjoyed inthese relationships.

Towards a reciprocity of love

When we look to theories of exchange and reci-procity it appears that in most cases it would be

Hip billboard message from the South African LoveLife

campaign



26/147


inappropriate to talk of transactional sex when inter-preting relationships that are underpinned by mate-rial exchange amongst students in Limpopo. In fact,if scholars in Europe and North America were more

willing to launch studies of exchanges of materialand immaterial goods in so-called love-marriagesin the west, it would probably be quite easy to dem-onstrate that there is much more transactional stuff

going on than we are often led to believe. Whereasstudents at Turoop campus talk endlessly about

the material exchanges involved in their relation-ships, many westerners would probably make an at-tempt to under-communicate such dynamics, whichare not seen as appropriate from a moral point of

view due to the prevailing understanding of moneyin western culture.

Furthermore, as a general rule, the social benet

schemes from which people living in welfare statesstand to benet in times of crisis are seldom avail -

able in South Africa. Hence, one would always ex-pect the focus on material comfort to be more explic-it in intimate relationships in contexts without suchbenet schemes. Not only does this highlight that

the intertwining of romance and nance has partic-ular social meanings over and above the cynical andstrategic exchange of sex for money. It also points tothe capacity of money to convey and communicateemotions of love and respect. Whereas much gen-der research in South Africa has treated the material

exchanges involved in relationships as transactionaldynamics that serve to underscore the power of menonly, the concept of a reciprocity of love points tobroader denitions of exchange that involve differ-ing notions of personhood, identity creation and so-cial becoming.

the intertwining of romance and nance has

particular social meanings over and above the

cynical and strategic exchange of sex for money

Students thus nd it very easy to distinguish be-tween prostitution and other sorts of relationshipsthat involve material exchange. Interestingly, themajority of exchange processes alluded to here in-

volved female as well as male agency, and it shouldbe understood that among peers it is a regular oc-currence that it is the woman who has the upperhand nancially. Based on these insights one can

easily appreciate how students juggle different in-terpretations of what the exchange processes of aspecic relationship make of them. In this regard

it is not simply a question of becoming a man ora woman, but rather that one emerges as a minis-ter, a course pusher, a cherry, the regte, a chickenor a cheese-boy (or something else), depending on

whether it was money, respect, academic assistance,sex or something else that was exchanged at the timeof denition. It also tells us that in order to get ahead

in his or her social becoming, a young person mustbe able to engage in relationships that involve thereciprocity of the material and the immaterial. It isexchange that makes for social relationships in therst place, and the continued reciprocity that keeps

the relationship going. Therefore, are we not rightto say that money talks and that money is like alanguage that can be used to communicate mattersof the heart? Quite clearly, students in Limpopo arenot afraid of the intertwining of love, sex and money what about you?Gate Three: The student entrance of the Turoop Campus,

University of Limpopo



27/147

27THE cOLLEcTOR OF ART

THE cOLLEcTOR OF ART

Cobi Labuscagne(WISER, University of the Witwatersrand,Johannesburg)

How are lives lived with art? Why do people buyworks of art, and what roles do the works play

in collectors lives? What are the relationshipsbetween private and public collections withregard to the curatorship of national heritage?Cobi Labuscagne visits private art collectors andtheir collections in Johannesburg and discovers anetwork of private activity that may constitute thenations future archive.

In 2009 a collective called, Empty Ofce embarked

on a project that they called, Joburg Art Bin. It was an initiative aimed at encouraging corporate

and private art collectors to give back their art toa version of a public. For this collective the buyingof art and the hanging of art in private spaces wasan assault on that art works integrity because it nolonger had a life in the public realm. The name ofthe projects close resemblance to the Joburg Art

Fair, a trade fair for buying art from galleries, is, Ibelieve, no coincidence. I came upon the Joburg ArtBin project during my ethnographic research on thecompany that produced and owned the Fair. Along

a, perhaps, similar trajectory, a Wits academic re-marked in a newspaper article leading up to the rst

Joburg Art Fair that elitist yuppies are sure to buythe works at this event. While I was not that inter-ested in debates around art works either as goodsfor private consumption or as a public good, thesetwo responses led me to focus my research into the

Joburg Art Fair on trying to understand more about

how lives are lived with art.The collector of art, like the art public, is not onekind of individual, a fact sometimes lost in theorythat considers collecting as a practice. In a chapterinRevisions, a 2006 book on South African art, IvorPowell suggests that collecting art, as much as themore abstract and attendant business of discourse

generation, is an active and dirty process that takesplace in real, profane time, and in the always com-promised real world. Yet for Powell, in South Africathere is also a political agency involved in collecting

works of art as it shows art works at work:

the fact that a private collection is ineluctablyidiosyncratic at some level, reecting personal

choices, preferences and tastes also gives it acoherence that other species of collecting lack constructing a serious and systematic artcollection represents a dynamic rather than astatic engagement with history and reality. Atevery level what is demanded of the collector,as well as practitioners engaging at differentlevels with the cultural discourse of the time,is that art needs to be conceptually wrenchedfrom the morass of over-determination to whichit has been subjected. At the same time and in

the same gesture it needs to be revisioned andrecontextualised in ways that allow elements of adifferent telling of history to emerge.

Powell proposes that a persons private art collec-tion is at once about the collector, and allows fora recontextualised version of periods in history ofart, or the history of a place. Thus, while the worknaturally refers back to the artist, it also speaks ofa time in history of art, a place where it was pro-

duced, and, once bought, of the person who madethe purchase. Both Jean Baudrillard and Mieke Balhave theorised this relationship between collectionand collector; between the act or impulse to collectand social traits.

Agapanthus

lambda on metallic paper, 2006

22.5 x 45 cm, edition 5

Flickr: Nathaniel s


28/147


29/147

29THE cOLLEcTOR OF ART

been turned away, abducted from itself, its inher-ent value and denuded of its dening function so as

to be available for us as a sign

salon vol4 final

Documents