Since 1652: Tortured Souls and Disposed Bodies

Senzeni na? Senzeni na? Isono sethu ukub’nyama. [What have we done? What have we done? Our sin is that we are black.]
—South African Struggle Song

We therefore make bold to say that South Africa is a country of two nations.
… It [black nation] has virtually no possibility to exercise what in reality amounts to a theoretical right to equal opportunity, with that right being equal within this black nation only to the extent that it is equally incapable of realization.
—Thabo Mbeki1

I would like for us to think together about the kind of moment and conditions of life that we find ourselves in in South Africa today. To do this, we must begin with a set of questions that will guide our explorative thinking. Using the living conditions of millions of Black and Brown people2 in South Africa as a reference point, is it possible that we continue to live under a particular type of domination that has been marked as “freedom” through a combination of linguistic, political, and legislative devices? If indeed our lives are enveloped within the power and politics of domination misrepresented as freedom, how might we continue to imagine an alternative world in which free-(from)-domination is not only a political philosophy but a principal condition of life?

Catastrophic Wounds

I would like to persuade you to consider the possibility that we, Black and Brown people, living in South Africa today are not living in a post-apartheid society. We are living, instead, in an advanced stage of economic and racial domination that began in 1652 shortly after the arrival of Jan Van Riebeeck in the Cape. We do not have the luxury of space here to rehearse the entire history of racial domination and its links to the development of racial capitalism in South Africa. We will satisfy ourselves only with pointing to some of the crucial turning points in this history. We do this not to dress ourselves up in garments of victimhood. We briefly review this history to remind ourselves and to mark, in our minds, the passage of time since the original infliction of what Anthony Bogues calls a “historically catastrophic event.”3 Here Bogues is thinking about historical trauma “as a social wound inflicted upon the body and self” not as a single event but “as a historical event of long duration [which] through repetition become[s] catastrophic, producing conditions and practices in the political realm.”4 This is a useful conception of historical trauma which we will return to and expand in new directions. The first task for us is to timestamp the history of our collective trauma and repetitive wounding.

Admittedly, it is difficult to clearly distinguish and untangle economic and racial oppression in the long histories of anti-Black racism since they reinforce each other. Nonetheless, we can still point to a few crucial moments in South African history.

Our catastrophe began with Dutch settlement in 1652 and later advanced both geographically and experientially through settler Dutch farmers who later identified themselves as Afrikaners. In 1834, these farmers moved inland in what became known as the Great Trek and their politico-religious mission was to “contribute to the triumph of civilisation over barbarism.”5 This thinly veiled racist mission had already displaced and killed many San and Khoikhio peoples in the Cape. As the settler farmers advanced east and north, they encountered and clashed with amaXhosa, amaZulu, abaBasotho, amaNdebele, and abaBapedi peoples whom they sought to dispossess of their land and cattle. These clashes, which the British increasingly had a hand in, began in 1799 and became known as the “land wars” that lasted until the 1840s. The Napoleonic wars in Europe between 1803 and 1815, which were largely financed by the United Kingdom and as a consequence of which the British Empire was able to expand, also led to the British taking rule of the Cape as their colony in 1806. By the late 1800s there existed a large population of African peoples who were without land and livelihoods and who were effectively “rendered voteless, rightless and voiceless.”6 This reminds us that in South Africa, anti-Black racism was almost from the outset intertwined with concerted efforts to deprive African peoples of their means to direct their own trade and commerce, and by extension generate their own human provisions through the use and ownership of land and cattle.

When diamonds were discovered in Kimberly in 1870, it began the industrialization of South Africa. The operations of diamond mines required a large supply of labor and Cecil Rhodes’s solution was to construct labor compounds or locations near the De Beers mines to ensure an easily accessible and steady supply of cheap African labor.7 Such a labor force was possible precisely because there already existed a large population of Africans without land and livelihoods who could be grossly exploited as labor supply in the mines. Alongside this was the displacement of Griqua, Hora, and Tlhaping peoples (who had been mining diamonds, at least since 1869) by large capital-funded corporations such as De Beers.8 By the late 1870s and 1880s the consolidation of the diamond industry had advanced to the extent that big corporations were buying out individual and small diamond miners and employing White diggers as supervisors and skilled labor.9 Furthermore, legislation passed in the 1880s such as the Mining Act of 1883 became explicitly racial by restricting Black workers from handling explosives. In 1889 another piece of legislation prohibited Black workers from any form of mining work without the supervision of a “white man as his master or ‘baas.’”10

The diamond-mining industry, like the gold-mining industry that followed, depended on the exploitation of low-paid, tightly controlled South African and African Black migrant laborers performing predominantly unskilled tasks. Competition from Black workers was eliminated by legislation and White miners could occupy the ranks of skilled workers, artisans, and overseers who were drawn almost entirely from the White population.11 Job reservation practices for Whites were further entrenched through the Mines and Works Act of 1911 (amended in 1925) that bound African workers to non-skilled labor in the mines, railways, roads, and building sectors.12 Similarly, the Native Labor Regulation Act of 1911 made it a legal offense for Black workers to breach their contracts and it made provisions only for Black workers to be housed in stringently policed compounds.13 It is this confluence of legislative (see also the 1918 Factories Act, 1922 Apprenticeship, 1924 Industrial Consolidation Act together with the Glen Grey Act of 1894, the 1913 Land Act, the 1936 Native Land and Trust Act), corporate, economic, political, and racial discrimination that became the foundation for class exploitation and White wealth accumulation, on the one hand. On the other hand, it was the ground for the systematic deprivation of African peoples of their own means of human provisioning and the determination of their own lives and future.14 Thus, the discovery of diamonds in South Africa was also the inauguration of capitalism as an economic and political framework that relied on the racist exploitation of African people.15 It is this perverted relationship between race and economics, commerce and gross exploitation of African peoples for White capital accumulation and monopoly that we refer to as racial capitalism. It is still important to understand that racial capitalism was one of two (the other being settler colonialism) crucial instruments of an ordering infrastructure of the world—White supremacy—“the presumed superiority of white racial identities … in support of the cultural, political, and economic domination of nonwhite groups.”16 In our brief revision of South African history, hitherto, the second instrument of White supremacy is also evident. Bonds and Inwood argue that colonialism and settler colonialism are projects of empire (and the maintenance thereof) but that the two are different projects.17 Colonialism is a project of imperial expansion through militaristic and economic instruments while settler colonialism,

focuses on the permanent occupation of a territory and … the eradication of indigenous populations, the seizure and privatization of their lands, and the exploitation of marginalised peoples in a system of capitalism established by and reinforced through racism.18

For the purposes of our discussion, we can thus understand 1652 as the inauguration of settler colonialism in South Africa and 1870 as the inauguration of racial capitalism, both of which are subsets of White supremacy as “the material production and violence of racial structures and the hegemony of whiteness in settler societies.”19 It is these workings of White supremacy that produce privilege as a symbolic and material system of benefits and protections for White people (which reinforces the presumption of White superiority) while simultaneously exploiting, dehumanizing, and dominating Black and Brown people to the point that their worth and contribution to society is measurable only by the strength of their muscles as disposable tools of labor.

When the Afrikaners and the British finally settled their squabbles for power acquired through thievery, thuggery, and pillage in the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) they celebrated by creating the Union of (White) South Africa in 1910. This achieved two things. First, it was an occasion that allowed the English and Afrikaners to unite, notwithstanding their differences and tensions, under the White racial category as a force against African peoples. Second, the 1934 Status of the Nations Act allowed White people to unify the land stolen from African peoples (Cape Colony, Natal Colony, Transvaal Colony, and the Orange River Colony) into one entity led by Afrikaner politicians under the auspices of the British Empire. A 1960 referendum established South Africa as a sovereign state— Republic of South Africa—and in 1961 the British Empire ended its rule in South Africa. Between 1948 and 1994 Afrikaner nationalism shaped South African society around five interlinked nodes of racial domination, some of which had been laid and refined since the 17th century through the legal apparatus. Apartheid worked these five nodes to near perfection— political segregation (setting up powerless chiefdoms under which Black people could not direct their lives and affairs), spatial segregation (land theft, racially demarcated land, and control of Black people in and out of urban areas), social segregation (micro racial segregation in sports, entertainment, toilets, restaurants, marriage and sex, etc.), racialized labor (White job reservations to protect Whites from Black labor competition), and education (mediocre education for Black people).20 Consequently, the basic and urgent human needs recorded in the 1956 Freedom Charter as freedom demands correspond with the five nodes of racial domination outlined above— land, water, energy, sanitation, education, and labor (and wages).

This is a good place to return to Bogues’s conception of historical trauma as a social wound inflicted over a long duration of time. First, we have just reminded ourselves of the scale of this wound by recounting the passage of time in which the wound was inflicted within the South African social context. Second and following Bogues, we must acknowledge the bodily dimension of this historical wound, which Bogues also speaks of as “power in the flesh.”21 This violence on the body is multilayered and I will briefly point to two of its dimensions here. On the one hand, is the skinning of the body from the land. We are here referring to colonial and apartheid violence working to displace and disembowel Black and Brown bodies in its thirst for land and all that land represents and generates for human existence and sustenance. This is a thirst that drinks the blood of mutilated Black and Brown bodies. A thirst that cannot be quenched. When Black and Brown bodies were not literally killed, they were displaced through forced removals from livable land and beautiful landscapes (e.g., Simons Town, Camps Bay, Newlands, District Six) to bare and boundless arid land (e.g., Manenberg, Bonteheuwel, Hanover Park, Khayelitsha, Langa, Gugulethu). The first people in South Africa to experience this form of bodily violence were the Khiokhoi and San people who were displaced from along the Liesbeeck River (named as such by Jan Van Riebeeck) to make way for the farming activities of the Dutch East India Company and the appropriation of land for Jan Van Riebeeck’s first farm. Furthermore, it is estimated that during apartheid about 3.5 million, mostly Black people, were subjected to this violence of bodily displacement.22 What we must realize is that this was a form and continuation of the “land wars” of the 18th and 19th centuries. This violence, however, works deeper and beyond the displacement of bodies. We are talking about violence that destroys livelihoods, breaks families, warps our sense of place and identity, ruptures our connection with ancestors we buried in the land, and perverts our relationships with the environment and plant and animal life.

On the other hand, there is a type of violence that specifically fixes itself on the bodies of Black men. This is a violence of “fantasmatic consumption,”23 as the White social fantasy to see and consume Black bodies in duress and destruction. This destruction of Black bodies must be kept at a distance to maintain the sense of fantasy which is otherwise spoiled by proximity to Black bodies. Derek Hook24 argues that Black bodies, and especially those of Black men, were “viable news images” beamed on television screens and pictured in newspapers during apartheid—for example, the burning body of Lindsaye Tshabalala in 1990 and other gruesome images of Black bodies in pain and under destruction in what became known as “necklace murders” in the 1990s. Even Steve Biko’s tortured and deformed body was shown in newspapers in 1977. I would argue that what partly drives this desire to see suffering and destroyed Black bodies is a nostalgia for colonized and White-controlled Black bodies, on the one hand. On the other hand, such a fantasy helps to keep alive the old-age lie that White people are superior and as such cannot suffer or cannot be seen to suffer in the same ways and from the same things that Black and Brown bodies suffer. Since Black bodies can no longer be colonized, owned, controlled, and suffered at will, at least, they can be watched suffering and destroyed at the safe distance of the television screen, newspapers, and in squalor along and across highways.

What makes this White social fantasy of suffering Black bodies so striking is the contrasting absence of suffering and destroyed White bodies on television news and in newspapers. It is not that White bodies do not suffer and die but these bodies are not displayed and consumed on television and in newspapers. The sensitivity, respect, and privacy with which suffering and destroyed White bodies are treated renders such bodies unimaginable and unthinkable. Where suffering White bodies cannot be covered up, resources are deployed to soothe the pain and restore comfort. The “poor White problem” of the 1930s (it was already evident in the 1890s) is one such case. The response was a five-volume report by the Carnegie Commission investigating educational, psychological, sociological, health, and economic aspects of White suffering bodies. White poverty seems to be on the rise once again as we witness increasing numbers of dirty White bodies caressed by the thorny hands of poverty while begging in the streets. These are White bodies that no longer enjoy the protection of apartheid and specifically that of the Industrial Conciliation Act of 1956 and 1959 “according to which the Minister of Labour had the power to reserve certain jobs for specific racial groups.”25 Still, the crucial point we want to highlight here is that Black bodies have had to be commodified, objectified, suffered, altered, and ultimately destroyed in the theater of White fears and insecurities, on the one hand. On the other hand, Black bodies have had to be subjects and objects of suppressed White sexual desires and envy. In this regard the stereotype of Black men who live with permanently erect big dicks has been used and exploited to no end. Even here we are still dealing with violence that operates through White fantasmatic consumption of Black bodies that oscillates between desire and disgust. Hook makes a similar observation about the Black body in contemporary South Africa:

The fantasmatic black body exists thus in two irreconcilable scenes: as site of destruction (the body in-pieces) and as image of physical perfection, bodily exultation, site of exaggerated vitality. Body in extremis coincides thus with the body in excelsis.26

The last point I wish to make on this question of historical wounds that become catastrophic because they are repeated over a long passage of time may already be apparent to you. These wounds, although mainly inflicted on and suffered in and through the body, extend beyond the physical body to the realm of the psychic and emotional life of a people. In other words, since 1652 Black and Brown people have been pushing against a system bent on denying them the natural right to expand their consciousness on their own terms. Every human being feels the pull of consciousness beckoning them to explore new things, expand in new directions, desire new experiences and beautiful things and places, and to mature in the understanding of oneself and the world we live in. It is all this which has been denied to generations of Black and Brown people who are expected to be content with a lowly place in life as “happy slaves” who must wait to be raised from this state by the benevolence and discretion of White people. This is an attempt to arrest and torture millions of souls because they appear in the world in bodies decorated with beautiful melanin. This is a spiritual catastrophe suffered by Black and Brown people over centuries. It is a psychic wound that correlates with the ways in which our Black and Brown bodies are disemboweled and disposed of to die in the filth of poverty. Our ancestors may be dead, but we have not lost connection with them. They speak through us when we think and write about such things, they cry through us when we sing struggle songs, and they move through us when the muscles of our Black and Brown bodies twitch and flex in anger. Why though, do our historical wounds still gape and ache and our scabs itch as if we are still living under the sword of racial domination?

Democratic Bondage Mistaken for Freedom

The historically catastrophic wounds of Black and Brown people continue to fester because we live under an illusion that South Africa is a transformed or transforming democratic country. To begin mapping the landscape of our intricately weaved illusion of transformative democracy we must briefly return to Bogues. In the same essay, “Race, Historical Trauma and Democracy,” in which we borrowed from in the preceding section, Bogues contrasts two experiences to illustrate how “antiblack racism as a structured form of domination … transforms human relations, becoming the framework within which the social is lived in America”27 and how “the black body remains the site of a historical wrong that American democracy has no answer for and is still unable to grapple with.”28 In thinking through this American situation Bogues makes two movements. On the one hand, Bogues reminds us of Frantz Fanon’s experience recorded in his 1952 publication of Black Skin, White Masks in which Fanon was forced to experience himself outside of himself because his Black body was encountered and experienced as a danger which is obviously not how Fanon experienced himself. Traveling on public transport, a young White girl cries out “Look, a Negro! … Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened! Frightened! Frightened.”29 On the other hand, Bogues cites the story (published in 2001) of a man, Ruiz, who immigrated to the USA from Cuba. Part of the story reads as follows:

Dogs did not growl as him [Ruiz] and police officers did not hose him. But he felt the stares of security guards when he entered a store in a white neighbourhood and the subtle recoiling of white women when he walked by.30

This offers us an important framework for thinking about the illusion of transformative democracy within which we live in South Africa. First, we note that the differences in Fanon’s experience recorded in 1952 and Ruiz’s experience recorded in 2001 is one of degree and not kind. Both experiences are outcomes of structurally embedded anti-Black racism that has transmuted itself to absorb and to survive attempts to rupture it, in this case, between 1952 and 2001. This means that irrespective of whether it is the 1950s in France, 2000s in the United States, or whether it is 1652, 1948, or 2018 in South Africa, our human relationships remain imprisoned in the intestinal walls of anti-Black racism. In other words, the technologies and techniques (e.g., settler colonialism and racial capitalism) of Black domination have evolved but the racism of White supremacy, as a way of life, has not changed. This means that we should guard against the tendency to see White supremacy only in historical terms and we must instead see its articulations in the values and ways of life in our societies today.

Second, since the substance and fabric of human life produced by the processes of colonial modernity that were set in motion in 1492 have not been altered, much of the world today remains incapable of responding ethically to the historical wounds and wrongs that it inflicted on Black and Brown bodies over centuries. This is partly because projects of racial oppression do not see their anti-Black racism as a problem and a perversion but instead see it as a justification, a permission, and a set of practices and institutions that generate ways of life for White people which are simultaneously ways of dying and death for Black and Brown people. In such a political and moral psychosis, democracy can incorporate the oppression of other human beings, free-trade can be the freedom to trade other human beings as commodities, property rights can mean the right to own other human beings as property, resistance to oppression can mean terrorism, and in 2017, the Premier of the Western Cape, overcome by nostalgia, used social media to remind the world that, “For those claiming legacy of colonialism was ONLY negative, think of our independent judiciary, transport infrastructure, piped water”31; and when Black and Brown people are offended we are reminded that her freedom of speech is enshrined in our democratic Constitution.

It is such absurdities that lead Bogues to argue that the reason liberal democracy cannot deal with the question and issues of race is because liberal democracy works through a limited concept of political equality. This conception of democracy attempts to deal with historical wounds and wrongs by including Black and Brown people within the fold of political equality and rights enjoyed by White people. A series of irreconcilable contradictions arise out of this conception of democracy. Here are two for us to think about. First, it admits Black and Brown people into the cult of anti-Black racism and then co-opts a small group as the political and business elite to be the legitimate leaders of the masses. That is to say, to be the new face of the bondage machinery which our new Black political leaders never really alter but simply assume positions of power within. All the while the fundamental economic structures of racial oppression are tightened, refined, and largely put out of sight to operate in the shadows. Once White economic interests are secured, Black and Brown people are then allowed to tinker with what may appear to us to be important matters because we perceive these things to be the cause and instruments of our historical wounds. So, we go to work to produce a new democratic Constitution, composing a new national anthem and later, we rename roads and airports after ourselves. All this is fine. However, none of it ruptures the infrastructure of White supremacy that generates living conditions for Black and Brown people that amount to decaying and death. Consequently, in a democratic South Africa, Black and Brown people still have to struggle, suffer, and ultimately die for the same basic human necessities that were recorded as “freedom demands” in the 1956 Freedom Charter—land, water, energy, sanitation, education, and labor (and wages). And then, when poor Black and Brown people take to the streets in protest and anger we are placated with ridiculous reminders such as “things are better now than what they were during apartheid.” It is at such moments that we get a glimpse of the fact that democracy was not intended to radically transform our lives but only to slightly soothe the bite of racial domination and suffering. Fanon succinctly summarized all this: “slight readaptation, few reforms at the top, a flag, and down at the bottom a shapeless, writhing mass, still mired in the Dark Ages.”32 Human life constituted by such irreconcilable contradictions not only induces mental health problems but such a life itself is a devastating mental health meltdown. It is this grotesque contortion of the experience of being alive that led Black people to cry out during apartheid “Senzeni na? Senzeni na? Isono sethu ukub’nyama.” This cry echoes today in every instance in which the lives of Black and Brown people are bled out of meaning and purpose.

Second, accepting the White invitation into liberal democracy inadvertently means that Black and Brown people must embrace a “logic that props up their oppressors as the standard of human value.”33 What this means is that since White people invented liberal democracy to serve their own interests, aspirations, and desires, the admission of Black and Brown people into liberal democracy requires, as Gordon suggests, that White people continue to be seen and treated as the standard of what it means to be human, progressive, civilized, cultured, sophisticated, scientific, artistic, innovative, and so forth. Consequently, today in South Africa, Black and Brown people live and are tolerated within the womb of White social and cultural values as the main framework of human life. This means, for instance, that upward social mobility for Black and Brown people generally amounts to assimilating into White social and cultural values and ways of life. These are values and ways of life that are bankrolled by wealth accumulated over centuries of Black and Brown oppression. What I am arguing is that the comforts, luxuries, privileges, and ways of life that we get to enjoy when we are admitted, through social class, into the Republic of White South Africa, were paid for by the disemboweled and disposed bodies and tortured souls of our foremothers and forefathers. That historically catastrophic price, however, was not enough. Today your body and mine are still “the site of a historical wrong that [South African] democracy has no answer for and is still unable to grapple with.”34 You know too well the micro-aggressions of stares, stiffened faces, fake smiles, clenched handbags, infantilizing questions and comments, being unseen, unheard, and unwanted—you encounter them almost every day. We are undoubtedly still treated as a “problem people”35 and our destiny is that of all problems: elimination—symbolically, culturally, socially, economically, intellectually, religiously, psychologically, and our suffering and destroyed bodies. This latter form of elimination is one that we actively participate in every day, and this is because our psychological, moral, social, and emotional death has already been achieved elsewhere. What is at stake here is the very possibility, for Black and Brown people, to live and die as human beings and to do so on our own terms.

Taking these two irreconcilable contradictions together, we come to the realization that the democracy that has been offered to Black and Brown people as an end to oppression is, in fact, a continuation of anti-Black racism by other means. It is for these reasons, and more, that after 24 years of democracy in South Africa we have not made significant progress in attempts to deal with historically catastrophic wounds of Black and Brown people. It is also for these reasons that race will continue to be a point of contention for years to come because it remains a crucial organizing principle of our lives and our deaths. The reason that our bodily, spiritual, and emotional wounds still ache with deep pain is because we live under democratic bondage. We live as “death-bound subjects”36 which is,

… living with the possibility of one’s arbitrary death as a legitimate feature of a system … that demonstrates that one group of people’s lives are less valuable than others’ to the point of their not being considered to be really people at all.37

In the context of what we have been exploring here, it is not cynical or hyperbolic to reach the conclusion that from the perspective of Black and Brown people, and especially those who are ravaged by the hyenas of poverty, post-apartheid does not signal the end of bondage but rather its advancement in new dimensions hidden in plain sight. However, since we are still alive, although at the precipice of what increasingly seems to be developing into a cyberpunk dystopia built on the wreckage of our historical wounds, we have the ethical obligation to continue to imagine and invent an alternative humane future.

A Poetics of Freedom

In this closing section, I would like for us to think about the call of freedom that still quivers on the lips of our ancestors and echoes in the valleys and plateaus of Black and Brown histories of violent dehumanization. To think about freedom today is also to admit to ourselves that the most important event in South Africa, from the perspective of Black and Brown people and our ancestors, has not passed through the birth canal of history. Our freedom is still in gestation, and it has been, at least as early as 1659, when Khoikhoi people fought with the Dutch over the latter’s increasing encroachment on Khoikhoi land and livelihoods.38 Since then, our imaginations of freedom and struggles against oppressive regimes have taken many forms—for example, rebellions by enslaved peoples; freedom petitions; the formation of political organizations; borrowing and refining ideological, religious, and intellectual traditions (e.g., African Nationalism, Pan Africanism, the Black Consciousness Movement); the Freedom Charter; labor strikes and the formation of labor unions; community led/popular struggles (e.g.; the Defiance Campaign); youth and student movements (e.g., the 1976 student uprising, #RhodesMustFall, and #FeesMustFall); women’s struggles; armed struggle; and the litany of basic human needs protests across the country today. All this, and much I have not listed here, constitutes varied ways in which Black and Brown people have been grasping at freedom for centuries. It is also in view of these struggles against oppression and for freedom that some scholars have critiqued the limitations of South Africa’s political emancipation.39 Thus, what I offer is a modest contribution to these long traditions and struggles for freedom.

I would like for us to consider how we might constitute our freedom at the level of our collective psychology. In view of all that we have explored hitherto, a psychological turn may seem an unnecessary flight or abstraction from the concrete instances of political and economic issues. Perhaps. Although I would differ, since such a view misses one of the crucial sites of colonialization and oppression—the minds of oppressed peoples. Biko was aware of this insight when he remarked “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”40 James Baldwin tells us the same thing: “You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger.”41 In other words, coloniality seeks to psychologically transform oppressed people from humans to things—“colonialization ¼ thingification.”42 Consequently, an important aspect of liberation struggle is the psychological metamorphosis of all oppressed peoples. Such work is now particularly urgent in post-apartheid South Africa as an antidote to the illusion that liberal democracy is freedom for Black and Brown people. We will make two moves in this regard.

The first move is to discard, completely, the image of the “Rainbow Nation” as a symbol of post-apartheid South Africa. The image of the “Rainbow Nation” played an important role in capturing our imagination as a nation already united in its diversity. The idea of the “Rainbow Nation” emerged out of and belongs to the democratic transition discourse of reconciliation and nation-building that characterized the first decade of the post-apartheid moment. The fundamental problem with the rainbow image is that it presupposes its own conditions of possibility without fulfilling these conditions. We relegated the work that we as humans needed to perform to make the “Rainbow Nation” possible to the image itself—we mistook the sign for the destination. Yet the lived experiences of millions of poor people in South Africa reject the false image of South African society as a rainbow. For example, regular protests (as a language of frustration and desperation) for basic human needs and the killing of miners in Marikana (as unambiguous enactment of state violence on poor Black people) speak back at and against the unexamined “diversity” and “unity” of the post-apartheid condition as a rainbow.43 Most recently we witnessed the starving of millions of people, for an entire month, who are dependent on a government grant while government and its contractors played hide-and-go-seek on the matter.44 It is these and other forms of everyday decaying and dying alive for poor Black and Brown people in South Africa that shows us that the rainbow does not extend to the “black nation” that Thabo Mbeki spoke of as early as 1998.

The second move we must make is to shift our focus from the image to the imagination. I am suggesting a shift of focus from the image of the rainbow to an imaginative culture of thinking about social and economic change in South Africa in terms of ways of life free from bondage. What might it mean for us to live in South Africa as a society committed to freedom as ways of living that create a humane world? Here freedom is not a destination but practices, processes, and an infinite grasping at a humane co-existence of a peoples, cultures, aspirations, and desires. This is to say, how can we humanely live in and with ruptures, discontinuities, errors, failures, successes, complexities, fragments, beauty, and ugliness that characterize human action and existence, without flattening all this into a singledimensional story of unity, stability, sterility, comfort, death, and simplicity?

Oppression and domination fundamentally attempt to psychologically create a particular type of human being out of the oppressed—humans whose humanity is emptied out of meaning. This is to say that oppression and its forms of violence and nihilism amount to a psychic genocide. We can think of this as the indefinitely arrested expansion of consciousness in its trajectory of discovering its own limits and bringing “invention into life.”45 Consequently, one of the primary tasks of liberation should be the psychic revival of the survivors of oppression and their descendants. At a psychological level then, freedom is a psychic rebirth of consciousness in its embodiment in dark skin bodies. What might this crucial life of freedom look like in psychological terms?

As Black and Brown people we would radically rethink what it means to be human after centuries of the erasure of our humanity. How do we redefine what and who we think we are in the world? Biko offers some clues: “Freedom is the ability to define oneself with one’s possibilities held back not by the power of other people over one but only by one’s relationship to God and to natural surroundings.”46 As a people who have been oppressed and who continue to live under old and new forms of bondage, the work of attempting to redefine who we think we are is an example of a freedom constituting psychosocial practice. In taking up this challenge we are, in effect, seeking to break with the mystifying and mechanical gaze that always seeks to reduce Black and Brown bodies and minds into a shadow of living corpses. This is a psychological response to colonial/colonizing structures of inferiority and their internalization in our lived experiences. This is also a political and historical project in which, by redefining ourselves, we simultaneously “[re]examine and question old concepts, values and systems”47 of the “European Spirit” that is devoid of “humility and modesty … and tenderness.”48

The aim here would be to form our own concepts and systems; to write our own histories and invent our own futures; and define our own values and practices. All this would be a contribution to the foundational work already done by our ancestors and contemporaries in imagining one’s own philosophy and practices of freedom. Here we would be interested not in theoretical human rights but rather an embodied philosophy of freedom—for example, ethical social relations; a politics of care and compassion articulated not least in the ways in which we are governed by politicians; and a valuation of human beings based on their contributions to creating a humane world rather than the profits they generate from the exploitation of other humans and the natural environment. In all this, we would be imagining a regime of human life whose ways of living are a response to the question: how might we heal our historically catastrophic wounds and finally create a humane world in which to live and die?

Acknowledgments

Initial work for this article was made possible through a post-doctoral fellowship at the Historical Trauma and Transformation Research Unit, Stellenbosch University, South Africa. I would like to thank Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela for offering me the material resources to research and write this essay.