Gabeda Baderoon, Africa is a Country
“I recognized Cape Town the first time I saw it,” Deborah
Thomas revealed at a lecture she gave in the city in July 2014. A sociologist
who works in Jamaica, she knew instantly that she was looking at a place shaped
by slavery.
What do you see when you recognize slavery?
December 1st, 2014 marked 180 years since the abolition of
slavery in South Africa. Few remember that apartheid was built on the systemic
violence, displacement, racial formation and institutions of social control
that marked slavery in the South African colonies from 1658 to 1834.
In fact, for 176 years, slavery was the central form of
social and economic organization in the territories that would form South
Africa. People were captured in Mozambique, Madagascar, India and South-East
Asia to be brought as slaves to the Cape, the first and largest of the colonies
that would form South Africa. Though the Dutch East India Company was forbidden
from enslaving indigenous people at the Cape, the latter were subjected to
genocide and conditions as brutal as slavery. Over the course of almost two
centuries of slave-holding, enslaved people came to constitute the majority of
the population of the Cape Colony, numbering more than 60,000 people (Ross,
1999, 6).
Slavery generated foundational notions of race and sex in
South Africa, yet we have largely forgotten its role in our history. Our
forgetting has now lasted longer than slavery itself.
When will we remember? And what does it mean to remember 176
years of pain and survival.
Forgetting is common even among those people who are
descended from slaves, like me. As the writer and literary scholar Zoë Wicomb
has argued, this is the effect of the deep psychic costs of almost two
centuries of extreme violence, and the further violence of being blamed for
inviting that brutality. This has resulted in a phenomenon she unforgettably
called a “folk amnesia” born of “shame” (1998, 100).
But it is also the consequence of a sustained system of
propaganda that has diminished the meaning of slavery. Studies of South African
history written before 1980 portrayed the role of slavery in the Cape as minor
and its character “mild” (Keegan 1996, 16), a benign view also reflected in
popular culture through texts such as cookbooks, cartoons and landscape
paintings. It was only in the 1980s that significant new scholarship
demonstrated that slavery shaped all aspects of life at the Cape and its
hinterland (Worden, 1985), and slave labor was in fact central to the economy
and the culture of the Colony.
The legacy of slavery still permeates South Africa today.
Pumla Gqola’s superb and ground-breaking study What Is Slavery To Me?
Postcolonial/Slave Memory in Post-apartheid South Africa (Wits, 2010) takes up
the challenge of articulating the pertinence of this period for the
present. My book, Regarding Muslims:
from Slavery to Post-apartheid (Wits, 2014), examines the place of Muslims in
the confluence of slavery and the making of race and sex in South Africa.
Once you look closely at the landscape of the country and
listen to the people who live there, you see the inward and outward signs of
slavery’s legacy everywhere – in ideas about race and sex, in language, even in
curses. Terms of abuse like “kaffir” (a racial epithet used to license violence
against Black people during apartheid but that actually dates from the colonial
period) and “poes” (Afrikaans for “vagina”) form an intimate catalogue of
memory of 176 years in which people were property and their lives were marked
by brutality. Extreme violence, including systemic sexual violence, became the
norm under slavery. Enslaved women were subjected to forced prostitution, and
the Slave Lodge, which housed enslaved people owned by the Dutch East India
Company, was also the “main brothel” of Cape Town (Keegan, 1996, 20). Today,
the Slave Lodge is the national museum for memorializing slavery.
Seen in this light, the slave-holding period is the primal
scene for understanding racial and sexual codes in South Africa, and our lack
of attention to slavery prevents us from understanding a foundational time in
our history. What do we miss by doing so?
The historian Robert Ross writes that “throughout the 180 years of
slavery at the Cape, not a single man, slave or free, was convicted for raping
a slave woman.” The scale of such sexual violence is part of the reason that
South Africa continues to experience epidemic levels of sexual violence today.
Because of the high proportion of male slaves to male colonists, colonial
society at the Cape had an intense fear of slave resistance and consequently
slaves were disciplined through “the massive use of judicial force” (Ross,
1983, 2) and “violent and extreme” punishment (Worden, 1985, 4). It is striking
that a system characterized by such brutal control was portrayed as mild and
picturesque.
The imprint of slavery is evident today in forms of labor
that are crucial yet continue to be undervalued, underpaid and characterized by
systemic violence, such as farm labor and domestic labor. After all, as a
pattern of appropriation of people’s bodies and labor, control over their
movement and constraint over their access to economic independence, slavery was
replaced by other forms of exclusion after emancipation.
Wicomb’s notion of shame shows how powerfully emotion causes
us to veer away from grappling with slavery’s impact. Yet artists have gone
into the spaces fenced off by contempt and the propaganda of the picturesque to
recover memories of slavery, for instance, in the visual art of Berni Searle,
the novels The Slave Book by Rayda Jacobs and Unconfessed by Yvette
Christiansë, and the play “Reclaiming the P…Word,” produced by students and
faculty at the University of the Western Cape. The protagonist in Unconfessed,
the novel about an enslaved Mozambican woman at the Cape, testifies that
through slavery, Black women became “poese up to our chins” (2007, 320). In the
present, the word “poes” is a ubiquitous swear word, “scrawled on toilet doors,
station walls and schoolboys’ desks,” as a character in “Reclaiming the P…Word”
asserts, marking the subsumed trace of the sexual violence of slavery that
cannot be spoken of otherwise. To recall slavery beyond the veil of “shame”
would allow us to understand the continuing prevalence of sexual violence
against Black women, and the meaninglessness that is ascribed to Black
suffering generally – the ground on which apartheid was built – as we
contemplate the global resonance of the events in Ferguson, Missouri, and
Staten Island, New York.
And yet of course to remember slavery is not only to remember
pain, but also enslaved people’s “modernity” (C. L. R. James, 1962) – their
creation of new cultures, their evasion of official strictures and categories,
their remaking of received practices, and their splicing of language, food, music
and beliefs in ways that would eventually come to shape national culture as a
whole. It is necessary to remember slavery to be able to attend to the forms of
survival, inventiveness, and flourishing among the descendants of slavery. Yet
it remains important to attend to the inter-generational effects of systemic
violence and the interior and external signs of pain that it produces. As in
other parts of the world, South Africa’s history of slavery continues to shape
the present in profound ways.
How will we remember its legacy this month?
