On the haunting presence of South Africa’s ongoing ‘woundedness’: APC October Research Development Workshop-turned-Dialogue, 21–23 October

In an uncanny, repeated twist of fate, as was the case with the April 2015 workshop at the time of the #RhodesMustFall campaign, the October research development workshop was in progress when the #FeesMustFall campaign escalated dramatically at UCT. Turning within a matter of days into a powerful and defiant national protest movement that shook South Africa to its core, this was the biggest student protest the country has seen in higher education since 1994. 

 

On Wednesday 21 October, hundreds of students marched on parliament in Cape Town to protest against the 6% tuition fees increase negotiated nationally a few days earlier. At the end of the day, news reached the university community that six of the 29 students arrested were facing serious charges, including high treason. In support of the now popular media-dubbed historic ‘Class of 2015’, the APC and visiting scholars participated in protests to show disapproval of gratuitous police brutality towards students. The police denied later that those arrested had faced charges of treason. 

 

Thousands mobilised in protests across the country and at many of its universities against slow transformation of higher education institutions, unequal education provision, and the related matter of outsourcing. A march on 23 October to the Union Buildings in Pretoria ended in violent clashes with the police.   By the afternoon of Friday 23 October, President Jacob Zuma and the ANC government announced on national television that there would be a 0% increase in university fees in 2016. 

 

Against this backdrop, the participants in the APC workshop took a formal decision to abandon the workshop and to carry on voluntarily with a protest-support dialogue, drawing on the research of participants where relevant.  The dialogues allowed those students who had leadership responsibilities to participate fully within the protest movement, and academics seeking to fulfil their responsibilities in the unfolding protest to do so with support from the group. These conversations were an attempt to maintain the momentum of the APC’s intellectual protest and to keep one another connected and informed regarding history that was being made ‘in the moment’ by young people on university campuses around the country. 

 

Visiting APC Honorary Research Fellow from Germany, Katharina Schramm, who also participated in the protests on UCT campus and who supported participants in the march to the city centre to drop the charges against the students who stormed parliament, noted that ‘being in South Africa at this time highlighted the global connections regarding the costs of higher education and their wider frames of reference’; and that she ‘was glad to be in a community of friends to share thoughts and observations about what was going on outside in the protests’. ‘I think the APC would have felt quite at a loss without participating in the protests in support of the students,’ Schramm further remarked.

 

The research of APC Honorary Research Fellow based at MISTRA, Xolelwa Kashe-Katiya, on ‘South Africa’s Heritage of Woundedness’, set the terms of much of the dialogue that ensued.  As Kashe-Katiya put it, the events around the student protests offered a window onto contemporary woundedness. There is, she contended, a need to understand the nature of this festering wound and also of continued "historical wound-making" that flows from the effects of colonialism, capitalism, neo-liberalism in the present etc. 

 

The APC conversation took the theme of ‘woundedness’ and ‘wound-making’ further into the #FeesMustFall context, raising, among other things, the issue of sacrifice as a key element of healing processes and the different ways in which this can be viewed, for example, the ‘ancestral sacrifice of a beast’,  ‘sacrifice of narratives of self-deception’ and ‘the sacrifice of collective illusions about our past and even our present’.

 

Although not all relevant research could be discussed as participants took to the protests on all three days, a total of 17 papers were prepared by APC scholars for the original workshop and read in advance, and these facilitated conversations around a myriad timely intellectual and theoretical provocations. 

 

Jo-Anne Duggan’s contribution, ‘You can’t get pictures of dead people lying in the mortuary out of your head’, examined how engagement with photographs allows us to embrace the ‘hauntingness’ of our history. In reflecting on Derrida’s argument that writing - and archiving - enables forgetting, a kind of consignment, it was asked whether photography does this too, or whether it does something different.

 

Especially when their subject matter is troubling, photographs may not play the expected role of bringing to mind a particular individual or event or evoking personal memories. They may have unexpected outcomes, such as inducing numbness in viewers. 

 

Richard Pakleppa, a visiting documentary filmmaker whose work includes ‘Paths to Freedom’, which tells the story of Namibian freedom fighters using oral history and archival sources, shared reflections on the notion of ‘haunting’ by spirits such as that of the young Cape Flats ANC activist, Colleen Williams, who was killed in Athlone in the 1980s by a booby-trapped bomb. 

 

Much of the research undertaken by participants engaging the established archive critically is directly relevant to efforts to decolonise processes of knowledge production. This was an important thread in the ongoing discussion.

 

The APC was also fortunate to have Nhlanhla Dlamini, a historian based at the Department of History, University of Swaziland, as guest participant in the conversation. Dlamini’s earlier research work on the Swaziland Oral History Project relates directly to the APC’s Five Hundred Year Archive project. His current work examines the race relations and political history of Swaziland. 

 

The following papers were prepared for the original workshop:

 

•    Zuleiga Adams: The Psychic Archive and its role in South African history: The Case of Demitrios Tsafendas

•    Erica de Greef: The Mannequin as necessary device and exercise in artifice:  Imagined and real bodies in Iziko Museums’ displays of dress/fashion

•    Kerusha Govender: Viewing Jokes as an Archive - Scrutinising the Historical Content of Peru and Bala

•    Jo-Anne Duggan: “You can’t get pictures of dead people lying in the mortuary out of your head.” Photographs, Oral History and Memory

•    George Mahashe: Exposure over Time, method and practice

•    Richard Pakleppa: Paths to Freedom 

•    Katharina Schramm: Race/Trouble, Genealogy and the Genomic Archive in Post‐Apartheid South Africa

•    Katleho Shoro: The African Studies within and Afropolitanism without: An ethnographic perspective

•    Mbongiseni Buthelezi: "Who's to blame for colonialism and apartheid?": The past in public discourse"

•    Xolelwa Kashe-Katiya: South Africa's Heritage of Woundedness

•    Mbongiseni Buthelezi & Dineo Skosana: The Salience of Chiefs in Post-apartheid South Africa: Reflections on the Nhlapo Commission

•    Charles Unwin: Show Trial and Historical Event: Civilisation, 'Hottentots', and The Colour Question. The Treason Trial of Andries Botha in the Cape Supreme Court, May 1852

•    John Wright & Carolyn Hamilton: Politics, political economy, and political consciousness in the making of the early Zulu kingdom: lineaments of a critical commentary

•    Grant McNulty: The Five Hundred Year Archive 

•    June Bam: The South African History Project (2001-2004): considerations towards a transformative interdisciplinary history education model

•    Lauren White: Plotting the Precolonial: History Textbooks in South Africa, 1980s – present