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Illegible Will
Coercive Spectacles of Labor in South Africa and the Diaspora
By Hershini Bhana Young Duke University Press
Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7333-9
CHAPTER 1
RETURNING TO HANKEY
Sarah Baartman and Endless Repatriations
I found myself grappling not with the safe residue or inert traces of history removed from the present, but with a vital, visceral plumb-line of historical ghostings questioning neatly marked categories of difference. ... Dreams become literal visitations ... actual encounters irrupting onto the scene like disavowed grandmothers.
— REBECCA SCHNEIDER, THE EXPLICIT BODY IN PERFORMANCE, 175
Given this book's emphasis on material bodies, recalcitrant historical events, and performances of labor, there are few case studies more appropriate to begin with than the ubiquitous story of Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman. Rather than focus on her time in France and scientific racism, this chapter develops two particular historical moments. First, I trace Baartman's "afterlife" that, through its relationship to time, reveals how absence and presence weave through our histories. Next, I examine the various performance traditions that situate her display in London, ending with the African Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior of Africa's suit against Baartman's exhibitors Hendrik Cesars and Alexander Dunlop in London in November 1810, in which they were accused of enslaving her "against her will." While it may seem counterintuitive to move backward in time, such a strategy refuses a narrative of performative origins. Instead, through this sequencing I enact what Joseph Roach has called "vortices of behavior" — those transhistorical processes and physical spaces that "canalize specified needs, desires and habits in order to reproduce them." What happens when we read Baartman's early years, particularly in London, through her repatriation and rumors of her missing body? Can thinking about her repatriation and burial refuse the closed circuit of scientific racism she and discourse on her has remained ensnared within? Instead of understanding contemporary society by making recourse to her past, how do our present concerns shape her history?
I begin this chapter, then, with a discussion of the present-day labor performed by the repatriation of Baartman's remains. Her return home, as Jin-Kyung Lee argues, shows how the "moral and material economies of death are mediated by individuals, households and communities who have a historical affinity towards movement." Like the exhumations of numerous displaced Africans such as migrant workers from the late nineteenth century on, Baartman's reburial reimagines a cultural politics of national belonging. For the post-apartheid government, the return of her remains supposedly sutures together a new figure of national citizenship. My consideration of Baartman's complicated burial, however, focuses less on questions of nation than on questions of will within the black diaspora. This chapter asks whether we can use Baartman's remains to rethink subjectivity as characterized by diasporic resonances, fragments, and inauthenticity. What do a plaster cast, a skeleton, preserved organs, and wax molds of genital parts — none of which are verifiable as belonging to Baartman — say not just about the "body" that was buried in Hankey and the way it functions, but also about the post-apartheid diasporic subject?
The second part of the chapter uses the stunning archival work in which Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully identify several moments of transatlantic performance that informed Baartman's exhibition in London. Using their research, I show how the convergence of ethnographic spectacle, the freak show, and the exotic display/sex inscribes meaning onto Baartman's body and the black female body in general. In addition, I focus on the African Association's lawsuit against Baartman's "captors" in London. While clearly not the intention of the litigants, the case foregrounds issues of consent that play out in the present. Descriptions of court proceedings reveal the African Association's reading of her embodied performance as one that resonated with the performances of transatlantic slaves for sale, especially in New Orleans. Using this comparison, I argue that Baartman's performances did indeed resemble the spectacular staging of slaves. However, the conclusions I reach from these resonances differ from those of the African Association, whose real concern was to establish clear-cut distinctions between contractual free labor and slavery (abolished on British soil only in 1807). I find the question of whether Baartman had signed a contract of secondary importance and instead argue that systems of free and unfree labor are versions of each other whose relatedness becomes obfuscated by the illusion of choice. Rather than trying to read the archive for whether Baartman chose to be exhibited, I engage critically with the illegibility of her will. To do this, I read her afterlife for the various ways post-apartheid figures have stepped into the void of her will, claiming to speak for her. Through close readings of descriptions of her performances, I place Baartman's embodied gestures alongside those of slaves for sale to conjure the ghostly possibilities of her agency within the close confines of free and unfree labor.
Performances of Death and Displacement in Hankey
Testimony in front of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) about the human rights abuses that took place in South Africa between 1960 and 1994 abound with the mention of bodily remains. From the "baboon hand" of Sicelo Mhlauli preserved in a bottle, to the brains of Sony Boy Zantsi buried in the ground by the policeman who shot him, one is repeatedly struck by the materiality of bodies torn apart. Death did not mark the end point of bodily violence, as corpses were hacked to pieces, set alight, and otherwise mutilated. Not only the murder but also the savage treatment of the corpse was used to inflict terror on the living, whose dead often returned to them as fragments — as "scraps of hair attached to parts of his scalp" or limbless torsos. It was no accident, then, that TRC witnesses insisted on the recognition, recovery, and repossession of bodily remains. For example, Joyce Mthimkulu took pieces of her son's scalp to a TRC hearing as a form of testimony, not just about the injustices of the past, but also about the continuation of violence into the present. For those without even those macabre fragments, such as Ncediwe Mfeti, pleas were made often for the return of some part, any part, of their loved ones. Ciraj Rassool, Leslie Witz, and Gary Minkley record Mfeti as saying, "Even if it is his remains, if he was burnt to death, even if we can get his ashes, the bones belonging to his body, because no person can disappear without trace. If I could bury him, I am sure I could be reconciled." Possession of the fragment comes to stand in metonymically not for the recovery of the whole body but, instead, for the ability to memorialize the dead and demonstrate the continued suffering of the living. By respecting the dead, the state (represented by the law) thus does not suture the wounded body together but acknowledges the injury inherent in the fleshy scrap. As Rassool claims in "Human Remains," "Heads and burials, bodies and returns ... provided an inventory of human rights violations and an archive of symbolic reparations."
From the late 1900s onward, the repatriation of dead bodies increasingly became an issue, particularly in the cases dealing with the bodies of resistance leaders and fighters who waged much of their struggle from across South Africa's borders. The state was incredibly reluctant to take on such a herculean task, involving not just a logistical nightmare of identification, exhumation, and transportation but also an economic quagmire of financing. Most individual repatriations were privately funded and facilitated. Starting in 2005, the state began to respond to the demands of the TRC by locating burial sites, identifying the dead, and returning corpses and remains for state funerals. Ironically, given their powerful historical complicity with scientific racism, forensic analysis and physical anthropology became key to the identification of the remains of cadres who died as political prisoners or were otherwise killed by the apartheid government.
Along with such high-profile cases, however, the issue of repatriation affects many South Africans who were not resistance leaders, soldiers, or ethnographic spectacles. Since the second half of the twentieth century, the politics of death and displacement in South Africa has been profoundly altered by the growing mobility of Africans, and particularly of the Xhosa peoples. Given the state's misuse of the migrant labor system, the forced removals of "illegals," coerced relocations, and the near-impossibility of wage labor in rural areas, "ways of dying" have had to be reimagined across distance. Rebekah Lee stresses the ways that community and kin have navigated the moral and material economies of death and mobility. "In what way," she asks, "has this more mobile orientation influenced the perception of rites and responsibilities surrounding death? And how have more mobile 'ways of dying' in turn created new subjectivities and new ways in which to imagine relations between the living and the dead?"
In the late nineteenth century, for example, Sotho migrants developed idioms and sefala songs of comradeship to contest and endure the dangerous conditions in the mines, the omnipresence of death, and the longing for "home." Consider, for example, the following lyrics: "I am a cut sprout, ever resprouting. A poor man has no place in the country ... Poor men, we are long-legged; You know we shall die far away" or "I am not dead; even now I still live. I am a wanderer of the mines; Sootho." Awarded little respect in life, Sotho migrants had little chance to be buried with any kind of ceremony, let alone the appropriate cultural rites, and it was unlikely that the mining company would transport workers' bodies to their ancestral homes. In fact, the mines established their own cemeteries at the start of the twentieth century and began unceremoniously burying Africans in unmarked graves. Eddy Maloka documents how Basotho miners responded by establishing the first South African burial societies, through which families were informed about the death of their relative and efforts were made to return the body to Lesotho for proper burial. He goes on to tell us that in case the body of the deceased failed to arrive home, some people "had a customary provision for a 'fictional' burial [involving] a ritual for the 'burial' of the belongings of the deceased," followed by customary mourning.
The repatriation of ancestral remains in South Africa thus has a significant history that deals with, among other things, disrespect and violence against dead and living African bodies; varying "traditional" and "Christian" rites and rituals around death; and the exorable link between death as material and death as symbolic. Our historically contingent interactions with and interpretations of actual bodies are key to how we imagine ourselves individually and collectively. Our treatment of the dead forms what Diana Taylor calls scenarios or acts of transfer: "meaning-making paradigms that structure social environments, behaviors, and potential outcomes ..., [the] portable framework [of these paradigms] bears the weight of accumulative repeats. The scenario makes visible, yet again, what is already there: the ghosts, the images, the stereotypes." Thus, corpses that are buried, exhumed, and reburied work through what Roach calls "surrogation," where bodies are reinhabited across time, allowing for the construction and diasporic transmission of memory. Surrogation works as embodied ritual, providing social actors with the means to reincorporate the corpse into various living communities and restore meaning to what is left. I would argue that this process is always incomplete. There are always pieces left over that make no sense, like a scrap of scalp.
Sarah Baartman was merely one of the traveling dead. How do we then account for the role her body performs in post-apartheid South Africa? How do we make sense of her fame, her spectacular homecoming, and her burial? Why is it that scholars, including me, continue to focus on her? Even if we consider the repatriation of ethnographic spectacles, she is not alone. Consider the case of "El Negro of Banyoles," the name given to a stuffed human body displayed from 1916 to 1997 at the Francesc Darder Museum of Natural History in Banyoles, Spain. According to Connie Rapoo, "El Negro" was supposedly buried around 1830 in Botswana or South Africa, then stolen from his grave and stuffed by French taxidermists named Edouard and Jules Verreaux. He was displayed as "Le Bechuana," or a person of Tswana descent, and the museum's deeply racist ethnographic installation went unremarked until December 1991, when Alphonse Arcelin, a Haitian doctor living in Spain, began a series of protests that coincided with preparations for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. Spain's anxiety about adverse international publicity most likely expedited the repatriation of the stolen corpse. The nameless man was repatriated and reburied in Gaborone, Botswana, on October 5, 2000. Unlike Baartman, "El Negro of Banyoles" remains an obscure, anonymous tragedy.
Rapoo writes that the reason for this discrepancy may stem from El Negro's and the Hottentot Venus's different "dynamics of identification and social relations: two genders, two nations, complex meanings of diaspora and assimilative tropes of tradition, family and postcolonial national belonging." Gender, in particular, as well as the global reintegration of South Africa as a beacon of racial reconciliation, played a huge role in this disparity. After the release of Nelson Mandela and the "fall" of apartheid, the eyes of the world were fixed on South Africa. Thus, the performance of repatriating and reburying Baartman became crucial to the country's articulation of itself as a post-apartheid nation with shifting identities, desires, and fears. Her corpse became a stage on which historical introspection, land claims, and an emerging concept of indigenous rights and rites were played out. In April 2002, the remains of the Khoikhoi Sarah Baartman were finally repatriated to South Africa after an eight-year campaign. People of Khoikhoi descent, particularly the Griqua, were instrumental in claiming Baartman as kin and demanding her return. The Griqua had not heard of Baartman until the genealogist Mansell Upham brought her plight to their attention. Motivated by the growing international interest and burgeoning economies around indigeneity, Upham returned to South Africa shortly after the elections of 1994 to become the legal adviser for the Griqua National Conference (GNC). In late 1995, the GNC's leader A. A. S. LeFleur II approached Nelson Mandela and the French Embassy, arguing for Baartman's repatriation.
Thus, three agendas — the Griquas', Upham's, and LeFleur's — converged to result in Baartman's return. Demonstrated knowledge of ancestral burial sites has been crucial to land claim disputes, as Lee argues, with reburials helping to "consolidate families' legal and material entitlement to land." For the Griqua, Baartman provided a way to consolidate their long unrecognized and complicated identity, their land claims based on that identity, and their place-within the new South Africa. Baartman performed their displacement and lent a name to their loss across time and space. Thus, for example, France was initially reluctant to open the door to what could become a flood of repatriations, given the country's possession of a large number of ethnographic bodies and objects from Africa. However, attempts to preserve national reputation, alongside increasingly contentious internal racial politics, led the French government grudgingly to hand over Baartman's remains.
France's actions in connection to Baartman partly stemmed from the nation's desire to obscure its treatment of an increasingly politicized and vocal second generation of African and Arab French citizens descended from sub-Saharan African immigrants who began arriving en masse in the 1980s. These immigrants and their children met with increasingly virulent racism and ethnocentrism, greatly aided by the growing popularity of the French right in the 1990s. France saw Baartman's return as a means of exonerating itself from increased accusations of racism as African migrants either struggled to eke out a living or continued to be deported. As Lydie Moudileno argues, for the nation-state, Baartman's return has putatively "delivered the ghost from its wandering 'revenant' condition," even while her contemporary counterparts still search the streets of Paris for the justice that is their birthright. This diasporic population remains "an embarrassing body and presence for French laws and Republican ideals, an awkward reminder that the historical circumstances of today's global immigration continue, in fact, to produce tomorrow's ghosts."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Illegible Will by Hershini Bhana Young. Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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