In defence of the lowercase b

Black is a refuge. We can use it as a space of wonder and repair. We can put it to use to make demands—for respectability and to be seen.

Being attentive to the movements and uses of race is important when deciding whether to capitalise race or not. The uppercase B for Black appears to have snuck up on Africans. Like a lot of black culture, the capital B comes to our shores from across the Atlantic Ocean. It is a respectable B that demands white seeing because white must remain uncapitalised. It is a historical reckoning pointing to the hegemony of whiteness. I get this project and I sign up to its work.

Yet. I am attached to the small b. It is the b of Sylvia Wynter, Bessie Head, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Chinua Achebe, Miriam Tlali, Marlon Riggs, Norman Duncan, Aimé Césaire, Sylvia Tamale, Audre Lorde, Édouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, Paul Gilroy, bell hooks, and Bhekizizwe Peterson. These are some of the people from whom we learned about race and racialisation. What does it mean to abandon their teachings at the altar of respectability? In a different context, Christina Sharpe writes about her suspicion of the term ‘black excellence’. “I am annoyed by the phrase Black excellence. It doesn’t do the affirming work that many people who deploy it imagine that it does. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson gets it precisely right when she tells me that ‘Black excellence’ is the answer to a racist question.”[1]

This is a disquiet that I share with her. What does it mean to self-define in an extroverted way—for one’s racist audience rather than for oneself?  

For me, black with a small b has always been buoyant, shape shifting, fugitive, creative, moving, liquid, and evasive. It is a mournful formation which recognises the weight of racialisation, but it is simultaneously riotous because it is refusal too. An unruly middle finger rather than the last word. The capital B feels calcified. The veritable last word. It is unable to hide and evade. In other words, it appears incapable of doing the work of blackness. Survivance and livingness. Like Gladys Knight stumbling upon Boys to Men’s End of the Road, when I read La Mar Jurelle Bruce’s thoughts on his uncapitalised b, I felt a great sense of relief akin to recognition. Yes! Finger clicks. Bruce explains his use of the small b.

“I use the lowercase b because I want to emphasize an improper blackness: a blackness that is collectivist rather than individualistic; a blackness that is ‘never closed and always under contestation’; a blackness that is ever-unfurling rather than rigidly fixed; a blackness that is neither capitalized not propertized via the protocols of Western grammar; a blackness that centers those who are typically regarded as lesser and lower cases, as it were; a blackness that amplifies those who are treated as ‘minor figures’ in Western modernity.”[2]

It clicks. It resonates. Black is not only a description. It is work. It is pleasure. A tributary. Astride and rarely ever just one thing.

I turn to black for refuge. Not to be seen by whiteness but to vanish from its panopticon. To remain out of sight from the blue-eyed gaze. And so, when I submit my work to journals and am told that the publication’s policy is to capitalise black, the respectability which I am compelled to adorn does not resonate. It stultifies and moves against my intent and the spirit of blackness that I work with. It does not capture the thing I feel on the dance floor and my frolics in the ocean. Where is the soul in the uppercase B?

The lowercase b is not oblivious to its environment. In its movement across space and time, it builds solidarities, it rubs against others, and surrenders itself to being remade in relation. Since it is founded in heartache, it sees brutality and builds bonds created in solidarity. The small b is in pain when genocide occurs in Palestine, Namibia, Rwanda, the Congo, and Germany. Its antennas are attuned to the workings of whiteness. It utilises its cellular knowledge of survival and resistance to call out atrocities done to similarly oppressed people and beings. It chants— “from the river to the sea”. It sees beyond itself because it refuses the seduction of atomised individualism.

The small b is wily. It has deep reserves that it builds beyond the gaze of whiteness. Strategic sharing of its empathy and skills does not deplete the small b. Care is encoded in the small b.

Perhaps, instead the single use of b, we should opt for multiple possibilities. Capitalised, big, and respectable. Small, mixed, in motion, and boundless. There are moments when Black needs to tower at the pulpit, political rally, the lectern, and assert itself in response to the oppressive work of whiteness. Sometimes, one needs to be seen. This is important. But the black I most need is that which is out of reach of whiteness. The black of contradictions that evades arrival at final truths. This is the black of Nonqawuse and Sarah Baartman to whom we return with questions across the centuries. This black has no resolution.

On the African continent, the Caribbean, Brazil, United States and elsewhere, even if momentarily, blackness plays outside of the glare of whiteness. In a clearing where we speak in native tongue and dance in a boundless rhythm. In this black clearing, since there is no audience, there is no need for translation. A naked streak in the water. A playful, creative, and mobile blackness that is evasive and refuses pinning down, possession and enclosure. Blackness that multiplies in the ancestral realm.

The black that inspires and enfolds me is the blackness that gives us soaring jazz notes. Hugh Masekela’s piecing trumpet. The cinematic accomplishment of Moonlight. Zim Nqawana, Abdullah Ibrahim, and Fela Kuti. The devastating poetry of Keorapetse Kgositsile and Kamau Brathwaite. Toni Morrisonian and Bessie Headian literature. The lightening feet of Pele, the liquid motion of Simone Biles and the resolute spirit of Caster Semenya on and off the track. The writerly hustle of Zukiswa Wanner and Nick Mhlongo. The deformative lyric of Bob Marley, the wail of the Wailers, the multivocal choir behind Sankomota and Ray Phiri. The voices of Angélique Kidjo, Oliver Mtukudzi and Bongeziwe Mabandla. Black as ricochet and ripple. Streaking, supple, electric, queer. Donna Summer, Brenda Fassie and RuPaul. Irreverent dance. The category is! A making and unmaking.

As Black capitalises and swells in size, might we keep space for black motion encoded in the small b?  

---

[1] See Note 56 in Ordinary Notes, 2023, 91.

[2] See How to go mad without losing your mind. Madness and black radical creativity. 2021, 6.

Watching my mother

My mother 

When my mother was 60, her mother told her that when she was two, her legs gave in for a while. She learned to walk again. When she was in her mid to late 50s, her legs gave in once more. Her joints had begun to wear out from rheumatoid arthritis. Until my grandmother’s death at 93, she walked faster than her daughter, my mother. Two hip replacements later, my mother walks with an aid. Sometimes two crutches. But she insists on moving her legs. I am watching her amble now.

My mother turned 81 on Saturday. On Sunday, I will not run the Comrades marathon. I will walk with my mother. 

Dear Christina

It is possible, I think, to learn to love your mother more in her old age. To care more. From you, I learn new forms of care for my mother. 

My mother had a bad night. This morning, her hands and fingers are swollen pink. They appear to throb. Her feet are the hue and shape of sweet potatoes. A fungus lives in her toenails. Today she needs more care. I am happy to be home to provide this care. To make her bed and wash her feet. From your notes on care for your mother, I learn to read new registers of care. Last night before bed, my mother and I sang happy birthday to each other. Our birthdays are a few days apart. At the time of the singing, the beauty of the moment evaded me. But as I settled into sleep, the warmth of that singing sounded a note of care that carried me into sleep. 

Home is a nine hour drive from Johannesburg where I live. It is an arduous drive that I make about three times a year. Clearly, this is insufficient. Phone calls do not capture descriptions of the pain of swelling joints, the cumbersome gait of walking, and the joy of singing for each other. The brisk pace of ageing and the cough that travels through the walls of our drafty home. When I read the detail of the memories you share about your mother in the long song of your ordinary notes, I know, as have always known, that I need to spend more time with my mother. Time is care. 

I have feared my mother’s death since I was a little child when my father died soon after I turned seven. Seeing death at that age might tether one to the remaining parent with an air of desperation. Or, one might abandon care because the cost of looming death is too much to bare. My father’s death made my mother my lifeboat. I was surprised when she turned sixty. And then twenty years sped by and now she is 81. 

I have watched my mother age and it has been a wondrous thing. Her long life has allowed me to shift my love from desperation driven by the fear of death, to something more simple. Care. I too see the care registered in her eyes when she looks at me. I have learned not to chastise her for needing me. To lean into her needs is a joy. While she struggles to ask for help, my mother is able to show appreciation and gratitude. She is great at saying and showing ‘thank you’. I confess that I get a kick from her gratitude. It makes giving easy. Washing her throbbing feet and swollen ankles is rewarded by sparkling eyes. I live for the sparkle. 

Christina, I write this note because you wrote yours. As I have always known, writing gives form to things that may be lost in the busyness of everyday life. But sometimes we need authorisation that this is worth doing. We have been taught that black feeling and care need authorisation. I am glad for your example. It means I can write my mother while she lives. 

Writing

This reminds me of the letter writing era before cell phones. Here in the third world where telephones in rural areas came late, letter writing was very popular. It has all but disappeared. We have closed our post office account. P. O Box 118. Lusikisiki, 4820. Transkei. Over the years, I have found letters I wrote my mother from boarding school and then later from university. They form a chain of historical witnessing. A chain of care between a mother and her boy. 

My mother’s mother 

I like to think of my grandmother as my mother’s mother because I experienced her this way. She cared for her grandchildren but she loved us through our parents. Since my mother never left Lusikisiki where she was born, our grandmother was always within reach. This is to say, we saw her regularly. We sometimes lived with her to be closer to the school that, except for the youngest, all of my siblings briefly attended before we headed to boarding school. Sometimes we moved to escape death. 

My mother loved her mother. I saw this. Her mother loved her too. Two remarkably strong woman who live/d in a hard world. Two women made hard. 

My grandmother confronted me in my Master’s year of study. ‘You have had enough education now. It is time to give my daughter a break.’ I laughed because my grandmother was showing her characteristic care for her daughter. Children can be a drain on parents. On other occasions, my grandmother would serve as debt collector for my mother. If she discovered that someone owed her daughter money, she would go to them and ask them to pay what they owe. ‘My daughter is a widow. Have you no shame? Can you not see that she is raising seven children all alone?’ My mother would be scandalised in a good way. 

When my mother’s mother was on her death bed, my mother went to stay with her. To care for her by washing her body, tending her bed sores, but also to protect her from others who visit deathbeds in order to listen for confessions of witchcraft since old women are always cast as witches. When the moment came, the women gathered around her. My sister was there to close her grandmothers eyes and to hold her jaw in place by binding it to her head in a scarf. Women gathered in three generations of grief. Of care. A binding.

My mother and her mother 

Her mother cried when my mother married my father. Her mother implored her daughter not to marry my father. She went to her in-laws and asked them to speak sense to my mother. Her mother had married an unemployed man. Her white father and his white father arranged the marriage and fixed their problems. With the helpless son now married off to a poor hardworking woman of similar circumstance, their fathers —the white men could continue their lives. 

My mother married my father against the protestations of her mother. In the wedding picture, my grandmother wears a pained expression. Her arms twist with angst. My mother found my father employment and made him useful in ways that her father had not been. When my father died, my grandmother cried for her daughter’s loss. She had come to love my father too. 

My mother’s joints 

Sometimes, I imagine them as biological zones where autoimmune activity is furiously in action, working against the body. Places of rejection that swell with pain and redness. Where blood slows, constricts and congeals. At other times, I see my mother’s joints as archives that store all the things she has borne. A history that homes in the joints. Slowing her and mooring her in a past that refuses transcendence. What does she carry in her joints? 

When we are home, we massage the joints and kneed the constricted blood vessels. To keep alive, the blood must flow. The hold of the past must loosen so that it is not a dead weight. We laugh at memories so that the blood pumps and warmth reaches her frozen joints. 

It is when we are not there, that I worry about.

Morning 

I have come to realise that my mother is not a morning person, not really. Waking early was a matter of necessity. It is now habitual. And in any case, her body cannot take the pressure of being in bed too long. Sleeping in is painful. I am not a morning person too. But when I am home, I force myself to follow her laboured footsteps to the kitchen. 

She boils water to make a big pot of maize meal porridge. For everyone who eats it and for her many dogs. This is an enduring memory. Since we were children, she insisted on porridge. Sometimes with a stick at her side. Not all my siblings liked it. Porridge was the foundation before anything else could be eaten. I still eat it when I am home but I have replaced it with oatmeal in my own home. The foundation endures.

Next, I watch her squeeze a lemon into hot water. And then honey when she has it. Or lots of sugar. I turn away when she adds the sugar. She feels judged. 

We talk about the night. The wind of this place. Wakefulness. Sleep. The coughing. Her body takes a while to shake off the stiffness. The chickens outside begin to get rowdy. She leans out the door and throws handfuls of rice at the baby chicks. She counts them. She’ll give the older ones grains of maize at 8. There is a schedule here. I know why she misses home when she is away. No one counts her chickens in her absence.

She sees the time and the pace picks up. She needs to bath and get ready for the day. She disappears to complete her ablutions. I return to my room. But now awake, I read a book. 

Things she can no longer do

She was the quintessential rural woman bent over a hoe and working the fields and gardens. She walked to church. She led the singing. Her soprano pierced the roof. She awakened us with her singing. To manage all of us, she occasionally threw a tantrum that had us scampering. 

She ran a business that raised us. She worked it from morning till sunset. Or it worked her. She stocked it. She drove a vehicle over the hills, changed flat tires, got snagged in the mud in an extensive network to deliver goods to customers all over the hills of Lusikisiki. 

She attended funerals. She laughed hard. 

This was all before she got vertigo.

She still goes to the shop. She laughs more softly. But everything is a shadow of itself. The other things, she can no longer do. 

Reading

My mother was always a reader. When a book was good, she read it obsessively. It was possible to finish it in a day. In the bathroom and through the night. Now in her 80s, my mother is still a reader. Even her cataracts didn’t stop the reading. The genres of books that she tolerates are more limited now. She will not finish reading my book.

But, watching television is easier than the weight of a book in her hands. It is simpler for her swollen fingers to flip channels than to turn the pages of a book. You don’t commit to television programmes like you have to commit to a book. But she reads still.

It is only later when I discovered that reading was not normal, that I began to think that her love of reading was remarkable. She completed grade 8 or standard 6 before she had to go and work. She passed the practice of reading to half her children. The other half prefer television. I am the half that reads.

Ways of being

I am like my mother. I can see how this is a problem. Most times, it is a problem I embrace. Impassive and sometimes experienced as aloof. Difficult to approach. Deliberate. Eyes that cut.

Beauty 

She says she was never beautiful. Not until she grew old. Now, little girls gushingly tell her how beautiful she is. 

We are in the kitchen when her carer, who is also, strangely, one of her many children, suddenly says, ‘wow, you are beautiful’. The beauty is surprising. It startles.

I, who had never considered her pretty, see this too. It is as though old age has shorn her of her fierce independence, the hardness needed to raise seven children alone. Old age has sapped the hardness and revealed a beauty. Perhaps, vulnerability and need can make one beautiful. 

A wilting flower can be a thing of startling beauty.

From a work in progress. hugokacanham 

Leaving psychology to look askance and stand aside

You do not care about this news. But I write it anyway in order to record the moment and to think it through in writing. So, no, you do not have to read it. Watch a film instead. Scroll past.

I have left the department of psychology and the University of the Witwatersrand. To leave is to lean into something else. It is also to refuse. To move towards opacity. My sideways move away from discipline and academic tradition, is driven by my desire to stand aside. To stand aside is to be on the margin. Outside of the centre in order to cast a critical and sceptics eye. To glance quizzically. To sit with grey, ambiguities, confusion and nuance. Never committing fully. It is to be older. Perhaps to be jaded and burned. To recover and to claim a limited and liminal wisdom after the years of being on the inside. Taken for granted but supported by a small band too. To stand aside is maybe to be quieter, more deliberate and thoughtful. Less frazzled even.

For my scholarship, leaving Wits psychology is to adopt a critical eye that looks askance. It frees me to be suspicious of fads and single issue politics and scholarship. It frees me of the limitations of the psychological register. I want to use my freedom to pay homage to the black mother against the wishes of the patriarch. To tend to. To care for the dying and the dead. To applaud the death defying dance at the centre of black life. To sit with the filicidal mother while steadfastly refusing pathology. To look askance is to love the queer adolescent and to see their doting father. It is to look for shades and complexity in despair. To apprehend life off stage.

Unmoored from psychology as discipline, I move towards something new and less defined in order to learn anew. To read and to be in community with those similarly adrift. To sometimes study literature and cadence instead of models. To be lost in poetry and adrift from frameworks. To love my rural folk and to learn about my township kin. To imagine kin as estranged from blood. As care. As community.

To move from a department of psychology is to own my jadedness and to learn how to care again. To learn from those who’ve been burned too many times but continue to care anyway. Where does your strength come from and how do you nurture it? Where do you get the audacity to be so steadfast in your solidarity with Palestine? With Abahlali BaseMnjondolo and the Amadiba Crisis Committee? With Khulumani Support Group? I want to learn how you take care of yourself.

My move is motion towards forsaking borders, boundaries and rankings. It is to be in search of ideas and to trace their winding pathways beyond the nation state. For me, to move is to tarry on the Indian Ocean shoreline. To think from Zanzibar, Kenya, Mozambique, and the long Cape shoals. To imagine continuities where lines have been drawn. To be moved by Zimbabwe and Malawi and not to limit my care to Lusikisiki and Soweto. To forsake colonial standards and university rankings is to heed Grace Khunou’s advice that black standards are always in doubt and that we carry our value with us. Deep inside. To know your value beyond your employer. It is to imagine a universe bigger than Braamfontein.  

To move away from Wits is to admit that I am a teacher in need of repair. To move is to refuse shame for not being a teacher in the traditional way. It is to relieve students of my wilting eye. It is to move away from curricula determined by professional boards and teaching and learning committees for whom well tread pathways trump curiosity, discovery and the lessons of waywardness. To move this way is to be wayward. It is to embrace a truth I’ve known since I first learned to read in 1984. I am a writer. I need to give the writer a chance. My thoughts form in words. They emerge from my fingers. Haltingly. But with silence they form something. To confess that teaching is too noisy for me at the moment, is to claim my writerly self.

Even though I am moving to another university, the move is a kind of refusal. To move to the side and to look askance means that I must refuse the things that institutions require. My refusals and protestations are not loud. I avert my eyes instead. But this too is a way of speaking. I look away and skulk waywardly from the directorship and deanery. Managers do important work but writers need silence. Writing requires the lonely road away from the corner office. My home is filled with silence because I do not have children. Friends are few. Silence helps me to think and to form sentences undisturbed. For me, writing is to be in a posture of refusal. Eyes turned to the screen. Buried in books. Averted. Looking at life askance.

To move requires honesty. This is to say, I arrive at this position of choice after years in the trenches. I arrive here by entering the full professoriate. My risk is calculated and not totally naive or financially risky. Honesty needs me to recognise the vulnerability of leaving a comfort zone. A comfort zone with no interest in my ideas. Where my dreams were at risk of being weighed down by the egos of others. Am I bitter? Some. But I’m not sorry for the fifteen years in Braamfontein. Walking away is also a decision not to linger in the place from which I walk. Honesty requires me to pause on the tender place of uncertainty. To admit to the fear that I may not be moving towards the quietude I imagine. To walk tentatively but with shoulders square.

Even with feelings of trepidation, the movement towards something else is a walk of hope. Towards a different kind of community. It invites reimagining oneself. Casting off bad habits and being open to newness. It is to hold back the self-protective shutters we learn to hide behind. It is to hope that I will attract doctoral students that do not want to solve problems and heal pathology but want to imagine expansive horizons of black freedom and radical love. To tend to self-love and rage. It is to imagine collaborative projects that teach me humility and pause. To move away from discipline is to hope I can finally write about the black waters of the boundless ocean. How they make and unmake us. To move towards newness is to hope for space to imagine ancestors that walked here hundreds of years before us. To divine their words and desires carried in the wind. In the stone walkways of cities and water springs in the folds of village valleys. In the ebb and flow of the tide at ILha de Mocambique and the Wild Coast.  

To strike a new path is to allow myself to dream anew. To write stories and to refuse entrapment. To rely on my sense of survival and fortitude. But it is also to nurture the courage to walk away whenever my freedom is at stake. To value the freedom of errantry and to refuse stasis. To wander the pathways of freedom.

Ps. It might be interesting to read the piece in the following link together with the current piece. It might also be worth your time to check out a forthcoming book – Riotous Deathscapes. If this bored you, remember the disclaimer with which I opened this note.

Coming out as…

Bulawayo’s Glory at the faltering light of the window

Following on “We Need New Names”, NoViolet Bulawayo has published her second novel, “Glory”. This time she raises her gaze from the small story of ordinary life in order to tell a more country level story. At one level, Glory might be read as an historicisation of Jidada—the fictionalised Zimbabwe as it transitioned from Robert Mugabe’s near four decade hold over that country—to the “new dispensation” of Turvy or crocodile Emmerson Mnangagwa.

But the novel Glory is so much more than a fictionalised  history. It is an ancestral prayer and incantation that refuses to lose sight of an apocalyptic past and it’s ongoingness. It is a snotty cry of the living and a lament of the dead. A raging bull of fury at the genocidal Gukurahundi. 

The Gukurahundi is itself a preseason rain that washes away the chaff and grime of winter in preparation for spring. A renewal and cleansing rain that a branch of the Zimbabwean freedom fighters or defenders read as a foretelling—an invocation to rid themselves of the Ndebele dissidents who complicated freedom dreams in the post-independence glow of 1982. Bulawayo returns to the killing fields to give them form through tenderly rescripting them so that we might see and feel the full measure of violence. She inserts black women freedom fighters into the bush war that freed Zimbabwe from Ian Smith and Queen Elizabeth’s colonial tyranny. And in the first blush of independence, Bulawayo shows us how ethnic cleansing gave form to Zimbabwean unfreedom. The very foundations of that freedom were worm infested and foul. While Mugabe is not spared of Bulawayo’s scathing pen, she resists easy straw men. Instead, readers have to reckon with more illuminating forms of complicity that often implicates them/us too.

Bulawayo personalises the Gukurahundi through the character of Destiny Lozikeyi Khumalo. She insists on memory. The reader must feel the horror of Gukurahundi.

“In the coming days, in the coming weeks, our bodies rotted. We didn’t have medical care to treat the wounds, how would we even seek or get it when the Gukurahundi were crawling all over and we were afraid of the being finished off? There were also rumours they were waiting for us in hospitals in case we sought treatment. And so we carried colonies of magots on our bodies, you could scratch the creatures off and just watch them writhe. We stank so much we could hardly stand ourselves. We slept on our stomachs for months. Because our bodies were in pain. We rotted. Chunks of flesh fell off my behind, first one buttock, and then the other. Even today I have holes, valleys, ridges in my flesh. But why am I telling you when I know my words can’t really show you what I mean.”

And, indeed, neither documentary nor fiction can capture the real horror of newly independent Zimbabwe.

Now, reader, we cannot claim we did not know. Like Operation Dudula, when we stand in the way of people accessing hospitals, we repeat an old pattern of brutalisation. Flesh rots, black death proliferates, trauma sediments. Rage rings.

The characters in the novel take the form of animals. Much will be said about the animalisation of Bulawayo’s characters. It won’t sit easy with readers sensitive to how we Africans have tended to be rendered through the prism of an animal farm. Since Africans have been made animals, we generally strive to assert our humanity by distancing ourselves from nature. In Bulawayo’s account, we see horses, donkeys, cats, dogs, birds, goats, sheep and a range of other animals through which she narrativises Zimbabwean life and social class.

To say that she humanises these animals would be to simplify the complexity of this narrative device. As she shows us, animalism is a common spiritual practice for Africans. Our clan totems are generally animal figures and animals are imbued with human qualities. Majola. Trees like the Baobab and the Nehanda tree (so named after the hanged Ndebele freedom fighter) are spiritual zones at which we make and remake ourselves. Harry Garuba has shown how animist enchantment is central African world making. Animals are not less than humans. They are part of us and we are part of them. We co-constitute each other. Bulawayo follows a host of great Zimbabwean women writers, including Yvonne Vera, who long wrote in ecocritical genres. She self-consciously builds on this legacy.   

But as a literary device, animalisation allows Bulawayo to apply pressure on Jidada—with a da and another da, aka Zimbabwe—without concern for litigation and demands of fidelity to accuracy or truth claims that come from retelling a very recent history. Crucially, animalisation also allows Bulawayo artistic license. This is the lifeblood of art that seeks to create untethered from the vagaries of narrowly defined truths which history often demands. This births a few masterful characters like Dr Sweet Mother the donkey (Grace Mugabe), Mother of God the goat, and the Duchess of Lozikeyi the cat. Here Bulawayo’s pen is at its most majestic. If Grace Mugabe ever wanted to see herself in written history, this may be the most creatively evocative account she could ever hope for, scintillatingly scandalous or not. 

NoViolet Bulawayo appears to have been pushed off the starting blocks of writing this book by the momentous events of Mugabe’s ousting through the military coup of 2017. Even as the book takes us through the highs of that watershed moment in Southern African history and the heartrending lows of the disappointment of the “new dispensation” of Turvy, the scarf wearing crocodile’s theft of freedom, our literary life is all the better for this heartache. Bulawayo takes our everyday lives, turns them inside out at the faltering light of the window, and darns them with the most beautiful and tender thread. Africans are rarely ever so lovingly held in writing yarn. Readers will hind in anger and purr with contentment of the caress offered by the novel.

In apocalyptic conditions where Zimbabweans are shunned in South Africa and elsewhere, Bulawayo renders them as complex, complicated and beautiful. Glory casts shade over xenophobes who react without care for the pain that drives Zimbabweans out of that country. It is the accomplished highroad alongside the low rogues. After a long season of colonialism and decades of post-independence battering, in Glory, we see joy, love and hope alongside heart-breaking lows and hauntings that will not allow restful dreams. The desolation and hunger caused by political greed and the stranglehold of global capitalism is counterpoised with the verdant evergreen garden of the Duchess of Lozikeyi.

The book relies on a number of storytelling motifs. For instance, its creative uses of Twitter enable direct expression of varying voices that might be read as a choir of descent, lament and resistance. We might quarrel with the resolution offered in Bulawayo’s ending of the book. Those who live with ongoing horror might wryly smile at her optimism. The long night of African colonialism and independence tells us that there are no happy endings on the African continent.

To work with historical fiction of recent, and ongoing life, is always going to be a risky enterprise. In this case, Glory triumphs. It does not falter in its steadfast commitment to lives of ordinary Zimbabweans. This resolve to write from love and loss saves the novel from heavy sentimentality and cynicism. Readers may respond in different ways to her repeated motif of “tololukhuti”. While it sometimes jarred with me, I see her insistence in grounding the book in ordinary idioms of Zimbabwe’s Ndebele speaking people whose language and metaphors are often written out of history. 

The book takes some risks. In the age of sound bites and short attention spans, at 400 pages, the book is very long. Perhaps in seeking to tell an epic tale, it does too much. Its length means that it is not be the kind of book to consume over a few sittings. For me, it was a companion for two months. I travelled with it, took long baths with it, and when I needed to get away from work, I escaped into its painful but healing world.

So, while I do not think this book will be as widely read as its predecessor, “We need new names”, it will be a landmark classic that we will return to over and over. The risk may be worth it. Although the Booker Prize jury is still out, initial reviews paint a mixed picture. But beyond the prizes and criticism, time will be the best judge of this book’s failings and triumphs. Bulawayo has after all chosen to stick to truth over novelistic escape. And truth makes for uncomfortable reading. 

Hugo ka Canham

Author of the forthcoming Riotous Deathscapes

The last professor has gone

What will we do now that the professor has gone?

Prof Bhekizizwe Peterson cared beyond the gesture. He may be the last of that school of deep thought and care for ideas and for others. Generations of us whose lives he touched are reeling at the news of his death. We are devastated and left floundering.  We fear that the project of scholarly care has lost its last soldier. Prof loved us quietly and he looked at the academy with the eyes of someone who’d seen too much. 

Trained at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), a postgraduate degree abroad, and then as young academic at Wits which he never left, Prof BP experienced the cold wind of white liberalism. Even after he got his PhD, her royal highness, Belinda Bozolli remarked that his work was not worth the paper it was written on. But he kept true to himself and in his quiet unassuming manner, got on with making the films, writing the scholarship and nurturing the students that would be his true legacy. He left palace politics to others and committed himself to a truly remarkable project of braiding a transdisciplinary scholarship on whose coattails we ride today. Outside the university he co-established Natives at large in order to make films that would interrogate post-apartheid South Africa. One moment he was writing screenplays, shooting films, writing books, and the next he was supervising doctorates, teaching undergraduates, mentoring, sitting in communities across Gauteng — listening to the old and young narrating their lives, and creating spaces for community based creative outputs. Because his version of the university was not the ivory tower, he traversed these spaces without contradiction. Always with humility. He chastised us with care because he was invested in how we impact the world. By the time he was 50, Prof was a legend. A self-confessed old school academic that took accumulated experience seriously. Not everyone agreed with his style. He sometimes said, with some bitterness, that he was called ‘a patriarch’. But he earned everyone’s respect. An oracle of sorts that we laughingly, but with deep affection, sometimes mocked. I remember Yolisa and a gang of his former students on social media, laughing about something he said in class many years ago. He had exacting standards when it came to deep knowledge and slow scholarship. He did not play at the surface. His students now teach across the country and they are respected throughout the continent. African literature owes much to his care for depth. 

I remember being part of a fellowship panel a few years ago. We interviewed an impressive young Nigerian applicant over Skype. We unanimously decided we wanted the applicant at Wits. When we asked who his prospective doctoral supervisor would be, he gave one name: Prof Bhekizizwe Peterson. Last year, Adebayo Sakiru finished his PhD. He organised a number of us to do a roundtable discussion of Zulu Love Letter, a film by Prof BP and Ramadan Suleman. This was about 15 years since the film was first screened. We published the roundtable piece with a concluding commentary by Prof BP. The discussion can be found in SAFUNDI. Without really saying so, the roundtable publication was our tribute and gesture of care for Prof BP. Now I wish we had been more upfront about our intent. A declaratory shout of our appreciation and admiration.

In this epoch of busyness, he stood out for taking time and he was never in a hurry. Anyone who has ever spoken to him meaningfully will remember the length of conversations. In the past eight or so years, he partnered with Jill Bradbury from psychology to create NEST (narrative enquiry for social transformation) to advance the project of thinking across disciplinary boundaries. To watch their collaborative style across genres and disciplines and the deep humanity with which they engaged each other and others has been a teaching moment for us who see. Many of us affiliated to the project came to witness a scholarship of care. Grants for students, reading groups, field trips to Dobsonville. And he intervened when the bureaucracy threatened the academic project. While he was essentially laid back, he was impatient when students slacked and were avoidant. He would be exasperated and quietly intervene when the bureaucracy threatened to torpedo students’ work and well-being. I sometimes thought he cared for student’s work more than they cared about it themselves. But this model of care helped students to learn to care too. This is why I claim that he was the last professor. We who remain are not as invested. 

Prof Peterson has an impressive body of work but his investment in the collective project saw him edit important volumes on African intellectual traditions and do less of the work that builds a dazzling monument to his name. His co-edited book on Sol Plaatje is an example of how he supported younger scholars and cultural production. The last project he worked on is due out next year with Wits Press. This is a centenarian volume with about twenty essays in a work titled: The Meaning of Foundational Writers: Abrahams, Jabavu, Nyembezi and Mphahlele Across A Century. Prof BP edits this book with a younger colleague and a writer poet. Again, the intent is to surface lineages of scholarship in order to remind younger generations that much of the work we often claim does not exist, has actually been done. Our job is not to claim invention and discovery but to build and tease out. Importantly, we see the hallmark collaborative style across all his work. Always building. As a way of nudging him to talk about solo work, I recently asked when he would be following up on his book Monarchs, missionaries, and African intellectuals: redemption and revolution in South African theatre which was published in 1997. He told me that there was a longstanding project but that it was always being deferred by more pressing work. By this he was referring to his collaborative projects and his students work. This is his legacy to us.

What are we going to do now that the professor has gone?

Perhaps, we should recall his seminal teachings to us. To write while grieving means one is distracted by emotion. But I will recall just two of the lessons I learned.

Music and film are not entertainment to be played as background at the end of a conference. As creative interventions, they demand full and respectful attention. To attend to creative works with our full selves means that we should bring our affective and analytical lenses to the arts. The people that he trained are fluent in the analysis of literary texts, artefacts, music, oral accounts, film and other forms of popular cultural production. These genres are fundamental to African lives. Prof looked quizzically at the use of voice. For instance, at a symposium, he was confounded by the notion that we could see black dancers as denied agency when we’d watched them express it in a two hour blaze on the dance floor. Or that the dancers would not be able to speak for themselves if they felt silenced. To claim the silencing of creative artists is to imagine the speech act as the primary or only form of communication. He insisted that we attend to the creative arts beyond the idea of unidirectional speech acts from the conference lectern.

Prof BP taught us not take ourselves too seriously. Take ideas seriously sure — but not yourself. He wore track pants, sandals, and on cold days — a warm hat on his head. But our heads turned to him like sunflowers find the sun. For many, he was the sun. For his family, generations of colleagues and students who have passed through his classes, the sun has gone.

Prof BP became my mentor about seven years ago. In all this time, I have felt seen more than ever before. As COVID-19 restrictions changed our way of life, he would phone and then as he navigated his way on Teams and Zoom, the conversations would last more than an hour at a time. A few months ago, he told me that his doctor had cautioned that given his medical history, COVID-19 would be the death knell for him. And yet when he did get it, we were hopeful that he would recover. He had ten more years of teaching, deep scholarship and mentoring to do. We needed him still. The pace of the vaccine roll out means that our most senior scholars are at risk. Given the immeasurable value of senior scholars, this means that the academic project is at risk.

Yesterday morning, in the turmoil of the news of his death, I spoke with his long-time collaborator and she told me that they spoke almost daily. Long conversations about work, but mostly about life. She is at sea and already misses his counsel and care. But we (Jill and myself) are not from his discipline. We come into his orbit later in life. There are colleagues who have worked with him for decades and I know that they are shattered. We are crushed and adrift now that the sun has gone.

But as Prof BP enters the ancestral realm, I imagine that he is already a senior ancestor. One that we pour libations for and salute for all he did and what he means to us. We will have to figure out how to live now that the last professor has gone.

From ephemeral equality to vaccine nationalism

For a brief moment at the dawn of the pandemic, we were all disoriented. A new killer lurked and all of us – from Bill Gates and Richard Branson to the shop assistant in Kinshasa and the farmer in India were stilled. Suddenly and perhaps for the first time in a generation, we were all vulnerable to death. We retreated into our homes and communities and observed the skies clear of jet plumes. The oceans bare of ships. Roads empty. Looking out and listening from our homes, the world was strange. Bereft. We have not known such disorienting stillness.

But soon, capitalism rallied and ‘livelihoods’ outweighed life. While many of us who were able to keep our jobs, tried to recalibrate our labour over 45-minute Zoom meetings, another form of plotting was afoot. Big pharma and its global north government sponsors were hatching up vaccines faster than we could say AIDS. Here was another opportunity for entrenching western hegemony with the reliable recipe of capitalist greed. And eight months into the pandemic, Africans watched as the worlds real citizens began to inoculate themselves against this epoch of death. Canada, that blue eyed boy of democracy that gave out citizenship to highly skilled Africans and Asians obtained more vaccines than it had citizens. Israel rolled out vaccines to its citizens with an efficiency only surpassed by its murderous terror on Palestine. Vaccine hoarding became a by-line in global south virtual meetings. India and South Africa used worn out multilateral platforms to challenge vaccine nationalism. As predicted, they lost in that great tradition of democracy called voting. Even after the removal of the fascist from the American Whitehouse, the pandemic has not drawn goodwill. The sentiment ends at the gates. The strongmen of democracy hoarded vaccines they did not need while others died. Tragic but nothing new. Surplus food is destroyed in parts of the world while people starve elsewhere. Missiles are launched from the west to the east. The direction of devastation is as predictable as the gender of the president. The borders of the nation state are the boundaries of compassion and care. This is the way of the nation state and its marriage to capital. International relations scholars will study the most sustained and widespread border shutdowns in generations. Humans on one side and ‘no humans involved’ out there. The jury is out on whether the virus respects borders on a sustained basis. I know for sure that the subaltern has no respect for nationalism and its enclosures. And those most oppressed in our societies will continue to swim, wade across the waters and scale walls.

And so while we empathise and join global webinars that give the illusion of a flat boundary-less world, we know that some of us will likely outlive others based solely on the geopolitical order that decides on life and death. Time zones are not the only registers of difference in our left leaning webinars.  

More worthless than junk

The momentary disorientation of early 2020 has turned into the certainty of 2021. We know who will die and who will live. We know their nationality and we know their likely race. It would be enraging if it was not so familiar. This feeling and reality of different orders of life.
These are established grammars of dying. In the logic of trickle-down economics, a year later vaccines are slowly trickling down to Africa. We go deeper into debt until whole societies are owned by pharmaceuticals. Rating agencies create further matrices of junk status for Africans and South Americans. How does it feel to be more worthless than junk?

Africans who point out inequality are required to perform the labour of explaining why their governments fail and why they are more adept at asking for ‘handouts’ than producing their own food, manufacturing medicines, skills, vaccines etc, etc. I direct those requiring this work to read about the last five centuries. Preferably read the work of African writers and avoid the colonial nostalgia.

But we survive and Africans endure

Like we weathered and weather enslavement, colonialism, AIDS, hunger, neoliberalism, drought, floods and the pandemics in the in-between times, we will endure this pandemic. It will decimate but not kill us all. We continue to live through the stereotypes – ‘eat your food! Don’t you know that Africans are starving!’ We live through global wars and extractive industries that take our resources and lives. While we have the shortest life expectancy, we have the youngest and most vibrant population on the globe. As in Haiti, we dance here in Africa. There is no killing us off. Not totally. This is the home of survivance.

But does this mean that we do not deserve vaccines? No, despite what we know about the reliable logics of geo-inequality, we will continue to clamour for equality and assert our claims to mattering. We will not voluntarily surrender our lives and those of the ones we love.

Pandemic Noise

Now the stillness has been replaced by nationalist noise and the grumbles of capital trying to mimic a world forever past. Among ourselves, we argue about who is most deserving of scarce vaccines. Some presidents are first in line, others dither in zero sum politics of herbs, steaming and prayers versus vaccines. We bury some presidents. Opposition leaders die in the middle of elections. Intense pain and remarkable openings occur. Only the second African woman becomes a current sitting president as a consequence of the flux introduced by the pandemic. Or a heart attack. Nationalists call for the closure of borders and the vaccination of citizens first. The country with the highest incidence of the pandemic in southern Africa closes its borders to ‘protect’ its citizens. From who? When the nation state is at its weakest, talk of citizenship heightens. Fellow South Africans. A hollow sound reverberates in response. Illogic reigns in the noise of the pandemic. Police continue to kill those that security forces were founded to profile and murder. The state sponsored pandemic alongside the biological one. An old pandemic grating and rubbing against the infant pandemic. Both lethal. Students protest and push against the order of capital. Palestinians protest against tyranny. The police shoot in defence of capital because education cannot be for all. Governments bail out grounded industries like airlines and practise austerity where people’s needs are concerned. Church leaders wail for tithes to maintain their fleets. Twitter explodes with show offs who can no longer parade their wealth on social catwalks. We envy those who go viral even as the virus wrecks our lives. Rolling blackouts are normalised but suspended for the real citizens. Door bells ring and pleading voices perform their hunger hoping for bread and worn-out clothes. The middle classes, who are also the real citizens, threaten to evict the homeless from parks. ‘They litter, you see! Why can’t they clean after themselves? If you don’t give them food, they won’t hang out here’ – they whine.

Meanwhile, we bury the dead.

hugokacanham

The black leadership albatross in academia

I have come full circle on my views about black leadership at universities. To say it is unnecessary would be to miss the mark. But to say it is essential is to overstate the point.

In the past fifteen years, I have been able to view the university from different angles. First as a junior academic feeling my way in the dark, then as a project manager trying to support the research of black and women academics in the university administration, as the head of transformation at the university, and after my return to an academic role – as a mid-career academic with some senior oversight in my faculty. Another way of saying this is to point to an evolution from Mr to Dr and now to (Associate) Professor. In my Mr stage, together with most black academics, I insisted that black leadership was essential and I saw my job as supportive towards this objective. We had to normalise and insist on black leadership after apartheid had relegated us to bringers and fetchers. I celebrated when a black academic ascended to the role of head of department, head of school, director, dean, deputy vice chancellor, and vice chancellor. Representation at all levels was important to me. Much of my early scholarship was premised on the case for black management. And since this is a black majority country, representation mattered at all levels.

Soon after my title changed to Dr, I began to feel a new kind of pressure. People began to look at me as a prospect for head of this and director of that. While I was often flattered, this felt more like a negative weight. It did not take my interests into account and the timing was never right. It became the thing around my neck. I felt the pressure to represent and to pay back the debt of support I had received. ‘Everyone must do their shift,’ I was told. When I looked around me, I saw my white academic peers writing and publishing their work at astonishing rates (okay, not all). Research publications are at the heart of the 21st century university. We all have to teach. But google a scholars name by university courses taught and then google research articles. Now see what happens. Management and leadership are important but incidental to the academic project. No one remembers the great head of department but great books outlive a generation. To sit in at a meeting at the university is to read power differently. The professor may report to the Mr, Mrs or Dr in the organogram but we all know that the most senior person is the professor. The credentials that allow for seniority are accumulated through the habits of research. The next time you attend a live graduation, look at the order of the procession. When I became associate professor, the pressure mounted. I was now perceived to have the seniority and legitimacy to head this and direct that. It was my turn. Again. I watched as really great black scholars with loads of potential were lured into management and leadership. Unchecked, this can lead to the hollowing out or whitening of the heart of the academy. We can therefore have black leaders and white knowledge makers. It is knowledge producers that determine what generations of students read and write. The books at the library and the articles on google scholar are written by researchers. If we all manage, the deferred decolonial agenda will be in the hands of white academics.  

Not all black people are great managers. Some of us are terrible. We can be inept when we don’t have management experience, we can be dictators that terrorise everyone, and we can be negligent. But we can also be great, supportive and change making. The point is that these are not inbuilt attributes. They are not coded in the blood – in black and white. We are not all cut out to be managers and not all of us want to be leaders. Some of us are committed to shaping disciplines and leading at the level of ideas. This is crucial. At its worst, propelling black people and women into leadership can course deep unhappiness and alienation from what we really love. Combined with a lack of support and opposition, this can have fatal consequences. And sometimes, it is too early in our academic careers to abandon research and teaching in favour of strategy and meetings. This does not mean that we will never be ready and interested to lead. Leadership is important. It can be a place from which doors can be opened, funds allocated and progressive strategy formulated and implemented. But we have to think carefully about who and when people enter management. It means that academic careers require more thought and stewarding. My own early career is evidence of a mismanaged academic career trajectory. I detoured to pay my black debt to transformation too early. My white peers did not have this pressure.

When black people become managers in the academy, they can be cast as sell outs. As assistant dean, people have expressed their disappointment in me in public fora. The expectation is that since I am in a particular office, my presence erases a hundred year history and eliminates the dictates and logics of the bureaucracy. I am a magic wand or I am callous, clueless and have sold out.

The black public that is committed to the idea of black excellence (and embarrassed by failure) generally measures excellence by the title, size of the pay check and location of the office. These are important but they can also be red herrings. Fetishes for LinkedIn and Twitter. Mothers boasts. The black rat race is to be the youngest dean and the first black head of this and that. We do not sit in on the meetings where the youngest dean has to navigate toxic academic politics that are so entrenched in the academy. Invested in black excellence as spectacle, we are only there to retweet the picture of the youngest head of department. We ‘like’ the LinkedIn profile of the first woman to head chemistry but we are absent when the men do what they want anyway. I can hear the readers disagreement here. ‘But we have to occupy these positions too!’ Absolutely, but not all of them and not immediately. To be a critical mass in leadership, we have to be a critical mass in the classroom and on google scholar. I am suggesting that the egg is research leadership and the chicken is administrative leadership. To corrupt this is to misunderstand the academy and to misread power.

So what is to be done? The up and coming black academic that shows immense promise should be left to keep their head down and do what scholars do. Think, research and write. And teach. This should be nurtured. Colleagues, family and the black excellence club should not rub their hands in glee at the prospect of the next vice chancellor and the jump in pay cheque. This pressure does not nurture scholarship. It can be destructive. A career is not incomplete if one becomes a leading bio scientist without being the deputy vice chancellor. Some of us are good managers and the academy has good examples of this kind of academic. If I have argued against compulsory black leadership, it is only because to be a scholar is so undervalued. To live in the world of theory or to play in the interface of theory and practice is dismissed as out of touch with the ‘real’ world. I am fine with this. For me, an atheoretical world is a scarier prospect. I need not point to some atheoretical presidents who lead us. And yes, none of this is either or. There is always more grey than black or white. Most academics simultaneously research, teach and lead. But placing us under pressure to join the administration should not be the only option.

To have white leadership is not a failed transformation project. It is to imagine administration as service, as care and perhaps as a tax to be paid at some point. It is to buy time and space for black scholars to do scholarly work. To insist that managers should all be black is to require us to be the caretakers of the academy – operational managers. In the academy, leaders/caretakers are never quite the stars of the show. They do the important work of nurturing the stars. In this country with its legacy of black people serving white people, we just need to be careful that the stars are not all white and the caretakers black.

hugokacanham https://hugokacanham.wordpress.com/

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Anticipatory Grief

Over two months since COVID-19 became a reality in our lives, the picture of what awaits us is coming into stark relief. In South Africa, projections suggest that as many as 50 000 people will die. If we personalize this abstract figure, it translates to the expectation that many of us will die. Many will most certainly be infected with the coronavirus and those of us that recover will know many others who will die. The wave is poised above our heads and its collapse is inevitable. It has fallen with a thunderous crash in Italy and the United States and we watch the devastation left in the wake of the fall. South Africa and other African countries have been praised for their responses to the pandemic. But now public health experts are telling us that our efforts amount to a delay in the inevitable.

Our governments are working around the clock to prepare for the mass sickness and the dying that awaits us. When South African president Ramaphosa outlined measures to secure the services of approximately 73 000 soldiers towards the end of the extended lockdown, many were surprised. Why more soldiers than were used during the actual level 5 lockdown period? Perhaps to prepare for the impending labour of bearing the sick to hospital, carrying those who die to the morgue and then directly to the grave. Are soldiers are on standby to dig mass graves and bury our dead? Ordinarily one would describe this as a tad dramatic. However, after seeing the countless images of mass graves and burials without any witnesses, we may want to more closely consider what awaits. A friend whose mother is a nurse in New York City tells me that her mother is haunted by the mounting piles of bodies now kept in mass cold rooms.

As African governments plan for the worst, ordinary people are not being asked to prepare for the coming pain of grief. How do we deal with anticipatory grief? If social media is an indication of people’s feelings, we appear to be suspended between hysterical laughter and a growing numbness. These are suggestions that something is amiss. A disbelief that this is where we are. A reckoning with suspended dreams. Will I die before I complete the project I have worked on for the past three years? Before my child completes their final year of school? Before I reconcile with my brother? We worry if we will ever see our parents who live in distant provinces. With borders closed, will we ever see our loved ones in Malawi and Zimbabwe? The reality is dawning on us. Our phone conversations take on a new level of intensity and now we pay attention to the small things. Many of us who live far away from our families know we will not be allowed to travel home to see the sick. We may be able to travel to their funerals if we can get a permit to move between provinces. We are unlikely to see their faces because whispers suggest that the corpses of those killed by COVID-19 are dressed in airtight plastic bags and placed in sealed coffins. Forwarded Whatsapp voice notes suggest that soldiers or morgue employees will bury our dead because we are forbidden from touching the coffin. The sacred rites of our cultures must cease. The body cannot be brought home for the last farewell. We will bury our dead as diseased bodies to be treated with suspicion of contamination.

With this abrupt change to the customary, how do we grieve? When our deaths happen in the context of mass dying, our grief becomes unexceptional. If we are all lost in our grief, who will comfort us? What happens to community networks when we cannot visit each other? How do we embrace and acknowledge each other’s cries? How do we gear ourselves towards anticipatory grief? Perhaps this is the time to open spaces for remote connections where family and friends come together to hold each other. But this is only possible for the middle classes tethered to fiber networks. Perhaps all we have is the aftermath of dying on the other side of COVID-19. Maybe then, families, communities and governments need to make space for communal and national mourning. In these spaces, maybe we will be able to finally grieve and hold each other through our wailing. And then afterwards, if we will ever have an afterwards, we can visit grave sites to say goodbye. Rwanda’s mass mourning tradition may be a pathway to consider. But how do we find space for the personal in mass ritual? What can we do while we stand on the brink?

The world has changed irreversibly. With this change we should not lose sight of the value and need to grieve and mourn our losses. We have to brace ourselves for the coming wave of loss. Governments have bought us time. Will we call our loved ones in the remaining time? We have known other ways of dying but how will we prepare ourselves on this precipice?

Hugo kaCanham

This is a follow up on an earlier piece on black death – https://www.nihss.ac.za/content/black-death-and-mourning-time-covid-19

The great coloured fallacy

This is a black conversation.

Repeat something often enough and it becomes real. We become habituated to what we are told we are. In their obsessive need to categorise and control, the colonial and apartheid administrators differentiated between white settlers, people of Indian descent, Africans of ‘bantu extraction’ and then the hugely heterogenous other. This last group became a potpourri of people constituted by groups formally known as Indonesian and Malaysian enslaved descendants, Khoikhoi, San, Griqua, and descendants of people of ‘bi-racial’ extraction among others that didn’t fit the script of the grand race lie. So a Mpondo person whose great grandfather may have been a European shipwreck castaway but who was raised Mpondo, would be labelled coloured. An isiZulu speaking person from a KwaZulu-Natal north coast hamlet whose father was Indian but who was raised Zulu by her Zulu mother and family on a sugarcane plantation would be called coloured. This label requires forgetting and surrender to the great scheme and crime of colonial amnesia. All traces of Malaysian descent or ones lived reality as Pedi must be jettisoned in order to fit the homogeneous narrative of this place called South Africa.

In truth, most people in Southern Africa have a trace of elsewhere in their blood. But because of Afrikaner anxieties about their own mixed heritage, we were trained to valorise purity and to be suspicious of complexity. What does a pure coloured look like? What does it mean to be 100% Zulu or Tswana? Is the person of Indian descent flatly Indian after more than a century in Africa? The coloured label flattens out, divides and alienates. Sure enough, there are people who want to be called coloured. It has been their reality for too long and they have developed a culture around this nexus of identification. Many of these have been raised in the coloured ghetto. Cape Town may be the most representative of this experience. But it is not everyone’s experience. In fact, this may not be most peoples experience. What does it mean to deprive people complexity?

Tshepo Madlingozi recently suggested that all blacks including those called coloured were black Africans. He simultaneously remarked on the nonsensical label of ‘black African’. After all, why should Africans qualify their African-ness with ‘black’? In response, some ‘black Africans’ challenged this inclusion of coloured people as black African. They asserted that many coloured people that they knew did not want to be called black because coloured identification resonated most with their experience. Some said coloured people had internalised racism and hated the blackness inside of them and in others. While all of this may no doubt be true, it is not the whole story. The fuller story has many shades to it and a blanket naming and generalisation falls foul to ‘the danger of a single story’. So what should be done with this conundrum? To begin with, gender and sexuality politics have taught us the value of self-naming and the productivity of fluidity.

I am black.

But every once in a while, someone asks – “what are you?” This is a big – small question. The response could of course be long but I keep it short. “I am black”. For me, black is open, embracing, fierce, historical, nuanced, wounded, proud, vulnerable and lived. Black is open, knowing and inviting. Most people accept this response but the race police who believe in certainty and purity are sceptical. I don’t care. I know my experience more than anyone else. My blackness does not delegitimate the experience and identifications of those who want to be called coloured, Indian or Khoikhoi. They are who they say they are. Given the inexact nature of race and the contingency of identity, people might change the way they see themselves over time. And we should be open to this. Identity policing is a colonial artefact that some woke people have come to embrace wholeheartedly. Some call this embrace of the colonial – ‘coloniality’. The colonial hangover. Or the ongoing internalisation and practise of colonial values.

I generally prefer to keep away from the coloured conversation. It is fraught. The coloured identity activists and the black purists are tiring. They share an obsession with exactness and identity boxes. They have no patience for fluidity and paradox. They flatten experience and see history as a straight line. They foreclose possibilities of solidarity, relation and class consciousness. And so we can have ‘race’ wars between two impoverished communities who could better advance their cause through solidarity. In the same vein, my reading of Shireen Hassim’s latest book illustrates that we are ready to deny the seminal contributions of people like Fatima Meer to black studies because she does not fit our narrow conceptions of blackness and because some people of Indian descent are racist. Walter Sisulu is considered a great black South African. We do not split hairs about his blackness. But what would we see if we did? Writing about Frieda Mathews (partner to ZK Mathews of Fort Hare University) in the 1950s, Noni Jabavu observes that “her generation and branch of the family were partly English and Scotts; but Xhosa people have no complex about ‘miscegenation’”. Would this be true in 2019? Do we have a complex now?

I am not a race abolitionist or denialist. I am also not a rainbow nationalist. We have to do the work necessary to get out of the melancholic rut of race. We can’t do that by abolishing race. But like Zimitri Erasmus, we can certainly work to expose its lie.

There was no coloured person in southern Africa until colonial administrators decided there was. With this in mind, I end with some questions that might or might not be useful. What was lost in this naming and what was gained? By whom? How much longer do we hold on? What would decolonisation look like for how people identify? What are the implications of this for the categories presented in the census, employment equity forms, employment contracts, and the attendant discriminations and stereotyping? What happens when we assume that the person from Mannenberg, Kuruman, Mandeni and Flagstaff share the same experience and identity? What are we afraid of?

Afterword: There are paradoxes in this piece. I contradict myself because this shit is complex. Sometimes, I police identity. I too am a product of this place. But we can do better.

Hugokacanham

Exchanging black excellence for failure

The black excellence mantra is a trap. It imprisons subscribers within the fallacy of perfection. It expects nothing but socially sanctioned success. Black excellence shames those who do not have the ‘goods’ to live into the mantra. It kills middle class empathy for the other. It is almost single-mindedly self-interested.

Like the next person, I am happy for those who excel. And because of the low expectations cast on black people in a white world, I am especially pleased when black people beat others at their ‘own’ game. However, I cannot help but cringe at the hash tags when black people excel at sports, academia, business, art and in other spheres of life where they were historically expected to fail. These hash tags valorize a very limited range of activities and invisibilise everyday successes that carry very different meanings to people. They are distinctly middle class and therefore blind to the everyday struggles and triumphs of the working class and rural people. And no, I am not suffering from hash tag envy.

 

Most middle class black South Africans are first generation middle class. This does not include the Sisulu’s, Tambo’s, Vundla’s, Motsepe’s and Nxasana’s among others. But us ordinary Mary Jane’s and Themba’s are recent arrivals. The effect of the black excellence mantra is that it dulls us. It deprives us from experimentation and error. From the bittersweet learnings of failure. It makes us carry the burden of not only our families and communities but also the black race. We have less fun than our parents when they were our age. We become representations, signifies and metaphors. Evacuated of the vibrancy of life. We model hard work and what is possible. We are examples. We dare not fail for all hope is heaped on our weary shoulders. We cannot prove our racist naysayers right. And so we must succeed at all costs. We choreograph where we are seen and whom we are seen with. The food and drinks in our pictures must signal our success and by extension our excellence. Our morning runs and breakfast strawberries must be broadcast on apps. Our clothing and cars are not mere means of adornment and transportation but tropes that stand in for. They are representations. Our body shape and weight have become gestures and extensions. They are not lived in. Shells with beautiful echoes and scents. Shrines to excellence. Archived on Instagram. A friend once jokingly told me that his body of work could be found on his Instagram account. That will be his legacy to the world. A clean and empty contoured beauty.

Tired are being told that we stink, we do not embrace the funk and we are embarrassed by error and fatigue. The pressure leads to misrepresentation, debilitating caution and psychological collapse. There is nothing heady about black excellence. Ask Tiger Woods. The crash burns. Serena Williams has to sit with the heft of black expectation and the fear of defeat. Even when defeat must surely come in any sport. She must be the edifice to black excellence. Always. I’d rather be Venus. The cumulative burden of black excellence is a choking Albatross that leaves us unable to breathe. Some of those who labour under the burden of heteronormativity or patriarchy will tell you of the wrist cutting and death fantasies because the cost is too high. Likewise the burden of black excellence. In its daily practice, the number of likes on social media chalks up the calculus of black excellence. It elevates us to what I heard Hlonipha Mokoena refer to as slashers.  Influencer/entrepreneur/public figure/occasional model/motivational speaker/. An empty list of signifiers. And people pay for this. We are approached by advertisers to promote commodities on our social media platforms if we are ‘liked’ and ‘shared’ enough. Clothing lines, moisturizers, weight loss products, whisky, cars. Here then, black excellence becomes a billboard for capital and commodification. It is unattainable by those squeezed by the economic crunch and hemmed in by their class position. Those not represented by the hash tags.

 

I have seen the drive for black excellence break people and turn those that I had thought were fun people into ogres. This is the burden of internalizing the black excellence mantra. Disciples of black excellence work to grow their number and attempt to convert us all. High expectations. ‘Do more than everyone. Shine. Do it for the black child.’ Those so driven, forget to laugh. We remember the abandonment with which they laughed before they began drinking at the trough of black excellence and taking themselves too seriously. Having lived long enough to see these transitions, I am afraid of the perverse effects of black excellence. I would rather be mediocre if it means I can love myself more without the paranoia that others are coming to snatch the representations and trinkets of black excellence from me. Because once attained, one has the mammoth task of maintaining black excellence. And we who attempt to live side by side with failure are seen as threats to those who streak ahead with multiple titles.

The treadmill of black excellence has no room for failure. It eschews failure.

Grace Musila talks about the need for creating space for failure in our lives. I desire permission to fail so that I can experiment, be lazy, and enjoy life a little more. The treadmill of black excellence has no room for failure. It eschews failure. And yet, failure gives us permission to love all of ourselves and to see the foibles in others as endearing. It makes us less afraid of what others will think. It enables us to break out from the prison of the fishbowl. As writers, it opens us up to try out new genres. As business people, it permits us to work with our passions. As children, we are freed to display our disdain for the bigotries of our parents but also demonstrate how much we love them and appreciate their sacrifices. As parents, embracing the possibilities of failure means that we can drop the mask of martyrdom. To each other, failure permits us to break with the pretense. As lovers, we might forgive each other more readily if the ideal couple on social media didn’t exist. Hash tag – bae goals. Even though we all know that our bae goals come to us through a filter at just the right angle and with the light just so. And even if the caption declares ‘no filter’.

 

There is success in failure. There is a mellowing out from slowing down to smell the coffee, the crap and the roses. Failure allows us to live in our bodies, not as the extensions of commodities but as ageing vessels for our pleasure and pain. The body as that thing within which our hearts beat and from which we attain untold pleasure. I was raised in a village where I watched people enjoy their bodies. The languorous walk without a care for the time. The non-event of stretch marks. The pleasure from eating amasi and carbohydrates. Umbona omtsha. The gentle roll of the run. The beating of the chest and the anguished cry. The proverbial dance like no one is watching. Of course the village is also the place of unspeakable anguish. But it reminds me of the lived in body that refuses or mocks representation through commodities.

 

The yolk of black excellence can be discarded if we allow ourselves to be more acquainted to the feeling of failure. I hated failing at school. My early life was characterized by repeated failure. I know the feeling of failure intimately. I was soaked in failure. This two-syllable word is my long-term friend. Knowing failure helped to keep me somewhat anchored to the knowledge that the world will not collapse if I let go. If I fall, it will not be into an abyss. I have to remind myself of this though. Living in this middle class vortex, I too am imprisoned by the fear of failure. Letting go fills me with terror. I am not immune to the demands and allure of black excellence. But knowing my discomfort with the headlights, I shrink back from being interpolated into the maelstrom of black excellence. The noose that is black excellence does not entirely debilitate me. By holding onto the knowledge of my discomfort, I am able to sometimes say ‘no’. Because saying no will save your life. It may slow down your career advancement but it will not really be career suicide. Saying yes and then laboring under the strain of too many yesses can lead to suicide. And suicide is the final way of saying no. We are not excellent when we say no to our families, our managers, lovers, and communities. But we are still black. Or human.

 

‘No’ is a kind of failure that buys us space and time. Failure is then a genre of self-care. Self-care is a kind of love. Slowing down, meandering, and changing our minds, makes life more forgiving and liveable.We feel the pleasure of small successes without the pressure to be the CEO, youngest professor, first doctor in the family, or the principal dancer of the company. We are better at it when we do it slower and when we dim the expectant gaze of success.