“Postcolonialism” has come rather late to South African literary studies, but this has not prevented its rapid advance in the academy, to the point where it has almost achieved hegemonic status – something which not all South African critics have welcomed.23 It is, however, difficult to see how the perspectives afforded by
postcolonial theory and criticism can be resisted: “If we understand postcoloniality as referring to an historical and cultural condition, one in which the legacies of
colonialism have yet to be transcended, then South Africans are hardly in a position to refuse the term” (Attwell, “Introduction” 1).24
One nevertheless enters into the postcolonial field with some trepidation. In the first place, as various local critics have pointed out, one is faced with the somewhat peculiar South African case history: when does South Africa become “postcolonial”?25 In 1652, when Jan van Riebeeck established the first permanent white settlement at the Cape?26 In 1910, when the Union of South Africa was formed, uniting the British colonies with the Boer republics? In 1948, with the rise to power of Dr Malan and the National Party (as the representatives of Afrikaner nationalism, they
23
“I feel there is some evidence that post-colonial enquiries in this country are, at worst, tending to become a hegemony of their own, increasingly inward-looking and too often based around a set of clichés about our literary and cultural past and present” (Sole, “Acceptance Speech” 355).
24
Attwell was introducing a special issue of the journal Current Writing which aimed to explore the meaning of postcoloniality in the South African context. It helped to generate a sometimes acrimonious critical debate.
25
See, for example, Visser (“Postcoloniality of a Special Type”), 82-83.
26
Ashcroft, Griffitths and Tiffin use the term “post-colonial” to cover “all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonisation to the present day” (2).
saw this as the culmination of their anti-colonial struggle)? In 1961, the year in which Dr Verwoerd led South Africa out of the Commonwealth and declared a Republic? Or in 1994, the year in which black South Africans, led by Nelson Mandela and the ANC, were finally able to participate in national democratic elections and form a fully representative government? And if we are to confer postcoloniality on South Africa at some point, how does this apply to the white (settler) minority? Are Gordimer and Coetzee, for example, postcolonial writers?
The brief discussion of South Africa in The Empire Writes Back is symptomatic of the difficulty of fitting this country into the postcolonial frame. The authors point out that while white South African literature has “clear affinities” with the literatures of the “settler colonies” (Australia, Canada, New Zealand), black South African literature “might be more fruitfully compared with that of other African countries” (27). They note, however, that South Africa’s racial politics “creates a political vortex into which much of the literature of the area, both Black and white, is drawn” (27).
Even apart from these local difficulties, the term “postcolonial” (or “post- colonial”) is beset with problems. “No word is more seductive . . . and few words have proved more elusive,” argues Parry. “There is a constant slippage between significations of an historical transition, a cultural location, a discursive stance, and an epochal condition” (“The Postcolonial” 3). A major difficulty is that in assuming the existence of a globalised condition (“postcoloniality”, “the postcolonial”,
“postcolonial space”, “postcolonial discourse”, “the postcolonial Other”, etc.) the term almost necessarily has the effect of suppressing or eliding local histories and
particular circumstances. It implies that colonialism was a more or less distinct set of practices, informed by a particular discourse, which affected subject peoples around the globe in comparable ways. (In this respect, its founding text is Said’s Orientalism (1978).) As McClintock points out, the term “re-orients the globe once more around a single binary opposition: colonial/postcolonial” (292) – thereby also effacing what are in some cases thousands of years of pre-colonial history. The result can be “a panoptic tendency to view the globe within generic abstractions voided of political nuance” (McClintock 293). In particular, the prefix “post” might seem to imply that colonial domination ended with formal independence, when in fact its legacy continues and assumes new forms in what is euphemistically referred to as “the new world order” – the present era of global capitalism and neo-colonialism. JanMohamed goes so far as to propose the terms “dominant colonialism” and “hegemonic colonialism” to
describe what he sees as two stages of the same process: “The moment of
‘independence’ – with the native’s obligatory, ritualised acceptance of Western forms of parliamentary government – marks the formal transition to hegemonic colonialism” (62).
Apart from these conceptual or definitional problems, postcolonialism is itself hardly a unified field, either theoretically or in the ways in which it has been applied. On the one hand De Kock – himself a proponent of postcolonial approaches –
concedes that there is a risk of “agglomerating various approaches in the ‘post’ mode” and creating “a dehistoricised monolith of essential knowledge” (“Postcolonial
Analysis” 45). On the other hand, according to Moore-Gilbert, such has been the “elasticity” of the term that “some commentators have begun to express anxiety that there may be a danger of it imploding as an analytical construct with any real cutting edge” (11). Postcolonial criticism is, he suggests, so riven by internal conflicts that it may splinter into “a series of competing, mutually incompatible or even antagonistic practices” (11). The “monolithic” tendency is associated with colonial discourse theory, inaugurated by Said’s Orientalism. This approach is largely informed by poststructuralist or postmodernist approaches to textuality, language and the
constitution of identity (Foucault, Derrida, Lacan), and often seems to suggest that the colonised subject is constituted entirely by discourse – thereby severely limiting the possibilities of agency or resistance.27 Given the realities of the South African situation, and our particular history of struggle and resistance, any approach which theorises oppression primarily in discursive terms (“epistemic violence”),28 or which discounts the ability of the colonised to resist oppression and exploitation through political action, is clearly problematic.The underlying problem with colonial discourse analysis is, as Williams and Chrisman point out, that it “tends to position colonial/imperial subjectivity as having epistemological and ontological primacy; native or subaltern subjects feature as secondary ‘subject-effects’ allowed, according to the critic, greater of lesser degrees of oppositional power within the discourse of empire” (16). In the somewhat crisper formulation of Mishra and Hodge, “political
27
Moore-Gilbert notes that “perhaps the most heated current debate concerns the political implications of the incorporation of French-derived ‘high’ theory into postcolonial analysis” (17). I should express an indebtedness to Moore-Gilbert’s well-informed and balanced discussion of postcolonial theory.
28
See Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak”: “The clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the remotely orchestrated, far-flung and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other” (24-25).
insurgency is replaced by discursive radicalism” (278).29 The discourses of the anti- colonial liberation movements are often criticized for their “nativism” or their “cultural nationalism” – and the role played by nationalist movements in resisting colonialism is often downplayed.30 Some critics (notably Ahmad) go so far as to suggest that postcolonialism is politically regressive, and (somewhat tendentiously) they point to the institutional location of some of its leading theorists.31
The other founding theorist of postcolonialism is of course Fanon, and the Fanon of The Wretched of the Earth (1961) proposes a stark Manichean schema to describe the colonial world. The colonial world is “a world cut in two” and “inhabited by two different species” (30). “As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation, the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil” (32). In this version of postcolonial thought “native” and “settler” represent irreconcilable
opposites, and the violence which underpins the colonial order requires a
corresponding, cleansing violence if the colonised is to free himself/herself – both psychologically and politically. It is not difficult to see how the analysis of the colonial world as a “Manichean” world must have resonated with Biko and the proponents of Black Consciousness in South Africa. One problem with this view, as Cooper and others have pointed out, it that “Manichean identity takes one monolithic duality as fundamentally descriptive of the person” (44), with the implication that one is trapped in a particular subject position. In stark contrast to Fanon, the strain of postcolonial theory represented in particular by Bhabha attempts to move beyond a conception of colonial relations as determined by binary oppositions (settler/native; coloniser/colonised). Instead, this view emphasises what Moore-Gilbert calls “the mutualities and negotiations across the colonial divide” (116). For Bhabha, colonial discourse is not as coherent, stable, consistent or confident as Said’s account of it might suggest. The coloniser is in fact partly dependent on the colonised for the
29
This comment is made in the context of their critique of The Empire Writes Back, the critical text which more than any other helped to place postcolonial studies on the academic map. They elaborate as follows: “The danger here is that the post-colonial is reduced to a purely textual phenomenon, as if power is simply a matter of discourse and it is only through discourse that counter-claims might be made” (278).
30
These are issues that will be explored in more detail in the context of the Black Consciousness and the discourse of resistance in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s.
31
The implication (or sometimes the accusation) is that postcolonialism is largely the product of the intellectual work of a privileged and deracinated elite who have appropriated “European ‘high’ theory” for their own purposes. The most obvious example of this kind of attack is Ahmad’s In Theory (1992). Some of his points are taken up by South African critics, in particular Sole (“South Africa Passes the Posts”) and Visser (“Postcoloniality of a Special Type”).
confirmation of his/her identity, and through “mimicry” the colonised can disturb or unsettle the coloniser’s authority.32
The work of Bhabha and others, in drawing attention to the complexity of colonial relations, and focussing attention on subjectivity, is undoubtedly valuable. This kind of analysis underlies Attwell’s contention that, even in the case of South Africa, the colonial or racial dichotomies are not as simple or clear-cut as they might appear:
Both ‘settler’ and ‘native’ forms of consciousness . . . are shaped to a considerable degree by the emergence of the other form of articulation. That is to say, the poles are attracted not merely by their opposition to one another; rather, their construction is founded on a dialogic
principle – sometimes imitative, sometimes hostile – so that any simple theoretical polarity becomes unworkable. (“Introduction” 5)
This view complicates the generally received picture of the South African situation as entirely polarised in Fanonian terms, and cautions one against adopting over-simple or essentialised views of identity based on either “blackness” or “whiteness”. The
interventions of Ndebele (Rediscovery of the Ordinary) and Sachs (“Preparing Ourselves for Freedom”) were in part intended to question an identity that had been constructed largely in response to apartheid.33 One needs to acknowledge that there are no “pure” cultures, that identity (especially, perhaps, in the colonial situation) is necessarily complex, and that both sides of the racial divide are (or were) internally fractured in various ways (in terms, for example, of origin, or language, or ethnicity, or lineage, or class, or gender).
More recently Nuttall and Michael have suggested that, despite the legacy of apartheid, South Africa is “a place striking for its imbrication of multiple identities – identities that mythologies of apartheid, and of resistance to it, tended to silence” (Senses of Culture 1). They argue that “complex configurations, at least at the level of identity, were always there” – however much apartheid, with its ideology of
separation, tried to mask them.34 They quote Ndebele to the effect that a shared history has created “reluctant bonds” between oppressor and oppressed: “It was not
32
See in particular the early articles collected in The Location of Culture (1994), in particular “The Other Question” (66-84) and “Of Mimicry and Man” (85-92).
33
This point is made by De Kock (“Postcolonial Analysis” 55-56).
34
Similarly, they suggest, the liberation movement “strategically emphasized enforced separation” as a way of mobilizing resistance (2).
strangers who sat at the negotiating table, he remarks, and the ‘bonding’ seen there was ‘too remarkable’ not to have had a long history.” (9).
It is certainly true, as they point out, that South Africa has long been thought of as a place apart, separate from the rest of the world, fixated on race as a
determinant of identity and (prior to 1994) “bound to a narrative of liberation” (1, 2). As Sole points out, apartheid was designed to keep “the different racial groups from mutual knowledge or common identity”. It is, he suggests, “little short of a miracle” that there has been “any cross-cultural interaction in the past” (“Democratising Culture” 1). Nuttall’s and Michael’s emphasis on the “intimacies and connectivities” that existed despite apartheid is clearly salutary – but it should not detract from a recognition of the grim realities of enforced segregation and racial oppression under apartheid. As a counter to the post-apartheid perspective of Senses of Culture, one might turn to From South Africa, the anthology of writing edited by Bunn and Taylor in 1987. Its flavour is captured by the opening paragraph of their introduction:
Almost a year after the introduction of the second State of Emergency in June 1986, the Botha regime, in announcements by its propaganda arm, the Department of Information, claims to have reduced violence in the country to a minimum. Yet even the most servile government newspapers speak of an “uneasy calm” and continue that Manichean style of rhetoric which habitually depicts white dread in terms of
looming black clouds on the horizon. (13)
They go on to record that in the previous twelve months almost 35 000 people had been detained, including much of the leadership of the extra-parliamentary political organisations and the trade unions. They are, they say, reporting “from the
battlefront”: South Africa is effectively a country at war, or “in the initial stages of a revolution” (14). In this climate it is not surprising that Menán du Plessis, a white writer and activist, should be quoted as saying, in a speech given at a “Jews for Justice” forum on “The Right to Know”:
It’s clear that the struggle for cultural freedom is perceived as one aspect of, and indivisible from, the general struggle for national
liberation. And if ordinary people, often heartbreakingly young people, are prepared to make terrifying sacrifices for the sake of these
freedoms, it seems almost incumbent on artists – in their turn – to stand up and declare themselves willing to fight shoulder to shoulder with
In exploring the literature and culture of the apartheid period, then, one needs to negotiate between the Fanonian view of South Africa as a starkly polarised society where oppressor and oppressed are locked together in a grim struggle (although even here, arguably, the image implies some kind of mutuality), and the alternative view which sees colonialism as transactional, rather than oppositional, and employs the concepts of hybridity or creolisation and ambivalence. The problem, as Parry defines it, is to understand how what she calls the “dialogical model” relates to “the record of colonialism as violent dispossession achieved by military force and sustained by institutional power, or to the received perceptions of the quotidian colonial world as a place of economic exploitation, social division, and political conflict” (“The
Postcolonial” 26). Despite the problems attendant on the term “postcolonial”, the kind of thought and analysis associated with this approach has opened up important issues for debate and investigation. Of particular value is the attention given to culture, to subjectivity and to the question of identity. The perspectives and insights made
available by postcolonial critics and theorists are clearly relevant to the study of South African literature and culture – but they need to be held in balance with the
specificities of the South African situation.