Why, a decade on, a new book on Zuma's rape trial has finally hit home

Supporters of President Jacob Zuma in full cry outside the court during his 2006 rape trial.
EPA

In 2007, barely a year after the man who went on to become South Africa’s president, Jacob Zuma, was acquitted on a charge of raping a young woman called “Khwezi” (the name given to Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo during her rape trial), gender activist Mmatshilo Motsei published “The Kanga and the Kangaroo Court”. The book was an unsparing account of a society that allowed a prominent man to get away with acts of violence, of a criminal and justice system that was broken for the vast majority of those who were sexually abused, raped and tortured, and of a political system that had lost its compass.

Motsei was eminently qualified to write the book, as a survivor herself and as one of the pathbreaking group of activists who had begun the movement to end violence against women. Few read her book. Those that did were feminist activists and scholars who felt that she had given voice to their concerns, that she had released a collective howl from the gut.

Cover of Redi Tlhabi’s book on ‘Khwezi’.
Jonathan Ball

Hardcore Zuma loyalists almost certainly did not read the book. Nevertheless they opened a new battlefront against Motsei, attacking her both publicly and privately.

Ten years later, broadcaster Redi Tlhabi has resurrected the story with her new book “Khwezi: The Remarkable Story of Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo”. This time the public response has been very different. Record-breaking audiences have attended book launches. And radio conversations reveal a rapt public entirely consumed with the injustice done to Khwezi. The book sold out within weeks and is in reprint.

What has changed, many wonder? It is certainly not the story.

The story hasn’t changed

Kuzwayo’s story was first told in excoriating terms in 2006 by feminist academic Pumla Gqola. It was also told by Motsei and numerous academics analysing the violent condition of life for women and queer people in South Africa.

These accounts zeroed in on the shortcomings of the trial that allowed evidence that should not have been permissible, the social norms that denied women sexual desire and that demanded of women compliance with a patriarchal rendering of what constituted a rape-able person – certainly the child Khwezi, raped by at least one man in her community, was deemed to be consenting.

They exposed the almost complete inability of progressive organisations such as the African National Congress (ANC) and its tripartite allies, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and trade union federation Cosatu, to treat women and queer people as right-bearing members. All of these stories have been told, many times.

What’s different this time is that Tlhabi speaks into a South Africa that has changed. The pact of complicity that surrounded Zuma has broken. There are still those who are prepared to die for the “100% Zuluboy” as the T-shirts at the rape trial proclaimed. But they are no longer as powerful.

The tripartite alliance has fractured into innumerable feuding, chair-throwing, accusation-hurling bands of people without an ideological or moral centre. Zuma is now an acceptable target of vitriol. His endless Pyrrhic victories against those seeking to remove him from office have created a vast constituency of critics, not united by ideology, political affiliation or social identity but by a sense that something needs to change. It’s safe to hate on Zuma.

The moment does offer an opportunity, evident even to a jaded, cynical feminist. Tlhabi’s book has stepped into this political space with a clear-eyed argument about the small and everyday violations of women that make possible a culture of rape, “a war on women’s bodies”, to use Pumla Gqola’s terms.

Forthright style

Using her forthright style, and staking a reputation for honest and fair comment that was built over a long period as a host in talk radio, Tlhabi challenges South Africans to consider the violence that is normalised and invisible in human interactions. She invites people to consider everyday terms, she uncovers the assumptions behind legal terms, she shows readers how to read the discourses that underpin a rape culture.

Jacob Zuma at his 2006 rape trial.
EPA

In the trial, Zuma’s lawyers painstakingly presented Khwezi as a woman who was untrustworthy, inconsistent, hyper-sexualised and entirely to be dismissed. Tlhabi gives us Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo: a likeable, funny, garrulous, trusting woman, a loyal if exasperating friend and a caring daughter, someone who was loved by her friends and comrades.

Her family was the ANC, to be sure, but it was also a collective of feminist friends (old and young) who held her through the worst nightmares of the trial and subsequent re-exile. She shows us how one rape, one abuse, leads to another, that this violence is part of a never ending cycle.

Tlhabi is at pains simultaneously to honour the particular biography of Fezeka, while reminding readers that Fezeka is every woman. She does this well, mapping the single story against a contextual landscape of statistics and historical patterns of violence against women.

Anti-rape protesters at Jacob Zuma’s 2006 rape trial in Johannesburg.
EPA

Fezeka died, tragically and unexpectedly, just a year before the book was published. Her death, too early, is a dramatic end to the personal story. But the publication of the book gives her a public life that, perhaps, she might have felt valorised the experiences that the trial so powerfully cast as lies.

The real lies, of course, are political. Fezeka was let down over and over again by a movement that she loved and trusted. Some leaders – such as Communist stalwart and Zuma critic, Ronnie Kasrils – come out of this sorry story well. Most, however, do not.

‘Burn the Bitch’

Throughout the trial, while Zuma played to the rabble of supporters outside the court, the ANC leadership watched in silence. It was silent when he sang his archetypal phallic and violent anthem “Awuleth’ Umshini wam’” (Bring me my machine gun) outside the court room, and silent when members of the ANC carried banners saying “Burn the Bitch”.

Jacob Zuma at his rape trial in 2006 singing Awuleth’ Umshini wam’ a minute into the video.

And, perhaps, the leaders who were not silent were the most shocking. The ANC Women’s League mobilised actively against Fezeka both in public and in private. They were the storm troopers of patriarchy.

In 2007, unity in the ANC was mobilised against truth and justice. Cosatu and SACP leaders and activists thought that the rape trial was a distraction from the “real” issue of “returning the ANC to the branches”. “One fool at a time,” to coin Fezeka’s favourite line, the ANC and its allies fell behind Zuma.

Jacob Zuma supporters at the court in Johannesburg during his 2006 rape trial.
Mike Hutchings/Reuters

And no opposition political party offered meaningful support to Fezeka, happy perhaps to leave this dysfunctional family of the ANC to disintegrate.

What’s changed

South Africa has changed. In the wake of the trial, a new and assertive feminist movement seeded and grew. It began with the women’s rights organisation, “One in Nine”, formed expressly to support Fezeka, and has ballooned well beyond that.

Its daughters are everywhere - the four young women who held up banners during a Zuma speech at the Independent Electoral Commission in 2015, the queer black feminists on university campuses who are no longer prepared to tolerate violence in the name of unity, the artists and musicians and writers who are framing experiences in new ways. They too, are part of a new moment that makes possible a new conversation.

Yet. Yet. At least this reader, observing the hype surrounding the book, is still plagued by the question of who is listening, and what messages are being absorbed into South Africa’s political DNA. Will this book provoke the urgently needed attention to violence by the government, the police, the courts? Will people listening and reading ask themselves if they have enabled a culture of rape?

It isn’t just Jacob Zuma who stands accused of rape, after all.

Shireen Hassim, Professor of Politics, University of the Witwatersrand

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Herbex misleads after legal setback

The Advertising Standards Authority can issue rulings on the adverts of non-members

By Safura Abdool Karim and Nathan Geffen
6 October 2017

The painting Cutting the Stone by Hieronymus Bosch depicts medieval quackery. Image from Wikipedia (public domain)

 

Herbex, an alternative health supplement company that attempted to stop the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruling on its adverts, has released a press statement with several misleading claims. Herbex’s statement is at the bottom of this article.

About four years ago the ASA ruled against Herbex adverts that claimed that Appetite Control Tablets, Booster Eat Less and Attack the Fat Syrup reduced weight. Herbex estimated losses of several million rand over a three-month period because it could not advertise products the ASA had ruled against. The consumer activist who lodged the complaint, Harris Steinman, described Herbex’s products as not having “a snowball’s chance of working”.

The Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) made an order last week that was the product of negotiations between Herbex and the ASA. The order, with some minor caveats, restored the ASA’s powers that had been stripped by a High Court ruling of May last year. This was explained in a previous GroundUp article.

The order says that the ASA can rule on any advert, irrespective of whether the advertiser or publisher are ASA members. Their rulings, however, are only enforceable against members, but this is not new since the ASA’s decisions can, under the law, only bind its members. However since most of the country’s large publications abide by ASA decisions, if an advert by a non-member is found to be in breach of the code, that advert will usually be stopped from appearing in the mainstream press.
Herbex states that it is vindicated by the SCA settlement. While that’s a matter of opinion, the following is a matter of fact:

1. Herbex claims that the ASA masquerades as an organ of the state.
The ASA’s website has always stated that it is an independent body created by the marketing communications industry. Similarly, correspondence from the ASA does not contain any representations that the ASA is an organ of state or that it is empowered to regulate advertising through any law (with one narrow exception: electronic broadcasting, that isn’t relevant here). However, both the SCA and High Court orders required the ASA to amend their complaint letters to clarify that their processes are voluntary.

GroundUp has viewed the letter that Herbex claimed misrepresented the ASA’s status. There is no claim by the ASA that it is a government agency or that it is exercising some power of state in adjudicating its complaints. The only ambiguous statement in the ASA’s correspondence is that “rulings must be adhered to until reversed”. As part of the settlement, the ASA has agreed to include wording that explicitly states that their rulings are not binding on non-members.

Herbex also says the ASA claimed to have received authority from the Medicines Control Council (MCC) to regulate advertising about medicines. While the High Court did find that there was a misrepresentation by the ASA on whether it was empowered by the MCC, these claims by the ASA were removed from the Advertising Code before the case was heard. The court actually found the ASA “misrepresentation” to be irrelevant to Herbex’s case. As a result, this was not part of the High Court or SCA orders.

2. Herbex’s statement leaves readers with the impression that the ASA cannot make rulings against it and that the ASA has no jurisdiction over any advertisements unless the advertiser and publisher are members.

This inaccuracy is, in part, due to Herbex omitting a key paragraph of the court order from its statement. The omitted paragraph makes it clear that the ASA is able to adjudicate and make rulings on any complaint, irrespective of whether the publisher or advertiser are members. However, these rulings are only binding on members. This has always been the case, and something that the ASA agreed even before the High Court decision.

3. Herbex’s statement claims that the ASA only appealed the High Court ruling because it was overly broad.

In fact the High Court ruling left the ASA powerless and unable to adjudicate any complaints unless both the publisher and advertiser were both members of the ASA. So if Herbex hypothetically advertised in the Sunday Times, the ASA would not be able to make a ruling on the advert, following the High Court decision, even though the Sunday Times abides by ASA rulings. This was an absurd situation (and in our view the High Court should have done better). The ASA’s appeal to the SCA was aimed at restoring the powers it held before the High Court decision so that the ASA could continue to ensure that consumers were not being subjected to false and misleading advertisements, at least in the mainstream media. The ASA’s appeal succeeded in that the settlement says the ASA can make rulings on any advert, though, as has always been the case, the rulings are only binding on members.

4. Herbex claims that the SCA held that it was substantially successful in the appeal proceedings.
The SCA, as explained in GroundUp’s article, stated that both parties had “achieved a measure of success”. This is the reason why each party was ordered to cover its own costs with no adverse cost order against the ASA.

Notably, the SCA order overturned the interdict that prevented the ASA from making rulings on complaints involving Herbex as well as allowing the ASA to place adverse rulings against any advertiser or publisher on its website. The ASA’s adverse rulings against Herbex are on its website. They are enforceable, in that ASA members will not be able to run these Herbex adverts.

Herbex Statement

HERBEX VINDICATED BY THE SUPREME COURT OF APPEAL
1. In 2014 Herbex, represented by Mr Shoot of Fluxmans Inc Attorneys, instituted proceedings in the High Court of South Africa, Johannesburg against the Advertising Standards Authority (“the ASA”), a non-profit company masquerading as an organ of state and which had falsely claimed to be a statutory regulator purportedly mandated by the Medicines Control Council (“MCC”) to regulate amongst other things, medicine, complementary medicine and foodstuff advertising.

2. Herbex was successful in the High Court application and in May 2016, the High Court in its Judgment, essentially found that the ASA had misleadingly, claimed to have received authority from the MCC to regulate medicine advertising. The High Court further made an Order essentially:
2.1 declaring that the ASA has no jurisdiction over any person or entity who is not a member of the ASA and that the ASA may not in the absence of a submission to its jurisdiction require non-members to participate in its processes, issue any instruction, order or ruling against the non-member or sanction it ;

2.2 directing the ASA to include in its standard letters of complaint to non-members a reference to the fact that in the absence of a submission to its jurisdiction, it, the ASA, has no jurisdiction to adjudicate the complaint and that such non-member is not bound to participate in the ASA processes ;
2.3 ordering the ASA to pay Herbex’s costs of the High Court litigation, including the costs of two Counsel.

3. The ASA appealed the High Court Order essentially on the basis that it was overly broad. The Supreme Court of Appeal delivered its Judgment on 29 September 2017. As appears therefrom the parties agreed on an Order (save in regard to the issue of costs) to be made by the SCA essentially [emphasis added] :

3.1 declaring that the ASA has no jurisdiction over any person or entity who is not a member of the ASA and that the ASA may not, in the absence of a submission to its jurisdiction, require non-members to participate in its processes, issue any instruction, order or ruling against the non-member or sanction it;

3.2 the ASA was directed to include in its standard letter of complaint inter alia the aforesaid and that a non-member is not obliged to participate in any ASA process.

4. The only outstanding issue in the appeal before the SCA was the question of costs. The SCA vindicated Herbex by expressly finding that “The court a quo (High Court JHB) was undoubtedly correct in holding that in the absence of a submission to its jurisdiction the ASA has no jurisdiction over non-members and could not require them to participate in its processes. The respondent (Herbex) was substantially successful and consequently, there is no basis to interfere with the court a quo directing the ASA to pay the costs of that application, which include the costs of two Counsel.” Each party was directed to pay their own costs in regard to the appeal.

5. In addition, it is relevant to note that the Department of Health previously confirmed: “The MCC (The Medicines Control Council) does not have a formal relationship with the ASA. The statement that the ASA is managing the Marketing Code on behalf of the MCC is therefore incorrect”.

6. Herbex is relieved that the ASA finally conceded that it has no jurisdiction over any person or entity who is not a member of the ASA, that its private rulings which it issues to its members (the ASA incidentally only has 9 members) are not binding on non-members and the ASA may not: (i) require non-members to participate in its processes; (ii) issue any instruction; (iii) order; or (iv) ruling against non-members; or (v) sanction non-members. Herbex is also delighted that the ASA has been directed to amend its standard letters of complaint to non-member advertisers to advise them of the aforesaid. This will prevent non-member advertisers being misled by the ASA in the future. Indeed, as appears from the SCA Judgment, “ … non-members such as Herbex are legally entitled to ignore the rulings and procedures of the ASA” and such “Rulings are not legally enforceable against non-members.”

7. Hopefully this will bring an end to the ASA’s until now, unlawful assertion of jurisdiction, issuing of instructions, orders, rulings and sanctions against non-members.

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Published originally on GroundUp .

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Exclusive: Damning letter from PRASA manager describes railway security meltdown

Railway police sit in first class carriages instead of patrolling trains and stations

By Zoë Postman
5 October 2017

Commuters hang on to a Khayelitsha-bound train. Archive photo: Mandla Mnyakama

The breakdown of security on Cape Town’s central railway line cost the Passenger Rail Agency of SA (PRASA) R100 million in a year, according to a damning letter from the regional security manager of PRASA, Ernest Hendricks, to the PRASA executive.

The letter, dated 31 May, and addressed to Tiro Holele, an executive member of PRASA at head office in Pretoria, describes in detail problems with the security system which has led to vandalism, cable theft, train delays and unsafe conditions on trains.

Hendricks told Holele that two performance audits — one by PRASA head office — had shown that the department was not meeting its mandate, and managers had been given 90 days to “turn things around”. “This deadline was not met and a two month extension was granted and yet again managers have not delivered on getting things implemented as part of the corrective action that needs to be taken,” Hendricks told Holele.

Among the problems he identified are:

• Private security contractors are not performing and PRASA has “suffered huge losses” as a result. Trains have been set alight where security guards are deployed.
  
• The relationship with the Railway Police has “soured”. There is no joint deployment, no joint operations, no police visibility on trains, no police visits to stations or depots, a reluctance to open case dockets or to arrest suspects, and police intimidation of PRASA staff. Hendricks said police did not prioritise incidents on the railways but only worked on reported crimes, and sat in first class carriages instead of physically patrolling trains. (The Railway Police report to the South African Police Service.)
  
• Trains have become “easy targets to criminals” and there was not enough staff to man trains to prevent vandalism. “Criminals have become so desperate that they have even committed crimes in the presence of our commuters, who just become onlookers out of fear for their lives”.
  
• Key areas of the rail network are not fenced, and “criminals have free access”.
  
• The conditions of service roads is poor and some cannot be used in winter.
  
• The growth of vegetation has made it easy for criminals to vandalise equipment without being seen, and obscures the view of the train drivers.
  
• The lighting in the rail network is poor and it is “virtually impossible” to patrol the area.
  
• The Western Cape region has no radios.
  
• Not all staff have protective clothing such as bullet proof vests or firearms. Staff have not been sent on annual compulsory training exercises.
  
• Most of the vehicles have more than 400,000 kilometres, are in “a poor state” and need to be replaced urgently. Some are damaged but there are no accident reports.
  
• Departmental overtime is very high, though it has been reduced from an average of R2.8 million a month to R1.4 million.
  
• Military veterans on the staff have criminal records which have not yet been expunged and as a result cannot be registered with the Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority.
  
• Many staff members are medically unfit for duty as a result of illness or substance abuse.
  
• All managers were promoted four years ago, some of them skipping two levels. “It is clear that their appointment as managers was not in the interests of the business.”
  
• Supervisors come late for work, don’t deal with matters of staff reporting to them, leave the workplace without permission and “don’t attend meetings or functions they must perform”.
  
• There is low morale among staff and high absenteeism. “The members run away from work, desert their posts and also show complete disregard for their supervisors and don’t perform their duties as protection officials,” writes Hendricks.
  
• Staff have not been issued with uniforms since 2014.
  

Hendricks suggested a number of solutions, including the “lockdown” of the most critical areas of the rail network with a brick wall. This would “drastically” reduce losses in these areas, he said.

Most of the losses were in the notorious “Bonteheuwel Split”, the area from Nyanga to Bonteheuwel and Bonteheuwel to Bishop Lavis. “For the past 12 months a total loss of more than R100 million was suffered by the organisation due to incidents which occurred in [the] Bonteheuwel split and the area up [to] Nyanga, ranging from vandalism of infra equipment, theft of infra equipment, claims as a result of injuries and fatalities”.

He also suggested:

• A “phase out” plan to reduce the use of external security companies over a three-year period. This, he said, would “cut the contract security cost by 66.6% over two years and would allow the internal security department to police the environment and be held accountable to protect the train environment.”
  
• Locking mechanisms on the trains, on-board cameras, buffers between coaches and foam to protect cables from theft.
  
• Clearing of vegetation.
  
• Design of service roads.
  
• Hotlines at stations for commuters to report problems.
  
• Better staff rosters and time-keeping mechanisms.
  
• Guard monitoring systems in staging yards, hotspots and some stations.
  
• Double cab, 4x4 vehicles so that response teams can be made up of four people.
  

Hendricks called for a “national security turn-around team” with clear target dates to be appointed by head office. The team could be housed in a flat in Cape Town instead of a hotel which had previously cost PRASA “more than R80,000” per person per month.
In response to a request for comment PRASA said: “it is important that we thoroughly investigate the allegations made in the letter. PRASA will then be able to comment with facts on the issue.”
The Railway Police did not respond to a request for comment.

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Published originally on GroundUp .

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Roots of racism: 6 essential reads

www.shutterstock.com

On Friday, Sept. 15, “Third Rail with OZY” will discuss racism in the United States.

These stories from The Conversation archive explore where racism came from and why it persists.

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1. Going back to Europe

American University historian Ibram Kendi has traced the history of racist ideas in the U.S. back to the European societies that largely populated our nation. In an essay based on his award-winning book “Stamped from the Beginning,” Kendi rejects the conventional wisdom that hate and ignorance breed racist policies.

Rather, Kendi writes: “Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era.”

2. Myths of slavery

Arguably, the most racist policy of any era was the one that allowed whites in this country to call black people property – chattel slavery.

Many people connect the origins of racism to slavery without knowing much about that history. Daina Ramey Berry, a historian at University of Texas at Austin, lays out four major myths of slavery – including the idea that it happened too long ago to have much impact on our contemporary society.

“Truth: African-Americans have been free in this country for less time than they were enslaved,” Berry writes. “Do the math: Blacks have been free for 152 years, which means that most Americans are only two to three generations away from slavery.”

3. Teach your children well

One reason racism persists into contemporary times is because racist ideas are passed down from one generation to the next. Psychologist Marjorie Rhodes looks at the importance of how adults speak to children.

“Hearing generalizations, even positive or neutral ones, contributes to the tendency to view the world through the lens of social stereotypes,” Rhodes writes.

4. Not just city folk

One stereotype people hold is that American cities are diverse while rural areas are mostly white.

However, research by Jennifer Van Hook and Barrett Lee at Penn State shows “the populations of communities throughout the nation are being transformed,” as the scholars write. “Nine out of 10 rural places experienced increases in diversity between 1990 and 2010, and these changes occurred in every region of the country.”

The researchers argue this trend is past the tipping point. “Despite the initial importance of migration, racial and ethnic diversity is now self-sustaining,” they write. “Minority groups will soon be maintained by ‘natural increase,’ when births exceed deaths, rather than by new immigration.”

5. Learning while black

Kevin O'Neal Cokley of the University of Texas, Austin is an African-American scholar who studies the experiences of black college students.

“The unfortunate reality is that black Americans experience subtle and overt discrimination from preschool all the way to college,” Cokley writes. “Black boys are almost three times as likely to be suspended than white boys, and black girls are four times as likely to be suspended than white girls.”

The issue is not restricted to primary education. Black men are also underrepresented in college – even compared to black women. “According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, there were 887,000 black women enrolled in college versus 618,000 black men,” Cokley writes.

6. A hopeful message

“How can we heal a nation that is divided along race, class and political lines?” Joshua F.J. Inwood of the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State asked. He suggests that remembering Martin Luther King Jr.‘s message of love could bring our fractured nation together.

“For King,” Inwood writes, “love is a key part of creating communities that work for everyone and not just the few at the expense of the many.”

Danielle Douez, Associate Editor, Politics + Society, The Conversation and Emily Costello, Senior Editor, Politics + Society, The Conversation

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Blackness, oceans and South Africa’s colonial history are at my family’s core

Cape Town.
Sutterstock

This excerpt is based on an extract from the book, “Race Otherwise: Forging a New Humanism for South Africa” by the author.

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My blackness is supposedly visible only because I do not “look white”. But, in some parts of West Africa I am called white. My blackness is ambiguous because I am not black Black or black African. These descriptions are increasingly used to distinguish between formerly colonised South Africans with different historical relationships to this region and its colonial past. I am (more often than not) not considered African in South Africa. I am still called “Coloured”.

It is perhaps worth pausing for a moment to deal with the lexicon of race.

In my book “blackness” and “black” (not capitalised) refer to the racialised construct “black”. “Black”, capitalised and in inverted commas, refers to the apartheid racial category. Black, capitalised and without inverted commas, refers to the global political identification on the part of individuals and collectives who are constructed and classified as black.

At first use I place the apartheid race category “Coloured” in inverted commas to indicate that it is contested. Hereafter for ease of reading I do not use inverted commas. I capitalise the term to signify its continued official status as a race category. Simply writing “coloured” as a descriptive term erases its history, its contestation and its official status.

I write “White”, hereafter without inverted commas, to refer to the apartheid and the post-1994 official race category, capitalising the term to indicate its historical and current official categorical status. The terms “whiteness” and “white” (not capitalised) refer to the racialised construct “white”.

The cover of ‘Race Otherwise’.

In South Africa’s Western and Eastern Cape provinces “what I am”, racially speaking, is seldom questioned. People who say that they are from Limpopo and Mpumalanga, the northern provinces of South Africa, ask which tribe and which country I am from.

In parts of Europe I am assumed to be from a Caribbean island. African-Americans are surprised to find that I was born and live “in Africa”.

People from different parts of the world ask “what mix” I am. Which would you prefer? Salt and vinegar or cinnamon and sugar? Neither one of my parents was black Black. Neither one of them was white White. I am not half-and-half.

A bundle of story lines

Like all families, mine is a bundle of lines. A bundle of story lines. A bundle of journey lines. South Africa’s colonial history is at their core. Its “meshworks” – produced by the interconnected processes of modernity and coloniality – met in the southern African region and made waves of community that tangled in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

From these oceanic perspectives, the landscape and mindscape at the tip of the continent are thresholds between the two oceans; between the unrecorded lives sustained, changed and sacrificed by these seas; between circuits of ideas; and between circuits of lived experience and of possibilities.

My mother’s maternal grandmother was from St Helena Island in the south Atlantic Ocean. My mother told me that her paternal grandfather wore a kuffiya, a form of headdress worn by Muslim men in parts of the world, on his deathbed. He came to South Africa from the Indonesian island of Java with his parents, who were Muslim.

Their surname changed from Abdurahman to Adriaan. When this change happened remains unclear… I was shown photographs of a maternal great-aunt who was described as a “boere tannie” (Dutch aunty). She was called Cousin Snow and lived in the northern region of the then Cape Province.

My paternal grandfather was of the KhoiKhoi, people considered indigenous to South Africa. This is a diasporic history of cross-currents, of slavery and various forms of unfree labour, of “vrij zwarten” (free black people), of “inboekseling” (apprenticed labour), and of Dutch settlement.

It is a history of creolisation: processes by which ways of living and forms of community – for the most part (but not only) born of struggles against violent power – are forged in order to survive and to remake histories. These histories are intertwined in ways that do not obliterate social differences and they suggest several possibilities including complicity and resistance (not necessarily separate acts); domination and reciprocity; and various forms of intimacy and of distance.

My family’s stories are one response to a question posed by the literary scholar and poet Gabeba Baderoon:

‘What do the two oceans tell us?’ They show that the oceans ‘tell us about history’; about the ways in which ‘the individual relation to the sea is weighted with history’; about the ways in which ‘the register of the private can open a path to history’.

Birth of capitalist modernity

Histories of the North Atlantic have had a preponderant influence on scholarship about race because of its place in the birth of capitalist modernity as a world system based on the trade in African slaves. But, for scholars in the humanities and social sciences who study southern Africa, this is changing.

The Indian Ocean can be thought of as an emergent knowledge space. It is a domain of lived experience that is configured by interconnected histories; by the exchange and movement of people, things and ideas; and by the circulation of technologies, communities and institutions. The South Atlantic Ocean, and specifically St Helena Island, can also be thought of as an emergent and critical knowledge space.

These oceanic knowledge formations trouble ideas about race-making, race-mixing, and about inevitable links between place/nature and race/culture that are taken for granted. These links are expressed in what became a universal racial taxonomy premised on theories about the origin of permanent differences among humans as a species – Africa/Negroid, Asia/Mongoloid, Europe/Caucasoid.

St Helena Island and the port city of Cape Town at the Cape of Good Hope are two historical nodes in these ocean spaces through which people, ideas and goods circulated. These nodes, like slave and trading ships, tack together the two oceans making meshworks in the southern hemisphere. The mesh works are at the centre of my family history, and they are an important part of the history of southern Africa because of its position as a threshold between the two oceans.

“Race Otherwise: Forging a New Humanism for South Africa” published by Wits University Press: 2017.

Zimitri Erasmus, Associate professor of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand

This article was originally published on The Conversation.