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Gcaleka’s invocation of the colonial past perhaps unwittingly called into question the dominant concepts of history that were at work in the TrC, because it articulated the possibility t

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First published 2009

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© 2009 Human Sciences Research Council

The views expressed in this publication are those of the author They do not necessarily relect the views or policies of the Human Sciences Research Council (‘the Council’)

or indicate that the Council endorses the views of the author In quoting from this publication, readers are advised to attribute the source of the information to the individual author concerned and not to the Council.

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Cover illustration from The Death of Hintsa by Hilary Graham, reproduced with kind permission

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For Kiera, to account for the absence; Jaymathie and Jayantilal Lalu; and Hansa Lalloo

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List of illustrations viii

Acknowledgements x

Introduction: thinking ahead 1

1 Colonial modes of evidence and the grammar of domination 31

2 Mistaken identity 65

3 The properties of facts (or how to read with a grain of salt) 101

4 Reading ‘Xhosa’ historiography 141

5 The border and the body: post-phenomenological relections

on the borders of apartheid 191

6 History after apartheid 219

List of illustrations

Figure 1 The cover of the Frederick I’Ons exhibition catalogue; there is little

clarity on whether the igure portrayed is Hintsa or Nqeno 71

Figure 2 Charles Michell’s cartographic representation of the landscape in

which Hintsa was killed, published in 1835 83

Figure 3 Flight of the Fingoes [sic], by Charles Michell, 1836 84

Figure 4 Warriors Fleeing Across a River/The Death of Hintsa, by

Frederick I’Ons n.d 90

Figure 5a Portrait of Hintsa, by Charles Michell, 1835 98

Figure 5b Portrait of Hintsa, by George Pemba, 1937 98

Figure 6 The tragic death of Hintsa, triptych by Hilary Graham,

Ah, Britain! Great Britain!

Great Britain of the endless sunshine!

You sent us truth, denied us the truth;

You sent us life, deprived us of life;

You sent us light, we sit in the dark,

Shivering, benighted in the bright noonday sun.

SEK Mqhayi, on the visit of the Prince of Wales to South Africa in 1925, translated by AC Jordan

History always tells how we die, never how we live.

Roland Barthes, Michelet, 104

Perhaps the most daunting task in completing this book is to recall the many people who have had to endure its long incubation If I mention them by name, it is not so that they may be reminded of their complicity

in The Deaths of Hintsa but to thank them for their generosity, insight,

friendship and love over the years To them I attribute my long-held desire

to substitute a politics of despair with a politics of setting to work on postcolonial futures

My irst foray into writing this book began under the watchful eye of Allen Isaacman and Jean Allman at the University of Minnesota,

as a graduate student in African History and as a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship grant The more detailed study of the story of Hintsa was initially submitted as a doctoral dissertation under the title ‘In the Event of History’

to the University of Minnesota in 2003 Thanks to Allen Isaacman, Director

of the Interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of Global Change, I was granted

an opportunity to interact with a group of thought-provoking historians of Africa including Maanda Mulaudzi, Peter Sekibakiba Lekgoathi, Marissa Moorman, Jacob Tropp, Heidi Gengenbach, Derek Peterson, Ana Gomez, Alda Saute, Helena Pohlandt McCormick and Jesse Buche

While at the University of Minnesota, John Mowitt, Qadri Ismail, Ajay Skaria, David Roediger, Lisa Disch and Bud Duvall provided many new and exciting directions for developing my thoughts on colonialism, apartheid and postapartheid South Africa John Mowitt and Qadri Ismail gave new meaning to the idea of academic exchange, with Qadri especially responsible for teaching me a thing or two The members of the postcolonial reading group fostered friendships conducive to the exploration of ideas Monika Mehta (for teaching me how to cut), Andrew Kinkaid, Guang Lei, Joel Wainwright and Adam Sitze (for teaching me how not to cut) have, unbeknown to them, been present at every stage of the writing even as I

deposited myself far across the Atlantic Ocean in a little-known place called the University of the Western Cape (UWC).

The History Department and the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at UWC provided the most enabling environment for the development

of new ideas and critique The staf and students of the History Department ofered unconditional support for my research through the years Leslie Witz, Ciraj Rassool, Patricia Hayes, Nicky Rousseau, Brent Harris, Gary Minkley (now at Fort Hare University) and Andrew Bank made a special efort to read

my work and comment on it I hope this book is an acceptable response to their many questions and queries, and that will be seen as a contribution

to the ongoing innovative research in UWC’s History Department Thanks are also due to Uma Mesthrie, Martin Legassick and Terri Barnes for their encouragement over the years The Centre for Humanities Research South African Contemporary History and Humanities seminar provided a privileged space for critical readings of my work In the last years of writing,

I was encouraged by many irst-year and honours history students who took the time to engage with the ideas of this book I would like to single out Riedwaan Moosagee, Thozama April, Vuyani Booi, Peter Jon Grove, Noel Solani, Virgil Slade, Maurits van Bever Donker, Shanaaz Galant and Khayalethu Mdudumane for their interest in my work and for journeying with me to the site of Hintsa’s killing on the Nqabara River The fellows

in the Programme on the Study of the Humanities in Africa (PSHA) at UWC were a source of encouragement in pressing me to substantiate my argument for the need for a subaltern studies in South Africa I would like

to thank speciically Paolo Israel, Annachiara Forte, Jade Gibson, Heidi Grunebaum, Crystal Jannecke, Rachelle Chadwick, Annette Hofman, Jill Weintroub, Maurits van Bever Donker, Zulfa Abrahams, Mduduzi Xakaza, Charles Kabwete, Lizzy Attree and Billiard Lishiko for their generosity and friendship Finally, Leslie Witz, Susan Newton-King and Andrew Bank ofered to take over my teaching to enable me to retreat for a sabbatical to Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where I put the inishing touches to the book

A fellowship at the Centre for the Study of Public Institutions

at Emory University provided the much-needed intellectual stimulus for ine-tuning the formulations of the book Ivan Karp and Cory Kratz are responsible for more than they can imagine, including much of the discussion on the discourse of anthropology in the eastern Cape Both ofered encouragement, support and unconditional friendship at a very crucial time in the making of the book Helen Mofett provided me with signiicant editorial comment and engaged with the text during my

fellowship at Emory I would also like to thank Durba Mitra, Sunandan Nedumpaly, Ajit Chittambalam, Shailaja Paik and Swargajyoti Gohain who invited me to be a participant in their Subaltern Studies class at Emory University, and Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully for the many conversations.The research for this book was supported by the National Research Foundation-funded project on the Heritage Disciplines based at UWC I would like to thank Leslie Witz and Ciraj Rassool for inding a place for

my research in the overall project that they lead The PSHA provided a research platform for the development of the argument Garry Rosenberg, Utando Baduza, Mary Ralphs, Karen Bruns, Fairuz Parker and Lee Smith

at the HSRC Press gave me support and guidance in inalising this book I would also like to thank the many librarians and archivists both here and

in the United States for their generous assistance, especially Simphiwe Yako, Graham Goddard and Mariki Victor (Mayibuye Centre, UWC); Sandy Roweldt (formerly at the Cory Library and subsequently at the African Studies Library at the University of Cape Town); Michelle Pickover (William Cullen Church of the Province of SA Collection, University of Witwatersrand); Zweli Vena, Victor Gacula and Sally Schramm (Cory Library); friends at the District Six Museum and the staf at the Albany Museum, Grahamstown, State Archives and Manuscripts Division; and the South African Library in Cape Town (especially Najwa Hendrickse)

Early versions of Chapters 1 and 5 appeared in History and Theory, Vol

39, No 4, December 2000 and in the South African Historical Journal, 55,

2006 respectively They are included with permission; and Hilary Graham,

Bobo Pemba and the staf of the Albany Museum (History) granted me permission to reproduce the images that appear in the book.

Friendship is the basis for all writing and hospitality, its condition Unfortunately, writing may also inlict untold damage on friendships Vivienne Lalu endured most of the fallout of this project I am truly sorry for the harm it has caused but would like to acknowledge her steadfast commitment over the years Others who graciously sufered my writing and obsessions along the way include Ajay, Kilpena, Nikhil and Rahoul Lalu, Ameet, Nital, Meha and Amisha Lalloo, Deepak, Primal, Natver and Badresh Patel, Jim Johnson, Latha Varadarajan, Noeleen Murray, Nic Shepherd, Abdullah Omar, William and Sophia Mentor, Manju Soni, Carolyn Hamilton, Mxolisi Hintsa, Ramesh Bhikha, Dhiraj, Tara and Reshma Kassanjee, Ratilal, Pushpa and Hansa Lalloo, Amy Bell-Mulaudzi, Suren Pillay, Kamal Bhagwan, Saliem Patel, Fazel Ernest, Ruth Loewenthal and members of my extended family I am grateful for all they have done to support this book

A book that is written over many years invariably leads to friendships across continents and across urban and rural divides Colleagues at the Basler Afrika Bibliographien, Basel, Switzerland, especially Giorgio Miescher, Lorena Rizzo, Patrick Harries and Dag Henrichson invited me to present some of the arguments of the present book and encouraged me to think beyond borders and boundaries Similarly, I have made many friends in the Tsholora and Mbhashe in the eastern Cape, amongst whom I wish to single out Kuzile Juza, Sylvia Mahlala, Mda Mda, Nomathotho Njuqwana and Joe Savu Mostly, the residents who have won rights to the Dwesa Cwebe Reserve following a land restitution process deserve my unconditional gratitude I hope that our many conversations, agreements and disagreements have helped to make sense of the predicament of the rural eastern Cape

This book is dedicated to Kiera Lalu At the very least, I hope it may serve to meaningfully account for my absence As for answering her searching question on whether this book will end up in a museum, we will have to wait and see It is also dedicated to Jaymathie Lalu, Hansa Lalloo, and

my father, Jayantilal Lalu, for all you have done and much, much more

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Two years inTo The TransiTion to democratic rule in South Africa, a little-known healer–diviner, Nicholas Tilana Gcaleka, stumbled onto the stage of history On 29 February 1996, just over 160 years after the fateful shooting of the Xhosa king, Hintsa, by British colonial forces on the banks of the Nqabara River in the eastern Cape in southern Africa, local newspapers reported widely on Nicholas Gcaleka’s return to South Africa with ‘Hintsa’s skull’, which he had found in Scotland Guided by a dream in which his ancestors supposedly made an appearance in the form of a hurricane spirit, Gcaleka had undertaken his mission with the hope that the return

of Hintsa’s skull would usher in an era of peace in a new democratic South Africa The rampant violence and corruption that plagued the new South Africa, he proclaimed, was because the soul of Hintsa ‘was blowing all over the world with no place to settle’.2

Judging from the responses to the alleged discovery of Hintsa’s skull,

it seemed highly unlikely that Gcaleka’s dream would be allowed to become a reality In newspaper accounts, some journalists used the opportunity ofered

by the supposed discovery of Hintsa’s skull to cast light on the demand for the repatriation of bodily remains taken in the period of European

Introduction: thinking ahead

Wherever colonisation is a fact, the indigenous culture begins to rot and among the ruins something begins to be born which is condemned to exist on the margin allowed it by the European culture 1

colonisation more generally The Irish Times noted that even ‘if Chief Gcaleka

is something of a showman, his search is part of a broader, more serious movement [through which] indigenous people are increasingly clamoring for the restoration of human relics removed from their country during the colonial era’.3 Others resorted to descriptions, veiled in acerbic humour, of a maverick power-hungry individual invoking a pre-modern register so as to advance his own ambition and greed Labelled ‘the chief of skullduggery’, Gcaleka was accused of having a shrewd eye for publicity by his disgruntled spokesperson, Robert Pringle, who went on to describe the mission to recover Hintsa’s skull as a ‘hoax’.4 The Mail & Guardian quoted Xhosa paramount

Xoliliswe Sigcawu, who claimed that ‘the sangoma was a charlatan out

to make money and [a] reputation by playing on Xhosa sensitivities’.5 At a meeting in Nqadu, Willowvale, in the eastern Cape in 2001, Sigcawu asked the British High Commissioner to investigate how Gcaleka ‘had come to possess a skull purportedly that of the late Xhosa hero, Chief Hintsa’.6

Mathatha Tsedu, then writing in the Cape Times, stressed Gcaleka’s lack

of success in proving the skull’s authenticity, although – as a member of the fraternity of journalists – he wrote with a rare hint of sympathy for the mission.7 Claiming that ‘the head of king Hintsa has been missing since it was lopped of after he was killed resisting colonisation’, Tsedu added, ‘Chief Nicholas Tilana Gcaleka has been waging a one-man war to trace the head and bring it home for proper burial without success.’8

Gcaleka arrived back in South Africa amidst this far-reaching public interest in his ancestral instruction But once he set foot in South Africa bearing a skull he claimed belonged to Hintsa, Sigcawu summoned

him to an imbizo (council) to establish the truth about his discovery The

skull was coniscated,9 placed in the care of the police mortuary in Bisho, King William’s Town, and subsequently handed over to GJ Knobel of the department of forensic medicine at the University of Cape Town, VM Phillips

of the oral and dental teaching hospital at the University of Stellenbosch and PV Tobias, the director of the Palaeo-Anthropology Research Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand, for scientiic investigation In a press

release on 23 August 1996, the scientists commissioned to study the skull concluded that:10

Although one could still argue that there is a remote possibility that the skull could represent a male person with slight build and weak musculature, and of mixed parentage, with a preponderance of European features [Tobias], this skull belonged to a human female, of European or Caucasoid descent, who at the time of death, was middle aged It can be stated, beyond reasonable doubt, that this skull is not that of the late king Hintsa, who at the time of his death would have been a middle-aged human male of unmixed African origin.11

Quite clearly, the scientists who saw themselves as adjudicators in an important matter of history were equipped with a rather dated vocabulary

of ‘race’ for talking about evidence Even the deliberation of bare bones,

it seems from the pronouncements on the killing of Hintsa, had to be enveloped in the primacy of skin And as a consequence, a signiicant incident in the colonial past was surrendered to the terms and categories

of a forensic procedure that reduced history to mere epidermal diference Matters, as it turns out, came to a head at the annual Anatomical Society of Southern Africa Conference held at the University of Stellenbosch in 1997 The scientists charged to study the skull submitted an abstract under the title

‘Hintsa’s Head or Phantom Skull?’ In it the authors note:

On 29 February, a Xhosa man, claiming to be a sangoma and calling himself Chief Nicholas Gcaleka, disembarked at Port Elizabeth airport with a cranium he had brought from Scotland He had apparently gone in quest of King Hintsa’s skull, guided, as he said,

by spirits which led him to Scotland Holding the cranium aloft,

he pointed to a defect which he asserted was the mark of a bullet The legal representative of the Xhosa King and traditional leaders disagreed, pointing out that the skull had disintegrated when Hintsa was shot .The cranium was subsequently examined by VMP [VM Phillips] and GJL [GJ Louw] Both noted that, in respect of racially

and sexually diagnostic features, the indings were equivocal They detected no convincing features such as would have been expected in

a male person of indisputably African origin.12

Leaving aside for a moment the diagnostic procedures that ultimately deine ‘a Xhosa man’, the indings of the investigation into the skull

were presented to an auditorium made up of members of the scientiic community Unbeknown to the participants, Nicholas Gcaleka had iniltrated the meeting, like a phantom, where, according to newspaper reports, he was treated to the chastisement of a scientiic fraternity gathered under

the banner of ‘Anatomy in Transition’ Demanding the return of his skull,

Gcaleka identiied himself as the person who was being ridiculed and added that he had no faith that the scientists commissioned to study the skull had any interest in the ancestors of the Xhosa

If Gcaleka was overstating the point, it was only because the scientists recalled historical narrations of Hintsa’s death without explicitly suggesting how the contestations and doubts surrounding these afected their investigations Knobel et al cited ‘varied reports, [in which] it has been

claimed that the fatal short [sic] shattered Hintsa’s head, scattering his brain

and skull fragments, that [the shot] blew of the top of his head and that it was apparently common practice for soldiers to decapitate victims and take the heads as trophies’.13 The forensic procedure had to be supplemented by historical evidence about the killing of Hintsa, but no indication either of the source of the ‘reports’ or their claims to authority was required As we shall see, all these reports came from colonial oicials who were implicated in the killing of Hintsa

It was not entirely coincidental that Gcaleka should be confronted

by the demand for forensic and historical evidence The combination of the two was in the process of being tested at the time in relation to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TrC) The TrC was oicially established

by the postapartheid14 state to investigate and account for gross human rights violations under apartheid Initially, Nicholas Gcaleka’s quest was not

altogether out of place in an environment where the return and excavation

of dismembered bodies became a major national preoccupation through the TrC process It was not surprising that the dismembered bodies of the colonial past were being recalled alongside the deliberations of the TrC.15

However, Gcaleka’s quest had, perhaps unintentionally, brought the very foundational concepts of truth and reconciliation, upon which the TrC process rested, into question by recalling an unresolved historical

controversy from the nineteenth century While his lie was easily dismissed

in the public debates following his return to South Africa because it was not forensically and historically veriiable, it proved more diicult to grasp the implications of his search for Hintsa’s skull At one level, we might ind

in Gcaleka’s lie more of the constellation of the regime of truth, and how it

functions, than is proclaimed through the juridical foundations of the TrC itself Luise White has proposed that lies, like secrets, are socially negotiated realms of information.16 Good lies, she argues, are crafted, they have to be negotiated with a speciic audience, and they have to be made to stick – a lie,

a cover story, not only camoulages but explains Lies, in this formulation, are

about excess that demands, inter alia, revised strategies of reading, diferent

from those that historians are accustomed to For White, lies are not merely inventions, but fabrications that rest at the very heart of society and its histories The intersection of lies and social life is, we may argue, one way of perceiving of a narrative dimension that is central to the work of history To simply recognise lies as a condition of life is to neglect the structure of the presumed lie that is so crucial to the functioning of social worlds In other words, it is to ignore the ways in which lies overlap with regimes of truth or, more importantly, how regimes of truth are lodged in the articulation of what are ultimately considered lies

At another level, the allegations of the lie simply put into greater doubt the very efects of a regime of truth which, while being mobilised to a presumably noble end of national reconciliation, ofered little hope of settling the outstanding questions about the colonial past In speaking of colonialism

I am aligning the concept with a suggestion by Nicholas Dirks, who argues

that colonialism is an important subject in its own right and a metaphor for the subtle relationship between power and knowledge, culture and control.17

Rather than approaching colonialism in purely historicist terms as an essential and necessary development, colonialism in Dirks’s view not only had cultural efects too often ignored or displaced into the inexorable logics

of modernisation and world capitalism, but it was also a cultural project of control.18 By focusing on the moral outrage against the lie, and by reducing the basis of judgement to the fact that he lied, no one seemed to inquire

into whether raising the question of colonialism as integral to the search for reconciliation constituted a valid historical pursuit

The point is perhaps rendered clearer if we remind ourselves of responses to Gcaleka, who dared to speak what many considered to be a lie in a period when South Africa’s democratic transition was increasingly being deined by the terms of truth central to the work of the TrC The TrC’s

concept of truth was entirely drawn from a juridical discourse that limited the functions of truth to testimony and confession.19 The notion of gross human rights violations therefore limited the scope of the investigations

of violence In relation to the elevation of judicial and scientiic concepts of truth that assumed prominence in the TrC’s inquiry into gross human rights violations under apartheid, Gcaleka was readily dismissed as a fraud and an egotistical liar The forensic evidence supported this conclusion, and Gcaleka seemed to be making the error of conlating truth and reconciliation His claims were therefore easily relegated to the realms of fantasy and fraud The healer–diviner from the town of Butterworth in the eastern Cape was laughed at because his fantasy was not one that fell within the rules of the true instituted by, for example, the human rights violation inquiry of the TrC.20

While Nicholas Gcaleka operated outside of the parameters of the rules of the true, he nevertheless touched a raw nerve by invoking the nineteenth-century story of the killing of Hintsa Neither notions of truth (in relation to the commission of inquiry into his death in 1836) nor reconciliation (in relation to accusations that he was beheaded) applied to

the story of the killing of Hintsa in 1835 Gcaleka’s invocation of the colonial past perhaps unwittingly called into question the dominant concepts of history that were at work in the TrC, because it articulated the possibility that the regime of truth functioned in accordance with modes of evidence that regarded the archive as merely a storehouse of documents and not

an apparatus that produced and reproduced forms of subjection The key question was: how could a form of evidence once used to cover up acts

of violence be depended on to ofer us an escape from the violence of the apartheid past?

Nicholas Gcaleka’s fate depended as much on the coincidence between a regime of truth and the modes of evidence of the archive as it did on the judgements rendered about his personality Much was made

in the press of the fees he charged for interviews He was widely accused

of fabricating history by distorting the account of Hintsa’s death for the purposes of self-enrichment The accusation of distortion, however, was based on the very colonial record of the killing that had been doubted for more than a century in South Africa Indeed, the historian Jef Peires refers

to the commission of inquiry into Hintsa’s death as a cover-up on the part

of colonial oicials.21 Lost in the denunciations were the very traces of the contestations that lie at the heart of South African history At the height of

a moment of political transition endowed with historic achievement and signiicance, there could be no room for doubt The introduction of the story of the killing of Hintsa was treated as a mere distraction in the overall objectives of transition – from the apartheid to the postapartheid state – that the TrC was instituted to oversee

Hintsa, Gcaleka and history after apartheid

The quest for Hintsa’s head not only called into question the categories by which the TrC functioned, but also seemed to inadvertently short-circuit

a discussion amongst South African historians after 1994 about the crisis

in history.22 This crisis has been variously represented as a drop in student

interest in the discipline, the disconnection between the economic demands

of the present versus the critical assessments of the past, and the looking imperatives of postapartheid South Africa Gcaleka’s search for evidence of South Africa’s colonial past, perhaps unwittingly, put a new twist on the historians’ debate His search for Hintsa’s skull enabled a diferent question: what diference, if any, might the discourse of history make in unravelling the legacies of authoritarianism? This problem arose even as the political claims about narrating the present strategically, at times selectively, reclaimed history in order to extract some meaning of

forward-a nforward-ascent postforward-apforward-artheid society History, it seems, wforward-as ever-present forward-as forward-a resource for determining which conigurations of political struggle would prevail as national historical narrative But the appropriation of history to re-envisioning nation and identity tended to emphasise, rather than displace,

the disciplinary reason that was the very modus operandi of apartheid The

commitment to establishing alternative histories to apartheid was burdened

by the tendency to recycle well-worn modes of disciplinary inquiry (as if these were neutral and timeless) in the interests of making a break from a hideously violent and ofensive past What remained unclear, however, was whether the task of re-narrating pasts could be efectively pursued through the discourse of history Was it, in other words, possible to elaborate a concept of the postapartheid as a distinct ethico-political displacement of a prior violence by way of the discourse of history?

Amidst the laughter and ridicule that surrounded Nicholas Gcaleka

in South Africa and in London, in academic conferences and township meetings, the implication of history’s critical function in relation to

apartheid’s pasts was burdened by a nagging sense that history’s discourse may ofer little opportunity for thinking ahead In a rare moment, replete with public pronouncements about ‘miraculous social transformation’, a healer–diviner brought an encounter between the colonial past and the postapartheid present to the fore, in which it became not only possible but imperative to inquire into history’s relation to the exercise of power His fate would be decided by the answer to that question It is, I would argue,

necessary that the fate that awaited Gcaleka, as he recounted the story of the killing of Hintsa, be tackled head on Where there is mocking laughter there

is reason to suspect that a regime of truth is at work

This book traces the efects of a regime of truth founded upon colonial modes of evidence that engulfed two subjects who failed to make the cut of history: a king who at the prime of his rule was killed and mutilated

by British forces in the early nineteenth century and a healer–diviner who, towards the end of the twentieth century, two years into the birth

of a postapartheid democracy, recalled that king’s alleged decapitation Surrounding the king’s death in 1835, and the healer–diviner’s mission in

1996, are lies alongside truths and histories presented as unproblematic narratives of change Beyond the speciicities of the coincidence, this book explores the role of history so that a postapartheid future need not fall back

on the very subjective strategies that marked the excessive disciplinary violence of a highly racialised and stratiied system of oppression It clears the ground for thinking ahead, after apartheid, through a series of reversals and displacements of the techniques of subject formation generic to the colonial archive and its modes of evidence For this I propose that we allow the misits of the text23 to lead the way – without, I should add, too much expectation of where they might lead us

The Deaths of Hintsa brings together two related themes At one

level it brings the laughter surrounding Gcaleka’s mission to retrieve Hintsa’s skull to bear on an investigation of the modes of evidence of the colonial archive, so as to better understand the relationship between history and power speciic to the archive Rather than join the frenzy of public denouncement and ridicule, I wish to take seriously Gcaleka’s implicit provocation that while the foundations of a postapartheid society were being laid, the critique of apartheid’s colonial past was found wanting The deliberations surrounding Hintsa’s skull, speciically, provide us with an opportunity for mulling over the proliferation of signs at a time, not too long ago, when Nicholas Tilana Gcaleka encountered the history of colonialism

In the turbulence that followed the encounter, he was not, as many suspect,

excluded from participating in history but perhaps unwittingly caught up

in the event of history, that is, in the enunciative modalities of history that deined the diference between what could be said and what was actually said about the killing of Hintsa Rather than merely identifying an exclusion from

a regime of truth, this book asks how Nicholas Gcaleka, instead of being

regarded as a historian who had travelled far and wide in search of evidence into the killing of Hintsa, became the object of the very discourse of history that he had helped and hoped, in part, to articulate It addresses that question

by returning to the archival fate that awaited Hintsa after he was killed on the banks of the Nqabara River in 1835

At another level it examines how the transition from apartheid to postapartheid bypassed the colonial archive and therefore failed to anticipate the resilience of its modes of evidence If history was given any role in adjudicating in the matter of Nicholas Gcaleka, it was not to inquire into the question of the meaning of colonialism, but rather to put Gcaleka in his place, so to speak By returning to South Africa, bearing evidence in the form of the skull, the healer–diviner unwittingly solicited responses from within a discourse of history, organised around competing constructions of colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism, in which the culpability for the killing of Hintsa was far from being settled Overcoming apartheid required coming to terms not only with the efects of history, but with the discourse of history itself

Evidence and imagination in narratives of the killing of Hintsa

As a speciic ield of intelligibility, South African history, insofar as it might be viewed as a coherent research community, targeted and functioned in relation

to regulatory environments that we might call regimes of truth Even the most left-wing historiography turned to the archive to sustain its arguments, and established its legitimacy via the protocols of proof and evidence Along the way it tended to elide the function of the imaginary structure – or what Michel de Certeau calls ‘the historiographical operation’24 – that was, and is,

intrinsic to the discourse of history The imaginary structure here does not

refer to the unreal but rather to that constitutive part of discourse resulting in

a crystallisation of a set of exchanges that, if left unchecked, would prevent questioning the reality efect of a discipline like history To look into that crystal is to envisage how disciplines, which strive to achieve a reality efect, end up producing a subaltern efect that reveals a fundamental continuity in the functions of history as a statist discourse As a consequence, the discourse

of history in South Africa frequently slips into regulatory systems that govern the emergence of normative statements

This is precisely the double bind in which Gcaleka arguably found himself While the search for evidence was insuicient to meet the

expectations of history, his evoking of dreams and imagination was seen

as equally deicient in laying claim to reliably participating in the discourse

of history.25 Taken together, this was seemingly suicient reason for his disqualiication To simply cast Gcaleka aside for failing the rules of a regime

of truth, either in terms of the rules of evidence or in terms of recourse to the imaginary structure, is to ignore how his quest foregrounds the work

of the imaginary structure in the discourse of history After all, history,

as Hayden White has shown, necessarily relies on an imaginary structure

in the construction of its narratives.26 In history, the imaginary structure

is a necessary and complementary aspect of discourse If we follow the lead of De Certeau,27 we might say that the imaginary structure is not, as White suggests, merely a structural condition of history, but ‘a restless seeking after the self in the present underpinning the discourse of history’ The disqualiication of Gcaleka on the grounds of resorting to imaginary structure thus thwarted a more sustained relection on how history as a discourse suppresses the function of the conditions of narrativity in its discourse Gcaleka, perhaps surreptitiously, renders the distinction between evidence and imagination, or history and historiography, inoperable by revealing their imbrications in the modes of evidence of the colonial archive.This inoperability of a key distinction in historical discourse is a recurrent theme in narratives on the killing of Hintsa Consider, for example,

two slightly discrepant descriptions of Hintsa – and of the so-called

cattle-killing episode of 1856–57 – ofered by Jef Peires in his history The Dead

will Arise and Zakes Mda in his novel The Heart of Redness Although Mda’s

novel draws extensively on Peires’s research as it sets out to explore the cattle killing, it is infused in contemporary debates about rural development and ictionalised around tourist development in Qolora, the setting of Nongqawuse’s suicidal prophecy Peires’s description of Hintsa’s death is echoed in Mda’s text with slight but signiicant adjustment Shortly before telling us that Sarhili did not wish to invite upon himself the fate meted out

to his father, Hintsa, due to inaction, Peires recalls how:

Sarhili [could not] forget that terrible day more than twenty years previously (April 1835) when he had accompanied his father Hintsa

as he rode proudly into the camp of Governor D’Urban Hintsa was given assurances of his personal safety, but he was never to leave the camp alive D’Urban disarmed Hintsa’s retinue, placed the king under heavy guard and threatened to hang him from the nearest tree Hintsa was held hostage for a ransom of 25 000 cattle and 500 horses, ‘war damages’ owed to the colony He tried to escape but was shot down, and after he was dead his ears were cut of as military souvenirs.28

In adhering to the broad outlines of Peires’s account of the cattle killing, Mda ofers the following account of the circumstances in which Hintsa was killed Narrating the unfolding drama of the cattle killing, Mda reminds us of the chasm between the administrative burden of the colonial archive and the demands of anti-colonial memory:

The Otherworld where the ancestors lived had been caressed by the shadow of King Hintsa Even though almost twenty years had passed since King Hintsa had been brutally murdered in 1835 by Governor Sir Benjamin D’Urban, the amaXhosa people still remembered him with great love They had not forgotten how D’Urban had invited the king

to a meeting, promising him that he would be safe, only to cut his ears as souvenirs and ship his head to Britain.29

The charge of murder in this narrative revision replaces the agency of escaping, D’Urban is made responsible for the shooting rather than George Southey whom the colonial archive identiies as having ired the shot and, not only was the body mutilated but, according to Mda, the head was also shipped to Britain As the subjects of history emerge in the respective narratives, the event of history recalls the diference between what can be said and what is actually said about the killing of Hintsa, the historical diference, that is, between history as a system of subjection, and history as a system of production Herein, I wish to argue, lies the fate, and perhaps the salvation, of Nicholas Gcaleka.

This is not to suggest that the poetic necessarily represents an alternative to the colonising predicament of the archive Rather than

subsuming the killing of Hintsa into a temporal context of colonial

conquest that can be adjudicated by way of methodological feat or by poetic reinscription, which seemingly permits a perspective unfettered by the archive, I wish to argue that the contested alignment of evidence, poetics and the recovery of subjectivity in the narration of history posits an epistemic limit in conceptualising a history after apartheid That problem may be discerned in what I am calling the fabrication of historical subjectivity – the process by which the subject is necessarily cast as the very object of historical discourse

Raising the stakes in critiques of apartheid

The story of the killing of Hintsa cannot be told without blurring the distinction between history and historiography This is the premise of this book, which endeavours to connect the modes of evidence of the colonial archive with the imaginary structure that underlies its narrative possibilities

In delineating the indistinction of the two in the story of the killing of Hintsa, I hope also to outline a way to connect history and historiography so

as to activate a postcolonial critique of apartheid that would enable possible new directions in the rewriting of South African history

Nicholas Gcaleka’s mission was one instance where the writing

of South African history was opened up for deliberation Gcaleka’s quest brought to the fore the question of the killing of Hintsa in the nineteenth century, which paradoxically led to his very own entanglement in the modes

of evidence of the colonial archive It also had the unintended consequence

of generating a discussion about the rewriting of South African history after apartheid For example, the search for Hintsa’s skull was the inspiration behind a lecture on the rewriting of South African history by eminent social historian Shula Marks in Britain in 1996.30 Marks approached the topic of the rewriting of South African history by discussing the recent retrieval

of a skull – alleged to belong to Hintsa – by the healer–diviner Nicholas Tilana Gcaleka In a bid to interpret the quest for the skull and in light of the failure to prove the skull’s authenticity once discovered, Marks declared that Gcaleka was a man of his time.31 By this Marks meant that Gcaleka served as evidence of an identity that mediates the economic diiculties accompanying unfulilled political promises in the post-apartheid period – the agent that mediates, and perhaps represents, a social reality Now a double victim of his own truth game, Gcaleka was to be mobilised against the postmodernists and postcolonialists – themselves agents supposedly seeking to undermine the sacred domains of disciplinary history – as a sign of the legitimacy of what Marks calls materialist history

Mike Nicol similarly sees Nicholas Gcaleka as adding to the modern noise of late capitalism by making claims on shaky historical foundations Ciraj Rassool, Gary Minkley and Leslie Witz all refer to the diiculty that Gcaleka poses for social history when the evidence of human remains does not it the requirements of histories of social change As Gcaleka slipped into his new representative role as a sign of the times, he came to mark the postapartheid present as an imperfect tense In each case, I suggest, Gcaleka must be seen to be creating the space for thinking about history’s relation

of discipline, sometimes exceeding expectations and at others falling hopelessly short thereof If Gcaleka is indeed to ofer a diferent reading

of the South African past, and help in unravelling the hegemony of the colonial archive, then we might revalue his position in terms of the potential ascribed to the subaltern subject in tandem with elevating the theme of postcolonialism, discernible in earlier critiques of apartheid To resurrect this latent postcolonial theme is to ask that we attend to the colonial hangover in the constitution of the subject of history Any attempt to forge a history after apartheid would in my view need to attend to the strands of postcolonialism

as a way to make explicit the relations between disciplinary knowledge and power In the long run such an approach may help us better comprehend the formation of subjectivity in South African history

Today, in the aftermath of apartheid’s legal dissolution, it is also necessary to reformulate the meaning of apartheid given the seemingly entrenched legacies of authoritarianism that seem to persist in South African society The postcolonial critique of apartheid is a continuation of a strand

of critique that derives from a critical engagement with the intellectual inheritance of Marxist scholarship of the 1970s, which investigated the structural conditions of apartheid The scholarship of the 1970s, especially the formative debate involving Martin Legassick and Harold Wolpe, helped

to activate a revisionist understanding of race and class and to pave the way for the agency rooted in the black experience of rural dispossession and urban labour.32 The critique of apartheid, inluenced to some extent

by the growth of underdevelopment theories, forged in the context of Latin America, resulted in an analysis in which the concepts of race and class critically interrupted each other However, these arguments were later appropriated into the narratives of the Cold War and resistance to apartheid

in South Africa, tending in the process to become somewhat ixed in

their meaning.33 One reason for this is, perhaps, that, in the discourses of liberation movements, the notions of race and class became increasingly regulated through programmatic statements such as ‘colonialism of a special type’, which became the basis of analyses of apartheid within the African

National Congress (aNC) and the South African Communist Party (SaCP) after 1962.34 Given the imbrication of concepts of race and class and also the need to propose a concept of apartheid that allows us to properly formulate

a deeper meaning of the postapartheid, we may have to embark on what I call a postcolonial critique of apartheid This will require us to dehistoricise the history of race and class by dissolving nostalgic formulations of

agency embedded in the willing subject, thereby enabling a relocation of agency in the activating dynamic of discipline through which the subject

of contemporary politics is seemingly inaugurated.35 Most importantly, a postcolonial critique of apartheid will ask whether the discourse of history

is capable of initiating a diferent ethical relation to Nicholas Gcaleka by contesting historicist formulations of colonialism

The term ‘postcolonial’ perhaps invites us to explore the conditions under which the colonised subject, even after the advent of anti-colonial nationalism and, one might say, after the dissolution of legalised apartheid,

is returned to the position of subaltern The term has gained such currency

in contemporary Africa as a designation of mere temporal distinction with colonialism (a usage with which I remain uncomfortable) that its precise deployment in respect of the interlocking stories of Gcaleka and Hintsa is in need of elaboration In my reading, the postcolonial ofers a critical model of disciplinarity that supplements the unravelling of apartheid in terms of race and class In a crudely composite sense, the term ‘postcolonial’ ultimately leads us to a critical concept of the subjection of agency which brackets nostalgic concepts of agency to one that takes seriously its disciplinary conditions of possibility

Occasionally, the term ‘postcolonial’ is greeted with some scepticism amongst scholars whose arguments fall within the epistemic frameworks staked out by an emergent but earlier critique of the underdevelopment wrought by late capitalism Largely basing their disagreements on a

temporal understanding of the postcolonial as temporally post-colonial,

Anne McClintock, Ella Shohat and Arif Dirlik, among others, early on expressed wariness about the concept, which they believed proved inadequate

in confronting the efects of globalisation At times the argument about the term’s imprecision held that its targets were misplaced and that there was scant regard for the post-colonial impulse of the 1970s that addressed the problem of the development of underdevelopment accompanying late capitalism Dirlik in particular was concerned that the post-colonial was needlessly underestimating the category of class and the mechanism of capital in manufacturing its most recent installation in globalisation For Dirlik, the post-colonial grossly underplays capitalism’s structuring of the modern world McClintock, Shohat and also, in a slightly diferent polemic, Aijaz Ahmad37 were concerned that the term ‘post-colonial’ unnecessarily abandoned the resources of history and yet-to-be-exhausted political

projects with which to confront globalisation Together they bemoaned the depoliticising efects of the post-colonial Ahmad, for his part, entered into

a vitriolic critique of the post-colonial as a consequence of the irst world location of its intellectuals, amongst whom he singled out Edward Said Judging from Stuart Hall’s incisive reworking of the idea of the postcolonial as an invitation to think at the limit, these problematisations of the term by McClintock, Shohat and Dirlik were not without consequence.38

Hall, for example, takes Dirlik’s comments about the absence of any talk of capitalism in the work of postcolonial scholars seriously, agreeing that the elision is remarkable, but inds the subsequent conlation of postcoloniality and late capitalism troubling, if not stunningly reductionist to material context For Hall, the rise of postcolonial criticism might more usefully be seen as an ally in tackling the linear unidirectional narrative of globalisation

by posting ‘a critical interruption into that whole grand historiographical narrative’.39 It therefore serves as a counterpoint to the history of globalisation and its accompanying claim of a common humanity by revealing the

inheritance of the violent efects of a colonial modernity In the process the postcolonial also breaks down the inside/outside of the colonial system on which, according to Hall, histories of imperialism have thrived.What I ind most enabling about Hall’s critique of McClintock, Shohat and Dirlik is his insistence on the further problematisation and intensiication of the term

‘postcolonial’ if it is to serve as a strategy to harness the discontents with globalisation to political ends It is not therefore surprising that he should approach the postcolonial as an episteme in the making If the postcolonial

is to serve as accomplice in constructing a history after apartheid by

constituting a diferent ethical and political relation to the subject, it would prove necessary to forego a reliance on the temporal structure that separates history and historiography

Perhaps the best-known efort to test the implications of postcolonial critique is that produced by the Subaltern Studies Collective (SSC) in South Asia The rise of the igure of the subaltern – a subject that is always also out

of synch with the empty homogenous time of capital – has contributed to

unfolding a strategy of parabasis – being outside while at once inside the play

or argument of history By putting the subaltern into play in the discourse of history, SSC has also realigned the principal disciplinary distinction between history and historiography that deines the historian’s craft In so doing, it has called into question unilinear temporal theories of change that dominate the discourse of history and the political efects of the speciic histories they give rise to

Let me draw out the productivity of the exchange more carefully so

as to emphasise its potential in working towards an epistemic rupture It

is possible to discern in SSC not only an argument with British liberalism

in India but also a fundamental disagreement with Marx’s famous essay,

‘On Imperialism in India’,40 in which he proposed that colonialism was

a troublesome but necessary event in the history of capital SSC draws out the inadequacies of nationalist responses to this narrative of change by implicating its disciplinary forms in the very colonial violence that it sets out

to oppose As I prefer to think of the work undertaken by the collective, it did not merely follow Marx in turning Hegel’s inversion of things right side up,

on their feet, as in the famous metaphor for the dialectical challenge posed

by the young left Hegelians, but opted to inquire into the failed promise of its spirit that prompted none other than Marx to explore the necessary stage

of colonialism in world history SSC did not merely seek to react in opposition

to Hegel’s model, but called into question the limits of dialectical thinking Writing on Hegel’s attempt to shield world historical deeds from criticism, Ranajit Guha, one of the originators of the project, notes:

Our critique, which stands at the limit of World-history, has no compunction whatsoever in ignoring this advice [from Hegel] From the point of view of those left out of World-history this advice amounts to condoning precisely such ‘world historical deeds’ – the rape of continents, the destruction of cultures, the poisoning of the environment – as helped ‘the great men who [were] the individuals

of world history’ to build empires and trap their subject populations

in what the pseudo-historical language of imperialism could describe

as Prehistory.41

This, however, was not merely to write a social history from below; one that was additive of those who were cast as Europe’s people without history The elaboration of the concept ‘subaltern’ exposed something of a categorical crisis when history’s relation to power was speciically refracted through the prism of postcolonial criticism As such, the subaltern marked a necessary limit in the composition of power This, as Gyan Prakash notes, means that subalternity erupts within the system of dominance and marks its limits from within, that its externality to dominant systems of knowledge and power surfaces inside the system of dominance, but only as an intimation,

as a trace of that which eludes the dominant discourse.42 Even as a ruse of dominance, as a sign internal to a system or an impossible inadequation

in a sign system, the term ‘subaltern’ nevertheless conveys a sense of categorical distinction If Prakash’s formulation echoes my own reading of Gcaleka, there is still some need to explain the shift proposed by subaltern studies from the recuperative project surrounding the preordained subject

of history to a reading of the traces of subalternity in hegemonic discourses The question, it seems, is equally one about the concepts of diference that subaltern studies entertains and whether these might help to activate a postcolonial critique of apartheid

In Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s argument about representation and the subaltern in the essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ a strategic use

of essentialism in a politically scrupulous programme simultaneously highlights the limits of identity politics in an environment overdetermined

by the interplay of disciplinary power and reason.43 The operative phrase – politically scrupulous programme – is of course crucial because in the attempt to recover the subjectivity named by the place-keeper ‘subaltern’, the historian invariably encounters the limits and complicities of her own apparatus of reading In the case of colonial India and its independence struggle, that apparatus was deeply imbued with the shades of nationalism and Marxism, each promising a future that transcended a violent past but becoming increasingly embroiled in the prescriptions of the Cold War In the SSC, the subaltern is inserted into the logic of these grand narratives, not because it can be featured as an exemplar of historical consciousness, but because it enables an investigation of the anatomy of failure to complete the critique of colonialism in the discourses of nationalism and Marxism.The work undertaken in the name of the SSC, itself a considerably diverse research agenda bound together by a broad postcolonial intellectual commitment, has resulted, in at least one sense, in a critical deconstruction

of historiography – both nationalist and Marxist In the promise of transition from colonial rule, the igure of the subaltern stood, hyperbolically perhaps,

as a demographic diferential, to use Guha’s term, that interrupted the lows

of historiographical modalities of social change If indeed that phrase has proved successful in calling attention to failed promises, I want to argue that,

in a peculiar if not ironic sense, apartheid too could be seen as an instance

of demographic diference, especially if we consider its legislative tyranny of separate development

Yet, there is something more poignant than the reminder of apartheid’s decree in the arguments of the SSC, especially in its attempt

to question the theories of change presented by nationalist and Marxist historiography in respect of those whose consciousness needed to be

translated into respective metaictions More crucial is the way in which the

SSC helps us to think of how nationalism resonates with the universalising narrative of Marxism Perhaps one way to name that productivity is through the more deconstructive edge of the collective, which annotates its own failure in recovering subaltern agency even as it makes possible a critique

of theories of change The subaltern, to rephrase the collective’s initial strategies, was always also placed under erasure as a result of the operation of regimes of truth As a consequence the project, for all intents and purposes,

is better understood as one aimed at deconstructing historiography Dipesh Chakrabarty provides us with a useful summary of how these strands came together in the work of subaltern studies in India:

With hindsight, it can be said that there were three broad areas

in which Subaltern Studies difered from the history-from-below approach of Hobsbawm or Thompson (allowing for diferences between these two eminent historians of England and Europe)

Subaltern historiography necessarily entailed a relative separation

of the history of power from any universalist histories of capital,

a critique of the nation form, and an interrogation of the relation between power and knowledge (hence of the archive itself and of history as a form of knowledge) In these diferences, I would argue, lay the beginnings of a new way of theorizing the intellectual agenda for postcolonial histories.44

My engagement with the SSC is premised not so much on its notion of the subaltern as demographic diferential but rather on its interruptive strategy for reading, as I have already suggested, the theories of change I am not necessarily interested in comparative histories in the social scientiic sense

of that term or in the use of the term ‘subaltern’ to denote yet another subject category in the pantheon of multiculturalism I do not feel that the term

‘subaltern’ should limit us to a sense of categorical distinction Mine is a more selective advancement of the project of the SSC which stages an inquiry about the theory of change in the transition from apartheid to postapartheid South Africa, and allows us, as Hall would have it, to intensify postcolonial

criticism If histories of change are conventionally believed to be marked

by historiographical presuppositions, what speciic theory of change guides the shift towards the onset of the postapartheid? My own contribution to the discourse of the SSC is to show how history works to put the subaltern in his

or her place by recourse to the modes of evidence that constitute the colonial archive while ofering the SSC some recourse to the watchword of apartheid.The intellectual programme charted by the SSC serves as a strategic interlocutor because it expands the sense of the critical work of history

in productive and consequential ways The SSC, especially its more

deconstructive tendencies, has highlighted the discrepancy between the philosophical critique of humanism and the historical discourse on the representation of the postcolonial subject Recall here Frantz Fanon’s rhetorical question which succinctly articulates the point I wish to

emphasise: ‘What is this Europe where they are never done talking about man but go about killing men everywhere?’46 The resultant impasse, we might say, that activates the programme of the SSC is aligned with the critique of humanism that permeates the interventions of Fanon both

in terms of the problem of subject constitution and the irreducibility of colonised subject in the discourse of Europe

The dialogue with the SSC is aimed at unravelling the crisis of history

in a manner that clears the ground for the arrival of a postapartheid future

By ‘postapartheid future’ I mean not only that legal rearrangement of society that signiies a period after apartheid but also a discourse that activates a very precise formulation of the postcolonial, which this book helps to elaborate What enables the dialogue, I believe, is the manner in which the term

‘subaltern’ indirectly allows for a conceptual correlation between subaltern agency and the constraints of identity politics represented by apartheid This double bind of agency and constraint is consummately recorded in the phrase ‘subjection of agency’ which, according to John Mowitt, opposes notions of agency that lay claim to the will of the agent rather than viewing the formation of the subject’s agency as a product of a long-drawn-out discursive event.47 If we are to think of this in relation to the position of

Nicholas Gcaleka’s quest for Hintsa’s skull, we might say that not making the cut of history is the point at which the long-drawn-out collusion of archive and history is revealed Why the insistence of combining the term ‘subaltern’ with Mowitt’s formulation of the subjection of agency? Because, I argue, it allows for distance between those forms of narration which seek to recover subaltern agency at the expense of attending to how the reinscription of the subject into the discourse of history produces repetition, not diference Coupled with the phrase ‘subjection of agency’, subaltern studies may be thought of less as a project of recovery than of tracking subaltern efects

in discourse

To mark the important distinction that I am belabouring, it may help to place the terms ‘subjection of agency’ and ‘subaltern’ alongside the cryptic notion of ‘lines of light’ that permeates the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari They suggest that the line of light ‘is a sort of delirium’ not unlike that which marks the predicament of postcoloniality and the efort to invalidate the binaries forged under the aegis of colonial decree.48 Underscoring a distinction between line of light and escape, Deleuze provides a qualiication that we would do well to entertain if we are to reformulate the productivity of the term ‘subaltern’ in the interests of developing a postcolonial critique of apartheid:

even when a distinction is drawn between the light and the voyage, the light still remains an ambiguous operation What is it which tells

us that, on a line of light, we will not rediscover everything we are leeing? In leeing fascism, we rediscover fascist coagulations on the line of light In leeing everything, how can we avoid reconstituting both our country of origin and our formation of power, our

intoxicants, our psychoanalyses and our mommies and daddies? How can one avoid the line of light’s becoming identical with a pure and simple movement of self-destruction .?49

Lines of light allow us to relocate the force of agency in the very conditions

of constraint to which it is ultimately bound It sheds light on the speciic

relation between subalternity and subjection of agency so as to establish the conditions for deliberating new meanings for postcolonial diference One way to proceed, it seems, is to understand apartheid’s relation to colonial violence and its archive anew, in terms of the subjection of agency and its related subaltern efects

If the colonial archive not only preceded apartheid but deined it discursively as a system of modernist tyranny, if it is the source of organising the subjection of agency, then the question that this book poses is: how does one establish a line of light not only from the violence of colonialism, but also from the tendency for the archive to regulate much of what can be said

in its wake? Far from being akin to a superstructure, though, the colonial archive is a reminder of the possibilities of power to code every emergent relation in society, even the resistance to that power that I too ultimately seek

to establish through the process of writing this book.50

As theories of underdevelopment increasingly seeped into analyses

of apartheid through Marxist scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s, a more discreet strand of postcolonial criticism inaugurated in part by the work

of Bernard Cohn and Edward Said simultaneously, but independently

of speciically Marxist framings, drew attention to the vast networks of knowledge by which the colonial project created the conditions for the exercise of power.51 That the critique of apartheid as a recognisable social formation opted out of pursuing this latter postcolonial trajectory seems to have stunted the possibilities of intensifying the critique of apartheid, in ways that tackled the disciplinary conditions of apartheid’s exercise of power Taken together, Cohn and Said placed before us a radical revision of

the analysis presented in Michel Foucault’s Order of Things and Archeology

of Knowledge;52 theirs was not merely an echo of the trajectory charted in Foucault’s early work Their arguments on the making of the Orient as an object of knowledge tended to diminish the distance between epistemic formation (the arrangement in an episteme of rational elements and other elements that are not rational) and discursive formation (the regularisation

of statements expressed through their positivity) Accordingly, Foucault’s

description of the classical, renaissance or modern episteme was propped

up by the vast ediice of Europe’s expansionist project.53 What Said in

particular achieved in his Orientalism, published in 1978, was to intensify the

implications of Foucault’s analysis of epistemes and discursive formations by establishing a more deinite connection between the disciplinary power and the rise of academic disciplines The resultant sense of disciplinary reason

which Foucault himself would uncover in his Discipline and Punish challenged

the very colonial logic and premise of the formation of the human sciences.54

The implicit argument of Orientalism, as I see it, is that any efort to oversee

the birth of the postcolonial must be accompanied by a commensurate rupture

in the systems of knowledge that established the conditions of possibility

of colonialism in the irst place In returning to the themes developed in

Orientalism some years later, Said articulated this aspect of his quest in which

he situated his own return to the theme of humanism and the problem of a universalising historicism:

Along with the greater capacity for dealing with – in Ernst Bloch’s phrase – the non-synchronous experiences of Europe’s Other has gone a fairly uniform avoidance of the relationship between European imperialism and these variously constituted and articulated

knowledges What has never taken place is an epistemological critique

of the connection between the development of a historicism which has expanded and developed enough to include antithetical attitudes such as ideologies of western imperialism and critiques of imperialism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the actual practice of imperialism by which the accumulation of territories and population, the control of economies, and the incorporation and the homogenization of histories are maintained

We must, I believe, think in both political and theoretical terms, locating the main problems in what Frankfurt theory identiied as domination and division of labor We must confront also the problem

of the absence of a theoretical, utopian, and libertarian dimension in analysis We cannot proceed unless we dissipate and redispose the material historicism into radically diferent pursuits of knowledge,

and we cannot do that until we are aware that no new projects of knowledge can be constituted unless they resist the dominance and professionalized particularism of historicist systems and reductive, pragmatic, or functionalist theories.55

This statement not only ofers a way to ascertain the complicity of history

in sustaining forms of power, but also extends the critique to those

histories that present themselves as inclusive and radically opposed to imperialism The desire to seek an inclusionary narrative of world history has relinquished the need for a critique of historicism which was part of the selective narrative, and its diabolical consequences, in the irst place More importantly, Said is attempting to re-circuit knowledge that does not amount

to merely enacting earlier historicist reversals of anti-imperialist narratives

of change

In seeking to revisit the relation between apartheid and colonialism,

I am suggesting that the search for the meaning of the postapartheid may beneit from the postcolonial expectation of an epistemic rupture and that the latter may be served by a deeper understanding of apartheid Stated diferently, the possibility of a postapartheid that is geared at deepening democracy is perhaps best dealt with by bringing a postcolonial critique

of apartheid to bear on it This would entail bringing to an end historicist constructions in which colonialism, apartheid and the postapartheid (or, in this instance, the post-apartheid) are treated as merely temporally sequential rather than connected through the techniques of disciplinary reason

As the machinery of apartheid is dismantled and its components placed on the proverbial dust heap of history, three very speciic questions that have not guided the critique of apartheid hitherto remain to be

answered: what kind of disciplinary power did apartheid represent, what kind

of normalising efects does it entertain and where would we mark the ends of apartheid? These questions arise from a sense of diiculty in deining what can be best described as the faltering narratives of transition from apartheid