How did the office of the Vice Chancellor know which staff were black African and which were Coloured? It used race classifications recorded in the university’s human resources database and invited staff members who had presumably selected to classify themselves by race.
I was and remain unclassified and did not receive this invitation. Nevertheless, I attended the meeting because a colleague (ironically, considered white and foreign) told me about it. These questions remain with me: What kinds of conversations and outcomes might be generated if staff are gathered by academic rank, not race classification, in order to discuss matters of transformation? What kinds of conversations and outcomes might be generated if transforming the composition of academic staff were made a central concern for the entire university community, irrespective of race classification? When will white people cease to be the noise in the room in a country with a black majority, a minority of whom are part of a growing and empowered elite? As a beneficiary of funds for the advancement of black African and Coloured staff, how do I relate with integrity towards colleagues (close and not so close to me) who are equally qualified but are deemed ineligible for such financial support? How do I resist the translation of my blackness into a currency?
Lived anti-racialism
The fourth experience I wish to share occurred during 2008 and 2009 when I worked with the team who wrote the policy against racism and racial harassment for UCT at the time, under the sage leadership of Crain Soudien. We worked with stories of staff and students (about UCT) that were much like our own. We collectively created the policy by drawing on these stories. For me, those meetings are best described as a lived sense of anti-racialism. It was a holistic experience: one that touched my intellect, my embodied self, my inner self and my relationship to others and to my past.10 What I felt, learned and imbibed during that process is best expressed by Veena Das (2007) when she writes about the Partition of India and about the questions: What does it mean to inhabit a world? How does one make a world anew? What does it mean to pick up the pieces of a past that weighs so heavily on the present, and to live on in the very place of one’s wounding?
To bring her insights, and her very words, to bear on what I refer to here as a lived experience of anti-racialism would mean to describe this experience as follows: the ‘concrete relations that we establish[ed]’ as a team by living with the stories of others were ‘like the shadows of the more abstract questions’ before us: How do we help cultivate an anti-racial social ethos? How do we help stop the racial violence of the everyday? How do we infuse the idea of anti-racialism with life? How do we begin to make it ordinary? For Das, we learn how to make our worlds anew ‘in the process of such living’. For, she posits, ‘[w]ords, when they lead lives outside the ordinary, become emptied of experience, lose touch with life ...’ (Das 2007: 5).
Another way of describing this lived sense of anti-racialism is to say that as a group of people working and thinking together we held onto one another as we tried to change what Hinterberger (2012) calls ‘the population imagination’ – the ‘blood of government’ (a phrase I borrow from Paul Kramer [2006]) that manages difference and inequality – by cultivating an ethos of contesting inequality and living-together-indifference.
THRESHOLDS
This autobiographical sketch of the texture of the everyday and of living on multiple thresholds shapes my thought, my becoming and my humaning. My parents lived on both sides of 1948, the year the National Party came to power to further entrench racial segregation, exclusion and discrimination. I came into the world at a time when my parents had just graduated from municipal housing to home ownership. The financial responsibility tagged to their new status instilled a sense of precariousness that extended into my childhood. This is evident in the ways my mother spoke of our lives as never far from the breadline. My mother’s anxiety about losing me, as she had lost two of her sons who died during their teenage years, was palpable. It made me acutely aware of the threshold between life and death. The threshold between a somewhat diverse neighbourhood, only some of whose residents had basic comforts such as running water, and a neighbourhood declared exclusively Coloured, was ever present. So was the threshold between apartheid’s meta-narrative of racialised destiny and the counter-narrative of my parents and teachers about a future with possibilities that defied this destiny. For them, these possibilities depended on dedication to education, keeping out of ‘politics’ and avoiding (not preventing) teenage pregnancy.
The lived reality of my youth was shaped by a precarious fusion of selective privilege and oppression under apartheid. As a young woman I hung delicately between heterosexual (South African) young men’s conception of me as on the one hand ‘not quite eligible’ as a bride and, on the other, a woman unreachable under the patriarchal reign of my father. In the politics of the time, I was neither for apartheid nor actively involved in organised resistance against it. To paraphrase Zoe Wicomb (1998), my blackness draws its meaning from multiple, overlapping and contradictory belongings and not-belongings. I repeatedly renegotiate these as I move from one place to another inside and outside of South Africa. This Blackness defies attempts to give Blackness a general, monologic and definitive meaning.
My thought is infected with these thresholds. This states the obvious. More obfuscated is my definitive experience of having lived, as the educationist Jonathan Jansen puts it, ‘on both sides of the 1990s, the decade in which everything changed’ in South Africa. He reminds: ‘It will never happen again’ (Jansen 2009: 1). I am a child of apartheid and a beneficiary of the outcome of South Africa’s ‘liberation’. From this place I use ideas about humanism as critique to question – without losing sight of their effects – the continued use of apartheid’s race categories which rely on normative ways of knowing race.
My point of departure, the premise that South Africa’s apartheid regime is an extension of its colonial history, conjoined with my conception of its land- and mindscape as a threshold between various oceanic cross-currents, begins to place its history as well as its contemporary reality within the modern colonial world system – an economic, political and knowledge system whereby Europe, through its domination, made its world the destination for all worlds, including worlds of Africa; a system by means of which Europe assumed ownership of history and of knowledge (Mignolo 2012: x). Worlds outside of Europe thus come to constitute the ‘underside’ of this world system; the ‘underside’ of modernity. The socio-political manifestations of the multiplicities I have sketched in this chapter are fragments of one expression of the heterogeneity of social formations on the ‘underside’ of modernity. They are a fraction of the fecund unsettledness, produced by a particular constellation of power for a particular historical and lived experience in South Africa. This experience is a small part of the ‘underside’ of modernity.
Without searching, I find my thought, affect and lived experience inside Walter Mignolo’s (2012: xvi) notion of ‘border thinking’, an idea which he borrows from the Latin American feminist Gloria Anzaldua: thinking from the border as opposed to about or within borders, whether spatial, cultural, disciplinary or psychological. Mignolo is among several scholars who form part of the Latin American Modernity/Coloniality/ Decoloniality Research Collective.11 Border thinking is an act of epistemic and disciplinary disobedience which includes disobedience against any form of policing thought and practice, irrespective of its intention. It entails a conscious bending and breaking of hegemonic knowledge to the purpose of living and thinking on thresholds, while continuing the struggle to mould one’s own coming to know and one’s own principles for living.
A border implies a boundary between places – spatial, temporal, mind/ body places – one crossed by choice, whether circumscribed or free. Borders are, by virtue of being borders, always policed, with or without success. Borders are lines of domination, lines of occupation that divide people, restrict their movement and disrupt their lives (Ingold 2007: 81-84). It feels more accurate to describe my thinking as ‘from multiple thresholds’. Thresholds are lines of relation which can