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 South Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The latter is suggestively renamed ‘the Afrasian Sea’ by Michael N. Pearson (2007), a scholar of the Indian Ocean, to express the movement of communities between Africa and Asia that dates back to the first century CE. 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. 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 Java with his parents, who were Muslim. Their surname changed from Abdurahman to Adriaan. When this change happened remains unclear. This resonates with the formation of Muslim communities at the Cape (later classified ‘Malay’), which dates back to 1860 with the arrival of indentured labourers and traders from South Asia (Baderoon and Green 2012: 166). These routes make up the contours of the underside of South Africa’s modernity and its history of conquest, indenture and slavery at the early Cape (Dooling 1994; Ross 1983; Shell 1994; Worden 2007). 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 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 vrijzwarten (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. This diasporic history gestures towards fragments of multiple, mostly unknown elsewheres: historic, geographic, religious, cultural and epistemic elsewheres. St Helena Island, the South Atlantic Ocean, Islam, the Indian Ocean, the Cape before colonial settlement and the Netherlands are among these and possibly other unknown elsewheres.
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’ (Baderoon 2009: 93-96). 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 (see Gilroy 1993). But, for scholars in the humanities and social sciences who study southern Africa, this is changing. The historian and scholar of literary studies Isabel Hofmeyr (2007) explicates the ways in which historiographies of the Indian Ocean query theoretical assumptions premised on black Atlantic motifs. In her overview of these historiographies she notes some of the differences between the Indian and the North Atlantic Oceans: the slave trade in the Indian Ocean was predominantly female, not male; this was trade in household, not plantation slaves; distinctions between slaves and ‘free’ people, between indentured labourers and settlers, and associations of race with slavery were not as pronounced as in the North Atlantic. Convicts and lascars (seamen) were among these ‘forms of unfree labour’, an important analytic device (according to Hofmeyr) for understanding the Indian Ocean. Equally important for Hofmeyr is the variety of free migrants – which included independent traders and mainly Muslim clerics and pilgrims – who crisscrossed this ocean.
The Indian Ocean can be thought of as an emergent epistemic space – 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; it is a space that enables critical inquiry into normative ways of knowing. In the words of John C. Hawley, a professor of English, ‘the Indian Ocean world offers a philosophical challenge to the hegemony of Western modernity’ (2008: 5). Hofmeyr (2007) notes the ways in which this domain troubles racialised and binary notions of the slave as African and the free person as European; the ways in which it questions clear and stable divisions between slave and free person, and in so doing, reveals complex meanings of freedom, un-freedom, settler, diaspora, race and agency. This approach to Indian Ocean histories reopens several questions: who is a settler; who is a slave; who was dispossessed of land and livelihoods, and by whom; what were the limits, if any, on colonial power; and who was involved in the making of modernity, and in anti-colonial struggles. Hofmeyr suggests that the circulation of ideas across the Indian Ocean produces a conception of colonialism as more about ‘a contestation of universalisms’ than about local encounters with global forces. This complex and layered texture of Indian Ocean histories is part of the bundle of spoken and unspoken lines that make up my family’s stories.
The anthropologist Daniel Yon (2007) examines the other ocean-side of this threshold – the spatially vast South Atlantic oceanic world. Like scholarship on the Indian Ocean, his work suggests that the South Atlantic Ocean, and specifically St Helena Island, can be thought of as an emergent and critical epistemic space. Its ‘flux and fluidity [can be] invoked as a contrast to an Apartheid world that insists upon fixity’ (2007: 144). This troubles taken-for-granted ideas about race-making, race-mixing, and about inevitable links between place/nature and race/culture. 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.
Yon (2007) draws on moments in the history of St Helena Island – including its early entanglements with the Cape Colony and with the Indian Ocean – to highlight the multiplicity and movement of people to and from the island, which he describes as a meeting place for the Indian Ocean, Europe, the Americas, Africa and South and East Asia. From 1502, this island was inhabited, for shorter or longer periods, by Portuguese exiled and convalescent soldiers from its colony, Goa; by British colonists; by slaves from Africa and the Indian Ocean islands; and by indentured labourers from China. Yon notes the ways in which these flows, temporary landings, emigrations and meetings trouble and sometimes rearticulate the Cape’s iteration of Eurocentred modernist politics, which welded together race and place to produce a discourse of roots and origins (2007: 148-60). He refers particularly to the period from the emigration of St Helenians to Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East London, Durban and Port Nolloth in the late nineteenth century (when the significance of the island as a hub declined) through to the dawn of official apartheid in 1948. My grandmothers’ parents were, in all likelihood, among those who emigrated from the island to various parts of the Cape during this time, and whose offspring were later classified under apartheid as ‘of mixed-St Helena race’ (2007: 157) and as Coloured.
Hofmeyr and Yon show that 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 the two oceans into a quadrangle of meshworks – bordered by the Americas, Europe and Africa to its southern tip – in the south (Yon 2007). The meshworks 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, not because of the region as a bounded territory.
LIVING INSIDE APARTHEID
Frantz Fanon, the revolutionary intellectual from Martinique, saw apartheid as ‘an emblematic instance ... of the colonial condition’ (Sekyi-Otu 1996: 2), a condition for which racialisation is a fundamental ordering principle. From the mid-seventeenth century,