Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg 2001
First published in South Africa in 2016
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ISBN 978-1-86814-968-1 (Print)
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TIES THAT BIND
Race and the Politics of Friendship in South Africa
EDITED BY SHANNON WALSH & JON SOSKE
Love itself, the subversive gift, is an important public good, and loving is a significant political act, particularly among those stigmatized and marked as unworthy of love and incapable of deep commitment.
– Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic
From now on, all friendship is political.
– Comité invisible, L’Appel
FANON’S SECRET
GABEBA BADEROON
The grape picker holds out
his hand full of fruit but turns
his face, the slight, unavailable cast
of his head his most precious possession.
The woman who cleans your house
all day is in the places you cannot be,
touches your sheets.
You hate
what is held back,
not known to you,
kept, stolen, enchanted.
1: THINKING ABOUT RACE AND FRIENDSHIP IN SOUTH AFRICA
JON SOSKE AND SHANNON WALSH
Writing in 1896, Olive Schreiner, arguably the most radical critic of imperial policy of her day, argued that a racial apocalypse could be averted only if South Africa’s white population ruled the country in the spirit of friendship, ‘a course of stern unremitting justice is demanded from us towards the native ... we [must] raise him & bind him to ourselves with indissoluble bonds of sympathy and gratitude’. By tying the responsibilities of colonial governance to the cultivation of an unbreakable emotional bond, Schreiner articulated a vision of friendship that served as both an instrument and outcome of the civilizing mission, replacing a precarious rule of violence with the cultivation of a ‘native’ subjectivity that was bound by affection and gratitude to the (former) colonial master.1 Strikingly, a similar rhetoric can be found in the writing of white South Africans ranging from the segregationist Jan Smuts to the liberal author and politician Alan Paton, from apartheid ideologues of the 1950s to the young nonconformist Patrick Duncan. In the 1930s and 1940s, a social scientific version of this language developed under the sponsorship of the European-Native Joint Councils movement and the South African Institute of Race Relations. Whether articulated as a civilizing mission, separate development, or racial equality, each of these projects made claims on the emotional life of the colonized, and envisioned its outcome as generating bonds of affection between black and white. A history of colonial power in South Africa must therefore incorporate a genealogy of the language and practices of friendship.
At the same time, friendship is often understood to transcend the sphere of politics. Circulating affections and desires create connections that are not easily mapped onto existing power relations. Friendship can crystallize almost instantly both practices that resist structures of oppression and those that enable them: intimacies and complicities. This volume explores friendship as a mode of liberal colonial power, while still holding on to possibilities for insurgent, transgressive, and subversive friendships. How did the (generally homosocial) framework of colonial friendship function to police other forms of desire and articulate the gender dynamics of white settler society? How did African intellectuals, spanning from the work of S. M. Molema in the 1920s to Steve Biko in the 1970s, develop a critique of colonial friendship? How did the rhetoric, symbolism, and imagery of the liberation struggle attempt to subvert or reconfigure the expectations of friendship as a racial script? To what extent do languages and practices of solidarity — both during the anti-apartheid struggle and within the contemporary South African left — build on earlier visions of racial friendship? How has literature and art served as a space to disrupt the emotional economy of colonialism or experiment with alternate models of love and intimacy?
Writing from a diverse range of disciplinary, theoretical, and political perspectives, the contributions to this volume bring South African debates into conversation with three currents of scholarship developed in other contexts. First, we engage with a new generation of scholarship in settler colonial studies, critical race theory, and indigenous studies. These literatures, albeit in ways that differ significantly, have placed the ‘structure of settlement’ (Wolfe 2006) and the very definition of the human at the center of debates over core ideas of political theory: nation, civil society, sovereignty, citizenship, and recognition (Burton 2011; Byrd 2011; Simpson 2013; Stoler 2002). We consider ways in which the idea of the South African nation, both historically and following the 1994 transition, presupposes the structures of settler society — expressed in the project of ‘civilization’ or liberal civil society — and normalizes the underlying violence of whiteness. Second, we engage in a dialogue with queer theory and postcolonial feminism regarding the role of affect and intimacy in the operation of power. By looking at affect we bring a lens to the libidinal and emotional forces that circulate in often-invisible ways between and through how people relate to one another. Third, we reflect on the critique of solidarity that has emerged across a number of locations, including African American feminist activism and Palestinian studies. In developing such concerns, we read the question of nonracialism, an idea often treated as uniquely South African, within an international set of debates regarding over-identification, appropriation, and the denial of privilege. Several chapters struggle with what anthropologist Audra Simpson (2014) describes as refusal: the ethical and political rejection of the gift of friendship, a refusal that includes rejecting what is deemed good, rational, and sensible by a given social order. Finally, this volume asks: what forms of love, friendship, and mutuality can emerge from the rupture created by the failure of civil