Until the last decade or so, most scholarship on race in South Africa focused on the grand architecture of segregation or ideologies of white supremacy (Posel, Hyslop, and Nieftagodien 2001). By placing the question of friendship at the center of South African cultural life, past and present, this volume examines how power operates within everyday social relationships. These are not only historical questions. In a country profoundly divided by race, class, and gender-based violence, these issues are central to almost any discussion of South Africa’s present. Interrogating friendship as a political space is not meant to hollow it out or stiffen the emotional and intimate flows that make friendship dynamic and hopeful. To the contrary, the chapters in this volume keep alive the promise of friendship and its possibilities, while also investigating what Lisa Lowe (2015: 18) calls the ‘political economy of intimacies’, in which affective relations are not only personal and interior, but also an essential part of the social reproduction of power.
There is no universal position from which to define a politics of friendship in South Africa. Friendship must be understood in the dynamics between diverse African cultures of affiliation as well as the complex formation of subjectivities that occurred through settler colonialism, indigenous genocide, African land dispossession, slavery, and Indian indenture. ‘Friend’ is an English language word and the valence of English, especially when tracking histories of affect and intimacy, should never be treated as neutral. Each of South Africa’s languages has its own lexicon for describing and performing social bonds and their emotional entailments. In isiZulu, to take one case, many expressions for friendship invoke or crosshatch with other relationships: umngani obalulekile (an important friend), untanga (a friend of the same age), umkhozi (one who is close to the heart). The use of kinship as a vocabulary of friendship, for example the Afrikaans word boetie, sometimes ties personal intimacy to the community created by a shared way of inhabiting a language. The history of friendship in South Africa is also the story of these idioms and their multidirectional translations.
Given those caveats, considering friendship as a central site of the political in South Africa is crucial for a few reasons. First, it helps return historicity to race and its production through the lived experiences of evolving subjectivities. As such, the chapters in this volume are interested in mapping the overlapping genealogies of liberal colonialism, discourses of affection, and the bonds of intimate ties as they relate to settler colonial governance, the codifying of racial difference, white supremacy, and anti-blackness. Second, the ties of friendship are manifest from liberal colonial projects of the nineteenth century to the apartheid security police, but they also can be found between comrades in the underground, as intimate personal and political networks were essential to the clandestine nature of anti-apartheid activities (O’Malley 2007; Soske 2012). The bonds of loyalty, as well as the scars of betrayal, continue to be present in the everyday debates of political life in South Africa (see Hardy and Rampolokeng this volume; Dlamini 2014; Lewin 2011). So too, there are times when friendship is an essential space for subversion, improvisation, and resistance: a place where alternative subjectivities and ‘affective communities’ can flourish (Gandhi 2005).
Finally, friendship underlines the intersection between affect (the ability and potential to affect and be affected) and the very constitution of politics. Affect is not a fixed object that can be easily mapped and studied: it is a potential and a relation, found in circulations, intensities, and emotions that pass from body to body. Said simply, affects are experiential states (ranging from arousal to trauma) that are situated within social worlds and that bring bodies in relation with other bodies (Ahmed 2010; Massumi 2002). In South Africa the folding together of affect and the political can be seen, for example, when looking at the evolving public precepts and strictures around sexuality and romantic intimacy: from early racist panics over the black ‘peril’ to white women going back to the 1920s, to the policing of intimacy, romance, and sex across race with the successive ‘immorality’ laws of 1927, 1950, and 1957, to the HIV pandemic in the 1990s, which posed a range of questions around intimacy, sex, and desire that burst open the private space of the bedroom into the public arena of political life (Epprecht 2008; Fassin 2007; Walsh 2009). Mark Hunter’s (2010) work brilliantly maps the geography of intimacy in South Africa in which love, sex, and gender identities are entwined with economic questions such as unemployment and poverty in the context of everyday realities of AIDS. While sex and its psychic, political, and social implications have been the focus of investigations into the dynamics of power (Burns 2007, 2012; Cole and Thomas 2009; Epprecht 2004; Posel 2005), the familiar bonds of friendship have received less critical investigation. Sex and modes of intimacy that were policed by the apartheid state possessed more transparent coordinates with which to track oppression and resistance than do the shifting and illusory bonds of friendship that often slip from view. Accounting for these conflicting, interwoven, and entangled spaces of intimacy and affection as they relate to political life is central to this volume.
As an increasingly rich body of literature demonstrates, friendship has long served as a privileged form for understanding political relations. In one sense, friendship reflects an attachment to the political: it is a desire for ‘non-sovereignty’, giving up independence for interconnection with others (Berlant 2011). Yet unlike familial, contractual, romantic, or professional relationships that assume prescribed obligations, the basis of friendship — especially as it has been understood across European cultural history — is a mutually given affection and respect for the other’s autonomy (Silver 1989). As a result, philosophical and popular discussions often circle around a subversive paradox. While friendship exemplifies the pleasures of social life (and in some discourses society itself), it nonetheless remains radically dependent on the open-ended commitment of two individual wills. Debates over friendship have repeatedly centered on both its universal character — the possibility of an ethical commitment that truly escapes from personal interests and instrumentalism — and the question of who has the capacity for this universality (Caine 2011). Beginning with Aristotle’s Ethics, a canonical concept limited the highest form of friendship to the virtuous subject: he who has the freedom and autonomy to enter into a relationship of true reciprocity.2 Friendship between elite men thus was a way to define the borders of ethical life — the mode of life, unlike the woman or slave, to which Aristotle attributed universal value. As Jacques Derrida argues, this construction of friendship is one of political exclusions: it is phallocentric and rooted in concepts of brotherhood, family, territory, and (in later writers) the nation-state (1997).
Such exclusions are particularly acute in the context of settler colonialism, which privileges certain subjects and cultures as worthy, rational, civilized, and human, while simultaneously marking and distinguishing those who are deemed unfit or disallowed. In such a context, prohibitions and edicts around social relations are ways to reinforce and deepen social