In South African studies, Pumla Gqola, Gabeba Baderoon, Mark Sanders, Ashraf Jamal, Patricia Hayes, Jacob Dlamini, Gary Minkley, and Ciraj Rassool are scholars who attempt to think different modes of intimacy, complicity, affect, or emotion together with the political: from the slave owner’s kitchen in the eighteenth-century Cape to Jacob Zuma’s rape trial.4 In a seminal contribution, Sarah Nuttall and Cheryl-Ann Michael’s edited volume, Senses of Culture (2000: 5) provocatively reads South African culture through its ‘intimacies and connectivities’, which, it is claimed, have been neglected in favor of a focus on struggle, segregation, and separation. Nuttall and Michael argue that the close proximity of different cultures has created cultural entanglement and creolization in South Africa. This focus on intermingling opened up a wide-ranging debate about whether their approach too quickly set aside the existing material realities of racial and class division (Jacobs 2002), as well as whether the notion of creolization, or hybrid identities, masked the violent processes that have particularly targeted and oppressed black bodies.5 We argue that a focus on intimacy need not neglect material concerns, nor fall into a trap of celebrating hybridization. To the contrary, looking at intimacies as inherently part of the political economy and production of racial difference forces a careful attention to the nuances, processes, and constraints from which they emerge. As Baderoon (2014: 50) writes, these intimacies can be read as ‘charged by silence and as coded trauma’. Rather than assume that cultural entanglement necessarily disrupts or diminishes difference, we are interested in the inverse: how intimacies expressed through friendship produce and structure difference.
FICTIONS OF FRIENDSHIP
There is a long and rich tradition of writing about the intersections of race and friendship in South Africa. The novel, in particular, has offered a medium for exploring the possibility and limits of empathy between oppressor and oppressed. Because fiction presupposes the ability to imagine another’s experience, writers were frequently torn between attempting to depict the separation between worlds and the reaffirmation of literature’s capacity to reach across the racial divide. Beginning with Schreiner (1883) and Sol Plaatje (1930), the question of whether friendship was possible across racial lines served as a vehicle for reflecting on the conditions for building a common society. In this mode of writing, the personal serves as a microcosm: it stands in for and makes possible a vision of social and political life. The failure of friendship therefore calls into question the emotional and ethical basis for a future nationhood. In different ways, Es’kia Mphahlele (1957), Lewis Nkosi (1963, 2002), and Nadine Gordimer (1976) have critiqued how English language writers, particularly the tradition identified with the liberal novel, denied the unbridgeable racial inequalities of colonial rule and apartheid. In a 1976 essay, Gordimer contended that the liberal novel’s depictions of interracial friendship offered a nonrevolutionary resolution to white domination: the colonizer is redeemed not through the loss of power, but through the love and forgiveness of the oppressed. Gordimer’s early portrayal of an interracial relationship, Occasion for Loving (published in 1963), depicted how intimacy, far from healing divisions, could resolve in an assertion of white impunity that underscored the chasm between worlds.
In a discussion of Gordimer’s later work, Nkosi (1983) was skeptical of the capacity of white writers, such as Gordimer, to imagine a complete disintegration of interracial relationships. Clinging to the interpersonal, even in a failed form, was a way of continuing to assert their relevance. Nkosi’s early critical essays argued that literary realism (and, in certain statements, any literary aesthetics) could not adequately represent the entrapment, malaise, and daily chaos of black life. The failure of literary empathy derived not only from the insularity and privilege of white writers, as Nkosi (1983: 109) has suggested, but also the sheer absurdity of black existence under apartheid conditions. At moments, he denied that friendship was possible between black and white: ‘Such relationships are dogged by guilt, by equivocation, and the major problem of communication between a world deeply divided by color’. Writing after 1994, Nkosi nuanced and elaborated his argument by questioning whether a common experience existed, beyond the fact of division, which could express itself in a truly South African literature. Surveying post-apartheid literary developments, Nkosi (2002: 328) warned against the seductions of nation building based on a superficial performance of reconciliation. If the novel could help to prepare the space for the emergence of new subjectivities, it would require a fundamentally transformed social reality: ‘The truth of recent South African history can only be told in novels of the abyss.’ Nkosi’s argument suggests that the liberal tradition should be read as an archive of imagination’s failures: an archive of the abyss. These failures were not only individual, but also testify to the exorbitant nature of the structuring violence that drew black and white together.
As Njabulo Ndebele (1986) has warned, however, the hypnotic character of this violence poses its own set of dangers. An aesthetic fixated on the overwhelming spectacle of confrontation risked emptying characters, especially black characters, of interiority and complexity. In important respects, Ndebele’s argument built on the new political and intellectual space created by the Black Consciousness (BC) movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. Reviving earlier debates over the role of minorities in the liberation struggle, BC leader Steve Biko denied that white South Africans could seek the destruction of a system that guaranteed their privileges. Despite friendships with white activists (such as the academic and anti-apartheid activist Richard Turner), Biko maintained that the elusive quest for white solidarity was a trap. The BC movement inspired an enormous body of poetry, theatre, music, and autobiographical writing that emphasized consciousness building, community, and self-reliance among black South Africans. This work placed art and culture at the center of creating ‘a true humanity’ (Biko 2004).
Responding to a major debate during the 1980s over the concept of art as a weapon of struggle, Ndebele developed a pointed critique of writers who reduced politics to the spectacular battle of black and white. In contrast, Ndebele (1986) urged an aesthetic mode, and therefore a kind of political imagination, that eschewed the dramatic in favor of subtlety, the everyday, and psychological nuance. According to Ndebele, the ordinary is