of this address, Bhabha articulated similar sentiments in his interview with Kerry Chance (2001: 3), where he asserted: ‘I think it is our intellectual responsibility to understand that the ground beneath our feet is a shifting, sliding ground, and to try to actually take account of that.’ Mindfulness to the shifting grounds informs the kinds of critical vocabulary we develop so that the cultural sites we read inform our cultural texts, rather than being the space on which we apply pre-crystallised lenses.
I find Bhabha’s theorisation of the aspirational particularly helpful to think about the activity of this space racially. In not being utopian the participants of this society are unwilling to frame their behaviour in terms of the binaries of utopia and its necessary other, dystopia; or the accompanying tropes of either racialised as ‘pure white’ or as ‘pure African’. Centring survival is to emphasise and celebrate slave agency. It is to deny the violence of slavery and colonialism complete power over the body of the colonised and/or enslaved. In Patricia Williams’s terms, to assert Khoi identity in the manner of the !HCM is to claim Black will. Rather than highlighting the position of the colonised and/or enslaved, it focuses on her/his activity – her/his survival – and celebrates this. It is to think about this ancestry as invested with agency, as humans living under constant physical and epistemological attack who survive genocidal attempts, and not as property. It is an invitation to rethink the position of people as slaves, a descriptive confinement, which is necessary for the fallacy of Black anti-will which is the ‘description of master-slave relations as “total” ’ (Williams 1991: 219).
To root a self-identification as Khoi, B/black, Brown and African in the face of previous classification as ‘coloured’ is to assert the presence of will in the lives of the ancestors who were objectified – dehumanised as property. This self-definition contests what it means to be descended from people who were property. Williams (1991: 217), in the essay ‘On Being the Object of Property’, declares:
Reclaiming that from which one has been disinherited is a good thing. Self-possession in the full sense of that expression is the companion to self-knowledge. Yet claiming for myself a heritage the weft of whose genesis is my own disinheritance is a profoundly troubling paradox.
Self-representation as Khoi, African, Brown and B/black is a way of engaging this history of erasure and disinheritance. It is not the path of claiming a reshaped colouredness since the word is deemed irredeemably implicated in the aforementioned history of racial terror and genocide. It is to contest the narrative of the disappearance of the Khoi from the political, social and physical landscape of South Africa. It is anti-racist in privileging the excavation of the subaltern’s voice not just in the present but also in the past. This is an example of postcolonial mnemonic work in practice. The enslaver’s and coloniser’s force does not need any help: it is the hegemonic power which silences the subaltern. The !HCM’s self-construction does not deny the given: that those (previously) classified coloured feature in colonialist and apartheid discourse as the result of ‘racial mixing’ and constitute a ‘third race’ at once privileged (preferential treatment legislation) and ‘inferior’ due to ‘lack’ (without culture, ‘barbaric’, ‘bush’). Nor is it informed by a refusal to mediate the dominant circulatory discourses on race which are responsible for the instances of their somatic reading as ‘coloured’ in accordance with the conservative meanings of that category.
Thus, foregrounding Khoi identity is not to pretend that these racist discourses do not exist, but to choose a particular self-positioning in relation to them. It is to contest the racist academic and popular discourses which declare that Khoi and San identities are vacated spaces. In Bhabha’s terms, it is to exert/assert ‘the right to narrate’, to speak (not just talk) and be narrated, to draft a history, something to be interpreted. It also forces the remainder of the Black South African populace, regardless of which identity they prioritise or how they mediate their position within Blackness and in relation to Africa, to contend with what it means to celebrate identity. It forces the question of what it means politically to celebrate a history of survival. It is to assert, in the words of the old slave song, ‘we are here because we are here’ and to invite an interrogation of the untidy meanings we attach to survival.
In its political assertion, therefore, the !HCM does not deny history, but foregrounds it by contesting the meanings which ensue from it whilst underlining that historically its members are not invested with enough power to deny history in a way which would make any political sense, given that they must continue to live in a country and a world in which notions of ‘racial hybridity’ retain currency. So that even as the members self-identify as Khoi, Black and African, and as Brown instead of coloured, the possibility remains to be read and interpreted, through the signs mythologised as evidence of classification, as ‘coloured’, ‘mixed-race’ and so forth. The political imperative adopted by the members of this society does not gesticulate towards a mystical wholeness, but contests dominant discourses about the constitution of all South African racial identities. Such identification also draws attention to shifting meanings in ways akin to those of other western Cape Black anti-racists, examined in Chapter 4, who claim post-apartheid the very diasporic identity they disavowed as anti-apartheid activists.
The !HCM’s self-definition is to assert agency in the face of this changing political landscape, to insist on a self-representation which is more than somatic, but one which revolutionarily claims will and psychic presence. It shifts the terms of the debate and the terrain of race and self-representation in a democratic South Africa where, because the country cannot be an island cut off from the rest of the world or from its own past, there are always colonial discourses circulating.
It recognises the fact of multiple histories, diverse ancestry and therefore creolity even as it chooses to stress specific African ancestry. The choice of which ancestor to foreground is neither arbitrary nor unique. Most people with a known varied ancestry prioritise one with whose name to identify themselves. Whilst it has become almost mandatory in cultural studies to lay claim to the always already hybrid forms of all cultural production and identity formation processes, the case of the !HCM poses challenges for the meanings attached to this declaration. Dutch and British slaves forced to work in the Cape were captured from a variety of locations in South (East) Asia, East Africa, as well the South African interior. Those from the interior were mainly Khoi and/or San.
The !HCM insists on claiming and prioritising its Khoi legacy, rooting itself within an African history not just because of physical location. It can participate in other histories of Africa located elsewhere and also informed by slavery, but the premise must be different because it is not diasporic but continental. Identifying as Khoi declares !HCM entry into a specific African identity through means other than geography and sociology, although these are not completely eliminated either. It is thus not only a political assertion but a shifting of the terrain and a signalled rejection of the terms of participation in African identity spelled out by white South Africa – that is, birthright – because Khoi suggests links with the African world and other indigenous people as another kind of claim to African identity. It is to acknowledge that claiming an African identity for people of African descent in South Africa is always a process accompanied by contestation and denial, that it is a declaration of will in choosing an association with this particular continent.
The decision to identify as Khoi challenges the narrowness of conservative definitions of who can people the space labelled ‘African’. Brown identity within !HCM parlance and its relationship to emancipatory language, among other things, marks it as different from Afrikaners who pretended to be ‘racially pure’ and premised their identity on the suppression of African foreparents. It is not premised on ‘racial purity’.
Further, it does not claim a position of privilege as its entitlement because of where it is. It broaches the difficult terrain, like Erasmus’s theorisation of colouredness, of identifying what else these subjects are in addition to and in proximity with always being Black and African. In other words, it is ‘aspirational and does not aspire to
