The ghosts of slavery still haunt us
IN 2003, bones of up to 3 000 people believed to have been slaves were discovered at Prestwich Place, in Green Point.
This discovery confirmed that Cape Town “was built over the graves of slave ancestors, and its continued construction represented an architecture of erasure, a concrete covering over of the material traces of memory”, as Heidi Grunebaum reminds us.
The unearthing of the bones also shed light on the invisible, silent and repressed history of slavery at the Cape in part due to a one-sided colonial historiography.
Such silence exists despite evidence that slave labour contributed to the culture and economy of South Africa.
Award-winning writer Nadia Davids’s unpublished play, What Remains, performed at UCT in 2017, is a dramatisation and engagement with this invisible history of slavery in the Cape.
Author and historian Robert Shell said one of the reasons for the silence on slave history is that “early colonial South African historians ignored the institution of slavery and wished to emphasise and celebrate the freedom of the first ‘freeburghers’”.
The silence on slavery at the Cape is also reflected in the overriding absence of slave sites and slave descendants who may not always know their ancestors’ stories. This clearly highlights the need for more research that revisits the memory of slavery in South Africa and engages with it more sufficiently.
In my recent doctoral study, I looked at how the memory of slavery has been constructed in post-apartheid narratives on slavery at the Cape, and how such imaginings portray slave histories as haunting South Africa’s present on an individual and collective level.
I focused on Yvette Christiansë’s Unconfessed, André Brink’s Philida, Rayda Jacobs’s The Slave Book, Therese Benadé’s Kites of Good Fortune, Daniel Sleigh’s Islands and Russel Brownlee’s Garden of the Plagues.
Three of the novels – Christiansë’s Unconfessed, Brink’s Philida and Benadé’s Kites of Good Fortune – imagine fictional characters who were historical slaves. They emerge from and tackle suppressed slave history, historiography and the Cape colonial archive to construct the untold stories of slavery.
Themes discussed in these narratives include white privilege, constructions of blackness, intergenerational slave trauma and the continued silence on slave histories as well as contestations, complexities and practices of racial purity and cultural identity.
These novels imagine slave histories as a way of engaging with marginalisation in the past, right up to and including the present.
What’s interesting is that Christiansë, Brink and Benadé have direct slave/slave owner ancestry.
Christiansë’s grandmother was a descendant of a freed slave born in St Helena and Brink’s direct ancestors owned the slave woman that he imagines in his novel, while the historical figure that Benadé narrates is part of her direct family tree.
In the same manner, Jacobs shares the heritage of the Muslim slaves at the Cape whose culture has been elaborated by poet and writer Gabeba Baderoon as one of the invisibilities of slavery at the Cape.
The novelists’ own slave ancestry affects how they tell their stories and speaks to ideas of transgenerational trauma. Even though they do not confess personal trauma, haunting or guilt regarding their slave or slave-owner ancestry, their writings engage with issues that manifest as haunting in post-apartheid South Africa. In Ross Chambers’s words, these can be seen as the ghosts that have refused to be laid to rest.
These neo-slave narratives concern themselves with the absences of slavery in the historical record, so they provide an alternative history and rich ground for interacting with slave silences at the Cape.
They show how literary works can interrogate history, imagine the violence of slavery and convey instances of haunting. Their engagement with questions of racial identities provides a useful critique to the divisions of race persisting in post-apartheid South Africa. They also offer a counter-narrative to historical accounts that are dominated by colonial perspectives.
These novels are not only a sort of historical memorial, but also demand attention because of their characteristically haunting nature.
They make visible the invisible bodies of the enslaved and propose how this invisibility haunts the present. They help us understand why the representation of slave memory from the mid-17th to early 19th century is prevalent in post-apartheid South Africa in the early 21st century.
The publication of the novels over a century after slavery was abolished in the Cape can be attributed to being haunted by slave memory and that the novelists represent the trauma of a larger historical and haunted consciousness.
Haunting is necessary because it calls back to memory regardless of its suppression at individual or societal levels.
I agree with feminist scholar Pumla D Gqola that “(m)emory is a shadow always hovering and governing our relationship to the present and the future” and that it “resists erasure and is important for the symbols through which each community invents itself”.
The power of memory to influence the present is reiterated by literary critic and writer Njabulo Ndebele, who argues that “narratives of memory, in which real events are recalled, stand to guarantee us occasions for some serious moments of reflection”.
The study of slavery as imagined in post-apartheid texts, enables a reading of the past and present together, pointing to continuities of enslavement, colonialism, apartheid in the post-apartheid, and practical questions of the afterlives of slavery, reparation and justice.
These novels interact with colonial historiography to offer critical conceptual perspectives of the history of slavery and they bring to light the fact that the history of slavery in South Africa has not yet been adequately dealt with.
They offer a way for readers in post-apartheid South Africa to deal with the traumatic history of slavery and present an unsettledness on traumatic violent pasts.
The ultimate question for post-apartheid South Africa concerns the ways of dealing with the ghosts of traumatic slave pasts. Dealing with the ghosts that “refused to be laid to rest” demands that we either cohabit with or exorcise the ghosts of slavery. The novels mentioned here do both.
Kasembeli recently obtained her PhD in English Studies from Stellenbosch University. This article is based on her doctoral research.
Questions on racial identities give a useful critique to divisions of race persisting in post-apartheid SA. They offer a counter-narrative to historical accounts by colonial perspectives