Constructing and Deconstructing Identities in Post-apartheid South Africa: A Case of Hybridity versus Untainted Africanicity?

 

Gerrie Snyman (University of South Africa)

 

The aim of this paper is to analyse the current rhetorical exigence of racialised discourse within the post-apartheid identity debate and to provide pointers for a theoretical framework that will move the focus away from race, although not denying its social reality.
 
The paper will discuss the following:
 
(1) the religious nature of identity discourse (canon and Israelite identity, the biblical nature of Afrikaner identity construction);
(2) factors that bedevil identity construction (essentialism and racism);
(3) a constructivist approach towards identity construction;
(4) identity construction within the post-colonial condition: the issue of hybridity (Edward Said; Fanon);
(5) the rhetoric of identity in contemporary South Africa: untainted Africanicity?
 
The immediate (historical) context of this paper is the renewed accusation of racism within the AIDS, rape and violence debate, sparked by Pres. Thabo Mbeki's reproach of Charlene Smith's views on rape and violence already expressed in 2002. In his most recent reproach (ANC Newsletter of 1-7 October 2004) his "African body" merely mirrors a black body that already exists out there in the world. Smith's own raped white female body does not find a space in his African body.
 
It is not without irony that post-apartheid South Africa finds itself within a renewed identity debate. At the height of apartheid in the 1970 and 1980's, Afrikaner identity was seriously discussed in various cultural organisations. However, Afrikaner identity cannot be separated from (Calvinist) Christianity. To know God is to know yourself. God is ultimately tied up with a socio-political identity.
 
In apartheid South Africa, Afrikaner identity was closely associated with and directly related to Israel's identity within the confines of the different ancient stories of the Exodus, the Conquest and the post-exilic period. Afrikaner identity was enforced and defended with laws very similar to those found in the Book of Deuteronomy. Afrikaner history after the Anglo-Boer War was conceived in terms of the exile and as Afrikaner nationalism hit its peak in the late 1940's, the stories of the post-exilic period provided an impetus for the construction of society under apartheid. The Afrikaner has become Israel and apartheid's demise in the end meant to some diehards that the Afrikaner did not fulfil God's precepts correctly.
 
Even in theological and biblical studies the biblical texts too were closely associated with identity. In what is called canonical criticism (Childs and Sanders), canon is thought to be engaged with two questions: "Who am I?" and "What am I to do?". Canon is said to provide indications of identity and life style of the ongoing community who reads it as stories that once functioned to inform the producing community who they were and what they were to do. Recently, even the critical appraisal of the biblical text by the postmodern likes of Phillip Davies and the late Robert Carroll (so-called minimalists), the texts continue to function as some sort of construction of identity, only in this case, quite late (early Persian period or Hellenistic period).
 
An indisputable outcome of the demise of apartheid was the revelation of the modernist cloak behind a religious association with identity. Stripped from religion's essentialist connotations, the South African identity discourse currently stimulates rather than abates the old apartheid racial categories. Pres. Thabo Mbeki's views on violence and African culture show how our identities are still being shaped by race.
 
In most of early postcolonial theory race is constructed as an essence, a natural phenomenon whose meaning is prior and beyond the reach of human intervention. This is Mbeki's problem with Smith's reference to South African culture and rape. He read in her allegation an implied essentialist reference to innate violence within Africa, an inclination towards natural behaviour which portrays black men as sexual predators, a feature beyond history, permanent and fixed. If this portrayal is read in terms of a constructivist framework (which I think is Smith's theoretical stance in any case), sexual politics becomes cultural and thus open to modification and change. But this is not how the argument is understood. It is taken as a continuing affirmation of the privileged position of whiteness in the social hierarchy that maintains bodily inscriptions of a system of racial domination.
 
A racialised discourse like this creates within my own postcolonial sensitivities an extreme discomfort and sadness, yet a kind of estrangement. I am forced to recognise the intense affect of a shamed and traumatised whiteness. I do not experience any redemptive power in such a discourse. What happens, though, is that I enter an experience of defamiliarisation of identity. I realise how other see my whiteness, yet I know that I am not what they propose to see. In my process, the subjectivity of my whiteness becomes fore-grounded and radically reconfigured.
 
As long as the frame of reference remains essences, we continue to be embedded in a racialised hierarchy where whiteness constitutes the evil other of the colonial past. There is no space for a hybrid identity which has become valued by the postmodern condition of globalisation. The ease of movement between different contexts creates a situational self that has become more fluid, enabling hybrid identities to flourish. However, hybridity is the historical outcome of colonial expansion which trampled the cultures and heritages of degraded, hated, haunted, despised indigenous people's cultures. The hybrid should not be romanticised or idealised. Hybridity did not emerge through a cosmopolitan dangerous fantasy nor was it willed by artists who exercised an unconfined imagination. To see hybridity in this way, is to echo the guile and privileged aloofness of the postmodern bourgeois liberal. However, it seems that postcolonial South African racialised discourse discourages hybridity, because racial identification is still part of the discourse and people then do not like to see them as hybrid. Within the post-colonial condition, hybridity, as a result of colonialism, has become a problem as the once colonised now claim what the colonisers once denied them, Africanicity, untainted by anything Western.

 

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