Breakthrough: But South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994 did not end apartheid.
Some time ago, a student at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London asked me in a class on South African writing: “So when did apartheid end?” — meaning: When were the first democratic elections held? Or, perhaps: When was grand apartheid dismantled and taken off the statute books? Or, subliminally, in response to commemorations of the 20th anniversary of the day: When did the world see Nelson Mandela walk free?
All of these could be provided as answers, but instead I wanted to say: “Has it?” This may seem like a pessimistic response, but I want to frame it differently. Apartheid is ending (even if one may want to insist, as I do, that it has not ended), and there is a crucial place for academic writing and teaching in this process of the long ending and new beginning. In the reluctance to accept an easy “post-” position for South Africa (post-apartheid, post-race) my intention is not to diminish what has been achieved already, but instead to contribute to developing ways of thinking forward, and modes of writing, reading and teaching that are actively and positively engaged in the further work of this ending.
My understanding of this enduring ending is not the one to be found in the kind of writing and thinking which argues that South Africa is post-apartheid (and therefore history has become irrelevant, the “post-” erasing the responsibilities and formations of the past). Nor is it the kind of ending that chooses to be silenced and to perform this silence as proof that a certain kind of voice, a certain kind of opinion, is “finished”, the time for it over.
There is also another kind of talk about endings with which I do not want to agree, which says that apartheid may have ended but nothing has changed, that the “post-ness” is somehow fake.
Perhaps what ties together these senses of the ending is the expectation that the end will be finite, that there will have been a morning when the world woke up to a new day that bore no traces of what had gone before. In this book’s interpretation of the long ending of the previous time, the time when apartheid was inscribed (asymmetrically, diversely) in and on much of South Africans’ lives, the ending is understood as an activity, and as a point of view that needs to be developed and cultivated. I call this work “accenting”.
The way in which I use the term “accented” in this book is to refer to ways of thinking that are aware of the legacies of the past, and do not attempt to empty out the conflicts and violence under the surface. Accented thinking and accented conversations will often, perhaps typically, appear conflictual and overly insistent on difference and dis-agreement. In this book I argue that it is precisely those discourses that acknowledge the asymmetrical legacies of apartheid and draw attention to the enduring effects of the violent past that can bring about the long ending of apartheid.
The value of this accented sense of an ending is that it requires a regard for the past and a responsibility to seek out that about which one chooses not to be ignorant. It is an understanding of the sense of the ending of apartheid as an activist task in which there is work to be done — precisely the work towards this ending.
In other words, it is not enough to uphold the ideal of nonracialism through merely stating it (“apartheid has ended”). That position requires constant work, and work that will require a high degree of tolerance for disagreement and discord. This activist work — which includes academic writing and teaching, but is not only that — is a way of countering discourses of failure and disappointment, and of reversing a potential paralysis and silence.
My argument here insists on the necessity of acquiring particular kinds of knowledge about the South African past and present as a way of making a different future. This book aims to reach a general audience, and not only those with the interests and conventions of academic writing in mind.
Yet higher education is a major concern in the book, and the university provides the backdrop for a number of the chapters. The university is at times the physical location of a research project or an artwork that I discuss. Sometimes it is the staff common room or the library that sets the scene for one of the discordant encounters I analyse. Throughout the book, learning and teaching encounters are scrutinised for what they reveal about power relations and who the beneficiaries are of know-ledge and scholarship.
In this book I am often suspicious of teaching situations, and of the ways in which scholarship can maintain exclusive circuits of prestige and gain. In the accented pursuit of knowledge, I argue, it is not the student alone who needs to be transformed, but also the teacher and the teaching institution. This book offers a theorisation of the teaching and learning encounter that is insistent on the self-transforming labour to be performed by teachers and teaching institutions.
The arguments of this book return to questions of divided audiences and to conversation partners who are in conflict over the meanings of their encounters. The subjects chosen for analysis present versions of “accented” discourse: conversations and encounters that are often marked by disagreement and disappointment. They do not speak in monolingual voices (even if the encounter is written in one language only). The definition of a South African accent is one that insists on the multiplicity of this accent. In fact, the defining characteristic of this accented thinking is that it is not spoken in just one accent, but instead represents an orientation that creates an awareness of, and an “ear” for, many and diverse accents, and for the diverse forms of know-ledge and languages around us.
While the argument returns to the question of apartheid, and to South Africanness, it may well be that these questions do not remain as pertinent to a next generation as they are to my own. Younger readers of the material, or readers elsewhere, may well find its insistence on South Africanness perplexing and even counterproductive.
And it may in fact be a good thing for the times to outgrow the concern of this work with apartheid, with exclusion and transformation. Integral to the work outlined in this book is a tolerance for difference and disagreement, and a willingness to show vulnerability at the same time as taking up resistant and challenging positions. I call these approaches and orientations “accented thinking”.
This is an edited extract from Accented Futures: Language Activism and the Ending of Apartheid by Carli Coetzee, published in July by Wits University Press. Coetzee is senior teaching fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London