Freund Humanus

I recently had the privilege of watching the South African actor Tony Miyambo performing the ape Red Peter in Kafka’s Report to the Academy, adapted for the stage by Phala O. Phala.

In Kafka’s story, Red Peter has learned to mimic the gestures of human intelligence as a way out of captivity. Instead of pursuing an illusory freedom, he chooses the way out that he sees in the “murky gaze” of humans. Red Peter meets this murky gaze with his own intelligence. It is an intelligence that has chosen to avoid captivity by taking the human path.

Carl Hagenbeck, the entrepreneur who funded Red Peter’s capture, had been displaying Samoans, Africans, Inuit, and other “savages” alongside his wild beasts for more than 40 years by the time Kafka wrote his story.

When Kafka’s friend Max Brod (yes, he’s the one who purportedly was supposed to burn Kafka’s writings when Kafka died) – when Brod heard his wife Elsa read Kafka’s story aloud in the Prague Club for Jewish Women and Girls on 19 December 1917, Brod wrote that it was “the most ingenious satire of Jewish assimilation ever written.” I’m sure Brod is right, but Kafka’s ape knows much more than this.

When I watch Miyambo play Red Peter, I can see he knows something that I don’t, something intimately bound up with his embodied experience. “My skin is not necessarily my truth,” he says, but still “we are sealed in our bodies.” When Miyambo speaks as Red Peter, he is speaking as a post-apartheid South African in a body that South Africa’s apartheid government would have marked as suitable for captivity. The theft and captivity of apes from Africa is, as Donna Haraway observes, not very different from the enslavement of Africans – whether on African soil or elsewhere. When I watch Miyambo’s Red Peter explain with perfect logic how and why he found his way out of captivity, when I hear him interrupt this explanation with cries of pain, loss, appetite and desire, I start to suspect he is performing the emotional and epistemological distress shared by stolen primates and enslaved humans. The rift between his logical thought and his cries of fear, pain and trauma, is it the same rift that marks the everyday lives of black South Africans 27 years after the first democratic elections? Between the knowledge of democracy and the lasting experience of captivity in apartheid’s legacy?

It seems to me that Miyambo is asking me to rethink fundamental assumptions about who is marked for dehumanization, who counts as human and who does not, who has the right to make statements about human life, and who can be confined to captivity, to slavery. He is dramatizing my intellectual complicity in his own captivity – or at least in the marking of his body as suitable for captivity. I am, after all, one of the “esteemed gentlemen of the academy.”

Which is interesting, because the university is a special kind of academy. It has certainly long been complicit in marking bodies for captivity, and there are some startling examples of this from Miyambo’s country. For example Steven Robins’s remarkable discovery at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, of some relics of the eugenics studies carried out by the Nazi scientist, Eugen Fischer. Robins reports on this in his equally remarkable book Letters of Stone.

But the university was also founded as a place where harmful forms of knowledge could be worked out, worked through and worked against. Harmful in the sense that they inhibited the free unfolding of human potential. Universities have never rid themselves of the tension between this humanist ideal and its faulty, blinkered, or damaged implementation.