Freund Humanus

Premesh Lalu was for many years director of the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), South Africa. When I was asked to speak on a panel discussing his latest book, Undoing Apartheid, I was thrilled. I’d already seen the manuscript and was inspired by his novel approach to conceptualizing apartheid and its aftermath. The published version (Polity Press) is an important book, beautifully written, challenging and rewarding. These were my thoughts after a more careful reading of his book:

The title, Undoing Apartheid, only tells half the story. It’s a book about the never-ending end of apartheid, what might be called apartheid’s endlessness. But its also a book about unresolved problems in the contemporary world, however you want to label it, the world of global race-based inequality, of north-south divide, of neo-liberalism. Reading this book, I soon realized, it’s not just about undoing apartheid, it’s about aesthetic and philosophical interventions in a world where race-based slavery continues under a different name. Lalu’s book addresses problems concerning the conception of race, the understanding of freedom, the becoming-technical of the human if I can use one of his phrases, and the place of the aesthetic in education and in understanding history.

In my presentation, I spoke about the book along both these registers.

So, to start with, reading the book as an intervention in debates on South Africa after apartheid. The final chapter of Lalu’s book begins with the question, what might have ensued if, on that sunny day in 1990, when Nelson Mandela stepped out of prison, he had encountered what protesting students had accidentally discovered in 1985 when police hidden in the back of a truck opened fire on them? The incident Lalu is refering to became known as the Trojan Horse massacre.In Lalu’s words, “on 15 October 1985, a South Africaaaaa Railways vehicle with gun-wielding soldiers hidden in metal crates brought a macabre scene of death and espair to the streets of Athlone” (p. 163). Athlone is a suburb of Cape Town that was designated “coloured” under apartheid’s Group Areas Act.. Jonathan Claasen, aged 21, lost his life, so did Shaun Magmoed, aged 15, and Michael Miranda, aged 11.

What had the protesting students accidentally discovered, apart from the bare fact that a moment of free expression could be erased by state violence? It’s characteristic of Lalu’s book that you aren’t going to get a simple and immediate answer to this question, but instead you’re going to have to work for it. And I mean that in the best possible way. This is a book of complex negotiations with concepts, but the work of the reader in entering those negotiations is rewarded, not only with new insights but with a prose that’s careful and concise and a pleasure to read. You’ll encounter sentences such as

“The puppet keeps watch over the becoming technical of the human, resisting the slide into mechanized life that took shape as the logic of petty apartheid” (26) The image is from William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company’s performance of Jane Taylor’s “Ubu and the Truth Commission,” with Busi Zokufa and Adrian Kohler.

“Could there be a cure adequate to the wound inflicted on that fateful day in October, as the tragedy of apartheid resonated with the mythic sacking of Troy narrated in Homer’s Iliad” (162). The image is Giovanni Tiepolo’s “The Procession of the Trojan Horse into Troy”.

So what might Mandela have encountered? Those of us who went down to the Grand Parade to hear him speak will never forget it when he addressed the crowd with the words “Friends, comrades and fellow South Africans. I greet you all in the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all.”

Or when he ended with the words he had spoken decades earlier at the Rivonia trial in 1964: “’I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.”

Mandela’s dream rests upon a particular understanding of race, domination, freedom, opportunity, agency, the possibilities open for political action. What he would have encountered is the undoing of each of these concepts. That’s why these are the key concepts Lalu examines in his book, and in each case, what he uncovers is remarkable, not only because it forces us to rethink what they meant and continue to mean in South Africa, but what they might mean in other societies too. But first, postapartheid South Africa. There are various ways to think about what Mandela wanted, what he achieved, what failed. Most of you will be familiar with narratives of political compromise, of being held hostage by global capital, of an idealism divorced from political realities, of a vision upended by corruption, etc. There has been much debate about what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission achieved and where it failed.

But what Premesh Lalu askes us to consider is what got lost every time a vision of South African society after apartheid failed to understand how apartheid had infiltrated everyday life in the practices of petty apartheid. Of course, much has been said and written about petty apartheid, but the achievement of this book is to make it clear that without an interrogation of petty apartheid, the concepts we use to think about South Africa after apartheid become hollow shells – words like freedom, opportunity, education, even race ring hollow. Because in the practices of petty apartheid, every day, these concepts were made and undone, again and again.

This is the underlying theme of the book, that an examination of petty apartheid’s intrusions into everyday life is the first step in thinking about South Africa after apartheid. In Lalu’s examination, petty apartheid was many things. It was a psychological disconnect between individual and group psychology. It was a cruel play with desire. But most important, perhaps, it was aesthetic, a manipulation of the senses. This is why the three test cases in his book are all aesthetic practices dissecting the subject of petty apartheid – the Handspring Puppet Company and William Kentridge’s adaptations of Goethe’s Faust, Büchner’s Woyzeck, and Jane Taylor’s reworking of Ubu the King. And by the way, as someone who has taught Woyzeck and Faust for years, I was amazed by Lalu’s insight into these works, and it was an absolute joy for me to gain new insights through his readings.

These stories all point to and perform what Lalu calls petty apartheid’s “psychic wreckage of everyday life” (13). Let me zero in on three of the concepts that get caught up in this psychic wreckage, Freedom, Education, and Race, then end with the idea of aesthetic education.

First there is freedom. How, Lalu asks in the introduction, might education re-enchant the search for freedom (19). Re-enchanting freedom is a theme that runs through the book. In Lalu’s reading, re-enchanting freedom means returning to the hope that Seamus Heaney pointed to in his The Cure at Troy, the hope of the distant shore. The idea of re-enchanting freedom is one that remains enigmatic in the book. Freedom is a concept that doesn’t travel well. Lalu’s immediate audience is one who knows the feeling of unfreedom in post-apartheid South Africa, and perhaps remembers it in apartheid South Africa. But elsewhere it does different work. In my part of the world it’s been co-opted by neo-liberalism (and I’m thinking of the “freedom convoy” that shut down the capital city of Canada last year, or the demands for “freedom” in the storming of the Capital in 2021). While it remains an open question how far beyond South Africa Lalu’s thoughts on freedom can travel, I believe much could be gained by adressing his thoughts on freedom in all cases where the concept appears to have political force.

Then education. Again and again, it was education that was at stake in the waves of protest that brought high school and university students onto the streets in the 70’s and 80’s. Of course, it was the right to a free and fair education, but Premesh Lalu shows that it was more. It was a torn and damaged sense of the human, with conflicting desires making life unliveable.  I find it very compelling when Lalu asks historians of the student uprisings on the Cape Flats in 1985 to look beyond narratives of war and violence to see the impossible position of students who were pulled in two directions at once – on the one hand the desire for an education that would short circuit the education system’s “production of docile bodies” in the “passage from school to factory”, and on the other hand the desire for social mobility that would allow them to walk through the door opened by media images of a very different world from the one they occupied. It seems to me that this same impossible rift in desire is still at work 30 years later in 2015 when the #rhodesmustfall movement pulls in an opposite direction as #feesmustfall. Fees must fall demanding fair access to the kind of education that would allow social mobility , and Rhodes must fall demanding that education be reshaped outside the neo-liberal logic of social mobility.

Then race. What I take away from this book is that we cannot understand racism and racist social structures if we think we know what race is. We can’t know what race is without looking at the way the human objects of race-based unfreedom are forced in their everyday lives to reconstruct and perform race. And when I use the word “we” I’m evoking the kind of collective political project Lalu implies in his book. But “we” also decenters the place of thinking about unfreedom. In the South African context, and perhaps elsewhere too, ontologies of race have to give way to the kind of interrogation Lalu so beautifully demonstrates– interrogations into the entanglement of technology, aesthetics and biopolitics. I think Lalu’s comments on petty apartheid do travel well, leading me to conclude that this isn’t just a book about race in South Africa, but about race in general.

Finally, a word about the aesthetic and aesthetic education.

In the wake of the French revolution, Schiller contemplated the oncept of freedom, asking where its motivation might lie. In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Human Beings (1795), he rejected the idea that freedom might be based on pure animal urges for violent upheaval or on idealist conceptions of society. He concluded that aesthetic education was the realm where freedom was possible. Premesh Lalu picks up on this and shows that it is the aesthetic where the difference between freedom and unfreedom is going to be worked out.

When Lalu speaks of the wound of Philoctetes, he shows that it is only the person bearing the wound who is in a position to educate the subject of political machinations. If you want to know what it’s like to suffer Philoctetes’s wound, ask Philoctetes. In Lalu’s conception, this asking but also the answer is the work of aesthetic education. And this education can’t be based on the rage of passion we find in Achilles nor on the cunning of reason in Odysseus. It has to be based on the aesthetic object. It has to come from the aesthetic object and be worked out in the aesthetic object.