The Impasse of Violence : writing necklacing into a history of liberation struggle in South Africa

Magister Artium - MAThis thesis falls within the category of historical studies that is concerned with a difficult legacy of South Africa's liberation struggle, namely the practice of necklacing that accompanied it. My interest in the practice is limited to its emergence and politicizing as it relates to the ANC, the UDF and the apartheid state. The ANC and the UDF overwhelmingly understood the practice as resistance, yet ambivalently so. The question guiding this thesis therefore asks: how is necklacing written into the narrative of struggle history? Here I refer to its (re)representation, its (re)characterization, its (re)articulation in a wider discursive war of propaganda strategies that was waged through the interplay of an apartheid state discourse and what I consider to be an official non-state discourse, that of the ANC and the UDF.South Afric

Missing-ness, history and apartheid-era disappearances: The figuring of Siphiwo Mthimkulu, Tobekile ‘Topsy’ Madaka and Sizwe Kondile as missing dead persons

Philosophiae Doctor - PhDThe argument of this dissertation calls for an abiding by missing-ness as it relates to apartheid-era disappearances. I am concerned with the ways in which the category missing is articulated in histories of apartheid-era disappearances through histories seeking to account for apartheid and how that category is enabled and /or constrained through mediating practices, processes and discourses such as that of forensics and history itself. My deployment of a notion of missing-ness therefore is put to work in underscoring notions of history and its relation to a category of missing persons in South Africa as they emerge and are figured through various discursive strategies constituted by and through apartheid’s violence and iterations thereof. I focus specifically on the enforced disappearances of Siphiwo Mthimkulu, Tobekile ‘Topsy’ Madaka and Sizwe Kondile and the vicarious ways in which they have been produced and (re)figured in a postapartheid present. Mthimkulu and Madaka were abducted, tortured, interrogated, killed and their bodies disposed through burning by apartheid’s security police in 1982. In 2007 South Africa’s Missing Persons Task Team exhumed commingled burnt human fragments at a farm, Post Chalmers. After two years of forensic examinations, those remains were identified as most likely those of Mthimkulu and Madaka. Their commingled remains were reburied in 2009 during an official government sanctioned Provincial re-burial. Kondile was similarly abducted in 1981 and after being imprisoned, tortured, interrogated and killed, his physical remains were burnt. The MPTT has been unsuccessful in locating and thus exhuming his remains for re-burial. Sizwe Kondile remains missing. Missing-ness as I evoke it serves to signal the lack and excess as potentiality and instability of histories accounting for the condition and symptom of being missing. The productivity of deploying missing-ness and an abidance to it in the ways I argue is precisely in not explicitly naming it, but rather by holding onto its elusiveness by marking the contours of discourses on absence-presence, those which it simultaneously touches upon and is constitutive of. Articulating it thus is to affirm missing-ness as a question that I argue, be put to work and abided by

Missing and missed: Rehumanisation, the nation and missing-ness

The bringing together of two lines of research that have previously been treated separately – namely the missing/missed body of apartheid-era atrocities and the racialised body of the colonial museum – animates this issue of Kronos. Both the skeletons of empire and those of apartheid-era atrocities can be thought of as racialised, and as ‘disappeared’ and missing. Furthermore, both areas are marked by similar lines of enquiry, linked to issues of identification, redress and restoration, often framed through notions of humanisation or rehumanisation. Consequently, these different ‘disciplines of the dead’ have been brought into collaboration and contestation with each other, with missingness often reproduced through the ways in which the dead have been drawn into grand narratives of the nation and its seeming triumphs over colonialism and apartheid. Notwithstanding their similarities, the racialised body of the colonial museum and the body of more recent conflicts have their own genealogies and literatures. The ‘disappeared’ entered the political lexicon of terror largely through Argentina and Chile; two decades later Rwanda and Bosnia turned international attention to mass violence and genocide as exemplified by the mass grave. South Africa slips through these grids: apartheid security forces tried but failed to emulate their Latin American counterparts in ‘disappearing’ activists on a large scale, while inter-civilian violence, which mostly took the form of political rather than ethnic, racial or religious cleansing, did not produce mass graves. Nonetheless, both ‘disappearances’ and inter-civilian conflict produced missing persons in the South African conflict – most presumed dead, and thus, as Madeleine Fullard describes them (this issue) ‘in limbo – dead, but missing.’ Investigations into such cases, led first by the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and later by its Missing Persons Task Team (MPTT), sought to locate, exhume, identify and return mortal remains to their families. In so doing, South Africa joined a growing list of countries following this route

A prose of ambivalence: liberation struggle discourse on necklacing

This article is concerned with the ambivalence that permeates liberation struggle discourse on the practice of necklacing. Through examining what was said about the killing of suspected collaborators and/or necklacing during the mid- to late 1980s by leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) and the United Democratic Front (UDF), I argue that those public positions produced a prose of ambivalence. I ask how this prose of ambivalence was produced and why that ambivalence is seemingly rendered intangible. I suggest that the ANC and UDF were caught in a double bind. They could not explicitly condemn the practice and risk losing their mass support base, nor explicitly condone the practice and risk losing the support of important internal and international constituencies thereby giving the apartheid state the upper hand in a discursive war on the moral and political legitimacy over using violence. Yet, I argue, this ambivalence was not merely a tactical one in that underlying the liberation discourse on the practice of necklacing was/is an inherent formulation of the binary of resistance and oppression/repression. The practice understood within this framework could only be rendered as state violence or resistance. In rendering it as the latter, though uncomfortably so, the ANC and UDF proposed that it be understood within a causal framework, as the result of oppression/repression. Ambivalence about the practice of necklacing thus, I argue, was produced in the interstice of the resistance - oppression/repression binary. Leading from this, I argue more broadly that the problematic of violence and attending ambivalence within the ANC has a history that predates the discourse around necklacing. I suggest that necklacing refuses to be forgotten precisely because of its ambivalence. Indeed, it may be that the inescapable ambivalence of necklacing is the condition for the possibility that it will always also be remembered