Theme Issue 39
"Not Telling": Secrecy, Lies, and History
Edited by Gary Minkley and Martin Legassick
Cover image: “Purple and Blue Abstract Window,” by Jr Korpa (5 November 2018)
+ GARY MINKLEY and MARTIN LEGASSICK, "Not Telling": Secrecy, Lies, and History, History and Theory, Theme Issue 39 (December 2000).
No abstract.
+ LUISE WHITE, Telling More: Lies, Secrets, and History, History and Theory, Theme Issue 39 (December 2000), 11-22.
This essay argues that secrets and lies are not forms of withholding information but forms by which information is valorized. Lies are constructed: what is to be lied about, what a lie is to consist of, how it is to be told, and whom it is to be told to, all reveal a social imaginary about who thinks what and what constitutes credibility. Secrets are negotiated: continual decisions about whom to tell, how much to tell, and whom not to tell describe social worlds, and the shape and weight of interactions therein. All of this makes lies and secrets extraordinarily rich historical sources. We might not see the truth distorted by a lie or the truth hidden by a secret, but we see the ideas and imaginings by which people disclose what should not be made public, and how they should carry out concealing one narrative with another. Such insights involve a step back from the project of social history, in which an inclusive social narrative is based on experience and individuals' ability to report it with some reliability, and suggests that historians need to look at social imaginings as ways to understand the ideas and concerns about which people lie and with which people construct new narratives that are not true. The study of secrets, however, links the study of social imaginings with the project of social history, as the valorization of information that results in the continual negotiation and renegotiation of secrets shows individuals and publics imagining the experiences labeled as secret because of the imagined power of a specific version of events.
+ HELENA POHLANDT-MCCORMICK, "I Saw a Nightmare...": Violence and the Construction of Memory (Soweto, June 16, 1976), History and Theory, Theme Issue 39 (December 2000), 23-44.
The protests on June 16, 1976 of black schoolchildren in Soweto against the imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in their schools precipitated one of the most profound challenges to the South African apartheid state. These events were experienced in a context of violent social and political conflict. They were almost immediately drawn into a discourse that discredited and silenced them, manipulating meaning for ideological and political reasons with little regard for how language and its absence-silences-further violated those who had experienced the events. Violence, in its physical and discursive shape, forged individual memories that remain torn with pain, anger, distrust, and open questions; collective memories that left few spaces for ambiguity; and official or public histories tarnished by their political agendas or the very structures-and sources-that produced them. Based on oral histories and historical documents, this article discusses the collusion of violence and silence and its consequences. It argues that-while the collusion between violence and silence might appear to disrupt or, worse, destroy the ability of individuals to think historically-the individual historical actor can and does have the will to contest and engage with collective memory and official history.
+ PREMESH LALU The Grammar of Domination and the Subjection of Agency: Colonial Texts and Modes of Evidence, History and Theory, Theme Issue 39 (December 2000), 45-68.
This article focuses on colonial accounts of the killing of the Xhosa chief, Hintsa, in 1835 at the hands of British forces along what came to be known as the eastern Cape frontier. It explores the evidentiary procedures and protocols through which the event came to be narrated in colonial frames of intelligibility. In proposing a strategy for reading the colonial archive, the paper strategically interrupts the flow from an apartheid historiography to what is commonly referred to as "alternative history." The aim in effecting this interruption is to call attention to the enabling possibilities of critical history. This is achieved not by way of declaration but rather through a practice whereby the foundational category of evidence is problematized. The paper alludes to the limits of alternative history and its approaches to evidence on the one hand, and the conditions of complicity within which evidence is produced on the other. Whereas alternative history identifies its task as one of re-writing South African history, critical history, it is suggested, offers the opportunity to reconstitute the field of history by addressing the sites of its production and also its practices. In exploring the production of the colonial record on the killing of Hintsa, the paper seeks to complicate alternative history's slippage in and out of the evidentiary rules established by colonial domination even as it constitutes the category of evidence as an object for a politics of history of the present.
+ JABULANI SITHOLE and SIBONGISENI MKHIZE, Truth or Lies? Selective Memories, Imagings, and Representations of Chief Albert John Luthuli in Recent Political Discourses, History and Theory, Theme Issue 39 (December 2000), 69-85.
Individuals, organizations, and institutions adopt prominent people as political symbols for a variety of reasons. They then produce conflicting memories and images of their chosen symbols. In this article we argue that multiple representations of celebrated public figures should not only be viewed in terms of a choice between "truths" and "lies." Using the case of Chief Albert Luthuli, the president of the African National Congress from 1952 to 1967, we show that secrets and silences about aspects of his political life would make it difficult for anyone to establish the veracity of competing memories which have been produced around his name since his death in 1967. We argue that many "Luthulis" were produced for different purposes and at different times during this period. We therefore suggest that to understand the motives for the making of the various images of Luthuli we need to explore in some depth the contexts in which they were made.
+ HELEN BRADFORD, Peasants, Historians, and Gender: A South African Case Study Revisited, 1850-1886, History and Theory, Theme Issue 39 (December 2000), 86-110.
A gender revolution allegedly occurred in the British Cape Colony (and South Africa at large) in the nineteenth century. African patriarchs, traditionally pastoralists, took over women's agricultural work, adopted Victorian gender attributes, and became prosperous peasants (nicknamed "black English"). Scholars have accepted the plausibility of these seismic shifts in masculinity, postulated in Colin Bundy's classic, The Rise & Fall of the South African Peasantry. I re-examine them, for Bundy's "Case Study" of Herschel, acclaimed as one of the regions that best fits his thesis. This Case Study omits women, who were the typical peasant producers. It marginalizes men failing to conform to bourgeois Victorian gender norms. It misrepresents class formation, causation, periodization, and peasant well-being. It misdates proletarianization by at least three decades. The zenith of commodity production is misdated by at least half a century. A labor reservoir characterized by severe subsistence problems is represented as a prosperous peasantry. Bundy postulates that patriarchs "rose" into women's work and colonial masculine scripts in response to favorable conditions; I argue instead that younger men "fell" into these domains in response to disasters. A silent gender bias-towards black Englishmen, against African women-had a marked impact on Bundy's analysis of class formation. The purpose of this article is to interrogate this silence and to show how it has warped a classic text.
+ SIFISO MXOLISI NDLOVU, Johannes Nkosi and the Communist Party of South Africa: Images of "Blood River" and King Dingane in the Late 1920s-1930, History and Theory, Theme Issue 39 (December 2000), 111-132.
In divided societies like South Africa, history, among other things, serves ideological purposes. The colonial encounter between King Dingane, the second Zulu king, who ruled from 1828 to 1840, and white settlers highlights this fact. The core of Afrikaner Nationalist historiography regarded the king as a treacherous, uncivilized barbarian. He was perceived to be an anti-white demagogue who was beyond redemption. But elsewhere, African nationalists and workers viewed the king as one of the original freedom fighters who resisted the tyranny of the land-grabbing white settlers and voortrekkers of the nineteenth century. Their interpretations of King Dingane's relationship with white settlers depict the latter as disrespectful imperialists and unscrupulous men, attempting to enrich themselves at the expense of the indigenous population. Accordingly, their interpretation of this encounter revolves around the land question in South Africa. This article discusses a case study regarding these issues. It is about the challenge mounted by African workers in the late 1920s and 1930 against the official celebration of December 16. This celebration honored the victory of the voortrekkers at the so-called battle of "Blood River" on December 16, 1838-hence the public holiday was once referred to as "Dingaan's Day." As a counter-commemoration of this day, African workers regarded the official celebrations as symbolizing the loss of their land and the passing of their freedom. As a result African workers aligned with the Communist Party of South Africa, and through the leadership skills of Johannes Nkosi, mounted vigorous protests and challenges against these celebrations by white South Africans. They staged protest marches and defiant anti-pass campaigns that emphasized the centrality of the land question in South Africa. They also paid tribute to their past, include King Dingane. Through their actions they imbued conscience in African workers throughout the country, hence the response of the state was brutal and culminated with the death of Johannes Nkosi in 1930.