Edition Politik

Forced Evictions and Criminalisation Practices in Present-Day South Africa

Sara Dehkordi

• Publisher: transcript Verlag
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783732853106
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In present-day South Africa, urban development agendas have inscribed doctrines of desirable and undesirable life in city spaces and the public that uses the space. This book studies the ways in which segregated city spaces, displacement of people from their homes, and criminalization practices are structured and executed. Sara Dehkordi shows that these doctrines are being legitimized and legalized as part of a discursive practice and that the criminalization of lower-class members are part of that practice, not as random policing techniques of individual security forces, but as a technology of power that attends to the body, zooms in on it, screens it, and interrogates it.

Chapter one

The colonial archives repertoire

Discursive power of archive in the face of forced evictions

“They could evict us, take the houses and demolish them. But they can never take away our memories. Our memories will always stay with us […]. This suitcase will go with me, wherever I go.”
Magdalene George, February 2015

“… the postapartheid is unimaginable without effecting a strategic invalidation of the modes of evidence of the colonial archive which enabled the violence of apartheid…apartheid was inconceivable without the apparatus of the colonial archive. The colonial archive provided apartheid with its multiple metaphors and strategies of demarcation and segregation…The modes of evidence specific to the colonial archive were not only the foundation on which apartheid was built but its very discursive condition. Apartheid was, we might say, entangled in colonial modes of evidence and born in the shadow of the colonial archive.”1
Premesh Lalu

Introduction

A suitcase full of memories. A story untold. Documented evidence of a struggle against the forced eviction from houses in which the pensioners where born. Mrs. George, Jerome Daniels, and Faeza Meyer, each of whom were evicted from different places in the greater Cape Town Area, insist on narrating what has happened in the eviction process themselves. The ways they organised themselves, formed committees, how they were framed and presented their court cases, and the ways in which police and Anti-Land Invasion Unit treated them – all these issues they are determined to raise awareness around by providing access to their narratives and the related material they have collected over the years. The arrangements of that material have formed archives that tell a different story to the official narrative of the particular eviction process. In this chapter I want to know, how can these archives be understood? What does the dominant discourse on forced evictions try to erase, what archives nurture the discourse and how can that what remains untold be read?

This chapter wants to find answers to this question and will discuss memory, method, historiography, and epistemology in relation to this question. The discussion and use of theory evolved out of the necessity to formulate what the people affected by forced eviction and criminalisation were expressing and narrating, their living conditions and the ways in which they accessed their memories on the one hand, and the mechanisms used by governments, business sector and media to undermine histories of eviction, removal, relocation, criminalisation and unequal access to the city, on the other hand. In this vein, this chapter starts from Thinking archive with Derrida, and continues with the discussion on Coloniality and the Archive. It then discusses and formulates answers to the relation between The archive, institutionalisation and the making of memory, and subsequently, between Archive and method. As its next step, the chapter thinks of the people evicted as archivists and will discuss their archives in the section Thinking the Forbidden Archives. The aim here is to formulate an understanding of how their archives relate to the dominant discourse on forced eviction, while the concept of forbidden archives will become clearer as well. Through accessing and analysing the colonial archive, its ways to name and frame the black subject, the reciprocal relationship between Coloniality and the Urban Development Discourse will be illustrated and analysed. As the chapters last endeavour, Imagining a third space, in which epistemology can be critically reviewed, will point a way forward for building and formulating the approach this book will undertake.

As in many other works that evolve from an open decolonial perspective, questions of archive, methodology, language and the power to knowledge production are not only central to the study this book emanates from, but they function as a permanent critical voice that challenges, seeks reflection and re-reflection, and that shatters normalised and dominant epistemologies that were/are complicit in the construction and reproduction of colonial/neo-colonial discourse. This perspective evolved out of the necessity to rethink orders of knowledge that were manufactured by the colonial regimes in order to maintain political, economic and cultural hegemony. Coloniality, then, is a power structure that accumulated and settled in the different layers and institutions of society, beginning with its most influential domain in relation to knowledge production, the academy. Considered further, not a single discipline could have been spared, on the contrary, some branches of the humanities and the natural sciences assumed an essential role as actual artisans of colonial discourse. Ann Laura Stoler alludes to “anthropology’s longstanding complicity in colonial politics”.2 Indigenous peoples3 as subjects - those whose study was so desirable-, were at the same time subjects of colonial rule, a condition without which the anthropological encounter would have been impossible. Wendy James points to this dependency when she asserts that, “there was little possibility of a European traveller knowing the people intimately in the pre-colonial period […] the situation of a lone European living for months or years in an ordinary village without a retinue was only possible when benevolent colonial administration was well-established”.4 Accordingly, the interconnectedness of colonialism and anthropology was thus implicated as a logical consequence. This remained the case even if in some instances anthropologists directly contravened colonial administrations and were accused by colonial officials of defending their informants against the colonial regime and acting as their spokesperson.5 As certain as colonial administrations employed anthropologists as advisors on the “Native Problem”6, such as the Union of South Africa did officially after 19257, the formation and implementation of colonial discourse was co-supervised by anthropologists whose work benefited from and was informed by the colonial condition. But when we speak about colonial discourse, we will have to at the same time admit that the complexity of the colonial project’s structures and mechanisms, aims and processes, allowed a certain multiplicity, albeit limited, of discourses to co-exist. Nevertheless, we will need to inquire into the commonalities of these discourses, to understand whether a tangible leitmotif, or better to say, recurring themes of the colonial project exist. To that effect, Lalu’s concluding statement (that heads this chapter) on the role of the colonial archive was chosen purposefully to indicate the suggestion this chapter makes: to include the question of archive as crucial to all layers of one’s approach, and in particular, to the theoretical framing one’s work adopts.

Lalu’s work forms an important pillar in postapartheid theory that had an extraordinary decisive impact on the analysis of the colonial archive’s discursive power in South Africa. Adam Sitze writes in his book review of Lalu’s exercise into the operations of the colonial archive: ‘But The Deaths of Hintsa is no ordinary text. It’s a text that asks us to think twice – both more searchingly and more responsively – about what it is exactly that we want to know, insofar as our intellectual curiosity takes the form of a demand for historical knowledge’.8 What in my view Sitze describes here is a general approach that seeks to not only re-read History and to scrutinise its function as a ‘discursive condition’, but to see this condition as preparer and organiser of the epistemological realities of the present: History here not as merely events of the past, but rather as discipline.

Thinking archive with Derrida

In the discussion about emergence and evolution of the archive, about its substance and structures, Jacques Derrida’s exceptional deconstructivist response appears as the most concrete, but also as the most essential one. Without claiming to have written a theory of the archive, he provides suggestions for a possible future theory. He argues that the substance/content of the archive are elected documents in a “privileged topology” that are housed in a residence/a “domiciliation”. This domiciliation of documents then shifts from the representation of a private space and collection, to the manifestation of a public entity, and therefore, to the establishment of an institution that produces knowledge - its ultimate institutionalisation. The particularity of this institutionalised and released entity is that it is a limited structured corpus. Limit here is understood not as shortage but as active limitation – that unifies, identifies, classifies and brings together an arrangement of signs. This gathering together of signs Derrida articulates as “consignation”, since it turns the different documents into a unit that is “a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration”.9 This configuration does not allow heterogeneity, because, if it would, it would bring with separation and discordance inside the discourse that is constructed or that is aimed to be constructed.10 This does not mean that not every archive bears inside a certain amount of heterogeneity. But what is unified, identified and classified, is at the same time systematically configured, which also means that it is named and structured. This “topo-nomology”« now becomes protected by the “archontic” principle of guarding the “arkheion”/the archive and, as such, gains authority and legitimacy through the law and right that enable its existence.11 Further, what guards and limits the archive is neither structurally embedded in mysterious entanglements of society, nor is it coincidental or unintended. In my view, one of Derrida’s key statements comes in an extended footnote, where he emphasises, “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory”.12 It is this sentence in the only book that he ever dedicated fully to the question of archive, that I want to underline, and subsequently let breath.

How can we understand what Derrida is suggesting here? I suggest that this conclusion provides the essential answer to the whole inquiry underscoring the question. To control the archive, and therefore memory, means to control the ways in which history is perceived, but also, how it becomes reconstructed and imagined. Implied violences of the present can in this way be cut off from their historical background and reside as isolated conditions of the social, but not of the political. Dehistoricising then means at the same time a depoliticising of the event. We may take the German genocide on the Herero and Nama in Namibia as an example. It is impossible to read the catastrophe of the holocaust as a historical one13, without taking into account the brutal manifestations of fascism within the German colonial apparatus. Put more clearly, the genocidal practices and technologies in both cases, the manner in which colonialists and leaders of the national socialist party viewed themselves, the racialised regimes in which they ordered, administrated and made law, and the epistemological foundations th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titelseite
• Impressum
• Inhalt
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter one
• Chapter two
• Chapter three
• Chapter four
• Chapter five
• ConclusionS
• Epilogue
• Bibliography