Nicky Rousseau, University of the Western Cape

Eastern Cape bloodlines

If red is politics, tradition, and also that which is read, then red is also violence and
bloodlines. This paper thinks about the different ways in which bloodlines can be
assembled - or not - by examining the exhumation of human remains from a farm near
Cradock in the Eastern Cape in 2007.
While bloodline is regarded as the most reliable forensic requirement for individual
identification, establishing or, following Zoe Crossland, producing - personhood requires a
different kind of assembling, one that centres around hands and their handling of artefacts
and bone. Both identification and personhood rest on techniques and assemblages of, among
others, forensic medicine, physical anthropology, criminology and increasingly the
testimonial practices of transitional justice. Nationhood, on the other hand, in which these
particular bodies were (and continue to be) entangled, rests on yet other bloodlines that run
through histories of property (prison and police station, holiday farm, hunting lodge and
abbatoir) and perpetration (the murders of Steve Biko, Siphiwo Mtimkhulu,Topsy Madaka,
the Pebco 3, the Cradock 4, the Motherwell 4).
In thinking about these particular bloodlines and the ways in which they are assembled
(including here), this paper works with the tensions between exhumation as a project of
recovery and recuperation, one that is not dissimilar to that of recording and writing hidden
histories or recuperating silenced voices, and one that disassembles existing assemblages
of place and time, material and symbol, human and animal, and the body itself. Focusing on
disassembly draws attention to the work that is expended in stabilising the exhumed body,
upon which the claims of social history, transitional justice and nationhood rest.