Professional Documents
Culture Documents
BY
HYLTON WHITE
(University of Chicago)
ABSTRACT
Not all peopleexistin the sameNow. Theydo so onlyexternally,by virtueof thefact that
theymayall be seentoday.But that doesnot meanthat theyare livingat thesametimewith
others.Rather,theycarryearlierthingswith them,thingswhichare intricatelyinvolved.One
has one'stimesaccording to whereonestandscorporeally, aboveall in termsof classes.Times
olderthan thepresentcontinueto effectolderstrata;hereit is easyto returnor dreamone'sway
backto oldertimes.
Ernst Bloch, 1935 (1976: 22)
Introduction
Bloch's point in the passage above is not that the forms of life in
any society can be ordered on an evolutionary scale, a disparate jux-
taposition of survivals and departures, but rather that the ghosts of the
old can be conjured up, palimpsestically, from within the uneven ter-
rains of the new itself. Writing thus in the context of an essay on the
rise of German fascism in the 1930s, he argued, in particular, that
moments of seemingly unresolvable crisis and blockage could lead the
insecure classes of such an age to resort to the specters of other times,
both real and imagined, in order to render familiar, though falsely so,
young man's rural home as the local domestic foreground for precisely
the dualist landscape of migratory oscillations that existed under
apartheid-but in the absence of its former economic and political con-
ditions. The present is thus conceived in relation not to one but to
two-and seemingly different-varieties of past: an ancestral past of the
homestead on the one hand and an apartheid past of migrancy on the
other. In fact, I argue, the histories of these two pasts are intimately
entangled with each other. And the form in which the first has come
to haunt the life of the now is a precipitate, I suggest, of the ways in
which the second has as well, in a wider context of interrupted post-
apartheid social transformation.
at that time, she said, should in fact have been not one beast but two.
The first of these goats would have been to tell the spirits of the home
about the work that was being done, and its place within the collec-
tive life and history of the family, this animal being killed just before
the ghost was fetched, so that the dead would bring their spiritual pow-
ers to bear upon the efficacy of that act. The second was the one that
should have welcomed him into the home, being slaughtered for him
after his brother's son had brought him back from beyond. Since the
first of these latter two animals had been lacking in the construction
of the earlier ritual attempt, the spirits of the family dead had neither
comprehended nor assisted in the work, so that the ghost was still left
stranded, as a result, hovering just outside the bounds of the yard. With
speeches making apologies for this oversight, the family thus prepared
for the second sacrifice, where I learned this fuller version of the story
as they were killing the pair of goats that were meant to redeem their
prior omission-the first, of what originally should have been three,
having already done its cleansing work before the second's absence had
made impotent the third.
I end my account here only because it was shortly after this second
cffort to fetch S'khumbuzo's grandfather's brother's spirit that my own
time in the area elapsed. On later visits, I found S'khumbuzo still unem-
ployed, but his family was preoccupied with a cycle of feasts to do with
problems that troubled his sister's emerging affinal relationship with the
father of her infants. If events thus far and analogous cases were any
indication, however, it seemed very far from likely that the history of
the matter had come to an end-and it was almost a certain bet that
still more goats would go the way, in years to come, of the four that
had preceded them in the family's failed efforts to put it to rest.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the events that I have narrated
here is the web of tangled threads that connect various presents with
their pasts and futures alike. Note, for instance, the temporal conflation
between the first and the second attempts to fetch the ghost of
S'khumbuzo's grandfather's brother. Although the second effort was
imagined in part as negating and superseding the inadequacies inher-
ing in the first, at an even more basic level the second divination had
warped the immediate present itself back to where it had already been
more than a year in the past. So in both cases, paradoxically, the work
of repatriation was being done now because it had never been done
before.
mined their first attempt to do so. At all times, on the contrary, they
had acted in good faith, for these tears in the moral fabric were only
made to be manifest later through the appearance of wounds in
S'khumbuzo's body, and then the holes in his pockets.
When they came to perform the second fetching, then, S'khumbuzo's
kin were not just repeating what they had already tried to do, but once
again going back, even further, to the time when their kinsman was
murdered in Johannesburg, the time when they would have undertaken
to bring him home if only they had known about his death. If this is
a past that came to haunt their present as its future, though, their first
effort to put it to rest was troubled by their relations with a second,
still more distant past: the ancestral time that provides the knowledge
of protocol which is requisite to efficacious and fully complete behav-
ior in the present. It was because they did not know what should be
done that their dead could not recognize what they were doing. And
so they faced a paradox that plagues the temporality of knowledge in
this countryside: the past's incompletion can only be known by way of
its ramifying effects in the future, but this is only so because the con-
tinuous present itself is disconnected from a past of ancestral fullness.
The knowledge that is requisite to life thus lies in the future and in
the distant customary past, but it is never simply available to con-
sciousness in the present; and the gaps in the recent past, and thus the
tears in the present, are there because of this even greater chasm that
separates both of these times from a past construed as the temporal
site of true traditions.
There are no doubt many senses in which something resembling this
state of affairs has long existed in Zulu domestic worlds. The presence
of the past, the continuing lives of the dead, the role of rupture in div-
inatory diagnoses of suffering: all these are recurrent themes both in
the oldest ethnographic works on the region and in more recent mono-
graphs (Berglund 1976; Bryant 1949; Krige 1936; Ngubane 1977). But
the concrete form that the dialectic of temporal connection and dis-
connection assumes in this case also has to do with historically quite
specific dilemmas facing rural Zulu households, under apartheid and
in its aftermath. I turn now to examine those dilemmas under the
rubric of moral discourse concerning domestic relations and migrancy.
It used to be you'd know that your neighbor's boy was back from the city when
you heard the sound of new cattle, bellowingin his father's kraal. Now you know
he's back when you hear the noise of his new cassettesplaying on his radio while
he's walking up and down the road outside-talking up all the girls he can, even
though he doesn't have any work, or any animals to give to their families.
patriline, and one of the elder men in his family leads the work of
repatriating their long-lost kinsman's ghost and entreating the same
agnatic spirits S'khumbuzo had addressed. It was one of S'khumbuzo's
sisters who first went to consult a diviner, though, and later she pro-
vided the fee for the second divination as well. And when S'khumbuzo's
mother wished the entrepreneur to help out through his connection to
me, she went not straight to him but instead to his mother, whom by
clanship she called her sister-in-law.
If relationships based on women have for a long time been the unspo-
ken grounds of a kinship structure reckoned in patriarchal terms, more
recently these ties have come to govern domestic life and sociability in
everything but name. The loss of formal industrial employment has left
most young men unable to gather bridewealth means, and thus to cre-
ate rural households of marriage through which they might exercise
masculine social identities. At the same time, the abolition of racial
laws that once constrained voluntary mobility has sponsored the emer-
gence of an expanding informal sector, straddling urban and rural spaces
in complicated circuits in which women by far outnumber men as the
agents of microenterprise. And in this new national terrain, as in many
parts of the world, a different kind of domestic realm has emerged into
view as well: one in which adult men are largely marginal, and marriage
all but a memory, while bonds of female filiation, siblingship and friend-
ship undergird not just the material lives of households but their socio-
logical composition as well (Ross 1995; Spiegel and Mehlwana 1996).
These terms of an intersecting class-and-gender revolution account
not only for the dilemmas of male youth, but also for the ways in
which attempts are made to resolve them. For if the decline of indus-
try has first made its mark in the social fortunes of young men, it has
ramified very quickly into the lives of others as well, through chains of
obligation and neglect, and through chilling levels of violence. But the
pressures which undermine industrial work in the current moment also
undermine the public institutions that are necessary for cohesive col-
lective responses to such developments, whether these be state inter-
ventions, aborted under neoliberal fiscal restraints, or trade unions that
have been weakened by the scale of unemployment. And so the bur-
den of dealing with social problems falls to private efforts instead, and
thus above all to women, who have been dealt the burdens of private
responsibility through the very same historical process too.
It would be one thing if these new forms of domestic life represented
a decisive break with the class-and-gender arrangements of the past;
that is, if the transcendence of apartheid had enabled rural women, at
the same time, to transcend the social limits that the conjuncture of
labor migrancy and bridewealth marriage had placed on them and their
households. But for most black South Africans, especially the rural poor,
the combination of economic decline and state paralysis means that the
post-apartheid era marks less the transcendence of the apartheid social
order than its chaotic disintegration, and this holds true as much for
the domestic sphere as it does for civil society, economy, and polity.
Explaining this fact requires looking more closely at the shifts that
are occurring in domestic composition, away from marital households
and towards bonds of siblingship and matrifiliation focused on cores of
unmarried women and their children. By no means are these relations
new departures. Rather, they are exactly the sorts of relation that in
this region have long composed the elementary maternal or uterine
houses that women produce through the works of rearing children and
providing food: houses that men appropriate, in turn, into homesteads
under their names, by circulating bridewealth goods such as cattle in
their marital transactions (see Kuper 1982: 10-40; J.L. and J. Comaroff
1992: 133-41). What is happening, then, is not so much a revolution
within the kinship ordcr as it is the generalization of its most partial
structural forms, in the absence of the means by which men historically
have encompassed them. Since the income women earn in informal or
service sector activities is a poor replacement for urban-industrial wages,
what is more, the loss of marital prospects based on male labor migrancy
is experienced not as grounds for female autonomy but rather as a
general decline into misery. The problem that is facing rural house-
holds, then, is not that new relationships are coming into existence but
that older ones have lost their fundamental conditions of being.
Here, then, is the crux of the matter. On the one hand, while a
wave of globally-driven economic crisis has rolled across the South
African region, culling male migrants in their millions from the urban
wage-labor market, the post-apartheid state has also retreated from its
mandate to ameliorate the lives of black South Africans, forcing these
former workers back on the private goods of their rural households
instead. On the other hand, however, and for precisely the same material
reasons, the processes by which these rural domestic spheres were cre-
ated under apartheid have collapsed as well, leaving a social vacuum
that cannot be filled in the absence of a thorough political-economic
restructuring-a task that is impossible under current neolibcral con-
straints. What is left to rural householders, then, is not the optimistic
spirit with which the post-apartheid era was born, but possession by
the ghost of apartheid itself, neither vanquished as it was meant to
be by the new nor quite lively enough to sustain the social forms of
the old.
Hence, I suggest, the curious and seemingly paradoxical forms in
which the past is made manifest within the events that followed
S'khumbuzo's stabbing. To tie his bodily fate to that of his missing
migrant elder was to hope that he would succeed where the former
had long ago failed, by tying together the poles of city and country-
side and making himself a man of name and substance. But to do so
was to cast him into a time that was not his-a temporal displacement
made vividly evident in the ritualized organization of his yard around
an absent kraal, construing it as the foreground for a landscape that
was as lost to the home as the prodigal migrant himself. Because the
means were thus lacking for the alignment of social intent and ritual
form, the latter was bound to fall short of its primary purpose: to mark,
that is, the beginnings and ends of migratory journeys. Yet the absence
of those same means also explains the explanation that was offered for
this failure. Since the point of successful migrancy under apartheid was
to remake the male migrant as a remembered and honored patriarch
in the countryside, in the image of his ancestral spirits, the gap between
S'khumbuzo and that prospect was a chasm between the present and
the past of ancestral custom as well. Both his possession by the familial
past as well as his spiritual alienation from it, then, were not so much
grounds as products of his material incapacity to create his social future.
Conclusion
NOTES
1. The fieldworkon which this paper is based was funded with generous grants from
the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Division of Social
Sciences at the University of Chicago, and a MacArthur Scholars Fellowshipfrom the
Council on Advanced Studies in Peace and International Co-operation at the University
of Chicago. Zolani Ngwane, NevilleHoad, Kelly Gillespie,Paja Faudree, Amy Stambach
and Brad Weiss have provided invaluable commentary on drafts of this material.
2. From the causative ukukhumbuza ('to remind'), as in a mnemonic or a memento.
Nominalized and contracted, S'khumbuzo is quite a common Zulu personal name.
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