C is for culture. C is for civilisation. C is for colonialism

I’m currently reading Robert Young’s Colonial desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race and I’ve been taking pictures of interesting excerpts which are making me rethink culture.

Thus far (I’m still reading the book) I’m beginning to wonder how Africans thought about difference amongst different groups of people before the catastrophe of Western/European colonialism.

These thoughts have led me back to Prof Archie Mafeje’s paper The ideology of tribalism where he makes an argument questioning the origins of the word tribe and how it came to be accepted that ‘tribalism’ is a part of the African experience (in anthropology in particular). He begins the paper with the statement: Few authors have been able to write on Africa without making constant reference to 'tribalism'. This suggests that tribalism has become to be an essential part of how we describe Africa and make sense of the differences amongst different people in Africa. Mafeje continues by posing the questions: Could this be the distinguishing feature of the continent? or is it merely a reflection of the system of perceptions of those who write on Africa, and of their African 'converts'? I understand this to be making sense of what it means if Europeans write about Africa in order to make sense of them to justify colonialism. What would have happened if Africans had started writing about what it means to be African as a way of explaining themselves to the European colonisers and missionaries, rather than the other way around? Mafeje poses this question too: Might not African history, written, not by Europeans, but by Africans themselves, have employed different concepts and told a different story? Surely these are the questions about decolonising and being in a postcolonial moment.

With Mafeje’s ideas in mind, I then came across Young’s writing about the ideas about culture/s and civilisation/s. Notice how the words change if the s is there or not. However, we are in the habit of using culture and cultures interchangeably as though they are an extension of the same thing. Or are they? In a section with the title ‘Culture and Civilisation’ Young writes:

Culture comes from Latin cultura and colere, which had a range of meanings: inhabit, cultivate, attend, protect, honour with worship. These meanings then separated out: with Christianity, the ‘honour with worship’ meaning of cultura became the Latin cultus, from which we derive our word ‘cult’—and from which the French derive their word couture. More significantly, the ‘inhabit’ meaning became the Latin colonus, farmer, from which we derive the word ‘colony’—so, we could say, colonisation rests at the heart of culture, or culture always involves a form of colonisation, even in relation to its conventional meaning as the tilling of the soil. The culture of land has always been, in fact, the primary form of colonisation; the focus on soil emphasizes the physicality of the territory that is coveted, occupied, cultivated, turned into plantations and made unsuitable for indigenous nomadic tribes.

           

This sentence jumped up from the page and made sense to me: so, we could say, colonisation rests at the heart of culture, or culture always involves a form of colonisation, even in relation to its conventional meaning as the tilling of the soil.

These words—culture and civilisation—are about understanding and explaining difference. But they are not African. In the sense of that the words are not in an African language. This led me to consider if there is an African epistemology about thinking about difference. With or without the influence of the English ideas about culture. The best way I could think about this was through anecdotal evidence in my family.

My maternal grandmother’s clan name is Hlathi. I grew up calling her by her clan name. Phenotypically Hlathi looked Khoisan. She didn’t look black. This meant she looked Coloured because of the apartheid erasure of Khoisan heritage. I am now curious about the origins of her clan and how they came to be and whether her ancestors had any links with the Khoisan. There was no crises about my grandmother looking different. At her funeral people spoke about how proud she was that she was one of the most educated people in her village: she had a Standard 6 (Grade 8 equivalent). She was more educated than her husband nogal. It seems her education and the extent to which she was a colonial subject, a lady, that was the defining feature. That she looked different did not seem to be foregrounded (to my younger self). This is not to say the difference was not obvious or that we don’t have a language for explaining difference. My mother spoke about the historical connections between oonoqhakancu (the Xhosa word for Khoisan people) and she spoke about the connections through stories about inter-marriage and borrowing of language—some have even written about how the word Xhosa is in fact from the Khoisan meaning angry—but she never spoke about the wars and the bloodshed. I’ve even heard others talk about ooSukwini, a clan named attributed to Xhosa people who have links to Khoisan or Coloured origins (not that Khoisan and Coloured are interchangeable). Thus with the figure of my grandmother I grew up without the colonial idea that difference needed to be a crises or something to be managed. It was simply a way of life.

My maternal grandmother, uBhele, never married. She had 6 children with three different men. I never had the courage to ask her about these relationships but the stories would emerge in drunken family brawls. My mother is the eldest and she shares a father with sibling number 6. Sibling number 3, 4, 5 had the same father. This meant sibling number 2 was the odd one out. Rumour has it Bhele never told her about her father and she spent most of her adult life having an existential crises trying to find out (it doesn’t help that uBhele asked family friends to raise her, adding to her existential crises). This is all significant because in trying to think about difference, my mother spoke about her father a lot. She also introduced me to another half-brother whom she knew but was never really close with. According to my mother, her father was quite a dashing young man about town. Light-skinned, a sportsman. Looking at mama, my uncle and her half-brother you would think they were Coloured. Especially the half-brother. But this was not a crises. Given the politics of the racial pecking order, this lighter skin was a sense of pride for my mother. It meant she had other blood in her. It meant she was not completely black.

Of course these are simply anecdotal examples of how I experienced difference in subtle ways before I began school in a multiracial school. I went to a preschool and started Sub A at schools designated for Coloured children. I spoke Afrikaans. My mother tells me I was the translator at my preschool: between the black kids who couldn't speak English and the teachers who knew English and Afrikaans. I also spent a year at another preschool in the Indian area in East London. Multiculturalism did not begin with adding white people in my world. It began with other languages and playing with kids who looked like me but had different texture hair and sometimes didn’t speak isiXhosa.

The crises began when I began to understand the racial pecking order and what it meant to be black in a previously white school in the early 90s. All of a sudden culture became something we performed and had to explain to other people. White people. Culture became something to explain why my friends and I spoke another language on the playground during break. Culture became the thing which was uncomfortable for the white people when my sister and I had beaded bracelets on Monday morning and we had to explain that we had had umsebenzi over the weekend.

Culture meant I was the other. I was the problem.

I light of Young’s words above I now understand this framework of culture being a problem rather than being another way of being. The irony of course, is that in the decolonial moment there’s a confusion about whether we should be harking back to our precolonial cultures as black people. How do we make sense of our current cultures right now which are far from pure? Where many of us are more of what Noni Jabavu writes about when she says The mores that I was used to were neither purely Western nor purely Bantu. We were not ‘black Europeans’, yet I saw how we were not ‘white Bantu’ either. How do we understand culture in this decolonial moment? I would argue we need to decolonise the very idea of culture and perhaps throw it out as a framework of understanding difference because right now, culture is also being used to pit us against each other—it’s my culture, it’s not my culture—as though there was only one way of being.

In isiXhosa culture is loosely translated to inkcubeko which is a would used to explain the traditions amongst Xhosa people. However, inkcubeko does not have the same hangovers of what culture means when used in the sense of “South Africa has many cultures”. So perhaps, within the framework of isiXhosa as a language, it would be interesting to look at other words in other African languages. Perhaps by using African languages as a starting point we could see the problematic nature of the obsession we have culture/s and begin to talk about our experiences in ways where difference is not a crises.

Young ends Chapter 2 with the following thoughts which seem as an apt conclusion to this post:

Culture never stands alone but always participates in a conflictual economy acting out the tension between sameness and difference, comparison and differentiation, unity and diversity, cohesion and dispersion, containment and subversion. Culture is never liable to fall into fixity, stasis or organic totalisation: the constant construction and reconstruction of cultures and cultural differences is fuelled by an unending internal dissension in the imbalances of the capitalist economies that produce them. Culture has inscribed within itself the complex and often contradictory differences through which European society has defined itself . Culture has always marked cultural difference by producing the other; it has always been comparative, and racism has always been an integral part of it: the two are inextricably clustered together, feeding off and generating each other. 

Race has always been culturally constructed. Culture has always been racially constructed.