The Black Body as an act of Resistance

 

I guess apartheid could have worked in its purest, separatist way; like how most Afrikaans nationals at the time wanted it to be and how essentially it was designed to be: complete separation of the races. I am convinced this could have worked; this could have been the easiest way for white people, in general, to pretend that black people did not exist. The English then stepped on the scene and insisted on the relegation of certain jobs to non-whites. The English needed non-whites as domestics, gardeners, miners, street sweepers, etc. In so doing, the English had inadvertently handed black people a weapon of resistance in the form of black bodies in white spaces. This was, I think, one of the ways apartheid stepped on its own tail. The Group Areas Act itself was undermined because although the Black person slept in the township, they commuted daily into white spaces and black bodies could be seen littered across the white landscape for extended periods of time in the day.

 

Carl Jung wrote of slavery in ancient Rome: ‘Every Roman was surrounded by slaves. The slave and his psychology flooded ancient Italy; and every Roman became inwardly, and of course unwittingly, a slave. Because living constantly in the atmosphere of slaves, he became infected through the unconscious with their psychology. No one can shield himself from such an influence. The potency of a resource, fundamentally, lies not in the overt (what it can be used for or what it does) but in the covert; that it’s very existence assaults the senses in such a way that it soon becomes an extension of man. Similarly, the black resource became an extension of the white man and the white man became, in the Jungian sense, a Swarte… he was also not immune.

 

And so when, as a white person, you woke up and were first met with the black back of your domestic worker feeding your children or you were sitting in your office but you could hear the miners’ singing floating from the mines; you were not immune.

And while you may try to ignore the black person, or proceed to deem him inferior to you and thereby assert your superiority in your personal narrative- placing yourself and the black person at opposite ends of the continuum- at the subconscious level this separation does not exist. The continuum is not a straight line, it is a Möbius strip. It is this dissolution that eats you from the inside; that makes you lash out in all manners of brutality and indignity; that makes you yearn to exterminate; that makes you hate. It makes you hate the other; it makes you hate the other in you; it makes you hate… well, you. And it’s damn impossible to love others when you cannot love yourself.