COMAROFF COUNTRY

David BunnUniversity of the Western Cape

This article highlights several key propositions from Volume II of Of Revel-ation and Revolution (RRII), relating to the way LMS mission discourses

facilitated the phased transition to capitalism. It then tests the applicability

of these hypotheses to the study of landscape aesthetics, labour manage-

ment, and conceptions of ethnic sovereignty in another domain of Liberal

administration in South Africa: the early Kruger National Park. In the

process, the article charts a rather different history of the colonial body to

that advanced by the Comaroffs, emphasizing the way in which LMS

mission station and game reserve alike produce bounded, spatial conditions

for the management of contradictory conceptions of rights and ethnic

subjectivity. Some points of similarity are found between the Comaroff

conception of moralized Tswana bodies, commoditization, and the crisis of

value, on the one hand, and on the other, management of ‘Shangaan’ labor

and identity in the early Kruger National Park. Moreover, this similarity

also underscores the explanatory power of the historical method in VolumeII: present crises of value apparent in late twentieth-century South African

witchcraft discourses, for instance, are seen to have a long history dating

back to destructive contradictions around rights and currency already

apparent on LMS mission stations. The article concludes with a case study

that draws attention to the slightly problematic theory of capillary state

power operating in Volume II. Instead, it calls for a more concrete history

of articulating state agencies, showing how in the example of the Makuleke

interventions Vol. 3(1) 5–23 (ISSN 1369-801X print/1469-929X online)Copyright © 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 1080/13698010020026967

Comaroff

ethnicity

hegemony

Kruger NationalPark

South Africa

state power

articles

6

land claim in the northern Kruger National Park, distinct government

departments competed to establish different allegories of paternalistic racial

management. Ironically, this history can only be written with a return to the

understanding of agency and statehood that characterized earlier Comaroff

work on African elites.

Jean and John Comaroff know an awful lot about several unprepossessingpatches of land in South Africa’s northern and northwest provinces. Thisarticle is not directly about ‘Comaroff country,’ if I may call it that. Instead,what I propose to do is to take a series of propositions derived from RRIIand test their applicability to the history of another region a little to the east:South Africa’s Kruger National Park game reserve in the period 1926 to 1950.Putting theories that were re�ned in the cultivated lands around Kuruman towork in the untilled, wilderness spaces of the Kruger Park should yield someinteresting results.

The central thesis of RRII is that the colonial age is not over, and that infact it is still unfolding in the present global logic of modernity. This is anextension of hypotheses present in earlier Comaroff works like Ethnographyand the Historical Imagination and the edited volume Modernity and ItsMalcontents. Taken together, these works assert that despite globalization,the world has not been reduced to sameness; that there are ‘many moderni-ties’; that there was not one form of the colonial state in Africa; and thatgiven the ‘incorrigibly plural’ nature of power on the colonial periphery, his-torical anthropology is the one discipline that manages to ‘take suf�cientaccount {both} of the worldwide facts of colonial and postcolonial coercion{and} the role of parochial signs and values’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993:xiii).

RRII repeats a claim that has irked opponents of the Comaroffs in the past,a claim that I too would wish to defend, namely that, in giving expression tometropolitan modernity, colonialism has always been ‘inseparably a processin political economy and culture’ (p. 19). This central hypothesis is developedfurther in a series of propositions about the missionizing world of the south-ern Tswana: �rst, there is the suggestion that colonialism extends itselfthrough bodily regimes and reforms, epitomized by the evangelist’s under-standing that ‘the body was the plane on which the commodity met the self’(p. 60); second, it is claimed that colonies were ‘locales in which the waysand means of modernity . . . were subjected to experimentation and reim-ported’ (p. 22); �nally, that because of its ‘dialectical relationship with indus-trial capitalism,’ colonialism was founded on ‘a series of discontinuities andcontradictions’ (p. 27). In the case of the Nonconformist mission to theTswana, this meant, paradoxically, that the deployment of an Enlightenmentconcept of rights facilitated the formation of ‘ethnic subjects in a racially

in terv ent ions – 3 :1

7C OM A R O F F C OU NT RY

David Bunn

divided world’ and enabled the racialized relations of production that under-pinned the apartheid labor system. These hypotheses about the body, aboutlocal and global scale, and the relationship between rights, ethnicity, andexchange value are the scaffolding upon which the main arguments of thisin�uential volume are built. To what extent, though, may similar claims bemade about the relationship between colonialism and modernization beyondComaroff country? Let us move a little further east.

Like the world of the southern Tswana, the landscape system I wish toexamine is a boundary zone. The 19,000-square kilometer Kruger NationalPark is smack up against the Mozambique and Zimbabwe borders. Formallyproclaimed in 1926, it was an expression of progressive new conservationprinciples spelled out in the 1918 Report of the Game Reserves Commission.Kruger, the report suggested, would be a protected space that shored upvalues being lost elsewhere with the advance of modernity (Carruthers 1995:55). Moreover, like the missionary garden at Kuruman, it was seen as anexemplary landscape: it was productive, in that it preserved and multipliedantelope species; and it was emblematic, in that it embodied lessons aboutadministrative resolve.1

Obedient bodies

To test the applicability of Comaroff hypotheses to this game reserve space, weshall have to re-examine their version of the history of the colonized body. RRIIdescribes a history of bodily reform as it was instituted by Protestant Noncon-formism. I want to tell a slightly different story, beginning with the evidence ofan 1860s painting by the artist-explorer Thomas Baines (Figure 1). This worktells us a great deal about conceptions of the body in the early imperial moment.The white explorer leans forward over the Sublime abyss, as though bent againsta great wind caused by the rushing curtain of water. In his journal, Bainesdescribes the synaesthetic experience of sound, light, and color: at the base ofthe falls, he says, the glassy green cascade is transformed ‘into abroken . . . �eecystream, bearing but little resemblance to liquid water’ (Baines 1864: 519).The sublime effects of light on water on a vast scale produce an apparentlyuncanny change in the state of matter; at the same time, this is also metonymi-cally associated with the speaker’s interior state, his transforming awe, and whatis before the eye is thus also a mark of the Romantic reciprocity betweensubject and landscape.2 However, the apparent absorption and projection ofthe white subject into the landscape has a wider impact: it appears to drainlife from the other �gures in the painting. In this early imperialist moment, inother words, black bodies appear torpid when they are not harnessed to alarger project. They remain in the realm of the drives, of service or use value,without the capacity for introspection, and there is evidence in the painting of

1 Sections of thisarticle summarizeelements of a farmore detailedargument about thehistory of the KrugerNational Park that Idevelop elsewhere.See e.g. myunpublished seminarpaper ‘Waterholework: drought,photography, andpolitics in theKruger NationalPark, 1926–1950.’

2 For a detaileddiscussion of theimagined reciprocitybetweenconsciousness andlandscape, as itappears in Romanticlandscape poetry, seeLiu’s seminal work(1989).

8

an underlying belief in what Anson Rabinbach has called the ‘metabolicexchange of matter, mediated through labour’ (1990: 77). Black bodies arethus switched on and off like machines in relation to the teleological expedi-tionary project; they stand in a very different relation to work than the moral-ized Tswana bodies that were the target of reform by LMS missionaries.

Several decades later, a rather different dramatization of somatic discoursesbegins to take hold. Here is one example (Figure 2). This is the house of apetty of�cial in charge of the supplies to construction workers on the ZuidAfrikaansche Spoorweg Maatschappij (ZASM) line, Boer President Kruger’srailway lifeline to the port of Lourenco Marques. Somehow, a fascinatingreversal of value has taken place. This cleared area is not simply exemplaryof the power of the rational, imperialist imagination over wilderness. Instead,it is as though the entire meaning of the space – and, by implication, the statusof the petty of�cial in the wider tunnel engineering project – has becomedependent on an idea of framing, fetishistic loyalty: Swazi warriors adoptexaggeratedly theatrical poses at the gate. The project of colonial engineer-ing has become reliant on a new metaphoric association, in which therelationship between �gure and ground is harmonized, and justi�ed, by the

in terv ent ions – 3 :1

Figure 1 Thomas Baines, Eastern Portion of the Victoria Falls (1863)Source: © National Library of South Africa, ref. INIL 6583

9

presence of these transitional �gures. In a development worthy of Hegel, theadvance of imperial science has become reliant on certain recognition effects.Other photographs in the same series go as far as dressing a cast of blackconstruction workers in ethnic garb and having them salute the progress ofthe railway line with wild assegaai gestures.

Between Baines’ epiphany at the waterfall, and the photograph of thehouse in the Lowveld bush, a genealogy of bodily representation begins toemerge, one that is slightly different to what is described in RRII. It is true,as the Comaroffs suggest, in one of their most persuasive chapters, that withthe generalization of labor as a commodity, a tension develops between ‘twoquite antithetical forms of African person,’ associated with rights-bearingliberal individualism on the one hand and the ‘sovereign subjects’ of ethni-city on the other (RRII: 368). However, there is not, as it is sometimessuggested in RRII, primarily a contradiction between the two; instead, theirrelationship is classically dialectical, in that the one becomes a necessarycondition for the emergence of the other. In fact, the purpose of much ofthe architecture, photography, and built environments of missionaries andimperial administrators alike is to �nd a space in which this problem ofemerging rights may be managed. For the LMS to allegorize itself, it needs

C OM A R O F F C OU NT RY

David Bunn

Figure 2 ZAZM Warehouse Of� cer’s house, KomatipoortSource: © The Transnet Heritage Library, Johannesburg

10

to have a savage frame, and a visible logic of conversion between differentmoral orders; hence the ubiquity of the genre of before-and-after missionphotos in all missionary discourse. The colonial context offers a specially dra-matic scene in which these distinct temporalities – the older order of custom-ary law and the new world of rights-bearing individualism – may bespatialized and presented simultaneously.

The two images I have discussed above also point to a general change inconceptions of value equivalence that took hold because of the coincidenceof colonialism and modernization. To demonstrate that further, I will returnto the Kruger National Park, which, in the 1930s, was a bounded space thatpreserved not only animals, but an older order of labor relation (Figure 3).Gate guards and ‘police boys’ were a crucial part of the early tourist experi-ence in the Kruger National Park.3 Typically, they wore conservative khakidress, but this was not the same reduced uniform as that of the ‘growing pro-letarian army’ in the southern Tswana countryside referred to in RRII(p. 259). Instead, the game guard uniforms combine an older ‘houseboy’ stylewith that of the colonial military. These individuals themselves display a rictalmask of obedience, greeting the passage of the tourist from the outside realm

in terv ent ions – 3 :1

Figure 3 Gate guard, early Kruger National ParkSource: © SA National Parks, Pretoria

3 In fact it might beargued that they stillform a crucial partof the touristexperience today,though the of�cialnomenclature haschanged. Despite theremarkablyinteresting politicaltransformations thathave taken place inthe Kruger NationalPark, it is still thecase that all(without exception,as far as I know)‘�eld rangers’ areAfrican men. Field

11

of modernity to a strange new zone in which an older yeoman class of loyaltycan still be imagined.

While gate guard uniforms are not the same as those worn by Tswanamigrants, both forms of khaki dress are fundamentally conservative. More-over, it is at such points, in discussions of modernism, colonialism, andtheatricality, that there is a visible convergence between the latest work of theComaroffs and the argument originally advanced by Homi Bhabha (1994).What we see exempli�ed in the world of the southern Tswana, as well as inthe Kruger photographs, is the ‘belatedness of the black man’ as the onto-logical condition for the emergence of the modern. Put more generally, thecolonial periphery offers special scenarios without which ‘the discourse ofmodernity cannot . . . be written’ (Bhabha 1994: 25). This analysis alsoextends a line of argument that appeared most dramatically in Comaroff andComaroff (1992). In their much discussed chapter on ‘The madman and themigrant,’ for instance, they argue the point that consciousness is a process inwhich ‘human actors deploy historically salient cultural categories to con-struct their self-awareness’ (p. 176). However, unlike the Tshidi madmanwhose motley dress was an aspect of work, work ‘on himself with laboriouscare to bring together in startling anomaly things that, frequently, were keptwell apart’ (p. 174), Shangaan gate guards play a different role with regard tothe modernization of colonial consciousness. They dramatize two orders oftime and racial identity – one that of the ‘improved’ native and the other thatof the customary, ethnic collective – that cannot easily coexist outside theboundaries of the reserve. Their clothing therefore exempli�es work for theOther as much as for the self, and in fact it might be said that the rigid poseadopted by these men in tourist photographs is an internalization of thecamera’s gaze, rather than any sign of loyalty. ‘The pose,’ says Kaja Silver-man, ‘needs to be more generally understood as the photographic imprintingof the body.’ ‘It may be the result,’ she suggests, ‘of a projection of a par-ticular image onto the body so repeatedly as to induce both a psychic and acorporeal identi�cation with it’ (1992: 205).

The idea that older relations of production persist on the colonial peripheryin forms of fetishistic devotion is central to the Lugardian understanding ofnative administration. As we know, it was a crucial aspect of Shepstone’sadministration of despotic rule in Natal, and it is repeated in the under-standing of the �rst warden of the Kruger National Park, James Stevenson-Hamilton.4 What Stevenson-Hamilton wanted to achieve in Kruger was aReserve space that preserved animals and particular kinds of native subject.‘I would like to point out,’ he says in his Warden’s Annual Report of 1929,‘{that} whereas our natives are always civil and obliging to Europeans, thoseliving along the Crocodile River especially close outside our borders are justthe reverse, and seem permeated with political propaganda’ (p. 4). The south-western edge of the Kruger National Park is a moralized, imaginative border,

C OM A R O F F C OU NT RY

David Bunn

rangers wear adistinct, greenuniform, and thoughthey carry ri�esinstead of assegaais ,they travel aroundthe reserve bybicycle.

4 The best accountof Shepstone’s verytheatricaladministrativeregime is in CarolineHamilton (1998),‘TheophilusShepstone and themaking of RiderHaggard’s Shaka.’

12

a pareragon associated with half-modernized native subjects under the careof the warden; just beyond this invisible boundary the older bonds of fealtyare shrugged off and a new order of familiarity between boss and servantassociated with the modern state starts to appear.5 The increasing loss ofrespect for benevolent white administration was most noticeable at the trialsof poachers: ‘When caught and tried in Court,’ the warden noted, ‘theydisplay far more erudition and cleverness than was the case some years ago’(p. 4).

What Stevenson-Hamilton was encountering indirectly was the effect in the1930s of political mobilization by the early Industrial and Commercial Unionin the Bushbuckridge region.6 This raises a question about political agency asit appears in RRII. Questions of native rights may be managed by mission-aries and game wardens alike as long as they are framed in particular tran-sitional spaces that mediate between different temporal orders: in Kruger, asin Kuruman, modern rights therefore appear to emerge slowly, but not at theexpense of older forms of pre-capitalist value, or ‘custom,’ and not as a con-dition brought about through obvious African political agency. Outside thespatial frame, as in the abstract space of the lawcourts, the contradictionsbecome destructively sharp. Because of the detailed concentration, in RRII,on bodily reform, architecture, and material culture, we rarely see beyond themissionary frame of interaction to other realms of Tswana political organiz-ation; to be fair, this is also the effect of an argument that spreads itself overthree volumes, where discussion of certain types of causation is reserved fordistinct sections. In this volume, the mise-en-scène of the mission is what isforegrounded, at the expense of other less obviously coherent sites like thelunatic asylum.

Places like colonial game reserves and mission stations are an example ofhow the ‘disjunctive temporalities of modernity’ are translated into ‘the dis-course of space’ (Bhabha 1994: 251) so that they do not appear as contra-dictions. To grasp the theoretical implications of this phenomenon for theComaroffs, however, we need to explore a rather different understanding ofthe relationship between capitalism and ideology.

It is intriguing to see that in the transition from RRI to RRII, Gramsci hasdropped out of the index. In part, this is probably because of the nuanceddiscussion on hegemony in Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, thatde�ning work written between the �rst two volumes of the Comaroff tripledecker. ‘Hegemony,’ they say in this intermediate text, ‘is that part of a domi-nant ideology that has been naturalized and, having contrived a tangibleworld in its image, does not appear to be ideological at all’ (Comaroff andComaroff 1992: 29). Ideology and hegemony, in other words, are part of onesystem, with the latter being that domain of signs and practices in which the‘agentive’ mode has become invisible (p. 28).

The absence of reference to Gramsci in RRII points to an understanding

in terv ent ions – 3 :1

5 The problem of‘parergonality’, or,to put it moreconventionally, theproblem of whethervisible boundariesare markers oflimitation orsupplementarity, isone that JacquesDerrida has returnedto obsessively in anumber of hisessays. See Duro(1986: 2).

6 See Bradford(1993: 229) for anaccount of increasedunion activity in theregion.

13

of state power that is rather different to that of earlier Comaroff work: poweris seen as far more dispersed and is experienced mainly as a crisis in the systemof value. Colonial South Africa, after the mineral revolution, and viewed fromthe perspective of the missions to the southern Tswana, was a place wherecontradictions around value, labor, currencies, and the ‘universalization ofequivalent labor power’ (Jameson 1981: 250) were dramatically visible. Fromthe perspective of the Tswana themselves, say the Comaroffs, colonialism isfelt ‘as a loss of control over the production and �ow of value,’ and hence‘virtual currencies’ like beads come into being to slow the ‘rapid conversionfrom one form to another’ (p. 214). This view of the advance of agrarian capi-talism is of course radically different from the old, revisionist South Africanhistorian’s account of how the countryside was rapidly transformed, ‘fromabove, along the “Prussian path” into capitalist agriculture’ (Bradford 1993:65).

What John and Jean Comaroff suggest is that missionaries played a criti-cal role in the phased transition to capitalism. None the less, with the domi-nance of this mission narrative in RRII, there is not as much emphasis on thearticulation of different state agencies and actors and the compounding ofadministrative force. Nonconformists, and a succession of imperial agentsincluding game wardens, it seems to me, were important to the binding ofideology and hegemony in the early modern period. Nonconformism was alsocritical for the advance of instrumentalized labor relations, not just becauseit plays such an important role in splicing together ‘bourgeois biopower andcolonial taxonomy’ (Stoler 1995: 96), but also because it dramatizes an ideaof pastoral administration that underpins Liberal capitalism. What non-conformism allows, therefore, is a productive misrecognition: the under-standing that the impact of wage labor in the countryside will be lessened bybenevolent paternalism, and that the effects of racist administration will bemoderated by local humanitarian concern. Missions teach that the relation-ship between colonial agencies is not one of additive force, but of disciplinemoderated by care, and their net effect is to disguise the connections betweenlocal reforms and metropolitan power. I think I can illustrate this best bymoving from the example of clothing to that of architecture.

Huts

Protestant evangelism, the Comaroffs argue, played a role in ‘the formation ofVictorian domesticity both in Britain and overseas’ (RRII: 277). Missions tothe Tswana ‘measured progress by the extension, across the landscape, of four-sided frames, fences, and furrows’ (p. 301). This general ideology of improve-ment, binding aesthetics to a moral understanding, has frequently beencommented upon, for instance, in Clifton Crais’ work on settler architecture

C OM A R O F F C OU NT RY

David Bunn

14

in the eastern Cape (Crais 1979: 43). Where the Comaroffs are far moresophisticated, however, is in their reading of how nascent class fractionsamong the Tswana took the new languages of the missionary built environ-ment and produced a range of fusions.

RRII shows brilliantly how the moralizing class aesthetics of Protestantismare circulated between metropolitan centers and LMS missions; however, Iwould like to speak about the history of Liberal aesthetics in a different way.That discourse of improvement which resulted in the leveling of peasantvillages in England was always accompanied by a compensatory nostalgia forcottage architecture.7 There was an almost eroticized longing, whichexpressed itself on English and French landed estates in fantastical follydairies, faux cottages, and hired hermits in elaborately decorated arti�cialgrottoes. Something similar, it seems to me, is true of the architecture ofimprovement preferred by missionaries in South Africa. Many missionarieshave an obsessional interest in creating a transitional, vernacular architecturethat gestures towards ‘native style.’ As early as 1820, for instance, we �ndthe missionary settler Thomas Pringle building a wattle-and-daub beehive hutas his �rst shelter in South Africa. Doubtless this is a re�ection of Virgilianlandscape aesthetics, but there is also a deeply eroticized understanding thatthe white body needs a different sort of transitional, native dwelling for thesake of its own colonial citizenship. It is both libidinally satisfying, in that itallows the subject to imagine itself temporarily in the place of the Other; andit offers a more secure metaphoric grounding for the settler self on foreignsoil.8 RRII describes the transition from the early LMS missionary belief thatthe ‘sinuous pathways’ of the Tswana bred promiscuity, to a ‘mutual appro-priation of aesthetic forms’ and then a ‘steady convergence in frontier housingstyles.’ In contrast, I would argue that this dialectic was present from the �rstmoment of contact.

According to the Comaroffs, the civilizing mission produced for theTswana an attenuated existence in which ‘things existed primarily by virtueof their nonbeing’ (RRII: 395). I have tried thus far to extend their argumentto the history of white subjectivity, by showing how similar contradictionsare managed spatially by various colonial agents. Inevitably, however, givenmy sympathy for this line of argument, what begins with my mild criticismof the architectural history in RRII ends up with some major points of agree-ment: that what we know as ‘the hyperreal,’ and associate with late capital-ist commodity culture, is already strongly present in the binding of fantasyand ideology in the built environments of early modernism, and in the imposs-ible paradoxes of ethnicized rights discourses in colonialism. This seems tome a profoundly important historical point, and one that is consistentlyignored by South Africanists. What the Comaroffs make possible, in theirbroader discussion of the explosive historical forces at work in the emergenceof the homeland ‘Bophuthatswana,’ is an understanding of the link between

in terv ent ions – 3 :1

7 RRI (pp. 72–3)makes reference tothe violent remakingof British landscapesduring the IndustrialRevolution, and thefashion, in writerslike Wordsworth,for elegiac accountsof the passing of theyeoman classes. Thisis not, however,developed in thediscussion ofmission architecturein Volume II.

8 See my discussionof Thomas Pringleand cottagearchitecture inMitchell (1994: 127ff.). Even morepertinent for thisdebate is the �nediscussion of T. E.Lawrence’s libidinalinterest in ‘Arab’clothing and disguisein Kaja Silverman(1992: 330).

15

colonial productive forces and the catastrophic politics of ethnic identity inlate twentieth-century rural South Africa. To say this is to reformulate a claimmade by ZÏ izÏ ek and others, that the ‘dispersed, plural, constructed subjecthailed by postmodern theory . . . simply designates the form of subjectivitythat corresponds to late capitalism’ (ZÏ izÏ ek 1993: 216). Of course, this is alsowhere Jean and John Comaroff are most misunderstood. Their critics areoften grudgingly prepared to accept the analysis of the crisis in value inTswana society, but not what they take to be the more �agrantly ‘postmodern’analysis of commoditization, globalization, and witchcraft accusations inmodern South Africa. RRII forces us to imagine these things together.9

So, does it make sense to historicize notions of the hyperreal, and to seehyperreal environments emerging dialectically out of colonialism and intomodernism? It makes perfect sense, and if we were to �nd an analogy for thisin the Kruger National Park, we would have to look no further than thehistory of tourist huts.

Roundness is a key compensatory signi�er in the architectures of the earlyKruger National Park. When James Stevenson-Hamilton presided over theearly Park, he carefully controlled the rustic aesthetics of the camps. Agovernment pamphlet from the period points to why round tourist huts werefelt to be so attractive:

The distinctive design of the . . . huts is based on the quaint little dwellings of theNatives. These hive-shaped huts, called rondavels, �t snugly into the luxuriousgreen background of the plains and hills. . . . {They never seem} to mar or concealthe harmony of the scene.

Tourist huts are a fantasmic imitation of native dwellings. They are in somesenses also prosthetic structures, distracting attention away from the onto-logically ungrounded nature of ‘white’ citizenship in a racist society.

There is an intriguing discussion of rondavel architecture in RRII. ‘{T}heconical clay and thatch structure that began as a white man’s bricolage,’ saythe Comaroffs, ‘has become a generic southern African style’ (p. 312). Inthe early modern period, though, and especially in the bushveld, the needfor hybrid forms of vernacular architecture was also underscored by specu-lative environmental theory. Stevenson-Hamilton believed that the Lowveldwas ‘essentially a black man’s and not a white man’s country’ (1934: 17),whereas for the Afrikaans poet and country doctor Louis Leipoldt, themalarial regions produced lassitude and enervation in the white workingclass at the very time that this group was competing with African labor.Leipoldt’s eugenics research took him to the brink of another paradoxicalconclusion: in imported plant species, he noted, successful environmentaladaptation followed after several generations of hybridization (Leipoldt1937: 42). ‘The crux of the matter,’ he concluded, ‘is whether or not the

C OM A R O F F C OU NT RY

David Bunn

9 In some respects,the Comaroffs arethe most serioustheorists ofglobalization and itsimpact on SouthAfrican ruralcommunities. Thisvolume, and theirmost recent work onwitchcraftaccusations in SouthAfrica after the 1994general election,charts a newdirection for theunderstanding ofnationalism andtransnationaleconomic forces inlate twentieth-century SouthAfrica. Few othertheorists have beenable to follow theirlead, although recentwork by VeitErlmann (1991) onquestions ofdifference andcommoditizationbears somesimilarity to theargument in RRII.

16

race can be perpetuated in Nordic integrity without constantly drawingupon new blood and new stamina for its regeneration’ (ibid.: 43). Goingagainst the tide of warnings about the effects of miscegenation, this passagetoys with the idea that in racial hybridity, the emergence of a new speciesof South African, lies the key to successful political adaptation. Clearly thiswas a trend that the entire later history of apartheid and group areas plan-ning was designed to circumvent.

Thus the extraordinary popularity of Kruger’s rondavels reveals a deepnational longing, on the part of whites, for partial adaptation to African life-styles so as to reinvigorate senses dulled by urban living and racial isolation.However, in the long term, neither here nor in Bechuanaland, this promise ofconvergence and ‘of a distinctly hybrid architecture’ did not resolve itselfbecause the ‘dialectics of colonial encounters . . . {promise} to erase differenceeven while insinuating it into the practical consciousness of all those involved’(RRII: 313). Rondavels, in the end, retain a mildly fantastical and eroticizedsense of the communal spatial experience of rural African homesteads.Vernacular architectures such as these eroticize the idea of undifferentiatedinterior dwelling spaces; that is why they have remained such an integral partof the game lodge experience, not only for South African visitors, but also forforeign tourists bearing in themselves the scars of living in racially dividedurban environments.

Despite the powerful in�uence that RRII has exerted on my own work, Iam left with some lingering doubts about the representation of the role of thestate in relation to other agents in that work. To illustrate the dilemma, I wantto end my discussion by reference to a quarrel that almost tore the KrugerNational Park in two.

Ebb and f low

Thinking back on the �rst volume of RR, I remember being intrigued by whatit has to say about water. The book describes an extraordinarily complexexchange between evangelists eager to use the example of irrigation andbenevolent water provision, and Rolong and Tlhaping royal rain-makers forwhom ‘control over water . . . was a crucial aspect of sovereign power’ (RRI:207). This was not simply a matter of one dominant discourse replacinganother. It was also a question of practical power, for water provision wasthe single most important symbolic expression of chie�y authority. Mission-ary irrigation channels and boreholes cut into the body of the local Tswanapolity.

Ideas of water provision and �ow are fundamental to the early discourseof Liberal capitalism, from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments to theobsession with unobstructed river traf�c we see in early mercantile explorers

in terv ent ions – 3 :1

17

like Mungo Park. Similar discursive associations persisted into the earlymodern period, and they are exaggerated in the Kruger National Park underits early administrators, because of the sharp visible difference between thelandscape of the game reserve and the desiccated wastes of the surroundingnative reserves. Here too, as in Kuruman, a quarrel over the rhetoric of waterprovision masked a far more serious con�ict over labor and land.

Until Helen Bradford’s rewriting of eastern Transvaal farming history, itwas widely believed that the pre-1948 South African state did little to inter-vene on behalf of securing labor for farmers. (This is the central claim in SaulDubow’s (1989) study of the Native Affairs Department, for instance.) Intruth, it now appears, matters were far more complicated. White farmersaround the Kruger National Park were desperate for cheap labor, and theybitterly resented what they took to be the state’s privileging of mine laborbureaux such as the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WENELA).Farmers took advantage of migrating laborers and illegal Mozambican immi-grants, effectively kidnapping them to work on Lowveld farms. In stark con-trast to this violence, the neighboring Kruger National Park was a crucialsigni�er of pastoral control: of proper landscape administration, of erosionprevention, and of care for the tourist self. By de�ecting the idea of racistpopulation management on to the idea of water provision for animals, Krugerbecame a signi�cant ideological buffer for the shocks of agriculturalmodernization throughout the farming regions of the Lowveld. That is to say,the Reserve as a whole system served a visible symbolic function: the properprovision of boreholes and dams, and the proper management of water �ow,was evidence that the destructive time regimens of industrial capitalism – pro-ducing cycles of plenty and scarcity, encouraging the onset of drought, andalienating workers – could be escaped through enlightened management.

For many local farmers, drought was a sign of a newly destructive orderof temporal sequencing intrinsic to capitalism: the industrialization of agri-culture was proceeding out of control, and drought was the apocalypticresult. In the propaganda �lms of the 1930s, water provision in the properlymanaged landscapes of Kruger was frequently juxtaposed against the cata-strophic cycles of erosion in the native reserves.10 Within the Park itself,however, there were two signi�cant places where the idea of the settled andwell-managed landscape system broke down: in the far north, in the Pafuriregion, and in the region of the present Numbi gate.

Sovere ign subjects

Until 1969, when they were �nally and forcibly evicted from the area after itwas incorporated into the Kruger National Park, the Makuleke communitylived on the banks of the Luvuvhu River at Pafuri. The National Parks Board

C OM A R O F F C OU NT RY

David Bunn

10 Scores of soilerosion propaganda�lms were producedin the 1940s and1950s. Some of themost interestinginclude VanishingAfrica (1948, blackand white, 22minutes) andGuardians of theSoil (1954, color), inwhich Krugerfeaturesprominently.

18

coveted this area, for aesthetic as much as conservation reasons, and theyemphasized the picturesque nature of the locale in all the arguments they usedto justify its expropriation. However, they also came into con�ict with theother main state agency in the area working with the rhetoric of water pro-vision: the Native Affairs Department. Finally, it came down to a competitionaround water as a signi�er: water as scenery, mark of successful game andlandscape management, versus water as a potential source of irrigation, theprovision of services for natives.

In the end this goes beyond the question of land, and landscape aesthetics,to the idea of rights-bearing subjects. The Makuleke were xiTsonga speakers,a group generally referred to as ‘Shangaans’ by Lowveld whites. As PatrickHarries has shown, terms such as Shangaan and Tsonga are highly compli-cated,11 but the idea of Shangaan identity is closely associated in the KrugerPark with notions of loyalty, of people who have given up external politicalrights for the citizenship of the Park. What we see here, in other words, isdirectly parallel to what was effected in Bechuanaland. The attribution ofprimal sovereignty, of a static ‘Shangaan’ essence, like that of the ‘Bechuana,’was in contradiction with the desire to at the same time modernize Africansociety (RRI: 394). In the case of both Bechuanaland and the Kruger NationalPark, these contraries were held in place through a landscape matrix: themission station and the reserve. Quarrels over the incorporation of Makulekeland into the reserve, therefore, broke the spell of landscape and revealedunderlying contradictions. In their most concerted attempt yet to remove theMakuleke, beginning in 1947, the Board argued that they were not moderncitizens with property rights; nor, it seems, were they of a type with the �xedand static ‘Shangaan’ police boys and gate guards. Instead – to adopt theComaroff terminology – they were sovereign subjects out of place: they werea remnant group that actually owed allegiance to Chief Mhinga, who livedto the west of the Park, and who would welcome their resettlement. TheMakuleke, the new warden argued, had a form of transitional identity associ-ated with cross-border and transdiscursive experience: ‘As the years went by,’said Warden Sandenbergh, in an imaginative account of their clan identity,‘the Makuleka {sic} natives started repudiating {their allegiance to ChiefMhinga} and as they were situated in a remote part became increasingly inde-pendent and a law unto themselves. They married women from Mozambiqueand Southern Rhodesia and natives from both these territories trekked in andsettled there. It became a lawless sanctuary for fugitives’ (NKW44/4/5 {152}JABS to NP Board). Makuleke identity, it seems, could no longer be managedin the mise-en-scène of the game reserve space, and a series of contradictionsreturned to trouble the rhetoric of native administration. The Makuleke are‘a law unto themselves’: neither subject to customary rule, nor the gratefulrecipients of the gift of modern rights; it is as though they exist in some thirdspace between discourses.

in terv ent ions – 3 :1

11 See Harries(1987 and 1996).

19

This story reminds me again of the ‘double consciousness’ explored inRRII, in which evangelists set about making ‘two quite antithetical forms ofAfrican person.’ Like the missionaries, the Parks Board thought of itself as a‘friend of the natives,’ and sought to preserve in the Park stable forms ofethnicity like the Shangaan gate guards, police boys and trackers. Shangaanworkers, it seems, often clung eagerly to the image of themselves as �ercelyloyal: as Mozambican immigrants they were very vulnerable to deportation,and the semi-autonomous Kruger Park administration, with its military-stylehierarchies, became a place of refuge and virtual citizenship. However, theMakuleke were more independent, and their territory actually straddled theborder. To displace the Makuleke from Pafuri, the Parks Board had thereforeto work against the notion of sovereign citizenship, and here they came intocon�ict with another state agency, the Native Affairs Department (NAD).Interestingly, the NAD also used the rhetoric of water provision as ametaphor for larger forms of control: opposing Parks Board plans to expelthe community, they suggested instead that the Makuleke situation could beresolved by a government irrigation scheme that allowed villagers to farm thealluvial soils of the Limpopo Valley all year round. What we have describedas the impossible contradiction between forms of citizenship under colonial-ism here plays itself out as a battle between state agencies, one defending anidea of ethnic identity appropriate to a particular landscape system, and theother defending the modernized rights of ‘natives’ in betterment schemes.

Both the National Parks Board and the NAD, in other words, were usingan aesthetics, in the form of a landscape relationship between subject andbackground, as an alibi. Despite there being many forms of the colonial state,power continued both in a hierarchical form and in the connections betweenstate agencies. It is this articulation of diverse elements of state power that issometimes missing from the missionary-centered account in RRII.

I hope I have shown my admiration for the hermeneutic method embodiedin RRII by demonstrating its powerful ability to explain other regions andtimes. What I also hope has been clear is that like several other SouthernAfricanists, I am still assessing the implications of this remarkable, synopticvolume. Nevertheless, my own approach – exempli�ed here by my examin-ation of the colonial origins of contradictions within the Kruger National Parkitself – differs from that of the Comaroffs in several minor respects. First, it isclear that pastoral agents like missionaries and conservationists are crucial inthe transition to capitalism in southern Africa in that they offer apparentsolutions to contradictions generated elsewhere. Like the Comaroffs, I aminterested in how these solutions are often presented in the form of boundedlandscapes: the mission station, and the reserve. At the same time, however,there are limitations to this type of analysis: an examination of the capillaryeffects of power within a closed space too frequently ignores the fact that suchsites disguise the additive effects of power. Different forms of the state come

C OM A R O F F C OU NT RY

David Bunn

20

together in the countryside, but the rhetoric of pastoral care masks the fact thatthese forms are articulated, in relationships between mission stations andgovernment departments, the word of God and the Law. Too close a concen-tration on the architecture of Kuruman, Skukuza, or indeed Mmabatho, dis-tracts attention away from the larger institutions of power at a distance.

Second, the idea of a ‘conversation’ between two interlocutors is probablynot the best way of describing the co-implication of missionary and Tswanaworlds, primarily because this is exactly how missionaries themselves wouldhave described it. Autonomous Tswana political action of course continuedbeyond the moralizing penumbra of the mission station, and part of what wesee in changes to southern Tswana dress and architecture was a matter of per-formance for missionaries rather than a remaking of Tshidi-Rolong historicalconsciousness. In Kruger, the Makuleke continued to act independently ofreserve authorities, and in terms of local contestations around chie�y rule,despite the considerable administrative pressure of six different governmentagencies in the Pafuri area. They presented one conversational face to theParks Board while acting entirely differently at home. In the end, it may onlybe possible to trace this form of agentive action through the biographies ofindividual local elites.

Finally, it seems to me that in the development of the argument betweenRRI and RRII, some of the richness in understanding of the body has beenlost, though much else has been gained. RRII tends to portray the body interms of an inscriptive surface, or, when this surface yields to a deeper in�u-ence, interiority is frequently reduced to a discursive opposition betweensekgoa and Setswana. Perhaps some extension into RRII of the earlierComaroff accounts of the missionary understanding of Tshidi interiority iscalled for, of Tswana subjectivity as an interactive �eld for the reception ofChristian grace. Related to this is a question raised in discussion by TimBurke: where is there a fully elaborated understanding of Tswana as them-selves individually desiring and consuming subjects, eagerly acquiring newgoods and deploying them to level existing hierarchies in the precapitalistcirculation of symbolic goods? For the most part, for Jean and JohnComaroff, commodities disseminated by missionaries are part of wider,extrinsic refashioning in the ‘signifying economy of empire.’ The burden ofthis signifying economy on the local system of value is lessened by the adap-tation of existing systems of exchange, most particularly ‘exchange value onthe hoof’ (RRII: 175), in the form of cattle. Despite the brilliance of this argu-ment, what it leaves out is an understanding of the effects of new forms ofexchange on rival elites, and between fractions and factions. Compare, forinstance, the wealth of information we have about individual rivalries, anddesires, sometimes between family members, in that other great catastropheof value associated with bovine currency: the mid-nineteenth-century cattlekillings in the Xhosa kingdom of the eastern Cape.

in terv ent ions – 3 :1

21

What I offer here is less a criticism than a call for further debate on issuesraised by this extraordinary volume. The considerable depth of the Comaroffanalyses may be measured against the relative shallowness of other discursiveanalyses (of clothing and colonialism, of bodies) in a host of instrumentaliz-ing contemporary accounts that reduce African responses to commoditiza-tion to ‘elaborate forms of mimicry’ (McClintock 1995: 231).

Happily, we may now conclude with the contemporary example of theMakuleke. Some readers may know that the northern part of the KrugerNational Park has been returned to this community in one of the �rst success-ful acts of land restitution by South Africa’s new democratic government. Oneof the pieces of evidence presented in the hearings, I was told, was PhineasChauke’s moving account of his family trek in the drought of 1964, with1,500 dying head of cattle, to beg for grazing rights at Pafuri from ChiefMakuleke.12 At issue was precisely the nature of sovereign authority, withChief Mhinga’s descendants still claiming that the Makuleke were a vassalgroup. In fact the rivalry between the two groups was so �erce that at onestage there was an assassination attempt on the life of Samuel Chauke, anelder who was one of the chief Makuleke oral historians.

For H. P. Chauke, the Makuleke chief’s performative act in grazing rightsfor his father’s cattle was enough to constitute a de�nition of power; in thatmoment, in other words, ‘Headman’ Makuleke became a chief. As it turnedout, the state probably did not rely on this evidence, for in questions of landclaims it has tended to focus more on literal displacements rather than oncomplex questions of chie�y authority. None the less, I am quite sure thatneither John nor Jean Comaroff would be surprised that here too, in theminds of certain factions engaged in an autonomous political battle, an issueof rights was settled by the evidence of the slow, implicating movement of anolder form of value equivalence, namely cattle. It is the un�nished, monu-mental Comaroff project that has taught us to see things this way.

Acknowledgements

This article was originally written for presentation at a special session of theDecember 1998 American Anthropological Association devoted to Volume IIof John and Jean Comaroff’s RR. I am grateful to Mark Auslander andCharles Piot for their invitation to me, and to Ivan Karp, Cori Kratz, BobbiePaul and Emory University for the generous travel grant that allowed me tovisit the United States that year. Tim Burke, Paul Landau, John and JeanComaroff, and all the aforementioned individuals were also valuable intel-lectual interlocutors who helped me shake some of these baggy ideas intoshape.

C OM A R O F F C OU NT RY

David Bunn

12 This summaryaccount is based onmy own discussionswith H. P. Chauke,and on interviewsconducted by StevenRobins and DinganeMthethwa.

22in terv ent ions – 3 :1

References

Unpubl ished and archiva l sources

Kruger National Park nature conservation archivesNKW Annual Reports. Warden’s Reports for 1924,

1926, 1927, 1928, 1929, 1930, 1931, 1933, 1936,1937, 1938, 1939, 1940, 1942, 1945, 1946, 1947,1953.

NKW {44/5} 2/6 Omruil Van Grond. Letter to NPBfrom Warden, 28 May 1947.

InterviewsPhineas (‘HP’ ) Chauke, interviewed by David Bunn,

Berg-en-Dal, KNP, August 1998.Phineas (‘HP’ ) Chauke, interviewed by Alannah

Birch, Mopane, KNP, 19 November 1998.

Samuel Chauke, interviewed by Steven Robins, PundaMaria, KNP, 4 August 1998.

Lamson Maluleke, interviewed by Steven Robins,Ntlaveni, 1 August 1998.

Publ ished sourcesBaines, Thomas (1864) Explorations in South-West

Africa, London: Longman, Green.Beinart, William (1984) ‘Soil erosion,

conservationism and ideas about development: asouthern African exploration, 1900–1960’,Journal of Southern African Studies 11(1): 52–83.

Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) The Location of Culture,London: Routledge.

Bonner, Philip, Delius, Peter and Posel, Deborah (eds)(1993) Apartheid’s Genesis, 1935–1962,Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Press.

Bradford, Helen (1985) ‘The Industrial andCommercial Workers’ Union of Africa in the SouthAfrican countryside, 1924–1930’, unpublishedPh.D. dissertation, University of theWitwatersrand.

—— (1993) ‘Getting away with murder: “MealieKings,” the state and foreigners in the easternTransvaal, c. 1918–1950’, in Bonner et al. (eds),pp. 96–125.

Bunn, David (1994) ‘ “Our wattled cot”: mercantileand domestic space in Thomas Pringle’s Africanlandscapes’, in Mitchell (ed.), pp. 127–74.

—— (1998) ‘Whited sepulchres: on the reluctance ofmonuments’, in Judin and Vladislavic (eds),pp. 93–117.

Carruthers, E. J. (1988) ‘Game protection in theTransvaal, 1846–1926’, unpublished Ph.D.dissertation, University of Cape Town.

—— (1993) ‘ “Police boys” and poachers: Africans,wildlife protection and national parks, theTransvaal 1902–1950’, Koedoe 36(2): 11–22.

—— (1995) The Kruger National Park: A Social and

Political History, Pietermaritzburg: University ofNatal Press.

Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John L. (1991) OfRevelation and Revolution, Volume I, Christianity,Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa,Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

—— (1993) Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritualand Power in Postcolonial Africa, Chicago, IL:University of Chicago Press.

Comaroff, John L. and Comaroff, Jean (1992)Ethnography and the Historical Imagination,Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

—— (1997) Of Revelation and Revolution, VolumeII, The Dialectics of Modernity on a South AfricanFrontier, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

—— (1999) ‘Occult economies and the violence ofabstraction: notes from the South Africanpostcolony’, American Ethnologist 26(3):279–301.

Crais, Clifton (1979) The Making of the ColonialOrder, Johannesburg: University of WitwatersrandPress.

Dubow, Saul (1989) Racial Segregation and theOrigins of Apartheid in South Africa, 1919–1936,London: Macmillan.

Duro, Paul (ed.) (1986) The Rhetoric of the Frame,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Erlmann, Veit (1991) African Stars: Studies in BlackSouth African Performance, Chicago, IL:University of Chicago Press.

Hamilton, Caroline (1998) Terri�c Majesty: ThePowers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of HistoricalInvention, Cape Town: David Philip.

23C OM A R O F F C OU NT RY

David Bunn

Harries, Patrick (1984a) ‘Aspects of poverty inGazankulu: three case studies’, unpublishedconference paper, Second Carnegie Inquiry IntoPoverty and Development in Southern Africa, 13April.

—— (1984b) ‘ “A forgotten corner of the Transvaal”:reconstructing the history of a relocatedcommunity through oral testimony and song’,unpublished conference paper, University of theWitwatersrand History Workshop, January.

—— (1987) ‘The roots of ethnicity: discourse and thepolitics of language construction in South-eastAfrica’, unpublished conference paper, Universityof the Witwatersrand History Workshop, 9February.

—— (1996) Work, Culture, and Identity: MigrantLaborers in Mozambique and South Africa, c.1860–1910, Johannesburg: University ofWitwatersrand Press.

Jameson, Fredric (1981) The Political Unconscious,Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Judin, Hilton and Vladislavic, Ivan (eds) (1998)Blank___: Architecture, Apartheid and After,Rotterdam: NAI.

Leipoldt, C. Louis (1937) Bushveld Doctor, London:Jonathan Cape.

Liu, Alan (1989) Wordsworth: The Sense of History,Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

McClintock, Anne (1995) Imperial Leather: Race,Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest,New York: Routledge.

Mitchell, W. J. T. (ed.) (1994) Landscape and Power,Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Niehaus, Isak A. (1994) ‘Coins for blood and bloodfor coins: towards a genealogy of sacri�ce in theTransvaal Lowveld, 1930–1993’, unpublishedseminar paper, University of the WitwatersrandInstitute for Advanced Social Research, March.

Packard, Randall M. (1998) ‘ “Malaria blocksdevelopment” revisited: the role of disease in the

history of agricultural development in the easternTransvaal Lowveld, 1890–1960’, unpublishedseminar paper, African Studies seminar, EmoryUniversity, 15 October.

Pienaar, U. de V. (1985) ‘Indications of progressivedesiccation of the Transvaal Lowveld over the past100 years, and implications for the waterstabilization programme in the Kruger NationalPark’, Koedoe 28: 93–165.

Rabinbach, Anson (1990) The Human Motor:Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity,Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of CaliforniaPress.

Schapera, Isaac (1993) ‘Economic conditions in aBechuanaland native reserve’, South AfricanJournal of Science XXX (October): 633–55.

Schirmer, Stefan (1994) ‘Agriculture in Lydenburg,1900–1960’, unpublished seminar paper,University of the Witwatersrand Institute forAdvanced Social Research, 16 May.

Silverman, Kaja (1992) Male Subjectivity at theMargins, New York: Routledge.

Stevenson-Hamilton, James (1934) The Low-Veld: ItsWild Life and Its People, London: Cassell.

—— (1993) South African Eden, The KrugerNational Park, Cape Town: Struik. Originallypublished 1937.

Stoler, Ann Laura (1995) Race and the Education ofDesire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and TheColonial Order of Things, London: DukeUniversity Press.

Transvaal Province (1918) Report of the GameReserves Commission, Pretoria: GovernmentPrinters.

ZÏ izÏ ek, Slavoj (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology,London: Verso.

—— (1993) Tarrying With the Negative: Kant,Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, Durham, NC:Duke University Press.

Copyright of Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies is the property of Routledge and

its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's

express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.