WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN – Resurrecting, Recollecting, Restraining: patenting, labelling, bottling, and putting the lid on Ancestors …

WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN

Resurrecting, Recollecting, Restraining: patenting, labelling, bottling, & putting the lid on Ancestors

Mansell Upham

Ancestor worship is a tad à la mode, if we go by the plethora of ancestral names on local wine and spirit bottles, eg: Olof Bergh, Ansela van de Caab, Pierre Jourdaan, Van Loveren, and Jacques de Savoye.

“To be converted you need to destroy your past,
destroy your history.
You have to stamp on it and say,
‘My ancestral culture doesn’t exist,
it doesn’t matter …”
– V.S. Naipaul comparing the “calamitous” effect of Islam on the world with colonialism [‘Brilliant! Even if he says so himself’, News Review, Sunday Argusn (1 October 20001), p. 26]

These names have even been patented and legally monopolized – and not necessarily even by legitimate biological offspring.

This is a distinct departure, however, from the usual traditions of worshipping ancestors or the Izinyanya.

Whether Shintoist, Buddhist, ‘African tribal’ or Catholic; whether the festival is for Umtendeleko or All Souls or O-Bon, ancestors are usually amorphously anonymous and seldom singularly and individually recalled or invoked.

Now, ancestors are being personally named.

In another extraordinary departure from tradition, local [South African] British-born artist Sue Williams’s state-of-the-art contraption of glass, canvas, water and rope, entitled ‘Memories from the Moat’ originally exhibited at the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale (1997) is sufficiently in-your-face to challenge any ‘South African’ conscious of her / his slave ancestry.

The name of each and every slave purchased and sold at the Cape of Good Hope appearing in the Addendum 2 [a brief summary of transactions pertaining to slaves, compiled from documents preserved in the Deeds Office, Cape Town] that originally appeared in Anna Böeseken’s book Slaves and Free Blacks at the Cape 1658-1700, has been engraved on a bottle each, containing also additional information inside.

Anna J. Böeseken (1906-1997)                   

These thousands of bottles, all wet or moist, are either floating and submerged or caught suspended in trawler netting, with water constantly draining through.

Bewildered onlookers have the ingenious aid of a Schindler-esque replica of Böeseken’s List in take-away booklet form.

Unfortunately, not only has Böeseken’ s List been discredited for being substantially inaccurate [vide J. Leon Hattingh, ‘A.J. Böeseken se addendum van Kaapse slawe-verkooptransaksies: Foutiewe regstellings’, Kronos, vol. 9 (1984), pp. 3-21], the list comprises only those privately owned slaves recorded in terms of Transporten en Schepenkennis [These were registered deeds of private sales and transfers for fixed property – including slaves] procedures and requirements.

This means, that all the other contemporary slaves that belonged to the VOC (‘the Company’) at the Cape – being the majority of slaves – have been overlooked, ignored …

A reconstructed history with a faulty premise …

To remember, to recall, to recollect are vital to the Human Condition.

Where memory has been obliterated or even faded, should we stomach the imposition of reconstructed, fabricated and contrived pseudo-memory in the name of art, political justice, religious salvation or ideological indoctrination?

“We see the irretrievable only when we dead awaken.
What do we really see then? We see that we have never lived.”
– HENRIK IBSEN Vaar vi doede vaagner

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)

“All that is buried is not dead”
– OLIVE SCHREINER

Olive Schreiner (1855-1920)

“… for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
GEORGE ELIOT, Middlemarch

Geoge Eliot (1819-1880)

Originally featured as an editorial in Capensis 3/ 2001 (SEPTEMBER  2001)