Tài liệu The Deaths of Hintsa docx

Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za
Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za
Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za
Published by HSRC Press
Private Bag X9182, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa
www.hsrcpress.ac.za
First published 2009
ISBN (soft cover) 978-0-7969-2233-5
ISBN (pdf) 978-0-7969-2248-9
© 2009 Human Sciences Research Council
The views expressed in this publication are those of the author. They do not necessarily
reflect the views or policies of the Human Sciences Research Council (‘the Council’)
or indicate that the Council endorses the views of the author. In quoting from this publication,
readers are advised to attribute the source of the information to the individual author concerned
and not to the Council.
Copyedited by Lee Smith
Typeset by Baseline Publishing Services
Cover by FUEL Design
Cover illustration from The Death of Hintsa by Hilary Graham, reproduced with kind permission
of the Albany Museum, Grahamstown
Distributed in Africa by Blue Weaver
Tel: +27 (0) 21 701 4477; Fax: +27 (0) 21 701 7302
www.oneworldbooks.com
Distributed in Europe and the United Kingdom by Eurospan Distribution Services (EDS)
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7240 0856; Fax: +44 (0) 20 7379 0609
www.eurospanbookstore.com
Distributed in North America by Independent Publishers Group (IPG)
Call toll-free: (800) 888 4741; Fax: +1 (312) 337 5985
www.ipgbook.com

Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za
For Kiera, to account for the absence;
Jaymathie and Jayantilal Lalu;
and Hansa Lalloo
Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za
vi
Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za
List of illustrations viii
Acknowledgements x
Introduction: thinking ahead 1
1 Colonial modes of evidence and the grammar of domination 31
2 Mistaken identity 65
3 The properties of facts (or how to read with a grain of salt) 101
4 Reading ‘Xhosa’ historiography 141
5 The border and the body: post-phenomenological reflections
on the borders of apartheid
191
6 History after apartheid 219
Conclusion 253

Notes 270
Bibliography and archival sources 309
Index
329
Contents
Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za
List of illustrations
 1 The cover of the Frederick I’Ons exhibition catalogue; there is little
clarity on whether the figure portrayed is Hintsa or Nqeno
71

 2 Charles Michell’s cartographic representation of the landscape in
which Hintsa was killed, published in 1835
83
 3 Flight of the Fingoes [sic], by Charles Michell, 1836 84
 4 Warriors Fleeing Across a River/The Death of Hintsa, by
Frederick I’Ons. n.d.
90
 5 Portrait of Hintsa, by Charles Michell, 1835 98
 5 Portrait of Hintsa, by George Pemba, 1937 98
 6 The tragic death of Hintsa, triptych by Hilary Graham,
1990
222–223

viii
Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za
ix
Ah, Britain! Great Britain!
Great Britain of the endless sunshine!
You sent us truth, denied us the truth;
You sent us life, deprived us of life;
You sent us light, we sit in the dark,
Shivering, benighted in the bright noonday sun.
SEK Mqhayi, on the visit of the Prince of Wales to
South Africa in 1925, translated by AC Jordan
History always tells how we die, never how we live.
Roland Barthes, Michelet, 104
Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za
x
Perhaps the most daunting task in completing this book is to recall the
many people who have had to endure its long incubation. If I mention

them by name, it is not so that they may be reminded of their complicity
in The Deaths of Hintsa but to thank them for their generosity, insight,
friendship and love over the years. To them I attribute my long-held desire
to substitute a politics of despair with a politics of setting to work on
postcolonial futures.
My first foray into writing this book began under the watchful
eye of Allen Isaacman and Jean Allman at the University of Minnesota,
as a graduate student in African History and as a recipient of a MacArthur
Fellowship grant. The more detailed study of the story of Hintsa was initially
submitted as a doctoral dissertation under the title ‘In the Event of History’
to the University of Minnesota in 2003. Thanks to Allen Isaacman, Director
of the Interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of Global Change, I was granted
an opportunity to interact with a group of thought-provoking historians of
Africa including Maanda Mulaudzi, Peter Sekibakiba Lekgoathi, Marissa
Moorman, Jacob Tropp, Heidi Gengenbach, Derek Peterson, Ana Gomez,
Alda Saute, Helena Pohlandt McCormick and Jesse Buche.
While at the University of Minnesota, John Mowitt, Qadri Ismail,
Ajay Skaria, David Roediger, Lisa Disch and Bud Duvall provided many
new and exciting directions for developing my thoughts on colonialism,
apartheid and postapartheid South Africa. John Mowitt and Qadri Ismail
gave new meaning to the idea of academic exchange, with Qadri especially
responsible for teaching me a thing or two. The members of the postcolonial
reading group fostered friendships conducive to the exploration of ideas.
Monika Mehta (for teaching me how to cut), Andrew Kinkaid, Guang Lei,
Joel Wainwright and Adam Sitze (for teaching me how not to cut) have,
unbeknown to them, been present at every stage of the writing even as I
Acknowledgements
Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za
xi
deposited myself far across the Atlantic Ocean in a little-known place called

the University of the Western Cape (UWC).
The History Department and the Centre for Humanities Research
(CHR) at UWC provided the most enabling environment for the development
of new ideas and critique. The sta and students of the History Department
oered unconditional support for my research through the years. Leslie Witz,
Ciraj Rassool, Patricia Hayes, Nicky Rousseau, Brent Harris, Gary Minkley
(now at Fort Hare University) and Andrew Bank made a special eort to read
my work and comment on it. I hope this book is an acceptable response to
their many questions and queries, and that will be seen as a contribution
to the ongoing innovative research in UWC’s History Department. Thanks
are also due to Uma Mesthrie, Martin Legassick and Terri Barnes for
their encouragement over the years. The Centre for Humanities Research
South African Contemporary History and Humanities seminar provided a
privileged space for critical readings of my work. In the last years of writing,
I was encouraged by many first-year and honours history students who
took the time to engage with the ideas of this book. I would like to single
out Riedwaan Moosagee, Thozama April, Vuyani Booi, Peter Jon Grove,
Noel Solani, Virgil Slade, Maurits van Bever Donker, Shanaaz Galant and
Khayalethu Mdudumane for their interest in my work and for journeying
with me to the site of Hintsa’s killing on the Nqabara River. The fellows
in the Programme on the Study of the Humanities in Africa (PSHA) at
UWC were a source of encouragement in pressing me to substantiate my
argument for the need for a subaltern studies in South Africa. I would like
to thank specifically Paolo Israel, Annachiara Forte, Jade Gibson, Heidi
Grunebaum, Crystal Jannecke, Rachelle Chadwick, Annette Homan, Jill
Weintroub, Maurits van Bever Donker, Zulfa Abrahams, Mduduzi Xakaza,
Charles Kabwete, Lizzy Attree and Billiard Lishiko for their generosity and
friendship. Finally, Leslie Witz, Susan Newton-King and Andrew Bank
oered to take over my teaching to enable me to retreat for a sabbatical to
Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where I put the finishing touches to

the book.
Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za
xii
A fellowship at the Centre for the Study of Public Institutions
at Emory University provided the much-needed intellectual stimulus
for fine-tuning the formulations of the book. Ivan Karp and Cory Kratz
are responsible for more than they can imagine, including much of the
discussion on the discourse of anthropology in the eastern Cape. Both
oered encouragement, support and unconditional friendship at a very
crucial time in the making of the book. Helen Moett provided me with
significant editorial comment and engaged with the text during my
fellowship at Emory. I would also like to thank Durba Mitra, Sunandan
Nedumpaly, Ajit Chittambalam, Shailaja Paik and Swargajyoti Gohain who
invited me to be a participant in their Subaltern Studies class at Emory
University, and Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully for the many conversations.
The research for this book was supported by the National Research
Foundation-funded project on the Heritage Disciplines based at UWC. I
would like to thank Leslie Witz and Ciraj Rassool for finding a place for
my research in the overall project that they lead. The PSHA provided a
research platform for the development of the argument. Garry Rosenberg,
Utando Baduza, Mary Ralphs, Karen Bruns, Fairuz Parker and Lee Smith
at the HSRC Press gave me support and guidance in finalising this book. I
would also like to thank the many librarians and archivists both here and
in the United States for their generous assistance, especially Simphiwe
Yako, Graham Goddard and Mariki Victor (Mayibuye Centre, UWC);
Sandy Roweldt (formerly at the Cory Library and subsequently at the
African Studies Library at the University of Cape Town); Michelle Pickover
(William Cullen Church of the Province of SA Collection, University of
Witwatersrand); Zweli Vena, Victor Gacula and Sally Schramm (Cory
Library); friends at the District Six Museum and the sta at the Albany

Museum, Grahamstown, State Archives and Manuscripts Division; and the
South African Library in Cape Town (especially Najwa Hendrickse).
Early versions of Chapters 1 and 5 appeared in History and Theory, Vol.
39, No. 4, December 2000 and in the South African Historical Journal, 55,
2006 respectively. They are included with permission; and Hilary Graham,
Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za
xiii
Bobo Pemba and the sta of the Albany Museum (History) granted me
permission to reproduce the images that appear in the book.
Friendship is the basis for all writing and hospitality, its condition.
Unfortunately, writing may also inflict untold damage on friendships.
Vivienne Lalu endured most of the fallout of this project. I am truly sorry
for the harm it has caused but would like to acknowledge her steadfast
commitment over the years. Others who graciously suered my writing and
obsessions along the way include Ajay, Kilpena, Nikhil and Rahoul Lalu,
Ameet, Nital, Meha and Amisha Lalloo, Deepak, Primal, Natver and Badresh
Patel, Jim Johnson, Latha Varadarajan, Noeleen Murray, Nic Shepherd,
Abdullah Omar, William and Sophia Mentor, Manju Soni, Carolyn Hamilton,
Mxolisi Hintsa, Ramesh Bhikha, Dhiraj, Tara and Reshma Kassanjee, Ratilal,
Pushpa and Hansa Lalloo, Amy Bell-Mulaudzi, Suren Pillay, Kamal Bhagwan,
Saliem Patel, Fazel Ernest, Ruth Loewenthal and members of my extended
family. I am grateful for all they have done to support this book.
A book that is written over many years invariably leads to friendships
across continents and across urban and rural divides. Colleagues at the Basler
Afrika Bibliographien, Basel, Switzerland, especially Giorgio Miescher, Lorena
Rizzo, Patrick Harries and Dag Henrichson invited me to present some of the
arguments of the present book and encouraged me to think beyond borders
and boundaries. Similarly, I have made many friends in the Tsholora and
Mbhashe in the eastern Cape, amongst whom I wish to single out Kuzile Juza,
Sylvia Mahlala, Mda Mda, Nomathotho Njuqwana and Joe Savu. Mostly, the

residents who have won rights to the Dwesa Cwebe Reserve following a land
restitution process deserve my unconditional gratitude. I hope that our many
conversations, agreements and disagreements have helped to make sense of
the predicament of the rural eastern Cape.
This book is dedicated to Kiera Lalu. At the very least, I hope it
may serve to meaningfully account for my absence. As for answering her
searching question on whether this book will end up in a museum, we will
have to wait and see. It is also dedicated to Jaymathie Lalu, Hansa Lalloo, and
my father, Jayantilal Lalu, for all you have done and much, much more.
Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za
xiv
Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za
1
     to democratic rule in South Africa, a
little-known healer–diviner, Nicholas Tilana Gcaleka, stumbled onto the
stage of history. On 29 February 1996, just over 160 years after the fateful
shooting of the Xhosa king, Hintsa, by British colonial forces on the banks of
the Nqabara River in the eastern Cape in southern Africa, local newspapers
reported widely on Nicholas Gcaleka’s return to South Africa with ‘Hintsa’s
skull’, which he had found in Scotland. Guided by a dream in which his
ancestors supposedly made an appearance in the form of a hurricane
spirit, Gcaleka had undertaken his mission with the hope that the return
of Hintsa’s skull would usher in an era of peace in a new democratic South
Africa. The rampant violence and corruption that plagued the new South
Africa, he proclaimed, was because the soul of Hintsa ‘was blowing all over
the world with no place to settle’.
2

Judging from the responses to the alleged discovery of Hintsa’s skull,
it seemed highly unlikely that Gcaleka’s dream would be allowed to become a

reality. In newspaper accounts, some journalists used the opportunity oered
by the supposed discovery of Hintsa’s skull to cast light on the demand
for the repatriation of bodily remains taken in the period of European
Introduction: thinking ahead
Wherever colonisation is a fact, the indigenous culture begins to rot and among
the ruins something begins to be born which is condemned to exist on the margin
allowed it by the European culture.
1

Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za
2    
colonisation more generally. The Irish Times noted that even ‘if Chief Gcaleka
is something of a showman, his search is part of a broader, more serious
movement [through which] indigenous people are increasingly clamoring
for the restoration of human relics removed from their country during the
colonial era’.
3
Others resorted to descriptions, veiled in acerbic humour, of a
maverick power-hungry individual invoking a pre-modern register so as to
advance his own ambition and greed. Labelled ‘the chief of skullduggery’,
Gcaleka was accused of having a shrewd eye for publicity by his disgruntled
spokesperson, Robert Pringle, who went on to describe the mission to recover
Hintsa’s skull as a ‘hoax’.
4
The Mail & Guardian quoted Xhosa paramount
Xoliliswe Sigcawu, who claimed that ‘the sangoma was a charlatan out
to make money and [a] reputation by playing on Xhosa sensitivities’.
5
At a
meeting in Nqadu, Willowvale, in the eastern Cape in 2001, Sigcawu asked

the British High Commissioner to investigate how Gcaleka ‘had come to
possess a skull purportedly that of the late Xhosa hero, Chief Hintsa’.
6

Mathatha Tsedu, then writing in the Cape Times, stressed Gcaleka’s lack
of success in proving the skull’s authenticity, although – as a member of
the fraternity of journalists – he wrote with a rare hint of sympathy for the
mission.
7
Claiming that ‘the head of king Hintsa has been missing since it
was lopped o after he was killed resisting colonisation’, Tsedu added, ‘Chief
Nicholas Tilana Gcaleka has been waging a one-man war to trace the head
and bring it home for proper burial without success.’
8

Gcaleka arrived back in South Africa amidst this far-reaching
public interest in his ancestral instruction. But once he set foot in South
Africa bearing a skull he claimed belonged to Hintsa, Sigcawu summoned
him to an imbizo (council) to establish the truth about his discovery. The
skull was confiscated,
9
placed in the care of the police mortuary in Bisho,
King William’s Town, and subsequently handed over to GJ Knobel of the
department of forensic medicine at the University of Cape Town, VM Phillips
of the oral and dental teaching hospital at the University of Stellenbosch
and PV Tobias, the director of the Palaeo-Anthropology Research Unit at
the University of the Witwatersrand, for scientific investigation. In a press
Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za
3
:  

release on 23 August 1996, the scientists commissioned to study the skull
concluded that:
10
Although one could still argue that there is a remote possibility that
the skull could represent a male person with slight build and weak
musculature, and of mixed parentage, with a preponderance of
European features [Tobias], this skull belonged to a human female, of
European or Caucasoid descent, who at the time of death, was middle
aged. It can be stated, beyond reasonable doubt, that this skull is not
that of the late king Hintsa, who at the time of his death would have
been a middle-aged human male of unmixed African origin.
11

Quite clearly, the scientists who saw themselves as adjudicators in an
important matter of history were equipped with a rather dated vocabulary
of ‘race’ for talking about evidence. Even the deliberation of bare bones,
it seems from the pronouncements on the killing of Hintsa, had to be
enveloped in the primacy of skin. And as a consequence, a significant
incident in the colonial past was surrendered to the terms and categories
of a forensic procedure that reduced history to mere epidermal dierence.
Matters, as it turns out, came to a head at the annual Anatomical Society of
Southern Africa Conference held at the University of Stellenbosch in 1997.
The scientists charged to study the skull submitted an abstract under the title
‘Hintsa’s Head or Phantom Skull?’ In it the authors note:
On 29 February, a Xhosa man, claiming to be a sangoma and calling
himself Chief Nicholas Gcaleka, disembarked at Port Elizabeth
airport with a cranium he had brought from Scotland. He had
apparently gone in quest of King Hintsa’s skull, guided, as he said,
by spirits which led him to Scotland. Holding the cranium aloft,
he pointed to a defect which he asserted was the mark of a bullet.

The legal representative of the Xhosa King and traditional leaders
disagreed, pointing out that the skull had disintegrated when Hintsa
was shot. . .The cranium was subsequently examined by VMP [VM
Phillips] and GJL [GJ Louw]. Both noted that, in respect of racially
Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za
4    
and sexually diagnostic features, the findings were equivocal. They
detected no convincing features such as would have been expected in
a male person of indisputably African origin.
12
Leaving aside for a moment the diagnostic procedures that ultimately
define ‘a Xhosa man’, the findings of the investigation into the skull
were presented to an auditorium made up of members of the scientific
community. Unbeknown to the participants, Nicholas Gcaleka had infiltrated
the meeting, like a phantom, where, according to newspaper reports, he
was treated to the chastisement of a scientific fraternity gathered under
the banner of ‘Anatomy in Transition’. Demanding the return of his skull,
Gcaleka identified himself as the person who was being ridiculed and added
that he had no faith that the scientists commissioned to study the skull had
any interest in the ancestors of the Xhosa.
If Gcaleka was overstating the point, it was only because the
scientists recalled historical narrations of Hintsa’s death without explicitly
suggesting how the contestations and doubts surrounding these aected
their investigations. Knobel et al. cited ‘varied reports, [in which] it has been
claimed that the fatal short [sic] shattered Hintsa’s head, scattering his brain
and skull fragments, that [the shot] blew o the top of his head and that it
was apparently common practice for soldiers to decapitate victims and take
the heads as trophies’.
13
The forensic procedure had to be supplemented by

historical evidence about the killing of Hintsa, but no indication either of the
source of the ‘reports’ or their claims to authority was required. As we shall
see, all these reports came from colonial ocials who were implicated in the
killing of Hintsa.
It was not entirely coincidental that Gcaleka should be confronted
by the demand for forensic and historical evidence. The combination of the
two was in the process of being tested at the time in relation to the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission (). The  was ocially established
by the postapartheid
14
state to investigate and account for gross human
rights violations under apartheid. Initially, Nicholas Gcaleka’s quest was not
Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za
5
:  
altogether out of place in an environment where the return and excavation
of dismembered bodies became a major national preoccupation through
the  process. It was not surprising that the dismembered bodies of the
colonial past were being recalled alongside the deliberations of the .
15
However, Gcaleka’s quest had, perhaps unintentionally, brought
the very foundational concepts of truth and reconciliation, upon which
the  process rested, into question by recalling an unresolved historical
controversy from the nineteenth century. While his lie was easily dismissed
in the public debates following his return to South Africa because it was
not forensically and historically verifiable, it proved more dicult to grasp
the implications of his search for Hintsa’s skull. At one level, we might find
in Gcaleka’s lie more of the constellation of the regime of truth, and how it
functions, than is proclaimed through the juridical foundations of the 
itself. Luise White has proposed that lies, like secrets, are socially negotiated

realms of information.
16
Good lies, she argues, are crafted, they have to be
negotiated with a specific audience, and they have to be made to stick – a lie,
a cover story, not only camouflages but explains. Lies, in this formulation, are
about excess that demands, inter alia, revised strategies of reading, dierent
from those that historians are accustomed to. For White, lies are not merely
inventions, but fabrications that rest at the very heart of society and its
histories. The intersection of lies and social life is, we may argue, one way of
perceiving of a narrative dimension that is central to the work of history. To
simply recognise lies as a condition of life is to neglect the structure of the
presumed lie that is so crucial to the functioning of social worlds. In other
words, it is to ignore the ways in which lies overlap with regimes of truth or,
more importantly, how regimes of truth are lodged in the articulation of what
are ultimately considered lies.
At another level, the allegations of the lie simply put into greater
doubt the very eects of a regime of truth which, while being mobilised to a
presumably noble end of national reconciliation, oered little hope of settling
the outstanding questions about the colonial past. In speaking of colonialism
I am aligning the concept with a suggestion by Nicholas Dirks, who argues
Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za
6    
that colonialism is an important subject in its own right and a metaphor for
the subtle relationship between power and knowledge, culture and control.
17

Rather than approaching colonialism in purely historicist terms as an
essential and necessary development, colonialism in Dirks’s view not only
had cultural eects too often ignored or displaced into the inexorable logics
of modernisation and world capitalism, but it was also a cultural project of

control.
18
By focusing on the moral outrage against the lie, and by reducing
the basis of judgement to the fact that he lied, no one seemed to inquire
into whether raising the question of colonialism as integral to the search for
reconciliation constituted a valid historical pursuit.
The point is perhaps rendered clearer if we remind ourselves of
responses to Gcaleka, who dared to speak what many considered to be a
lie in a period when South Africa’s democratic transition was increasingly
being defined by the terms of truth central to the work of the . The ’
s
concept of truth was entirely drawn from a juridical discourse that limited
the functions of truth to testimony and confession.
19
The notion of gross
human rights violations therefore limited the scope of the investigations
of violence. In relation to the elevation of judicial and scientific concepts of
truth that assumed prominence in the ’
s inquiry into gross human rights
violations under apartheid, Gcaleka was readily dismissed as a fraud and an
egotistical liar. The forensic evidence supported this conclusion, and Gcaleka
seemed to be making the error of conflating truth and reconciliation. His
claims were therefore easily relegated to the realms of fantasy and fraud.
The healer–diviner from the town of Butterworth in the eastern Cape was
laughed at because his fantasy was not one that fell within the rules of
the true instituted by, for example, the human rights violation inquiry of
the .
20
While Nicholas Gcaleka operated outside of the parameters of
the rules of the true, he nevertheless touched a raw nerve by invoking

the nineteenth-century story of the killing of Hintsa. Neither notions of
truth (in relation to the commission of inquiry into his death in 1836) nor
reconciliation (in relation to accusations that he was beheaded) applied to
Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za
7
:  
the story of the killing of Hintsa in 1835. Gcaleka’s invocation of the colonial
past perhaps unwittingly called into question the dominant concepts of
history that were at work in the , because it articulated the possibility
that the regime of truth functioned in accordance with modes of evidence
that regarded the archive as merely a storehouse of documents and not
an apparatus that produced and reproduced forms of subjection. The key
question was: how could a form of evidence once used to cover up acts
of violence be depended on to oer us an escape from the violence of the
apartheid past?
Nicholas Gcaleka’s fate depended as much on the coincidence
between a regime of truth and the modes of evidence of the archive as it
did on the judgements rendered about his personality. Much was made
in the press of the fees he charged for interviews. He was widely accused
of fabricating history by distorting the account of Hintsa’s death for the
purposes of self-enrichment. The accusation of distortion, however, was
based on the very colonial record of the killing that had been doubted for
more than a century in South Africa. Indeed, the historian Je Peires refers
to the commission of inquiry into Hintsa’s death as a cover-up on the part
of colonial ocials.
21
Lost in the denunciations were the very traces of the
contestations that lie at the heart of South African history. At the height of
a moment of political transition endowed with historic achievement and
significance, there could be no room for doubt. The introduction of the

story of the killing of Hintsa was treated as a mere distraction in the overall
objectives of transition – from the apartheid to the postapartheid state – that
the  was instituted to oversee.
Hintsa, Gcaleka and history after apartheid
The quest for Hintsa’s head not only called into question the categories by
which the  functioned, but also seemed to inadvertently short-circuit
a discussion amongst South African historians after 1994 about the crisis
in history.
22
This crisis has been variously represented as a drop in student
Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za
8    
interest in the discipline, the disconnection between the economic demands
of the present versus the critical assessments of the past, and the forward-
looking imperatives of postapartheid South Africa. Gcaleka’s search for
evidence of South Africa’s colonial past, perhaps unwittingly, put a new
twist on the historians’ debate. His search for Hintsa’s skull enabled a
dierent question: what dierence, if any, might the discourse of history
make in unravelling the legacies of authoritarianism? This problem arose
even as the political claims about narrating the present strategically, at
times selectively, reclaimed history in order to extract some meaning of
a nascent postapartheid society. History, it seems, was ever-present as a
resource for determining which configurations of political struggle would
prevail as national historical narrative. But the appropriation of history to
re-envisioning nation and identity tended to emphasise, rather than displace,
the disciplinary reason that was the very modus operandi of apartheid. The
commitment to establishing alternative histories to apartheid was burdened
by the tendency to recycle well-worn modes of disciplinary inquiry (as if
these were neutral and timeless) in the interests of making a break from a
hideously violent and oensive past. What remained unclear, however, was

whether the task of re-narrating pasts could be eectively pursued through
the discourse of history. Was it, in other words, possible to elaborate a
concept of the postapartheid as a distinct ethico-political displacement of a
prior violence by way of the discourse of history?
Amidst the laughter and ridicule that surrounded Nicholas Gcaleka
in South Africa and in London, in academic conferences and township
meetings, the implication of history’s critical function in relation to
apartheid’s pasts was burdened by a nagging sense that history’s discourse
may oer little opportunity for thinking ahead. In a rare moment, replete
with public pronouncements about ‘miraculous social transformation’, a
healer–diviner brought an encounter between the colonial past and the
postapartheid present to the fore, in which it became not only possible but
imperative to inquire into history’s relation to the exercise of power. His
fate would be decided by the answer to that question. It is, I would argue,
Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za
9
:  
necessary that the fate that awaited Gcaleka, as he recounted the story of the
killing of Hintsa, be tackled head on. Where there is mocking laughter there
is reason to suspect that a regime of truth is at work.
This book traces the eects of a regime of truth founded upon
colonial modes of evidence that engulfed two subjects who failed to make the
cut of history: a king who at the prime of his rule was killed and mutilated
by British forces in the early nineteenth century and a healer–diviner
who, towards the end of the twentieth century, two years into the birth
of a postapartheid democracy, recalled that king’s alleged decapitation.
Surrounding the king’s death in 1835, and the healer–diviner’s mission in
1996, are lies alongside truths and histories presented as unproblematic
narratives of change. Beyond the specificities of the coincidence, this book
explores the role of history so that a postapartheid future need not fall back

on the very subjective strategies that marked the excessive disciplinary
violence of a highly racialised and stratified system of oppression. It clears
the ground for thinking ahead, after apartheid, through a series of reversals
and displacements of the techniques of subject formation generic to the
colonial archive and its modes of evidence. For this I propose that we allow
the misfits of the text
23
to lead the way – without, I should add, too much
expectation of where they might lead us.
The Deaths of Hintsa brings together two related themes. At one
level it brings the laughter surrounding Gcaleka’s mission to retrieve
Hintsa’s skull to bear on an investigation of the modes of evidence of the
colonial archive, so as to better understand the relationship between history
and power specific to the archive. Rather than join the frenzy of public
denouncement and ridicule, I wish to take seriously Gcaleka’s implicit
provocation that while the foundations of a postapartheid society were
being laid, the critique of apartheid’s colonial past was found wanting. The
deliberations surrounding Hintsa’s skull, specifically, provide us with an
opportunity for mulling over the proliferation of signs at a time, not too long
ago, when Nicholas Tilana Gcaleka encountered the history of colonialism.
In the turbulence that followed the encounter, he was not, as many suspect,
Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za
10    
excluded from participating in history but perhaps unwittingly caught up
in the event of history, that is, in the enunciative modalities of history that
defined the dierence between what could be said and what was actually said
about the killing of Hintsa. Rather than merely identifying an exclusion from
a regime of truth, this book asks how Nicholas Gcaleka, instead of being
regarded as a historian who had travelled far and wide in search of evidence
into the killing of Hintsa, became the object of the very discourse of history

that he had helped and hoped, in part, to articulate. It addresses that question
by returning to the archival fate that awaited Hintsa after he was killed on
the banks of the Nqabara River in 1835.
At another level it examines how the transition from apartheid to
postapartheid bypassed the colonial archive and therefore failed to anticipate
the resilience of its modes of evidence. If history was given any role in
adjudicating in the matter of Nicholas Gcaleka, it was not to inquire into
the question of the meaning of colonialism, but rather to put Gcaleka in his
place, so to speak. By returning to South Africa, bearing evidence in the
form of the skull, the healer–diviner unwittingly solicited responses from
within a discourse of history, organised around competing constructions of
colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism, in which the culpability for the
killing of Hintsa was far from being settled. Overcoming apartheid required
coming to terms not only with the eects of history, but with the discourse of
history itself.
Evidence and imagination in narratives of the killing of Hintsa
As a specific field of intelligibility, South African history, insofar as it might be
viewed as a coherent research community, targeted and functioned in relation
to regulatory environments that we might call regimes of truth. Even the
most left-wing historiography turned to the archive to sustain its arguments,
and established its legitimacy via the protocols of proof and evidence. Along
the way it tended to elide the function of the imaginary structure – or what
Michel de Certeau calls ‘the historiographical operation’
24
– that was, and is,
Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za
11
:  
intrinsic to the discourse of history. The imaginary structure here does not
refer to the unreal but rather to that constitutive part of discourse resulting in

a crystallisation of a set of exchanges that, if left unchecked, would prevent
questioning the reality eect of a discipline like history. To look into that
crystal is to envisage how disciplines, which strive to achieve a reality eect,
end up producing a subaltern eect that reveals a fundamental continuity in
the functions of history as a statist discourse. As a consequence, the discourse
of history in South Africa frequently slips into regulatory systems that govern
the emergence of normative statements.
This is precisely the double bind in which Gcaleka arguably found
himself. While the search for evidence was insucient to meet the
expectations of history, his evoking of dreams and imagination was seen
as equally deficient in laying claim to reliably participating in the discourse
of history.
25
Taken together, this was seemingly sucient reason for his
disqualification. To simply cast Gcaleka aside for failing the rules of a regime
of truth, either in terms of the rules of evidence or in terms of recourse to
the imaginary structure, is to ignore how his quest foregrounds the work
of the imaginary structure in the discourse of history. After all, history,
as Hayden White has shown, necessarily relies on an imaginary structure
in the construction of its narratives.
26
In history, the imaginary structure
is a necessary and complementary aspect of discourse. If we follow the
lead of De Certeau,
27
we might say that the imaginary structure is not, as
White suggests, merely a structural condition of history, but ‘a restless
seeking after the self in the present underpinning the discourse of history’.
The disqualification of Gcaleka on the grounds of resorting to imaginary
structure thus thwarted a more sustained reflection on how history as a

discourse suppresses the function of the conditions of narrativity in its
discourse. Gcaleka, perhaps surreptitiously, renders the distinction between
evidence and imagination, or history and historiography, inoperable by
revealing their imbrications in the modes of evidence of the colonial archive.
This inoperability of a key distinction in historical discourse is a
recurrent theme in narratives on the killing of Hintsa. Consider, for example,
Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za