“No Serenity Here” - Interview with Dr Uhuru Portia Phalafala

How is 'no serenity here' related to 'lefa la ntate'? I ask because of the ref in Kgositsile's work to the mines and in the performance piece too. Can you elaborate on this relationship?

The two are related in terms of the fact that both the poem and the performance are engaging the legacy of the migrant labour system and the effects of the industrialization of Southern Africa during the colonial era. 

Lefa la Ntate quite obviously grapples with the notion of inheritance, which during apartheid (And to large extent now) has always been a question of what different races get to inherit from their forebears. 

In the case of black South Africa, black people often inherit conditions of poverty, homelessness, broken homes, servitude... amongst other things, whilst our white counterparts inherit their forebearer’s wealth which was acquired through the generational seizure and ownership of native/indigenous lands as well as the subsequent exploitation of African labour. Lefa la ntate is a comment on that legacy. My body, as framed in the photo series, represents the collective black experience in Southern Africa during colonialism, and the coal represents the extraction of mineral wealth and thus brings into focus the history of the diamond fever of Kimberley in 1867 and and gold rush of 1886 in the Transvaal. 

[there is also something to be read into the figure being partially covered in coal. It may represent a sort of burial or returning to the ground….as a symbolical counterpoint to the history of mineral extraction or ‘exhumation’, so to speak.] Both these events saw European “prospectors” descend on Southern Africa to claim their portion of the mineral wealth. Likewise many African men where recruited from Sekhukhune land, Basotholand, and the various other parts of rural southern Africa…many left their families to congregate in the mines, and many never returned. And in indeed many women were widowed and never saw their spouse’s remains, many children were left fatherless when their parents were swallowed by the mines. Numerous black families were disbanded, entire communities driven to the ground in the drainage of men from the homelands to the mines. And indeed "the roads to the mines were littered with these and other casualties*

This history of diamond and gold mining in South Africa is crucial in understanding some fundamental aspects and make-up of the South African society. From the rise of the Cape colony under British rule, to the Boer republics in the Transvaal and Orange, to the Union of South Africa and Apartheid, and the current dispensation, black people have predominantly served the role of mere servants; a labour class in a master and slave society based on a heirachy of race. When the National Party came into power in 1948 it adopted some of the instruments of controlling black labourers on the diamond fields of Kimberley. The pass laws, in particular, were adopted from systems devised and used by the De beers company to control the influx, movement and activities of black miners in Griqualand. 

No Serenity Here  is a beautiful expression of this history and its effects on South Africa’s society. The poem  also makes mention of the far reaching consequences of European imperialism and makes reference to the Berlin conference where the continent was cut up and new borders drawn up all whilst the interests of Africans we completely disregarded. In the poem the continent is described as a land where borders mark where one European territory ends and another begins, making the severity of colonialism bare. The poem goes into detail to describe the casualties that result from colonial system such as the corrosive nature of the exploitation of black laboured life. 

As a body of work that speaks from the 21st century to the 20th century through intergenerational conversation (with kgositsile) and historical memory (through mining, even as mining continues today), do you think it is fair and/or accurate to read you work within the framework of a rising consciousness related to student protests and call for decolonization at the time? 

To rephrase, is you digging into the archive of mining and poetry by an elder attempts to recover unknown history?

With all my work there is always a looking back, some sort of attempt to connect to the past, excavate and bring to the surface. With this performance work i took the same approach. The poem acts as a portal to access some tangible elements of the past, so a poem written in or about that context bring the performance closer to speaking directly to history. And a great part of it is about redress. How does one account for omitted voices in this long history, why the proliferation of one side of the story told by Europeans and their descendants. It is not secret that the has been a concerted effort to suppress the voices of the native races found everywhere in the world where European imperialists went. Entire histories were erased or hidden away from future generations…and that is the condition for many post colonial nations today, a disconnection to the past. So my decision to engage the poetry of yesteryear is an attempt to excavate Kgosistile’s words and meditations and bringing them into the present to speak across generations to the same issues…

“I fear the end of peace, and i wonder is that is perhaps why our memories of struggle refuse to be erased, our memories of struggle refuse to die. “

Memory is at the centre of my practice, so i was drawn to the words above. I connected with the idea of this fear that the end of peace is coming…this speaks to the anxiety felt by many South Africans over the cosmetic changes made to conceal the deep political, economic, social and spiritual wounds inflicted on a people for centuries. There is a fear and scepticism that the veil of the rainbow nation founded on ubuntu will someday be lifted and the animosity that has been bottled up might some day spill out…bringing the end of a superficial kind of peace. The poet makes a connection between this fear and the fact that even with efforts to suppress our voices that the memories are too fervent to extinguish. 

That fear still exists in the hearts of many South Africans…and we see it manifest before our eyes as a society in many different ways.  So i  borrowed from the poem in order to express my own anxiety over the state of things in our country…in the post colonial or post ’94 era. There is always a lingering feeling and perhaps desire that there will be a day of reckoning. 

Can you please give me some background regarding the Click festival and how you came to collaborate with the 2 people, what the theme was that led you to choose Kgositsile's poem.

Click festival is an annual performance art event in Hensingor, Denmark. The event is organised by a group called The culture Yard. The event is accommodated in a former ship yard with an interesting link to Danish maritime history. The festival exports contemporatu art s through installation, performance, sound, talks and workshops. In 2019 the theme for the event was Death-worlds, inspired by the work of post-colonial theorist Achille Mbembe on Necropolis . The notion that a state or other entity can hold the right and power to kill, but also to expose others to death (citizens, communities, and entire nations). It implies the social and political power to control people. 

The connection to kgosiestil’s poem came from reading the following words:

we have known women widowed

without any corpses of husbands

because the road to the mines

like the road to any war

is long and littered with casualties

even those who still walk and talk

To me this extract speaks to the cost of the political brutalities and violence of the Apartheid colonial regime on black lives in particular. The connection to Necropolis as a theory is comes from my understanding of the role of the colonial settlement in South Africa in particular being the paramount cause of the social, political and corporeal deaths of millions of black bodies…and it still continues to be the cause…perhaps more so today.