Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A7
T. Keenan
It is one thing to make someone or something disappear, and another thing to make a disappearance itself disappear. The two often go hand in hand – an abduction or a murder removes someone from their world, and then the traces of that erasure are erased as well. (I say ‘often’ because there are exceptions: sometimes the forces of disappearance seek to amplify their power or generate obedience by promoting their capacity to make things and people go away.) In an ironic twist, though, it can also happen that projects designed to undo the first disappearance can themselves contribute to the disappearance of the disappearance. For instance, when forensic experts identify the remains of missing persons, or authorities claim that ‘closure’ has been brought to an otherwise unfinished chapter in history, it can seem as if the uncertainty and limbo of missing-ness has been definitively put to rest. The missing are no longer lost, but found; the lie is undone by the truth, the denial exposed. An honest forensic practice, though, knows that nothing could be further from the truth than this truth. It’s essential to tell the truth, to establish whatever fragments
{"title":"Getting the dead to tell me what happened: Justice, Prosopopoeia, and Forensic Afterlives","authors":"T. Keenan","doi":"10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A7","url":null,"abstract":"It is one thing to make someone or something disappear, and another thing to make a disappearance itself disappear. The two often go hand in hand – an abduction or a murder removes someone from their world, and then the traces of that erasure are erased as well. (I say ‘often’ because there are exceptions: sometimes the forces of disappearance seek to amplify their power or generate obedience by promoting their capacity to make things and people go away.) In an ironic twist, though, it can also happen that projects designed to undo the first disappearance can themselves contribute to the disappearance of the disappearance. For instance, when forensic experts identify the remains of missing persons, or authorities claim that ‘closure’ has been brought to an otherwise unfinished chapter in history, it can seem as if the uncertainty and limbo of missing-ness has been definitively put to rest. The missing are no longer lost, but found; the lie is undone by the truth, the denial exposed. An honest forensic practice, though, knows that nothing could be further from the truth than this truth. It’s essential to tell the truth, to establish whatever fragments","PeriodicalId":53088,"journal":{"name":"Kronos","volume":"20 1","pages":"102-122"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85365692","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A16
Talya Lubinsky
{"title":"Howard Williams and Melanie Giles, (eds), Archaeologists and the Dead","authors":"Talya Lubinsky","doi":"10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A16","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53088,"journal":{"name":"Kronos","volume":"67 1","pages":"258-262"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85636972","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A2
N. Rousseau, Riedwaan Moosage, C. Rassool
The bringing together of two lines of research that have previously been treated separately – namely the missing/missed body of apartheid-era atrocities and the racialised body of the colonial museum – animates this issue of Kronos. Both the skeletons of empire and those of apartheid-era atrocities can be thought of as racialised, and as ‘disappeared’ and missing. Furthermore, both areas are marked by similar lines of enquiry, linked to issues of identification, redress and restoration, often framed through notions of humanisation or rehumanisation. Consequently, these different ‘disciplines of the dead’1 have been brought into collaboration and contestation with each other, with missingness often reproduced through the ways in which the dead have been drawn into grand narratives of the nation and its seeming triumphs over colonialism and apartheid. Notwithstanding their similarities, the racialised body of the colonial museum and the body of more recent conflicts have their own genealogies and literatures. The ‘disappeared’ entered the political lexicon of terror largely through Argentina and Chile; two decades later Rwanda and Bosnia turned international attention to mass violence and genocide as exemplified by the mass grave. South Africa slips through these grids: apartheid security forces tried but failed to emulate their Latin American counterparts in ‘disappearing’ activists on a large scale, while inter-civilian violence, which mostly took the form of political rather than ethnic, racial or religious cleansing, did not produce mass graves. Nonetheless, both ‘disappearances’ and inter-civilian conflict produced missing persons in the South African conflict – most presumed dead, and thus, as Madeleine Fullard describes them (this issue) ‘in limbo – dead, but missing.’ Investigations into such cases, led first by the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and later by its Missing Persons Task Team (MPTT), sought to locate, exhume, identify and return mortal remains to their families. In so doing, South Africa joined a growing list of countries following this route. Except perhaps in the United States, the practice of valorising the remains of the ‘unknown soldier’ – the unidentified dead of battle – has given way to a questioning of practices that allow the dead of war and conflict to be buried where they fall in marked or unmarked graves. Where cenotaphs mark the presence of an absence, and came to stand for all those who did not return,2 this has shifted to a focus on
{"title":"Missing and Missed: Rehumanisation, the Nation and Missing-ness","authors":"N. Rousseau, Riedwaan Moosage, C. Rassool","doi":"10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A2","url":null,"abstract":"The bringing together of two lines of research that have previously been treated separately – namely the missing/missed body of apartheid-era atrocities and the racialised body of the colonial museum – animates this issue of Kronos. Both the skeletons of empire and those of apartheid-era atrocities can be thought of as racialised, and as ‘disappeared’ and missing. Furthermore, both areas are marked by similar lines of enquiry, linked to issues of identification, redress and restoration, often framed through notions of humanisation or rehumanisation. Consequently, these different ‘disciplines of the dead’1 have been brought into collaboration and contestation with each other, with missingness often reproduced through the ways in which the dead have been drawn into grand narratives of the nation and its seeming triumphs over colonialism and apartheid. Notwithstanding their similarities, the racialised body of the colonial museum and the body of more recent conflicts have their own genealogies and literatures. The ‘disappeared’ entered the political lexicon of terror largely through Argentina and Chile; two decades later Rwanda and Bosnia turned international attention to mass violence and genocide as exemplified by the mass grave. South Africa slips through these grids: apartheid security forces tried but failed to emulate their Latin American counterparts in ‘disappearing’ activists on a large scale, while inter-civilian violence, which mostly took the form of political rather than ethnic, racial or religious cleansing, did not produce mass graves. Nonetheless, both ‘disappearances’ and inter-civilian conflict produced missing persons in the South African conflict – most presumed dead, and thus, as Madeleine Fullard describes them (this issue) ‘in limbo – dead, but missing.’ Investigations into such cases, led first by the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and later by its Missing Persons Task Team (MPTT), sought to locate, exhume, identify and return mortal remains to their families. In so doing, South Africa joined a growing list of countries following this route. Except perhaps in the United States, the practice of valorising the remains of the ‘unknown soldier’ – the unidentified dead of battle – has given way to a questioning of practices that allow the dead of war and conflict to be buried where they fall in marked or unmarked graves. Where cenotaphs mark the presence of an absence, and came to stand for all those who did not return,2 this has shifted to a focus on","PeriodicalId":53088,"journal":{"name":"Kronos","volume":"14 1","pages":"10-32"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87797875","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A10
M. Fullard
January 2005. Winterveld is my first cemetery, and it teaches me everything. Day after day, it takes my assumptions, theories and plans and grinds them into the fine dust that eddies in small puffs around the graves in the late afternoon, when the heat cools and a small breeze picks up. Vast, swollen, Winterveld defies all principles of linear and numerical order. Over the years, the cemetery strains and bursts its seams. Graves creep towards the rough fences and the dirt road. Standing at one end, it is not possible to see where the cemetery ends. It is as if some curvature of the earth conceals its limits. It will take you twenty minutes to weave through the graves, shrubs, low trees and thorny grass to get to a point where you can see the opposite side. You may think you are in a rural area, judging from the sounds of livestock, the vegetation, the small plots and scattered homesteads, but Winterveld is just north of Pretoria, right on the periphery of the townships of Soshanguve and Mabopane. It is an unassuming cemetery. Some of the intermittent tombstones are formal granite structures, but most are rough homemade markers, cobbled together with bricks, cement and wood. Many graves are marked only by low mounds of soil, edged with stones picked up in the nearby fields, often adorned with a few old porcelain cups and enamel plates. These chipped pieces of crockery are the most frequent markers of mourning here: this was his cup, this was her plate. Somewhere in this cemetery lie the remains of ten students, known as the ‘Mamelodi 10’, as well as eight other residents of the Pretoria township of Mamelodi. All eighteen vanished on various dates between 1986 and 1988. Their families knew nothing of their fate until 1996, when members of the Northern Transvaal Security Police and the South African Defence Force applied for amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for their deaths. Stolid ageing white men and their junior black colleagues stood before the Commission’s Amnesty Committee, and members of the affected families, and described the murders in vague but scalding detail. The Mamelodi 10 were drugged and burnt to death. The other eight were strangled or electrocuted and their bodies blasted into fragments with the help of limpet mines. One was burnt. The perpetrators’ recollection of names, dates and locations was poor, perhaps deliberately so.
{"title":"Some Trace Remains (An Extract)","authors":"M. Fullard","doi":"10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A10","url":null,"abstract":"January 2005. Winterveld is my first cemetery, and it teaches me everything. Day after day, it takes my assumptions, theories and plans and grinds them into the fine dust that eddies in small puffs around the graves in the late afternoon, when the heat cools and a small breeze picks up. Vast, swollen, Winterveld defies all principles of linear and numerical order. Over the years, the cemetery strains and bursts its seams. Graves creep towards the rough fences and the dirt road. Standing at one end, it is not possible to see where the cemetery ends. It is as if some curvature of the earth conceals its limits. It will take you twenty minutes to weave through the graves, shrubs, low trees and thorny grass to get to a point where you can see the opposite side. You may think you are in a rural area, judging from the sounds of livestock, the vegetation, the small plots and scattered homesteads, but Winterveld is just north of Pretoria, right on the periphery of the townships of Soshanguve and Mabopane. It is an unassuming cemetery. Some of the intermittent tombstones are formal granite structures, but most are rough homemade markers, cobbled together with bricks, cement and wood. Many graves are marked only by low mounds of soil, edged with stones picked up in the nearby fields, often adorned with a few old porcelain cups and enamel plates. These chipped pieces of crockery are the most frequent markers of mourning here: this was his cup, this was her plate. Somewhere in this cemetery lie the remains of ten students, known as the ‘Mamelodi 10’, as well as eight other residents of the Pretoria township of Mamelodi. All eighteen vanished on various dates between 1986 and 1988. Their families knew nothing of their fate until 1996, when members of the Northern Transvaal Security Police and the South African Defence Force applied for amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for their deaths. Stolid ageing white men and their junior black colleagues stood before the Commission’s Amnesty Committee, and members of the affected families, and described the murders in vague but scalding detail. The Mamelodi 10 were drugged and burnt to death. The other eight were strangled or electrocuted and their bodies blasted into fragments with the help of limpet mines. One was burnt. The perpetrators’ recollection of names, dates and locations was poor, perhaps deliberately so.","PeriodicalId":53088,"journal":{"name":"Kronos","volume":"1991 1","pages":"163-180"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82345285","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A3
J. Fontein
On 16 August 2011 Zimbabwe awoke to the news that retired General Solomon Mujuru, aka Rex Nhongo (his war alias), the former deputy commander of ZANLA (Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army) and independent Zimbabwe’s first black army commander, husband of the (then) vice-president, Joice Mujuru, longterm confidante of (then) president Robert Mugabe, and widely regarded as ‘kingmaker’ with the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF), had died in a mysterious fire at his farm in Beatrice, 60 km south west of Harare. Just four days later, on 20 August, amid public statements of grief from across the political spectrum, and growing speculation about the cause of his death, Mujuru’s remains were buried at the National Heroes Acre in Harare at a huge state funeral attended by tens of thousands of people. After the ‘inexplicable, horrendous fire accident’ – as Mugabe then described it1 – there was only a ‘small pile of charred bones and ash’ to be buried, and workers reportedly needed ‘shovels to scrape his remains off the floor’.2 ‘Burnt beyond recognition’, unconfirmed reports suggested dental records were needed to confirm his identity;3 and (unusually for state funerals in Zimbabwe) the ‘coffin remained sealed’.4 Nevertheless, the closed casket did little to contain the plethora of rumours that emerged in the months that followed, which remain unresolved, despite police investigations and an official inquest. In this article, I use Mujuru’s death as way into discussing ‘political accidents’ in Zimbabwe’s recent history, in order to explore the efficacies of rumours and the politics of uncertainty in relation to what I tentatively term the unfinished nature of death in Zimbabwe. Mujuru’s death is useful because the controversies that surrounded it, and the official inquest that followed, which continue to be the subject of great speculation both in print and on social media,5 turn not only on the inconsistencies of different witness accounts, and the woeful incompetence of the police and fire brigade’s response to the fire, but also on their failure to secure forensic evidence properly, the contested role of the state-appointed pathologist, the unresolved mysteries of the
{"title":"Political Accidents in Zimbabwe","authors":"J. Fontein","doi":"10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A3","url":null,"abstract":"On 16 August 2011 Zimbabwe awoke to the news that retired General Solomon Mujuru, aka Rex Nhongo (his war alias), the former deputy commander of ZANLA (Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army) and independent Zimbabwe’s first black army commander, husband of the (then) vice-president, Joice Mujuru, longterm confidante of (then) president Robert Mugabe, and widely regarded as ‘kingmaker’ with the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF), had died in a mysterious fire at his farm in Beatrice, 60 km south west of Harare. Just four days later, on 20 August, amid public statements of grief from across the political spectrum, and growing speculation about the cause of his death, Mujuru’s remains were buried at the National Heroes Acre in Harare at a huge state funeral attended by tens of thousands of people. After the ‘inexplicable, horrendous fire accident’ – as Mugabe then described it1 – there was only a ‘small pile of charred bones and ash’ to be buried, and workers reportedly needed ‘shovels to scrape his remains off the floor’.2 ‘Burnt beyond recognition’, unconfirmed reports suggested dental records were needed to confirm his identity;3 and (unusually for state funerals in Zimbabwe) the ‘coffin remained sealed’.4 Nevertheless, the closed casket did little to contain the plethora of rumours that emerged in the months that followed, which remain unresolved, despite police investigations and an official inquest. In this article, I use Mujuru’s death as way into discussing ‘political accidents’ in Zimbabwe’s recent history, in order to explore the efficacies of rumours and the politics of uncertainty in relation to what I tentatively term the unfinished nature of death in Zimbabwe. Mujuru’s death is useful because the controversies that surrounded it, and the official inquest that followed, which continue to be the subject of great speculation both in print and on social media,5 turn not only on the inconsistencies of different witness accounts, and the woeful incompetence of the police and fire brigade’s response to the fire, but also on their failure to secure forensic evidence properly, the contested role of the state-appointed pathologist, the unresolved mysteries of the","PeriodicalId":53088,"journal":{"name":"Kronos","volume":"84 1","pages":"33-58"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79029523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A14
C. Kratz
This special issue of Kronos fruitfully focuses on fraught issues related to persons who are missing and missed. Examining the processes involved in becoming ‘missing’, and how the categories related to being missing and missed are created, can offer ways to consider how historical knowledge and political meanings are produced and contested, as well as how diverse disciplinary formations and perspectives come together to constitute such knowledge and meanings. The papers attest to the instability, indeterminacy, and power relations that can pervade questions about evidence – numbers, events, memories, images, and a range of categories (what is a funeral? who is a ‘civilian’? who is counted among the dead?) – as narratives and knowledge about the missing are constituted across a range of contexts. Museum exhibits are one such context, providing a powerful resource through which cultural categories are created and popular histories are shaped and narrated.1 In the process, exhibits can spark the affective and evaluative freight of categories, histories, and narratives, provoke questions, and evoke memories and experiences. Exhibition design is essential to these processes and effects, drawing together verbal, visual, audial, material, and spatial media to craft categories, stories, values, and emotional engagement, as well as to mediate visitors’ understandings and experiences.2 In thinking about the practices and issues that swirl around ‘missingness’, exhibition design offers a productive way to examine how the categories, histories, and politics related to missing persons and the ‘unsettled dead’3 are incorporated into, and produced through, exhibits.
{"title":"Where did you cry? Crafting Categories, Narratives, and Affect through Exhibit Design","authors":"C. Kratz","doi":"10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A14","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue of Kronos fruitfully focuses on fraught issues related to persons who are missing and missed. Examining the processes involved in becoming ‘missing’, and how the categories related to being missing and missed are created, can offer ways to consider how historical knowledge and political meanings are produced and contested, as well as how diverse disciplinary formations and perspectives come together to constitute such knowledge and meanings. The papers attest to the instability, indeterminacy, and power relations that can pervade questions about evidence – numbers, events, memories, images, and a range of categories (what is a funeral? who is a ‘civilian’? who is counted among the dead?) – as narratives and knowledge about the missing are constituted across a range of contexts. Museum exhibits are one such context, providing a powerful resource through which cultural categories are created and popular histories are shaped and narrated.1 In the process, exhibits can spark the affective and evaluative freight of categories, histories, and narratives, provoke questions, and evoke memories and experiences. Exhibition design is essential to these processes and effects, drawing together verbal, visual, audial, material, and spatial media to craft categories, stories, values, and emotional engagement, as well as to mediate visitors’ understandings and experiences.2 In thinking about the practices and issues that swirl around ‘missingness’, exhibition design offers a productive way to examine how the categories, histories, and politics related to missing persons and the ‘unsettled dead’3 are incorporated into, and produced through, exhibits.","PeriodicalId":53088,"journal":{"name":"Kronos","volume":"14 1","pages":"229-252"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88131310","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A15
Sophie Schasiepen
{"title":"Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Élisabeth Anstett, Human Remains in Society: Curation and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Genocide and Mass-Violence","authors":"Sophie Schasiepen","doi":"10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A15","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53088,"journal":{"name":"Kronos","volume":"154 1","pages":"253-257"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79753318","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A8
B. Laun
For their families, the bodies of many of those hanged by the apartheid state remain missing and missed. Judicial executions, and the corpses they produced, were hidden from the scrutiny of the public and the press. While families might have known about the sentencing and fate of their relatives, and some might have come to Pretoria Central Prison to say goodbye and even attended a brief funeral service at the prison after the hanging, the state claimed and maintained control over the bodies of the condemned, both alive and dead. Families of the condemned were prohibited from viewing the bodies or attending burials, and while they could later request information about grave numbers, they were never allowed to recover the remains.1 Relatives could request that the remains be cremated but at their own cost, and even then, the ashes remained the property of the state and were not returned to the families. Many simply never knew what had become of their family members’ remains. Being prevented from seeing the body, taking the remains home, and attending or conducting a ‘dignified burial’ was a source of great sadness and distress for families.2 To add insult to injury, the bodies were buried in unmarked graves without ceremony or prayers.3 Relatives expressed disgust at the lack of care taken with the remains of hanged prisoners, lamenting the fact that their graves were ‘no more than an empty space.’4 Indeed, some sections of Mamelodi Cemetery outside Pretoria, where hanged prisoners classified by the apartheid state as ‘Bantu’ were buried, still resemble desolate fields. These missing dead who emerged from the state violence of judicial executions are now the focus of a government-run project that seeks to recover their remains, commemorate their political sacrifices and finally ‘lay their ghosts to rest’.5 The Gallows
{"title":"Bureaucratically missing: Capital punishment, exhumations, and the afterlives of state documents and photographs","authors":"B. Laun","doi":"10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A8","url":null,"abstract":"For their families, the bodies of many of those hanged by the apartheid state remain missing and missed. Judicial executions, and the corpses they produced, were hidden from the scrutiny of the public and the press. While families might have known about the sentencing and fate of their relatives, and some might have come to Pretoria Central Prison to say goodbye and even attended a brief funeral service at the prison after the hanging, the state claimed and maintained control over the bodies of the condemned, both alive and dead. Families of the condemned were prohibited from viewing the bodies or attending burials, and while they could later request information about grave numbers, they were never allowed to recover the remains.1 Relatives could request that the remains be cremated but at their own cost, and even then, the ashes remained the property of the state and were not returned to the families. Many simply never knew what had become of their family members’ remains. Being prevented from seeing the body, taking the remains home, and attending or conducting a ‘dignified burial’ was a source of great sadness and distress for families.2 To add insult to injury, the bodies were buried in unmarked graves without ceremony or prayers.3 Relatives expressed disgust at the lack of care taken with the remains of hanged prisoners, lamenting the fact that their graves were ‘no more than an empty space.’4 Indeed, some sections of Mamelodi Cemetery outside Pretoria, where hanged prisoners classified by the apartheid state as ‘Bantu’ were buried, still resemble desolate fields. These missing dead who emerged from the state violence of judicial executions are now the focus of a government-run project that seeks to recover their remains, commemorate their political sacrifices and finally ‘lay their ghosts to rest’.5 The Gallows","PeriodicalId":53088,"journal":{"name":"Kronos","volume":"75 1","pages":"123-144"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80850378","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A5
Ricardo Roque
In this article, I approach the issues of missing data and testimony in the context of the history of race science, craniology, and collections of human remains housed in museums. In the context of comparative race science, human skulls were intended to be examined in association with short histories and biographical data about their pasts. I investigate how and why such documentation and historicising work formed part of a knowledge economy in the nineteenth century that, at the microscopic scale of the archival documents linked to the collections, was intended to verify the authority of human remains as testimonial evidence of distinct human races. I then show that the association of documents, narratives and historical information with collections of human skulls was a common and important practice in the field of ‘anthropology’ (which, in nineteenth-century usage, was referred to as the ‘science of race’, or ‘natural history of man’, and later renamed ‘physical anthropology’), and a significant part of its claims to scientificity. At the time, the notion of ‘race’, even in craniology (race science’s most paradigmatic manifestation), was more than a construct derived purely from the observation of human remains. In the context of such collections, ‘race’ was an artefact entangled in a network of documents, archives, and narratives associated with anatomical collections – its coming into being shaped, and was shaped by, how collectors, race scientists, and museologists produced, curated, and authenticated the histories and records of specific human skulls over time. I concentrate in this article on the relationship that the historiographic domain maintained with the production of credibility. That is, I focus on the authority of collectors’ testimonies, and on how the authenticity of these testimonies was managed within the field of the race science that was craniology.1 Historical documentation, including narratives about the pasts and the identities of collections, served as technologies that attested to the credibility of using the testimony of human remains as evidence in support of racial theories, genealogies, and taxonomies. In proposing this argument, I draw inspiration from the seminal studies by historians Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer on the importance of ‘economies of
{"title":"Authorised Histories: Human Remains and the Economies of Credibility in the Science of Race","authors":"Ricardo Roque","doi":"10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A5","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I approach the issues of missing data and testimony in the context of the history of race science, craniology, and collections of human remains housed in museums. In the context of comparative race science, human skulls were intended to be examined in association with short histories and biographical data about their pasts. I investigate how and why such documentation and historicising work formed part of a knowledge economy in the nineteenth century that, at the microscopic scale of the archival documents linked to the collections, was intended to verify the authority of human remains as testimonial evidence of distinct human races. I then show that the association of documents, narratives and historical information with collections of human skulls was a common and important practice in the field of ‘anthropology’ (which, in nineteenth-century usage, was referred to as the ‘science of race’, or ‘natural history of man’, and later renamed ‘physical anthropology’), and a significant part of its claims to scientificity. At the time, the notion of ‘race’, even in craniology (race science’s most paradigmatic manifestation), was more than a construct derived purely from the observation of human remains. In the context of such collections, ‘race’ was an artefact entangled in a network of documents, archives, and narratives associated with anatomical collections – its coming into being shaped, and was shaped by, how collectors, race scientists, and museologists produced, curated, and authenticated the histories and records of specific human skulls over time. I concentrate in this article on the relationship that the historiographic domain maintained with the production of credibility. That is, I focus on the authority of collectors’ testimonies, and on how the authenticity of these testimonies was managed within the field of the race science that was craniology.1 Historical documentation, including narratives about the pasts and the identities of collections, served as technologies that attested to the credibility of using the testimony of human remains as evidence in support of racial theories, genealogies, and taxonomies. In proposing this argument, I draw inspiration from the seminal studies by historians Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer on the importance of ‘economies of","PeriodicalId":53088,"journal":{"name":"Kronos","volume":"6 1","pages":"69-85"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86472511","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-01-01DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2018/V44A12
L. Rede
At the Red Terror Martyrs’ Memorial Museum (RTMMM) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, there sits upon a wall a chart of the torture houses used during a campaign of terror waged by the Derg regime that ruled Ethiopia from 1974 to 1987. Among the most notable was Bermuda House – named as such because, ‘if someone went in there, they would not come back out’.1 Alongside the wall chart is a puppet, bound up in strings and rods, that is staged and used to depict the wofe lala torture technique (also known as Technique No. 8 and falanga)2 used by the military junta. In this article, I attempt to think through the roles played by the puppet, and by spaces such as Bermuda House, as contributory interlocutors to the grand narrative of the Red Terror as constructed by the museum. In doing so, I consider ways in which the puppet, through its staging and performance, stands proxy for the still missing who disappeared during the Red Terror. I also show how the puppet illustrates an entanglement between genres of missingness while acting on its audiences as its object. The puppet, I argue, as a proxy for the still-missing missed, stages the tension that exists between atrocities that are named as terror in popular discourse but recognised as genocide under Ethiopian law. Furthermore, the puppet stages not only the bleeding of these tensions into one another but also the question of what remains unacknowledged between them.3
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