Andrew Scull is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego.  His newest book, Hysteria: The Biography, is a volume in our series Biographies of Disease which we will be looking at for the next few week (read previous posts in this series here).  Each volume in the series tells the story of a disease in its historical and cultural context – the varying attitudes of society to its sufferers, the growing understanding of its causes, and the changing approaches to its treatment. In the excerpt below Scull looks at the spectacle hysteria patients provided, specifically the displays by Jean-Martin Charcot.

It was Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-93), the august Professor of Pathological Anatomy and later of Diseases of the Nervous System of the Paris Medical Faculty, the leading international neurologist of the nineteenth century, who made hysteria a spectacle and a circus.  It was a scandalous circus that attracted the attention of  tout Paris, one that regularly featured scantily clad women disporting themselves in unmistakably erotic cataleptic poses, or writhing and moaning in ways that mimicked orgasms on a public stage, before an understandably rapt audience – an audience soon drawn not just from the highest ranks of French society, but also from those attracted to Paris by news of these extraordinary Leçons du Mardi.  The photographs of these occasions, captured in carefully staged arrangements before the supposedly objective lens of the camera and thus transmuted into indelible visual representations for a vastly greater virtual audience, have survived for later generations to inspect, and have become iconic images of a disorder seen as at once sexual and feminine.

Yet Charcot thought of himself, and was acknowledged by his contemporaries, to be no nineteenth-century Mesmer, no marginal charlatan catering to depraved appetites (among patients and audience alike), but on the contrary a sober scientists, a man of genius, one of the leading contributors to the newly emerging science of the brain.  His accomplishments first in internal medicine and then as a neurologist were legion, and had brought him czars and princes, great merchants and bankers, as his clients, in the process making him a very rich man.  And, while his most famous patients were women, he personally insisted…that hysteria was not solely a female malady, but, on the contrary, could be diagnosed and detected among the male of the species.  Hysteria was, he confidently declared, a disorder of the nervous system, not of the female reproductive organs.  It was, moreover, as real and as somatic a disease as any of the other neurological catastrophes he had earlier elucidated….

…Charcot had his favorites, those who returned time and again to put on multiple, often increasingly elaborate, performances.  None was more famous than Blanche Wittman, the queen of hysterics, a performer who luxuriated in her role.  Perhaps the most famous single image of a hysterical patient is an 1887 painting by André Brouillet that captures Charcot presenting Blanche, his pet hysteric, to members of his neurological service.  She swoons over the outstretched arm of his assistant, Joseph Babinski, her pelvis thrust forward, her breasts barely covered by her blouse and pointing suggestively toward the professor, her head twisted to the side and her face contorted in what looks like the throes of orgasm.  (Freud kept a copy of this painting, which dates from 1887, in his study in Vienna, and again in London.)

Wittman was admitted to the Salpêtrière in 1878, and remained there for some sixteen years, performing on command.  After her discharge, she became Marie Curie’s laboratory assistant, and eventually was poisoned by the radium she was working with. In consequence, both legs and her left arm had to be amputated…

The Iconographies, the collections of photographs of the performers who made up the circus, circulated widely and disseminated the Charcotian vision of hysteria to an audience who could only virtually witness the Parisian scene.  They did much to fix the image of hysteria in the public mind, and perhaps to spread suggestively what purported to be neutral, naturalistic recording of a neuropathic disorder.  The photograph (at least before the age of digital manipulation) carried the illusion of providing the truth, a direct and unmediated portrait or even a mirror of nature, the instantaneous representation of what passed before the lens of the camera.  But the limitations of lighting, and the technical requirements of picture-taking with wet collodion plates, or even the later silver gelatino-bromide coating, made for long exposures, sometimes as long as twenty minutes per plate.  Perhaps appropriately, given that Charcot’s posthumous critics…viewed his clinical demonstrations as fraudulent, the “objective” photographs that recorded the pathologies were themselves necessarily staged, posed, and manufactured constructions whose status as “facts” is as slippery as the live demonstrations they purport to record.

Charcot was not alone in exploiting his patients, in treating them as so many specimens rather than as suffering human beings.  The disdain and the callousness were a feature of the whole clinico-pathological tradition, something that American medical students visiting Paris for instruction viewed with dismay as early as the 1830s.  As feminist historians focused their attentions on hysteria as a female complaint, and perhaps the product, as some them speculated, of an inchoate, inarticulate protest against the roles in which Victorian women were imprisoned, Charcot’s serial exploitations of these poor creatures, his willingness to expose them repeatedly to the prurient gaze of his audience at whatever cost to their emotional well-being drew fierce criticism and reproof.  But those same moral failings were visible to Charcot’s contemporaries, and were the subject of bitter commentary, even from the literary figures such as Tolstoy and de Maupassant.  A Madame Renooz, in the pages of the Revue scientifique des femmes, protested about his “sort of vivisection of women under the pretext of studying a disease for which he knows neither the cause nor the treatment.”…

…And yet Charcot, as the feminist historian Elaine Showalter acknowledges, cannot be easily typecast as a crude misogynist, for he adopted liberal positions by the standards of his time on women’s rights, and his students and externs included women training for the medical profession.  Moreover, one of Charcot’s more striking departures from the conventional wisdom of his time had been his insistence that hysteria was not just a female disease…

I recently chatted with Gillian Saunders, director of Grant Thornton Strategic Solutions, the consulting firm that has been working on the 2010 World Cup for over a decade now. In this podcast she explains why South Africa got the bid, how preparation for the tournament has changed the country, the controversy behind the giant stadiums, and the one thing you should see when you visit South Africa.  Be sure to check out more “Place of the Year” contributions here.

Rafferty: So Gillian, I was wondering if first you could first discuss, give us an overview, of the role Grant Thornton has played in the preparation for the World Cup.

Gillian Saunders: Well we were first approached in the late nineties by the South African football association, FIFA, to assist them with looking at a bid for the World Cup, and they felt that the way to promote this country going for the bid, was to look at the economic impact it would have on the country. So we did an economic impact analysis then; subsequent to that we did one for the 2006 bid and then we did another one for the 2010 bid which of course was a successful bid and we now actually have the event happening next year. Since then we’ve updated it a couple times. Most recently only last year, haven’t updated it again since, we will plan to update it after the draw in December when there’s a lot more finality about exactly who’s coming, where they’re traveling, etc…

Rafferty: In 2004, what role did you play in South Africa winning the bid to host the tournament?

Saunders: Well I think one of the reasons that Africa was seen as an attractive destination for the event was people did feel that it’s an event that can actually help the economy of a country like South Africa and other countries in Africa, and that was what we demonstrated and what went into the bid book and what helped I think position South Africa as a meritus winner of the event; and if we go back even further, the initial exercise we did, and it was based on work we’d done previously for Grand Prix that had been successful as well in terms of saying that major sporting events actually leave an economic legacy and are beneficial to the destination. And that you know there are some people that feel the benefit is minimal, that the benefit is often not only measured in the actual economic benefit of the event or the net additional economic benefit of the event, but the profiling of the destination that has a knock-on effect for trade, investment, and tourism in years after the event. So we looked at all of that, and basically our exercise was used by the football association to get South Africa to buy into bidding for the event. And the FIFA 2010 event is a huge undertaking from a government perspective; the country has to give a lot of guarantees and has to be involved in a lot of the infrastructure needs if there are such. So it brought our government on board to go for the event

Rafferty: So since winning the bid, what role has your firm played in the preparation for the tournament?

Saunders: We’ve been very involved with a number of the venue cities. We’ve worked on specific economic impact studies for those cities so that they can understand the benefits to the city itself. We’ve also worked on the stadia, for, in fact eight of the stadias out of the ten that are being used, we’ve done the business plan for. That was used by the National Treasury to make decisions on what funding to give to the stadia development projects in each city. Then we worked on destination marketing work for provinces and towns and neighboring countries, doing strategies of how they can best maximize their involvement in the event, as well as how they can protect what they may need to protect in terms of if the event has a negative impact on their country. So for instance neighboring countries like Namibia and Botswana, it’s very much their high tourism season, and they need to have the strategy to maintain their normal tourism markets so that the tourists don’t feel crowded out and don’t not come. For instance the Olympics in Greece, when they were in Athens, I think it was in 2006, 2004, they saw one of their worst seasons on the Greek Islands, simply because tourists start to feel, “I can’t go there, it’s too busy for me.” So we’ve been working on strategies like that with neighboring countries and with towns, in South African towns and cities.

Rafferty: So, how has the preparation for the World Cup affected the economy in general? Or how different does the country look from 2000 when you began doing this research? Does the landscape look any different? Do you think the economy has improved?

Saunders: I think the main change in South Africa is the government has put a huge amount of money into infrastructure. The normal amount that often gets quoted is more than 400 billion rand. Now what a lot of that is, is accelerated infrastructure projects that would have been needed and should have been done anyhow. But we were, if you like, very lucky that the World Cup became an impetus or a catalyst for all that happening. But within that is probably of the order of 30-40 billion rand worth of infrastructure that’s directly related to the event. Which is transport infrastructure around the stadia themselves and the stadiums. And I don’t know if anybody’s been lucky enough to see our stadiums, but we’ve got some stunning stadiums coming up. The one in Cape Town has had it’s lights lit up now, and you’ve seen it against the sort of backdrop of Table Mountain and the harbor and the port. It’s an amazing thing to see. We’ve got another beautiful stadium, in, new stadium, in, or more or less new, in Johannesburg called Soccer City and it’s designed after a calabash. And so these things are coming up around the country and people are seeing them either reported on the news, photgraphed in the newspaper, or they’re going past them themselves and they look stunning. And our transport infrastructure is still rather a lot of building signs and road works, but we can see that we are getting some massive improvements to our transport infrastructure. What’s happening now as well, I think the ball has really started rolling with the Confederations Cup earlier this year, is the sponsors and the host cities are really getting behind the programs and advertising that are sort of getting the population now to feel very positive and proud about the events coming. So there’s a lot of billboards that are using 2010, there’s a lot of advertising, a lot of merchandise in the shops that’s already out there. So it’s starting to build up the excitement in the country towards the event and that’s beginning to go quite nicely. We have something for instance, it was started by the tourism industry, instead of having casual Friday, we have Football Friday. And everybody wears a soccer shirt, any soccer shirt, Bafana Bafana, our national team is good, on Fridays. And that’s starting to roll out. We’ve had the Deputy President launch it on the lawns of the Union Buildings. So those are things that are changing, that we are seeing in the psyche in South Africa.

Rafferty: I have read there’s been controversy over these stadiums, basically saying that they’re a huge money suck because in the end they’re going to be rendered useless after the World Cup, and I was just wondering what your opinion is on that.

Saunders: Some of them are going to be well used. For instance, the one in Cape Town is a prime location and an iconic city where we know when we worked on the business plan that conference organizers, race organizers, people who organize functions and events, main ones, looked forward to getting that facility and being able to use it. The trick to any of these is multiple sports that you can get in them and the alternative uses which you can get in them. So we feel Cape Town can go very well and one of the big pluses for Cape Town would be if the Western Cape rugby moved to the new stadium, which has been talked about, it’s been discussed in the press, but nobody knows whether or not it would happen. Because they have a stadium that’s too small, that could easily be sold for good property development rights and then make a move into the new one. So the things that could still happen to make these stadia even more long term viable. A stadia generally is a cost to a municipality, you know there’s only a couple of places like the soccer leagues in Germany and England that can have stadias that actually sustain themselves. So they often make a small operating profit or a small operating loss, they are sustained by subsides from the government side—it’s the extent of those subsidies and how much they would cost. And some of our stadia in the less prominent towns, such as Nelspruit and Polokwane, they may be the ones that struggle the most in terms of having on going reasonable levels of usage and reasonable levels of income. But they will be used on an ongoing basis.

Rafferty: Grant Thorton, at the beginning of your research, you estimated that the World Cup would contribute 55.7 billion rand to the South African economy and generate 415,400 jobs, and 19.3 billion rand in tax income to the government, and I was just wondering if you could tell me: Do those numbers still stand? Do you still estimate that’s what we’re going to see happen?

Saunders: Yes they do, the only area, because some of that expenditure has happened, it’s been a lot of the infrastructure spending. The only area that people could challenge if they wanted is the tourism spending which I mentioned at the beginning and since how we’ve build that up. But all the research we’ve looked at related to soccer and people following an event like this, is that recessions and things like don’t usually have much of an impact. They might trade down slightly, but they’ll not, not travel, so we fully expect the same levels of tourism and tourism expenditure as we had originally estimated. And to be quite honest, our estimates are probably on the conservative side because we know there’s certain information we just couldn’t get the information on, that’s being spent by some of the provinces, and some of the cities, and some of the sponsors. So being consultants we are slightly on the conservative side. So we wouldn’t change those numbers at all, and the employment generated as well, we wouldn’t change any of those numbers. We would stand by them and say, “Look they were on the conservative side, they are still a little bit on the conservative side.”

Rafferty: There’s going to be a bunch of people traveling to South Africa for the World Cup. What is one thing that you would recommend they do? And it doesn’t even have to be soccer related. What’s one thing you suggest they do when they come?

Saunders: It’s a difficult one, but I think the thing that has the most impact is if they can make it to a good game park and do some game viewing. You know African wildlife is stunning, the African Bush is stunning, it’s a very very different experience. And even if they can’t make it to one of the top game reserves, which would mean traveling in some instances quite a way, it depends where they’re based and where they watch their matches, we have lots of smaller wildlife farms nearer to the big cities, so take time to go and see some of our wildlife, it’s stunning.

Rafferty: Great. Well Gillian, thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me today, I really appreciate it.

Saunders: It’s a pleasure Michelle, thank you very much.

Jake Kraft received a MSc in Anthropology at Oxford in 2004 and just finished up a JD/MBA at Stanford. Having recently visited South Africa, one of Jake’s college buddies (and my dear friend) suggested Jake contribute to our “Place of the Year” campaign, to which he kindly agreed. In the following piece Jake sheds light on South Africa’s exorbitant population loss since the mid 90s by consulting three natives who chose to leave. Be sure to check out more “Place of the Year” contributions here.

South Africa exports many goods which the world consumes and which enrich South Africa. Other countries buy South Africa’s metals and minerals, agricultural products, machinery, and wine, sending their own goods and cash in return. But in the last fifteen years, South Africa’s greatest export has traded at great profit to importing nations and at great expense to the exporter. Since the mid-1990s, more than one million South Africans, including more than a fifth of the white population, has emigrated abroad. Many of these are South Africa’s most educated citizens; most have no plans to return.

Last winter I visited South Africa and enjoyed tremendous natural scenery, wildlife, bustling cities and towns, food, and cultural traditions. South Africa is wonderful for a tourist, but life as a resident is more complicated.

I made the trip to visit three South African friends whom I had met in the United States. This opportunity to see them and learn about their home was special not only because I would be guided by locals, but also because it would be my last chance: all three had decided to leave the country and settle elsewhere.

My first stop was in the Eastern Cape, to visit my friend the journalist. A wiry white English South African, he had been lucky to study at top boarding schools and attend an excellent private university where he had become a collegiate champion in kayaking. In addition to inimitable charm, he has a great deal of compassion, and as a journalist wrote stories highlighting the plight of AIDS victims and AIDS orphans. He unearthed local corruption, and developed an encyclopedic knowledge of South African history and culture, as well as a seemingly endless number of friends who would greet us wherever we went.

He now lives in London. South Africa has limited opportunities for an enthusiastic journalist to grow in his career, especially as traditional media models fall apart and journalism becomes intertwined with the internet. He would love to go back if he could, but he doesn’t know how or when South Africa will have professional opportunities in which he can flourish.

From the Eastern Cape I traveled to Johannesburg, where I met my friend the entrepreneur. Chinese South African, he had grown up in a posh area on the North side of the city, attending excellent schools and University in the United States. His family lived in mansion straight out of Beverly Hills, including swimming pool and pool house, magnificent rooms for living and entertaining, and a garage full of sleek Mercedes. The local malls and restaurants were equivalent to anything I’d seen in the United States and we spent a very civilized afternoon eating scones and playing croquet with friends at the local club.

My friend now lives in China. Besides its luxury, his family home in South Africa is surrounded by 15 foot walls, which are topped with electrified barbed wire. The outer doors of the house are fortified with steel bars and must be unlocked with a key from the inside or outside in order to enter or leave. An enormous guard dog barks at any movement. Security guards with sub-machine guns patrol his neighborhood. Even so, not long ago, perpetrators managed to poison the dog and hop over the walls from a nearby telephone pole, catching his mother as she was exiting the pool house, and holding her and the rest of the family at gun point as they robbed the home. The family survived, but the incident was uncommon only in that sense. Every house in the neighborhood has this kind of security, and violent robbery is a daily risk. As he pursues his ventures, my friend would prefer that his success won him some other life.

My last trip was to the Free State town of Ladybrand, a small farming hamlet not far from the Drakensberg Mountains and the Lesotho border. Here I met my third friend, the broad shouldered and sandy-haired son of an Afrikaner farmer. He had grown up chasing cattle thieves on horseback, swimming in river dividing South Africa and Lesotho, and dreaming of playing rugby for the Springboks. He never spoke English until he traveled to Cape Town for his University degree, where he gave up rugby and excelled at actuarial studies. After finishing University, he landed himself a job with a prestigious international consultancy, where he was whisked around Africa, working at the great mining projects and factories of the continent. Once he had a taste of the outside world, he wanted more, and sponsored by his company, he came to the United States to finish his education. When he did, he decided to stay in San Francisco. There is opportunity in South Africa, he believes, but why take the risk with so much government corruption and physical violence. As a South African, he did not feel wanted in America, but as a businessman, he did not he feel wanted by South Africa.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen more beautiful sunsets, eaten better steaks or had more outdoor fun than I did in South Africa. But I left the country feeling discouraged. If my three friends are in any way representative of the million plus who have left or are leaving, how can the South Africa expect to win its fight against AIDS, improve its government and civic life, or bring its education and economic opportunities not only to the lucky few born into them, but also to the millions born into extreme poverty? How can the country find a way to keep its educated and passionate young citizens, or a way to bring them back? What should be the priority? The rule of law? Economic opportunities? Security?

Our OUP-UK friends Helen Eaton, Assistant Commissioning Editor, Academic Science and Dewi Jackson, Publishing Editor, Higher Education, recently went on a trip to South Africa.  In honor of our 2009 Place of the Year selection they have shared their experience with us and some stunning photos.  Be sure to check out other “Place of the Year” contributions here

We recently spent 20 days in South Africa split between Cape Town, the Garden Route, and Kruger National Park.

Cape Town is a beautiful and unique city filled with plenty of things to do and see whatever your taste. It is watched over by Table Mountain – an imposing 1000m rocky mountain that fills every vista. The views of the city and surrounding sea from the top are incredible – you can either hike up it or take the easy cable car option (as we did). Day trips to Cape Point (the site of many shipwrecks) and inland to the famous Cape Winelands are highly recommended. We certainly enjoyed eating and drinking in the ‘Mother City’!

The Garden Route is a verdant strip of coast stretching east from Cape Town. Its towns are small and friendly and its beaches pristine. South Africa is famous for having some of the best whale watching in the world and it didn’t disappoint. The whales swim so close to land that you can easily watch them from the shore, but we took the boat option and got within feet of 18m long Southern Right Whales. Just inland from here we visited Oudtshoorn in the Little Karoo, the home of ostrich farming, where we saw, rode, and ate the largest bird in the world.

You can drive yourself around National Parks and Game Reserves in South Africa – in a VW Polo in our case – making for a more personal experience. Be aware, however, that this means if you get into trouble there may be no one around to help you, as we found when trapped between a lone elephant bull walking down the road towards us and a large herd crossing behind. We’ve never wanted a Humvee more.

In the Kruger National Park we were lucky enough to see the Big Five (Africa’s ‘trophy’ animals) – Elephant, Lion, Leopard, Buffalo, Rhino. But there’s much more to the Kruger experience – its smaller creatures and bird life, the views, the unique sounds of the African bush at night, and cooking an enormous steak on your braai make it truly memorable.

South Africa is a worthy winner of ‘Place of the Year’. Nowhere else in the world can you experience beautiful landscapes and incredible wildlife at the same time as eating in exquisite restaurants and relaxing on empty beaches. We had a wonderful holiday there and I’m sure that anyone who visits after reading this will do too!

1. Table Mountain viewed from Cape Town harbour. Photo by Dewi Jackson
2. Growing wine outside Cape Town. Photo by Dewi Jackson
3. Ostriches in the Little Karoo. Photo by Helen Eaton
4. Spectacular scenery on the Garden Route. Photo by Helen Eaton
5. Buffalo in the Kruger Park. Photo by Dewi Jackson
6. Lions in the Kruger Park. Photo by Helen Eaton

Jancis Robison, wine connoisseur and editor of  The Oxford Companion to Wine, Third Edition, recently revealed the drawbacks of South Africa’s stringent wine standards: because South African wine law mandates that 100 % of the grapes must be grown in the appellation (geographic location) specified on the bottle, consumers usually have no idea exactly where their wine is from. According to Robinson this is a shame given that there are more than 80 appellations in South African wine country; terroir clearly shapes how a wine tastes and this law precludes wine drinkers from learning anything about “the Cape’s wonderfully varied geography.” But on the plus side, the average quality of wine being exported from South Africa has improved immensely.

In continuation of our “Place of the Year” celebration, I offer you some quick facts on the growing South African wine industry from The Oxford Companion to Wine, Third Edition. After successfully gleaning two or three talking points for your next tasting or wine/cheese mashup, be sure to check out other “Place of the Year” contributions here.

Beginner
You have a case of “Two Buck Chuck” in your kitchen. Wine falls in two categories: white and red.

• South Africa has only 1.5% of the world’s vineyards, but it is one of the world’s top ten wine producers.
• The winelands are widely dispersed throughout the Western and Northern Cape, some 700km/420 miles from north to south and 500 km across, strung between the Atlantic and Indian oceans.
• Just as Europe and America people are drinking less, but better, South Africa has shifted away from a beer-and-spirit-only consumption pattern. This coupled with a tenfold increase in exports between 1993 and 2003 has shifted the focus to quality not quantity for South African vine-growers.

Intermediate
You have been a member of the Wall Street Journal wine club (WSJwine) for over a year now. When out for drinks you are confident in returning a glass to the bar because “it has turned.”

• The father of the South African wine industry was 33-year-old-Dutch surgeon Jan van Riebeeck, sent to establish a market garden to reduce the risks of scurvy on the long sea passage between Europe and the Indies. In 1652, seven years after sailing into Table Bay, he recorded: ‘Today, praise be to God, wine was pressed for the first time from Cape grapes.’
• The Benguela current from Antarctica makes the Cape cooler than its altitude may suggest, which means many new vineyard areas south towards Agulhas as well as on the west coast offer the prospect of a long, slow ripening seasoning.
• White varieties constitute by far the majority of Cape vineyeards. Chenin Blanc, known sometimes as Steen, has for long been the dominant grape variety in South Africa.

Advanced
“Education and Work” on your Facebook profile includes “seasoned viticulturist.” If you are a devout Catholic you steer clear of the chalice—even on religious holidays. And you have this commited to memory.

• Controlled malolactic fermentation, reduced dependence on flavour-stripping filtration and stabilization processes, as well as new canopy management strategies and increasing vine densities have all played a role in the increase of wine quality.
• The definition of ‘dry’ in relation to South African wines sold on the domestic market has recently been changed: the maximum residual sugar content is now 5 g/l rather than 4 g/l/.
• Pinotage, the Cape’s own crossing of Pinot Noir and Cinsaut, is becoming increasingly popular and was the single most planted new red vine variety in 1996 (Chardonnay was the white) although it still represented only 6.7 per cent of the nation’s vines in 2004.

For more than 30 years of his life Albie Sachs lived as both lawyer and outlaw in an apartheid South Africa—working through the law in the public sphere, and against the law in the underground. As a result, he was detained in solitary confinement, tortured by sleep deprivation, and eventually blown up by a car bomb which cost him his right arm and the sight of an eye. Later he returned to play an important part in drafting South Africa’s post-apartheid Constitution, and was appointed by Nelson Mandela to be a member of the country’s first Constitutional Court. As Sachs wrapped up his 15 year term this fall, Oxford published his book The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law. Below Sachs tells us why people all over the world visit the South African Constitutional Court every year.

Following his post is an excerpt from the opening of The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law which features artist Judith Mason. She explains the inspiration behind her Blue Dress, one of the art pieces acquired by Albie Sachs for the South African Constitutional Court gallery and the image on the cover of his book. To learn the full story behind Mason’s Blue Dress collection go here. And for more first hand perspective on South African culture and history, be sure to check out all of our Place of the Year contributions.

Justice Albie Sachs on the Constitutional Court Gallery

I recently had the great pleasure of visiting the new Supreme Court of the United Kingdom in Parliament Square. Its site is wonderful, and the rather unprepossessing building it occupies has been artfully adapted to give it a friendly, functional and stylish character. The one feature that I thought worked badly, however, was the presence in strategic places on the walls of large oil portraits of dead white, male dignitaries who had occupied the building in the past. One day I will be a dead, white male judge myself, nothing wrong with that in itself. But if it is the only imagery you see, the story is one of unjust exclusion, at odds with the very notion of doing justice to all without favour or prejudice. And even those less afflicted with political correctness than myself would recognise that apart from one elegant Gainsborough portrait, the pictures represent rather gloomy dead souls haunting a building in which the evolving wisdom of the ages is intended to resolve the problems of today in a clear, transparent and convincing way. I couldn’t help comparing the paintings with those that hang in the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, from which I have just stepped down as a judge after my fifteen year appointment came to an end. And this reflection made me realise what a remarkable place South Africa is to be in these days.

In particular I thought of the image of the Blue Dress in our Court. The Court was the first major new building of the post-apartheid era, constructed in the heart of the Old Fort Prison where both Gandhi and Mandela had been imprisoned. Thousands of visitors from all over the country and the world, visit the Court each year, not only to watch justice being done, but to journey through a remarkable building filled with extraordinarily rich and soulful artwork. And always, visitors pause for some minutes, and sometimes cry, when they see the Blue Dress.

The work on the cover of this book commemorates the courage of Phila Ndwandwe and Harald Sefola whose deaths during the Struggle were described to the Truth and Reconciliation Commision by their killers.

Phila Ndwandwe was shot by the security police after being kept naked for weeks in an attempt to make her inform on her comrades. She preserved her dignity by making panties of of a blue plastic bag. This garment was found wrapped around her pelvis when she was exhumed. ‘She simply would not talk’, one of the policeman involved in her death testified. ‘God…she was brave.’

…I wept when I heard Phila’s story, saying to myself, ‘I wish I could make you a dress.’ Acting on this childlike response, I collected discarded blue plastic bags that I sewed into a dress. On its skirt I painted this letter:

Sister, a plastic bag may not be the whole armour of God, but you were wrestling with flesh and blood, and against powers, against the rulers of darkness, against spiritual wickedness in sordid places. Your weapons were your silence and a piece of rubbish. Finding that bag and wearing it until you were disinterred is such a frugal, common-sensical, house-wifey thing to do, an ordinary act…At some level you shamed your captors, and they did not compound their abuse by stripping you a second time. Yet they killed you. We only know your story because a sniggering man remembered how brave you were. Memorials to your courage are everywhere; they blow about in the streets and drift on the tide and cling to thorn-bushes. This dress is made from some of them. Hamba kahle. Umkhonto.

Peter McDonald was the first to investigate the newly opened archives of South Africa’s apartheid censorship bureaucracy in 1999. The process wasn’t easy—evidence was everywhere. Some materials had been deposited in the State Archives in Cape Town, some in Pretoria, others appeared to be missing, and the rest were still with the post-apartheid Film and Publication Board (FPB). As McDonald sorted the pieces startling discoveries were made, which he eventually recounted in his book The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and Its Cultural Consequences. In the following reflection McDonald reveals the poignant questions that drove him to discover the truth behind apartheid censorship in South Africa. You can check out more contributions to our “Place of the Year” week here.

For most of my professional life I have been thinking about the idea of culture as it has been shaped and reshaped over the past two hundred years, and about the processes and perils of literary guardianship, especially in the complex, intercultural world that emerged in the course of the long twentieth century. The last thing I ever imagined was that the archives of the apartheid censorship bureaucracy in South Africa would provide me with an astonishingly rich, if also disturbing, set of materials with which to address these sometimes abstruse questions.

After all, it is a truth universally acknowledged that censors are the enemies of culture. They are the hateful guardians of the law; the nightmarish state-sanctioned adversaries who have, for one reason or another, taken it upon themselves to keep modern writers and their readers in check; and, besides, they hardly warrant close study by literary scholars, since they are censorious bureaucrats whose vocabulary is limited to a simple yes or no.

This, at least, is how I always thought about censors in general and about the apartheid censors in particular. Whenever the topic was raised when I was a child attempting to grow up in the South Africa of the 1960s and 1970s, it would not take long before someone would recount a story about the censors once banning Black Beauty, Anna Sewell’s strange late Victorian horse memoir. Like many others, I thought this said everything I needed to know about the barbarous stupidity of the system. When I looked into the newly opened archives of the censorship bureaucracy in the late 1990s, and saw some of the secret censors’ reports for the first time and discovered who wrote them, I realized that I had a major problem on my hands and a huge topic for a book.

I expected to see reports signed by ex-policemen, security agents, retired military types, and the like, but what I found was that the overwhelming majority were written by literary academics, writers and esteemed university professors. That was surprising enough. Digging a little deeper into the history of the system, I discovered that a particularly influential group of these seemingly miscast figures actually saw themselves as the guardians of literature, and, more bizarrely, as defenders of a particular idea of the ‘Republic of Letters’. What on earth were they doing there? And what sense was I to make of the fact that, as the archives revealed, repression and the arts were so deeply entangled in apartheid South Africa?

The labyrinthine archival trail, which extended from South Africa to the UK, the US, Norway, Holland, East Germany and elsewhere, soon led me to a host of other, more specific but not less improbable questions. Why were works by a number of leading black writers, including Mafika Gwala, Njabulo Ndebele, Es’kia Mphahlele, and Mongane Serote, passed by the censors? Why were the eminent Afrikaans writers Andre Brink, Breyten Breytenbach and Etienne Leroux let through in the 1960s and then banned a decade later? Why were no literary works in South Africa’s nine African languages ever suppressed? Why were the supposedly most obscene bits from Wilbur Smith’s debut When the Lion Feeds published in South Africa’s largest circulation Sunday newspaper soon after the novel was banned in 1965? Why were the censors so enthusiastic about Indaba My Children, Credo Mutwa’s ethnographic collection of tribal lore? Why did the South African branch of PEN have such a troubled history? Why did J. M. Coetzee apply to be a censor? And why was Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses hastily banned in 1988 and why is it still illegal for South African booksellers to display it today?

Again, somewhat to my surprise, pursuing the answers to these questions led me to reflect not just on a future in which apartheid, and apartheid thinking (which was not limited to South Africa), has no place, but on the power of words in the world and on the demands of our intercultural present.

(By the way, I found no evidence to support the Black Beauty anecdote, though I did establish that South African customs officials once found a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book hidden in an edition of Anna Sewell’s equine autobiography, which they promptly impounded.)

Still have some unfinished after-school business from the 90s? Was it your dream to be this kid? Do the words “Do it, Rockapella!” elicit an involuntary fist pump? Take a stab at redemption with the “Place of the Year” challenge—created in conjunction with our friends at DK Publishing. The rules are simple and would make Carmen Sandiego seem like child’s play if it weren’t already:

1. Answer the ten questions below.
2. Submit answers to publicity.us@oup.com by November 27, 2009.

Gumshoes with all ten correct answers (the equivalent of 1,000,000 ACME crime bucks) will then be placed in a raffle for prizes which include: Atlas of the World 16th edition, South Africa: DK Eyewitness Travel Guide, The Rough Guide to South Africa 5, and Top 10 Cape Town & the Winelands. Winners will be announced November 30, 2009.

One entry per contestant. All cheaters will immediately lose all crime bucks and be subject to the wrath of the Chief.

Questions:

1. South Africa has how many official languages?
a.3
b.11
c. 2
d.6
e.14

2. South Africa has a nickname, what is it?
a. The Rainbow Nation
b. The Divided Nation
c. New Africa
d. The Continent’s Capital
e. The Second Africa

3. True or False: South Africa is roughly 3 times the size of Texas.

4. How many capital cities does South Africa have?
a. 1
b. 4
c. 3
d. None
e. 5

5. South Africa has coastlines on which two major bodies of water?
a. The Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans
b. The Indian and the Atlantic Oceans
c. The Pacific and the Southern Ocean
d. The Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean
e. The Southern Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea

6. Who, or what, are “The Big Five”?
a. A group of influential political Afrikaner leaders
b. The five major African tribes found in South Africa
c. The five symptoms of malaria
d. The nickname for five of Africa’s greatest wild animals
e. The five driest months of the year

7. South Africa’s population has increased by 5 million people in the last year. What is the current population of South Africa?
a.48,783,000
b. 40,491,000
c. 21,129,000
d. 52,476,000
e. 40,218,000

8. True or False: South Africa has more people infected with the HIV virus than any other country.

9. Who was elected president of South Africa in 2009?
a. Thabo Mbeki
b. Nelson Mandela
c. Frederik Willem de Klerk
d. Jacob Zuma
e. Kgalema Motlanthe

10. Ke Nako. Celebrate Africa’s Humanity is the official slogan for the South Africa Fifa 2010 World Cup. What does Ke Nako mean?
a. A time to make friends
b. It’s time
c. Let friendship shine
d. Be a good sport
e. Let’s be friends

Now that you are done, be sure to check out more “Place of the Year” posts here.

Iris Berger is professor of Professor of History, Africana Studies, and Women’s Studies at the University at Albany and author of Threads of Solidarity: Women in South African Industry, 1900-1980 and South Africa in World History. For many years, she was involved in anti-apartheid organizations in Upstate New York. In the following piece she recalls how sports have played a vital role in South African politics. You can check out other “Place of the Year” contributions here.

I had never paid much attention to rugby. My only previous encounter with the game occurred on September 22, 1981 when I joined 1,000 other demonstrators who marched in a downpour from the New York State Capitol to a stadium on the edge of Albany to protest the match between the Springboks and the local rugby team. As Pete Seeger led us in singing “Wimoweh,” the virtually all-white South African team trounced the Eastern All-Stars 41-0. Threats of violence had prompted Governor Hugh Carey to cancel the game and an explosion at the headquarters of the Eastern Rugby Union seemed to confirm his fears. But the United States Court of Appeals ruled that cancellation would be an abridgement of freedom of speech.

This brief immersion in the politics of professional sports left me unprepared for the events of June 24, 1995 when I arrived in Cape Town in mid-morning, groggy from the twenty-four journey from Albany. A year earlier apartheid had ended and Nelson Mandela was elected President in the country’s first democratic elections. Determined to fight my jet lag and adjust to local time, I walked from my quaint guest house at the foot of Table Mountain to the bustling Main Road and caught a cramped mini-van taxi to the city center. Getting off at the train station, I was mystified by the quiet. Only the Zimbabwean women street vendors, displaying soapstone sculptures and crocheted sweaters, broke the silence. When I ventured a few blocks to a small café for lunch, I found the crowds I’d been expecting – but they were all huddled in front of the television set intent on following a rugby game between South Africa and New Zealand, cheering boisterously when the local team scored. The scene was repeated at my next stop – the Bo Kaap Museum in the former Muslim quarter of the city, now furnished as a nineteenth-century house.

Only when I returned to the guest house in mid-afternoon and found everyone there glued to the screen did I finally realize that I had unwittingly stumbled onto an historic event. Just as the anti-apartheid movement had enlisted the national passion for rugby in the interests of liberation, Mandela saw that hosting the World Cup might offer an opportunity for a symbolic reconciliation between the black-dominated government and the white minority, now ousted from its exclusive hold on power. This time I joined the group to witness – and celebrate – the victory of a new South Africa and see to Mandela walk onto the field in his team’s bright green cap and uniform, his shirt bearing the number of the team’s white captain.

Invictus, Clint Eastwood’s new film dramatizing these events will no doubt resurrect memories of the country’s ecstatic response in 1995, when South Africans were still celebrating the country’s transformation from a bastion of racism to a “rainbow nation.” But fifteen years later, life sometimes seems more complicated, even on the playing fields. The recent furor over the gender identity of the South African running champion Caster Semenya, which provoked heated controversy both internationally and in South Africa, mirrors the issues now confronting a nation struggling to overcome a legacy of poverty and unemployment, and to face the more recent challenge of HIV/AIDs. It’s an open question of whether, in this more difficult context, the current President Jacob Zuma will be able to use the World Cup soccer championship in 2010 to reinvent the country’s image and to renew people’s commitment to a shared national identity.

Author Richard Rathbone first went to South Africa as the Students’ Visiting Lecturer Fund nominee at Cape Town University in 1976 and returned as Visiting Lecturer to the University of the Witwatersrand in 1979 and then as visiting professor to the universities of Cape Town and Witwatersrand in 1998. He has authored, co-authored and edited ten books on African history including African History: A Very Short Introduction. In the following piece Rathbone reveals where South Africa’s true beauty lies and why it is deserves to be “Place of the Year.” You can check out more “Place of the Year” contributions here.

South Africa has been my place of the year on a regular basis since we first got to know each other in 1976. It wasn’t quite love at first sight; rainy winter days in Cape Town spent in chilly rooms with inadequate heating aren’t exactly romantic. But like many who think they are in love, I noticed South Africa’s looks first and learnt to enjoy its company afterwards. If you start, as I did, at the Cape, you first catch your breath by that jagged seascape dominated by Table Mountain and the last land before the South Pole. And at Cape Point I saw my first baboons, and my first sea eagles soaring over the meeting of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, the meeting of hot and cold, ying and yang. But I saw all of it first during apartheid and all that beauty was deformed by very visible cruelties of the system which was older than apartheid. The beaches are scattered with the relics of ship-wrecks and the tragedies of lost lives. Piles of seashells are all that is left to memorialise the old hunter-gatherers, the strandloopers, whose beaches these once were, years before whites started building mile on mile of ugly but expensive beachfront apartments. And the most spectacular view of Table Mountain, that from Blauberg Strand, the Blue Mountain Beach, is spoilt by the grim history of Robben Island inescapably there at the edge of the famous view, a leper colony before it was escape- proof prison. In turn the majestic sweep of Hout Bay was deformed by the fish-canning factory whose sad labourers’ drawn faces betrayed harsh working conditions and poor nutrition.

Further along the coast and then inland are the beautiful winelands, glorious valleys over-shadowed by intimidating mountains. Here again beauty is bittersweet for this world once depended upon slavery and until very recently upon the labour of the descendants of those slaves whose pay was partly taken in alcohol which damaged their and their children’s health. The country’s national flower, the protea, catches the contradictions being both shamelessly pretty while being incredibly hard, irresistible and repellent. I had fallen in love with a tart, a very pretty tart, but a tart with stony heart.

But I learnt fast that the real beauty was and is still to be found less in its scenery and more in its people. In the apartheid years I was thrilled. Inspired by, and even jealous of, the commitment and courage of so many people, black and white, Afrikaaner and African. The cruelty of it all was so obvious; housing in which decent people would refuse to house a dog, the in-your-face insult of “whites only” signage and the ultimate negation of humanity, the idea that people of colour were somehow non-whites, somehow less than human in the eyes of the country’s rulers. The sheer awfulness of that all provoked something more wonderful than cowed, sullen victim-hood. Instead defiance and resistance were suffused with a warm and inclusive humanity. Although it was a state which killed, tortured and incarcerated innumerable people, it and its supporters were made absurd as well as cruel and weakened by the sting of satire, of cartoons, of performances both formal and informal. What often appeared to be obsequious behaviour was frequently audacious and thinly concealed piss-taking at the expense of thoughtless whites. It was and is a sceptical society, a society which refused dictation. And that underlying refusal to internalise the brutal and unintelligent messages of apartheid but instead to imagine and then work for a world without it has informed all that is good about today’s South Africa. So much of that is bound up in the remarkable personality of Nelson Mandela.

Of course South Africa isn’t perfect; all countries that survive revolutions, and the end of apartheid was a revolution, are bound to be imperfect because revolutions are violent affairs which generate all sorts of collateral damage, psychological as well as material. But the real reason why South Africa must be my place of the year is that despite all the many temptations to break with the idea of “a rainbow nation”, the vast majority of South Africa’s continue to subscribe to warmth and humanity, and to reconciliation.