Author: howdypress

An international retirement celebration was held to honor the long, widely celebrated careers of John and Jean Comaroff on July 6, 2024. Held on zoom and timed to permit participants to join from across the world, over one hundred and twenty-five took part; many who could not sent messages of appreciation and congratulation. Some forty spoke. They included former and present students, colleagues, and comrades from North and South America, Europe, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa. Over almost four hours, they offered reminiscences spanning almost fifty years – many of them deeply moving – of the impact of the Comaroffs on their lives and their careers, stressing the ways in which they were encouraged to find their own unique voices, to stretch their intellectual ambitions and endeavors to the full, to be unafraid to take on tough challenges and unpopular positions. Words that resounded throughout were generosity, kindness, care, intellectual rigor, scholarly legacy. So did humorous references to the Comaroffs’ famed (very lengthy) letters of reference, the sheer number of their doctoral advisees, their quick responses to even the most untimely and unlikely student requests, and the mystery of when, if ever, they slept. Jean and John ended the event by expressing their gratitude not just for the sumptuous words of praise and the insightful comments about their scholarly oeuvre, but for everything that they have learned from their from students, from their colleagues and collaborators, from their children, Josh and Jane – both scholars of note in their own right – and from those with whom they built the scholarly circle around them at Chicago and Harvard. Emphasizing the difficult, destructive challenges confronting academia and the planet at large, they made a plea for opening up possibilities in the face of the impossible, for scholarship committed to the pursuit of a more human, equal and equitable world. For hope against despair.

A number of ‘customary’ African kings and chiefs – historically accountable to the will of their subjects – have sought to turn their offices into lucrative sources of accumulation; indeed, into a form of monopoly capital founded on the assertion of a political sovereignty unaccountable to any other. What historical conditions have laid the ground for this transformation? How widespread is it? What, in the ‘new’ economies, technologies, ideologies and politics of the global order, has given the Kingdom of Custom its material, affective and political heft in this, the twenty-first century? In addressing these questions with particular focus on South Africa, Comaroff explores the relationship between ‘local’ structural conditions and those exogenous to the country in order to explain ongoing transformations in traditional authority – and their impact on the political and cultural economy of the nation at large.  

The essay, “Chiefship, Pty unLtd.: Reflections on Sovereign Un/accountability, Past and Present,” is published in the European anthropology journal, Ethnos; see https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00141844.2023.2261652.  

Synopsis: This narrative begins with the story of a king from the Eastern Cape Province exercising sovereignty over life and death – and, in so doing, pitting himself, along with other South African traditional leaders, against the state, its constitution and the liberal democratic ideology of a nation recently reborn. It documents a protracted, ongoing struggle – with roots deep in the colonial epoch – between two political theologies. One is civic-national, the other ethno-racial. Each aspires to a hegemony that remains incomplete. This struggle has been, is being, fought out in many registers: over land, labor, law, life-and-death; over recognition, rights, regulation and rents. It has been interminably messy, with lots of ups and downs, lots at stake, lots more to come. Its broader, exogenous context has arisen from changes in the global order, its economies, technologies, ideologies, politics. Its proximate context lies in the complex, labile sociology of post-apartheid South Africa. In respect of the latter, of the proximate, Comaroff shows how rising identity politics have given the Kingdom of Custom – a thoroughly anti-liberal, Afromodernist construct – renewed affective, economic and electoral heft for many black South Africans. The constitutional protection of the customary, and its sacralization, has fueled insistent chiefly claims to territory, material and immaterial property, and, most of all, sovereign unaccountability; claims justified by the reconstruction of so-called traditional authority under colonialism, in violation of indigenous theories and practices of government. Comaroff also shows how the broader context – the neoliberal turn to the ethic of the market, the privatization of public assets, the stress on deregulation and the outsourcing of the state – has engendered the means and ends for commodifying cultural difference, turning it into rents and profits; indeed, into corporate ethnicity and, for so-called ‘business chiefs,’ into new species of political and financial capital. In sum, Chiefship Pty unLtd, the phenomenon, is a creature of contemporary political-economy, a hyphe-nated fusion,

both hot and cold, of the exogenous and the proximate: hot, in that it rests on new passions; cold, in that its transactions occur within the chill logic of cost–benefit calculation. If these are the conditions, both necessary and sufficient, that have remade the Kingdom of Custom, those who rule in its name range widely in their capacity to reap its harvest; this for reasons ecological, cultural, political, transactional, circumstantial. Therein lies the complex relationship between the Kingdom and its Kings: the forms of accumulation, of monopoly capital, that the kingdom promises and potentiates – mythically grounded in a promiscuous mix of revisionist history and putative ontology, facilitated by conditions in the contemporary global order – depend in large measure on the capacity of living rulers to husband the resources at their disposal. And, more importantly, to sustain the integrity of the king’s two bodies against the political forces that may drive a wedge between them. Thus, for better or worse – depending on one’s ideological take on such matters – does Chiefship Pty unLtd move from an aspirational imagining to a more or less accomplished fact.

John and Jean Comaroff recently published a pathbreaking new essay on a topic of critical importance in the contemporary world: generation and intergenerational relations. It focused on the social, material, cultural, political rationalities that different generations bring to those relations with each other – and why there is so much talk these days on “the generation war.” Published in The Monist (Oxford University Press, Volume 106, Issue 2, April 2023, 165-180), one of the oldest and most distinguished journals of philosophy, the Comaroffs offer the following synopsis of their essay:  

“How are relations between generations shifting? As anthropologists, our take on intergenerational relations and the rationalities on which they are based—i.e., generationality—is historically situated. In many parts of the world, generation has become a major axis of social and political struggle, sometimes of bitter conflict. This, we argue, is a corollary of post-Cold War transformations in economy and society—and a radical rupture in processes of social reproduction. These transformations have conduced to the perception of a rising ‘generation war.’ How, then, in these circumstances, are we to think anew of intergenerational relations—and justice?” 

In addressing these questions, the essay opens up a new theoretical framework for understanding contemporary “generationality” and its impact on the history of the present.

The Boer War Diary of Sol. T. Plaatje, edited by John Comaroff, was first published in 1973 by Macmillan, along with a limited leather-bound edition put out simultaneously. Comaroff came across the manuscript of the diary – now a famous publication in South Africa – when he was a doctoral student in the Mafeking District adjacent to the Botswana border in 1969. In the course of his research he looked for indigenous historical documents and came upon a tatty scrapbook in the possession of the descendants of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje; folded into that scrapbook was the diary. The Diary documents the historically notable siege of Mafeking, a critical theater in the so-called South African (or, in the past, Anglo-Boer) War of 1899-1902. It is the only published account by a Black person involved in that war; Plaatje was a court interpreter to the British authorities. It offers a memorably vivid, memorably lucid, and profoundly poignant account of the experience of the siege from the perspective of the indigenous inhabitants of Mafeking – or, in the Setswana vernacular, Mahikeng. This is especially noteworthy, since the protagonists of the conflict, Boer and Briton alike, sought to sustain the myth that this was a “White Man’s War,” a myth Plaatje exploded for once and for all, ensuring a place for his Diary in the subsequent historiography of the siege. 

Plaatje was to become a figure of great note in South Africa. Despite a limited education, he rose to become one of the country’s noted black journalists, the founding General Secretary of the South African Native National Congress (later the African National Conference), author of the first novel to be published in the country by a Black South African, Mhudi, and Native Life in South Africa, a memorable account of the Natives’ Land Act of 1913, which laid the ground for the racial geography of apartheid South Africa, translator of Shakespeare into Setswana, newspaper editor, and much besides. After his death in 1932, Plaatje came largely to be forgotten: the erasure of Black scholars and public intellectuals was itself a product of the epistemic violence of the notorious apartheid regime. 

After the end of the apartheid regime in 1994, Sol Plaatje gradually assumed his rightful role in the pantheon of South African public intellectuals and historical figures. Now there is a municipality, a university, and public buildings named after him. He is recognized in innumerable ways in the country. Brian Willan has published a truly magisterial biography, Sol Plaatje: A Life of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, 1876–1932 (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2018), and the Diary itself has seen several revisions and new editions edited by Comaroff and Willan, one in 1999 at the centenary of the Siege of Mafeking. Each version carried more detailed annotations and historical contextualizations by the editors, amplifying the significance of the text. A recent volume, In Revisiting Sol Plaatje’s Mafeking Diary: Reconstruction and Reconsideration, edited by Willan and Sabata-mpho Mokae (Jacana Media 2023), explores the literary merit of the text, which has been the subject of a large, diverse, and enthusiastic scholarly literature. 

In late 2023 fifty years after its was first published, a new, significanly enlarged edition of the Diary was published – an event which marks the sheer longevity of interest in the volume, which is now taught in schools and colleges. Published by a Black South African press, Xarra Books, it includes a foreword by Sabata-Mpho Mokae and a large number of hitherto unpublished photo images.