Swakopmund
Hugo ka Canham: Of the images I’ve shared with you here, two are from Swakopmund, a coastal town in Namibia. The first image is of a cemetery of genocide, of mostly Ovaherero and Nama peoples. It's a place of relative neglect by the state and by the apartheid government, which was the caretaker of Namibia, as South West Africa, until 1990 when it got independence. So, its presence is a testament of people insisting on this history.
Before going to the cemetery, I met with an Ovaherero genocide activist who has a genocide memorial in the back of his house. It’s a really small space, but he talks to visitors about this history. At certain points in the year, he takes people to the cemetery to gather sand into mounds. The graves move with the wind, and the stones act as a tether to remind people where they are. Standing in that space, you can’t help but be moved. It is a desert, so the graininess of sand is everywhere. Being there you think about what it actually means, that this sand may be constituted by fragments of human remains. And there’s a stillness, in the way that places of death are often still. There’s a great loneliness to it. The stones work to mark the space, yet the sand will move, as one can see in the dunes in the background.
It is an incredibly moving space if you are attuned to the weight of it, but not everyone is. Swakopmund is also a place of tourism, a lot of German and South African tourists, who drive 4x4s around the landscape. In this vast landscape of death, the cemetery is inadequate to the weight of what it is carrying. But there’s a simplicity to it too, that I almost feel is more powerful than the ways in which we sometimes seek to memorialize death with grand monuments. These are rudimentary grave markers; they use what is there in the landscape. But in some ways, they are closer to what happened. The memorial site works with the materials that have been there for over a century since the genocide, and they refuse grandeur. They operate on a double register, both of neglect and also a form of thinking about what happened.
The second image is of the jetty in Swakopmund which goes into the sea, an oceanic cemetery. These two sites are adjacent to one another; it is only a short walk from the memorial cemetery to the jetty. The jetty is a more overt tourist attraction, yet these sites speak to each other. The nearby Walvis Bay was a natural deep-water harbor, but it was a British Protectorate. So the Germans were compelled to use Swakopmund, which was not ideal for a harbor. This meant that they needed to build deep into the ocean to enable ships to maneuver. The construction was done by local enslaved labor in the same moment when they were building the railway system, and many people fell to their death in the ocean. Many enslaved people from the nearby concentration camps jumped to their death from the jetty, with the knowledge that they might soon die of dehydration, starvation, and mistreatment in the general death-making of the camps. My reading of contemporary literature indicates that it is still a place of suicide.1 There are tourist restaurants, one at the beginning and the other at the end of the jetty. After nightfall, the descendants of the people who were killed in the genocide might walk past the restaurants to their death. It is a place of great haunting.
I could not walk to the end of the jetty. I began to walk one morning, but even at that time the waves were so high. And it's an open wooden structure, so you can see the churning water below. It was terrifying to do this walk. There is a stubbornness of history in how the jetty as a tourist attraction erases the foundations of why the jetty was created, and at the same time, how the suicides in the present resonate and echo those foundations. Of course, the jetty is haunting and beautiful, in ways that register water that the gravesite does not, but they are part of the same project of genocidal death.
I see the work that the Overherero genocide activist does together with others as a commitment to his great-grandmother who was killed at the site; as care work, as resistance, and as a form of repair. They gather the sand to mark the place of those buried. On one level, this is a simple act. But on another level, it is this incredible refusal to let their ancestors be blown away with the wind. The stone marks the site they can return to. My research method is to always go to the site, to connect with it sensorially, and to connect with the people who inhabit the spaces whose histories are tied to them. And because my practice is writing, I narrate these places by knitting together the work that people do to remember the space to its materiality. And then I look at official archives. In Namibia, I started in Windhoek, where the national archives are. I quickly learned that the keyword “genocide” would not pick up anything, because it was always referenced as a “war.” “War” has a neutral implication. We see this slippage now in the genocide underway in Palestine. All major news networks refer to it as a “war.” When researchers and artists are seeking to tell the story, what exists in the archive is scattered and inaccurately named. This means we must improvise. We’ve got to think across forms as storytellers, as researchers and writers, about how to work with fragments. In Namibia, if the archive is shallow, sand allows us to go into geological time. It inserts the lives and erasures into the very landscapes, into the geology, and enables these histories to be read. To read them, we have to attend in ways that may not be seen as scientific, but it is incumbent on us who are trying to tell these stories and narrate them.
I enter the archives almost as a person casting a fishing net, and, using Sara Ahmed’s askance lenses, I don't take archives at face value but rather as entry points.2 I'm suspicious of them. But I think they're productive, and they have certainly helped me in this cross-border project with my own training. Archives augment the blind spots of our educational training, which narrowly centers the apartheid or the colonial project, and as a result is primarily concerned with national accounting and does not take regional and African histories seriously.
Waterhof, Cape Town
Huda Tayob: To work beyond the prescriptions and disciplinary strictures of scientific methods is imperative. Part of this work involves reading and looking again at Cape Dutch architecture, which is often understood as the foundation of architectural history in South Africa. Returning to these sites raises questions on the production of history and archives, and how knowledge production operates to position certain bodies and places outside of history. Two images that come to mind in response are of the gardens and stoep of the prominent Cape Dutch homestead, Waterhof, in Cape Town. This seventeenth-century slave-owning homestead is named after the freshwater spring that is located on the site, which in many ways shaped the house and its ecological, political, and social landscape more generally. The spring and site were captured as part of the initial parceling of this land for a market garden which supported the early colonization of the Cape, and was later the central municipal spring for the city. The freshwater system that fed the spring had long been the source of life for Indigenous people in what is largely an arid, albeit coastal city landscape. The control of these fresh water sources was therefore part of a larger colonial strategy of limiting access to life-giving sources.
I came across these photographs in research into the history of Cape Dutch architecture, a typology that emerged in the early twentieth century and is tied to what are considered the origins of architecture and architectural history in South Africa. These are histories which continue to dominate questions of heritage and value in the built environment. The historical narrative of these houses largely exists as isolated from the violence they enacted as central to mechanisms of control and capture, and as slave-owning plantations. At the same time, these former plantations continue to be sites of Black labor and white leisure into the present.
In revisiting early architectural history texts from the 1920s, I was struck by brief moments of slippage. There was a disruption, an interruption of the historical moment and sense of time in constructing this architecture by moments of mutiny and revolt. These are scattered stories submerged within the larger narrative. However, they surface briefly in imprecise yet repetitive accounts, or “legends” that were told about certain houses; in captions to images which speak to slave histories, and the blurry dark figures present in images. These are quiet stories: they speak of the barely audible sound of whipping or crying, of the ominous tension of a corner of the garden near the “Batavian brick oven,” of the sound of a female ghost’s footsteps on the stairs.
I started to follow some of these stories from the archives to the houses, speaking to those who work in and with them. I have not been able to visit Waterhof, as it is privately owned, and can only see the tops of trees over the high walls that block it off from the road. But stories about Waterhof are ubiquitous. On a visit to Leeuwenhof, which is located opposite Waterhof, was once part of the same plantation, and is occasionally open to the public, I was told by those who clean and care for the grounds that this female ghost can still be heard; the sound of footsteps at certain times of day, of a woman walking down the main staircase holding a child. In the constructed narrative that erases the violent histories of empire, the ghostly figure traces possibilities of return.
These images, some of the few I could find from the early 1900s of the house, come from the Western Cape Archives housed in the former Roeland Street Prison in Cape Town. They are similarly quiet images. Their eerie stillness is carefully framed with branches and foliage. There is no trace of bending to the will of the strong south-easterly wind. The house is barely visible behind the garden wall in the first, which was perhaps taken in the summer with the garden in full bloom. And perhaps the second shows the empty forlorn stoep shuttered against winter rain. They speak to the impossibility of reading the house without the manufactured landscape, the ordered garden in front, and jagged mountain behind. In many of these stories, mutinous ghostly figures are heard in the gardens amidst the “Batavian brick” oven or terraces, amongst the honeysuckle, myrtle, and jasmine—all spoils of empire.
The ghost is a figure who ruptures the architectural narrative. As Avery Gordon has noted, the ghost is a social figure who demands attention.3 This raises questions about the architecture as being in tension, as living and seething. The ghost is an insistent presence. A quiet presence in some ways, yet unresolved. I am interested in these stories that have been deemed as fiction; in taking storytelling seriously as a means to unravel archival fictions and their associated power. Returning to archival sources in companion with the ghostly figure requires revisiting the origins of the materials and plants used there, which were gathered from geographies of shifting and expansive empires. These disruptions point to the possibility of revolt and a different social order is written by these ghostly footsteps, with material reverberations across coastal shores.
In working through questions of remembering and forgetting as always entangled, I have been reading Mahmoud Darwish’s “Memory for Forgetfulness.”4 It is a prose-length poem that was written during the siege of Beirut in 1982. The relevance of the text this year with the ongoing genocide in Gaza and bombardment of Beirut in itself speaks to the ongoing orders of knowledge and violence. The text is meandering, and as a result difficult to read at times. Darwish moves from the smell and aroma of a morning cup of coffee while reading a newspaper to the sound and sense of siege. Quiet and mundane moments of attempting to hold onto daily life are interrupted with the screams and crushing violence of the city crumbling around him. He asks who will mourn or count our dead? There is a sense of life as simultaneously possible and impossible. This has been an important text to think with in questioning methods of working and narration. Darwish draws out the simultaneous sense of urgency and slowness, reminding us of the importance of thinking and working through multiple temporalities, moments, and collisions of history and time. This text, as with the writing of Michel-Rolph Trouillot on Haitian history, has been a reminder to pay attention to the condition of the production of historical narratives.5 Returning to the archives with a spectral companion is part of this work for me.
Fort of São Sebastião, Ilha de Moçambique
HkC: Going up the South African coastline, right next door is Mozambique. I’m familiar with southern Mozambique as it's really close to Johannesburg. It's a six-hour drive, eight hours at most. There are long, shared, intimate histories of mining between the two. In the early twentieth century, Mozambican miners were the largest source of labor on South African mines, more than South Africans or any other neighboring countries. Charles van Onselen writes about some of this in his work with the railway.6 This image is from further north, the original colonial capital of Mozambique, Ilha de Moçambique. Islands do something to time. I’ve read this about the Caribbean and seen it in Zanzibar too. Time slows down; there’s a feeling that you're entering a different time zone. I mean this without romanticizing it. The architecture changes much slower than on the mainland, as the structures are built with materials like coral which can last very long. The fort was built in the 1600s and it's built on a coral bed. The whole island is like this; very little grows. The fort is massive and takes up a significant portion of the island which was built by the Portuguese as a defensive structure. It was built as a structure of insecurity, against locals but also potential invading powers from the upper Persian Gulf and competitor slave traders.
If you look closely at this first image, there are a group of young schoolgirls on the coral bed. At that point in the day, the water had receded. I had gone there to think about Sila van de Kaap, who is a figure from Yvette Christiansë’s novel Unconfessed, which is based on a real story of an enslaved woman from Mozambique.7 I kept wondering what it would mean to be in search of her, and for her to be one of these evasive figures in the background in the shade of the fort, which was also the place from where mass enslavement was coordinated to South America, the Caribbean, and the islands of the Indian Ocean. People were being traded from the entire region of Southern Africa—Malawi, Zimbabwe, and even South Africa, northern KwaZulu Natal—and channeled to other parts of the world. There’s a live force from these young schoolgirls against this coral structure that talks to the present and the future. Sila eventually dies, possibly, hopefully, after getting freedom and all the hardship that she lived with. To travel to where she may have been captured and enslaved is a form of revitalization and reclamation. This image is a dreaming, an imaginary of what potentially could have been if Sila was one of those little girls living now.
The other image is of a concrete bench on the Stone Town shoreline near the former slave warehouses which line the streets and are situated a few hundred meters from the fort. The bench looks out onto the ocean as a memorialization of the slave trade, facing away from the mainland. I sat on the bench imagining possible connections between this island and the multiple destinations of the slave trade. It is a place of great longing and hoping. I write about it and imagine a kind of spider web in which branches extend with centrifugal force; a space that traces back to people arriving from Zambia, Malawi, the Congo, next door Tanzania, Zimbabwe. The bench and its imaginary webs make me think about what their longings and hopes were. I think about this as a dewy kind of spider web that is carrying the weight of what we might call tears. The spider web is a freighted representation of the pain and paths and routes to home, of freedom from capture, but also the bidirectional and multiple flows of water. So, again, as in Namibia, the memorialization of a foundational moment, a heavy moment, is relatively subdued and quiet. It's an image of quiet, but I’m trying to listen to its frequencies, with Tina Campt; thinking about the weight of liquid, thinking with the buzz which is an insistent present.8 This buzz, the frequency of this place, is so persistent that you can forget it’s there. On the island, one gets used to these sounds. In attending to them, you see and feel what is carried in the undertow of the water. And it allows imaginaries of freedom, because that is sometimes all we have to work with.
Mombasa
HT: Mombasa is a coral and mangrove island. The landscape is constantly shifting terrain, which does not easily fit into binary categories of water or land. I had been looking at contemporary transnational migration, and the ways in which Mombasa and Cape Town are connected. This led to looking at deeper histories of connections, tied into multiple generational displacements, and longer histories of moving across land and sea—as well as the fungibility with which they operate. These excerpted film stills are part of a wider search of stories and records of coastal living in my project on “Watery Archives.”9 They are sourced from an amateur film (ca. 1934) of parts of the coast including Mombasa and Dar es Salaam, along with Durban, Port Elizabeth, and Cape Town. These are excerpts in the sense of having been cropped and zoomed to return and focus the background figures. I became very interested in film archives as early-twentieth-century accounts that are both records and narrative. Looking at archival films along the east African coast expands the visual catalog of its cities and sites, many of which have since been irrevocably changed.
In the first still, which is an excerpt from footage most likely shot in Mombasa, washed out and faded is the grainy figure of a woman with a basket on her head. The scene is of a military parade, with only a few onlookers. This figure walks in the opposite direction of the marching legs, swaying gently as she walks. In working with the film archive, I am curious about how we read these figures as foreground, as a way to think about urban life which existed despite being pushed to the margins. In Fanon’s “Algeria Unveiled,” he speaks to the muscular tension of the women who cross the city.10 In particular he draws out the generic figure of “Fatma” who is able to move across worlds, often unseen. Reframing the image centers her movement, her saunter against the regularity and rhythm of the marching feet. The disruption of the marching rhythm is also an opening to the possibilities of other tenses present in these urban encounters. The grain and noise of the film becomes a drawing of atmosphere and humidity; another kind of spatial reading.
From the same reel, the second image is part of a street scene of a small harbor and town, filmed from a stationary car. There is a moment where we see a glimpse of the blond hair of the filmmaker in the rearview mirror. In a small excerpt, two women walk past white-washed coral houses and palm trees. As they walk past, one turns her head slightly to look at the camera, while lifting her veil. They continue across the frame, with no other changes in their pace or gait apart from the slight turn of head. Her companion does not hesitate and keeps walking. In some ways like the ghost, there are figures who unintentionally slip into the urban narrative. Amplifying these momentary interruptions invites another reading of urban space. In many ways, Mombasa is a site that operates through these slippery and sticky residues. This is related to wider stories about the city, the ongoing co-existence with various watery beings, Majini and Vibwengo among them, to which Mombasa at times has owed its ongoing existence. Taking seriously, these various beings and bodies in Mombasa to read archival images, archival fictions, and fictional archives as intimately connected, is to look at how lines are drawn between what is deemed fiction and history, to return to Trouillot.
The coral buildings and structures speak directly to the ongoing life with watery creatures, even in the sense of the porous nature of the material. It is quite incredible when you look close at it and see fossilized remains, often of shells, and other kinds of bodies that are either embedded within walls, or have since left their trace, creating cavities for other life forms. Part of my project asks how we look at the city with these multiple life forms? It's also a question of history, in terms of what history is, and how it is operationalized. In other words, what history does. This is not separate from questions of narration. The Swahili poetry tradition is another form which reminds us of this, which all relates back to archival work, in the sense of how these poetic traditions don't enter the archive or enter it as fiction rather than as history. Khal Torabully is a Mauritian poet who writes about coral as a way of thinking about indentured labor in Mauritius.11 He writes that the tongues of his memory are not stone but coral. His poetry is evocative for thinking with coral as ways of reading history; of understanding cross-scalar, multi-temporal kinds of world-making practices. Coral always builds on its ancestors. Even when coral dies, new coral can grow out of it. This layering and building of life teems with multiple knowable and unknowable life forms. Thinking about the question of archives as potential sites of repair has been about looking for or taking seriously multiple forms of life, and what it means to take seriously the kinds of histories they record. Maybe “history” is not the right word, but the kinds of pasts. Pasts that are being negotiated in the future. This is also, in a way, what coral does.
For instance: Jack Boulton, “‘The crocodile is stronger in the water’: Swakopmund jetty as a place of death in Namibia,” in New Perspectives on Urban Deathscapes, ed. Danielle House, Avril Maddrell, and Mariske Westendorp (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023), 107–23.
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). Hugo ka Canham expands on this formulation through his conception of ukwakumkanya outlined in Riotous Deathscapes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023).
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut 1982 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2013).
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
Charles van Onselen, The Night Trains: Moving Mozambican Miners to and from the Witwatersrand Mines, 1902–1955 (London: Hurst Publishers, 2019).
Yvette Christiansë, Unconfessed (New York: Other Press, 2006).
Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).
Huda Tayob, Index of Edges, ➝.
Frantz Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” in A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 35–67.
Khal Torabully, Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude (London: Seagull Books, 2021).
