Echos of History Betrayed

BOIKIE TLHAPI - Echoes of History Betrayed

Boikie Ramatua Tlhapi was an anti-apartheid activist affiliated with the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), born in Ikageng, township outside Potchefstroom. His short and eventful life ended in Office Number 12, at the Stilfontein Police Station. The circumstances of his death as told by witnesses, Mr. George Mbathu and Mr. George Mogoejane, spell of a harrowing tale of torture and brutal force that saw his heart pierced by his broken ribs.

“Majestic”, as he was fondly known by his comrades, was arrested at roadblock outside of Orkney, and taken to the Stilfontein Police Station, together with a group of activists who were on their way to a night vigil in Jouberton, for another activist who was shot by the Special Branch Police.

Stilfontein, established in 1949 is a residential centre for three large gold mines and it is home to the infamous “mini Vlakplaas”, as the Stilfontein Police Station was known, established as a symbol of oppression of dissent by young activists against apartheid and white supremacy.

There is a phenomenon called “inimba yomzali” which translates to “the inner pain of parent”, but in western terms it is often termed “maternal or patronal instinct”. This intrinsic connection between a parent and an offspring in undeniably strong during birth and throughout the live of both, but it tends to be more severe when the child, the gift is taken away unexplainably and under duress.

It is as though the deceased child transmit their unrest in the land of the dead to the living parens, who are often assailed by physical and emotional distress, that often causes illness in those who happen to be in their twilight years.

This is the situation with Mme Thabitha Tlhapi, who has been ill for years following the events at Stilfontein mineshaft number 11, which is alleged to be the final resting place of his son.

Guided by conversations with many who were close to Boikie, this ongoing research behind his disappearance and subsequent death continues to open wounds for many who are intimately connected with the events, including family relatives still living without closure.

***

On the day that Boikie Tlhapi was arrested by the Special Branch, he was on his way to Jouberton for a night vigil of another activist named Vincent MPUMLWANA, who was shot dead by members of the SAP..

On Friday the 28th of March in 1986, Nicholas Ramatua ‘Boiki’ Tlhapi was arrested near Stilfontein along with others on their way to a night vigil in nearby Jouberton, where another activist had been murdered by the police. Detained under Section 29 of the Internal Security Act, he was held at Stilfontein Police Station, where he was tortured and assaulted. 

Boikie Tlhapi died on the 28th of March 1986 in Office Number 11 at the Stilfontein Police Station and Mr. Mbathu’s office was adjacent to the room that sealed an innocent man’s fate. Boikie suffered a punch from Sergeant April (Part of The infamous RIOT Unit of the western Transvaal SAP) which he blocked with his elbow, which in turn broke his rib and lodged it into his heart. Boikie disappeared after his arrest, and despite the family’s efforts, neither he nor his remains have been found.

In 1994, an inquest court returned a finding that it could not conclude that Boiki was deceased.

On 29 September 1996, Boiki’s father, Barileng James Tlhapi, testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The TRC found that Tlhapi was assaulted and tortured by Warrant Officer Viljoen, Sergeant Makiti, and Constables Tseladimitlwa, Tshwaedi, Majaja, and Mano of the Jouberton Security Branch, holding them and senior police officials responsible for his disappearance.

The much more recently, Tony and James Shaft in Stilfontein are the final places where the badly injured and tortured of Boikie Tlhapi wis alleged to have been discarded by white policemen responsible for the apartheid systems machinations to subvert revolutionary fervour of black people during the State Of Emergency of 1985 and later 1986.

This story traces the events preceding Boikie’s disappearance, covering his life as recalled by family and friends; it investigates the identities of the perpetrator of the brutal n=murder, and follows the quest of one former-apartheid police officer Mr. Geaorge Mbathu, as he grapples with revealing the action of his former colleagues.

On the 7th of March 1986, days before Boikie’s disappearance, the infamous State of Emergency imposed on 21 July 1985 was lifted. Yet one is left wondering if this move was not a mere ruse to lure activists out hiding, especially when as many as 1 416 people had died since September 1984 to March 1986. 

Incidentally, the month of March 1986 had the highest monthly figure of 171 deaths, and it was during this month that Boikie met his fate, because he was stopped at a roadblock manned by Special Branch police members who actually admitted to have been looking for him according to Mr. Mbathu.

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Many of the black officer inherited from the apartheid era after Nelson Mandela's release from prison in 1990, were drawn from eleven police forces in South Africa, with each constituted under its own piece of legislation, operating within its own jurisdiction. 

These homeland police forces had been created during the 1970s and 1980s, with the core members being drafted from the SAP. These members were either black members of the SAP, who were identified on the basis of their ethnicity, skill, and perceived loyalty to the apartheid model; or more senior white officers who were "seconded" to the homelands on the basis of lucrative fixed-term contracts. 

Street-level policing was conducted in a heavy- handed style, with bias against black citizens and little respect for rights or due process. Criminal investigations were largely reliant on confessions extracted under duress, and harsh security legislation provided or tolerated various forms of coercion and torture. 

This was the climate under which Mr George Mbathu worked since 1976 until his dismissal due to his inability to turn a blind eye to brutal policing techniques used against young black detainees. And being one who was infamously outspoken to his white superior, he was inevitably a threat that had to be disposed off, as killing him would have raised suspicion during a time political transition.

Another reality is that Western Transvaal and Buphutatswana, apart from the financial benefits of being deployed to the homelands, the founder members of the homeland forces found themselves the beneficiaries of rapid promotions, and were able to operate with unusual autonomy from the police headquarters in Pretoria - which often allowed the creation of the networks of patronage and corruption which came to characterise the homeland forces. 

The infamous police force known as the SAP was formed in 1913, the same year that the Native Land Act was introduced and enforced, and strangely, Mr. George Mbathu  joined the SAPS in 1976, when many black youths were taking arms against the apartheid system. 

This police station, over decades seems to have become a place where white mine owners can be exonerated by black brute police force while the bones of activists disposed by their apartheid police remain forgotten in the rubble of newly rotting flesh of those deemed illegal for mining the land of their ancestors.

The devastating history of the Stilfontein Police station as a centre for torture of anti-apartheid activists is well known in the Matlosana district of South Africa. Many bodies of activists who were abducted, tortures and murdered in the infamous cells of that police station were dumped into open mineshaft around the towns of Orkney and Stilfontein.

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Built around colonial ruins are the townships of Khuma, Kanana and Jouberton, and Alabama, spaces fragmented by racial demarcations and tribal lines, mere spaces for recycled and exploited labour, residences of disenfranchised generations who took to the streets to demand equality.

Death and torture are synonymous in these regions and silence is not an absence, it bears witness to the voids left by the disappeared and perished activists, the politics of resistance and resilience; where silence becomes an echo of loss haunting the present.

And through voices of elders and memory-keepers in acts of active listening, we encounter a profound dialogue with memory, resistance and activism, where collective memory emerges as both an act of mourning losses and a gesture of hope. 

Legacies of colonial violence characterise the now dying small town of Stilfontein; an alienated landscape that is vehicle of various economic and political struggles. Social services have ground to a halt because of the retraction of mining activities, and rampant crime soaks the streets with good due to traumas of unemployment and poverty.

And approaching the evident social decay under the New Democratic dispensation, one wonders if the sacrifice of struggle stalwarts and activists have borne fruit? 

This investigation provides a framework for an ongoing conversation around advocacy and accountability and reparation for the ills of the past, provoking the artist in me to investigate criminal records and other data to deliberately track realities of destruction of the human spirit.

These lingering traces of past state sanctioned crimes have yet to find redress within the present context of an epoch of unveiling truths about the unfinished work of the Truth And Reconciliation Commission. Yet, the persistence of colonial logic when analysing displacement of people of colour from their ancestral lands fails to conceive the magnitude of the trauma caused by exploitation and imperialist policies of racial segregation and subordination of people of colour.

After 40 years of his disappearance, Boikie’s legacy is fading into obscurity at the brink of political isolation, and the notion of intergenerational justice raises the questions about reparations for crimes that transcend generations and questions about methods of finding closure for the bereaved families left without bodies to bury. 

***

 

Inextricably linked to vast networks of economic and political power, the current endemic corruption within the Matlosana Police Force, forces bureaucratic obstacles on anyone requesting access to information pertaining to previous personnel, their various case files and dockets, especially those related to activists arrested during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.

These obstacles, compounded by aggressive attitudes from the current police force, are often inherited from the apartheid era networks, and as colonial crimes pile up, an interconnected of these crimes continues to shape our devastating present and future.

And when delving into the historical roots of state sanctioned assassinations, one also discovers the recruitment of taxi owners into the Frey of political sabotage of activists and their activities. These owners, would snitch and sell many activists out to Special Branch police, and these activists would never be seen alive again.

It was during a period of drastic social and political upheavals, many young people undertook to make the country “ungovernable”, as was a clarion call by the leaders of the ANC in exile. All township protests and acts of civl disobedience  might be interpreted as a response to their attendant insecurity and ideological disorientations that came with the state of emergency of 1986.

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With the recent announcement of an inquest into the death of a number of activists, these public hearings will certainly unveil and prosecute intergenerational crimes, addressing crimes of the past and reflecting on the intergenerational impact of those crimes on communities.

There might be some proverbial barometers of political relevance that determines which activist receives acknowledgment and acclaim in this newly emancipated nation, but personages such as Boikie Tlhapi, seem to be relegated into the voids of history, similar to the mine-shafts into which his body was disposed.

A distinguished gentleman, and indispensable dressmakers for a community mending its seams torn by an oppressive political climate, Boikie was also a lover and father, cherished by many souls who bear the loss of his untimely death. But as the South African Geographical Names Council consults with communities regarding their meticulously crafted Draft Amendment Bill, Boikie’s name will fall short of remembrance and commemoration.

***

Human history has been shaped by the process of asking questions.and historical imagery, a vision of cultural history that connected the past and present are essential elements for recollection of erased and censored memories.

The central node of a broader investigation into the disappearance of Boikie “Majestic” Tlhapi is predicated therefore on finding a conciliatory closure for family members, but also for the community that shaped his political awareness.

As a narrative vessel, Tlhapi’s life is a reminder that in order for transparency to take the fore society need effectively respond to complex and evolving questions of his death. As a filmmaker it has been an awakening journey of an inclusive discourse that I am to foster regarding the untruths and erasures of people in the not so distant past of white supremacist oppression of black people in South Africa.

And through this documentary, a work that deftly combines documentary, archival research, and performative strategies, viewers are entreated to face the dire face of history, to stare into the maw of mineshaft concealing restless souls of lost activists and struggle heroes.

This work brings together diverse voices, materials and histories to create something greater than the sum of its parts, its title derives from an exhibition by Sammy Baloyi titled Echos Of History, Shadows Of Progress. The artist’s work which inspires my work explores the complex interplay of cultural identity, colonial history, and industrial exploitation within his homeland, the Democratic Republic of Congo. His work is an ongoing research of the cultural, architectural and industrial heritage of the contested and mineral-rich region of Katanga, as well as a critical examination of the impact of Belgian colonisation.

deeply rooted in memory and history, offering a powerful and experimental approach that encourages reflection on significant yet under-explored social histories, this documentary film speaks historical cliches that contuse to shape contemporary perspectives of the past, deforming and reforming them for subaltern purposes of censor and erasure.

Decolonizing The Self

 

Colonising the self, the over-self or psyche (soul), can be a phenomenon where an individual allows their inner thoughts to be morphed into any form popularised by the masses, yielding their rational faculties to be directed vicariously by group-based notions that have been proselytised as universal truths.

It is an extensive cultural agenda that requires the individual to valuate their worth within the collective and its conceptual dialogues that redefine discussions on de-coloniality and the persistently radicalised dynamics in the symbolic spheres of social interactions.

Personal memories built alongside illusions created through media bombardments, are essential components that require to be annexed. And the fraught notion of a body at war with itself; its mind, becomes symptomatic of the condition of “colonising the self”, making one into a colony of usurped ideologies and plagiarised reality definitions.

This phenomenon occurs importantly to those discrete parts of the soul, “psyche”, whose identity and biological coherence are called into question by mainstream trends of self-observation and awareness.

These repressive processes and social systems worshipped today, specifically those that attack “forms of self-affirmation”, yield therefore such forms of inner paralyses and stoppage when the self dares retrieve its essence.

A colonised reality and memory exist in constant interplay, they merge and replace each other, memory played like an echo, constantly reassembled. When a mother neglects and is repulsed by her own offspring, yet is satiated by tending to another puritanical “messianic child; this sentiment exemplifies the colonial empathy crippling most people of colour.

Decolonising the usurped self means uncovering a history of merciless bodily control that entails disentangling oneself from all association with colonial imprints, disgusting only the anti-colonial in order to decolonise the self. 

Thoughts as imagery, sketches, and blueprints of a colonised inner self seen through a colonial lens, must be purged through rigorous interaction with all that is extra-legal in terms of western moralistic norms, carving a million voiced interpretations of pure intention.

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Existing without any political bearing on reality is near impossible, and obscuration and reclusivity have often been misconstrued for living a marginal existence that has no impact on a social dimension. Yet, the colonised self morphs and exists in liminal spaces, a chameleon who wear a kaleidoscopic personage which is reflected and projected on self-organized practices.

For an artist, should there be a vocabulary of seeing the self and extricating the self from the milieu, as a shadow membrane; an aesthetic-political freedom reaffirming much more lucid ways of how the real world appears to an abstracted self.

Does decolonising the self counter the colonial project enraging many woke people? Or is it a way of (dis)membering oneself in order to (re)member the self, not as a suspension of lucidity, but a way of reclaiming the shattered psyche that judges the shadows we occupy?

***

Bravely staring into the gulfs of the psyche is daunting, especially when escapist methods have been employed to construct an illusory self, that purports to exist beyond the confines of coloniality. Rupturing the membranes of memory is traumatic in itself, but it is the essential route to truer self-rediscovery after absentia.

Emerging from this distortion and disfluency, the self translates its freedom on the premise of destruction of the colonial norm as a retirement for a self-centred d-colonial project. This deliberate effort to reassert  poetry to the discordance of the psyche allows for a wealth of generative forces. 

The forces in turn mould the soul into potentialities for transformation that can be transmitted to others as a form of intermediation. This new self, a hybrid of tensions in the silent emptiness discovered after shedding the illusory and colonised self is a gateway to a new silence beyond the boundaries of dogma, an echo of metaphors that emerged from the darkness of subservience.

The flood of time stirring awake after being displaced from the truer self, thus reaffirms life surging through cracks in walls built around the colonised self, trembling with each astonishing experience that reconfigures all reality around. 

Through this assemblage of psychic infractions and immersive mirages, a ghost in the mirror of the mind observing the alienated self through smoky eyes emerges, granting wishes from the grave not blinded by clarity. This reassembled self guides a new evolution of the soul, illuminating with an intensity that unsettles the resilient potential for transforming the preconceived notions of self in a constructed reality.

music inside

vibrating and haptic, 

visual and immaterial, 

embodied and disembodied,

with ceaseless grace 

like aural sculptures in vapours of time

the music inside swells.

with hums in a capsule

lured to their demise in collective joy 

not as denial or enchanted parenthesis, 

but as a conscious and active resistance 

to the depressive order of the lower world,

the music inside, a remedy as much as a tool. 

a room

a room that lives 

in indispensable shadows

and parallel snapshots of half dreams

amid a cascade of fragmented allegories of vision

gestures of lived thoughts

iterations of mythical undoings

crafting a recursive choreography 

witnessed through tears

in this room 

a grotesque comedy of forced oblivion

and fluid contemplations of synthetic fetishes

scrambles for lost reminders

about forgotten sounds of wonder

in this room 

filled with poly-vocal re-imaginings 

revealed through tinted glass

art the fragility of awkward objects

secured like wooden hearts in ragged ribcages

akin fragments of utopias distorted by blindness

fibres of destiny unreel with each gaze

translucent materiality draped in past disquiet

pressed against panes of a wasteland

and as this room eats its way 

through forests of dreamtime images

in muted violence stuck on wooden floors

slinking in and out to mimic the mischief of clocks

awaits yet, another room 

Drowsy Gods And Spoilt Demons

when the land becomes a mother,

folded by the sky timidly

in an age of loneliness,

her anxious gaze prompts us 

to experience unembellished self-forgetfulness

like faultless men at the mercy of the sea

***

and when rises a disregarded room above the waters,

an adrift matter like a memory playing live

stalled in dormant conversations that look like forests

prophetic and reclined, tenderly trivial

yet an exemplar against amnesia,

it beckons us to sink our teeth into our skins to bleed patterns of wit into illumined soils

***

and in an art of a drowning man,

his mother - her girdle bound his neck;

in his eyes is observed a placid sea

thrusting back by a million deposited souls,

soaking to receive immortal honours

among drowsy gods and spoilt demons 

Black Mind.

Against Colonial Psychology - A View

Stories are remembered, revealed, feared, and not always recounted in a way that is desirable, and in them there are lingering echoes of past conflicts and trauma.

And just as territorial and post-colonial spaces are perceptible and tangible while revealing all historical complexity in order to address historical silences, they can also obscure portions of historical memory which continue to haunt many victims of colonial brutality. 

This obscuration and concealment ultimately reshapes the conditions of visibility for these victims while fostering new modes of appearing and surviving from the self-same obscurity and loss of identity.

In South Africa, narratives that exposes how grand colonial fantasies of segregating people of colour along their usefulness in regards to colonial demands, there coexisted narratives of the fetishization of homelands among the colonised which seem to be overlooked in academia. 

Investigating how these homelands, which symbolised blatant dispossession of land, became havens for black identity formation along tribal lines; is another aspect of the collective healing project that require scholarly attention; to uncover how the oppressed would accept such an unequal and exploitative social arrangement.

And as these narratives analysing various forms of sedimented colonial violence that deformed collective minds of black communities begin to come to the fore, due credit can be given to the efforts of dissident scholars such as Professor Kopano Ratele, among many.

In a time of monumental debates, inadequate ways of coping with the past and current manifestation of colonial traumas are further exacerbating senses of dislocation and social despondency in many who are concerned with finding tools for collective healing beyond western methodologies and analysis.

It therefore becomes essential that they find spaces for the examination and re-imagining of African cultural traumas in our autocratically ordered and increasingly post-factual world beyond the confines of academia and glass-walled lecture-halls made for voyeuristic observations.

Their work seems to repeatedly deal with questions of dislocation and the collective imagination of home and its interrupted relation to identity whilst suggesting its instability and plurality.

It is commendable that there are researchers, scholars, psychologists and writers who develop works that translate inner landscapes of traumatised people; observing, dissecting, reassembling their distraught identities and narratives of survival in adversity.

And although the notion of place as a locale informed by sedimented social and ecological histories is eroded by globalisation, their continued search and analysis of black minds, developed through a community-based approach, pushes a variety of boundaries, inserting subtle shifts and offering new readings destabilizing expectations and norms of western socio-psychological analysis.

Transforming past experiences into indelible social marks often neglects and turns away from accuracy, but rather moves towards convening, sensing, and misbehaving with histories, and stories enshrouding particular sites of memory.

Words are gestures, are images, are forms of witnessing in a social project shaped by collective experiences, and through their various incarnations, words can assist in reconstruction of shattered identities and healing.

Therefore the intention for this video poem stems from how private lives were impacted by historical catastrophes, dabbling with themes of self-reflection, offering vantages to rethink the current wretched souls of black folks while challenging hegemonic narratives of pain. 

.

This video poem interrogates various interpretation of psychology in the African context, from how African centred research and practice converge to form hybrid form of psycho-analysis. 

It also questions how western psychology has been adapted and reassigned African metal illnesses, thus compounding the mounting questions about how a field of study fashioned by colonial minds liberated the particularities of the minds of the oppressed.

Rather than following a narrative structure, the video poem embodies a process with no clear beginning or end. It reflects the continuous interactions between the artist and scholars, capturing both moments of cacophony and moments of alignment. 

The emphasis is on the dynamics of collaboration, with individual authorship dissolving into new collective audio-visual shapes, reflecting on the historical, cultural, and psychological impacts of colonialism, as well as the process of revisiting the trauma it caused.

The video poem is consequently an effort to investigate the far-reaching emotional implications of western cultural hegemony and colonial systems of power for non-western subjectivities, focusing particularly on collective trauma and notions of repair.

Music In Times Of Strife - A Note To Musicians

Rather than viewing collapse as mere destruction,  embrace it as a generative force where brokenness is understood as a condition to embody and negotiate, rejecting the logic of repair.

This concept extends to the idea of dismantling the dominant systems that shapes our understanding of our existence, those oppressive structures that appear social, political, and environmental—developed out of Western thought.

This method of “re-worlding” therefore suggests an undoing of the existing world order of notes and melodies of melancholy, creating aural space for new possibilities that emerge from the collapse of these orchestrated systems.

From this state of improvised brokenness found in the chaotic aftermath will emerge a kinship found in wastelands of maternal wails. 

And through these new connections — both human and non-human as in robot sibilances that haunt dreams — in light and shadow, in forests and in depths of oceans. - our metaphors will embrace their demons.

Write notes in the translation of errors emotional exchanges between cultures, souls and wrapped in their losses and recurring methods of deprivation.

Rhythmatize freedom that arises from the disarticulation of simple images of poverty in a climate of impunity and make beauty seem like transition and upheaval waltzing hand in hand. 

***

Your melodies aught be not orchestrated by state and societal forces, but rather by reimagines of a new poetics of resistance and littered with narratives of mobility, impermanence and acts of resilience in adversities.

But can music be composed that juxtaposes multiple temporalities pertaining to Africa’s diverse history, mythology, and ecosystems related to biological evolution and eminent extinction?

As musics of each land are independent corpuses of knowledge about the envisioned future, from pasts that unfold horrible memories they linger as scores narrated through blistered lips.

Can Africa’s songs be generated through sequences of informal instigations and responses to destruction,  traumatised jubilations that become a metaphor for inherited gestures and wounds?

Are there sonic remnants and souvenirs after any destruction such as sounds of fighter jets and explosions of shells in homesteads that can be decoded and recoded into a collage of real and fantasized history?

Believing that music is not meant to atone or repent the broken and damaged, it still has the capacity to interrogate, trigger and root memories. So, can musicality induced in the cacophonies of horror become a soothing balm to scars in minds and souls of the dispossessed?

And can music made against a background of incomprehensible ruin and killing in warzones like Gaza and elsewhere be considered therapeutic of lived traumas?

***

What song can translate our leaders’ tyrannous genes, those who could watch hundred of young men perish trapped in cramping mineshaft, wantonly disregarding life for favour of profiteers?

Whispering to souls frightened by jubilation, could this music be mournful and painterly, rousing wounds to song and bleeding over again, in the midst of relief and momentary rescue?

In light of imposed silences that convey concealed voices of poets incarcerated by their demons, may your chorus be filled with uncomfortable hymns that triumph over bellicose slander of paddlers of power. 

Self Portraits