CORPOREALITIES OF VIOLENCE IN SOUTHERN AFRICA
4th - 6Th SEPTEMBER 2013, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, UK.
Background: Recognising a recent growth in academic interest in the complex social and political
significance of human corporeality, the British Academy International Partnership between the
University of Edinburgh, UK and the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, aims to explore how
a focus on the transformations of human forms and substances can offer new ways to investigate how
violence, migration and health are linked in the lives of people across the Southern African region. After
the success of our first workshop in Johannesburg in April 2012, we invite applicants to participate in the
second of three workshops taking place as part of the “Transforming Bodies: Health, Migration and
Violence in Southern Africa” research partnership. Between 2012 and 2014, the partnership seeks to
bring together emerging and established scholars working in a range of disciplines in the Humanities and
Social Sciences across the Southern African region, in order to generate new comparative and
theoretical approaches towards understanding the changing significance of human corporeality across
the region, and to expand writing, editing and publishing capacity among participants.
CORPOREALITIES OF VIOLENCE IN SOUTHERN AFRICA: This second workshop will focus on how human
bodies are not only the means and target of violence in a diversity of forms, and therefore transformed
by it in a myriad of ways, but also how human corporealities are often at the centre of what follows
violence: including refugee displacements, and subsequent movements and ‘returns’; medicalization,
documentation, and sometimes incarceration; as well as acts of burial, mourning, and commemoration;
and forensic examinations and exhumations for (often elusive) processes of ‘transitional justice’,
‘reconciliation’ and ‘healing’. Taking the transformations, interferences and flows of bodies and bodily
substances animating violence and its consequences as its central problematic, it will seek to explore the
convergences and discontinuities of different forms of individual and orchestrated violence,
encompassing political and social violence alongside torture, intimate partner violence, rape and
broader forms of structural or institutionalised violence.
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Draft Programme
Day 1: Wednesday 4th September 2013: Writing workshop day
9 – 9.30 Introduction& Welcome (Joost Fontein)
9.30 – 10.30 Editors panel ‘Getting published’ (Sara Dorman, Paul Nugent, Joost Fontein)
10.30 – 11.00 Coffee
11.00 -1.00 Breakout session begins
1.00 – 2pm Lunch
2 – 3.30pm Breakout session continues.
3.30 – 4pm Tea
4 – 5.30pm Keynote address: Nicky Rousseau Another story of an African farm: the search for remains at
Post Chalmers, Cradock.
5.30 onwards – CAS BRAAI
Day 2: Thursday 5th September 2013: Research workshop
9 – 10.30am Keynote address: Paul Lane Brutal murders, colonial skull-duggery and post-colonial neglect:
the case of the Mau Mau bones in the museum cupboard
10 .30– 11 Coffee
11 – 12.30 Panel 1: Post violence: traces, burials and human remains (co-organised with ERC research programme
Corpses of Mass violence and Genocide)
Laura Major - The (un)lovely Bones: Exhuming and reburying human remains in Rwanda
Ina Jahn and Matthew Wilhem-Solomon - ‘Bones in the Wrong Soil’: Reburial, Belonging and Disinterred
Cosmologies in Post-Conflict Northern Uganda.
Matthew Wilhem-Solomon – ‘We hear them dancing on the roof’: Death, Violence and the Urban Form’
12.30 – 1.30pm Lunch
1.30 – 3.30 Panel 2: Post violence: spirits, ghosts and traumas
Leila Bright – Avenging Spirits of the Dead, accountability and Political Violence in Zimbabwe
LIZ Ravalde – Pentecostal Bodies and Post-War Recovery: Rethinking “Local” vs. “Global” Debates in
Uganda through Pentecostalism
Frederica Guglielmo – Medicalising Violence: Technologies of diagnosis in post-genocide Rwanda
3.30 – 4 Tea
4 -5.30 Panel 3: Criminalities, security and public ordering
Bianca van Laun - Captured Bodies: Investigating the visual representation of the Paarl march and Poqo
Tessa Diphoorn - “It’s all about the body”: Cultivating Force Capital to Claim Sovereign Power in Durban,
South Africa
T.Nyamunda – From a popular to an absolutist, panoptic State: The makings and meanings of the 1997/8
protests and the government’s violent response in Harare, Zimbabwe
7 – Workshop dinner
Day 3: Friday 6th September 2013: Research workshop
9 – 10.30am Keynote address: Steffen Jensen Corporealities of violence: rape and the stabilization of bodies in
South Africa
10.30 - 11 Coffee
11 – 1pm Panel 4: Migration and gendered violence in South Africa
Kirsten Thomson – Exploring the tangibility and realness of the continuous experience of trauma on
community health care workers in South Africa
Mara Mattoscio - Victims or negotiators? Violence against women’s bodies in South African fiction and
filmic adaptations
Nataly Woollett– Fragmentation and disconnection: linking HIV, gender based violence (GBV) and health
in the South African context
1 - 2 Lunch
2 - 3 Summing up & close
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Format:
DAY 1 writing/publishing workshop: The first day of the conference will be a writing and publishing
workshop. We will have a session led by journal editors focusing on writing and getting published. There
after the participants will break out into smaller group sessions, according to their panels for the next
day, each led by one our keynote speakers. Each participant must have read the papers of the other
participants in their group/panel before hand. It is therefore important that participants will have
circulated their papers to their group members and to their ‘keynote speaker’ in advance. Deadline for
papers to be submitted for circulation: 1st August 2013
DAYS 2&3 Research workshop: Keynotes will have 90 min sessions, 45 min for the papers & 45 min
discussions. Participants will have 20 minutes (maximum) to present their papers, the rest of their time
will be for discussions.
Locations & Rooms:
Most of the events will take place in the McEwan Hall Reception Room (booked for 4th, 5th and 6th
September between 08:30-17:30) – See no. 35 on map on next page
See: http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/registry/timetabling/bookable-rooms/bookablerooms?rid=1.300&fid=01&bid=113&cw_xml=Room_info.cfm
For the breakout sessions: 3 small meeting rooms (rms 3, 4 and 5, on those floors) have been booked in
the CMB, 15a George Square (no. 38 on map on next page)
Accommodation: most delegates will be staying at the Kenneth Mackenzie, on Richmond Place
(between no. 27 & 29 on map on next page)
See: http://www.edinburghfirst.co.uk/for-accommodation/kenneth-mackenzie
Braai: The braai on Wednesday (4th) evening will take place in the garden at 21 George Square, which
can be accessed from the lane behind George Square. Bring your own booze, and anything else you
particularly fancy.
Dinner on Thursday (5th) will be at 7.30pm, at the Nile Valley Cafe, (again bring your own booze).
see: https://plus.google.com/112387781755065606620/about?gl=uk&hl=en
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Keynote abstracts
Paul J. Lane (Professor of Global Archaeology, Department of Archaeology & Ancient History, Uppsala
University, Sweden. e-mail: paul.lane@arkeologi.uu.se)
Brutal murders, colonial skull-duggery and post-colonial neglect: the case of the Mau Mau bones in
the museum cupboard
The National Museums of Kenya (NMK) holds a reference collection of human skeletal material that includes the
remains of just over 480 individuals. The collection is currently housed in the Osteology Department at the Nairobi
Museum, which is also the headquarters of NMK. Additional human remains from excavated archaeological sites
are also held by the Archaeology Department elsewhere in the Nairobi Museum. As is common with excavated
skeletons, these latter examples are of varying completeness. However, this is also true of the reference collection
and in fact none of the reference specimens are actually complete (i.e. comprised of the full range of cranial and
post-cranial elements). Skulls, several of which are missing their lower mandibles, form the most common
component of the reference collection. Post-cranial elements are far less numerous. Despite such limitations, the
collection is far more comprehensive than those that exist elsewhere in the region, such as in the national museums
of Tanzania and Uganda, and as such is a valuable resource for scholars from a variety of disciplines including
archaeology and biological anthropology. Accompanying documentation indicates that the majority of the human
remains derive from just two closely related ethnic groups, the Kikuyu and Embu. From this documentary evidence
most of specimens can be linked to particular settlements, and in several cases the causes of death, many of them the
result of violence, and/or the sex, age, and even name of the individual is recorded. Most critical and disturbing of
all is that the evidence indicates the majority of these specimens were obtained on behalf of the Corydon Museum
(the precursor on NMK) by the then Director, Louis Leakey, from the government pathologist after post-mortem
examinations conducted as part of investigations into possible murders that took place during the Mau Mau
campaigns against British colonial rule. The manner in which this reference collection was built up, especially the
questionable legitimacy of Leakey’s actions and the lack of any evidence that informed consent was given by the
relatives of the deceased, raise a series of ethical issues. As does the fact that many of the individuals whose remains
now make up the reference collection can be identified by name and almost certainly have close family members
who are still alive today. Because the circumstances under which the reference collection was obtained by the
museum, the latter have no knowledge of the whereabouts of the bodies of their kinsmen and women. Repatriation of
the remains would seem to be the most obvious ethical choice today. Yet, NMK is the leading research institution in
Kenya and the collection is an important academic resource. It seems likely that the museum would be able to find a
substitute reference collection (both for reasons of availability and potential cost of establishing one). Repatriation
of the remains would thus deprive the museum and the local research community of materials that can aid their
work as scientists and scholars. This paper aims to examine these ethical issues as well as describing in more detail
what is known about the circumstances behind the creation of this reference collection. The paper will conclude
with an examination of the arguments that can be made for and against the repatriation and reburial of these human
remains as a way of stimulating further debate on the topic at the workshop.
Steffen Jensen, Senior researcher Dignity – Danish Institute against torture sje@dignityinstitute.dk
Corporealities of violence: rape and the stabilization of bodies in South Africa
In this paper I will explore the extent to which and how the corporeality of bodies are destabilized as a result of
violence and what the effects of such destabilization might be. What kind of new corporealities are called forth as a
result of violence and what effects might we imagine in terms of reterritorializing the body in law, in politics, in
social science to mention but a few fields? To answer these questions, I will revisit ethnographic material from Cape
Town on rape and more specifically gang rape. In this analysis I attempt to follow different implicated actors from
the rape survivor and the perpetrators to the legal and political systems that are charged with or take it upon them
act of the violence. Rather than arriving at definitions of how we should understand these categories, I argue that
all categories are radically unsettled through the violence and as a consequence bodies as intelligible corporal
entities shimmer in and out of focus. Hence, while the rape obviously radically deterritorializes the female body, it
also recasts the male body and the body of the state and community in unpredictable and unsettling ways.
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Nicky Rousseau, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of arts, University of the Western Cape, SA. Email:
nrousseau@uwc.ac.za
Another story of an African farm: the search for remains at Post Chalmers, Cradock.
Between 2007 and 2009, the Missing Persons’ Task Team (MPTT) worked on an investigation that sought to locate
the remains of five anti-apartheid activists who had been ‘disappeared’ and killed by apartheid security police in
two separate operations in 1982 and 1985. The MPTT is an official body, based in a unit established by the South
African government as part of its obligations as a signatory to the International Criminal Court, but which also has
responsibility for investigations arising from the work of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This
particular investigation centred on the grounds of - among its many incarnations - a farm, Post Chalmers, where
security police claimed to have killed the five men, burnt their bodies and thrown the remains into the Fish River.
Post Chalmers is situated just outside Cradock, a rural town in the Karoo, which came into being following the
conquest of the Ndlambe and Gqunukhwebe Xhosa in 1812, around 20 000 of whom were driven west of the Fish
River by colonial and settler forces deploying a scorched earth policy. In the aftermath, a court and prison
established on a stretch of land near the Fish River grew into the town of Cradock. Post Chalmers and Cradock thus
constitute a space saturated with sedimented histories of corporeal violence.
The paper is primarily centred on the location and retrieval of the human remains in 2007, although it considers
both the colonial spectres of violence that never seem too far away in the Eastern Cape as well as the subsequent
lives of the retrieved human remains as they travelled through Pretoria, Cape Town, and Pretoria again, to their
final ‘homecoming’ and reburial in the township of Zwide in Port Elizabeth, the city from which all five had been
abducted.
A common practice of the MPTT is to have a pre- or test dig before formal exhumation. In the spirit of this practice,
this keynote turns in the final part to the politics of knowledge. As a way of floating some of the themes that may be
pertinent to the workshop, it asks us to consider what this account, concerned as it is with the corporeality of
violence, may offer, and what it may occlude.
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Writing workshop break out groups
Group 1: Led by Paul Lane
Laura Major - The (un)lovely Bones: Exhuming and reburying human remains in Rwanda
Ina Jahn and Matthew Wilhem-Solomon - ‘Bones in the Wrong Soil’: Reburial, Belonging and Disinterred
Cosmologies in Post-Conflict Northern Uganda.
Matthew Wilhem-Solomon – ‘We hear them dancing on the roof’: Death, Violence and the Urban Form’
Group 2: led by Nicky Rousseau
Leila Bright – Avenging Spirits of the Dead, accountability and Political Violence in Zimbabwe
Liz Ravalde – Pentecostal Bodies and Post-War Recovery: Rethinking “Local” vs. “Global” Debates in Uganda
through Pentecostalism
Frederica Guglielmo – Medicalising Violence: Technologies of diagnosis in post-genocide Rwanda
Group 3: led by Steffen Jensen
Bianca van Laun - Captured Bodies: Investigating the visual representation of the Paarl march and Poqo
Tessa Diphoorn - “It’s all about the body”: Cultivating Force Capital to Claim Sovereign Power in Durban, South
Africa
T.Nyamunda – From a popular to an absolutist, panoptic State: The makings and meanings of the 1997/8 protests
and the government’s violent response in Harare, Zimbabwe
Group 4: led by Emily Venables & Jo Veary
Kirsten Thomson – Exploring the tangibility and realness of the continuous experience of trauma on community
health care workers in South Africa
Mara Mattoscio - Victims or negotiators? Violence against women’s bodies in South African fiction and filmic
adaptations
Nataly Woollett– Fragmentation and disconnection: linking HIV, gender based violence (GBV) and health in the
South African context
Updated 27/8/13
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