Cultural Critique

1. Endorsements of this distinction can, for example, be found in the work of Abdul JanMohamed, Benita Parry and Helen Tiffin. While JanMohamed acknowledges that "we can observe a profound symbiotic relationship between the discursive and the material practices of imperialism," he nonetheless treats [End Page 248] them as theoretically and phenomenally distinguishable categories: "the discursive practices do to the symbolic, linguistic presence of the native what the material practices do to his physical presence" (83). I wish to revise this position to insist that discursive practices also act on physical presence. Gayatari Spivak and Homi Bhabha top the list of those whose work is charged with, in Parry's words, an "exorbitation of discourse and a related incuriosity about the enabling socioeconomic and political institutions and other forms of social praxis" (43).

2. This idea has been hotly contested, primarily in the form of debates over figural language. I wish neither to maintain the "literary" as a value-laden term nor to make "everyday" and "literary" into essentialized categories that function as a mechanism of exclusion. I would rather describe literary and everyday language as differing in degree rather than in kind and read the figurality often associated with "literariness" as an intensified version of the foreignness in all language that tends to be sublimated in ordinary speech. On the argument for the distinctive nature of "literariness," see Shklovsky; Erlich; and Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading. For arguments that the everyday is (or can be read as the) literary, see Lakoff and Johnson; and Fish. On the literariness of philosophical language, see Derrida, "White Mythology."

3. On Russian formalism, see Shklovsky; Erlich; and Jameson.

4. The product of contact with foreigners—of a German viewing Chinese theater in Russia—Verfremdungseffekt first appears in Brecht's writings after his attendance at a 1935 performance by Mei Lan-fang's company in Moscow and is, ironically, deployed in the service of precisely the political theory (Marxism) that the formalists wished to oppose through ostranenie.

5. This project, I should perhaps emphasize, differs from that of theorists such as Homi Bhabha who investigate the discursive practices of colonialism but implicitly rely on a transparent model of language, employ linguistics metaphorically (see, for example, Bhabha's discussion of "the language metaphor" [176 ff.]), and concentrate on the play of the signified. While I have no argument with these projects, they do, I believe, leave open the crucial question of (what I am calling) the "foreignness" in language. That is, even those postcolonial studies that deploy deconstructive practices theoretically tend to sidestep the foreignness that deconstructive practices let loose linguistically.

6. Etranger and extranjero both derive from a Latin root (extraneus) that simultaneously signifies externality, impropriety, and irrelevance.

7. This prohibition may take the form of law, economic exclusion, or milder forms of social disapprobation: disparagement for taking away what "rightly belongs" to natives or citizens, or for using property improperly (e.g., furnishing the home, business, or body in "poor taste"). This figure of the improper, it should be noted, corresponds to, and is a specific version of, the Manichaean allegory identified by Frantz Fanon and elaborated by JanMohamed as "a field of diverse yet interchangeable oppositions between white and black, good and evil, superiority and inferiority, civilization and savagery, intelligence and emotion, rationality and sensuality, self and Other, subject and object" (82). [End Page 249]

8. Significantly, Aristotle's terms for what we call the literal and the figural are, respectively, the (kurios: authoritative [or, substantively, an owner, possessor]) and the (xenos: foreign). See Rhetoric, book 2. Moreover, if metaphor is, as Du Marsais would have it, a concept "in a borrowed dwelling" (quoted in Derrida, "White Mythology," 253), then the foreigner is a literalized incarnation of metaphor: of the movement, the transport of baggage from one realm to another, and the "highly suspect exchange of properties" that characterizes metaphor. Derrida also notes the potential classification of metaphors that "supposes an indigenous population and a migration" and that classifies metaphors "according to their native regions" (ibid., 220). On the indeterminable border between figural and proper meaning and the "explo[sion of] the reassuring opposition of the metaphoric and the proper," see ibid., 270.

9. What I call "the zone of error" thus names a range of positions: the everyday experience of being a foreigner, an image projected on to one as a result of being named foreign, or an epistemological position one may assume that entails risking identity, becoming improper and impure.

10. See also Bultmann: "[E]very interpretation incorporates a particular prior understanding—namely that which arises out of the context of living experience to which the subject belongs" (73).

11. "According to Aristotle, poetic language must appear strange and wonderful, and, in fact, it is often actually foreign: the Sumerian used by the Assyrians, the Latin of Europe during the Middle Ages, the Arabisms of the Persians, the old Bulgarian of Russian literature, or the elevated, almost literary language of folk songs" (Shklovksy, 22).

12. Fish's theory not only conceptually obliterates "literal" foreigners, but explicitly reassures those critics fearful of the threat of literary foreignness; for polysemy, uncertainty, error, and such threats are, he argues, always already disciplined by context. Rather than investigate the implications of this fear itself, he aims to demonstrate "how baseless the fear of these dangers finally is" (305). Yet the "level of observation or discourse at which meanings are obvious and indisputable" (270) by which Fish claims texts are stabilized is also, I would argue, the mechanism through which ideology functions; it is the invisible law that regulates propriety and disciplines foreignness. Indeed there are moments when Fish's interpretive communities bear a conspicuous resemblance to ideological hegemony: they render texts "always stable," repress the processes through which that stability is constructed, and make meanings appear "natural." "[I]n every situation," he writes, "some or other meaning will appear to us to be uninterpreted because it is isomorphic with the interpretive structure the situation (and therefore our perception) already has" (277). That apparently "uninterpreted" meaning, I would add, renders foreignness irrelevant and reinstates the "automatism of perception" against which Shklovsky deployed defamiliarization. On the "structural nonsaturation" of context, see Derrida, "Signature," 310.

13. I am indebted here to Gallagher who has argued that the novel demonstrates that "a complete binary opposition of self and Other is both oppressive [End Page 250] and false" (118); and to Attwell who describes the magistrate as "attempt[ing] to reject the subjective space that his circumstances and history have prepared for him" (82). It is helpful to keep in mind that, in South Africa, magistrates are appointed from the ranks of the civil service, perform both judicial and administrative functions, and were responsible for trying most offenders under the laws of apartheid. On the role of magistrates in South Africa, see Dugard, 280-303.

14. There exist numerous insightful readings of Waiting for the Barbarians. On the novel's discursive relation to events in South Africa, see Gallagher; on the novel's critical reception and constructions of apartheid, see Barnett; on the novel as a deconstruction of liberal humanist novelistic discourse, see Dovey; on the position of the novel within Coetzee's literary development, see Attwell. On the novel's treatment of torture, see Gallagher; Eckstein; and Wenzel. On its imagery of sight, see Penner; and Castillo. On debates over the political efficacy of Coetzee's style, see Eckstein; Jolly; Attwell; Watson; Martin; and Hewson. On the novel's treatment of colonialism, see Watson; Moses; and Rich. On the novel's use of the present tense, see Neumann; and James Phelan. On its indeterminate setting, see Gallagher; Dovey; Penner; and Attwell. For a reading of the novel's intersections with deconstruction, see Olsen. On the significance of Constantinos Cavafy's poem from which Coetzee draws his title, see Moses; Attwell; Penner; and Gallagher.

15. Many critics, including Neumann; Rich; Dovey; Moses; Gallagher; Penner; and Attwell have described Waiting for the Barbarians as an allegory. Dovey elaborates allegory via Lacan as "a mode implying the recognition that to speak is to speak as Other" (43). Stephen Slemon contends that postcolonial allegorical writing constitutes a challenge to the traditional relation between allegory and history. His argument, which coincides on a number of points with my own, is that "Coetzee's tactic in this novel is to portray imperial allegorical thinking in the thematic level of his novel and to juxtapose it with the allegorical mode in which the novel itself is written. The juxtaposition foregrounds the discontinuity between the two kinds of allegorical discourse, one based on imperial codes of recognition and the other on resistance to totalitarian systems" (163). Barnett assesses the work of various critics who read the novel as moral or political allegory. On allegory, see Whitman; de Man, "Rhetoric" and Allegories of Reading; Fletcher; Benjamin; Greenblatt; and Teskey.

16. Similarly, Quintillian notes that allegory is translated by Latin inversio—a term that captures both the relative and negative nature of foreignness. Medieval grammarians described allegory as alieniloquium, "other speaking."

17. Augustine's law of charity and the systematization of exegesis during the early Christian era are paradigmatic. See Whitman on insuring "the coherence and integrity of Christian doctrine" (78); and Teskey on "the ideological coherence of the medieval culture of the sign" (148).

18. The image of the banshee—a kind of fairy or imp that wails under the windows of a house where someone is going to die—marks both the tricky instability beneath the word's apparent solidity and the sense of foreboding associated with uncovering it. [End Page 251]

19. Of course, this is not to say that one cannot wager on a more or less correct meaning; in fact, it is precisely the act of reading an event, object, or word in multiple contexts that enables such a decision. It is to say, however, that the magistrate's interpretative activity is not a matter of recovering an original or proper context.

20. On the novel's thematization of indeterminacy, see Dovey, who argues for the subversive effects of "avoid[ing] fixation in a particular meaning" (52); and Attwell. Recognizing the significance of the magistrate's reading otherwise is not to be confused with a categorical endorsement of all of his activities or interpretations. Indeed, the magistrate's reading of the barbarian girl as sign arguably repeats the de-humanizing gestures of the empire, confirms Teskey's argument for the violence of allegory, and adumbrates apartheid's reading of Biko (see below). However, this position, I believe, needs further refinement: the magistrate does not read the girl according to a code (as apartheid does Biko); indeed it is precisely the absence of such a hermeneutic code that conditions the magistrate's obsessive exegesis. Further, I would argue that humans, their bodies, acts, and words do signify; it is neither possible nor "humanizing" to take them out of the realm of signification. What is most reprehensible about the magistrate's reading of the barbarian girl is, from my perspective, the fact that he reads only a fragment of her and does so within a singular, obsessive context (the empire's program of torture) and, further, that he largely disallows her from producing proper meaning.

21. Those injudicious reading practices are also a resistance to facile moral verdicts. When he attempts to elicit the sentiments of his torturer, for example, the magistrate explicitly distinguishes understanding from blaming: "Do not misunderstand me, I am not blaming you or accusing you, I am long past that. . . . I am only trying to understand. I am trying to understand the zone in which you live. I am trying to imagine how you breathe and eat and live from day to day" (126).

22. I am extending J. L. Austin's linguistic concept of the "performative," much as Judith Butler has in describing the construction of gender; this performativity should be conceived "not as a singular or deliberate 'act,' but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names" (Butler, 2). Dovey argues that Coetzee's "re-writings" resist precisely this kind of normative reiteration through a defamiliarizing dislocation, that they "involve a displacement of the ideological position available to the subject in language, rather than the passive repetitions involved in normative reading and writing" (59).

23. It should be evident from this elaboration that I use the term "nihilism" in the specific sense sketched by Nietzsche in The Will to Power. See Section 12, 12-14.

24. If we dwell a little longer in the culture of this text, it becomes disconcertingly evident that, although the novel itself indicts the suppression of linguistic foreignness as a primary technique for oppressing "literal" foreigners, it is [End Page 252] precisely for housing linguistic foreignness that Coetzee has been most consistently criticized. Gordimer, for example, disparages Coetzee's use of allegory as "a kind of opposing desire to hold himself clear of events and their daily, grubby, tragic, consequences" (3). Similarly, JanMohamed charges that Coetzee's "deliberate allegory epitomizes the dehistoricizing, desocializing tendency of colonialist fiction" and is a "studied refusal to accept historical responsibility" (92). Martin objects that an "alienation from itself, from its linguistic and historical constitution, marks the text of Waiting for the Barbarians at every level and prevents it from transcending itself" (20). Moses writes of the "troublesome political implications" that follow from Coetzee's "poststructural understanding of interpretation" (122); and Rich contends that "Coetzee's novel . . . indicates that literary postmodernism in a postcolonial context such as South Africa . . . is a moral dead end" (389). Identifying Coetzee's offense alternately as "allegory," "postmodernism" or "poststructuralism," this reprimand is also symptomatic of a much more diffuse suspicion of literary foreignness that is not uncommonly encountered in critical discourses committed to mediating cultural foreignness. This suspicion—which has put in conspicuous appearances in feminism, identity politics, cultural studies, and postcolonialism, for example—is evinced by a reliance on a strictly transparent and referential model of language, the assumption that a necessarily antagonistic relation obtains between textual and "real" foreignness, and a marked absence of "close reading"—shunned as if it carried the defiling taint of a critical community with which one would not want to be caught associating. For a reading of the "feeling stupid" of the novel's final line as "neither despair nor humiliation," see Eckstein, 198.

25. What or who constituted apartheid is by no means self-evident. I include in my use of the term not only the political program and system of laws imposed by the Afrikaner National Party (NP), but also the active and passive reiteration of practices, discourses, and attitudes that enabled and maintained its power. Apartheid is an Afrikaans word meaning "apartness." It was first used to designate political policy in the "Sauer report," a statement on the "racial problem" prepared for the Afrikaner Nationalist party in 1946. Building on existing discriminatory laws, apartheid began to be implemented as state policy after the Nationalist Party came to power in 1948. Hendrik Verwoerd, prime minister from 1958-1966, is largely responsible for transforming the concept of apartheid into a "drastic, systematic program of social engineering" (Thompson, History, 198). "At the heart of the apartheid system were four ideas," writes Thompson: "First, the population of South Africa comprised four 'racial groups'—White, Coloured, Indian, and African—each with its own inherent culture. Second, Whites, as the civilized race, were entitled to have absolute control over the state. Third, white interests should prevail over black interests, the state was not obliged to provide equal facilities for the subordinate races. Fourth, the white racial group formed a single nation with Afrikaans- and English-speaking components, while Africans belonged to several (eventually ten) distinct nations or potential nations—a [End Page 253] formula that made the white nation the largest in the country" (History, 190). Although apartheid as a political program has been abolished and its legal structure, since 1994, largely dismantled, many of its economic and social effects remain. Hence, I adopt a historical present tense that refers primarily to the period between 1948 and 1994, but that also shades into the literal present. On the history of the apartheid era, see Thompson, History; Sparks; Mermelstein; and Bernstein, No. 46. For a nuanced analysis of the material circumstances and discursive articulations that conditioned apartheid and its multiple transformations, see Norval. For a summary of apartheid laws, see Omond; Horrell; and McLachlan. On apartheid policies, see African National Congress, "A Special Mayibuye Supplement"; and Dugard. For a glossary of key terms of apartheid, see Bernstein, For Their Triumphs.

26. The Commonwealth Report is the result of an extended visit by seven senior Commonwealth politicians (the so-called "Eminent Persons Group") to South Africa in 1986, led by Malcolm Fraser of Australia and Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria. While the group succeeded in establishing a dialogue between the South African government and Nelson Mandela, it terminated its stay on May 19 when the South African Defense Force (SADF) attacked alleged ANC bases in Harare, Lukasa, and Gaborone.

27. Successively created through the Native Land Acts of 1913 and 1936, the Group Areas Act of 1949, and the Black Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970, the homelands (formerly referred to as "native reserves" or "bantustans") facilitate the migrant labor system in which blacks, who do not hold political rights outside of these areas, work as "foreign labor" within white South Africa, where they are not entitled to reside, hold citizenship, possess civil rights or, as Member of Parliament G. F. L. Forneman put it, "be burdened with superfluous appendages such as wives, children and dependents who could not provide service" (quoted in Bernstein, For Their Triumphs: 14). "The goal," declared Cabinet Minister Cornelius Mulder "is that eventually there will be no black South Africans" (quoted in Sparks, 136-37). Removals to these areas were carried out forcibly with armed police, bulldozers (which demolished blacks' homes in "white areas"), arrests and numerous forms of intimidation. In 1976, the government began declaring these areas "independent" and calling them "black states" (though they were unrecognized by any other nation): a process the South African government compared to decolonization and described as "creative withdrawal of the Whites from the Black territories" (Yearbook, 201). For a political analysis of the conception of homelands, see Norval, 142-51. On removals to and conditions in the "homelands," see the Surplus People Project Report; Horrell; and Bernstein, For Their Triumphs. In recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings, the ANC has indicted forced removals as one of apartheid's crimes against humanity.

28. This is to distinguish not only signifier (word) from signified (concept or mental image), but also signified from referent (a phenomenal object). I do not, however, mean to suggest the availability of an unmediated referent exterior to, [End Page 254] prior to, or distorted by discursive context. Nor are my distinctions between the figural and proper, the allegorical and the literal, meant to suggest a fixed or natural domain of the literal. Indeed this would be to erase precisely the genesis of literality that I am attempting to map and to subscribe to as normative that "proper meaning" I am attempting to critique. I am interested, rather, in investigating how the literal is constituted, what it includes and excludes, in tracing proper meaning as an effect of context and in examining how context regulates both the proper meaning of words and the perception of referents.

29. A history textbook puts the matter this way: "The established nationhood of the Whites has to be protected and maintained in that part of the country that has always been theirs. At the same time, the policy provides for the development of each separate Black nation to full autonomy. The focal point of this development is the Black States. These states are those parts of the country that originally belonged to the Blacks and still belong to them" (quoted in Dean, Hartmann, and Katzen, 77).

30. Even the most recalcitrant material details can, with some creative context management, be reconciled with the literal meaning of "homeland." For example, bits and pieces of unconnected land—Bophuthatswana contained nineteen fragments, some hundreds of miles apart; KwaZulu comprised twenty-nine major and forty-one minor fragments—can constitute a homeland if, as the Yearbook claims, "The fragmentary appearance of these areas is chiefly the result of tribal wars and succession disputes" and if "the Blacks settled in comparatively small areas because their migrations were tribal movements rather than major population shifts involving full-fledged nations" (204). For a detailed refutation of this position, see Cornevin, 121-26.

31. "[A] skillful attempt to divert attention from the domestic causes of black resistance in South Africa" (Thompson, History, 216), apartheid's rhetoric of communist threat was also insistently deployed by the South African delegate to the United Nations, Eric Louw, who argued before the General Assembly, for example, that "It is common knowledge that for the past five or six years there has been an infiltration into some of the emergent States of Africa of Communist agents of various kinds—commercial, technical, and also political" (Louw, 62), that "a number of the leaders of the African National Congress, which is a subversive organization and which largely contributed to the Sharpeville riots earlier this year, are well-known Communists, some of them having been trained in Russia" (63), and that "the aim of Communistic penetration on the continent of Africa appears to be to create conditions of unrest and later on chaos in the emergent African States and territories" (64).

32. It is this trajectory of correspondence that underlies what Fletcher calls the "dualism associated with allegory which implies the radical opposition of two independent mutually irreducible, mutually antagonistic substances" (222), as well as the personifying process that "treats real people in a formulaic way so that they become walking Ideas" (28); it is also presupposed in Fletcher's contention that allegory "does not accept the world of experience and the senses; it [End Page 255] thrives on their overthrow, replacing them with ideas" (322). It is not without significance that these assertions both depict the power of allegorical codes to eradicate foreignness and describe material circumstances in South Africa. Along similar lines, Teskey argues that "allegory [must] somehow capture the substantiality of beings and raise it to the conceptual plane. But for this to occur any integrity those beings may have must be negated. The negation of the integrity of the other, of the living, is the first moment of allegory's exertion of its power to seize and to tear" (18).

33. The press scandal in April 1978 brought to light the extent to which national news and information sources were surreptitiously funded and controlled by the Nationalist Party, exposing that the party had financed nearly 150 front organizations for pro-apartheid propaganda (see Laurence; and John Phelan). TRC hearings have confirmed the broad influence the Nationalist Party exercised over the tone and content of news, including its power to "plant" stories. Sparks notes that it is not only during the obligatory years of military service that white boys are infused with military doctrine, but that "the educational process itself has been militarized. Some 200,000 schoolboys are formed into school cadet detachments, where they are drilled and psychologically prepared for national service" (309). On South African textbooks, see Dean, Hartmann, and Katzen.

34. See, for example, the statements of Patrick McGluwa, William Tshimong, and Ian Rwaxa (Amnesty, 31-32).

35. Teskey argues for the role of allegory in maintaining such a context: "allegories do not just reflect ideological structures," he contends; "they engage us in the practice of ritual interpretation by which those structures are reproduced in bodies and expressed through the voice. As a substitute for genuine political speaking, allegory elicits the ritual repetition of an ideologically significant world" (132).

36. On September 12, 1977, black consciousness leader Stephen Biko died while in detention under Section 6 of the Terrorism Act. Biko had been central in establishing the South African Student Organization (SASO), the Black People's Convention (BPC), and numerous local programs in black communities. On Biko's life, work, thought and writing, see Biko; Arnold; Bernstein, No.46; Woods; Pityana et al. On September 13, Minister of Justice James T. Kruger issued a statement that read in part: "[Biko] was arrested in connection with activities related to the riots in Port Elizabeth, and inter alia for drafting and distributing pamphlets which incited arson and violence. He was detained at the Walmer Police Station in Port Elizabeth since September 5. Mr. Biko refused his meals and threatened a hunger strike. But he was, however, regularly supplied with meals and water which he refused to partake of. . . . After consultation with the District Surgeon it was decided to transfer Mr. Biko to Pretoria. He was taken to Pretoria the same night. On September 12, Mr. Biko was again examined and medically treated by a district surgeon in Pretoria. Mr. Biko died the same night" (quoted in Pollak, 7-8). Activists and journalists pressed for an inquest, which was ultimately [End Page 256] held between November 14 and 29, 1977. The inquest (which has less formal procedures than a trial) was presided over by a magistrate—Marthinus Prins—assisted by two assessors (who played an advisory role); Sidney Kentridge functioned as lead barrister for the Biko family and Retief van Rooyen as lead barrister for the security police. For legal opinions of the inquest, see Pollak and Napley, in Bernstein, No. 46, 137-47. At the inquest, State Pathologist J. Loubser testified that Biko had died of "extensive brain injury," that his injuries were "clearly indicative of severe traumatic brain contusions" originating from "a mechanical origin" (Woods, 328). Professor of Anatomical Pathology N. Proctor concurred. Witnesses at the inquest included six security police officers, Colonel P. J. Goosen, the physicians who attended Biko in detention (Drs. Lang and Tucker), and consultant specialist Dr. Hersch. The magistrate's final ruling at the inquest was that "the deceased was Bantu Stephen Biko, a black man aged thirty, that he died on September 12, and that the cause of death was brain injury which led to renal failure and other complications"; that "the head injuries were probably sustained on September 7 in a scuffle in the Security Police offices in Port Elizabeth"; and that "on the available evidence the death cannot be attributed to any act or omission amounting to a criminal offense on the part of any person" (quoted in Woods, 353-54). My analysis of the inquest is based on transcripts contained in the "Record of the Inquest into the Death of S. B. Biko, November 1977," in Biko Doctors Case Collection, Microfiche, 688-1119; Bernstein, No. 46; and Woods; the latter is a compilation of notes taken by Wendy Woods, Roger Omon of the Daily Dispatch, and Helen Zille of the Rand Daily Mail.

37. Both Gallagher and Attwell have previously noted this connection.

38. It perhaps warrants more explicit statement that the difference, as I see it, between apartheid's allegorical reading and the magistrate's is the difference between, on the one hand, making another foreign in order to establish one's own meaning as proper and, on the other hand, recognizing the foreignness in oneself and others as a way of allowing for differing meanings; between stabilizing meaning by a code—that is, eradicating the foreignness from language—and allowing the foreignness in language to speak; between concentrating solely on the trajectory of allegorical correspondence and insisting on the trajectory of divergence; and between the genesis amnesia characteristic of meaning commodities and a genealogical excavation that indicts those meanings.

39. It also entailed a confiscation of property: when arrested he "wanted to take his private possessions with him to the cell, but this was not permitted" (Woods, 234).

40. Under Section 6, "No person other than the Minister or an officer in the service of the state acting in the performance of his official duties, shall have access to any detainee, or shall be entitled to any official information relating to or obtained from any detainee" (quoted in Pollak, 4).

41. If a material referent for the name Biko was systematically erased from both public and private view, nearly anyone capable of making reference to [End Page 257] that referent was similarly disciplined: following Biko's death, the BPC, SASO, and Black Women's Federation were banned; BPC officials, including Malusi Mpumlwana, Thenjiwe Mtintso, and Kenny Rachidi were detained; journalists and activists pressing for an inquest, including Donald Woods, Percy Qoboza, Beyers Naude, Theo Kotze, David Russell, Cedric Mayson, and Brian Brown were banned, and their newspapers were summarily shut down.

42. Recontextualizing, Kentridge described Biko's symptoms appearing in a white schoolchild on holiday and asked Dr. Tucker whether he would have the child hospitalized. Tucker responded "I think that there are a certain—there is a certain difference in shall I say circumstance. . . . I would insist that the child go into hospital, yes" (Biko Doctors, 919).

43. However, a telex dated September 16 from Colonel Goosen to police headquarters makes it clear that he recognized that Mr. Biko was in a "semi coma" (Pollak, 143).

44. The doctors' treatment of Biko generated a long and widespread controversy in the medical community. The South African Medical and Dental Council established a committee to investigate the matter, which in April 1980 found "no prima facie evidence of improper or disgraceful conduct on the part of the practitioners" (Rayner and the Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility, 36). The committee's resolution was adopted by the Council the following June. Outraged members of the medical faculties of the Universities of Cape Town and the Witwatersrand took the case to the Medical Association of South Africa, a voluntary professional organization, which at first expressed its solidarity with the SAMDC but, subsequent to further pressure from members and negative international publicity, appointed an ad hoc committee that reviewed the available evidence and found that "Dr. Lang and Dr. Tucker acted in an improper and disgraceful manner" in that "1) They did not take a proper history either from the police or Mr. Biko. 2) Their physical examination was inadequate. 3) They ignored and mis-represented the opinion and advice given to them by Dr. Hersch and Dr. Keely. 4) They did not tell the police that Biko had unequivocal evidence of brain damage. 5) They falsified certificates. 6) They did not insist on hospitalisation. 7) They accepted that the interests of their patient were subordinated to those of the security police. 8) They exhibited callous disregard for Biko's comfort" (Biko Doctors, 8). No punitive action was, however, taken against the doctors, and a group of physicians took the case to the Supreme Court, which ultimately upheld the charges of the ad hoc committee, abrogated the resolutions adopted by the SAMDC, and ordered it to establish a disciplinary committee. This committee, meeting in 1985, issued a caution and reprimand to Dr. Lang and suspended Dr. Tucker's license for three months.

45. Dr. Lang admitted that the possibility of Biko having a head injury "was in the back of [his] mind," but as Kentridge pointed out, "It might have been at the back of your mind but it was not in the forefront of your affidavit" (Bernstein, No. 46, 77). This silence concerning Biko's injuries rested on a well-established [End Page 258] foundation of resistance to legally acknowledging torture; as Bernstein notes, "It was generally agreed that to complain about torture in the setting of the terrorism trial would inflame the prosecution and the judge. It was not in the best interests of the defendants, who were on trial for their lives, to assume this risk" (ibid., 133). While affidavits were ultimately necessitated by the imminence of an inquest, none of the twenty-eight affidavits made in connection with Biko's death mentioned him falling with his head against a wall or described any other scene of injury.

46. This insistence on certainty arguably extended to the judgment itself, which, as Sir David Napley (in his introduction to the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights report) has noted, offers no rationale but attempts to rest on its own self-evidence: "As a matter of judicial craftsmanship, the verdict is defective not so much because it is not persuasive as because it does not undertake to persuade. It merely declares a result" (Pollack, 26).

47. A method for detecting possible brain injury, testing the plantar reflex entails stroking the bottom of the foot, which should make the toes curl down (and not upward).

48. Dr. Gluckman, pathologist for the Biko family, stated of the results of the lumbar puncture: "This report has contradictions. The analysis reports show the spinal fluid to be colourless, and at the same time containing 1655 red cells. Spinal fluid containing this count could not possibly have been clear. Anything from 2-300 red cells is slightly turbid, and this increases as the number of red cells increases. It is not possible to have fluid containing over 1600 red cells, and for that fluid to be clear. One or the other is incorrect" (Bernstein, No. 46, 73). Dr. Hersch testified that he had "made it clear [to Goosen] that there were positive findings from the puncture" (ibid., 89).

49. I wish to stress that while my emphasis in this essay has been on apartheid's manipulation and repression of linguistic foreignness, that this focus is in no way a dismissal of the multiple and highly successful forms of organized resistance and everyday opposition that have been crucial to ending apartheid and conceiving a new South Africa. Indeed, it could be demonstrated that many of these forms of resistance, perhaps particularly those theorized and practiced by Biko, were synonymous with what I have been describing as venturing into the zone of error.