Reflecting on Science and Art as Dirge: READ Fellowship Project 2020

In September 2019, I travelled from South Africa to Switzerland to start my PhD at the University of Basel. I was frazzled, not just by the weight of the undertaking, but also because I had been out of a university environment for nearly five years and this was my first time living away from my home country. From Johannesburg to Abu Dhabi to Zurich and finally to Basel, each leg of the journey offered time to get into the zone and prepare for academia. But by the time I arrived, my mindscape was so messy that I gave up, avoiding all thought to protect feelings.

I had a day to settle in before The Basel Summer School in African Studies. The theme was The Value(s) of Science: The normative order of African Studies and I didn't understand any of the jargon, abstract normative orders went right over my head and while hearing other PhD candidates speak to their projects was cool, talking about my own was horrible, like pulling out my own teeth. The worst part was smiling throughout the ordeal, trying to drum up enthusiasm for the project I had proposed: a comparative study of climate discourse in South Africa and Nigeria. The problem wasn’t my project. I thought it was important and interesting then and still do now. With hindsight, I see that I was suffering from a pretty severe, if subconscious, cognitive dissonance.

Safe, silent Switzerland compared to the colourful chaos of South Africa is disorientating under normal circumstances, but I had left home in the wake of nationwide protest and memorial services for Uyinene “Nene” Mrwetyana, a 19-year-old student who was brutally raped and murdered at a post office in Cape Town on 24 August 2019. Every news outlet was focused on the twin crises of gender-based violence (GBV) and femicide ravaging South Africa, the only thing anyone was talking about as we collectively tried to process the trauma of what had happened to Uyinene, what happens every day to so many. Numbers can't articulate the continuous violent acts against bodies, to paraphrase Lindokuhle Nkosi. “How to speak about the continuous violent acts against women? There is no justice in statistics.⁰

Uyinene’s death sparked a movement, lighting up social media as women took to the streets, shouting #AmINext. But in Switzerland? Shouting? Forget it. Nobody does that. It was impossible to even talk about the spectacle of violence shaping South African society without the conversation devolving into a hollow expression of shock, stripped of context.

Similarly, talking about the climate crisis in the wake of the shared horror I had left at home felt just as empty. There were a bunch of climate strikes happening in Basel when I arrived in 2019, but they seemed like child’s play compared to the raison d’etre of the protests in South Africa. Thinking about designing a PhD project around environmental issues seemed so dumb when something as simple as picking up a package could get me killed. This was a debilitating despair, the curiosity-killing kind.

Arundhati Roy’s description of how various kinds of despair compete for primacy articulates well the tension between individual (research, in my case) interests and “the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation.”⁰ But try communicating in quotes to a new supervisor, or factoring literary coping mechanisms into funding applications and you will quickly see that.

“Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening.”⁰

The despair doubles in tandem with the almost-physical panic that is part and parcel of all climate research. So, I put my head down and did the things necessary to keep my head above water in the beginning stages of doctoral deep seas. But a hard, cauterized lump of nerve-endings remains, the same one that throbs sometimes, resentfully glowering every time something crazy happens. As if to say, nothing matters, nobody cares, why should I?

Fast forward a year of COVID-19 craziness (what Bim Adewunmi aptly termed “a crying year”⁰ and I travelled once more travelled from South Africa to Switzerland with protests on the brain. This time it was October 2020, and the chaos was in Nigeria as young people took to the streets to protest the rampant brutality of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS). Maybe I was better prepared, used to colleagues and friends relentlessly asking me if I was following the news. Maybe I was just distracted by this fellowship project. Maybe I was thinking differently about the value(s) of science. One thing is certain though: I followed the #EndSARS protests cocooned by art, and there was a small modicum of grace in that.

When Nigerian Armed Forces shot unarmed protesters at Lekki tollgate on 20 October, I was studying Zina Saro-Wiwa’s work, and her style of mapping emotional landscapes through video kept me company while I worked through the trauma of the news. I kept a close eye on my own emotional landscape, aided by Damilola Agbalajobi explaining why these protests are different⁰ and Kovie Biakola contextualizing the Lekki massacre in Nigeria’s history of resistance and revolution⁰. I thought of Saro-Wiwa’s way of ”while rolling my eyes at the celebrity performativity highlighted by Adesuwa Aighewi.”⁰ while rolling my eyes at the celebrity performativity highlighted by Adesuwa Aighewi⁰.

Later, I read Nomusa Makhubu writing about how the concept of entanglement is embedded in Saro-Wiwa’s work, reflecting the myriad, intricate relations and interlaced systems of production, reproduction and artistic creation⁰. Devouring Saro-Wiwa and Makhubu at the same time, I was grateful for art as knowledge production and critical writing as therapy. I realised then what the value of science can be for me: a toolkit for processing despair. But this requires asking some difficult questions about what values, what science, what ways of knowing are both artful and useful?

Amy Sall described the massacre and human rights violations happening across Africa as consequences of ‘phantom colonialism’⁰ which reminds me of Yvonne A. Owuor’s searing keynote address at the International Conference: Colonialism as Shared History. Past, Present, Future, 7–9 October 2020, Berlin. In her words, the address is not a speech so much as “a dirge, or an introit for a requiem, or a literary autopsy.” She lambasted the idea of a shared history, reminding instead that the forced entry of Europe into other worlds could never be anything but a horror story.

“Shared colonialism? Which of the thresholds of our discontent do we cross into first? Epistemic, Economic, Theological, Scientific, Conceptual, Ontological, Philosophical, Historical, Linguistic, Cultural, Militaristic, Technological, Biological, Civilizational, Imaginational, Aesthetic, Teleological, Psychological, Typological, Natural? Pathological?”⁰

Online keynote address given at the International Conference: Colonialism as Shared History. Past, Present, Future, 7–9 October 2020, Berlin. Available here: https://codesria.org/spip.php?article3110

All of those words are worlds, sites of curation, knowledge production, pain and pleasure. Like art and like science, they require philosophies and grammars to navigate. But they also need emotional distance, a balancing act of caring-enough-to-be-curious and not-caring-too-much. Addressing colonialism, the starting point of any climate crisis conversation, Yvonne A. Owuor says:

“Our spirits need distance to process the effect of the four centuries of your hungry-angry frenzy. We have our own, longstanding appointment with grief; the ghosts in and of our history will not let us rest. It is time for us to attend to them. We have a date with our history: we must learn how earth’s wealthiest continent, cradle and crucible of human knowledge and trade allowed itself to be bamboozled, bullied, weakened, possessed and disordered”⁰

For me, this project has been and continues to be a date with both discontent and despair. Writing through art towards climate, hoping that the value(s) of science can be a balm in the same way that art can be both restorative and generative. Binwe Adebayo said “the whole continent feels like one big inoperable wound.”⁰ It is also a grave. A crime scene. A living laboratory. The mental gymnastics required to think about environmental degradation and climate variability are not child’s play, and imagining alternatives is difficult and depressing when so much is happening all the time, from GBV to police brutality. So, following Owuor, this project has also become a dirge: “a site and space of, among other things, argument, audit and debate… a site of witness.”⁰ This project has been great for tracking my own knowledge production processes, but also for creating a cartography of care: from the artists that have cradled me when I was too stressed to care, the curators who guided how I think about art, the editors shuffling content into form and the writers who have articulated incomprehensible thoughts and feelings.