Sabelo Mcinziba and Dr. Serawit Debele
Media records
Abstract
- Abstract
- In this episode of the Cluster Conversations, artist fellow Sabelo Mcinziba talks with his host Dr. Serawit Debele about his residency and the exhibition “With his hands” that he has curated in Bayreuth during his stay. The exhibition tells people’s life stories through the medium of hands as narrative portals. He also shares how his ideas about being “human” flowed into his curatorial work.
People & roles
Origins & context
- Title
- Sabelo Mcinziba and Dr. Serawit Debele
- Language
- English
- Podcast series
-
Cluster Conversations
- Date
- July 19, 2024
Rights & access
- Extent
- 33 minutes, 52 seconds
Identifiers & sources
Further details
- Episode number
- 24
Full text
- Transcript
-
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Speaker 1: Cluster Conversations, a podcast by Africa Multiple.
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Speaker 1: Okay, hello everyone. Thanks for tuning into the latest episode of our Cluster Conversation. My name is Sarah Witte Debelé. This morning, I'm going to be in conversation with my friend and colleague Sabelo Mncube from South Africa, Cape Town, who is here at the Bayreuth Academy as an artist in residence, and I have the pleasure of serving as his host. And we will begin by introducing Sabelo to you, and I'm going to invite him to do that because I wouldn't know where to start if I tried that. So Sabelo, over to you.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much. I will start at the beginning. I am Sabelo Mncube from Gaka Street in Zolethembu, Worcester, in the Western Cape in South Africa. I am in Bayreuth to curate an art exhibition called With These Hands. And it's an exhibition that was really started when I listened to Sarah Witte's wonderful presentation at the University of Cape Town a couple of years ago on revolutionary mothering. And I was curious to explore this question further and how mothering and hands is so connected, but beyond mothering as well, that hands are doing a lot of other things. And I was curious to find out how people in different walks of life use their hands in their everyday to articulate their humanity. And so that's how this exhibition idea started. And I'm grateful to the University of Bayreuth for making it a reality for me. So it's wonderful to be here. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Thanks. Yeah, this is really exciting and I'm flattered obviously. But so among other things, I know you think deeply about the question of the human, the question of the human in relation to land, the question of the human in relation to race and blackness, and the question of the human in relation to contemporary political developments. And so I wanted you to reflect on how the, you know, the exhibition and beyond that, the work that you do beyond the exhibition on hands helps you think about these issues that are really, really important for your intellectual exercise, for your activism, for artistic practices. So if you could just link that a bit.
Speaker 2: Yes, thank you for that question. So the question of the human is the most central question that I am preoccupied with. And it really pertains to how human beings for a long part of our time here on earth have been trying to find ways of being human. And we have done this usually at the expense of other human beings, usually at the dehumanization of other human beings. And so at the heart of the question of the human is obviously the big legacy of dehumanization that we have faced over the last several centuries. And this takes a racial form in the most pronounced sense, but it also takes a gendered form. And we're increasingly aware that it takes several other forms of oppression, class and so on and so forth. And in all of these dehumanization practices, what people do with their hands is right at the heart of it. Whether it is presidents or chancellors of nations signing certain decrees or treaties that then expel other people from their lands, whether it's warring on other nations, these are usually performed through the medium of hands. Yes, speech is a part of it, but it's usually with voting by hands or signing on certain papers where you authorize certain things to happen. And it was
Speaker 1: through these actions that people take with their hands that we can see very clearly the practices of dehumanization. My interest of course ultimately is the question of rehumanization which would obviously have to work through this difficult terrain of being dehumanized. And of course the other people on the other side would have been doing their dehumanization and in both of these instances we learn that none of us really come out as human in the aftermath. The ones who do the subjugation produce subhumans but they don't become humans by that same token. They become something akin to gods or superhumans so to speak. So the terrain of humanity is still vacant. It's still empty. We still haven't figured out exactly what it means to be human and it's something that we have to do in concert with one another. And one of the things that this means is that the group of people who've been submerged to the level of the subhuman need to be elevated to the level of the human and the people who have godified themselves so to speak needs to come down to the level of the human. And again the medium of hands is an important one in doing this work. So this is how I come to this question of hands and it's at a grand scale as I have mentioned but it is also at a micro scale where everyday people are engaged in everyday exercises that are trying to humanize themselves and trying to assert their humanity in very important ways using their hands.
Speaker 2: Mhm. No thank you very much. You know you're making me think about so many things and so I'm going to skip the the question I had in mind and come to another question or perhaps a couple of them. You speak of the divide right so the the godified and the subhumanized and you're trying to imagine a space in which we can all become humans. Those on the hierarchy of the the the the godified ones should come down and the dehumanized or the subjugated should come up and then we should meet somewhere. And so again coming back to hands and the work that hands do. To how do you imagine for example through the stories that hands tell or it could be in any other way but that you know that kind of involves hands and the works they do. How do you imagine we kind of transcend this divide and arrive at that middle point of humanity. How do we work together. Can you imagine a space where we can meet and work towards a shared humanity. One coming down from their ladder and the other one going up and you know beyond and outside of that dichotomy or divide. If if you see what I mean.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. So it's clear to me but it is also clear that it will not happen without friction. It will not happen without tension. And one hopes that it can be a productive tension and not one that collapses us onto and we fall on the wayside. We are necessarily going to have clashes. It's not easy to think of yourself as a god and live in the world as a god and suddenly you're confronted with being terrible and human and fallible like everybody else. It's not an easy adjustment to make. It's also not an easy adjustment to be submerged for so long and to be ridden with self-doubt, inferiority and so on. And you suddenly have to now assert yourself on an equal plane of humanity. None of these are easy and they will both be ridden with frictions. And we see some of those frictions already. A lot of what we do when we do justice work for gender, justice work for class, race is that tension is
Speaker 1: what holds the entire terrain. So it's not an easy one. It's going to be ridden with friction. There are ways of moving the wheel certain steps forward. But I also think that it's important to be humble and know what one generation can possibly achieve and what is then left for future generations which we like to think of as the beautiful ones. But we also know that we can't be overtly optimistic about the future without doing the necessary work in the present to somewhat guarantee that future. So our hands are very important in what we do every day to ensure that we don't those of us who are in on the patriarchal hierarchy for instance, that we are aware of what we use our hands for. And that we interrogate ourselves at a deep intra and interpersonal level to check one another. And people who have class privilege and racial privilege will have to do the same as well. So the work begins with us literally controlling what it is that we do within the realm of our embodiment and not infringing on other people's bodies whether we think that they don't appear in ways that we don't like and so on and so forth. We need to be able to humble ourselves and know that we cannot and should not even be involved in trying to control how other people's bodies show up and how other people's bodies express their notion of freedom. So I think at the first instance it's it almost is a Confucian way of it's like a double combination between the Confucian rule of do not do harm unto others and the golden rule of do unto others as you would like for you to be done unto you. But the Confucian one is probably safer because when you when you don't do you have you stand less risk of doing harm. And we've done a lot of harm with each other with these hands and we continue to do so as well. So the challenge is still here. It is a present one, but it is its intention is futuristic because it took centuries to get here and it'll take centuries to undo it. But what we do in the present is so important for that future. So I do see a way out and I think with more of us bringing our heads, our hearts and our hands together, we can do more to get closer to a more humane world where we bring down the godified and lift up the subhumanized.
Speaker 2: Right. Thank you very much. Um, I'll come back to the to the to the friction uh that you kind of hinted at uh in you know answering in answering my question. But before that, I still want to stay with hands because um this is also like very interesting to me. I I mean uh I think the connection between you and me was like one of the reasons was so so easy was because we started by talking about hands and I told you the story and the history of of hands, my mother's hands and what that meant to me to observe that and how much I miss it. And and for some reason it's strange, many people pay attention to hands and how they evolve and what kind of story they tell. And so that's like our point of con connection among many others of course. And so I want to still come back to that to that question of hands in them as storytellers in some ways. And um I also know you have collected so many pictures um as part of your exhibition and um collected so many pictures that tell stories. Um and you know pictures of uh people from different classes and genders and races. What is uh like from at least from the pictures you so far have, what is like the outstanding story that you find really really striking that you know that that you'd like to share with us?
Speaker 1: That's a trick question.
Speaker 2: You have to deal with it.
Speaker 1: Um, I connected with every single one of these stories through these interviews. And as you said, they come from all...
Speaker 1: different walks of life, and all of them have a particular meaning to me. There were some stories through these hands that were challenging certain gender norms, which I particularly enjoyed. There were also some who were in a way reifying gender norms in the name of keeping family traditions and sort of keeping the family heritage through certain rituals and performances, food cultures, which are all performed through hands. I also found those to be quite appealing. One of the things that I found most surprising perhaps would is the element of caregiving insofar as men are concerned, particularly cis het men. This I found to be most surprising, especially in the African continent where a lot of the stereotypes are that African men make children with women and then they look at the children and provide for them and that's it.
Speaker 2: They give them away when they start crying.
Speaker 1: Correct, correct, correct. But this, this, these interviews really revealed a different narrative that I thought was incredibly revealing. So, these men that I was interviewing, they are the ones that brought up this information. I didn't dig for it. I didn't ask a specific question to say, do you take care of your children? The only question that I asked for these interviews really is what is it that you have done with your hands? And people take a genealogical account of what they remember their hands doing from as early as childhood all the way up to adulthood. And as they tell their life story through the medium of hands, this care work shows up from the men. And this I found to be most surprising because as I said, the, the gendered stereotypes. So I appreciated that and I'm hoping that it will help me to open up more conversations about decolonising African masculinities, which is another area that I have taken interest in. And so I also wanted to speak about what our hands do as something that we are consciously engaged in as African men, as a way to go back to the second question of really knowing when to check ourselves, when to retrieve from overreach, but also how to use hands in a curative manner, in a manner that goes not only for moving away from the overreach but undoing some of the previous harm that had historically been done. So I've been very, really surprised by this particular element in the interviews. But all of them have been incredibly striking. Even here in Germany, the interviews that I've done here, there is an incredible universality that hands perform that connects humans from everywhere. And this is why I wanted to do twenty five photographs and twenty five interviews in South Africa and five photographs and five interviews in Germany and bring these into conversation at the exhibition and also in the interviews to see what is being generated here. And care is really something that a lot of people do and the intimacy of hands is something that people are aware of all the time. And this is also what connected us through Hortens Spiller's work on intimacy and touch. You see it at work through hands and it's something that I want to explore more with more interviews that I do and more sets of hands that we're able to get for future exhibitions. So I think the gendered element for me is one of the things that was surprising.
Speaker 2: Right. Um, I, I guess what you said now connects to perhaps the next question that I wanted to raise about the friction and about the politics of knowledge production because you're also touching upon what unnuanced knowledge production or research does to representation, for example, because...
Speaker 1: precisely because of what you say, the assumption is that African men just, you know, provide and do this and that and have nothing to do with care work, for example, and we don't really ask a follow-up question because it seems to be a given. And that's linked to how knowledge has been produced over the years. And so you are inviting us in some ways to also like step back and rethink African masculinities, for example, right? And you all—I mean, the other thing is, uh, you—you know, you mentioned Spillers, and I always find find it really curious the way in which you kind of cut across disciplinary boundaries, geographical boundaries as well. Like you are in one minute working with thinking with Harri Garuba and then another you're with Heidi Hartmann or Spillers or Christina Sharpe. And so—and these are usually frowned upon kind of activities because for many people, in particular within the African Studies circle, Black studies is a thing of its own and African studies is a thing of its own. And you seem to trespass that boundary in so many many ways and really impressively. Um, and so this brings me to the to the to the question of knowledge production and how you see yourself, how you see your work across disciplines, across geographies, and how you do that and why you think it's important we do it that way and um, what outcome of that kind of engagement is. If you could say just a few words about that, I think um, just I am many people who are listening to us would be interested to to to hear.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you for that. So, as we said in the introduction, my focus is on the question of the human, not on the discipline of the human, but on the question of the human. And this choice of words is deliberate because questions are open-ended. And when one deals with questions, one has to be faithful to the question. And being faithful to the question in my intellectual practice means being able to follow the question wherever the question may lead you. So if the question that you're dealing with sends you to this one discipline, you will go to that discipline. But if going further with this question necessitates that you go to another discipline, then you follow the question faithfully and so on and so forth. Usually when we work within our disciplinary bounds, we deal with a question through the confines of the discipline and we stop where the discipline stops. So we then make the point or we perform the point of Michel Foucault's articulation that disciplines discipline. That's what they do. And I'm not trying to discipline knowledge. I think for me, knowledge is vast. Knowledge is wide. We cannot fully capture or seize it and we shouldn't try to. So one needs to throw themselves into the sea of knowledge and find ways of maneuvering and navigating around that. And leading with questions and being faithful to questions is the way that I've been able to do it for many years now. And that's why I find it easier now to move across these disciplines because I'm being faithful to the question and following the question wherever it leads me. So literary studies, yes. Feminist scholarship, yes. Black studies, yes. Uh, music, yes. Performance, yes. There's nothing architecture. There's nothing that I will stop at as long as the question is pushing there. And the question of the human, I would like to believe is a question that we are all invariably dealing with whether we are aware of it or not. And so what I try to do then is not only a critical exercise to knowledge but also a meta-critical exercise where you're able to in a way stand above your own self in what it is that you're studying and what it is that we are engaged in and then be able to zoom in. From there, you're able to navigate the maze a little better. So that's how I think of the approach to knowledge and I deliberately try to move away from disciplines.
Speaker 1: I think I'm going to quote, uh, I'm I'm going to use faithful to the question for uh for the times to come. I think I like that and because usually the demand is um for us to be loyal or faithful to a discipline. I am an anthropologist and I stay in my lane. Um and so I think the idea of being faithful to to the question seems to be much more important from you know the way you you are reflecting now. And again staying with um the idea of being faithful to the question maybe this is my final question. Um I also want to come to another related issue which is um academia and activism because you also trespass that, right? Um you you are not so loyal to disciplines but you also are not so loyal to uh one of the two. You're not an activist, you're not an academic only or you know and that is another thing that's also um looked at very very carefully. Many people want us to take distance from from that kind of engagement. Um and for some I know it's not even a luxury to choose between this and um stay in this one and leave the other one. And so what do you think about about that and what is your impression for example, um having spent some months in in Europe in in in this space, um what is your impression, what is your takeaway from the work we do and how we do it and what is what is your addition for example in terms of trying to bridge this gap between academia and um and activism and how do you feel about that?
Speaker 2: So I'll relate it to the last question and embark from a different vantage point and it is this. We are working towards rehumanization, as I said initially. And working for rehumanization is working against dehumanization. And the grandest event in my estimation that happened over these years has been colonialism. It has shaped our world so much so that we can't even talk about Africa without talking about pre-colonial, colonial or post-colonial Africa. It is so central to our identity as a continent that it's really difficult to move away from it and we shouldn't because it is the most central event that took place and into our subject formation over the last few centuries. And with colonialism, you're dealing with a phenomenon here which is incredibly transdisciplinary. Colonialism wasn't there only to attack people's languages. It wasn't there only to attack food. It wasn't there only to attack religion and whatever have you. It went, it came for everything. So it's very odd to me that when we try to fight against colonialism, when we try to do decolonial work, we then lock ourselves in pockets that say I am doing this and I am not doing the other because I am a this. This for me strikes me as odd because the work of colonialism in itself, as I said, was total in its nature. So my hope is that we also move to thinking about our work and doing it in a way that understands the importance of this totality because the question of the human is bound to an entire totality. So even when I work as doing something right now, it's what I'm doing right now. It's not an identity that is overdetermining. So today I'm doing an art exhibition and through this art exhibition I would come to Bayreuth as an artist and I am here with the cap of being an artist. And I step out of Bayreuth and I go somewhere else and I'm a community activist working in taverns or shebeens to talk to men about behavior, behavioral change. And I walk out of that and I go home and I'm a son and I have to do certain duties there. And I think for me this...
Speaker 1: way of thinking and practice is more representative of what it means to be human. And my hope is that even as we do our work in scholarship or in activism or anywhere really, we need to be aware of this multifaceted nature that we all possess first at the level of the human, but also at the level of the structures that we are dealing with. The affront to our humanity comes from so many different angles that it's important to deal with all of these different angles. And of course we're limited to the extent to which we can stretch ourselves to all of them. And so we end up working in respective pockets. But even if we end up doing so, we should do so in a way that is intentionally connected to other areas of work and how all of these then work towards a larger totality that is working towards undoing the effects of colonialism, which is truly the work of decolonization, even as though these days we've lost decolonization in a way because it's become a catchphrase. But for me, decolonizing really means undoing colonialism. And undoing colonialism cuts across so many different disciplines. It cuts across so many different facets of life. So this approach is extremely important to me. And queering our relations with everything that we have been associated to deal with in straightjackets is something that is absolutely fundamental. So I have been here and of course I come to the part of the world where these kinds of compartmentalized notions of existence are so strong. But I also think that even in these parts of the world, there are realizations of the dangers of living in this way. And I think that's why this institution is also now figuring out what it means to reconfigure doing African studies. Because these ways in which we've been doing it is clearly not taking us towards this goal of humanity. So this refiguring is very important and the reconfiguration is very important and it's going to require a lot of cross-pollination. It's going to require a lot of disciplinary breakdowns of the walls. It's going to require a lot of queering up. And that's something a lot of people are uncomfortable with because of these socializations that we come from. So for me, I'm hoping that through this exhibition of these hands, we will be able to tackle some of these questions or at least open ourselves up to the invitations that this exhibition calls us to. And my hope, as I said, is to do more interviews and to have more hands in order to complicate the picture while at the same time finding the common thread of what connects us all as humanity from across the world. Thank you.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much. I think you have really wrapped it up very well. There isn't much else for me to say other than inviting our listeners to the Hands Exhibition happening in September and oh sorry, my apologies, in October. And thank you also very much for listening in today. And yeah, till next time. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
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