Drowning migrants, apartheid, circadian tokens, and the apartheid/holocaust distinction.
A week or so ago, on June 15, 2023, hundreds of migrants, most of them from Pakistan, were accosted on an overloaded boat by the Greek coastguard. Hundreds drowned. What does it all mean? What does it not mean? This was not the first such mass drowning in the Mediterranean. It will not be the last. There are drownings of South Americans in the Rio Grande (who can forget Salvadoran Oscar Alberto Martinez and his 23-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria?), and drownings of Zimbabweans in the crocodile-ready Limpopo. Approaching these questions inductively and forensically will show that all of this is apartheid at work. The issue begins and ends with the dompas. This is, again, a subject that calls for Apartheid Studies.
To do Apartheid Studies (AS) properly, we must of course study the dompas carefully, thoroughly, systematically, and with nuance. There is, to my mind, just no other way to do it. We must study how the dompas “works”, its workflow, algorithms, and operating principles, and the whole scope of its operating system.
So, the dompas never destroys the human in an apocalypse, an Armageddon, or a holocaust. This, in a sense, is the qualitative difference between Apartheid Studies and, say, Holocaust Studies. Apartheid, unlike the concept of a holocaust which is designed around a timetable about how quickly and how long victims can be sent to their deaths, rather destroys differently. The differences in destruction matter. Apartheid destroys by dompas. That is, the dompas destroys by slow intensity. Whereas in the military they like to speak of low intensity warfare, apartheid’s intensity is always high – yet it is slow, like every queue is slow. The notion of a slow intensity might seem a paradox, but it is not. Anyone who has ever queued for a dompas sees the problem clearly immediately.
So, the dompas destroys by slow intensity by design, by daily erosion and attrition, through tortuous constant daily “small” costs that extort the human, contort his or her reflexes, hollow out circadian rhythms, and drain the well of human be-ing, leaving, prominently exposed, the freshest forms and acts of human un-being ever seen. The clearest example of human un-being, of course, is how poor people fight other poor people. There are countless examples – in the media, in the courts, and in anecdotes – of poor people hurting, even killing, each other, for a plate of food, a cup of beer, some scrap metal, or a dollar or twenty-one cents. Scholarly examples of human un-being are the common indicators beloved by UN and other institutions, such as the poverty line, the bread line, the poverty datum line, and a dollar a day. I use the notion of human un-being because even the worst criminals and killers remain human beings. The human is an intransitive, unmoving concept.
Anyhow, slow intensity attrition and erosion by design means that the victims of apartheid are routinely located far outside the radius of the Pass Office (cf. Mboti 2023a). Notably, the dompas’ catchment area is not a geographical district but, rather, located in the district of the pocket, the wallet, the handbag, the shuffle of feet in a public transport queue or in the queue for jobs, the commonest contents of regular pots and pans, the cost of having each meal, the till slip, and daily dry draining and vacuum cleansing by constant bills of revenues, surpluses, and savings. In Apartheid Studies: A Manifesto, I refer to this strangely everyday phenomenon as distributed eugenics. Hence, the catchment analysis of apartheid is best done by re-districting whatever we have been told and have thought about how things are the way they are in the world.
One implication of re-districted analysis is that Apartheid Studies is best done forensically and inductively, at household level and at the level of circadian rhythms. A dompas’ catchment area is, thus, the circadian district where an oppressed person’s household shortages are coming from. A circadian district is basically the sum of things that a person typically does in each 12-to-26-hour circadian window (see Mboti 2023c). Think, if you can, of all the threads, networks, and concentrations of dompas-things that position themselves at all the watersheds of your life, sucking, leeching, and draining out all sense of a beginning for your life. What life is this that never begins? A fair question has always been: tiri kuendepi? That is, where are we going? But, also, how are we going where we think we are going? The careful study of the dompas answers all these questions.
Circadian windows are defined, simply, by the costs, routines, patterns, distances, travel times, mobility patterns, anxieties, aspirations, and socio-economic arrangements that drive away a person’s sleep in a 12-to-26-hour temporality (for the calculation of the circadian window, see the discussion of the three circadian tokens mamuka sei, maswera sei, and makadii in Mboti 2023c). Circadian windows allow us to analyse social life not only in a variety of methods and ways but also in a fundamentally new, and startlingly beautiful, scope. Circadian windows and districts, including the dzimba-matenga tokens (cf. Mboti 2023c), are, now, the best means to analyse people’s Rates of Oppression. Essentially, circadian tokens show a person (but also, a household) where his or her shortages come from and how much sleep he or she loses as a result, while indicating the level of harm that a person is prepared to put up with.
Circadian windows are such a powerful method of analysis because they paint a startlingly exhaustive picture of the coverage of harm and the overall pull of the Pass Office (that is, household expenses), making it extremely easy to “compare” different Rates of Oppression (that is, Verwoerdian good neighbourliness), extrapolate how much, how far, and how long oppressed people can live with harm and live in harm’s way, and how saturated with harm our communities are. We will be able to use circadian windows to determine how much, how far, and how long people live with harm and live in harm’s way. It is circadian windows that determine how many people die from preventable harms, for instance, and how much the deaths mock what it means to be human, whether it is Zimbabweans drowning (or being eaten by crocodiles) in the Limpopo River whilst attempting to cross to South Africa, or children dying in shack fires in South African informal settlements, or the Africans drowning in the Mediterranean attempting to cross to Europe, or the South Americans crossing the Rio Grande, or the Union Carbide Bhopal disaster of 1984, or the Coalbrook Disaster of 1960, and so on.
That is, just as my High School geography notes at Cheziya High School said that a catchment area collects rainfall, bounded by topography of water shedding hills, so the dompas collects and concentrates all our commonest wants, desires, anxieties, aspirations, austerities, and shortages, bounded by circadian rhythms. Through these concentrations it drains away our lives. As I have shown in some detail (cf. Mboti 2023a; Mboti 2023b; Mboti 2023c), how our lives drain away is a highly differentiated business. The drainage basin of global injustice is the same, but our Rates of Oppression are different. These rates, like currency exchange rates, are always on the move, and always in flux, depending on how much we are caught in the rainfall, to twist Achebe’s phrase a little. So, even though the poor die every second, but not all the poor die every second. Rather, suffering is queued, like digit strings. This queued-ness of suffering is at the heart of the study of the persistence of harm, injustice, and oppression in our communities. It is impossible to understand how harm persists at scale in human society if one does not carefully study the dompas, circadian rhythms, Rates of Oppression, and queues.
REFERENCES
Mboti, N. (2023a). Apartheid Studies: A Manifesto, Vol. 1. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Mboti, N. (2023b). Introducing Apartheid Studies: A new forensic-inductive philosophy for abolishing harm. Filosofie & Praktijk, 44(1), 58-73.
Mboti, N. (2023c). The Rate of Oppression (ROp): The Apartheid Studies Approach to the Study of Harm, in: Chitando, E. and Mlambo, O. (eds.) Palgrave Handbook of Violence in Africa. London: Palgrave.