Apartheid and the unconscious: an introduction

Abstract

Responding to his own question, Coetzee reads the texts of sociologist and Broederbond intellectual, Geoffrey Cronjé. Drawing on psychoanalysis, Coetzee diagnoses the version of apartheid Cronjé set out during the period between 1945 and 1948 as an obsessional neurotic “counterattack upon desire” (18). What so disturbed Cronjé, Coetzee argues, was the “blunting [afstomping]” of psychological resistances to “race-mixing” (18). But Cronjé’s texts, as Coetzee reads them, also betray a psychic investment in precisely “the dissolution of difference” against which he set himself, a “fascination” with “the mixed” (21–22). Railing against miscegenation, it was always on Cronjé’s mind. Having left an impression on official and actual apartheid, Cronjé’s apartheid was also an embarrassment for Afrikaner nationalists, during Cronjé’s lifetime but especially for later generations. As such, historians, Coetzee notes, had tended to downplay the significance of Cronjé’s texts, seeing them as an extreme outworking of apartheid on paper, a draft that would soon be revised, if not discarded and forgotten. But such a framing, Coetzee suggests, ignores the relation between the form of Cronjé’s prose, in which there takes place an elaborate, ritualised, repetitive – that is to say, symptomatic – forced removal of racialised objects of desire, and apartheid spatial planning. Apartheid’s discourse, Coetzee writes, “demanded black bodies in all their physicality,” but it also “made iron laws to banish them from sight” (2). This “continual hide-and-seek with desire” (11) cannot, of course, explain everything about apartheid, but the ambivalent, unconscious processes Coetzee reads into Cronjé’s texts are certainly discernible in apartheid’s later ideologues, who were no less concerned about “whites” and “nonwhites” being “compelled to mingle,” and no less bent on the neutralisation of desire, on establishing desexualised “neighbourliness,” “the ordinary friendship of everyday life” (Verwoerd 1966, 493).