PALIMPSETS IN PONTE CITY
Palimpsests in Ponte City
Chapter 4
Beginning in 2008, South African artist Mikhael Subotzky and British artist Patrick Waterhouse began visiting Ponte to document the “regeneration” of Ponte during and after Investagain’s failed attempts to gentrify the building in 2007.
Their photographs and the 800 personal objects they collected became part of a travelling art exhibition and book publication called Ponte City (2014). This unique art archive is a prime example of a capacious set of objects with boundaries that extend well beyond what is held in one’s hand. Like opening a board game, the cover of the lid bears the image of an architectural sketch of Ponte. Inside is this large clothbound book. Underneath it, a smaller rectangular hole houses 17 smaller booklets. The first booklet contains photocopies of newspaper articles snipped, magnified and reconfigured on each page. These are meant to be a newspaper archive of Ponte starting from its construction, completion and cycles of reinvention.
After the title page, this is followed by a guide which displays all 17 booklets like a photographic contact sheet ordered by Roman numerals. These are followed by an introductory essay written by South African writer Ivan Vladislavic. Portraits of residents were taken from inside one of Ponte’s defunct lifts. Each of the subjects direct their gaze at the camera. The anonymous residents present and absent in the photographs are just as integral to the work as are the personal artefacts they contribute. Like a jigsaw puzzle, a two-page spread with a cut-out image disrupts the centre of the second page. This provides a clue for which small booklet belongs to it. This is placed over the cutout and the front cover of the booklet completes the continuous image of the two-page spread.
Subotzky and Waterhouse spent six years at Ponte taking photographs of every door, window and television screen. The two artists explored the abandoned flats which were scheduled for overhaul before contractors gutted and discarded the materials inside them. Not only did they find upturned furniture, unfinished light fixtures and broken kitchen cupboards, but also used consumer products like film negatives, diaries, school notebooks, religious pamphlets and tape cassettes. Some of the most memorable objects in the archive are those found in flat 3607, which were occupied by two Congolese cousins with refugee status in South Africa: Jerome Matondo Kabangu and Promise Ilunga Kinkela. The events of the Second Congo War drove them to flee their home country, and the two men lived in Ponte until they were evicted in mid-2007.
There are no records that detail why the two cousins were evicted, nor was there a follow-up investigation to determine whether these young men stayed in South Africa or left.
Bus ticket
Visa rejection letter
Personal photograph
There was, however, an eviction notice issued by Investagain, a visa rejection letter from the Australian Embassy, a bus ticket, some personal photographs and an old African Union poster that listed Joseph Kabila as president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). If personal possessions are extensions of the self, the objects speak to us even when their owners cannot.
When asked why they decided to include found objects in their art book and exhibition, artist Mikhael Subotzky replied: ‘We found that the rubbish really spoke to the ghosts of the presence of people who weren’t there anymore’. In Ghostly Matters, sociologist Avery Gordon argues that haunting is a method of social research. ‘To study social life, one must confront the ghostly aspects of it’. These material objects evidence the lives of non-white residents marked by the stigmatising label of “rubbish”. But as the seTswana proverb goes, motho ga a latlhwe. You cannot throw a person away. Or as Elizabeth Spelman suggests, ‘We can get rid of our trash, but it doesn’t quite get rid of us’.
Visa Application Forms
In the Canadian visa forms, applicants must explain their reason for leaving their home country. Only a few blank lines are given to provide an answer. It was as if Kabangu saw the limited lines allotted and could not imagine how it could be enough space to tell his story. He began to practise writing it out on one copy, then another and another. He was forced to recall painful memories, to ponder at what level of detail to describe these incidents, and to edit himself based on what he imagined the Canadian government wanted to hear. Though Kabangu had managed to enter South Africa undocumented in April 2003, he had sought asylum in Canada just two months after his arrival. He longed to be reunited with an uncle who had made it to Vancouver with his wife and two children. Kabangu could already write of negative experiences with other South Africans he’d called “xenophobes”.
Both Kabangu and Kinkela have stories that bespeak the politics of everyday life as Congolese residents marked by imposed categories of limited mobilities and citizenship. Kabangu details the story of Rwandan troops barging into his home and accusing his father of collaborating with Laurent Désiré-Kabila, a Congolese rebel and politician who became the third president of the DRC from 1997 until his assassination in 2001. Multiple drafts of Kabangu’s story are shuffled and out of order. Kabangu mentions the “first war”, “August 1998” and the name “Laurent Kabila” several times in each draft. Understanding the significance of these wars, dates and key figures can help fill major gaps of knowledge in why Kabangu fled with his cousin to South Africa in 2003.
Patrice Lumumba was the first prime minister of the newly independent state. He notoriously gave an unscheduled speech on 30 June 1960 at the proclamation ceremony of the Congo’s independence from Belgium. Though Congolese listeners received the speech with praise and admiration, the Belgian King Baudouin and his attending officers were incensed. Lumumba rebuked King Baudouin’s insinuation that the end of colonial rule in the Congo was part of the “civilising mission” begun by King Leopold II in the Congo Free State. Unwilling to let his remarks go uncontested, Lumumba confidently walked up to the podium following the Belgian king’s speech and stated the following:
‘Morning, noon and night we were subjected to jeers, insults and blows because we were “Negroes”. Who will ever forget that the black was addressed as tu, not because he was a friend, but because the polite vous was reserved for the white man? We have seen our lands seized in the name of ostensibly just laws, which gave recognition only to the right of might. We have not forgotten that the law was never the same for the white and the black, that it was lenient to the ones, and cruel and inhuman to the others’.
Lumumba was the leader of the anti-colonial Mouvement National Congolais (MNC). As an avid proponent of Pan-Africanism, the discourse of struggle was one also used and popularised amongst those in the Black Consciousness Movement of South Africa in the 1960s. Lumumba reminded the Belgians that independence was a product of the fight to end a ‘humiliating bondage’ that was enforced upon the Congolese.
In an interview with the late politician Cleophas Kamitatu, he paraphrased this specific segment of Lumumba’s political speech: ‘Remember how differently whites and blacks were treated, remember our place in schools, remember the apartheid!’ Though the word “apartheid” was not used in Lumumba’s original speech, Kamitatu’s memory was mediated through the subsequent years he spent in exile after Mobutu’s takeover. He lived many years in South Africa until his death in 2008. Kamitatu saw a clear parallel between the suffering of the Congolese under Belgian rule and that of the inhumanity suffered during South African apartheid.
The remnants of Kabangu’s application to Canada are relevant for this reason. What he left behind were different photocopies of the second page of the 2003 “Schedule 2: Refugees Outside Canada” application. Kabangu seemed to find the questions on page 2 the most difficult to answer, precisely because the events that unfolded in the DRC after 1998 were exceedingly complex. He wrote 11 drafts altogether. In some versions, Kabangu’s handwriting looks quick, hurried and impatient. In others, it is neat and confident. It is as if the process of drafting his story was a means of digging into the archaeology of his memory. It is not that one account is truer than the other. Having witnessed assault, torture and murder amongst his family members, Kabangu likely suffered severe post-traumatic stress disorder. He was likely challenged with the task of explaining and proving that his home country was not safe for him to return to, and that he had lost many loved ones in the process.
Kabangu always dates the beginning of his story to August 1998 with the outbreak of the Second Congo War. Laurent-Désiré Kabila had re-emerged as leader of the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Libération of Congo (ADFLC), a Rwandan and Ugandan-sponsored rebel group that invaded Zaire and overthrew Mobutu during the First Congo War from 1996 to 1997. In another draft, Kabangu writes, ‘During the first war led by Laurent Kabila, young people were recruited by force into rebellion army (A.F.D.L.) Alliance de Force Democratique Pour La Libération du Congo. Due to that situation, I fled and hide my self into bush. My life was miserable in the bush and certain people with who I was fled died. After few months, I and some young returned in the city. One year later, my city of Kalemie was again besieged by Rwandan foreign troops. My father was arrested and beaten’. The attempts to coerce Kabangu into Kabila’s rebel army foreshadow the irony of his death in 2001, when Kabila was assassinated by his 18-year-old bodyguard, Rashidi Mizele, who was believed to have been conscripted as a child soldier. Kabangu’s story speaks to the years of mutiny, military insurgency and kleptocracy that drove many Congolese to flee and seek refuge in other countries. .
Political scientist Thomas Turner dates August 1998 as the month when Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia foiled an attempt to overthrow Laurent Kabila. Though this was the date attributed to the beginning of the Second Congo War, this conflict lasted until 2002. Kabangu’s refugee papers indicated that he entered South Africa by bus in 2003. But perhaps the reason the Canadian government rejected Kabangu’s application has more to do with the confusing way the moving parts of the DRC’s history of conflict unfold in the specificity of his life, when an estimated 3.3 million Congolese died between August 1998 and November 2002. Rwandans adapted a strategy to depose Laurent Kabila and his regime, but ‘Rwandan troops and Congolese rebels were flown to Kitona military base in Bas Congo province, west of Kinshasa. They freed and recruited a number of former troops of Mobutu being “re-educated” there. Others seized the nearby hydroelectric complex at Inga and the country’s major ports at Matadi’. A refugee intake officer may struggle to match Kabangu’s hometown of Kalemie in relation to what bureaucrats, state officials or investigative journalists know about the movements of various armies.
But what was subtle in Kabangu’s reason for leaving his home country was not simply the circumstances of the intercontinental wars fought within and beyond DRC borders, it was what he experienced once he escaped to South Africa. He arrived seeking sanctuary, only to discover that he needed to seek refuge from the refuge: ‘Here in South Africa it is not easy to get a job especially if you are a refugee even to study especially if you are [a] refugee. Many companies here need those pupil people who do have a valid passport to work freely and study freely, so we are home without doing anything even to travel is not easy…’ (sic). Like Kabangu, many African foreign nationals found that living in South Africa was not quite as idealistic as they’d hoped. Kabangu wrote that South Africans ‘accuse us for doing any crime’ and that police tear up their refugee papers and arrest them for unfounded reasons.
Kabangu’s cousin Promise Ilunga Kinkela had apparently applied for refugee status in Australia, but a copy of his rejection letter was found in the midst of the rubble. Did Kabangu and Kinkela abandon these documents out of disappointment? Their existence in the rubbish might say something of the owners’ ambivalence towards the letter. They hadn’t disposed of these documents—this letter and Kabangu’s drafts, after all, still survived the eviction—but neither had they kept them. How would it have felt to keep a rejection letter, a reminder of the spurned efforts taken to navigate the intense bureaucratic process of seeking asylum and establishing a new life in an unfamiliar country? The Australian refugee and humanitarian officer’s reply to Kinkela stated that he had ‘failed to satisfy the relevant criteria’ and, without specifying, merely referred him to the listed criteria for schedule 2 of class XB visas. These two cousins were guided by the dream of a “better” life in another destination, but in the bureaucratic remnants left behind, fearful movements and urgent sojourns overdetermined their lives. They would have travelled through Ponte every day, vertically crossing borders via the lift, barely missing other residents who walked the same pathways at different times.
Sometimes Ponte’s residents are framed as “citizens” or “locals”, others are stigmatised as “refugees”, “foreigners” and “illegal aliens”.
In the documentary, Africa Shafted, one Nigerian resident bemoans the stigma of his status: ‘At every crime, they say it’s Nigerians. A Congolese is a Nigerian. Even sometimes a Zulu guy is a Nigerian. A Xhosa guy is a Nigerian’. He goes on to say that one of the first words he learned in South Africa was the word tsotsi. He could not understand how South Africans could sweepingly claim that the millions of Nigerians who live in his country are all criminals and drug lords. He pointed out that the irony was that he was told South Africa was known for some of the worst crime rates in the world, and that it was South Africans who were seen by other African foreign nationals as the tsotsis. This word in English means “thug” or “criminal”. This word originally derived from the argot Tsotsitaal, a slang language which is a mixture of Afrikaans, seSotho, seTswana, sePedi and isiZulu. Tsotsitaal emerged in the 1940s and 50s in Sophiatown, an apartheid-era township that was a Black cultural hub for artists and activists until residents were forcibly removed. The use of Tsotsitaal during apartheid demonstrated one’s rebellion against the apartheid state. Despite many African nations showing solidarity to Black South Africans suffering under apartheid, the word tsotsi is used to invalidate immigrants much like those who live in Ponte.
Another resident in Africa Shafted laments: ‘What makes us foreigners in our nation—in our African continent? I just don’t understand that language. I want to know what makes us foreigners. Some of the South African, they graduated in university of my nation. They were free, they were in fight, they were in exile. We are not seeing them like they are in exile, we are seeing them like our brothers. We’ve been crying, we’ve been sharing, we’ve been praying in churches for the things happening in South Africa. So now why are we so hated this way now?’ Many thought that South African democracy would usher in Pan-African unity. Instead, as residents move up and down Ponte’s lifts and out into the hectic city, what they carry with them are the stories of displaced people trying to find a place in an otherwise divided nation.