Show description

46 Of course, the series of events that surrounded the Gwasa siege is embedded in a drama of much larger dimensions, one that saw African autonomous power coming under the steadily rising pressure over several decades of Boer military conquest in combination with land dispossession, indenture, and labor migrancy. And it is within this larger context that present-day and, somewhat more sparsely recorded, nineteenth-century attempts at narrating these events have to be seen. Most retellings of the Gwasa episode, as Hofmeyr Js careful analysis reveals, are concerned not so much with establishing a chronology of facts as with resolving the tensions that pulled at the fabric of the Ndebele world.

As Sternberger's discussion of the panoptic gaze of the nineteenth century illustrates, another, a deeper, significance comes into play here. The panorama is more than a metaphor for a world whose last remaining frontier by the turn of the century had become outer space. In the panorama of nineteenth-century society it is consciousness itself that is being reconfigured. Under the conditions of high imperialism, it is no longer possible to break up the delusionary tableau of people, objects, and vistas that eliminates the sharp and contradictory distinctions of reality.

We will examine how the global imagination of Europeans, African-Americans, and black South Africans functioned as both ARCHAIC IMAGES, UTOPIAN DREAMS 31 the outcome and medium, product and process, of social agency, reflecting and organizing specific historical actors' practices and sense of a world whose social, spatial, and symbolic contours were becoming subject to dramatic displacements and vital reformulations—shifts that are reflected as much in the discourses and performances of the South African singers as in their biographies.