COMAROFF COUNTRY

Abstract

This article highlights several key propositions from Volume II of Of Revelation and Revolution (RRII), relating to the way LMS mission discourses facilitated the phased transition to capitalism. It then tests the applicability of these hypotheses to the study of landscape aesthetics, labour management, and conceptions of ethnic sovereignty in another domain of Liberal administration in South Africa: the early Kruger National Park. In the process, the article charts a rather different history of the colonial body to that advanced by the Comaroffs, emphasizing the way in which LMS mission station and game reserve alike produce bounded, spatial conditions for the management of contradictory conceptions of rights and ethnic subjectivity. Some points of similarity are found between the Comaroff conception of moralized Tswana bodies, commoditization, and the crisis of value, on the one hand, and on the other, management of 'Shangaan' labor and identity in the early Kruger National Park. Moreover, this similarity also underscores the explanatory power of the historical method in Volume II: present crises of value apparent in late twentieth-century South African witchcraft discourses, for instance, are seen to have a long history dating back to destructive contradictions around rights and currency already apparent on LMS mission stations. The article concludes with a case study that draws attention to the slightly problematic theory of capillary state power operating in Volume II. Instead, it calls for a more concrete history of articulating state agencies, showing how in the example of the Makuleke land claim in the northern Kruger National Park, distinct government departments competed to establish different allegories of paternalistic racial management. Ironically, this history can only be written with a return to the understanding of agency and statehood that characterized earlier Comaroff work on African elites.