Governing the Ungovernable: Performing and Contesting Chris Hani’s Legacy at the Hani Memorial

Abstract

This article focuses on the Hani Memorial, an annual state-led ceremony held in Ekurhuleni on the anniversary of Chris Hani’s assassination. By analysing the memorialisation, appropriation and performance of Hani’s legacy at this site, it seeks to contribute to debates surrounding the production of liberation struggle historiography in southern Africa, to expand upon Richard Werbner’s ‘post-colonial memorial complex’, and to probe how, through these practices, the Tripartite Alliance has attempted to consolidate political power in post-apartheid South Africa. It takes its cue, though, from Jenny Edkins’ notions of ‘state time’ and ‘trauma time’, which I read as representative of, or analogous to, different modes of organising or disrupting the ways in which people experience time and therefore make sense of the world. According to Edkins, the time of the state is that of ‘linear, procedural time of process and organisation, history, heroes and nations’, whereas trauma time is representative of a ‘collective scream’, ‘a protest against the way people have been treated, a demand to hold open the temporality of trauma and a demand for a different politics’. This article argues that remembering Hani extends far beyond the temporality of the state, its tangible monuments to the past, and its forms of governmentality. In other words, Hani’s legacy cannot be contained or governed by the discursive frames, monumental projects, and temporality of the state, which ultimately seek closure and the end of a politics that has the state as its target. Furthermore, the very performative and operative character of memorials themselves makes them particularly vulnerable to alternative memorialisation and invocations of the past. In short, although national memorials are conventionally understood as sites of state power, authority, governmentality, and historical certainty, they are more generatively understood as sites of temporal rupture through which the ‘time of the state’ is exposed and challenged.