The politics of black identity: Slave Ship and Woza Albert!

Abstract

Both Apartheid South Africa and white America relied on images or representation to mediate and distort the identity of blacks. In the United States, the misrepresentation dates as far back as 1619, when the first African slaves were brought to Virginia. In South Africa, the distortion predates 1652, the year Jan van Riebeeck landed at the Cape, but was intensified in 1948, when the nationalists came to power on an agenda of racial discrimination and separation. The enormous investments in the arts in both societies would ultimately create a semiotic ensemble that, while systematically erasing the identity of blacks, posited a white structure of value as the point of reference. Woza Albert! and Slave Ship are designed to counteract such images. As products of the Black Power Movement and the Black Consciousness Movement respectively, they constitute a mode of intervention, political and aesthetic, into a world or discourse that sought to annihilate blacks.