when the hand that holds the trowel is black

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2003 3: 334Journal of Social ArchaeologyNick Shepherd

Self-Representation and the Issue of `Native' Labour in Archaeology`When the Hand that Holds the Trowel is Black...' : Disciplinary Practices of

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334

‘When the hand that holds the trowel isblack . . .’Disciplinary practices of self-representation and the issue of‘native’ labour in archaeology

NICK SHEPHERD

Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa

ABSTRACTThis article uses images from the archive of John Goodwin, one of thefirst professional archaeologists in sub-Saharan Africa, to open up aset of questions around relations of work in archaeology – in particu-lar, practices involving the use of ‘native’ labour. It seeks to tell thestory of those men who dug, sieved, sorted, located sites and finds,fetched and carried, pitched camp, cooked and served food, negoti-ated with local chiefs and suppliers, and assisted in the interpretationof artefacts and events, yet who remain unacknowledged in officialaccounts of the discipline. Restoring to such men the dignity of a nameand the lineaments of a biography is a first step in a process of redressinvolving archaeology in colonial and former-colonial contexts. Usedin this way, photographs provide an opportunity to imagine a processof editing or reframing, so that the figure on the margins of the scenesteps into the foreground, or steps behind the camera to become theframing consciousness.

Journal of Social Archaeology A R T I C L E

Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com)Vol 3(3): 334–352 [1469-6053(200310)3:3;334–352;034876]

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335Shepherd ‘when the hand that holds the trowel is black . . .’

KEYWORDSarchaeology ● colonialism ● knowledge production ● ‘native’labour ● photography

■ SECRET HISTORY

The secret history of archaeology in Africa is the history of ‘native’ labour.It is the story of those men (and they were almost always men) who dug,sieved, sorted, located sites and ‘finds’, fetched and carried, pitched camp,cooked and served food, negotiated with local chiefs and suppliers, andassisted in the interpretation of artefacts and events, but who remainunsung and unremembered in official tellings of the development of thediscipline. In many cases, they were and are skilled practitioners: notArchaeologists, or even ‘archaeologists’ (for such is the politics of namingin the sciences), but something else, field-hands, or assistants, or moreusually just ‘boys’. In almost all cases they were and are far more directlyrelated to the remains which they disinterred, to the hand that made thepot or the bones in the grave – whether on grounds of culture, tradition,history, lineal descent, or whatever – than the archaeologist on whosebehalf they laboured. Yet, in the ironised contexts of the construction ofarchaeological knowledge in the colonies and former colonies (and theessential tenor of this enterprise is that of irony), they are almost neverreferred to, or are referred to in passing or with contempt.

If these men – let us call them ‘co-workers’ – are textually absent, thenthey are present in another and more unnerving fashion. The spread ofarchaeological fieldwork in Africa coincided with the popularization ofcamera technologies and the techniques of photography and the photo-graphic record became an important part of the procedure of excavation.In South Africa, archaeology and photography coincide exactly. PaulLandau (2001) notes that ‘from the 1870s on in South Africa, wealthy whitefamilies went to photographic studios to have their portraits taken’ (2001:151), and it was not long before cameras were taken into the field to estab-lish a range of genres (the hunting photograph, the ethnographic photo-graph, the study of nature and landscape and so on). This is the samedecade in which one first finds a continuous published record of researchon prehistory in local journals like the Cape Monthly Magazine and theTransactions of the South African Philosophical Society. The optical empiri-cism of the late nineteenth century and the status of the camera as part ofa ‘truth apparatus’ being forged by science and police work in modernisingstates in Western Europe (Sekula, 1989) meant that the techniques of

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photography played an important part in a number of fledgling disciplines,archaeology and ethnology among them. In Africa, as elsewhere, cameraswere taken onto archaeological sites to document sediments, record finds,capture mises-en-scène and record scenes of camp life (Shanks, 1997). Andit is here, captured to one side of the frame, leaning on a shovel, or bentover a sieve – or more occasionally, looking boldly back at the camera –that we encounter the issue of native labour.

‘When photographs come out of storage, it is as if energy is released’,write Hayes, Silvester and Hartmann in the introduction to their book onNamibian photography (Hayes et al., 2001). My interest in this subjectbegan with a single image (Figure 1). Two men occupy the frame, a sievelying between them. To the left of the frame is John Goodwin (1900–1959),the South African-born, Cambridge-trained archaeologist, who returned in1923 to take up a post at the University of Cape Town as research assistantin ethnology under A.R. Radcliffe-Brown. A contemporary of LouisLeakey, Goodwin was one of the first professional archaeologists to workin sub-Saharan Africa. He was largely responsible for the establishment and‘disciplining’ of archaeology in Southern Africa in the decades of the 1920sand 1930s, and set in place a basic nomenclature and typology for StoneAge studies which is still in standard usage (Goodwin and van Riet Lowe,1929). Goodwin’s legacy is a significant one, but remains largely neglected,

Figure 1





even within the discipline, although this is being remedied by a currentresearch project (Shepherd, 2002a, 2002b, in press). His considerablepersonal archive occupies just over 100 boxes in the manuscripts andarchives division of the university library. As well as manuscripts and type-scripts, lecture notes, correspondence and site notebooks, it containsseveral hundred photographic plates, photographs and negatives.

To the right of the frame is an unnamed co-worker. Roland Barthes(2000) writes of the punctum, the point in any image, which skewers ourinterest, which captures our attention and imagination. The punctum of thisimage is provided by the expression on this man’s face. He looks back atus with a disconcerting frankness. We register a pair of muscular forearms,a composed presence. Goodwin’s gaze is oblique. He holds a cigarettebetween the fingers of his left hand. What has passed between them andthe taker of the photograph? A communication hangs in the air.

As is the case with most of the images in the collection, this image isuncaptioned and unprovenienced. Goodwin is identifiable from otherphotographs. The site is identifiable from the grid markings on the wall asbeing Oakhurst Cave, a large and productive site in the southern Capeexcavated by Goodwin in six visits between February 1932 and February1935 (Goodwin, 1937). There is no reference to the second figure, theunnamed co-worker. However – remarkably – he recurs in a second set ofphotographs from the site of Forest Hall, excavated in June 1940, in whichhe appears as one of a group of native labourers. Who was he? Thus beganan investigation within an investigation.

■ ADAM WINDWAAI

In June 1940, Goodwin and B.D. Malan, accompanied by Mrs Jean Malanand an unspecified group of assistants, excavated Forest Hall shelter on thesouthern Cape Coast. No field notebook was kept, nor were the results ofthe excavation published. In 1988, nearly half a century after the event,M.L. Wilson published a short report in the South African ArchaeologicalBulletin based on material from the site in the archaeological and physicalanthropological collections of the South African Museum, and an interviewwith Berrie and Jean Malan.

The site of Forest Hall is on the Forest Hall estate, about 2 km east ofKeurboomstrand, and about 800 m east of the better-known Matjies Rivershelter, at the base of some steep coastal cliffs. It faces east and is screenedby dense coastal forest ‘that makes its present environment dank and un-attractive’ (Wilson, 1988: 53). The excavation was carried out over a periodof three weeks. The party camped in a fisherman’s shack nearby, ‘with waterfor cooking and drinking being brought on donkey-back from Forest Hall





(estate) every other day’ (Wilson, 1988: 53; note the passive, indirectconstruction).

The deposit consisted of an upper shell-midden capping, surmountingstratified fine, damp black soils. In all, 19 ft 5 in (5.9 m) of deposit wasremoved, a considerable depth of deposit by any standards. Only arepresentative collection and unusual items were retained from the exca-vation. The remains of two and possibly three individuals were excavated,but no record was kept of the depth at which they were found, or of anyartefactual associations. A feature of the stone artefact collection is therelative absence of diagnostic artefacts (in the sense of artefacts whichcould be assigned to an archaeological ‘culture’), leading Malan to describethe excavation as ‘boring’ and ‘a waste of time’. A postscript on Forest Hall:the depth of the shell-midden and the relative uniformity of the deposit ledthe excavators to assign it, dismissively, to the ‘shell-midden culture’ of thelast 3000 years, a variation of what Sampson (1974) would call the ‘Strand-loper’ industries. A sample of Donax serra shells collected from the baseof the shell-midden capping was submitted for dating by Wilson andreturned with a date in the early Holocene, 9770 ± 80 BP, making thedeposit considerably older than first imagined.

One part of the series of photographs from Forest Hall deals with techni-cal shots of the excavation. We see a deep trench running along the back ofthe rock shelter, essentially a means of finding human skeletal remains. Theshell-midden capping is clearly visible. Berrie Malan brushes loose depositfrom partially-excavated human remains. Another part of the Forest Hallseries deals with images of camp life. In the framing of the scene black co-workers carry out their tasks on the margins of the camera’s interest. Anotherimage: four figures face us across a campfire (Figure 2). A fifth figure lifts akettle from the flames. A pencilled note on the back of the photograph reads,‘Forest Hall; Goodwin, Jean and Berrie Malan’. The caption is not inGoodwin’s hand and was added by Ione Rudner, a keen amateur archaeol-ogist with a long history of involvement in the discipline, who went throughthe collection in 1979. Goodwin has his arms folded on his knees. To his right,sitting close to him but caught in the shadow where Goodwin is bathed inlight, is the unnamed assistant from the Oakhurst Cave excavation.

He appears in two other images. In the first, which is taken shortly beforeor after the previous photograph, he can be glimpsed in the background,working in the excavation (Figure 3). In the second (Figure 4), he appearsto the left of the frame with another co-worker (bringing to three thenumber of ‘native’ labourers employed on the site). As in the previousphotographs, his poise is notable. My attention is drawn to his bare feet.

As vignettes of camp life, the Forest Hall photographs are fascinating,but their lack of annotation, other than long after the fact, makes themappear ghostly, stray remembrances. In them the contradiction emergessharply. While the white excavators live on, in their own words (in Wilson’s





Figure 3

Figure 2





report), in the memory of others (Ione Rudner) and in official accounts ofthe discipline’s coming into being (Deacon, 1990; Goodwin, 1935, 1958;Malan, 1956, 1970), their black co-workers have been lost in time. I carriedout a systematic search of material covering the period of Goodwin’s field-work in the southern Cape. Working from a list of published site reports,field notebooks and personal and professional correspondence, it provedimpossible to identify with any certainty even a single black co-worker inthese images. In fact, what becomes remarkable is the near-total absenceof reference to black excavators, assistants and camp followers. When thehand that holds the trowel is black, it is as though holes dig themselves andartefacts are removed, labelled and transported without human agency. Anaccount book belonging to Goodwin records the following entries:

Water carrier 1/0

To boy for 2 days 2/6

These come between ‘Paraffin – 3/6’, ‘Sardines – 9d’, and ‘Hotel lunch 22Jan. – 6/0’. In a site notebook from the excavation at Glentyre Shelter (nearGeorge, close to Oakhurst Cave) we find:

Work stopped on 21 July. Thursday. (Adam Windwaai came to help on thelast day)

Figure 4





The name Adam Windwaai needs some explaining. Adam is easy enough:Adam, the first man. ‘Windwaai’ is an Afrikaans name meaning ‘the blowingwind’, or ‘blowing in the wind’. Adam, the first man, blowing in the wind.

■ JUSTUS AKEREDOLU

In the mid-1950s, Goodwin travelled to Nigeria where he undertook a seriesof excavations in association with Bernard Fagg, the pioneering Britishprehistorian in West Africa (along with Thurston Shaw and Oliver Davies).This time, in a correspondence with his wife, he makes direct reference tohis co-workers. The shift in register to the letter format (gossipy, confiding)is significant, as, no doubt, are the possibilities presented by distance andthe appearance of the exotic. In a letter of ‘5.1.1955’, addressed to ‘My dearEverybody’, he writes:

The ‘staff’ consists of the following: Mr Jacob Eghánevba, with a strongaccent on the á, the rest is merely an added noise. vb stands for a b with thelips not quite closed, a sort of hard w. As in Yoruba the letter n is anasalisation rather as in the French but softer.

Akeredólu (Justus) is from Owo, about 100 miles due north. He was trainedfor 3 years in England, went to France, Switzerland & Italy, and is in atemporary post which he hopes to make permanent soon. He has his ownchâlet at the rest house & we eat together in the mess. Luckily he does notshare my châlet! So far (although I took in one belated traveller) I have hadmy little place to myself. He comes in from time to time, & puts potterytogether. He is trained as a museum assistant but has little power to thinkthings out. He is an expert wood-carver in ebony etc., essentially a ratherartistic craftsman. Thin and tall, with a narrow face & skull and a pleasantsmile, about 42 or so.

He has a little Bini (Benin) boy as his personal servant, a nice lad who lovescleaning my bicycle, for which I ‘dash’ him a bob or so a week. He says hewould prefer a book on geography – whether he means an atlas I don’tknow, he is about 13–14.

Haruna Rashid is at sergeant-major level & an Assistant, whereasAkeredólu is an Instructor grade. He is Hausa-speaking from Kano on thenorth and was at Ife with us, a nice lad of about 30 or perhaps less. Verywilling, a little presumptuous (he likes a pop into my bathroom & use mytoothglass for a drink of water) but quite courteous and helpful.

Two of my labourers, Gáruba and Adámu, I had at Ife, both very nice men,not very hard workers, but willing, a third is Enobi (like N-O-B) who is newto me. Then by some curious chance another man (known as Conjo) hasdrifted up from the Kongo tribe at the north of the Conjo. His people were





all cannibals 40 years ago, and he is like a Nubian slave, short legged, stocky,bullet headed and just one mass of muscles. He works the others off theirfeet, quite happy to do all the pick & shovel work. I can only suppose he hasescaped justice by coming here. He speaks Hausa, but seems to have gotalong in French in the meanwhile. The rest all laugh at him and say –‘un-deux-trois-beaucoup de travail’, words they have picked up from him.He smiles happily but the joke is clearly wearing thin!

In a letter of ‘1.1.1957’ addressed to ‘My beloved W.L.G.’ (Winnifred L.Goodwin), he writes:

On Friday the labourers went on a slow-down strike as they felt I ought tofind a place for them to sleep. They have been dossing in the compound ofthe Seriki Hausa (chief Hausa) and he is kicking them out. I scouted roundand found a funny little ‘Junior Staff’ house (No T16) was empty, just next toour present dig. So I went to see the various people who might beresponsible, one after the other. They were all very cooperative and hopeful,but nobody seemed to know who had the final say.

The real trouble is my men get from 2/8 to 3/- per day and are ‘foreigners’,while the local minimum is 5/- a day. The results are that everyone putsprices up to outside people, and my men can’t meet it out of their pay. Theyget a rice and gravy breakfast brought round by a ‘Mammy’ (market woman)for 3d, which I augment at 11 with a penny worth of peanuts from anotherMammy. When they get paid on Saturdays they have a ‘bust’ of buying andeating, but whether they get anything else I don’t know. Rooms run from12/6 to £1–10–0 a month, but they have only been offered a room betweenthem for £1–10–0.

When we returned (from Ugbeku) two of the men were ill so I sent themwith notes to the hospital. One is just bronchial from the Harmattan, theother is not at all well. I had sent him in a week ago to be treated for syphilis,but after reacting well to the treatment, he has more or less collapsed, but hewas too late in the vast hospital queue, and will have to wait until Jan 2nd fortreatment – if he survives. I have dosed him with aspirin meanwhile.

In another part of Goodwin’s archive, following the conventional separ-ation of image and text, are collected a set of photographs from his sojournin Nigeria, including several, that show his co-workers. We see three mencrouching in a hole (Figure 5); a close-up of a figure excavating with a hand-pick (Figure 6); two men bending over a sieve (Figure 7); and – my favourite– five figures standing in an excavation, separated by baulks of deposit(Figure 8). Most of them produce a smile for the camera, although inanother photograph taken immediately before or after this one (not repro-duced here) they are scowling.

Once again, none of the images is captioned, although the packet ofphotographs has a note in Goodwin’s hand, ‘Nigeria ‘55’. It seems reason-able to infer that several of the figures in these photographs are the subject





of Goodwin’s first letter home. A number of the men are recognisableacross the set of images. The figure at the back and to the right of the framein Figure 8 is the same man shown in close-up in Figure 6, and may be JustusAkeradolu (although I am unable to confirm this). Amidst this swirl ofnames and faces, it is the detail in Goodwin’s letters that speaks tellinglyof colonial relations of work. We have Goodwin’s concern over the sharedtoothglass; the penny-pinching detail of payment and the cost of food andlodging; the colonial shibboleths (cannibalism!); and the final, chillingobservation (‘if he survives’); all of it framed by Goodwin’s breezy paternal-ism, for which the correct term must be racism. Most damaging is hissummation of Justus Akeredolu (‘little power to think things out’, ‘essen-tially a rather artistic craftsman’).

And there things would rest, were it not for the fact that Justus

Figure 5





Akeredolu leaves a biographical trace, not in the discipline of archaeology,but in the related field of art history. In 1986, Frank Willett published anaccount of his life in the journal African Arts under the title of ‘NigerianThorn Carvings: A living monument to Justus Akeredolu’. Willett is theauthor of African Art: An Introduction (1971). Trained as a philologist andanthropologist at Oxford, he was seconded to the Department of Antiqui-ties in Nigeria in the mid-1950s. From 1958–1963 he was employed asGovernment Archaeologist and Curator of the Ife Museum (Kense, 1990)and during this period Akeredolu acted as his assistant.

(Chief) Justus Akeredolu (?-1983) was born in Owo, was trained as asculptor and went on to become Curator of the Owo Museum. In 1950, hewas awarded a Government scholarship to study museum work at the Insti-tute of Archaeology at London University. On his return in October 1954,he was appointed to the post of Technical Instructor, and ‘(his) skills were

Figure 6





Figure 7

Figure 8





put to use at once in the Nigerian Museum in Lagos . . . in restoring missingparts of sculptures in wood’ (Willett, 1986: 50), a position which he held untilhis posting to Ife in 1958. His death in 1983 was due to cancer. In Willett’spaper Akeredolu is remembered for originating a demanding medium, thecarving of miniatures from the thorns of the silk-cotton tree. These thornfigures are conical in shape and between 2 inches and 4 inches high anddepict a variety of scenes from everyday life (‘boy hoeing’, ‘girl grindingmeal’). Akeredolu’s figures have attracted many imitators. The form report-edly thrives in Nigeria and in Mexico, where a similar species of thorn is tobe found (Willett asks: ‘Was this stimulated by imported thorn carvings fromNigeria? Or did a traveller who had visited Nigeria, seeing such thorns inMexico, suggest that they might be carved? Or is it a case of independentinvention?’). He concludes: ‘Perhaps the continuing use of a medium onehas invented is the best monument an artist could desire. Certainly no onehas yet come close to matching Akeredolu’s skill in using it’ (Willett, 1986:53); a fitting epitaph for Goodwin’s ‘rather artistic craftsman’.

The story here is in the slippage between the terms ‘art’ and ‘craft’(rather as in the slippage between ‘archaeologist’ and co-worker). WhereWillett sees artistry and innovation, Goodwin is able to see only the dullapplication of a craft. The irony of Akeredolu’s entry into the official recordwill have escaped nobody’s notice. He is able to elevate himself above hispeers not as a maker of history, but as its raw material. His thorn carvingsremain sought after by collectors who, like Willett, admire ‘the delicacy ofhis touch’ (Willett, 1986: 50).

■ NATIVE LABOUR

Of what do such fragments speak? At one level they speak powerfully ofthe partial and limited nature of the archive. The Goodwin Collectionmakes me privy to Goodwin’s life, thoughts and interior processes to aremarkable degree, down to his undergraduate poems and on-sitedoodlings, but cannot begin to specify his co-workers. But there is another,and more specific challenge, I think, presented in terms of disciplinaryhabits of self-representation and the elision or effacement of labour. Thesehabits of elision are well-established, of course, not only in colonial archae-ology. What else is a site report but the presentation of a fait accompli, anexercise in the removal of agency? Sections are cut precisely, squaresnumbered, finds bagged and labelled, in the unfolding of a process as neces-sary as it is inexorable. The implication is that the actual human agents areirrelevant, what counts is the extent to which they act on a methodology.Hodder (1989) notes a shift in the style and rhetoric of the archaeologicalsite report. Early examples of the genre give actor-oriented accounts and





make use of personal pronouns. In the late nineteenth century ‘(a) trans-formation occurs towards more distant, abstract, decontextualisedaccounts’ (Hodder, 1989: 271), and the use of passive voice (a sandstoneblock ‘was found’). Underlying these shifts are changes in the modes ofauthority in the discipline, and the nature of its institutional insertions. Forthe archaeological agent to appear god-like in her or his authorship of thesite, the excavation is presented in the indirect, passive voice.

In a colonial context such habits of elision were compounded by aspecific anxiety operating around the issue of ‘native’ labour, which takesus simultaneously to the heart of colonial political-economy and to thecentre, the deepest wellings, of settler imaginaries. A concern with nativelabour, its tractability, its cost, its continued supply, runs as a thread throughcolonial and apartheid histories, from attempts to indenture the Khoisan,to the practices of slavery at the Cape, to the growth of the trade unionmovement and its challenge to the apartheid state in the 1970s and 1980s(Elphick, 1977; Elphick and Giliomee, 1989; O’Meara, 1983; Seekings,2000). In a justly famous essay, J.M. Coetzee uncovers the history not ofwork, but of its opposite, ‘Idleness in South Africa’ (1988). He writes of anenduring tradition in the ‘discourse of the Cape’ in terms of which indigen-ous people are represented as idle and indolent (and thus anti-modern, anti-progressive). In an ironic inversion, with the advent of the British at theCape this charge of idleness was transposed onto the Boers themselves.One reading of the history of apartheid is as an attempt to counter theseductions of idleness, ‘to take away from white men the freedom to dropout of the ranks of the labouring classes’, a process in which might bedivined ‘the demise of White Christian civilization at the tip of Africa’(Coetzee, 1988: 35).

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the fusion of racist thought andideas about ‘native’ labour was well underway. Patrick Brantlinger (1998)notes that the Victorians viewed Africans as ‘a natural labouring class,suited only for the dirty work of civilization’ (Brantlinger, 1998: 183).Imperialism expressed a turning outwards, a nostalgia for a lost authority‘and for a pliable, completely subordinate proletariat’ which had been lostat home. In this context, ‘Racism functions as a displaced or surrogate classsystem, growing more extreme as the domestic class alignments it reflectsare threatened or erode’ (Brantlinger, 1998: 184). In one of the few passagesin which he reflects on the question of native labour, Goodwin expresses asimilar sentiment. In 1945, he published what was, until recently, the onlylocally-produced text on archaeological methodology, Method in Prehis-tory. In a section on ‘Excavation’ he has this to say:

In Europe the ‘season’ generally coincides with part of the Long Vacation.There a return is made again and again over a period of years to the samesite. Work is done by European workmen under supervision, or by partly





trained students – again under supervision. It has been found that two orthree workmen and a casual hand are all that can be adequately controlled,while half-a-dozen students are the maximum that can be organized forsupervision. In Africa two labourers (who should be employed for cleaningand camp-work only, unless particularly dependable and trustworthy), astudent and the trained supervising excavator are generally the most thatcan be used in one trench or section, digging and sieving alternately.(Goodwin, 1945: 90)

In those two words, ‘dependable’ and ‘trustworthy’ (or as Goodwin has itin his letters, ‘willing’), might be read all of the hopes and fears of coloniallabour policy. Interestingly, of course, Goodwin’s own practice belies thisstatement, as attested by the photographs in his archive; just as, on abroader stage, ‘native’ labour was to play a far greater role in buildingsettler society than is generally admitted, doing not just its heavy-lifting buta good deal else besides.

Elements of Goodwin’s descriptions of his co-workers, in particular themixture of familiarity and distance, and the latent cruelty, point the way toa psychoanalytic reading of such relationships. In 1990, I acted as a researchassistant and reader to J.M. Coetzee in a project on the work of GeoffreyCronje, apartheid’s founding ideologue, published as ‘The Mind ofApartheid’ (1991). Coetzee finds in Cronje’s writing a rich vein of obsession,which he explores in terms of a thematics of contact, pollution and mixture.He notes that: ‘As an episode in historical time, apartheid is overdetermined.It did indeed flower out of self-interest and greed, but it also flowered outof desire and out of the hatred of desire. In its greed it demanded blackbodies in all their physicality in order to burn up their energy as labour. Inits anxiety about black bodies it made iron laws to banish them from sight.Its essence was therefore from the beginning confusion, a confusion whichit displaced wildly all around itself’ (Coetzee, 1991: 2).

These dynamics of attraction and repulsion gave rise to one of the centralfantasies of settler life, that of an African continent free of Africans, butsimultaneously a place where labour continues to be performed, wherework is done. This fantasy of leisure and innocence gave rise to a set ofpractices to do with the effacement of native labour: the maid’s roomtucked around the back of the house, the township thrust beyond the citylimits, the glaze which crosses the madam’s eye as the tea tray is set downand the dirty dishes removed. Njabulo Ndebele, the South African writerand critic and member of a newly-empowered black elite, describes theexperience of visiting a game lodge in the late-1990s, some years down theroad of South Africa’s political transformation (Ndebele, 1998). Intendedas an exercise in relaxation, it becomes, instead, an unexpectedly painfulone, for Ndebele is thrown up against the celebration of ‘a particular kindof cultural power: the enjoyment of colonial leisure’.

For Ndebele, everything is still in place, from the ‘clearing in the middle





of the bush, signifying civilization’ to ‘the faceless black workers, behavingrather meekly, who clean the rooms, wash the dishes, make the fire, babysitthe children, and make sure that in the morning the leisure refugees findtheir cars clean. Living somewhere “out there”, beyond the neatly clippedfrontier, the black workers come into the clearing to serve. And then theydisappear again. In their comings and goings, they are as inscrutable as thedense bush from which they emerge and to which they return’. He asks:‘How can the game lodge evolve forms of leisure that are rooted in contem-porary South African experience, catering for a new leisure clientele andguaranteeing profitability? How can the game lodge participate in thegeneral liberation of leisure?’ And then, more disturbingly: ‘Is it possiblethat South Africa is one big game lodge where all its black citizens arestruggling to make sense of their lives, like people who awake in anenormous vacation house which is now supposed to be theirs, but whichthey do not quite recognize? . . . We think: there is no peace for those caughtin the process of becoming’.

■ KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION

By focusing on relations of work in archaeology we are reminded of anumber of things. In the first place, we are reminded that knowledge inarchaeology is produced and constructed (rather than discovered), and thatsuch production involves sweat and toil. The act of knowledge productiontakes place, as Foucault reminds us in The Archaeology of Knowledge(2001), his major synthetic work, under certain ‘conditions’ and ‘relations’,including relations of work and material production. The flip side to thisobservation is that such conditions and relations inevitably determine thenature of the knowledge which is produced. As over-worked as the notionof knowledge production may appear to be, it retains a surprising relevancefor archaeology, a discipline which remains generally committed to a modelof scholarship in which knowledge is discovered (rather than produced).On the one hand, this is in contradistinction to the discipline of socialanthropology, which advertised its ‘reflexive turn’ as early as the mid-1980s(Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Marcus and Fischer, 1986). On the other hand,this is despite the advent of post-processual archaeology in much the sameperiod (Hodder, 1987, 1994; Shanks and Tilley, 1987a, 1987b), and the bodyof exciting and theoretically-adventurous work collected under thatheading.

Indeed, there is a consummate irony here, that archaeology, a disciplinewhose methodologies involve maximum physical exertion, hours spent inthe pit or at the sieve, so routinely should lose sight of its own conditionsof material production. Like the clue in a murder-mystery, that which is





nearest at hand is least remarked. The troubling narrative of archaeologicalproduction is shaded out by the spectacular narrative of discovery, themiraculous moment of the opening of the tomb, or the unearthing of therare find. Goodwin’s co-workers present us with an extreme instance of theelision of ‘native’ labour, but such practices were, and in some cases stillare, widespread within the discipline (Fotiadis, 1993). The interest ofGoodwin’s relations of work lies not in their exceptionalism, but in themanner in which they direct us towards the practices which define theepisteme.

The notion that archaeological knowledge is constructed leads us, in turn,to a further possibility: the notion that knowledge might be differentlyconstructed. It opens the possibility of new knowledge, even of new formsof knowledge. Returning to the photographs: if we imagine a process ofdigital editing, the image is reframed, the figure on the margins or crouch-ing in the shadows steps into the foreground, or – even better – stands behindthe camera, becomes the framing consciousness behind the photograph.Embedded in this point is a comment on the nature of the photographicarchive itself. The images that interest me are the images that are unprinted– and unprintable – within the traditional genres of archaeological produc-tion. Instead, what we find in site reports are stylised shots of individual arte-facts (strategically lit and arranged against neutral backgrounds), andcarefully composed shots of archaeological deposits (brushed, tidied,squared-away and labelled). These form a class of imagery from which co-workers and assistants are edited out, along with extraneous items of equip-ment, signs of camp life, collapsed sections and misplaced artefacts, in fact,any signs of production or failure. However, even in the most dispassionateof hands, the camera excels at admitting the unexpected, at finding serendip-itous arrangements of light and shadow and surprising compositions offigures, in short, at evading control (where ‘control’ is a notion much-usedby archaeologists in connection with the process of excavation).

And it seems to me that therein lies the lasting power of these images:in that they are able to open up spaces for alternative apprehensions of thereal, to gesture towards newness, even if they fail to specify its nature.Archaeology in South Africa, and elsewhere, is caught at a moment of tran-sition, which will either see the old and established patterns of operationconfirmed, in a (neo) colonial division of labour and reward, or the emerg-ence of something new. In my own practice, the photographs of theGoodwin Collection become a medium through which to rethink (thefashionable word would be to deconstruct) the terms of engagement ofarchaeology in this part of the world. Archaeological texts have been closedagainst so many things, but most of all they have been closed against theconditions of their own production. Question: What happens when youopen up your text? Answer: You let in the light.





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NICK SHEPHERD is a senior lecturer in the Centre for African Studiesat the University of Cape Town. He recently won the ArchaeologicalDialogues essay competition on the future of archaeology. In 2004, hewill be based at Harvard as a Mandela Fellow, continuing to work on thesocio-politics of archaeology in Africa.[email: [email protected]]




when the hand that holds the trowel is black

Documents

history of native labour

use of native labour

disciplinary practices

issue ofnative labour

trowel isblack

cidade universitaria

local chiefs

pitched camp