Surplus, Excess, Dirt: Slavery and the Production 0f Disposability in South Africa

Abstract

Centuries before apartheid, South Africa was fundamentally shaped by 176 years of slavery, a period of racialised and gendered brutality that lasted from 1658 to 1834. Enslaved people were brought to the Cape by the Dutch East India Company from African and Asian territories around the Indian Ocean, and eventually came to constitute the majority of the population of the Colony. Françoise Vergès (2005Vergès, F. 2005. "One World, Many Maps." Interventions 7 (3): 342-345. doi:10.1080/13698010500268155.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]) asserts that slavery in South Africa generated "processes of disposability" that transformed enslaved people and indigenous Africans, the majority of the population, into "surplus" and expendable objects. The scale of this expendability is difficult to discern today because of the invisibility of slavery in conceptions of the country's history. In this article, I use the lens of "dirt" to render such "processes of disposability" visible. I...