COULD NOT SING IN THE DEAD HEAT: LINER NOTES 

UNDER THE SUN 
 

 
 

 

Molemo Karabo Ramphalile 

 

 

Supervisor: Prof Antje Schuhmann 

 

July 2022 

 

Department of Political Studies, University of the Witwatersrand 

 

 



i  
 

 

Declaration 
 

 

I declare that this thesis is my own unaided work. It is submitted for the degree of 

Doctor of Philosophy at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. It has 

not been submitted before for any degree or examination at any other university. 

Candidate: Molemo Ramphalile  

Student Number: 0608894e 

Signature: 

 

Date:  

30/07/2022



ii  
 

 

 

 

 

 

For  

Gomolemo Ka’eo Thamae 

and  

Oarabile Vuyiswa Sathima 

 



iii  
 

 

Acknowledgments 
 

My family, my first and most consistent teachers, who never lost patience with a child 

that constantly questioned and that stubbornly argued about things, many times out 

of turn. The continued nurturing and unwavering offering of support, care, and strong 

sense of home is what keeps me together. I remain forever your student. Ka teboho, 

hlompho le lerato Bakoena.  

My friends, with whom I have the honour of building family and community with, who 

are there even if I’m not always the most communicative and available; it’s an 

incredible pleasure to learn and live with you. Gregory Maxaulane, Thabang Manyike, 

Lwazi Lushaba, Gabriel Letsoalo, and Modise Thompson, who, specifically, have 

provided me with familiarity, mentorship, camaraderie, education, respite and fun in 

this mostly aggressive and unaccommodating South African academy. The game won’t 

be the same after you lot have ran through it. Bennita, whose presence at crucial times 

in this journey has been affirming, engaging, patient and elegantly understated, and 

whose tenderness, understanding, and humility reveal a style and flair I admire 

greatly. I look forward to sharing many more significant and non-significant life 

moments with you. Going half on things with you has been one of the best things I 

could have done for myself. 

 My colleagues and friends at the HSRC: Zonke Gumede, Billie-Jean Joseph, Sarah 

Chiumbu, Reabetswe Molobela, Zuziwe Khuzwayo, Ragi Bashonga, Finn Reygan, Alude 

Mahali, Adam Cooper, Sharlene Swartz, and Heidi van Rooyen, who afforded me the 

resources, space, guidance, and affinity without which this journey might have not 

ended in submission. Thank you for pushing me, allaying my fears about my survival 

in the environment despite my ‘lack of institutional discipline,’ and for constantly 

making me feel valued. Viveka Pillai and Tsakani Mathebula from the HSRC library 

whose efficiency in finding for me what were sometimes “old and rare” texts never 

failed to amaze; your friendliness and eagerness to help also don’t go unnoticed.   



iv 
 

The Wits Political Studies department, my departmental base that for many years has 

not stood in the way of scholarly pursuits that may not always be in line with the 

disciplinary strictures of Political Science. I am grateful for the facilitation of many 

important relationships and milestones.  

Lastly, my supervisor and friend, Antje Schuhmann, who many years ago single-

handedly convinced me that a scholarly life was worth pursuing and who continues to 

be exemplary in how to read and cast personal convictions and intuitions as legitimate 

critical and academic concerns, this thesis does not happen without you. Your impact 

on my life has been momentous, and I am excited to see what our futures hold for us. 

I hope we continue to find each other. 

I use the pronoun “we” instead of “I” throughout this study mostly to try capture the 

level of influence that many of the special people referred to above have had on my 

critical, intellectual and scholarly outlook, as well as saying to them that I do not 

consider myself an exception or apart from them and that all that is good and of value 

in this study is because of them.  If I misrepresent anyone in this group, it is not done 

intentionally and with malice.



v  
 

Abstract 
 

On the one hand we place blackness as a historical if inconsistent category inextricable 

with morbidity, disfavour, depravity, mystery, wretchedness, penumbra, opacity or 

absence of light, and the abyssal – in both secular and religious metaphysical 

symbolism. On the other hand we place space as a historical and physical category 

denoting area, range, clearance, scope, volume, expanse, lacunae, aperture, margin, 

and in its instance as verb – opening, arranging, ordering, placing, separating, and 

locating; which in cosmography, geography and cartography finds its varied 

imaginative and applied interpretation. We coalesce what is in both hands in order to 

envisage how blackness persistently becomes and comes to be the extractable 

property of sub-Saharan Africans. Through various ontological-cosmographic-

geographic designations such as Torrid Zone, ‘land of the blacks’ or even terra nullius, 

we encounter visualisations of a territory and expanse that is always either completely 

devoid of people or inadequately peopled, that is, the territory whence blackness as 

inextricably embodied (or fleshened) exists and is cultivated. Blackness: not only does 

it determine our modes of being, or non-being, in this world, but for us in this study, 

it is also an experiential, experimental and analytical lens permitting the suggestion 

and scribing of historical narratives and discourses that centre the inveterate 

decentring of blacks. In the tradition of liner notes, this study is written in a 

performative relation to the subject or object at hand; there under the sun, in the 

dead heat.  

 

  



vi 
 

Contents 
COULD NOT SING IN THE DEAD HEAT: LINER NOTES UNDER THE SUN ............................   

Declaration ..................................................................................................................................i  

Acknowledgments .................................................................................................................... iii  

Abstract ...................................................................................................................................... v  

Contents .................................................................................................................................... vi 

Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1 

“sunshine, black skin, and doubt (in that order)” .................................................................... 12 

from da corner… .................................................................................................................. 13 

from de corner… .................................................................................................................. 18 

from the fungible/black/nullius… ......................................................................................... 24 

from way back who… ........................................................................................................... 28 

from way back where… ........................................................................................................ 42 

from the ships that come, the ships that take… .................................................................. 52 

Endnotes .............................................................................................................................. 65 

“That skin become ................................................................................................................... 67 

Slur   slide   susurration” .......................................................................................................... 67 

The rise against .................................................................................................................... 70 

the not-quite human,........................................................................................................... 84 

the fall in ............................................................................................................................ 104 

the flesh ............................................................................................................................. 114 

Endnotes ............................................................................................................................ 131 

“Fired in history’s unrelenting sun” ....................................................................................... 132 

Variations on a theme of irreverence .............................................................................. 133 

Variations on a theme of not-telling ................................................................................ 145 

Variations on a theme of silence and absence ................................................................ 155 

Variations on a theme of method .................................................................................... 166 

Endnotes ............................................................................................................................ 174 

Coda ....................................................................................................................................... 175 

Appendix ............................................................................................................................. 187 

References ............................................................................................................................. 190 

 



 

1 
 

Introduction 

 

“But you know we’re black right?” As if it is possible to forget. Particularly at that 

moment. Perhaps the tragedy that occasioned this reminder, this rhetorical gesture, 

this extension of consolation, this political mobilisation, could offer a kind of shelter 

from the sense that it resulted from something specifically anti-black. It could’ve 

happened to anyone after all. Anyway, isn’t the severance from one’s kin, the 

paradigmatic ‘natal alienation,’ said to be at the foundation of a particular non-

relation, dependant on some kind of momentary experience and tangible promise of 

a relation in this material world, prior to a violent separation? Does not a touch, a 

glimpse, a whiff, a slight kindling of tenderness proffer an inevitable rupture its 

profuse consequence? Or is the very nonexperience of natal contact in actual fact 

reflective of what is actually at stake; imminent dispossession is not dissimilar to the 

transitory non-possession that it initiates. In other words, for something to be taken 

it has to be had, but in order for it to be had in a way that it can be taken there has to 

be generated the idea in the one that it is taken from that it can be had and will be 

taken, which at the time it is not yet had, might as well be a taking.  

Perhaps this is what the words “but you know we’re black right” meant; that because 

you’re black you should have, in some way, expected that this or something like this 

will happen, that the tragic is always palpably lurking, metres and seconds away from 

pouncing. That is, as a black you live to be taken, taken away from, and have taken 

away from. These were not harsh words, they were words intended to soothe and 

offer solidarity, and that they did. That is if this was what was meant by them. For the 

imploration that followed not so long after these words suggested another meaning; 

that because we are black, and a death has occurred, there are certain traditional 

rituals that have to be performed and observed when the circumstances are such as 

they are. That my mind didn’t immediately assume that this is what was meant is 

perhaps attributable to the too instinctive rush to find solace, respite and ameliorative 

consanguinity in the very blackness that was implied to be the inevitable cause. It is 

also likely that one has grown accustomed to the South African discursive positioning 



 

2 
 

of blackness as a fundamentally historical, political, public, socio-economic 

experience. This is demonstrated, for example, in how the ‘Black’ in Black 

Consciousness thought and politics is said to be a ‘political blackness,’ that is, a 

political identity not necessarily racial and definitely not biological or essential, 

intended to rally those disparate groupings who bear the brunt of white supremacy 

under the banner of radical and substantive liberation from the strictures and violence 

of race and racism.  

This instance of blackness, or its kind, is not often interchangeable with what is 

insinuated by the phrase “as an African” or would be insinuated by the question “you 

know we’re African right?” Had he said this I would have known what was meant 

immediately, because we’ve generally come to understand the ‘African’ qualifier as 

alluding to a kind of preserved interiority (an eroded yet resilient spiritual and 

cosmological reservoir that that goes underground or into the bush when necessary 

but is never not there), a traditional heritage that at the very least, and mostly, is 

enacted and observed in a private world. Blackness therefore is what happens and 

comes from out there, constantly intruding and affecting what’s in here. And 

Africanness is what determines and protects what’s in here, and battles for relevance 

and traction out there. So, being reminded “you know we’re black right” as an opening 

to share the inescapable importance and necessity of a cleansing, of an ‘African 

traditional ritual’ that when read historically and politically (which of course may be a 

violent undertaking, or, takes place in the context of colonial violence) is also a defiant 

gesture of preservation, was both initially confusing and subsequently compelling. It 

makes one think and consider the extent to which these two terms delineate two 

different experiences.  

There is certainly a sense of interchangeability when one considers the plethora of 

terms, local and diasporic, that categorise a certain kind of dark body, and render 

equivalent a racial identity and a continental lineage and identity: African, Black, Black 

African, sub-Saharan African, Bantu, Black Atlantic, African American, Afro-Latina, 

Black British etc. But there’s also widespread sense that one comes into blackness, 

depending on where one is, and also that one comes into different kinds of blackness 

depending on the particular locale. On the continent, there certainly exists sentiments 



 

3 
 

that are not only resistant to the applicability of blackness to local contexts, but also 

see it as a very specific identity emerging from North America and maybe the 

Caribbean. African, here, is considered more relevant as explanatory frame of an 

interior and exterior world of most of those who come from and reside on the 

continent. So even upon cursory inspection we begin to see that especially in Africa, 

African and black can really mean different things. Under what circumstances then 

does black and African come to be undifferentiated in the way a good friend suggested 

to me? Mbembe clarifies this for us:  

Clearly, not all Blacks are Africans, and not all Africans are Blacks. But it matters little where 

they are located. As objects of discourse and objects of knowledge, Africa and blackness have, 

since the beginning of the modern age, plunged the theory of the name as well as status and 

function of the sign and of representation into deep crisis. The same was true of the relation 

between being and appearance, truth and falsehood, reason and unreason, even language and 

life. Every time it confronted the question of Blacks and Africa, reason found itself ruined and 

emptied, turning constantly in on itself, shipwrecked in a seemingly inaccessible place where 

language was destroyed and words themselves no longer had memory (2017: 12-13). 

Mbembe continues:  

“Africa” and “Blackness”: these two notions took shape together. To speak of one is to invoke 

the other. Each consecrates the other’s value. As we have noted, not all Africans are Blacks. 

But if Africa has a body, and if it is a body, a thing, it gets it from the Black Man – no matter 

where he finds himself in the world. And if the term “Black” is a nickname, if it is that thing, it 

is because of Africa. Both of these – the thing and that thing – refer to the purest and most 

radical difference and the law of separation. They mix with and burden each other as a sticky 

weight, at once shadow and matter. As this chapter demonstrates, both are the result of a 

long historical process that aimed at producing racial subjects (2017: 38, emphasis added).  

Firstly, perhaps Mbembe uses the gendered qualification Black Man unwittingly, or 

maybe it is intentional; either way it has to be pointed out that we will provide a critical 

elaboration of gendered blackness and its possibility later in the study. Secondly, 

Mbembe notes, not all Africans are blacks and not all blacks are African. But this 

elucidation is moot when considering those to whom the distinction can possibly be 

confused or interchanged. In other words, we believe that not all Africans are black 

only because there are people on the African continent who consider themselves 



 

4 
 

African but are not black. For these people, Africanness, in the most part, does not 

take shape with blackness and is almost always, if not violently, separated from 

blackness. But of course, these are not people who we think of, and not the kind of 

distinction in question that interests us: we are thinking of those people to whom 

Africa and blackness are categories that are accessible not only in the forms of an 

interiority/political identity binary, but also those to whom from without this 

distinction is not thinkable, perceptible, or even necessary. Put differently, whilst 

many Africans can make a distinction between their Africannes and their blackness, it 

is not the case for all Africans (or even all blacks) that their Africanness and their 

blackness “mix with and burden each other as a sticky weight, at once shadow and 

matter” (Mbembe, 2017: 38).  

 

The black in African, and the African in black, insofar as each is determinably present 

in the other, certainly contributes an ineradicable mark that even when these Africans 

distance themselves from blackness, and these blacks distance themselves from 

Africanness, from the gaze without this distinction is easily collapsible. What, from this 

gaze, at its base, is encountered, is a “lively human of a strange shape, roasted by the 

rays of the celestial fire, endowed with an excessive petulance, captive to the empire 

of joy, and abandoned by intelligence, the Black Man is above all a body – gigantic and 

fantastic – member, organs, color, a smell, flesh, and meat, an extraordinary 

accumulation of sensations (Mbembe, 2017: 38-39). Prior to its fabrication as a racial 

category or property, blackness is fundamentally seen indistinguishably from a 

geographic reality; it is the land of the blacks in the same register as it is Africa proper, 

that is, sub-Saharan Africa. If in pre-modern periods what we consider as sub-Saharan 

Africa was mapped as torrid zones, regions thought so hot as to not be inhabited and 

if anything to be incubators of non-life, then the sight of unsightly black skin formed a 

logical extension between extreme climate and geography and extreme physical 

appearance. Harry Garuba makes the point that  

 

Colonial conceptions of space and people, and thus colonial mapping, were premised on a 

Cartesian logic which foregrounded the fantasy of an autonomous subject with a privileged 

view casting his [sic.] eye over transparent space. This Master Subject-often European and 



 

5 
 

male-supposedly inhabiting an Archimedean position outside of discourse with a supposedly 

unmediated access to transparent space-created what Mary Louise Pratt (1992:201) describes 

as the 'monarch of all I survey' mode of Victorian exploration and travel writing. The positional 

authority of this Master Subject was constituted, first, by a division of the world into subject 

and object with all the dualisms involved in this process (e.g. mind/matter; nurture/nature; 

civilised/savage) and then by a configuration or mapping of space to consolidate this visual 

authority (2002: 87-88, emphasis added).  

 

Garuba continues:  

But as land is never just transparently there but is culturally constituted, so also is the body 

never just naturally there. Perhaps even more than land, the body is always already 

contaminated by signification. The body as a visual sign has often functioned as a site for the 

cultural coding of a multitude of ideas, of beauty and ugliness, the normal and abnormal, self 

and other, the familiar and the exotic, and so on. In racist and sexist discourses, it has mainly 

served as the site for the visual coding of naturalised difference (2002: 105, emphasis added). 

 

The abject environment that is sub-Saharan Africa and the abject blackness that is the 

form of the sub-Saharan African are thus comprehensible within a visual trajectory 

such that stubbornly sustains even when the black or African body is extracted from 

that specific environment. We are beginning to comprehend then, from the guidance 

of Mbembe and Garuba, the extensive profundity and critique encompassed by the 

question “but you know we’re black right?” To think of Africanness and blackness as 

fundamentally interchangeable is to take a position and to uptake a provocation. It 

calls upon an investigation into a historical encounter of world making capacity, the 

critical exploration of which at the very least disrupts the assumed validity of a 

historical public violation in the most obvious and known form of colonialism 

(including its ‘neo’ or ‘post’ guise) and slavery, and a private preservation in the form 

of African cultures and traditions. We of course make sweeping generalisations in 

suggesting that there exists a unanimous cognizance of a difference between being 

African and being black. In South Africa for example you do not have to wonder or 

pontificate or search too much to obtain the sense that black people do feel strongly 

that the particular colonial apartheid history was destructive of both an exterior and 

interior life, as well as the sense that what tends to the interior is as much a blackness 



 

6 
 

as it is an Africanness. This may not be the case in other African countries without a 

history of settler colonialism and apartheid. 

 

But the objective that this study takes to be central is not necessarily a polemic or 

focused investigation of the differences and similarities between Africanness and 

blackness. We point out the distinction between being African and being black, for 

one, not only because it provoked a moment and more of analytical contemplation 

within a personal exchange, but also because it highlights the personal exchange that 

itself is such an appropriate example of the ways that a conception of blackness allows 

a broaching of tragedy, colonial history, tradition, culture etc., in the minutiae of the 

everyday. We are also fascinated by the idea suggested in the question and reminder 

“but you know we’re black right” and its positioning of blackness not only as 

interchangeable with Africanness, but as that under which both dispossession and 

conservation can take place. Put otherwise, what we can conclude from the equation 

of Africanness and blackness is that those spheres considered the place for a surviving 

and protected Africanness are the same as those spheres considered the place for a 

surviving and protected blackness.  

 

Blackness as a mode, measure, site or clearing, and metaphor for both dispossession 

as well as recovery is one of the central investigatory and investigated concepts  of 

this study. We think of recovery not only as an attempt at a repossession or retrieval 

of something taken, lost or destroyed by continued colonial violence in the sense of 

an African or black personhood or world that existed before the 1400 and 1500s when 

external inquisitions and aggressions began and/or intensified in earnest, but also as 

entailing a recuperation, rallying, and betterment. That blackness is able to carry and 

intimate absolute violence as well as some kind of shelter from it speaks to its 

elasticity; this also exemplified in how blackness is constituted as, and constitutes, 

excess and extremity as well as deficiency and emptiness. Therefore, we aim to 

specifically explore the ways in which blackness is constituted as superfluity and void, 

as severity, threshold, and shortfall. The contention we make is that we come to 

understand blackness in these ways by way of a spatial dynamic, or inextricably from 

a spatial dynamic, that places and makes logical the connection between the 



 

7 
 

mysterious, unknown, unbearably hot, uninhabitable, non-existent, extraordinary, 

uncultivated, undomesticated, and liminal expanse that is sub-Saharan Africa, and the 

darkly, feral, debauched, impure, inane and primitive character and appearance of the 

people from it. In other words, the argument we intend to pursue is that, and to return 

to Mbembe’s words, there are ways in which that thing (blacks/blackness) which 

comes from the thing (Africa/sub-Saharan Africa/land of the blacks/torrid zones) has 

been historically conceived and produced from the outside that has thus been 

generative of an ontology that has structured Africa/black related realities such as 

slavery, colonialism, dispossession, neo-colonialism, capitalist extraction and 

exploitation, poverty, underprivilege, discrimination, chronic instability, and violence 

as endemic, inevitable, always-already, and anticipated. The sheer and sublime 

inseparability of that thing from the thing, is what for this study requires not quite an 

interrogation of the socio-political and economic histories of contact between the 

inhabitants of the region known as sub-Saharan Africa and those from without, but 

more so the ways in which the geographic, cartographic, climatological, and mythical 

have built long-lasting and structuring ideas of the place called Africa and those who 

emerge from it. Indeed, much conventional thought about Africa (and blacks/Africans) 

from those without the place is constructed through the narrative, the discursive, the 

poetic, and the representational. So too, however, is the tradition of thought from 

those within the matrix of the thing/that thing. This study in seeking to understand 

how knowledge about Africa has invariably been constructed and understood also 

situates itself within this matrix of that thing/the thing, that is, within traditions of 

thought about blackness and Africa that centralises the poetic and mythic.  

 

The first part of the title of this study “could not sing in the dead heat” is taken from 

a poem titled Musa by poet Kamau Brathwaite. As will be evident the role of the sun 

and the sun’s heat is a central component in prefacing the region we call sub-Saharan 

Africa in the imagination of those from without this region. We argue that what is 

considered the curious, divergent, wearisome if insufferable, and severe climate 

introducing this geographical area persists in its inhabitant’s curious, divergent, 

languid, and severe skin and nature. We can’t but think of Wilson Harris’s brief 



 

8 
 

reflection (in conversation with unacknowledged but supposedly well-known excerpts 

and quotes by American poets) on the representation of the sun in American writing:  

Yet energy, while essential for change or creation or art, may be self-destructive. It may be – 

a wish to be again 

threatened alive, in agonies of decision, 

part of our nation, of a fanatic sun. 

 

This reminds me that there is a school of West Indian art which idealizes the sun. And it has 

always struck me that this is an American attitude, American idealism. I have lived for long 

periods in savannahs so much exposed to heat and fire, that the sun has become an adversary 

– one of two antagonistic principles – night and day – and only an association of these two 

principles provides release. Which would bring the forms that are bound in a principle of 

subjection, genuinely into the light of day, without cruel suffering, must find truly that the sun 

has no stationary hold over its subjects like a feudal lord over his serfs. The sun is indeed a 

great reality in the West Indian world in a more terrible sense than the poet realizes when he 

exclaims: Sun’s in my blood. (1973: 10). 

Harris’ contemplation about the sun being depicted as creative source of energy, 

whilst also existing as destructive or extractive of vitality is essential particularly 

because it captures the crippling/creative binary of the title and the contents.  If the 

first part of our title for this study also references the inability of singing because of 

the sheer heat of this region, then the second part “liner notes under the sun” 

positions our activity as creatively and performatively attempting to note and scribe 

this non-performance, even if unsuccessfully, under the same relentless heat and 

glare. A non-performance, and a potentially failed performance which intends to 

witness and bear it. If we think of liner notes, most commonly a piece of writing 

accompanying a music recording, writing about a recorded performance, usually in its 

appraisal, readied for consumption, then us writing liner notes under the sun 

complicates this tradition, challenging the desire to write about and foregrounding the 

struggle to write alongside and from. Which is then to say that insofar as the heat of 

the sun is a critical component in a construction of blackness, what we really want to 

think about is the extent to which singing, or rather, creating and/or expressing, could 

happen in the deep hole that is blackness. If torrid sun entails and assumes destruction 

that becomes particularly evident in the corporeality and character of the inhabitants 

of this region, and the energy necessary for singing, for creation or art by these 



 

9 
 

inhabitants, may lead to a self-destruction, then we want to explore, in a manner not 

driven by destination, the ability and space to do anything, that is, to perform within 

this (black) condition. This indeed may be the more terrible sense of the exclamation 

‘the sun’s in my blood’ that escapes the poet, that the torridness of the sun already 

anticipates a total embroiling that becomes the lot of the black; an anticipation of 

seizure, an expectation of impossibility and loss, and a salvaging that is a poetics and 

poetry and song that exceeds that of the poet and singer – “you know we’re black 

right?”  

 

The study takes the form of an introduction, three long essays structured as chapters, 

and a coda. The first chapter introduces the reader to many of the key concepts that 

help and allow us to think through the arguments that we engage throughout the 

study. We suggest that places thought of or determined as black acquire through this 

very blackness a peculiar ability to be abstracted and pliable which properly deny them 

the stability and prevalence of place and project onto them the fears and fabulations 

of the outsider-onlooker. This then impels us to contend with ancient, medieval and 

early modern imaginations of geography, cosmography and cartography, and their 

particular relation to the region that is sub-Saharan Africa, for the purpose of tracing 

the ontological genealogy of blackness in the way we think of it. We suggest that these 

notions of sub-Saharan Africa, and the people said to be from or close to it, contribute 

to how the sub-Saharan world is approached, encountered, confronted, constructed, 

and captured. In essence, the first chapter broaches blackness from the side of the 

thing, postulating how an archetypal space comes to be constructed historically.  

 

If the first chapter traces the spatiality that sets the tone for blackness as it prevails as 

a foundational determinant in how a world’s region and its people come to be known, 

then the second chapter seeks to trace how this blackness coheres in the body, or 

more appropriately, the flesh of the black. We explore how certain notions of the kinds 

of beings emergent of the torrid zones, together with religion and theological exegesis 

and the Mediterranean geo-politics of the late medieval/Renaissance era, combine to 

instantiate a paradigmatic relation from which our understanding of modern 

subjectivity and alterity are formed. We ruminate in this chapter on the ways that 



 

10 
 

blackness is figured as that which is at odds with prevalent conceptions and categories 

of humanity despite its indispensable role in constructing these very categories and 

conceptions. In essence, the second chapter broaches blackness from the side of that 

thing, postulating how an archetypal (non) being, the black – and its variants, comes 

to be constructed through its indelible and inescapable association with the thing. It 

is not only an enduring binding that proves consequential in pre-modern to modern 

figurations of the human but that also sustains without the need to be bound to 

notions of racism as we understand them.  

 

The second half of the chapter engages in a form of experimentation, attempting to 

write out and represent in a literary form our deeply unsettled sense of how the black, 

that thing, under its various guises, can contend with its fallen and fleshly existence. 

This is a necessary endeavour in that on the one hand it further elaborates the 

complex, dramatic, otherworldly and mundane ways that the figure of the black as 

ineradicably marked by its geography is historically constructed, and on the other 

hand follows the proposition that a historiographic contention with this kind of subject 

matter is inadequate particularly from the position of the black historical scholar or 

practitioner. 

 

 This then leads us to the third chapter, which is a critical contemplation on 

methodology and historical method in particular. We specifically examine how black 

feminist methodologies and poetics, together with black studies ethico-poltical 

frameworks provide us the apparatus required when approaching certain historical 

discussions in non-reactionary and non-subjectifying (and non-objectifying) ways. In 

essence we consider here the (im)possibilities and struggles involved in recovering 

from the historical archive the lives, voices, presence, and narratives of black people 

and whether this is a desirable objective or not.  The final section of the study is the 

coda, in which we see how the conceptual assertion that we have been building 

throughout allows us to critically interrogate a position within South African 

contemporary debates about land. The intention of the coda is not a summation is not 

quite a direct summation of the preceding work, but a look forward to the thematic 



 

11 
 

and theoretical possibilities offered us through a creative and critical understanding 

of that thing from the thing. 



 

12 
 

“sunshine, black skin, and doubt (in that order)”i 
 
 
 
Cornered, on the corner, cut, cur(at)ed, a coat hook for some headphones, to listen to a language you 
don’t have…the corner where site and work converge in and as displacement… 

- Fred Moten, 2017 

 
Who made the land? Who made the land? 
God made the land, God made the land. 
Who owns the land? Who owns the land? 
Mr Johnson owns the land, Mr Johnson owns the land 
Who did Mr Johnson buy the land from? 
He bought the land from God 
Far as I know, God don’t take cash, cheque, Visa, or Mastercard 
So how did Mr Johnson pay for the land? 
Mr Johnson is God 
I know because Mr Johnson told me so 
I said “Am I God too? Am I God too?” 
He said “no, you’re only 3/5s of a man, you can’t own no land” 
… 
 Mr Johnson is God 
I know because Mr Johnson told me so 
I said “Am I God too? Am I God too?” 
He said “no, you’re only 3/5s of a man, you can’t own no land” 
Who made the land? Who made the land? Who made the land? 
Who made the land? Who made the land? Who made the land? 

- William Parker/Raining on the Moon, “Land Song”, 2007 

 
Land is not the traditional element used to analogize Black fungibility or think about moving, 
exchangeable and unstable Black diasporan subjectivity. Rarely does land evoke the kind of flexibility, 
elusiveness and trickster like qualities that Black diasporan bodies symbolize in the Western 
Hemisphere. Water, most often the Ocean, has been our faithful metaphor. 
 

- Tiffany Lethabo King, 2013 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



 

13 
 

from da corner… 
 

If as Lethabo-King (2013: 5) informs us that “Black Studies enables a discussion of the 

unique and un-analogous form of terror and domination that produced the Slave,” 

then we too are engaged in a type of Black Study. Although somewhat of an archetypal 

figure the slave is, we wonder (and wander) what are the grounds upon/through 

which this figure is produced? And what of the colonised? And the black? These are 

only some of the questions - we have many - of which we will seek answers, or at least 

clarification, or at most complication. Alexander Weheliye puts it thus: “blackness 

cannot be defined as primarily empirical nor understood as the non/property of 

particular subjects, but should be understood as an integral structuring assemblage of 

the modern human” (2008; 324). Lethabo-King returns to say “understanding the 

conditions under which the human comes into being is both a political and ethical 

project” (2013: 5). Without overemphasising our political and ethical pursuits, or 

indeed prioritising them, we hope to follow Weheliye and Lethabo-King and weave 

together some thoughts around blackness in relation to slavery/colonialism, as well 

as the modern human in relation to the black/slave, by way of a conjecture about 

(black) space and spatiality, and in doing so making an argument for how it is that 

these categories emerge and are grappled and played with in this study.  

 

There are many places to begin, but let us continue with ‘substance’. What we know 

of it is manifold. It is matter, and that which matters. It’s materiality - not light and 

superfluous but weighty and compelling. It is “mellow enough to ease the pain, but 

could also cause haemorrhage to the brain” (Inspectah Deck, 1999).  And as the Rebel 

INS tells us further, it is “too hot to handle, and too cold to hold” when pumped in a 

manner that is uncontrolled (Inspectah Deck, 1999). Indeed, its relationship to control 

in many instances determines its nature (and extent of illicitness?); when moving as 

“unfettered ur-matter, unthinkable exorbitance, and deregulated 

transubstantiation”, in other words, as the “mythicized substance ambling around 

despised flesh and an otherwise creativity exceeding the fungible fantasies 

masquerading as thought itself” then it is what Carter and Cervenak (2016: 204) dare 

to consider as ether, as black ether, as blackness. As blackness, it is the flavour that is 



 

14 
 

the stuff of the world, the coarse salt of the earth and wherein lies its rub, that which 

can be inexhaustively run into the ground but/and also the “mythic ground that 

intoxicates and fortifies whiteness, that which is held and expelled” (Carter and 

Cervenak, 2016: 205, emphasis added).  

 

Substance is also a rapper or MC. He raps from Vosloorus, a township east of 

Johannesburg, South Africa. Substance’s song ‘Inhlakanipho Yemali’ featuring Cut 

Corner contains a rhyme that opens up our reflections in this chapter but also allows 

us an intuitive conceptual moment upon which most of this study is attempting to 

build. In particular, it propels us into thinking and sensing about place and space, 

about blackness, about ‘black spatiality’, about what looms, about what’s inevitable, 

about what awaits that which already was. The song itself is the most directly, self-

consciously made ‘conscious’ – to use hip-hop parlance – song on an album/mixtape 

titled ‘Do The Knowledge Vol. 1’ released in 2008. And it is certainly one of the more 

poignant and perceptive songs, and the only one fully rapped in his vernacular 

language (a mixture of isiZulu and tsotsitaal or ‘Joburg Zulu’) as opposed to English 

(the prominent language on all the other songs). This factor lends credence to Marlene 

Nourbese Philip’s sense that “some experiences demand a faithfulness to the 

language in which the experience happens” (Philip, 1991: 130). Near the end of his 

second verse, Substance raps:  

 

ijele nalo alipheli ntwana liqala ecorneni 

nalengoma ibuhlungu ntwana ngoba ibhalwe ‘corneni 

  

(With all due respect, and with apologies) Roughly translated: “jail/prison won’t see 

an end because it begins on the corner/ and this song is painful because it was written 

on the corner” (Substance, 2008). The corner, as we know it to be: within the black 

township or ghetto, is where mostly young men are known to coalesce, for reasons 

and/or activities that can be interchangeably and nominally mundane, ritualistic, 

convenient, suspicious, criminal, panoptic, ebullient, territorial, violent, lazy, 

despondent, menacing, mischievous, wasteful, destructive, constructive, protective, 

spiritual, loving, joyful – amongst others. Common, The Last Poets and Kanye West, 



 

15 
 

on the corner: “on the corner niggas rob and kill and dying just to make a living huh… 

the corner was our time when time stood still… the corner was our magic, our music, 

our politics, fires raised as tribal dances and war cries broke out on different corners… 

the corner was our Rock of Gibraltar, our Stonehenge, our Taj Mahal, our testimonial 

to freedom, to peace, and to love” (‘The Corner’, 2004). Nonchalant, on the corner: “a 

black woman, trying to get through to the few/ so you can lead the next crew… 5 

o’clock in the morning, where you gonna be? (outside on the corner!) you need to get 

yourself together, while you’re wasting all your time right along with your mind” (‘5 

O’Clock’, 1996). Mandoza, on the corner: “uwe lo ekuseni… sowuse’corneni, uhlupha 

abaya emsebenzini/ uzovuka nini, ufane nabo, bade lam’, isikhathi siyak’shiya, walala 

walimala… uzoyithola kanjani uhlele ‘corneni”ii (Mandoza, 1999).   

 

For Substance, the corner seems to be many of these things too, and perhaps more. 

There is certainly a suggestion of a space given to, and characterised by, criminality or 

some kind of illicitness. This is expressed in the sense, idea and argument that jail or 

prison is a guaranteed presence, reality, outcome or inevitability. Why? Because it is 

already on the corner.  And so there is too a suggestion of this particular space as given 

to a creative rendering of an experience of pain (perhaps partly the pain that lies in 

lethargy, that is lethargy, and partly the pain of past, current and impending 

criminality), or the pains of township or ghetto life. It appears that he is, or is not, or 

is invariably, saying that the crime is happening, has already happened and is about to 

happen. It appears that he is, or is not, or is invariably, saying that the pain that is the 

song is being sung, has already been sung and is about to be sung. “The corner was 

our time where time stood still” – we don’t know if it can be said that time stands still 

on Substance’s corner, but there is certainly an arrest of some sort that is coming or 

has happened. We also don’t know if like the Last Poet who marks out an ‘our time’ 

that continues to move at the same time as a ‘time’ or ‘Time’ that stands still, it can 

be said that Substance’s corner’s time maintains and is maintained by varying and 

infused temporalities, but there is certainly a paradoxical temporal movement (corner 

to prison even though in/on the corner prison already is) that is at the same time as 

the ‘time’ or ‘Time’ in, of, and that is arrest or imprisonment.    

 



 

16 
 

The movement is, of course, of spatial simultaneity too. Alves, thinking of the Brazilian 

favela, (2013: 329) writes:  

Within the context of urban Brazil, the dialectics of life and death, violence and resistance, 

territorial captivity and placelessness produce the favela not only as a zone of death, but also 

as an alternative spatiality in which a black “spatial praxis” (Soja 1980) and a black (painfully 

and deadly constituted) subjectivity come into being. That is to say, because the cargo ship, 

the plantation, the favela, and the prison were/are geographic technologies of domination, 

black survival depends (ed) on spatial strategies of resistance that challenge not only the racial 

spatial order but also the very equation blackness = placelessness (Brown 2005; McKittrick 

2006; Spillers 1984). 

 

A spatial contemporaneity; on the one hand a space of death, and on the other hand 

(without emphasising the ‘resistance’ of it all) a space of attempts at, and actual 

flourishing of, some kind of life as well as creative renderings in response to and 

around the death-giving and death-letting of that space. Alves also speaks of a 

“spatiality produced in/by black subjugation to death” (2013: 327). Substance and 

Alves are, as we see it, in the same cypher; that is, if we are to think of Substance as 

referring to the corner as a spatiality produced in/by black subjugation to impending 

arrest. It being an arrest that is as inevitable as it has already transpired designates 

the corner as also a spatiality produced for/as black subjugation to impending arrest. 

Again, the same cypher; for Alves, spatiality produced in/by black subjugation to 

death, or “macabre spatiality”, is also and always an alternative spatiality that is 

coterminous with the creative emergence of a  black subjectivity that is nonetheless 

“painfully and deadly” constituted, in much the same way as for Substance the corner 

spatiality, or spatiality produced also for/as black subjugation is coterminous with an 

acoustic (or otherwise) creative rendering of pain because and despite of impending 

arrest(ability) (Alves, 2013).  

 

Once more, the same cypher; if as the Merriam Webster dictionary defines ‘placeless’ 

as “lacking a fixed location” and as “indistinguishable from other such places in 

appearance or character” and for Alves ‘macabre spatiality’ is characterised by a 

dialectics of “territorial captivity and placelessness” as well as an equation between 

blackness and placelessness, then much the same can be said for Substance, for whom 



 

17 
 

corner spatiality (in that it is also, always, as yet and almost jail/prison spatiality) lacks 

a fixed location, and for whom exists a fundamental (ontological?) indistinguishability 

between corner and jail/prison (https://www.merriam-

webster.com/dictionary/placeless). Blackness then appears to devoid place of its fixity, 

transforming into a black space characterised by the machinations of arrest as well as 

the desire (potential) of its unravelling.  This is certainly consistent with McKittrick’s 

view, who in noting the conceptual and logical extension that is prison from the 

plantation uses the term ‘prison life’ to “point to the everyday workings of 

incarceration as they are necessarily lived and experienced, as a form of human life 

and struggle, inside and outside prison” (2011: 956). The work of prison, the work of 

the plantation, the work of black space, is therefore already in process on the corner. 

After all, for blacks, prison is the “site that houses the slow death of inmates, racial 

violence, and the spatial management of race, and can also be conceptualised as an 

abstracted urbicidal geography that deliberately harms a particular population” (2011: 

955-6). Frank Wilderson, in sighting the structural, anticipatory and routine work of 

the plantation-to-prison forwards the figure of the prison slave and prison slave-in-

waiting to conceptualise this logical extension (2003). Pointing out Assata Shakur’s 

disdain and flat-out hatred of working within specific activist circles involving white 

allies, Wilderson suggests that this belies a sense from Shakur that blacks in these 

spaces are essentially as unsettled, both experientially and ontologically, as in the non-

ally or non-radical outside that is a general racist society that these activists are raging 

against (2003). Wilderson continues, 

Her hatred of this work is bound up in her anticipation, fully realized, of all the zonal violations 

to come when a white woman asks her if Zayd [Malik Shakur] her "panther... you know, is he 

your black cat?" and then runs her fingers through Assata's hair to cop a kinky feel. Her 

narrative anticipates these violations-to-come at the level of the street, as well as at the level 

of the body. Here is the moment in her life as a prison-slave-in-waiting, which is to say, a 

moment as an ordinary Black person, when she finds herself among "friends" - abolitionists, 

at least partners in purpose, and yet she feels it necessary to adopt the same muscular 

constriction, the same coiled anticipation, the same combative "one-liners" that she will need 

to adopt just one year later to steel herself against the encroachment of prison guards. The 

verisimilitude between Assata's well known police encounters, and her experiences in civil 

society's most nurturing nook, the radical coalition, raises disturbing questions about political 

desire, Black positionality, and hegemony as a modality of struggle (2003, 19). 

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/placeless
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/placeless


 

18 
 

 

 The paradoxical nature of the indistinguishability and abstractness that are black 

spaces, is amplified by a territorial(ly-based) captivity or arrest or immovability with a 

synchronous kind of inability for fixedness, rootedness, and place. They are as 

indistinguishable as they are simultaneous, asynchronous, contemporaneous, 

separate, interchangeable, differing, coterminous and at odds. They speak to black 

positionality proper, that is, black positions and blacks in position, that thing from the 

thing. So, the corner, back to Substance, is a placeless space; it is a black space, it’s a 

space by its very nature of the prison slave-in-waiting. 

 

from de corner… 

 

To challenge and push Substance’s cypher further, however, and importantly: BUT 

JAMETTES GET RAPED TOO! This is what Marlene Nourbese Philip reminds and 

teaches us. In thinking about ‘place’ and the attachment to it such that it enables a 

movement towards writing “from rather than about place”, Philip highlights the 

necessity, impossibility, and dire inevitability looming over (black) women’s claiming 

and reclamation of public space (Philip, 2017: 241 – emphasis original). Philip 

contends:  

In patriarchal societies (the only ones we have known), the female body always presents a 

subversive threat. By far the most efficient management tool of women is the possibility of 

the uninvited and forceful invasion of the space between the legs – rape. Which is a constant. 

A threat to the space – the inner space between the legs. Even if never carried out, this threat 

continually and persistently inflects how the female reads the external language of place, or 

public space – the outer space (2017: 242).  

 

Philip, in what could be a direct conversation with Substance, continues:  

How the female poet interacts with the land, the countryside, or the urban-scape – with the 

outer space in all its variety, or place in the most physical of senses – is entirely affected by 

gender. Is the choice, therefore, either to accept the restriction in physical behaviour and 

available space that the threat of rape brings – limit one’s activities to the daytime, and to 

specific places? Or what? The female poet’s understanding of place in its most physical sense 

will be different, and necessarily a more restricted one, than that of the male poet’s (2017: 242; 

emphasis added). 



 

19 
 

 

Marlene Nourbese Philip and Nonchalant, black women, seem to be on one side, away 

from and aware of the corner, unable to access it comfortably, critical of it/its 

denizens, threatened by it and the worlds that produce and necessitate it, potentially 

dispossessed by it. Substance, Common, The Last Poets, Chiskop, black men, seem to 

be on the other side, on the corner - as well as away and aware of it, able to access it 

- uncomfortably, both critical and affirming of it/its denizens, threatened by it and the 

worlds that produce and necessitate it, threatening from it, potentially dispossessed 

by it, finding and building fraternity on and from it. It is not the space that is the corner 

that sets them apart, but it is space, the space between. Philip once more: 

Space and place – the public space – must not only be read and interpreted from the point of 

view of the space between the legs, but also from the perspective of how safe the space 

between the legs is or will be. The Body. And that most precious of resources – the space. 

Between. The legs. The Black woman comes to the New World with only the body. And the 

space between. The European buys her not only for her strength, but also to service the black 

man sexually – to keep him calm. And to produce new chattels – units of production – for the 

plantation machine. The Black woman. And the space between her legs. Is intended to help 

populate the outer space… The space between the Black woman’s legs becomes. The place. 

Site of oppression – vital to the cultivation and continuation of the outer in a designated 

form – the plantation machine. Harness the use value of the inner peace to the use value of 

the outer space so that the inner space becomes open to all and sundry. Becomes, in fact, a 

public space. A thoroughfare. The “black magic” of the white man’s pleasure, the “bag o’ sugar 

down dey” of the Black man’s release. And the space through which new slaves would issue 

forth (2017: 243 italics original, highlighting added).  

 

With a glance at Sun Ra, but keeping it terrestrial, reluctantly, but necessarily so, we 

see that Space IS the Place. And the place is the space that is a site of oppression, the 

space created and seized to enable and continue the passage to the plantation 

machine. It is this space that sets the black women and the black men mentioned 

above, together; in the passage towards the natal moment, within the natal moment 

itself, and the passage to the numerous plantation moments thereafter and before. 

And it is these plantation moments (and the passage to them) that at times sets the 

black women and black men as indistinguishable, in that they rely on the paradoxical 

assemblage of gendering and ungendering elements that form the plantation machine 



 

20 
 

itself. It is the space that puts both black women and black men on the same corner, 

in the same space. But, again, JAMETTES GET RAPED TOO!  

 

In nineteenth century Trinidad, only a few decades after the declaration that slavery 

was abolished, jamettes emerged as a symbol and embodiment of the moral morass 

that was, of course, always bound to be rampant in the absence of the virtuous and 

civilising project of trans-Atlantic slavery. The term ‘jamette’ itself is a Trinidadian 

Creole derivative of “the French diametre, which translates into “diameter,” referring 

to the imaginary line that divides society into two sectors, the respectable and the 

criminal” (Noel, 2010: 61). ‘Jamette’ therefore, was firstly “used to describe a class of 

poor, underprivileged, and formerly enslaved people” before being more lastingly 

deployed as a “strategically gendered descriptor for women of a certain race, class, 

and deportment” (Noel, 2010: 60-61). The importance of this locutionary alteration is 

twofold; firstly, as alluded to above, the history of the amiable gendering and 

ungendering entanglements to the point of gender indistinguishability constitutive in 

the creation of a slave people, together with the post-slave society attempt of 

incorporation of former slaves into conventional gender roles, is what permits, and is 

illustrative of how, ‘jamettes’  in the first instance is used in a way that it “clearly 

feminizes the cultural practices of a certain class of people, and [is then], in turn, used 

by society to regulate and scrutinize the sexuality of black women” (Noel, 2010: 61). 

Secondly, and relatedly, the jamette Carnivals of the late nineteenth century soon 

became associated with the scandalous public performances and behaviours of the 

women involved (jamettes), who slyly and/or boisterously defied and exaggerated 

gender and sexual stereotypes as well as prevalent norms of respectability. They also 

aggressively and at times violently imprinted themselves in a public domain formerly 

and conventionally at odds with them (not forgetting, as Noel points out, the men who 

would dress as women much to the chagrin of the elites), and thus aptly epitomised 

the extent of social decay, and in effect provided a preview of the total dissipation if 

left uncontrolled.  Noel writes:  

The women of the jametre class often organized themselves into bands for Canboulay 

[Carnival], with such names as “Black Ball, Dahlias, Don’t-Care-A-Damns, Magentas, Maribuns 

(usually Maribone), Mousselines and True Blues,” all of which were seen in the 1868 Carnival, 



 

21 
 

wearing fantastic dresses. Their participation in Carnival, however, was not pure revelry; the 

concealment of weapons was a common practice in these bands as early as 1864, and many 

of these women armed themselves with horsewhips, stones, and razors, reflecting the violent 

culture inherent among the jametres. The viciousness of slavery and its quasi continuation in 

the post-emancipation era of colonial plantation society produced a class of both men and 

women who could inflict violence with as much vigor as they endured it. Women not only 

actively participated in riots and confrontations, they could be key instigators. It is this 

disposition of animosity that culminated in the Canboulay riots of 1881 when several jametre 

bands and the police force confronted each other during Carnival in a calculated attempt to 

defeat each other (2010: 63).   

 

It is within this context that Philip tells the story of the jamettes and implores us to 

remember that JAMETTES GET RAPED TOO! For Philip, a lower-class area in the streets 

of Port of Spain, Trinidad, a jamette haven, is the stage and space of a confrontation 

between the Don’t Give a Damns and the Mousselines. They fight, in and for the space, 

they do what jamettes do. Soon, the police, all men, circumspectly enter the fray. 

Prudent, with attempted authority, they declare “you’re a disgrace to womanhood! 

All you jamettes – a disgrace, you should be locked up”. They back up as they say this, 

unsure of the reactions of the jamettes many of whom they have a history of clashes 

with. Indeed, as they feared, the jamettes, now united, taunting, skirt-lifting, are doing 

what jamettes do: advancing, prodding, claiming, protecting (Philip, 2017: 248). It is 

now set for a showdown between jamettes and the police, in the public outer space, 

in the public inner space, the space between; and by all indications, the jamettes are 

winning. They shout, variously: “The streets is we own!” “You see we here in all we 

nakedness – you see any of we shame of it? Not one, not one a we shame of we 

nakedness or frighten of you,” “De space between we legs is we own to do with as we 

please, and we not frighten of these streets. Dese streets is we own – we have a right 

to be here and beating any man who telling we different” (Philip, 2017: 248-249). The 

police run! The jamettes won! “The women laughing loud loud like real jamettes. 

Suddenly the stage black black” (Philip, 2017: 249).  Needless to say, JAMETTES… 

 

Noel (2010) explains how after 1881 the colonial administrators and elites classes 

began a series of clampdowns on jamettes and their cultures and activities, 



 

22 
 

particularly around carnival, resulting in the eventual curbing of exuberant jamette 

presence at Carnival by the conclusion of the century. The characterisation of jamette 

women as licentious and untrammelled, as effective or actual prostitutes was one of 

the ways in which jamettes were pushed back and their public and spatial ranging 

restricted. Noel notes how the “police constantly scrutinized them, following them on 

a regular basis and, in some cases, extorting sexual favors. Those who did not comply 

might be sent to the courts to be registered as common prostitutes, a marker that 

made them even more vulnerable to official harassment” (2010: 64). The more actual 

jamettes were systematically stifled and suffocated, the more ‘jamette’ emerged as a 

figure and parable mobilised as the foil of respectable womanhood, that is, the 

domain of no womanhood at all, and thus the domain of black womanhood.   

 

We move on to the next part of the story that Philip shares, and it commences at Act 

Two - Scene Two; a jump from Act One - Scene One (that ended in jamette victory), 

but located at the same scene, the “same crossroads as in Act I, Scene I”. It’s a part 

that is characterised by song and silence. A man, on one of the corners of the 

crossroads, strums a guitars and laments the contemptible audacity of Boadicea, one 

of the leaders of the jamettes from the previous scene we know. She, Boadicea, sings 

the man, should have embraced the life-saving mores of Victorian womanhood; “is 

better she die or lock up in jail,” these the apparent options on the table in the event 

that she didn’t embrace these mores, which she didn’t (2017: 249). These options, 

descendants of the plantation, itself a descendant of the passage, itself descendant of 

farther places deemed black, are staples of the plantation machine, serving 

‘impending arrest’ and ‘macabre spatiality’ to bring back Substance and Alves.  We 

hear, here, the song and silence of this song in Act Two - Scene Two, and the silence 

and song of the “missing text” between the Acts (Phillip, 2017: 251). That is, what is 

missing in the narrative that goes from the resounding public victory of the jamettes 

to the lament that reminds us of their fateful options of death and arrest. Philip 

reflects that to “read the silence around the text, one must become a jamette poet – 

possessing the space between the legs – the inner space – uncompromisingly – as the 

outer space” (2017: 251). It is from the dispossessed space that song is as audible as 

silence, is impossible without silence, and indeed anticipates the silence; victory is 



 

23 
 

unfathomable without defeat; claiming and reclamation lie in wait for deprivation and 

bereavement.   

 

In the dwelling of the missing text, we are then moved to a calypso, by the famous 

calypsonian “Mighty Sparrow”, titled ‘Jean and Dinah’, popular in the 1950s and 60s. 

On calypso, Noel (2010) makes the contention that despite being able to trace its 

beginnings in the kalinda songs of the jamettes in the 19th century, by the 20th century 

calypso had largely become a genre in which the jamette caricature was utilised to 

denigrate women of unacceptable social standing and behaviour, through their very 

designation as jamettes. “Calypsonians were often critical of these women, and their 

songs reflected what the masses felt about this cohort, relegating them to the 

category jamette. In their lyrics they often presented the moral ideals they expected 

women to follow, yet they seldom professed a desire to change their own behaviors” 

(2010: 70).  In Mighty Sparrow’s calypso, Jean, Dinah, Rosita and Clementina are sex 

workers who have apparently fallen on increasingly tough times following the 

departure of a large military presence of American men in Port of Spain - men who 

had constituted the majority of their clientele. The exit of these foreign military men 

has thus entailed a financial adjustment back to the pre-war, pre-inflated reality for 

these women, a reality where men like the protagonist of the calypso knew them for 

what they were really worth, jamettes. Philip writes:  

Jean, Dinah, Rosita and Clementina, their space a corner, a street corner, where they posing 

and selling what all men wanted and still do – a piece of their space, the space between their 

legs… Because of the Yankees, Jean, Dinah, Rosita and Clementina charging a higher price for 

their space, the place that was theirs and theirs alone. Sparrow man, calypso man, putting 

them round the corner posing, and believing he could get it all for nothing. Because he 

controlling the outer space, which controlling their inner space. Jean, Dinah, Rosita and 

Clementina – their space, their place, dis place between the legs – public women, women in 

public on the street corner, round the corner selling… your life, mine and theirs (2017: 250-

251).  

 



 

24 
 

The seeming reclamation of space – between, inner, and outer - was momentary, 

apparently, much to the delighted contempt of the caplysonian. The return of the 

status quo is a return to a spatial structure that for the jamette only differs in the 

level to which it is explicit in its articulation of who belongs where and when. 

The jamette corner then, are continuations of the space between, spaces of 

possession circumvented by initiatory dispossession. A non-redemptive 

possession, the kind of possession in the plantation machine. What the jamettes 

remind us of is that within the precariousness that is black public life, which is to 

say black life generally, the corner is, on the one side, not the exclusive realm of 

black man/male sociality and spatiality-cum-potential recuperative insurrection, 

and on the other, not an especial quintessence of the black man/male experience 

of dispossession. Philip shows us, or at least allows us to realistically imagine, 

that these corners are black spaces, that is, they are too spaces of black 

woman/female reclamation-cum-potential recuperative public insurrection. In 

doing so, Philip warns against a romantic appraisal of the corner, and reminds us 

of the corner as a constant threat to dis/place. And in its guise as a masculine 

panopticon peering across the township landscape, it is a space that so often 

figures as the site for unwanted attention and harassment for black girls and 

women, occasionally intense enough to warrant a reconfiguration of routes and a 

reconstitution of a township/ghetto geography.iii 

from the fungible/black/nullius… 

 

From the corner, we move and seek to find as divaricate a polyphony as we’re allowed, 

and as necessary, with Lethabo-King’s (2016) idea of black fungibility. With the 

intention of employing it as a “spatial analytic”, Lethabo-King states how “within the 

tradition of Spillers (1987) as well as Hartman (1997), the concept of fungibility 

denotes and connotes pure flux, process, and potential” and so Black fungibility could 

be understood as the “capacity of Blackness for unfettered exchangeability and 

transformation within and beyond the form of the commodity, thereby making 

fungibility an open-ended analytic accounting for both Black abjection and Black 

pursuits of life in the midst of subjection” (2016: 1023, 1024). Because of slavery’s 

initiatory extraction, (of and) from blacks, of humanity and those traits that did and 

would go on to satisfactorily cohere the human form, the black body, and indeed 

blackness, is left open, is left an open field, and is left as openness. What lies in the 

wake of this process for Lethabo-King is “Blackness as abstract matter or space” (2016: 

1026). The foundational extraction is because of, leads to, and is for, a foundational 

abstraction; blackness, which on the one hand renders a tensility, pliancy, and 



 

25 
 

shapeshiftability, the sort of which grates against, distorts, and collapses logical 

adherence to conventional forms. And which on the other hand, as open field, as 

unencumbered access and as generative inconsequence, provides occasion and space 

for decimation, demarcation, delineation, and decision.   

 

The abstraction is spatial and space-making in that way; it clears a space, opens space 

up, provides the space for, spatializes, spaces, and places space. Lethabo-King 

continues: “under slavery and conquest, the Black body becomes the ultimate symbol 

of accumulation, malleability, and flux existing outside of human coordinates of space 

and time… Blackness is the raw dimensionality (symbol, matter, kinetic energy) used 

to make space. As space, Black bodies cannot occupy space on human terms” (2016: 

1028-1029, emphasis added). Blackness as raw dimensionality therefore maintains a 

primordial menace that discounts certain categories (place, space, time, human) even 

as it makes and consolidates them at premium. And so it is what permits the black 

body, as its constellation and installation, to not be a body like bodies are and should 

be. And it is what allows a colonial settler to see black bodies as preserving the 

capacity to “merge with the green plantain fruit and become blocks of colour. Black 

bodies become part of the vegetation and the abstract space of terra nullius that 

constitutes the Caribbean Island” (Lethabo-King, 2016: 1028).iv Wilderson reminds us 

that “what it means to be a slave is to be subject to a kind of complete appropriation… 

[and that] it’s a body you can do what you want with (Hartman and Wilderson, 2003: 

188). 

 

Slavery and conquest are foregrounded by thinkers such as Wilderson as elemental to 

the formation of the conception of blackness, the black body, black space, and black 

time, as fungible and abstract. We would however, here, like to think of the possibility 

of adding to, or anticipating, the primacy allotted to slavery in the formation of these 

conceptions. Following Substance’s and Philip’s insights and taking seriously the idea 

of the ‘abstract space of terra nullius’ we want to explore a potential; that is, slavery’s 

potential, and colonialism’s potential, or the potential that is both slavery and 

colonialism. And so to move from the colony, the middle passage, the plantation, the 

township/ghetto/favela, the corner, the prison, and back again, for the very first time. 



 

26 
 

What we have being doing thus far is looking at the peculiar and commonplace ways 

in which blacks/blackness (that thing) cohere in, as, and with black spaces (the thing), 

in the different places in the “black diaspora” or those places that black people have 

been regarded as black historically. We continue by picking up on the concept of terra 

nullius, and working with it in a way that further permits us to tell a story about that 

thing from the thing. Indeed, if for scholars like Wilderson slavery marks the 

dissolution of preexistence or being prior and the impossibility of subsequent 

categorisation in the emergent and successful modern world for the black (who is only 

produced as prison slave and prison slave-in-waiting), then we would like to suggest 

that this is already anticipated by the long-held conceptions about the space that is 

Africa and the beings emergent from it. If our discussion of the corner succeeds in 

showing the ways that rendering spaces as black at once abstracts them and offers 

their inhabitants and dwellers as both placeless and inextricably bound, as rootless 

and captive, then what we hope becomes clear in our following discussion is that 

slavery does not present a departure of kind to a prior relation (into a non-relation) 

but rather a logical expatiation of a history of encounters, mappings, and narratives. 

This perhaps is what also presents us the opportunity to travel between a corner in a 

South African township in the early 21st century and a corner in 19th century Trinidad 

and various corners in late 20th century American ghettoes; we forfeit the conceptual 

investment that Wilderson has in marking a difference between the black descendent 

of slaves and slavery (and perhaps the Khoisan) on one side, and the black African 

descendants of the colonised and colonialisation on the otherv, and look towards a 

more fundamental connection between blackness and space that also sustains prior 

to trans-Atlantic slavery,  and subsequently in Africa. 

 

Mbembe informs us variously: “for a long time, in the Western imagination, Africa was 

an unknown land. But that hardly prevented philosophers, naturalists, geographers, 

missionaries, writers, or really anyone at all from making pronouncements about one 

or another aspect of its geography, or about the lives, habits and customs of its 

inhabitants… Africa is sometimes a strange land, marvellous and blinding, and at other 

times a torrid and uninhabitable land. It appears sometimes as a region afflicted with 

an irreparable sterility; at others, as a country blessed with spontaneous fertility… But 



 

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whatever the beauty or ugliness of its face, the destiny of Africa is to be dispossessed” 

(2017: 70/71, emphases added).  

 

There is a lot to be said about terra nullius; Springborg suggests that  

the early modern doctrine of terra nullius seems to have been derived from the Roman Law 

concept of res nullius and the innocuous clause in the Digest that uncultivated land belonged 

to the class of things open to the first taker; as formulated by Gaius it included ‘wild beasts, 

birds and fish’, which Grotius paraphrased as ‘a numerus clausus of things unowned’ that 

might be subject to possessio: ‘Of such sort are many places hitherto uncultivated, islands in 

the sea, wild animals, fish and birds’. From these apparently innocent beginnings terra nullius 

had a long career as the pretext for the dispossession of native peoples in North America, 

Australia and the Middle East (2015: 114-115).  

 

It is our desire to think about terra nullius and to simultaneously think about nobody’s 

land, no-bodies land, dis/ possessible land; in conjunction with lands afar considered 

torrid (oppressive) and uninhabitable (unlivable/not germane to ordinary life). That is, 

to say all these words in the same breath. We do this because we think of the Latin 

meaning of the term as meaning ‘nobody’s land’, then we think of modern colonial 

history that, unlike Springborg’s words above, crucially includes and begins with 

Africa. Then we think of how the modern matrix of colonialism and slavery is not only 

developed in Africa but can be argued to be that which slings us forward into 

modernity. And so if Springborg omits Africa as not having a pretext for dispossession 

steeped in the notion of terra nullius comparable to North America, Australia and the 

Middle East yet it was still the exemplary case of dispossession, land and people alike, 

we can only surmise that it is because the pretexts for colonial African dispossession 

was something other than terra nullius. Or perhaps that colonial dispossession of 

African body and land is noteworthy in an-other exceptional or unexceptional way. Or 

that it is simple discursive oversight. Either way, terra nullius, for us a historical 

referent veered conceptual heuristic and intervention, properly forms part of a lineage 

of designations pointing towards the yonder that is sub-Saharan Africa when from the 

Mediterranean, and the yonder of hinterland Africa when from the eastern coast of 

the continent. Insofar as it not popularly understood to be applicable to black Africa, 

part of what we want to suggest in this study is that the Iberian wandering into areas 



 

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formerly thought torrid, and their encounter with black Africans neither Muslim nor 

Christian, is paradigmatic such that it forms a kind of blueprint for a relation to land 

and people in the new world and the Indian and Pacific Oceans. We want to use the 

term ‘torrid nullius’ then to refer to the specific no-bodiedness and abstractness that 

sets the bounds for the emergence of various categories specific to what becomes the 

modern, that is, as specific to sub-Saharan Africa. Torrid nullius also allows to evoke 

other meanings of torrid, and capacities of torrid; that which implies extreme heat 

that melts and liquefies and thus makes fluid and adjustable and adaptable. The 

archetypes for nobodyness and no-bodiedness are then moulded from the raw 

material of torrid zones.     

 

Back to the corner, on the corner, where Substance anticipates the prison, and as we 

have pondered, the corner that is, in effect, already the prison. Are we then allowed  

to abstract that if “Afropessimists have gone to considerable lengths to show that, 

point of fact, slavery is and connotes an ontological status for blackness; and that the 

constituent elements of slavery are not exploitation and alienation but accumulation 

and fungibility,” then notions of scorching yet extractable lands deemed thus for their 

not-bodied or more acutely ‘imbodied’ nature, already anticipate the constituent 

elements of slavery? (Wilderson, 2010, as quoted by Lethabo-King, 2016, 1028). Can 

we think of torridness and uninhabitability as that which points towards, directs, and 

is an ‘ontological’ status for blackness, that is, that which sets that stage for and is 

already fungibility and accumulation?  

 

from way back who… 

 

Holding Mbembe’s above utterances, we always seek some kind of serrated 

symphony with Sylvia Wynter, who weaves together a panoramic chronicle that 

teaches us of the terrestrial and celestial unravelling that becomes modernity. It is 

Wynter’s sojourn into the middle-ages of Western historiography and cartography 

that awakens us to the digging necessary for us to write something that we feel 

compelled to write. We don’t exalt uncritically, but we offer praise, and carry with, 

and move. It is Wynter then who leaves us at Mudime’s search in antiquity for “Greek 



 

29 
 

and Latin writers’ influence on the European invention of Africa” (1987, 81). It’s a 

search that finds a varied lot of ancient writers’ perceptions about Africa and its 

inhabitants, as a whole, that do by no means have any salient fidelity to what become 

modern conceptions of race, but in many ways that revel in modes and tropes familiar 

to the modern eye, albeit admittedly more fanciful. Mudimbe reads ancient Greek 

historian Herodotus as having suggested that “west of the Tritonian Lake the country 

is savage, full of wild animals and strange creatures: ‘dog-headed humans,’ ‘headless 

peoples,’ and ‘human beings who have their eyes in the breasts,’ ‘besides many other 

creatures not fabulous’’ and was indeed mapped as a “geography of monstrosity” 

(83/84). Mudimbe continues:  

“In the fifth century B.C., Hereodotus could state: ‘to my thinking, there is no part of Libya of 

any great excellence whereby it should be compared to Asia or Europe, save only in the region 

which is called by the same name as its river Cinypus’ (iv, 198). Five hundred years later, Pliny 

described the north of Africa in terms of the transformations brought about by Roman 

civilisation (NH, v, r, i4). Yet, his geography of monstrosity faithfully mirrors Herodotus’s 

description. To Herodotus’s immense space of human monsters living in the eastern part of 

Libya, Pliny opposes a specific area around the ‘black river which has the same nature as the 

Nile’ (NH, V, Vita, 44). Strange beings live there: peoples who do not have individual names, 

cave dwellers who do not practice marriage, the “Blemmyae” who are headless, satyrs, 

strapfoots, etc. (NH, V, VIII, 45-46). Let us note briefly that Diodurus of Sicily’s ethnography of 

Ethiopians (Book iii) conforms to this model. It is also antithetic and presents two types of 

Ethiopians. There are ‘civilized’ ones who inhabit the capital city of Napata, and whose history 

is transformed for the better by a Greek-educated king, Ergamenes. Then there is the majority, 

the other ethnic group, who are savage (agroi) and black in colour (melanes)” (1987: 84).  

The purview of mythologizing did not only move in the realm of the monstrous and 

beastly however. Tsri (2016) notes how various Greco-Roman writers considered and 

characterised Ethiopians (also spelt ‘Aethiopians’), with whom there had been contact 

with and knowledge of as a people from the areas south of Egypt, as boasting a 

favoured relation with the gods thus their prodigious sanctity and military might. In 

Book I 400 – 430 of the epic poem ‘The Iliad,’ Homer writes: “for Zeus went yesterday 

to Okeana, unto the noble Ethiopians for a feast, and all the gods followed with him” 

(Leaf, Long, and Myers, 1909: 14). And documenting the feats of Cambyses II, son of 

Cyrus and King of Persia from 530 to 522 BCE, and in particular the encounter with 



 

30 
 

and subsequent attempted attack on the Ethiopians, Herodotus, in Book III of 

Histories, writes – at length: 

“After Cambyses took counsel with himself, and planned three expeditions. One was against 

the Carthaginians, another against the Ammonians, and a third against the long lived 

Ethiopians, who dwelt in that part of Libya which borders upon the southern sea. He judged it 

best to despatch his fleet against Carthage and to send some portion of his land army to act 

against the Ammonians, while his spies went into Ethiopia, under the pretence of carrying 

presents to the king, nut in reality to take note of all they saw, and especially to observe 

whether there was really what is called ‘the table of the Sun’ in Ethiopia. Now the table of the 

Sun according to the accounts given of it may be thus described: it is a meadow in the skirts of 

their city full of the boiled flesh of all manner of beasts, which the magistrates are careful to 

store with meat every night, and where whoever likes may come and eat during the day. The 

people of the land say that the earth itself brings forth the food. Such is the description which 

is given of this table. When Cambyses had made up his mind that the spies should go, he 

forthwith sent to Elephantine for certain of the Icthyophagi who were acquainted with the 

Ethiopian tongue… As soon as the Icthyophagi arrived from Elephantine, Cambyses, having 

told them what they were to say, forthwith despatched them into Ethiopia with these 

following gifts: to wit, a purple robe, a gold chain for the neck, armlets, an alabaster box of 

myrrh, and a cask of palm wine. The Ethiopians to whom this embassy was sent are said to be 

the tallest and handsomest men in the whole world. In their customs they differ greatly from 

the rest of mankind and particularly in the way they choose their kings; for they find out the 

man who is the tallest of all the citizens, and of strength equal to his height, and appoint him 

to rule over them.  

The Icthyophagi on reaching this people, delivered the gifts to the king of the country, and 

spoke as follows: ‘Cambyses, king of the Persians, anxious to become thy ally and sworn friend, 

has sent us to hold converse with thee, and to bear thee the gifts thou seest, which are the 

things wherein he himself delights the most’. Hereon the Ethiopian, who knew they came as 

spies, made answer: ‘The king of the Persians sent you not with these gifts because he much 

desired to become my sworn friend – nor is the account which ye give of yourselves true, for 

ye are come to search out my kingdom. Also your king is not just a man – for were he so, he 

had not coveted a land which is not his own, nor brought slavery on a people who never did 

him any wrong. Bear him this bow, and say – ‘The king of the Ethiops thus advises the king of 

the Persians – when the Persians can pull a bow of this strength thus easily, then let him come 

with an army of superior strength against the long-lived Ethiopians – till then, let him thank 

the gods that they have not put it into the heart of the sons of the Ethiops to covet countries 

which do not belong to them’… The Icthyophagi then in their turn questioned the king 



 

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concerning the term of life, and diet of his people, and were told that most of them lived to be 

a hundred and twenty years old, while some even went beyond that age – they ate boiled 

flesh, and had for their drink nothing but milk. When the Icthyophagi showed wonder at the 

number of the years, he led them to a fountain, wherein when they had washed, they found 

their flesh all glossy and sleek, as if they had bathed in oil – and a scent came from the spring 

like that of violets. The water was so weak, they said, that nothing would float in it, neither 

wood, nor any lighter substance, but all went to the bottom. If the account of this fountain be 

true, it would be their constant use of the water from it which makes them so long-lived. When 

they quitted the fountain the king led them to a prison, where the prisoners were all of them 

bound with fetters of gold. Among these Ethiopians copper is of all metals the most scarce and 

valuable. After they had seen prison, they were likewise shown what is called ‘the table of the 

Sun’. 

When the spies had now seen everything, they returned back to Egypt [a land that Cambyses 

had conquered and had declared himself a pharaoh], and made report to Cambyses, who was 

stirred to anger by their words. Forthwith he set out on his march against the Ethiopians 

without having made any provision for the sustenance of his army, or reflected that he was 

about to wage war in the uttermost parts of the earth. Like a senseless madman as he was, no 

sooner did he receive the report of the Icthyaophagi than he began his march, bidding the 

Greeks who were with his army remain where they were, and taking only his land force with 

him. At Thebes, which passed through on his way, he detached from his main body some fifty 

thousand men, and sent them against the Ammonians with orders to carry the people into 

captivity, and burn the oracle of Jupiter. Meanwhile he himself went on with the rest of his 

forces against the Ethiopians. Before, however, he had accomplished one-fifth part of the 

distance, all that army had in the way of provisions failed; whereupon the men began to eat 

the sumpter beasts, which shortly failed also. If then, at this time, Cambyses, seeing what was 

happening, had confessed himself in the wrong, and led his army back, he would have done 

the wisest thing that he could after the mistake made at the onset; but as it was, he took no 

manner of heed, but continued to march forwards. So long as the earth gave them anything, 

the soldiers sustained life by eating grass and herbs; but when they came to bare sand, a 

portion of them were guilty of a horrid deed: by tens they cast lots for a man, who was slain 

to be the food of the others. When Cambyses heard of these doings, alarmed at such 

cannibalism, he gave up his attack on Ethiopia, and retreating by the way he had come, 

reached Thebes, after he had lost vast numbers of his soldiers. From Thebes he marched down 

to Memphis, where he dismissed the Greeks, allowing them to sail home. And so ended the 

expedition against Ethiopia” (1978: 93-94). 

The palpability of the display of beatific poise and firm yet unostentatious conviction 

by the Ethiopians in these passages betrays the level of awe with which they were held 



 

32 
 

by Herodotus. Furthermore, the perceptions surrounding their military vigour is even 

more deepened and fabled by the very fact that Cambyses and his army had lost the 

fight before even reaching the lands of the Ethiopians, which were the ‘uttermost 

parts of the earth’. Such is their favour with the gods that not only is the unleashing 

of their force preserved, but so too is it necessary that their instinct for conquering is 

divinely curbed lest their possible subjugation of vast lands and peoples. And so 

ordained is their mercy, or, so impervious are they and their lands to prevalent and 

terrestrial notions of value, that they bind their prisoners with gold manacles.  

Following Mudimbe then, we could postulate that by the time of the late Middle 

Ages/Renaissance, the period that is of requisite consequence for Wynter, there did 

exist discursive precedents to the prevalent knowledge of some kind/s of unknown 

(black) lands and peoples therein, who were obscured in and by arcane overtures both 

monstrous and saintly. There certainly appears to be a greater knowledge of Africa 

and its peoples along its east coast then there appears to be of its west – that expanse 

that lies deep into and beyond the modern-day Sahara. It seems too the case that it is 

the hinterlands or less immediate portions of Africa (at this point beginning and/or 

ending at places variously named Ethiopia or Southern Libya or Kush), as opposed to 

the areas closer to the Mediterranean, that were embroiled in the hyperbolic 

fantastic. Indeed, it is likely that the key factor upon which assessments of civility and 

savage beastliness of the peoples turned was the extent to which the lands whence 

they came were known or imagined to being accurately known. These assessments 

and their guiding notions were of course part of an already existent grammar of 

alterity that Tsri (2016) regards as being defined by the category of the ‘barbaros’ or 

‘barbarian’ which was used as immediate designation for people not touched by the 

sophisticated hand of Greco-Roman cultures, or their likeness. This designator of 

alterity did not only map the imagination south into Africa, but also offered a 

locutionary criterion in the identification of many other peoples, lands and customs 

whether in (modern day) Europe, Asia, or the Middle-East as at times strange, alien, 

savage, fabulous, admirable and inferior (Tsri, 2016).  Alongside geography, custom, 

ancestry, and language, Tsri argues that skin colour was also a significant determinant 

of alterity in ancient Greco-Roman literature (Tsri, 2016).  



 

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The skin colour of the Ethiopians, whose lands purportedly extended from the south 

of Egypt to the edges of habitability represented by torrid zone, is here instructive. In 

the abridged version of Lidell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon (1909: 19), the 

translation offered for Ethiopian is written thus: “Αἰθί-οψ, οποϛ, ὁ, fem. Αἰθιοπίϛ, 

ίδοϛ, (αἴθω, ὄψ) an Ethiop, negro, properly Burnt-face” followed by a couple of 

associated words denoting ‘burnt,’ ‘burning heat,’ and ‘fire’ and then followed by the 

entry “αἴθονσα (ϛϲ. Στοά), ἡ, (αἴθω) the corridor or vestibule of a house; mostly 

looking East or South, to catch the sun – whence the name”. The darkness of the 

Ethiopian’s skin is thus said to be so because of their proximity to the sun; an 

inescapable mark of its blinding glare and burning char, and perhaps what is owed 

their said closeness to the heavenly light and warmth of the gods. This apparent 

adjacency or close association with the sun echoes throughout Herodotus’ quote 

above, through the allusion to the storied ‘table of the sun’, and is a prominent feature 

too in the writings of other Greco-Roman authors.  

In Book I, 21 – 52, of The Odyssey by Homer, said to be the sequel to The Iliad, the 

propinquity of the Ethiopians to scorched regions teetering on unbearable is made 

evident: “Howbeit Poseidon had now departed for the distant Ethiopians, the 

Ethiopians that are sundered in twain, the uttermost of men, abiding some where 

Hyperion sinks, and some where he rises. There he looked to receive his hetacomb of 

bulls and rams, there he made merry sitting at the feast but the other gods were 

gathered in the halls of the Olympian Zeus” (Butcher and Lang, 1887: 2). The reference 

to Hyperion (Titan of heavenly light and father of Helios, god and personification of 

the sun, in Greek mythology) and a place of rising and place of setting, is said to betray 

a commonly held belief in antiquity that Ethiopia and India were in fact not that 

separate geographically; at times the same place, at times one the extension of the 

other, at times only separated by a body of water (Red Sea or The River Nile), but both 

the most proximate to the sun’s mercy (Tsri, 2016; Snowden, 1970). Snowden does 

however make the point that inasmuch as the ‘Ethiopian’ and ‘Indian’ were 

interchanged, collapsed into one, and confused, one still maintains the ability to tell 

whether Indian or Ethiopian is being written of (1970). Invoking the grammar of 

alterity mentioned earlier, Tsri writes: 



 

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The conventional divisions based on the perceived differences between Greeks or Romans and 

barbarians were reconstituted to capture and reflect the new group, the Africans. The 

reconfiguration of those who were neither Greeks nor Romans and barbarians was based on 

their proximity to the Greco-Roman geographical location. The inhabitants of the known 

regions located nearer to the Greeks and Romans were regrouped under the generic name 

‘Scythians’ or ‘Nomads’ and the inhabitants of the regions far removed from them were 

designated Ethiopians. However, the term ‘Ethiopian’ was later used strictly to designate 

foreigners inhabiting the regions of Africa. Pliny brings to the fore the importance of skin 

colour in the Greco-Roman categorisation when he observes that Indians were burnt by the 

sun but not as burnt as black as Ethiopians (2016: 30). 

Snowden corroborates this view stating that “Ethiopians were the yardstick by which 

antiquity measured colored peoples. The skin of the Ethiopian was black, in fact 

blacker, it was noted, than that of any other people” (1970: 2). If not the sun that 

caused the extreme blackness of the Ethiops then it was the earth on which they 

dwelled, or at least a combination thereof. Either way, environmental theory, as Tsri 

would have it, “established a direct relationship between geography and what was 

referred to as ‘the influence of the laws of nature’, which means that the inhabitants 

of a place assimilate into their physique and character the nature of their land, water 

and air” (2016: 30). Perhaps an example of what could be called an environmental 

theory of the ancients we can catch sight of can be found in the voluminous tome 

Geographica by the Asiatic Greek geographer and philosopher, Strabo, who in Book II 

Part II wrote of the torrid zones in relation to the Ethiopians:  

“Poseidonius, then, says that Parmenides was the originator of the division into five zones, but 

that Parmenides represents the torrid zone as almost double its real breadth, inasmuch as it 

falls beyond both the tropics and extends into the two temperate zones, while Aristotle calls 

"torrid" the region between the tropics, and "temperate" the regions between the tropics and 

the "arctic circles." But Poseidonius censures both systems, and with justice, for by "torrid,” he 

says, is meant only the region that is uninhabitable on account of heat; and, of the zone 

between the tropics, more than half is uninhabitable if we may base a conjecture upon the 

Ethiopians who live south of Egypt — if it be true, first, that each division of the torrid zone 

made by the equator is half the whole breadth of that zone and, secondly, that, of this half, 

the part that reaches to Meroë from Syene (which is a point on the boundary line of the 

summer tropic) is five thousand stadia in breadth, and the part from Meroë to the parallel of 



 

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the Cinnamon-producing Country, on which parallel the torrid zone begins, is three thousand 

stadia in breadth” (1959: 361 -363) .     

Strabo here locates the Ethiopians in the vicinity of lands rendered uninhabitable as a 

result of the torridness of the heat of the equator. In Book XVII Chapter I of 

Geographica Strabo furthers his project by making a connection between the 

geography of the place that is Ethiopia to the nature of Ethiopians: “indeed the 

Aethiopians lead for the most part a nomadic and resourceless life, on account of the 

barrenness of the country and of the unseasonable climate and of its remoteness from 

us, whereas with the Aegyptians the contrary is the case in all these respects; for from 

the outset they have led a civic and cultivated life and have been settled in well-known 

regions, so that their organisations are a matter of comment” (1967: 9). Strabo drives 

the point home; Book XVII Part II: 

“In the earlier parts of my work I have already said many things about the Aethiopian tribes, 

so that the description of their country may be said to be included with that of Aegypt. In 

general, the extremities of the inhabited world, which lie alongside the part of the earth that 

is not temperate and habitable, because of the heat or cold, must needs be defective and 

inferior to the temperate part; and this is clear from the modes of life of the inhabitants and 

from their lack of human necessities. They indeed live a hard life, go almost naked, and are 

nomads; and their domestic animals – sheep, goats, and cattle – are small; and their dogs are 

small though rough and pugnacious. And perhaps it is from the natural smallness of the people 

that men have conceived of Pygmies and fabricated them; for no man worthy of belief 

professes to have seen them… The Aethiopians live on millet and barley, from which they also 

make a drink; but instead of olive oil they have butter and tallow. Neither do they have fruit 

trees, except a few date-palms in the royal gardens. But some use grass as food, as also tender 

twigs, lotus, and reed-roots; and they use meats, blood, milk, and cheese. They reverence as 

gods their kings, who generally stay shut up at home. Their greatest royal seat is Meroe, a city 

bearing the same name as the island… The Aethiopians also use bows, which are four units 

long, are made of wood, and are hardened by fire; and they arm the women also, most of 

whom have a copper ring through the lip; and they wear sheep-skins, since they have no wool, 

their sheep having hair like that of goats; and some go naked, or wear round their loins small 

sheep skins or girdles of well-woven hair. They regard as god the immortal being, whom they 

consider the cause of all things, and also the mortal being, who is without name and not to be 

identified. But in general they regard their benefactors and royal personages as gods: of these 

the kings as the common saviours and guardians of