“’John Chavafambira’ was an unknown Zimbabwean migrant made famous by Black Hamlet (1937), Wulf Sachs’ pioneering South African psychoanalytic case study,” said Brendon Nicholls of the Centre for African Studies at Leeds University. “However, Sachs fabricates parts of John’s life and plagiarises key events in the therapeutic history (see Laurence Wright, forthcoming). To make matters more complex, the original manuscript of the ‘psychoanalytic case’ was an unpublished novel, African Tragedy. A decade after Black Hamlet, Sachs revised and republished it as a political biography (Black Anger, 1947). Additionally, John was a key informant in a pioneering sociological study of an urban slum (Ellen Hellmann, 1948), and featured in an African-American travel diary (Ralph Bunche, 1938) and an American play (John Bright, 1949).”
In a fascinating seminar, which at times resembled an episode of Cold Case, Nicholls took fellows on a journey of dead ends and breakthroughs in his quest to find out more about this ‘ordinary man’. “I’m following someone lost to history,” he said, “an ordinary black man in pre-Apartheid South Africa (1937-1947). In the absence of known facts, I gather a small set of confirmatory co-ordinates in the world.”
“Anyone looking for the repeatedly chronicled, genre-traversing ‘John Chavafambira’ encounters obstacles and absences. He was world-famous for a decade but remains completely anonymous. The various, partial accounts of him are unreliable,” continued Nicholls. “John is silent in all the conversations. We only know about him because of what other people write. Of course, there is a long history of people who are voiceless and only heard through other voices.”
Nicholls described in detail his work with pre-Apartheid archives, church records and other sources (like the Bantu Men’s Social Centre where John studied English) to intuit John’s name, school, his place of birth, his marriage, his neighbourhoods and his lived choices. By following his lifelong tracking of church – even though he is described as despising the Church and Christianity – Nicholls has guessed his church in Jeppe in Johannesburg in which he found the wooden Madonna and Child statue he believes was referred to in African Tragedy. He has also managed to track down the GPS coordinates of the fig tree also described, near John’s mission school, resulting in finding a class photo from 1916 which likely includes John. He has tracked John’s wife Maggie in the records from Orlando township in Soweto as well as their marriage certificate which places him, via the marriage witnesses, close to the growing African National Congress (ANC) political elite, including Mandela.
“I work with the different texts and try to cross correlate,” he explained.
He also explained how he maps the adjacent and sequential – “Asking who knows who and how?
What might be next to the object you are looking for and do the people change in the changing circumstances?”
“I combine experimental techniques with the pre-Apartheid archive’s correlations, falsehoods and silences – moving of necessity between filtered histories and improvised analysis, I track how John’s dailyness interacted with wider social institutions and knowledge-making networks.”
His next steps will include digital analysis of the school photo to compare it to the two known photos, further social-network analysis and sourcing more oral histories.
He has also undertaken to map the methodological journey including all the wrong turns. “I’m discovering history and trying to answer historical problems and understand the magnitude of what became Apartheid.”
What is already very clear is that ’John Chavafambira’ lived an interesting life – a fascinating entanglement between African traditional beliefs (his father was a traditional healer), the Christian Church, Jewish intellectuals and the emergence of the ANC.
“Sachs and Hellmann were undoubtedly both benefitting intellectually from this work. They were also curious and immersed in the social aspects but equally bound into the social assumptions and constraints of the time – including the intrusion of state threat.”
“John Chavafambira is an unrecognised intellectual of the same level as others – exceptional and fascinating. Living in an urban slum, down on his luck, forced to move. The ordinariness of his status in society at that moment meant that he was placed within a set of restraints, but we don’t have to be,” said Nicholls.
Other ways of knowing the world
Nicholls’ in-depth work on one man points to the ongoing need to examine other ways of knowledge production and of knowing the world.
“John’s ordinariness, I argue, maps us onto the foundationally extractive modes of some academic disciplines,” he said. “If what we think we all know and share derives from selective itineraries of prestige, knowledge and silencing, then one conclusion may be that partnership within global research collaborations might also mean engaging with uneven archaeologies of the known.”
“We must mistrust knowledge production – what is shared is not always the truth. We must be asking which knowledge is disqualified and what do we make of it,” he added. “I’m looking at the conditions that make information sharing possible.
“We don’t talk about shared history and the silence of those not part of the elite. Power is enmeshed in knowledge making. We need to look at how it is done and what it leaves out. We need a reorientation of how we understand the origins of knowledge. And we need to investigate all potentials to negotiate participation in global imaginaries.”
“We should be reordering our assumptions around how knowledge is made. For example, research should be conducted in African languages, with African PIs and lead researchers. This would help to reorder the priorities and the mode in which data are gathered,” he said.
“There have been reminders all along of false avenues and the willingness of the mind to confirm biases,” he said. “I’m trying to keep open multiple possibilities in what doesn’t make sense. And allowing the silences to remain silent when you can’t prove something. The more one keeps the question open, the more answers one derives. I’m trying to read against the grain and opening up all scopes and narratives.”
“It’s possible things are not lost. You just have to look differently.”
Michelle Galloway: Part-time media officer at STIAS
Photograph: SCPS Photography