ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an analysis of Dancing the Death Drill by Fred Khumalo. It explores Khumalo’s representation of the South African Native Labour Contingent and of the disaster of the SS Mendi that carried black South African labourers to France in 1917. Khumalo revisits earlier and later historical events, such as the Anglo-Boer War and the Algerian War of Independence, to present a complex multidirectional view of biopolitical legacies in the twentieth century. The chapter demonstrates how the main protagonist questions the rigid racial classifications integral to white supremacist policies in South Africa. Furthermore, in Branach-Kallas’s interpretation, the black labourers’ aspirations, hopes and dreams serve to transcend the discourses of enslavement, segregation and necropolitics, with far reaching implications for a reimagining of Blackness and South African futurity. Key to the analysis is the dance of the title, which the author approaches as an act of protest against the mistreatment of black South Africans, as well as European epistemologies.
