ABSTRACT
In the critique of the imperial-colonial monuments that are at the core of the decolonising organisation and movements in South Africa lies the historical call for another world, another future. In this critique, South Africa cannot remain a colonial dominion or become an undifferentiated, homogenous community. The critique comes as a shock at the recognition of the unimaginable cruelties of Dutch, British, and apartheid imperialism in the ‘non-racial’ democratic South Africa. This chapter is an altogether different inquiry into the question of colonialism or the relationship between imperial-colonial violence and its living on in the fine arts – sculptures, statues, and paintings. It proposes that we understand imperial-colonial monuments as genosites – sites of ‘race’ – that are formed around genophilia – love of ‘race’ – the perpetuity of which both makes difficult the possibility of South Africa as a ‘community of survivors’ in a ‘decolonised political community’ (Mamdani 2020) and produces an inherently volatile historical, social, cultural, and political condition. Genophilia – genosites – are where the intimacies of colonialism come into existence and, consequently, are sites where imperial science, love of the ‘white race’, and acts of annihilation co-habit.
