Stellenbosch is a beautiful town, held as though in a glass bubble. It is caught in an uncanny warp, a vortex even, of snarled space and twisted time, which turn upon each other. Stellenbosch is set amidst the hills of the Cape Winelands, a mere 50 kilometres or so from the haunting (and haunted) Cape Town. The stunningly gorgeous region, which produces some of the finest wines of the world, is home to slavery, indenture, apartheid, democracy, and after. Put differently, these terrains embody the contradictions, contentions, and contingencies of modernity.
Late in the Antipodean winter of 2013, I was a fellow for three months at the spectacular Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies, commonly known as STIAS, aka Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Salads, something of a measure of the local envy for the place. My principal project there had begun as a history and anthropology of my high school class from Modern School (Barakhamba Road, New Delhi), only to expand into something wider, a curious account of contemporary India. The critical archives for the project were the digital recordings of conversations with my cohort. These were contained on my laptop computer, a rather raggedy machine yet one with sufficient memory. Enthusiastic and excited about working through the recordings, I had begun to settle into the rhythms of STIAS and Stellenbosch.
And then, the laptop was gone. It was filched from our heavily secured apartment, provided by the Institute, in central Stellenbosch. The deed was done on a weekend. We (my partner, Ishita and I) were out for the day with friends driving around the coast of the Western Cape. On a whim we set off for Cape Agulhas, the southernmost tip of the African continent, which is actually strangely uninspiring, at least at deepening dusk. After losing the way in the dark – and nearly colliding with an enormous porcupine – our bedraggled party of four returned home late at night to discover something amiss at the apartment. We found an overturned vase, a flowerpot askew, and the immense dining table out of place. Yet there was little that was obviously missing. Except: the tiny computer.
The pilfering was a production. While locking up everything carefully, we had forgotten a loose slat on a side window-blind in the living room. It was this sliver that had been forced open; then a thingamajig improvised from a long broom handle and wires lying in the patio was used to pull the humongous and heavy dining table toward the window; and, finally, the laptop was lifted. There was nothing else gone. The arrival of the Falstaff-like Stellenbosch police constables at midnight, and of the smart detective from Paarl the next day, are tales within tales, best reserved for another time.
For all the effort, what had the thief gained? Didn’t a laptop with an operating system and keyboard in Spanish – in a principally Afrikaans and Xhosa using part of the Western Cape – seem a little pointless, whether for sale or as acquisition? Even if the innards of the machine were unknown to the pilferer, why had its power-supply, easily accessible, been left behind? It all appeared uncanny. Until the concierge of the swishy hotel in front of our apartment block told us that the theft was not business as usual. No, not at all.
Rather, the laptop had been taken on a weekend that was ritually significant. It was at that time of the year, during those days, that “cape-coloured” young women of 14 to 16 were initiated into girl gangs, after a spectacular act of derring-do. The child, if I may, had pulled off the incredible, considering the weight of the table, the modus operandi, and the security/surveillance all around. The theft of a computer with research materials on my cohort, intimating privilege and entitlement, led to a ritual initiation into a coloured cohort, inhabiting vulnerability and worse. Here was testimony to the necessarily split yet ever entangled nature of modernity.
Now, I was at a loose end, at least by way of a research and writing project at STIAS. Yet, I was also foot-loose and fancy-free. Through long rambles in pretty Stellenbosch, disparate bits that existed as talks and scribbles, inchoately indicating a book ahead, now began to fall in piece. Such was the maculate conception of my Subjects of Modernity: Time-Space, Disciplines, Margins recently published (actually, in January 2017) by Manchester University Press. For a book that approaches modernity as being constitutively contradictory and contingent, thinking it through on Stellenbosch Mountain proved particularly productive. For I speak of a sentinel that gazes out toward the vineyards and valleys of god’s own country, yet a spectator that stands mute testimony to the formative violence that is sown into the soil, its spirit and substance – here, there, and everywhere in sight. Unsurprisingly, my endless long walks, communing with this magic mountain, have shaped Subjects of Modernity.
My last meeting with Stellenbosch Mountain produced twin tales. Through the long, rigorous hike, almost everyone, especially the runners, beamed/waved back at me. Alongside, from a forest within, a strange sound, human yet eerie, haunted my communion. Those smiles and that sound settled into my soul, and now echo in my writing. For it is the happiness and the strangeness (and the joy and the horror), ever together, which bid goodbye to me from Stellenbosch Mountain, that make modernity so compelling. As William Mazzarella puts it, “only those ideas that compel our desire as well as our resistance receive and deserve our most sustained critique.”
Meanwhile, the Mountain weathers it all.
The author is a historian-anthropologist and writer who teaches at the El Colegio De Mexico, Mexico City
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A shorter, edited version of this appears in print
