1 - The Black and the Colonial Contract

Summary

There is no relation between the black and the colonial contract because the black is expelled from anything that stands for relationality.

What exists is the weight of imposition and a contradiction in all things that might be termed –contractual—, because of the absence of relation. This non-relation has been part of what South Africa is. This is the territory that has been founded on conquest, which is underwritten by the colonial contract. Therefore, the colonial contract is not, at all, a contract. In real terms, there is no relation present in what is colonial and what is a colonial contract. This is the exposition that is brought by the idea of Azania. If there is anything that is called relation, that is nothing but a myth. Colonialism, the colonial contract, is imposed as if there are parties to it, whereas there are none – there is no contract between parties. The colonial contract does not offer anything. It takes away everything. It has no system of relation, and there is nothing symmetrical about it; the black is disadvantaged not because of being a non-party to the colonial contract but because of being the exterior – the non-contractual thing. There is surplus imposition, excess even, as the colonial violence is the legitimizing point of extraction, looting, dispossession and death. By being ratified by law, the colonial apparatus par excellence, the colonial contract is a foreclosure of the black narrative that criticizes what it has witnessed and experienced, because the black does not have the ontological status of subjecthood.

The colonial contract is a totality that unleashes terror in its unimaginable excess. It is the imposition of power that legitimizes dispossession, dehumanization and death. Also, it is underwritten by the infrastructure of antiblackness. What is a problem, therefore, is colonial conquest as the authorizing mode of this contract. It is in the name of colonial conquest that there is a colonial contract.

The colonial contract is not a point of reference. It is, in point of fact, an object of critique from the perspective of the figure of the black. For it is the contract that confronts the black as the de-ontologized entity, the one dethroned from the ranks of humanity and consigned to the abyss – the domain of non-existence.