Despite quibbles about Neanderthal genes, the concept of homo sapiens is a fairly stable and widely accepted one. The concept of the human is far more fluid and uneasy. Defining and recognizing the human appears to be a contextually determined process, consistently reshaped by parameters determined by both time and space. While this is regularly acknowledged, it is less commonly recognized that inventing the human is both a social process and individual one. In the contemporary moment, human identity may be moulded by both essentialist conceptions of identity and patterns of migration that challenge and complicate such simplifications. 

 

This tension is profoundly significant in the poetry of Chris Mann, a white South African of British descent, who yet openly acknowledged the importance for his writing of both Romanticism and the Zulu concept of the shades or guiding spirits. My paper will examine his use of this key aspect of Zulu spirituality and argue that its presence in his poetry allowed him to challenge the racial binaries prevalent in late twentieth-century South African culture. By affirming a prismatic identity for himself, it will be suggested that Mann both subverted the rigidly physical categorizations of traditional racial politics and created a third space in which he placed himself at once between and beside `the assumed “polarities” of conflict’ (Bhabha 1999).

 

By doing so, Mann attempted both to escape the restrictions placed on identity by rigid apartheid categorizations and also to reclaim a more complex and less divisive concept of the human by openly acknowledging that modernity has ensured that `many and probably a growing number of people are saturated by shades that originate in other cultures’ (1992, 9). By questioning the limitations inherent in traditional determiners of humanity, including culture and ethnicity, Mann thus echoes De Toro who has also observed that with the blurring of boundaries that once surrounded totalizing discourses, in the future we can only hope to position ourselves with regard to a ‘nomadic subjectivity in a nonhierarchical space, where discourses are being constantly territorialized, deterritorialized and reterritorialized’ (1995, 39).