Buis Johann S
Wheaton College, 501 College Avenue, Wheaton, IL 60187, Ph. Correspondence to:
Torture. 2013;23(2):55-67.
How is it possible for song and dance to exist in political incarceration and manifest itself later as public policy responding to apartheid atrocities? Examining the body of songs, oral history accounts, and eye-witness reports provided by fellow-prisoners of Mandela on Robben Island prison, I uncover a psychological environment mediated through music and dance--within the confines of a political prison. This source of prison music-making by political prisoners in detention, provide us with the artistic expressions of revolutionary songs, parody songs, praise songs, laments, etc. These music genres reflect ontologies embedded in Mandela's juristic imagination. My framework for explaining these ontologies is a theoretical framework I call an aesthetic of function: internal ontologies that speak to the African cultural ground against which external ontologies are expressed in the jurisprudential redress to apartheid atrocities. Examining his external (jurisprudential) ontologies through song and dance, one realizes that the best way for him to have solved the unprecedented public redress of apartheid atrocities is evident in the songs he sang in Robben Island prison. Retribution could have been a logical solution for him. Instead, he turned to truth-telling and reconciliation as public policy. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's unprecedented breaking of social and jurisprudential boundaries, the claim of agency for both victims and perpetrators, and public policy of South Africa's first democratically elected black president, lie deeply embedded in cultural practices he testified to in his autobiography, "The Long Walk to Freedom". These cultural practices in prison were singing and dancing. This paper complements the music-as-torture trope: here music in detention carries ontological agency. Musical evidence of stylistic features, text, and contextual analyses, and related literary criticism devices, expose Mandela's embedded internal and external ontological cultural practices. Here, song and dance have agency to influence public policy despite the constraints of political detention.
歌舞如何能在政治监禁中存在，并在之后表现为应对种族隔离暴行的公共政策？通过审视曼德拉在罗本岛监狱的狱友提供的歌曲、口述历史记录和目击者报告，我揭示了一种在政治监狱范围内通过音乐和舞蹈介导的心理环境。被拘留的政治犯创作监狱音乐的这种方式，为我们提供了革命歌曲、模仿歌曲、赞美歌曲、悲歌等的艺术表达。这些音乐类型反映了曼德拉法律想象中所蕴含的本体论。我解释这些本体论的框架是一个我称之为功能美学的理论框架：内部本体论与非洲文化基础相关，而外部本体论则在针对种族隔离暴行的法律补救中得以表达。通过歌曲和舞蹈审视他的外部（法律）本体论，人们会意识到，对他来说，解决种族隔离暴行前所未有的公共补救的最佳方式，在他在罗本岛监狱所唱的歌曲中显而易见。报复对他来说可能是一个合乎逻辑的解决方案。相反，他转向了真相与和解作为公共政策。真相与和解委员会对社会和法律界限的前所未有的突破、对受害者和犯罪者的代理权主张，以及南非首位民主选举产生的黑人总统的公共政策，都深深植根于他在自传《漫漫自由路》中所证实的文化实践中。监狱里的这些文化实践就是唱歌和跳舞。本文补充了音乐即酷刑的说法：在这里，被拘留期间的音乐具有本体论上的能动性。对风格特征、文本、语境分析以及相关文学批评手段的音乐证据进行研究，揭示了曼德拉内在和外在本体论文化实践的内在联系。在这里，尽管受到政治拘留的限制，歌舞仍有影响公共政策的能动性。
