Inheritance as Violence: Land, Memory and Necropolitics in Damon Galgut's the Promise

Abstract

In this article the connection between inheritance, land ownership and racial violence in The Promise is examined using the theory of  Mbembe on the ‘crisis of the institution of slavery' and Nixon on 'slow violence'. The study does not consider inheritance as an innocent legal succession of property, but rather as an extension of colonial violence, as Galgut sees it. The fact that the Swart family would own the farm reflects the continued existence of settler privilege in post-apartheid South Africa, and the repeated delay of the Swarts' promised inheritance speaks to the fact that justice is never served when it comes to land. Necropolitics is a concept of Mbembe that helps to account for the possibility of racialized sovereignty to shape who has access to land and who is not included in the political sphere of life. Slow violence is a theory of Nixon which shows that colonialism persists in the form of an act of dispossession that is gradual, normalized and often invisible. This article uses textual analysis to show that The Promise is an anti-reconciliation celebration because it reveals the moral flaws of passing down of privilege. Galgut offers a critique not on the notion of continuity but on the idea of inheritance as a tool to perpetuate colonial structures from one generation to the next. In sum, this text posits that real reconciliation will not come until material restitution (and not symbolic recognition) is achieved by undoing inherited systems of inequality. Authored by the authors of the book The Promise, this series is a conversation on all of these topics.

Keywords: Damon galgut, Inheritance, Land, Necropolitics, Slow Violence, Settler Colonialism,  The Promise, Nixon

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21968651