Whose Pain Is It, Anyway?: On Kippie Moeketsi and John Chavafambira’s Encounter with Medical Science

Black pain, while overwhelmingly real for those experiencing it, has an altogether incontestably singular structure that exposes the incompatibility of protocols of relief with the structure of anti-Blackness. Reading and reflecting on the late South African composer Kippie Moeketsi’s tragic sojourn in London’s Ferreira Hospital’s “mental asylum,” this paper probes, through an afropessimist critique, the tension between the unfettered access to and gratuitous enjoyment of the (pained) Black body and problem of Black thought. Instead of treating this incident as isolated, I trace it from Wulf Sachs’ psychoanalytic-cum-anthropological study of and relationship with a Black analysand, John Chavafambira, in his 1937 Black Hamlet (later adapted to Black Anger in a revised 1947 edition) to highlight a fundamental ambivalence and dependence of human social relations on Black pain for their coherence. Moreover, I interrogate the problem of the figure of the “mad African” and the supposed incongruity of their psychic structure with the demands of an anti-Black order.