One of the most disturbing art exhibitions I’ve ever been to was Pippa Skotnes’s “Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen” at the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town in 1996. We were only two years into our democracy, and there were still many hangovers from the grim past.
“Miscast” was intended as a deconstruction of the term “Bushman” and an attempt to break with the unequal power structures embodied by the diorama style of historical representation that portrayed indigenous inhabitants such as the San as specimens in a museum, rather than historical subjects. The Bushman diorama at the South African Museum opened in 1960 and was a major drawcard for the next four decades. I was taken there on school trips and remember the figures posed against a painted Karoo landscape.
As you can imagine, there was a lot of pushback against the “Miscast” exhibition. It did have a visceral effect, though; some of the items on display were official permits issued to hunt and kill Bushmen (or San peoples, to use the more correct term). A terrible part of our colonial history, and one that we would imagine is consigned to the past. Though not that far in the past, as the last permit was issued in 1936. And incredibly, it seems hunting humans for fun was still a thing in 1996, the year “Miscast” was taking place.
In a recent essay on Substack by philosophy professor Slavoj Žižek, “When killing humans becomes a safari”, he refers to widespread reports, including the 2022 documentary Sarajevo Safari, that people would pay to kill residents of the besieged city of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War.
“Now we have learned about the real business,” Žižek writes. “Dozens of rich foreigners (mostly from the US, UK, and Italy, though some also from Russia) paid high fees for the chance to shoot at the residents of besieged Sarajevo. The trip was organised by the Bosnian Serb Army: the customers were transported from Belgrade and then brought to a safe place with a view of Sarajevo down in the valley. Prices were fixed — for example, to kill a young child cost more than to kill an adult.”
Horrifying, and it puts the killer dentists and accountants from Europe and North America who pay to hunt our canned lions into some sort of perspective. Or perhaps it’s aspirational for them, and they too would love the menu option to upsize their hunt to humans.
The subjectivity of a “safari” hunter of humans, the idea that victims become anonymous, with a symbolic wall separating the hunter from the target, is a key point in Žižek’s essay. “It is not the victim who was here derealised; it was the ‘hunter’ himself who excluded himself from ordinary reality and perceived himself as located in some safe place above reality. This is how reality itself became part of a spectacle in which the hunter can pretend that he is not personally involved.”
One can’t help drawing a connective line between civilians paying to hunt residents of Sarajevo from the safety of snipers’ positions in the hills and the sort of hygienic warfare we are presented with in Iran.
This week, headlines shrilly announced: “Two US troops killed and one missing after Iranian attack in Jordan” (BBC). It was a rare departure from the usual headlines about the thousands of mostly anonymous people who have been killed in Iran, and the asymmetrical numbers are ghastly. So far, 17 US servicemen and women have died in the war, against the 3,468 people dead in Iran and 3,371 in Lebanon that Al Jazeera has reported.
This is not meant to belittle any of these fatalities, but it is disturbing to think how easily, as Žižek puts it in relation to the hunters of Sarajevo, the people who are bringing death can exclude themselves from ordinary reality and perceive themselves as located in some safe place above reality.
This, to paraphrase, is how reality itself becomes part of a spectacle in which the hunter can pretend that he is not personally involved. And the potential consequences of this sort of thinking will affect us all. In colonial South Africa, issuing hunting licences for San people was intended to render them less than human and make them legitimate targets of genocide. A similar thing is happening with the way war is presented today.