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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Wulf Sach's Black Hamlet: A Case of 'Psychic Vivisection'?
Author:Dubow, SaulISNI
Year:1993
Periodical:African Affairs: The Journal of the Royal African Society
Volume:92
Issue:369
Period:October
Pages:519-556
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:healers
psychoanalysis
urbanization
biographies (form)
Literature, Mass Media and the Press
About persons:Wulf Sachs (1893-1949)ISNI
John Chavafambira (c. 1904-)
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/723237
Abstract:Wulf Sachs's 'Black Hamlet', an account of 'the mind of an African negro revealed by psychoanalysis', as the subtitle explains, was first published in 1937. Its origins date back to the end of 1933 when Sachs, a doctor and psychoanalyst, met John Chavafambira in a slumyard in downtown Johannesburg. Sachs's account of John tells the complex story of a Manyika healer-diviner who moves from eastern Zimbabwe to Johannesburg in 1921, living mainly in the slumyards of Doornfontein, and in the townships of Sophiatown and Orlando. This paper explains the complexity of the interaction between John Chavafambira and Wulf Sachs by counterposing their shared professional and intellectual interests against their differing motivations and objective life situations. In order to contextualize their relationship the author has located the story in terms of the history of migration of rural Africans to South Africa's mining and industrial heartland in the first decades of this century; the dynamic social, cultural and intellectual milieu of urban Johannesburg in the 1930s and 1940s; and the broad political processes which conditioned the uneasy and tentative nature of black-white contact at this time. Notes, ref.
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