Black Hamlet

Originally published in 1937 as Black Hamlet: The Mind of an African Negro Revealed by Psychoanalysis, the book was written between 1933 and 1936 by the South Africa psychoanalyst and physician Wulf Sachs, and was the result of Sachs' meeting and subsequent "analysis", of John Chavafambira ("Black Hamlet" of the book), a Manyika (present day eastern Zimbabwe) nganga (healer-diviner). The book Black Hamlet - whose genre is difficult to define, being part case history (but more like a psychoanalytic biography), part narrative, part projection, part anthropological research, part historical account - concerns Sachs' account of the life story of John Chavafambira the Manyika healer-diviner who moves from Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to Johannesburg in the early 1920s. The narrative account attempts to parallel the life of John with Shakespeare's Hamlet, recounting John's birth into family of well-known Manyika diviner-herbalists (ngangas), his father's untimely death, and his mother Nesta's marriage to his uncle, Charlie (also an nganga), according to tribal tradition, and John's attempt to deal with his oedipally based neuroses. This is set against the background of migrant labor in 1930s Johannesburg, and the emergence of both legalized racial segregation and African resistance. As both the authors of the two introductions, Saul Dubow and Jacqueline Rose point out, Black Hamlet is also an important document of South African pre-Apartheid discourse about Africans and their political and economic circumstances before 1948 and raises important questions about cultural difference and psychological intervention. The book is also a rich document in the medical and psychological history of Southern Africa, and can be situated in the larger debates about the "medicalisation of the African body", as well as the relationship between medical and psychological discourse and the discourses of racism and colonialism. The book is in essence Sachs' attempt to argue against racially based classifications of psychic difference by resorting to the "Hamlet" narrative and the universalist assumptions of Freudian psychoanalysis. These concerns make the book an important text for current debates about cultural difference and psychology. Reading Black Hamlet is like reading a detective story, a case history and an epic. It's also like reading a travelogue, or an anthropological work, intermingled with an account of a mythic journey into the exotic and archaic past of "tribal" existence. But finally perhaps Black Hamlet strikes one as a uniquely South African Bildingsroman, one which both captures the uniqueness of the particular colonial configuration and an interestingly modern tale of one man's search for his identity.