Situated in eighteenth-century colonial Cape of Good Hope (now in South Africa), Proteus (2003) tells the story of a love affair between an indigenous person, Claas Blank, and a Dutch settler, Rijkhaart Jacobsz. Based on real fragments of court reports, the film reconstructs the historical trial of homosexuals in colonial South Africa to show the danger and annoyances that a relationship between a Dutch settler and a native provoked in 18th century; disturbances that led to the execution of the couple as criminals.
In Proteus, queerness is embedded in colonial dialectics where imperial reason differentiates itself from its colonized people and territories through hegemonic self-affirming postulates. The objective of the ordering of reason and knowledge is the rationalization of the colonizer’s superiority as a God-given inalienable right over the colored people and their lands. Thus the dominant context is one of colonial encounters, dispossession, exploitation and criminalization of the natives. So construed, Proteus is dialectical in ways that bring forth conversations about colonial knowledge, indigenous people, nature and the techniques of its production. Central to these techniques is the administrative apparatuses put in place to insure that on the one hand, internal class hierarchy among the white settlers are preserved, and on the other hand, the perennial subservience of the natives is taken for granted. Religion and law in particular, are the pillars of colonial administrative apparatuses, the systems against which queerness wrestles in Proteus.
Same-sex desire and eroticism thus serve as multidimensional and multifocal lenses through which one appreciates the double task of deconstruction that queer subjects must undertake in order to survive negation. Deconstruction of the spiritualized violence in religious and legal indoctrination that perpetually assault the colonized’s images of the self. Deconstruction of the colonial mindset and practices that rob the colonized body of its productive energy through forced labor and other types of corporal punishments and territorial encroachment. This work of deconstruction centers around the production of meanings that counter the hegemonic assumptions impressed on the soul, land, and bodies of the colonized. Thus, Proteus is a larger project in the imagination of African subjectivities that cannot be understood outside of the systemic and institutionalized contingencies that queerness must confront in order to strategically reinvent agential selves beyond victimization.