Missing People, Present Decay

Abstract

Decay, this conference suggests,might be engaged as a "critical and creative methodology" rather than a sign of heritage failure. But what happens when people themselves utilise decay as a decolonial practice? This paper explores how young South Africans involved in the Khoisan revivalist movement actively dismantle colonial identity categories, employing what I term "fabulation" to transform the rigid boundaries of "coloured" into the emerging possibilities of "Khoisan." Drawing on ten years of ethnographic research with working-class youth who identify as both "coloured" and "Khoisan," I explore how fabulation functions as intentional decay—a methodology that softens colonial categories to enable new ways of being and belonging. These participants, whom I consider "missing people," emerge specifically through the breakdown of fixed identity frameworks. They exist at the generative margins where systematic neglect creates space for radical reimagining.

Fabulation here involves more than storytelling; it functions as a material practice that actively dismantles imposed identities. One participant described their experience as "tenseless"—existing outside linear heritage time—as they collaborate with the decay of colonial categories to fabulate Indigenous futures. This process reveals how "stickiness" functions as affective compost, enabling new attachments while allowing old forms to decompose. The paper explores three main aspects of this identity composting: how participants see genealogical "gaps" as creative spaces rather than absences to be filled; how they engage in "apolitical" politics that oppose both colonial and modern nationalist frameworks; and how they manage the temporal complexity of becoming Indigenous in the present moment. These ethnographic insights highlight decay's potential as a decolonial method—not just accepting breakdown but actively fostering it as a form of creative practice.

Yet this research moves beyond fabulation-as-decay towards a more radical idea. If my participants' identity work resembles the collaborative,more-than-human processes of material decomposition, might all decay already be fabulation? Instead of humans learning from compost, perhaps we are engaging in the same fundamental processes of creative transformation that fungi and bacteria have perfected. This challenge redefines both heritage studies and decolonial practice within what we might call a fabulative materialism—where the boundary between social and biological transformation dissolves into collaborative becoming.