Do South Africans Exist?

Nationalism, Democracy and the Identity of 'the People'

Ivor Chipkin

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781776143788
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia culturale e sociale

Do South Africans Exist? Addresses a gap in contemporary studies of nationalism and the nation, providing a critical study of South African nationalism against a broader context of African nationalism in general. Narratives of resistance, telling of African peoples oppressed and exploited, presume that 'the people' preceded the period of nationalist struggle. This book explores how an African 'people' came into being in the first place, particularly in the South African context, as a collectivity organised in pursuit of a political – and not simply cultural – end. The author argues that the nation is a political community whose form is given in relation to the pursuit of democracy and freedom, and that if democratic authority is lodged in 'the people', what matters is the way that this 'people' is defined, delimited and produced. He argues that the nation precedes the state, not because it has always existed, but because it emerges in and through the nationalist struggle for state power. Ultimately, he encourages the reader to re-evaluate knee-jerk judgements about the failure of modernity in Africa.

1
The Nature of African Nationalism

In 1991 the historian Saul Dubow declared that ‘in recent years our historical understanding of Afrikaner nationalism [in South Africa] has been transformed’ (Dubow, 1991: 1). ‘We now have’, he continues, ‘a much deeper understanding of the ways in which Afrikaner identity was forged from the late nineteenth century, and the means by which Afrikaner ethnicity was mobilised in order to capture state power in the twentieth century’ (p. 1). What remained, he suggests, were certain gaps in the historical record. These omissions were a result of a general amnesia about the place of racist ideas in Christian thought. They also reflected, he suggests, the pre-eminence of a Marxist scholarship fearful of ‘idealism’. Marxist scholars were not interested in questions of ideology and culture on their own terms. ‘The ideology of race’, Dubow observes, ‘has therefore tended to be discussed in terms of its functional utility: … the extent to which racist ideas can be said to express underlying class interests’ (p. 1). Dubow had in mind the tradition of radical political economy that announced itself so boldly in the mid-1970s.

In September 1976, just three months after the beginning of a massive student revolt in Soweto, the Review of African Political Economy published a special edition on South Africa. It contained several essays that would partly define the terms of South African studies for at least the next ten years. Of especial importance was an article on the state by Robert Davies, David Kaplan, Mike Morris and Dan O’Meara. Applying theoretical developments within French Marxism to a periodisation of the form of the state in South Africa, the authors explored what they called the secondary contradictions of the social formation. They argued that the form of the state was given, in addition to the primary contradiction between workers and capitalists, by struggles for hegemony between different fractions of capital itself (Davies et. al., 1976). Between 1920 and 1948, they argued, the critical division within the capitalist class was between imperialist/foreign capital(s) on the one hand and national capital(s) on the other (p. 29). At stake was whether ‘South Africa was to remain an economic chattel of imperialism or to generate its own national capitalist development’ (p. 29). The ‘unique’ feature of South Africa, they concluded, was the early hegemony that national capital exercised in the state. The displacement of imperial capital from this position after World War II saw the transformation of the economy away from reliance on primary production (mining) towards relatively high levels of industrialisation (p. 29). What is important to notice is how Davies et al. treated phenomena like Afrikaner nationalism. On their terms, political/ideological criteria reflected the latter’s base in different sectors of production (p. 5). ‘[It] is here’, Davies et al. continue, ‘that the English/Afrikaner traditions are to be located’ (original emphasis) (p. 6). English traditions in South Africa reflected the interests of foreign capital; Afrikaner nationalism was an ideological effect of national capital.

These were the terms of analysis that Dubow protested. John Lonsdale too had complained, at about the same time, that ‘Marxists were not much interested in the historical study of … nationalism’ (Lonsdale, 1992: 301). Both noted how, in the hands of such scholars, notions of race, volk¹ and nation were reduced to mere effects of class positions. So too was racism. On these terms, there was little place for studies of ideology, politics and culture on their own terms. What Dubow was, in effect, celebrating when he toasted the growth of research on Afrikaner nationalism was the emergence of an environment more conducive to the study of nationalism, race and politics generally.

At least since the early 1980s, in South Africa and Britain, so-called French structuralist historiography was being taken on by a school of historians that claimed sympathy with the Marxist project, often self-identified as radical, and yet refused the idea that history was a process without a subject. Instead of privileging the role of anonymous structural processes, they emphasised the agency of historical actors and the contingency of beliefs and practices. In South Africa, these scholars often rallied behind the banner of social history, citing E. P. Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory (1978) in their disputes with those sympathetic to Althusser and Poulantzas. By the early 1990s, this dispute had ostensibly been won: Althusser had disappeared from the academic scene and Poulantzas was dead. Moreover, social history was on the ascendancy.

We might reasonably suppose that in this environment, Dubow looked forward to new studies of nationalism, including African nationalism. He had reason to be optimistic: in 1987 Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido had edited a collection of essays that were published together as The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa. In their introduction, Marks and Trapido offered a continuous historical narrative as a first step towards accounting for nationalism and ethnicity in a synthesis of twentieth-century South African history. The book was an invitation to further research.

With the hindsight of more than a decade, we are obliged, unfortunately, to conclude that Dubow’s optimism was nothing more than that. It is true that around about the time of his article a few new studies emerged on Zulu nationalism.² These were exceptions, however. Apart from a few journal articles, most of them published as part of the Marks and Trapido collection mentioned above, the last major studies of African nationalism in South Africa were published in the 1970s: Black Nationalism in South Africa by Peter Walshe came out in 1973; the most recent edition of Black Power in South Africa by Gail Gerhart was published in 1979; and Eddie Roux’s Time Longer than Rope was even older, first appearing in 1964. Roux’s text is typical of the way that African nationalism has been construed in South Africa, even in the later Marks and Trapido study, and its sub-title is instructive: A History of the Black Man’s Struggle for Freedom in South Africa. African nationalism has been defined in terms of resistance to colonialism, racial segregation and apartheid. Scholars, moreover, have been ready to accept a person’s or an organisation’s own designation as nationalist on their own terms: if they identified themselves as nationalists, that is what they were taken to be. What, however, was nationalist as such about the form of their resistance? This question has never been addressed in South Africa. It is a question, moreover, to which there are only disparate answers when it comes to African nationalism more generally.

The vast majority of studies of African nationalism date from the period of decolonisation, between the 1950s and 1970s. Among the earliest and still the most important of these texts is Thomas Hodgkin’s Nationalism in Colonial Africa. It first appeared in 1958, and was already in its sixth edition ten years later. When it appeared, readers were familiar with political revolts – Hodgkin (1968: 10) calls them ‘explosions’, to give a sense of their sudden violence – in Nigeria, the Gold Coast (today Ghana), the Sudan, French West Africa (especially the Ivory Coast) and South Africa (presumably, the Defiance Campaign). Even more ‘tranquil’ territories like Northern Rhodesia (today Zambia), Nyasaland (Malawi), French Equatorial Africa and the Cameroons were in an ‘eruptive state’ (p. 11). Readers had also witnessed new self-governing, if not fully sovereign, states emerge in Africa. In 1956 the Sudan declared its independence, refusing a constitutional link with Egypt. Formerly Italian Eritrea had since 1952 become an autonomous territory within the federal Ethiopian Empire. The Gold Coast was on the verge of independence; so too were parts of Nigeria. The year 1956, Hodgkin wrote, ‘has been noted in the diaries of British West African politicians as the year of decision’ (p. 11). In 1957 the independent state of Ghana came into being. Then, in 1960, Cameroon, Togo, Mali, Senegal, Malagasy, the Congo Republic (Belgian), Somalia (Italian and British), Dahomey, Niger, Upper Volta, Ivory Coast, Chad, the Central African Republic, the Congo Republic (French), Gabon, Nigeria and Mauretania became independent. In total, 17 new countries appeared within months of each other. The following year, Sierra Leone was declared independent, as was Tanganyika. In 1962 Ruanda (Rwanda) and Burundi became independent; so too did Algeria and Uganda. In 1963 Nigeria became a republic and Kenya a sovereign state. Malawi followed in 1964; Northern Rhodesia became independent Zambia. And 1964 also saw the emergence of Tanzania from the union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar.

In this context, studies of African nationalism usually documented resistance to colonial rule. The term ‘African nationalism’ was used interchangeably with several other expressions: anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, ‘Black Protest’ and ‘National Liberation’. Such studies showed a fundamental preoccupation with struggle; and struggle against colonialism in particular. They read two terms together: nationalism and independence.

‘My own inclination’, writes Hodgkin,

is to use the term ‘nationalist’ in a broad sense, to describe any organisation or group that explicitly asserts the rights, claims and aspirations of a given African society … in opposition to European authority, whatever its institutional form and objectives (emphasis added) (Hodgkin, 1968: 23).

Hodgkin defended his methodology against those who wanted to be more circumspect in their use of the term. There are those, he observes, who ‘describe only those types of organisation which are essentially political, not religious, economic or educational, in character, and which have as their object the realisation of self-government or independence for a recognisable African nation, or nation-to-be’. Yet, he continues, to restrict the use of the term in this way seems to raise two difficulties. Firstly, it tends to conceal the ‘mixed-up’ character of African political movements. ‘In a single African territory’, he continues,

it is possible to find coexisting a diversity of organisations, of different types, with different objectives, operating at different levels, each in its own way expressing opposition to European control and a demand for new liberties; and to discover a network of relationships between these organisations (Hodgkin, 1968: 24).

Some might be political organisations seeking independence for the ‘nation’; others, messianic movements; still others, church groupings; tribal associations; or trade unions. These diverse organisations, Hodgkin insists, were only intelligible in relation to ‘a single historical process, of nationalist awakening, to which they all belonged’ (Hodgkin, 1968: 25). If one did not see them as ‘variations on a single theme’ then one was bound to conclude that nationalism was non-existent in places where ‘nationalist aspirations have not yet begun to express themselves in the language of separatism’ (p. 25). Hodgkin was thinking here of the Belgian Congo, which he describes as being in a state of ‘incipient nationalism’ (p. 25). Two years later, he seems to have been proven right: in June 1960 Patrice Lumumba addressed dignitaries at the ceremony marking the independence of the Congo. He juxtaposed nationalism and independence in the very way that Hodgkin suggested was meaningful:

Your Majesty, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentleman, Congolese men and women, Fighters for independence who today are victorious, I salute you in the name of the Congolese government. … The Republic of Congo has been proclaimed, and our beloved country is now in the hands of its own children. … Homage to the Champions of National Sovereignty! Long Live Independent and Sovereign Congo! (cited in Kohn & Sokolsky, 1965: 118–21).

Yet Hodgkin himself gave reason to be more discerning about what was and what was not a nationalist movement. Nationalism in Colonial Africa is, in part, a study of new forms of urban association. Part II of the books considers the ‘new towns’ of Africa – ‘great, amorphous, squalid agglomération urbaine’ (Hodgkin, 1968: 64) – where, Hodgkin tells us, a new ‘indigenous civilisation’ is being created (p. 83). It is there that he locates the rise of African nationalism, in some of the ‘characteristic institutions of this new civilisation’ (p. 83). What is novel about this civilisation, according to Hodgkin, is its peculiar urban form: ‘By mixing men from a variety of social backgrounds’, he explains,

[the new towns] make possible the discovery of new points of contact and interest. Around these interests there develops a network of new associations, through which for the first time men come to think of their problems as social rather than personal; as capable of solution by human action rather than part of the natural order (p. 63; emphasis added).

Hence, he argues,

African towns have this two-fold aspect: seen from one standpoint, they lead to a degradation of African civilisation and ethic; seen from another, they contain the germs of a new, more interesting and diversified civilisation, with the possibilities of greater liberty (p. 63).

African nationalism, according to this account, intends a new African civilisation, one that transcends kinship and ethnicity, where freedom heralds social mixing and ethnic diversity. Its culture is urban and secular, permitting a view of the world unmediated by supernatural cosmologies. African nationalism construed in this way fits uncomfortably with a definition that reduces it to the search for independence. It is not indifferent to the form of society after independence. Indeed, in this account, nationalist movements become so when they struggle for a particular version of the postcolony.

This ambivalence regarding the definition of African nationalism produces very different appraisals of historical phenomena. Take, for example, the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya. According to the first definition of African nationalism (whereby nationalism = anti-colonialism), it is easily construed as an African nationalist movement. This is how, for example, Bruce Berman characterised it. It was not an atavistic Kikuyu tribal rebellion, he said, but a modern national movement against colonial rule (Berman, 1991). Kofi Opoku, in a similar way, suggests that Mau Mau attained ‘national consciousness’ and ‘cultural awareness’ because it struggled for independence (Opoku, 1986). More circumspect, however, is John Lonsdale’s analysis in a book he jointly edited with Bruce Berman: even if Mau Mau was a nationalist movement, it mobilised on the basis of Kikuyu tribalism. Lonsdale is interested in the relationship between nationalism and ethnicity and concludes with the notion of ethnic nationalism: Mau Mau was an ethnic nationalist revolt, he suggests (Lonsdale, 1992: 268). He introduces this qualification – ethnic nationalism – because he knows that the history of Mau Mau sits uncomfortably with the implicit normative register of most views of nationalism (Lonsdale, 1992: 275). Firstly, it organised on tribal (ethnic) lines. It was not multiracial, nor did it imagine the time after colonialism as the time of black Kenyans. It appealed to a quasi-mysticism. It was not urban-based, nor did it attach special value to technological and economic progress. Hodgkin himself thought that there were more constructive methods of channelling African political energies than Mau Mau, which represented for him an example of a blighted ambition ‘wasted in messianic and puritanical religious movements, or … attracted to terrorism as a violent means of breaking the bonds of the plural society’ (Hodgkin cited in Lonsdale, 1992: 282). The ‘undecidability’ of the phenomenon qua nationalist centres precisely on this question of definition. At stake, ostensibly, is a historiographical problem: What facts counted as proof of national phenomena?

The temptation to treat African nationalism as the name for resistance to colonialism is, nonetheless, widespread. So pervasive has been its influence, writes Anthony Smith in the early 1980s, ‘that to this day one of the most popular views on nationalism in the “Third World” regards itself as a movement for national liberation and a reaction to European colonialism’ (Smith, 1983: 37). Smith worries, in effect, that if African nationalism were construed simply in terms of what it opposed, the impact of territorial division and bureaucratic homogenisation, key to the force and shape of nationalism, would be overlooked. Such an appraisal was also mute about the cultural features of nationalism: ‘But this is to miss much of the point behind a nationalist movement,’ he objects, ‘its ability to attract diverse groups, to renew itself after attaining independence, and to provide a basis and rationale for new social and political units and institutions’ (p. 38). In response, Smith proposes a typology and a periodisation of African nationalism. There was a phase of ‘primary resistance’ to European incursion, a period of ‘millennial protest’, a phase of ‘gestation’ and ‘adaptation’, a period of nationalist agitation for self-rule and, finally, the adoption of social programmes (p. 39).

Smith is certainly correct about the dangers of construing nationalism simply in terms of resistance. Yet we must sometimes distinguish between what the literature says it is doing and what it does in fact do. Literature from this period often goes in two directions simultaneously. It discusses African nationalism in relation to struggle, yet it also discusses it as a particular form of struggle. However, it is the view of the present book that it is better characterised in terms of an ambivalence about nationalism’s form.

For example, Ndabaningi Sithole’s 1959 history of the subject under discussion, entitled African Nationalism, documents how the ‘spirit of independence’ after World War II spread to Africa. It discusses African nationalism largely in the terms that Hodgkin defined, as ‘a move against European domination which tends to devalue the African people’ (Sithole, 1959: 24). Sithole’s text is clearly addressed to European readers, and is at pains to assure them that African nationalism is not anti-white (nor Communist), but that it merely represents the ‘fier...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Acronyms
• Introduction: The Sublime Object of Nationalism
• Chapter 1: The Nature of African Nationalism
• Chapter 2: The Democratic Origin of Nations
• Chapter 3: African Nationalism in South Africa
• Chapter 4: The South African Nation
• Chapter 5: The Impossibility of the National Community
• Chapter 6: The Production of the Public Domain
• Chapter 7: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Identity of ‘the People’
• Conclusion: Notes Towards a Theory of the Democratic Limit
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index