The Social and Political Thought of Archie Mafeje

Bongani Nyoka

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781776145966
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Social scientist Archie Mafeje, who was born in the Eastern Cape but lived most of his scholarly life in exile, was one of Africa's most prominent intellectuals. This ground-breaking book is the first to consider the entire body of Mafeje's oeuvre and offers much-needed engagement with his ideas.
The most inclusive and critical treatment to date of Mafeje as a thinker and researcher, it does not aim to be a biography, but rather offers an analysis of his overall scholarship and his role as a theoretician of liberation and revolution in Africa.
Bongani Nyoka argues that Mafeje's superb scholarship developed out of both his experience as an oppressed black person and his early political education. These, merged with his university training, turned him into a formidable cutting-edge intellectual force.
Nyoka begins with an evaluation of Mafeje's critique of the social sciences; his focus then shifts to Mafeje's work on land and agrarian issues in sub-Saharan Africa, before finally dealing with his work on revolutionary theory and politics. By bringing Mafeje's work to the fore, Nyoka engages in an act of knowledge decolonisation, thus making a unique contribution to South studies in sociology, history and politics.

Part I

A Critique of the Social Sciences

1 | From Functionalism to Radical Social Science

From his high school days in the 1950s Archie Mafeje was a member of the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), later renamed the Unity Movement of South Africa (UMSA), a radical Marxist political organisation. He was therefore versed in classical Marxism and other radical theories. Yet his early work, published as a postgraduate student at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in the early 1960s, is written from the functionalist anthropological perspective fashionable at the time. This suggests that he was a radical Marxist in Unity Movement circles, while steeped in liberal and functionalist anthropology in his academic work – which indicates the bifurcated existence that still afflicts a good number of black students in South African universities today.

His famous essay of 1971, ‘The Ideology of “Tribalism”’, established a radical break with his early liberal functionalism, yet constitutes a thematic critique of anthropological categories, of particular themes or concepts within the social sciences, rather than an all-encompassing critique of the social sciences themselves.¹ Notwithstanding his otherwise compelling critique of the ideology of tribalism, his handling of the concept of tribe has been widely misunderstood. Mafeje did not so much reject the entity of tribe, or claim it was non-existent – he rejected it for being anachronistic. In The Theory and Ethnography of African Social Formations,² he laments this misreading of his work.³ What Mafeje set out to analyse was the ideology of tribalism, as the title of his 1971 essay clearly indicates; the problem lies in his concession that the entity of tribe existed in Africa at an earlier period. Jimi Adesina’s objection is that such a view is not borne out by history or archaeology.⁴ There was always migration, movement and intermingling on the African continent. This was interrupted by colonialism and the implementation of arbitrary colonial borders. I believe it is because of this fact that Mafeje says that Europeans invented tribes in Africa.

Mafeje’s argument turns on four key issues. First, his understanding of the ‘ideology of tribalism’ is that it was European in origin: colonial administrators used it in their policy of divide and rule on the African continent. Second, the ideology of tribalism was used by European social scientists not only to explain conflicts in Africa, but also to rationalise colonialism. Third, African leaders have used it for political ends. Finally, insofar as ordinary Africans came to believe in it, tribalism is false consciousness.

Early functionalist writings

Mafeje began his academic career at UCT in 1957 as an undergraduate student, studying biological sciences, with majors in botany and zoology. But because of his poor academic performance in these subjects, in 1960 he switched from the biological sciences to the social sciences, majoring in social anthropology and psychology. From November 1960 to September 1962, Monica Wilson employed him as a research assistant to carry out ethnographic research in the township of Langa, Cape Town. His field notes led to a book co-written with Wilson, Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township, published by Oxford University Press in 1963. In the same year, Mafeje completed his Master’s degree in social anthropology, his thesis titled ‘Leadership and Change: A Study of Two South African Peasant Communities’. The book on Langa seeks to answer two questions: (i) what are the effective social groups in Langa? and (ii) when and why do they cohere, and when and why do they split or dissolve? The second question, the authors argue, leads to one of the ‘fundamental problems in social anthropology’: what is the basis for the coherence of groups?⁵

Typical of liberal academics, Wilson and Mafeje confess that although South Africa of the 1960s was in a political crisis, they did not ask political questions of their research participants. They attribute this to the banning of the two major political organisations at the time, the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), but there is a sense in which their explanation is misleading. The research began long before Mafeje was hired as Wilson’s assistant. A.R.W. Crosse-Upcott was Wilson’s fieldworker from July 1955 until March 1957, some five years before the ANC and PAC were banned in 1960. So Wilson and Mafeje’s claim that they could not pose political questions ‘because that would have aroused political suspicion’ is a rationalisation after the fact. Nor is there a valid reason why Wilson could not ask political questions during Crosse-Upcott’s tenure as fieldworker. Silence on political issues highlights one of the major problems with liberal anthropological writings – the tendency to pretend to remain neutral in the face of important political developments, often a reflection of a political commitment antagonistic to the demands and objectives of the suppressed group. It is about acquiescence with the oppressor group, even if they disagree on minor issues. This commitment says more about Wilson than Mafeje, even at this early stage.

The theoretical objectivity (assumed neutrality) of liberal functionalist anthropology does not necessarily mean that its practitioners are apolitical. On the contrary, that anthropologists remain silent on matters political in favour of value-free scientific inquiry is itself a political manoeuvre typical of liberal academics. On the pitfalls of liberalism Adesina observes that it has a tendency to acquiesce with injustice and inequity in order to preserve class, race and gender privileges and that the preservation and defence of these privileges is usually in the form of arguing against government encroachment on individual freedom and liberty. In universities, this takes the form of academic and intellectual freedom.⁶

In anthropological writings certain questions – of slavery, conquest, land dispossession, exploitation and oppression – are hardly ever posed. When they are, they receive rather perfunctory treatment. In Bernard Magubane’s view they ‘constitute a historical totality of horror, whose structures are bound together in such a way that any one of them considered separately is an abstraction’.⁷ In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s anthropology and history shared the same problem of abstraction. Magubane observes that ‘what is striking about the historiography of South Africa is that each generation seems to think that history began only yesterday and what happened a day before yesterday is “ancient history” that has no relevance for today’s problems’. Magubane could see, in the discipline of anthropology, a sinister political project, which, in spite of its purported neutrality, was designed to enable colonial administration and apartheid. He recognises that in the colonial situation anthropologists studied Africans as though they were ‘people without history’. Magubane maintains that anthropology became an applied discipline that sought to manage Africans for the purposes of control and exploitation. He contends that although anthropological writings spoke of social change in Africa, they could not account for change because ‘failure to account for change was built into the subject as a theoretical discipline’.⁸ In the eyes of anthropologists, Magubane writes, Africa serves as ‘raw material for anthropological studies’. Because of the ahistorical nature of anthropology, it was unable to account for the changes taking place in Africa since the advent of colonialism, and to the extent that it did, it did so in ethnocentric and mechanistic terms. Anthropological research findings described black people’s behaviour and needs, but overlooked the historical and structural context that gave meaning to those needs. Following C. Wright Mills, Magubane refers to such undialectical and seemingly apolitical analyses as ‘savage neutralism’.⁹

It was because of Mafeje’s participation in the study of Langa that certain of these problems were avoided in his book with Wilson. For example, he uses the terms that research participants used for themselves. Mafeje’s first article, ‘A Chief Visits Town’, is concerned to ‘illustrate the attitude of townspeople in Cape Town to chiefs’.¹⁰ In ‘townspeople’ he includes both black migrant workers and permanent residents. Mafeje is interested in the first group in particular. ‘Migrant workers,’ he reasons, ‘regard themselves as country people and most of them have their families in the country. Their reaction in any given political situation is of particular interest, as it gives the sociologist an opportunity of seeing how the people’s aspirations fit in the government’s policy of increasing the power of Bantu authorities in the country, and appointing chiefs’ representatives in towns or establishing urban Bantu councils.’ In particular, Mafeje sets out to describe the arrival in Cape Town of Chief Zwelihle Mtikrakra, the third chief of abaThembu. Beyond the descriptive nature of the article, its theoretical thrust is that by the 1960s there were no tribes to speak of in South Africa. The absence of tribal entities in South Africa means that, contrary to liberal functionalist anthropology, there is no absolute divide between rural and urban settings – owing to the migrant labour system, the Africans in the countryside were already incorporated into the British colonial state by the end of the nineteenth century and the classification ‘tribe’ is an anachronism. By the time the apartheid government took office, some Xhosa chiefs in Cape Town (such as Chief Joyi) were not only ordinary labourers, but had also transcended ethnic identities in order to fight racial oppression. In his 1963 article, Mafeje notes that Chief Joyi believed that ‘the chief is a chief by the grace of the people’.¹¹ Although Chief Mtikrakra himself was not really well received in Cape Town, and although a certain section of the Langa population regarded chiefs as oomantshingilane (police spies) or government stooges, some chiefs had a ‘chance of acquiring a position in the national struggle, if they are still, as individuals, acceptable to the modern political leaders’.¹² This is a political reality with which anthropological writings had failed to grapple.

Mafeje’s subsequent article, ‘The Role of the Bard in a Contemporary African Community’, was part of his thematic critique of the anthropological anachronism that reduced African societies to tribes.¹³ He uses the English term ‘bard’ interchangeably with, or to translate, the isiXhosa word imbongi because he saw a similarity between imbongi and the bard in medieval Europe.¹⁴ In anthropological literature and linguistics, the bard is reduced to a praise-singer. Mafeje concludes that this is a misplaced assessment because bards are sociopolitical critics more than praise-poets and argues that anthropologists and linguists are ‘over-emphasising the wrong aspect of the institution’.¹⁵ There is a functional difference between bards and individual members of society who compose praise-poems for themselves or their loved ones. Anthropologists saw the difference only in status: those who act as praise-singers as a calling and those who do so for personal reasons. The former have greater political significance while the latter act for self-entertainment. As a result of the seriousness of the institution of imbongi, not every member of society can stand up at public gatherings and recite a poem, either for a chief or the general public. Those who do might do so for personal gain or recognition, but that is hardly the central function of the bard. In arguing that imbongi is a sociopolitical critic, Mafeje does not deny that imbongi might from time to time praise the chief (every political institution has its legitimisers). The point was to call into question the view that imbongi is primarily a praise-singer.

Although the terms ‘poet’ and ‘bard’ are often used synonymously, Mafeje contends that the latter is a term of Celtic origin used to designate ancient Celtic poets who enjoyed certain privileges and functions. The term ‘bard’ comes from the Latin bardi, a title for national poets and minstrels among the people of Gaul and Brittany. Although the institution disappeared in Gaul, there is ‘evidence of its continued existence in Wales, Ireland, Brittany and Northern Scotland, where Celtic people survived the Latin and Teutonic conquests’.¹⁶ In Wales, an organised society with hereditary rights and privileges, the bards were akin to royal families and were exempt from tax and military service. Their duty was to celebrate victories and sing hymns of praise, and they gave poetic expression to societal sentiments. In this sense, they were very influential. In Ireland, too, bards were a distinct social category, and also enjoyed hereditary rights. They were divided into three types, each of which had a distinct role: those who celebrated victories and sang hymns of praise; those who chanted the laws of the nation; and those who gave poetic genealogies and family histories. In South Africa the role of imbongi is to interpret and organise public opinion. If imbongi is unable to do so, he cannot attain the status of a national poet. The major difference between the South African bard and his European counterpart is that the former does not enjoy hereditary rights and privileges such as tax exemption. South African bards are not an organised society. They pursue their endeavours as individual members of society. Imbongi is self-appointed and his success depends largely on how people respond to him. If the people respond positively, imbongi could be elevated to the level of imbongi yakomkhulu (the poet of the main residence) or imbongi yesizwe (the poet of the nation). In the latter sense, he transcends ‘tribal’ identities.

For Mafeje, there were three key issues that characterised both the South African and the European bards: they usually emerged from the ranks of commoners (were not of royal blood); their role and substance depended on how they were received by the people; and they had freedom to criticise (overtly or covertly) those in power. Having laid this historical and conceptual background at the beginning of ‘The Role of the Bard’, Mafeje goes on to analyse the poems of imbongi known as Melikhaya Mbutuma, who was imbongi of abaThembu’s paramount chief, Sabata Dalindyebo. Mafeje followed Mbutuma as part of his fieldwork in what was then the Transkei for his Master’s thesis in 1963.

The methodological lessons to be drawn from Mafeje’s article on the role of the bard relate to literary, archival research, ethnography and textual analysis. The poems are in isiXhosa; Mafeje first reproduces them in the original and then translates them into English to make their meaning apparent to the reader – but also to subject them to critical scrutiny. Although the process of translation is prone to clumsiness, his translation is accurate and the meaning is not lost. Imbongi yosiba (the poet who writes down his poems) is usually distinguished from imbongi yomthonyama (the poet who recites his poems from memory), but Mbutuma’s poems were in written form, ‘except some of the shorter ones which I wrote down as he recited them in public gatherings’.¹⁷ Mbutuma’s poems cover political events in the Transkei region from 1959 to 1963.

In citing these poems, Mafeje illustrates the role of the bard as a mediator between two social categories, the ruler and the ruled. Although the poems are political in content, Mafeje’s goal is not to show Mbutuma’s political astuteness, but to highlight the role of the bard as a mediator (although to mediate in the events of the Transkei of the late 1950s and early 1960s was ipso facto to play a political role), but when the situation fails to resolve, imbongi is forced to abandon his role as a mediator and join forces with either side. If he sides with the ruler whose authority is being questioned, he loses his social status, which depends more on acceptance by the people than on the ruler.

A reader of Ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: A Critique of the Social Sciences
• Part II: On Land and Agrarian Issues in Sub-Saharan Africa
• Part III: On Revolutionary Theory and Politics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index