South African colonial modernity, which spans 500 years, is a long gory story covered in blood, sweat, tears and suffering of those who have been subjected to its insidious machinations. Generations of white population have immensely and fabulously got wealthy and still enjoy ill-gotten gains necessitated by colonization. On the contrary, black people are the case of working hard like a slave and never being able to live like a king. South African modernity is founded on, and etched in, blood. It stands on the cadavers of indigenous people, whose extermination and subjugation necessitated the ground on which South Africa is constructed. Colonial modernity and coloniality of power and their equally sinister accessories, war, murder, rape and genocide, have had a lasting impact on those unfortunate enough to receive such ghastly visitations. Colonial modernity and all constitutive of it were acts of unprovoked war; in any case, war and violence necessitated colonial modernity. Maldonado-Torres views war, conquest and genocide as fundamental to coloniality and imputed by the misanthropic scepticism of the humanity of indigenous people who were deemed inferior not only in skin colour but also in religion (Christianity), culture and civilization, which corresponded with death, violence and genocide.1 For Maldonado-Torres, the non-human Other is ârapeableâ and âkillable,â notions that are inscribed in colonial bodies.2 The colonial encounter itself is brutal. It uses terror, which facilitates establishment of hegemonyâa terror which is not only a physiological act but also a social factâand a cultural construction, which serves as a mediator for colonial hegemony.3 It leads to cultures of terror whose violence is based on and nourished by silence, thus a cultural construction of evil.4
Coloniality is indeed insidious and wholly devilish, given its history of bloodshed, unparalleled cruelty and blood-curdling adventures anywhere in the world where contact has been made with indigenous populations. In South Africa, like the Americas, coloniality wasnât only the arrival of an economic system of labour and capital and extraction of surplus value, but it was also a hotchpotch power structure that included the cultural, spiritual, religious and cosmological aspects. Thus, we see a colonial power matrix that is multidimensional, multitudinous and latitudinal, with race being the primary criterion for structuration and individuation. Before the expansion of South African modernity into the hinterland, the Cape economy was slave-based. The coerced physical labour was assigned to those deemed inferior and black, and its alienation has been dominant in South African colonial modes of production. Under South African colonial modernity, there is an entanglement of labour, slavery, serfdom, Othering and production of commodities for the world market.
Colonial ontological difference and exteriority of the Other as racially marked, as different, as scum of the earth, as the wretched who is imbricated in the hegemonic epistemic and structures of domination, is a very prominent feature of South African colonial modernity. Race is primary, which marks the difference between conquerors and conquered, where inferiority is naturalized through biologically and phenotypically based codifications.5 In the Americas, coloniality of power emerged from the poser whether Indians had souls or not.6 In South Africa, it was whether the Khoi and the San, and later the âBantuâ-speaking peoples were human or not. Even though groups like the San are lighter skinned, it couldnât exempt them from a white supremacist racial gaze that privileges fair hue. Thus, global coloniality and indeed global white supremacy begin from the logic of hue of colour and its lightness, which guarantees full humanity.
This book maintains that South Africa, despite the official end of apartheid in 1994, remains steeped in the interstices of coloniality. We propose that there is a distinction between colonialism and coloniality, although colonialism is constitutive of coloniality. According to Maldonado-Torres:
We are, however, cognizant of the so-called exceptional or unique South African colonial experience, which has been sometimes called Colonisation of a Special Type, given the presence of Afrikaner domination, which had long-lost connection with The Netherlands and geographies of social origin, and the imperial nature of the British. The fact that both the British and the Afrikaners were internal settlers doesnât preclude the colonial nature of South Africa, which is similar to any classical colonial situations. South African colonial modernity, just like the Americas, emerges at a particular socio-historical setting. It is not lost to us that both Diaz and Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape within a decade of Columbusâ âdiscoveryâ of the Americas, and that Diaz and Columbus were at one point companions on a ship to the West Coast of Africa in 1482 to establish a slave fort. In 1481, Diaz had also accompanied Diogo dâAzambuja in exploration of the formerly Gold Coast. That area became important in trans-Atlantic slave commerce. During the same era, Columbus also sailed in search of a route to India but got lost and ended up in the western hemisphere. Our conjecture is if he had got his bearings right and parked at the Cape, he would have prosecuted the same genocide he did in the Americas, and South Africa would have given rise to the modern European capitalist system and indeed Western modernity.Coloniality is different from colonialism. Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, which makes such nation an empire. Coloniality, instead, refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but define culture, labour, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production beyond strict limits of colonial administrations. Thus coloniality survives colonialism.7
The year 1488 is the landmark year in South African historiography. Unlike the arrival of Jan Van Riebeeck in 1652, the âdiscoveryâ of the Cape in 1488 by Portuguese explorer Bartholomew Diaz laid the foundations of South Africaâs colonial modernity. We propose that South African colonial modernity begins in 1488 when Bartholomew Diaz circumnavigated the Cape. We argue that what makes 1488 significant is the fact that it is a year that marks the beginning of South Africaâs insertion into the capitalist world-system. While it is true that the âdiscoveryâ of the Americas by Columbus within the same decade gave rise to Western modernity and, subsequently, its prosperity, the sojourns of Diaz not only exposed the southern part of Africa to later colonization but also opened important trade routes to India and the Asian subcontinent.
We stretch this point further and say South African colonial modernity is marked by six major interregnums. The first is the period between 1488 and 1652, in which routes to Asia were established and Jan Van Riebeeck arrived at the Cape with the intention of colonising it. The second is the period between 1652 and 1795, which marks the eruption of initial major wars and confrontations, genocide of indigenous populations, the establishment of the Dutch Cape colony that was juxtaposed with slave-based economy and forced labour, the appearance of the British, Afrikanerization, Anglicization, proselytization and beginning of accumulation at a major scale. The third is the period between 1795 and 1910, which marks the presence of the British Cape colony, further encroachment into the interior by both the Afrikaners and the British, conflicts among the colonizers, a subsequent period of mass black proletarianization, urbanization and industrialization as a result of discovery of precious metals in Kimberly and Witwatersrand and formation of South Africa as white manâs nation when the 1910 Union of South Africa was instituted. The fourth is the period between 1910 and 1948, which saw the consolidation of white imperial capital and the contemporary phase of African resistance to colonial rule. The fifth period is between 1948 and 1994, which marks the institutionalization of racist white supremacist ideas in the form of apartheid, which is a node in the thread of South African modernity; these ideas had been existent since, at least, 1488. The sixth period is after 1994; it is a continuum of global coloniality, the difference with earlier phases being that local white and global capital in tandem with black nouveau riche elite entangle in a mixture of âoldâ money and ânewâ money, which is mixed up in a hotchpotch constellation of accumulation and consumption. However, we donât see South Africaâs colonial modernity as linear, not even marked by continuities and discontinuities, rather by eruptions and disruptions. This book sketches mainly a theoretical schema of this subject, taking the themes of decolonial ethics, decolonization, coloniality and modernity as a departure point. Nonetheless, we combine these with the traditions of black radical thought, as they have been spelt out in South African political historiography.
We counterpoise the notion that South African modernity begins with the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1887 or even the Kimberly diamond rush two decades earlier. We concur that it is true these events precipitated modern forms of extractive relations of productions in South Africa. However, the countryâs colonial modernity should be traced to Diazâs sojourns and âdiscoveryâ of the Cape in 1488 and the arrival of Van Riebeeck in 1652.
South African indigenous peoples have a long history of resistance to encroachment of, and ill-treatment by, foreigners, and this dates back to the time of Diaz. There were also clashes with Antonio de Saldanha in 1503 and Francis de Almeida in 1510. The latter was killed together with 67 of his men at Table Bay. Subsequent sojourns to the East Indies by the Portuguese carefully avoided the area. In 1488, Diaz encountered the Khoi at Mossel Bay, and bartered trinkets with cattle and sheep, but a skirmish broke out. Diaz shot dead one of the Khoi with a crossbow. Quarrels with the Khoi were usually caused by the ill-mannerisms of Diaz and da Gama, including fetching water without permission from the Khoi. Earlier on, in 1497, da Gama clashed with the Khoi. Da Gamaâs barbarous cruelty and sadistic treatment to those he encountered elsewhere in East Africa and India is well known.
Within 4 years of Van Riebeeckâs arrival, the first KhoiâDutch war broke out, the primary cause being appropriation of Khoiâs prime land by the Dutch. These conflicts including the so-called Kaffir wars continued right up to the Bambatha rebellion of 1906.
Azanian Black Nationalist thought, in all its forms and shapes, is a historical idea rooted in the colonial encounter between Africans and colonizers. It is a consummation of a long tradition steeped in the desire of colonized Africans to liberate themselves. It is a strand, a node in a long thread woven through different historical epochs in Azanian resistance struggles. It is my intention to trace this idea. More important is the question why certain ideas persist throughout history, refusing to be buried, and like a spectre or ghost of the past return to haunt the present.
This boo...