Becoming Worthy Ancestors

Archive, Public Deliberation And Identity In South Africa

Xolela Mangcu, Ntongela Masilela, Frederik Zyl Slabbert, Martin Bernal, Pumla Dineo Gqola, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Benedict Anderson, Carolyn Hamilton, Xolela Mangcu, Xolela Mangcu

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781868148202
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why does it matter that nations should care for their archives, and that they should develop a sense of shared identity? And why should these processes take place in the public domain? How can nations possibly speak about a shared sense of identity in pluralistic societies where individuals and groups have multiple identities? And how can such conversations be given relevance in public discussions of reconciliation and development in South Africa? These are the issues that the Public Conversations lecture series – an initiative of the Constitution of Public Intellectual Life Project at Wits University – proceeded from in 2006. Five years later, cross currents in contemporary South Africa have made the resumption of a public debate to clarify the meanings of identity and citizenship even more imperative, and an understanding of 'archive' even more urgent. The 2006 lectures were subsequently collected, resulting in this volume which takes its title from Weber's point, elaborated on in the chapter by Benedict Anderson, that the future asks us to be worthy ancestors to the yet unborn. The book, as did the lecture series, aims to reach a broad and informed reading public because the topic is still of pressing interest in contemporary public discourse. In a changed (and, some might say, degraded) environment of public dialogue, the editor hopes to inspire a re-thinking of the very essence of what it means to be a citizen of South Africa. Becoming Worthy Ancestors aims to make accessible the theoretically informed, sometimes highly academic work of its various contributors. With chapters from high profile international and local contributors, it will be of interest to South African and international audiences. Editing for publication has further enhanced the accessibility of each speaker's thinking without forfeiting any of its complexity, and the addition of an introductory chapter by the editor contributes to the coherence of the volume. While the target audience is the broad public, the book is based on a core of academic thinking and research.

1

EVIDENTIARY GENOCIDE: INTERSECTIONS OF RACE, POWER AND THE ARCHIVE

XOLELA MANGCU

MEMORY, POWER AND NATION BUILDING

Central to this book are questions of memory, archive, identity and public deliberation. These chapters consider why it matters that nations should care for their archives, and why those archives should inform discussions about a sense of shared identity. I deliberately distinguish between shared identity and common identity, for while we cannot speak of a common identity and experiences, even within a group of people, the concept of ‘shared identity’, by definition, suggests the existence of multiple individuals and groups who have a stake in the continued existence of the nation.

But this book does not seek to settle age-old debates about shared identity in pluralist societies. Its aim is to highlight how the archive is often employed to make certain identity claims and, in the process, to privilege certain identities’ histories over others. At its worst, this claim-making leads to the genocide of individuals and groups in the name of the nation or, conversely, the genocide of the nation in the name of groups. As Benedict Anderson puts it in his chapter: ‘No nation looks forward to happiness in Heaven, or torment in Hell. What it fears is the quite earthly: the possibility of extinction through genocide.’ To use a cliché, memory becomes the weapon, quite literally.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has explained the role that memory plays in affirming individual and group identity – but also as a weapon of extinction:

My identity is linked very intimately to my memory … What I know is what I remember, and that helps to make me who I am. Nations are built through sharing experiences, memories, and a history. That is why people have often tried to destroy their enemies by destroying their histories, their memories, that which gives them an identity.¹

The physical genocide of groups and nations is thus often preceded by what I would call evidentiary genocide. Public deliberation around issues of identity and archive becomes both the means and the end of interrogating those identity claims, and of exposing their use in the service of power.

In her chapter, Carolyn Hamilton makes a distinction between archive as the epistemological and political frame that shapes how we approach the past and archives as the actual collections of materials about the past. My introductory chapter focuses more on the former – the manner in which formative aspects of our history have been left out of the historical narrative of the nation, and the implications thereof for developing a sense of shared identity. More specifically, I demonstrate how, under the leadership of former president Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress, appropriated the language of the Black Consciousness and Pan Africanist movements while disfiguring the role of those movements in the struggle for liberation, with specific and real consequences for how we think about development.

One of the great illustrations of the costs of forgetting is captured in this opening vignette from Milan Kundera’s novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

In February 1948, the communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square. Gottwald was flanked by comrades, with Clementis standing close to him. It was snowing and cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded. Bursting with solicitude, Clementis took off his fur hat and set it on Gottwald’s head. The propaganda section made hundreds of thousands of copies of the photograph taken on the balcony where Gottwald, in a fur hat and surrounded by his comrades, spoke to the people. On that balcony the history of Communist Bohemia began. Every child knew that photograph, from seeing it on posters and in schoolbooks and museums. Four years later Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately made him vanish from history and, of course, from all photographs. Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on the balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only the bare palace wall. Nothing remains of Clementis but the fur hat on Gottswald head.²

South Africa’s various liberation movements became the fur hat on the ruling party’s head as it dressed itself in nationalist garb in the early 2000s. If Thabo Mbeki emerged as our metaphorical Gottwald, then Pan Africanist and Black Consciousness leaders such as Robert Sobukwe and Steve Biko became our metaphorical Clementis, although it is hard to associate Sobukwe or Biko with the obsequiousness of a Clementis. In one of the early acts of historical erasure, Jacob Zuma, then deputy president of the ANC, claimed, in an article in City Press, that the ANC had masterminded the June 1976 uprisings. Long before my intellectual interest in the role of the archive in nation building, I utilised the ANC’s own archives to refute Zuma’s claim. I retrieved an article that appeared in the ANC’s mouthpiece Sechaba barely a month after the uprisings. The publication literally labelled the 1976 uprisings a mark of adventurism and concluded that, unlike the generation of Mandela, Tambo, Sisulu and other Youth Leaguers of the 1950s, the youth of 1976 lacked a sound political direction and leadership.³ I argued then, as I do now, that the ANC, while dominant, should be careful not to suggest that the history of this country can be understood only through its lens.

More recently, the leader of the ANC Youth League, Julius Malema, stated on public television that the historic events of Sharpeville on 21 March 1960 were not organised by the PAC as had been generally acknowledged, but by the omnipresent ANC. This created so much uproar that PAC youth leaders threatened Malema’s life, demonstrating once again the deadly business of memory. Some of us have taken the more persuasive route of reminding our society of the role that individuals such as Biko and Sobukwe played in the construction of our political identities, and I did as much in responding to Malema’s distortion of history.⁴ We have taken it upon ourselves to protect their philosophies from the vulgarisation of present-day nationalism in the service of power. As Kundera puts it: ‘ … the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’.⁵

THE COLLUSION OF THE MEDIA

Evidentiary genocide has not been the exclusive monopoly of the ruling party and the state. The power to shape memories also operates in more horizontal capillarial ways and the forgetting takes place in civil society when, for example, powerful institutions such as the media privilege certain histories over others; if the ANC saw itself as ‘the sole authentic voice’ of South Africans, the local and international media played no small part in that representation. Even if we concede that other political movements were on the decline, it is evident that the media abetted the glorification of one particular movement over others and the privileging of one vision over others. The reason for the media bias would most likely be that the ANC’s philosophy of non-racialism was far less threatening than the radicalism of these other movements; the media played a particularly critical role in the presentation of Mbeki as the sophisticated black intellectual who was the voice of reason. Again, the media was actively involved in the way in which Nelson Mandela – and, to a lesser extent, the ‘terrorist’ Oliver Tambo – became the icon of the new South Africa. The choice of certain icons over others could be seen in the furore over the re-naming of Johannesburg International Airport as Oliver Tambo International Airport; for white South Africans, Oliver Tambo was the ‘terrorist’ while Mandela was the one who forgave them and absolved them of any historical responsibility. In its glorification and privileging of the ANC, the media forgot that it was only at its conference in Mogorogoro in 1969 that membership was opened to whites, and that it was only at the Kabwe Conference in 1985 that whites were allowed to hold leadership positions. It could be argued therefore that Mbeki was taking the ANC to an earlier self that the media had wilfully ignored.

But beyond the matter of plurality why would it be substantively important to include the story of other movements in the making of our nation? Let us take black consciousness as an example.

THE RISE AND FALL OF BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS

In 1960, the apartheid government outlawed the main political organisations in the black community, the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress. The PAC had broken ranks with the ANC in 1959 in opposition to the latter’s adoption of the Freedom Charter, a document which stated that the land belonged to both blacks and whites. To radical nationalists within the ANC, the mother body had lost its claim as the custodian of African nationalism. The PAC also argued that the ANC was dominated by white liberals and communists. The Black Consciousness Movement emerged in the late 1960s to fill the political vacuum left by the banning of these two organisations. In many ways, the new movement was close to the PAC in its radical nationalism and in its assertion of racial identity as a weapon of struggle. However, while the PAC did not completely bar white membership, the Black Consciousness Movement excluded it completely. As Robert Fatton argues, the PAC’s inspiration was the continent itself whereas the inspiration of the Black Consciousness Movement were the Third World political and intellectual movements.⁶

Here is how Barney Pityana captured the impact of these political and intellectual currents on the movement’s founder, Steve Biko:

Black Consciousness for him was moulded by a diversity of intellectual forces and fountains: from the liberation history of South Africa, the Pan Africanism of Kwame Nkrumah, the African nationalism of Jomo Kenyatta, the negritude of the west African scholars like Leopold Sadar Senghor, Aimé Césaire and others in Paris. Biko taught himself a political understanding of religion in Africa. He devoured John Mbiti. Ali Mazrui. Basil Davidson. He understood the critical writings of Walter Rodney and he interpreted Frantz Fanon. He laid his hands on some philosophical writings like Jean Paul Sartre and made ready use of some philosophical concepts like syllogism in logic and dialectical materialism in Marxist political thought. All this by a young medical student.⁷

This movement lasted for the better part of the 1970s, reaching its high water mark with the 1976 student uprisings. Steve Biko was killed by the apartheid security police in 1977, and all the black consciousness organisations were banned in the following month.

Yet another lull occurred in the late 1970s as former black consciousness leaders sought to regroup under the leadership of the Azanian People’s Organisation. But it was also precisely during this period that movements sympathetic to the non-racialism of the ANC emerged, culminating in the formation of the United Democratic Front. It is extremely difficult to pinpoint the founders of political movements, as often an idea will have circulated for a while in the community before finding its most articulate spokesperson – who then takes on the title of the founder. The person most closely associated with the formation of the UDF was Allan Boesak, later a prominent member of the ANC when it was unbanned.

The UDF took the initiative from a weakened Black Consciousness Movement and made no bones about its support for the ANC and its philosophy of non-racialism. This multiracial body dominated South African politics throughout the 1980s. When the UDF was banned, it was replaced by the Mass Democratic Movement, which consisted of a combination of mass action and underground military organisation. Elsewhere, I have described the transition from black consciousness to the mass mobilisation of the 1980s in the following terms:

Whereas the Black Consciousness Movement had concentrated on inward-looking strategies of community development in preparation for an idealised non-racial order, the new movements directed the struggle almost exclusively outwardly. Impatient with the steady pace and institution building of the 1970s, the ‘young lions’ of the 1980s brought a dizzying urgency to the situation. Seeking to make the country ungovernable, this generation’s emphasis was more on mobilisation of the masses than on organisation and institution building.⁸

The changeover from the dominance of the philosophy of black consciousness to the non-racialism of the UDF and the ANC was violent, laying claim to many lives as the two movements competed for ideological hegemony in the black community. And thus were planted the seeds for the kind of militarism we would come to witness, especially among young people in the 1990s. The talk of killing to protect ANC president Jacob Zuma thus has antecedents that go back to the youth violence of the 1980s. While many people have rightfully deplored ANC Youth League President Julius Malema’s statement to kill to defend Zuma, the reality is that it is a language that many young, hopeless and marginalised youth find seductive.

The UDF/ANC alliance ultimately prevailed and imposed the hegemony of non-racialism in the liberation struggle throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, and this in turn influenced much of the political discourse until the Mandela years. Mandela did not pay much attention to the political culture within the black community, investing much of his time in a process of building relations with white people and the international community.

THE COSTS OF FORGETTING: IDENTITY AND DEVELOPMENT IN THE NEW ERA

One of the more perceptive observations of changing political attitudes in the black community after apartheid came from Mandela’s biographer, Anthony Sampson:

In his first months as president, he enjoyed a brilliant honeymoon, particularly with white South Africans, to whom this tolerant old man came as a wondrous relief … at the end of the first hundred days in office the Financial Times could find no whites who had a bad word for him. It was a normality which carried its own dangers, as black militants saw the revolution betrayed, and younger ANC leaders including Thabo Mbeki knew they must make reforms which would offend the whites.⁹

Mbeki adopted the once ‘discredited’ Pan Africanist and black consciousness themes of African unity and identity for South Africa and spoke increasingly of an African renaissance and the themes of black self-determination that were at the heart of black consciousness. He also admitted leading Pan Africanist and black consciousness figures to his inner circle and cabinet. There were, however, two central contradictions in Mbeki’s appeal to black consciousness.

First, there was the emergence of a nativist, essentialist discourse coming from Mbeki and his closest advisors. Even though black consciousness had always been an exclusivist movement, it had never adopted an essentialist approach to identity; one of the great achievements of the liberation movement was the manner in which identities were de-essentialised and given a political meaning, and blackness for example was never constructed as simply a matter of skin colour or biology. For Steve Biko, blackness was always a matter of consciousness and identification, hence the movement’s description of black people as ‘all those who are by law and tradition discriminated against, and identify themselves as a unit towards the realisation of their aspirations’ The nativist, essentialist reading of black consciousness themes was part of a trend of appeals to racial solidarity among Southern African leaders. Like Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Mbeki saw in radical racial nationalism a way of mobilising black support against critics. For example he castigated black critics of his government as ‘foot lickers of the white man’and he suggested that white critics, irrespective of their political pedigree, were acting out racist stereotypes about Africans as corrupt. Veteran ANC leader Jeremy Cronin was reprimanded by ANC leader Dumisani Makhaye after he said there was a process of Zanu-fication taking place within the ANC (a clear reference to the authoritarianism of Zimbabwe’s ZANU-PF). What was instructive was the racialised nature of the reprimand. And the essentialism lies in the fact that it is Cronin’s whiteness that disqualified him from speaking about Zimbabwe, not his ideas or values. In other words Cronin’s detractors were saying, ‘it’s a black thing you can’t understand’.¹⁰ Mbeki and his cohorts were effectively re-presenting the black consciousness critique of white racism as a nativist reduction of political consciousness to skin colour.

One of Mbeki’s supporters, Ronald Suresh Roberts, wrote a book, Fit to Govern, The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER ONE
• CHAPTER TWO
• CHAPTER THREE
• CHAPTER FOUR
• CHAPTER FIVE
• CHAPTER SIX
• CHAPTER SEVEN
• CHAPTER EIGHT
• ENDNOTES
• INDEX