It has been a long, laborious, year. An emotionally and spiritually taxing journey, all of which drained me. Frankly, I thought it was 2016 all over again. But I’m here. And don’t get me wrong, the draining was good for me. Part of this personal journey, as one inevitably moves inward, was knowing how and when to place boundaries against certain spaces for my own growth. As such, I’m exercising a ‘healthy detachment’ from some spaces, politics being one of them.
Given these recent personal changes, I did not have the urge to write anything this year – although I think the spaces between law and politics provided a lot of material in both intellectual and academic realms. For my part, it just didn’t feel like there was much intrigue that required a sustained critique. If there was any intrigue, its form was quite clear: we have a manifestly corrupt elite, compromised State institutions and a duplicitous private sector – revelations by both the audit firm, KPMG, and the software firm, SAP, have demonstrated, in contrast to the Save South Africa campaign, the double-dipping nature of the sector. That is, sometimes seemingly reputable companies are a front for essentially elicit ways for profit making – Khaya Sithole provides a riveting expose in this regard. So perhaps this is just human nature? But this too easily falls into a problem of pathological behaviour, a problematic conclusion for a social scientist.
Nevertheless, three of my withheld interventions this year necessitate comment.
The first is my rejoinder to the menaretrash hashtag, which is ‘controversial’ because of the dominance of liberal feminism in South Africa – well, among the chattering classes. So I’ll only publish that some years from now, if ever I do – But Nigerian feminist, Oyeronke Oyewumi, and African American feminist, bell hooks, are decisive nodes in that rejoinder. Similarly, my unpublished intervention on the ideological orientation of South Africa’s public discourse: in liberal discourse, to associate a woman with her ex-husband may indeed be sexist, but does the same analysis hold in cultural terms? Doesn’t the latter paint a more complex picture? In any case, I’ve sat on this piece partly because I’m trying to develop it into a paper. But both these interventions fall under the rubric of coloniality, at least at the level of values. In a number of ways, these interventions were to me a powerful reminder that ‘metropolitan’ spaces in South Africa should not be used as a yardstick to appreciate the cultural and political contours of the country. After all, it is such spaces that orbited ‘South Africa’ into the cosmology of Western modernity: in other words, rule of law, private property, constitutional supremacy, standards of beauty, standards of development etc. And it is for this reason that theorists such as Patrick Bond and Andile Mngxitama argue that 1994 represented a bourgeois democracy or that South Africa remains a colony, respectively. Not surprisingly, both for different reasons. There goes some of my reservations regarding the South African Communist Party (SACP)! Finally, my 12-page intervention entitled ‘Returning to Non-racialism: The question of Whiteness’ is still in its infancy . I tried to get it out before the 2017 December Elective Congress of the ANC but that will no longer be possible.
In this article, therefore, consistent with the angle on coloniality, I focus on the state of the South African liberation project. And no, I’m not excluding the ANC.
Often, one discerns a tendency to essentialize the liberation project to a number of measurable deliverables in the form of basic services such as water, electricity and sanitation etc. A further tendency is to delink ‘aesthetic’ issues such as a black girl’s hair in high school from social justice issues such as water or electricity – as if ‘being’ and ‘development’ have no relation to one another. There is also a recent tendency to limit the project to the African majority, at the exclusion of Indians and Coloreds.
Surely the liberation project should be concerned with all of these, especially the relationship between ‘being’ (or identity politics) and development. Development is merely the material manifest of how we approach our ‘being’ in the world: Steve Biko sharply foregrounded this proposition in his Black Consciousness thesis.
Therefore the objective of the liberation project is to fashion a common humanity or citizenship, not on the basis of living a ‘good life’ because life is solitary, ‘nasty, brutish and short’, taking Europe’s Hobbesian trajectory, which would be inclusive of the Left’s version of history, but because there is a need to restore that which was broken, taking the liberatory trajectory. This is not a matter of going to the ‘root’, which would produce a socialist revolution in the Left’s dialectic, but is about opening up alternative paths to development. In liberation-speak, therefore, development is not without such historical distinctions.
Colonial-apartheid fulfilled two missions: firstly, it demonized and therefore halted the development of African traditional life – approaches to ‘being’ or culture were interrupted. Secondly, it partially integrated Africans into Western modernity. While the late revisionist Philip Bonner provides a challenge to the ‘dead’ decade of the 1930’s, something I’ll venture into the next few years, from the 1940’s, the ANC has been fighting for full integration into Western modernity: the 1943 African claims, or the ‘Atlantic Charter from the Africans point of view’ as it was formally referred to, is one such document that first declared this struggle for full integration. The 1955 Freedom Charter is a coherent appendage to the trajectory of the 1943 African claims. So the Nationalists had effectively consolidated their power within the ANC. But they did so at the expense of not struggling to reverse the interruption of culture, instead, they replaced culture with ‘class’ analysis. The ANC’s motive forces, ‘Blacks in general and Africans in particular’, were then enveloped into the orbit of Western modernity. Others will refer to this as an inclusive form of African Nationalism.
For a long time to come, the struggle to restore African traditional life was not the dominant impulse within the ANC: of course the 1940’s Youth League, the late 1960’s ‘gang of 8’ and arguably the Youth League of Julius Malema have provided occasional prominence to this impulse: often referred to as the Africanists.
Given the power of the ANC in society, however, the liberation project is about the liberation of ‘Blacks in general and Africans in particular’ – for now, let’s suspend our critique of this formulation as both the PAC and the BC provided biting critiques of it premised on their position on colonial-apartheid’s demonization of African traditional life – their dominant impulse being the issue of identity politics. That is, the realization that land dispossession facilitated the erasure of culture. Further, and this has proved to be the most enduring, the Freedom Charter, given these and other critiques, presents the ANC as a civic movement. In its historic mission of liberation for the African landless (this cohesion was nothing short of a feat), which is the first impulse, it interlocked its mission with the interests of white South Africans. This is the second impulse. As such, this ensured that some features of colonial-apartheid were accommodated post 1994. However, the ANC sought to make dominant the first impulse by arguing that the liberation of ‘Blacks in general and Africans in particular’, first, will necessarily liberate white people from their superiority complexes. It is no wonder then that the 1996 democratic Constitution contains these two impulses. But like the Freedom Charter, the strength of any one impulse is contingent on the balance of power in society.
But given the naval-gazing posture of the ANC this past decade or so, the first impulse within the ANC stands to be disaggregated: to be separated into its constituent parts. As we have recently witnessed, this liberation project has therefore oscillated between emergent political parties. We see this in the formation of COPE, on the one hand, and in the formation of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), on the other hand. The former continues the struggle for full integration into Western modernity while the latter represents the Africanist impulse, with a sprinkle of Nationalist attitudes and socialist thought – in sum, the latter initially represented what Andile Mngxitama had initially recognized as the children of both OR Tambo and Robert Sobukwe coming together in one home. Of course, Mngxitama, representing The Black First Land First (BLF), broke away from the EFF to claim an alleged purist critique of the colonial-apartheid project, rejecting the Nationalists – and partly the socialists’ – version of South Africa. Further, the so-called Fallist movement also emerges out of the conceptual womb of this block. And it enters the fray with its own version of (decolonial) radicalism, with some emphasizing the excessively subjective notion of ‘Indian capitalism’.
Of course, I’ve left out a lot of history. History is a living creature with slopes, steep inclines, sharp bends and T-junctions along the way. After all, the separatist ventures of the union, NUMSA, and the entryism of COSATU have collapsed the Left. And we’re here now: the centre is unable to hold as the ANC can no longer fend off the Africanist block within and without, which has splintered into many versions of radical politics – with some immersed into a fetishism of meaningless concepts. It is unable to fend off a right-wing imagined fear of a looming genocide against Afrikaners nor can it curb the greed of its own members against syphoning off State coffers. Ultimately, the Africanist block is weak and has degenerated into populist sloganeering.
Inadvertently, given all these interests, only a centrist party, one appealing to all, can emerge – which still leaves space for the ANC, if only it can get its act together. But if any centrist party were to capture the political imagination of South Africans, including a renewed ANC, it would nevertheless have to bargain with a number of these groupings.