“The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present”[1]
Many events have occurred this past week and a half. And it is has become a norm, given our public debates, to move from one controversy to the next without taking some time off from what appears to be a drift into ideological ruses. Mme Winnie Nomzamo Madikizela Mandela passed on. On 14 April 2018, we bid farewell to her, and gave her off into the world of the living-dead. In the African National Congress (ANC) culture, I suppose, she now belongs to those galaxy of leaders that selflessly gave off their lives for the international struggle of freedom.
In an interesting way, however, Mme Mandela occupies a unique place in the struggle constellation of the ANC: she was one of a few figures that was central to the various strands of the ANC. Namely, the MK camps on the Continent and the diplomats in the UK, on the one hand, and the imprisoned Robben Islanders in Cape Town and the UDF/COSATU contingents, on the other hand. Having said that, she also represented the Radical, Africanist, position within the Congress movement.
Given these intricacies, it is no surprise that South Africa witnessed a public ‘lynching’ of Mme Mandela: To those who made use of a feminist platform to strip her of her ANC, the EFF who sought to isolate her within the ANC only to take aim at the ANC, to the racists who wished to demonize her and the liberals who sought to fragment her legacy, many of us on the sidelines could only watch with anxiety.
However, this is not another article about Mme Winnie per se, but it is an invitation to ‘break bread’ with the ANC’s vexing question of belonging, to which, I contend, the above-mentioned intricacies direct us to. It is an article about how these intricacies underline a core tenet of the ANC.
Its best to start with the story of ‘Africa’
Vineet Thakur reminds that “in many of the writings of African scholars and thinkers, the certainty of state-centric international relations has never been true: Africa, for many, is a cultural, not necessarily spatial, concept”[2]. But while many state-centric features of colonial-apartheid were left intact, the logic of belonging, or differently put, citizenship, was more in line with the notion that to be African was less a matter of space then it was a matter of culture. Consequently, the Freedom Charter’s opening adage that “… South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people” is no surprise.
So while it is true that “South Africa is a historically settler-colonial society”[3], the above-mentioned Freedom Charter adage unsettles its contextual basis. Furthermore, as Jon Soske elsewhere reminds us, although he laments this, “the idea of the multi-racial society was predicated on white indigeneity”[4]. That is, it was based on white South African’s legitimate claim to belonging on African soil.
Certainly, the refusal to learn national languages, to resist broad based economic empowerment, and/or affirmative action, to continue separate development, to celebrate particular public values only, and to continue to view Africans as inferior, breeds political impulses that qualify blackness as a condition for belonging and of claiming land. This, however, should not necessarily come as a surprise: ethical conditions for belonging are valid. That being said, ethical conditions should never threaten others’ existential claims. So in our case, a formulation that is sensitive to both impulses is long overdue.
This is where I anchor my argument; Mme Mandela’s life exemplifies an impulse, having lived through the human deviation that was colonial-apartheid, to increase the freedom of the downtrodden and have their place in humanity. Also, being a member of the ANC, she was part of a collective that, added to the struggle for freedom, sought to also free white people from their notions of superiority. This resonates with the principle of duality that ‘in order to create anything, its opposite must exist’. As such, the exclusivity of colonial-apartheid created the inclusivity of the post 1994 project.
Following on from Frederick Nietzsche in E.H. Carr, he says that “the falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it… the question is how far it is life-furthering…”[5]. For any serious progressive, this will always be the objective of the struggle. Consequently, “the validity of the knowledge depends on the validity of the purpose”. So, historical knowledge must be weaved in such a manner as to advance the cause of furthering life. Of course, the Andries Tatane murder, the Marikana massacre, the demolishing of homes in Lenasia and the many other instances when government displaced, killed and dispossessed people of their land, their lives and their livelihoods after 1994, rubs against the furthering of life. Similarly, home loans and their repossessions, the private taxi industry and their herding of human bodies, the retail sector and their proletarianization of the work force, and the racial profiling that bedevils Corporate South Africa and many other sectors, aren’t instances of life furthering.
All of this brings into sharp focus the view that historians determine ‘which of the facts of the past’ to turn into ‘historical facts’. Even though it can be poignantly argued that this happens according to their own biases and agendas, it is certainly not to insinuate ‘that any one interpretation of history is as good as any other’. As such, history constitutes “a relationship ‘of equality, of give-and-take’ between the historian and their evidence”[6]. In other words, at the time of reckoning, this is a relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor, depending on the validity of the purpose.
The very fact that the former National Party (NP), representing the right, and the ANC, representing the left, and both cautious of liberalism, found common ground to architect the State on liberal principles[7], indicates that the post 1994 project was constructed on the basis of ‘equality, of give and take’. As I noted above, this basis of equality is not without its opposite, its own deviation. But surely, this deviation cannot compel us to reroute, at a strategic level, an inclusive trajectory.
But it is for this purpose, that for some, the ANC is not part of the evolving history of liberation politics. That it lost its liberation credentials when South African liberation politics took a sectarian turn in the 1950’s. That is, out of it surfaced splinter groups who articulated different tendencies in South Africa’s social and political formation. But perhaps there is something to say about an organization that celebrates, strategically, an inclusive project yet still engage, tactically, exclusivist tendencies.
Notwithstanding the fact that intellectual currents both inside South African academia and outside have become hostile to the ANC, we need to remember that even those that celebrate Mme Mandela’s life, she lived and died ANC for these very reasons.
[1] Carr, E.H (1961) What is history? Cambridge University.
[2] Thakur, V (2014) The International in/and South Africa. Concept note.
[3] Madlingozi, T (2018) The Proposed Amendment to the South African Constitution: Finishing the Unfinished Business of Decolonisation. Critical Legal Thinking. Accessed here: http://criticallegalthinking.com/2018/04/06/the-proposed-amendment-to-the-south-african-constitution/
[4] Soske, J (2015) The Impossible Concept: Settler Liberalism, Pan Africanism, and the Language of Non-Racialism. African Historical Review. Volume 47| Number 2
[5] Carr, E.H (1961) What is history? Cambridge University Press.
[6] Carr, E.H (1961) What is history? Cambridge University Press.
[7] Jordan, P (2012) Some Notes on Liberalism. The Journal of the Helen Suzman Foundation. Issue 65| July 2012