Is Apartheid Really Dead? Pan Africanist Working Class Cultural Critical Perspectives

Julian Kunnie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429979231
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica africana

Is Apartheid Really Dead? Pan Africanist Working Class Cultural Critical Perspectives is an engaging and incisive book that radically challenges the widespread view that post-apartheid society is a liberated society, specifically for the Black working class and rural peasant populations. Julian Kunnie's central contention in this book is that the post-apartheid government was the product of a serious compromise between the former ruling white-led Nationalist Party and the African National Congress, resulting in a continuation of the erstwhile system of monopoly capitalism and racial privilege, albeit revised by the presence of a burgeoning Black political and economic elite. The result of this historic compromise is the persistent subjugation and impoverishment of the Black working class by the designs of global capital as under apartheid, this time managed by a Black elite in collaboration with the powerful white capitalist establishment in South Africa.Is Apartheid Really Dead? engages in a comprehensive analysis of the South African conflict and the negotiated settlement of apartheid rule, and explores solutions to the problematic of continued Black oppression and exploitation. Rooted in a Black Consciousness philosophical framework, unlike most other works on post-apartheid South Africa, this book provides a carefully delineated history of the South African struggle from the pre-colonial era through the present. What is additionally distinctive is the author's reference to and discussion of the Pan Africanist movement in the global struggle for Black liberation, highlighting the aftermath of the 1945 Pan African meeting in Manchester. The author analyzes the South African struggle within the context of Pan Africanism and the continent-wide movement to rid Africa of colonialism's legacy, highlighting the neo-colonial character of much of Africa's post-independence nations, arguing that South Africa has followed similar patterns.One of the attractive qualities of this book is that it discusses correctives to the perceived situation of neo-colonialism in South Africa, by delving into issues of gender oppression and the primacy of women's struggle, working class exploitation and Black worker mobilization, environmental despoliation and indigenous religio-cultural responses, and educational disenfranchisement and the need for radically new structures and policies in educational transformation. Ultimately, Is Apartheid Really Dead? postulates revolutionary change as a solution, undergirded with all of the aforementioned ingredients. While anticipating and articulating a revolutionary socialist vision for post-apartheid South Africa, this book is tempered by a realistic appraisal of the dynamics of the global economy and the legacy of colonial oppression and capitalism in South Africa.

1
A Comprehensive History of the South African Struggle

It has been about a decade since the racist white minority regime of South Africa unbanned major political organizations such as the African National Congress (ANC), the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC), and the South African Communist Party (SACP), and released ANC leader Nelson Mandela and other ANC members from prison. It has been 347 years since the first European intruders landed on South African shores, marking the beginning of one of the longest colonial eras of recent history.¹ South African history, notwithstanding its distinctive colonial past, must be considered within the purview of African history, since regardless of its Westernized outlook, it is still an intrinsic part of Africa.

This chapter will furnish a detailed and comprehensive history of the various trajectories of Black resistance in South Africa in order to shed light on the current wave of changes observed in post-apartheid South Africa, including the watershed events that led to the negotiated settlement and the first post-apartheid national elections of 1994. Such a delineated history needs recounting to further explain the tenacity of colonial occupation and racial capitalism entrenched in modern-day South Africa.

From the perspective of many among the oppressed Black majority, a radical critical social and historical analysis of the South African situation reveals that the South African entity represents a combination of European settler-colonialism and racial capitalism within the context of the Western European subjugation of Africa. Apartheid connotes a socioeconomic system of settler-colonialism where racism is the ruling ideology and monopolistic capitalism is the economic philosophy.² Settler-colonialism signifies a situation in which Europeans initially colonized the indigenous populace through wars of attrition, expropriated the lands of the latter through military conquest, and later decided to settle in the country and establish European-controlled republics. In the South African case, this process transpired following the discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in the Witwatersrand region in 1886. (This colonial process follows similar patterns of European settler-colonialism extant in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand [called Ao Te Roa by the indigenous Maoris], and Palestine.) Apartheid must therefore be perceived in terms of its socioeconomic underpinnings, with race functioning as the visible ideological mechanism for the pursuit of capital accumulation via a system of the exploitation of forced and cheap Black labor. Bernard Magubane, a South African political economist, contends:

While colonialism has an ancient history, the colonialism of the last five centuries is closely associated with the birth and maturation of the capitalist socio-economic system. The pursuit and acquisition of colonies accompanied the mercantile revolution and the founding of capitalism. To study the development of capitalism is thus the best way to study race inequality, for to do so places socio-economic relationships at the heart of the problem, and shows how underdevelopment and racial inequalities developed together.³

Analysis depicting South Africa as a "settler-colonial" republic is not popular in the Western world, and understandably so, because it delegitimates the right of European colonial settlers to rightful occupation of indigenous peoples' lands and challenges the fundamental right of such regimes and populations to determine the destiny of indigenous peoples. Patently, too, this kind of perspective asserts the primary right of self-determination of indigenous peoples based on their own histories, cultures, and experiences. In the South African context, this implies the refusal by indigenous Black people to recognize the occupation of their country as legitimate, though the Western capitalist world demands such acceptance as bona fide and normative nation-state reality.

This view of history warrants some form of explication because it certainly does not accord with the mainstream view of African history, or global history, for that matter, held by both bourgeois and even some left-leaning Eurocentric historians. The question of perspective in most historical narratives of colonized regions such as South Africa is crucial in the discourse on contemporary socioeconomic analysis. Histories of most places in the world, particularly histories of those continents and areas where Europeans invaded and violently conquered the indigenous populations through protracted wars of attrition, forcing the subjugated populations to work for the colonizers, have generally been written by white hands, from the vantage point of the settler-colonialists. The American continent, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand are places that come to mind.⁴

With regard to South Africa, historical discussions have almost without exception viewed the intrusion of Europeans into Southern African shores as a given, as an inevitable course of natural historical evolution. From the vantage point of the indigenous African population, however, the presence and invasion of Southern Africa constituted a brutal fracturing of the independent historical evolution of the region.

The Indigenous African Struggle Against Colonialism and Black Working-Class Resistance to Industrial Capitalism

Early Years

In examining the history of the Black resistance struggle in South Africa, one discovers that it has always been a resilient formation in the South African experience. The earliest indigenous African cultures extant in the southwestern tip of Southern Africa were those of the San (or Abathwa) and the Khoi Khoi. The Abathwa were hunter-gatherers whose history reaches to 60,000 years ago. Their political organization was rudimentary, as W. M. Tsotsi notes.⁵

The Khoi Khoi were pastoral people who depended on cattle and sheep farming for subsistence. They resided on the land from the "Keiskama River to the Cape Point northward along the Atlantic coast past the Olifants River."⁶ Unlike the Abathwa, the Khoi Khoi accumulated cattle and sheep and traded with their neighbors, the Nguni, who lived in the eastern region of Southern Africa, from Delagoa Bay in the North to Algoa Bay in the South. The roots of the Khoi Khoi are most probably in contemporary Botswana, and they are believed to have been present in the region for at least a thousand years prior to the Portuguese invasion in 1488.⁷ They are credited for introducing pottery and sheep farming to the Cape anywhere between 200 and 100 b.C.E. The Khoi Khoi were responsible for initiating Southern Africa's first indigenous resistance movement, repelling the attempted Portuguese intrusion by killing many of the marauders, including their leader Viceroy Francisco D'Almeida, in 1510.⁸ Although the Portuguese were armed with swords, lances, and crossbows and numbered 150 men, the Khoi Khoi were successful in staving off the Portuguese invasion, and after the exchange, sixty-five invaders lay dead.⁹ The myth that Africans in Southern Africa volitionally gave their lands to Europeans is shattered with the recounting of such incidents.

The Sotho were another adjacent indigenous nation that practiced cattle farming and agriculture, occupying the area north of the Orange and Vaal Rivers. They engaged in iron smelting and mined copper and tin at Dithakong in the Western Cape. Iron smelting sites have been found in the Northern Transvaal dating to the third century and in the Eastern Transvaal, traced to the fifth and sixth centuries.¹⁰

These diverse indigenous groups lived in relative propinquity to each other, and though there were cases of serfdom of the Abathwa and the Khoi Khoi, there were frequent intermarriages among the various communities and even mutual linguistic influences.¹¹ The Nguni groups practiced cattle herding and the cultivation of crops like sorghum, calabashes, beans, coco yams, and groundnuts, and the Sotho grew hemp and tobacco, resulting in a thriving trade in the region. This emergence of commercial activity eventually led to a gender division of labor between men and women, with women cultivating crops and men farming with cattle and hunting. Although agriculturalism led to forms of early accumulation by the Nguni, at no time was land isolated for privatized individual use; families had usufruct rights within a system of communal land tenure.

It was this ethos of indigenous African social stability and evolution that European colonizers invaded, establishing a legacy of genocide and systems of exploitation that Africa had never witnessed in its vast, far-reaching history. In 1652, when the Dutch East India Company initially decided to establish a "refreshment" station at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa as a halfway point between Europe and the East Indies, its representatives were allotted the status of "temporary guests" by the indigenous people, in a manner that would similarly apply to the hypothetical situation of Africans attempting to construct a trade mission station in Liverpool, England. On realizing the fertility of the land, the beauty of the landscape, and the vastness of the natural resources, the Dutch (and later the British) decided that they should own South Africa, setting these European groups in conflict with the indigenous Black population. The Black people considered Azania (South Africa) their national homeland since this was the land they had lived on and with for countless generations, the same land where their historical ancestors had been buried for centuries.

The Dutch East India Company represented the first major intruders, led by Jan Van Riebeeck, who referred to the Khoi Khoi as "black stinking dogs" and "dull, stupid and odorous," akin to the way Christopher Columbus disparagingly referred to the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and the Americas when he first encountered them.¹² This nascent anti-Black racism impelled Van Riebeeck to introduce Black slaves from Guinea and Angola into South Africa as early as 1658. The Dutch colonizers attempted to enslave the Khoi Khoi and the Abathwa, but a smallpox epidemic erupted in 1713, which, coupled with the subsequent actions by Dutch military commandos, resulted in the virtual extermination of these indigenous African nations, much as Native peoples in the Americas were almost totally eliminated. The colonials then imported slaves, many of whom were skilled artisans, from Madagascar, East Africa, Delagoa Bay, the Bay of Bengal, Indonesia, and Malaya.

From the time of the earliest European intrusion, the Khoi Khoi resisted, from 1658 to 1677 defending the sovereignty of their land under the courageous leadership of their leader, Gounema. The Khoi Khoi struggled to repossess their traditional grazing grounds in the Liesbeeck Valley, but the Dutch relentlessly encroached on all of the best land. Van Riebeeck contended that "if their (the Khoi Khoi) lands were restored there would not be enough grazing for both nations," referring to the Dutch colonizers.¹³ The Khoi Khoi realized that the European invaders were land greedy, and following decades of fierce military defense, they were physically exhausted as an indigenous nation. Van Riebeeck stolidly declared that the land had been taken from the Khoi Khoi through war and was now the possession of the Dutch, totally rejecting the Khoi Khoi's claim to the land as the first and indigenous inhabitants. This war over land would continue for centuries, well into the twentieth century, as the European colonizers who defeated the indigenous African people forcefully imposed their illegitimate acquisition of the Southern African land on the subjugated Black majority via the apartheid system At the heart of the Black struggle against white domination in South Africa is the struggle to regain the land that was stolen by European invaders.

The Dutch launched a series of wars in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries against the Xhosa-speaking people of the Cape. How ironic it is to describe these colonial wars as "Xhosa Wars" when it was actually the Dutch who declared war on the Africans! The Dutch were committed to eliminating the indigenous people because they viewed them as obstacles to their frenzied obsession with acquiring the land. In 1850 and 1877–1878, Xhosa communities like the Ngqika, Gcaleka, and Thembu, together with Griqua communities in the Cape, launched attacks against the British and the Dutch, which in effect were indigenous wars of resistance for the preservation of African lands and the right to self-governance in the wake of European colonial violence and slavery.¹⁴

These African communities strongly protested against inhumane and repressive anti-proletarian legislation such as the Masters and Servants Act of 1856, and though not successful in getting such colonial laws repealed, they were able to gain some limited reforms that protected servants employed on colonial farms. Saul Solomon was one such working-class resister who campaigned vigorously for the defense of Black workers' rights at a time when the only law governing Africans was that of legalized European colonial terrorism.¹⁵

The Dutch endeavored to force the Xhosa nation off their land at the end of the seventeenth century, particularly in the area on the west bank of the Fish River and all the way to the Gamtoos River, but were unsuccessful. The Xhosa communities resisted, fearlessly protecting their ancestral lands. It is worth noting that the Xhosa nation and the Dutch coexisted as neighbors for fifty years, with only three conflicts, a fact of which apartheid's architects were very much aware.¹⁶

With regard to the Abathwa, they were hospitable to decent and civil passersby but rejected the intrusive presence of the Europeans who were bent on occupying their hunting grounds and water holes, which they viewed as ancestral. The Europeans dispersed th...