The Contested Idea of South Africa

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Busani Ngcaweni, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Busani Ngcaweni

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000476934
• Edition: 1

This book reflects on the complex and contested idea of South Africa, drawing on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives.

Ever since the delineation of South Africa as a country, the many diverse groups of people contained within its borders have struggled to translate a mere geographical description into the identity of a people. Today the new struggles 'for South Africa' and 'to become South African' are inextricably intertwined with complex challenges of transformation, xenophobia, claims of reverse racism, social justice, economic justice, service delivery, and the resurgent decolonization struggles reverberating inside the universities. This book covers the genealogy of the idea of South Africa, exploring how the country has been conceived of by a broad group of actors, including the British, Afrikaners, diverse African nationalist traditions, and new formations such as the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), Black First Land First (BLF), and student formations (Rhodes Must Fall & Fees Must Fall). Over the course of the book, a broad range of themes are covered, including identity formation, modernity, race, ethnicity, indigeneity, autochthony, land, gender, intellectual traditions, poetics of South Africanness, language, popular culture, truth and reconciliation, and national development planning.

Concluding with important reflections on how a colonial imaginary can be changed into a free and inclusive postcolonial nation-state, this book will be an important read for Africanist researchers from across the humanities and social sciences.

Part 1

Major debates on the contested idea of South Africa

DOI: 10.4324/9780429340857-1

1 Introduction

Why is the idea of South Africa contested?

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Busani Ngcaweni

DOI: 10.4324/9780429340857-2

Introduction

The idea of South Africa concerns related questions of the precolonial heritage, the rise as well as construction and reconstructions of South African modernity. At the centre of the contestations and complex politics of nation-formation, nation-building and state-making are equally complex and overlapping histories which are the precolonial, colonial, anti-colonial and post-Apartheid interludes. The complexity is compounded by struggles for liberation, daunting questions of citizenship, identity, land, gender, the constitution and ideology, as well as the materialization of freedoms, individual rights, entitlements and social justice issues. As we witnessed in the July 2021 riots accompanied by devastating looting and the killing of more than 300 people in the provinces of Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, persistence poverty and inequality has a major influence in the manifestation and consequences of contestations around the idea of being and becoming South Africa. As some chapters in this book argue, those who exit in the margins of society feel excluded not only from national wealth but the very idea of belonging. Hence the lingering question: whose South Africa is this; it belongs to the rich (because the rich have unparalleled privileges including using money to evade the law); and sometimes others say, it belongs to the criminals (when citizens complain about ‘too much’ rights being given to criminals) and even foreign nations (when there is a feeling that foreign nationals are being protected). Above political rhetoric, the jargon that has permeated South Africa’s political discourse, such as reference to White Monopoly Capital as pursued by the Radial Economic Transformation movement, are largely about the contestation of the concentration of wealth among the minority (both black and white) whilst the overwhelming majority of the citizens are poor, unemployed or subsist in precarious conditions as the middle class with high levels of debt.

Since 2015, the #RhodesMustFall (RMF) and #FeesMustFall movements have added the equally complex issue of cognitive justice and epistemic freedom, with universities being the key sites of struggle – continuing on contested ideological manifestations and contests of the 1970s (black consciousness), the 1960s (the South African Republic and the adoption of the armed struggle), 1950s (adoption of the Freedom Charter and breakaway of the Pan Africanist Congress from the African National Congress), 1940s (legalization of apartheid and formation of the ANC Youth League), 1930s (the Africans Claim), 1920s (formation of the Communist Party of South Africa and extension of racial segregation laws), 1910s (formation of the Union of South Africa, formation of the ANC and passing of the 1913 land act), among others.

The idea of South Africa preoccupied such minds as that of early white liberals like Olive Cronwright Schreiner as far back as 1923 when she posited that:

the people of South Africa resemble the constituents of a plum-pudding when in the process of being mixed; the plums; the peel; the currents; the flour; the eggs; and the water are mingled together. Here plums may dominate, there the peel; one part may be slightly thinner than another, but it is useless to try and resort them; they have permeated each other’s substance; it would be dividing a complex but homogenous substance into parts which would repeat its complexity.

(Schreiner, 1923: 60–61)

She went further to pose pertinent questions:

What then shall be said of the South African problem as a whole? Is it impossible for South African peoples to attain to any form of unity, organization and national life? Must we forever remain a vast, inchoate, invertebrate mass of humans, divided horizontally into layers of race, mutually antagonistic, and vertically severed by lines of political state division, which cut up our races without simplifying our problems, and which add to the bitterness of race conflict irritation of political divisions? Is national life and organization unattainable by us?

(Schreiner, 1923: 61)

This was one of the earliest attempts at understanding the challenges of making of a people called South Africans. In 1941, G. H. Calpin published a book entitled There are No South Africans and posited that ‘The worst of South Africa is that you never come across a South African’ (Calpin, 1941: 9). At the base of the making of South Africa has been the challenge of how to translate a figurative expression describing the southern tip of the African continent into an identity of a people.

If one flashes analysis back to the precolonial times, the complexity is accentuated because the forebears of the present black South Africans were also actively involved in the processes of enlargement of scale of their polities, nation-making and state-building initiatives. Such nation-builders as Shaka of the Zulu, Moshweshwe of the Sotho, Mzilikazi of the Ndebele and many others contributed to the identity of modern South Africans (Etherington, 2001).

So, at play were not only the imperial and colonial initiatives predicated on frontiers of conquest by the Dutch and the English which culminated on such identitarian projects as Anglicization and Afrikanerization. Colonial conquests and colonial administrations always provoked resistance and contestations from the black indigenous people. The epic Xhosa (Eastern Frontier) wars of resistance lasted over a hundred years whereas the Zulu resistance delivered the defeat of the British at the Battle of Isandlanwa in 1879 and remerged in 1906 with the Bhambatha Rebellion against the tax imposition by colonial administrators of Natal. These were not the only forms of resistance and contestation against imperialism, colonialism and apartheid – between the natives and the settlers.

The Afrikaners and the English also fought over resources, especially minerals as well as over power right up to the time of the Act of Union of 1910. Known as the two Anglo-Boer Wars over the control of the colonies of Natal, the Cape, Transvaal and Orange Free State, the democratic government after 1994 named these the South Africa Wars. This was in part meant to recognize that they were not just engaged in a white (Afrikaner) on white (English) war but over the control of the state power and resources across the colonies. In fact, the natives did participate and suffered a great deal from these wars although only later formally recognised as such in history books. In fact they were major losers of these wars as racial discrimination and land dispossession intensified as the new Union was indeed a white Union. Bongani Nqgulunga in chapter three of this book debates this further.

Arguably, the Wealth of Nations and the Communist Manifesto might have foretold these conflicts for they both mentioned the significance of the colonization of the land in the southern tip of Africa (or the Cape) in the evolution of colonialism and capitalism (Ngcaweni, 2014).

The coming together of the Afrikaners and the British in 1910 to construct modern South Africa as a ‘whitestan’, which excluded black African people from power provoked unity among black African people. The modern anti-colonial and anti-apartheid nationalist struggles became embodied by the formation of the African Native National Congress (ANNC, later renamed the African National Congress) in 1912. This was followed by the establishment of other congresses such as the Indian Congress and Coloured Congress. The most important document that emerged from the congress movements was the Freedom Charter of 1955 which emphasized an inclusive non-racial post-apartheid nation (see Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013).

While the Freedom Charter attempted to define the imagined postcolonial/post-apartheid South Africa as a non-racial formation, it provoked radical nationalists like Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe who had already imbibed the Africanist and pan-Africanist ideas of decolonisation being about liberation of conquered black African people and establishment of black African-ruled republics to break from the African National Congress (ANC) to form the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) of Azania. Earlier in 1934, Moses Konate of the Community Party of South Africa wrote what came to be known as the Cradock Letter in which he called for the ‘Africanisation of the Communist Party’, in part recognizing the significance of the natives playing a leading role in the leadership of the liberation movement, driven by their direct experience of oppression and their proximity to local communities.

In short, the period of the anti-colonial struggles exhibited its own complex ideological contestations as well as divergent imaginaries of freedom and liberation. One can distil culturalist-ethnic nationalism, Black Consciousness nationalism, pan-Africanist nationalism, leftist-Marxist-class-oriented nationalisms and liberal-bourgeois-oriented nationalisms. These ideological divergences reflected the complexity of the idea of South Africa as well as the difficulties of its resolutions. How to turn what to some appeared as a mere geographical expression (South Africa) into a stable name of a people who are freed from racism, colonialism, sexism and patriarchy had never been easy. The colonialists and apartheid ideologues had chosen the most simplistic and problematic solution of ‘separate development’ predicated on fragmentation of people into races and tribes (Bantustans). This was a tragic imagination which provoked all sorts of conflicts. Also, the Freedom Charter prescription of ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it’ without resolution of economic justice issues has plunged the country into new layers of contestations and conflicts over land for instance, which has remained in the hands of those who benefitted from apartheid colonialism.

Thus, the end of administrative apartheid provoked further imaginations of the nation with Desmond Tutu coining the idea of a ‘rainbow nation’ and Thabo Mbeki pushing the idea of ‘African Renaissance’ and its emphasis on an emergent and inclusive African identity born out of complex historical experiences. It is, therefore, not surprising that scholars like Ivor Chipkin would produce such books as Do South Africans Exist in 2007 which returned to the pertinent question of the construction of South Africa identity linked to the the equally complex issue of democracy (Chipkin, 2007).

The present book is also returning to the fundamental question of how South Africa has been conceived and imagined while at the same time engaging rigorously with various imaginations of the nation across time and space within the context of what Saul Dubow (2006; 2007) terms ‘the struggle for South Africa’ and ‘a struggle to become South African’. In the intra-party discourse of the ruling party, the contest between ideological tendencies is often referred to as ‘the battle for the soul of the ANC’ (see Gumede, 2007) while in fact the horizon of this struggle is hegemony over the political and economic institutions of the country.

Today, the new struggles ‘for South Africa’ and ‘to become South African’ are inextricably intertwined with complex challenges of transformation, xenophobia, claims of reverse racism, social justice, economic justice, service delivery and the resurgent decolonisation struggles reverberating inside the universities. The RMF Movements underscores the shift from the idea of South Africa that cascaded from colonial/imperial/apartheid thinking to the new ‘South African idea’ as defined by the descendants of those who were victims of enslavement, colonialism and apartheid.

More recently, these contestation have taken another dynamic particularly as fractures in the ruling African National Congress continue to negatively impact on society. They impact in various ways including:

• Factionalism – this spills over to society to a way of creating violent conflict in communities and institutions. In provinces like KwaZulu-Natal, murder of political ...