South African Colonial Modernity
Societies like South Africa with a long history of settler colonialism have endured the long-lasting effect of racism and ethnicism which are ghosts that continue to haunt contemporary society. Opinion makers and those in the levers of political power grapple to deal with it. The question then is: why? This book attempts to lay out pertinent theoretical, political and ideological questions. It takes a historical tour and analyses how the South African social formation was configured and how it continues to do so. It unashamedly, and with courage and conviction, argues that colonial conquest and the colonial idea of artificial difference has much to do with what we are witnessing today. South African colonial modernity is not an isolated instance. Since 1488, it has been a part of a world historical process and a world system whose base has been capitalism, and whose axis has been race and racism. South African modernity, as elsewhere, has been a monster that has terrorised indigenous inhabitants; and has, in its totality over the past five hundred years, seen internal and inherent mutations, fissures and fractures in the process creating subjectivities and identities that are racialised and ethnicised.
The myth accompanying colonial occupation has been the civilisation of the non-Western world whereby Western civilisation was seen as a generous gift and contribution to humankind (Fanon 1964). This implied a number of assertions: that civilisation diffuses from Europe and Europe brings civilisation to the whole world; that European civilisation is superior; that Europeans are the makers of history; and that Europe is the source and centre and the rest is the periphery (Blaut 1993). The epistemological orientation of European modernity sees other people as sub-human, less intelligent and less cultured (ibid.). In this milieu, Africa is constructed as dark devoid of light, savage, barbaric and cruel. The truth of the matter, however, is that the so-called European civilisation is a recent project: African and Asian civilisations have been in existence for thousands of years. Africa gave birth to the sciences, the letters, and the arts. For this reason, Europeans cannot claim superiority over other people because prior to colonial modernity they were ânot more advanced, not more modern, and not more progressiveâ (Blaut 1993: 51). Moreover the rise of Europe after 1492 was the result not of superior intellect but of the destruction of societies in Africa, Asia, the Americas and a policy of plunder, conquest and colonial exploitation (ibid.).
In 1488 Bartholomew Diaz circumnavigated the Cape in a failed attempt to reach India, a feat finally achieved by Vasco da Gama ten years later. Diazâs achievements were crucial in opening the southern part of Africa and later to colonisation and incorporation of South Africa into the nascent world capitalist system. By the time Jan Van Riebeeck arrived in 1652 the pathway had already been opened. Van Riebeeck and his squad were children and products of colonial modernity that carried with them its imperial and racist baggage. Their white supremacist ideas and values were framed prior to their arrival on the shores of South Africa. Thus anti-black racism did not develop with the inception of a new mode of production, but was consolidated with settler colonialism. Within twenty years of Van Riebeeckâs arrival, the Dutch settlers considered themselves owners of the land they dispossessed from the Khoi , land they claimed was acquired through military victory. Similarly, the British settlers who later arrived in the Cape colony were given generous portions of land. This was in addition to encroachment on pastures and territories and the extermination of indigenous peoples through diseases like smallpox, typhoid, measles, common cold, drought and cattle disease. Similarly, elsewhere in the Americas Christopher Columbus exchanged germs and genes which had a devastating impact on indigenous populations who had no immunity to them (Gunder Frank 1998). British arrival on the Cape in 1795 and their supposedly conflict with Dutch settlers portended a fateful future for indigenous people of South Africa. The arrival of both of these groups, progenitors of Western modernity, resulted in war, conquest, genocide, slave labour, dispossession, rape and alienation. In fact, British readiness for genocide is seen in its amassing of 6500 armed troops at the Cape in 1810 and the experience of men such as George Grey and John Cradock, who had previously prosecuted genocide against indigenous people in the Australasian territories. Indeed, the British lived true to their word and conviction. During the wars of 1835 and 1846 they carried âscotched earthâ policies on the Xhosa. The Grahamstown Journal of 10 April 1847 declared:
Let war be made against the kaffir huts and gardens. Let all these be burnt down and destroyed. Let there be no ploughing, sowing or reaping. Or, if you cannot conveniently, or without bloodshed prevent the cultivation of the ground, take care to destroy the enemyâs crops before they are ripe, and shoot all who resist. Shoot their cattle too wherever you see any. Tell them the time has come for the white man to show his mastery over them. (cited in Magubane 1986: 12)
All of these features are central to colonial modernity, whose primary raison dâĂȘtre is elimination. The initial phases of conquest saw colonial occupiers establishing domination, affirming their superiority resulting in the defeated groups suffering dehumanization (Fanon 1964). The polydimensional aspect of occupation: exploitation, raids, tortures, racism, collective liquidation and national oppression take turns thereby objectifying the colonised that is âbroken down in the very depth of his subsistenceâ (ibid.: 35). Colonialism, according to Fanon , cannot be understood without the possibility of torture, violation and massacre and âtorture is an expression and a means of occupant-occupied relationshipâ (Fanon 1964: 66).
White Settlerism
For Magubane (1979: 3), white settlers are a creation of the world capitalist economic system from the seventeenth century who âwould safeguard colonial conquest and secure these countries as future outlets for excess population and for investment of capital from the metropolitan country.â Further still, âput simply, the settlers came to South Africa as robbers and enslavers and they stayed as colonisers. The country belongs to the African people, both as hereditary right and through life-and-death labours extracted from them to build everything that the settlers claim as their ownâ (Magubane 1979: 4). In another way, colonies provided a safety valve where problems in the metropolitan were exported and although some settlers arrived as indentured labour, social misfits and social outcasts, it was the darker peoples who became truly exploited and exterminated (ibid.). By definition, settler colonialism and the term settler implies the dispossession of indigenous peoples to facilitate the settlement of people of European origin. Settler colonialism, which conditions economic, political and cultural processes of indigenous peoples in which power and coercion are central, naturalises those processes. Fundamental to the notion of settler colonialism is the logic of elimination, extermination and genocide. Constitutive of these approaches are practice such as murder, rape, plunder, enslavement, racialised labour, theft, dispossession, deceit, trickery, chivalry â the list and adjectives are endless. Settler colonialism is established within the confines of white supremacy in which race and rabid racism are underlying factors. Humans and human relations are organised on the idea of superficial differences , taxonomies and racial ordering. To facilitate these processes, some humans have to be construed as lesser humans or sub-human â akin to animal level. The justification is eminently religious, epistemological and scientific. The legal demarcation of civilised/uncivilised prompted disciplines like anthropology where characteristics of the uncivilised were elaborated (Anghie 1999). The rationalisation of white supremacy played on innate differences , gradation and racial hierarchy of superior and inferior races (Magubane 2007). This goes hand in hand with extermination and assignment of the status uncivilised, animal, bestial, barbaric and savage. In the Americas, the general question was whether indigenous peoples could be civilised, converted to Christian belief and follow precepts of law or were barbarians who acted against Godâs law and therefore deserved to be enslaved was a poser (Morgensen 2011). The latter solution was arrived at anyway. Although indigenous people could be accorded provisional humanity. it could not stop the settlers from applying the logic of elimination regardless of whether or not indigenous people conformed to settler norms (ibid.). Central to white Settlerism and white settlers claim to ownership of land is the myth of empty lands and that all other areas were blank interiors devoid of occupation. Thus,...