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Do South Africans Exist? Addresses a gap in contemporary studies of nationalism and the nation, providing a critical study of South African nationalism against a broader context of African nationalism in general. Narratives of resistance, telling of African peoples oppressed and exploited, presume that ‘the people’ preceded the period of nationalist struggle. This book explores how an African ‘people’ came into being in the first place, particularly in the South African context, as a collectivity organised in pursuit of a political – and not simply cultural – end. The author argues that the nation is a political community whose form is given in relation to the pursuit of democracy and freedom, and that if democratic authority is lodged in 'the people', what matters is the way that this 'people' is defined, delimited and produced. He argues that the nation precedes the state, not because it has always existed, but because it emerges in and through the nationalist struggle for state power. Ultimately, he encourages the reader to re-evaluate knee-jerk judgements about the failure of modernity in Africa.
Acknowledgements
List of Acronyms
Introduction: The Sublime Object of Nationalism
Chapter 1: The Nature of African Nationalism
Chapter 2: The Democratic Origin of Nations
Chapter 3: African Nationalism in South Africa
Chapter 4: The South African Nation
Chapter 5: The Impossibility of the National Community
Chapter 6: The Production of the Public Domain
Chapter 7: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Identity of ‘the People’
Conclusion: Notes Towards a Theory of the Democratic Limit
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

Social Science

Sociologie, société et politique

Cultural studies

Anthropology

Social

Culture

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Publié par	WITS University Press
Date de parution	01 avril 2007
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781776143788
Langue	English

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Do South Africans Exist?
Do South Africans Exist?
NATIONALISM, DEMOCRACY AND THE IDENTITY OF ‘THE PEOPLE’
Ivor Chipkin
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg
South Africa
www.witspress.co.za
Text © Ivor Chipkin, 2007
Cover artwork © William Kentridge, ‘Casspirs Full of Love’,
1988-1989, charcoal and pastel, Collection: Johannesburg Art Gallery Citations © archives and institutes from which sourced, as indicated
First published 2007
ISBN 978-1-86814-445-7 (Paperback)
ISBN 978-1-77614-377-1 (Web PDF)
ISBN 978-1-77614-378-8 (EPUB)
ISBN 978-1-77614-379-5 (Mobi)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express permission, in writing, of both the copyright holder and the publishers.
Cover design and layout by Hybridesign
To Ingrid, Eamonn and Liat
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Acronyms
Introduction: The Sublime Object of Nationalism
Chapter 1: The Nature of African Nationalism
Chapter 2: The Democratic Origin of Nations
Chapter 3: African Nationalism in South Africa
Chapter 4: The South African Nation
Chapter 5: The Impossibility of the National Community
Chapter 6: The Production of the Public Domain
Chapter 7: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Identity of ‘the People’
Conclusion: Notes Towards a Theory of the Democratic Limit
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
This book began its life as a PhD thesis at the Ecole Normale Superieure. Phillipe Gervais-Lambony made my French adventure possible and I want to thank him for his faith and friendship during this time and since then. My gratitude also goes out to Marie-Anne and Isis. I think too of Afifah Barkallah and Justus Njagu.
The text has also benefited from discussions with Debbie Posel and Achille Mbembe and other former colleagues at the Wits Institute for Social Economic Research. Vyjayanthi Rao has been an inspired friend in Johannesburg, Mumbai, New Haven and cyberspace. I am especially grateful to William Beinart and also to St-Antony’s college for the chance to spend some time at Oxford, where several chapters of this book were written. Peter Hudson has always been a generous reader of my work and given me invaluable support and assistance.
I was able to complete this manuscript while working for the Human Sciences Research Council. I am grateful to Adam Habib and my other colleagues in the Democracy and Governance Programme for their collegiality and friendship.
In preparing this book for publication, I was fortunate to have the excellent services of Hilary Wilson as proofreader, Margie Ramsay as indexer and Karen Lilje as book and cover designer. If this book is a little easier to read it is because of the editing and the advice of Alex Potter. Estelle Jobson managed to bring this whole project together. I am very grateful to her.
The publishers and I wish to thank Jeannine Howse of the Johannesburg Art Gallery and Byron Kozakiewiez of Beith Digital for assistance with locating and scanning the cover artwork. We gratefully acknowledge the permission granted by William Kentridge to reproduce his art on the cover of this book. We wish too to acknowledge the following institutions, from whom extracts in their archives or publications have been reproduced and credited accordingly: Grove/Atlantic, New York; Image, Doubleday, Random House, New York; The South African Labour Bulletin, Johannesburg; and Verso, London.
List of Acronyms ACT Area Co-ordinating Team (Manenberg) ANC African National Congress Comintern Communist International Cosatu Congress of South African Trade Unions CPSA Communist Party of South Africa Devcon Department of Community Development Fosatu Federation of South African Trade Unions GWU General Workers’ Union Mawu Metal and Allied Workers’ Union MK Mkhonto we Sizwe NDR national democratic revolution NGO non-governmental organisation Numsa National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa PAC Pan-Africanist Congress RDP Reconstruction and Development Programme SACP South African Communist Party Sactu South African Congress of Trade Unions SALB South African Labour Bulletin Saso South African Students’ Organisation TRC Truth and Reconciliation Commission UDF United Democratic Front
Introduction: The Sublime Object of Nationalism
This book sets out to address a gap in contemporary studies of nationalism and the nation. Despite the extraordinary growth of articles and books about nationalism and nations over the last 20 years, critical studies of African nationalism are not reflected in this literature. This is surprising for two reasons. In the first place, resistance to European colonialism usually happened in the name of nationalism and in pursuit of independent African nation states. In the second place, the pursuit of independent African nation states was not the only form that resistance to colonialism took.
Opposition to French colonialism, in particular, sought not so much the dissolution of empire as its democratisation. Before his conversion to nationalism, Leopold Senghor, the first president of independent Senegal, was a deputy in the French National Assembly. He only reluctantly sought independence for his country (Meredith, 2005). Closer to home, we will find in the figure of Sol Plaatje an ambivalence towards the British Empire. On the one hand, he railed against its injustices; on the other hand, he thought of himself as a loyal subject of the British crown (Willan, 2001).
What this means is that it is necessary to account for the rise of nationalism – and African nationalism in particular – as the pre-eminent form of resistance to colonialism and apartheid. This vision of what freedom from colonialism might look like has itself been a victim of nationalist mythologies, which narrate the story of an African people oppressed and exploited by foreign ones. Here, ‘the people’ are taken as something that preceded the period of nationalist struggle. What this conceals, however, is how an African people came into being in the first place. This book addresses itself to this question in the South African context.
The book will argue that African peoples emerged primarily in and though the process of nationalist resistance to colonialism. Here we must distinguish between the people as datum and the people as political subject. In the first case, the term ‘the people’ refers to an empirical collection of individuals in a given geography; in the second, it refers to a collectivity organised in pursuit of a political end. I am interested in this second sense of the term. The argument here is that the South African people came to be defined and produced in and through the politics and culture of nationalist struggle. Even if there are traces of other notions of what the term ‘the people’ means (clannic, for example), the image of the South African nation looms large in the political imaginary.
This view helps us recover the specificity of the nation, not simply as a cultural artefact, but as a political one. I will say more about this in the course of the book, which will argue that the nation is a political community whose form is given in relation to the pursuit of democracy and freedom. If democratic authority is lodged in ‘the people’, what matters is the way that the concept is defined, delimited and produced. In this sense, the nation precedes the state, not because it has always already existed, but because it emerges in and through the nationalist struggle for state power. The history of the postcolony 1 is, in this sense, the history of ‘the people’ qua production.
From this perspective, we have to re-evaluate knee-jerk judgements about the failure of modernity in Africa. If the mark of modern power – as opposed to tribal, monarchical or dynastic authority – is that it vests sovereignty in ‘the people’ themselves, African nationalism too ‘locates the source of individual identity within a “people”, which is seen to be the bearer of sovereignty, the central object of loyalty, and the basis of collective solidarity’ (Greenfeld, 1992: 3). What matters is: (a) the limit and character of ‘the people’ in whom power is supposed to repose; and (b) the political forms through which ‘the people’ are represented. Simply put, the democratic project firmly places the identity of ‘the people’ on the agenda. We should not be surprised, therefore, to observe that the ongoing democratisation of African states has been accompanied by a renewed preoccupation with authenticity (Geschiere, 2005). Yet, if the democratic project poses the question of ‘the people’, we will see that an answer can take one of two forms. The first is that ‘the people’ constitute a nation; alternatively, that ‘the people’ constitute a democracy.
As a way of prefacing this argument, I want to consider an advertisement that appeared in the Sunday Times , a major South African weekend newspaper, in 2001. In ‘The media vs President T. M. Mbeki’, Ashley Mabogoane, Jabu Mabuza, Pearl Mashabela, Prof. Sam Mokgokong, Kgomotso Moroka, Don Ncube, Ndaba Ntsele, Christine Qunta, Mfundi Vundla, Peter Vundla and Sindiwe Zilwa accused the media of providing a platform for a right-wing plot to subvert South African democracy (Mabogoane et al ., 2001). They caution the president not to ‘be distracted by the current campaign against [him]’, and add that ‘under [Mbeki’s] leadership we have the best government this country has ever had’. Finally, they advise the president to ‘go ahead and govern: govern fairly; govern with compassion but govern decisively’. Let us note the terms of the argument in this advertisement.
On the one hand, a right-wing conspiracy is posited. It is supposedly spearheaded by white, so-called liberals from the apartheid era, certain so-called independent research organisations (it is not cle