Decolonising the Coloured Question – Part 2; Rejecting Reactionary Nationalisms

“In Human Society nothing is natural” (Simone de Beauvoir)

During the Mid-19^th century, there emerged among African –American intellectuals a concept of race as a social construct. This was a significant departure from the received wisdom of European Science at the time which promoted the notion of race as a biological concept.  The central argument developed during this time argued that observable differences between the races are socially and economically constructed rather than natural or innate.

Up to this point and even beyond,  the European notion of race as a biologically determined reality had been used in colonial settings to justify the stratification and division of oppressed people across the globe and which I outline at length in the first part of this essay.

By the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20th, the concept of race as a social construct had gained some academic credence through the work of W.E.B.Du Bois. But it was not until Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish economist; working with a team which included a number of African-Americans undertook a massive study of American race relations in 1944, titled, An American Dilemma. This study, in the words of Myrdal concluded that “modern research has tended to confirm the Negroes view and not the whites.”

This was further expanded upon by Simone de Beauvoir who was working at the time on her own essay on women focused on the theory of intersubjectivity. During her interaction with Richard Wright, an African American novelist, who expounded to her a social constructionist explanation of race and race relations, she realised that it fitted perfectly with her won smaller scale anti-essentialist analysis.

From there she was able to generalise the social construction theory of race into the general concept of the Social Other, which she set out in the Introduction to the Second Sex (1949). She presents this relation as the process by which groups of people are defined and differentiated.

South African`s defined and differentiated.

In South Africa, our own experience of being defined and differentiated to suit a certain naturalist view of the world was not only exemplified in the creation of the “Coloured” other , but was also used more nefariously to mask the social relations of economic exploitation and the provision of cheap labour, as race relations.

The “coloured” community, created out of the remnants that remained after the genocide perpetrated against the Hottentots, Khoi ,San, Koranna, Griqua and other local groups as well as the free slaves who hailed from as far afield as Indonesia, China, Madagascar, and Mozambique.

During this period of genocide driven by the need for cheap abundant labour, the colonial settlers undertook a dastardly campaign to kill or capture as many indigenous labourers as possible.  Various accounts record how expeditions of settlers went out into the interior to hunt and kill Hottentots and Bushmen “like pigs”. One record mentions a Kommandant Nel who bragged that “within the last thirty years he had been on thirty two commandos against Bushmen in which he had captured or killed 3200 Bushmen”.  The Children and women of the slain warriors were to eventually form the nucleus of the “coloured” community.

Having decimated the culture and history of their colonial subjects, and despite the obviously rich diversity of origins and cultures, the Colonial project was determined to stratify and divide this community from the rest of oppressed to aid its project of domination over a divided indigenous population.

Reactionary Nationalisms

Recent attempts by the state and other elite actors to recapture the past by reviving colonial conceptions of traditional leadership within the “coloured” community appear to be attempts at cementing old Colonial notions of naturalism and serves to entrench the masking of social relations as race relations. This ossification of traditional leadership into a never changing throwback to the past is a critical element of colonial subjugation of the colonised.

These attempts at reviving what Neville Alexander called “reactionary nationalisms” are paradoxically exactly what Dr Verwoed ordered.  It is thus a shame, but nonetheless a consequential outcome of a national discourse which is deeply and firmly rooted in colonial notions of naturalism.

Colonial epistemologies and Afrikaner Nationalism and its impacts on our intellectual discourse on the national question has left a deep and indelible mark which permeates through the Afrikaner nationalist movements, the Liberation movements and consequently the post 1994 state.

In order to understand how our contemporary discourse mirrors the very ideology we supposedly fought against, it would be useful to recap the Afrikaner Nationalist ideology.

Neville Alexander summarises Afrikaner Nationalism as follows:

(1)    Nations are divinely ordained, pre-destined categories, ideal forms, the historical context of which is determined in concrete struggles of congeries of peoples;

(2)     nations are communities of culture, defined by a set of values acquired and maintained in historic struggles;

(3)    this culture finds its main deposit in specific languages ….the “badge of nationality”;

(4)    community of “race” is an inherent attribute of a nation so that people of divergent “race” cannot belong to the same nation.

(Motala and Vally)

The Afrikaner Nationalist ideology closely aligns to conceptions bandied about within the public domain around “coloureds, Indians, zulus and other ethnic groups extant today, and yet this summary of a nationalist ideology is far removed from the ‘radical’ conception of nation propounded by Olive Schreiner who opined that ‘there is that common South African condition through which no dividing line can be drawn. .. South African unity is a condition the practical necessity of which is daily and hourly forced upon us by the common needs of life’.

The Bantustan theory of nationality therefore attempted to extend the idea of ‘nation’ enunciated by the Afrikaner intellectuals of the Broederbond ‘to the different language groups and colour-castes amongst the oppressed’ (Motala and Vally)

The irony is of course that prior and subsequent to the Afrikaner Nationalist ascendance to power in South Africa, the essential response of emerging black middle classes and other liberatory movements, from the earliest enunciations of the South African Native National Congress, and later more comprehensive analysis of the Communist Party and its detractors in the Trotskyist movements, all used the same racial categories derived from Colonial impositions.

Thus despite all claims of non-racialism by the liberation movements, the practical reality of their positions was more akin to multi-racialism than the anti-naturalist epistemological tradition of non-racialism in which race as a social construct is deconstructed as opposed to celebrated and entrenched.

This embrace of racial politics as the basis for the South African analysis, while ostensibly the antithesis to the Apartheid conception of separate development has nonetheless incorporated a geographical state which mirrors the Bantustan system and which entrenches tribal and traditional leadership.

 As Dr Aninka Classens recently warned; “We have come full circle: 100 years after the 1913 Land Act denied black land-ownership, the ANC is forcing this "tradition" on rural people. The reasoning seems to be that the 17-million people living in the former homelands are "tribal subjects", not South African citizens. Equal citizenship in a united South Africa and the promise of land reform are potent symbols of our hard-won transition to democracy. But the ANC seems unaware that the Traditional Courts Bill and the Restitution Amendment Bill reinforce colonial and apartheid fault lines – a divided, unequal citizenship with segregated property rights.”

In 2003 Parliament passed the Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework Act (TLGFA). This Act recognised ‘tribes’ created in terms of the Native Administration Act of 1927 as current ‘traditional communities’. It also recognised ‘tribal authorities’ created in terms of the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 as ‘traditional councils’. The sum of the tribal authority boundaries made up the Bantustans under apartheid.

TAB’s use of the TLGFA’s terms ‘traditional community’ and ‘traditional council’ means that TAB adopts many of the categories created under apartheid to define African people. These categories ignore the reality that rural areas are not made up of neat, separate ‘tribes’. Instead, in many places people from different backgrounds live together, but were labelled ‘tribes’ under apartheid.

Non-Racialism

Thus it can be argued in line with Alexander`s analysis, that far from driving a non-racial project in South Africa, the state, in similar fashion to previous colonial rulers have committed to use imposed racial identities to maintain hegemony over the population in order to mask the social relations which is based on the exploitation of the many by the few.

This is why the incident at Klipspruit, whose genesis revolves around a community who feels disenfranchised and oppressed, could be masked and embroiled in a question of race, rather than focusing on its true condition of exclusion and exploitation. It is also why Julius Malema could make broad sweeping statements about “Indians” while ignoring the structural imperative of capitalism which drives exploitative practices and behaviours, no matter the colour of the owner of capital.

If the state, rather than basing its ideology on multi-racialism, the recognition of many races, were instead to base its praxis on South Africa`s constitutional commitment to non-racialism, which implies the rejection of the ideology of ‘race’ itself, the implication would be to reject those actions and practices which are reliant on such definitions based on race.

Carrying Alexanders argument further, we can say as he did, that in effect , unless the use of ‘non-racial’ is attached to the struggle against all forms of racism, that is, that its content is ‘anti-racist’ and seeks to eradicate the material conditions under which racist forms of power are developed in capitalism, all talk of ‘non-racialism’ would remain vacuous. Making the distinction between ‘non racialists’ who are in reality no more than multi-racialists and those who are steadfastly ‘anti-racists, remains the critical defining factor’. (Motala and Vally)

In conclusion then, if it is accepted that race is not a naturally fixed biological fact, but instead is constructed  through human agencies and power relations and is maintained in order to mask the true determinants of inequality in society, then our task is not entrench racial political communities, who then become easy scapegoats, but instead our imperative must be to deconstruct colonial constructions of race in order to move beyond these limitations imposed by our historical and contemporary oppressors to address the real drivers of inequality and poverty.