Who is African, and who gets to decide that?
The ANC’s retreat into identity politics risks South Africa’s future, writes Ivor Chipkin
SOMETHING more fundamental is going on in South Africa than a spasm of xenophobic violence. To the extent that it suggests some kind of irrational outburst, the term itself, xenophobia, obscures more than it reveals.
The figure of the “foreigner” is a political term, not simply a description of those without South African citizenship. It is a way of defining a “we” or “us” against an outside “them”. What is shocking about the recent violence is not simply that foreigners were attacked and killed. It is also shocking for “we” South Africans in whose name they were killed.
A highly racialised conception of the nation is at work, one with growing ethnic, chauvinist tendencies.
In 2007, I wrote a book called Do South Africans Exist? The title was sometimes criticised as being unnecessarily provocative. In fact, the title was meant seriously. The book explored the different ways that the unity of the nation was conceived, especially from within the antiapartheid movement.
It discussed several tendencies, including a civic tradition that sought to found the unity of the people on the basis of progressive and democratic values. South Africans were those people who treated each other as equals and worked towards social justice. It was a far cry from the nationalism of the past, which founded the state on the basis of race and ethnicity.
During the presidency of Thabo Mbeki, this conception of the people began to weaken and a more conventional, Europeanstyle nationalism surfaced. It was associated with subtle shifts in the discourse of the ANC.
At least since the historic Morogoro conference in 1969, the position of the ANC was that the anti-apartheid struggle was a nationalist struggle. It said then: “The main content of the present stage of the South African revolution is the national liberation of the largest and most oppressed group — the African people.”
For the 1969 text, this was a strategic consideration, tempered by the fact that if Africans could deliver political freedom, it was the increasingly organised working class that would deliver economic freedom. The relationship between these “phases” of the National Democratic Revolution have defined the terms of political struggle within the ANC and the alliance ever since.
In 1985, in Kabwe, there were signs of a shift. For all its analysis of the South African “social formation” as capitalist and its identification of the “ruling class” as made up of white, monopoly capitalists, there was no mention of the working class as a protagonist of change. Instead, the document simply repeated the clause from the 1969 resolution that Africans were to lead the revolution.
It was a very loud omission, both in terms of the earlier formulation and in terms of the international “left”. There is another key omission that I will come back to shortly.
The Kabwe document proved hopelessly controversial and in the end was not adopted. It signalled growing confusion about the relationship between “workers” and “Africans” in the struggle. In 1985, the working class was simply subsumed under the term “African”.
By 1997, Africans are described as the “main motive forces” while the working class is said to be at the “head” of the struggle for freedom.
For the first time, the black bourgeoisie and middle classes are described as motive forces of change. So, too, are “student and professional organisations, structures of the religious community, the youth, women, traditional leaders, business associations, structures in rural areas, civic associations and others”.
What was happening here? There was growing recognition that “Africans” were themselves divided on the basis of class and gender and “social strata”. This is a far cry from the 1985 document, which admits no such complexity, even omitting to discuss the implications for the ANC of the growing number of Africans working for bantustan administrations. What about the black policemen and women in the apartheid-era South African Police and in bantustan police forces, in the army and in the various civil services? There is nothing about chiefs and traditional authorities. The 1997 document hints at these complexities, but does not engage them. Nor do subsequent ANC documents, although they insist that the role of the ANC is to liberate “Blacks in general and Africans in particular”. Who, however, is an African? Mbeki, let us recall, defended his notorious HIV/Aids policies in the name of being an African. He stood for African authenticity in the face of an alleged conspiracy of international pharmaceutical companies, Western governments and local black SIGNS OF THE TIMES: Children from Ulandi Daycare in Meadowlands, Soweto, hold posters at a 'United Against Xenophobia' briefing at the ANC’s Luthuli House in Johannesburg
On the streets, SA’s borders are being redrawn. The foreigner is also potentially me and you
stooges. African writers and journalists who did not sanction his politics were regularly denounced as counter-revolutionary and lacking patriotism. They were not, in other words, authentically African.
The politics of identity has plagued our country ever since. It has now taken another disturbing turn. As the ANC loses electoral support across South Africa, it has turned to chiefs to shore up its rural political base. The strategy seems to have worked in KwaZulu-Natal. This Faustian pact has given kings and chiefs a prominent role in public life. They are increasingly able to influence the discussion about who belongs where.
One of the most disturbing developments of these past weeks has been the surge of ethnic attacks. In one case, socalled Zulu protagonists in Durban lamented having to share their country with foreigners, including Vendas, Shangaans, Sothos and Tswanas. In Emalahleni, an informal settlement near Nancefield Hostel in Soweto, a woman was attacked for being Venda.
The figure of the foreigner in this violence is not simply that of the illegal immigrant from beyond our borders. On the streets, South Africa’s borders are being redrawn. The foreigner is also potentially me and you, depending on what standard of African authenticity is at work in the here and now.
What is urgently needed is to confront this politics of authenticity in the name of nonracialism. The future is at risk if we do not.
Chipkin is executive director of the Public Affairs Research Institute in Johannesburg