Our African identity is complex and unique
Increasingly — and alarmingly — many people have a very narrow perception of who or what is African in SA. They base this on one type of pigmentation, ethnicity of forebears or level of suffering.
This leads to the misguided phenomenon that some people are perceived as not African or black enough. For many South
Africans this leads to unnecessary trauma, with people questioning their sense of identity and belonging.
We need deeper debate on what constitutes a postapartheid African and South African identity at the individual, communal and national level.
Africanness in the South African context cannot take only one form. It cannot but be layered and interwoven, because of the country’s unique history.
It can never, by any stretch of the imagination, be the same as, say, an African identity in Nigeria, Zimbabwe or Ghana.
SA was not colonised in the way many other African countries were. It was colonised under what became known in mainstream history as part of the “New World” in the 1600s, by European powers, in a similar way to countries like Brazil.
Colonisation of the New World type is different to that experienced by most other African countries. In the New World type of colonialism, indigenous people inhabited the countries prior to colonialism, but colonialism brought settlers from the colonial countries. In many cases it also brought subjected peoples from others parts of the world, as slaves or subjects.
These societies over time became ethnically, culturally and pigmentationally mixed. Even the indigenous communities who were present before colonialism were often mixed at one level or the other.
An African identity in the South African context is therefore more diverse than in most other African countries — and that is the overwhelming character and strength of Africanness in the South African context. It is the basis of the country’s national identity, its mirror to itself and its face to the world.
On the face of it, in many cases distinctly different communities remained at the end of apartheid and colonialism, in spite of centuries of intermixture.
However, South African identities are not “gated communities” with fixed borders; they overlap meaningfully, beyond the occasional shared word or value. Our modern South
Africanness, therefore, cannot but be a layered, plural and inclusive one, based on acceptance of our interconnected differences.
Building commonality on the basis of difference presents a unique challenge.
In SA’s colonial and apartheid history, white skins were bestowed with more social, political and economic power. Power was further dispersed based on skin pigmentation.
Building a common African identity is challenging because colonial, slave and apartheid colour-based power often remains ingrained in social, political and economic spheres.
Therefore, building a shared South African common identity must involve economic redress, tackling racism and a rebalancing of apartheid-inherited power relations.
However, this does not mean a national identity based on a single shared culture, language or ethnicity. As Nelson Mandela stated from the dock in 1962, it also should not be defined solely in relation to one majority community.
In times of crisis — whether due to economic collapse, corruption or state failure — citizens of countries with diverse roots, such as South Africans, fall back on the historical selfidentities, groups and divisions of the past.
This makes the forging of a shared new identity much harder, yet so much more urgent.
South Africans will have to transform their individual selfidentity away from narrow white, black African, coloured or Indian to a more inclusive South Africanness.
Being born into a particular “community” should be only one aspect of Africanness or South Africanness. An African and South African identity would be adding parts of all communities to those one was born into, discarding aspects that impinge on the human rights of others.
Building commonality on the basis of difference presents a particular challenge