Provinces: Brave new future or a sop to the past?
Afew weeks ago, over Easter on the sidelines of a family ritual in Kwazakhele in Nelson Mandela Bay, I enjoyed a characteristically “philosophical” if not “esoteric” debate with family members and neighbours.
In between the goat meat, samp dishes and the recurrent arrival of gin and brandy for those so inclined, the discussions gravitated to political and historical questions. One incisive contribution, from a middle-aged fellow who self-identified with the Azanian People’s Organisation (Azapo), raised the necessary but “historical” debate about the role of provinces and the broader subnational configuration of the institutional architecture of our beloved land.
The final salvo in the discussion was his view of the “nine provinces” as an ethno-historical feature of continuity between the colonial, apartheid and democratic states. This part of Gqeberha is historically “Azapo territory”, as my uncles often tell me, unsurprisingly echoing the view contained in both the Azapo and EFF manifesto for a removal of provinces.
He had seemed to imply that “provinces” were a key part of the tripartite alliance’s vision for (shared with the National Party and Inkatha) a new South Africa. The discussion subsequently centred not only on explaining why this was not true, but rather that “nine provinces” emerged as a hotly debated compromise during the transition.
I was reminded of that exchange last week, at the pre-launch of the Mz’ontsundu Book Festival in Sophiatown. The festival, an initiative spearheaded by Gauteng government communicator Castro Ngobese, was an opportunity to discuss the intellectual contribution of Jabulani Nobleman “Mzala” Nxumalo, an ANC, SACP and MK activist and ideologue who died in 1991 at the age of 35.
In a wide-ranging panel discussing the recently published book Mzala Nxumalo, Leftist Thought and Contemporary SA edited by Robert J Balfour, the discussion on his intellectual contribution focused on the seemingly intractable challenge of the role within the struggle over social and economic development of the subnational spheres of government, in the context of “nationformation”.
Many South Africans, including Govan Mbeki and Mzala, correctly identified the lack of an economic rationale for the provinces. The focus was on reproduction of the ethno-national roots of our provincial boundaries. These roots emerge from two historical moments, 50 years apart, with enduring consequences.
The first, being the South Africa Act of 1909, and the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act passed in 1959 which recast what had been “an urbanising” African oppressed class into “eight national units”. A clumsy but intentional anthropological fudge that made “nations” synonymous with “languages”.
These two pieces of legislation had the effect of triggering the formation of organisations such as the ANC in 1912, and undoing the “political unity” among Africans. This unity remained a key matter of concern of Mzala, both among the oppressed African, Indian and coloured groups, and white democrats and the different ideological currents within the broader liberation movement.
Mzala argued that the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), himself a product of that movement, had to be located, even from a Marxist perspective, within a “concrete historico-economic study of the national movement of the oppressed in South Africa”.
For him “nationalisms of the oppressed” was a “reflection of our concrete material conditions in the colour-defined position we occupy in relation to the wealth of the country, the political institutions of administration, education, and so on”.
One feature involved the functional deployment and even the “creation” of new traditional forms of authority to extend the colour-defined fantasies of apartheid.
Ethno-national territoriality
Nxumalo understood that “boundary-setting” would lead the struggle for a nonracial, nonsexist society overseen by a unitary state down a blind alley. It is precisely because of the “macro-fiscal” and “development” implications of ethno-national demarcation that the acceptance of existing territorial boundaries has been seen as immutable.
Economic and spatial organisation as a feature of political and class rule
These accepted demarcations presented problems from the start of the post-apartheid administration. Reporting on the first few months of the implementation of the reconstruction and development programme in a provincial report to the December 1994 conference of the ANC, the then Eastern Cape premier Raymond Mhlaba lamented that “the boundaries issue has also created tensions, particularly in the area bordering KwaZulu-Natal”, and also the issues of homeland debt and reorganisation of numerous public administrations. The Eastern Transvaal (now Mpumalanga) report highlighted the challenges of “the unclear vision of the exact delimitation between government (sic) and provincial functions”.
While significant and often understated progress has been made in the “unification” of these administrations, problems remain. In a context where provinces receive more than two-fifths of the non-interest allocation of nationally raised revenue, their role remains for some, an open question.
At the panel discussion, Phindile Kunene of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung suggested that the reemergence of “federalist impulses” is not unrelated to the spatially uneven distribution of economic activity, and by extension the ability of local authorities to underwrite their operations.
This also extends to the uneven ability to finance infrastructure capital projects across the over 250 municipal authorities and 44 districts and eight metros.
SACP spokesperson, and one of the chapter contributors, Alex Mashilo, challenged the audience to accept that “there can be no decolonisation without removing the colonially imposed mode of production: capitalism”.
Capitalism complicates the task of creating “one nation”, or overcoming the inequality between races. Mashilo was suggesting that it reproduces the “ethno-national utility” of tribalism in our politics, or even parasitic corruption and wastage. So too does the particular form that capitalism has taken on in South Africa create, as Dr Rasigan Maharajh from the Institute for Economic Research on Innovation at the Tshwane University of Technology suggested, the conditions for exploitation and “imperfect competition” in a manner that makes entry by non-capitalist forms of economic organisation (“co-operatives, small firms and so on”) difficult if not seemingly impossible. All these are related parts to, as Mzala’s work challenges us to recognise, the “national” and economic features of colonial and apartheid political and class rule. Many are still with us.
Many South Africans, including Govan Mbeki and Mzala, correctly identified the lack of an economic rationale for the provinces
Culture and the role of the artist in a colonial capitalist society
Yet it is not just in the economic and spatial reorganisation of life that the mindless pursuit of profit “overdetermines”, as Maharajh emphasised, but its “totalising” effect on all areas of life. One such area, as Mzala’s work shows, is the terrain of the cultural struggle and the role of cultural workers.
In doing so, he was challenging his comrades then, and us now, to view culture, much like the task of nation-formation and post-apartheid statecraft, as the reversal of the tyranny of the market and individualism. The festival and the panel reaffirmed not only the growing marginality of left-leaning ideas and struggles in the societal contests under way, but more importantly, our immeasurable agency in our thoughts, words, songs and actions, to change that.
The Mzontsundu Book Festival runs from May 45 in Sophiatown, Johannesburg.