Ivor Chipkin - Do South Africans Exist?: Nationalism, Democracy and the Identity of ‘the People’

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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

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-Antonys 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 is, in this sense, the history of the people

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