Ebrahim Harvey - The Great Pretenders: Race and Class under ANC Rule

Praise for The Great Pretenders

The Great Pretenders is a timely and critical intervention in current public discussions on race and racism. Pertinently, it brings into sharp relief important historical continuities in the ANCs problematic politics on these questions. This book by public intellectual, Ebrahim Harvey, will certainly provoke much debate on the crucial nexus of race and class, as well as on the state of contemporary South Africa.

N OOR N IEFTAGODIEN, SA R ESEARCH C HAIR ( SARC H): L OCAL H ISTORIES, P RESENT R EALITIES AND H EAD OF H ISTORY W ORKSHOP, U NIVERSITY OF THE W ITWATERSRAND

Ebrahim Harvey provides a stinging critique of the failings of the ANC and its animating nationalist philosophy from the time of its founding to the present day. His chief concern is its failure to rise to the historical challenge posed by South Africas system of racial capitalism. Harvey insists that race and racism constitute a central theme of that history. But he is equally insistent that race and racism are not free-floating facts of life: they are functionally embedded in the way economy and society are organised at a material level, and they will not be uprooted by changing hearts and minds alone. He brings much sophisticated theoretical and historical analysis to bear in support of his argument. This is a study that is fierce, passionate and provocative. It provides a challenge to liberationist rhetoric that serves to disguise the class interests that still hold the state in thrall. Harvey does not pull his punches and is unforgiving in his judgements. The book is a cri de coeur for radical root-and-branch thinking about where South Africa finds itself and where we are heading a quarter century after democracy.

T IMOTHY K EEGAN, AUTHOR OF C OLONIAL S OUTH A FRICA AND THE M AKING OF THE R ACIAL O RDER

Veteran political analyst Ebrahim Harvey has written a provocative and partisan book. It is full of uncomfortable insights on race and racism. It raises tough questions that need to be urgently addressed if we are to create the shared society that we proclaim. An essential read on a neglected perspective.

E DWARD W EBSTER, P ROFESSOR E MERITUS, U NIVERSITY OF W ITWATERSRAND AND D ISTINGUISHED R ESEARCH P ROFESSOR S OUTHERN C ENTRE FOR I NEQUALITY S TUDIES ( SCIS )

In his latest book, author, political analyst and trade unionist Ebrahim Harvey analyses the metamorphosis of the ANC from a national liberation movement to a neoliberal ruling party with unparalleled fidelity to established facts. He provides a historical, ideological and political critique of the ANCs handling of the race and class aspects of the struggle in South Africa with admirable intellectual and political insight.

Harvey is able to clearly identify the confluence of the key strategic, ideological, organisational and ethnic factors in ways that clearly account for the persistence of the racial and class dimensions of apartheid in post-apartheid South Africa. In his inimitable style and intellectual depth, Harvey opens the ANC to unparalleled scrutiny.

G AUTA K OMANE, FORMER ANC OFFICIAL AND POLITICAL COMMENTATOR

This is a brilliant and provocative study of the historical development of South Africas race-class history. This book delves into the past and the present in such a way that it provides an indispensable guide to the future.

While it delves into the origins of the racial capitalist system through the growth of the cheap black labour system of the mineral revolution and its concomitant racial political expression in segregation and apartheid, the focus of the book is on the ANC and the race/class question.

It is a must-read for historians, academics, students but mainly activists in the trade union movement, social movements and leftwing organisations. He has ruffled many feathers and much of what he says will not go down well with those in power. There is no doubt that this book will be the primary reader on race and class in South Africa for the foreseeable future.

S HAHEEN K HAN, S OCIALIST R EVOLUTIONARY W ORKERS P ARTY

Harvey tackles the proverbial bull by the horns in this account of the pernicious issue of race relations in South Africa. In addition to an historical overview that sets the scene, he takes on and lays the blame for worsening racialised social conflict and the failure to address the National Question squarely at the door of the ruling African National Congress. The Rainbow Nation approach, advocated by SAs Nobel laureates, Mandela and Tutu, comes in for a real beating.

M ARTIN J ANSEN, D IRECTOR OF W ORKERS W ORLD M EDIA P RODUCTIONS

In this interesting, important and provocative book, Harvey argues a simple yet powerful thesis. The durability of South Africas notoriously rapacious form of capitalism since 1994 dooms African nationalism to corruption, condemns ANC governments to failure and reproduces racism. Agree or disagree, Harveys thesis must be engaged.

M ICHAEL M AC D ONALD, AUTHOR OF W HY R ACE M ATTERS IN S OUTH A FRICA

Ebrahim Harvey uses a skilful and erudite, but uncompromising, scalpel to undertake an autopsy of the living corpse that has become the hopes for, and dreams of, substantive radical change in the post-1994 South Africa, especially for the increasingly impoverished masses. The book is an evisceration of the ANC and its record in office, including its use of the masters tools in its recourse to a colonialist nativisation of African and clearly shows that the ANC has failed to adequately address the matter of racism which still exists, for the most part, in its apartheid form. Class and race are the two dominative axes of oppression and exploitation around which Harvey conducts his interrogation, laying bare the way in which expediency, ignorance and corruption have squandered the potential for socialist progress.

N EVILLE A DAMS, INDEPENDENT R ACE E QUALITY SCHOLAR, L ONDON

The ANC dominated South Africas liberation struggle and continues to dominate post-apartheid politics. Ebrahim Harveys The Great Pretenders challenges conventional wisdom about the party. Harvey challenges the ANCs claim to revolutionary leadership of the black masses and critiques its race politics. This book is sure to provoke controversy. In doing so, it will enrich public debate about South Africas political history and possible futures.

S EAN J ACOBS, EDITOR AND FOUNDER OF A FRICA IS A C OUNTRY, AND AUTHOR OF M EDIA IN P OST-APARTHEID S OUTH A FRICA: P OSTCOLONIAL P OLITICS IN THE A GE OF G LOBALIZATION

The Great Pretenders reveals in stark detail the failure of the ANC to address the National Question. Harvey documents the failure of the ANC to roll back the race and class divide in SA.

A BDUL K ARRIEM M ATHEWS, COMMUNITY ACTIVIST

Just as the ANC enters its terminal crisis, Ebrahim Harvey has produced a powerful and richly detailed analysis of the path that led to the crisis and its likely results. A tour de force!

A NDREW N ASH, E MERITUS A SSOCIATE P ROFESSOR, P OLITICAL S TUDIES, U NIVERSITY OF C APE T OWN AND AUTHOR OF T HE D IALECTICAL T RADITION IN S OUTH A FRICA

Harvey seeks to unravel the unholy epistemological and political alliance between (African) nationalism as espoused by the ANC and the manifestations of white monopoly capitalism. In his assessment, the contemporary context is marked by a very complex, fluid, ambiguous, contradictory and revealing race-class-gender greyness that has socially reconfigured SA, but still under capitalist hegemony. The reasons for this alliance, the author argues, are lessons gleaned from South Africas colonial past under British imperialist rule; are to be found in a misreading of this history by the (early) leaders of the ANC who saw a resolution of the historical convulsions of racism and capitalism in a liberal non-racial bourgeois democracy, as we have had since 1994. Against this background, it has been of no surprise to the author that post-apartheid South Africa as governed by the ANC remains enmeshed in a race quagmire and in a globalised capitalism which goes roughshod across the corpses of Marikana, the poor and the marginalised. In essence, Harvey states, the ANC in 1994 was ill-prepared to govern and to proffer viable social justice-driven alternatives to the capitalist crisis which it had inherited from the Nationalist Party.