-Premesh Lalu
Vol - XLVIII No. 28, July 13, 2013 EPW
The illness of Nelson Mandela has
been turned, by South Africa's media and politicians, into a spectacle of his
"macabrely anticipated absence". In such a context, a historian and
anti-apartheid activist underlines the rich legacy of Mandela's intellectual
and political ideas and their continued relevance in the ongoing struggle for a
just South Africa.
Premesh Lalu (premeshl@gmail.com) teaches history at the Centre for Humanities Research,
University of the Western Cape, South Africa. He is the author of The Deaths of
Hintsa: Post-apartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts.
If one believes media reports,
Nelson Mandela is no longer with us. Yet, in more ways than one, he is. In the
midst of the frenzy of sound bytes and images that now circulate through the
space left by his macabrely anticipated absence, there is danger that Mandela
will be honoured, even monumentalised, but not meaningfully remembered. Part of
the problem it seems is that the anti-apartheid struggle to which Mandela
contributed so substantially has been recalled as an event, as a passing phase,
not a sustained development of a thought that opened onto a concept of the
post-apartheid.
Thankfully, Mandela is not yet and
not quite comparable to a Mahatma, not at least in the shape that Shahid Amin
(1984) recalls in the figure of Gandhi with his saintly aura. Thankfully so
too, in part because such a status would not be a product of a subaltern
imaginary in South Africa, but of the mediated neoliberal imagery that gives
you a quick fix. Rather than seek out Saint Mandela, we would do better to pay
tribute to his legacy of dedicated struggle against apartheid by placing his
thinking in a longer genealogy of anti-apartheid thought.
In the years to come, the struggle
will surely be one that seeks to recuperate Mandela for the project of thinking
our way out of the predicaments of apartheid, against the hype and hypocrisy of
an apparatus that has reduced every principle and every thought to either
ridicule or banality, if not pathos. Against the hollowing out of meaning, we
may ask what continuities and disjunctures of thought were enabled by Mandela,
so that we are compelled to rethink the concept of the post-apartheid. What
might Mandela offer us as a resource for elaborating a concept of the
post-apartheid that will also inflect our desire for the postcolonial in ways
that exceedapartheid’s construction of difference?
Understanding Apartheid
Mandela’s significance can be
understood in part through his ability to concede that the concept of the
post-apartheid, like the critique of apartheid, could not be entrusted to
messianism or figureheads. It required more sustained effort at unravelling the
legacies of authoritarianism and racism. The demand for an expanded effort to
understand and overcome apartheid flowed from recognition that apartheid
represented something that anti-colonial nationalism had not foreseen, let
alone imagined possible.
Two major political shifts marked
the onset of this recognition amongst the generation of youth leaguers to which
Mandela belonged. The turn to armed struggle in the 1960s represented an effort
to align the anti-apartheid struggle with the anti-colonial struggles elsewhere
in Africa. Beyond the search for alignments withmovements of decolonisation,
apartheid also served as a catalyst for a reorientation of thinking about race
that resulted inintense debate about the nature of the South African state and
theories of the South African Revolution.
These debates and theoretical
perspectives were threaded through other constellations of thought as it
brushed up against strands of Marxism, Pan Africanism, non-alignment,
development of underdevelopment theory and decolonisation. In each, something
of a residual trace of apartheid’s specificity, not to mention its intensifying
grip over the black subject, meant that apartheid could not be fully grasped in
terms of the left critique available through the struggles for decolonisation.
It was apparent that apartheid was a form of the exercise of power hitherto
unforeseen in the critique of colonialism.
Mandela, as we know, was associated
with both the shift to armed struggle and rethinking the problematic of
apartheid. Ultimately, his thinking on the meaning and implications of
apartheid perhaps defined the project of the building of a post-apartheid
society that he championed after 1990 upon his release from prison.
In conventional histories of the
African National Congress (ANC), the militancy of the youth leaguers is
emphasised over the continuities and discontinuities in their thinking. This of
course aids the current hagiographic renderings of Mandela who cut his teeth in
the Youth League. Mandela’s resourcefulness rested with his political
reasoning, historical sense and astute ability at reading.Taken together, he
was capable of picking up a strand of thinking from an earlier generation of
nationalist thinkers about the dangers of trusteeship to show how it was at the
very heart of the violence of apartheid. Trusteeship was a discourse for
interpellating black subjects into the narrative of liberalism and the orders
of a segregationist state. Mandela specifically offered a view that showed that
apartheid was indeed the logical outcome of the trusteeship that undergirded
liberalism’s programme of fostering race relations in the 1930s.
Mandela’s generation looked upon
this horizon of apartheid in the aftermath of the second world war, in much the
same way that a generation of ANC intellectuals looked upon the threat of a
race war in the aftermath of the first world war. Together with a burgeoning
intellectual circle educated at Lovedale College and Fort Hare University in
particular, they developed a unique perspective on the pending threat of
apartheid from the mostly rural eastern Cape. From their vantage point, it was
perhaps not too difficult to see the culmination of a barrage of racial laws
culminating in the passage of the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Bill of
1959. In a consequential debate between Govan Mbeki and Nelson Mandela on
strategies for resisting apartheid, it was clear that a view from the rural
reserve would prove indispensable in anticipating apartheid’s most devastating
consequences. It would also prove critical to naming apartheid’s specificity.
The Limits of Liberalism
In 1959, Chief Albert Luthuli,
responding to the ultimatum to give up the presidency of the ANC or risk losing
his chieftainship described apartheid as a form of “domineering paternalism”.
Luthuli tacitly revealed the paradox of apartheid that ushered in a new
generation of nationalist thinkers, Mandela included, who were realising that
the concept of trusteeship professed by liberalism lay at the very heart of
justifications for apartheid. “Domineering paternalism” described apartheid in
a manner that recalled the failure of liberalism to appease black aspirations
for decolonisation while appropriating decolonisation that was taking root
elsewhere in Africa to promote what it called self-government. If apartheid was
a version of cynical reason in which liberal concepts of trusteeship and
nationalist projects of decolonisation were appropriated to its own meaning,
the programme of self-government was clearly its most damning symptom. This is
how Mandela (1978: 14) summarised the situation by the 1950s;
As the African accepted none of
the[se] measures to ‘civilise’ him without a struggle, the Trustees had always
been worried by this prospect as long as the Cape Franchise remained. With
little compunction, in 1936 the last door to citizenship was slammed in the
face of the African by the Natives Representation Act which gave us three White
men to represent 80,00,000 Africans in a house of 150 representing 20,00,000
Whites. At the same time a Land Act was passed to ensure that if the 1913 Land
Act had left any openings for the African, then the Natives Land and Trust Act
would seal them in the name of ‘humanity and Modern Civilisation’. The 1937
Native Laws Amendment Act closed up any other loophole through which the
African could have forced his way to full citizenship. Today, Trusteeship has
made every African a criminal still out of prison. For all this we had to thank
the philosophy of Trusteeship.
The worry with trusteeship had a
longer history in ANC thinking. Only now, in the 1950s, Mandela’s reference to
it was not only a backward glance but a thinking ahead, onto the horizon where
trusteeship promised to lead the black subject into the shadow of death.
The glance onto the past recalled
the suspicion with British liberalism came to be viewed in the writings of ANC
intellectuals such as Silas Modiri Molema after the first world war. In his The
Bantu: Past and Present, written in 1917 and published in 1920, Molema
reflected on the dangers of naturalised concepts of race in the aftermath of
the first world war in Europe where the limits of liberalism were becoming
patently evident.
For those liberals who claimed a
moral high ground offering solutions to the race question in South Africa, he
reserved a few choice words:
In these things, we shall look, and
look in vain, for the much vaunted ‘Western Liberalism’. In vain shall we
search the actions for the so-called High Political Morality. Liberalism and
Morality are hollow meaningless words and egregious tricks, then as well might
a thirsty traveller expect to get water from a mirage as the Bantu hope to find
emancipation by that morality and modern Liberalism. British Liberalismis
offering nothing to the Bantu of South Africa except such morbid creations and
fancies as ‘the Native Problem’.
Set alongside each other, the texts
of Molema and Mandela have much in common – with one small but consequential
difference. Mandela’s generation was left with imagining what lay ahead, with
the tightening grip of apartheid in which the liberal philosophy of trusteeship
was lodged. If in the heyday of liberalism in South Africa in the 1930s,
trusteeship was a philosophical ground, under apartheid, it became a legal
foundation. Its legality was founded not only on the basis of its
persuasiveness and presumed rationality, even philosophical elaboration, but on
administrative rationality that had no qualm in appropriating the tide of
decolonisation sweeping through Africa to its own repressive ends.
Imagining the Post-Apartheid
Hendrik Verwoerd’s plans for making
trusteeship the legal basis for so-called self-government in the dreaded
Homelands, was backed up by a history lesson from the Minister of Bantu Affairs
and Administration in 1959, de Wet Nel. Paling in comparison to Mandela’s reading
of history, de Wet Nel spoke with the confidence of a Trustee (Kruger 1960):
We hear so many provocative remarks
about Bantu nationalism and Black nationalism, but it is my conviction that
there is nothing of the kind. If it exists, then there is also something like
White nationalism. But what does exist is the hatred on the part of the Black
man for the White man. That is the monster which may still perhaps destroy all
the best things in Africa. But I want to ask whether this monster has not to a
large extent been created by the white man himself? The fact that he has
ignored their own forms of government and their own cultural assets, has led to
the growth of this monster, and that is the reason why we plead that this
monster must not rear its head in South Africa. That is why we want to give
them the opportunities for self-government.
Self-government, in the cynical
reason of Verwoerd and de Wet Nel, was supposedly in keeping with the spirit of
decolonisation in Africa, even averting its force in South Africa. It was also
in keeping with the benevolent gesture of trusteeship, aimed at finding a
solution to the native problem that liberalism had promised, but on which it
failed to deliver.
The horizon of apartheid prompted
the youth leaguers into action, realising the intensifying grip over black
subjectivity that trusteeship held out in South Africa. Looking over their
shoulders to draw together earlier strands in the critique of trusteeship, and
looking ahead into the abyss of possible death, Mandela and his generation
produced some of the most profound thinking on race and racism. As trusteeship
emerged as a legal precedent of South African governmentality, Mandela in
particular entrenched himself in the thought of law by receiving its force and
returning it.
Nelson Mandela is around like never
before. The time of his thought has not yet arrived. Perhaps, his
anti-apartheid thought was in excess of his own capacity to actualise that
thought – institutionally and otherwise – after 1994. What Mandela bequeaths to
us is precisely this excess. The thought that he leaves in his wake is of
considerable importance for elaborating a concept of the post-apartheid.
Trusteeship, as we now know, has proven more resilient than imagined in the
struggle against apartheid. As the struggle to understand newer scripts of
trusteeship in neoliberalism unfolds, Nelson Mandela gives us reason to pause,
to think again, in these thought-provoking post-apartheid times.
References
Amin, Shahid (1984): “Gandhi as
Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921-22” in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern
Studies, Vol III (New Delhi: Oxford University Press).
Kruger, D W, ed. (1960): South
African Parties and Policies 1910-60 (Cape Town: Human and Rousseaux).
Mandela, Nelson (1978): The
Struggle Is My Life (London: IDAF).
Molema, Silas Modiri (1920): The
Bantu: Past and Present, An Ethnographical & Historical Study of the Native
Races of South Africa (Edinburgh: W Green and Son).
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