by Premesh Lalu, Economics & Politics Weekly
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
soundbites 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 Shaheed 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 with movements of decolonisation, apartheid
also served as a catalyst for a reorientation of thinking about race that
resulted in intense 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 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 realizing 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 3 White men to represent 8,000,000 Africans in a house of 150 representing 2,000,000 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 buta 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 amoral 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 Liberalism is 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, realizing 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 actualize 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 RanajitGuha (ed) Subaltern Studies Vol. III, Oxford
University Press, New Delhi.
Kruger, D.W. ed. (1960). South African Parties and Policies
1910 - 1960, 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, W
Green and Son, Edinburgh.
