Richard Pithouse, Kafila
South Africa was supposed
to be different. We attained our freedom, such as these things are, after
everyone else but Palestine. It was late in the day but the afternoon sun was
glorious and the best people, people who had passed through the long passage of
struggle, told us that we would be able to avoid the mistakes made everywhere
else.
There was a mass movement
that, whatever its limits, had won tremendous popular support and carried some
noble ideals through its travails. Its leaders cast long shadows. Our
Constitution, we were always told, was as good as they get. Liberalism,
apparently vindicated by history, had its evident limits but there was, it was
said, lots of room for deft manoeuvre within those constraints. We were assured
that there was room for everyone at what Aimé Césaire had called the
‘rendezvous of victory’.
For a long time the
presence of all kinds of features of the past in the present was widely
understood as something that would be resolved in time. Land would be
redistributed, schools would flourish, houses would be built, there would be
jobs – the kind of jobs that reward hard work – and universities would emerge,
bright and bold, from their cocoons spun by settler culture. Time, it was
generally believed, was on the side of justice and the eventual redemption of
the suffering, striving and struggles of the past.
The theory and novels of
the postcolony were seldom read as portents of our own future. The beautiful
ones were widely thought not just to have been born but to be on television, in
parliament and in power. It was not often imagined that our turn would come to
inhabit what Salman Rushdie described as a society “adrift, disoriented, amid
an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies”.
It’s been a good while
since the sun set on that glorious afternoon. The political class, entwined
with capital but not reducible to it, has become a predatory excrescence on
society. Millions find themselves without real possibility for their lives to
unfold into adulthood living, in the words of Lesego Rampolokeng, “a stray
existence where the township cracks / frustrated hoisted then dropped against
the rocks of promise.” Emancipation is now a private project, one that often
takes the form of competing to access patronage via the ruling party.
A stone’s throw from
gated opulence children die from diarrhoea or in shack fires. What Anna
Selmeczi calls “the lethal segmentation of the urban order” is sustained with
the routine exercise of violence. This is no longer just a matter of men with
guns in the uniforms of the police or G4S. In the province of KwaZulu-Natal,
where the degeneration of the African National Congress (ANC), and the state it
manages, is most advanced the party now organises its own violence and this, together
with torture, assassination and the open suppression of the right to organise
and to protest, is now part of the everyday grammar of the actually existing
political terrain.
The nation, forged in
struggle and written into grand documents with ringing declarations, can still
congeal in response to certain kinds of events. But on ordinary days it is
steadily splitting into all kinds of chauvinisms constituted around
nationality, race and ethnicity. Queer people are murdered, their bodies left
mutilated on back streets. Migrants from elsewhere in Africa and from Asia are
hounded by the police, the broader state and now, again, subject to open
popular violence on the streets. In recent days streets in Durban, streets now
named for Pixely kaIsaka Seme, one of the founders of the ANC, and Mohandas
Gandhi, have looked like a war zone. In 1906 Seme, in a speech that he gave at
Columbia, anticipated the moment when Africa, Africa as a whole, shall “waking
with that morning gleam / Shine as thy sister lands with equal beam”. In recent
days life on the street that carries his name has diverged, more or less
absolutely, from this vision.
Today, as the ANC loses
all capacity to generate a credible vision for an inclusive future, there are
plenty of people offering dogmatic reassertions of old ideas swept into
insignificance by the great tide of support for the ANC in the 1980s. But in
most cases they are radically alienated from actually existing popular
struggles and strivings. It is only the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), an
off-shoot from the ANC, that are making a serious attempt to capture escalating
and rapidly mutating popular discontent, a river of sorrow and rage that
carries potentially progressive and reactionary currents and eddies.
But as Achille Mbembe has
noted the return of what he calls “the hunting season” is, this time, being
accompanied by an emerging ideology. Attacks on migrants may often be organised
at the local level by petty business interests with prosaic material interests
but the language of the ideology summoning this violence into motion is that of
blood, soil and the call to war – the poetry, such as it is, of fascism. It is
articulated to ideas that also fester in the ruling party, and its allies in
traditional authority. Politicians regularly make statements hostile to African
migrants. The Zulu King has described African migrants as ‘lice’ that need to
be excised from the body politic. From time to time this emerging ideology also
marks South Africans who have roots elsewhere in the country, or who are of
Indian descent, as unwelcome aliens. It could not be more evident that the
desire to restore an imagined primordial wholeness has a very dangerous, and
potentially catastrophic, aspect. Frantz Fanon could have been writing of the
here and now when he observed, in 1961, that: “From nationalism we have passed
to ultra-nationalism, to chauvinism, and finally to racism. These foreigners
are called on to leave; their shops are burned, their street stalls are
wrecked.”
In the days before the
new hunting season reached its climax in Durban there was a very different kind
of attempt to erase some of the signs of a foreign presence. Two statues were
defaced in the city. One was a statute of King George V standing in the gardens
that look onto the harbour from the campus of the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
It was reported that at a protest against the statue a member of the EFF,
mobilising, precisely, an apartheid fantasy, threatened students of Indian
descent with deportation. A bronze bust of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa
was also defaced in Durban. An altogether more modest presence than the statute
of the British King, it was erected by the Fundação Engenheiro António de
Almeida – a foundation in Porta, Portugal’s second city, in 1987. It sits in a
small and rather dilapidated paved space, often used for street theatre,
adjacent to an equally run-down multi-story parking lot in a part of the city
largely used by people who are black and working class. The statute was defaced
in the name of the EFF and Vusi Khoza, speaking for the party, welcomed the
defacement of the bust which he described as a “symbol and reminder of
apartheid oppression.” Pessoa arrived in Durban in 1896, at the age of 7, and
left ten years later. An argument could be made that, although Pessoa died in
Lisbon more than forty years before Afrikaner Nationalism ascended to state
power in South Africa, there is a reason why Fanon wrote that there is a moment
in the anti-colonial dialectic in which “When the native hears a speech about
Western culture he pulls out his knife—or at least he makes sure it is within
reach”. But there is no dialectic that redeems the kind of nativism practiced
by Khoza. He was convicted for participation in a fatal assault on African
migrants in 2009. A statute of Mohandas Gandhi was also defaced in Johannesburg
along with statues in other cities closely tied to Afrikaner nationalism and
British imperialism.
The defacement of these
statues followed the successful campaign by students to have the statute of
Cecil John Rhodes removed from its plinth at the University of Cape Town (UCT).
The political logic of that campaign was clear. Rhodes was a crusading psychopathic
racist who laid waste to much of the region and put in place social structures
that became central to apartheid and continue to shape South Africa today. It
is plainly obscene to honour Rhodes. But neither English colonial power, nor
its primary ideology, a very white liberalism, has been held to much account
after apartheid. By taking on Rhodes the students raised questions of urgent
import that relate directly to the exercise of oppressive modes of power in the
here and now that stretch from the UCT to Rhodes University in Grahamstown – a
small rural town named for a colonial butcher – to the platinum mines where
striking workers were massacred in 2012.
By all accounts the
students in Cape Town created an extraordinary space of discussion – insurgent
and autonomous – in which women, queer people and people from elsewhere on the
continent, were often in the forefront. At Rhodes University, where the faculty
is even whiter than at UCT, students quickly organised in response to the
initiative in Cape Town. Their challenge took the form of an impressively
deliberative mode of politics organised around the search for collective
consensus. This process enabled an extraordinarily gifted generation of
post-graduate students, a golden generation, to emerge as political actors in
their own right and to offer a direct challenge to the coloniality and endemic
racism of the university. There are important differences between the forms
that the new student activism is taking within and between different universities
but in Grahamstown, as in Cape Town, students also issued a clear refusal of
the hegemony of English liberalism.
Their intervention –
lucid, rational and often carried by the surfacing of a deep pain consequent to
the innumerable ways in which routine racism has refused the desire of the
young to, in Fanon’s words “come…into a world that was ours and to help to
build it together” – has been egregiously misrepresented via a set of enduring
colonial tropes as the unthinking politics of the mob. The university issued an
extraordinary statement to its alumni in response to the new student struggle
that was rank with colonial tropes. In the reactionary imagination, black and
white, the response to the new student politics emerging across the country
has, as Camalita Naicker has noted, placed the students together with
self-organisation of impoverished black people as barbarians about to storm the
gates of civilization. This has not only been a matter of symbolic violence. In
Cape Town the students were subject to a degree of violence both on the campus
and by the police when they went to parliament to protest against the ongoing
violence on Africans from elsewhere in the continent.
Liberalism has always
been fundamentally tied up with the poisonous fantasy of its barbarian other.
In 1859 John Stuart Mill, the great philosopher of English liberalism,
declared, in his famous essay On Liberty, that “Despotism is a legitimate mode
of dealing with barbarians”. The essential logic of actually existing
liberalism – freedom for some, despotism for others – was never merely, as they
say, academic. In 1887 Rhodes, speaking in parliament in Cape Town echoed these
sentiments when he declared that: “we must adopt a system of despotism in our
relations with the barbarians of South Africa”. Yet in 2015, in a society still
fundamentally shaped by the historical weight of this idea of freedom for some
and despotism for others, a text book for first year politics students, written
and prescribed in South African universities, a text book in which not a single
African person is presented as a thinker worthy of study, declares that “Most
discussions of freedom begin with John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty”. This sort of
academic consensus, which seemed entrenched a few weeks ago, no longer seems to
have much of a future. The students have made an intervention of real weight
and consequence.
It is true that in Cape
Town this intervention has excited some statements that are crude,
authoritarian and easily compatible with the most reactionary forms of
nationalism. But as the hegemony of the ruling party unwinds South Africa has
become a society in which crude sloganeering and opportunistic attempts to
exploit struggles to generate political capital frequently takes on what Fanon
described as “a certain brutality of thought and mistrust of subtlety”. This
has always characterised parts of the independent left after apartheid and
there is a degree to which it is now, more or less, an inevitable backdrop to
any political intervention of any significance. For instance, to take just one
recent example, efforts to affirm solidarity with Palestine have been marred by
the expression of gross anti-Semitism. As this debacle has shown the temptation
to reify one evil as the only evil of consequence and to make dubious alliances for short term gain can result in progressive causes legitimating deeply
reactionary modes of politics rather than, as is presumably hoped, harnessing
their energies behind a emancipatory project. It has become vital to both
affirm emancipatory principles and practices and to distance these from the
various kinds of crude political opportunism that are increasingly present in
our fractious public sphere.
The students in Cape Town
have, very rapidly, punched a gaping hole into the continuum of English liberal
hegemony over the university, and a set of linked sites of a certain kind of
elite power, and, thereby, a mode of white supremacy and coloniality that has
not been subject to sufficient critique and opposition. It is an extraordinary
political achievement that will, no doubt, inscribe itself into the history of
the South African academy, and the wider society.
Their anti-colonial
intervention has been warmly received by everyone from some of our best
intellectuals to grassroots activists engaged in increasingly dangerous and
difficult struggles against both the local state and the forms of popular
chauvinism often articulated to it in various ways. But it has also been
welcomed by various kinds of evidently reactionary forms of nationalist
politics in and out of the state. And it could be argued that the students’
appeal, prior to their assault by the police, to the ruling party rather than
to their own constituent power, and alliance with other progressive forces, to
continue to force their agenda was ill considered. The decision to appeal to
the authority of a state that sustains colonial arrangements of various kinds,
along with new forms of predatory accumulation, and is evidently willing to use
torture and murder as modes of social control, is not to be taken lightly.
In many instance the new
student politics has often spoken with clarity, with luminous clarity, about
its opposition to both the enduring coloniality of some of our universities,
and the pathologies of the post-colony. But it seems that the wider public
sphere is often still structured, to some degree anyway, by what Fanon called
the primary Manicheanism of the colonial condition. This means that many people
just don’t hear what is being said and read political interventions through the
distorting lens of this Manicheanism. When that Manicheanism does give way,
what Antonio Gramsci called the common sense of society often seems to find
itself in a situation well described by Fanon: “The clear, unreal idyllic light
of the beginning is followed by a semi-darkness that bewilders the senses”.
There isn’t a language, or a set of concepts, ready-to-hand, that enables a
clear grasp of the fact that one can, without contradiction, oppose both the
coloniality and racism of universities like Rhodes and UCT, the degree to which
wider society retains colonial features, or liberalism in general, and the
authoritarian and chauvinistic forms of nationalism being actively promoted in
various quarters from the President, to the Zulu King, to the form that the EFF
is taking in Durban and various kinds of popular reaction. There is also no
political instrument that can oppose both enduring forms of coloniality and
reactionary forms of nationalism at scale and with real force.
It would seem that the
task now is, to stay with Fanon, to “work out new concepts” that can, from
within the vortex of a new struggle linking a new generation of intellectuals
to popular struggles, generate a set of ideas and practices that confront the
pathologies of the colony and the postcolony simultaneously.
