Revisiting Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Conversation with Partha Chatterjee

Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony

Rethinking the South African Crisis

We are very pleased to announce that Gillian Hart will be giving this year’s Thinking Africa Public Lecture on the 15th of August. Gillian Hart is Professor of Geography and Co-Chair of Development Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and Honorary Professor, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Gillian Hart’s forthcoming book is about to come out with UKZN Press.

The publishers describe the book as follows:

“Rethinking the South African Crisis revisits longstanding debates to shed new light on the transition from apartheid. Drawing on nearly twenty years of ethnographic research, Gillian Hart argues that local government has become the key site of contradictions. Local practices, conflicts and struggles in the arenas of everyday life, feed into and are shaped by simultaneous processes of de-nationalisation and renationalisation. Together they are key to understanding the erosion of ANC domination, and the proliferation of populist politics. This book provides an innovative and forceful dialectical analysis of the ongoing, unstable and unresolved processes through which the crisis in South Africa is playing out. It also suggests how Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution, adapted and translated in relation to present circumstances, can do useful analytical and political work in South Africa and beyond.” 

Writing Revolt: An Engagement with African Nationalism

Writing Revolt: An Engagement with African Nationalism 1957-1967, by Terence Ranger. James Currey, 2013., Reviewed by Duncan Money, New Left Project

Terence Ranger is best known for co-editing The Invention of Tradition with Eric Hobsbawm, but his first book Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896-97, on the first Chimurenga uprising against British colonial rule, was a landmark work of African history. Revolt was a careful reconstruction of how spirit mediums and other religious figures drew on the shared histories of the Ndebele and Shona peoples to organise one of the most widespread and serious challenges to colonial rule in this period. The book quickly became the seminal text for the nationalist movement which fought white minority rule in Rhodesia in the 1970s, with copies dispatched to leaders incarcerated in Rhodesian prisons and to military camps in Zambia and Mozambique. While its specific arguments that the first Chimurenga was inspired and directed by spirit mediums and that the risings were co-ordinated at all have been challenged and largely discarded by later historians,[1] Ranger's more general claims that African societies had a history that was recoverable and significant, and that they themselves had a sense of that history, proved a fatal blow to existing colonial historiography.

From May 2008 to 2011: Xenophobic Violence and National Subjectivity in South Africa

by Judith Hayem, Journal of Southern African Studies, 2013

This article examines the recurrence of xenophobic attacks in 2011 in the light of the events of May 2008. Using archives and secondary data, examining slogans and discourses heard at the time and reflecting on the author’s own involvement as an activist alongside foreign residents displaced by the 2008 attacks, it is argued that the xenophobic attacks demonstrated a shift in the national subjectivity or conception of citizenship, from an inclusive notion implying participation in the future South African society to a dialectical representation of nationals against foreigners. It is further argued that, in its mismanagement of the 2008 crisis, the South African government contributed to the emergence of such attitudes and did nothing to stop the violence; hence its repetition. The notion of human rights that has emerged in South Africa is one of the keys to an understanding of the representations at stake: whereas human rights used to be a universal and founding notion in post-apartheid South Africa, they are now seen as a national privilege regarding access to basic needs. The article shows that the humanitarian management of the May 2008 crisis by the South African Government contributed considerably to obscuring the notion of ‘human rights’. In order to oppose such a dangerous policy, there is an urgent need to revive the political debate in South Africa.

The People Shall Obey

by Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

In his speech at the memorial service for the soldiers who were killed in the Central African Republic Jacob Zuma presented us, and not for the first time, with the idea that we should receive another accumulation of bodies – of black bodies – as a tragedy, as a cruel consequence of the random movement of the wheel of fortune. Thabo Mbeki, watching our steady accretion of 'tragedies' from the sidelines, might, perhaps, have recalled a line from Shakespeare: “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky.”

Gender, myth, nationalism: Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers

by Mani Sharpe, Open Democracy

Inspired by Yacef Saadi’s account of his experiences as an F.L.N (Front de Libération Nationale) military commander, Gillo Pontecorvo’s seminal 1966 work The Battle of Algiers dramatises Algeria’s struggle for independence between 1956 and 1957, during which the nationalist movement shifted its focus from rural Kabylia and the Aurès mountains to the capital, Algiers.

As the film illustrates, this renewed emphasis upon guerrilla warfare attracted both the attention of the international community and witnessed the increasing participation of women within the conflict, as female nationalists (known asmujahida) were tasked with carrying information and weapons through the besieged city.

Class, Nation, Ethnicity in Natal's black working class

Sitas, Ari (1990) Class, Nation, Ethnicity in Natal's black working class. Collected Seminar Papers. Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 38 . pp. 257-278. ISSN 0076-0773

Click here to download this paper in pdf.

The limits of nationalism

Sumit Sarkar

TO start with the obvious: history, described famously by E.H. Carr many years ago as the ever-changing dialogue of the present with the past, is necessarily being ‘rewritten’ all the time. The immediate issues that have given this question great topicality and high media profile need not be rehearsed again. Briefly, they relate to the current state-backed Hindutva drive to ‘rewrite’ history through an onslaught on established historiography.

Reflections on Human Rights Discourse and Emancipation in Africa in the Twenty-first Century

by Michael Neocosmos, Solidarity Peace Trust, Zimbabwe (undated)

At the very time when it most often mouths the word, the West has never been further from being able to live a true humanism – a humanism made to the measure of the world (Aimé Césaire).

Whoever is engaged in popular struggles for democratic emancipation in Africa today is confronted with an immediate problem concerning human rights.  While on the one hand a discourse of rights is seemingly necessary for thinking democratisation, given that the state regularly flouts these, on the other human rights seem to refer to a discourse mainly propounded by neo-liberal interests whether local or foreign.  Several repressive regimes in Africa and elsewhere (Zimbabwe, Sudan, maybe Cote D’Ivoire, Iran) oppose a discourse of nationalism to one on human rights.  As an activist, one finds oneself in a seemingly irresolvable discursive contradiction between human (predominantly individual) rights and national (or group or identity) rights.  At times this contradiction is central to government itself.  For exampling in Thabo Mbeki’s South African government, a central contradiction appeared in the form of a commitment to neo-liberal conceptions of rights on the one hand along with a sensitivity to national and racial oppression in Africa on the other. This was reflected in government reactions to a number of different issues including Zimbabwe. In fact this contradiction is arguably constitutive of the subjectivity of the new South African bourgeoisie itself.  On the one hand their private accumulation is premised on an adherence to neo-liberal precepts including human rights, on the other a sensitivity to racism and to a lesser extent to Western hegemony in African affairs is also evident.  The manner in which the vagaries of this contradiction were navigated explains much regarding Mbeki’s presidency (Neocosmos, 2002).

‘Wash Me Black Again’: African Nationalism, the Indian Diaspora, and KwaZulu Natal, 1944-1960

by Jon Soske, PhD Thesis

My dissertation combines a critical history of the Indian diaspora’s political and intellectual impact on the development of African nationalism in South Africa with an analysis of African/Indian racial dynamics in Natal. Beginning in the 1940s, tumultuous debates among black intellectuals over the place of the Indian diaspora in Africa played a central role in the emergence of new and antagonistic conceptualizations of a South African nation. The writings of Indian political figures (particularly Gandhi and Nehru) and the Indian independence struggle had enormous influence on a generation of African nationalists, but this impact was mediated in complex ways by the race and class dynamics of Natal. During the 1930s and 40s, rapid and large-scale urbanization generated a series of racially-mixed shantytowns surrounding Durban in which a largely Gujarati and Hindi merchant and landlord class provided the ersatz urban infrastructure utilized by both Tamil-speaking workers and Zulu migrants. In Indian-owned buses, stores, and movie theatres, a racial hierarchy of Indian over African developed based on the social grammars of property, relationship with land, family structure, and different gender roles. In such circumstances, practices integral to maintaining diasporic identities — such as religious festivals, marriage, caste (jati), language, and even dress and food—became signifiers of ranked status and perceived exclusion. Despite the destruction of this urban landscape by forced removals beginning in the late 1950s, these social relationships powerfully shaped African and Indian identities in Natal, the popular memory of different communities, and the later politics of the anti-apartheid struggle.

A serious case of, convenient, Ardziemers

by Danielle Alyssa Bowler, The Star & The Daily News

“Morena baloo ke, na na sari steve, opec di say peeper lemur train yeah ho”. Sound familiar? Let’s try again “Morena boloka setjhaba sa heso, O fedise dintwa le matshwenyeho”. The latter is the national anthem of South Africa, the former, Ard Matthew’s rendition of the national anthem, according to Daily Maverick writer Rebecca Davis. Whilst it might seem unbelievable, Davis’s take is not far from what South African’s saw and heard on their television screens a couple of weeks ago.

Colonialism, Nationalism and Fundamentalism: Liberating Algeria

'Colonialism, Nationalism and Fundamentalism: Liberating Algeria', the third chapter of T. Deanen Sharpley-Whiting's book Fanon, Conflicts and Feminisms (1998) is online here.

Linking the Urban and the Rural

by Mahmood Mamdani, Chapter Eight from Citizen and Subject, Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, 1996 (via the Marxist Internet Archive)

AS THE DAWN of independence broke on a horizon of internal conflict, reconsideration of the African colonial experience began. Could it be that the African problem was not colonialism but an incomplete penetration of traditional society by a weak colonial state or deference to it by prudent but shortsighted colonizers? Could it be that Europe’s mission in Africa was left half finished? If the rule of law took centuries to root in the land of its original habitation, is it surprising that the two sides of the European mission — market and civil society, the law of value and the rule of law — were neither fully nor successfully transplanted in less than a century of colonialism? And that this fragile transplant succumbed to caprice and terror on the morrow of independence?