Internal Frontiers. Jon Soske
the anticolonial intellectual a “theorist,” the historian then validates the figure’s standing (and by implication his or her own) through a critical dialogue with pillars of the Western canon, whether John Locke or Michel Foucault.74
Individual thinkers populate this book. Nevertheless, Internal Frontiers returns to the grounds of their thinking: their families and others that they loved; their circles of collaborators; the branches and committees of their political organizations; the cities where they lived, traveled, and worked; the structures of race, class, and gender that generated the social field of their everyday experiences; and the institutional and ideological frameworks of white supremacy that they fought. The purpose of this reconstruction is not the saturation of thought with biographical or empirical context. Far more than is often realized, intellectuals such as Lembede and Luthuli drew on Western political theory to articulate universalizing claims even as they critiqued the form of abstract reason that characterized secular politics. Rather, this attentiveness to personal and social terrains reflects the fact that the work of thinking always remains open to and interwoven with its outside.75 At another level, this approach attends to the specific character of philosophical practice that developed within the antiapartheid struggle of the 1950s. The intellectual and aesthetic labors of African thinkers—and a central argument of this book is that these modes are indissociably linked—were instruments for sustaining a resistance movement and building a new form of national community. This living community, rather than a master text or a new articulation of universalism, was the true medium of African nationalist thought.76
The most important space for the elaboration of this project was the commercial African press of the 1950s. These publications, written in English and African languages, play a central part in this book. They are both significant protagonists and the stage on which much of the drama takes place.77 As Ntongela Masilela observes: “The real intellectual history of South Africa is predominantly traceable through newspapers.”78 Although the ANC lacked a national paper during this period, three major African publications—Bantu World, Ilanga lase Natal, and Inkundla ya Bantu—were edited by influential members of the ANC. Two of these editors were members of the Natal ANC Youth League: Ngubane ran Inkundla and H. I. E. Dhlomo oversaw Ilanga with his brother Ralph.79 If editorial lines generally followed their personal convictions, these individuals were proud professional newsmen and opened their pages to articles about (and by) the major factions in black politics. The press not only provided a forum for intellectual debates, it allowed grassroots followers of the ANC, Unity Movement, the Communist Party, and Indian Congress to evaluate and publically respond to the policies of their own and other organizations. This openness also reflected a particular understanding of the newspaper’s function. In the absence of institutions controlled by black South Africans, newspapers served as something like makeshift governments: they stood in for missing schools, national representative institutions, even health departments.80 As this book argues, the ANC became increasingly media conscious during the 1952 Defiance Campaign and its depiction by the black press—especially the legendary lifestyle magazine Drum—contributed to the development of a new aesthetic of political struggle that celebrated the cosmopolitanism of urban South Africa, especially Johannesburg. Once intellectuals such as H. I. E. Dhlomo and Luthuli became aware of local reworkings of this aesthetic, they drew a significant conclusion: a shared symbolism could help unite an otherwise heterogeneous people if it created space for different groups to write themselves into an unfolding national narrative.
AFRICAN NATIONALISM AND NONRACIALISM
Internal Frontiers reconstructs the debates over two questions—the place of the Indian diaspora in South Africa and the postwar reconfiguration of African nationalism—and describes when their intersection became central to the development of the ANC. This book is therefore neither a linear narrative of the liberation struggle nor a comprehensive treatment of the diverse (and very different) contributions of Indian South Africans. Occasionally, canonical people and events are passed over lightly. “Minor” figures sometimes take center stage. Through telling the story of how the “Indian question” became central to the organizational structure of antiapartheid politics and the broader culture of resistance, Internal Frontiers argues that the problem of the also-colonized other drove the ANC’s formulation of an inclusive, African nationalism. This understanding of nation, articulated by Luthuli on his election to the ANC presidency in 1952, became a major intellectual current within the organization and, perhaps as importantly, reinforced the emergence of a political culture organized around a powerful symbolic politics, which I call “symbolic constitutionalism.” Based on participation “from below” and affective communities nurtured in struggle, this culture generated a new aesthetic of nationhood: the struggle itself provided the image of a multiracial African nation that affirmed the claims of each group to belonging. In direct opposition to apartheid’s discourse of “separateness” and its fantasy of coherent racial subjects, this imagery located heterogeneity, entanglement, and an asymmetrical form of reciprocity at the center of a shared identity. Luthuli and his co-thinkers, the Natal Group, developed their interpretation of African nationalism through their defense of the African-Indian alliance of the early 1950s and the experience of solidarity during the 1952 Defiance Campaign. They subsequently generalized from the relationship with the also-colonized other to an ethics of nationhood that presupposed recognition and negotiation across multiple forms of difference. In other words, they attempted to leave the internal frontier open by enfolding alterity within the conceptualization of the nation form.
Most accounts of the antiapartheid struggle during the 1950s focus on one of two developments. The first involves Mandela and the Communist Party. After recognizing the strategic importance of African nationalism, party members within the ANC and Indian Congress played a major role in championing non-European cooperation as well as the alliance between the ANC and left-wing whites organized in the Congress of Democrats.81 Perhaps the only organization in South Africa where whites and blacks could meet on equal terms, the party attracted a key group of younger African nationalists, including Walter Sisulu and Mandela, and helped break this group from an exclusionary Africanist ideology. During this same period, the party codified an understanding of the national democratic revolution that projected the overthrow of white supremacy by the African majority leading other oppressed groups and progressive whites. This position understood South Africa as composed of one nation, the African majority, and several national minority groups.82
The second event was the emergence of the Africanist opposition within the ANC and its split in 1958 to form the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC).83 Originating as a loose-knit opposition to collaboration with Indians and Communists, the Africanists became a major force in black politics and (in some areas) channeled popular disillusionment with the ANC. The leadership of the PAC, especially the brilliant Robert Mangiliso Sobukwe, believed that the revolutionary struggle of the African oppressed could create a nonracial, Pan-African identity by abolishing the system of white supremacy and replacing it with a democratic government founded on equal rights for individual citizens. This program, however, required mobilizing the explosive anger of the PAC’s grassroots supporters—a rage which often expressed itself as explicitly anti-Indian and antiwhite—in the service of a revolution that would somehow transform their collective racial consciousness.84
These stories intersect Internal Frontiers’s narrative at several turns. However, they concern people and events that were centered in the Transvaal and, when juxtaposed, frame this period in terms of the opposition between the Communist Party’s “nonracialism” and the PAC’s Africanism. In contrast, this book moves back and forth between Johannesburg and Durban and includes a wider cast of characters. Its focus is a group of African intellectuals in Natal who simultaneously remained outside of the Communist Party and opposed the strategy of the Africanists. Originating in Durban student circles during the early 1940s, this group included Lembede (the Philosopher), H. I. E. Dhlomo (the Poet), Jordan Ngubane (the News Man and Publicist), and M. B. Yengwa (the Organizer). Known among themselves as ibandla (the historical term for the council of the Zulu king’s advisiors), they were instrumental in the election of Luthuli (the Liberation Theologian) to the Natal ANC presidency in 1951.85 At some point in their careers, the writings or statements of each