Do South Africans Exist?. Ivor Chipkin
might therefore say: to gauge the excellence of President Mbeki on the basis of his record is unpatriotic. On the contrary, belief in his excellence itself will reveal just how the legacy of apartheid is being redressed. The ‘facts’ by which we measure the merit of President Mbeki (as a ‘Black’) are those of a mysterious and sublime quality. ‘Blackness’ here is attached to a spiritual knowing: a knowing through faith, where turning back the vestiges of apartheid refers to some spiritual, metaphysical redress. And this knowledge is accessible only to authentic ‘Blacks’ because they alone are true believers. What this kind of nation-building does is transform the presidency and the government into quasi-religious objects that endure all torments and survive with immaculate beauty.
Unless we recognise that there is a profoundly new articulation of blackness today, we will not be in a position properly to evaluate its politics. The measure of blackness is today that of national sovereignty. By this term I do not mean state sovereignty. If the latter refers to the ability, in Agamben’s (2005) terms, to define the state of exception, national sovereignty refers to the control of state institutions by authentic representatives of the nation. An authentic national community is merely that group deemed to be the veritable bearer of the national mission – whatever it may be. It is that community of true believers. A distinction must be made between a citizen as such and an authentic national subject. So, even if citizenship is founded on principles of universal human rights, for example, nation-building would have us say that some citizens are more authentically members of the nation than others. At stake is the measure of freedom. Nationalism associates being free – the ability to see the world as it really is and act accordingly – with determinate marks of population. By this I mean a schema of physical marks and social-psychological characteristics: being of a certain race, practising a particular religion, preferring certain kinds of sexual partners, and so on. Conversely, the absence of these marks of population is associated with a state of unfreedom. We might say that citizens who are not national subjects are not equal because they are not free and they are not free because they are not national subjects.4 What we are discussing here, essentially, is the nature of legitimate authority. Who, in other words is a legitimate bearer of state power in society?
In these terms, the current struggle within the ANC over the identity of President Thabo Mbeki’s successor is a national conflict par excellence. At stake is less an ideological struggle between, say, (neo-)liberalism and socialism, than a conflict about the measure of national authenticity. Who is more authentically a representative of the nation, Jacob Zuma or some other (as yet unnamed) contender?
During the apartheid period, the nation was delimited by virtue of a measure of population. In considering the major constitutional changes that have accompanied, and to some extent inaugurated, the democratic dispensation, we will see that they have sought to overcome these particular measures by outlawing discrimination, including on the basis of race, religion and sexual orientation. In so doing, however, we have to ask: is the South African demos without a measure of population at all?
The book will open (Chapter 1), with a survey of the literature on African nationalism, to argue that contemporary writing on Africa and South Africa pays very little attention to this phenomenon. Indeed, the subject has almost escaped serious academic treatment for 20 years or so, despite its overwhelming relevance. In South Africa, at least, the post-apartheid period has been fraught with debates about the ‘national question’. When the subject is broached, studies tend to be ambivalent about nationalism’s character. Following Thomas Hodgkin’s well-known definition of the phenomenon, there is a tendency to understand African nationalism, including African nationalism in South Africa, simply as resistance to colonial authority, irrespective of its form. Yet reading carefully, many of these same studies effectively treat it as a modernist form of anti-colonialism: urban, post-tribal/non-racial, secular and interested in an industrialised post-colonial system.
In Chapter 2, I will try to overcome this ambivalence by directly confronting the nature of African nationalism. I will do so by reading the phenomenon against a selected literature. I am especially interested in nationalism as a specific kind of democratic imaginary. Whereas this relationship is easily obscured by authors more interested in it as a cultural artefact, we will see that democracy was until recently believed to lodge naturally in nations. By the eighteenth century, for example, this view was axiomatic for as diverse a group as Johan Gottfied Herder, John Stuart Mill and the French revolutionaries. In the South African context, African nationalism opposed apartheid in the name of national democracy.
In Chapter 3, I will seek the form of the South African nation in the struggle against apartheid and for national democracy. In this regard, I will pay particular attention to the development of the theory of national democratic revolution (NDR). Although Pan-Africanism and Negritude were important discourses informing the terrain of struggle, resistance to apartheid was pre-eminently framed by the politics and theory of NDR. In this chapter I will try to generate the identity of the authentic national subject from the repertoire of images, figures and practices of the theory of NDR. In particular, I will ask: Who, according to this theory, is free?
The theory of NDR may have been the pre-eminent expression of nationalist resistance and organisation in South Africa, but apart from its name, what was nationalist about its discourse? In Chapter 4, I take up this question with regard to the politics of NDR and also that of Black Consciousness. What, if anything, made their respective politics a truly nationalist politics? By carefully reading their respective discourses, I will suggest that both discourses appealed to gendered subjects embedded in particular cultures and languages. Hence, despite appearances, we will see that both posited the citizen as a bearer of marks of population.5
Chapter 5 will argue that the history and practice of the theory of NDR helps us understand the terms of a violent conflict that overcame three townships east of Johannesburg between 1990 and 1994.
Chapter 6 will consider the conditions of a public domain that does not conflate the citizen with an authentic national subject. It will argue that citizens are interpolated into democratic ideology through the practice of democratic institutions. In this way I want to argue for a theory of democracy that locates its conditions in its very practice; instead of seeking them, that is, in either a culture or civilisation (‘Western’ values, for example) that precedes them. Here the conditions of democracy refer to: (a) the circumstances around which formal democratic institutions are established (their production), and (b) the situation that needs to prevail for them to function effectively over the long term (their reproduction).
Chapter 7 will pursue the conditions of a non-national imaginary by considering the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We will see that one of the key tasks of the commission was to identify and establish the basis for national unity. At stake was the principle of identity or commonality among South Africans as a ‘nation-people’. In the commission’s very failure we will identify another principle of political community – a principle that is not national.
The concluding chapter will pose further the conditions of democracy as a society by asking how such a demos might generate its own limit. A meaningful discussion about the democratic limit or boundary is only now beginning. Chantal Mouffe, for example, has recently argued that democracy always entails relations of inclusion–exclusion that speak to a notion of the political frontier. One of the key problems of democratic theory, she suggests, has been its inability to conceptualise such a limit (Mouffe, 2000: 43). This has not, until recently, seemed an urgent task. The reason, I imagine, is largely political: the figure of the citizen has, historically, been deemed either a resident of a nation or of the world. Nation–world are the two poles that have exhausted the democratic imaginary. Yet over the last two decades, both identities have become increasingly unsettled. In the first place, the collapse of ‘really existing’6