Do South Africans Exist?. Ivor Chipkin
academic scene and Poulantzas was dead. Moreover, social history was on the ascendancy.
We might reasonably suppose that in this environment, Dubow looked forward to new studies of nationalism, including African nationalism. He had reason to be optimistic: in 1987 Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido had edited a collection of essays that were published together as The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa. In their introduction, Marks and Trapido offered a continuous historical narrative as a first step towards accounting for nationalism and ethnicity in a synthesis of twentieth-century South African history. The book was an invitation to further research.
With the hindsight of more than a decade, we are obliged, unfortunately, to conclude that Dubow’s optimism was nothing more than that. It is true that around about the time of his article a few new studies emerged on Zulu nationalism.2 These were exceptions, however. Apart from a few journal articles, most of them published as part of the Marks and Trapido collection mentioned above, the last major studies of African nationalism in South Africa were published in the 1970s: Black Nationalism in South Africa by Peter Walshe came out in 1973; the most recent edition of Black Power in South Africa by Gail Gerhart was published in 1979; and Eddie Roux’s Time Longer than Rope was even older, first appearing in 1964. Roux’s text is typical of the way that African nationalism has been construed in South Africa, even in the later Marks and Trapido study, and its sub-title is instructive: A History of the Black Man’s Struggle for Freedom in South Africa. African nationalism has been defined in terms of resistance to colonialism, racial segregation and apartheid. Scholars, moreover, have been ready to accept a person’s or an organisation’s own designation as nationalist on their own terms: if they identified themselves as nationalists, that is what they were taken to be. What, however, was nationalist as such about the form of their resistance? This question has never been addressed in South Africa. It is a question, moreover, to which there are only disparate answers when it comes to African nationalism more generally.
The vast majority of studies of African nationalism date from the period of decolonisation, between the 1950s and 1970s. Among the earliest and still the most important of these texts is Thomas Hodgkin’s Nationalism in Colonial Africa. It first appeared in 1958, and was already in its sixth edition ten years later. When it appeared, readers were familiar with political revolts – Hodgkin (1968: 10) calls them ‘explosions’, to give a sense of their sudden violence – in Nigeria, the Gold Coast (today Ghana), the Sudan, French West Africa (especially the Ivory Coast) and South Africa (presumably, the Defiance Campaign). Even more ‘tranquil’ territories like Northern Rhodesia (today Zambia), Nyasaland (Malawi), French Equatorial Africa and the Cameroons were in an ‘eruptive state’ (p. 11). Readers had also witnessed new self-governing, if not fully sovereign, states emerge in Africa. In 1956 the Sudan declared its independence, refusing a constitutional link with Egypt. Formerly Italian Eritrea had since 1952 become an autonomous territory within the federal Ethiopian Empire. The Gold Coast was on the verge of independence; so too were parts of Nigeria. The year 1956, Hodgkin wrote, ‘has been noted in the diaries of British West African politicians as the year of decision’ (p. 11). In 1957 the independent state of Ghana came into being. Then, in 1960, Cameroon, Togo, Mali, Senegal, Malagasy, the Congo Republic (Belgian), Somalia (Italian and British), Dahomey, Niger, Upper Volta, Ivory Coast, Chad, the Central African Republic, the Congo Republic (French), Gabon, Nigeria and Mauretania became independent. In total, 17 new countries appeared within months of each other. The following year, Sierra Leone was declared independent, as was Tanganyika. In 1962 Ruanda (Rwanda) and Burundi became independent; so too did Algeria and Uganda. In 1963 Nigeria became a republic and Kenya a sovereign state. Malawi followed in 1964; Northern Rhodesia became independent Zambia. And 1964 also saw the emergence of Tanzania from the union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar.
In this context, studies of African nationalism usually documented resistance to colonial rule. The term ‘African nationalism’ was used interchangeably with several other expressions: anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, ‘Black Protest’ and ‘National Liberation’. Such studies showed a fundamental preoccupation with struggle; and struggle against colonialism in particular. They read two terms together: nationalism and independence.
‘My own inclination’, writes Hodgkin,
is to use the term ‘nationalist’ in a broad sense, to describe any organisation or group that explicitly asserts the rights, claims and aspirations of a given African society … in opposition to European authority, whatever its institutional form and objectives (emphasis added) (Hodgkin, 1968: 23).
Hodgkin defended his methodology against those who wanted to be more circumspect in their use of the term. There are those, he observes, who ‘describe only those types of organisation which are essentially political, not religious, economic or educational, in character, and which have as their object the realisation of self-government or independence for a recognisable African nation, or nation-to-be’. Yet, he continues, to restrict the use of the term in this way seems to raise two difficulties. Firstly, it tends to conceal the ‘mixed-up’ character of African political movements. ‘In a single African territory’, he continues,
it is possible to find coexisting a diversity of organisations, of different types, with different objectives, operating at different levels, each in its own way expressing opposition to European control and a demand for new liberties; and to discover a network of relationships between these organisations (Hodgkin, 1968: 24).
Some might be political organisations seeking independence for the ‘nation’; others, messianic movements; still others, church groupings; tribal associations; or trade unions. These diverse organisations, Hodgkin insists, were only intelligible in relation to ‘a single historical process, of nationalist awakening, to which they all belonged’ (Hodgkin, 1968: 25). If one did not see them as ‘variations on a single theme’ then one was bound to conclude that nationalism was non-existent in places where ‘nationalist aspirations have not yet begun to express themselves in the language of separatism’ (p. 25). Hodgkin was thinking here of the Belgian Congo, which he describes as being in a state of ‘incipient nationalism’ (p. 25). Two years later, he seems to have been proven right: in June 1960 Patrice Lumumba addressed dignitaries at the ceremony marking the independence of the Congo. He juxtaposed nationalism and independence in the very way that Hodgkin suggested was meaningful:
Your Majesty, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentleman, Congolese men and women, Fighters for independence who today are victorious, I salute you in the name of the Congolese government. … The Republic of Congo has been proclaimed, and our beloved country is now in the hands of its own children. … Homage to the Champions of National Sovereignty! Long Live Independent and Sovereign Congo! (cited in Kohn & Sokolsky, 1965: 118–21).
Yet Hodgkin himself gave reason to be more discerning about what was and what was not a nationalist movement. Nationalism in Colonial Africa is, in part, a study of new forms of urban association. Part II of the books considers the ‘new towns’ of Africa – ‘great, amorphous, squalid agglomération urbaine’ (Hodgkin, 1968: 64) – where, Hodgkin tells us, a new ‘indigenous civilisation’ is being created (p. 83). It is there that he locates the rise of African nationalism, in some of the ‘characteristic institutions of this new civilisation’ (p. 83). What is novel about this civilisation, according to Hodgkin, is its peculiar urban form: ‘By mixing men from a variety of social backgrounds’, he explains,
[the new towns] make possible the discovery of new points of contact and interest. Around these interests there develops a network of new associations, through which for the first time men come to think of their problems as social rather than personal; as capable of solution by human action rather than part of the natural order (p. 63; emphasis added).
Hence, he argues,
African towns have this two-fold aspect: seen from one standpoint, they lead to a degradation of African civilisation and ethic; seen from another, they contain the germs of a new, more interesting and diversified civilisation, with the possibilities of greater liberty (p. 63).
African nationalism, according to this account, intends a new African civilisation, one that transcends kinship and ethnicity, where freedom heralds