The Social and Political Thought of Archie Mafeje. Bongani Nyoka
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The Social and Political Thought of Archie Mafeje
The Social and Political Thought of Archie Mafeje
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg 2001
Copyright © Bongani Nyoka 2020
Published edition © Wits University Press 2020
Cover image: Archie Mafeje in Darling Street, Cape Town, 1961. Photographer unknown, with kind permission from Margaret Green.
First published 2020
http://dx.doi.org.10.18772/12020095942
978-1-77614-594-2 (Paperback)
978-1-77614-598-0 (Hardback)
978-1-77614-595-9 (Web PDF)
978-1-77614-596-6 (EPUB)
978-1-77614-597-3 (Mobi)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic mechanical photocopying recording or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
Project manager: Alison Lockhart
Editor: Monica Seeber
Copyeditor: Alison Lockhart
Proofreader: Lee Smith
Indexer: Marlene Burger
Cover design: Hybrid Creative
Typeset in 11.5 point Crimson
To my paternal grandmother, Nonzwakazi Nobanzi Ntuli (1918–2001), and my mother, Nomsa Mtsaka
Contents
Part I: A Critique of the Social Sciences
1From Functionalism to Radical Social Science
3Reading Mafeje’s The Theory and Ethnography of African Social Formations
Part II: On Land and Agrarian Issues in Sub-Saharan Africa
4The Land and Agrarian Question
5Peasants, Food Security and Poverty Eradication
Part III: On Revolutionary Theory and Politics
6Neocolonialism, State Capitalism and Underdevelopment
7Liberation Struggles in South Africa
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the generous support of many individuals and institutions. For financial support, my thanks are due to the Academic and Non-Fiction Authors’ Association of South Africa (ANFASA) and the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS).
I am equally grateful to the Wits University Press team, particularly Roshan Cader and Kirsten Perkins. I would like also to thank Alison Lockhart who proficiently managed this book project. I owe a special debt to my editor, Monica Seeber, who addressed the manuscript with perspicacity and professionalism.
A shorter and somewhat different version of chapter 7 appeared in the journal Social Dynamics in 2020
I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to Jimi Adesina, who not only introduced me to African scholarship when I was an undergraduate student, but also supervised both my Master’s and doctoral theses.
I must express my gratitude to Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu for advice and assistance at various stages of preparing the manuscript. I am grateful also to Michael Cross and Bongani Ngqulunga. I cannot forget to thank Patrick Mlangeni who drew the pre-colonial map of the Great Lakes region that appears in this book.
Naturally, all remaining errors in this book are entirely my own.
Bongani Nyoka
Tshwane
April 2020
Introduction
Aspectre is haunting the South African academy, the spectre of knowledge decolonisation. Academics and university students are calling for decolonisation, but what they call brilliant is not new, and what they call new is not brilliant. As early as the nineteenth century, the South African poet William Wellington Gqoba grappled with the impact of Western education on black people; in the early twentieth century, Benedict Wallet Vilakazi and Herbert Isaac Ernest Dhlomo were debating the role of language and modernity in South Africa. Equally, the works of Cheikh Anta Diop on sources of knowledge and social history, Kenneth Onwuka Dike on African historiography and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o on language and decolonising the mind point to a longer genealogy of outstanding work on decolonisation discourse and a critique of Eurocentrism. In South Africa, mainstream social scientists in the 1980s and 1990s were talking about reform, while in the 2000s they were talking about transformation – but throughout the 1990s and 2000s, other voices, alternative to the mainstream, were talking about the Africanisation and the indigenisation of knowledge.
These ideas – reform, transformation, Africanisation, indigenisation – continue to this day, but the idea of decolonisation has gained more traction than any of them.1 All the same, the inability to transcend the call and to get into the actual business of decolonising means that the call itself has taken on a life of its own. It is what I call the politics of suspension; talking about decolonisation for so long without engaging in the actual process means that the term loses its content and becomes irrelevant. It is also what I call epistemic posturing, for talking about the need to engage in knowledge decolonisation is not itself the act of decolonising knowledge – nor does it constitute a rupture with old knowledge systems. Eurocentrism has long been an object of critical analysis by African scholars, so to speak of Eurocentrism and coloniality in the social sciences is at this point merely to state the obvious.
In this book, when talking about knowledge and epistemological decolonisation, I refer to tapping into the African knowledge archive. I use the term in a narrow sense to refer to engaging with the works of African scholars and in a broad sense include taking seriously what Jimi Adesina calls the ‘ontological discourses and narratives’ of African people.2 In other words, I use the term to mean generating theoretical insights from the lived experiences of African people, rather than importing theory in order to understand them. Based on these two senses, this volume shifts the discussion from talking about decolonising