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5398 results in Wits University Press

Page 256 of 270

  • 12 - Ufikile! Udubulesendlwini bac'ol'i nto emnyango! Kuse beyifanisa (New Year) It's here! Find-at-the-Door-What-you-Shot-from-Inside and only later identified! (New Year)

  • Nontsizi Mgqwetho
  • Edited and translated by Jeff Opland
  • Translated by Phyllis Ntantala, Abner Nyamende
  • Book:
    Nation's Bounty
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    11 June 2019
    Print publication:
    01 June 2007, pp 70-75

  • Summary

    Hail, 1924, we offer you greetings,

    Dusky one with beetling brows.

    Bear your report to the One on High,

    plead our case in elegant terms.

    Peace! Oh, peace, 1924!

    Behold the risen star;

    let it alight on Maxeke, B.A.,

    the only man who knows the fords.

    Once he confused us by stumbling in starting,

    urging return to battle.

    Son of Maxeke, blaze a new trail

    until King George sets his seal.

    You raised the dust by stumbling in starting,

    next thing we knew the cops had the cuffs on us.

    Without seeming to do so I've sung your praises.

    Oh I blundered in going to whites!

    Africans, listen to what I've told you!

    Will the years roll by and leave you

    to die like locusts on blades of grass,

    with pendulous jowls like the whites you serve?

    Come back this year, Greybeard of ours,

    you've sung the songs of the years.

    Don't brag clasping cash that you'll never be penniless.

    Look closely at 1924.

    Thank God, Thunder-and-they-shudder,

    another year dies but we're still alive.

    Awu! Peace then, Father of even the tadpole,

    stop our foes from breaching our ridges!

    We salute you, 1924,

    white-flanked kite of far-flung Africa,

    stand tall like the ironwood safe from the axe,

    thrust with your spear till rivers run dry.

    Greybeard of ours, will the rolling years

    leave you rooted to one spot?

    Instruct your boys to return to battle:

    hyenas ravage our royal sons.

    We praise you, 1923,

    great fosterhome for babies.

    Quiet! No troubles all the year through!

    Mercy then, Elephant browsing back home.

    Make no mistake, 1924,

    we Africans travel well armed,

    we modern poets don't lounge about:

    dogs will devour you on our turf.

    If you send us in search of the causes

    we'd learn all and have your head.

    Look both ways on leaving home,

    avoid hyenas going back to their lairs.

    But rise, New Year star,

    leave your nursing kraal, increase the herds:

    yours is the kingdom, 1924,

    today the people are yours.

    Break the mould of years gone by:

    bring southern Africa something new,

    bellow at splotches of mud,

    bellow at bulls of distant lands.

    We salute you, 1924,

    mist on the Drakensberg, heavenly snow;

    fountain of unity, course down ravines,

    bank your clouds over Africa.

  • 99 - Vumani! Siyavuma!! “Agree!” “Agreed!!”

  • Nontsizi Mgqwetho
  • Edited and translated by Jeff Opland
  • Translated by Phyllis Ntantala, Abner Nyamende
  • Book:
    Nation's Bounty
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    11 June 2019
    Print publication:
    01 June 2007, pp 428-431

  • Summary

    If you should forsake Jehovah and serve foreign gods, then he will turn and do you harm: Agreed! So come back this year, Greybeard of ours—you've attained your heart's desires. Please seek another ford to lead the nation across, because we don't want a ford that will shatter our wagons: heaven's pillars can tumble after blacks raise their voices in dance at the gates of Zion. You've said it, Chizama, cow with an antelope's wisdom.

    Sing a song to God Almighty,

    glorify and praise him highly,

    sing, all you old and young,

    sing a new song now.

    This great king will be honoured,

    while other gods are toppled.

    May everyone invoke him widely,

    this great Maker who made all.

    Agreed!

    There Joshua's telling us

    to spurn strange gods on pain of death.

    We toyed with God while whites looked on:

    today our country's affliction itself.

    Agreed!

    Ah, the sorrow that siezes your land, Nontsizi,

    all the things that bring us grief,

    recalling our old Mgqwetho kin

    wrapped in blankets of skin.

    Agreed!

    Let yesterday's gods pass away:

    their ways ripped out our hearts,

    and so we don't know who we are

    and our God has completely forsaken us.

    Agreed!

    Today a host of blacks

    have drawn apart from their customs:

    they drove them from their homes

    in the heat of the summer sun.

    Agreed!

    You see, my people, we're old,

    truth threw us long ago;

    my people, we need to be planted and watered

    to bring forth the spirit of nationhood.

    Agreed!

    Agree, herders of Sandile's cattle,

    Mshweshwe's and Langalibalele's,

    mimosas that twisted in falling.

    That rising sun made me think of Shaka.

    Mercy, Africa, strife-torn land!

    There's little indeed we can take for the truth.

    Nitpicking poets, I say,

    ignore the grain that pecks the chicken.

    All of you know what's going on:

    you're patently ringed by lies.

    Seek the truth from those above,

    who died both here and in the water.

    You're the Great God of heaven,

    surpassing the white man's cannon.

    You're you, the fortress of truth,

    you're our defence, shield of truth.

  • 73 - Qengqa!-Elolitye!! (Easter) Roll back the stone! (Easter)

  • Nontsizi Mgqwetho
  • Edited and translated by Jeff Opland
  • Translated by Phyllis Ntantala, Abner Nyamende
  • Book:
    Nation's Bounty
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    11 June 2019
    Print publication:
    01 June 2007, pp 324-327

  • Summary

    What now, great python, Death?

    The One on High laid you low today;

    through Adam we once were forsaken

    but today we're saved through Jesus.

    People, praise him today, he has risen,

    he, who was dead, rolled back the stone.

    Death, where then is your sting?

    Your bow and arrows are broken.

    Wake, cascade of praise in Africa,

    incite Tanganyika wastelands,

    spread the news of the Templars,

    call out lest we forget.

    Who are these soldiers arrayed in rank,

    with swords at the ready watching that grave?

    We took our sticks and joined the crowd

    in search of this long-renowned Christ.

    This Christ who shattered the tree of the cross,

    crushed its head and made it a trophy,

    called to those who took to the hills

    to tell them the tale of these sources of mercy.

    The dumb spoke in Decapolis,

    the eyes of the blind were opened in Jericho.

    He has risen and nations praise him;

    through these triumphs, all strength to him.

    Wake, Africa, join in the victory song:

    through him you conquer your enemies.

    He's completely restored your liberty:

    honour this hero in song.

    What now, great python, Death?

    The One on High laid you low today.

    There is Satan in shackles.

    The ancient serpent's trampled.

    He's risen and with him all life,

    to put an end to all death.

    Spread the news right up to Tugela:

    here is this long-renowned Christ.

    He's risen and Mary with him:

    in the far Kalahari I heard the news.

    Elephant browsing the tops, how you fought

    for all the beauty of heaven and earth!

    The world took fright when this judge arose,

    the pillars of every grave shattered,

    the stone was rolled back and laid down there

    and the Jews were thrashed and scorched.

    So he's calling, “Wake up, sinners,

    cast off sin and the Slanderer's stubbornness.

    There's no compassion, no absolution,

    there is no mercy on the Day of Wrath.

    Wake up!!”

  • 8 - Ingxoxo yo Mginwa ku Magqoboka! A Red debates with Christians

  • Nontsizi Mgqwetho
  • Edited and translated by Jeff Opland
  • Translated by Phyllis Ntantala, Abner Nyamende
  • Book:
    Nation's Bounty
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    11 June 2019
    Print publication:
    01 June 2007, pp 50-53

  • Summary

    Where are your daughters? What do you say?

    They crossed the land in search of marriage,

    shamelessly shacked up with live-in lovers,

    cavorted in dances with young men in New Clare.

    With eyes of porridge their mothers bemoan

    their absent children, who left them standing,

    advising blank air and pleading in vain

    with sons and daughters who've all been to school.

    Jails crammed to capacity, courts jam-packed

    with the learned products of school education;

    the judges in charge just hoot in derision

    at college certificates brandished by bums.

    All our crooks are in school,

    all our thieves are in school,

    all our witches in school:

    by Nontsizi, I swear you should all be expelled!

    You wear red blankets in God's very house,

    you're Christians by day, hyenas by night;

    the pastor, the shepherd of God's own flock,

    scurries past you without a nod.

    What do we make of this curious conduct?

    Which voice do we choose from among this babble?

    Pride is one of your Christian companions,

    God wears a cloak of crocodile hide.

    You Christians are suckers for every fad,

    you cast off skin garments and dressed up like whites,

    your ears are tinkling for white man's booze,

    but whites won't touch a drop of yours.

    Every Sunday you romp on the veld,

    kicking a football, whacking a racquet,

    clothing your shame in the name of God:

    Satan's struck dumb in amazement.

    You're bereft of love, bereft of all,

    yet you proclaim a God of love:

    that faith of yours stands just as tall

    as I do down on my knees.

    If you ever try to come near us again,

    we Reds will roast you like meat.

    But I'm not saying the word of God

    is entirely barren of truth.

    Peace!

  • Chapter 4 - The South African Nation

  • Ivor Chipkin
  • Book:
    Do South Africans Exist?
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    30 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 April 2007, pp 99-120

  • Summary

    This chapter will argue that what made the politics of national democratic revolution a nationalist politics was that it posited the citizen as necessarily a member of a nation – as a bearer, in other words, of some or other quality of population. To get sense of our task, let us begin this investigation with a well-known speech of Thabo Mbeki, given on behalf of the African National Congress on the occasion of the adoption of the Constitution in Cape Town in May 1996. In ‘I Am an African’, Mbeki states:

    I owe my being to the Khoi and the San whose desolate souls haunt the great expanses of the beautiful Cape. … I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new home on our native land. … In my veins courses the blood of the Malay slaves who came from the East. … I am the grandchild of the warrior men and women that Hintsa and Sekhukhune led, the patriots Cetshwayo and Mpephu took to battle, the soldiers Moshoeshoe and Ngungunyane taught never to dishonour the cause of freedom. My mind and my knowledge of myself is formed by the victories that are the jewels in our African crown, the victories we earned from Isandhlwana to Khartoum, as Ethiopians and as the Ashanti of Ghana, as the Berbers of the desert. I am the grandchild that lays fresh flowers on the Boer graves at St Helena and the Bahamas … I am the child of Nongqause. … I come from those who were transported from India and China (Mbeki, 1998: 31–32).

    These lines, treating the identity of the African, are punctuated with the following declaration (and elsewhere, something very similar): ‘Being part of all these people, and in the knowledge that none dare contest the assertion, I shall claim that I am an African!’ (Mbeki, 1998: 32). Here Mbeki deliberately invokes a term that, in the context, is profoundly ambiguous. Why does he declare ‘I am an African’ instead of ‘I am a South African’? Why does his verse slide between allusions to the continent in general and to South Africa specifically? The South African people, that is, are also the people of the continent of Africa.

  • Chapter 3 - African Nationalism in South Africa

  • Ivor Chipkin
  • Book:
    Do South Africans Exist?
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    30 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 April 2007, pp 63-98

  • Summary

    National democratic discourse since the mid-1950s has been the preeminent expression of anti-colonial nationalism in South Africa. The year 1955 is, schematically, a moment of rupture. At least until the end of the 1940s, opposition to racial segregation and apartheid was framed in the terms of Cape liberalism and Christianity. More radical expressions of dissent found expression, not so much in and through the politics of Pan-Africanism, than in terms of Garveyism (Walshe, 1973: 24). Within the African National Congress (ANC), Garveyite ideas were especially influential in the organisation's Youth League. As late as 1948, for example, the ‘Basic Policy of the Congress Youth League’ included the Garveyite slogan ‘Africa for the Africans’, though other more-militant slogans proved to be unpopular.

    A mere seven years later, there had been a sea change in the trajectory and form of nationalist struggle. We can get a sense of it by comparing the Youth League slogan above with the key statement of the Freedom Charter, adopted at the Congress of the People in June 1955. ‘South Africa belongs to all those who live in it, white and black,’ it proclaimed. Yet ambivalence regarding Garveyism within the ANC could already be detected as early as 1943. In that year, the ANC issued ‘Africans’ Claims’, the organisation's reaction to the Atlantic Charter signed in 1941. ‘Africans’ Claims’ called for the granting to Africans of ‘full citizenship rights such as are enjoyed by all Europeans in South Africa’ (ANC, 1943). It envisaged a cosmopolitan community composed of Africans and Europeans, and in this sense anticipated the Freedom Charter by more than a decade. Yet there is an important difference between the Freedom Charter and ‘Africans’ Claims’. If the latter reflected a brief (and perhaps expedient) engagement with liberalism, the Freedom Charter suggested the growing influence of Communists in the alliance, the rising importance of Marxist-Leninist concepts and terms and, most importantly, the emergence of the theory of national democratic revolution (NDR; see below) as the pre-eminent expression of African nationalism in South Africa. Today, although its concepts and practices are increasingly giving way to others, NDR's vocabulary continues to inform ANC policy statements and its lexicon, i.e. the dayto- day language of politicians and senior government officials.

  • Chapter 7 - The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Identity of ‘the People’

  • Ivor Chipkin
  • Book:
    Do South Africans Exist?
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    30 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 April 2007, pp 173-188

  • Summary

    We [the TRC commissioners] were certainly authentic in reflecting the alienations, chasms and suspicions that were part and parcel of our apartheid society. We were a useful paradigm for our nation for if we could eventually be welded into a reasonably coherent, united and reconciled group then there was hope for South Africa.

    Archbishop Desmond Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness (1999: 70–71)

    Underlying the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was an ontological imperative. Reconciliation was not simply to be achieved through a process of catharsis through truth telling. More importantly, the TRC sought to provide a principle of commonality that would ground South Africans, despite their differences of culture, religion, language and race, as a people. In other words, reconciliation was not simply to be achieved by ‘help[ing] the nation both to deal with its painful past and to move on to a more democratic future’ (Gibson, 2004); it was to be achieved by determining the basis on which to found South Africans as a nation in the first place. We might recall Immanuel Wallerstein's famous question about India: ‘Does India exist?’ (Wallerstein, 1991). In a similar vein, we might say that the challenge of the TRC was to overcome the worry that the South African people did not actually exist.

    Citizenship and its limits

    Shortly after the transition from white minority rule, once the process of working out the constitutional and political arrangements for the new dispensation was completed, and the first democratic election was concluded, there was an urgent drive to define the basis for South Africa's unity as a people. On what grounds, in other words, were South Africans a single people? Nor was this question trifling: it cut to the heart of the political settlement.

    Firstly, the idea that South Africans formed a people made it sensible to think about the time after apartheid as the time of a single, unitary state. Secondly, it was self-evident that the people of Namibia, say (or a citizen of any other country) were not South Africans. In other words, and inversely, South Africans were their own people seeking self-determination in their own state. South Africa belonged not to everyone, but to South Africans.

  • Conclusion: Notes Towards a Theory of the Democratic Limit

  • Ivor Chipkin
  • Book:
    Do South Africans Exist?
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    30 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 April 2007, pp 189-220

  • Summary

    A meaningful discussion about the democratic limit or boundary is only now beginning. In South Africa, the political transition from apartheid to democracy keeps running up against the substance of ‘the people’. In the absence of any traditional unifying principles (of language, culture, religion, race, and so on), the identity of South Africans is elusive. We might note too that much of the cosmopolitan literature on democracy appeals to a shift in scale, from the territorial state to the world, or globe, or even planet. Yet, says John Agnew, such appeals have important consequences for democracy without properly theorising them. He argues that:

    the only way that they [supporters of cosmopolitanism] can conceive of world citizenship without opening up to question the founding condition of democratic theory – the presumption of a territorialized political community – is by ‘scaling up’ from individual states to the world as a whole (Agnew, 2005: 439).

    The merit of Chantal Mouffe's work is that she has recently broached the question of the democratic limit with a view, precisely, to theorising it. She argues that democracy always entails relations of inclusion exclusion that speak to a notion of the political frontier (Mouffe, 2000: 43). One of the key problems of democratic theory, she suggests, has been its inability to conceptualise such a limit (p. 43). This has not, until recently, seemed an urgent task. The reason, one can imagine, is largely political. The figure of the citizen has, historically, been deemed either a resident of a nation or of the world, so that 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’ socialist states and the associated crisis of Marxism have disturbed the prospect of internationalism. In the second, feminist and multicultural critiques of the nation have inspired thinking about new forms of political community. More and more, writers have been drawn together around the notion of cosmopolitanism. It is in this context that there is growing interest in a principle of political demarcation, a principle of the frontier, that can simultaneously discriminate between citizens and non-citizens, but in a way that is not discriminatory.

  • Chapter 1 - The Nature of African Nationalism

  • Ivor Chipkin
  • Book:
    Do South Africans Exist?
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    30 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 April 2007, pp 17-40

  • Summary

    In 1991 the historian Saul Dubow declared that ‘in recent years our historical understanding of Afrikaner nationalism [in South Africa] has been transformed’ (Dubow, 1991: 1). ‘We now have’, he continues, ‘a much deeper understanding of the ways in which Afrikaner identity was forged from the late nineteenth century, and the means by which Afrikaner ethnicity was mobilised in order to capture state power in the twentieth century’ (p. 1). What remained, he suggests, were certain gaps in the historical record. These omissions were a result of a general amnesia about the place of racist ideas in Christian thought. They also reflected, he suggests, the pre-eminence of a Marxist scholarship fearful of ‘idealism’. Marxist scholars were not interested in questions of ideology and culture on their own terms. ‘The ideology of race’, Dubow observes, ‘has therefore tended to be discussed in terms of its functional utility: … the extent to which racist ideas can be said to express underlying class interests’ (p. 1). Dubow had in mind the tradition of radical political economy that announced itself so boldly in the mid-1970s.

    In September 1976, just three months after the beginning of a massive student revolt in Soweto, the Review of African Political Economy published a special edition on South Africa. It contained several essays that would partly define the terms of South African studies for at least the next ten years. Of especial importance was an article on the state by Robert Davies, David Kaplan, Mike Morris and Dan O'Meara. Applying theoretical developments within French Marxism to a periodisation of the form of the state in South Africa, the authors explored what they called the secondary contradictions of the social formation. They argued that the form of the state was given, in addition to the primary contradiction between workers and capitalists, by struggles for hegemony between different fractions of capital itself (Davies et. al., 1976). Between 1920 and 1948, they argued, the critical division within the capitalist class was between imperialist/foreign capital(s) on the one hand and national capital(s) on the other (p. 29). At stake was whether ‘South Africa was to remain an economic chattel of imperialism or to generate its own national capitalist development’ (p. 29). The ‘unique’ feature of South Africa, they concluded, was the early hegemony that national capital exercised in the state.

  • Chapter 6 - The Production of the Public Domain

  • Ivor Chipkin
  • Book:
    Do South Africans Exist?
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    30 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 April 2007, pp 151-172

  • Summary

    Let us move beyond critique here. What this chapter will do is consider the conditions of a democratic public domain that does not, ultimately, conflate the citizen with an authentic national subject. Although the implications of this argument are not confined to South Africa, the chapter will again refer to South African examples. The intention is not so much to consider the theoretical conditions of the public domain as to examine the conditions of its theoretical practice. The chapter will suggest that the citizen is such when called upon to act socially in the public domain; in other words, the public space is a domain of normative action. As such, the conditions of the public domain are twofold: firstly, a set of institutions and practices that allow for social interests to be expressed politically; and secondly, a political space that captures and holds persons to social, i.e. ethical standards of behaviour. If these are, abstractly speaking, the conditions of the public domain, then the concrete, historical conditions of such a space cannot be stated in advance. They will depend on the peculiar history of the societies in which they are being produced – their particular political traditions, customs and fashions – and their availability to some ideas and practices and not to others. If we are to move beyond a critique of nationalism to posit the conditions of the public domain, then we cannot remain in the abstract. The conditions of the democratic space must be specified in the concrete and contingent.

    Measuring the Reconstruction and Development Programme

    Much has been written about the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) with regard to its origin, its implementation, the competing political interests that it attempted to reconcile and ultimately its jettison, at least in practice, if not in words. What has not been adequately explored is the gauge of development that it appealed to. Now, in this regard the RDP White Paper was quite explicit. Reconstruction and development were intended to create ‘a people-centred society which measures progress by the extent to which it has succeeded in securing for each citizen liberty, prosperity and happiness’ (Republic of South Africa, 1994, sec. 1.1.1).

  • Chapter 5 - The Impossibility of the National Community

  • Ivor Chipkin
  • Book:
    Do South Africans Exist?
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    30 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 April 2007, pp 121-150

  • Summary

    This chapter will argue that nationalist politics is driven to exclude and ultimately even repress those that defy its terms. In intending a ‘free people’, where freedom is incarnate in a specific personality/figure, nationalists must at best ignore, at worst destroy those that do not resemble the national being. Instead of a theoretical proof of this claim, however, the chapter will show how this perspective helps us grasp the logic of a violent conflict that overcame three townships east of Johannesburg between 1990 and 1994. What concerns us will be the conditions or terms of the violence. How did the violence take the form of a conflict between hostel-based, mostly Zulu migrant workers and township youth organised in and through civic structures and youth organisations? What the chapter will suggest is that as the politics of NDR become dominant in the 1980s, two things occurred simultaneously:

  • • firstly, migrant workers, before then the most active and militant trade unionists, were increasingly alienated by the new unionism; and

  • • secondly, their estrangement from politics was overdetermined by a crisis in the management of hostels, a taxi war and the unbanning of the ANC that transformed the phenomenon of growing political distance into arguably the most bloody urban war in the history of South Africa.

    • The chapter will consider this double movement: estrangement and, ultimately, war. The first movement it will situate in the rise of NDR trade unionism on the East Rand. Hostel dwellers, who had until then been among the most militant of the trade unions’ members, were increasingly overlooked by Cosatu officials and ultimately alienated by the new style of unionism. We will see how the growing political distance between, in the main, Zulu migrant workers and the new ‘social movement’ unions began the migrant workers’ estrangement from the larger township community. Rather than the product of a long-standing cultural difference or the effect of the particular nature of the hostels, we shall see how this estrangement was brought about by the inability of many Zulus to accept the nationalist politics of NDR. In contrast, we will notice that under the auspices of Fosatu, being a (‘traditional’) Zulu was not a logical obstacle to behaving as a democrat.

  • Chapter 2 - The Democratic Origin of Nations

  • Ivor Chipkin
  • Book:
    Do South Africans Exist?
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    30 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 April 2007, pp 41-62

  • Summary

    It has been suggested that the nationalist imaginary must be understood as a particular democratic imaginary. More precisely, nationalism is a response to the question of democracy par excellence: Who are ‘the people’ in whom sovereignty is vested? This relationship between the nation and the democratic imaginary is easily overlooked if the nation is conceived of as, above all, a cultural artefact; worse, if culture is opposed to the political. This is what happens in The Nation and Its Fragments, Partha Chatterjee's (1993) discussion of post-colonial nationalism in Asia. His argument is that anti-colonial nationalism is unlike European nationalism, precisely because it does not imagine the space of the nation as a political domain. This is an important claim that needs to be addressed.

    Chatterjee starts by acknowledging the importance of Benedict Anderson's influential book, Imagined Communities (1991) for animating fresh discussion about nationalism. ‘I have one central objection to Anderson's argument,’ Chatterjee writes. ‘If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain “modular” forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine?’ (Chatterjee, 1993: 5). He is worried that Anderson, in a long tradition of European orientalism, denies agency to non-Europeans and/or non-Americans. ‘History, it would seem,’ he writes sarcastically,

    has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity. Europe and the Americas, the only true subjects of history, have thought out on our behalf not only the script of colonial enlightenment and exploitation, but also that of our anticolonial resistance and postcolonial misery. Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized (Chatterjee, 1993: 5).

    Might Michel Foucault not have, in all seriousness, replied, ‘Yes, as a postcolonial subject, you are indeed a perpetual consumer of modernity’? Let us recall Foucault's argument about disciplinary apparatuses, at least in Discipline and Punish (1979) and the first volume of the History of Sexuality (1998): that the very things such apparatuses seek to discipline and control are already their effects. We are told over and over again, for example, that during the nineteenth century, efforts to control and discipline sexuality resulted in its proliferation. Slavoj Zizek extends the logic of this argument to the field of colonialism.

  • Introduction: The Sublime Object of Nationalism

  • Ivor Chipkin
  • Book:
    Do South Africans Exist?
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    30 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 April 2007, pp 1-16

  • Summary

    This book sets out to address a gap in contemporary studies of nationalism and the nation. Despite the extraordinary growth of articles and books about nationalism and nations over the last 20 years, critical studies of African nationalism are not reflected in this literature. This is surprising for two reasons. In the first place, resistance to European colonialism usually happened in the name of nationalism and in pursuit of independent African nation states. In the second place, the pursuit of independent African nation states was not the only form that resistance to colonialism took.

    Opposition to French colonialism, in particular, sought not so much the dissolution of empire as its democratisation. Before his conversion to nationalism, Leopold Senghor, the first president of independent Senegal, was a deputy in the French National Assembly. He only reluctantly sought independence for his country (Meredith, 2005). Closer to home, we will find in the figure of Sol Plaatje an ambivalence towards the British Empire. On the one hand, he railed against its injustices; on the other hand, he thought of himself as a loyal subject of the British crown (Willan, 2001).

    What this means is that it is necessary to account for the rise of nationalism – and African nationalism in particular – as the preeminent form of resistance to colonialism and apartheid. This vision of what freedom from colonialism might look like has itself been a victim of nationalist mythologies, which narrate the story of an African people oppressed and exploited by foreign ones. Here, ‘the people’ are taken as something that preceded the period of nationalist struggle. What this conceals, however, is how an African people came into being in the first place. This book addresses itself to this question in the South African context.

    The book will argue that African peoples emerged primarily in and though the process of nationalist resistance to colonialism. Here we must distinguish between the people as datum and the people as political subject. In the first case, the term ‘the people’ refers to an empirical collection of individuals in a given geography; in the second, it refers to a collectivity organised in pursuit of a political end.

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