Читать книгу The Social and Political Thought of Archie Mafeje - Bongani Nyoka - Страница 10

1 | From Functionalism to Radical Social Science

From his high school days in the 1950s Archie Mafeje was a member of the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), later renamed the Unity Movement of South Africa (UMSA), a radical Marxist political organisation. He was therefore versed in classical Marxism and other radical theories. Yet his early work, published as a postgraduate student at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in the early 1960s, is written from the functionalist anthropological perspective fashionable at the time. This suggests that he was a radical Marxist in Unity Movement circles, while steeped in liberal and functionalist anthropology in his academic work – which indicates the bifurcated existence that still afflicts a good number of black students in South African universities today.

His famous essay of 1971, ‘The Ideology of “Tribalism”’, established a radical break with his early liberal functionalism, yet constitutes a thematic critique of anthropological categories, of particular themes or concepts within the social sciences, rather than an all-encompassing critique of the social sciences themselves.¹ Notwithstanding his otherwise compelling critique of the ideology of tribalism, his handling of the concept of tribe has been widely misunderstood. Mafeje did not so much reject the entity of tribe, or claim it was non-existent – he rejected it for being anachronistic. In The Theory and Ethnography of African Social Formations,² he laments this misreading of his work.³ What Mafeje set out to analyse was the ideology of tribalism, as the title of his 1971 essay clearly indicates; the problem lies in his concession that the entity of tribe existed in Africa at an earlier period. Jimi Adesina’s objection is that such a view is not borne out by history or archaeology.⁴ There was always migration, movement and intermingling on the African continent. This was interrupted by colonialism and the implementation of arbitrary colonial borders. I believe it is because of this fact that Mafeje says that Europeans invented tribes in Africa.

Mafeje’s argument turns on four key issues. First, his understanding of the ‘ideology of tribalism’ is that it was European in origin: colonial administrators used it in their policy of divide and rule on the African continent. Second, the ideology of tribalism was used by European social scientists not only to explain conflicts in Africa, but also to rationalise colonialism. Third, African leaders have used it for political ends. Finally, insofar as ordinary Africans came to believe in it, tribalism is false consciousness.

Early functionalist writings

Mafeje began his academic career at UCT in 1957 as an undergraduate student, studying biological sciences, with majors in botany and zoology. But because of his poor academic performance in these subjects, in 1960 he switched from the biological sciences to the social sciences, majoring in social anthropology and psychology. From November 1960 to September 1962, Monica Wilson employed him as a research assistant to carry out ethnographic research in the township of Langa, Cape Town. His field notes led to a book co-written with Wilson, Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township, published by Oxford University Press in 1963. In the same year, Mafeje completed his Master’s degree in social anthropology, his thesis titled ‘Leadership and Change: A Study of Two South African Peasant Communities’. The book on Langa seeks to answer two questions: (i) what are the effective social groups in Langa? and (ii) when and why do they cohere, and when and why do they split or dissolve? The second question, the authors argue, leads to one of the ‘fundamental problems in social anthropology’: what is the basis for the coherence of groups?⁵

Typical of liberal academics, Wilson and Mafeje confess that although South Africa of the 1960s was in a political crisis, they did not ask political questions of their research participants. They attribute this to the banning of the two major political organisations at the time, the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), but there is a sense in which their explanation is misleading. The research began long before Mafeje was hired as Wilson’s assistant. A.R.W. Crosse-Upcott was Wilson’s fieldworker from July 1955 until March 1957, some five years before the ANC and PAC were banned in 1960. So Wilson and Mafeje’s claim that they could not pose political questions ‘because that would have aroused political suspicion’ is a rationalisation after the fact. Nor is there a valid reason why Wilson could not ask political questions during Crosse-Upcott’s tenure as fieldworker. Silence on political issues highlights one of the major problems with liberal anthropological writings – the tendency to pretend to remain neutral in the face of important political developments, often a reflection of a political commitment antagonistic to the demands and objectives of the suppressed group. It is about acquiescence with the oppressor group, even if they disagree on minor issues. This commitment says more about Wilson than Mafeje, even at this early stage.

The theoretical objectivity (assumed neutrality) of liberal functionalist anthropology does not necessarily mean that its practitioners are apolitical. On the contrary, that anthropologists remain silent on matters political in favour of value-free scientific inquiry is itself a political manoeuvre typical of liberal academics. On the pitfalls of liberalism Adesina observes that it has a tendency to acquiesce with injustice and inequity in order to preserve class, race and gender privileges and that the preservation and defence of these privileges is usually in the form of arguing against government encroachment on individual freedom and liberty. In universities, this takes the form of academic and intellectual freedom.⁶

In anthropological writings certain questions – of slavery, conquest, land dispossession, exploitation and oppression – are hardly ever posed. When they are, they receive rather perfunctory treatment. In Bernard Magubane’s view they ‘constitute a historical totality of horror, whose structures are bound together in such a way that any one of them considered separately is an abstraction’.⁷ In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s anthropology and history shared the same problem of abstraction. Magubane observes that ‘what is striking about the historiography of South Africa is that each generation seems to think that history began only yesterday and what happened a day before yesterday is “ancient history” that has no relevance for today’s problems’. Magubane could see, in the discipline of anthropology, a sinister political project, which, in spite of its purported neutrality, was designed to enable colonial administration and apartheid. He recognises that in the colonial situation anthropologists studied Africans as though they were ‘people without history’. Magubane maintains that anthropology became an applied discipline that sought to manage Africans for the purposes of control and exploitation. He contends that although anthropological writings spoke of social change in Africa, they could not account for change because ‘failure to account for change was built into the subject as a theoretical discipline’.⁸ In the eyes of anthropologists, Magubane writes, Africa serves as ‘raw material for anthropological studies’. Because of the ahistorical nature of anthropology, it was unable to account for the changes taking place in Africa since the advent of colonialism, and to the extent that it did, it did so in ethnocentric and mechanistic terms. Anthropological research findings described black people’s behaviour and needs, but overlooked the historical and structural context that gave meaning to those needs. Following C. Wright Mills, Magubane refers to such undialectical and seemingly apolitical analyses as ‘savage neutralism’.⁹

It was because of Mafeje’s participation in the study of Langa that certain of these problems were avoided in his book with Wilson. For example, he uses the terms that research participants used for themselves. Mafeje’s first article, ‘A Chief Visits Town’, is concerned to ‘illustrate the attitude of townspeople in Cape Town to chiefs’.¹⁰ In ‘townspeople’ he includes both black migrant workers and permanent residents. Mafeje is interested in the first group in particular. ‘Migrant workers,’ he reasons, ‘regard themselves as country people and most of them have their families in the country. Their reaction in any given political situation is of particular interest, as it gives the sociologist an opportunity of seeing how the people’s aspirations fit in the government’s policy of increasing the power of Bantu authorities in the country, and appointing chiefs’ representatives in towns or establishing urban Bantu councils.’ In particular, Mafeje sets out to describe the arrival in Cape Town of Chief Zwelihle Mtikrakra, the third chief of abaThembu. Beyond the descriptive nature of the article, its theoretical thrust is that by the 1960s there were no tribes to speak of in South Africa. The absence of tribal entities in South Africa means that, contrary to liberal functionalist anthropology, there is no absolute divide between rural and urban settings – owing to the migrant labour system, the Africans in the countryside were already incorporated into the British colonial state by the end of the nineteenth century and the classification ‘tribe’ is an anachronism. By the time the apartheid government took office, some Xhosa chiefs in Cape Town (such as Chief Joyi) were not only ordinary labourers, but had also transcended ethnic identities in order to fight racial oppression. In his 1963 article, Mafeje notes that Chief Joyi believed that ‘the chief is a chief by the grace of the people’.¹¹ Although Chief Mtikrakra himself was not really well received in Cape Town, and although a certain section of the Langa population regarded chiefs as oomantshingilane (police spies) or government stooges, some chiefs had a ‘chance of acquiring a position in the national struggle, if they are still, as individuals, acceptable to the modern political leaders’.¹² This is a political reality with which anthropological writings had failed to grapple.

Mafeje’s subsequent article, ‘The Role of the Bard in a Contemporary African Community’, was part of his thematic critique of the anthropological anachronism that reduced African societies to tribes.¹³ He uses the English term ‘bard’ interchangeably with, or to translate, the isiXhosa word imbongi because he saw a similarity between imbongi and the bard in medieval Europe.¹⁴ In anthropological literature and linguistics, the bard is reduced to a praise-singer. Mafeje concludes that this is a misplaced assessment because bards are sociopolitical critics more than praise-poets and argues that anthropologists and linguists are ‘over-emphasising the wrong aspect of the institution’.¹⁵ There is a functional difference between bards and individual members of society who compose praise-poems for themselves or their loved ones. Anthropologists saw the difference only in status: those who act as praise-singers as a calling and those who do so for personal reasons. The former have greater political significance while the latter act for self-entertainment. As a result of the seriousness of the institution of imbongi, not every member of society can stand up at public gatherings and recite a poem, either for a chief or the general public. Those who do might do so for personal gain or recognition, but that is hardly the central function of the bard. In arguing that imbongi is a sociopolitical critic, Mafeje does not deny that imbongi might from time to time praise the chief (every political institution has its legitimisers). The point was to call into question the view that imbongi is primarily a praise-singer.

Although the terms ‘poet’ and ‘bard’ are often used synonymously, Mafeje contends that the latter is a term of Celtic origin used to designate ancient Celtic poets who enjoyed certain privileges and functions. The term ‘bard’ comes from the Latin bardi, a title for national poets and minstrels among the people of Gaul and Brittany. Although the institution disappeared in Gaul, there is ‘evidence of its continued existence in Wales, Ireland, Brittany and Northern Scotland, where Celtic people survived the Latin and Teutonic conquests’.¹⁶ In Wales, an organised society with hereditary rights and privileges, the bards were akin to royal families and were exempt from tax and military service. Their duty was to celebrate victories and sing hymns of praise, and they gave poetic expression to societal sentiments. In this sense, they were very influential. In Ireland, too, bards were a distinct social category, and also enjoyed hereditary rights. They were divided into three types, each of which had a distinct role: those who celebrated victories and sang hymns of praise; those who chanted the laws of the nation; and those who gave poetic genealogies and family histories. In South Africa the role of imbongi is to interpret and organise public opinion. If imbongi is unable to do so, he cannot attain the status of a national poet. The major difference between the South African bard and his European counterpart is that the former does not enjoy hereditary rights and privileges such as tax exemption. South African bards are not an organised society. They pursue their endeavours as individual members of society. Imbongi is self-appointed and his success depends largely on how people respond to him. If the people respond positively, imbongi could be elevated to the level of imbongi yakomkhulu (the poet of the main residence) or imbongi yesizwe (the poet of the nation). In the latter sense, he transcends ‘tribal’ identities.

For Mafeje, there were three key issues that characterised both the South African and the European bards: they usually emerged from the ranks of commoners (were not of royal blood); their role and substance depended on how they were received by the people; and they had freedom to criticise (overtly or covertly) those in power. Having laid this historical and conceptual background at the beginning of ‘The Role of the Bard’, Mafeje goes on to analyse the poems of imbongi known as Melikhaya Mbutuma, who was imbongi of abaThembu’s paramount chief, Sabata Dalindyebo. Mafeje followed Mbutuma as part of his fieldwork in what was then the Transkei for his Master’s thesis in 1963.

The methodological lessons to be drawn from Mafeje’s article on the role of the bard relate to literary, archival research, ethnography and textual analysis. The poems are in isiXhosa; Mafeje first reproduces them in the original and then translates them into English to make their meaning apparent to the reader – but also to subject them to critical scrutiny. Although the process of translation is prone to clumsiness, his translation is accurate and the meaning is not lost. Imbongi yosiba (the poet who writes down his poems) is usually distinguished from imbongi yomthonyama (the poet who recites his poems from memory), but Mbutuma’s poems were in written form, ‘except some of the shorter ones which I wrote down as he recited them in public gatherings’.¹⁷ Mbutuma’s poems cover political events in the Transkei region from 1959 to 1963.

In citing these poems, Mafeje illustrates the role of the bard as a mediator between two social categories, the ruler and the ruled. Although the poems are political in content, Mafeje’s goal is not to show Mbutuma’s political astuteness, but to highlight the role of the bard as a mediator (although to mediate in the events of the Transkei of the late 1950s and early 1960s was ipso facto to play a political role), but when the situation fails to resolve, imbongi is forced to abandon his role as a mediator and join forces with either side. If he sides with the ruler whose authority is being questioned, he loses his social status, which depends more on acceptance by the people than on the ruler.

A reader of Mafeje’s article will not fail to notice his political fidelity to the people, which is quite evident in his analysis of the poems and the general political developments in Transkei of the 1960s. Moreover, unlike social anthropologists such as Isaac Schapera,¹⁸ Mafeje clearly demonstrates that the people were not merely impressed by the form of the poems from imbongi – they were impressed by the content or substance, and when they asked for imbongi who ‘says worthwhile things’, or when the chief’s entourage took away the microphone from imbongi who was critical of the chief, everyone knew that this was testament to Mbutuma’s political astuteness.

On the ideology of tribalism

Mafeje’s argument is that few social scientists had been able to write about Africa without invariably making reference to tribalism and it was not clear whether this was a distinguishing feature of the African continent. He argues that from the viewpoint of the sociology of knowledge, objective reality is not easily distinguishable from subjective dispossession. In this sense, social scientific categories are hard to separate from the ideological baggage of their peddlers. It is not by accident, therefore, that when African scholars write about their societies they tend to reach conclusions and to deploy concepts different from those of their Euro-American counterparts. According to Mafeje, liberal idealists, Marxist materialists and African converts alike tended to assign nomenclature that was fundamentally at odds not only with African history, but also with the present day. The problem with social scientific writings in Africa was not necessarily one of concrete realities, but one of ideology – particularly the ideology of tribalism.

The phenomenon of tribalism is traceable to European colonialism and its ideological reconstruction of African realities. Europeans regarded the African continent as distinctly tribal, and European social scientists were unable to transcend the colonial categorisations of Africa used by colonial administrators – precisely because their studies were the handmaidens of colonialism. The assumption that Africa was tribal produced certain ‘ideological predispositions that made it difficult for those associated with the system to view these societies in any other light’.¹⁹ Colonial anthropologists, and some of their African counterparts, wrote about Africa as if there were no significant economic and political changes on the continent by the turn of the twentieth century. It thus stands to reason, Mafeje maintains, that if tribalism is uniquely African, then the ideology that perpetuates it is distinctly European.

While some European social scientists sought to exonerate themselves by arguing that they did not use the term ‘tribe’ to denigrate Africans, but because Africans themselves tended to use it,²⁰ it is significant that the term surfaced only when English was spoken, as Mafeje argues. Even if it were true that Africans use the term, social scientists are not bound to use the same terms as their objects of inquiry, and their argument ends up as phenomenological affirmation of what the objects of inquiry say, instead of a critique rooted in historical and wider contexts. At any rate, the question stands: From where did the ‘natives’ derive these categories in the first place? Sometimes, adopting the terminology of the objects of inquiry would be useful and even desirable, but it could also perpetuate stereotypes, particularly if the researcher uses derogatory terms uncritically to mimic the objects of research. Things are not always what they are called. In South Africa the word ‘tribe’ has no equivalent in local languages. People tend to speak of a nation, clan or lineage, or simply identify themselves according to the territory from which they originate.

Mafeje considers that tribes, noticeably the central unit of analysis in anthropological writings, were, by and large, created by colonial authorities and were a result of the setting of colonial borders, which hindered the free flow of African people. That anthropologists were uncritical or otherwise unable to transcend the notion of tribe says something about their complicity in colonial domination and the structuring of African societies. Anthropological studies were serviceable to colonial administrators; it is not surprising that Africans, who are still shaped by colonial distortions, continue to use the term in spite of its connotations. The negative images that Africans come to have about themselves cannot be understood outside this historical and sociological context. In The German Ideology, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels observe that in every period in history the ruling ideas are always those of the ruling class. This means that ‘the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force’.²¹

Significantly, Mafeje reasons, anthropologists had ignored any noticeable changes in Africa by the turn of the twentieth century. The essentialist and purist nature of the assumption that there were no changes in Africa conveniently depoliticised the colonial intrusion that forced African people into migrant labour. This is the period in which Africans were being ensnared into the web of extra-economic and political relations. Even when Africans were residing in urban areas, anthropologists always sought to re-tribalise them by tracing their rural roots or by drawing invidious tribal distinctions among them through perpetuating stereotypes.²² This was not the only method they adopted, since they sought also to draw distinctions between urban-based and rural-based Africans, the former purportedly aspiring to a ‘Western way of life’, ‘Europeanisation’ or ‘civilisation’ while the latter were referred to as ‘red people’ or ‘pagans’. Aspiring to a Western way of life meant that Africans paid the heavy price of deculturation. Such changes in African societies, emanating as they did from extractive economic and political relations, led to studies of social change.

Curiously, while anthropologists saw that African societies were not as static as they had hitherto thought, they did not dispense with tribe as a unit of analysis. The concept became an organising framework in a different way. Initially considered a rural phenomenon, it was now discovered that tribalism persists in urban areas as well – colonialists and anthropologists re-tribalised Africans while at the same time seeking to ‘civilise’ them. The rural/urban divide was, of course, a false dichotomy since the urban African was the same as the rural African. Sociologically, people adjust or adapt to the environments they find themselves in.

Mafeje saw Arnold Epstein as one of the few anthropologists willing to dispense with the concept of tribe.²³ Epstein contends that Africans living in urban areas were not necessarily affected by tribalism; in the copper mines of Zambia, miners refused to accept ‘tribal elders’ as their representatives or leaders in negotiations with mine management. Waged workers were suspicious of salaried leaders. Having noted this, Mafeje concludes that this ‘was another instance of class formation among Africans’.²⁴ I believe that this is a controversial point, which some may wish to dispute and to argue that Mafeje mistook social stratification for class – that gradations within the same stratum need not admit class differentiation and the so-called salariat is not a class apart from the proletariat. For Mafeje this was a known datum, however, in that he did not declare the miners to be a class proper, but rather that they were gaining class consciousness. Enthusiastic about such developments, Mafeje was moved to assert that these were winds of change that were fast becoming a reality. He mentions political scientists who came with notions of modernisation in what they considered to be modernising states. That such theories were no different from anthropological civilising missions is not something Mafeje offers to discuss. He goes on to argue, however, that anthropologists were incorrigible in their use of the term ‘tribe’ as an analytical category, only this time they were more determined to buttress the ‘persistence and resilience’ of tribes, rather than their disintegration or disequilibrium. While anthropologists initially sought the tribe in rural areas, they now sought to identify its resilience and persistence in urban areas. This represented, according to Mafeje, a shift (although not a change) in the ideological standpoint of anthropologists. For them, modernisation was not incompatible with tribalism or traditionalism. They thought ‘tribal values’ were an explanation for Africans’ reluctance to embrace modernity and that Africans would fully modernise once they had dispensed with tribalism.

Mafeje says that unlike anthropologists who wholeheartedly embraced the tribal ideology to explain both the successes and failures of modernisation in Africa, political scientists and African nationalists used the ideology of tribalism only to account for failures in modernisation and, unlike anthropologists, preferred to speak of problems of integration, penetration and mobilisation. In spite of this, political scientists had conceptual problems much bigger than those of anthropologists. They lacked the ethnographic detail of knowledge available to anthropologists and their use of the tribal framework made it difficult for them to account for similar problems in other parts of the world. As a result, they fell victim to Eurocentrism in the same way as their anthropologist counterparts. The only difference is that anthropologists have ab initio been engaged in tribal studies.

Having discussed the political antecedents and ideological function of the concept of tribalism, Mafeje turns his attention to its conceptual problems. His question, one that immediately arises, is whether tribalism exists without the existence of tribes. Anthropologists typically described tribes as societies that were ‘self-contained, autonomous communities practising subsistence economy with no external trade’.²⁵ In the 1940s, Meyer Fortes and E.E. Evans-Pritchard introduced new terms such as ‘centralised states’, ‘stateless’ and ‘acephalous’ societies.²⁶ Yet it is odd to suggest that African societies were, by the twentieth century, still self-contained, autonomous communities that were practising subsistence economy. Thus, Mafeje reasons, the continued use of the word ‘tribe’ is a contradiction in terms.

Instead of dispensing with the concept altogether, the social anthropologist Isaac Schapera shifted the proverbial goalposts by redefining tribes as ‘separate “political communities”, each claiming exclusive rights to a given territory and managing its affairs independently of external control’.²⁷ This is a loosely formulated definition; if this is what passes for a tribe, then surely an array of societies, including nation states, are tribes. The constituent elements of a tribe outlined in Schapera’s definition are to be found in many places even to this day. In this regard, anthropologists, following Schapera’s definition, were not only contradicting themselves, but were also, as evidenced by the double standard of the definition, performing an ideological role. It is noteworthy that according to Mafeje the concept of culture never figured in the foregoing definitions of tribe until the arrival of pluralist sociologists and political scientists. Moreover, by 1969, anthropologists had dispensed with the term and sought, once more, to redefine it. By then, Philip Hugh Gulliver had defined a tribe as ‘any group of people which is distinguished, by its members and by others, on the basis of cultural-regional criteria’.²⁸ Again, this is not an airtight definition. There is no reason to suppose that the same cannot be said of European societies. Moreover, the notion of a tribe had, in Gulliver’s view, become a subjective perception.

Having mounted a critique of colonial anthropological writings, Mafeje concedes that ‘although their reasons are suspect, anthropologists may have been right in insisting that traditional or pre-colonial African societies, large or small, were tribes’.²⁹ Although Mafeje concedes that anthropologists might have been right, there is very little evidence, on the basis of the definitions he enumerates, that this was actually the case. If I am reluctant to endorse what he says, it is not because I believe that Mafeje was wrong; it is simply that he himself was uncertain about the veracity of what he said – ‘anthropologists may have been right’. In his second impression on the concept, Mafeje concedes unambiguously that a ‘careful analysis of African social formations would indicate that tribal formations did exist in Africa but that they were not characteristic of all regions of the continent’.³⁰ Adesina questions the validity of this. He argues that ‘the problem is that Mafeje pursued his line of thought at the expense of conceding that the category might have been valid at an earlier time. Not only does Anthropology deal with its objects of enquiry outside of history, it is ill-equipped to address the issues of history.’³¹ Mafeje goes on to say that he did not deny the existence of tribal sentiments and ideology on the African continent. His argument is that this ideology and sentiment has to be reconceptualised in the post-independence period. Mafeje says we have to make a distinction between someone who tries to preserve the traditional integrity, customs and autonomy of their tribe and someone who invokes tribal ideology in order to maintain power, not in a rural but in an urban setting, and thereby undermines and exploits fellow Africans. For Mafeje, ‘the fact that [the ideology of tribalism] works, as is often pointed out by tribal ideologists, [was] no proof that “tribes” or “tribalism” exist in any objective sense’.³²

That tribalism seems to work in Africa is not a sign that the term exists objectively but, rather, an indication of false consciousness on the part of Africans. This is so because in subscribing to tribalism, which leads them to ignore the real causes of their suffering, they unwittingly submit to voluntary servitude. Tribalism is of great benefit to African leaders who peddle tribal rhetoric because it leads away from a correct comprehension of reality and, in the process, conceals the exploitative role of the African elite. It is ‘an ideology in the original Marxist sense’, something that the African elite share with their ‘European fellow-ideologists’.³³ Mafeje points out that if tribalism per se does not matter, the ideology of tribalism does – for three reasons. First, it performs a capitalist, colonialist and imperialist function that obscures the nature of economic and power relations domestically (it also performs the same function between Africa and capitalist countries of the West). Second, it is not only divisive among Africans, but also between Africans and people from outside the continent. Third, it is an outdated concept that thwarts analysis and cross-cultural comparisons. Elsewhere, Mafeje argues that ‘“tribalism” is more an ideological reflex than an index of some concrete existence in Africa’,³⁴ and he laments the fact that his earlier critique of tribalism was taken to mean a denial of the existence of tribes in Africa. That is not so, Mafeje argues. His original argument ‘was that the idea that all African societies were “tribes” was a result of the colonial legacy on the continent’ and he concedes that the problem with this misunderstanding may be a result of the fact that ‘the original paper was not definitional and was concerned mainly with exposing the falsity of that assumption [that all African societies were tribes] by pointing to contrary cases’.³⁵

Mafeje maintains that ‘“tribes” refer to particular forms of political organisation which are kin-based. The chief is the most senior man of the most senior lineage of the founding clan, whether putative or real’.³⁶ Mafeje was only shifting the deckchairs here. First, if ‘kin-based relation’ is what makes the political organisation a tribe, how many of abaThembu, for example, are abaThembu because of consanguinity? Consanguine relations and political structure relate to entirely different elements of social life. Second, if this is what defines a tribe, what is a clan or lineage? It is not uncommon to use the label ‘tribe’ to define people who share a common language – even if the sub-variations of the language are such as to make aspects of communication mutually unintelligible. If, as Mafeje argues, the word ‘tribe’ does not exist in the indigenous languages, what is the point of African intellectuals seeking to sustain the idea? What makes 11 million amaZulu a tribe and 5.3 million Scots a nation?

In his second impression on the concepts of tribalism, Mafeje writes that African intellectuals believe that the European assumption that there is tribalism in Africa reflects the usual European stereotypes derived from colonialism.³⁷ Significantly, this leads to an ideological and epistemological disjuncture between African intellectuals and their Western counterparts. Mafeje goes on to argue that the problem ‘is not to decry a spurious category called “tribalism” but to confront the problem of cultural pluralism within modern nation-states which, deriving from the European historical antecedent, are supposed to be unitary. What is called “tribalism” in Africa is often an attempt by disadvantaged sociocultural groups to gain more social space within the given political and economic setup. In the circumstances, democratic pluralism is at issue rather than a dictatorial insistence on misconceived unitarism.’³⁸

Mafeje suggests that with democratic pluralism tribalism would wither away; yet this ignores the patent reality that democracy does in fact facilitate a resort to narrow jingoism in mobilising support or articulating grievances. There is little evidence that democracy necessarily attenuates tribalism. Mafeje modified his earlier position on tribalism; he oscillated between cultural pluralism and democratic pluralism. It is far from clear that the two are the same or that the existence of one necessarily entails the existence of the other. Mafeje did not quite spell out what he really had in mind when he invoked the notion of pluralism. In an article titled ‘The Bathos of Tendentious Historiography’, he says that ‘in recent years there has been an observable social drift toward democratic pluralism … Democratic pluralism is more of a social than a political concept. For instance, it does not mean “multipartyism” but, rather, the right of people(s) to form their own organisations for self-fulfilment and for having a direct input in the formulation of national policy regarding things that affect them.’³⁹ He did not use pluralism as it was used by anthropologists and subsequently criticised by Magubane.

As early as 1969, Magubane had questioned the notion of pluralism and its anthropological counterpart, tribalism. According to him, anthropological writings on pluralism and tribalism were too tentative and superficial to explain what was taking place in Africa during colonialism.⁴⁰ Symptoms were treated as underlying causes. For Magubane, the problem with pluralism is that it treats social cleavages as though they are innate or as though societies are static. In this regard, the pluralist anthropologists could not construct what Magubane calls, following Perry Anderson, ‘a totalising history’.⁴¹ Magubane’s objection is that conflicts in Africa should be historicised and contextualised and not reduced to psychological variables like tribalism or the purportedly innate hatred between ethnic groups. It remains the case, of course, that for societies to be considered societies they ought to have some degree of coherence and stability. However, there are no societies without internal divisions and frictions. The issue, for Magubane, is to explain these frictions in depth and contextually (that is, finding their root causes). Magubane maintains that, properly understood, present-day conflicts stem from colonial and imperial rule. The administrative personnel may have changed, but the economic and institutional structures remain.

The problem with pluralist anthropology is to isolate ethnic conflicts and other social features in space and in time.⁴² For Magubane, the pluralists were reluctant to situate problems in Africa in the wider context of the colonial situation or as an extension of the capitalist metropole. To the extent that African societies were brought together through arbitrary colonial borders, they were robbed of the opportunity to develop organic institutions that would foster unity and solidarity. The notion of pluralism failed to explain the role of governments in denying societies the opportunity to foster organic unity. Because some pluralists considered tribalism to be the source of conflict, they assumed that African societies will always be ridden by conflicts since, in their view, tribalism was the state of nature in Africa. In many respects, the concept of pluralism as was used did not take into account economic and social analysis of Africa – what it did do was to brush aside core issues and make conflict and tribalism seem natural. Ultimately, Magubane observes, this led to the view that these conflicts would sort themselves out or die a natural death.

Magubane further contends that the use of such concepts as tribalism and pluralism in explaining conflicts in Africa was a case of stereotypes prevailing over reality; to understand the true nature of these concepts one had to consider colonial maladministration and neocolonialism. Parochial loyalties existed and at times manifested themselves in ethnic terms, but such loyalties were typically based on ‘perceived material interests by those who exploit them’.⁴³ To the extent that pluralists invoked history, it was only to invoke prejudices, many of which were devoid of analysis of present-day problems in Africa. Pluralists simply appealed to notions of an African as a tribesman in an essentially primitive state. The focus – even when aided by empirical research – was on epiphenomena, not the core socio-historical and structural realities. Epistemologically, pluralist anthropologists, inspired by John Furnivall, misread his argument.⁴⁴ Magubane argues that ‘despite the limitations of the concept of pluralism as used by Furnivall, among the recent pluralists the concept becomes not only a distortion of the social realities but a despairing philosophy … Pluralism, as used in this sense, covers such disparate social and economic historical formations that it loses validity.’⁴⁵

Magubane’s central critique of pluralism is that it merely described a multiplicity of ethnic groups within a particular nation state, yet it said very little about the relationship between the said groups – save when they were in conflict. Pluralism on the part of anthropologists only meant ‘multi’ and was never qualified or accompanied by reference to concrete historical situations.

On ethnic groups, ethnic divisions and ethnicity

Mafeje considered that the terms ‘tribalism’ and ‘ethnicity’, typically deployed interchangeably by social scientists, were used as ‘things in themselves’; the terms are ‘illusory and need to be deconstructed and replaced by radical or transcendent thought-categories’.⁴⁶ In an article on the use of tribalism in Africa, Peter Ekeh notes that ‘while it now appears that the term “ethnic group” has replaced the disparaged concept of “tribe” in African scholarship, there is no clear statement about the relationship between the two – whether, especially, there has been transition from one to the other and whether there is persistent relevance in the previous analysis of tribes for our understanding of ethnic groups in modern Africa’.⁴⁷ Ethnicity was the successor to tribalism in part because it was considered less offensive. Mafeje claims that the two concepts have the same ideological connotations. The advantage the term ‘ethnicity’ has over the term ‘tribalism’ is that Africans have no objection to its usage, but although ‘ethnicity’ has gained currency among African scholars, this, Mafeje realises, does not explain why it is correlated with the crisis of state power in Africa and elsewhere. He contends that ethnicity may not be what it is presumed to be – as far as he is concerned the term is a metaphor. Although in his classic text The Theory and Ethnography of African Social Formations Mafeje denies the existence of tribalism but not of tribes, in the essay ‘Multi-Party Democracy and Ethnic Divisions in Africa’, while conceding that the idea of ethnicity is a pervasive problem in Africa, he denies that it is attributable to the existence of ethnic groups: ‘In our interrogation, while acknowledging the fact that “ethnicity” has become a pervasive problem in Africa, we will try to dispel the supposition that it is attributable to the existence of a multiplicity of natural units of affiliation called “ethnic groups” within African countries.’ ⁴⁸

Mafeje returns to classical sociology on the distinction between a social group and a social category. A social group is characterised by necessary patterns of social interaction (a lineage, an association, a religious sect) whereas a social category, although characterised by a common identity, has no necessary or regular patterns of interaction. He believes that the same was true of the so-called ethnic groups, members of the same race, sex or faith. It might come as a surprise, he surmises, but the same is also true of Africa’s political elites. That they are dominant does not mean that they are necessarily a coherent whole, or homogeneous. They are a category consisting of different social factions and in this sense they are a loose category, yet for me there is reason to believe that this would apply to any social group. I believe that it is shared characteristics that make them a group, not face-to-face interaction or homogeneity. For Mafeje, it is continued internecine conflicts among the elites that usually give rise to labels such as ‘tribalism’ or ‘ethnicity’. My view is that Mafeje’s argument limits the problem to the political elite and misses the possibility that contestations and tensions that give rise to jingoism exist at the level of ordinary citizens. Controversially, Mafeje argues that members of the African elite are too loosely organised and their interests too personalised to constitute a class in itself and for itself. The social category of elite is not the same thing as class.

In support of the foregoing claim, Mafeje contends that ‘historically, it is unimaginable that members of a hegemonic class would engage in unbridled mutual extermination and preside over the destruction of their supreme instrument of social control, the state, as has become the order of the day in Africa’.⁴⁹ If that is the case, it is not clear how one should classify the African elite. Mafeje misses the target in this regard. What makes an elite an elite is its relations to other levels in society – social distance – and its relative size. Sub-divisions and intra-group conflicts are inherent in any social group. I am inclined to think that a distinction has to be made between contestation over control of the state between factions of the elite and situations where the legitimacy of the state and political society itself is at stake. Coherence is not an essential element in the characterisation of a group as a cultural, economic or political elite.

What matters, as was always the case with Mafeje, is to subject concepts to critical scrutiny. No theory or concept is taken for granted in his work. The question thus is whether or not such internecine struggles are necessarily a result of multi-ethnicity in African countries. Mafeje denies such an assumption and argues that the existence of ethnic groups or ethnic existence does not necessarily entail ethnicity. In his own words, ‘existence is not necessarily limited to systems of social classification’.⁵⁰

Just as he makes a distinction between social groups and social categories, Mafeje makes a distinction between categorical and structural relations. To the extent that ‘systems of social classification are notional and taken for granted by their bearers they are passive and non-binding whereas socially structured relations are not only binding but are also purposeful and dynamic’.⁵¹ People from different backgrounds or sociocultural identities can live together in peace without discriminating against one another or exhibiting ethnicity. But ‘in times of structural conflict not between whole categories but between interacting groups this could occur’. It is at moments such as these that ‘perceived identities of difference are called into play’. Ethnic conflict (or ethnicity) is a result of greater interaction among people with sociocultural identities living in the same geopolitical space, a result of processes of state formation in post-independence Africa. Unlike pre-colonial and colonial wars, ethnic conflicts are not struggles for liberation but for relative advantage within the same sociopolitical framework. If anything, they are a distraction and do more harm than good; Mafeje concludes that they are not ‘struggles for autonomy but for relative advantage within the same set-up. They are, thus, in theory non-transcendent.’⁵²

But if this is the case, how does one understand secessionist movements or projects such as Biafra or South Sudan? Although intermittent or occurring not permanently but periodically, ethnic conflicts are nevertheless recurrent and are invoked typically at moments of crisis of state power. In this way, such conflicts become a political culture and an ideological tool to maintain or to gain power. Not only does this entail the centralisation of power, it also leads to ethnic competition. According to Mafeje, ethnic competition does not necessarily translate into ethnic conflict even when certain modes of existence or specialised fields of endeavour (pastoralism, arable agriculture, fishing) have become part of certain communities. With the possibility of competition for access to resources, such communities might also, by virtue of their specialisation, need to co-operate. From this perspective, ethnic diversity could contribute to social division of labour, but in post-independence Africa this is not to any extent the case, even if it might be true of pre-colonial Africa.

Mafeje claims that whatever conflict may arise in these situations, it is never widespread; that ethnicity does not occur at local level in mundane activities, but at national level where there is serious political competition. But this is not entirely accurate – when killings begin, they do so as local phenomena. It is significant, however, that ethnic antagonisms connote a state of national politics that deviates from the objectives of liberation movements and thus undermines nation building as envisaged at the moment of independence. For Mafeje, ethnicity is more the progeny of modern African politics than of African antiquity, and from a historical point of view it is hard to say that there is any organic link between the phenomenon of ethnicity and what are called ethnic groups. There are parallels between ethnicity and what people are called or what they call themselves. Ethnicity is peddled by African political elites in order to gain power or to maintain it. Only then do people embrace it as a result of classificatory systems or categorical identities. Political elites are fully aware of these weaknesses and proclivities, and take advantage of them to further their own ambitions.

Mafeje considers that ideology as false consciousness cuts both ways. This is so because the kind of falsity peddled by elites obscures objective reality such as class differentiation and group conflicts among the same people – and it also undermines co-operation among people of differing ethnic origins. Mafeje’s claim, however, casts the political elites as all-knowing and consummate masters of history whereas sometimes they are both initiating and responding to social crises, and could be hapless beings swept up in the current of history, just like everyone else. Ultimately, the sorriest casualties of the ideology of ethnicity are the ordinary people and not the elites. The reproduction of ethnic identities is a work of serious indoctrination. As ethnicity may lead to disaster, the question that confronts sociologists is why African elites continue with what would suggest a level of irrationality in the elite mobilisation of ethnic jingoism. Self-aggrandisement on the part of the elites is not a satisfactory answer.

Part of the reason for this, Mafeje argues, is not just class interests, but sectional interests. Where class interests are vital to the class as a whole, sectional interests, if not managed carefully, could jeopardise the interests of the whole. Mafeje’s claim does not really address the question. It would seem extraordinary that elites would want to jeopardise not only their opponents’ interests, but their own interests as well, for sectional interests could threaten not just sections but also the whole. Mafeje does not immediately address this issue, but he argues that Africans in sub-Sahara have been the slowest in the world in developing an authentic class and although African ruling elites had bourgeois aspirations, they nonetheless demonstrated no consistent capitalist outlook, discipline and ethics. Instead, they plundered state resources and engaged in corrupt activities. Mafeje suspects that the real problem lay in their inability to ‘convert states revenues into real capital’.⁵³ Tellingly, there is no qualitative difference in patterns of investment between mineral-rich and mineral-poor African countries.

Mafeje reasons that ethnicity is either an admission of failure or an excuse to cover up shortcomings. He calls this an ‘ideological ploy’ and not a class ideology. In the context of cunning manoeuvres by African elites, he considers the use of the term ‘ideological ploy’ more than justified, but the question is what makes it ideological – and it is ideological because of its ideational or cognitive impact on the people. What the elites believe or do not believe is somewhat irrelevant – it is the impact of what they say to their target constituencies that matters. This, in Mafeje’s language, is an ideological reflex and not ideology itself. Although he said this, Mafeje still believed in the explanatory value of ideology in the classical sense, and by ideology he refers to the rationalisation of class interests, which, in the main, applies to hegemonic classes since they wish to remain dominant. The term ‘rationalisation’ refers to both practical considerations and normative claims to justify them; ideology can be used in a positive sense and also in a negative sense. Given this ambiguity, Mafeje reasons that it is difficult to tell what the guiding ideology of the emergent African elites is supposed to be. The absence of a broader societal and regional vision has led to the ‘degenerative political culture’ of ethnicity and to petty dictators. In this sense, African elites have no competitive advantage over others in the world. The disintegration of African states and economic decay can be explained similarly. The effects of ethnicity are typically acknowledged, but are hardly seen as ideology per se – it is ethnic-consciousness, instead, that is seen as ideology proper, and ethnicity is seen in negative terms because it is used to gain power by manipulating people’s sentiments. In this sense, it can be described as antipathetic. Mafeje thought that it was important to note that there exist sympathetic forms of organisation among people of the same ethnic origin. He gives examples of mutual-help associations, burial associations and social clubs, which tend to be inward looking and are usually found in urban areas where newcomers might suffer alienation and anonymity, and social and emotional insecurity.

In colonial anthropological parlance these organisations are called tribal associations; anthropologists refer to them as voluntary associations. Yet they miss the contradictory nature of such a label in that, by their own admission, tribal organisations are prescriptive while voluntary organisations are discretionary insofar as individuals have freedom to choose. Voluntary organisations were seen as affirmations of the discourse of social change, the supposed progress from barbarism to civilisation. Aside from these colonial epithets, Mafeje notes that the underlying issue here is that the so-called tribal associations are people’s organisations and not intended for exploiting or oppressing others. From the members’ point of view the value of the organisations ‘was instrumental rather than ideological’; ‘their relations were personal rather than categorical’.⁵⁴ Mafeje considers it is incorrect to refer to solidarity of their kind as ethnicity since this term connotes an evocative, impersonal and pernicious force. Above all, it could be argued that ethnicity is the exact opposite of these associations because it militates against their mundane and innocent interest.

Mafeje analyses what he calls, in anthropological terms, ‘exegetic texts’, authored by living subjects in their own context, excerpts and quotations based on views from ordinary people who were involved in ethnic conflicts in Africa, specifically the Bahutu-Batutsi clash that led to the Rwanda genocide and the majimboism in Kenya.⁵⁵ Having discussed these texts, or verbal reports, which, he concedes, are ‘very scanty’, Mafeje notes that the problem in Africa is not necessarily the existence of multi-ethnicity but, rather, that African leaders supposedly dealing with the national question in their own countries are the very people at the root cause of political conflicts. African elites are the cause, or ‘authors’ in Mafeje’s language, and not the bearers of ethnic identity because socially, economically and politically they are too far from and free of the conflicts they fuel. Mafeje reiterates that ethnic identity on its own was innocuous and there was nothing to it that could be said to be intrinsic since in many ways it can be replaced with other identities such as religion, race or regionalism. On the African continent there has been a blanket approach to conflict resolutions, which relate to liberal notions of rational negotiations – but although negotiations are important in their own right they tend to run against vested interests, and here Mafeje criticises liberal social scientists for failing to recognise the concept of contradiction in political conflicts. He does not say much about the concept but, given his partiality to revolutionary theory, he is invoking Mao Tse-Tung’s antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions. Simply, the former speaks to irreconcilable differences between those waging the struggle and their enemy, while the latter refers to reconcilable differences among the comrades and fellow travellers waging the struggle (in any case, the powerful political elites would rarely be willing to negotiate away their power and comparative advantages). In this way, wars or conflicts of resistance are not at all irrational. Additionally, they are not likely to be solved by conflict resolution or negotiations unless and until their root cause has been effectively dealt with.

In this sense, conflict resolutions tend to deal with symptoms rather than causes. Because liberal ideals of negotiations tend to dominate the discourse of conflict resolutions in Africa, it could be said that the symptomatic reading of problems is to be expected. In another sense, there is the old question of the superstructure and the material base, which remains unaddressed. Although Mafeje does not mention it, it is nevertheless latent in his analysis – for example, he questions issues of superstructure such as the law and state institutions, which are usually invoked to solve problems of ethnic conflicts. Yet these issues, despite their importance, hardly succeed in solving societal problems. It is only later in his argument that Mafeje speaks about the material base of ethnic social formations in Africa, arguing that it has been undermined by modern developments in the process of which ethnic identities are used as tools to mediate or forge new social relations and for promoting new social interests. Against Claude Ake and Okwudiba Nnoli, who argue that lack of commoditisation of social relations in Africa is one of the reasons for the persistence of ethnic identities, Mafeje argues that the opposite is true because if there is anything that capitalism successfully introduced on the continent it is the market system – which necessarily includes the sale of labour power.⁵⁶ Mafeje contends that in the African market system, trade or circulation competes with agriculture not only in national, but also in regional economies and national and regional trade means that people of different ethnic origin would have to learn each other’s languages. This then leads to what he calls acculturation. ‘As far as this is concerned, it is quite possible that African peoples are ahead of their ruling elites.’⁵⁷

If one were to excuse the awkward term ‘acculturation’, which Mafeje uses quite freely, the issue in the foregoing quote is that through interaction or intermingling ethnic identities tend to be irrelevant (although sometimes latent) until they are used or manipulated by political powermongers. This idea, in typical left discourse, sees the masses – when they engage in acts that the intellectuals consider contradictory to their assumed interests – as hapless victims manipulated by their elites, and yet because of their perceived interests, people participate enthusiastically in the extermination of others who are of different hues, creed or other identities. Mafeje’s denunciation of the African elites is in this sense typical of the class-centric discourse of the left.

In the context of processes of social integration it becomes important to decentralise power. Decentralising power gives space for local initiatives so that people can express themselves in various ways. Mafeje contends also that decentralising power does away with fragmentation among ordinary citizens and brings them together. This may, however, not be the case because such fragmentations simply play out at the local level. The contradictions that manifest as national phenomena are typically experienced at local levels, in which segments of a local government or even a town can become the basis for new fragments invented in the process of competition over resources. Mafeje argues that ‘strategically and in the long term, there is no advantage in fragmenting the existing African states’.⁵⁸ When he talks about decentralisation he had in mind the delegation of authority and responsibility to provincial and local governments – something neither new nor novel. One might argue that even in centralist states such as the United Kingdom substantial work and autonomy happens at local levels. One would be hard-pressed to find an African country where all powers and decision making are concentrated at the national level. Several African countries are federations, yet Mafeje does not advocate a federal structure such as in the United States, states within a state. Such a model, he says, could increase regional antagonisms, especially where regions coincide with ethnic maps.

In many African countries prospects for nation building were undermined by the ‘bourgeois form of government adopted at independence’.⁵⁹ The claim that Africans are generally incompetent, autocratic and corrupt does not, on its own, suffice as an explanation since many African leaders who have the potential to make changes have been imprisoned, banned, exiled, assassinated or murdered, often with the help of imperialist Western powers. Mafeje concedes that ultimately the use of concepts such as ethnicity, ethnic groups or multi-partyism is prejudicial and quite Eurocentric. For one thing, multi-partyism is not the same thing as democracy; for another thing, to equate the term with democracy mistakes form for substance. Moreover, it is analogical in nature, with very little regard for qualitative differences in sociocultural context.

Mafeje contends that there is greater ethnic integration in Africa than ever before, attributed to migration and intermarriages. If anything, ‘sociologically-understood, the so-called ethnic conflict or ethnicity is a sign of the imperatives of greater integration or social pressures arising out of a shrinking political arena’.⁶⁰ He continues: ‘If by “shrinking political arena” is meant increasing crisis of democracy, then it becomes clear that in the absence of other ideological predispositions the corollary of this is intensified “ethnicity”. If intensified ethnicity is an index of absence of democracy, then it stands to reason that our starting point is not the imagining of ethnic divisions, nor their ideological manipulation in the form of ethnicity but the question of democracy itself.’

Mafeje’s general conclusion is that ethnic divisions in Africa are, by and large, imagined and encouraged by the elites who stand to benefit from them. This is ideological manipulation, which should be called ethnicity and ‘not innocent, self-imposing identities which people acquire by historical accident’.⁶¹ In the final analysis, what makes people who they are is not the labels attached to them, but what they do to reproduce themselves.