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Introduction: The Sublime Object of Nationalism

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 pre-eminent 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. I am interested in this second sense of the term. The argument here is that the South African people came to be defined and produced in and through the politics and culture of nationalist struggle. Even if there are traces of other notions of what the term ‘the people’ means (clannic, for example), the image of the South African nation looms large in the political imaginary.

This view helps us recover the specificity of the nation, not simply as a cultural artefact, but as a political one. I will say more about this in the course of the book, which will argue that the nation is a political community whose form is given in relation to the pursuit of democracy and freedom. If democratic authority is lodged in ‘the people’, what matters is the way that the concept is defined, delimited and produced. In this sense, the nation precedes the state, not because it has always already existed, but because it emerges in and through the nationalist struggle for state power. The history of the postcolony¹ is, in this sense, the history of ‘the people’ qua production.

From this perspective, we have to re-evaluate knee-jerk judgements about the failure of modernity in Africa. If the mark of modern power – as opposed to tribal, monarchical or dynastic authority – is that it vests sovereignty in ‘the people’ themselves, African nationalism too ‘locates the source of individual identity within a “people”, which is seen to be the bearer of sovereignty, the central object of loyalty, and the basis of collective solidarity’ (Greenfeld, 1992: 3). What matters is: (a) the limit and character of ‘the people’ in whom power is supposed to repose; and (b) the political forms through which ‘the people’ are represented. Simply put, the democratic project firmly places the identity of ‘the people’ on the agenda. We should not be surprised, therefore, to observe that the ongoing democratisation of African states has been accompanied by a renewed preoccupation with authenticity (Geschiere, 2005). Yet, if the democratic project poses the question of ‘the people’, we will see that an answer can take one of two forms. The first is that ‘the people’ constitute a nation; alternatively, that ‘the people’ constitute a democracy.

As a way of prefacing this argument, I want to consider an advertisement that appeared in the Sunday Times, a major South African weekend newspaper, in 2001. In ‘The media vs President T. M. Mbeki’, Ashley Mabogoane, Jabu Mabuza, Pearl Mashabela, Prof. Sam Mokgokong, Kgomotso Moroka, Don Ncube, Ndaba Ntsele, Christine Qunta, Mfundi Vundla, Peter Vundla and Sindiwe Zilwa accused the media of providing a platform for a right-wing plot to subvert South African democracy (Mabogoane et al., 2001). They caution the president not to ‘be distracted by the current campaign against [him]’, and add that ‘under [Mbeki’s] leadership we have the best government this country has ever had’. Finally, they advise the president to ‘go ahead and govern: govern fairly; govern with compassion but govern decisively’. Let us note the terms of the argument in this advertisement.

On the one hand, a right-wing conspiracy is posited. It is supposedly spearheaded by white, so-called liberals from the apartheid era, certain so-called independent research organisations (it is not clear which ones) run by whites, and a ‘few’ members of the white business community. They are aided by black commentators ‘who unwittingly contribute to this campaign’ (Mabogoane et al., 2001). These forces are acting in concert, spreading vicious, underhanded ‘disinformation’ about the president. Their intentions are malicious: to discredit him personally, and by way of him, the competence of black people generally. Even more sinister is their sabotage of the country’s economy (by portraying South Africa as a place not to do business in), and their attempt to subvert the will of the people (by questioning the fitness of a democratically elected president). In doing all this, the whites involved want to obstruct the dismantling of the apartheid system in order to secure the benefits they gain from its workings.

On the other hand, there are blacks who deeply love their country, who balance criticism with constructive mention of the government’s landmark achievements, and who see in the attacks on the president a hateful, contemptuous assault on democracy. Blacks are presented as having faith in the potential of the country to be a well-managed, technologically advanced and truly egalitarian society. Moreover, whereas racist whites see in the ‘errors’ of the president the necessary failures of a black man, the blacks observe such errors as all-too-human weaknesses. Whereas whites question the very competence of Mbeki’s leadership, and by association the leadership of all blacks, blacks propose guidance to a leader whose only weakness is that he is human.

Let us not worry about the truthfulness of this claim – that there is a conspiracy – other than to note how commonplace such claims have become in South Africa. Let us note rather that the advertisement makes certain epistemological claims that will help us determine its political genealogy. In particular, what is at stake is the nature of certain facts. Do they consist of independent and mostly unrelated actions or events? Or are they merely moments in a larger drama that is unfolding? Take, for example, the question of the media ‘campaign’. Here a number of articles, appearing in different newspapers and at different times, and written by various journalists are seen as evidence of an underlying unity, one that exceeds their literality (as newspaper articles), to reveal the secret and underhand work of (racist) conspirators. Of course, many journalists and newspaper editors, in countering this claim, assert precisely the opposite. Abbey Makoe writes in the Saturday Star, for example, that ‘[t]he era of white-owned media dominating public opinion in South Africa can no longer be used as an excuse for lazy black professionals who hardly ever make an effort to participate in matters of public debate’ (Makoe, 2001). Rather than being symptomatic of a conspiracy, these ‘awful’ claims against Mbeki are the work of ‘individuals’, the article claims. More importantly, their predominance is less a sign of a white conspiracy than it was of something else: the ‘quietude of silence’ into which black commentators had fallen. Unlike the 1960s and 1970s, which buzzed with the eloquence of writers like Steve Biko, Barney Pityana, Nchaupe Mokoape, Mamphela Ramphele and many others, the new elite (‘self-styled struggle heroes’) do not read, they do not write and they fail, therefore, to participate in the processes of national agenda-setting. Instead of whining privately, whingeing among themselves, and then dangling fat chequebooks in front of editors, writes Makoe (2001), they should state their views in public debate. Unfounded perceptions about Mbeki, he implies, are prevalent in the media because they have not been shown up as the ‘horrible’ views that they are by literate and articulate black writers. If Makoe, nonetheless, sympathises with Mabogoane et al.’s frustration that Mbeki is the subject of offensive articles, John Matshikiza is more dismissive. In the Mail and Guardian he calls it ‘nonsense’: ‘So, where are these whites?’ he asked. ‘And where are the forums that are endemically racist and reactionary?’ (Matshikiza, 2001). What both authors criticise are the so-called facts of the advertisement: that there is a white right-wing media campaign. What neither raise, however, is the logic of the argument itself. It is composed of the following premises:

•Blacks want to dismantle the legacy of apartheid.

•President Mbeki is black.

•He is head of a democratic black government.

•Since 1994 a million houses have been built, 1.3 million housing subsidies approved, 400,000 homes electrified and 120 clinics completed.

•Mbeki as the successful leader of a black government redressing the legacy of apartheid is helping black people regain their dignity.

•To criticise President Mbeki is to want to preserve the legacy of apartheid, undermine black rule, threaten democracy and insult the dignity of blacks.

The syllogisms above rest on three argumentative devices. The first is what we might call logical, the second empirical and the third is a rhetorical device. The least interesting part of this argument is its circularity: turning back the legacy of apartheid is included in the very definition of being black. This makes it logically indifferent to any empirical proof. Blacks are, by definition, reversing the apartheid inheritance. Yet the advertisement is not content with such an argumentative fiat; rather, it invites us to measure the truthfulness of its claims by a ‘factual’ measure: the number of houses built, and so on. It begs the question: What if the president cannot be shown empirically to be reversing the legacy of apartheid? For the most part, this is the level at which the debate happens.

This line of reasoning, whatever its merits and demerits, obscures another more worrying argumentative device. The advertisement employs a rhetorical claim that appeals to a different standard of evidence than that of the record in fact of President Mbeki and his government. On the advertisement’s terms, the argument can still be true even if the ‘facts’ are wrong. Or even: the ‘bad’ facts are enrolled as further support of why the president is so good. What is at stake are the criteria of good and bad, true and false. Discussing when people have the ‘right to criticise’, the advertisement makes the following claims:

The White rightwing forces do not realise that the right to criticise is accompanied by a responsibility to be fair and to recognise the landmarks and the achievements of the government and Black people in the way Black journalists and commentators do. In the absence of such balance, no amount of self-righteous claims of the public interest, transparency and press freedom will conceal their real motives (Mabogoane et al., 2001).

Valid criticism is here premised on love for the country and its people, and predicated on loyalty to the government. This is what authentic blacks do: they caution when the president ‘errs’, they lift him when he ‘stumbles’, they know that he is human and sometimes behaves as such, and they know too that his government is the best South Africa has ever had. This is the standard of authentic criticism, and to act differently is evidence of, at least, a lack of patriotism and, at worst, racism and treason. This is why black writers and journalists balance their criticism with praise. But there is an anomaly here: certain blacks, it would seem, do not. In discussing the identities of the plotters, the advertisement makes the following startling claim: ‘Separately from them (the White right-wingers), there are a few Black commentators who unwittingly contribute to this campaign’ (Mabogoane et al., 2001). What these unspecified blacks lack is authenticity, presumably because they find fault without praise. It is precisely this rhetorical device that Xolela Mangcu rebuts:

[T]he advertisement raises an important point about the moral autonomy of black people. The ad relies on a logic of black authenticity that urges them to put solidarity with their leaders or heroes above everything else. In this case the history of racial oppression is used as racial blackmail, or what Mothubi Mutloatse describes as ‘the liberation handcuffs that have given us Mugabe, Nujoma and now Chiluba’ (Mangcu, 2001).

Mangcu is troubled that the appeal to black solidarity is elevated above what he calls ‘moral reasoning’: the autonomy to make ethical judgements about what is right or wrong. In other words, he refuses to condone the line that the president should be supported simply because he is black.

Mangcu is defending a notion of blackness that balances solidarity with what he calls ‘moral reasoning’, in contrast to the terms of the advertisement: blackness/loyalty to the president and government. His remarks go to the core of what is novel in the way blackness is sometimes (and more and more) discussed. Authentic blacks support the president and the government, not on the basis of their record in advancing a certain project, but simply because they are black. Herein lies the fundamental rupture with Black Consciousness² and the politics of national democratic revolution (NDR)³, two key views of what it means to be a South African that will be discussed in detail in later chapters.

Blackness no longer denotes a social position (in the racial capitalist relations of production) or a psychological condition. It designates an authentic national subject that is loyal to the state simply because that state is controlled by other blacks like it. The facts are irrelevant to the proof. Or rather, the argument appeals to other ‘facts’. But what are these facts? Or rather, what is the new mark of authenticity? Who is ‘Black’ and not merely black? If the measure of ‘Blackness’ is not given by the degree to which the legacy of apartheid is reversed, then nor is it simply a question of complexion. We recall that there are ‘Blacks’ (more correctly, blacks) in the service of the plotters. So, to what does ‘Blackness’ refer?

Let us approach this displacement in the following way. In terms of Black Consciousness and NDR, a black was ‘Black’ to the extent that he/she undertook certain concrete, particular actions: resisted racial oppression, struggled against exploitation, and asserted the value of black culture and history. In the same way, and following this logic, a government was ‘Black’, i.e. libératoire, to the extent that it took certain actions to reverse the legacy of apartheid: ended racial discrimination, redressed the material inequality between blacks and whites, and so on. Authenticity had a measure that was evidenced by particular facts. What matters here is a certain epistemology: that belief follows from evidence: ‘I support the government because, through a process of reasoning and verification, I have come to the conclusion that it is truly reversing the legacy of apartheid.’ We recall, however, that this is not the standard of truth suggested by the advertisement. Valid criticism, criticism in other words that is true, is by definition balanced by praise. And how do we know this? Precisely because, according to the advertisement, blacks that reproach the African National Congress (ANC) government without complimenting it lose their claim to authenticity. Certainly, President Mbeki makes mistakes, but in essence, the advertisement holds, he is turning back the apartheid tide. Or, rather: President Mbeki is an excellent ‘Black’ leader, over and above the details of his actual political record.

What is the condition of truth in such a claim? What is at stake is a certain ontology: belief (that the government is authentically ‘Black’) does not derive from evidence (data collected, sorted and interrogated by reason). Rather, the facts are revealed through belief – a mysterious inversion. Only through loyalty to the government (patriotism) is it apparent how President Mbeki and his government are addressing the vestiges of apartheid. Knowledge follows from belief, or access to the truth is only attained through faith. This last term is precise here. For the analogy is Christian religious conviction: ‘to believe in Christ because we consider him wise and good is a dreadful blasphemy – it is, on the contrary, only the act of belief itself which can give us insight into his goodness and wisdom’ (Kierkegaard, cited in Zizek, 1992: 37).

We might therefore say: to gauge the excellence of President Mbeki on the basis of his record is unpatriotic. On the contrary, belief in his excellence itself will reveal just how the legacy of apartheid is being redressed. The ‘facts’ by which we measure the merit of President Mbeki (as a ‘Black’) are those of a mysterious and sublime quality. ‘Blackness’ here is attached to a spiritual knowing: a knowing through faith, where turning back the vestiges of apartheid refers to some spiritual, metaphysical redress. And this knowledge is accessible only to authentic ‘Blacks’ because they alone are true believers. What this kind of nation-building does is transform the presidency and the government into quasi-religious objects that endure all torments and survive with immaculate beauty.

Unless we recognise that there is a profoundly new articulation of blackness today, we will not be in a position properly to evaluate its politics. The measure of blackness is today that of national sovereignty. By this term I do not mean state sovereignty. If the latter refers to the ability, in Agamben’s (2005) terms, to define the state of exception, national sovereignty refers to the control of state institutions by authentic representatives of the nation. An authentic national community is merely that group deemed to be the veritable bearer of the national mission – whatever it may be. It is that community of true believers. A distinction must be made between a citizen as such and an authentic national subject. So, even if citizenship is founded on principles of universal human rights, for example, nation-building would have us say that some citizens are more authentically members of the nation than others. At stake is the measure of freedom. Nationalism associates being free – the ability to see the world as it really is and act accordingly – with determinate marks of population. By this I mean a schema of physical marks and social-psychological characteristics: being of a certain race, practising a particular religion, preferring certain kinds of sexual partners, and so on. Conversely, the absence of these marks of population is associated with a state of unfreedom. We might say that citizens who are not national subjects are not equal because they are not free and they are not free because they are not national subjects.⁴ What we are discussing here, essentially, is the nature of legitimate authority. Who, in other words is a legitimate bearer of state power in society?

In these terms, the current struggle within the ANC over the identity of President Thabo Mbeki’s successor is a national conflict par excellence. At stake is less an ideological struggle between, say, (neo-)liberalism and socialism, than a conflict about the measure of national authenticity. Who is more authentically a representative of the nation, Jacob Zuma or some other (as yet unnamed) contender?

During the apartheid period, the nation was delimited by virtue of a measure of population. In considering the major constitutional changes that have accompanied, and to some extent inaugurated, the democratic dispensation, we will see that they have sought to overcome these particular measures by outlawing discrimination, including on the basis of race, religion and sexual orientation. In so doing, however, we have to ask: is the South African demos without a measure of population at all?

The book will open (Chapter 1), with a survey of the literature on African nationalism, to argue that contemporary writing on Africa and South Africa pays very little attention to this phenomenon. Indeed, the subject has almost escaped serious academic treatment for 20 years or so, despite its overwhelming relevance. In South Africa, at least, the post-apartheid period has been fraught with debates about the ‘national question’. When the subject is broached, studies tend to be ambivalent about nationalism’s character. Following Thomas Hodgkin’s well-known definition of the phenomenon, there is a tendency to understand African nationalism, including African nationalism in South Africa, simply as resistance to colonial authority, irrespective of its form. Yet reading carefully, many of these same studies effectively treat it as a modernist form of anti-colonialism: urban, post-tribal/non-racial, secular and interested in an industrialised post-colonial system.

In Chapter 2, I will try to overcome this ambivalence by directly confronting the nature of African nationalism. I will do so by reading the phenomenon against a selected literature. I am especially interested in nationalism as a specific kind of democratic imaginary. Whereas this relationship is easily obscured by authors more interested in it as a cultural artefact, we will see that democracy was until recently believed to lodge naturally in nations. By the eighteenth century, for example, this view was axiomatic for as diverse a group as Johan Gottfied Herder, John Stuart Mill and the French revolutionaries. In the South African context, African nationalism opposed apartheid in the name of national democracy.

In Chapter 3, I will seek the form of the South African nation in the struggle against apartheid and for national democracy. In this regard, I will pay particular attention to the development of the theory of national democratic revolution (NDR). Although Pan-Africanism and Negritude were important discourses informing the terrain of struggle, resistance to apartheid was pre-eminently framed by the politics and theory of NDR. In this chapter I will try to generate the identity of the authentic national subject from the repertoire of images, figures and practices of the theory of NDR. In particular, I will ask: Who, according to this theory, is free?

The theory of NDR may have been the pre-eminent expression of nationalist resistance and organisation in South Africa, but apart from its name, what was nationalist about its discourse? In Chapter 4, I take up this question with regard to the politics of NDR and also that of Black Consciousness. What, if anything, made their respective politics a truly nationalist politics? By carefully reading their respective discourses, I will suggest that both discourses appealed to gendered subjects embedded in particular cultures and languages. Hence, despite appearances, we will see that both posited the citizen as a bearer of marks of population.⁵

Chapter 5 will argue that the history and practice of the theory of NDR helps us understand the terms of a violent conflict that overcame three townships east of Johannesburg between 1990 and 1994.

Chapter 6 will consider the conditions of a public domain that does not conflate the citizen with an authentic national subject. It will argue that citizens are interpolated into democratic ideology through the practice of democratic institutions. In this way I want to argue for a theory of democracy that locates its conditions in its very practice; instead of seeking them, that is, in either a culture or civilisation (‘Western’ values, for example) that precedes them. Here the conditions of democracy refer to: (a) the circumstances around which formal democratic institutions are established (their production), and (b) the situation that needs to prevail for them to function effectively over the long term (their reproduction).

Chapter 7 will pursue the conditions of a non-national imaginary by considering the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We will see that one of the key tasks of the commission was to identify and establish the basis for national unity. At stake was the principle of identity or commonality among South Africans as a ‘nation-people’. In the commission’s very failure we will identify another principle of political community – a principle that is not national.

The concluding chapter will pose further the conditions of democracy as a society by asking how such a demos might generate its own limit. A meaningful discussion about the democratic limit or boundary is only now beginning. Chantal Mouffe, for example, has recently argued that democracy always entails relations of inclusion–exclusion that speak to a notion of the political frontier. One of the key problems of democratic theory, she suggests, has been its inability to conceptualise such a limit (Mouffe, 2000: 43). This has not, until recently, seemed an urgent task. The reason, I imagine, is largely political: the figure of the citizen has, historically, been deemed either a resident of a nation or of the world. Nation–world are the two poles that have exhausted the democratic imaginary. Yet over the last two decades, both identities have become increasingly unsettled. In the first place, the collapse of ‘really existing’⁶ socialist states (primarily the Soviet Union) and the associated crisis of Marxism have disturbed the prospect of internationalism. In the second place, 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 a growing interest in a principle of political demarcation, a principle of the frontier, that can simultaneously (a) discriminate between citizens and non-citizens, and that is (b) congruent with a definition of citizenship that is universal. The problem in contemporary terms is of a particular demos, not constituted on any measure of population, be it of race, culture, religion, ethnicity or any combination of these. The concluding chapter will attempt to propose a solution to this problem.

Before continuing, I want to discuss some of the concepts and vocabulary of this analysis. I have used a range of familiar terms in an unfamiliar way and also made up some new ones. Most important among these are ‘citizen’ and ‘authentic national subject’ (discussed throughout the text, for the sake of brevity, as a ‘national subject’). I have opposed these two terms in order to capture the difference between two kinds of political community. The first is a democracy conceived not simply as a mode of government, but as a form of society. The second is a nation, also understood as a particular kind of society. The first is composed of citizens, and the second of national subjects. I have invoked this last term, ‘national subject’, in order to avoid confusion.

We will see, for reasons associated with the historical origins of democracy, that the term democracy is seldom opposed to that of nation. In other words, the two terms are hardly thought to be contradictory, except when nationalism goes ‘bad’ – when it is associated with fascism and racism. This is hardly surprising. Nationalism was an important vehicle of democracy, especially in relation to colonialism, monarchies and empires. It has also played an important role in equalising members of society, at least at the level of political rights. Historically, democracies were lodged in nations, such that citizenship implied closure in a particular state. ‘The citizen’, moreover, is a pre-democratic appellation. Enlightened monarchs often referred to themselves as citizens of the realm.⁷ In this regard, in conversational and some academic writing, it makes sense to talk and write of ‘citizens of the nation’. Here the two terms are reconciled by an appeal to distinct levels. The nation refers to the political community (demos) in which citizens are entitled to exercise their rights and responsibilities. We might say that the nation belongs to the ontology of the political, whereas the citizen belongs to the ontic (see Chapter 7). In other words, the term ‘citizen’ is simply the name for the subject of the nation. We will see later that this is the way that Jurgen Habermas (2001) conceptualises the relationship between them.

The purpose of this book is to argue that there is a heavy price to pay for this seemingly benign formulation. It comes at the expense of a certain idea and practice of democracy. The citizen is the subject par excellence of democracy, not of the nation.

The historical contiguity of nations and citizens obscures their political-theoretical distance. Even though they are both products of the democratic imaginary, the citizen and the national subject are the effects of answering the question of democracy differently: Who are ‘the people’ in the rallying cry ‘Power to the people’?

When we discuss democracy simply as a kind of politics, as a way of exercising power, it becomes akin to, say, dictatorship or oligarchy or republicanism or liberalism. What such a notion foregrounds is democracy qua system of institutions, practices of decision-making, rules and regulations, rights, and obligations. As a form of society, what comes into view, in contrast, are the very persons that inhabit the political community. What are the customs and codes that govern how they relate to one another? From such a perspective, we are able to undertake a political anthropology of the demos. This is where the difference between the citizen and the national subject becomes most apparent. The citizen is hailed through democratic institutions and acts according to democratic norms – what I will call ‘ethical values’. The national subject is produced in and through the nationalist movement, supplemented by state bodies if it comes to power.