Читать книгу Internal Frontiers - Jon Soske - Страница 13

2

Beyond the “Native Question”

Xuma, Lembede, and the Event of Indian Independence

And then—UN! The whole of South Africa has been shaken by the decisions of that Assembly. The decisions have had international repercussions. The main source of the upheaval which is revolutionizing race relations in this country is—Durban! The centre of the Indian problem is Durban. And but for Durban there would have been no reverse for this country at the UN. . . . In Durban, the Indians (like the uprooted, war torn new European settlers) are experiencing rebirth. What of the African? May not Durban be the spring—or at least a chief actor in the story—of African Regeneration?¹

—X. [H. I. E. Dhlomo]

THE MID-1940S witnessed a series of watershed moments: the revitalization of the Indian Congress under a younger, more dynamic leadership, their launch of a campaign of passive resistance against the Asiatic Land Tenure Act in 1946, and the first censure of South Africa’s treatment of Indians by the UN later the same year. Occurring in break-neck succession, these events had an enormous influence on the thinking of African intellectuals, especially a new generation of activists associated with the ANC Youth League. At the same time, the ANC was divided over the proper response. The emergence of a new left-wing party based in the Cape, the Non-European Unity Movement, posed a direct challenge to the older organization and forced it to clarify its position on a series of questions, most significantly cooperation with other non-European groups. At the same time, the new leadership of the Indian Congress, the Radicals, pursued a closer working relationship with the ANC. The ensuing debate over cooperation versus unity between the ANC and other groups revived an older discussion about the place of the Indian in Africa and contributed to a broader reflection on the racial basis of African nationalism. In effect, it raised the question of the nation’s internal and external boundaries.

After the Indian government invited ANC president Dr. A. B. Xuma to travel to the UN, it became evident to the ANC leadership that their relationship with the Indian Congress (and their attitude toward Indians) was a matter with international ramifications. On 9 March 1947, the presidents of the ANC, Transvaal Indian Congress, and Natal Indian Congress—Xuma, Dr. Yusuf Dadoo, and Dr. Monty Naicker—released a statement of common interests following a meeting in Johannesburg. The Doctors’ Pact, as it came to be known, announced that “a Joint Declaration of co-operation is imperative for the working out of a practical basis of co-operation between the National Organizations of the non-European peoples.”² An important breakthrough, the pact reflected the competition between political organizations (especially the Unity Movement, the ANC, and the Communist Party) and the rivalry between different factions within the ANC itself. Shortly after it was signed, the Natal ANC leadership refused to implement it.

These rapid changes occurred against the background of two transformative events: the establishment of the UN in October 1945 and the 1947 independence of India and Pakistan. Far reaching in their geopolitical implications, these developments were also philosophical ruptures in the form that Susan Buck-Morrs attributes to the Haitian Revolution of the late eighteenth century.³ By creating a new global context for anticolonial politics (and the discourse of politics in general), they generated an intellectual space for the reconceptualization of “universal history”: the extension of the Enlightenment project of modernity beyond the limiting boundary of colonial racism.⁴ Although dominated by Anglo-American interests (as reflected by South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts’ role in drafting the preamble to its charter), the UN suggested the possibility of a world after empire for many African thinkers.⁵ Conceptualized in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide of Europeans Jews, this new order presupposed two founding principles: the sovereign nation-state and the international legal framework of universal human rights. In asserting the capacity of a heterogeneous people for democracy, Indian independence represented a realization of this vision which, simultaneously, challenged the normative Western ideal of the homogenous nation. Although the partition of Indian and Pakistan underscored the limitations of this achievement, India nevertheless provided African nationalists with a new model for thinking about sovereignty and nationhood.

This chapter begins by surveying the early history of the ANC, its attitudes toward the Indian diaspora, and its complex relationship with empire and colonial liberalism. It then focusses on two individuals, Lembede and Xuma, who sought to reorient the ANC in the 1940s and—in very different ways—articulated a vision of African nationalism beyond the framework of liberal empire and settler civil society. After discussing the impact of the 1946 Passive Resistance Campaign on the ANC, this chapter reconstructs the debate regarding “non-European unity” and the fallout over the Doctors’ Pact. In the process, it introduces individuals and organizations that will play important roles in the remainder of the book, including the Indian Congress Radicals, the Unity Movement, the Communist Party, Lembede’s co-thinker Mda, the Natal ANC president Champion, H. Selby Msimang, and (most importantly) Ngubane and H. I. E. Dhlomo. If the postwar moment created a new problem space for African nationalism, the question of the also-colonized other interrupted this opening and forced a reflection on the internal frontier of the nationalist project.

THE EARLY ANC, EMPIRE, AND THE NATIVE QUESTION

From its founding on 8 January 1912, the ANC’s vision of the future was characterized by a fundamental tension between an inclusive idea of a civilized South Africa and the belief in African unity.⁶ At the level of political strategy, the early ANC sought to secure the access of literate, property-owning African men to the rights of citizenship promised (or so they believed) by the British Empire. Explicitly rejecting the settler discourse of a “white South Africa,” ANC leaders fought for a common society based on a number of grounds, including British imperial citizenship, Christianity, a shared concept of civilization, and the contributions of African labor to building the country.⁷ Although imperial citizenship did not suggest social integration (and it certainly did not entail the assimilation of racial groups), it implied a political identity based on Western civilization and democratic institutions: white and black would share South Africa together. At the same time, the formation of the ANC reflected the conviction that only independent African activity could secure this outcome. Following the 1910 Union of South Africa, the government’s tabling of the 1912 Native Lands Act promised the dramatic curtailment of African rights. Little remained of the liberal pretense of African progress under white tutelage. Rejecting the framework of trusteeship, the founders of the ANC concluded that only African unity could secure their people’s access to civilization and modernity.⁸ African nationalism and the embrace of a broader South African identity were thus interdependent, rather than distinct, strands of thought within the early ANC: a national organization was the necessary instrument for achieving a democratic South Africa. This vision was possible because the horizon of early African nationalist thinking was not a South African nation-state, but the multiracial British empire that incorporated numerous nations and peoples in complex political and legal-juridical configurations.⁹ The early ANC aspired to a radical renegotiation of the relationship between black and white within the context of liberal empire.¹⁰

During first half of the twentieth century, the most widely accepted framework for describing this relationship was the “Native Question.”¹¹ Articulated in nineteenth-century debates over the responsibilities of empire, the Native Question cohered into an administrative paradigm during the 1920s. Premesh Lalu explains: “Caught between a discourse on vanishing cultures and the story of progress, academic disciplines performed the role of trusteeship over the category of the native, which appeared resolutely bound to administrative decree and capitalist demand.”¹² In other words, the Native Question defined the problem of colonial governance as the disciplining and management of populations no longer located in the idealized realm of African tradition, but not yet fully incorporated as modern subjects within liberal capitalism. In this paradigm, the Native occupied a (perpetually) liminal space: colonial modernity had disrupted or destroyed precolonial African societies without fully assimilating Africans into the political, economic, and cultural institutions of Western civilization.¹³ Because Africans allegedly lacked the discipline formed by participation within settler civil society, they had not yet developed democratic capacity; that is, the ability to rationally and responsibly exercise the rights of citizenship. The cornerstone of this discourse was the identification of historical progress—the assumed form of a people’s participation within universal history—with the development and spread of Western civilization.¹⁴

Early leaders of the ANC rejected the Native Question’s means of bringing Africans into modernity—the settler population’s commitment to white supremacy vitiated the framework of trusteeship—while generally accepting the larger vision that associated progress and historicity with Western civilization. At its founding, the ANC consisted of a relatively elite and entirely male group of intellectuals, professionals, and chiefs. Its activities focused on appeals and delegations to the South African and British governments. ANC leaders argued that racial citizenship violated the universality of the law and therefore threatened to undermine empire’s foundation on the principle of justice. At the same time, they challenged a narrow determination of democratic capacity by invoking other criteria such as universal male suffrage in England or the existence of democratic institutions within African societies.¹⁵ If a later generation of African intellectuals saw this strategy as insufficiently radical, many contemporaries understood the subversive character of the ANC’s claim: these delegations and petitions performed the African’s right to approach the Crown without intermediary. Such assertions of modern political subjectivity—“the right to have rights” in Hannah Arendt’s well-known formulation—produced full-throated outrage among white settlers.¹⁶ Nevertheless, these activities failed to arrest the implementation of racist legislation and the expropriation of African land. In 1919, the ANC leadership expelled its founding president, the Natal educationalist and newspaperman John Dube, on the grounds that he endorsed working within the framework of segregation. This schism resulted in the secession of the Natal congress from the national organization.¹⁷ After a brief period of greater militancy, the ANC stagnated during the 1920s. Both the International Commercial Union (ICU), a rural trade union movement influenced by Garveyism, and the Communist Party surpassed the organization in membership and influence. Anthony Butler concludes, “The ANC could easily have died in the 1930s.”¹⁸ When the Natal ANC reunited with the national body following Dube’s death in February 1946, the new president was a former leader of the ICU, the formidable operator Champion.

Alongside Ethiopia, Liberia, and (most importantly) the United States, references to India occurred regularly in the writings of early ANC figures. The famous opening line of Sol Plaatje’s 1916 Native Life in South Africa includes a citation, consciously or not, of untouchability: “Awakening on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African Native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.”¹⁹ Across multiple iterations, India served both as a reference point within a common imperial geography and an emblem of the global struggle against colonialism that flared following the end of the First World War. In Abantu-Batho (the ANC’s newspaper of the 1920s), the Amritsar massacre was invoked to show that “there is no moral code among nations” while India’s revolt for national recognition appeared alongside Abyssinia and the Caribbean labor revolts as a warning to empire.²⁰ Other articles invoked Gandhi as the Indian version of Marcus Garvey.²¹ Attitudes toward South African Indians were, predictably, more varied. Even as writers such as Plaatje celebrated the courage of Gandhi’s 1913 campaign, anxieties regarding Indian migration were a regular theme of African newspaper articles. In Natal, broadsides against Indian exploitation were a staple of ANC articles and speeches, including in statements by individuals who praised the industry of Indians and cultivated personal alliances with Indian leaders.²² In general, a consensus existed that the different political situations of Africans and South African Indians rendered an alliance between the two groups impractical. Writing about Native policy and racial reconciliation in 1930, a young Xuma captured this outlook: “The Indian in South Africa does not fall within the purview of our discussion, because . . . the Indian cannot make common cause with the African without alienating the right of intervention on their behalf on the part of the Government of India.” ²³ According to this view, the “Asiatic Question” and the “Native Question” represented distinct problems within the overarching framework of liberal empire.²⁴

XUMA, THE REVITALIZATION OF THE ANC, AND THE POSTWAR WORLD

During the Second World War, the ANC experienced the beginnings of a revival. Tom Lodge has aptly described the 1940s as “a watershed moment.”²⁵ In the year following the armistice, three explosive social struggles shook the country: a national anti-pass campaign coordinated by the Communist Party; the eighty-thousand-strong African mineworkers strike on the Rand gold mines; and the initiation of passive resistance by the Indian Congress for the first time since 1913. As the ANC began to reorient strategically and intellectually, two figures exemplified its search for a new direction: the prim, studious, and determined physician A. B. Xuma and the brilliant president of the ANC Youth League, Anton Lembede. Mandela’s autobiography suggests that the conflict between Xuma, representing the older generation’s gradualism, and the Youth League dominated the ANC during the 1940s. Militant African nationalism, according to this account, confronted and triumphed over the delegation-and-petition school of black leadership.²⁶ However compelling, this narrative obscures the ways in which Xuma, who entered politics some fifteen years after the founding of the ANC, embraced the idea of national liberation and charted an ambitious new direction for the ANC in the context of a rapidly changing international order. Despite their intellectual, strategic, and temperamental differences, Xuma and the Youth League sought to conceptualize the project of African nationalism outside the framework of the Native Question. In different fashions, they drew on the experiences the Indian anticolonial struggle and the event of Indian independence in their efforts to articulate a basis for the claim to nationhood beyond empire and settler civil society.

Born in the Transkei to devout Methodist parents, Xuma’s childhood—like that of many African figures in this book—spanned two distinct worlds: the village life of rural African society and the discipline of the mission school. After training as a teacher, Xuma traveled to the United States where he studied at Booker T. Washington’s famed Tuskegee Institute in Atlanta and the University of Minnesota. Xuma’s American years were marked by periods of financial hardship and efforts to remedy the limits of his earlier education through night school. But he also benefited from the generosity of Christian networks, connections developed through the YMCA, and personal benefactors, including the chair of zoology at Minnesota. Working his way through medical school as a waiter on the Northern Pacific Railway, he passed his exams at Northwestern University in 1925 before proceeding to Hungary and Budapest to specialize gynecology and surgery. In 1927, he returned to South Africa and established his practice in Sophiatown. He named his surgery “Empilweni” (place of healing).²⁷

Xuma entered politics in response to the Herzog government’s 1935 segregationist legislation. Elected to the vice presidency of an organization founded to coordinate black opposition, the All African Convention, Xuma achieved national prominence and became an advocate for independent African political organization. Although he worked closely with liberal whites at points in his long career, he fiercely resented paternalistic efforts at European “guidance.”²⁸ Notably, he convinced the convention to reject an early proposal for unity with the liberal South African Institute of Race Relations. He also declined to stand for the Native Representative Council, an advisory board to the government created by the Hertzog legislation. If US black politics remained a touchstone for Xuma, he followed developments in India closely and concluded that the end of the war would create unprecedented opportunities for the colonized to participate in the crafting of peace.²⁹ As early as 1935, he began weighing the consequences of employing “passive resistance” to gain African rights.³⁰ His papers at the University of the Witwatersrand contain a complete press run of an Indian Opinion supplement on the Indian independence struggle from the mid-1940s.³¹

In 1937 Xuma returned to the United States to fundraise and consult with the National Association for the Advacement of Coloured People (NAACP), among others. He also met Maddie Beatrice Hall, who married Xuma in 1940. The following year, he studied public health in London, where he cultivated connections with Pan-Africanist circles. After he returned to South Africa, the Reverend James Calata asked Xuma to run for the presidency of the ANC, which he assumed in 1940. As the ANC’s seventh president, Xuma overhauled a collapsing, provincially fragmented, and clique-ridden apparatus. He passed a new constitution, fought to professionalize finances, and worked to create a functioning branch structure. Through these efforts, membership increased from around 1,000 in the 1930s to 5,517 in 1947.³² Xuma explicitly invoked the Indian Congress as a model for his effort to reconstruct the ANC.³³ In a fateful move, he supported the unification of the Natal ANC under the presidency of Champion, who brought the province back into the national organization for the first time since 1919. Xuma defended the trailblazing efforts of his wife to revitalize the ANC Women’s League.³⁴ He also embraced equal membership rights for women and sought to build stronger ties between the ANC and black trade unions.³⁵

A younger generation of ANC leaders, such as Mandela, remembered Xuma as an elitist who, despite his important achievements, was caught in a gentleman’s politics ill-suited to a mass movement.³⁶ It might be fairer to suggest that Xuma promoted an NAACP-style politics of racial uplift, respectability, and aggressive legal activism whose South African moment—if it ever existed—was shuttered by apartheid. In Xuma’s eyes, India’s independence under the leadership of a cultivated middle-class intellectual such as Nehru, and its self-appointed role as the diplomatic champion of the Third World, may well have represented the possibility that world politics was in the process of becoming more “American.”³⁷ It was in this postwar opening that he saw the greatest opportunity to advance the African’s cause.

Whatever its continuities with earlier ANC traditions, Xuma’s approach departed from his predecessors by articulating the national aspirations of Africans within an internationalist framework of human rights and the nation-state. After the publication of the Allied war aims, the 1941 Atlantic Charter signed by Churchill and Roosevelt, Xuma began to strategize ways to interject the ANC’s voice into the coming negotiations over the contours of the postwar world.³⁸ He also recognized that the foundation of the UN created the possibility for Africans to circumvent their disenfranchisement and utilize the body to indict South Africa’s racial policies. The consequences of this strategic reorientation were far reaching. Removing African politics from the geography of the British Empire, Xuma located the project of African nationalism within a problem space defined by the globalization of the nation-state and a new understanding of legitimate sovereignty. As independent India demonstrated, membership in the community of nations was no longer based on liberal conceptions of homogenous political community and democratic capacity derived from Western civilization. In this emerging world order, the nation-state derived its authority from the promotion of a globally binding framework of international law based on universal human rights.³⁹