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ANC 100 YEARS CONFERENCE - DEBATING LIBERATION HISTORIES

AND DEMOCRACY TODAY

September 2011

REVISITING THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE

NATIONAL QUESTION IN SOUTH AFRICA

By Judy Mulqueeny

“Blank pages in history should not be allowed”, Mzala 1989

In 2012 the ANC will celebrate its centenary. It situates this in the organisational framework

resolved at the Polokwane Conference in 2007. The philosophical underpinning of the planned

event is unity in diversity and the struggle against imperialism. Since democracy in 1994 this

theme has been the cornerstone of the ANC's nation building project it says.

Historically, struggles in the villages and other local areas formed a vital part of the the national

liberation struggle led by the ANC. The centenial celebration seeks to bind the nation as well as

to cement communities. It aims to engage the people, to open their energies and to keep them

involved. Also, the centenary will be celebrated as a South African, African and world historic

event.

I

A Brief History of Imperialism With the birth of capitalism, nations and national movements emerged, with each rooted in a

single economy. Moreover, modernity as modern civilisation, as well as capitalism stirred in

large areas of the world beyond Europe. But for various reasons the potentially different paths to

modernity aborted. Modernity became inseparable from the imperialist expansion of European

capitalism.

Both liberal and socialist theorists in Europe were long preoccupied with the national question,

debating issues of national unity and independence. After the first Communist International,

Marx and Engels labeled revolutions of the people - the workers, peasants, professionals,

intellectuals and small shopkeepers - 'bourgeois democratic'. Now the revolutionary process need

not wait for capitalism to be developed. The road to socialism had to be an uninterrupted one

also.

In 1853 Marx wrote a series of articles on India. These have been recognised as the start of

modern thinking on imperialism. In one of his articles Marx noted that "the profound hypocrisy

and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilisation lies before our eyes, turning from its home,

where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies where it goes naked" (The Future Results of

British Rule in India, August 8). He placed great emphasis on forging a strategy of struggle of

the international movement for democracy and socialism.

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As industrial capitalism grew, so did the working class swell. Lenin analysed the development of

19th century capitalism into the phase of imperialism - the growth of monopoly capitalism and

the colonial system globally. In 1917 he and the Bolshevik Party led the October Revolution

which brought into being a worker's state in Russia. However, in hastening the development of

the productive forces, capitalist approaches were used to modernise and organise the economy,

The October Revolution brought a qualitative change in international relations. A new stage in

the struggle for socialism had been reached. In the Third Communist International (Comintern)

there were fierce debates about the character of the bourgeois democratic movement in the

colonies. The Comintern ultimately came to proclaim that the colonial revolution against

imperialism was no longer solely a bourgeois revolution. Rather, it was part of the world

proletarian revolution against capitalism and for socialism. One could speak now of the 'national

democratic revolution' (NDR).

Bourgeois civilisation in the west was based on enslaving working people in the colonies. In the

struggle for socialism, working class struggles against the bourgeoisie in the capitalist countries

needed to be combined with that of the great masses of the colonised against imperialism.

Imperialism violated the right of oppressed peoples to determine their future for themselves. One

way it did this was to deny them a historical and cultural memory. Or, they were offered an

apocryphal one deriving from the metropolis, theorists have noted.

There has been a long struggle against imperialism in South Africa, including African and

Afrikaner nationalist struggles. The same land came to be occupied by oppressed and oppressor

peoples. They arrived in the modern world along different roads. Still a source of division

among historians is the nature of British imperial policy at the turn of the twentieth century.

Both Boer and Briton then proclaimed their special civilising mission in Africa. They searched

for a common 'native policy' and set up an independent white state in 1910.

Most notable was the way in which the Afrikaner working class was depoliticised. Forsaking

their attack on British imperialism, Afrikaner intellectuals stoked fears of the swartgevaar.

Appeals were made to Afrikaners to unite. They were called on to fight to preserve white

civilisation. Afrikaner nationalism grew, blurring class divisions. It was marked by an extreme

ethnic bias. Women in the churches and cultural organisations contributed to mobilising support

for it.

Also some liberal and Marxist scholars argued over the last century that there was no longer a

national question in South Africa. Yet the segregationist state worked to divide the workers on

racial lines and to put in place structures of the internal colonialism of African people. This gave

impetus to the growth of African nationalism. In addition, the state instigated a system of

codified customary law which distorted African culture and entrenched patriarchy.

African national consciousness emerged in the time of the shift from a pastoral to an industrial

society. It was against the background of imperialist modernisation that struggles for land and

the franchise occurred. Modernist leaders, largely men, ascribed to British imperial ideals of

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justice, fairness and equality. Most were influenced by nationalist African-American intellectuals

too. One such was Booker T. Washington, who preached education with labour and self reliance.

The nationalist newspapers and journals that were founded helped create a vision of an

alternative society. Yet the link between modernity and the nationalism of the oppressed in South

Africa was not of one mould. In particular, the Gandhian critique of modernity was based on a

fundamental questioning of British imperialism.

After the Second World War the global epoch of the transition from capitalism to socialism

began to take shape. National liberation revolutions took place in this context. In South Africa

the industrial working class was growing. Also, a new generation of modernist leaders of the

oppressed peoples came to the fore. Both men and women and including youth and workers,

they favoured a common society in South Africa.

They began to forge new ways of engaging the people and new approaches to mass mobilisation

in the struggle for democratic rights and against imperialism. Searching for an alternative

modernity, some became wedded to socialism. Yet imperialists fought back to prevent genuine

people's power. South Africa became a bulwark of racism, neo-colonialism and imperialism on

the African continent (Yusuf Dadoo, July 1978).

By the time it entered into a negotiated transition in the 1990s, neo-liberal globalisation was

gathering pace. It was spurred by the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe. Added to this,

social democratic gains in industrialised countries were being rolled back and perceptions of the

state in Africa as a failed state increased. Newly independent African countries had been faced

with great problems of modernising the economy. They had sought to upgrade standards of

living rapidly, improving health, education and social welfare.

After democracy arrived in South Africa in1994 the move from resistance to reconstruction was

seen. One of the victims seemed to be our racist past. But the efforts to redirect the energies of

the communities, workers, the rural poor, women and youth too easily opposed development to

resistance (Judy Mulqueeny, 1996, p.86). Linked to the reintegrating of the country into the

global market, national development efforts re-assumed the trappings of modernisation. This

proved inimical to history as a critical awareness of our public past.

Knowledge, culture and nature were commodified and privatisation increased (Helen Sheehan,

2009, p.83). Class analysis lost favour, with a greater pre-occupation with livelihoods. There

was also a separating out of the concerns of political and civil society, of the political and social.

As well, the extent to which globalisation is imperialism has been blurred by proponents of neo-

liberalism and post-modernism. They deny the possibility of concepts of totality or 'grand

narratives', such as that of imperialism or of the nation. At issue too is the extent to which

African nationalism in South Africa was a modernist project.

While the process of tying cities to global forces exacerbated fragmentation, decentralisation saw

the rise of localities to prominence. The struggle against imperialism continues in the 21st

century. The struggle to recreate the ‘nation‘, the national market, national production and

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exchange has once again become a basic historic demand (James Petras, 1997-98). Amid global

economic crisis the hegemony of neo-liberalism is under attack. In Africa the quest for a

democratic development state is seen. There is a rethinking of the relations between the state, the

market, society and the people. Pan-Africanism is once again on the continental agenda also.

II

Debating the National Question

The historiography of the liberation movement in South Africa is vast. Some critiques came from

within, while many of the works are not academic, or are literary. An oral tradition as well as

song, dance and visual art, whose riches largely remain unmined, also forms part of the

histororiography of the movement.

Some of the historiography of the ANC has been triumphalist or functionary. It has masked the

contradictions, tensions and conflicts among leaders or between them and the people or between

the different races, classes and genders involved in united front politics. As well, some popular

versions have "sanitised" or provided simplified versions of a complex history.

On the other hand, some analyses have been biased against the ANC and its alliance partners.

Not objective, these were based largely on information from traitors and defectors. The style of

one writer "resembles a prosecutor rather than an academic". Often there is a reliance on

secondary or more remote sources. Other writers are "captives" of their hypotheses (Vladimir

Shubin, 2002, pp. 1-12).

There is also the challenge of 'amnesia' and nostalgia with regard to apartheid. A related problem

is the silence regarding the works of those intellectuals whose histories offer insights crucial to

nation building but who seem to challenge dominant academic paradigms. There is a dearth of

black academic historians too.

The role of history and historiography in nation building is not a new theme in Africa including

South Africa. History has been and still is hotly contested, as well as being a source of

mobilisation or 'a weapon of struggle'. Our "controversial past" and its significance for the new

South Africa has helped make the task of nation building perilous though (Jakobs Gaard Stolten,

2002, pp. 11 - 17). See in particular debates about the national question.

Pallo Jordan has written that the process of building a nation was central to the national

liberation movement (The South African Liberation Movement and the Making of a New

Nation, 1988). Pixley ka Seme, a founder of the African National Congress in 1912, laid out the

tasks of the national liberation movement. It would have to abolish the colonial relationship;

establish democracy to secure the right of self determination; unite the South African people and

act the midwife at the birth of a new nation.

However by the late 1930s and early 1940s the ANC and the All African Convention (AAC)

were in dispute about which was the premier national organisation. While the ANC departed

from the AAC, the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) one of the partners of the AAC,

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enunciated its Ten Point programme in 1943. It said that the struggle for freedom and the

struggle for land were inseparable. Emphasis was laid also on systematic political education.

This can be contrasted to the Africanist inspired ANC Youth League whose nationalist

philosophy was greatly influenced by the mass struggles of new arrivals in the city.

A complex intertwined relationship developed between the ANC and SACP; between the

national democratic revolution and the struggle for socialism or between national and class

struggle. The main contents of the South African national democratic revolution came to be

defined in the Freedom Charter in 1955. Its theme was ''The People shall govern". With an ethics

of non-racialism and endorsed by the ANC and its alliance partners, the Charter was not a

programme for socialism. Rather it was a common programme for a free and democratic South

Africa agreed on by socialists and non-socialists.

The ANC led alliance invoked a concept of the national question which yoked together the

forces of national liberation and working class revolution. It was based on the principle of

building the broadest united front of patriotic and anti-racist forces against white domination in

South Africa. Also, at the base of nation-building was the need to overturn the legacy of

underdevelopment with its deep rooted racial, class and gender inequalities.

Another NDR theoretical milestone was the South African Road to Freedom. This 1962

programme of the South African Communist Party was based on the two faced nature of

modernity prevailing in one country. It made a major contribution to the political tradition of

indigenising Marxism. An immediate proposal was advanced before the workers and

democratic and patriotic peoples of South Africa. This was for a national democratic state within

the framework of the Freedom Charter.

In 1969 the main thrust of the SACP programme was incorporated in the strategy and tactics of

the ANC at the Morogoro Conference. From then the ANC subscribed to the view that the

contradiction between the colonised black majority and the white oppressor state was the

dominant one. This could not be resolved by the colonial state reforming itself out of existence.

Rather the system of colonial domination had to be overthrown (Pallo Jordan, 1997). The ANC

also motivated that the NDR would be led by the African working class.

After the black workers strikes in 1973 and the Soweto uprising of students in 1976, mass revolt

erupted in the 1980s. The question of the nation in South Africa became highly controversial

wrote Neville Alexander (1986). Some academics propagated the view that after South Africa

became a dominion 1910-31, a national question no longer existed. They arrived at this

conclusion because they equated the national question with the colonial question or the lack of a

peasantry in the country. Reflecting a narrow Eurocentric approach, they misconceived the

national question, over-emphasising class struggle.

At the other exreme were followers of the black consciousness movement. Their argument was

that in 'Azania' were different nationalities without land or other structural property that actually

constituted a single black nationality. Repossession of the land and the seizing of political power

were required to achieve nationhood. Again, 'populists' contended that the struggle by the people

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for national liberation was more important than the class struggle punted by 'workerists'.

An ANC discussion document entitled The National Question in Post 1994 South Africa (1997)

also was written by Pallo Jordan. He reminded us that there have been intense struggles around

the issues of ethnicity, race, class and gender in the national liberation movement. Was there a

national question post 1994? The answer was in the affirmative, although it had assumed a new

form.

While racialism was no longer institutionalised, both it and different forms of ethnic mobilisation

had been amplified. Racism and ethnicity were functions of the development of South African

capitalism in a colonial milieu. Jordan highlighted the "dependent identities" and "erratic ethnic

consciousness" of the Indian and Coloured working classes (p.4). What should be added now is

the populism and xenophobia of some of the African working people. Also, black working and

poor women have borne the brunt of crises of social reproduction rooted in the legacy of

underdevelopment.

It could be argued that the ANC's Polokwane Conference was a struggle to reclaim the concept

of national democratic revolution over that of bourgeois liberal democracy. On the other hand,

Bundy (2007) asserts that all the debates on the national question in South Africa have produced

no national answer. Raymond Suttner argues the need to debate the NDR concept in the current

conjuncture (Debating NDR: Sunday Dispatch, Dec. 4, 2010).

But the way he splits the three terms 'national', 'democratic', 'revolution', as concepts which do

not have fixed meanings, is ahistorical. The concept of the NDR, as it has been used in the ANC

led alliance in particular, is rendered meaningless it is argued. What must not be denied is the

impact Marxist ideas about imperialism and the national question, particularly those of Lenin,

had on Africa. To help address the unfinished NDR, the history and historiography of the

national question must be reclaimed and reconsidered, it is contended.

Suttner also deprecates what appears to be a "hierarchy of historiographies" (April 2011, p.12) in

South Africa. Premesh Lalu (2008) notes that the 'native question' associated with the

segregationist state greatly influenced the study of history in the first half of the twentieth

century. He points out that the 'Native Republic Thesis' of the Communist Party of South Africa

was shaped in this context.

Yet Lalu highlights the academic reluctance to tackle nationalism as a problem of history now.

This includes the nationalism which opposed apartheid and whose programme is the foundation

of the modern democratic state in South Africa. It is Lalu's argument that if scholarship is to help

deepen democracy it has to renew a critique of apartheid. At the same time, the monopoly by

nationalism to speak in the voice of the oppressed is not unchallenged now, he adds.

Now we are faced with wide ranging 'service delivery protests' or community protests against the

local state. Also, much contemporary debate is focused on the meaning and strategy to build a

development state in South Africa. The debate usually omits the substantial effort made to

reconstruct the local part of the unitary state, in particular, as a development state since 1994. A

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re-evaluation of its history can help throw light on the extent to which the current state can foster

substantive democracy to complete the NDR.

III

Overview of Debates about Race and Class in South Africa 1920s - 1970s

Bourgeois civilisation arrived in South Africa arm in arm with imperialism. The independence of

its oppressed peoples and their right to self determination was undermined. How to resist this

came to be called the national question. To resolve it issues of race and class had to be addressed.

From early on however there was ambivalence about the 'woman question'. This was even

though from the beginning of the 20th century poor black women started to challenge a national

oppression based on inequalities of race, class and gender. Also, from the late 1920s Communist

Party of South Africa women leaders began to mobilise working women for a common national

struggle with men against colonialism.

The national question was called the 'native question' or 'native problem' by colonial rulers. It

became a controversial and ideological issue. In addressing it from the 1920s both government

policy makers and scholars drew on a whole sequence of government commissions, committees

of inquiry and reports. These works sought to unravel the problems for capital and the state

associated with the great African townward move.

In general, the towns and white farms were portrayed as centres of modernisation, with the

African countryside seen as traditional or backward. Between 1910 and 1948, the 'development

of the reserves' became a key feature of segregationist policy. As migrant labour and influx

control were entrenched, the need to develop the reserves or their agricultural modernisation

assumed central importance in the evolution of a cheap labour policy (Judy Mulqueeny, 1996).

In 1927 the Native Administration Act was passed. A main reason was to contain the perceived

threat to the state posed by the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU) and the

Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA). The Act helped set in place structures of the internal

colonialism of African people, particularly in the reserves. Associated with it was a propaganda

of differentiation.

At its 1928 meeting in Moscow the Comintern passed a resolution on the South African

Question. This came to be called the The Native (Black) Republic Thesis. It stated that the

development of relations of capitalist production had led to British imperialism carrying out the

economic exploitation of South Africa. Backed by black and white reformists, it formed a united

front with the white bourgeoisie in the country, both Boer and Briton. This did not alter the

general colonial character of the economy though.

The CPSA was faced with exceptionally complicated but favourable conditions stated the

Comintern. It was the only political party that could unite the white and black proletariat and

landless black peasantry for the struggle against British imperialism and its allies. The fight

against anti-native laws needed to be combined with the slogan of an independent native South

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African republic as a stage towards a workers and peasants republic, with full and equal rights

for all races.

Forming the bulk of the population was the black peasantry. Its land had been expropriated by

the white minority. Hence, the national question in South Africa, based on the agrarian question,

lay at the foundation of the revolution. The CPSA was urged to pay particular attention to

embryonic native organisations such as the ANC. While retaining its independence, the CPSA

should aim to transform the ANC into a fighting national revolutionary organisation of the toilers

against the white bourgeoisie and British imperialism. This constituted one of its major tasks.

It needed also to work out an agrarian programme and plan to organise the native peasants and

agricultural workers, while paying attention to poor agrarian whites. The Thesis was adopted by

the CPSA at its conference in 1929. In propagating it, the Party proclaimed that the struggle for

national liberation was inseparable from the struggle for land. A successful agrarian revolution

would form the basis of the victory of the masses over imperialism and for national

independence.

The Native Republic Thesis paved the way for closer co-operation with the ANC over the longer

term. But it led to intense acrimony within the CPSA, with some of its most committed members

expelled. Socialists also divided on the issue of the relation between town and country. Conflict

centred on the Native Republic Thesis spurred the development of Trotskyism in South Africa,

which itself split over the agrarian question. Trotsky himself responded to the Native Republic

Thesis debates in 1935.

In 1950 the CPSA was banned. Soon after that the Bantu Authorities Act was passed,

propagating ethnic nationhood. Over the years although the state accorded formal recognition of

the chiefs in the homelands, their powers were reduced consider -ably. At the same time the state

extolled those African cultural traditions that had bolstered the authority of the chiefs. Among

these were polygamy and lobola.

The CPSA and later the South African Communist Party (SACP) adapted the Native Republic

Thesis to the changing circumstances of struggle, not least the mass struggles of the 1950s. It

reached full expression in the 1962 Programme of the SACP entitled The South African Road to

Freedom. Here it was noted that the white ruling classes had manufactured a version of the past

of South Africa which they systematically attempted to impose everywhere. Further, South

Africa was characterised as a 'Colonialism of a Special Type' in the Programme.

A new type of colonialism had developed. Geographically the oppressing white nation occupied

the same territory as the oppressed people and lived side by side with them. On one level was

White South Africa. It possessed all the features of an advanced capitalist state in its final stage

of imperialism. The South African monopoly capitalists were closely inked to British, USA and

other foreign imperialist interests, exporting capital abroad, especially to Africa. On another

level was non-white South Africa with all the features of a colony, particularly in the African

reserves.

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It was this combination of the worst features both of imperialism and of colonialism within a

single frontier which determined the special nature of the South African system. Also, the

workers in the towns comprised the most dynamic and revolutionary force in South Africa. This

class in alliance with the masses of rural people was capable of leading a victorious struggle to

end white domination and exploitation.

The 1962 Programme declared that the revolutionary people could not merely take over the

existing state designed to maintain colonialism. They had to destroy it and create new people's

institutions. A unitary state in republican form should establish new administrative regions.

While local government should be rooted in the progressive traditions of the people of each

region, it also had to conform to the overall character and laws of the people's state.

Large scale planned development of the economy should be controlled and directed by the state.

Most importantly, control of the vital sectors of the economy needed to be placed in the hands

of the NDR state. By demanding the nationalisation of the mining industry, banking and

monopoly industry the foundation would be laid for the advance to socialism. In regard to the

African Revolution, the SACP argued that it was possible for the people in colonial countries to

advance along non- capitalist lines towards the building of socialism.

Yusuf Dadoo later commented on the exceptionally complex interplay of national and class

identified in the 1962 Programme. He wrote that the defining feature of a Marxist-Leninist

approach lay in the indivisible connection between the national question and the solution of the

antagonistic class contradictions between the exploited and the exploiters (July 1978). Others

have acknowledged that this theory of the South African revolution based on an application of

Marxism to indigenous realities has been one of the most important achievements of the SACP.

But in his The Theory of Internal Colonialism - The South African Case (1975) Harold Wolpe

took issue with the CST concept. He was in the unusual position then of being a leading member

of the SACP who also subscribed to the western Marxism of revisionist historians. There was an

unproblematic use of 'imperialism' and 'colonialism' in the wrting on internal colonialism

generally he contended.

Further, under CST, class relations were assimilated to race relations. To this extent it converged

with the conventional race relations theory. It thereby suffered the same analytical limitations.

The simultaneous recognition of the diversity of classes within racial groups on the one hand,

and their homogenous character on the other, forced the SACP into a contradictory position. It

gave the impression that the ruling class was composed of the entire white population. In fact

real power was in the hands of monopoly capitalists.

This work of Wolpe was part of an extensive body of literature that emerged in South Africa in

the 1970s that sought to analyse society from a perspective of class and class struggle (Class

Struggles in the NDR, SACP Discussion Document, 2004). Important insights about the relation

between racial discrimination and national oppression on the one hand, and the processes of

capital accumulation and the exploitation of the working class on the other, were generated.

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The impetus for this came from white radical students mostly studying at various universities in

the UK. Although they developed their theses as a response to the limitations of the Oxford

History of South Africa, they largely did not subscribe to the concept of the national democratic

revolution. The focus of their criticism was the liberal modernisation thesis which presented

racism as dysfunctional to the development of capitalism.

Liberal scholars and ideologues had used the dual economy concept to argue that agricultural

viability in the reserves was hampered by state interference in the free market. The colour blind

logic of the market would lead to the disappearance of 'race' as a factor in South Africa was their

argument. Roughly between the 1920s and 1970s, historians and other social scientists

consolidated this "liberal-pluralist orthodoxy" (Neville Alexander, 2002).

For the radical scholars racial ideology was functional to capitalist growth. Also, South Africa

was not a dual economy. Rather, it possessed a single forced labour economy of gold and maize.

These insights were based on an argument about black migrant labour largely male and the

mechanisms of cheap labour power. Some of the historians also traced the struggle between

fractions and strata of the dominant classes in the state and the impact on apartheid policies.

The classic work Capitalism and Cheap Labour Power in South Africa: From Segregation to

Apartheid (1972) was written by Wolpe. In it he analysed the transition from segregation to

apartheid in regard to the supply of cheap labour power. With the articulation of two modes of

production, the pre-capitalist mode was both dissolved and conserved by the dominant

capitalistic mode, with the reserves transformed into producers of labour power. To maintain the

system of migrant labour, the state sought to modernise the apparatus of political domination.

This was in the face of an assault on the whole political and economic structure in the 1940s and

1950s by the national liberation movement.

The contending views of liberal and radical historians derive, however, from a wider problematic

it is argued. Some of the best known scholars in South Africa such as Monica Wilson, Colin

Bundy as well as Wolpe grappled with the reasons for the underdevelopment of the Eastern Cape

reserves. In their works they presented an image of the reserves in the forty years after the Land

Act 1913 marked by soil erosion, dessication and falling fertility of the soil.

Agriculture was shown to be stagnant or in decline. As ecological impoverishment gathered

pace, the implication was that the state had to intervene in the reserves to bolster the migrant

labour system by developing the reserves. But in displacing the growing crisis in the policy of

segregation to African agriculture, an ideology of development grew to legitimate increasing

state interference with the productive forces in the reserves.

The segregationist state, including the local councils, served to displace peasant politics and

resistance, generated racial, cultural and gender stereotypes and obcured the nature of the

agrarian question. Thus although accounts varied according to the hue of the paradigm -

Modernisation or Dependency - the portrayal of the ecological decay and agrarian crisis in the

reserves helped perpetuate an ideology of development. The bureaucrats of segregation imposed

an agricultural modernisation and decentralized industrialisation that exacerbated a rural exodus.

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In Wolpe's later contributions he showed that the state and state policies could not be reduced to

an instrument of any class force. Rather, they were sites of struggle and contestation. In addition

there was a general theoretical failure, he contended, to relate structure to struggle adequately.

This made it difficult to understand the significance of conflicts in relation to political

transformation. Wolpe was critical also of revisionist historians who failed to consider the impact

of popular struggles of the dominated classes on the state.

But in the context of revolutionary and working class mobilisation in the country at the time, the

radical writings galvanised the whole range of social studies. History became one of the most

popular school and university subjects. "Marxism was a pivotal presence in the universities" as

well, with history as the master tool of intellectual resistance (Helen Sheehan, 2009, p.81).

Bernard Magubane's The Political Economy of Race and Class in South Africa published in

1979 was a polemical work directed against the racist apologia widespread in the works of

liberal scholars. In it he traced the systemic aspects of imperialism that fostered inequality and

racism in the South African political economy. The first step in formulating a theory of

inequality and racism in South Africa was to recover a sense of Britain's colonial legacy he

argued. Racial oppression and class exploitation were inextricably intertwined.

Africans were conquered by force and then confronted with a battery of cultural symbols and

weapons. Through these the conquerors justified their superiority. African culture was used as a

yoke in the oppression of African people. From the end of the Anglo-Boer War, South Africa

was integrated into the capitalist world economy by every social, cultural, economic and

geopolitical bond that history could bestow writes Magubane. It was in this era of imperialism

that racist theories were formalised.

Different emphases in the history of 'native policy' were related to the history of the class in

power at a particular time. The colonialist 'white man's burden' was replaced by the 'trusteeship'

of segregation. Unlike previous racist theories, trustee-ship pronounced it possible for those

under guardianship to become civilised people. With the loss of the Cape African franchise, the

ideology of trusteeship was tested. It was buried during the war years.

Apartheid followed as the next systematic falsification suffered by African people. Liberal

scholars presented it as the ideological inheritance of the frontier experience of Afrikaners. As

an ideology, apartheid attempted to cope with the demise of white supremacy around the world

and the wave of colonised nations winning independence. The evolution of apartheid ideology

had to be linked to the contradictions of capitalism also, Magubane argued.

He explained how capital accumulation unfolded in the urban space. The ecological forms seen

in the city were determined by the laws of the capitalist mode of production. South Africa's

urban-industrial areas were the supreme expression of human suffering. Only the revolutionary

emancipation of African men and women and society from capitalist rule and wage slavery

would solve the urban problem. Magubane later noted that for Marx the whole economic history

of society was summed up in the antithesis between town and country. Although an ancient

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urban tradition had existed in Africa, the colonial city was the creation of imperialism.

"Everyone in it was far from home" (2000).

Both Wolpe and Magubane were cadres of the national liberation movement. Wolpe occupied

important positions in the SACP and Congress of Democrats. Arrested after the Rivonia Raid, he

escaped from prision and went into exile in Britain. Here he became a well known sociologist

and social theorist. That he made important contributions to the development of the theory of the

South African revolution has been widely recognised in the academy. His 1972 article in

particular has been very influential and is still so today although it arouses fierce debate for or

against.

Also instructive is Wolpe's thinking on the relation between research and writing and the policies

and political priorities of a liberation movement. How should scholars relate to the movement

and the democratic government now? Wolpe believed that researchers needed to investigate the

social theories and empirical analysis that inform political strategies. That structural conditions

had an impact on political struggles had to be acknowledged. As to the topics of enquiry, the

relation between race and class or between national and socialist struggle should predominate. It

seems though that before his death Wolpe was moving away from this stance on the role of

intellectuals in national reconstruction.

Magubane was another politically committed intellectual who published widely internationally.

He contributed to an intellectual tradition that was concerned with the role of the city in the

construction of modernity in South Africa. (Ntongela Masilela, 2009). Influenced by SACP

intellectuals such as Albert Nzula and Govan Mbeki, he contributed to a native Marxism in the

country as well. In writing about race and class and the historiography of the liberation struggle,

he tapped into a long tradition of scholarship inspired by the struggles of ordinary people who

fought against oppression. This tradition ranged from the works of du Bois to Cabral to Jack

Simons notes Jimi Adesina (2010).

But Magubane's work has encountered a frosty reception from academics at some South African

universities. His focus on British imperial policy and racism, at a time when it was more popular

to write about class issues from an alternative Marxist perspective, was resisted. He also

subscribes to the concept of national democratic revolution. Adesina believes that the silence

regarding Magubane's work betokens censorship and a form of erasure. It denies the new

generation a sense of their intellectual heritage and of the contributions made to global social

science. Alternative traditions and narratives offered by intellectuals like Magubane are

fundamental to the nation building project is Adesina's contention.

It has been said that a proper history of women's struggles in the South African liberation

movement, which are as old as the liberation struggle, is still awaited. The chief role that women

leaders played was to mobilise black women for a common national struggle with men against

colonialism. At the same time, the struggle for women's emancipation was never subsumed

totally. What helped direct its course was the non-racial class struggle against capitalism. This

enabled the women to place their oppression in the context of the struggle for working class

rights.

13

The achievements of previously oppressed women since 1994 have seemed to be both

exceptional and unexceptional. To understand this development, gender in relation to race and

class needed to have been considered both historically and theoretically. But there has been a

greater focus on overcoming the inequality associated with 'Blacks in general and Africans in

particular'. Also, there has been the belief that national or class struggle would automatically

solve the problems of women's oppression. Yet this overlooked the fact that patriarchy has a

material basis in the sexual division of labour in families and households, is tied to the ownership

of private property and is reproduced in the wider society.

Another challenge is that the women's struggles, largely from below, were linked to social and

not only political impediments. Under segregation and apartheid a developmental welfare state

emerged in South Africa. Both white and black patriarchs in it particularly at local level

attempted to turn black women into rural stay at home private housewives. Into the 1950s, while

women's organisations were able to mobilise women across ethnic and class divides, unlike

elsewhere in Africa they seemed to focus more on social than on political issues. In search of

economic independence, they focused on community development and self help.

IV

Overview of the Historiography of the National Question from the 1980s

The growth of manufacturing industry from the 1950s saw the industrial working class swell.

But economic growth slowed down in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Following the black

workers strikes of 1973 and the Soweto uprising of the youth in 1976, mass upsurges occurred in

the 1980s. Liberated districts emerged in some parts of South Africa. Here rudimentary organs of

people's power were set up in the place of the discredited local councils. The working class both

in workplaces and in communities played the leading role in the struggles for people's power.

There were many debates about the issues of people's education and history, people's and

working class culture or a people's war. Leading analysts of people's power included Mzala and

George Mashamba, both cadres of the liberation movement. The concept of people's power was

not equivalent to that of Parliamentary power. It was that and more. Mashamba wrote:

The dominance of the 'monolithic notion of people's power

as the supreme controlling power in the state' which has to be

seized by the people via the instrumentality of their leading

organisations - the ANC and allied organisations - was

superceded by a 'dispersed notion of people's power that has

to be seized via the instrumentality of the various organs of

people's power' in each and every front of struggle as a

matter of both tactical and strategic priority... People's power

is concerned with people's control of their lives in all aspects

- political, economic, cultural, educational, etc - on a continuing

and local basis (George Mashamba, 1990, pp. 11-12 as quoted in

Blade Nzimande, 1996, p.9)

14

In this context the crucial question was what constituted the nation in South Africa? Neville

Alexander asked this in his book One Azania, One Nation (No Sizwe, 1979). In it and in a series

of papers he also discussed the ways in which different conceptions of the nation in South Africa

were related to the question of the emancipation of the working class.

Alexander has been committed to learning and education for a long time. He was deeply

involved in the struggle against apartheid through guerilla activities and had links with the Non-

European Unity Movement. For ten years he was imprisoned on Robben Island for conspiracy

to commit sabotage. He is a proponent of a multilingual South Africa.

Working class movements had led the struggles for national liberation in a number of nation-

states over the 20th century. Or they had taken the lead in building their nations, Alexander

noted in 1986. In South Africa too the task of building the nation through struggle had fallen to

the black working class. It alone could unite the other oppressed and exploited classes. This was

because it was not implicated in imperialism and capitalism as a beneficiary.

As well, the vanguard organisation of the working class had to project an alternative concept of

the nation. Alexander stressed the vital political and social importance of creating a different

discourse of race and ethnicity and the formative role of language in creating a new national

identity. But the new nation would be realised fully only under socialism. A non-racial

capitalism was impossible in South Africa. Class, colour and nation converged in the national

liberation movement.

One of the foremost activist intellectuals of the liberation movement in the 1980s was Jabulani

'Mzala' Nxumalo. His writings, mostly in struggle journals such as African Communist,

Sechaba and Dawn, are unknown in the country largely. He had fled the country after the

Soweto uprising and joined the ANC and the SACP. Although he had a leading position in

Mkhonto we Sizwe, his main contribution has been an ideological one. He lectured widely on

the relation between national and class struggle in South Africa.

In his Revolutionary Theory on the National Question in South Africa (1988) he argued that

the need to ensure that the liberation struggle contained a strongly organised working class was

the main reason behind the alliance of the ANC and SACP. For them, the solution of the

national question in South Africa could proceed only from the integration of the two nations,

oppressor and oppressed, into a single South African nation under conditions of total equality.

The aim in the future South Africa was the fraternal unity of the workers and peoples of both

nations and all nationalities. This would happen only if the working class headed the process.

Then too could the road from the NDR to socialism be an uninterrupted one.

In his The National Question in the Writing of South African History (1989) Mzala contends

that it was in the writing of history, more than in politics, that the controversies and conflicts

about the presentation of the national question in South Africa were reflected. More than in any

other country, the question of the political implications of historiography was at the root of

debates about the national question.

15

A criticism by Mzala was that most of the earlier historical works seemed to be trapped in

empiricism. They lacked a concept of totality. In these works a burning issue was whether South

Africa had a single history or many histories. The historical question of who South Africa

belonged to was the first and central issue in the presentation of the national question in this

country. As well, the link between the issue of land ownership and the right to self determination

was a common denominator.

Mzala traced divergent historical approaches to the national question:

The Colonialist Tendency: The main body of early written historical knowledge about South

Africa came from white writers such as G. Theal, Donald Moodie and George Edward Cory.

These works provided ideological legitimation for colonial aggression, national oppression and

racial inequality. Historical works written by Africans in their own languages were never

published. Later the establishing of bantustans and ethnic 'nations' was an attempt to deny

nationhood to the black people and the existence of a national question.

The Liberal Tendency: Mzala also reviewed the work of four historians of liberal persuasion -

W.M. Macmillan, C.W de Kiewiet, Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson. For them the central

theme of history was the integration of South African peoples into a single nation resulting from

the growth of a single economy. They believed that in 1910 South Africa became an independent

nation and the national question ceased to exist then. That Africans had been excluded was an

issue only to the extent that those who were already 'civilised' were not included in the franchise.

In his critique of the Oxford History of South Africa written by Wilson and Thompson, Mzala

notes that it regarded whites as a homogenous ethnic community. It also failed to trace the link

between ethnic differentiation and national unity among Africans historically. The integration of

African ethnic groups into a single nationality should not be oversimplified and presented as

theoretically and historically unproblematic, Mzala adds.

The Nationalist Tendency: Sol Plaatje's novel Mhudi and his Native Life in South Africa

provided a perspective on the views of the emergent intelligentsia who articulated the embryonic

national consciousnesss of the African people. An ANC leader, Plaatje located the common

nationhood of Africans in the question of the land. However, the early nationalists did not assert

the right of the oppressed to national self determination. Instead the legitimacy of the white state

was unquestioned.

Mzala cautions against partisanship in writing about the ANC. "Blank pages in history should

not be allowed. Everything should be told. If needs be, it has to be told dispassionately and

ruthlessly..." (p. 39). There was no shame in portraying the tactics of the early ANC as reformist,

with strong liberal influences, or that by the 1940s it was moribund.

CPSA members in the ANC then made known the Party's championing of majority rule as the

only answer to the solution of the colonial and national question in South Africa. The young

generation of Africans also demanded the transformation of the ANC. Bringing a changed

perspective on nationalism, they urged the ANC to rely on the masses of the people as the true

16

makers of history.

Up to the 1940s there was no history of South Africa from the African nationalist point of view

contends Mzala. The first breakthrough came from a white ex-communist, Eddie Roux. His Time

Longer than Rope was published in 1948. Mzala insists that the issue of the racial origins of

historians is relevant only insofar as it relates to their ability to present history from the point of

view of the national question or the oppressed people.

In Roux's work Africans were presented for the first time in South African history as self

conscious and active protagonists. Like Plaatje's nationalist approach, and contrary to both

colonialist and liberal historiography, Roux's book affirmed the existence of two nations in South

Africa, the oppressor and the oppressed.

The Africanist Tendency: Anton Lembede, who was the leader of the young militant

nationalists of the 1940s, defined Africanism as the spirit of self determination and asserted the

common cultural destiny of African people. But Mzala contends that Africanism in South

African conditions was a narrow version of nationalism. It ignored the complex problem of the

relation between national oppression and class exploitation. Africans were portrayed as a

homogenous category without class or other social conflicts, or with ethnic problems only

between black and white.

Mzala also criticised Pan-Africanists for taking flight into an African continental perspective

while leaving South Africa's national problems unresolved. But he acknowledged the stance of

Robert Sobukwe that not all Africanists subscribed to the doctrine of South African

exceptionalism. Sobukwe's belief was that South Africa was an integral part of Africa. She

could not solve her problems isolated from the rest of the continent.

The Radical Tradition in South African Historiography: Despite not producing many

historical studies, proponents of the Marxist-Leninist tendency had made a truly comprehensive

analysis of the national question says Mzala. The few works produced, such as those by Jack and

Ray Simons and Francis Meli, proved that it was with this ideological stance that most of the

questions posed by South African historiography, and the problems of presenting the national

question, found some initial but not final answers. To understand why the immediate national

goals of the ANC and the SACP converged, a historical study of the national question and of the

relation between class and national struggle was needed. It needed to be examined within a

critique of the theory of the bantustans and its concept of ethnic nationhood. But Mzala died

before he could complete such a study.

It can be added that Class and Colour in South Africa 1850-1950, the work by Jack and Ray

Simons, has been used by the range of Marxists in South Africa. In its foreward the authors

write that the book traces the interactions between the two main streams of resistance to white

domination – the national movements of Africans, Coloureds and Indians and the class struggles

of socialists and communists. The authors add that their book was not a history but an exercise in

political sociology on a time scale.

17

In 1989 the SACP developed a new programme The Path to Power. Seeking to address

criticisms of its 1962 programme, it updated it in the new context. "The path to power lies with

the masses" it proclaimed (p. 24). Mass political energy had to be harnessed and its enormous

potential realised. This continued to be the dominant task of the liberation vanguard. While there

was no conflict between an insurrectionary perspective and the possibility of a negotiated

transfer of power, the masses were the key. "Our working class is the decisive force to bring

about the collapse of racism and victory in the NDR as a stage towards building a socialist South

Africa" (p.30).

In a more recent study (An Ordinary Country - Issues on the Transition from Apartheid to

Democracy in South Africa, 2002), Alexander arrives at broadly similar conclusions to Mzala in

terms of his survey of the historiography of race and class. But he also raises pertinent issues not

considered by Mzala. The colonial history of South Africa differed from other European settler

colonies in that, with one important exception, it did not result in the genocidal eradication of the

indigenous peoples, he argues. He comments that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

report should be considered as historiography, including its nation building aspect.

It is clear that Alexander subscribes to the concept of 'bourgeois democratic revolution' but not to

the 'national democratic revolution'. This strengthens his argument that South Africa is now an

ordinary country and not exceptional. But based on what we have shown in this paper, his

argument is not convincing.

There is a more prononced focus on Afrikaner historians in his work than Mzala showed.

Afrikaner-nationalist historians - Thom 1936; Van Der Merwe 1938; Muller 1969 among others

- continued to write in crude racist ways long after most English speaking historians had

jettisoned these frameworks of the late 19th century. But in the main in both colonialist and

liberal histories, African people were presented as an undifferentiated and passive mass who had

not yet become historical actors. In more recent writing Alexander agrees we have to contend

with an unfinished revolution in South Africa.

Of relevance are the paradigms that continue to predominate in the production of historical

knowledge now. Sheehan (2009) notes the contradictory transformations at universities. There

have been trepidations about the decline in the popularity of history as a subject while

controversies centred on Africanisation continue to reverberate. Marxism is still, to an extent, a

popular way of viewing the world in tertiary education, in the state and elsewhere. But it has had

to contend with the post-modernist and neo-liberal onslaught.

What must be interrogated as well is how far the transforming of the institutions that control the

production and dissemination of historical knowledge has proceeded. Political suppressions

must be exposed, silenced voices liberated and audiences reconceptualised (M. Cross, 1994). It

should be acknowledged also that historical knowledge is being produced in a number of sites

beyond the academy. Its validation as knowledge is a nettle to be grasped. This includes the

collective developing of revolutionary theory, which should be based on learning from history,

and its relation to strategy.

18

In 1985 on the 30th

anniversary of the Freedom Charter Mzala paid tribute to its significance in

the history of our country. He wrote that it was a uniting force of all the people who were

struggling for democracy and national rights, a mirror of the South Africa yet to be won. But its

implementation was impossible without the complete dismantling of the white state and its

political and economic foundation. That was what made the Freedom Charter revolutionary.

(Mzala Nxumalo, 1985).

The ideological struggle was most important Mzala added, given ideological trends in the

national liberation movement – factionalism, racial prejudice, chauvinism, tribalism and anti-

communism. Other commentators have contended too that while the concept of colonialism of a

special type may be a pregnant one it needed to be allied to a broader explanatory approach.

Employed as a tool to explain our South African world from the 1940s, perhaps it needs to be

updated or refined in our changed context as well.

In the early 1990s Mzala commented that the SACP had not paid sufficient theoretical and

practical attention to the development of a socialist perspective (Colin Bundy, 1991). The

challenge was to translate populism about socialism among the working people into something

organized and reliable and a real force for the building and defence of socialism. That challenge

has become more relevant now.

Finally, we must learn from socialist Cuba in the 1990s when it was faced with overwhelming

challenges after the crash of socialism in Eastern Europe. Not only did it reconfigure the relation

between social and economic development. But it also sought to drive an accelerated 're-

cubanisation' that re-installed Cubans in the world in a new way. Cuban identity was conceived

as a crucible which lives in popular traditions. These were critically examined and made

accessible to the people with a struggle against elitist, racist and populist stereotypes. National

identity was expressed in a process of constant renewal and recreation.

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