Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 121
July 29, 2021
An��lise da gest��o da COVID-19
Photo by Francisco Ven��ncio on Unsplash Em Angola, a pandemia �� a m��e da incompet��ncia. No discurso do estado da na����o, o Presidente Jo��o Louren��o declarou a pandemia COVID-19 respons��vel por todos os fracassos de 2020. Mas foi menos a pandemia em si do que a incompet��ncia na gest��o do estado que causou problemas.
Primeiro, vamos discutir a corrup����o, que �� prima pr��xima da incompet��ncia. Actualmente ao abrigo de acordo alargado ao abrigo do programa de financiamento ampliado com o FMI, o Estado angolano deve ser mais cuidadoso na gest��o dos fundos relancionados com a pandemia. Em julho de 2020 o FMI publicou um artigo intitulado ���Corruption and COVID-19,��� que clamava por uma gest��o transparente da pandemia. Durante a crise atual, o FMI afirmou que n��o se esqueceu de seu trabalho de governan��a e combate �� corrup����o. O FMI enfatizou que a pandemia exigia ampla interven����o dos governos, mas tamb��m alertou que ���os governos precisam de relat��rios oportunos e transparentes, auditorias ex post facto e processos de responsabiliza����o, bem como uma coopera����o estrita com a sociedade civil e o setor privado.���
Apesar das avalia����es positivas do FMI, o Estado angolano n��o tem sido t��o transparente quanto poss��vel na sua contabilidade nem disp��e de bons sistemas de fiscaliza����o.
As declara����es do estado de emerg��ncia p��blica e da calamidade p��blica em Mar��o e Maio de 2020, respectivamente, foram os raros momentos em que se discutiram os custos do COVID-19. Esta �� uma clara viola����o do direito �� informa����o. Na sequ��ncia de press��es de jornalistas e de algumas especula����es, a Ministra da Sa��de, Dra. S��lvia Lutucuta, em abril fez citar o custo total por paciente em cerca de 16 milh��es de kwanzas (quase $25,000). Seguidamente, em Junho, o ex Ministro de Estado e Chefe do Gabinete de Seguran��a do Presidente, General Pedro Sebasti��o, apresentou ao parlamento angolano o primeiro e ��nico relat��rio n��o detalhado sobre os custos da luta contra a COVID-19, argumentando que, o executivo tinha gasto (at�� �� data) o equivalente a $69.4 milh��es. Por fim, durante seu discurso no debate geral da ONU sobre a COVID-19 de dezembro de 2020, o presidente da Oi apresentou os custos em $ 164,6 milh��es, o que significa que as despesas mais do que dobraram em um periodo de seis meses. A TVRecord Angola calculou o custo por paciente em $ 10.715. Mesmo que o custo por paciente tenha ca��do, o custo por paciente em Angola �� seis vezes maior do que em outros lugares no mundo, como Portugal.
Os n��meros s��o grandes e a transpar��ncia exige estudos mais detalhados. Presos entre o precedente de defer��ncia aos poderes executivos e as ��reas cinzentas da interpreta����o jur��dica, os membros do Parlamento n��o auditam os relat��rios do Estado. E isso apesar do fato de den��ncias quase di��rias sobre o envolvimento de altos funcion��rios do Estado em esc��ndalos como os que envolvem a importa����o de EPI; a constru����o de instala����es para abrigar hospitais de campanha; a falta de material descart��vel nos hospitais p��blicos; e exames insuficientes para m��dicos. A presen��a de EPI nas m��os de vendedores ambulantes nas ruas de Luanda �� marcante. Tendo em vista que a ind��stria local est�� produzindo bens e o estado tem o monop��lio da importa����o de EPI e do apoio externo, a falta de m��scaras e luvas nos hospitais p��blicos �� inaceit��vel.
N��o �� surpreendente que a Transpar��ncia Internacional tenha classificado Angola na 142a posi����o (de 180 pa��ses) em 2020. Um estudo que analisou a promo����o da transpar��ncia nos pa��ses subsaarianos estabeleceu dez indicadores, dos quais Angola n��o atingiu nenhum.
Al��m da falta de transpar��ncia na gest��o dos recursos da COVID e da incompet��ncia demonstrada na produ����o do EPI, o Estado tamb��m falhou em garantir a seguran��a p��blica. Nos primeiros dois meses de implementa����o do estado de emerg��ncia, as for��as de seguran��a causaram mais mortes do que a COVID-19. A viol��ncia pol��tica �� mais mortal do que a pandemia.
A morte de um pediatra, Dr. S��lvio Dala, v��tima da brutalidade policial, desencadeou uma onda de rep��dio nacional que levou a protestos tamb��m de m��dicos. Outros cidad��os foram mortos, baleados ou espancados at�� a morte, por n��o usarem m��scaras, mesmo quando estavam sozinhos em seus carros.
Muitas medidas tomadas em Angola levam-nos a crer que estamos diante de decisores pouco capazes que desconhecem a realidade da maioria dos angolanos. O jornalista Jo��o Armando em editorial publicado em Abril de 2021 escreveu que ���o combate �� corrup����o �� fundamental, mas o combate �� incompet��ncia tamb��m.��� Ele observa que ���os mais competentes s��o mais interessados, d��o mais opini��es, querem fazer mais altera����es, mas acabam por ser apelidados por ���revus��� e s��o afastados.��� Em vez de ter quadros competentes, temos um jogo de cadeiras em que l��deres incompetentes fracassam, mas depois s��o realocados em diferentes posi����es no Estado.
Algumas falhas combinam corrup����o e incompet��ncia. O regime tenta influenciar e se afirmar dentro das organiza����es profissionais e sindicatos a fim de controlar as massas. Isso colocou a Ordem dos M��dicos de Angola, que aceitou a hist��ria de que o Dala tinha morrido de doen��as pr��-existentes, e o Sindicato de M��dicos, que culpou a brutalidade da pol��cia, em desacordo sobre a causa da morte de Dala. Como resultado, slogans como ���Fora S��lvia Lutucuta,��� foram ouvidos durante as manifesta����es contra a morte do Dr. S��lvio Dala em Setembro de 2020.
A corrup����o, manifestada na recusa do regime em permitir que a Ordem dos M��dicos de Angola agisse independentemente da influ��ncia do Estado, foi tamb��m vis��vel na forma como o Estado tratou os m��dicos angolanos como classe profissional durante a pandemia. Os m��dicos do Sindicato de M��dicos criticaram a Lutucuta e o Estado por causa das pol��ticas relacionadas com a situa����o do COVID19 que marginalizam os m��dicos angolanos num momento em que os seus conhecimentos eram mais necess��rios. Quando 244 m��dicos cubanos chegaram a Angola para ajudar no combate ao COVID-19 em todo o pa��s criou uma onda de descontentamento entre os m��dicos, visto que Angola tem muitos m��dicos com as mesmas qualifica����es que se encontram desempregados. H�� disparidade salarial entre m��dicos cubanos e angolanos criou mais tens��o: os cubanos recebem sal��rios dez vezes superiores aos angolanos, com os m��dicos cubanos a receberem dez vezes mais do que os angolanos: Este �� um exemplo do compromisso e a ���d��vida de sangue��� que o MPLA tem com Cuba, pa��s com o qual estabeleceu rela����es privilegiadas nas ��reas da defesa, seguran��a, educa����o e sa��de, depois de as tropas cubanas terem ajudado a garantir a independ��ncia de Angola em nome do MPLA.
Os enfermeiros, maior grupo de profissionais de sa��de do pa��s, cogitaram fazer greve em fevereiro deste ano para exigir melhores condi����es de biosseguran��a nas unidades de sa��de e 13�� m��s de abono salarial. Em meio �� pandemia, m��dicos e enfermeiras e as organiza����es profissionais que os representam ficam pendurados pela incapacidade e incompet��ncia do regime.
As dificuldades de governan��a associadas com a pandemia, revelam problemas mais duradouros.�� O regime nunca olhou para a sa��de p��blica como um investimento potencial e um elemento de poder. Diante disso, a elite pol��tica, a come��ar pelo pr��prio presidente, obt��m seus servi��os m��dicos em cl��nicas privadas e, muitas vezes, fora do pa��s.
Ol��vio N’kilumbu e professor ao Universidade de Oscar Ribas, polit��logo, analista pol��tico e consultor.
Nighttime in Nairobi
President Records Ltd present Matata, London, 1971, photo: unknown, (c) President Records Ltd. As a child, one of my favorite Soukous songs was “Nairobi Night” by the Soukous Stars. I loved the rolling bassline, percussive guitars, and the language-neutral singalong chorus. I knew little about nightlife, only from parties my parents threw in their basement on occasions like New Years Eve, but seeing the title, perhaps I imagined what a Nairobi night might feel like thousands of miles away. So it is in the spirit of that imagining that I present the next episode of Africa Is a Country Radio, where we continue our look at club culture across the African continent, and take a visit to Nairobi.
In this episode I chat with Bill Odidi, a journalist and radio programmer who participated in the Ten Cities book project about his essay on clubbing culture in the Kenyan capital. I ask, questions like “What defines a club in a city full of mobile soundsystem matatus?” “How does club culture reflect the character of the city?” “What do you think of sheng drill music in?” and more. We of course listen to some both classic and cutting edge tune out of one of East Africa’s most vibrant and diverse music scenes. Take a listen on Worldwide FM, and follow us on Mixcloud to catch up on all the episodes.
July 28, 2021
Postfeminism is only for wealthy Nigerian women
Deola RTW, NY Fashion Week 2014. Image credit James Nova via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Simidele Dosekun���s new book, Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture, is a book about young, class-privileged women in Lagos who wear���to a spectacular degree and in spectacular combination���weaves and wigs, false eyelashes and false nails, heavy and flawless makeup, and the highest of heels. This ���spectacularly feminine style,��� as she calls it, has been growing in visibility and popularity in Nigeria for about the last 15 years. It dominates Nigerian popular media, from Nollywood stars and other celebrities, to glossy women���s magazines, to the looks curated by sites like bellanaija and other accounts on Nigerian social media. Unsurprisingly, it is also the style of brides and other women at the most ���fabulous��� Nigerian weddings. Based on interviews with 18 women in Lagos who dress broadly in this style, Fashioning Postfeminism is concerned with the accompanying senses of identity and self being fashioned and communicated. The book argues that the women see themselves in ���postfeminist��� terms: as ���already empowered��� and even ���self-empowering.��� Donning a style of dress that promises self-confidence by way of normative feminine beauty, these women see themselves as individually beyond the need for feminism as collective politics and struggle.
In the following conversation, Grace Adeniyi-Ogunyankin and Simidele Dosekun discuss and reflect upon Dosekun���s book. Their conversation comes out of a wider panel discussion at the 2021 Lagos Studies Association Conference.
Grace Adeniyi-OgunyankinI found Fashioning Postfeminism exciting because it moves away from the predominant scholarship on low-income African women who supposedly ���need to be empowered.��� We rarely read about ultra-privileged African women who are ���already empowered,��� particularly through consumerism and its accompanied ���freedoms and choices.��� I am, however, intrigued by the implicit suggestion in the book that ���postfeminism is only for wealthy Nigerian women.��� I wonder about the non-wealthy women in Nigeria���s new economy who are also influenced by transnational culture and engage in practices of the spectacular feminine, and about the women we might call the ���empowered almost,��� those who embody the aspirational and imagine their future selves as ���fully empowered.��� Where might they come in?
Simidele DosekunWhen I started the project 10 years ago, there was an uninterrogated assumption in the literature that postfeminist notions that women can ���have it all��� and no longer need feminism were addressed pretty much exclusively to privileged white women in the global north. My counterargument in the book is that postfeminism travels across borders of various kinds, but I didn���t want to slip into making an argument that the culture is just up for grabs by any or all women everywhere. I do think that, ultimately, it is quite elitist. This is not to say that, in a place like Nigeria, only wealthy women consume postfeminist media, for example, or engage in the kind of spectacular fashion and beauty practice with which my book is concerned. But I do think to have or at least claim a sense of self as ���already empowered,��� as happily unencumbered by power relations, requires a fair bit of material privilege. My argument about class is about who can claim postfeminism in the present; I very much agree with you that there are questions about aspirational futures that also need to be considered.
Grace Adeniyi-OgunyankinWhile reading, I also kept on wondering about elite queer and trans Lagosian women, who do not appear to be part of your research demography. Is it possible for some of them to be postfeminist subjects? Which technologies of feminine beauty do they employ and what do these technologies promise for them? How do they navigate transnational culture vis-��-vis the negotiation of local power and culture in Nigeria?
Simidele DosekunAbsolutely. I think queer and trans women can and do also ���do��� postfeminism, both in terms of the kinds of technologies of feminine beauty in question in the book, and the accompanying claims and mentalities about feminine empowerment that I heard from the cis women whom I interviewed. Indeed, there are also cisgendered men too, both queer and not, taking up the beauty technologies���in Nigeria, media personality Denrele Edun comes to mind, for instance. As to what such beauty technologies and practices promise and mean for different kinds of gendered subjects who embrace them, I cannot presume to answer, as I don���t believe we can read subjectivity from style. To answer, we���d precisely have to hear from the actors in question.
Grace Adeniyi-OgunyankinThe women in the book clearly articulated their desire not to be misrecognized as ���runs girls��� [Nigerian slang for women who engage in transactional sexual/romantic relationships]. They also embraced sexual propriety and respectability when it came to distancing themselves from transactional sex. I am curious about the possibility of considering this embrace of sexual propriety and respectability as ���cruel attachments��� too.
Simidele DosekunI was a little surprised at the relative sexual conservatism that the participants expressed, to be honest. I suspect one reason was that I did not always bring up questions of sex and sexuality in the most fluid way, so, most likely, I introduced some awkwardness around these themes. It���s useful to think of women���s attachment to ���sexual respectability��� in terms of ���cruel attachments,��� as promising much but ending up hurting us, so thanks for the suggestion. I think women the world over know that, at the end of the day, ���respectability��� will not protect us from possible abuse and violence of all kinds, and, moreover, that the line between the putatively respectable and disrespectable is incredibly fine and capricious.
Grace Adeniyi-OgunyankinMy favorite topic was your insightful and nuanced analysis of weaves and wigs as ���unhappy technologies��� of spectacular femininity, using Sara Ahmed���s definition of unhappy objects as those that ���embody the persistence of histories that cannot be wished away by happiness.��� You point out that the women���s postfeminist claims and affects, for instance, could not resolve or even mask the melancholy and painful histories of their hair choices and stories.
Simidele DosekunI really wanted to make a case in the book for moving past reading or seeing black women in weaves and wigs as ���self-hating,��� ���wanting to be white,��� and so on. I find this far too simplistic, and even disrespectful; it pathologizes black women, and even if it is voiced in the name of black nationalism, in a roundabout way it continues to affirm and naturalize white supremacy. Sara Ahmed���s concept of the ���unhappy��� helped me make an argument for keeping white supremacy in view without making it the whole story. I do not explore the following question in the book���I had it in mind for a postdoctoral project that never happened���but I���d say that we also need to think about and conceptualize the fact that the so-called ���human hair��� that black women are wearing and desiring is ���Indian hair,��� ���Vietnamese hair,��� and so on. What are the race���and other���politics of this? It is very complicated.
Grace Adeniyi-OgunyankinOverall, you argue for a politics of the unfashionable in a book about fashion by urging us to look beyond the market/consumerism for liberation. In a moment when global white supremacist capitalist patriarchy pervades our daily lives, you insist that we be ���killjoys,��� circumvent ���happiness,��� zero in on uncomfortable questions around justice, and magnify the need for liberation from structural inequalities.
Simidele DosekunYes, I am suspicious of sexy and fashionable and commodified feminisms! This is not to say that I think feminism is, or feminists are, sexless, frumpy, humorless, and so on, which are of course well-worn stereotypes. I just think that we need to resist strongly the co-optation and hollowing out of feminist and other progressive politics by the market���the reduction of feminist politics into T-shirt slogans, say. I also believe firmly in the right to and value of anger so long as there are things in the world that make us angry!
What is whiteness in North Africa?
Photo by Xingtu, via Flickr CC. On the second day of Ramadan, in early May of 2019, the Doha-based television channel Libya al-Ahrar aired an episode of its hidden camera program in which the show���s star prankster blackens her face, adopts mocking versions of a ���Sudanese��� accent and attire, and then traps strangers in an elevator with two monkeys that she insistently describes as her children. Only a few days later, the show repeated the blackface gag. This time, the actor asked the waiter in a Lebanese restaurant in Libya to read the menu line by line with her as she responded with outrageous incomprehension, confusing things like ���juice box��� and exclaiming, ���You have dog juice?!��� The elevator episode circulated on social media platforms with some condemnation but remains available on YouTube; the restaurant episode seemingly aired without hesitation. The ostensible comedy in these depictions relies on anti-black racism and, in so doing, functions to ratify discourses of white supremacy. Like blackface performance practices elsewhere, these depictions reveal much more about those creating and consuming the racist portrayals than about those supposedly being portrayed. In these Libyan hidden camera clips and elsewhere in North African popular culture, who are the ���white��� Arabic speakers that these racist depictions aim to elevate? What is whiteness in this context?
How should we think about these questions���about whiteness and race���in North Africa? The answer requires consideration of Islam, slavery, indigeneity, Arabness, the Sahara, and colonial legacies in the region. It also requires accepting two claims.�� First, there is analytical purchase to thinking whiteness in and through North Africa, even while this formation of whiteness only partially overlaps with the more dominant formations of whiteness attendant to and produced by European colonialism. Second, through a range of discourses and performances in both scholarship and popular culture, blackness is repeatedly constructed as if it were non-indigenous to North Africa. Ironically, this latter discursive practice is among many which, as Jemima Pierre has argued, ���actually work to impede race analysis about the African continent (beyond southern Africa), entrapping us into a kind of race-blindness.��� The North versus Sub-Saharan Africa divide, Pierre continues, ���has shaped Africanist scholarship to the point that this distinction is often assumed rather than interrogated.��� This naturalized division is racialized: colonial scholars painted light-skinned people of the southern Mediterranean as ���closer��� to Europe both geographically and in terms of civilization. By continuing to describe North Africa as inevitably distinct from ���Black Africa,��� we not only reinscribe this violent hierarchy, but we also prevent ourselves from seeing racialization as processual and dynamic. In so doing, we miss the opportunity to understand North and Saharan African spaces as sites for the ongoing production of race and white supremacy.
To offer a starting place: in a 1967 article, historian Leon Carl Brown described North Africa as ���the great border zone where white ends meeting the area where black begins������where, he contended, ���native whites and native blacks have confronted each other since the beginning of history.��� Brown���s essay goes on to incorporate a number of the key factors that I identify here, and compellingly illuminates a period of early postcolonial African hope and its emerging challenges by describing the ambivalent Pan-Africanism of Gamal Abdel Nasser and others in the 1950s and 1960s. But this formulation of a ���great border zone��� aptly illustrates the racialization of naturalized geography which has long characterized colonial (and some earlier) descriptions of northern Africa. When we take for granted the idea that the Sahara constitutes a natural border, we reify a logic that posits racial whiteness as indigenous to North Africa, racial Arabness as contributing to the maintenance of that whiteness, and racial blackness as non-indigenous. Amazigh (���Berber���) indigeneity is here simultaneously configured as racially white and erased insofar as indigenous modes of thinking difference are domesticated.
Here, and in my research on contemporary Libya, I am invested in understanding whiteness not as a static ontology but as ���a problematic, or an analytical perspective: that is, a way of formulating questions about social relations.��� Thinking in terms of both conceptual and embodied movement, I am especially interested in ���the ways that whiteness seduces and rewards, becoming the subject of fantasy and desire,��� and I agree with Steve Garner that ���the best way to understand whiteness is to think both relationally and comparatively.��� In Garner���s work and in more recent scholarship, this has primarily meant taking the critical study of whiteness beyond its ���home��� of the United States and into Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. But what happens when we take this study from settler colonial contexts into the postcolony? To turn again to Pierre, ���how could any postcolonial society not be structured by its legacy of race and racialization���especially when colonialism was, in the most ideological, political, and practical way, racialized rule? How do we, in fact, analyze the persistence of white (and racialized Arab) privilege in postcolonial spaces?���
Whiteness is both productive and the product of affective force, and while it moves, it moves us. As Sara Ahmed has argued, ���Whiteness could be described as an ongoing and un-finished history, which orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting how they ���take up��� space.��� My argument here is not that (some) North Africans are in any stable sense white or have access to the top rungs of global hierarchies of white supremacy. Rather, I am interested in the array of things that formations of whiteness do and enable in the contexts of northern Africa.
Whiteness shapes both how bodies can take up space and what spaces are available to whom. As Ahmed writes,
If the world is made white, then the body-at-home is one that can inhabit whiteness. As Fanon���s work shows, after all, bodies are shaped by histories of colonialism, which makes the world ���white���, a world that is inherited, or which is already given before the point of an individual���s arrival. This is the familiar world, the world of whiteness, as a world we know implicitly. Colonialism makes the world ���white���, which is of course a world ���ready��� for certain kinds of bodies, as a world that puts certain objects within their reach.
Ahmed is not describing North Africa here (even while a trace of North Africa haunts this passage with Fanon). But the ���bodies-at-home��� in North Africa are most often those that can inhabit whiteness. As I suggest above, both Western scholarship and local discursive practices make North African spaces white. In this way, whiteness in North Africa takes on valences of ���Europeanness��� as a colonial remnant, while it also operates in another register, as ���our own��� whiteness, a color-coded language of virtue and status. This includes but is not reducible to white-as-Western because a local articulation of whiteness can be valorized at the same time that Westernness is rejected. This local articulation of whiteness is bound up in histories that stretch back at least as far as the seventh-century Arab invasion of North Africa.
Blackness is produced as nonindigenous to North Africa through a racial imaginary that relies on the histories of racialized enslavement that have characterized the region. To offer an incomplete list, the slave trade was officially outlawed in Tunisia in 1841, Algeria in 1848, Libya in 1856, Egypt in 1887, Morocco in 1923, and Mauritania in 1980.
In each of these contexts, abolition involved a complex interplay of colonial politics with regional and local discourses and economic forces; in most cases, the practice continued for decades after its legal prohibition. The slave trades that moved across the Sahara, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean Sea involved captives of a range of geographic and ethnic backgrounds, and, as a number of historians have shown, frequently were justified through moral-legal formations that marked non-Muslims as enslavable. Yet historians have also illustrated how enslavement came to specifically express a conception of blackness in these regions, producing a racialized distinction. John Hunwick, for example, argued that from the sixteenth century onward in the ���Mediterranean Islamic world,��� blackness became associated with slavery by virtue of the high proportion of enslaved black people. Similarly, and pushing back against a generation of scholarship which described ���Islamic slavery��� as a relatively ���benign��� institution, Chouki El Hamel more recently argued ���that relying solely on Islamic ideology as a crucial key to explain social relations, particularly in the history of black slavery in the Muslim world, yields an inaccurate historical record of the people, institutions, and social practices of slavery in the Arab world.��� More broadly, in the context of North Africa, the production of a category of blackness linked to enslavement and arrival also enabled the production of a formation of whiteness linked to Arabness, superiority, and normative belonging.��
The legal and social histories of Arab attempts to variously claim and disavow whiteness in the United States have received substantive scholarly attention. These studies have illustrated how nineteenth and early twentieth-century legal claims to whiteness by Arab immigrants were structured by the particular racial and legal regimes of their time. Primarily Christian immigrants who had come from greater Syria litigated claims to their whiteness as the route to naturalization in a period of Asian exclusion. This history is particular and contingent; that is to say, it might, in different circumstances, have been otherwise.
Even while describing a US context, such studies are relevant for conceptualizing whiteness in North Africa insofar as they enable us to observe some key aspects of the overlapping problematics at play between these two geopolitical sites, as well as the limitations of this overlap. Histories of Arab racialization in the US inflect globally circulating racial discourses. Further, even in a more contemporary US political context, one in which many Arab Americans do not actively seek access to whiteness, we find some popular and even scholarly articulations of Arabness that specifically occlude blackness. One finds this occlusion in, for example, discussions of shifting Arab American inclusion in whiteness, which leave out black Arab Americans for whom whiteness has never been accessible.
Historians have also traced notions of Arabness as whiteness in other geopolitical and historical contexts. Ibn Battuta, for example, wrote in the mid-fourteenth century of ���whites��� as he traveled through the West African Sahel and southern Sahara; for him, these included Arabs and Arabophone North Africans, but not Berbers, whose ���distance and foreignness from the normative cultural practices of the Arab Muslim World��� precluded whiteness. El Hamel demonstrates that this formulation of ���white��� Arabness may have included people of a variety of family lineages, so long as they could claim ���one drop��� of (paternal) ���Arab blood.��� Precolonial Arab and Arabophone social formations did not necessarily value whiteness in terms of color and in terms of Europeanness in the same way that these come to be valued through empire, but Arabophone anti-blackness is evident long before the European colonial period. In postcolonial North Africa, these intertwined legacies have enabled outcomes like that described by Afifa Ltifi in Bourguiba���s Tunisia, where colorblind family name policies constructed a normative whiteness and ���reproduced the patron client relationships that bound slave and master���s descendants.��� Across contexts, ���Arab��� proximity to and approximation of whiteness has historically been predicated on anti-blackness���on the ability to define themselves in opposition to a black Other.
Colonial representations in scholarship and popular media which utilize an oppositional framework for understanding ���North Africa��� as distinct from ���Sub-Saharan Africa��� suggest a racialized boundary of naturalized geography in the desert. A wave of scholarship in recent decades has attempted to alter this paradigm, describing the desert as a ���bridge��� and honing in on Saharan and ���trans-Saharan��� histories and lifeworlds. Some of this work has illuminated the racialization that the Arabophone states of the Mediterranean coast continue to extend to the descendants of enslaved peoples captured in West Africa and other places. This racialization, as I describe above, posits blackness as a referent of enslavement which sticks to an array of bodies, including those of more recent migrants and indigenous black North Africans. One result of this is the carving away of indigeneity from black North Africans. By linking blackness to enslavement, this discourse in both scholarship and popular practice dispossesses black North Africans of a natal claim to North Africa (and, in some instances, Arab identity) apart from a history of arrival. If, as Sara Ahmed has argued, ���whiteness becomes worldly through the noticeability of the arrival of some bodies more than others,��� then this is a distortion that contributes to the (re)production of whiteness in/as North Africa.
One of the quotidian ways these racial geopolitics are maintained is through the common third-person descriptor of black people in northern Africa as ���Africans��� distinct from an unspecified (unmarked) norm. This discursive practice also produces a tension-filled and ambivalent whiteness, one with which Algerian diasporic activist Houria Bouteldja recently danced in a polemic on ���whites, Jews, and us.��� She writes, ���Fifty years after the independence movements, North Africa is the one subduing its own citizens and black Africans. I was going to say ���my African brothers.��� But I no longer dare to, now that I have admitted my crime. Farewell Bandung.��� In ���no longer daring��� to claim fraternal kinship, Bouteldja acknowledges the violence of North African anti-blackness. Yet, even then, in describing ���North Africa��� as ���subduing its own citizens and black Africans,��� she also seems to suggest that the end of the colonially constructed state system could end North African anti-blackness. But the latter runs far deeper than the postcolonial state. North African unmarked whiteness itself holds up the ���and��� in her phrase, ���its own citizens and black Africans,��� as though these categories are or have ever been mutually exclusive.
If whiteness needs maintenance to persist and racializations of all sorts are continually unfolding, popular culture is a privileged site in which this work occurs. In film, performance, visual art, and literature, representations mark bodies in and out of normative community, naturalize racialized language, entrench stereotypical figurations, and reify social hierarchies. Recent years have seen greater public controversies appear surrounding racist representations of black characters in North African (and other Arab) popular culture. Scholarship investigating race and popular culture in/and North Africa is relatively emerging, but has tackled a range of themes and questions surrounding nationalism, empire, alterity, and aesthetics across performance forms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Continued work is needed. As of yet, scholars have more vigorously illustrated and theorized anti-black discourses, practices, and representations in popular culture than they have asked how these works produce and maintain whiteness.
Describing blackface performance in early twentieth-century Egypt, Eve Troutt Powell wrote of songs and plays in which ���Nubian��� (���berberi���) and ���Sudanese��� characters enacted Egyptian anticolonial, nationalist desires. As she explained, ���In the absence of the ���right��� kind of Sudanese political allies���that is, those who would proclaim a desire for the unity of the Nile Valley���the Egyptian artists and writers deeply involved in the promulgation of the nationalist message “made up their own Sudanese.��� The Libyan hidden camera skits with which I opened this writing, and which drew directly from this long history of Egyptian caricatures of Sudanese people, illustrate the continued need to interrogate the racial work that blackface and other performance practices do in North African contexts. Through violently erasing the Others they purport to represent, both a century ago and in the recent past these practices have served to construct their performers��� and audiences��� visions of themselves. They utilize anti-black tropes to produce whiteness in their performers, audiences, and cultural milieus. In this way, they join myriad other discursive and performative practices that repeatedly construct blackness as not indigenous to North Africa. It is imperative that we do not stop at noting the anti-black racism that we rightly see in these, but rather go on additionally to theorize the racial and spatial whiteness that these practices enable and uphold.
What is Black Conservatism in South Africa
The podcaster, Sihle Ngobese, known as ���Big Daddy Liberty��� and a well known South African black conservative (Youtube screen grab). The last time South Africans had serious intellectual discussions about black conservatism was in the late 1980s. Various academics and researchers concentrated specifically on the figure of Chief Gatsha Buthelezi and his Inkatha movement as emblematic of black conservatism in the country. Those who identified Inkatha as a black conservative movement include historians Jabulani (Mzala) Nxumalo (1988), Gerhard Mar�� and Georgina Hamilton (1987), as well as political scientist Shireen Hassim (1988). Hassim in particular honed in specifically on the gendered implications of Buthelezi���s conservatism as a black politician.
Of particular relevance for reviving discussions of black conservatism now is an argument that Hassim makes in relation to Inkatha. She focuses specifically on its centralization of an expressly patriarchal and hierarchical invocation of the traditionalist Zulu family, mobilized in defense of Inkatha���s anti-labor and anti-sanctions or divestment politics at the time.��
Buthelezi���s sociopolitical conservatism stood in stark contrast to the politics of black liberation���which he claimed nonetheless. In fact, we take it for granted that in the apartheid era, to be a black politician and public intellectual meant being situated someplace on the left-liberal spectrum. However, a figure such as Buthelezi put that assumption into question, along with a large number of black male intellectuals who were part of the apartheid government���s 1980s reforms which focused on creating a new black middle class with a stake in preserving rather than overthrowing this system. Fast-forward to the postapartheid period and 21st-century South Africa, and we can observe how the fruits of the 1980s project begin to take prominent shape in the greater push for expanding the middle class���especially the black middle class.��
It should be acknowledged, however, that to speak of a homogenous black middle class in South Africa is problematic, especially given the lack of clarity as to how one measures middle class identity (as academics like Ronel Burger, Cindy Lee Steenekamp, Servaas van der Berg, Asmus Zoch,��Geoffrey Modisha, and Roger Southall show). Despite such warnings, the black middle class constitutes an important identity to which we should pay attention in studies of modern-day South Africa.��
Sociologist Roger Southall sees value in focusing on the black middle class in South Africa; ���while the black middle class may indeed play an important role in furthering democracy,��� he writes, ���its political orientations and behavior cannot be assumed to be inherently progressive.��� In other words, as part of a global class that has been labeled as preoccupied with consumption and status, Southall notes that the middle class���s significance in contemporary South Africa ���revolves overwhelmingly around the extent and consequences of black upward social mobility.��� Consequently, the interests of this class are likely to align with conservative modes of self-preservation rather than plebeian politics. To this end, middle-class buy-in to conservative right economic discourse does not need much defending���the issue of diversity of interests within this class notwithstanding.
This means that despite its rich history of left politics, South Africa is not shielded from the rise of the type of black conservatism ripping through the United States (but also England, Canada, and parts of northern Europe). In the United States, the names of Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas, and Ben Carson are just a few of the personalities associated with black conservatism. In South Africa, Herman Mashaba (the former Democratic Alliance mayor of Johannesburg) and Sihle Ngobese (a podcaster known as ���Big Daddy Liberty���) are certainly newer reflections of this phenomenon in postapartheid South Africa.��
Writing on Ngobese, for example, political scientist Christopher McMichael describes ���a black online media personality who styles himself on black American political operatives like Candace Owens [identified with Donald Trump and the American far right] reinforcing white conservatives��� beliefs that structural racism does not exist because a black person says so and that they are under siege from creeping socialism.��� What Ngobese and, in particular, Mashaba represent (as the most vocal and public faces of the rising black conservatism) is a view that is in line with traditional New Right discourse, namely that ���the decline of values such as patience, hard work, deferred gratification and self-reliance have resulted in the high crime rates, the increasing number of unwed mothers, and the relatively uncompetitive academic performances of black youth,��� as black American philosopher Cornel West described in 1986.��
What this alignment means is that the black South African middle class���s attack on programs aimed at redress, undertaken in pursuit of ���middle-class respectability based on merit rather than politics,����� can easily sideline the poor among them and further the Afrophobia against Africans from elsewhere on the continent. For example, Herman Mashaba, while mayor of Johannesburg, promoted these ideas under the guise of protecting South Africa from so-called criminal elements.��
What reflects as middle-class pursuit in the postapartheid context is more akin to conservative New Right ideology (complete with its moral regeneration campaign) than it is to the liberal narrative of the pursuit of equality and freedom for all. In the case of South Africa, it is arguable that the latest national election results in 2019 reflect a general trend towards such middle-class economic conservatism.��
In fact, in the 2019 South African general elections, the Inkatha Freedom Party drew support nationally, as well as in the two major provinces of Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal (where, at the time of writing this piece, pro-Zuma protests in response to his imprisonment were underway). Furthermore, the newly formed church-based party, the African Transformation Movement (ATM), with its ���South Africans First��� motto, managed to secure an eighth position in the elections nationally on its first try. ATM claims to follow the philosophies of humanism and ubuntu, but a closer reading of its policies reveals that ATM believes in the return of capital punishment, building a ���society founded on Divine-based Values,��� promoting ���Moral Regeneration,��� and reinvigorating the role of traditional leadership in governance. As is clear from this list, ATM espouses ideas commonly found in conservative and New Right discourse as imported from the United States. In fact, in expanding the reach of ATM���s discourse beyond the black block, we can observe that its discourse aligns very well with the Democratic Alliance���s conservative stances and policies on immigration, crime, and rights of sexual minorities. This points to a broader conservative alliance between the white right-centered bloc and the black middle class. Interestingly enough, ATM���s economic principles are more in line with the Economic Freedom Fighters��� nationalization of the economy, including the reserve (or central) Bank. It remains to be seen how it balances this ���socialist��� economic outlook with its moral conservatism.��
Another conservative Christian organization also garnered enough votes for a sixth place finish in the 2019 elections: the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP), founded in 1993. While its electoral performance has basically remained flat, this party has nonetheless remained competitive in all elections since 1994, failing to acquire any national seats in only one election (1994). Its highly positive 2019 elections performance indicates its continued relevance, especially in light of the argument of this piece regarding the rise of black conservatism. In fact, the ACDP performed well in the three major provinces of Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, and the Western Cape.��
Led by Reverend Kenneth Moshoe, the ACDP promises a fresh start based on Christian and family values: in its own words, ���The ACDP promotes, upholds and defends Christian family values����� Moreover, the ACDP proclaims: ���We adhere to a moral philosophy that is based upon the Word of God, and measure the interpretation of our policies against the prerequisites of biblical standards.��� More importantly, the ACDP economic policy foregrounds traditional right economic principles. It does so by advocating for a commitment to ���reducing government debt and spending; job creation and economic growth through an open-market policy with as little government interference as possible; becoming competitive in the global economy and global markets; lowering inflation; state enterprises operating in open competition with private providers; and doing away with complicated tax forms, laws and expensive monitoring.��� In other words, there is much conservatism to be found in the specifically evangelical Christian orientation of this organization, including the fact of their black constituency.
Although the focus here is only on a few organizations, the point is to illustrate the very eclectic nature of what constitutes black conservatism in present-day South Africa. This eclecticism means that there seem to be two distinct conservative currents at work: one that is more traditional and the other that is a more populist-styled current. The first current, embodied by Herman Mashaba and Sihle Ngobese, embraces free-market economics and self-improvement ethics. The second, more populist-styled current is embodied by parties or movements like ATM (which does embrace some outwardly left-wing policies like nationalization).��
This raises questions of viability and appeal. One, which of these strains of black conservatism is most viable in the current political context? Two, can the strains be further demarcated along the urban black middle class versus working class line? In fact, in making a case for why the 2019 elections mattered and doing so in a way that highlights the key aspect of black conservatism, we can note how the rise of this aspect is tied to a number of challenges usually associated with conservative backlash. Both conservative strains address aspects of the challenges related to the economy, education, morality, national identity, and sexuality. This raises the question of how our democracy will respond to these challenges, a question that leaves open the possibility that South African politics remain fertile ground for new orientations, albeit mainly conservatively black in my estimation. To which eish is not a sufficient response from the left.
What is Black Conservatism in South Africa?
The podcaster, Sihle Ngobese, known as ���Big Daddy Liberty��� and a well known South African black conservative (Youtube screen grab). The last time South Africans had serious intellectual discussions about black conservatism was in the late 1980s. Various academics and researchers concentrated specifically on the figure of Chief Gatsha Buthelezi and his Inkatha movement as emblematic of black conservatism in the country. Those who identified Inkatha as a black conservative movement include historians Jabulani (Mzala) Nxumalo (1988), Gerhard Mar�� and Georgina Hamilton (1987), as well as political scientist Shireen Hassim (1988). Hassim in particular honed in specifically on the gendered implications of Buthelezi���s conservatism as a black politician.
Of particular relevance for reviving discussions of black conservatism now is an argument that Hassim makes in relation to Inkatha. She focuses specifically on its centralization of an expressly patriarchal and hierarchical invocation of the traditionalist Zulu family, mobilized in defense of Inkatha���s anti-labor and anti-sanctions or divestment politics at the time.��
Buthelezi���s sociopolitical conservatism stood in stark contrast to the politics of black liberation���which he claimed nonetheless. In fact, we take it for granted that in the apartheid era, to be a black politician and public intellectual meant being situated someplace on the left-liberal spectrum. However, a figure such as Buthelezi put that assumption into question, along with a large number of black male intellectuals who were part of the apartheid government���s 1980s reforms which focused on creating a new black middle class with a stake in preserving rather than overthrowing this system. Fast-forward to the postapartheid period and 21st-century South Africa, and we can observe how the fruits of the 1980s project begin to take prominent shape in the greater push for expanding the middle class���especially the black middle class.��
It should be acknowledged, however, that to speak of a homogenous black middle class in South Africa is problematic, especially given the lack of clarity as to how one measures middle class identity (as academics like Ronel Burger, Cindy Lee Steenekamp, Servaas van der Berg, Asmus Zoch,��Geoffrey Modisha, and Roger Southall show). Despite such warnings, the black middle class constitutes an important identity to which we should pay attention in studies of modern-day South Africa.��
Sociologist Roger Southall sees value in focusing on the black middle class in South Africa; ���while the black middle class may indeed play an important role in furthering democracy,��� he writes, ���its political orientations and behavior cannot be assumed to be inherently progressive.��� In other words, as part of a global class that has been labeled as preoccupied with consumption and status, Southall notes that the middle class���s significance in contemporary South Africa ���revolves overwhelmingly around the extent and consequences of black upward social mobility.��� Consequently, the interests of this class are likely to align with conservative modes of self-preservation rather than plebeian politics. To this end, middle-class buy-in to conservative right economic discourse does not need much defending���the issue of diversity of interests within this class notwithstanding.
This means that despite its rich history of left politics, South Africa is not shielded from the rise of the type of black conservatism ripping through the United States (but also England, Canada, and parts of northern Europe). In the United States, the names of Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas, and Ben Carson are just a few of the personalities associated with black conservatism. In South Africa, Herman Mashaba (the former Democratic Alliance mayor of Johannesburg) and Sihle Ngobese (a podcaster known as ���Big Daddy Liberty���) are certainly newer reflections of this phenomenon in postapartheid South Africa.��
Writing on Ngobese, for example, political scientist Christopher McMichael describes ���a black online media personality who styles himself on black American political operatives like Candace Owens [identified with Donald Trump and the American far right] reinforcing white conservatives��� beliefs that structural racism does not exist because a black person says so and that they are under siege from creeping socialism.��� What Ngobese and, in particular, Mashaba represent (as the most vocal and public faces of the rising black conservatism) is a view that is in line with traditional New Right discourse, namely that ���the decline of values such as patience, hard work, deferred gratification and self-reliance have resulted in the high crime rates, the increasing number of unwed mothers, and the relatively uncompetitive academic performances of black youth,��� as black American philosopher Cornel West described in 1986.��
What this alignment means is that the black South African middle class���s attack on programs aimed at redress, undertaken in pursuit of ���middle-class respectability based on merit rather than politics,����� can easily sideline the poor among them and further the Afrophobia against Africans from elsewhere on the continent. For example, Herman Mashaba, while mayor of Johannesburg, promoted these ideas under the guise of protecting South Africa from so-called criminal elements.��
What reflects as middle-class pursuit in the postapartheid context is more akin to conservative New Right ideology (complete with its moral regeneration campaign) than it is to the liberal narrative of the pursuit of equality and freedom for all. In the case of South Africa, it is arguable that the latest national election results in 2019 reflect a general trend towards such middle-class economic conservatism.��
In fact, in the 2019 South African general elections, the Inkatha Freedom Party drew support nationally, as well as in the two major provinces of Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal (where, at the time of writing this piece, pro-Zuma protests in response to his imprisonment were underway). Furthermore, the newly formed church-based party, the African Transformation Movement (ATM), with its ���South Africans First��� motto, managed to secure an eighth position in the elections nationally on its first try. ATM claims to follow the philosophies of humanism and ubuntu, but a closer reading of its policies reveals that ATM believes in the return of capital punishment, building a ���society founded on Divine-based Values,��� promoting ���Moral Regeneration,��� and reinvigorating the role of traditional leadership in governance. As is clear from this list, ATM espouses ideas commonly found in conservative and New Right discourse as imported from the United States. In fact, in expanding the reach of ATM���s discourse beyond the black block, we can observe that its discourse aligns very well with the Democratic Alliance���s conservative stances and policies on immigration, crime, and rights of sexual minorities. This points to a broader conservative alliance between the white right-centered bloc and the black middle class. Interestingly enough, ATM���s economic principles are more in line with the Economic Freedom Fighters��� nationalization of the economy, including the reserve (or central) Bank. It remains to be seen how it balances this ���socialist��� economic outlook with its moral conservatism.��
Another conservative Christian organization also garnered enough votes for a sixth place finish in the 2019 elections: the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP), founded in 1993. While its electoral performance has basically remained flat, this party has nonetheless remained competitive in all elections since 1994, failing to acquire any national seats in only one election (1994). Its highly positive 2019 elections performance indicates its continued relevance, especially in light of the argument of this piece regarding the rise of black conservatism. In fact, the ACDP performed well in the three major provinces of Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, and the Western Cape.��
Led by Reverend Kenneth Moshoe, the ACDP promises a fresh start based on Christian and family values: in its own words, ���The ACDP promotes, upholds and defends Christian family values����� Moreover, the ACDP proclaims: ���We adhere to a moral philosophy that is based upon the Word of God, and measure the interpretation of our policies against the prerequisites of biblical standards.��� More importantly, the ACDP economic policy foregrounds traditional right economic principles. It does so by advocating for a commitment to ���reducing government debt and spending; job creation and economic growth through an open-market policy with as little government interference as possible; becoming competitive in the global economy and global markets; lowering inflation; state enterprises operating in open competition with private providers; and doing away with complicated tax forms, laws and expensive monitoring.��� In other words, there is much conservatism to be found in the specifically evangelical Christian orientation of this organization, including the fact of their black constituency.
Although the focus here is only on a few organizations, the point is to illustrate the very eclectic nature of what constitutes black conservatism in present-day South Africa. This eclecticism means that there seem to be two distinct conservative currents at work: one that is more traditional and the other that is a more populist-styled current. The first current, embodied by Herman Mashaba and Sihle Ngobese, embraces free-market economics and self-improvement ethics. The second, more populist-styled current is embodied by parties or movements like ATM (which does embrace some outwardly left-wing policies like nationalization).��
This raises questions of viability and appeal. One, which of these strains of black conservatism is most viable in the current political context? Two, can the strains be further demarcated along the urban black middle class versus working class line? In fact, in making a case for why the 2019 elections mattered and doing so in a way that highlights the key aspect of black conservatism, we can note how the rise of this aspect is tied to a number of challenges usually associated with conservative backlash. Both conservative strains address aspects of the challenges related to the economy, education, morality, national identity, and sexuality. This raises the question of how our democracy will respond to these challenges, a question that leaves open the possibility that South African politics remain fertile ground for new orientations, albeit mainly conservatively black in my estimation. To which eish is not a sufficient response from the left.
July 27, 2021
The longest shadow
The author outside St Cyprian's Cathedral in 1981 at the age of 13. ��� South African writer Sol Plaatje in his 1930 novel, Mhudi���I am going to leave this place while the leaving is good.”
However hard I try, I find myself being unable to write anything else before I have written this. I am in the midst of writing a fourth novel, but the cogs of my creativity have ground to a halt, the exit routes that lead the imagination beyond this wretched piece are sealed. All that remains is this blank screen onto which these hands are forced into writing this miserable story. Perhaps, once it is written, I will be able to turn my mind to other things; this will be a case of writing to free my mind. As James Baldwin wrote: ���Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.���
I was born in Johannesburg in April 1968, under the sign of Aries, and during the Chinese year of the monkey. I am told that this is a formidable astrological alignment, but I don���t set much store by such things. When I was two weeks old, my parents moved to Cape Town, the first of many journeys that would typify my nomadic life, a life of incurable wanderlust, a life lived on the move: running away from the past, running away from myself.
I have many memories from my early years in Cape Town. I remember the layout of the house we lived in. I remember the bulbous reflective kettle in the kitchen that distorted the shape of my face when I peered into it. I remember the kindergarten I went to, and that yellow crayons were my favorite because they had a luminous glow.
I remember shaving off my eyebrows because I didn���t want to pose for photographs at a birthday party my parents had organized. I remember us one day driving behind a huge lorry packed with cars. That was when I learned the word ���pantechnicon.��� I remember an older cousin from Johannesburg coming to live with us while he was studying at the University of the Western Cape, and the big, heavy books he was always buried in. I remember the little girl I played with at the end of the corridor, only to be told years later that she had actually died in the house before we moved in. I remember falling ill and always being surrounded by doctors. I didn���t like that, but their strange necklaces fascinated me. That was when I learned the word ���stethoscope.��� I remember the old ladies who appeared when the doctors had left. They strung garlands of garlic around my neck, plastered my chest with cabbage leaves, and rubbed my forehead with strong-smelling potions. That was when I learned the words ���Hollandse medisyne.��� But no matter how many doctors and old women came to my bedside, I did not recover.
I remember being told that the cold and wet Cape Town winters were not good for me, and that we would be moving to Kimberley where the climate was drier. The move to Kimberley is the first journey I recall. My mother and I went by plane because I was too ill to travel by road. That was my first of countless flights. I still have the navy blue tailored jacket my parents dressed me in for the flight, and the ticket with the old South African Airways flying springbok emblem. All these memories, and I was only five.
If I could go back in time, I would save that little boy from boarding that flight. The move to Kimberley would prove to be disastrous for my family life and for me. Small towns cast the longest shadows.
I started school in Kimberley in 1974. The next twelve years���the years before my matriculation from secondary school in 1985���would be a torment for me. I hated school because of all the bullying. I was called a pretty boy with flowing hair, but neither adjective was intended as a compliment. The first bullying incident I remember was in grade one, when an older girl with bushy hair pulled a fistful of hair from my head and said, ���You have girls��� hair. Give it to me.��� I was chosen last for sports teams and tormented for playing the piano. The torment escalated when word got out that I was taking typing lessons on my mother���s typewriter.
Kimberley is a diamond mining city and the capital of the Northern Cape province. Cecil John Rhodes established De Beers Consolidated Mines there in 1888. The ���Diamond City��� is situated in the center of the country, close to the border between the Northern Cape and the Free State.�� It is 950 kilometers from Cape Town, 480 from Johannesburg, and 700 from Port Elizabeth and East London. I know these routes well because few school holidays passed without us traveling to visit family in those cities. I lived for those journeys, because life in Kimberley was dull and drab; everybody was obsessed with the pursuit of small-town bourgeois respectability. There was nothing like the thrill of my mother stepping on the accelerator once we had reached the open road and looking back to see the lights of Kimberley disappear on the horizon behind us. But when at home, we did our best to entertain ourselves. As children, we baked mud cakes in the garden on Saturday mornings. I can still smell that wet red soil, the red soil for which Kimberley is famous.
During these earthy games, we kept a lookout for diamonds because there were always stories circulating of people finding diamonds while gardening. Like many Kimberlites, we got to know the Kimberley Mine Museum like the back of our hands and the story of the Open mine by rote. The biggest hole in the world started as a hillock on a farm, which belonged to the De Beers brothers. Digging for diamonds there commenced in 1871 and ended in 1914. During that time, 22 million tons of earth were excavated, yielding 2,700 kilograms of diamonds. All this digging left a crater 200 meters deep with a circumference of two kilometers. It also left high mine dumps of blue-grey kimberlite around the city. A favorite pastime was to go tobogganing down those dumps on old conveyor belts. We became proficient with the diamond mining process: from deep level explosions, to excavation, to filtering on grease belts to which the diamonds stuck, to weighing, to sorting, and finally to cutting. Sorting happened in Harry Oppenheimer House, one of Kimberley���s two tallest buildings. It rises over fourteen floors with windows on only the south-facing side. These dark-tinted windows are angled precisely to let in just the right amount of light to facilitate the sorting process. Access was strictly curtailed. We would stare up at those angled windows from down below and imagine the mysterious process of sorting the world���s finest gemstones. Many of my classmates dreamed of working up there when they finished school. Not me. My only dream was to get out.
But it is another famous Kimberley landmark that passes the longest shadow over my life, ���longest��� being a poignant word here because it houses the longest nave in South Africa���St. Cyprian���s Cathedral. While I am a Muslim, I am from the kind of religiously mixed family that typifies my hybrid community in South Africa, a family in which Hindus married Christians and Christians married Muslims. If South Africa were to split along sectarian lines, families like mine would be torn apart. St. Cyprian���s was where my maternal family worshiped. Growing up, I spent a lot of time there because I was an altar boy and a chorister. Being an altar boy meant serving at Mass four or five times a week. Being a chorister meant choir practice twice a week and singing at Mass two or three times a week���more often on big religious festivals like Christmas and Easter. In a monotonous city where nothing special ever happened, being associated with superlatives like the biggest hole in the world and the longest church in the country brought some kind of sad kudos. I say that this landmark has cast the longest shadow over my life because it is at St. Cyprian���s Cathedral where I was sexually abused by priests from the age of ten.
I first came out about the child sexual abuse I experienced at St. Cyprian���s in 2018, after Archbishop Desmond Tutu resigned as ambassador to Oxfam following the sex abuse scandal that rocked the international aid agency. I made my statement then to point out that while Tutu was being critical of Oxfam, he never fully addressed the systematic and institutionalized sexual abuse happening inside his own organization, the Anglican Church of Southern Africa. In my initial statement, I did not divulge the names of the priests who abused me. Neither did I go into the details of the abuse and its full impact on my life. In fact, I turned down subsequent requests for interviews resulting from that first statement. Even at the point of coming out, I still acted on one of the most common impulses the abused feels towards their abusers���to protect them.
At the time, I thought that my initial coming out would be the end of the story. I was wrong, firstly because I now realize that coming out is not the end of the conversation, but the beginning, and secondly because three years after my statement, the abuse I experienced in the Church continues in different forms. While child sexual abuse in cities like Cape Town and Johannesburg is relatively well documented, it remains comparatively underreported in provincial cities like Kimberley, where recourse is often curtailed by concerns like, ���What will people say?��� So let me proceed with the details now���by no means to discredit a faith, but rather to challenge an institution. I hope that speaking openly will help other survivors to realize that they are not alone either, even if they choose to remain silent. We tell our stories when we are ready.
My first abuser arrived at St. Cyprian���s in 1978, the year I turned ten. His name was Roy Snyman. The touching started almost immediately. Snyman was a divisive man, who at the height of apartheid insisted on displaying the old South African flag in the cathedral. As a boy, I never understood why a bigoted white man would be attracted to a skinny black boy like me, but now I have come to realize that his abuse was not attraction. It was the typically racist assertion of white power and authority over the black body; his intention was not to flatter, but to humiliate. When Snyman shook my hand in greeting, he would drop our tightly clenched hands to my groin, rub my intimate parts, and ask, ���How is the tiger in the tank growing?��� This happened whether we were dressed in civilian clothes or religious robes. It happened whenever he could snatch a moment with me alone: in the dark corners of the cathedral, in his office in the cathedral, or in his house on the cathedral grounds.
When I was sent with messages to his office, he would beckon me to stand behind his desk. Remaining seated, he would rub my intimate parts and ask his usual question. On one occasion, I was sent to deliver a message to his house. I found him in the TV room, watching the weather forecast. He gestured at me to sit on the armrest of his armchair and told me to wait, because the weather was important���all the while fondling my intimate parts. Snyman was a man full of wit, but also prone to ugly outbursts of anger. He could have people in stitches, but could also make them tremble with fear. With time, I stopped laughing at his jokes, but I never moved on from my fear of him.
When Snyman���s death in Port Elizabeth was reported on September 15, 2020, I was filled with a strange mixture of confusing emotions for which I have still not found the words. In the months since Snyman���s death, I have felt stuck, unable to leave the house, and unable to focus on anything much for any length of time. So one day I set about researching all the adults who were in positions of authority while I was a child at St. Cyprian���s. That was when I made a shocking discovery: the cathedral choirmaster, Nicolaas Bester, who had in the intervening years emigrated to Tasmania, was imprisoned there on two occasions for sexually abusing one of his fifteen-year-old students. Bester, who is now a convicted sex offender, described the abuse he had inflicted on his student as ���awesome.���
My second abuser arrived in Kimberley from Wales in 1981, the year I turned thirteen. His name is Keith Thomas. I still remember the first time I saw him; it was at a baptism service in the cathedral. I also remember his first visit to our house during his rounds to introduce himself to congregants of the parish. While I have no recollection of Snyman visiting our home���he was more given to socializing with white parishioners���this visit from Thomas, a handsome Welshman, was a big deal; it felt as though God himself had walked through the door. The special cups and saucers were brought out, and the table decked from side to side with canap��s and snacks. When the visit ended, Thomas asked me to walk him to his car, which he had parked on the next street. I remember him commenting on the size of the lemons on our neighbors��� lemon tree during our walk. Today, it strikes me as strange that he did not park outside our house, especially as we had an ample driveway. But at the time, the bullied boy felt like the chosen one.
While Snyman was an opportunist, Thomas played the long game. First, there were increasing visits to our house until, over the years, he became a family friend who was always invited to special family occasions. My parents��� marriage was in decline and Thomas was their marriage counselor. Then there were invitations to join the youth club, which met at his house on the cathedral grounds on Friday nights. Looking back, I see that this is how child sexual abusers frequently operate���by winning the trust of the family. Youth club was supposed to be a safe space, keeping young people of the parish away from clubs, substances and underage sex, all of which were rampant in Kimberley. With the deterioration of my parents��� marriage during the course of 1982 and 1983 and my increasingly fraught relationship with my father, the invitations extended to spending the night after youth club so that I didn���t have to go home to face my father. It wasn���t long before I was spending the whole weekend at Thomas���s house, only going home after Evensong on Sunday nights. Over the years, I was becoming increasingly isolated from my family, while often being selected for special roles in the church. For instance, in preparation for Bishop George Swartz���s enthronement as Bishop of Kimberley and Kuruman in 1983, I was the boy selected to clean and polish his silver crozier. It took me two days working in Thomas���s house to remove all the tarnish.
Even though the sexual abuse started almost immediately, with Thomas coming into my bed every night I stayed over, I did not understand it as abuse. I longed for the weekends when I could get out of our troubled family home and spend time with him. My bed was in the corner in a room at the end of the corridor. Thomas would come into it during the night. I would press myself into the wall, but he would press up behind me, rubbing himself up against the back of me while trying to pull down my pajamas to gain access to my intimate parts. That was when I learned the word ���frigid,��� because that was what Thomas called me when I resisted him.
Today, I���m still trying to understand what was worse, the escalating sexual abuse or the increasing psychological abuse that followed. Thomas would lose his temper with me whenever I spent my free time with my family, my cousins, or my friends. I started to feel guilty for neglecting him, so I withdrew from those relationships to spend all my time with him.
I also remember that Thomas���s shelves were lined with books���that was where I read The Diary of Anne Frank for the first time. There were afternoon drives into the countryside during which Thomas let me change the gears on the car while he guided my hand with his; there were times when I listened to Mozart at full volume while conducting the imaginary orchestra in my mind.
Sometimes, I used his key to enter the cathedral when nobody was there. Alone in that magnificent building, I would spend Saturday and Sunday afternoons by myself playing the beautiful grand piano and the splendid pipe organ. My favorite piece to play on the piano was Beethoven���s ���Moonlight��� Sonata; on the organ, his 5th Symphony. Even the food Thomas served was a novelty: I had never eaten baked beans on toast. But most of all, there was love, or so I thought. I loved Thomas as a father; after my parent���s marriage ended, I fantasized about him marrying my mother. (My teenage fantasy overlooked the prohibition of such a union by South Africa���s Immorality Act, which banned sexual relations between white people and people of other races.) In fact, it would be many years before I realized that the sexual acts Thomas inflicted on me were also prohibited, and that what he had done was criminal. I simply had no notion that priests could do any wrong. At the time, I believed that he loved me, so when the time came for me to go to university, my elation at finally being able to leave Kimberley was tempered with sadness at having to leave him behind.
My child sexual abuse took place during the political abuse of the grand structure of apartheid. As my political awareness developed at university, I started to grapple with my position as a man who was racially abused by the apartheid state and a child who had been sexually abused at the hands of white priests. My story is not an exception. Neither does it belong to the past; child sexual abuse in South Africa remains pervasive. According to the Children���s Institute at the University of Cape Town, one in three South African children are sexually abused before the age of eighteen. In my experience, the reasons survivors of child sexual abuse are reluctant to speak about their abuse are complex and many: as children, they don���t have the language to express what is happening; they are afraid no one will believe them; they worry that they have done something wrong; they fear retaliation from their abuser; they expect that they will be punished; they become entrapped in a ring of isolation their abuser weaves around them; they are afraid for the reputations of their families; and they internalize the shame, all of which leads them to choose suffering in silence, as I had done for forty years.
The consequences of child sexual abuse endure into adulthood, long after the abuse has stopped. I live with bipolar disorder. I have grappled my whole life with the symptoms of my condition, which are well-documented: excessive spending, substance abuse, eating disorders, extreme highs during which one feels invincible, debilitating lows during which one cannot stir from bed, suicidal thoughts, sexual promiscuity, self-harm, and risky behavior. Such behavior started in early adolescence and continued all through my adult life, until three potentially fatal events, which happened in quick succession in 2017, finally forced home the realization that my life had become unmanageable and that if I didn���t seek help, I would end up dead. Today, I manage my condition with counseling, medication, vipassana meditation, exercise, and the unconditional support of my loved ones.
But that has not stopped the abuse I experience from the Church, which has now taken on other forms. In April 2018, I gave the names of the priests who abused me to a senior bishop of the Anglican Church in South Africa. Since then, I am not aware of any conclusive action taken against Snyman or Thomas by the Church; I only know that Snyman died a priest in robes in September 2020. In September 2019, after no substantive action relating to my case on the part of the Church, I initiated legal action against Snyman, Thomas, the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, and the Office of the Archbishop of Cape Town. In retaliation, the Church demanded that I pay $40,000 as surety for their legal fees because I am not a resident in South Africa. In December 2020, the courts threw out that demand, opening the way for us to move forward with legal proceedings, which are now pending. That Snyman died before facing trial is perhaps part of my confusion surrounding his death. The rest is for the courts to decide, but I have little faith in the Anglican Communion Safe Church Network given the Church���s lack of transparency and sincerity in its handling of my own abuse case. And whenever I hear Beethoven���s ���Moonlight��� Sonata and 5th Symphony, I am overcome with feelings of utter loss and total foreboding.
As altar boys, we were given medals depicting a phoenix rising from the ashes. Like all writers, one is frequently asked about why one writes. In the past, a typical response was: Because I feel I have to. But I have never fully understood why I have felt so compelled to write���until now. It is only through writing this that I have come to understand the drive behind the compulsion, and it turns out to be quite basic: I write to stay alive. The pen is now my phoenix, and if I am unable to write another thing, at least I have written this, and it has kept me living. Writing has brought me to a greater understanding of what happened to me when I was a child. Now, as a man, I stand on the threshold of my most important journey���from the shadows and into the sunlight.
July 26, 2021
On failed states and the pitfalls of Western commentary
Photo by Emmanuel Ikwuegbu on Unsplash Why did a fairly obvious observation by two white American scholars about Nigeria being a failed state cause controversy? It is because their conclusion departs from a familiar arc of Western commentaries on Nigeria and Africa, which tend to favor platitudinous waffling over candor and critique, and because it aligns with the much-critiqued dominant Western narrative of African dysfunction.
Novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie���s viral critique of un-nuanced Western narratives that homogenize Africa as a hotbed of chaos and tragedy has become the staple reference for discussions on Western portrayals of Africa. But this critique has, in its virality, made it difficult to recognize and engage the other end of the spectrum of Western reportorial engagements with Africa and Africans, the flipside of what Adichie clinically critiqued: the tendency of Western commentators to dress up African tragedies in the patronizing logic of relativism.
Much Western commentary is steeped in a benign, avuncular racism that understands Africa as a delicate entity whose dire conditions must be minimized as the inevitable travails of developmental infancy. But Africans need informed, truthful, and nuanced commentary, not denialist, feel-good platitudes that gaslight them on what plagues their countries.
Paternalistic Western narratives about Africa work in two different but equally suffocating ways. One strand is quite familiar, seeking to inculcate Western values into Africans deemed to lack and need them, a neo-civilizing enterprise that seeks to remake Africans in the image of the West in total disregard for the cultural and aspirational singularities of Africans.
A second strand claims that Africans are not to be judged by Western standards of good governance, security, and citizen rights because Africans are allegedly culturally conditioned to find joy in small things, are happy even when beset by problems, and have more modest aspirations than Westerners.
In the old colonial days, this was the myth of ���merrie Africa,��� which is explained in detail in Curtis Keim and Carolyn Somerville���s book, Mistaking Africa. Today, the same construct of Africans being happy and content amidst adversity is so prevalent in Western commentary that when a Western opinion on the continent bucks that narrative, it rattles stakeholders from citizens to governments.
This was the case when Robert Rotberg, the founding director of the Harvard Kennedy School���s Program on Interstate Conflict, and James Campbell, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, argued in a recent essay published by Foreign Policy that ���Nigeria is a Failed State.���
The authors were echoing the verdict of most Nigerians, restating what many Nigerians had been saying for several years as they watched their country come apart under the watch of President Muhammadu Buhari and his ruling All Progressive Congress (APC).
Although the Nigerian government predictably reacted to the publication with denial and bluster, and the presidency���s spokesperson even attacked the credibility of the authors���these overreactions demonstrated the government���s unfamiliarity with candid and critical Western assessments of the Nigerian situation���the essay resonated widely in the Nigerian media ecosystem.
The message that Nigeria is a failed state was not new to Nigerians because it merely, and faithfully, relayed their predicament under the devastating impact of several armed insurgencies and widespread violent criminality, which have effectively rendered Nigeria a failed state in their eyes.
The essay���s authors��� social scientific explanation of what it means for a state to be considered failed may have fleshed out their argument, but Nigerians already knew that their government was unable to protect them. The key indicators of this state failure are the helplessness of the Buhari administration in the face of growing insecurity, the number of internally displaced persons camps, and the large number of Nigerians who have fled to neighboring countries for refuge.
While the ���failed state��� message was not a surprise to Nigerians, the authors��� blunt delivery of it was uncharacteristically punchy. It was a departure from the familiar style of Western interlocutors and experts on Nigeria, who, much to the frustration of many Nigerians, often refrain from accurately naming the country���s dysfunction, let alone laying blame on erring incumbent leaders.
Nigerians are long-accustomed to platitudinous Western commentary on their country���s problems. They are used to Western reluctance to criticize the failures of Nigerian governments. They are familiar with Western experts who rationalize failings they would not tolerate in their own countries. They are acquainted with the tendency of Western commentators to relativize Nigeria���s problems because of what is known in American political debates as the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Many Western experts on Nigeria are in the habit of gaslighting Nigerians about the problems their country faces, which, in many cases, these Nigerians must navigate daily as matters of life and death.
Two weeks before the publication of Rotberg���s and Campbell���s essay, a British expert on Nigeria, Nic Cheeseman, along with a Nigerian coauthor, Fola Aina, published an essay titled ���Don’t Call Nigeria a Failed State��� in Foreign Affairs. In the essay, they managed, with a perplexing analytical logic, to turn the multifaceted calamity unfolding in Nigeria into an alternate reality of a nation on the rise and on the path of greatness.
I was one of many Nigerians who found their conclusion both depressing and mendacious. It made many of us who grew up in Nigeria, have daily informational pipelines to the country, and are called upon to help family and friends cope with the current crisis, question whether we knew what we knew about our own country.
These different strands of Western commentaries on Nigeria���s current conditions raise a broader issue, namely the responsibility of Western scholars and commentators to empathize with and defer to the sentiments, anxieties, and aspirations of Africans���or the extent to which they should let the perspectives of Nigerians and other Africans inform their analyses and arguments.
Although Rotberg and Campbell���s conclusion struck a chord with Nigerians because it reflects how they feel about the ongoing insecurity crisis in their country, the essay is anchored on the esoteric social scientific criteria the authors discuss, not on the viewpoints and feelings of Nigerians.
The main problem remains the reluctance of Western interlocutors to represent African realities accurately, or to consider the opinions and experiences of Africans. There are several reasons Western experts recuse themselves from faithfully discussing African realities or echoing the experiential perspectives of regular Africans, and why, when their conclusion aligns with the sentiments of Africans, it comes across as surprising.
When Western entities criticize failings in African countries, they are sometimes told to keep off or, worse, are accused of haughty interference, such as the Buhari administration���s reaction to CNN���s criticism of its crackdown against #EndSARS protesters in Nigeria last year.
No event illustrates this African backlash against Western pontifications on African affairs than former President Barack Obama���s 2009 visit to Ghana, during which he gave a speech to the Ghanaian parliament that many African observers considered preachy and condescending. Obama���s subsequent address to the African Union in 2015 was similarly criticized for its tone of ���insult��� and arrogant, prescriptive lecturing.
While some African critics accused Obama of talking about Africa and African leadership in the mold of a colonial headmaster self-righteously scolding his ���wayward��� pupils without acknowledging the reality of colonial domination and intrusion, others praised him for what they regarded as his unvarnished, ���tough love��� truth telling about the dysfunction in most African countries.
These dueling African perspectives on Obama���s engagement with Africa illustrate four interrelated points. First, Western interlocutors, even those with sentimental affinities to the continent, struggle to find the right frame to engage with Africa and its issues.
Second, there is a tendency to pigeonhole Western commentaries on Africa into two categories of hostile and friendly opinions. This binary opposition, despite the emotional and intellectual energies invested in defending it, produces dead-end debates because it leaves out many nuances that defy these categories.
Third, debates on Obama���s Africa rhetoric skirt the critical question of whether or to what extent Obama���s evaluation and even his rhetoric accorded with or departed from the sentiments and quotidian narratives of non-elite Africans on the problems of their countries.
Finally, the debate over how Obama talked about and to Africa was shaped by the tendency of some African elites to become instinctively defensive in responding to Western criticisms of African leadership and state failure, a reflex that makes it seem like Africans are afraid to take responsibility for their failures, to be self-reflexive and self-critical, and to accept critique.
Contrary to this perception, Africans are able to separate tendentiously patronizing Western criticism from genuine concerns about leadership failure and dysfunction in their countries. Africans desire well-targeted criticisms from Westerners who are concerned without being conceited, critical without being condescending.
It is a delicate balance between minimizing and pathologizing African dysfunctions. A Western interlocutor who desires to study and engage credibly with Africa needs to painstakingly learn that balance and the appropriate terms for considering African affairs in ways that are respectful of African perspectives and sufferings. In tone and substance, the Western opinion should not contradict or lecture Africans about their own reality.
Most Western commentators on Africa lack Obama���s outrage-defying platform and clout, so instead of courting controversy, they avoid blunt criticisms of failings in the countries with which they engage.
Some Westerners refrain from criticizing failings in Africa because they don���t want to be thrown out by host governments, the way the Lagos correspondent of The Economist was expelled from Nigeria in 2016. Others who are scholars want to preserve access to research materials, informants, and interlocutors, and so refrain from critical political commentary.
Another group of Western commentators operates out of an antiquated handbook of White liberal guilt that forbids finding fault with Africans because, for them, criticizing African failings amounts to blaming or revictimizing the victims of violent Western intrusions such as slavery and colonialism.
Other Western experts on Africa take the calculated stance of not criticizing state policies so as not to endanger internally persecuted minorities and groups who could be further targeted if they are seen as instigators or beneficiaries of Western criticism and activism.
Perhaps the most significant reason for the turn towards overly rosy and unrealistically positive rendition of African realities is the recent critique of the dominant trope of�� Western portrayals of Africa, in exclusively negative terms, as a diseased and poverty-ravaged basket case.
The Western media is accused of ignoring positive events in Africa to focus on the negative. This critique was given global visibility by Chimamanda Adichie���s searing audio-visual enunciation of the danger of the Western single story on Africa.
These may be legitimate reasons for Western commentators to avoid certain uncomfortable truths about the conditions of the countries they study or to tell the truth in a soothing, stripped-down manner, but such Western experts need to know that the option of maintaining a studious, deferential silence when they are not sure how to respond to African tragedies is available. They need to know that this option is preferable, from the perspective of Africans, to pandering, patronizing platitudes that conceal or dilute the seriousness of African countries��� predicaments or the failings of their governments.
Adichie���s memorable critique of the Western single story should not be read as permission to patronize and condescend to Africa and Africans with positive portrayals that bear little correlation to actual conditions on the continent.
The issue is not simply about balancing the negative with the positive or vice versa, in a mechanical, cynical way, only for the sake of reconciling the representational books. Rather, the problem is that commentaries on African matters often devolve into two extreme categories of overly negative or positive and, more crucially, with little or only partial fidelity to the perspectives and experiences of Africans living in the countries under discussion.
A graphic illustration of this tendency towards extreme narrative tropes is the fact that the May 13, 2000 edition of The Economist declared Africa to be ���the hopeless continent��� on its cover only for the December 3, 2011 edition of the same magazine to declare Africa “the hopeful continent,” projecting the simplistic narrative of ���Africa rising��� without explaining the parameters of this ���rising��� or considering the critical question of for whom Africa is rising, if indeed it is rising.
Negative or positive, Western analysis of African realities should be faithful to the ways that Africans themselves are experiencing and narrating those realities. It is not the job of Western analysts to make Africans feel better about their own conditions by whitewashing and attenuating those conditions or by deploying platitudinous and patronizing rhetoric, nor is it their place to articulate on Africans��� behalf how bad things are on the continent.
Whether it is expressed as the rhetorical exaggeration of and reduction of complex African realities to un-nuanced tragedy and adversity or advanced in the offensive language of cultural relativism, Western attitudes to African conditions spring from the same source: a reluctance to let the perspectives of Africans determine the narratives around their predicaments.
The Adichiean rebuke of the Western single story must be accompanied and balanced out by a complementary denunciation of its antipode: the condescending romanticization of African tragedies and the corresponding infantilization of Africans as uniquely resilient and unconditionally happy Others.
Western commentaries on African conditions and on governments that superintend these conditions should mirror the sentiments of Africans in those countries, not the ideologies or prepackaged bromides of the commentators.
July 24, 2021
Mobilizing in disorder
A member of Bolivia's Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) movement in 2013. The MAS is back in power after a brief rightwing coup (Photo: Canciller��a del Ecuador, via Flickr CC). There has been much effort to try and characterize the nature of the unrest that has gripped South Africa in recent weeks. Following the arrest of former president Jacob Zuma for contempt, the country exploded into a period of disorder that brought flashbacks of the violence that engulfed South Africa before its first democratic elections in 1994. Some elements of this wave bridge then and now: the strategy of coordinated attacks on vital infrastructure, the weaponizing of deep racial and ethnic tensions, and the conditions of widespread poverty and inequality that serve as their background. The difference is that, when Nelson Mandela graced television screens to address the nation to appeal for calm after the murder of Chris Hani, it was a moment that put South Africans at ease���that reminded them that the postapartheid state in the making gave much reason for hope and that the African National Congress (ANC) would lead all into this brighter future. But when President Cyril Ramaphosa first addressed South Africa on this occasion, his presentation was flat and lethargic, representative of an ANC that is spent and left with little to offer the masses.
The available evidence suggests that the violence was predominantly orchestrated by supporters of Zuma as a plot to either extract concessions from Ramaphosa in favor of Zuma (such as that he be pardoned), or to sink the Ramaphosa government altogether. This is a dramatic confrontation between two factions of the ruling party: one, the so-called wing of ���Radical Economic Transformation��� (RET), represents a politics of faux radicalism that advocates a united front of the black tender-based capitalist class allied with the working class against the white-dominated private sector. It mostly serves as a rhetorical device to provide ideological cover for a system of political patronage in which the state becomes a site for accumulation. Ramaphosa���s camp, then, is associated with anti-corruption and the return to a mythical, clean capitalism where states and markets are neatly disentangled.
Many South African commentators have identified the RET faction as populist. In South Africa, this mainly functions as a dirty word, a floating signifier for a crass, antidemocratic political style where all power is vested in the grip of a charismatic leader���whether it���s Zuma or Julius Malema, the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), South Africa���s third-largest party which increasingly cohabits the same space as the RET faction in South Africa���s political field. In the last 10 years, ���populists��� have been the standard-bearers for the myriad ills afflicting South African politics today: systemic corruption bleeding out state resources and hollowing its capacity, social polarization through racialism and xenophobia, and the machismo which contributes to the country���s escalating rate of gender-based violence.
Indeed, the political trajectory the country now travels exhibits some of the hallmark beginnings of a full-fledged populist moment. The most recent general election in 2019 showed cracks in the center; the ANC and the Democratic Alliance (DA), the largest parliamentary opposition party, fielded their worst electoral performances to date. Though this is hardly enough to count as evidence of ���Pasokification,��� there is palpable inertia afflicting the mainstream parties. Despite coming to power promising to expel corruption, Ramaphosa looks mostly powerless to control members of his own party. Before this spate of violence, his hands were full with managing the fallout from a scandal in which Minister of Health Zweli Mkhize (who is mostly well-liked and viewed as competent given his professional health background) was placed on leave following revelations that he played a role in awarding an improper contract worth $10 million to a communications company run by a former aide.
While ANC comrades continue to use the public purse to fill their coffers, the party is moving forward with its plan to drain the pockets of citizens. In sharp contrast to governments elsewhere that are using the exigency of the pandemic to increase public spending, the ANC is reining it in���with steep cuts to the public sector, education, and health planned. The DA, on the other hand, has been bleeding support due to its misplaced obsession with right-wing American identity politics and concomitant efforts to rebrand as a culture-war fighting force (the de facto party leader, Helen Zille, sets the tone). In the corridors of elite public opinion, the ANC is roundly derided and the DA is routinely mocked. Of course, both parties have loyal voting bases that give them enduring electoral dominance. But for some time now, the political forces seen as lively and creative are either fresh players like the EFF, African Transformation Movement, ActionSA, and Patriotic Alliance, or the RET faction spiritually led by Zuma (read more about the unrest precipitated by his arrest here, here, and here).
These aforementioned groups are drawing from the populist playbook in more identifiable ways, specifically with regard to their ideological focus and political form. In terms of the first, they are marked by a tendency to make identity the dividing line of society. The EFF, for example, conceives of South Africa���s fundamental social cleavage as proceeding on racial lines. South Africa���s political dysfunction is attributable not just to nagging, racialized inequality, but that the ���national question��� (the debate on South African nationhood) remains unresolved. In other words, all political conflict is an expression of an irreconcilable, transhistorical antagonism between settler and native. Unless and until there is some kind of thoroughgoing redistribution of resources that makes the color of economic and cultural power in South Africa noticeably black, social instability will abide.
As already alluded to, the EFF is but a more sophisticated extension of the RET faction. The latter is by no means a stable or coherent one and mostly encompasses a loose network of people that stand to lose if patronage is seriously curtailed through legal and policy interventions. But the normative framework deployed by proponents of RET and the EFF is the same insofar as it diagnoses South Africa���s problems as stemming from wealth being far too concentrated in the hands of the white minority. The problem is not the unequal distribution per se, but the perceived unfairness of resources being predominantly owned and controlled by ���non-indigenous��� South Africans���i.e., whites and Indians. The programs touted as vehicles for redistribution���be it land reform or nationalisation���are not pursued as egalitarian initiatives, but as projects for reclaiming national sovereignty as a ���black������specifically ���African������race.
These tropes clearly mirror the strategies of populists elsewhere, but do they resonate with the masses? Notwithstanding its impressive electoral growth since starting in 2013, the EFF seems headed for a plateau. After its noisier initial years as one of the biggest adversaries of Zuma, it now looks stuck. One reason for this comes from an overreliance on its online presence, itself a quality of the populist political form. As a ���digital party,��� the EFF commands a large social media following with a unique ability to shape the agenda of the digitized public sphere. But this hasn���t translated into much political influence, as the party has mostly eschewed the base building required to actualize its (once) ambitious political program.��
Nowadays, the EFF is largely content to organize protests against racism at South African schools (which are mostly counterproductive and involve little consultation with the victims) or against the national health regulator (endangering members��� lives during a pandemic while demanding that scientific decisions about vaccines be decided by political whim). This, under normal circumstances, is perfectly fine for a political party to do. Yet the fact that this constitutes the bulk of the EFF���s activity during an unprecedented social and economic crisis makes the party either laughable or suggests something about the true nature of its political priorities. Basically, the EFF is not really as anti-systemic as its leaders make it out to be, and it only seeks a transformation of South Africa���s elite.��
The EFF appeals to working-class voters with its rhetoric, but because it lacks any roots in working-class society it has grown increasingly disconnected from it. It has mostly projected the idiosyncratic views of its top brass, and with expected inconsistency���for example, during this violence, some of its senior members have called for Zuma���s pardon, others have shamed his kleptocracy, and others have represented him in the court proceedings attempting to prevent his arrest. The EFF seems unsure of its identity���iffy about how far to follow its ostensible commitments to accountability, the rule of law, and Pan-Africanism, versus how much to pander to fashionable discourses. It is no wonder that it has started to tacitly embrace right-wing talking points to shore up against possible decline.
The communal racial violence of mid-July will certainly give ammunition to those keen on packaging South Africa���s divisions as primarily a conflict between its four racialized groups���black, white, Indian and coloured. But outside of specific regions���such as KwaZulu-Natal, where tensions between blacks and Indians have deep historical origins���race-based concerns don���t figure as much in the political concerns of the majority. One guess as to why this is so is that although white South Africans are still seen as the symbol of wealth and inequality, there is an established, if not bitter, commonsense understanding that they are so integrated into South Africa���s social and economic fabric that for better or worse, they are here to stay. Though they might hoard their wealth or practice versions of ���redlining��� (to keep black residents out of certain neighborhoods or police blacks��� movements using private security), they are accepted as being a positive force in the country overall. It is telling, for example, that most South Africans look disapprovingly to Zimbabwe as a worst-case scenario of white flight that a hyper-racialized polity would precipitate.
It is here that savvier populists are breaking ground, with immigration selected as the prism of choice to explain numerous social ills like joblessness, crime, and communal disintegration. That South Africa���s political class scapegoats migrants is nothing new. What���s distinct about the moves made by emerging outfits is the latent effort to forge an anti-immigrant alliance across class lines, between the townships and suburbs. Some characters that have more explicitly drawn on these themes are those like Herman Mashaba, whose anti-immigrant record is well-established. When he was with the DA, Mashaba���s political commitments placed him in the tradition of high-minded, pro-business, by-your-bootstraps black conservatism (he made his money selling hair straightening products).��
However, his new outfit, ActionSA, exhibits a more ���catch-all��� character, with its policy platform spanning issues both left and right: from climate change, land reform, and housing, to immigration and the rule of law. These maneuvers bear a strong resemblance to the non-partisan populism of Beppe Grillo���s Five Star Movement in Italy, which straddles both left and right and draws the line of social antagonism between ordinary citizens and the political establishment. Ahead of local government elections scheduled for October this year, ActionSA announced that it would appoint its mayoral candidates through a digital voting system that allows registered members to pick them���a copy-paste of Five Star���s experiment with direct democracy, the Rousseau platform (former DA leader Mmusi Maimane, who left the party for similar reasons as Mashaba, has also launched a citizen populist outfit called the OneSA movement).
Often attached to such anti-immigrant sentiments are law and order discourses, although they also have a logic of their own; these discourses will no doubt have stronger allure in the wake of the recent unrest. Images of quickly mobilized vigilante groups in predominantly white or Indian neighborhoods show the success of the siege mentality that parties like the DA have pushed to exploit suburban paranoia. Since 2008, white South Africans have increasingly become militant, because where they once had the economic muscle to opt out of society���through gated communities, private schools and private healthcare���the COVID squeeze has subjected them to the generalized precarity enveloping everyone else. In the securitized enclaves to which they now make a desperate retreat (enclaves that increasingly also have black residents), black South Africans are marked as ���foreigners��� and increasingly put through the humiliating trial of racial profiling. (In the recent violence in Kwazulu-Natal, for example, armed white residents patrolled entrance roads to their suburbs demanding black residents show IDs and in some cases shooting at blacks.)
Though images of self-organized, armed groups in middle-class suburbs are new and horrifying, they have been a mainstay in South Africa���s townships and rural areas given the general pattern of poor service delivery that policing forms a part of. A notable development was when minibus taxi associations mobilized their ranks to defend shopping malls against looters and to help with cleanup operations (in contrast, taxi violence has rocked the Western Cape, a province that the looting didn���t reach). The security forces��� inability to quell this recent eruption of violence will only harden perceptions of state failure and pave the way for unaccountable non-state actors to mete out violence and law enforcement in South African communities. Accompanying this will be renewed calls for a more punitive criminal justice system to properly ���deal��� with criminals.
More traditional right-wing formations, like the Christian evangelical African Transformation Movement, explicitly advocate for the return of capital punishment, as well as the empowerment of traditional leadership���and, surprisingly, for a state bank (not unlike the EFF���s call for the nationalization of the reserve, or central, bank). There are also groupings like the Patriotic Alliance, led by gangster-turned-businessman Gayton McKenzie, which is making inroads with coloured communities in Johannesburg (ousting the DA in by-elections in suburbs like Riverlea and Eldorado Park). McKenzie has also made imprisoning undocumented foreigners a focus, declaring, ���We shall build walls like Donald Trump. We shall put soldiers there.���
What gives these groups traction is less their own ingenuity or organizational strength, but rather their ability to capitalize on the economic insecurities, cultural anomie, and political discontent which pervades all corners of South African society. Popular mobilizations these days look less like well-organized masses taking to the streets united by a shared cause and vision, and more like motley crowds spilling over from Twitter, where hashtags determine the shape of mutual grievance���#PutSouthAfricansFirst, #RacistBanksMustFall, and now, #ShutdownSA. Like all populists weaponizing popular frustrations, questions linger about their ability to move in a sustainable political direction, since they by nature flourish in a climate of disorganisation and ill-defined disaffection.
Put another way, populists, rather than representing an exogenous development, are products of the prevailing conditions. The patterns are global: the decline of parties and civil society organisations like trade unions as a result of neoliberal globalization. The manifestations are local and have as their key dynamic the political decay of South Africa���s ruling coalition. Although the Tripartite Alliance (the ANC; South African Communist Party, or SACP; and Congress of South African Trade Unions, or SAFTU) entered South Africa���s democratic era as the most vibrant social force, its grassroots institutions are now withered and sickly. Dominated by ghost members, local branches are now undemocratic vehicles for power plays and patronage dealing, and the trade union movement is fractured between those loyal to the ANC (under the Congress of South African Trade Unions, or COSATU), and those oppositional to it (under SAFTU). The ANC���s wane and increasing dysfunction matter not just as an object of political intrigue, but because they affect the possibilities in the political field as a whole.
Populism arises out of this political void; it represents an earnest attempt to ���rethink mobilization in an age of demobilization.��� A well-accepted definition is hard to come by, but instead of viewing contemporary populism as the force corroding democracy (though some populists do, such as Viktor Orban in Hungary or Narendra Modi in India), populism arises from the erosion of democracy wrought by thirty years of neoliberalism, which retooled the state to shield the market from political contestation. Populism is not solely a right-wing phenomenon as it is often thought of. More accurately, it is just the dominant organizational form of our age.��
Those content to simply hurl the label as an epithet reveal an anti-majoritarian inclination, a longing for the heyday of post-ideological consensus at the peak of neoliberalism. Since its unravelling with the 2008 financial crisis, politics���understood as the conflict of different societal visions beyond the mere administration of government���has been returning in fits and starts. Conditioned by neoliberal depoliticization, populists have mostly struggled to advance a coherent vision and at best can only offer firm repudiations of the status quo. Where intermediary institutions would have once played the role of interest formation by helping individuals become groups through shaping shared political commitments, populists are only able to draw from the surface of inchoate social grievance. Thus the usual recourse to identity as a framework for understanding social conflict, for those markers which previously expressed competing interests, like class, have become objectively displaced. Identity provides an anchor for vague discontent, but it can hardly provide the roots for real politics.
Still, it is hard to see a path to power for most of these right-wing populists, mainly because the ANC���s hegemony is spectacularly resilient. But perhaps the mistake is thinking that power is what they want. Some likely just want a piece of the pie that is the expansive and lucrative ANC party-state; others are simply interested in becoming coalition players and advancing their policy hobby horses. Though many personally brand as outsiders���like the EFF���s Julius Malema, for example���many are one-time insiders in search of a route back in. Their significant effect on the South African political landscape, however, has been to set the terms for how social antagonism is popularly framed and understood. Even Ramaphosa���s presidency has involved him casting his political agenda in populist terms, with talk of ���inclusive growth��� and building an economy that works for the majority. Of course, the ANC is well-practised in talking left and walking right. (For his part, Ramaphosa recently admitted the government is giving serious consideration to a basic income grant���whether this is more than just placation remains to be seen).
Where is the South African left amidst all this? The South African left has been in disarray for a long time. Its popular structures were mostly tethered to the ANC; following the democratic transition, they were either dissolved (most notably, this happened with the United Democratic Front which led the anti-apartheid resistance in the final decades of apartheid when the ANC was in exile) or consolidated into a vehicle for the ANC, like what happened with different civic organizations on the ground when they were absorbed into the South African National Civic Organisation in 1992. The late 1990s, therefore, was a moment where many formations reevaluated the strategy of organizing with and through the Alliance, in the face of its disappointing volte-face away from a radical policy of economic distribution.��
As such, a structural shift occurred where the South African left fragmented into the left within the Tripartite Alliance and the independent left. The independent left emerged from the proliferation of social movements in the early 2000s that mushroomed against the growing failures of the ANC to deliver the popular reform it promised (e.g., the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, the Anti-Privatization Forum, Anti-Eviction Campaign, groups like Abahlali Basemjondolo, which organized shack dwellers, and the AIDS movement). Even the Treatment Action Campaign, the only one of these groups that became a national movement, can be considered part of this independent left. The culmination of this rift came through the ���NUMSA moment��� in 2013, when the largest trade union affiliated with COSATU, the National Union of Metalworkers South Africa (NUMSA), broke away from the Tripartite Alliance. At once, it resolved to form a new working-class party and spearheaded the formation of the United Front, a wide coalition of workers, the unemployed, rural people, civic organizations, academics, and activists that would unite workplace and community struggles and lay the groundwork for a workers��� party.
The project stalled, and feeling that it had been taken over by NGOs, NUMSA left, throwing the UF into quiet death. In 2017, NUMSA also played a hand in the creation of the South African Federation of Trade Unions so as to displace COSATU as South Africa���s largest trade union confederation. Right then, the sense that a new party was on the horizon began to lift, and at the end of 2018, the Socialist and Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP) held its pre-launch convention with delegates drawn primarily from SAFTU. But after the SRWP���s humiliating defeat at the 2019 general election following a rushed campaign (it amassed only 25,000 votes, below the threshold required to obtain at least one seat in parliament), South Africa���s left is once again left roaming in the political wilderness.
Since then, many have been wondering about what it would take to revive the South African left with its constituent social movements. Though it is admitted that the historic weakness of the labor movement is both a fact of political failure and a result of neoliberalism���s transformation of work, it is much harder to confront the extent to which it also reflects a broader and graver crisis of political mediation in general. Not only parties and trade unions, but all intermediary institutions that once formed the lifeblood of social and political life���traditional media, civic organizations, churches, sports clubs and even neighborhood committees (what German historian Jan-Werner M��ller calls the critical infrastructure of democracy)���are all in decline.��
The vast majority of the South African population, without a vehicle for political visibility, is mostly illegible to the public sphere. The decline of traditional media has accelerated social media as the battleground of ideas, where disinformation is widespread but the barriers to entry are still high. Since the spate of unrest, reliable facts have been hard to come by on the extent of lives lost and which infrastructure was targeted. Additionally, it is even harder to paint an account of exactly who was involved, and why���to have a sense of motivations and incentives on the ground. Traditional media outlets, for example, no longer have ties to community media that would ordinarily play the role of conveying the holistic picture of their social situation beneath surface-level reportage.
The escalating dominance of social media disinformation was already on display just before the unrest, when a senior journalist at one of the country���s mainstream newspapers published a story about a black woman giving birth to 10 children and thus breaking a Guinness World Record. The story turned out to be fake and probably linked to the ANC���s factional fights, but many of the journalist���s social media supporters dismissed his critics as racist (he is black). To this day, nobody knows what actually happened���a testament to how difficult it is to have a handle on what is going on in South Africa today. But rather than view the country as now suddenly victim to the era of post-truth, these challenges reflect a collapse in what Dylan Riley terms the ���material and social conditions for the production of claims.��� In the new public sphere, everything is chaotic noise because no groups are being clearly spoken for.��
The decomposition of social institutions leaves what remains of the South African left disconnected. As Mazibuko Jara (who was expelled as Communist Party spokesperson for disagreeing with the SACP���s support for Zuma) explains, ���The Left lacks a popular narrative that connects directly with how people are experiencing the crisis. We need to build this narrative for now, for moments when struggles flare up, and for the long term.��� Jara���s point can be extended to the insight that politics is not just the site for discovering one���s economic interests, but also for developing a worldview���for finding explanations for why the world is the way it is, for developing tools for understanding why it changes when it does. Where populists have been successful, it is because they have developed powerful���if not ultimately shallow and incorrect���accounts of why people are where they are and what they have to confront in order to be somewhere better.
Put another way, they provide stories with protagonists, though often cast in simplistic terms as Manichean struggles of good versus evil���the struggle of the downtrodden black majority against a powerful network of white monopoly capital, or of hardworking South Africans against lazy and greedy foreigners, for example. Often, contemporary stories cross over into the land of conspiracy and mythmaking. The dearth of substantive political narratives today reflects the hole opened at the end of history, i.e., the notion that society is without a telos, no longer working towards something better and greater���that liberal capitalism is as good as it gets. The fall of the Berlin Wall made obsolete the grand narratives that supplied meaning to most of the world during the twentieth century: capitalism versus communism, colonizer versus colonized.
��I would like to suggest that Jara���s intervention���a response to Niall Reddy���s call for a new left party���reads like an endorsement for left-wing populism in South Africa. What would it mean for the South African left to undertake a populist political strategy? One way in which populism appears incompatible with the political ambitions of the left is that to be left is to be by definition counter-hegemonic. While the right is only interested in tinkering around the edges of the social order, the left wants to transform it entirely���and so is faced with the challenge of having to create durable organizations capable of building power in the long term. Speaking of the fall of left populism in Europe (considering the decline of SYRIZA in Greece, Podemos in Spain, Die Linke in Germany, La France Insoumise, and Labour under Jeremy Corbyn), political theorist Anton Jager puts the predicament well: ���In a certain sense, left populism tried to synthesize what couldn���t be synthesized���too ���left��� to fully profit from the breakdown of the traditional party system, and too ���populist��� to answer key organizational questions.���
��But is Europe the only model for what left-wing populism could look like? Elsewhere, left-wing populism looks resurgent. Though the rise of right-wing, neoliberal populist governments in Latin America following the ���Pink-Tide��� moment has led many to declare the end of left populism there, the return of the Peronists to power in Argentina, the resurgence of the Movement for Socialism (MAS) in Bolivia in the shadow of a 2019 coup, and recently, the presidential ascendancy of left-wing trade unionist (and school teacher) Pedro Castillo in Peru (while in Chile, a process of radical constitutional reform, propelled by the popularity of radical feminists, is underway) suggest a steady left renewal in South America. Even in Brazil, Lula da Silva���s exoneration and return to politics gives reason to believe the trend will continue (with a likely run in next year���s presidential elections, he outperforms Bolsonaro in almost every poll).
As Thea Riofrancos discusses, the Latin American case demonstrates a way to progressively construct a political subject out of ���the people.��� But instead of the blood-and-soil formulations of the right, they ���comprised a heterogenous bloc of the exploited and excluded, the discriminated against and dispossessed.��� The need for doing so arises by necessity in places like Latin America, Asia, and Africa, where the structure of capitalism subordinates most outside of the traditional wage-labor relation. South Africa���s consistently high unemployment rate has meant that trade union organization is an option foreclosed to many, and for those employed, union rates are at their lowest (in 2018, only 29.5% of employees were members of a trade union). Much as rebuilding the union movement is an urgent task, it no longer seems capable of ���grounding socialist politics in a mass base��� as Reddy maintains (not in the short term, at least).��
So, then, how to mobilize the masses of unemployed, precariously employed, and downwardly mobile? In defence of left populism, Venizelos and Stavrakakis maintain that ���within societies marked by multiple divisions, inequalities, and polarizations, populism thus indicates a discursive practice that aims at creating links between the excluded and suffering in order to empower them in their struggles to redress this exclusion.��� Thinking back to the United Front, and its earlier inspirant the United Democratic Front, what are these if not South African instantiations of left populism, even if not self-consciously so?
This is not to impose contemporary frameworks on the past; in fact, such ideas are themselves reflected in debates at the time. For example, Steven Friedman in Transformation, discussing the mid-eighties debate over whether the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU, formed as an outgrowth of intense union mobilisation in the 1970s known as ���The Durban Moment���) should remain autonomous and focus on class struggle or join the popular front against apartheid led by the UDF, frames it as a disagreement between ���workerists��� and ���populists.��� In The New Left Review, John Saul pushes back against this framing, instead preferring Ernesto Laclau���s term of ���popular-democratic,��� noting that it ���captures better the positive thrust that expressions of nationalism, racial consciousness and democratic self-assertion are capable of having in South Africa. Moreover, such popular-democratic assertions can also give positive conceptualization to the kind of broad alliance of classes and class fractions (workers, peasants, petty-bourgeois, etc.) which can be most effective in mounting the struggle against the anti-apartheid state.�����
Since then, things have changed: Laclau (along with his widow and longtime collaborator, Chantal Mouffe) became the principal advocates of left populism, while the ANC has abandoned the left populism of the national liberation movement. Its populist currents today are not revolutionary, but patrimonial and clientelist. Still, the dream of national liberation powerfully endures in the popular imagination. Ignoring the opportunists who wield it cynically (Zuma, for example, was comparing lockdown restrictions to apartheid-era states of emergency at a press conference just before his arrest), many understand the post-apartheid condition as fundamentally unchanged. Understood through this lens, demands for change are vocalized as demands for social inclusion and economic freedom, for the real democracy that was promised, to be realized.
��
This is what distinguishes populism in the West against populism in the Third World: while populism in the former arises from the void left from the attrition of mass party democracy and robust welfare states, populism in the latter stems from the absence of it. Much as South Africa is undergoing the same disintermediation that characterizes everywhere else, it barely had political mediation to begin with. At least, not to the extent exemplified by postwar social democracy, with its stable employment and institutionalized class conflict (through bargaining councils and the like), as well as the collective provision of social needs like education, health care, and transportation. What the contemporary cry for freedom expresses is the longing for national integration, to form part of the political community in a deep and meaningful way beyond simply having the right to vote.
It is no surprise, then, that the ���land question��� has so much affective force. It���s a container for a whole host of issues at once���the historic injustice of land dispossession, the deprivation of food sovereignty, and the alienation of the multitude. Some attribute it mystical importance, noting the significance of being connected to the land in traditional African belief and custom. More straightforwardly, though, it is because the moment of dispossession marked the moment of something which has since not been recovered: the loss of self-determination. South African society is structured such that self-determination���the ability to set and pursue your own ends���is decided by class position, which is in turn shaped by our recent past of racial hierarchy.
A left-populist strategy could address the need for self-determination (individual and collective) by aiming not for the restoration of national sovereignty (an empty idea that belies the obsolescence of the nation in the age of globalization), but popular sovereignty. Left populism turns out as a kind of republicanism from below, representing a claim to full citizenship rather than the partial and burdened citizenship of apartheid. The historian Erin Pineda makes the argument that America���s civil rights movement should be interpreted as populist: its claims, she argues, ���did not press an exclusive idea of peoplehood���a deserving black minority, the true people, against everyone else���but advanced the idea that mobilizing from the perspective of those who bear the brunt of the ���malignant kinship��� held the key to freeing everyone.���
At the moment, the South African left mostly proclaims the death of the national liberation project. But instead of dismissing it, why not reclaim it? To do so would already be a modest advance; it would disabuse us of the false impression projected by the ANC that national liberation is synonymous with it. Reclaiming the narrative of national liberation is not simply to dogmatically assert it in the abstract, but to ground it in concrete struggle. The South African left has repeatedly been faced with the puzzle of how to discursively unite workplace, community, and student struggles. Not ignoring the fact that the reasons for a rift between the different sites of struggle are deeper, the populism of the ���mass democratic movement��� actually presents a viable model for giving them coherence. What would it mean to revive it in a contemporary context? To render struggles for housing, water, basic income and free education, not as socialist (too removed), or anti-capitalist (too vague), but as part of an ongoing liberation struggle which now significantly takes aim at the erstwhile liberators?
Neoliberalism���s devastation manifests not only economically, but psycho-politically as well. When all of life is subject to the vagaries of the market, it produces not only a precarious existence but a devastating feeling of powerlessness. This widespread dissolution of agency is what a new left political project should appeal to, and in South Africa, it���s questionable whether real political agency has existed for most. To the extent that it did, it was felt most potently during the peak of the anti-apartheid movement, the most complete practice of collective agency in South Africa to date (the HIV/AIDS struggles of the 2000s follows). National liberation was understood as a process���whether in the ANC���s stagist framework of the ���National Democratic Revolution��� (that ultimately shaped up to be a chimera), or, more simply, as requiring the undoing of apartheid���s deliberate policy of social and economic underdevelopment. It was never going to be enough to aim for minimum provision and sufficiency���the dream of national liberation has equality as its premise.
Whereas the now-disintegrated national liberation coalition of the ANC established the black bourgeoisie as its hegemonic element, Jara argues that ���nation-building, for the working class, should mean unifying itself nationally as the leading class whose developing culture, aspirations and economic interests become increasingly those of the overwhelming majority of our people.��� His argument that the ���working-class must construct an African nation��� calls back to the nature of organization in the anti-apartheid struggle. Whether the social formations of the anti-apartheid movement were deeply embedded in communities, or whether claims of such are exaggerated, their direction was not just to oppose the apartheid state but to form a counter-society in the absence of state provision.��
It is these energies that the ANC quelled when it entered into government. Indeed, the ANC is the cautionary tale of capitulation that haunts many left-populist forces today. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, writing of Syriza���s failure in Greece, insist that ���insofar as the Syriza government has failed the most crucial democratic, let alone revolutionary, test of linking the administration up with popular forces���not just for meeting basic needs but also for planning and implementing the restructuring of economic and social life���there were all too few on the radical left outside the state who saw this strategy as a priority either.���
Yet the failure of national liberation populism does not fall into the ���too left, too populist��� dilemma identified earlier. Rather, in postcolonial contexts, national liberation movements were not left enough. This is no accident, and expresses a tendency Frantz Fanon predicted in his seminal text, Wretched of the Earth. Though the national liberation project is easily co-opted by the national bourgeoisie for its own economic interests, Fanon does not want us to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Instead, he maintains a difference between national liberation as sterile elite capture and national liberation as collective ownership over the goals of anticolonial struggle.
How this comes to pass cannot be stipulated in advance. The profound explosion of rage in South Africa���for now, mostly knee jerk, inchoate, and driven by desperation���indicates that the once passive masses have reached their breaking point. Mobilization to channel this anger into a progressive direction must be centered on demands that address people���s immediate needs. Doubtless, future campaigns will organize for basic income, for free decent services including water, electricity, and sanitation, and against the imposition of austerity. But what is the glue that binds these aspirations together? What is the imaginary which gives them impetus?
��
Everyone bemoans the weakness of the South African left, but how to rebuild it in such hostile conditions? By now, populism looks less like a model of organizing the South African left can make use of, and more like the default template in a country whose political traditions are still young, whose democracy is still nascent. Populism here takes its form as national liberation, but its substantive articulations vary���from the now widely discredited ���Rainbowism��� that papered over racialized inequalities and fetishized liberal constitutionalism (itself receiving another lease on life at the moment, at Ramaphosa���s advantage), to the RET economic nationalism that makes race foundational and denigrates liberal constitutionalism. Is there another way that transcends both?
��It goes without saying that the South African left needs to get its house in order. What���s different is that this task is more urgent than ever. Not only does it need as expansive a coalition as ever to advance the structural reforms necessary, but it needs to do so quickly given the pace of social and ecological collapse. It simply feels too late to only opt for the road of long and patient organizing entailed by rebuilding the labor movement. Even so, a new left-wing political project in South Africa must address not only the material needs of people, but must be underpinned by a philosophical outlook���an answer to the question, what is this all for?
If there is one thing the explosion of unrest has clearly demonstrated, it is the failure of the South African left to become a recognizable social force after apartheid. An effort to rebuild the left in South Africa must take into account the constraints of our historical conditions, have a pulse on popular consciousness, and advance a vision that raises expectations about what society could look like and what people should expect from it. The case for appropriating national liberation is the case for the South African left to go beyond itself, to go beyond its self-concept as marginal. It needs to become majoritarian in spirit and character, while remaining firmly principled. It needs to first speak to the people before it can speak for them.
Mobilizing in Disorder
A member of Bolivia's Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) movement in 2013. The MAS is back in power after a brief rightwing coup (Photo: Canciller��a del Ecuador, via Flickr CC). There has been much effort to try and characterize the nature of the unrest that has gripped South Africa in recent weeks. Following the arrest of former president Jacob Zuma for contempt, the country exploded into a period of disorder that brought flashbacks of the violence that engulfed South Africa before its first democratic elections in 1994. Some elements of this wave bridge then and now: the strategy of coordinated attacks on vital infrastructure, the weaponizing of deep racial and ethnic tensions, and the conditions of widespread poverty and inequality that serve as their background. The difference is that, when Nelson Mandela graced television screens to address the nation to appeal for calm after the murder of Chris Hani, it was a moment that put South Africans at ease���that reminded them that the postapartheid state in the making gave much reason for hope and that the African National Congress (ANC) would lead all into this brighter future. But when President Cyril Ramaphosa first addressed South Africa on this occasion, his presentation was flat and lethargic, representative of an ANC that is spent and left with little to offer the masses.
The available evidence suggests that the violence was predominantly orchestrated by supporters of Zuma as a plot to either extract concessions from Ramaphosa in favor of Zuma (such as that he be pardoned), or to sink the Ramaphosa government altogether. This is a dramatic confrontation between two factions of the ruling party: one, the so-called wing of ���Radical Economic Transformation��� (RET), represents a politics of faux radicalism that advocates a united front of the black tender-based capitalist class allied with the working class against the white-dominated private sector. It mostly serves as a rhetorical device to provide ideological cover for a system of political patronage in which the state becomes a site for accumulation. Ramaphosa���s camp, then, is associated with anti-corruption and the return to a mythical, clean capitalism where states and markets are neatly disentangled.
Many South African commentators have identified the RET faction as populist. In South Africa, this mainly functions as a dirty word, a floating signifier for a crass, antidemocratic political style where all power is vested in the grip of a charismatic leader���whether it���s Zuma or Julius Malema, the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), South Africa���s third-largest party which increasingly cohabits the same space as the RET faction in South Africa���s political field. In the last 10 years, ���populists��� have been the standard-bearers for the myriad ills afflicting South African politics today: systemic corruption bleeding out state resources and hollowing its capacity, social polarization through racialism and xenophobia, and the machismo which contributes to the country���s escalating rate of gender-based violence.
Indeed, the political trajectory the country now travels exhibits some of the hallmark beginnings of a full-fledged populist moment. The most recent general election in 2019 showed cracks in the center; the ANC and the Democratic Alliance (DA), the largest parliamentary opposition party, fielded their worst electoral performances to date. Though this is hardly enough to count as evidence of ���Pasokification,��� there is palpable inertia afflicting the mainstream parties. Despite coming to power promising to expel corruption, Ramaphosa looks mostly powerless to control members of his own party. Before this spate of violence, his hands were full with managing the fallout from a scandal in which Minister of Health Zweli Mkhize (who is mostly well-liked and viewed as competent given his professional health background) was placed on leave following revelations that he played a role in awarding an improper contract worth $10 million to a communications company run by a former aide.
While ANC comrades continue to use the public purse to fill their coffers, the party is moving forward with its plan to drain the pockets of citizens. In sharp contrast to governments elsewhere that are using the exigency of the pandemic to increase public spending, the ANC is reining it in���with steep cuts to the public sector, education, and health planned. The DA, on the other hand, has been bleeding support due to its misplaced obsession with right-wing American identity politics and concomitant efforts to rebrand as a culture-war fighting force (the de facto party leader, Helen Zille, sets the tone). In the corridors of elite public opinion, the ANC is roundly derided and the DA is routinely mocked. Of course, both parties have loyal voting bases that give them enduring electoral dominance. But for some time now, the political forces seen as lively and creative are either fresh players like the EFF, African Transformation Movement, ActionSA, and Patriotic Alliance, or the RET faction spiritually led by Zuma (read more about the unrest precipitated by his arrest here, here, and here).
These aforementioned groups are drawing from the populist playbook in more identifiable ways, specifically with regard to their ideological focus and political form. In terms of the first, they are marked by a tendency to make identity the dividing line of society. The EFF, for example, conceives of South Africa���s fundamental social cleavage as proceeding on racial lines. South Africa���s political dysfunction is attributable not just to nagging, racialized inequality, but that the ���national question��� (the debate on South African nationhood) remains unresolved. In other words, all political conflict is an expression of an irreconcilable, transhistorical antagonism between settler and native. Unless and until there is some kind of thoroughgoing redistribution of resources that makes the color of economic and cultural power in South Africa noticeably black, social instability will abide.
As already alluded to, the EFF is but a more sophisticated extension of the RET faction. The latter is by no means a stable or coherent one and mostly encompasses a loose network of people that stand to lose if patronage is seriously curtailed through legal and policy interventions. But the normative framework deployed by proponents of RET and the EFF is the same insofar as it diagnoses South Africa���s problems as stemming from wealth being far too concentrated in the hands of the white minority. The problem is not the unequal distribution per se, but the perceived unfairness of resources being predominantly owned and controlled by ���non-indigenous��� South Africans���i.e., whites and Indians. The programs touted as vehicles for redistribution���be it land reform or nationalisation���are not pursued as egalitarian initiatives, but as projects for reclaiming national sovereignty as a ���black������specifically ���African������race.
These tropes clearly mirror the strategies of populists elsewhere, but do they resonate with the masses? Notwithstanding its impressive electoral growth since starting in 2013, the EFF seems headed for a plateau. After its noisier initial years as one of the biggest adversaries of Zuma, it now looks stuck. One reason for this comes from an overreliance on its online presence, itself a quality of the populist political form. As a ���digital party,��� the EFF commands a large social media following with a unique ability to shape the agenda of the digitized public sphere. But this hasn���t translated into much political influence, as the party has mostly eschewed the base building required to actualize its (once) ambitious political program.��
Nowadays, the EFF is largely content to organize protests against racism at South African schools (which are mostly counterproductive and involve little consultation with the victims) or against the national health regulator (endangering members��� lives during a pandemic while demanding that scientific decisions about vaccines be decided by political whim). This, under normal circumstances, is perfectly fine for a political party to do. Yet the fact that this constitutes the bulk of the EFF���s activity during an unprecedented social and economic crisis makes the party either laughable or suggests something about the true nature of its political priorities. Basically, the EFF is not really as anti-systemic as its leaders make it out to be, and it only seeks a transformation of South Africa���s elite.��
The EFF appeals to working-class voters with its rhetoric, but because it lacks any roots in working-class society it has grown increasingly disconnected from it. It has mostly projected the idiosyncratic views of its top brass, and with expected inconsistency���for example, during this violence, some of its senior members have called for Zuma���s pardon, others have shamed his kleptocracy, and others have represented him in the court proceedings attempting to prevent his arrest. The EFF seems unsure of its identity���iffy about how far to follow its ostensible commitments to accountability, the rule of law, and Pan-Africanism, versus how much to pander to fashionable discourses. It is no wonder that it has started to tacitly embrace right-wing talking points to shore up against possible decline.
The communal racial violence of mid-July will certainly give ammunition to those keen on packaging South Africa���s divisions as primarily a conflict between its four racialized groups���black, white, Indian and coloured. But outside of specific regions���such as KwaZulu-Natal, where tensions between blacks and Indians have deep historical origins���race-based concerns don���t figure as much in the political concerns of the majority. One guess as to why this is so is that although white South Africans are still seen as the symbol of wealth and inequality, there is an established, if not bitter, commonsense understanding that they are so integrated into South Africa���s social and economic fabric that for better or worse, they are here to stay. Though they might hoard their wealth or practice versions of ���redlining��� (to keep black residents out of certain neighborhoods or police blacks��� movements using private security), they are accepted as being a positive force in the country overall. It is telling, for example, that most South Africans look disapprovingly to Zimbabwe as a worst-case scenario of white flight that a hyper-racialized polity would precipitate.
It is here that savvier populists are breaking ground, with immigration selected as the prism of choice to explain numerous social ills like joblessness, crime, and communal disintegration. That South Africa���s political class scapegoats migrants is nothing new. What���s distinct about the moves made by emerging outfits is the latent effort to forge an anti-immigrant alliance across class lines, between the townships and suburbs. Some characters that have more explicitly drawn on these themes are those like Herman Mashaba, whose anti-immigrant record is well-established. When he was with the DA, Mashaba���s political commitments placed him in the tradition of high-minded, pro-business, by-your-bootstraps black conservatism (he made his money selling hair straightening products).��
However, his new outfit, ActionSA, exhibits a more ���catch-all��� character, with its policy platform spanning issues both left and right: from climate change, land reform, and housing, to immigration and the rule of law. These maneuvers bear a strong resemblance to the non-partisan populism of Beppe Grillo���s Five Star Movement in Italy, which straddles both left and right and draws the line of social antagonism between ordinary citizens and the political establishment. Ahead of local government elections scheduled for October this year, ActionSA announced that it would appoint its mayoral candidates through a digital voting system that allows registered members to pick them���a copy-paste of Five Star���s experiment with direct democracy, the Rousseau platform (former DA leader Mmusi Maimane, who left the party for similar reasons as Mashaba, has also launched a citizen populist outfit called the OneSA movement).
Often attached to such anti-immigrant sentiments are law and order discourses, although they also have a logic of their own; these discourses will no doubt have stronger allure in the wake of the recent unrest. Images of quickly mobilized vigilante groups in predominantly white or Indian neighborhoods show the success of the siege mentality that parties like the DA have pushed to exploit suburban paranoia. Since 2008, white South Africans have increasingly become militant, because where they once had the economic muscle to opt out of society���through gated communities, private schools and private healthcare���the COVID squeeze has subjected them to the generalized precarity enveloping everyone else. In the securitized enclaves to which they now make a desperate retreat (enclaves that increasingly also have black residents), black South Africans are marked as ���foreigners��� and increasingly put through the humiliating trial of racial profiling. (In the recent violence in Kwazulu-Natal, for example, armed white residents patrolled entrance roads to their suburbs demanding black residents show IDs and in some cases shooting at blacks.)
Though images of self-organized, armed groups in middle-class suburbs are new and horrifying, they have been a mainstay in South Africa���s townships and rural areas given the general pattern of poor service delivery that policing forms a part of. A notable development was when minibus taxi associations mobilized their ranks to defend shopping malls against looters and to help with cleanup operations (in contrast, taxi violence has rocked the Western Cape, a province that the looting didn���t reach). The security forces��� inability to quell this recent eruption of violence will only harden perceptions of state failure and pave the way for unaccountable non-state actors to mete out violence and law enforcement in South African communities. Accompanying this will be renewed calls for a more punitive criminal justice system to properly ���deal��� with criminals.
More traditional right-wing formations, like the Christian evangelical African Transformation Movement, explicitly advocate for the return of capital punishment, as well as the empowerment of traditional leadership���and, surprisingly, for a state bank (not unlike the EFF���s call for the nationalization of the reserve, or central, bank). There are also groupings like the Patriotic Alliance, led by gangster-turned-businessman Gayton McKenzie, which is making inroads with coloured communities in Johannesburg (ousting the DA in by-elections in suburbs like Riverlea and Eldorado Park). McKenzie has also made imprisoning undocumented foreigners a focus, declaring, ���We shall build walls like Donald Trump. We shall put soldiers there.���
What gives these groups traction is less their own ingenuity or organizational strength, but rather their ability to capitalize on the economic insecurities, cultural anomie, and political discontent which pervades all corners of South African society. Popular mobilizations these days look less like well-organized masses taking to the streets united by a shared cause and vision, and more like motley crowds spilling over from Twitter, where hashtags determine the shape of mutual grievance���#PutSouthAfricansFirst, #RacistBanksMustFall, and now, #ShutdownSA. Like all populists weaponizing popular frustrations, questions linger about their ability to move in a sustainable political direction, since they by nature flourish in a climate of disorganisation and ill-defined disaffection.
Put another way, populists, rather than representing an exogenous development, are products of the prevailing conditions. The patterns are global: the decline of parties and civil society organisations like trade unions as a result of neoliberal globalization. The manifestations are local and have as their key dynamic the political decay of South Africa���s ruling coalition. Although the Tripartite Alliance (the ANC; South African Communist Party, or SACP; and Congress of South African Trade Unions, or SAFTU) entered South Africa���s democratic era as the most vibrant social force, its grassroots institutions are now withered and sickly. Dominated by ghost members, local branches are now undemocratic vehicles for power plays and patronage dealing, and the trade union movement is fractured between those loyal to the ANC (under the Congress of South African Trade Unions, or COSATU), and those oppositional to it (under SAFTU). The ANC���s wane and increasing dysfunction matter not just as an object of political intrigue, but because they affect the possibilities in the political field as a whole.
Populism arises out of this political void; it represents an earnest attempt to ���rethink mobilization in an age of demobilization.��� A well-accepted definition is hard to come by, but instead of viewing contemporary populism as the force corroding democracy (though some populists do, such as Viktor Orban in Hungary or Narendra Modi in India), populism arises from the erosion of democracy wrought by thirty years of neoliberalism, which retooled the state to shield the market from political contestation. Populism is not solely a right-wing phenomenon as it is often thought of. More accurately, it is just the dominant organizational form of our age.��
Those content to simply hurl the label as an epithet reveal an anti-majoritarian inclination, a longing for the heyday of post-ideological consensus at the peak of neoliberalism. Since its unravelling with the 2008 financial crisis, politics���understood as the conflict of different societal visions beyond the mere administration of government���has been returning in fits and starts. Conditioned by neoliberal depoliticization, populists have mostly struggled to advance a coherent vision and at best can only offer firm repudiations of the status quo. Where intermediary institutions would have once played the role of interest formation by helping individuals become groups through shaping shared political commitments, populists are only able to draw from the surface of inchoate social grievance. Thus the usual recourse to identity as a framework for understanding social conflict, for those markers which previously expressed competing interests, like class, have become objectively displaced. Identity provides an anchor for vague discontent, but it can hardly provide the roots for real politics.
Still, it is hard to see a path to power for most of these right-wing populists, mainly because the ANC���s hegemony is spectacularly resilient. But perhaps the mistake is thinking that power is what they want. Some likely just want a piece of the pie that is the expansive and lucrative ANC party-state; others are simply interested in becoming coalition players and advancing their policy hobby horses. Though many personally brand as outsiders���like the EFF���s Julius Malema, for example���many are one-time insiders in search of a route back in. Their significant effect on the South African political landscape, however, has been to set the terms for how social antagonism is popularly framed and understood. Even Ramaphosa���s presidency has involved him casting his political agenda in populist terms, with talk of ���inclusive growth��� and building an economy that works for the majority. Of course, the ANC is well-practised in talking left and walking right. (For his part, Ramaphosa recently admitted the government is giving serious consideration to a basic income grant���whether this is more than just placation remains to be seen).
Where is the South African left amidst all this? The South African left has been in disarray for a long time. Its popular structures were mostly tethered to the ANC; following the democratic transition, they were either dissolved (most notably, this happened with the United Democratic Front which led the anti-apartheid resistance in the final decades of apartheid when the ANC was in exile) or consolidated into a vehicle for the ANC, like what happened with different civic organizations on the ground when they were absorbed into the South African National Civic Organisation in 1992. The late 1990s, therefore, was a moment where many formations reevaluated the strategy of organizing with and through the Alliance, in the face of its disappointing volte-face away from a radical policy of economic distribution.��
As such, a structural shift occurred where the South African left fragmented into the left within the Tripartite Alliance and the independent left. The independent left emerged from the proliferation of social movements in the early 2000s that mushroomed against the growing failures of the ANC to deliver the popular reform it promised (e.g., the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, the Anti-Privatization Forum, Anti-Eviction Campaign, groups like Abahlali Basemjondolo, which organized shack dwellers, and the AIDS movement). Even the Treatment Action Campaign, the only one of these groups that became a national movement, can be considered part of this independent left. The culmination of this rift came through the ���NUMSA moment��� in 2013, when the largest trade union affiliated with COSATU, the National Union of Metalworkers South Africa (NUMSA), broke away from the Tripartite Alliance. At once, it resolved to form a new working-class party and spearheaded the formation of the United Front, a wide coalition of workers, the unemployed, rural people, civic organizations, academics, and activists that would unite workplace and community struggles and lay the groundwork for a workers��� party.
The project stalled, and feeling that it had been taken over by NGOs, NUMSA left, throwing the UF into quiet death. In 2017, NUMSA also played a hand in the creation of the South African Federation of Trade Unions so as to displace COSATU as South Africa���s largest trade union confederation. Right then, the sense that a new party was on the horizon began to lift, and at the end of 2018, the Socialist and Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP) held its pre-launch convention with delegates drawn primarily from SAFTU. But after the SRWP���s humiliating defeat at the 2019 general election following a rushed campaign (it amassed only 25,000 votes, below the threshold required to obtain at least one seat in parliament), South Africa���s left is once again left roaming in the political wilderness.
Since then, many have been wondering about what it would take to revive the South African left with its constituent social movements. Though it is admitted that the historic weakness of the labor movement is both a fact of political failure and a result of neoliberalism���s transformation of work, it is much harder to confront the extent to which it also reflects a broader and graver crisis of political mediation in general. Not only parties and trade unions, but all intermediary institutions that once formed the lifeblood of social and political life���traditional media, civic organizations, churches, sports clubs and even neighborhood committees (what German historian Jan-Werner M��ller calls the critical infrastructure of democracy)���are all in decline.��
The vast majority of the South African population, without a vehicle for political visibility, is mostly illegible to the public sphere. The decline of traditional media has accelerated social media as the battleground of ideas, where disinformation is widespread but the barriers to entry are still high. Since the spate of unrest, reliable facts have been hard to come by on the extent of lives lost and which infrastructure was targeted. Additionally, it is even harder to paint an account of exactly who was involved, and why���to have a sense of motivations and incentives on the ground. Traditional media outlets, for example, no longer have ties to community media that would ordinarily play the role of conveying the holistic picture of their social situation beneath surface-level reportage.
The escalating dominance of social media disinformation was already on display just before the unrest, when a senior journalist at one of the country���s mainstream newspapers published a story about a black woman giving birth to 10 children and thus breaking a Guinness World Record. The story turned out to be fake and probably linked to the ANC���s factional fights, but many of the journalist���s social media supporters dismissed his critics as racist (he is black). To this day, nobody knows what actually happened���a testament to how difficult it is to have a handle on what is going on in South Africa today. But rather than view the country as now suddenly victim to the era of post-truth, these challenges reflect a collapse in what Dylan Riley terms the ���material and social conditions for the production of claims.��� In the new public sphere, everything is chaotic noise because no groups are being clearly spoken for.��
The decomposition of social institutions leaves what remains of the South African left disconnected. As Mazibuko Jara (who was expelled as Communist Party spokesperson for disagreeing with the SACP���s support for Zuma) explains, ���The Left lacks a popular narrative that connects directly with how people are experiencing the crisis. We need to build this narrative for now, for moments when struggles flare up, and for the long term.��� Jara���s point can be extended to the insight that politics is not just the site for discovering one���s economic interests, but also for developing a worldview���for finding explanations for why the world is the way it is, for developing tools for understanding why it changes when it does. Where populists have been successful, it is because they have developed powerful���if not ultimately shallow and incorrect���accounts of why people are where they are and what they have to confront in order to be somewhere better.
Put another way, they provide stories with protagonists, though often cast in simplistic terms as Manichean struggles of good versus evil���the struggle of the downtrodden black majority against a powerful network of white monopoly capital, or of hardworking South Africans against lazy and greedy foreigners, for example. Often, contemporary stories cross over into the land of conspiracy and mythmaking. The dearth of substantive political narratives today reflects the hole opened at the end of history, i.e., the notion that society is without a telos, no longer working towards something better and greater���that liberal capitalism is as good as it gets. The fall of the Berlin Wall made obsolete the grand narratives that supplied meaning to most of the world during the twentieth century: capitalism versus communism, colonizer versus colonized.
��I would like to suggest that Jara���s intervention���a response to Niall Reddy���s call for a new left party���reads like an endorsement for left-wing populism in South Africa. What would it mean for the South African left to undertake a populist political strategy? One way in which populism appears incompatible with the political ambitions of the left is that to be left is to be by definition counter-hegemonic. While the right is only interested in tinkering around the edges of the social order, the left wants to transform it entirely���and so is faced with the challenge of having to create durable organizations capable of building power in the long term. Speaking of the fall of left populism in Europe (considering the decline of SYRIZA in Greece, Podemos in Spain, Die Linke in Germany, La France Insoumise, and Labour under Jeremy Corbyn), political theorist Anton Jager puts the predicament well: ���In a certain sense, left populism tried to synthesize what couldn���t be synthesized���too ���left��� to fully profit from the breakdown of the traditional party system, and too ���populist��� to answer key organizational questions.���
��But is Europe the only model for what left-wing populism could look like? Elsewhere, left-wing populism looks resurgent. Though the rise of right-wing, neoliberal populist governments in Latin America following the ���Pink-Tide��� moment has led many to declare the end of left populism there, the return of the Peronists to power in Argentina, the resurgence of the Movement for Socialism (MAS) in Bolivia in the shadow of a 2019 coup, and recently, the presidential ascendancy of left-wing trade unionist (and school teacher) Pedro Castillo in Peru (while in Chile, a process of radical constitutional reform, propelled by the popularity of radical feminists, is underway) suggest a steady left renewal in South America. Even in Brazil, Lula da Silva���s exoneration and return to politics gives reason to believe the trend will continue (with a likely run in next year���s presidential elections, he outperforms Bolsonaro in almost every poll).
As Thea Riofrancos discusses, the Latin American case demonstrates a way to progressively construct a political subject out of ���the people.��� But instead of the blood-and-soil formulations of the right, they ���comprised a heterogenous bloc of the exploited and excluded, the discriminated against and dispossessed.��� The need for doing so arises by necessity in places like Latin America, Asia, and Africa, where the structure of capitalism subordinates most outside of the traditional wage-labor relation. South Africa���s consistently high unemployment rate has meant that trade union organization is an option foreclosed to many, and for those employed, union rates are at their lowest (in 2018, only 29.5% of employees were members of a trade union). Much as rebuilding the union movement is an urgent task, it no longer seems capable of ���grounding socialist politics in a mass base��� as Reddy maintains (not in the short term, at least).��
So, then, how to mobilize the masses of unemployed, precariously employed, and downwardly mobile? In defence of left populism, Venizelos and Stavrakakis maintain that ���within societies marked by multiple divisions, inequalities, and polarizations, populism thus indicates a discursive practice that aims at creating links between the excluded and suffering in order to empower them in their struggles to redress this exclusion.��� Thinking back to the United Front, and its earlier inspirant the United Democratic Front, what are these if not South African instantiations of left populism, even if not self-consciously so?
This is not to impose contemporary frameworks on the past; in fact, such ideas are themselves reflected in debates at the time. For example, Steven Friedman in Transformation, discussing the mid-eighties debate over whether the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU, formed as an outgrowth of intense union mobilisation in the 1970s known as ���The Durban Moment���) should remain autonomous and focus on class struggle or join the popular front against apartheid led by the UDF, frames it as a disagreement between ���workerists��� and ���populists.��� In The New Left Review, John Saul pushes back against this framing, instead preferring Ernesto Laclau���s term of ���popular-democratic,��� noting that it ���captures better the positive thrust that expressions of nationalism, racial consciousness and democratic self-assertion are capable of having in South Africa. Moreover, such popular-democratic assertions can also give positive conceptualization to the kind of broad alliance of classes and class fractions (workers, peasants, petty-bourgeois, etc.) which can be most effective in mounting the struggle against the anti-apartheid state.�����
Since then, things have changed: Laclau (along with his widow and longtime collaborator, Chantal Mouffe) became the principal advocates of left populism, while the ANC has abandoned the left populism of the national liberation movement. Its populist currents today are not revolutionary, but patrimonial and clientelist. Still, the dream of national liberation powerfully endures in the popular imagination. Ignoring the opportunists who wield it cynically (Zuma, for example, was comparing lockdown restrictions to apartheid-era states of emergency at a press conference just before his arrest), many understand the post-apartheid condition as fundamentally unchanged. Understood through this lens, demands for change are vocalized as demands for social inclusion and economic freedom, for the real democracy that was promised, to be realized.
��
This is what distinguishes populism in the West against populism in the Third World: while populism in the former arises from the void left from the attrition of mass party democracy and robust welfare states, populism in the latter stems from the absence of it. Much as South Africa is undergoing the same disintermediation that characterizes everywhere else, it barely had political mediation to begin with. At least, not to the extent exemplified by postwar social democracy, with its stable employment and institutionalized class conflict (through bargaining councils and the like), as well as the collective provision of social needs like education, health care, and transportation. What the contemporary cry for freedom expresses is the longing for national integration, to form part of the political community in a deep and meaningful way beyond simply having the right to vote.
It is no surprise, then, that the ���land question��� has so much affective force. It���s a container for a whole host of issues at once���the historic injustice of land dispossession, the deprivation of food sovereignty, and the alienation of the multitude. Some attribute it mystical importance, noting the significance of being connected to the land in traditional African belief and custom. More straightforwardly, though, it is because the moment of dispossession marked the moment of something which has since not been recovered: the loss of self-determination. South African society is structured such that self-determination���the ability to set and pursue your own ends���is decided by class position, which is in turn shaped by our recent past of racial hierarchy.
A left-populist strategy could address the need for self-determination (individual and collective) by aiming not for the restoration of national sovereignty (an empty idea that belies the obsolescence of the nation in the age of globalization), but popular sovereignty. Left populism turns out as a kind of republicanism from below, representing a claim to full citizenship rather than the partial and burdened citizenship of apartheid. The historian Erin Pineda makes the argument that America���s civil rights movement should be interpreted as populist: its claims, she argues, ���did not press an exclusive idea of peoplehood���a deserving black minority, the true people, against everyone else���but advanced the idea that mobilizing from the perspective of those who bear the brunt of the ���malignant kinship��� held the key to freeing everyone.���
At the moment, the South African left mostly proclaims the death of the national liberation project. But instead of dismissing it, why not reclaim it? To do so would already be a modest advance; it would disabuse us of the false impression projected by the ANC that national liberation is synonymous with it. Reclaiming the narrative of national liberation is not simply to dogmatically assert it in the abstract, but to ground it in concrete struggle. The South African left has repeatedly been faced with the puzzle of how to discursively unite workplace, community, and student struggles. Not ignoring the fact that the reasons for a rift between the different sites of struggle are deeper, the populism of the ���mass democratic movement��� actually presents a viable model for giving them coherence. What would it mean to revive it in a contemporary context? To render struggles for housing, water, basic income and free education, not as socialist (too removed), or anti-capitalist (too vague), but as part of an ongoing liberation struggle which now significantly takes aim at the erstwhile liberators?
Neoliberalism���s devastation manifests not only economically, but psycho-politically as well. When all of life is subject to the vagaries of the market, it produces not only a precarious existence but a devastating feeling of powerlessness. This widespread dissolution of agency is what a new left political project should appeal to, and in South Africa, it���s questionable whether real political agency has existed for most. To the extent that it did, it was felt most potently during the peak of the anti-apartheid movement, the most complete practice of collective agency in South Africa to date (the HIV/AIDS struggles of the 2000s follows). National liberation was understood as a process���whether in the ANC���s stagist framework of the ���National Democratic Revolution��� (that ultimately shaped up to be a chimera), or, more simply, as requiring the undoing of apartheid���s deliberate policy of social and economic underdevelopment. It was never going to be enough to aim for minimum provision and sufficiency���the dream of national liberation has equality as its premise.
Whereas the now-disintegrated national liberation coalition of the ANC established the black bourgeoisie as its hegemonic element, Jara argues that ���nation-building, for the working class, should mean unifying itself nationally as the leading class whose developing culture, aspirations and economic interests become increasingly those of the overwhelming majority of our people.��� His argument that the ���working-class must construct an African nation��� calls back to the nature of organization in the anti-apartheid struggle. Whether the social formations of the anti-apartheid movement were deeply embedded in communities, or whether claims of such are exaggerated, their direction was not just to oppose the apartheid state but to form a counter-society in the absence of state provision.��
It is these energies that the ANC quelled when it entered into government. Indeed, the ANC is the cautionary tale of capitulation that haunts many left-populist forces today. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, writing of Syriza���s failure in Greece, insist that ���insofar as the Syriza government has failed the most crucial democratic, let alone revolutionary, test of linking the administration up with popular forces���not just for meeting basic needs but also for planning and implementing the restructuring of economic and social life���there were all too few on the radical left outside the state who saw this strategy as a priority either.���
Yet the failure of national liberation populism does not fall into the ���too left, too populist��� dilemma identified earlier. Rather, in postcolonial contexts, national liberation movements were not left enough. This is no accident, and expresses a tendency Frantz Fanon predicted in his seminal text, Wretched of the Earth. Though the national liberation project is easily co-opted by the national bourgeoisie for its own economic interests, Fanon does not want us to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Instead, he maintains a difference between national liberation as sterile elite capture and national liberation as collective ownership over the goals of anticolonial struggle.
How this comes to pass cannot be stipulated in advance. The profound explosion of rage in South Africa���for now, mostly knee jerk, inchoate, and driven by desperation���indicates that the once passive masses have reached their breaking point. Mobilization to channel this anger into a progressive direction must be centered on demands that address people���s immediate needs. Doubtless, future campaigns will organize for basic income, for free decent services including water, electricity, and sanitation, and against the imposition of austerity. But what is the glue that binds these aspirations together? What is the imaginary which gives them impetus?
��
Everyone bemoans the weakness of the South African left, but how to rebuild it in such hostile conditions? By now, populism looks less like a model of organizing the South African left can make use of, and more like the default template in a country whose political traditions are still young, whose democracy is still nascent. Populism here takes its form as national liberation, but its substantive articulations vary���from the now widely discredited ���Rainbowism��� that papered over racialized inequalities and fetishized liberal constitutionalism (itself receiving another lease on life at the moment, at Ramaphosa���s advantage), to the RET economic nationalism that makes race foundational and denigrates liberal constitutionalism. Is there another way that transcends both?
��It goes without saying that the South African left needs to get its house in order. What���s different is that this task is more urgent than ever. Not only does it need as expansive a coalition as ever to advance the structural reforms necessary, but it needs to do so quickly given the pace of social and ecological collapse. It simply feels too late to only opt for the road of long and patient organizing entailed by rebuilding the labor movement. Even so, a new left-wing political project in South Africa must address not only the material needs of people, but must be underpinned by a philosophical outlook���an answer to the question, what is this all for?
If there is one thing the explosion of unrest has clearly demonstrated, it is the failure of the South African left to become a recognizable social force after apartheid. An effort to rebuild the left in South Africa must take into account the constraints of our historical conditions, have a pulse on popular consciousness, and advance a vision that raises expectations about what society could look like and what people should expect from it. The case for appropriating national liberation is the case for the South African left to go beyond itself, to go beyond its self-concept as marginal. It needs to become majoritarian in spirit and character, while remaining firmly principled. It needs to first speak to the people before it can speak for them.
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