THE AFRICAN NATIONAL CONGRESS AND NATION BUILDING
The African National Congress, arguably one of the key nexus of a nation-building assignment for South Africa, has over its history been at considerable pains to define a national vision acceptable to all. The general moral high ground it occupies or rather occupied, and more specifically among its supporters, for being the first organised political entity in South Africa to embrace and fight that; South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people; South Africa will never be prosperous or free until all its people live in brotherhood, enjoying equal rights and opportunities; and only a democratic state, based on the will of all the people, can secure to all their birthright without distinction of colour, race, sex or belief (Freedom Charter 1955); positions it as a naturally critical, though not exclusive, custodian of the nation-building exercise.
A failure by the ANC and therefore its successive administrations to live up to this task will amount to an abdication of responsibility by the legacy inheriting generation of leaders. It has to be stated though, that Nelson Mandela, within his historical vintage privilege, made great attempts at establishing the requisite cosmetic, ornamental and in many instances emotional environment for the nation-building assignment to flourish. Nelson Mandela presided over the creation of national symbols that still need to be harnessed to draw into a common future South Africa’s past.
The state-building mandate for President Mandela’s successor, former President Thabo Mbeki, procured for a systematic reversal of all institutionalised vestiges of race-based social engineering entrenched by past governments. The antidote for past race-based governance tended to default towards race-based restitution policy development and therefore social re-engineering with unintended consequences for the declared intent of the ANC nation-building mantra; ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it’. Whilst the ANC continued to profess its commitment to non-racialism, the need to level the playing field for the establishment of a South African nationality that must be a source for a creative cultural energy and economic wellbeing dictated, rightly or otherwise, a race-based affirmative programme with profound consequences for South Africa’s historic future, as witnessed in the Manyi and Manuel brawl over interpretations of racism (Sunday Times; 2011).
It will be important to illustrate here that the ANC has over its entire struggle history always positioned itself as the ultimate custodian of nation-building. This is notwithstanding its migration from being exclusively native African to a ‘multi-racial’ and ultimately to a ‘non-racial’ political formation. At its founding conference in 1912, Pixley ka Seme aptly captured the purpose of the conference, or congress, in his opening address when he said:
‘Chiefs of royal blood and gentlemen of our (black) race, we have gathered here to consider and discuss a scheme which my colleagues and I have decided to place before you. We have discovered that in the land of their birth, Africans are treated as hewers of wood and drawers of water. The white people of this country have formed what is known as the Union of South Africa - a union in which we have no voice in the making of laws and no part in their administration. We have called you, therefore, to this conference, so that we can together devise ways and means of forming our national union for the purpose of creating national unity and defending our rights and privileges’ (Asmal, Chidester and Lubisi; 2005, 42).
In this call for the formation of ‘our national union’ the ANC founding fathers had in sight the vision or purpose of creating national unity. The truth about this national unity is that it underwent various redefinitions, because it seems to have always unsettled subsequent leaders of the ANC that the ‘national unity’ referred to, amounted to some form of exclusion for non-blacks, and was therefore incomplete. The resolve to advocate for an all inclusive form of nation-building anchored the ANC as the primary organised expression of the current South African nationalism to date, albeit with growing and legitimate claimants of its post 1994 version.
The primacy of the ANC should however be seen in the context of its predominance, and not exclusive role, on the nation-building landscape. The contest to define the South African nation in terms of the race relations character it must adopt and follow intensified both within and outside the ANC. The reason for the intensification is, as captured by Robert Sobukwe,’...that many (allegedly progressive white intellectuals) fail to outgrow the ‘racist’ environment into which they were born and bred. As a result they seek to infiltrate the liberation movement in order to shape its policy and programme in the image of their own intellectual wavering’ (PAC Monograph, 16). The Sobukwe warning was premised on a growing consensus amongst the then African intellectuals that ‘African nationalism is a project of an educated elite that fought for inclusion into the ruling colonial elite thus accessing its benefits and advantages’ (Mbeki; 2010).
The most authoritative redefinition of the so-called non-racial nation-building vision of the ANC came from the 1940 to 1949 generation of ANC Youth Leaguers, interestingly amongst them emerged leaders of the would-be Pan Africanist Congress. It is also not a coincidence that it is from this cross-racial generation that South Africa prides itself of political icons and/or villains across the colour line; the leaders that emerged from this era will remain the core of South Africa’s socio-political, scientific and economic history irrespective of the writer or reader’s orientation.
The ANC Youth League’s forthright declaration that the fundamental aim of African nationalism is freeing Africa from foreign domination and foreign leadership; the creation of a united nation out of the heterogeneous tribes; and the creation of conditions which can enable Africa to make her own contribution to human progress and happiness (the ANC Youth League). A priority of loyalties was therefore established for generations to come. Whilst this is, and in my opinion, the most authoritative redefinition, it does not negate the existence of equally nationalistic perspectives advocated by other liberation seeking movements.
The attainment of this nationalist ideal was further conditioned to include any person who may not be of African indigenous decent provided he or she; agrees to an equitable and proportionate re-division of land, assists in establishing a free people's democracy in South Africa and Africa in general; and completely abandons his/her domination of Africa (ANC Youth League, 1948). In its demand for the abandonment of domination of Africa, the ANC Youth League sought to repudiate the political superior to inferior arrangements of colony-empire relations thus negating the fact that colonialism and its attitudes dies hard (Nkrumah 1961). In this demand the youth league enjoyed the yet to be acknowledged support of the Afrikaner nationalist anti-imperial ideals.
It is worth noting that as the nation-building ideal, contested and divided from within, was gaining momentum within the ranks of the ANC Youth League, there was an equally explosive ‘nation-building’ momentum developing within the non-black sections of the polarised South African population. The opportunity costs of this parallel and yet anti-colonially decisive spirit are enumerable to contemplate especially given the emotionally taxing losses experienced in the current nation-building efforts by political coalitions of present-day South Africa. The requirements of building a South African nation-state based on non-racial ideals as espoused by the ANC and its then alliance partners remains one of difficult lessons of struggle for South Africa than the easy pull and appeal of narrow nationalism (Everatt: 2010, 170).
The ‘volk-bou’ assignment of the white leadership of the 1940s triumphed and an Apartheid state was formally legalised through the 1961 Constitution and a series of regulations promoting Afrikaner and by extension white empowerment initiatives. Despite its focus on producing an institutionalised racial hierarchy, it would be objective prudence to conclude that in narrow and uncritical anti-colonial struggle terms, the 1961 Constitution represented a decisive moment in the political independence path of present-day South Africa (Mathebula 2004). Yet it gave rise to the phenomenon of settler-colonialism or colonialism of a special type (CST), a situation of internal colonialism as described in Strategy and Tactics of the ANC in 1962.
The rapidity of legalised racial ordering of South Africa could only attract from amongst the Black Nationalist political community, as a first response, a clarification of nationalism that still focused on non-racial nation-building. The then generation of ANC leaders, which by the way still included amongst them the would-be Pan Africanist Congress intellectuals such as Robert Sobukwe, argued that in South Africa:
there are two streams of African Nationalism. One centres on Marcus Garvey's slogan - 'Africa for the Africans'. It is based on the 'Quit Africa' slogan and on the cry 'Hurl the White man into the sea.' This brand of African nationalism was considered extreme and ultra revolutionary; there is another stream of African nationalism (Africanism) which is moderate, and which the Congress Youth League professes. In this second form the Youth League takes account of the concrete situation in South Africa, and realises that the different racial groups have come to stay. But we insist that a condition for inter-racial peace and progress is the abandonment of white domination, and such a change in the basic structure of South African society that those relations which breed exploitation and human misery will disappear. Therefore, our goal is the winning of national freedom for African people, and the inauguration of a people's free society where racial oppression and persecution will be outlawed. (ANC Youth League 1948)
The definition and/or distinguishing of nationalisms was based on the premise that the ANC as the then head in the liberation movement claims its prefecture as the primal activist for “an inclusive South African nationhood rooted in the universalist, liberatory outlook of modernity and the realities and imperatives of South Africans” (Jordan 1994, 10). The Reverend Mahabane’s invocation of “the common fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man” continued to be the orthodox theme of nation-building that informed African nationalism in a context of growing cosmopolitanism that was overwhelming South Africa (Jordan 1994, 5).
Driven by its belief that democracy ‘is a regime in which the basic arrangements of social life are chosen by the wills of free and equal citizens’ the ANC sought to create together with a coalition of like-minded South Africans an ideological framework capable of outpacing its very existence (Unger 2004, 373). The inherent ambition to dislodge South Africa from a 1948 created circumstance that left it hostage to a race based politically privileged faction would inform future thinking about the nation-building assignment to an extent that even the erstwhile tacit supporters of apartheid claim wisdom in non-racial co-existence.
The Youth League formation era was a result of the deliberate institutionalisation and naming of the separate development policy of the then non-black governments. Intellectually this period generated a race classification discourse that sought to define related concepts such as racism, multi-racialism, minority protection and non-racialism. African intellectuals, in particular Mangaliso Sobukwe who later led an Africanist faction of the ANC to form the PAC as an alternative to the ANC, emphatically argued for a political dispensation where ‘ every person who is in Africa will be African, and a man’s colour will be as irrelevant as is the shape of his ear’ (Sobukwe 1959). The seeds of the current ‘non-racial’ character of the South African Constitution, inherited from liberation movements, were sowed then. A South African non-racial vision was therefore cast in stone as a politically contestable ideal.
The PAC declares in its founding policy statement that ‘the African people are very much proud of their race, the human race...the African people are neither racists nor racialists, and they unreservedly condemn all forms of racialism, including multi-racialism’ (PAC Monograph, 15). The declaration clearly confirms the PAC as one of the early political proponents of ‘non-racialism’. The early inclinations of non-racialism were those espoused in the African Claims in South Africa document of 1943 when it declared that the world should ‘realise once and for all that a just and permanent peace will be possible only if the claims of all classes, colours and races for sharing and for full participation in the educational, political and economic activities are granted and recognised’ (African Claims for South Africa 1943, 1).
Drawing its cue from the Sobukwe generation of Africanist scholars, the Black Consciousness movement (BCM) was to give credible content to the Sobukwe injunction that as Africanists they stood ‘for the full and complete development of the human personality with the active creation of conditions that will encourage the rapid disintegration of group exclusiveness’ (Sobukwe 1959). BCM crafted for itself within the nation-building contested terrain a niche of exercising intellectual and political influence on the political space. Although incorrectly labelled ‘racialist’ the BCM contribution onto the chronicles of nation building started by limiting itself to instilling a greater sense of ‘black’ self-worth and confidence; liberating white South Africans from a false sense of superiority; celebrating the importance of ‘Blacks’ in the unfolding historical destiny of South Africa as well as encouraging ‘Black scholarship’(Liebenberg et al; 1994).
Whereas other chronicles and contributions of their author formations helped define the political architecture of South Africa, the Freedom Charter profoundly redefined the political landscape of South Africa. Its myriad of interpretations by all and sundry turned out to be its legitimacy strength, particularly the authority it derives from its mode of creation (Chipkin 2007, 68). The process towards the 1955 adoption of the Freedom Charter with its mass based and ‘non-racial’ and/or ‘multi-racial’ character elevates it to levels dissimilar to comparable policy pronouncements. The rejection crisis it attracted was relevant for the then era but later on in history its crisis became repudiated by the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) process that confirmed ‘the South Africa belongs to all’ contested statement, that fundamentally led to the ANC-PAC split. The contents of the Freedom Charter advocated for a people-centred contestable political terrain only winnable through the ballot. In the Freedom Charter, South Africa can unveil the secret of becoming a nation through the continuous melting of its ethno-racial identities.
The growth of the Africanist orientation was also marred in its path by a constant, though not consistent, redefinition of the non-racial character of the “Africa for Africans” slogan within the context of a hostile liberal democracy influenced potential voting constituency in the event of a franchise breakthrough. There is a view which claims that the ANC Youth League pre-conditions for inclusion into the African definition for anyone who is not of indigenous African decent, actually originates from chief protagonists of the Pan-Africanist orientation. Irrespective of its origin, the idea still resonated with the nation-building mantra of its parent movement as it engulfed South Africa at the time.
The non-racial future yielded through a series of coalition building initiatives such as the Freedom Charter. The content of the Charter and not its ideological or otherwise origins provided a vision for the future whence it is gradually been qualified to be an operating system upon which any political and economic system could operate. The latest development has been the drive by South Africa’s newest political party, the Congress of the People hereinafter referred to as COPE; claim that the spirit and letter of the Freedom Charter is no longer well represented by the current ANC. The Freedom Charter was destined to preside over the struggle for justice in South Africa and in many ways legitimised the broader liberation movement as a non-racial assignment.
The character of the South African nation building assignment has created a historical journey that attracted in its course men and women who were not good enough for the institutional establishment emanating from the Freedom Charter era related policy documents, as well as those who were too good for the same establishment. The racially motivated intellectual repository of individuals who structured the apartheid machine were not good enough for the Freedom Charter inspired assignment, and their non-racially motivated counterparts became too good for the same assignment. Those who were not good enough such as Dr HF Verwoed messed up and those who were too good such as Dr Nelson Mandela were either incarcerated or exiled.
The Freedom charter, read as embodying elements of the other liberation movements’ policy chronicles, provided and still provides South Africa with a vision that everyone could abide by. Its definitive rules and/or pronouncements are actually designed to promote both majesty and mystery in the theatre of nation-building. The ideological stance of the Freedom Charter encapsulated in its glorious message that ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it’ positions it as a national consensus frontier. The general nation-building character of the Freedom Charter and its socio-economic facilitative nature further entrenches its capacity to become the core of South Africa’s national soul, if bequeathed to South Africa. The nation-building premise of the Freedom Charter creates of the charter a frontier personality claimable by both left and right oriented economic orientations; notwithstanding orthodoxies of it being a leftist masterpiece.
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