SURRENDER THE ASSIGNMENT OF BUILDING A NATION TO THE NATION: THE ANC CHALLENGE VOLUME 1

The political institutions, policies and mechanisms for reshaping a better nation can be conceptualised. The more challenging issue is embedding the right attitudes about the socio-political structure of those charged with the task. All socio-political, cultural and economic revolutions and evolutions require a set of congruent attitudes if they are to be of any significance and successful. The African National Congress’s (ANC) ascendance to power in 1994 and the successive electoral victories , did not only put the ANC, the liberation movement, in pole position to assume a central leadership position of the Republic of South Africa, but also bestowed on it the mantle of rekindling a declining South African national consciousness.

The degree to which the ANC was and still is ready to deal with this challenge is one of the most vexing questions about post-Apartheid South Africa. The assertion that the time in South Africa, like all other times, will disperse nothing without restoring it in a reconstituted unity is in this instance accurate. The path to power the ANC went through was by far the most tumultuous in the history of South Africa, pre- and post- apartheid. The events leading up to 1994 democratic breakthrough, will go into the history of South Africa as the most critical period, where South Africa’s national resolve in almost every aspect of its continued socio-political existence was and will be tested.

It is widely asserted that ‘the direction South Africa has taken and continues to take is in the main a direct result of the democracy seeking efforts and political direction of the ANC, first as a liberation movement and thereafter as an immediate ruling party after the 1994 democratic breakthrough. The centrality of the ANC electoral constituency in the socio-political organisation of South Africa will, and for a foreseeable future, be determining on what type of a nation or large society South Africa will ultimately become.

The ANC has, through its historical declarations, claimed inalienability of the right to shape the South African nation. Despite the ANC’s success in the definition of the ideal state in terms of designing a South African nationhood, the task of building a South African Nation remains one of the most elusive of assignments the ANC has ever undertaken, especially in the context of it being the governing party. The elusiveness is partly because of the heterogeneous nature of the South African society in general, and the ANC membership in particular. It is, in fact, a tribute to the remarkable resilience of the South Africa’s political sector that it has been able to maintain the country’s ranking in the developing world for the last decade and a half in terms of political stability and inter-ethnic harmony despite plunging service delivery indicators for the factors under the control of public administrations (Pottinger 2009 280).
 

The need therefore to complete the nation-building assignment is now greater than it ever was before. The Mandelian edict that “the need to unite the people of our country [South Africa] is as important a task now as it has always been; [and] no individual leader is able to take this enormous task on his or her own”, is more relevant today than it was 100 years before his release in 1990 (Manuel 2009, 1). The function of defining a nation within the current South African context will be posited to provide a framework for its analysis as a challenge for the ANC government and administration. Characteristic of the South African context will be the additional dictate to deal with the national soul matters as lubricants to the envisaged challenges.

This article explains what a nation is or can be. It traces South African nationalism from its tension-filled founding years, notwithstanding it occurring along two lines, distinctly defined as African (and supposedly non-racial) and Afrikaner (unashamedly racist in its then character) Nationalisms. It poses nationa-creation challenges and identifies the potential threads which need to be weaved together. The centrality of nation-building as a challenge to an ANC government is examined as a key issue throughout the chapter. 

It is not my intention to delve into the definitions and redefinitions of concepts around nation and nationalism. The definitions presented here provide a context for arguments that will follow. It is my view that varying contexts of our society, as South Africans, are the very reason we have a deficiency in crafting an integrated national context. The contextual parameters utilised herein will, in all instances, be a direct and/or indirect account of my general general socialization sub-context. It is for this reason that the recommendations section of this piece calls for the fracturing of these contexts in favour of a new “South Africanness” context. 

THE CONTEXT FOR UNDERSTANDING A ‘NATION’

In South Africa the word nation is and will remain ambiguous until we redefine ourselves. South Africa’s notion of a nation has, and still is, in the main, been defined in terms of the country’s inherent anti-colonial struggles, race-based social engineering and a persistently chronic ‘native’ control sub-context. The vector of identity in South Africa remains race, and this is despite it taking an added significance because of the history of racism and discrimination(s) (Chipkin; 2007). However, the South African nation has, and after 15 years, since 1994, of growing acceptance and global importance, finally reached its infancy. The recently gained nationhood status, underpinned by the Nelson Mandelian induced euphoria of nationalism, has as punctuation marks, undefined catch phrases such as ‘rainbow nation’ and ‘miracle nation’. While other nations are dealing with issues of national cohesiveness, the South African ‘nation’ is still grappling with defining what its resolve is or should be.

The use of the term nation has always been marred in South Africa by some mediated agenda. Hendricks, in Nzongola-Ntalaja and Lee (1997, 105), submits that it has generally been used ethnically, to define ancestry, legally for statehood and,  politically to create ethno-cultural and political power congruency. However, consensus is developing that nation-building means creating a desired congruence between a political, economic and geographic unit, supported by a citizenry that has a definable overriding loyalty (Mare in Nzongola-Ntalaja 1997, 245). The consensus implications instruct the imagination of a nation within a political domain, a luxury previously ‘colonised’ democracies like South Africa do not have.

In this context, the unity of members of a society in the process of defining itself as a nation is the foremost ‘social capital’ required for any nation-building endeavour. In South Africa the period between 1948 and 2009 can be said to represent the biggest disinvestment period of this social capital. During this period, the country experienced rising feats of a somewhat dual nationalism, although it can be proven that the national consciousness decline was consistent, albeit with temporary spikes of growth on a falling trend slope. The temporary spikes have, in most instances, been parallel, occurring almost independently of each other and sometimes representative of the diametrically opposed attitudes about the nature of South Africa. The most jointly celebrated growth spike has been the Nelson Mandela-led government of National Unity, and this is despite ‘the jury being out’ as to what criterion defines the said nationalist growth consensus. The race-based ethnic divide that institutionalised South Africa since 1948 and potentially (though unconsciously) re-institutionalised it in the aftermath of the 1994 ‘democratic breakthrough’ created and recreated a socio-political recession requiring some socio-political stimulus package.

The recessionary impact of national consciousness growth has resulted in a South Africa that does not have a common approach towards nationhood. Within this context it must be remembered that the stark and sometimes irresponsibly pronounced black and white racial divide does not translate into watertight homogenous groups, but instead reveals permutations of ethno-racial and religious tendencies that still need to be woven into some homogeneity that does not remove the inherent heterogeneity characterising South Africa. The divide is therefore not only racial but includes an array of variables still to explode in the not so distant future; as experienced in other parts of the developing world.

With this context in mind, a nation can loosely be defined as a cultural and social community. Although this definition is still in dispute, there is growing consensus that in defining a nation, it is prudent to encircle the context into the realm of nation-state description. The fact that a nation and a state are not synonymous is established, and yet the contribution to the use of the concepts creates a consensus that a nation-state may either be unicultural or multi-cultural as long as there are elements of common identity united in the political and legal structure of that nation-state (Wikipedia 2009). The South African experiment boasts a democratic constitution underpinned by a judicially protected Bill of Rights, thus making the Constitution the supreme law of the land, with a nation-building potent that has not yet been explored to its fullest. 

Mill (1991, 391) defines a nation as a portion of mankind, (that is) united amongst themselves by common sympathies that do not exist between them and any other-which make them co-operate with each other more willingly than with other people, and they desire to be under the same government as well as a desire that they should be governed by themselves or a portion of themselves exclusively. The issues of language, territory, to an extent religion or spiritual commonality, some form of ethnicity as well as a shared history, are usually the basis upon which nations are understood. A nation is therefore human in character; and because all humans (nations) are both cultural and historical, there is no nation without some form of ‘agreed culture and history’. South Africa’s history should and must therefore define its nation-building endeavour, lest it invests in some future social rupture.

The most well-known artefacts (language, culture, territory, etc.) of nation building have an inherent capability to be the very reason(s) for its dismemberment; this is particularly charged in multi-cultural and multi-racial societies like South Africa. Successfull heterogeneous nations, such as the United States of America, have been built through a deliberate and conscious negation of these artefacts in favour of a new and commonly defined future, in their case the founding principles underpinning their Constitution became a rallying point. The greatest of American artefacts that define them as a unit, albeit heterogeneous in character, is their inherent gladiatorial attitude towards the defence of their Constitution and so called ‘freedoms’.

The most neutral definition of a nation has been one commissioned in a United Nations sponsored dictionary of sociology, wherein a nation is defined as the largest society of people united by a common culture and consciousness (Gould and Kolb 1964). In an attempt to characterise a nation, the definition elevates to prominence the importance of a nation occupying a common territory so that its members have common interests of place and land, the vital binding force of the nation is variously derived from a strong sense of its own history and its special culture (Gould and Kolb 1964).

Critical to the understanding of a nation would be to view it as some form of spiritual principle. The greatest possessions of a nation should be a common rich heritage of memories, good and bad, as well as an agreement detailing a desire to live together and make the most of the joint inheritance as bequeathed by past generations, loved or hated (Gould and Kolb 1964). In the South African sense inheritance may have to include recognition by those who were oppressed under apartheid that they are beneficiaries of some form of inheritance from their erstwhile oppressors. The  importance of recognising, and sometimes at the cost of discounting some of the group-pride emanating from past tribal, ethnic or ideological heroic feats, as a larger society that a nation possesses a common stock of thought and feelings acquired during the course of common (territorial) history should be elevated only to build a homogeneous national consciousness about going forward.

The task of building a nation becomes therefore an emotional and intellectual assignment procuring for a togetherness that must be able to transcend established social patterns, rituals and socio-political stereotypes created by that society’s past and perceived future. Since humanity will always, and notoriously so, be prejudiced in its memory, the need to reconcile a society’s memory of its past with an envisaged future should form the basis for the legitimisation of any coalition of interests organised to access the administration of commonly pooled national resources. South Africa’s Apartheid past procures for the disablement of prejudices already acknowledged by erstwhile perpetrators.

The basic arrangements of socio-political life should therefore be premised on a future derived from a (shared) history that resonates with the assignment of nation-building. In this assignment there has to be an acknowledgement by nation-building architects that there will have to be, “in the beginning base-things, events, ideas and ideals that can be shared” across all defaults lines of division (Mphahlele 2009). A conscious effort to execute the nation-building assignment in an environment that negates the human tendency to always act as if the social context of their life and thought are indeed the context of all contexts, should be sought at all time(Unger 2004,128). South Africa has in this instance an underperforming sub-context, primarily informed by strongly held and manufactured views about what constitutes a being a South African nation.

The creation of a nation occurs therefore, in an ever-changing milieu that is particularly influenced by the diminishing importance of geographical definitions of nation-statehood in favour of the growing, yet virtual nation-stateness in the global context. A greater burden on the nation-building cause for South Africa is further bankrupted by the dwindling prominence of nationalism as a result of:

·       the globalization of national economies and the internationalization of political institutions. The foregrounding of multilateralism as the bedrock for international co-existence has so much intensified that ‘infant’ nations emerging from a divided past like South Africa melt into the global scheme of things with no national foundation; acculturation emerges as a victor in such contexts

• the universalism, sometimes arrogantly, of a largely shared culture as diffused by content transmitted through hypermedia systems within a western civilization modernization paradigm and;
• the growing scholarly, and often with vested interest, assault on the concept of nations (Castells 1998, 31).

The assumption that successful nation-building projects have empirically emerged from sharing linguistic, territorial, religious and historical political attributes no longer holds (Castells 1998, 34). Societies are in a constant modernising process driven by a dominant survival of the fittest culture which obliterates any less modernised culture, often organised into a nation-state. The refuge for less modernised nation-states is to either join one of the dominant orientations; the default past-coloniser orientation is usually an arbiter for the direction the previously colonised nation-state will follow.
 

The South African multi-stage colonialisation history, that spans from a type where a colonial power is based in some far-flung imperial city to a type where the coloniser and the colonised share borders and national allegiance, and to a dismembered type whereby a ruling elite has assimilated foreign tendencies (during liberation movement exile era or study exchange programmes) present new permutations of orientations. The cloned ruling elite, in this circumstance, aggregate into a socially dominant class that has multiple reference points. These reference points are often in defense of systems where they have either studied or been exiled to and thus socialised.

The building of a nation, in this context, also requires from its architects, a voluntary encirclement of the larger society into some form of group consciousness. The collective, and in most instances, past fortunes of the group should, in the encirclement process, be reconciled with the new nation. The crafting of this nation-building premise must be deliberately steered towards the justification of a nation-state as an ideal form of political organisation. The nationalist ideological crusades have historically been characterised, in the main, by a quest to be an independent nation-state; a quest to define some path towards national progress; a quest to have, as a motive force, a national mission; and a resolve to engender into the psyche of the larger society supreme loyalty to the nation-state (Gerth and Mills 1954).
 

The South African state, and despite its tendency to negate a heroic and phased anti-colonial heritage, has gone through parts of the crusade. The independent nation-state phase was executed with precision and was crowned with the racially defined 1961 constitution. The quest to define some path towards national progress was skewed towards the White race and to the exclusion of the Black race. Apartheid economic infrastructure was created within this ideological paradigm of ‘national progress’ path finding. The crusade had, and still has, as a discounting factor its inability to craft an inclusive national mission that should have engendered loyalty to the nation-state rather than etho-religious affiliation. 

The South African nation-state building assignment has grown in importance to an extent that any analysis of its national building endeavour will henceforth be bound to acknowledge that nationalism itself may or may not be oriented towards the construction of a sovereign nation-state, and thus nations can sometimes be entities independent of the state; nationalism should therefore not necessarily be an elite phenomenon. In fact, emerging evidence attests to the fact that nationalism has grown to become a reaction against globalizing elites; and, the reactionary nature of nationalism has made it to be more cultural than political and thus more oriented towards the defence on an already institutionalised culture than towards the construction or defence of a nation-state (Castells 1998, 34). The permutations of these understandings create a bouquet of analysis prisms for crafting some national consciousness.

The South African nation-state has, and unfortunately so, over its entire historical period, positioned itself to continuously procure for a profoundly reactionary type of (ethnic and race-based) nationalism, thus creating in each instance new default lines of division. The policy of Apartheid, and since the adoption of the 1910 Constitution, has always been an instrument that structured the South African polity in such a way that it fostered and concealed a non-black hegemony, a cause that is potentially, and in most instances unconsciously, pursued by the inheriting generations of erstwhile Apartheid architects (Adam and Gilomee 1979). The rational calculation of racially based interests rather than nation-building zealotry have,  and as a consequence of apartheid structuring, underpinned the exercise of power by ancestral pre-1994 regime architects; the jury is still out for the post-1994 administrations and emerging oppositional coalitions.

Whereas the South Africa assignment presents itself as a case-study on how not to build a nation through deliberate parallel efforts, its course has valuable lessons for the future. The dominant literature on South African history celebrates, and in certain instances it is justified, the nation-building heroism of ‘non-black or white’ South Africa; notwithstanding current efforts at exposing black history. The most defining feature of the parallel nation-building assignments undertaken by ‘white South Africa’ led by the predominantly Afrikaner Nationalist movement organised in the main as the National Party, and the ANC-dominated broader liberation movement that included the PAC and BCM , has been the anti-colonial character of the process.

The nationalist-intensive approach towards politics that characterised the 1948 to 1961 South African political coalitions remains a key determinant in any understanding of opposition politics of that era.  The remaining vestiges of colonial control still visible in the aftermath of the Second World War were once again challenged from differing vantage points. The golden thread enjoining the activism of this era was a common belief that South Africa’s form of nationalism ‘is to be pursued with the fanaticism and bigotry of religion, for it is the only creed that will dispel and disperse the (national) inferiority complex which blurs our sight and darkens our horizon’ (Lembede: 1942). The nation-building activists operated within an ideological framework that instructed as a ‘divine mission the task of unifying and liberating South Africa, from colonial masters, thus enabling her to occupy her rightful and honourable place amongst the nations of the world’; an ideal that was shared by all South Africans then. (Lembede : 1942).

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