South Africa became a Constitutional democracy in 1910 after a non-blacks-only consensus to establish a State whose sovereignty would be defined within the context of being a colonial outpost of Britain. This began a process of consolidating political power and decision-making into a National Legislature, supported by an Executive Arm of government. Any arising disputes were adjudicated by courts of law. The new state's legislative, executive, and judicial authority was defined within the constraints imposed by South Africa's limits as a colonial outpost. Described as a colony with a resident Governor-General whose office had all executive authority vested in it, the legal status of citizens was legitimised by the extent to which the legitimacy of the British Crown prevailed in an emerging democracy. The arrangements with which those at the post-Anglo Boer conflict consensus manufacturing table agreed to govern South Africa provided the first stirrings of localised freedom to legislate other arrangements to reconcile conflicting and collaboration interests of those given citizen rights within such arrangements.
The 1910 Constitution and its arrangements packaged public power into a commodity tradeable in the political marketplace whose arbitration process, elections, defined the legitimacy of the entire system. Franchise rights were established as the ultimate process to gain control of government as the most active state agencies. Political legitimacy would then be derived from the extent to which society borrowed its public power from a political coalition. This meant the authority of the state over its citizens, the monopolies it would galvanise to impose its will, and the concentrated conduits of coercing society into submitting to its symbols of authority were legalised through the legitimacy of the 'borrowed public power' wherever it resided and/or is limited. Similarly, the publicness of South Africa's public power ended at the sims as the privateness of the same power as viewed from the vantage of the British Crown.
To be public in South Africa was legal to the extent that the private nature of the British Crown allowed it through its resident Governor General. While those in South Africa were not all defined as native to it, those that were then privileged to be defined natives were not included in the regulation of public power defined in the constitution, save for their role as a 'special and racially defined caste' amongst the subjects of the crown.
Creating or establishing a political caste system would have meant those in upper castes had earned that status through war and conquest. It would be the terms of treaties signed after conflicts that legitimised whatever order put in place to define power relations as manifest in property and other interests' links. In South Africa, race condition became a vector of caste formation. Class distinctions were race defined, the effects of which still represent the image out of which South Africa is modelled. Class, caste-like, and economic participation exclusion-based systems governing South Africa as a state were institutionalised as part of the legal system. In fact, it was legal to have your land dispossessed and later given to those the legal system expected to be propertied. Invariably apartheid was legal, albeit immoral and illegitimate.
The 1910 Constitution, like all others, created the institutional basis for all contracting at the origins of being South African. Being an act of coordinating our ways of ordering societal lives together, it established the basis for those elected not to necessarily govern but to let the principles undergird it. As a template of statehood it,s architecture would serve as a background of permanence against which continuity between what might seem to be the old and the new regimes will be guaranteed. The coloniality threads in the Constitution and all other subsequent ones decorate the various legitimacy-seeking epochs, including the final 1996 settlement.
As Constitutional democracy was consolidating itself as a hegemonic political power management system, it was also a conduit within which the legality of colonial dispossession and exclusion of Blacks, and African natives in particular, in the political economy, was formalised. A public administration system anchored on the institutionalisation of laws of the land set in motion the creation of a bureaucracy whose essence was about making the system work for and towards the policy intents that a democracy puts. The opposition therefore to exclusion from the 1910 consensus was more about inclusion in the deal, or instead taking control of the system for repurposing to be about 'all who live in South Africa'.
As the 'liberation movement' with the African National Congress as its pole representative sought to define alternatives to the excluding system, the best it could determine was the content it would enter the system with and less about the system. In fact, the liberation movement bound itself to law, thus accomplishing the apartheid endgame by law. Judicial interpretation of the correctness of ending apartheid became the core process with which compromises and deadlocks during the final negotiations to 'include' 'all who live in it in the new consensus were resolved. This then made or turned the law legitimate, and it was easy to agree that 'the rule of law' would be supreme in an emerging dispensation.
Generic revolutionary rhetoric of mass insurrection, seizure of power, radical economic transformation, and building a socialist future was upstaged by a revolution by law. Instead of a process defined by episodes of physical battles constituting a bigger war, there were, in fact, working committees of the CODESA process hard at work in chiselling the legality and lawfulness of South Africa's liberation and democracy. This has defined the type of society which emerged; law became a refuge for both the previously excluded and the then excluders. In the same way, laws constructed apartheid; it would be laws that carry the responsibility to end it. The legitimacy of those amongst us who would be borrowed public power to legalise whatever process or content we bring into the new system, as we repurpose it, lies in the legality of what they do.
Whilst the liberation movement, or the anti-apartheid alliance led by the ANC, was hegemonic in the delegitimisation of the apartheid state, government, oligarchs, and political economy, it did so within the constraints of its legality. Most of what apartheid was about could not be easily found illegal, notwithstanding the profundity of illegitimacy. The legal system made a point of creating in law an institutional framework whose object was to put (lawful) obstacles to discipline the freedom-seeking objectives along paths that will not temper with the established templates of dominance, with class rather than race as the dominant vector. In this process, the legitimacy of the liberation struggle has become legal, whence the nature of South Africa's freedom is legal. Whatever happened in the past can only be undone to the extent it is legal. CUT!!!
🤷🏿♂️A ndzo tlangatlangela nawo
🤷🏿♂️Hi ta ku yini? Yiii!!
🤷🏿♂️Matimba nge a le nawini shem
While l have great respect for the thincfoundation for wanting to contribute towards change, this narrative of our history is problematic...
ReplyDelete1. To talk of Constitutional democracy in 1910, is an insult to South Africans even to the governors of that time, and shows lack of understanding of what you are claiming. Constitutional democracy, like in SA and Germany, etc...means that the Constitution is supreme. SA never had that, it was parliament that had the final word on matters of state and law.
2. While it appeals to people who have not studied histoty as a subject, or the history of colonialism, nonetheless it is not factual. From a linguistic approach, one feels the influence of an 'economistic' approach to history... where everything has been packaged in commodities.
3. There is nothing like a 'non-black consensus in 1910'. This is false. Non-African maybe.
4. This narrative nullifies the wars of resistance and how at the end of it, resistance came in the form of the native congresses being established - later ANC.
5. It also nullifies the character of the state that emerged and the dual power-sharing arrangement between the defeated Boers and British representatives. Without this element, it would be difficult to understand why SA differed from all other colonies in Africa... and why then the struggle was against an internal white supremacy, and why it took so long to dismantle apartheid (again putting the blame on others).
6. The narrative sounds revolutionary, but it is the language of the 'radicals' that only finds fault with Britain and ignores all the forces that were present in this part of the world... that influence SA to be what it is today.
In other words, we must not fail to see colonialism as an offshoot of the capitalism... representing a specific phase in the development of economic and political systems!l