Internal Frontiers. Jon Soske
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3 explores the ways that this violence polarized African public opinion and generated an unprecedented crisis in the ANC, leading to the downfalls of both Xuma and Natal president A. W. G. Champion. In the Riots’ aftermath, a diverse group of intellectuals within the ANC—including Luthuli, Ngubane, and Youth League leader A. P. Mda—experienced a genuine crisis of conscience and began to rethink the relationship between African nationalism and a broader South African identity. Although they differed considerably in outlook, these thinkers rejected a racial definition of national community (Mda denounced what he called African “fascism”) and created a space for the conceptualization of the national subject as simultaneously singular and multiple. In the following decade, these arguments would inform a larger set of discussions about the constitutional structure of a postapartheid government, the character of a future national culture, and the relationship between the Union of South Africa and the African continent.
Chapter 4 uses the Riots to explore the role of gender and interracial sex in structuring Natal’s African-Indian dynamics. As Philip Bonner observes, the dominant culture within the ANC understood the national as a masculine domain and located women within the terrain of local politics.90 This national public was also constructed around the use of English, while provincial political life largely transpired in vernacular languages. (This fact allowed Indians and whites, who rarely spoke vernacular languages, to participate in national African politics without necessarily transforming their relationship to African cultural and social life.) As a result, gender, the vernacular, and the “local”—which sometimes occupied the same physical space as the “national”—each became associated with the disruptive effects of African-Indian racial dynamics on the ANC’s construction of the nation. A frequent complaint raised by African men in Durban during this period (particularly in the isiZulu-language pages of black newspapers) was the “Indian peril”: purported sexual predation against African women. This allegation underscored the gendered character of urban space and the perceived absence of social reciprocity. According to this discourse, Indian men mixed freely with Africans in buses, movie theaters, and jazz concerts—where they “seduced” African women, often urbanized professionals—while Indian women remained isolated within the temple, mosque, or home. Simultaneously, the Indian woman became the central icon of a cultural discourse that circulated between colonial sources, diasporic versions of Indian nationalism, liberal social science, and African stereotypes. These “citings/sitings” (to use Burton’s evocative coinage) of gender and race both underwrote and troubled the ideas of nation that are the focus of this book.91
The third section explores the transformation of the ANC following the 1949 Riots. Chapter 5 focuses on a pivotal event: the 1952 Defiance Campaign, the first mass mobilization of Indians and Africans together. Near the end of the campaign, ANC leaders called for the creation of a white organization (the Congress of Democrats) to work with the other two groups, generalizing the form of its partnership with the Indian Congress and laying the foundations for a new political formation, the Congress Alliance. Drawing on the earlier symbols, slogans, and iconography of the ANC, the Defiance Campaign generated—to invoke the philosopher Jacques Rancière—an aesthetic of struggle: a “redistribution of the sensible” that made visible new political possibilities and therefore facilitated the emergence of unanticipated identifications.92 The Congress Alliance provided the image of a single, united South Africa in which each “section” (alliance leaders generally avoided the terms “majority” and “minority”) possessed a claim to belonging. In other words, the principles of national unity and racial multiplicity were reconciled at the level of political symbolism. While this imagery developed organically, ANC leaders, especially Luthuli, soon began to reflect on this process and strategize the aesthetic dimensions of the antiapartheid struggle. On the basis of these experiences, Luthuli (now the president of the ANC) formulated a philosophy of African nationalism that rejected a materialist foundation of politics, especially the liberal claim that democracy presupposed social homogeneity based in a common civil society. Reworking earlier contributions by Lembede, Ngubane, and H. I. E. Dhlomo, Luthuli’s ideas developed in active collaboration with a group within the Natal ANC (including Ngubane and Dhlomo) and represented a distinct Natal synthesis of African nationalist thought.
Chapter 6 reconstructs the Natal synthesis and Luthuli’s struggles to defend it against other currents within the ANC, namely an insurrectionist African nationalism associated with the Transvaal-based leadership and the Cold War anticommunism of Luthuli’s erstwhile friend and collaborator, Ngubane. The Natal synthesis envisioned nation as a plural political subject that would emerge through the struggle for universal values. The result was a layered conception of nationalism. African nation building, embodied in the ANC, could exist side-by-side with the struggles of other peoples. Together, they could fold into a broader South African identity. Because African nationalism was already a pluralistic identity, incorporating multiple groups in the pursuit of a greater ideal, it could open itself to others without endangering its essential unity. In isiZulu, Luthuli expressed this idea in terms of a nation composed of many nations: “kulelizwe siyizizwe eziningi.” At several points, he stated that it represented Africa’s most significant contribution to human culture. Luthuli’s ideas, and his promotion of symbolism as an instrument of articulating unity in heterogeneity, had a significant impact on the ANC’s broader political culture, especially through the celebration of 26 June (“Freedom Day”) and the campaign for the 1955 Congress of the People. By the mid-1950s, however, Luthuli found himself defending his philosophy on two fronts. On the one hand, he led a factional battle against proposals, embodied in the so-called Tambo constitution, to centralize the ANC and to adopt the Freedom Charter as the basis for cooperation with other groups. On the other hand, he conducted a public fight against Ngubane over the role of the Communist Party within the ANC. In both cases, the debate over the African political subject—and its relationship to the also-colonized other—became entangled with the global imaginary of the Cold War.
Internal Frontiers concludes with an epilogue that considers the long-term influence of Luthuli’s ideas within the ANC. Despite its popularization through Luthuli’s presidency, the Natal synthesis was only one of several competing formulations of African nationalism. At the same time, Luthuli either introduced or reworked ideas that would become more widely influential: the centrality of ideals to nation building, the importance of symbolic politics and popular participation in rituals of nation, and (most importantly) the constructive role of African nationalism in creating a broader South African identity. Although they rejected many of his philosophical assumptions, both the Pan-Africanism of Sobukwe and the Communist Party’s concept of the “national democratic revolution” incorporated elements of the Natal synthesis, especially the production of a common identity through the African liberation struggle. The ANC’s launch of sabotage in 1961, and the Communist Party’s growing influence within the ANC in exile, resulted in the eclipse of the Natal synthesis by a more traditional, majoritarian conception of nationalism. Despite this fact, the ANC incorporated Luthuli into a narrative of its history organized around major figures (especially presidents) and “stages” of struggle. Even if represented as surpassed, earlier leaders functioned as symbols of tactics and values that remained part of a living Congress tradition. At key moments during the Mass Democratic Movement of the 1980s and early 1990s transition, ANC leaders drew on the political aesthetic of the Congress Alliance and revivified elements of the Natal synthesis.
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In his memoir, the antiapartheid activist Ismail Meer recalls a day he spent with Lembede shortly before the philosopher unexpectedly died at the age of thirty-three. After walking through Johannesburg, Meer took Lembede to see the library at Wits University. Lembede, who had earned two advanced degrees by correspondence, physically trembled at the site of the books. “This is what the bastards have kept from me,” he exhaled.93 The two young men proceeded to Orient House, where they shared a lunch of curry cooked by the charming Amina Pahad, whose imprisonment in the 1946 Passive Resistance Campaign helped shatter Mandela’s belief that Indians were incapable of struggle.94