Internal Frontiers. Jon Soske
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or a unified political economy, a racial identity or a shared territory—and instead emphasized the collective project of building new societies founded on shared ideals and an expanded vision of humanity. To quote the philosopher Achille Mbembe, the struggle against colonialism created the space in which to articulate a “volunté active de communauté,” an active will to share in community.29
AFRO-ASIAN SOLIDARITY AND ETHICAL NATIONALISM
In recent scholarship, Afro-Asian solidarity—symbolized most powerfully by the 1955 Bandung Conference—has elicited two conflicting interpretations. Among one group of scholars, the “Bandung moment” represented the most powerful expression of the anticolonial will-to-community, the highpoint of the revolutionary movement to build societies free of empire and racism. Recovering the radical aspirations of Bandung (often against the actual policies pursued by postcolonial elites), Vijay Prashad argues that the Third World was not a place, but a political project that sought to reimagine the international order against the bipolar system of the Cold War. Although this project ultimately collapsed through a combination of external sabotage and its own internal contradictions (including structures of class and neotraditional patriarchy), it nevertheless pointed to unrealized trajectories of liberation and new forms of political subjectivity.30 By shifting the focus from high diplomacy to grassroots activism and imaginations of Afro-Asianism, other scholars underscore the internationalist character of anticolonial politics. Not only did nationalist movements incorporate diasporic communities and transnational practices of solidarity, they reimagined self-determination and liberation by envisioning decolonization as a global revolutionary process.31 In a significant body of writings, the novelist Amitov Ghosh connects the expansive ethos of Afro-Asian solidarity with deeper histories of cosmopolitanism, exchange, and travel throughout the Indian Ocean. With their limited resources, Ghosh argues, resistance movements strove to articulate a universalism based on older conversations between entangled and intimately connected worlds: “Those of us who grew up in that period will recall how powerfully we were animated by an emotion that is rarely named: this is xenophilia, the love of the other, the affinity for strangers.”32 Employing a strategy of “nostalgic futurism,” Ghosh and others read the unrealized visions of Bandung as an archive and resource for creating a postnationalist politics in the era of neoliberal empire.33
In contrast, historians of southern and eastern Africa generally express skepticism regarding the reach of Afro-Asianism while raising questions about the ways that anticolonial nationalism presupposed a majoritarian political subject that racialized postcolonial citizenship.34 In a trenchant discussion of mid-century Tanzania, James Brennan argues that the country’s Indian community functioned as the primary other for the development of a dominant, racialized African nationalism. However inclusive its official rhetoric, the Tanganyika African Union (TANU) embraced and reinforced popular discourses of racial purity—grounded in patrilineal modes of reckoning descent—by defining nation in terms of Swahili civilization and common (African) economic suffering.35 Though individuals of South Asian descent participated in anticolonial struggles such as Kenya’s Mau Mau uprising, such solidarity coexisted with—and in certain ways drew its strength in opposition to—a forbidding backdrop of colonial segregation, ideas of Indian racial and civilizational superiority, and equally racialized African resentments.36 In her wide-ranging Africa in the Indian Imagination, Antoinette Burton describes the ways in which heroic narratives of Afro-Asianism inscribe “brown” over “black” while lionizing the masculine subject of anticolonial nationalism.37 These accounts resonate with an important critique of solidarity—as both concept and practice—that warns about the ways that progressive alliances serve to disavow white (and other kinds of) privilege while disciplining more radical black political aspirations in the name of unity and respectability.38
Rather than celebrating or critiquing the project of Afro-Asian unity, Internal Frontiers describes how an important group of intellectuals attempted to overcome the limitations of solidarity by reconceiving the nation in ethical terms. Because nationalism was a narrative of the African people’s participation within (a particular conception of) history, later historiographical debates were anticipated within the antiapartheid movement as disputes over basic principles. A breakthrough occurred in the process of organizing the 1952 Defiance Campaign against unjust laws. Following this first mobilization of Africans and Indians together in nonviolent civil disobedience, Luthuli and other ANC leaders linked the possibility of Black-Indian solidarity to a reformulation of the African nation-building project. The foundation of this compact was Indian recognition of the ANC’s leadership. If Indians (and later others) endorsed the African liberation struggle through personal risk and genuine material sacrifice, the ANC would welcome these communities as distinct communities within a broad project of African nationalism. This act of welcoming, which was deeply resonant with the importance of hospitality in precolonial African cultures, represented the inclusive moment of the ANC’s idea of an “inclusive African nationalism.”
Unlike liberal conceptions of solidarity or multiracialism, this alliance did not presuppose the equivalency of its members.39 Rather, reciprocity was both asymmetrical and particularized: African acceptance of the other’s claim to indigeneity presupposed Indians’ prior recognition of the country’s fundamentally African character. In two important senses, this reimagining of solidarity articulated the nation as an ethical relationship between distinct yet entangled communities.40 In the first instance, this relationship was ethical because the form of reciprocity it demanded was based on the individuality of each group rather than the general obligations of citizenship. Indeed, every demarcation of ethnic boundaries requires the negotiation or disavowal of an ethical disposition toward others.41 More profoundly, this relationship was ethical because it incorporated an open-ended negotiation with the other within the historical process of creating a South African identity. This openness was possible because the ultimate basis of inclusive nationalism was a shared commitment to transcendent ideals.
This understanding had significant repercussions for the meaning of liberation. As philosopher Gillian Rose warns in a different context, recognition entails the discovery of “the self-relation of the other as the challenge of one’s own self-relation.”42 If national identity is inseparable from the other’s ideas and practices of community, freedom can no longer be expressed in terms of asserting independence, but instead requires a deepening of entanglement.43 Consequently, self-determination becomes a set of relationships that required continual elaboration both within and beyond the borders of the national state: it possessed an external and internal dimension.44 This form of belonging also created vulnerability and, therefore, the possibility of particularly brutal and wounding forms of violence.45 Of the many problems that this vision posed, one stands out. Could this understanding of nation expand to include the white settler population, which was committed to defending its apartheid—the Afrikaans word for “separation”—by force? In the context of the protracted fight against white supremacy, this question became entangled within a second debate: Was it possible to achieve democracy without civil war?
THE NATAL CRUCIBLE
Located on the southwestern rim of the Indian Ocean, the province of Natal was a world composed of multiple worlds. Not only did each of these social universes, in turn, contain other milieus (nested inside one another much like a series of fitted Russian dolls), the worlds abutted and overlapped, creating a complex pattern that changed forms depending on the viewer’s perspective. In the first instance, it was conquest and settler society that bound these realities together. Beginning in the late 1830s, Afrikaner and then English incursion established a white presence in the region that slowly expanded over the course of the next two decades. As anthropologist Patrick Wolfe argues, colonial invasion was “a structure not an event”: the violence of settlement continues to exist as an ongoing process embodied and reproduced by the institutions of colonial civil society.46 In the case of Natal, these institutions developed through the gradual incorporation of the region into broader international networks: the administrative structures and political institutions that linked the colony to the British Empire (Natal was later the most English of South Africa’s four provinces); the port that opened Natal to the currents of the Indian Ocean and the global capitalist