Susan Booysen looks at noble legacies of struggle history and the present.
Flux and fluidity are the order of the day in Africa. Scholars from around the world gathered in Paris this week to consider contestation, resistance and revolt – collective mobilisation – around the continent. In that context, South Africa, problems and all, is a contradictory but stable speck on the map.
The event was the sixth European Conference on African Studies (ECAS), held at the University of Sorbonne. More than 1 500 scholars and activists presented papers at 235 panels – with three to six at each. African polity and society were interrogated by rich social science research, scrutinised by established and aspirant scholars.
ECAS’s “collective mobilisation” theme illustrated an African continent through the lens of engagement and contestation between state and people. Citizens – but also governments – are clearly active on hundreds of fronts in Africa’s 54 diverse countries, criss-crossed as they are by trans- and sub-national flows, historical memoirs, and new generations of engaged political subjects.
A cacophony of narratives unfolded on the forms of protest, resistance, insurrection and a multitude of other manifestations of Africa’s complex and contradictory socio-economic and political developments.
In this comparative context, South Africa appears stable. Our battles of pushing for the president’s accountability, or of pressing a powerful – as well as legitimate, legally elected – party to assume responsibility for leadership choices are pivotal issues. Scholars focusing on contemporary rebel governments, warlords who rule substantial national territories, famines and mass displacements, see South Africa as an interesting but mundane research topic.
These multinational and interdisciplinary conferences of progressive leanings parade history, anthropology, political science, development studies, art, drama, and literature side by side. The weapons of mobilisation that are dissected range from guns and bazookas, to plays, poetry, protests and revolts, tweets and blogs. The researchers’ attention floats seamlessly between past and present.
The conference provided vivid evidence of how art flourishes in conditions of human suffering, and social media mobilisation creates extra-territorial internet identities and lifelines for the diaspora. The studies in social media mobilisation showed how an online war memorial was created in Eritrean virtual space – and how these media offer the relief of virtual resistance. The electronic mobilisational spaces deliver resistance of sorts – but this cannot substitute for physical war or the conquests of liberation struggles.
The research is still unravelling – and sometimes deconstructing – the grand Southern Africa liberation struggle narratives as more of the historical and archival data become available. Romanticism is enfolded – but sometimes challenged – in this scholarly quest. The historians have less responsibility than the political scientists to dissect how the liberation movements have fared since taking power!
The historian-activists push the analysts of contemporary politics to be more circumspect and to acknowledge the noble legacies of the struggles have not disappeared from the post-liberation trajectories.
Where is the line between remembering struggle history and measuring up the liberation movements in power?
The conference offered multiple papers on how the liberation movements of South Africa, Mozambique, Namibia, Angola and Zimbabwe co-operated or shared resources in their host countries – supported by active international solidarity movements: trans-nationalisation is nothing new!
Scholars are still unravelling the workings of exile training camps and the underground networks that helped sustain the armed struggle. The clandestine nature of this part of the region’s liberation struggles, combined with the inherently secretive culture and politicians’ interest in keeping dark sides of their struggles under wrap means there will be much research in the years to come.
South Africa is a haven of exemplary politics.
My own paper transported the ANC into the present. Its core question was how a liberation movement-party such as the ANC mobilises for the retention, if not strengthening, of political power when its liberation movement dividend begins to weaken.
The analysis dissected how the ANC as government and governing party mobilises in the present. It created a framework that takes account of three modes of mobilisation – projecting the present as an ongoing component of the liberation struggle, working with state power to deliver and transform people’s lives, and using electoral mobilisation to consolidate the gains that had come through the channels of popular and state mobilisation.
Each of these three modes of mobilisation has an affirmative, struggle-centred side. At this extreme I recognise that the ANC’s struggle for liberation indeed continues.
The massive legacy of colonialism and racism can be gradually ameliorated at best, even if all possible resources are mustered. Government is hard at work getting delivery on a higher plain. The ANC has a super-majority that has been earned through a large measure of popular legitimacy and the votes that go with this.
The three mobilisation building blocks also have dark sides entailing manipulation and deviations from struggle ideals and democratic practice.
The ANC as party reinterprets the struggle to extend it into the present as the evidence accumulates of government performance falling far short of liberation movement ideals.
Multiple “enemies of choice” are presented as the contemporary reincarnation of past evils. Under President Zuma’s rule these have included the judiciary and public institutions such as the public protector.
Yet, if this conference – itself illustrating Africa’s importance on the world stage – is anything to go by, governments won’t be keeping many secrets, and resistance to their failings will be analysed carefully, albeit somewhat sympathetically.
* Booysen is professor at the Wits School of Governance. Her new book Dominance and Decline: The ANC in the Time of Zuma will be published later this year by Wits Press.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
The Sunday Independent