Xolela Mangcu
The Hungarian economic historian Karl Polanyi said something about Adam Smith’s concept of economic man that could have relevance for the discourse on race in contemporary South Africa. Smith had argued that the propensity to barter was proof that humans were essentially economic beings.
So influential was Smith’s theory of economic man that entire disciplines – from economics to sociology – were founded on it.
But as Polanyi argued, “no misreading of the past ever proved more prophetic of the future… Adam Smith’s suggestions about the economic psychology of early man were as false as Rousseau’s on the political psychology of the savage”.
What may be of even greater relevance for our discourse on race is Polanyi’s observation that “the same bias which made Adam Smith’s generation view primeval man as bent on barter and truck induced their successors to disavow all interests in early man…” Similarly, the one-track argument that race has no biological foundation has led many critics of “race thinking” to similarly disavow any interest in any other conceptions of race in human history.
To these critics, scientific rationality is the only way human beings have always understood and experienced the world. Social phenomena that depart from the exactitudes of science lack legitimacy.
The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah showed how bizarre this proposition is by way of a religious analogy: “Where religious observance involves the affirmation of creeds, what may ultimately matter isn’t the epistemic content of the sentences but the practice of uttering them. By Protestant habit we’re declined to describe the devout as believers, rather than practitioners; yet the emphasis is likely misplaced.”
Appiah offers what he calls a vague criterial approach to race, according to which there is no scientific rule book that could guide how people should construct and conduct their lives. Appiah writes that “the vague criterial theory does suggest a route to understanding the race concept: namely to the sorts of things people believe about what they call races. We often want to understand how other people are thinking, for its own sake; and second, because people act on their beliefs, whether or not they are true. Even if there are no races, we could use a grasp of the vague criteria for the concept race in predicting what their thoughts and their talk about race will lead them to do, we could use it, too, to predict what thoughts about races various experiences would lead them to have”.
The writer Dr Es’kia Mphahlele described this phenomenon as follows: “I cannot help but appreciate and support the concept of Black Consciousness in South Africa. How else? We have been shut up in an enclave for 300 years so that we never forget that we are black, so what is so startling or scary when we make it known that blackness has become our anchor, our source of strength, the reason for our survival?” In America, Cornel West would define blackness as “a political and ethical construct”.
In his classic work, The Signifying Monkey, the distinguished Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr uses the concept of Signification to demonstrate how black people resisted white domination by, among other things, disrupting the relationship between words and their meanings in white society. This disruption resulted in the contextual re-interpretations of standard English words into new black meanings. In South Africa the Black Consciousness movement emptied the word “black” of its biological meaning and gave it a political meaning as a means of undermining the system of oppression. The apartheid government initially welcomed the movement’s blacks-only approach as a vindication of separate development. Before they knew it, they had young black people on the streets shouting “Black is beautiful”. The subversion of black as biological and ugly into black as political and beautiful was in Biko’s words “the most positive call to come from the black world in a long time”.
To be technical about it, black people disrupted the equation: sign = signifiers/signified. The relationship between the signifier (black) and the signified (people), which had always denoted a biological entity was now changed into something political. This was done by replacing the word “black” with its antanaclasis Black. Hence Biko’s definition of blacks as “those who are by law discriminated against and identify themselves as a unit towards their liberation”. The homonym black/Black thus corresponded with what Gates calls “two parallel discursive spaces”, one white and biological and the other black and political.
As it turns out this political approach is consistent with the history of the concept of race as far back as antiquity. As Jeremy Tanner puts it in his introduction to David Bindman and Gates Jr’s multi-volume The Image of the Black in Western Art: “neither ancient Egypt, nor Greece and Rome were before ‘colour prejudice’. Race had existed as an aesthetic concept long before the European scientists put their scientific cast on it. The fact that they are now recanting on their narrow vision does not oblige us to abandon research into the long histories of racial thought.
What Gates called the shared “text of blackness” in literature could also be seen in the fact that 19th century black intellectuals spoke and wrote about race in historical terms. John Tengo Jabavu named his newspaper Imvo Zabantsundu (Brown/Black Opinion), and Magema Fuze wrote a book called Abantu Abamnyama Lapho Bavela Khona(The Origins of Black People).
However, in South Africa, white academics who know little to nothing about this long and complex history of racial thought possess the power and the privilege to tell everyone how they should think about race. This lack of self-reflexivity has produced a post-racial illusion built on an optical vision of race as defined by white people themselves. At UCT this led to the calamitous decision to banish race from student admissions. As Polanyi would have said: “no misreading of the past ever proved so more prophetic of the future”. Tragically so, I might add.
The disparate understandings of race in human history would have been all the more reason to put our respective racial understandings at the centre of the educational experience at UCT instead of avoiding them like the plague.
The black intellectual archive would be our competitive advantage, not something to be feared. It also would be more the reason to hire black professors who would have lived and studied that experience.
At UCT we like to say we are number one in Africa. But where is the glory in being the best in your own neighbourhood? The history of racial Signification, and what the Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz called transculturation, in our country gives us an opportunity to stake our place as the unbeatable centre of race studies in the world.
For decades white South Africans thought nothing could be better than the cloistered existence of apartheid. But democracy came and they – and a few black faces (which we can also Signify as Blackfaces) – laughed all the way to the bank. We must take the same leap of faith for our universities. Raise your heads above the parapet my dear colleagues, and you may see the future of scholarship on race lying ahead of you – verdant and beckoning. In short, it will be okay, trust me.
l Mangcu is Associate Professor of Sociology at UCT