Xolela Mangcu
This is an excerpt from my latest book, The Colour of Our Future: Does Race Still Matter in Post-Apartheid South Africa?(Wits University Press, 2015).
Liberal and Marxist scholars would rather we banished all talk of racial identities because they view such talk as pre-modern. Gary Peller locates this dismissive attitude towards racial identities within a longstanding, “Enlightenment story of progress as consisting of the movement from mere belief and superstition to knowledge and reason, from the particular and therefore parochial to the universal and therefore enlightened”.
But as the Oxford don Isaiah Berlin pointed out, this liberal argument also harks back to the Enlightenment idea that solutions to social problems will be obtained “by the correct use of reason, deductively as in the mathematical sciences, inductively as in the sciences of nature… there is no reason why such answers, which after all have produced triumphant results in the worlds of physics and chemistry, should not apply to the equally troubled fields of politics, ethics and aesthetics”.
But on social questions of identity, this logic quickly turns into what the distinguished Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah describes as an uncompromising, “hard rationalism” that will not countenance any social phenomenon that cannot be established through scientific rationality. And yet, Appiah counsels, identities are “unlikely to be settled by uncontroversially factual considerations”.
What people believe about racial identities – or any other type of identity for that matter – shapes how they act. We are better equipped to anticipate such conduct when we directly confront those identities as social realities, instead of being satisfied in dismissing them as unscientific fictions. Patrick Chabal also argued that our “inability to conceive of other beliefs, other rationalities, confines our abilities to make sense of what we observe”.
Opposition to racial identities is not limited to liberals. The Marxist intellectual Neville Alexander attributed the embrace of racial identities to ignorance: “We must remember, however, that even though they are constructed, social identities seem to have a primordial validity for most individuals, precisely because they are not aware (own emphasis) of the historical, social and political ways in which their identities have been constructed.”
However, the Marxist reduction of human experiences to economic exploitation is so ahistorical and abstracted from the cultural dimensions of everyday life that Antonio Gramsci was moved to describe it as “primitive infantilism”.
Inspired by Gramsci, the British Marxist described this economism as not just a “reduction” but an “evasion”.
This evasion has come to underpin the ideology of non-racialism in South Africa. Non-racialism has been so normalised and reified that you would be forgiven for thinking that it is the only way black political movements thought about racial identities. But as Nhlanhla Ndebele demonstrated, Julie Frederickse’s assertion that non-racialism was “an unbreakable thread” in the ANC was factually incorrect. The ANC opened its membership to whites only in 1985.
Indeed, there were many in the ANC who held onto their racialised identities for purely jingoistic reasons. But there were a whole lot more who were not prepared to go along with attempts to banish race talk from their vocabulary.
Doing so was tantamount to banishing them from speaking about their historical experiences. These Africanists either voluntarily left the ANC to form the Pan Africanist Congress or were expelled as the so-called Gang of Eight. An even more sophisticated way of thinking about racial identities as political identities came with the Black Consciousness movement in the 1970s.
To be sure, they were not the first ones to give race a political definition.
The great African-American leader and intellectual, W E B Du Bois, rejected biological definitions of race: “It is easy to see that a scientific definition of race is impossible”.
But Du Bois’s instinct was not to evade, but to give a political meaning to race. And so he asked a rhetorical question: “But what is this group; and how do you differentiate it; and how can you call it black when it is not (biologically) black?” His answer to his imagined interlocutor was that “I realise it quite easily and with full legal sanction: the black man is a person who must ride Jim Crow in Georgia”.
Steve Biko similarly described South Africa as a “case of haves and have-nots where whites have been deliberately made the haves and blacks have-nots”. That politically and officially sanctioned dispossession is not there now, even though its effects are there for all to see.
In thinking about how to go about imagining a way of talking meaningfully about racial identities we might want to resurrect Chief Albert Luthuli’s vision of “a multi-racial society in a non-racial democracy”.
However, I would revise it to read slightly differently as “a multiracial society in an anti-racist democracy” – where “multiracial” is not a reference to biological races but different historical experiences, and anti-racism is a value around which we can create a new moral majority in this country.