South Africa without Apartheid: Dismantling Racial Domination by Heribert Adam; KogilaMoodleyReview by: Bernard MagubaneCanadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol. 21, No. 1(1987), pp. 86-88Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Canadian Association of African StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/485089 .

Accessed: 10/06/2014 02:49

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Taylor & Francis, Ltd. and Canadian Association of African Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.150 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 02:49:03 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

86 CJAS / RCEA XXI:I 1987

broad study of the degree to which this conforms or conflicts with other experiences, it is difficult to ascertain the broad relevance of this example.

In general, the book is strongest when it is focused on the details of village experi- ence; it falters when the authors attempt to intepret the events. Unfortunately, beyond a few general statements, the brief introduction by Abrahams does little to alter this. He misses the opportunity to explore the implications of these village-level studies by either inductively commenting on the literature or by gleaning their policy ramifications. However, the monograph is essential reading for those still attempting to decipher the complexities of rural transformation in modern Tanzania.

Howard Stein Department of Economics Roosevelt University Chicago, Illinois

Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley. South Africa Without Apartheid: Dismantling Racial Domination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. 317 pp.

It is a truism that oppressed humanity is not only the victim of its oppressors and exploiters but sometimes of those who make a living out of studying and writing use- less books on the condition of the oppressed. These books can be broadly divided into those that are unashamedly apologetic about the deeds of the ruling classes and those that tell half truths that are even more injurious to the interests of the oppressed. Social theory can never be neutral; it is always active, either in attempting to preserve or in providing theoretical weapons to destroy the unjust social order.

Heribert Adam in particular (and now joined by his spouse, Kogila Moodley) has written a great deal about contemporary South Africa. A great deal of what he has written is at best of dubious quality, but the current book is a travesty. After going through the book, I realized that Adam and Moodley were not about to discuss the contemporary tragedy in South Africa or to provide a background to the events that led to the current crisis, in which over two thousand black people have been massa- cred in cold blood, in which 3 /2 million have been moved from their ancestral lands to the barren wastelands, in which almost ten million in the so-called homelands have been stripped of their citizenship, and in which another three million are with- out work. What we have in this book is a piece of academic social commentary by writers who spot a trend, put a new phrase into the language, rush a new book to the press, and then wait for a new tragedy about which to write another book.

Adam and Moodley first entertain us with their biographies in order to establish, I suppose, their credentials. Moodley, for instance, tells us that she spent her first twenty-five years as a member of the Indian community in colonial English Natal. Her home used to be visited by many Congress activists, among them the Natal Indian Congress stalwart, Monty Naicker. As Congress sympathizers, members of her family, we are told, engaged in civil disobedience and courted arrest during the passive resistance campaign.

Heribert Adam was born and raised in Germany. He reminisces about an elemen-

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.150 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 02:49:03 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

87 Book Reviews / Comptes rendus

tary school teacher in Nazi uniform who gave his class of nine-year-olds patriotic lec- tures that conflicted with the values taught in a strict Catholic home. He then tells us about his debt to his teacher and thesis advisor, Theodore W. Adorno, and exposure to other members of the Frankfurt school. That is, Adam was, in his own words, "steeped in an unorthodox radical political tradition at an impressionable age" (xii). He then tells of his sojourn to South Africa, where he taught for two years and where he illegally courted his future wife. Adam also lists his publications about South Africa. What better-qualified couple to write about South Africa!

The book itself is made up of eight chapters, covering such areas as the contradic- tions of apartheid, ethnicity, nationalism, and the state; conflicts in white politics; conflicts in Black politics, etc., and concludes with a chapter on policy implications. In the introduction, the authors describe their point of departure. "Our study," they write, "focuses on ethnicity and the state with special emphasis on the problems of legitimacy of 'ethnic states."' The authors also "unashamedly confess a reformist bias":

To postpone small-scale reform in the hope that present misery will accelerate a more fundamental transformation to us smacks not only of cynicism but of immorality. Indeed, it is true that apartheid cannot be reformed but must be eradicated. Yet this dismantling of a political system does not necessarily require the destruction of a society (8, emphasis added).

To argue that apartheid can be eradicated without destroying society is to bring in a red herring. In the first place, whoever said that he wanted to destroy society? Can one argue that the French, Russian, and other revolutions destroyed society? What about the Civil War in the US, which eradicated slavery? Did it destroy society? In light of these examples, the authors' attempt to take the "moral" high ground demonstrates either gross ignorance about the nature of revolution or ideological posturing to jus- tify the status quo.

After a perfunctory review of Marxist literature on South Africa, Adam and Mood- ley dismiss it for its reductionist paradigm and accuse neo-Marxists of "failing to treat ideologies and issues of political culture as independent variables rather than as deriv- atives of underlying interests" (6). In this study, they "emphasize the cultures and ideologies that determine how changing interests are perceived, redefined and nego- tiated." They are suspicious of the "neat, compartmentalized paradigms of class or state actors who always know what their real interests are and act accordingly." They lament that in critical writing on capitalist exploitation in South Africa "little realis- tic analysis exists concerning appropriate political strategies and tactics" (7).

No subtlety of perception is required to determine that the book is a sophisticated apology, not so much of apartheid, which the authors condemn in the most emotive terms, but of capitalism. For them, reform means removing racial categorization of groups, but not the injustices of capitalism. Second, to argue that the conflict in South Africa is not about fundamentally different values is simply to ignore the true history of settler colonialism in South Africa and indeed the nature of settler societies. Third, to equate the ANC and Inkatha is insulting to the ANC. To refer to those who run the

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.150 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 02:49:03 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

88 CJAS / RCEA XXI:I 1987

South African state as a "technocratic elite" is another example of the use of clich6s by the authors. Like the earlier cliche, "modernizing racial domination," this one is going to enter the vocabulary and serve to deaden our senses to the cruelties borne daily by the oppressed. And to suggest that struggle in South Africa is motivated by consumerism is demeaning to the aims and objectives of those who have lost their lives.

Cliches are sometimes thought of as wisdom gone stale, but just as often they rep- resent a Madison Avenue ethic, one in which you attribute virtues to consumer goods that will ultimately kill you. Adam and Moodley's objective seems to be to generalize prejudices and common sense notions entertained by plain folks, to put minimum logical order into these notions, and then to feed them back to their originators as the latest word in sociological wisdom. In their deference to the utterances of the regime, the authors indeed become apologists for apartheid. It is books like this that discredit sociology and make it, as a subject, the handmaiden of the oppressor.

Bernard Magubane Department of Anthropology University of Connecticut

Jean-Loup Amselle et Elikia M'Bokolo. Au Coeur de 1'ethnie: ethnie, tribalisme et Etat en Afrique. Paris: La d6couverte, 1985. 226 pp.

Ce livre fort interessant fait le point sur l'6tat actuel de la probl6matique de l'ethnicit6 en Afrique. II combine une r6flexion theorique synthetique et cinq 6tudes de cas demonstratives de la these centrale de l'ouvrage selon laquelle l'impact du colonial- isme fut plus d6terminant dans la constitution du profil ethnique et social contem- porain que les survivances ante-coloniales.

J. L. Amselle developpe ici son idee d'une anthropologie qui se demarquerait de l'approche monographique en tentant de considerer les unit6s sociales de reference comme des segments de r6seaux de relations regionales d'6change et de commerce constituant ainsi un "espace international" pre-colonial. Cette these est tres feconde car elle permet de depasser les modeles simplificateurs en 6chelle et en mosaique. L'analyse de ces formations sociales r6gionales au sein desquelles la s6mantique de l'identite est manipulee permet aussi de restituer le veritable niveau de complexit6 des systemes sociaux.

Certains reprocheront au texte la rapidit6 de l'analyse du concept d'ethnicit6 et l'insuffisance des ref6rences les plus recentes sur le sujet. Cependant, les conclusions critiques sur le concept d'ethnie comme systhme semantique labile sont pertinentes meme s'il y a lieu de se demander si en voulant 6viter le fktichisme ethnique on ne tombe pas dans une sorte de panacee historiciste. En effet, il se peut que le rejet en bloc des d6marches alternatives limite l'avancement de la recherche sur ces ques- tions. Par exemple, lorsque l'auteur affirme A la page 12 que l'analyse structurale avec sa m'thodologie comparatiste syst~matique de plusieurs societ's adjacentes ne peut placer l'ethnicit6 au centre de son objet, il semble adopter une vision stereotyp~e de l'analyse structurale qui, autrement, peut-etre une voie valable pour construire des modeles de differentiation des formations ant6-coloniales. De cette faqon, il est non

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.150 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 02:49:03 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions