UJ Sociology, Anthropology & Development Studies

W E D N E S D A Y

S E M I N A R Hosted by the Department of Sociology and the

Department of Anthropology & Development Studies

Meeting no 17/2015

To be held at 15h30 on Wednesday, 29 July 2015,

in the Anthropology & Development Studies Seminar Room, DRing 506, Kingsway campus

Agazi Ukuthi Iyozala Nkomoni:

African Nationalism As Social Philosophy - Please do not copy or cite without authors’ permission -

Tereblanche Delport

Unisa

- Programme and other information online at www.uj.ac.za/sociology -

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Agazi Ukuthi Iyozala Nkomoni: African Nationalism As Social Philosophy

Terblanche Delport

Department of Philosophy, Practical and Systematic Theology

University of South Africa

delpopt@unisa.ac.za / spaghetti.studios@gmail.com

Abstract/Summary:

The writing on African nationalism in South Africa has not been completely absent from

public and academic discourse (Roux 1948, Ngubane 1963; 1971, Nkoane 1967; 1968,

Walshe 1973; 1987, Gerhart 1978, Noluthsungu 1982, Lodge 1990, Pheko 1994, Suttner

2014, Ndletyana 2014). It is, however, our contention in this paper that few of these writings

have as their historiographical approach a way to understand African nationalism as not only

a political movement, but also a social theory, a philosophy of the social. Related to this point

is the view shared by many of the abovementioned theorists that African nationalism is a

movement and form of resistance that finds its origins in the rise of an urban class of African

workers who were able to “transcend” tribal and ethnic differences and articulate a mode of

resistance against exploitation. The domination of a Marxist and class-based analysis to read

and write Southern African history has led to a very myopic engagement with African

nationalism (Du Toit 2010; Jaffe 1990). This Marxist – or neo-liberal Marxist as Hosea Jaffe

calls it – line of analysis and argumentation would attribute the rise of African nationalism to

individuals like Tiyo Soga or Tengu Jabavu, individuals who helped to establish journalism

and a lively print press among the African “urban working class”. This in turn resembles a

theoretical position – one that is discernible in Eric Hobsbawm’s (1996 [1962]) The Age of

Revolutions and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1991) – that places the idea

of the nation historically at the same time as the mass circulation of print publications became

possible and the “fiction” of the nation could be constructed and narrated to a wider audience.

The rise of modern Europe in the 17th century and the establishment of the nation-state on the

European Continent is the historical model for this argument. African nationalism in general,

an in South Africa in particular, finds its place as the ever-present absence in this historical

model. The depiction of African nationalism as “reactionary” (Walshe 1973; 1987),

“conservative” (Lodge 1990), and “ethnophilosophical” (Suttner 2014), all shares a

theoretical legacy with this historical model through immediately associating nationalism

conceptually with its European variant and consequently dismissing it as a historical

occurrence only. African nationalism in South Africa is depicted as merely a temporal

political movement and is placed within a predetermined historical narrative: as a political

movement against apartheid that is to be relegated to where it belongs as a moment in the

dialectic that lead to the new South Africa. In order to argue that African nationalism

represents a social theory as much as a political movement, I will attempt to extract several

principles that can assist in mapping an Africanist theory of the social from a close reading of

the writing and work of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe and Anton Muziwakhe Lembede, as well

as some other key documents from the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania. I will attempt to

highlight the argument for a located and geopolitical responsive social philosophy: an

Africanist social philosophy.

Keywords: Sobukwe, African Nationalism, Resistance, Lembede, Social Philosophy, Pan

Africanist Congress, South Africa, Radical history, Africanism.

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“What creature will come forth”? This is a question posed by Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe at

the occasion of the first annual meeting of the newly formed Pan Africanist Congress of

Azania (PAC), an organisation of which he was also the first president (Sobukwe 1959: 14).

Sobukwe asks this question in relation to the freedom of Africa, what creature will Africa

become if it is free? How would South Africa, or rather Azania, look when there is freedom?

Sobukwe is here invoking an idea of an authentic African existence and consciousness in the

face of a growing white supremacist government in South Africa. Sobukwe’s use of this

metaphor also speaks to the fact that a form of African politics and history has been

consciously oppressed and subjugated. In the literature on African nationalism in South

Africa this observation by Sobukwe also holds true. Where African nationalism appears in

South African historiography it does so as merely a footnote or a straw man, not as a fully-

fledged theory or approach to history and politics. In this paper I will investigate the South

African historiography of African nationalism and attempt to investigate the contours of the

“creature that will appear”.

I will extrapolate from these aforementioned writings some basic principles with which to

analyse the social. It is also in this process of extrapolation that we are able to posit an

Africanist social philosophy as the theoretical and conceptual grounding of African

nationalism as a political movement. A critique that merely focuses on African nationalism as

a political movement misses this underlying analysis of the social, what I will call in this

paper Africanist social theory. The meaning of the social here cannot, as will be shown

below, be separated from notions of culture, identity, subjectivity; in short, the social cannot

be separated from those fields of enquiry that psychological studies claims competence in.

Although this relationship between the social and that of cultural identity and subjectivity is

not necessarily connected in the way I propose it to be here, after this connection is

established in the following section the terms “theory of the social” and “the social” will be

used to indicate this connection. The term Africanist social theory will thus be used to denote

that theory of history, cultural identity, and subjectivity, that function as the conceptual

markers for African nationalism as a political movement in South Africa.

The paper also attempts to present a reading of African nationalism that has been rendered

absent in the existing literature. It offers a contrapuntal reading by way of a discourse

analysis of the current literature on African nationalism in South Africa. This analysis shows

a deliberate ignorance (see Mills 2007 – on White Ignorance) to a certain type of engagement

with African Nationalist thought; it presents, to cite Lacan’s term that has become somewhat

famous in critical studies these days, a meconnaissance. This paper, by extrapolating an

Africanist theory of the social from African Nationalist writing in South Africa and applying

it to the existing literature on the subject matter, also lays bare a specific from of white

critical consciousness that reduces African nationalism to a secondary and derivative mode of

discourse. This then manifests as a malicious ignorance of the theoretical and conceptual

indicators of African nationalism and reduces this movement to merely a political occurrence

with not real substantive understanding of the social.

What is a Social Theory?

In Beyond the Masks: Race, Gender, and Subjectivity, Amina Mama considers

movements of African nationalism on the Continent in relation to both dominant theories of

post-structuralism and empiricist psychology and its reading of, and application on, Africa.

According to Mama, psychology and dominant theories of behavioural and empiricist

psychology “did not address the intellectual challenges that nationalist transformations

engendered… Psychologists did not address themselves to the way in which African

nationalist discourses challenged European constructions of Africans” (Mama 1995: 32). For

Mama the main reason for this failure on the part of psychology to address these challenges

was due to its over-reliance on facts and observable data and the consequent external

observation of the human being (Mama 1995: 33). There was thus no attempt to understand

the human being’s relationship to its bigger society and also develop a theory of society.

African nationalism’s challenges to issues of identity and culture where left un-theorised and

not brought to bear on these same issues as they presented themselves. In relation to this

Mama argues that “[i]t was during the nationalist period that African redefinitions of what

Nkrumah refers to as “the African Personality” and what it means to be black were thrust into

the international arena to fuel the existential and philosophical crises that the demise of

colonialism provoked in the Western world and which ultimately led to the emergence of

postructuralism” (Mama 1995: 34). Movements of African nationalism did not only function

in the political sphere but brought together issues of theory and politics in the form of

challenging dominant white supremacist ideas of subjectivity, culture, and identity that

fuelled and aided the expansion of empire and the march of colonialism: African nationalism

and theories of African personality “became a way of expressing the concern with celebrating

the collective African past as articulating a collective will and vision for the future. Within it,

personality was both a philosophical and political concept” (Mama 1995: 34-35). This above

formulation can allow us to consider African nationalism’s positing of different ideas of

history, subjectivity, culture, and identity as being a central aspect of its theoretical

unfoldment and political project. The clear distinction between theory and political praxis

here becomes blurred since what is deemed traditionally as theoretical pursuits transforms

into immediate political concerns and vice versa. This intersection between these concerns is

easily discernible in the run-up to, and the formation of, the Pan Africanist Congress of

Azania in 1959.

During the 1940’s and 1950’s in South Africa there emerged dissatisfaction with certain

leading factions of the African National Congress and their strategy and tactics to deal with

white supremacy. The National Party was voted into power by a white minority in 1948 and

the policy of apartheid started a process of legally codifying 300 years of colonial

domination. The ANC adopted a multi-racial and proto-human rights document in the form of

Freedom Charter in 1955, a move that would see critique and dissent in the form of the

Africanist faction within the movement. It was with the understanding of the current

construction of society as well as the imagining of the national post-liberation proposed in the

Freedom Charter that the Africanists were opposed to. There were competing theories of how

the social constructs itself and how it is to be critiqued, one from the side of the ANC

“charterists” (a term to denote those that was in support of the freedom charter position) and

another from the Africanists. The idea that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, both

black and white” (Freedom Charter 1955/2014), being a particular point of contention. As

Nkutsoeu Raboroko, NEC member of the PAC, writes in in 1960 on the difference between

the ANC’s Freedom Charter and the PAC’s Manifesto: “[t]he Manifesto of the Charterist

Congress, the Kliptown Charter of 1955, speaks of and for the “people of South Africa, black

and white together”. The Africanist Congress, in the 1959 Pan Africanist manifesto, speaks of

and for the “African people”, whom it regards as “part of one African nation”. The basic

literature of each body, therefore, provides the clue to its essential nature” (Raboroko 1960:

25). The discrepancies in the theory of the social between the PAC and the ANC is clearly

stated by Raboroko earlier in the same document: “[t]he crucial issue today is whether the

interests of the five million Europeans throughout Africa must continue to dominate over

those of the two hundred and eighty million Africans, or whether the reverse process should

obtain. This is an issue that no social philosophy pretending to have a solution for Africa’s

social problem can afford to gloss over” (Raboroko 1960: 2). The theory of the social that

Raboroko refers to here must be one that has a way of making sense of the current and the

past but also of theorising, and imagining, a vision of the future. Since the social problem in

Africa is a historical one as much as it is a contemporary one, a theory of the history of the

present must be something that this social philosophy also contains. Since the question of the

current is a question of liberation, an imagining of the future must also be an integral part of

this social philosophy.

This theory of the social contains within itself issues of history, subjectivity, culture, and

identity, which will repeat itself thematically in the work and thought of other Africanist

thinkers. The social must here be understood more practically and specifically as the set of

current economic, cultural, and legal, apparatuses and how they structure the human being’s

relationship with one another. The Manifesto for the Africanist Movement has a section

dedicated to social relations, where social relations is understood as “the question of how

man shall live with his fellowman in fellowship; in harmony and peace. Man moves and has

his being in a social environment. In the absence of social life the social question would fall

away. Man’s relation to his fellowman is determined by his primary needs. The social

question, whose structural foundations are to be found in economic determinism, arises

within the framework of social relations…[the human is] a social being and not an economic

animal. To live in harmony with his fellowman, man must recognise the primacy of the

material interests of his fellowman, and must eliminate the tendency on his part to uphold his

own interest at the expense of those of his fellowmen” (1959/2013: 484-485).

The idea of the social formulated in the Africanist’s Manifesto constructs the social as the

sphere of human interaction and relationship and not merely as economic bondage. The

attempt to re-think the social is a re-thinking of a specifically determined subjectivity and

cultural identity, in this case that of white supremacy. The PAC and the where in agreement

with the need for a change in the conditions of the social but they differed fundamentally on

how this new idea of the social should be constructed. This also had to do with, as Raboroko

points out, the different ways in which the PAC and the ANC identified the problems in the

current and their relation to the history of white supremacy in South Africa. The Africanist

Manifesto puts forth an idea of the social and of the human being that challenges the

dominant theory of the time. The Africanist Manifesto does not accept the current social and

the history that constructed it.

Important Terms and Heuristic Devices for an Africanist Theory of The Social

a) Conqueror and Conquered

In an interview given by Sobukwe in 1959, he illustrates clearly how the Africanists’

understanding of the present, and the solution thereto, is deeply linked with an understanding

of history and an imagining of the future. Sobukwe states that the origin of the PAC is not to

be found in an arbitrary political or historical date but rather in the history of Moshoeshoe

and Chaka and these leaders’ attempts at nation-building (1959/2014: 471). Sobukwe traces

the inspiration for the Africanist movement long before colonialism or the consolidation of

South Africa as a union in 1909 or the establishment of Apartheid in 1948. For Sobukwe and

other Africanists, the locus of the struggle is not apartheid but the dispossession of land by an

invading, conquering, class that turned the people living in Africa at that time into a class of

conquered, invaded, and dispossessed, people. Consequently, South Africa does not belong to

all who live in it; it belongs to the African people since time immemorial. The theory of the

social put forth here by Sobukwe is one that attempts to bring about a new idea of the social

based on an understanding of history and cultural identity rooted in Africa; a praxis that takes

Africa as the position of articulation and imagination, of action and reflection: “[h]ere is a

tree rooted in African soil, nourished with waters from the rivers of Afrika. Come and sit

under its shade and become, with us, the leaves of the same branch and the branches of the

same tree” (Sobukwe 1959/2014: 480).

When the PAC was launched in 1959 it stated that the goal of the movement is “to unite and

rally the African people into one national front on the basis of African nationalism and

overthrow white, racist, settler colonial domination in order to establish and maintain the

right of self-determination of African people for a unitary, non-racial democracy” (Quoted in

Kondlo 2009: 64). In his speech delivered at the first annual meeting of the newly formed

Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, Sobukwe attempted to highlight and accentuate a theory

of the social and a praxis for liberation: “We aim, politically, at government of the Africans

by the Africans, for the Africans, with everybody who owes his only loyalty to Afrika and

who is prepared to accept the democratic rule of an African majority being regarded as

African… Socially we aim at the full development of the human personality and a ruthless

uprooting and outlawing of all forms or manifestations of the racial myth” (Sobukwe

1959/2014: 480). Sobukwe here argues that the idea of the national is an African one where

the first step towards this is a systematic process of psychological and collective liberation.

Also referencing mercantile capitalism and the arrival of the Dutch on Azanian shores earlier

in his speech, Sobukwe argues that the African people’s oppression is tied to an international

movement of colonialism and imperialism. As in his interview in the same year, Sobukwe

ties the current need for liberation to the history of resistance against, not merely apartheid

and the fiction of South Africa, but the history of colonialism and white supremacy on the

Continent.

In another piece authored by Sobukwe – but published under Leballo’s name in 1957 in The

Africanist as The Nature of The Struggle Today – Sobukwe puts forth a series of

definitional claims related to the social structures and mentalities that make-up the struggle

against colonial oppression and the position of its participants. It is necessary to quote

Sobukwe at length here: “For the Africanists the struggle is both nationalist and democratic,

in that it involves a restoration of the land to its rightful owners – the Africans – which fact

immediately divides the combatants into the conquered and the conqueror, the invaded and

the invader, the dispossessed and dispossessor. That is a national struggle. It has nothing to

do with numbers and laws. It is a fact of history. And both sides are each held together by a

common history and are, in the struggle, carrying out the task imposed by history. That task

is, for the whites, the maintenance and retention of the spoils passed on to them by their

forefathers and, for the Africans, the overthrow of the foreign yoke and the reclamation of

“the land of our fathers” (Sobukwe 1957/2014: 465).

The situation of the struggle against apartheid in 1957 is according to Sobukwe both a

nationalist and democratic struggle. The nationalist struggle is what enables the Africanists to

see the social structure as stratifying its participants as conquerors and conquered, invader

and invaded. This again speaks to the theorisation of the struggle as not merely being against

apartheid but also against the continuation of colonial conquest. This formulation by

Sobukwe does not see apartheid as an exceptional mode of oppression but rather as part of a

historical fact of colonial conquest. Colonisation has as its main goal the turning of a

geographical area into an extension of the metropolis: “Colonialism… can be thought of as a

duplication and a fulfilment of the power of Western discourses on human varieties”

(Mudimbe 1988:29). Colonialism is thus a possession by force, and transformation of, space

and territory. The conqueror is the colonialist and the conquered are those that have been, and

for Sobukwe continue to be, colonised. Sobukwe insists that the conquered peoples must

“either go under or exist as a nation. We are convinced that the struggle is between the

conquerors and the vanquished and there can be no compromise nor surrender on our part,

nor can we agree to go 50's with the oppressor in Afrika” (Sobukwe 1957/2013: 469).

The belief that Africa had no history prior to the colonial encounter, or if it had history it was

static and pre-modern one, is what contributes to the obfuscation of the democratic struggle

with the nationalist struggle: the “democratic struggle is a recognition of numbers, a National

struggle is a struggle for the recognition of heritage” (Sobukwe 1957/2013: 465). The

nationalist struggle, being for Sobukwe a fact of history, is something that acts as a guiding

principle from which to articulate a position regarding the struggle against apartheid. To

merely focus on the democratic struggle is to only focus on the number of Africans able to

partake in the decision-making processes of an already existing government. This is a

reduction of democracy to a method of decision-making. To understand the democratic and

national struggle as interconnected follows more closely an understanding of democracy as

the power of a group to not only partake in the decision making processes of the government

but to also establishing a certain form of society. Democracy understood in the latter sense is

a form of power generated by a political community in order to form certain social

institutions.

The formulation of what is needed to bring about liberation for the African people is thus

deeply rooted in a theory of the present social order as well as the historical situation that

gave rise to it. The theory of the social, or the social philosophy, that comes from Sobukwe in

the examples given above is one that attempts to give us the conceptual and social constructs

of conqueror and conquered with which to understand and read the present, and the past, of

the country. It is also concepts that can allow the construction of a future: if these terms

continue to exist in ways that structure the sphere of social praxis as well as its economic and

material conditions, then there is still a critique to be made. Although there is a possibility of

reductionism in this binary formulation by Sobukwe, it forces an understanding of South

Africa, and the world, as a place where one cultural identity and history is accorded more

social value than another. This is an important aspect that is again discernible in the current

political realities of South Africa: the continued existence of the country along the fractured

lines of mental and social constructs related to white supremacy’s arrangement and

configuration of human life along racial, gender, and cultural lines.

b) History and Nation

Sobukwe’s observations above and the establishment of conceptual and social categories of

conqueror and conqueror can be considered as a necessary condition of an Africanist social

theory but not yet a sufficient condition. The conceptual and social construct indentified by

Sobukwe is one of the principles that guided African nationalism as a movement but also

became a theoretical argument in the work of writers in the Critical Race Theory tradition

that attempted to define and understand racism as a continuation of white supremacy (Mills

1999, offers a reading of white supremacy and its functioning as a political philosophy; and

Modiri 2012, discusses of Critical Race Theory, or CRT, and its application in South Africa).

The equation of white supremacy with racism takes the issues of racism away from an

interpersonal, feelings based, definition and instead posits racism and white supremacy as a

historical movement that still structures social relations and power positions. Amina Mama,

when attempting to put forth a definition of white supremacy, makes the following

observation: “It is worth pointing out that enslavement and colonisation did not only

materially exploit and politically subordinate African resources and ways of life but at the

same time transformed and subjected Africans to the imaginings and caprices of imperial

culture and psychology. Colonisation was carried out by an expansionist regime that owed its

success to both military and mercantile power, which it ruthlessly deployed in the practice of

trade, conquest and enslavement. So it was that the imperial powers were able to assert,

maintain and reproduce white supremacy across the globe. White supremacy can thus be

conceptualised as a set of discourses and practices that subjugated non-European people and

cast them in the position of subjected Others, while it advanced the interests of European

nations” (Mama 1995: 17). When the colonial settlers first made contact with the continent

there was an acceptance that the land was terra nullius (land belonging to no one) and res

nullius (nobody's property), with the people occupying the land filius nullius (son of nobody)

(Pheko 1990: 1; 62). The indigenous people of the continent were not seen as necessary to

engage with but rather only to force into a foreign system of cultural and economic bondage

as labourers and slaves. The colonialists also needed the indigenous people, and imported

slaves from other conquered territories, to be able to commence in their program of

transforming their “new” territory into a station to serve the colony. This resulted in the

production of Africa as an archive where the data set (including people) was observed,

considered, and systematized into an already accepted European history (Mudimbe 1988).

There was thus no history that was not colonial history or a history in the process of being

colonised. For the colony to be transformed into the metropole, everything that exists in the

colony must be either transformed or destroyed. Any type of knowledge that was not from the

metropole was thus also to be transformed or destroyed.

One can thus argue that one of the goals of a nationalist struggle as opposed to a democratic

struggle is the assertion of a historical praxis that puts forth a mode of politics that can be

responsive to the African experience and mode of being-black-in-the-world (Manganyi

1973). This is also part of identifying the struggle not only against apartheid but also against

successive colonial regimes that attempted to erase any type of historical memory of the

conquered people. This mode of politics and resistance that puts an emphasis on heritage and

history as well as political reform is what we can, following Sobukwe, call an Africanist

social theory, what Sobukwe refers to as Africanism: “[w]e must have faith and devotion to

duty with courage and a determination to defend our cherished ideals that Africa is for the

Africans, that the Cause of Africa must triumph, that we must remember Africa first, that

African nationhood must be achieved irrespective of whatever odds are facing us, and that

our right to determine the destiny of our Fatherland is an inherent one. The dawn of the day

must come when fascist foreign rule shall have collapsed into a rubble” (1957/2013: 468). If

the conceptual and social construct of conqueror and conquered is thus the necessary

conditions for an Africanist social theory then the historical understanding of a struggle

against global white supremacy and its destruction of the history of the conquered peoples is

the sufficient condition.

The thesis of Africanism is something Sobukwe strongly credits to Lembede: “The late

Lembede emerged with his thesis on Africanism. He gave us the direction as probably no

other man could have done, and in doing so, saved us as a nation” (1957/2013: 468). Anton

Muziwakhe Lembede was a schoolteacher and lawyer born in Kwazulu-Natal in 1914. After

obtaining his Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Law from the University of South Africa – the

institution where he also completed a Masters in Philosophy – he moved to Johannesburg in

1943 (Edgar and Msumza 1996: 11; Gerhart 1978: 45). It was Lembede and Ashby Peter

Mda – someone who Lembede met with regularly to discuss politics and philosophy while in

Johannesburg – who would be instrumental in the forming of the ANC Youth League

(ANCYL) in 1944. The Youth League was the ideological ferment of the Africanist position

regarding the issue of national liberation, self-determination, and Africa for the Africans.

Although by no means the start of an Africanist understanding of the social, the Youth

League and the ideas developed by Lembede and Mda was able to operationalize a possible

mode of politics that is based on an Africanist social philosophy; an Africanist social

philosophy in its understanding of historical praxis, the current social situation, and the

possibility for a future liberation.

Lembede – who was elected as ANCYL president in 1944 – and Mda both had a significant

influence in the drafting of Congress Youth League Manifesto in 1944 (ANC 1944). The

main concerns of the document were African self-determination and the idea of African

unity. The manifesto opens by asserting, as its statement of policy, that the problem of South

Africa is “[t]he contact of the White race with the Black race [that] has resulted in the

emergence of a set of conflicting living conditions and outlooks on life which seriously

hamper South Africa’s progress to nationhood” (ANC 1944). The manifesto also identifies

race as the locus for oppression, not class. In Lembede we can thus already discern the

theoretical grounding that will enable Sobukwe to posit the conceptual categories of

conqueror and conquered as well as his formulation of the democratic and nationalist

struggles illustrated above.

In an article written in Ilanga Lase Natal in 24 February 1945 – Some Basic Principles of

African Nationalism – Lembede lays out the philosophical basis, the social theory, of

African nationalism as a rejection of the purely materialistic and biological interpretation of

the human being, something that is echoed in the Africanist Manifest (Lembede 1996:85). He

writes that the human consists of “body, mind and spirit with needs, desires and aspirations in

all three elements of his nature. History is a record of humanity’s striving for complete self-

realisation” (Lembede 1945/1996: 85). Later on in the same article, when dealing with the

historical basis for African nationalism Lembede quotes Paul Kruger to the effect that “[o]ne

who wants to create the future must not forget the past”, and goes on elaborating about the

great African leaders “Shaka, Moshoeshoe, Hintsa, Sikhukhuni, Khama, Sobhuza, Mozilikazi

etc.” (Lembede 1945/1996: 85-86). It becomes clear throughout the article – in the different

sections on the economy, democracy, and ethics – that history in relation to African

nationalism and Africanist social theory plays a central role. In several other articles – Know

Thyself (1945), National Unity Among Africans (1946), In Defence of Nationalism (1947)

– the themes of self-assertion of African history becomes central to Lembede’s position

regarding African nationalism. Sobukwe’s invocation of Lembede when referring to

Africanism can therefore be read as a reference to a way of understanding and reading the

history of South Africa and the need for Africanism to be a both a historical praxis and a

mode of resistance and struggle; historical praxis as resistance and struggle. Lembede himself

attempts to draw a formulation of Africanism from the historical struggles against

colonisation and conquest. Lembede’s invocation of African leaders involved in these

struggles and the battles they fought also shows what Sobukwe later articulates as the

“historical fact” of a nationalist struggle: the fact that the point of articulation of the struggle

should not be against apartheid only, but against a history of colonial dispossession and

conquest.

Although there is a remarkable danger in attempting to view modern Africa through the lens

of ancient Africa or attempt a return to a pre-colonial time, the distinction between modern

and ancient is in itself a problematic formulation (Okere 1996). There is a continuation in the

existence of African history and culture, a continuation and connection that most Africanist

leaders not only saw but also insisted on asserting against the violent and systematic doubt

levelled against its existence1. This is an integral element of an Africanist social philosophy’s

understanding of history and historiography. The tradition of liberation that is invoked by

Lembede and Sobukwe is one that includes the wars of resistance fought by a people that

were in the process of being conquered. Lembede and Sobukwe’s claim of a history of an

1 References to all these leaders would be excessive but cf. Nyerere, Nkrumah, Garvey, Cabral.

anti-imperial struggle as a source for African politics appeals to an idea of nationalism as a

mode of social theory and not merely as linked with the formation of a nation-state. Sobukwe

(1959/2013: 471) echoes Lembede's arguments in 1959 when attempting to make this exact

point about African nationalism’s origins and influences: “When Moshoeshoe brought

together the scattered remnants of various African tribes and moulded them into a patriotic

Sotho tribe, he was engaged in nation-building. Similarly Chaka’s wars whereby he sought to

establish a single authority in place of many tribal authorities of Natal, were, we say, steps in

the direction of nation-building. In the Cape the House of Gcaleka was recognized as the

Paramount authority. There is no doubt that the pressure of social and economic conditions

would in time have given rise to the Union of these territories”.

The most orthodox theory of nationalism holds that the existence of nations in Europe

develops at the same time as capitalism (Nzongola-Ntalaja 1987: 43). This argument

excludes the possibility of nationalism in Africa prior to colonial conquest. According to this

argument, pre-colonial Africa cannot have nations because capitalism is only brought with

conquest. The tripartite thesis of terra nullius, res nullius, and fillius nullius also does not

allow the acknowledgment of political formations and modes of politics prior to colonial

conquest. Initially, Africa was the ground for resource exploitation in order to build European

Nations; when political movements arose that attempted to assert National identity and use it

as a mode of resistance, they were supressed with violence or discredited politically and

theoretically. Nzongola-Ntalaja (1987: 44) argues that “[i]n pre-colonial Africa there were

nations…corresponding to social formations made up of closely related lineages or other

kinship groups unified by a core cultural tradition and a relatively durable politico-

administrative structure”. The effect of colonialism and conquest on these forms of

nationality was also much more complex than merely disrupting the process of nation

building: “On the one hand, the imposition of colonial rule resulted in the fading away of a

large number of pre-colonial nations…. On the other hand, colonialism united different

African nationalities and peoples under a single territorial and institutional framework,

widened their social space as a result of greater inter-ethnic interaction through the

institutions and practices of the colonial system, and thus created a common historical

experience of economic exploitation, political and administrative oppression, and cultural

oppression” (Nzongola-Ntalaja 46).

Nzongola-Ntalaja’s argument acts as a helpful heuristic device with which to read the theory

of history and the nation put forward by Lembede and Sobukwe’s Africanist social

philosophy. Both Lembede and Sobukwe, in arguing for the assertion and confirmation of an

African heritage and history, emphasise the existence of a historical praxis different to the

one brought by the conqueror; it becomes a historical praxis that asserts identity and history

as modes of resistance (Wamba-dia-Wamba 1992; Ramose 1999). We also need to read the

appeal to anti-imperialist Kings within this same frame of reference: these Kings are an

example of conquered people acting in opposition to the conquering forces. Acting in

opposition against a foreign system of value and politics has to be understood as asserting a

political formation and mode of politics and social living that is different to the one being

opposed. It is not opposition in the sense of mere reaction, but informed by the disruptive

experience of living under the yoke of colonial subjugation and positing a way to live and be

governed differently. This other form of being governed is the reference to a mode of politics

that existed prior to its disruption by colonial conquest. Both Lembede and Sobukwe then see

Africanism as at once a historical praxis invoking a way of living different as well as a

political movement of anti-imperialism. The political argument of restoration and restitution

was not seen as separate or in fact qualitatively different from the struggle against

epistemicide and a new conception of the social. Because colonisation in southern Africa is

based on the tripartite thesis of terra nullius, res nullius, and filius nullius, the assertion of a

mode of politics of the African nation questions exactly this fundamental argument.

c) A Universal Ethnophilosophy

In a recent article written by Raymond Suttner on African nationalism as an intellectual

tradition in South Africa, he refers to Lembede’s position as “a discourse similar to current

essentialist thinking found in South Africa on African customs and cultures – what Paulin J.

Hountondji calls ‘ethnophilosophy’, which is based on an ‘imaginary consensus’ that is

claimed to have prevailed in Africa prior to conquest” (Suttner 2014: 136-137). Suttner’s

precipitate clutch at “ethnophilosophy” and his dubious interpretation thereof hardly deserve

serious philosophical consideration. He cites Hountondji and his theorisation on

ethnophilosophy as the only, and by extension authoritative, source on the topic.

Hountondji’s use of the term – first appearing in Comments on Contemporary African

Philosophy (1970) – is reserved for the type of thought that parades anthropology or

ethnology as philosophy. Barry Hallen sums up Hountondji’s position on ethnophilosophy as

1) a philosophy that presents itself as a characteristic of a people instead of an individual; 2) a

philosophy that only finds its sources in the pre-colonial African past; 3) that

methodologically this type of philosophy works with changeless and timeless images and

concepts from the past (Hallen 2010: 75).

Suttner use of “ethnophilosophy” as a derogatory term is meant to act in a way that

disqualifies Lembede’s work from serious theoretical engagement. This is done without so

much as taking into account contemporary discourses from the 3rd world on, for example,

border gnosis (Mignolo 2000), post-ethnophilosophy (Osha 2011), and philosophy of

liberation (Dussel 2003 [1980]); all of which makes the point of situational thinking. All

philosophy is ethnophilosophy because all philosophy comes from a specific place and deals

with a specific set of questions. Suttner seems works with the underlying assumption that

some ethnic group – white Europeans – does not derive from some place and thus is able to

invoke universal theory to critique a so-called particularist movement. As Pathé Diagne

argues, however ‘[a]ll thought is thought from somewhere. There is no such thing as a

thought in itself. Every explicit thought is contingent, dated, and produced in the context of a

possible culture, with its data, concepts, and theoretical frameworks’ (Diagne 1993: 95). In

Suttner’s off-hand classification of Lembede as an ethnophilosopher he contributes to a

wealth of questionable historical literature that considers African nationalism as a reductive

and essentialist ‘ethnic’ position2. As already mentioned, Lembede’s, and Sobukwe’s,

assertion of an African history as integral to an anti-imperial struggle invokes an idea of

nationalism and the nation prior to the mere formation of a nation-state. The classification of

this as mere “ethnophilosophy” corresponds with the view that Lembede and Sobukwe were

opposing: that Africa had no history and no politics prior to the arrival of the conqueror and

that any type of reference to such a history is but a nostalgic imagination of a past. Suttner

does not attempt to read Lembede as a theoretician nor does he attempt to understand African

nationalism on its own terms. He employs an already existing theoretical edifice – in his case

a mixture, based on the conqueror’s epistemological paradigm, between social history and a

dialectical reading of African nationalism that finds fruition in the 80’s with the United

Democratic Front (UDF). This has already been critiqued by generations of Africanist

scholars from Lembede through Nyerere and Nkrumah to Sobukwe. This theoretical tradition

is absent from Suttner’s questionable theory of African nationalism. This historically artificial

2 See next two sections for a discussion on this historical position in South Africa.

vacuum facilitates Suttner’s option for a well-worn and comfortable theoretical edifice that

attempts to place African nationalism within a dialectical historical movement. Against

Suttner’s trivialisation of African nationalism we can posit Lembede and Sobukwe’s

insistence on history and social reality as the seedbed of African nationalism. What has

presented itself until very recently as philosophy, history, and social theory ‘proper’ is

proving to be no more than the universalisation of a particular Euro-American

ethnophilosophy.

Historiographical Reasoning

a) Reaction to What?

According to the writings of Peter Walshe – a historian of African nationalism in South

Africa – the rise of African nationalism can be traced back to the second half of the 19th

century and the influence of three main political and cultural movements during this time.

The movements identified by Walshe are the Cape liberal tradition, Christian missionary

education, and the fight for the extension of civil liberties by African-Americans like Booker

T Washington (Walshe 1973: 5-9; 1987: 2-10). The fact that 12 000 Africans were on the

voter’s roll in the Cape Colony by 1880 and in 1886 Africans held 46% of the vote is

described by Walshe as having a substantial influence on the African leaders of the 19th

century (Walshe 1973: 5). The formation of the South African National Native Congress in

1912 (SANNC) was a reaction to the growing repression of the newly elected Afrikaner

government after the unification of the different colonial territories into the country currently

known as South Africa – that included the segregation of land and the prohibition of African

membership in the Dutch Reformed Church – and an attempt to strengthen the Cape tradition

of liberalism and collaboration (Walshe 1987: 30-31).

For Walshe the early politics of African nationalism gets realised in the formation of the

SANNC and the acceptance of the Cape liberal tradition as a political programme. The

fermentation of African political praxis can consequently be traced to the influence that this

British model of politics had on the African people. Walshe argues that “Africans sought

their political self-expression, sought justice and dignity” through becoming involved in a

“reactive process, a process of rejecting the steady flow of discriminatory legislation”

(Walshe 1973:10). African nationalism is here viewed as merely a reactionary political

programme that comes into existence only when the African population is discriminated

against, or comes into contact with the conqueror. The conclusion of this argument is that

there is no such thing as an African political praxis that is not wholly influenced by, and

comes exclusively as a reaction to, Western colonial models of government. Although there

is no doubt that African nationalism as a political programme was influenced, in the form of

both strategy and tactics, by the different forms of white supremacy that it fought against

from 1652 to today, to reduce African nationalism to purely this reaction to white supremacy

ignores and dismisses the arguments made by Sobukwe and Lembede with regard African

history and political praxis. African nationalism, being also a theory of the social, takes the

position of a combative position (Mafeje 2000) the moment that it comes into contact with

the colonial conqueror; a mode of politics and social organisation is put under threat and is

then defended by way of combative measures. African nationalism asserts a mode of

existence and social formation that is different to an imposing one and thus resists this

imposing form of the social. The relevance of seeing apartheid as merely a continuation of

colonial conquest is also the affirmation of a history of resistance that can be traced back to

this will to resist imposition through the affirmation of the always already existing.

Resistance, in the case of Sobukwe and Lembede’s formulation, has to do with positing a

different idea of the social, not merely resistance to forms of political oppression.

b) The Radicalisation of the Reactionaries

Walshe forms part of a group of historians that theorises African nationalism as merely a

political movement that did not exist prior to the influence of European political systems.

Tom Lodge, likewise, makes the claim repeatedly that African nationalism reflects a

conservative and backward-looking mode of politics. For Lodge, the radical element in the

early struggle for liberation can be found in the influence that the Industrial and Commercial

Workers’ Union (ICU) and the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) had on the “newly”

formed African National Congress (ANC) – as the SANNC was renamed to in 1923 – in the

early 1920’s (Lodge 1990: 5). The problem with SANNC policies was, according to Lodge,

its petty-bourgeois calls for inclusion for an elite class of African leaders. The influence of

the Cape liberal tradition was thus, according to Lodge, clearly discernible in the policies of

the SANNC during the First World War and immediately after. The early attitude of the

SANNC was typified by Sefako Makgatho’s 1919 presidential address: “I cannot understand

how anyone could call it a crime to send a delegation to the headquarters of the Empire. What

sort of a King have we that we should never go to see him?” (Makgatho 1919). Sol Plaatjie,

founding member of the SANNC, also had a framed letter from Sir Richard Winfrey,

Secretary for Agriculture for the British Crown, hanging on his office wall that read, “[a]t the

close of the war we shall do all in our power to help you to regain that justice and freedom to

which, as loyal British subjects, your people are justly entitled” (Makgatho 1919).

For Lodge it is the emphasis on a class-based struggle that “radicalises” the ANC into some

sort of action in the 1920’s counter to the notion of a reformist and inclusionary direction

taken by the early leaders of the Congress. This radicalisation through class-based

mobilisation has to do with the possibility for class allegiance to transcend race and ethnic

ties. With mobilisation based on an orthodox Marxist position that sees class as the locus of

struggle, the argument is that ties of race and ethnic identity become secondary due to the

oppression faced as a lower class. Lodge here clearly applies a theory of the social that he

finds in Marxist literature to read African nationalism as a historical moment. Instead of

attempting to understand the theorists and writers associated with African nationalism on

their own terms, Lodge, much like Suttner and Walshe, applies an existing theory of the

social to evaluate African nationalism as a historical and political movement. This argument

also sees the locus of the struggle against capitalism and not white supremacy or the

continuation of a colonial conquest because the latter, colonial conquest has its roots in the

former, capitalism. For Lodge then, a progressive or radical politics is to be found at that

stages when the social situation is theorised in the terms provided by Marxist analysis. Lodge

can thus claim that with the election of Pixley ka Isaka Seme in 1930 there was a shift in the

resistance struggle “several degrees rightwards into almost total moribundancy” (Lodge

1990: 9). Lodge brands Seme a conservative because of his emphasis on the need for African

reconstruction and the assertion of African history and subjectivity in the face of white

supremacy3. One of the basic conditions for an Africanist social philosophy is thus what

Lodge classifies as conservative. This classification by Lodge of Seme as conservative sets

the tone for his reading of the nationalist element within African politics from the 1930’s

onward. Writing about the formation of the PAC in 1959, Lodge puts forward their basic

tenets as ethnic nationalism and populism that theorise the South African situation as firstly a

situation based on racial domination; this racial domination thus also means that the

3 This is most clearly discernible in Seme’s 1906 speech at Colombia University as well as Dutton’s 2003 analysis of the same speech by Seme.

participation of whites in the struggle for black domination should be treated with suspicion

(Lodge 1990: 84). The African nationalism identified by Lodge is one that attempts to return

and re-invoke a collective and shared past of all Africans and “a political leadership which

played upon violent emotions and identified oppressors in racial terms” (Lodge 1990: 82).

The nationalist approach ascribed to the PAC is apparently opposed to that of other ANC

leaders that “by virtue of their social background and moral beliefs, had not cared to exploit

this [violent emotions and the identification of oppressors in racial terms]” (Lodge 1990: 82).

The indicators that Lodge uses to describe and classify African nationalism are seen as

conservative because of his own application of a specific, in his case Marxist, social theory

with which to analyse and understand African Nationalism as a merely political movement.

Lodge does not consider African nationalism as a theory of the social and, like Walshe and

Suttner, exhibits an apparently wilful ignorance with regard to the theoretical grounding of

African nationalism.

The readings presented by Walshe and Lodge of African nationalism and black politics in

South Africa see a reactive and conservative politics emerge in response to a growing

disenfranchisement. This politics can, however, at best beg for inclusion or present a class-

based analysis of the prevailing political problems. If, and when, a form of politics emerges

that attempts to theorise black solidarity or an assertion of African history and praxis, it is

classified as conservative. An Africanist social philosophy is thus impossibility for these

liberal and Marxist historians. André Du Toit (2010) characterises the position of historians

like Walshe, Lodge, and Suttner, as “radical” in that they tended to present the history of

African resistance not merely in opposition to that of dominant Afrikaner nationalist

histories, but also against liberal historical approaches. For Du Toit the writings of this brand

of historians can be seen as a “paradigm shift” in that “they substituted class for race as a

basic explanatory category; they sought the origins of apartheid not in racial attitudes

inherited from the era of pre-modern frontier conflict but in the exploitation of migrant labour

in the diamond and gold mines, on commercial farms, and in industries of modern South

Africa; they argued that apartheid was not an ‘irrational’ and ‘dysfunctional’ anomaly

obstructing the course of capitalist progress, as liberal historians assumed and maintained, but

that it actually amounted to a highly functional form of racial capitalism” (Du Toit 2010:

271). Du Toit points out that this type of radical historiography was the dominant narrative in

the development of South African history and politics because of its proximity to Marxist

based social analysis and political movements. The relevance of Du Toit’s observations for

this analysis is the point that there was a conscious shift of paradigm from race to class. Du

Toit presents us with a reading of these aforementioned historians that clearly supports the

argument that the theory of the social and of history from which they construct their

narratives cannot read a social theory based on racial difference as anything but conservative

or reactionary (in the Marxist sense of the word). The choice of class as a privileged unit of

analysis was a conscious move by these historians that relegated any possibility of reading

the theoretical foundations African nationalism’s understanding of the social practically

impossible.

In the case of Walshe, Lodge, and Suttner, there is an overall engagement with African

nationalism as a political movement. None of these writers do, however, consider the

theoretical basis of African nationalism and consider it as a social theory. An Africanist

social theory is thus one that is still largely absent from academic and public discourse. This

can be attributed to the overall epistemological bias exhibited in the form of a white, Western

– Western is used here in the sense to indicate all those geopolitical territories that have, and

continue to have, colonial interests in countries in the South – theoretical approach to Africa:

Africa brings the data and the theory comes from the West. This overall white critical

consciousness, or white ignorance, is something that has been pointed out by several authors

and there is no need to go into detail here (hooks 1989, 2000; Mills 1999, 2015; Mignolo

2011; Dussel 2003; Ramose 2003; Martin-Alcoff 2005; Dladla 2012). Suffice it to say that

such theoretical approaches to the study of African political movements will forever see it as

merely a political and/or historical occurrence and fail to engage with the theoretical and

conceptual understanding that forms these movements.

Politics is the theory of the Impossible; or, The Logic of the End

Both Lembede and Sobukwe form part of a tradition of Africanist leaders and thinkers who

saw in the political emancipation of Africa the need for a radical historical praxis. These

thinkers also saw that the political argument of restoration and restitution was and cannot be

seen as separate or in fact qualitatively different from the struggle against epistemicide. The

politics proposed by the Africanist tradition is one that is not only based on resisting a

current mode of oppression, but rather positing a completely different imagining of the social

and its past, present, and future. This imagining of the social is one that does not accept the

current and its possibilities as an option for a political praxis; the imagining of the social is

one that asserts a political praxis that moves beyond the available and possible options.

It was Otto von Bismarck who once remarked, ,,Die Politik ist die Lehre vom Möglichen”

(Von Bismark 1895: 248). Mostly translated in political textbooks as “politics is the art of the

possible”, its literal translation being “politics is the logic/theory of the possible”. Von

Bismarck’s remark has become one of the most visibly manifested characteristics of politics:

possibility, feasibility, and negotiability. It speaks to not only a political tactic of pragmatism

but also a strategy of pragmatism. This type of a politics is one that lacks an historical

imagination of the future. A historical imagination of the future is exactly what Lembede and

Sobukwe present in their writing and theoretical elaborations: a way of thinking a future

possibility based on the current historical juncture in which they find themselves. It is an

imagination of a possible future that is rooted in a historical praxis that has been denied.

Politics as the logic/theory of the possible is exactly one that takes for granted the existing

foundations of the political, one that is based on the global construction of white supremacy

and its local manifestations. This is also a politics that can easily be identified with the ANC.

From the forming of the SANNC through to the Defiance Campaign and Freedom Charter to

the most recent political power sharing tactic called by some “negotiations”, the

SANNC/ANC has proved themselves to be a party that sees politics as the art of the possible:

the possibility to be included through petitions and the possibility to negotiate a power

sharing platform. This pragmatic approach to politics can perhaps explain the ANC’s

continued success as a parliamentary political party in the ways in which they negotiate

themselves into positions of possibility and at times ethically questionable feasibility.

Opposed to the pragmatism of the ANC, for Lembede, Sobukwe, and the Africanist tradition,

politics has to be a logic of the impossible. In the face of white supremacy and an increasing

repressive governmental apparatus, the assertion of an African historical praxis and mode of

politics is exactly what is impossible. A historical imagination of the future is a politics as the

theory of the impossible since it is able to think a political future that is not yet real. Politics

as the theory of the impossible is this realisation of that which cannot yet be thought: the true

liberation of Africa and the assertion of an African historical praxis. This is not achievable

through the application of a pragmatic politics because, as Nkoane (1968: 36) points out, the

conquered people have been “subjected to conditions that all but dwarfed mental

development, had been beaten into submission to the point of resignation and acceptance of

their lot as irredeemable” and the need “[t]o break this stranglehold was as much a

sociological as a political need”. A liberatory politics had to be able to prove liberation as a

possibility in an impossible situation. An affirmation of the existence of a history of being

governed differently was important to break this political and sociological stranglehold. A

social theory of the present, the past, and the future is the necessary and sufficient condition

for a liberatory politics to pronounce itself. It is a historical imagination of the future, a

politics as the theory of the impossible, that is able to break the stranglehold mentioned by

Nkoane. To think the impossible is to think the liberation of the conquered people of Africa.

In the words of a young Sobukwe (1949: 9): “Watch our movements keenly and if you see

any signs of ‘broad mindedness’ or ‘reasonableness’ in us, or if you hear us talk of practical

experience as a modifier of man’s views. Denounce us as traitors to Africa”

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