Abstract
This article makes historical sense of the recent signs of the metamorphosis of nationalism into nativism in Zimbabwe and South Africa. The central thesis of the article is that the resurgence of Afro-radicalism and nativism in post-settler and post-apartheid societies partly reflected deep-rooted antinomies of black liberation thought and partly current ideological conundrums linked to the limits of both the African national project and global liberal democracy. Dismissals and sententious approaches towards nativism do not help in understanding the current issues in Zimbabwe and South Africa. There is the need to revisit the issues of imaginings of the African liberation agenda together with issues of the resolution of the national question, teleology of the liberation, ownership of strategic resources, knowledge production, control of public discourse, imaginations of the nation and visions of citizenship and democracy. Making sense of nativism provides an oblique entry into an interrogation of the current status of the African national project in Zimbabwe and South Africa.
Introduction
Three recent developments in Zimbabwe and South Africa evoke the need to rethink African nationalism and the current stage of the African national project. The first was the promulgation and unrolling of the Third Chimurenga in Zimbabwe from 1997 onwards together with its agenda of reclaiming land from the white commercial farmers (settlers/aliens) giving it back to the black Zimbabweans (natives) as part of the fulfilment of the objectives of the liberation struggle (Mugabe 2001; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2006). The second was the launch of the Native Club in South Africa in 2006 as the “third pillar” of the democratic transformation agenda with a specific focus on issues of national identity, knowledge production, revival of African cultures and critique of neo-liberal ideology (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2007; 2008). The third was the explosion of xenophobia in South Africa at the beginning of 2008 that left more than 60 people dead and many others homeless (Mbembe 2008). These developments compel one to rethink the direction of the national project in post-colonial Africa and the changing deployments and articulations of nationalism not only as a state ideology but also as a popular imaginary open to manipulation by both the elites and the poor in times of crisis.
The key question can be posed in the Foucauldian sense of what it is that African nationalism is enabling within a problematic post-colony in the 21st century. Krista Johnson (2005: 7) noted that for the new African elites nationalism galvanised their push for embourgeoisement through increasing demands on the post-colonial state for capital and resource accumulation. For the poor, nationalism enabled increasing demands for social justice, and for resource redistribution as native/indigenous entitlements. At another level, leaders like Robert Mugabe have continued to deploy Afro-radicalism and nativism as part of taking the decolonisation struggle to the further level of economic liberation from the snares of neo-colonialism (Osaghae 2005: 1). Can the ideological behaviour of Mugabe be seen as signalling the dawn of a new nationalism? Is it signalling revival of the African national project? Does it signal the degeneration and failure of African nationalism, giving way to the narrow, xenophobic and racist articulation of the African national project? This article responds to these questions on two levels. The first level is the theoretical interrogation of African nationalism revealing the hidden Afro-radical and nativist tendencies. The second level is the provision of two empirical case studies that demonstrate the current pulsations of nativism in Zimbabwe and South Africa.
Rethinking Nationalism and Nativism
Frantz Fanon (1968/1990: 122–125) predicted what was to happen on the “morrow of independence” in Africa. He foresaw that nativist language of nationalisation and Africanisation was to be deployed violently to attack “colonial personalities” as people constituting an “insult” to the “dignity of the nation.” Fanon also predicted that nationalism would again be articulated in racial terms when the “native bourgeoisie” claimed land, mines and jobs as part of indigenous entitlement. He also noted that as the “native bourgeoisie” “goes into competition with the Europeans” the majority of the poor members of society would “start a fight against non-national Africans.” To Fanon the trajectory of nationalism went like this: “from nationalism we have passed to ultra-nationalism, to chauvinism, and finally to racism” (Fanon 1968/1990: 125). He noticed that there was a “permanent seesaw between African unity, which fades quicker and quicker into the mists of oblivion, and a heartbreaking return to chauvinism in its most bitter and detestable form” (Fanon 1968/1990: 157–8).
The debate on the metamorphosis of African nationalism into Afro-radicalism and nativism has seen Kwame Anthony Appiah (1992) and Achille Mbembe (2002) emerging as the most severe critics of nativism in Africa. To them, nativism is a fake philosophy founded on the neurosis of African victimhood. Resurgence of nativism in South Africa, provoked Mbembe to liken it to the fatalistic “Nongqawuse” millenarian prophecy of the nineteenth century that misled the Xhosa people to kill all their cattle on the understanding that once that was done, Xhosa ancestral spirits would rise and sweep away the white settlers into the sea, leading to the restoration of the olden days (Mbembe 2006 and Peires 1989). To Mbembe, the proponents of nativism were latter-day false prophets manifesting the Nongqawuse prophecy which he defined as syndrome: “Nongqawuse syndrome is a populist rhetoric and a millenarian form of politics which advocates, uses and legitimises self-destruction or national suicide, as a means of salvation” (Mbembe 2006). Mbembe saw the task of nativism as that of creating a common language of grievance through repetition of “the sorry history it pretends to redress” (Mbembe 2006).
On the other hand, Benita Parry is sympathetic to nativism and is not satisfied with dismissals and sententious approaches to this phenomenon. She prefers deployment of an unsententious approach towards nativism that takes into account the historical fact of its embeddedness in all narratives of decolonisation. She also criticised those scholars who approach nativism with a disciplining theoretical whip in hand and who are quicker to dismiss nativism as “a catalogue of epistemological error, of essentialist mystifications, as a masculinist appropriation of dissent, as more than an anti-racist racism” (Parry 1994: 176). Parry argued for some “cheers” for nativism as a reverse discourse with its own agency and status in the drama of decolonisation. As a reverse discourse, nativism used the same categories and the same vocabulary deployed by the dominant discourse to subvert, undermine, and decentre the latter (Parry 1994: 177). If key nationalist ideologies were all permeated by nativism, it does not make much sense to spend more effort in dismissing nativism, as mere anti-racist racism or as fatalistic populist millenarianism, rather than interrogating it.
There is a general tendency to see African nationalism as having enabled and inspired heroic sacrifices for liberation and as having facilitated democratisation. There is also an attempt by post-liberation governments like the ZANU-PF (Zimbabwe African National Union) in Zimbabwe, the ANC (African National Congress) in South Africa, the SWAPO (SouthWest Africa People's Organisation) in Namibia, the FRELIMO (Frente da Libertação de Moçambique) in Mozambique and the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola) in Angola to create a false impression of a singular version of African nationalism. African nationalism was underpinned by very deep antinomies of black liberation thought that have continued to provoke competing versions of the nation, contested definition of citizenship, different imaginations of democracy and disagreements on the teleology of that national liberation struggle itself. Worker-oriented definitions of the struggle understood national liberation in class terms of conflict between labour and capital. This version of the struggle was more pronounced within trade unions and such parties as the SACP (South African Communist Party). The trade unions produced numerous nationalists. African nationalists were a bizarre mixture of people of various ideological persuasions. They drew ideological resources from pre-colonial traditional claims and entitlements, as well as modern global and Diasporic resources. What brought about a semblance of ideological unity was a common conception of national liberation in terms of ending white colonial racial oppression; seizure of political power by the African elite; and nationalist re-imagination of nationhood (Amin 1981; Tsotsi 1982; Alexander 1986).
African nationalism operated in the form of an anti-colonial phenomenon that consistently reacted to specific actions of the colonial state. The issue of ideology was never settled at any one stage of the decolonisation phase of nationalism until the achievement of independence by early decolonisers in the 1960s and late decolonisers in the 1990s. Many liberation movements, including even the openly Afro-radical PAC (Pan Africanist Congress) of South Africa, were largely forced to project the non-racial civic strand as its “public transcript” for strategic and pragmatic purposes while retaining the nativist strand as the “hidden transcript” (Scott 1990). Nationalist movements survived by swallowing different strands and doses of African political thought on liberation and soaking up different ideological strands of black struggles from within Africa and from outside. Africanism has always been a contradictory phenomenon with some nationalists learning through the struggle and realising its limits and exclusive tendencies. Other nationalists had to “grow away” from exclusive black Africanist ideology while others enthusiastically embraced it (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2006).
The early version of African nationalism took the form of elite nationalism informed by African bourgeois ideologies of legitimation (Ekeh 1975: 91). It emerged as part of educated African elite struggles for inclusion in colonial structures of governance. But when the colonial state remained inflexible and continued to deny African elites those privileges that were enjoyed by the white bourgeois, a desire to fight and replace white colonial rulers became an aspect of elite nationalism. But elite nationalism remained a moderate and elitist view that sought citizenship rights through miming and appropriation of imperial discourses of citizenship. It was therefore not opposed to the perceived ideals and principles of Western institutions. It was predicated on the manifest acceptance of white “liberal” ideals and principles. Educated elites insisted that African conformity with white liberal ideals indicated a level of achievement and that education had to earn them the right to the leadership of their country. But the African educated elite had to mobilise nativism to justify “native bourgeoisie” entitlement to leadership of African states.
Nativism was openly manifested as a key aspect of the Garveyist slogan of “Africa for Africans” and the drive by Marcus Garvey for the establishment of black republics across Africa (Barber 1999: 110; Fredrickson 1995: 282–3). Garveyism pulsated heavily within the PAC under Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe that claimed South Africa for Africans as opposed to the ANC that claimed South Africa for all. In Zimbabwe both the ZAPU (Zimbabwe African Peoples Union) and the ZANU contained the nativist strand of liberation thought within its ideological arsenal, projecting it more openly when mobilising peasants and workers as supporters. Some leading nationalist leaders like Joshua Nkomo of Zimbabwe modelled themselves as cultural nationalists and as “native sons” of the soil that worshipped together with peasants on the mountain shrines rather than in the modern church (Nkomo 1984; Ranger 1999).
In South Africa the apartheid ideology provoked various African ideological reactions that ranged from the ANC's emphasis on non-racialism as the teleology of liberation, the PAC that emphasised a combination of Afro-radicalism and Pan-Africanism, and the BMC (Black Consciousness Movement) that emphasised the eradication of the black racial inferiority complex while at the same time claiming a greater black identity that included Indians and Coloureds (Gerhart 1978). The BMC tried to represent all the disenfranchised peoples as blacks. Steven M. Davis (1998: 13) emphasised the resilience of Africanism as an ideology within African nationalism that was not only dominant within the PAC but that permeated even those organisations that claimed to espouse non-racialism. Africanism has always stood as an alternative to multiracialism manifesting itself through intermittent revivals and resurgences of Afro-radicalism and nativism. Radical Africanists were of the opinion that citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa was to be rooted in black communal identities, values, and virtues. A true citizen of South Africa was to be an “Azanian” fully compatible to the right of African people to self-rule and the reclamation of all of their ancestral land (Halisi 1997: 68; Driver 1980). In Zimbabwe the ZAPU and the ZANU emphasised that the authentic citizens were to be the “sons and daughters of the soil” as opposed to the alien whites (amabhunu).
South Africa has the richest liberation traditions due to the length of its struggle. But out of the liberation movements, the IFP (Inkatha Freedom Party) under Chief Gatsha Mangosuthu Buthelezi became one of the most misunderstood liberation movements. It projected a combination of nationalist politics with essentialised Zulu culture while at the same time embracing whites and Indians within its ranks. Some saw the party as a collaborator with apartheid government because of the acceptance of a leadership role by its leader in institutions created by the apartheid regime. Yet there were those nationalists who embraced class struggle and economic liberation (Picard 2005: 93–4). It was within the ranks of Afro-Marxists that the South African situation was described as “colonialism of a special type”. The SACP took the lead on this strand of thought bringing together whites and blacks who were left-leaning. Looked at from the broader perspective, all the strands of nationalism were shaped by what Kuan-Hsing Chen termed “the decolonisation question” where settler colonialism shaped its supposed opposite (African nationalism):
Shaped by the immanent logic of colonialism, Third Word nationalism could not escape from reproducing racial and ethnic discrimination; a price to be paid by the coloniser as well as the colonised selves (Chen 1998: 14).
Halisi (1997: 61) noted that
“at the core of black political thought, there are two interrelated and recurring visions of liberation: one, the image of multiracial union; the other, black republican ideology.”
Yet to see the intellectual debates in terms of a multi-racial and non-multiracial binary ignores other visions of liberation that were influenced by nativism. Indeed questions of national identity (how the people are to be defined, who belongs to the political community, and what are the criteria of inclusion and exclusion) embedded in various schools of liberation thought continue to influence the formerly colonised people's popular attitudes towards issues of democracy and human rights (Halisi 1997: 61).
Mbembe (2001: 16) argued that the post-colony has no identifiable essence, no markers for predictability and is very unstable. Within this post-colonial terrain, nationalism turned into state ideology where “citizenship was reduced to indigeneity and formalised by legislation” (Neocosmos 2006: 71). As a state ideology, nationalism increasingly lost its popular basis and appeal as it pushed the agenda of monolithic national identity underwritten by state prescriptions rather than popular mobilisation. Halisi (1997: 78) noted that nationalism was permeated by rival populisms. These rival populisms were inevitably bound to have an impact on the evolution of perceptions of citizenship. Popular democratic traditions, of which populism is one manifestation, have remained among the most durable sources of inspiration for democratic thinkers. For Zimbabwe and South Africa that emerged from centuries of racial domination, it would be unrealistic to expect an ethos of non-racial citizenship to prevail unchallenged by older political perceptions of nativism. While the black liberation struggle is generally viewed by many as a national achievement, the post-liberation governments still have to cope with the sensibilities grounded in both non-racial and race politics.
African nationalism, that initially assumed the character of developmentalism and a civic conception of the nation, is gradually falling into cultural nationalism, Afro-radicalism and nativism. Post-Cold War global agenda for democratisation pushed nationalism into the defensive particularly in Zimbabwe. Dorman, Hammett, and Nugent (2007) wrote of “citizenship and its causalities in Africa”. Narrow nationalism has eclipsed earlier cosmopolitan and flexible nationalist ideologies of “diverse people unite”. Rhadika Desai explained the failure of developmental nationalism in terms of its acquiescence to capital and withdrawal of capital (Desai 2008: 654). Unable to deliver on material promises, having lost its previous popular appeal and pushed into the defensive by global pressures for democracy, African nationalism fell into cultural nationalism and nativism as a way to compensate for crisis and decline.
Under these circumstances “the rest of society is to be managed in the absence of material concessions, culturally, by articulating inequality as cultural difference” (Desai 2008: 668). The failure of progressive and developmental nationalism lay in its political economy that was premised on “the power of capital to deliver benefits to wider constituencies.” The key limit of cultural nationalism lay “in its empty and fetishist conception as compensation for lack of material basis for legitimacy.” The key challenge according to Desai is:
Whether cultural nationalism can have a settled hold on lower strata which bear the costs of unequal political economy and punitive cultural politics of cultural nationalism is an open question. Can culture really compensate? (Desai 2008: 668).
Resurgences of populist ideologies of nativism and Afro-radicalism have their roots in the crisis and decline of developmental nationalism. What appears as “new nationalism” is, in reality, attempts to revive the older nationalism within a terrain in which post-nationalism remains ill-defined, ideologically bankrupt and is being used loosely to mean “multiple and disparate political projects” (Johnson 2005: 3). Narrowly defined, post-nationalist politics were easily beaten back by the forces of Afro-radicalism and nativism. Post-nationalism was easily beaten back and de-legitimised as a “political project detached from pan-African ideal and free of its moral imperative, which promotes a more exclusionary and adversarial image of the nation” (Mkandawire 2003; Johnson 2005: 4). In Zimbabwe, the embers of Afro-radicalism and nativism rather than those of post-nationalism are pulsating heavily within the body politic whereas in South Africa the embers of nativism have been confronted by strong liberal traditions. Only through empirical case studies can the contours of nativism in South Africa and Zimbabwe be clearly understood.
Zimbabwe: From Reconciliation to the Third Chimurenga as a Nativist Revolution
At the end of the Cold War, Zimbabwe gradually manifested a growing shift from the developmental nationalism of the 1980s into the Afro-radicalism and nativism of the 2000s together with its emphasis on cultural nationalism. This shift happened in tandem with the emergence of a radical civil society that began to embrace and articulate post-Cold War neo-liberal ideologies of good governance, democracy and human rights. These developments were happening within a local context of Zimbabwe's fast descent into an unprecedented economic crisis at the beginning of the 2000s and a global context of increasing international pressure on peripheral governments to embrace liberal democracy and its notions of rights. The nationalist liberation project was being pushed into the defensive by the triumphant forces of globalisation, neo-liberalism and cosmopolitanism (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2006).
Indeed by the mid-1990s, the nationalist project as represented by the ZANU-PF plunged into its toughest times with indications of its bankruptcy, if not exhaustion, becoming increasingly manifest and apparent. The national referendum on the constitution of 2000, more than any other event, revealed the waning popularity of the ZANU-PF as it was defeated for the first time in an election since coming to power in 1980. The same period witnessed the launch of a strong opposition party known as the MDC (Movement for Democratic Change) backed by a trade union and an assortment of human rights-oriented civic groups (Moyo, Makumbe, and Raftopoulos 2000). It was in this context of weakening nationalism that the founder president of the MDC Morgan Tsvangirai pronounced a post-nationalist project as founded in civic society and social movements as opposed to the
ZANU PF's nationalist thinking which has always been top-down, centralised, always trapped in a time warp. Nationalism was an end in itself instead of a means to an end (Southern Africa Report 2000).
Even the scholars Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri pronounced the weakening of nationalism; with the concept of national sovereignty seen as losing its effectiveness (Hardt and Negri 2000: 305). The ZANU-PF and Mugabe remained wedded to nationalism and reacted by trying to revive the liberation struggle. The Third Chimurenga became one way of re-launching the liberation struggle in the direction of achievement of redistributive justice and indigenisation of the economy. Mugabe justified the Third Chimurenga in the following words:
We are now talking about the conquest of conquest, the prevailing sovereignty of the people of Zimbabwe over settler minority rule and all it stood for including the possession of our land […] Power to the people must now be followed by land to the people (Herald, 6 December 2005).
The Third Chimurenga became a terrain for the revival of the tradition of national liberation in Zimbabwe and the increasing verbal and physical attack on all other political forces operating outside the ZANU-PF as a front for the re-colonisation of the country. The beginning of the 2000s witnessed a particularly frenzied re-creation of the liberation discourse in very narrow xenophobic, racist and nativist terms ranged against whites and those belonging to the MDC which was seen as a front for colonialism.
A large section of emerging black/national bourgeoisie, frustrated by the slow pace of embourgeoisement, aligned to the ZANU-PF. Some sections of the academic fraternity, war veterans, ex-detainees and unemployed youth combined to support the Third Chimurenga with its nativist claims and its hostility towards whites. Brian Raftopoulos argued that the 2000s had become the age of a revived nationalism
[that was] delivered in a particularly virulent form, with race as a key trope within the discourse, and a selective rendition of the liberation history deployed as an ideological policing agent in the public debate (Raftopoulos 2007: 101).
The Third Chimurenga pretended not only to be founded on the memory of the liberation struggle but also on pan-Africanism and other anti-colonial resources including the Third World Solidarity Movement. The Third Chimurenga was not only constituted by the controversial fast-track land reform programme (Sachikonye 2003: 227–240). Like all nativist revolutions, it was backed by a very elaborate cultural component that included music galas, annual commemorations of departed heroes, the re-definition of national days such as independence and heroes days and the re-definition of citizenship in non-civic terms as well as promulgation of what Terence Ranger terms “patriotic history” (Willems and Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2008; Ranger 2004 and Bull Christiansen 2004).
In addition to commemoration, concrete steps were taken to forcibly inculcate liberation struggle history on the nation in general and the youth in particular in an endeavour to create what was termed a “patriotic citizenry”. This took two forms. The first was the introduction of a compulsory course in teacher-training at poly-technical colleges known as National Strategic Studies aimed at teaching issues of national strategic importance like sovereignty, national ethos, history of the liberation struggle and the importance of land for economic development and as part of native heritage. The second was the introduction of National Youth Training Service Programme as a conduit to reproduce the traditions of the national liberation struggle through forcible and intensive inculcation of the youth with a very partisan narrative of national history of liberation.
While all this was happening on the side of the ZANU-PF, the MDC intensified its agenda of democratisation, human rights and good governance. The ZANU-PF emphasised the issues of social justice and economic empowerment of the people through land reform. The ZANU-PF emphasised the resolution of the national question whereas the MDC emphasised the democratic question. Those scholars in favour of the land reform in Zimbabwe like Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros celebrated the late 1990s and the beginning of 2000s as a period of revolutionary situation in which a radical state was in the forefront of the resolution of the national question via radical agrarian reform. To them, Zimbabwe was the first state on the African continent since the end of the Cold War that embarked on a revolution to sort out the national question (Moyo and Yeros 2007: 103). Without ignoring the violence and the corruption that accompanied the fast-track land reform programme, they maintain the ZANU-PF and Mugabe took bold revolutionary action to complete an “unfinished business” of land distribution (Hammar, Raftopoulos, and Jensen 2003).
Citizenship was re-defined in the context of repudiation of the earlier policy of reconciliation. The white commercial farmers in particular who owned large tracks of land were quickly re-defined as amabhunu (Boers, a reference to white settlers in South Africa) rather than citizens and Mugabe declared that “our party must strike fear into the heart of the white man. They must tremble” (Mugabe 2000). Citizenship became re-defined in nativist terms that excluded white races as Mugabe proclaimed “Zimbabwe for Zimbabweans” ideology. Articulating the philosophy behind nativist and Afro-radical discourses, Mbembe wrote:
Nativist and Afro-radical discourses of the self are both projects of self-regeneration, self-knowledge, and self-rule. Self-knowledge and self-rule are justified in the name of autochthony. According to the argument of autochthony, each spatio-racial formation has its own culture, its own historicity, its own way of being, and its own relationship with the future and with the past. Each has, as it were, its own certificate of origin and its own telos. In all cases, the idea is that the encounter between Africa and the West resulted in a deep wound: a wound that cannot heal until the ex-colonised rediscover their own being and their own past (Mbembe 2002: 635).
When Mugabe told the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair to keep his Britain and stated that he (Mugabe) would keep his Zimbabwe, he was projecting a clear “spatio-racial” argument that was well put by Mbembe. A group of what one would term “nativist” scholars from the University of Zimbabwe have been mobilised by the state to articulate nativist conceptions of citizenship under a televised programme known as “National Ethos”. The leading personages in this programme include Dr. Vimbai Chivaura, Professor Claude Mararike, Dr. Tafataona Mahoso, Professor Isheunesu Mpepereki and some other invited guests like Dr. Kenneth Manungo. Reading from their utterances, these scholars are trying to shape and influence public discourse in the direction of nativism. Their topics are generally about heritage and African indigenous knowledge intertwined with the liberation struggle. These “regime scholars” are blindly regurgitating the ZANU-PF discourse and are at pains to give it an intellectual underpinning and respectability (Tendi 2008).
The issue of citizenship in postcolonial societies like Zimbabwe are at the centre of the agenda of resolution of the national question as it relates to the issues of race relations, settler-native binaries, and ownership of resources like mines and land, and control of national public discourse (Mamdani 2001: 63–73). The other aspect of the Third Chimurenga was the resolution of the ownership of the state and the manning of state institutions. While all other institutions had undergone Africanisation since 1980, the judiciary system had remained manned by predominantly white judges inherited from the colonial era. Under the Third Chimurenga, these white judges including Chief Justice Anthony Gubbay were forced to leave the bench by war veterans with the blessings of the state and the political elite. The white judges were blamed for constantly blocking the land reform through judiciary decisions that always favoured the white commercial farmers.
Throughout the unfolding of the Third Chimurenga Robert Mugabe became very active as the most articulate and most committed latter-day nationalist revolutionary, continuing the tradition of nationalist liberation agenda. This led Tafataona Mahoso and other “regime intellectuals” to celebrate Mugabe as the embodiment and keeper of patriotic memory. Mahoso wrote that Mugabe represented “pan-African memory,” he was a “reclaimer of African space” and was “the African power of remembering the African legacy and African heritage which slavery, apartheid and imperialism thought they had dismembered for good” (The Sunday Mail, 16 March 2003).
South Africa: From a Rainbow Nation to Nativism and Populism?
Unlike Zimbabwe where nativism became a state project, South Africa witnessed the formation of a Native Club in May 2006 that took the form of an intellectual initiative. The proponents of Native Club described the club as a public initiative whose main objective was to mobilise and consolidate South African black intelligentsia into a vibrant social force able to shape national discourse and influence government policy direction, particularly the democratic transformation agenda.
The formation of the Native Club came as a major challenge to those who favoured the spirit of “rainbowism” as introduced by the Nelson Mandela administration in 1994. No wonder then that its launch raised an animated debate that mainly criticised its appropriation of the politically loaded label “native” for its own ends (Nevin 2006). South Africa had strong radical Africanist traditions from which the Native Club could draw inspiration and it also had an equally strong liberal tradition dating back to the Cape liberal tradition right through to the Freedom Charter of 1955. It was the power of the liberal civic conception of citizenship that influenced Thabo Mbeki to deliver his widely quoted “I am an African” speech that sought to define South African identity as a cosmopolitan one rather than a nativist one.
The Native Club's vision included the facilitation of cultural decolonisation of the South African people and the country; complete eradication of the apartheid and colonial mindset; enhancement of the self-affirmation of black African people; protection and promotion of indigenous languages, cultures, traditions and music; adding impetus to moral regeneration; promotion of a culture of critical thinking among Africans through reading, reflection and debates; utilisation and deployment of indigenous cultures, indigenous knowledge and values to advance nation-building and democratic transformation; and active participation of Africans in the shaping and controlling of national discourse on socio-economic, political and cultural issues (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2007).
The Native Club was launched under the banner of “Where are the Natives?” and Magashe Titus Mafolo, a senior political adviser to President Thabo Mbeki and the chairman of the Native Club gave details of the circumstances and thinking behind its launch in a newspaper article. According to him, there was a noticeable decline in intellectual engagement by blacks since 1994 that called for the re-mobilisation of black intellectuals into a vibrant forum to counter the current situation where
well-resourced, organised and strategically placed neo-liberals are consistent in trying to shape the form and content of the transformation of South Africa through public discourse, vocal and visible campaigns for their causes and better networking (Mafolo 2006a).
The Native Club was also poised to engage in systematic and intellectually thought-out critique of the neo-liberal ideology that was seem as maintaining and buttressing apartheid-induced gross material inequalities. On the position of Native Club vis-à-vis neo-liberal ideology, Mafolo pointed out that the club “firmly believed that neoliberalism is inimical to the objectives of transformation and national reconstruction, at least in terms set and determined by the historically marginalised sections of our society” (Mafolo 2006a). Mafolo openly railed against what he termed an identity crisis in South Africa stating that:
Though we are Africans, many South Africans seem to have an identity crisis. Through our dress, music, cuisine, role models and reference points we seem to be clones of Americans and Europeans (Mafolo 2006b).
When the Native Club came under heavy criticism by white liberal intellectuals as retrogressive and as nothing but reverse-racism, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of South Africa (UNISA) N. Barney Pityana (2006) tried to justify the Club as drawing its inspiration from the Fanonian language “when he talks about the native intellectual, the ‘settler’ and the colonial critic.” He defined “a native intellectual” as one “who claims his/her intellectual inspiration from indigenous African knowledge systems and values, who espouses them without shame.” Mafolo defined the Native Club as the “third pillar of transformation” with a specific focus on cultural revival (Mafolo 2006b) while Eddy Maloka traced the roots of the Native Club to Afro-radical liberatory traditions of Black Consciousness, Pan-Africanism and Negritude, noting that throughout the liberation struggle “the realm of ideas always stood vigilant behind the barrel of the gun” (Maloka 2006).
The appearance of the Native Club happened at a time when the rise of populist politics crystallised around Jacob Zuma. It also coincided with developments of ideological and personality clashes within the Tripartite Alliance (ANC, COSATU and SACP) that culminated in three recent political events: the defeat of the Thabo Mbeki and his faction at Polokwane in December 2007, the re-calling of Thabo Mbeki as state president and the launch of the COPE (Congress of the People) as a breakaway from the ANC. The ideological situation in South Africa is different from that obtaining in Zimbabwe where Mugabe pursues open racial nativism and where constitutionalism has been destroyed. In South Africa, those who support Zuma are not nativists like the war veterans that support Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Zuma is supported by the SACP and the COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) who can be described as internationalist Marxists rather than nativists. Even Zuma himself has gone out to assure the whites that they were not considered aliens in South Africa. On the other hand, the COPE is made up of those who claim to be defending the constitution and the liberal trajectory as installed by Mandela and deepened by Thabo Mbeki. Those that have continued to support Zuma, model themselves as opposed to those who have decided to side with an unbridled capitalist system that continues to exploit the workers and peasants.
Conclusion
An unsententious interrogation of nativism that historicises and contextualises it within broader issues of the antinomies of black liberation thought enables a broader reflection on the path taken by nationalism from the phase of decolonisation to the current phase of globalisation. This article has shown that nativism was embedded deeply in African nationalism and decolonisation discourses to the extent that it cannot be understood outside of an interrogation of the African national project. What appears as “new nationalism” manifests an increasingly narrow definition of belonging in post-colonial Africa and the metamorphosis of progressive developmental nationalism into retrogressive cultural nationalism with its deep dose of Afro-radicalism and nativism. While in Zimbabwe (notwithstanding the opposition from the MDC) Afro-radicalism and nativism managed to win support among war veterans and some sections of peasants. The Zimbabwean version of nativism has very open racial connotations. In a multi-racial society like South Africa, nativism immediately locked horns with a very strong liberal tradition that continues to defend a liberal trajectory. But in both countries, the future of liberal democracy remains uncertain.