‘New Ways to Remember...’: Community in Southern Africa

Abstract

Mainstream International Relations constructs southern Africa through the power and omnipresence of the region’s nation states. Using an interpretative opening offered to social science by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, this article challenges this particular approach to the idea of regional community. It argues that the construction of the region’s first Westphalian state, South Africa, was an incidental occurrence contingent on a series of other events, including the discovery of mineral wealth. While the grand historical narrative near-obliterated forms of community that lie below the region’s modernist framing, other forms of community are increasingly identifiable. Although apartheid has ended, these other forms, rather than the states, offer the region’s people the opportunity for lasting emancipation.