Centre for Education Rights and Transformation, UJ (3MB)

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 1

enOugh is A feAstA TRIBUTE TO DR NEVILLE ALEXANDER 22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012

2 A tribute tO Dr neViLLe ALeXAnDer

Published by the Foundation for Human Rights8th Floor209 Smit Street Building209 Smit StreetBraamfonteinJohannesburgSouth AfricaTelephone: 27 (11) 339 5560/1/2/3/4/5 Fax: 27 (11) 339 5566/7 Email: [email protected]

First print 2012ISBN 978-0-620-55813-6 (print)ISBN 978-0-620-55814-3 (digital)

Edited by Hanif Vally and Maureen IsaacsonDesign and layout: QUBA Design & MotionIllustrations: Francois Smit

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 3

cOntentsPREFACE .......................................................................................................................... 5

TRIBUTES TO DR NEVIllE AlExANDER

DIgNIFIED AND PRINCIPlED To THE END .................................................................. 9A TRIBUTE To NEVIllE AlExANDER By SAlIM VAlly, BRIAN RAMADIRo AND JANE DUNCAN Mail & Guardian, 31 AUgUST 2012

MEMoRIES oF THE lIME QUARRy AND gRATITUDE FoR lESSoNS FRoM THE “TEACHER’S TEACHER” ............................................................................... 13SPEECH By AHMED KATHRADA DElIVERED AT MEMoRIAl SERVICES FoR NEVIllE AlExANDER

“HAyI, ASIloSIKo lAKoWETHU UKUBUyA NgoMVA” ............................................... 16[“oH No, IT’S NoT oUR CUlTURE To TURN oUR BACKS oN oUR oWN ACHIEVEMENTS”]A TRIBUTE By SElBy NoMNgANgA, 08 SEPTEMBER 2012, ATHloNE, SoUTH AFRICA

HUMAN DIgNITy oNly THRoUgH RADICAl TRANSFoRMATIoN ............................ 21A TRIBUTE To NEVIllE AlExANDER FRoM CoMRADES AND FRIENDS oF THE WoRKER’S oRgANISATIoN FoR SoCIAlIST ACTIoN (WoSA) INTERNATIoNAl JoURNAl oF SoCIAlIST RENEWAl, 29 AUgUST 2012

THE CoNSCIoUSNESS oF BEINg CoMPlETEly AND oNly HUMAN ........................ 23A TRIBUTE To NEVIllE AlExANDER By CRAIN SoUDIEN, CAPE ToWN, 3 SEPTEMBER 2012

REVISITINg THE NATIoNAl QUESTIoN ....................................................................... 26A NAMIBIAN TRIBUTE To NEVIllE AlExANDER By SHAUN WHITTAKER

TEXTS BY DR NEVIllE AlExANDER

SoUTH AFRICA ToDAy THE MoRAl RESPoNSIBIlITy oF INTEllECTUAlS .............................................................. 31

SoUTH AFRICA: AN UNFINISHED REVolUTIoN? ....................................................... 39

RACE IS SKIN DEEP, HUMANITy IS NoT ........................................................................ 55Cape TiMes, 15 APRIl 2011

lET US RETURN To THE SoURCE! ................................................................................ 59IN QUEST oF A HUMANISM oF THE 21ST CENTURy

RoBIN HooD, RoBBEN ISlAND AND THE PoST APARTHEID STATE.......................... 67souTh afriCan hisTory online (saho), 20 JANUARy 2011

AFTER APARTHEID: THE lANgUAgE QUESTIoN ......................................................... 71

HAS THE RAINBoW VANISHED? ................................................................................... 87THE MEANINg oF NATIoNAl UNITy IN THE NEW SoUTH AFRICA

BIBlIogRAPHy ................................................................................................................ 95

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 5

PrefAce

The death of Dr Neville Alexander leaves the country bereft of a great revolutionary, historian, educationist, linguist, writer and moral compass. He will be remembered as much for his dedication to addressing the plight of the poor in a democratic South

Africa as for his commitment to the struggle against apartheid, and for which he was sentenced to ten years imprisonment on Robben Island.

His incisive analysis of the failure of the democratic leadership to honour the much-vaunted values enshrined in our Constitution remains a beacon for those searching for a way forward. Alexander decried the continued structural inequality pervasive in the country. He believed that the wave of violence engulfing us was its direct consequence.

Intellectual timidity would be an abrogation of responsibility; for Alexander, the ‘amorality of capital’ provided a cover for the Faustian pact that perpetuated the country’s crisis of values. Erstwhile Marxists, claiming there was ‘no alternative’, were now in bed with the untransformed racists of the past ‘parading fake credentials’ to satisfy the requirements of Black Economic Empowerment.

Until December 2011, he served as the Director of the Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (Praesa), a research unit at the University of Cape Town. His fight for multilingual education and mother-tongue learning was a vital contribution to language policy. This was but a single brick in the visionary building of the socialist state, which ideal he was never to forsake.

The son of a carpenter and schoolteacher, Neville Alexander was born in Cradock, Eastern Cape. By the time he learned the facts of his maternal grandmother’s rescue from slavery in Ethiopia, his campaign against the ethnic prejudice shaping the country’s identity politics was entrenched.

As the essays and writings in this memorial collection reveal, Alexander was consistent in his revolt against the vulgarity and profligacy of the power elites. He lived his ideals and the values he proclaimed. He was offered an ambassadorship, which he declined. He remained an activist to the end.

This small volume is our modest tribute to Dr Neville Alexander’s history, his talents and commitment to social justice. our shared belief in the inalienability of human rights was an enduring bond.

We mourn the loss of a fighter, activist and, above all, a thinker.

Hamba Kahle, Comrade Neville.

Yasmin Sooka & Hanif Vally for the foundation for human rights

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 7

TRIBUTES To DR NEVIllE AlExANDER

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 9

Neville Alexander’s death, coming as it does in the wake of the massacre of striking mineworkers at Marikana, is a double blow.

He had the breadth of intellect and depth of knowledge to help the world to understand the significance of these events.

Throughout his life, Neville maintained the important combination of being an activist and a scholar. His activism saw him imprisoned on Robben Island for ten years and subjected to house arrest for a further six years. For his entire life, he both argued for and practised a principled approach to building an independent anti-capitalist left, while emphasising the need for unity of all organisations committed to a socialist future.

He believed that it was impossible to wage a successful struggle without a theory, and remained committed to using the analytical tools of Marxism to develop this theory. His Marxism was not vulgar; it was enriched by his deep understanding of the South African reality, with its complex intersections of “race”, class and gender. He was also an internationalist following recent developments in North Africa and the

Middle East closely. Previously Neville formed strong bonds with Ben Bella and Ernest Mandel, as well as with leading revolutionaries in Namibia, Palestine and other countries.

In South Africa’s increasingly crass intellectual environment, where many around him were abandoning their moral compasses and replacing principled political interventions with buffoonery, he stood out as a voice of great insight, attempting to provide what he at one stage described as a “gPS” for the country.

The recent events at Marikana would have come as no surprise to Neville. Cutting through the hype about South Africa’s celebrated transition to democracy, he warned repeatedly of the long-term dangers of the compromises arrived at during the negotiated settlement – compromises that ensured the continuity of the capitalist state and the highly unequal social relations embedded in it.

In fact, in two books on the transition, Neville argued that “it is common cause in South Africa that unless a radical redistribution of material resources is realised within the lifetime of the present generation,

DignifieD AnD PrinciPLeD tO the enD

A TRIBUTE To NEVIllE AlExANDER

By SAlIM VAlly, BRIAN RAMADIRo AND JANE DUNCAN

MAIl & gUARDIAN 31 AUgUST 2012


all the glib rhetoric of social transformation, national democratic revolution, and African Renaissance will come to mock their authors and exponents in the years ahead”. He warned repeatedly of the potential for social instability.

His prescient ability to predict South Africa’s political trajectory made him an unpopular figure with the ruling establishment, who were often unsettled by his critique of the dominant, largely celebratory discourse of national liberation and their own role within it. But he was also widely respected, even by those he criticised.

Remarkably, despite foreseeing the mess that South Africa finds itself in as a likely trajectory, he never lost hope in the ability of its people to achieve the Azanian uhuru that so many had hoped for.

His optimism was profound. He had a deep respect for humanity and the ability of the human spirit to overcome the most difficult of odds, and believed that human beings were not inherently self-centred. He knew periods of great despair in his life, but he never lapsed into cynicism.

His great love for humanity also made him a very humble person. Not one to be impressed by titles and status (or what he liked to call “honorifics”), he believed that, in his own words, “intellectuals are not people who go to universities, but are people who understand how society works and how to change it”. He did not just mouth these sentiments, but lived them, continuing with grassroots work to the end of his life.

Neville viewed ostentation with disdain. He was humorous, perfecting the art of scorn towards the politically and morally corrupt sections of the elite, but he was also always inspirational. Neville’s analysis was often enlivened by characters and events from german literature, greek mythology and Shakespearean comedy, and his everyday speech was peppered with aphorisms such as “enough is as good as a feast” and “you shall be judged by your deeds, not by your words.”

Neville will be remembered for his pioneering work on the national question and language. Writing under the pseudonym “No Sizwe” in the 1970s, he critiqued the dominant liberation organisations’ approach to

building a new, united historical community. He argued that they essentialised “race”, which would probably make it all but impossible for “race thinking” to disappear in a future South Africa. He firmly rejected the racial classifications of the apartheid state, and drew on the concept of “racial capitalism” to explain the ways in which the South African state derived economic and social value from the maintenance of racial identities.

In the two subsequent decades, he developed this line of argument, asserting that, in order for South Africa to emerge as a nation, it would need to be united on all levels of the social formation, including the economic, cultural and social. To simply proclaim South Africa the “rainbow nation” was premature as the material conditions that would allow a united nation to come into being were simply not present. These realities meant that the nation’s social cohesion was built on quicksand.

In fact, Neville feared that society would fracture, creating space for opportunistic leaders to mobilise racial divisions to build power bases. Using the xenophobic attacks in 2008 as a salutary backdrop, he warned emphatically that: “Things can fall apart very quickly. our entire sociohistorical fabric can unravel within a few weeks: it took less than 100 days in Rwanda!”

In later years, he argued that unless state institutions placed disadvantage rather than “race” at the centre of their transformative strategies, they would advantage a narrow group of black people only and perpetuate race thinking, at the expense of the working and unemployed poor.

His work on language developed his arguments on the national question. He believed that South Africa would not unite unless indigenous languages became the languages of power. He was a firm believer in the power of critical pedagogy and quality public education. The latter issue occupied his mind in his last few weeks.

If Neville could be faulted for anything, it would be for insufficient introspection about why independent left organisations have so far failed to have consistent mass resonance, and why their ideas have failed to

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 11

become the general ideas of society. The last thing Neville would have wanted is a hagiography.

In spite of his untimely death, Neville will continue to speak to us for a long time to come.

A true revolutionary, he touched and changed many,

many lives, including our own. our thoughts are with his family, his many friends and comrades, and his partner Karen Press. Hamba Kahle, Comrade Neville.

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 13

Karen, members of Neville’s immediate and extended family, friends, comrades, ladies and gentlemen.

I wish to reiterate heartfelt condolences from the Mandela Foundation, the Kathrada Foundation, from me, Barbara Hogan and scores of others, especially fellow inmates, including laloo Chiba, Eddie Daniels, Kwedi Mkaliphi.

My intention today is to speak mainly about the decade we spent together on Robben Island.

After about a month in the communal cells, Neville, Fikile Bam, Don Davis and lionel Davis were transferred to B Section, following an altercation with warders.

I was privileged to spend the better part of 10 years with Neville. We were among about 25 inmates,

completely isolated from the hundreds of political prisoners. If we set eyes on Marcus Solomon during those years, it would have been purely by accident.

It did not take long for us to know that in Neville we were with a man of towering intellect. His diverse qualities made him:

• a courageous and loyal comrade and freedom fighter, with very strong views;

• a life-long, committed educationist, a ’teacher’s teacher’;

• a comrade who was prepared to admit mistakes or misconceptions about the ANC, and

• a wonderful, caring, compassionate and sensitive human being, with a lively sense of humour.

My relationship with him was primarily that of two

MeMOries Of the LiMe QuArrY AnD grAtituDe fOr LessOns

frOM the “teAcher’s teAcher”. SPEECH By AHMED KATHRADA

DElIVERED AT MEMoRIAl SERVICES FoR NEVIllE AlExANDER1

1 Ahmed Kathrada read this speech at Memorials for Neville Alexander on 8 September 2012, at the Belgravia High School Hall, Cape Town, and on 15 September 2012 in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture Auditorium, Bunting Road Campus, University of Johannesburg


friends, and of teacher and student. Naturally we discussed politics. At the lime quarry, where we worked with picks and shovels, we spent quite a bit of time together, especially when he was not teaching.

Neville’s passion for education was shown by his ever-readiness to assist all of us who were in need. He also helped to rope in other teachers to form RITA –Robben Island Teachers Association.

There were three elderly inmates from the Transkei who were completely illiterate. Witnessing all of us busy with studies, they developed an acute hunger for education. During the brief period they spent with us, they managed to acquire some very basic education, and were able to converse in English.

Then there was my neighbour, who never received a visit for the 15 years that he was with us. Both he and his family members were illiterate, thus letters between them were infrequent. But that also began to change when he and the three men I mentioned received tuition from RITA members and he too was able to communicate with his folks. In my Memoirs21 I wrote:

“Thanks to Dr. Neville Alexander and his group of dedicated teachers, my neighbour left the Island literate.”

I personally owe a deep sense of gratitude to Neville. During my university studies on the Island he enthusiastically helped me with history – his forte. But he did much more. He was entirely responsible for my passing two additional subjects that had not been part

2 Ahmed Kathrada. Memoirs. Zebra Press (2004).

of his own studies – sociology and library science. He studied my text books, and guides, mastered them, lectured to me, and ensured that I got through!

Why library science? Because B.Bibliography allows African politics as a second Major!

Neville once described how Robben Island was turned

“... essentially into an informal university ... enabling inmates to see the Island as a constructive experience.”

As a politician, Neville possessed the largeness of spirit to tell us that he had arrived on the Island with erroneous ideas about the calibre of ANC leaders. This contributed immensely towards a united front in confronting the common challenges.

of course, this is not to say that we were completely free of occasional tensions, both within and between organisations. But thankfully these were ephemeral.

Neville was with us on what to my mind was the very worst and most frightening night of my 26 years in jail. It was Friday, 28th May, 1971. It was a bitterly cold night, and we had already been locked up. We had just settled down in our individual cells when a large number of warders, many of them drunk, suddenly marched into B Section, unlocked our cell doors and ordered us to completely strip naked and face the wall with our arms stretched above our heads. They said they were looking for newspapers, but this was not true. In fact, we were being punished because we were on hunger strike. They deliberately prolonged this search, while we stood shivering. Then suddenly govan Mbeki, who was among us, collapsed, and

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 15

tensions rose as we feared the worst. Fikile Bam broke down in tears. What saved us from what could have been a bloodbath was our discipline. one wrong move on our part, and who knows what it could have led to.

Having said this, I must not leave you with the impression that prison was only gloom and doom.

It is necessary for us to bear in mind that while we are mourning Neville’s death, it is also a celebration of his life.

In addition to his commitment to education, Neville involved himself with vigour in every activity that helped to make prison life less intolerable – sports, music, drama, debate, polemics.

on another occasion, while we were at the quarry an argument broke out between Neville and a warder. This led to Neville being charged for being disrespectful towards a warder. The offence? He used the words “jy” en `‘jou` instead of “u”!32

Ironically, the name of the magistrate before whom Neville appeared was Marx!

We believed that because of the inherent injustice in the enemy’s courts we were not bound by the regime requiring us to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That’s where I came in as Neville’s only defense witness. I knew Neville had uttered those words. But, with all the eloquence at my command I managed to convince the court it was unimaginable that a man of Neville’s education and linguistic expertise could, even in a moment of anger, depart from what is polite language. Magistrate Marx

3 In Afrikaans, ‘jy” and “jou” are the informal address of “you”; “u” is the formal equivalent.

seemed to have agreed with me.The result of his judgement: not guilty and

discharged.There was a sequel to this. Some time after my

release, I asked Neville to launch a book of mine. He readily agreed to come to Johannesburg for this purpose.

At question time I mischievously asked Neville if it was true that he had been so intimidated by the Robben Island court case that his fear had even spread to marine life, so much so that he had gone to the extent of changing the name of Cape Town’s favourite fish from kabeljou to kabel u! He joined everyone else in the burst of laughter.

Time will not allow me to continue relating our Robben Island experiences.

I will always remember my last telephone conversation with him after he was diagnosed with cancer. Far from any sign of self-pity, our conversation left me with confidence that he was going to recover. I deliberately avoided disturbing him again while on chemotherapy, and eagerly looked forward to seeing him up and about. But alas, it was not to be. That simple conversation about ordinary things transported us back to Robben Island. It powerfully brought back the Neville I knew – his simplicity, his sense of humour, his care, his humanity, his brilliance, his undying commitment to education and justice,

Farewell my dear friend, my teacher, my fellow prisoner, my comrade. our years together immeasurably enriched my life. We will miss you.


l omhobe ungezixholo-xholo ezilandela ukutshatyalaliswa kwemfuyo ukuze ondlebe-zikhany’ ilanga bangafumani nelize

ngokombono ka Nongqawuse.UMqhayi uthi uMakinana wafumana incwadi ethi

uyise ubhubhile ngoko makabuye kuba “amaNdlambe akanamntu.” Waphendula ngelithi akugqiba ukuvuna, uyakuza. Esendleleni njalo, uFeni wamthumela incwadi ethi:

“Jika Makinana kuba kubi.”Impendulo kaMakinana: “Hayi, asilosiko

lakowethu ukubuya ngomva.” Waya kuvalelwa esiQithini nabanye besithi mabayo

kubola balityalwe. Suka wafundisa abanye kwavuka iDyunivesthi kaMakinana. Esithi “Hayi, asilosiko lakowethu ukubuya ngomva.”

Kwathiwa ikhaya labo liyakuba yijele iminyaka

emihlanu, wasuka wabhala incwadi ethi ungu Nosizwe, ebabaza ukupheliswa kobuhlanga kuba “asilosiko lakowethu ukubuya ngomva.”

yahamba iminyaka kuzatyalazwa amadlagusha esithi thathani naba onomgogwagwana bamaBhunga. lahesha inyange lisithi sifuna Ubuntu obupheleleyo kuba “asilosiko lakowethu ukubuya ngomva.”

ooRholihlahla bemkhweba besithi amanqathe akho, kwaye amanye avela ngaphesheya. Bambi besithi baphelelwa ubusoshiyali kwihlabathi, waphendula wathi: “Hayi, asilosiko lakowethu ukubuya ngomva.”

Kwathiwa jonga apha Nosizwendini, ungatya uhluthe bayeke abanye aba, masidlobe isiNgesi. Ingaba wathini ukuphendula?

“Hay’, asilosiko lakowethu ukubuya ngomva.” [“oh no, it’s not our culture to turn our backs on

what we have achieved within ourselves.”]

“hAYi, AsiLOsiKO LAKOWethu

uKubuYA ngOMVA”

[“Oh nO, it’s nOt Our cuLture tO turn Our bAcKs On Our OWn AchieVeMents”]

A TRIBUTE By SElBy NoMNgANgA

8 SEPTEMBER 2012, ATHloNE, SoUTH AFRICA

yivesi yesicatshulwa kumhobe u ah! sitimela nguSEK lowe Ngxeke-ngxeke Mqhayi (1875–1945)

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 17

AN ExCERPT FRoM THE PoEM AH! JUNE STAR by SEK lowe Ngxeke-ngxeke Mqhayi (1875–1945)1

The poem is about the turmoil that followed the cattle killing, which was an attempt to deprive the white colonialist of food, according to the vision of nongqawuse.

Mqhayi says Makinana receives a letter announcing the death of his father urging him to come back because “... the Ndlambe now has nobody.” He has said after harvesting he will come. on his way, Fynn sends him a letter saying:

“Turn around Makinana, the country is in turmoil.”

He answered: “oh no, it’s not our culture to turn our backs on what we have achieved within ourselves.”

He was jailed on Robben Island, left to rot and be forgotten. Instead he became one of the founders of the University of Makinana because “it’s not our culture to turn our backs on what we have achieved within ourselves”.

They said his home was to be his jail for five years. Instead he wrote under the pseudonym Nosizwe a book calling for the end to racism because “it’s not our culture to turn our backs on what we have achieved within ourselves”.

years of struggle passed the rich, urging acceptance of dummy councils. The professor rejected those councils, saying full humanity must be restored because “it’s not our culture to turn our backs on what we have achieved”.

Rolihlahla and his comrades waved, saying shares were available, some coming from abroad. others said socialism has failed in the world, because “it’s not our culture to turn our back on what we have achieved within ourselves”.

They said: “little nation builder, get rich and forget the others and let English reign supreme”. What do you think he said? “oh no, it’s not our culture to turn our backs on what we have achieved from within ourselves”.

The truth about the part played by Neville

1 SEK lowe Ngxeke-ngxeke Mqhayi (1875- 1945), editor of izwi labantu newspaper, was a writer, poet and praise-singer who contributed seven verses to Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika

Alexander in the struggle for complete emancipation requires once again, in the light of what Khulumani Support group called the “extra-judicial killings” of 34 mine workers and 78 other injured at Marikana, the “reclaiming the vision of liberation”.

Together with others, Comrade Neville felt that the Truth Movement was an instrument to ensure we do not only listen to our selves, but also talk in a way that a real narrative of what and how an alternative society for full equality free from hunger, want and avoidable disease burden can be built. In so doing the words of Vladimir lenin in state and revolution caution us against the way in which his contribution may be turned against the working class to which he dedicated his life.

lenin wrote: “During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes meted out to them constant persecution, received their teachings with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander.”

We may add that in such a lifetime some who were in the trenches with Neville have turned against him – and continue to distort his views, attack his character.

lenin continues: “After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to surround their names with a certain halo for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and in order to dupe the latter, while at the same time emasculating the content of the revolutionary teaching, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.”

And we hope no one will try to open a religious sect in his name. you may be aware of Diego Maradona of Argentina that there are followers who pray to him as a “god of Football”.

They simply have no clue about how to take the game forward so that it can benefit all, especially the urban and rural poor.

It is for this reason that the Truth, and hopefully the Truth Movement, will play such a pivotal role in our interactions and how we seek to formulate a narrative based on the fundamental interest of the urban and rural poor. The truth about what we know; the truth


of what others see in us, the truth about our systems of health, education, economy and welfare can be made to work better, especially for the urban and rural poor.

Without the respect of the views of others, or rather without the confidence to trust history to resolve our different strategic and tactical orientation, we surely will not arrive at the best possible democratic practice and our own views will be incomplete as a result of the splintering into various sectarian sects.

It is reported that the cost of corruption since 1994 totals an estimated R 8 649 billion. It is gained by stealing from the poor people. The rising cost of food with over 60% of the income of the poor going to food. The black working-class children have been the undisputed guinea pigs of the education system’s oBE experiment and its mutations into various forms. Where are the textbooks? Where are the classrooms, laboratories and libraries? Where are the promised houses that don’t leak and are closer to the basic amenities? For 18 years claims have been made that arms were bought for job creation, claims that infrastructure expenditure will create many jobs – where are the jobs?

And worse, those who should be standing with the poor in defensive battles for decent living and working conditions retreat into sectarianism, name calling,

joining the ruling class and to indifference.Ernest Mandel in his wisdom said:“Do not succumb to despair, resignation or

cynicism, given the terrible odds we all have to face. Do not retreat into ‘individual solutions’. Never content yourself with pure propaganda activities. Never forget the initial and final commitment of Marx: ‘The philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it’.

like comrade Neville we must work with and among the poor to help with reading groups, health committees, community action groups to oppose rising electricity cost and ensure accountability of local councillors, support initiatives in strikes and in self-actualisation learning. This is work you will not find in the headlines. It is work that will ensure that the working class, in the face of the deepening crisis of capitalism, can defend its own physical integrity. Seeking a living wage for the Marikana workers and others is the best way to build a prosperous country by placing the needs and aspirations of the poor at the centre of production, distribution and exchange.

long live, Comrade Neville Alexander.

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 19

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 21

C omrades and friends who have known Neville Alexander through the Workers organisation for Socialist Action mourn the passing of this

great socialist and revolutionary.Neville dedicated his life to the struggle against

oppression and injustice and for the upliftment of his fellow human beings. From the early days of student struggles to his arrest and imprisonment on Robben Island and his latter years working on language and education, Neville’s deep humanitarian spirit, his respect for the ordinary people and his humility were always present.

We remember Neville’s incredible intellect and his intimidating command of language, an ability he did not hesitate to use to devastating effect in meeting debates. His prodigious writings remain a rich legacy of ideas spanning many decades and many topics including race and racism, language, guerrilla warfare and the “new South Africa”. The juxtaposition of a sharp, often cutting, intellect with incredible warmth

and humour was one of Neville’s trademarks, making him well loved by close comrades and political adversaries alike.

We remember the (very!) early morning study groups, the countless meetings during those intense years of transition in the early 1990s and the Sunday morning discussions of more recent times. His personal discipline, punctuality, attention to detail and careful preparation – reflected in beautifully handwritten notes – enriched these meetings. The ideas debated here deepened our work in civic struggles, in education, in health and in the environment. Neville steadfastly remained committed to the realisation of a radical transformation of our society as the only way to achieve our collective human dignity. on occasion he was known to refer to the biblical injunction to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and shelter the homeless when describing our socialist ideal, an injunction that captured our beliefs in the simplest of terms.

Comrade Neville had a great affection for children

huMAn DignitY OnLY thrOugh rADicAL trAnsfOrMAtiOn

A TRIBUTE To NEVIllE AlExANDER FRoM CoMRADES AND FRIENDS

oF THE WoRKER’S oRgANISATIoN FoR SoCIAlIST ACTIoN (Wosa)

inTernaTional Journal of soCialisT reneWal, 29 AUgUST 2012


and the youth. This translated in practice to his work in PRAESA and in the setting up of reading groups in langa and other townships. He took great joy in personally participating in these reading groups. His rich and multifaceted contributions within the education sphere ranged from advocating for free education to challenging curriculum content and fighting for mother-tongue-based learning. The Public Participation in Education Network (PPEN) was a culmination of much of this work.

At a time when the freedom fighters of yesterday are in the cul-de-sac of political office, when poverty and inequality continue to deepen and when a socialist alternative is difficult to conceptualise, Neville continued, through the Truth Conference and other processes, to give leadership and build new organisational forms. A tribute to his legacy would be for us as activists in the labour, women,

youth, environmental and education movements to continue to seek the Truth and build organisations that transform our society.

Throughout the decades of his political life, Neville was involved in many political formations: Apdusa, the Neum, the yu Chi Chan Club, NlF and Wosa. His eternal and indefatigable political optimism and his insightful and singular translations of the thoughts of Marx, lenin, Trotsky, luxemburg, Mandel and others into the South African reality infused all these movements.

His passing leaves a yawning gap in the political landscape of our country and a terrible sadness in the hearts of all those who knew and loved him.

Hamba Kahle, Comrade Neville.Aluta continua29 August 2012

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 23

Neville Alexander died on the morning of Monday 27 August 2012. He was surrounded by people he loved and who loved him,

his family and Karen Press, his life-long partner. He had fallen ill while he was on an extended academic visit to germany. Doctors there told him that he had a tumour in his left lung and recommended that he undergo treatment immediately. It was clear that he had been shaken by the news but was determined to continue doing what he had gone to germany to do, that is to work. He had a scheduled meeting with Mathias Brenzinger, a colleague who now works at the University of Cape Town, after his visit to the doctor who would tell him about the tumour. Mathias said that Neville insisted that the meeting should continue. He did decide, however, to return to Cape Town and begin his treatment here. He came back, optimistic about his return to health. He and Karen wrote several letters to his friends and comrades explaining what was happening. All through this he kept assuring

everybody that he realised what was happening but that he remained hopeful. Karen was to say: “Many of you have expressed concern as to Neville’s level of discomfort right now. He wants to reassure everyone that he is still being Neville – reading, doing a little work on the new book he had almost completed when he left germany [a collection of essays on the current state of South Africa], and building up his strength.” As we now all know, he took a turn for the worse on the evening of 26 August and died on the next day. The whole experience had played itself out in just over two months.

With Neville’s death, the end of an era approaches. He was one of a generation of extraordinary South Africans – IB Tabatha, Ben Kies, Kenny Jordaan, goolam gool, Archie Mafeje, Dick Dudley, Alie Fataar, Basil February, Dulcie September, Victor Wessels, Dullah omar and Dawood Parker – all of whom have gone. A small handful of these men and women are still alive and continuing to struggle in the Eastern

the cOnsciOusness Of being cOMPLeteLY AnD OnLY huMAn

A TRIBUTE To NEVIllE AlExANDER By CRAIN SoUDIEN

CAPE ToWN, 3 SEPTEMBER 2012


Cape, the northern parts of the country, in Namibia and of course here in Cape Town. The list consists, of course, largely of men, and says something of the gendered nature of the era, but they were, and those who still live, nonetheless, extraordinary people. They all emerged out of one of the most rigorous schools of consciousness-building the country has yet seen – the organisations, clubs and societies that existed in and around and in association with the left-wing movement in the country, the Non-European Unity Movement, the African People’s Democratic Union of South Africa, the Fourth International of South Africa and a number of other allied organisations. Every single one of these men and women was the beneficiary of, and in turn the co-producer, of a project that had as its objective the attainment of the full franchise and unconditional access for all to the human rights to which they were entitled.

And yet, even among these extraordinary men and women, Neville was exceptional. like his mentors and peers, Isaac Bongani Tabata in particular, he could hold forth and write with eloquence, elegance and clarity. History, however, was to bestow on him a special responsibility. Because of the confluence of events in his life and through his own personal character, he was able to build on what they had achieved. He was fortunate to receive a level of formal induction into the vocabularies and the content of a wide range of knowledge forms, of analytic approaches, of cultural and simple life experiences that made him exceptional.

He passed through the hands of his teachers at the Holy Rosary Convent in Cradock in the Eastern Cape who, with his mother and father, instructed him about the value of hard work. He came to the University of Cape Town in 1953 where he distinguished himself as a german scholar and came to learn about Fichte and Herder, the major scholars of culture, nation and identity. He would win a scholarship to Tübingen University where he would earn a PhD and so deepen his knowledge of german and European literature. And then he would land in prison and there, apart from writing one of the first critical pieces on the history of Namibia, through intense discussions with Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, he would claim his Africanness. Alongside of this, and in some ways even more formative, would have been his experience of living and working in the struggle alongside the deeply important figures mentioned above, in this struggle’s deliberately pedagogic spaces, in its social and sometimes even hedonistic opportunities for social and cultural release it allowed, and in the dramatic cut and thrust of its encounters with the daily struggle against hegemony. out of this he would emerge with an almost unrivalled understanding of the sociology of South Africa, of its national question and of the particular issues of race, class and language that gave this sociology its specific character. He would learn there about his own strengths and weaknesses, what he was capable of and what not, of what he could expect and should expect of others and not. He would acquire

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what one could call an ecological sense of himself and the world – that he actually depended on others and that others depended on him and that he was, therefore, never alone. That this was a feature of life that one should celebrate. He would learn, sometimes the hard way, the shortcomings of earlier phases of his ongoing induction into how to engage domination and he would constantly grow. He would learn to curb his temper, to modulate his ways with people, to refine his outlook, to cultivate his relationships with comrades and friends, and, through long reflection, that it was his special responsibility as a revolutionary to model the practice of thoughtfulness. learning, and never ceasing to learn, would become that which was to distinguish him.

What he learnt and how he came to exemplify his learning in his life is what we lose in the passing of Neville. He was, for all of us, a constant reminder of how in the most dire of circumstances or in those moments when one finds oneself in danger of being swept up in the seduction of personal ambition and material excess, one can remain fully human. He showed how – in the business of the everyday, in relationships, and in personal commitments – to maintain unwaveringly a practice of unqualified acceptance of the humanity of others. He had personally committed “race” suicide. What one looked like had absolutely no significance for him. “His people” was not a narrowly defined community based on the nonsense of “race”, ethnicity, language or religion. He had, by the time he became

a Marxist in the early 1950s, an almost instinctive contempt for class pretension. He never wore a tie. He only drove a Toyota Corolla. He lived modestly. The property he owned was without ostentation and designed entirely to be sufficient for the needs of his family and himself. When he came out of prison he embraced the full lesson the feminist movement sought to teach the world. Men and women were fully equal. He had achieved the consciousness of being completely and only human and never gave up the belief that everybody around him had the same capacity to shake off the encumbrances of the limiting histories that domination provided for them – that they could transcend the narrow identities of “Bantuism”, “Indianism”, “colouredness” and “whiteness” that hegemonic history sought to impose on them.

grieve we will. Neville’s loss we will feel each time we go through a Marikana or a “spear” incident, or as we struggle with how to engage with old and new forms of domination. But in talking about how he wished to be remembered he emphasised that he did not want to be monumentalised in any way. All he hoped for was that all of us would continue to struggle in our different ways for the full and unqualified right to dignity, equality and the possibility of fulfilling our human potential for everybody.


It is a remarkable historical coincidence that Neville Alexander was laid to rest on the very same day that some Marikana workers – most of whom were

also from the Eastern Cape – were buried. This tragic incident of the miners represents a

turning point in the nationalist politics of the entire southern African region.

Neville’s significant contribution to the anti-colonial struggle in Namibia is seldom acknowledged. yet the reality is that his revolutionary ideas have become even more pertinent to the debates on the national question in contemporary Namibia, the rest of Africa and beyond.

After his banning order was lifted in 1979, Neville immersed himself in research on Namibian history, which led to the publishing of three essays entitled: (1) Jakob Marengo and namibian history; (2) responses to German rule in namibia or the enigma of the Khowesin and (3) The namibian War of anti-Colonial resistance (1904–1907). These written pieces initially appeared in a left-wing publication, namibian review publications (June 1983), which was produced by Neville’s comrades Kenneth and ottilie Abrahams. An amazing anecdote is that Neville and ottilie drove 1 500 km to the grandson of Marengo, an audacious anti-colonial fighter, to establish the proper spelling of their surname.

It is Neville’s essay on the Namibian war of anti-colonial resistance, however, that has the greatest resonance for the national question today. His writing insisted that the anti-colonial resistance against german

occupation was a national effort that involved language groups from all over the country. This is an imperative theme for two reasons. Firstly, that a single language or ethnic group cannot claim credit for the entire anti-colonial resistance, i.e. against both german and South African occupations, and, secondly, that a sectarian political interpretation of the anti-colonial struggle is untenable. Such progressive arguments should form the basis for the resolution of the sensitive topic of german reparations as well as defining the national identity in post-colonial Namibia. The contemporary ruling elites, of course, have proven themselves incapable of leading this nation-building project. As intermediaries of global capitalism, the elites are preoccupied with state-building.

Nevertheless, the early discussions on nation-building, which occurred among the South African left, are not only relevant, as that was the milieu that shaped Neville’s consciousness, but also since Namibia was colonised by South Africa at the time. In April 1951, as example, the Unity Movement of South Africa maintained that “In a nation it is not necessary that the people forming it should have a common language or a common culture, common customs and traditions … All that is required for a people to be a nation is community of interests, love of their country, pride in being citizens of their country.” Although the latter part of the Unity Movement’s approach is too subjective, this demonstrates that the left rejected the classical Marxist definition of “nation” at that juncture.

However, that classical definition also confirmed

reVisiting the nAtiOnAL QuestiOn

A NAMIBIAN TRIBUTE To NEVIllE AlExANDER By SHAUN WHITTAKER

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unequivocally that “a nation is not a racial or tribal, but a historically constituted community of people”. This clarification is crucial in order not to confuse “nation” and “tribe”. At the same time, the definition did not mention social class, colonialism or imperialism, which represented another limitation. We certainly live in a historical era of imperialist domination, not a rising capitalism. And it is crucial to grapple with the matter of working-class leadership of the nation. This is why the national question would remain germane for as long as imperialism exploits us, because this system generates monstrous social inequality and consequently the ability to heighten fault lines among the majority, i.e. the working class. Amilcar Cabral averred that “so long as imperialism is in existence, an independent African state must be a liberation movement in power, or it will not be independent”.

A 1980’s document by the Cape Action league, of which Neville was the leading figure, called “A View on the National Question”, reasoned that, because there has not been a bourgeois democratic revolution in South Africa (or Namibia), racial, ethnic or tribal ideology would remain hegemonic and the perils of social fragmentation would be ever-present. In the absence of the ideology of individual freedom as found in so-called Western countries, the dangers of a Rwanda, Angola or yugoslavia would linger on in countries like Namibia and South Africa for the foreseeable future. So, it was (and is) in this context that the slogan of “one Azania, one Nation” or “one Namibia, one Nation” should be comprehended.

In an ordinary Country (2002), Neville puts the subject of the national question beyond doubt by declaring that: “… in the post-war African context, the word ‘nation’ is, and should continue to be used in order to denote the population that resides within a given independent state. This is not because the state and the nation are coterminous but because, in the post-colonial African context, the state, generally speaking, creates the conditions in which meaning (identity, and identities) is created. For this reason, I repeat the assertion that ‘community of language’ is not an ‘essential attribute’ of the nation. In other words, the crucial issue is the capacity of the citizens to

communicate with one another effortlessly, regardless of the language in which they do so” [emphasis in original] (p. 88).

Neville asserted (and devoted much of his life to developing) an essentially leninist position on the national and language questions. language is the key to resolving the national problem because it is the most flexible social marker. In the Namibian situation, for instance, serious consideration should be given to the harmonisation of indigenous languages such as Tswana and lozi, otjiherero and oshiwambo, and so on. The existing harmony between the Nama and Damara dialects confirms that this is a viable option. Further harmonisation of other languages/dialects would be a potentially fatal blow to an intensifying and troubling tribalism. In addition, the re-standardisation of Afrikaans could counter three separate tribally based identities in Namibia and would include the beautiful oranjerivier dialect that is so widely spoken in the country.

In the same way that racial labels were disputed during apartheid and colonialism, the national identity should also be challenged. Indeed, this proposal is not about being nationalist, but emanates from the desire to promote genuine national unity. The left is hardly oblivious to the dangers of chauvinism and xenophobia, or the need for internationalism, but the national question is a site of struggle that should be taken on primarily to prevent the disunity of the working people. In fact, we should even contest the traditions, customs and cultures of the people by spotlighting the revolutionary elements since these social manifestations are not frozen in time. Besides multilingualism, the left must promote a progressive multiculturalism as part of nation-building.

So, Comrade Neville, these were the kinds of ideas you inspired us with. you were such a warm and exceptional human being. And although we in Namibia deeply mourn your passing away, we find consolation in your towering legacy that will persist for many generations to come.

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TExTS By DR NEVIllE AlExANDER


In the context of this celebration of 10 years of the Foundation for Human Rights, I am tempted to pose the question slightly differently: Why is it that in spite of a constitution that was arrived at in a 20th century model of democratic bargaining and consensus building and in which are enshrined some of the noblest sentiments and insights concerning human rights, we are living in a situation where very few of those rights appear to be realised, or even realisable, in practice?

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sOuth AfricA tODAY the MOrAL resPOnsibiLitY

Of inteLLectuALs1

NEVIllE AlExANDER

it is the role of the arab intellectual today to articulate and defend the principles ofliberation and democracy at all costs, and to do so by impressing the leadership of the

arab nation with these realities and values. otherwise, our future – if we are to have oneat all – is extremely grim, and in a sense not worth defending.2

1. on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Foundation for Human Rights, it is appropriate to remind ourselves of the historic significance of the negotiated settlement that brought a formal end to the rule of the apartheid regime. Elsewhere, I have referred to this as the last act in the very gradual abolition of slavery. Above all, however, in constitutional terms, the settlement initiated the establishment of a liberal democracy in which civic, social and economic rights were entrenched. As one who has spent my entire adult life in the cause of the urban and rural poor of this country and beyond, I am, naturally, especially interested in the realisation and entrenchment of those rights that are relevant to them, such as the right to work, the right to form trade unions, the right to strike, the right to maternity leave, the right to use the language of one’s choice; in short, all those rights that potentially improve and secure the wellbeing of the oppressed and exploited majority. This is, to repeat the point, a momentous achievement of the new South Africa. However, as Edward Said’s words, cited in the epigraph, make abundantly clear, we would be failing in our duty as organic intellectuals of the working classes, were we to keep quiet about the very real dangers that are engulfing us in South Africa today.

2. The moral crisis of the elite in the new South Africa has been the subject of much recent media

1 Speaker’s notes for lecture delivered at the 10th anniversary celebration of the Foundation for Human Rights in Pretoria, 29 November 2006. An earlier version of this talk was delivered at the UCT School of Medicine in october 2006.

2 Edward Said. 1995. on Nelson Mandela and others. The politics of dispossession. The struggle for palestinian self-determination 1969–1994. london: Vintage. (p. 371).


attention, and deservedly so. All of a sudden, examples of corruption, profligate spending of public money for the personal edification of political and other prominent public figures, incredible sexism, outright theft and fraud, and even murder and assassination, apparently linked to somehow shady business deals, among many other things, are reaching the headlines and front pages of electronic and print media on a daily basis. In this connection, the tragicomic goings-on around the person of Mr Jacob Zuma are, not to put too fine a point on it, the tip of a melting iceberg. Within the circles of the elite itself, the question about the kinds of role models that a society that is supposedly committed to democracy, equality, freedom and, as incongruous as it already sounds today, to solidarity, should be projecting and preferring. The tidal wave of violent crime and abuse, which is the direct consequence of the structural inequality and the mental structures that characterise post-apartheid South Africa, demands of the radical intelligentsia that we go into emergency mode. And, while we have to consider seriously the pertinent effects of the legacy of colonialism and apartheid in this context, it is time that we stop justifying our intellectual timidity and lack of historical imagination with this threadbare mantra.

3. Ever more frequently, those of us who fought consciously and often at great personal cost for the liberation of South Africa from the shackles of apartheid and capitalism are left asking ourselves whether this is the kind of society we had in mind when, like Faust in Scene 2 of goethe’s enduring drama, we dreamt of a country where we would be able to exclaim triumphantly: Hier bin ich Mensch, hier darf ich’s sein! Here I am man, here I can be it!

4. In the context of this celebration of 10 years of the Foundation for Human Rights, I am tempted to pose the question slightly differently: Why is it that in spite of a constitution that was arrived at in a 20th century model of democratic bargaining and consensus building and in which are enshrined some of the noblest sentiments and insights concerning human rights, we are living in a situation where very few of those rights appear to be realised, or even realisable, in practice?

5. Why single out the elite, and the intellectuals in particular, for special scrutiny? Is it not true that a people gets the government it deserves? Did the vast majority of the people not choose this government in a free and fair election? Are we not all to blame? The short answer to these questions is the simple word: leadership. Because it is impossible to analyse this issue adequately in the space of a short talk, I shall present no more than the outline of what I consider to be essential social research.

6. I wish to emphasise that this is not a critique of “the government”. That would be a different kind of exercise. It is, instead, a critique of and a challenge to South Africa’s elite, specifically the intelligentsia.

7. Elites are the inevitable result of asymmetrical power relations, which are themselves the consequence of historically evolved class societies. Elites are not necessarily elitist. University students, for example, who in all societies continue to be among the privileged few – hence an elite – don’t have to behave in an elitist manner. Elitism is an aspect of the ideology of a ruling class that has become a class-for-itself, i.e., one that consciously acts on the assumption that if all people did as its members do, they would be doing the right thing. In the era of capitalism, it is an ideology that justifies privilege and inequality in terms of merit based on individual competition, regardless of how and why some of the individuals are endowed with a head start while others are hobbled by handicaps at the starting blocks. Because capitalism is an integrated world system, this phenomenon is global in scope. It

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shapes the consciousness of all modern elites. oscar lafontaine, one of the leaders of the german Party of the left, in a recent critique of the dominant neoliberal ideology,3 cites a statement by the german Chancellor, Angela Merkel, to the effect that the efficiency and productivity of the strong and powerful is the driving force of democracy and freedom. According to her, more freedom is dependent on “us” having many more strong and powerful people so that they can pull everyone else along with them and, thus, make available more to the weaker ones. “We” need a country where performance is the heart of the system and if “we” have the stomach for performance, then we should also have the stomach for more and ever more performance. To this, the left social democrat lafontaine responds with words that capture exactly the point I wish to make:

The fact that the weak and the strong ones go to the starting blocks endowed with very unequal skills, wealth and social capital is not mentioned in this way of seeing the matter. To take account of this would entail recognition of the right to freedom and to equality of opportunity of every individual. We see, therefore, that the neoliberal idea of freedom represents a regression to the prevailing ethos before the era of the French Enlightenment when it was already clear that it is law that establishes equality between the weak and the strong and that freedom without law is tantamount to oppression. Neoliberalism does not believe in strengthening the weak and promoting equality of opportunity. Their wellbeing is, instead, supposed to depend on the “generosity” and the “uplifting example” of the “stronger ones”. The weak are social ballast, able to relate to the strong only as dependants and beggars.

8. There are too many issues to be dealt with in the time at our disposal. Hence, I shall discuss a few of those I consider to be crucial to understanding and, more important, to acting towards the creation of a counter current to that which seems to be prevalent at the moment.

a. The discussion about whether or not the ANC has become an “ordinary” political party as opposed to a nationalist or even a quasi-socialist movement should be conducted in terms of whether the driving force of that organisation and of the millions it represents is constituted by “passion” or by “interests”. Edward Said, taking up a strand of social analysis originally suggested by Albert Hirschman in an attempt to explain why the Renaissance curiosity and the imaginative exploratory prowess of the Early Modern Europeans degenerated into the cynical expansion of capitalism that it became concluded that it boiled down to “the argument that human passion should give way to interests as a method of governing the world”.4 once this pattern is established, the mind-set of those who have to co-ordinate and manage the system changes fundamentally and the continuities with the past weigh much

3 Privatisierung bringt keine Freiheit. Die Neoliberale Politik beschaedigt das gemeinwesen. frankfurter rundschau, 23 September 2006.

4 Edward Said. 1994. Culture and imperialism. london: Vintage. (p.225).


more heavily than the discontinuities. To put it differently, in our specific case, the fact that there was no social revolution in the early 1990s means that the capitalist class continues to hold all the strategic positions and the new cohort of managers of the system (to use a traditional Marxist postulate) have had to adapt their ways of seeing and thinking about things. There is no doubt about this. only vested interest prevents one from registering this phenomenon as fact.

b. Capital is amoral. Ardent as well as “reluctant” racists of yesteryear have all become convinced “non-racialists” bound to all South Africans under the “united colours of capitalism”5 in an egregious atmosphere of Rainbow nationalism. The same class of people, often the very same individuals, who funded Verwoerd, Vorster and Botha are funding the present regime. The latter has facilitated the expansion of South African capital into the African hinterland in ways of which the likes of Cecil John Rhodes or Ernest oppenheimer could only dream. Be that as it may: it is simply foolish to think that it could have been otherwise. In this connection, it is pertinent to point out that the strategy of Black Economic Empowerment – broad-based or narrow is immaterial – is no more than smoke and mirrors, political theatre on the stage of the national economy. The only way that erstwhile Marxist revolutionaries in the liberation movement can justify their support and even enthusiastic promotion of these developments is by chanting the no longer convincing mantra: There is no alternative! Hence, we need to examine this particular mystification and abdication of intellectual responsibility.

c. To begin with, this was never true. Human beings always have alternatives. otherwise, they would not be human beings. In the extreme case, the alternative is death. But it is unnecessary to be melodramatic. In our case, as in the case of so many other countries in the South, the alternative to the neoliberal hegemony of the past three decades has been, and continues to be, the long march. The very nature of the capitalist system guarantees not that it will collapse of its own accord, because wars and other forms of wanton destruction ensure that it can always be “resilient” – hence the “success” in the Middle East of Bush and of the military-industrial complex behind him – but that it will reach the point when the wretched of the Earth, under the leadership of organised masses of productive workers, will bring it to a dead halt in one country after another. This is identifiably the master narrative of classical Marxism and of other brands of socialist thought. Whether or not it is still feasible after the collapse of the USSR and other state socialist entities after 1989 is irrelevant. The alliance of historical agents that will initiate the collapse of

5 Heribert Adam. 1995. The politics of ethnic identity: tentative theoretical and comparative conclusions from the South African case. Paper presented at the World Congress of Sociology RC 05. Bielefeld, germany, 18-24 July 1994. Unpublished mimeo.

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the system will in all likelihood look very different from that which we had had in mind even a few years ago. The important point is that the alternative to promoting the neoliberal hegemony is to undermine the capitalist system by strengthening democracy. In other words, there is a profound truth in Marx’s aphorism that democracy as we know it is nothing else than the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. I refer you again to the quote from lafontaine. It is the inadequacy and the inconsistency inherent in bourgeois notions of freedom and democracy that have to be exposed by the intelligentsia. This is our continuing revolutionary task and our challenge, one that is particularly relevant to organisations such as the Foundation for Human Rights.

d. I will not waste our time by discussing the vulgarity and the philistinism that characterise the behaviour of so many of the new elite as described in media reports and as one can observe at any gathering of these people. Bishop Tutu and other professional custodians of our moral wellbeing have albeit with very little success done this eloquently enough. More important are questions such as whether – even in the context of a liberal democracy – for example, it is necessary to perpetuate racial identities, the cynical, almost psychopathic disregard for ordinary human fellow – feeling that is supposed to lie at the heart of our vaunted “African humanism” of ubuntu, or, at a more mundane level, the utterly stupid custom of continuing to dress ourselves in the inappropriate garments that evolved in a remote European climate. (I am particularly irritated by the gowns and hoods that South African universities and even preschools think to be de rigueur!)

e. given the global paradigms within which we are willy-nilly operating and the imperatives of historical redress, it is one of the most tragic facts of post-apartheid South Africa that we have comprehensively fooled ourselves into believing that because we have “black” skins, we are automatically “good people”. This is the reason why all too often we have incompetent, inexperienced people appointed to positions that are way above their actual capacity at the time. This is a wrong and thoughtless, short-term response to the legacy of colonial and apartheid racism. There are other ways of dealing with this issue and with related issues of education and training. To fool ourselves, as we have also done in respect of the HIV/Aids challenge, is the worst possible redress. We are going to pay bitterly in terms of sociopsychological and economic damage for this unnecessary strategy. Most instructive in this regard is the story of Khanya College, which was founded on, among other things, the fact that Bantu and other forms of apartheid education for black people, had to be recognised as having actually disadvantaged our children, the young activists of the 1980s, given the hegemonic educational mindsets at the time. Denialism in all dimensions of our society, including, devastatingly – until very recently – that of crime, is the beginning of a disaster waiting to happen.


f. The quality of all our lives has been ruined by the understandable paranoia that the ubiquity of violent crime in a thousand different forms has brought with it. This crime wave, as we see in comparable situations in countries like Russia, is one of the results of the democratic opening up of the apartheid society, where it had been confined to the locations and the Bantustans, unseen by the inhabitants of the “leafy suburbs”. It is nonetheless difficult to believe that a party that had prided itself for some five years in the early 1990s that it was “preparing to govern” had somehow not realised that this would be one of the immediate challenges to continuing bourgeois stability in the new South Africa. Now it is imperative, for all the best imaginable reasons, including especially the protection and realisation in practice of our constitutional and natural rights to dignity and safety, that decisive action be taken, regardless of how such action will affect the popularity and the voting profile in future elections of any parliamentary party. otherwise, the future of our children will be mortgaged to a kind of Bacchic dystopia as portrayed in Euripides’s ancient play. Already, we are witness to the brazen and systematic disregard for the law and the orderly behaviour that is the hallmark and the precondition of a civilised society. And, this is the real point, it is not just the crazed taxi drivers who are possessed by this Bacchanalian spirit.

g. We are building a new historical community in South Africa. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whatever its virtues and positive legacies – I have referred to these in my book an ordinary Country – could not establish the social basis for this new community. Reconciliation and forgiveness between two individuals or even small groups of people, such as families, are possible and often happen. Social reconciliation under conditions of cruel inequality such as we have in South Africa is not only impossible, it is also a lie that has to be exposed. We will have to work very hard at bringing about social cohesion and national unity. How and for what purposes such a project should be undertaken is too big a subject to enter into here. Suffice it to say that unless the gini coefficient is tackled seriously, all talk of social cohesion and national unity is so much nonsense. The implications of this apparently simple and apodeictic statement are profound. As profound, I am bold enough to say, as the Benedictine demolition of limbo as a site of sterile happiness for the luckless many who were consigned to it until a few weeks ago.

h. What should we do? Is there a more or less clear road map to a different destination than the one on which we seem to be hell-bent at the moment? The short answer is yES! There is, as this statement implies, a very long answer, almost as long as the long march, but that is precisely what I meant at the beginning of this talk when I referred to the social research that awaits those of us who are not satisfied to be towed along by

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the Bacchanalian drivers of the neoliberal tow-trucks currently controlled and deployed by President Thabo Mbeki and his colleagues. It has always been the task of the intelligentsia to speak out and to indicate what the alternatives are. In sum, I believe that we have to transform our uhuru into ubuntu.6 We have to find our way back to the passion and the values of freedom, equality and solidarity that drove us to struggle against the apartheid system. We have to get back to the modesty and the generosity of spirit that inspired most of us then. Besides ensuring that democratic legislation in favour of the poor and the oppressed strata of our new South Africa is put on the statute book and implemented efficiently, we have to go back to the communities and to the grassroots in all their different forms. We have to rebuild our neighbourhoods on the basis of mutual trust and mutual aid, sharing our resources and our skills, by gradually establishing co-operative forms of production, distribution and exchange until these reach all levels of the economy. It is not true that human beings, including black-skinned human beings, are necessarily good or necessarily bad. We have to insist that we want to create the kind of society in which, as the late Ernest Mandel said in a memorable speech on the campus of the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town in 1992, the biblical simplicity of the injunction of the Sermon on the Mount becomes the practical programme of socialism.

FEED THE HUNgRy

CloTHE THE NAKED

HoUSE THE HoMElESS

VISIT THE SICK

CARE FoR THE olD, THE yoUNg AND THE WEAK

Can we do this in South Africa today?

6 It is one of the most hopeful signs of the intellectual renaissance that is beginning to stir on the margins of our society that, besides those of us who are intent on and serious about finding a new language for and a new approach to adapting the fundamental insights of historical materialism to the changes in the world capitalist system, there are many initiatives from within the system itself that are beginning to ask the right questions about alternatives to the barbarism of real capitalism as it becomes manifest in neoliberal practice, structured in line with the requirements of the primacy of finance capital. Searching analyses of the consumerist model and its manipulation and exploitation of desire – as opposed to the determining effects of the principle of sufficiency – along the lines of the French economists and philosophers, André gorz and Bernard Stiegler, such as those by Johann Roussouw in recent issues of die Vrye afrikaan as well as the numerous stimulating articles by Margaret legum and other exponents of the South African New Economics (Sane) Network, in which the possibility of creating model enclaves based on production and exchange for use rather than for maximising profit, point the way towards re-establishing the credibility and the viability of economic and systemic alternatives that transcend the existing system. For, unless we are able to do this, it will be virtually impossible to find the Archimedean leverage that will ultimately remove the mental blockages by which the system maintains itself.

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I

In her historical novel, a place of Greater safety, which is played out against the backdrop of the great French Revolution through an illuminating

character analysis of three of that revolution’s most prominent personalities, namely, Maximilien Robespierre, georges-Jacques Danton and Camile Desmoulins, Hilary Mantel imagines the following conversation between lucile Desmoulins and Danton: So has the Revolution a philosophy, lucile

wanted to know, has it a future? She dared not ask Robespierre, or he would lecture her for the afternoon on the general Will: or Camile, for fear of a thoughtful and coherent two hours on the development of the Roman republic. So she asked Danton. “oh, I think it has a philosophy”, he said seriously. “grab what you can, and get out while the going’s good.” 1

* The 4th Strini Moodley Annual Memorial lecture, held at the University of KwaZulu-Natal on 13 May 2010.

1 Hilary Mantel, 1992. a place of Greater safety. Macmillan.

This sentiment, I make bold to say, puts in the bluntest possible way the dominant sense of disillusionment and disbelief that most middle-class South Africans have when they feel compelled to “whine” and complain about where we appear to have landed in post-apartheid South Africa. All the heady hopes even those who were not in or of the Congress Alliance had in 1994 and 1995 seem to have turned into ash. There are few thinking South Africans today who would be prepared to say that they are happy with how things have turned out.

Because the title of my talk is bound to raise all kinds of expectations about its content, it is essential that I state clearly at the outset that I shall not wander off again into the well-trodden paths that are supposed to bring the excited novice to an understanding of the relationship between the “bourgeois democratic” and the “socialist” revolutions or, even more superiorly to the realisation that “the revolution” is permanent and that the first necessarily “grows over” into the second under the conditions that obtain in semi-industrialised or newly industrialising countries. These debates are as relevant today as they were at the beginning of the past century. I do not for one second wish to deny the importance of getting conceptual and strategic

sOuth AfricA: An unfinisheD reVOLutiOn?*

NEVIllE AlExANDER


clarity in this domain. For, without such clarity, we do no more than tap about in the dark in the hope of finding by chance a route out of the suffocating maze of the world capitalist system. I shall, however, have occasion to refer to this subject briefly when I discuss the illusion of the “National Democratic Revolution”. In the Marxist paradigm, the word “revolution” has very precise meanings. Most often, it is used to refer to a “social revolution”, i.e., the displacement of the rule of one class by that of another, usually by violent means, i.e., in the course of a civil war or an armed struggle2. Thus, for example, the great French Revolution formally put an end to the rule of the feudal nobility and the clergy in France and, later, in the rest of Western Europe, and the great october Revolution ended the rule of the Tsarist aristocracy and of the incipient Russian bourgeoisie. It ought to be clear to everyone here tonight that, in South Africa, we have not, in this very precise sense, experienced a social revolution. If anything, the post-apartheid state is more capitalist than its apartheid parent. To deny the continuity between the apartheid capitalist state and the post-apartheid capitalist state, as some people actually do, is a futile and quixotic exercise.

A “political revolution”, in this context, refers to what we would nowadays term “regime change”. That is to say, certain fundamental changes in the form of rule and of the institutions of the state machine are brought about without, however, a concomitant change in the fundamental power relations at the level of the economy and of the management of the repressive apparatuses of the state. In my view, what we have experienced in South Africa during the past two decades is precisely such a political revolution. For reasons of focus, I shall refer only briefly to the third social dimension, i.e., the “cultural revolution”, important though it is to grasp the integral but intricate relationship between these three aspects of any revolution.

2 In the language of Marxist theory, revolutions become inevitable when the relations of production are outstripped by the development of the productive forces in a given social formation.

Why and how the regime change came about is not the focus of my address this evening either. There have been many scholarly analyses, biographies of significant actors as well as insightful journalistic articles and documentaries on the transition from apartheid to post-apartheid South Africa. Read together, these provide us with a range of perspectives, which help us to make sense of the often bewildering events of the period. Instead, I want to talk about the fact that most South Africans, certainly most oppressed and exploited South Africans, feel that they have been, if not betrayed, then certainly misled. And, because I do not believe that political action is a monopoly of so-called politicians, I want to talk about what we can do in order to get out of the state of shock into which we have been driven. I want to talk about what we can do to find again that vision of a different South Africa that inspired all of us in one way or another regardless of what political tendency we belonged to at the time. For I believe that if, through discussion and practical action, we can again visualise that other South Africa, we will very soon put behind us the barbaric and vulgar universe in which we are forced to try to survive with dignity today.

let me also make it clear that, in spite of the implication in its title, I have no idea what “the finished revolution” would have looked like or what it will look like. Revolutions, I think, are never completed. Radical social transformation, even when it is imperceptible in the here and now, is a continuous and complex process. But, even though this is an essential part of the meaning of revolution, this objective process has to be articulated in concrete programmes and strategies for any kind of revolution to eventuate. The success or failure, the “completeness” or otherwise of the revolution we speak of in South Africa can only be measured against the extent to which, roughly, the set of ideas and programmatic demands that have guided all sections of the national liberation movement since the axial period, 1928–1945 approximately, and which were refined and differentiated according to the ideological predispositions and class position of

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 41

the different tendencies within the broad movement,3 were realised in the course of the 80 years that have elapsed since then. Without reducing the complexity of contemporary South African history to some simplistic formula, I believe one can say without any distortion that the discourses of the national liberation movement were characterised by the intersection of nationalist, liberal-democratic and broadly socialist paradigms and that the particularity of one or other political tendency was determined by the ways in which its exponents blended or interpreted these three discursive strategies, each of which, of course, derived from and reinforced specific class interests, whether or not the social actors involved were conscious of these.

II

As the main burden of my talk concerns the developments after 1994, it seems to me most realistic and, in an important sense, also fair to take as the point of departure for my analysis the general demands of the Freedom Charter, which has guided the political strategy and tactics of the Congress Movement since 1955. given the decision to negotiate a deal with the apartheid regime rather than become entangled in a 100-years war, such as that raging in Palestine,4 the leadership of the Congress Alliance had to make definite decisions about which of the demands of the Charter could be put on the back burner, as it were, in order to make a deal acceptable to the economic and political elites of the old regime. Today, it is obvious to all who wish to look that the fundamental concession was made with the agreement not to touch the existing property relations except for the virtually unimplementable provisions about land restitution and the clauses referring to affirmative action. To put it differently, these agreements deliberately restricted the horizon of the “revolution” to the conditions that

3 My book, one azania, one nation. The national Question in south africa, published pseudonymously in 1979, was one of the first attempts to deal with this period comprehensively.

4 This is the real meaning of Nelson Mandela’s biographical reference to how he came to his crucial decision to steer the ANC towards accepting the need to negotiate. (See long Walk to freedom, p. 513-515)

prevail in any bourgeois democracy. This means that the middle-class leadership of the Congress Movement was albeit “temporarily” in effect abandoning their pro-poor and pro-proletarian comrades and the mass of its working-class members and supporters. This is where the theory of the “National Democratic Revolution” was called upon to play a useful mediating role. At the crucial moment, i.e., when the actual concessions were being made, the NDR found its programmatic expression in the now forgotten “Reconstruction and Development Programme” (RDP). The simple, clear language of former president Nelson Mandela’s version of it is how most of the oppressed and exploited masses understood the promises made by the leadership in the early 1990s:

The ANC drafted a 150-page document known as the Reconstruction and Development Programme, which outlined our plan to create jobs through public works; to build a million new houses with electricity and flush toilets; to extend primary health care and provide ten years of free education to all South Africans; to redistribute land through a land claims court; and to end the value-added tax on basic foodstuffs. We were also committed to extensive affirmative action measures in both the private and public sectors. This document was translated into a simpler manifesto called “A Better life for All”, which in turn became the ANC’s campaign slogan.5

Mandela goes on to emphasise that he regularly reminded his audiences that “freedom” would not translate into some kind of Cinderella-like overnight change into prosperity. In essence, he was truthfully warning his people that now the class struggle would become brutal and unrelenting. Unlike some of his left-wing comrades, he did not try to sell this straightforward fact as a so-called “National Democratic Revolution”.

But, before I expand on this matter, let me say a few words about individual psychology and shifts of social

5 Nelson Mandela. 1995. long walk to freedom. little Brown & Co. p.605.


or class positions. I should like to phrase this as simply and authentically as possible, because it is at this level that resentment and hostility are engendered when one criticises a movement, such as the Congress Movement, that has become so powerful and hegemonic in South Africa. I do not doubt for one minute that most, if not all, members of that movement sincerely believed in the ringing trumpet tones of the Charter: The people shall govern; There shall be houses, security and comfort, and so forth. It is probable even that many, but certainly not the majority, of the leaders considered that the deviations from the trajectory the Charter seemed to suggest, i.e., away from the race-based capitalism of more than 100 years towards some kind of African socialist or at least social democratic future, were no more than tactical adjustments necessitated by the realities of the political terrain at the end of the 20th century after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is impossible to guess at how each of the prominent individuals actually came to terms with the psychological dissonance caused by the need, as they saw it, to carry out one or more ideological somersaults. Not all of them were as public and as forthright as Mandela himself, especially in his famous U-turn with respect to nationalisation as the policy of the ANC. The biographies of many of the actors undoubtedly provide some insight into this matter. All I wish to stress here is that any blanket statement about “sell-out” and “betrayal” could only be made at the most general and abstract level against the background of the avowed previous ideological or programmatic positions of the individuals or groups of people concerned.6

I want to say as clearly as possible that, apart from incorrigible revolutionary socialists, such as myself and many others who were routinely maligned as “ultra-leftists” or even more anachronistically as “Trotskyites”, the bourgeoisie and a few of the leaders of the Congress Alliance were clear that the 1993-94 agreements were in essence about stabilising the capitalist state and system in South Africa and creating the conditions

6 In the cut and thrust of politics this language is taken for granted, but when one sets out to explain a historical phenomenon a different discourse is essential.

for its expansion as a profitable venture. Examples of this understanding are today easily accessible even though they are, for obvious reasons, condemned as prejudiced, false, malignant and even “unpatriotic” by those who are now the powers that be. A few of the more significant statements will suffice to make the point. As early as 24 April 1991, almost 20 years ago, John Carlin, the South Africa correspondent of The independent, wrote:

Mr. Mandela and the other “moderates” in the ANC leadership […] believed that the government and the ANC would be equal partners in the voyage to the “New South Africa”, that apartheid would go and they, as the natural majority party, would glide into power … In one sense [that] trust was not misplaced. Mr. de Klerk will remove apartheid from the statute books. […]. But this was never the issue; he knew from the day he came to power that this was what had to be done. The real issue was to retain power, to perpetuate white privilege and the economic status quo after apartheid had gone.7

of course, De Klerk also miscalculated on the dynamics of the negotiations but the essential point remains true. Today, thanks particularly to Professor Sampie Terreblanche’s summary of the hidden negotiations about the economic aspects of the negotiated settlement, we know that there was no innocence on the side of the leadership of the ANC and of prominent leaders of Cosatu and the South African Communist Party (SACP), in spite of disagreements on policy, which fact became evident most dramatically with the eventual imposition of the policy of gEAR. Chapters three and four of Terreblanche’s book ought to be compulsory reading for any remaining doubting Thomases in the former liberation movement. We cannot thread our way through the intricacies of the debates and the manoeuvres that led to the shifts in the approach of the ANC leadership. The following

7 Cited in McKinley, Dale T. 1997. The anC and the liberation struggle. A Critical Political Biography. p. 122

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 43

statement gives a crystal clear picture of what actually happened:

At stake was not only the economic policy of a democratically elected government but also the nature of South Africa’s future economic system. given that South Africa was the most developed country in Africa, the stakes were extremely high, and the negotiations were strategically hugely important for the corporate sector. For almost 20 years all the joint attempts of the corporate sector and the NP government to find a new accumulation strategy had been unsuccessful. After almost 20 years of prolonged stagflation, the latter was desperate to convince the core leaders of the democratic movement what the economic ideology and economic system in a democratic South Africa should be. The strategy on which the corporate sector and the ANC agreed during the informal negotiations in 1993 can be described as the fourth phase of the AAC-led [Anglo-American Corporation] search for a new accumulation strategy. […] The main characteristic of every phase of the AAC-led search for a new accumulation strategy was that the supreme goal of economic policy should be to attain a high economic growth rate, and that all other objectives should be subordinated to this. By convincing ANC leaders to accept the AAC’s approach, the corporate sector in effect persuaded – or forced – the ANC to move away from its traditional priority, namely to uplift the impoverished black majority socially and economically.8

Although it is tempting to dwell on the details of this shift, I think the essentials are clear enough. There ought to be no doubt in anyone’s mind after a close reading of this text that, and why, the bourgeoisie, the self-same capitalist class of yesterday, is in command of all the strategic positions, no matter what the

8 Terreblanche, Sampie. 2002. a history of inequality in south africa 1652–2002. pp. 95-96

“democratic” posturing of the politicians might be. And, although it would be an oversimplification to maintain that the ANC at the beginning of the 21st century has become a party of the capitalist class, it ought to be equally clear that the bloodletting and the cruel battles that are currently tearing the organisation apart are precisely about how soon it will become such a party rather than the supposed broad church as which it continues to be marketed by the bureaucratic leadership. The sketch I have given, without any attempt on my part to join all the dots, does, I think, explain to a large extent why we have been catapulted into the ugly world of modern-day capitalist barbarism with its devastating features of high and growing unemployment, increasing social inequality, horrific violent crime, racist and xenophobic dog-eat-dog conflicts, among many other things. This is very far from the almost utopian revolutionary euphoria with which most South Africans, unaware of what had been agreed upon in the devilish details of the negotiation process, had so proudly cast their votes on 27-28 April 1994.

I cannot resist the temptation to cite one of my favourite texts in order to illuminate the dilemma of the governing party. President Jacob Zuma and his team are reaping the bitter fruits of the negotiated settlement. They find themselves in the tragic situation described by Friedrich Engels in the memorable paragraph in the peasant War in Germany:

The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents, and for the realization of the measures which that domination implies. […]. Thus he necessarily finds himself in an unsolvable dilemma. What he can do contradicts all his previous actions, principles, and the immediate interests of his party, and what he ought to do cannot be done. In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whose domination the movement is then ripe. In the interests of the movement he is compelled to advance the


interests of an alien class, and to feed his own class with phrases and promises, and with the asseveration [solemn assertion] that the interests of that alien class are its own interests. Whoever is put into this awkward position is irrevocably lost.9

III

Enter the National Democratic Revolution, i.e., the smoke and mirrors of the so-called left in the Congress Alliance. let me say it very clearly: the new South Africa has brought about fundamental changes in the form of rule and in the institutional furniture of the capitalist state. The realm of freedom has been expanded beyond anything that most people imagined in the 1960s, and millions of people have been lifted out of abject pauperism to some level of human dignity. The struggle has not been in vain in any sense of the term. But, the struggle continues. After 1994, and especially after 1996, it is no longer a struggle for national liberation. It is a class struggle “pure and simple” or, in good South African English: finish and klaar. The inverted commas are necessary because one cannot discard overnight the birthmarks that are imprinted on the new body politic by the old order. Social inequality continues to be reproduced objectively largely as racial inequality in spite of the continued growth of the “black” middle class. Racial prejudice, inequalities justified on alleged cultural, linguistic, ethnic or nationality differences, all the things that defaced colonial-apartheid South Africa, persist even if in attenuated forms. They will require decades, perhaps centuries, to become completely irrelevant.

The attempt to frame the class struggles in which we are now engaged in terms of the so-called NDR is no more than tilting at windmills. To put it bluntly: for the leadership of this NDR to be an integral part of a bourgeois government while pretending to conduct a revolutionary struggle against the capitalist system

9 Friedrich Engels. 1850 German peasant’s War. International Publishers

is the merest political buffoonery. Workers and other poor people can be got to mouth and repeat all the heroic phrases that are supposed to give expression to the demands and aspirations of this “revolution” but at some point they will realise that they are being sold a dummy. What is at issue here is not the value or the sociohistorical impact of the day-to-day struggles being waged by the working class and other strata of the urban and the rural poor. That does not depend on the misleading discourses of the NDR that are supposed to guide their struggles. The real danger is that the goal, the destination, of these struggles is being described and presented in terms that necessarily limit the horizons of the class struggle to the bourgeois universe. Strategically, this can only lead to the consolidation of the social democratisation of the workers’ movement in South Africa, a process that began with the tying of the main trade union federation to the goals and modalities of the Congress Alliance in the mid-1980s. In doing so, a vital part of the workers’ movement was agreeing to the leadership of the liberation movement by the nationalists, as opposed to the socialists. The SACP had gone even further by allowing, indeed compelling, its members to become card-carrying members of the ANC. Things can change, of course, but, as I see it, the SACP is currently not an independent political formation.

Theoretically, we are once again faced with a concept of the state that makes any movement beyond capitalism inconceivable. I have neither the time nor the inclination to enter into this particular debate in any detail in this address. Suffice it to say that the question can be formulated quite clearly in terms that Rosa luxemburg first made famous in her essay on reform or revolution, published in 1900, i.e., 110 years ago. In her own words:

[…] [People] who pronounce themselves in favor of the method of legislative reform in place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for surface

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 45


modification of the old society. If we follow the political conceptions of revisionism, we arrive at the same conclusion that is reached when we follow the economic theories of revisionism. our program becomes not the realization of socialism, but the reform of capitalism; not the suppression of the system of wage labor, but the diminution of exploitation, that is, the suppression of the abuses of capitalism instead of the suppression of capitalism itself.10

Another way of putting this is the proposition that, in gramscian terms, the class struggle gets stuck, as it were, in a war of position in the belief that these manoeuvres in themselves constitute a transformation of the capitalist state and society into a socialist society and a workers’ state.11 This, as I see it, is the tendency of much that is put forward as the programme of the NDR, quite apart from the fundamental sleight of hand perpetrated by those who are busy stabilising the capitalist system in South Africa while they pontificate at the same time about the “fundamental transformation” of our society. By way of example, I refer to the resolutions of the 1997 Cosatu national conference, all of which remain on the agenda in 2010:

• Building a robust anti-capitalism, which means a relentless criticism of capitalism; building working class hegemony in many areas such as sport, culture, values, the media and most importantly (sic), in politics; and tirelessly upholding a vision of full equality (and not just constitutional equality), including gender equality;

• Rolling back the market – water, education, shelter, healthcare are basic human rights, not commodities. Everyone should have a right to these things, regardless of whether they can afford them. We should not allow the market to dominate in meeting the basic needs of people;

• Transforming the state – a powerful public

10 Rosa luxemburg. 1900. reform or revolution. pp. 49-50

11 See Daniel Bensaid. revolutionary strategy Today. International Institute for Research and Education. Number 4. 1987. p. 30

sector is a crucial component of socialism, but should not be big for its own sake. our vision is that it should be developmental and facilitate participation and consultation, it should be more responsive and accountable, and the higher, bureaucratic echelons should be reduced;

• Advancing and experimenting with other, non-capitalist forms of ownership such as co-operatives and “social capital” (eg. workers’ pension and provident funds);

• Transforming how work is organised and managed – toward worker control and worker self-management. The actual conditions of the workplace should change, so as to empower working people; and

• Strengthening worker organization – in addition to trade unions, there are other organizations in which workers are active, and these should be part of a socialist programme.12

Though few left-wing people will disagree with any of this, except for the giveaway phrase about “transforming the state”, it is clear that these objectives are put forward in the mode of Bernsteinian revisionism and that, as a consequence, they can at best lead to what I have already referred to as the consolidation of social democracy in the workers’ movement. The entire strategy depends on a notion of the state as being essentially neutral.13 The final disillusionment will come, of course, when the repressive apparatuses of the state, instead of supporting the exploited classes and other oppressed strata, turn their weapons on the masses to protect the interests of the capitalist class. The response of police personnel to many of the so-called service delivery protests prefigures what I am saying here.

12 Building socialism now: preparing for the new Millennium. 1999.Cosatu/SACP publication. p. 68

13 I cannot take up the question of the so-called developmental state here but my critique of that fashionable concept would proceed along similar lines.

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 47

IV

on the other hand, this is not an inevitable outcome, as the history of every successful revolution attests to, and we are probably decades away from any such scenario at this moment. However, not to postulate consistently and as a matter of daily practical political education the need to end the rule of the local and international capitalist class, as eccentric as that may appear to be at present, is to disarm the working class and its allies ideologically before the decisive battles are fought.14

So, what should we be doing, those of us who consider ourselves to be on the left and as being committed to bringing about that other world that socialists across the globe and across the centuries have envisaged? I want to address this question briefly at a general rather than at an operational level, as this is not a forum for the discussion of tactical issues.

In a sentence, I would say that we have to find the ideological and organisational means to build the counter-society that insulates the oppressed and exploited from the undermining and disempowering values and practices of bourgeois society. This goal must once again become an integral part of the class struggle against exploitation and oppression. Today, because of the massive pollution of the popular consciousness by means of (mostly) American consumerist culture, this is a much more difficult task than it was for those who fashioned – in struggle – the mass social democratic parties and workers’ movements of Europe towards the end of the 19th century, or of some of the mass parties of the newly industrialising countries, including, incipiently, the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s.

In order to get to the orientation I wish to suggest, I want to put forward a number of propositions that have to be borne in mind.

firstly, for reasons that I assume need not be spelled out, the collapse of the USSR and of its satellite states

14 occasional references to this scenario do appear in the literature and, I am sure, in the speeches, of Cosatu and SACP activists. They are, however, negated by the anti-revolutionary practices of most of the leadership of those formations.

in Eastern Europe catapulted the pro-socialism forces in the world into one of their most deep-going and enduring crises. In particular, I think, there can be no doubt that the credibility of the socialist project as the only viable alternative to capitalism as a world system has been called into question. The very fact that the majority of human beings in the second half of the past century equated socialism with what had come into existence in the Soviet Union has once again raised the question of what we mean by the concept. This is not new, of course. At the end of the 19th century, similar debates were conducted among, especially, socialists in Europe, notably in the german Social Democratic Party. However, we live in an entirely different world today and the question has, therefore, to be approached with the new technological and ideological environment in mind. I realise, of course, that most of us have ready answers to this question but I believe it is essential that we find a different language in which to articulate these answers. otherwise, our cliché-ridden formulae will continue to alienate the popular consciousness. We have to use traditional as well as modern media in order to disseminate these answers in diverse and innovative forms among all of humanity. Stories, utopias, novels, plays, songs, rapping, even soapies, we need to experiment with all of these forms, and more, in order to get our message across more effectively.

secondly, the caving in of layer after layer of former so-called socialists to the pressures and enticements of neoliberal bourgeois norms and aspirations, which has been one of the most melodramatic political developments of the late 20th century, has temporarily weakened the socialist forces numerically and intellectually but, in the longer term, has also laid the foundation for a much more solid political edifice built with the will and the knowledge of many dedicated men and women. Clearly, the question that we have to consider here is something along these lines: how do we, among other things, maximise the acceptance of the need by the majority of people in our societies to base their lives and their aspirations on the principle of sufficiency (André gorz)? The question implies an understanding of the moral economy in an industrial environment,


a countering of the capitalist myth of “economic rationality” and a reintegration of the, if you wish, pre-industrial, pre-capitalist values based on the notion that “enough is as good as a feast”.15 This approach has obviously been reinforced by the insights derived from the researches of ecological science and activism. It is from this ideological mind-set, formulated in political programmes of principle and practical action plans, that the motivation and the passion will be generated to oppose and, therefore, not to emulate the acquisitive and status-seeking desiderata that are the stock-in-trade of the capitalist system.

We need as a corollary to this to spell out what we mean in practice when we proclaim that socialism is a process, not an event. For example, in the educational domain, should we not place the spotlight firmly on preschool education and, consequently, universalise this phase of education as a defining component of any modern democracy? (It goes without saying that we have to work out all the curricular and training implications of this proposal).

Thirdly, there is very little doubt in the mind of any serious revolutionary socialist protagonist that the form of organisation – the party, for short – that will lead or guide the struggle for socialism in the world has once again become a point of debate. This is so because of the elitist pretensions, authoritarian ethos and undemocratic practices that have often come to be associated with so-called vanguard parties of the working class. It ought not to be necessary to say that this is a fundamental question, one that requires from all of us total honesty and intellectual integrity, because socialist activists are – ideally – people who have specialised in the study of society and of history, which necessarily equips them with a certain kind of knowledge that others either don’t have or do not consider to be essential to their “happiness”. Because of the social power that this knowledge endows us with, which, incidentally, is not very different from the power that technocrats such as civil engineers or nuclear scientists have, we are called upon to

15 We have to bear in mind, of course, that today abundance is no longer a utopian vision.

display higher levels of social responsibility than most “ordinary” people, something that recent history has taught us not to take for granted at all.

fourthly, we find ourselves in a strategic impasse. Both theory and history tell us that socialism in one country is impossible. yet the domino effect of socialist revolutions seems always to be interrupted by imperialist machinations and direct intervention. Hence, at the international level, where one always has to begin any analysis, the strategic question today is: What do we have to do in order to prevent the isolation of any socialist revolution such as that which is underway in latin America? This question is not about not fighting against your own bourgeoisie, as some wiseacre tried to tell me at a recent conference; it is about ensuring that your own efforts at the national level can be sustainable once they eventuate in successful overthrow of the existing system. It is also about the most effective practical manner of countering the paralysing sectarianism of the left. It is only when all revolutionary socialists in the world act together (in international brigades, large-scale boycott and sanctions campaigns against aggressor nations, etc.) that some of the edges that make it impossible for left-wing people to act in concert will begin to be rubbed off.

V

let me add a few points with respect to political economy issues at the beginning of the 21st century. The centrality and dominance of the United States in the world economic landscape, though it continues to shape events and political economy processes, is beginning to become less taken for granted than even five years ago. This situation is most visibly manifest in the decline of the dollar and the zig-zag rise of the euro. Besides the ever more obvious inter-imperialist rivalry between North America and the European Union, we are witnessing the appearance on the world stage of the Asian capitalist giants of China, India and Indonesia, as well as of the more established capitalist regimes of Japan, South Korea, Malaysia-Singapore and an assertive Russia. The new dynamic that these

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 49

relations have inserted into the world capitalist system has been exhaustively analysed by many Marxist and other progressive scholars. It will suffice, therefore, if I highlight a few issues that appear to me to be relevant to our present context.

firstly, the dominance of finance capital is clearly a high-risk situation as far as the system as a whole is concerned. The latest series of crises triggered by the collapse of the so-called subprime market in the US demonstrates this most clearly. Not only the banking system of the US but those of all countries have been put in jeopardy and are relying on their central banks (i.e., their taxpayers) to bail them out.

secondly, and related to the first point, the bull markets of the past decade or more have been demand driven, i.e., based on consumption that is itself the result of the expansion (overexpansion) of credit. This situation is unsustainable and the continued creation of ever more sophisticated credit-creating instruments (especially the plethora of loyalty cards and smart cards for their not so smart “owners”) is a recipe for the deepest possible recession and, ultimately, depression. This predictable fact has produced the usual oracular pronouncements about the collapse of capitalism from all manner of Marxist and other socialist analysts. It is my view that we should avoid this eschatological tendency, because it really does not enrich our understanding of how the system actually works. We cannot at one and the same time say that the system will not collapse of its own accord and, without any reference to whether or not the subjective factor, i.e, the leadership, the party and all that that implies, is adequately prepared to deliver the final blows, predict its “inevitable” fall. The so-called resilience of the capitalist system, as we know from especially the world and other wars of the past century, is based on its “creative destruction” of resources through, among other things, primarily investment in the military-industrial complex and the conduct of war on the

most threadbare of “justifications”. If any person on Earth still doubts the truth of this proposition after the exposure of the official lies about the so-called weapons of mass destruction in Saddam’s Iraq, nothing will convince them. Not even two years ago, george W Bush was embarrassingly stopped from publicly pushing in the direction of preparing for a similar war scenario in Iran by his own “intelligence service” releasing a report that shows clearly that Iran had given up any notion of producing nuclear arms as far back as 2003!

of course, a realistic assessment of the prospects for successful anti-capitalist-imperialist actions by large masses of exploited and oppressed people in many different parts of the world does not mean that one is suggesting that socialist revolution is not on the immediate agenda. In latin America, as I have pointed out, the conditions for such a leap across the ideological and political hurdles that have been placed so very deliberately and effectively in the path of the workers of the world has become decidedly possible, even probable.

Thirdly, from the point of view of the economic South of the globe, the entrance of China and India as major investors in infrastructure and consumers of raw materials and other commodities has the potential of re-establishing a “neutral” space for the elites that is not dissimilar from that which made it possible during the Cold War for a Nehru, a Nasser, an Nkrumah and others to strut large on the world stage, whatever their nationalist and personal attributes might have contributed to their stature. Block formation such as that manifest in the European Union (EU), the African Union (AU), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (Alba) and other similar entities, is, in Manuel Castell’s terms, initially a form of resistance to “globalisation” by the elites. It implies the manifest rejection of the new international division of labour imposed by the


international financial institutions on behalf of the US hegemon on the rest of humanity.16 It can, however, only succeed in the long run if it manages to create what he calls “project identities”, i.e., if the generality of the population identifies with the newly created block. This is the reason for the discussion about a European identity and for the ongoing discussion in South Africa of the question: Who is an african? For the left, it poses the question (in Africa, for example) whether we can and should give new meaning to the pan-African project, i.e., as a left project that is implacably opposed to the capitalist-imperialist basis and the elitist ethos of Nepad and all its ancillary formations. I believe that this is a fundamental question for socialists in Africa, one the consideration of which we can no longer defer.

fourthly, the increasingly co-ordinated strategies of the world capitalist class through entities such as the World Economic Forum as well as the yawning gaps between the rich and the poor that are the direct consequence of the neoliberal economic orthodoxy and its barbaric practical instantiations in most countries of the world, especially in the economic South, have given rise to a worldwide protest movement that has come to be associated in the main with the World Social Forum (WSF) and its geographical offshoots with the catchy motto/slogan to the effect that another world is possible, reminiscent of Schiller’s ode to Joy eternalised in the Chorale of Beethoven’s 9th symphony. Now, whatever else the WSF might be, it is universally acknowledged that it is not, and should not try to be, a new International. It does, however, by implication raise many questions about the international co-ordination of revolutionary socialist and other working-class activities.

16 It should be noted, of course, that all of the mentioned formations, except for Alba, are based on a vision of reforming the international institutions that keep guard over the international division of labour.

VI

Any illusions individual socialists or groups of socialists may have had about the class nature of most co-opted regimes, especially in Africa, have been dispelled by the blatant and abject subordination of the South African liberation struggle to the dictates of international and domestic capital. Africa’s position in the international division of labour has been very firmly defined as supplier of certain raw materials, especially oil, gas, precious metals and plantation goods such as sisal and cotton. only South Africa itself has a sufficiently diversified economic structure to withstand to some extent the devastating consequences of essentially monocultural economies. As has been pointed out by authors such as John Saul and Colin leys in numerous publications, the situation of the urban and especially the rural poor in most of Africa is exacerbated by the fact that all previous populist notions of “African” socialism have been discredited, most of them even before the implosion of the USSR. In spite of this, of course, the sporadic and sometimes sustained protests and uprisings against the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank imposed austerity regimes, most prominently in Zimbabwe in recent years, but equally so in Zambia, Uganda, Senegal and elsewhere, are a sign of the latent force of anti-neocolonial and anti-capitalist resistance, of the potential of the second Chimurenga. These actions have highlighted the need for:

[…] nation-wide movements and/or parties through which such local groups and initiatives can ultimately unite to confront the political and economic power of the transnationals and the states that back them.17

17 Colin leys, cited in Saul, J. 2006. The next liberation struggle. Capitalism, socialism and democracy in southern africa. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, p. 284.

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 51

For this reason, as well as others, the direction that the class struggle takes in South Africa during the next few years will be crucial to the rest of the continent. Currently, because of all the smoke that is being projected by SACP sleight of hand as a raging fire of revolutionary “transformation” of the ANC into a quasi-socialist party, there appears to be much confusion. However, the position can be stated clearly and simply. The working and unemployed masses are voting with their feet. Whatever their lingering loyalties and ever more feeble hopes in the myth that “the ANC will deliver”, however big the gap between political consciousness and material practice, the thousands of township uprisings, countrywide strikes and serial metropolitan protest actions have one simple meaning: We reJeCT your poliCies and your praCTiCes as anTi-WorKer and anTi-poor. It is, in my view, a misnomer to refer to these stirrings of self-organisation of the working class as an expression of “collective insubordination”,18 even though their immediate impulse is usually reactive rather than proactive. They are saying very clearly and very loudly that the appeal to nationalist, blood and soil rhetoric has lost its power and that we are standing on the threshold of a politics that will be shaped by a heightened sense of class struggle. It is this understanding that should inform our analysis and our estimation of the prospects for a more principled socialist-orientated direction of the struggle in South Africa.

The Biko generation inculcated positive values of self-respect, self-esteem and self-consciousness into the young people at schools and at higher education institutions as well as older people in communities and in workplaces. They did so because they understood that the slave mentality is the proximate source of the sense of disempowerment, despair and political apathy that keeps the oppressed in thrall. Above all, they

18 Celestin Monga, cited ibid, p.49.

understood intuitively that power is not simply the control of armed force, legitimate or otherwise. Hence, they undertook community development programmes and mobilised people at the grassroots in order that they might survive in the menacing environments of apartheid South Africa. Under the banner of the slogan you are your own liberators! the Black Community Programmes empowered whole communities across the entire country. Together with the evolving modern labour movement inside the country, it was this war of position that eventually put an end to the apparently linear curve on which the apartheid regime thought itself to be proceeding ever upwards. There is no doubt, of course, that the struggle against racial oppression in all its reprehensible forms compelled everyone to focus on the overriding objective of throwing off the yoke of racism. The mistake that many made was to assume that the end of apartheid would bring about the end of class exploitation.

let us try, however briefly, to sketch some of the consequences of applying the principle of sufficiency as the major moral force shaping post-apartheid South Africa, a principle that can create the kind of unifying vision, based on the paramountcy of working-class interests. To begin with, in the domain of education, where the state and other public institutions can legitimately intervene, the content, orientation and delivery of the curriculum at all levels of the system would be changed fundamentally. The psychological, pedagogical, ideological and emotional revolution implied by an approach that does not glorify individual or group domination while allowing for the full development and flowering of the potential inherent in each and every human being can be imagined and extrapolated very easily. Individual brilliance expressed and deployed on behalf of and for the benefit of democratically legitimated groups at different levels of society will continue to be one of the drivers of all social progress, including economic development. In the domain of the media and especially advertising, we


would be rid of the brutalities and socially disreputable messages that subject us to the domination of capital. Adverts like one that is currently popular in South Africa, which claims that everyone wants to be a “winner” and in the “first team” rather than a ”deputy-chairperson” or a “benchwarmer” – or words to that effect – would become as absurd and counterproductive as they are from the point of view of a more humane social order. The glorification of the ostentatious consumption and high life of so-called celebrities in politics, culture, sport and even religion would cease to be the supposedly inspiring models of “the good life” that they are marketed as being in television programmes such as Top Billing and others. All domains of life would be affected in the most profoundly possible way.

What a drab and boring vision, I hear the privileged strata exclaiming. on the absolute contrary, I should like to respond to my imagined detractors. Artists, designers, architects, urban planners, in fact all creative individuals and agencies, will be faced with the challenge of finding the optimal ways of expressing and realising the entire range of possibilities in every domain of life. This will be the terrain of competition, not for individual glory and unequal reward but precisely for the common good, the old-fashioned commonwealth!

Is this no more than John lennon or Vladimir lenin’s dream? How do we begin to initiate and incrementally realise this vision and this set of values? Besides the ongoing political and economic class struggles, in which we are willy-nilly involved and by means of which we attempt to create and to consolidate more democratic space in the short to medium term, we have to go back to the community development tasks that the BCM initiated so successfully, if not always sustainably, owing to the ravages of the apartheid system.

We have to rebuild our communities and our neighbourhoods by establishing, as far as possible on

a voluntary basis, all manner of community projects that bring visible short-term benefit to the people and initiate at the same time the trajectories of fundamental social transformation I have been referring to. These could range from relatively simple programmes such as keeping the streets and the public toilets clean, preferably in liaison with the local authority, whether or not it is “delivering” at this level, to more complex programmes such as bulk buying clubs, community reading clubs, enrichment programmes for students preparing for exams, teachers’ resource groups at local level, and, of course, sports activities on a more convivial basis, etc. It is important that I stress that, wherever possible, the relevant democratic authority should be asked to support the initiative. on the other hand, the community and its community-based organisations must remain in control of what they are doing. This is the difference between South Africa today and South Africa yesterday. As long as, and to the extent that, we have a democratic system, there is no reason why any of these programmes have to be initiated as anti-government initiatives. Any representative democratic government would welcome and vigorously support such initiatives, because they are pro-people and, in the current context, pro-poor initiatives.

There are already many of these initiatives and programmes in existence. They will, if they are conducted with integrity and not for party-political gain, inevitably gravitate towards one another, converge and network. In this way, the fabric of civil-society non-government organisations that was the real matrix of the anti-apartheid movement will be refreshed and we will once again have that sense of a safety net of communities inspired by the spirit and the real practices of ubuntu, the “counter-society” I referred to earlier that saved so many of us from being destroyed by the racist system. Today, the struggle is much more obviously being conducted as a class struggle against exploitation and unconscionable as

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 53

well as totally unnecessary and unjustifiable social inequality, manifest in the miserable lives of the vast majority and the vulgar parading of wealth and comfort by the few.

VII

Viewed from a different angle, the question we are confronted with is whether the revolutionary left cadres will be able to find the requisite solution to the organisational question so that the debilitating and paralysing fragmentation that has marginalised them can be overcome before this passionate resistance of the workers is transformed into the kind of passive resistance we associate with most other post-colonial African states or the nightmare scenario of race war and ethnic cleansing that we saw in Kenya not so long ago finally overwhelms us. The strategic and tactical implications of this proposition are numerous and radical; among other things, we shall have to find practical answers to old questions in a new context, questions such as:

• What kind of party or organisation should be created out of the confluence of all our political tendencies and traditions in order for the socialist alternative to be firmly rooted within this evolving social base?

• What are the core issues around which a programme of transitional demands and an

action plan can be formulated in a democratic process?

• How can such a programme be connected to and informed by the essential task of rebuilding our communities and our neighbourhoods on the basis of co-operativist and collectivist values of ubuntu, of sharing and caring?

• How do we align ourselves politically with Cosatu and with the other union federations or with individual unions?

• How do we work with the rest of the African working class, especially in southern Africa?

• What position do we take with regard to the World Social Forum?

• How do we relate to other left-wing international formations without becoming encoiled in the sectarian knots or being sidetracked and lost in the maze of largely irrelevant apologetics that constitutes the stuff of the debates among these sects?

There are, as we speak, a few serious national initiatives underway, all of which are posing these and other relevant questions from slightly different perspectives. I think I have spoken, and speak, in the spirit of Strini Moodley and his comrades when I express the hope that we will find unity in action even as we try to find new ways of seeing the struggle for another world and another South Africa.

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 55

in the wake of the “furore about the racist remarks attributed to Mr Jimmy Manyi”, neville alexander discusses the challenges around creating a “raceless

society” in post-apartheid south africa.The furore about the racist remarks attributed to

Jimmy Manyi and to a few other would-be pacesetters in the aspiring leadership cadre of the new South Africa is without any doubt one of the defining moments of our country’s history.

Enough has been written and more than enough said in “jest” or otherwise about what these people actually said or wrote, about why Solidarity, with its not-so-hidden agenda, suddenly sprang this revelation on an “unsuspecting” South African middle-class public, and about the positions taken by various professional politicians, especially those in and around the ANC.

I shall therefore spare myself the agony and the embarrassment of commenting on the disgusting crassness and the latent brutality of the utterances and passages attributed to Manyi, Kuli Roberts and the others.

This is all the more justified because the general sense of outrage, cathartic as it might be, is not the real point. Whether some, or all, of the critics and commentators are more or less “racist” than Roberts, Manyi and Co is not worthy of serious discussion.

The very fact that “race” and racial labels can become a point of contestation in what is no more than a rather childish name-calling exercise is indicative of the profound ironies of the “new” South Africa. Indeed, I intervene in this matter with a sense of shame.

Shame, because all of us who have advocated and fought for so many decades and even generations for the goal of a non-racial South Africa have so patently failed in our mission. Shame, but not defeat! This “debate” merely underlines the fact that the struggle for the total liberation of the people of South Africa continues.

In my view, we need to restate the underlying issues involved in “the race debate” and stop making things worse by dwelling on what are no more than superficial features of actual and potential conflict deriving from vested economic and political interests.

let me begin by saying again, as I have done a thousand times in many articles and speeches on this issue: race thinking is real and it has real consequences, which will not disappear overnight.

Most South Africans will continue for a very long time to see themselves, and see one another, as “Africans”, “Indians”, “coloureds” and “whites”, simply because these identities were constructed in terms of ruling-class agendas and interests over decades and centuries.

rAce is sKin DeeP, huMAnitY is nOt

NEVIllE AlExANDER

Cape TiMes, 15 APRIl 2011


These people have a right to see themselves as such but, given the history of racial conflict and inequality, it is the duty of those who have the power to do so to create conditions in which the need to identify in this way becomes unnecessary and undesirable.

Although there are many things we can do in the short to medium term to create a more tolerant and tolerable social climate, it will take generations of consistent and patient work to alter the underlying structures that cause and entrench racial prejudice and all the awful expressions of hatred and ignorance that inevitably go with racial stereotyping.

I want to deal briefly with three fundamental issues involved in this debate. Many South African scholars, starting from different points of view, have written on these issues and anyone who is seriously concerned about understanding the complexities of the racial order could do worse than to go back to these sources.

First and foremost we have to confront the question: is a raceless society possible? Should such a society be our desired destination? Is this what we all mean when we speak about a “non-racial South Africa”? If, when using these and related terms, we mean minimally the kind of society in which the colour of one’s skin, the texture of one’s hair, etc. are irrelevant in terms of one’s human dignity and life chances, we have to face a few stubborn facts not only of South African society but also of all racist societies.

given the tenacity and the apparent solidity of the colonial-apartheid social and economic structures and their ideological underpinnings that have shaped all our lives, how realistic or feasible is a non-racial South

Africa? Is it not an even more utopian notion than the “classless society” that many of us continue to carry around with us as our political gPS?

The short answer to this question is that, if you can believe in heaven and other notions of a life of perfect harmony after death, it ought not to be difficult to conceive of the possibility of a raceless or a classless society here on Earth.

If you cannot envision such a society, you are saying to all of us, among other things, that biology is fate and that there is nothing much we can do about improving our conditions of life, depending on which “race” or “class” is on top.

Such fatalism is antithetical to any society that is bent on social transformation.

The longer answer to the question is that because we are human beings, we create meaning for ourselves, and a social goal such as a “non-racial South Africa” is not only conceivable but also eminently feasible.

To make it happen, we have to do many things in the short, medium and very long term.

What Roberts, Manyi and Co seem to have done, or seem to be doing, as far as I am concerned, points in the opposite direction, i.e. the kind of South Africa from which we thought we were ready to escape in 1994.

The second issue we have to confront is that of human worth or dignity. If Manyi has been quoted correctly, he has done no more than take to its logical conclusion the implications of any human capital theory, i.e. a way of seeing people as assets and in terms of their exchange value.

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 57

once you are on that road – and most capitalist business ideologues are on that road – it is very easy to fall into the kind of discourse where one or other group of people is considered to be “superfluous”, “over-concentrated”, etc.

The Hitlers and the Fronemans of the world eventually forced these people into railway trucks or lorries and transported them to their deaths in the gas chambers or to their last graves in the many Dimbazas of our beloved country (Frank Froneman was the former deputy minister of Bantu Administration who referred to the wives and children of black workers as “superfluous appendages”).

The dehumanisation of language and discourse corresponds to the dehumanisation of stigmatised persons. once the commodity value of people displaces their intrinsic human worth or dignity, we are well on the way to a state of barbarism.

Unless and until we bring back into our paradigms, and thus into our social analyses, the entire human being and the ways in which human beings can live fulfilled lives beyond their mere economic needs, we will continue to promote anti-human philosophies and policies that ultimately tend to work to the benefit of those who have, and to the detriment of those who do not have.

Thirdly, and finally, it is time that we admit publicly and without any qualification that you cannot fight racial inequality, racial prejudice and race thinking by using racial categories as a “site of redress”.

Among many others, I have written about alternatives to affirmative action policies, so I shall not

repeat those points here. Suffice it to say that fighting race with race is bad social science and even worse practical politics.

Besides tackling the structural economic and social inequalities that we took over without much modification from the apartheid state, we have to do the hard work of exploring, researching and piloting alternative approaches to those based on the apartheid racial categories to counter the perpetuation of white and other social privilege.

It is a fundamental theoretical and strategic error to try to do so by perpetuating racial identities in the nonsensical belief that this will not have any negative or destructive social consequences.

The Employment Equity Act and all related legislation should be reviewed, not in the direction that the Department of labour seems to want to do but in a totally different direction, one that moves away decisively from any notion of “race” and looks specifically at “disadvantage”.

Seventeen years into the new South Africa, we can afford to interrogate even our most dearly held views about things. In South Africa, because we do live in a liberal democracy, we can actually ask these questions without fear of losing our limbs or even our lives.

The Manyi affair is much larger than the few individuals involved. It is a matter that, unless we look beneath the verbiage, may ruin any future of peace and prosperity our children may hope for.

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 59

I

It was with much pleasure that I accepted the invitation of the organisers of this memorial event1 to speak in honour of the late Sipho

Maseko, whom I knew for most of his life as an activist operating within the paradigms of Black Consciousness. I accepted the invitation with a sense of gratitude, especially because I believe that this is the kind of occasion when we should reflect with care and seriousness on the paths we have travelled during our short post-apartheid journey. Sipho, whose widow, Pam, worked with me in the National language Project and in other contexts for many years, was one of those young people of the 1980s who was totally committed to the total liberation of South Africa and of the continent as a whole. The sincere, indeed the naive, belief in the values of freedom, equality, solidarity and democracy that drove all of us at the time, has been systematically eroded by the irruption of the narcissistic, dog-eat-dog virus that is spreading across the globe in the current era of the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism.

1 Address delivered on the occasion of the annual Sipho Maseko Memorial lecture, University of the Western Cape, 8 october 2009.

II

It is against this backdrop that I want to put the spotlight on the question whether it is possible for us to “return to the source of” – to borrow an exhortation from Amilcar Cabral – to place once again at the centre of our vision, our plans and our behaviour the values on the basis of which we hoped to build the non-racial, democratic republic after the demise of apartheid-capitalism. Because of time constraints, I shall not analyse the many important writings of the Black Consciousness generation, in which they grappled with, among other things, questions of identity and social structure. Allow me to highlight two central issues only. The first is the vision that actually illuminated the path of struggle chosen by that entire generation, whether or not they belonged to formal organisations of the Black Consciousness Movement. In the words of Steve Biko in one of his very last interviews shortly before he was murdered:

We are of the view that we should operate as one united whole toward attainment of an egalitarian society for the whole of Azania. Therefore, entrenchment of tribalistic, racialistic or any form of sectional outlook is abhorred by us. We

Let us return tO the sOurce!

in Quest Of A huMAnisM Of the 21st centurY 1

NEVIllE AlExANDER


hate it and we seek to destroy it.2

Elsewhere,3 I have written about the dynamics of the Black Consciousness Movement. All I wish to stress here is that the Biko generation set out on that long march implicit in the gramscian notion of the war of position. Through the University Christian Movement and other sources, they came into contact with the pedagogical and social conceptions of Paulo Freire and the theology of liberation, among others, and all of these influences, besides the ideas current in the different organisations involved in the national liberation struggle, in the context of the repression and against the background of the mixture of Christian philanthropy and African communal life that all of us who were adults in those days had experienced in the countryside, undoubtedly contributed to their formulation and conscious promotion of this strategy. The promotion of the Black Community Programmes, together with the development of a modern labour movement, which had a more differentiated but related source and a sometimes converging, sometimes diverging, trajectory, was no less than such a war of position, one that eventually brought about a change in the balance of forces and helped to reshape the political space in the worst years of the repression.

2 Steve Biko. 1987. i write what i like. oxford: Heinemann. p. 147

3 See Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander and Nigel C. gibson (eds). 2008. Biko lives: Contesting the legacies of steve Biko. New york: Palgrave Macmillan.

While bearing this in mind, let me refer you to the other issue that I consider as having been central to the strategic path of the BCM, i.e., the idea of “psychological liberation”.

In dealing with this concept critically, we have, in philosophical terms, to navigate carefully between the Scylla of voluntarism and the Charybdis of political paralysis. Today, we would deal with the question in terms of the relationship between structure and agency. However, let us keep the discourse at a manageable level by stating quite simply that the question we are faced with is whether, and if so, how it is possible in the era of neoliberal barbarism to implant a different set of values among especially the younger people in South Africa and elsewhere, in spite of the many structural constraints that determine their individual existential projects and the massive bombardment of negative and self-destructive ethical messages emanating from the media and other ideological state and non-state apparatuses. It is clear, certainly to me, that this is the challenge that faces all thinking South Africans, and people on the left specifically, if we are to have any hope of turning our society to head once again in a direction that can lead to the post-apartheid and even post-capitalist situation we had envisaged before 1996, more or less.

We know, of course, that it is a combination of ideas, organisation and political-economic developments at the macro level that brings about fundamental social shifts at any given time and place. It would, therefore, be a mistake to

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 61

think that by harking back to a concept such as psychological liberation I want to suggest that we focus all our energies on moral education of the youth, as important as that activity is. The real question behind these reflections is how we can tap back into the power that actually exists in many different social spaces and instantiations but which we have made ourselves believe is vested only in and, indeed, belongs to, “the government”. If the BCM and other movements, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, taught us anything, it is that we always have access to power, as long as we know how it is distributed.

The Biko generation inculcated positive values of self-respect, self-esteem and self-consciousness into the young people at schools and at higher education institutions as well as older people in communities and in workplaces. They did so because they understood that the slave mentality is the proximate source of the sense of disempowerment, despair and political apathy that keeps the oppressed in thrall. Above all, they understood intuitively that power is not simply the control of armed force, legitimate or otherwise. Hence, they undertook community development programmes and mobilised people at the grassroots in order that they might survive in the menacing environments of apartheid South Africa. Sipho Maseko himself and others, in accordance with the injunction education for liberation, organised in Cape Town the Black Students Project that undertook political education as well as enrichment programmes that sought to help students to understand their school-work properly and pass their

examinations, among many other things. Under the banner of the slogan you are your own liberators! the Black Community Programmes empowered whole communities across the entire country. As indicated earlier, together with the evolving modern labour movement inside the country, it was this war of position that eventually put an end to the apparently linear curve on which the apartheid regime thought itself to be proceeding ever upwards. Again, I do not have to go into detail; many articles and reports are available for those who have a more serious interest in what was done by the young people of the 1970s and the 1980s. There is no doubt, of course, that the struggle against racial oppression in all its reprehensible forms compelled everyone to focus on the overriding objective of throwing off the yoke of racism. The mistake that many made, as we shall see, was to assume that the end of apartheid would bring about the end of class exploitation that, in this country because of the peculiar historical dynamics, continues to perpetuate racial inequality.

III

What does the picture look like today? let me begin to answer this question by referring to the fact that when Evo Morales became president of Bolivia not so long ago, one of his first official acts was to get a law passed that reduced his presidential salary by 57%. In post-apartheid South Africa, the very opposite occurred. The recommendations of the Melamet Commission


of 1994 and of the subsequent annual increases recommended by the Independent Commission for the Remuneration of Public office Bearers,4 based on the principles of remuneration of the apartheid dispensation, were accepted without much soul-searching among the new elite. This, in my view, was the first signal that we were headed in the wrong direction. It sent entirely the wrong message to the youth of a poor, “third-world” country, South Africa, to the effect that successful black people are people who earn in these brackets and who own fancy cars and houses. The role model effect of this kind of lifestyle and value system that, today, 15 years later, has become the accepted thing, will take many years and many alternative models of success to turn around. I cite the effect of the acceptance of the salary packages recommended by the Melamet Commission in its different instantiations as the first of a series of lifestyle signposts for the youth. Add to this the fact that during the struggle against the apartheid regime, everyone, including your “Comtsotsi”, was seen to be and treated as an equal, whereas after 1994 there was this sudden and very visible divide between those who were deemed to have been “successful”, on the one side, and the great Unwashed, on the other side, the veritable underclass, victims of apartheid before 1996 and of neo-liberalism thereafter. one does not need a degree in philosophy to work out the sociopsychological results of this situation.

4 The current chair of this Commission is Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke.

The thousands of “service delivery protests” – a euphemism for localised mini-uprisings – the vandalism that accompanies them as well as “ordinary” crimes such as hijackings, cash heists, kidnappings, armed robberies, etc.: all of these horrendous manifestations of barbarism induced by the logic of capitalism in the 21st century are payback acts of entitlement. “If you who, yesterday, were in the trenches with us or with our parents can now drive around in a Mercedes Benz or a BMW, live in a mansion or even a palace in the leafy suburbs, and generally live it up, why should I continue to be mired in poverty and filth in so-called informal settlements with pit latrines, no garbage removal and no proper educational and health facilities?” This is the logic that is playing itself out on our streets. The simple fact is that if young people in the townships and in the rural areas are unemployed, hungry, frustrated and angry, they will, under these circumstances, resort to theft and even murder in order to live like those few others who, by grace of birth or because of political patronage, belong to the new elite. given the retreat of all the moral and political censors that kept things “looking good” during the post-war years, one can hardly “blame” this youth for behaving in such a reactionary manner. Drugs and Americanised TV are increasingly added to this lethal syndrome of social pathologies.

There have been many more or less sophisticated attempts at explaining the sociology of the current disaster and it is unnecessary to add another such attempt to this list. What is clear, however, is that if

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we fail to address the question of values with even a modicum of success, we will inevitably arrive at the edge of the abyss, pushed there by this logic of capitalism. The intelligentsia in particular has a moral obligation to help the entire nation to find and accept the alternative. Today, when we are witnessing the collapse of the global financial system, which reflects the terminal condition of the system of capitalism as a whole, the Thatcherite mantra: There is no alternative, which in any case never had any basis in fact, is no more and no less than an expression of social dementia and denialism of the most self-destructive kind. For, not only are there alternatives, they are staring us in the face if we have the boldness and the imagination to explore them and, like the generation of Sipho Maseko, begin to make a difference on the ground.

IV

How do we re-establish a culture of positive values, one that is socially critical but not destructive in its modalities? What is the foundational value that should inform everything else we believe in and do? I am here referring to the kind of value system that can inspire an entire generation of young people to take on to themselves the task and to forge the instruments of social mobilisation on a large scale and for decades, rather than just a few years, knowing full well that the realisation of their “dream” will change everything from the bottom up and shape social structures and processes that will

be very different in form and effect from those of the neoliberal imperialist agencies that now disfigure their lives and ruin our societies. In the previous dispensation, anti-racism and anti-apartheid for most, as well as anti-capitalism for some, were such a set of beliefs that not only fostered solidarity and unity but also charged the imagination of young people with a vision of the “non-racial, non-sexist and democratic” alternative to apartheid.

The answer has been lurking in, among other places, the ecological economics of scholars such as André gorz5 for many years, but it has taken global climatic disasters and the collapse of the tyrannical political structures in Africa, latin America, Asia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere to make us understand the full significance of the present stage of bourgeois rule. Today, we know that political diversity is as important for a humane society as are bio- and cultural diversity. For some years now, it has dawned on me that a humanism of the 21st century will have to be based on what gorz calls the principle of sufficiency, which, for the sake of a broader understanding of what this concept entails, I have transliterated as “Enough is as good as a feast”.6

It ought to be obvious that if the structures and processes of modern industrial societies

5 See, for example, gorz, André. 1987. ecology as politics. london: Pluto Press; and gorz, André. 1989. Critique of economic reason. london and New york: Verso.

6 This is not an arbitrary act on my part; gorz in fact derives the principle from the same pre-industrial period in which this aphorism originated.


were informed and shaped by this view of life, most of the currently existing social modalities and human desires and activities in most contemporary states would forthwith become antiquated and counterproductive. The hegemony of the world view that proclaims, among many other things, that “more is better”, that in terms of the much-vaunted “intellectual property rights”, I deserve all the fruits of what I have initiated, and that the ideal is to be the “world champion” in all spheres of life: in short, that the good life is to be had by competing and fighting against other human beings who, in the extreme case, have to be dehumanised so that I am not constrained by any fellow feeling from killing them.

V

I am all too aware of the fact that this has turned out to be a kind of secular sermon. It would have been easier, and it was probably expected by most of my audience, for me to have formulated yet another analysis of “the global crisis of the capitalist system”. There are more than enough of these, I think. Here, too, enough is as good as a feast. It has been more difficult and challenging for me to return to the source, to reflect on the first principles that motivate us

in our struggle for a humane world order, one in which every child and every person has more than an outside chance of fulfilling his or her human potential. Today, we have to formulate these principles in a new language, one that will find readier access among the youth, to whom, as we say so beautifully but so ineffectually, the future belongs. I have probably not succeeded in finding those words but I hope that my attempt to do so will inspire others to take up the challenge. I also know that I have spoken very much in the spirit of the late Sipho Maseko and his generation of revolutionaries.

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22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 67

Together with ten of my comrades, I was sentenced to ten years imprisonment on Robben Island in April 1964 for allegedly conspiring

to commit sabotage with a view to overthrowing the apartheid regime.

leaving aside the details of the background to this case and the real, as opposed to the court, version of what actually happened, I remember with much fondness the adamant opposition to our plans for a protracted guerrilla war in southern Africa often expressed by one of my close friends, an attorney, who unfortunately is no longer among us. He was convinced, as were many others, that this was a pipe dream.

He was, however, a scintillating wit with a wonderful sense of humour. one of the first letters I received on the Island was from my learned friend. Its salutation read very simply: “Dear Robin Hood”.

I reveal this nugget because I remain convinced that the vast majority of the men who ended up on Robben Island, regardless of political party or class background, were at the time in some sense and in their own consciousness following in the footsteps of the famous archer of Sherwood Forest in that, ultimately, at the

simplest possible level of description, they wanted “to steal from the rich to give to the poor”. I am, however, not the first observer of South African society to note with alarm that this view is no longer tenable. There has been in recent months – also in the columns of this newspaper – a constant trickle of contributions, from people who can in no way be called opponents of the ruling party, warning against obviously corrupting tendencies that seem to have become endemic in the African National Congress as an organisation. Indeed, one of the most devastating of these critiques has come from within the Tripartite Alliance itself in the form of a comprehensive and in many ways searching analysis by Cosatu of what appears to be wrong in that party.

In one of the more recent expressions of scepticism about the lore of the liberation struggle, Jacob Dlamini, in his essay, native nostalgia, makes the (actually quite obvious) point that just because a reprobate such as Joe Mamasela had stated that “not everybody on Robben Island was holy”, it does not mean that ... “ordinary South Africans should be cowed from asking if the men and women who led the struggle were the heroes and heroines of legend”. like him, many of us are becoming increasingly anxious “... about the

rObin hOOD, rObben isLAnD AnD the

POst-APArtheiD stAte

NEVIllE AlExANDER

(IN My PERSoNAl CAPACITy)

SoUTH AFRICAN HISToRy oNlINE (SAHo), 20 JANUARy 2011


political entrepreneurship and racial nativism ... [we] see all about us today as black South Africans with no history of struggle take advantage of the valorisation (or is it fetishism?) of blackness to enrich themselves or gain positions”.1

like many of us, in his attempt to explain the disastrous social, economic and political terrain in which we find ourselves today, he has decided to challenge some of the master narratives of the liberation struggle. Indeed, I am convinced that the time for those who can see that we are digging a big hole for ourselves and for the coming generations to speak up with one concerted voice is overdue. This is not the place for a review of Dlamini’s sophisticated and challenging theses. Suffice it to say that anybody interested in understanding the real complexity and some of the conundrums of the liberation struggle should read this slender volume. Whatever one’s doubts or disagreements with the author might be, his work introduces a welcome new voice and approach into debates that have become more like a set of charades involving all the usual suspects as talking heads with every passing day. It is certainly one of the most intelligent social analyses of the post-apartheid dispensation I have read for some time.

Although, as I have intimated, many academics, activists and other writers who have an understanding of how our social order is structured and how it functions have expressed some concern about the state of affairs, I believe that much more pressure has to be placed on this layer of people to take up a clear position with respect to the post-apartheid state. one of the reasons why things seem to be sliding uncontrollably in the direction of what is quite misleadingly called a “failed state” is that the generality of the population is not aware of the dangers in the situation. In my opinion, it is the task of the “intellectuals”, as I prefer to call this group of people, regardless of the level of

1 Jacob Dlamini.2010. native nostalgia. Jacana.

formal education they may have had, to spell out these dangers clearly. There will be, and there are, many contradictions and different points of view, but this is to be welcomed because it is only through the clash of ideas that clarity emerges.

The following are a few of the issues that have to be taken up fearlessly and candidly, no matter how awkward they may be. It should be noted that these questions have little or nothing to do with the ANC as an organisation. They are directed to the entire leadership cadre of our country, regardless of party, because they involve fundamental questions of values, attitudes and culture, in the proper sense of that term.

one: What is our attitude towards the post-apartheid state? In the apartheid era, whatever the differences among different tendencies and factions in the national liberation movement, there was unanimity about the antagonistic relation to the apartheid-capitalist state. Do we believe that the current state can actually improve in some radical manner the socioeconomic and cultural levels of the majority of our people? If we do not believe this, let us state this clearly and also give our reasons for saying so. If we believe that the current state is fundamentally able to deliver to the poor, we need to say clearly where the limits are, if there are any.

Two: It is no longer acceptable to countenance in stoic but nonetheless complicit silence the brazen looting of state resources – which are ultimately derived from the surplus labour of the working class – by elements of the middle and upper classes. This behaviour shows very clearly what their attitude towards the state is. Is the alienation of working class youth from the state – evident in rampant vandalism, theft, fraud, lack of institutional pride and wilful neglect of maintenance, among many other things – simply a continuation from the apartheid era of the attitudes engendered among oppressed people by the white supremacist racial

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order? or is it evidence of an emerging understanding that the ostensible disappearance of overt racial discrimination does not make the post-apartheid state less of a capitalist formation than its apartheid forebear? A more disturbing thought in this regard is the fact that these attitudes are not confined to the state and its functionaries. With many exceptions, of course, the youth seem to have been infected by the ultra-individualism and self-centredness that have come to characterise the era of neoliberal capitalism. As a result, their anger, aggression and acquisitivness are callously directed at all and sundry. This, together with the contagion of the drug culture, is indeed a toxic mix that will make any recovery and healing of a profoundly sick society extremely difficult.

Three: What can we do at the grassroots level to begin the steep ascent out of the ditch in which we have been landed? Can we help to reduce, perhaps eradicate, the culture of dependence on the state that has been the, probably unintended, consequence of the system of social grants? Can we return to the source of our liberation ideology by promoting a counterculture of self-reliance and sharing in the process of rebuilding our communities and our neighbourhoods? These are extremely difficult questions and there are no simple answers. In the next few years, we are going to have to learn from one another’s more or less successful attempts at finding the appropriate answers in our work among the urban and the rural poor.

Four: Not everyone who reads this will agree that the question is relevant. Nonetheless, I believe we would be failing in our duty if we did not pose it. How is the credibility of the socialist alternative to be revived in view of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the capitalist road chosen by Deng’s China? The triumphalism of the end-of-history apologists for the barbarism of neo-liberal capitalism has been muted – not silenced – by the continuing collapse of the financial markets and the attendant multiple permanent crises of that system, currently most evident in southern Europe and Ireland. The challenge at all levels – local, national, regional and international – is to identify the dynamic elements in the rapidly changing and volatile world and to forge the links between these and the post-capitalist alternative(s) in a language that is charged with the values and the principles of socialism but not constrained by the formulaic slogans and chants of yesterday. New wine has to be poured into new bottles if we are to inspire the young working people of the 21st century.

If this question is met with the hackneyed response that it is utopian and that I do not understand “human nature”, I point the reader in the direction of one of the most inspiring artists of the 20th century. Bertolt Brecht, in one of his most matter-of-fact moments, wrote these unforgettable words: “Injustice is human; but more human still is the war against injustice.”

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In their book, Writing science: literacy and discursive power, Halliday and Martin (1993:10) state what ought to be obvious but for the fact that most of us never think about language as an

issue in our societies. They postulate that: The history of humanity is not only a history of socioeconomic activity. It is also a history of semiotic activity.

In South Africa, where “race” has been the main ideological prism through which people have perceived their realities, this insight has tended to be ignored even by intellectuals working in the social sciences. However, although the racial fault line was the most prominent feature of the South African socio-political landscape for most of the 20th

century, there were occasions when the language issue erupted with volcanic menace to remind the world that this is a country that cannot be viewed in simple black-and-white terms. on occasion, the apparently

NOTE: for full bibliographical details see references and further reading, pp 84-85

1 In Shapiro, H and Tebeau, K (eds.). 2011.

antagonistic contradictions in the language domain became manifest with respect to the status and use of Afrikaans,2 especially as a language of teaching in the educational sphere. During the rule of lord Milner (1901–1905) and of Verwoerd and Vorster (1958–1979), social conflict was articulated, among other ways, in terms of the use and recognition of Afrikaans in the schools that catered for Afrikaans-speaking white3 and Bantu-speaking black4 children respectively. It was the Soweto Uprising of 1976, as we now know, that set off the series of tremors that eventually caused the implosion of the apartheid state.

In broad historical terms, the issues remained the same throughout the 20th century. The dominance of English in the modern sector of the economy, the challenge to its consequent hegemonic status that came from the rising Afrikaans-speaking elite

2 During Milner’s tenure, it was the Dutch language that was nominally at issue. In fact, however, “Dutch”-speaking people used Afrikaans, except for purposes of formal writing.

3 See giliomee 2003 for a sensitive account and for numerous references. See pages 84-85, References and Further Reading.

4 See Hirson 1979, Kane-Berman 1979, lodge 1984 among others.

After APArtheiD: the LAnguAge QuestiOn1

NEVIllE AlExANDER


and the passive but powerful support of most black people for the continued dominance of English as one of the ways in which they could demonstrate their rejection of the racial order, one of the insignia of which was precisely Afrikaans, “the language of the oppressor”, influenced and characterised in part the interactions between the contending elites. For reasons that reach far back into the history of colonial conquest, of slavery and of the role of the missionaries, among other things, in the course of the 19th century, English, rather than Afrikaans, became the language of aspiration and eventually the language of national unity and of liberation for the black elites. The pro-English sentiments of the black leadership were never more clearly enunciated than in the well-known words of Dr Abdurrahman in 1912:

The question naturally arises which is to be the national language. Shall it be the degraded forms of a literary language,5 a vulgar patois: or shall it be that language which Macaulay says is “In force, in richness, in aptitude for all the highest purposes of the poet, the philosopher, and the orator inferior to the tongue of greece alone?” Shall it be the language of the “Kombuis” [kitchen] or the language of Tennyson? That is, shall it be the Taal [Afrikaans] or English? (Cited in Alexander 1989:29).

In what follows, I want to show briefly how vested interest in, ignorance about and the consequent neglect of the significance of language policy and language use on the part of the new rulers of South Africa resulted in missed opportunities with respect, among other things, to the deepening and the broadening of the liberal democratic dispensation that was the issue of the negotiations between African and Afrikaner nationalisms during the early 1990s.

5 This refers to the “Dutch” that was actually spoken by the Afrikaans-speaking population. (See note 2 above)

“lEAVE yoUR lANgUAgES AloNE”: THE FAllACy oF CoMMoN SENSE

In his planning language, planning inequality, James Tollefson (1991:2) wrote:

….[language] is built into the economic and social structure of society so deeply that its fundamental importance seems only natural. For this reason, language policies are often seen as expressions of natural, common-sense assumptions about language in society.

The purpose of his book is to rebut this all-pervasive notion and to demonstrate by way of many significant historical and contemporary examples that language policies are governmental strategies designed, mostly consciously, to promote the interests of specific classes and other social groups.

It should be stated quite clearly, therefore, that it is not true that languages simply develop “naturally”, as it were. They are formed and manipulated within definite limits to suit the interests of different groups of people. This is very clear in the case of so-called standard languages as opposed to nonstandard regional or social varieties (dialects, sociolects). The former are invariably the preferred varieties of the ruling class or ruling strata in any given society. They prevail as the norm because of the economic, political-military or cultural-symbolic power of the rulers, not because they are “natural” in any meaning of the term. The importance of this proposition derives from the fact that it validates the claim that languages, just like cities or families, can be planned. Indeed, it is a fact that in any modern state, whether or not it is explicitly acknowledged by governments, languages are always planned, in that legislation prescribes, often in great detail, where and how one or more languages are to be used. This is universal practice and, as I shall have occasion to show, it has significant consequences in critical social domains such as education. This is why Weinstein (1983:3) makes the point that:

… [If] it is possible to show that language is the subject of policy decisions as well as a possession conferring advantages, a case can

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be made for the study of language as one of the variables pushing open or closed the door to power, wealth, and prestige within societies.

In regard to post-apartheid South Africa, it remains to be said that albeit reluctantly the principle – as well as the practice – of language planning is accepted. Not surprisingly, however, lack of implementation planning and, thus, of delivery, tends to negate the principle and to reduce it to mere lip service. This fact, as I have intimated, points to a definite political orientation or stance towards the language question on the part of the ruling strata.

THE PoWER oF lANgUAgE AND THE lANgUAgE oF PoWER

There are two fundamental sources from which language derives its power, i.e., the ability of the relevant individuals or groups to realise their intentions (will) by means of language (empowerment) or, conversely, the ability of individuals or groups to impose their agendas on others (disempowerment of the latter). For human beings to produce the means of subsistence, they have to co-operate and, in order to do so, they have to communicate. language is the main instrument of communication at the disposal of human beings; consequently, the specific language(s) in which the production processes take place become(s) the language(s) of power. To put it differently, if one does not have the requisite command of the language(s) of production, one is automatically restricted in one’s options as regards access to employment and all that that implies in a state where employment opportunities are hierarchically structured and differentially rewarded. At this point, the relationship between language policy, class and power ought to become intuitively obvious. Rather than take for granted the automatic recognition of this relationship, however, I shall spell out some of the implications of this particular insight for modern industrial societies with special reference to (South) Africa.66

6 In doing so, I base my analysis and comments on the insights derived from the many historical and sociological studies

For reasons connected with the colonial history of southern Africa, the language of power in post-apartheid South Africa is undoubtedly English. Afrikaans continues to play an ancillary role in the processes of economic production in the so-called formal economy even though there are determined attempts to reduce its significance in this domain as well as in other high-status domains. The question we will have to consider presently is whether this fact in and of itself implies, as is often said and universally assumed, that “English is enough” and what the implications of this belief are for democracy and development.

Before I deal with these issues, however, I refer briefly to the other source of the power of language, i.e., its function as a transmission mechanism of “culture” or, more popularly, its role in the formation of individual and social identities. In this essay, I shall not deal with this matter any further even though it is necessarily implicated in the general discussion of the broader topic of language, class power and democracy. Suffice it to say that being able to use the language(s) one has the best command of in any situation is an empowering factor and, conversely, not being able to do so is necessarily disempowering. The self-esteem, self-confidence, potential creativ-ity and spontaneity that come with being able to use the language(s) that have shaped one from early childhood (one’s “mother tongue”) are the founda-tion of all democratic polities and institutions. To be denied the use of this language is the very meaning of oppression. In the words of Vladimir Ilyich lenin (1983:138):

“… [a] democratic state is bound to grant complete freedom for the native languages and annul all privileges for any one language. A democratic state will not permit the oppression or the overriding of any one nationality by another, either in any particular region or in any branch of public affairs” (Emphasis in the original).

informed by the approach of the late Pierre Bourdieu.


It is this aspect of the language question that has fuelled and often justified ethnic-nationalist and separatist movements during the past three centuries, including that which eventually led to the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902.

ENglISH IS ENoUgH: THE ClASS CHARACTER oF THE MoNolINgUAl HABITUS

The hegemony of English, or of other languages, is not merely tolerated in the ‘developing’ world; it is considered a legitimate model for society. In many newly independent states, a tiny English-speaking elite controls state policy-making organs while the masses of the people remain excluded. … A world system that is more just and equitable depends upon an understanding of how people can gain control of their own institutions. A key issue is the role of language in organizing and reproducing those institutions (Tollefson 1991:201).

Twenty years earlier, Pierre Alexandre (1972:86) had shown clearly how, for post colonial Africa, proficiency in the language of the former colonial power (English, French or Portuguese) constituted “cultural capital” and was an index to the class location of the individual, because this ability almost automatically elevated the speaker into the ruling elite. This insight derives primarily from the meticulous theoretical and practical studies of Bourdieu and his associates with respect to the evolution of linguistic markets. For our purposes, however, I simply draw attention to the immediately relevant propositions as they apply to our South African context.7 The hierarchical relations between different varieties of a language or between different languages are a reflection of the historically evolved relations of domination and subjugation between and among the speakers of the relevant varieties or

7 An excellent summary of Bourdieu’s theory as it pertains to the language question is Niedrig 2000:21-27. It is, however, only available in german. The classic English exposition of the relevant theory is Bourdieu 1991.

languages. In the South African case, Dutch, English and, later, Afrikaans, came to be the “legitimate languages” in different periods of our history. This legitimacy was/is the result of colonial conquest in the first instance but, as the structural transformations that accompanied that historic event became common-sense routine, dominance was complemented and reinforced by hegemony. That is to say, the consent of the victims of colonial subjugation became the major factor for the maintenance of English and, until 1994 more or less, in some social domains, of Afrikaans, as the legitimate languages. In South Africa, unlike most other African countries in the British sphere of influence, the presence of a relatively large group of first-language speakers of English reduced the potential “profits of distinction” that came with proficiency in the legitimate language, although the rate of profit remains relatively high. For, according to Bourdieu, the smaller the number of people who are proficient in the legitimate variety and the more widespread the perception of the value of that variety in the relevant population, the greater the profits of distinction. This is, incidentally, the objective economic reason for the phenomenon of “elite closure” referred to below. I make the point here simply to stress the fact that there is a material reason for the maintenance of a particular language policy in any given period.

Whereas it remains the case that proficiency in the dominant languages of European origin co-determines one’s class location in most countries on the continent of Africa, it does not tell us anything about the class consciousness or the class position of individual members of the elite. What has to be established in any given case, therefore, is the degree of consciousness of the ruling strata of the de facto policy of “elite closure”8 or exclusion of the masses by means

8 This concept is described by its author as “a tactic of boundary maintenance. It involves institutionalizing the linguistic patterns of the elite, either through official policy or informally established usage norms in order to limit access to socioeconomic mobility and political power to people who possess the requisite linguistic patterns”. (Meyers-Scotton 1990:27) She also makes it clear that in sub-Saharan Africa we are invariably dealing with cases of “strong elite closure”, where the social gap between the elites and the masses is deepened by the dominant position of foreign, i.e., European, languages in

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 75

of language policy.9 To do so is no easy task, because the levels of mystification and, more problematically, the veils of ignorance that delude policy-makers and other power brokers into believing that their understandings are “scientific” defy the logic of mere argument and historical experience.

The relevant essential proposition is simple enough. It states that, in a multilingual society, it is in everyone’s interest to learn the dominant language (of power), because this will help to provide equal opportunities in the labour market as well as in other markets. In post-colonial Africa, this has led to the almost complete marginalisation of the local languages of the people and the valorisation of English, French and Portuguese in the relevant African states. Indeed, in most other African states, the distinction between “official”, i.e., European, and “national” (African) languages ironically highlights in an unintended manner the social distance between the elite and the masses of the people. Because of the role-model status of the middle class in most societies, the monolingual habitus10 becomes generalised in such a manner that the vast majority of the people come to believe that all that matters is knowledge of English in so-called Anglophone Africa. This utterly disempowering disposition assumes the character of a social pathology, one which I have called the “Static Maintenance Syndrome”11 . To add insult

which more than half of the population do not have adequate proficiency. (Meyers-Scotton 1990:27-28)

9 Ayo Bamgbose, Emeritus Professor of linguistics and African languages at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, published an elegant study of the many ways in which elite closure has operated in post colonial Africa. His justified optimism about the evolving language policy in the new South Africa at the time remains to be realised in practice. (See Bamgbose 2000)

10 Ingrid goglin (1994), basing herself on Bourdieu’s work, coins the term “monolingual habitus” in order to describe the ironical phenomenon of, among other things, colonially oppressed peoples who “voluntarily” deny that their indigenous languages have any value and valorise only the former colonial language(s). In metropolitan European states, this valorisation is manifest in the standard variety of the relevant language.

11 This means simply that most African people are willing to maintain their first languages in the primary contexts of family, community, elementary school and religious practice but they do not believe that these languages have the capacity to develop

to injury, as it were, Tollefson’s paradox notes that in modern societies:

… while vast resources are directed toward language teaching and bilingualism, especially involving English, more people than ever are unable to acquire the language skills they need in order to enter and succeed in school, obtain satisfactory employment, and participate politically and socially in the life of their communities. … The great linguistic paradox of our time is that societies which dedicate enormous resources to language teaching and learning have been unable – or unwilling – to remove the powerful linguistic barriers to full participation in the major institutions of modern society. (Tollefson 1991:7)

Tollefson arrives at the conclusion that inadequate competence is not mainly the result of poor books and other texts, inadequate pedagogy or lack of motivation and other similar suggested deficiencies. Instead:

… language competence remains a barrier to employment, education, and economic well being due to political forces of our own making. For while modern social and economic systems require certain kinds of language competence, they simultaneously create conditions which ensure that vast numbers of people will be unable to acquire that competence. A central mechanism by which this process occurs is language policy. (Tollefson 1991:7)

Post-apartheid South Africa is, in spite of numerous improvements on its predecessor, a textbook example of this paradox. Although it is understandable, given the colonial and racist history of South Africa, that before 1973 the ruling class was fundamentally concerned with maintaining the limited markets in raw materials and semiprocessed commodities South Africa, because

into languages of power. Their consciousness reflects the reality of the linguistic market and they have become victims of a monolingual habitus, in spite of the fact that most African people are proficient in two or more languages. My use of the term was inspired by the analysis of Colin Baker 1996:173.


of its place in the international division of labour, had to provide to the transnational corporations and other imperialist entities, the implicit continuation of such policies in post-apartheid South Africa is something of an anomaly. For, whereas in apartheid South Africa, the rulers could afford to, and did, approach African languages as though they had no economic or cultural value, in the new South Africa, this attitude is clearly self-limiting and self-defeating, if not self-destructive. Unless we are prepared to grant that we are simply trotting along the same footpaths as those pioneered by the neocolonial states after 1960, when the indigenous languages of Africa were not seen as resources but as problems. In this connection, it is germane to our focus to point to the fact that Africa, including South Africa, is today subject to the intensified pressures of “globalisation” and that the pressure to adopt English, which is incontestably the global language, as the only legitimate language is exceptionally strong in “Anglophone” territories.12 one of the most serious strategic errors in this respect has been the failure to introduce mother tongue-based education.

oNE STEP FoRWARD, TWo STEPS BACK

The history of language policy and planning in post-apartheid South Africa is one of exhilarating potential and great expectations being squashed at regular intervals. By the time the formal negotiations process began in earnest in about 1991, with respect to the language dispensation in the new South Africa, the situation might be described in broad brushstrokes as follows. on the side of the white minority, specifically the Afrikaner nationalists, represented in the main by the National Party, there was a clear commitment to the retention of the formal constitutional equality of Afrikaans and English. The white nationalists had little doubt that Afrikaans would continue to be one of the dominant languages in the new republic. on the side of the liberation forces, represented in the main by the

12 For a more detailed discussion of this aspect of the issue, see Alexander 2005 (a).

African National Congress, the predominant instinct was to press for English as the only official language on economic as well as political grounds. These two positions reflected in woodcut simplicity the historical experience and the aspirations of the two divergent nationalist movements. The Afrikaner nationalists had gained political power by mobilising the votes of the Afrikaans-speaking white population during the decades of the pigmentocracy known as the Union of South Africa and the elite had used the language to entrench its economic power, based initially on agriculture but increasingly also on mining and, much later, on manufacturing industry. The African nationalists, on the other hand, had experienced exactly the same developments that established and augmented the sectionalist power of the Afrikaners as a process of dispossession and disenfranchisement as well as racial and class disempowerment in the same Union of South Africa, which, for them, was a brutal pigmentatorship. For reasons that have been discussed in detail by numerous scholars,13 it was high proficiency in the English language that appeared to the black elite to hold out the promise of liberation, unification and empowerment. The anti-apartheid leadership would have followed unerringly in the footsteps of their anti-colonial predecessors by opting for the officialisation of English only. Indeed, in 1990, at the very time they began their historic dialogue with the “racist Pretoria regime”, the leadership of Swapo had declared English to be the only official language of the free Namibia.

That this did not happen in South Africa eventually had two main reasons, both of which had very little, if anything, to do with the strategic vision or theoretical clarity of the leadership of the negotiators on either side. To begin with, there was the simple political fact that if the representatives of the black majority conceded equality of status to Afrikaans and English, they could not justify not doing the same for all the indigenous African languages. Had they done so, they would have been seen as adopting a neo-apartheid

13 See, among others, Alexandre 1972, Herbert 1990, Bamgbose 2000.

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 77

language policy that it would have been impossible to sell to their constituency. The ironic consequence of the Afrikaner nationalist demand, therefore, was the wholly unplanned-for and unexpected officialisation of 11 South African languages.14

This decision was facilitated by the availability to the liberation movement of a comprehensive theory of language planning as an integral aspect of the programme for the liberation and democratisation of South African society.15 This theory was derived from a body of both international and domestic research on language use in many domains of life. It postulated, among other things, that language is a resource, not a problem, that multilingualism is the global norm today and that individual multilingualism,16 together with the proliferation of link languages, is one of the keys to intercultural communication and social cohesion. This latter insight is important, because it provides the answer to one of the persistent fallacies of post-colonial African states, i.e., that the officialisation of indigenous languages would inevitably lead to ethnic rivalry and separatist movements.

With this theoretical life jacket at its disposal, the liberation movement took the plunge and in so doing made history, or appeared to do so. In order to gauge to what extent history was made, we have to consider what was actually done between 1995 and 2007. To begin with the new Constitution: the negotiations of the early 1990s, for reasons I have intimated above, resulted in one of the most progressive sets of constitutional provisions on language use in the world. Section 6 of the Constitution (Act 108 0f 1996) reads as follows:

1. The official languages of the Republic are Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, Siswati, Tshivenda, xitsonga, Afrikaans, English, isiNdebele, isixhosa and isiZulu.

2. Recognising the historically diminished use

14 The 11 languages were those that had enjoyed national and/or regional official status under the previous regime.

15 For an account of how this position evolved in South Africa, see Alexander and Heugh 1999.

16 In the Council of Europe’s usage, this aspect of multilingualism is now referred to as “plurilingualism”

and status of the indigenous languages of our people, the state must take practical and positive measures to elevate the status and advance the use of these languages.

3. (a) The national government and provincial governments may use any particular official languages for the purposes of government, taking into account usage, practicality, expense, regional circumstances and the balance of the needs and preferences of the population as a whole or in the province concerned; but the national government and each provincial government must use at least two official languages. (b) Municipalities must take into account the language usage and preferences of their residents.

4. The national government and provincial governments, by legislative and other measures, must regulate and monitor their use of official languages. Without detracting from the provisions of subsection (2), all official languages must enjoy parity of esteem and must be treated equitably.

5. A Pan South African language Board established by national legislation must:

(a) promote, and create conditions for, the development and use of: (i) all official languages; (ii) the Khoi, Nama and San languages; and (iii) sign language; and

(b) promote and ensure respect for all languages commonly used by communities in South Africa, including german, greek, gujarati, Hindi, Portuguese, Tamil, Telegu and Urdu; and Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit and other languages used for religious purposes in South Africa.

other significant sections of the Constitution refer to rights in the domains of education (29)(2); culture (30), (31, (185) and (186); and the judiciary (35)(3)(k)


and (35)(4). All of these protect and promote the right of individuals or the relevant “linguistic community” to use their mother tongue or other official language of their choice in all interactions among and between themselves and between themselves and the state.

Because of the pro-English attitudes that prevail among most of the middle-class elites and other formally educated South Africans, with the significant exception of a majority of Afrikaans-speaking citizens in these categories, the realisation of these provisions in daily practice is beset with very serious problems. The shaping of a consistently democratic multilingual language policy and practice reflecting the values and the aspirations of the Constitution will require decades, perhaps even generations, of see-saw progress.

ACHIEVEMENTS

In the 12 years since democratisation, the beginnings of the requisite language infrastructure have been put in place:

• The Pan South African language Board (Pansalb), representative of all the official languages as well as South African sign language.17

• Nine provincial language committees. Their main task is to represent Pansalb and to watch over the implementation of official language policy at provincial level.

• 14 National language bodies whose main task is to see to the corpus development of their respective language.

• 11 lexicographic units, each of which has ultimately to create and maintain a comprehensive monolingual explanatory dictionary as well as promote and publish other dictionaries for the respective language.

Although it has constitutional autonomy as a statutory body, administratively, Pansalb falls under the Department of Arts and Culture, which has responsibility for managing language matters in the

17 See Pansalb website www.pansalb.co.za for details.

new South Africa. As the National language Service (NlS), which, originally, was no more than the translation and terminology service to government, also falls under this department, overlapping concerns and conflicts of interest inevitably occur and, in fact, in recent years there have been numerous, sometimes paralysing, tensions between the two entities. It should also be noted that important departments of state, among others, Education and Defence, have tended to make policy independently, with only nominal consultation with Pansalb.

Notable among Pansalb’s achievements have been the successful piloting and inauguration of a Telephonic Interpreting Service of South Africa (TISSA), the commissioning of the vital language use and language interaction in south africa. a national sociolinguistic survey (2000) and the institution of the structures referred to above. In general, however, it has not been a prominent force and has been obstructed by the hegemonic national and global forces that shape the asymmetrical power relations of all multilingual states. Except for the South African Broadcasting Corporation, which has an improving record as far as the use of indigenous languages is concerned, most media, the public service and the vital tertiary education sector have tended to join the slide towards a unilingual public policy delivery, in spite of the fact that this disposition favours the English-knowing elite and, thus, deepens the asymmetry of power relations in South Africa. Because each province has its own official languages, the provincial language committees, potentially, play a decisive role with respect to developments on the ground. In practice, however, few of them have the necessary skills and resources at present and the de facto language policy in most provinces is a laissez-faire English-mainly policy. As long as mother tongue-based multilingual education does not become the default approach to language-medium policy in the schools of South Africa, these divisive and ultimately oppressive practices will continue to ensure economic and cultural constraint and stagnation.

Two other important language policy initiatives should be noted. The National language Policy

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 79

Framework,18 approved by Cabinet in 2002, was shaped by a dedicated task team that reported directly to the Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology. The same team formulated the South African languages Bill, which, at the time of writing (April 2007) has not yet been placed before the National Assembly even though it was similarly approved by Cabinet. The language Policy for Higher Education (2004) also resulted from the work of a special committee, appointed by the Minister of Education.

CHAllENgE AND RESPoNSE

By way of demonstrating the complexity of the problems faced by the new South Africa with respect to the practical realisation of a consistently democratic language policy, I shall consider briefly the challenges posed in the central domain of education.

Bourdieu stresses the social reproductive role of education. Through compulsory education, individuals are forced – and also want – to learn the legitimate language, mainly because of its pivotal role in the production processes and the social status that proficiency in it confers on its speakers. An array of certificates, diplomas and degrees constitute a market, regardless of the real levels of proficiency and competence, and are traded like any other commodity. They take on the character of “cultural capital” (assets) and can be translated into economic assets through enhanced salaries, wages, bonuses and other rewards. linguistic capital is necessarily the most important component of this cultural capital.

The legacy of apartheid education in South Africa exacerbates the Static Maintenance Syndrome,19 because most black people continue to equate mother tongue-based education with the ravages of Bantu education. Without analysing the matter any further,

18 The NlPF is an important interim provision, because all departments of state and provincial governments can and do use it as a set of guidelines for the formulation and implementation of language policy. As such, it constitutes an important guarantee for the practical realisation of a democratic policy of multilingualism and language equality in the longer term.

19 See p. 75 above.

I maintain that this tendency, even though there are currently some hesitant beginnings of countervailing tendencies, will continue to undermine South Africa’s ability to expand and consolidate democracy and at the same time represents a built-in constraint on economic development, the magnitude of which remains to be established by means of carefully designed research in all branches of the economy.

The following studies show how we unnecessarily restrict the capabilities of our workforce and the efficiency of economic production, besides the not unimportant factors of inadequate job satisfaction and a reduced work ethic. It should be noted, however, that not much detailed research has as yet been done in this area. The numbers quoted here are indicative and they do not reflect the real magnitudes of the phenomena. let me add, nonetheless, that these magnitudes in all probability will be found to be much greater than our statistics indicate at present.

A University of Cape Town MPhil mini-dissertation on the subject of Medium of instruction and its effect on Matriculation examination results in 2000 in Western Cape secondary schools hypothesised that:

… African language speaking learners in the Western Cape will tend to do badly in the matriculation examination largely because the medium of instruction and assessment is not the mother tongue, but a second or third language. (october 2002:5)

The mini-dissertation, among other things, compares the results of Afrikaans l1 and English l1 students with those of isixhosa l1 students in key subjects and confirms the hypothesis. The actual statistics are, in the context of the “new” South Africa, ironic and extremely disturbing because they demonstrate all too clearly some of the avoidable continuities between apartheid and post-apartheid education. Probably the most significant finding of this study is that the only “learning area” in which all the matriculation candidates performed at comparable levels was the First language (Higher grade) subject, i.e., English, Afrikaans and isixhosa. This was, for the isixhosa l1 speakers the only subject in which they were taught


and assessed in their mother tongue.20 These findings have been reinforced by a recent

survey of selected matriculation results by Simkins and Patterson (2005). Although their point of departure for their inquiry into learner performance in south africa is, pedagogically speaking, somewhat conservative, as its preferred model appears to be a transitional bilingual one, they nonetheless arrive at the conclusion in respect of the causal significance of the language of teaching (medium of instruction) factor that:

… social and economic variables at the individual household level do not play an enormous role in determining performance, with the exception of the language variables. Pupils whose home language is an African language are at a considerable disadvantage in the language of instruction [read English] by the time they reach grade 11 if the language of instruction is never spoken at home. This can be offset somewhat if the language of instruction is spoken sometimes at home and it can be offset considerably if the language of instruction is spoken often at home. (Simkins and Patterson 2005:33)

They also claim that competence in the language of instruction is crucial for performance in mathematics. “Every extra per cent earned in the language test is associated with an addition of one-sixth of a per cent in the mathematics test in grade 9 and one-third of a percent in grade 11” (Simkins and Patterson 2005:34).21 Their study, although limited and preliminary in many respects, has advanced the argument for mother tongue-based education from postulating a correlative to demonstrating a causal relationship between educational success and language

20 See october 2002:76-77.

21 However dubious such number-crunching might be, the authors have grappled with a large measure of success with the issue of relative weighting of causal factors, which october (2002:77) had been forced to leave in abeyance. Their statistical methods for weighting the effects of different relevant variables are explained in Chapter 3 of the study.

medium.22 At a quantitative level, our project calculated a few

years ago that, on the assumption that in a properly functioning educational system, a 90% pass rate would be reasonable, we have been wasting approximately R3 billion annually on paying the salaries of the teachers employed in grades 10-12 who produce the average 50% failure rate we have experienced in the matriculation examination in the period 1987 -2002. If these impressions do nothing else, they ought to demonstrate the need for in-depth educational research, in which the language issue, specifically the language-medium policy and practice, should feature centrally. The recent Human Rights Commission hearings appear, after initial silence on the language factor, to have realised its significance as a valid, indeed a crucial, research question! A major revision of policy in respect of languages of learning and teaching has in fact been initiated. Thus, for example, in the Commission’s report on its public hearing on The right to Basic education, one of the recommendations reads as follows:

given the recognised importance of mother-tongue learning, the Department [of Education] must re-evaluate the decision of granting SgBs [School governing Bodies] the power to determine language policy. Possible amendment to SASA [South African Schools Act] should be considered. Affected parties need to approach the issue based on what is in the best interests of the child. (HRC 2006:43)

SHIFTINg PERSPECTIVES?

We can only hope that evidence such as this will lead to a shift in the perceptions of the political and cultural leadership who, it should be noted, have in recent months begun to speak more openly and frequently in public about the virtues and benefits of mother

22 other important variables such as a good meal once a day and a favourable home literacy environment are essential, of course, but for the first time in post-apartheid South Africa, the language medium issue has been demonstrated to be a central cause of success or failure.

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 81

tongue-based education. Dr Nic Taylor, one of South Africa’s most prominent

educational analysts and researchers who, until recently, was at best agnostic about the demand for and practicality of mother tongue education, remarked recently in response to a question about fundamental changes between apartheid and post-apartheid education that:

… we haven’t made much progress in realising the potential of poor children in terms of giving them quality schooling. ...The legacy of apartheid-era education is seen in the poor education of black teachers who, generally, teach black children. The [Joint Education] trust’s research shows that the average mark a sample of grade three teachers in 24 rural schools in SA achieved on a grade six test in their subject was 55%. Teachers are shaky in terms of the subject they are teaching, and this is exacerbated by the language problem. They are not teaching in their own tongue. He praises Education Minister Naledi Pandor for her promotion of mother tongue education, at least in the earlier years of school … (Blaine 2005:17)

In the Western Cape, the government is firmly committed to the implementation of mother tongue-based bilingual education for a minimum of seven years of primary schooling and will be investigating the financial and training implications of extending the system into secondary schools.

However, unless African languages are given market value, i.e., unless their instrumentality for the processes of production, exchange and distribution is enhanced, no amount of policy change at school level can guarantee their use in high-status functions and, thus, eventual escape from the hegemony of English. We have understood for many years already that the previous and current language-medium policy caused cognitive impoverishment and, consequently, necessitated investment in compensatory on-the-job training by the private sector in order to enhance the “trainability” of the just-from-school recruits. This wastefulness would be completely avoidable if there

had been a national development plan in which reform of education and economic development planning were more effectively integrated. This would mean that fundamental changes in the language-medium policy would be directly related to the increased use of African mother tongues, where relevant, in the public service and in the “formal” economy. An articulated programme of job creation and employment on the basis of language proficiencies would, in the South African context, also serve as an organic affirmative action programme, one that would not have the unintended consequence of perpetuating and entrenching divisive racial identities inherited from the apartheid past.

At a more general level, it is my view that we have to move rapidly beyond mere posturing and gesturing in the direction of implementing a consistently democratic language policy in South Africa. We have to do so not only in order to improve and consolidate the democratic political culture that has been initiated here but also in order to expand the potential of national economic development that will become possible because of a higher level of general education of the workforce and a deeper substratum of ordinary South Africans attuned to the needs and dynamics of modern science and technology that will have been mediated through local languages as well as English. In order to do this, we shall have to review and refurbish the impressive but underfunded and bureaucratised language infrastructure established since 1995.

It is, in my view, of the utmost importance that the original independent statutory character of the Pan South African language Board be restored and reinforced so that real progress, as opposed to the uneven achievements hitherto, can be initiated and accelerated.

lANgUAgE PolICy AS A ClASS PRoJECT

This new phase of the development and use of African languages in high-status functions should be approached and understood against the background of the strategies, activities and programmes of the African Academy of languages (Acalan), viewed as an instrument of the African Renaissance and of the


cultural revolution on the continent during this, the “African century”, both of which were so hopefully proclaimed by President Thabo Mbeki at the end of the 20th century. As a specialised bureau of the African Union, Acalan is beginning to influence decisively the direction and modalities of language policies on the continent.23 South Africa, because of its own recent history and its human and material resources, is bound to play an important role on this new road and clarity about our own positions on and commitment to a democratic language dispensation is, therefore, fundamental. The success of Acalan will have direct and enduring consequences for all African countries, not least for the Republic of South Africa.

It is clear that the future direction of language policy in South Africa will be influenced as much by exogenous as by endogenous factors. If mother tongue-based multilingual education proves to be a success, the pressure for the expansion of the system and the related practices will become irresistible. The key challenges that have to be addressed at the beginning of the 21st century are the increasing hegemony of English, the need to raise literacy levels by means of, among other things, the successful implementation of appropriate language-medium policies in the schools and universities and, closely related, the need to demonstrate the positive relationship between functional multilingualism and economic efficiency and productivity. The inculcation and nurturing of a culture of reading in African languages is the key to all of these issues.

It is necessary that we “return to the source” and pose once again a question first suggested by Amilcar Cabral with respect to the continent as a whole: Will South Africa’s middle class find the courage, does it have the imagination, to commit class suicide by moving away decisively from the current English-mainly and often English-only language policy, with all its negative consequences for a democratic polity? My answer to this apparently rhetorical question is simple but, I suspect, only too true. This can happen if we can demonstrate the economic value of African languages.

23 An introduction to Acalan is Alexander 2005(b).

Moves in this direction are now increasingly evident, even though they are still offset by negative attitudes in respect of African languages.24 My colleague, Michellé october, among others, has begun researching this area. Preliminarily, she has discerned a definite move on the part of major economic players such as the banking sector, parastatal communications firms and the public service administration towards increased use of African languages in the workplace, in their administration and especially at the interface with customers. one of the country’s biggest banks, for example, has made available on their autobank screens instructions in isiZulu and Sesotho and not only in English and Afrikaans, as was the case in the past. According to their latest data, just under 30% of their customers use these two indigenous African languages. They intend making this facility available in all of the 11 official languages of the country.25 The parastatal South African Broadcasting Corporation found that during the financial year 2003–2004, they had a jump in revenue because of the increased provision of local content programmes in African languages.26 It is clear that if this trend continues, in all the different economic sectors and large institutions, including especially the educational system, the market potential of these languages will be enhanced in ways that cannot now be anticipated.

The challenge, however, is not only to the political, business and cultural leadership of the country. It is a challenge also to the applied language scholars and language practitioners of southern Africa. Above all, it is high time that the intelligentsia begin to move out of their comfort zones and accept that language policy, class and power are tightly interwoven and that, unless we devise our own agendas in the interest of our people as a whole, we are willy-nilly carrying out others’ possibly nefarious agendas.

24 This is largely a function of the fact that proficiency in African languages continues to be inadequately remunerated except at the highest levels of translation and interpreting.

25 By the end of 2006, isixhosa and Setswana had been added to the menu of language options.

26 M. october, personal communication.

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 83


REFERENCES AND FURTHER READINg

Alexander, N. 1989. language policy and national unity in south africa/azania. Cape Town: Buchu Books.

Alexander, N. & Heugh, K. 1999. “language policy in the new South Africa”. Culturelink special issue 1998-1999. Cultural Change and development in south africa.(edited by A. Zegeye and R. Kriger). Zagreb: Institute for International Relations.

Alexander, N. 2002. “linguistic rights, language planning and democracy in post-apartheid South Africa”. In Baker, S. (ed.), language policy: lessons from Global Models. Monterey, CA.: Monterey Institute of International Studies.

Alexander, N. 2005 (a). “The impact of the hegemony of English on access to and quality of education with special reference to South Africa”. (lecture delivered at the language and Poverty Conference, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.y. 14 october 2005). Unpub. Mimeo. Alexander, N. (ed.). 2005 (b). The intellectualisation of african languages. Cape Town: Praesa/University of Cape Town.

Alexandre, P. 1972. an introduction to languages and language in africa. london: Heinemann. Baker, C. 1996. foundations of Bilingual education and Bilingualism. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Bamgbose, A. 2000. language and exclusion. Hamburg: lIT-Verlag.

Blaine, S. 2005. “losing the legacy of apartheid education”. Business day (20 years Anniversary Edition Supplement), August 23 2005, page 17.

Bourdieu, P. 1991. language and symbolic power. (Edited and introduced by John B. Thompson. Translated by gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson) Cambridge: Polity Press.

giliomee, H. 2003. The afrikaners. Biography of a people. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

gogolin, I. 1994. der monolinguale habitus der multilingualen schule. Münster and New york: Waxmann.

Halliday, M. and Martin, J. 1993. Writing science: literacy and discursive power. london: Falmer Press.

Herbert, R. (ed.). 1990. language and society in africa. The Theory and practice of sociolinguistics. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.

Hirson, B. 1979. year of fire, year of ash. london: Zed Press. HRC. 2006. Report of the Public Hearing on the Right to Basic Education. Pretoria: South African Human Rights Commission.

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Kane-Berman, J. 1979. soweto. Black revolt, White reaction. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.

lenin, V. 1983. lenin on language. Moscow: Raduga Publishers.

lodge, T. 1984. Black politics in south africa since 1945. london and New york: longman. Mesthrie, R. (ed.). 2002. language in south africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Myers-Scotton, C. 1990. “Elite closure as boundary maintenance. The case of Africa”. In B. Weinstein (ed.), language policy and political development.Norwood, NJ.: Ablex Publishing Corporation.

Niedrig, H. 2000. sprache, Macht, Kultur. Multilinguale erziehung in post-apartheid südafrika. Münster and New york: Waxmann. october, M. 2002. Medium of instruction and its effect on Matriculation examination results for 2000 in Western Cape secondary schools.

Praesa occasional Papers No. Cape Town: Praesa. Republic of South Africa. (1996)

The Constitution of the republic of south africa. (Act No. 108 of 1996). Pretoria: Republic of South Africa.

Shapiro, H and Tebeau, K (eds.). 2011. after apartheid: reinventing south africa. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

Simkins, C. and Patterson, A. 2005. learner performance in south africa. social and economic determinants of success in language and Mathematics. Cape Town: HSRC Press.

Tollefson, J. 1991. planning language, planning inequality. language policy in the Community. london and New york: longman.

Weinstein, B. 1983. The Civic Tongue. political Consequences of language Choices. Norwood, NJ.: Ablex Publishing Corporation.

Wilson, M. and Thompson, l. (1969) The oxford history of south africa, vol. 1. oxford: oxford University Press.

22 OctOber 1936 – 27 August 2012 87

I want to begin this evening by saying a few words about the spirit in which I approach this “difficult dialogue”.1 We are living in very troubled times in

South Africa, in the rest of Africa and in most parts of the world. This has as much to do with geopolitical changes since the collapse of the Soviet Union as it has with internal national contradictions. If these developments have taught us nothing else, we should at the very least have begun to understand that there are no blueprints and no pontifical infallibility. Consequently, the worst approach to any serious conversation is one of grandstanding, one-upmanship, smart-aleckiness and mere fault finding. A dialogue between people who approach things in this way will invariably degenerate into a dialogue of the deaf. Instead, we need to accept that, unless the contradictions involved are of an antagonistic nature, we have to listen carefully, respect one another’s integrity and good faith even as we realise that we are approaching the issues at hand from very different positions. In my view, we are still in the fortunate position in present-day South Africa that we can assume that all of us are attempting to prevent

1 Address delivered at the University of Cape Town in the Cape argus series: difficult dialogues on 13 August 2008.

non-antagonistic contradictions from becoming antagonistic ones.

When I proceed, therefore, to accuse the ruling party and the dominant elites of post-apartheid South Africa of wilfully creating or, at best, tolerating, a situation that in all likelihood will degenerate into one general “night of the long knives”, a war of all against all, such as we last saw in lebanon in the 1980s and in the former yugoslavia in the 1990s, these introductory remarks have to be borne in mind. our worst-case scenario is without any doubt a kind of replay of the genocide in Rwanda, which is why we cannot treat these issues light-heartedly. In making this accusation, I am at the same time challenging the powers that be to make the intellectual and the moral effort to study our history and to examine carefully the scientific tools that are necessary and available in order to address the danger systematically and seriously with a view to averting the disaster.

The fact that I am not alone in this view of the developing situation is no consolation. Recently, we have had a rash of “public conversations” of all kinds. At the very least, this is a signal to all of us that civil society and specifically the intelligentsia have begun to

hAs the rAinbOW VAnisheD?

the MeAning Of nAtiOnAL unitY in the neW sOuth AfricA

NEVIllE AlExANDER


wake up to the reality and even the immediacy of the dangers that face us. Two weeks ago, Reverend Alan Boesak denounced the very phenomenon I am going to address and, if nothing else, the fact that so many prominent people are beginning to say similar things ought to make the ANC leadership and other power-holders sit up and take notice. Few people have been as fortunate as we have been during the past 20 years, more or less, when quite unforeseen circumstances afforded us the opportunity albeit within definite limits to remake our society and our polity, indeed even our economy, in such a way that South Africa and southern Africa can become a more humane space within which to nurture our children and our grandchildren and in which to be creative in many other ways. I believe we still have the time to recover lost ground and this is the reason why I agreed to speak out in this second talk in the series of “difficult dialogues”.

THE RACIAl HABITUS

I speak at a moment in our contemporary history that will be remembered as one that had all the promise of a new beginning. This statement has nothing to do with Barack obama, Jacob Zuma or lynn Brown. It has to do with the fact that, for reasons relating to the political economy of this country during the past two years, ordinary working people have suddenly realised that they can no longer depend on government or on the dominant classes to help them to realise that founding myth of the new South Africa: a Better life for all! It has become abundantly obvious that we are heading for a period of intense class struggles. From the point of view of the left in this country, this means quite simply that we have been afforded a second chance within as many decades to transform our society fundamentally. And this is what I am going to speak about this evening. More precisely, I want to speak about one of the most neglected preconditions for radical social transformation, i.e., about the ideological and ethical foundations of a South Africa that is more humane and equitable for the majority of the citizens rather than the nightmare which the present situation

is for most of those who do not belong to the gated middle class.

About a month ago, I came face to face in the most concrete way possible with a theoretical issue to which I have given much thought and consideration during the past 30 years and more. My motor vehicle was involved in a “minor” accident, which, as a matter of interest, cost a mere R30 000 in repairs! I was forced to go through the unavoidable rigmarole of getting a police case number for purposes of contacting my insurance firm. Imagine my horror when, without even being consulted, I was classified “coloured” by a constable at the first police station2 I went to in order to report the accident. I asked courteously but firmly what made him believe that I am “coloured” and he immediately went scarlet with shame. After a brief skirmish, he informed me that this scene repeated itself regularly every day and appealed to me “not to shoot the messenger”. Again, as a matter of interest, at both of the other police stations I visited on that day, this classificatory exercise was pointedly ignored. Whether the police officials involved quietly filled in this shameful box afterwards, I cannot say; if that is the case, I assume they were trying to avoid the kind of wearying quarrel that this ridiculous practice gives rise to most times. After all, besides the issue of principle, what on earth has anyone’s so-called “race” got to do with his or her ability to drive a motor vehicle?

This irritating experience, which most citizens in South Africa are subjected to every single day of the year at one government office or another, confirmed what everyone knows but never ponders, viz., that it is the state or, more generally, the dominant classes, that set the template by which social identities in the modern world are primarily fashioned. By compelling us to declare whether we belong to this or that so-called “race”, the state forces us into a racial mould, whether we like it or not. Eventually, a racial habitus takes hold of us so that we take it for granted that we belong to this or that so-called “race” and we

2 In a Kafkaesque comedy of errors, I was compelled to report the same accident at no fewer than three police stations before all the bureaucratic requirements were in place!

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assume the relevant racial identity. This is what happened during the colonial-apartheid era and this is, preposterously, what continues to happen in post-apartheid South Africa, allegedly in order to benefit the oppressed and exploited majority. I am not going to discuss the intricacies of the process, the fact, for example, that, historically, the subaltern groups contest these identities because they sense or feel very concretely that they come with economic, political and social disadvantages. In our own recent history, the contesting of racial identities such as “coloured” and “Bantu”, among many others, demonstrates the point very clearly.3

I am going to take the liberty for the purposes of this difficult dialogue to list a series of propositions that are based on the insights of the social sciences in the second half of the 20th century and that are widely, if not universally, accepted.

• “Race” is not a valid biological entity. Most recently, genomic science has confirmed this position.

• Race is a social reality in most modern states, especially in those where the transatlantic slave trade has left its tragic legacy. Few, if any, modern polities have escaped the resultant racial habitus or race thinking completely. Next to Nazi germany, apartheid South Africa was the epitome of the racial state.

• Races, like other social phenomena, are constructed, not primordial or “given”. This fact, as Professor Deborah Posel has demonstrated in her studies of “racial science” in the apartheid think-tanks, was clearly understood by the ideologues of the Afrikaner Nationalist movement.

• Because ordinary citizens are not social scientists and are not aware of the processes by which their identities have been, and are being, constructed, social, including racial, identity does have a primordial significance for them. This is the real reason for the tenacity of these

3 There is a host of sociological, historical, biographical and literary materials on this particular topic.

identities.• Whereas subordinated people may, and do,

resist and contest the imposition by the ruling classes of specific racial labels on them, the latter have this paradigmatic prerogative, based on their political and economic power.

An important corollary to this list of propositions regarding racial identities is one that is seldom articulated and even more seldom deemed worthy of articulation. I refer to the fact that all these social categories are historical and, thus, dynamic. That is to say, they can be deconstructed and refashioned; we can reimagine ourselves, change from one identity to another, much as immigrants change their national identities after the first years of anguish and nostalgia. If we are not doing this today, when we have every opportunity to do so, given that in distinctive periods of transition such as we have been, and are, experiencing, people are more amenable than usual to radical change, we are likely to discover the reasons for the apparent inertia in the class advantages of the racial order.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTIoN AND THE PERPETUATIoN oF RACIAl IDENTITIES

In various recent papers,4 I have demonstrated and condemned the manner in which the unthinking implementation of legitimate affirmative action measures is perpetuating the very racial identities constructed in the colonial-apartheid era for the benefit of the dominant groups in southern Africa. In summary, my argument is deceptively simple and, I want to add provocatively, incontrovertible. The policy of affirmative action, levelling the playing fields, representivity, or whatever other suitable name we care to use, is in my view one of the most sensitive issues in the new South Africa, not because it is wrong in any sense but because of its unintended consequences. It evolved in a most elaborate process of public

4 See, among others, Alexander, N. 2004. Brown vs Board of education. a south african perspective. Cape Town: PRAESA.


consultation that culminated in the core legislation of the Public Services Act, the Employment Equity Act, the Skills Development Act and the Skills Development levy Act. All of these are, laudably, geared towards the imperative of the redistribution of economic, social, cultural and political power and resources that constituted the fundamental reason for the struggle against racial capitalism in general and apartheid in particular. These measures result from the undeniable fact that we have not had a social revolution in South Africa. If we had overthrown the apartheid state by military means, we would certainly not have had any reason to implement “affirmative action” in its present form. For this reason, it is perfectly correct to maintain, as I do, that only reactionaries and hide-bound conservatives are opposed to these redistributive and redress objectives of the post-apartheid government. The vast majority of the people support them as a matter of course.

My point, it ought to be clear, is not to criticise the intentions or the specifics of the policy even though I will say that, as implemented, on balance it is a policy that benefits mainly the rising black middle class and in effect deepens the inherited class inequality in our society. The real target of my intervention is the perpetuation of racial identities, the irresponsible practice on the part of political, cultural and other role models of referring unproblematically to “Blacks”, “coloureds”, “Indians”, and “whites” in their normal public discourse, well knowing that by so doing they are perpetuating the racial categories of apartheid South Africa and wittingly or unwittingly entrenching racial prejudice. This discourse is embedded in the legislation I referred to and in the social practices and inter-group dynamics they give rise to or reinforce.

let us be quite clear about the issue of affirmative action. The simple fact of the matter is that it can only apply to relatively few people who have comparable levels of knowledge and skills. In such cases, it is accepted that individuals from the “designated groups”5 of the Employment Equity Act should be given preference. I believe a case can and should be made in

5 “Blacks”, women and disabled people.

favour of youth still labelled “white”, who were born after, say, 1990 and were, therefore, not automatically advantaged merely because of their supposed skin colour. I do not want this issue, as important as it might be to the individual person, to divert us from the main line of my critique. However, besides the obvious question of equity, this issue raises much more profound imponderables. Among other things, it suggests that the history of humanity can be unmade by means of affirmative action-type measures on behalf of the state. We should not forget that all polities have been the sites of oppression and exploitation of one group of people by another throughout most of modern history. If we genuinely believe that it is possible in some vague manner “to level the playing fields” by means of such measures, we are being ahistorical in the most naive manner. For, if this were really the case, the descendants of Europe’s feudal nobility, assuming we can still identify them, should still be working at historical redress and making good the inequalities of the past. In short, the policy should only apply to the one or two generations that actually suffered under apartheid, since this is still within the range of contemporary historical memory. The rest should be dealt with under the rubric of “transformation”, i.e., the remaking of the entire economy, society and polity.

This critique reaches right back to the way in which the legislation is interpreted and implemented. Although one accepts that because of the apartheid regime’s practice, the legislation will, necessarily, use the terminology of that time, it does not follow that we have to use the logic and the rationale of that bygone period. We have to study each relevant domain carefully and ask ourselves what actually caused the disadvantage. To take the educational sphere as an example: it was not the colour of my skin that disadvantaged me; it was the quality of the schooling I received, the lack of resources at my various schools, the untrained or under-trained teachers, who taught me, etc. Consequently, in addressing the issue, I can, and should, ask, among other things, to which school did this candidate go. By doing so, I am not circumnavigating the sensitive issue of “race”; I am refusing to use the short hand of “race” and asking

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what the real reasons were. At the same time, I am not entrenching the racial habitus or race thinking in the minds of all concerned.

We can, to put it briefly and bluntly, carry out justifiable affirmative action policies without entrenching racial stereotypes and racial consciousness. My favourite example of using linguistic resources as one of the criteria for putting applicants in relevant jobs demonstrates the point very clearly, but there are many other options. given the nature of the civil service, for example, it ought to be a requirement that any applicant should be literate, at the very least, in a relevant African language, next to either English or Afrikaans, depending on the particular post. Besides valorising the African languages and, incidentally, leading to a revival of the academic and professional study of these languages, this would compel Afrikaans- and English-speaking South Africans to learn an African language. This is certainly no problem for more than 90% of South Africans who are not monolingual in English. There will be contradictions and issues that will require some ironing out but these are minor and, in principle, soluble within reasonable time frames. I have no doubt that the generations born in the 2020s and after will be completely trilingual in that all children, besides their home language – if it is not English – will learn English and another important South African language, usually from the Nguni or a Sotho cluster.

Income is another important criterion if our approach is that what has to be addressed is disadvantage, not so-called “race”. Time does not allow me to go into detail here but it ought to be obvious that if we approach things from this angle, we immediately push aside “race” as a factor and certainly undermine any racial prejudice and potential racist effects of affirmative action policies. The still large-scale overlapping of “race” and class in South Africa guarantees that no disadvantaged “black” person will fall through the net by virtue of the use of non-racial criteria such as language and income.

If there are good reasons for tracking or monitoring demographic shifts in the occupancy of given posts at our many different institutions – for example, where

the old boys’ club syndrome acts as a roadblock in a black-majority country to the inclusion of people who were previously excluded on the basis of colour – there are ways of problematising, rather than reinforcing, racial identities. In any case, as I have intimated already, if we were to carry out radical transformative strategies consistently and with firmness, such monitoring will become superfluous within less than a decade. There are, if we want to put it bluntly, too few people labelled “white” in South Africa for this to be a real problem in a flourishing economy, a fact that is more than amply demonstrated by the very collapse of apartheid.

BlACK ECoNoMIC EMPoWERMENT

I have very little to say about this matter. given the class leadership of the national liberation movement, as led by the African National Congress, it was, and is, inevitable that entrepreneurial, would-be, or actual, middle-class elements among the oppressed will want to enrich themselves within the rules of the capitalist game. The African nationalist political movement is the vehicle this class of people has used and will use in order to further their interests. This is as it should be, if that is one’s class position. If, however, one accepts, as I do, that the “white capitalist class”, i.e., the individuals who, for reasons of the peculiarities of colonial and imperial conquest in southern Africa, still own more than 90% of the means of production (mines, factories, farms, banks, etc) in South Africa are South Africans – even if, as is the case in all countries today, a large proportion of the capital they manage and work with is derived from foreign sources – there can be no reason to assume that capital will become more South African if a few black faces appear on the boards of directors of the relevant firms. That this will happen in any case as the result of the extension of the franchise to all South Africans is obvious. But that we should use the revenue of the state in order to further the interests of particular individuals be they green or blue is not as obvious to me. My position on this matter is simple, even simplistic: we have to fight against the super-profits of the capitalist class and for higher taxation of companies that exploit the


working people, so that more money will be available for improving the education, health and welfare of the poor in the cities and in the countryside. The colour of the people whom we fight against in order to attain these objectives is completely immaterial to me.

This is a deliberate simplification, an attempt to get beyond the nonsense we are sold by self-seeking individuals; in practice, things are much more complex, as every trade unionist knows. But, unless you keep your eye firmly on the real targets of the class struggle, you can easily be paralysed by notions such as the “patriotic bourgeoisie”, being “proudly South African”, and other forms of the same hype.

This is not the place to discuss the alternatives in any detail. Suffice it to say that, in my view, instead of the privatisation drive in favour of so-called black entrepreneurs, the South African state should launch a large-scale co-operative movement in all sectors of the economy and, gradually, draw in as many of the working population into these firms as possible. In that way, the redistributive imperatives of the democratic movement will redound to the benefit of many more of the oppressed than the present deepening of the abysmal gulf between the rich and the poor. The socioethical and educational effects of such a strategy would help to counter the rapid slide into the criminal barbarism we are experiencing today.

THE DISgRACE AND THE DANgER oF THE BBI

In recent weeks, on the heels of the xenophobic disaster of May and June and the “Chinese puzzle” of June-July,6 we have had inflicted on us the tragi-comic developments around the establishment of a “Bruin

6 That puzzle was appropriately summed up by the Minister of labour when, in a Mad Hatter moment, he objected to the “absurd” notion that the “Chinese” can be “coloured”, never mind “black”. His indignation bordered on the linguistic when he pontificated that “coloureds don’t speak Chinese”. This kind of mid-winter madness is grist to the mill of the Tannie Evitas and the Zapiros but it demonstrates the utter stupidity of race thinking. The Minister’s uncharacteristic outburst also reminded me that it is high time that we stopped referring to the prevailing multi-racial discourse and practice as “non-racialism”. None of us, to stay in the realm of Alice in Wonderland, has the authority of a Humpty-Dumpty.

Belange-Inisiatief” (BBI). given that we are speaking about this in the Western Cape, it would be very easy to trivialise the matter. That would be a mistake, because it is no laughing matter. For, let me say it clearly, this is no less than the thin edge of the genocidal wedge. To believe anything else is to ignore the lessons of history and be doomed to repeat them.

The BBI appeals to the basest instincts of a group of people, the so-called “coloureds” who, under the apartheid system as a deliberate divide-and-rule strategem, were treated slightly better, speaking generally, than the vast majority of the oppressed. The racist consequences of this coloured preference policy were, and are, horrendous.7 All of us in this hall can tell many stories about this disgrace. But, as we all know, in this part of the country, there is a great tradition of non-racialism that is associated with the liberation movement as a whole, and with the Unity Movement in particular. Indeed, one of the challenges we have to put in front of the movement is to explain – through careful research aimed at addressing the issue effectively – why that tradition does not appear to have given rise to a culture of tolerance and integration among especially working class people.

I shall leave it there for now so that we can get back to the BBI. Clearly, the people behind this move, instead of grabbing the opportunity 1994 has given us to reimagine ourselves and, using the resources of the state and civil society – and of the private sector for that matter – to address the issues that affect all the poor, resort to one of the most sinister strategies of mobilising people on a racial basis. I have no doubt at all, whether the people involved will admit to it in public or not, that this is, at one level, a silly attempt by the “volk” of yesterday to annex the “volkies”, also of yesterday. I cannot for one second believe that the youth will allow themselves to be caught with such a slap riem. I can understand the situation where one goes into an Afrikaans-speaking community in order to do

7 Incidentally, even though they are worse, they do not differ in kind from similar racial prejudice phenomena among other South Africans. Need I refer to the xenophobic outbursts of the other day?

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some genuine development work and uses essentially Afrikaans in order to communicate with people. In the same way, if one has to work among xhosa-speaking people, one will use mostly isixhosa in order to do whatever work one has to do in the community. But to form a national organisation in order to promote the interests of a group defined by “race”, besides the fact that it is probably unconstitutional, is highly dangerous because of its exclusivity. Imagine if the Red Cross were only to help “red” people instead of all people who are in need of their assistance!

Resources may constrain one to working in only one city or one province but one would still be able to work among all the poor if the intention, as is suggested by the spokespeople of the BBI, is to alleviate poverty and to rebuild communities.

I am, for example, involved in community literacy programmes across the Peninsula, on a personal level, mainly in langa and lotus River. In langa, we help the children with reading and writing in isixhosa and English; in lotus River with Afrikaans and English, besides many other things that are not as relevant to the topic under discussion. We also bring them together as often as we can when, for example, they can enjoy joint visits to the zoo, the theatre or the botanical gardens. We work, to put it simply, among poor working class people, not among “coloured” or “black” people. There is a world of difference between this approach and its effects and that of the BBI.

SUB-NATIoNAl IDENTITIES

The BBI is even more dangerous because its point of departure is that so-called Coloureds are a “minority”. This goes right back to PW Botha’s notion of “a nation of minorities”. I shall not grace this notion with serious consideration in this context. Suffice it to say that to define yourself into a minority corner in a situation such as the transition in South Africa is to play with fire in an almost literal sense. There is nothing more dangerous. It is as though Jews in Nazi germany themselves voluntarily displayed the Star of David in order to distinguish themselves from the rest of the population. All that such a “minority” would need

to become a target of pogroms and even genocide is a group of cynical politicians and criminals. Again, the recent xenophobic phenomenon is like a bolt of lightning that may have heralded the storm.

We have to insist that we are all South Africans and that those subnational identities that do not undermine our national unity can and should be accepted as consonant with the democratic project. Such subnational identities would include those based on gender, language, region, religion, among others, because hitherto, with the exception of Afrikaans during the apartheid era, they have not been used to mobilise people in divisive ways. of course, there is no reason to believe that they cannot be so used. That will depend on the political and social leadership of the country and the ways in which we use our knowledge of social science in order to anticipate such possible divisive strategies and tactics. Subnational identities based on “race”, for reasons connected with the history of this country, fall outside of this frame of reference even though many, perhaps even most, people will for many years or decades continue to identify themselves in racial terms. The state can, and should, reduce, and eventually eliminate, the conditions under which racial identities thrive.8 one immediate and highly effective intervention would be to abolish the need to identify oneself on government forms in terms of “race”. our public discourse should increasingly do away with the need for using racial labels of any kind and we should be using our creative energies to find other, more constructive, ways of referring to people.

oNCE MoRE: RAINBoW oR gARIEB

The xenophobic disasters of recent times have confirmed my view that we are an all too ordinary country. The notion of South African exceptionalism has been attacked by many scholars and the attacks on so-called foreign Africans have underlined the need for

8 If people consider themselves to be “coloured”, “Indian” or anything else, we cannot deny them the right to do so but we can help to create the conditions that will enable them to free themselves from such social prisons.


all of us to wake up to the reality that we, too, could all too easily be faced with situations such as those that have tested other African countries in Katanga (Shaba), Biafra, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Mauretania, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola, Mozambique, Morocco, Uganda, Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, Zimbabwe, etc, etc.

The rainbow, besides being an optical illusion, as an iconic metaphor of national unity, places the emphasis on coexisting colour units. If the recent xenophobic events herald the end, i.e., the disappearance, of the rainbow, they may well mean that we can start somewhere else. My proposal is that we conceptualise our multicultural reality in dynamic and indigenous terms using the metaphor of the garieb, the great river, that flows into the ocean of humanity. Its main tributaries (African, European, Asian and modern “American”) that flow together to constitute the mainstream culture of South Africa will from time to time and from place to place under different circumstances have more, or less, influence on the whole but they do not disappear altogether. We can be both one and different in dynamic ways. We do not

have to box ourselves into racial cages out of which it is impossible to escape and for the preservation of which we are willing to lay down our lives in ethnic and genocidal civil wars. only such a conception of nation-building,9 of culture without borders, will do in the new South Africa; it will also open up the possibilities of freeing our minds and our creativity so that we can find the synergies between the most radical economic, political and socio-cultural tendencies in our country and in our region. South Africa is the one country in the world where, for historical and cultural reasons, it is possible to demonstrate that a raceless society is possible, a society in which, if we return to the sources of our garieb nation, we can fill the notion of ubuntu with humanistic, as opposed to mere folkloristic, content. We live at the Cape of Storms, which, if we change our angle of vision, is at the same time the Cape of good Hope.

9 olive Schreiner’s social democratic vision of a non-racial South African unity, articulated exactly 100 years ago, was the first expression of this goal; most of the other South African intellectuals projected one or other sectionalism based on “race”.

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1979 one azania, one nation. The national Question in south africa. london: Zed Press.

1983 (a) nation and ethnicity in south africa. In national forum. Johannesburg: The National Forum Committee.

1983 (b) Three essays on namibian history. Windhoek: Namibian Review Publications.

1985 sow the Wind. Contemporary speeches. Johannesburg: Skotaville Publishers.

1987 “Ten years of the Education Crisis. The Resonance of 1976”. In g. Zabala (ed.), education for affirmation. Johannesburg: Skotaville Publishers.

1989 (a) language policy and national unity in south africa/azania. Cape Town: Buchu Books.

1989 (b) “liberation Pedagogy in the South African Context”. In C. Criticos (ed), experiential learning in formal and non-formal education. Durban: Media Resource Centre, Dept. of Education, University of Natal, Durban.

1990 (a) “Educational Strategies for a New South Africa”. In J. Samuel and B. Nasson (eds), education: from poverty to liberty. (Vol 2 series of reports of the Second Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty in South Africa) Cape Town: David Philip.

1990 (b) education and the struggle for national liberation in south africa. Johannesburg: Skotaville Publishers

1992 (a) “Robben Island: A Site of Struggle”. In N. Penn, H. Deacon and N. Alexander, robben island: The politics of rock and sand. UCT.

1992 (b) “language Planning From Below”. In R. Herbert (ed.), language and society in africa. The Theory and practice of sociolinguistics. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.

1992 (c) “The National Political Situation. The Real South Africa”. Address delivered at the Third National Conference of the Workers’ organisation for Socialist Action, April 1993. Cape Town.

1993 (a) africa and the new World order. Alexander Von Humboldt-Stiftung Mitteilungen.

1993 (b) some are More equal Than others. Essays on the Transition in South Africa. Cape Town: Buchu Books.

1993 (c) robben island dossier 1964–1974. Report to the International Community. Cape Town: UCT Press and Buchu Books.

1995 (a) race, ethnicity and nation in post-apartheid south africa. South Asia Bulletin. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. xV (1) 5-11.

1995 (b) Mainstreaming by Confluence: The Multilingual Context of literature in south africa. World literature Today. 70(1) 9-11.

1996 (ed) Towards a national language plan for south africa. Final Report of the language Plan Task group (langtag). Pretoria: State language Services.

1998 Building a new nation: promoting unity and accommodating diversity. In M. Cross, Z. Mkwanazi-Twala and g. Klein (eds), Dealing with Diversity in South African Education. A Debate on the Politics of a National Curriculum. Cape Town: Juta.

bibLiOgrAPhYseLecteD PubLicAtiOns bY neViLLe ALeXAnDer


1999 (with Karen Press) investigating economics. grade 7 learner’s Book. Kenwyn: Juta.

2000 (a)(compiler) educational innovation in post-Colonial africa. Selected Papers from the Panafrican Colloquium, 1994. Cape Town: Praesa.

2000 (b) human rights in the african Context: a Cross-Cultural perspective. In Krull, W. (ed.) Debates on Issues of our Common Future: 13-29. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft.

2000 (c) Why the nguni and sotho languages in south africa should be harmonised. In Deprez, K., Du Plessis, T. (eds) Multilingualism and government. Studies in language Policy in South Africa: 171-175. Pretoria: Van Schaik Publishers.

2000 (d) english unassailable but unattainable: The dilemma of language policy in south african education. Praesa occasional Paper No.3. Cape Town: Praesa.

2000 (e) Manuel Castells and the new south africa. Social Dynamics 26.1: 18-36.

2002 an ordinary Country. issues in the Transition from apartheid to democracy in south africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press.

2003 (a) The african renaissance and the use of african languages in Tertiary education. (Praesa occasional Papers No. 13). Cape Town: Praesa.

2003 (b) Foreword. In Jelloun, T., racism explained to My daughter. Cape Town: New Africa Books and Praesa.

2003 (c) implications of Brown v Board of education. a post-apartheid south african perspective. (Praesa occasional Papers No. 20). Cape Town: Praesa.

2006 (a) language policy, symbolic power and the democratic responsibility of the post-apartheid university. In Pithouse, R. (ed.). Asinamali: University Struggles in post-Apartheid South Africa. Trenton, NJ and Asmara: Africa World Press, Inc.

2006 (b) after harare. introduction to unesco. language policies in africa. Final Report on the Intergovernmental Conference on language Policies in Africa. Paris: Unesco.

2006 (b) “We Should Not Compare ourselves With America”. Interview with Neville Alexander. Humboldt Kosmos (87)28-29.

2007 (a) “Ten years after Apartheid: The State of Nation-Building in South Africa”. In Dorman, S., Hammett, D. and Nugent, P. (eds). Making nations, Creating strangers. states and Citizenship in africa. leiden and Boston: Brill.

2008 (b) “An Illuminating Moment. Background to the Azanian Manifesto”. In Mngxitama, A. and Alexander, A. (eds). Biko lives: Contemporary Black history. london: Palgrave Macmillan.

2011 racism and education. (with Vally, S.). Johannesburg: Centre for Education Rights and Transformation.

2012 “The Unresolved National Question in South Africa”. In Jeenah, N. (ed). pretending democracy: israel, an ethnocratic state. Craighall: Afro-Middle East Centre.

Space does not permit the publication of the full list of Alexander’s publications. For the full list please contact [email protected].

Two books by Neville Alexander are to be published posthumously in 2013:• Thoughts on the new south africa. Johannesburg: Jacana Media • language policy and the promotion of peace; african and european Case studies (with Arnulf

von Scheliha). Pretoria: Unisa Press.

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