Race, Nation, Democracy: Questioning Patriotism in the New South Africa

Gerhard Maré Race, Nation, Democracy: Questioning Patriotism in the New South Africa Just as you cannot survive without dreams, you cannot move on without the memory of where you come from, even if that journey is fictitious. Is what we call identity not that situation made up of bits and pieces which one remembers from previous encounters, events and situa­ tions? Is memory not hanging from the branches? — BREYTEN BREYTENBACH (1998) . . . since memory, which is veiy sensitive and hates to be found lacking, tends to fill in any gaps with its own spuri­ ous creations of reality, but more or less in line with the facts of which it only has a vague recollection, like what remains after the passing of a shadow — JO SÉ SARAMAGO (2000:174). INTRODUCTION W HILE BEN ED ICT A N D ERSO N (19 8 3 ) HAD QUITE CORRECTLY DRAWN our attention to the “imagined” nature of political social identities (in particular the imagined communities that shelter under national­ ism), his phrase had also been too appropriate and soon became the new common sense. It is necessary to go beyond that common sense, social research Vol 72 : No 3 : Fall 2005 501 to see why populations are “available” (John Saul’s term [1979]) for mobilization, and not just investigate the methods through which that community is called into being, is mobilized, or imagined. Bowman, in a provocative contribution on Palestine and the imagined commu­ nity of Palestinians, argues that “the reader [of print media which, in Anderson’s argument, calls upon its mass audience] does not . . . ‘find’ a national identity through imagining a simultaneity of thou­ sands (or millions) of others who are reading the same text at the same time. Instead, a national identity is constituted by discovering a set of concerns he or she ‘recognizes’ as his or her own within a text or texts” (1994:141, emphasis added). Shared memories would be one set of such discoveries, even if only “more or less in line with the facts.” What do South Africans recognize after the transition to an inclu­ sive democratic order and within the common call to “build a nation” after 1994? Here lies my quest in this paper, asking whether the “nation” is feasible or even desirable: asking whether there are not more appro­ priate recognitions that can provide social cohesion. My argument is that the notion of a South African nation is tenuous at best, but that there are in any case more promising social commitments. In South Africa, since 1994, the call for “nation-building” has become familiar in many political discourses. This is not surprising in a country that had to create the new out of the fragments created by apartheid: fragments of ethnic “homelands” and divisions of “race,” certainly, but also of gender and of massive inequality, and of a labor exploitation system that relied on the “oscillating” migration of hundreds of thousands every year. However, the process of finding the most adequate and achievable form of “nation” has not been that easy and is far from realized, and here memory (also in the fleeting forms indicated by Breytenbach and Saramago), but also, and even more important, the material traces and scars of the past, are pertinent. How do these elements—race, nation, democracy, exploitation, and patriotism for that matter—relate to each other in this unusual context, a society in transition for a decade now: a society that was not colonial, in the strict sense, but sometimes characterized as “colonial­ 502 social research ism of a special type”; a society that was democratic, but for a very small proportion of the total population; a society that had been deliberately isolated, from within and without, and which was suddenly thrust into a world already transformed by processes of globalization and by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites, effectively remov­ ing whatever options toward socialism that would otherwise have been considered in the transition? In this “new world” these elements are deliberately addressed at the local, the South African level, through policy and political discourse in a nation-state that both exists, as state, and has still to be created, as nation. I...