Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonization

6. The Idea of South Africa and Pan-South African Nationalism

6 The Idea of South Africa and Pan-South African Nationalism If a crude and homely illustration may be allowed, the peoples of South Africa resemble the constituents of a plum-pudding when in the process of being mixed; the plums, the peel, the currants; the flour, the eggs, and the water are mingled together. Here plums may predominate, there the peel; one part may be slightly thinner than another, but it is useless to try to resort them; they have permeated each other’s substance: they cannot be reseparated; to cut off a part would not be to resort them; it would be dividing a complex but homogenous substance into parts which would repeat its complexity. What then shall be said of the South African problem as a whole? Is it impossible for the South African peoples to attain to any form of unity, organization, and national life? Must we forever remain a vast, inchoate, invertebrate mass of humans, divided horizontally into layers of race, mutually antagonistic, and vertically severed by lines of political state division , which cut up our races without simplifying our problems, and which add to the bitterness of race conflict the irritation of political divisions? Is national life and organization unattainable by us? […] We believe that no one can impartially study the condition of South Africa and feel that it is so. Impossible as it is that our isolated states should consolidate, and attain to a complete national life, there is a form of organic union which is possible to us. For there is a sense in which all South Africans are one […] there is a subtle but a very real bond, which unites all South Africans, and differentiates us from all other people in the world. This bond is our mixture of races itself. It is this which divides South Africa from all other peoples in the world, and makes us one. (Olive Cronwright Schreiner 1923: 60-61) Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonization 148 Introduction South Africa has a long history of identity crisis and contested questions of belonging and citizenship. This crisis is captured in such literature as There Are No South Africans by G. H. Calpin (1941) and recently by Ivor Chipkin’s Do South Africans Exist (2007). Calpin posited that, ‘The worst of South Africa is that you never come across a South African’ (Calpin 1941: 9). This means that one of the enduring themes and inconclusive questions in South African political and social history is that of the making of pan-South African nationalism to underpin the imagined nation. This argument is confirmed by three modern historians, Colin Bundy, Saul Dubow and Robert Ross. Bundy argued that: In the political catechism of the New South Africa, the primary enquiry remains the National Question. What is the post-apartheid nation? Who belongs or is excluded, and on what basis? How does a ‘national identity gain its salience and power to transcend the particularities of ethnicity and race?’ (Bundy 2007: 79) Dubow urged historians to focus research on the making of the South African nation in these words: It is surely time […] for historians to formulate detailed questions about how South Africa has been conceived and imagined, to analyze the different forms in which ideas about South Africa and South African societies have developed over time, and to trace the ways in which the South African ‘problem’ or predicament has been conceptualized. In order to do so, we should remember that the struggle for South Africa has long been, and continues to be, a struggle to become South African (Dubow 2007: 72). Ross, on the other hand, observed that: […] even if the essential unity of South Africa and the identity of South Africans are beyond dispute, there remains the question of what is, and what is not, South Africa. Who are, and who are not, South Africans (Ross 1999: 3). All these arguments speak to the pertinent issue of who constitute the authentic subject of the post-apartheid nation. It is a new and old question as it pre-occupied the proponents of Anglicization, Afrikanerization and Africanization as discursive processes within which identities germinated and were reconstructed and contested. What further complicated the situation were the questions of indigeneity and nativity that have persistently existed as a hidden script across all imaginations of the nation within plural and multiracial societies created by colonialism. 149 The metaphor...