The South African Ideology: The Myth of Exceptionalism, the Idea of Renaissance

I'd like to begin—I hope this will not strike readers as merely an indulgence—on something of an autobiographical note. I was an undergraduate student at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in the early- to mid-1970s. It was in this context—at once institutional and ideological—that my intellectual horizons were given a distinct shape for the first time and that I came to political consciousness. The political and intellectual commitments seemed to develop simultaneously—I don't think my impression is a matter of retrospective "harmonization" or rationalization. I was animated, politically, by antiracism, antiimperialism, and anticapitalism; my academic interests formed around modern literature and cultural theory, and I found myself drawn particularly to African literature.

I remember being rocked to my roots, especially, by Ayi Kwei Armah's novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, which was published in 1968, but which I first read in 1976, at more or less the same time—June of that year—that Soweto exploded into insurrection. My response to Armah's novel was no doubt overdetermined by this hugely consequential event in recent South African history. Like many other left-wing white students at the time, I had been struggling to rise to the challenge posed by the Black Consciousness movement, which had sharpened the ideological lines of struggle in the country, among other things quite rightly making it more difficult for whites to take refuge in a scrupulous rhetoric of nonracialism while doing absolutely nothing to oppose apartheid as a social and political reality. Particularly after 1973, when the (black) South African Students Organisation (SASO) disaffiliated from the (officially nonracial, but effectively, after this, white) National Union of South African Students (NUSAS),¹ it became necessary for white students opposed to apartheid to learn that their principles came at a price, that they had, as it were, to put their money where their mouths were. The lesson that they—we—needed to learn was that the decision to oppose apartheid was irrevocable. It was not the easiest of lessons to take on board: on the one hand, it entailed a degree of personal risk (the state had demonstrated that it had the will to move selectively against white dissident students); on the other, it entailed a significant degree of marginalization (from the majority white community as well as from our black student counterparts; the former we wanted nothing to do with; the latter, increasingly, wanted nothing to do with us).

In some ways, I'm sure, The Beautyful Ones appealed to me so because it spoke to the manifold contradictions of my own position at the time. The novel's overarching narrative of hope and disillusion embodied its own determinate contradictions, patently: its story of revolutionary nationalism and the rising up of the powerless; then of the betrayal of hope; but of the central protagonist's rock-bottom resistance to this betrayal, in the name of that older revolutionary impulse, now everywhere trampled upon, is shot through with intellectualism and messianism. But these were also among the contradictions that I was grappling with, and I found tremendously resonant the novel's ethical intensity, its commitment to the radical transformation of society, and, simultaneously, its acute consciousness of marginality, which of course it rather romanticized. It was only to be expected, I suppose, that a white South African student in my situation would find himself drawn to Armah's rather Adornian interest in using his privilege to wage war on all privilege and in addressing the relation between symbolic production and political emancipation, the "connectedness," as the Ghanaian writer puts it in his novel, "of words and the freedom of enslaved men."²

But there were other things that I found in Armah's novel, and in postcolonial African literature as a whole, that were less particularistic in their implications, that shed a penetrating comparative...