Democracy as Death: the moral order of anti-liberal politics in South Africa by Jason Hickel (review)

The first argument of this excellent book is one Hickel made with Megan Healy-Clancy in their edited volume Ekhaya: the politics of home in KwaZulu-Natal. This is the claim that, whatever else colonialism was on South Africa’s eastern seaboard, it was a ‘colonialism of the home’: a project aimed at shaping Zulu worlds by framing how people made their family lives. Hickel extends that proposal here by tracing how the South African state fixed attention on township houses and rural homesteads as the objects of two different kinds of colonial governmentality. Township houses were sites for establishing direct rule over nuclear families included in industrial modernity. Rural homesteads were sites where indirect rule was meant to uphold patriarchal hierarchy. Hickel says that this juxtaposition of two different models of family life shaped Zulu popular politics throughout the twentieth century and beyond.

Secondly, Hickel says that these domestic visions underpinned the violence of Zulu nationalism in the conflict around South Africa’s transition, and animated antipathy towards the ANC’s liberalism among rural Zulu migrant workers well into the first decade of this century. The vision of home developed under indirect rule is one Hickel shows to be deeply valued by migrants, who see relations of hierarchy and difference as conditions of the good. From this perspective, the model of family rooted in the township and its rebellions seems anomic and fragmented. Migrants see it as death. Extending Mamdani’s thesis, Hickel suggests that people subject to indirect and direct rule are also separated by their cosmologies. Migrants see the moral form of the township house as the undoing of their idealized rural homesteads. Defending the latter, they understand democracy as a project of destruction.

More conventional scholarship would read this anti-liberalism as a legacy of colonialism, but Hickel argues that this would silence his interlocutors. No puppets of history, he says their motives stem from a morality that can only be grasped cosmologically. While he offers us a history of antagonistic concepts of home, Hickel thus insists on their status as culture. Such ideas are often considered dangerous in South Africa, where scholarship has been burned by the historical analogy between culturalism and official ethnic obsessions. Hickel’s retort: the opponents of culture have their own essentialist conception of the human as autonomous individual, in need of extrication from the bonds of collectivity. This same idea his informants call death. Rather than doubt them, Hickel makes a self-consciously Latourian move to say that we face a world view here that cannot be accounted for in terms of critical theory, which in his view privileges visions of human agency dependent on Western notions of labour, property and commodity – all foreign to the world of the Zulu homestead.

The argument is well sustained, but some challenges are in order. Firstly, like Mamdani’s work, it suffers from undue binarism. Rural Zulu communities have always harboured deep if sometimes small pockets of support for the ANC. Hickel makes a great deal of the relation between the spatial form of ‘the’ Zulu homestead and antagonism to the ANC, but one of the largest, spatially most conservative homes in my own field site in the 1990s was built by an ANC family that had fled there from Inkatha attacks. Nor were they the only ones to combine a devotion to Zuluness in homestead life with support for a party led then by Mbeki (not, note, by Zuma). Likewise, if antagonisms of township house and rural home are the cosmological grounds for the opposition of Zulu nationalism to the ANC’s democratic project, how does one account for violence between those parties in rural parts of the region?

Secondly, Hickel could reflect more on the tensions between the cultural and historical dimensions of his analysis. Sometimes the book is assertively Latourian; at other times it works...