What Can We Learn from Archie Mafeje about the Road to Democracy in South Africa?

Transcription

1 Legacy What Can We Learn from Archie Mafeje about the Road to Democracy in South Africa? Lungisile Ntsebeza INTRODUCTION More than two decades after the advent of democracy in 1994, South Africa finds itself at a crossroads in many ways similar to the crisis it faced in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the democracy we are now enjoying was negotiated. It is now apparent that, as in the rest of the African continent of which South Africa is an integral part, the leaders of the national liberation movements the African National Congress (ANC) in the case of South Africa are mostly interested in protecting the interests of private capital, mainly controlled by whites and an aspirant and emerging class of black capitalists. These leaders also use state resources to feather their own nests, paying lip service to the needs of the growing number of poor people living in both rural and urban areas that put them in power. The waves of strikes and protests which began in the early 2000s the current (2015/16) universitybased, student-led campaign being the most recent example illustrate the dismal failure of the leaders of the ANC to embark on a thoroughgoing project of decolonizing South Africa. This clearly shows that these leaders are mimicking their counterparts in the rest of the African continent. In this article about the legacy of Archie Mafeje, I focus on his reflections on the issues raised above. What can we learn from Mafeje about the road to democracy in South Africa? More specifically, what can we learn from his socio-historical analysis? I begin with a biographical sketch of Mafeje, with special emphasis on his intellectual development. I then move on to delineate his theoretical approach, which is based on a socio-historical analysis. From there I discuss Mafeje s politics. In doing so, I emphasize that Mafeje s approach to politics as an academic cannot be divorced from his association with the political tradition or tendency of the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM). I demonstrate that, over time, Mafeje used his The reviewers comments on earlier drafts are gratefully acknowledged. Development and Change 47(4): DOI: /dech C 2016 International Institute of Social Studies.

2 Legacy: Archie Mafeje 919 academic training as a way of expressing his politics. I consider some academic debates that Mafeje was engaged in and how these illustrate his views of the nature and character of post-independent Africa in general, and the South African liberation struggle and democracy in particular. I conclude by reflecting on the legacy of Mafeje and what it means for the current conjuncture. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Archibald Boyce Monwabisi Mafeje, popularly known as Archie Mafeje, was born in the District of Engobo in the Transkei part of the Eastern Cape on 30 March He matriculated in 1954 at Healdtown High School, the alma mater of many nationalist leaders in South Africa, including Nelson Mandela. His university education began in 1955 with a short stint at the then University College of Fort Hare, another institution that produced future nationalist leaders not only from South Africa, but throughout sub-saharan, English-speaking Africa. Mafeje left Fort Hare in 1956 after an unsuccessful academic performance. From 1957 to 1964 he studied at the University of Cape Town (UCT) where he completed a BA in Anthropology, an Honours degree in Urban Sociology and a Master s degree in Political Anthropology. He achieved the latter with a distinction under the supervision of Monica Wilson, one of the leading anthropologists at the time. Mafeje enjoyed a good working relationship with his supervisor, which he later expressed in one of his letters to Wilson dated 9 October 1964 in these terms: Working with you in Cape Town gave me great satisfaction because I felt I was not just being a student, but I was working on certain anthropological problems. 1 On Wilson s strong recommendation, Mafeje went to Cambridge University where he was initially employed as a research assistant and later graduated with a PhD in His supervisor at Cambridge University was Dr Audrey Richards. It is clear from the correspondence involving Mafeje, Wilson and Richards that the relationship between Mafeje and Richards contrasted sharply with his relationship with Wilson. Right from the outset, Richards doubted Mafeje s intellectual abilities, especially in dealing with theoretical issues, proper reading and analyses of text. She also did not, as Wilson did, have high regard for Mafeje as a field worker. 3 Her view of Mafeje is captured in one of her letters to Wilson dated 6 January 1968: I don t understand what is holding him up. He is quick and brilliant in discussion and a popular 1. All correspondence involving Mafeje, Wilson and Richards can be found in the African Studies section of the UCT Libraries. 2. Note that in the CV that Mafeje submitted to UCT when he applied for a job in 1993, he erroneously states that he completed his doctoral studies in See correspondence between Richards and Wilson.

3 920 Lungisile Ntsebeza supervisor always impresses newcomers. Yet he seems unable to read a document and get anything out of it... His stuff is like a clever man who isn t working, but his fellows say (unprovoked) that he is an obsessional worker!. Not unexpectedly, Richards did not think that Mafeje would be a good academic. Here are some of her remarks on Mafeje when the latter was to embark on an academic career after completing his PhD: I always feel his charm when I am with him. But I tremble to think of him as THE lecturer on Rural Sociology at Dar!. 4 She was more forthright and scathing in her letter to Wilson dated 22 September 1970: In spite of his quickness and ability, I know for certain now that Archie has no academic gifts although I think he will do well in an organizing job at a university because of his charm of manner, quickness and enthusiasm. For his part, Mafeje did not enjoy his stay at Cambridge. After barely a year in Cambridge, Mafeje wrote to Wilson that he was not getting as much stimulation as [he] expected. His letter to Richards dated 10 June 1970 arguably sums up the relationship between the two: Although personally you are not to blame and, in fact, you did everything to help, you are associated with this experience in Cambridge. Your frequent charge that I was ungrateful to you for the various things you had done for me... did not make me feel any better. As a matter of fact, I began to wonder why you continued to help at all if that is what you felt about things. Whatever your complaints, one thing certain is that you knew from me that I was fully aware and appreciative of everything you have done for me. But for my own reasons, I was not going to allow myself to be adopted by anybody. History was to prove Richards wrong. Mafeje held senior positions in universities across the world, in Europe, America and his own continent, Africa. Notable amongst these was the University of Dar es Salaam, where he became professor and head of department of Sociology at the tender age of 34 years. Mafeje also enjoyed a special relationship with the Institute of Social Sciences (ISS) in The Netherlands between 1968 and In 1973 he was appointed Queen Juliana Professor of Anthropology and Sociology of Development by an act of Parliament, getting the approval of all the 29 universities of The Netherlands (Olukoshi et al., 2007). His scholarship covered a broad range of topics such as democracy, development, academic freedom, land and agrarian issues. His publication record began in 1963 with a seminal book entitled Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township, which he co-authored as a second author with his supervisor, Monica Wilson. His most path-breaking scholarly pieces include: The Ideology of Tribalism (1971); The Theory and Ethnography of African Social Formations: The Case of the Interlacustrine Kingdoms (1991); and Anthropology and Independent Africans: Suicide, Or the End of an Era? (1996). Some of his important publications constitute the subject of this article. 4. Letter from Richards to Wilson dated 20 December 1969.

4 Legacy: Archie Mafeje 921 Following the establishment of the Council for the Development of Economic and Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in 1973, Mafeje devoted most of his life to building and nurturing a community of especially young African scholars based on the African continent. In December 2003, he was awarded Lifelong Membership of CODESRIA, conferred on the best and most illustrious African scholars. At the time of his death in 2007, Mafeje was a member of the Scientific Committee of CODESRIA. Mafeje started his academic career at UCT and was destined to return to this institution after completing his doctoral studies. He never did return, however, despite the fact that he was appointed, on merit, in 1968 as Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology. This was ostensibly for political reasons emanating from the apartheid policies. However, when Mafeje re-applied in 1993, in the dying days of apartheid, he was not even interviewed for the job. These two developments left a bitter taste in the relationship between Mafeje and UCT that has yet to be fully resolved. 5 MAFEJE S THEORETICAL METHOD Mafeje s method comes up very clearly in his critique of Harold Wolpe and Michael (Mike) Morris in a review article that was published in a special issue on anthropology and history of the Journal of Southern African Studies (Mafeje, 1981). The title of the review article is On the Articulation of Modes of Production, and it is based on a review of chapters by Wolpe and Morris that appeared in a book edited by Wolpe (1980). Mafeje enters into a debate with these scholars on precisely the topic of the articulation of modes of production in South Africa. 6 Central to Mafeje s critique is the distinction and/or relationship he draws between idiographic and nomothetic enquiries. He elucidates the distinction and/or relationship in terms of approaching the specific via the general or vice versa. For Mafeje, to avoid being lost in abstraction, one should approach the general via the specific (1981: 124). By implication, he accuses Wolpe and Morris of being lost in abstraction and accuses them of arriving at the specific via the general. Mafeje s main contention is that the majority of the articulation theorists use, more or less the concrete... as a slogan (ibid.: 134). One example that Mafeje uses is that of capital or capitalism. According to him, these terms are often talked of as a noun agent with an inexorable logic (ibid.). For Mafeje, Wolpe is the most vulnerable in this regard. Wolpe s thesis is that capitalism in what became South Africa in 1910, developed on the 5. For full details see Hendricks (2008) and Ntsebeza (2014). 6. It is important to note that despite searching high and low for a response from Wolpe and Morris to Mafeje s detailed and scholarly criticism, I could not find even a single reference to Mafeje s article. I find this astounding given that the article was not published in an obscure journal.

5 922 Lungisile Ntsebeza basis of cheap labour, which was justified by the existence of the reserves, whose economy subsidized the reproduction of labour. In the heyday of apartheid and secondary industrialization, according to Wolpe, cheap labour was guaranteed through force. Mafeje criticized Wolpe on the grounds that he (Wolpe) did not see any limit to the demand for cheap migrant labour. Yet, for Mafeje, South Africa had, by the time of his 1981 review article, witnessed the dumping of unwanted labour in the reserves, not to reproduce their labour-power but to perish (ibid.). Mafeje was also critical of Wolpe s assumption that land in the rural areas of the former Bantustans, what Wolpe (1972: 431) referred to as African redistributive economies, was held communally by the community. Mafeje drew attention to the quit rent and permit to occupy (PTO) systems applicable to these areas. Although the land was legally owned by the state, the plots could be inherited, which meant that in practice particular descendent groups are able to hold the original plot in perpetuity (Mafeje, 1981: 135). Against this background, Mafeje asked the rhetorical question: What is communal about that?. In a nutshell, what Mafeje noted was that there is a persistent confusion of communal ownership with redistributive kinship units in South African literature (ibid.: 128). With respect to Morris s (1976) article The Development of Capitalism in South African Agriculture: Class Struggle in the Countryside, Mafeje argues that the content of the concrete struggle in Morris s work was predetermined by the concepts that Morris used. In his article, Morris uses the classical definition of a proletariat to understand the conversion of the African producers. In this tradition, the process of conversion is complete when producers lose complete control and ownership of the means of production and rely for a living on selling their labour power for a wage. Mafeje accuses Morris of not taking into account the parallel struggles by originally autonomous pastoralists, clans and lineages as a reaction to conquest, and sees this as indicative of an inability to theorize the colonial factor. The omission of these struggles, Mafeje argued, amounted to Morris succumbing to the fallacy of a history without subjects and to the substitution of modes of production for human action and consciousness (Mafeje, 1981: 131). In short, the essence of Mafeje s criticism of Wolpe and Morris, whom Mafeje saw as representative of most South African Marxist theorising about Africans, is that their theories are based on texts which are largely divorced from context. According to Mafeje, these protagonists hardly acquired idiographic knowledge through field work, presumably of their own, but relied on work done by liberals, anthropologists, linguists, economists and historians, whose empiricism is a guarantee for doing field work (ibid.: 137). Mafeje further scathingly pointed out that some of these Marxists disdained fieldwork under the guise that abstract theory was superior knowledge than empirical research, something that Mafeje did not see as tenable (ibid.). Elsewhere, Mafeje contends that class struggle without political agents cannot be materialised as the motor of history (ibid.).

6 Legacy: Archie Mafeje 923 This takes us back to the idea of a dividing line between idiographic and nomothetic enquiry. For Mafeje, a close study of the history of the socalled pre-capitalist modes of production and its people is as important as that of capitalism. However, he noted that a general theory, nomothetic inquiry, was needed to make the specificities of these modes of production intelligible. Mafeje s insistence on the idiographic and, in particular, doing fieldwork is a clear testimony of the impact of anthropology on him. At the same time, Mafeje is arguably known in the community of scholars as a severe critic of anthropology. This goes back to his path-breaking article The Ideology of Tribalism (1971) and the debate with a range of scholars, including anthropologists, which appeared in the first issue of the African Sociological Review that was published in This begs the question as to where he stood with respect to the discipline of anthropology, in which he himself was trained. Did he abandon his discipline? Sharp s (2008) reading of Mafeje is most persuasive in this regard. He recalled correspondence between the young Mafeje and his supervisor and mentor, Monica Wilson whom Mafeje referred to as Prof and later, when he had acquired his PhD, as Aunt in which Mafeje disclosed his love for anthropology, declaring it his calling (Sharp, 2008: 159). This was during the time Mafeje was doing fieldwork in Langa. According to Sharp, Mafeje always insisted on the importance of his ethnographic inquiries (ibid.: 165). This was despite his trenchant critique of anthropology as he grew in his scholarship and began relating his academic interests to his politics. Mafeje was clearly comfortable with the research methods of anthropology. As Sharp put it, Mafeje remained faithful to Wilson s injunction that any attempt to understand the circumstances of people in Africa required first-hand inquiry into what they made of these circumstances themselves (ibid.). What Mafeje objected to was a particular version of anthropology, which he associated with colonialism, or saw as Western derived. This, again citing Sharp, was an anthropology in which particular epistemological assumptions... were allowed to overwhelm whatever it was that people on the ground had to say about the conditions in which they found themselves (ibid.). Anthropology is one area in which Mafeje combined his scholarship and his politics. MAFEJE S POLITICS Mafeje is one of a few renowned scholars who managed to combine his academic pursuits with his political commitment to the struggle for social change and justice with specific reference to the African continent. In his article Mafeje and Langa: The Start of an Intellectual Journey, John Sharp (2008) eloquently captures the marriage between Mafeje s scholarship and his politics, which for Sharp was a process that reached fruition after more

7 924 Lungisile Ntsebeza than a decade. He argues that in the early 1960s, when Archie Mafeje was still a student under the supervision of Monica Wilson, he had not yet worked out how to bring the principles derived from his political activism on his standing as a beginning anthropologist (ibid.: 161). According to Sharp, when Mafeje worked with Wilson in the early 1960s, he could not come up with a position that would counter the liberalist interpretation of his mentor and supervisor. Sharp was referring to the book Langa, for which Mafeje did the fieldwork in the township and wrote extensive notes. For Wilson, Langa was, in the words of Sharp, a very straightforward story about the sequence of steps by which the urban encounter was schooling black South Africans in Christianity in particular, and civilisation in general (Sharp, 2008: 162). While Mafeje would not be happy with this interpretation, he could not, at the time, formulate a counter-argument. It would, in the view of Sharp, take more than 10 years for Mafeje to have the confidence to articulate his own distinct position. He did this in his contribution to Monica Wilson s Festschrift that was published in 1975, which he used to revisit their study on Langa, arguing against Monica Wilson that the major problem facing blacks in South Africa was racial capitalism, rather than merely racial domination. Mafeje, according to Sharp, looked at the growing influence of the militant urban youth, and the militant pagans in the countryside for answers to his questions about assimilation into white middle-class cosmic view and about this view transcending itself (ibid.: 163). While Mafeje would not dispute that some blacks were attracted to civilization along Western lines, he demonstrated in his contribution that this was not true of all the residents of Langa (ibid.: 165). In this article, I build and elaborate on the insights of Sharp. Mafeje cut his political teeth in the NEUM tradition. The NEUM was formed in Its programme was based on the principle of noncollaboration with the government and its institutions (Tabata, 1950, 1952). The NEUM s orientation towards politics was summed up by its leader Isaac Bangani Tabata in his letter to Nelson Mandela, dated 16 June 1948: It is not what the members say or think about an organisation that matters. It is not even a question of the good intentions of the leaders. What is of paramount importance is the programme and principles of the organisation (quoted in Karis and Carter, 1979: 362, original emphasis). Towards the late 1950s, the NEUM split, with Tabata leading the majority faction. 7 Tabata had concluded that Africans were predominantly a landless peasantry that could be mobilized for social revolution on the issue of land hunger (Drew, 1991: 464). That the African population in the 1930s and 1940s was overwhelmingly rural (Drew, 2000: 146) might have influenced Tabata to draw this conclusion. Tabata argued for the mobilization of people on the basis of their immediate needs and demands, rather than abstract goals. These needs and demands revolved around the right to buy and sell land, one of 7. For details of the split see Drew (1991, 2000).

8 Legacy: Archie Mafeje 925 the demands of the NEUM s Ten Point Programme. Tabata was in favour of this land demand. The young Archie Mafeje, who was in his early 20s when the split occurred, cast his lot with the Tabata faction. He was active in the rural struggles against the introduction of chiefs and the land conservation measures, including the culling of stock. His involvement would lead to his detention during one of his visits to the Eastern Cape in the late 1950s. However, there is no evidence of Mafeje s independent contribution to the debates that led to a split in the late 1950s. Indeed, there is no evidence that Mafeje played any leading role in the politics of the NEUM while he was a student in Cape Town from the late 1950s to 1964, when he completed his Master s degree. Be that as it may, I will show that Mafeje would draw from the tradition of and his experiences in the NEUM as he pursued his academic endeavours, specifically in his critique of the liberation movements not only in South Africa, but in sub-saharan Africa. We have already seen the influence of the NEUM in Mafeje s theoretical method, specifically the distinction he draws between the idiographic and nomothetic inquiry. Mafeje s article Soweto and its Aftermath, which was published in the Review of African Political Economy in 1978, is arguably the first major academic piece on his politics. It was not only about the student revolts, as he called them, which exploded in Soweto on 16 June 1976 and spread like wildfire across most of the country by the end of that year. It also raises questions about a revolutionary strategy in South Africa, with specific reference to implications for an alliance of workers and students and for its relation with the liberation movements (Mafeje, 1978: 17). In other words, Mafeje s article focuses not only on students, but on their relationships with workers (both urban and migrant) and the South African liberation movements. He does this by looking at the social identity of the student movement, its organizational form, political programme and strategy, as well as its historical meaning (ibid.: 17 18). Mafeje s point of departure was that the uprisings were the work of students themselves, thus rejecting any claim that the liberation movements such as the ANC and the PAC, which were then banned, were the proverbial power behind the throne. If anything, Mafeje argues that the events of 16 June 1976 took these expatriate organisations by surprise. He pointed out that for most of the time the students, under the leadership of the Soweto Student Representative Council (SSRC), focused on coordinating student action in the face of increasing police brutality and threatened chaos (ibid.: 18). According to Mafeje, it took the students close to two months, at the beginning of August 1976, to realise that their cause was in danger, without direct support of the working-class. Initially, the students were arrogant and regarded their parents and elders as irrelevant (ibid.: 18). Clearly drawing on the experience he acquired as a political activist in South Africa, his research on Langa and his Master s thesis (1963) which took him to the rural areas of the Transkei, Mafeje was aware of the need

9 926 Lungisile Ntsebeza to problematize the nature of the South African working class in order to reach a deeper understanding of the Soweto revolts. In this regard, he commented that migrant workers in Soweto and, when the uprisings spread to the Western Cape, in Cape Town were the weak link in the efforts of the police to break the strike (ibid.: 20). The bulk of migrant workers stayed in single-sex hostels in which they were grouped along ethnic lines and made to live like bachelors, while their families remained in the rural areas of the former Bantustans. The police, Mafeje averred, pitted migrant workers against their urban counterparts, on the one hand, and migrants against students, on the other hand. The majority of the students were born and raised in urban areas. In the early days of the revolt especially, students burnt down the hostels, thus, Mafeje suggests, playing into the hands of the police. It was in response to the manner in which the police exploited the situation that the students started to work on improving relations with migrant workers and elders. Thus by September 1976, according to Mafeje, the students had reasonably successfully worked on bridging these divisions (ibid.: 21). However, having declared total victory for the students! Mafeje (ibid.) noted that neither the students nor the workers had a long-term strategy for dealing with such heavy blows from the establishment, especially as the revolt expanded to the Western Cape towards the end of According to Mafeje, the students in the Western Cape seemingly had not learnt from the mistakes of their counterparts in Soweto, where students had reached a level of forming a representative committee where mistakes could be analysed and corrected (ibid.). In Cape Town, as in Soweto in the early days of the revolt, there was initially confrontation with the migrant workers (ibid.). It is not clear from Mafeje s analysis what precisely the nature of the student body in Cape Town was, whether they were classified Coloured or African (Bantu), or both. This is important to take note of given that migrant workers staying in single-sex hostels were African. If student activists were mainly Coloured, this would undoubtedly have made contact with African migrant workers all the more difficult. Mafeje was sympathetic to the students and argued that the complexities of a divided working-class in South Africa have proved intractable even to the older movements (ibid.: 23). He recalled a long-standing argument between the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), later the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the NEUM, later the Unity Movement of South Africa (UMSA). The former argued that migrant workers, by virtue of selling their labour-power to capitalists in industry were definitely part of the urban proletariat. On the other hand, the NEUM argued that migrants identify more with the peasantry than with the urban population and still have a vested interest in land (ibid.). For Mafeje, the problem need not be resolved at the level of abstract theory, but at the level of strategy and in the process of answering the question of what is meant by the alliance between workers and peasants in the revolutionary struggle (ibid.). According to

10 Legacy: Archie Mafeje 927 Mafeje, situations such as Soweto made migrants think of their families back home, thus making it difficult for them to make decisions about joining strikes in urban areas. 8 This, Mafeje elaborated, is complicated by the force of the tradition of migrants, where every decision is an outcome of long and tedious deliberations by all concerned, which is in sharp contrast to the instantaneous and precipitous reactions of the urban youth (ibid.). The urban youth, according to Mafeje, might, in the initial stages of the revolts, have been influenced by their prejudice towards migrants, something which led to the vicious backlash by the migrants. Mafeje did not see any prospect of the students, acting on their own, bringing about social and political change. He argued that although the students had eventually successfully patched up their differences with migrant workers, the former could not take their cause much further largely because they were ideologically and organisationally... handicapped (ibid.: 22). In terms of political organization and ideological orientation, the student revolts were associated with the Black Consciousness movement comprising the South African Student Movement (SASM), the South African Student Organisation (SASO) and the Black People s Convention (BPC). Notable, Mafeje insisted, is that they were not allied with any of the national movements (ibid.: 21). For Mafeje, a Programme of Action was critical for any organization that is committed to social change. He states: Revolutionary commitment is impossible without a guiding ideology, a programme of demands and a clear policy (ibid.: 23). He was dismissive of Black Consciousness and pointed out that it could hardly be considered a historical advance on the older nationalist movements, to wit, the PAC and ANC (ibid.: 24). Mafeje contended that the students went into militant action without a clear political programme (ibid.). Where attempts were made to provide a political explanation of student struggles in the Western Cape, largely through organizations sympathetic to the Unity Movement, there was, Mafeje seems to suggest, very little done to support the students (ibid.). As far as Mafeje was concerned, the struggles of students continued to be characterized by spontaneity and to be informed by simple slogans (ibid.). In many ways, the theoretical position of the Black Consciousness movement as articulated by Mafeje could easily have been used by him as an example of an idiographic inquiry without a theoretical context, the nomothetic inquiry. Mafeje contrasted the Black Consciousness movement with the South African political organizations that were in exile at the time of the outbreak of the Soweto revolts, the ANC/SACP Alliance, the PAC and UMSA. 9 Unlike the Black Consciousness movement, these organizations the older movements had written programmes and had addressed 8. See Dan O Meara (1975) for a nuanced version of this position. 9. Note that Mafeje did not make any reference to the Black Consciousness movement which, by 1976, had a presence in at least Botswana.

11 928 Lungisile Ntsebeza themselves to the question of national liberation and bourgeois democratic rights. Their differences, according to Mafeje, centred on issues of imperialism/capitalism and the class struggle, with the ANC not raising the issue of the class struggle and socialism in its official documents, whereas these questions were addressed in documents of the PAC and UMSA (APDUSA 1961 Constitution) (Mafeje, 1978: 26). Of these movements, Mafeje pays special attention to the SACP and its alliance partner, the ANC. In this regard, Mafeje highlighted the SACP s ideological position based on the two-stage revolution as stated in its 1963 Declaration: As its immediate and foremost task, the South African Communist Party works for a united front of national liberation. It strives to unite all sections and classes of oppressed and democratic people for a national democratic revolution to destroy White domination (quoted in Mafeje, 1978: 26). The two-stage approach fitted well with the principles of the Freedom Charter which was adopted in 1955 by the Congress Alliance. This document articulates the version of the United Front propagated by the SACP. The position of the SACP compelled Mafeje to question the status of the Communist Programme in the short run, asking: Was the declaration tantamount to subordinating the class struggle to the national democratic revolution? (ibid.: 26). Mafeje argued that the issue has to be addressed, not at the theoretical level, the nomothetic inquiry, where there could be any number of answers to these questions, but at a historical and practical level, the idiographic inquiry. At the latter level, Mafeje drew examples from the African continent since independence, pointing out that there is hardly any evidence to suggest that the national democratic stage envisaged by the SACP is any longer a meaningful historical concept (ibid.). In his booklet In Search of an Alternative: A Collection of Essays on Revolutionary Theory and Politics, published in 1992, on the eve of South Africa s democracy, Mafeje returns to the issue of the liberation struggle in sub-saharan Africa, pointing out that what the ANC was promising could be achieved in the national democratic revolution was no different from what the earlier leaders of nationalist organizations in Africa had promised. But these leaders had ended up as glorious managers of economies controlled by the former imperialist powers. Mafeje surmised that the reason the SACP was not being forthright about the possible transition to the second stage could be its historical roots as a white party, which could make it difficult to recruit both black and white workers. The SACP ended up adopting a strategy of entrism, whereby it used its alliance with the ANC to recruit from within leading cadres who are often petit-bourgeois (ibid.). The alliance with the black petit-bourgeoisie would, in Mafeje s view, have serious implications for the working class and its control and leadership. According to Mafeje, a communist party is in principle a class organisation whose existence is accounted for by the working-class membership and not so much by selected petit-bourgeois

12 Legacy: Archie Mafeje 929 elements of any colour (ibid.: 26 7). The SACP ANC alliance, he claimed, always subjected urban workers to petit-bourgeois rule and demands (ibid.: 27). Mafeje proposed a united front made up of left-leaning individuals in each of the South African organizations. Although critical of the expatriate organizations, Mafeje warned against ruling them out as irrelevant to the struggle. According to him, they still possessed a significant amount of political capital which could be used destructively and positively, depending on the nature of the forces at work (ibid.: 28). Mafeje was critical of attempts to over-emphasise the armed struggle at the expense of political methods of struggle. Given his view that South Africa is an industrialised country which depends on blacks for up to 80 per cent of its labour supply, focus should be on concerted efforts to organise black workers to use [their] weapon to the maximum (ibid.: 29). He argued that rather than recruiting workers for military training abroad, they should be recruited and financed for sustained political strikes and other campaigns inside (ibid.: 29). 10 As to who would organize black workers, Mafeje was of the opinion that it was the task of a communist party, to protect the interests of the workers at all stages of the revolution (ibid.). However, given Mafeje s view of the SACP, the latter would not stand for the interests and rights of workers at all stages of the revolution. With respect to the country s youth, Mafeje argued that the militant youth inside South Africa should take seriously the question of ideology, theory and organisation (ibid.). 11 More than 10 years later, Mafeje re-visited the political situation in South Africa. This was on the eve of the political negotiations that started in the early 1990s. These notes are taken from a piece titled South Africa: The Dynamics of a Beleaguered State. 12 In this piece, Mafeje returns to his criticism of Marxism in South Africa with its universalistic pretensions which have their foundation in European history at a particular juncture (Mafeje, n.d.: 97). Given this, Mafeje inquires, how does (Marxism) relate to vernacular languages? (ibid.). This, according to Mafeje, should be the problem of discerning (as opposed to dogmatic and intellectually opportunistic) contemporary Marxists. For Mafeje, the origins of Marxist theory and socialist politics in South Africa go back to the total transplant of the twenty-one points laid down by the Third International or Comintern for fraternal organisations everywhere in the world (ibid.). But this programme, according to him, was meant for the leadership of the socialist movement in capitalist 10. Among Mafeje s files was the Manifesto of the People s United Front for the Liberation of South Africa (PUFULSA). A copy of the manifesto is with the author. Issues raised in this manifesto will be the subject of a separate publication. 11. Note that this article was part of a debate involving Mafeje, Ruth First and Livingstone Mqotsi. Here, I will not focus on the details of the debate. 12. It is not clear where and when this piece was published, but it seems certain that the paper was written on the eve of the political negotiations of the early 1990s.

13 930 Lungisile Ntsebeza Europe, where schooled Marxists and an experienced working-class existed (ibid.). Mafeje thus comes to the conclusion that there was a dearth of both the Marxist tradition and working-class politics in South Africa (ibid.) and that the problems of the relationship between universal and vernacular language are still very much with us. He cites the example of migrant workers: After the First World War the African migrant workers in the mines were as uncouth as they are today. More importantly, they spoke a different language, as they still do, from that prescribed by the Third or even the Fourth International. The European immigrant workers and intellectuals were more than presumptuous in supposing that they were the natural or authentic interlocutors in the situation... they were neither up to date with Marxist debates in Europe nor adept in African political vernacular. Their imported notions of tribal economy, communal land tenure, feudal landlords and peasants were like semantic categories abstracted from another language. (ibid.: 97) The implications for South African communists is that they became ever so dependent, theoretically, on [their] Third International mentors and given their inability to reach the semi-tribal black workers... turned to the black petit-bourgeoisie who predominated in the African National Congress (ibid.: 98). The black petit-bourgeoisie, according to Mafeje, was the only class among the blacks in South Africa who comprehended both the vernacular and the universal language (ibid.). WHITE LIBERALS AND BLACK NATIONALISTS IN SOUTH AFRICA Mafeje comes back to the theme of what he refers to as the petit-bourgeois character of the leadership of the liberation movement in South Africa in the context of the negotiated political settlement of the 1990s. His focus is the ANC and to a lesser extent, its alliance partner, the SACP. By the late 1980s, the ANC, with strong support from the SACP which made use of its global links, had established its dominance in the South African political scene. Other political organizations, including Mafeje s own organization, the Unity Movement, along with bodies such as the PAC and the Black Consciousness movement, had been completely overshadowed by the ANC. This made the ANC arguably the only dominant liberation movement during the political negotiations that started in earnest in the early 1990s. The landslide victory of the ANC and the dismal performance of the other liberation movements confirmed the hegemony of the ANC on the South African landscape. It thus made perfect sense for Mafeje to give serious thought to the implications for democracy of an ANC-led government. In arguably his last major piece on politics, White Liberals and Black Nationalists: Strange Bedfellows, Mafeje (1998) reflected on the initial years of South Africa s democracy under President Nelson Mandela. He did so by situating South Africa s democracy in the broader context of independent Africa. Mafeje s main argument in this article, which builds on

14 Legacy: Archie Mafeje 931 his earlier work during the negotiations period, is that: the African revolution is highly compromised... its leaders have no sense of hegemony and a limited and impoverished sense of state power which breeds petty dictators, ethnicity, and political dwarfs.... They have no hegemony nationally and continentally. All they can do is to make believe by using state power to trample on the people s political and human rights (Mafeje, 1998: 48). For Mafeje, a vague sense of (African) hegemony (ibid.) existed in the era that was dominated by Pan-Africanism at the dawn of independence in Africa going back to Ghana s independence in This is an era that was characterized by the birth of movements such as the Monrovia and Casablanca groups and the emergence of leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah and his clarion call that Africa Must Unite (ibid.). A question that arises is what became of this emerging African hegemony. Typically, Mafeje s criticism was that this form of Pan-Africanism was ideologically deficient because it advocated supra-state power without saying what was to be its social foundation (ibid.). This reminds us of Mafeje s earlier critique of most South African Marxists and specifically, his criticism of Morris who, according to Mafeje, succumbed to the fallacy of a history without subjects (Mafeje, 1981: 131). Mafeje saw the need to clarify its social foundation as key to any project that seeks to revive and establish Pan-Africanism as a hegemonic force. Mafeje borrows the term hegemony from Gramsci, and asserts that hegemony belongs to those who enjoy the greatest ideological resonance in society (Mafeje, 1998: 46). It is precisely the lack of political predominance that derives from pervasive social and ideological influence (ibid.) that is at the heart of the failure of African nationalist leaders to establish their own hegemony. For African hegemony to be achieved, Mafeje argued, the national question, in the form of genuine equality in an African context that would address the issue of the oppression and exploitation of the indigenous people, would have to be resolved. As already noted, Mafeje argued that the national question on the African continent has not been resolved. If anything, according to him, the revolution in southern Africa has been hijacked by white liberals with the collaboration of black nationalists (ibid.: 48). In typical NEUM fashion, Mafeje traces this collaboration, captured in the sub-title of his paper as strange bedfellows, from the advent of colonialism in Africa and attempts by white liberals to entrench their hegemony. According to Mafeje, liberals established their hegemony through the educational system, the political values of Western, capitalist democracy and notions of Western civilization more broadly. In Southern Africa in particular, where colonialists became settlers, the key issue revolved around racial oppression and white supremacy. Racism became the most immediate issue. White liberals used the issue of racism to co-opt large sections of the black middle class in particular. This was especially the case after Africans formed political opposition to racial oppression and white supremacy.

15 932 Lungisile Ntsebeza Mafeje draws our attention to the complex nature of racism in South Africa and how an appreciation of this racism would help us understand the eventual co-optation of Black Nationalist leaders in the ANC in particular. In this regard, the distinction between how the Afrikaners, the Boers and the English articulated and practised the race issue in South Africa is critical. This distinction became pronounced particularly in the era marked by the rise of black nationalism in Africa after the Second World War. In 1948, three years after the war, there were elections in South Africa. The main contestants of the elections were the United Party and the National Party. The United Party s manifesto foresaw the eventual possibility of incorporating blacks in a liberal multi-racial society, whereas the National Party propagated a crude version of racism known as apartheid. As is well known, the elections were won by the National Party which immediately introduced and implemented apartheid. By this time, Mafeje would argue, opposition to racism took two broad forms. On the one hand, there were blacks who worked with whites who were sympathetic to the middle-class cause of the liberation movement, essentially the ANC. On the other hand, there were the Pan-Africanists who would not entertain collaboration with whites. These Pan-Africanists eventually formed themselves as the PAC in Actors in both forms of opposition, Mafeje contended, qualified as black nationalists... in so far as they were committed to the struggle against white domination (ibid.: 46). But it was never clear what, in concrete terms, they would replace apartheid with. Following Mafeje s formulation with respect to the African experience, there was no clarity about the shape African hegemony would assume in post-apartheid South Africa. It is precisely the lack of an African hegemonic project in South Africa that led Mafeje to conclude that white liberals, with the collaboration of black nationalists in the ANC, high-jacked the revolution. For Mafeje, the national question in South Africa under the ANC and its alliance partner, the SACP, manifested itself as a struggle in the hands of liberal black nationalist movements who enjoyed hegemony within their societies in the sense of receiving the greatest resonance from the subjects of their revolution (ibid.: 48). However, in the era leading up to and including the political negotiations of the early 1990s, there was, Mafeje would argue, greater collaboration between white liberals, on the one hand, and black nationalists within the ANC and the SACP, on the other. According to Mafeje, in this period white liberals emerged who drew a distinction between political power and economic control, in the context of a crippling political and economic crisis that engulfed South Africa. These white liberals were quite happy to forgo political power as long as they could retain economic control in a Westminster type of democracy (ibid.: 46). As Mafeje put it, while these white liberals were prepared to be ruled by black nationalists, they reserved the right to reign, that is, to enjoy general hegemony (ibid.). To achieve this, they worked closely with the liberal black nationalists and

16 Legacy: Archie Mafeje 933 used the latter to contain radical black nationalists who would have nothing to do with whites and Marxists outside the SACP. As Ebrima Sall pointed out in his tribute following Mafeje s death, nationalism, for Mafeje, did not always end up as a negation of colonialism, but its imitation (Sall, 2008: 50). In many ways, this is what happened in South Africa after the advent of democracy in TOWARDS A CONCLUSION: WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM MAFEJE? This article is written at a critical moment in the history of post-1994 democratic South Africa. The entry of university-based students in the political and social life of South Africa since March 2015 added momentum to mass protests against the ANC-led government s neoliberal policies that date back to the early 2000s. The student-led campaign manifested itself in the open on 9 March 2015, when a UCT student activist Chumani Maxwele flung poo onto the imposing statue of arch imperialist and capitalist, Cecil John Rhodes which was mounted on UCT grounds. Soon thereafter his student supporters, who organized themselves under the #RhodesMustFall movement, demanded the removal of the statue. They alleged that the statue signified deep-rooted links between the University of Cape Town and colonialism or, in the words of Emeritus Associate Professor Dave Cooper, colonial capitalism (Cooper, 2015). The students occupied the administrative block of the University and announced that they would only leave it upon the removal of the statue. Within a month, the statue was removed, making this a major victory for the student-led effort. By this time, a number of universities in South Africa and beyond had pledged support for the campaign. At the same time, students had added more demands, notably the decolonization of the curriculum, as they called it, and the insourcing of former university workers. The announcement by various universities in South Africa that fees would be increased in 2016 set the proverbial cat among the pigeons and led to an unprecedented student-led campaign named #FeesMustFall, against the increase. This campaign drew wide support, including from parents and workers who bore the brunt of paying the fees. The student worker parent alliance was no doubt the climax of the activities of the student-led campaign, forcing a complete shutdown of all South African universities, a march to Parliament in Cape Town, the ANC headquarters and the Union Building, the seat of government administration. In the end, the ANC-led government was forced to make an announcement that there would be no fee increases in Further, the campaign has forced universities to reverse their policies of outsourcing workers. At the time of writing the beginning of January 2016 it is not possible to say what 2016 will bring, save that the campaign is far from being over. The year 2016 also marks 40 years since the Soweto

17 934 Lungisile Ntsebeza revolts and the chance of high-school students joining the protests in 2016 cannot be discounted. Against this background, we return to the issues raised in the introduction and specifically about what we can learn from the legacy of Mafeje. Let us start with the current student protests. We have seen that Mafeje raised two crucial aspects in his assessment of what he called the Soweto revolts. The first concerned the initial arrogance of students and their tendency to vilify their parents and, critically, the migrant workers, rather than forging alliances with the workers, both urban and rural, as well as their parents and elders. By so doing, Mafeje showed, they played right into the hands of the police and indeed the apartheid state, who capitalized on these divisions. The second point relates to the question of what Mafeje saw as the necessity of a programme of action, with a guiding ideology, a coherent programme of demands and a clear policy, which he saw as critical for any organization that is committed to social change (Mafeje, 1978: 23). For Mafeje, as has been shown, militant action and simple slogans, important as they are, are no substitute for a programme of action. These are important lessons for students in their current struggles for the decolonization of universities and the curriculum. On the question of alliances that Mafeje raised, it does seem as if the current student-led protests, particularly the FeesMustFall campaign, are inclusive of a range of actors, including parents, most of whom are workers and academics. Not only did students wage a struggle about fees, which directly affected them and their parents, they also joined forces with university-based workers who had been fighting their own battles of being outsourced since neoliberal principles of managerialism were introduced at South African universities in the late 1990s. Mafeje no doubt would be happy with how, on the whole, students have managed to strike alliances with their parents and workers. This is a major improvement from what happened in Soweto when the revolt exploded. What Mafeje would feel to be missing, however, is a programme of action. A coherent programme with clear objectives and goals, informed by theory is, for Mafeje, a sine qua non for those committed to change. As far as the current student campaign is concerned, it is difficult to establish its political and class character, beyond what Mafeje would see as simple slogans such as decolonizing the curriculum and references to the likes of Fanon and Biko. Having said this, I must be quick to say that it is too early to make conclusive statements. More in-depth research is needed to understand the character and nature of the current student movement, in all its diversity. In the broader scheme of things, another lesson that can be learnt from Mafeje is his constant reminder about the importance of learning from the experiences of post-independent Africa. Mafeje contended that what the ANC committed itself to at the dawn of democracy and what they are now doing as a party in power are not radically different from what its forerunners on the African continent promised, did and are doing. They all make promises