The idea of South Africa is blowing in the wind – we are in the middle of an epochal change

The idea of South Africa is blowing in the wind. Many of the institutions intended to transform the promise of a non-racial democracy into a concrete reality are in tatters. Public commentary tirelessly laments the corruption and ineptitude of our leaders and our administrators.

Yet the problem lies not only with what we can see and touch. It is in the air that we breathe, an increasingly foul pestilence that overcomes people and institutions.

What is this air? It is the ideas and values that circulate between us, that fires our imaginations and our passions and that draws the lines between friends and enemies. We pay hardly any attention to what Pratap Mehta calls these “normative conditions of institutions”, as if public life breathes in a vacuum.

We are in the middle of an epochal change in South Africa.

One of the enduring paradoxes of the ANC, especially as the organisation evolved from the mid-1950s, is that in the name of “nationalism” it endorsed a profoundly non-national vision of South Africa.

A new report by a group of international legal scholars notices – I believe for the first time – an important disappearance from the ANC’s political language. The term “self-determination” vanished from its lexicon in the 1950s. Elsewhere, across Africa and Asia, colonised people fought for self-determination from European empires.

Read in Daily Maverick: “ANC discussion papers reveal the governing party’s dystopian vision of South Africa’s future”

This was a term with a long provenance in European conceptions of political community, invented to give legitimacy to popular appeals from largely Slavs, Greeks and German speakers for independence from European continental empires – the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for example, or the Ottoman Empire.

As it became a principle and later a right of international law, African movements seized on it as a route to their own independence despite misgivings about its deep roots in European nationalism.

Here in South Africa, however, the ANC and its Congress allies struggled for national democracy, not for self-determination. The Pan Africanist Congress split with the ANC precisely on this point.

Instead, the language of self-determination was appropriated by the National Party, who from the 1960s and 1970s framed apartheid as a project of decolonisation. The purpose of Grand Apartheid, the NP declared, was to give self-determination to Africans in their own ethnic states.

The Union of South Africa, they proposed, was an imperial abomination, an artificial political community that threw diverse people together in an unnatural unity. The order of the world was distinct nations in their own territory.

The idea was not so far-fetched from an international perspective. The post-World War 2 consensus, the great historian Tony Judt explained, was founded on the idea that homogenous nations should reside in their own territories – driving a post-war exchange and movement of populations (ethnic cleansing) unprecedented in human history.

Since 1955 and especially since 1969 the ANC has refused such ethnic republicanism. Instead, it has insisted over and over again that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white”.

In other words, the ANC accepted that anti-colonial freedom in South Africa would not be achieved through the self-determination of blacks in relation to whites. There is no doubt that South African communists played a decisive role in blunting the nationalist tendencies in the ANC. This fluid and plural vision of South Africa, however, also resonated with African precolonial traditions.

If we compare, for example, European society at the Cape in the 18th and early 19th century with Nguni societies before Shaka, what is striking is their political sophistication by modern standards.

Whereas Company rule in the Cape did not know the rule of law, Nguni society was rule-bound. Whereas European society was riddled with race-thinking and with race, Nguni societies easily integrated strangers, even white ones. Whereas Cape society was a slave-owning and trading one, this was a practice largely unknown among the Mthetwas, the Zulus and the Ndwandwe. The Cape chronicles are full of stories of European shipwreck survivors travelling among peaceful, orderly societies.