DOCUMENT A view from the National Forum BELOW WE REPRINT extracts from a speech entitled 'Nation and ethnicity in South Africa' given by Neville Alexander to a meeting of the National Forum on June 11-12, 1983. This speech puts forward a point of view on the national question which is opposed to that of. the so-called 'Chartist' current but which does not necessarily reflect the views of other currents in the National Forum. (Source; publication of the National Forum Committee).
SOUTH AFRICA and justify even greater fragmentation of the working people whose unity held within itself the message of doom for the capitalist apartheid system in this country.
The fact of the matter is that the Afrikaner National Party used ethnic theories in order to justify Bantustan strategy whereby it created bogus 'nations' and forced them to accept an illusionary 'independence' so that the working class would agitate for political rights in their own so-called "homelands'
Those organisations and writers within the liberation movement who used to put forward the view that South Africa is a multi-racial country compsed of four 'races' no longer do so for the same reasons as the conservative and liberal ruling-class theorists. They have begun to speak more and more of building a non-racial South Africa. I am afraid to say that for most people who use this term 'non-racial' it means exactly the same thing as multi-racial. They continue to conceive of South Africa's population as consisting of four so-called 'races'. It has become fashionable to intone the words a non-racial democratic South Africa' as a kind of open sesame that permits one to enter the hallowed portals of the progressive democratic movement'. There is nothing wrong with the words themselves. But, if we do not want to be deceived by words we have to look behind them at the concepts and the actions on which they are based.
The word 'non-racial' can only be accepted by a racially oppressed people if it means that we reject the concept 'race' that we deny the existence of 'races and thus oppose all actions, practices, beliefs and policies based on the concept of "race'. If in practice (and in theory) we continue to use the word non-racial as though we believe that South Africa is inhabited by four so-called 'races' , we are still trapped in multi-racialism and thus in racialism. Non-racialism, meaning the denial of the existence of races, leads on to anti-racism which goes beyond it because the term not only involves the denial of 'race' but also opposition to the capitalist structures for the perpetuation of which the ideology and theory of race' exists. Words are like money. They are easily counterfeited and it is often difficult to tell the real coin from the false one. We need, therefore, at all times to find out whether our 'non-racialists' are multi-racial or anti-racists. Only the latter variety can belong in the national liberation movement ...
We have to admit that in the libera tion movement ever since 1896, the question of the different popula
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In South Africa, a peculiar development took place. Here, the national bourgeoisie had come to consist of a class of white capitalists. Because they could only farm and mine gold and diamonds profitably if they had an unlimited supply of cheap labour, they found it necessary to create a split labour market, that is one for cheap Black labour and one for skilled and semi-skilled (mainly white labour). This was made easier by the fact that in the pre-industrial colonial period white-Black relationships had been essentially master-servant relations. Racialist attitudes were then prevalent in one degree or another throughout the country. In order to secure their labour supply as required, the national bourgeoisie in South Africa had to institute and perpetuate the system whereby Black people were denied political rights, were restricted in their freedom of movement, tied to the land in so-called 'native reserves' , not allowed to own landed property anywhere in South Africa and their children given an education, if they received any at all that 'prepared them for life in a subordinate society'. Unlike their European predecessors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the colonial national bourgeoisie in South Africa could not complete the bourgeois democratic revolution. They compromised with British imperialism in 1910 in order to maintain their profitable system of super exploitation of Black labour.
They did not incorporate the entire population under the new state on the basis of legal equality, they could not unite the nation. On the contrary, ever since 1910, elaborate strategies have been evolved and implemented to divide the working people into ever smaller potentially antagonistic groups. Divide and Rule, the main policy of any imperial power, has been the compass of every government of South Africa since 1910.
In order to justify these policies the ideology of racism was elaborated, systematised and universalised. People were thrown into a set-up where they were categorised racially. They grew up believing that they were whites, Coloured, Africans, Indians. Since 1948, they have been encouraged and often forced to think of themselves in even more microscopic terms as "Xhosa'; "Zulu; "Malay'; Muslim'; 'Hindu'; "Griqua' "Sotho'; "Venda'; etc., etc. To put it differently: at first the ruling ideology decreed that the people of South Africa were grouped by God into four 'races'. The ideal policy of the conservative fascistminded politicians of the capitalist class was to keep these races' separate. The so-called liberal element strove for 'harmonious race relations in a multi-racial country' . Because of the development of the biological sciences where the very concept race' was questioned and because of the catastrophic consequences of the racist Herrenvolk policies of Hitler Germany socio-political theories based on the concept of 'race' fell into disrepute. The social theorists of the ruling class then resorted to the theory of 'ethnic groups' , which had in the meantime become a firmly established instrument of economic and political policy in the United States of America as well as elsewhere in the world. It is to be noted that this theory of ethnicity continued to be based on the ideology of race' as far as South Africa is concerned. From the point of view of the ruling class, however, the theory of 'ethnic groups' was a superior instrument of policy, because, as I have pointed out, it could explain
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tion registration groups has presented us with a major problem, one which was either glossed over or evaded or simply ignored. I cannot go into the history of the matter here. We shall have to content ourselves with the different positions taken up by different tendencies in the liberation movement today. These can be summarised briefly as falling into three categories.
For some, the population registration groups are 'national groups or racial groups, or sometimes, ethnic groups. The position of these people is that it is a 'self-evident and undeniable reality that there are Indians, Coloureds, Africans and whites (national groups) in our country. It is a reality precisely because each of these national groups has its own heritage, language customs and traditions' (Zak Yacoob, speech presented at the first general meeting of the Transvaal Indian Congress on May 1, 1983).
Without debating the point any further, let me say that this is the classical position of ethnic theory. I shall show presently that the use of the word 'national group' is fraught with dangers not because it is a word but because it fires expression to and thereby reinforces separatist and disruptive tendencies in the body politic of South Africa. The advocates of this theory outside the liberation movement, such as Inkatha and the Progressive Federal Party (PFP), draw the conclusion that a federal constitutional solution is the order of the day. Those inside the liberation movement believe contradictorily that even though the national groups with their different cultures will continue to exist they can somehow do so in a unitary state as part of a single nation.
We have to state clearly that if things really are as they appear to be we would not need any science. If the sun really quite self-evidently moved around the earth we would not require astronomy and space research to explain to us that the opposite is true, that the , 'selfevidently real is only apparent. Of course there are historically evolved differences of language, religion, customs, job specialisation ete among the different groups in this country. But we have to view these differences historically, not statically. They have been enhanced and artifically engendered by the deliberate ruling-class policy of keeping the population registration groups in separate compartments, making them lead their lives in group isolation except in the market place. This is an historical reality. It is not an unchanging situation that stands above or outside history. I shall show just now how this historical reality has to be reconciled through 20
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The people fight back against the racist state (DR)
class struggle with the reality of a single nation.
The danger inherent in this kind of talk is quite simply that it makes room both in theory and in practice for the preaching of ethnic separatism. It is claimed that a theory of 'national groups advocated in the context of a movement for national liberation nerely seeks:
*to heighten the positive features of each national group and to weld these together so that there arises out of this process of organisation a single national consciousness' (Yacoob) whereas the ruling class 'relying upon the negative features (of each national group) 'emphasises ethnicity' or 'uses culture in order to reinforce separation and division'. We can repeat this kind of intellectualist solace until we fall asleep, the fact remains that ethnic or 'national group, approaches are the thin end of the wedge for separatist movements and civil wars fanned by greatpower interests and suppliers of arms of opportunist 'ethnic leaders'. Does not Inkatha in some ways represent a warning to all of us? Who decides what are the 'positive features' of a national group? What are the boundaries or limits of a national group? Are these determined by the population register? Is a national group a stunted nation, one that, given the appropriate soil, will fight for national self-determination in its own nation-state? Or does the word 'national' have some other more sophisticated meaning? These are relevant questions to ask because the advocates of the four-nation or national-group approach maintain that a liberated South Africa will guarantee group rights such as 'the right of national groups to their culture' and that we have to accept that if the existence of national groups is a reality and if each national group has its own culture, traditions, and problems, the movement for change is best facilitated by enabling organisation around issues which concern people in their daily lives, issues such as low wages, high transport costs and poor housing. Or as other representatives of this tendency have bluntly said we need separate organisations for each of the national groups, which organisations can and should be brought together in an alliance.
These are weighty conclusions on which history itself (since 1960 and especially since 1976) has pronounced a negative judgement. To tan the fires of ethnic politics today is to go backwards, not forward. It plays into the hands of the reactionary middle-class leadership. It is a reactionary, not a progressive policy from the point of view of the liberation movement taken as a whole. Imagine us advocating 'Indian' 'Coloured' and 'African' trade unions or student unions today!
There is a diametrically opposite view within the liberation movement even though it is held by a very small minority of the people. According to this view, our struggle is not a struggle for national liberation. It is a class struggle pure and simple, one in which the working class' will wrest power from the capitalist class'.
For this reason, the workers should be organised regardless of what so-called group they belong to. This tendency seems to say (in theory)
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that the historically evolved differences are irrelevant or at best of secondary importance.
I find it difficult to take this position seriously. I suspect that in practice the activists who hold this view are compelled to make the most acrobatic compromises with the reality of racial prejudice among workers'. To deny the reality of prejudice and perceived differences, whatever their origin, is to disarm oneself strategically and tactically. It becomes impossible to organise a mass movement outside the ranks of a few thousand students perhaps.
Again, the historical experience of the liberation movement in South Africa does not permit us to entertain this kind of conclusion. All the little organisations and groups that have at one time or another operated on this basis have vanished after telling their simple story which, though full of sound and fury', signified nothing ...
Certainly, the population registration groups of South Africa are neither tribes' nor 'ethnic groups' nor 'national groups'. In sociological theory, they can be describea colour castes or more simply as colour groups. So to describe them is not unimportant since the word captures the nature or the direction of development of these groups. But this question of words is not really the issue. What is important is to clarify the relationship between class, colour, culture and nation.
National bourgeoisie fails to omplete democratic revolutio
The economic, material, language religious and other differences between colour groups are real. They influence and determine the ways in which people live and experience their lives. Reactionary ethnic organisation would not have been so successful in the history of this country had these differences not been of a certain order of reality. However, these differences are neither permanent nor necessarily divisive if they are restructured and redirected for the purpose of national liberation and thus in order to build the nation. The ruling class had used language, religions and sex differences among the working people in order to divide them and to disorganise them. Any organisation of the people that does not set out to counteract these divisive tendencies set up by the ruling-class strategies merely ends up by reinforcing these strategies. The case of Gandhi or Abdurrahman (1) are good examples. Middle-class and aspiring bourgeois elements quickly seize control of such colour-based 'ethnic organisations and use them as power bases from which they try to bargain for a larger share of the economic cake. This is essentially the kind of thing that the Bantustan leaders and the Bantustan middle-classes are doing today.
Because they are oppressed, all Black people who have not accepted the rulers' Bantustan strategy desire to be free and to participate fully in the economic, political and social life of Azania. We have seen that the national bourgeoisie has failed to complete the democratic revolution. The middle classes cannot be consistent since their interests are, generally speaking and in their own consciousness tied to the capitalist system. Hence only the Black working class can take the task of completing the democratisation of the country on its shoulders.
It alone can unite all the oppressed and exploited classes. It has become the leading class in the building of the nation. It has to redefine the nation and abolish the reactionary definitions of the bourgeoisie and of the reactionary petty bourgeoisie. The nation has to be structured by and in the interests of the Black y ang in the working class. But it can only do so by changing the entire system. A non-racial capitalism is impossible in South Africa. The class struggle against capitalist exploitation and the national struggle against racial oppression become one struggle under the general command of the Black working class and its organisations. Class, colour and nation converge in the national liberation movement.
Politically - in the short term and culturally - in the long ter, the ways in which these insights are translated into practice are of the greatest moment. Although no hard and fast rules are available and few of them are absolute, the following are crucial points in regard to the practical ways in which we should build the nation of Azania and destroy the separatist tendencies amongst us.
- Political and economic organisations of the working people should as far as possible be open to all oppressed and exploited people regardless of colour.
While it is true that the Group Areas Act and other laws continue to concentrate people in their organisations - geographically speaking -largely along lines of colour, it is imperative and possible that the organisations themselves should not be structured along these lines. The same political organisations should and can function in all the ghettoes and group areas, people must and do identify with the same organisations and not with 'ethnic' organisations.
All struggles (local, regional and national) should be linked up. No struggle should be fought by one colour group alone. The President's Council proposals, for example, should not be analysed and acted upon as of interest to 'Coloured' and 'Indians' only. The Koorhof Bills should be clearly seen and fought as affecting all the oppressed and exploited people.
- Cultural organisations that are not locally or geographically limited for valid community reasons should be open to all oppressed and exploited people ... The historic role of the Black working class
The Black working class is the driving force of the liberation struggle in South Africa. It has to ensure that the leadership of this struggle remains with it if our efforts are not to be deflected into channels of disaster. The Black working class has to act as a magnet that draws all the other oppressed layers of our society, organises them for liberation struggle and infuses them with the consistent democratic socialist ideas which alone spell death to the system of racial capitalism as we know it today.
In this struggle the idea of a singie nation is vital because it represents the real interest of the working class and therefore of the future socialist Azania. "Ethnic', national group or racial group ideas of nationhood in the final analysis strengthen the position of the middle class or even the capitalist oppressors themselves. I repeat, they pave the way for the catastrophic separatist struggles that we have witnessed in other parts of Africa. Let us never forget that more than a million people were massacred in the Biafran war, let us not forget the danger represented by the 'race riots' of 1949. Today, we can choose a different path. We have to create an ideological, political and cultural climate in which this solution becomes possible ... 1. Abdullah Abdurrahman was a leader of the first significant organisation of the Coloured people - the African People's Organisation, founded in 1902. Though a largely Coloured organisation the group was in favour of Black unity. However, Abdurraman was opposed to mass action and sought to use the voting power of Coloureds and Africans to influence events. His efforts were singularly unsuccessful. Gandhi, later to become a vital figure in the Indian independence struggle, during his time in South Africa founded, in 1894 the Natal Indian Congress. [Note by 'International Viewpoint'].
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SOUTH AFRICA