Post-Liberation South Africa: Sorting Out the Pieces

Introduction

The protracted struggle that liberated South Africa from the apartheid system successfully came to an end more than 22 years ago. Yet efforts to write a comprehensive history of that struggle can at best be said to have began in earnest only in 2009 with the publication of Kwandiwe Kondlo’s In the Twilight of the Revolution: The Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania (South Africa), 1959–1994, the first single piece of serious work that ‘presents a complete and integrated picture’ (2009: 3) of one of the principal liberation movements that waged that epic struggle. For reasons that derive from the dynamics that characterized South Africa’s liberation struggle, the actions, inactions, and reactions of some of the principal actors who drove and inspired those dynamics, the overall outcome has been such that portrays the misleading notion that the liberation struggle was waged in the main, if not exclusively, by the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party (SACP), and the Congress of the South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the tripartite alliance that currently holds the reins of state power in South Africa. Nothing can be farther from the truth.

Not Only the Ruling Alliance, But the PAC and Others, Too

Apart from the ANC and its two alliance partners, South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle was waged by several other notable liberation movements, including the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) of Azania, which splintered from the ANC in 1959, the Azania People’s Organization (AZAPO), and the New Unity Movement (NUMO), amongst several others. All said and done, it does not augur well at all for a meaningful deepening of South Africa’s multi-racial democracy if scholars fail to properly and contextually situate the narrative of its anti-apartheid struggle in a manner that includes the roles played by all the liberation movements and the respective actors who drove their activities throughout the course of that struggle. In and by itself, such a failure by scholars to provide a comprehensive account of where and how the liberation movements and the personalities who drove their activities made errors, as well as how those errors may have impacted and shaped the ultimate outcome of the liberation struggle, which is represented by the multi-racial political arrangements that subsequently emerged in South Africa through the transitional negotiations that involved the liberation movements, the apartheid regime, and the then-dominant Afrikaneer National Party (NP) which instituted the apartheid system after it won the first electoral victory in 1948, and sustained it over the years through unprecedented repression and brutality constitutes a debilitating deficiency in South Africa’s quest to transform its hard-earned multi-racial democracy.

Crucially worthy of documentation and analytical assessment are the errors – tactical blunders – that may have been made by the PAC and the other movements as well as the misfortunes that befell them as a result on the one hand, and on yet the other hand, in the case of the PAC especially, the adversities that it experiences in the perception of its relevance by South Africans in the politics of their country and the international community during the post-apartheid era. The lessons that can be gleaned from any such exercise will definitely enrich contemporary participants, be they individuals or movements, or even political parties, in the direction of society and its affairs in South Africa during this contemporary period in their history when South Africans are grappling with the challenges and tasks of entrenching multi-racial democracy.

With Kondlo’s book and the issues it raised about the PAC and the realities that obtain in post-apartheid South Africa serving as the back-drop, the articles in this Special Issue of the Journal of Asian and African Studies (JAAS) were solicited from seasoned scholars who have used their contributions to examine, assess, and debate the issues and challenges that South Africa’s erstwhile liberation movements – that are today’s political parties – face at this time, which requires different organizational and tactical repertoires from them.

Amongst the unique attributes and characteristics of the PAC that made it stand apart from the rest of the other liberation movements in South Africa from its inception and thereafter are its: (1) Pan-African and radical perception of the anti-apartheid struggle; (2) its radical articulation of how to engage and resolve it; and (3) and its embodiment of radicalism in its organizational definition of itself and the modus operandi as a liberation movement. There was indeed no doubt that the PAC was not determined to settle for just any outcome in the struggle that was less than a social revolutionary liberation of South Africa in particular and Africa in general at the end of it all. Specific pointers discerned from an array of the PAC’s founding documents and the inaugural speech by its founding president, Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe, are necessary at this point to buttress the foregoing assertion: the Pan-Africanist Manifesto, which prescribed a detailed theoretical framework aimed at enabling ‘militant progressive forces of African nationalism . . . bound to crush the reactionary forces of white domination’ (Sobukwe, 2010: 51–2) perceived the anti-apartheid struggle in the context of the emancipation of all Africans from every manner of domination ‘on a Pan-African basis’ (Sobukwe, 2010: 51). The PAC’s definition of race presented in the Manifesto seemed straight forward and holistic; that is ‘that there is only one race to which all belong, and that is the human race’ (Sobukwe, 2010: 21). Noteworthy, however, is the fact that this definition of race was incongruent with its restriction of its membership to only Black South Africans.

Even then, although the PAC emphasized ‘that the freedom of the African means the freedom of all in South Africa, the European included’ (Sobukwe, 2010: 23), noteworthy also, is another emphasis in the same document to the effect that ‘the illiterate and semi-illiterate African masses constitute the key and centre and content of any struggle for true democracy in South Africa’ (Sobukwe, 2010: 23). The reiteration that:

The African people can be organized only under the banner of African nationalism in an All-African Organization where they will themselves formulate the policies and programmes and decide on the methods of the struggle without interference from either so-called left-wing or right-wing groups of minorities who arrogantly appropriate to themselves the right to plan and think for the Africans. (Sobukwe, 2010: 23)

was unique and glaring to all involved in the anti-apartheid struggle with wide-ranging implications in the overall. Those implications bordered on the notion that the PAC depicted the anti-apartheid struggle in strictly racial, non-inclusive Africanist context.

Equally radical is the PAC’s disciplinary code, which sought to guide the ‘Expression of ideas, spreading of ideas or release of certain information, especially to the media, acquisition of knowledge, personal habits and relations with other liberation movements’ (Kondlo, 2009: 62) through the Stalinist mantras of ‘Democratic Centralism’ and ‘factionalism’. The former prescribed:

That the power of directing the Pan-Africanist Congress is centralized in the National Executive Committee which acts through the President who wields unquestioned power as long as he acts within the grounds laid down by the decisions of the organization which must have been democratically arrived at. The President shall have emergency powers, which [sic] he may delegate, to suspend the entire Constitution of the Pan-Africanist Congress so as to ensure that the movement emerges intact through a crisis. At that time he directs the Movement by decree, and is answerable for his actions to the National Conference. (Sobukwe, 2010: 58)

In order to curb factionalism, which the PAC described in its disciplinary code as ‘the enemy of solidarity and unity of action’ (Sobukwe 2010: 58), the movement stipulated that ‘Where the normal processes of free discussion fail to curb factional tendencies, then firm iron discipline should come into play, and factional Elements, no matter how important, should be chopped off without ceremony’ (Sobukwe, 2010: 59). Equally strident in this regard is the PAC’s oath of allegiance, which stipulates irrevocable obedience at the risk of personal ‘peril’ to ‘the orders, commands, instructions and directions of the National Executive Committee of the PAC’ (Sobukwe, 2010: 59) and prescribed the acceptance of ‘death as punishment’ (in Kondlo, 2009: 63) for failure of its members to honour the oath. There can be no doubt at all that these no-nonsense stipulations must affected the PAC’s disposition as a liberation movement towards the masses and their perception of the PAC in that it may not have attracted many from countless Black South Africans who may have been faint-hearted amongst the masses of the people.

It is perhaps ironic that the attributes that made the PAC stand apart from the other liberation movements may have equally been partly responsible for why its membership was exclusively African, which may have boosted its capacity to engage the armed struggle with a singleness of purpose that won it dedicated support and admiration in some quarters in Black Africa. Conversely, this same factor constituted a challenge in that the movement was perpetually under pressure to prove in practical terms that its proclamation of non-racialism in its manifesto was not inspired by deception (Biko, 1987, cited in Kondlo, 2009). On this same note, the retaliatory killing of five unarmed White civilians – including children – who were sleeping by the roadside by a bridge in a town called Bashee in the Transkei on 4 February 1963 by cadres of Poqo, the then newly-formed military wing of the PAC, sequel to the Sharpville Massacre of unarmed Black South Africans who responded to Anti-Pass Campaign demonstration called by the PAC on 21 March 1960 did not help matters at all. At the same time, in the international community, especially amongst individuals and organizations that hold and support pro-establishment ideology and views in the Pan-European world – those attributes that placed the PAC apart from other liberation movements – opened it up for suspicion and harsh criticisms that portrayed it as an ultra-radical and even racist revolutionary fringe movement that was determined to wreck mayhem on White South Africans. All of those cost the PAC much-needed goodwill and material support from anti-apartheid supporters in Europe and North America (Barrell, 1989). Furthermore, that radicalism, which pervaded the PAC’s perception of the struggle, its articulation of how to engage it, and its organizational structures and modus operandi, proved most problematic on another scale in that ‘they provided a loophole for the abuse of power by PAC [sic] leaders’ (Kondlo, 2009: 62), who ‘invoked disciplinary procedures to deal with political power contestations and ideological dissent’ (Kondlo, 2009: 62). At home in South Africa, that radicalism earned the PAC a quick attention from the NP government, which called it ‘a hotbed of the most dangerous and poisonous agitators in the country’ (Raboroko, 1960: 27) and swiftly proscribed it alongside the ANC on 8 April, 1960, a mere few months after it came into existence. Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, its founding leader, was promptly clamped into jail and was never allowed to operate again as a free man until he died in 1978. Early proscription of the PAC by the apartheid regime, before the movement clocked one year in existence, represented an existential challenge that it never overcame.

The PAC’s unwavering radicalism influenced its refusal to renounce armed struggle and get involved in the negotiations that produced South Africa’s current multi-racial democratic constitution in 1994. That radicalism culminated in the PAC’s hard-line position alongside the AZAPO, in which they demanded that the NP-led apartheid government must stand down first as a pre-condition for them to participate in the negotiations. It was not until quite late in those negotiations that the PAC got involved. As Mashupye H Maserumule laments in the article, which he contributed to this Special Issue, that hard-line stance was a strategic error made by the PAC and AZAPO, which truncated their capacity ‘to influence the character of the post-1994 democratic state’ in South Africa. Maserumule (2012) strongly believes that the big negative outcome is that, through that strategic error, both movements inadvertently delivered to the NP the tremendous leverage to manipulate and outsmart the ANC and the SACP in those negotiations and the contents of their outcome; that is, the multi-racial constitution of South Africa.

Speaking in objective terms, however, the PAC lacked the benefit of seasoned existence, which the ANC and the SACP enjoyed prior to its proscription on 8 April 1960, and the years of exile that followed. Thus, unlike the ANC and the SACP, the PAC never was able to consolidate its existence, talk less of grooming the leadership cadre that could have provided it with the seasoned set of leaders and activists that it needed to survive existence in exile and a return to participate competently in the politics that paved the way for multi-racial democracy in post-apartheid South Africa.

The PAC and Others Must Make Themselves Relevant Again

At the national level, the PAC has been unable to improve its electoral performance since the first multi-racial elections in 1994 when it captured five seats in South Africa’s parliament. Today, the PAC holds a mere lone seat in parliament. Notwithstanding that much of the glory for terminating apartheid is heaped on the ANC and its alliance partners, the unalloyed truth is that neither the ANC, nor its alliance partners, can meaningfully handle the challenges involved in transforming South Africa’s multi-racial democracy. When the PAC’s role in the anti-apartheid struggle is audited and brought to the fore, the verdict will be that it still has a relevant role to play in the ensuing phase of South Africa’s political development. Whether the PAC will be able to redeem the promise inherent in the immediate assertion is another matter.

As South Africa grapples with the challenges of transforming its hard-earned multi-racial democracy, the inability of the PAC to reinvent and make itself relevant in the ensuing process should be cause for worry for anyone who rightly understands the potential dangers inherent in the monopoly of state power by one party in a post-conflict or new democratic setting over an extended period of time. Such dangers manifest when the absence of credible opposition in the political process translate to the erosion and disintegration of the dimension of leadership Responsiveness in the practice of authority in society and the direction of its affairs by leaders that in this case represent the ruling party. The ingredients and signs of that danger are gradually manifesting themselves in South Africa, and Bernadette Atuahene captures it quite succinctly when she said: “The ANC totally dominates South African politics, so it faces no real competition for its constituents’ votes. It controls 66 percent of the National Assembly, eight of the country’s nine provinces, and five of the six big-city governments. During the last election in 2009, there was hope that the Congress of the People (Cope)…would provide a viable alternative, but COPE only managed to secure eight percent of the seats in the National Assembly…” (Atuahene, 2011: 126). On the pressing issue land reform for instance, in the absence of credible opposition, the ANC is in evident limbo even as the Land Question is gradually sinking into the sort of crisis that could consume South Africa if and when it finally explodes into a violent racial revolt. Experiences in this regard abound all over Africa – and even close-by in southern Africa – to validate this concern. Robert Mugabe and his ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), quickly come to mind here: The withering and folding of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) into the Robert Mugabe-led ZANU-PF in 1987 robbed society in Zimbabwe of the immense benifits that could have accrued to it for post-settler rule democratic transformation. Nothing can be as credible as when opposition in a post-liberation political arrangement is furnished by a political party, which stands shoulder to shoulder against the ruling party on the basis of the revolutionary credentials they share because of their participation in the struggle that liberated their society from political oppression. A close assessment of the PAC reveals that it is yet to recover from the maladies that it suffered for reasons that derive from how quickly it was descended upon by the apartheid regime almost right after it came into existence. Its leadership and rank-and-file members still lack an understanding of South Africa’s post-apartheid political terrain. Not only that, they have also been unable, as of yet, to reinvent themselves and the PAC for relevance. There are clear indicators that show that they are still stuck in the perception and tactics of the liberation struggle at a time when they should be operating on different perceptions and tactics. For instance, rather than identify the categories and groups that could constitute the electoral base for their party in South Africa’s multi-racial democracy, which they must mobilize for votes, they are ever busy basking in the glory of their dead heroes. Most of the activities that they organize are commemorations of historic events where young men in military fatigues and combat boots stage drills and shout slogans that include ‘one settler, one bullet’ that still scare the hell out of the Afrikaner community. If these trends and patterns continue, the PAC will be unable to play any relevant role in South Africa’s post-apartheid political development.

Perhaps the PAC’s inability so far to reinvent itself does not derive from the lack of capacity to come to terms with the necessity for that amongst some of its members. In the closing paragraph of the memoir, which he wrote about his role in the armed struggle that he entitled Child of this Soil: My Life as a Freedom Fighter (2002), Letlapa Mphahlele, who doubles currently as the PAC’s president and its sole member of the parliament, ponders:

The struggle has taught me that I am neither inferior nor superior to anyone else . . . I have learnt that change is constant, but we can steer it or be its passive victims.

I’m proud to have been part of the PAC, an organization that once strode centre stage of South African politics with confidence. The PAC is now reduced to a shadow, thanks to its unusual birth as well as other self-inflicted ills.

It had a short legal existence – 11 months before it was banned and driven underground into guerrilla war. It didn’t live long enough to develop its own culture and leadership core. Exile and the underground are the worst places to try and mould an organization. Many took advantage of its shadowy existence to further their personal agendas.

It’s sad that, [sic] to this day, we haven’t had a PAC [sic] post mortem of our struggle to liberate Azania. We as an organization and as a country were too quick to pop champagne bottles.

The PAC ought to call a big indaba and honestly answer some hard questions. Is the organization still relevant and necessary? If the organization thinks it has to continue, what does it need to say to South Africans? What must it do for them?

The PAC might find it has to hold hands with others on the left of the political spectrum . . . We need to be refocusing our people and getting them into the new battlefields: the war to control the economy of this country and this continent. (Mphahlele, 2002: 211)

President Mphahlele did not misspeak above. It is not just only the PAC, which must summon the big press conference he recommended. All of South Africa’s liberation movements, indeed all of Africa, must summon the nerve to adopt his suggestion to address questions similar to those he raised. The absence of such an endeavor makes the efforts that this Special Issue represent more necessary. Contributors to the Special Issue have not only acknowledged the importance of Kondlo’s book in their articles. They have also used them to raise and address some crucial issues that knock at the heart of Africa’s contemporary politics.

Mashupye Herbet Maserumule’s article, which I referred to earlier, goes to great lengths to show that South Africa’s ‘politics of transitions . . . were more focused on building a democratic state rather than a ‘developmental state’’ (2012). The essence of Maserumule’s argument in his article, therefore, is that a core challenge, amongst several others that South Africans must brace themselves up for, is the task of transforming their democratic state into a ‘developmental state’, which would deliver the economic dividends of multi-racial democracy to all South Africans.

Chris Landsberg’s (2012) contribution is based on an assertion made by Kondlo in his In The Twilight of the Revolution that aspects of the foreign policy agenda on Africa that successive ANC-led governments in South Africa have pursued derived from the PAC’s Pan-Africanist ideals. But the pertinent query, which Landsberg ought to have raised and probably addressed in the discourse that he weaved in his article is: are there some foundational maladies that have practically inhibited Africa’s contemporary states from performing up to the expectations of their respective populace in every aspect of their lives ever since the end of de facto colonial rule all over the continent? The mere act of dismantling the Organization of African Unity (OAU), replacing it with the African Union (AU), establishing Regional Economic Communities (RECs) and other continent-large structures and programmes that South Africa has spear-headed through its Africa-focussed foreign policy initiatives cannot be adequate answers to the foundational maladies that afflict states in Africa, and render them incapable of earning the bases of legitimacy in the perception of Africa’s distinct nationalities and peoples.It is indeed origin deficiencies that include their unitary character that dispose African states as arenas of poor governmental and political performance for conscience-challenged political actors of all strips who also use them for graft and looting the wealth that accrue from plentiful natural resources almost everywhere on the continent. Even new structures that derive from Africa’s caricature states would by logic be as ineffective as the former. Thus, the same factors that rendered the OAU ineffective cannot be wished away. They still exist intact and will do the same to the AU, RECs, etc., unless they are tackled and resolved. Rather continue to tinker with the comatose legacies that colonialism created and bequeathed as states on the continent, the rational approach to Africa’s state crises is to therefore deal with and resolve those debilitating origin factors that afflict and dispose them to poor governmental performance, for good by readdressing the state building question.

Chris Saunders used his article to succinctly document the historiography of Pan-Africanism in South Africa, which has been neglected by historians even though it was an invaluable wellspring that the PAC founders tapped for inspiration and ideas. As he puts it:

Clearly there is much more work that needs to be done to place the PAC in the context of the earlier history of Pan-Africanism in South Africa, a field that has been sadly ignored in the historiography of resistance in that country. (Saunders, 2012)

Sanuders’ article is indeed a worthy effort that gets the task he rightly identified as necessary underway. In his own article in the Special Issue, Pade Badru’s assessment is that the revolutionary crescendos in Africa that began in the post-World War II era and culminated in the demise of apartheid in South Africa in the last decade of the twentieth century, failed to accomplish much in that they did not produce ‘the revolutionary over-throw of the colonial state and the building of more progressive and autonomous states across Black Africa’ (Badru, 2012). Badru’s wish, which echoes Kondlo’s as he expressed it in his book, as well as in his response to contributors to the Special Issue (2012), coincides with Mphahlele’s desire for Black Africans to prosecute another liberation war to capture control of the economy everywhere on the continent. But in the light of the evident realities on the ground in South Africa, Badru’s desire ‘for popular progressive forces within both the ANC and the PAC to form a new alliance to continue the struggle for national liberation’ (2012) in post-apartheid South Africa remains unrealistic. The similar desire by Badru for ‘groups like the Congress of the People (Cope), the latest splinter group from the ANC, and other radical organizations of the Azania people to unite and continue the struggle for a genuine national liberation’ is rather farfetched given that even the Cope, which is not radical in any sense of the word, has shown that it is unworthy of the high hopes placed in it in this regard by Badru and many others (2012).

Another pertinent issue worth raising at this point is the one raised by some people who argue that, at the time when the ANC and the SACP agreed to negotiate with the apartheid regime, armed struggle was about to vanquish the latter, and was therefore trumped by the negotiated settlement, which they claim saved the regime, and ultimately, the Afrikaner community and paved the way for the settlement in which the ANC and the SACP sold the objective economic interests of Black South Africans out to White South Africans. Speaking in objective terms, anyone who appraises the liberation struggle in southern Africa vis-à-vis global affairs at the time will agree that the argument above derived from a simplistic assessment or understanding of the objective realities as they pertain to the liberation struggle in southern Africa in the late 1980s. At the time, the liberation struggle – especially the armed struggle component – in southern Africa, which was a de facto proxy war in the Cold War that raged at the time between the United States (US) and the now defunct Soviet Union and their allies, was at a turning point: Mikhail Gorbachev was desperately managing the crumbling Soviet Union, its empire, including its military and strategic commitments all over the world.

Aspects of those commitments included the Soviet Union’s direct engagement in Afghanistan and of course, the liberation and internal wars going on in different parts of southern Africa, and being waged on its behalf by its proxies – Cuba, the liberation movements (the ANC, the SACP, SWAPO) and the governments of Angola, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe. The Soviet Union’s inability to sustain the absorption of the heavy toll represented by those commitments had compelled it to wind down its military involvement in Afghanistan and withdraw, relinquish support to its southern African proxies, and negotiate the withdrawal of Cuban troops stationed in Angola to fight off South Africa’s aggression and invasion, with the US and the West, which led to Namibia’s independence. The prospects of South Africa’s liberation movements achieving a decisive military victory against the apartheid state at the time were not on the cards. Not only that, the apartheid state military and security forces were still all intact, their loyalty was as well, and unflinching. However, those notwithstanding, its destabilization engagements in the sub-region were exacting a heavy economic toll on the regime at a time when sanctions from the US and the West were not letting up on the economy. Internally, the unrest in the townships was boiling over to the point of an explosion whose devastating outcome was better imagined. In the absence of sustained support from the Soviet Union, the liberation movements found themselves hapless as the dynamics of the internal resistance tended towards making them irrelevant in the pursuit of the liberation of the people who they claimed they were fighting for.

In the light of all these, there was no reasonable alternative to the negotiated settlement that ensued. The character of the outcome of the settlement proper is another kettle of fish, which could have turned out differently if, say, the ANC, SACP, PAC, etc., had approached it in concert. Does the fact that the outcome of the negotiated settlement is not as far reaching as most Black South Africans, some of their fellow citizens who White and progressive, and their allies and supporters all over the world would have wanted it call for complacence and wishful hand wringing in a political economy that still burdens Black South Africans with back-crushing poverty? The quick response is a definite no!

For another set of reasons, Ted R Gurr (2012) does not buy into Badru’s preference for a revolutionary seizure of power in South Africa or anywhere on the continent or beyond. His position is based on the assessment that, wherever that has been achieved on the continent, the outcome has benefited solely the revolutionary elite whose elements justify their graft and corruption with the lead role they played in the anti-colonial struggle. The nightmare which Robert Mugabe and the ZANU-PF plunged Zimbabwe into a few years after power was relinquished to them by the White minority regime led by the now-late Ian Smith through negotiations at Lancaster House, is an alarming example given by Gurr alongside other tragic cases in point on the continent to buttress his disagreements with Badru.

There is hardly any doubt that Badru’s Marxist-inspired position is premised on his disenchantment with the outcomes of the negotiated processes that he believes aborted the triumph of social revolutionary victories over European and settler colonialism all over Africa. Kondlo registers a similar disenchantment about the outcome of the negotiations that dismantled apartheid in South Africa in his book as well as in his brief interventional response article to contributors in the Special Issue. For Badru and Kondlo, in each case on the continent, what was left behind is successor post-colonial states that are still intact and thriving like their colonial predecessors, to the detriment of Africans –the masses especially.

One of the core issues – there are several – that knock at the heart of politics in contemporary African states that Badru failed to raise and deal within his article is that colonial intervention left state building on the continent uncompleted in that it created mere ‘colonial projects’ (Boone, 1994a, 1994b) that still exist all over the continent as states. One of the peculiarities of these ‘colonial projects’ is that they are unitary to the core, which renders them crucibles of, first, the hegemony of European rulers over African nationalities that they were carved out of, and subsequently at the end of colonial rule, of members of the ruling elite in the nationality to which the respective colonizing powers relinquished state power in different parts of the continent. One of the recurrent legacies of all these is that, since independence, the continent has remained mired in political instability. The resultant political instability that prevails all over the continent will best be addressed through genuine state-building efforts that must redress the wrongs inherent in colonial state building by accommodating the diversity of peoples involved, in each case in true federal arrangements. The sad reality is that the unitarism that characterize Africa’s colonial states are still intact and has, in fact, been jealously guarded by the indigenous men and women who inherited the mantle of state power decades ago from the colonial powers. Even in those cases where the indigenous inheritors have been ousted from their control of state power by new generations of political actors, not much has changed. Everywhere on the continent the ambition and determination of gangs of elite politicians exist to merely monopolize or capture state power and utilize it to control and loot the economy. The control and monopoly of state power, and through those, the control, looting, and plunder of the economy in Africa’s unitary states by indigenous men and women have provoked as much if not more political instability as was experienced during de facto colonial rule almost everywhere on the continent.

One can now safely infer at this point in this article that, even if there had been a revolutionary overthrow of the apartheid state in South Africa, the outcome could probably not have been any different from what obtains in parts of Africa that archived political independence by social revolution. Gurr (2012) makes this same point in his article. Would anyone who subscribes to Gurr’s point of view and uses that to argue that there is no guarantee that another war by Black South Africans to capture control of the economy of their country will entail an arrangement capable of fostering socio-economic equity amongst all South Africans be ruled out of context? Rebellions that replace a hegemony with another variety in society hardly advance the course of progress at all therein, especially when the society is composed of diverse racial, ethnic, or religious groups. Experience has shown that the acquisition of state power through revolutionary or other means on the continent and elsewhere is not an end in itself. There is indeed, a monumental challenge that Africa’s contemporary and maybe future generations must brace themselves up for and deal with in order to achieve that better socio-political arrangement that must displace the dysfunctional legacies of colonialism that exist as states and that hold Africa’s distinct peoples and society hostage on the continent. That challenge revolves around genuine state building, the outcome of which must reflect and accommodate Africa’s distinct and diverse nationalities.

Again, Gurr raised his concern about the dangers of victors saddling society with another version of an exploitative hegemony. ‘Once revolutionaries are in power’, he reminds us, ‘idealism all too often gives way to self-righteous cupidity’ (2012). The experience in Africa is that the psycho-political pathology of ‘self-righteous cupidity’ afflicts not just revolutionaries when they are in power. It afflicts establishment political actors even more deeply all to the overall detriment of society at large. Gurr is therefore rightly worried by the resort to violence by revolutionary leaders in response to attempts by society to resist their plunder and appropriation of ‘state funds for their own and their supporters’ benefit’ (2012). Again also, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe comes quickly to mind, but he is not alone on the continent as regards this manner of political brigandage. Again, one must concur with Gurr by quickly pointing out that Africa’s establishment inheritors of state power are as guilty as their revolutionary counterparts on this count.

The More Durable Solution

Efforts made to address the challenges that contemporary Africa is faced with in the realm of democratization must begin with recognizing the diversity that society in Africa embodies. Although the negotiations that terminated the apartheid state in South Africa achieved a multi-racial democratic state, which is administered through one of the most progressive constitutions ever written in contemporary Africa, South Africa is no exception in this regard; that is, as regards the need to harness Africa’s distinct diversity in state building and democratic transformation of society. It is worthy of emphasis to argue here that the inherent diversity – the internal variations (distinct social authority patterns, languages, cultures, etc.) – that characterize the nationalities and racial groups that constitute society in Africa are not as Badru (1998) indicated elsewhere, anachronistic (relics of the past) whose continued existence hinder the rise of a viable bourgeois hegemony in the continent’s ‘social formation’ (Falola and Ihonvbere, 1985: 234).

Scholars such as Stephen Ellis (1999), Gurr (2000), Donald Horowitz (2001), Mahmood Mamdani (2001) and Luis Martinez (2000) have used their respective work to affirmatively respond to Crawford Young’s query: ‘Does identity politics provide the key to deciphering African disorder?’ (Young, 2002: 534). There is indeed logic and truth in Young’s assertion that ‘ethnicity is a sociological reality to acknowledge and value’ (Young, 2002: 556), and not ‘a pathology to exorcise’ (Young, 2002: 557). The internal variations inherent in the distinct groups that constitute any society are critical components that must be factored into state building and other political arrangements in order to guarantee the stability of states and entail their high governmental performance (Eckstein and Gurr, 1975). Those internal variations include the social authority patterns evolved by those social groups in society over time. They canalize into the bases of legitimacy perceptions of the authority exercised in society by leaders in the realm of politics and elsewhere.

Gurr alludes to all that in Why Men Rebel ¹ (2010) where he lucidly explains why people resist autocracy and domination in society. He affirms his explanations even in his article in this Special Issue when he argues that:

To build more peaceful and secure societies, we need to begin by analyzing the minds of men – and women – who oppose bad governments and unpopular policies. But equally we need to know about the societies in which they live, their beliefs and cultural traditions and the governments they oppose. (2012)

Since the publication of Gurr’s Why Men Rebel more than 40 years ago, other scholars – including Theda Skocpol (1994), Sidney Tarrow (1998), and Charles Tilly (1978) – who have become prominent in their respective rights, have affirmed the finding that he made therein, that culture and identity are crucial elements in state building, resistance, rebellion, and state stability. Indeed, as Gurr points out in his article here also, ‘the politics of identity are central to understanding people’s reference group, their sense of collective injustice, and their susceptibility to appeals for political action’ (2012). The recipe for building stable states in Africa is, therefore, subsumed in the diverse groups that colonialism made to constitute Africa’s contemporary states and their age-old internal variations.

For all the resources, the sacrifices made in blood, and treasures that were poured into the struggle to liberate South Africa, as it were, in terms of outcome, the country did not turn out badly when we look at the character of the Constitution, which the negotiations bequeathed to all South Africans. This is especially true when we assess what exists on the ground today on the continent as the outcomes of the anti-colonial struggles that took place in various parts. On the positive side, there is a lot to feel positive about in South Africa. As Ali A Mazrui points out:

Among the intriguing paradoxes of South Africa’s history is that this land is the last country on the African continent to be liberated, and yet it is also among the first to be truly democratized. In our context here, liberation is either from racial minority rule or from colonialism in the imperial sense. On the other hand, democratization is either the quest for, or the consolidation of, a system which combines government’s accountability with popular participation, and links the pursuit of social justice with open society. (2011: 2)

As it is with most of life’s endeavours, as far as political development is concerned, South Africa is still a work in progress, albeit more finished than most of the rest of Africa. Although, there is a lot more still outstanding that must be accomplished in South Africa by all South Africans.