Beyond In The Twilight of the Revolution : A Response to My Reviewers

Not long ago, in 2002 to be precise, one of the outstanding South African scholars, Neville Alexander, wrote in his book, An Ordinary Country: Issues in the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy in South Africa:

the slogan about the ‘transfer of power’ from white minority to the black majority under which the nationalist movements have mobilized the working class and other oppressed strata ever since 1949 has remained no more than a slogan. Today, there are very few people in the leadership of the ANC who do not realize that taking office is not the same as taking power. (Alexander, 2002: 60)

As if Alexander’s critique was part of some intellectual plot, seven years later Issa Shivji at the University of Dar-Es-Salaam in Tanzania wrote in his book, Where is Uhuru? Reflections on the Struggle for Democracy in Africa, that the need ‘to democratize land tenure systems and full participation of communities in decision making processes’ is a critical element of an ‘Uhuru’ which democracies in Africa have failed to deliver. He also draws attention to the uncritical acceptance of the ‘premises of liberal democracy’ which, he argues, ‘provide neither feasible nor acceptable modes of politics and organization of state power in our countries’ (Shivji, 2009: 8). Shivji (2009: 6) proceeds to touch on an issue sometimes underemphasized when examining ‘the state of the state’ in post-independence Africa and this is about the ‘state of the global political economy, which continues to be the most decisive context for the economies and politics of our countries and societies’. This shows intricacies involved in post-liberation state formation in Africa and these of course go far beyond In The Twilight of the Revolution in South Africa. It is not only the route to liberation and the choices made at the very points of liberation but the paradigms of democracy and the context of the global political economy which circumscribe and deform liberatory ideals on the African continent. These issues are covered, even though not exhaustively, in the book that I wrote, and are being reviewed in this Special Issue of the journal.

Chris Landsberg’s article (2012), ‘Afro-Continentalism: Pan-Africanism in Post-Settlement South Africa’s Foreign Policy’ deals with this complexity but uses the lens of foreign policy and inter-state relations. Landsberg basically shows how the tenets of Pan-Africanism become modified and diluted in the post-independence phase to assume an inchoate civic nationalism, something he refers to as Afro-continentalism. I agree with him if by this he seeks to underline the sort of perversion African nationalism has undergone partly as a result of the realistic imperatives of the Westphalian modes of governance and the material needs of survival in a changing context. The question Landsberg does not examine exhaustively, and which is obviously not covered in the book, is the one about sustainability of Afro-continental arrangements given the deepening poverty and mounting popular discontent in many parts of the continent. This point pushes further the boundaries of debates made in my book and generates insights which may need to be worked into the second edition, when it is written.

In the case of South Africa, I still argue, and Neville Alexander (2002) also seems to make a similar argument, that looking at the results of the surrendered revolution, (deleate in South Africa) it is very clear up to this far, that the real power at the level of society and economy has not changed hands. The question of sustainability is even more intriguing in the case of South Africa where even members of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) alliance (the ANC Youth League in particular) have begun to question the wisdom of the compromises made during transitional negotiations in Kempton Park, Johannesburg during 1990–3. It is interesting to note that Ted R Gurr’s (2012) article, ‘Some Observations on Resistance and Revolution in Contemporary Africa’, argues differently. He argues that South Africa ‘was fortunate to avoid the fate of revolutionary seizure of power’ and that the private economy remains largely autonomous and generates enough resources that, ‘in principle, there could be substantial redistribution for the benefit of the bulk of the population’ (2012). Gurr’s position is contrary to popular sentiments, especially among Black people in South Africa. South Africa’s popular discourse has already gone beyond that optimism. That was the optimism of the Nelson Mandela period but it has long been eclipsed by a new pessimism generated by the realities of a recalcitrant White power in society and economy. The fact that 16 years are now gone and only 7% (see www.rlc.gov.za) of the land has been redistributed to Black people and the rest of productive land is still owned by Whites who make only 14% of the total South African population is gradually exposing the negotiated settlement not only to academic critique but to popular discontent. Gurr’s argument is logical and academically solid but I still think it falls short of providing an alternative discourse to the challenges raised in In The Twilight of the Revolution, especially the contention that ‘White domination in its institutional form may have been removed’ (2012) but ‘disparities in material wealth continue to widen in a way which threatens democratic consolidation’ (Kondlo, 2009: 7). Also, Gurr seems to have confidence in the private sector of the economy and that redistribution will occur because this sector is ‘autonomous and generates enough resources’ (2011: XX) for redistribution. In South Africa, the situation is far more complex than that. Corporate capital is not just autonomous but is an unaccountable power which threatens democracy itself. Hence, I wrote in my weekly column in a newspaper called The Free State Public Eye, that

If there was hope that the autonomous free-markets, as explained by Gurr, were moving in the direction of transforming society and economy, the democratic government in South Africa would not be so pre-occupied with various measures to deal with a lagging transformation process. The ANC-led government in South Africa has invoked the notion of the developmental state which is examined by Hebert Maserumule (2012) in his contribution, ‘Politics of Transition in South Africa and the Post-1994 Democratic State’. Maserumule argues that the politics of transition were more focused on building a liberal democratic state rather than a developmental state. He argues that, ever since the time of negotiations, former liberation movements, including the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) have not stopped battling to find the best ways to handle transition and transformation in the country. In other words, the crisis confronting these organizations is how to make the democratic state deliver beyond its negotiated character. The idea of a developmental state is now bandied about as a solution to the inherent frailties of a state born out of compromise. Unfortunately the idea of a developmental state has hardly gone beyond political attribution; it hardly informs the organization of the bureaucracy, the way of doing government business differently and the regulation of the markets. In the book, In the Twilight of the Revolution (Kondlo, 2009), I have not delved into PAC positions on the developmental state. One may examine this area in the second edition of the book.

I concur with Pade Badru’s argument that ‘what needs to be done, at this point of the unfinished revolution in South Africa, is for popular progressive forces within both the ANC and the PAC to form a new alliance to continue the struggle for national liberation’ (2012). I think this is the most logical and significant thing South Africans should do to complete the unfinished liberation struggle. But if one considers the extent to which the ANC has been so damaged by greed and the rush for political power and its trappings, one wonders if liberation still matters beyond the slogans and rhetoric. The PAC, on the other hand, is so consumed by internal battles one may even wonder if there is time and space for constructive political discourse. The South African Black person has become his own worst enemy – the limited freedoms that he enjoys have completely clouded his consciousness. In an article, ‘From Fringes to Fossils – PAC of Azania in Post-1994 Politics’ (Kondlo, forthcoming), which I wrote recently, I tried to expose the way that hope can, in the course of time, turn into hopelessness as a result of internal dynamics rather than external forces. The PAC is one such hope. It is one organization which is supposed to lead the discourse on some of the unresolved issues in post-apartheid South Africa that are part of its longstanding ideological positions. Land reform is one such issue. The unresolved issue of the land question in South Africa is a time bomb. Hence, it is not possible to argue convincingly the case for a developmental state, if the land question in South Africa is unresolved. The land question matters in South Africa, not only to help deal with historic grief among indigenous communities, but in and by itself, it is also a developmental issue. No development occurs up in the air – all development in this world starts on the land. The fact that emerging Black farmers and land owners are not as productive as their White counterparts should not be used as an excuse to go soft on the transformation of land ownership in South Africa. It took a long time and involved huge amounts of funding by colonial and apartheid regimes to get White farmers to the position they are in today. One needs to look at issues historically in order to understand why the present South Africa is still unjust.

One is glad that Christopher Saunders (2011) in his contribution, ‘Pan-Africanism: The Cape Town Case’, forces us to be mindful of local and specific situations that form the initial context of liberation movements. Sometimes we get carried away with the ‘big picture’ and fail to examine the original and local settings and the implications they have for the character of liberation movements. He argues that ‘Pan-Africanism in South Africa, in contrast, began as an urban-based movement, and its main initial centre was Cape Town’ (2011: XX). I would agree that the coherent articulation of Pan-Africanism and the organizational form it assumed originated in urban areas and the largest organizational support was in Cape Town. But the ideas of Pan-Africanism existed as diffuse, inarticulate feelings and expressions of ‘togetherness in suffering’ often expressed by African peoples in various forms. The Eastern Cape’s experience of ‘frontier wars’ has resulted in a rich oral tradition among indigenous communities and the legacy of this tradition, particularly its Pan-Africanist undertones, cannot be undermined in laying the foundations for the germination of Pan-Africanism. Hence the PAC, after it was formed, received fast-growing support from rural communities in the Eastern Cape, and of course among migrant workers, especially those who worked in Cape Town. I was requested in April this year to review a book, The Struggle for the Eastern Cape, 1800–1854: Subjugation and the Roots of South African Democracy by Martin Legassick (2010), which clearly illustrates how Pan-Africanist ideas grew in the heat of frontier wars against colonial incursion in the Eastern Cape. In the review article that I wrote, I argued that the book partially discloses how early Pan-Africanist ideas developed in South Africa.