CRY THE BELOVED MALAMULELE!: BLACK TRIBALISM AND ETHNIC CHAUVINISM IN THE AGE OF A POST-MODERN AND POST-APARTHEID AFRICAN POLITY .
"The study of the African realities has for too long been seen in terms of tribes. Whatever happens in Kenya, Uganda, Malawi is because Tribe A versus Tribe B. Whatever erupts in Zaire, Nigeria, Liberia, Zambia is because of the traditional enmity between Tribe D and Tribe C...Unfortunately, African intellectuals have fallen victims - a few incurably so - to that scheme and they are unable to see the divide-and-rule colonial origins of explaining any differences of intellectual outlook or any political clashes in terms of the ethnic origins of the actors." Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Introduction: Towards the Universal Struggle of Language, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, 1986.
"As long as people lived in ‘a bright future', they fought side by side irrespective of nationality - common questions first and foremost! But when doubt crept into people's hearts, they began to depart, each to his national tent - let every man count only upon himself!...And the more the movement for emancipation declined, the more plentiful nationalism pushed forth its blossoms". Josef Stalin, the former Eastern European Communist strongman and Soviet dictator, Introduction: Marxism and the National Question.
INTRODUCTION
The Business Report SA of 05 August 2008 carried a fascinating article by Polo Radebe, the CEO of Identity Development Fund, under the heading ‘Afrikaner empowerment is a powerful model for today'. In the piece, Polo Radebe did not hide her great admiration of how South Africa's white Afrikaaners, an ethnic group, or white African tribe if you like, mobilised their ethnic chauvinism and tribal sentiment to achieve astonishing economic progress after seizing power in 1948.
Polo Radebe wrote:
"Sanlam/Santam, Absa, Naspers, BHP Billiton, Pepkor, Venfin, Remgro and KWV: these companies are examples of highly successful businesses started by Afrikaner entrepreneurs during the time of Afrikaner nationalism. Afrikaner empowerment history makes for interesting reading. It reminds one that it is possible to turn around the economic fortunes of the previously marginalized. Afrikaners obtained political momentum when the Nationalist Party came into power in 1948. At the time, more than 70 percent of Afrikaners were rural and involved in agriculture. Commerce and industry were dominated by English-speaking white people and the Indian and Jewish communities."
Clearly, here is an instance in South Africa's recent history of what Kenya's literary icon, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, called "the study of African realities" where the non-black African tribes - the white Afrikaaners, white English-speaking South Africans, the South African Indians and the South African Jews - all who are African tribes or ethnic groups, are shown to have made economic progress, not so much because Tribe white Afrikaaners versus Tribe white English-speaking South Africans, or because Tribe Indian South Africans versus Tribe South African Jews, neither because of their mutual enmities or rivalries, but because of how they pulled their ethnic or tribal power, group think and collective resources under the apartheid white dictatorship between 1948-1994 to register very impressive economic progress for their respective ethnic or tribal groups.
Polo Radebe's piece referred to above is representative of a wide-spread intellectual and political tendency in South Africa's black community to speak with awe about the white Afrikaaners, as well as South African Jewish, Indian and white English-speaking ethnic communities' legendary ability to mobilise their groups and self-organise for a definite positive economic outcome, or as is commonly said in the black community, that members of these South African ethnic groups are able "to work together and help each other as groups".
In this case the Tribe or the ethnic group is not seen as an expression of backwardness. Neither is the Tribe in this case viewed as a hindrance to economic advancement and material prosperity. If anything, the Tribe or ethnic group is seen as a launchpad for economic renaissance.
However, the dominant narrative in the black South African community about the black Tribe or ethnic group is diametrically opposite. One of the best articulation of this hostility towards the black Tribe or ethnic group was provided by Mondli Makhanya in a Sowetan article of 05 June 2012 under the heading ‘That dreaded "T"word in the ANC'. In this article, Makhanya wrote:
"What South Africa's liberation movements, with the ANC as the main driver, successfully managed to do in the past century was to deal effectively with ethnic difference. They did not do this by killing culture, ethnic identity and traditions. This would have just been fulfilling the objectives of colonialism and apartheid. Rather, they struck a knockout blow at tribalism as a political tool and a form of political identification early on in the life of the liberation struggle. When it reared its head in exile years, in the internal Mass Democratic Movement and the trade unions, it was similarly dealt with. Even when some have tried to stoke the fire for political gain in some of the multi-ethnic provinces in post-1994 South Africa, tribalism has been immediately crushed and its sponsors' oxygen taken away".
Mondli Makhanya further quoted the famous pre-ANC Speech of Pixley ka Isaka Seme, one of the founders of the ANC, who railed against "the demons of racialism...and the aberrations...these divisions, the jealousies" of tribalism, which he saw as "the cause of all our woes and all our backwardness and ignorance today".
I'Nkosi Albert Luthuli, the former President General of the ANC, expressing the ideal of black African unity cutting across tribes in South Africa, wrote in his ‘Let My People Go' that:
"One of the major purposes of Congress, right at the beginning, was to overcome the divisions and disunity between tribes, and, since we did not then hope to create national unity against the will of the whites who held all the power, at least to develop African unity. Right from its inception the ANC realized the importance of awakening the African people and uniting them in a common loyalty which would cut across all lesser loyalties. Our oppressors have done all in their power to retain and emphasise all lesser loyaties". (2006, Page 81).
But the harsher, if lesser known, condemnation of tribal divisions in South Africa's black community was contained in the ANC first secretary general and founder Sol T. Plaatjie's novel ‘Mhudi - An Epic of South African Native Life a Hundred Years Ago'. Through the mouth of a fictional Ndebele King Mzilikazi, Plaatjie wrote:
"Then, passing his hands before his eyes, as if to wipe out the calamities of which he was the victim, he drew himself up to his full height - a noble and kingly figue, despite adversity - raised his voice and with something of his old dignity he addressed the gathering crowd: -
‘Amandebele, O People of Matshobani, listen to me! We escaped from the tyrant in the land of the rising sun and fought our way through Basuto, Mantise and Bechuana, until we found a resting place in this country, surrounded though it is by vile treachery. You are my witnesses. Have I not been kind to these Bechauana traitors? It was my desire to incorporate them with ourselves so that together we could form one great nation; they pretended to be willing, yet they have always played me false. When they failed to bring tribute I slew them not; yet at the first opportunity they did not hesitate to abuse my kindness. Those Barolong dogs assassinated my indunas, the Bangwaketse beasts led to a desert trap one of my regiments; the Qoranna dissemblers helped my enemy; the Bahurutse and Bafokeng, while professing to be my friends constantly sowed thorns in my path; the deceitful Griquas also laid snares for me. Sechelle is the one friend I found in this country; yet when I appealed to him for an army to support me in my present plight he promised one next moon, when he knew it would be too late. Nevertheless, I do not want to quarrel with the doubtful friendship of his Bakwena. As for those other Bechuana robbers, the infernal spirits they have invoked upon me will recoil on them". (1989, pages 186-187).
In Sol Plaatjie's fictionalized account of how the legendary Ndebele King Mzilikazi, after escaping from "one tyrant" (King Shaka Zulu) and in an attempt to "form one great nation" out of various and disparate black tribes of southern Africa, he (King Mzilikazi) was met with "...vile treachery...traitors...beasts...dissemblers...thorns...abuse of my kindness...the deceitful...playing false...doubtful friendship...robbers...infernal spirits".
Eighty five years after the publication of Plaatjie's Mhudi, and hundred and three years after the formation of the ANC, the challenges facing the quest for the attainment of black African unity in South Africa, in the context of a non-racial and democratic South African nation, have not gotten lesser or less intimidating.
So, when Samuel P. Huntington, the USA's leading sociologist and author of ‘Who Are We? - The Challenges to America's National Identity' stated that South Africa has been described "...as engaged in ‘the search for identity'...' he was correct (2004, page 12). But what he forgot to clarify was whether we were engaged in "the search" for a positive or negative "identity", and which will be the final outcome of our national identity search.
On the other hand, Huntington further wrote, very controversially, about the fact of "the virtual disappearance of ethnicity as a source of identity for white Americans" (page 295, Ibid). Yet across former Yugoslavia and across former Soviet states in Eastern Europe, and indeed even across the European Union itself, let alone across democratic South Africa, (eg Orania and Kleinfontein in Pretoria), it is the re-emergence of ethnicity which is providing a renewed impetus to whites to define their collective identity, in contrast to what Samuel Huntington adduced about "the source of identity for white Americans".
The bitter, very destructive and ongoing war in Ukraine, which pits western Ukrainians against Russians of eastern Ukraine, is also indicative of this rise of white ethnic chauvinism in Europe. Much of the Russophobic sentiment amongst the dominant and ruling political and intellectual elites of western Europe and the USA is motivated, historically, primarily also by anti-Slavic and anti-Russian tribal, ethnic chauvinistic predisposition.
Whilst Huntington could claim that ethnicity was virtually disappearing as a source of ethnic identity amongst white Americans, the same white American elites, in pursuit of the project of eternal, "uber alles", unchallengeable and "permanent" American global dominance, have not been shy to themselves play up and fan the fires of tribal and ethnic divisions and animosities amongst the white tribes and ethnic groups of Europe, such as in the former Communist Yugoslav states, the former Soviet Baltic states, southern Europe and now in Ukraine.
Polo Radebe's article referred to above is a reminder of how the white Afrikaaner tribe of Suth Africa successfully and triumphantly used its narrow, ethnic and tribal identity to mobilise, chauvinistically, for political power and economic prosperity between 1948-1994.
The endurance of "ethnicity as a source of identity" (Samuel Huntington) for many black South Africans was pointed to by The Times SA's Phumla Matjila in her piece ‘Arching layers of pain - Apartheid architects ensured that townships were zoned along tribal lines - and black neighbours are perpetuating this evil of the past' of 12 June 2012.
She wrote, inter alia, the following about Soweto in Johannesburg:
"Meadowlands is divided into zones, which were divided into ethnic groups. Zone 8 is predominantly a Shangaan area, Zone 7 a Tswana sweet spot and Zone 6 is home to Zulus...Mamelodi, where I grew up, is not much different to Meadowlands. The Pedis are concentrated in one area and the Ndebeles in another...These living arrangements were part of the apartheid government's divide-and-rule policy...The divisions were obviously very effective because, even today, take away racism and xenophobia, so that black South Africans take a hard look at themselves and you are left with tribalism and the stereotypes, and even the superstitions, that inform it...When you peel away that layer of tribalism in which stereotypes exist even within tribes, and the superstitions that inform one sub-tribe's prejudices about another, you wonder if it is possible to have peace in our country."
The key challenges of black tribalism and ethnic chauvinism in democratic South Africa are of course not confined just to Soweto and Mamelodi alone.
Far from it.
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