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The Good Society, Volume 21, Number 2, 2012, pp. 279-299
(Article)
3XEOLVKHGE\3HQQ6WDWH8QLYHUVLW\3UHVVDOI:
10.1353/gso.2012.0014
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the good society, vol. 21, no. 2, 2012 Copyright 2012 The
Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
Populism has been a controversial term in South African public
discourse in recent years precisely because it has been used as a
tool in the lexical armoury of the combatants in the battle for the
leadership of the ruling African National Congress. In order to
understand why populism has been denigrated to great effect by the
political, economic and social elite one has to have some idea of
the historical resistance to popular democracy by African elites
going back to the nineteenth century.
The anti-populist streak has its antecedents in the social
division that emerged among African people following their
encounter with European modernity in the nineteenth century. At the
end of the anti-colonial wars that lasted almost a hundred years
between the end of the 18th century and the end of the nineteenth
century, Africans found themselves divided between two groups:
those who subscribed to the new religious and educa-tional systems
brought into the country by the European missionaries and those who
rejected European civilization as a bastardization of African
cul-ture. And because religion and education came to stand for what
Ntongela Masilela calls the facilitators of the entry into European
modernity,1 lead-ership became the preserve of what Du Bois called
the talented tenth.2
To be sure, the social division started among Xhosa chiefs
Ngqika (17781829) and Ndlambe (died 1828) who stood for submission
to and rebellion against European colonialism, respectively.
Aligned to both chiefs were the prophet-intellectuals Ntsikana and
Nxele. Ntsikana became possibly the single most influential
individual in converting the Xhosa to Christianity.
African Modernity and the Struggle for Peoples Power: From
Protest and Mobilization to Community Organizing
xolel a mangcu
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Nxele led 20,000 men to a war against the British in the small
town of Grahamstown. Thousands were killed and Nxele was
incarcerated on Robben Island, where he died. Peires argues that,
their differences notwith-standing, their attraction to their
respective followers lay in their power to reinterpret a world
which had suddenly become incomprehensible. They are giants because
they transcend the specifics to symbolize the opposite poles of
Xhosa response to Christianity and the West: Nxele representing
struggle, Ntsikana submission.3
These two individuals lay the contours of a continuing conflict
between what can be described as conservative and radical
modernizers.4 Conservative modernizers accepted European modernity
as a God-bestowed blessing on the heathen Africans. They denounced
African cultural tradi-tions and even in their politics were
careful not to disturb the apple-cart of European civilization. One
of the most influential and yet controversial of these conservative
modernizers was John Tengo Jabavu (18591921), a teacher and a
preacher who later became a community leader. He established the
influential newspaper Imvo Zabantsundu and was one of the movers
behind the establishment of the University of Fort Hare as the
first university for black students. Jabavu was controversial not
only for his dependence and appeasement of his white financiers but
also for his support for the notori-ous Land Act of 1913, which
dispossessed black people of their lands. The Act apportioned only
13 percent of the land to black people and allocated the remaining
87 percent to whites.
Despite opposition from radical modernizers such as WB Rubusana,
Sol Plaatje, SEK Mqhayi, who jointly established their own rival
newspa-per, Izwi Labantu, the conservative modernizers became more
influential in shaping the course of oppositional politics in South
Africa. Having stud-ied under Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee
Institute, they came back to establish the South African National
Native Congress, later renamed the African National Congress in
1923. One of the more radical modernizers, WB Rubusana, was at the
founding of the ANC, with W.E.B Du Bois at the Pan African Congress
in London in 1911, and also the firstand the lastAfrican to run for
parliament in the then Cape parliament, which at the time allowed
for African representation under a qualified franchise. The
franchise was later abolished and blacks were removed from the
voters roll in 1936.
As Masilela points out, Booker Ts protgs were not prepared to
give over their right to lead Africans to a bunch of radicals with
radical and Garvey-ist and even socialist leanings. John
Langalibalele Dubea
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conservative modernizer, a former student of Booker T and the
first president of the ANCexpressed his lack of faith in a radical
approach when he pleaded to the government in 1926 as follows:
Unless there is a radical change soon [regarding the grievances
of the Africans] herein lies fertile ground for hot-headed
agitators among us natives, who might prove to be a bigger menace
to this country than is generally realized. Let us all labour to
forestall them: that is my purpose in life, even if I have to
labour single-handed.5
While conservative modernizers dominated the African National
Congress for the first half of the twentieth century, the radical
modern-izers came into the ascendancy in the mid 1940s with the
formation of the African National Congress Youth League under the
leadership of AP Mda, Anton Lembede, Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo,
Walter Sisulu and Robert Sobukwe. Sobukwe later broke from the ANC
completely to form the Pan Africanist Congress which was even more
radical in its demands for the return of the land to black people.
The Pan Africanists felt that by adopting the Freedom Charter, a
document which stated that the land belonged to both blacks and
whites, the ANC had lost its claim to be the custodian of African
nationalism. Under the leadership of Robert Sobukwe, the Pan
African Congress (PAC) set the figure of 100,000 as the target for
membership. Seeking to take the initia-tive from the ANC, the PAC
led a countrywide anti-pass campaign, culminating in the
Sharpeville Massacre of 1960. The government banned the PAC before
it could realize its membership target.
These ideological differences notwithstanding, both the
conservative and radical modernizers still held on to the talented
tenth notion of leadership. The idea of community organizing as the
basis of building peoples power did not enter the political
imagination until the emergence of Steve Biko and the Black
Consciousness Movement (BCM) in the 1970s.
Through Bikos leadership the BCM in South Africa differentiated
itself from the older liberation movements such as the ANC and the
PAC in the way it related to communities. The movement eschewed the
racialistic appeals that were coming from certain sectors of the
PAC
Ideological
differences
notwithstanding,
both the
conservative and
radical modernizers
still held on to
the talented
tenth notion of
leadership.
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about driving whites to the sea or the racial nativism that
would come to characterize South African politics under Thabo
Mbeki, where every criticism was characterized as racist (if you
were white) and reactionary (if you were black), leading to a host
of conspiracy theories and denial about HIV/AIDS and
corruption.6
Biko offered a political definition of Black Consciousness that
drew Africans, Coloured, and Indians together as a collective
movement for liberation. And he always made it a point that the
struggle was for a non-racial democracy based on what he called the
joint culture of black and white people, constructed out of the
hybridity of their respective cultures, we have whites here who are
descended from Europe. We dont dispute that. But for Gods sake it
must have African experience as well.7 Biko also insisted that
black people could not effectively participate as equals in that
process as long as they had internalized notions of inferiority.
Consciousness raising in the black community thus became the
move-ments praxis.
While the ANC and PACs strategy was that of political
mobilization, the BCM pursued the path of community organizing by
linking the political struggle to peoples everyday practical
concerns. While mobilization tends to emphasise inflammatory mass
appeals to large numbers of people, com-munity organizing
emphasises changing peoples consciousness and improv-ing their
civic capacities for collective problem solving. While mobilization
easily leads to the objectification of people, and a Schumpetarian
conception of democracy as nothing more than support for leaders
and political parties, organizing focuses on the subjective
consciousness of citizens so they can take their fate into their
own hands. In this volume Harry Boyte describes how mobilization
leads to a politics of polarisation and consumerism. He cites
candidate Barack Obamas critique of the mass mobilization approach
to the community: most community organizing groups practice . . . a
con-sumer advocacy approach, with a focus on wrestling services and
resources from the outside powers that be, few are thinking of
harnessing the internal productive capacities . . . that exist in
communities.8
In the next section I describe the Black Consciousness
experience with community organizing. I show that the Black
Consciousness Movement was a populist movement to the extent that
it relied on peoples cultural and community resources for the
resolution of social problems. I argue that the transition from
community organizing in the 1970s to mass mobilization in the 1980s
and what I have described as technocratic creep in the 1990s was a
setback for the cause of popular democracy in South Africa, and
ultimately
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led to the same consumerist culture described by candidate Obama
above.9 However, these developments are not inconsistent with the
historical trajec-tory of elite suspicion for the masses discussed
above.
The Black Consciousness Movement: An Experiment in Community
Organizing
South Africas Black Consciousness Movement was born at the
heyday of radical student politics around the world. The movement
was occasioned by a sense among black students at higher education
institutions that they needed to have a greater say in the
direction of the struggle. At the time of its formation in the late
1960s both the ANC and the PAC were banned. The only oppositional
voices were those of white liberal individuals such as opposition
parliamentarian Helen Suzman and the predominantly white National
Union of South African Students. However, several incidents led
black students to question their secondary role in what was
essentially their struggle. Steve Biko captured the essence of the
need for a more indepen-dent, blacks-only student movement: I am
against the superior-inferior stratification that makes the white a
perpetual teacher and the black the perpetual pupil (and a poor one
at that). I am against intellectual arrogance of white people that
makes them believe that white leadership is a sine qua non in this
country and that whites are the divinely appointed pace-setters in
progress.10 He then defined the new philosophy of Black
Consciousness as an attempt by blacks to infuse the black community
with a new-found pride in themselves, their efforts, their value
systems, their culture, their religion, their outlook to
life.11
The rest is history. The movement spread like a wildfire
throughout the townships of South Africa, and Steve Biko became a
truly household name and national leader after his testimony as a
defence witness at the South African Students Organization and
Black Peoples Convention (SASO/BPC) trialthe first major trial of
its kind since Nelson Mandela and his comrades were sentenced to
life imprisonment on Robben Island in 1964. Despite various
attempts by the ANC to claim the June 16, 1976 as its making, it
was in reality the high water mark in the politics of Black
Consciousness. According to Biko:
the response of the students then was in terms of their pride.
They were not prepared to be calmed down even at the point of a
gun. And
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hence what happened, happened. Some people were killed. These
riots continued and continued. Because at no stage were the young
studentsnor for that matter at some stage their parentsprepared to
be scared.12
The sociologist Dan OMeara wrote that, Soweto regenerated a deep
sense of pride in much of the black population. It was a key
catalyst of the psycho-logical liberation which the Black
Consciousness Movement had worked so hard to produce.13
For Biko the consciousness raising had to transcend the environs
of the ivory tower into the community. Thus he posed the question
of what was to be done next, and answered it by saying, there is a
lot of community work to be done.14 After a tour of various black
campuses he noted that, the students realize that the isolation of
the black intelligentsia from the rest of the black society is a
disadvantage to black people as a whole.15 And so it was that the
activist-intellectuals of the Black Consciousness Movement put
their efforts into forming the Black Community Programmes (BCP) in
1971. Already the students had been conducting community work
conducting literacy and health programmes in poor communities. The
focus on health projects may have been a result of the fact that
the fulcrum of their lead-ership was based at the University of
Natal medical school where Biko, Aubrey Mokoape, Mamphela Ramphela
and many others were studying. As the programs grew in number and
volume they were shifted into the BCP. The BCP benefited greatly
from its association with the Study Project on Christianity in An
Apartheid Society (SPROCAS) run by radical Afrikaner cleric Beyers
Naudes Christian Institute. Biko had prevailed on the director of
SPROCAS development programmes, Ben Khoapa, who assisted BCP by
utilizing the donor funding that SPROCAS received to help the BCP
run its programmes. This served both parties well since SPROCASs
funders insisted on an action dimension to its work and since BCP
was doing the work but needed the funding.
Asked to reflect on the community development work that the
students were undertaking, Biko observed that, the universities
were putting out no useful leadership to the black people because
everybody found it more com-fortable to lose himself in a
particular profession, to make money. But since those days, black
students have seen their role as being primarily to prepare
themselves for leadership roles in the various facets of the black
community.16
There was a political dimension to the community development
work as well. According to the director of the Black Community
Programmes in the
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Transkei the idea was to give people a sense of ownership of
their assets or projects, and this led to a greater preparedness on
the part of communities to protect those assets and projects when
the police moved in to demolish them. In my township of
Ginsbergwhich is also Bikos townshipthe community rallied around
him because of the material difference that the projects had
brought to the community. More important is that the manner in
which the projects were implemented was empowering to the people.
Here is how he explained his development philosophy of
self-reliance:
We believe that black people, as they rub shoulders with the
particular project, as they benefit from that project, with their
perception of it, begin to ask themselves questions and we surely
believe that they are going to give themselves answers. They
understand, you know, that this kind of lesson has been a lesson
for me, I must have hope. In most of the projects we tend to pass
over the maintenance to the community.17
I now turn to a description of some of the projects before I
point to the difference between this kind of consciousness raising
and what happened under the mass mobilization of the 1980s and the
technocratic creep of the 1990s and onwards.
The Black Community Programmes: Experiences in Community
Organizing Projects18
Health and Welfare
After he was banished to Ginsberg by the apartheid government
Biko expressed a great desire to utilize his skills and networks
for the benefit of the community. One of the things he wanted to do
was to continue with the public health work he had initiated when
he was still in SASO. How-ever, he found that for fear of the
police very few of the local chiefs who presided over rural land
were prepared to sell or lease to the BCP the land it needed to
build a health clinic. So he asked the prominent composer Bka T
Tyamzashe to approach the Anglican Church for sale of a piece of
land located between two large rural settlementsZinyoka Valley and
Balasia few kilometres outside King Williams Town. However, there
was the addi-tional problem of access to water. Biko then entered
into an agreement with Tyamzashewho had a large farm nearbyto have
a borehole put in the farm. The clinic was started at the beginning
of 1975 and for the first time
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provided free healthcare facilities to communities that had been
traveling miles to pay for healthcare in the racist hospitals of
nearby King Williams Town. When the Black Consciousness Movement
was banned in 1977 the director of the clinic and Bikos lover
Mamphela Ramphele was banished to her remote rural village in what
is now the province of Limpopo, where she replicated the Zanempilo
Clinic model. A similar clinic, Solempilo (which is Xhosa for
watching over a communitys health), was established outside of
Durban. According to Ramphele, [Zanempilo] clinic could be said to
be one of the earliest primary health care projects in South
Africa.19 Ramphele later became the first black Vice Chancellor of
the University of Cape Town and, later, a Managing Director at the
World Bank.
The BCP also provided day-care centres in urban areas, enabling
more members of poor families to either go to school or work. This
is how Biko explained the rationale behind the crche in our
community in Ginsberg:
For instance where I stay in King Williams Town we revived a
commu-nity crche, which was serving a basic need for the community
in that a number of mothers could not go to work because they had
to look after their babies and toddlers. Or if they go to work it
implies that kids who are supposed to be school-going must stay
behind looking after the toddlers. So that it became clear to us
that this was a strong com-munity need to provide a crche to that
community. And we revived a crche which I attended actually when I
was young . . . but it had gone defunct . . . we call it the
Ginsberg Creche. 20
Home Industries
The BCP established home industries in the Eastern Cape province
to offer means of economic assistance to destitute communities. The
home indus-tries manufactured leather goods and cloth garments
employing fifty peo-ple in 1974. Seventy more people were employed
by projects of the Border Council of Churches, a close collaborator
with the BCP. The leather indus-tries were producing belts, purses,
hand-bags and upholstery. Women who would ordinarily remain
unemployed were brought together and taught sewing skills and
encouraged to produce articles for which they were paid according
to their production. The BCP subsidized the purchase of materi-als
and machines. By 1975 the home industries were approaching the
stage where they would not need subsidies anymore, except for
expansion. The
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most celebrated of these projects was at Njwaxa, a rural
village. One of the first people to work in that project is an
elderly lady who goes by the name, No-Fence. She remembers Bikos
contribution to the empowerment of peo-ple there as follows, He
worked with meuneducated as I am. I was doing the beadworkI was the
main person here when it came to bead work . . . Then one day he
said No-Fence, lets get a second person to help you with the load
of work. Thats how Ntombomhlaba got a job here. There were others
such as Mncedisi Xaphe, Esther Mpupha, Nolulamile Mpupha and
Ntombomhlaba James who also got jobs here because of that young
man.21
Community Trust Funds
A self-tax fund received money from middle class and wealthier
supporters of the BCP. These people would impose a tax upon
themselves which would be held in trust for the benefit of the
community. An additional trust fund, the Zimele Trust Fund, was
established with international sup-port to primarily take care of
recently released political prisoners and their families. These
people were employed in the industries and scholarships provided
for their children. The director of the trust fund, Ray Curry, had
just deposited R50,000 on exactly the same day that the police
banned all Black Consciousness organizations.
Womens Development Issues
In 1975 over 200 women from 58 townships throughout the country
met in Durban and committed themselves to work together to attain
self-reliance and independence as black women. The meeting founded
the Black Womens Federation of South Africa. The organizations
constitution stated that the organization would, determine and draw
up programmes with a view to heightening the social, cultural,
economic and political awareness of black communities and thereby
establish self-reliant communities. During its first meeting the
Federation resolved to motivate member organizations to undertake
projects of self-help to meet the needs of deprived
communities.
The Black Workers Project (BWP)
At its third General Council in July 1972, SASO had passed a
resolution to form the Black Workers Project to organize black
workers into unions. Black Consciousness leaders Mthuli kaSheziwho
was killed when a white
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railway worker pushed him in front of a moving trainand Bokwe
Mafuna organized weekly lectures on trade unionism and industrial
legislation. They opened a reference library covering wages and
working conditions at the BWP offices in Johannesburg.
Consequently, the Black Allied Workers Union (BAWU) was established
on August 27, 1972 in Soweto. BCM activ-ists were actively involved
in the famous dockworkers strike in Durban in 1972. This strike had
a demonstrative effect on other workers in the country.
Increasingly black workers started to organize themselves around
the issue of trade union recognition. Through constant agitation
the government was forced to make concessions such as the formation
of workers councils and, in a landmark change, recognition of trade
union rights in 1979 under the Wiehahn Commission. Throughout the
1980s the trade union movement was to grow at a rate Biko and his
peers might not have imagined, becom-ing, in fact, a leading force
in the struggle for political change.
The Black Press Commission
In July 1972 Biko and his colleagues in the South African
Students Organi-zation adopted a resolution calling for a seminar
on The Role of the Black Press in South Africa. This conference,
held on October 9 and 10, 1972, in Johannesburg, established The
Black Press Commission. The commission was charged with
establishing a monthly newspaper, a printing house, a publishing
house, and a distribution arm for the paper. Since 1970 SASO had
been publishing a newsletter and it also launched a book,
Creativity and Development. Other publications included Essays on
Black Theology, Black Viewpoint, and Black Perspectives. These were
under the Research and Publications Department of the Black
Community Programmes. In 1975 the mandate of this department was
broadened to establishing resource centres throughout the country.
In 1975 the Institute for Black Research was formed to train
researchers and stimulate writing in the black com-munity,
undertake surveys on community issues and compile, publish and
distribute books, monographs and journals. The Institute of Black
Studies provided a forum for discussion in the community.
Leadership Formation Schools
The BCP organized leadership formation schools on an annual
basis. Here people were not only taught the substantive
philosophical content of Black Consciousness but also seemingly
mundane things such as organizational
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development, administration, financial and human resource
management. They were also trained in public speaking and community
education using Paolo Freires method of conscientization. Here is
how Barney Pityana sums up the leadership legacy of Black
Consciousness, worth quoting at length because of the departure
from the Black Consciousness tradition when the ANC technocrats
took over in the transition to democracy in 1994:
Black Consciousness has made sure that black South Africa is
never without its own leadership. During Bikos time many people
were trained and had experience of leadership, planning,
strategizing, and mobiliz-ing and yet drew closer to the masses of
the people in their suffering and pain and frustrations. . . . When
Black Consciousness emerged, leader-ship had become remote and
ideas seemed to owe more to the guilty conscience of white liberal
establishment than to the concrete experi-ence of the oppressed
people themselves. Prior to that there had been leadership of a
more traditional, one-man, individualistic kind. Biko spread the
net so that leadership could come from many sources.22
When The Movement Died
In 1977 the government clamped down and banned all black
consciousness organizations. This was shortly after its founding
father and spirit Steve Biko had been killed. The entire leadership
was either jailed or banned. It was to be the end of arguably the
most creative era in black politicsparticularly the fusing of
political and community organizing that the movement initiated. One
of the publications of the movement observed that despite the
bannings and the killings the movement had created an environment
for objective reflection, thus the movement towards devel-opment in
the community has just begun.23
What followed was a new dynamic of mass mobilization.
From Community Organizing to Mass Mobilization
In his reflections on grassroots movements in Latin America,
Albert Hirschman makes the observation that, the social energies
that are aroused in the course of a social movement do not
disappear when that movement does, but are kept in storage and
become available to fuel later and sometimes different social
movements. In a real sense, the original movement must
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therefore be credited with whatever advances or successes were
achieved by those subsequent movements: no longer can it be
considered a failure.24 Hirschman described this dynamic as The
Principle of the Preservation and Mutation of Social Energies.
Indeed, as had been the case after the banning of the ANC and PAC,
the banning of the Black Consciousness Movement was followed by an
immediate upsurge of new leadership and the formation of the
Azanian People's Organization in 1978, just a year after the 1977
crack-down. As with the 1960 bannings, the 1977 bannings quickened
the introduc-tion of new directions and emphases in the
struggle.
Hirschmans observation notwithstanding, the shift from community
organizing to mass mobilization had unfortunate consequences. Dan
OMeara argues that the lesson from the demise of black
consciousness is two-sided. On the one hand it signified the
importance of consciousness raising as the basis of political
action, leading ultimately to the transfigura-tion of black
politics in the 1980s. However, OMeara argues that the poli-tics of
the Soweto generation was voluntaristic, maximalist, and profoundly
militaristic . . . and significantly contributing to the culture of
violence after February 1990.25
I would predate the culture of violence to the 1980s, when black
people killed each other like flies, because they differed on
methods of struggle. But I would attribute much of the violence to
the brutalization of black youth by the police in the 1980s. If the
action of the students were voluntaristic that probably had more to
do with the card that they were dealt by the mili-tarism of the
government. By the end of the 1980s violence had become the
permanent arbiter of political discourse.26 And of course one of
the great losses in the transition to democracy was the language of
community and agency, the hallmark of Black Consciousness. Biko and
his peers strongly believed that the people were the makers of
their own destiny, but this had to start with the people taking
ownership of community development proj-ects as part and parcel of
their own social and political empowerment.
Both hardline Marxist critics and more sympathetic critics such
as Saleem Badat have also criticized the Black Consciousness
Movement for adopting a voluntaristic approach to the community
development work. Badat thus dismisses the notion that the projects
were an example of patient organizing:
First, project after project was adopted willy-nilly without any
attempt to prioritize in terms of political objectives, strategy
and resources.
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Second SASO was completely unrealistic about its ability to run
some of its projects. Third, it also seriously underestimated what
the projects would entail in practice.27
But that is precisely the reason that the students shifted the
projects to the Black Community Programmes, where people like Biko,
now no lon-ger a student, worked on them on a full-time basis.
Badat concedes that what characterized Bikos approach was a theory
of action that responded to peoples lived experience, for Biko
there had to be some agitation . . . action rather than
sophisticated theory and detailed social analysis . . . was more
urgent and important.28 Biko put it this way, it doesnt matter if
the action does not take a fully directed form immediately, or a
fully supported form.29
However by the 1980s the language of consciousness raising and
commu-nity action was replaced by an economistic language of class
and socialism by the Azanian Peoples Organization, the very
organization that was set up to continue the Black Consciousness
tradition. To be sure the call for Black Consciousness to embrace a
class approach had its roots in and around 1976 when people like
SASO president Diliza Mji became critical of the exclusive focus on
race and national issues. This critique was carried forward into
the 1980s particularly through the umbrella of left-wing
organizations called the National Forum. The struggle was now
redefined as a fight against racial capitalism to be led by the
black working class on the factory floor. Whereas the Black
Consciousness Movement of the 1970s had, in a classical popu-list
sense, concentrated on practical strategies of community
development by calling on peoples cultural resources, the black
consciousness move-ment of the 1980s became lost in Marxist
polemics. Various splinter groups emerged, some claiming to be more
Marxist than others. Lybon Mabasa led a break-away body called the
Socialist Party of Azania, and Nkosi Molala founded the Black
Peoples Conventionwith hardly the commitment to community action
that had characterised the original BPC.
Impatient with the steady pace and institution-building of the
1970's and with what they saw as AZAPOs intellectualizing, the
young lions of the 1980's brought a dizzying urgency to the
situation. Seeking to make the coun-try ungovernable, this
generation's emphasis was more on mobilization of the masses than
on organization and institution building. This included the
mobilization of communities against local, black, puppet
authorities that had been set up by apartheid government as dummy
institutions for black
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political representation at the local level. These institutions
were set up as part of the newly-elected Prime Minister PW Bothas
attempt to appease the international community and the black
community in the wake of the uprisings of 1976 and 1977.
Populism as a Keyword in the Transition to Democracy
A protracted process of negotiations led up to the first
democratic elections in 1994. During this time the term populism
re-emerged in our lexicon as a means of disciplining the masses
from making unreasonable demands, part of what Raymond Williams
would call keywords or formations of meanings. These are indicative
of ways of seeing the world and interpret-ing our experiences, and
by that very definition are always loaded with political meanings,
reposed more in the political world of values than in the
dictionary. Williams noted that impersonal as the dictionary
appeared it was indeed not so impersonal, anyone who reads Dr.
Johnsons great Dictionary soon becomes aware of his active and
partisan mind . . . I believe that this is inevitable and all I am
saying is that the air of massive imperson-ality which the Oxford
Dictionary communicates is not so impersonal, so purely scholarly
or so free of active social and political values as might be
supposed from its occasional use.
Populism emerged as part of a cluster of value-laden terms that
were indicative of how we were supposed to respond to the
compromises of the negotiated transition. Accompanying words were
pragmatic, reasonable, rational, reconciliation; in this context
populist was used with negative connotations. This cluster of words
was however not limited to the negotia-tions process but was soon
institutionalized into the language of govern-ment and provided the
underpinnings for the kind of neoliberal public policies the
government adopted. We were told that it was not practical or
pragmatic to expect government to consult with the people before
making decisions. ANC members were told that the people could not
be trusted to elect their own provincial premiers because Thabo
Mbeki was not pre-pared to give such responsibility to the
populists. The converse of this was that governance was the
province of the technocrats who would efficiently deliver services
to the people. It is in that context that one of the most
unfortunate keywords of the democratic eraservice deliveryemerged.
It was a matter of time before people were reduced to empirical
objects of gov-ernment policy, not citizens who participate in the
sovereignty of the state.30
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Association of Populism with Jacob Zuma
Ideological deployment of the term populism reached its high
water mark when a man who had never seen the inside of a classroom,
Jacob Zuma, presumed to challenge the highly articulate graduate of
Sussex University Thabo Mbeki for the leadership of the ANC. What
calumny, Mbekis sup-porters asked? After all, this had never
happened in the history of African modernity. The ensuing debates
were thus a modern day replay of the nineteenth century social and
cultural wars between those who accepted (amakholwa) and those who
rejected (amaqaba) Western civilization. On Zumas cultural
backwardness was superimposed a political argument that he was not
fit to govern.31 While no doubt Zuma is a deeply flawed individual,
many analysts thought he would lose to Thabo Mbeki on that basis.
In fact the respected African scholar Achille Mbembe suggested that
Zuma was leading a millenarian movement, likening Zumas followers
to the Xhosa people who followed the young prophetess, Nongqause,
who urged them to kill their cattle and burn their fields in
anticipation of a bet-ter life. Mbembe compared Zumas popularity to
that of a primitive religion, a fundamental phenomenon of primitive
religion is to bring mass hysteria to a high pitch and to hurl the
spirit of the mob onto one totemic individual who is then turned
into a surrogate victim. The subtitle of Mbembes article read as
follows, a dozen years after the end of apartheid, a dangerous mix
of populism, nativism and millenarian thinking is inviting South
Africans to commit political suicide.32
Mbembe thus reduced politics to the realm of the metaphysical.
In Mbembes framework politics is reduced to a Manichean game where,
on the one hand, is a uniform delusional mob defending Zuma, and on
the other, a rational mob defending Mbeki. As I noted in Business
Day, a lead-ing national newspaper, if you scratch the surface
there is enough rational and mob mentality all around the ANC, and
in life in general.33
Business Day soon was a venue for a fierce public debate about
the meaning of populism. Thus I challenged the conflation of
populism with millerarian movements in South African public
discourse:
Would our writers, commentators, activists and politicians
please stop misusing the term populism. I am amazed by how much of
the political analysis of Jacob Zuma hangs on a mischaracterization
of populism as mob rule. Populism is one of the finest traditions
in democracy, based on the struggles of small men and women in
farmers co- operatives
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against big business and political oligarchs in the 19th
century. One of the worlds leading authors on populism Lawrence
Goodwyn argues that the very experience of existing as members of
farmers co- operatives required a deliberative culture: populists
would not fear that people, once encouraged to be really candid
with one another, would promptly want the moon and ask for too
much.34
Goodwyn was making a point about the rationality of everyday
people that Karl Marx had also observed in 1844 in reaction to the
revolt of backward German weavers against bankers and
industrialists. He wrote mockingly of the German elite, the
cleverness of the German poor stands in inverse ratio to that of
the poor Germans.35
I concluded by arguing that, SAs problem is not populism, which
is to be properly understood as the creation of a popular
democracy, but what Hannah Arendt described as ochlocracywhich is
when democracy morphs into mob rule as happened in Germany or
fascist Italy. In response, Mbekis Minister of Education, the late
Kader Asmal, ripped into me, seeking to keep the populists at
bay:
Is there to be no end to the ceaseless preciousness of Xolela
Mangcu? In his recent column on the mean-ing of populism, he
lectures all of us as to the real meaning ofthe word and threatens
to shriek if any-one uses populism to mean anything other than
popular democracy, standing up for ordinary peo-ple. The great
vitality of the English language is the way usage changes, whatever
Mangcus professors say. The Cambridge Encyclopedia refers to the
way
populist reaction seeks to regain authority over events beyond
the power of people and which is blamed on some conspiracy of
foreign-ers, ethnic group or economic group or intellectuals. In
other words the wronged outsiders seek either some form of
participation or revenge or redemption.36
Asmals argument tells us something about the extent to which
conservative elites have been successful in redefining the concept
of populism to subvert its radical democratic origins. The question
is what shall it take to regain that lost ground?
Conservative
elites have
been successful
in redefining
the concept
of populism
to subvert
its radical
democratic
origins.
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Towards A Usable Past: The Potential Role of the National
Planning Commission
Over the last year, the launch of the National Development Plan,
orga-nized by the National Planning Commission headed by Trevor
Manuel, has proven a venue for continuing this debate. The plan
identifies a number of strategic policy areas for South Africa to
focus on in the next twenty years: job creation, education, spatial
integration, energy development, infra-structure development, crime
etc. I participated in this event, and objected to the absence of
two words in Manuels presentationinstitutions and culture. While
Manuel defended himself and the commission on the atten-tion they
had paid to institutions, he conceded that the commission had not
paid any attention to culture.
This is a telling omission. From the nineteenth century Romantic
move-ment to the Populist farmers and workers of the 1880s and
1930s to com-munity organizing in the late twentieth centuryculture
making has been seen as an essential component of what it means to
be human. Culture is what gives us meaning and the capacity to act
on the world, instead of being passive spectators and victims of
what happens around us. Thus Boyte in this volume describes human
agents as storytellers and meaning makers.37 It is those
storieswhether from family or community lorethat fire the
imagination and impel people to action. Culture helps people not
only sur-vive but collectively chart new pathways of development.
Its degradation blocks imaginative ways of thinking about those
pathways. In his essay, Luke Bretherton, describes how cultural
movements such as the Populists are an example of what Polanyi
calls the double-movement-society pro-tecting itself from the
vicissitudes of laissez faire capitalism, and its degra-dation led
to disempowerment and ultimate destruction of communities:
not economic exploitation as often assumed, but the
disintegration of the cultural environment of the victim is then
the cause of the degra-dation. The economic process may, naturally
supply the vehicle of the destruction, and almost invariable
economic inferiority will make the weaker yield, but the immediate
cause of his undoing is not for that rea-son economic; it lies in
the lethal injury to the institutions in which his existence is
embodied. The result is a loss of self-respect, and standards,
whether the unit is a people or a class. . . . 38
Life in a cultural void, Polanyi observed, is no life at all.39
Steve Biko captured the same sentiment when he said, material
poverty is bad
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enough, coupled with spiritual poverty, it kills.40 Cornel West
similarly argued that, people, especially poor and degraded people,
are also hungry for meaning, identity and self-worth.41
When people are forced to pursue development goals that do not
fulfill them spiritually and to which they cannot relate
culturally, then they simply go through the motions without any
enthusiasm for the work at hand or any emotional investment in the
development of their community. In South Africa the government
built millions of atrocious houses for the poor, which the poor
have since abandoned. About 87 percent of the housing stock was
found to be faulty. Though the language of housing has changed to
liveable communities and the name of the department of housing has
changed to the Department of Human Settlements, it remains to be
seen whether the most critical element of what it means to be
humancultural makingwill be part of the actual housing
programmes.
There is a general sense of alienation by young people in the
affairs of the country that is quite unlike the historical
trajectory of the 1970s when young people held their fateand the
fate of the country in their hands. Through anecdotal and empirical
evidence one sees a growth of peoples movements, youth
organizations and young people in general harkening for the themes
of Black Consciousness, albeit within a democratic, non-racial
setting. It is the duty of those who were involved in the cultural
creativ-ity of that eraincluding people like Trevor Manuel and
Cyril Ramaphosa (the deputy chairperson of the commission)to use
such institutions as the Planning Commission as an instrument for
retrieving the relevant parts of that experience as part of our
usable past, as inspiration for collective self-reliance in our
communities.
The question of course is what political nature would such
move-ments take. Luke Bretherton makes a distinction between
political and anti-political Populism in the United States.42
Political Populism attends to issues of power, including questions
of who has the prerogative to decide about the life of the
community. In anti-political populism, on the other hand, the
throwing off of established authority is a prelude to the giving of
authority to the one and the giving up of responsibility for the
many.43 In some ways this is what happened in South Africa in the
transition to democracy. The throwing off of authority structures
became a mere replacement of one type of authority for another
without the public engagement that democracy requires. It could be
argued that this is in keeping with more than a hundred years of
elite prerogative to
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rule that I discussed in the first part of the paper. Leaving
the discussion at that would succumb to path dependence without
acknowledging the breaks from established black elite authority
that took place with the Black Consciousness Movement and to some
extent the civic movements of the 1980s.
Towards A Politics of Community-Based Knowledge and Cultural
Production
While a student at Cornell University in 1994 I was asked a
question by Martin Bernal about the technocratic leap Back to the
Future that South Africa was taking: Why is South Africa
leap-frogging way back into the 1950s as if the 1970s never
happened? Bernal was right. The throwing off of authority
structures was not only just a replacement of one authority
structure by another but also the retention of the technocratic
knowledge system upon which the political and cultural system was
also founded. It was a matter of old wine in new bottles.44
Political Populism properly understood as popular democracy with
com-munity organizing as its organizational and political core
requires a deep engagement with notions of modernity and who
belongs in that modernity. Those are cultural questions upon whose
resolution the political and devel-opmental trajectory of the
country depends.
The question is whether we return to the conservative,
anti-political modernity of the early ANC, the radical mobilization
of the 1950s and 1980sor the radical democratic and participatory
politics of the 1970s. The choice is clear if the goal is that of
creating a more participatory democ-racy built on strong community
foundations. This requires a departure from the over-reliance on
big leaders and their technocratic solutions that has characterized
South African society both pre and post-apartheid.45
Xolela Mangcu is Associate Professor of Sociology at the
University of Cape Town and author of Biko: A Biography. A graduate
of Cornell University he returned to South Africa to become one of
the country's leading pub-lic intellectuals. The Sunday Times,
South Africas largest newspaper, has described Mangcu as possibly
the most prolific public intellectual in South Africa.
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NOTES1. Ntongela Masilela (2000), interview with Sandile Ngidi,
unpublished manu-
script. See also Catherine Higgs, The Ghost of Equality: The
Public Lives of DDT Jabavu of South Africa, 18851959 (Athens, Ohio:
Ohio University Press, 1996); and Bheki Peterson, Of Missionaries,
Intellectuals and Prophets (Johannesburg: Wits University Press,
2006).
2. For a critical review of Du Bois Victorian conception of
leadership see Cornel West, Black Strivings in A Twilight
Civilization, in The Future of the Race ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr
and Cornel West (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
3. Jeff Peires, The House of Phalo (Cape Town: Jonathan Ball,
1981), 73744. Masilela, op.cit.5. Gail Gerhart, Black Power in
South Africa: the Evolution of An Ideology ( London:
University of California Press, 1978), 48.6. For further
discussion of Mbekis racial nativism see Xolela Mangcu, To
the Brink, The State of Democracy in South Africa
(Pietermaritzburg: University of Kwazulu-Natal Press, 2008).
7. Steve Biko, I Write What I Like (Johannesburg: Picador
Africa, 1978), 148.8. Harry Boyte, PopulismBringing Culture Back
In, The Good Society, 21:1
(2012).9. I use candidate Obama to signal what Boyte describes
as a shift from the lan-
guage of we that Obama used in the campaign to the language of I
in government.10. Biko, 26.11. Ibid., 53.12. Ibid., 165.13. Dan
OMeara, Forty Lost Years (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1996), 181.14.
Biko.15. Ibid., 19.16. Ibid., 164.17. Millard Arnold, The Testimony
of Steve Biko (London: Maurice Temple Smith,
1978), 94.18. For a fuller description of these projects and the
sources see Xolela Mangcu,
Social Movements and City Planning, Cornell Working Papers in
Planning (Ithaca, New York, 1993).
19. Barney Pityana, Mamphela Ramphele, Malusi Mpumlwana, and
Lindy Wilson, Bounds of Possibility (Harare; SAPES Trust, 1991),
164.
20. Millard Arnold, op cit.21. Interview conducted for my
forthcoming, Biko: The Biography (Cape Town:
Tafelberg Press, 2012).22. Pityana, 256.23. Mangcu, 1993.24.
Albert O Hirschmann, Getting Ahead Collectively: Grassroots
Experiences in
Latin America (New York: Pentagon Press, 1984), 5556.25. OMeara,
181.26. Xolela Mangcu, The Rule of the Thug: Without a Tolerant
Political
Consciousness We Might As Well Kiss This Democracy Project
Goodbye, Sunday Times, May 6, 2012.
27. Saleem Badat, Black Man, You Are On Your Own (Johannesburg:
Steve Biko Foundation and STE Publishers, 2009), 101.
28. Saleem Badat, Black Man You Are On Your Own, 100.
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29. Gerhart, 28889.30. See the work of Partha Chaterjee.31. This
argument is further developed in my book, The Democratic Moment:
South
Africas Prospects Under Jacob Zuma (Jacana Press, 2009).32.
Achille Mbembe, South Africas Second Coming: The Nongqawuse
Syn-
drome, Open Democracy Essays, June 14, 2006.33. Xolela Mangcu,
Challenge is to Look Beyond Crude Dichotomies, Business
Day, October 2, 2008.34. Xolela Mangcu, Populism Gets Short End
of the Stick Again, Business Day,
December 6, 2007.35. Karl Marx, cited in Nigel Gibson, Fanonian
Practices in South Africa: From
Steve Biko to AbahlaliBasemjondolo (Pietermaritzburg: University
of KwaZulu Natal Press, 2011), 127.
36. Kader Asmal, Stop it, Precious, Business Day, December 6,
2007.37. Harry C. Boyte, PopulismBringing Culture Back In, The Good
Society 21:2
(2012).38. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, The Political
and Economic Origins of
Our Times (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944), 15758.39. Ibid.40.
Biko.41. Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage Books,
1993).42. Luke Bretherton, The Political Populism of Broad Based
Organizing, The
Good Society 21:2 (2012).43. Bretherton, XX.44. In 2011 City
Press newspaper carried a debate between Pallo Jordan and me
about the extent to which the ANC yielded the writing of its
policies to liberal and some-times conservative white consultants
and academics because it was simply not equipped with the expertise
or not ready to reach out to those who did in the black community
because of ideological differences.
45. This theme is further taken up in a book manuscript, Beyond
Personalities, Towards Institutions that explores the imperative of
institution building as the basis for a more enduring
democracy.
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