Paul Shipale
While the editorial of the Sun Newspaper on Friday, 23 August 2024, was cautioning the voters against “a litany of mega thumb sucked promises in the manifestos” of political parties without explaining how they will be fulfilled, on his part, Emeritus Professor André du Pisani said this was “A time of empty hollow ringing manifestos” in a country where words have lost their meaning due to deep racial and social divides.
Du Pisani’s assertion is premised on his argument that in the context of Southern Africa, there has been two dominant modes of transition from national liberation movements to governing parties. These are; Privatised Liberation, claiming an exclusive role in bringing about independence and Corporatized Liberation, of a pact between capital and the elite. The former include the MPLA party in Angola, FRELIMO in Mozambique and ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe, while the latter comprises SWAPO Party in Namibia and ANC in South Africa. Du Pisani says that both categories tend to conflate the party and the state, creating, overtime, party states.
According to him, the defining features of first generation national liberation movements have been the armed struggle, anti-colonial nationalism and state capture as their first strategic objective with a hybridity of making generous promises and advancing a strong re-distributive agenda, which explain their initial success and their ultimate unravelling.
My learned Professor Emeritus writing’s is purporting to speak for the “majority marginalized” of those given ‘thorns’ against the “few minority well fed moneyed elite given roses in salubrious suburbs and gated estates, lifestyle complexes or security villages in a folie de grandeur” far from “the infested social and spatial economy of the multidimensional poverty, inequality and visceral precarity”.
My learned Professor may be correct when referring to opulence with some alleged to have amassed millions through duplicitous means. However, he seems to have taken a leaf from the pages of the book written by Dale T McKinley on April 10, 2017, titled; South Africa: Behind the ANC’s corporatised ‘liberation’, and added SWAPO to the characterization that “the ANC and the state it has politically controlled for two decades have become corporatised in form and content. This has produced a major shift in the balance of forces away from the mass of workers and the poor.”
Indeed, according to Dale T McKinley, despite the more general social, political and economic advances that have been made under the ANC’s rule since 1994, power has not only remained in the hands of a small minority but has increasingly been exercised in service to capital. As a result, ‘transformation’ has largely taken the form of macro-acceptance of, combined with micro-incorporation into, the capitalist system, now minus its specific and formal apartheid frame. Dale T McKinley concludes that what has happened in South Africa since the end of apartheid in 1994 is the corporatisation of liberation; the generalised political and economic commodification of society and its development with all the attendant impacts on governance, the exercise of power, the understanding and practice of democracy as well as political, economic and social relations.
To those who have already reached a conclusion, assuming with the underlined tone, that power in Namibia and South Africa has not only remained in the hands of a small minority but has increasingly been exercised in service to capital, I will attempt to first give the context as to why this happened by giving a summarized historical background before I offer my views from a Pan-Africanist perspective on Decoloniality.
Lest we forget, Southern Africa is the only region in Africa that has collectively defeated imperialism through the barrel of the gun and their surrogate of Ian Smith in former Rhodesia and the apartheid regime in both Namibia and South Africa. This narrative that in Southern Africa we only negotiated our independence is false because we won the border wars of independence and forced the boers to the negotiation table when they were told by the Western countries, through the Assistant Secretary of State for African affairs, Chester Crocker’s ‘shuttle diplomacy’ of constructive engagements in his mediation efforts to go for negotiated settlements which included, among others, sunset clauses and property rights as well as access to capital.
Thus, during the negotiations process, compromises were struck around modalities of the transition and South Africa and Namibia’s transitions towards democracy reflected the self-interest of the contending forces to avoid a scorched earth even if the core character of the political settlement of the early 1990s was the acceptance of consistent democracy enshrined in an enabling constitutional framework.
In the period since the advent of democracy, there have been many global and domestic developments that bear relevance to the strategic and tactical approaches of both the ANC and the SWAPO Party analysis of the global and domestic balance of forces, and how this facilitates or hinders the attainment of their ultimate objectives.
Since the global economic crisis which started with the financial meltdown in 2007, the world is experiencing a poly-crisis reflected in the rapacious conduct of finance capital. Across the world, progressive left political movements have sought to challenge this state of affairs. However, many parties have either been co-opted into the dominant school of thought or are unable to break through discourse that justifies social inequality. At the core of global social discord is the fundamental question of political economy, the distribution of income and assets in society. Income inequality and inequitable distribution of assets are at their most intense. Poverty and unparalleled opulence live cheek by jowl. Apartheid colonialism ensured that these disparities express themselves along racial lines, with gender and geographic location overlaying the canvass upon which these fault-lines play out.
From the tentativeness of the transition, and armed with overwhelming electoral mandates and constitutions that call for fundamental change, it became possible to start introducing far-reaching programmes of transformation. As both countries stepped onto the sunshine of non-racial democracy, the legality, legitimacy and authority of the new political systems, the nascent states and the new governments were incontrovertible. The emergence of the new system of an inclusive democratic society, starts with the attainment of political power. It is a conscious act of construction. The forces that coalesced to remove the old order had to endure yet another protracted process of conscious action before their ideals are realised.
In the process of social transformation, as during the years of struggle, the motive forces organise and act jointly and severally to attain their objectives. Such joint action requires a political movement with a vision that reflects the common interests of these forces encapsulated in the notion of an inclusive democratic society premised on constitutionalism and rule of law. Through the ebbs and flows of changing historical settings, the ANC and SWAPO have endeavoured to play this role. Ultimately, using various forms of struggle, they both emerged as the primary forces in the struggle against apartheid. This status was further underlined by the organisations’ electoral performances from the first democratic elections in 1990 and 1994, respectively.
Discussing decolonization with Gadfly Magazine in 2021, Professor Lwazi Lushaba, who teaches in the discipline of Political Science at the University of Cape Town, but his interests are much broader; and more in the history of South Africans, social sciences and a little, philosophy. More particularly, what he calls African modes of cognizing. And, of course, he also invariably has to study modernity, which denies Africans of cognizing, broadly described what neo-colonialism looks like in the world right now, and suggest that the concept of neo-colonialism may no longer serve us.
He thinks the concept of capitalist modernity is what will help us understand better what drove the encounter between the oppressor and the oppressed, but also what will sustain it thereafter. If you think of Africa as a place that is under the throes of capitalist modernity, he thinks we are going to be better able to make sense of what are the present challenges that Africa is faced with.
Indeed, the colonizer not only takes possession of the land, its components delimited as resources and the possibilities of accumulation that he invents from it, but also of our bodies and our dreams, monopolizing, likewise, the ways of imagining, understanding and relating to the world. Here we are reminded of a line somewhere in Fanon’s book; Towards the African Revolution. It says, “Having judged, condemned, abandoned his cultural norms, his language, his food habits, his sexual behavior, his way of sitting down of resting, of laughing of enjoying himself, the oppressed, flings himself upon the imposed culture with the desperation of a drowning man.”
Now, what Fanon was talking about is certainly not neo-colonialism, as we understand it in the radical political economy sense. The tragedy Fanon was talking about here is much larger than that. Professor Lwazi Lushaba thinks it’s the concept of modernity, that we are under the throes of capitalist modernity, and what Africa has to decide is whether it wants to replicate Western modernity or not.
People who insist that what gave birth to modernity was the Industrial Revolution mean that the industrial revolution would not have happened without reason to actualize itself. Now, it was that kind of thinking that European social thinkers would reduce to three concepts; reason, rationality, and capital not as fungible capital, but as a way of thinking. It was those three concepts that Marx and Durkheimian would say were the markets of Europe’s transition into capitalist modernity which was basically the coming into existence of an outlook towards the world underlined by the raising of capital.
In the all-encompassing nature of colonialism as we’ve seen its effects, in the cultural and political developments of inequalities in African countries and the desire to develop towards modernity influenced by their European, colonial past, perhaps the even more threatening resource behind this is the discourse of development. The Colombian anthropologist and leading decolonial thinker Arturo Escobar has an interesting book titled; Encountering Development. What he does in the book is to show how the discourse of development itself suggests that to develop necessarily means to replicate the Western model of modernity.
The question is; what other system or model of governance were the first generation of liberation movements supposed to follow if not the Western model of capitalist modernity and development? After all, the problem for the continent is that formal independence comes to us via nationalism. And nationalism, to borrow from Partha Chatterjee, represents a closed dialect. He says that by accepting to be more than what nationalism does everywhere, is to accept the Western model of modernity, as actually representing the trajectory that all societies necessarily have to follow.
The other problem at the foundation of Western epistemology, which is universally understood as the theory and study of knowledge, is the philosophical idea of man who has to be the proprietor of knowledge, who is possessed of reason that is unencumbered and so is the one that produces this knowledge but the Latin cogito, ergo sum, usually translated into English as ‘I think, therefore I am’, is the ‘first principle’ of René Descartes’s philosophy originally published in French as je pense, donc je suis in his 1637 Discourse on the Method, is diametrically opposed to the African philosophy of Ubuntu sometimes translated as “I am because we are” or “humanity towards others”.
The problem is that to equate ourselves to Western disciplinary boundaries, we are already defeated because those disciplines, as the West has imagined them, have their own methodological underpinnings. Like in a capitalist system, it’s your relationship to the means of production that matter. Whiteness or Western capitalist modernity and model of development, in fact, become precisely the means of production here. Everyone has to understand themselves in terms of their relation to that model, which produces all sorts of material advantages, but it also produces an idea of being.
If such model is the norm, everything else becomes defined in terms of its distance from that norm. The further away from the norm, the more scorn the world reserves for you; the closer you are to the center, the norm, the world is a little kinder to you. That is why the first generation of liberation movements followed the Western model of capitalist modernity and development but now are characterized as privatized and corporatized liberation.
There is nothing essentially or innately European. It is a constructed identity. Against this background, the sooner African reality and lived experiences can be narrated outside Western people’s experiences, with self-validation through Decoloniality as a liberatory language of the future for Africa, the better, instead of being defined by others as privatized and corporatized liberation through their epistemology and lens of Coloniality of power which is associated with the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Qui-jano who conceptualized a power matrix that constitutes the modern/colonial world to consolidate capitalism. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of my employer and this newspaper but solely my personal views as a citizen.
