South Africa’s Unresolved National Question: The seeds of a new movement and the challenges for socially-engaged artists

It is undeniable in South Africa today that black artists have become central to a range of artistic endeavours and sites. A decisive social shift has taken place from the apartheid division of labour in art – in which black artists were overwhelmingly jazz musicians, choral singers, dancers, stage actors, poets and short-story writers, while white artists dominated in the visual arts (including film and TV), classical music, opera and literature and in the ownership of “art infrastructure” (galleries, studios, theatres, companies).

Along with this shift has gone the greater social weight of the concerns of belonging, citizenship and identity – issues that shape the political discourse and the concerns of artists in South Africa today.

The key question is however: Does this shift reflect the greater upward social mobility of black people in general, so that this development is indicative of greater equality in post-apartheid South Africa? Or is the surge in black creatives and the blurring of the old apartheid art division of labour occurring despite the growth of greater inequality in South Africa?

It is of course the latter. Which is why there are the concerns of belonging, identity, citizenship etc. These are reflective of real experiences of non-belonging, non-citizenship and oppression at the societal and systemic level.       

Along with all other people in society black artists face the challenge of the power relations and institutions of South African life that continue to be dominated by white society. This is true both in respect of the production of art as well as in the consumption of art. And who is the arbiter of what is considered “creative” or “art”.

Across the spectrum of creative endeavour – poets and writers being at the mercy of publishers, visual artists dependent on galleries and the “art market”, playwrights and actors relying on theatres and middle class pundits, musicians on suburban venues and recording studios and film makers on large investors – this may vary in degree and form.  But all of them reflect the power relations of white domination of South African life.          

So it was no surprise in early 2021 when black artists took their example from community activists toyi-toying about housing evictions, water cut-offs and other instances of social abandonment … and blockaded the offices of the National Arts Council (NAC). This was a fight over the misallocation of public resources and allegations of corruption and nepotism at the NAC.

While this was a battle over public funds, it is part of a bigger issue of inequality and abandonment, which is why the community toyi-toying spilled over to the art world.

But while this spillage did occur there is an ongoing schism that challenges us all. On the one hand, not a day goes by when there isn’t a demonstration, a march, a road-blockage or a work-stoppage by the working class and the poor in some part of South Africa’s urban and rural townships and workplaces against their sense of abandonment. To the extent that they have variously been called a “movement of the poor” or “insurgent citizens”. And, on the other, artists are focussed on “identity” as a “racial”, cultural or sexual definition.

Yet both sides to this schism are responding to, and manifestations of, South Africa’s transition.                 

The single most defining feature of South Africa today is a conundrum – South Africa is a democracy in which the black majority are able to put in power the leading organisation of the anti-apartheid liberation movement and yet, nearly 30 years later, white power and black subordination still characterises almost all institutions of public life.

As regards artists, there is a bitter irony at play here. Young black artists, many of them middle class, products of private schools and the formerly white universities, experience the upward professional mobility into historically white spaces and yet also experience the racism and exclusion from the conventions of those spaces.

In this regard socially-engaged artists face a challenge and an opportunity: how do we articulate and take sides in this conundrum? Do we focus on exclusive “racial”, cultural or sexual identities in response to these exclusions? Or do we discover modes of expression with which we can engage the seeds of a wider movement for social justice?

But first we need to understand. By critiquing some of the reasons on offer for South Africa’s conundrum.

Reflecting on some reasons offered   

There are of course, many narratives that are used to explain this phenomenon.

Some commentators draw on a kind of Afro-pessimism to say that South Africa is simply following in the footsteps of others on the Continent. They seem to be citing a kind of deterministic path whereby ex-liberation movements inevitably become corrupt rent-seekers once in power and the enthusiasm for national liberation wanes.

This fatalism explains nothing. It simply disparages every African country’s histories of struggles, experiments, victories and defeats at the hands of imperialism, structural adjustment programmes and local elites, and their ongoing battles for democracy today. But it also doesn’t explain why South Africa – which is a modern industrial and financial power in Africa (and was seen as the key to the liberation of the continent as a whole) - should now just be an exemplar of the same disease.

Then there are the Fanonian analyses which brilliantly capture the psycho-cultural dimension of how the native elites become conveyor belts for colonial ideologies. But these fail to get us to really understand the specifics of South Africa’s transition to democracy which occurred well after the period of anti-colonial struggles of the 1950 and 1960s and which was characterised by the kind of insurrectionism that inspired Fanon.

The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), as a breakaway from the African National Congress (ANC), has a narrative that says that the negotiations trade-off that instituted democratic South Africa was that the black majority gained political power but the white elite retained economic power.

The weakness of this argument is two-fold. On the one hand it separates the political from the economic - thereby takes us back from lessons long learnt by social justice activists for many generations – that economic power is the source of political power. And on the other hand it doesn’t explain why after nearly 30 years the ANC has not been able to use its political power to lever economic power from the white elite. 

From the side of the ruling ANC it has often argued that South Africa’s democracy was achieved through a negotiated settlement and not by a revolutionary victory. Negotiated settlements involve compromises and trade-offs with the white ruling class and its apartheid party, they say.

The ANC wishes us to combine this sobriety with the triumphalism that it also embraces in asserting that it won a resounding victory at the negotiating table and in the form of the 1995 Constitution. Equipped with this victory, with all its necessary compromises, the ANC can claim that the continued domination of white power over much of South Africa’s public life is residual and temporary and is being attended to by both legislation and the campaigns of official civil society (which the ANC both welcomes and encourages).

It is precisely the thinness of this argument after nearly 30 years that informs much of the generalised disappointment and anger throughout South Africa, particularly among young people, who grew up either in the reformed apartheid years or the post-1994 years, with the “liberation ethos”.

In order to understand our current reality of contested notions of citizenship and identity we need to take a step back into the political language of what many people may think of as a bygone era ….and revisit the National Question.       

The National Question[1]  

The term “National Question” should not be conflated with nationalism. It comes from debates amongst the Marxist Left, who saw themselves not as nationalists (or at least, bourgeois nationalists) but were primarily concerned with the social justice issues of human emancipation.  But they grappled with how these related to issues of colonialism, citizenship, identity and exclusion – which were dominant over much of the 20th century.

Of course that might make some artists say that that automatically makes it old hat and irrelevant for the modern world of the 21st century.

But that would be wrong!  

One only needs to look at the daily news to see that the national question is at play across the world.   Israel’s ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people, the Kurdish people’s struggles for national liberation across Syria, Iran, Iraq and Turkey, Britain’s Brexit turmoil over its colony, Northern Ireland, Scottish independence struggles prompting the possible end of the United Kingdom, Hong Kong and Taiwan becoming both struggles for democracy and flashpoints in geo-political battles between the West and China. And Catalan independence activists get jailed for treason in Spain.

In Africa we have seen the breakaway of South Sudan as Africa’s newest country on the strength of a Western-driven narrative that there was a Khartoum-driven violent campaign of Northern Muslims against the “animist” South. The Saharawi people continue to seek independence from Morocco. The current status and boundaries of Somalia, Somaliland, Eritrea and Ethiopia are still being contested as is the case with Cameroon, where there are also language struggles today, relating to its history of colonial contestation between Britain and France.

The national question is the most modern and up-to-date of issues.

The Marxist Left were concerned with a fundamental tension, a historical hypocrisy if you like – that while people of Western Europe had forged nation states over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they were all involved in the denial of nationhood to the peoples that they had colonised in the Global South.

This has particular meaning in Europe itself as, at the end of World War 1, the old empires of Austro-Hungary, Czarist Russia and the Ottomans imploded and a whole new process of state formation was unleashed and new “nations” configured.

It was these activists on the Left who began to argue, in time (we make no pretence that there was some kind of unanimity here), that the National Question required a two-fold resolution:

·         On the one hand recognition of the right to sovereignty and independence and, on the other

·         Recognition that who constitutes the “nation”, for the purposes of citizenship would be reconfigured by the struggles of the oppressed people themselves and not by the colonial power.

Many of us today are familiar with insights from Benedict Anderson that “nations” are “imagined communities” and that for much of the history of national states it was the states that formed nations and not the other way around. Nations are not, primarily, aggregates of language, culture, skin-colour, “race” or any other criteria other than political considerations. Who determines these political considerations is a matter of struggles between competing social forces.   

This latter point was to be not so much the subject of academic debate but the subject of bitter experience and lessons throughout the twentieth century.

This was particularly so with the concessions of the largest colonial power - the British. When faced with the need to cede colonial authority and grant independence the British Colonial state determined who was “the nation” to whom power could be transferred. For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries this was the white settler group – in the US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada and then South Africa in 1910.

For their colonial rule Britain administered the native population through traditional rulers (and even created such” traditional authorities”, where necessary)[1].  The British saw the native populations as indelibly members of hostile religions or “tribes” who needed to be keep apart and did not constitute a unified nation at all.

Ireland had been the precursor in 1921 to this British strategy of division but it was most notably done in 1947 with partition of India - into India and Pakistan - on the basis of religion.

So, in response, the default perspective of anti-colonial struggles was to stress that national liberation from colonial rule required both political sovereignty as well a unified nation based on political status rather than “race”, language or culture.

To be sure, we say “default position” because national unity could also disguise the actual oppression of some communities, particularly as national boundaries were a colonial imposition.  But the founding Organisation of African Unity (OAU) decided both to recognise colonial boundaries as a point of departure for addressing the national question and to embrace Pan-Africanism as a vision.

In South Africa the white minority regimes of Segregation and Apartheid had, of course, their ideological justifications. That the oppressed black majority were actually a potpourri of many “tribes” or nations, whose responsibility for keeping the peace was that of the white rulers. British colonialism even co-opted or prescribed chiefs and traditional leaders to act as vehicles for colonial administration. This practice was carried over into the apartheid era of white rule.

And as the struggles against apartheid intensified from the 1950s and ‘60s the regime even invented the concept of South Africa being a “consociational democracy” of many nations to justify apartheid.

These ideological creations also had their “cultural” and “artistic” equivalents, to enhance the project of separate identities, with both the state and its client, the Chamber of Mines, sponsoring Zulu and Xhosa artistic expression via Radio Bantu, the promotion of boxing amongst migrant workers and the tourist artefacts of “Rickshaw boys”, “Malay Choirs and “township art”.                   

In time all sections of the South African liberation movement embraced the idea that South Africa was one nation and rejected the old ruling elite’s notions of “tribalism”, Bantustans, federalism and tricameralism. The major sections of the internal mass movement – the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) - defined themselves in opposition to racial identities, while uniting the black majority.

This became the alpha and omega of political activism over many decades. 

From the early 20th century black creatives and artists emerged which gave expression to both the pain of colonialism and white rule and the notions of resistance[2]. In this there was both an embrace of identity as a challenge to forced incorporation into colonialism and a resistance to white-imposed identities.

After WW2, socially-engaged black artists, both in the choices of mediums in which they were prominent as well as in the choices of subject matter and the forms of organisation they founded, were all about giving expression to resistance and rejection of apartheid-imposed identities. They became both artists and activists.  

This was the case with the Drum writers[3] of the 1940s, 50s and 60s; the Staffrider[4] poets of the 1970s; the jazz musicians from the 1950s – the Kiepie Moeketsies, the Mackay Davashes, the Chris McGregors, the Miriam Makeba’s and the Dollar Brands (later Abdullah Ibrahim).

Hugh Masekela and members of The Blue Notes were forced into exile in the wake of the Sharpeville Massacre, while the work of artists such as Gerard Sekoto, Dumile Feni took on a decidedly anti-apartheid posture. Dennis Brutus and Keorapetse Kgositsile would increasingly see their writing lives as inseparable from their work as activists. 

They all fought for expression that broke down apartheid prescribed identities.

Nowhere was this more notable than amongst the black poets from KZN, like Mafika Pascal Gwala and others, who founded art collectives in the townships around Durban and Pietermaritzburg[5], specifically repudiated Zulu-ness.    

Those traditions of socially-engaged artists even saw the formation of organisations of artists – the COSAWs (Congress of South African Writers) and the Cultural and Theatre Collectives of the Federation of South African Trade Union (FOSATU) workers.  

The relevance of all this for South Africa, today, may not be obvious. We have our formal sovereignty and are not beholden to a colonial power. Our Constitution declares us a non-racial, non-sexist, unitary country. Yet, in reality we have both the continued domination of whites in social life and the resurgence of apartheid racial divisions amongst the black majority. 

This is direct consequence of the non-resolution of the National Question.    

Why is the National Question not resolved in South Africa?

The deepest reason is that the structural underpinnings of the whole system of both apartheid and its predecessor, segregation, were left unchallenged in the transition to democracy in the 1990s.

The late colonial period, the segregation period after 1910 and the 1948 period of apartheid were all iterations of racial capitalism in which racial oppression was a vehicle to ensure capitalist exploitation and accumulation.

With this inextricable link between Apartheid and capitalism the fight for democracy and a new configuration of the South African nation would have to be combined with fundamentally changing capitalist social relations.

But instead the leaders of the post-1994 liberation project not only left capitalism unfettered – they embraced capitalism as a so-called “development project”.

In the meantime, capitalism itself changed – from its post-WW2 ethos of Keynesianism to the neo-liberalism which is the form of capitalism that is globally-entrenched today.

And one of the defining features of neo-liberal capitalism is that it fragments all strata – rent-seeking capitalists challenge industrial capitalists via the financialisation of stock markets; middle class people leave the traditional professions and chase outsourced contracts on offer by the state and big business, the working class sink into innumerable instances of casualization, zero-hour contracts and informality.

And, above all, neo-liberalism breaks the link in public life between the middle classes and the working class poor. The collapse of public transport, public schools and public healthcare has meant the increased social distance between middle class and working class people across the world.

In South Africa, while apartheid segregated black people racially it blurred class lines within these “racial groups” residentially. Every township had its “home-ownership” scheme cheek-by-jowl with its council houses. The children all went to the same local township school.

Now some of the black middle class live in the suburbs and go to private schools while the working class has been reduced to shacks and “no-fee” schools.     

So together with South Africa’s apartheid legacy of being separated into “races” and “tribes” neo-liberal capitalism makes fragmentation at the heart of capital accumulation and so of social life itself. As Margaret Thatcher once said: “There is no such thing as society” We’re all competing now.”

The second reason for the non-resolution of the National Question is the outcome of the national negotiations between the Apartheid regime and the liberation movement which gave rise to the new Constitution and the current order in power today.

The apartheid regime won a huge victory in ensuring that the geography of apartheid was written into the Constitution in the form of the high degree of Provincial competencies (along quasi-federal lines) and the de-facto retention of much of the bantustans into provincial boundaries. 

So de facto –with the notable exception of Gauteng - South Africa’s provinces remarkably reproduce the old apartheid divisions – “coloureds” in the Western Cape, The Eastern Cape as the home of the amaXhosa and associated Bantustans, KwazuluNatal as the fiefdom of the Zulus etc.

Within this framework the ANC government has failed to use public schools – and schooling is a Provincial “competence” - as a vehicle for resolving the language barriers which prevent nation-building. In practice, instead of making it possible to both have one’s mother-tongue language respected as a medium of instruction and ensure that all can speak a pool of languages through public schooling, these matters have been abandoned to the “market”. Which means the preponderance of English in public institutions with all that that implies for the non-English-speaking majority of South Africans.   

And of course post-1994 factions of the ANC have dabbled in tribalism as they sought political allies amongst traditional authorities and ex-bantustan leaders in its attempts to consolidate electoral platforms.  

The result has meant that there is still as yet no unproblematic South African nation and, instead, the long shadow of apartheid intrudes into every aspect of social life. This is the most fundamental consequence of the non-resolution of the national question.

So what now?

The Marikana Massacre of 2012 marked a turning point in the unassailable moral authority of the anti-apartheid liberation movement and the ANC as its custodian.  

This disappointment and, more recently, the media obsession with corruption has seen this moral authority plummet even further.

In this regard the key question is: Why does this disappointment not lead to a galvanised social movement of protest at such a historical betrayal of the liberation movement? A movement capable of holding government accountable? Or even fomenting more radical change? Of recasting the nation?

Because each stratum in South African society feels the nature of and the sources of this betrayal differently and draws on their historical insertion of apartheid to make sense of things.

White people retreat into their laager seeking even more racial walls, ex-bantustan residents recall the “well-functioning” services of Mangope and Matanzima, “coloureds” resort to the “we are not black enough” syndrome or pursue chimeras of Khoisan royalty, some middle class black youth seek to discover their Zulu and Xhosa identities. Rural people in some communities reclaim traditional authorities as a vehicle for livelihoods and meaning. Some poor people turn on foreigners as the cause of their poverty.      

Why this retreat?

There are a number of reasons, including the fragmentation induced by nature of neo-liberal capitalism in South Africa and the long reach of apartheid in the Constitutional order, which we have already mentioned.

And the ANC’s resurrection of “race” and “tribe” for reasons of political expediency, despite its own adoption of the 1-nation position to resolve the national question.

In this regard one can feel the anger of poet and cultural activist from the FOSATU era, Ari Sitas:

“In refusing to be patronised by whites, the best of the black intelligentsia pinned its hopes outside the existing cultural networks and institutions. They were left in the lurch when the ANC, despite bold noise since the early 1980s about the arts, culture and creativity (remember Gabarone, remember CASA?) handed the cultural apparatus of the country to Inkatha and its creativity to the market”[6].   

So, the national question was not resolved by the old anti-apartheid movement. But it cannot now be expected to do so, like a schoolchild who has forgotten to do their homework.

This responsibility now falls on a new generation who, while being mindful of the past, cannot fix the present with the tools of the past.     

But there are the seeds of a new movement …. A movement emerging out of the ruins of the old anti-apartheid movement. 

For many years, at least since the early 2000s, South Africa’s working class communities have been waging struggles against the near abandonment of any of public services for the poor throughout South Africa. The government’s programmes of neo-liberal austerity have seen the growth of mass settlements of shack dwellers, the abandonment of cleaning in townships and water and electricity cut-offs.

In response there has not been a day when there is not road-blocks, marches, demonstrations and land occupations. Variously dubbed by commentators as “service delivery revolts” or a “rebellion of the poor” these have become the stuff of social life and made South Africa the “protest capital of the world”.

In the sphere of labour we have also seen a plethora of wild-cat strikes and work stoppages by farmworkers, casual workers, car guards and various groups of workers outside the official industrial relations framework. Here too neo-liberal policies of labour fragmentation and the cosy partnership between COSATU and the government has seen a rising tide of struggles.

What is notable about both of these instances is that they are not within the terms of the ANC’s Tripartite Alliance partners, or the official channels of citizenship or even through the circuits of NGOs who have claimed the mantle of “civil society”.

For much of the same period students at what was known as the former black tertiary institutes – known as the “bush colleges” - boycotted and occupied classrooms against fee payments and exclusions.   

Then from 2014 and 2015 they were joined by students at the former white universities fighting not only against fee increases but, most importantly against racism and colonial symbols and seeking to de-colonise the curricula. 

Then too there are young people who have blown the cover off questions which traditions in our communities have suppressed – particularly the broad fluidities of sexuality.

But all these struggles are embryonic, at best, seeds of a new movement...     

The reasons these have not coalesced into a national, movement worthy of that name, are many – including that the instances – community, labour and student youth – do not converge, collaborate or even speak to or acknowledge one another.

They do not have an identity or a language which can forge a common identity.

This is a big issue which cannot be reduced to a few simple formulae.

But, if we have learnt anything from the past, the role of an organic intelligentsia cannot be excluded in this regard. And this includes artists – poets, musicians, playwrights, dancers and writers…

But that would mean a shift in focus for mainly middle-class black artists. To look beyond their concerns with exclusion from, and the hypocrisies of, white society.  

We should not underestimate the role that the Black artists played throughout the 1950s and 60s in providing a language, a spiritual, inspirational and sustaining role. Songs like Stimela, Yakhal’Inkomo and Manenberg did not only provide a backdrop to struggles. A student activist could identify with a migrant coal worker; an urban activist could hear the bellowing of a bull; an African activist from Umlazi could sense the rhythm of life in a “coloured township”. These songs gave meaning and life and commonality to thousands of activists, and to people who did not even consider themselves activists, but came away with the sense that another world was possible.

The black consciousness poets of the 1970s were indispensable to what became the mass labour and civic movements of the 1980s even though these movements ended up marching under a different political banner. As did the Drum generation of the 1950s.

The challenge to socially-engaged artists today is to help build a new movement for social justice, by speaking to the current issues – the unresolved national question, the fragmentation of the working class, the suppression of sexuality -   experimenting with form and content, and finding the means of expression that can water the seeds of this new movement and help it find its own language and identity.             

[1] See Mahmoud Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, Princeton University Press, 1996, and for a specifically South African case study articles by Xolile Mancgu and Phil Bonner in Beinart and Bundy, Reassessing Mandela, Jacana, 2020.        

[2] For these and other reflections I am indebted to the most comprehensive collection of what he called “publically-negated” intellectuals from mid-19th century South Africa to mid-20th century South Africa, published on the website of Ntongela Masilela, New African Movement (http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/NAM). Sadly, with his death in 2019 the site has been discontinued, but South African film-maker, Bridget Thompson, is best-placed to access his material     

[3] These include Can Themba, Todd Matshikiza, Nat Nakasa and Lewis Nkosi.    

[4] These include Oswald Mtshali, Sipho Sepamla, Don Mattera and James Mathews. 

[5] See The Arts of Resistance – Mafika Gwala and South African Poetry, by Ari Sitas    

[6] Sitas, Ari, The Arts of Resistance 

[7] For a useful recent summary of the use of this term in South African political language and debates amongst the major protagonists in the anti-apartheid liberation movement, see Edward Webster and Karin Pampellis, The Unresolved National Question in South Africa, Wits University Press, 2017