SETTLER COLONIALISM, THE NATIVE QUESTION, AND THE POLITICS OF RELATION
In 1895 a young Jan Smuts delivered his first published political address in Kimberley. Intended as a critique of Schreiner’s views, Smuts’s speech began by placing the defense of western civilization at the center of South African politics. He described South Africa as an imperiled white outpost surrounded by a sea of barbarism and savagery. A proper approach to the Native Question, therefore, began with building a common white identity, itself a kind of friendship, in order to strengthen civilization’s resolve against the military and cultural-biological threat of African demographic superiority. If this celebration of white domination served to rebuke Schreiner and the color-blind franchise of the early Cape, it nonetheless accompanied a conception of trusteeship that shared Schreiner’s insistence on the interwoven destinies of the settler and the African. The failure to gradually raise the native would ultimately lead to their mutual ruination:
The Natives are our servants and nurses; they are to a large extent the playmates of our children; they dwell among us in towns and on our farms; in short, they constitute a permanent part of our moral and social environment. According to the character of that environment will be its influence on us. … I mention these considerations to show that our white supremacy in South Africa has grave responsibilities which, for our own sake as well as for the sake of the aborigines, we are bound to discharge faithfully (Hancock and Van Der Poel 2007: 96).
The conclusion that Smuts drew from this formulation paralleled Schreiner’s vision of a racial catastrophe. If exploitation and colonial violence threatened to plunge the country into a racial apocalypse, only a society based on the native’s willing embrace of a shared civilizational project could guarantee a common future. Smuts argued that the pedagogy of ‘civilizing labour’ (see Barchiesi 2011, 2012), rather than education or culture, would ‘discipline the Native into something worthy of our civilization and his humanity’ (emphasis added). Because colonialism had produced the interdependence of white and black, the African’s acceptance of a common future — the native’s desire for entrance into civilization — was the very basis of its survival. At the time, the African’s incorporation could only ever take the form of subordination: the process of assimilation was forever incomplete.
Schreiner’s and Smuts’ reflections underline the relationship between three questions that reoccur throughout the contributions to this volume: the Native Question, settler civil society, and the politics of relation. As Premesh Lalu (2009) has argued, the Native Question was consolidated during the early twentieth century as an administrative and academic discourse regarding the formation of African subjectivities. Lalu (2011) explains: ‘Caught between a discourse on vanishing cultures and the story of progress, academic disciplines performed the role of trusteeship over the category of the native, which appeared resolutely bound to administrative decree and capitalist demand.’ In other words, the Native Question defined the problem of colonial governance as the disciplining, management, and gradual uplift of populations no longer located in the idealized realm of African tradition, but not yet fully incorporated as modern subjects within liberal capitalism (see also Barchiesi 2012).
Despite their opposing political perspectives, Schreiner and Smuts’s late nineteenth-century formulation of the Native Question adds two critical dimensions to our understanding of this discursive framework. First, this discourse presupposed the universality of bourgeois civil society or (in Smuts’s language) civilization. A robust concept incorporating private property, the heteronormative nuclear family, Christianity, and western law, civilization provided the basis for the assimilation or exclusion of the native. In effect, the Native Question occurred at the limits of the universalization of bourgeois civil society as a political project: this limit was then projected onto the body of the colonized as an imminent danger to civilization. Second, Smuts and Schreiner understood the central problem of colonial governance in terms of the interdependency of colonizer and colonized. If segregation and indirect rule would emerge as the preferred solutions to the Native Question in the 1920s (Mamdani 1996), they nevertheless presupposed a more fundamental question of managing entanglement. This framework was a way of conceptualizing the relationship between those who enjoyed citizenship within settler civil society and the perpetually unassimilated bodies that must be both excluded and controlled. As a result, the Native Question placed the politics of relation at the center of imagining colonial power. It also required a fundamentally hypocritical disavowal of ‘exploitation’, that is, the forms of economic and political violence that underwrote civil society as a colonial project.
Situated at the fringes of European expansion (at least before the discovery of gold in the 1880s), South Africa emerged from a patchwork of European enclaves, frontier economies, colonial protectorates, and experiments in indirect rule over African societies (Keegan 1996). Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the South African racial order gradually emerged from four founding moments of violence: the genocide of the San peoples, the instantiation of a slave society in the Western Cape, the deployment of Indian indentured labor in Natal, and the destruction of independent African landownership across southern Africa through either expulsion or indirect rule. While exterminating force was directed at the Cape San (Adhikari 2011), settler formations developed adjacent to and in conflict with African societies that the South African state (unified in 1910) brought fully under its control in the early twentieth century. Even then the dispossession of Africans was never fully completed: the reach of civil society was considerably less extensive and absolute than in other settler contexts. By attacking indigenous control of land, colonialism undermined the economic, political, and cultural foundations of pre-colonial existence (Landau 2010), while refusing Africans entry into a common social life as citizens. In relationship