The reassertion that the ANC was first and foremost an African nationalist organization represents a departure from another current of scholarship: the narration of the antiapartheid struggle in terms of the development of nonracialism.86 A major focus of postapartheid debates over South African identity, nonracialism is an unstable and much contested term. Dependent on the protean concept of “race,” it has been claimed for multiple agendas, including the liberal project of race-neutral laws and institutions, a radical vision of transcending race through nation building, and the Marxist program of working-class solidarity.87 An important tradition describes the ANC’s ideological evolution in terms of the development and then gradual extension of nonracialism, first through its collaboration with white organizations (most importantly the Communist Party) and later through its admission of non-African members at the 1969 Morogoro conference. In another context, I argue that this narrative is anachronistic.88 In the early 1960s, some ANC leaders, including Luthuli and Mandela, adopted the phrase “non-racial democracy” to express their support for the constitutional principles of equal protection and individual (rather than group) rights. However, it was only later—especially during the Mass Democratic Movement of the 1980s—that the idea of nonracialism became virtually synonymous with the ANC’s vision of nation.89 At the time of its banning in April 1960, the ANC possessed several competing philosophies of nationalism: the Natal Group’s ethical vision of a multiracial African nation, the Transvaal Leadership’s majoritarian nationalism based on an African-led struggle for power, the liberalism of an older generation of intellectuals such as Z. K. Mathews, the Federation of South African Women’s appeal to shared women’s experiences, as well as more racialist forms of Africanism. The postapartheid focus on the origins of nonracialism, however it is defined, not only compresses this series of complex (and largely unresolved) discussions into an evolutionary narrative, it obscures the central question debated by the ANC during the 1940s and ’50s: What understanding of the African political subject could escape the racial logic of a classic, majoritarian nationalism?
BOOK STRUCTURE AND CHAPTER SUMMARIES
This book is divided into three sections composed of two chapters each. The first section explores the ramifications of the Second World War and Indian independence on African politics at local and international levels. Accelerated by wartime industrialization, the large-scale migration of Africans to urban areas propelled growing political militancy and working-class resistance that contributed to the revitalization of organized African politics. While these developments encouraged the proliferation of popular nationalisms and millenarian aspirations throughout South Africa, Durban witnessed a distinctive pattern of urbanization: most Africans entered the city illegally and survived through an ad hoc infrastructure of housing, transport, and stores provided by (generally poor) Indians. Prejudice and local conflicts between Indians and Africans certainly preexisted these developments. However, this pattern of African migration—and the resulting organization of urban space—created the conditions for the generalization of local racial dynamics and the emergence of populist resentment against the alleged domination of “Indian over African.” In contrast to other South African cities, where African-Indian conflict generally remained confined to specific neighborhoods, anti-Indian populism developed into a powerful force on a city-wide and provincial scale. Chapter 1 explores the consolidation of this binary “African-Indian” racial discourse and the methodological problems of writing about race in contexts where a variety of social relationships either traverse or simply ignore the racial scripts that dominate popular imagination.
Coinciding with these developments, the foundation of the United Nations and Indian independence created a global context for the reimagination of South Africa after the end of empire. Chapter 2 describes how intellectuals within the ANC, represented by Xuma and Lembede, began to reorient African nationalism within the newly emerging international order. These efforts were informed, directly and indirectly, by a new generation of South African Indian activists, the Radicals, who seized control of the Indian Congress in the mid-1940s. In 1946, the Radicals launched a mass campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience. Invoking the Indian independence struggle (they carried the flag of the Indian National Congress on demonstrations), the Radicals sought to utilize India’s growing influence in world affairs to pressure the South African government. At the campaign’s height—which saw tens of thousands join protests and vigilante retaliation by racist whites—India brought a case against the Smuts government in the United Nation’s general assembly, internationalizing the debate over South Africa’s racial policies. Simultaneously, the Radicals pursued an alliance with African political organizations, especially the ANC and black trade unions. Their entry into the political field transformed the ANC’s relationship with the Indian Congress—and the ANC’s position on the status of Indians in South Africa—into a matter of national and international political significance. The election of the Nationalist Party in 1948, which slandered Indians as “alien” and considered their expulsion, further underscored the urgency of a common front.
This series of rapid developments intersected a parallel set of discussions. In the early 1940s, the founding of the Cape Town–based Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) forced a debate over the relationship between the existing African, Indian, and Coloured political organizations. In response to the NEUM’s proposals for “unity,” Xuma (who was supported by the Communist Party) advocated a more limited conception of cooperation between racially defined parties. In turn, ANC Youth League intellectuals, particularly Lembede, rejected all but the most limited collaboration with Indians, arguing that “they” were “foreign exploiters” who sought to manipulate Africans for their own ends. Acutely sensitive to popular resentments, the Natal ANC leadership echoed Lembede’s position and argued that the strained relationship between the two groups rendered an alliance impracticable. The ensuing controversy raised fundamental questions about the nature of the struggle. Did the separate political parties imply that non-European groups were distinct nations and therefore possessed unique claims to group representation within a democratic state? What was the relationship between party structure and the political subject of the liberation struggle? Did national boundaries correspond with the “common sense” racial categories of South African society, or were the ideas of race and nation irreconcilable in principle? After 1948, the significance of these questions was underscored by the fact that the apartheid regime legitimated its segregationist ambitions on the basis of an ethno-nationalist appeal to white self-determination. The Afrikaner Nationalist rhetoric of “separation” saturated the discursive space of politics and provoked competing (and sometimes conflicting) rejoinders of South African unity. In this context, the Indian became the focal point for a reconsideration of the idea of nation. Were Indians foreigners, immigrants, or South Africans—and, if they were South African, what was the basis for their inclusion within this entity? In translating diaspora into the categories of the nation-state, these responses invoked different criteria of nationhood (racial, cultural, political, and legal-juridical) and generated competing visions of political community.
The second section focuses on two events that interrupted these debates and challenged the majoritarian basis of anticolonial nationalism: the Partition of India and Pakistan and the 1949 Durban Riots. Partition severely damaged the credibility of the Indian National Congress, especially Nehru, and prompted some African intellectuals to begin reflecting on the dangers of the claim to popular sovereignty based on majority rule. Situated across the newsprint page from the postwar refugee crisis in Europe, the creation of Israel, and the victory of the National Party, Partition was as much a global moment as a singular event: it revealed the dangers inherent to the demand for national self-determination within multiracial or multinational territories. Less than a year after Gandhi’s murder in the midst of ongoing communal violence, Partition was followed by another rupture: the 1949 Durban Riots. Prompted by a clash between a shopkeeper and boy in Durban’s Grey Street area, a melee among Indian and African men escalated into two