Internal Frontiers. Jon Soske

Indian Congress under a younger, more dynamic leadership, their launch of a campaign of passive resistance against the Asiatic Land Tenure Act in 1946, and the first censure of South Africa’s treatment of Indians by the UN later the same year. Occurring in break-neck succession, these events had an enormous influence on the thinking of African intellectuals, especially a new generation of activists associated with the ANC Youth League. At the same time, the ANC was divided over the proper response. The emergence of a new left-wing party based in the Cape, the Non-European Unity Movement, posed a direct challenge to the older organization and forced it to clarify its position on a series of questions, most significantly cooperation with other non-European groups. At the same time, the new leadership of the Indian Congress, the Radicals, pursued a closer working relationship with the ANC. The ensuing debate over cooperation versus unity between the ANC and other groups revived an older discussion about the place of the Indian in Africa and contributed to a broader reflection on the racial basis of African nationalism. In effect, it raised the question of the nation’s internal and external boundaries.

      After the Indian government invited ANC president Dr. A. B. Xuma to travel to the UN, it became evident to the ANC leadership that their relationship with the Indian Congress (and their attitude toward Indians) was a matter with international ramifications. On 9 March 1947, the presidents of the ANC, Transvaal Indian Congress, and Natal Indian Congress—Xuma, Dr. Yusuf Dadoo, and Dr. Monty Naicker—released a statement of common interests following a meeting in Johannesburg. The Doctors’ Pact, as it came to be known, announced that “a Joint Declaration of co-operation is imperative for the working out of a practical basis of co-operation between the National Organizations of the non-European peoples.”² An important breakthrough, the pact reflected the competition between political organizations (especially the Unity Movement, the ANC, and the Communist Party) and the rivalry between different factions within the ANC itself. Shortly after it was signed, the Natal ANC leadership refused to implement it.

      These rapid changes occurred against the background of two transformative events: the establishment of the UN in October 1945 and the 1947 independence of India and Pakistan. Far reaching in their geopolitical implications, these developments were also philosophical ruptures in the form that Susan Buck-Morrs attributes to the Haitian Revolution of the late eighteenth century.³ By creating a new global context for anticolonial politics (and the discourse of politics in general), they generated an intellectual space for the reconceptualization of “universal history”: the extension of the Enlightenment project of modernity beyond the limiting boundary of colonial racism.⁴ Although dominated by Anglo-American interests (as reflected by South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts’ role in drafting the preamble to its charter), the UN suggested the possibility of a world after empire for many African thinkers.⁵ Conceptualized in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide of Europeans Jews, this new order presupposed two founding principles: the sovereign nation-state and the international legal framework of universal human rights. In asserting the capacity of a heterogeneous people for democracy, Indian independence represented a realization of this vision which, simultaneously, challenged the normative Western ideal of the homogenous nation. Although the partition of Indian and Pakistan underscored the limitations of this achievement, India nevertheless provided African nationalists with a new model for thinking about sovereignty and nationhood.

      This chapter begins by surveying the early history of the ANC, its attitudes toward the Indian diaspora, and its complex relationship with empire and colonial liberalism. It then focusses on two individuals, Lembede and Xuma, who sought to reorient the ANC in the 1940s and—in very different ways—articulated a vision of African nationalism beyond the framework of liberal empire and settler civil society. After discussing the impact of the 1946 Passive Resistance Campaign on the ANC, this chapter reconstructs the debate regarding “non-European unity” and the fallout over the Doctors’ Pact. In the process, it introduces individuals and organizations that will play important roles in the remainder of the book, including the Indian Congress Radicals, the Unity Movement, the Communist Party, Lembede’s co-thinker Mda, the Natal ANC president Champion, H. Selby Msimang, and (most importantly) Ngubane and H. I. E. Dhlomo. If the postwar moment created a new problem space for African nationalism, the question of the also-colonized other interrupted this opening and forced a reflection on the internal frontier of the nationalist project.

      THE EARLY ANC, EMPIRE, AND THE NATIVE QUESTION

      From its founding on 8 January 1912, the ANC’s vision of the future was characterized by a fundamental tension between an inclusive idea of a civilized South Africa and the belief in African unity.⁶ At the level of political strategy, the early ANC sought to secure the access of literate, property-owning African men to the rights of citizenship promised (or so they believed) by the British Empire. Explicitly rejecting the settler discourse of a “white South Africa,” ANC leaders fought for a common society based on a number of grounds, including British imperial citizenship, Christianity, a shared concept of civilization, and the contributions of African labor to building the country.⁷ Although imperial citizenship did not suggest social integration (and it certainly did not entail the assimilation of racial groups), it implied a political identity based on Western civilization and democratic institutions: white and black would share South Africa together. At the same time, the formation of the ANC reflected the conviction that only independent African activity could secure this outcome. Following the 1910 Union of South Africa, the government’s tabling of the 1912 Native Lands Act promised the dramatic curtailment of African rights. Little remained of the liberal pretense of African progress under white tutelage. Rejecting the framework of trusteeship, the founders of the ANC concluded that only African unity could secure their people’s access to civilization and modernity.⁸ African nationalism and the embrace of a broader South African identity were thus interdependent, rather than distinct, strands of thought within the early ANC: a national organization was the necessary instrument for achieving a democratic South Africa. This vision was possible because the horizon of early African nationalist thinking was not a South African nation-state, but the multiracial British empire that incorporated numerous nations and peoples in complex political and legal-juridical configurations.⁹ The early ANC aspired to a radical renegotiation of the relationship between black and white within the context of liberal empire.¹⁰

      During first half of the twentieth century, the most widely accepted framework for describing this relationship was the “Native Question.”¹¹ Articulated in nineteenth-century debates over the responsibilities of empire, the Native Question cohered into an administrative paradigm during the 1920s. Premesh Lalu 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.”¹² In other words, the Native Question defined the problem of colonial governance as the disciplining and management of populations no longer located in the idealized realm of African tradition, but not yet fully incorporated as modern subjects within liberal capitalism. In this paradigm, the Native occupied a (perpetually) liminal space: colonial modernity had disrupted or destroyed precolonial African societies without fully assimilating Africans into the political, economic, and cultural institutions of Western civilization.¹³ Because Africans allegedly lacked the discipline formed by participation within settler civil society, they had not yet developed democratic capacity; that is, the ability to rationally and responsibly exercise the rights of citizenship. The cornerstone of this discourse was the identification of historical progress—the assumed form of a people’s participation within universal history—with the development and spread of Western civilization.¹⁴

      Early leaders of the ANC rejected the Native Question’s means of bringing Africans into modernity—the settler population’s commitment to white supremacy vitiated the framework of trusteeship—while generally accepting the larger vision that associated progress and historicity with Western civilization. At its founding, the ANC consisted of a relatively elite and entirely male group of intellectuals, professionals, and chiefs. Its activities focused on appeals and delegations to the South African and British governments. ANC leaders argued that racial citizenship violated the universality of the law and therefore threatened to undermine empire’s foundation on the principle of justice.