AFRICAN NATIONALISM AND UNCANNY INDIA
Internal Frontiers examines the intellectual history of the South African liberation struggle from the founding of the ANC Youth League in 1944 to the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre through three distinct (and sometimes converging) lenses. First, it explores the ways that Indian anticolonial nationalism and the events surrounding Indian independence, including the partition of India and Pakistan, helped shape the political thinking of African intellectuals, especially their imagination of sovereignty. If the Indian National Congress and the Quit India Movement of the 1940s provided a new generation of African intellectuals with an important reference point for conceptualizing their own struggle, Partition illuminated the dangers inherent to the assertion of self-rule, including the schismatic and oppressive potentials of majoritarian nationalism. The considerable influence of India, however, was both mediated through and complicated by the sizable population of Indians in South Africa. This is the second lens employed by this book. It follows the debate that emerged among African intellectuals (including, it should be underlined, South African Indians) in the mid-1940s over the role of Indians within the liberation struggle and, ultimately, their place within South Africa. Initially posed in terms of the relationship between the ANC and Indian political organizations, this discussion evolved into a wide-ranging reconsideration of the struggle’s ideological foundations and framed the ANC’s ambitious attempt to rethink the concept of nation in the 1950s. Though these two discussions—one over India as a model and the other over Indians as a group—sometimes ran in parallel, at other times they intersected in complex ways, raising questions about both the internal and external boundaries of the nationalist political project. At crucial points, they were also interrupted and reconfigured by interventions from “below.” The third lens of this book focuses on vernacular discourses of race, including a powerful current of anti-Indian populism among many Africans, which consolidated in Durban as migration reconfigured urban space from the 1930s. While new racial dynamics generated a sense of African-Indian antagonism on an unprecedented scale, they also coexisted with the intimacies and anonymous solidarities of urban life. Multiple relationships, in ways that were both highly visible and unremarkable in their ordinariness, crosshatched the hardening divide. In confronting this fractured and contentious landscape, African intellectuals navigated and later theorized the existence of a profound division between the colonized that, as they knew well from their own life experiences, failed to exhaust the complexities of identity in Natal.
By exploring the interplay between these three lenses, Internal Frontiers argues that India and the Indian diaspora were decisive questions—and at certain moments the decisive question—during the crucial period when the ANC first emerged as a mass political organization and fully developed its conception of African nationalism. Since its foundation in 1912, the ANC (then called the South African Native National Congress) had countered the settler dystopia of a white South Africa with the demand for inclusive citizenship based on individual capacity (a qualified franchise and “equal rights for all civilized men”). By the mid-1940s, a series of factors—increased African militancy, the publication of the Atlantic Charter, and the closing of wartime prospects for reform—led a new generation of intellectuals, including figures as different as Dr. A. B. Xuma and Anton Lembede, to demand universal citizenship rights based on African nationalism. In the wide-ranging debate that emerged over the nature of this nationalism (it involved not only intellectuals within the ANC, but liberals, Communist Party members, and the heterodox Marxist Non-European Unity Movement), India provided a reference point for all sides. For South African observers as well as many others around the world, the decolonization of India and Pakistan announced the transition from empire to the sovereign nation-state as the foundation of the global system. When Xuma argued for transforming the ANC into a mass movement in the early 1940s, he invoked the Indian National Congress in much the same way that Youth League members, including Mandela and Tambo, would list the actions of Gandhi and Nehru when arguing against Xuma’s cautious approach at the end of the decade. While Lembede quoted Nehru in his celebration of nationalism as the spiritual expression of racial genius, his fellow ANC Youth League activist H. I. E. Dhlomo stressed India’s importance in terms of the postwar system of nation-states and the human rights framework of the United Nations. Marxists of various stripes cited India as an example of a successful alliance between Communists and the forces of anticolonial nationalism as well as a betrayal of the revolution by political elites tied to the Indian bourgeoisie.
Across these competing appropriations, the figure of India served a common purpose: it authorized a claim of self-determination in the present. The ANC’s earlier leadership had, with brief exceptions, envisioned the gradual incorporation of Africans into colonial society under the leadership of the black middle class. By and large, they accepted that democracy presupposed a common social existence (“Western civilization”) based on property ownership, education, the nuclear family (including its heteronormative vision of gender relations), Christianity, and the rule of law.7 Intellectuals within the ANC did not, of course, reproduce this framework passively. At various points, they challenged one or more of the precepts of civilization and critiqued their underlying racial assumptions. They asserted Pan-African origins for the universal values that Europe claimed to exemplify.8 They struggled to build independent black institutions—the African press, schools like John Dube’s Ohlange Institute, and the ANC itself—that would provide the basis for a self-consciously modern political life outside of white control.9 They championed the cause of African workers in order to extend the reach and criteria for participation in civil society.10 And, as Robert Vinson argues, many black South Africans looked to African Americans as both examples and allies in the “regeneration” of Africa: an alternative path to modernity that would bypass colonial trusteeship.11
The Indian independence struggle, in contrast, did not symbolize a desired future. It instantiated democratic self-government in a diverse, polyglot, and religiously divided country whose leadership, moreover, asserted continuity with two ancient civilizations, Hinduism and Islam. A world historic event, it had philosophical as well as political ramifications. Indian independence not only challenged the fact of foreign rule, it negated a common assumption of colonial ideology and important strands of liberal political theory: that a developed political economy, experience in modern institutions, and common loyalty to a shared identity—in other words, the normative attributes of ‘nation’ in liberal thought—were the necessary foundations of a sovereign and democratic state.12 Transported and translated into South African intellectual life, India provided African intellectuals with a vehicle to begin to think (both empirically and theoretically) about possible foundations of nationhood beyond empire and settler civil society. This transformed temporality of politics—conveyed most powerfully by Lembede’s slogan “freedom in our lifetime”—created a new conceptual “problem space.”13 In claiming sovereignty on behalf of a subaltern and socially heterogeneous people, the 1940s generation of nationalists inaugurated a new intellectual horizon within which African thinkers would reimagine the grounds and meaning of nation.
THE INTERNAL FRONTIER OF THE NATION-STATE
If Indian independence suggested a new model for the thinking of nation, the Indian diaspora interrupted a central precept of this worldview: the envisioning of nation—to subvert Benedict Anderson’s famous phrase—in homogenous, empty space.14 The postwar map may have been composed of “liberated sovereignties,” emerging states that would ostensibly realize and guard the promise of universal human rights, but this map was far from empty.15 It was transversed by older geographies of empire, capitalism, and the oceanic worlds created by the movement of people, cultures, and ideas.16 These dense histories posed a fundamental problem for the new nationalisms. When anticolonial intellectuals conceptualized the people as sovereign over a territory, they confronted the question of translating these alternate geographies into the imaginary of the nation-state. The “other than national” had to be rendered internal (and therefore governable by an entity with territorial jurisdiction) or foreign—a more ambiguous and exceptional status. The Indian diaspora resisted both determinations. A deterritorialized and geographically dispersed entity, diaspora served as an internal frontier of the imagined political community, a site