[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Native Club's revo roots

[Patrick Bond]

www.sundaytimes.co.za

The Native Club and the national democratic project

Now that political power has been achieved, we cannot afford to 
marginalise the realm of ideas in the process of transformation, writes 
Eddy Maloka.

The current debate on the Native Club speaks directly to the question of 
the role of intellectuals in South Africa, an issue already raised in 
the pages of Umrabulo particularly by Jeremy Cronin and Mandla Nkomfe 
(See Umrabulo 25).

Yet, the Native Club is simply a movement, or rather a network, of a 
section of our country's intelligentsia which is 'gatvol' with the 
dominance that whites continue to enjoy in our knowledge production sector.

Three revolutionary intellectual traditions

The intelligentsia has historically played a role throughout the world, 
not only in the generation of ideas, but also in the many struggles 
against inequality, exploitation and oppression. In the African context, 
the nationalist project has dominated the preoccupation of the 
continent's intelligentsia, especially with respect to issues around 
colonialism, the right to self-determination, anti-imperialism and 
combating racism. Over the years, these issues came to coalesce around 
Pan-Africanism, which is simultaneously a movement for the liberation of 
the African continent and an intellectual project aimed at contesting 
the ideological hegemony of the West.

The Pan-African project evolved in the context of the anti-colonial 
struggles, and came to entail four elements: a sense among Africans on 
the continent and those in the Diaspora of themselves as 'one' people 
because of common historical experience and destiny; the quest for the 
'regeneration', 'awakening' or 'renaissance' of Africa on the social, 
cultural and economic fronts as well as in global affairs; the 'dream' 
of an Africa united in the social, cultural, economic and political 
spheres; and the spirit of solidarity among people of African descent.

The South African intelligentsia, like its counterparts in the world and 
the rest of Africa, could not escape the effects of the anti-colonial 
struggle.

For most of the white intelligentsia, colonialism was a project to 
rationalise and defend. The few who broke ranks fell into three categories.

The majority of the latter resorted to the liberal interpretation of the 
South African question; they reified 'race' at the expense of 'class', 
and regarded the oppressed as objects of pity. To them, identifying with 
the struggle of the oppressed was as exotic as visiting a stone-age 
community in the middle of some jungle. Nonetheless, the liberals 
dominated 'left' thinking among the whites, and their influence 
continues to this day.

In the second category were a comparatively smaller group of white 
intellectual cadres who made a genuine leap to join the ranks of the 
struggle of the oppressed. An even smaller group, in the third category, 
refused to join either the oppressed or the liberals. These 'legal' 
Marxists accused the liberals of failing to understand 'class', and 
dismissed the liberation movement as a 'petty bourgeois' project; they 
searched for 'class' purity and 'perfect' revolutions in lecture halls 
and libraries. This tendency has dwindled in influence, especially in 
the aftermath of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of 
apartheid. In fact, some of the former 'legal' Marxists are today 
over-zealous champions of the racist campaign against affirmative action.

The black South African intelligentsia, by contrast, has generally been 
influenced by three revolutionary intellectual traditions. Since the 
early years, the liberation movement in South Africa never lost sight of 
similar struggles taking place on the continent and elsewhere in the 
world. In this context, the influence of Pan-Africanism reached our 
shores. Some of our compatriots, like Pixley ka Seme, Sol Plaatje and 
Albert Luthuli, also contributed to the development of Pan-African 
thought. To this day, various tendencies of Pan-African thought dominate 
the ideological orientation of the liberation movement and the outlook 
of post-apartheid South Africa. Some of the ideas currently on the table 
which are traceable to this intellectual tradition include our 
determination to regain and assert the independence of our country and 
continent, building strong linkages with the African Diaspora, 
reaffirming and asserting African culture, challenging Western notions 
of Africa, and working hard to position Africa as a force in the global 
arena.

Marxism is another intellectual tradition whose influence on the black 
intelligentsia continues to this day, thanks to the role particularly of 
the South African Communist Party. The early Black Consciousness (BC) 
Movement, building on the heritage of Negritude and the influence of 
Frantz Fanon and the Black Power struggles in the United States, has 
also made its contribution in directing the outlook of our country's 
black intelligentsia.

The three revolutionary intellectual traditions are, indeed, 
complementary, to the extent that they could even be synthesised into a 
single body of thought. For example, Marxism, by extracting 'class' out 
of the complex of racial colonial domination and adding an 
internationalist dimension to the anti-colonial struggle, helped deepen 
and enrich the understanding in the liberation movement of the national 
democratic project. And, thanks to the BC influence, very few in our 
ranks will dispute the importance of reaffirming and asserting black 
identity. Whereas the emphasis of BC is on psychological liberation, the 
primary focus of Pan-Africanism and Marxism is on resolving national 
oppression and class exploitation, respectively.

To a large extent, the debate among the black intelligentsia has mainly 
revolved, on the one hand, around the definition of and the relative 
weight that one attaches to dialectically linked categories such as 
'race', 'class', 'culture' and 'nation', and, on the other, around the 
political definition and socio-economic content of post-apartheid South 
Africa. There is in our country a genre of intellectual thought whose 
components are elements of the three traditions.

The liberation movement has had to depend for decades on its own 
intelligentsia, not least because pillars of knowledge production in the 
country were in the hands of whites. Even the black intellectuals who 
were based at institutions which were controlled by whites had to draw 
inspiration from the three traditions and from the actual experience of 
struggle. The theories of the liberation struggle which informed the 
approach of the various organs of the liberation movement were the 
product of the thinking within the ranks of the movement itself; they 
were not developed by some intellectual sitting somewhere high, up 
there, in some ivory tower. To be sure, most in the knowledge sector 
establishment were hostile to the liberation movement; liberals thought 
our struggle was too violent while 'legal' Marxists doubted whether we 
were radical enough. To this day, the cadreship of the movement is 
trained not by some academic, no matter how well read the person may be, 
but by those well schooled in the theories and praxis of our struggle.

The members of the Native Club are influenced predominately by the three 
revolutionary intellectual traditions, with the battle-cry being to 
address the legacy of apartheid in the knowledge production sector. The 
liberation movement, as argued already, came to power with its own body 
of knowledge and an engaged intelligentsia, but since 1994 there has 
been a significant retreat on these two fronts. This has largely been 
because many of those who in the past were dedicated to the generation 
of ideas for the struggle have now been absorbed into new 
responsibilities. The private sector is also playing its part, paying 
the highest price for the best brains in the country. In the private 
sector innovation is subordinated to the logic of capital accumulation.

The terrain of ideas should not be left uncontested, lest our school 
children are condemned to singing, under the banner of the flag of our 
new South Africa, praise songs for Christopher Columbus for having 
'discovered' the world. Our ancestors, in their resistance against 
colonial intruders, never lost sight of the importance of ideas, some 
even sending their children and trusted cadres to missionary schools to 
learn the 'secrets of the white man'. During our struggle the realm of 
ideas always stood vigilant behind the barrel of the gun. Why then, when 
we have political power, do we marginalise ideas as a priority sector 
for transformation?

Eddy Maloka is the President of the African Association of Political 
Science (AAPS)