NAMING AND PUBLIC SPEECH IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH AFRICA

“Why can't you just call yourself African Indians?” asked the then president-elect Thabo Mbeki in May 1999 at a meeting with self-styled community leaders drawn from the so-called “Indian community” in Durban. The meeting was held at a beachfront hotel a few weeks before the general elections in 1999 and Mbeki's entourage consisted of a high-powered group of ANC ministers and advisers, many of them of Indian origin. ANC leaders hoped that the meeting could provide a breakthrough among the economically important and resourceful Indians in the city, a group that largely had turned its back on the ANC since the early 1990s.

After having listened to what his advisers dismissed as “perceptions, not rooted in facts,” Mbeki lost his patience with what he saw as a privileged group of people, wanting an unambiguous public recognition in the post-apartheid order but only as Indians. Mbeki continued: “If you called yourself African Indians it would make a major difference in how you are perceived. In this way you'd say to your fellow South Africans, ‘this is my country, I am an African first, but I am also an Indian because my forefathers came here to work.’ …. What is, after all, wrong with being an African?”

Mbeki's remarks were clearly informed by the broader project of an “African Renaissance” which he has made his trademark through high-profile conferences and nebulous rhetoric.