Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-07T06:26:15.894Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 9 - The National Question confronts the Ethnic Question

from PART TWO - CONTINUITY AND RUPTURE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 April 2018

Get access

Summary

DISTURBING THE NATIONAL QUESTION

The National Question has predominantly been interpreted in the South African context as conceptualising the route to empowering an oppressed racialised majority. In this sense it has already been answered, it would seem, through the creation of a non-racial democracy based on shared citizenship. Black (as referring to a black African nation) majority rule was achieved with the overwhelming victory of the African National Congress (ANC) in April 1994. The consequence is that both ‘[c]lass and race mattered but, politically, race mattered more’ (Friedman, 2015: 146). Ironically, this liberal argument may also describe the approach of some South African Marxist theorists, including those of the South African Communist Party (SACP). As a first stage towards the overthrow of capitalism, it seems certain from present conditions that the revolution has been postponed until power is transferred to another political imagination.

Such postponement may well be the reason why the National Question continues to be asked, alongside the (always) incomplete National Democratic Revolution (NDR), despite all achievements towards and since the overthrow of apartheid.

However, my position is that it was never the right question to begin with, not in this recent (since 1910) nation state. The National Question relied on an assumed hegemonic and homogenising shared experience of racial domination among all black Africans. Steven Friedman writes about an anonymous article (revealed to be by Raymond Suttner, Jeremy Cronin and David Rabkin, all political prisoners at the time) in Africa Perspective (Anonymous, 1983):

… the authors argued that … the new Marxism [of the 1970s] did not understand how the ‘actual experience’ of black people under apartheid laid the basis for unity ‘under the banner of African nationalism’. It [the new Marxism] ignored ‘the National Question’: Marxism had long known that national territory, language or culture could unite people across class lines (Friedman, 2015: 154).

The contradictions were effectively ‘transcended’ within the ‘question’ as framed (Anonymous, 1983: 90), but continue to leave extreme traces of conflict unattended, postponed and even denied, as had been the case during years of struggle against apartheid.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Unresolved National Question in South Africa
Left Thought Under Apartheid
, pp. 163 - 180
Publisher: Wits University Press
Print publication year: 2017

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×