THE METAPHOR

In 1900, twenty-one-year-old Raden Adjeng Kartini, who liked best to think of herself as a young wild horse, a daughter of the Javanese regent of Japara, a woman who after her death became an anointed “mother of Indonesian nationalism, ” wrote to a friend, Henri van Kol, a Dutch parliamentarian and European socialist expert on colonialism that “it would seem as though an invisible telephone cable ran from here to Lali Djiwa and back again.”Raden Adjeng Kartini, Letters of a Javanese Princess (New York: W. W. Morton, 1964), 190. By “here,” Kartini meant her father's palace on the north coast of the Netherlands East Indies' main island; Lali Djiwa was van Kol's residence in Prinsenhage in Holland. A few months earlier, Kartini had written to another friend, a Dutch feminist who worked at the city post office in Amsterdam, describing the closeness she felt between herself and her father — as if “a wire” connected their hearts.H. Bouman, Meer licht over Kartini (Amsterdam: H. J. Paris, 1954). It was the opening of a new century, and Kartini's mode of expression reflected what seemed to be a distinct mood of the time. Hers appeared to be a good case of what Søren Kierkegaard once defined as “enthusiasm of imagination,” a nostalgia for the mythical, a stepping “forth in a new form, that is, as a metaphor.”Kierkegaard's explanation of his and Hegel's view of metaphor in The Concept of Irony (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 101–3.

The scene was Chongqing, China's wartime capital; and the time was 1942, the fifth year of the Sino–Japanese War (1937–45, known in China as the War of Resistance against Japan). An anti-Japanese woodcut exhibition was held at the Sino–Soviet Cultural Association (Zhong-Su wenhua xiehui) from October 10 to 17 to rally people's support for the war. With 54 artists participating and a total of 255 pieces of work on display, this was an unprecedented event, capturing widespread attention in this inland river city at an uncertain time.Yu (1942:4). See also Li Hua (1946:38). Besides being uncommonly large, the show was unusual because it included woodcuts from the Communist-controlled territories, among them the works of Gu Yuan (1919–96) and Li Qun (1912– ).

In the political tradition of black South Africa, such ideological positions as liberalism, socialism, and nationalism are secondary to those themes emerging from the conjuncture of race and class. At the core of black political thought there are two interrelated and recurring visions of liberation: one, the image of multiracial union; the other, black republican identity.I am aware of the contentious nature of the terms multiracial and nonracial within the context of black South African political debate. Nonetheless, I have decided to use multiracial union because, in my judgment, it provides a more realistic picture of the actual appeal and vision of this strand of thought. I do not assume that either black republicans or multiracial unionists are uncommitted to the ideal of a nonracial society. While adherents to both visions espouse the ideal of a genuinely nonracial society, they disagree over the question of whether intra-racial versus inter-racial class solidarity is the means to attain this end.

Since Robert Dahl's seminal writings on democracy more than two decades ago, interest in the topic has emerged again, especially among scholars analyzing democratic transitions. Great strides have been made in revealing the uncertain nature of these transitions (O'Donnell et al. 1986; Malloy and Seligson 1987; Diamond, Linz, and Lipset 1989; Hakim and Lowenthal 1991; O'Donnell 1994), in methodologically analyzing them as contested and “crafted” rather than spontaneous (Di Palma 1990), and in documenting the class and social forces that make democratic outcomes more likely (Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992; see also Moore 1966). Despite these advances, there has been little change in our theoretical understanding of democracy. As Bruce Cumings has perceptively noted, recent studies of democratic transition have “given way to atheoretical and idiosyncratic explanations of more or less successful democratic ‘openings’” in which little time is spent elaborating “the decision rule for saying this person is hard-line or soft-line, that system is ‘liberalized autocracy’ instead of ‘limited democracy,’” or for defining democracy itself. If scholars do bring theory into their writings “through the back door of the obscure but telling footnote,” he observes, “rather than advancing their own conception of democracy, [they] uniformly define democracy by reference to Robert Dahl's Polyarchy, a classic pluralist account of the North American system” (Cumings 1989:15–17).

ONE DEMOCRACY, MANY CULTURES?

This discussion is intended to convey a way of studying, thinking and writing about socio-political transformation in Africa that avoids the pitfalls of hasty and sweeping generalization and contributes to a more balanced understanding and informed appreciation of the complex process of liberalization and democratization in Africa in the late twentieth century. This assumes an urgent need for systematic documentation based on empirical investigation involving extended field work.

THE COLONIZATION OF MADNESS

Lunatic asylums began to emerge in India towards the end of the eighteenth century. Although some critics expressed concern as to the propriety of an institutional response to mental illness, they formed a small minority. During a period when the asylum took on “a status as panacea equivalent to the steam engine, the rights of man, or the spread of universal knowledge” (Bynum et al. 1988:3), medical and public opinion had come to believe that madness could be cured and that confinement in an institution could not fail to be beneficial both for Europeans and Indians. Furthermore, Europeans in India could not usually rely on any family or parochial networks, so the East India Company had to assume responsibility and increasingly make institutional provision for these employees until they could be sent back home to Britain. The steady growth in institutional provision was also applied to lower-class Indians. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, the three small institutions in the provincial capitals of Madras, Mumbai (Bombay), and Calcutta (originally intended for the European insane and for only a small number of Indians of the better classes) were no longer considered adequate in view of the considerable expansion of British territory during that period. Consequently, the need to set up a network of public asylums to receive both “criminal” and “harmless” insane Indians in provincial centres upcountry had become pressing.

COLONIAL SUBJECTS AND INDIAN TRADITIONS

In late October 1891, the Madras MailOctober 23,1891. The Madras Mail was the largest English daily in Madras at the time. brought dramatic attention to the fact that “the barbarous and cruel custom of hookswinging to propitiate the Goddess of Rain, which has been obsolete for some time, has been revived at Sholavandan near Madura.” The newspaper describes this event with scandalized disapproval. “The manner in which this horrible custom is carried out consists in passing iron hooks through the deep muscles of the back, attaching a rope to the hooks, and (after the method of a well sweep) swinging the victim to a height several feet above the heads of the people. The car on which the pole is placed is then drawn along by large ropes in willing hands . . . Full details of this hookswinging affair are too revolting for publication.” The person swung from the hooks was selected by lot from a larger group that represented a number of the villages sponsoring the festival. Throughout the article, he (for it was always a man) was referred to as “the victim.” The newspaper explains its choice of language: “Victim he may well be called, because, though he enters upon this ordeal voluntarily, the chief reason which drives him to it is the sentiment of doing good to his village.”