as well as a political subject represented by a party.
11.It is important to note that Fanon insists here on a subjective political orientation, namely ‘revolutionary principles’, yet the problems in sustaining such principles within a context of state politics are not thought through. A similar problem is encountered in Cabral’s notion of the ‘class suicide’ of the petty bourgeoisie, as the subjective excess over class interest is not theorised in his work, as we shall see below.
12.Similarly, the popular pan-African affirmation of the National Liberation Struggle mode of politics is gradually replaced by a reactive subjectivity of official pan-Africanism viewed as a mere agglomeration of states.
13.One attempt to warn against ignoring politically the national question has been outlined by Mamdani (2008b) with reference to Zimbabwe and gave rise to an extensive debate. Although Mamdani’s warning that ignoring national grievances over land made possible the opportunism and authoritarianism of Mugabe’s nationalism in Zimbabwe, since addressing this issue resonated among significant numbers of people, is fundamentally a correct one, critics largely chose to respond by emphasising the appalling human rights record of the regime. Unfortunately, Mamdani himself remains at the level of thinking a state form of nationalism exclusively, while the majority of his critics ignore the relevance of the national question in favour of liberal notions of rights. As a result, the current form of the national question in Africa still remains unaddressed, especially from the position of the majority of people. See Jacobs and Mundy (2009).
14.‘... we must not waste time repeating that hunger with dignity is preferable to bread in slavery’ (Fanon, 1990: 167, translation altered).
15.For a recent assessment of Cabral’s thought, see Manji and Fletcher (2013).
16.The dates of this sequence can obviously be debated. At the level of the Third World as a whole, the mode probably began as early as 1910 with the publication of Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1958), which was a systematic critique of colonial values accepted uncritically by the Indian middle class. See Hardiman (2003: 66–93). The following very important remark, which illustrates the emancipatory character of Gandhi’s thought, is taken from this text (p. 72): ‘to believe that what has not occurred in history will not occur at all is to argue disbelief in the dignity of man’.
17.Although, again, its origins can be stretched as far back as the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, as we saw in chapter 1.
18.See Fanon (1989: ch. 1) on the struggle of Algerian women.
19.The fact that in the same paragraph Cabral refers positively to this formulation as being in tune with the thinking of Fidel Castro indicates the extent to which such an apolitical notion of individual ‘morality’ was dominant in the NLS mode worldwide. Elsewhere, Cabral insists that ‘a reconversion of minds – of mental set – is thus indispensable to the true integration of people into the liberation movement. Such reconversion – re-Africanization, in our case – may take place before the struggle, but it is completed only during the course of the struggle, through daily contact with the popular masses in the communion of sacrifice required by the struggle’ (1973: 45). It is impossible to ascribe these intentions to a collective political subject, of course, as they are only attributable to individuals. Whatever the case may be, morality or individual commitment, the problem remains that, while he had understood the necessity for an excess over class interest in emancipatory politics, that political excess still remained untheorised by Cabral.
20.Lenin’s influence on Cabral’s thought of politics is apparent here. Given that Leninism was so central to the NLS mode and thus to the broader thought of emancipation in Africa in the 20th century, I will return to it in detail in chapter 7.
Chapter 5
The People’s Power mode of politics in South Africa, 1984–1986
The people shall govern!
– The Freedom Charter, 1955
The people have formed these area committees, so that they can try to control themselves.
– An activist from the Eastern Cape, Isizwe, March 1986
RETHINKING THE SOUTH AFRICAN LIBERATION STRUGGLE
Having shown at some length the features of the National Liberation Struggle (NLS) mode of politics, I now wish to assess how it was transcended in South Africa in the 1980s. I will outline the new popularly based subjectivities which saw the light of day in that decade and will argue that the period 1984–6 witnessed an event (in Badiou’s sense of the term) in South Africa. This event gave birth to a new mode of politics for the 21st century in Africa, which can be called the People’s Power mode of politics, one that was revived in 2011 in North Africa. I will suggest that the People’s Power mode in South Africa inaugurated a frankly new way of thinking emancipatory politics for the 21st century, which has attempted to overcome some of the limitations of the NLS mode on the continent.
Throughout this chapter, the struggle for liberation in South Africa is considered within an African context, as illustrative of and not exceptional to an African experience, for it also occurred, although to a more limited extent, in Nigeria, Congo-Zaire and elsewhere and ultimately resulted in the formation of liberal-democratic state systems in most of the continent. This form of state became both the norm and a condition for the spread of neo-liberal capitalism in Africa. South Africa is, after all, probably the most consistently politically neo-liberal of African countries, at least in the eyes of empire, which regularly sets it up (along with Botswana and Mauritius) as a model for the continent. What was optimistically named the ‘second independence’ of the continent was not born exclusively of the neo-colonial imposition of neo-liberal economic policies; it was also, and primarily in South Africa, the result of mass popular movements which, for a while at least, challenged the dominance of capitalist hegemony and its attendant state modes of rule. Given that this period is occluded today, it is imperative to provide an assessment of it, especially as it produced a number of political innovations of universal significance.
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