included the dashing Communist and proudly Muslim physician Yusuf Dadoo, the avowed Gandhian “Monty” Naicker, the trade union stalwart and socialist H. A. Naidoo, the courageous medical student Zainab Asvat, and the intellectual firebrand Fatima Meer, among many others. Some of these activists possessed childhood memories of Gandhi’s campaigns or grew up listening to their parents’ stories about the Mahatma. Nevertheless, they appropriated and reworked his legacy for a politics inspired by Nehru, the Indian independence struggle, and (in some cases) the party. Under Nehru’s influence and the pressure of events, this group drew the far-reaching conclusion that the struggle of South African Indians could only succeed as part of a broad alliance led by the ANC. This stance required surmounting the fears, racial prejudices, and structural insecurity of their immediate families and broader communities. Especially after the 1949 Durban Riots, they faced significant opposition from other organizations as well as many working-class and poorer Indians.71 Although they are not the focus of this book, the Radicals appear frequently in its pages. They played an irreplaceable part in the developments that it charts.
POSTCOLONIAL INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
As a history of ideas and intellectuals, Internal Frontiers contributes to the broader project of decolonizing and globalizing political theory. Its main goal is to explore new modes of thought that emerged from the struggle against colonialism and apartheid. In this respect, this book is part of a growing literature of postcolonial intellectual history that has begun to elaborate the implications of Third World nationalism and decolonization—central experiences of the twentieth century by any account—for our understandings of foundational philosophical concepts such as sovereignty, nation, citizenship, ethics, civil society, and alterity. Drawing on the pioneering efforts of Edward Said and Sylvia Wynter (among others), this scholarship insists that the long, many-faceted battle to assert the dignity and equality of the “darker nations”—the majority of the human race—could not fail to transform our understanding of the political in far-reaching ways.72 At the same time, Internal Frontiers adopts a different approach from some recent studies of intellectuals such as Gandhi, Fanon, and B. R. Ambedkar. Grounded in a close reading of texts, these accounts reconstruct the normative arguments of anticolonial figures to demonstrate that they were not only political actors, but important thinkers in their own right. As Hamid Dabashi argues in a key programmatic statement, a powerful set of discourses continues to deny the existence of meaningful philosophical production beyond the West. The “non-European” remains the perpetual object of historical, biographical, or ethnographic analysis—never the universal subject of a truly revolutionary mode of thought.73 While postcolonial intellectual history challenges this positioning in significant fashions, it frequently replicates the mode of “high theory” that remains dominant within the Euro-American university. By reducing intellectual production to a written corpus, the historian can distill a series of arguments that mimic the form of Western political philosophy: disembodied, textually based, and universalizing. At its worse, intellectual history adopts a practice of cultural brokering. After rendering the anticolonial intellectual a “theorist,” the historian then validates the figure’s standing (and by implication his or her own) through a critical dialogue with pillars of the Western canon, whether John Locke or Michel Foucault.74
Individual thinkers populate this book. Nevertheless, Internal Frontiers returns to the grounds of their thinking: their families and others that they loved; their circles of collaborators; the branches and committees of their political organizations; the cities where they lived, traveled, and worked; the structures of race, class, and gender that generated the social field of their everyday experiences; and the institutional and ideological frameworks of white supremacy that they fought. The purpose of this reconstruction is not the saturation of thought with biographical or empirical context. Far more than is often realized, intellectuals such as Lembede and Luthuli drew on Western political theory to articulate universalizing claims even as they critiqued the form of abstract reason that characterized secular politics. Rather, this attentiveness to personal and social terrains reflects the fact that the work of thinking always remains open to and interwoven with its outside.75 At another level, this approach attends to the specific character of philosophical practice that developed within the antiapartheid struggle of the 1950s. The intellectual and aesthetic labors of African thinkers—and a central argument of this book is that these modes are indissociably linked—were instruments for sustaining a resistance movement and building a new form of national community. This living community, rather than a master text or a new articulation of universalism, was the true medium of African nationalist thought.76
The most important space for the elaboration of this project was the commercial African press of the 1950s. These publications, written in English and African languages, play a central part in this book. They are both significant protagonists and the stage on which much of the drama takes place.77 As Ntongela Masilela observes: “The real intellectual history of South Africa is predominantly traceable through newspapers.”78 Although the ANC lacked a national paper during this period, three major African publications—Bantu World, Ilanga lase Natal, and Inkundla ya Bantu—were edited by influential members of the ANC. Two of these editors were members of the Natal ANC Youth League: Ngubane ran Inkundla and H. I. E. Dhlomo oversaw Ilanga with his brother Ralph.79 If editorial lines generally followed their personal convictions, these individuals were proud professional newsmen and opened their pages to articles about (and by) the major factions in black politics. The press not only provided a forum for intellectual debates, it allowed grassroots followers of the ANC, Unity Movement, the Communist Party, and Indian Congress to evaluate and publically respond to the policies of their own and other organizations. This openness also reflected a particular understanding of the newspaper’s function. In the absence of institutions controlled by black South Africans, newspapers served as something like makeshift governments: they stood in for missing schools, national representative institutions, even health departments.80 As this book argues, the ANC became increasingly media conscious during the 1952 Defiance Campaign and its depiction by the black press—especially the legendary lifestyle magazine Drum—contributed to the development of a new aesthetic of political struggle that celebrated the cosmopolitanism of urban South Africa, especially Johannesburg. Once intellectuals such as H. I. E. Dhlomo and Luthuli became aware of local reworkings of this aesthetic, they drew a significant conclusion: a shared symbolism could help unite an otherwise heterogeneous people if it created space for different groups to write themselves into an unfolding national narrative.
AFRICAN NATIONALISM AND NONRACIALISM
Internal Frontiers reconstructs the debates over two questions—the place of the Indian diaspora in South Africa and the postwar reconfiguration of African nationalism—and describes when their intersection became central to the development of the ANC. This book is therefore neither a linear narrative of the liberation struggle nor a comprehensive treatment of the diverse (and very different) contributions of Indian South Africans. Occasionally, canonical people and events are passed over lightly. “Minor” figures sometimes take center stage. Through telling the story of how the “Indian question” became central to the organizational structure of antiapartheid politics and the broader culture of resistance, Internal Frontiers argues that the problem of the also-colonized other drove the ANC’s formulation of an inclusive, African nationalism. This understanding of nation, articulated by Luthuli on his election to the ANC presidency in 1952, became a major intellectual current within the organization and, perhaps as importantly, reinforced the emergence of a political culture organized around a powerful symbolic politics, which I call “symbolic constitutionalism.” Based on participation “from below” and affective communities nurtured in struggle, this culture generated a new aesthetic of nationhood: the struggle itself provided the image of a multiracial African nation that affirmed the claims of each group to belonging. In direct opposition to apartheid’s discourse of “separateness” and its fantasy of coherent racial subjects, this imagery located heterogeneity, entanglement, and an asymmetrical form of reciprocity at the center of a shared identity. Luthuli and his co-thinkers, the Natal Group, developed their interpretation of African nationalism through
