and the experience of solidarity during the 1952 Defiance Campaign. They subsequently generalized from the relationship with the also-colonized other to an ethics of nationhood that presupposed recognition and negotiation across multiple forms of difference. In other words, they attempted to leave the internal frontier open by enfolding alterity within the conceptualization of the nation form.
Most accounts of the antiapartheid struggle during the 1950s focus on one of two developments. The first involves Mandela and the Communist Party. After recognizing the strategic importance of African nationalism, party members within the ANC and Indian Congress played a major role in championing non-European cooperation as well as the alliance between the ANC and left-wing whites organized in the Congress of Democrats.81 Perhaps the only organization in South Africa where whites and blacks could meet on equal terms, the party attracted a key group of younger African nationalists, including Walter Sisulu and Mandela, and helped break this group from an exclusionary Africanist ideology. During this same period, the party codified an understanding of the national democratic revolution that projected the overthrow of white supremacy by the African majority leading other oppressed groups and progressive whites. This position understood South Africa as composed of one nation, the African majority, and several national minority groups.82
The second event was the emergence of the Africanist opposition within the ANC and its split in 1958 to form the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC).83 Originating as a loose-knit opposition to collaboration with Indians and Communists, the Africanists became a major force in black politics and (in some areas) channeled popular disillusionment with the ANC. The leadership of the PAC, especially the brilliant Robert Mangiliso Sobukwe, believed that the revolutionary struggle of the African oppressed could create a nonracial, Pan-African identity by abolishing the system of white supremacy and replacing it with a democratic government founded on equal rights for individual citizens. This program, however, required mobilizing the explosive anger of the PAC’s grassroots supporters—a rage which often expressed itself as explicitly anti-Indian and antiwhite—in the service of a revolution that would somehow transform their collective racial consciousness.84
These stories intersect Internal Frontiers’s narrative at several turns. However, they concern people and events that were centered in the Transvaal and, when juxtaposed, frame this period in terms of the opposition between the Communist Party’s “nonracialism” and the PAC’s Africanism. In contrast, this book moves back and forth between Johannesburg and Durban and includes a wider cast of characters. Its focus is a group of African intellectuals in Natal who simultaneously remained outside of the Communist Party and opposed the strategy of the Africanists. Originating in Durban student circles during the early 1940s, this group included Lembede (the Philosopher), H. I. E. Dhlomo (the Poet), Jordan Ngubane (the News Man and Publicist), and M. B. Yengwa (the Organizer). Known among themselves as ibandla (the historical term for the council of the Zulu king’s advisiors), they were instrumental in the election of Luthuli (the Liberation Theologian) to the Natal ANC presidency in 1951.85 At some point in their careers, the writings or statements of each of these individuals reflected anti-Indian resentments and stereotypes. They also struggled against this form of racialism: in their communities, inside the ANC, and personally. In arguing for the centrality of the Natal Group to the intellectual evolution of the ANC, Internal Frontiers suggests that the most significant debates of this period occurred within the ANC between different interpretations of African nationalism.
The reassertion that the ANC was first and foremost an African nationalist organization represents a departure from another current of scholarship: the narration of the antiapartheid struggle in terms of the development of nonracialism.86 A major focus of postapartheid debates over South African identity, nonracialism is an unstable and much contested term. Dependent on the protean concept of “race,” it has been claimed for multiple agendas, including the liberal project of race-neutral laws and institutions, a radical vision of transcending race through nation building, and the Marxist program of working-class solidarity.87 An important tradition describes the ANC’s ideological evolution in terms of the development and then gradual extension of nonracialism, first through its collaboration with white organizations (most importantly the Communist Party) and later through its admission of non-African members at the 1969 Morogoro conference. In another context, I argue that this narrative is anachronistic.88 In the early 1960s, some ANC leaders, including Luthuli and Mandela, adopted the phrase “non-racial democracy” to express their support for the constitutional principles of equal protection and individual (rather than group) rights. However, it was only later—especially during the Mass Democratic Movement of the 1980s—that the idea of nonracialism became virtually synonymous with the ANC’s vision of nation.89 At the time of its banning in April 1960, the ANC possessed several competing philosophies of nationalism: the Natal Group’s ethical vision of a multiracial African nation, the Transvaal Leadership’s majoritarian nationalism based on an African-led struggle for power, the liberalism of an older generation of intellectuals such as Z. K. Mathews, the Federation of South African Women’s appeal to shared women’s experiences, as well as more racialist forms of Africanism. The postapartheid focus on the origins of nonracialism, however it is defined, not only compresses this series of complex (and largely unresolved) discussions into an evolutionary narrative, it obscures the central question debated by the ANC during the 1940s and ’50s: What understanding of the African political subject could escape the racial logic of a classic, majoritarian nationalism?
BOOK STRUCTURE AND CHAPTER SUMMARIES
This book is divided into three sections composed of two chapters each. The first section explores the ramifications of the Second World War and Indian independence on African politics at local and international levels. Accelerated by wartime industrialization, the large-scale migration of Africans to urban areas propelled growing political militancy and working-class resistance that contributed to the revitalization of organized African politics. While these developments encouraged the proliferation of popular nationalisms and millenarian aspirations throughout South Africa, Durban witnessed a distinctive pattern of urbanization: most Africans entered the city illegally and survived through an ad hoc infrastructure of housing, transport, and stores provided by (generally poor) Indians. Prejudice and local conflicts between Indians and Africans certainly preexisted these developments. However, this pattern of African migration—and the resulting organization of urban space—created the conditions for the generalization of local racial dynamics and the emergence of populist resentment against the alleged domination of “Indian over African.” In contrast to other South African cities, where African-Indian conflict generally remained confined to specific neighborhoods, anti-Indian populism developed into a powerful force on a city-wide and provincial scale. Chapter 1 explores the consolidation of this binary “African-Indian” racial discourse and the methodological problems of writing about race in contexts where a variety of social relationships either traverse or simply ignore the racial scripts that dominate popular imagination.
Coinciding with these developments, the foundation of the United Nations and Indian independence created a global context for the reimagination of South Africa after the end of empire. Chapter 2 describes how intellectuals within the ANC, represented by Xuma and Lembede, began to reorient African nationalism within the newly emerging international order. These efforts were informed, directly and indirectly, by a new generation of South African Indian activists, the Radicals, who seized control of the Indian Congress in the mid-1940s. In 1946, the Radicals launched a mass campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience. Invoking the Indian independence struggle (they carried the flag of the Indian National Congress on demonstrations), the Radicals sought to utilize India’s growing influence in world affairs to pressure the South African government. At the campaign’s height—which saw tens of thousands join protests and vigilante retaliation by racist whites—India brought a case against the Smuts government in the United Nation’s general assembly, internationalizing the debate over South Africa’s racial policies. Simultaneously, the Radicals pursued an alliance with
