its complex relationship with empire and colonial liberalism. It then focusses on two individuals, Lembede and Xuma, who sought to reorient the ANC in the 1940s and—in very different ways—articulated a vision of African nationalism beyond the framework of liberal empire and settler civil society. After discussing the impact of the 1946 Passive Resistance Campaign on the ANC, this chapter reconstructs the debate regarding “non-European unity” and the fallout over the Doctors’ Pact. In the process, it introduces individuals and organizations that will play important roles in the remainder of the book, including the Indian Congress Radicals, the Unity Movement, the Communist Party, Lembede’s co-thinker Mda, the Natal ANC president Champion, H. Selby Msimang, and (most importantly) Ngubane and H. I. E. Dhlomo. If the postwar moment created a new problem space for African nationalism, the question of the also-colonized other interrupted this opening and forced a reflection on the internal frontier of the nationalist project.
THE EARLY ANC, EMPIRE, AND THE NATIVE QUESTION
From its founding on 8 January 1912, the ANC’s vision of the future was characterized by a fundamental tension between an inclusive idea of a civilized South Africa and the belief in African unity.6 At the level of political strategy, the early ANC sought to secure the access of literate, property-owning African men to the rights of citizenship promised (or so they believed) by the British Empire. Explicitly rejecting the settler discourse of a “white South Africa,” ANC leaders fought for a common society based on a number of grounds, including British imperial citizenship, Christianity, a shared concept of civilization, and the contributions of African labor to building the country.7 Although imperial citizenship did not suggest social integration (and it certainly did not entail the assimilation of racial groups), it implied a political identity based on Western civilization and democratic institutions: white and black would share South Africa together. At the same time, the formation of the ANC reflected the conviction that only independent African activity could secure this outcome. Following the 1910 Union of South Africa, the government’s tabling of the 1912 Native Lands Act promised the dramatic curtailment of African rights. Little remained of the liberal pretense of African progress under white tutelage. Rejecting the framework of trusteeship, the founders of the ANC concluded that only African unity could secure their people’s access to civilization and modernity.8 African nationalism and the embrace of a broader South African identity were thus interdependent, rather than distinct, strands of thought within the early ANC: a national organization was the necessary instrument for achieving a democratic South Africa. This vision was possible because the horizon of early African nationalist thinking was not a South African nation-state, but the multiracial British empire that incorporated numerous nations and peoples in complex political and legal-juridical configurations.9 The early ANC aspired to a radical renegotiation of the relationship between black and white within the context of liberal empire.10
During first half of the twentieth century, the most widely accepted framework for describing this relationship was the “Native Question.”11 Articulated in nineteenth-century debates over the responsibilities of empire, the Native Question cohered into an administrative paradigm during the 1920s. Premesh Lalu explains: “Caught between a discourse on vanishing cultures and the story of progress, academic disciplines performed the role of trusteeship over the category of the native, which appeared resolutely bound to administrative decree and capitalist demand.”12 In other words, the Native Question defined the problem of colonial governance as the disciplining and management of populations no longer located in the idealized realm of African tradition, but not yet fully incorporated as modern subjects within liberal capitalism. In this paradigm, the Native occupied a (perpetually) liminal space: colonial modernity had disrupted or destroyed precolonial African societies without fully assimilating Africans into the political, economic, and cultural institutions of Western civilization.13 Because Africans allegedly lacked the discipline formed by participation within settler civil society, they had not yet developed democratic capacity; that is, the ability to rationally and responsibly exercise the rights of citizenship. The cornerstone of this discourse was the identification of historical progress—the assumed form of a people’s participation within universal history—with the development and spread of Western civilization.14
Early leaders of the ANC rejected the Native Question’s means of bringing Africans into modernity—the settler population’s commitment to white supremacy vitiated the framework of trusteeship—while generally accepting the larger vision that associated progress and historicity with Western civilization. At its founding, the ANC consisted of a relatively elite and entirely male group of intellectuals, professionals, and chiefs. Its activities focused on appeals and delegations to the South African and British governments. ANC leaders argued that racial citizenship violated the universality of the law and therefore threatened to undermine empire’s foundation on the principle of justice. At the same time, they challenged a narrow determination of democratic capacity by invoking other criteria such as universal male suffrage in England or the existence of democratic institutions within African societies.15 If a later generation of African intellectuals saw this strategy as insufficiently radical, many contemporaries understood the subversive character of the ANC’s claim: these delegations and petitions performed the African’s right to approach the Crown without intermediary. Such assertions of modern political subjectivity—“the right to have rights” in Hannah Arendt’s well-known formulation—produced full-throated outrage among white settlers.16 Nevertheless, these activities failed to arrest the implementation of racist legislation and the expropriation of African land. In 1919, the ANC leadership expelled its founding president, the Natal educationalist and newspaperman John Dube, on the grounds that he endorsed working within the framework of segregation. This schism resulted in the secession of the Natal congress from the national organization.17 After a brief period of greater militancy, the ANC stagnated during the 1920s. Both the International Commercial Union (ICU), a rural trade union movement influenced by Garveyism, and the Communist Party surpassed the organization in membership and influence. Anthony Butler concludes, “The ANC could easily have died in the 1930s.”18 When the Natal ANC reunited with the national body following Dube’s death in February 1946, the new president was a former leader of the ICU, the formidable operator Champion.
Alongside Ethiopia, Liberia, and (most importantly) the United States, references to India occurred regularly in the writings of early ANC figures. The famous opening line of Sol Plaatje’s 1916 Native Life in South Africa includes a citation, consciously or not, of untouchability: “Awakening on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African Native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.”19 Across multiple iterations, India served both as a reference point within a common imperial geography and an emblem of the global struggle against colonialism that flared following the end of the First World War. In Abantu-Batho (the ANC’s newspaper of the 1920s), the Amritsar massacre was invoked to show that “there is no moral code among nations” while India’s revolt for national recognition appeared alongside Abyssinia and the Caribbean labor revolts as a warning to empire.20 Other articles invoked Gandhi as the Indian version of Marcus Garvey.21 Attitudes toward South African Indians were, predictably, more varied. Even as writers such as Plaatje celebrated the courage of Gandhi’s 1913 campaign, anxieties regarding Indian migration were a regular theme of African newspaper articles. In Natal, broadsides against Indian exploitation were a staple of ANC articles and speeches, including in statements by individuals who praised the industry of Indians and cultivated personal alliances with Indian leaders.22 In general, a consensus existed that the different political situations of Africans and South African Indians rendered an alliance between the two groups impractical. Writing about Native policy and racial reconciliation in 1930, a young Xuma captured this outlook: “The Indian in South Africa does not fall within the purview of our discussion, because . . . the Indian cannot make common cause with the African without alienating the right of intervention on their behalf on the part of the Government of India.” 23 According to this view, the “Asiatic Question” and the “Native Question” represented distinct problems within the overarching framework of liberal empire.24
XUMA,
