World Cup championship. The authors argue that although support for the All Blacks in South Africa may at first appear as wilfully contrary and even perversely wrongheaded, it demonstrates the many and enduring fault lines still plaguing South African society.
Jabulani Sithole and Mary de Haas analyse aspects of ‘Zulu’ identity. Sithole explains why KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) remains the one province in South Africa with the most persistent and formidable ethnic identities – identities which sometimes exhibit secessionist and regionalist tendencies, despite all attempts to forge a national unity in the country. Why the persistence and resilience of this specific expression of ethnic identity? In pursuing this question, Sithole traces the complex and fragmented history of the region and finds that the idea of a consolidated ‘Zulu’ identity only emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century. He then probes the implications of the recent resuscitation of Zulu ethnic identities and concludes that sections of the country’s population are still searching for ways of reconciling individual human rights with collective cultural belonging. What emerges is the picture of a ‘composite’ state, containing conflicting elements typical of a kingdom, of a regional, secessionist state, and of a group participating on the national level of government.
Mary de Haas describes how the unresolved tensions between these conflicting notions of the state and the continuing existence of other ethnic identities lead to endemic violence in KZN. She relates how the apartheid state made good use of the ethnic blueprint prepared by the British colonial era to establish a KwaZulu Bantustan which set the parameters for enduring conflict. The situation intensified during the negotiations for an inclusive democracy in the 1990s and ethnic mobilization continued even in the post-apartheid era. Relations in the province are further complicated by the growing involvement of multinational mining companies in KZN. De Haas maintains that violence will continue to hold its iron grip on the province, given the high level of unemployment and the willingness of ‘Zulu warriors’ to defend the king and ‘his’ land.
In a concluding chapter, Bernard Lategan draws some metatheoretical and normative conclusions. The preceding discussion makes abundantly clear that current concepts of both the state and of identity are in need of critical re-examination as well as substantial readjustment. This includes a re-conceptualization of borders, of what constitutes an effective state and of the matrix which determines our understanding of identity. In view of the progressive fragmentation of societies and the destructive consequences of mono and restricted forms of identity, an ‘innocent’ concept of identity can no longer be maintained. The challenge is to move beyond the limits of narrow interests and regain a new vision of the common good. This calls for a mature understanding and responsible use of identity with ‘distinctive interconnectedness’ as the goal.
Chapter 2 Mobility, Globalization and the Policing of Citizenship and Belonging in the Twenty-first Century
Francis B. Nyamnjoh
This chapter on mobility, citizenship and decoloniality draws on my recent book titled #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa (Nyamnjoh 2016). The book examines student protest movements in 2015 to have the statue of Cecil John Rhodes moved or removed from the University of Cape Town campus. It addresses questions such as: How do ideas and practices of mobility evolve, in a world of border protections and exclusionary practices? How do convivial forms of interaction counter such trends? How do they bond fictional insiders and perceived outsiders? How are race, citizenship and belonging constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed across the fluid yet sometimes oppressive frontiers that link ‘nation-states’? What can we all learn from the twenty-first-century nimble-footedness of humans, things and ideas? How do students of society make scholarship more convivial by factoring in human mobility as the norm in being human? How do ethnographers such as myself and my students (and some of you) decolonize the alienating tendencies that lead to the objectification of the people with whom we study by denying them the very essence of being – mobility?
Cecil John Rhodes as the epitome of unsettling mobility
It is all too easy to forget, in this day and age when countries around the world are increasingly obsessed with detecting, policing and containing human mobility – through chains, agents, cameras, walls and other tools – that there used to be a time when it was free to move. If Africa was the cradle of humankind some four and half million years ago, then it is only proper to remind ourselves that waves of migration out of Africa must have accounted for the presence of humans elsewhere in the world, north, south, east and west of the African continent. It was normal in the deep past, and for centuries subsequently, for people to cross borders without passports and encounter other humans and learn about new resources and perspectives in the course of their travels.
Cecil John Rhodes is known as a consummate colonialist, an imperialist and a foot soldier of the British Empire. He was nimble-footed – like migrants of present-day Africa seeking to cross the Mediterranean into Europe in their quest for opportunities. However, unlike Africans knocking at the doors of Europe in the twenty-first century, mobile Europeans like Cecil Rhodes were backed by colonial powers to unsettle those they encountered in the course of their mobility. Rhodes was able to harness the technologies of dominance of his day to seek and maintain power and privilege for himself and his people. Little or nothing was allowed to stand in the way of this treasure hunter and his ruthless pursuits. As Brown puts it, ‘Rhodes began to feel he had been put on this earth for some greater purpose. He would expand the English-speaking sphere of influence until it was so powerful that no nation would dare oppose it, and war would be a thing of the past’ (Brown 2015: 18). Rhodes was a key pillar in the making of the British Empire, which contributed significantly to the configuration of the modern world (Hyam 1976; Ferguson 2018).
Rhodes proved that a powerful settler, equipped with ‘a good supply of maxims and field-guns’, including ‘a gun called “Long Cecil”, of which the shells were inscribed With compliments C. J. R.’ (Plomer 1984 [1933]: 78, 150; see also Jourdan 1910: 120–2), and with ruthless indifference to the humanity of others, can become a native and the native a settler (Roberts 1987: 226–41; Plomer 1984 [1933]: 74–82). Simply by defining and imposing himself and his race as superior, Rhodes denied the native sons and daughters he encountered any claim to civilization. He limited aspirations for equality to those certified to be civilized by British gendarmes of value and taste, for in Britain, in his own words, ‘the finest race in the world’ was to be found (Van der Westhuizen 2007: 15, 58).
In an enabling environment, Rhodes let his childhood fantasies run wild, and he turned the world into one big fantasy space. His mobility and ambitions of dominance made nonsense of the age-old idea of civilization as the acquisition and resolute defence of a bounded sense of values. His mobility made settlers of natives and natives of settlers. Unlike his mobile African counterparts of the twenty-first century, Rhodes did not have to endure the inconvenience of respect for his host communities, let alone be categorized as coming from a backward, despicable country. His limited knowledge of local cultures was tied to self-serving purposes (Stent 1924: 59–60).
Whatever he lacked, however, did not stand in the way of his nose for diamonds and gold, nor his craving for immortality. He mobilized and unsettled local populations to dig and forage for diamonds. He had a reputation for having little use for human tools that he could not sharpen for his purposes. He disciplined and punished locals by transforming them into labour zombies – mostly through the use of colonial taxes, which he described as a gentle stimulus to make blacks work and remove them from what he termed a life of sloth and laziness (Hyam 1976: 298). According to Flint, ‘Desperate for labor as the mines grew deeper, he used blacks ruthlessly, penning them up in compounds, destroying their family and tribal life, and giving them wages that made them little better than slaves, so creating the economic base of apartheid’ (Flint 1974: xv).
Rhodes partook of an imperial British appetite for swallowing up continents and eating up countries.
