Non-racial South Africa: ebook reveals debate on nation constructing continues to be related at this time

There was a lot remark not too long ago on the shortage of illustration of minorities within the management buildings of South Africa’s governing occasion, the African Nationwide Congress (ANC).

For Douglas Gibson, a former chief of the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), the solely black composition of the ANC’s top leadership reveals that the ANC is not dedicated to constructing one nation. He believes

the ANC is clearly not a house for all. Take a look at its MPs, ministers, MECs, councillors, and mayors … The management has place just for black South Africans.

For Gibson, the baton has been handed on to the DA.

On the centre of this debate is the “national question”, the drive to construct one united democratic nation. This debate has been captured within the scholar Mandla Radebe’s fascinating biography, The Misplaced Prince of the ANC: The Life and Instances of Jabulani Nobleman “Mzala” Nxumalo, 1955-1991.

The ebook doesn’t solely start to fill a niche in liberation historical past. It additionally reminds South Africans of the wealthy and sturdy debates that came about by an idealistic era dedicated to constructing a non-racial South Africa. It’s a legacy that the ANC must get well whether it is to rebut those that argue that it’s not a “home for all”.

Who was Mzala?

Mzala was one thing of a cult determine in ANC circles, celebrated for his mental insights. However his untimely dying on the age of 35 makes him a comparatively unknown determine outdoors the occasion.

Born and introduced up in a carefully knit and deeply non secular household in rural KwaZulu-Natal, Mzala confirmed a detailed curiosity and skill in scholarly pursuits at an early age. Pressured into exile after a scholar revolt on the College of Zululand in 1976, he quickly emerged as a number one grassroots mental inside the ANC and its ally, the South African Communist Occasion (SACP). He was prolific in his writings and the vary of points he touched on.

The good worth of Radebe’s ebook is that it gives the reader a rounded image of a revolutionary of many surprising dimensions. He was deeply dedicated to his household and strongly influenced by his Christian upbringing. His ardour was music and the Amandla Cultural Ensemble of the ANC, a cultural group that by means of its music, poetry, theatre and dance, was used to mobilise worldwide assist for the wrestle towards apartheid.

However what stands out in Radebe’s biography is Mzala’s contribution to debates on Marxist principle contained in the ANC. It was three-fold.

Firstly, he regarded the working class because the driving power of the revolution. Secondly, the driving force behind the revolution was not the exiled management, however the lots again residence.

Historical past’s nice name to our motion is to start a means of de-exiling ourselves, of transferring the initiative of the liberation course of to the precise area of our wrestle, inside South Africa (web page 143).

However his main contribution was on the tough debate on the function of ethnicity. Mzala unequivocally wrote that

our democratic republic will certainly develop the constructive features of my Zulu tradition, language and so forth, in order that I, along with these of my ethnic group, can contribute a cultural flower to the banquet of South African tradition (web page 236).

Within the phrases of Essop Pahad, who labored carefully with Mzala in exile and was later appointed the Minister within the Presidency below Thabo Mbeki:

Maybe the best lack of all is to our occasion’s ongoing makes an attempt to indigenise Marxism-Leninism on South African soil (web page 4).

For Mzala, some members of the communist occasion, such because the doyen of South African Marxists Harold Wolpe, decentred “race”. Certainly, Radebe stories that Mzala rejected Wolpe as a supervisor of his PhD as he “felt that Wolpe downplayed the function of race and elevated class within the debate” (web page 238).

Sadly Mzala by no means accomplished his PhD, and the reader is left not realizing what a scholarly model of his argument would have been. Nevertheless, Radebe does present a clue by giving us the working title of the thesis, “Ethnicity and the issue of nation-formation in South Africa”.

Mental contribution

What made Mzala’s mental contribution distinctive was that it mixed a complicated grasp of revolutionary principle with a sensible engagement with the fact of ethnic nationalism in KwaZulu-Natal. This emerges most clearly in his best-known work, Gatsha Buthelezi: Chief with a Double Agenda. The ability of Mangosuthu Buthelezi, as chief of a Bantustan – impoverished areas the place the apartheid state decreed blacks belonged to distinct ethnic states, separate from one another and from whites – relied on the apartheid state.

As stress on the state grew because of inner resistance to apartheid and sanctions from overseas, Buthelezi got here to be regarded an increasing number of as a authorities puppet. His emphasis on Zulu id over nationwide unity led finally to a virtual civil war between his Inkatha Freedom Occasion’s primarily Zulu loyalist supporters and ANC members in KwaZulu-Natal and components of Gauteng province.

Mzala rejected this slender view of ethnic id, most clearly expressed (web page 8) by Mozambican revolutionary Samora Machel:

For the nation to thrive the tribe should die.

Mzala’s extra nuanced method is captured when he wrote (pages 2020-1):

Denunciation of tribalism and ethnic exclusiveness shouldn’t be denunciation of the ethnic communities themselves. Folks’s democracy doesn’t imply that each one cultural and conventional distinctions between the varied teams should disappear … what shouldn’t be wanted are bantustans to protect their cultural heritage.

For this reason it is very important revisit Mzala’s writings; it reminds all South Africans of the central objective of constructing one nation in all its ethnic diversity.

Recovering the nation-building venture

The “nationwide query” because it developed in South Africa went nicely past the talk round Buthelezi’s Inkatha and Zulu identity; it was and is a debate about who constitutes the South African nation. For instance, the Western Cape Province, which post-1994 has seen sharpened racial tension, is populated by a majority of “coloureds” with “Africans” and “whites” as minorities.

Within the mild of the ANC’s nation-building venture, how ought to these tensions be understood? Does their manifestation present an unresolved nationwide query, activist and democratic Marxist Mazibuko Kanyiso Jara (2002) asks, or a failing nation-building venture?

Learn extra: Can the ANC survive the end of South Africa’s heroic epoch?

Though the ANC has usually equivocated traditionally on how finest to deal with minority groups, its imaginative and prescient of constructing one nation has been a vital contribution to the liberation wrestle. By recovering the misplaced debate on the “nationwide query” by means of this complete biography of Mzala, Mandla Radebe has reminded us of the ANC’s historic aspiration to construct one united non-racial nation.