TOPIC: THABO MBEKI AND THE NEW TRIBALISM.
INTRODUCTION: ON SOTA.
At the height of his intellectual influence over the South African society, some amongst us were wont to refer to former SA president, Thabo Mbeki, as “the Philosopher-King.” It is a type of portmanteau that was intended to convey a sense of Mbeki’s great skill as a competent, “managerial” SA State president, as well as his impressive and widely-acclaimed intellectual erudition. It is also a term that represented a rare occasion of our collective public endorsement, as a form of sincere flattery, of this rare quality in Thabo Mbeki, which clearly set him apart, in a positive sense, from his iconic predecessor, Nelson Mandela, the father of the nation and archetypical reconciler. But uneasy laid the Mbeki head that wore the philosopher-king throne. It was really never clear whether Mbeki’s undoubted intellectual influence owed much to his long-held positions at the apex of our democratic State, both as Nelson Mandela’s deputy president, and later as SA’s president in his own right, or whether it was Mbeki’s intellectual erudition that made his pulsating presidency both so compelling and highly controversial, synchronously. Now that Mbeki has lost his “political kingdom” – or the “king” nomenclature of the portmanteau “philosopher-king” – after his unceremonious ouster from power in the late 2008, we are coming closer by the day to answering the quizz. For Mbeki the King is finished politically, at least in terms of the above portmanteau. What should remain as part of his presidential rule’s oddments is Mbeki the Philosopher.
But is Mbeki the Philosopher still as intellectually influential over our society as Mbeki the philosopher-king was? Is Mbeki the Philosopher still taken seriously without the formidable prop of the massive and far-reaching SA state apparatus? Do we now have less of Mbeki the Philosopher, and more of Mbeki the sagacious African Sage, as a result?
The best way to seek to solve this puzzle is to look at Thabo Mbeki’s recent pronouncements regarding the specter and threat of rising tribalism in South Africa under SA President Jacob Zuma. This is because Mbeki’s statements about tribalism are his most pointed critique of post-Mbeki South Africa yet. But they also indicate Mbeki’s continuing determination and interest in shaping post-apartheid South Africa as a major and influential intellectual powerhouse, or as Mbeki the Philosopher/African Sage.
Speaking recently at the University of South Africa (UNISA), Thabo Mbeki bemoaned the failure of the ANC in the last hundred and two years to overcome the problem of tribalism in South Africa, a stirring objective that was put before the ANC’s founding fathers by former ANC president, Pixley la ka Seme. What is more, Mbeki was particularly scathing regarding the practice of leading SA Cabinet Ministers and State officials to fill up positions in their respective ministries and offices with their fellow tribesmen, or with people from their regions, which practice runs counter to the ANC’s founding values, vision and ethos.
The diagnosis on tribalism by Mbeki was welcome and lauded by many in our society, whilst ridiculed and dismissed by as many amongst us. The more critical accused Thabo Mbeki of hypocrisy and double-standards, and of having himself permitted, if not actively encouraged, the growth and consolidation of Xhosa-led tribalism during his own SA presidency.
The responses in support of and against Thabo Mbeki’s statements on tribalism are a sharp reminder of the pitfalls of what the Brazilian pedagogue, Paul Freire, once referred to as “the mystification of ideological knowledge.” So sensitive are the subjects of tribalism and racism in South Africa that it is almost impossible to demystify any disquisition about, as well as a rational national debate on, either. As a result, we are really no wiser today as to whether Mbeki’s State of Tribalism Analysis (SOTA), as a counterpoint to the more stodgy, predictable, somnolent, self-praising and annual State of the Nation Address (SONA) by President Jacob Zuma since 2009, has any validity in lived reality or facts. More heat than light has been generated by protagonists on Mbeki’s SOTA, dueling against one another to gain what is often a silly political advantage in the public intellectual space. This is truly unfortunate and ungainly.
DISCOURSE ON TRIBALISM: THABO MBEKI’S SHADOW.
In his amazing short story, Miracle, the Nigerian prodigy of literature, Tope Folarin, wrote:
“This is what I learned during my first visit to a Nigerian church: that a community is made up of truths and lies. Both must be cultivated for the community to survive.”
The SOTA protagonists in Africa, including in South Africa, are also a combustible community held together, and pulled apart, by its own re-iterations of truths and lies, which have allowed it to survive colonialism and the African post-colony’s harsh modernization and detribalization drive. My own first reading of Mbeki’s SOTA at UNISA strongly reminded me of Tope Folarin’s words about his first visit to a Nigerian church. There is certainly a lot of truth in what Mbeki was saying about tribalism in South Africa. In fact, Mbeki was not the first public personality, nor will he be the last, in South Africa to warn against the threat and rise of tribalism. But, as now the retired successor of Nelson Mandela in the SA and ANC presidency, Mbeki’s public utterances on the subject of tribalism carry a particularly poignant and powerful moral force, which invariably, as if by an autocue, jerk our society into some sort of full attention. It is no wonder Mbeki’s UNISA SOTA has elicited so much national debate and for so long, whose embers have really not yet completely died down.
But as with so many things, context is everything in terms of Mbeki’s SOTA. The manner and timing of Mbeki’s SOTA open it to suspicion and derision on the part of Mbeki’s now formidable political foes, forever awaiting an opportunity to politically ambush and belittle him and his legacy. Mbeki waited a solid five years after being booted from the SA Presidency, before he could make his first, highly charged, divisive and controversial, yet necessary and opportune, and in some quarters eagerly awaited, public interventions on tribalism in South Africa under Jacob Zuma. To believe Thabo Mbeki, is to believe that during those five, solid years of his self-imposed quietude, tribalism in South Africa got completely out of the whack. Did he have to wait that long, whilst bearing silent witness to the growing, menacing peril of the growth and consolidation of pernicious tribalism in his own country? Wouldn’t his much earlier public protestation against tribalism have alerted us to it in its infancy still, when our efforts to address and vanquish it would have been guaranteed more success?
On 31 January 2014, ThinkAfrica Press carried a blog by William Clarke under the title “If the UK were an African country: Was Great Britain a Mistake?” In his fascinating piece, Clarke refers to the Scots, English, Welsh and the Northern Irish of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, rightly, as tribes. By the same token, there should be no doubt that in South Africa the white Afrikaaners, the English, Scots, Welsh, Irish, Germans, Portugues, Greeks, Italians, white Jews, Christian Arabs, Russians, Bulgarians, Czechs, Spaniards and others of our white communities, which descended from Europe, Latin America and the Middle East, are tribes too, just like their black African tribal brethens. As a matter of fact, our black African tribes, such as the Zulus, Xhosas, Pedis, Southern Sothos, Shonas, Ndebeles and Tswanas, are often much more numerically bigger than our white tribes, whilst they are rarely defined as nationalities or nations, as is often the case with our white tribes. The Zulus alone are numerically more than all the white tribes in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique, Zambia, Malawi, Angola and Namibia combined.
But in South Africa at least, this reading of white communities as tribes, as offered by William Clarke, amongst others, has not yet found universal purchase or traction, sadly. And this is because “the tribe”, in the minds of South Africa’s black and white relentless modernists and urban elites, remains essentially something barbarous, anarchronistic, shameful; because “the tribe” is viewed by them as basically an occultist conglomeration of collectively-minded people, and a community of black African jackasses and savages. In this sociological schema, the black African tribes represent a direct and conflicting negation of everything that enlightened Europe and America stand for, supposedly. And in this schema, the black tribes of Africa do not even deserve the colonial master’s privilege of being classified as “scheduled tribes,” as the UK’s colonial governments sometimes denoted some of colonized India’s tribes for special and privileged access to education and health.
Amilcar Cabral once declared that “for the nation to survive, the tribe must die.” Yet, long before his words, colonial Europe was convinced that for European civilization to survive, the black African tribe must die.
As recently as 04 February 2014, The Citizen newspaper carried a bizarre piece by the South African conservative and right-wing commentator and columnist, Andrew Kenny, in which he stated, amongst other things, that:
“Around the world and down the ages it does seem true that people vote according to their tribe when tribes are clearly delineated. In England in 800 AD, if there had been a general election, there is little doubt that all the Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Celts and others would have voted by tribe. The English don’t do so today, simply because their tribal divisions have disappeared.” (Article, “Race still dominates our politics”).
There is no doubt that Andrew Kenny, like many like him, expect the black tribal divisions in Africa to disappear, as the same tribal divisions “disappeared” in England.
[It should, however, in all fairness, be readily conceded that although I characterize Andrew Kenny’s views on the tribe as “conservative and right-wing”, he is in truth more in line with original Marxist thinking on the subject, as a reading of Frederick Engels’opus, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” (1884), especially the last chapter on “Barbarism and Civilisation”, makes abundantly clear. The very unfortunate choice of Engels’s phrases to caption this chapter speaks volume about what the founders of Marxism and Communism thought about the division of the various stages of universal human progress. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrongly thought that the irresistible and powerful spread of capitalism around the world, on the back of Europe’s colonial conquests, would sweep “the tribe” away and bring about a non-tribal and industrial-era Nirvana, wherein the industrial proletariat, and not the backward tribesmen, would enjoy class hegemony through the dictatorship of the proletariate. It is no surprise that Engels himself, in his opus, created a hierarchy amongst ancient tribes, above all of whom he placed the white tribes of Celts, Teutons and Jews as the most advanced and developed of tribes, whilst placing the American Indians and the African tribes at the very bottom of the hierarchical pile, and whilst at the same time singing high praises to the nobility and justness of the latter two’s social organisations and mores. This appears to be indirectly the source of Andrew Kenny’s delusion as well regarding the rumored death of white European tribes in England, just because England’s white tribes gave birth to rapacious capitalism, the Industrial Revolution and Darwinism, to name but a few of what should have passed as the mortal enemies of “the tribe.”].
The rumor about the death of the tribe and tribalism has too been greatly and universally exaggerated.
Clearly, tribalism is not a uniquely black Africa’s problem. It is a universal challenge, much of which has withstood and survived colonial conquest, the Industrial Revolution, slavery, forced religious conversion, bloody tribal wars, and now the Information Age. The tribe in Africa again will survive Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the current religious fad of Prosperity Theology as well. There must be something deeply enduring and abiding about the tribe and tribalism, something perhaps the Bible’s Old Testament has done more and better to recognize, highlight and celebrate, given the degree to which it has canonized ancient tribes of the Middle East. Here is one, rare instance when the Bible easily trumps Marxist and western rationalist thinking, reducing both Frederick Engels and E.M Forster (author of A Passage To India)’s quivering cogitation on tribes to a trumpery.
The biggest weakness in Mbeki’s SOTA is that he seems to think that our varied white tribes in South Africa have definitively resolved their tribalism question, as Andrew Kenny patently and wrongly announces. This is not so. Mbeki should be the first to understand that the task of solving the tribalism question amongst our white tribes is now as much the ANC’s and our collective task as the challenge of resolving the tribalism amongst our black African tribes. To present SOTA that focuses solely on our black African tribes, to the exclusion of our many SA white tribes, is to unwittingly fall under the spell of the same colonial-era tropes about dark Africa, now being popularized by Andrew Kenny, amongst others, whilst debunked by William Clarke and others. Given the diversity and unity of our multi-tribal and multi-racial South African nation, Mbeki’s SOTA entrenches ancient, inconvenient and hidden lies amongst our white tribes in South Africa, as if they exist in some form of a pure post-tribal and post-colonial idyll, which approach to SOTA by Mbeki has the unintended potential effect of strengthening white racialist canards and paternalistic false consciousness about tribalism in Africa amongst some of our white compatriots. In this sense, Thabo Mbeki himself becomes the false enemy of tribalism in Africa in general, and South Africa in particular, or what one of the more febrile bloggers of James Myburgh’s Politicsweb once derogatively described as “an anti-tribalist tribalist”. To its eternal glory, the ANC’s Constitution of 1919, adopted by the ANC’s predecessor, the South African Native National Congress, spoke of the need “…to bring together into common action as one political people all tribes and clans of various tribes or races…,” thus recognizing clearly that South Africa has black and white clans and tribes and different races. This Mbeki should know.
Mbeki would do well to also heed the wise words of United Kingdom’s foremost scholar of identity, culture, multiculturalism, and politics, the recently deceased Jamaican-born Stuart Hill, who stated that “cultural identities come from somewhere…But, like everything which is historical they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to continuous play of history, culture and power.” Mbeki’s treatment of SOTA at UNISA lacked historical context, was un-dialectical and linear, suffered from failing to cogently locate the rise and the threat of tribalism within the broader political economy and socio-pathology of post-Mbeki South Africa, and was to some extent alarmist and disturbing, if not outrightly sensationalist. The incoherent diagnosis on tribalism was as a result followed by an even weaker prescription. In this context, the statement of Stuart Hill is key to understanding tribalism as democratic South Africa’s challenge, and in seeing tribalism through the prism of the Hegelian dialectics of unity and struggle of the opposites, perpetually undergoing mutation and wholesome change, and forever in constant sociological and political motion and commotion. Not as a fixed, static and obsolete phenomenon, or as a dangerous relic from our so-called “unglamorous” tribal past. I shall return to Stuart Hill’s point at the conclusion of this disquisition. One of the most convincing critique of Mbeki’s SOTA is that his own presidency made all our tribes – black and white -, to paraphrase Stuart Hill, “subject to continuous play of…power”. Many have rightly argued that as a matter of fact, the tribe and tribalism are for the most part just neutral constructs about identities, until they are forcefully, or through cajoling, mobilized and hijacked by contending elites in Africa in their self-aggrandizing project to “subject them to continuous play of…power.” The only difference is that at that time, it was Mbeki’s power as our State President, and not Jacob Zuma’s, which was the issue. It is possible that Mbeki’s political self-esteem, if not intellectual narcissism, prevents him from undertaking the much-desired and much-needed critical, impassioned self-introspection of his presidency regarding the question of tribalism in South Africa. As the English saying goes, a cobbler never mends his own shoes well. But Mbeki can do to the presidential shoes he left behind a much better mending job than an English cobbler by trade. So, we must insist to ask, to what extent is the tribalism Mbeki bemoans and denounces today a direct reaction to, and an outcome of, his presidential decisions, actions and signals? Is it unreasonable to expect Mbeki to subject his own presidency to the same SOTA as he is dishing out on the Zuma presidency, even if obliquely so? Failure to do so on the part of Thabo Mbeki diminishes his intellectual stature, influence and reach as our venerated African sage. It spells the onset of the slow death of Mbeki the Philosopher/African Sage.
In his seminal biography, “Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC” (2005), William Mervin Gumede makes an interesting observation about those in what was then the Thabo Mbeki camp in the ANC leadership of the time, and who tightly gate-kept for Mbeki:
“Some of the Africanists in Mbeki’s camp quite literally see the African Renaissance as a romantic embracing of a mythical Africa steeped in culture, literature and folklore.” (page 203).
It would seem now that Thabo Mbeki and a dispirited gaggle of his remaining and fawning die-hard intellectual admirers see not some African Renaissance on the near horizon about to burst out and flourish across our continent, but tribalism as a form of the Irish poet WB Yeats’ “rough beast” and “a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi..” which “slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” (The Second Coming), if not towards i’Nkandla in KwaZulu Natal province of South Africa, to be eternally cursed and buried. The “romantic embracing of a mythical Africa steeped in culture, literature and folklore” has given way, inexplicably, to a much more macabre, hectoring, shrill, panicky, excoriating and sententious assessment of the state of tribalism in South Africa by Mbeki, in the post-Mbeki era.
This is surprising.
How did this disheartening change of heart on tribalism in South Africa, on the part of Thabo Mbeki, our former State president, come about?
This is no trifling concern either.
SOTA UNDER PRESIDENT JACOB ZUMA ,
During the much more liberal, cosmopolitan, Afropolitan and open-minded era of his political career, hardly more than half a year after ascending to our country’s ultimate and most powerful executive office, namely our national presidency, President Jacob Zuma penned arguably his most progressive, rationalist and Voltaire-sque Open Letter to Sowetan daily, dated 02 November 2009, long before the genre of open letters in South Africa’s media became a popular form of dissing and vomiting out in public political enemies. In his long Open Letter, entitled “Nothing To Fear From Debate”, Jacob Zuma made an important public commitment to uphold what the great philosopher, Karl Popper, would call an Open Society, which commitment has now, regrettably, become hoary with the sad passage of time since it was made five years ago. At the end of the Open Letter, Zuma wrote, evocatively:
“There is an unhealthy tendency to label comrades, sometimes even to call them derogatory names. This detracts from the purpose of debate, which is to critically examine differing perspectives. Rather than impugn the motives of comrades, we should concentrate instead on exposing every view to scrutiny, regardless of who expresses it.”
This was Jacob Zuma’s personal Prague Spring moment, without any argument.
The extent to which Jacob Zuma himself, and his now hegemonc Zuma ANC (ZANC) faction within the ANC, have veered far away from this Open Society commitment of November 2009, is simply astonishing. The ongoing public mud-slinging accompanying the collapse of COSATU and the Tripartite Alliance is one case in point. The other is ZANC’s zoological distaste and open, pathological hatred for Mbeki’s recent SOTA at UNISA. For his part, president Jacob Zuma himself does not shy away from enjoining the intellectual bar brawls and street fights of our public discourse, often calling those he passionately dislikes and strongly disagrees with as “clever blacks”, a highly insulting term he most probably thinks befits Thabo Mbeki.
For his trouble in sharing his controversial views on SOTA with the general SA public, which is his enshrined democratic right, and very much in line with Jacob Zuma’s personal Prague Spring of 2009, Thabo Mbeki has been labeled all sorts of things, called derogatory names, and even denounced as a closet apostate. His motives in raising the matter of the menacing threat of tribalism in South Africa have been impugned ad nauseum. Instead of exposing Mbeki’s SOTA to scrutiny as a particular view on SOTA amongst many within the ANC and the country, Mbeki has even been accused of using the occasion of the death of Nelson Mandela to “settle political scores.” Suddenly, under Jacob Zuma, and contrary to what Jacob Zuma himself committed to on 02 November 2009, in terms of an Open Society in South Africa, now it does matter hugely who expresses a view, and where, and how, especially if the person happens to be former president Thabo Mbeki, and particularly if he has the “chicanery” to raise the vexed and troubling matter of tribalism under Jacob Zuma.
This is clearly a democratic backslide on the part of ZANC faction within the ANC, undoubtedly, with regard to the national debate about tribalism in South Africa.
The best measure of the rude health, vitality and vibrancy of ANC’s own internal democratic principles and practices is how it handles its own former president(s), in terms of Jacob Zuma’s own 2009 public commitment to an Open Society in South Africa. When Thabo Mbeki’s ANC NEC hauled Nelson Mandela over the coals and humiliated him for opposing Mbeki’s Aids-denialism, the country understood that we were entering a dangerous phase of our democratic deficit. If a globally revered and legendary figure such as Nelson Mandela could be roughed up “…and was being violated in the most brutal manner by junior leaders…” (ANC NEC member Ngoako Ramathlodi) at Mbeki ANC NEC in 2002, we understood that none amongst us could truthfully claim to be truly safe and secure in the exercise of our democratic rights. (See ANC NEC member Ngoako Ramatlhodi’s moving SA Sunday Times Op-Ed of 19 October 2008 on this matter, entitled “When the ANC jeered Madiba.”). In the same way, the brickbats that ZANC is now throwing at former president Thabo Mbeki for his SOTA at UNISA, represent troubling amber lights on our 20th anniversary four-way crossing as a young but maturing democracy. If the ANC cannot respect and protect its own former presidents when they publicly express a differing opinion, there is very little to make us, ordinary South Africans, to believe that it will have any respect for ordinary South Africans’ democratic rights, especially the rights of non-ANC members of our society, when these are exercised to the dislike of the ANC, but in terms of their right to an open, democratic debate and freedom of expression.
Nevertheless, there should be absolutely no doubting that the issue of tribalism in South Africa is an infinitely complex and potentially explosive matter, often raised under a false flag, by the ANC’s false friends, and often for motives that have little to do with the nation-building project or non-tribalism in South Africa. Still, there is not a more arresting view politically than the sight of the African continent’s pre-eminent economic, diplomatic, military, industrial and scientific powerhouse – South Africa – clumsily grappling with, and sometimes even fumbling regarding the ancient impulses of white and black tribalism in our country. In the same way that the issue of racism is now and again able to rudely burst from under the suppressed pimples on the seemingly smooth, baby-oiled face of the 250-year-old USA’s democracy, the issue of tribalism in South Africa is both a humbling and a pedagogic experience for an interested observer, underlining and exposing the false pomposity and the ethereal nature of our nation-state’s pretenses to be some global power and a global moral force. The terrible xenophobic terror attacks of May 2008 in our country – what I call South Africa’s own civil war of a special type – also underlined and exposed this, – our soft, exposed underbelly -, despite our undiminished penchant, occasionally, to morally pontificate to the rest of the world, and especially to the rest of Africa, about “our political transition’s miracle.”
To my mind, three examples amplify how complex tribalism in South Africa is, both at the superficial and deeper levels.
The first example is from John Allen’s biography of Archbishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu, “Desmond Tutu – Rabble-Rouser for Peace”, 2006. There, Allen John quotes Tutu speaking about his father, Zacchariah, a Xhosa, and his mother, Matse, a Tswana, thus, in terms of the complexity of tribal sentiments amongst black Africans of the time:
“Zacchariah, was born in 1901 in the town of Gcuwa in the Eastern Cape, and was brought up in Qumbu, about 140 kilometers (90 miles) away. He was proud to be a Xhosa-speaker, part of the Nguni group of peoples; and he was, in Desmond’s words, ‘quite arrogant…He thought that Xhosas were God’s gift to the world….He didn’t think the Batswana* were very smart….I don’t know why he married my mother, because he thought that anyone who was not Xhosa was a lesser breed in many ways.'” (page 11).
Another example is how Nelson Mandela’s “long-time personal chef”, Xoliswa Ndoyiya, was recruited by our legend himself:
“”He just asked me my clan name, and said: ‘I believe you are a good cook and can cook our home food’. And that was it; I got the job.” (Quoted by The Citizen, 04 February 2014). If Xoliswa Ndoyiya had come from another Xhosa clan, let alone from another black African tribe in South Africa, even if she had had decades of experience as a cook, and could have boasted a multiplicity of qualifications in cookery, restaurant management and food science, she most probably would not have been a minor cooking celebrity that she is today. All that was required for her to land a much-coveted chef job with Madiba was that she was from the right Xhosa clan. And this at the end landed her ultimately a suitably impressive bequest of R50 000 from Madiba for her long service, as one of Madiba’s staff so bequeathed in Madiba’s Will.
The third example is the now pervasive political charge that Jacob Zuma has stuffed his Cabinet Security Cluster and key national security appointments overwhelmingly with Zulus, his own tribesmen. Other than the i’Nkandla alleged scandal, this is one allegation causing Zuma the greatest political harm. It will also prove harder to shake off though.
And, in case you get mistaken and start thinking that the accusations and counter-accusations about tribalism are leveled only at and among South Africa’s five big black tribes, hold your thought. Some of the recent media analyses of the recent violent service delivery protests in and around Malamulele near Tzaneen, Limpopo province, pointed to acute tribal tensions and “the demons of tribal animosity” between our Shangaans/Tsongas and Vendas, arguably South Africa’s two smallest black tribes. (See City Press’s article of 27 October 2013, written by Alex Ntiyiso Mabunda, under the title “Malamulele: 21st century tribalism?” and pay a special attention to the article’s introduction that simply read “In Malamulele, life is particularly tough when you’re Tsonga.”). A sad case of alleged tribal discrimination and marginalization of one SA black tribe by another SA black tribe, is hard to conjure up, if the City Press article is to be believed.
On the other hand, the quotidian, lived experiences of masses of South Africans, in their tens of millions, whether it be ANC’s activists and the activists of other political parties, millions of workers on the shop-floors, farm-workers across rural South Africa, football and other sporting codes’ fans, millions of our worshippers every Friday, Sabbath and Sunday, be it the millions of the masses of our daily commuters, the hustled commercial consumers in our numerous malls and other shopping outlets, the millions of residents of our middle class and gated communities across South Africa, the hundred of thousands who paid homage to Nelson Mandela as he laid in state in December last year, the tens of millions of our voters who stand together in harmony once every five years, since 1994, to cast their vote in our national elections, the millions of our kids in our pre-schools, schools, colleges and universities – all these denounce, by their ordinary daily acts of Ubuntu, tribalism and the bathos of our tribal and racial divisions.
This too is a post-1994 good story crying out to be told.
So why, if these tens of millions of South Africans proclaim their oneness everyday, shaming tribalism and racism by their unscripted good acts and common humanity, is there a sense of the rising tide of tribalism being felt by some amongst us, especially amongst our elites? Are they merely shouting “fire” in a crowded cinema, or are they crying wolf unnecessarily? Or could they indeed maybe be the canary tweeting impending doom in our coal mine?
CONCLUSION: ON TRIBAL CONSCIOUSNESS.
To best understand the conundrum posited above about the tribe and tribalism in post-1994 South Africa, it is pertinent to quote one of the post-colonial founding fathers of Africa, former Zambian president, Dr. Kenneth Kaunda. In his seminal book, A Humanist In Africa – Letters to Colin M. Morris, Kaunda penned these observations:
“Africans, being a pre-scientific people, do not recognize any conceptual cleavage between the natural and the supernatural. They experience a situation rather than face a problem. By this I mean, they allow both the rational and non-rational elements to make an impact on them, and any action they may take could be described more as a response of the total personality to the situation than the result of some mental exercise. I think too, that the African can hold contradictory ideas in fruitful tension within his mind without any sense of incongruity and he will act on the basis of the one which seems most appropriate to the particular situation.”
Just above this quoted paragraph, Kenneth Kaunda explains at some length how white Europeans’ “problem-solving mind,” their “aggressive mentality” and their “rigorously scientific” approach are often not helpful in dealing with African challenges, because the white European draws “a sharp line between the natural and the unnatural, the rational and the non-rational, and more often than not, he dismisses the supernatural and non-rational as superstition.”
This largely explains why white Europeans like The Citizen’s columnist, Andrew Kenny, quoted above, have completely misunderstood the evolution of black tribes and tribalism in Africa. It is also largely, but sadly, why the Business Day and SA Sunday Times’ thoughtful and prolific, but “illiberal” liberal (acknowledgment here in order to Ronald Suresh Roberts, author of Fit To Govern – The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki, 2007, for the use of this term) columnist and commentator, Charles van Onselen, cannot just get it that the Democratic Alliance (DA)’s national spokesman, Mmusi Maimane, can effortlessly, synthetically, and in a syncretic way, be strongly committed to the DA’s South African liberalism, whilst pledging his full and undying allegiance to the ethos and philosophy of Ubuntu. Because, unlike Andrew Kennys and Charles van Onselens of this world, people like Mmusi Maimane and the DA’s parliamentary leader, Lindiwe Mazibuko, respond to the political and developmental challenges of South Africa “…more as a response of the total personality to the situation than the result of some mental exercise,” as Dr. Kenneth Kaunda would so correctly put it. But black African graduates of Europe’s universities like Thabo Mbeki and myself, often labor under the same misapprehension and misconception regarding black South African tribes and tribalism, as the Andrew Kennys of this world do. And it is why Amilcar Cabral could mistakenly believe that “for the nation to survive, the tribe must die”, thus conflating the tribe and tribalism. It is a conceptual conflation and confusion that has cost many an African political statesman, organisation/party and nation-state very dearly – in blood, wealth and arrested development. It is a profoundly costly mistake.
In this sense, I fully agree with Michael MacDonald’s trenchant argument in his Why Race Matters In South Africa (2006), that whilst the tribe and tribalism, ethnic groups and ethnicity, races and racism may indeed all be social and political, and not biological, constructs that confer a sense of group identities, the fact of people agreeing to organize themselves, by force or willingly, even under a false pretext or false consciousness arising out of social constructs, results in real, lived experiences and consequences in human life, which we have to deal with as objective realities, like the beauty embodied in real, objective western artworks which depict the Almighty God, who may or my not exist, as an unknown Diety. The Christian artworks are real, although given rise to by what is clearly a social construct, namely, religion. Consequently, these social and political constructs transcend their origin, like a pupa transiting to become a caterpillar or a butterfly, and become powerful, organizing realities in themselves and of their own. And thus, the tribes and tribalism become not just some primitive and barbarous social and political constructs forever fixed in some past, and whose desirable termination can be decreed by a colonial-era or present-day government’s fiat, or by some self-assured and spirited ideology or theology. They instead become enduring and persistent lived human realities, and as real as the rising sun or the forming clouds above, the rising sea tide or the howling of the south-easterly wind, the desert dust storm or the mighty roar of the beast of prey in the thick Amazon jungle. And some of these human self-organisations, like tribes and races, in fact practically become even much more powerful than some of the natural forces and phenomena, to which they owe, some of them like families and clans, their very being in the first place. Not even a scientifically rigorous and rationalist white tribal mind will make them disappear. As Karl Marx famously put it, “it is not the social consciousness of man that determines his existence – rather, it his his social existence that determines his consciousness”. Amilcar Cabral put it in simpler terms when he stated that we should “always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, and to guarantee the future of their children.” And that is the ultimate purpose of practically all human self-organization historically, even if this larger purpose was later often subverted and mutated, such as through clanism, tribalism, ethnicity, regionalism, racism, jingoist nationalism or a predatory form of unipolar globalism, to the detriment of others.
In discussing tribalism in South Africa, we should all guard against what Karl Popper, in his classic The Open Society and Its Enemies – Volume Two: Hegel and Marx, in the chapter entitled “Hegel and The New Tribalism”, described as “…a new age controlled by the magic of high-sounding words and by the power of jargon.”
in his most moving and famous speech, I Am An African, former SA deputy president Thabo Mbeki, addressing the SA Parliament on the occasion of the adoption of SA’s Constitution in 1996, declared how deeply proud he was that he owed his whole being to the various and magnificent human strands that have constituted and built what is today a South African Rainbow nation. It was a speech that clearly spelt out that the dream of a united, diverse and prosperous South Africa can rise above the demons of our tribal and racial divisions. I Am An African is an immortalized Mbeki speech that Thabo Mbeki should hanker after more frequently, without him being made to feel cowered from raising the kind of tough issues he raised in his SOTA at UNISA.
Mbeki’s I Am An African speech was also a resounding affirmation of the spirit of the wise words of Stuart Hill that “…identities are the name we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within the narratives of the past.”
It is as clear as daylight that in his I Am An African speech, as well as in his SOTA speech recently at UNISA, Thabo Mbeki showed “…the different ways” he is “positioned by, and positioned” himself “within the narratives of the past.” And from this varying positioning by and positioning of self on the part of Mbeki, it is obvious that Mbeki’s high hopes of 1996 have given way to his frightening sense of foreboding that South Africa is coming off the rails regarding the perennial question of our tribes and tribalism in the post-Mbeki era. And there is nothing wrong in raising such an alarm, as long as it is not a false alarm.
The least that we can do is to conduct a frank, honest and mutually respectful national debate about black and white tribalism and tribal consciousness in South Africa, and not to seek to shut up the shaking and quivering voices on the matter, like the one issuing from our former SA and ANC president, Thabo Mbeki, whilst recognizing that our post-apartheid society, like Tope Folarin’s first visit to a Nigerian church, is “…a community.. made up of truths and lies,” and that “both must be cultivated for the community to survive”. Take this brilliant example to demonstrate the truism of Tope Folarin’s literary allusion: Whilst we South Africans assiduously cultivate the notion that South Africa is a Rainbow Nation, we know deep in our hearts that such a characterization is both true and false – yet we keep on cultivating it religiously. We do not tire from its many iterations by ourselves. At occasions like the 1995 Rugby World Cup victory, the 1996 African Nations’ Soccer Cup victory, or during our mourning of the death of Nelson Mandela in December 2013, we clearly are a rainbow. No doubt about that. Yet, soon after each of such uplifting and far-and-in-between occasions, we revert to our typical dwellings, which have largely been determined for us by apartheid and racism’s disintegrative geographic special development, historically speaking; meaning that the various colors of the rainbow disaggregate and each go its own way to its largely racially segregated habitats for a deep sleep at night – until the next day, and the next rainbow occasion. Nigeria’s Tope Folarin calls them “lies,” others call them “myths,” and we often call them acts of patriotism. But they all serve a higher purpose, including the purpose of fighting against the sordid tendency on the part of Africa’s elites to mobilise tribal, ethno-centric and racialist sentiments for a definite and defined temporal political advantage and short-term material, and not so much worldly, gain.
I still recall vividly, and with great fondness, an august occasion I attended at Manhattan, New York’s swanky Waldorf Astoria hotel, in the mid 1990s, where then SA deputy president, Thabo Mbeki, thoroughly enjoyed the honor of introducing the legendary ANC struggle stalwart and icon, Walter Sisulu, to a motley assemblage of a USA African American Congressman, New York-based American anti-apartheid activists, United Nations diplomats, American businesspeople, and some of the South African expatriates living in New York. In his brilliant off-the-cuff remarks at this important and momentous occasion, whilst introducing Walter Sisulu, Thabo Mbeki let slip that he, with the help of Sisulu, was going to write an autobiography on his long involvement in the struggle against apartheid and racism in South Africa, which he intimated he was going to entitle “Cleaning The Augean Stables of Apartheid in South Africa.”
Wow!
Since that historic moment on Manhattan, New York, I have been waiting to be privileged with the opportunity of being able to buy such a voluminous Mbeki autobiography. Such a Thabo Mbeki autobiography, – Cleaning The Augean Stables of Apartheid in South Africa -, would indeed come very handy today and set the record straight on many of Mbeki’s more controversial political aspects and policy stances. And it may just answer the many questions many in our public life have as to what did Mbeki actually mean, or seek to articulate, with his recent SOTA at UNISA. It may also do to Mbeki’s post-power life (and legacy) what Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk To Freedom and Conversations With Myself did to Madiba’s life, and now are doing to his afterlife and legacy.
And “Cleaning The Augean Stables Of Apartheid in South Africa” may just secure Thabo Mbeki’s esteemed position as the pre-eminent post-colonial African Philosopher-King of his generation and for all time.
So far, Thabo Mbeki has not delivered on his almost twenty year-old intellectual and literary commitment. This is a pity, because a well-rounded and exhaustive Mbeki autobiography could certainly be a major literary event in South Africa and the rest of Africa, and would afford him the opportunity to clarify his thinking on issues such as tribes and tribalism in Africa, amongst others.
Can anyone out there shout to Thabo Mbeki, even if by way of ghost-writing his memoirs, to discover his own Alpheus river to assist him to show us how he undertook the Herculean task of cleaning up the Augean stables of apartheid in South Africa, so that we can better understand, in a more coherent and nuanced way, his recent musings and halting utterances at UNISA on the tribe and tribalism in post-Mbeki South Africa?
7th Cedia blog.
18 February 2014.
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Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi,
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