Gerhard Mare

‘Non-racialism’ in the struggle against apartheid

Abstract This article examines the movement of South African society from a racialised past to a racialised present. It argues that an important opportunity, arising out of the transitional conjuncture, seriously to come to grips with the racist and racialised categories of apartheid, is rapidly being lost. Racism and a racially-ordered system is founded on the soft bed(rock) of race-thinking, and continues to draw on the banal perpetuation of notions of race in everyday life, as well as in political practice in a democratic South Africa. The author proposes that the undoubted commitment of the African National Congress to ‘non-racialism’ has remained unrealisable because there was no serious theoretical investigation of the status of race categories, either how they operated within apartheid South Africa or within the struggle for democracy itself. For this reason, it seems clear that the ANCs ‘non-racialism’ more appropriately should be read as ‘non-racism’, as the notion of the existence of ‘races’ as socially meaningful categories have remained pivotal political categories and continue to operate as everyday common sense.

Versions of resistance history in South Africa: the ANC strand in Inkatha in the 1970s and 1980s

Since the 1999 elections in South Africa the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) has entered into a ‘coalition’ with the African National Congress (ANC) (now described as such by both parties) at both provincial (KwaZulu‐Natal ‐ KZN) and national levels of government. Such close cooperation, albeit largely at leadership and parliamentary representative level, would have been hard to imagine even five years ago, when the IFP refused to participate in the first democratic elections unless a range of demands were met by the negotiators in the transition process. Such confrontation reflected the vicious, state‐supported, war that was waged between IFP and ANC supporters in KZN and on the east Rand, in which thousands were killed and many more turned into internal refugees. While any steps to attain lasting peace are to be welcomed, if the past is not addressed such moves may prove to be fragile. An aspect of the past is the relationship between the ANC, as movement and as resistance symbol, and the Inkatha movement of nkosi Mangosuthu Buthelezi during the 1970s and 1980s. Inkathas perception and presentation of ‘the ANC during this period is discussed. The argument is that Inkatha leadership had the opportunity, and not only the ideological pressure, to place the movement within an ANC resistance history, that was also populist, denying class and other divisions. However, Inkatha was never able to escape its political location with the KwaZulu ethnic bantustan, and the ANC was driven to an uncompromising position through the rise of internal resistance from the late‐1970s.

Evidence for an ethnic identity in the life histories of Zulu‐speaking Durban township residents

This paper addresses the nature of ethnic consciousness among Zulu‐speaking workers in Natal through an analysis of 24 open‐ended life history interviews with residents in Umlazi township in Durban. The authors are concerned with four main issues: the evidence for Zulu ethnic consciousness in the life stories collected, the situations in which Zulu identity becomes salient, the ways in which ethnic identities are being refashioned under the impact of township life in the 1990s, and the relationship between the ‘everyday’ and the political aspects of ethnic identity. The authors do not find evidence for a strong ethnic consciousness apart from informants’ commitment to the Zulu language. Those fragments of ethnic consciousness that were evident in the life histories were connected to informants’ personal, family and domestic lives rather than to the far more politicised version of ‘Zuluness’ promoted by Buthelezi. The authors conclude that a gap exists between the political mobilisation of ethnicity and th...

Ethnicity, regionalism and conflict in a democratic South Africa

Abstract South Africas transition to a democratic order is especially threatened by the strongly contested areas of the place of ethnicity and of regionalism within the new order. This article investigates the most threatening manifestations of such conflict, especially as it relates to the KwaZulu‐Natal province, and suggests that legitimate concerns over identity and decentralisation have to be addressed.

Inkatha and regional control: policing liberation politics

1. Never abuse, insult, shout at or beat any member of the public. 2. Never take anything in the form of money or property from any member of the public not even somebodys sweet bananas or sugar-cane on the ground that it is a mere sugar-cane without paying for the same. 3. Pay promptly for anything you take and in cash. 4. Never kill any member of the public or any captured prisoners, as guns should only be reserved for armed enemies or opponents. 5. Return anything you borrow from the public. 6. Offer help to members of the public when you find them engaged in productive work, if you have time. 7. Offer medical treatment to members of the public who may be in the territory of your unit. 8. Never develop illegitimate relationship with any woman because there are no women as such waiting for passing soldiers yet many women are wives, or daughters of somebody somewhere. Any illegitimate relationship is bound to harm our good relationship with the public. 9. There should be no consumption of alcohol until the end of the war. Drunken soldiers are bound to misuse the guns which are given to them for the defence of the people.

Book Review: Forty Lost Years: The Apartheid State and the Politics of the National Party 1948-1994, by Dan O'Meara. Johannesburg: Ravan Press; Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996

This long work follows chronologically and thematically on O’Meara’s earlier, and in terms of length more modest, Volkskapitalisme (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983). The earlier study examined the development of Afrikaner nationalism, 1934-48, and the way in which the notion of a &dquo;people’s capitalism&dquo; was used to mobilize Afrikaners towards gaining state power. This theme forms the back-

Ethnicity, society and conflict in Natal

In September 1992 a conference was held at the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg. This Briefing is a slightly amended version which sets out the issues raised by that conference.