african modernity and the struggle for people’s power: from protest and mobilization to community...

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The Good Society, Volume 21, Number 2, 2012, pp. 279-299 (Article)

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the good society, vol. 21, no. 2, 2012 Copyright 2012 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

Populism has been a controversial term in South African public discourse in recent years precisely because it has been used as a tool in the lexical armoury of the combatants in the battle for the leadership of the ruling African National Congress. In order to understand why populism has been denigrated to great effect by the political, economic and social elite one has to have some idea of the historical resistance to popular democracy by African elites going back to the nineteenth century.

The anti-populist streak has its antecedents in the social division that emerged among African people following their encounter with European modernity in the nineteenth century. At the end of the anti-colonial wars that lasted almost a hundred years between the end of the 18th century and the end of the nineteenth century, Africans found themselves divided between two groups: those who subscribed to the new religious and educa-tional systems brought into the country by the European missionaries and those who rejected European civilization as a bastardization of African cul-ture. And because religion and education came to stand for what Ntongela Masilela calls the facilitators of the entry into European modernity,1 lead-ership became the preserve of what Du Bois called the talented tenth.2

To be sure, the social division started among Xhosa chiefs Ngqika (17781829) and Ndlambe (died 1828) who stood for submission to and rebellion against European colonialism, respectively. Aligned to both chiefs were the prophet-intellectuals Ntsikana and Nxele. Ntsikana became possibly the single most influential individual in converting the Xhosa to Christianity.

African Modernity and the Struggle for Peoples Power: From Protest and Mobilization to Community Organizing

xolel a mangcu

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2 8 0 | t h e g o o d s o c i e t y | vol. 21, no. 2

Nxele led 20,000 men to a war against the British in the small town of Grahamstown. Thousands were killed and Nxele was incarcerated on Robben Island, where he died. Peires argues that, their differences notwith-standing, their attraction to their respective followers lay in their power to reinterpret a world which had suddenly become incomprehensible. They are giants because they transcend the specifics to symbolize the opposite poles of Xhosa response to Christianity and the West: Nxele representing struggle, Ntsikana submission.3

These two individuals lay the contours of a continuing conflict between what can be described as conservative and radical modernizers.4 Conservative modernizers accepted European modernity as a God-bestowed blessing on the heathen Africans. They denounced African cultural tradi-tions and even in their politics were careful not to disturb the apple-cart of European civilization. One of the most influential and yet controversial of these conservative modernizers was John Tengo Jabavu (18591921), a teacher and a preacher who later became a community leader. He established the influential newspaper Imvo Zabantsundu and was one of the movers behind the establishment of the University of Fort Hare as the first university for black students. Jabavu was controversial not only for his dependence and appeasement of his white financiers but also for his support for the notori-ous Land Act of 1913, which dispossessed black people of their lands. The Act apportioned only 13 percent of the land to black people and allocated the remaining 87 percent to whites.

Despite opposition from radical modernizers such as WB Rubusana, Sol Plaatje, SEK Mqhayi, who jointly established their own rival newspa-per, Izwi Labantu, the conservative modernizers became more influential in shaping the course of oppositional politics in South Africa. Having stud-ied under Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute, they came back to establish the South African National Native Congress, later renamed the African National Congress in 1923. One of the more radical modernizers, WB Rubusana, was at the founding of the ANC, with W.E.B Du Bois at the Pan African Congress in London in 1911, and also the firstand the lastAfrican to run for parliament in the then Cape parliament, which at the time allowed for African representation under a qualified franchise. The franchise was later abolished and blacks were removed from the voters roll in 1936.

As Masilela points out, Booker Ts protgs were not prepared to give over their right to lead Africans to a bunch of radicals with radical and Garvey-ist and even socialist leanings. John Langalibalele Dubea

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mangcu | African Modernity and the Struggle for Peoples Power | 2 8 1

conservative modernizer, a former student of Booker T and the first president of the ANCexpressed his lack of faith in a radical approach when he pleaded to the government in 1926 as follows:

Unless there is a radical change soon [regarding the grievances of the Africans] herein lies fertile ground for hot-headed agitators among us natives, who might prove to be a bigger menace to this country than is generally realized. Let us all labour to forestall them: that is my purpose in life, even if I have to labour single-handed.5

While conservative modernizers dominated the African National Congress for the first half of the twentieth century, the radical modern-izers came into the ascendancy in the mid 1940s with the formation of the African National Congress Youth League under the leadership of AP Mda, Anton Lembede, Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu and Robert Sobukwe. Sobukwe later broke from the ANC completely to form the Pan Africanist Congress which was even more radical in its demands for the return of the land to black people. The Pan Africanists felt that by adopting the Freedom Charter, a document which stated that the land belonged to both blacks and whites, the ANC had lost its claim to be the custodian of African nationalism. Under the leadership of Robert Sobukwe, the Pan African Congress (PAC) set the figure of 100,000 as the target for membership. Seeking to take the initia-tive from the ANC, the PAC led a countrywide anti-pass campaign, culminating in the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960. The government banned the PAC before it could realize its membership target.

These ideological differences notwithstanding, both the conservative and radical modernizers still held on to the talented tenth notion of leadership. The idea of community organizing as the basis of building peoples power did not enter the political imagination until the emergence of Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) in the 1970s.

Through Bikos leadership the BCM in South Africa differentiated itself from the older liberation movements such as the ANC and the PAC in the way it related to communities. The movement eschewed the racialistic appeals that were coming from certain sectors of the PAC

Ideological

differences

notwithstanding,

both the

conservative and

radical modernizers

still held on to

the talented

tenth notion of

leadership.

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about driving whites to the sea or the racial nativism that would come to characterize South African politics under Thabo Mbeki, where every criticism was characterized as racist (if you were white) and reactionary (if you were black), leading to a host of conspiracy theories and denial about HIV/AIDS and corruption.6

Biko offered a political definition of Black Consciousness that drew Africans, Coloured, and Indians together as a collective movement for liberation. And he always made it a point that the struggle was for a non-racial democracy based on what he called the joint culture of black and white people, constructed out of the hybridity of their respective cultures, we have whites here who are descended from Europe. We dont dispute that. But for Gods sake it must have African experience as well.7 Biko also insisted that black people could not effectively participate as equals in that process as long as they had internalized notions of inferiority. Consciousness raising in the black community thus became the move-ments praxis.

While the ANC and PACs strategy was that of political mobilization, the BCM pursued the path of community organizing by linking the political struggle to peoples everyday practical concerns. While mobilization tends to emphasise inflammatory mass appeals to large numbers of people, com-munity organizing emphasises changing peoples consciousness and improv-ing their civic capacities for collective problem solving. While mobilization easily leads to the objectification of people, and a Schumpetarian conception of democracy as nothing more than support for leaders and political parties, organizing focuses on the subjective consciousness of citizens so they can take their fate into their own hands. In this volume Harry Boyte describes how mobilization leads to a politics of polarisation and consumerism. He cites candidate Barack Obamas critique of the mass mobilization approach to the community: most community organizing groups practice . . . a con-sumer advocacy approach, with a focus on wrestling services and resources from the outside powers that be, few are thinking of harnessing the internal productive capacities . . . that exist in communities.8

In the next section I describe the Black Consciousness experience with community organizing. I show that the Black Consciousness Movement was a populist movement to the extent that it relied on peoples cultural and community resources for the resolution of social problems. I argue that the transition from community organizing in the 1970s to mass mobilization in the 1980s and what I have described as technocratic creep in the 1990s was a setback for the cause of popular democracy in South Africa, and ultimately

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led to the same consumerist culture described by candidate Obama above.9 However, these developments are not inconsistent with the historical trajec-tory of elite suspicion for the masses discussed above.

The Black Consciousness Movement: An Experiment in Community Organizing

South Africas Black Consciousness Movement was born at the heyday of radical student politics around the world. The movement was occasioned by a sense among black students at higher education institutions that they needed to have a greater say in the direction of the struggle. At the time of its formation in the late 1960s both the ANC and the PAC were banned. The only oppositional voices were those of white liberal individuals such as opposition parliamentarian Helen Suzman and the predominantly white National Union of South African Students. However, several incidents led black students to question their secondary role in what was essentially their struggle. Steve Biko captured the essence of the need for a more indepen-dent, blacks-only student movement: I am against the superior-inferior stratification that makes the white a perpetual teacher and the black the perpetual pupil (and a poor one at that). I am against intellectual arrogance of white people that makes them believe that white leadership is a sine qua non in this country and that whites are the divinely appointed pace-setters in progress.10 He then defined the new philosophy of Black Consciousness as an attempt by blacks to infuse the black community with a new-found pride in themselves, their efforts, their value systems, their culture, their religion, their outlook to life.11

The rest is history. The movement spread like a wildfire throughout the townships of South Africa, and Steve Biko became a truly household name and national leader after his testimony as a defence witness at the South African Students Organization and Black Peoples Convention (SASO/BPC) trialthe first major trial of its kind since Nelson Mandela and his comrades were sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island in 1964. Despite various attempts by the ANC to claim the June 16, 1976 as its making, it was in reality the high water mark in the politics of Black Consciousness. According to Biko:

the response of the students then was in terms of their pride. They were not prepared to be calmed down even at the point of a gun. And

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hence what happened, happened. Some people were killed. These riots continued and continued. Because at no stage were the young studentsnor for that matter at some stage their parentsprepared to be scared.12

The sociologist Dan OMeara wrote that, Soweto regenerated a deep sense of pride in much of the black population. It was a key catalyst of the psycho-logical liberation which the Black Consciousness Movement had worked so hard to produce.13

For Biko the consciousness raising had to transcend the environs of the ivory tower into the community. Thus he posed the question of what was to be done next, and answered it by saying, there is a lot of community work to be done.14 After a tour of various black campuses he noted that, the students realize that the isolation of the black intelligentsia from the rest of the black society is a disadvantage to black people as a whole.15 And so it was that the activist-intellectuals of the Black Consciousness Movement put their efforts into forming the Black Community Programmes (BCP) in 1971. Already the students had been conducting community work conducting literacy and health programmes in poor communities. The focus on health projects may have been a result of the fact that the fulcrum of their lead-ership was based at the University of Natal medical school where Biko, Aubrey Mokoape, Mamphela Ramphela and many others were studying. As the programs grew in number and volume they were shifted into the BCP. The BCP benefited greatly from its association with the Study Project on Christianity in An Apartheid Society (SPROCAS) run by radical Afrikaner cleric Beyers Naudes Christian Institute. Biko had prevailed on the director of SPROCAS development programmes, Ben Khoapa, who assisted BCP by utilizing the donor funding that SPROCAS received to help the BCP run its programmes. This served both parties well since SPROCASs funders insisted on an action dimension to its work and since BCP was doing the work but needed the funding.

Asked to reflect on the community development work that the students were undertaking, Biko observed that, the universities were putting out no useful leadership to the black people because everybody found it more com-fortable to lose himself in a particular profession, to make money. But since those days, black students have seen their role as being primarily to prepare themselves for leadership roles in the various facets of the black community.16

There was a political dimension to the community development work as well. According to the director of the Black Community Programmes in the

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Transkei the idea was to give people a sense of ownership of their assets or projects, and this led to a greater preparedness on the part of communities to protect those assets and projects when the police moved in to demolish them. In my township of Ginsbergwhich is also Bikos townshipthe community rallied around him because of the material difference that the projects had brought to the community. More important is that the manner in which the projects were implemented was empowering to the people. Here is how he explained his development philosophy of self-reliance:

We believe that black people, as they rub shoulders with the particular project, as they benefit from that project, with their perception of it, begin to ask themselves questions and we surely believe that they are going to give themselves answers. They understand, you know, that this kind of lesson has been a lesson for me, I must have hope. In most of the projects we tend to pass over the maintenance to the community.17

I now turn to a description of some of the projects before I point to the difference between this kind of consciousness raising and what happened under the mass mobilization of the 1980s and the technocratic creep of the 1990s and onwards.

The Black Community Programmes: Experiences in Community Organizing Projects18

Health and Welfare

After he was banished to Ginsberg by the apartheid government Biko expressed a great desire to utilize his skills and networks for the benefit of the community. One of the things he wanted to do was to continue with the public health work he had initiated when he was still in SASO. How-ever, he found that for fear of the police very few of the local chiefs who presided over rural land were prepared to sell or lease to the BCP the land it needed to build a health clinic. So he asked the prominent composer Bka T Tyamzashe to approach the Anglican Church for sale of a piece of land located between two large rural settlementsZinyoka Valley and Balasia few kilometres outside King Williams Town. However, there was the addi-tional problem of access to water. Biko then entered into an agreement with Tyamzashewho had a large farm nearbyto have a borehole put in the farm. The clinic was started at the beginning of 1975 and for the first time

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provided free healthcare facilities to communities that had been traveling miles to pay for healthcare in the racist hospitals of nearby King Williams Town. When the Black Consciousness Movement was banned in 1977 the director of the clinic and Bikos lover Mamphela Ramphele was banished to her remote rural village in what is now the province of Limpopo, where she replicated the Zanempilo Clinic model. A similar clinic, Solempilo (which is Xhosa for watching over a communitys health), was established outside of Durban. According to Ramphele, [Zanempilo] clinic could be said to be one of the earliest primary health care projects in South Africa.19 Ramphele later became the first black Vice Chancellor of the University of Cape Town and, later, a Managing Director at the World Bank.

The BCP also provided day-care centres in urban areas, enabling more members of poor families to either go to school or work. This is how Biko explained the rationale behind the crche in our community in Ginsberg:

For instance where I stay in King Williams Town we revived a commu-nity crche, which was serving a basic need for the community in that a number of mothers could not go to work because they had to look after their babies and toddlers. Or if they go to work it implies that kids who are supposed to be school-going must stay behind looking after the toddlers. So that it became clear to us that this was a strong com-munity need to provide a crche to that community. And we revived a crche which I attended actually when I was young . . . but it had gone defunct . . . we call it the Ginsberg Creche. 20

Home Industries

The BCP established home industries in the Eastern Cape province to offer means of economic assistance to destitute communities. The home indus-tries manufactured leather goods and cloth garments employing fifty peo-ple in 1974. Seventy more people were employed by projects of the Border Council of Churches, a close collaborator with the BCP. The leather indus-tries were producing belts, purses, hand-bags and upholstery. Women who would ordinarily remain unemployed were brought together and taught sewing skills and encouraged to produce articles for which they were paid according to their production. The BCP subsidized the purchase of materi-als and machines. By 1975 the home industries were approaching the stage where they would not need subsidies anymore, except for expansion. The

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most celebrated of these projects was at Njwaxa, a rural village. One of the first people to work in that project is an elderly lady who goes by the name, No-Fence. She remembers Bikos contribution to the empowerment of peo-ple there as follows, He worked with meuneducated as I am. I was doing the beadworkI was the main person here when it came to bead work . . . Then one day he said No-Fence, lets get a second person to help you with the load of work. Thats how Ntombomhlaba got a job here. There were others such as Mncedisi Xaphe, Esther Mpupha, Nolulamile Mpupha and Ntombomhlaba James who also got jobs here because of that young man.21

Community Trust Funds

A self-tax fund received money from middle class and wealthier supporters of the BCP. These people would impose a tax upon themselves which would be held in trust for the benefit of the community. An additional trust fund, the Zimele Trust Fund, was established with international sup-port to primarily take care of recently released political prisoners and their families. These people were employed in the industries and scholarships provided for their children. The director of the trust fund, Ray Curry, had just deposited R50,000 on exactly the same day that the police banned all Black Consciousness organizations.

Womens Development Issues

In 1975 over 200 women from 58 townships throughout the country met in Durban and committed themselves to work together to attain self-reliance and independence as black women. The meeting founded the Black Womens Federation of South Africa. The organizations constitution stated that the organization would, determine and draw up programmes with a view to heightening the social, cultural, economic and political awareness of black communities and thereby establish self-reliant communities. During its first meeting the Federation resolved to motivate member organizations to undertake projects of self-help to meet the needs of deprived communities.

The Black Workers Project (BWP)

At its third General Council in July 1972, SASO had passed a resolution to form the Black Workers Project to organize black workers into unions. Black Consciousness leaders Mthuli kaSheziwho was killed when a white

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railway worker pushed him in front of a moving trainand Bokwe Mafuna organized weekly lectures on trade unionism and industrial legislation. They opened a reference library covering wages and working conditions at the BWP offices in Johannesburg. Consequently, the Black Allied Workers Union (BAWU) was established on August 27, 1972 in Soweto. BCM activ-ists were actively involved in the famous dockworkers strike in Durban in 1972. This strike had a demonstrative effect on other workers in the country. Increasingly black workers started to organize themselves around the issue of trade union recognition. Through constant agitation the government was forced to make concessions such as the formation of workers councils and, in a landmark change, recognition of trade union rights in 1979 under the Wiehahn Commission. Throughout the 1980s the trade union movement was to grow at a rate Biko and his peers might not have imagined, becom-ing, in fact, a leading force in the struggle for political change.

The Black Press Commission

In July 1972 Biko and his colleagues in the South African Students Organi-zation adopted a resolution calling for a seminar on The Role of the Black Press in South Africa. This conference, held on October 9 and 10, 1972, in Johannesburg, established The Black Press Commission. The commission was charged with establishing a monthly newspaper, a printing house, a publishing house, and a distribution arm for the paper. Since 1970 SASO had been publishing a newsletter and it also launched a book, Creativity and Development. Other publications included Essays on Black Theology, Black Viewpoint, and Black Perspectives. These were under the Research and Publications Department of the Black Community Programmes. In 1975 the mandate of this department was broadened to establishing resource centres throughout the country. In 1975 the Institute for Black Research was formed to train researchers and stimulate writing in the black com-munity, undertake surveys on community issues and compile, publish and distribute books, monographs and journals. The Institute of Black Studies provided a forum for discussion in the community.

Leadership Formation Schools

The BCP organized leadership formation schools on an annual basis. Here people were not only taught the substantive philosophical content of Black Consciousness but also seemingly mundane things such as organizational

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development, administration, financial and human resource management. They were also trained in public speaking and community education using Paolo Freires method of conscientization. Here is how Barney Pityana sums up the leadership legacy of Black Consciousness, worth quoting at length because of the departure from the Black Consciousness tradition when the ANC technocrats took over in the transition to democracy in 1994:

Black Consciousness has made sure that black South Africa is never without its own leadership. During Bikos time many people were trained and had experience of leadership, planning, strategizing, and mobiliz-ing and yet drew closer to the masses of the people in their suffering and pain and frustrations. . . . When Black Consciousness emerged, leader-ship had become remote and ideas seemed to owe more to the guilty conscience of white liberal establishment than to the concrete experi-ence of the oppressed people themselves. Prior to that there had been leadership of a more traditional, one-man, individualistic kind. Biko spread the net so that leadership could come from many sources.22

When The Movement Died

In 1977 the government clamped down and banned all black consciousness organizations. This was shortly after its founding father and spirit Steve Biko had been killed. The entire leadership was either jailed or banned. It was to be the end of arguably the most creative era in black politicsparticularly the fusing of political and community organizing that the movement initiated. One of the publications of the movement observed that despite the bannings and the killings the movement had created an environment for objective reflection, thus the movement towards devel-opment in the community has just begun.23

What followed was a new dynamic of mass mobilization.

From Community Organizing to Mass Mobilization

In his reflections on grassroots movements in Latin America, Albert Hirschman makes the observation that, the social energies that are aroused in the course of a social movement do not disappear when that movement does, but are kept in storage and become available to fuel later and sometimes different social movements. In a real sense, the original movement must

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therefore be credited with whatever advances or successes were achieved by those subsequent movements: no longer can it be considered a failure.24 Hirschman described this dynamic as The Principle of the Preservation and Mutation of Social Energies. Indeed, as had been the case after the banning of the ANC and PAC, the banning of the Black Consciousness Movement was followed by an immediate upsurge of new leadership and the formation of the Azanian People's Organization in 1978, just a year after the 1977 crack-down. As with the 1960 bannings, the 1977 bannings quickened the introduc-tion of new directions and emphases in the struggle.

Hirschmans observation notwithstanding, the shift from community organizing to mass mobilization had unfortunate consequences. Dan OMeara argues that the lesson from the demise of black consciousness is two-sided. On the one hand it signified the importance of consciousness raising as the basis of political action, leading ultimately to the transfigura-tion of black politics in the 1980s. However, OMeara argues that the poli-tics of the Soweto generation was voluntaristic, maximalist, and profoundly militaristic . . . and significantly contributing to the culture of violence after February 1990.25

I would predate the culture of violence to the 1980s, when black people killed each other like flies, because they differed on methods of struggle. But I would attribute much of the violence to the brutalization of black youth by the police in the 1980s. If the action of the students were voluntaristic that probably had more to do with the card that they were dealt by the mili-tarism of the government. By the end of the 1980s violence had become the permanent arbiter of political discourse.26 And of course one of the great losses in the transition to democracy was the language of community and agency, the hallmark of Black Consciousness. Biko and his peers strongly believed that the people were the makers of their own destiny, but this had to start with the people taking ownership of community development proj-ects as part and parcel of their own social and political empowerment.

Both hardline Marxist critics and more sympathetic critics such as Saleem Badat have also criticized the Black Consciousness Movement for adopting a voluntaristic approach to the community development work. Badat thus dismisses the notion that the projects were an example of patient organizing:

First, project after project was adopted willy-nilly without any attempt to prioritize in terms of political objectives, strategy and resources.

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Second SASO was completely unrealistic about its ability to run some of its projects. Third, it also seriously underestimated what the projects would entail in practice.27

But that is precisely the reason that the students shifted the projects to the Black Community Programmes, where people like Biko, now no lon-ger a student, worked on them on a full-time basis. Badat concedes that what characterized Bikos approach was a theory of action that responded to peoples lived experience, for Biko there had to be some agitation . . . action rather than sophisticated theory and detailed social analysis . . . was more urgent and important.28 Biko put it this way, it doesnt matter if the action does not take a fully directed form immediately, or a fully supported form.29

However by the 1980s the language of consciousness raising and commu-nity action was replaced by an economistic language of class and socialism by the Azanian Peoples Organization, the very organization that was set up to continue the Black Consciousness tradition. To be sure the call for Black Consciousness to embrace a class approach had its roots in and around 1976 when people like SASO president Diliza Mji became critical of the exclusive focus on race and national issues. This critique was carried forward into the 1980s particularly through the umbrella of left-wing organizations called the National Forum. The struggle was now redefined as a fight against racial capitalism to be led by the black working class on the factory floor. Whereas the Black Consciousness Movement of the 1970s had, in a classical popu-list sense, concentrated on practical strategies of community development by calling on peoples cultural resources, the black consciousness move-ment of the 1980s became lost in Marxist polemics. Various splinter groups emerged, some claiming to be more Marxist than others. Lybon Mabasa led a break-away body called the Socialist Party of Azania, and Nkosi Molala founded the Black Peoples Conventionwith hardly the commitment to community action that had characterised the original BPC.

Impatient with the steady pace and institution-building of the 1970's and with what they saw as AZAPOs intellectualizing, the young lions of the 1980's brought a dizzying urgency to the situation. Seeking to make the coun-try ungovernable, this generation's emphasis was more on mobilization of the masses than on organization and institution building. This included the mobilization of communities against local, black, puppet authorities that had been set up by apartheid government as dummy institutions for black

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political representation at the local level. These institutions were set up as part of the newly-elected Prime Minister PW Bothas attempt to appease the international community and the black community in the wake of the uprisings of 1976 and 1977.

Populism as a Keyword in the Transition to Democracy

A protracted process of negotiations led up to the first democratic elections in 1994. During this time the term populism re-emerged in our lexicon as a means of disciplining the masses from making unreasonable demands, part of what Raymond Williams would call keywords or formations of meanings. These are indicative of ways of seeing the world and interpret-ing our experiences, and by that very definition are always loaded with political meanings, reposed more in the political world of values than in the dictionary. Williams noted that impersonal as the dictionary appeared it was indeed not so impersonal, anyone who reads Dr. Johnsons great Dictionary soon becomes aware of his active and partisan mind . . . I believe that this is inevitable and all I am saying is that the air of massive imperson-ality which the Oxford Dictionary communicates is not so impersonal, so purely scholarly or so free of active social and political values as might be supposed from its occasional use.

Populism emerged as part of a cluster of value-laden terms that were indicative of how we were supposed to respond to the compromises of the negotiated transition. Accompanying words were pragmatic, reasonable, rational, reconciliation; in this context populist was used with negative connotations. This cluster of words was however not limited to the negotia-tions process but was soon institutionalized into the language of govern-ment and provided the underpinnings for the kind of neoliberal public policies the government adopted. We were told that it was not practical or pragmatic to expect government to consult with the people before making decisions. ANC members were told that the people could not be trusted to elect their own provincial premiers because Thabo Mbeki was not pre-pared to give such responsibility to the populists. The converse of this was that governance was the province of the technocrats who would efficiently deliver services to the people. It is in that context that one of the most unfortunate keywords of the democratic eraservice deliveryemerged. It was a matter of time before people were reduced to empirical objects of gov-ernment policy, not citizens who participate in the sovereignty of the state.30

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Association of Populism with Jacob Zuma

Ideological deployment of the term populism reached its high water mark when a man who had never seen the inside of a classroom, Jacob Zuma, presumed to challenge the highly articulate graduate of Sussex University Thabo Mbeki for the leadership of the ANC. What calumny, Mbekis sup-porters asked? After all, this had never happened in the history of African modernity. The ensuing debates were thus a modern day replay of the nineteenth century social and cultural wars between those who accepted (amakholwa) and those who rejected (amaqaba) Western civilization. On Zumas cultural backwardness was superimposed a political argument that he was not fit to govern.31 While no doubt Zuma is a deeply flawed individual, many analysts thought he would lose to Thabo Mbeki on that basis. In fact the respected African scholar Achille Mbembe suggested that Zuma was leading a millenarian movement, likening Zumas followers to the Xhosa people who followed the young prophetess, Nongqause, who urged them to kill their cattle and burn their fields in anticipation of a bet-ter life. Mbembe compared Zumas popularity to that of a primitive religion, a fundamental phenomenon of primitive religion is to bring mass hysteria to a high pitch and to hurl the spirit of the mob onto one totemic individual who is then turned into a surrogate victim. The subtitle of Mbembes article read as follows, a dozen years after the end of apartheid, a dangerous mix of populism, nativism and millenarian thinking is inviting South Africans to commit political suicide.32

Mbembe thus reduced politics to the realm of the metaphysical. In Mbembes framework politics is reduced to a Manichean game where, on the one hand, is a uniform delusional mob defending Zuma, and on the other, a rational mob defending Mbeki. As I noted in Business Day, a lead-ing national newspaper, if you scratch the surface there is enough rational and mob mentality all around the ANC, and in life in general.33

Business Day soon was a venue for a fierce public debate about the meaning of populism. Thus I challenged the conflation of populism with millerarian movements in South African public discourse:

Would our writers, commentators, activists and politicians please stop misusing the term populism. I am amazed by how much of the political analysis of Jacob Zuma hangs on a mischaracterization of populism as mob rule. Populism is one of the finest traditions in democracy, based on the struggles of small men and women in farmers co- operatives

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against big business and political oligarchs in the 19th century. One of the worlds leading authors on populism Lawrence Goodwyn argues that the very experience of existing as members of farmers co- operatives required a deliberative culture: populists would not fear that people, once encouraged to be really candid with one another, would promptly want the moon and ask for too much.34

Goodwyn was making a point about the rationality of everyday people that Karl Marx had also observed in 1844 in reaction to the revolt of backward German weavers against bankers and industrialists. He wrote mockingly of the German elite, the cleverness of the German poor stands in inverse ratio to that of the poor Germans.35

I concluded by arguing that, SAs problem is not populism, which is to be properly understood as the creation of a popular democracy, but what Hannah Arendt described as ochlocracywhich is when democracy morphs into mob rule as happened in Germany or fascist Italy. In response, Mbekis Minister of Education, the late Kader Asmal, ripped into me, seeking to keep the populists at bay:

Is there to be no end to the ceaseless preciousness of Xolela Mangcu? In his recent column on the mean-ing of populism, he lectures all of us as to the real meaning ofthe word and threatens to shriek if any-one uses populism to mean anything other than popular democracy, standing up for ordinary peo-ple. The great vitality of the English language is the way usage changes, whatever Mangcus professors say. The Cambridge Encyclopedia refers to the way

populist reaction seeks to regain authority over events beyond the power of people and which is blamed on some conspiracy of foreign-ers, ethnic group or economic group or intellectuals. In other words the wronged outsiders seek either some form of participation or revenge or redemption.36

Asmals argument tells us something about the extent to which conservative elites have been successful in redefining the concept of populism to subvert its radical democratic origins. The question is what shall it take to regain that lost ground?

Conservative

elites have

been successful

in redefining

the concept

of populism

to subvert

its radical

democratic

origins.

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Towards A Usable Past: The Potential Role of the National Planning Commission

Over the last year, the launch of the National Development Plan, orga-nized by the National Planning Commission headed by Trevor Manuel, has proven a venue for continuing this debate. The plan identifies a number of strategic policy areas for South Africa to focus on in the next twenty years: job creation, education, spatial integration, energy development, infra-structure development, crime etc. I participated in this event, and objected to the absence of two words in Manuels presentationinstitutions and culture. While Manuel defended himself and the commission on the atten-tion they had paid to institutions, he conceded that the commission had not paid any attention to culture.

This is a telling omission. From the nineteenth century Romantic move-ment to the Populist farmers and workers of the 1880s and 1930s to com-munity organizing in the late twentieth centuryculture making has been seen as an essential component of what it means to be human. Culture is what gives us meaning and the capacity to act on the world, instead of being passive spectators and victims of what happens around us. Thus Boyte in this volume describes human agents as storytellers and meaning makers.37 It is those storieswhether from family or community lorethat fire the imagination and impel people to action. Culture helps people not only sur-vive but collectively chart new pathways of development. Its degradation blocks imaginative ways of thinking about those pathways. In his essay, Luke Bretherton, describes how cultural movements such as the Populists are an example of what Polanyi calls the double-movement-society pro-tecting itself from the vicissitudes of laissez faire capitalism, and its degra-dation led to disempowerment and ultimate destruction of communities:

not economic exploitation as often assumed, but the disintegration of the cultural environment of the victim is then the cause of the degra-dation. The economic process may, naturally supply the vehicle of the destruction, and almost invariable economic inferiority will make the weaker yield, but the immediate cause of his undoing is not for that rea-son economic; it lies in the lethal injury to the institutions in which his existence is embodied. The result is a loss of self-respect, and standards, whether the unit is a people or a class. . . . 38

Life in a cultural void, Polanyi observed, is no life at all.39 Steve Biko captured the same sentiment when he said, material poverty is bad

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enough, coupled with spiritual poverty, it kills.40 Cornel West similarly argued that, people, especially poor and degraded people, are also hungry for meaning, identity and self-worth.41

When people are forced to pursue development goals that do not fulfill them spiritually and to which they cannot relate culturally, then they simply go through the motions without any enthusiasm for the work at hand or any emotional investment in the development of their community. In South Africa the government built millions of atrocious houses for the poor, which the poor have since abandoned. About 87 percent of the housing stock was found to be faulty. Though the language of housing has changed to liveable communities and the name of the department of housing has changed to the Department of Human Settlements, it remains to be seen whether the most critical element of what it means to be humancultural makingwill be part of the actual housing programmes.

There is a general sense of alienation by young people in the affairs of the country that is quite unlike the historical trajectory of the 1970s when young people held their fateand the fate of the country in their hands. Through anecdotal and empirical evidence one sees a growth of peoples movements, youth organizations and young people in general harkening for the themes of Black Consciousness, albeit within a democratic, non-racial setting. It is the duty of those who were involved in the cultural creativ-ity of that eraincluding people like Trevor Manuel and Cyril Ramaphosa (the deputy chairperson of the commission)to use such institutions as the Planning Commission as an instrument for retrieving the relevant parts of that experience as part of our usable past, as inspiration for collective self-reliance in our communities.

The question of course is what political nature would such move-ments take. Luke Bretherton makes a distinction between political and anti-political Populism in the United States.42 Political Populism attends to issues of power, including questions of who has the prerogative to decide about the life of the community. In anti-political populism, on the other hand, the throwing off of established authority is a prelude to the giving of authority to the one and the giving up of responsibility for the many.43 In some ways this is what happened in South Africa in the transition to democracy. The throwing off of authority structures became a mere replacement of one type of authority for another without the public engagement that democracy requires. It could be argued that this is in keeping with more than a hundred years of elite prerogative to

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rule that I discussed in the first part of the paper. Leaving the discussion at that would succumb to path dependence without acknowledging the breaks from established black elite authority that took place with the Black Consciousness Movement and to some extent the civic movements of the 1980s.

Towards A Politics of Community-Based Knowledge and Cultural Production

While a student at Cornell University in 1994 I was asked a question by Martin Bernal about the technocratic leap Back to the Future that South Africa was taking: Why is South Africa leap-frogging way back into the 1950s as if the 1970s never happened? Bernal was right. The throwing off of authority structures was not only just a replacement of one authority structure by another but also the retention of the technocratic knowledge system upon which the political and cultural system was also founded. It was a matter of old wine in new bottles.44

Political Populism properly understood as popular democracy with com-munity organizing as its organizational and political core requires a deep engagement with notions of modernity and who belongs in that modernity. Those are cultural questions upon whose resolution the political and devel-opmental trajectory of the country depends.

The question is whether we return to the conservative, anti-political modernity of the early ANC, the radical mobilization of the 1950s and 1980sor the radical democratic and participatory politics of the 1970s. The choice is clear if the goal is that of creating a more participatory democ-racy built on strong community foundations. This requires a departure from the over-reliance on big leaders and their technocratic solutions that has characterized South African society both pre and post-apartheid.45

Xolela Mangcu is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Cape Town and author of Biko: A Biography. A graduate of Cornell University he returned to South Africa to become one of the country's leading pub-lic intellectuals. The Sunday Times, South Africas largest newspaper, has described Mangcu as possibly the most prolific public intellectual in South Africa.

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NOTES1. Ntongela Masilela (2000), interview with Sandile Ngidi, unpublished manu-

script. See also Catherine Higgs, The Ghost of Equality: The Public Lives of DDT Jabavu of South Africa, 18851959 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1996); and Bheki Peterson, Of Missionaries, Intellectuals and Prophets (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2006).

2. For a critical review of Du Bois Victorian conception of leadership see Cornel West, Black Strivings in A Twilight Civilization, in The Future of the Race ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr and Cornel West (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).

3. Jeff Peires, The House of Phalo (Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 1981), 73744. Masilela, op.cit.5. Gail Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: the Evolution of An Ideology ( London:

University of California Press, 1978), 48.6. For further discussion of Mbekis racial nativism see Xolela Mangcu, To

the Brink, The State of Democracy in South Africa (Pietermaritzburg: University of Kwazulu-Natal Press, 2008).

7. Steve Biko, I Write What I Like (Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 1978), 148.8. Harry Boyte, PopulismBringing Culture Back In, The Good Society, 21:1

(2012).9. I use candidate Obama to signal what Boyte describes as a shift from the lan-

guage of we that Obama used in the campaign to the language of I in government.10. Biko, 26.11. Ibid., 53.12. Ibid., 165.13. Dan OMeara, Forty Lost Years (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1996), 181.14. Biko.15. Ibid., 19.16. Ibid., 164.17. Millard Arnold, The Testimony of Steve Biko (London: Maurice Temple Smith,

1978), 94.18. For a fuller description of these projects and the sources see Xolela Mangcu,

Social Movements and City Planning, Cornell Working Papers in Planning (Ithaca, New York, 1993).

19. Barney Pityana, Mamphela Ramphele, Malusi Mpumlwana, and Lindy Wilson, Bounds of Possibility (Harare; SAPES Trust, 1991), 164.

20. Millard Arnold, op cit.21. Interview conducted for my forthcoming, Biko: The Biography (Cape Town:

Tafelberg Press, 2012).22. Pityana, 256.23. Mangcu, 1993.24. Albert O Hirschmann, Getting Ahead Collectively: Grassroots Experiences in

Latin America (New York: Pentagon Press, 1984), 5556.25. OMeara, 181.26. Xolela Mangcu, The Rule of the Thug: Without a Tolerant Political

Consciousness We Might As Well Kiss This Democracy Project Goodbye, Sunday Times, May 6, 2012.

27. Saleem Badat, Black Man, You Are On Your Own (Johannesburg: Steve Biko Foundation and STE Publishers, 2009), 101.

28. Saleem Badat, Black Man You Are On Your Own, 100.

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29. Gerhart, 28889.30. See the work of Partha Chaterjee.31. This argument is further developed in my book, The Democratic Moment: South

Africas Prospects Under Jacob Zuma (Jacana Press, 2009).32. Achille Mbembe, South Africas Second Coming: The Nongqawuse Syn-

drome, Open Democracy Essays, June 14, 2006.33. Xolela Mangcu, Challenge is to Look Beyond Crude Dichotomies, Business

Day, October 2, 2008.34. Xolela Mangcu, Populism Gets Short End of the Stick Again, Business Day,

December 6, 2007.35. Karl Marx, cited in Nigel Gibson, Fanonian Practices in South Africa: From

Steve Biko to AbahlaliBasemjondolo (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu Natal Press, 2011), 127.

36. Kader Asmal, Stop it, Precious, Business Day, December 6, 2007.37. Harry C. Boyte, PopulismBringing Culture Back In, The Good Society 21:2

(2012).38. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, The Political and Economic Origins of

Our Times (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944), 15758.39. Ibid.40. Biko.41. Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).42. Luke Bretherton, The Political Populism of Broad Based Organizing, The

Good Society 21:2 (2012).43. Bretherton, XX.44. In 2011 City Press newspaper carried a debate between Pallo Jordan and me

about the extent to which the ANC yielded the writing of its policies to liberal and some-times conservative white consultants and academics because it was simply not equipped with the expertise or not ready to reach out to those who did in the black community because of ideological differences.

45. This theme is further taken up in a book manuscript, Beyond Personalities, Towards Institutions that explores the imperative of institution building as the basis for a more enduring democracy.

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