The uses of the comparative imagination: South African history and world history in the political consciousness and strategy of the South African left, 1943-1959

Radical History Review

Volumn 92, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 31-61

  Lee, Christopher Joon Hai ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 77949721133     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: 15341453     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2005-92-31     Document Type: Article

References (113)

1. University of Cape Town Archives (hereafter, UCT Archives), BC 925, UMSA/Tabata Collection, Anti-CAD Bulletin, March 27, 1943.
2. Ibid.
3. The term Coloured refers to persons of multiracial background. It holds sway primarily in the Western Cape, where 53.9 percent of the total population, according to a 2003 estimate, ostensibly falls under this term.
4. Baruch Hirson, "A Short History of the Non-European Unity Movement: An Insider's View," Searchlight South Africa, no. 12 (1995): 65.
5. See, for example, Clifton C. Crais, The Politics of Evil: Magic, State Power, and the Political Imagination in Soutli Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
6. For a recent examination of oral history and social discourse, although local in its uses and meaning, see, for example, Luise White, Stephan F. Miescher, and David William Cohen, eds., African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).
7. UCT Archives, BC 925, UMSA/Tabata Collection, Anti-CAD Bulletin, April 27, 1943. For translation terms, see James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 39.
8. The designations NEUM and Unity Movement ate used interchangeably. Bill Nasson, "The Unity Movement Tradition: Its Legacy in Historical Consciousness," Radical History Review, no. 46/47 (1990): 189-211. The republished version, with its page numbers cited in subsequent footnotes here, is Bill Nasson, "The Unity Movement Tradition: Its Legacy in Historical Consciousness," in History from South Africa: Alternate Visions and Practices, ed. Joshua Brown et al. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). For a separate study of the Unity Movement's influence, see also Christopher Saunders, The Making of the South African Past: Major Historians on Race and Class (Cape Town: David Philip, 1988), 135-38.
9. See Crais, Politics of Evil. I should note here that, due to limitations of space, I will focus primarily on the Anti-CAD and NEUM generally, despite the integral importance of the All African Convention and writings by its leader, I. B. Tabata.
10. For comparative history, see, for example, George M. Fredrickson, The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997);
11. Frederick Cooper, "Review Essay: Race, Ideology, and the Perils of Comparative History," American Historical Review 101 (1996): 1122-38;
12. Peter Alexander and Rick Halpern, "Introduction: Comparing Race and Labour in South Africa and the United States," Journal of Southern African Studies 30 (2004): 5-18.
13. Africa has posed a challenge, however. See Steven Feierman, "Africa in History: The End of Universal Narratives," in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 40-65;
14. Joseph C. Miller, "History and Africa/Africa and History," American Historical Review 104 (1999): 1-32.
15. The concept of contact zone comes from Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 6, 7.
16. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Gayatri Spivak has similarly called for internationalizing subaltern perspectives. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Race before Racism and the Disappearance of the American: Jack D. Forbes' Black Africans and Americans: Color, Race, and Caste in the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples," Plantation Society 3 (1993): 84, 85. For an example of the increasing influence of subaltern studies in southern African studies, see Clifton C. Crais, "Conquest, State Formation, and the Subaltern Imagination in Rural South Africa," in The Cidture of Power in Southern Africa: Essays on State Formation and the Political Imagination, ed. Crais (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003), 27-48.
17. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
18. I. C, interview by the author, District Six Museum, Cape Town, July 3, 2001. Initials used on request.
19. Gavin Lewis, Between the Wire and the Wall: A History of South African "Coloured" Politics (Claremont, South Africa: David Philip, 1987), 207-9.
20. Some disagreement does exist over the notion that the NEUM had always been nonracial in practice. See Mohamed Adhikari, "Fiercely Non-Racial? Discourses and Politics of Race in the Non-European Unity Movement, 1943-1970," Journal of Southern African Studies, forthcoming; Nasson, "The Unity Movement Tradition," 147.
21. For important studies of the Cape and Cape Town, see Vivian Bickford-Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
22. Robert Ross, Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 1750-1870: A Tragedy of Manners (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
23. For some overviews, see Ross, Status and Respectability;
24. Vivian Bickford-Smith, "Black Ethnicities, Communities, and Political Expression in Late Victorian Cape Town," Journal of African History 36 (1995): 445;
25. Mohamed Adhikari, "The Sons of Ham: Slavery and the Making of Coloured Identity," South African Historical Journal 27 (1992): 95-112.
26. Lewis, Between the Wire and the Wall, chaps. 2-6;
27. Mohamed Adhikari, "The Product of Civilization in Its Most Repellent Manifestation': Ambiguities in the Racial Perceptions of the APO (African Political Organization), 1909-23," Journal of African History 38 (1997): 283-300.
28. Tom Lodge, foreword to Baruch Hirson, The Cape Town Intellectuals: Ruth Schechter and Her Circle, 1907-1934 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2001), xii.
29. Allison Drew, Discordant Comrades: Identities and Loyalties on the South African Left (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000), 139-43, 199-219.
30. An influence here is Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).
31. "Legibility" refers to James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). The so-called Native Republic thesis debate during the 192o5 makes for the most well-known example of these tensions on the South African Left. For an overview, see Drew, Discordant Comrades, chaps. 5-7, 9.
32. - Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
33. See also Mahmood Mamdani, "When Does a Settler Become a Native? Reflections of the Colonial Roots of Citizenship in Equatorial and South Africa" (inaugural lecture, University of Cape Town, May 13, 1998).
34. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; Terence Ranger, "Africa in the Age of Extremes: The Irrelevance of African History," in Rethinking African History, ed. Simon McGrath et al. (Edinburgh: Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, 1997), 269-91.
35. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 16.
36. For an extension of his argument in this direction, see Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
37. Frederick Cooper, "Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History," American Historical Review 99 (1994): 1516-45.
38. B. M. Kies, '"The Background to Segregation,' Address Delivered to the National Anti-CAD Conference, 29 May 1943," in 1943-1964, vol. 1 of South Africa's Radical Tradition: A Documentary History, ed. Allison Drew (Cape Town: UCT Press, 1997), 54.
39. Lewis, Between the Wire and the Wall, 214.
40. Zainunnissa "Cissie" Gool was the youngest daughter of Abdullah Abdurahman, president of the APO from 1905 until his death in 1940.
41. This broader context includes the death of Abdurahman in 1940, the CPSA's virtual collapse in 1938, the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943, and the marginalization of the ANC, which only had one thousand members in 1940. See Drew, Discordant Comrades, 188, 236, 242.
42. These ten points, briefly summarized, include the rights to franchise, education, property and privacy, freedoms of speech, movement and occupation, and social equality; and revisions of land law, civil and criminal codes, taxation, and labor legislation in accordance to the first six points.
43. For an analogy, see Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 28, 33.
44. Neville Alexander, "Aspects of Non-collaboration in the Western Cape, 1943-1963," Social Dynamics 12 (1986): 1-14.
45. It should also be noted that it was published irregularly, though initially it came out weekly.
46. Lewis, Between the Wire and the Wall, 214; I. C, interview.
47. Clifford, Routes, 39.
48. UCT Archives, BC 925, UMSA/Tabata Collection, Anti-CAD Bulletin, April 5, 1943.
49. UCT Archives, BC 925, UMSA/Tabata Collection, Anti-CAD Bulletin, September 16, 1943
50. Cooper, "Review Essay."
51. UCT Archives, BC 925, UMSATabata Collection, Anti-CAD Bulletin, October 13, 1943.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. UCT Archives, BC 925, UMSATabata Collection, Anti-CAD Bulletin, October 27, 1943.
55. UCT Archives, BC 925, UMSATabata Collection, Anti-CAD Bulletin, October 13, 1943.
56. See, for example, Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982);
57. Patrick Manning, Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (New York: Palgrave, 2003).
58. Cooper, "Conflict and Connection"; Frederick Cooper, "What Is the Concept of Globalization Good For? An African Historian's Perspective," African Affairs 100, no. 399 (2001): 189-213.
59. Cooper, "Conflict and Connection," 1539.
60. UCT Archives, BC 925, UMSA/Tabata Collection, Anti-CAD Bulletin, August 16, 1944.
61. Ibid.
62. UCT Archives, BC 925, UMSA/Tabata Collection, Anti-CAD Bulletin, August 31, 1944.
63. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 118-20.
64. Ibid., 5-23 ("The Intellectuals"), 24-43 ("On Education").
65. For a recent discussion of the Van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival, see Leslie Witz, Apartheid's Festival: Contesting South Africa's National Pasts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).
66. Nasson, "The Unity Movement Tradition," 161.
67. Mnguni [Hosea Jaffe], Three Hundred Years (1952;
68. Cumberwood, South Africa: APDUSA, 1988).
69. Nosipho Majeke [Dora Taylor], The Role of the Missionaries in Conquest (1952;
70. Cumberwood, South Africa: APDUSA, 1986), 6.
71. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, 1997).
72. E. L. Maurice, "The Colour Bar in Education," in The Contribution of the Non-European Peoples to World Civilization, ed. Maurice Hommel (Braamfontein, South Africa: Skotaville, 1989), 49. For Jordaan and van Schoor, see K. A. Jordaan, "Jan van Riebeeck: His Place in South African History," in Hommel, 135-63;
73. W. P. van Schoor, "The Origin and Development of Segregation in South Africa," in Hommel, 103-33.
74. Ibid.
75. B. M. Kies, "The Contribution of the Non-European Peoples to World Civilisation" (A. J. Abrahamse Memorial Lecture, Cape Town, South Africa, September 29, 1953), 40.
76. NEUM members did continue to remain politically active, however, in new versions of the movement as well as in other organizations, and, as Nasson has pointed out, its intellectual tradition persists to this day.
77. For discussion, see Lewis, Between the Wire and the Wall, chap. 8;
78. Mary Simons, "Organised Coloured Political Movements," in Occupational and Social Change among Coloured People in South Africa, ed. Hendrik W. van der Merwe and C. J. Groenewald (Cape Town: Juta, 1976), 202-37;
79. Hosea Jaffe, "Signposts of the History of the Unity Movement" (two lectures, Department of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town, September-October 199a);
80. Hirson, "A Short History"; Alie Fataar, "Falsification of History: The Role of the Unity Movement in Liberation," African Studies Library, University of Cape Town, Pamphlet Collection, March 1999.
81. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
82. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 149. On Edwards's engagement with Anderson, see Edwards, Practice of Diaspora, 115-18.
83. James Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), xii.
84. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 16-20.
85. Though race constituted a clear element, segregation was largely predicated on ideas of ethnic and cultural difference, a Boasian logic taken to a political extreme. See Saul Dubow, Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa, 1919-36 (London: Macmillan, 1989).
86. In making these statements, I do not wish to overlook the fact that whether individuals embraced or rejected the identity, they were still profoundly affected, forced removals in the Cape Town area being among the most tangible historical effects.
87. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 6.
88. This idea proposed here can be seen as an extension of Ja?nes Clifford's notion of "discrepant cosmopolitanism." See Clifford, Routes, 36.
89. Gilroy himself recognizes this possibility. See Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 16, 39,40;
90. Paul Gilroy, "There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack": The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
91. Another work of influence in this vein is Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000).
92. See, for example, Gyan Prakash, "Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism," American Historical Review 99 (1994): 1475-90;
93. Florencia E. Mallon, "The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History," American Historical Review 99 (1994): 1491-1515.
94. For example, see C. L. R. James, World Revolution, 1917-1936: the Rise and Fall of the Communist International (New York: Pioneer, 1937);
95. W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part which Africa has Played in World History (New York: Viking, 1947);
96. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1951).
97. It is worthwhile noting that Hosea Jaffe-"Mnguni"-continued to publish as an independent scholar. See Hosea Jaffe, A History of Africa (London: Zed, 1985);
98. Hosea Jaffe, European Colonial Despotism: A History of Oppression and Resistance in South Africa (London: Kamak House, 1994).
99. Keletso E. Atkins, '"Kafir Time': Pre-industrial Temporal Concepts and Labor Discipline in Nineteenth-Century Natal," Journal of African History 29 (1988): 229-44;
100. Frederick Cooper, "Colonizing Time: Work Rhythms and Labor Conflict in Colonial Mombasa," in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992).
101. See also Frantz Fanon, "M. Debré's Desperate Endeavours: A Falsified Historical Time," in Toward the African Revolution (New York: Grove, 1969), 158,159.
102. Cooper, "What Is the Concept of Globalization Good For," 198,199.
103. Feierman, among others, has argued for this position. See Feiennan, "Africa in History."
104. UCT Archives, BC 925, UMSA/Tabata Collection, Anti-CAD Bulletin, October 26, 1944.
105. See, for example, Sarah Nuttall and Cheryl-Ann Michael, eds., Senses of Culture: South African Cultural Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
106. Witz, Apartheid's Festival; Carolyn Hamilton, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998);
107. Hamilton et al., eds., Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002).
108. Mamdani, "When Does a Settler Become a Native?"
109. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). For South Africa,
110. see also Robin D. G. Kelley, "The Religious Odyssey of African Radicals: Notes on the Communist Party of South Africa, 1921-34," Radical History Review, no. 51 (1991): 5-24.
111. The continuing role of Marxist politics in South Africa is substantial though complex. For one overview, see Rob Nixon, Homelands, Harlem, and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond (New York: Routledge, 1994), chap. 9. Pier Larson has noted the ubiquitous and uncritical use of European social analysis where greater attention should be paid to local social theory. He draws an interesting analogy between this imported practice and world-systems theory. See Pier M. Larson, "'Capacities and Modes of Thinking': Intellectual Engagements and Subaltern Hegemony in the Early History of Malagasy Christianity," American Historical Review 102 (1997): 969-1002.
112. I. C, interview. The complex tension between Marxism and nationalism embedded within this interview relates to a discussion by Frederick Cooper regarding the nation and class dialectics of decolonization. See Cooper, "The Dialectics of Decolonization: Nationalism and Labor Movements in Postwar French Africa," in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 406-35.
113. My use of the museum is influenced by James Clifford. See Clifford, Routes, 188-219.