For most of the participants in it, the struggle for southern African liberation was, perhaps, principally a struggle for liberation from racial domination, as epitomised in South Africa under the term and in the practice of apartheid. Nor is this surprising, given the horrors of apartheid per se. Yet this dimension did not exhaust the meaning of the struggle for many of those involved, nor did the overthrow of racial domination exhaust the meaning and import of the concept ‘liberation’. In fact, the latter also implied, for many involved, a struggle on three other fronts, with liberation in southern Africa also thought:
- 1.
to involve (certainly on the part of some of the movements and notably, at least initially, Frelimo in Mozambique but also, to some degree, the African National Congress [ANC]) the overthrow and/or strong qualification of the capitalist system, defined as it crucially is, by class differentiation and exploitation, both locally and globally;
- 2.
to facilitate the realisation of a distinctive measure of gender equality, such a struggle waged in the furtherance of claims centred on demands for a much greater measure of women's emancipation; and
- 3.
to be conceived as the attainment of a meaningful democratic voice, in terms of the genuine empowerment of the entire mass of the population from the bottom up.2
Thus, in spite of the fact that ‘liberation’ has been the focus of my political life and my scholarly preoccupations since the 1960s (Saul 2005), that work continues to present analytical problems which arise precisely from working with the expanded notion of liberation suggested above. How, in fact, should one assess the relative claims of race, class, gender, and voice in any evaluation of outcomes in southern Africa? Of course, no one can doubt, to start with, the importance of the fact that a demand for racial equality has, at least to some degree, been realised in the region, although, equally, no one would claim that problems of race and racism have merely disappeared even, or perhaps especially, in South Africa itself. Nonetheless, although I did not live directly under apartheid and race rule in southern Africa, I well recall, on an admittedly minor note, my first exposure to the White South some 45 years ago when I worked in Dar es Salaam. At that time the way from Mbeya to Sumbawanga and Mpanda on the Lake Tanganyika coast had to lie, by road, via (what was then) Abercorn, in only recently independent Zambia. I found, to the naked eye, a large population – well into the thousands, I guessed to myself – in Abercorn as I drove in and stopped for lunch at a well-appointed hotel. ‘We're full up’, said the owner, ‘but there's a place at that table where that chap [he indicated the place] is sitting alone.’ Soon, I was seated opposite a white ex-colonial civil servant still wearing the full regalia of his now transitional post: white shirt, shorts, and knee-socks. ‘Say, how many people live in Abercorn?’, I asked politely in order to launch an informal chat over lunch. ‘Oh, a couple of hundred; there used to be five or six hundred, but …’! A couple of hundred? People? Welcome to the White South, I mused.
Of course, I was to learn a great deal more about this reality by carefully studying developments in both southern Africa and South Africa itself over the crucial years of liberation/anti-apartheid struggle there, including several trips (one made ‘underground’) to South Africa during the apartheid decades. I also lived for periods in both Tanzania and neighbouring Mozambique and was privileged, too, to be involved in Canada in the liberation support movement for many decades. Nonetheless, in all such contexts I was also forced continually to ask myself: can you not talk about the struggle against the palpable horrors of apartheid per se while being careful to highlight the necessary interpenetration of self-evident and parallel claims cast in terms of class, gender, and democratic voice at the same time? And if you can and must do all of these things, must you not also ask, quite concretely, whether, at any given time, the glass of liberation so defined is full; or merely half full; or perhaps, at best, half empty. Difficult questions to answer, needless to say. And, equally obviously, the answers arrived at will depend crucially upon just what you mean by liberation!
This is a point that was reinforced for me quite recently when I was invited to become part of a Southern African Development Community (SADC)-sponsored team to help compile a series of volumes on the southern African liberation struggle. My own brief was to cover the US and Canadian fronts of that global struggle. However, at a planning meeting in Dar es Salaam, it became apparent that my operative definition of liberation (as sketched above) was not so very readily acceptable – a point quickly conveyed to our global research group by the overall coordinator of the project, my former Dean at the University of Dar es Salaam, Arnold Temu, and also by the patron of the project, Hashim Mbita, formerly and for many years the chief executive officer of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) Liberation Committee.
For, as we were firmly instructed, we were to concentrate only on ‘the first phase’ of the liberation struggle in southern Africa, the overthrow of racial rule, and other phases would ‘come later’. I was not alone in Dar in arguing the sad fact that the very ‘winners’, the new elites who had successfully led the struggle for racial equality, would be those who were often most responsible, in defence of their own class and gender interests and their own political power, for putting the brakes on any continuing deepening of the meaning to be given to ‘liberation’. Indeed, these very elites were to be our paymasters in such a SADC project. Small wonder that it should be feared that such heads of state and other members of their entourages would be less than enthusiastic about raising the issues of class, gender, and democratic voice-from-below in investigating ‘their’ liberation struggles.
I found some breathing room for my own paper by insisting that it would be impossible, in writing about North America for example, to accurately recount the history of the liberation support movement there without seeing it as engaged with developments, real struggles, in southern Africa (and as between southern Africa and Canada) that occurred on the multiple levels I have mentioned. Nor (as was apparently being tacitly implied by my critics) was this because of some ultra-leftist, purist idiosyncrasy on our part. In fact, I noted, we had learned most as to the expansiveness of the southern African liberation struggles from those directly engaged in the liberation movements themselves, notably from Frelimo and also from a wide range of activists at work in South Africa. Recall, for example Eduardo Mondlane's strong statement to the effect that:
I am now convinced that Frelimo has a clearer political line than ever before … The common basis that we had when we formed Frelimo was hatred of colonialism and the belief in the necessity to destroy the colonial structure and to establish a new social structure. But what type of social structure, what type of organisation we would have, no one knew. No, some did know, some did have ideas, but they had rather theoretical notions that were themselves transformed in the struggle.
Now, however, there is a qualitative transformation in thinking that has emerged during the past six years which permit me to conclude that at present Frelimo is much more socialist, revolutionary and progressive than ever … Why? Because the conditions of life in Mozambique, the type of enemy which we have, do not give us any other alternative … [In fact] the conditions in which we struggle and work demand it. (Mondlane, as quoted in Saul 2005, p. 185)
It is the current situation in South Africa, however, that must preoccupy us. Let us assume (although we did also problematise any too-glib version of such an assumption above) that ‘liberation’ in terms of racial equality has, to a meaningful (if qualified) degree, been achieved with the overthrow of apartheid. What about liberation in the extended sense that I am invoking here? Take, for example, the fact that the economic gap between black and white is narrower than previously it has ever been in South Africa. But note too that the gap between rich and poor is actually wider. We have valuable work by scholars like Sampie Terreblanche, Michael McDonald, and Nattrass and Seekings to point the way here (Terreblanche 2002, Nattrass and Seekings 2005, McDonald 2006). But note also the intervention several months ago by a leading South African prelate, Rev. Fuleni Mzukisi, who charged that poverty in South Africa is now worse than apartheid and, in fact, ‘a terrible disease’. As he said, ‘Apartheid was a deep crime against humanity. It left people with deep scars, but I can assure you that poverty is worse than that … People do not eat human rights; they want food on the table’ (Nzwili 2008).
In short, as an African elite is increasingly consolidated in power we seem merely to have substituted for a racist society ever more of a (relatively) colour-blind yet profoundly hierarchical class society. But if this is indeed so, there is the further question: why does this class gap not seem to matter to many people – especially those outside the country, but the elites inside as well – nearly so much as the racial gap once did? Is this kind of ‘commonsensical’ acceptance of dramatic class inequality, in fact, what becoming ‘an ordinary society’, to invoke Neville Alexander's deft phrase, means in South Africa (Alexander 2002)?
Of course, we had seen Thabo Mbeki disclaim as early as 1984 that the ANC had anything like a socialist project, and even if he then qualified his clear, even soberingly prophetic, statement with talk of the importance of safeguarding the interests of workers and peasants and the like, he did not vouchsafe for even a moment that socialism (real socialism, that is) could be a particularly effective (and indeed preferable) economic development strategy for all the people (Mbeki 1984). In fact, we also soon saw Mandela himself, in the very first years of his freedom, shifting ground rapidly. Thus, he moved from the strong affirmation, in his first speech in Cape Town on the day of his release from prison in 1990, that ‘the nationalisation of the mines, banks and monopoly industry is the policy of the ANC and change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable’ to the assertion a mere four years later, to a joint session of the US Houses of Congress, that the free market is a ‘magical elixir’ that would produce freedom and equality for all. Here, indeed, was a sobering anti-climax for a struggle for liberation, as defined in any very expansive sense.
Needless to say, striking out in an innovative left direction in South Africa would not have been easy to do, with the global odds of the time so stacked against socialism. Nor is it the case that capitalism is necessarily, for each and every follower of the Mandela and Mbeki line, an unproblematic development option. It is rather that South Africa is said by them to have no choice, although there are plenty of South Africans who disagree with that position, ranging from Oupa Lehulere and Trevor Ngwane to Patrick Bond, and including, no doubt, many of those who felt quite comfortable earlier this year to be able to vote for someone other than Thabo Mbeki for president.
Yet the ‘no choice’ alternative is in effect the rationale that Mark Gevisser offers, rather complacently, in his recent much-cited biography of Mbeki, especially in chapters 23, ‘The Diplomat’ and 24, ‘The Seducer’ of that book (Gevisser 2009). This is also an analysis that Ben Turok, in his important recent rethinking of the ANC's record once in power, seems, at first, to echo (Turok 2008a; see also Turok 2008b).4 Thus he quotes an earlier version of Gevisser's book (Gevisser 2007) with apparent approval, agreeing that, by as early as 1985, Mbeki had concluded that ‘a negotiated settlement [required] a far more liberal approach to economic policy’ than had been the ANC position up to that time, and that, by 1994, ‘he and his government [felt] forced to acquiesce to the Washington Consensus on macro-economic policy when they implemented their controversial GEAR [Growth, Employment and Redistribution] programme in 1996.’ Indeed, notes Gevisser, Mbeki's first instructions to Trevor Manuel, upon the latter's taking over as finance minister in 1996, was for a policy that ‘called precisely for the kind of fiscal discipline and investment-friendly tax incentives that the international financial institutions loved and that Manuel already believed in’ (Gevisser in Turok 2008a, pp. 57–58).
In short, here was an ANC in power with very few remaining predilections on the left. Yet Turok himself has also remained far too honest not to see the limitations of such strategies, set as they were firmly within an overall capitalist framework and with their ‘Black Economic Empowerment’ mantra actually more likely to produce only some kind of black middle class empowerment rather than ‘black empowerment’ in any more general sense. In short, here in place were the mechanisms of further class formation and, in effect, of a neo-colonial solution to the ‘liberation problem’ in South Africa. Has the state, Turok now asks, ‘given equal attention to empowering the masses as to the elite? And why has the insistence of parliament on broad-based empowerment brought so little success?’ (Turok 2008a)
Yet Turok knows the answer to such questions. Indeed, it can come as no surprise to find Turok in the later chapters of his book backing away rather uneasily from the ‘new’ ANC's hard-line capitalist position, and himself harking back to the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) and even, in effect, to positions such as those taken by Eduardo Mondlane above (even though Mondlane's is a position that has long since been left behind by the current Mozambican leadership). For we there find Turok invoking the need to premise socio-economic activity on ‘the primary objective in a development society’, with this in turn to be defined as a society in which all (not only ‘full-time paid workers’ but also ‘part-time workers, casual work and even unpaid work’) are ‘to be usefully engaged in productive activity, however it may be defined’. Any alternative, he asserts, would be to merely dismiss ‘pro-active efforts’ on ‘the mistaken assumption that ordinary people in the second economy have no skills or capabilities to lift themselves out of poverty, even with state support’ (Turok 2008a).
Instead, Turok invokes the possibility of an alternative class dynamics and a politics of progressive change. Yet to truly empower people in this and other ways would also be to view the ANC as capable of facilitating a practice that reaches, in democratic terms, well beyond anything that the ANC in power has taken as a possible premise of social and economic strategy – one that aspires to a radical politics of ‘voice’ and of ‘democratic liberation’ beyond anything it has heretofore envisioned. True, we have just witnessed an election in South Africa that suggests democracy to be alive and, if not entirely well, at least much more than being merely formal.5 But how far this is, at the moment, from any genuine popular empowerment and from any sense of ownership in their own liberation and their own development on the part of the broadest reaches of the population.
Truth to tell, of course, few ever saw the ANC alone as the possible agent of dramatically democratic practice. In Canada, for example, we were more than a little nervous about its Stalinist tics and its uncertain economic vision. But we saw the positive signs of a popular revolution-in-the-making in South Africa and hoped that the broader movement there, far from requiring a vanguard to guide it, would itself be strong enough to hold the ANC on a progressive political and economic course. Recall, however, a passage from the late Rusty Bernstein, a long-time stalwart of the ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP) , who wrote to the present author an unsolicited letter commenting on my own somewhat disillusioned piece, ‘Cry for the beloved country: the post-apartheid denouement’ first published in Monthly Review a year or two before (Saul 2001). In this letter, he suggested not only that he agreed ‘with almost every word of [my article]’, but then went on to give an extended analysis of ‘what is going wrong, and why’, an ‘understanding’ of this being, in his words, ‘the essential precondition for any rectification, and thus for any return to optimism about South Africa's democratic future.’ His summary:
The drive towards power has corrupted the political equation in various ways. In the late 1980s, when popular resistance revived again inside the country led by the UDF [United Democratic Front], it led the ANC to see the UDF as an undesirable factor in the struggle for power, and to fatally undermine it as a rival focus for mass mobilisation. It has undermined the ANC's adherence to the path of mass resistance as a way to liberation, and substituted instead a reliance on manipulation of the levers of administrative power. It has paved the way to a steady decline of a mass-membership ANC as an organiser of the people, and turned it into a career opening to public sector employment and the administrative ‘gravy train’. It has reduced the tripartite ANC-COSATU-CP [ANC-Congress of South African Trade Unions-Communist Party] alliance from the centrifugal centre of national political mobilisation to an electoral pact between parties who are constantly constrained to subordinate their constituents' fundamental interests to the overriding purpose of holding on to administrative power. It has impoverished the soil in which ideas leaning towards socialist solutions once flourished and allowed the weed of ‘free market’ ideology to take hold. (Bernstein 2007)
Moreover, it is not that such energies do not continue to exist, manifested as they are in a range of popular mobilisations of recent years: the Treatment Action Campaign, the Anti-Privatisation Forum, the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, and so on: all the kind of initiatives, that is, which are so effectively evoked in the slogan ‘We are the Poors’ to which Ashwin Desai has given such resonance in his book of that title (Desai 2002). But what would it have looked like if more of such activities had actually been facilitated by the state and by the ruling party and given expression as part of a planned institutionalisation of agency, from below, for meaningful change, rather than merely premising the (perfectly understandable) popular suspicion of a recolonised state of palpably corporate and new-elite provenance that we now have?
Much the same could be said about the further expansion of the concept of liberation, as proposed above: that which looks towards enhanced feminist empowerment and a dramatic increase in gender equality. What would ongoing liberation look like in this sphere? True, there are aspects of South Africa's recent past that have suggested a history of distinctive promise in this regard. Thus Shireen Hassim's excellent book, Women's organizations and democracy in South Africa with its very resonant subtitle ‘contesting authority’ makes it clear that, in her words, women within the ANC, ‘more often and more consistently than any other sector within the liberation organization, opened debates about what a democratic culture might look like’ (2006, p. 114) – the reference here being to diverse women's efforts at ‘shifting, disrupting, and reconstructing the organizational culture and objectives’, and this despite ‘the limits of nationalism as democratic discourse and … the exclusionary and hierarchical aspects of exile culture, particularly one in which military mobilization was favoured over political organization’ (Hassim 2006, p.114).
Yet there seems no doubt from Hassim's account that the drive to sustain such a challenge to established power (at once top-down and masculinist) has been weakening. In part, this evidences the drain of feminist activists into parliament and the bureaucracy, a trend that, even if momentarily representing an apparent achievement, has also served to undermine the efficacy of the pressure of organised women coming from below:
The danger of leaving policy formulation and agenda setting to women within the state … is that gender issues may become the domain of academics and technocrats, a new elite that may leave behind black working-class women – the ‘moral subject’ of the triple-oppression approach to understanding gender inequalities in South Africa. (Hassim 2006, p. 265)
In effect, then, we are posing some pretty basic questions here: what is liberation? In what ways and to what extent has southern Africa been liberated? How necessary is, in the words of the title of an earlier book of mine, a ‘next liberation struggle’? We must be careful here: it would clearly be very foolish to downgrade or underestimate the scope of what has been accomplished, both in South Africa and throughout the region, through the overthrow of racial dictatorship. Nor should we underestimate the cruel constraints imposed by the fact that the global capitalist hegemony is at its strongest in Africa and that western capital is reinforced in its power by working with and through the complex domestic structures of class and other divisions that the continent has to offer. After all, imperialism is trying too, and it would be sheer ‘voluntarism’ to ignore the severe constraints that have been placed upon the leaderships of the liberation movements come fresh to power in the region, not least upon those among them who had envisaged other, more progressive, possibilities. We must not, in short, fall into a voluntarist cul-de-sac by ignoring the structures of cooptation that pressed the southern Africa ‘liberation-elites’ into becoming mere junior partners in the new ‘Empire of Capital’.
Yet the danger opposite to that of voluntarism is a far too comfortable form of ‘structural determinism’ that would allow liberation movement elites to rationalise their own passage into privileged positions within a process of post-liberation domestic class formation with the excuse that ‘imperialism made me do it’. No, choices have been made in southern Africa, and they have not, by and large, been choices favourable to the life chances of the poorest of the poor or to their empowerment: to their liberation, in sum. After all, the facts are there, many alluded to above, including the unsettling reality that even if in South Africa the income gap between black and white has narrowed somewhat, the gap between rich and poor has actually widened; that related gaps along similar lines could be readily documented in the spheres of health, education, food and the like; that democracy has become stalled, even in South Africa, at the level of a relatively passive act of voting rather than an active engagement of people in the transformation of their own lives; that the pace of a genuine levelling up of the role and status of women has slowed to a relative standstill. So, in the end, the question is not merely ‘what is liberation?’ but, to repeat, whether the glass of liberation is best considered as being half empty or half full. And if, as I suspect to be the case, it is at best merely half full, we must seek to identify and to encourage such social forces (and their organisations) as we can realistically expect to engage in a ‘next liberation struggle’, a struggle that will be necessary in order to further advance the cause of African liberation in its fullest, most multi-faceted and most meaningful sense.