Mafeje on black struggles in South Africa: history and theory

ABSTRACT

Archie Mafeje had an unusual ability for socio-political prognosis. This is true both in terms of his theoretical and of his concrete analysis of the South African liberation struggle. Much of what he wrote in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s is still relevant today. Although he had hoped for a socialist democracy, things did not turn out that way. In his work on revolutionary theory and politics, Mafeje set out to understand the path to complete liberation, primarily of the African people, but also of oppressed people in other parts of the world, generally. This article revisits Mafeje’s conception of the South African revolution.

KEYWORDS:

• Apartheid
• colonialism
• imperialism
• Mafeje
• revolution
• socialist democracy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For details on Mafeje’s life, see Nyoka (2017).

2. The Twenty-One Points were adopted in Moscow in 1920.

3. Later changed from the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) to the South African Communist Party (SACP).

4. The CPSA was disbanded in 1950; the South African Communist Party (SACP) was formed in 1953 as an underground organisation. The SACP formally adopted the concept of “colonialism of a special type” in 1962, although the concept of “internal colonialism” has a longer genealogy (see Marquard 1957) and continued to be used by the likes of Wolpe (1975) and Magubane (1989). The two concepts will be used interchangeably throughout this article.

5. In talking about “universal texts” and “the vernacular,” Mafeje is not only talking about languages. In his discourse, the former also refers to theory while the latter refers to concrete conditions. Sometimes he speaks about “nomothetic” versus “ideographic” enquiry (see Mafeje 1981).

6. In talking about the Afrikaner petit bourgeoisie, Mafeje refers to Afrikaner foremen, politicians and the first generation managerial class. He considered them recent arrivals to the middle stratum of white South African society. The idiom of the bourgeois Afrikaner as a foster child refers to the fact that they became rich because their petit bourgeois counterparts made economic conditions favourable for them to accumulate wealth.

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Notes on contributors

Bongani Nyoka

Bongani Nyoka is a Research Fellow at the Ali Mazrui Centre for Higher Education Studies and a Senior Research Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, University of Johannesburg. He is the author of Archie Mafeje: Voices of Liberation (HSRC Press, 2019). His research interests include the works of Archie Mafeje and Bernard Magubane, and South African historiography.