Editorial

The nine articles in this issue exemplify the contribution made by JSAS to area studies. They cover five of the countries in the southern African region and convey the findings of half a dozen academic disciplines. Despite their range and variety, there are intriguing links between some of the pieces, and they have been grouped to reflect this.

The first two articles explore pressures upon the South African state, at national and local levels, respectively. Nicoli Nattrass and Jeremy Seekings present a vivid account – and unsparing critique – of the South African government’s strategy for delivering vaccinations against Covid-19 in 2021. Following James C. Scott,¹ they depict the government’s planning and implementation of the vaccine roll-out as an instance of ‘high modernist hubris’: a sweepingly ambitious scheme aimed at enhancing order, control and surveillance presented as ‘following the science’ and matching ‘best international practice’. At the core of the planned roll-out was an Electronic Vaccine Data System (EVDS) – intended, argue the authors, not only to provide mass access to essential medicine but also to extend state control over health care and, in particular, to advance the ANC’s proposed National Health Insurance (NHI) system. The NHI aimed to bring private health care under public control and redistribute health benefits from the rich to the poor. The envisaged roll-out was highly centralised with elaborate proposals for registration, prioritisation, monitoring and delivery. However, the state’s intentions were subverted ‘from below’. Elderly and at-risk citizens simply began to walk into public sites that were inoculating people without official EVDS appointments. Provincial governments initiated short cuts and alternative arrangements; health care workers devised informal systems to vaccinate people as quickly as possible. Scott’s Seeing Like a State focused on the dangers of over-confident planning in authoritarian states. The South African government ‘remained accountable in important ways’: in the face of criticisms and contestations by civil society, government planners retreated and allowed a somewhat disorderly but effective roll-out to replace their original model.

If the central state evinced modernist hubris, local government provided a dismaying narrative of decline and dysfunction. In the 2021 local government elections – David Everatt and Marius Pieterse point out – only 46 per cent of registered voters turned out, and nearly 600,000 ballots were spoiled, ‘a quite remarkable figure’. All the major parties haemorrhaged votes, and many municipalities were headed by ‘everybody but the ANC’ alliances. Governance, especially in small-town and rural municipalities, teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, and the ‘damage was deeper than instability’. A number of factors had converged – including corruption, ANC factionalism, delivery failures and civic despair – to precipitate a situation posing ‘fundamental questions about the South African constitutional architecture’. Reformist factions within the ANC and ‘fed-up local communities’ turned for relief to Chapter 9 institutions (such as the Auditor General, the Public Protector, the Human Rights Commission) or to the courts. Provincial governments failed to carry out the interventions provided for in the constitution in the case of municipal dysfunction – and the national state, sapped by ‘elite venality’ and predation, in turn failed to hold the provinces to account. Consequently, the central state was obliged to ‘outsource’ the management of governance to Chapter 9 institutions ‘in the hope that they could control the local sphere’. Residents and local businesses channelled their frustration into protest and a ‘broad and far-reaching array of direct action’, and these triggered a substantial expansion of judicial power. The authors analyse a series of decisions in courts at various levels, including the Constitutional Court, which saw previously executive terrains of local governance and oversight ‘unequivocally “judicialised”’. The void of political accountability and the failure of constitutional arrangements designed to give effect thereto have left ‘the courts and community self-reliance’ as the only alternatives. Courts have bypassed dysfunctional municipal structures and endorsed community self-help in ways unimaginable even a few years ago.

There follow three articles that engage in different ways with issues of memory, narrative, complicity and identity. Fabian Krautwald explores memories in Namibia of the German colonial occupation (1884–1915). Central to his analysis is a focus on ‘memory making’ and the ‘politics of memory’ on the part of Herero leaders and communities: how experiences of German colonialism were recalled, told and retold, marshalled, disseminated and ultimately mobilised locally and internationally in support of Namibian independence from South African rule. In 1915, the South African government published a Blue Book on German treatment of the indigenous population in its colony, drawing on German documents and on oral testimony by Namibians. It became ‘the most important document in Herero memory politics’; it was considered at the Paris Peace Conference after the First World War; decades later, it was incorporated into petitions to the UN and reparations lawsuits. The author describes how the Herero invoked memories of German colonial rule when negotiating with South African officials and demanding more land, better education and the provision of basic infrastructure.² In the half-century after 1915, the summoning of memories of German colonialism and especially of the 1904–1908 genocidal war against the Herero and Nama, influenced the emergence of a Namibian political discourse. This served to wrest concessions from South African administrators during the 1920s and 1930s. From 1960 onwards, comparisons were made between von Trotha’s extermination order and the Holocaust: the Herero developed a vernacular language of genocide and mobilised it for political ends. It became ‘an underlying grammar of Herero political rhetoric’. Memory making, in short, was integral to the development of anti-colonial activism inside Namibia and in the halls of international diplomacy.

Memory, colonial dispossession and competing narratives are central to the article by Danelle van Zyl-Hermann and Rafael Verbuyst. They locate the ANC’s adoption in 2018 of expropriation of land without compensation as policy within what Cherryl Walker calls the ‘master narrative of loss and restoration’ informing land reform since 1994, a homogenised narrative of black dispossession through legislation, forced removals and poverty, with racially defined victims and villains.³ But the authors identify two alternative narratives to the hegemonic portmanteau account of land (dis)possession; they emanate from two groups claiming to represent marginalised minorities and they both reject the dominant narrative. The first of these counter-narratives is that of Khoisan activists, a diverse demographic of somewhat tenuous organisations held together by a rejection of coloured identity, which mobilises discourses of indigeneity, First Nation status and prior occupancy of the land. The second is that of AfriForum, a well-funded Afrikaner interest group growing in prominence and popularity and currently claiming 275,000 members. It deploys a narrative claiming expertise, rationality and impartiality to legitimate its rejection of the ANC’s version of South Africa’s past; it criticises the dispossession of the Khoisan by ‘migrating’ Bantu-speakers; it claims that Afrikaners ‘saw themselves as Africans’ and ultimately proposes that whites settled on empty land, acquired territory through agreement or, in rare instances, through conquest. Although Khoisan activists and AfriForum differ vastly in size, goals and organisational capacity, and while they offer competing – even incompatible – versions of the past, their alternative narratives intersect at points and have yielded instances of mutual support and apparent co-operation. Both claim that ANC policies ignore ‘historical complexities’, and both frame themselves as victims, marginalised under black majority rule. The authors suggest that rapprochement between them, at any scale, suggests shifts in minority politics and a new fluidity in contestations over land.

Autobiographies, by definition, deploy memory and narrative techniques. The four texts discussed by Lena Englund also share a concern with notions of personal and collective culpability and implication in South Africa’s apartheid past and its current state of extreme inequality. Englund frames her study of books by Rian Malan, Christopher Hope, Sisonke Msimang and Haji Mohamed Dawjee with Michael Rothberg’s The Implicated Subject and his emphasis on the category of beneficiary.⁴ In an interview, Rothberg defined implicated subjects as those who play indirect roles in systems of domination and histories of harm: ‘[t]hey are also subjects who inherit and benefit from such systems and histories … implicated subjects do not originate or direct regimes of power, but they inhabit them and participate in upholding them’. This approach certainly applies to the best-known of the four texts, Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart, a memoir that deals directly and viscerally with his own guilt as an Afrikaner but also that of Afrikaners generally, ‘the white tribe of Africa, arrogant, xenophobic, and “full of blood”’. Implication (however forcefully claimed by Malan) belongs not only to white South Africans: it ‘crosses racial lines’, as demonstrated in Msimang’s Always Another Country. Her account of a relatively privileged childhood and education in exile is followed by details of her return to South Africa and her married life in an affluent neighbourhood. There, ‘in this house and on this street’, she is seized by the inescapable facts of her privilege: ‘[t]he house makes me complicit’. Christopher Hope’s Café de Move-on Blues is not an autobiography but a travel memoir. Hope structures his journey through South Africa as a search for statues and monuments ‘that address the nation’s past and future’. His condemnation of Afrikaners for apartheid is strident (‘[t]hey set their faces against variety, reason, forbearance, love, toleration, imagination and humour’), but he does not exculpate white English-speakers entirely – ‘a helpless, if noisy minority … just as hooked on the racial privileges [apartheid] engineered for Whites’. Dawjee’s Sorry, Not Sorry is also only partly autobiography; it is a collection of essays which (remarks Englund) ‘deals with implication, guilt and the benefits of oppressive pasts in multiple contexts’. Highly critical of whites as beneficiaries, Dawjee extends the critique beyond South Africa to ‘the general dominance of whiteness’.

Two articles explore aspects of China’s role and influence in southern Africa through economic and political case studies, respectively. Hangwei Li, Dominik Kopiński and the late Ian Taylor consider how the spectacular growth of Chinese investment in Africa over the past two decades has created optimistic expectations: that such investment may make Africa the ‘next factory of the world’, with growth matching that of China and other East Asian economies. In particular, the hope is that investment’s ‘spillover’ – the transfer of knowledge, techniques and technology – can bring about Africa’s long-awaited structural transformation. Through a forensic analysis of the Zambian experience, this article challenges such celebratory assumptions. Almost 900 Chinese companies are located in Zambia; a robust Chinese business community has strong affiliations to Zambia; an ‘all-weather’ Sino-Zambian friendship has been forged over 60 years – and yet spillover effects are hard to detect. Systematic linkages between Chinese investors and Zambian suppliers are ‘extremely rare’; just over a quarter of procurement by value is sourced from Zambian firms and mostly involves very basic products (such as wood, stone, clay), and goods produced in Zambia by Chinese firms are ‘almost exclusively [in] the medium-low and low technology categories’, critically limiting what indigenous firms can learn from their Chinese partners. Prospects of Sino-Zambian linkages are further constrained by strong diasporic links in the Chinese community, reinforcing closer co-operation between Chinese companies. Finally, linkage formation is further crippled by weaknesses in the capacity of the Zambian state, at macro, meso and micro level. Successive Zambian governments have failed to assist the growth of indigenous capital, to build an institutional set-up that would help local firms or to put in place local content policies.

We move from a tour d’horizon of the Zambian economy to a close focus upon a single structure: the parliamentary building in Maseru, capital of Lesotho. Like 15 other government headquarters in African countries, the Lesotho parliament’s new home was designed, paid for and built by Chinese firms – which continue to be responsible for its maintenance and upkeep. Innocent Batsani-Ncube poses three questions about the building’s provenance. Why has Lesotho, like other recipient states, accepted gifts of buildings that are functionally and symbolically the site of governance? Why is China interested in strengthening African parliaments, institutions historically conceived from the liberal democratic tradition? And why are these buildings being given to poor countries when dominant accounts portray China’s foreign aid as directed primarily at resource-rich countries? The parliament building inherited by Lesotho at independence in 1966 was more than 50 years old and far too small to house the bicameral parliament. The Lesotho government had resolved to erect a new building, and a multi-stakeholder body oversaw its design – but the project was summarily ditched after Prime Minister Mosisili’s visit to China in 2005. Batsani-Ncube identifies various shortcomings in the building that Chinese constructors completed by 2012 – building materials ill-suited to the climate, seats that were too small and insufficiently sturdy, and problems in sourcing replacement fittings and furnishings – but the major flaw was that the space allocated for the Senate was too small to serve as a debating chamber. Consequently, Senate debates continue to take place in the old parliament building in central Maseru, a situation exacerbating tensions between National Assembly and Senate, an historic issue in Lesotho’s politics. Batsani-Ncube’s answers to his framing questions are, first, that for Lesotho’s political elites the new building counts as a win, a trophy in the form of a landmark building and a closer relationship with a major international patron. Secondly, in funding Lesotho’s parliamentary building, China was not ‘interested in … calculating prospective economic returns’. It was a political investment with the long-term objective of influence in Lesotho’s political and diplomatic circles. Thirdly, the strategy of providing poorer countries in Africa with such buildings is seen by China as a relatively inexpensive way of securing visibility and prestige. It is part and parcel of the China’s post-Tiananmen Square foreign policy’s outreach strategy.

The final two articles in this issue are stand-alone pieces: a tightly argued study of the transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe and an evocative slice of cultural history in apartheid-era Cape Town.

In the interregnum between the announcement of election results on 4 March 1980 and the formal transfer of power to a new government six weeks later, a series of wildcat strikes spread throughout Zimbabwe’s cities. This eruption of industrial action caught the ZANU(PF) government in waiting by surprise and helped to shape subsequent uneasy relations between organised labour and the new Zimbabwean state. Previous analyses of the March 1980 strikes have emphasised the inherent weakness of a spontaneous, uncoordinated, leaderless movement; Rudo Mudiwa proposes a new reading of the period, arguing that the strikes were ‘enactments of a bottom-up vision of decolonisation during a crucial moment of transition’. Worker initiatives raised specific issues around wages, working conditions and racist white supervisors, but the strikes were also an attempt to seize the moment and to press the breadth and speed of decolonisation well beyond what ZANU(PF) was contemplating. The article’s title refers to ‘Timing as Tactic’, and Mudiwa calls the strikes ‘kairotic actions’,⁵ which grasped at the possibility opened up by independence to secure rights long denied. The strikers’ preferred tempo for decolonisation challenged that approved by the Lancaster House agreement – a contestation that Mudiwa explores by the different meanings attached to ‘reconciliation’ and ‘transformation’. While Mugabe admonished that the ‘time for retribution is over, now is the time for reconciliation, reconstruction and nation-building’, the more radical Edgar Tekere, ZANU(PF)’s secretary general, told the BBC that ‘I like quick change … This is what I mean by the process of the revolution. We taught the people that there must be quick change’. This ‘double-minded nature’ of ZANU(PF)’s discourse precisely matched the ‘difference in rhythm’ between nationalist elites and the masses identified by Fanon. The strikes brought into the open a clash over what decolonisation might mean: a radical break with the colonial past and the dismantling of its institutions or gradual reform and reworking existing institutions. This ‘intractable conflict’ over the timing, speed and depth of change continued to animate public debates in the early years of Zimbabwean independence.

Drive-in cinemas enjoyed tremendous popularity in apartheid South Africa during the 1960s and 1970s, especially among whites. Fernanda Pinto de Almeida explores the phenomenon not only as a particular form of leisure but also as a key site of ‘the racial politics of cinema’ in the later apartheid years. In Cape Town, as elsewhere in the country, conventional indoors cinemas were segregated well before the National Party was elected on an apartheid platform: signs designating ‘Europeans Only’ audiences appeared in the early 1920s; segregated cinemas held special screenings of films for ‘Non-Europeans’ and ‘coloured bioscopes’ were opened. The first drive-ins in the mother city maintained this pattern: four were built in in the early 1960s in white-designated areas while an exclusively coloured drive-in was planned for Mitchell’s Plain, the sprawling area designated in 1972. The four ‘white’ drive-ins were in working-class areas where land was cheaper. The Sunset drive-in in Wetton differed from the other ‘white’ drive-ins and indeed from all cinema houses in the city. It permitted audiences of whites and coloureds, but physically separated by an infamous wooden partition, rapidly dubbed the ‘Berlin Wall’ by the local press. The Mitchell’s Plain drive-in, Funlands, opened only in 1977 after planning delays. This was a year after television had belatedly been permitted by P.W. Botha’s government. The competition from this new domestic entertainment, but also from coloured and African cinemas, prompted white cinema owners to apply for specific cinemas to be ‘open to all’. By 1978, drive-ins represented over half of all cinemas in South Africa. In November 1980, the Berlin Wall in the Sunset drive-in was suddenly removed: the site was now available to all who had cars. Applications for the desegregation of entertainment sites multiplied after 1979; across the country, drive-in owners applied for permission to house desegregated, multi-racial audiences. All the Cape Town drive-ins were effectively declared non-racial in 1980, outpacing similar changes in conventional cinemas. If the Sunset drive-in had been an emblem of both segregation and desegregation, its end is also revealing. It was razed to enable the building of a new shopping mall – permitting ‘individuals to consume as individuals’!

The issue concludes with four book reviews. Dilip Menon discusses the account – recently translated from isiXhosa into English – by D.D.T. Jabavu (In India and East Africa) of his trip to a peace conference in newly independent India, via east Africa. Another translated text is reviewed by Daria Zelenova: V.G. Shubin’s From Cairo to Cape: Africa as a Russian Saw It. Mesrob Vartavarian reviews L. Bollinger’s Apartheid’s Black Soldiers: Un-National Wars and Militaries in Southern Africa, and Lesley Machiridza considers Joost Fontein’s The Politics of the Dead in Zimbabwe 2000–2020.

Notes

1 J.C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998).

2 The former German colony was of course designated at Versailles as a ‘mandated territory’ called South West Africa and administered by South Africa under League of Nations mandate from 1919 to 1945. From 1946 to 1990 the territory was administered by South Africa although the basis for this was disputed by the United Nations.

3 C. Walker, ‘Critical Reflections on South Africa’s 1913 Natives Land Act and its Legacies’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 40, 4 (2014), p. 656.

4 M. Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2019).

5 From the Greek concept of kairos, a propitious moment.