Black Marxism: an incorporated analytical framework for rethinking Chinese labour in South African historiography

Abstract

In recent years, the perceived threat of China has been uncritically conflated with the activities of various Chinese actors, including laborers and migrants, in the African continent. Characterizations of Chinese people resonate with that of the late 1800s and early 1900s and continue to displace them from the history of specific African countries. This is especially true in South Africa, where there is little memory of how indentured Chinese laborers were imported to help revitalize the gold mines after the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). In the paper, I offer an analysis of two dominant strands of historical writings about South Africa, aiming to show how the ways in which history were conceived at particular political junctures was largely responsible for the absence of the Chinese laborers. Importantly, I discuss how Robinson's challenges to Marxism and its theory of history in Black Marxism provide a space to unthink notions of capital, labor, and race. In the paper, I further explore how the dialectical, multi-temporal, and multi-spatial view of history that he puts forth already envisioned the presence of and included theses laborers who were brought into the European capitalist world-economy on a large scale by the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Keywords:

• Black Marxism
• Chinese labor
• South Africa
• race
• history
• China–Africa

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Dr Tiffany Willough-Herard for her comments at different phases of rewriting this article.

Notes

 1. Since the writing of this article, Andrew MacDonald's review of the two-volume of The Cambridge History of South Africa and Jon Soske's response to the review have started to address the racial composition of and imbalance among the historians who write about South Africa (MacDonald, 2012; Soske, 2012); however, the gender imbalance has yet to be discussed.

 2. The goals were simultaneously local and historical plus scholarly and popular: (1) ‘to participate in, facilitate and stimulate the writing of scholarly history of a high standard by local people in the main’; (2) to be part of the process of generating ‘historical or cultural commodities…such as popular books, photographs, films, slide shows, recorded oral testimony, etc.; or performances – such as plays, talks and other public events’; and (3) to identify as well as utilize available popular forms to ‘convey the findings of [the Workshop's members’] research and production of artefacts to audiences' (Bozzoli, 1983, pp. 3–5).

 3. For lack of a better word to describe this new preoccupation with the future, I use the word ‘futuristic’ loosely here, which does not touch on eschatological prophecies or technology.

 4. Here ‘black’ is in quotations because in post-apartheid legislation, blackness is treated as a political identity of those who were oppressed by the whites during apartheid, which included Black, Colored, and Asian/Indian. However, at the apex of the black consciousness in the 1980s, all non-white persons, meaning Indians and Coloreds, who did not align themselves with the white power structure were included within the ambit of ‘black.’

 5. This meant a society whereby ‘race’ is not a criterion for any form of discrimination. Using the terms of James C. Scott, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni points out that non-racialism constituted the ‘public transcript’ that was more acceptable during the transition from apartheid to democracy. On the other hand, ‘[t]he radical republican Africanist thought with its trappings of nativism was relegated to a “hidden transcript” – a discourse taking place and playing itself out beyond the formal political arena’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2008, p. 66).

 6. During her writings of popular history in the 1980s, Luli Callinicos made the distinction between popular/peoples', radical/social, and public history. The first two genres of history overlap and have roots in as well as seek to strengthen workers' movements; however, popular history ostensibly surpasses the scope of social history, presenting an alternative history of the present that has more radical aims at the end of the day. It is not just concerned with the urban area, but also the rural proletariat and migrant experiences. According to Callinicos, its alterity cum radical nature prevents it from being co-opted by dominant media, which represents public history. Examples of public history, she points out, include the type of media produced by ‘the SABC [South African Broadcast Corporation], the press, or the “historical preservation societies” to be found in some of the more public spirited towns and cities in South Africa’ (Callinicos, 1987, p. 54).

 7. For evidence of such black–white binary in post-apartheid society, one could review the case and court ruling of the Pretoria High Court in 2008 that Chinese South Africans are legally and categorically ‘black.’

 8. See ‘About Sara Baartman,’ Zimbio (http://www.zimbio.com/Sarah+Bartmann/notes/1/About+Sarah+Bartmann).

 9. As Posel, Hyslop, and Nieftagodien's discussion of the conference reveal, ‘the American work of the 1990s on the social construction of race, and especially of “whiteness,” was influential.’

10. This is a different project from the project that assumes the predominance of Europe and Europeans.

11. Robinson defines racialism as ‘the legitimation and corroboration of social organization as natural by reference to the “racial” components of its elements’ (Robinson, 1983/2000, 2).