THE NEW SOUTH AFRICA

Abstract

Within the constraints of an aversion to the autobiographies of bit players in epic events, I attempt to trace my intellectual formation in 1950s South Africa. I go on to suggest that the experience of participation in a far‐left political movement indelibly marked my subsequent work within and against the grain of postcolonial studies where the critical embrace of a “reconciliatory” ideology displaced the explanatory category of conflict and struggle in situations of domination. Arguing against a politics of accommodation, I foreground the necessity of casting a cold eye on South Africa’s arrested revolution at a time when too much writing and commentary is directed at mythologizing the transition and justifying the conduct of the present regime.

Keywords:

• left intellectual formation
• dissidence
• hazards of conciliatory ideology

Notes

1 That his preference is congenial to other South African critics can be seen in a recent review of his book that wholly embraces his thesis. See Sarah Nuttall (135–38).

2 Ngwane also comments:

Without detracting from those twenty‐seven years in jail—what that cost him, what he stood for—Mandela has been the real sell‐out, the biggest betrayer of his people. When it came to the crunch, he used his status to camouflage the actual agreement that the ANC was forging with the South African elite under the sugar‐coating of the Reconstruction and Development Programme. (41–42)

3 The full context is:

The Thatcherian argument that “There is no Alternative” (to the neo‐liberal macro‐economic strategy) [ … ]wielded by the moderate leadership, and the failure of the left‐wingers to come forward with a viable alternative strategy that would not alienate the national and the international bourgeoisie, have resulted in a situation where it can be said [ … ] that the ANC government, first and foremost, serves the interests of the capitalist class. (48, 49)

4 Saul writes that the option to adopt neo‐liberal economic policies was primarily “an ideological one”, and he goes on to compare the South African transition with “Frantz Fanon’s notion of a false decolonization: the rising African middle‐class, both entrepreneurial and bureaucratic in provenance, merely sliding comfortably into their political positions as, yes, the intermediaries of global Empire” (20, 22, 24).