The idea of postapartheid South Africa
2.2. A brief history of South Africa
The idea of South Africa is a colonial idea linked to the twin ideas of Africa and that of Southern Africa. According to Mudimbe, although the scramble for Africa and the active period of colonization lasted less than a century – between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries – the colonialism period was a crucial time in laying the foundation for the idea and the invention of Africa (1988: 14). Constructed, imagined and represented as different from Europe, Africa “has served as an exotic prism through which outsiders, mainly Europeans, refracted images of ‘the other’ and of themselves” (Parker and Rathbone, 2007: 5). Easton (2007) notes that Southern Africa, as a subcontinent or a sub region, has a specific colonial history shaped by the colonial migrant labour regime. In that history, South Africa occupies a specific place. With its three “white settler colonies of Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe,” the question of Southern Africa, posed from a decolonial and postcolonial standpoint, is from the onset haunted by “recurring themes of colonialism, apartheid, war, nationalism and independence” (Easton, 2007: 131).
What was to be South Africa in future is a space that has a long history of African kingdoms that include the Zulu nation, the Xhosa kingdoms, the Sotho kingdoms and the Venda kingdoms,
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among others. Thompson posits that, in the hands of most “historians of the white South African establishment” the history of South Africa is always the history of European colonisation (2001:
1). This tends to emphasise the role of capitalism “as the moulder of modern Southern Africa”
(Thompson, 2001: 1). However, the precolonial history of the Southern Africa region is important as it provides “essential link” in explaining the present (Thompson, 2001: 1). This precolonial history is important in contextualising any understanding of the constructions and shaping of black African subjectivity that emerges in the colonial period and is perpetuated into the postapartheid period. That is why Black pan-Africanists like Anton Lembede, A.P. Mda, Robert Sobukwe and Steve Biko, among others, preferred to search within indigenous knowledges and history in attempts to theorise black liberation in South Africa.
South Africa’s history before colonisation is usually told as the Bantu history. An emphasis on Mfecane and the Mfecane states focusing on King Shaka who ruled the Zulu nation from around 1810 also creates the impression that the country’s history does not start until colonisation that came in the 1652. Importantly, criticism has been that this writes the Khoi and San people out of the country’s history. For the Khoi and San communities, and the later communities of the Zulu, Xhosa and Venda chiefdoms, among others, no notion of South Africa existed (Ntsebeza and Saunders, 2014: iv). Until as recent as the 1960s, the people called the San or Khoisan have not appeared in any historical writings (Wright, 2014: 8). Their history even today still remains trapped in the assumptions that their culture and identity has not changed from the stone age (Wright, 2014:
8). In terms of the Bantu people, a history that has been centred in the history of black South Africa, the tendency is to centre the Zulu kingdom, under the leadership of King Shaka (Wright, 2014: 7).
This history is always told as the history of the ‘wars of Shaka’ or umfecane where King Shaka is portrayed as “the archetype of despotic African king who ruled a highly militarised kingdom”
(Wright, 2014: 7). This despotic African king that King Shaka was imagined to be prefigures the postcolonial African strongmen and dictator leaders like Robert Mugabe, Yoweri Museveni, and others. However, historical work has cast doubt on the idea of umfecane (Wright, 1989; Cobbing, 1988; Omer-Cooper, 1993). Its most prominent critic, Cobbing (1989) has argued that it is a colonial alibi to conceal wrongdoing by the colonisers especially over land expropriation. The Mfecane is seen as a series of wars in the 1820s that led to great suffering in the land. This led to some groups leaving the region leading to new nations such as the Ndebele under Mzilikazi, the
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Swazi under Sobhuza, the Pedi under Sekwati, the Basotho under Moshoeshoe, the Bhaca under Madzikane, the Gaza under Soshangane, the Ngoni under Zwangendaba, and many others (Wright, 2014: 7). Wright notes that these new states “formed the bases of communities which have continued to play important roles in the history of southern Africa into the present” (Wright, 2014:
7 – 8).
Settler history in South Africa dates to 1652 when Jan van Riebeeck arrived with a group of Dutch settlers at the Cape of Good Hope. Riebeeck and his group had been sent by the Dutch East India Company (DEIC) to establish a base at the Cape of Good Hope that would be a station for the colonising company’s ships “‘to refresh themselves with vegetables, meat, water and other necessities en route to the East Indies” (Feinstein, 2005: 1). The DEIC was founded in 1602 and secured a monopoly on trade throughout Asia, especially in spices, cloves, cinnamon, and pepper (Lapierre, 2008: 5). Since the demand for the fresh produce was actually very high, the company was compelled to allow volunteers to settle in the Cape of Good Hope alongside the soldiers so as to produce wheat, other grains and breed cattle and sheep (Feinstein, 2005: 1). Lapierre emphasises that the DEIC was allowed by its government to open trading posts across the world, enter into deals with rulers across the world, and to deploy armed forces wherever it wished to establish itself (2008: 5). As a result of this blank cheque, the company was able to amass 150 merchant vessels and 40 warships effectively becoming “a state within the state that had absolute control over the greatest trading enterprise of its day” (Lapierre, 2008: 5). In the year following the setting up of a station in the Cape of Good Hope, in 1653 alone, the company traded the value of cargo that
“exceeded the budget for Louis XIVs France” (Lapierre, 2008:5). Lapierre argues that it was this commercial supremacy that made Holland “enrich itself through colonial conquest” and the many maps on the company’s walls in 1651 convinced them there was “no shortage of territory to colonize, whether in Africa, America, or even Asia” (2008: 5).
In the early years of the company’s settlement in the Cape of Good Hope, the settler economy was largely based on farming. Feinstein notes that before the discovery of mineral wealth, the country was a backward economy “almost entirely dependent on agriculture” (2005: 2). The challenges around agriculture were that not the entire country had good rains and other conditions for good farming. This applied to both indigenous and European settler farmers. The economy of the region,
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to be latter called South Africa was transformed by the discovery of minerals – diamonds and then gold – in the late 1800s. Feinstein notes that as a result of this discovery South Africa’s history
“becomes, in essence, a story of how this unique combination of the indigenous population, European settlers, and mineral resources was brought together in a process of conquest, dispossession, discrimination, and development to promote rapid economic progress” (2005: 3).
However, the conquests and dispossession had begun earlier on before the discovery of gold and diamonds (Feinstein, 2005: 22). It was the Khoikhoi who suffered first at the hands of the first white men to land at the Cape of Good Hope such that by 1672, two Khoikhoi chiefs were compelled to sign treaties surrendering large tracts of land to the white settlers (Mellet, 2020;
Ngcukaitobi, 2018). It is alleged that the colonialists paid the chiefs fractions of the promised compensation for the land (Feinstein, 2005: 22).
It would take 100 years after that before European expansion into the interior, eastwards, that the Europeans clashed with Xhosa people (Laband, 2020, Ngcukaitobi, 2018). Feinstein notes that
“from that time forward the economic life of Africans and Europeans would be indissolubly bound together” (Feinstein, 2005: 22). The arrival of white settlers on the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 dispossessed black people of land on which they lived, farmed and reproduced their life, and invented them as colonial labourers. As a result of the discovery of diamonds and gold in Kimberly and what was to later become Johannesburg, the black African became a colonial labourer in the whole of the Southern Africa sub-continent. As Wynter (1995) has argued, land dispossessions were based on the fact that in the European imagination, indigenous people were simply not there and hence could not own the land.