A couple of new books about the Unity Movement (or Non-European Unity Movement formed in 1943) go a long distance towards debunking the one-sided and sanitised histories of our protracted liberation struggle.
Accounts of pre-1994 struggles commonly claim that the African National Congress (ANC) solely defeated the Afrikaner supremacist rulers, rubbishing the contributions of organisations not kowtowing to its viewpoint. Despite the popularity of this claim, it is falsified history which ANC leaders have been peddling for their self-seeking gains. Glorifying the notion that the ANC miraculously ended our disenfranchisement through political compromises with the pre-1994 government is not only convoluted reasoning but utterly absurd. However, rhetorical falsehoods and media spin cannot prevent the logic of their policy of compromise and opportunism from betraying itself in practice. The disastrous outcome of the ANC’s fraudulent 1980s slogan, ‘Negotiations: Another Site of Struggle!’, manifests in today’s deepening misery afflicting the labouring majority. Invariably, peddlers of these popular but blatant falsehoods enjoy full endorsements of the liberals and imperialism, the ultimate beneficiaries of such ANC or Nelson Mandela glorification.
Debunking Falsified History
In ‘Cape Radicals’ (WITS University Press, 2019), Professor Crain Soudien suggests that every socio-political struggle against oppression and injustice pivots on a battle of ideas. The struggle for ideological principles or principled politics is an essential requirement for successful revolutionary action in any freedom struggle! This message is arguably the chief strength of this book. The book pays tribute to the activism of the New Era Fellowship (NEF), a political discussion club in this battle for ideological clarity. Soudien documents how the NEF nurtured an intelligentsia that devoted themselves to the establishment and building of the NEUM (renamed the Unity Movement of South Africa in 1964).
Through their efforts to solve South Africa’s national question, Soudien argues, the Cape Radicals made incisive and lasting breakthroughs, shifting our liberation struggle onto a far-reaching revolutionary path. Rival organisations, particularly the ANC and SA Communist Party, diluted and misrepresented the national question. Their Freedom Charter promotes multiracialism, which is indistinguishable from the veiled racism of the liberals. By contrast, the NEF and Unity Movement rejected, from the onset, that multiracialism or multinationalism is a solution to South Africa’s national question. The Unity Movement’s motto “We Build A Nation” advocates its tenacious devotion to non-racialism in outlook and action.
The other noteworthy book is simply titled Archie Mafeje (HSRC Press, 2019). In this book, Bongani Nyoka, a young South African sociologist, has assembled and edited seven articles that Archibald Boyce Monwabisi Mafeje (1936-2007) wrote between the early 1970s and late 1990s. After completing his Masters’ degree at UCT in the early 1960s, Mafeje enrolled for doctoral studies at Cambridge University, graduating around 1968. Subsequently, when UCT refused Dr Mafeje’s appointment as a senior lecturer in 1968, a rejection based on racist prejudice rather than scholarly credentials, he moved on to become a venerated professor of Anthropology/Sociology at universities in Dar es Salaam, The Hague and Cairo.
Nyoka’s introduction offers a captivating background to the sampled articles, tracing how Mafeje evolved into an admirable social scientist and what animated his prolific scholarly work. But the book covers more than just Mafeje’s remarkable academic accomplishments. The volume’s introduction is in effect an abbreviated history of the Unity Movement, understandably constricted to the moments when Mafeje actively participated in it.
Before he went abroad, Mafeje belonged to several organisations that were Unity Movement affiliates. Stalwarts of the Movement, particularly Nathaniel Tshuthsa Honono, educated Mafeje in Unity Movement politics during his high-school years in the former Transkei. This enlightenment, coupled with his formative political training in the Society of Young Africa (SOYA) and the Cape Peninsula Students Union (CPSU) – Unity Movement affiliates operating alongside student/youth groups in Durban and Johannesburg – aided Mafeje to become a towering intellectual figure with recognition beyond Africa.
The imprint of Unity Movement ideology on Mafeje’s thinking was indelible as is evident from this collection, notwithstanding his paradoxical aloofness from organised political involvement during his decades abroad and, since 2002, his residency in Pretoria where he took up an academic position at the University of South Africa (UNISA). Unity Movement politics is prominent in the topics Mafeje worked on and, far more profoundly, in the method of scientific reasoning subtly woven into his arguments. As a renowned scholar on the political economy of agrarian transitions, he dissected the dynamics of agrarian class formation and unmasked how anachronistic tribal despots serve capitalist accumulation. It is common knowledge that in the Unity Movement tradition, the agrarian question is central. Furthermore, Mafeje advocated a militant defence of dialectical logic and historical materialism whenever he dealt with the methodology of social theory.
Inheritance for Future Social Revolutions
Soudien and Nyoka must be commended for their thoughtful introductions to the true history of our unfinished struggle and countering the falsification of past struggles. On the whole, the core strengths of these books eclipse their shortcomings. While these books cast the spotlight on the historical relevancy of the Unity Movement up to the 1960s, the authors hesitate to step beyond academic curiosity of a bygone era for its own sake. They are silent on the organisation’s contributions to the liberation struggle over decades since the ‘Dark Sixties’.
Since the mid-1960s, for instance, the Unity Movement leadership in exile fought tirelessly to garner support for an uninterrupted South African revolution, frustrated by reactionary leaders of the OAU. Another significant turning point was the ‘Terrorism Trial’ of 14 members of APDUSA in 1971/2, with 13 of them eventually sentenced to lengthy imprisonment on Robben Island. With the gradual revival of the organisation throughout the 1980s, cadres of young workers, students and intellectuals joined this revolutionary tradition to fight for its programme. The political re-orientation of APDUSA in the early 1990s – adopting a set of anti-capitalist transitional demands for unity with progressive forces and resistance against the neoliberal onslaught of the post-1994 neoliberal state – echo the call: “A Luta Continua!”
Lessons accumulated over the last four decades of struggle, also belong to social movement and trade union activists now awakening to revolutionary consciousness but still unaware of their rich revolutionary inheritance. New generations of activists must seize this inheritance, soberly internalise all lessons from past struggles and use it to arm themselves for formidable battles ahead.