NEW NATIONALISM – Mzantsi-style

Is there a link between Nkandla, xenophobia and the “I love Hitler” Facebook status of the now evicted Wits SRC president?

I believe there is, but in order to explain this, it is necessary to take a step back.

About two weeks ago I wrote, proposing the use of the idea of “home-making” and “homelands” as a way to understand the current predicament of economic inertia in the Eastern Cape and also the xenophobic violence in South Africa.

By defining “home” is a particular way, associated with rural homesteads and tradition – the Nkandla model – the ANC has generated a new model of South African nationalism which excludes settlers and non-South African Africans.

This new nationalism is basically an ethnic nationalism but not tribalism in the narrow, conventional sense. It is based, firstly, on a definition of national cultural insiders and outsiders, and, secondly, on the idea of state-driven feudalism (the provision of tributes) rather market-driven capitalism as the main vehicle for economic development.

This is not the rainbow nation version of nationalism and citizenship, nor the market driven inclusive growth, development version of the National Development Plan. Rather it is an Nkandla “homeland” model essentially based on a modernised version of feudalism rather than developmental capitalism.

One reason why this model has massive support in South Africa today, especially among the disgruntled masses, is because the liberal market model of former President Thabo Mbeki has not been effective in delivering the goods. A new version of nationalism and economic development has become necessary. And, with the political left in disarray, we have returned to homeland politics.

What President Jacob Zuma, EFF leader Julius Malema and disgraced ex-Wits SRC president Mcebo Dlamini are all doing is working this territory of discontent to find a mode of populist politics that will give them power.

The problem for Zuma is that no-one finds his feudal model very convincing. And this is where, I believe Dlamini, with his university education has seen Adolph Hitler as a modern alternative and as a role model. Although not a feudal warlord, Hitler was a fierce and brutal ethnic nationalist. He imagined a new Germany built on a powerful plan of nationalisation and economic modernisation.

To understand how the ground is prepared let us return to the warnings of well-known Africanist scholar Mamhood Mamdani who in 1996 wrote his seminal Citizen and Subject. This has been one of the most widely referred to texts in African studies in the past 20 years.

The basic argument is that South Africa, despite claims to the contrary, offered no exception to the Africa wide-pattern of state formation, which combined a feudal-style system of tribal authority with democratic citizenship after independence.

Mamdani insisted the key to Africa’s failed attempts at modernisation lay in the continent-wide maintenance of these two parallel forms of power and authority, an entitlement-based patriarchal tribal model authority, based on tribute extraction and a democratic one based on universal citizenship and economic development.

He further said many of Africa’s woes could be explained by the failure of post-colonial states to leave tribalism behind, both as a type of state and as a form of economy.

This duality, Mamdani said, was also fundamental to understanding the violence in South Africa immediately prior to the democratic elections of 1994, where bloody clashes took place, not only between Zulus themselves, but between Zulus and Xhosas and other ethnic groups.

These almost brought cities and rural areas to their knees and threatened to derail the liberation process at the11th-hour.

South Africa was born with the politics of tribalism in its bowels, said Mamdani, and thus faced the critical test of whether to follow the well-trodden African path or take a new road, where citizenship would not be encumbered by the politics and economics of tribalism.

The ANC ignored Mamdani’s analysis and decided instead to keep remnants of the Bantustan systems in place, retaining communal land tenure, tribal authority and chiefly power. It argued that chiefs and traditional leaders had been active members of the ANC since its inception and it would be wrong to exclude them from playing a key role in society.

Their influence has increased massively under Zuma. And interestingly, despite all his skill as a statesman and his commitment to democracy, Nelson Mandela did his bit to keep the tribal system alive, by engaging with chiefs and traditional leaders around the country, and especially in the Eastern Cape. He did so against strong opposition from within the ranks of his party.

Mbeki, far less enamoured by tradition, focused instead on developing a technicist, contemporary Africanist class for driving the agenda for the country. His African Renaissance movement and “native African intellectuals” were not traditionalists, but modernists who rejected tribalism and narrow ethnicity, although they did assert African indigeneity.

Under Zuma, the traditionalist faction has received sustained support and their position is stronger than ever, as witnessed by the increasing resources, status and influence that traditional authorities enjoy. Some even argue that Zuma is no more than a tribal chief dressed up in presidential robes.

So how has the entrenchment of tribalism worked itself out in our politics?

Well, there has not been a repeat of the everyday ethnic violence of the 1990s. This type of conflict has subsided. Townships residents do fight one another, but not primarily based on tribal affiliation. Rather they fight for access to services, housing subsidies and a better life.

There are, of course, clearly factions in the ruling alliance based on tribal identity and affiliation, but this is not the politics of the masses. They want a better life, jobs and serviced houses from their leaders and feel entitled to these as South Africans with a particular history.

Since the cities have proved to be hostile places for permanent home-making – too expensive, insecure and violent – many have returned to the homelands to build the umzi.

So Zuma’s politics of Nkandla is not so much a signal to the masses of a return to tribalism, as some suggest, but more an endorsement of a particular idea of home-making, the kind that involves anchoring in a place of origin and attending to the business of ubuntu.

The nation then becomes a place for all those who have homelands in a specific sense of the word and who embrace particular cultural traditions of home and home-making, which have now been modernised with access to taps, electricity, services and new suburban house styles.

The new ideology of the serviced house is blended with the old politics of homelands to create a new version of “homeland nationalism”.

The idea of Nkandla is not just a Zulu thing, but something open to all those with a “homeland” and a home to return to.

Those without homelands and access to the ubuntu of home, then become outsiders. Whites are obvious candidates for exclusion, but so too are so-called coloureds and Indians – despite their blackness and suffering under apartheid.

When ethnic Africans diminish coloured people they called them, malawu, meaning people without “traditions”, which is another way of saying they have no home, Nkandla-style or African home-making practices and ubuntu. They are therefore like white settlers.

“Foreign” Africans, by contrast, might have ubuntu, but do not have their homes in South Africa, so they are people without homelands in that sense. They are not only seen as homeless, but urban competitors, which makes them adversaries. They have now become the new tribal “others”, and have repeatedly been met with the fire and rubber that local tribal and political adversaries used in the townships of the 1980s and early 1990s.

The new version of South African nationalism, I would argue, is being driven from below, because of the frustrations of the marginalised, poverty and unemployment.

But it is being shaped from above by leaders like Zuma and Malema who want the popular vote.

Indeed, the masses are feeling the same sense of disillusionment and anger that the German people felt at the end of the Weimar Republic. They had hoped for a new dawn after the First World War, but experienced more misery and poverty.

The German masses were also disgusted by the hedonistic, self- serving excesses, greed and corruption of their ruling class. Nazism grew on the back of ruling class excess and greed that was literally eating the wealth of the nation.

The other driving factor behind Hitler’s rise to power was the failure of Germany’s post-World War One economy to provide a livelihood for the masses. This was partly due to poor economic policies, but also because Germany was being punished for its role in the war.

These factors are precisely our current conditions in South Africa. We have a ruling class that is corrupt, greedy and hedonistic, eating alone while others go hungry. We have also seen hope turn to despair, and our economy in free fall.

The missing ingredient in this dangerous cocktail has been an exclusive form of cultural/racial nationalism which galvanises the politics of xenophobia. Hitler distinguished between Aryans and Jews, and later between Germans and other “impure” outsiders like Poles, Austrians, Russians, as well as gypsies and homosexuals.

Is this where the new ethnicised version of South African nationalism will lead us, to a new apartheid-style of identity politics?

Against this context the admiration of Hitler expressed by individuals such as Dlamini is not perhaps as shocking as some believe.

Dlamini, as a student leader, feels the waves of popular discontent and anger and the rising tide of new nationalism. He is looking for ways to articulate the way forward – and this is where he sees Hitler.

Professor Leslie Bank is director of the Fort Hare Institute of Social and Economic Research