More quietly than the cricketers ever could, a West Indian diplomatic and trade delegation recently came and went. Anti- apartheid South Africans and West Indians have longstanding cultural, political and – – through Cuba — military links. In Trinidad, when rebel cricketer Bernard Julien returned from a sanctions-busting tour, ordinary folks literally spat on him in the streets.
When Nkosi Sikelele erupted at the delegation’s farewell party last weekend, I saw a greater proportion of West Indian mouths moving in unison, having mastered the words during their short visit, than I have as yet seen of Springbok mouths moving on the rugby pitch.
Above all, West Indians and anti-apartheid South Africans became linked by the principle of non-racialism, not only as their respective elites mingled in London, but also in the grassroots lexicon of West Indian politics.
“There can be no Mother India for those whose ancestors come from India. There can be no Mother Africa for those of African origin. There can be no Mother England and no dual loyalties. There can be no Mother China, even if one could agree on which China is the mother; and there can be no Mother Syria and no Mother Lebanon. A nation, like an individual, can have only one mother. The only mother we recognise is Mother Trinidad and Tobago, and Mother cannot discriminate between her children.”
These Mandelaesque words, prefiguring also Thabo Mbeki’s landmark “I am an African” speech, were written in 1964 by Trinidad’s first post-colonial prime minister and founder of the People’s National Movement (PNM). He was Eric Williams, the Oxford- educated historian whose Capitalism and Slavery (1944) transformed understanding of slavery’s economics and whose From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean, 1492-1969 (1970) still leads its field.
Apartheid propagandists and assorted liberals portrayed anti-apartheid thinkers as crudely Africanist and eagerly violent, a mendacious and unscholarly campaign continued today by Ken Owen and Hermann Giliomee.
But Williams, speaking in 1963, saw things differently. He invoked anti-apartheid ideals in order to promote non-racialism across Trinidad’s main demographic divide: between descendants of African slaves and descendants of Indian indentured labourers. “I call upon all party members to stop once and for all this infuriating nonsense that every Indian is anti-PNM. Every Indian is not anti-PNM, nor is every white. Some of the worst enemies of PNM are as black as the ace of spades. Reaction knows no colour … Indians and Africans are fighting together in South Africa against apartheid.”
Addressing a mass audience in 1961, Williams proclaimed “Massa Day Done”, announcing white supremacy’s demise. “But,” he added, “not every white man was a Massa. If Massa was generally white, but not all whites were Massa, at the same time not all Massas were white.” This wisdom, directly fuelled by the insights and example of the anti-apartheid movement, remains relevant here and now.
When liberals accuse President Nelson Mandela of mean-spirited attacks on (in Owen’s inelegant phrase) “Uncle Tom blacks serving the purposes of whites”, are they not implying that only whites — not blacks — can be reactionaries?
The Institute of Race Relations has, for instance, replaced a white president, who last year denied that apartheid was a crime against humanity, with a black president, who has called for a return of the death penalty. It is literally and unambiguously reactionary for the president of a “liberal” institution to seek this backward step, the return of state-sanctioned death, for which the National Party too still brays.
The anti-apartheid movement, decades before it took power, influenced many incumbent post-colonial governments. Today, that “foreign” experience remains relevant to South Africa’s transformation, as inherited apartheid institutions — the South African Chamber of Business, Chamber of Mines, Institute of Race Relations — propel blacks into apparent leadership roles.
These new appointees should not be prejudged, but nor should eventual judgment be derailed by the liberals’ convenient insistence that there is no such thing as a black reactionary.
“Fuck the Poor” read a bumper sticker I saw on a prominent black businessman’s Mercedes in 1995. Already, characters like Rian Malan, attacking transformation, have begun quoting black American neo-conservatives like Shelby Steele, Dinesh D’Souza and Thomas Sowell, who are themselves widely dismissed as Uncle Toms by African Americans. Malan explicitly urges liberals to find local blacks to emulate these Americans.
Malan at least accepts that experiences elsewhere must be debated, not simply dismissed, as in Owen’s incomprehensible warning against a “venomous brand of western-hemisphere racial politics” (apparently promoted by yours truly).
Owen’s warning exactly embodies the colonial mindset, which Edward Said summarises as “a proclivity to divide, subdivide and redivide”, ending predictably in the “regrettable tendency of any knowledge based on such hard and fast distinctions as ‘East’ and ‘West’: to channel thought into a West or an East compartment”.
Actually, West Indian-South African politics, like Southern African, African and, indeed, world history, is already irreducibly hybrid. As is brilliantly evoked in Achmat Dangor’s Kafka’s Curse (1997), simunye [“we are one”] neither begins nor ends at the water’s edge. Owen’s nativism (like the black nativism that would label him a “settler”) long ago missed the boat.
If the appalling threatened deportation of “foreign” journalist Newton Kanhema is reversed (as surely it must be), it will not be thanks to laager-minded liberal commentators, nor to the Democratic Party, which has berated Mandela for taking a “foreigner”, Graca Machel, on overseas trips. Alas, liberals lack a principled basis for criticism.
Ronald Suresh Roberts, co-author of Reconciliation Through Truth: A Reckoning of Apartheid’s Criminal Governance, is from Trinidad