/ 13 September 2002

An intellectual architect of SA

South Africans seem to have short memories. While the horrors of the apartheid years are deeply etched on the minds of the older generation, there is quite simply a lack of knowledge among the younger generation. This is a feature of everyday life and is by no means confined to this country.

Ask the younger generation about the famous Rivonia trial. It is likely to draw a blank — not only from schoolchildren, but young adults as well. People in their late 20s and early 30s were not even born when the Rivonia arrests took place and the resistance movement looked as though it had been crushed.

Allied to this change in historical events is another factor — the change in intellectual life that affects social policies, the media and mass communication. The collapse, in political terms, of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall witnessed a corresponding change in what can be termed the sociological analyses from structural accounts to postmodernism and post-structuralism.

Parallel to the dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union was a change in the intellectual climate. What became known as postmodernism or post-structuralism was a new mode of analysis that, it could be argued, became infinitely reducible to the actions of individuals and the meanings given to these actions by individuals. Structures no longer needed to be considered. In such a world of analyses the role of the individual was valorised. This has had a marked effect on intellectuals, who in the course of espousing the new orthodoxy rejected former useful structural analyses. But there are now signs of cracks appearing and the beginning of a return to the older, more established structural analyses.

An example of a structural analysis is reflected in a seminal article, entitled Capitalism and Cheap Labour Power in South Africa from Segregation to Apartheid, by Harold Wolpe, writing as long ago as 1972. In this article (which had to circulate clandestinely in the country because as a ”named” and ”banned” person nothing he wrote could be publicly acknowledged) he argued that the apartheid system was not the outcome of a fundamental racism. This was, as Ronald Segal wrote, ”an original view of the difference between traditional segregationist policies and the specific systems of exploiting cheap labour, in response to the requirements of capital, rather than racism, which went under the name of apartheid”.

In a paper at a conference dedicated to Wolpe’s work, Dan O’Meara pointed out that the theoretical rigour of the article changed the direction of the argument then being voiced against liberalism to a new level of theoretical sophistication.

This article had an extraordinary impact on the resistance movement. Years later I was told by an activist that it provided an alternate base to the black consciousness movement because it was founded on an intellectual argument that sited the struggle firmly in a concrete materialist base. This is not to deny the existence and the devastating effect of racism, but demonstrated that using racism as a means to account for power and control does not provide a satisfactory answer.

Here is an immediately identifiable account of how intellectual analysis can contribute to social movements. These wider theoretical contexts have to take account of changing social and political conditions. The recent World Summit on Sustainable Development highlighted the difference in political analyses between the First and Third World countries (even the terminology has changed — Third World countries are now called the underdeveloped nations of the world). And going back a little in time to the World Trade Organisation meeting held in Seattle in 1999, the schism between the political representatives of the industrialised world and civil society arena of NGOs was violently apparent. The latter represented organised labour in sectors susceptible to demands by developing countries and environmental groups, all of whom challenged globalisation. All these events require quite clear analytical debates and research. And there is a dearth of this work in the country.

On Wolpe’s death, Kadar Asmal approached the family and asked in emphatic terms what we were doing to commemorate his contribution to the new South Africa. And so the Harold Wolpe Memorial Trust was founded. Since then it has held an international conference, followed by regular forum meetings in which politicians, academics and NGO members participated. Recently the fund received a generous grant and is now expanding its work. Its aim is to promote intellectual debate and discussion, a part of Harold Wolpe’s intellectual legacy.

O’Meara was unstinting in his praise of Wolpe. ”While Harold Wolpe never occupied a leading position in the liberation movement as such — indeed he declined formal political office throughout his life — through his remorseless intellect and prodigious capacity for analytical synthesis, Harold was without any doubt whatsoever one of the architects of ‘the new South Africa’. His work quite literally reshaped the way in which vast numbers of people saw apartheid South Africa.”

It is this quality of analytical synthesis that informs the aims of the trust. And it is within this framework that the trust sets out to stimulate intellectual debate beyond the confines of academia and into the broader sphere of the politician, the NGOs and civil society.

The first memorial lecture, which will acknowledge Harold Wolpe’s work, will take place in Parliament’s Old Assembly Hall in Cape Town at 6.30pm on September 19. It will be hosted by Professor Kadar Asmal; the speaker will be Professor Jakes Gerwel