South Africa & India: Shaping the Global South edited by Isabel Hofmeyr and Michelle Williams (Wits University Press)
“Where the world has not been
broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls — into that heaven of freedom, let my country awake.” — Rabindranath Tagore
Apartheid scholarship was marked by containment rather than expansiveness, with national and regional frameworks dominating parameters of study. One of the important developments since 1994 has been the dismantling of the conventional disciplinary boundaries of academic research agendas and the burgeoning of new fields of exploration.
Historically, the world had been loosely divided into East and West and for the past half-century Third World discourses have dominated the way we have defined and understood the developing world.
Intersecting anticolonial histories
Then the truncated scholarship of the apartheid era and the tendency to cast the country in the predictable binaries of apartheid and resistance glossed over the way transnational histories are intertwined. However, during this present post-Cold War period, we are witnessing a vibrant re-imagining and reconfiguring of global alignments and South-South dialogue, with permutations of various kinds gaining ground.
Different facets of this strategic study, with particular reference to South Africa and India, are vividly captured in the book, South Africa & India — Shaping the Global South. Under the South-South rubric, the editors point out that India and South Africa present themselves as natural and logical areas for critical comparative studies. Despite centuries of interaction, it is ironic that India and South Africa were presented for so long as sundered, rather than conjunctive, domains of Âanalysis.
On closer scrutiny, we appreciate that both countries share histories of slavery and indenture and both share intersecting anticolonial histories. It is worth pointing out that India, in its robust independence struggles, set the example for the rest of the colonised world in general and for Africa in particular. In his novel, A Grain of Wheat, for example, Ngugi wa Thiong’o alludes to the inspirational role that Mahatma Gandhi, among others, played in the Kenyan independence struggles.
As the collection demonstrates, focusing on South Africa and India opens up a bewildering array of nodal points for study and investigation, with the selected authors taking us on many vicarious voyages of discovery. The individual essays, by an international community of reputable scholars, are illuminating in themselves and for what they bring to the whole project.
We see how the flow of ideas, people and merchandise has interlaced the history between South Africa and India. It is not surprising that the Indian Ocean becomes the natural theatre in which some of the linkages and circulation are played out. Jonathan Hyslop dredges up a kaleidoscopic world of seafarers and lascars (black sailors), steamships and labour migrants, but shows how the dodgy politics of terra firma invariably intrudes into this universe.
Similarly, Pamila Gupta’s tracer study of migrants between Goa and Mozambique draws attention to the impact of empire and of decolonisation on shifting racial identities and hierarchies at different moments in history.
Gandhi’s influence
Sociopolitical connections between India and South Africa invariably draw on the solidarity and dialogue pertaining to political resistance and it is not surprising that Gandhi’s influence frequently crops up in this respect. Given Gandhi’s sojourn in South Africa and his iconic role, he constitutes a palpable and tangible link in South Africa-India Âinteractions.
Isabel Hofmeyr explores the role of Gandhi’s printing press and textual migration during the early years of the 20th century, critiquing the forms of cosmopolitanism that developed across the Indian Ocean as a consequence.
Goolam Vahed considers the influence that Gandhi and Nehru had on the resistance politics of Monty Naicker and the South African Indian Congress during the 1950s.
Focusing on the present, Crain Soudien asks how Gandhian principles could be applied to South African schools, ravaged as they are by violence and the [il]logic of Âdominance.
Some of the authors provide illuminating and provocative in-depth analysis of selected issues in each country to better understand each case.
Changing world order
Although both countries enjoy progressive constitutions, Phil Bonner rightly argues that real transformation must lie in the deepening of democracy. Similarly Patrick Heller in his insightful chapter makes the important point that, at present, both India and South Africa, given their penchant for state control, are faced with enormous challenges for the practice and enactment of their democracies on the ground and the strengthening of civil society.
We cannot evade the high levels of inequality and poverty in both countries and the impact of a changing world order on each in this respect.
These important emphases, which run parallel (if not counter) to the emerging official narrative of bilateral economic partnership and “economic synergies” between India and South Africa, need to be heeded and responded to.
That South Africa and India actively implemented decentralisation and participation to strengthen local democracy is conceded by Claire Bénit-Gbaffou and Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal in their comparison of the two countries. However, they show that the rural bias evident in India (influenced, no doubt, by Gandhi, who famously exhorted the country that “India lives in her villages”) is in marked contrast to South Africa.
Civic virtue and private ethics
Michelle Williams, in her comparative study of the communist parties in both countries, shows that the ideological manifestos of transformative politics do not always translate into reality.
In his nuanced and perceptive chapter Eric Worby also draws attention to the fault lines that continue to determine the two societies. He points to the importance of giving attention to civic virtue and private ethics, where the care of the community and personal conduct are important conditions for the maturing of any democracy.
With its compelling moral and ethical agendas, this collection proves again, if proof is needed, that contemporary humanities scholarship is jolting us from our complacency and contributing in a vibrant way towards addressing the many challenges we face in this post-transitional phase in South Africa and in the world at large.
If in looking at the title, you assume that South Africa is principally cast as part of the Indian diaspora, these essays do much to rectify that impression. Indeed, the scholarship moves away from chauvinisms of any kind and from tired discourses on identity politics and, in the final analysis, posits a global community in which the “great ethical questions of post-colonial modernity for all of humanity” are pondered and judged.
The editors rightly argue that a comparative study of India and South Africa should prompt the two to cast a critical eye on their particular historiographies, in which the inclination towards a convergent nationalist bias is evident. A strong centrist approach occludes the important role that the margins play in the construction and defining of each nation. As one of the authors succinctly points out: “The nation’s peripheries are important in its imaginative formation.”
Linearity and glibness of rainbowism
This is something we would do well to remember in South Africa, as we interpret the nature of these “peripheries” both within and beyond our borders in daring and creative ways.
A project such as this overrides the linearity and glibness of rainbowism, retrieving veiled and asymmetrical histories and foregrounding present-day conditions. It shows the need to explore the heterogeneity and multi-polarity that constructs and defines the nation from within and without. These essays remind us that the body politic is an amalgam of parts and that selective constructions diminish a full and responsible understanding of the world in which we live.
In the transnational and global arena, we are forcibly reminded, marginals and metropolitans have long inhabited the same space (as do these essays).
Therefore, we are constrained to invent new formulations, away from the triumphalist but staid postures of post-colonial thinking, such as “the empire writes back” and especially the spurious “the diaspora writes back”. In the present world we must be ever vigilant against the temptation to submerge uncomfortable truths about our collective lives and choreograph only heroic narratives of the nation.
Indeed, Shaping the Global South deals with the kinds of historical truths and contemporary realities we need to ferret out, urging us to go to those obscure places where many knowledges may exist — knowledges that have directly or indirectly shaped the way we have constructed ourselves as individuals and as peoples. This brave new scholarship, set against the canonised and fixed knowledge of the past and present, is inventing new theories of knowledge and pointing us to new hidden spaces to examine.
Epoch of juxtaposition
More than ever, this collection reminds us that the rigid fences we erect around our countries are in fact porous, are shadow lines. We are all connected and overlap — across continents and the world.
As Foucault, in his usual prescient style, says: “The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity; we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than of a network that connects points and Âintersects with its own skein.”
Dr Devarakshanam (Betty) Govinden is a senior research associate at the University of KwaZulu-Natal