Legacy

What Can We Learn from Archie Mafeje about the Road

to Democracy in South Africa?

Lungisile Ntsebeza

INTRODUCTION

More than two decades after the advent of democracy in 1994, South Africa
finds itself at a crossroads in many ways similar to the crisis it faced in the
late 1980s and early 1990s, when the democracy we are now enjoying was
negotiated. It is now apparent that, as in the rest of the African continent of
which South Africa is an integral part, the leaders of the national liberation
movements — the African National Congress (ANC) in the case of South
Africa — are mostly interested in protecting the interests of private capital,
mainly controlled by whites and an aspirant and emerging class of black
capitalists. These leaders also use state resources to feather their own nests,
paying lip service to the needs of the growing number of poor people living
in both rural and urban areas that put them in power. The waves of strikes and
protests which began in the early 2000s — the current (2015/16) university-
based, student-led campaign being the most recent example — illustrate the
dismal failure of the leaders of the ANC to embark on a thoroughgoing
project of decolonizing South Africa. This clearly shows that these leaders
are mimicking their counterparts in the rest of the African continent.
In this article about the legacy of Archie Mafeje, I focus on his reflections
on the issues raised above. What can we learn from Mafeje about the road
to democracy in South Africa? More specifically, what can we learn from
his socio-historical analysis? I begin with a biographical sketch of Mafeje,
with special emphasis on his intellectual development. I then move on to
delineate his theoretical approach, which is based on a socio-historical ana-
lysis. From there I discuss Mafeje’s politics. In doing so, I emphasize that
Mafeje’s approach to politics as an academic cannot be divorced from his
association with the political tradition or tendency of the Non-European
Unity Movement (NEUM). I demonstrate that, over time, Mafeje used his

The reviewers’ comments on earlier drafts are gratefully acknowledged.

Development and Change 47(4): 918–936. DOI: 10.1111/dech.12244

C 2016 International Institute of Social Studies.
Legacy: Archie Mafeje 919

academic training as a way of expressing his politics. I consider some aca-

demic debates that Mafeje was engaged in and how these illustrate his views
of the nature and character of post-independent Africa in general, and the
South African liberation struggle and democracy in particular. I conclude
by reflecting on the legacy of Mafeje and what it means for the current
conjuncture.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Archibald Boyce Monwabisi Mafeje, popularly known as Archie Mafeje,

was born in the District of Engobo in the Transkei part of the Eastern Cape
on 30 March 1936. He matriculated in 1954 at Healdtown High School, the
alma mater of many nationalist leaders in South Africa, including Nelson
Mandela. His university education began in 1955 with a short stint at the
then University College of Fort Hare, another institution that produced future
nationalist leaders not only from South Africa, but throughout sub-Saharan,
English-speaking Africa. Mafeje left Fort Hare in 1956 after an unsuccessful
academic performance. From 1957 to 1964 he studied at the University of
Cape Town (UCT) where he completed a BA in Anthropology, an Honours
degree in Urban Sociology and a Master’s degree in Political Anthropology.
He achieved the latter with a distinction under the supervision of Monica
Wilson, one of the leading anthropologists at the time. Mafeje enjoyed a
good working relationship with his supervisor, which he later expressed in
one of his letters to Wilson dated 9 October 1964 in these terms: ‘Working
with you in Cape Town gave me great satisfaction because I felt I was not just
being a student, but I was working on certain anthropological problems’.1
On Wilson’s strong recommendation, Mafeje went to Cambridge University
where he was initially employed as a research assistant and later graduated
with a PhD in 1969.2 His supervisor at Cambridge University was Dr Audrey
Richards.
It is clear from the correspondence involving Mafeje, Wilson and Richards
that the relationship between Mafeje and Richards contrasted sharply with his
relationship with Wilson. Right from the outset, Richards doubted Mafeje’s
intellectual abilities, especially in dealing with theoretical issues, proper
reading and analyses of text. She also did not, as Wilson did, have high
regard for Mafeje as a field worker.3 Her view of Mafeje is captured in
one of her letters to Wilson dated 6 January 1968: ‘I don’t understand what
is holding him up. He is quick and brilliant in discussion and a popular

1. All correspondence involving Mafeje, Wilson and Richards can be found in the African
Studies section of the UCT Libraries.
2. Note that in the CV that Mafeje submitted to UCT when he applied for a job in 1993, he
erroneously states that he completed his doctoral studies in 1966.
3. See correspondence between Richards and Wilson.
920 Lungisile Ntsebeza

supervisor — always impresses newcomers. Yet he seems unable to read a

document and get anything out of it . . . His stuff is like a clever man who
isn’t working, but his fellows say (unprovoked) that he is an obsessional
worker!’.
Not unexpectedly, Richards did not think that Mafeje would be a good
academic. Here are some of her remarks on Mafeje when the latter was to
embark on an academic career after completing his PhD: ‘I always feel his
charm when I am with him. But I tremble to think of him as THE lecturer on
Rural Sociology at Dar!’.4 She was more forthright and scathing in her letter
to Wilson dated 22 September 1970: ‘In spite of his quickness and ability,
I know for certain now that Archie has no academic gifts although I think
he will do well in an organizing job at a university because of his charm of
manner, quickness and enthusiasm’.
For his part, Mafeje did not enjoy his stay at Cambridge. After barely a
year in Cambridge, Mafeje wrote to Wilson that he was ‘not getting as much
stimulation as [he] expected’. His letter to Richards dated 10 June 1970
arguably sums up the relationship between the two:
Although personally you are not to blame and, in fact, you did everything to help, you are
associated with this experience in Cambridge. Your frequent charge that I was ungrateful to
you for the various things you had done for me . . . did not make me feel any better. As a
matter of fact, I began to wonder why you continued to help at all if that is what you felt
about things. Whatever your complaints, one thing certain is that you knew from me that
I was fully aware and appreciative of everything you have done for me. But for my own
reasons, I was not going to allow myself to be ‘adopted’ by anybody.

History was to prove Richards wrong. Mafeje held senior positions in

universities across the world, in Europe, America and his own continent,
Africa. Notable amongst these was the University of Dar es Salaam, where
he became professor and head of department of Sociology at the tender age
of 34 years. Mafeje also enjoyed a special relationship with the Institute of
Social Sciences (ISS) in The Netherlands between 1968 and 1976. In 1973
he was appointed Queen Juliana Professor of Anthropology and Sociology
of Development by an act of Parliament, getting the approval of all the 29
universities of The Netherlands (Olukoshi et al., 2007).
His scholarship covered a broad range of topics such as democracy, devel-
opment, academic freedom, land and agrarian issues. His publication record
began in 1963 with a seminal book entitled Langa: A Study of Social Groups
in an African Township, which he co-authored as a second author with his su-
pervisor, Monica Wilson. His most path-breaking scholarly pieces include:
‘The Ideology of Tribalism’ (1971); The Theory and Ethnography of African
Social Formations: The Case of the Interlacustrine Kingdoms (1991); and
‘Anthropology and Independent Africans: Suicide, Or the End of an Era?’
(1996). Some of his important publications constitute the subject of this
article.

4. Letter from Richards to Wilson dated 20 December 1969.

Legacy: Archie Mafeje 921

Following the establishment of the Council for the Development of Eco-

nomic and Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in 1973, Mafeje devoted
most of his life to building and nurturing a community of especially young
African scholars based on the African continent. In December 2003, he was
awarded Lifelong Membership of CODESRIA, conferred on the best and
most illustrious African scholars. At the time of his death in 2007, Mafeje
was a member of the Scientific Committee of CODESRIA.
Mafeje started his academic career at UCT and was destined to return to
this institution after completing his doctoral studies. He never did return,
however, despite the fact that he was appointed, on merit, in 1968 as Senior
Lecturer in Social Anthropology. This was ostensibly for political reasons
emanating from the apartheid policies. However, when Mafeje re-applied in
1993, in the dying days of apartheid, he was not even interviewed for the
job. These two developments left a bitter taste in the relationship between
Mafeje and UCT that has yet to be fully resolved.5

MAFEJE’S THEORETICAL METHOD

Mafeje’s method comes up very clearly in his critique of Harold Wolpe and
Michael (Mike) Morris in a review article that was published in a special
issue on anthropology and history of the Journal of Southern African Stud-
ies (Mafeje, 1981). The title of the review article is ‘On the Articulation of
Modes of Production’, and it is based on a review of chapters by Wolpe
and Morris that appeared in a book edited by Wolpe (1980). Mafeje enters
into a debate with these scholars on precisely the topic of the articulation
of modes of production in South Africa.6 Central to Mafeje’s critique is the
distinction and/or relationship he draws between ‘idiographic’ and ‘nomoth-
etic’ enquiries. He elucidates the distinction and/or relationship in terms of
approaching the specific via the general or vice versa. For Mafeje, ‘to avoid
being lost in abstraction’, one should approach ‘the general via the specific’
(1981: 124). By implication, he accuses Wolpe and Morris of ‘being lost in
abstraction’ and accuses them of arriving at the specific via the general.
Mafeje’s main contention is that ‘the majority of the “articulation theo-
rists”’ use, ‘more or less’ the ‘concrete . . . as a slogan’ (ibid.: 134). One
example that Mafeje uses is that of ‘capital’ or ‘capitalism’. According to
him, these terms are ‘often talked of as a noun agent with an inexorable logic’
(ibid.). For Mafeje, Wolpe is the most vulnerable in this regard. Wolpe’s the-
sis is that capitalism in what became South Africa in 1910, developed on the

5. For full details see Hendricks (2008) and Ntsebeza (2014).

6. It is important to note that despite searching high and low for a response from Wolpe and
Morris to Mafeje’s detailed and scholarly criticism, I could not find even a single reference
to Mafeje’s article. I find this astounding given that the article was not published in an
obscure journal.
922 Lungisile Ntsebeza

basis of cheap labour, which was justified by the existence of the reserves,
whose economy subsidized the reproduction of labour. In the heyday of
apartheid and secondary industrialization, according to Wolpe, cheap labour
was guaranteed through force. Mafeje criticized Wolpe on the grounds that
he (Wolpe) did not see any limit to the demand for cheap migrant labour.
Yet, for Mafeje, South Africa had, by the time of his 1981 review article,
witnessed ‘the dumping of unwanted labour in the reserves, not to reproduce
their labour-power but to perish’ (ibid.).
Mafeje was also critical of Wolpe’s assumption that land in the rural areas
of the former Bantustans, what Wolpe (1972: 431) referred to as ‘African
redistributive economies’, was held communally by the community. Mafeje
drew attention to the quit rent and permit to occupy (PTO) systems applicable
to these areas. Although the land was legally owned by the state, the plots
could be inherited, which meant that in practice ‘particular descendent groups
are able to hold the original plot in perpetuity’ (Mafeje, 1981: 135). Against
this background, Mafeje asked the rhetorical question: ‘What is communal
about that?’. In a nutshell, what Mafeje noted was that there is a ‘persistent
confusion of communal ownership with redistributive kinship units in South
African literature’ (ibid.: 128).
With respect to Morris’s (1976) article ‘The Development of Capitalism
in South African Agriculture: Class Struggle in the Countryside’, Mafeje
argues that ‘the content of the “concrete struggle” in Morris’s work was
‘predetermined’ by the concepts that Morris used. In his article, Morris uses
the classical definition of a proletariat to understand the conversion of the
African producers. In this tradition, the process of conversion is complete
when producers lose complete control and ownership of the means of pro-
duction and rely for a living on selling their labour power for a wage. Mafeje
accuses Morris of not taking into account the ‘parallel struggles by originally
autonomous pastoralists, clans and lineages as a reaction to conquest’, and
sees this as ‘indicative of an inability to theorize the colonial factor’. The
omission of these struggles, Mafeje argued, amounted to Morris succumbing
‘to the fallacy of a history without subjects and to the substitution of modes
of production for human action and consciousness’ (Mafeje, 1981: 131).
In short, the essence of Mafeje’s criticism of Wolpe and Morris, whom
Mafeje saw as representative of ‘most South African Marxist theorising
about Africans’, is that their theories are based on ‘texts which are largely
divorced from context’. According to Mafeje, these protagonists hardly ac-
quired ‘idiographic knowledge through field work’, presumably of their own,
but ‘relied on work done by liberals, anthropologists, linguists, economists
and historians, whose empiricism is a guarantee for doing field work’ (ibid.:
137). Mafeje further scathingly pointed out that some of these Marxists
disdained fieldwork under the guise that ‘abstract theory’ was superior
knowledge than empirical research, something that Mafeje did not see
as tenable (ibid.). Elsewhere, Mafeje contends that ‘class struggle with-
out political agents cannot be materialised as the motor of history’ (ibid.).
Legacy: Archie Mafeje 923

This takes us back to the ‘idea of a dividing line between idiographic and
nomothetic enquiry’. For Mafeje, a close study of the history of the ‘so-
called pre-capitalist modes of production’ and its people ‘is as important
as that of capitalism’. However, he noted that a general theory, nomothetic
inquiry, was needed to make the specificities of these modes of production
intelligible.
Mafeje’s insistence on the idiographic and, in particular, doing fieldwork
is a clear testimony of the impact of anthropology on him. At the same time,
Mafeje is arguably known in the community of scholars as a severe critic
of anthropology. This goes back to his path-breaking article ‘The Ideology
of Tribalism’ (1971) and the debate with a range of scholars, including
anthropologists, which appeared in the first issue of the African Sociological
Review that was published in 1997. This begs the question as to where he
stood with respect to the discipline of anthropology, in which he himself
was trained. Did he abandon his discipline?
Sharp’s (2008) reading of Mafeje is most persuasive in this regard. He
recalled correspondence between the young Mafeje and his supervisor and
mentor, Monica Wilson — whom Mafeje referred to as ‘Prof’ and later,
when he had acquired his PhD, as ‘Aunt’ — in which Mafeje disclosed
his love for anthropology, declaring it his ‘calling’ (Sharp, 2008: 159).
This was during the time Mafeje was doing fieldwork in Langa. According
to Sharp, Mafeje ‘always insisted on the importance of his ethnographic
inquiries’ (ibid.: 165). This was despite his trenchant critique of anthropology
as he grew in his scholarship and began relating his academic interests
to his politics. Mafeje was clearly comfortable with the research methods
of anthropology. As Sharp put it, Mafeje ‘remained faithful to Wilson’s
injunction that any attempt to understand the circumstances of people in
Africa required first-hand inquiry into what they made of these circumstances
themselves’ (ibid.). What Mafeje objected to was a particular version of
anthropology, which he associated with colonialism, or saw as ‘Western’
derived. This, again citing Sharp, ‘was an anthropology in which particular
epistemological assumptions . . . were allowed to overwhelm whatever it
was that people on the ground had to say about the conditions in which
they found themselves’ (ibid.). Anthropology is one area in which Mafeje
combined his scholarship and his politics.

MAFEJE’S POLITICS

Mafeje is one of a few renowned scholars who managed to combine his

academic pursuits with his political commitment to the struggle for social
change and justice with specific reference to the African continent. In his
article ‘Mafeje and Langa: The Start of an Intellectual Journey’, John Sharp
(2008) eloquently captures the marriage between Mafeje’s scholarship and
his politics, which for Sharp was a process that reached fruition after more
924 Lungisile Ntsebeza

than a decade. He argues that in the early 1960s, when Archie Mafeje was still
a student under the supervision of Monica Wilson, he ‘had not yet worked
out how to bring the principles derived from his political activism on his
standing as a beginning anthropologist’ (ibid.: 161). According to Sharp,
when Mafeje worked with Wilson in the early 1960s, he could not come up
with a position that would counter the ‘liberalist interpretation’ of his mentor
and supervisor. Sharp was referring to the book Langa, for which Mafeje
did the fieldwork in the township and wrote extensive notes. For Wilson,
Langa was, in the words of Sharp, ‘a very straightforward story about the
sequence of steps by which the urban encounter was “schooling” black South
Africans in Christianity in particular, and “civilisation” in general’ (Sharp,
2008: 162). While Mafeje would not be happy with this interpretation, he
could not, at the time, formulate a counter-argument.
It would, in the view of Sharp, take more than 10 years for Mafeje to
have the confidence to articulate his own distinct position. He did this in
his contribution to Monica Wilson’s Festschrift that was published in 1975,
which he used to revisit their study on Langa, arguing against Monica Wilson
that the major problem facing blacks in South Africa was racial capitalism,
rather than merely racial domination. Mafeje, according to Sharp, looked at
the ‘growing influence of the militant urban youth, and the militant pagans in
the countryside’ for answers to his questions about ‘assimilation into white
middle-class cosmic view’ and about this view transcending itself (ibid.:
163). While Mafeje would not dispute that some blacks were attracted to
civilization along ‘Western’ lines, he demonstrated in his contribution that
this was not true of all the residents of Langa (ibid.: 165). In this article, I
build and elaborate on the insights of Sharp.
Mafeje cut his political teeth in the NEUM tradition. The NEUM
was formed in 1943. Its programme was based on the principle of non-
collaboration with the government and its institutions (Tabata, 1950, 1952).
The NEUM’s orientation towards politics was summed up by its leader
Isaac Bangani Tabata in his letter to Nelson Mandela, dated 16 June 1948:
‘It is not what the members say or think about an organisation that matters.
It is not even a question of the good intentions of the leaders. What is of
paramount importance is the programme and principles of the organisation’
(quoted in Karis and Carter, 1979: 362, original emphasis). Towards the late
1950s, the NEUM split, with Tabata leading the majority faction.7 Tabata
had concluded that Africans were predominantly a landless peasantry that
could be mobilized for social revolution on the issue of land hunger (Drew,
1991: 464). That the African population in the 1930s and 1940s was over-
whelmingly rural (Drew, 2000: 146) might have influenced Tabata to draw
this conclusion. Tabata argued for the mobilization of people on the basis
of their immediate needs and demands, rather than abstract goals. These
needs and demands revolved around the right to buy and sell land, one of

7. For details of the split see Drew (1991, 2000).

Legacy: Archie Mafeje 925

the demands of the NEUM’s Ten Point Programme. Tabata was in favour
of this land demand.
The young Archie Mafeje, who was in his early 20s when the split oc-
curred, cast his lot with the Tabata faction. He was active in the rural struggles
against the introduction of chiefs and the land conservation measures, in-
cluding the culling of stock. His involvement would lead to his detention
during one of his visits to the Eastern Cape in the late 1950s. However, there
is no evidence of Mafeje’s independent contribution to the debates that led
to a split in the late 1950s. Indeed, there is no evidence that Mafeje played
any leading role in the politics of the NEUM while he was a student in Cape
Town from the late 1950s to 1964, when he completed his Master’s degree.
Be that as it may, I will show that Mafeje would draw from the tradition of
and his experiences in the NEUM as he pursued his academic endeavours,
specifically in his critique of the liberation movements not only in South
Africa, but in sub-Saharan Africa. We have already seen the influence of the
NEUM in Mafeje’s theoretical method, specifically the distinction he draws
between the idiographic and nomothetic inquiry.
Mafeje’s article ‘Soweto and its Aftermath’, which was published in the
Review of African Political Economy in 1978, is arguably the first major
academic piece on his politics. It was not only about the student revolts, as
he called them, which exploded in Soweto on 16 June 1976 and spread like
wildfire across most of the country by the end of that year. It also raises
questions about ‘a revolutionary strategy in South Africa’, with specific
reference to ‘implications for an alliance of workers and students and for its
relation with the liberation movements’ (Mafeje, 1978: 17). In other words,
Mafeje’s article focuses not only on students, but on their relationships
with workers (both urban and migrant) and the South African liberation
movements. He does this by looking at the social identity of the student
movement, its organizational form, political programme and strategy, as
well as its historical meaning (ibid.: 17–18).
Mafeje’s point of departure was that the uprisings were the work of stu-
dents themselves, thus rejecting any claim that the liberation movements
such as the ANC and the PAC, which were then banned, were the proverbial
power behind the throne. If anything, Mafeje argues that the events of 16
June 1976 took these ‘expatriate organisations’ by surprise. He pointed out
that for most of the time the students, under the leadership of the Soweto
Student Representative Council (SSRC), focused on coordinating ‘student
action in the face of increasing police brutality and threatened chaos’ (ibid.:
18). According to Mafeje, it took the students close to two months, at the
beginning of August 1976, ‘to realise that their cause was in danger, without
direct support of the working-class’. Initially, the students were arrogant and
regarded their parents and elders as ‘irrelevant’ (ibid.: 18).
Clearly drawing on the experience he acquired as a political activist in
South Africa, his research on Langa and his Master’s thesis (1963) which
took him to the rural areas of the Transkei, Mafeje was aware of the need
926 Lungisile Ntsebeza

to problematize the nature of the South African working class in order

to reach a deeper understanding of the Soweto revolts. In this regard, he
commented that migrant workers in Soweto and, when the uprisings spread
to the Western Cape, in Cape Town were the ‘weak link’ in the efforts
of the police to break the strike (ibid.: 20). The bulk of migrant workers
stayed in single-sex hostels in which they were grouped along ethnic lines
and made to live like bachelors, while their families remained in the rural
areas of the former Bantustans. The police, Mafeje averred, pitted migrant
workers against their urban counterparts, on the one hand, and migrants
against students, on the other hand. The majority of the students were born
and raised in urban areas. In the early days of the revolt especially, students
burnt down the hostels, thus, Mafeje suggests, playing into the hands of
the police. It was in response to the manner in which the police exploited
the situation that the students started to work on improving relations with
migrant workers and elders. Thus by September 1976, according to Mafeje,
the students had reasonably successfully worked on bridging these divisions
(ibid.: 21).
However, having declared ‘total victory for the students!’ Mafeje (ibid.)
noted that ‘neither the students nor the workers had a long-term strategy for
dealing with such heavy blows from the establishment’, especially as the
revolt expanded to the Western Cape towards the end of 1976. According to
Mafeje, the students in the Western Cape seemingly had not learnt from the
mistakes of their counterparts in Soweto, where students had reached a level
of forming ‘a representative committee where mistakes could be analysed
and corrected’ (ibid.). In Cape Town, as in Soweto in the early days of the
revolt, there was initially ‘confrontation with the migrant workers’ (ibid.). It
is not clear from Mafeje’s analysis what precisely the nature of the student
body in Cape Town was, whether they were classified ‘Coloured’ or African
(Bantu), or both. This is important to take note of given that migrant workers
staying in single-sex hostels were African. If student activists were mainly
Coloured, this would undoubtedly have made contact with African migrant
workers all the more difficult.
Mafeje was sympathetic to the students and argued that ‘the complexities
of a divided working-class in South Africa have proved intractable even to
the older movements’ (ibid.: 23). He recalled a ‘long-standing argument’
between the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), later the South
African Communist Party (SACP) and the NEUM, later the Unity Movement
of South Africa (UMSA). The former argued that migrant workers, ‘by virtue
of selling their labour-power to capitalists in industry’ were ‘definitely part of
the urban proletariat’. On the other hand, the NEUM argued that ‘migrants
identify more with the peasantry than with the urban population and still
have a vested interest in land’ (ibid.). For Mafeje, the problem need not ‘be
resolved at the level of abstract theory’, but ‘at the level of strategy and in the
process of answering the question of what is meant by the “alliance” between
workers and peasants in the revolutionary struggle’ (ibid.). According to
Legacy: Archie Mafeje 927

Mafeje, situations such as Soweto made migrants think of their families

back home, thus making it difficult for them to make decisions about joining
strikes in urban areas.8 This, Mafeje elaborated, is complicated by the force
of the tradition of migrants, where ‘every decision is an outcome of long
and tedious deliberations by all concerned’, which is in sharp contrast to
the ‘instantaneous and precipitous reactions of the urban youth’ (ibid.). The
urban youth, according to Mafeje, might, in the initial stages of the revolts,
have been influenced by their prejudice towards migrants, something which
led to the vicious backlash by the migrants.
Mafeje did not see any prospect of the students, acting on their own,
bringing about social and political change. He argued that although the stu-
dents had eventually successfully patched up their differences with migrant
workers, the former could not take their cause much further largely because
they were ‘ideologically and organisationally . . . handicapped’ (ibid.: 22).
In terms of political organization and ideological orientation, the student re-
volts were associated with the Black Consciousness movement comprising
the South African Student Movement (SASM), the South African Student
Organisation (SASO) and the Black People’s Convention (BPC). Notable,
Mafeje insisted, is that they were not ‘allied with any of the national move-
ments’ (ibid.: 21).
For Mafeje, a Programme of Action was critical for any organization
that is committed to social change. He states: ‘Revolutionary commitment
is impossible without a guiding ideology, a programme of demands and a
clear policy’ (ibid.: 23). He was dismissive of Black Consciousness and
pointed out that it could ‘hardly be considered a historical advance on the
older’ nationalist movements, to wit, the PAC and ANC (ibid.: 24). Mafeje
contended that the students ‘went into militant action without a clear polit-
ical programme’ (ibid.). Where attempts were made to provide a ‘political
explanation’ of student struggles in the Western Cape, largely through or-
ganizations sympathetic to the Unity Movement, there was, Mafeje seems
to suggest, very little done to support the students (ibid.). As far as Mafeje
was concerned, the struggles of students ‘continued to be characterized by
spontaneity and to be informed by simple slogans’ (ibid.).
In many ways, the theoretical position of the Black Consciousness move-
ment as articulated by Mafeje could easily have been used by him as an
example of an idiographic inquiry without a theoretical context, the nomo-
thetic inquiry. Mafeje contrasted the Black Consciousness movement with
the South African political organizations that were in exile at the time of
the outbreak of the Soweto revolts, the ANC/SACP Alliance, the PAC and
UMSA.9 Unlike the Black Consciousness movement, these organizations
— the ‘older movements’ — had written programmes and had addressed

8. See Dan O’Meara (1975) for a nuanced version of this position.

9. Note that Mafeje did not make any reference to the Black Consciousness movement which,
by 1976, had a presence in at least Botswana.
928 Lungisile Ntsebeza

themselves to the question of national liberation and bourgeois democratic

rights. Their differences, according to Mafeje, centred on issues of imperi-
alism/capitalism and the class struggle, with the ANC not raising the issue
of the class struggle and socialism in its official documents, whereas these
questions were addressed in documents of the PAC and UMSA (APDUSA
– 1961 Constitution) (Mafeje, 1978: 26).
Of these movements, Mafeje pays special attention to the SACP and its
alliance partner, the ANC. In this regard, Mafeje highlighted the SACP’s
ideological position based on the two-stage revolution as stated in its 1963
Declaration: ‘As its immediate and foremost task, the South African Com-
munist Party works for a united front of national liberation. It strives to
unite all sections and classes of oppressed and democratic people for a
national democratic revolution to destroy White domination’ (quoted in
Mafeje, 1978: 26). The two-stage approach fitted well with the principles of
the Freedom Charter which was adopted in 1955 by the Congress Alliance.
This document articulates the version of the United Front propagated by the
SACP.
The position of the SACP compelled Mafeje to question the status of
the Communist Programme in the short run, asking: ‘Was the declaration
tantamount to subordinating the class struggle to the national democratic
revolution?’ (ibid.: 26). Mafeje argued that the issue has to be addressed, not
at the theoretical level, the nomothetic inquiry, where ‘there could be any
number of answers to these questions’, but at a historical and practical level,
the idiographic inquiry. At the latter level, Mafeje drew examples from the
African continent since independence, pointing out that ‘there is hardly any
evidence to suggest that the “national democratic stage” envisaged by the
SACP is any longer a meaningful historical concept’ (ibid.). In his booklet
In Search of an Alternative: A Collection of Essays on Revolutionary Theory
and Politics, published in 1992, on the eve of South Africa’s democracy,
Mafeje returns to the issue of the liberation struggle in sub-Saharan Africa,
pointing out that what the ANC was promising could be achieved in the
national democratic revolution was no different from what the earlier lead-
ers of nationalist organizations in Africa had promised. But these leaders
had ended up as glorious managers of economies controlled by the former
imperialist powers.
Mafeje surmised that the reason the SACP was not being forthright about
the possible transition to the second stage could be its historical roots as a
white party, which could make it difficult to recruit both black and white
workers. The SACP ended up adopting a strategy of ‘entrism’, whereby it
used its alliance with the ANC ‘to recruit from within leading cadres who are
often petit-bourgeois’ (ibid.). The alliance with the black petit-bourgeoisie
would, in Mafeje’s view, have serious implications for the working class
and its control and leadership. According to Mafeje, ‘a communist party
is in principle a class organisation whose existence is accounted for by
the working-class membership and not so much by selected petit-bourgeois
Legacy: Archie Mafeje 929

elements of any colour’ (ibid.: 26–7). The SACP–ANC alliance, he claimed,

‘always subjected’ urban workers to ‘petit-bourgeois rule and demands’
(ibid.: 27).
Mafeje proposed a united front made up of left-leaning individuals in
each of the South African organizations. Although critical of the expatriate
organizations, Mafeje warned against ruling them out as ‘irrelevant to the
struggle’. According to him, they ‘still’ possessed ‘a significant amount of
political capital’ which could be used ‘destructively and positively, depend-
ing on the nature of the forces at work’ (ibid.: 28). Mafeje was critical of
attempts to ‘over-emphasise’ the armed struggle at the expense of ‘political
methods of struggle’. Given his view that ‘South Africa is an industrialised
country which depends on blacks for up to 80 per cent of its labour sup-
ply’, focus should be on ‘concerted’ efforts ‘to organise black workers to
use [their] weapon to the maximum’ (ibid.: 29). He argued that rather than
recruiting workers for military training abroad, they should be recruited and
financed ‘for sustained political strikes and other campaigns inside’ (ibid.:
29).10 As to who would organize black workers, Mafeje was of the opinion
that it was the task of a communist party, ‘to protect the interests of the work-
ers at all stages of the revolution’ (ibid.). However, given Mafeje’s view of
the SACP, the latter would not stand for the interests and rights of workers
‘at all stages of the revolution’. With respect to the country’s youth, Mafeje
argued that ‘the militant youth inside South Africa should take seriously the
question of ideology, theory and organisation’ (ibid.).11
More than 10 years later, Mafeje re-visited the political situation in South
Africa. This was on the eve of the political negotiations that started in the
early 1990s. These notes are taken from a piece titled ‘South Africa: The
Dynamics of a Beleaguered State’.12 In this piece, Mafeje returns to his crit-
icism of Marxism in South Africa with its ‘universalistic pretensions’ which
have their foundation in ‘European history at a particular juncture’ (Mafeje,
n.d.: 97). Given this, Mafeje inquires, ‘how does (Marxism) relate to vernac-
ular languages?’ (ibid.). This, according to Mafeje, should be the problem
of discerning (as opposed to dogmatic and intellectually opportunistic) con-
temporary Marxists. For Mafeje, the origins of Marxist theory and socialist
politics in South Africa go back to the ‘total transplant of the twenty-one
points laid down by the Third International or Comintern for fraternal or-
ganisations everywhere in the world’ (ibid.). But this programme, according
to him, was meant ‘for the leadership of the socialist movement in capitalist

10. Among Mafeje’s files was the Manifesto of the People’s United Front for the Liberation of
South Africa (PUFULSA). A copy of the manifesto is with the author. Issues raised in this
manifesto will be the subject of a separate publication.
11. Note that this article was part of a debate involving Mafeje, Ruth First and Livingstone
Mqotsi. Here, I will not focus on the details of the debate.
12. It is not clear where and when this piece was published, but it seems certain that the paper
was written on the eve of the political negotiations of the early 1990s.
930 Lungisile Ntsebeza

Europe, where schooled Marxists and an experienced working-class existed’

(ibid.).
Mafeje thus comes to the conclusion that there was a ‘dearth of both the
Marxist tradition and working-class politics’ in South Africa (ibid.) and that
the problems of the relationship between universal and vernacular language
‘are still very much with us’. He cites the example of migrant workers:
After the First World War the African migrant workers in the mines were as ‘uncouth’ as
they are today. More importantly, they spoke a different language, as they still do, from that
prescribed by the Third or even the Fourth International. The European immigrant workers
and intellectuals were more than presumptuous in supposing that they were the natural or
authentic interlocutors in the situation . . . they were neither up to date with Marxist debates in
Europe nor adept in African political vernacular. Their imported notions of ‘tribal economy’,
‘communal land tenure’, ‘feudal landlords’ and ‘peasants’ were like semantic categories
abstracted from another language. (ibid.: 97)

The implications for South African communists is that they ‘became

ever so dependent, theoretically, on [their] Third International mentors’ and
given their inability ‘to reach the “semi-tribal” black workers . . . turned
to the black petit-bourgeoisie who predominated in the African National
Congress’ (ibid.: 98). The black petit-bourgeoisie, according to Mafeje,
‘was the only class among the blacks in South Africa who comprehended
both the vernacular and the universal language’ (ibid.).

WHITE LIBERALS AND BLACK NATIONALISTS IN SOUTH AFRICA

Mafeje comes back to the theme of what he refers to as the ‘petit-bourgeois’

character of the leadership of the liberation movement in South Africa in
the context of the negotiated political settlement of the 1990s. His focus is
the ANC and to a lesser extent, its alliance partner, the SACP. By the late
1980s, the ANC, with strong support from the SACP which made use of
its global links, had established its dominance in the South African political
scene. Other political organizations, including Mafeje’s own organization,
the Unity Movement, along with bodies such as the PAC and the Black
Consciousness movement, had been completely overshadowed by the ANC.
This made the ANC arguably the only dominant liberation movement dur-
ing the political negotiations that started in earnest in the early 1990s. The
landslide victory of the ANC and the dismal performance of the other liber-
ation movements confirmed the hegemony of the ANC on the South African
landscape. It thus made perfect sense for Mafeje to give serious thought to
the implications for democracy of an ANC-led government.
In arguably his last major piece on politics, ‘White Liberals and Black
Nationalists: Strange Bedfellows’, Mafeje (1998) reflected on the initial
years of South Africa’s democracy under President Nelson Mandela. He
did so by situating South Africa’s democracy in the broader context of
independent Africa. Mafeje’s main argument in this article, which builds on
Legacy: Archie Mafeje 931

his earlier work during the negotiations period, is that: ‘the African revolution
is highly compromised . . . its leaders have no sense of hegemony and a
limited and impoverished sense of state power which breeds petty dictators,
“ethnicity”, and political dwarfs . . . . They have no hegemony nationally
and continentally. All they can do is to make believe by using state power
to trample on the people’s political and human rights (Mafeje, 1998: 48).
For Mafeje, a ‘vague sense of (African) hegemony’ (ibid.) existed in the
era that was dominated by Pan-Africanism at the dawn of independence
in Africa going back to Ghana’s independence in 1957. This is an era that
was characterized by the birth of movements such as the Monrovia and
Casablanca groups and the emergence of leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah
and his clarion call that ‘Africa Must Unite’ (ibid.).
A question that arises is what became of this emerging African hegemony.
Typically, Mafeje’s criticism was that this form of Pan-Africanism was
‘ideologically deficient because it advocated supra-state power without say-
ing what was to be its social foundation’ (ibid.). This reminds us of Mafeje’s
earlier critique of ‘most’ South African Marxists and specifically, his crit-
icism of Morris who, according to Mafeje, succumbed ‘to the fallacy of a
history without subjects’ (Mafeje, 1981: 131). Mafeje saw the need to clarify
its social foundation as key to any project that seeks to revive and establish
Pan-Africanism as a hegemonic force.
Mafeje borrows the term hegemony from Gramsci, and asserts that ‘hege-
mony belongs to those who “enjoy the greatest ideological resonance in
society”’ (Mafeje, 1998: 46). It is precisely the lack of ‘political predomi-
nance that derives from pervasive social and ideological influence’ (ibid.)
that is at the heart of the failure of African nationalist leaders to establish
their own hegemony. For African hegemony to be achieved, Mafeje argued,
the national question, in the form of ‘genuine equality’ in an ‘African con-
text’ that would address the issue of the oppression and exploitation of the
indigenous people, would have to be resolved.
As already noted, Mafeje argued that the national question on the African
continent has not been resolved. If anything, according to him, the ‘revolution
in southern Africa has been hijacked by white liberals with the collaboration
of black nationalists’ (ibid.: 48). In typical NEUM fashion, Mafeje traces this
collaboration, captured in the sub-title of his paper as ‘strange bedfellows’,
from the advent of colonialism in Africa and attempts by white liberals to
entrench their hegemony. According to Mafeje, liberals established their
hegemony through the educational system, the political values of Western,
capitalist democracy and notions of Western civilization more broadly. In
Southern Africa in particular, where colonialists became settlers, the key is-
sue revolved around racial oppression and white supremacy. Racism became
the most immediate issue. White liberals used the issue of racism to co-opt
large sections of the black middle class in particular. This was especially
the case after Africans formed political opposition to racial oppression and
white supremacy.
932 Lungisile Ntsebeza

Mafeje draws our attention to the complex nature of racism in South

Africa and how an appreciation of this racism would help us understand the
eventual co-optation of Black Nationalist leaders in the ANC in particular.
In this regard, the distinction between how the Afrikaners, the ‘Boers’ and
the ‘English’ articulated and practised the race issue in South Africa is
critical. This distinction became pronounced particularly in the era marked
by the rise of black nationalism in Africa after the Second World War. In
1948, three years after the war, there were elections in South Africa. The
main contestants of the elections were the United Party and the National
Party. The United Party’s manifesto foresaw the eventual possibility of
incorporating blacks in a liberal multi-racial society, whereas the National
Party propagated a crude version of racism known as apartheid. As is well
known, the elections were won by the National Party which immediately
introduced and implemented apartheid.
By this time, Mafeje would argue, opposition to racism took two broad
forms. On the one hand, there were blacks who worked with whites who
were sympathetic to the middle-class cause of the liberation movement,
essentially the ANC. On the other hand, there were the Pan-Africanists
who would not entertain collaboration with whites. These Pan-Africanists
eventually formed themselves as the PAC in 1959. Actors in both forms
of opposition, Mafeje contended, qualified as ‘black nationalists . . . in so
far as they were committed to the struggle against white domination’ (ibid.:
46). But it was never clear what, in concrete terms, they would replace
apartheid with. Following Mafeje’s formulation with respect to the African
experience, there was no clarity about the shape African hegemony would
assume in post-apartheid South Africa.
It is precisely the lack of an African hegemonic project in South Africa
that led Mafeje to conclude that white liberals, with the collaboration of
black nationalists in the ANC, ‘high-jacked’ the ‘revolution’. For Mafeje,
the national question in South Africa under the ANC and its alliance partner,
the SACP, manifested itself as a struggle in the hands of ‘liberal black
nationalist movements’ who enjoyed ‘hegemony within their societies’ in
the sense of receiving ‘the greatest resonance from the subjects of their
revolution’ (ibid.: 48). However, in the era leading up to and including the
political negotiations of the early 1990s, there was, Mafeje would argue,
greater collaboration between white liberals, on the one hand, and black
nationalists within the ANC and the SACP, on the other. According to
Mafeje, in this period white liberals emerged who drew a distinction between
political power and economic control, in the context of a crippling political
and economic crisis that engulfed South Africa. These white liberals were
quite happy to forgo political power as long as they could retain economic
control in a ‘Westminster type of democracy’ (ibid.: 46). As Mafeje put it,
while these white liberals were prepared to be ruled by black nationalists,
they reserved the right to reign, that is, to enjoy general hegemony (ibid.).
To achieve this, they worked closely with the liberal black nationalists and
Legacy: Archie Mafeje 933

used the latter to contain radical black nationalists who would have nothing
to do with whites and Marxists outside the SACP. As Ebrima Sall pointed
out in his tribute following Mafeje’s death, nationalism, for Mafeje, ‘did not
always end up as a negation of colonialism, but its imitation’ (Sall, 2008:
50). In many ways, this is what happened in South Africa after the advent
of democracy in 1994.

TOWARDS A CONCLUSION: WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM MAFEJE?

This article is written at a critical moment in the history of post-1994 demo-

cratic South Africa. The entry of university-based students in the political
and social life of South Africa since March 2015 added momentum to mass
protests against the ANC-led government’s neoliberal policies that date back
to the early 2000s. The student-led campaign manifested itself in the open
on 9 March 2015, when a UCT student activist Chumani Maxwele flung
‘poo’ onto the imposing statue of arch imperialist and capitalist, Cecil John
Rhodes which was mounted on UCT grounds. Soon thereafter his student
supporters, who organized themselves under the #RhodesMustFall move-
ment, demanded the removal of the statue. They alleged that the statue
signified deep-rooted links between the University of Cape Town and colo-
nialism or, in the words of Emeritus Associate Professor Dave Cooper,
‘colonial capitalism’ (Cooper, 2015). The students occupied the administra-
tive block of the University and announced that they would only leave it
upon the removal of the statue. Within a month, the statue was removed,
making this a major victory for the student-led effort. By this time, a num-
ber of universities in South Africa and beyond had pledged support for the
campaign. At the same time, students had added more demands, notably the
‘decolonization of the curriculum’, as they called it, and the insourcing of
former university workers.
The announcement by various universities in South Africa that fees would
be increased in 2016 set the proverbial cat among the pigeons and led to
an unprecedented student-led campaign named #FeesMustFall, against the
increase. This campaign drew wide support, including from parents and
workers who bore the brunt of paying the fees. The student–worker–parent
alliance was no doubt the climax of the activities of the student-led campaign,
forcing a complete shutdown of all South African universities, a march to
Parliament in Cape Town, the ANC headquarters and the Union Building,
the seat of government administration. In the end, the ANC-led government
was forced to make an announcement that there would be no fee increases in
2016. Further, the campaign has forced universities to reverse their policies
of outsourcing workers. At the time of writing — the beginning of January
2016 — it is not possible to say what 2016 will bring, save that the campaign
is far from being over. The year 2016 also marks 40 years since the Soweto
934 Lungisile Ntsebeza

revolts and the chance of high-school students joining the protests in 2016
cannot be discounted.
Against this background, we return to the issues raised in the introduction
and specifically about what we can learn from the legacy of Mafeje. Let
us start with the current student protests. We have seen that Mafeje raised
two crucial aspects in his assessment of what he called the Soweto revolts.
The first concerned the initial arrogance of students and their tendency to
vilify their parents and, critically, the migrant workers, rather than forging
alliances with the workers, both urban and rural, as well as their parents and
elders. By so doing, Mafeje showed, they played right into the hands of the
police and indeed the apartheid state, who capitalized on these divisions.
The second point relates to the question of what Mafeje saw as the necessity
of a programme of action, with a ‘guiding ideology, a coherent programme
of demands and a clear policy’, which he saw as critical for any organization
that is committed to social change (Mafeje, 1978: 23). For Mafeje, as has
been shown, ‘militant action’ and ‘simple slogans’, important as they are,
are no substitute for a programme of action.
These are important lessons for students in their current struggles for
the decolonization of universities and the curriculum. On the question of
alliances that Mafeje raised, it does seem as if the current student-led protests,
particularly the ‘FeesMustFall’ campaign, are inclusive of a range of actors,
including parents, most of whom are workers and academics. Not only did
students wage a struggle about fees, which directly affected them and their
parents, they also joined forces with university-based workers who had been
fighting their own battles of being ‘outsourced’ since neoliberal principles
of managerialism were introduced at South African universities in the late
1990s.
Mafeje no doubt would be happy with how, on the whole, students have
managed to strike alliances with their parents and workers. This is a major
improvement from what happened in Soweto when the revolt exploded.
What Mafeje would feel to be missing, however, is a programme of action.
A coherent programme with clear objectives and goals, informed by theory
is, for Mafeje, a sine qua non for those committed to change. As far as the
current student campaign is concerned, it is difficult to establish its political
and class character, beyond what Mafeje would see as ‘simple slogans’ such
as ‘decolonizing the curriculum’ and references to the likes of Fanon and
Biko. Having said this, I must be quick to say that it is too early to make
conclusive statements. More in-depth research is needed to understand the
character and nature of the current student movement, in all its diversity.
In the broader scheme of things, another lesson that can be learnt from
Mafeje is his constant reminder about the importance of learning from the
experiences of post-independent Africa. Mafeje contended that what the
ANC committed itself to at the dawn of democracy and what they are now
doing as a party in power are not radically different from what its forerunners
on the African continent promised, did and are doing. They all make promises
Legacy: Archie Mafeje 935

that are not in keeping with the policies that they commit themselves to —
policies that are, in many instances, in the interests of the imperialist powers
that they replace politically. Mafeje would argue that those who are armed
with theory — the nomothetic enquiry — and, crucially, who can relate it to
the material conditions — the idiographic enquiry — are in the best position
to punch holes in the empty promises of nationalist leaders. Mafeje was
always critical of any attempt in political analysis to separate theory from
the social and historical context, and vice versa — hence the relationship
he draws between the idiographic and monothetic enquiries. Herein lies the
legacy of Archie Mafeje and what we can learn from it.

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Lungisile Ntsebeza (e-mail: LNtsebeza@gmail.com) is Professor and Di-

rector of the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town. He holds
the National Research Foundation Research Chair in Land Reform and
Democracy in South Africa and the A.C. Jordan Chair of African Studies.
His research interests are in land and agrarian studies in Africa.