The Black Archive as a Tool for Building National Unity
“I am the child of Nongqause.” (Mbeki, 1996)
With this assertion, former president Thabo Mbeki expressed a deeply ontological claim in his I Am An African speech. His appeal was to an ideal of an inclusive national identity, whose culture was expressive of all South Africans. For him to say I Am an African was an attempt—on his part, and an invitation to the nation—to contend with a context that sought to erase indigeneity, for nearly 500 years. The question with which he is grappling concerns how our democracy embraces an inclusive identity that incorporates, even, the descendants of those who sought to expunge Blackness (as Indigeneity) from the face of this land. Inqolobane Yolwazi/ (the) Black Archive project is rooted in making sense of precisely this deeply ontological question, whose expression is political. The politics of this assertion is not only one witness nearly 3 decades ago, but continues to be political in the production and development of knowledge, in the modern university in South Africa.
My musings on the former president’s philosophical proclivities seek to foreground how Inqolobane Yolwazi/ (the) Black Archive espouses the ideal of nation-building. With the concept borrowed from the word used to describe a granary in isiZulu, it denotes the seeds of a new crop – sown with the spirit of sprouting a new harvest, that feeds the spirit of inclusion, national unity and belonging. Inqolobane Yolwazi /(the) Black Archive is an investment in a national identity using the resources of historical Black intellectuals. Drawing from their music, poetry, literature and art, this project seeks to discover new ways of seeing, being and knowing, a predisposition that actions rather than merely theorising decolonisation.
It is a project whose aims are expressive of the desire to see South Africa—as a nation—articulate for the present and the future, an inclusive national identity that holds competing ontologies, in tandem. It grapples with how we understand the place of the oppressed and the oppressor, in a country that must work. It portends the Mamdanian ideal of a restoration of humanity without eliding the realities of those historically oppressed. Inspired by Mbeki’s assertion of ‘I Am An African’ Inqolobane Yolwazi /(the) Black Archive confronts the injustices of oppression and seeks to understand how best we attend to the historical divides of racial oppression that still manifests as economic disparaties. Mbeki’s historic claim vividly highlights the histori-contemporary richness embedded in the thinking of Black/Indigenous intellectualism in our country. The former president, with his words, urges deep and critical reflection about Africanness—a consideration taken up by Joel Mokhoathi’s (2021) ‘A Philosophical Enquiry of Identity and Culture’.
Reflecting on this project, with its aims and objectives, immediately after the national and provincial elections—wherein political parties from the either side of the divide try to find one another to form a functional coalition—highlights a historic moment whereby democracy is being tested. This moment appraises the commitment of the oldest liberation movement in Africa to democratic values. This commitment finds its expression in the assertion
“I am the grandchild of the warrior men and women that Hintsa and Sekhukhune led, the patriots that Cetshwayo and Mphephu took to battle, the soldiers Moshoeshoe and Ngungunyane taught never to dishonour the cause of freedom.”
Mbeki (1996)
Important to consider, however, especially at this moment, is what freedom denotes. What is the meaning of freedom and liberation—a question considered since the French Revolution in the 18th century?
Framing Mbeki’s acceptance of the constitution that has entrenched democracy in South Africa, as a profound ontological claim seeks to highlight my understanding of the deeply contested notion of belonging in our country. His approach petitions for a broader national vision wherein all the constitutive identities coalesce on being South African, and, thus African. Even the children of colonial settler descendants, in Mbeki logic, become African. What we must contend with is whether we choose to accept or reject this ontological framing of national identity—a choice whose implications will reverberate through the generations and be borne by our collective progeny.
Inqolobane Yolwazi/ (the) Black Archive is spurred by the impetus to answer the choice we make in a historically just fashion. It seeks to do so by devising new conceptual tools that attend to this historical dilemma first identified by a critical cultural worker Zoë Wicomb when she asked “How will black people, long accustomed to dispossession and deprivation, adjust to a new condition of not being racial victims”. In my scholarship comprising work developed in the Black Archive is critical of the framing of Wicomb’s question, for its naivety. To say Wicomb is naïve is rooted in the reality that her question presupposes ontological recognition, that is to say in 1993, she presumed Blackness/Indigeneity would already be regarded as politically agential—a fact we are still contending with, contemporarily.
Addressing this reality, the project challenges and dismisses discourses that pit South Africans against one another. It offers that this is only possible if we turn to the neglected resources developed by African intellectuals. This project confronts how the existing theoretical tools fail to conceptualise our country’s realities. Moreover, the scholarship produced from this project holds that such an ineptitude, premised on theoretical importations, demonstrates that the theoretical tools we use were never intended to understand African realities.
Inqolobane Yolwazi/ (the) Black Archive is rooted in the theoretical and socio-historical analysis of the work of Black/Indigenous intellectuals who were excluded from the project of knowledge development in South Africa. This exclusion was inaugurated by the division promulgated at Lovedale College in 1870, whereby the succeeding Principal—James Stuart—racially divided educational training. Black/Indigenous students were put to a practical education (bookbinding, wagon making and agriculture), while white students were retained in the more academic stream (i.e., geometry, Latin and Greek). This historical division precipitated the Bantu Education and the Extension of Higher Education Acts of the following century. This legislation still haunts our country with disparate educational attainment outcomes, to the present day.
For Mbeki to claim, against historical trauma, that I Am An African,sought to defend and uphold the Arendtian position—and I will quote her at length to demonstrate the point:
“[…] that violence, as it were, gave birth to history, that whatever brotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out of fratricide, that whatever political organization men may have achieved has its origin in crime [and that this uncontested assertion] – has travelled through the centuries as one of the almost unexamined, almost self-evident assumptions of political thought”. (Arendt [1966]/1967)
Thinking with Black/Indigenous intellectuals is done with the purpose of examining this historical axiom of violence. Can an inclusive national identity reconcile the history of displacement, violence and colonial derision with the future-oriented gaze of nation-building and a consolidated conception of political peoplehood? From fratricide, can we emerge as a nation, against the reality of our definitive categories of coloniser and the colonised? Our research has not reached conclusive theoretical claims but inspires a sense of intellectual responsibility. In examining this question of national identity and belonging the task that becomes starkly clear for the contemporary intellectual in our country, is that it is our duty to pursue scientific inquiry responsibly. Our responsibility is a commitment to academic freedom, that is, we do not serve at the behest of any political objective, however, we do serve science at the behest of the duty to advance humanity and the objectives of peace and stability, globally. While ambitious, Inqolobane Yolwazi/ (the) Black Archive judges its achievements against these ideals, firmly rooting it in my disciplinary home of Philosophy—a humanist scientific endeavour, since time immemorial.
Author Bio:
Siseko H. Kumalo is a Philosophy Lecturer at the University of Fort Hare. He is a political theorist whose work focuses on Blackness/Indigeneity in South Africa. His Ph.D. examined belonging and national identity using the scholarship of two historical Black intellectuals, i.e., William Wellington Gqoba and SEK Mqhayi. He read for his Master of Arts (which was awarded Cum Laude) in Political Philosophy at the University of Pretoria’s Department of Political Sciences. Formatively, Dr. Kumalo trained at Rhodes University where he read in Political and International Studies, Anthropology and Philosophy. His research and teaching interests centre around Black ontology, national culture, and emancipatory epistemologies. Dr Kumalo supervises graduate students working on the Black Archive and continues to advance this area of scholarship in South Africa and across the global academy. His most recent publications include ‘Pedagogic Obligations Towards a Decolonial and Contextually Responsive Approach to Teaching Philosophy in South Africa’ which appeared in the Journal of Philosophy of Education and ‘Can Iqaba Possess Ontological Legitimacy’ which appeared in Critical Philosophy of Race.