In 1997, Pallo Jordan delivered a discussion paper to the 50th national conference of the ANC. He explored the notion “the national question” in post-apartheid SA. The idea of a “national question” is an ideological construct to address the most intractable national construction issue, the idea that if adequately solved, it would have a sustained transformative effect on the country.
In the context of a period of complex, rapidly changing, transitory post-apartheid SA taking place in the 1990s, Jordan’s argued that the national question was how to undo the institutionalised racialised oppression and how that would help the country to confront and solve its devastating impact on the black majority. This conversation was the lodestar that could navigate us to becoming who we wanted to be.
Jordan, like many others, naively and mistakenly concluded that institutional racism was overcome with the formal end of apartheid, and that a new national question needed to be crafted. Unfortunately, that belief has proven untrue as many parts of SA’s systems of governance, in the private and public sphere, continue to rely on structural economic deprivation, inequality and disempowerment of black, coloured and Indian South Africans who have not transcended a class position of impoverishment that colonialism and apartheid imposed.
Not only does the national question about overcoming institutional racialised oppression persist, but it has also been complicated and compounded with new class struggles within black communities, new versions of state abuse and new political contestations fuelled by personal, gendered, ethnic and other identity politics.
Increasingly, the question that South Africans are asking each other is not what our national question is, but what the common enemy is today that will bring about the kind of collective action that ended formal apartheid and catalysed the transition into democracy. We know how to be at war and to galvanise against a common enemy.
The idea of a common enemy, in the form of the apartheid regime, is commonly credited as the reason mass mobilisation, underpinned by a clear political consciousness was possible even in times of extreme violence. The message was clear, the enemy was apartheid and the solution was to end it.
Today, the search for a new enemy in SA’s body politick is hotly contested. For some it is whiteness, for others it is white monopoly capital, for some it is African foreign nationals and for many it is the African National Congress, or at minimum the faction of the ANC they least prefer.
While it is tempting to find a common enemy and use the stirring of anger and frustration to awaken South Africans from apparent political disengagement, perhaps the answers to solving our most pressing challenges is not finding a new enemy but finding a bold, new collective goal.
An idea that appeals to our nation's sense of hope and creativity, beyond competing for the removal of power and resources in the hands of some and handing them to others. We must do more than overcome, but real triumph and victory is created what the South African dream is, not just getting rid of what its nightmares are.
The advent of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in the 1980s is an example of why a common enemy is not enough. One of the features of the UDF, as an informal political vehicle for change when political movements were banned, is that its slogan focused less on the idea of apartheid as an obvious enemy and more on the power of united action to change the country’s trajectory. The slogan, “The UDF unites, apartheid divides”, was shorthand for the movement’s goal which was to establish a non-racial, united SA in which segregation, apartheid, is ended.
The idea of the possibility of a new society, coupled with a call to action that was local, specific and reliant on people’s own power to act, galvanised people from various walks of life, regardless of their previous political participation or current affiliations, to become an unstoppable force for change.
There are many things to be learned from the experience of political organising in the 1980s that is relevant to contemporary SA. Chief among them is that the power to change society is not, and should not be allowed to be, an endeavour of political or the minority economic elites. It must be based on returning power to all people.
While some argue that we are in a post-ideology phase of politics, many lessons from the past remind us of the power of political consciousness and animating ideas about the SA we want. It is in a clear, shared and empowering vision of what is possible, that we may find the will to reclaim people’s power and reshape SA’s future. Besides, hope is more powerful than fear.
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