be found in the rural hinterland of All Saints, an Anglican mission station in the Engcobo District. The same can be said of cultural practices – the migrant worker who lives in Langa is the same man who goes home to perform cultural rituals during holidays or for subsistence farming in his retirement and, furthermore, the so-called pagans of the Transkei are to be found in the migrant worker barracks in Langa. Mafeje writes: ‘In South Africa after 1½–2 years I was able to interview in the Transkei, a rural area, the same men as I had interviewed in Cape Town. In Uganda before I had finished my 15-month survey some of the poorer farmers had disappeared to the city for employment or were commuting by bicycle.’12
According to Mafeje, what becomes ‘a curious logic of colonial history’ is the fact that the pagans, or amaqaba, who were once considered conservative insofar as they refused to give up their African ways of living, became latter-day militants through the sheer force of their resistance to Christianity and the Western way of life. They found allies in the urban-based militant youth who rejected Christianity and racism by appealing to an African God. Mafeje finds that the youth in Langa were not only indifferent to the church, but were also dissatisfied with it – and that was partly why they condemned Christianity as a ploy by whites to oppress and exploit black people. The grievances and feelings of the youth ‘are genuine and they explode with anger and frustration’.13 Mafeje says there may have been a difference between the two – the militant youth (who rejected Christianity and spoke of an African God) and amaqaba, the rural dwellers (who rejected Christianity and the Western way of life) – at the level of theoretical self-consciousness, but there were also affinities. The rural-urban thesis, much loved by anthropologists and sociologists of social change, was no more than a false dichotomy, for the same white supremacist ideology was found in both settings – in the church, white liberal ideology reproduced itself through missionary work and education. Mafeje is, however, too quick to find positive features in this colonial arrangement when he says: ‘While at first this represented a progressive force, by introducing the arts of writing and universalising metaphysical concepts in small pre-literate societies which relied on simple theoretical paradigms for explanation, later it became reactionary, precisely by failing to come to terms with the contradiction of its own emergence in peculiarly South African conditions.’14
Mafeje unwittingly accepts the ‘civilising mission’ of the missionaries, but fails to locate its logic in its wider sociological and historical context. The sheer enormity of pain and oppression accompanying this ‘civilisation’ simply overshadows the supposed ‘progressive force’ about which Mafeje speaks. The colonial project, suitably interpreted, was about plundering, looting and subjugating. Civilisation, if it must be so called, is a by-product and not the driving force of colonialism. Mafeje is here pandering to the social change theory of colonial social scientists. Once again, Magubane’s work is instructive in this regard. Magubane argues that because social scientists of the time were reluctant to criticise colonial governments, they chose to play it safe and did not expose the truth about colonial rule or touch on matters political, but simply focused on anodyne issues such as blacks speaking English, wearing European-style clothes or buying expensive cars. To the extent that they touched on colonialism, they depicted it as a necessary stage in history and considered how its long-term effects benefited African people. They ignored altogether the suffering, exploitation and degradation of Africans and their value systems. Thus, when the theory of social change accounts for social change in Africa, it does so in mechanistic and ethnocentric terms. When social scientists saw change, they saw tribesmen who were becoming Europeanised, mistaking appearance for reality. In this respect, they saw the fulfilment of white supremacist ideals – hence the notion that the African was being ‘civilised’.
Notwithstanding Mafeje’s claim about the progressive nature of liberal ideology, he nevertheless acknowledges that being civilised did not necessarily mean automatic acceptance of the white liberal middle-class cosmic view. Liberal theory, which has always taken for granted its own supposed progressiveness, was put under the spotlight and its hypocrisy exposed by Mafeje. It was unable to transcend itself insofar as it treated black people as perpetual subordinates in need of tutelage. The liberals sought to produce ‘black “carbon-copies” of white Christian orthodoxy in South Africa’.15 Mafeje posits that, from the point of view of the sociology of knowledge, the liberal might not be able to transcend their own ideological limitations. Following Max Weber, Mafeje reminds sociologists of knowledge that ideologies cannot be transcended because they can be both objective and subjective at the same time. The best that people can do is to endure ideologies ‘stoically’. Insofar as Weber accepted the view that ideologies cannot be transcended, Mafeje admits that Weber ‘paid the price of being radical without being revolutionary’. In invoking the sociology of knowledge, Mafeje’s attempt was to build a case against the supposed value-free or non-partisan positivist belief generally, and functionalism particularly.
On positivism and functionalism in anthropology
The issues above were not unique to the social sciences in South Africa, but were characteristic of the social sciences more generally. Indeed, anthropologists and sociologists in other parts of the world had, by the 1960s, begun to question the status of anthropology as a discipline as well as the categories anthropologists used in understanding Africa and other ‘less-developed’ societies. In the essay ‘The Problem of Anthropology in Historical Perspective’, Mafeje surveys the diverse manner in which critics of anthropology in the North aired their views on the status of anthropology and found that in the American academy criticisms of anthropology were largely ideological, rather than theoretical. In Britain, on the other hand, he found the discussion less ideological, so as to give it respectability in the name of an academic dialogue.
These discussions and revisions led to what Mafeje calls ‘neopositivist conceptions’ of the French anthropologists.16 Neopositivism was to be found in Lévi-Straussian structuralism or in liberal relativism, which was couched in neo-Marxist jargon. According to Mafeje, this was an ideological tactic all of its own. Unlike in the United States and the United Kingdom, in France there was a sharp divide between Marxist and non-Marxist anthropology. Although the scholars attempted to place on the table issues that plagued anthropology as a discipline, Mafeje nevertheless felt that the problematic they grappled with was badly formulated from the start. Characteristically, the critics of anthropology in the United Kingdom lacked a totalising critique and sought to rehabilitate anthropology by suggesting that it was not always in the service of colonialism and imperialism. The ‘militantly critical anthropologists’, on the other hand, allowed their analyses to remain at the level of ideology and polemic, the upshot of which was self-contradictory appellations such as ‘radical anthropology’ or ‘socialist anthropology’. Yet, as Mafeje eloquently argues in his essay on the problems of anthropology, ‘it is as hard to fit socialist clothes on an imperialist offspring as it is to transform positivism by radicalising it’.
In short, the two sides of the divide are best understood as reflective of the complicity of opposites. They take different routes only to arrive at the same conclusion: there is a better side of anthropology, which can be rescued. Magubane, a critic of anthropology himself, was not spared Mafeje’s criticism. Mafeje reminded Magubane of the importance of the sociology of knowledge in shaping one’s ideas. Not only was Mafeje censuring Magubane, he was also conducting auto-critique, arguing that in singling out colonial anthropology as the problem, its critics were undialectical and thus created an epistemological impasse. They identified, in anthropology, functionalism and imperialism, but failed to link these to the ‘metropolitan bourgeois social sciences which are equally functionalist and imperialist’.17 They failed to advance the totalising critique about which Mafeje spoke. As far as he was concerned, the problem of anthropology was primarily theoretical (‘universal’) rather than ideological (‘colonial’), for merely to point out that anthropology was a handmaiden of colonialism was to present the argument in a partial and ideological way – that it was colonial could not have been its single diagnostic attribute. Epistemologically, its biggest crime was positivism, functionalism and alterity.
The Enlightenment, out of which anthropology and the other social sciences were born, was inherently bourgeois and sought to universalise anthropological viewpoints.