book presents an opportunity to tap into some of Mafeje’s ideas and considerable intellectual legacy, in order to look at our society anew. Although some of his ideas may be deemed outdated, given that he began writing in the 1960s, they nevertheless stimulate us to think about sociopolitical and economic issues in different ways. The most important reason why we need to read Mafeje’s work is precisely because we need ideas not only here in South Africa, but also throughout the African continent. Mafeje had very important things to say about decolonising knowledge and knowledge production, and about race and class issues, all of which are hugely relevant in South Africa today. We would lose a great deal by not taking seriously some of his and other African intellectuals’ ideas. At the moment South African intellectual debates are stale. This is partly because we do not reflect on old ideas, and to freshen up our debates we should revisit the ideas of intellectuals like Mafeje and his peers. The point is not to take Mafeje’s ideas slavishly, but to react to them critically and to debate them. Returning to Mafeje’s ideas will have an impact on current and future generations of readers. With this book, my goal is not to exhaust discussion of Mafeje’s work, but to point out that it exists.
Part I
A Critique of the Social Sciences
1 | From Functionalism to Radical Social Science
From his high school days in the 1950s Archie Mafeje was a member of the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), later renamed the Unity Movement of South Africa (UMSA), a radical Marxist political organisation. He was therefore versed in classical Marxism and other radical theories. Yet his early work, published as a postgraduate student at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in the early 1960s, is written from the functionalist anthropological perspective fashionable at the time. This suggests that he was a radical Marxist in Unity Movement circles, while steeped in liberal and functionalist anthropology in his academic work – which indicates the bifurcated existence that still afflicts a good number of black students in South African universities today.
His famous essay of 1971, ‘The Ideology of “Tribalism”’, established a radical break with his early liberal functionalism, yet constitutes a thematic critique of anthropological categories, of particular themes or concepts within the social sciences, rather than an all-encompassing critique of the social sciences themselves.1 Notwithstanding his otherwise compelling critique of the ideology of tribalism, his handling of the concept of tribe has been widely misunderstood. Mafeje did not so much reject the entity of tribe, or claim it was non-existent – he rejected it for being anachronistic. In The Theory and Ethnography of African Social Formations,2 he laments this misreading of his work.3 What Mafeje set out to analyse was the ideology of tribalism, as the title of his 1971 essay clearly indicates; the problem lies in his concession that the entity of tribe existed in Africa at an earlier period. Jimi Adesina’s objection is that such a view is not borne out by history or archaeology.4 There was always migration, movement and intermingling on the African continent. This was interrupted by colonialism and the implementation of arbitrary colonial borders. I believe it is because of this fact that Mafeje says that Europeans invented tribes in Africa.
Mafeje’s argument turns on four key issues. First, his understanding of the ‘ideology of tribalism’ is that it was European in origin: colonial administrators used it in their policy of divide and rule on the African continent. Second, the ideology of tribalism was used by European social scientists not only to explain conflicts in Africa, but also to rationalise colonialism. Third, African leaders have used it for political ends. Finally, insofar as ordinary Africans came to believe in it, tribalism is false consciousness.
Early functionalist writings
Mafeje began his academic career at UCT in 1957 as an undergraduate student, studying biological sciences, with majors in botany and zoology. But because of his poor academic performance in these subjects, in 1960 he switched from the biological sciences to the social sciences, majoring in social anthropology and psychology. From November 1960 to September 1962, Monica Wilson employed him as a research assistant to carry out ethnographic research in the township of Langa, Cape Town. His field notes led to a book co-written with Wilson, Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township, published by Oxford University Press in 1963. In the same year, Mafeje completed his Master’s degree in social anthropology, his thesis titled ‘Leadership and Change: A Study of Two South African Peasant Communities’. The book on Langa seeks to answer two questions: (i) what are the effective social groups in Langa? and (ii) when and why do they cohere, and when and why do they split or dissolve? The second question, the authors argue, leads to one of the ‘fundamental problems in social anthropology’: what is the basis for the coherence of groups?5
Typical of liberal academics, Wilson and Mafeje confess that although South Africa of the 1960s was in a political crisis, they did not ask political questions of their research participants. They attribute this to the banning of the two major political organisations at the time, the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), but there is a sense in which their explanation is misleading. The research began long before Mafeje was hired as Wilson’s assistant. A.R.W. Crosse-Upcott was Wilson’s fieldworker from July 1955 until March 1957, some five years before the ANC and PAC were banned in 1960. So Wilson and Mafeje’s claim that they could not pose political questions ‘because that would have aroused political suspicion’ is a rationalisation after the fact. Nor is there a valid reason why Wilson could not ask political questions during Crosse-Upcott’s tenure as fieldworker. Silence on political issues highlights one of the major problems with liberal anthropological writings – the tendency to pretend to remain neutral in the face of important political developments, often a reflection of a political commitment antagonistic to the demands and objectives of the suppressed group. It is about acquiescence with the oppressor group, even if they disagree on minor issues. This commitment says more about Wilson than Mafeje, even at this early stage.
The theoretical objectivity (assumed neutrality) of liberal functionalist anthropology does not necessarily mean that its practitioners are apolitical. On the contrary, that anthropologists remain silent on matters political in favour of value-free scientific inquiry is itself a political manoeuvre typical of liberal academics. On the pitfalls of liberalism Adesina observes that it has a tendency to acquiesce with injustice and inequity in order to preserve class, race and gender privileges and that the preservation and defence of these privileges is usually in the form of arguing against government encroachment on individual freedom and liberty. In universities, this takes the form of academic and intellectual freedom.6
In anthropological writings certain questions – of slavery, conquest, land dispossession, exploitation and oppression – are hardly ever posed. When they are, they receive rather perfunctory treatment. In Bernard Magubane’s view they ‘constitute a historical totality of horror, whose structures are bound together in such a way that any one of them considered separately is an abstraction’.7 In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s anthropology and history shared the same problem of abstraction. Magubane observes that ‘what is striking about the historiography of South Africa is that each generation seems to think that history began only yesterday and what happened a day before yesterday is “ancient history” that has no relevance for today’s problems’. Magubane could see, in the discipline of anthropology, a sinister political project, which, in spite of its purported neutrality, was designed to enable colonial administration and apartheid. He recognises that in the colonial situation anthropologists studied Africans as though they were ‘people without history’. Magubane maintains that anthropology became an applied discipline that sought to manage Africans for the purposes of control and exploitation. He contends that although anthropological writings spoke of social change in Africa, they could not account for change because ‘failure to account for change was built into the subject as a theoretical discipline’.8 In the eyes of anthropologists, Magubane writes, Africa serves as ‘raw material for anthropological studies’. Because of the ahistorical nature of anthropology, it was unable to account for the changes taking place in Africa since the advent of colonialism, and to the extent that it did, it did so in ethnocentric and mechanistic terms. Anthropological research findings described black people’s behaviour and needs, but overlooked the historical and structural