nothing to it that could be said to be intrinsic since in many ways it can be replaced with other identities such as religion, race or regionalism. On the African continent there has been a blanket approach to conflict resolutions, which relate to liberal notions of rational negotiations – but although negotiations are important in their own right they tend to run against vested interests, and here Mafeje criticises liberal social scientists for failing to recognise the concept of contradiction in political conflicts. He does not say much about the concept but, given his partiality to revolutionary theory, he is invoking Mao Tse-Tung’s antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions. Simply, the former speaks to irreconcilable differences between those waging the struggle and their enemy, while the latter refers to reconcilable differences among the comrades and fellow travellers waging the struggle (in any case, the powerful political elites would rarely be willing to negotiate away their power and comparative advantages). In this way, wars or conflicts of resistance are not at all irrational. Additionally, they are not likely to be solved by conflict resolution or negotiations unless and until their root cause has been effectively dealt with.
In this sense, conflict resolutions tend to deal with symptoms rather than causes. Because liberal ideals of negotiations tend to dominate the discourse of conflict resolutions in Africa, it could be said that the symptomatic reading of problems is to be expected. In another sense, there is the old question of the superstructure and the material base, which remains unaddressed. Although Mafeje does not mention it, it is nevertheless latent in his analysis – for example, he questions issues of superstructure such as the law and state institutions, which are usually invoked to solve problems of ethnic conflicts. Yet these issues, despite their importance, hardly succeed in solving societal problems. It is only later in his argument that Mafeje speaks about the material base of ethnic social formations in Africa, arguing that it has been undermined by modern developments in the process of which ethnic identities are used as tools to mediate or forge new social relations and for promoting new social interests. Against Claude Ake and Okwudiba Nnoli, who argue that lack of commoditisation of social relations in Africa is one of the reasons for the persistence of ethnic identities, Mafeje argues that the opposite is true because if there is anything that capitalism successfully introduced on the continent it is the market system – which necessarily includes the sale of labour power.56 Mafeje contends that in the African market system, trade or circulation competes with agriculture not only in national, but also in regional economies and national and regional trade means that people of different ethnic origin would have to learn each other’s languages. This then leads to what he calls acculturation. ‘As far as this is concerned, it is quite possible that African peoples are ahead of their ruling elites.’57
If one were to excuse the awkward term ‘acculturation’, which Mafeje uses quite freely, the issue in the foregoing quote is that through interaction or intermingling ethnic identities tend to be irrelevant (although sometimes latent) until they are used or manipulated by political powermongers. This idea, in typical left discourse, sees the masses – when they engage in acts that the intellectuals consider contradictory to their assumed interests – as hapless victims manipulated by their elites, and yet because of their perceived interests, people participate enthusiastically in the extermination of others who are of different hues, creed or other identities. Mafeje’s denunciation of the African elites is in this sense typical of the class-centric discourse of the left.
In the context of processes of social integration it becomes important to decentralise power. Decentralising power gives space for local initiatives so that people can express themselves in various ways. Mafeje contends also that decentralising power does away with fragmentation among ordinary citizens and brings them together. This may, however, not be the case because such fragmentations simply play out at the local level. The contradictions that manifest as national phenomena are typically experienced at local levels, in which segments of a local government or even a town can become the basis for new fragments invented in the process of competition over resources. Mafeje argues that ‘strategically and in the long term, there is no advantage in fragmenting the existing African states’.58 When he talks about decentralisation he had in mind the delegation of authority and responsibility to provincial and local governments – something neither new nor novel. One might argue that even in centralist states such as the United Kingdom substantial work and autonomy happens at local levels. One would be hard-pressed to find an African country where all powers and decision making are concentrated at the national level. Several African countries are federations, yet Mafeje does not advocate a federal structure such as in the United States, states within a state. Such a model, he says, could increase regional antagonisms, especially where regions coincide with ethnic maps.
In many African countries prospects for nation building were undermined by the ‘bourgeois form of government adopted at independence’.59 The claim that Africans are generally incompetent, autocratic and corrupt does not, on its own, suffice as an explanation since many African leaders who have the potential to make changes have been imprisoned, banned, exiled, assassinated or murdered, often with the help of imperialist Western powers. Mafeje concedes that ultimately the use of concepts such as ethnicity, ethnic groups or multi-partyism is prejudicial and quite Eurocentric. For one thing, multi-partyism is not the same thing as democracy; for another thing, to equate the term with democracy mistakes form for substance. Moreover, it is analogical in nature, with very little regard for qualitative differences in sociocultural context.
Mafeje contends that there is greater ethnic integration in Africa than ever before, attributed to migration and intermarriages. If anything, ‘sociologically-understood, the so-called ethnic conflict or ethnicity is a sign of the imperatives of greater integration or social pressures arising out of a shrinking political arena’.60 He continues: ‘If by “shrinking political arena” is meant increasing crisis of democracy, then it becomes clear that in the absence of other ideological predispositions the corollary of this is intensified “ethnicity”. If intensified ethnicity is an index of absence of democracy, then it stands to reason that our starting point is not the imagining of ethnic divisions, nor their ideological manipulation in the form of ethnicity but the question of democracy itself.’
Mafeje’s general conclusion is that ethnic divisions in Africa are, by and large, imagined and encouraged by the elites who stand to benefit from them. This is ideological manipulation, which should be called ethnicity and ‘not innocent, self-imposing identities which people acquire by historical accident’.61 In the final analysis, what makes people who they are is not the labels attached to them, but what they do to reproduce themselves.
2 | A Totalising Critique
When I went to Langa to do fieldwork in 1961, I was armed with an essentially ahistoricist and overly functionalist question: Why and how do social groups cohere or split? Historically, it is necessary not to accuse me of inanity but simply to acknowledge the fact that I should have known that ebbs and flows are the very movements of which the dialectic of history is made, and, as such, are permanent features of collective existence.
Archie Mafeje, ‘Religion, Class and Ideology in South Africa’
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Archie Mafeje had managed to reconcile his Marxist political convictions with his academic work.1 He had moved on from his liberal functionalist work of the 1960s to write from a Marxist perspective and also to advance a programmatic critique of the social sciences.2 Yet those who are enthusiastic about polemic tend to reduce his evaluation of the social sciences to a polemic on anthropology. Theirs is the standard or conventional view, which holds that he single-handedly demolished anthropology as a discipline, or that he single-handedly destroyed the science of anthropology. This conception of Mafeje’s work is misleading in at least three respects. First, while it is true that the discipline of anthropology underwent a crisis for at least two decades, its system of thought shaken, it is not true that it was demolished – for all its problems, anthropology is still a thriving academic discipline. Mafeje, Bernard Magubane and Francis Nyamnjoh would not, as late as the twenty-first century, have felt the need to analyse a discipline dead and buried. Second, the idea that Mafeje ‘single-handedly’ demolished anthropology is factually and historically incorrect – there were a number of other radical social scientists who dissected anthropology from the