Mayibuye iAfrika? : disjunctive inclusions and black strivings for constitution and belonging in 'South Africa'
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Abstract
With a focus on South Africa, I employ the phenomenological approach from an African
perspective to analyse strivings for constitution (to constitute an inclusive polity, and etymologically,
constare ‘to stand together’) and belonging (affectively and materially). In this postcolony, these
strivings can be discerned in perennial protests by impoverished black communities for an inclusive
democracy and for social goods; in contestations around land redistribution and against institutionalised
forms of social ‘invisibilisation;’ and in calls for the valorisation of life-worlds different from the
western. I contend that these strivings should be understood from the perspective that settler colonial
constitution-making processes presaged “death of the land” (ilizwe lifile); that is, the shattering of the
socio-cultural worlds of indigenous peoples. The outcomes of this processes were ‘native’ pariahdom,
homelessness and worldlessness. Accordingly, the original impulse of anti-colonial struggles was
Mayibuye iAfrika (‘Return’/‘Re-member’/ ‘Resurrect’ Africa).
My two-fold thesis is, firstly, that perennial protests by marginalised communities are impelled
by the fact that post-1994 constitutional re-arrangements did not rise to the decolonisation challenge of
re-membering the land/world. These re-arrangements have thus perpetuated homelessness, pariahdom
and worldlessness. Secondly, I demonstrate that the cause of this failure is partially the fact that ruling
party elites - who were beneficiaries of partial inclusion into the settler-constituted polity - failed to
overcome their liminal-status induced conditions of double consciousness and racial melancholia. The
result is that they elaborated terms of constitution and belonging whose eventual outcomes are, on the
one hand, assimilation of ‘native’ elites into the white-dominated world, and on the other, continuing
pariahdom and worldlessness for the majority.
In Part I, I show that South African anti-colonial leaders based their vision of constitution and
belonging on W.E.B. Du Bois seminal manifesto for how people of African descent could achieve
liberation and world-reclamation. I argue that this manifesto leads to elite nationalism, a dearth of
national consciousness and that it ultimately perpetuates the inherited world of apartness. The main
insight from this Part is that quests for post-colonial constitution-making ought to be geared towards
re-membering and (re)constituting the historically-colonised world on spiritual, social and material
planes – the three realms of African belonging in the world. In Part II, I propose decolonising
constitution-making processes centered on politics of Mayibuye understood here as creolising
homemaking and re-membering of the world. I do this by advancing Es’kia Mphahlele, Steve Biko and
Abahlali baseMjondolo’s interconnected praxes of Afrikan humanness, Black Consciousness and
Abahlalism. I contend that these praxes are faithful to the Mayibuye exigency because they, respectively
and together, propose ways of re-membering the triadic world and of (re)constituting an all-inclusive
polity based on African humanness