The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
WHEN social scientists talk about othering they refer to the social imagination and construction of another person or a group of people as not only different but also inferior to the authentic person or people that hold themselves as a standard of being and belonging to a place. Similarly, the philosophers, especially phenomenologists, hold otherness as radical difference and also opposition to an individual or a community of persons. Othering, therefore, is the imagination, construction, invention, production and treatment of other people as removed and alien from true and real subjects of the human family.
Coloniality as the system and structure of power that is fortified through the classification of human beings according to race, nationality, ethnicity, gender, religion and spirituality, culture, age, ability and inability of body among other axis of difference is a political and social process of othering. Individuals and groups that are othered are removed from the human family and surrendered to that no man’s land between “citizens and subjects,” that political and legal wilderness between political fact and public law. Othered people find themselves without political or legal protection; existing in a kind of state of nature where life is brutal, fragile and uncertain.
Giorgio Agamben called it “the state of exception” where people are exposed to the harsh political weather and legal climate outside the protection of the law and the care of regular public morality. Conquered, colonised and enslaved people such as black Africans were, and somehow still are, true others. Conquest and the coloniality that follows it produces and maintains new political identities of conqueror and the conquered, enslaver and the enslaved, and the coloniser and the colonised as binary and also conflictual identities and relations of power. Being the other, politically and socially, I observe is being in between some rocks and other very hard places.
In this article I elect to look at females and foreigners as othered people in the present South African economy and polity. I also seek to insist that the female and foreign others are actually not a uniquely South African artefact but an invention of the modern colonial world system that is, by its nature, constituted with coloniality and tyranny. The canonical and historical question is as old as philosophy itself; how and when did one person become the self and the next person the other, it is a question of conquest, the classification of human beings and discrimination, all of which are the properties of coloniality that Empire has polished to Rock and Roll, and has deployed to keep the globe under its tyrannical grip of the Octopus, the proverbial many handed monster.
The historical idea of South Africa
The name South Africa, as a geographic term, refers to a place in the South of, not in Africa, and that is politically important. Once the Boers and the English fought bitterly over this geographic and political landscape, until in 1910, when somehow they agreed as white people to unite in their exploitation and oppression of the blacks. On 31 May 1910, South Africa became part of the British Empire. The Khoi Khoi and the San are the believed original inhabitants of the land that were dealt a genocide and their descendants are continuing to struggle for political recognition, as I write, a number of naked and very angry light skinned natives are encamped outside the Union Buildings, in Pretoria, demanding justice.
This has been the land of the Khoi and the San, of the Bantu, the Boers and the English, and some Malay slaves and coloureds. The Khoisan <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khoisan>, Bantu <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantus>, English <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_people>, Afrikaners <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaners>, Austronesians <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austronesians>, East Asians <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asians> and South Asians <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Asians> all make strong claims to the land. The authentic ownership of the land is so contested that the exalted Freedom Charter could only politically correctly say: “South Africa belongs to all that live in it.” This is a deep political and philosophical, and also historical statement that does not solve but further complicates the idea and problematic of South Africa.
The argument of the descendants of the Khoi and the San is that, some foreigners and conquerors, white and black came, invaded and colonised their land. It was politically significant when for his inauguration; President Cyril RaMaphosa engaged the poetic and cultural services of Khoi Khoi Imbongi. South Africa is a melting pot of political identities, of some people and their others.
The idea of South Africa must be a Pentecostal idea of many people being different together under one nation and one Republic. It is conquest that has produced the many political identities of South Africa, a Republic that ended being a monarchy officially in 1961 on 31 May, when Governor General of the Queen of England handed over power. On 5 October 1960, a Referendum decided the country to be a Republic. From 1948, apartheid imagined and constructed the country after its own imaginary until 1994, when Mandela and his ANC labelled the country non-racial, non-sexist and a “Rainbow Nation of God” by the words of Arch-Bishop Desmond Tutu. But the homeland and homeland political identities remained intact, I argue.
- To be continued next week
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Braamfontein, Johannesburg. This piece is an abridged version of a Keynote Address to the National Business Initiative; Sandton, 19 September, 2019. [email protected]
