Preface
This essay looks at southern Africa in the fourth year of the third
millennium and explores what futures lie ahead for the region and
its peoples. A decade ago an exercise of this kind would have been
thought unnecessary – indeed untoward – because the ending of
both the Cold War and apartheid promised to deliver southern Africa
from its fractious past. Seamus Heaney famously wrote at the time
that hope and history had rhymed.1
It is a clichй to say that the future was not what we expected it
to be. In southern Africa, hopes of peace and prosperity have been
dashed. This issue underpins this entire essay; but so too does the
view that other futures are still possible. Thinking aloud about the
region, its past and its future, represents an opportunity to give
form (or rather forms) not only to present uncertainties, but to the
future itself.
There have been a number of exercises that look towards the
region’s future. The most famous of these, at least in the public
domain, is the exercise conducted by the Institute for Global
Dialogue in 2002,2 in which I participated. Borrowing from the
techniques offered by scenario-building, versions of southern Africa’s
future were sketched out. The first scenario sketched a region
dominated by internecine conflict between the states of southern
Africa; this was called ‘Danger, Ingozi, Kotsi’. The second, called
‘Market Madness’, portrayed a regional future dominated by entirely
free and unfettered markets linked to a world in which market forces
were supreme. The third scenario, called ‘Regional Renaissance’,
envisioned a region in which strong leadership would help to reverse
economic decline and poverty by sharing the goals of social
democracy and economic justice. The fourth scenario, ‘The Slow
Slide’, traced a trend towards neo-patrimonialism and clientalism
throughout the region. Finally, scenario five – ‘Poor but Proud’ –
described a region, with weak governments and under-developed
civil society, which was disengaged from the international
community.
In the second part of this essay, I too outline possible futures for
the region on the basis of the arguments – historical and other – that
are made in Part One. To be frank, I have done this with certain nervousness: scholarship cannot seek to predict the future and only
the most foolhardy of scholars attempt to do so. However, scholars
can try to interpret the past, explain contemporary events and, very
tentatively, suggest what might happen if the present trends
continue – although often, of course, they do not. It is not intended
that the futures set out here should provide quick and easy
gratification to the sound-bite mentality which drives policy
punditry in South Africa and elsewhere. If anything, they show that
there are no ready answers to southern Africa’s myriad challenges.
When I was invited to participate in this project by the Catholic
Institute for International Relations, my initial response was to
decline. I had spent nearly 15 years thinking about the region and
trying to engage with its politics. My own intellectual interests had
drifted towards social theoretical issues, and I had just completed a
dense (and somewhat overly theoretical) book on southern Africa; a
book that focused particularly on South Africa’s approach to regional
security.3 This had however left me with the uncanny feeling that
hidden within its chapters a shorter, more immediate, work was
waiting to escape. Between these new covers, then, that escapee may
well be found.
I hope this essay will be received in the spirit in which it is offered.
As any reading of the burgeoning literature in African studies would
suggest, an acute tussle is under way over the nature and scope of
knowledge. Of particular importance in this conversation is the issue
of who can write on Africa and African topics. I cannot escape either
my own past or who I am. So, yes, this essay is written from a
particular experience of the region and its ways – but I hope that my
own political and intellectual concerns for social emancipation and
the region’s people will shine through in what follows.
The above point also raises an ancillary, but important, question:
where in the world does South Africa, the region’s newest state,
belong? Once, especially during the Cold War, the answer to this
question was clear – it belonged with the West, those white-centred
states that opposed communism as much, it seems fair to say, as they
opposed the liberation of what many still call the Third World.
Indeed, apartheid’s longevity – the point was often made – was
contingent on the support that the minority received from the West.
After the ending of apartheid, many expected this to change, but alas
it has not. In a perceptive foreword to the catalogue for South African sculptor Brett Murray’s 2002 exhibition ‘White like me’, Ivor
Powell writes:
For all the lip service of African National Congress politicians to
African traditional customs and values, the new South Africa is as
powerfully written by the dominant global white discourse as ever
was the old. We buy into American economic and cultural values
and aspirations as enthusiastically and as unreflectively as we buy
into the compromised values of Westminster and United States
democracy, not to mention abstract notions like justice and fair
play. We educate and define knowledge and achievement almost
exclusively in terms derived from the imperialist hegemony of the
Western ‘white’ powers ... 4
This essay is for my friend John Barratt – gentleman, scholar,
progressive Catholic.
Peter Vale
Grahamstown, South Africa, January 2004
Notes:
-
See Seamus Heaney’s ‘Address: Hope and history’ in The visit of Seamus Heaney to Rhodes
University in honour of Malvern van Wyk Smith, mimeo pamphlet produced by the
Department of English, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa, August 2002. The
phrase comes from Heaney’s poem The cure of Troy: A version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1991): ‘History says, Don’t hope / On this side of the
grave. / But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up, / And
hope and history rhyme.’
-
De Villiers, R (ed) (2002) Southern Africa 2020: Five scenarios, Institute for Global Dialogue,
South Africa.
-
Vale, P (2003) Security and politics in South Africa: The regional dimension, Lynne Rienner
Publishers, Boulder (Colorado) and London.
-
Foreword by Ivor Powell to White like me, a catalogue produced for Brett Murray’s exhibition
as winner of the Standard Bank Young Artist award for 2002.
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