Introduction
This edited collection introduces readers to the past, present and future relevancy of the scholarship of Archibald Boyce Monwabisi Mafeje (1936–2007). The timeliness of this volume, in light of renewed interests in this thinker’s journey through life and the knowledge he bequeathed to current and future social scientists, is impossible to overstate. Initiatives to promote Mafeje’s contributions to knowledge, whether to satisfy historical curiosity or as intellectual scaffolding for the building of new analytical frames, proliferate. The University of South Africa (UNISA), for instance, has established a research institute in his honour, thus preserving his intellectual legacy for generations to come. This institute has gained traction as a hub for visiting scholars from across the globe, offering them space to draft or improve a manuscript and partake in lively symposia.1 Its better-known initiative, however, is a co-hosted annual lecture, which is usually addressed by academics that claim affinity with Mafeje’s view of the world or their own interpretations thereof.
Seven of Mafeje’s original articles, written between the early 1970s and the late 1990s, form the backbone of this volume. The section, aptly titled ‘His voice’, is sandwiched between two sections written by the editor: an opening section, entitled ‘His life’, and a concluding section, entitled ‘His legacy’. When browsing the titles in the selected bibliography, it is evident that Mafeje’s letters, particularly those debating weighty socio-political topics, have been excluded. Treasures of immortal academic value locked up in this correspondence, often recalled in anecdotes about his life, will hopefully be uncovered for publication in the not too distant future.
The articles handpicked for this volume make for an enriching read and attest to the breadth, prescience and depth of what Mafeje thought and how he reasoned. If we only consider the selected readings in terms of breadth and prescience, criteria that are useful to identify the encyclopaedic scope of topics in these writings, then it is clear that this man transcended the boundaries of social anthropology and sociology. Although his postgraduate training, doctorate and professorial appointments were in these academic disciplines, issues explored in his writings stretched far beyond the scope of these academic fields. This break with disciplinary boundaries contradicts the attempts of many commentators who have been trying to squeeze his work into disciplinary straightjackets. The editor of this volume refutes misconceptions that are not supported by hard evidence, insisting that Mafeje’s writings showcase the work of an interdisciplinary social theorist.
Scholarly depth resides in the analytical logic to plumb the essence of something to reveal its qualitative distinction from something else which appears to be similar. It is about whether a thinker is consistent in the use of the principles of reasoning or scientific logic to define substantive rather than superficial differences within and between things. This is intrinsic to clinical reasoning that does not confuse the dynamics of how essence relates to appearance or general and specific or chance and necessity. It crystallises these opposites and their ceaseless motions. Every article in ‘His voice’ displays these basic attributes of scholarly depth, illustrating the profundity with which Mafeje could unmask the hidden contradictions in complex ideas as well as unfolding social phenomena. What underpins the analyses in this collection is the inseparable inter-penetration of scholarly depth with breadth and prescience.
A succinct preface to each article underscores the significance of the arguments it contains and the context in which it was written. Supplementary information in the book, particularly the life history timeline and photographs, are not only informative but also provide clues to unanswered questions about Mafeje, especially the sources that inspired his consciousness and social convictions. Three cross-cutting themes bind the collection into a coherent whole. First, academic activism, a standout theme, shows how scholarly work interacts with an orientation towards societal progress. It pivots on the rational harnessing of advances in scientific thought for socio-economic and political progress. Second, it articulates and applies principles of incisive reasoning, a methodology of logic, that enable torchbearers in science to have their shoulders above the rest as they enlighten the uncharted terrain ahead. Third, it contextually underscores why agrarian problems have retained such dominance in socio-economic transitions in South Africa and comparable societies in the global South, a theme that has inspired refreshing scholarship. This review briefly looks at each of these themes below.
Youthful activism2
During his high-school years in the Eastern Cape, Mafeje became an active member of organisations affiliated to the Unity Movement of South Africa (UMSA).3 The politics of this organisation energised his youthful militancy when he briefly enrolled at Fort Hare University from 1955 to 1956. Fort Hare University expelled Mafeje due to his political activism, as detailed in the editor's introduction to the volume. Subsequently, as a student at the University of Cape Town (UCT) he remained a Students Of Young Africa (SOYA) militant and also held a leadership position in the Cape Peninsula Student Union (CPSU), another UMSA affiliate alongside student bodies active at universities in Durban and Johannesburg. The Unity Movement not only equipped him with solid training in radical left politics but set him on course to evolve into an acclaimed social theorist among the continent’s progressive intelligentsia (Sharp 2008). Two parts of this volume dissect what academic activism means and begin to answer questions such as: what connection did Mafeje maintain between his scholarly activities and his social convictions and membership of a political organisation? How and why did he maintain these connections before he went abroad, during his years at Cambridge and in Cairo and after his return to Pretoria in 2002? Where does socio-political activism fit into scholarship and where does scholarship fit into socio-political activism?
Varied reasons exist as to why academics tend to be far less secretive about their social conscience than about their association with any political organisation, despite the fact that science free from any ideology does not exist in reality. The case at hand represents a rare exception to such widespread figments of the imagination because South African intellectuals could not escape the naked social injustices of one of the world’s most repulsive regimes. In such circumstances it would be odd for intellectuals, who were victims of institutionalised discrimination, not to speak out and rebel against pervasive state repression. Thus, the progressive radicalisation in social conscience among the educated strata of dispossessed and oppressed people is not surprising but inevitable wherever prejudice is so barbaric and pervasive. Against this backdrop, the life history chapter emphasises how Mafeje’s involvement in one political movement started in his youth when his teachers introduced him to political enlightenment. Even though the last three of Mafeje’s own articles in this volume are not excerpts from his ‘unpublished memoirs’, each one sheds light on his socio-political thinking through commentaries on ideological battles of the 1970s and 1980s, decades of social protest that culminated in the end of supremacist minority rule.
In the historiography of South Africa’s protracted struggle for freedom, the influence of the liberation movement to which Mafeje belonged is rarely mentioned without any distortion or denigration. Whenever mainstream commentators have found it impossible to erase UMSA from their narratives, they have invariably seized the moment to rehash their hostility towards it. Moreover, second-hand anecdotes rather than irrefutable primary evidence have overshadowed the methodology of this anti-UMSA history. Mafeje and the editor compare how far the activities and political goals of the Unity Movement transcend the promises of freedom that the African National Congress (ANC), Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) espoused. Even though this comparison is not exhaustive, it helps to clarify whether divergent ideologies of liberation resonated with the political, social and economic needs of the oppressed majority. Mafeje the academic–activist features prominently in ‘His life’, drawing heavily on the editor’s own interviews with friends and relatives. In constructing this storyline, the editor neither interrogated the Unity Movement archives at UCT nor interviewed any existing members, thus leaving gaps in the evidence on why Mafeje the mature and aging scholar became increasingly aloof from the political organisation of his youth. It is not enough to cite periodic and casual engagements with this or that ex-member of this organisation but rather requires the documentation of interactions with its functioning structures, especially its programmatic perspectives and concrete public activities.
To help fill this gap, it is useful to summarise the basic tenets of Unity Movement ideology and how its actions found expression in its politics. The Unity Movement concluded that national oppression, land dispossession and labour exploitation in South Africa served the system of capitalist accumulation on a world scale. South Africa’s dominant mode of livelihood, with its corresponding social relations before capitalism gained traction, variedly classified as tribalism and feudalism, became subsumed in the logic of the new mode of social organisation premised on enriching a minority at the expense of the majority. UMSA prioritised the agrarian question in light of the centrality of concentrated land ownership and surplus extraction from migrant labour, drawn from dispossessed peasants under the rule of state-appointed tribal despots. It defined the national question in terms of a society under foreign imperial domination and in which basic democratic liberties of the majority of the population do not exist, thus rejecting a reduction of the national question to artificial racial identities. Based on this diagnosis, it envisioned the resolution of the national and agrarian questions as inseparable and quintessentially the start of uninterrupted anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist revolutions. All its political principles and policies followed from applying its ideology in South Africa. It codified this programmatic vision in a set of minimum demands, known as the Ten Point Programme, and a policy of rejecting hollow and inferior political institutions that kept the majority of the population without basic democratic rights (Tabata 2014).
When Mafeje began his postgraduate studies at UCT in 1961, the apartheid state was intensifying its campaign of terror to crush the peasant revolts in Pondoland, an uprising propelled by agrarian impulses that swept the northeast region of rural Eastern Cape. This is the region where Isaac B. Tabata, Nathaniel T. Honono, Leo Sihlali and other All African Convention organisers agitated for the mobilisation of peasants into strong combative organisations for more than a decade preceding this revolt. The Pondoland revolt was a culmination of this organising work and the last epicentre in more than a decade of peasant rebellions when one UMSA rallying call, ‘Land and liberty’, found an echo among protest movements in the countryside and the cities (Kayser 2002). Furthermore, through the migrant labour system, the peasant revolts helped catalyse urban protests in faraway townships of Sharpeville, outside Johannesburg, and Langa, outside Cape Town, the well-known fieldwork site for the Mafeje–Wilson anthropological studies (Sharp 2008).
In terms of its numerical strength, UMSA reached its zenith with the waves of mass rural and urban uprisings of the early 1960s. These waves of emancipatory protests subsided for many reasons but less so due to an exhausted militancy among people craving basic democratic liberties than to the crackdown of the state, ruthlessly determined to safeguard minority rule. The Pondoland and Sharpeville massacres inaugurated a campaign of authoritarian terror widely known as the ‘dark sixties’. Outlawing the literature and leadership of UMSA stifled its overt organisational activities, forcing it into clandestine methods to achieve its programmatic ends (Nikani 2009; Tabata 2014). Efforts by its exiled leadership to secure assistance from the Organisation for African Unity (OAU) for military training dragged on for years but yielded no success. With Cuban aid, a contingent of its fighters received training in guerrilla armed combat in Guinea Conakry. In its first big mission, this group of trained men entered South Africa to take more recruits for guerrilla training abroad. When the apartheid security forces got a tip-off about this courageous mission, it had to be aborted. The security forces retaliated with arrests of more than 200 UMSA members across the country. After a long trial, 13 of these members were charged with plotting a terrorist overthrow of the state and imprisoned on Robben Island for terms ranging from 8 to 12 years (Nikani 2009). Following their release from Robben Island from 1978 onwards, these ex-prisoners, despite the strictures of house-arrest and surveillance by the security forces, resumed clandestine interactions with the leadership based in Lusaka (later relocating to Harare). Devoted to rebuilding the Unity Movement, they were forced to do so under the blanket of intensified state repression. Rebuilding occurred in fits and starts, interrupted by the arrest and imprisonment of new recruits around 1981 when they returned from a conference with the leadership in Zimbabwe. The setback from this round of arrests, however, was short-lived and failed to halt the momentum behind the movement’s revival, with annual gatherings hosted in Harare until the end of the decade, when Tabata passed on. Signs of gradual recovery in the strength of the Unity Movement became visible by the start of the 1990s, primarily through the growth of the African People’s Democratic Union of Southern Africa (APDUSA) and a new generation of young members. However, it was still a long way away from having a sufficiently large membership to significantly impact the course of struggles before and immediately after the euphoric 1994 elections.4
Questioning scientific logic
Articles in ‘His voice’ engage with currents of thought prominent in the social sciences and their defining methods of reasoning, demonstrating why and how (transdisciplinary) schools of thought rise and fall. Through his dissection of methodological rivalries in social theory, Mafeje demonstrates the incisiveness of the logic of scientific thinking he advocated, defended and applied. Argument construction in the writings under review shows the work of a devotee of dialectical logic, the fundamental principles of which Mafeje assimilated in Unity Movement study circles rather than as a subject in his university lectures. Even if his public divorce from liberal functionalist modes of analysis took place during his Cambridge years, the dialectic has been present since his earliest publications.
Mafeje never tasked himself with compiling a handbook of dialectical laws from the seminal texts of its founders and pioneers, as is common among dogmatists of closed systems of thought. What catches the eye is that explicit reference to Karl Marx, or the most authoritative proponents of ideas and practices his thought inspired, decorated with copious excerpts from revered Marxist classics, is virtually absent from these articles. Instead of this rote that numbs the mind, Mafeje puts dialectics to use, rigorously, to disclose fallacies and contradictions in the reasoning of self-styled promoters as well as its enemies. Recurring allusions to negation, historical contradiction, holistic totality, essence versus appearance, combined and uneven transformation and so forth, analytical categories often implicit in arguments developed across an article, confess an unmistakable affinity to this science of logic. This dialectical social theorist not only subjected intellectual trends in the academy to in-depth and compelling critique but also laid bare concealed and irreconcilable antagonisms in ideologies of some South African liberation movements.
Mafeje questions the raison d'être of anthropology with aims of inquiry that reinforce each other. On the one hand, this questioning represents a case study in theoretical methodology with lessons for social theory and science at large. On the other hand, it questions the determinants of the discipline’s existence coupled with popular hegemonic influences within it and how anthropologists rationalise their theories and praxes. The first two chapters in ‘His voice’ explore an elementary question of relational logic: what identity exists between anthropology and other social sciences? Instead of limiting himself to descriptive attributes of typical studies of ‘primitive societies’, Mafeje zooms in on the difference–identity dialectic inherent in how the part (anthropology) corresponds with the whole (social sciences in general) epistemologically. One instructive example is the anthropological fixation to cast modern transitions in Africa in terms of ‘cultural identities’, tribes and traditionalism, which stems from the field’s ethnocentric ideological moorings. This exemplifies ahistorical and reductionist reasoning which mystifies social relations in Africa that are increasingly subjugated to capitalism, a mode of production based on labour exploitation for private profit accumulation and its own class hierarchy. The logic of ethnocentrism deeply rooted in anthropology obfuscates social realities and in so doing it ultimately serves the interests of capital against the aspirations of destitute peasant and worker majorities it purportedly seeks to understand. This vulgar subservience to bourgeois ideology, Mafeje insists, has not only disgraced anthropology but ‘all the cognate bourgeois social sciences’ (127). What philosophy, economics, sociology and political studies share in common with anthropology is resolute adherence to positivism – at least the hegemonic schools of thought that reign in the European and American academy. Positivist reasoning defends equilibrium against contradiction, statics against dynamics and treats individuals in isolation from their socio-economic context, with methodological individualism of neoclassical economics perhaps the crudest epitome of this logic. Deductively, positivists follow a rigid ‘demarcation between observation and theoretical language and that “science” can validate its propositions by appealing to facts which are external to it’ (120). Irrespective of the strain of positivism, its core epistemological programme is that ‘knowledge grows by accretion and that it is a result of specialised subjects (the scientists) who are able to extract knowledge from an object-world, [overlooking] the important principle of the reversibility of the subject–object relation in knowledge formation’ (119).
Grappling with the theory or philosophy of science is also at the heart of Mafeje’s critique of the ‘articulation modes of production’ theorisation (133–152), which was popular among some South African social theorists in the 1960s and 1970s. To unmask the contradictions and limits in this intellectual fad, Mafeje focused on the seminal contributions of Harold Wolpe and Mike Morris, two of its chief South African proponents. Mafeje takes issue with the theory and empirics of these ‘structured articulation’ advocates. Their central construct, modes of production, has no consistent definition and it is unclear how foundational analytical categories such as property ownership, labour use/allocation, surplus appropriation and class relations translate into a coherent theoretical reference point. Morris concentrates on how capitalism developed in South African agriculture and reduces all pre-capitalist modes of production to feudalism. This oversimplification deprives Morris of a social class category for labour tenants on white farms with ties to Bantustan (‘segregated black homelands’) socio-economic arrangements. How different are these labour tenants from landless peasants crowded into marginalised Bantustans? Wolpe’s categorisation of a pre-capitalist mode of production, by contrast, also provides for African redistributive economies (based on lineage production and reproduction) and labour tenancy on white farms (spuriously conflated with sharecropping). Despite this nuanced categorisation, vague and arbitrary definitions of key terminology, applied to classify communal land and cattle for instance, exacerbate the confusion and incoherence of this approach. Furthermore, Wolpe did not resolve a cardinal empirical puzzle: are South African peasants accumulating cattle as means of production or as prestige goods, and why?
Neither Wolpe nor Morris carefully reasoned through how the state and class struggles, fundamental to capitalism’s violent emergence and evolution, fit into their analytical schemes. A systematic comparison of this variety of ‘structural articulation’ with the popular French scholarly trends which originally inspired it, exposes the deep inconsistencies that undermine the existence of a holistically integrated body of analytical principles. These glaring shortcomings mean that foundational criteria to substantiate its aspiration to a scientific theory are missing. Epistemologically, Mafeje demonstrates, this ensemble of Marxists has abandoned ‘dialectical materialism’ (144) in favour of mechanistic contrivances about ‘articulated structures’. In passing, academic debates about the transition to and beyond capitalism in the 1970s amounted to an unsuccessful imitation of a controversy settled in the mid 1930s among radical Marxist formations outside academia in battles for programmatic consistency that dialectically interact with strategic political action (Kayser 2002).
Historicising agrarian crises and transitions
Throughout his illustrious career Mafeje preoccupied himself with the political economy of agrarian inequalities, as this sample of his writings attests. The impetus behind this preoccupation is twofold. First, the prime sociological impetus stems from the nature of agrarian livelihoods, quality of life and socio-political obstacles that confront peasants and workers. Structural inequalities in the ownership and control of farmland and farm production mirror socio-political polarisation that fuels agrarian socio-political conflicts, class struggles and social revolutions. Second, Mafeje’s recognition and appreciation of why solving the agrarian problem is such a decisive social question is traceable to his Unity Movement political upbringing. As Nyoka reiterates in the introduction, Mafeje’s Unity Movement activism was instrumental in training him to dissect agrarian issues and recognise why the landless peasantry is a vital force for transitions beyond capitalism. His contributions in this field not only fuse and apply his commitment to dialectical logic and radical socio-political philosophy discussed earlier in this review, but also open novel research trajectories to make sense of unfolding agrarian transitions (Moyo 2018; Jacobs 2018).
Mafeje’s scholarship on the agrarian question historicises Africa’s twenty-first century agrarian crises which manifest in the destitution of peasants and farm workers and growing climate catastrophes that have, in turn, worsened the socio-economic plight of these dispossessed and dominated social classes. His writings delineate the continuities and discontinuities between past and present agrarian transitions. With the reconfiguration of structural adjustment into neoliberalism since the 1990s, Mafeje was in the vanguard of exposing the dangers of this neoliberal offensive for the livelihoods of African peasants and farmworkers. Neoliberalism intensifies the commodification of land, environmental resources, agrarian livelihoods and social relations at the behest of global and local capitalist interests, with local elites sharing in the spoils. Glorified as a solution to agrarian crises, neoliberal agrarian reforms have in fact facilitated the direct opposite: aggravating the hardships of the poorest social classes in the agrarian sector. As one African state after another, including governments dominated by ex-liberation movements, imposed neoliberal agrarian reforms, Mafeje picked apart the analytical principles and mechanics of this orthodoxy as a step towards the case for anti-neoliberal agrarian transformation alternatives.
How neoliberalism has been aggravating agrarian production and social crises in Africa today has animated a rethinking of the nature and scale of modern agrarian transitions. To illustrate Mafeje’s impact on this rethinking raging in the field of agrarian political economy, two recent contributions are instructive and merit closer attention. First, Sam Moyo, a leading Zimbabwean scholar of Africa’s agrarian question, argues compellingly for radical agrarian transformation in settler and non-settler Africa, building on an extensive but critical appraisal of Mafeje’s arguments and proposals on this subject (Moyo 2018). Based on a comparative synthesis of evidence of accelerated peasant land dispossession coupled with land concentration, Moyo demonstrates the saliency as well as the convergence of the agrarian question across settler and non-settler African countries. On this point, Moyo credits Mafeje as the source of his intellectual inspiration, as is evident from the affinity of Moyo’s theorisation of the agrarian question with Mafeje’s analytical categories and reasoning. Empirically, however, Moyo underscores a marginal difference between them: Mafeje underestimated the resolution of the land question as a developmental priority in non-settler Africa as ‘he considered land alienation to be limited in scale’ in these contexts (Moyo 2018, 222). The usefulness of separating a prime material condition for agriculture in Africa, ownership and control of land, from the continent’s agrarian question is a dubious proposition given the observed convergence in agrarian realities across the continent. After all, land is intrinsic to the agrarian question.
In another contribution, Ricardo Jacobs (2018) draws on Mafeje to debunk long-standing misconceptions and confusion about the agrarian imprint of urban class formation in metropoles like Cape Town, constructed on the foundations of a structurally polarised organisation of society. Extensive regions of this metropolitan hub are dominated by rural–urban migrants involved in urban agriculture that resonate with evidence elsewhere and call into question the assumptions that underpin the ‘linear proletarianisation’ thesis (Ibid., 887). This questionable thesis takes for granted that capitalism (a) gives birth to an urban proletariat with the consciousness and aspirations of a wage-worker and (b) progressively modernises urban areas in the global South. Realities of chronic urban unemployment, inequalities and socio-economic decay negate both articles of faith. With detailed evidence gathered from long-term urban land occupants and farmers, Jacobs refutes the assumptions and logic of this stubborn delusion. Contrary to extant beliefs, Jacobs demonstrates, a class of ‘proletarians with peasant characteristics’ proliferates as a result of the accumulation logic of late capitalism in Cape Town and beyond. The features, composition, demands and struggles of this urban class match the profile of peasant-migrant workers analysed in the writings of Mafeje and Tabata, a leading historical materialist and radical left freedom fighter. This dynamic signifies the ‘agrarianisation of urban space’ (Ibid., 899). It is needless to repeat that Tabata, one of Mafeje’s political mentors, placed agrarian classes under the microscope to come to grips with the weight of agrarian social forces in an anti-capitalist social revolution. Consistent with this initial rationale behind the Tabata–Mafeje investigations into class formation in a colonial country, Jacobs invites scholars to rethink the dialectics of urban class formation and social protests as well as what the agrarian aspirations of such a dual social class mean for transitions beyond capitalism.
Conclusion
This collection of Mafeje’s writings addresses the long-standing ignorance of his youthful activism and scholarly accomplishments. Every article demonstrates that Mafeje devoted himself to the harnessing of science for the realisation of noble social convictions and principles: laying bare the dynamics of how to emancipate humanity from misery, exploitation, oppression and backwardness. With the aid of this volume, new generations of social scientists encounter a more precise understanding of Mafeje’s thoughts and reasoning, allowing us to wrestle with his ideas, in his own words, to help in the search for progressive solutions to contemporary developmental puzzles.