South Africa: Inventing the Nation

Abstract

South Africa: Inventing the Nation. By Alexander Johnston. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Pp. 354; map, notes, bibliography. $29.95 paper.It takes a courageous scholar to accept the assignment to try to understand the complex and unending process of building a South African nation out of the disparate parts of that land and its peoples. During most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries South Africa was governed by regimes that sought to emphasize the differences among its peoples. How can we expect that a mere quarter century of effort, even a harmonized effort, to unify such peoples can overcome the entrenched legacies of division and control? In short, there are more questions than answers about the state of nation-building in South Africa. The ongoing dilemma faced by national leaders is that "South Africa could not become a nation unless it was democratic and it could not democratize unless it was (or at least could pretend to be) a nation" (p. 1).What is more, there is hardly agreement on what sort of nation ought to be built and how best to fuse it together. Three forms of nation vie for attention in the current order: "an Afrikaner nation, which had to die in order that a democratic South African nation could be born; a civic nation, hastily improvised to provide a platform of legitimacy for constitutional democracy during the negotiations which brought apartheid to an end; and an African nation which is glimpsed but not fully articulated in the ideology of African nationalism ..." (p. 3). A running debate centers on grand issues-what does it mean to be African? Who qualifies as South African today? Is it possible to go beyond racial reconciliation and toward social cohesion? The optimism of Mandela's "rainbow nation" has long since passed, but a widely acceptable substitute for that vague design has eluded national leaders.To his credit, Alexander Johnston has plunged into the morass that is South African politics and he has left nothing outside his field of vision. His first part is a thorough examination of the demographic, spatial, socioeconomic, linguistic, and ethnic features that combine to make a profile of South Africa's peoples. During the Constitution drafting stages in the 1990s that diversity was recognized and encouraged. But there is a dark side to this diversity. South Africa must find a way of dealing with vertical (ethnic, religious, racial) divisions as well as horizontal (e.g., economic) ones. So what passes for a South African nation is an improvised one. Practically every issue of public policy poses a stress test for these obvious differences and disparities.Emerging from the crucible of the early 1990s were the making of a finessed constitution and a general agreement on the composition of the new state. In a way it was much like the U.S. Constitution in that there were as many unanswered questions and illdefined compromises as there were settled issues. It became the task of the African National Congress, clearly the most popular political party, to add meat to the bones of the state. …