Hi, welcome to my Poliseries: an exploration of the vision each parliamentary party has for South Africa’s future. The topic I explore in this regard is land reform. In this report, I discuss the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC); another bastard child of the ANC that differentiates itself by being the ‘black’ version of the FF+. The main difference, ideologically, between what the FF+ and the PAC represent is that the former, as I see it, represents the Afrikaans culture inclusive of the language primarily focused on South Africa; the latter represents, not the culture per sé but the hereditary claim only of groups of African descent. Other than that, these two parties cherish, equally, the idea of cultural self-determination: Pan-Africanism and Pan-Afrikaanerism respectively.
Founded by Robert Sobukwe in 1959, the PAC aborted itself from the ANC because its ideology, that of Pan-Africanism, clashed with the ANC’s non-racialist approach to the anti-apartheid struggle which meant accepting help from, and working with, non-black and non-African racial groups. Pan-Africanism is a movement that encourages the independence, self-sufficiency, and solidarity of all African descendants for their ultimate prosperity. Considering that being African, in this sense, is conflated with being of the black race, this ideology is exclusive of all other races – a version of racism if you will.
Racism, like all belief systems, is heavily rooted in a sense of identity; and the PAC, according to its 2020 publication on the land question’s parliamentary resolution process, considers land as an important environmental component of identity that serves to facilitate/house it as its domain of manifestation. As such, the land question is synonymous with that of identity and culture; therefore, one cannot deal with it as separate from history. In addition, the PAC states that this resolution process has effectively been ‘captured’ by domestic and international capital which, in its enduring mission to ‘further’ human progress, considers the true resolution of the land question a regressive outcome. To this end, it has co-opted/coerced and indoctrinated most stakeholders into embracing this viewpoint. A condition the PAC calls ‘civilised’.
With that said, the PAC regards the whole land reform programme as a scam; a play in which stakeholders e.g., the state, civil society, political organizations etc. are acting out the true resolution of the land question as a fiction. In accordance with the Pan-Africanist viewpoint: land must be returned to its original, indigenous, owners without any prerequisites; thus, even expropriation without compensation falls short of the party’s demands in this regard. That is, because it is a legal process with its own terms and conditions of execution and that it aims to serve the whole as individuals which effectively prevents them from embracing one another hence their communal/Pan-Africanist heritage and destiny.
Pan-Africanism, as per Robert Sobukwe’s advocacy, decries the individualisation of land reform’s recipients as this retains the commodification thus individual ownership of land – a clear example of the abortion of heritage thus history and communal identity/nationality; that is, the selling of what makes up a large part of one’s being. Executing land reform, in its current form, according to the PAC, simply caters to the symptoms and does nothing to change the fundamental system that is colonisation. Economic decline/prosperity are the stick and carrot used to encourage said abortion. In some respects, a parallel of the same justification furnished to women on several related issues (abortion, feminism etc.). But that’s a subject for another day. Under a PAC government, no individual will own land; all indigenous people, as a collective, will – that is, under the custodianship of a ’supra chapter 10 body’ that will out-rank even the state on these matters.
Land can only be accessed by people based on their nationality over-and-above their African descendancy; as such, it will serve, also, as an identification device, pinning the presence of cultures to specific geographic locations in the country. Identity and culture/tradition are inseparable from history as an emotional experience, this time, also at a communal level; as I stated in my FF+ report, the land issue, in terms of expropriation without compensation, like affirmative action initiatives such as BBBEE, is driven by the need to address this communal emotional trauma resultant from our history. The PAC goes as far as to acknowledge this:
“Territory, geographical space, and land are primarily and principally national issues and Identities. It is not an economic issue”.
- PAC Publication on the Parliamentary Process on the Resolution of the Land Question.
The tendency of whites in general, and Afrikaners in particular, to disregard this by dodging fault in insisting on the economic consequences of these initiatives is part of the reason the implementation of said initiatives is flavoured, at some level, by a cumulative ‘Fuck You’-like air of vindictiveness. Their apparent disregard sends that same message.
The PAC would replace the land reform program, in its entirety, with its decolonization program; The Decolonization of Land Ownership Distribution and Utilization process which consists of two phases:
1. De-commoditizing land by expropriating it and officially declaring it the property of all African people.
2. Considering whether those from whom it was expropriated should be compensated.
The second phase above has me a bit confused: I wonder what the outcome of said consideration would be; considering the emotional nature of the land question as previously discussed regarding our history. It surprises me that expropriation with compensation is on the table at all. Adding to my confusion is the PAC’s intended acknowledgement of non-Pan-Africanist Africans: Africans whose hereditary ancestry is not African; this inline, they say, with the concept of ‘open nationalism’ – which also, I will add, is in line with the FF+’s claim to Africa’s resources as ‘justified’ by their claim to African-ness. It is funny how ‘open nationalism’ corresponds with Afrikaners’ claim to African-ness based on inclusivity while, as demonstrated in the FF+ report, Afrikaners envision South Africa as a nation closed to the rest of Africa.
The PAC’s combination of Pan-Africanism with the concept of open nationalism: the combination of nationalism with liberalism, is what Craig Wilkie discusses in his thesis: Open Nationalism: Reconciling Popper's Open Society and The Nation-State. His main question is: to what extent are these two seemingly opposing ideas practically compatible? Pitting Karl Popper’s Open State idea against those of conservatism, liberalism and pluralism including Yael Tamir, David Miller, Roger Scruton and John Gray, Wilkie concludes that Popper’s hasty rejection of nationalism, in relegating it to the category of ‘totalitarianism’, prevented him from thoroughly exploring its compatibility with the open state thereby failing to distinguish its various forms. As a result, Popper missed how liberal Nationalism, as one of those forms, corresponds with his open state while accommodating conservative nationalist concerns. This is what the PAC refers to as open nationalism: a hybrid socio-economic and political structure for a conservative-liberal state that is both Pan-Africanist and, at the same time – not.
Having stated, earlier, that Pan-Africanism is racism, the PAC’s intended open state challenges that statement by putting forward the diversity of this party’s envisioned future – or does it? Imagine a nation-state founded on the principles of Pan-Africanism inviting those it deems, per those same principles, ‘the other’ into its borders. This is a scenario like the type of future envisioned by the Al Jamah-ah party: a class division between those that belong as citizens, and the rest as second-class citizens; the former based on heritage and the latter on religion. Considering that all land will be communally owned only by African descendants, I expect that this distinction will be exemplified in the PAC government’s land access/use policies.
Comentarios