A luta contra o apartheid tornou-se um paradigma global para as lutas por justiça. Mas não foi assim que muitos ativistas negros da libertação na África do Sul entenderam sua causa.
Panashe Chigumadzi
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| O "dia de luto" em Joanesburgo pelas vítimas do massacre de Sharpeville em 1960. Imagem: AP |
Menos de três semanas após o presidente sul-africano Cyril Ramaphosa ter sancionado a Lei de Expropriação nº 13 de 2024 — uma tentativa histórica, embora modesta, de lidar com o legado contínuo da desapropriação de terras indígenas na chamada nação “pós-apartheid” — Donald Trump declarou que ela era uma prova de “desrespeito chocante” pelos “direitos” dos sul-africanos brancos. A pedido de Elon Musk, ele próprio um expatriado sul-africano branco, Trump ofereceu asilo como “refugiados” nos Estados Unidos a africânderes que fugiam do que Musk chamou de “genocídio branco”.
É claro que Trump não mencionou exatamente como os sul-africanos brancos, que representam apenas 7,2% da população, chegaram a adquirir os “direitos” sobre 72% das terras agrícolas privadas do país — enquanto os sul-africanos negros possuem apenas 4% — em primeiro lugar; Nem a história da antiga colônia, marcada por guerras coloniais de povoamento, que começou com a conquista do Cabo da Boa Esperança pela Companhia Holandesa das Índias Orientais em 1652; nem a Lei de Terras Nativas de 1913, que concedeu à minoria branca de colonos o direito a 93% das terras e confinou a maioria negra indígena a 7%.
O termo “apartheid” é super-representado e superenfatizado no discurso racial.
Não importa que o “genocídio branco” na África do Sul já tenha sido há muito desmascarado como um mito supremacista branco. Ou que a Lei de Expropriação de Ramaphosa reflita uma prática comum das democracias capitalistas liberais: o Estado pode tomar terras privadas, mediante justa indenização, para fins públicos. E não importa que, para Trump, a cláusula mais ofensiva da legislação — que permite ao Estado confiscar terras sem indenização se estas tiverem sido abandonadas ou mantidas apenas para especulação — jamais tenha sido usada. Até mesmo o Movimento Solidariedade, de direita, organização que reúne grupos de “direitos civis” dos africâneres, não só recusou a oferta de reassentamento de Trump, como se apressou em esclarecer: “Não acusamos o governo de apropriação de terras em larga escala”.
As alegações de vitimização dos africâneres são em parte falsas e pouco sérias, mas isso não as impediu de desempenhar um papel importante como distração do conjunto muito real de lutas pela terra que assolam a África do Sul desde a conquista do Cabo pelos colonizadores holandeses. De fato, alguns foram tentados a explicar o desmoronamento do país recorrendo apenas à história recente, focando no movimento conservador de direita e não nas forças mais profundas que o originaram. Mas, além de serem intelectualmente preguiçosas, essas explicações obscurecem um problema mais complexo, que aflige as tradições liberais e de esquerda do país há dois séculos: em suma, é mais fácil imaginar o fim do apartheid do que o fim do colonialismo de povoamento.
Despite its relatively short forty-six-year lifespan, “apartheid”—the official policy of the “separate development” and segregation of races implemented by the Afrikaner National Party in 1948—has not only become the dominant historical framework for analyzing the country’s three-century history of settler colonial conquest and indigenous land dispossession. Apartheid is so overrepresented and overemphasized in racial discourse that it has also become liberals’ and leftists’ go-to term to describe race, class, and gender injustices globally, from the racial regime of Israel and its occupation of Palestinian territory in the West Bank, “gender apartheid” in Afghanistan, and the caste system in India to COVID-era “vaccine apartheid.”
Yet few of the term’s adoptees have bothered to ask if it accurately describes the genesis of the injustices that brought us to this moment in South African history. The period we know as “apartheid” comes long after the historical fact of settler colonial conquest. Even worse, the focus on apartheid obscures the fact that settler colonialism, as the anthropologist Patrick Wolfe has argued, is not an event but an ongoing structure. Apartheid, therefore, isn’t the question: settler colonialism is.
Many in the Black South African intellectual tradition, of course, have made precisely this point. But these insights have largely been ignored. Within the global left’s discourse on apartheid, there’s a troubling tendency to think about Black South Africa but not with Black South Africans, mining their tradition for its raw political goods and exporting the universal theory. Bar the obligatory Mandela or Tutu quote in international rights discourse, intellectuals, activists, and state policymakers alike tend to show a startling disregard and inattention to Black South African political thought and intellectual traditions. For example, while many lionize Mandela and his African National Congress (ANC) as icons of the apartheid struggle, few know that the 113-year-old ANC, which was founded in 1912 in anticipation of the 1913 Natives Land Act, is the world’s oldest Black political party—and therefore one of the world’s most important continuous political and intellectual traditions.
Generations of Black South African political activists, thinkers, philosophers, and historians have critiqued and contested apartheid as the paradigmatic historical framework, rejecting the liberal notion that the end of segregation and the achievement of democratization is the sole object of the Black liberation struggle. Perhaps the first to propose that racial equality and desegregation—as opposed to self-determination and sovereignty—ought to be the ultimate object of Black struggle was South Africa’s two-century old Cape Liberal tradition. Beginning in the early 1800s with the London Missionary Society’s Reverend Johannes van der Kemp and John Philip’s civil rights campaigns for Khoe and San peoples who had lost their independence as sovereign nations, and continuing through the abolition of serfdom in 1828, slavery in 1834, and the establishment of the most liberal constitution ever granted to a British colony and the world’s first qualified non-racial franchise in 1853, the Cape Liberal tradition is not only one of the world’s oldest and most consequential liberal traditions. It is also the womb of one of the world’s oldest and most consequential civil rights traditions.
And alongside the development of the South African liberal tradition is an over two-century-old series of critiques of liberalism’s inability to secure Black liberation and confront the question of land dispossession and indigenous sovereignty. The most trenchant of these critiques came from the Azanian tradition, the progenitor of South Africa’s Pan-Africanist and Black Consciousness Movements, which drew on centuries of indigenous resistance to land dispossession and global liberation movements as it rose to prominence in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, most vividly associated with Black freedom fighters Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe and Steve Bantubonke Biko.
Even as apartheid became an international cause célèbre in the 1980s, the Azanian tradition remained committed to its critique. On January 14, 1985, the Azanian People’s Organisation (AZAPO)—founded in 1978 as the heir to the Azanian tradition—blockaded Senator Edward Kennedy’s visit to Soweto’s Regina Mundi Cathedral. The protesters charged Kennedy with coming to South Africa only to “fight against apartheid, thus reducing our struggle to a civil rights struggle.” Rejecting the Cold War–era liberal framework of civil rights first conceived by U.S. President Harry S. Truman’s 1946 Committee on Civil Rights and championed internationally by the likes of Kennedy, AZAPO declared that it was not an anti-apartheid movement but instead a “liberation movement”—one for whom “apartheid is only a point of departure in our struggle for national self-determination and repossession of the land.”
Yet few of the term’s adoptees have bothered to ask if it accurately describes the genesis of the injustices that brought us to this moment in South African history. The period we know as “apartheid” comes long after the historical fact of settler colonial conquest. Even worse, the focus on apartheid obscures the fact that settler colonialism, as the anthropologist Patrick Wolfe has argued, is not an event but an ongoing structure. Apartheid, therefore, isn’t the question: settler colonialism is.
Many in the Black South African intellectual tradition, of course, have made precisely this point. But these insights have largely been ignored. Within the global left’s discourse on apartheid, there’s a troubling tendency to think about Black South Africa but not with Black South Africans, mining their tradition for its raw political goods and exporting the universal theory. Bar the obligatory Mandela or Tutu quote in international rights discourse, intellectuals, activists, and state policymakers alike tend to show a startling disregard and inattention to Black South African political thought and intellectual traditions. For example, while many lionize Mandela and his African National Congress (ANC) as icons of the apartheid struggle, few know that the 113-year-old ANC, which was founded in 1912 in anticipation of the 1913 Natives Land Act, is the world’s oldest Black political party—and therefore one of the world’s most important continuous political and intellectual traditions.
Generations of Black South African political activists, thinkers, philosophers, and historians have critiqued and contested apartheid as the paradigmatic historical framework, rejecting the liberal notion that the end of segregation and the achievement of democratization is the sole object of the Black liberation struggle. Perhaps the first to propose that racial equality and desegregation—as opposed to self-determination and sovereignty—ought to be the ultimate object of Black struggle was South Africa’s two-century old Cape Liberal tradition. Beginning in the early 1800s with the London Missionary Society’s Reverend Johannes van der Kemp and John Philip’s civil rights campaigns for Khoe and San peoples who had lost their independence as sovereign nations, and continuing through the abolition of serfdom in 1828, slavery in 1834, and the establishment of the most liberal constitution ever granted to a British colony and the world’s first qualified non-racial franchise in 1853, the Cape Liberal tradition is not only one of the world’s oldest and most consequential liberal traditions. It is also the womb of one of the world’s oldest and most consequential civil rights traditions.
And alongside the development of the South African liberal tradition is an over two-century-old series of critiques of liberalism’s inability to secure Black liberation and confront the question of land dispossession and indigenous sovereignty. The most trenchant of these critiques came from the Azanian tradition, the progenitor of South Africa’s Pan-Africanist and Black Consciousness Movements, which drew on centuries of indigenous resistance to land dispossession and global liberation movements as it rose to prominence in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, most vividly associated with Black freedom fighters Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe and Steve Bantubonke Biko.
Even as apartheid became an international cause célèbre in the 1980s, the Azanian tradition remained committed to its critique. On January 14, 1985, the Azanian People’s Organisation (AZAPO)—founded in 1978 as the heir to the Azanian tradition—blockaded Senator Edward Kennedy’s visit to Soweto’s Regina Mundi Cathedral. The protesters charged Kennedy with coming to South Africa only to “fight against apartheid, thus reducing our struggle to a civil rights struggle.” Rejecting the Cold War–era liberal framework of civil rights first conceived by U.S. President Harry S. Truman’s 1946 Committee on Civil Rights and championed internationally by the likes of Kennedy, AZAPO declared that it was not an anti-apartheid movement but instead a “liberation movement”—one for whom “apartheid is only a point of departure in our struggle for national self-determination and repossession of the land.”
Recently, in an obituary for Peter Magubane, renowned photographer of the crimes of South Africa’s National Party, the veteran journalist Mathatha Tsedu reprised the Azanian tradition’s critique of liberalism’s apartheid paradigm. Lampooning the local and international liberal media for “reducing” Magubane to a mere “anti-apartheid activist” who was “fighting to use the same toilets, or using the same beach,” Tsedu argued that Magubane should instead be honored as a “freedom fighter” committed to “ending the settler-driven system that made black people foreigners in their own land.” For Tsedu, citing “Black Souls in White Skins?” (1970), Biko’s classic critique of white liberalism, liberals embraced the fight against apartheid because “they wanted separate facilities to be abolished,” while “the dispossession of people of their land was seen and is still seen as either unworkable or unreasonable.” In other words, within the liberal imagination it is “workable” and “reasonable” to end apartheid and racial segregation, while it is “unworkable” and “unreasonable” to end settler colonialism and indigenous land dispossession.
Poucos dos que adotaram o termo se deram ao trabalho de perguntar se apartheid descreve com precisão a origem das injustiças na história da África do Sul — e em outros lugares.
It’s tempting to dismiss the distinction between anti-apartheid and civil rights struggles on the one hand and liberation struggles on the other as a parochial quibble among South Africans with little relevance to a wider world in which the word “apartheid” has become synonymous with a universal crime against humanity. But the path taken by the South African anti-apartheid activists had consequences for the rest of the continent—and beyond. Consider former South African President Thabo Mbeki’s remarks in a widely circulated 2016 letter titled “South Africa’s policy towards Zimbabwe: A synopsis,” which he repeated in a memorial lecture following Robert Mugabe’s death in 2018. Mbeki reminded us that as South Africa began negotiations to end apartheid in South Africa in 1990, the then Secretary General of the Commonwealth, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, asked President Mugabe to delay his government’s land redistribution program until after South Africa officially ended apartheid, because the Commonwealth Secretariat feared that Zimbabwe’s more radical project would “frighten white South Africa” and undermine international support for the anti-apartheid movement. Already, this international support had ensured that the United Nations—the premier institution of the postwar rules-based international order—had passed the 1973 Apartheid Convention. According to the liberal logic that underpinned the convention, the crime against humanity committed across Southern Africa’s white settler regimes was defined as the crime of “racial segregation and discrimination,” and not the historical crime of settler colonialism, indigenous land dispossession, and the loss of sovereignty.
And yet, if you were to ask my grandmother or my uncle why they fought in Zimbabwe’s Chimurenga, the 1970s liberation war against the Rhodesian settler state, they would not answer that it was for the “workable” and “reasonable” goal of “one man one vote,” desegregation, or equal rights in a democratized settler state; they would tell you that they went to war for the return of our ancestors’ land. To believe otherwise is a betrayal of our ancestors’ historical consciousness. When the Commonwealth asked Mugabe to delay the indigenization of the land in Zimbabwe, it made this clear: liberation and the liberalism of the “rules-based international order” are incompatible.
Since the 1980s, the term “apartheid” has traveled far beyond Southern Africa. In particular, a long line of individuals and institutions—as early as Edward Said and Uri Davis in the 1980s and the first post-apartheid South African visitors to Palestine in the 1990s and as recently as the International Court of Justice in July 2024—have named the Israeli settler regime an “apartheid” regime. And following the failure of armed struggle and the Oslo Accords’ state-led negotiations over Palestinian sovereignty and self-determination, more and more Palestinian activists and grassroots organizations have, understandably, pivoted toward the apartheid framework too, drawn by the resonance to international civil society of what the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement founder Omar Barghouti describes as “the universal principles of freedom, justice, and equal rights that animated the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.”
But like their South African counterparts, Palestinian activists have confronted the limits of a “segregationist apartheid” paradigm. When six Palestinian “Freedom Riders,” inspired by the fiftieth anniversary of the U.S. civil rights movement’s Freedom Rides against Jim Crow segregation, boarded Israeli–only buses in November 2011, they garnered international praise and attention. But they soon faced internal critique from fellow Palestinians who, the Palestinian American human rights lawyer Noura Erakat writes, “understood the action as a demand for integration at the expense of liberating the land.” The radical Palestinian critique of the “segregationist apartheid” paradigm the Freedom Rides embodied makes this clear: liberation movements have been neither human nor civil rights movements. “A political program is necessary to avoid confusing the equivocating tendencies of a human rights framework with a practice of decolonization,” Erakat argued. “The appeal to universalism can inadvertently depoliticize the question of Palestine by framing it as a movement for equality.” (The Palestinian Freedom Riders clarified that they were not merely “seek[ing] the desegregation of settler buses” but also the “ability to be able to travel freely on their own roads, on their own land.”)
How did struggles against settler colonialism and land dispossession come to be seen as unworkable and unreasonable under the liberal international order? It’s instructive to remember that it was only in the late 1970s that liberalism’s human rights framework —which primarily defends individuals against state abuses—decisively displaced the anticolonial principles of collective self-determination and sovereignty. As the historian Samuel Moyn has shown, the late Cold War–era “turn to human rights”—marked by the UN’s 1971 Apartheid Convention, Amnesty International’s 1977 Nobel Peace Prize, and Jimmy Carter’s championing of global human rights—was premised on former Western imperial powers’ ability to use their former colonies’ political and economic crises as an opportunity to reassert their political authority and reclaim the moral and ideological supremacy of liberalism which had lost its legitimacy as empire’s handmaiden.
Yet the “unworkability” and “unreasonability” of indigenous sovereignty in the postwar order has deeper roots, too. Ever since Lenin and the Bolsheviks endorsed the anticolonial nationalist demand for self-determination as a central tenet of the New Revolutionary International in 1917, the West’s imperial states have appropriated its radical implications. In what political theorist Adom Getachew calls the “counterrevolutionary moment” that followed World War I, South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts and Woodrow Wilson “excised the revolutionary implications of the Bolshevik right to self-determination and repurposed the principle to preserve racial hierarchy” in their newly formed League of Nations’ mandate system for former German colonies and Ottoman territories. The racially tiered mandate system, outlined in the Covenant of the League of Nations, subverted the anticolonial demand for self-determination by claiming the need for the “tutelage” of territories “inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world” under “a sacred trust of civilisation.”
Como as lutas contra o colonialismo de povoamento e a desapropriação de terras passaram a ser vistas como inviáveis e irracionais?
Subsequently, as anticolonial movements gained strength globally and the United States prepared to join World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill championed self-determination and sovereignty as a nominally universal principle in the August 1941 Atlantic Charter, which laid out their vision for the postwar international system. Unlike the League’s racially paternalistic mandate system, the Atlantic Charter stated that the Allies would “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” and “wish[ed] to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.” Even as Churchill, in a September 1941 speech, argued that the principle only applied to Nazi-occupied Europe, anticolonial leaders from Mahatma Gandhi and Ho Chi Minh to Nnamdi Azikiwe and Kwame Nkrumah insisted that self-determination was universal—that such rights ought to be afforded their nations, too.
The ANC would respond to the Atlantic Charter, too. In its December 1943 statement, Africans’ Claims in South Africa, the party addressed the question of the self-determination and sovereignty of South Africa’s Black indigenous majority—declaring itself, for the very first time in writing, a “liberation movement.” Yet the position the ANC articulated in the document, as well as its key postwar ideological statement, the 1955 Freedom Charter, showed that its vision for “liberation” would always have limits, giving credence to the Azanian tradition’s long-standing dismissal of the ANC as a civil rights movement.
After settlers defeated Southern Africa’s last sovereign indigenous nations in the late nineteenth century’s wars of conquest, the ANC (then called the South African Native National Congress) emerged. It was borne out of two currents: on the one hand, the “Ethiopianist” (independent Black church) movement; on the other, the Black political tradition of petitioning for the fulfillment of the Cape Liberal tradition’s nonracial promise of “equal rights for civilized men.” Although the ANC’s fourth President, the radical Garveyist-Communist Josiah Gumede, briefly pushed the ANC to call for an “Africa for Africans” before his ouster in 1930, conservative mission-educated Black men led the ANC’s first four decades as an elite civil rights movement.
And so, when the world’s liberation movements seized on the Atlantic Charter’s promise of self-determination and sovereignty as a universal right, the ANC, under its moderate president A. B. Xuma, was forced to clarify its position. Despite declaring itself a “liberation movement” in Africans’ Claims, the ANC made it clear that while “in certain parts of Africa it should be possible to accord Africans sovereign rights and to establish administrations of their own choosing,” in the Union of South Africa “the peculiar circumstances of a political entrenched European minority ruling a majority [African] population the demands of the Africans for full citizenship rights and direct participation in all the councils of the state should be recognised.” In other words, the ANC did not demand “sovereign rights and self-government” for their Black indigenous majority, nor did it contest settler colonial conquest. Instead, professing continued faith in “Christian, democratic and civilised standards,” the ANC demanded mere participation and democratization of the existing settler state through the extension of “full citizenship rights such as are enjoyed by all Europeans in South Africa.”
In five years, the ANC would find even their “workable” goal of equal rights falling further and further out of reach when the country’s newly elected National Party officially implemented apartheid in 1948. In response to the Black majority’s rapidly worsening situation and the ineffective response from the ANC, the radical “Africanists” of the new ANC Youth League, led by the likes of Anton Muziwakhe Lembede and A. P. Mda, transformed the ANC from an elite rights-petitioning organization into a 100,000-member strong mass movement. The Africanists produced the ANC’s 1949 Programme of Action, which called full-throatedly for “the right of self-determination” for African people. The subsequent 1950-1952 Defiance Campaigns brought the world’s attention to the Black struggle for liberation in South Africa for the first time and jolted the United Nations into establishing a commission to investigate the “situation” in South Africa. The Africanists drew inspiration not from rights discourse, but from both the global anticolonial resistance and indigenous political philosophy of nineteenth-century African sovereign state builders such as Shaka kaSenzangakhona of the Zulu nation, Moshoeshoe kaMokhachane of the Basotho nation, and Mzilikazi kaMashobane of the Ndebele nation.
The Africanist wing’s emphasis on indigenous sovereignty led them to protest their party’s landmark 1955 Freedom Charter, which declared in its famous opening preamble that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.” Brainchild of the moderate ANC Cape President Z. K. Matthews and key members of the Congress Alliance (the ANC, the South African Indian Congress, the South African Coloured People’s Organisation, and the South African Congress of Democrats, which included former members of the banned Communist Party of South Africa), the Freedom Charter, foundational document of the anti-apartheid movement—and of the post-apartheid constitution—envisions a radically democratized settler state: a non-racial, non-sexist society in which, amongst other things, “All Shall Enjoy Equal Human Rights!” and “The People Shall Share In The Country’s Wealth!” through industry nationalization. However, in bypassing the historical question of indigenous land dispossession by declaring that “The Land Shall be Shared Among Those Who Work It!” the Freedom Charter’s nonracial universalism offers a blank historical slate to all, indigene and settler.
While the popular narrative of its creation presents the Freedom Charter as the “will of all the people,” a key source of contention was that it was ultimately the work of a small but influential group within the Congress Alliance, including Lionel “Rusty” Bernstein, widely credited as the primary drafter, who transformed thousands of demands into the Charter’s key clauses—including its controversial preamble, which set the tone for the entire process. Even key ANC figures, such as its then-President General Albert Mvumbi Luthuli, who had suffered a stroke, famously admitted they had not been fully aware of the Charter’s final contents prior to its adoption, signaling the limited circulation and elite control over the final document.
Despite not having been a key drafter of the Charter, Nelson Mandela, who had been steadily rising up the movement’s ranks, became one of its most important public proponents. Defending the document in a 1956 article for Liberation magazine, Mandela claimed that it was “by no means a blueprint for a socialist state,” despite its call for industry nationalization—only further fueling the Africanists’ critique of the Freedom Charter as “reformist” and “bourgeois.” Instead, Mandela wrote, the Charter was a call for “African-style capitalism” and the growth of a “non-European bourgeois class,” a claim he would repeat over the decades, from his 1964 Rivonia Treason Trial testimony to his reassurances to Afrikaner counterparts in a 1989 working group and his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. A common refrain among some leftists in the post-apartheid era is that Mandela “sold us out” to capital during South Africa’s transition to democracy. But this idea both dehistoricizes and individualizes that moment: a close reading of the ANC’s century-old intellectual and political traditions from which Mandela emerged reveals that embracing capital has always been part of its ideological core. Despite famously priding itself a “broad church movement” that could, for example, birth the radical Africanist movement in the 1940s and ’50s, the ANC has ultimately always seen these radical formations as irritants chafing against its vision for the party as an elite, rights-seeking organization.
Poucos dos que adotaram o termo se deram ao trabalho de perguntar se apartheid descreve com precisão a origem das injustiças na história da África do Sul — e em outros lugares.
It’s tempting to dismiss the distinction between anti-apartheid and civil rights struggles on the one hand and liberation struggles on the other as a parochial quibble among South Africans with little relevance to a wider world in which the word “apartheid” has become synonymous with a universal crime against humanity. But the path taken by the South African anti-apartheid activists had consequences for the rest of the continent—and beyond. Consider former South African President Thabo Mbeki’s remarks in a widely circulated 2016 letter titled “South Africa’s policy towards Zimbabwe: A synopsis,” which he repeated in a memorial lecture following Robert Mugabe’s death in 2018. Mbeki reminded us that as South Africa began negotiations to end apartheid in South Africa in 1990, the then Secretary General of the Commonwealth, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, asked President Mugabe to delay his government’s land redistribution program until after South Africa officially ended apartheid, because the Commonwealth Secretariat feared that Zimbabwe’s more radical project would “frighten white South Africa” and undermine international support for the anti-apartheid movement. Already, this international support had ensured that the United Nations—the premier institution of the postwar rules-based international order—had passed the 1973 Apartheid Convention. According to the liberal logic that underpinned the convention, the crime against humanity committed across Southern Africa’s white settler regimes was defined as the crime of “racial segregation and discrimination,” and not the historical crime of settler colonialism, indigenous land dispossession, and the loss of sovereignty.
And yet, if you were to ask my grandmother or my uncle why they fought in Zimbabwe’s Chimurenga, the 1970s liberation war against the Rhodesian settler state, they would not answer that it was for the “workable” and “reasonable” goal of “one man one vote,” desegregation, or equal rights in a democratized settler state; they would tell you that they went to war for the return of our ancestors’ land. To believe otherwise is a betrayal of our ancestors’ historical consciousness. When the Commonwealth asked Mugabe to delay the indigenization of the land in Zimbabwe, it made this clear: liberation and the liberalism of the “rules-based international order” are incompatible.
Since the 1980s, the term “apartheid” has traveled far beyond Southern Africa. In particular, a long line of individuals and institutions—as early as Edward Said and Uri Davis in the 1980s and the first post-apartheid South African visitors to Palestine in the 1990s and as recently as the International Court of Justice in July 2024—have named the Israeli settler regime an “apartheid” regime. And following the failure of armed struggle and the Oslo Accords’ state-led negotiations over Palestinian sovereignty and self-determination, more and more Palestinian activists and grassroots organizations have, understandably, pivoted toward the apartheid framework too, drawn by the resonance to international civil society of what the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement founder Omar Barghouti describes as “the universal principles of freedom, justice, and equal rights that animated the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.”
But like their South African counterparts, Palestinian activists have confronted the limits of a “segregationist apartheid” paradigm. When six Palestinian “Freedom Riders,” inspired by the fiftieth anniversary of the U.S. civil rights movement’s Freedom Rides against Jim Crow segregation, boarded Israeli–only buses in November 2011, they garnered international praise and attention. But they soon faced internal critique from fellow Palestinians who, the Palestinian American human rights lawyer Noura Erakat writes, “understood the action as a demand for integration at the expense of liberating the land.” The radical Palestinian critique of the “segregationist apartheid” paradigm the Freedom Rides embodied makes this clear: liberation movements have been neither human nor civil rights movements. “A political program is necessary to avoid confusing the equivocating tendencies of a human rights framework with a practice of decolonization,” Erakat argued. “The appeal to universalism can inadvertently depoliticize the question of Palestine by framing it as a movement for equality.” (The Palestinian Freedom Riders clarified that they were not merely “seek[ing] the desegregation of settler buses” but also the “ability to be able to travel freely on their own roads, on their own land.”)
How did struggles against settler colonialism and land dispossession come to be seen as unworkable and unreasonable under the liberal international order? It’s instructive to remember that it was only in the late 1970s that liberalism’s human rights framework —which primarily defends individuals against state abuses—decisively displaced the anticolonial principles of collective self-determination and sovereignty. As the historian Samuel Moyn has shown, the late Cold War–era “turn to human rights”—marked by the UN’s 1971 Apartheid Convention, Amnesty International’s 1977 Nobel Peace Prize, and Jimmy Carter’s championing of global human rights—was premised on former Western imperial powers’ ability to use their former colonies’ political and economic crises as an opportunity to reassert their political authority and reclaim the moral and ideological supremacy of liberalism which had lost its legitimacy as empire’s handmaiden.
Yet the “unworkability” and “unreasonability” of indigenous sovereignty in the postwar order has deeper roots, too. Ever since Lenin and the Bolsheviks endorsed the anticolonial nationalist demand for self-determination as a central tenet of the New Revolutionary International in 1917, the West’s imperial states have appropriated its radical implications. In what political theorist Adom Getachew calls the “counterrevolutionary moment” that followed World War I, South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts and Woodrow Wilson “excised the revolutionary implications of the Bolshevik right to self-determination and repurposed the principle to preserve racial hierarchy” in their newly formed League of Nations’ mandate system for former German colonies and Ottoman territories. The racially tiered mandate system, outlined in the Covenant of the League of Nations, subverted the anticolonial demand for self-determination by claiming the need for the “tutelage” of territories “inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world” under “a sacred trust of civilisation.”
Como as lutas contra o colonialismo de povoamento e a desapropriação de terras passaram a ser vistas como inviáveis e irracionais?
Subsequently, as anticolonial movements gained strength globally and the United States prepared to join World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill championed self-determination and sovereignty as a nominally universal principle in the August 1941 Atlantic Charter, which laid out their vision for the postwar international system. Unlike the League’s racially paternalistic mandate system, the Atlantic Charter stated that the Allies would “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” and “wish[ed] to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.” Even as Churchill, in a September 1941 speech, argued that the principle only applied to Nazi-occupied Europe, anticolonial leaders from Mahatma Gandhi and Ho Chi Minh to Nnamdi Azikiwe and Kwame Nkrumah insisted that self-determination was universal—that such rights ought to be afforded their nations, too.
The ANC would respond to the Atlantic Charter, too. In its December 1943 statement, Africans’ Claims in South Africa, the party addressed the question of the self-determination and sovereignty of South Africa’s Black indigenous majority—declaring itself, for the very first time in writing, a “liberation movement.” Yet the position the ANC articulated in the document, as well as its key postwar ideological statement, the 1955 Freedom Charter, showed that its vision for “liberation” would always have limits, giving credence to the Azanian tradition’s long-standing dismissal of the ANC as a civil rights movement.
After settlers defeated Southern Africa’s last sovereign indigenous nations in the late nineteenth century’s wars of conquest, the ANC (then called the South African Native National Congress) emerged. It was borne out of two currents: on the one hand, the “Ethiopianist” (independent Black church) movement; on the other, the Black political tradition of petitioning for the fulfillment of the Cape Liberal tradition’s nonracial promise of “equal rights for civilized men.” Although the ANC’s fourth President, the radical Garveyist-Communist Josiah Gumede, briefly pushed the ANC to call for an “Africa for Africans” before his ouster in 1930, conservative mission-educated Black men led the ANC’s first four decades as an elite civil rights movement.
And so, when the world’s liberation movements seized on the Atlantic Charter’s promise of self-determination and sovereignty as a universal right, the ANC, under its moderate president A. B. Xuma, was forced to clarify its position. Despite declaring itself a “liberation movement” in Africans’ Claims, the ANC made it clear that while “in certain parts of Africa it should be possible to accord Africans sovereign rights and to establish administrations of their own choosing,” in the Union of South Africa “the peculiar circumstances of a political entrenched European minority ruling a majority [African] population the demands of the Africans for full citizenship rights and direct participation in all the councils of the state should be recognised.” In other words, the ANC did not demand “sovereign rights and self-government” for their Black indigenous majority, nor did it contest settler colonial conquest. Instead, professing continued faith in “Christian, democratic and civilised standards,” the ANC demanded mere participation and democratization of the existing settler state through the extension of “full citizenship rights such as are enjoyed by all Europeans in South Africa.”
In five years, the ANC would find even their “workable” goal of equal rights falling further and further out of reach when the country’s newly elected National Party officially implemented apartheid in 1948. In response to the Black majority’s rapidly worsening situation and the ineffective response from the ANC, the radical “Africanists” of the new ANC Youth League, led by the likes of Anton Muziwakhe Lembede and A. P. Mda, transformed the ANC from an elite rights-petitioning organization into a 100,000-member strong mass movement. The Africanists produced the ANC’s 1949 Programme of Action, which called full-throatedly for “the right of self-determination” for African people. The subsequent 1950-1952 Defiance Campaigns brought the world’s attention to the Black struggle for liberation in South Africa for the first time and jolted the United Nations into establishing a commission to investigate the “situation” in South Africa. The Africanists drew inspiration not from rights discourse, but from both the global anticolonial resistance and indigenous political philosophy of nineteenth-century African sovereign state builders such as Shaka kaSenzangakhona of the Zulu nation, Moshoeshoe kaMokhachane of the Basotho nation, and Mzilikazi kaMashobane of the Ndebele nation.
The Africanist wing’s emphasis on indigenous sovereignty led them to protest their party’s landmark 1955 Freedom Charter, which declared in its famous opening preamble that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.” Brainchild of the moderate ANC Cape President Z. K. Matthews and key members of the Congress Alliance (the ANC, the South African Indian Congress, the South African Coloured People’s Organisation, and the South African Congress of Democrats, which included former members of the banned Communist Party of South Africa), the Freedom Charter, foundational document of the anti-apartheid movement—and of the post-apartheid constitution—envisions a radically democratized settler state: a non-racial, non-sexist society in which, amongst other things, “All Shall Enjoy Equal Human Rights!” and “The People Shall Share In The Country’s Wealth!” through industry nationalization. However, in bypassing the historical question of indigenous land dispossession by declaring that “The Land Shall be Shared Among Those Who Work It!” the Freedom Charter’s nonracial universalism offers a blank historical slate to all, indigene and settler.
While the popular narrative of its creation presents the Freedom Charter as the “will of all the people,” a key source of contention was that it was ultimately the work of a small but influential group within the Congress Alliance, including Lionel “Rusty” Bernstein, widely credited as the primary drafter, who transformed thousands of demands into the Charter’s key clauses—including its controversial preamble, which set the tone for the entire process. Even key ANC figures, such as its then-President General Albert Mvumbi Luthuli, who had suffered a stroke, famously admitted they had not been fully aware of the Charter’s final contents prior to its adoption, signaling the limited circulation and elite control over the final document.
Despite not having been a key drafter of the Charter, Nelson Mandela, who had been steadily rising up the movement’s ranks, became one of its most important public proponents. Defending the document in a 1956 article for Liberation magazine, Mandela claimed that it was “by no means a blueprint for a socialist state,” despite its call for industry nationalization—only further fueling the Africanists’ critique of the Freedom Charter as “reformist” and “bourgeois.” Instead, Mandela wrote, the Charter was a call for “African-style capitalism” and the growth of a “non-European bourgeois class,” a claim he would repeat over the decades, from his 1964 Rivonia Treason Trial testimony to his reassurances to Afrikaner counterparts in a 1989 working group and his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. A common refrain among some leftists in the post-apartheid era is that Mandela “sold us out” to capital during South Africa’s transition to democracy. But this idea both dehistoricizes and individualizes that moment: a close reading of the ANC’s century-old intellectual and political traditions from which Mandela emerged reveals that embracing capital has always been part of its ideological core. Despite famously priding itself a “broad church movement” that could, for example, birth the radical Africanist movement in the 1940s and ’50s, the ANC has ultimately always seen these radical formations as irritants chafing against its vision for the party as an elite, rights-seeking organization.
Indeed, the Africanists were chafing against the ANC’s vision in the Freedom Charter, ultimately rejecting entirely the document and its ahistorical claim that the land “belonged to all.” Refusing to recognize the historical legitimacy of the settler colonial state named “South Africa” and claiming the sovereign indigenous land as “Azania” they stated (in rather masculinist terms): “It is an historical fallacy to say South Africa belongs to everybody: both oppressor and oppressed, robber and robbed, Azania is not a prostitute that belongs to everybody all the time.”
Emboldened by the 1958 All African Peoples’ Conference in Accra—particularly Kwame Nkrumah’s opening speech envisioning independent African states and African unity—the Africanists, led by Robert Sobukwe, ceded from the ANC and established the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) of Azania. At the PAC’s opening conference in Soweto’s Orlando, Sobukwe declared, “We aim, politically, at government of the Africans by the Africans, for the Africans, with everybody who owes his only loyalty to Africa and who is prepared to accept the democratic rule of an African majority being regarded as an African.” For Sobukwe and the PAC, liberation could only be assured in the democratic socialist state of Azania in which all were welcome regardless of race—if, that is, they accepted and supported the self-determination and sovereignty of the indigenous majority to whom the land belonged. With “Izwe Lethu!” (Our Land!”) as their official slogan, the PAC insisted that the settler state must not merely be democratized but overthrown through the return of the land to indigenous peoples.
While it is true the PAC’s Azanian tradition never gained the numbers of their rivals in the ANC, it has often shaped the trajectory of struggle. The twentieth century’s two most pivotal moments in the Black quest for liberation in South Africa—the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre of ninety-one unarmed PAC members and the 1976 Soweto Uprising of Black youth—galvanized the PAC and the Black Consciousness movement, respectively. The bloody aftermath of the apartheid state’s violence at Sharpeville, in particular, prompted both the ANC and PAC to turn to armed struggle.
Critically, the ANC’s willingness to bear arms has often mistakenly led to its identification as a liberation movement. However, when Mandela invoked the indigenous political philosophy embodied in the seTswana dictum “Sebatana hase bokwe ka diatla” (the wild beast’s attacks can’t be averted with bare hands alone) as justification for forming the ANC and the CPSA’s military wing in the face of Nobel Peace Prize-winning Luthuli’s Christian Pacifist principles, he affirmed that the question of violence or nonviolence was a question of tactics and not principle. (Perhaps ironically, this very indigenous claim to the right to self-defense arises out of the right to self-determination and sovereignty.) In both civil rights and liberation movements, the means cannot be conflated with the goals of political action.
Indeed, as the ANC’s 113-year history shows, civil rights movements can have conservative, moderate, and radical forms, which all ultimately leave the land question and the settler state uncontested. Conservative civil rights movements—such as the pre-1943 Atlantic Charter ANC, which demanded equal rights for “civilized men”—call for the qualified extension of political and citizenship rights to select members of society through participation within the existing political, legal, and economic structure of the settler state. Moderate civil rights movements—such as the post-1943 Atlantic Charter ANC, which called for “full citizenship rights such as are enjoyed by all Europeans in South Africa” while declining to call for “self-government” and “sovereign rights” for the Black indigenous majority—demand the full extension of political and citizenship rights to all members of society through participation within the existing political, legal, and economic structure of the settler state. And in their radical form, civil rights movements—such as the post-Freedom Charter ANC, which proclaims that the land “belongs to all”—demand equal political rights and citizenship through the democratization of the existing political, legal and economic structure of the settler state. The 1955 Freedom Charter—which remains the ANC and the Congress tradition’s core ideological statement—was radical insofar as the ANC jettisoned its qualified demand for “equal rights for civilized men” and instead demanded them for all but still failed to address the question of indigenous sovereignty.
Up to and including the 2024 Expropriation Act, the ANC’s answer to the post-apartheid land question has been a failed experiment: the World Bank–supported “willing seller–willing buyer” (WSWB) model, a market-led agrarian reform based on the voluntary purchase of land at market prices. When the WSWB principle first captured post-apartheid South Africa’s land reform agenda during the 1993–96 period of democratic transition, it reflected the rapid shift in the ANC’s economic thinking from left-nationalist to neoliberal in the post–Cold War era. The ANC’s 1992 “Ready to Govern” policy statement advocated expropriation and other non-market mechanisms for land redistribution, as did its 1994 election manifesto, the Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP). Once in power, the new Department of Land Affairs embarked on extensive consultations within the country and with international advisers such as the World Bank. A few years later, the WSWB principle formed the cornerstone of the department’s 1997 White Paper on South African Land Policy.
The World Bank’s capture of the post-apartheid land reform agenda reflects how the very same historical forces that formed the high-water mark of the liberal international order and ushered in apartheid’s legal end in 1994—the fall of the Berlin Wall heralding the “end of history,” the triumph of neoliberal capitalist democracy, and the human rights paradigm—are the same that foreclosed the possibility of ending settler colonialism and land dispossession in South Africa. Facing external pressure from the Frontline states and the reality that intensified armed struggle was no longer viable in the post–Cold War era, Mandela’s ANC secured Black political rights (as opposed to sovereignty) through the protection of white property rights—the so-called “negotiated settlement.”
In 1996, it made good on its compromise with the unveiling of the country’s new constitution, a document whose range of civil rights, obligations, and provisions were unprecedented at its adoption. By 2021, the South African Constitutional Court was the world’s second most cited court. Leading liberal legal scholar Cass Sunstein proclaimed it “the most admirable constitution in the history of the world.” And yet, set against the longue durée of settler colonial modernity inaugurated in 1492 and South Africa’s own three-century settler colonial history, the constitution’s affirmation of the sanctity of property rights evades and rationalizes the violent history of how land and property were acquired.
“É uma falácia histórica dizer que a África do Sul pertence a todos: tanto ao opressor quanto ao oprimido, ao ladrão e ao roubado”, argumentaram os africanistas.
Only recently has the elite legal academy shown a willingness to listen to Black South Africans contesting the post-apartheid constitutional order. In May 2017, legal scholars gathered at a landmark University of Pretoria symposium entitled “Conquest, Constitutionalism, and Democratic Contestations” to take “seriously the moral, intellectual and political unravelling of post-1994 South African constitutionalism to enquire whether it has been able to respond adequately to the fundamental contradictions generated by slavery, colonisation and apartheid.” Among the participants were the “constitutional abolitionists”—largely from the increasingly influential Azanian tradition of legal jurisprudence—who argued that the historical injustice of settler colonial conquest remains an ongoing ethical exigency. Drawing from the Azanian political tradition and the philosopher Mogobe Ramose’s work on Ubuntu as an African legal philosophy, they pose a wholesale challenge to the philosophical, historical, and cultural bases of the post-apartheid constitution which it deems “conqueror’s law”: a document that ratifies the results of settler colonial wars of dispossession.
As for the ANC, while it has largely dismissed Azanian critiques, it has been forced to admit the urgency of the land question and persistent inequality, poverty, and unemployment that disproportionately affects the indigenous Black majority. The Expropriation Act of 2024 is emblematic of this tendency; it seeks to redress the land issue through the constitutional order. For the Azanians and other Black-led opposition parties such as the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), the Act is a reformist ratification of “conqueror’s law” and the illegitimate “private property rights” of those who unjustly acquired land through settler conquest. The core Azanian demand remains indigenous people’s recovery of unencumbered sovereign title to the entire territory (Azania)—and not mere redistribution. Therefore, while the Act allows for “nil compensation” in certain circumstances, the issue is not whether compensation is paid, but the historic illegitimacy of current land ownership patterns—a fact which, under the liberal international order, will always remain concealed.
II.
The notion of “apartheid” continues to hold sway among the world’s liberal and left intelligentsia. In 2012, for instance, Desmond Tutu asserted that “Israeli apartheid is far worse than South African apartheid”—a futile comparison that, as we will see, exposes the limits of the apartheid paradigm in attending to the specific predicament of a Black indigenous population but that has nonetheless become common sense in South Africa and beyond. Within the past few decades, though, more and more activists and intellectuals have recognized the category’s limitations, eschewing it in favor of another analytic: settler colonialism. Yet even while it gets a good deal of the way closer than that of the apartheid framework’s blinkered history, its prevailing theories—like Wolfe’s widely influential argument that settler colonialism is universally governed by “the logic of the elimination” of the native—still do not account for important differences in settler societies. Can such theories account for the relationship between settler colonialism, race, and anti-Blackness in Southern Africa? What happens when the “natives” are Black?
Scholars such as historian Robin D. G. Kelley have demonstrated that what Southern Africa’s settler authorities have called the “native question” was defined by both a logic of elimination and extraction: Southern Africa’s white minority settlers had the paradoxical need to eliminate the majority Black indigenous population from their land while simultaneously extracting Black labor. Consider South Africa’s 1913 Natives Land Act, a policy that enabled the minority settler state to drive indigenous Black people from the fertile lands sought by white settlers and confine them to barren lands that served as “native reserves.” From there, Black men, who were paid below-family wage pittances, were sent to work far away in mines and farms, while Black women eked out a subsistence living. In the process, South African mining and farming capital effectively extracted Black women’s unpaid reproductive labor, earning spectacular profits by doing so. In fact, South African Marxists’ recognition of this process led them, in the 1970s, to coin the now-popular term “racial capitalism.”
Here is the crux: beyond revealing the paradoxical logic of elimination and extraction of the Black native, the centrality of Black women’s unpaid reproductive labor to settler colonial society in Southern Africa reveals its roots in the logic of transatlantic slavery—a logic of anti-Blackness defined by the simultaneous lash and lust, disdain and desire, the absence and presence of the very bodies it requires to reproduce itself.
Paying attention to the specific predicament of a Black indigenous population under settler colonial rule makes the shortcomings of the apartheid framework clear. As we’ll see, it’s impossible to understand apartheid’s infamous “masters and servants” acts—which were first implemented in 1841, seven years after slavery’s abolition, and continued to govern labor relations until 1974—without contending with the 176 years of master and slave relations at the Cape, slave-raiding in the interior right up until the late nineteenth century, or British industrial mining modeled on Brazilian slave-mining. With the enslaved outnumbering the settlers from the time Amersfoort arrived with the first slave shipment six years after the colony’s founding—and consistently outnumbering them from 1711 until emancipation in 1834, settler society in South Africa began and developed not just as a society with slaves, but as a slave society. Abolition simply transformed the settler colony from a master and slave society into a masters and servants society, which was later perfected under apartheid.
Yet, right up until apartheid’s fall, the historiographical consensus emerging from radical leftist revisionists of the 1970s and 1980s was that apartheid was almost wholly sui generis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century mining and industrial capitalism, urbanization, and Afrikaner nationalism. Although Isobel Edwards’s Towards Emancipation: A Study in South African Slavery pioneered the academic study of South African slavery in 1942, it wasn’t until apartheid’s final decades that landmark slavery studies such as Nigel Worden’s Slavery in Dutch South Africa (1985) began to systematically challenge the orthodoxy that South African slavery was “only” “mildly” violent, small-scale, limited to the Cape, and therefore inconsequential.
Since then, the post-apartheid reclamation of slave histories has, on the one hand, seen historic events that have brought the era to the forefront of public memory. In 2002, France repatriated the remains of the nineteenth century’s most famous enslaved woman, the Gonaqua Khoe woman Sara Baartman; In 2015 researchers working off Cape Town’s coast discovered the São José slave ship, a Portuguese vessel carrying 512 enslaved Mozambicans when it sank en route to Brazil in 1794. Now housed between South Africa’s Iziko Museums and the U.S. National Museum of African American History and Culture, the São José is a remarkable embodiment of the mutuality of the transatlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades. Not only is it the first ship that carried enslaved Africans to have been identified; it is also a record of one of the first known attempts to bring a large number of East Africans into the transatlantic slave trade in the face of the rising abolition movement and the depletion of the West and Central African sources, a practice which prolonged the duration and intensity of the practice for decades.
On the other hand, these histories have also proven valuable tools for the settler minority. In recent years, Afrikaner settlers have cynically reclaimed and appropriated the long-disregarded genealogies of families of enslaved people, claiming enslaved “stammoeders” (founding mothers of lineages) for themselves—one of many post-apartheid settler strategies to appropriate indigeneity in the so-called “Rainbow Nation.” And, despite the renewed public attention to slave history, post-apartheid transitional justice institutions such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission—whose legal mandate only deals with “gross human rights violations” committed between the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre and Mandela’s 1994 inauguration—have excluded slavery from the officially sanctioned timeline of national historical injustice. Amidst this, Black feminist activists, scholars, visual artists, poets, novelists, and filmmakers —among them, Yvette Abrahams, Desiree Lewis, Pumla Dineo Gqola, Gabeba Baderoon, Berni Searle, Diana Ferrus, Yvette Christiansë, Rayda Jacobs, Zoë Wicomb, and Gail Smith—have led the call for repair and reparations for slavery’s ongoing harms.
It’s not just that slavery structured the settler colonial response to the so-called Native Question in Southern Africa. It structured European settlers’ response to the Native Question in the so-called New World, transforming the fates and fortunes of all peoples across the world, both during and after slavery’s legal end. In order to understand how this came about, it’s worth taking a step back from twentieth-century apartheid and returning to settler colonial modernity’s birth in the aftermath of transatlantic slavery’s early-fifteenth-century advent.
Forty-eight years after the Portuguese captured eleven Africans from what is now Mauritania and launched the transatlantic slave trade in 1444, and thirty-eight years after the 1455 Papal Bull granted Portugal both the monopoly of trade with Africa and authority to enslave Africa’s indigenous peoples, Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of Hispaniola in 1492 marked the dawn of settler colonial modernity. Put another way, settler colonial modernity was born in transatlantic slavery’s womb.
As Mahmood Mamdani shows, 1492, rather than the 1658 Treaty of Westphalia, represents the founding moment of the modern nation-state, whose liberal character is marked by religious tolerance and the reciprocal recognition of sovereignty within and among (European) nations. Settler colonial modernity is the intensification of Europe’s drive to resolve internal conflict through expulsion: not only expelling Europe’s conflicts and wars onto non-European peoples and lands, but also expelling Europe’s excess and unwanted populations onto its settler colonies. Take, for example, the French Huguenots fleeing the French Catholic Court, who landed on Cape Town’s shores in 1688 as the violence of the Protestant Reformation flung European settlers across both sides of the Atlantic. Or the 1820 decision of Britain, facing an unemployment crisis after the Napoleonic wars, to depose 5,000 citizens to the British Cape Colony—the largest single influx of settlers in South African history.
The year after Columbus landed on Hispaniola, settler colonial modernity’s founding legal tract, the 1493 Papal Bull “Inter Caetera,” granted Spain the right to colonize, convert, and enslave the “natives” of the newly “discovered” lands. The bull transformed Spanish and Portuguese occupation of those lands into lawful sovereignty which other European nations were bound to respect. Through two key tenets, it also made the denial of the sovereignty of indigenous peoples a central principle of settler colonial modernity and modern international law: European settlers’ “right of conquest,” and the “doctrine of discovery, which gave European Christian nations’ claims to sovereignty over lands they “discovered,” even if those lands were already inhabited by non-Christian indigenous peoples, effectively extinguishing indigenous title and right. The bull decreed that non-Europeans (by virtue of being non-Christians) had no rights which Europeans (by virtue of being Christians) had to respect. Centuries later, in 2000, the Bull Inter Caetera made international headlines when a small group of Catholics petitioned Pope John Paul II to disavow the doctrine. In 2023 Pope Francis apologized for it and formally recognized the sovereign rights of indigenous “non-Christian peoples.”
As mesmas forças históricas que marcaram o auge da ordem internacional liberal impediram a possibilidade de pôr fim à desapropriação de terras.
Less than a century after the Papal Bull Inter Caetera, the infamous 1550–1551 Valladolid debate, named for the Spanish city in which it took place, became the first major attempt among European settlers to address what we now know as the Native Question. During the debate between Spanish theologians Father Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, the former affirmed a 1537 papal bull against enslaving “Indians” (the indigenous people of the Americas) by arguing that they possessed rational souls and were thus capable of receiving the word of Christ. They therefore couldn’t be considered “natural slaves,” as Sepúlveda argued. The outcome of the debate was inconclusive. Spain nonetheless followed de las Casas’s suggestion that while enslaving the indigenous people of the Americas should be forbidden, Africans were uniquely fit for chattel slavery.
De las Casas had made this clear: all Black people—those stolen from their lands and enslaved in the New World as well as those in Africa whose lands were later stolen from them—had no claim to either bodily or territorial sovereignty. Meanwhile, Europeans were morally bound to respect the bodily sovereignty of the native peoples of the Americas by refraining from enslaving them, even though they were not bound to respect their territorial sovereignty.
De las Casas therefore entrenched the dual non-recognition of Black peoples’ bodily and territorial sovereignty as central to settler colonial modernity’s development. And the land claims of the Black peoples indigenous to Africa became doubly moot: if one has no enforceable claims to their own body, how can they have any claims to land and territory which others are bound to respect? (Inversely—this is the question at the very heart of territorial Zionism’s demand for the establishment and preservation of the nation-state of Israel—how can one have any claims to bodily sovereignty if one has no claims to land and territory which others are bound to respect? The Zionist settler colonial case for a Jewish nation-state is animated by the idea that the bodily and territorial sovereignty of a people are inextricably linked.)
This same logic shaped the trajectory of the Dutch conquest and settlement of the Cape of Good Hope from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. For most of the slave-trading “Dutch Golden Age,” the Dutch West India Company largely drove the transatlantic slave trade, while its older sister company, the Dutch East India Company (VOC), monopolized the Indian Ocean slave trade. More than this, the Dutch provided the finance and technology that enabled the global slave trade, as their English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese counterparts established and expanded their own slave-based empires.
In 1652, the Dutch East India Company established the first permanent European settlement at the Cape of Good Hope; five years later, the Amersfoort arrived with the first shipment of slaves—174 Angolan children who, outnumbering the Dutch settlers, transformed the settler colony into a slave society. By the time the British captured the Cape for the second time in 1806, the Dutch had imported at least 63,000 souls from all over the Indian Ocean basin from South East Africa to the Indonesian archipelago, not including the indigenous Africans conquered and enslaved by the Dutch. As early as 1673, the VOC granted their settlers, the Dutch burghers, the right to form kommandos which waged wars with indigenous Africans over land and cattle and conducted slave raids in the interior. By 1775, the enslavement of indigenous Africans was formally legalized as inboekestel—the so-called “apprenticeship” of African children orphaned by wars of conquest or young adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five.
And from the British Empire’s first capture of the Dutch Cape in 1795 until the 1899-1901 South African War, the question of slavery effectively mediated or decided every major Anglo-Boer conflict over “natives” and territory. The British abolition of serfdom in 1828 and slavery in 1834 at the Cape precipitated the so-called 1835-1846 Great Trek, the exodus of the Voortrekkers—the “pioneering” Boer slaver-settlers—into the South African interior. “We complain of the severe losses which we have been forced to sustain by the emancipation of our slaves,” Voortrekker leader Piet Retief proclaimed in his famed 1837 Manifesto. Whereas the closing up of the American frontier to slavery drove the slave-holding Southern Confederacy from the Union as they protested their right to own slaves in the American Civil War, the supposedly “empty” Southern African interior allowed the slaveholding Boer Voortrekker to embark on a physical exodus to re-establish their freedom to, in Retief’s words, “preserve proper relations between master and servant.”
After the exiled Boers conquered new territories in the interior, the British annexed Natal Colony in 1843, and later the Transvaal in 1877, on the pretext of protecting natives from “Boer slavery.” And yet, after annexing Natal, the same Britons pioneered the infamous isibalo system of forced labor on Natal’s public works and farms. As the British began to look to laborers from their Indian colony to work Natal’s sugar cane plantations and railways in the decades that followed, Natal came to embody how—even after emancipation—slavery structured the response to not only the “native labor question,” but to the labor question in general. Across the British Empire, the end of transatlantic slavery created the need for “post”-slavery regimes of labor that gave rise to the so-called “coolie” labor system of importing indentured laborers from India and China.
Long after the British officially abolished slavery in the Cape, as the 1866 discovery of diamonds in Kimberley and the 1886 discovery of the world’s largest gold stores on the Witwatersrand kicked off Southern Africa’s “minerals revolution,” slavery remained the ghost in the monstrous machine of Southern African industrial capital. On Kimberley’s diamond fields, British mining capital’s “solution” to the “Native Question” was the conscription of Southern Africa’s Black men into the infamous compound mining system. As a direct, local rearticulation of the transatlantic plantation logic, the Southern African minerals revolution propagated the widespread use of carceral labor compounds and the pass system—once again, fixing Black men as cheap, captive labor.
Like the American Civil War, the 1899–1901 South African War was not merely a battle over (white) sovereignty; the British and Boers were also battling for control of the world’s largest gold-mining complex and the “natives” who would mine them. It’s no mistake that just decades after the official end of slavery, “the native question” in British South Africa after the war became the major impetus for the first Pan-Africanist Congress, held in London in 1900. As he led the final day’s discussion on this topic, Dominican barrister George James Christian drew a transatlantic line between the fate of Africans who “were stolen from their land in the 16th century and were now jostled out of their lands.” As he asked, “What was this if not the revival of slavery?” Ultimately, warring Boers and Britons reconciled over their denial of Black sovereignty and claims to land through the newly formed Union of South Africa and the 1913 Natives Land Act.
As the twentieth century progressed toward the National Party’s official implementation of apartheid in 1948, settler authorities began the discursive project of naturalizing settler colonialism by denying the Black indigenous majority’s status as natives altogether. After centuries of referring to Black peoples as “native,” the word was eliminated from the official apartheid nomenclature; officials began referring to Black people instead as the “Bantu.” The twentieth-century settler historiography and apartheid myth-making machine decreed that, rather than arriving on the sub-continent thousands of years ago, the Black Bantu-language speakers who today constitute nearly 80 percent of South Africa’s population first crossed the Limpopo River at precisely the same time as the first Dutch settlers landed at the Cape. The Black Bantu language speakers, therefore, could not be considered the indigenous peoples of the land because, as the Afrikaner nationalist project began to put it, “We are all settlers.”
By 1958, the apartheid state had renamed the former Native Affairs Department the Bantu Administration and Development Department, while Native Education became the much-despised Bantu Education. Keenly aware that this was a political motive to deny their sovereign claims to the land, Black people rejected the term “Bantu.” As the Black newspaper Bantu World (which changed its name to The World in 1956) explained in a September 1949 editorial, “The Government wants Africans to be officially known as ‘Bantu,’ and neither as ‘Natives’ nor ‘Africans.’ One University professor objects to ‘African’ because it makes the Black folk so patriotic as to say of Africa, ‘This is my own, my Native Land.’” If, in the face of settler colonial rule, a Black indigenous population cannot make an inviolable sovereign claim to Africa as their “native land,” how can Black people anywhere in the world have an inviolable claim to sovereignty?
Os nacionalistas africâneres começaram a naturalizar o colonialismo de povoamento ao negar completamente o status de nativos da maioria negra indígena. Como eles mesmos diziam: "Somos todos colonizadores".
Just as the delegates of the first Pan-African Congress did at the start of the twentieth century, we in the twenty-first must reckon with the fact that transatlantic slavery is the specter haunting Black sovereignty across Africa and its diasporas. In its aftermath, there is a historical force that binds together the Black people in the African diaspora whose ancestors were stolen from their lands and the Black people on the continent whose lands were stolen from their ancestors: their continued lack of bodily and territorial sovereignty. No sooner than Haiti had become the first Black republic, France invaded and saddled it with a reparations bill it would take more than a century to repay. A century and a half later, the long shadow Haiti cast on Black sovereignty ensured that no sooner had the world declared 1960 the “Year of African Independence” than the United States and Belgium claimed Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba’s scalp, dashing any hope of Black sovereignty in the Congo beyond flag independence.
When the Commonwealth appealed to Zimbabwe’s Mugabe to delay the very land redistribution program that had inspired the Zimbabwean liberation war, they feared that demanding the return of indigenous lands to Black people in Zimbabwe would undermine international support for the “reasonable” and “workable” struggle to end apartheid and racial segregation in South Africa. And it still does: in post-apartheid South Africa, the inviolability of the white body and white territory is why the global backlash to Zimbabwe’s land reform is held up as a bogeyman to Black South Africans who dare broach the land question.
“We are all familiar with the global sanctity of the white body,” the South African literary critic Njabulo Ndebele reminded us in his 2000 Steve Biko Memorial Lecture. “Wherever the white body is violated in the world, severe retribution follows somehow for the perpetrators if they are non-white, regardless of the social status of the white body. . . . South African whiteness is a beneficiary of the protectiveness assured by international whiteness.” It is this very international whiteness which saw Trump offer “refugee” status to Afrikaners while punishing the “sovereign” Black majority nation-state of South Africa for attempting modest land reform through the Expropriation Act.
O fato de um dos projetos centrais do Estado sul-africano pós-1948 ter sido a negação do status da maioria negra indígena como "nativos" da terra evidencia o principal problema do paradigma do apartheid: o próprio apartheid foi um exercício de naturalização e silenciamento da história anterior e contínua do colonialismo de povoamento e da desapropriação de terras indígenas, a fim de abrir terreno ideológico para o projeto segregacionista, então mais palatável politicamente, do "desenvolvimento separado" de "grupos nacionais". Naturalizar a conquista colonial de povoamento — seja afirmando "somos todos nativos", seja "somos todos colonos", seja reificando o paradigma segregacionista racial do apartheid — é um exercício que torna impossível imaginar seu fim.
Em outras palavras, não se trata apenas de regimes conservadores de direita, como o Estado do apartheid sul-africano, terem apagado a conquista colonial de povoamento. Ao adotar e reforçar o paradigma do apartheid, as tradições liberais de esquerda da África do Sul, a esquerda internacional e a “ordem internacional liberal baseada em regras” — que ainda não revogou formalmente a “doutrina da descoberta” e o “direito de conquista” fundamentais — não apenas naturalizaram o colonialismo de povoamento e a desapropriação de terras indígenas, como também os ratificaram.
Panashe Chigumadzi é professora assistente de Estudos Africanos e Afro-Americanos na Universidade Brandeis. Ela é autora do livro de memórias históricas These Bones Will Rise Again e do romance Sweet Medicine.
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