This article represents a continuation of one published two months ago. At the time I saw the Government of National Unity (GNU) as an attempt to address a fairly tumultuous moment in South African politics, with the ANC losing its majority in Parliament and cobbling together a coalition/GNU.

I saw that moment of relative unpredictability representing an “opening”, where the direction of South African politics could be changed for better or worse. That opening also represented a condition for hope, for renewal of our democratic project, without any guarantees, uncertain, but depending on what was done by our own efforts, by our own understandings made to influence the GNU with whatever inputs we as the public would be able to make, wherever we were located.

That same opening, depending on what forces gained the upper hand, could lead to a setback for freedom. The jury may still be out on what the outcome has been thus far, though there have been some encouraging and also discomforting signs. Nevertheless, despite some actions evoking unhappiness, the GNU seems to have become a fairly settled political phenomenon.

At the time of its initiation and in the inaugural address of President Cyril Ramaphosa, reference was made to the GNU initiating a “national dialogue”, a call that had been made earlier by others and has been supported by foundations named after heroic Struggle figures, and others.

The notion of a national dialogue has been met with mixed feelings. It could, in my view, lead to a unifying and emancipatory output, but it depends on how some key issues are addressed. These are areas or potential issues of disagreement, or that have not yet arisen in a manner that reveal differences that may prove contentious. These include the question of unity and difference, social cohesion and “deviance” from norms, which I address here or in articles to follow.

Much ANC literature from its inception dwells on unity and also banishing “tribalism”. Pixley ka Isaka Seme, one of the founders, stressed the need to end division:

“The demon of racialism, the aberrations of the Xosa-Fingo feud, the animosity that exists between the Zulus and the Tsongaas, between the Basutos and every other Native must be buried and forgotten; it has shed among us sufficient blood! We are one people. These divisions, these jealousies, are the cause of all our woes and of all our backwardness and ignorance today” (PKI Seme, 1978 [1911]. ‘A Native Union’. In T. Karis and G Carter, From Protest to Challenge, vol 1, Stanford University Press, Stanford, p 72. Original spelling). See also the important interpretation in: P Jordan, ‘The South African Liberation Movement and the Making of a New Nation’, in M van Diepen (ed) The National Question in South Africa. (London, New Jersey, Zed books, 1988), 107-24.

Before addressing the status of tribalism within national unity, let us consider the notion of unity to which we aspire in South Africa. Unity goes to the core of transforming the geographical entity of South Africa into a state and endowing it with various qualities, initially a state with rights only for whites (with limited and fragile exceptions at different times), then only in 1994 creating a state where it was intended -constitutionally - that all would enjoy equal rights.

Unity is sometimes associated - as with the call for a national dialogue - with the notion of “social cohesion”, a rather vague concept but nevertheless centred on unifying peoples under agreed values.

But unity of any people - even at the level of small villages - coexists with a range of identities that inhabit the same geographical area as is the case with other countries. That a geographical area becomes a unified state does not mean that the distinct qualities of the entities that comprise it are dissolved or no longer valued by some or many people.

It often happens that groups within the country periodically are in conflict with one another or that a state favours some ethnic or other groups over others. If we wish to build unity we need to simultaneously acknowledge and respect difference, as long as that difference is not manifested in a racist manner or in other forms of disrespect or devaluation of others.

Tribalism and tribal or ethnic identities are often depicted as a barrier to nation building, social cohesion and unity of people. The word tribe and also ethnic are often accompanied by the word "chauvinism”, as in "tribal chauvinism”.

But a tribal or ethnic identity, which people are comfortable with, as in someone saying that they are proud of their heritage, as someone who comes from the amaMpondo people, is not the same as amaMpondo chauvinism.

We need to draw a distinction between people having a legitimate pride in the customs and cultures from which they come and in using those customs and cultures as a form of arrogance and superiority in relation to other people and sometimes evoking division within a community.

At the same time, this is not to suggest (as some academic decolonial projects appear to do) that we retrieve all cultures and customs and see them as immediately and always worthy and applicable. Many customs and cultures must be retrieved, but they need engagement, not simply adopted and applied.

One thinks immediately of ukuthwala, the waylaying of a woman and raping her as a prelude to a marriage widely practised among some peoples in South Africa. (See HJ Simons, African women: Their legal status in South Africa. 1968). When damages are awarded under the customary law inherited and often retained from the apartheid era, the injured party in a highly patriarchal order is seen to be the father or male guardian, not the woman).

It's important to understand that while it is a custom, respect for people and their belief system does not deny us the right to interrogate the meanings, applications and implications of customs and resultant practices. That is required of us constitutionally and also as members of communities that relate to one another.

However, to return to my reason for writing this, I do not think it's helpful to simply dismiss tribalism as anti- the national, anti-social cohesion, anti-progressive phenomena, in that the notion of unity must be understood as a combination of unity and a range of distinct identities. South Africa is no exception to that.

The overall understanding of the ANC as - until recently - the apparent bearer of the national vision has generally not envisaged much space for independent identities. Profound awareness of distinct identities, during the Struggle was not always possible nor necessary for the tasks at hand, (though many cases are recorded where customary identities interfaced with MK recruitment, entering battle and other elements of dangerous struggle. (See Raymond Suttner, The ANC Underground, 2008, Jacana Media. See also the important and more recent work of Siphokazi Magadla, Guerrillas and Combative Mothers: Women and the Armed Struggle in South Africa, 2023).

But many such identities have emerged fairly boldly in the period after the first democratic elections, for example, a range of people admitting to consulting their ancestors or becoming izangoma/izinyanga (isiXhosa, isiZulu words for spiritual healers), which I can recall being mocked by a leading African activist in the 1980s. Sometimes the boldness of the emergence of these identities conceals charlatanism for which many people have unfortunately fallen costly victims.

The notion of the national is said to coexist with a celebration of diversity, which enjoys legal protection in the Constitution, (Statutes of South Africa, 1996, sections 9, 10, 15-19, 23, 29, 30 from the Bill of Rights) and which all members of the GNU purport to celebrate.

All cultures and identities are to be respected – officially - but there is a qualifier. In ANC political understanding these should feed into an overall national identity (ANC, Strategies and tactics, 2007, paragraphs 71,101.)

In reality there is an erasure of a dialectical relationship between specific identities and a potentially unifying national identity. “Unity” is instead equated with a hierarchy where the distinct element must comply with and be absorbed into the requirement of a hierarchically greater national “unity”. But within this “unity” there is no place for “tribalism” and “regionalism”. These will be stamped out wherever they “rear their ugly heads” (ANC, 2007, 101). 

This is also found in statements of the late Samora Machel who declared that “our struggle killed the tribe...We killed the tribe to give birth to the nation.”  Machel was a revered revolutionary figure whose words few in the Struggle would have dared or wanted to question.

Interestingly, Machel’s widow, Graca Machel, reinterprets its meaning in a significant Mistra lecture. (https://mistra.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/2014-Annual-Lecture.pdf. I interpret the lecture in a Polity interview: https://www.polity.org.za/article/tribe-nation-and-other-identities-2014-07-30 0).

This intervention of Graca Machel profoundly amplifies the remarks I have made relating to identities with examples of young women with whom she trained in Frelimo, many of whom only knew their own village, did not know that there was a sea despite the long coastline that Mozambique has. This is not to ridicule them but to demonstrate the complexity of identities and how the experiences in their lives vary extensively.

For Graca Machel, the tribe is a seed, present throughout human development but transforming in different ways:

“I am looking at the tribe, and more widely at the nation as at the heart of the identity we form through our ethnic socio-cultural contexts as the seed that is within us all. That seed of our identities is transformed as we grow, as we extend our relationships, our physical, emotional and intellectual contexts. Yet our identities remain rooted in the original influences and norms within which our social beings developed. So the seed does not die. It is rooted, but transformed.

“So our original identities do not die. We are rooted, but as additional influences and contexts are added to our lives, so we transform and our identities are expanded, transformed.

“So no, I do not believe that the tribe must die for the nation to live.”

This notion of identities grasps at once the distinct quality of identities and their interrelationship with other factors, human and environmental. They are always changing and that changes both the interrelationship with others and the broader unity.

Raymond Suttner is an Emeritus Professor at the University of South Africa and a Research Associate in the English Department at the University of the Witwatersrand. He served lengthy periods as a political prisoner. His current writings cover mainly contemporary politics, history, and social questions.