This chapter will argue that what made the politics of national democratic revolution a nationalist politics was that it posited the citizen as necessarily a member of a nation – as a bearer, in other words, of some or other quality of population. To get sense of our task, let us begin this investigation with a well-known speech of Thabo Mbeki, given on behalf of the African National Congress on the occasion of the adoption of the Constitution in Cape Town in May 1996. In ‘I Am an African’, Mbeki states:

These lines, treating the identity of the African, are punctuated with the following declaration (and elsewhere, something very similar): ‘Being part of all these people, and in the knowledge that none dare contest the assertion, I shall claim that I am an African!’ (Mbeki, 1998: 32). Here Mbeki deliberately invokes a term that, in the context, is profoundly ambiguous. Why does he declare ‘I am an African’ instead of ‘I am a South African’? Why does his verse slide between allusions to the continent in general and to South Africa specifically? The South African people, that is, are also the people of the continent of Africa.