THE NATIONAL QUESTION: SOME EPISTEMOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Even though this chapter is primarily an exposition of the black consciousness approach to the National Question, it is ultimately an exploration of what an alternative conception of this question might have been outside of its dominant framing within twentieth-century Marxism. This conceptual re-framing is in the spirit of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign that started at the University of Cape Town on 9 March 2015. After concerted mobilisation – and resistance – the students succeeded in having the university agree to the removal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes. The statue came down exactly a month later, on 9 April 2015. Central to the demands of the students was a call for all inherited and accepted knowledge systems – including Marxism, non-racialism and black consciousness – to be the subject of renewed critique from the perspectives of black people, and black women in particular.

In the ensuing debates, students and staff have questioned the scientific rationality that informs both liberal and Marxist epistemologies. This rationalist epistemology, Kwame Anthony Appiah (2005) argues, can be divided into two categories. On the one hand is the hard rationalism that refuses to entertain anything that has no foundation in scientific fact. Opponents of the Rhodes Must Fall movement dismissed it as too focused on pain and emotion. And because race does not have such scientific validity, they have been insisting that it should be barred from political discourse.

Isaiah Berlin (2000: 22) pointed out that this argument harkened to the Enlightenment idea that solutions to social problems will be obtained ‘by the correct use of reason’. The logic is that ‘there is no reason why such answers, which after all have produced triumphant results in the worlds of physics and chemistry, should not apply to the equally troubled fields of politics, ethics and aesthetics’ (Berlin, 2000: 22). But Appiah also describes an alternative way of thinking about the world, and about race in particular, which he calls ‘soft rationalism’. This allows for the fact that identities are ‘unlikely to be settled by uncontroversially factual considerations’ (Appiah, 2005: 178). Or as Patrick Chabal (2012: 33) puts it, the ‘inability to conceive of other beliefs, other rationalities, confines our abilities to make sense of what we observe’.

Seeing race is as old as the ages. This much is clear from the recently published multi-volume Image of the Black in Western Art, edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr. In the introduction to the first volume, covering Pharaonic Egypt and the Graeco-Roman Period, classicist, art historian and sociologist Jeremy Tanner disputes the argument that racial prejudice is a modern invention that was unknown to the ancients. His argument is primarily a critique of the Afrocentrists, who arugue that black people were well integrated into these early societies, and of the argument that racism owes its origins to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's racial classification at the end of the eighteenth century. He criticises those who, like Martin Bernal, argue that ancient racism pales in comparison with ‘the tidal wave of ethnicity and racialism’ of the eighteenth century, even though he also admits that in the early period racial ‘boundaries were not policed in the systematic manner characteristic of the southern United States before the Civil Rights Act or the apartheid era in South Africa’.

Without entering into the intricacies of the debate about who was more or less racist between the ancients and the moderns – although the inventions of the latter would seem hard to match – there seems to be sufficient consensus in the literature that ‘neither ancient Egypt, nor Greece and Rome were before “color prejudice”’. Even more important for the purposes of this book is to point out that racialisation of black people in terms of body parts – dark skin, thick lips, woolly hair, exaggerated penis size – and their representation in art was a reflection of their geopolitical power or lack thereof at any given point in time.