Why there are no South Africans and it's ok

On Wednesday evening I felt like such a bastard. At a great roundtable debate which focused on the possibility of a South African identity, hosted by the Helen Suzman Foundation, I threw an existential bone at the audience by arguing that there are no South Africans. And, furthermore, that that’s ok. The idea of a South African essence strikes me as both incoherent and dangerous. We soon judge others as more or less South African depending on how close to our stipulated prototype of a true South African we deem them to be. However, I was fascinated by a less sceptical possibility that was sketched by fellow analyst William Gumede. It is worth exploring.


He argued that the construction of a national identity is a necessarily political project. While he conceded that the search for a robust notion of South Africanness is a fruitless pursuit, he nonetheless put a second-best option on the table. Political institutions, such as our constitution, should be the basis of a pragmatic answer to the question, ‘Are there South Africans?’ That pragmatic answer rests on two pillars.

First, the achievement of social justice should be a common goal. This is based on the indisputable fact that a majority of South Africans do not yet enjoy social justice in any meaningful, material sense.

Second, if we are to finally achieve social justice some twenty years after Mandela’s release then we need solidarity, and black solidarity in particular, to get us there. But it would seem that any solidarity aimed at achieving social justice requires a sense of national identity or at least some overlapping set of values. Is this view right?


Certainly, there are critically important nuggets of truth in Gumede’s position. The pursuit of social justice has to be understood as a pragmatic project aimed at improving the material lot of the disenfranchised majority. We cannot be happy with brilliant constitutional jurisprudence if it makes no difference to people at the coalface of poverty. Social justice in all its practical glory, rather than a perfectly articulated liberal constitutional vision, must the ultimate yardstick of our democracy’s success.


It is also true that there are important instrumental benefits to be derived from group solidarity. It seems strategically sensible to imagine a South African identity into existence even if group identity is an ontological dream. Take, as an example, the gains made by feminists as a result of strategically imagining themselves to be a cohesive group for purposes of political mobilisation. This analogy lends weight to the Gumede thesis. Solidarity, and black solidarity in particular, should be imagined into political existence as one means of organising people to keep their collective eye focused on the goal of social justice.


Yet, even so, the identity conundrum remains. If we rightly agree that social justice matters, and recognise that it has not yet been achieved, have we thereby stumbled upon a South African identity? It seems to me that identity has nothing to do with social justice. Social justice, though important, is merely a reference to the material conditions that all human beings should enjoy in order to live autonomous and flourishing lives. In a very real sense, the fight for social justice is a fight to enable individuals and communities to live under conditions in which they can choose their own identity. Social justice is not identity. Social justice is a catalyst for authentically chosen identities to emerge.

We should therefore see social justice claims as demands for enablers that can, in their turn, allow for self-chosen identities. We do not want to be philosophical delinquents by conflating the conditions for authentic living with the wholly independent question of what a South African is, if indeed such a creature could ever exist or even be imagined. A common national SA identity therefore cannot be defined as “our collective wish for social justice for all”. That is not an identity claim but rather a description of a virtuous goal.


The same holds for Gumede’s tantalising view on solidarity. The critical question is whether or not solidarity presupposes group identity? It need not. Tommie Shelby, a brilliant black American philosopher, argues in his critically acclaimed book, We who are dark, that black solidarity is possible without relying on substantive conceptions of black identity.

Put simply, Gumede and I do not have to agree on what it means to be “a black man” in the sense of a black man with very particular characteristics in terms of his beliefs, values, music taste, dress sense, accent and the like. All that is needed is the reality that black people share a collective history of being at the receiving end of racist ideology and policies. From this shared history, we can unite to fight the remaining structural obstacles that stop the black majority from being full participants in politically free South Africa.

We can therefore achieve the instrumental benefit of social justice by organising ourselves as a group with a political agenda. But the achievement of this practical goal does not require belief in a non-existing black essence. This insight, extrapolated to the national identity debate, yields a similar conclusion. There are no South Africans. And that’s ok.