Empire Unbound - Imperial Citizenship, Race and Diaspora

231 Pages·2015·8.15 MB·English

UUnniivveerrssiittyy ooff PPeennnnssyyllvvaanniiaa
SScchhoollaarrllyyCCoommmmoonnss
Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations
2015
EEmmppiirree UUnnbboouunndd -- IImmppeerriiaall CCiittiizzeennsshhiipp,, RRaaccee aanndd DDiiaassppoorraa iinn tthhee
MMaakkiinngg ooff SSoouutthh AAffrriiccaa
Khwezi Mkhize
University of Pennsylvania, [email protected]
Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations
Part of the African American Studies Commons, African Languages and Societies Commons, and the
African Studies Commons
RReeccoommmmeennddeedd CCiittaattiioonn
Mkhize, Khwezi, "Empire Unbound - Imperial Citizenship, Race and Diaspora in the Making of South Africa"
(2015). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1096.
https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1096
This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1096
For more information, please contact [email protected].
EEmmppiirree UUnnbboouunndd -- IImmppeerriiaall CCiittiizzeennsshhiipp,, RRaaccee aanndd DDiiaassppoorraa iinn tthhee MMaakkiinngg ooff SSoouutthh
AAffrriiccaa
AAbbssttrraacctt
"Empire Unbound" is an exploration of the history and politics of empire and imperial citizenship that went
into the making of South Africa before the Second World War. The making of racial difference in South
Africa is often located in the temporal and political terrain that is Apartheid (1948-1994). In this
dissertation I look to the history of South Africa in the long nineteenth century and recuperate the
frameworks of empire and imperial citizenship in making sense of struggles for belonging. Empire, both
as a form of government and imaginary, invokes a degree of scale that exceeds the nation-state. It also
historically precedes the nation-state, which has come to exemplify the model form for organizing
sovereign polities. In "Empire Unbound" I argue that as South Africa became a self governing territory in
the early twentieth century it folded the remnants of empire into its instrumentalities of racial governance.
I therefore explore South Africa's imperial politics and imaginary as it extends to other parts of Southern
Africa such as Namibia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana. Empires also have histories that
date back to maritime commerce and the making of the modern world. In in this dissertation I turn to
Cape Town to examine the ways in which this long history of empire gradually formed the grammars of
belonging in South Africa and the Atlantic world. Black intellectuals in South Africa during the early
twentieth century had their investments in empire but theirs was a struggle to wrestle its grammars into a
form that included blackness in its regime of belonging. It was especially after the First World War that
these intellectuals sought to write themselves and the colonized masses of the world into an alternative
grammar of sovereignty. I demonstrate in this dissertation that these intellectuals were far from mimic
men and women; they were involved in a dialogue of reshaping what it meant to belong in the world after
empire.
DDeeggrreeee TTyyppee
Dissertation
DDeeggrreeee NNaammee
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
GGrraadduuaattee GGrroouupp
Africana Studies
FFiirrsstt AAddvviissoorr
Deborah A. Thomas
KKeeyywwoorrddss
Black Diaspora, Black Intellectuals, Empire, Imperial Citizenship, Race, South Africa
SSuubbjjeecctt CCaatteeggoorriieess
African American Studies | African Languages and Societies | African Studies
This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1096
EMPIRE UNBOUND:
IMPERIAL LIBERALISM, RACE AND DIASPORA
IN THE MAKING OF SOUTH AFRICA
Khwezi Mkhize
A DISSERTATION
in
Africana Studies
Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania
in
Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
2015
Supervisor of Dissertation ______________________________
Dr. Deborah A. Thomas, Professor of Anthropology and Africana Studies, University of
Pennsylvania
Graduate Group Chairperson ______________________________
Dr. Herman Beavers, Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies, University of
Pennsylvania
Dissertation Committee
Dr. Cheikh Anta Babou, Associate Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Tsitsi E. Jaji, Associate Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Deborah A. Thomas, Professor of Anthropology and Africana Studies, University of
Pennsylvania
!ii

Dedication
For my Parents and Grand-Parents
who made my world possible
and held it together
longer than
I
can remember
!iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
At last, some words of gratitude and acknowledgement at the end of a rite of
passage. Becoming an “arrivant” at some threshold is a thing that memory threatens to
behold in an unruly fashion. A certain narrative of “completion” is imposing itself on me
with deceptive orderliness. In invoking your names and thanking you all, I am reminding
myself that if the dots ever came together at all, it is because you lent me your shoulders
to stand on. I will carry this deeply within me, lest new myths in the coming passages give
struggle the appearance of providence.
My advisor Deborah Thomas has been an incredible wealth of knowledge,
support and a great, I mean great, example, of how to do and live Africana Studies. Thank
you for walking me through the various mutations of becoming a scholar, keeping your
door open, the wonderful food you fed us, and your staunch reminder to find in ongoing
struggles the need to overstand knowledge, as the Rastafari say. It is impossible to imagine
how one could have deigned to straddle the lines between Africa and the black diaspora,
between literary and cultural studies, and between reading and listening without the
patient and generous presence of Tsitsi Jaji. I am deeply fortunate that my years in
Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania coincided with yours. Cheikh Anta
Babou has been the epitome of patient, deliberate and concise thinking and writing. My
years spent as your student has opened me up to the rigors and demands of historical
thinking and the ever present specter of religion in what we study. In Chinua Achebe’s
novel Arrow of God, Ezeulu advises his son that “the world is like a Mask dancing. If you
want to see it you do not stand in one place.” This is true of my teachers at the
Department of African Literature and the University of the Witwatersrand who refused
to let me stand in one place - even though it was the home they had raised me in - and
sent me off to graduate school in the U.S. As it turned out I landed in the last American
university that Professor Es’kia Mphahlele taught in before returning to South Africa and
founding the Department of African Literature! Professors Bhekizizwe Peterson and
Isabel Hofmeyr have been constantly present in my life and pushed me over the years to
reach beyond myself. I hope, one day, to make you proud and do under others as you
have done unto me. I also thank the faculty and staff of the department of African
Literature, Mrs Merle Govind, Professors James Ogude, Dan Ojwang, Pumla Dineo
Gqola and Litheko Modisane for being such model scholars. The faculty and staff at the
Center and Department of Africana Studies at UPenn and beyond created a social and
intellectual space that came to embody home in the past six years. I thank Professors
John L. Jackson, Jr. Eve Troutt Powell, Barbara Savage, Rita Barnard, Audrey Mbeje,
Ntongela Masilela, Simon Gikandi, Innocent Mhlambi, Gabeba Baderoon, Tanji
Gilliam, Ms Carol Davis, Ms Gale Garrison and Ms Michelle Gilliard Houston. James
Spady has been a mentor to me outside of the classroom since we met in between the
book shelves of Van Pelt library in the fall of 2009. He has helped me imagine black
Philadelphia and the African American diaspora in ways that have enriched my attempts
!iv
at scholarship. Jonathan Highfield and Claudia Ford afforded me an opportunity to teach
at the Rhode Island School of Design in the spring of 2009. They, along with their
families, have been done more for me than they can imagine. I am grateful for the
remarkable time that we have shared thus far. My research has been supported by
archivists and librarians in South Africa and the United States. I would be remiss if I did
not thank you.
To my motley crew of fellow travelers and children of Africa and its diaspora: in
the pages that follow is a dissertation but behind it is the invisible story of our friendship,
our ongoing conversations, food, anguishes and joys shared over years. You have all been
so essential to this elusive thing that I call my identity, intellectual and personal. I do not
imagine there to be an essential difference between the words that we have shared over
the years and what I have written. We thought things through together. In the end, what I
have written will have to stand on its own but I will take this moment to call on your
names to shadow the substance: Krystal “Dada” Smalls, Christopher Ernest Werimo
Ouma, Laura “Fellow Prodigal” McTighe, Marina Bilbija, Venise Adjibodou, Wilfredo
Gomez, Cameron Brickhouse, Nomaduma Masilela, Derilene Marco, Kemang Wa
Lehulere, Faye Baldoz, Jeremy Dell, Palesa Shongwe, Ntsako Mkhabela, Julius B.
Fleming, Jr., Karl Swinehart, Layla “Mase Nadodo” Ben-Ali, Celina De Sa, Josslyn
Luckett, Diana Burnett, Savannah Shange, Eziaku Nwokocha, Sara-Ellen Strongman,
Stephanie Contreras, Mphathi Mutloane, Richara Leona Krayewski, Monika Bhagat-
Kennedy, Kathleen Ebersohn-Khuvutlu, Lebogang Mokwena, Simangele Mabena,
Elizabeth Dyer, Christine Thu Nhi Dang, Marissa Mika, Nikki Kalbing, Unifier Dyer,
Anand Venkatkrishnan and Shireen Hamza. Smangele and Lesedi: of course, you’ve
waited for this mythical and often uncertain odyssey to reach some sort of conclusion. I
hope that the pieces align, this time, as they should, and that what should be remains
engrained in the memory of elephants.
My family: the Mkhizes, the Nyantumbus and their ongoing extensions seem to
have been standing in absented present time and on the other side of it, not to mention
on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. I cannot say thank you without recalling the
monumental amounts of waiting and loving you have bestowed upon me. Thank you all.
The last word goes to my parents: Busisiwe and Themba Mkhize. Only you posses
the memory of how long you have done what you have done for me. All I can do is
marvel. My gratitude to you is unending.
!v
ABSTRACT
EMPIRE UNBOUND:
IMPERIAL LIBERALISM, RACE AND DIASPORA
IN THE MAKING OF SOUTH AFRICA
Khwezi Mkhize
Deborah A. Thomas
Empire Unbound is an exploration of the history and politics of empire and imperial
citizenship that went into the making of South Africa before the Second World War. The
making of racial difference in South Africa is often located in the temporal and political
terrain that is Apartheid (1948-1994). In this dissertation I look to the history of South
Africa in the long nineteenth century and recuperate the frameworks of empire and
imperial citizenship in making sense of struggles for belonging. Empire, both as a form of
government and imaginary, invokes a degree of scale that exceeds the nation-state. It also
historically precedes the nation-state, which has come to exemplify the model form for
organizing sovereign polities. In Empire Unbound I argue that as South Africa became a self
governing territory in the early twentieth century it folded the remnants of empire into its
instrumentalities of racial governance. I therefore explore South Africa’s imperial politics
and imaginary as it extends to other parts of Southern Africa such as Namibia,
Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana. Empires also have histories that date back
to maritime commerce and the making of the modern world. In in this dissertation I turn
to Cape Town to examine the ways in which this long history of empire gradually formed
the grammars of belonging in South Africa and the Atlantic world. Black intellectuals in
South Africa during the early twentieth century had their investments in empire but theirs
was a struggle to wrestle its grammars into a form that included blackness in its regime of
belonging. It was especially after the First World War that these intellectuals sought to
write themselves and the colonized masses of the world into an alternative grammar of
sovereignty. I demonstrate in this dissertation that these intellectuals were far from mimic
men and women; they were involved in a dialogue of reshaping what it meant to belong
in the world after empire.
!vi
Table of Contents
Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
Abstract v
Table of Contents vi
Introduction: The Violence of Belonging 1
Chapter I: “to see us as we see ourselves:” 27
John Tengo Jabavu, Empire, Colonial Belonging and the Public
Sphere”
Chapter II: Cape Town and the Black Modern 71
Chapter III: Black Cosmopolitans in Cape Town 107
Chapter IV: “A Home-Made Empire:” Race, Nation and Diaspora 150
in the Making of the Union of South Africa
Conclusion: “1936 - Fascism and the End of Liberal Citizenship” 199
Bibliography: 204
!1
Introduction: The Violence of Belonging

A Saturday evening, dark like any other, settles to a chilling stillness as you unleash
the chain to the gate to park the car. This is an old ritual by now. Simulating calmness,
you lax your shoulders, lean a little further in, breathing evenly and turning your head to
surveil the surrounds, slip the key into the lock - almost always locked from the inside -
and feel the unraveling of metal from metal. Beyond the gate there lies another held shut
by a pair of bricks. These you kick aside and let the inner gate gently swing itself open.
The bricks, trusted props, make their return to hold the gate open. You turn around and
walk assuredly toward the car. The only noise that cuts the air is the song of the trees
whispering the night. Halfway there.
This, this is a different night. The trees that so often resemble miniature people, a
soft choir of a silhouette in the distance, sing the taste for blood. There are shadows ap-
proaching. Shadows of people holding hands and hoisting weapons of famished rage. You
are the only one on this lonely street. You are the only one who will taste this rage. The
calm gives to fear. The night is hungry and the people who had turned their burning tires
and machetes against those deemed outsider flesh are fast approaching; a silent mob. You
were born here, but will they know that? You are the only one on the street. What will it
matter?
You are seized by panic. As your senses spiral into uncontrollable fear you head
back to the outer gate, abandoning the last ritual of return midway. Barely locking the
gate and the silent silhouettes imminent, you dash into the car and drive toward a safe
distance. You end up in your friend’s apartment in Melville halfway across town. She re-
ceives you in the dead of night, fearing for your life. You settle yourself down and finally
story opens up what has been. There was nothing different in the streets barely an hour
before. It narrowed to the same church-end that you know. The trees inched ever closer to
each other and at times merged into the form of crowds scattered in the distance. In any
other night they would have been trees leaning into each other in a narrowing street. The
violent gestalt that wrenched you so abruptly out of normalcy was a hallucination.
Earlier that day you marched the streets of Johannesburg with a few thousand
others, denouncing the theatre of violence that turned some into outsiders marked for
expulsion. The new diasporas of Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Nigeria, Kenya and other na-
tions had existed in an uncomfortable tangle of postcoloniality with the diminishing ro-
mance of Apartheid’s end. They were deterritorialized Africans without citizenship. They
were guests. And guests live on borrowed time and a hospitality that is tenuous and con-
tingent. Then the patience of those who belonged ran out on them. The guests were
making new homes. They were making new lives amidst the waning euphoria of the new
South Africa. Some had even married “our” women. The boundary between those who
belonged and those who endured their hospitality was becoming a blur. In an uncanny
way fixed and emergent postcolonialities were colliding. The specter of “failed African
states” was breeding their contagion into the “rainbow nation.” South Africa was being
swamped by Africans! To preserve the purity of the precarity of those who belonged “the
Africans” had to be dealt with. Then there came the explosion. People were pursued,
!2
rounded up and asked to provide proof of being South African. Those who failed the test
of belonging were thrown out of their homes and beaten. Some homes were burnt. Some
people were hacked. Some were burnt and left, like the said sell-outs of Apartheid’s nadir,
languishing in flames long enough to perish. It happened so suddenly for you. The Zim-
babwean neighbors who came and asked to leave their furniture and belongings at your
home for a few days wore faces of the terrified and shameful. They were not victims of
crime or anything of the sort. Their shame was not to belong or posses the skill to make
convincing appearances. Their belongings were safe but, now driven to a fugitive exis-
tence, where would they go if the night came for them? In the days you and your family
held these belongings the violence of belonging became apparent. You were inviolable
because the colonial borders that made South Africa almost a century before gave you the
privilege of citizenship after Apartheid’s demise.
You carry that uncanny passage of time in you. It is now a way of seeing the limits
of citizenship. Some years after the autumn of 2008 you will learn that of the people who
were assaulted many were in fact South African. They were either too dark in complex-
ion, belonged to suspect ‘ethnicities’ or spoke one of the less favored languages to pass for
‘real’ citizens. Their likeness to ‘Africans’ was often the telling difference. Belonging is skin
deep. That quiet evening of the march carried with it some bitter lessons. Before you
turned that last corner in your drive home, flames licked the sky in a near distant settle-
ment of shacks. You wondered then, were people burning too? Your strange hallucination
came after this. Perhaps the scenes that had changed the color of the television screen and
newspapers headlines leapt uncontrollably out of your mind now that you were under the
cover of darkness. Perhaps, after a day of moving in a crowd, you could only see in
crowds. It matters little. The uncanny gift of that hallucination - now that you sit and re-
flect from the luxury of gentrified Harlem in America’s “Empire State” - is knowing how
deadly the grammar of belonging can become.
Discordant Postcolonialities
Empire Unbound: Imperial Liberalism, Race and Diaspora in the Making of South Africa rep-
resents my attempts at working through the political unconscious of the events and en-
tanglements that I have briefly sketched above. In May of 2008 there erupted a series of
expulsions of ‘foreigners’ in various parts of South Africa. The attacks of 2008 which in-
cluded “the murder, rape, and looting directed at bodies and belongings of non-South
Africans” had, by the beginning of June, left more than 60 people dead.1 It was later con-
firmed that about a third of these people were South African. In the midst of discussions
about the violence something of a clear consensus emerged that what had transpired
owed itself to the xenophobia of some South Africans. For some, such as Thabo Mbeki,
then the country’s president, xenophobia talk masked the actions of “people who acted
1 Eric Worby, Shireen Hassim and Tawana Kupe, “Introduction: Facing the Other at the Gates of Democracy” in Go
Home or Die Here, (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008), pg. 1.