The Native Club is not an organisation, not does it have a membership. Yet it aims to mobilise South Africans to ensure that the ideas, philosophies, values and knowledge that propel society in a particular direction reflect the indigenous identity of our people, writes Titus Mafolo.
Voluminous texts have been written about the Native Club, what it represents and what it does not represent, who is eligible to be a member and who is not, with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) saying this is a 'foolish initiative'.
The Native Club is not an organisation and has no membership. It is a forum, led by a small committee that facilitates workshops, discussions and debates around different issues and will soon begin research around identified topics. It is a club that seeks to encourage on-going critical engagement, especially among blacks, around the many and varied matters confronting our transformation.
We seek to strengthen our democratic order by interrogating the philosophical framework within which we produce knowledge and within which certain ideas have become entrenched and dominant in our society. This is particularly critical because today, blacks in South Africa are responsible for around only 15% of knowledge production.
We have also identified the need to work with schools around debates, creative writing, research, drama and other extra mural activities to engender critical consciousness among young people. We will in the near future engage the Minister of Education and the MECs of education with this programme.
The main focus of the Native Club is the area of culture. Culture in this context refers to the totality of inherited ideas, beliefs, philosophies, assumptions, values and knowledge that propel society in a particular direction. Of particular importance is the space of knowledge production, which is in the hands of whites, the majority of whom adhere to a liberal ideology. We refer here to writing and production of books, tutorials, study materials and research work and the dissemination of all these knowledge materials. As in the economy, whites control and own the means of knowledge production and dissemination.
For instance, there is a big challenge for the rich knowledge in the hands of comrades to be translated into books. Yet, only a tiny minority among us has written about our own experiences in the struggle for liberation. As a result, young people have no actual and real references about the challenges that we faced as we prosecuted the struggle for freedom. Perhaps the problem is that we own the stories but we don't own the pen. The Native Club wants to ensure that comrades and blacks in general also own the pen.
The contest for the hegemony of the cultural space is consistent with the strategic objective of the ANC which is the liberation of blacks in general and Africans in particular. That liberation is not only political.
The transformation of the South African society stands on three pillars -politics, economy and culture. Since 1994, the political transition has advanced rapidly. The apartheid political edifice has been largely dismantled with most of the laws that underpinned the system repealed and the many apartheid structures replaced with democratic institutions. The judiciary is becoming more and more representative. The civil liberties of all citizens have been entrenched in the past twelve years and progress has been achieved in addressing the social needs of our people.
Participation in electoral processes is higher than the global average and all spheres of government have, to varying degrees, used izimbizo to ensure that the mass of our people have the possibility to be part of regular democratic engagements on matters that directly affect them. While challenges still remain, it is clearly in the area of politics where the national democratic revolution has made major strides.
Not surprisingly, the second pillar, the economy, poses more difficulties than that of politics. Twelve years after liberation the economy is still firmly in the hands of whites, most of whom continue to resist transformation of the economy and had to be dragged into the process of economic change through legislation.
Although there are laudable interventions in the economy, the jury is still out as to whether the existing measures are sufficient to radically change the ownership, control and management of the South African economy.
The third pillar in our transformation is that of culture. This is the whole space of the inherited ideas, belief systems, philosophies, assumptions, values and knowledge which constitute the shared basis of social action.
South Africa, like other former colonies, is dominated by ideas, beliefs, philosophies and assumptions emanating from the erstwhile colonial powers.
These range from religions such as Christianity to the ideologies of liberalism, social democracy and different shades of socialism.
The question confronting South Africans as we grapple with the challenge of identity, is, which of these beliefs and philosophies should define us? What world outlook should inform the moulding of a new South African? On what philosophies and assumptions should we base our values, ideas and knowledge? Many South Africans would readily seek to locate our transition somewhere between the existing dominant global ideologies - whether liberal, social democratic or socialist - and adopt a negative stance towards anyone suggesting the indigenisation of our revolution. In part, this is because both in apartheid-colonial education and propaganda as well as in the general teachings of the liberation movement there was, at worst, the denigration and, at best, the marginalisation of indigenous knowledge systems. Accordingly, the body of knowledge as represented by Ubuntu would generally be regarded as part of nativist thought that can only drag our country backwards.
Those who attempt to articulate Ubuntu are dismissed as anachronistic idealists. Yet, the priests and mullahs among us, also propagating millennia-old beliefs, are respected as representatives of civilised and accepted belief systems. Even comrades that are agnostics and materialists respectfully acknowledge Christianity, Islam and Judaism as religions, but African belief systems as superstitions. Accordingly, we should look no further for colonised minds that need, as Ngugi Wa Thiongo' says, decolonisation.
In 2002, during the ANC's Year of the Volunteer, ANC branches across the country embarked on letsema campaigns. But few of our cadres could explain what letsema was. All spheres of government have embarked on izimbizo and each year we hold one lekgotla after the other. Few, if any, among the cadres of the movement have attempted to understand and elaborate on these concepts, the totality of which constitute the philosophy and practice of Ubuntu.
There is no doubt that South Africa, even if it had not gone through colonialism and apartheid, would not have been immune from the pervasive influence of some of the major global philosophies and ideas of today.
As we know, China, Japan, India and Malaysia among other countries, could not escape the penetration of the various philosophies and ideologies of the world. Yet, the Chinese managed to indigenise socialism such that the Analects of Confucius have formed the basis of the Chinese belief system.
Chinese society is today underpinned by Confucianism as much as is driven by the combination of socialist ideology and the workings of the free market economy. Similarly, Japan has used Shintoist and Buddhist thoughts as the bedrock of their society even when they embraced western style democracy and a capitalist system.
Therefore, the Native Club argues that it is about time we look seriously into the elaboration and codifying of Ubuntu as a belief system, which encompasses among others the values of Batho Pele, self-empowerment as articulated in Vuku'zenzele, solidarity with the weak and the poor, selflessness, compassion, and collective work within an egalitarian society.
Just as many belief systems have discarded their obsolete aspects, there is no way in which reactionary parts of the African belief systems can survive.
The Native Club urges more of the cadres of our movement to be part of the intellectual engagements that would systematically identify, disaggregate and elaborate the elements and principles of Ubuntu and infuse these into our policies. Already, we tinker with some of them. Hence, we convene makgotla and izimbizo, we embark on letsema campaigns and call on our people to be driven by the ethos of Batho Pele. It is wrong to leave the meaning of these and other principles of Ubuntu to incorrect interpretations leading to further distortions of our history, culture and traditions.
But we can only do this effectively if we contest and wrestle the space of culture, especially knowledge production, from the hands of a minority in our society.
It cannot be that an initiative that contests the terrain of knowledge production and culture is labelled 'foolish'. Is it better that thousands of comrades that are teachers should continue to teach using knowledge based on assumptions and belief systems that are inconsistent with their own identity as Africans? Except for many African countries, most nations of the world have their own indigenous identity even when they embrace socialist or capitalist systems.
Although the Native Club is not membership based, we have set ourselves the task of mobilising the black intelligentsia to contest this arena of culture. People would choose and pick the programmes they think offers them space for engagements. This we welcome. As in the past, invitations to engagements would normally be made through newspaper adverts.
Titus Mafolo is a founding member of the Native Club.
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