![]() Marks’s work confirmed that precolonial southern Africa was not an “empty space” when Europeans penetrated into the interior. Although she highlights their great achievements in precolonial society, her conception of Africans under successive colonial, apartheid and democratic dispensations is of a people so downtrodden they have lost every sense of their identity and the capacity to imagine their own future. How do Africans see themselves how do they understand their circumstances how do they interpret their actions? Qunta’s conceptualisation of the African is strikingly different. They lambasted traditions of scholarship that did not put African agency in the foreground of analysis. Marks and Magubane were two of the critical voices of the 1970s. These two South Africanists, despite drawing from different historiographical traditions, shared at least one thing in common: they insisted that Africans are social actors making their own history, albeit not under conditions of their own choosing. The text strikes the right chords in its reference to some of the icons of the historiography of race, power and nationalism in South Africa, particularly Shula Marks and Ben Magubane. ![]() This is the tragedy of our post-apartheid condition, she argues. Structural and ideological racism affects institutional life and personal choices. ![]() Qunta does not shy away from the politics of hair - the straightening of curly hair and the wearing of wigs and weaves is described as a social pathology akin to what Frantz Fanon described as “the wish to be white”: a “neurotic situation” in a society where institutional power depends on the “inferiority complex” of the colonised.Įven as she turns to the more autobiographical material in the book, based on her professional life, Qunta relays one argument in no uncertain terms: we are not a nation because racism is perpetrated by whites and unchallenged by blacks. She provides numerous examples of how the beauty industry privileges whiteness, and thus encourages hazardous practices such as skin lightening. Qunta is also concerned with African forms of self-presentation, particularly among black women. What she sees ahead is conflagration, a violent eruption of racial war. We are locked, in her words, in “a ritual dance of deception: white entitlement and black docility, laced with resentment on both sides and occasional public eruptions”. In the book, she presents the argument that despite every effort at reconciliation by black South Africans, their white counterparts remain aloof and arrogant. Qunta’s roots are in the Black Consciousness Movement, and she served on various national platforms during Thabo Mbeki’s presidency. In her new book, Why We are Not a Nation, former SABC deputy chairperson Christine Qunta asks a pertinent question about deepening social schisms in South Africa, not least structural inequalities in the economy.
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