Apartheid isn’t the Question, Settler Colonialism is: Black South African Thought and the Critique of the International Left’s Apartheid Paradigm

It’s easier to imagine the end of apartheid than it is to imagine the end of settler colonialism. “Apartheid”—which the National Party first implemented in 1948 as the official policy of the “separate development” and segregation of races in South Africa—looms large in the global imagination of race, class and gender struggles. Despite the fact that the Dutch East India Company’s conquest of the Cape in 1652 is the genesis of three centuries of settler colonial warfare, land dispossession, genocide, slavery and indenture in what is now South Africa, apartheid’s relatively short 54 years of institutionalized segregation has become the dominant historical framework for analyzing South Africa’s long and complex racial history. This is to say, segregation comes long after the historical fact of settler colonial conquest. Apartheid, therefore, isn’t the question: settler colonialism is. Despite this fact, apartheid is overrepresented in racial discourse and historiography.

In “Apartheid isn’t the Question, Settler Colonialism is,” Chigumadzi argues that within the International Left’s discourse on apartheid, there’s a troubling tendency to think about Black South Africa and not with Black South Africans. The lecture, therefore, takes its point of departure from the generations of Black South African political activists, thinkers, philosophers, and historians—most notably from the Pan Africanist-Black Consciousness Tradition (also known as the Azanian Tradition of South Africa)—who have critiqued and contested apartheid as the paradigmatic historical framework and rejected the liberal notion that apartheid’s end—as opposed to the return of indigenous lands—is the object of the Black liberation struggle. The lecture analyzes the uses and limits of apartheid as an historical analytic framework both within South Africa, and as it has travelled across various political contexts in the world.