Until his retirement in 2024, John Comaroff was Hugh K. Foster Professor of African and African American Studies and Anthropology at Harvard University; before that, he served until 2012 as Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He studied at the University of Cape Town (B.A., 1966) and earned his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics in 1973.
His research focuses on South Africa, especially crime, statehood, democracy, political economy, and questions of ethnicity, identity, religion, and culture in Africa. 

While this occasion, this Centenary celebration*, is focused on the historical legacy of Tata Madiba – as we like to call him in South Africa – I should to like to engage only orthogonally and indirectly with that aspect of Nelson Mandela-as-biography. This is not out of a lack of respect for the heroism of the man or his historic role. Above all, it is because I prefer not to reduce the South African past, present, and future – let alone a protracted anticolonial struggle, fought in a number of registers by many different historical actors – to yet another Big Man mytho-history. Which is what the New York Times did on the day of Madiba’s passing in a banner that screamed, Conqueror of Apartheid Dies – thus to erase, in a classically American liberal gesture, all the complexities of a long, as yet radically incomplete, march to freedom.

Rather, I should like to treat Mandela as a shifting signifier, a mythic figure on whose person the passage from one historical epoch to another was played out. And, as such, the figure in whom all the arguments arising out of the disjunctures between those epochs, all the contradictions produced by an unresolved dialectic between them, have come to be invested. Put in bald terms, Mandela’s release and the end of formal apartheid came at the time when the world was itself undergoing a metamorphosis away from the era of industrial capitalism and its inscription in either the liberal democratic nation-state or its communist antitheses, the era of empire and colonialism, the era of Keynesianism and development grounded in the telos of modernization, the era of the old international order, the era in which the fight against inequality was taken to be the proper object of class/race politics, mass mobilization, and leftist social praxis. It was during the late years of that era that liberation wars, conforming to the ideological contours of the day, were framed in the terms of two-stage revolutions: the first, pitted against colonialism, the second against racial capitalism. This second revolution, of course, is what was written into the text of the Freedom Charter of 1955. And, in 1994, with the end of the ancien regime, into the postcolonial promise of a Better Life for All, a life governed by a constitution committed to social justice, equality, dignity. It was the promise personified in and by Nelson Mandela.

*The “Centenary celebration” refers to the roundtable “After Mandela: Citizenship, Generation and Historical Time,” held at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) on July 18, 2018, to commemorate the Nelson Mandela centenary and Mandela Day. John Comaroff participated in the panel alongside Achille Mbembe, Sarah Nuttall, and Jean Comaroff, and offered the present text in that context.

Trouble is that the world had changed radically: a stealthy, creeping twist to the right – to wit, an altogether different sort of revolution – had ushered in a New Global Order, the Age commonly referred to as Neoliberal, itself a slippery, polysemic signifier, which embraces a range of diverse diacritica: market fundamentalism; the displacement of industrial by finance capital; the erasure of the welfare state by the corporate state, itself increasingly the object of capture, privatization, and rentier government; seismically rising inequality; the move from class struggle to identity and social movement politics; and the treatment of all sociality, all biography, as motivated by enlightened selfinterest and cost-benefit calculation on the part of “responsibilized, self-caring individuals.” As most scholars know, this is the world as typified by Foucault in his famous lectures of 1978-9. It is also what gave us Thatcher and Reagan – leading genealogically to Trump – and the pressures exercised on Africa by structural adjustment, pressures that led the ANC to give up on many of the clauses of the Freedom Charter and move towards policies of deregulation, privatization, casualization, and techno-politics amidst a dramatically shrinking labor market and a fracturing manufacturing economy – albeit not entirely, course. The country still has a social benefits regime well in excess of many others across the planet.

Put another way, as we have said before, South Africa attained its liberation at the moment of (neo)liberalization. And here’s the rub: most the expectations of the new regime were founded on fashioning a free country as if it were to take up its proper place in the old liberal modernist, party-democratic, nation-statist, developmentalist, preglobalization world order, expectations that Madiba came to represent – even if, in reality, he was a much more complex political figure than this suggests. Hence the investment of hope in him, which remains widespread among those who continue to sustain their faith in the modernist conception of the good life and the proper means to attain it. But Madiba’s Second Coming, his proto-messianic return after his carceral crucifixion, happened also to coincide with the end of the epoch for whose highest aspirations he had come to stand.

The new global age, patently, shook the foundations of post-apartheid South Africa before it was even born. Since I hardly need reiterate what we all know about the neoliberal turn and the rise of millennial capitalism, let me speak of just two things that converge in the arguments over Mandela’s historical persona, his capacity to signify disjuncture across epochs: historical time and generation. 

First, time. Neoliberal temporality, it is becoming commonplace to note, is quite different from its liberal modernist predecessor, although traces of the latter do of course persist. It is a sense of time that refuses Grand Narratives, Grand Theory, Hegelian teleologies; one in which the long term, save in the form of future-as-fantasy, collapses into the continuous present; in which, indeed, in the domain of finance, “futures” – totally detemporalized, purely imaginary abstractions – are bought and sold in the here-and-now; in which, as Nietzsche would have predicted, the past becomes increasingly irrelevant, as it has to younger generations in most places. This sense of ahistorical time backgrounds duration and linearity, and any hint of cyclicity, in favor – recalling Bachelard’s “temporal duality” – of the primacy of the instantaneous, of discontinuity and disruption, thus to explode entirely “the continuum of historical time.” Which, incidentally, echoes the new hegemony of economic vitalism, which, nowadays, is taken to depend on rupture, on breaking molds not investment in the long run. The five year plan is dead, corporate success is measured in the next balance sheet. Similarly, religious, cultural, and informational economies, with their rapid turnover, their abbreviated attention spans, their quick-fire obsolesence, their inscription in the electronic commons, social media, and digital immediacy. And political life, which, under neoliberal rationalities, increasingly erases what has gone before in the name of new kinds of legitimacy – often imported from the corporate sector – and promises instant resolution of structural impossibilities: like “jobs for all,” or a “return to greatness” totally unanchored in reality. I shall return to this in a moment. Hold the thought.

For now, the other matter: generation, to which Jean has also already alluded. Two decades ago, we argued that, nowadays, the most palpable line of fissure in South Africa and many places besides is generation, which we referred to as “the class of 2000;” the site into which class and its anxieties were increasingly displaced. Whereas Marxists had argued for the fusion of class into race under colonial capitalism, under neoliberalism, it too had metamorphosed, and was no longer experienced as the basis of discrimination and inequality – despite still being a critical line of structural fissure. Instead, largely due to changes in the workings of capital and its new labor regime, it was young black South Africans, largely male, who felt most acutely the downsides of economic change, found it difficult to earn a steady income, marry, and graduate into full adulthood – thus remaining trapped, as “youth,” in a generational limbo; it was, is, on their bodies and souls that the crisis of reproduction had become, and remains, palpable. (This is true also in much of the USA and Europe.) Nor is it just the poor: high school and university graduates also look out at the world and see upcoming precarity: for many, no jobs or insecure ones. Neither does ascent into middle class status resolve anything much: in neoliberal times that status is measured less by asset value than by the capacity to leverage debt, putting personal disaster just one reverse, one misfortune, away. The class of 2000 – in sum, the concrete abstraction we know as generation, sociologically embodied in (typically racialized) “youth” – finds itself in a world in which its elders appear to have been secured by a past that has receded into the mythic, a past irrecuperable for them. What is more, they are a fast rising proportion of the population at large across all of Africa, one that, as Jean pointed out, is increasingly conscious of itself as a social category, both an and fur sich. As she said, too, “youth” have, throughout modern history, been treated ambivalently: at once as a generative, creative, vital force for the production of futures AND as unruly, potentially dangerous, rule-breaking, irrational, not yet.... This ambivalence persists – in many places ever more so – adding a decided edge to youthful politics, its immediacy, its immanence, its impatience. Which returns us to time...

Captured by the historical antitime of the neoliberal moment, the time of disruption and the instant, for many members of this generation the idea of waiting, of a long run, of a teleological imagination makes little sense. Nor could it. The time of Mandela has become meaningless except by its refusal, its repudiation as an oppressive anachronism, a signifier of the political failure to deliver the millennial promise. My African American colleague, sociologist Lawrence Bobo, has made the argument for the political value, in the USA, of black rage as a positive political instrument. In South Africa, that rage, albeit highly controversial, has also evinced a capacity to move the political realm. I shall not enter into the controversies occasioned by it, except to say this. It is all very well either to express rage or to decry it. But it is much more critical to understand it, to grasp the historical conditions – the disjunctures and ruptures and unresolved dialectics – which have given rise to it. If the Mandela legacy is not simply to be a political Rorschach, as Rebecca Davis wrote in the Daily Maverick, a hagiographic slate onto which anyone and everyone might write their political claims, promises, and hopes, then perhaps the “meaning of Mandela,” to use Mandla Langa’s term, is to make sense of why it is that, for some, that meaning lies in “nostalgia about the Madiba era,” for others it lies in “the value to be hewed from a deepening social crisis”; this amidst “a sense that,” in South Africa, “something [is] struggling to burst forth.” Just as Mandela was the ultimate icon of a struggle past, maybe his value in the present lies in being the spectral ancestor around whom the argument for the South African future might proceed.

The general point, in conclusion, is that the passage from one epoch to another, marked by the disjunctures embodied in the contested figure of Mandela, has been productive of ideological conflicts in which, ideal-typically at least, generations show an elective affinity – if I may appropriate Max Weber – for taking on contrasting, clashing senses of time and citizenship, of presence and futures – and, hence, political dispositions to think and act in different ways. In this light, perhaps the true legacy of Mandela lies in a dialectic of provocation: the provocation of an argument, generationally framed in the first instance – but, let’s hope, not in the last – about how to make a new world, a new South Africa, and, albeit ironic in the face of what I have said, a new sense of future built not on an anti-history but – in honor as much of Fanon and Cesaire, Biko and Hani as Mandela – a new kind of consciousness tailored to the age in which we now live. Perhaps that is what is needed, by way of challenge, to begin to “open another space in politics, a space that has hitherto been unthinkable” in the cause of a new natality, a re-generation.

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Davis, Rebecca; Nelson Mandela’s Legacy: The Rorschach Test for South Africa’s Politicians
Daily Maverick, 17 July 2018

Langa, Mandla; Reclaiming Mandela: Sunday Times (South Africa), 15 July, pp.17-18.

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Further reading on South Africa at Literatur.Review:

All Gomorrahs Are The Same
A Socio-critical overview of  trajectories of the ‘South African novel’, 2020 – 2023

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