African Modernity and the Struggle for People's Power:

Abstract

Copyright © 2012 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA Populism has been a controversial term in South African public discourse in recent years precisely because it has been used as a tool in the lexical armoury of the combatants in the battle for the leadership of the ruling African National Congress. In order to understand why populism has been denigrated to great effect by the political, economic and social elite one has to have some idea of the historical resistance to popular democracy by African elites going back to the nineteenth century. The anti-populist streak has its antecedents in the social division that emerged among African people following their encounter with European modernity in the nineteenth century. At the end of the anti-colonial wars that lasted almost a hundred years between the end of the 18th century and the end of the nineteenth century, Africans found themselves divided between two groups: those who subscribed to the new religious and educational systems brought into the country by the European missionaries and those who rejected European ‘civilization’ as a bastardization of African culture. And because religion and education came to stand for what Ntongela Masilela calls the “facilitators of the entry into European modernity,”1 leadership became the preserve of what Du Bois called the “talented tenth.”2 To be sure, the social division started among Xhosa chiefs Ngqika (1778– 1829) and Ndlambe (died 1828) who stood for submission to and rebellion against European colonialism, respectively. Aligned to both chiefs were the prophet-intellectuals Ntsikana and Nxele. Ntsikana became possibly the single most influential individual in converting the Xhosa to Christianity. African Modernity and the Struggle for People’s Power: From Protest and Mobilization to Community Organizing