Struggles for Self-Determination: The Denial of Reactionary Statehood in Africa by Josiah Brownell

Abstract

Struggles for Self-Determination examines the sovereign claims of African counterrevolutionary nationalisms in Katanga, Rhodesia, Transkei, and Bophuthatswana. The book’s most important contribution is conceptual; Brownell takes the nationalist claims of these countries seriously, even though they were denied that legitimacy by international forums in their own time.Dominant nationalist historical narratives of African decolonization are entwined with the legacies of the anticolonial nationalist movements that became ruling postcolonial state governments.1 Therefore, understandings of African decolonization have relied on refuting the legitimacy of counterrevolutionary nationalisms that posited political alternatives to postcolonial nation-states. In addition, accounts of these counterrevolutionary nationalisms were often implicitly connected to notions of imperial nostalgia.2It is to Brownell’s credit that he charts a careful path between sympathy and denial of these nationalist claims. For these reasons, he is upfront about what his book is not—he is not making normative claims of legitimacy for these regions, he is not arguing that they were all the same, and he is not researching daily life of ordinary people in these regions (3–4). Instead, Brownell is concerned with the externalities of sovereignty—its performance and the pursuit of international recognition, especially when that pursuit requires circumnavigating official international forums (such as the United Nations). He discusses how these claimants tapped into “certain aesthetico-idological lineages designed to generate the maximum sympathy and support from particular overseas constituencies” (6).This focus on the performance of national sovereignty begs the question, who is writing these nationalist scripts?3 While Brownell highlights a fascinating cast of characters, the agency and the structural limits of these scriptwriters as African “nationalist” figures—people such as Moise Tshombe, Lucas Mangope, Kaiser Mantanzima or the Zulu leader Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi (an intellectually fascinating figure whose activities fall outside of the book’s scope)—are not central to his narrative. He instead focuses his book on what he sees as four common elements across the nationalist claims of Katanga, Rhodesia, Transkei, and Bophuthatswana—that they were responding to both decolonization and Pan-Africanism; that they utilized right-wing transnational networks; that they ideologically contested the role of ethnicity, race, and power in postcolonial Africa; and that they were viewed as threats by postcolonial African states.Tracing these common elements, a number of individuals appear repeatedly, people such as Selous Scout Ron Reid Daly, Rhodesian and Bophuthatswanan politician Rowan Cronje, and U.S.-Rhodesian lobbyist Kenneth Towsey. Drawing upon Pessemiers’ work on the adhoc forms of collaboration between white supremist Southern African regimes, Brownell is uncomfortable drawing direct strategic connections.4 In order to make the connections, he identifies that the three white post-imperials (Daly, Cronje, and Towsey) and others like them served as pivots between multiple counterrevolutionary nationalisms—a point that could be opened up to further exploration.Brownell’s loose chronology begins in 1960 with Katanga’s attempted secession from newly independent Congo-Léopoldville and the subsequent United Nations intervention, and ends in 1985 when international investors and cultural entrepreneurs decided to boycott the Sun City resort in Bophuthatswana. Chapters focus on the ideological framing of these nationalist claims, performances of sovereignty at home and abroad, and the utilization of culture and tourism as “soft power” in nationalist claims-making.The subject of chapter 7, the Bophuthatswanan Sun City resort serving as a hub for the cultural performance of reactionary statehood, is particularly intriguing. If this resort was a portal for international claims-making, what exactly was Bophuthatswana claiming to be? According to Brownell, Sun City “resided in an ambiguous zone. It was both a supposedly politics-free ‘pleasure dome’ and a stalking course for the normalization of” Bophuthatswana’s claim of independence (262). In a magazine advertising the resort, British Airways extolled the lack of racial segregation at Sun City where all guests “have an equal right to lose their money on the slot machines and at the roulette tables. The races mix on the dance floor, in the restaurants and at the shows” (273). However, by 1985 the global advocacy of the anti-apartheid movement successfully cast Bophuthatswana as a satellite to apartheid rather than independent, making it lose popularity as an international destination.It is noteworthy that Brownell takes a multidisciplinary approach, utilizing the archival methods of a historian and the thematic organization of a social scientist. His interventions on “sub-nationalisms” are imbedded in qualitative political science literature, particularly that of Jackson.5 A worthwhile study would be found in placing Brownell’s work in dialogue with scholarship in global international relations, particularly on South African contributions to the international legal-order that in the end denied recognition to the counterrevolutionary nationalisms chronicled in Brownell’s book.6By considering the nationalist aspirations of Katanga, Rhodesia, Transkei, and Bophuthatswana seriously and navigating between the poles of imperial nostalgia and anticolonial negation, Brownell has opened up avenues of future research. This reader came away from Struggles for Self-Determination looking forward to finding scholarship on the political thinking, writing, and positioning of counterrevolutionary nationalist leaders.7