[In the following essay, Visser expounds on the development of postcolonial theories in South Africa in response to the abolition of apartheid, comparing current trends in postcolonial theory to a previously articulated theory called “Colonialism of a Special Type” (CST) and cautions against adopting a theory of definition that would in effect repeat the shortcomings of CST, thus limiting a true revitalization of South African literary and cultural practices.]

Readers familiar with South African ideological debates of the 1970s and 1980s will have recognized the allusion in the title of this essay. Since I have no wish to baffle the uninitiated, what the title echoes is a theory called ‘Colonialism of a Special Type’ or, as it came to be known, CST. I begin by referring to CST out of a concern that the South African reception and circulation of theories of postcoloniality risk reinstating certain inadequacies of that earlier theoretical description of South Africa's political and cultural make-up.

A document entitled ‘The Road to South African Freedom: Programme of the South African Communist Party’, published in 1963, inaugurated CST as a theory which held that the structure of the South African economic and social order was in all essentials identical with the relationship between a colonial power and its colony. A key passage in the manifesto claims that although South Africa may not be strictly speaking a colony but an independent country, nevertheless

masses of our people enjoy neither independence nor freedom. The conceding of independence to South Africa by Britain in 1910 […] was designed in the interests of imperialism. Power was transferred not into the hands of the masses of the people of South Africa, but into the hands of the minority alone. The evils of colonialism, insofar as the non-White majority was concerned, [were] perpetuated and reinforced. A new type of colonialism was developed, in which the oppressing White nation occupied the same territory as the oppressed people themselves and lived side by side with them.

‘Non-White South Africa’, the document goes on to say, ‘is the colony of White South Africa itself.’¹

As a description of apartheid South Africa, CST, which was endorsed as official policy by the African National Congress (ANC) at its Consultative Conference in 1969, is not without a measure of persuasive sense.² Had an outsider with little knowledge of South Africa asked for a succinct account of what the country was like, CST would have served quite well, as it does for instance in a remark by the South African novelist and critic J. M. Coetzee that after 1948 ‘white South Africans graduated to uneasy possession of their own, less and less transigent internal colony’.³ Nevertheless, whatever its value as an informal, impressionistic description, as a serious analytical and explanatory model CST obscures as much as it reveals.

Since the South African appropriation of postcolonial theory stands to recirculate certain errors of CST, it would be worthwhile briefly stating some of the more significant failings of CST at the outset. CST assumes that we can understand oppression and exploitation in South Africa as a version of the colonial oppression and exploitation of poor countries by rich ones. In so focusing on what they thereby choose to understand as essentially a relation between ‘nations’ or ‘peoples’, the adherents of CST deliberately subordinate class relations, asserting instead that domination and exploitation in South Africa take place between groups defined as racial or national in composition. CST further assumes a uniformity of interest and experience among all such ‘colonially’ oppressed people in South Africa: all who are other than white are thought to experience oppression and exploitation equally, and this shared experience of colonial subordination supposedly leads to a fundamentally racial identity and an accompanying thoroughgoing convergence of interests and aspirations. There are several shortcomings in such a conception. For one thing, there is no reason to suppose that all who suffer domination do so equally: even in pre-1994 South Africa, people who were other than white but were also middle-class were able, within limits, to escape forms and intensities of oppression and exploitation that working-class people and the urban and rural poor were not able to escape. In addition, there is no reason to believe that even if domination was experienced equally, that state of affairs would necessarily lead to a shared identity: middle-class blacks might well experience oppression principally as a ‘racial’ matter, while workers in mining and industry might experience it more along the lines of class exploitation. Moreover, there is in fact little reason to imagine that all members of a given category, or all people occupying a similar social and political position, ‘experience’ their situation in an identical manner, and furthermore no reason to believe that even if identical experience could be granted it could be assumed to bring about a uniform outcome. Anyone who has grown up with siblings is likely to have good reason to doubt that identical formative circumstances necessarily produce identical personal outcomes.⁴

Finally, even if adherents of CST were able to persuade us that South Africa really is, or was, in all essentials like a colonial situation, that would not provide indisputable grounds for substituting racial or national for class relations. The colonial relation itself has a crucial class component, as Charles Bettelheim succinctly argues:

Because the concept of exploitation expresses a production relation—production of surplus labour and expropriation of this by a social class—it necessarily relates to class relations (and a relation between ‘countries’ is not and cannot be a relation between classes).⁵

For Bettelheim, then, the view that colonialism is fundamentally a relation between rich and poor ‘countries’ or ‘nations’ misleads ‘because it suppresses the social relations’ (p. 301). A climactic moment in Sembene Ousmane's God's Bits of Wood, a novel rather bewilderingly classified as ‘postcolonial’ by some recent critics, captures the same crucial distinction. Near the end of the novel, when the railway strike that constitutes its central action is finally being negotiated, Dejean, the French director of the railway, interrupts one of the strikers' representatives, Lahbib, to exclaim:

‘I know that pack of lies—I've heard it all before! You are led by a bunch of Bolsheviks, and you are sitting there insulting a great nation and a great people!’

‘Monsieur le directeur,’ Lahbib said, ‘you do not represent a nation or a people here, but simply a class. We represent another class, whose interests are not the same as yours. We are trying to find a common meeting ground, and that is all.’⁶

Assumptions about shared experience, about the supposed convergence of interests among all who are not white, and about shared racial subjectivity—the assumption, that is, that identity or subjectivity in South Africa is fundamentally racial—have been central features of CST. They are also key features of postcolonial theory in South Africa, and within that theory they carry the same questionable entailments.

Although a few South African critics were alert to metropolitan developments in colonial discourse theory and latterly in notions of postcoloniality as early as the late 1980s, what is notable is the extraordinary burgeoning of developments over the past couple of years. South Africa has seen a dramatic proliferation of institutional venues and publications devoted to postcolonial inquiry of one sort or another. Undergraduate and graduate courses, and even entire graduate degree programmes with titles such as ‘Colonial Discourse and Postcoloniality’, have sprung up at various universities; the Association of University English Teachers of Southern Africa held its 1995 annual conference on the theme ‘Postcolonial Perspectives: Tradition and Renewal in South African Culture’; a conference to be held next year will carry the title ‘Shakespeare—Postcoloniality—Johannesburg 1996’ (an intriguing collocation); South African journals such as Current Writing, Journal of Literary Studies, and AlterNation devote increasing prominence and even special issues to the topic. At the same time social and historical studies in South Africa are becoming embroiled in debates over issues raised by postmodernist and postcolonial challenges.⁷

This flurry of activity raises an obvious question: why is this happening or, more precisely, why is it happening now? One answer would be that we are merely witnessing the usual time-lag between metropolitan developments and their reception on the periphery, and to some extent that is probably the case. There seems clearly, however, to be something more at work here. South Africa, those seizing on postcoloniality are in effect saying, is now, at long last, postcolonial. To say that would seem to presume that South Africa became so only with the democratic elections and installation of the first post-apartheid (a term that has been surprisingly overshadowed by ‘post-colonial’) government in 1994. And what that presumes is that CST was right all along: South Africa remained, until that watershed moment, a colonial society. Even CST, however, in its more restrained formulations, claimed only that the state of affairs in South Africa was strongly analogous to colonialism, that colonialism provided a useful analytical tool for understanding South Africa ‘at one level’, as Joe Slovo, to whom can probably be ascribed much of the original theorizing behind CST, once conceded.⁸ What conference organizers and journal editors and the like have in mind, however, is no mere analogy and certainly no restriction to one analytical level but a statement, indeed a celebration, of fact: ‘We were colonial; now we are postcolonial.’

This more factually asserted ‘now’ is not without interesting difficulties. Any celebration of ‘now’ entails that ‘postcolonial’ is, if only inter alia, seriously intended as a historical or temporal term, referring to aspects or features of societies once colonial but no longer so. If it is not seriously intended as a temporal term, then of course there is no basis for South African adherents of postcolonial theory to be celebrating their new postcoloniality. Since they evidently do want to celebrate, we might want to pause to question the adequacy of their dating of the moment of transition from colonial to postcolonial. The transition that occurred in South Africa between 1990 and 1994 is not the only, not even, for those who do not subscribe to CST, necessarily the most convincing occasion for dating the end of colonial rule over South Africa. There is 1910 and the creation of Union; or 1931 and the Statute of Westminster; or 1960-61 and departure from the Commonwealth and declaration of the Republic. To complicate the picture further, large numbers of white Afrikaans-speaking South Africans quite explicitly hailed the National Party victory in the election of 1948 as the moment colonialism ended. As Annamaria Carusi suggests, for Afrikaners postcoloniality, ‘as a desirable state of affairs, [had] been accomplished […] in a most successful manner’.⁹ And, finally, we should not overlook the historical irony, grotesque though it was, that the puppet leaders of the South African ‘homelands’ hailed the granting of homeland ‘independence’ as the end of colonial rule by South Africa. The question of fixing the postcolonial moment is a minor point, but it lays bare the confusion underlying much work being done under the rubric of postcoloniality in South Africa.

Celebrations of South Africa's (putative) new postcoloniality—‘fresh out of the box’, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu declared of Nelson Mandela the day before his inauguration—can lead to confusion on another score as well, in so far as they threaten to obscure an important consideration: given such things as ties to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and dependence on foreign capital, how ‘independent’, how truly post-colonial (the hyphenated form here is deliberate), is South Africa really, leaving aside purely formal conceptions of national independence? Does ‘postcolonial’, with its celebratory overtones, not occlude certain things that ‘neocolonial’ more accurately highlights? What exactly is it, then, that advocates of postcolonial theory are celebrating? Examining the particular appropriation of postcolonial theory in South Africa will go some way towards supplying an answer to that question.

Theresa Dovey, in her The Novels of J. M. Coetzee, published in mid-1988, was among the first South African based academics to publish work directly informed by postcolonial theory; her final chapter draws on Homi Bhabha, Simon During and Gayatri Spivak to add a postcolonial dimension to her generally Lacanian analysis of Coetzee's work.¹⁰ Dovey provides little commentary on the postcolonial theorists she cites, apparently accepting their ideas and analyses as self-evidently true; her easy receptivity, however, is something of an exception. Since Dovey's work appeared, others have tended to question the efficacy of the theory at some level or other. As has been the case elsewhere, responses to postcolonial theory in South Africa have ranged from enthusiastic embrace to qualified approval to sweeping rejection, the last arising from both traditionalist and radical positions. Two South African critics, Leon de Kock and David Attwell, have shown especially strong commitment to postcolonial thought and have endeavoured to establish its position firmly in South African intellectual debates. Their work displays some of the most salient features of this most recent South African appropriation of metropolitan theory.

In two recent articles, de Kock has set out to clear space for postcolonial theory in South African literary and cultural studies.¹¹ In both articles, he is concerned to defend postcolonial theory from attack by various South African critics. The particular occasion for the first, entitled ‘Postcolonial Analysis and the Question of Critical Disablement’, is a keynote address delivered by Malvern van Wyk Smith at a conference of the Association of University Teachers of Southern Africa in 1991. Writing as a staunch liberal pluralist made uneasy by the more inflationary statements customary in current theory, Smith worries that postcolonial theory, especially in what he sees to be its overriding concern with ‘othering’, rules out any effective contribution to the study of colonial societies by white critics and literary historians—hence de Kock's reference to ‘disablement’ in his title.

The validity or otherwise of Smith's anxiety about disablement is of less interest in the present context than are the ways in which de Kock responds to his challenge. According to de Kock, Smith attacks not a proper version of postcolonial theory, but merely a straw-man version. He is not, however, alleging that Smith misunderstands the work of postcolonial theorists; rather, Smith allegedly errs in insisting on emphasizing what de Kock repeatedly calls the ‘hard’ version of postcolonial theory. This ‘hard’ form of the theory, and not some flatly erroneous grasp of it, is the straw man to which de Kock vigorously objects. What is puzzling about this emerges the moment one considers the substance and origins of this ‘hard’ version. After all, in so far as Smith accurately sets out the ‘hard’ version (and de Kock nowhere suggests Smith is being inaccurate), he is dealing with the actual positions of postcolonial theorists. Smith did not, in other words, invent the ‘hard’ version: he derived it from the work of theorists working in the field. Moreover, this version is the one associated with the most prominent originators and practitioners of the theory. Smith's error, according to de Kock, is not that he does not know the theory, but that he takes it too seriously, believing that the theorists he reads actually mean what they say and that the theory, in a significant way, derives from and rests on what they have said. One might want to dispute Smith's understanding of the theorists whose work he cites and to question the conclusions he draws from his reading, but that is not de Kock's criticism. ‘Hard’ postcolonial theory is as firmly rejected by de Kock as it is by Smith; only de Kock asserts the existence of, and wishes to retain, a version free of ‘hardness’.

Reservations regarding ‘hard’ versions of current theory proliferate through the essay as de Kock seeks to distinguish the theoretical position he advocates from ‘hard’ versions not only of postcolonial theory but also of poststructuralism (pp. 51, 59), deconstruction (p. 60), and postmodernism (p. 53). In each case, however, the ‘hard’ version appears to be that which contains the most decisive and provocative, not to say the most centrally distinguishing, assumptions and conclusions. De Kock seeks a deconstruction without most of Derrida or de Man, a poststructuralism without most of Foucault or Lacan, a postmodernism without most of Lyotard or Baudrillard; just as he appears to seek a postcolonial theory without most of Spivak or Bhabha. What is unclear is just what remains after such substractions, and why anyone would want to advocate the remainder.

De Kock begins the essay by declaring his wish to retain the term and concept ‘postcolonial’, even though he is aware of some of the confusion surrounding them, and some of the critiques that have appeared. As his argument develops, however, the concept takes on ever wider and more baffling implications. Citing Henry Louis Gates's critique of poststructuralist conceptions of the subject, de Kock asserts that Gates nevertheless ‘speaks as a postcolonial critic’; he goes on to describe Gates as ‘writing with a decided postcolonial political affiliation’, and with ‘a voice from within the ranks of critics located in “postcolonial” space’ (pp. 52-53. We might ask what import we are to attach to the quotation marks around ‘postcolonial’ in the last expression.) Similarly, Kumkum Sangari is seen as ‘another notable example’ of those located in this postcolonial space, even though the work de Kock cites is a strongly argued critique of some of the central implications of postcolonial theory (p. 53). And, finally, the work of the noted South African writer and critic Njabulo Ndebele is effortlessly absorbed into postcolonial studies as well, on the grounds that, even though he nowhere shows any interest in or awareness of the theory, nevertheless ‘the space from which Ndebele as a black South African critic must work is undeniably “postcolonial”’ (p. 57; note again the quotation marks). This extraordinarily capacious ‘space’, which can stretch from India to the United States to South Africa, is not, for all that, sufficient to include Annamaria Carusi, a South African theorist whose work de Kock discusses in the same context as Gates and Sangari, and whose reservations about postcolonial theory are much the same as theirs. Nowhere is it suggested that Carusi might be included within postcolonial space. Indeed, the closer one looks at de Kock's discussion, the more one is led to conclude that the principal constituent of postcolonial space is race. Gates, whose ‘space’, after all, in a very important sense is Harvard, is, somehow by definition it seems, postcolonial tout court; Carusi, producing her work at the University of South Africa, is, somehow by definition, not. What, apart from race, is doing the distinguishing here? And where might de Kock place himself in relation to this ‘space’?

A tendency to essentialize race notoriously underlies much postcolonial thought, especially in its earliest articulations. Latterly, however, many of the theory's more sophisticated adherents have recognized the tendency and have sought to offset it. In his preferred, presumably ‘soft’, version of the theory, de Kock is quite unembarrassed about the tendency. He commends Gates, for instance, for defending the notion of an ‘assertive black identity’ against ‘the silencing force of deconstructive logic’, and quotes approvingly his effort ‘to define […] black subjectivity’ (p. 52). It may be the case that CST theorists and postcolonial theorists would account very differently for the formation of identity or subjectivity, the former stressing experience, and the latter the constituting power of discourse, but for both camps South African identity and subjectivity are fundamentally racial. De Kock makes this underlying compatibility between CST and postcolonial theory explicit in a note at the conclusion of the essay in which he briefly describes CST, the validity of which he apparently accepts without reservation, since he goes on to state: ‘Theories of postcoloniality in present-day South Africa would have to rely on a similar argument’ (p. 65 n. 2). If de Kock ignores some of the efforts within postcolonial theory to avoid granting essential standing to race, he nevertheless accurately reflects the preoccupation with race. Postcolonial theorists may insist that racial identity is always constructed, but the identity constructed is always somehow racial.

In his second essay, ‘Reading History as Cultural Text’, de Kock covers much of the same ground. This time, the challenge to which he is responding comes not from a liberal pluralist but from a more politically radical position. But however much the radicals (myself and a person writing a satirical column in the Southern African Review of Books under a nom de plume) may criticize postcolonial theory from a standpoint substantially different from Smith's, we are said to commit the same offence; that is, we allegedly set up a straw-man version of postcolonial theory and attack that. For all that we have supposedly identified merely a straw-man target, de Kock readily concedes that ‘many writers from within “Post” positions have indeed committed excesses to justify’ criticism; such criticism, however, is relevant only to the ‘straw-man version’. Anyone who engages in such criticism is merely the sort of critic who ‘seeks to hold anyone who adopts “Post” positions to the “strong” postmodernist attitude’ (p. 68; note the shift from ‘hard’ to ‘strong’). Here again, the straw-man version is not some invention of the critics but, rather, a ‘strong’ version de Kock explicitly associates with Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha (p. 68). What de Kock advocates in place of such apparently dubious authorities is a postcolonial theory based on a ‘weak form of postmodernism’ espoused by Judith Squires (p. 69), once again a postmodernism without the troubling presence of its seminal figures and their most salient theoretical assertions.

In this later essay de Kock is clearer about what he seeks to do with his ‘soft’ or ‘weak’ form of postcolonial theory. Throughout the essay he is concerned to resist any ‘strong’ poststructuralist or postcolonial position which ‘implies a denigration of reference to a world which is palpably real, and one in which values still matter’ (p. 69). He defends an entirely realist philosophical position, which squares oddly with much that is central in poststructuralist and postmodernist thought (p. 70), and he insists on the availability of ‘certain rules of reliability and credibility [which] serve to enhance a historical narrative's purchase on extra-discursive reality’ (p. 72). What de Kock is unwilling to sacrifice to ‘strong’ poststructuralist or postcolonial theory is access to historical inquiry. He therefore finds it necessary to counter the epistemological scepticism associated with postmodernist and poststructuralist conceptions of history, the sort of scepticism expressed particularly emphatically in South Africa by Coetzee, who once argued:

I reiterate the elementary and rather obvious point I am making: that history is not reality; that history is a kind of discourse; that a novel is a kind of discourse too, but a different kind of discourse; that in our culture, history will, with varying degrees of forcefulness, try to claim primacy, claim to be a master-form of discourse, just as people like myself will defend themselves by saying that history is nothing but a certain kind of story that people agree to tell each other.¹²

Against such a position, de Kock (somewhat contradictorily, since later in the same paragraph he insists on the existence of ‘ascertainable events’) asserts that, despite ‘the argument that “history” is discourse and not event, one should not subscribe to a hopelessly relativistic position of absolute indeterminacy’ (p. 72; here again the quotation marks invite reflection). Coetzee's ‘nothing but’ would presumably constitute the sort of indeterminacy de Kock sees as threatening to undermine the possibility of inquiring into ‘notions of value and justice’ (p. 71).

David Attwell is in many respects a more adroit critic and theorist than de Kock, but their projects, including insistence on the possibility of serious historical inquiry, are much the same. Like de Kock, Attwell is eager to rescue a core of postcolonial theory from the critiques to which it has been subjected. Both theorists largely endorse critiques which seek merely to purge postcolonial theory of some of its more sweeping implications; they are quick, however, to defend the theory from more comprehensive critiques, especially those stemming from politically radical theoretical positions. Attwell's interest in what, following the political vocabulary of Western media, we might think of as a ‘centrist’ or ‘moderate’ version of postcolonial theory is made clear in the penultimate footnote to his recently published book on Coetzee, in which he commends Benita Parry for challenging ‘some of the excesses of colonial discourse analysis’.¹³ Attwell has been interested in ‘moderate’ versions of current theory for some time. In an earlier version of what became one of the chapters in his book on Coetzee, he spoke of seeking a way that would ‘make it possible to see the resources of postmodernism as enabling, rather than undermining, an historical engagement’.¹⁴ In a suitably ‘moderate’ version of postcolonial theory he discovers a theoretical paradigm that seems to him to provide just such an approach: ‘Postcoloniality’, he writes, ‘has become a privileged site […] for theorizing and examining tensions and links between poststructuralism and historical discourses.’¹⁵

Unlike de Kock, Attwell is too attuned to current theory to essentialize race, at least explicitly; however, he is no less emphatic that any analysis of South Africa must be based primarily on race rather than on class. Thus, in his book on Coetzee he says, somewhat obscurely: ‘Although class factors are […] in evidence within black intellectual circles as well, race is a crucial determinant, perhaps the final determinant, of the social composition of intellectual life’ (p. 24). Even in context the precise import of this statement is not entirely clear. What is clear is the insistence on the primacy of race in South Africa. This insistence is further revealed in an interview he recently conducted with Homi Bhabha, which he included in the special issue he edited of Current Writing devoted to postcolonial theory. Throughout the interview, Attwell seems intent on inducing Bhabha to disparage the idea that class might be central to cultural and political analysis. Eventually, just in case the point might be insufficiently highlighted, he asks: ‘So class is one agency among others?’, to which Bhabha satisfyingly answers: ‘One agency among others.’ After some prompting by Attwell to discuss South African writing, about which Bhabha at first seems hesitant to speak, he finally makes the remark Attwell seems to have been waiting for, and which he quotes prominently in the introduction to the special issue:

Both at the political level and in terms of fictional writing, South Africa represents, in […] an acute and tragic and problematic way, the opportunity to actually see transformative elements at work in the construction of a new historic destiny, where the question of race and cultural difference is foregrounded.¹⁶

This is hardly the place to review the complex debates over the relative significance of race and class in South African history and society. Of concern here is what an insistent valorizing of race enables adherents of CST, and latterly of postcolonial theory, to highlight in their discussions, and what to leave occluded. As Attwell makes clear throughout his book on Coetzee, an emphasis on race accords with a focus on the relation of literature to intellectual and cultural contexts and on what he calls ‘the discursive conditions obtaining in South Africa’, rather than, say, on the relation of literature to political currents or social relations or material conditions within society.¹⁷ Since Attwell seeks not to avoid reference to political and social contexts altogether but merely to subsume such considerations into ‘discursive conditions’, what we have is a difference in emphasis rather than in kind. It is nevertheless a decisive difference. About discursive practices and conditions postcolonial theory, especially in its ‘moderate’ version, is very eloquent; about material and social conditions and political praxis it is largely silent. And Attwell, like de Kock, prefers things that way.

De Kock and Attwell are not the only contributors to postcolonial studies in South Africa; were this a survey it would be necessary to look at the work of other critics working in South Africa, as well as the work of former South Africans working at metropolitan universities and of non-South Africans who have made South Africa their field of interest. The aim here, however, is not a survey but an inquiry into some of the implications, especially the political implications, of the way South African academics have taken up and developed postcolonial theory. Given that aim, these two warrant careful study because their work has gained them positions of some prominence in South African critical circles, and the particular appropriation they make of postcolonial theory reveals a great deal about literary studies in South Africa today. They also exemplify one notable characteristic of South African literary studies. A survey of developments in South African literary studies over the last three or four decades might lead an observer to surmise that somewhere at the core of the discipline is an immensely powerful self-regulating mechanism. Whatever new currents may emerge, and however challenging to the prevailing critical orthodoxy they may initially seem, this mechanism ensures that within a fairly short time things will be shifted back to the norm, an entrenched liberal-pluralist orientation. Smith, for example, speaking with the customary voice of the norm, worries that postcolonial theory might jeopardize business as usual in literary studies. De Kock chastises Smith for such suspicions, and then goes on to shape postcolonial theory into a safely ‘weak’ version which is itself thoroughly liberal-pluralist in all essentials. In other words, Smith need not have worried. Attwell follows suit, advocating a form of postcolonial analysis safely shorn of its ‘excesses’.

One place we can glimpse this self-regulating mechanism at work is in the relation between current theory and syllabus construction. Since at least the 1940s, and probably earlier, two texts have had an unshakeable hold on the English department syllabus of the historically white universities of South Africa, especially at first-year level: A Passage to India and Heart of Darkness. They have been canonical in South Africa to a degree unknown in Britain or the United States, or probably anywhere else in the English-speaking world. And the reasons for that status have always been clear. They were believed to be good for young white students, believed to inculcate in them desirable values. Now absorbing Forster into a project of forming students into good liberal pluralists is not without its complications, but ultimately it is not particularly difficult, however much we may question the values actually underlying A Passage to India. Absorbing Conrad into any kind of liberal stance is another matter.

The status of Heart of Darkness had to weather the famous intervention by Chinua Achebe, whose creative work was highly regarded in the same South African academic circles, but Achebe's account of racism in the novel only briefly complicated and did not dislodge its hold on the syllabus.¹⁸ Indeed, efforts to offset Achebe's criticisms cropped up frequently in South African literary discussion. At the conference of the Association of University English Teachers of Southern Africa in July 1986, at the outset of the nationwide State of Emergency that witnessed South Africa's darkest moments, the majority of those in attendance cheered a spirited defence of Heart of Darkness by a visiting African-American writer whose attendance at the conference had been paid for by the United States Information Agency. The enthusiastic response was hardly surprising: here was, after all, a black person defending our canonical text. With such racial authority behind the defence, who could now doubt Conrad's liberal-pluralist credentials?

One might have thought that the novel's day as essential reading for young South Africans had passed with the arrival of the ‘new’ South Africa; instead one of the first projects conducted under the banner of postcoloniality is yet another effort to perpetuate the novel's position in South African literary studies. One part of the project is a conference announced for 1998 on ‘Conrad and Postcoloniality: Heart of Darkness Centenary Conference’. Among recommended topics for papers are ‘The position of [Heart of Darkness] in the metropolitan canon and postcolonial syllabuses’, and ‘Teaching Heart of Darkness in multicultural classrooms’. No sign here of any slackening of the belief that the novel is good for students, and no longer just white students. Of course maintaining that standing requires that Achebe's criticisms be somehow set aside, that students, including now black students, be persuaded that Achebe was wrong or, alternatively, that he may have been right but it does not matter, or does not matter all that much, or if it matters there are nevertheless redeeming features. In any event, the book is to be rescued.

The other component of this project is a book of essays written by critics from several countries, assembled and edited in South Africa and entitled Under Postcolonial Eyes: Joseph Conrad After Empire.¹⁹ The introduction by the South African editors, Gail Fincham and Myrtle Hooper (Fincham is also one of the organizers of the 1998 conference), as one would expect in a volume first published in South Africa, gets round to race on its very first page. We are assured, on the authority of several critics, that Conrad may be effectively absolved of charges of racism since, though he may not have been actually exempt from it, he was still ahead of his time. The editors assure us that in fact he is ‘not just remarkable for his time; his writing is remarkable now’ (p. xi). Now one may readily agree that Conrad's writing is remarkable, but it is difficult to see what that has to do with his racism. After all, we are talking about a novelist who throughout an entire novel, Nostromo, could use a phrase like ‘Negro liberalism’, crystallizing in a single expression both his racist and his politically reactionary leanings. Exempting Conrad from responsibility for such expressions by ascribing them to a narrator or to some authorial ‘second self’ is simply an act of critical mystification bordering on bad faith.

Part of the difficulty arises from the meaning placed on ‘racism’ by those who seek to discount its presence or significance in Conrad's work in order to secure his place in postcolonial studies. In such accounts, racism is implicitly equated with extreme forms of prejudice and racial discrimination and with active pursuit of racist goals, in short, with the kind of racist regime that ruled South Africa until quite recently. Clearly, if such things supplied the measure, Conrad would not figure. Racism, however, is not solely a matter of prejudice or discrimination or oppressive action taken against people; it is also, and crucially, the assumption that race is an explanatory category. When the characteristics and behaviour of characters are accounted for by their race, then the narrative analysis through which they are being represented is racist. Conrad regularly, even habitually, engages in this mode of characterization.

No one is suggesting that Conrad would persecute a group or victimize an individual on racial grounds, but to say that is not the same as claiming that he is not racist. The real issue is not really whether Conrad is racist, but what his racism implies for the value we place on his work. We may want to argue about the relation between Ezra Pound's anti-Semitism or Conrad's racism and the value of their art, or their place in the literary canon, or their inclusion in syllabuses; but to argue that they are somehow not anti-Semitic and racist (or even that they may be but it does not really matter) is to place students, notably, but not only, Jewish or black students, in an intolerable intellectual position, a sort of cognitive double-bind in which they are authoritatively told to disbelieve or disregard what is manifestly there and matters a great deal. To do this in the name of liberal pluralism or what is supposed to be postcolonial theory seems especially unfortunate.

Although the work of de Kock, Attwell, and Fincham and Hooper shows interesting differences, their overall position and underlying assumptions—South Africa's essentially colonial status under apartheid, race as the overriding determinant of South African historical and cultural development, and the selective adaptation of the tenets of postcolonial theory designed to reinforce liberal-pluralist ends—are fully shared. Together they distinguish the major South African appropriation of postcolonial theory, a ‘centrist’ or ‘moderate’ appropriation which domesticates the theory, stripping it of its more interesting and provocative assertions in order to reinstate it as the latest expression of liberal pluralism. That effort towards domestication is evident, for instance, in Attwell's desire to arrive at a position ‘where we are able to look beyond the fixed polarities of some metropolitan versions of postcolonial studies’ (‘Introduction’, p. 5). To that extent Malvern van Wyk Smith's anxieties about postcolonial theory are unnecessary and de Kock's rebuttal is overstated: more than the adversaries themselves are able to recognize, they actually substantially agree about the aims and values involved in teaching and writing about literature. Smith simply prefers to retain more familiar modes of liberal-pluralist inquiry, while de Kock seeks a more up-to-date mode, with the enhanced standing that participation in current theory provides.

In important respects the South African appropriation of postcolonial theory is an interesting reprise of CST. They share an analysis of South Africa based on the assumption of colonialism; a generally univocal and monolithic understanding of what ‘colonial’ means; the assumption that politics in South Africa (whether the politics of relations of power for CST, or the politics of identity and cultural practice for postcolonial theory) is organized almost exclusively along racial lines; and the belief that identity and subjectivity in South Africa are racially constructed, though those who articulate the theories appear to exempt themselves from that consideration. There is no suggestion in their writing that de Kock or Attwell or the editors of the book on Conrad in their self-representation view race as strongly determinant either of their identities or of the intellectual work in which they are engaging. Their position seems to be somehow transracial, however much their theories make such a notion inconceivable.

In one crucial area CST and postcolonial theory part company, and here the difference between them is as significant, and as revealing, as their similarities. One of the most contentious features of CST was the assumption that, given the supposed colonial structure of South Africa, a national liberation struggle (or the National Democratic Struggle, as it became known) must logically precede the transformation of South Africa into a socialist society. This ‘two-stage theory’ was always something of an oddity for a communist party to be espousing; however, the South African Communist Party (SACP), which first developed the theory, used it in part to make sense of its subordinate position—its junior partnership, so to speak—in its alliance with the ANC. The two-stage theory held that the first stage, the national, racial settlement, would somehow automatically possess an orientation towards socialism, so that the one stage would lead logically and irreversibly to the other. Critics of the theory pointed out that there was no reason to assume this inherent orientation, and would doubtless point to developments since 1990, with the abandonment by the ANC of the more socialist clauses of the Freedom Charter, to support their contentions. They might also point out that CST, precisely by granting primacy to the National Democratic Struggle, helped to lay the groundwork for that outcome. But however inadequate the two-stage theory might have been, its adherents nevertheless assumed that a socialist transformation of South Africa was, even if it had to be delayed until the onset of a second stage, a desirable outcome to the long years of struggle against apartheid. Here, on the projection of a second stage to South Africa's social, political, economic, and cultural transformation, CST parts decisively with the South African adaptation of postcolonial theory.

The centrist or moderate South African version of postcolonial theory—South Africa's postcoloniality of a special type—is very definitely a one-stage theory. We were colonial; we have become postcolonial; no further fundamental transformations are required. Arriving at this presumed state of affairs, and having to go no further, is what the enthusiastic response to postcolonial studies in South Africa celebrates. Race, according to this view, is and always has been the primary factor in South African affairs, and with the elections of 1994 the racial settlement has been largely effected; class was not really significant, and so there is no need to be concerned with the fact that class relations remain entirely unaltered in the ‘new’ South Africa. Certainly postcolonial theory is unlikely to prompt much concern for that state of affairs. What remains unsaid in all this is that among the things that need not be transformed is the social position of the critic.

If pressed on class, South African advocates of postcolonial theory will reply that such misdirected concerns are characteristic of Marxist forms of literary and cultural criticism, while, as Attwell puts it, ‘on the intellectual front [postcolonial theory] is post-marxist, for it is concerned above all with the myriad connections between modes of representation, epistemologies, and the exercise of power’ (‘Introduction’, p. 4). Now ‘post-marxist’ would appear to suggest some sort of development out of Marxism, an advanced revision of the traditions of Marxist thought or a higher synthesis of its conceptions. What Attwell is actually spelling out, and here he is fully representative of virtually all South African academics who have embraced postcolonial theory, is not post-Marxism but the far more familiar anti-Marxism. He seeks to offset a theoretical orientation that would insist on looking not just at modes of representation but also at modes of production and the social relations that pertain to them; not just at epistemologies but also at strategies for social transformation; not just at power in a Foucauldian micropoetics of power, with its liberal distaste for the concept, but at the class constituents of the distribution of actual power in South Africa and the need to intervene in relations of privilege and deprivation. These are the sorts of issue postcoloniality of a special type, in its self-congratulatory ‘post-marxism’, effectively removes from theoretical discussion in South Africa.

Restoring those issues to their rightful and necessary place is perhaps the most urgent task for those who would seek a genuinely rather than a merely modishly revitalized mode of inquiry in South African literary and cultural studies. If there is one lesson to be drawn from South African appropriations of postcolonial theory, it is that this task is unlikely to be accomplished by any theoretical orientation prefixed by post-, whether hard or soft, strong or weak, excessive or moderate.

Notes

1. ‘The Road to South African Freedom: Programme of the South African Communist Party’, The African Communist, 2.2 (January-March, 1963), 24-70 (pp. 43-44). There is a fairly extensive literature on CST; the following are some of the more important contributions to the debate: Anon., ‘Colonialism of a Special Kind and the South African State: A Consideration of Recent Articles’, Africa Perspective, 23 (1983), 75-95; Peter Hudson, ‘The Freedom Charter and the Theory of National Democratic Revolution’, Transformation, 1 (1986), 6-38; Joe Slovo, ‘The Theory of the South African Revolution’, in Southern Africa: The New Politics of Revolution, by Basil Davidson, Joe Slovo, and Anthony R. Wilkinson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), pp. 118-49; Harold Wolpe, ‘The Theory of Internal Colonialism: The South African Case’, in Beyond the Sociology of Development, ed. by Ivar Oxall, Tony Barnett, and David Booth (London: Routledge, 1975), pp. 229-51. Jeremy Cronin replies to Hudson in ‘National Democratic Struggle and the Question of Transformation’, Transformation, 2 (1986), 73-78, and Hudson responds in ‘On National-Democratic Revolution: A Reply to Cronin’, Transformation, 4 (1987), 54-59. The term ‘internal colonialism’ is usually used synonymously with CST, as by Wolpe, although it is sometimes used to refer exclusively to the apartheid policy of pseudo-independent homelands.

2. See ‘Strategy and Tactics of the African National Congress’, Sechaba, 3.7 (July, 1969), 16-23 (p. 21).

3. J. M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 11. Coetzee's comment, though hardly presented as a definitive analysis of South Africa, is none the less symptomatic of the extent to which CST is taken as more or less given in South African literary studies. Lately that assumption has become explicit. To cite a few representative examples, Ulrike Kistner cites the theory in ‘Literature and the National Question’, Journal of Literary Studies, 5.3-4 (December, 1989), 302-14 (p. 309); her remarks are recirculated in Leon de Kock, ‘Postcolonial Analysis and the Question of Critical Disablement’, Current Writing, 5.2 (October, 1993), 44-69 (p. 66 n. 1). Gayatri Spivak picks up the theory from discussion with South African academic David Attwell and reproduces it without further reflection in a South African journal: ‘Theory in the Margin: Coetzee's Foe Reading Defoe's Crusoe/Roxana’, English in Africa, 17.2 (October, 1990), 1-23 (p. 22 n. 27).

4. There is a useful discussion of the issues of identity and subjectivity in CST in Hudson, pp. 27-32.

5. Charles Bettelheim, ‘Appendix 1’, in Unequal Exchange, by Arghiri Emmanuel (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), p. 301. The passage is quoted approvingly in Wolpe, p. 240; yet, having shown this and other weaknesses in CST, he goes on to advocate an only partly improved version of it.

6. Sembene Ousmane, God's Bits of Wood, trans. by Francis Price (London: Heinemann, 1962), p. 182.

7. See, for example, Megan Vaughan, ‘Colonial Discourse Theory and African History, Or Has Postmodernism Passed Us By?’, Social Dynamics, 20.2 (Summer, 1994), 1-23; and David Bunn's somewhat disingenuous reply in the same issue: ‘The Insistence of Theory: Three Questions for Megan Vaughan’, pp. 24-34.

8. Slovo, p. 135; original emphasis.

9. Annamaria Carusi, ‘Post, Post and Post, Or, Where is South African Literature in All This?’, in Past the Last Post, ed. by Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin (Calgary, NY: University of Calgary Press, 1990), pp. 95-106 (p. 96).

10. Theresa Dovey, The Novels of J. M. Coetzee (Johannesburg: Donker, 1988), pp. 330-402.

11. Leon de Kock, ‘Postcolonial Analysis and the Question of Critical Disablement’ and ‘Reading History as Cultural Text’, AlterNation, 2.1 (1995), 65-78.

12. J. M. Coetzee, ‘The Novel Today’, Upstream, 6.1 (Summer, 1988), 2-5 (p. 4). This essay has had an interesting history. Delivered at the Weekly Mail Book Week in Cape Town in 1987, it was hailed in the press and immediately taken up by various academics. Within South African literary and cultural circles, it was probably the most influential piece of theoretical writing Coetzee has produced. Yet when Coetzee and Attwell assembled the material that appeared in Doubling the Point (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), a collection of interviews and Coetzee's essays that were not included in his earlier work White Writing, the essay did not appear and no mention was made of it. Since the volume had room for essays on comic-book heroes and rugby, one can only surmise that space was not a problem and that, despite the essay's impact, a decision was taken to suppress it.

13. David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 134 n. 8.

14. David Attwell, ‘The Problem of History in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee’, in Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture, ed. by Martin Trump (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1990), pp. 94-133 (p. 96).

15. David Attwell, ‘Introduction’, Current Writing, 5.2 (October, 1993), 1-6 (p. 4).

16. ‘Interview with Homi Bhabha’, interviewed by David Attwell, Current Writing, 5.2 (October, 1993), 100-13 (p. 112); Attwell quotes the passage in the introduction to the special issue, p. 2; emphasis added.

17. Attwell, Coetzee, p. 6.

18. Chinua Achebe, ‘An Image of Africa’, Massachusetts Review, 18 (1977), 782-94.

19. Under Postcolonial Eyes: Joseph Conrad After Empire, ed. by Gail Fincham and Myrtle Hooper (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1995). I am grateful to Gail Fincham, who generously made a copy of the page-proofs available to me, despite knowing that we disagree over the question of race in Heart of Darkness and over postcolonial theory.

Kelwyn Sole was originally to have co-authored this essay but had to withdraw owing to illness. I have benefited greatly from discussions with him. His views on current theory in South Africa are set out in ‘Democratising Culture and Literature in a “New South Africa”: Organisation and Theory’, Current Writing, 6.2 (October, 1994), 1-37.