University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2015 Empire Unbound - Imperial Citizenship, Race and Diaspora in the Making of South Africa Khwezi Mkhize University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the African American Studies Commons, African Languages and Societies Commons, and the African Studies Commons Recommended Citation Mkhize, Khwezi, "Empire Unbound - Imperial Citizenship, Race and Diaspora in the Making of South Africa" (2015). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1096. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1096 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1096 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Empire Unbound - Imperial Citizenship, Race and Diaspora in the Making of South Africa Abstract "Empire Unbound" is an exploration of the history and politics of empire and imperial citizenship that went into the making of South Africa before the Second World War. The making of racial difference in South Africa is often located in the temporal and political terrain that is Apartheid (1948-1994). In this dissertation I look to the history of South Africa in the long nineteenth century and recuperate the frameworks of empire and imperial citizenship in making sense of struggles for belonging. Empire, both as a form of government and imaginary, invokes a degree of scale that exceeds the nation-state. It also historically precedes the nation-state, which has come to exemplify the model form for organizing sovereign polities. In "Empire Unbound" I argue that as South Africa became a self governing territory in the early twentieth century it folded the remnants of empire into its instrumentalities of racial governance. I therefore explore South Africa's imperial politics and imaginary as it extends to other parts of Southern Africa such as Namibia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana. Empires also have histories that date back to maritime commerce and the making of the modern world. In in this dissertation I turn to Cape Town to examine the ways in which this long history of empire gradually formed the grammars of belonging in South Africa and the Atlantic world. Black intellectuals in South Africa during the early twentieth century had their investments in empire but theirs was a struggle to wrestle its grammars into a form that included blackness in its regime of belonging. It was especially after the First World War that these intellectuals sought to write themselves and the colonized masses of the world into an alternative grammar of sovereignty. I demonstrate in this dissertation that these intellectuals were far from mimic men and women; they were involved in a dialogue of reshaping what it meant to belong in the world after empire. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Africana Studies First Advisor Deborah A. Thomas Keywords Black Diaspora, Black Intellectuals, Empire, Imperial Citizenship, Race, South Africa Subject Categories African American Studies | African Languages and Societies | African Studies This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1096 EMPIRE UNBOUND: IMPERIAL LIBERALISM, RACE AND DIASPORA IN THE MAKING OF SOUTH AFRICA Khwezi Mkhize A DISSERTATION in Africana Studies Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2015 Supervisor of Dissertation ______________________________ Dr. Deborah A. Thomas, Professor of Anthropology and Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania Graduate Group Chairperson ______________________________ Dr. Herman Beavers, Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania Dissertation Committee Dr. Cheikh Anta Babou, Associate Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania Dr. Tsitsi E. Jaji, Associate Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania Dr. Deborah A. Thomas, Professor of Anthropology and Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania !ii Dedication For my Parents and Grand-Parents who made my world possible and held it together longer than I can remember !iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS At last, some words of gratitude and acknowledgement at the end of a rite of passage. Becoming an “arrivant” at some threshold is a thing that memory threatens to behold in an unruly fashion. A certain narrative of “completion” is imposing itself on me with deceptive orderliness. In invoking your names and thanking you all, I am reminding myself that if the dots ever came together at all, it is because you lent me your shoulders to stand on. I will carry this deeply within me, lest new myths in the coming passages give struggle the appearance of providence. My advisor Deborah Thomas has been an incredible wealth of knowledge, support and a great, I mean great, example, of how to do and live Africana Studies. Thank you for walking me through the various mutations of becoming a scholar, keeping your door open, the wonderful food you fed us, and your staunch reminder to find in ongoing struggles the need to overstand knowledge, as the Rastafari say. It is impossible to imagine how one could have deigned to straddle the lines between Africa and the black diaspora, between literary and cultural studies, and between reading and listening without the patient and generous presence of Tsitsi Jaji. I am deeply fortunate that my years in Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania coincided with yours. Cheikh Anta Babou has been the epitome of patient, deliberate and concise thinking and writing. My years spent as your student has opened me up to the rigors and demands of historical thinking and the ever present specter of religion in what we study. In Chinua Achebe’s novel Arrow of God, Ezeulu advises his son that “the world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it you do not stand in one place.” This is true of my teachers at the Department of African Literature and the University of the Witwatersrand who refused to let me stand in one place - even though it was the home they had raised me in - and sent me off to graduate school in the U.S. As it turned out I landed in the last American university that Professor Es’kia Mphahlele taught in before returning to South Africa and founding the Department of African Literature! Professors Bhekizizwe Peterson and Isabel Hofmeyr have been constantly present in my life and pushed me over the years to reach beyond myself. I hope, one day, to make you proud and do under others as you have done unto me. I also thank the faculty and staff of the department of African Literature, Mrs Merle Govind, Professors James Ogude, Dan Ojwang, Pumla Dineo Gqola and Litheko Modisane for being such model scholars. The faculty and staff at the Center and Department of Africana Studies at UPenn and beyond created a social and intellectual space that came to embody home in the past six years. I thank Professors John L. Jackson, Jr. Eve Troutt Powell, Barbara Savage, Rita Barnard, Audrey Mbeje, Ntongela Masilela, Simon Gikandi, Innocent Mhlambi, Gabeba Baderoon, Tanji Gilliam, Ms Carol Davis, Ms Gale Garrison and Ms Michelle Gilliard Houston. James Spady has been a mentor to me outside of the classroom since we met in between the book shelves of Van Pelt library in the fall of 2009. He has helped me imagine black Philadelphia and the African American diaspora in ways that have enriched my attempts !iv at scholarship. Jonathan Highfield and Claudia Ford afforded me an opportunity to teach at the Rhode Island School of Design in the spring of 2009. They, along with their families, have been done more for me than they can imagine. I am grateful for the remarkable time that we have shared thus far. My research has been supported by archivists and librarians in South Africa and the United States. I would be remiss if I did not thank you. To my motley crew of fellow travelers and children of Africa and its diaspora: in the pages that follow is a dissertation but behind it is the invisible story of our friendship, our ongoing conversations, food, anguishes and joys shared over years. You have all been so essential to this elusive thing that I call my identity, intellectual and personal. I do not imagine there to be an essential difference between the words that we have shared over the years and what I have written. We thought things through together. In the end, what I have written will have to stand on its own but I will take this moment to call on your names to shadow the substance: Krystal “Dada” Smalls, Christopher Ernest Werimo Ouma, Laura “Fellow Prodigal” McTighe, Marina Bilbija, Venise Adjibodou, Wilfredo Gomez, Cameron Brickhouse, Nomaduma Masilela, Derilene Marco, Kemang Wa Lehulere, Faye Baldoz, Jeremy Dell, Palesa Shongwe, Ntsako Mkhabela, Julius B. Fleming, Jr., Karl Swinehart, Layla “Mase Nadodo” Ben-Ali, Celina De Sa, Josslyn Luckett, Diana Burnett, Savannah Shange, Eziaku Nwokocha, Sara-Ellen Strongman, Stephanie Contreras, Mphathi Mutloane, Richara Leona Krayewski, Monika Bhagat- Kennedy, Kathleen Ebersohn-Khuvutlu, Lebogang Mokwena, Simangele Mabena, Elizabeth Dyer, Christine Thu Nhi Dang, Marissa Mika, Nikki Kalbing, Unifier Dyer, Anand Venkatkrishnan and Shireen Hamza. Smangele and Lesedi: of course, you’ve waited for this mythical and often uncertain odyssey to reach some sort of conclusion. I hope that the pieces align, this time, as they should, and that what should be remains engrained in the memory of elephants. My family: the Mkhizes, the Nyantumbus and their ongoing extensions seem to have been standing in absented present time and on the other side of it, not to mention on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. I cannot say thank you without recalling the monumental amounts of waiting and loving you have bestowed upon me. Thank you all.