BLACK UNITY

It is mistaken to believe that the common experience of being conquered and oppressed by whites provided black South Africa with a basis for national black unity. Black South Africa is not an undifferentiated mass of people. Blacks in South Africa are as much drawn together by their common suffering at the hand of the white oppressor, as they are distinguished by cultural and historic factors which are regional. Thus while the founding fathers of the African National Congress could draw on history and the black experience to argue the need for unity, they also recognised that unity would only be achieved within the parameters of new political ventures and would not flow automatically from the common black experience of oppression.

It is all too easy to decry ethnic realities by using the emotive term "tribalism" as an evil but it is just as easy to espouse one ideology or another which regards all people as the same in a undifferentiated human mass. The realities of the South African situation are that its black population has distinctively different black tap roots into the past. While all blacks in the country experienced subjugation, they also experienced different white tactics and strategies and what is more, they experienced these differences as different people.

Black skins do not imply underlying similarities any more than white skins imply underlying white similarities. The Zulu experience as people is experience of having been conquered by a full scale war. The major groups of indigenous blacks each had their own cultures, their own form of political organisation and their own distinctively national cultural values.

The social organisation of the Zulus differed radically from the social organisation of, say, Tswanas or Vendas. The destruction of Zulu institutional life by conquest had distinctive human consequences for Zulus.