Apartheid Isn’t the Question, Settler Colonialism Is: Black South African Thought and the Critique of the International Left’s Apartheid Paradigm

Panashe Chigumadzi, assistant professor of African history at Brandeis University, argues that within the liberal international order, it is “reasonable” and “workable” to struggle to end apartheid and racial segregation, while it is “unreasonable” and “unworkable” to struggle to end settler colonialism and indigenous land dispossession.

In arguing that apartheid is overrepresented in the international left’s racial discourse and historiography, Chigumadzi draws from generations of Black South African political activists, philosophers and historians — most notably from the Pan Africanist-Black Consciousness Tradition. These traditions critique apartheid’s relatively short 54 years of institutionalized racial segregation as the paradigmatic historical framework for analyzing South Africa’s three centuries of settler colonialism and land dispossession. Drawing from this black radical critique, Chigumadzi rejects the liberal notion that apartheid’s end is the object of liberation struggle, and, instead asserts the centrality of the struggle for the return of indigenous lands.

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Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Princeton African Humanities Colloquium

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