This chapter explores the thought of the intellectual and revolutionary activist, Zweledinga Pallo Jordan, in South Africa. It argues that a global intellectual history approach can be usefully incorporated in understanding his key writings, both archival and curated. Jordan’s writings, largely overlooked, personify a vibrant and engaged intellectual project of anticolonialism, drawing from a transnational circulation of ideas. Their style, content, and form vary considerably, incorporating discussion papers, editorials, newspaper columns, published chapters, articles, speeches, and lectures. The chapter therefore recovers the meaning of the central ideas contained in these writings, by examining Jordan’s own biography and the global context of political exile. It focuses on significant themes such as nation, race, class, and democratic constitutionalism as Jordan attempts to articulate the scope of the South African national liberation project in line with his ideological commitment to the African National Congress (ANC).

A core purpose of South Africa’s Constitution was to modify private orderings growing out of Apartheid’s legacy of racism. Hence, the South African framers, and specifically those representing the African National Congress (ANC), had strong reason to adopt some version of horizontal application. While republican elements occur in some of the ANC’s early thought on private actors’ duties, such discourses featured less when the party had to find consensus with representatives of the Nationalist Party while negotiating the Interim Constitution. A strong formalist streak in the legal culture, concerns about preserving property rights, and the incentives of institutions such as the Supreme Court of Appeal all cut against the practice of horizontal application. Ultimately, the constitutional framers provided for both direct and indirect horizontal application in the Final Constitution. The ANC’s vision was thus fixed in this feature, and subsequent cases further cemented a break from prior orderings. Republican discourses ensued in cases involving horizontal application and perhaps most clearly in issues striking at the heart of the old Apartheid regime, such as housing and education.

South Africa furnishes one of the most complex examples of the eclipse of Greater Britain, on account of the sheer diversity of peoples and political forces that shaped events in the post-war era. English South Africans experienced a period of prolonged disorientation as their paradigmatic status dwindled, caught between an Afrikaner majority determined to override their totems of British loyalty, and a burgeoning Black resistance calling time on the bogus liberties invested in the British Crown. In the decades after 1945, a uniquely opportune climate for humanitarian and anti-colonial claim-making was forged — not least for the empire’s First Peoples. All over the world, settler communities were confronted with insistent demands to redress the injustices flowing from the pioneering intrusions of their forebears, challenging their foundational myths and raising nagging questions about their security of tenure. For the minority of white, professedly ‘liberal’, English-speaking South Africans, bent on combatting Afrikaner political dominance, the advent of Indigenous demands rooted in universal rights would ultimately pose the more severe test to their British affinities and allegiances.

This chapter considers the relationship between solidarity and revolution by exploring the internal and international politics of the African National Congress (ANC). In the 1960s, the ANC operated internationally but there was little consensus on how the party should wage its struggle against apartheid South Africa. Taking inspiration from Cuba, young Tricontinental radicals challenged the diplomatic strategy of ANC elders like Oliver Tambo and launched an unsuccessful invasion of nearby Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Tambo responded by appropriating parts of this message and situating the ANC as part of an anti-capitalist revolt aimed at the United States. Tambo also opened the ANC to non-Africans who supported his leadership, which increased the influence of the South African Communist Party and fought off Cuban-inspired militancy by collapsing the distinctions between revolutionary action and international solidarity. Because the Vietnamese and Portuguese revolutions confirmed the inevitability of apartheid’s demise, the ANC prioritized international collaboration over guerrilla warfare as part of a strategy that positioned the party as the legitimate alternative to the apartheid state.

The post-apartheid ANC government took pride in repurposing the country as a modern, democratic state and promoted a vision of science and technology for the common good. Astronomy was a particular beneficiary of the new dispensation. The Southern African Large Telescope at Sutherland was part of the dividend resulting from the country’s transition to democracy and the decommissioning of nuclear weaponry. Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki, advocated national renewal through an ‘African Renaissance’ that promoted both indigenous knowledge and scientific ambition. Mbeki’s suspicion of the authority of Western science and his Africanist affinities impelled him to intervene in the controversy surrounding HIV/AIDS and to support AIDs denialism. It has often been alleged that Mbeki was caught between ‘indigenous’ and ‘Western’ knowledge, yet his scientific legacy was more complex. In fields such as ethno-botany, for instance, there is evidence of complementary research in post-apartheid South Africa between scientists and carriers of African knowledge of plant medicines. The process of developing a new spirit of ‘South Africanism’ in the post-apartheid rainbow nation meant greater openness to South Africa’s position as an African nation, while also inviting bids leadership of Africa through ‘big science’ initiatives like astronomy and Antarctic research.

In this chapter, I test the deliberative partnership thesis and its competitors against the behavior of the African National Congress (ANC) and aligned justices on South Africa's Constitutional Court. These justices were instrumental in developing a doctrinal approach to the Constitution's Equality Clause, which reflected a constitutional vision associated with President Nelson Mandela and stressed reconciliation between South Africa's various cultural groups after apartheid. But when Mandela's successor, President Thabo Mbeki, oversaw the expansion of affirmative action, Mbeki risked conflict with the justices that the ANC had previously appointed. Again, however, this conflict did not materialize. Instead, many of the same justices began to elaborate new doctrinal positions pursuant to a transformational constitutionalism that stressed greater opportunities for the historic victims of apartheid. But when the ANC-aligned justices attempted to expand these egalitarian understandings to cases involving socioeconomic rights, they encountered stiff resistance from the ANC and subsequently capitulated, which is consistent with the deliberative partnership thesis.