Civil Society in Namibia: History, Context and Possibilities (Part 1)

ANDRÉ DU PISANI WRITES:

"Civil society" is one of the most used and abused concepts in current political conversation in this country.

Namibian civil society is an historical and social construct and should be understood as such. Depending on philosophy and theory, civil society has different meanings and different roles are associated with it. In Namibia, not unlike many other post-colonial contexts, civil society is invoked to serve particular purposes, while an influential Western idea like civil society has itself been altered and modified by the specific contexts of intellectual and practical life in the society of Namibia. Perhaps, one should call it "associational life" rather than civil society?

"We are using discourses which we never invented. Joining discourses, we never vetted." - Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973)



INTRODUCTION

The idea of civil society regularly returns in political conversation in this country. In discussions about politics in diverse settings, analysts write on and speak about civil society – its absence, its decline, its promise and possibility.

What, however, does the idea mean in all these different contexts? Do civil society agencies all try to achieve the same ideals?

Secondly, what could the construct of civil society mean? Is it a descriptive term for a certain type of social structure, mode of social behaviour, or political ideal? What are the conditions of its possibility and existence?

These questions are meant to clarify and problematize the concept and to stimulate clear thinking. There are at least three clearly identifiable strands in the contemporary literature and conversations about civil society, or, more precisely, discussions in which the idea of civil society figures prominently. In some theoretical discussions, as in intellectual conversations, civil society is about what the organization of society and its relation to the State in post-Communist and in post-colonial societies should be.

After the collapse and passing of those kinds of states, there was a need, it was argued, for encouraging the rise of institutions of civil society outside the legal jurisdiction of the State.

There are at least two strands of current leftist political thought in the West which are also keen to revive the idea of civil society. Some theorists, following the unraveling of the Communist experience, wish to radicalize the idea of democracy by re-invoking notions of civil society. Others, mostly in the United Kingdom, were shocked by the retreat of the welfare state as a consequence of the rise of neo-conservatism (Thatcherism), and sought to revive the older tradition of trade-union militancy and "statism", in an attempt to reverse the conservative atomization of society.

The theoretical difficulties embedded in most contemporary discussions about civil society arose because of two key ambiguities. First: because the setting in which civil society was invoked, varied a great deal between various societies – those with robust political institutions and pluralistic media and those with weak state institutions, those that are democratic and those that are democratizing or "partial democratic regimes". The contextual distinctions between political institutions and political practices, was not the only source of confusion.

The idea of civil society was not entirely singular in its connotations in the history of Western thought either. Some of the ambiguities in Namibian conversations arose because of the multiple meanings of the term in the Western tradition itself.

Within the Western canon, one can distinguish among other traditions: the Scottish Enlightenment, French Enlightenment thought, and the German strand running through Marx, Hegel, a neo-Marxist seam in the work of Antonio Gramsci, and the ideas of the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, who introduced the seminal distinction between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (Association). Moreover: some individual thinkers and philosophers such as John Locke (who introduced the distinction between the State and civil society rather than the older distinction between "the state of nature" and civil society), while Hegel's intervention on civil society is widely regarded as having being particularly influential because of his new interpretation of the idea as bürgerliche Gesellschaft. Strictly speaking the idea of civil society predates modern Europe, and was already present in Roman law and Italian political thought in the form of "guilds".

A further aspect that lies beyond the scope of this cursory paper is the recognition that civil society is increasingly a trans-national phenomenon that transects state boundaries. Examples of such trans-national manifestations of civil society coalitions are in the realms of human rights, the environment, gender, and public health.

Finally, to conclude these introductory comments, it is widely accepted that development of theoretical thinking on politics occurs within two types of contexts. The first is an intellectual and cultural context of received "languages" through which individual writers think about their societies.

Their understandings are both enabled and constrained by their conceptual language and intellectual tradition.

Secondly, political theorizing happens under the pressure of historically specific predicaments, particularly specific problems faced by generations of people. In this sense, as this brief submission argues, political theory is thus often produced under the demands of political practice. Political thinking is thus at times an act of intellectual desperation, not of calm and orderly intellectual introspection.

It is not surprising, therefore, that once the idea of civil society gains a certain currency, it would be invoked by a range of persons desperately seeking solutions to their specific historical problems in a number of different contexts. This, I believe, is the case in Namibia and explains why the construct of civil society has the limited traction that it has.