Race, class, gender and voice: four terrains of liberation

This article focuses on the complex conceptual and practical terrain offered by the concept of ‘liberation’, both analytically and practically. It argues that liberation is best considered to be a multi-dimensional process, evoking an approach to its study (and to its practice) that would take seriously its resonance, for purposes of the analysis of Africa, as implicating struggle on the levels of race, class, gender, and (democratic) voice. The article then seeks, with special reference to South Africa, to suggest the costs that have accompanied a collapsing of the meaning of the term ‘liberation’ into a mere metaphor for national emancipation from colonial/quasi-colonial and racially defined rule. Comfortable as the narrowing of its definition in such a way may be to the domestic elites who have succeeded their former colonial rulers into possession of formal power, it leaves great scope for merely rationalising the imposition of a kind of recolonisation upon the territories concerned and ensuring the continued subordination in class, gender, and political terms of the vast mass of the ostensibly ‘liberated’ population. In sum, in both political and theoretical terms the concept ‘liberation’ must be reclaimed so as to permit both more precise scientific investigation and more militant and engaged practical work.