Race and capital in democratic South Africa: the enduring relevance of Bernard Magubane’s critical historical method of inquiry

Abstract

Race pervades every aspect of democratic South Africa. A quick sweep of the ways in which the mainstream and social media loosely engage race reveals the increasingly uncritical appreciations of race in South Africa. Its all-encompassing hold on the South African political imagination demanded, especially from academia, some explanation for its endurance. In our experience, the explanations advanced in various configurations used race to explain, rather than explaining race. In Bernard Magubane’s scholarship, we found a qualitatively different method of explaining race. Committed to the value of critique, Magubane’s ‘critical historical explanation of race’ with capitalism at the centre, we found, was the appropriate tool to deploy from which to explain the ubiquity of race in modern South Africa.