There is a scientific and political imperative to stop thinking that a national consciousness is a deficit, some ‘misrecognition’ of interest or a distorted ideology. The historical idea of a belonging, a ‘horizontal solidarity’ to use Benedict Anderson's (1991) formulation, with its weaving together of territories, traditions and experience, is not as ancient as its narratives claim but it is a product of nation states and of hegemonic projects within specific boundaries. It received unique formulations in the colonial period of the late nineteenth century, particularly in racially structured settler societies such as South Africa's.

It is rather more to the point to ask what kind of consciousness it is, what its inflections are, and how it facilitates the emergence of non-racialism, anti-racism and class consciousness. By ‘inflection’ I mean that the national or horizontal comradeships it created differ in space and time: Cabral's articulation of the National Question is not Mobutu's, and what was articulated in African Claims in 1943 was not exactly what is being articulated now (Sitas, 1990; Hart, 2013).

Similarly, such horizontal solidarities are not merely a reaction to a structural constraint. There were many such constraints in the creation of South Africa's capitalist society: native reserves in the 1870s, pass laws in the 1880s, taxes culminating in the Poll Tax by the 1900s, the Union of South Africa and the Land Act by the 1910s, the Native Urban Areas Act and the Industrial Conciliation Act by the 1920s (Saul, 1979; Wolpe, 1990; Legassick, 1995; Mamdani, 1996; Guy, 1999) – all these cohered to define and construct the ‘native’, and as this construction was also ‘tribal’ the native's ethnicity was always at issue. Yes, such constraints were vital, but agency was and is important: it is equally vital to understand the emergence of the ‘national idea’ as an active, creative and ideomorphic narrative by those who were considered to be natives, and how these narratives came to use the jargon, a ‘metanarrative’ that is transmitted inter-generationally (Sitas, 2010). There is no one correct articulation of the ‘national’.