Sam Ditshego
Mmusi Maimane delivered a speech against racism last week which received extensive media coverage. I don’t want to impugn his motives; I propose to address the issues he raised to see if his party’s views or his views on racism are realistic and honest.
He began his speech thus: “I stand before you as a child of Soweto, a proudly black South African, a son of the African soil.
“I stand proud to live in a country that is no longer the skunk of the world, proud that out of the ashes of apartheid, a new nation could rise.
“I am a product of the Group Areas Act, the Population Registration Act and the 1913 Land Act.
“I was born four years after the Soweto Uprising, but the struggle that began at Morris Isaacson High School was my struggle. And the desire to break down the last vestiges of Bantu Education still burns within me.”
To begin with, “black pride” in this country was popularised by the South African Student Organisation (Saso) and the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) in the late 1960s and early 1970s, led by martyrs Bantu Steven Biko and Onkgopotse Tiro and many others who are still alive. But nowhere in his speech does Maimane mention Biko, Tiro, Saso and BCM.
The phrase, “son of the soil” in this country was popularised by Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) founding president Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe, PAC founding member and second president Zeph Mothopeng and others. But nowhere in his speech does Maimane mention Sobukwe, Mothopeng and the PAC.
The Soweto Uprising was a direct result of the influence of the BCM and PAC. After his expulsion from the University of the North, following his speech billed the “Turfloop Testimony” in 1972, in which Tiro criticised Bantu Education and the apartheid government, Tiro went to teach at Morris Isaacson, where Tsietsi Mashinini, one of those who led the Soweto Uprising, was a student.
Like many other students, Mashinini was influenced by Tiro and the BCM. But Mashinini’s name was also not in Maimane’s speech. At the time of the Soweto Uprising, the principal of Morris Isaacson was Lekgau Mathabathe, a PAC underground operative. His name was also not in Maimane’s speech.
“The desire to break down the last vestiges of Bantu Education still burns within me,” said Maimane. When the apartheid government introduced Bantu Education in 1951/52, Mothopeng – who was vice-principal at Orlando High – opposed the move and lost his job. Others who lost their teaching posts were Es’kia Mphahlele and Peter Matlare.
There is no leader during the time of the introduction of Bantu Education who was as fiercely opposed to its introduction as Mothopeng. But his struggle and opposition to Bantu Education didn’t register in Maimane’s mind. As president of the Transvaal African Teachers Association, Mothopeng travelled the length and breadth of this country agitating against Bantu Education.
In 1978, after a lengthy and secretive Bethal trial, Mothopeng was sentenced to 30 years on Robben Island for having predicted and led the 1976 Soweto Uprising. In the aftermath of the PAC’s 1960 anti-pass campaign, which culminated in the Sharpeville massacre, which Maimane conveniently left out of his speech, Mothopeng and Sobukwe were sentenced to prison, including time on Robben Island.
On non-racialism, we can’t talk about this concept without invoking the name of Sobukwe. He introduced that term into the English lexicon. When he first spoke of non-racialism, the likes of Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu said there was no such word in English.
Without having gone very far with his speech, Maimane mentioned “This humble man, incarcerated for 27 years for fighting against racial domination, was the embodiment of forgiveness and reconciliation. He urged us to look beyond our differences and find our common humanity. And so we did”.
First of all, Mandela was not incarcerated for 27 years. Maimane should first get his facts right. He spent only 18 years on Robben Island and spent the rest at a house of a former prison warder with a television, fax and a phone at Victor Verster Prison.
If Mandela fought against racial domination, why is Maimane still talking about blacks being victims of racism 21 years after democracy? The person who fought against racial domination and correctly spelt it out as white supremacy was Sobukwe. He is the one to whom the phrase “common humanity” can be ascribed. In his 1959 inaugural address, he – not Mandela – spoke of one race, the human race, to which we all belong.
Sobukwe spoke about the myth of racial superiority because he said no race was superior to any other and no race was inferior to any other.
Last year, I criticised Maimane in various newspapers for overlooking Sobukwe when talking about non-racialism and always harping on about Mandela. The following day, he mentioned Sobukwe in an SAfm radio interview and he never mentioned him again. It seems as if he is instructed on who to mention and who not to mention and what to say and what not to say.
Maimane continued: “They said the scars inflicted by centuries of colonial rule and half a century of apartheid laws were just too deep. They said forgiveness and reconciliation were impossible. And then came a leader who taught us that our scars would not be healed by more hatred, but only by love and understanding.”
Mandela has misled youngsters and old people alike. He didn’t understand the extent of the damage colonialism and racism caused, which is why South Africa is where it is today. Colonialism and apartheid or institutionalised racism can’t be resolved by love, understanding and reconciliation. What’s needed is decolonisation.
Maimane said: “Part of the problem is that we – as black South Africans – are still made to feel inferior because of the colour of our skin. And this inferiority complex runs deep.”
The inferiority that blacks are made to feel does not antedate colonisation. Prior to colonisation, Africans (blacks) were not made to feel inferior. Scholars who understood colonialism and racism better than Mandela observed that direct colonial rule may have disappeared – but colonialism, in its many disguises as cultural, economic, political and knowledge-based oppression, lives on.
The police, for instance, still treat Africans the same way the apartheid police treated them. There is no single white person who has been shot and killed or beaten to death by police officers the way Andries Tatane was killed in Ficksburg.
In his 1952 book Black Skin, White Mask, Frantz Fanon writes that “a given society is racist or it is not”. Fanon said the displacement of the white proletariat’s aggression on to the black proletariat is fundamentally a result of the economic structure of South Africa. At the present moment, it is about preservation of white privilege. Colonial exploitation is the same as other forms of exploitation, and colonial racism is not different from other kinds of racialism.
Maimane, Mandela and Julius Malema won’t criticise Europe because to them it represents the Tabernacle. (After his recent trip to Britain, where he addressed a Cecil John Rhodes-created institute, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Malema said the people there were more civilised.)
Fanon said South Africa has a racist structure. In South Africa, there are a little over 50 million people, out of whom about 4 million are white, and it has never occurred to a single black to consider himself superior to a member of the white minority.
Maimane said: “We must continue to embrace the rich diversity of South Africa – with all its challenges and contradictions. If we do not, we will not be able to have an honest conversation about our divided past, nor will we be in a position to craft our shared future.”
Let me revert to Fanon again. He writes that the seeds of inferiority of the non-Westerner are already laid. But Western history writes off the history of the non-West. History, both the history of the West and history as perceived by the West, is transformed into a mighty river into which all other histories flow and merge as mere minor and irrelevant tributaries.
White or European history claims that when white settlers arrived in the interior of the country, there were no people. By “people”, they meant whites or Europeans. Will Maimane agree with that falsification as well as non-recognition of Africans?
Finally, Maimane said racists are not welcome in the DA and that he is going to introduce an anti-racism pledge that every new and returning member will be required to sign when they join his party.
If Maimane was honest, he would, as suggested by Fanon, propose to prove the impossibility of explaining man outside the limits of his capacity for accepting or denying a given situation. Thus, the problem of colonialism includes not only the interrelations of objective historical conditions, but also human attitudes toward these conditions.
That pledge will never rid Maimane’s organisation of racists. Maimane’s and the DA’s approach to racism clearly indicates that they are not best placed to eradicate racism.
l Ditshego is a fellow at the Pan Africanist Research Institute