It’s much easier to insist that Jacob Zuma is the problem than to question how white captains of industry gave instructions to the ANC. Andile Mngxitama looks at why that’s not called state capture but rescuing the country, as he explores the next stage in bringing Biko back to the fore
Next year, it will be exactly 40 years since the assassination of Steve Biko by the apartheid regime. As we approach that historical marker, the relevance of Black Consciousness (BC) is gaining steam with the steady march away from the 1994 “democratic breakthrough”.
That moment was, after all, achieved by a political process not informed by Biko’s ideas, but rather the ideas of Nelson Mandela as expressed in “non-racialism” as espoused by the Freedom Charter.
Twenty two years later, the project of 1994 is in deep crisis and many black people, especially the youth, are now more and more looking to Biko for direction.
The perennial question that moves in tandem with the development of Biko’s memory is whether Black Consciousness (BC) is still relevant. More specifically, what is the use of BC in our democracy?
Biko’s emphasis on mental liberation as a prerequisite for total emancipation presupposes that the oppressed had internalised the ideas of their oppressors and had come to normalise oppression. Consequently, when Biko observed South Africa in the 1960s, he was moved to make a brutal assessment of the state of the minds of black people.
He said: “All in all, the black man (woman) has become a shell, a shadow of a man (woman), completely defeated, drowning in his (her) own misery, a slave, an ox bearing the yoke of oppression with sheepish timidity.”
Biko laboured to design a philosophy which would assist black people to come to know themselves through struggle and to have a correct conception of what the main contradiction was in South Africa.
He identified “white racism” as the key point of struggle, if we hoped to realise black liberation. White racism, accordingly, was linked to colonial land dispossession and the brutalisation of black people by the minority settler population. This process was responsible for creating the defeated black person Biko decried.
The tragedy of 1994 is that it didn’t address this main contradiction.
The events of that year didn’t end white racism. They only gave it constitutional legitimacy. So the ongoing acts of individual racism that erupt into the social media space are not an aberration, but the foundation to everyday reality for the black voting majority.
The 1994 transition robbed black people of the understanding of the central contradiction in South Africa. But with the erosion of black perspectives, and the insertion of legalistic narratives of justice that privilege wrongdoing by the new political elite, white racism has receded further into the distance. This is, of course, part of the systematic arrangement of white power as normalised into the protection of property by the post-1994 constitution.
Today, black action is mired in the endless contest for political office which comes with the perks which have fallen from the table of white settler capitalism. And this meaningless but often well-sponsored political drama doesn’t have the capacity to confront the foundations of white racism because the political lexicon permitted by the constitutional dispensation outlaws questioning white power.
For instance, it’s much easier to insist that Jacob Zuma is the problem than to question how nine white captains of industry instructed the ANC to fire a minister of whom they didn’t approve, for one with whom they were comfortable.
It’s not called state capture when whites do it. It’s called rescuing the country.
Today, a return to Biko’s ideas is centrally about making visible the invisible hand of white power, often expressed in white monopoly capital. The hypervisibility of black corruption meanwhile provides for easy political fodder in the game of electoral politics, which has been designed in such a way that it can only ensure the rotations of managers but not change the system.
Here is where blacks are once again trapped and fed narratives that prevent us from seeing the real problem. Often, very quietly, almost never in the open, the question is asked: Why is there a big public outcry that says the Guptas must go, but there is no call for Lonmin to go?
Black Consciousness helps us to see that politics as contestation for political office in a neo-colony like South Africa only serves to keep blacks busy with side shows, such as Thabo Mbeki must go and then, Zuma must go.
All these calibrate from the real felt disappointment of the black majority as as result of the 1994 project.
Without a narrative designed and controlled by blacks, we end up mere captured vassals of narratives designed by the same white settler interests as before.
The whole space of discourse formation from civil society, the media and universities has crafted the dominant idea today that corruption is black and is the main problem, instead of seeing how failure to obliterate the colonial structure of the economy and society has bred the current social dislocations and the very same corruption.
The effect has become the cause.
How do we get out of this?
If black people are to avoid being trapped in a perpetual circle of marginalisation and meaningless political games whose outcomes are pre-determined against us, then we have to tower above politics and set a black agenda.
Such an agenda will have to be informed by a correct application of Black Consciousness. It must posit once more that the cardinal contradiction is white racism, which was not ended in 1994.
If we move from the premise that South Africa is anti-black and racist, then we would stop being surprised by a Penny Sparrow or demands of straightening our hair. We would see it as abnormal that 22 years later, land is still predominantly in white hands and we are trapped in townships and squatter camps.
Setting a black agenda means resisting the white agenda.
The first thing is to refuse to enter the futile game of fighting among us about who must be president. The removal of Mbeki didn’t change our fortunes nor shall the removal of Zuma. In fact the presentation of Zuma as the main problem is a distortion to precisely move our gaze from the real problem.
A black agenda is the only means through which any black president, irrespective of who they are, can be held to account to our programme. It is for this reason that Black First Land First (BLF) has undertaken a campaign that says: Hands Off Zuma – Economic Liberation Now!
The campaign sets demands for Zuma to address which are part of a black agenda. Among these are the return of land to black people, making sure that reparations are paid by Lonmin to the workers and widows of Marikana, free education, breaking down business monopolies, nationalisation of banks and mines and setting up a living minimum wage and a basic income grant.
This is a minimum set of demands in elaborating a black agenda to realise Biko’s dream. But the choice really is between that agenda or a perpetual empty political theatre, without direction and sponsored by those who continue to benefit from our exclusion.
To be true to Biko today, is to be anti-politics and pro-black.
* Andile Mngxitama is the leader of Black First Land First and a Bikoist