White supremacy manifesting as racism persists precisely because the ANC took it out of the liberation struggle equation, writes Malesela Steve Lebelo.
Recurring acts and public displays of racism are testimony to enduring white supremacy. They also underline the chilling reality that the liberation struggle in all its dimensions failed to rid society of white supremacy and its everyday manifestation, racism.
This is because the liberation struggle led by the ANC was never against and about white supremacy. If it was, it was so only in its rhetoric. In fact, since its inception, the ANC has consistently demanded the inclusion of Africans showing reasonable levels of civilisation and of above average income to be included in a white social order. This they duly achieved in 1994.
Simple minded political analysts, wholly dependent on and misguided by the fabricated and largely falsified narrative of the liberation struggle, fail to provide a realistic explanation of why racism persists. White supremacy manifesting as racism persists precisely because the ANC took it out of the liberation struggle equation.
In its quest for a non-racial society, the ANC did little or nothing to undermine the racist hegemony of apartheid. It did nothing to prefigure a non-racial society it claimed to be in pursuit of. Rival political formations such as the PAC and the Black Consciousness Movement, insisting on the centrality of white supremacy and race in the liberation struggle equation, were widely demonised not only by alarmed white society but also by the ANC and its alliance partners.
Increasingly, the distinction between white supremacists on the one hand and the ANC and its alliance partners on the other in respect of the significance of white supremacy and the racism it fostered became blurred.
Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness (BC) philosophy placed white supremacy and the racism it engendered at the centre of the liberation struggle equation. It is significant that BC provided the only moment in the era of mass mobilisation in which white supremacy and the racism it engenders were at the centre of the liberation struggle equation.
When Africanists formed the PAC, they were marginal in the ANC, struggling in vain to push their paradigm to the centre of organisational imperatives.
In the era of BC on the other hand, white supremacy and racism became central in political engagement. BC made no distinction between white liberals and radicals, demonising the latter as radicalised liberals and in reality, a subtle extension of white supremacy. Unfazed by Biko’s chastisement for their meddling in black politics and resistance movement, white liberals reinvented themselves as radicals. The same white liberal crowd linked to the National Union of South African Students (Nusas) that Biko urged to mobilise white society emerged as custodians of a radical tradition that would mobilise black Africans.
It is through their efforts that the Durban moment, sitting awkwardly in the BC tradition, happened in 1973. But their involvement was short-lived and dwarfed by the eruption of the Soweto Revolt.
Biko’s death and the banning of BCM formations opened the way for a rethinking of BC.
Leading the process of rethinking BC for the mass mobilisation of the 1980s and early 1990s were the radicalised liberals of Nusas fame. They included activist academics like Eddie Webster, Neil Aggett, Glen Moss, Rick Turner and David Webster to mention but a few. Their impact on the ideological imagination of the ANC’s internal partners, the United Democratic Front, the Congress of South African Trade Unions student and civic formations was massive.
The reinvented radicals constructed and controlled the definitions for the struggle in the aftermath of Biko’s death. They demonised BC’s preoccupation with white supremacy and racism as a mark of immaturity in revolutionary matters.
They constructed a discourse drawing largely from Marxist-Leninist formulations, claiming they were scientific where BC was ideological. The ANC’s internal partners swallowed this garbage hook, line and sinker. It shaped their ideological outlook in the rolling mass action they celebrate as the most heroic moment in the history of the struggle.
What is distinct about this historical moment is that it forced white supremacy and racism out of the liberation struggle equation. It is not only the ANC’s internal partners that embraced this new doctrine. The Azanian People’s Organisation was split when a range of ideological re-conceptualisations of BC emerged.
The Socialist Party of Azania is an outcome of this. It is not only in formal political formations that a conspiratorial rethinking of BC occurred. The intellectual domain at Wits University, the University of KwaZulu-Natal and to a lesser extent, Rhodes University and the University of Cape Town became custodians of the ideological formulations that guided and inspired the rolling mass action undertaken by the ANC’s internal partners. The emerging generation of thinkers have received BC through the filter of reinvented radicals’ reconceptualisation of Biko’s thinking.
This is apparent in Andile Mgxitama’s understanding of BC. Made to doubt the lack of scientific validation in BC, Mgxitama has sought ways to insinuate Marxist-Leninist explanations that obfuscates the reality that white supremacy and racism need to be at the centre of the liberation struggle equation.
There is also a glaring inconsistency in the way Marxist-Leninist formulations are used by Mgxitama in his latest political adventure. His defence of one form of capitalism over another is curious. In terms of its strictest definition, capitalism, whether of the Guptas, the Ruperts or the Maponya variety are a negation of BC. But more importantly, preoccupation with capitalism, whether in its condemnation as was the case before 1994 or in its defence as has been the case since, is indefensible. Invariably, it has been used to foreclose on any discourse that places white supremacy and racism at the centre of political engagement.
It is clear from this historical context of the liberation struggle that no effort was made to confront white supremacy and the racism.
This explains why racism keeps surfacing, provoking extreme resentment in the public sphere. Yet, the fact that the liberation struggle failed to deal with it, explaining its endurance is barely appreciated by political analysts ill-equipped to deal convincingly with this historical complexity.
* Lebelo is a historian and author.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.