Cape Town - Somewhere between 1970 and 1972, Steve Biko gave an interview in which he was prophetic.
If, he said, South Africa were one day to have only a few black faces in office, and not fundamental changes of economic policies allowing only a few blacks to become rich, and not “a whole new economic pattern that will bring meaningful redistribution of wealth, opportunities and power, “our society will be run almost as of yesterday.”
In 2019, a journalist from Time Magazine in the US visited South Africa to “see what lessons the world could learn from South Africa.”
After 1994, there were the lessons of reconciliation. Now, after Cyril Ramaphosa, might there be lessons of a new beginning?
In Hout Bay’s Imizamo Yethu, she met Kenny Tokwe. He did not talk about a “new dawn.” He talked about ongoing impoverishment, hunger, unemployment, broken promises and shattered trust. About anger, disillusionment and hopelessness.
The lesson to be learnt is the journalist’s conclusion is the meaning and consequences of “squandered hopes.”
Kenny Tokwe was proving how right Steve Biko was. In many ways, this is probably the worst of it: those hopes carried by centuries of struggle, purified by fire, and kept alive by endurance and resilience.
After nearly 30 years of democracy, South Africans now know for certain that a black face in office, rather than a white one, as Biko has foreseen, does not guarantee justice and rights for our people.
Our experience now teaches us that a black face in office does not guarantee economic opportunity, economic security, and economic dignity for our youth.
We know for certain that what we have is not the democracy we thought we were fighting for but, in fact, the fruits of what UKZN economist Patrick Bond called an “Elite transition from apartheid to Neo-liberalism.” It is what the late, greatly lamented Sampie Terreblanche of Stellenbosch University bluntly called “the elite conspiracy” between the African National Congress and the white political and economic establishment.
In painful lesson after painful lesson, we have learnt that a democratic society is not necessarily a liberated one.
So, indeed we have today what Biko referred to as “the few blacks filtering through into the so-called bourgeoisie”, while the vast majority of our people remained mired in the misery of continuing impoverishment. “Post-apartheid economic inequality has been driven by increasing gains at the top,” experts say, but the problem lies deeper, even in the planning of the present government.
Analysis of the National Planning Commission reveals that equality for South Africans is not really the government's focus.
Ongoing inequalities are built into the future economic planning of the government. That is the nature of the Neo-liberal capitalist beast.
We should be clear. This is by design. Just after 1994, the ANC was able to convince even some critical observers that it really had no choice; it was virtually being blackmailed by the West, the World Bank, and the IMF.
Even if it was true then, and I have never been entirely convinced, it certainly is not now.
South Africa’s new, small black aristocracy, who have made such disastrous, if immensely profitable common cause with the old white capitalist class, have done so even though they knew that the heart of that system is endless greed, endless exploitation, endless carelessness, endless compassionlessness without which Neo-liberal capitalism cannot survive.
Hence, we should not be at all surprised at what we see today: the bottomless corruption from top to bottom, the shameless cronyism, nepotism and cadre-favouritism, all sustained by a deliberate disdain for the poor and the vulnerable.
It means that government policies are designed to maintain the chasm between rich and poor, to throw up the barricades that protect the wealthy and keep the poor outside the walls of coddled privilege.
If inequality is built into the system, it is unavoidable in perpetuity, or at least as long as the present system lasts.
It also means that tinkering with the system and calling it “reforms'' should be totally unacceptable.
What is required is total eradication of that system, replacing it with a more just and equitable alternative.
At this point, the tomorrow that millions have struggled, sacrificed and died for is hardly different from the yesterday we rose up against. And it is for all these reasons that we speak of an incomplete revolution.
Speaking the words in our first quotation from Biko, perhaps three to five years before Soweto’s children began to change history, Biko knew that the revolution had already started.
That generation soon realised that to call what was happening in Soweto a “protest” was inadequate.
We began to understand that there are times when, in the words of Black poet and philosopher Adam Small, protest can be “a form of begging.”
We stopped calling it a “rebellion,” or even an “uprising”, as some did. We called it a revolution because we understood that what began in Soweto and would morph into the United Democratic Front was a revolution of the people but uniquely led by the youth.
We understood that Soweto was not so much a place but a condition; a condition of oppression, exploitation, and marginalisation, a condition of outrage, anger and despair; and that it was our duty to turn that into a condition of consciousness, of decision, and of resistance.
Following Iranian scholar Hamid Dabashi, we called it “an open, ongoing work”, “the unfolding of an open-ended revolt”, which find resonate powerfully with the ongoing global resistance movements, “a Palestinian intifada going global.”
That is exactly what we have seen since Soweto and the United Democratic Front, and now in the “delayed defiance” of countries such as Sudan, Algeria, Chile, Tunisia, and Haiti.
We are seeing it again in the internationalised manifestations of the Black Lives Matter movement, and it is always present in Palestine.
In South Africa, this revolution is such a delayed defiance, taking new shape in the new post-1994 situation.
Selfless Revolutionaries is available at Loot.co.za (R665)
Cape Times