SA is paying a heavy price for failing to focus on the obvious but fundamental task of freeing ourselves from mental slavery, writes Faith Muthambi.
In his testimony during the now infamous Rivonia Trial on April 20, 1964, Nelson Mandela made a profound observation. He remarked the “lack of human dignity experienced by Africans is the direct result of the policy of white supremacy. White supremacy implies black inferiority. Legislation designed to preserve white supremacy entrenches this notion When anything has to be carried or cleaned, the white man will look around for an African to do it for him, whether the African is employed by him or not.”
Whereas Mandela correctly linked physical oppression with mental oppression, Steve Biko foregrounded the effect that physical oppression had on the psyche of black people.
He noted that “the type of black man we have today has lost his manhood. Reduced to an obliging shell, he looks with awe at the white power structure and accepts what he regards as the ‘inevitable position’. Deep inside his anger mounts at the accumulating insult, but he vents it in the wrong direction – on his fellow man”.
Indeed, a colonised black person does not need instruction to turn against his own. Doing so comes naturally, in the same way that such a black person brightens up in sheepish obedience as he comes out hurrying in response to his master’s impatient call.
This form of behaviour has recurred with unprecedented ferocity in our political space. Physical and mental energies have been expended, not on changing the material realities that affect the majority experience of our people, but against a convenient scapegoat. Finding a scapegoat for complex challenges exposes our continued intellectual entrapment. In a sense, this is what happens when an oppressed people refuse to acknowledge the psychological damage arising out of centuries of colonial subjugation.
Describing this sharply, Biko went further to state that “material want is bad enough, but coupled with spiritual poverty it kills. And this latter effect is probably the one that creates mountains of obstacles in the normal course of emancipation of the black people”.
South Africa is paying a heavy price for having overlooked this historical challenge. The result is that white supremacy continues to set the country’s political and economic agenda. Where necessary it enlists the services of the oppressed for the perpetuation of their own oppression. Our first responsibility should have been focusing on the task to dismantle white supremacy. We chose not to.
As a result, the country finds itself in the grip of what Antonio Gramsci describes as a crisis characterised by the fact “that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”.
The absence of change was ably described by Jonny Steinberg in Business Day newspaper. “The freedom South Africans acquired in 1994 was mercurial and slippery. Politically, the changes were dramatic. The electorate expanded overnight to include every adult. But the structure of society stayed much the same. And white people remained white people, doing what white people had always done: running the professions, the corporations, the universities. Expertise, wealth, technical knowledge, social confidence – all of these remained deeply associated with whiteness.”
The dominance of whites extends into every aspect of the economy. For instance, the Commission for Employment Equity Annual Report 2012-2013 found that at “the top management level, whites at 72.6%, particularly males, still continue to enjoy preference over other race groups in terms of representation, recruitment, promotion and skills development at this level”.
These are known facts. Thus, when Professor Chris Malikane observed that “the power of white monopoly capital could be seen in the private sector, in all apparatuses of the state, such as government, the universities, the courts, the press, the security forces and political parties”, he was stating the obvious.
Malikane went further to point out that the “strength of white monopoly capital is that it owns and controls South Africa’s resources and it has strong international backers. The dominance of white monopoly capital in the economy determines the nature of the state and society as a whole, since the existence of the state is supported by the resources monopolised by white capital”.
READ MORE: How to break monopoly white capital
Thus the call for radical economic transformation is not based on wishful thinking. It is informed by an objective reality that reminds us that South Africa is a country of two nations.
Describing the black condition, the former president, Thabo Mbeki, observed: “The second and larger nation of South Africa is black and poor, with the worst affected being women in the rural areas, the black rural population in general, and the disabled. This nation lives under conditions of a grossly underdeveloped economic, physical, educational, communication and other infrastructure. It has virtually no possibility to exercise what in reality amounts to a theoretical right to equal opportunity, with that right being equal within this black nation only to the extent that it is equally incapable of realisation.”
You would have thought that the country, and in particular African scholars, would invest most of their energies to reverse this trend.
But no, the need for white affirmation by some of our people is too great, and sometimes socially rewarding. It comes as no surprise that we have some who would deny the existence of white monopoly capital.
It would seem that we have failed in the most obvious but fundamental task of freeing ourselves from mental slavery. This has led to allowing ourselves to be easily diverted by irrelevancies. We need to divest all our energies to those thoughts that will lead to material benefits and economic emancipation of our people. Everything else is a sideshow that white supremacy has ensured that we busy ourselves with.
Unfortunately, even the most erudite amongst us have fallen for this diversion. What this country needs are thinkers who can come up with original ideas capable of uplifting the majority of our people. And the most urgent task is that of overhauling the discourse of white supremacy whose agenda is to maintain the socio-economic status quo. Finally, instead of bemoaning the grip that white supremacy has on our thinking, we need to ask; where are those among us who have had the benefit of education? What solutions to our material challenge have they contributed?
Those in the know tell us that they are to be to found in the golf clubs and fancy restaurants, while their white counterparts spend time brainstorming about critical issues. Instead of proffering solutions, they spend inordinate amounts of time boasting about their credentials.
It is thus hardly surprising that most of their pedestrian commentary is restricted to gossip and wishful thinking. The sooner we move out of the blame game, and start concentrating on coming up with solutions, the better.
But there is no way that we can escape the challenge of freeing our minds. If we don’t, all our self-hate and remonstration will take us out of the bottom rung of humanity.
For now, more energy, resources and time will be wasted in finding a scapegoat for our troubles.
* Muthambi is Minister of Public Service and Administration.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.