Johannesburg - I am totally frustrated with what seems to be going on (or not) in this country, particularly as it pertains to the daily struggles of the dejected and oppressed black masses. We are just too busy with a myriad of activities which, I believe, do not take us anywhere in terms of the pursuit of our liberation agenda as Afrikan people.
We are continually in a despicable state of obsession with peripheral issues and have put the liberation agenda on the back-burner.
It is noteworthy that politicians, especially in the “ruling” party, effortlessly utter phrases of “A luta continua” and, without blinking, still sing the Struggle songs that speak to the pain and aspirations of the oppressed black masses characteristic of our pre-1994 plight.
In essence, the relevance of these slogans and songs serve to confirm that we have, for the last 28 years of the “rainbow” dispensation, lost focus of the crux or core issue of what the Struggle was about.
We have missed the point as we have instead been playing silly games reminiscent of “black mampatile” in the guise of a rainbow nation for three decades now.
In the absence of a radical project to disrupt this white capital-controlled status quo, our perceived political activism will be analogous to the effervescence timidly contained in a glass or a cup, which fizzles out in time. So ephemeral, impotent, insignificant and inconsequential!
Slowly, perhaps not so slowly, we seem to be going nowhere in the direction of attaining true liberation. We may, of course, be caught up in the rhetoric of freedom, while in fact we are seized with the veneers of persistent oppression by our colonisers.
It will thus be foolhardy to keep on hoping that this decades-old rainbow template will lead us to the promised land. As a matter of fact, there is evidently no appetite on the part of the erstwhile liberation movement, ANC, in political office since 1994, to liberate the Afrikan people.
I am not sure whether it will be helpful to interrogate the rationale for this reticence and disinterest to disrupt the hegemony of whiteness. As I am wont to say, white monopoly capitalism dictates the agenda of the state. It has, if you like, captured the state.
Black people, within and outside the ruling party, need the infusion of the “Biko syrup” or black consciousness to deal with conformist and pliant malaises of mental slavery, non-whitism and house-negroism in order to extricate the organisation of Pixley ka Isaka Seme from the grip of white monopoly capital. I know this is not a nice thing to say, but it has to be said nevertheless.
We should not, for a second, be lulled into thinking that white supremacy is effervescent. It is constant, resolute, omnipotent and indeed omnipresent.
The gross mistake that we, as black people, have consistently made over history has been to underestimate the power of this monster (white supremacy).
Its gory tentacles pervade our various spaces across our class distinctions. It resides in our minds and hearts through miseducation and spiritual or religious conquest respectively. But most critically, it also resides in our stomachs in terms of which our leaders are lured to the white agenda through patronage. To many oppressed, the overbearing power of coloniality or mental colonisation has meant that they, without being instructed, volunteer to do the bidding of the oppressor.
This, as if to confirm Steve Biko’s timeless observation that “the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed”.
This is frighteningly apparent in how even our so-called political analysts and some academics in the neo-liberal media platforms devotedly defend the status quo and, at the drop of a hat, sneer at political projects premised on a revolutionary black agenda. Yet again, this underscores the power of the proverbial stomach!
This leads me to the reality that we have, this week, just landed in the month of September, which has been considered the “heritage” month, because September 24 is marked Heritage Day in the calendar of the post-1994 government.
Frankly speaking, as to what this “heritage” celebration brings or means to black people is unclear. What is the substance of this “heritage” narrative that preoccupies us in this month?
My observation is that it is one of those peripheral activities that serve to keep us busy and distract us from the real issue central to our liberation, which is the ideal of economic freedom.
As a way of “keeping busy”, we have truncated our pain and struggle in terms of historical events instead of looking at the black condition as an organic phenomenon that shouldn’t be viewed in a discrete manner.
I have consistently made the point that we have developed the habit of commemorating our political or struggle history in instalments or spasms of spectacle.
So, what do we do in this “heritage month”? As I have already hinted (or implied), we should shift our mindset from the logic of “heritage” purported by the rainbow dispensation in the context of our Eurocentric Constitution, because it’s all fake and fallacious.
What we are made to “celebrate” as our heritage is, in multifarious ways, a distortion of our culture, history and heritage as Afrikan people. We need to reinterpret the historical (calendar) events and deliberately steer them to the confluence river of consciousness and liberation.
Fortunately, September gives us the opportunity to do this. It is, for me, a Black Consciousness month or Biko month in that it was on the 12th of this month 45 years ago (in 1977) that the father of black consciousness movement (BCM), Bantu Steve Biko, was murdered by the white settler apartheid regime.
Biko is a symbol of true liberation, and we thus should rally around what he stood for, and indeed died for. If we understand Biko and BCM we will soon see through the triviality and the distractive nature of the so-called heritage activities and celebrations of the post-1994 society.
It is therefore extremely encouraging that the Azanian People’s Organisation (Azapo) will commemorate Steve Biko at his hometown of Ginsberg in the Eastern Cape next Sunday. The PAC is also expected to be part of this important session. It is, further, highly commendable that the EFF has consistently commemorated the death of Biko over the years since their formation in 2013. Secondly, and importantly, it is in this month that we, as Afrikans, are supposed to celebrate the new year in terms of the Afrikan calendar.
Coming back to the banal issue of “heritage” celebrations, we need to realise that the people are “forced” to celebrate fake things. The reason is simple: without economic emancipation a people cannot claim and effect cultural freedom.
This assertion amplifies the significance of economic freedom as the core element of true liberation. In other words, those who hold economic power are in a good position to influence or dictate the social, political, economic and, importantly, the cultural agenda of the country. These include the education, spiritual and language considerations.
It boils down to the question, who controls the media, the corporate and employment sector, and so forth? In such circumstances, we are bound to see the economically marginalised, irrespective of their numerical advantage, dictated to by those who dominate the economy.
A clear example, on matters of heritage, is the painful failure for black people, despite their majority, to simply change the senseless name of this country (Union of South Africa in 1910 and later South Africa in 1961) to Azania.
We religiously stick to this thing and come with all sorts of irritating defence mechanisms and explanations to keep the name that white people gave this country. Similarly, the name “Union Buildings” has been devotedly kept in honour of that obnoxious system that excluded the natives of this.
This is the very same arrangement that prompted Seme to start the ANC as a unitary force by Afrikan people to reclaim their land. That was before the calamitous confusion that came via the Freedom Charter in 1955.
I find it traumatic every time I see our political leaders singing the national anthem of apartheid, “Die Stem”, that’s uncomfortably packaged with Enoch Sontonga’s “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika” as the national anthem of the post-1994 dispensation. It’s so uneasy.
But it’s more painful when you know some of these leaders were in the liberation armies such as MK, APLA and Azanla. It just becomes impossible (for me) to imagine Steve Biko, Robert Sobukwe, Pixley ka Isaka Seme, Vuyisile Mini, Chris Hani, Mapetla Mohapi and many others of that ilk singing “Die Stem“.
I have said elsewhere that we have even adoringly kept the apartheid name of our currency, the “rand”. What a beautiful story and an act of fulfilment would it have been to have an indigenous name for our currency!
Further, I am attracted to the ideal of Azania adopting the Afrikan calendar, say the Royal Calendar of Kemet.
We seem to have lovingly embraced and normalised coloniality. Now, you have to ask yourself, if the “black” government fails to change things such as “Die Stem”, how do you expect it to repossess the land, Africanise the education system, nationalise the strategic sectors of the economy, create a state bank or even nationalise the reserve bank?
I so wish that one of the black opposition parties in Parliament could push for the removal of the apartheid “Die Stem” from our national anthem. I am just curious to see how some black parliamentarians would defend it!
I can already imagine the replay of the horror movie pertaining to the Section 25 Amendment in terms of which efforts were made to fail despite the ANC’s clear mandate as per their conference resolution of 2017 to “expropriate the land without compensation”.
As I have argued earlier, those who hold the economic power (that is, white people) ensured that their proxies obfuscated the matter and, in the end, maintained the status quo.
As we commemorate Biko month, let’s remember that economic freedom lies at the heart of the true liberation project. Without economic power, there is no way in which Afrikan laws, customs, traditions, values or heritage will be moved to the centre of our social and educational experience. Afrikan values will continue to play second fiddle to the dictates of other races.
Mayibuye iAfrika! Izwe Lethu!
David Letsoalo is a Sankarist, an activist and Law academic