Defending Zuma and the Guptas is not striking a blow for Black Consciousness against white monopoly capital, writes Malesela Steve Lebelo.
To Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness (BC) philosophy, the Guptas and the Ruperts are six of one and half a dozen of the other.
Yet the deluded Andile Mngxi-tama and Mzwandile Manyi argue that by defending Jacob Zuma and the Guptas they are striking a blow for BC against white monopoly capital. This is a fallacy of epic proportions, a gross misreading of BC philo-sophy, driven by nefarious intentions. The cannibalisation of Biko’s thinking cannot go unchallenged. BC has to be rescued from such delusional analysis.
The murder of Biko was a calculated, systematic assault on black radicalism or the swart gevaar by a white supremacist state determined to contain it.
This is unsurprising.
It’s the reaction of the ANC’s Tripartite Alliance, the SACP and the United Democratic Front (UDF) to BC and black radicalism that is bewildering.
Inspired by the Freedom Charter, the alliance was just as determined to expunge black radicalism out of the public sphere.
For the alliance, “an unbroken thread of non-racialism” runs through every historical moment and political conjuncture of mass mobilisation against white supremacy.
And because BC sits awkwardly in this constructed and contrived orthodox narrative, obfuscation occurs.
In the aftermath of Biko’s murder, the political landscape was turned on its head.
There was a convergence of interest between the white supremacist state and the Tripartite Alliance, the congress tradition.
Both were determined to rid the contested public sphere of BC and all manifestations of black radicalism.
PW Botha’s Total Strategy was not a response to a threat of a Total Onslaught posed by the ANC-SACP alliance and their armed formation, Umkhonto-we-Sizwe (MK).
Total Strategy was a frontal assault on black radicalism.
The immediate threat to white supremacy in the aftermath of Biko’s murder was the prospect of another eruption of popular violence inspired by black radical-ism conceptualising “race” as the decisive antagonism.
The apartheid state used both brutal (as in the murder of Biko) and subtle approaches in reacting to a thriving black radicalism.
Subtle approaches included dividing and fragmenting urban black society and solidarity displayed in the Soweto Revolt.
It popularised the idea that the path to black self-realisation was through black entrepreneurship.
This was an obfuscation of the decisive antagonism and an assault on BC.
It was a conscious and deliberate strategy to negate BC as an instru-ment of mass mobilisation of the black collective.
A quest for entrepreneurial and individual self-realisation was encouraged.
White monopoly capital invested in social redress programmes designed to construct a distinct social class of black entrepreneurs and professionals to be co-opted into the white supremacist system.
The creation of a generation of black entrepreneurs was an integral part of Total Strategy.
For a section of black society across townships, becoming black entrepreneurs and professionals became the new struggle.
This was a struggle that, philo-sophically, struck a blow at the very foundations of BC.
It was a struggle vetted by the white supremacist state as part of Total Strategy and designed to undermine BC’s core values of fostering a collective consciousness, a black radical identity.
Blacks were urged to internalise entrepreneurship values and indi-vidual self-advancement as opposed to concerns about blacks as a collective.
The struggle ceased to be an expression of black collective concerns and consciousness as articulated in BC ideology.
The new struggle was about becoming the first black one thing or the other.
This was a dominant ideology constructed by the white suprem-acist state to buttress white supremacy.
The first black chartered accoun-tant, remembered to this day, earned the most sought-after licence for admission into white society.
The DA’s Johannesburg mayor, Herman Mashaba, is an outcome of Total Strategy’s manoeuvre to absorb fractions of black society into a white superstructure process, a creation of Total Strategy and a negation of all that BC is.
Capital accumulation, be it by black Africans like Mashaba, Ephraim Tshabalala and Richard Maponya, or blacks of Indian descent such as the Guptas, is a negation of BC.
Both before and after 1994, black capital accumulation is an instrument of white supremacy rather than an articulation of black emancipation.
Before 1994, black entrepreneurship was an instrument of social control and a mechanism for fragmenting black solidarity as articulated by Biko.
In its current form as Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) black entrepreneurship legitimises white monopoly capital.
It has always been an initiative of white supremacists eager to contain and define black participation in the public sphere.
Total Strategy did not stop at driving a wedge within black African society.
It also conspired to dislodge blacks of Indian descent and so-called coloureds from the category “black” as defined by Biko.
Where orthodox Africanists of the 1950s such as Robert Sobukwe were ambiguous about the status of blacks of Indian descent in the definition of “African”, Biko was unequivocal.
Biko’s wider definition of “blackness”, considered a stroke of philosophical genius rather than an act of needless and misplaced magnanimity, was put to a test by white supremacy’s reaction to an enduring black radicalism.
In terms of Total Strategy’s imperatives, the Tricameral Parliament was a power sharing deal that embraced so-called coloureds and blacks of Indian descent into the white supremacist superstructure, isolating black Africans.
The impact on BC and Biko’s widely-defined black solidarity remains unaccounted for.
The reaction of blacks of Indian descent and so-called coloureds to white supremacy’s manoeuvre to undermine BC was less than heroic at best, and treacherous at worst.
Did blacks of Indian descent and so-called coloureds betray Biko?
Were they co-opted into the white supremacist social order?
Some did. “Black” was at the bottom of the pecking order.
Others opposed the power-sharing deal and joined the UDF to mobilise against the Tricameral Parliament.
Simplistically deemed a radical option and a matter of positionality, this was a negation of BC in a chan-ging political context in which white supremacy constructed illusions of struggle while relentlessly pursuing and crashing any hint of black radicalism wherever it manifested itself.
These communities were drawn into a public domain in which BC and black radicalism, both in thought and in political activism, was rendered the “the anti-public”.
Forces in the public sphere, made up of both the white supremacist state and the Tripartite Alliance may have had an adversarial relationship.
But they were united in their determination to contain black radical thought and activism.
The decisive antagonism therefore was the antimony between white supremacy and the Tripartite Alliance on the one hand, and BC and black radicalism on the other.
The bloodbath of 1984 to 1993, described as “black on black” violence, has to be the single most deranged response to white supremacy ever conjured up by any generation of Africans in any part of the globe.
The trauma and social death associated with popular violence that defined this political conjunc-ture, was restricted to black Africans. Blacks of Indian descent and coloureds were insulated from this popular violence.
The insularity of so-called coloureds and blacks of Indian descent from the politics of the “necklace” was more than a matter of strategic positioning.
It was an articulation of an existential reality, a structural imperative whose dimensions extend beyond 1994.
In its reaction to BC and black radicalism, the congress tradition had become an extension of the white supremacist order.
When BC was subjected to such systematic assault from within black society, what did Zuma do? Did he defend BC? Or was he complicit in its extirpation?
That his lack of formal education was no impediment to him grasping the complexities of Marxism-Leninism is considered a measure of his exceptional qualities.
As head of intelligence in exiled MK, Zuma was responsible for overseeing both the ideological reorientation of recruits over and above the physical preparations for their deployment back into South Africa. His mastery of Marx and Lenin, more imagined than real, was pressed into service following the Soweto Revolt.
MK recruits thrown up by the Soweto Revolt and organised into the June 16 Detachment needed an ideological reorientation.
They needed to be de-schooled from a conceptualisation of white supremacy as the decisive antagonism. They had to learn that the scientific approach to the liberation struggle, the Marxist-Leninist theory of revolution, revealed capitalist exploitation of labour as the decisive antagonism.
This Marxist-Leninist indoctrin-ation robbed BC and black radical-ism of a generation of its finest cadres most determined than any before or after to strike a blow at white supremacy.
* Lebelo is a historian and author.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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