It’s a political blasphemy, a total liberation struggle betrayal and can only come from those who were planted by the pre-1994 system to infiltrate the mass democratic movement to even conceive such a political experiment.
The capital mistake brought by its proponents is to theorise before they could even present empirically why it was not tested in the Western Cape, where DA is governing, so that it can be used as a raw data/facts or unit of analysis if not a barometer. Insensibly the protagonists begin by twisting facts to suit their theories and interests, instead of theories suiting the facts and Western Cape reality as a pilot project or case study for what they want.
These planted nostalgists are less dialogical about the current situation of a black man in this country economically, but are ruminating about immediate crumbs that normally fall from the white man’s dinner table. As Yevgeny Yevtushenko would say, “economic justice to them is like a train that is nearly always late, hence it’s easy to go for liberation shortcuts for the few”.
The black man’s circumstances here and in the diaspora largely is bristled with truth about economic reparation, a subject that the beneficiaries of colonisation always try to avoid.
Let’s not fool ourselves: the primary motivation for the evils of colonialism was and still is economic. It is organised crime; the robbery of other people’s land and resources; the exploitation and despiteful use of their labour. It is also about the reduction of these people to mass consumers and exclusion from the ownership of the factors of production and wealth creation.
Many years down the line black people manage poverty while white people manage wealth. When we talk about economic transformation, it can’t be mechanised and when we talk about reconciliation, we are referring to economic reconciliation. Now why would you have a flimsy mistaken belief that your historical oppressors will economically liberate you in the form of a DA/ANC coalition, yet they failed to liberate black people in the Western Cape?
Black people must learn to listen, especially those who have been lent leadership responsibilities to serve and not to rule, not unless you are what Aubrey Mashiqi refers to as a “policy askari”.
Like Martin Luther King Jr did in his Letter From Birmingham City Jail, written to white religious leaders who criticised King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for its role in supporting nonviolent civil disobedience to Jim Crow laws in Birmingham, Alabama, Steve Biko correctly declared that there is a difference between legality and justice.
Slavery was practised, supported and defended under “the rule of law”.
Robbery of land and labour of Indigenous people was upheld under “the rule of law”.
Without reparations for racial injustice, there is no reason to talk about racial reconciliation, let alone imagine that it is likely to happen under an ANC/DA coalition
Women were denied the right to vote “under the rule of law”.
People who insist that descendants of Indigenous and enslaved people whose land and labour were stolen by colonisers deserve economic reparation are vilified as opponents of “the rule of law” by white defenders of manifest destiny, self-proclaimed religious conservatives and colonial-minded blacks and policy askaris. They are vilified because colonisers and their lackeys have always referred to “the rule of law” to avoid demands for economic reparations as part of the overall claim for racial justice.
Chris Hani’s views are in line with those of Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, Cornel West, Tavis Smiley, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Kimberlé Crenshaw, the Black Lives Matter movement, the Poor People Campaign movement, Palestinians, and other Black and Indigenous people around the world who have been and are vilified for demanding economic reparations for legalised robbery, fraud and other oppression.
A close friend of mine who is based in North Carolina in the US, tells me that most Americans are in denial about white supremacy, racism and their pervasive influence on the legal system, society, economics, notions of government, religion and understanding of culture.
In his intellectual letters, Michael Eric Dyson described this denial tendency and its effect on racial equity in his introduction to Black Mutiny: The Revolt on the Schooner Amistad, by William Owens, as follows: “It is not overstating the case to suggest that, when it comes to race, we are living in the United States of Amnesia. America cannot solve its race problem because it cannot afford to remember what it has been through, or more accurately, what it has made its Black citizens endure: the horrible, cowardly, vicious legacy of racial domination stoked by religious belief and judicial mandate. The willed forgetfulness of our racial past continues to trap us. It appears easier for most Whites, and for many Blacks, to re-enact a pantomime of social civility through comfortable gestures of racial reconciliation than it is to tell each other the truth of the colossal breach of humane behaviour and democratic practice that slavery represented.”
Derrick Bell, one of the first legal scholars associated with critical race theory, was equally honest in his contribution to the introduction to Black Mutiny.
The distinctions between slavery, segregation and current era of quasi-opportunity are real, but the paradoxes built on white dominance and black subordination are recognisable in each era. Those blacks and whites who challenge the racial status quo are seldom hailed as heroes in their own time. Their words and actions are too threatening to allow either those they oppose or those they would help to comprehend when those bold individuals proclaim what might be.
In all times, the law is the handmaiden of those in power, especially in the Western Cape . Only in extraordinary circumstances will courts and legislatures break with this traditional role and reach out to the dispossessed, usually in ways that benefit those without power in small ways and in the short run. In large ways and in the long run, the seemingly remedial actions of law stabilise and legitimate even when, as is often the case, the powerful are most active in their opposition to these modest reforms. There are many examples to cite on this part.
Dyson’s observation about the “willed forgetfulness of our racial past” that enables most white people and many black people” to “re-enact a pantomime of social civility through comfortable gestures of racial reconciliation”, and Bell’s observation that “blacks and whites who challenge the racial status quo are seldom hailed as heroes in their own time”, are as true now as when they were made in 1997. That explains why right-wing politicians, religious figures, some judges, journalists, neo-fundamental capitalist colonisers, racist academics and imperialists, and white supremacists are trying to stop teaching, learning, writing and discourse about the history of racial injustice, including critical race theory, in colleges, universities and otherwise.
On another level, “willed forgetfulness” and outright hostility to truthful observations about the economic debt owed to descendants of Indigenous and formerly enslaved Africans are at the heart of recent attacks on historically privileged universities like Stellenbosch University, where white students will just urinate on the material of a black student.
At the same time, the descendants of Indigenous and formerly enslaved Africans who asserted our inherent rights of dignity, equality and freedom from oppression have always recognised how white colonisers and their descendants used black lackeys as agents of pacification. In the early years of the last century Booker T. Washington served that purpose. At the end of the last century and currently judges such as justice Clarence Thomas and religious figures such as Tony Evans serve that purpose in the US, and you can’t tell me we don’t have similar examples here in South Africa.
A generation ago, Randall Robinson wrote about what the US owes Africans and African Americans for the damage black people suffered and continue to suffer because of centuries of slavery, segregation and discrimination perpetrated under “the rule of law”. After quoting the long settled legal principle that a party wronged by unjust acts is entitled to recompense so the wrongdoer is not unjustly enriched, Robinson wrote: “Only in the case of black people have the claims, the claimants, the crime, the law, the precedents, the awful contemporary social consequences all been roundly ignored. The thinking must be that the case that cannot be substantively answered is best not acknowledged at all.”
The crime — 246 years of an enterprise murderous both of a people and their culture — is so unprecedentedly massive that it would require some form of collective insanity not to see it and its living victims.
But still many, if not most, whites cannot or will not see it (a behaviour that is accommodated by all too many uncomplaining blacks).
I thank God for Robinson, Bell, Dyson, Jones, Crenshaw, West, Smiley and others who refuse to allow the massive debt owed Africans and African Americans to be disregarded and disallowed by the “willed forgetfulness” and “collective insanity” rationalised by reliance on “the rule of law”.
I thank God that there are some South Africans who refuse to allow reliance on “the rule of law” to silence the rightful claim of South Africans to the reparation owed for the land and labour stolen from them for centuries.
And I thank God for Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, James Cone, Steve Biko, Chris Hani, Frantz Fanon, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and other prophetic religious and secular leaders who proclaim a festering inconvenient truth.
Without reparations for racial injustice, there is no reason to talk about racial reconciliation, let alone imagine that it is likely to happen under an ANC/DA coalition.
Which therefore begs the question, why didn’t the ANC take economic powerin 1994 and 1999 if we were true victors in the liberation struggle? Something doesn’t add up. John Henrik Clarke teaches us that if you are a real winner you take power in and feel it by your hand. Did we feel it ? If not, what were we scared of? Or we were waiting for this obscure and superficial elitist DA marriage?
• Mphumzi Mdekazi is an ANC member from Boland region and PhD student at Stellenbosch University
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