all rick turner, all the time

amidst all the crazy driving and fun adventures along the way, always the default topic and task was rick turner. reading about rick turner at every opportunity. calling people who knew rick turner and setting up appointments to meet them, meeting with about a dozen different people, at different cafes, offices and even parking lots, photocopying 1,000 pages of material from the rick turner archive, and then at night before bed reading more about turner. it felt almost like being a detective, and each day a new tiny piece of the whole puzzle i was trying to make sense of became more clear to me. who was he friends with? who did he work closely with? what did he believe deeply in? who killed him? and so on and so on. it all began with leaving simonskloof and driving a full 300km backwards towards cape town to meet with jann turner, rick’s daughter. but it was well worth it, as she told excellent stories about her childhood and about the radical left in south africa, and was extremely supportive of my work.

all around, the contsant focus on turner was, in fact, a very enjoyable obsession, and i felt proud of myself, libby expressed pride in my work, and people we met were grateful that i am undertaking this project. so, it was very fulfilling…

at the university of natal durban (now ukzn), they’ve named the student union after turner, a building where he once organized many debates and discussion forums, nonetheless the people i met randomly on campus seemed to have no knowledge of who he was…

this is the view of durban from the university library, where i was for many hours…

here our car is parked outside the house of fatima meer, a truly amazing old radical organizer who graciously gave me three hours of her time to talk to me about rick turner, because “i loved rick turner, and so i’ll help you in any way that i can.” it was one of the highlights of the trip, for sure.in this same home, twice assassins tried to murder fatima, once one week before they did kill rick. and also in this same home, rick turner was married to his wife foszia.

Steve Biko and his White Hero

“The biggest mistake the black world ever made was to assume that whoever opposed apartheid 

was an ally.”

- Steve Biko

True statement: white people participated in the struggle against apartheid. Another true statement: Donald Woods was one of these participants. Potentially true statement: the story of the life of Donald Woods, depicted in film, was a useful part of efforts to influence white, western audiences to oppose apartheid, in whatever small way that they might. White people have plenty of stories to tell to each other about their actions and non-actions which played a part in sustaining and undoing systems of oppression of which they were crucial benefactors. Donald Woods is not a hero (neither is Biko, of course) and nonetheless there are lessons other whites can learn from his life. Still, there is no justification for packaging the life of Donald Woods – or white activists generally – as the story of Steve Biko; and, whether intentional or not, this is essentially the consequence of the narrative structure utilized in Cry Freedom. 

Perhaps Attenborourgh didn’t intend his film to be so much slanted towards telling the story of Donald Woods’ life. Perhaps he was swayed by the political constraints involved with raising the tens of millions of dollars ‘needed’ to produce a film on the level of Cry Freedom. All the same, Peter Davis is fair in outright slamming the narrative structure of a black and white ‘buddy’ whose friendship ’shakes the nation.’ This kind of talk might make money for hollywood, but is otherwise rubbish. Vivian Bickford-Smith is also being fair when she reminds us that “the real Biko also believed that the white liberal had a role to play: to ‘address the white world not blacks’ and ‘to apply himself with absolute dedication to educating his white brother.’ This was surely – at least in part – what Woods and Attenborough were doing.” 

While one can believe that Woods internalized Biko’s critiques of liberalism to the extent that he was able, (and full of mistakes and contradictions, surely) it is harder to believe that Attenborough saw himself as giving Biko an international platform for attacking the attitudes and ideology of white liberalism. One gets the strong impression from Cry Freedom that liberal values are put forward not just for tactical reasons, but because the filmmaker wholeheartedly believes in them. The allegiance to liberalism may well be the single greatest flaw of the film. Rob Nixon, in trying to define the ‘penury of liberalism,’ explains that, “only a minority of South African whites ranked as liberals; more significantly, the ideology achieved very limited purchase among the black majority… leaving [liberals] marooned between a recalcitrant white right and an increasingly revolutionary group of outlawed African nationalist and socialist organizations.” In this context, the repeated theme of Cry Freedom – that Biko’s ideas are not so threatening as one (white person) might at first assume – rings deeply hollow. 

Furthermore, the repeated – and essential – clashes between the Black Consciousness Movement and white liberals are sidelined by the story laid out in Cry Freedom. The (all-Black) South African Student Organization (SASO) is brought to life precisely as a rejection of the paternalist structures and ideologies of ‘integration’ within the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) and after repeated arguments with them. Even though Biko played a critical role in these formative contestations with NUSAS and in the operations and ideology of SASO generally, very little is mentioned of this in the film. There are scenes where Biko confronts Woods directly on certain points of view that Woods holds (as a liberal) and even one where the BCM critique of ‘integration’ is explained to some extent. However, in an unnervingly ironic juxtaposition, this scene is followed immediately by a scene in which Woods, as Editor-in-Chief, is welcoming two of the black people who participated in the conversation about integration onto the staff of his newspaper. Woods tells his white employees that the black militants have been hired to ‘tell about the real news affecting black people.’ But, in effect, he is telling the young blacks that their opinion is irrelevant. Whereas they had told Woods that they didn’t want to just be ‘invited,’ in ones and twos, into the ‘white world,’ but rather to ‘create an African table’ and then invite whites to it, Woods simply responds with, of all things, an invitation to join the white world. The structure of these two scenes speak to the fallacy of Bickford-Smith’s claim that the film argues “that we should accept black South African views ahead of those of whites, including those of white liberals.” On the contrary, the over-riding message is that the Black Consciousness Movement doesn’t present any ideas which can’t be easily recuperated into the liberal frame of mind and action. 

Perhaps the most damning critique of Cry Freedom comes in the carefully thought out and strategic decision of the apartheid state’s Publications Committee to unconditionally approve the screening of the film in South Africa. In defending their decision, the committee wrote:

   “In fact, it would be quite understandable if a substantial number of viewers were to find the film’s heavy accent on the actions of Woods, who becomes the hero of the film, questionable or even deplorable in the light of his real role in relation to that of Biko, who, in the eyes of many, is something of a martyr-figure.

   Such a reaction against the film and its producer and script-writer is, of course, not undesirable in terms of the Publications Act. In fact, it is likely to neutralise emotions which might otherwise have arisen as a result of the screening of the film.”

That Biko’s ideas and actions could threaten apartheid should be fairly well evidenced in his assassination by the security police. That Biko could threaten the stability and validity of liberalism and whiteness, both at home and abroad, is a point Cry Freedom deftly avoids raising.

To Be People, Not Races.

To Be People, Not Races
Notions of White (In)Humanity in Mtutuzeli Matshoba’s Short Stories

“However, regardless of all these likelihoods,
to know that we once tried when everybody else was not trying
would give us reason to say we once lived;
we were not stillborn in the struggle for a truly human life.”
Mtutuzeli Matshoba

After more than five centuries of race-making within Europe and the portions of the globe colonized by Europe, there is little room left to dispute the fact that the origins of racial ideologies lie firmly amongst the so-called superior race, the whites. That is to say, while the complicity and resistance of the other, of the non-white populations of the world, have always been essential ingredients of racialism, race is and always has been produced and sustained by and for those people who claim to be white. Therefore, the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) which developed in South Africa can – at the very least (or at worst) – be described, as Chabani Manganyi has, as “a medium for positive, creative and defensive racialism which is opposed to the traditional negative racism practised by whites.”1 Black people, with BCM, insist on defining for themselves what the significance and ‘use’ of being ‘Black,’ is, will, or can be. This in opposition to a ruling order that “despises him [the black person] and his descriptions. They manage to create, deliberately, in every generation, the nigger they want to see. We, the blacks, can be described by others, but we are forbidden to describe ourselves.”2 But the point is not so simple, or crass, as ‘defensive racialism’ would make one think. For just as whites were unable to create themselves as a distinct ‘race,’ with clearly defined qualities, values, and privileges without simultaneously naming (and constraining) Black people, so too are Blacks unable to define themselves without simultaneously speaking to the nature of white people. Given the intrinsically dynamic nature of racial (self-)definition, if Black Consciousness is read only in terms of its descriptions of Blackness, crucial lessons regarding Whiteness are overlooked. In this paper, I intend to read the short stories of BCM writer Mtutuzeli Matshoba with a constant eye to what Matshoba is saying about who white people are, and what they are or are not capable of doing in order to supersede a society ‘obsessed with race,’ such as apartheid South Africa (and racial framings of humanity in general).

Central to Matshoba’s articulations of race in South Africa is the notion of humanity, the tricky question of how one can somehow not be understood – either by themselves or as perceived by others – as human. In Matshoba’s narrative, the category ‘black,’3 is sub-human, is not regarded4 as deserving the basic dignities of life in human societies. This creation of sub-human status is not just metaphorical, not simply a provocative claim on matshoba’s part, but meant, in a number of cases, to be taken as objective fact, as literal. For example, Matshoba’s story A Glimpse of Slavery depicts the brutal degradation – to the point of slavery – of convict labor in South Africa. In this economic arrangement, the extent of exploitation carried out requires a level of constant, vicious, and completely ugly violence; humanity must be literally beaten out of the worker, in order for them to submit to their conditions. One instance of such violence is described as follows: “Koos asked no questions but started flogging us with brutish enthusiasm. I covered my face and felt the lashes cutting my skin and setting it on fire. Two or three of us were crying out loud.” Later in the story, the convicts sit together and try to analyse the motivations for such brutality on the part of the whites. One prisoner offers: “’In order to satisfy their greed they have no choice but to insulate themselves against the sufferings of those they exploit by convincing themselves that the latter are not really human beings but something less than that. They liken us to beasts of labor that they can force to do anything they will upon us.’” Another prisoner chimes in to agree, and clarify that, “’if it had been that way [that we are simply beasts], there would have been no need to keep us in subjugation with guns…’” As spectacular as such instances of debasement are, the gnawing question of inhumanity lies in the constancy of it, the subtle repetitions of daily life. In Three Days in the Land of a Dying Illusion Matshoba asserts that, “The black man knows that he has been divested of his natural heritage of human dignity. He feels it on his way to and from work in the crowded trains, buses and taxis; in the crowded and sub-economic habitat, be it a hostel room or a dog-kennel… just about everywhere and at every moment of his life.”

In the process of degrading (black) people to a sub-human status, in defense of whiteness – a category which also needs to be created – whites themselves become sub-human. When, in Another Glimpse of Slavery, Matshoba describes Koos De Wet’s farm as “the place where I would learn the extent to which cruelty and hatred can turn man into something less than a wild beast,” it is Koos De Wet that is being named as “something less than a wild beast,” not his prisoners. White people lack the moral grounding that makes human beings basically decent, or at least makes one turn against acts of cruelty. Instead, whites seem to delight in causing suffering on others, or at least to delight in the material benefits of causing widespread suffering. Matshoba’s convict laborers describe white people as, “suffer[ing] from such a callousness as earn[s] the condemnation of the whole nation of humanity on the planet earth.” As moral condemnation this is all clear enough, and roughly sufficient, but in terms of political and social analysis – towards social change – more needs said; and perhaps Matshoba misses the possible insights and conclusions of his own formulations of white inhumanity.

Matshoba, in A Pilgrimage to the Isle of Makana goes as far as to say that, “Normally, if I see a white I see a white and not another human being. I see an image of the man who plunders my humanity.” There is here, potentially, an implication that compliance with the codes and behaviors of whiteness places one ‘beyond the pale’ of humanity. However, in this same section, Matshoba explains “seeing… a white and not another human being” as evidence of “how this racism smears all those exposed to it. I have been smeared, for my whole life. My very existence is determined along racial lines.” Fair enough. But Matshoba stops short of asking himself – and us – to answer the deeper and more significant questions about the nature and function of racial identity. The question that must be asked is whether or not whiteness – in specific, but by implication, also racial categories more generally – is in any way a ‘human’ identity? That is, can a person be fully human and also – incidentally or simultaneously – white? Failing to ask and answer these questions leads to weaknesses and dead-ends in trying to imagine anti-racial activity on the part of whites and a nonracial society yet to come.

A Pilgrimmage to the Isle of Makana discusses the dynamic between blacks in the struggle for liberation and white liberals in extensive detail. Matshoba portrays a black protagonist that is quite firmly rooted in his conviction that whites are irredeemable and yet has that conviction shaken somewhat through interacting with a small handful of liberals. Upon first introduction to his (black) friend Nomonde’s ‘good’ white friends, the protagonist tells the reader that, “I was not ready to part company before I had proved to Nomonde that whites could never be good, even if god was apparently on their side. They would hate the black man even in heaven. Why did she think they had separate graveyards?” However, after a bit of conversation about the political situation in the country, he decides, “These were human beings with a conscience and everything, like me!… Racism was crumbling fast before my eyes without a single bomb or life being wasted.” Remembering Nat Nakasa’s advice that “’the best way to live with apartheid is to ignore it,’” our narrator spends a number of hours enjoying a mixed-race party atmosphere and delighting in the ease and humanity of the interactions that feel possible there. But Matshoba doesn’t leave his characterisation of mixed-race interactions on such a sanguine note; the story is full of internal conflict and questioning.

In fact, it is quite telling that Matshoba’s investigation of the role of white liberals remains solely within the confines of a black man’s private questioning. Matshoba is admitting to us that he cannot explain or justify the motivations, goals and limitations of white people who attempt to rise out of racialism – he just simply doesn’t know. He doesn’t know, and he refuses to ask. “I ask myself these questions now, yet I know I cannot answer them. Only they could answer them. Why did I not ask them that day? I hate embarassing other people unless they are out to do it to me.” So, to save white liberals the embarassment of having to answer for themselves, Matshoba must either be content to simply raise questions or to offer only partial answers of his own.

Once again Matshoba resorts to the crisp language of moral indignation. “They live like human beings ought to live – no, that’s not right – they live in unfair abundance, while most of us just manage to survive. Look at their homes and think of our dog kennels! But would you say they enjoyed human rights when among their people it was regarded as shameful, even sinful, to exercise their right to love indiscriminately?” There is more than a bit of compassion here, as a motivating factor for white transgressions against racism is named not as guilt but as a basic lack of something so simple, beautiful and necessary as the capacity to “love indiscriminately.” Further, in speaking to the need for blacks to play a leading role in the struggle, rather than relying on white leadership, Matshoba again refers to a basic absence of essential human needs amongst whites. “We cannot expect Phil, Rachel and Shirley and those of their people who still have a conscience to give it [happiness] to us, because they haven’t got it themselves. Our unhappiness tarnishes any happiness they might have derived from their own existences.” Such statements jump off the page with their crisp, ethical clarity and their aspiration for the attainment of universal human values. And yet, in the end, Matshoba’s final characterisation of the white liberal ends clumsily, limply.

When speculating on the implications of a death of a black man held on Robben Island for the relationship of the protagonist to the ‘good’ whites, Matshoba resorts to a shallow and unproductive dichotomy. “Yes, I still saw them as friends and would not condemn them simply because they wore white skins. I knew very well that there was a special kind of white, the racist, who killed people.” Here a full retreat is made from the realization that whiteness debases its subjects to the point of inhumanity. In this passage, whiteness becomes not a destructive social construct – a dynamic that cuts both ways19 – but rather a question of skin, a question of the inherent malevolence of a small handful of those with a certain skin-tone, the ‘racists.’ Such an analysis does a disservice both to the ‘beasts’ of white supremacist systems and also to those – both ‘white’ and ‘black’ – who attempt to lay seige to those systems. Where is the striving for a mutual recovering of human dignity denied and debased if all that must be done is that ‘the racists’ are done away with?

Matshoba shines best when describing the limits, not the potential, of egalitarian collaboration between whites and blacks. Just as we are settling in to the joyful mixed-race party environment, Matshoba shakes us awake with the question, “Where were the haters then? Doubtlessly barricaded in their hatred and waiting, shotguns in readiness, for a swart gevaar onslaught on their identity and civilization.” He is not just being glib or cynical here, but rather pointing to the real, structural barriers which inevitably creep into the well-intentioned efforts of black and white ‘anti-racists.’ Matshoba continues to explain that, “Tomorrow hostilities would resume and intensify. Events would take place which would compel me to evoke again the only effective means of defence against hate and contempt: hate and contempt. Tomorrow he would go to the army and learn that the enemy he was being trained to defend himself against was the black man in the backyard who was stalking his household and abundance, day and night.” Those whites who aspire – in spite of their whiteness – to have human interactions with black people and thus simultaneously assert the humanity of black people cannot be fully human on account of the structural barriers of the racist system that they themselves have created. Humanity then becomes something whites can only catch for themselves in glimpses, something they can only share with blacks in fleeting, ’stolen’ moments. The only explicit offer of how whiteness (and therefore blackness) can be surpassed is in moments when it is “forgotten.” All the same, Matshoba stresses, finally, with a healthy dose of genuine gratitude that, “Regardless of all these likelihoods, to know that we once tried when everybody else was not trying would give us reason to say we once lived; we were not stillborn in the struggle for a truly human life.”

1 – Matshoba, M. (1979). Call me not a man. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.
2 – Baldwin, J. (1985). Price of the ticket, the. New York: St. Martin’s Press. pg. 58
3 – Need it be said: ‘created by whites’?
4 – Again, is it essential to say: ‘regarded by whites’? Or is this known, and therefore redundant?

all other quotes drawn from source #1… except…
19 – Or, one might say, in multiple, or all directions.

‘We Were All Affected’: Colonialism through the eyes of whites raised in independent Africa

INTRODUCTION

A white boy is born in Zimbabwe in 1987. For multiple generations before his birth, his family had been Rhodesian, part of the white settler community that declared themselves independent from Britain in 1965, fought a desperate 15 year war against the black guerrilla forces, then finally conceded to a negotiated Zimbabwean independence – and Black majority rule – in 1980. The white men of the generation before him played active roles in Rhodesia’s ‘counter-insurgency’ efforts. At age 21, the young white Zimbabwean can name the various ranks his father, uncles, and family friends had within the military. Attempting to explain the significance of his family’s role in the Rhodesian army’s attempts to maintain white rule he says, “we were all affected” by the war.

In one simple phrase, this young man absolves his ancestors of any agency in taking up arms for white supremacy, and thereby absolves himself of any need to make amends to the majority of his countrymen for the legacy he has inherited. The cognitive dissonance between his conception of the “Rhodesian Bush War” and what black Zimbabweans refer as to as Chimurenga, or Liberation struggle, makes for a profoundly troubling conception of one’s self and one’s history[1]. It is a cognitive dissonance that white people experience – indeed, impose on themselves – throughout ‘liberated’ Africa.

If, in naming silences we refer not only to the absence of speech, but also to speech that is conspicuously absent of vital information, I take it as a given that white people in Africa are largely silent about their own participation in colonial and racialist regimes. While this silence has vast implications for the history of post-colonial Africa, I am interested in the effects such a silence has on the young whites[2] in Africa who are given silence as a set of instructions about how to navigate life. That is to say, I am inquiring specifically into the circumstances of that generation – or generations – that grows up in a context in which their ancestors were part of the colonial apparatus of white rule, but are now themselves citizens of a (majority) black democracy.

If we are to make a second presumption, which is that post-colonial African states are in a period of re-defining themselves, both in the present and of their own national history, then where do young whites fit in this process of re-definition? Do they see themselves as needing or wanting to develop a different set of values from the ideology of their parents (and ancestors generally)? Are young whites able to find a comfortable ‘fit’ within nonracial democratic systems – do they embrace their society and feel embraced by it – or do they feel marginalized by and antagonistic to the project of independence?

This paper is an attempt at beginning to address these questions; it points to what is still left to be done as much as it brings closure.

This paper is divided into two broad thematic fields of inquiry:

1. Taking responsibility for crimes perpetrated by white people, and/or in the interests of creating and preserving White Power.

• In what ways did whites intervene to set the boundaries of justice that could be pursued following decolonization?
• How do the terms of ‘reconciliation’ frame white people’s understandings of their new role(s) in society?
• How does the behavior of white adults (who lived under, and perpetuated, colonialism) translate to young people’s understanding of themselves as culpable in white supremacy?

2. Developing Post-Colonial value systems, or, “How shall we look at each other then?”[3]

• How are white people described in the new history of the nation? Who is describing them? Are white people involved in their own re-making? Are there dissident tellings within the white community’s overall narrative?
• To what extent do the changing social relationships between white and African youth translate to a different set of morals or expectations of white behavior?

Principally the study focuses on South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Kenya. The choice of countries is mostly pragmatic. I have chosen countries with substantial white settler-colonial populations, and furthermore, in these countries, a great number of the whites didn’t flee[4] from the advent of black government[5]. Beyond pragmatism, I am interested in comparing and contrasting the effect of three different routes to independence[6] on post-colonial realities.

THE TERMS OF RECONCILIATION

“It does not occur to the descendants of the perpetrators (and often to the descendants of the victims) that true repayment can be meaningfully assessed only in a different form from the currency which has flourished on those crimes.”

- Jacques Depelchin

“We shall need to see our efforts not so much as attempts to right wrongs on behalf of the blacks, as to set our society free from the lies on which it is built.”

- Nadine Gordimer

After the Mau Mau rebellion had been suppressed at a cost of some 15,000[7] lives, independence came to Kenya in 1963 with the specter of the black demand for land still fresh on the minds of whites. In the words of one settler:

“We were frightened. Land was the big factor and we thought Uhuru would mean masses of Africans squatting on our farms… But when ‘Jomo’ didn’t realize our worst fears, we almost fell over ourselves with relief. He told us we must forget the past and build Kenya together[8]. We were skeptical at first; but gradually it became music to our ears. The bad man became our father figure, almost overnight.”[9]

In material terms, Kenyatta gained the confidence of the white population by suppressing the militant demands for land of the left wing and ensuring a basic level of protection for white property ‘rights.’ “Bolstered by British aid, advisers, and investment, the new rulers of Kenya maintained an open economy profitable to a growing number of multinational corporations aligned with Kenya’s black elite.”[10] In moral terms, an important precedent was set: ex-colonial settlers would allow for a level of social peace – broad compliance with black governance[11] – in exchange for minimal disruption to their hegemonic control of the nation’s economy.

By the time Mugabe came to power, in 1980, Samora Machel, president of Mozambique, would use the severe white[12] backlash against Mozambiquan socialism as a warning to Mugabe against pursuing socialism in Zimbabwe[13]. The boundaries of social justice had been clearly established. Therefore, Val Ingham-Thorpe explains:

“Prime Minister Robert Mugabe announced a policy of reconciliation. This was hailed at the time as taking a very mature and statesman-like approach.”

She continues:

“However, with hindsight, we can see that this policy caused several problems, having left intact many of the structures of oppression… indeed, whites often used the reconciliation policy to entrench still further their advantageous social and economic positions. They were not, and did not feel obliged to integrate themselves into the new Zimbabwe.”[14]

Writing in 1997, from within a Zimbabwean human rights organization, Ingham-Thorpe is clearly basing her claims as to the failures of ‘reconciliation’ on the lived experience of 17 years of independence. But what are the mechanisms of this failure? How does it come to be that, in Ingham-Thorpe’s words, “some of the events that have taken place since the end of the liberation war have demonstrated not reconciliation but rather silence, denial, and amnesia”?

According to Jay and Erika Vora, Zimbabwe effectively did “nothing” at all in terms of a structured process of reconciliation. They make this claim in order to contrast Zimbabwe against South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, (TRC) which they praise as, “one of the most remarkable efforts of peace making in recent human history.”[15] They are far from alone in making such a bold affirmation of the merits of the TRC. But for a scholarly investigation of the matter, this is a gross over-simplification.

Mahmood Mamdami, having undergone a much more thorough investigation of the language and mechanics of the TRC than Vora, asserts, in contrast to Vora’s optimism, that:

“The TRC extended impunity to most perpetrators of apartheid. In the absence of a full acknowledgment of victims of apartheid, there could not be a complete identification of its perpetrators. To the extent that the TRC did not acknowledge the full truth, the amnesty intended to be individual, turned into a group amnesty. For any perpetrator who was not so identified was a perpetrator who enjoyed impunity.”[16]

Mamdami’s central thesis is that the TRC addressed only ‘gross violation of human rights,’ as perpetrated by specific individuals upon individual victims. Furthermore, the TRC dealt with the actions of “any employee of the state… or any member of the security forces in the course of his or her duties” but only when the violations were conducted, “with the objective of countering or otherwise resisting the struggle [against apartheid][17].” [TRC 1: 82-83, ¶ 123] Therefore, despite acknowledging that “apartheid was in and of itself a gross violation of human rights,” [TRC 4: 288, ¶ 123] the TRC was unable to directly confront the specific policies of apartheid. As a result, the architects of apartheid policy were neither tried in a court of law, retaliated against through mob violence, nor asked to speak the ‘truth,’ but rather, quite simply, ‘let off the hook.’[18]

“If the ‘crime against humanity’ involved targeting entire communities for racial and ethnic cleansing and policing, individualizing the victim obliterated this particular – many would argue central – characteristic of apartheid… The consequence was to narrow the TRC perspective to a political reconciliation between state agents and political activists… It consequently ignored apartheid as experienced by the broad masses of the people of South Africa.”[19]

The failure to rectify the grievances of the majority of the victims of apartheid can be understood in simple numerical terms. “The commission acknowledged 20,000+ ‘victims’ of apartheid for whom it recommended reparations.” How plausibly is this a complete list of people owed reparations? Mamdami cites numerous examples of moments during the TRC’s mandate years (1960-1994) when thousands of people experienced ‘gross violations of human rights’ which were not dealt with by the TRC. In just seven days in March of 1990, “as many as 20,000 people” were forced to flee from their homes. In suppressing the Pondoland revolt of 1960-61, “hundreds of thousands” were victims of forced removals. Over the mandate years, some 80,000 people were detained without charges. And so on. “Could a ‘crime against humanity’ that involved a racial and ethnic cleansing of the bulk of its population have only 20,000+ victims?” Answering his own rhetorical question, Mamdami reminds us, with a hint of irony, that:

“The grounds for declaring apartheid a ‘crime against humanity’ were not the individual violations – killing, arson, etc. – that the commission acknowledged but the racial and ethnic cleansing – ‘institutionalized discrimination’ – that the commission refused to acknowledge.”[20]

The deeper implication of the TRC’s findings is that they, “rewrote the story of apartheid in a rather fundamental way.”[21] Having walled themselves off against both internal and international criticism during apartheid, white South Africans, presumably, had in the TRC their first opportunity to name and to face the nature of their decades of domination. Therefore, the TRC carried the power to frame the post-apartheid analysis of not only what exactly apartheid was, but also why and how it must be abolished. Mamdami, for his part, offers the following succinct definition of apartheid:

“The rule of apartheid was bifurcated: the law simultaneously racialized and ethnicized the population. Races were defined as those not native, not indigenous; whether they were accorded full civil rights (whites) or only residual rights (Coloreds, Indians), races were governed through civil law. In contrast, tribes were defined as those indigenous, those native to the land; set apart ethnically, each tribe was ruled through its own patriarchal authority claiming to enforce its vision of colonially sanctioned patriarchy as ‘customary law.’”[22]

According to Mamdami, this understanding of the nature of apartheid is obscured by the TRC’s attempt to ‘universalize’ the experience of apartheid, and the related over-emphasis on the idea of apartheid as a violation of democratic principles. “In trying to locate South Africa on a universal plane of rights violations, it dislocated both apartheid and its victims from a larger history of colonialism and its victims.”[23] However, Mamdami’s deepest, and most scathing indictment of the TRC is that:

“Even if all recommendations made by the Commission are to be implemented, it will leave in place the bifurcated division between civil and customary law. Its reforms will help deracialize civil law and civil power, but will not really promote a process tending to deethnicize customary law and customary authority… Will not the outcome of such a partial reform be a nonracial apartheid?”[24]

Indeed, with lynch mobs of South African citizens burning people with passports from other African nations because they don’t know the Zulu word for elbow, the grim affects of nonracial apartheid are undeniable.

Mamdami’s criticism that the TRC gave impunity, not amnesty to perpetrators of apartheid is not shared by the majority of observers. While the majority of black South Africans see a level of basic “effectiveness” in the TRC process, it appears most whites either dismiss it as wrong-headed or a waste, or use it as an excuse not to do anything further[25]. In 2000, a pledge of apology was drafted to try and encourage a broad process of white people taking responsibility for their participation in – and privilege as a result of – apartheid. From this basic acknowledgment, signatories pledged, “to use our skills, resources and energy … [toward] promoting a non-racial society whose resources are used to the benefit of all its people,”[26] This simple statement, which journalist Chris McGreal claims, “is no more than an acknowledgment of what many black people take as a truism,”[27] was signed by only 500 white South Africans. What of the other 4.5 million whites in South Africa?

“Quite a few whites will admit that they did do fairly well under apartheid. It is hard to deny the benefits of well-funded white schools compared to dilapidated black ones; the reservation of many jobs for a racial minority; and the group areas act which confined blacks to overcrowded and ill-maintained townships to keep them out of the hair of those in the plush white suburbs – except when they were required as maids and gardeners.

But there is a wholesale reluctance among the white population to admit individual responsibility for the system that imposed apartheid. Many whites will say they did not support it. Some claim they were really secret ANC supporters. It is hard to imagine where the National Party found all the votes that kept it in power for more than four decades.”[28]

With nobel prize winning F.W. DeKlerk as their role model, the TRC served as a backbone for many variants of arguments which claimed that the pledge was unnecessary, or wrong. DeKlerk claimed that his apology to the Commission ought to suffice, “and that ‘group judgment’ would cause ethnic tension and prejudice.”[29] In other words, the framing logic of the TRC – resolving conflicts between individual perpetrators and victims – carries the day.

Jacques Depelchin defines silences as, “facts which have not been accorded the status of facts.”[30] The ‘facts on the ground’[31] in South Africa today belie the tremendous silence on the part of white South Africans regarding their role in apartheid; a silence constituted both in opposition to, and through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. White people, as a class, constituted and reconstituted over generations, can not by named, or expected to account for themselves, within the discourse of reconciliation as framed by the TRC. Here, the five volumes of the Commission’s report, and the countless hours of testimony, congeal into the brutal silence of everyday normalcy, everyday apathy, on the part of the privileged.

HOW SHALL WE LOOK AT EACH OTHER THEN?

“Just as there are people physically maimed by the struggle between white power and black liberation, there is psychological, behavioral damage that all of us in South Africa have been subject to in some degree, whether we know it or not, whether we are whites who have shut eyes and electronically-controlled gates on what was happening to blacks…”

- Nadine Gordimer

“Whiteness must constantly struggle to re-invent itself and to maintain its (still) privileged, although increasingly contested, position in a global arena.”

- Nadine Dolby

At this point, across the globe[32], it has become a cliché for young people with privilege to claim that, “I do not feel guilty for it though because I was not responsible for everything that happened. I didn’t do those terrible things. It wasn’t me.”[33] Perhaps this casual attitude of teenage denial is the most striking marker of societies in which profound historical injustices have been left to fester. One white student at Fernwood High School[34] (in Durban) essentially says as much, in his own, racist[35] way:

“We were born in like ‘78, and whatever the white people at that time did to the black people is now on our backs, we’re sort of suffering for them. What’s happening is the black people are taking it out on all the white people.”

The reasoning is clear enough. White South Africans tried to slip out from underneath of any potential backlash against apartheid, thereby bequeathing the backlash to their offspring. Should black youth, then, ‘take it out’ – their anger, their disappointment, their hopelessness – on the parents and grandparents of their white schoolmates, who are anyway more responsible than their peers?

According to Dolby, such flippant youth, “do not simply mimic” the bitter, recalcitrant attitudes of their adult role-models; rather, they formulate their own recalcitrant viewpoint, in response to their own particular conditions. Like the viewpoints of their ancestors, “Blacks are positioned as morally inferior beings, who are only interested in retaliation and revenge. Yet, not surprisingly, the morals and behaviors of whites under apartheid (or in contemporary South Africa) are not questioned.”[36] But unnlike their parents, white students at Fernwood, “against their will and desire,” find themselves in a majority black school, and therefore, “confront black peers as equals and classmates on a daily basis. Their experiences with blacks are not distant, detached and infrequent, but intimate and constant.”[37] Correspondingly, the students engage in various conflicts over the culture and control of the school environment, struggling for ‘whiter’ music – techno – and other small gestures of “resuscitating whiteness as a valid, vibrant node of identity.”[38] Since the generation before them ceded a level of political and economic power, these youths find themselves in a circumstance where whiteness cannot be taken for granted and doesn’t seem to be ‘worth’ as much as it should, within the country of their birth. As a result, many students find solace in the global fact of whiteness, rather than the national. As one student explains, “I want to go overseas, I don’t want to stay here… All my friends will be here, but it’s no life to lead.”[39]

But white South Africa cannot be summed up by the glib commentary of their sixteen year olds; there are, of course, white people attempting to face squarely the question of white responsibility in the reconstruction of the nation. Reading novelist Andre Brink’s description of the social atmosphere following the election of the ANC, one gets the impression that he is living in an entirely other country from the students at Fernwood:

“We all share. We all talk, and laugh, and speculate together. In our midst are businessmen in suits, laborers in overalls, youngsters in jeans, the destitute in rags, the social climbers… All colours, all ages, all shapes and sizes…”[40]

Brink’s optimism is equally as troubling as the apocalyptic tone of kids afraid that their privilege has been ‘robbed’ or carelessly discarded. Luckily Brink’s position is far more nuanced. Isidore Diala writes of the ways in which Brink’s works after 1994 acknowledge, “the sombre realities of post-Apartheid South Africa, its violence, its disintegrating social services and justice system,” but still framing the central question as, “the role that whites must play in the new nation.”[41] In a way, Brink is raising the same questions the young people are asking themselves, only with a different tone, and through a different lens: who are we? What are we doing in this country, this time? What has all of this got to do with those who came before me? Similarly, when, for example, novelist and activist Nadine Gordimer encourages, “the average white to discover, earn, and affirm a valid identity in a society with a black majority,” she is not encouraging people to shove their whiteness down the country’s throat. Instead, she envisions a voluntary re-ordering of priorities, values and behaviors, in line with the overall ‘transition.’ Gordimer predicts that, “Groups of extremists who cannot adjust will die out with the present middle-aged generation… And as for those whites who threw in their lot with the black struggle – they are recognized as brothers and sisters and are active in all areas of reconstruction: they are long accustomed to contributing under the direction of blacks.”[42] Given Dolby’s insistence that whiteness ‘must constantly struggle to reinvent itself,’ it seems unlikely that the calcified values of privilege will merely ‘die out’ with time. Nonetheless, we ought to strive to articulate the circumstances whereby such a dying out could come to be.

Mahmood Mamdami offers a hopeful framing of an alternative possibility for the future when he writes that, “South Africa was confronted with a unique challenge: how to bring erstwhile colonizers and colonized into a single political community for the first time ever in history… For the state to integrate both victims and perpetrators – as survivors – into a single post-apartheid political community, it would have to acknowledge the majority as victims and take responsibility for reparations.[43]” The ‘right’ moment for setting about overcoming this challenge has already passed. Alright then, we are again in a moment in history where we might choose to rectify the injustices wreaked by our ancestors.

After the shrieking braggadocio of colonialism, white people now have conspicuously little to say about what they’ve done and what they ought to do now. But at some level, subtly, beyond the drunken, wobbling attempts to regain some footing on the solid ground of superiority, whiteness is cracking up. Somewhere a small boy, born in Zimbabwe, or somewhere else white men claimed to be ‘masters of the universe,’ is asking his parents, “how could this thing have happened?” And somehow, refusing to reply won’t work forever. Until then, “the confusion will be great, and the bloodshed will be great.”[44]

---

[1] This is not a fictional parable, but rather an actual interaction with a young man who asked to remain anonymous.

[2] There are periodic references herein to the ‘young’ whites, a designation that is quite logical in the South African context, in which any high school or college aged white person born in South Africa had essentially no experience with apartheid. But this short-hand should not be taken to imply that I am not interested in the experiences of white adults, outside of South Africa.

[3] This is taken from the title of an essay by Nadine Gordimer

[4] Peter Knauss notes that, in the case of Kenya, “Whites who have ’stayed on’ are virtually unanimous in attributing to the ‘leavers’ views of extreme racial intransigence. In point of fact, however, some of these ‘intransigents’ have returned to Kenya, after a brief sojourn in Rhodesia or South Africa; others appear never to have left at all.” As quoted in “From Devil to Father Figure: the transformation of Jomo Kenyatta by Kenya Whites,” The Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, 131-137. May, 1971.

[5] However, I do feel that a comparison between these countries and a place like Mozambique, where both many whites fled, and those who stayed were involved in an explicitly socialist transformation, would be quite useful.

[6] Speaking quite simply and generally, Kenya was granted independence directly from the British, Zimbabwe gained a

negotiated – by Britain – independence through protracted guerrilla war, and South Africa negotiated a transition to majority rule after mass mobilizations, coupled with an armed wing and international pressure brought the situation to an uncomfortable stalemate.

[7] According to statistics from the colonial office, Historical Survey of the Origins and Growth of Mau Mau (Cmnd. 1930, May 1960). Specifically, 12,590 Africans (described as Mau Mau) were killed in action or hung by the British, Mau Mau killed 1,880 civilians (58 whites) and 164 troops or police were killed.

[8] He references here a speech given in August, 1963, where Kenyatta states, “There is no society of angels, whether it is white, brown or black. We are human beings and as such we are bound to make mistakes… If we start thinking about our past, what time have we to think of the future?” As quoted in, Knauss, P. “From Devil to Father Figure: the transformation of Jomo Kenyatta by Kenya Whites,” The Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, 131-137. May, 1971.

[9] ibid.

[10] Wasserman, G. “Rhodesia is not Kenya.” Foreign Policy, No. 33 (Winter, 1978-1979), pp. 31-44

[11] Knauss stresses that, “their persistence in blatantly racist stereotypes of ordinary Africans, while bestowing extravagant praise on the ‘old man,’ suggested a process more complex than mechanical compliance with new political realities.”

[12] South African, Rhodesian, and US.

[13] Professor Patricia Hayes, as explained in a class lecture.

[14] Ingham-Thorpe, V. “Reconciliation in Zimbabwe: reality or illusion?” Development in Practice, Volume 7, Number 4, Novem, 1997.

[15] Vora, J. & E. “The Effectiveness of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Perceptions of Xhosa, Afrikaner, and English South Africans.” Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 34 No. 3, January, 2004 301-322.

[16] Mamdani, M. “Amnesty or Impunity? A Preliminary Critique of the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (TRC)”. Diacritics, Vol. 32, No. 3/4, Ethics, (Autumn – Winter, 2002), pp. 33-59. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore.

[17] Mamdami notes that “only 15% of the violations are said to have occurred during the heyday of apartheid.”

[18] The TRC even goes so far as to say that their findings, “should not be understood as a call for international criminal prosecution of those who formulated and implemented apartheid policies.” TRC 1: 94, ¶1. This in a global legal climate in which, “international law does not provide for the granting of amnesty for a crime against humanity.” TRC 5: 449, ¶ 63

[19] Mamdani, M. “Amnesty or Impunity? A Preliminary Critique of the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (TRC)”. Diacritics, Vol. 32, No. 3/4, Ethics, (Autumn – Winter, 2002), pp. 33-59. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore.

[20] ibid.

[21] ibid.

[22] ibid.

[23] ibid.

[24] ibid.

[25] For a small, but scientific study of ‘general’ understandings of the TRC within South Africa, see: Vora, J. & E. “The Effectiveness of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Perceptions of Xhosa, Afrikaner, and English South Africans.” Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 34 No. 3, January, 2004 301-322.

[26] McGreal, C. (20 December, 2000). “South Africa’s Guilty Reluctant to Sign Up.” Guardian Unlimited.

[27] ibid. The ‘truism’ reads: “We acknowledge the white community’s responsibility for apartheid since many of us actively and passively supported that system. Some white people were deeply involved in the struggle against apartheid but they were very few in number. We acknowledge our debt to fellow black South Africans since all whites benefited from systematic racial discrimination. We therefore believe that it is right and necessary to commit ourselves to redressing these wrongs.”

[28] ibid.

[29] ibid.

[30] Depelchin, J. (2005). Silences in African History. Between the syndromes of discovery and abolition. Dar Es Salaam: Mkuki Na Nyota.

[31] A reference to Ariel Sharon, and his policy of seizing Palestinian land by simply placing settlers on the land, and then later saying that the ‘facts on the ground,’ confirm Israeli claims that the land is theirs.

[32] American whites and Germans seem particularly skilled at claiming that slavery and Nazism have nothing to do with them… Let me also note here, and apologize, that this section focuses solely on South Africa, without incorporating any findings about Zimbabwe, Kenya, or elsewhere.

[33] Anonymous student at Fernwood High School, in Durban, as quoted in Dolby, N. (Mar., 2001) “White Fright: The Politics of White Youth Identity in South Africa” British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 5-17. Taylor & Francis, Ltd.

[34] Dolby chose the school because it was historically a white school that had become 60% black by 1996, and while momentarily lauded as an example of the ‘Rainbow Nation,’ Fernwood had a great deal of racial tension.

[35] Classicly, he says, “I don’t want to sound racist or anything, but…”

[36] Dolby, N. (Mar., 2001) “White Fright: The Politics of White Youth Identity in South Africa” British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 5-17. Taylor & Francis, Ltd.

[37] ibid.

[38] ibid.

[39] ibid.

[40] Andre Brink, Imaginings of Sand (Secker and Warburg, 1996), p. 311.

[41] Diala, I. (2002). “Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee, and Andre Brink: Guilt, Expiation, and the Reconciliation Process in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Journal of Modern Literature XXV, 2, pp. 50-68

[42] Gordimer, N. (1999). Living in Hope and History: Notes from our Century. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Note, again: “Some white people were deeply involved in the struggle against apartheid but they were very few in number,” which creates for a vacuum of viable alternatives to bitterness and resentfulness amongst the present generation.

[43] Mamdami clarifies this point by adding, “the people of South Africa – white and black – had yet to live under a single rule of law, the basis of a single political community.” I would add that any postcolonial African nations in which a significant portion of whites ’stayed on’ after independence would share this challenge.

[44] James Baldwin, in a debate with Malcolm X, speaking to the consequences of America’s widespread unwillingness to speak about the ‘dead body in the room’ that is racialism.

For Love of God and Father: popular rebellion and the trappings of nationalism

“Take politically rightless, socially subordinate, economically vulnerable youths; educate them in numbers beyond their parents’ wildest dreams, but in grotesquely inadequate institutions; ensure that their awareness is shaped by punitive social practices in the world beyond the schoolyard – and then dump them in large numbers in the economic scrap-heap.”

- Colin Bundy

“On 23 March 1985 in KwaNobuhle Uitenhage, police shot and killed 21 people. Angry residents retaliated by necklacing¹ a staunch community councillor and his three sons. Thereafter every known house of a policeman and informant was attacked and burned. The necklacing method subsequently spread to other areas of the country.”

- Truth and Reconcialiation Committee report, vol. 2

“To the South African and even international public, much of what youths and adults were doing remained hidden – confined to the private world of the township – except for the occasional report of a spectacular event. What outsiders saw instead was the enacting of a more public… theatre. Nationalism provided the central organising storyline for this display… It sought to present townships as symbolic spaces from which an undifferentiated mass of the suffering and helpless deserved to be liberated.”

- Belinda Bezzoli

By 1985, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa had exploded upwards and outwards, in a number of different directions, based on numerous visions of both the tactics and goals of liberation struggle. The Black Consciousness Movement (as well as a number of economic and political changes following the student uprisings of 1976) helped to set in motion a situation in which “a decentralised, localised, radicalised community-based politics took root.”² The emergence of student boycotts – which spanned many months and included the participation of tens of thousands of young people throughout the country – came in a context of a massive increase in trade union activity, the establishment of an ANC-affiliated, legal, mass organization³, a widespread desire in the black community for armed resistance, and a corresponding exceleration of the apartheid state’s methods of brutal repression of the black population as a whole. These different factors converged to create a climate in which both the aspirations and meanings of liberation were up for grabs, and yet, sometimes consciously and sometimes not, the movement would be neatly packaged and consumed globally as a pallatable story of ‘national liberation.’

Having been carefully isolated from the daily lives of the white population that benefited from and voted for apartheid – through both subtle and brutal forced removals – the black townships and homelands of South Africa sought methods to make their resistance visible to the outside world. The state’s decision to turn towards fascist methodology to survive – ’state of emergency,’ infiltration, torture and assassination – added both urgency and difficulty to attempts to register opposition broadly and clearly. For the exiled leadership of the ANC, a tension developed between the growing need for ‘a people’s war’ – widespread ‘ungovernability’ – inside South Africa, and international symbolic and material support for the end of apartheid. Chris Hani, speaking as a representative of the armed wing of the ANC⁴, answered the question ‘why the necklace?’ by explaining that, “the necklace was a weapon devised by the oppressed themselves to remove this cancer from our society, the cancer of collaboration of the puppets. It is not a weapon of the ANC. It is a weapon of the masses themselves…” Images of black bodies set alight made international news, but wasn’t the kind of imagery that would lead the good, first world liberal to call for an end to apartheid. Much more helpful, as far as international image was concerned, were notions like ‘father Mandela’⁵ showing ‘the children of Africa’ the way to freedom. People on the outside saw what they wanted to see, and also certain choices were made within the movement that allowed the story of ‘liberation’ to be told in a certain way.

Belinda Bezzoli asserts that the movement adopted methods of ‘theatricality,’ complete with ’scripts,’ ‘props,’ ‘acting techniques,’ ‘elaborate staging,’ including “backstage directions, and actual performances given.”⁶ To make this claim, Bezzoli looks closely at the mass funerals that develop as the ’state of emergency’ murders staggeringly high numbers of township youth. Funerals as a means of Nationalist protest have developed in a number of different countries that face military occupation, and a certain set of common characteristics have unfolded. Mass, politicized funerals in Palestine, Northern Ireland, and South Africa (etc.) are possible both because these communities view the levels of state brutality as altogether unacceptable, and the British, Zionists, and Boers⁷ all flatly deny the legitimacy of the colonized claims to nationhood – so these funerals develop an intensely national character. Most simply, this can be seen in the coffins of the dead being wrapped in the banned flags of the colonized. So the death becomes not simply the murder of the individual, but an assault on the nation itself.

But the ANC flag draped over coffins is not all that marks a procession of 40,000 in Soweto as a ‘nationalist’ demonstration. In fact, the basic fact of mass burials, attended by huge portions of the townships, is an issue that is struggled out within the community. “Cars with megaphones would travel the streets before each event, calling upon people to attend,”⁸ and youth militants would sometimes carry weapons to ‘persuade’ people to attend. While the young coerced attendance, adults built official committees to govern the events, stipulating “that only ordained ministers would be allowed to speak, that there must be no banners or singing of freedom songs, and that coffins should not be carried on people’s shoulders, but conveyed in vehicles.” Through the fusion of youth militancy and adult conservatism, “a new type of crowd emerged – a larger one, more subject to ritualised control and more predictable in its behavior.” In this space, “the metaphorical portrayal of the township – and by extenstion, the nation itself – as a ‘family’ living out a tragic drama” emerged. The family’s “children were killed; its elders mourned them. Its defenders were the forces of moral good – the churh, older patriarchs and matriarchs. Its worth was sustained in its nobility in suffering.”⁹ But this was by no means a seamless process.

While young people were learning how to build barricades, throw stones and petrol bombs, undermine infiltration, studying revolutionary struggles and forging alliances across racial lines and with organizations of workers¹⁰, adult leaders such as Boesak and Tutu¹¹ were trying to encourage them while explicitly restraining their passions. Tutu, for example, told a mass meeting, “We as your parents know that we have failed to lead you. We know that you are brave. But I want to ask you one favour, go home peacefully and the SACC will take your grievances to the authorities.” Now, given the overall political climate, one cannot empathize with the rage of the youth in being told to be ‘peaceful’ and to allow the parents to ‘take their grieavances to the authorities.’ Tutu couldn’t see that his – and many others’ – failure to lead the youth was not something that had only happened in the past, but something that was ongoing, and the bitterness remained. After attempting to stop Tutu from leaving the mass meeting, a group of youths are reported to have told him, “as soon as you leave here we will deal with the police in our own way because they are merciless.” Despite the fact that such spectacular internal conflicts were expressions of real and deep differences between tendencies within the liberation movement, Bezzoli claims that the expression of such differences was carefully contained. “People who ‘over-act’; who ‘break ranks’ by performing outside of the agreed script; who parody the performance… must be ‘disciplined’ in order to sustain a unified image.’”¹² In other words, militant, radical, ‘utopian’ politics are reduced to images of ‘wayward’ youths, who are excessively violent¹³, and whose ‘immediatist’ demands speak to their inability to actually lead ‘the nation’ to freedom, in the way that the ‘good reverend’ of course can.

Nationalism persists in our telling of the past, and our struggles today, because other, more radical notions are clumsier, harder to encapsulate on a TV screen, newspaper photo, or bumper sticker. If we are not members of families, and national groupings, governed by benign fathers, protecting virtuous women and peaceful youngsters, and backed by both God and State, then who are we? Will crowds of people gather to demand the life of ambiguities, relentless questioning and re-defining that a politics which rejects the nation-state and all its trappings beckons?

1 The phrase necklacing refers to placing a tire around the neck of a person (sometimes dead, sometimes alive) and setting the tire on fire.

2Bundy, C. (1987). Action, comrades, action! The politics of youth-student resistance in the Western Cape, 1985.

3The United Democratic Front, or UDF, claimed over 500,000 members (and 2 million ’supporters’) by 1987.

4Umkhonto We Sizwe, or Spear of the Nation, or MK.

5What really seems to have made ‘a killing,’ both figuratively and financially, especially (but not only) outside of South Africa, are the countless ‘touching’ stories of white people doing next to nothing to commit treason against racialism, which is then turned into a glowing narrative of ‘deep transformation’ brought about by the likes of F.W. DeKlerk, Mandela’s jailer, members of the apartheid security forces turned-christian, and so on. And then, in these stories, what is so touching and fatherly about Nelson Mandela is that he accepts being so easily equated with such paltry, offensive efforts at ‘reconciliation’ and ‘forgiveness.’

6Bezzoli, B. Nationalism and theatricality.

7Forgive the cheap-shot at the Boers, I understand that english speaking whites both collaborated with and laid much of the ground work for apartheid.

8Bezzoli, B. Nationalism and theatricality.

9ibid. all quotes this paragraph from Bezzoli.

10and, crucially, debating exactly how to do these things.

11Allen Boesak, a rev. and leader in UDF, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

12ibid. again, this paragraph draws on Belinda Bezzoli.

13Of course, there were certainly excesses brought about by the ‘people’s war.’ And if necklacing itself is not an ‘excess,’ (and it really is, i think) than certainly some of the victims of necklacing did not need to die, just as the thousands of people the apartheid government was able to capture and kill through infiltration died unnecessaily.

Class Analyis and the Most Ridiculous Lies

“Despite the distortions at the top, the nobility of socialism’s basic objectives inspired millions upon millions to devote themselves selflessly to building it on the ground.”

• Joe Slovo, South African Communist Party (SACP), 1989

“The essence of the matter is that we have learned quite gradually to be ashamed of the party to which we belong, this party which enjoys the notorious distrust of the people, which holds people in political tutelage day in and day out, and which still feels obliged to lie about the most ridiculous trivialities.”

• Rudolph Bahro, Bolshevik Party, 1934

Thinking about ‘class’ has been forever tainted by the excesses and brutalities of ‘existing socialism.’ It was Marx that developed a set of tools to understand society in terms of material relationships of alienation and exploitation, and it was the marxists themselves who  soured the teachings to the point where successive mass uprisings were necessary to overthrow the various ’socialist’ states. “Despite the advantage of over 40 years of a monopoly of education, the media, etc., the parties in power could not find a significant section of the class they claimed to represent (or, for that matter, even a majority of their own membership) to defend them or their version of socialism.”¹ In places like Albania, reminders of marxist dictatorship – even the public transport infrastructure – were torn apart piece by piece, and wherever possible, the dictators themselves were summarily executed².

Nonetheless, Marxist apologists remain, and though hundreds of thousands of outlawed and murdered anti-capitalist critics of Marxism have written and acted for alternate visions of ‘communism³,’ the so-called ‘communists’ remain largely unwilling to reconsider any of their failed viewpoints. Pallo Jordan, writing in 1990, rejects Joe Slovo’s reassurances that the SACP has ‘gotten over’ their flirtation with Stalinist values and practices, and insists that, “South African Communists would do well to turn to the works of the anti-Stalinist Marxists and Communists,”⁴ and, by implication, to question many of the stances taken by the SACP over the last decades. But even Jordan plays the same kind of games that made the Bolsheviks such a foul group of tyrants in the first place, and that ruins the self-criticism of men like Slovo in South Africa. In outlining the various repressive acts of Lenin and the rest of the leaders of the new USSR – principally crushing the anarchists and thousands of others in the ‘left opposition’ to a one-party ‘workers’ state’ that “makes labor not into a joy but into a new slavery”⁵ – Jordan insists that, “what we are dealing with is necessity.”⁶ Only Fascists say that Fascism is a necessity.

This habit of evading responsibility for criminal acts of repression and/or simple failures of strategy has become firmly entrenched within Marxist Parties. In the telling of their own history – for example, the history of the liberation struggle in South Africa – “defeat may simply be ignored; defeats may be rationalized as the exclusive result of external factors on the assumption that there was nothing that the liberation organisations could have done differently; defeat may be presented as only an apparent failure disguising a real advance; or finally defeat may be naturalized as a necessary moment in the progress of every revolutionary movement to its ultimate goal.”⁷ One can easily see the appeal of adopting such an attitude. When something goes wrong, isn’t it nice to be able to say, ‘external forces were to blame,’ rather than, ‘we fucked up’? But such evasive tactics on the part of the leadership of the liberation organisations has left us impoverished in our attempts to understand both the struggles which got us to this point, and where to go from here.

While Marxist analysis rejected the liberal proposition that capitalism “left to its own devices would dissolve white domination”⁸ (because racialism is ‘irrational,’ and therefore not profitable, goes the theory) they disagreed about the “real political possibility of a future de-racialised capitalism replacing apartheid.”⁹ Turns out, the answer is yes, and no. There has been no fundamental disruption to the capitalist system in South Africa, (even, it’s worth noting, many of the basic features of reserving wealth and ownership amongst the white minority) despite the fact that the entire legal apparatus of racially codified labor controls has been abolished. The ‘National Democratic Revolution,’ (spearheaded by the ANC, and backed by the SACP for decades) has not been able (or willing¹⁰) to take the necessary steps to reorganize the economic structure of the country in ways that would redress – in any meaningful way – the systemic theft of colonialism and racial capitalism. Here Fine’s warning about the apartheid state remain relevant: “to wait for a state reform which does not seek to entrap the very forces to which concessions are made is to wait forever.”¹¹

Furthermore, the constitutional removal of race-based barriers to social and economic equality does not, and cannot, equate to burying the categories of inferior and superior human beings that apartheid dedicated so much effort to creating. Racial thinking, racial legislation and racial terror all contributed to conditions of massive (white) capital accumulation and simultaneous massive degradation of the (black) working class. The Marxists are correct to analyse and name these processes. They are equally correct to seek out and name the forms of workers’ struggle that confronted and undermined the power of the apartheid system; that is to say, the power of class struggle. However, the major blindspot of all class-based analysis is that it simply refuses to believe that “the illusion of race has been turned into the reality of power… [and] is a line which necessarily runs through each individual.”¹² Race served capitalism, and race was, is, a power in and of itself.

Race was concocted in the interests of systems that were brutally oppressive on many levels, and the brutality of race tends to outlast transitions to new systems. What we know is that capitalism can adapt to race-as-sheer-terror as well as it can adapt to more subtle forms of racial inequality. What we don’t know is whether ‘communism’ has the capacity the bury not only¹³ class exploitation, but also the division of humanity into racial groups. As long as the ‘most ridiculous’ lies of the socialist ‘experiment’ are held dearly by present-day anti-capitalists, we’re likely to never find out.

1Slovo, J. (1989). Has socialism failed? SACP paper.

2Romanian dictator, Caeucescu, and his wife could not escape execution for example, though others, like Pol Pot, were able to die ‘peacefully.’

3Here I use this term very loosely, to give room to anarchists (of many varieties), council communists, operaists, the situationists, the ‘frankfurt school,’ and various other individuals and groups that oppose or at least criticize authoritarianism and vanguardism, while still opposing the state and capital.

4Jordan, P. (1990). The crisis of conscience in the SACP. Transformation #11.

5Temporary Revolutionary Committee of Kronstadt, as quoted in Jordan, P. (1990). The crisis of conscience in the SACP. Transformation #11.

6Jordan, P. (1990). The crisis of conscience in the SACP. Transformation #11.

7Fine, R. (1990). The antimonies of neo-Marxism. Transformation #11.

8Wolpe, quoted in, Fine, R. (1990). The antimonies of neo-Marxism. Transformation #11.

9Fine, R. (1990). The antimonies of neo-Marxism. Transformation #11.

10Though some pro-capitalist policies of the present government certainly seem intentional (rather than mistaken) the ‘external forces’ are severe, and so it does seem that the ‘ability’ to redistribute wealth is not so simple as a moral look might like to believe. Of course, without a willingness to oppose capitalism, one can’t blame ‘external forces’ for things staying the same, now can they?

11ibid.

12ibid.

13To be fair, none of the ’stripes’ of communists have really demonstrated an ability to bury capitalist relations for more than a brief window, and the ‘communist’ states may well have perfected capitalist modes of production.

slave ships. flooding the national memory.

slave ships.
human cargo hauled across land and water,
hurled beneath the gaze of people-owners, beneath the deck, beneath the lash, beneath the sea.
sold, without mother, father, brother, sister, husband, wife or child.
sold to work alien land, under the command of aliens, speaking in tongues that, praise the lord, covenant chains, profit and conquest over dignity, brotherhood, home.
sold again.
taken away again.
torn apart, torn away again.
down the river, down into the bowels of the master’s bed, and always piled atop his bankroll.
the child is a product for another man’s enrichment,
the mother is a womb, giving birth to products, things, which she can never claim to possess.
decades of sundays spent working towards buying humanity from the man that first denied it.
decades, made of months, made of weeks, made of seven days of toil, spent.
spent years, spent body, spent heart, spent
enduring the indignity of being torn apart from one’s self, and one’s kin,
and struggling to buy it all back from thieves.

*

slave ships.
make-shift boats, rafts, planks – floating trash drifting
through streets abandoned,
streets left to flood with the misery of the hated, of the destitute, of the desperate.
white flags, gunshots, prayers, even screams
go unnoticed,
passed over by men with orders to protect the centers of commerce from the starving,
or are answered by force.
human cargo hauled across land and water,
confined, contained, controlled,
kept waiting, waiting, waiting
for the walls to collapse, for the roof to come caving in, for the sun to burn away, once again,
the hopes of basic human decency in an alien land.
when the water resides,
when the dead have sunk beneath the rubble,
when the resistant have been brought back to ‘order,’
the soldiers become saviors
and the hated, the destitute, the damned
are shipped off,
taken away again.
torn apart, torn away again.
down river,
new orleans, the port of entry and the auction block,
once again disperses black bodies throughout the nation
without mother, father, brother, sister, husband, wife or child.
decades spent claiming to wash away the sins of a nation that, praise the lord, became an empire
through the endless toil of its slaves,
spending day after day in servitude,
serving a basic definition of humanity, a notion of ‘we the people’
that would drown their children
in days, weeks, months, years, centuries of toil,
only to sell them, again, on national tv, as free people – though hated and damned -
one way tickets to alien lands.
sold out by a nation in which the indignity of being torn apart from one’s self and one’s kin
endures.

**

“As a society, we live with the unbearable by pressuring those who have been traumatized to forget and by rejecting the testimonies of those who are forced by fate to remember… We impose arbitrary term limits on memory and on recovery from trauma: a century, say, for slavery; fifty years, perhaps, for the holocaust; a decade or two for Vietnam; several months for mass rape or serial murder… But attempting to limit traumatic memories does not make them go away; the signs and symptoms of trauma remain, caused by a source more virulent for being driven underground.”

Susan Brison1

Those individuals and groups that attempted to help heal the trauma caused by hurricane Katrina were startled to find that many of the ’survivors’ of the storm told many stories – not (only) of wind and rain and flooding but – of slavery2. The memory of families intentionally being torn asunder by slave traders and masters was reignited by the callousness of the u.s. government’s dispersal of the New Orleans population throughout the nation.

In the weeks following Katrina, families were loaded onto buses without being told the destination3, and thousands of people were therefore cut off from their kin. The insult of this was aggravated by the government’s unwillingness to assist people in finding their folk. But why does this experience spark memories of slavery? None of the evacuated population of New Orleans had any experience of having been enslaved, and likely the vast majority didn’t even have any living kin who were emancipated. Susan Brison claims that, “memories of traumatic events can be themselves traumatic: uncontrollable, intrusive…” Furthermore, Brison tells the story of an Israeli couple – neither of whom survived Nazism – “literally jump[ing] at the sound of a German voice shouting instructions at a train station in Switzerland.”4 In other words, social memory of suffering and violence cannot be rationalized or neatly explained; when and where people express their grief or their rage in response to oppression cannot be predicted, or restrained.

But the black diaspora brought about by Katrina didn’t tell their stories to a nation that was ready or willing to hear them. Aside from a few brief attempts at naming ‘race’ as a ‘factor’ in the national crisis that was Katrina, (most of them spectacular and shallow) the American memory of itself would not allow people to place Katrina within a centuries old history of negation and destruction of black bodies. The national memory of the United States is formed by a set of stories which make for a ‘cohesive’ understanding of American social and political values. Pierre Nora, in speaking of the national memory of France, describes the formation of a national memory as an inherently ‘authoritarian’ process, in which the state defines itself and forces that definition down into the ‘hearts and minds’ of its citizens. In both France and the USA, the state has attempted to create a certain kind of national unity by referring constantly to the revolution which brought the nation to life. Nora calls this a “permanent mobilization of the revolutionary memory against potentially destabilizing forces,” and against the “internal weaknesses” and “betrayals of principles”5 within the nation’s history.

In the case of the American Revolution6, the holding of millions of slaves while speaking of liberty has been a permanent barrier to a cohesive memory of who Americans are and what they stand for. In fact, this tension was enshrined within the US Constitution, which specifically made provisions for the perpetuation of slavery (and therefore the designation of ‘Negro’ or ‘Black’ as an inherently inferior social class). Further, the ruling in the 1857 Dred Scott case reinforced the negation of the humanity of blacks that the Constitution had earlier outlined7. That thousands of Blacks can be left to drown, to suffer inside the crumbling superdome, and to face the onslaught of the national guard, in 2005, demonstrates quite clearly that America is not yet willing to be held accountable for slavery, to grapple with the inevitable outbursts that must come to a slave-holding society.

In Brison’s framing, the national refusal to address the legacy of slavery amounts to a society-wide failure to listen, a systemic failure to heal. Brison asserts that, “narrating memories to others (who are strong enough and empathetic enough to be able to listen) empowers survivors to be able to gain more control over the traces left by trauma… the survivor is dependent on the listener in order to return to personhood.”8 The unwillingness to acknowledge the legitimacy of memories of negation leads to a social context in which oppression is the only available possibility. Despite their discomfort at seeing themselves portrayed so shamefully in their response to the hurricane, Americans, for the most part, squirmed out of all of the more damning implications of the disaster. Government response to the flooding – which many black survivors described as ‘genocidal’ policy – has largely been explained as ‘accidental,’ ‘misunderstood,’ or ‘unfortunate.’

The black body wading through the water on the tv screen remains voiceless. If we cannot hear her say that her ancestors were made into products, we cannot hear her tell of the continued denial of her humanity. But just as she is dependent on our sympathetic ear to finally come to life, we are bound to her silence as we force ourselves to plod on within a memory of ourselves and our nation that is – necessarily and always – a lie.

1Brison, S. Trauma narratives and the remaking of the self.

2This fact was recounted to me by a close friend who led a number of trauma support groups after the storm. From here forward, I am not substantiating my claims in regard to the hurricane, as the public record is extensive, and because this paper doesn’t require a detailed analysis of the truthfulness of events surrounding the hurricane, but rather an investigation of what the event means for individual and national memory.

3Or, if told of the destination, they were not offered any choice over which bus to board.

4Brison, S. Trauma narratives and the remaking of the self.

5Quoted in, Wood, N. Vectors of Memory: legacies of trauma in postwar Europe. New York: Berg Press.

6Of course, the French revolution is also plagued by the fact of the San Domingo revolution and what the establishment of Haiti says about the nature of French “liberte, fraternite, equalite.”

7In rejecting Dred Scott’s right to be speaking before the court, as a Negro, the supreme court ruled that the declaration of independence and constitution explicitly outline a government for and by whites only.

8Brison, S. Trauma narratives and the remaking of the self.

Neither Slaves Nor Victims, Neither Innocent Nor Saviors: Black Consciousness and the call to re-define ourselves.

THE ANC AS BOLSHEVIKS

“The Workers and Peasants Government has decreed that Kronstadt¹ and the rebellious ships must immediately submit to the authority of the Soviet Republic. Therefore I command all who have raised their hand against the Socialist fatherland to lay down their arms at once…Only those surrendering unconditionally may count on the mercy of the Soviet Republic… Simultaneously I am issuing orders to prepare to quell the mutiny and subdue the mutineers by force of arms.”

–Leon Trotsky
Commander-in-Chief of the USSR’s Red Army, 1921

“Already the idea was beginning to emerge among some circles… that the BCM [Black Consciousness Movement] could consolidate itself as, at worst, a political formation to replace the ANC [African National Congress] and, at least, a parallel movement enjoying the same legitimacy as the ANC. It was of primary importance that we should deny our opponents any and both of these possibilities.”

- Oliver Tambo

Oliver Tambo, and the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the ANC, in the spirit of the Bolsheviks, interpreted the Black Consciousness Movement as fundamentally an ‘opponent’ of the ANC – something to be carefully controlled, rather than as an offer. While they did not unleash the wrath which had earlier been directed at the Pan-African Congress (“whose complete collapse would help to limit the possibilities of the counter-revolution”²) their critique of the BCM was utterly tainted by the assumption that it could become a threat to ANC’s monopoly on being a ‘legitimate’ representative of the liberation struggle. This arrogant – almost paranoid – politics was rooted in the unquestioned assumption that the only possible path to ‘liberation’ lay in a vanguard party seizing state power. Within the Bolshevik tradition, the participation of broad sections of the oppressed in attacking the oppressive state and establishing new institutions is not desirable in and of itself, but only on the condition that the rebellious populace is simultaneously subservient to the authority of the vanguard party.

Therefore, Black Consciousness, a politics rooted in black people establishing an autonomous identity, (and the institutions needed to realize such autonomy) is rejected as mere rebellion. Tambo writes that, “the fact that the popular rebellion (of 1976) did not become an insurrection pointed up limitations in Black Consciousness ideology. There had been a lack of political direction to guide the outbreak of collective anger in the townships… Whatever the strengths of the upsurge they lacked a strategy and tactics which could only be found in the leadership of the ANC.”³As a result of the ANC’s insistence on monopolizing the terms of the struggle against apartheid, many important contributions of Black Consciousness have been undermined, eclipsed, and misnamed.

DUAL POWER

“Dual power recognizes that waiting until after the insurrection to participate in libratory political and economic relationships means postponing our liberation; it is as senseless as waiting until after the insurrection to begin reorganizing society…
The great task of grassroots dual power is to seek out and create social spaces and fill them with libratory institutions and relationships. Where there is room for us to act for ourselves, we form institutions conducive not only to catalyzing revolution, but also to the present conditions of a fulfilling life, including economic and political self-management to the greatest degree achievable. We seek not to seize power, but to seize opportunity vis a vis the exercise of our power.”

- Brian Dominick⁴

“One must immediately dispel the thought that Black Consciousness is merely a methodology or a means towards an end. What Black Consciousness seeks to do is to produce at the output end of the process real black people who do not see themselves as appendages to white society.”

- Steve Biko

Black Consciousness politics spring out of the basic poverty (economic, but principally psychological and social) of black South Africans under apartheid. The assertion is that the brutal strictures of white supremacy create a situation in which black people are not fit to participate as equals within a society that grants dignity to all human beings. According to Steve Biko, “the black man has become a shell, a shadow of a man, completely defeated, drowning in his own misery, a slave, an ox bearing the yoke of oppression with sheepish timidity.” Biko then uses this analysis to example an intriguing paradox. He writes, “This is the first truth, bitter as it may seem, that we have to acknowledge before we can start on any program of changing the status quo… The only vehicle for change are these people who have lost their personality.” By naming blacks as the ‘only vehicle for change,’ Biko therefore names the restoration of dignity to blacks as a necessary pre-condition for revolutionary change in South Africa. Perhaps most importantly, Biko is insisting that black people themselves must “pump back life into his empty shell.”⁵ Dignity is not something that can be granted from above. The simple transfer of state power to a black political party will not (can not, and has not) address the fundamental hollowing and degradation of black people under white power.

Mark Sanders’ essay on Black Consciousness⁶ draws our attention to the stress Biko and other Black Consciousness thinkers put on acknowledging and confronting the ways in which black people are complicit in their own oppression. Biko seeks to “remind (the black man) of his complicity in the crime of allowing himself to be misused and therefore letting evil reign supreme in the country of his birth. This is what we mean by an inward-looking process.” According to Sanders, “assuming responsibility in this way , becoming an agent instead of a victim, is as crucial to Black Consciousness as it was to Karl Marx when, in Capital, he ‘attempted to make the factory workers rethink themselves as agents of production, not as victims of capitalism.’”⁷ But Biko is taking Marx a step further. He is saying not only that oppressed people are (potentially) agents of their liberation, but also – and necessarily – agents of their own subjugation. It is exactly the acute attention to moments of complicity that gives Black Consciousness its explosive power. Someone that believes they ‘deserve better,’ may well fight for improvements in their life, but ultimately someone ‘else’ is responsible for bringing about that improvement. Someone that knows they are being degraded because they allow themselves to be, protects their dignity not with ‘rights,’ but with resistance, with rage. In Biko’s rather prophetic essay “On Death,” he writes, “If they want to beat me five times, they can only do so on condition that I allow them to beat me five times. If I react sharply, equally and oppositely, to the first clap, they are not going to systematically count the next four claps, you see. It’s a fight… If you allow me to respond, I’m certainly going to respond. And I’m afraid you might have to kill me in the process even if it’s not your intention.”⁸

The ANC criticizes what Biko refers to as the ‘inward-looking process’ that Black Consciousness necessarily produces. The NEC policy statement of 1973 states that, “it is in struggle, in the actual physical confrontation with the enemy, that the people gain a lasting confidence in their own strength… it is through action that people acquire true psychological emancipation.” Certainly one cannot regain self-confidence – a sense of inherent worth – merely by thinking about it, or talking about it. White supremacy is a set of tangible, material relations – in addition to ideology – that must be actively dismantled. But it is too narrow a definition of “action” to speak only of direct, physical confrontation with the ‘enemy.’

For example, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), in Mexico, demonstrates a clear alternative to the Bolshevik/Guerrilla war vision of revolutionary transformation. As an armed force in open rebellion against the Mexican state, the Zapatistas offer protection to communities that would like to declare themselves “autonomous” from the present regime. In order to receive armed protection from the EZLN, a community must build their own institutions to care for the sick, educate the young, administer justice, etc. The ‘bad government,’ which fails to (or flatly refuses to) genuinely meet the needs of oppressed peoples, must be replaced by institutions the people themselves craft. This is a politics of Dual Power. The revolutionary forces, rather than single-mindedly focusing on seizing state power, focus instead on replacing and superseding the state, in the process of actively confronting the reigning order. The Black Consciousness Movement showed signs of moving black South Africans in the direction of a dual power revolution – or, at the very least, further towards a self-governing populace than the vanguardist policies of the ANC could have, or did, produce.

Far from being ‘rebellious’ – in the sense of being solely destructive, or reactionary, or narrow-minded – the Black Consciousness Movement had that glimmer of tremendous possibility that all insurrections carry. In the moment of insurrection, people who have always been voiceless, mere ‘shells’ of human beings, demonstrate their capacity to govern all the affairs of daily life, and often with a level of cooperation, justice, and even beauty that are not conceivable within the grind of ‘normal’ life. In addition to building separate all-black political organizations, (and thereby asserting the ability, and the ‘right’ of blacks to step away from white liberals) the Black Consciousness Movement also created a number of health clinics and other social institutions to meet the needs of the black community. Had these initiatives been given room to continue – rather than being marginalized by the self-proclaimed vanguard – South Africa after the resignation of the National Party might be in much better shape. Rather than relying on the scant resources and good will of the ANC government, it could be possible that the majority of South Africans would see themselves as the most important factor in ‘reconstruction & development.’

THE TERMS OF INTEGRATION

“If they are true liberals they must realize that they themselves are oppressed, and that they must fight for their own freedom and not that of the nebulous ‘they’ with whom they can hardly claim identification.”

- Steve Biko

“We shall need to see our efforts not so much as attempts to right wrongs on behalf of the blacks, as to set our society free from the lies on which it is built.”

- Nadine Gordimer

Oliver Tambo sees a ‘limitation’ in BCM “describing the entire white population of our country as ‘part of the problem.’”⁹ In fact, the influence of Black Consciousness on white articulations of struggle and freedom was one of its main contributions. Both the ANC and BCM saw the end goal of liberation struggle as a nonracial society in which those-now-white and those-now-black co-exist on political, social and economic terms of equality and dignity. But there are important differences in the terms of integration, the means by which nonracialism can be achieved. These differences tend to b oversimplified to the point of slander, whereby it is assumed that the ANC treats whites with respect, and Black Consciousness simply attacks and condemns them. This slander – and the related marginalization of BCM ideas – allows for nearly fifteen years of ‘liberation’ in which the broad outlines of white privilege established during and before apartheid remain roughly intact; whites have been integrated into the new democracy without having to significantly confront their own values, nor the plunder of the nation which has allowed them such ‘comfort.’¹⁰ Cecil Rhodes is left in his Hitler pose, overlooking the company gardens, and a few blocks away he has been fused together with Nelson Mandela¹¹, as if the two represent roughly equivalent – and benign – worldviews.

Alternately, Black Consciousness invited whites to reconfigure themselves as neither innocent nor saviors, as neither entitled to their present status nor excluded from human interactions with the black majority of South Africa. SASO, the all-black South African Student Organization formed to avoid the paternalism of the majority white National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) was created, in Biko’s words, “to remove (the white man) from our table, strip the table of all trappings put on it by him, decorate it in true African style, settle down and then invite him to join us on our own terms if he liked.”¹² According to Sanders, “this is eventually what happened. By the mid-1980s NUSAS was taking its direction from the black leadership, which had developed since 1976.”¹³

In 1972 SPRO-CAS (the Special Program for Christian Action in Society) published a book entitled “White Liberation” in which an acceptance of Black Consciousness politics is the basic starting point for a politics crafted by and for whites. In an essay entitled “the white problem” Clive Nettleton insists that “the changes which black consciousness must inevitably bring will affect whites no less than blacks.” That is to say, Nettleton assumes that black people must, increasingly adopt Black Consciousness as a worldview and methodology and he assumes, then, that the blossoming of confidence amongst blacks will force whites to confront, as Biko puts it, “the one problem which they have, which is one of ’superiority.’”¹⁴ Refusing the choices of ignoring or actively suppressing Black Consciousness, Nettleton encourages whites to “try to create a white consciousness… which will enable them to act, rather then react. This would necessitate a change in the meaning of ‘whiteness’ to render possible an eventual meeting of blacks with whites. Domination by whites is the essential feature of such meetings as do at present take place. In a changed consciousness on the part of both blacks and whites lies the only possibility for a just and peaceful solution of the conflict inherent in the present situation.”¹⁵ Even if Gordimer, SPRO-CAS and others are on the radical fringe of white society, their attempts to acclimate themselves to the teachings of Black Consciousness speak volumes to the potential of Black Consciousness to influence white society generally.

Unlike the ANC’s ‘four nation thesis,’¹⁶ Black Consciousness rejects wholesale any biological concepts of race, stressing instead the social dynamics of power and privilege that produce ‘white’ and ‘black’ as distinct and antagonistic categories. Furthermore, whereas the post-apartheid policies of ‘reconciliation’ allow whites to be ‘victims’ of ‘human rights violations’ ‘perpetrated’ by the armed struggle¹⁷, Black Consciousness demands that both blacks and whites interrogate themselves in terms of their complicity in oppression. In other words, whites are offered integration into a majority black country, but not by assuming that their white identity is static, or natural, and not without being accountable for their ideas and actions which have wreaked havoc on that same majority.

REJECTING PASSIVITY, REJECTING THE VANGUARD

“Now we can only generate a response from white society when we as blacks speak with a definite voice and say what we want.”

- Steve Biko

In refusing to silently comply with white attempts to erase their humanity, activists in the Black Consciousness movement set off a series of explosions – some subtle, gradual, others unavoidably massive – within South Africa. Despite its rebelliousness, its failure to be easily categorized and the way it squirms its way out of obeying the marching orders of the Bolshevik party, Black Consciousness remains capable of inspiring both blacks and whites to reject passivity and to strive, instead, towards the fundamental human needs of dignity and autonomy.

 

1 Fighting on the slogan, “All power to the soviets, not the parties,” a broad alliance of anarchists and leftists in Kronstadt rose up in rebellion against the newly formed Bolshevik state. Their rebellion centered around freedom of the press, release of socialist and anarchist prisoners, establishment of communal housing broadly within the city, and principally centering power fully within the hands of the Soviets – workers’, neighborhood, peasant, etc. councils – rather than within the state apparatus. In short, they fought for a broadening of “democracy,” in the sense of self-governance at all levels of society. Trotsky did lead troops to crush the rebellion, to disarm the population, and to dismantle those institutions established by the so-called “mutineers.”

2 Tambo, O. (1987). Preparing for Power: Oliver Tambo speaks. Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books.

3 Tambo, O. (1987). Preparing for Power: Oliver Tambo speaks. Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books.

4 Published online as “An Introduction to Dual Power Strategy.” Can be found at: http://sandiego.indymedia.org/en/2002/09/2403.shtml

5 Biko, S. (1978). I write what I like. London: Bowerdean.

6 Included in: Sanders, M. (2002). Complicities: the intellectual and apartheid. Durham: Duke University Press.

7 Sanders is here quoting Gayatri Spivak.

8 Biko, S. (1978). I write what I like. London: Bowerdean.

9 Tambo, O. (1987). Preparing for Power: Oliver Tambo speaks. Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books.

10 See Grunebaum and Henri: “Where the mountain meets its shadow: a conversation on memory, identity and fragmented belonging” published by the Direct Action Center for Peace & Memory.

11 “Mandela Rhodes Place” is a five star hotel in the central business district of Cape Town.

12 Biko, S. (1978). I write what I like. London: Bowerdean.

13 Sanders, M. (2002). Complicities: the intellectual and apartheid. Durham: Duke University Press.

14 Biko, S. (1978). I write what I like. London: Bowerdean. I have changed the tense of this quote from past tense to present tense.

 

15 SPRO-CAS (1972). White Liberation. Johannesburg: Raven Press.

16 The four nations being the four racial categories established by apartheid: White, Indian, Coloured, and African. Though these were all nominally based in biological notions, apartheid’s ‘racial classification board,’ which every year re-defined the racial status of hundreds of people, proved their own fiction.

17 Again, see Grunebaum and Henri: “Where the mountain meets its shadow: a conversation on memory, identity and fragmented belonging” published by the Direct Action Center for Peace & Memory.

 

The Curse of Being Reasonable

The Curse of Being Reasonable

“South African capital still lacks any clear vision of an apartheid-free capitalism, let alone how to bring it about. But that does not mean that it won’t be able to live profitably when others finally end it.”

  – Gavin Williams¹

“The future will only contain what we put into it now.”

- Graffiti, France, May 1968

The Freedom Charter, drafted in 1955 by the Congress of the People, has been described as a minimum set of demands, towards the abolition of apartheid. Up against a brutally repressive regime, it may be necessary to declare a set of minimum demands, a list of basic necessities for a decent society. Still, there is a risk that minimum demands become the boundaries of what is possible, over time. This is a problem of success, for sure, but all the same a problem.

Looking back, 50 some years later, on the Freedom Charter, and evaluating its usefulness as a tool of the liberation struggle, one must say, first off, that it does delineate many of the tangible changes which have been brought about since 1994. ‘The People’ do govern: black people have been granted the right to vote, hold office, write the laws and serve as judges in the South African government. With the charter as a guide, the new constitution has repealed “all laws which discriminate on grounds of race, colour or belief,” established “free, compulsory, universal” education, granted everyone “equal right to use their own languages,” and grants South Africa more ‘human rights’ than many nations in the world. But that’s not all that should be said. The Freedom Charter also falls short of what it could, and even should, be. It sets boundaries, more than it explodes them. It makes us dream less, not more. It’s very reasonableness is a curse.

The concept of ‘equal rights’ sounds well enough – and is even relatively easy to attain – but it’s not much of a remedy for structural injustices. Apartheid used Power – police, soldiers, legislators, judges, architects, city planners, teachers, etc. –  to determine where people live, work and socialize, and how they move between those spaces. How to re-shape the social landscape and destroy the apartheid design? The ANC recognized the need for actively dismantling the infrastructure of apartheid; as such, the charter, “went as far as its drafters could reasonably have gone in a socialist direction.”² The sections of the Freedom Charter which stand out as ’socialist,’³ speak of nationalizing “the banks and monopoly industry,” and re-dividing the land “amongst those who work it to banish famine and land hunger.” Seizing land and industry are the only tools the charter gives the new state to implement broad programs of social welfare and to disrupt the patterns of (racially-codified, or otherwise) capitalist accumulation. As both land redistribution and nationalization threaten a massive exodus of rich people and industry, reactionary white violence, and CIA/IMF/World Bank destabilizing measures, neither have been done in South Africa since ‘94⁴. “Whereas in the 1950s the Charter was criticized for being too socialist, today it is more often criticized for not being socialist enough.”⁵ The changes needed in South Africa are not necessarily ’socialism’ per se, but it will certainly take a lot more than ending ‘discrimination.’

The Freedom Charter claims that in the new South Africa, “the aim of education shall be to teach the youth to love their people and their culture, to honour human brotherhood, liberty and peace.” Sounds pretty nice, but as an antidote to schooling which carefully separated the so-called four ‘national groups’⁶ and systematically inculcated inferiority amongst the blacks and superiority amongst the whites, the words stand relatively hollow. We can’t possibly believe that suddenly flooding blacks into white schools will produce a new value system within the curriculum, unless white schools are assumed to have taught something other than apartheid. What are the mechanisms to train a massive corps of black teachers, to re-train or fire white teachers that are stuck in racist pedagogy? The Freedom Charter only offers that “teachers shall have all the rights of other citizens.” As for the problem of white people buying their way out of attending de-segregated schools the charter has nothing at all to say. The sentence “adult illiteracy shall be ended by a mass state education plan,” is the only pragmatic suggestion the charter makes in terms of dismantling inequality within education.

While the charter makes some poetic proclamations around “houses, security and comfort,” it is hardly an outline for uplifting the millions of people living in shacks or for racial integration. Similar to the charter’s promises of nationalization and land redistribution, the section on housing now serves as a political liability for the ANC, as people’s hopes of the party being a vehicle for economic justice are being eroded. Statements such as “Rent and prices shall be lowered, food plentiful and no-one shall go hungry” are ‘pie-in-the-sky’ of the worst sort, and should have never been included in the charter. The claim that, “Slums shall be demolished, and new suburbs built where all have transport, roads, lighting, playing fields, creches and social centers” is encouraging in its specificity, but still leaves a lot of room for error. The cynical aesthetics of the N2 Gateway Project⁷ demonstrate the potential weaknesses of promising to demolish slums and replace them with utopias. Furthermore, giving everyone, “the right to live where they choose, be decently housed, and to bring up their families in comfort and security” brings to life a cruel paradox. The sentence simultaneously is a necessary blow against apartheid era forced removals and yet allows whites to remain in the more than decent housing that forced removals stole for them. If the people living in Joe Slovo and Delft⁸ are any indication, the right to live where one chooses is greatly desired, but this right is also a get-out-jail-free card to whites who want to resist integration and justice. 

Those of us who struggle for liberation don’t always lose, but how we win can make for quite a mess. Once we’re in a position to do something other than fight, the question becomes, “what is it that we said we wanted?” The better our answer to that question, the better our chances of actually creating a ‘liberated’ society. It’s vital that the demands our movement produces now – as oppressed people – have the capacity to generate tangible answers, clear ideas on how to solve entrenched social problems. Totally poetic slogans such as, “live without dead time,” and “beneath the paving stones, the beach,”⁹ are inspiring and valuable, but don’t serve to instruct much. While we shouldn’t in any way abandon the ability – even, the ‘right’ – to articulate seemingly ‘impossible’ political demands, we must avoid politics which are so beautiful that they’re of no use. Perhaps even more dangerous are those political demands that are so clear, and so possible, that they are actually impotent. For example, the call and response slogan, “Power!” “To the People!”¹⁰ doesn’t hardly begin to answer the question of what, actually, to do. Even if seizing power were, in and of itself, desirable – an extremely dangerous notion¹¹ – there’s still no sense of what uses ‘Power’ will be put to. Sometimes the clearest instructions are the most deadly.

The ’socialism’ of states such as Poland create full employment (“There shall be work and security!” says the Freedom Charter) but at such a great cost to human dignity that the outpouring of worker’s rage cannot be stopped, even with the imposition of martial law¹². Then again, other radical notions which have a ‘cleaner record,’ (take, for example, the classic idea of a ’soviet,’ a ‘workers’ council’) remain inspiring partly because they’ve never survived for very long.

So, what remains is neither a simple nor a light question. The question is as difficult to ask as to answer, and goes a little something like: How to make demands which are both attainable and also assume more demands will be needed; that is to say, demands that empower people to be demanding¹³?
This is a question all of us intent on a radical restructuring of society must grapple with.

1Williams, G. (1988) Celebrating the Freedom Charter. Transformation 6: Durban.

2Williams, G. (1988) Celebrating the Freedom Charter. Transformation 6: Durban.

3Specifying the right to form trade unions is a liberal demand, and the charter doesn’t even give these unions the right to strike, something liberal states definitely allow.

4Officially proclaiming the 1913 land act null and void and assisting in the transfer of some amount of white owned land to black hands is hardly “re-dividing the land to those who work it,” and couldn’t even stop white governing councils to extend 50 and 100 year leases to white farmers in 1993, nor could it stop the one million farm dwellers that have been evicted since the transfer of power.

5Williams, G. (1988) Celebrating the Freedom Charter. Transformation 6: Durban.

6White, Indian, Coloured, and African. These divisions were drafted by the Nationalist Party and accepted as fact by the Congress of the People (itself made up of the African National Congress, South African Indian Congress, the Coloured People’s Congress, and the all-White Congress of Democrats). The language of ‘National Groups,’ runs through the charter, and stands as the weakest point in the ‘equal rights’ logic system as a) allowing whites ‘equal rights’ in the economic sphere continues entrenched patterns of inequality and in the social sphere gives them outlets to avoid de-segregation and b) the entire construction of ‘national groups’ is meant only to make the black population easier to dominate by fostering division. Africanists present at the Congress criticized the charter for allowing for alliances between the national groups (an obvious necessity) but didn’t question the existence of these groups. The Black Consciousness Movement explicitly rejected both the formulation of national groups (seeing the principal divisions of power in South Africa as between ‘black’ and ‘white’) and the allowance of ‘national’ or ‘minority’ rights to whites.

7The N2 Gateway Project seeks to evict all of the people living in ‘informal settlements’ within sight of the highway, bulldoze their homes and replace them with government housing, much of which will only be affordable to the middle class. The evictions, re-settlement schemes, and new construction are all being resisted by the squatter communities: www.westerncapeantieviction.wordpress.com. All the same, it would be nice, the project presumes, if this all could be completed by 2010 when thousands of tourists pour into town from the airport on the N2.

8 Two communities – some 25,000+ people – facing (and resisting) eviction as part of the N2 Gateway Project.

9Graffiti in France, May 1968.

10Amandla! Awethu!

11Jacques Depelchin speaks of the lack of a choice between Capitalism and Communism being based on the fact that, “both are totally focused on seizing State power… politics is not Power.”

12See, Simon, H. (1983) Poland 1980-82; Class Struggle and the Crisis of Capital. Detroit: Black & Red. Simon’s analysis is that Polish ‘Communism,’ is merely an expression of Capital, and that the Solidarity movement is first and foremost a mass wildcat general strike, which both the Capitalists (the Communist Party) and the Unions attempt to co-opt in various ways, none of which fully contain workers’ rebellion.

For a very much under-stated summation of these points, Gavin Williams states that, “The view of socialism as state ownership of the means of production, central planning and a strategy of industrialization under the direction of a vanguard party is an impoverished one which has led to political repression of workers and peasants and, increasingly, to unresolved economic crises.”

13Suttner and Cronin, in speaking of the prospects of successful land redistribution in South Africa, assert that, “such matters will surely depend on the degree or organization, mobilization and consciousness in the countryside.” Perhaps the inability to stress people’s active participation in their own liberation, and the corresponding over-reliance on state power, is the greatest flaw of the freedom charter.

Legislated Violence & Guerrilla War in the name of ‘Upholding the Law’

“The words ‘people of the United States’ and ‘citizens’ are synonymous terms,

and mean the same thing…

Can a Negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen?

It is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration; for if the language, as understood in that day, would embrace them, the conduct of the distinguished men who framed the declaration of independence would have been utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted; and instead of the sympathy of mankind, to which they so confidently appealed, they would have deserved and received universal rebuke and reprobation…”

• Chief Justice Taney

United States Supreme Court

(ruling against Dred Scott in Dred Scott V. Sanford, 1857)

“It is very difficult to go back to something that did not exist.

Before the Civil War, which was before Reconstruction,

there was slavery in the U.S.A…

I don’t have much to say about ‘Reconstruction’ because it did not happen.

The reality of American history is evidence of the failure.

If there was ‘Reconstruction,’ there would be no need for the ‘Civil Rights Movement.”

• Gregory Jenkins

“The struggle of the Black community (or non-’white’ communities) would be undertaken in the name of an imported law and model, which were betrayed, in the first place, by the first to import them.

A terrifying dis-symmetry.”

• Jacques Derrida

In April of 1964, as Nelson Mandela defended his stance of armed struggle against apartheid, the nonviolent ‘Civil Rights Movement’ in the US was just months away¹ from being granted the Civil Rights Act. The achievement of this bit of legislation marks the official re-stating, on the part of the government, of a set of guarantees established in the Constitution some ninety years previous. These legal guarantees could not have been made real during the 100 years following the Civil War because they went against the basic economic and political structures of racialized power within the United States, and particularly within the racial tyranny of Southern ‘Segregation.’ Within months of the Act being passed², the Government would prove its unwillingness to grant any significant re-structuring of Power during the Democratic National Convention; they would deny, on national television, any recognition of the sharecroppers that had built for themselves the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and made their way to Atlantic City to advocate for themselves. From that point forward, the movement would steadily turn away from the previously dear notions of ‘civil rights,’ ‘nonviolence,’ ‘the beloved community,’ etc. and towards increasingly radical articulations of the nature of the American system and the nature of struggle required.

Perhaps, given the timing of these developments, one can forgive Mandela for testifying to the Court about, “the independence of [America's] judiciary.” And yet, we would insult Mandela to assume that he is merely glossing over, or ignorant of, the actual structure of justice within the United States. Surely he must have known that US Blacks were barred from voting, holding political power, serving as judges, jury members or police officers up until (and after) 1964. Taking Mandela’s words to summarize the American situation in 1964, “the African³ people were not part of the Government and did not make the laws by which they were governed.” Therefore, the only plausible explanation for Mandela claiming that American⁴ democracy, “never fail[s] to arouse my admiration,” is that he actually believes that American democracy has an ‘independent judiciary’ and other democratic concepts, which can be divorced from, and stand above the realities of race. That is to say, Mandela seeks to bring about a situation in which the British/American versions of democracy supplant the rigidly codified racialism of the National Party’s democracy. In seeking an antidote to apartheid in the ‘rule of law,’ as exampled in Britain and America, Mandela fundamentally mis-characterizes Apartheid.

The architects of Apartheid – much like the architects of US democracy – strenuously sought to be simultaneously democratic and white supremacist. The two concepts were not only not antagonistic, they were co-dependant. Contrary to Mandela’s reading of the problem, the National Party did not disenfranchise Blacks out of a desire to reject democracy, but rather out of a desire to reject the humanity⁵ of Black people. Black people are not entitled to ‘equal rights’ within South Africa because they are simply not South African. Just as Chief Justice Taney clarified to Dred Scott in 1857, if the Whites were to include Blacks within their conception of ‘the people,’ their own democracy would be a farce, a sham, indefensible based on its own logic: “they would have deserved and received universal rebuke and reprobation.”

The rebuke and reprobation that the Apartheid state accumulated over the years of Mandela’s imprisonment was rooted in people’s refusal – ‘at home and abroad’ – to accept the basic logic of Apartheid ‘citizenship.’ Such a refusal was necessary, and just. All the same, even as the Apartheid state introduced, “new and harsher laws, mobilize[d] its armed forces and sen[t] Saracens, armed vehicles, and soldiers into the townships in a massive show of force designed to intimidate the people,” and even as they justified “indiscriminate slaughter of [African] people,” as a legitimate response to rebellion, they had not, as Mandela claims, “decided to rule by force alone.” Surely a racial group consisting of less than 20% of the population that seeks to own 90% of the land must not shrink form using violence to achieve their ends. But the principles which the race-haters were willing to enforce with such tremendous brutality were fundamentally democratic ideals. Thousands of tons of paper were dedicated to legislating the intricate details of the peculiar tyranny that is ‘Apartheid.’ None of the ‘ideals’ of Apartheid could be made social fact through force of arms alone; it took the White Parliament, and their ‘independent judiciary’ to articulate the objectives that a nation of conscripts and an obscene arsenal would seek to implement. Those poor white fuckers that drove the Sarecens were motivated by the dream of a pure-White democracy, a country in which every white person is equal to every other⁶.

In seeking to craft a democratic system that is utterly reliant on notions of racial supremacy, and systemic racial terror, Apartheid had a number of historical precedents – not the least of which is the United States of America. In attempting to counter such a system with a vision of a democratic society in which ex-slaves – or members of previously hated racial groups – could participate in governing their society, without race as a hindrance, Mandela had no historical precedent to point to, so he made some up. Or, rather, he chose to define – against the evidence – the democracy practiced in Britain (and their ex-colony, America) as the ‘revolutionary democracy’ that the ANC intended to bring about (and that Africans practiced before colonialism). By setting ‘Western’⁷ democracy as the standard to measure justice and progress against, Mandela also defines the acceptable boundaries and methods of struggle for Black South Africans.

Seeing themselves as the victims of a democracy which stubbornly failed to include them – rather than a democracy that was effectively white supremacist – the ANC had long attempted to passionately appeal to the White government for inclusion. This policy continued, despite the fact that it “had brought the African people nothing but more and more repressive legislation, and fewer and fewer rights,” and despite the turn to armed sabotage. In outlining various strategic acts of sabotage intended to “scare away capital from the country,” Mandela still defines the ultimate success as, “compelling the voters of the country to reconsider their position.” Again the White government – and the population that elects them – are the focus of attention. This emphasis on the White reaction to Black violence (and the corresponding need to have the acts of violence be “properly controlled”) is based on setting the goal at a “non-racial democracy⁸,” and therefore needing to shy away from, “any action which might drive the races further apart than they already were.”

Violent resistance to apartheid was inevitable, according to Mandela, both because the government legislated against all manner of nonviolent protest (strikes, participation in the ANC, PAC, and SACP, civil disobedience, even written appeals⁹) and because in the Black community, “for a long time the people had been talking of violence.” While the apartheid state had clearly escalated its methods of repression after 1960, it was the willingness on the part of the Blacks to resist violently that most stressed Mandela. He admits that, “our followers were beginning to lose confidence [in the ANC leadership and methods] and were developing disturbing ideas of terrorism.” Furthermore, “there now arose a danger that these groups would adopt terrorism against Africans, as well as Whites, if not properly directed¹⁰.” In the past, “the ANC had nevertheless always prevailed upon them to avoid violence and to pursue peaceful methods,” but the failure of peaceful methods had led to a situation where the general feeling amongst Black people had out-paced the intelligence and daring of their self-proclaimed leaders.

This tension is not unusual within social movements. On some level all social movements attempt to restrain and channel people’s anger, only to find themselves – eventually, necessarily – propelled out of their own failures by that very same anger. Within the Civil Rights Movement, the militancy (albeit nonviolent) of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee shook the established leadership out of their failed tactics of legalism, only to later be superseded by the explosive ideas and tactics of Black Power. In South Africa, the risk of ‘terrorism,’ arising in the townships and homelands would force the ANC to bring Umkhonto we Sizwe to life, and repeatedly in years to come, insurrection in the township would force the official leadership to take more and more radical stances in regards to armed struggle. Despite the fact that Mandela and the rest of the ANC hierarchy were belatedly catching up to the anger within broader society, they would always claim to be ‘properly controlling’ the struggle.

On November 28, 1980, ANC president Oliver Tambo would go so far as to sign a UN declaration stating the ANC’s intention to fight a properly controlled guerrilla war. In his words:

It is the conviction of the ANC of SA that international rules protecting the dignity of human beings must be upheld at all times. Therefore… in the conduct of the struggle against apartheid and racism… it intends to respect and be guided by the general principles of international humanitarian law applicable in armed conflicts.

‘The rule of law’ – without any racial ‘discrimination’ – is set as the ideal, and so therefore, the struggle itself must conform to ‘the rule of law.’

In and of itself, ‘the rule of law,’ is not an ‘ideal’ – it’s not worthy of admiration. The legalized violence of apartheid was not an aberration or an anomaly. Apartheid came to life after slavery, (the legal system of turning human beings into property) after the defeat of Reconstruction (and the incumbent legal infrastructure that would not only disenfranchise Black people, but would allow thousands of them to be publicly castrated, hung, and burned without recourse to the law for protection) and after National Socialism (with its legislation aimed at justifying the extermination of millions). To believe that democracy – whether of the kind practiced in ‘the West’ or the imagined ‘non-racial’ variety – is an ideal worth living and dying for, requires us to ignore these fundamental realities.

1Signed into law July 2^nd, 1964.

2August 24-27, 1964.

3Granted, American racialism was based on the stripping of African identity, the systematic obliteration of African-ness, to be replaced by Negro, the opposite of and subordinate to, White.

4The British system is the paramount example in Mandela’s words, but as he claims that the American system arouses “similar sentiments,” I am using his words about Britain interchangably.

5Here, as exampled by Taney, being one of ‘the people,’ in the eyes of the state, is synonymous with being a ‘citizen,’ and by implication, when the Apartheid state denies the possibility of Black citizenship, they simultaneously, and officially, deny Black humanity.

6It goes without saying that these equal and democratic whites have no peers outside of the white racial group.

7He is much more specific than ‘Western,’ in that he explicitly names two states, one explicitly Imperial, and the other only defined as an ‘Empire’ by its enemies.

8Again, Mandela imagines, or pretends, that this exists already in Britain and America.

9“The white power does not believe itself required to respond, does not hold itself responsible before the black people… It does worse: it does not even acknowledge receipt.” – Jacques Derrida

10Emphasis mine.