The biggest mistake the black world ever made was to assume
whoever opposed apartheid was an alley- Steve Biko
I awaken to news that Nelson Mandela is no more. First I’m
taken over by emotions which I can’t place. Am I happy, sad or just
indifferent? A form of tiredness engulfs me. Some part of me seems to want to
feel for Madiba, another says voetsek, don’t get carried away. I have not even
checked what should be mass hysteria on facebook and twitter, but I feel if I
don’t put on my political ideological lenses I might get sucked into the empty self-deceptive
vortex of rainbowism. This is the biggest legacy of Mandela, it I.e. (rainbow
nation idea) and his often cited justice relegating- white people protecting
reconciliation, best represented by his friend Desmond Tutu’s truth and
reconciliation commission (T.R.C) always occludes one’s eyes to the inherent
dangers internal to those politics, which if one is unguarded incarcerates him
or her in mushy sentimental feelings which obscures power.
The dominant narrative on Mandela is as follows. His made
into a saint, iconized, and worshiped worldwide. The other narratives which
contradict these views by virtue of the dominance of the former view remain
stuck in the rubble of erasure or ignorance, unable to be retrieved and
properly examined. Anyway, be that as it may I won’t be surprised if, every news
outlet worldwide will bombard us with his pictures, pearls of wisdom, speeches
and quotes. But the need to ask how he handled power questions will probably be
buried underneath the very same above-mentioned rubble of uncritical gratitude,
these questions are- for whom is he really a hero?. Is he the majority
Africans/blacks hero or the minority white’s settler community hero, or both?
If both who does this power arrangement work more for? The other pertinent
question is in whose advantage where his policies directed towards?
Seeing that south Africa is the most unequal society as a
result of slavery, colonialism, apartheid and new forms of post94 apartheid characterized
by whites still dominating every sphere of this society and blacks being
tolerated and constantly leading dehumanized dishonored living conditions
crudely represented by townships-in the country of the forebears, nogal!-what
does Mandela’s supposed symbolic gestures say to this conundrum as well as the
questions I’ve already raised?. This is the most visible problem of Mandela-ism-
the ideology of Mandela. His and his beloved ANC’s unwillingness to transform
apartheid economic relations, that is to uproot South Africa’s economy from its
colonial roots. This is one of the worst
facets of Mandela and ANC handling of political power- this leads one to think
that Mandela and the A.N.C where fighting for inclusion in the white power
structure instead of wanting to use political power destroying it. Mandela like
all neocolonial African leaders failed to institute that famous Frantz Fanon
injunction which is to turn the colonial world upside down or in his hearkening
to that terse biblical advice- to make “the last to be first and the first to
be last”
Even at the height of his radicalism this problem always
surrounded him. Hence his almost mythical statement that in his life he has
‘fought against white and black domination”. The main question raised by all
honest intellectuals particularly Andile Mngxitama on his controversial pamphlet
Blacks Can’t be Racists is this, what is this black domination he was alluding
to here? Who has ever experienced it? Whites? And more importantly if it has
ever existed: where in the world did this black domination show itself?
On his aforementioned seminal text Mngxitama in explaining
the problems of Mandela’s and Tutus politics unleashes this heavy criticism:
What Mandela and Tutu
have achieved is a devastation that needs the kind of vision leader of the
Haitian revolution, Jean Jacquas Dessalines had while standing on the ruins of
his friend Toussaint L’overture, after the latter’s unnecessary surrender and
subsequent murder after Haiti’s victory against napoleon. Dessalines, seeing
the sellout, urged the fighting black masses on:
Your struggles against
tyranny are not yet over…our laws, our customs, our cities, everything bears
the characteristic of the French…and yet you believe yourself free and
independent of that republic…and what a dishonorable absurdity-conquering in
order to be slaves.
This Dessalines conundrum is at the heart of being sober
about Mandela even when all those around you lose their minds. Asking difficult
question about the position that blacks occupy in this society and this much
talked about reconciliation. A stern faced president Jacob Zuma having appeared
reading a eulogy on national television didn’t answer and I want to claim is
incapable of answering this rather terse question as best explicated by
Dessalines. What’s this freedom of Mandela if it’s unable to uproot the
structures of oppression and exclusion that forced Mandela to go into struggle
and to pick up arms in the 6o’s?
Do oppressed hungry people in the townships eat
reconciliation and empty magnanimity?
Mandela’s passing caught me in the middle of reading a
rather interesting book- Violence by Slavoj Zizek. Zizek is a world famous
Slovenian communist philosopher. On chapter 2 of Violence entitled, Fear thy
neighbor as thyself, therein explaining the emergence of new ideology which
claims to be against ideology oxymoronically, Zizek sizzles, he says
Today’s predominant
mode of politics is post- political bio-politics-an awesome example of
theoretical jargon which, however, can easily be unpacked: ‘post-political’ is
a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and, instead,
focus on expert management and administration, while ‘bio-politics’ designates
the regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as its primary goal….bio
politics is ultimately a politics of fear
In this formulation Mandela functions more so on the last
line of the quote paragraph. Ideological questions as I’ve already stated are
jettisoned and irrational fear of the bloodletting that Mandela saved us from
when he took over are constantly raised and then unthinking hagiographic views
and sentimentality takes over. These clumsy theoretical moves fail to grasp
that Mandela choose ideological stances that perpetuate apartheid structural
violence highlighted by the constant bloodletting which occurs in our black
townships every day. The difference is that as Zizek explains elsewhere in the
book is that this violence is unseen and it is silent and systemic whilst
violence of war, or terror as is the case of what is happening in the Central
African Republic has an identifiable agent-i.e. military, rebels etc etc. this
is the unseen violence Mandela’s prevention of civil war doesn’t grapple or
account for. Mandela saved us from individualized civil war but structurally
speaking he is no different to a war lord in Somalia or Central African Republic,
C.A.R. And seeing that South Africans and the world fail to differentiate
between individual and structural violence accurately many such leaders in the
fold of Mandela will continue to get away with murder. If u think I have a penchant for exaggeration,
check statistics on our infant mortality, cheapness of black lives in
townships, educational genocide in mostly rural areas and urban poor areas,
prison industrial complex in places like poolsmoors and many other prisons in
this country, and stubborn poverty and a tenacious untransformed racist
economy. This is the true legacy of Nelson Mandela and his beloved ANC.
Maybe my epigraph should change in future and be correctly
contextualized for the now. That Biko caution must now change to something like
this:
The biggest mistake the black world ever made was to assume
whoever opposed apartheid was or is a revolutionary in the proper sense of the
word!
Hamba kahle tata.
