Words don't come easy
South Africa’s post-1994 victory was actually a defeat for black people. This empty victory was the realisation of a “white grammar” of suffering embodied in the ANC’s Freedom Charter.
The charter was packaged by the white left with the enthusiastic help of native assistants; it became the template through which blacks viewed their liberation.
Post-1994 is a white heaven and the ANC is the guard at the door to keep the black riff-raff out. In exchange for this service the guard is permitted occasionally to grab leftovers from the rowdy white gluttony going on inside.
This is called democracy. Democracy has reduced blacks to a servant people: look in the farms, kitchens, gardens, underground in mines and those digging along the road in the blistering sun. The black professionals do not fare much better.
To be sure there are a few blacks who have been recruited into whiteness, such as our black millionaires and other BEE beneficiaries. These are modern slave catchers, providing legitimacy to an anti-black socio-economic and political system. The black majority is trapped in squatter camps and cheap labour reserves called townships.
White perspectives, however genuine, are structurally incapable of finding solutions to the black question. This is because black demands for true liberation operate outside the “white grammar of suffering”, as Frank Wilderson has argued.
Black liberation threatens the foundations of whiteness in more fundamental ways than the self-preserving demands the white left permits—even if they are Marxists or communists committed to a “socialist revolution” fantasy.
“White radicalism works through the same ensemble of questions, and the same structure of feeling, as does white supremacy,” Wilderson argues. Having concluded that white radicals are part of white supremacy, he wonders why “anti-blackness sutures [stitch together] affective, emotional and ethical solidarity between the ideological polar extremes of whiteness?”
This is, in essence, asking how come at the end of the day über-communist Joe Slovo and extreme rightwinger Eugene Terre’Blanche stand on the same side on the black question?
In case you are wondering, please remember that the New National Party adopted the charter and then dissolved itself into the ANC. Remember that black children sing Die Stem every morning in dilapidated centres of mis-education we call schools.
If you’re wondering, it’s because you haven’t noticed yet that despite the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging’s protestations, democratic South Africa is a white-supremacist country and Slovo played no small part in its creation. After all, didn’t he say RDP houses are good enough for blacks?
A black grammar of suffering ends dialogue and demands justice. Such grammar locates the creation of blackness at the vortex of three dispossessions: land, labour and the African sense of being. These dispossessions created white wealth and black poverty. Post-1994 sustains this anomaly.
Without a grammar of black suffering, blacks struggled for inclusion into the white system. One can’t shake off the image of young Thabo Mbeki and Dr Essop Pahad at university, daydreaming about the occupation of the Union Buildings. I’m sure Nelson Mandela, also from the lonely, watery view of Robben Island, must have imagined Tuynhuys. How could these people possibly destroy colonialism? Little wonder racism continues under a black government.
Racism is going nowhere as long as the structures of white supremacy remain intact, covered in the language of democracy and nonracialism. But this is not an indictment on whites. It’s rather a reflection on blacks, a pathetic numerical majority.
Three silencing mechanisms are unleashed on blacks who want to end racism: that they suffer from victimhood, that they practise racial solidarity and that they are racist.
Say “victimhood” and blacks hurry to declare that they bear no grudges for historical injustices. The same is true for the racial solidarity claim, which is the irrational defence of evil-doing blacks only because they are black. Who wants to be irrational?
The racism charge is absurd. However, the mind-snatched blacks peddle it as well because they don’t believe that blacks can’t be racist.
The end of racism depends on what blacks do and has little to do with whites. Right now blacks lack a grammar of black suffering and that’s the problem.
Andile Mngxitama is the publisher of New Frank Talk
