Red beret talk is old hat
Having read Andile Mngxitama’s last two “letters from Parliament” in the Mail & Guardian, I have come to the conclusion that he is both delusional and a hypocrite.
A few hours after the publication of his open letter to Richard Branson (warning that if he bought land in South Africa, it was stolen land), Mngxitama was spotted at the Maslow Hotel in Sandton, sipping red wine and whisky with about 10 friends wearing red berets – the Maslow Hotel, a bastion of capitalism, and red wine that was no doubt made on the farms that had been stolen from black people. What better way to entrench both capitalism and the theft of land – ideals he vehemently opposes – than to support such an establishment?
Furthermore, before having put pen to paper to write last week’s piece ( Mazibuko’s tea-tray ‘klap’ is a wake-up call for blacks in denial), Mngxitama might have thought to look at his commander-in-chief, Julius Malema. If Lindiwe Mazibuko was Helen Zille’s “tea girl”, then Malema surely was Jacob Zuma’s garden boy.
Malema did his job for the president as head of the ANC Youth League, but once he started getting too loud and too much for Zuma to handle, he was summarily hit on the head with the garden spade. Malema, unlike Mazibuko, who is off to study at Harvard, was shunned by those who once backed him and was sent packing into the political wilderness to fend for himself.
I have no doubt that Mngxitama would have been at the forefront of the Black Consciousness Movement during the struggle, alongside the likes of Steve Biko, but his rhetoric is now outdated and out of place. Mngxitama does not want to see black people succeed. If black people succeed, he will no longer have anything to talk about.
I also highly doubt that Mngxitama would turn down the opportunity to study Marxism at a prestigious university in “that land built on slavery”.
He and other members of the Economic Freedom Fighters need to look in the mirror before criticising others, otherwise the more than one million people who voted for them in this year’s election will see them for the charlatans they are – and Mngxitama may have to eat a red beret come 2019. – Nick Goldberg, Johannesburg
Western education does not imply indebtedness
Lee Mwiti’s article Dynasties built on the foundation of Western education cannot but be read in the seemingly negative tone in which it comes across, perhaps not intentionally so.
The reference to “colonial masters” and the mention that an African elite has “retained an Âadmiration for many things Western” smacks of the type of patronising diatribe in which many local commentators have become mired. This is particularly prevalent when locals perceive their fellow citizens who have been educated abroad as somehow “superior” to them.
Amherst College is mentioned in the article. As a “coloured” resident of Cape Town who also happens to be a graduate of the same college, I certainly do not see myself as beholden to any Western or “colonial master” as described by Mwiti. Neither was my decision to study in Massachusetts linked to any familial dynastic impetus.
In fact, it was my personal decision, not that of my family, to accept a place at Amherst.
There were at least four other South Africans of colour at the college when I was there, all of whom had done so of their own accord, and who certainly were aware of the implications of their choice of educational institution once they returned home.
Many of our classes reminded us of the damage that the notion that “might is right” can inflict on the developing world. We were made acutely aware of the hegemonic tendencies of the West, whether covert or overt, during our stay at the college.
I find the underlying implication that “exposure to a Western education” makes Africans somehow “beholden” to the West to be an insult to our intelligence and somewhat parochial.
Those educated abroad, as well as those who were not, are acutely aware of the interconnectedness of postmodernist states and their dependence on each other. An education gained outside of Africa can only enhance the future economic and social prospects of the entire continent, and is in line with the reality of an interconnected world, which no one can deny exists.
I therefore find the article’s analysis of the phenomenon of “dynastic” tendencies on the part of supposedly leading African families to be superficial in the extreme, and at worst rather disdainful. – Mark Douglas Frier, Cape Town
Whitey’s blissful denial a coping mechanism to expunge the past
Wallace Mayne, God save his benighted soul, is writing from the still-to-be Orania, I presume ( Reset land clock? You must be smoking your socks). He is a living example of why the Pan Africanist Congress called for “one settler, one bullet”. You can’t rob a people of its country and land, treat it as a travesty and then talk about democracy and human rights as Mayne does.
In my long political interactions with “whitey”, as he terms the members of his race, I know how difficult it is for them to come to terms with their barbaric conquest of our land and country. I suppose if I were a whitey, I would succumb to the same denial. No horror story can do justice to the unbelievable atrocities committed. Even a term such as “dispossession of the soul” can’t describe it.
I can imagine Mayne getting up every morning, singing hosannas to Nelson Mandela for having saved his bacon, cursing Robert Mugabe in the process, then dashing off to Sandy Bay for a safe swim – having not been driven into the sea as whitey once feared, because of his own guilt.
Ah! The depths of the whitey’s colonial mentality! I can only prescribe comic books for that level of depraved thinking, having robbed a whole nation of land and country, but now sitting pretty in comfort zones amid poverty. Ikwezi is too heavy reading for such a person. – Bennie Bunsee, editor: Ikwezi
• This correspondence is now closed. – Editor
Autonomy claims are baseless bluster
Reporting on last week’s appointment of National Freedom Party (NFP) leader to Cabinet, Andiswe Makinana quoted Zanele kaMagwaza-Msibi claiming to have read the president the riot act when she accepted a deputy minister position: she would “stay autonomous”, she would have her own views.
This kind of baseless bluster has become her trademark. In an interview just before the 2014 elections, the M&G posed some tough questions to kaMagwaza-Msibi, which she likewise blustered her way through. She said the NFP would unseat the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) in KwaZulu Natal and win 1.8-million votes nationally. Neither happened. She has often claimed that the NFP has a national footprint but the IFP is a regional party. Yet, even outside KZN, the IFP got more than three times the votes the NFP did.
In the same interview, kaMagwaza-Msibi skirted the issue of political violence, claiming that the NFP councillor who shot and killed an IFP member in broad daylight outside the Ntuzuma Magistrate’s Court in 2012, in full view of the police and media, had been found not guilty by reason of self-defence. Again, that didn’t happen. Instead, the case was struck off the roll when the SABC refused to hand over video footage to the NPA.
Asked about corruption allegations against her, made by the ANC, kaMagwaza-Msibi scored a magnificent own goal, saying that, because of the ANC/NFP coalition, “If they say we are corrupt, it means they are corrupt as well.” Clearly, then, because of the ANC/NFP coalition, if the ANC is corrupt, so too is the NFP. Yet the NFP campaigned against ANC corruption.
The ANC and NFP have a solid relationship of promises and reward. There is no autonomy. Back in 2010, the ANC Women’s League was already singing: “Zanele is ours.” What kind of opposition can she offer from within the ruling party’s pocket? – Sibongile Nkomo, MP and IFP secretary general