/ 26 March 2015

Why does Malema still want to sit at the white man’s table?

Readers are divided over the political direction taken by Julius Malema's Economic Freedom Fighters.
Readers are divided over the political direction taken by Julius Malema's Economic Freedom Fighters.

Recently “I saw a wild thing feel sorry for itself.” We misquote DH Lawrence to capture Economic Freedom Fighter commander in chief Julius Malema’s corrupted analysis: “We fought to live like whites.” This is a nauseating apology, a betrayal of a 400-year rage against white domination.

Malema is not alone in this “inherited pathology of a slave” concerning racism, as Mike Stainbank of the Apartheid Museum Trademark Case coins this race-induced sickness. The Oscar and Golden Globe winner, Lonnie Rashid Lynn Jr (famously known as Common), succumbing to this preconscious pathology, recently urged blacks to extend a hand to whites and “forget about the past”. Whenever we politicise black demands in a world that refuses to recognise us, this sickness appears. It comes with a self-imposed censorship noose, policing our speech from indicting whites in a crime against blacks.

How do we cure this? We must stay put in a “state of pure analysis”, as American writer and critic Frank Wilderson says, and not be rattled by settlers’ enunciations – sustained by the untested assertion that it rings “truer” in our terrorised psyche than the truth of black experience. We must cultivate diction of desire beyond the economic, beyond the “dreams of possession” Malema expresses.

The parcelling out of the world Malema envies does not originate in economic reality. It begins “with the fact of belonging to, or not belonging to, a given race”, writes Fanon.

The rule of violence
This world, cut into two, is not that of serfs and knights, legitimised by statutes and divine rights. But rather it is a world of two different species; the black sentient being and the white human being: chattel and subject; slave and master. As Fanon writes in The Wretched of the Earth: “It is neither the act of owning factories, nor estates, nor a bank balance which distinguishes the governing [race]. The governing race is the [un]original inhabitants, ‘the other’.’’

Second, Fanon says the governing race structured the colonial world by the rule of violence. That means that behind the thin veil of rights and laws crouches a constant principle of unprovoked and unmeasured violence. It is because of this wanton abuse, reserved for blacks, that Fanon paints this picture: “In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.”

It is more than “objective forces” of the free market that is the problem, Malema should be cautioned. In other words it does not suffice for post-apartheid South Africa to blame “objective” forces – such as the global economy, the Washington Consensus etcetera – for betraying black aspiration for liberation. Drawing on Steve Biko, Fanon scholar Nigel Gibson presents a caution that shifts the emphasis of thinking away from measuring “progress” and “development” using Western or “white standards,” a standard Malema re-inscribes.

Gibson argues: “What becomes the central issue in the ‘transition’ from apartheid towards liberating ‘the mind of the oppressed’ is not the question of the most useful economic programmes but the paradigm of black subjectivity.”

SA is not duped, we’re a willing participant
The problem is not capital flight (#PayBackTheMoney) caused by a parasitic, bureaucratic elite class living off state revenues. Gibson writes: “If we take seriously theories of imperialism and dependency, then the problem is that capital does not flow in the same manner (as it has for the metropoles) as it does to the colonies, unless investors are given assurance not only of high yield on investment, but also indirect influence on government.”

In other words, under ANC leadership, as the black consciousness activist Andile Mngxitama avers, the country was not simply duped – South Africa is a willing participant. It re-enacts the same anti-black reality of Rhodes and Verwoerd. Here Malema inspires no radical shift of thinking as he hankers to occupy the “haves” slot (whites) in the black/white power-relation template.

Deeply seated in the concrete project of returning land to its rightful owners are the spiritual ramifications, the desire to undo white erasure – not just put change in black pockets, but to end those engraved power-relations.

Transformation must take its cue from the ideological corollary. So we must agree with Slovenian Marxist and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek that it is ideology that is key to the development of society. It is ideology that shapes economic forms.

Gibson writes: “This is the sophistication of Biko’s conception of subjectivity, and the new conception of politics that it gave rise to. Black liberation depends not on ‘objective forces’ but on the objective of the African mind and the will of its people.”

Black suffering
Taking the land back, as Fanon instructs, is the source of our bread, dignity and freedom. This is how blacks end the world whose coherence is glued together by normalised black suffering.

In a radio interview, Wilderson reframes the black problem against Malema’s corruption: “[F]or blacks to suffer comes from a psychological grounding-wire that says: black suffering is a tactic of a strategy for human renewal. Violence against us is a tactic of a strategy to secure humanity’s place. It is not just a tactic of a strategy to take away our land or our rights. As blacks we come to understand that we cannot enter into the structure of recognition as a being and incorporation into the community of beings without that structure collapsing …”

Malema’s self-dissolutionary censure of reasonable demands to the white world resonates with Columbia University-based African American specialist Saidiya Hartman’s context of slavery: “What are the consequences of me speaking my mind going to be?”

Slave pathology
The underlying guttural cries that blacks bury in reasonable demands ring this hidden truth, written by Fanon: “If, in fact, my life is worth as much as the settler’s, his glance no longer shrivels me up nor freezes me, and his voice no longer turns me into stone. I’m no longer on tenterhooks in his presence; in fact I don’t give a damn for him. Not only does his presence no longer trouble me, but I am already preparing such efficient ambushes for him that soon there will be no way out but that of flight”.

This hidden truth speaks to the black problem; what Wilderson describes as “one of complete captivity, from birth to death, and coercion as the starting point of our interaction with the state and with ordinary white citizens”.

Malema unconsciously blocks this truth and regardless of Fanon-inspired EFF political theory, he seeks to have a place at the master’s table – to live like whites. This inherited slave pathology, is a sign of a broken [black] man.

Rithuli Orleyn is a contributing editor at the Con Mag and Lerato Lephatsa is a former junior lecturer at the Central University of Technology in the Free State.