Pallo Jordan: CROSSFIRE
‘Twilight,” my friend Karl-Heinz explained, “is the quintessential dialectical concept. It is the transition from light to darkness, from day to night. It tells us also that both day and night are but moments in a continuing cycle during which each day i s transformed into its opposite by the passage of time. Time evokes progress which serves to remind us that even though the cycle appears to repea t itself, we are moving forward.”
Reading Jeremy Cronin’s “fire across my bow” (“Neo-colonials and mint imperials”, March 13 to 19)I remembered Karl-Heinz and recognised why Cronin’s piece left me uncomfortable.
I recalled also the words of Joe Slovo, written circa 1977: “In the case of the black middle stratum … class mobility cannot proceed beyond a certain point; and again this point is defined in race rather than economic terms. Objectively speaking, there fore, the immediate fate of the black middle section is linked much more with that of black workers and peasants than with their equivalents acros s the colour line.”
Slovo’s view had provoked lively debate in the movement and its media, with a number of analysts arguing that the black middle stratum was almost fatally doomed to be ” a force for reaction”, in the words of Harold Wolpe. Cronin’s anecdote and his elucid ation of its significance virtually echo this view.
Cronin views the black bourgeoisie as frozen in time. Trapped by circumstances beyond its control, it is reduced to the object of the historical process, incapable of changing these circumstances by intervention and, in so doing, also changing itself.
Cronin is consequently constrained to portray Africa’s “emerged bourgeoisie” as either ego-maniacal military despots, tribal genocidists, unscrupulous kleptocrats or satraps of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank administering struct ural adjustment programmes prescribed by gnomes in Bonn, Brussels, Zurich, Tokyo, London, New York and Paris.
Cronin’s view doesn’t differentiate between a Kwame Nkrumah (former president of Ghana)and a Felix Houphou%t-Boigny (former president of the Ivory Coast); between a Yoweri Museveni (president of Uganda)and a Sani Abacha (ruler of Nigeria).
Africa’s “emerged bourgeoisie” beyond our borders is anything but uniform. Even the freedom struggle evinced a highly differentiated response among these elites!
We should remind ourselves of the great cost incurred by the subcontinent for the breakthroughs in Namibia and South Africa. By 1994, Angola and Mozambique, held up as the harbingers of a new wave of African independence struggles during the mid-1970s, b oth lay in ruins.
Development programmes and social upliftment have been rolled back by both internal political defeats as well as the constraints imposed from without. The fact that the Zambian elite owes greater loyalty to the IMF than its own kin today is the result of the reverses suffered by the progressive forces in Southern Africa after 1989.
The ability and willingness of the class forces that constitute Zambia’s leadership to fight and defend their national sovereignty is a function of both their choices and those of the IMF. In the context of a particular configuration of those forces, tha t ability will either be enhanced or diminished.
It is a pity that Cronin sees little to distinguish African Rainbow Mining’s Patrick Motsepe from Anglo American’s Bobby Godsell. This causes him to miss that even as these two capitalists sit through the same conference, apparently on the same side, Mot sepe is being fleeced by Godsell, to whom he is in hock to earn a seat at conference.
Is reminding Motsepe of that fact merely “soul-brother talk”, or does it offer other possibilities to both African Rainbow Mining and the National Union of Mineworkers? Are Motsepe and the African mineworker not both victims of Godsell and his Randlord pals? Won’t the manner in which each of them responds to that define the extent to which Godsell and his pals can continue to determine the Africa n future?
It has been repeated often enough that the Freedom Charter is not a socialist programme. What has been left largely unsaid is that neither is it a conventional bourgeois democratic programme.
It is a programme devised to capture the contradictory unity between a black petty bourgeoisie and a proletariat. Only the creative handling of this tension can maintain the unity of the national democratic forces while advancing the transformative proce ss.
Cronin can only heap scorn on Motsepe and romantic notions of “black culture”, but can’t assign to him and his class any national tasks or point them towards more worthy goals than the swelling of their pocket books.
An appeal to some residual sense of solidarity with the poor that might have survived their social elevation he dismisses as soul-brotherly mumbo jumbo. He is consequently left with no option other than to leave them to the untender mercies of Godsell, S anlam’s Marinus Daling and their mates in Bonn, Zurich, etcetera.
Cronin’s analysis might sound compelling, but it is in fact a dead end. During the 1970s and 1980s those of us who differed with Wolpe advocated a search for common ground with the African petty bourgeoisie. That appeal was grounded in moral as well as m aterial terms. Had the movement not done so, FW de Klerk’s reforming National Party might well have found many more allies among the black populat ion.
I still have to be persuaded that Godsell and Motsepe are cut from the same cloth. I’m certain Godsell can offer a host of elaborate alibis for his absence from the trenches that Cronin shared with Motsepe, Cyril Ramaphosa and Nthato Motlana. But I suspe ct that neither he nor I would find them convincing. Does that not suggest a profound distinction between Motsepe and Godsell?
Speaking at an African National Congress fund-raiser in Cape Town on March 11, Ramaphosa, former secretary general of the ANC and the very personification of the emergent black bourgeoisie, undertook to behave neither like the Randlords nor the Broederbo nders, but will strive to achieve real empowerment by building meaningful alliances with the workers’ movement and the wider black community. Woul d Cronin prefer him to look elsewhere for allies?
In calling on the black bourgeoisie to set new agendas for the corporations I did not imply that they hold copyright on such initiatives. Nor was I suggesting that they would act alone. I was, however, demanding that they display some vision and rise to the challenge history has thrown at their feet.