Ebrahim Harvey left field Since taking office President Thabo Mbeki has often spoken about the need to “activate” black intellectuals to participate in national debates on transformation and said that they have an important role to play in this regard.
He is right. But the truth is that many of our intellectuals, both black and white, have become quiet and withdrawn since 1994, particularly left-leaning and progressive ones. Why then does Mbeki appeal only to black intellectuals when, as Mamphela Ramphele stated last year, both black and white who were active and vocal during the anti-apartheid struggle, were now silent? Those who are not silent are not as vocal, active and sharp as they were before, perhaps due to the staggering effects of globalisation and the general weakness of the left. Mbeki, faced with the failure of his economic policies, which have resulted in worsening black unemployment and poverty, seeks to divert attention from that which threatens his party’s rule and its alliance with the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party, by racialising the immense difficulties his regime faces. Mbeki does not want the national spotlight to fall on the failure of his economic policies to build a better life for the black working class and so racism has, given our history, become the potentially powerful means of deflection.
But by stating that poverty eradication is necessary in the fight against racism, Mbeki, unintentionally, returns to its source: capitalism, which is the universally accepted culprit of poverty. Nowhere in the world has poverty been eradicated within the capitalist system. On the contrary, the general line of development over the past two decades is an increase in poverty, particularly in the Third World. Today, with the effect of globalisation, this trend has gained great speed. Mbeki’s appeals to black intellectuals, promoting his racial two-nation thesis, highlighting racist incidents and accusing the media of racism, are central to his strategy of building up black public support to see racism as the prime evil in the hope that this will give him more breathing space and buy him time until the situation improves enough to alleviate poverty and unemployment.
But Mbeki wants black intellectuals who will uncritically defend the ruling party and call for the continued support of its alliance partners and its electorate. He does not genuinely want greater black intellectual, unhindered involvement in the interests of open and rigorous debate, including that about his party’s policies and programmes. He wants to build a pool of black middle-class intellectuals who espouse the virtues of the African National Congress as he sees these and answers critics, to his left and right. But there are intellectuals and intellectuals, serving different social, political and class interests. The call on black intellectuals is also due to the fact that the ANC is losing the ideological battle to the left, inside and outside the ANC alliance. It therefore has to recruit intellectuals, its own resources being depleted, who can stand up to the challenges and provide feasible defence of the policy and strategic direction in which the party is moving. But the ANC will not be able to recruit black intellectuals from outside to succeed where those inside have failed. Nobody is equal to the task because the facts of the disastrous failure of its economic policies are palpably clear and indefensible. The reason that the ANC’s intellectual arsenal is in decline is that events are rapidly proving that its neoliberal policies have failed the black working class and the attempts by the party hierarchy to rationalise these policies, as necessary and good for us, have failed dismally too. Neither Mbeki nor any other ANC leader or black intellectual has been able to satisfactorily explain and justify the policy and strategic changes that have been made since 1996 and which have plunged the black working class and poor into greater poverty and hardship and is the reason for the increasing clashes with its allies. Its failure to convince them is a sharp internal reflection of intellectual and programmatic bankruptcy. Racism, the African “renaissance” and the two-nation thesis, worthy as some of their aspects are, have become Mbeki’s principal ideological and strategic means to deflect the failure of his economic policies. If these policies were to be the focus, their failures would be revealed. Revolutionary and progressive intellectuals are not encouraged to join or support a party which, in a Stalinist distortion of “democratic centralism”, takes disciplinary action against local leaders who oppose its neoliberal policy regime. Nothing less than free, open and vigorous debate about its chosen policy and strategic course, which has, in the light of experience, proven to be against the interests and needs of working, poor and unemployed people, is necessary.
But Mbeki has a partisan approach even to black intellectuals. When recalling the heroic fighters of the past he neatly ignored black consciousness and Pan Africanist Congress intellectuals and leaders and eulogised only those who came from an ANC tradition. He also needs to think again. First he calls on black intellectuals to become more active. Then when some, like Professor Sipho Seepe, criticise him and the ANC, he reacts, as he did a few months ago, by stating that some black intellectuals were a source of embarrassment to the black community. Mbeki actually means an embarrassment to himself and the ANC. But it is precisely from an intellectual-scientific standpoint that Mbeki has embarrassed us with his handling of the HIV/Aids debate. He accepted scientifically discredited neoliberal economic polices but entertained unscientific dissident views on HIV/Aids. But it was significant and encouraging to hear Mbeki tell the recent conference on racism not to be afraid to express views different from that of the government on racism and, by implication, any other matter. He quoted a Chinese saying: “Let a hundred flowers bloom! Let a hundred schools of thought contend.” However, the point is that Mbeki can afford to say this because, while he may encourage different views, he continues to reject them.