One cannot escape the feeling that somehow social movements are not yet speaking for themselves in discussions about their role and importance in South Africa and the world.
They have come to resemble the character Friday in JM Coetzees’s novel Foe. ”Friday has no command of words and, therefore, no defence against being reshaped, day by day in conformity with the desires of others”. We are further told ”I say he is a cannibal and he becomes a cannibal, I say he is a laundry man and he becomes a laundry man”.
The labels given to social movements span from them being described as an alternate power to the African National Congress; to sharing the choice insult of ”ultra-left” with the Congress of South African Trade Unions; to being declared the torch-bearers of the new socialist revolution. The adjectives ”progressive” and ”reactionary” have also been used, ostensibly to distinguish ”good” and ”bad” social movements.
Now the editor of the Mail & Guardian has added a description that suggests that these movements are megalomaniacs given to exaggerating the problems they face and their own self-importance.
In his weekly online Letter from the President, Thabo Mbeki recently added some of these social movements to the long list of ”enemies of the ANC” and has ominously warned that history has never been kind to the enemies of his party.
To date, what has often happened in these social movements in South Africa is that historically dominant voices — primarily white-left intellectuals — have been the main mediators of the identity and aspirations of the poor of the country. In a sense we are witnessing the re-inscription of racial domination in the service of a ”greater good” — to hold back the tide of neo-liberal attack on black bodies. This is not a uniquely South African problem.
The uprising in Seattle, which gained cult status among anti-globalisation movements, suffered a bad bout of melanin deprivation. How is it that global neo-liberalism, driven by the World Trade Organisation, attacks black bodies in the main and yet they were almost absent in Seattle?
Author and activist Aziz Choudry warns against neglecting or even muting indigenous people’s voices and struggles, which have been raging for centuries in places like Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the United States. Choudry asserts: ”I fear that the growing resistance to neo-liberalism in the global North risks being as inherently colonialist as the institutions and processes which it opposes”.
Because the voice of the majority of those in the ranks of the social movements is muted, others have identified the enemy for them — the neo-liberalism of the past 10 years.
In this connection, special venom is reserved for the new accumulating black elite. The names of Cyril Ramaphosa and Tokyo Sexwale have come to personify these new bloodsuckers, but in the process the Oppenheimers, the Ruperts and Kebbles recline into the distant background, forgotten. Truth is, the new accumulating black elite is picking the bones from what was once black bodies — the flesh, muscle and blood long converted into unbelievable wealth by whites who stole the land and labour of blacks.
Consistent with the historical denial of the salience of race as a determinant of politics by the South African white left, we are now told that the transition has been from ”racial apartheid to class apartheid”. We are told, ”drop the racial thing, your problem is neo-liberalism”.
To some of us, South Africa’s transition has not actually broken with the past nor destroyed a white supremacist reality. Ten years into ”democracy”, goods, resources, status and respect are still distributed in accordance with the colour of one’s skin.
This country treats black bodies markedly differently from white bodies. Take the case of Dennis Mathibithi (17) and Nhlahla Masuku (15), brutally murdered by the democratic government’s police bullets in February this year. Their sin? Taking part in resistance against the forced evictions of poor people from their homes in Katlehong. Their deaths received scant media attention and not so much as a press release from the social movements.
Take the torture of white activists on the other hand: the media and a myriad ”human rights” organisations and lawyers spring to life, to rightly condemn the barbaric actions of the police and demand justice. The inequitable responses must leave a bad taste in the mouth of honest observers.
This reality makes urgent the task of black voices being raised and heard. The poor in our country and in the world are black. The struggle for land, water, and electricity are fundamentally about self-realisation and dignity and a desire to break from the white-supremacist grip.
So what, then, is the vision of these movements? Are they really about to seize power and bring into being a socialistic revolutionary regime? Is this what the landless, homeless, and those under attack from the government’s neo-liberal programme (”pay or you are out!”) are marching for?
One of the commentators from within the movements, Ashwin Desai, projects a rather more modest vision. He says movements are fighting ”revolutionary struggles to stay where apartheid put them, to retain access to basic services like water and electricity and resist exclusion from education”.
It would seem that excluded black masses, brutalised by apartheid, terrorised by neo-liberalism, and lied to by politicians have a rather ”realistic” vision — a life that is not controlled by leaders (revolutionary or reactionary), advisers or politics. As a Landless People’s Movement (LPM) leader explained recently to the disappointment and chagrin of the ”revolutionary left”: ”We want the government to listen to us.” When the same LPM called for no land, no vote, the left jumped up: ”Aha! They want a true party to run their lives.”
However, in a world where ritual democratic elections march in tandem with neo-liberalism, the poor of the world seem to be looking for other solutions rather than those based on the party, leader and Parliament. Revolutionary theory as we know it has become suspect, together with the old answers it prescribed.
This celebration of the end of theory resonates with an activist of no less stature than the radical French small-farmer leader Jose Bove. Bove declares: ”There are no preconceived ideas. Those days have gone — thank goodness — when popular movements were slotted into theoretical constructs.”
What seems to be needed is a progressive race narrative that is able to challenge the neo-liberal war on the poor without abandoning the need for blacks to be the authors of their own destiny. It is for the historically dominant bodies to learn to listen, empathise and follow, without crowding out the voices of the marginalised. To do otherwise is to turn solidarity into imperialism.
Andile Mngxitama is land rights coordinator for the National Land Committee. He is writing in his personal capacity