The Nation of Islam, a religious, social and political organisation most popular in the United States, has proclaimed that black people in South Africa need to reconsider their future under democratic rule, which, it says, is a hindrance to their collective prosperity.
Sultan Ala Deen, a representative of the controversial separatist group, made the claim in an interview with the Mail & Guardian in the week of the group’s Saviours’ Day festival.
Ala Deen, a car salesman, said democracy has a symbiotic relationship with capitalism, which is an ‘illusion†because its ‘closed market system appeared open but was actually open only to those with capitalâ€.
One of democracy’s ‘tricksâ€, he said, was that it forces people to think of their lives only in five-year cycles, in accordance with each president’s term, rather than allowing them to plan decades in advance.
‘Economists and people who plan for world domination plan 50 or 100 years in advance,†he said. ‘The only one planning month to month is the black man because he has an immature understanding of time.â€
Expanding his theory, Ala Deen said the conflicts in Chad (‘a country that many didn’t even know had people until recentlyâ€) and Darfur in Sudan (‘a country that couldn’t even feed itselfâ€) were supported by the West and had been coming for a long time.
These conflicts are, he believes, fuelled by the scramble for oil, a resource that was discovered recently in those countries and is increasingly in demand as the US and France look elsewhere for supplies. Crude oil has shifted beneath the earth’s surface, from the Middle East towards Africa. ‘Scientists know that there are only about 20 years left to get that oil,†he said. The oil’s migratory patterns, Ala Deen said, are based on the earth’s rotational speed of about 1 660kph.
In the US, where the Nation of Islam was founded in 1930, the organisation has continuously called for the black ‘race†to be separated from mainstream society, demanding fertile and minerally rich land from the American government. However, Louis Farrakhan, the organisation’s figurehead, has endorsed Barak Obama’s presidential campaign, as he did Jesse Jackson’s in the 1980s.
Asked what he thought the solution was for South Africans, Ala Deen was somewhat vague, saying he believes it will require the people themselves putting their agenda before politicians and being vigilant enough to make sure the politicians do not renege on delivery. The people should do this, he said, by establishing think tanks that represent the diversity of the society in terms of race and gender.
Despite its opposition to capitalism the group advocates neither socialism nor communism. It endorses theocracy because it believes Allah ‘will raise up one among us, like ourselves [Africans], to lead usâ€.
The founder of the Nation of Islam, Wallace Fard Muhammad, is referred to on the group’s website as the Mahdi (the Muslim equivalent of Messiah). Saviours’ Day origally commemorated his birthday, but has evolved to mean ‘we must save ourselvesâ€, said Ala Deen.