Andile Mngxitama (April 25) condemns the ruling by the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) to the effect that the exclusion of white journalists from a meeting of the blacks-only Forum of Black Journalists (FBJ) — at which they hosted ANC president Jacob Zuma — was unfairly discriminatory and therefore unconstitutional.
But his argument contains little analytical rigour, nuance or perspective about the ”black struggle” he offers to enlighten us about.
A ruling that challenges the racially exclusive nature of the FBJ cannot sanction psychological violence towards blacks. Mngxitama uses words so loosely and glibly as to rob them of their elementary meanings: what ”liberation” struggle are blacks still waging? Certainly there are fundamental issues that remain unresolved post1994, but he fails to define these. Similarly, what homogeneous ”black interests” is he talking about?
He falsely assumes that ”black” identity has universal and self-evident values. But this amorphous black nationalistic approach is bereft of any socio-class analysis of the black population, which has since 1994 become fragmented along class lines. What common material interests does billionaire Patrice Motsepe have with ordinary black workers, millions of whom struggle just to put food on their tables?
It is deeply ironical that while co-editing a book on black consciousness Mngxitama fails to appreciate the necessary transformation it has gone through in terms of membership, ideology, perspective and programming since the Azanian People’s Organisation was formed in 1978. Instead he makes their progressive development appear unbecoming and he goes as far as to imply that they have betrayed the movement’s strictly black origins. He has the same view of the open membership of the Pan Africanist Congress.
This is a shallow, reactionary stance. Furthermore, he does not propose what kind of social transformation a multi-class but blacks-only solidarity will aim for, in the media or elsewhere. Race and racism remain not only salient but in fact have recently become more combustible national issues and this dangerous racial inwardness is likely to lead to further racial polarisation.
Mngxitama mentions the ”black condition” without identifying and describing its roots, characteristics and aspirations. This is not — and has never been — a purely racial matter of white superiority, but has all along been linked to questions of economic control. Even the most brutal forms of black slavery facilitated the growth of European and American capitalism. Hence it is impossible to confront black poverty in this country without confronting its historical capitalist framework and the post-1994 transition to neo-liberalism.
Mngxitama says 70 000 black children die before they reach the age of five. He implies that is purely because of continuing white racism. But it is, rather, the result of a much more complex story of deracialised neo-liberalism since 1994, which has produced Motsepes alongside gruelling black mass poverty.
Still, Mngxitama is correct to suggest that, although the FBJ has been censured for its blacks-only membership, overtly white racist organisations such as the AWB seem to have been left to relaunch recently. This is a contradiction that requires serious intervention by the SAHRC and the government. They are a bigger threat than the FBJ could ever be.