Graphic: John McCann/M&G
On 6 April 1652, three ships — Dromedaris, Goedehoop and Reiger — docked on the shores of South Africa. I am not sure if the Africans began referring to themselves as “black people” before or upon contact with the passengers of these infamous vessels. What I do think (inferentially) is that it was subsequent to this and other similarly imperial events, that African existentialism was reduced to modalism — whereby the dexterity of African hands would henceforth be both a modus operandi and modus vivendi.
Whether black Africans were picking cotton in the sweltering heat of Mississippi in the US or mining gold 3km below the surface of the Western Deep Level mine near Johannesburg, the reduction of a human being to one (colour-coded) mode was the same.
Of course, the bravery of our ancestors in the wars of colonial resistance is documented by scholars. Nonetheless, as bravely and ferociously as they fought, their defeat on the battlefield was predetermined by the hand that engineered the superior European war technology. And so, like the Trojan horse in Homer’s Iliad, the Europeans who had been warmly welcomed as “harmless” pilgrims, captured and altered the African polity.
Of course there are few, if any, dull moments in Africa’s tale of colonialism and apartheid. However, and perhaps disappointingly, this article does not add significantly to these hackneyed tales of the stolen Africa. Contrarily, and perhaps counterintuitively, this article seeks to make black identity a problem, not a solution.
What triggered me to ponder on the meaning of being black, is the ubiquity of the so-called “self-hating black people”. Moreover, it was the context in which this doctrine is raised that led to my decision to publicly critique it. That context is the moment when I question whether as black Africans are not capable of rising above mediocrity and achieve universal excellence that the Europeans and other races achieved.
Our intellectual achievements as black Africans defied and undermined the intelligence of those Europeans who believed that we were less human than they were. This in itself is the valid baseline upon which it is worth asking if something else, such as culture and subjective victimhood, does not under-determine our full capacity as human beings.
To put it in philosophical terms, the particular instances of the so-called black excellence are manifestations of the universal principle that governs human nature. The phenomenon of black excellence, politically deserved as it might be, is an irrelevant localisation or reduction (to race) of an attribute that is universally human. Why this distinction is important is because the perception of universality of an attribute resolutely assures another black person that they can also be another particular instance of this universal governing principle, that people of all races managed to manifest. Put differently, that black person who manifested excellence was not a fluke of nature. They confirmed (rather than infirm) the fact that what they achieved by natural design, can be achieved by another black person.
I am not oblivious to the political conditions from which the exaltation of black skins germinated. Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness was, in my view, an excellent instance of weaponising political irony. He neither persuaded black people to resist being called black, nor attempted to dissuade the apartheid regime from using skin colour to insult a fellow human being. Instead, he upended the weaponisation of skin colour to dehumanise the black person, and endowed it with universal virtues that make any human being human. Biko symbolically confiscated the enemy’s weapon and made them watch as what they thought was harmful, transformed into a powerful and generative force of affirmation that black is white and white is black once you look beneath the colour of the skins.
Biko, by his own account, did not intend to reduce human existentialism to black modalism. He said, “Let us talk more about ourselves and our struggles and less about Whites” (Biko, S. 1978). From this assertion, Biko does not only indirectly hint that Black Consciousness is transient, he also seems to give us a clue that it is entangled with white “supremacy.” Moreover, it does not take extraordinary perceptiveness to discern that Biko also encourages disentanglement of the black agenda from the white agenda. The concomitant proclamation “black man you are on your own” points as much to the futility of deferring our freedom elsewhere, as it does to the black person’s innate resources to free themselves.
But I posit that as much as Black Consciousness is our deeply fundamental ideological heritage, it germinated from a different epoch. In that epoch, human existence was modulated by skin colour. It was logical that in the absence of other ways of insulating the mind from the physical shackles, affirmation of our humanity through the colour of our skin was necessary. Moreover, I take the liberty to interpret “black man you are on your own” as essentially about the acts of a nation when its people march towards civilisation. A destination is predetermined, the route plotted in advance and (most importantly) errors are corrected along the way so that the way to that destination is not lost.
Why then, does the doctrine of “self-hating black” co-manifest with the moment in which the black person challenges themselves to realise their full potential? This is what’s bothering me. It is bothering me because the contemporary version of “black” is synonymous with disempowerment and logically suggests that black mediocrity is infinitely justified and acceptable.
But what’s there to love about your black, brown or yellow self, knowing that lowering the standard is not necessitated by human nature? How is it not intended to hinder another person’s progress, to call them “self-hating” when they question their own commitment to the realisation of their full potential — personally or in public office. They call you a “self-hating black” for questioning if institutions led by blacks must necessarily underperform, treat the marginalised spitefully and refuse accountability. And they do not recognise or pretend not to recognise that these questions would be unthinkable if the one asking them did not believe that blacks are capable of achieving excellence in whatever they do.
Perhaps, a constant supply of “helpless” black victims is profitable to political careerists. But the irony is that, today, the label “black” is a term of making victims out of ordinary human beings as it was during colonialism and apartheid.
So, whatever goodwill is intended by the term “self-hating black”, is not welcome when it interferes with my universally human nature to question my fitness for the journey, once I decide to be a man of destiny.
Moreover, this “self-hating black” doctrine must be treated with immense suspicion, now that the trust deficit between the politicians and the masses is vanishingly low.
There is more to the masses than being political prosthetics to limping political parties.
Mzwandile Manto kaB Wapi is a philosophy major from the University of Cape Town and a Wits Business School candidate for Master of Management: Business and Executive Coaching.