The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
The capital victory of racist white supremacy in South Africa and the entire Global South has been its ability to get its victims, the black people, to protect its power and privilege. Last week this column treated a subject concerning how what is called xenophobia and afrophobia are masks that conceal how white supremacy, power and privilege are still achieving their intended goals in the absence of a white apartheid administration.
This past week saw an eruption in Pretoria of spectacles of black against black, and black against black property violence that started as intra-party frictions of the ANC and ended as black nihilistic violence against anything in sight that had to do with blacks and the government of the day. From the Marikana massacre, through xenophobic attacks and intra-party skirmishes, I insist, white power and privilege are always the cause behind the violence even if no single white person participates in the violence or happens to be a victim. What has been described by decolonial thinkers of the Global South as coloniality is put simply, the ability of the ends of slavery, colonialism, imperialism and apartheid to be achieved for the white race and the Euro-American Empire even in the absence of overt structures of domination.
White supremacists and racist South Africans, using the benefits of one of the most democratic constitutions in the planet have kept the economy and all the fruitiest resources of the land to themselves and a few honorary whites in shape of carefully chosen black prefects. Apparently, democracy itself, at its best expression, can coexist with the most vulgar inequality that is protected in the spirit of the democratic constitution as sacred property rights.
Because of the homework that apartheid did in fixing homeland mentality in the minds of the black population, on tribal and homeland terms, South African blacks hate each other far more that they understand the white person as an oppressor who still retains his power and privilege after decolonisation. Years of bottled up black anger are frequently vented out in spectacles of violence against foreigners and property and never against whites or their property and businesses. The conditioning of the black mind and psyche in South Africa, and in the Global South has resulted in the image of the white person as a god. All other black people have to fight each other to the death for positions of place and superiority behind the white man.
Being white in South Africa
To be white in South Africa today is to be powerful. Whites can choose not to be involved in anything from education, work and politics but blacks are mobilised psychologically always to take care of white interests before their own. Whites, calling themselves the market in from of their businesses, choose which minister of finance they want and which one they don’t want. The market does not have to vote, it dictates. Indians, such as the now infamous Guptas, may try to use their business influence to position themselves politically but soon enough their jostling is criminalised as state capture and their businesses shut down. The real capturers of the state, white supremacists who own the market remain unseen and unknown.
All old white professors in South African universities preface their names, or have their names prefaced with the phrases such as “anti-apartheid activist” or “anti-apartheid icon,” and the whole of South Africa there is no evidence of even one white person who admits to have supported apartheid which is now a crime against humanity that has no perpetrators. All the whites who perpetrated and benefitted from apartheid have all over night turned themselves into human rights and democracy activists who daily become disgusted at how blacks are not doing well in power and in the economy. Some whites, especially in the universities become the leading and the most radical theorists and researchers on racism, nuancing on race and deconstructing it in manners that leave even the most gifted black professor with nothing to say. A few but powerful of them have to learn to play the influential card. As one theorist has observed, being white becomes a powerful passport that opens all borders, a black cheque that can be encashed anywhere and anytime.
In dignity and ontological density, one white person is equal to a crown of black people, even physically; a white jogger on the road can divert the route of a marauding crowd of burning and looting protesters. In South Africa, politically speaking, white people collectively and individually have stopped being people but have become a powerful and privileged system that does not have to do anything because blacks and even black anger are there to secure and maintain it. The power of America and the Nato alliance, and the entire financial and technological superiority of the Euro-American Empire is summarised and collapsed into the white people of the Global South.
Being black in South Africa
Even if blacks wished to be racist against whites in South Africa their racism would be powerless and would not harm even a white fly. For that reason, black racism and anger at dispossession is vented and expressed upon other blacks through tribal, xenophobic, domestic and criminal violence. Buses and buildings, the stall of Somalis and vulnerable women and children take the punishment on behalf of the system that has systematically robbed the populace. While a white woman does not have to check, in the morning, the shortness of her skirt to avoid being molested, a black girl has to take extra care. Black women have to do their hair, work on their accent and mannerism in order to appear professional at work.
White women turn up at the office as themselves and the office has to understand that it is their culture. Blacks are not supposed to bring their culture to work, they must bring professionalism. The problem, in the mindset that the Bantu have been given, is the other people from the other homelands or provinces, the foreigners from other countries who are squeezing the economy and making life itself insufficient for the South African. Being black in South Africa is to be a victim who is ready to victimise weaker victims.
The challenge of otherness
The temptation is to blame black South Africans for thoughtless violence and irrational activity, xenophobia, tribalism and criminality. It is easy to wonder what exactly gets into a people who turn around to burn their own schools and are prepared to set alight their own country and themselves in the process. In a way, however, all the peoples of the Global South have that powerlessness, they know and see the system that has put them in a hard place economically and politically and otherwise, but the system looks and seems way too indefatigable. Power is sought and found in oppressing, punishing and persecuting other powerless people. Every time in South Africa when students insist on transformation, decolonisation and transformation with immense pressure, soon enough, other forms of non-revolutionary violence and nihilistic forms of protest erupt and steal the thunder and attention from the protests against white power and privilege.
For coloniality to be defeated, the enemy must be seen clearly, identified, named and targeted. Provincial borders of South Africa, the national borders, and all the maps of Africa combined must seize to make blacks see each other as enemies, but remind them of the hand of the colonialist and the captain of apartheid who created the borders in the first place. Blacks have been, in the entire globe, othered by white supremacy for a long time, for blacks to continue othering each other can only be of the benefit to Empire.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a Zimbabwean academic based in South Africa: mailto:[email protected].
