The struggle must not eat itself

24 Apr, 2016 - 00:04 0 Views
The struggle must not eat itself Nelson Mandela

The Sunday News

Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena

It is the canonical wisdom of the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud that memories of violence and trauma do not perish. Pain and suffering do not evaporate but they conceal themselves in the subconscious of the man or the woman, only to erupt later in their lives as disease, insanity or personality imbalance and disorder. Sigmund Freud announced this understanding as a novel discovery at the University of Vienna in 1881, but I believe the sages and healers in Africa had long understood the ways of the human subconscious universe, hence their insistence in keeping children away from sights of violence and the presence of corpses and death.

That, however, is a story for another day. The question of today is, if the wisdom of Sigmund Freud still holds, what are we Africans to do with the memories and traumas of slavery, colonialism and apartheid that wait concealed in our unconscious minds?

It is also a question to ask how these dangerous memories and traumas make their appearance in our individual and collective existence each and every day. That the wounds of slavery, colonialism and apartheid still bleed among Africans cannot be news as it is a lived reality economically, politically and culturally. The news is that most of us Africans, even those among us who are supposed to know better are in denial that we are collectively traumatised, sick and suffering debilitating hangovers of our enslavement and colonisation. Even as neocolonialism continues among us as globalisation and internationalism, the scars of slavery, colonialism and apartheid weigh down on our African psyche as a stubborn demon. Sigmund Freud’s learned advice was that men and women should not conceal their pain or gloss over their wounds but cry out loud and expel the injuries from their souls. The healing method of psychoanalysis is that men and women should face their demons, look them in the eye and tell them to leave.

Psychoanalysis as a method of examination of sickness and healing was initially called the “talking cure” or “emptying the chimney” because it involved the victim of trauma describing their pain and emptying their mind of the memory of pain and suffering, anger and venom.

The South African Condition of Sickness in Africa

As a case study of how colonial traumas and memories of pain are concealed, and how these hidden demons explode and torment society, South Africa is rich. In 1994, through music, biblical sermons and political speeches, South Africans were told that they are now a “rainbow people of God.” Nelson Mandela the terrorist, a Black Pimpernel, was suddenly lifted up to a saint, a global statesman and a political celebrity. The Nelson Mandela of the Rivonia Trial, he who announced that if need be, he was prepared to die for the liberation of oppressed blacks was concealed behind a tamed Madiba who carried the Madiba Magic of reconciliation, kissed children and patronised rugby matches. The fire eating radical for liberation was turned into a teddy bear of compromise.

The perpetrators and beneficiaries of apartheid kept their benefits and still enjoy their privilege. The economy still remains in the hands of whites as the most democratic constitution in the world protects property rights and diversity. The poor blacks keep their squalor and are constantly being accused of harbouring a sense of entitlement and being lazy. This spectacular inequality that is secured by the constitution is not dramatised anywhere more that in the South African schools and universities. While white students complain about the shortage of secure parking space on campus, the black students clamour for free food and that “fees must fall.” In the big supermarkets, there are shelves that are exploding with cheap genetically modified foods and those other shelves with expensive organic foods that only the privileged can afford. As early as 1999, Thabo Mbeki described this Republic as a country of “two nations” in one country.

On the outside South Africa celebrates its miracle of democracy. The cultural industry is abuzz with happy music, trendy clothing fashion and party animalism of the youth. You know you are in South Africa when you hear that a black business tycoon has stopped taking his food from a plate and has taken to eating his Sushi from the belly button of beautiful model lady. Even funerals of the dead are quickly turned into parties and wild orgies of drinking and dancing. By all accounts, behind this sodomic and gomorrhic worship of pleasure, happiness and sensuality is masked a wounded and bleeding people. If the concealed trauma does not explode in burning alive some poor foreign vendors and hawkers, it comes in suicides, burning of buses and trains, and golgothic cases of domestic violence, rape and public insanity.

Behold Our Tower of Babel
In the Biblical days, after the Great Flood, the people of the city of Shinar resolved to build a tower that reached the heavens themselves. The struggle of the people of Shinar was for power of the heights, knowledge of God and fuller and wiser humanity. God would not have a people seek to know him that way, challenge his aboard and literary seek to discover him physically. The Almighty muted that “indeed the people are one, and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.” In anger, he threw down a multiplicity of languages, confounded the people who scattered across the earth, angry and divided. The struggle for liberation in Africa is in many ways like the effort to build a tower of Babel, soon those who struggle are divided and the struggle literally eats itself up to nothing.

In South Africa, our African case study, what must be a collective struggle for liberation from apartheid has splintered into many small battles for small benefits. Many think the struggle is against Jacob Zuma and the Guptas.

Many others think “fees must” just “fall” and everything will be just fine. Gays, lesbians, queers and transgenders think same sex relationships are the liberation. A few days ago some female students at Rhodes University stripped naked in protest against a culture of rape and libidinousness on campus. Feminists believe that patriarchy is the problem, “male chauvinism must fall.” The miners of Marikana and other poor workers believe that better wages and livable working conditions are the solution. In some university lecture rooms there are bored students who think textbooks are too long, and that the length of essays should be reduced to a few words, in other words intellectual rigour is dying, rigorous thinking is old fashioned. We as individuals and little groups are now speaking our different languages of liberation, we cannot build a common tower that rises up to knowledge, power and fuller humanity, we are scattered.

Pretending to be God, Empire loves us like that, divided, angry and eating each other up every day. The protests and demonstrations quickly turn into thoughtless action and our thinking collapses into actionless thought that is barren.

The condition of suppressed traumas and concealed scars that haunt the collective psyche of South Africa and that of Africa at large requires the thinking, talking and acting cure. The demon must be looked in the eye, called by name and told to vacate the body of the victim, pretending that we are happy only delays the explosion. The struggle of liberation must be given a name, a unifying name that will help the traumatised victims of Empire understand that the pain might affect different people in different ways, but the source of the pain is one, a discredited civilisation that continues to turn blacks into dispensable and disposable beings.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a Zimbabwean academic based in South Africa. [email protected]

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