The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
As represented and also dramatised in the events and incidents of recent weeks in South Africa; Africa is going through some dark and bloody times.
Vulnerable women have been raped and killed by men, some children kidnapped and others burnt with fires. Shops belonging to the Pakistanis and Somalians have been looted and set on fire.
Public buses have been set alight and motor vehicles belonging to private citizens torched in the streets. Festivals of cruelty and pure evil have been witnessed in the streets of the Republic.
It looks like nihilism. The mixture of violent xenophobia and cruel femicide and infanticide has enveloped the country in fear, anger and fury.
The victims, clearly, are the weaker and vulnerable people, women, the foreigners and children, upon which all sorts of angers and hatreds can be visited in any society in turmoil.
Some powerful people, such as the business tycoon Gavin Watson of Bosasa, have died mysterious and suspicious deaths under questionable and worrisome circumstances, a few days before giving what was to be a revealing testimony before the Judge Zondo State Capture Commission.
In particular, the logic of looting and burning, injuring and killing, raping and wounding, has been turned into a strange but very true commonsense of the moment in South Africa.
Other African countries have reacted with shock, anger and much concern as Zambians, usually a peaceable people, and the Nigerians, have retaliated by attacking long distance trucks and shops in their countries that belong to South Africans. A true season of anomy has set in and rendered the continent disturbed and concerning.
Clearly, things must urgently change for the better or we must just prepare for the worst, a war for all against all in Africa. A certain reasonable centre must hold us together or we must prepare to fall where our pieces may not even be picked up.
The troubling symptom of things
A few weeks ago, some informal traders in Johannesburg that have simplistically been generalised in the media as foreign nationals when they are a collective of poor and struggling Africans from South Africa and elsewhere, braved Metro Police officers that had come to evict them, pelted them with stones and insults, until the armed officers retreated.
A desperate and suicidal kind of anger and frustration has possessed the poor in South Africa.
The South African nation, since the end of juridical apartheid, has never been so disturbed.
The State itself, has never come under so much question and pressure, rendering it fragile and its future uncertain. The scarcity of goods and services has created an angry scramble for life and happiness that has made everyone look nearest and around for a weaker enemy and victim to punish. Women, foreigners and children are paying the highest price in the unfolding social downslide in the land.
The spectacles of cruelty, suffering and pure evil that are overtaking South Africa, in my view, are just but a symptom of a structural and systemic malady that covers the whole world, a world that is turning. As the world turns, socially, politically and historically, Africa is bound to suffer the squeeze and the twist of things. South Africa as a political and economic centre in Africa is bound to be the stadium upon which tragic performances of our times are to play out.
The proverbial piece of Europe in Africa that South Africa is cannot remain in peace in times of change.
The turning world-system in Africa
I write this article exactly six days after the passing of Immanuel Wallerstein, the American sociologist, and foremost student and teacher of World-Systems Analysis. Decolonially, World Systems Analysis refuses to take individual nation-states as units of analysis.
Events, incidents and developments in nation-states such as South Africa are read and understood in world-systemic and planetary terms. I also write after my own week of engagement with the Singaporean theorist of Public Policy and student of World-Systems, Kishore Mahbubani, in his telling book: Has the West Lost It?
The broad and also very high shoulders of these two giants, one recently departed and another trending, permit one to stand and see far and close, and clearly, what fundamentally might be afoot in our troubling world. I was introduced to Immanuel Wallerstein by Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni the founder of Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN) and some colleagues in the Latin American Decolonial Research Network (LADERN), among them Ramon Grosfoguel who is one of Wallerstein’s most productive and effective students.
As for Mahbubani, I stumbled and fell on his work while researching and taking notes for lectures on the Decolonial Vocation that I have been giving in different universities in South Africa in the past three months.
The Decolonial Collective, worldwide, has strong perspectives and views on what is happening from Brexit to the planetary accident called Donald Trump, the refugee crisis in Europe, Xenophobia in South Africa, and the increasing numbers of the poor and the angry in the world. The increasing powerlessness of states and governments; and the strengthening of right wing and fundamentalist political movements are explicable in decolonial and world-systemic terms.
Living in the End Times
In 2010, Slavoj Zizek typically frightened the thinking world with his book: Living in the End times, a book in which he predicted that the capitalist world faces a terminal crisis where the ecological crisis (climate change and natural disasters,) terrorism, poverty, refugees, and increasing conflict and inequalities will bring the planet to a standstill.
Poverty will cause people to fight for scarce resources, immigrants and refugees will become global scapegoats of the world social crisis, Zizek predicted.
What Zizek did was to recycle and give new fashion to what Immanuel Wallerstein predicted in 1970, that the capitalist world economy will come to crisis by causing internal problems of itself that it cannot solve, countries will return to narrow nationalisms that will put foreigners and other vulnerable people in trouble with nations and states. As I write, Europe in disintegrating, Brexit is proof, powerful countries are becoming more xenophobic and racist, Trump’s America is the testimony.
The terrorist shootings in America, hatred directed at Mexicans and blacks are true signs of the times. In South Africa, South Africans pressed for resources and opportunities are directing their anger against Somalis, Pakistanis, Nigerians and other foreigners.
The Republic is beginning to passionately look inward and see neighbours and even some locals as parasites that must leave or die. It is a world problem in South Africa, and in Africa, not the simple bigotry of South Africans.
The world capitalist economy and polity is in crisis and is daily manufacturing scapegoats and victims. Politicians and scholars have neither questions nor answers as to what exactly is happening in the Republic.
Ordinary people, hungry and angry, are possessed of insanities and are creating victims out of the next weakest thing and person. People are losing jobs in mass, properties are getting repossessed by banks and livelihoods are in peril.
Suicide rates are high, and so are murders, femicides and infanticides, the economy is in recession and the population is depressed. Foreigners, women and children are the weakest of the weakest and victims of the victims in a setting of political and economic crisis.
Mahbubani: The future is Machiavellian
Mahbubani reminds us that the West is presently led by the Euro-American Empire has only led the world for the past 200 Years. From AD 1 to 1820, the two largest economies of the world were those of China and India. In the long history of the past 1800 years, the West has only been an Empire for 200 years, a small part of the long duree.
Only after 1820 did Europe prosper followed by America. This reality is radically changing. China, followed by India are back as leading economies of the world. Other large parts of Asia have also prospered and such countries as Singapore have managed to decolonise and modernise their polities and economies without westernising their cultures.
In China Deng Xiaoping used the 1980s to launch the Four Modernisations Policy: Reforming Agriculture, Industry, National Defence and Science and technologising the country.
In India, Narasimha Rao, at the same time opened the economy for business and realised a boom. In light of the rise of China and India America and Europe are scared. From the entrance of China into the World Trade Organisation in 2001, things have never been the same. World economic and political power is inevitably changing hands and direction.
The West has reacted with right wing political and economic logics. Trade wars, racism and xenophobia. The West is in panic at the return of the Rest to political and economic prominence. Terrorism and counter-terrorism, bashing foreigners and refugees are but the structural and systemic symptoms of the changing times in the world.
When the West launched the G7 in 1976 the world’s powerful economies registered a share of the Global GDP of 45, percent by 1995. At the time, the small economies, the E7 registered 22,6 percent. In 2015, the E7 held 36,3 percent while the G7 suffered a fall to 31,5 percent. The Devil hides in the statistics. 2050, economically and politically looks like the property of Asia and the Global South, if this change in the world is handled well, not with war.
I conclude with Kishore Mahbubani that, true to Niccolo Machiavelli, a new order of things is needed in the politics and economics of the world. Africa, in particular, must lead in thinking otherwise and decolonising polities and economies, and positioning itself to benefit from the change of Empires.
Pan-Africanism, more than nationalism, is what the countries of the continent urgently need. Colonial borders and the foreigners that they came with are properties of the previous Empire. Racism, xenophobia and nativism are legacies of the western Empire that must have no place in a decolonised continent. A new Order of Things is due.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes North West University, Mahikeng Campus, South Africa: [email protected].
