The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
In the present world, racism, white supremacy and white privilege have become the stubborn corpse that insists on working up every time it is buried.
It has become evident that this toxic body has not died in the first place; decolonisation and independence became historical moments where the body faked its own death, only to appear the following morning in different guises to punish the unsuspecting celebrants of decolonisation and independence in the Global South. When two weeks ago a few brave white supremacists compared black people to monkeys in South Africa, and some accused blacks that cry for economic transformation of suffering from a sense of entitlement, many of us were blinded by the bravado of the whites and deafened by the noise of the singular black voice who called for the ethnic cleansing against whites in the land.
Our attention to scandal and spectacle prevents us from seeing clearly what racism is and what it has become in this otherwise modern generation of the selfie, where everything has become summarised in the miniskirt, in Lmao, Lmfao and the proverbial Lol, at the dear expense of long understanding of issues. Too much laughing, lolling and yelling makes us think that some evil things that must be abolished are part of our common sense and business as usual.
Who owns God?
Racism came into the world as an invention of imperialism and capitalism. It came as a greedy and unequal distribution of labour, gold and ultimately God himself. When Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas in 1492, as a good Christian he was talking a lot about God while he was wandering around also looking for land and gold. When he encountered the natives of the land and saw in them potential slaves and labourers, his argument was that these people did not have God and religion and that they did not have souls. Killing them, enslaving them and visiting violence on them was for their own good and a way of giving them civilisation and God.
From its very beginnings, racism involved denying the humanity of peoples that were not Europeans, insisting that they were soulless animals that did not have God and religion and whose lives were usable for labour and dispensable as waste materials of the civilising mission. Slavery and colonialism were backed by deep belief in the animalism of black people and the need to use force and education to bring them closer to God and to humanity. The philosophies of Calvinism and Apartheid itself explicitly stated that enslaving and colonising black peoples was a duty to God, a blessed white man’s burden. It should not surprise anyone today that racism, white supremacy and white privilege are so stubborn because originally they are connected to some misguided religious beliefs. At birth, racism and white supremacy invented myths and fictions of themselves as Godly and divine.
The Science and Philosophy of Racism
Charles Darwin intelligently supplied a philosophy and science of biology that fortified the belief that it was not only godly but also very natural to use black and supposedly lower peoples as slaves, cheap labour and objects of experimentation. In the philosophy of economics another genius, Adam Smith, classified that in the creation of the wealth of nations, enslaving lower peoples and using them for profit was not only forgivable but advisable.
It is the tragedy of the present world that those classic thinkers who are supposed to be the ones that first imagined modernity, civilisation and progress and such furnitures of the world as democracy, development and human rights are the same thinkers who used their genius to suggest and defend the enslavement of some peoples by others. Up to today Aristotle’s expositions on politics and the state stand on two legs in the global academy from the North to the South but his brilliance is the same that argued that some were born slaves when others were born to be masters.
This paradox escapes may among us who think that Rhodes must fall and that the university and the world must be decolonised but do so using the thinking and the logic of the same people who invented racism, white supremacy and white privilege. If Rhodes must fall, he must fall also in our minds, hearts and libraries. Racism, white supremacy and white privilege are a many headed monster that has fortified its defenses not only with God but also the finest of science and philosophy in the world. It is for that reason that decolonisation and liberation will not be achieved by lousy slogans but deep research, reflection and possibly the mobilisation of decolonial philosophy and theology.
Throughout the present world, wherever they are, black people are killable, rapeable, disposable and the loss of their property and lives is not as grieveable as that of the big Other. The crime of Hitler in Europe was not the killing of many human beings with such cruelty, but it was to do in Europe and to Europeans what Europeans and Americans in slavery and colonialism have been happy to do to the so called lower peoples in the Global South.
Racism, white supremacy and white privilege have participated not only in enslaving, colonising and killing the dark bodies, but killing their gods and religions, erasing and distorting their histories, silencing and deleting their memories and replacing them with an image of the godliness of the Euro-American Empire. For that reason, some learned people argue that by now we should be done talking about slavery and colonialism, but the decolonial question is, are slavery and colonialism done dealing us down?
Apartheid in South Africa, which was a work of deep philosophy, from 1948 put up a clever pretence of the gospel of separate development. Sexual congress between blacks and whites was a crime. Supposedly different peoples of different identities were to be allowed to develop separately from each other in their specific homelands, behind that guise whites were enriched with land and all of its other goods. White racism, white supremacy and white privilege backed itself with massive wealth. The capital question then is, can anyone undo racism, white supremacy and white privilege in South Africa without the redistribution of wealth and transformation of the economy.
Some clever voices from the past, at the University of Stellenbosch are arguing that we must not worry about old wealth and where it is, in the hands of whites, we need to create new wealth! In this logic, the black monkeys are lazy and noisy lice that must drop the sense of entitlement and work hard to create fresh wealth. Because of the massive wealth that white racists and white supremacists have amassed, the racism of black people against whites cannot be called racism because it lacks power, it has no social and political stamina, it is the anger of the ant that can be dismissed without consequences because it has no bite.
In the world, racism, white supremacy and white privilege produced liberals, those tricky beneficiaries of white privilege who however, took to crying with and on behalf of blacks without relinquishing their privilege. And they were many. Whenever blacks began thinking of white supremacy and white privilege as ultimate evil, there would be one or two white people that would be named as different and better. If white liberals were and are dangerous today, even more dangerous are black whites, the honorary whites, black people who use their education and wealth to be happy and angry on behalf of white supremacy and white privilege.
And they are many.
Blacks who practice white racism on other black people come in many guises, religious fanatics, intellectual sophists and some simple misguided social snobs. So if Rhodes must really fall, he must fall in many places including among us and in us as black people. White racism, white supremacy and white privilege in this post-independence and post-apartheid era in Africa and the entire Global South is not projected in white bodies but also in some black bodies, Cecil John Rhodes is concealed in some very black bodies in Africa, and is at work practicing racism as tribalism and racism as xenophobia.
Cetshwayo Mabhena is based in Pretoria, South Africa
