“And the bridge was suspended between the two eternities Arched so high up there that the Watchman Could from his tower see all that had gone before And all that was to come. And that is why the anxious, helpless peoples of this crazy […]
history introspection politicsA people that cannot celebrate themselves and their culture would never believe in themselves and their capabilities. In my previous paper ‘The Relevance of Moogadi in the Modern African Society’, I spoke about the struggles that have engulfed Africa; the struggles that include but not […]
adminWe have watched Marvel’s recent ground breaking movie, Black Panther directed by Ryan Coogler, and we have all come up with interpretations of the movie; from the representation of Killmonger, to the role Africa has played by neglecting to open channels that would have allowed […]
admin“And the bridge was suspended between the two eternities Arched so high up there that the Watchman Could from his tower see all that had gone before And all that was to come. And that is why the anxious, helpless peoples of this crazy […]
history introspection politics
“And the bridge was suspended between the two
eternities
Arched so high up there that the Watchman
Could from his tower see all that had gone before
And all that was to come.
And that is why the anxious, helpless peoples of this
crazy world
Continue to look up in despair and cry
O Watchman, tell us in this endless night
Just what the signs of promise are!” (Chancellor Williams p 294)
“Today, my resentment at the doctrine of race superiority, as preached and practiced by the white world for the last 250 years has been pointed to with sharp criticism and contrasted with the charity of Gandhi and of the colored minister [Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.] who lead the recent boycott in Alabama. I am quite frank: I do not pretend to “love white people.” I think that as a race they are the most selfish of any on earth. I think that the history of the world for the last thousand years proves this beyond doubt.”
(W.E.B. DuBois, “Whites in Africa After Negro Autonomy”, my italics)
“Perhaps the most outstanding early example of literary struggle came from the 1829 polemic David Walker’s Appeal, also written in Boston. Walker, a free man, proved from biblical and ancient Greek and Roman history that no earlier form of servitude approached western hemisphere slavery in its brutality. He confronted the pseudo-scientific racists by showing that the world’s pioneer civilizations in the Nile Valley were built by Africans. He said that white people were the natural enemies of Africans and called upon the enslaved to rise up.” (Tony Martin p 4, my italics)
This piece is an attempt to ground my view that the integration of blacks and whites both within white supremacy as reflected in the current situation and after the destruction of white supremacy is fatally disingenuous. And that while I am fully aware of Sobukwe’s and Biko’s view that whites who accept African culture and majority rule after the demise of White Supremacy can become African, I firmly reject this view as politically naïve in the long run. The underlying argument as I will discuss in the last section of this piece is that while I recognise whites’ cognitive capacity to change, I posit that they lack the necessary political will (for obvious reasons of Power) to change their culture, which, as Ani Marimba has demonstrated, makes them to be aggressive and obsess about power and control over what she calls the cultural-Other; in this case the African race.
In other words, I do recognise the fact that they can change their culture and only a few of them can do this, to a great extent unsuccessfully, ultimately due to the psychoanalytical dimension of their psyche. As a result of centuries-long process of racist social conditioning, in my opinion there is a “psychological remainder” which despite their conscious attempt to change still influences their behaviour and relation towards blacks in an anti-black fashion. In other words, the gist of my argument is not ontological or genetic but political, that is; it is about Power. Fundamentally speaking, I will disagree with Sobukwe’s vision of African nation post-white supremacy/post-conquest. While he entertained the idea of accepting whites on condition that they accept African majority rule and embrace African culture, I subscribe to Marcus Garvey’s vision of a strong African nation, as discussed by Prof Chinweizu, in the form of Neo-Garveysim and Black Power, as he calls it, which does not entertain integration or assimilation of any kind, as entertained by both Nkrumah with Arabs and Du bois with whites.
This African nation is for the Africans only. Indigeneity, which is African descent or ancestry, is the first fundamental trait of who counts as African but also loyalty, pride in one’s indigeneity, culture and the advancement of the interest, norms and values of the African. The exclusion of whites is not ontological but ethical. The problem is not the being of whites but how historically speaking they have and still relate with the Africans whom they have reduced to what Ani Marimba designates the cultural-Other. I will also draw from Chancellor Williams in my support of the exclusion of whites. I am aware that on the basis of African ontology, motion and change are the principles of being as discussed by Prof Ramose and Wade Nobles, but I will argue that politically speaking whites don’t deserve a second chance to be included in the future African nation. In other words, I posit that Post-conquest integration with whites while it is philosophically appealing it is politically disingenuous given the historical record of whites.
I don’t think that whites will disrobe their whiteness, that is become immigrants and be absorbed by the Africans. Psychoanalytically there will still be what I call the “psychological remainder” which will be the basis of unconscious racism. In other words, I don’t see whites committing racial suicide by ceasing to be white. A few of them can try it but this is only the exception to the rule of the obstinate preservation of whiteness and racism which goes with it. As an African Nationalist, my concern is with the general rule and not with exceptions. We are dealing here not only with white settlers but with white imperialism and as a global system of white power as discussed by Charles Mills. This means that it is correct to posit that whites need white supremacy and that white supremacy needs whites, thus racism is white supremacy.
While we need to retain the culture of Botho and Ubuntu, which is clearly foreign to whites, we should not apply it to whites. The fundamental function of culture is to solve problems and sustain the biological existence of a people. We need to use our culture carefully in the light of our modern challenges if we are to avoid becoming victims of our own culture like our ancestors did when they welcomed some whites only to wake up as the conquered. I will agree with John Henrik Clarke; Africans have to practice what he calls “the selfishness of survival”. I don’t doubt the fact that cognitively speaking whites can change but my argument is that, because of their “will to power” as Nietzsche calls it, which has sustained them for last 500 years of white domination, they should not be accepted as Abantu or Batho.
After a masterful and panoramic thorough study of history, the history of the encounter between the blacks and whites, Chancellor Williams confidently concluded that the white man is the “implacable enemy of” black people. In addition to saying that the white man is the implacable enemy of blacks, Williams stated that the whites are the traditional and everlasting enemy of blacks. In other words, as far as the view from the bridge is concerned, the white man is the bitter enemy of blacks. Here is Chancellor Williams in his own words:
What, then, is “the view from the bridge”? The outlook is grim . For the black people of the world there is no bright tomorrow. The Blacks may continue to live in their dream world of singing, dancing, marching, praying and hoping, because of the deluding signs of what looks like victories-still trusting in the ultimate justice of the white man ; but a thousand years hence their descendants will be substantially where the race was a thousand years before. For the white people, still masters of the world, do not have to yield. They have never changed their real attitude toward black people during all the passing centuries, and there is absolutely nothing upon which to base the belief that they will change in the centuries to come. (Williams p 301, my italics)
I am not the Watchman in this view from the bridge who can see two eternities, in other words all that has gone before and all that is to come. But I certainly concur with Williams as the Watchman that because whites are the everlasting enemy of blacks, there is no room for them at the rendezvous of victory. The point of my critique is the fantasy about future black and white integration, even if it is based on the terms of blacks .In other words, my main point is that a Black-Power-based African Nation should never entertain the fantasy of inviting whites to be part of it. The African tree and table should instead of inviting whites, invite Africans from the Diaspora to settle on the continent after the extermination of white-settler colonialism as well as Arab settler colonialism. Both Sobukwe and Biko entertained the idea of inviting whites after the destruction of white supremacy. Here is what Sobukwe has to say:
Here is a tree rooted in African soil, nourished with waters from the rivers of Africa. Come and sit under its shade and become, with us, leaves of the same branch and branches of the same tree. (Sobukwe p 11)
Sobukwe entertained the idea that whites who accept African culture and majority rule can be part of an African Nation which will be created after the destruction of white supremacy. This is what Sobukwe has to say in this regard:
We aim, politically, at government of the Africans by the Africans for Africans, with everybody who owes his only loyalty to Africa and who is prepared to accept the democratic rule of an African majority being regarded as an African. We guarantee no minority rights, because we think in terms of individuals, not groups. (Sobukwe p 11)
Biko also entertained the idea of whites and blacks coming together after the destruction of what he designated the “white power structure”. Here is what he has to say in this regard:
It had to be artificial because it was being foisted on two parties whose entire upbringing had been to support the lie that one race was superior and the others inferior. One has to overhaul the whole system in South Africa before hoping to get black and white walking hand in hand. (Biko)
Here is Biko again in his own words;
We knew he had no right to be there; we wanted to remove him from our table, strip the table of all trappings put on it by him, decorate it in true African style, settle down and then ask him to join us on our own terms if he liked.(Biko p 75 my italics)
The question becomes why the need to invite him in the first place? Now that we have established in accordance with the Watchman that whites are the everlasting enemy of blacks and the most selfish of the races as per DuBois’s formulation, does it make sense to invite them? The reason why I think Biko entertained the idea of white and blacks coming together after the destruction of the white supremacy is that dialectically speaking he thought that the main objective of liberation is to create a “true humanity”, Sobukwe on the other hand assumed that there are no races but one “human race” .This is what he had to say in this regard:
The African people are very much proud of their race – the human race. They recognize no inescapable fundamental differences among members of even the three main branches of that race: the Caucasoids, Mongoloids and Afrinoids. (Sobukwe p 24, my italics)
In a nutshell, for both Biko and Sobukwe there is a room for both whites and blacks at the rendezvous of victory, while for me there is room only for Africans both at home and abroad at the rendezvous of victory. My stance is in line with Garvey’s slogan “Africa for the Africans both at home and abroad”. In other words, my ideological approach is Garveyite. What is the basis of my different stance? I now turn to the second part of this piece to explicate the basis of my stance.
Pan-Africanism and the ties that bind; let the circle be closed
Before I even commence my analysis of the function and value of education, I have to make it clear that I subscribe to Marcus Garvey’s version of Pan-Africanism. Chinweizu explains very well and succinctly the difference between different forms of Pan-Africanism. According to Chinweizu, there is the Duboisian Integrationist Pan-Africanism which sees as its objective the ultimate integration between whites and blacks. And there is also Nkrumah’s continentalist version, which pursues Arab and Black co-operation as envisaged by Cheik Anta Diop in his book called Black Africa the politics of a federated Africa, which is highly useful for the purpose of industrialisation and attainment of Power; except for its exhortation of “Afro-Arab co-operation” which is misguided. I personally reject Nkrumah’s and Dubois’s version of Pan-Africanism.
Garvey’s version of Pan-Africanism is about African Power through economic industrialisation and military organisation which seek to protect and ensure the biological survival of Africans. In other words, it is about Africans to the exclusion of those who are not Africans. Whites and Arabs are excluded from the category of what counts as African. This exclusion is in line with Lembede’s Africanist tradition or African Nationalism. In the words, of Mabogo More, it is about “Black Solidarity” which is in line with Kwame Ture’s project and politics of Black Power. Garvey’s Pan-Africanism is historically grounded in the fact that the encounter between Africans and Arabs and Europeans made one thing clear and that is it is about Racial Power. In a nutshell, it is not about equality and inclusion, it is rather about who has Power, who exercises it, for whose benefit and at whose expense.
In other words, the emphasis is on race, which is the African race. This is what Garvey has to say in this regard;
Let no voice but your own speak to you from the depths. Let no influence but your own rouse you in time of peace and time of war; hear all, but attend only to that which concerns you. Your allegiance shall be to your God, then to your family, race and country. Remember always that the Jew in his political and economic urge is always first a Jew; the white man is first a white man under all circumstances, and you can do no less than being first and always a Negro, and then all else will take care of itself. Let no one inoculate you with evil doctrines to suit their own conveniences. There is no humanity before that which starts with yourself, “Charity begins at home.” First, to thyself be true, and “thou canst not then be false to any man.” (Garvey in African Fundamentalism, my italics)
White supremacy is a war declared by whites against the African race. The declaration of this began as early as 1441 with the capture of Africans by the Portuguese in West Africa. By then Arabs had already declared war against the African race, they did this as early as 640 AD when they conquered Egypt. In other words, the exigent problem which the African Race is faced with is white supremacy as a form of anti-black racial war. In North Africa the African race is facing Arab settler colonialism and Imperialism, and in the Southern tip of the continent the African race is facing the scourge of white settler colonialism and Imperialism at the hands of the white settlers who declared war on all fronts against the African race as early as 1652.
As a result of the declaration of war against the African race, Africans were forcefully transported to the Arab world and the Americas. Columbus provided the reason why the African race had to be transported to the Americas to be dehumanised and exploited at the hands of white criminals and immoral warmongers. The African race has since then identified with their continent of origin. Many Africans committed suicide while being kidnapped by white raiders. Those who landed in the Americas wanted to return to their motherland. In other words, the African race which went through the ‘middle passage’ retained their Africanity. As Robinson in The Invention of the Negro puts it:
At this point in history, slavery and the slave trade were essential components of the modern world-system. But from the initiation of the English part of the system, there had been those opposed to it. The trials of rebels in the colonies in the early seventeenth century provide testimony of one sort of resistance: rebellions by servants and slaves. (Robinson p 314)
And that in their rebellion against white criminals, they have preserved their humanity. And that rebellion against the immoral social relation created by the white raiders is a critique both at the cultural and political level of racism/white supremacy. In other words, the African race should realise that the encounter between the Africans and whites made one thing clear, which is captured by Garvey when he states:
“The attitude of the white race is to subjugate, to
exploit, and if necessary exterminate the weaker peoples with whom they come in
contact. They subjugate first, if the weaker peoples will stand for it; then exploit, and if
they will not stand SUBJUGATION nor is EXPLOITATION, the other recourse
EXTERMINATION.”(Garvey)
On the basis of this political analysis of white supremacy, African Nationalism which focuses exclusively on the African race is the only ideological stance which the Africans must use to destroy White Power and create Black Power without Whites and Arabs. In the words of John Henrik Clarke, the African race has to learn to practice the “selfishness of survival”. Clarke has posited that when one reads the history of the encounter between the Africans and other races, the Africans who have acted as hosts to these races which were guests, suffered as a result of their generosity to this foreigners who came to the continent with sinister intentions. And because we didn’t know their sinister intention and we did not have sinister intentions we assumed that they will treat us the way we treated them. What the Africans failed to understand and still do today is the mentality of the whites.
The Africans in America retained their consciousness of Africa. This is the argument maintained by Magubane in his book called The Ties That Bind. This fact is demonstrated, historically speaking, by Martin Delany and Robert Campbell who wanted way before Marcus Garvey the repatriation of the Africans in America to Africa. These are the key African figures who envisioned the regeneration of Africa after it was ravaged by what Chinweizu calls “the Black Chattelization War, or the Anti-Black Race War”. This Anti-Black Race War as a result of the ties that bind led to Pan-Africanism which I posit is the beginning of the circle that I am referring to. This is the circle of the slogan of Garvey’s Pan Africanism; which is “Africa for the Africans, those at home and abroad”. This is what Tony Martin has to say in this regard:
The great tragedy of 1441 can be taken as a convenient point of departure on the road that led eventually to modern Pan-Africanism. In that year, sea-borne Portuguese marauders kidnapped a few Africans on the West African coast and set sail for Portugal. In 1502 some of the newly enslaved Africans were transported across the Atlantic from the Iberian Peninsula to the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, now shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Later arrivals came directly from Africa to the Americas. These were the opening stages of our “maafa,” our holocaust of enslavement, the transatlantic slave trade. Despite the fact that slavery had existed since time immemorial in most societies, the transatlantic slave trade was qualitatively different from what had gone before. It was chattel slavery, in which a concerted effort was made to dehumanize its unfortunate victims. It was also the transatlantic slave trade, as opposed to similar trade to Asia or elsewhere, which produced the beginnings of the modern Pan-African movement. (Tony Martin p 1)
The fundamental objective of this movement as explained by John Henrik Clarke, in a book called Who Betrayed the African Revolution, is to get back what slavery and colonialism had taken away from the Africans. In the words of Sobukwe:
“Mayibuye i Afrika,” that is the cry ringing throughout the Continent. Africa for the Africans! Izwe Lethu – i Africa! Those are the words that spell the doom of white supremacy in Africa. (Sobukwe p 17 my italics)
The circle began with what Tony Martin calls proto-Pan-Africanism when the African wanted to regain their humanity and freedom through the consciousness that they are Africans and that Africa is their home. It is my argument, therefore, that this circle will be closed through Black Power in the form of the creation of a strong African Nation with economic and military power and the elimination of white and Arab settlers from Africa which will be followed by some Africans abroad and at home resettling on these lands formerly occupied by these enemy of the blacks.
In the words of Marcus Garvey:
Remember, we live, work and pray for the establishing of a great and binding racial hierarchy, the founding of a racial empire whose only natural, spiritual and political limits shall be God and “Africa, at home and abroad.”
The gist of the argument which will be solidified in the next section of this piece is that there is a room at the rendezvous of victory only for the Africans those at home and abroad. This victory is the destruction of white supremacy in the form of Arab settler colonialism in North Africa and White settler colonialism in Southern Africa. Thus, finally Africans will be able to do as Marcus Garvey advised a long time ago; which is:
“[T]he Negro peoples of the world should concentrate upon the object of
building up for themselves a great nation in Africa. . . [of] creating for
ourselves [there] a political superstate . . . a government, a nation of our own,
strong enough to lend protection to the members of our race scattered all
over the world, and to compel the respect of the nations and races of the
earth. . . .”(Garvey my italics)
Pan-Africanism, Nyerere and Black consciousness
In this section I want to demonstrate that as a result of land dispossession both in North Africa and Southern Africa, Africans are now concentrated in the sub-Saharan region. This is a reflection of our powerlessness and the power of the Arab and White settlers who have conquered us at different periods in history. White supremacy established itself in the form of the dispersion of whites all over the globe from as early as the 1500s. The Arabs on the other hand dispersed themselves on the African continent as early as 640 AD with the conquest of Egypt, the land of our highly civilised ancestors. In other words, as a result of both Arab and European population dispersions, the Africans are confronted with Pan-Europeanism and Pan-Arabism.
Pan-Arabism has included the enslavement of the Africans in North Africa and the occupation of lands previously owned by the Africans and the attempt to depopulate these lands to make room for the Arabs from the Arab World to take these lands. Pan-Arabism in other words is what I designate Arab Power which is detrimental to the biological survival of the Africans. Lest we forget Agyeman reminds us as follows:
The Arabs played a role in the invasions and conquests that wrought destruction on the ancient Black Kingdoms and empires of North-East Africa, as well as on the West African Black states of Ghana, Mali and Songhay. The Arab slave trade in Africa was a destructive force that raged from the 9th through the 19th centuries in the Eastern seaboard of Africa, both preceding and outlasting even the transatlantic slave trade on the West Coast. The Arabs made depredations on the Sudan through the murderous campaigns of Muhammed Ali at the beginning of the 19th century, and joined in the European Scramble for Africa in the latter part of the same century in an effort, once again, to carve out an African empire for themselves. Through this nexus of social, economic and political assaults, the relations between Arabs and Africans took on the confirmed asymmetry of victimizer and victim.(Agyeman p 2)
It is my view that these Black kingdoms were nothing but political institutions of Black Power on the African continent. This is how Agyeman explains Pan-Arabism:
And what is Pan-Arabism? In a word, it is an ideological- political movement representing a conscious effort to create a united Arab nation. Its underlying principle is that the Arab states are parts of one indivisible Arab nation. (Agyeman p 3)
Many Arab leaders have expressed the spirit of Pan-Arabism including Gaddafi, who has confused a lot of Africans by masquerading as an African and pushing the interests of the African race. This is what Nasser has to say:
We are one Arab nation. Both our constitution and the Iraqi Provisional Constitution provide in their articles that we are one Arab nation. Accordingly, every Arab state has the right to defend Iraq’s Arabhood and independence from Britain, the USA, the USSR, and all other countries. We are one Arab family in a boat caught in the tempest of international politics.(quoted in Agyeman p 3)
This is what Gaddafi declared:
“The third of the Arab community living outside Africa should move in with the twothirds
on the continent and join the African Union ‘which is the only space we have.’”
–Col. Mouammar Gaddafi of Libya, according to a Pan African News Agency report of 28
March, 2001
The history of Pan-Europeanism in Southern Africa is well known. White settler colonialism which the indigenous people in “Southern Africa” tried to deal with is just a more famous example. What I think is the less known is vastness of Afrikaner farms in what is now called south Africa. The British and the Boers/Afrikaners fought two European intertribal wars on the African land which are called South African wars.
Even though these wars demonstrated that there might be squabbles between these European settler-tribes, the Peace Treaty of Vereeniging proved to be an example of what I call Pan-Europeanism. In 1902, after these intertribal wars between these two factions of white supremacists, there was an agreement to stop these wars which fragmented White Power. This was in order to facilitate the white supremacist project of making “south Africa” a white man’s country. In other words, Pan-Europeanism is white nationalism which can only be negated by an equal force of African Nationalism.
The coming together of these Europeans marked the consolidation of White settler colonialism in Southern Africa. This also proves that settler colonialism needs whites just as these whites have demonstrated to need settler colonialism. Orania is an example of how these whites would like to continue what they agreed upon during the creation of the Union of South Africa; which is to make south Africa the White man’s world. They did all this knowing that white supremacy as a global system of White Power will support them and it did, the history thereof is well known. These European tribes decided to combine their efforts of settler colonialism in order to deal effectively with what they called “the native problem” or the black danger which is nothing but a racist invention by these conquerors of our ancestors. Like their Arab counterpart in North Africa, these whites through their project of conquest also destroyed “black civilization” in the words of Williams. They destroyed like the Arabs, although at different time-periods, political institutions of Black Power.
So where does this leave the African race on the land of their ancestors? The African race is under siege from both the Northern side and the Southern side of the continent. In other words, the Africans are caught in between the forces of Arab settler colonialism and White settler colonialism. On the basis of this political and historical analysis, the logical conclusion is that Arabs and whites are not our friends or allies. These people are our everlasting enemies, in the words of the Watchman. This simply means that as Africans we are on our own. This is what Nyerere has to say in this regard:
Africa, South of the Sahara is different, totally different. . . . Africa South of the Sahara is isolated. That is the first point I want to make. Africa South of the Sahara is totally isolated in terms of that configuration of developing power in the world of the 21st Century — on its own. There is no centre of power in whose self-interest it’s important to develop Africa, no centre. Not North America, not Japan, not Western Europe. There’s no self-interest to bother about Africa South of the Sahara. Africa South of the Sahara is on its own. Na sijambo baya. Those of you who don’t know Swahili, I just whispered, “Not necessarily bad”. . . . That’s the first thing I wanted to say about Africa South of the Sahara. African leadership, the coming African leadership, will have to bear that in mind. You are on your own . . . (Nyerere quoted in Chinweizu)
This means that the fact of us being Africans should be the fundamental basis upon which we fight these everlasting enemies. Lest we forget Chinweizu reminds us that:
Having lost a clear and detailed sense of our identity, we have naturally also lost our ability to create a point of view of the world strictly our own. With our scrambled sense of reality we have forgotten how to see things in terms of our separate and concrete interests. . . . Worse still we behave as if it were some sort of betrayal to discover and insist on our own point of viewing the world.
Our Pan-Africanism should be driven by what John Henrik Clarke calls the “essential selfishness of survival” and on the firm basis of the African race first. This is very important because as things stand our very biological survival as the African race has been in question for centuries, as explicated by Williams in The Destruction of Black Civilization. We, as the African race, clearly have to heed the advice of Lembede who made it clear that as Africans we are our own liberators. African warrior nationalist initiated the national liberation struggle against white settler colonialism. In the words of Sobukwe:
We are met here today to commemorate our National Heroes’ Day. We are today going down the corridor of time and renewing our acquaintance with the heroes of Africa’s past — those men and women who nourished the tree of African freedom and independence with their blood; those great Sons and Daughters of Africa who died in order that we may be free in the land of our birth. We are met here, today, to rededicate our lives to the cause of Africa, to establish contact, beyond the grave, with the great African heroes and to assure them that their struggle was not in vain. We are met here, Sons and Daughters of our beloved land, to drink from the fountain of African achievement, to remember the men and women who begot us, to remind ourselves of where we come from and to restate our goals. We are here to draw inspiration from the heroes of Thaba Bosiu, Isandlwana, Sandile’s Kop, Keiskama Hoek and numerous other battlefields where our forefathers fell before the bullets of the foreign invader. We are here to draw inspiration from the Sons and Daughters of Africa who gave their all to the cause and were physically broken in the struggle. We are met here, Sons and Daughters of Africa, to take a trowel in our right hand and a shield and sword in our left, to commence the tremendous task of rebuilding the walls of Africa! (Sobukwe p 18, my italics)
As Biko stated;
What blacks are doing is merely respond to a situation in which they find themselves the objects of white racism. We are in the position in which we are because of our skin. We are collectively segregated against – what can be more logical than for us to respond as a group. (Biko, my italics)
Because we will liberate ourselves from white supremacy as Africans; beyond white supremacy we should live together only as Africans to the exclusion of whites we excluded at the political level of organisation against the white supremacy. Put differently, we should exclude whites both organisationally and nationally. I now turn to the last section in which I solidify this thesis.
Garvey and African Nationalism: So much worse for the whites?
At best . . . blacks see whiteness as a concept that warrants being despised, hated, destroyed and replaced by an aspiration with more human content in it. (Biko)
The Other races have countries of their own and it is time for the 400,000,000 Negroes to claim Africa for themselves” (Garvey quoted in Edwin S Redkey p 395)
Having lost a clear and detailed sense of our identity, we have naturally also lost our ability to create a point of view of the world strictly our own. With our scrambled sense of reality we have forgotten how to see things in terms of our separate and concrete interests. . . . Worse still we behave as if it were some sort of betrayal to discover and insist on our own point of viewing the world. (Chinweizu, my italics)
This section will further solidify my thesis that there is no room for both whites and blacks, or the Africans and the Europeans, at the rendezvous of victory. My approach in this final section is Race-First Pan-African Nationalism influenced by Marcus Garvey. Put differently, I want to foreground the fact that Garvey unlike both Biko and Sobukwe subscribed to Race-First Pan-Africanism. The only African Nationalist in Azania whom I think subscribed to Garveysim is Muziwakhe Lembede. This is what Lembede has to say in this regard:
Africa is a black man’s country. Africans are the natives of Africa and they have inhabited Africa, their Motherland, from times immemorial; Africa belongs to them. (Lembede)
The best expression of the sentiment of African Nationalism by Lembede is the following:
As it is with individuals, so it is with nations. Each nation has its own peculiar unique character which no other nation in the world possesses or can possess. Each nation has thus its own peculiar talents and potentialities to develop and to realise. Each nation has its own peculiar contribution to make towards the general progress, welfare and happiness of mankind. (Lembede)
This is how Sabelo Sibanda, in Pan-Africanism and Afrikan Nationalism: Putting the Afrikan Nation in Context, aptly summaries the essence of African Nationalism:
The position of the Pan-Afrikanists is that the nation aspect of the Afrikan Nation is given credence and weight by, amongst others, the following factors:
continent of Afrika or not, originate from the same Afrikan ancestral
heritage and therefore are members of the same nation.
namely Afrika.
manifestation is concerned, Afrikan people share a similar culture.
experiences of racism, exploitation and the quest for freedom, thus
meaning that, in more ways than one, Afrikan people’s history is the same. (Sibanda p 241, my italics)
The point that I am making is that as Africans we need to see each other as a family and connect ourselves to our ancestors to the exclusion of whites who are foreigners. In terms of the African Nationalism that I am subscribing to, we should not entertain the idea of integrating whites in our African Nation which is ancestral in origin. Our first priority is to restore and secure our African Nationhood by destroying white supremacy. In other words, the interest of us as indigenous people or Africans should have primacy over those of whites. As Raboroko puts it in the Africanist Case:
The crucial issue today is whether the interests of the five million Europeans throughout Africa must continue to dominate over those of the two hundred and eighty million Africans, or whether the reverse process should obtain. This is an issue that no social philosophy pretending to have a solution for Africa’s social problem can afford to gloss over. Nationalism demands that the interests of indigenous peoples should dominate over those of aliens, because the country belongs to the indigenous people. (Raboroko p 25, my italics)
In my opinion, the destruction of white supremacy will be followed by a process of reconstruction in which we as Indigenous people need to reaffirm our African identity, culture, dignity and consciousness which were brutally attacked by whites throughout the centuries of the psychological violence of white supremacy. There are many Africans who have been psychologically victimised by white supremacy who will need the immediate attention of African Nationalism. Once we have restored African Nationhood I think that it will not be necessary to extend citizenship rights to Europeans. If some whites choose to embrace African culture as Sobukwe posited, we can congratulate them by telling them to go to Europe to educate their fellow Europeans.
As Garvey puts it:
The Negro has got to develop apart, and create his own government and industrial foundation” (Martin p 307)
This strong African Nation should be racially exclusive, and this is the meaning of Race-First approach as opposed to abstract humanism. We cannot simply be idealistic and ignore the existence of racial feelings amongst people in the world who accumulate and protect each other on the basis of racial collective power and solidarity. In an ideal world maybe blacks and whites can co-exist, but for the past 500 centuries the history of whites has taught us that they are the enemies of blacks. We have to view these whites not abstractly but on the basis of their historical record. As Garvey puts it gain:
“The attitude of the white race is to subjugate, to
exploit, and if necessary exterminate the weaker peoples with whom they come in
contact. They subjugate first, if the weaker peoples will stand for it; then exploit, and if
they will not stand SUBJUGATION nor EXPLOITATION, the other recourse
EXTERMINATION.”(Garvey)
The Europeans must have their own Europe and we will have our own Africa as our land by ancestral right since time immemorial. As Sibanda
puts it:
The crux of the matter really, is that, it is most paramount that the
Global Afrikan Family, as much as possible, be on the same page on issues
to do with the race and on questions of interpreting itself for the benefit
of its own people. (Sibanda p 237)
Tony Martin in Race-First had this to say in this regard:
Garvey saw Africa essentially as the only place where black people could launch a successful bid for equality with other races and nations. Africa was the black man’s ancestral home, he was still in a majority there, the continent was rich in natural resources, and with some technical help from black people in other areas a determined drive for equality would have the best chances of success there. And if the black man became powerful in Africa this would necessarily raise his status all over the world. (Martin p 133)
We will be crude in our idealism and utopianism if we think that by simply destroying white supremacy at the institutional level that we will automatically eliminate it at the unconscious level. Whites will not automatically stop to regard us as not human. My point is that, psychoanalytically speaking, even if whites were to embrace African culture and accept African majority rule there will still be the “white psychological remainder” which will be the basis of their “unconscious or latent racism”. In other words, whites are “irredeemable”. This is what one of these whites in Paradoxes of The Other (Post) Colonial Racism, Racial Difference, and Stereotype-as-Fetish had to say in this regard:
One of the challenges in understanding racism is exactly the question of how racist attitudes and beliefs seem quite able to function at the level of co-existing irreconcilable ideas. How is it, to give a concrete example, that the racist subject may be divided, between a (genuinely) professed view of racial tolerance, on the one hand, and undeniably racist behaviour and ideation, on the other, both of which exists on a rational and conscious level of functioning. Importantly, such contradictions may not simply be accounted for in terms of affect versus rational idea. In disavowal we may have attitudes which fit in with current wishes/anxieties, on the one hand, and attitudes which fit in with reality, on the other, existing side by side. If we take seriously the notion of disavowal, such contradictions of ideas may be more than simply a case of disingenuousness, resembling more closely the compromise of a defence……Thinking racism in terms of disavowal brings with it another implication: that racism functioning at this level is very difficult to eradicate. Why so? Well, because the racist has more often than not already assimilated the lesson of anti-racism. Disavowal works, as suggested above, by being a less than fully adaptive attempt at adapting to a threatening state of affairs, by saying, as Slavoj Žižek (1992) often mimes: I believe x, I just choose, every once in a while, to believe not x anyway. Each attempt to transform this racist logic is met with the same re-implication of structure: another acknowledgement of the fact that, oh yes, racial differences, whatever they might mean, don’t matter, of course not, that much is clearly understood, I just chose to act every now and again (nonetheless) as if they do. (Hook p 18, my italics)
The idealism and utopianism of giving whites conditions such as loyalty to Africa and accepting African majority rule, in my opinion, is a dilution of the Garveyite Africa for Africans position and runs the risk of creating a situation where:
One can repeatedly challenge the racist with the proof of racial equality in all the ways that matter, without making the slightest dent on their racist perceptions, because after all, they have already acknowledged that race makes no difference, they just opt to act as if it did, anyway. (Hook p19, my italics)
As More puts it in Universalism and Particularism in South Africa:
To deny that “races” exist, as for example Sobukwe does, offers………only the frail reassurance that there should not be a problem….Yet there is a problem and it cannot be wished away….(More p 42)
Garveyite Pan-Africanism is not some form of “anti-racist racism”, thus even beyond white supremacy the African race will remain and be the only basis of an African Nation which will be open to all Africans in the Diaspora. This will be in line with what the Africans in Haiti did after fighting successfully the forces of white supremacy; they declared a free and independent Haiti a refuge for all the blacks around the world and granted them citizenship. This is what Jacob H Carruthers in Intellectual Warfare states about Dessalines, one of the greatest leaders of the Haitian Revolution:
Dessalines asserted that never again would a European enter Haiti as a proprietor or colonist. He also raised the question: What have we in common with that bloody-minded people? He continued by asserting: Their cruelties compared with our moderation…plainly tell us they are not our brethren, that they will never become such. (Carruthers p 27, my italics)
In the final analysis Garvey advices us that:
We must inspire and promulgate a doctrine of our own without any apologies to the powers that be. The right is ours and God’s. Let contrary sentiment and cross opinions go to the winds. Opposition to race independence is the weapon of the enemy to defeat the hopes of an unfortunate people. We are entitled to our own opinions and not obliged to or bound by the opinions of others. (Garvey p 157)
…..the white man is first a white man under all circumstances, and you can do no less than being first and always a Negro (an African), and then all else will take care of itself. Let none inoculate you with evil doctrines to suit their own conveniences. There is no humanity before that which starts with yourself. Charity begins at home. First to thyself be true and thou canst not then be false to any man. (Garvey p 158, my italics)
By Masilo Lepuru
A people that cannot celebrate themselves and their culture would never believe in themselves and their capabilities. In my previous paper ‘The Relevance of Moogadi in the Modern African Society’, I spoke about the struggles that have engulfed Africa; the struggles that include but not […]
adminA people that cannot celebrate themselves and their culture would never believe in themselves and their capabilities.
In my previous paper ‘The Relevance of Moogadi in the Modern African Society’, I spoke about the struggles that have engulfed Africa; the struggles that include but not limitedto, to detangle itself from that which is foreign and is a thread to the thriving of the African people; as well as the struggle to reclaim our identity as a people. But it has become clear that no reclaiming can be done if one does not know what to reclaim.
One of the issues the modern African society struggles with understanding let alone accepting is African traditional ceremonies in their vastness. Before we delve further into discussing what these struggles are and the different traditional ceremonies, it is crucial to define what a ceremony is.
A ceremony can be defined as a public or religious occasion that includes a series of formal or traditional actions; or the ritual observance, traditional actions and words used on particular formal occasions. The one word that stands out from this definition is ‘traditional’. Traditional as defined by the Oxford Advanced Learner’s dictionary, as being part of the beliefs, customs or way of life of a particular group of people that have not changed for a long time. Be it traditional dress, food or norms and values.
Therefore it is clear that ceremony and tradition goes hand in hand. For the purposes of this discussion, we will look at tradition and culture, in the African context, as inseparable. Culture can be defined as the customs and beliefs, ways of life and social organization of a particular group of people.
All of these definitions have one thing in common; a way of life of a particular group of people. This is where in the modern African society there is an issue. As already stated, if you take away from a people their ways of life, you have taken from them their identity. And if you take away their identity, you control them forever.
Let us restrict the context of this discuss to that of South Africa. Today we have many ceremonies that we celebrate. Some of which many would give their lives to protect. Almost all of these ceremonies are religious in nature. This brings us to the question of how and why African traditional ceremonies where demonized. If I want you to wholeheartedly believe I am better than you, I know better and therefore I can get you to a much better place than where you are now, I introduce to you a believe system that portrays me and my kind as superior, and chosen for this task. Often times the introduced, and in most cases forced on people, believe systems conflicts with that of those who are being introduced to this system. One major instrument that ensures the believe system is entrenched in the people is by ensuring that all that is unsatisfactory about their indigenous believe systems is constantly thrust at them. Another instrument is fear. When you fear something you therefore cannot question it for fear of punishment. The introduced believe system will be portrayed in such light that the people would fear eternal condemnation and neglect to see any unsatisfactory aspects of this new believe system.
This was the start of the demonizing of African traditional ceremonies. From marriage ceremonies to birth and naming ceremonies, religion and many social organizations and movements that are not African in nature sought to point out the demonic nature of all these practices. Traditional African ceremonies such as the process of Magadi were reduced to a lowly bartering and haggling as that of consumers and sellers at the market place, to paraphrase Chinua Achebe’s words in ‘Things Fall Apart’. The naming ceremony and the ceremony that the Bapedi refers to as “go ntšha ngwana ka ngwakong”, became a baptism or dedication that had to be done by the priest and in the church. Go ntjha ngwana ka ngwakong, which literally means to take the child out of the house, by taking the child ‘ka ma fure’ or behind the house or even at the gate very early in the morning at sunrise and raise the child up to face the rising sun. This was the child’s first encounter with the sun and at sunrise the sun is at its gentlest ad therefore cannot be harmful to the newborn. The child is introduced to how the outside world is having only lived in a rather dark place since conception. The ancestors are then told officially of the new member of the family. To try and discuss the significance of this ceremony and its bearing on the child’s life will prompt a rather long discuss about god as seen by the Christian religion, and the African concept of god being manifest in all his creations which prompted the high respect of all that is nature by Africans.
This and many others became demonic practices that many feared to practice because the Christian religion described them as dedicating the child to the sun, and as offending to the Christian god. What we fail to recognize is by merely accepting that our traditional ceremonies are demonic, we have accepted our inferiority because we acknowledge being a people steeped in sin, and being detestable to god. We therefore waited for mainly the white man to come and save us.
Other ceremonies such as the initiation of the young into adulthood met with the same amountof resistance and many today believe such traditional ceremonies involve demonic practices. You ask what demonic practices mean, and the answer is always the same, using muti or dihlare. Dihlare or muti literally means medicine, but as long as it comes from nature and is not manufactured in a laboratory, it is demonic. This also calls for a full discussion of its own. By this the African acknowledges that even his language is sinful in itself. He’d rather say medicine. It sounds more civilized. I reiterate; you cannot reclaim what it means to be an Africa if you choose to reclaim certain aspects of your identity that does not conflict with your adopted identity that you are reluctant to relinquish.
Another reason that is raised for the demonizing of African traditional ceremonies is the slaughtering of animals. Slaughtering of an animal for any ceremony has always been done in the most humane way possible until guns where used; and until there was a slaughterhouse where thousands of animals are killed unceremoniously. Let’s not forget that a ceremony is a ritualistic practice, or a practice that has been done continuously in a similar manner for a long time, which means the slaughter of animals was done by Africans in a similar manner for eons and because the African believe system values and resects all that is nature, the animal was accorded the amount of respect it deserved for being one of the manifest of that which is god and for the purpose it’s body will serve for the ceremony. The slaughtering of an animal involved many processes that were of importance in the believe system of the African, and believe systems are crucial to the identity and survival of a people.
One crucial thing to note from this is, ‘if everything you do is considered demonic, all that you are must therefore be demonic’. By letting go of your own traditions and adopting those that are foreign to you, you acknowledge your inferiority and therefore agree that your own way of life must indeed be wrong. You therefore spend your entire life trying to scrub off from yourself all that makes you, you, in order to be acceptable to he who sees you as unclean and unacceptable.
Another African ceremony that has become controversial, as if one’s culture can be seen as controversial, is the veneration of ancestors in many African cultures.This ceremony is essentially the celebration of heroes and heroines that have departed, acknowledging that those who have departed have become spirits and are still part of us. This has been mistaken as the worship of ancestors. The god concept in the African sense did not have any human characters, and therefore anyone who departed became part of that whole spiritual concept that is god. Many religions across the globe venerate their departed, from Jesus in Christianity to Muhammed in Islam. Yet the African fears being unclean by venerating his departed relatives.
Today we celebrate Christmas, Easter and many such ceremonies. We hold white weddings and christenings. All of these are foreign ceremonies. All of these are traditional ceremonies of a certain group of people. Let us remember that traditions are ways of life that have been done in that way for a very long time. This therefore means the Africa has let go of his traditions and adopted those of others. In essence we are merely escorting others on this earth that are living who they are entirely while we try and fit in with what everyone else is but not who we are.
In addition to the spiritual onslaught that this has had on the African, the economical onslaught is incredible. We are accused, maybe justly, for being the biggest consumers of others productivity, now coupled with the amounts of money spent on each of these foreign ceremonies, the African is left at the beginning of the year and after each holiday with nothing but debt. To make things even more confusing many do not even know why they celebrate such holidays. Most have lost their religious importance yet many still observe them religiously without knowing why. This can be linked to one of the instruments used to entrench foreign ideologies and believe systems in a people: fear.
Our traditional ceremonies have been observed for generations innumerable, and the introduction of newly formed systems has all but eroded them. Does this mean our people have been lost since the beginning of time? That we have been a dark nation waiting to be saved? Isn’t this in itself an acknowledgement of inferiority?
Until the colonized relinquish the parts of the identity they have acquired through colonialism, they remain colonized regardless of political situations. In the past ignorance and lack of information can be blamed for all that has happened to the African. On what then do we put the blame today?
By Nancy Monnya
We have watched Marvel’s recent ground breaking movie, Black Panther directed by Ryan Coogler, and we have all come up with interpretations of the movie; from the representation of Killmonger, to the role Africa has played by neglecting to open channels that would have allowed […]
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Noticeably the dissecting of this movie always leaves one of the most crucial parts, in my opinion, the most important of all the depictions in the movie – African spirituality. This is a topic that most people, sadly Africans too, avoid in any situation, and the same is happening with the discourses around this movie.
“Camagu!” This is a phrase in the Xhosa language of Southern Africa, which literally means ‘greetings’. But Camagu cannot be likened to phrases such as hello, or hi which are also greetings in the English language. Ba kwa Ntu, who are known as Bantu, are a people whose spirituality was and still is not reserved for special days, or events and venues as observed in many religious practices. umuNtu is regarded as the physical form in which the spiritual form, the essence of Ntu, resides. This is not to say the human form carries all the supreme energy that is Ntu, but rather it carries part of it; as the human form is part of that which is creation and creation carries the essence of life.
Ba kwa Ntu spans the length and breadth of Africa, from the Ngunis in the south to the Igbos in the west, Luba, Sukuma, Kikuyu of central parts of Africa and many others; some of which Western demarcation of Africa’s people and their languages has left out. Just as the Xhosa’s say Camagu! All the other tribes have their own sayings reserved for greeting and acknowledging the ancestors.
One of the most important ceremonies in the movie’s mythical country Wakanda, is the coronation of the King. This involves a journey to the ancestral land where the new King T’Chala meets his ancestors who were also Kings before him. This journey begins with the new King drinking the mythical herb as Zuri the diviner makes incantations for him to be transported to the land of his elders. These incantations are preceded and followed by ‘Camagu!’ a greeting and acknowledgement of the ancestors as well as an agreement to the incantations. It is common practice for those who go to seek the assistance of an inyanga, a diviner or healer, to say ‘makhosi! or camagu!’ at the beginning of the consultation as a greeting, during the consultation as acknowledgement and agreement, as well as at the end of the consultation to symbolize acceptance of the messages from the ancestors as well as a form of farewell.
The new King is then buried, while still alive to symbolize his transcending the world of the living. Not only does this highlight one of the most important practices in African spirituality, which is the veneration of ancestors, it also shows the process of the rising of the departed in the ancestral plane. Having been buried and risen in the land of his ancestors, the new King T’Chala becomes a revealing signifier of the process of life and death in African spirituality; that life does not begin and end but rather it transcends to another plane of existence.
We see the old King T’Chaka and those who preceded him on the tree. They remain in their spirit form, the panther; while the old King goes down to meet his son. This is symbolic of another aspect of African spirituality, be that it has a name such as Ifa, Voudoun, or as widely recognised – African spiritual belief systems. The veneration of ancestors involves having one or two of your departed loved ones being the ones used to deliver messages to you. These are people who you know and can relate to, people you would trust. It is the same with young King T’Chala and the old King T’Chaka. His messages could have been delivered by any of his ancestors but it has to be his father, whom he knows and can easily relate to. What transpires on the ancestral plane includes the young King being told to ‘stand up now that he is a King’, and an opportunity for him to have closure. These highlighted some of the important reasons for the veneration and acknowledgement of one’s ancestors.
Eril Killmonger’s journey to the ancestral plane is different, yet still symbolic. His journey takes him instead to his departed father’s apartment. This is important for these reasons: Erik’s father was not buried at home, and therefore did not join his ancestors. As Africans we refer to a person’s passing as ‘joining their ancestors.’ Erik’s father did not get that chance because his brother did not afford him the honor. This in turn denies Erik the honor of meeting his ancestors, and not just his father. He is therefore left with only one spirit to guide him, a lost spirit, as his father pointed out. This seemingly insignificant part of the movie highlights the importance of proper burial that African spirituality does not take for granted.
Another proud display of African spirituality is seen during the King’s coronation, when he is stripped off the Black Panther’s superpower. The same happens when he is about to go through ritual combat with Erik. As the power of the mythical herb removes the superpower from him, the entire gathering starts rocking in unison. Not only is this a signifier of the importance of working in unison spiritually, it also mimics some of the people of the Dogon’s mask dances, and most noticeably the Sangoma dances of Southern Africa. The Basotho of Lesotho also have similar shoulder rocking dances during Lebollo ceremonies, when the young initiates return home covered in their traditional blankets. The Sangoma shoulder rocking is normally done while kneeing, either at the entrance of the yard before they (the sangoma initiates) enter the yard; as well as during a consultation and when amaThongo (ancestors) are manifesting. When amaDlozi, which are spirits that possess a person to become a healer, which are different from amaThongo, are at work, the rocking can also be noticed, and it is often involuntary. The same shoulder rocking can be observed with spiritual consultations with a Voudoun priest or priestess.
Spirituality in the movie appears to be linked with everything, including the technology around them. Whether deliberate or not, this points to the ancient Kemetic knowledge of spirituality and science. In ancient Egypt, spirituality and science were inseparable, and this appears to be the same in Wakanda. The same herb they use during their spiritual rituals is used to power their technology. It is sown into their clothes and appears to be in everything around them. Vibranium is the energy that holds Wakanda together.
This is the revelation of how science stems from that ancient knowledge, the knowledge that things such as the magnetic field are not the discovery of some clever intellectual, but rather a result of the movement and relationship of what is called energies. They understood these energies to essentially be spiritual manifestation of elements such as metals and other natural objects when aligned in the correct order. The human body is made up of the same elements that are found in nature and there appears to be a link, a need of one by the other. Wankanda is a reminder of that interdependency that humans have with nature. This is the essence of African spirituality; that the essence of life and supreme energy that led to the creation of the universe, runs through us as well as through everything that lives, from animals, to rocks to tree. The powerful little herb can be likened to the plant medicine and herbs that are used in African belief systems, and their potency; muti, mere, ogwu and so forth as known in our native tongues.
N’Jobu, Erik Killmonger’s father responds to King T’Chaka’s greeting by saying, “We thank Bast”. Bast or Bastet is the ancient Kemetic goddess who is often depicted as a cat, and is known as the protector of the royal house. The acknowledgement of this goddess bridges the gap that seems to keep the ancient Kemetic beliefs systems distance from the rest of Africa’s spiritual systems. Depicting Wakanda as venerating amaThongo as well as acknowledging the goddess Bast seamlessly bridges that gap. Another link to ancient Egypt is the crossing of arms that is done by general Okoye, and the Dora Milage, by Shuri and her brother King T’Chala when they greet each other, and pretty much by everyone in the movie. It is commonly known as the Osiris cross and seen as a representation of life
The depiction of spirituality in the movie may appear subtle, but they cannot be missed by those who have come to understand African spirituality. And as we are all aware, the power of motion pictures lies in our ability to retain visual information and be influenced, knowing and unknowing, by it. By the depictions in the movie, not only did the director Ryan Coogler manage to bring to life the aspirations of Africans across the world, to see an Africa that is self sufficient, an Africa that knows her riches and strives to connect all its people across the world, he has also managed to inspire young people and show that just like Wakanda, Africa can use it’s richness in minerals to technologically develop itself. Lastly, Coogler and the cast managed to bring to the screens a positive and un-watered down African spirituality; one that is neither demonized nor feared. It is in fact a normal way of the Wakandans and the foundation of their success! The Wakandans know their gods and the importance of amaThongo.
The South African Ghetto The place with such potential only those without can see it, for to be within is to strive to even catch a breath! Ghetto or squatter-camp, as we have come to know the crowded, dirty and undeveloped areas most of our […]
introspection relationships wellnessThe South African Ghetto
The place with such potential only those without can see it, for to be within is to strive to even catch a breath!
Ghetto or squatter-camp, as we have come to know the crowded, dirty and undeveloped areas most of our people live in in South Africa, is as despicable a name as the place itself. It is a place known for crime; drug peddling, guns and a life of dog eat dog. Those within know these ghettoes; they see them differently to those from without who look at them with loathing and fear. Yet, just as Black Americans have done with many despicable names and things that have been done and given to them since the days of slavery, they have come to own the ghetto. They have come to find pride in this ghetto. It is a home. The only home they know. Just as they have done with the word ‘nigger’, they have normalized ghetto. Ghetto is a word that not only describes an area, but rather it now seems to describe a way of life. In essence, the connotations attached to a ghetto have somehow either shifted, or have been buried in favor of ‘living on’, and refusing to be defined by, situations your people had no control over in the past.
Now the South African ghetto is a little different. Although it too is an area riddled with crime, filth and definitely not suitable for human habitation; squatter-camps, particularly, cannot be spoken of with pride (even in pretence or ignorance as is the case with the celebration of other types, or forms, of ghettoes). When one talks of the ghetto, one thinks of the resilience of a people who survived and still do against all odds. Thinking of squatter-camps brings different feelings as compared to when one hears of the ghetto (even though they differ by slight degrees). Maybe because squatter-camps are a little too close? Maybe because, unlike the ghetto we see on TV and hear stories of from our American friends and elsewhere, we live in the squatter-camps. We experience the raw, gut-wrenching, head-splitting fermenting phenomenon called squatter-camp. Just like with ghettos everywhere, squatter-camps are not just areas of habitation, but rather a way of life, and the ghetto that I know, is definitely not a way of life I wish for anyone.
Without delving into history, let us remember what squatter-camps were and still are. Dumping sites! These areas were used as dumping sites by the more affluent white areas and right next to these dumping sites were the infamous match-box houses. You look at areas such as Mamelodi, Soshanguve and Diepsloot (deep ditch). The developed parts of these and many other areas came to be known as townships. We still retain these ‘townships’ with pride; areas that were allocated to black people by the apartheid regime. This is the first disease of squatter-camps. The fact that people still live in these despicable areas today, and not only that but have come to call these ‘squatting’ places home. A home is a place of comfort, a place of peace, clean and with necessary amenities. Squatter-camps do not have any of these. I ‘lived’ and ‘experienced’ them and they cannot be regarded to as homes. These areas lack space. They lack proper sanitation. They lack decent housing! In fact they are not even habitable lands! When you dig a hole in these areas you come up with dirt, broken bottles and stacks of plastics. Digging a hole exposes the rot underneath that is the olden dumping sites. These very dumping sites are where some black people used to come and dig for food during the inhumane times of apartheid. Today they are considered homes for the very same black people. Only unwanted things are thrown into dumping sites, and today the dumping sites are still ‘homes’ to black people.
The second and more deadly disease of squatter-camps is the lack of life within these squatter-camps. Yes people are breathing, children are going to school, and fathers carry plastics with lunch boxes of pap and maotwana (chicken feet), women strap their handbags on their shoulders clutching them tightly in the dark hours of the morning. Stop and ask all of them where they are going – ‘makgoweng’ (at the white people’s area). This is still being said today! Those who don’t say this say they are going to work; to work in malls and shopping centers in predominantly white areas. At the end of the month everyone gets paid, and off they go to these same areas to spend their meager salaries. All of this movement, going in and out of the squatter-camps, can be mistaken for life, but it isn’t. It is mere reflex. It is tedious and habitual. Those who find themselves alive in this milieu quickly come to the realization that their thriving relies on them getting out. A home nurtures you and gives you space to thrive and be all you can, not propels you out for being different.
This disease is deadly because it is gradually killing the squatters. It is gradually turning the people into non-living matter. When you first get into the squatter-camps there is such a hype you quickly assume the place is abuzz with life. Spend some more time in there and you quickly realize that the buzz is constant, the hype is immobile! Day in day out the buzz starts off at a high pitch as many get ready ‘go ya makgoweng’ (to go to work) and the kids drag themselves to school and get a little respite from the shacks the families squat in. As you remain listening, you notice the buzz coming to a lull for a moment and then everyone else is up and you are shocked to see more faces and bodies coming out of the same one roomed shack you saw three other people leave for work and school earlier. The heat of the corrugated iron sheets is driving them out to the unsteady little trees offering shade right at the corner of the shack and a stone throw away from the neighbors shack and the little street with mucky waters that runs along non-stop. Now this is the contagious virus of the squatter-camps!
It is a known fact that Africa has the highest youth population, and when you are in the ghetto and the townships, or kasi, this fact hits you in the face. The young people pile out of these shacks and move about. Of these, perhaps ten percent are in a hustling mode, ‘pushing’ one money making scheme or another. A very small percentage of them run businesses with the potential to grow. Here is what is contagious: everyone wants to look busy, to be seen by peers as doing something while in fact nothing gets done. Young men spend hours sitting outside spaza-shops and at corners on top of beer crates discussing major moves that none of them make. Young women drag dirty toddlers down the streets in search of the next ‘skoti sa dikarata’ (card playing area). They sit around and count how much child grant money they are still left with for their card games. One gives this illness of idling around to a friend, who quickly passes it on to another.
By midday, a lull creeps in and the only sign of life is the drug addicts of the area referred to as ‘nyaope boys’ going about selling broken pencils and two left shoes. You hear them say ‘mamazala today I brought something special’, and the mother of the household who does not go to makgoweng asks to see the special thing. They don’t care where it comes from or how he managed to get it. They barter with him and give him two rands for a fix. The next nyaope boy comes along with nothing to sell having failed to snatch something from someone’s yard. This one will say, ‘sister, can I have two rands?’ bending his knees and leaving you wondering where is the ghetto heading to. What is kasi turning into? Is it even turning into anything or just quietly laying its head for a long nap?
When the rest of the inhabitants of this slowly dying place return; kids have been crying for hours because of hunger, and the rats are quietly standing by with their little ones and grey- backs that cannot even shuffle about, waiting for scraps from what the mother of the house brought home to cook.
This is the gut-wrenching, heart ripping hour of squatter-camps. At this hour the most broken people return from the fields. People who carry their shoulders straight but are so hunched up inside their hearts have no room to spread and show a tiny ray of love. This isn’t part of the illness of the ghetto; this is a persistent symptom of the death that is now consuming the ghetto. These are people who lived the first experience of being put into the townships; the first group of people to be squashed into squatter-camps. They were alive and young then and they felt the full brunt of it all. Then, they were still capable of seeing these areas as places for ‘squatting’ and not as homes. But maybe, just maybe, had they known that these would be their homes, they would have grown up to build proper structures to house their families. Maybe they would have become close knit and turned these dumping sites into habitable places, with booming beneficial businesses and fewer taverns. Maybe you wouldn’t have to skip over puddles of dirty bath water running down the streets; you wouldn’t lament at all the taps dripping water at all hours of the day or screw your face up at sight of the rats inhabiting the pit toilets as they scurry down the pit leaving you unsure of whether you are safe sitting on the newspaper covered seat with them down there.
Maybe if these broken souls had known that this would be their home, during and after apartheid, if they had known that politics are never for the people but for the participants, one wouldn’t have to listen to the neighbor’s loud music and favorite radio station at odd hours of the night when all one wants is silence. Maybe if the first inhabitants of these dumping sites had foresight, this wouldn’t be a squatter-camp, and maybe all these breathing non-living matter would be alive; and maybe the place would not be laying itself down preparing to go to sleep, and the nyaope boy you went to school with wouldn’t smile at your sight saying ‘ka bona wena ka bona two ranta bra yami’. (I saw you and immediately saw two rands my brother)
By Nancy Monnya
“In our land the law of the nation reigns supreme.” (Mazisi Kunene) Francis Cress Welsing argues that “if you don’t understand white supremacy, everything else that you think you know, will only confuse you”. In implicit agreement with this fundamental argument, Wade Nobles further […]
admin“In our land the law of the nation reigns supreme.” (Mazisi Kunene)
Francis Cress Welsing argues that “if you don’t understand white supremacy, everything else that you think you know, will only confuse you”. In implicit agreement with this fundamental argument, Wade Nobles further argues that power “is the ability to define reality and to impose it on other people as if it were their own definition”. Thus, in this context, white supremacy and white power are the fundamental points of departure. The Settler-colonial emergence of “customary law” will be explored within this context. It is important at this early stage of this critical exploration to understand the significance of the historicization of creation of categories. The category “customary law” only emerges with the advent of Settler-colonialism. Thus, “customary law” is not a natural phenomenon but a historical creation. As a historical creation it evolves out of Settler-colonial Social Imaginary (a racist one at that due to the culture of the white settlers). In other words, “customary law”, as we know it, is not a historical creation emanating from the African Social Imaginary.
When one critically explores the issue of “customary law”, the fundamental question to pose is: what is the condition of possibility for its existence? In our context, the unjust Conquest of the indigenous people is the condition of possibility for its existence. White supremacy is a global system of white domination and in “South Africa” it takes the form of Settler-Colonialism which began in 1652. “Customary Law” and “South Africa” are racist products of white power to define. Conquest manifested itself in two forms, namely, epistemicide and land dispossession. Epistemicide simply defined is the violent attempt by the settlers to distort and obliterate the culture, values, law and knowledge of the indigenous people conquered in unjust wars of colonization, and the attendant imposition of reality as defined by the settlers. This is a reality created by the racist “Social Imaginary” of the white conquerors.
“Customary Law” came into existence as a result of this process of epistemicide. At its very core, the issue of “customary law” is intimately intertwined with the question of “Izwe Lethu”. This is because Conquest and Settler-colonialism create a structural relation (a relation of unequal power) between the white conquerors and the indigenous conquered people. The fundamental antagonism of Conquest operates at two levels, namely, the material level, whites settling on the land of the indigenous people as well as at the epistemic level, settlers imposing their law(s) through a violent process of settlement.
It is important to understand that “Izwe Lethu” and “the land is ours” are not necessarily ideologically equivalent. “Izwe Lethu” is embedded in the Africanist tradition which regards the land as belonging solely to the indigenous people conquered in unjust wars of colonialism by white conquerors (an irrefutable historical fact). “The land is ours” while seeming like an “English translation” of “Izwe Lethu” can, in a subtle way, promote the Charterist tradition, which in terms of the Freedom Charter (a product of white power to define, as it was not drafted by the indigenous people but by self-appointed white trustees) regards the land as belonging to those who live in it; both the white conquerors and the indigenous conquered people (an obvious historical absurdity).
It is through Conquest at the epistemic level that the white conquerors impose European “customary law” (this is a critical reversion of a racist white projection, returning the projection to its source) on the indigenous people. By European “customary law”, I mean both the so-called common law and Roman-Dutch law which were imposed since 1652. Both these forms of European “customary law” developed in terms of the “customs” (by “customs”, which embed “customary law”, the Europeans, originally white missionaries and later anthropologists, meant backward and not yet scientific practices of the indigenous people after dismissing Africans as non-rational animals) of the European conquerors. Perhaps one of the lethal “customs” of these European conquerors is to define their law(s) as universal thus superior and the law of the indigenous people as particular thus inferior.
Theirs is (English) common law and that of the indigenous people is preceded by the adjective “customary” (African Law is not embedded in “customs” as understood by white racists but is grounded in Isintu or Setso as indigenous products of African Social Imaginary which are totally foreign to racist settlers). This is a subtle way of relegating African Law to a backward status of immaturity. As far as the Indigenous people are concerned there is nothing inferior and backward about Molao or Umthetho (of course Africans acknowledge that their Law is not perfect but insist on improving it on their terms as per their understanding of self-determination). The antagonism between the universal and the particular is important to comprehend as premised on the fallacious claim to Progress by the Europeans. In “South Africa”, for instance, African students (whites excluded as I believe there is no such thing as a white African but only whites in Africa; a point which raises the logical question, why are whites in Africa?) study “Law” at European colonial universities like Wits, which happen to be on the African continent (due, of course, to white supremacy). They are never told that by “Law” it is meant European “customary law” (these African students are studying the “Law” of the “civilized” whites, and this is the origin of cultural alienation and self-hatred among these students.). This is a “Law” which conceives of itself as law as such; a model to be emulated by the “inferior” and “immature” indigenous people. This is how the racist settlers arrogate to themselves the exercise of reason and classification to the exclusion of the indigenous people who are regarded as animals without reason and still immersed in nature. The great warrior-ancestor John Henrik Clarke once correctly posited that the first step towards a revolution is the rejection (on the part of the oppressed) of the classification by the oppressors.
European “customary law” was imposed since 1652 in the name of white “civilization” (“civilization” of course meaning white life and its customs). It is through this process of white “civilization” (which disrupted the autonomous evolution of indigenous civilization which preceded it by thousands of years as the great Cheik Anta Diop has firmly demonstrated) that the so-called white “civilizers” invented “customary law” of the indigenous conquered people. The white “civilizers” who regard themselves as racially superior (the human as such) fabricated “the white man’s burden” to rationalize their trusteeship of the so-called “uncivilized” indigenous people. This is because, in terms of the European doctrine of Great Chain of Being, the white “civilizers” regard themselves as both human and superior and dismiss the indigenous people as not human and inferior. This racist categorization of the indigenous people as not human and inferior is fundamental to the European self-conception. The Europeans derive “psychic benefit” from defining themselves in self-aggrandizing terms and derogating the indigenous people in negative racist terms (this is the cultural and psychological aspect of white supremacy which Marxists don’t comprehend by reducing racism to an epiphenomenon of class struggle).
Concomitant with the above-mentioned doctrine is the idea of Evolutionism. It is in terms of this idea that the white “civilizers” regard themselves and their law(s) as highly advanced and that of the indigenous people as backward. This racist illusion is predicated on the white “civilizers” linear notion of time. The racist illusions of white “civilization” and trusteeship originate from the doctrine of Discovery. This doctrine evolved out of papal bulls (issued by European popes and providing divine sanction to the so-called journeys of discovery around the 1400s) which authorized “European nations” to conquer and “civilize” the so-called “non-European savages, infidels and barbarians” (who were dismissed as the enemies of Christ and “lesser breeds without law and self-governance”; of course as understood by these very arrogant Europeans). This doctrine is grounded in “international law” (to be precise, the law of the colonizing nations). At the core of this doctrine is racial hubris. The white “civilizers”, in order to rationalize their campaign of white cultural warfare and genocide, could not and still cannot (without contradicting themselves) put themselves and the indigenous people at the same level of being and intellectual capacity. The hierarchy of being and reason is necessary if white supremacy is to make sense and sustain itself.
“Customary Law” is a racist colonial invention. The racist invention of the “cultural Other” and “customary law” are complementary. Colonial Indirect Rule and “customary law” go hand in hand. The Conquest of African Kings and Kingdoms (as originally based and sustained by African Law which was evolving on own its terms) as symbols and memory of Black Power and the invention of chiefs as agents of Indirect Rule explain the origin of “customary law”. The Repugnancy principle and case law legal requirements which regard “customary law” as valid to an extent that it is in accordance with the white “civilizers” notion of law, justice and morality are a reflection of the racist logic of white trusteeship. African Law, as a Law created by the Africans in terms of Isintu or Setso (Ubuntu or Botho) to solve their problems and meet their needs, was on an autonomous evolutionary path until it was violently disrupted by Settler-Conquest. And reduced to the unenviable racist status of the backward law of the “immature” and “uncivilized”.
The restoration of “Izwe Lethu” (African sovereign title to territory and self-determination) is the condition of possibility for the concomitant restoration of the supremacy of African Law. Thus, revolution is a historical necessity to restore both sovereign title to territory and the disrupted autonomous evolution of African Law and its supremacy. Until then, it is “not yet Uhuru” as Settler-colonial sovereignty persists and “customary law” is “subject” to European constitutional supremacy and its racist logic of white trusteeship as reflected in the current constitution. The current constitution is embedded in European notions of law, politics, culture, philosophy. The fact that some “blacks” were involved in its drafting only attests to the absurd degree of cultural alienation and contempt of these “blacks” (what Biko called non-whites). These “blacks” succumbed to white epistemology of domination to the extent of “witnessing” the absence of Ubuntu or Botho in this colonial racist document. Africans, as a proud and self-respecting race, have to reject this white master’s tool with the same vehemence that our living-dead, like Sobukwe, rejected the so-called Freedom Charter whose spirit this tool reflects. I want to conclude these combative hermeneutics by re-membering (relying on the wisdom of the living-dead in terms of African spirituality) Muziwakhe Lembede who provides a prescient critique of Liberalism which this white settler-colonial document embodies. This is Lembede in his own words:
To mislead the world and make it believe that the Whiteman in South
Africa is helping the African on the road to civilized life, the
Whiteman has arrogated to himself the title and role of Trustee of the
African people. The effects of Trusteeship alone have made the
African realize that Trusteeship has meant, as it still means, the
consolidation by the Whiteman of his position at the expense of the
African people, so that by the time national awakening opens the eyes
of the African people to the bluff they live under, White domination
should be secure and unassailable.
Works Used.
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Nobles W, What makes us human in the context of Education (video lecture)2007 https://eu0.proxysite.com/process.php?d=AyaXz0mnIEmjzWzQCIxc3lAhKBj5OxH8UDLTKtuoUMvoionsxbwE&b=1
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By Masilo Lepuru