Blacker than thou

Déjà vu — again. And of a particularly nasty variety too. After refusing to apologise for inciting violence by saying he’d “kill” for ANC president Jacob Zuma, ANCYL president Julius Malema promised not to use the word “kill” in public again. So, now he’s gone and used the word “eliminate”.

The last time we were arguing as South Africans over murder and its euphemisms, was when the likes of the former ministers of law and order and of foreign affairs Adriaan Vlok and Pik Botha were trying to explain decisions of the apartheid killing machine. That was at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in the late 1990s when Malema was in his teens.

One would not want to patronise Malema by suggesting that he could be unaware of what has gone before. As a black person he is still living the effects of apartheid. He was a prepubescent when apartheid killing was at its peak (between 1990 and 1994), so I’m sure nobody has to teach him about the destructiveness of violence.

But exactly that is the scary bit. Dr Mamphela Ramphele suggests Malema is “wounded”. Clearly he is more dangerously wounded than one could have imagined. And COSATU head Zwelinzima Vavi, who’s been saying similarly inciting things? Is he also wounded?

Maybe it is true that all of us are wounded, albeit in different ways, but still. It all depends, seemingly, on whether you choose to wield your wound as a weapon or not.

Malema and Vavi’s injunctions to force have been accompanied by what has been reported as “ANC-on-ANC violence”. ANC members have landed in hospital in Mpumalanga with knife and gun wounds. Northwest has seen violent skirmishes. In Limpopo one of many incidents included an axe attack. Even before Malema’s call, Mcebisi Skwatsha of the Western Cape ANC was stabbed in the neck.

But Malema’s latest call for “elimination” was aimed at the Democratic Alliance, long a favourite bugbear of intolerant ANC leaders. While the DA’s crass race politics of the 1999 election (the “Fight Back” campaign) was offensive in its stale repetition of white presumptuousness, it does not mean that the party should not exist. Indeed, a measure of our democracy is whether we can tolerate parties as odious as the DA has been at times.

Like it or not, the DA is a party that South Africans vote for. But, seemingly because its support has remained limited to racial minorities, it has been acceptable for the dominant party to display a level of intolerance towards the DA which goes beyond the usual power politics.

Let’s look at this against the backdrop of the “Chinese aren’t black” argument punted by the National African Federated Chamber of Commerce and Industry (NAFCOC).

Here the déjà vu kicks in again: race as hierarchical construction to be used for exclusion of racially defined others from material resources was pivotal to colonialism and apartheid. To argue that Chinese people should not be eligible for reparation in spite of their apartheid classification as “coloured” is to buy into the apartheid racial hierarchy.

This is the opposite of what the Employment Equity Act (1998) was about. This law collapsed the apartheid hierarchy in favour of the term “black people” who were all eligible for corrective steps in terms of the act.

The “blacker than thou” discourse has been running thick since President Thabo Mbeki came under pressure. A narrow nativist nationalism has since stuck out its neck in the ANC, defining “true blackness” and “true indigenousness” (being native) as unquestioning adherence to a certain ideological line.

It prepared the ground for the race-based outcry over the South African Chinese people’s claims. And for the recent “xenophobic” attacks. If Robert McBride’s report on the violence in Gauteng is to be believed, one-third of the victims of the so-called xenophobic attacks were in fact South Africans. This corroborates reports that Shangaan, Venda and Pedi people were also targeted.

An instructive analysis in this regard is that of Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani. In his book When Victims Become Killers, Mamdani explains how colonialism polarised political identity as settler/native, or non-indigenous/indigenous.

Non-indigenous meant being positioned as racial other, while indigenous meant being positioned as ethnic other. Colonial indirect rule, which Mamdani sees grand apartheid as an example of, necessitated the ethnicisation of the identity of “native”. Natives were ruled by native authorities while races were ruled by civic authorities.

There was a middle ground occupied by “subject races”, explains Mamdani. In South Africa, these were the racialised others called coloureds and Indians. While members of the “master race” enjoyed full citizenship, the subject races were also deprived of citizenship rights.

In some African colonies, subject races played the role of agents of the colonial state. An example is Rwanda’s Tsutsis, constructed as racial others during the colonial period.

In postcolonial Rwanda, up to a million Tsutsis were slaughtered round about the time we had our first democratic election. Political violence in the postcolonial state follows the settler/native line set during the colonial era, according to Mamdani.

During colonialism, settler violence was the starting point, sparking violent native resistance. In postcolonial states, writes Mamdani, “the more the native/settler dynamic proliferated, the more groups of settlers are created: first the master race, then the subject races — both racial strangers — and finally ethnic strangers from the erstwhile ethnic populations”.

In postcolonial political violence, these all become targeted as “settlers”. Which is what led to the genocide of the racially othered Tsutsis.

Ramphele identified this postcolonial dynamic of political violence in Zimbabwe during her recent address at the Economic Justice Initiative’s “Difficult Dialogues” series in Cape Town. It is a case of “for whom the bell tolls”, she said. First it was the 20 000 people killed after being identified with the Ndebele-dominated ZAPU in Matebeleland in 1985; then it was the white farmers from 2000 onwards; and now it is “each and every Zimbabwean”.

Mamdani regards conservative nationalism as the driving force in this dynamic. The reason is conservative nationalism’s “nativist notions of political identity”, which leads to the branding of every immigrant as a settler.

As South Africans we have to learn from this. The political choice, says Mamdani, is between Nyerere of Tanzania and Kayibanda of Rwanda. Nyerere promoted a single, unified citizenship — de-ethnicised and de-racialised. Tanzania has been “a paragon of political stability”. Rwanda … well, need we say more?