This Is Africa News

Black Anger Management

By Sandile Memela on February 23, 2016 — When blacks are bitter, angry and feeling revengeful in the name of seeking justice and redress, it is not whites who hurt. Instead, black people are hurting themselves. The victims and prisoners of this desire for justice, whatever that means, are black people.

Many ugly and unfair things were done to blacks under apartheid. The miracle that some people do not believe happened in 1994 is that black people, generally, forgave whites for their sins.

They chose to let bygones be bygones, release the hurt and trust that the gesture would significantly contribute to nation building and reconciliation. The alternative would have been to cling to the hurt and humiliation and become vengeful beasts that would have plunged the country into a race war without winners. There are no winners in war.

The apartheid regime waged a relentless war against black people that left thousands dead and countless others with deep scars in their souls. But still the mightiest military state in Africa did not win the war.

Black people who espouse and live out the philosophy of ubuntu – African humaneness – have refused to allow hurt to poison the future that so many died for, including children.

Many people throughout the world found it unthinkable that white people in South Africa could get away with murder, rape and land theft, literally. But through the grace of African people, they did. For those still wondering what the 1994 miracle was, it was the self-effacing forgiving spirit of black people.

In fact, the miracle was not the peaceful election or rise of Nelson Mandela as the first democratically elected leader of a fledgling nation. It was the generosity of black people, in general, to let go of bitterness and anger.

They intuitively knew that if they were to cling to desires of revenge to hurt and humiliate white people, they would be allowing what whites did in the past — to control black behaviour and attitude. White people cannot be hurt by black bitterness and anger. What these negative and useless emotions do is poison black lives.

Anyone who harbours feelings of revenge and anger to hurt others is carrying a heavy burden in their souls.

Unfortunately, there are some black people who are mad and angry at those who inflicted trauma and pain on them. These include men like HF Verwoerd who is dead and gone for over 50 years.

Some black leaders are bitter and angry at this man who is no longer living. Even his apartheid project has collapsed. It is bad enough that Verwoerd designed apartheid that stunted national development and destroyed black lives for 50 years. But Verwoerd is as dead as his apartheid project. They will never return.

Tempting as it is to want to prosecute people like FW de Klerk, Adriaan Vlok and their apparatchiks, black people must not allow themselves to be hurt by staying angry and revengeful.

This would be a serious setback to the journey they’ve made towards self-healing in the last 25 years.

When black people forgave white people, it was not because they were not aware of what happened in the past. It was done for black people themselves. Forgiveness was a gesture of self-healing and taking responsibility for controlling the past.

Those who want to control the future must control the past. They must retain power to define and interpret what happened in the past.

Forgiveness should have released black people from being victims and prisoners of negative emotions. It should have freed blacks from pain and anguish.

When blacks are bitter, angry and feeling revengeful in the name of seeking justice and redress, it is not whites who hurt. Instead, black people are hurting themselves. The victims and prisoners of this desire for justice, whatever that means, are black people.

When whites waged battle against indigenous people to take over the land and control its resources, they thought they would stop black people from self-determination and freedom. They believed black people would never assume leadership to determine the destiny of this country.

But today we know that whites were fooling themselves. Apartheid and white supremacy were failed projects from inception.

Black people, whether they realise it or not, control the destiny of this country. They have the power to decide to drag it back into the past or move it forward.

No one epitomises the spirit of forgiveness better than the late first president Mandela who was imprisoned for almost 30 years. This is one man could have been bitter, angry and full of vengeful thoughts.

But he did not let that injustice steal his destiny. He befriended the lowest white apartheid apparatchiks, learned the oppressor’s language, redefined himself, refocused his vision for nation building to move South Africa forward and thus claim his rewards.

There is no telling where this country would have been if he was bitter, angry and filled with revenge in his heart. There are many others who were not as lucky as Mandela to see freedom. They were brutally murdered. There are others who are buried in unmarked graves and some whose families do not know where they’re buried.

But black people cannot allow this brutality to take control of their thinking and feelings, now. They have overcome the enemy – which was a system designed to dehumanise them. Today, the destiny of black people is too great for them to cling onto bitterness, anger and revenge in the name of justice. The world is looking at black people to give it a human face.

Another living example of this spirit of forgiveness is Reverend Frank Chikane whose clothes were laced with poison. Like Mandela, Chikane allowed apartheid police chief Adriaan Vlok to wash his feet, forgave him and moved forward with him to build a new society.

As Martin Luther King Jr preached, “Either we live together as brothers or perish together as fools”.

Forgiveness is not about forgetting where we come from and the hurt and humiliation black people were subjected to under apartheid. It is not about being nice to De Klerk and giving him awards. It is about black people letting go so they can channel their energies and time to nation building and social cohesion, to leave a better world with a human face for posterity.

There are valid reasons to be bitter, angry and full of revenge. But it was not black people’s fault that white people were marauding thugs who went around the world turning others into slaves. The colonial project was approved by white kings and leaders in Europe. Blacks had no control over that.

What was done to them as a result was wrong. Forgiveness does not mean that white history will be glorified or ignored. It will be captured to show the levels that man can descend to. What happened can neither be forgotten nor excused.

Black people have every right to nurse their pain to heal themselves. But they have to learn to let go to focus on the future they suffered for.

The people of Mandela have a destiny to fulfil. They cannot falter now. The journey of healing themselves and those who hurt them must continue.

That is what Mandela would expect of black people.

This article was first published by Thought Leader and has been republished here by the authors permission.

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Mail & Guardian News

Opinion

Africanness goes deeper than the skin

27 JUN 2014 00:00 RHULANI THEMBI SIWEYA

The definition of an African has become a burden for women, some of whom are required to portray their Africanness in hairstyle and skin colour.

Are race and territory the correct terms for defining an African? It would seem that as Africans, we are still preoccupied with the debate of who is more African than the other, using race, language, hair and skin colour as criteria. Some among us have appointed themselves custodians of the true African image.

If you look at race as an example of defining an African, a question remains: How do we then define white South Africans, who have never known any other country but South Africa? If we define an African as a black man with certain Bantu features, what then becomes of Moroccans, Egyptians and other Arab Africans?

Some have tried to use geography in their definition. This option, however, is equally problematic. For example, if we choose to call all who have African ancestry Africans, how far back in time should we go?

This perspective also wrongly assumes that all who are citizens of the countries that make up the continent of Africa accept that they are Africans. Even within sub-Saharan Africa, some people in countries such as Somalia, Niger and Sudan would prefer to be called Arabs, not Africans.

It is also disconcerting the way in which the definition of an African has become a burden for African women, some of whom are required to portray their Africanness in hairstyle and skin colour, isolating those with Brazilian and Indian weaves and accepting those with Afros and dreadlocks as “more African”.

Our history dictates that we must accept that Arabs arrived in Africa as slaves and black Africans left the continent as slaves. This in itself indicates that there must be a modern and logical way of defining an African.

If the young people of the continent are to be able to see each other as one, beyond their physical features and historical relations in terms of how they came to the continent, perhaps we can move a step forward and develop this argument further.

If we can accept that technology allows people to alter themselves and that it is a personal choice, then maybe we can talk about education and empowerment beyond our physical looks. Maybe then we can accept that white South Africans represent a sad history that we cannot change.

Moving away from ancient definitions of an African will help us to move away from being tribalist and racist. It will assist us to accept that Africa is not for the darker-looking people alone; we are a rainbow continent.

We are a people who originate from various historical orientations, a people who have found each other to be settlers on this rich continent – and the responsibility for its development is on all of us, blacks, Indians, Arabs … This is our only home.

Rhulani Thembi Siweya is an independent political analyst. She writes for africaunmasked.co.za

Sunday Independent News

‘The Mandela of white people’

SUNDAYINDEPENDENT / 

27 July 2014 at 07:29am

By: Malaika wa Azania

The struggle legend does not equate with the people who spend 67 minutes painting schools, writes Malaika wa Azania.

American spoken word performer and author Gil Scott-Heron argues that no matter how far wrong you have gone, it is never too late to turn back.

I often wonder if this analogy applies to the defeatism of black people. I find myself wondering if we can still turn back from the path of self-destruction that we are on and claim back our dispossessed humanness.

I wonder if we have the will to return the retina to our eyes and see clearer (and further) than we are.

The month of July has made me preoccupied with this thought, for it is the month during which the depths of black people’s soporification become tragically visible.

July is Mandela Month, a period during which the Republic of South Africa celebrates the life of the first democratically elected president of the country.

Nelson Mandela is many things to many people. For some, he is a messiah, while for others he is a sell-out.

There are those who see Mandela as a true revolutionary who was guided by great feelings of love – love for peace and love for his people.

They hail him as the greatest man that ever lived, the epitome of human perfection.

And yet, there are those to whom Mandela signifies everything regressive.

They see him as a coward, a pawn in a game of the white world – a man who was the face of a negotiated settlement that left the black majority on the receiving end of a perpetuated apartheid legacy.

Of course, there is a limitation with both these narratives.

The idea that Mandela is a messiah is an absurd one that feeds into the liberalised synthesis of our struggle.

It is an idea that seeks to locate Mandela outside the ANC, which he served both as a leader and as an ordinary member.

There is an attempt on the part of many South Africans, in particular the white community and liberal media, to portray Mandela as this person who had no political allegiance, to divorce him from the congress movement.

In so doing, Mandela becomes elevated above all other great revolutionaries who don’t fit into the definition of what whites are comfortable with in a hero.

The idea that Mandela was a sell-out is also one that begs for critical analysis.

Unknown to most champions of this narrative, it actually fits into the former white-created narrative, because it, too, attempts to deify Mandela, to locate him outside the ANC.

It seeks to suggest that he was single-handedly responsible for the negotiated settlement.

This divorces him from the ANC by neglecting to communicate that Mandela’s actions were a product of a collective mandate of the organisation.

It is against the backdrop of these two problematic narratives that the twisted logic of Mandela Month is born.

The month-long celebrations are focused on Mandela the individual, the global icon, the philanthropist.

They are divorced from Mandela the activist and leader of the ANC, which is how Mandela the icon came about, to begin with.

Without the struggle against colonialism, there would never have been the ANC.

And without the ANC, there would never have been Mandela the global icon.

Mandela the boxer would have amounted to little because the constructs of the apartheid regime made it impossible for the black community to produce champions.

Black brilliance was crushed in its infancy, and many blacks who excelled in various fields were wiped from the books of history.

This is most likely what would have happened to Mandela had he never been recruited into the ANC.

Therefore, everything we know and have come to celebrate about Mandela transpired when he was a member and leader of the ANC – from his days as a community activist in Sophiatown right until he took his last breath in December.

To understand who Mandela was, we must first understand what the ANC is.

The formation of the ANC in 1912 was not an accident of history. It was a logical conclusion in the struggle against imperial devastation and colonisation.

For many years before the ANC was formed, natives of this country had been waging a battle against a settler minority who had violently dispossessed our people not only of their land and economy, but also of their very humanness.

The Battle of Isandlwana and other battles of resistance, documented and undocumented, are a vivid illustration of the resistance struggle that defined the socio-political milieu of South Africa before the consolidation of those fragmented efforts through the establishment of a movement that was tasked with uniting the different tribal national groups in an attempt to strengthen the fighting force of black people.

Nelson Mandela joined the ANC at the height of apartheid brutality.

In 1944, he became one of the founding members of the ANC Youth League, which was led by the militant Africanist Anton Lembede.

It was these Young Lions who, in 1949, championed the adoption of a radical Programme of Action that was intended to bring the apartheid regime to its knees.

The 1949 Programme of Action changed the posture of the ANC, which, until that point, had been led by middle-class liberals who believed that they could, through persuasion, wring concessions from the white government.

It became a militant liberation movement.

The Programme of Action called on the ANC to embark on mass action, involving civil disobedience, strikes, boycotts and other forms of non-violent resistance.

Nelson Mandela was one of the freedom fighters at the forefront of this struggle.

In 1961, along with the leader of the South African Communist Party, Joe Slovo, Mandela co-founded Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), which would later become the military wing of the ANC.

Operating through a cell structure, MK agreed to acts of sabotage to exert maximum pressure on the government with minimum casualties, bombing military installations, power plants, transport links and infrastructure that was sustaining the ruthless regime.

For the most part of the early 1960s, Mandela was travelling across the African continent, sourcing funding for the activities of MK.

It was his contributions to MK that would ultimately result in his arrest, leading to his incarceration on Robben Island and later Pollsmoor Prison and then, ultimately, Victor Verster Prison, for nearly three decades.

Mandela was released from prison in 1990 after spending 27 years behind bars.

It was shortly thereafter that the ANC and the white racist nationalist government entered into negotiations for a political transition in our country.

With the ANC delegation led by the current deputy president, Cyril Ramaphosa, the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa) began in December 1991 at the World Trade Centre in Kempton Park on the East Rand.

In 1994, South Africa held its first democratic elections, where Mandela emerged as the country’s president.

I have given this very brief account of Mandela’s life so that you realise and understand that Mandela was never an individual above the struggle or outside the ANC.

He was the leader of a national liberation movement whose historic task is to wage a struggle against colonialism in all its manifestations.

All that he did throughout his political life was a mandate of the organisation to which he pledged his political allegiance, an organisation that was historically a home of the oppressed native majority.

Nelson Mandela the activist is a Mandela of black people. The Mandela that is being celebrated in July is the Mandela of white people.

He is a Mandela who white people are comfortable with celebrating, because he does not pose a direct threat to their ill-gotten privilege.

This is the Mandela who visited sick babies in hospitals and held the hands of dying people.

It is the Mandela who donated to charities and gave talks about love and friendship between the oppressor and the oppressed.

It is not the Mandela who was a member of an organisation tasked with fighting against white domination.

And we as black people have fallen for this smokescreen.

We have become comfortable with the narrative that cleverly champions reconciliation above justice – which is the narrative that characterises this Mandela of white people.

This Mandela of white people is superficial, as, too, is his conceptualisation of the struggle of black people post-1994.

Perhaps it is because racism is so universal in this country, so deep-seated, that it is invisible because it is so normal.

White people in this country, in general, are not prepared to meet us halfway in the struggle against monopoly capital, which is keeping our people chained to a cycle of disenfranchisement and poverty.

They are resistant to genuine economic transformation at whose heart lies the just redistribution of land and the economy.

But come July, they are singing praises for Mandela, whom they have conveniently forgotten dedicated most of his life to fighting for this very transformation.

But of course, it is more comfortable to paint schools and feed a hungry black child than it is to contribute to the struggle for economic freedom.

For many white people, donating old clothes to an orphanage is the height of revolutionarism. It absolves them of confronting the real issue: the economic dispossession of black people, which they are benefiting from.

Even companies that are openly reactionary, companies that exploit their workers, line up activities for Mandela Month and dedicate 67 minutes to doing good that is eroded by the mistreatment they subject workers to in 364 days and 22 hours of the year.

There is nothing genuine about this farce that is Mandela Month.

If people want to honour the legacy of an activist, they must wage the same struggle he spent most of his life waging.

Mandela was not a painter or a nanny, so these kind acts of painting schools and spending the day with orphans, commendable though they may be, are not a reflection of the real struggle that faces black people in this country.

The very reason why we have schools that need painting and children who are parentless is that the disenfranchisement of black people has led to the increase in diseases and deaths resulting from black-on-black violence; violence rooted in the economic marginalisation of natives.

The real struggle to wage is the struggle for economic freedom.

This is the struggle that, when won, will result in significant change in how people relate to each other. It will result in better schools and fewer hungry children.

This one act of superficial “do good for 67 minutes” does nothing but absolve white guilt and encourage laziness. If this is what Mandela was about, then his hero status must be revisited.

*Wa Azania is a second-year Rhodes University student, and the African Union Youth Charter Ambassador for SADC.

** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.

Sunday Independent