This article has been in gestation in my mind for a very long time. Maybe it should have been written before, but it is my conviction now that it is time to write it. It has to do with defining reality for ourselves, instead of allowing people to define for us what our reality is or should be. First, I have to define who I mean by ‘us’. Who is us?
By us I mean the people who have a history that make us the colonized, and who want to reverse the dominance of people who hold and adhere to foreign cultural ideas that are increasingly being imposed on us without our consent. I can quote numerous examples of this phenomenon, but I will try and narrow the field. The field I will address here has to do with ideology.
For quite some time now we have read articles that seem to suggest that organizations like the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) are organizations that should be shunned. There are people in our society who are so terrified of the influence these organizations can bring to bear on the leaders of the African National Congress (ANC). More, these people are alleging that the ANC leadership is now under the control of these two branches of the Tripartite Alliance, tail wagging the dog kind of situation. Maybe now we need to state how we view Cosatu and the SACP, and not allow people to dictate to us what our attitude towards these organizations should be. Defining reality for ourselves.
During Apartheid, any person who opposed white racism was labelled a ‘communist’. Many black people who had never heard the word communist made efforts to discover what a communist was. They were told that any opposition to oppression and white racism was, according to the Apartheid rulers, a communism. Africans then drew a conclusion: that communists must be good people because they opposed oppression and white racism. One of the most unintended outcomes of the Apartheid machinery! Africans began to want to know who these communists were and where they could be found.
Minister De Wet Nel who was Minister of Bantu Affairs and Development in the late 1950s and 1960s went to address traditional leaders in KwaZulu, and he told the old men there that they should tell their people to reject the ANC. He said that people like Chief Albert Luthuli wanted to take the country, your land, and give it to the communists. When De Wet Nel was preparing to leave, satisfied that he had closed the organizational avenues for the ANC, an old man, a traditional leader said he needed clarification. De Wet Nel allowed him to ask a question. The traditional leader, illiterate and wearing traditional Zulu attire said:
‘Mpondozegusha (DeWet Nel’s Zulu name) says our sons are going to take our land and give it to communists. He says it is our land, but we do not have land! The land belongs to you Mpondozegusha and your people. If our sons take it from you as you say, and give it to the communists, maybe the communists will give back to us the land we lost to you. I have spoken.’ The Minister thanked the old man for his remarks and left.
I cite this remark to illustrate how successive white governments and individuals have sought to define for us what our reality should be, and a lot of us have accepted this. Capitalists, both black and white, tell us that capitalism is the best economic system there is. They concede, reluctantly, that it has its problems, but it is still the best. Communists and trade unionists like Blade Nzimande and Zwelinzima Vavi should be shunned. The ANC must never allow itself to be influenced by such people. Maybe the ANC should not allow itself to be influenced by these leaders; but it should be our own decision who we choose to influence us or not. It is time then for us to state how we see communists and trade union leaders.
Cosatu demands a fair wage and proper working conditions for the workers, the majority of whom are black people. The communists demand that those who produce wealth should own the means of production. I have simplified for myself the intricate ideological positions represented by these two ideological formations. The people then who are likely to view the trade unionists and communists as people who should be shunned, in my view, are those who do not want to give the workers a fair share of the profits they generate. Those who fear the communists are those who own the means of production, not us who have nothing to lose.
The trade unionists and the communists were with us in the trenches in our war against racial discrimination and economic exploitation, which still persist today. The capitalist world supported our enemies, ideologically and materially. The people who were prepared to give us material support, military training and equipment to defeat Apartheid were Socialist countries, not the so-called western democracies. Is it not strange then that after gaining political independence we now see the western countries as our friends? The enemies of yesterday have become today’s friends? Very strange.
I am not a member of any trade union, neither am I a communist. I find it supremely offensive though, when people who have never practised democracy and equity until we brought it to South Africa in 1994, have suddenly become our ideological mentors. The racial supremacists and exploiters of black labour have arrogated to themselves the title of defining reality for us. They preach to us Christianity when they have never been able to implement it in our entire history. They came to Africa and bought and sold us as slaves. Was that Christianity? Yet they are still preaching! How do people preach something they have never been able to practice? Was Apartheid, white racism, Christianity? They stole our land and livestock, made laws to protect this felony and will go to the Courts when black people want to claim back what was stolen from them. They murdered us when they arrived in Africa and they continued until we put a stop to it in 1994.
Yet they are still preaching, defining reality for us!
The leadership that was chosen in Polokwane in December 2007 is being accused of coming under the influence of communists and workers. Why not? These trade union leaders and communists say the new leadership should prioritize job creation in order to reduce unemployment, health, education and crime which affects mostly black communities. What is wrong with that? The people who are leaving the ANC to form a new organization do not want to come out and say that they hate the change in direction they foresee will happen. The poor are going to be a priority this time, not investors and capitalists. Investors and capitalists are welcome in South Africa, but it is the poor and oppressed who will define what will be emphasized this time around.
The erstwhile U S Foreign Secretary, Henry Kissinger, came to South Africa and reprimanded the National Party for not creating a black middle class. He told them that when the exploited and oppressed rose, there would no ‘cushion’ between the rich who are white and the poor who are black. The National Party, he said, should have created a black middle class, a class that would act as the ‘cushion’ when the wretched of the earth rose. We now have a black middle class, the cushion, and they have been created in the past ten years. These are the leaders who now work day and night to destroy the ANC. They have abandoned the Freedom Charter, the Peoples Manifesto, because they have benefited from the revolution that has been waged by the poor.
One of the people who attended Lekota’s meeting this week-end declared that he is a beneficiary of affirmative action as implemented by the ANC. He said, however, that Lekota should understand that they, business professionals, were the ‘cream of the country’, and were giving him the mandate to form the new party, the party of the ‘cream of society!’ What more should we say? Allow such people to define reality for us? Who the hell do they think they are?
