On the frontline in a battle waged against themselves

Black police officers are in no better a position than any black worker in the anti-black world that SA is, writes Theo Mapheto

THE spate of #FeesMustFall demonstrations across the country’s university campuses has justifiably thrust to the fore a dynamic of deep-seated antagonism against the police.

Given the power dynamics of our country there can hardly be any surprise that the demonstrations for free, decolonised education have pitted, in the main, black police officers against black youth leaders.

If the demonstrations continue to spread, with the rage spilling from campuses and into the streets, the result will be deepening animosity and resentment among the role players.

One thing is for sure: black police officers will be in crisis mode, if they are not already.

On the one hand, they are saddled with an obligation to carry out instructions from the state, their employer; and on the other, they have to face inevitable confrontation with students barely out of their teens, young enough to be their children.

Often where there is an absence of credible leadership, particularly in government, the result is a slow yet inexorable decline in the legitimacy of public institutions, of public power.

History offers lessons that often when public confidence in the government ebbs to its lowest levels, state power becomes synonymous with brute force as exercised through the police and the military.

Put differently, it is when things fall apart, when the centre cannot hold, that mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, as the Irish poet William Butler Yeats observed almost a century ago in The Second Coming.

It is not because they don’t identify with the call for free, decolonised education that black police officers will not bat an eyelid in beating the protesting students to a pulp.

It is in spite of their identification with the protests that they will act out violence on the black body.

Marikana and the deaths of 34 miners happened in 2012 not because police officers were unaware of the exploitation suffered by black underground mineworkers, or because somehow they happened to have been impervious to the indignities of black life. The reaction of black police officers to white protest is markedly different. Because whiteness is condescending and all-powerful, black police officers cannot help but be numbed into meek obeisance. White is right!

But a collective expression of black anger as seen with #FeesMustFall provokes a black police officer’s latent emotions of self-hate. It forces an examination of the existential reality of all black life.

Thus black police officers are themselves victims of the system. They know that they are in no better a position than any black worker in the anti-black world that South Africa is, yet they earn a living from defending the system.

They have children who cannot afford the prohibitively high university fees.

They are in a war. A war with themselves. The internal war within black police officers is under-analysed and misdiagnosed. It is when it does not form part of our daily issues for discussion, when it rages unknown and undetected, that it grows into a perfect storm.

The internal war induces a psychosis of collective fear and alienation, uncannily similar to what US psychologist Joy DeGruy labels “post-traumatic slave syndrome” in a 2005 book of that title.

The war is “externalised” through the outlet of violence against self and, more often than not, against others. It is yet another form of black-on-black violence, this time presided over by a black government. It is a ticking time bomb. It is outrageous that the government has not heeded calls for a national multi-stakeholder dialogue, not only because of the potentially cathartic effect that a national dialogue might have but also because the intersectionality of struggles such as Fallism demands a more nuanced, multidimensional imagination.

Central to the agenda should be the singular need, even more urgent than it was before the advent of democracy, to reclaim the philosophy of Black Consciousness as an antidote for collective black victimhood.

Mapheto is a Fallist, youth activist and attorney based in Johannesburg

The reaction of black police officers to white protest is markedly different. Because whiteness is condescending and all-powerful