Blacks’ struggles from the 1800s remain
FRENCH explorer Francois Le Vaillant in his writings Voyage de M Le Vaillant dans l’intérieur de l’Afrique, par le cap de BonneEspérance in 1790 wrote of the Nguni people: “The Caffers are in general harmless and peaceful, but being continuously pillaged, harassed, nay often murdered by the whites, they are obliged to take up arms in their own defence.”
This was 138 years after Jan van Riebeeck moored in the Cape on April 6, 1652.
Africans were used for slave labour, their girl children abducted and turned into concubines by the British and the Dutch. The pillaging Le Vaillant wrote about did not begin with the death knell of the 1913 Land Act – Africans had been robbed of their cattle, children, land and other possessions mainly because of their kind and ubuntu spirit. Africans took in many whites when their boats ran aground.
The British called our land “British Kaffraria”. Their pastime was to raid African settlements for wealth, livestock and women. Male slaves were also abducted in military-precision raids. Our land was grabbed and possessed by force or trickery. Africans suffered genocides at the hands of whites.
In 1833 the whites abolished slavery in South Africa, with 35 000 slaves freed in the Cape Colony. These were Africans who had become the property of whites, equal to donkeys.
On November 10, 1886, Umhlangaso Faku, writing for the paramount chief of the independent nation of AmaMpondo, wrote to Tsar Alexander III in Russia seeking protection: “The English government wants to take away our country.”
By the time the 1913 Land Act became law, Africans were brutalised. The act disowned Africans of their land, forcing them to pay a poll tax, which made the little subsistence farming they could perform impossible. The tax was designed to punish those who wanted to be self-sustaining, forcing them to be mine labourers.
Though they called African “caffers” or k ***** s (non-believers) – our forefathers believed in a supreme being. AmaZulu called him uMvelinqanga, the Khoi called him Utika and AmaXhosa called him Uhlanga. This did not matter, as colonisation wiped out our knowledge systems and destroyed our information gathering, turning us into mute tools of hard labour.
This is a part of the mosaic that brought about the ANC’s establishment in Bloemfontein in 1912, where, for the first time, all tribes gathered under one roof to say “Africans must unite.”
The ANC was formed to end black servitude and white domination. This ideological genesis remains as relevant today as it did in the 1800s when Chief Sandile became one of the first political prisoners on Robben Island.
Other than political power being restored and shared with our erstwhile political oppressors, African humiliation continues to persist, becoming more entrenched psychologically, physically, structurally, culturally, religiously and so forth. We see this in the squalor our African families still live under. Our people are suffering even though their government continues to pour in massive resources in an unmatched global standard to alleviate their plight.
The type of leadership collective the ANC needs is one that understands this history and the plight of our poor – a leadership that has not personally found himself or herself holding this history in rhetorical form. The nature and character of men and women of the ANC must be equal to the task to forgo ambitions of wealth and serve the people against a formidable moneyed class. It is a leadership that must push back against the developing political veto power the minority is establishing through our courts.
The ANC’s national executive committee (NEC) should not have compromising conflicts of interest. We, as congress, should be wary of the potential of having comrades-turned-corporate lobbyists at the highest decision-making bodies of the party and the government.
If congress is rooted in the poor, it must not be led primarily by the moneyed class, the corporate-corridors cadre. Congress must be led in the main by cadres dedicated to serving our people.
We must accept that the NEC discusses what corporate types call “price-sensitive” information. When a company director, in particular from the economic ruling class, is a participant in policy discussions that might affect his business’s profitability, we must ask what his fiduciary duty demands he puts first.
The leadership collective should be in touch with our realities and fully recognise that congress buried hamba kahle politics when OR Tambo crossed the Limpopo River in 1961. Inequality is ravaging our people. Unemployment has made our people paupers. We must not fail to locate the issues over the economic doctrine we employ and the hamba kahle politics. Radical economic freedom is non-negotiable. Congress has no time to waste. The destruction of our people’s lives is not giving us time.
The leadership to emerge in December has to commit to a new social contract with our people, and restore what was raided and forcefully taken from them since 1652. It is leadership that understands it is crucial and urgent that we decolonise religious beliefs so that the Khoi can remember their Utika.
The contract must commit to decolonisation of culture and education to stop our children learning what our enemies think of us. It should be alive to the truth that the “harmless and peaceful” people remain landless, humiliated and economically oppressed 365 years later, and counting.
The new ANC leadership must forgo ambitions of wealth