Vuwani, Malamulele breathe life into Verwoerd’s ghost
Limpopo protests manifest jungle law in the centre and on peripheries, writes Mukoni Ratshitanga
APART from the pictures of smouldering schools that conjure up images of medieval times, and an enthusiastically hands-on minister turned rubble remover, prominent among the narratives proffered to explain the unfolding tragedy in Vuwani, Limpopo, is the phenomenon of a polarised ethnic consciousness.
This narrative merits national attention. Additionally, we cannot discuss the events in Vuwani outside considerations of the demand for a Malamulele municipality.
In many post-colonial polities such as ours, a polarised ethnic consciousness is the manifestation of politics, both historically and in the present continuous.
Colonialism and apartheid presented ethnic and other diversities in irreconcilable binaries and laid the structural base for their mediation through separate spatial and mental spaces. These eased the colonial and apartheid project: the more divided the oppressed, the better it was to lord over them!
Until 1994, Vuwani and Malamulele, a stone’s throw from each other, belonged to two bantustans: the socalled Republic of Venda on the one hand, and the “self-governing” territory of Gazankulu on the other.
Tsonga-speaking people had been forcibly removed from multilingual communities throughout Limpopo between 1967 and 1978, and settled in Gazankulu to prepare for and sustain the fiction of the bantustan system.
The colonial and Verwoerdian ideology of separateness among the natives was thus completed; supported by educational and other cultural symbols and institutions.
Subsequent generations would be brought up on a toxic diet of an exclusive ethnic identity, deprived of the many nuanced elements that make up the totality of who we are.
But the ethnic factor is not the only lens through which we should view protests against the inclusion of Vuwani, a predominately Vendaspeaking area, into the recently demarcated Malamulele municipality, a predominantly Tsonga-speaking area.
There are other related and divergent causalities that require scrutiny.
None can honestly discuss the use of ethnicity as a political mobilising tool in post-apartheid South Africa without considering the “100% Zulu Boy” campaign platform of President Jacob Zuma’s supporters in the runup to the ANC’s 52nd national conVenda ference, in 2007, and the posture with which he, at best, came to be associated with thereafter or, at worst, he cultivated.
Whereas the founders of the ANC in 1912 had made the clarion call to “bury the demon of tribalism”, the terrible misadventure of Zuma’s slogan would result in the beast rising in the heart of the very organisation whence it had been banished 95 years earlier.
It was unsurprising that paraphernalia bearing ethnic oaths of all kinds began to proliferate in the months after the 2007 conference.
In Limpopo, the most notable was — and continues to be — the Shumela lobby (literally: “work for Venda”) — the motto of the former Venda bantustan. Thus, in a short space of time, the ANC had successfully rekindled a consciousness of whose containment it had been a leading force.
There is arguably a sense in which the demand for a separate municipality by Malamulele residents is partly a response to the barely veiled political meaning signified by the Shumela Venda brigade.
Narrow ethnic consciousness is not the preserve of the lower rungs. In fact, history shows that it is the elite that gives it the wings with which it takes flight.
Thus, on February 2 2011, I received “an urgent media inquiry” from a journalist from one of our prominent media houses, seeking former president Thabo Mbeki’s view on “the lack of delivery of basic services in the rural villages of South Africa generally, and specifically the former president’s home village, Mbewuleni, in the Eastern Cape”.
Without any apparent sense of irony, he sought “comment from Mr Mbeki about his thoughts on the lack of development and delivery of basic services to his home village in Transkei where people don’t have running water, proper roads, electricity in some parts and an enormously high rate of unemployment”.
Malamulele is also a manifestation of the cold logic of the various strands and impulses of the laws of the jungle that are beginning to mediate politics and economics in the centre and on the peripheries.
Local activists often draw attention to the commencement of the demands for a Malamulele municipality and failed attempts at land grabbing by some local businesspeople and chiefs some six years ago. They claim that businesspeople enjoy relations with some politicians at provincial and national levels. This typical rentseeking behaviour is to be found in many developing countries whose national liberation movements have departed from a vision of republicanism and inclusivity.
Together with what Professor Barney Pityana has argued is the perverse transformation of “access to positions of leadership into a factor of production”, rent-seeking will become more pronounced in the countryside if the less than optimistic projections of the ruling party’s electoral fortunes in the urban areas prove to be correct in the local government elections.
Cynical rent-seekers will exploit any and every local fault line, including latent ethnic consciousness, for so long as they extract economic and political benefit.
Vuwani is not without its share of rent-seekers and ethnic entrepreneurs of the Shumela Venda type, who are waxing toxically and ethnically lyrical.
The newly demarcated Malamulele municipality is the outcome of violent protests accompanied by ventilation of ethnic obscenities. It is conceivable that those behind the unfolding disgrace in Vuwani might be inspired by what they have seen at Malamulele and elsewhere in the country — which is that the government yields to demands when you wreak havoc.
One is, of course, not arguing that the government must be obstinate to the grievances of the people. But 22 years after 1994, we must surely reflect on forms of protest in a democracy, with the political and other echelons of the leadership providing the necessary leadership in word and in deed.
And so, thanks to the political mismanagement of the Malamulele demand, it may tragically come to pass that our democratic South Africa will bestow on Hendrik Verwoerd a badge of honour by entrenching the very ethnic spatial settlement patterns we fought against.
One of the tragedies of Malamulele and Vuwani is that although apartheid was obsessed with the division of people, it was not entirely successful in the Thulamela district. Neither Vuwani nor Malamulele is inhabited by people of only one language group and there is no notable history of acrimony between the Venda and Tsonga communities. To this end, they represent a model for national unity.
In the meantime, we had better be mindful of the value of the symbolic as a powerful medium of political communication.
For example, the prominent featuring of Minister of State Security David Mahlobo may inadvertently project a message that the government considers Vuwani essentially as a security — more than as a political — challenge.
Perhaps the most important lesson from the embers of Vuwani is the danger of the conscious or unconscious depoliticisation of society in favour of political expediency. Vuwani and Malamulele illustrate a crying need for a new national consciousness and vigilance; a progressive political outlook that will exorcise the lingering ghosts of Verwoerd and social engineers before him. To this extent, both Malamulele and Vuwani are a glaring microcosm of the emerging fault lines of postapartheid South Africa. Their lessons hold for the country as a whole.
Ratshitanga is an assistant to former president Thabo Mbeki and writes in his personal capacity
Barney Mthombothi is away this week
None can discuss the use of ethnicity in post-apartheid SA without considering the ‘100% Zulu Boy’ campaign platform Rent-seekers will exploit any and every local fault line for so long as they extract benefit