ANC took racism out of struggle, so white supremacy exists
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RECURRING acts and public displays of racism are testimony to enduring white supremacy. They also underline the reality that the liberation struggle failed to rid society of white supremacy and its everyday manifestation, racism.
This is because the struggle led by the ANC was never against and about white supremacy. If it was, it was so only in its rhetoric.
Since its inception, the ANC has consistently demanded the inclusion of Africans showing reasonable levels of civilisation and of above average income to be included in a white social order. This they duly achieved in 1994.
Simple-minded political analysts, dependent on and misguided by the fabricated narrative of the liberation struggle, fail to provide a realistic explanation why racism persists.
White supremacy manifesting as racism persists precisely because the ANC took it out of the liberation struggle equation.
By its admission, white supremacy and racism were only aspects of the superstructure in capitalist accumulation and exploitation.
The liberation struggle was therefore a struggle against capitalism as opposed to white supremacy and racism. It was hoped at the successful conclusion of the struggle, white supremacy and racism would vanish.
Not only did the ANC fail to strike a crippling blow at capitalism before 1994, it is faced with an unenviable task of having to rescue it from total collapse.
The ANC failed to bring an end to capitalist accumulation and exploitation of labour (typically black African labour) and left racism (directed mainly at black Africans) untouched. The latter was a strategic imperative in the organisation’s history.
Liberation struggles are by definition pre-figurative. In their execution, successful struggles dismantle and undo the hegemony they are confronted with, sowing the seeds for the emergence of the counter-hegemony they desire.
In its quest for a non-racial society, the ANC did little or nothing to undermine the racist hegemony of apartheid. It did nothing to prefigure a non-racial society it claimed to be in pursuit of. Rival political formations such as the PAC and the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), insisting on the centrality of white supremacy and race in the liberation struggle equation, were widely demonised not only by alarmed white society but also by the ANC and its alliance partners. Increasingly, the distinction between white supremacists on the one hand and the ANC and its alliance partners on the other in respect of the significance of white supremacy and the racism it fostered became blurred.
Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness (BC) philosophy placed white supremacy and the racism it engendered at the centre of then struggle equation. It is significant that BC provided the only moment in the era of mass mobilisation in which white supremacy and the racism it engenders were at the centre of the liberation struggle equation. When Africanists formed the PAC, they were marginal in the ANC, struggling to push their paradigm to the centre of organisational imperatives.
In the era of BC, white supremacy and racism became central in political engagement. BC made no distinction between white liberals and radicals, demonising the latter as radicalised liberals and in reality, a subtle extension of white supremacy.
Unfazed by Biko’s chastisement for their meddling in black politics and resistance movement, white liberals reinvented themselves as radicals. The same crowd linked to the National Union of SA Students (Nusas) that Biko urged to mobilise white society emerged as custodians of a radical tradition that would mobilise black Africans.
It is through their efforts that the Durban moment, sitting awkwardly in the BC tradition, happened in 1973. But their involvement was short-lived and dwarfed by the Soweto Revolt.
Biko’s death and the banning of BCM formations opened the way for a rethinking of BC. Leading the process for the mass mobilisation of the 1980s and early 1990s was the radicalised liberals of Nusas fame.
They included activist academics like Eddie Webster, Neil Agget, Glen Moss, Rick Turner and David Webster. Their impact on the ideological imagination of the ANC’s internal partners, the United Democratic Front and Cosatu student and civic formations was massive.
The reinvented radicals constructed and controlled the definitions for the struggle in the aftermath of Biko’s death. They demonised BC’s preoccupation with white supremacy and racism as a mark of immaturity in revolutionary matters.
They constructed a discourse drawing largely from MarxistLeninist formulations, claiming they were scientific where BC was ideological. The ANC’s internal partners swallowed this garbage hook, line and sinker. It shaped their ideological outlook in the rolling mass action they celebrate as the most heroic moment in the history of the struggle.
What is distinct about this historical moment is that it forced white supremacy and racism out of the liberation struggle equation.
It is not only the ANC’s internal partners that embraced this new doctrine. The Azanian People’s Organisation split when a range of ideological re-conceptualisations of BC emerged.
The Socialist Party of Azania is an outcome of this. It is not only in formal political formations that a conspiratorial rethinking of BC occurred. The intellectual domain at Wits University, the University of KwaZulu-Natal and to a lesser extent, Rhodes University and UCT became custodians of the ideological formulations that guided and inspired the rolling mass action undertaken by the ANC’s internal partners.
The emerging generation of thinkers have received BC through the filter of reinvented radicals’ reconceptualisation of Biko’s thinking. This is apparent in Andile Mngxitma’s (former EFF MP) understanding of BC.
Made to doubt the lack of scientific validation in BC, Mngxitma sought ways to insinuate Marxist-Leninist explanations that obfuscates the reality that white supremacy and racism need to be at the centre of the liberation struggle equation.
There is a glaring inconsistency in the way Marxist-Leninist formulations are used by Mngxitma in his latest political adventure. His defence of one form of capitalism over another is curious. In its strictest definition, capitalism, whether of the Guptas, the Ruperts or the Maponya variety are a negation of BC.
But more importantly, preoccupation with capitalism, whether in its condemnation as was the case before 1994 or in its defence as has been the case since, is indefensible. Invariably, it has been used to foreclose on any discourse that places white supremacy and racism at the centre of political engagement.
It is clear from this historical context of the liberation struggle that no effort was made to confront white supremacy and racism.
This explains why racism keeps surfacing, provoking extreme resentment in the public sphere.
Yet that the liberation struggle failed to deal with it, explaining its endurance is barely appreciated by political analysts ill-equipped to deal with this historical complexity.
• Lebelo is a historian and author.