MASILO LEPURU
The African National Congress has recently celebrated its founding moment in 1912. Although this celebration is normally accompanied by shallow fanfare which some regard as indicative of philistinism within the ANC.
For others, it called for a critical reflection on the legacy of the ANC as a civil rights movement masquerading as a liberation movement turned a governing party. Some of the points that emerge from this moment of critical reflection are whether or not the ANC betrayed the African majority during the so-called negotiations with white settlers since the 1980s and why nothing much has changed since the ANC took over governing reins from white settlers in 1994.
These points of critical reflection have led others who are more proactive to call for a “new South Africa” or a “Second Republic of South Africa”. Others are calling for a “post-conquest Azania” with the African majority in power to remedy the transitional betrayal on the part of the ANC.
What all these different critics and concerned people share is the consensus that the decades since the transition to the so-called post-apartheid South Africa have seen a rise in inequality and poverty among the African majority.
How then do we account for this consensus of a “post-apartheid South Africa” which is on the verge of collapse due to structural inequality, rising levels of poverty among the African majority and arrogant moments of honest racism on the part of white settlers?
Perhaps a popular way to phrase this question is by posing the question, did Mandela betray the African majority before and during CODESA? There are those who answer this question in the negative by claiming that Mandela attained political power for the African majority to use to restore economic power. Then there are those who argue the opposite by stating that Mandela betrayed the spirit of the Freedom Charter by not attaining economic power from white monopoly capital.
In other words, Mandela has blessed the curse of “seek ye the political kingdom and everything else shall be added unto you”.
While the above question and answers are interesting, they however fail to get to the root of the nature of the ANC to account for its actions. The point is that to fully account for the actions of the ANC it is misleading to focus on its “fight” against the apartheid regime and its governance since 1994.
We must go back to the founding moment of the ANC to account for its “post-apartheid” disaster. There are at least two fundamental questions we need to pose; namely what kind of Africans founded the ANC and why did they find it in the first place in 1912?
The ANC was founded by what Ntongela Masilela calls the New Africans. These are westernised and Christianised natives who were influenced by New Negroes such as W.E.B Dubois and Booker T Washington. What they share in common is a double consciousness of being integrated into white settler colonies (white America and white South Africa) which were founded on the racial exclusion of people who look like them. This split consciousness of desiring to be both Negro and American and black and South African also manifested itself in their relation to ordinary Africans like them.
Due to their “miseducation” (westernisation and Christianisation) these New Negroes and New Africans strongly regarded themselves as civilised thus, superior to their fellow ordinary Africans. They were the “talented tenth” and “amarespectables” who opposed themselves to the raw natives or kaffirs. These New Africans as “civilised natives” had accepted that “whites are here to stay” and embraced their civilising mission but complained about how they were mistreated by these whites.
Due to their westernisation and christianisation as amakholwa they resented being treated equally as their fellow “uncivilised natives”. For instance, John Dube as the president of the ANC expressed honestly that this “civilised native superiority complex” towards the raw native or kaffir the ANC was supposed to represent and liberate. Many of these raw natives or kaffirs were amaqaba who rejected westernisation and christianity and refused to accept the idea that “whites are here to stay”.
As amarespectables and “exempted natives” the leaders of the ANC despite their commendable goal of rallying the African majority around the identity of being African accepted white civilisation as superior and worthy of imitating. They founded the ANC to fight for integration into a civilised white South Africa which excluded them in its founding moment in 1910.
This resentment against racial exclusion and obsessive desire to be integrated resulted in a century-long series of collaborationist efforts with whites beginning with petitions to the British Empire, white communists, the so-called Afrikaner nationalist leaders in the 1980s and white settlers as a whole today.
The subjectivity in the form of the “civilised native superiority complex” towards the raw native or kaffir of the leaders of the ANC is the identity basis which we can use to account for the sometimes hidden contempt, vicious treatment and impatient help ordinary Africans receive from the ANC today.
This subjectivity of the leaders of the ANC since its founding moment in 1912 fundamentally accounts for the political settlement agreed upon during the so-called negotiations.
As nonracial amakholwa and amazemtiti the leaders of the ANC accepted that “whites are here to stay” and since white settlers are civilisers from Europe, they can rule white South Africa provided they accommodate Africans as so-called black South Africans by giving them rights. And rights within a white settler colony called South Africa is what the African majority got since CODESA.
So, is what the ANC doing to its people today a question of betrayal or the ANC being true to its character since 1912? With this question in mind and a book called Askari by Jacob Dlamini about collaborators within the ANC, the African majority must begin to think about the ANC itself as a collaborator.
Masilo Lepuru is a Junior Researcher at the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation.
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