Here on my desk is a bumper sticker. I have never peeled off the backing to stick it anywhere because it would have ended up like all my previous cars, somewhere in the past and forgotten. The sticker has travelled around the world with me for three decades or more. The text remains clear; black written on a yellow background.
“Asispini elokishini. Asikhawathi Udarkie.” (We should not cause trouble in our townships. We should not cause violence among black people.”)
The sticker was printed and distributed by the Azanian Youth Organisation, the youth league of Azapo, the Azanian People’s Organisation, founded in 1978 as the successor to the Black People’s Convention, which was, in turn, the organisational body of the Black Consciousness Movement.
Although I abandoned activism and engagement when I became a journalist, I held on to the founding principles of the Black Consciousness Movement until about 2006 or 2007. I held on to these principles much the way that everyone, journalists, judges, lawyers, scientists, engineers and prelates, holds on to beliefs and ideas that they believe will make for a better society. I did not suddenly become an automaton.
I am pretty sure that journalists, judges, lawyers, scientists, engineers and prelates have foundational beliefs in democracy, liberalism, socialism, free markets and even in fascism. Without our beliefs and without the inherent contradictions in all of them (in confrontation when they are with their daily lives) our writing would be dry, stale, bland and meaningless. The fact is that everyone believes in something, some people are just better at concealing their beliefs.
For instance, a writer like Walter Benjamin was much more honest, intellectually, with his journalistic work’s confrontation with the worst of the Weimar Republic. One of his foundational beliefs about publishing was that the purpose of the journal was “to proclaim the spirit of its age”.
This was what inspired us during the 1980s, arguably the high water mark of journalism in South Africa. That was when “opposition journalism” drove the editors of the Weekly Mail, Sowetan and the New Nation. I worked for the former two publications.
The late Archbishop Desmond Tutu said of the Weekly Mail, now the Mail & Guardian, that it was a newspaper that “will prevent whites from ever being able to say in the future: ‘We didn’t know.’” I would add to this the convenient claims that mark “the spirit of our age” (today), that injustices of the past are in the past, and that we should “move on”. Imagine telling the tens of millions of people who died because of Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot that they should forget and move on…
Black Consciousness dissolved in the acid of ethno-nationalism
Let’s get back, then, to the Black Consciousness Movement. In a recent article, Professor Sysman Motloung of North West University reportedly said that Black Consciousness had been abandoned (he is right), and that a new political formation was required to resuscitate the movement (I’m not sure it would work).
To be clear, revitalising the movement is a good idea. At its founding it was based on the belief that we, those of us who were not white/European, had a common objective. The ANC would insist, correctly, that their members, too, had a common objective. The EFF would not disagree.
However, what happened within a decade of the 1994 elections smashed any sense of common, universal justice on an anvil of greed placed where justice became divisible. Money-making, greed, avarice and crass displays of consumer capitalism’s excesses replaced the spread and securing of justice.
It started with the ideal of identifying people who deserved more justice than others, more freedom than others, and tagging people with the negative “non”. During the apartheid era, people were classified as “non-white” or “non-European”. Under the new dispensation there are “non” Africans and “non” blacks, much of which is based on diabolical ideas of admixture and/or phenotype, of racial preference and notions of purity and exceptionalism.
This crudeness is at the base of Julius Malema’s statement that there is something wrong (counter-revolutionary) about black people marrying white people.
It is a mark, also, of the nativist appeal of political figures from Panyaza Lesufi to Jacob Zuma and his followers. Each one of whom, mind you, would claim some origin in the Black Consciousness movement. Cyril Ramaphosa cannot/should not be associated with the rapscallions among us, but he too (like Mathews Phosa, among others) had his political awakenings in the Black Consciousness Movement.
Asispini elokishini. Asikhawathi Udarkie.
Black Consciousness is one of the greatest ideas to come from South African politics over the past five decades, but in office and in power its leaders, now a political formation, would be no better or no worse than the ANC and EFF.
When we survey the black community there is a lot of tension, turmoil and violence that shreds any notion of solidarity. During the late 1970s and much of the 1980s, under the guidance and leadership of people like Gomolemo Mokae, Strini Moodley, Muntu Myeza (who introduced a 16-year-old kid from Eldorado Park to Steve Biko, and made him read “the Black Viewpoint” pamphlets), Kehla Mthembu , Saths Cooper, and Lybon Mabasa, among others, made us understand that it was necessary to destroy racism, but did not explain what we should do after that.
We had to go “to the very gate of racism in order to destroy racism — to the gate but not further”, was one of the cries. My criticism is something like this: we must fight for emancipation, but we are not sure what to do with all this emancipation.
Nonetheless, it remains a standout example that Mokae’s main obsession in the 1980s was strengthening the intellectual and physical health of township communities. Taking a leaf from the book of Mokae (Abu Asvat, a medical doctor, was the cynosure of a leader who sought to empower our communities) we knew that our work began with the statement Asispini elokishini. Asikhawathi Udarkie; we had to prevent violence among ourselves, and not cause trouble in our communities.
We by and large achieved that by the time that the National Party-Inkatha axis ripped the heart and soul from our communities, with white people now gloating and indulging in “gratuitous vindication (and) “reacting with dismissive contempt” about so-called “black-on-black violence”.
For what it’s worth, when former president FW de Klerk returned from Europe in the late 1980s/early 1990s where he spoke about “black-on-black violence”, I asked him during a press conference if he would describe The Troubles or even World War 2 as “white-on-white violence” (The Star’s political correspondent at the time rolled his eyes, elbow nudged and shared a chuckle with a couple of his colleagues from the Argus Group based in the Parliamentary Press Gallery).
Never mind. The best conclusion that the TRC deigned to provide was that “a network of security and ex-security operatives, acting frequently in conjunction with right-wing elements and/or sectors of the IFP, were involved in gross violations of human rights, including random and targeted killings”.
It was established, nonetheless, that “Inkatha… received extensive covert support, in the form of arms and military training, from military intelligence and secret police units”.
The ANC was of course, not entirely innocent. It is a fair conclusion that the “black-on-black” violence was the result of provocation to somehow “prove” that black people cannot govern themselves.
Gloating
Hence the gloating and sense of vindication among the white community, as explained above. It was also a play for power by the ANC and Inkatha. Helen Suzman and John Kane Berman of the Institute of Race Relations would, of course, find reason to blame sanctions against apartheid for the violence in the black communities during the 1980s.
Kane-Berman laid down a precursor to Donald Trump’s “both sides” narrative with his statement that both sides have “bloody hands”, and never could accept the historical role of European colonialists and settler colonialists in fomenting conflict among indigenous people.
Honesty is not a strong part of settlers and colonists. Their biggest blind spot is the way that they provoked Africans to fight against each other, as a means of retaining power (see this report on the colonial roots of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994). Hence our struggle to avoid conflict and violence among ourselves — Asispini elokishini. Asikhawathi Udarkie!
To be clear, black people, in general, have been the main victims of black economic empowerment. In the townships, beyond Soweto, which replaced downtown Johannesburg as Sandton’s second city, we seem to have abandoned the cry, “Asispini elokishini. Asikhawathi Udarkie,” we seem to have become our own worst enemy in these days of democracy.
The growing elite has left the majority of black people behind in a working class, a proletariat and a peasantry that has given us an expanding precariat.
The struggle in the black community is not simply the violence opposed by “asispini elokshini”, it is the normalisation of “asiskhawati” as a somehow natural and unpreventable outcome of liberal political economy.
There is nothing to suggest that Black Consciousness leaders would not act differently from the ANC, the EFF and uMkhonto Wesizwe party (MK). Non-racialism is highly idealistic and necessary, but became a public relations weapon and performativity.
Economic freedom leans into market fundamentalism, free market nonsense and right-wing libertarianism. Justice in post-apartheid South Africa has become divisible. It’s important to remember that before 1994, the ANC promised everyone a glowing future; they just did not say that it would be prosperity for an elite that more closely resembles a comprador class.
For its myriad flaws, the EFF has been remarkably honest. It has put its politics of revenge, biblical punishment (of a current generation of “land thieves”) and fascism up front. The EFF is exactly what it says on the tin.
Jacob Zuma’s MK has yet to make itself open for scrutiny, beyond simply being a family business with its base in Nkandla. We should probably forget about the Black Consciousness Movement.
We will talk nice, probably return to Asispini elokishini, Asikhawathi Udarkie, but… the finest of principles collapse under the weight of gold. DM