I Hate to Say "I told you so"
This essay was written in June 2017, two years after my ostracism from the radical circles I was addressing in the previous post. I posted it on an earlier blog which I have lost login access to. It only has this and the previous post on it, so it's not worth a look-up. I let it go stale.
Of course, since writing this essay, several other speculative propositions have come to pass. By 2018, even the Vice Chancellor was praising the genocidaires. Now Fallism is the water the academy swims in. What is more, president Cyril Ramaphosa has begun land appropriation procedures, in an attempt to outflank the radicals in the state-capture and radical Marxist camps. Radical armed groups initiating lawless land seizures and tooling up for war have sprung up. The end is nigh.
It has been two years since I wrote the previous post. It is now time for an unfocused rant.
It turns out that my worst paranoia was not ill-founded. I now reside on a campus which has elected, to the Student Representative Council with the second-highest number of votes, a candidate who has publicly called for genocide, and on several occasions called for the mutilation of women who are insufficiently loyal to the revolution. The radical front of what was once RhodesMustFall has turned into a hypermasculine core of revolutionary genocidaires, who spurn the feminist and LGBT support groups they once relied on for support. The movement has been swallowed up by the fringe parties, the EFF and PAC, who I feel it safe to say can be called fascist parties, even if they do dress like French clowns.
A few days ago, I attended a speech on UCT upper campus in the Robert Leslie building. It appeared to be an academic presentation, but it was in fact an EFF rally. At this talk, in a packed auditorium, Mbuyiseni Ndlozi gave a speech ostensibly on African Liberation movements, though he touched on none of the history or any concrete examples of their shortcomings beyond the observation that many of the old dinosaurs had outstayed their welcome. Instead, using a combination of Hegel, Fanon and Mbembe, he argued that whites can never be considered part of the mutual “self-consciousness” of humanity required to cohabit a political space. Only whites in their nations, and blacks in theirs.
While the crowds were arriving, I spotted a former friend, Mohammed Jameel (formerly “Todd”) Abdullah. I had been building to attempt a reconciliation with this man. I felt a deep animosity to him for the past couple of years, but I had undergone a change. As I heard, so had he. I held out my hand and greeted him. He sneered, and refused to shake it. I can only speculate what this meant to him, but it felt as if he was ashamed to be seen with me.
I have long since been shunned by all associates with the movement on campus, and faced a strong social backlash. I could if I was so inclined, have drifted rightward politically and socially to find people who sympathised, but I am not so inclined. I have always seen myself as part of a progressive-liberal tradition. I cannot bear prejudice, spite or shortsightedness. So I stayed alone, waiting for others to see things my way.
Some have. I have commiserated with students who observe that a postmodernist and racial-essentialist consensus is rapidly overtaking the institution. The lecturers who have long been sufficiently intellectually dishonest to base what ought to be empirical disciplines, on what is essentially literary criticism, have lept on the demands for curriculum change as an excuse to purge their disciplines of the remainder of empirical or objective study. The current head of linguistics, for example, actually claims that there is no point in documenting dying languages, studying syntax, neurolinguistics or phonetics, and that the department should be collapsed into Anthropology to end the colonial practice of treating linguistics like a science, so we can draw pictures and "dance our languages" instead of doing serious research. She employed a Masters’ student who couldn’t be bothered to hold serious lectures, over a double-Phd from Oxford, just because he was intellectually dishonest enough to do his thesis on “linguistic landscapes” (seriously, this is just looking at road signs, and speculating wildly about how to find evidence of evil domination).
Any calls to objective standards in research is accused of colonialism. Any objection to Fanon is called racist, even if it comes from a black student, most of whom are branded race traitors in that very special way by the now-ubiquitous abuse of Biko-blackness to ostracise dissenters and black liberals (revolutionaries who are not white can be ‘black’, counter-revolutionaries become ‘non-white’, losing their black status, and whites remain perpetrators of domination all).
Not that people read the two African prophets in any but the most selective manner. Biko is there to tell us we ought to segregate white people out of all black spaces. Africa is a black space, therefore, there is no room for whites. Fanon is there to tell us how we need violence to truly liberate ourselves from colonialism – through bloodshed. A gift of freedom is not freedom, we must take it. So goes the new ideology.
It’s funny. Ndlozi told us that they (the EFF) do not intend to chase whites off their land with machine guns, but to pass a bill confiscating their real estate through parliament. Obviously he read Fanon quite selectively; Fanon recognised, as did Weber before him, that the state is an organisation with a monopoly on the use of violence within a territory, and that all laws are enforced and given reality by the threat of force. If any one of the 4.5 million whites living on SA soil resist eviction, they are obviously going to face coercion at the barrel of one of our fine national service pistols in the hand of some overweight phuza-faced policeman.
That was not enough for the members of the auditorium that day, a few insisted (to healthy cheers) that all material possessions and liquid wealth should be repossessed as well, on a purely racial basis. So now we have 4.5 million homeless people with no material possessions. Well, that would certainly alleviate the housing crisis. Whites constitute 8.4% of the population, shack-dwellers constitute 6%.
Of course, the white population would then turn to violence. Several far-right white nationalist organisations in South Africa are armed, and train their young men to fight in the bush in preparation for a coming race war that has repeatedly failed to materialise, no matter how loudly or drunkenly they cry wolf. I shudder to think how these nuts will react to this magical land bill. No doubt it is just what both they and the new revolutionaries long for. A cause de guerre; actual, living, breathing, white nationalist paramilitaries fighting for land against black nationalist appropriation.
For the EFF to pass such a revolutionary piece of legislation, they would need to be in control of a majority in parliament. Maybe they will get lucky, and the ANC will be pushing for transformation just as hard, hoping to distract from their failures and corruption with bread and circuses (well, they tried circuses in 2010, and that didn’t work too well). The EFF need these policies even more, since none of them appear to understand the most basic aspects of governance or political science, though some are bright and talented enough with public appeal and Machiavellian party politics.
And once they pass this holy document (Yizwe Lethu/Sieg Heil/Praise Jesus), we have 4.5 million internally displaced people. Perhaps they’ll try to flee over the border. Boy are Botswana and Namibia in for an immigration shock – they have a population of about 2 million each – white South Africans could become a voting majority in both. Mind you, some of the more vocal vanguard at my university claim they will liberate the neighbouring nations from their white-monopoly-capital puppet-governments come the revolution, to build an Africanist union by force. How much pull this crowd will have by the time we are all in our 30s and 40s is anybody’s guess.
But even if such a war were on the cards, I don’t think these guys realise quite how much the rest of Africa hates us. Congolese immigrants prefer to cram 20 to a room in white suburbs rather than risk the machetes and bonfires of the townships. We are seen as arrogant, ungrateful, hate-filled, uncultured drunks. No wonder – we burn any northern makwerekwere that come too close to prosperity in eKasi (funny aside, makwerekwere is named after the way foreigners are said to speak “kwere-kwere-kwere”, much like how tribes foreign to the Greeks were said to speak “bar-bar-bar”, hence, “barbarian”).
Fallists claim that this happens because apartheid taught them to hate blackness. I don’t buy their shit. These little middle class intellectuals are waxing lyrical about the affair without asking the perpetrators why they did it. Ask away – they do it because they are competing for jobs. They don’t compete with whites for jobs for the most part yet, so they only burn poor people's homes and shops down. Then, because foreigners struggle to get jobs (or even permits – home affairs treats foreigners like dirt), they turn to crime. So now they are considered inherently criminal. But noooo, it is the white man’s voodoo spell – the proletariat are too dumb to think for themselves, let us educate them.
Fallists have no respect for people’s actual exercise of autonomy. Which is why they accuse any dissenters of the new version of false consciousness – the colonised mind. Discussion is muted on campus. People are afraid to discuss anything for fear of social rejection. Everywhere you do see a political discussion, it is usually some dude trying to convince a less enthusiastic colleague that bloodshed is necessary for true freedom, and that, even if they don’t realise it, they are really super-duper oppressed.
I don’t believe everyone is enthused, but those who aren’t sure are keeping quiet. Especially whites. They police each other like nobody’s business. Anybody who says anything counter-revolutionary becomes instantly radioactive, and the grapevine starts jangling with calls to steer clear of the racist arsehole who said Fallism is not what it started out to be.
Fallism is fascism. It is. No doubt, no room for ambiguity, its fascism, but with a postmodern twist – instead of Nietzschean nihilism, we get relativism and identitarian solipsism. “There is no truth, only my truth and your truth”. And logic is “phallogocentric” or “colonial”, so there’s no room for dialogue in civil society, only revolutionary violence. What gives meaning where there is none? Revolution. But only for one race.
Two years ago, everyone chanted that “pro-black is not anti-white”. Fuck, nobody says that now. People campaigned body and soul to prevent the expulsion of Slovo Magida for wearing a homemade shirt saying “kill all whites”, but call for the incarceration of any white person who says anything remotely culturally insensitive. Hell, they voted for Masixole Mlandu, who makes Slovo look like a teddy bear. Hell, the man used to be tsotsi in high school. Slovo is just an opera singer raised by a middle-class white family with all the privilege that accompanies it. But they are small fry. We will still have professors like Dr Lushaba who are willing to hold little Nuremberg rallies in his classroom as ‘education’, and a history department who cut Economic History because it was “too international” and “not radical enough” (this is a private stance. In public they blame it on budget cutbacks).
Of course, we could cut anything. But instead, talented, world-renowned lecturers are being pushed from their perches, and any course not sufficiently postmodern or feminist or decolonial is being axed or cleansed. It is an absolute bloodbath. After last year’s protests, where admin staff were chased with buckwhips and clubs, any decent qualified people seem to be looking for other posts. Only the little islands of engineering philosophy soldier on.
But then, of course, it is a racist department, right? Well, what is the evidence? Unwillingness to bow to das Mode, die uns so streng teilt? Well, it turns out a student called Busi S’kumbuzo made a public claim that the fact that the philosophy department wouldn’t let her pass without doing any coursework, was the result of a racist plot to expel her radfem black ass. This attracted the might of the social networks at the height of RMF’s glory. When anyone pointed out how erroneous and based in falsehood her statements were, the reply was invariantly some version of “but we must heed the clarion call of the black woman” (that was a quote. My Ugandan friend Peter had a fantastic turn of phrase “the black woman fugaze” – the idea that somehow the black woman is always an innocent victimised angel “I’ve known black women my whole life! They’re people too – they can be assholes!”)
Plus, because the department is an analytic department (analytic philosophy bases itself on clarity and concision, and is based on dialogue between unambiguous arguments constructed by identifiable speakers), it has little input from African philosophy. So, clearly it must be racist. I’m not sure Fanon or Biko count as philosophers so much as political theorists, and outside of race, have little to comment on.
I’m a Liberal, surprise surprise. I still have a bit of Marx in me. But at base, one must recognise common humanity and equality before the law and ballot. Otherwise you are building a caste system at best, and slavery and genocide at worst. Liberalism generally holds universal equality before the law to be a non-negotiable norm. The limits to the use of coercion are to prohibit acts, or the commissioning of acts which cause physical harm to other people. All speech, in the sense of expression of opinion, must be protected. This is easily separated from threats, or the commission of acts, at least from a legal perspective. From an academic perspective, the placement of any limits to the opinions expressed in academia is anathema to the development of robust research.
Is any of this so fundamentally objectionable that anybody can justifiably hate it? Hate liberals? What an absurd concept. To hate neo-liberalism, sure, the extension of these freedoms to the practice of commerce, I understand – I firmly believe commerce must be regulated and taxed in a progressive fashion. I am not John Locke or Robert Nozick, nor Max Stirner or Milton Friedman. Bugger that, you rely on us to make your money, rich man, we get some of it back through the state. Anyone ever heard of John Rawls?
But apparently, liberalism is a vile colonial construct, designed to exclude and oppress, and “rainbowism” is a naive dream. But Richard Pithouse must remember, there were not only liberals in Europe’s colonial elite, but also nationalists, unabashed christian fundamentalists, irredentist white supremacists. The constant negotiation for the values which best served the expanding literate societies of the North allowed the liberals to bargain for an ever expanding “sphere of empathy” to quote Noam Chomsky, which included more and more people. The defeat of colonialism relies a great deal on the universalism of liberalism for much of what motivated the relinquishment of domination (of course, most of them fought bitterly to retain control in the face of it). But it is not satisfying, because it is not romantic and triumphant.
So let’s go back to war. Black people are dying every day, in a global holocaust, what does it matter that some millions die in our quest for liberation? It is our country, our revolution! If the people do not side with us, we shall force them to be free! They shall be remade in the fire, and liberate themselves by putting the masters to the sword! Yizwe Lethu!
Tripe. Read your history, people. Try Polyani, for a start.
I think the PAC and BLF guys who say that taking the land requires bloodshed are far more honest than the EFF’s softer pretense of peaceful legal reappropriation. When they talk about instituting slavery as a form of reparation, perhaps out of a dark sense of humour, perhaps out of defeatism I think, “at least some of us will live!”. These people do this shit out of resentment, and frustration at not understanding the institutions of the state; the slow rate of change induces the same impulse one gets when the laptop freezes. Smack it! Maybe it’ll work if you hit it harder.
I’m going to stick to my naive dreams of tolerance and cohabitation, universal rights and keep trying to bridge the little cultural gaps. It’s better than giving up and breaking shit because democracy is hard. What a weak move.