‘I do not want to South Africa anymore; I want to Azania’ (Makhafula Vilakazi in Words).
The deadly resurgence of the ridiculous black-on-black violence that advances white supremacy in South Africa in the form of the so-called xenophobic attacks on fellow Africans is one of the powerful indictments against the poisonous idea of South Africa. The fundamental point of departure is that ‘xenophobia’ is not a problem in South Africa but a problem of South Africa itself. In other words, we must think deeply about the relationship between violence and South Africa. What is this thing called South Africa? Why and how did white foreigners create South Africa? At the core of the idea and the material reality of South Africa is white settler colonialism in the form of land dispossession and intellectual warfare in the sense of the attempt to falsify the consciousness of African people in the southern tip of the continent of Africa. The originary violence of conquest of the Indigenous people and their land since 1652 by the Dutch and British settlers (white foreigners) who are not regarded as foreigners today by self-hating and cowardly ‘black South Africans’ who are expelling their African brothers and sisters laid the foundation for South Africa. In other words, the white violence against black bodies and their land is at the heart of the emergence and existence of South Africa. It is in this sense that the real South Africans are white settlers and their junior partners in the white settler colonial project called Indians who are also not regarded as foreigners by these desperate fictional ‘black South Africans’. This is even though these Indians have inflicted violence on the same ‘black South Africans’ who never retaliated but are attacking their fellow Africans. It is in this sense that ‘black South Africans’ are nothing but confused cowards and self-hating fools. But where do these ‘black South Africans’ come from? We know where white foreigners (white South Africans) these ‘black South Africans’ fear and love come from. The simple answer is that they both come from Europe and its racist imagination with the power to violently concretize itself into reality.
It is important to outline the inextricable connection between white-on-black violence and the creation of South Africa. This is to foreground the idea that South Africa and South Africans cannot be separated from violence both in terms of history and identity. There is no South Africa(n) without violence. South Africa and its identities of white South Africans (the real South Africans) and ‘black South Africans’ (fictional) are inextricably connected to white-on-black violence and today black-on-black violence against all Africans. This is why anybody who takes up the South African project will have to engage in violence to materialize and reinforce it. The end (objective) of South Africa was the creation of a white unity through a white bond between Dutch and British settlers based on violence against the bodies and land of blacks. It is in this sense that the delusional ‘black South Africans’ are replicating this violent bond through violence against their African brothers and sisters.
The first violent South African project as the materialization of white settler colonialism took the form of a Dutch republic called the South African Republic of 1852. This is a white republic based on the violent dispossession of the land of the Indigenous people and their violent exclusion through white supremacist constitution that excluded the people who today call themselves black South Africans. This South African Republic was not only based on the violence of land dispossession since 1652 but also tribal violence between the Dutch and British settlers that resulted in the so-called Great Trek. This Trek which began in the Cape colony created by the British since 1806 has continued to another British white settler colony called the United States. The so-called white refugees are still trekking to find their imaginary ‘fatherland’. The absurdity of being an ‘Afrikaner’ outside Africa is the height of the delusion of white settler colonialism as a global project of white supremacy.
The second South African project emerged in 1910. The fundamental reason behind this 1910 iteration of the South African project was to suspend the tribal violence between the two white tribes to redirect it at the dispossessed blacks. The cowardly and self-hating blacks engaging in Operation Dudula are reenacting the melancholic wish fulfillment to be part of this only South African project they are familiar with. This is because this South African project was also based on the violence of land dispossession and exclusion of all blacks from South African citizenship. The Union of South Africa created in 1910 was a union of two violent white tribes to create real South Africans. This union was preceded by the Anglo-Boer wars that resulted in the intramural violence between these two camps of white supremacy. So, a common white South Africa thus, white South African as an identity were created at the expense of blacks who were excluded both legally and ontologically. The Peace Treaty of 1902 in Vereeniging symbolizes the temporal suspension of intramural violence between violence-prone and war-obsessed white savages. The Union of South Africa was based on the extramural violence in the form of white-on-black violence to advance the interests of white supremacy of and in South Africa. This white-on-black violence was used to preserve white life at the expense of black life. Today black-on-black violence is deployed to destroy black life to preserve white life. This is the essence of the violence of South Africa and South Africanism. South Africa and South African were created by white foreigners on the backs of all Africans, the natives of the continent of Africa. The condition of possibility of South Africa and the identity South African is violence and exclusion. South Africa and South African are not redeemable but are so rooted in violence and exclusion that they can only be weaponized to replicate their origin and logic.
The making of this racist State of South Africa entailed the economic exploitation of all Africans through the migrant labor system spearheaded by the Chamber of Mines and the legal and ontological exclusion of all Africans in southern Africa from citizenship in the racist State. It is in this sense that South Africa is a Whiteman’s country to this day despite the cringeworthy over-compensatory performance of delusional black South Africanism. South Africa was created by violent white supremacist devils for white devils. Only the end of South Africa itself can eradicate the intramural violence in the form of black-on-black violence. The transformation of this intramural violence to an extramural violence directed at these white devils can bring an end to South Africa. To preserve African life Africans must unite to destroy white life. This is the historical dialectic of white-on-black and black-on-black violence at the core of the South African project. This triadic dialectic commenced as white-on-black violence in 1652 to black-on-black violence especially today; thus, it must now transition to black-on-white violence to advance the interests of all Africans.
The origins of the identity black South African can be traced to the desire for recognition and integration by blacks who were excluded by South Africans (white) from the Union of South Africa in 1910. Since the reemergence of this South African project in 1910 to 1996 there was never such thing as a black South African. All the constitutions of the South African project have always excluded blacks from the category of a human being and citizen. But the fundamental exclusion of all blacks is ontological. The legal exclusion through the constitutions from 1910 to 1996 is a mere reinforcement and formalization of the fundamental ontological exclusion based on race and racism. The race and racism at core of white settler colonialism since 1652 have eventuated in the logic of white superiority and black inferiority at the heart of the South African project. With the emergence of the Union of South Africa there was the convergence of ontology and law. In other words, the whites who have always been regarded as human because they are not black automatically became legal subjects within the white nation called South Africa. This is the racial foundation and essence of South African law. Being human is the condition of possibility for being a legal subject with abstract rights contained in the Bill of Rights and the constitutions of white settlers. Blacks only became South African (in the legal but not ontological sense) with the passing of the constitution of 1996. A black South African is a legal category but not an ontological being and reality. The law of the same white settlers who never regarded blacks as human like them will never suddenly change them into human beings in the eyes of white settlers. Because of the fundamental lack of ontological weight in the racist political ontology of white settlers black South Africans will remain legal fictions within South Africa. Black South African violence against fellow Africans is a cowardly and foolish attempt to transform this legal fiction into an ontological reality. In other words, it is this ontological density in the eyes of whites that blacks lack and are trying hard to bring into existence through violence against themselves (people who look them) that is at the core of violence of black South Africanism against fellow Africans.
The fundamental problem is the lack of ontological weight in the eyes of whites and their junior partners such as Indians that is behind the inferiority complex and self-hatred among black South Africans. Black is not human while South African is a racial legal category of citizenship. How do you bridge this gap between black and South African is the permanent dilemma of black South Africanism. It was white (human) South Africanism (white citizenship) that crated this permanent dilemma of black South Africanism. White nationalism, a form of racial solidarity of all white settlers behind the Union of South Africa created this bond between human (white) and citizen (South African). But this white bond is parasitic on black exclusion otherwise it plunges into conceptual incoherence and collapse. Blackness negates the humanity of black South Africans and trivializes citizenship in the eyes of whites and their junior partners. This is why black South Africans are citizens but still monkeys (Sparrow was just caught expressing this white truth) in the eyes of whites and Indians who inflict violence on them daily. By inflicting violence on fellow Africans who look like them black South Africans hope that they will be regarded as more human than these Africans thus, bridge the gap between blackness and South African citizenship. But this is an impossible and futile project which can only lead to collective suicide. This is why these black South Africans end up killing each other confusing themselves for fellow Africans! South Africa is nothing but violence, thus if you take it to its logical conclusion, you will be left with no South Africa(n). Only white nationalism as spearheaded by the likes of Jan Smuts (one of the founders of the Union of South Africa) and his successors-in-title has thus far prevented this inevitable collapse of South Africa into nothingness. After all it took the immense violence of land dispossession and the Anglo-Boer wars to create South Africa to deal with the ‘native question’ through inflicting more violence by killing blacks. South Africa is nothing but a bond between white settlers to suspend their intramural violence through extramural violence against all Africans. Due to the innate and internecine tribalism among the white settlers South Africa was never inevitable and is always unstable. Without white unity South Africa was never possible. South Africa came into being through the violence of white nationalism. Thus, South Africa has nothing do to with Africans except the sucking of life-endowing African blood by white vampires. South Africa is a racist white fiction created for white self-preservation through parasitic violence. White settlers deployed immense violence against Africans to bring this fiction of South Africa and South African into being. Black South Africans are replicating this logic of violence inherent in the South African project to transform the legal fiction of being South African citizens into an ontological reality (being human like whites and not like other Africans) in the eyes of the white South Africans. The victims of this two-pronged violence are Africans.
The so-called government of national unity is an attempt by white nationalists in the Democratic Alliance (white South Africans) and the African National Congress (behind the original desire by blacks since 1912 to be part of white South Africa) to prevent the collapse of South Africa into nothingness. Instead of accelerating this inevitable collapse into its original nothingness of violence, ‘black South Africans’ are inflicting violence on their fellow Africans. We saw this with the spectacular performance of ‘South Africa first’ by black South Africans (mimicking jingoistic right wing white nationalism in the US) who united across party lines to ‘save South Africa’ from foreigners (not whites!) but in fact from itself (collapsing into the nothingness of its original violence of whiteness). The same way it took immense violence (land dispossession and genocide) to create South Africa it will take immense violence to maintain it. The question is who will be the victim of this parasitic violence of keeping South Africa alive? For cowardly ‘black South Africans’ it should be Africans while for vicious white settlers and their junior partners it has always been all Africans (of course including ‘black South Africans’).
But how should Afrikans bring an end to this South Africa that relies on parasitic violence against them to sustain itself? To respond to this fundamental question regarding the nature of the struggle, we must foreground a significant postulation that the intramural violence among blacks is indicative of the disastrous failure of the white and black liberal tradition behind the so-called new South Africa. The triumph of liberal and Charterist nonracialism as embedded in the current white settler constitutional democratic order through the collaboration of white liberals and ‘black nationalists’ who ceded ideological and intellectual leadership to their ‘friends of the natives’ has eventuated in the marginalization of the Africanism of Anton Lembede and Azanianism of Robert Sobukwe and Steve Biko. The traitorous assassination of the Azanian political tradition by both white settlers and treacherous native informants within the Charterist tradition in the 1980s, has unfortunately contributed to the marginalization of political visions that entailed the end of South Africa. Lembede in the 1940s formulated the political philosophy of Africanism. As an intellectual formulation of the African radical tradition, Africanism was rooted in the battle-cry of Africa for the Africans. Lembede’s Africanism was embedded in Garveyism that became predominant in the 1920s. One of the fundamental political ideas of Garveyism is the vision of Africa for the Africans, those at home and abroad. For Lembede the nature of the struggle for Africans in South Africa but not of South Africa was not their assimilation into white South Africa but the creation of a New Africa based on Africa for the Africans. Thus, this vision rooted in the African radical tradition entails the destruction of South Africans and South Africa.
This is because the fundamental objective of the African radical tradition is the negation of Western civilization and culture and South Africa is its highest epitome. It is in this sense that there will be no ‘black South Africans’ who dissociated themselves from fellow Africans by embedding themselves in the absurd South African exceptionalism rooted in the anti-Africanism of whites and Indians. Sobukwe on the other hand naively diluted the idea of Africa for the Africans through the idea of the African tree which seeks to absurdly converted and integrated these whites and Indians as Africans. Despite this fundamental flaw this metaphor of the Azanian political vision entails the reintegration of Africans in South Africa into the continent of Africa as a whole. Lembede’s New Africa and Sobukwe’s Azania entail the end of South Africa and the rejection of the identity of black South African. Black South Africans are saved from South Africa and became African. The success of these African radical political visions meant that there would not be the distinction between black South Africans and other Africans at the heart of the so-called xenophobic attacks. It is in this sense that the rampant resurgence of black-on-black violence is indicative of the dangerous marginalization of the African radical tradition of Lembede and the Azanian political tradition of Sobukwe. The assassination and marginalization of the Africanist Movement by the Charterist movement and its wily white liberals is behind the homicidal psychopathology of black South Africanism and its suicidal anti-Africanism rooted in self-hatred and cowardice. Only the revolutionary vision of Poqo can save us from South Africa and its anti-African ridiculous anomalies. Africans in but not of South Africa urgently need a chimurenga based on the battle-cry of Africa for the Africans to bring an end to South Africa and restore New Africa. This New Africa based on Pan-Africanism and African socialism will embody the final resolution of the land and national question that is at the core of cowardice and self-hatred among Africans in South Africa against their fellow Africans.
“Look at us, we have been here before. Long before others came to our shores. Long before other conquerors came” (Don Mattera in Azanian Love Song).
Masilo Lepuru
African philosopher and founding director of the Institute for Kemetic and Marcus Garvey Studies (IKMGS)
