I am captioning this article with a rhetorical question with the hope that South Africans or as they are called, white people—especially those who consider themselves to be progressive and revolutionary—will reflect on what they truly represent in this colony. Having interacted with a couple of the “popular” white activists in this country, it is clear that their objectives are based on preserving their place on the pedestal of the colonial domination of Africans by European settlers.
If anyone feels triggered by my assertion, they should help us understand why the white left continue to call themselves South Africans or claim to be fighting for South Africa, when the very existence of this country undermines the freedom and independence of the colonized African nation. Isn’t that the best description of an ironic situation?
If the “whites who love us” (as Sobukwe sarcastically called them), those white activists who claim to be on our side, are honest—why do they never refer to themselves as colonizers? Most of them seem to believe that they are a special type of white people who miraculously descended from the sky bearing no biological and historical ties to the entire parasitic relationship between colonizer and colonized.
On one instance, when we tried to recruit some South Africans to join the Uhuru Solidarity Movement and send them into the white community to win more whites, they expressed their reluctance by suggesting that the other whites would not listen. But the question is, if you could listen and learn, why can’t other whites be taught to do the same? Unless, you believe yourself to be special and better than the rest of the white community. Or perhaps it’s an excuse to avoid the real struggle and choose to continue barking up the wrong tree.
Cynically, much as the white activists believe that other whites cannot be educated, they find it necessary to educate us Africans about the oppression we feel. This is the typical ideological imperialism that Chairman Omali Yeshitela exposed back in the 1970s when he founded the African People’s Socialist Party in Florida, USA.
Right here in South Africa, Bantu Steve Biko made the following observation about the White left: “They vacillate between the two worlds, verbalizing all the complaints of the blacks beautifully while skillfully extracting what suits them from the exclusive pool of white privilege. But ask them for a moment to give a concrete meaningful programme that they intend adopting, then you will see on whose side they really are. The protests are directed and appeal to white conscience, everything they do is directed at finally convincing the white elite that the black man is also a man and that at some future date he should be given a place at the white man’s table”.
In white people’s brains, African people do not have agency. This is the general ideological outlook of all white people whether in South Africa, Europe or New York. It is from this ideological foundation of capitalism aka racism that the U.S. charged Chairman Omali Yeshitela and the APSP with being agents of a foreign government (Russia). Their claim is that as Africans we cannot think for ourselves, that we cannot develop our own program and define our struggle based on our material and spiritual needs.
The most celebrated white leftists excel either in involving themselves in struggles between the neo-colonial African petty bourgeois factions or speaking out against imperialism in general terms. This is instead of getting their boots on the ground to confront colonialism in their illegitimate communities where their cousins continue to enjoy month-long vacations in game reserves while busy on their mobile devices lamenting a “white genocide.”
Indeed, the best of the white leftists are very vocal on the genocide in Palestine, and go to the extent of traveling to Gaza to defend Palestinians–they still have not acknowledged the genocide perpetuated against Africans right here in South Africa today. We stand with the Palestinians, but we oppose the opportunism and hypocrisy constantly demonstrated by the white left of South Africa. Africans who are living below the poverty line with less than 4 percent land ownership are at best referred to as “previously disadvantaged” or “victims of apartheid” as if our problems started with apartheid.
Here is the reality. The main contradiction confronting Africans did not start with apartheid—neither did it end with it. Africans suffer because we have been victims of global white domination for the last 600 years. It is no accident that South Africa has been rated to be the most unequal society in the world. Behind that inequality is the color line—the separation between a white settler population that has for the past 374 years been living at the expense of the majority and indigenous African population who toil and bleed daily without reaping the benefits of our labor and resources.
Globally, the white left hardly talks about colonialism. Yet they are the first to announce the rise of fascism. White people believe that facism is the worst form of the state that can ever emerge out of this system. The same fascism that Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler are notoriously credited for originating in Europe (when white people were oppressing and killing other white people). Under the state of fascism, white people begin to experience a semblance of what African and other colonized people live with on a normal day within the permanent state of the colonial mode of production.
The big question is, therefore, will white leftists willingly subject themselves to function under the leadership of the African working class? As revolutionaries we are optimists and would love to give everyone a fair chance of participating in the forward motion of human society as we historically turn objects into subjects, the oppressed voiceless masses into self determining human beings.
Throughout our colonial history, we Africans have been the objects of history, and now in the 21st century we are shaping the development of human society through revolution and no one can stop us.
In an interview with Jamie Simpson, where he brought up a statement by an American white leftist (Janae Woods) suggesting that there are 12 ways for white people to be allies in struggles for black liberation, African People’s Solidarity Committee Chairwoman Penny Hess explains what a genuine relationship between white activists and the African Revolution should be with this response; “So you have ‘12 ways to be an ally,’ what does that mean, you choose 4 of them or something? That doesn’t change your material relationship to African people. What does change that is a principled stand of solidarity under the leadership of the African revolution.”
Let me close with this quote: “The white left are gonna be those who are LEFT behind.” These are the words of Chairman Omali Yeshitela, the leader of the African Revolution. There is an option though; instead of joining the left or the right, which are wings of the same parasitic bird, white activists can join the Uhuru Solidarity Movement and function in the service of the African working class, the truly and consistently revolutionary social force.
Uhuru!
