EVATON WEST, SOUTH AFRICA–The June 2026 The Burning Spear article titled “The charlatans of South Africa attack African workers again!” outlined and destroyed three pro-colonial arguments posed by the black middle class and we intend to further challenge the rest of these main arguments.
These were the arguments we last printed:
- “There needs to respect for our country’s borders and its laws”
- “We don’t go to ‘their’ countries and become street vendors or drug pimps”
- “‘South Africans’ cannot get service delivery because there are undocumented black people all over the place.”
The recent violence that has been happening in the ghettos of South Africa has been occurring as a result of the campaign of petit-bourgeois charlatans like Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma’s and her “March and March” campaign which has sought to further disperse our African Nation as an act to help South Africa stay as is—colonial.
Africans all over the world are watching in shame and disgust as this unfolds. And the majority of the black workers in South Africa are against this campaign of reinforcing for dompasses against black people in our own land.
There have been a number of lives lost in the previous month to the recent time based on the March on March campaign which has designated itself as a force to keep South Africa for South Africans (not realizing that that simply means colonizers must have access to our soil and its resources because only white people are legally South Africans by their own historical objective definition).
Of these attacks and murders have been black people with dompasses—so-called South African identity documents—and those of us without them (those of us that this country deems undesirable). This is a sign to show that conservative-type petty bourgeois campaigns like these, outfits which seek to preserve the colonial mode of production and the resultant entities, will always target the colonized population regardless of the cover of law they come with.
This is reminiscent of what the South African government was doing back in the 1970s with the “swart gevaar” (black danger) scare where the white population was rallied in fear against the African population—a lot of our people were kidnapped and killed by the police because of this.
The colonizer, the South African, has always given reasons for why he is colonizing us—at some point he said it is because he is civilizing us, at another he said it’s because of religion, at another he said because darkies are communists and now he is saying it is because we are undocumented!
Chairman Omali Yeshitela reminds us that colonialism is colonialism is colonialism—meaning that we should not nitpick policies and reasons why our colonizers kill and steal from us. We should understand their objective relationship to us as our colonial oppressors.
The second argument—“we don’t go to ‘their’ countries and become street vendors or drug pimps”
This is a false statement because it assumes that these countries are not colonies created by the white colonizers at the advent of scrambling for Our Africa—all the way to the Berlin Conference which pulled the warring white entities together through dividing our land like a giant pie.
Because of this, the countries we are in are created by white people and for white people.
African workers do not often afford to travel to other parts of our own land. In order to do so, there are extreme circumstances which we have to overcome financially and contractually through agreements with the African middle class which is exploitative no matter what country we find ourselves in.
This is why, in Somalia or Malawi, there are middle class organizations which collect us as cheap labor and send us off on errands for the black petit-bourgeoisie and not for ourselves as workers—this is one of the problems we have that have partly resulted to this contradiction we face today.
We, the African People’s Socialist Party, strongly oppose any and all of these so-called countries on the African continent. We denounce all of them and we see them as our structural, objective antagonists. This is why we are opposed to South Africa and its attempts to maintain itself. We say that this country exists at our expense as African people all over the world—not just here.
This brings us closer to why we are selling corn and fruits in the streets of South Africa—we are a people without state power. We have heard arguments from the black, white nationalists of this colony and they have said things like “black people need to go back to their own countries.”
This is a statement that’s glaringly false because of two reasons: a) Africans have no countries even on our own continent and b) we need to create a state of our own—and that is up to us as black workers under the leadership of our own advanced detachment.
The issue of drug trafficking in the black community in South Africa has more to do with the bourgeoisie’s interests—the white settlers are behind it without a doubt. Why do we doubtlessly say this? Because the colony was created by them in order to benefit them. Hence, its maintenance is the responsibility of the bourgeoisie as its beneficiaries.
The story of how the colonial settlers set up a drug economy against our colonized community is prominent in the history of counterinsurgency. It has been written about in many reports from the very perpetrators of those crimes, the agents and police themselves!
And so if there is an accusation of the African working class as having some kind of drug selling relationship, it has more to do with how the white ruling class of South Africa maintains colonialism than it does with us.
The third argument—“‘South Africans’ cannot get service delivery because there are undocumented black people all over the place“
This is one argument that has some truth in it unlike the other two that we have debunked. The truth is that South Africans are the white settlers and thus are indeed inconvenienced by the existence of African people trying to produce and reproduce life.
The settlers have built themselves a life through stealing the land and labor of Africa and African people and they continue to do this today by keeping the masses of our people in the townships (a euphemism for concentration camps).
Only the colonizer population benefits from South Africa—the black, Indian or Chinese people are only able to move up in this society when and if they collaborate with the colonial agenda.
This is why there is neocolonialism all over South Africa—black people who are in governmental office who got there by pledging allegiance to this country.
This is what has been the main push behind the March and March campaign. It is a way to show the white settlers that there are willing blacks who long to serve our colonial oppressors. Of course, doing this will have personal financial benefits.
Having black people documented is not something that is a measure taken by us as a people, even if it is our own people who advocate for it. It is rather something that the real foreigners are doing to Our Africa as a part of population control.
African people who are “legally documented” due to being born here too can never be a priority to this government. A simple proof of this is the reality that Africans have lived in the townships with deplorable living conditions—living in shacks, without plumbing or drinking water.
This is historical evidence that Africans have never been—nor ever will be—South Africans. This means that the argument that we are not getting services in the ghetto because we are saturated is just as nonsensical as the other thousand reasons that the white man has offered up as the basis for why he is oppressing us.
The way forward—join InPDUM in South Africa!
We are calling all African people, especially those of us without dompasses, to join our campaign against the slander and the violence of the South African government and these social media charlatans. We are inviting any and every black person to join the local International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement branches.
Our plan is to have a network of Africans from everywhere and work together to build our own African economy—not this township economy the South African politicians are demanding we fight for.
The economy they speak of is no economy at all—it is just accepting that we should live in these camps while the resources of our land are up for grabs to our colonizers.
The Jacinta Ngobeses of the world find it easier to congratulate Donald Trump for kicking out Africans and Mexicans and emulate him than to recognize the reality of being black—not to mention what our mission should be in this period of history.
It is thus clear that only the African working class can lead us out of this contradiction successfully. We are the only class which has no agenda to maintain the colonial status quo.
There are movements that are opposed to this madness of South Africa; there are pockets all over the colony. But these are great movements that need to coordinate in order to have a real effect, because they too genuinely seek justice for our people rather than the quick fix based on popular white nationalism.
We call upon those forces as well and we put ourselves out there.
We also challenge Jacinta Ngobese Zuma and all of her partners, funders, advocates to a public debate which can be broadcasted all over the world so that the correct position is made known to the people.
Build the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement!
Power in our own hands!
