Black workers must wrest power from the African petty bourgeoisie-white settler alliance for status quo
While rulers from around the world flocked to South Africa to pay their respect to Nelson Mandela—the leader of the African National Congress (ANC) in the fifties and early sixties and first neocolonial black president of South Africa who died on December 5, 2013—the international bourgeois press beamed images of the mourning of Mandela every day for nearly two weeks.
They discussed his significance and legacy in South Africa and in the world.
What happens after the death of Nelson Mandela? Zuma was booed at the funeral ceremony! Who would keep the masses in check?
Despite the anxiousness of the bourgeoisie in losing their faithful partner Mandela, they never hid the immense service he made to white imperialist rulers and societies at home in South Africa and abroad inside of imperialist nations themselves.
This service was exemplified in the compromise Nelson Mandela made when he surrendered the struggle for national liberation and the land of South Africa in exchange for having the apartheid State power handed over to ANC leaders.
The white bourgeois and black petty bourgeois presses cried crocodile tears for their deceased first neocolonial black president. Praises poured in to celebrate the man who “ended” the apartheid regime.
It is imperative that we re-examine for ourselves what one means by the end of apartheid?
It is the inability of white rulers to rule in the old ways due to the strength of African resistance inside South Africa and because direct colonial white rule has collapsed everywhere in Africa—Angola and Mozambique in 1975, Zimbabwe in 1980 and Namibia in 1989.
South Africa’s military was defeated in Cuito Cuanavale at the hands of an alliance of armed forces from Angola and Cuba.
Mandela’s reconciliation without social justice was a compromise of our future with the white oppressors
What is the basis of reconciliation in South Africa?
In the book “The Road to Socialism is Painted Black”, Chairman Omali Yeshitela wrote, “The apartheid system between 1965 and 1970, was hanging an average of 100 Africans a year, almost 500 during the five–year period, or approximately two persons a week.“
It was not based on the truth and social justice! Not the truth of the oppressed.
The truth is that colonialism is a crime against humanity! The apartheid regime was born killing, murdering and brutalizing Africans in a most despicable way!
The truth was that South Africa is made of two nations, the white oppressor nation and the oppressed African nation. The white nation was born as a bourgeois nation, an oppressor nation, a settler nation, a robber, a usurper, a criminal nation.
It is a nation of people who hold on to wealth stolen from the African nation. It is what everyone with a common sense of history recognizes as colonialism.
African people in South Africa were universally recognized as an oppressed people with no right to determine our own future on our own terms. The deal struck by the ANC leaders determined that whatever we do, we must first guarantee the rights of our oppressors; we must first secure the lives of the oppressors.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was built on lie, as they equalized the violence of the foreign invaders and the violence of the indigenous to regain our land and freedom. It held the African freedom fighters who fought to overthrow oppression equally guilty as the police forces of torture. That is not the truth but fraud.
How can you build reconciliation on a system of crimes against humanity or with rulers of a system of crimes against humanity—specifically crimes against the African nation?
The problem didn’t begin nor end with apartheid
The killing started before the creation of the apartheid regime. The murdering of our people started with the theft of our land by white settlers by violently dispossessing us of our birthright: African land.
The real question was the land, not the apartheid, which was the form settler colonialism took in South Africa. The press, the ANC and the white settler nationalists were lying by raising the apartheid superstructures above the land question.
There was no reconciliation between the workers and the imperialist settlers. But there was a compromise between the petty bourgeois ANC and the white nationalist settler bourgeoisie.
The ANC‘s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a compromise between the old white international ruling class and white settler oppressors/exploiters and the new black opportunists, oppressors and exploiters.
It was a compromise between the minority white settler regime and the new minority ANC of the African petty bourgeoisie and its allies of the South African Communist Party (SACP).
Social justice requires the end of settler colonialism and transformation of the country for the benefit of the majority of the people, who are workers and poor people.
Social justice meant payback for stolen resources and pay up time for apartheid rulers for crimes against humanity.
Really, reconciliation begins by the removal of the pedestal of the oppression of the African nation, of which settler colonialism is a part.
Genuine white people must support the struggle to end white domination of the African nation in general, particularly in South Africa, under the leadership of the African working class in alliance with poor peasantry.
Concretely, they must get involved in a struggle for the return of land and all stolen resources to the African working class leadership.
They must have committed support for the black workers’ State power, which is by nature a power against all type of exploitations and oppressions of workers in the world.
Bishop Desmond Tutu and most of the white liberal pundits talked at length of Mandela’s magnanimity and empathy for his white oppressors.
But where is the magnanimity of Mandela and ANC towards African workers?
In 1995, Mandela refused to intervene against the general Sani Abacha’s hanging of Ken Sara Wiwa and the Ogoni 9 in Nigeria who fought against the Shell created ecological disaster in the delta region.
Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Zuma and their ANC are not revolutionaries!
Who was Mandela? Certainly not a revolutionary.
Chairman Omali has often said that if you want understand Mandela, listen to his speeches before he was jailed in 1964 and also when he was released from jail in February 1990.
In his most famous speech, he said, “I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for, and to see realized. But my Lord, if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
Mandela lied because he never fought black domination, there is no such thing as black power on this planet oppressing white people!
Mandela was lying to win acceptance from white oppressors. Black neocolonial rulers are white power in black faces.
Read ANC documents or Mandela’s writings, and if you study the actions of the ANC, you will come to the same conclusion as the African Peoples Socialist Party.
Read Desmond Tutu’s eulogy for Mandela in which he said, ”Can you imagine where South Africa would be today had he been consumed by a lust of revenge, to want to pay back for all the humiliations and all the agony that he and his people had suffered at the hands of their white oppressors ?”
The Chinese revolution’s victory over Japanese occupiers or the Vietnamese victory over U.S. imperialists was not characterized as lust for revenge!
Revolution is progress for humanity! Who is scared of the victory of African workers in occupied Azania? Only parasites who benefit from African workers’ oppression are afraid.
The view of the parasitical capitalist is expressed by Noah Feldman in the December 9, 2013 Bloomberg electronic newsletter:
“On the positive side, if black South Africans could accept the deal Mandela had struck, the country might avoid the flight of whites—and with them white capital—that had happened in other countries on the continent. In the aftermath of morally justified redistribution of wealth, many sub-Saharan countries had found themselves poorer, not richer.’
What this guy is calling capital is the theft of our land and mineral wealth dug out of the soil by our black labor. White capital is the French colonial pact, the theft of our resources by IMF, World Bank, etc.
White settlers fled poverty in Europe, and they found wealth and freedom in Africa.
Desmond Tutu in the same statement described what he called the extraordinary acts of nobility of Nelson Mandela “he walked the talk. He invited his former jailer to attend his presidential inauguration as a VIP guest, and he invited the man who led the State ‘s case against him at the Rivonia trial, calling for the imposition of the death penalty, to lunch at the presidency.”
A lot people argued that Mandela has never sold out, because he never compromised on one person and one vote, to ensure a black majority rule.
The vote is not the starting point. It is only the defeat of the black revolution around the world that has made this argument mainstream.
Genuine revolution by the African working class would destroy the capitalist-colonialist State itself and create a free worker’s State. The right to vote within the same oppressor state system only serves to obscure that the Africans and workers do not really have power. Apartheid was only a form of the capitalist-colonialist state that could no longer serve imperialist white power in the face of an awakened African working class and masses.
Land is the basis upon which every national freedom struggle is fought for. South Africa is no exception.
The emphasis on the voting system is a way for the African petty bourgeoisie, the social class in control of ANC, to mobilize the Africans masses to vote to keep them in power. Once the masses have voted, they are out of sight for another five years.
As long as the people have not achieved independent organization and ideological capacity, the ANC, SACP, the Coalition of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the African petty bourgeoisie leaders are not concerned about facing the wrath of the revolutionary workers and their revolutionary consequences.
The ANC and the international white liberal imperialism wanted an end of the apartheid system, the form of repression the settler colonialism system imposed on that part of the African nation.
The ANC and the imperialist press denounced apartheid, but were quiet on the foundation of apartheid, the theft of our land since 1652—of which 87 percent remains in the hands of the minority white settlers today.
Any genuine African leader must be judged on their practical struggle to get our land back from the white settlers.
White rulers and white people in general in South Africa and around the world know why they love the ANC and Mandela: they gave away our land and undermined the struggle for African national liberation.
The article by Noah Feldman expresses the conscious and calculated self-serving participation by white leaders against the African nation to secure results that maintain imperialist control of our oppressed nation.
The bourgeois press and the African petty bourgeoisie ignored Biko and Sobukwe
The question of land is absent for nearly all of the reporting on the mourning of Nelson Mandela. If they dare to talk about it, it is done in an obscure way.
However, the land question is the most crucial aspect of the uncompleted national liberation struggle in South Africa.
Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe split from the ANC because he could not agree with the ANC leaders that Africa belongs to all who live on it. The land of Africa, according to ANC belonged to settlers because they live on it.
It was Sobukwe’s Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) that launched the civil disobedience actions that plunged the apartheid regime into crisis with the Sharpeville Massacre, from which they never recovered politically or diplomatically.
It became an entrenched fact in world opinion that this massacre was an exemplification of the barbarity of the apartheid regime.
Sobukwe, unlike the ANC, believed in the connection and common future of the African struggle, as he subscribed to the vision of Kwame Nkrumah of one “Africa! One Nation!” which the African Socialist International pursues today.
It is under the leadership of Sobukwe that the slogan “Izwe Lethu I Afrika”—“Africa is our land” in Zulu—was coined.
It is under the leadership of Steve Biko that a new generation of young people burst on the scene of African resistance against the white settler regime, accelerating its demise.
The ANC reconciled with those who murdered Biko and Sobukwe without getting justice for them and all those who were killed like them.
South Africa key to liberation and unification of the African nation
Since 1994, the ANC has been in charge of the alliance between the African petty bourgeoisie and the white settlers, but increasingly, there are other African petty bourgeois leaders and organisations that are jockeying for position.
They aspire to evict the ANC from the driver’s seat and become the new partners of the white settlers. They include trade unions, ANC splinter groups and others.
The ASI, because it is centered in the African working class, is the organization to complete the vision of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe to complete the African revolution and unify Africa and African people into one African nation.
The ANC Freedom Charter and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission were acts and projects of the African petty bourgeoisie seeking acceptance from imperialism. These are sell-out projects.
The ASI is the project of the worldwide African working class to end parasitic capitalism. This is the black worker power project to redeem, free and unite the African nation.
Hold Up Steve Biko, Kwame Nkrumah, Lumumba, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X and Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe!
No Compromise! No Sell-out!
Smash Neocolonialism!
