LONDON, UK—Since the creation of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP), we have never stopped exposing the African National Congress (ANC) and the African petty bourgeoisie in South Africa as white power in blackface.
The pardon granted to the murderer Eugene de Kock is an insult to all African people and those who provided genuine solidarity to the struggle to end white settler colonialism in South Africa.
Alexander de Kock was known as “The Evil Killer.”
What did he do to earn such a horrific nickname?
Eugene Alexander de Kock, 66, was sentenced to two terms of life imprisonment plus 212 years in 1996 after admitting to more than 100 crimes of murder and other crimes of torture and fraud in the late 1980s and 1990s.
But in contrast, the ANC neocolonialist state gave Chris Mahlangu, an African worker who killed the white nationalist terrorist EugeneTerre Blanche over a wage dispute, a life sentence just for killing an oppressor white man who was the head of an organization which violently opposed even ANC neocolonial rule in South Africa during the apartheid years.
Eugene de Kock spent 15 years killing African freedom fighters in Zimbabwe
His murderous career as “Evil Murderer” surely did not start in South Africa.
Eugene de Kock, between 1964 to 1979, joined Ian Smiths forces in Zimbabwe, murdering Africans fighting to be free from while settler colonial domination.
We do not know how many of us he killed in Zimbabwe. Mugabe’s party made a deal, however, with white imperialist rulers at Lancaster House in 1979, which meant that Eugene de Kock and all the other white settlers from Rhodesia and South Africa who killed us in Zimbabwe would never have to worry about paying for their crimes against African people.
He is a co-founder of the infamous “Koevoet” death squads of a counterinsurgency force created to maim, kill and terrorize African national liberation fighters in Namibia.
He never stood trial in Namibia either.
The ANC’s state-led decision to grant a pardon to de Kock, a leading murderer of the now-defunct apartheid regime, should not come as a surprise.
Rather, it is a confirmation that Zuma, Mbeki and the rest of the ANC-led African petty bourgeoisie are social forces dedicated to maintaining the white economic power status quo in South Africa.
Shameless Justice Minister Michael Masutha said:
“In the interest of nation-building and reconciliation, I have decided to place Mr. de Kock on parole,” adding de Kock had expressed remorse over his crimes and assisted authorities in finding the remains of his victims (Lydia Smith, International Business Times, January 30, 2015).
Between 1983 and the fall of the apartheid regime, de Kock was part of C10, a counterinsurgency covert unit which specialized in murdering and brutalizing African anti-apartheid activists, including ANC members, inside South Africa itself.
The ANC state does not prosecute the oppressors but mercilessly hunts down African people who resist neocolonial rule.
The Marikana massacre is just one example.
The task of freeing all African freedom fighters that are still languishing in jails is left to the African working class.
Since liberation is incomplete short of revolution and seizure of power by the African working class, the ANC and the petty bourgeoisie cannot in South Africa open the jails and free the people, and particularly those who refuse to surrender to imperialism by accepting a neocolonial deal.
African freedom fighters twho have refused to surrender to the Truth and Reconciliation Committee are still languishing in jails.
This is inadmissible and unforgivable. Their imprisonment is the clearest indication that the struggle is not over yet.
In South Africa the status quo means that white settlers, regardless of crimes committed against African people, will not go to jail.
The state in South Africa was created as a white settler colonial state to protect European invaders and occupiers against African resistance seeking to push them back into the sea where they came from.
The state was also built in the process of stealing the land and repressing African workers’ resistance against colonial capitalist rule.
The international conference against racism in Durban declared colonialism and slavery as crimes against humanity.
Based on this statement, any serious African government in South Africa has the historical obligation to prosecute those who maimed, murdered and terrorized African people, not just de Kock but the whole white settler colonial leadership of apartheid and their African helpers should be in jail.
Not the freedom fighters.
What about Wouter Basson, Dr. Death, responsible for biochemical war against African people?
He is a free man today thanks to the criminal Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which equated the settler colonial violence of the oppressor white settler colonial nation with the anti-settler colonial violence from the dispossessed and oppressed African people.
Justice is in the overthrow of neocolonial rule
The African petty bourgeoisie in South Africa, like in the rest of Africa have met their objectives: removal of the apartheid regime’s administration ─ the form of white direct colonial rule which prevented them from running the settler colonial administration in South Africa because of the “color of their skin”─ and its replacement by the African petty bourgeoisie or white power in blackface.
African workers seeking justice must stop relying on the ANC and any other organization of the African petty bourgeoisie.
Justice will come about in the fight to overthrow neocolonial rule. This is the way to free all freedom fighters still currently locked up in South Africa.
We need to build our own organization capable of wrestling power from the African petty bourgeoisie everywhere throughout Africa.
The African Socialist International is such an organization.
Forward to African Revolution!
All Power to the Workers!
Build the African Socialist International!
