This week’s issue is written by Asa Anpu, the Secretary General of the African People’s Socialist Party – Occupied Azania
#Gender Based Violence
#Return of the Death Penalty
#EFF Presser
#BLF, Pan Africanism and Opportunism
#SAPS Vs The People in Johannesburg
Gender based violence: It is colonial violence!
In the previous weeks, an exposure of ongoing, historical violence and murders of black women has once again surfaced to South Africa’s media.
Early this week, an African woman, Uyinene Mrwetyana, a university student, was killed by an African man in a post office at Cape Town.
This sparked country-wide mourning, primarily led by students and feminist organizations.
Neocolonialist, Graca Machel, who functions as the chancellor of the university the brutalized sister went to, said that the problem is that women ‘are raising killers’—a statement that is factual but does not offer a solution.
Should women not give birth to males anymore? She is speaking from a position of powerlessness just like any other neocolonialist.
Speaking of which, neocolonial president Cyril Ramaphosa spoke on the issue and said that he would discuss bringing a State of Emergency and policing even more intensely violations of women and children —something that has taken the mourning students to a position of submission and took away their righteous anger.
Imagine that; South Africa removing the brutality which it is built upon—that would be suicidal!
However, the majority of students and the petty bourgeoisie really believe that the scientific relations of production in human society do not matter when it comes to hopes and laws.
Although gender activists mobilized as speakers for women, their folly was that they missed the mark—there is no such thing as women in general, as sister comrade President Yejide Orunmila has shown us through her revolutionary leadership.
To say that women are just women is to liquidate the contradictions emergent from colonialism.
They mean that the black women living inside corrugated tin while raising infants are having the same relationship to the world as a white woman raising her baby in the comfort of wealth and walls afforded by colonial violence and plunder.
This is opportunism, meeting short term interests of a few at the expense of the masses!
Black women have been brutalized not because ‘men are trash’ but because colonialism is built on the murder, rapes and brutality against black women!
The black men in our communities are born and educated through this relationship as a matter of politics and survival on all levels.
Africa was not hostile to African women until a world economy was born from the attack on where Africans are from, African women!
We have been attempting to build an understanding with African women through our own contingent organization, ANWO (African National Woman’s Organization) which is an organization that wins African women to go beyond feminist integration with white power to arming sisters to cut the head of the colonizer and any Negro neocolonialist pig putting his hands in the direction of our sisters and daughters.
Return of the death penalty
South Africa’s petty bourgeois feminists, as a response, have called for a return of the return of the death penalty to males who commit sexual violence. This had a loud clamor from the mourning students.
Our movement would like to break down the science behind the whole thing.
The death penalty is South Africa/imperialism’s tool for law enforcement, historically.
So what is the law and who decides what is legal? The law is the opinion of the ruling class; a class which is AGAINST the oppressed, colonized black women and their children as well as their men.
This is the reason South Africa historically always gave the penalty to African people for different reasons at different times.
The death penalty was abolished as a concession in trying to tone down African resistance against the South African government during its apartheid form.
The death penalty is simply an attack on the African community, nothing else!
The return of the death penalty was a call that came from white women and the black petty bourgeoisie because of their inability to see the African working class, whose blood they bathe and live from.
Africans in the townships, ekasi, face the death penalty every time we do anything because the country SOUTH AFRICA IS BUILT THROUGH THE DEATH OF AFRICAN PEOPLE.
This is why African women, children and men are filling up the prisons or funeral halls in South Africa every day.
The horizontal violence that we are seeing occur to Africans from Nigeria and other parts of Africa outside of the South African colonial borders is part of the process of South African law—it is the death penalty.
The murders of African people in the Cape flats are part of this same process.
In fact, even before neocolonialism, South Africa had put to death African people for many countless reasons, i.e. being at a place without a ‘DOM pass’, speaking this African dialect instead of the other allocated to that area, looking at white people in the face, etc.
EFF presser
The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), on September 5, 2019 in Johannesburg held a press conference in response to the ongoing horizontal violence; Julius Malema called for the tightening of the South African State.
Malema criticized the African National Congress (ANC) for not arming the police adequately, given that two police were shot dead yesterday morning in Cape Town.
Malema responded also to the issue around Africans from outside the border being attacked by Africans from inside the border—he referred to his party’s referendum on this matter, suggesting that borders be regulated more and ironically saying that the borders are colonial inventions.
Julius Malema, president of the Economic Freedom Fighters
The reason he is quibbling on this question is because Malema and the EFF are not scientists, they are detached from the class contradictions of African people in the ghettos—otherwise they would understand that the South African government is still a colonial government no matter what political party sits at the helm.
The EFF is much like any radical petty bourgeois organization, it does not believe that the people can be trusted with political theory and discourse and rather it seeks to keep leadership in the petty bourgeois class of the African nation—we have attended and saw many rallies by the EFF, ANC, DA and other white nationalist organizations and yet we have no history of political education or even a culture of it; leaving the masses of people depending on Malema as the only person capable of understanding political questions.
This is our criticism of the brother—he is not a scientist nor is he an educator, but he is a charming, fiery speaker—something African workers have had a problem with throughout this whole century.
African workers do not need you to tell us what your opinions are about our problems, we need theory, scientific philosophy born out of our day to day struggle to overturn South Africa.
This is why the Uhuru Movement functions with the value of political education above charisma and rhetoric.
Real revolutionaries believe that the poor, hungry sisters and brothers in the townships can get it.
That’s what revolutionaries Biko and Sobukwe did throughout their lives and that is whom we must emulate today in the struggle against imperialism and capitalism.
BLF, pan Africanism and opportunism
The Black First Land First (BLF) has recently released a statement about the issue of horizontal violence, incorrectly terming it ‘afrophobia’, in contention with the EFF’s term which is just as unscientific, ‘xenophobia’; however this is not the major error committed by the organization.
Andile Mngxithama, the leader of this organization has been disqualifying African national identity in his letter towards this crisis, referring to African people as foreign nationals and agreeing that there is a need to regulate the borders.
His reason however is that the white capitalists inside South Africa are opening up borders because they are creating a reserve of cheap labor, but before the end of the apartheid form of South Africa, did white capitalists not keep Africans in the ghettoes as cheap labor still?
Aren’t we still in the ghetto and unemployed even more so today? The African masses living in the ghetto does not really know the difference between an African from here and an African from there until our national and class enemies point it out.
What the BLF has been running away from is a discussion on neocolonialism and its relationship to capitalism.
Contrary to what the white Left (Marxists, so-called socialists etc.) might have us believe, capitalism did not produce imperialism; it is imperialism that produced capitalism.
I say that in order to say that historically, capitalism then gave birth to neocolonialism.
This is why neocolonialists refuse to open up the discussion of class within the African nation.
It is because they are doing what brother Bantu Biko said about them, the black middle class is only incensed at the white man only to that extent that he wants to entrench himself in his position.
This is what the radical black petty bourgeoisie wants and this is the ideological basis underneath Pan Africanist organizations such as the BLF and EFF.
They oppose the white man only on a skin-deep level, but in truth, they don’t want to destroy his foundation, which is a pedestal made of the African working class being enslaved and brutalized to this day.
I can easily tell you that the radical sector of the ANC is pushing the BLF to give the white man hell for the fulfillment of the above program, which is why the organization defends neocolonialists like Zuma etc.
But we are armed with theory and we want the masses to join us in identifying the material basis for opportunism for the black middle class so that when they betray us, we know falsifiable signs that anyone can point to.
This is the value of African Internationalism.
SAPS versus the people in Johannesburg
In the last issue of the Azania Weekly Rap, we spoke about the South African State as being the force behind the attacks on African people who are said selling ‘counterfeit goods’ as hawkers
However, this attack warranted the heavy resistance from African workers from outside this border, hitting the police back for their brutality and pushing them back.
Basically, the enemies of the people bit off more than they could chew and then their handlers in response spread the false national identity of ‘South African police attacked by Nigerian criminals’ – rallying up the uninformed black masses in the townships in defense of the colonial State.
This resulted in horizontal violence within the inner city of Johannesburg and surrounding townships, seeing African run stalls destroyed and stripped should the Africans happen to be from outside the border.
Although this has happened, the blowback that the State is facing is that the people are now attacking the white corporations i.e. Shoprite, PicknPay etc.
Now, all of a sudden the South African Police Service (SAPS) are “trying to stop the looters” and changed their language from calling African people foreigners to “protecting investors in South Africa.”
Our position as the African People’s Socialist Party is simple: We are opposed to South Africa and no matter what it does or says, its existence is antagonistic to our existence and development.
We are opposed to the existence of the colonies that African people are being kept in under siege: Nigeria, Somalia and every other so-called African “country.”
This is because we recognize their nature and historical trajectory in keeping capitalism alive through being neocolonialist entities.
And so we condemn the SAPS. The only thing that is illegal in Africa is colonial-capitalism and its states!
All power to the people! Black Power to the African community!
Uhuru
#Defend African Women! #Don’t Arrest Me; Arrest the Police! #One Africa One Nation! #Smash Neocolonialism
