EVATON WEST, SOUTH AFRICA–This article seeks to expose the opportunism of the African middle class which has recently been mobilizing against black workers that the South African government has defined as “undocumented” but whom we recognize as merely workers without dompasses. This term was chosen by us to include all colonial and neocolonial legal documents such as the South African identity book/ID and other legal papers as visas. These are a hassle to get unless some white people want you to have them as part of working for them.
Additionally, the word dompass is the proper word for the humiliating document that the South African government made Africans carry in the 1950s to 1980s. It means “stupid/dumb pass,” and it was used as population control, barring Africans from being where whites said we can’t be.
Personalities that are implicated in this opportunistic onslaught are not just neocolonial politicians but influential media personages as well. The U.S. government and the South African conservative bourgeoisie are also a major factor behind this recent attack.
Recently, South Africa has been campaigning to deport, arrest, extort or harass those of us without South African legal documentation—the major targets of this campaign are black workers as it is us most likely unable to afford legal protection from the colonizers’ law, and again, it is us who most likely have no documents as we flee from one colony to the next due to the conditions manufactured by white power.
Chairman Tafarie Mugeri, leader of the African People’s Socialist Party’s Africa Region work has summed up that the black middle class will not face the same kind of humiliation that we do as workers without dompasses. This can be seen in the handling of black hawkers from Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Lesotho by the police in Evaton West, Johannesburg and Sharpeville.
The arguments that the opportunists put forth are as follows :
- There needs to be 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 first argument
Although these arguments are words that have a major impact in the black working class they are the words of the bourgeoisie and their servile, opportunistic black middle class. The black masses are yet to speak in this country. Despite there being so-called “black freedom” since 1994, we as a class still do not have our own consciousness based in our own interests.
All the borders in our Africa are creations of the colonizers as the core ingredient to unify the European economy, politic and identity. In fact, according to Hosea Jaffe’s “A History of Africa”: “Africa became the most important part as the principal arena of European colonialism…and out of this totality arose capitalism and modern Europe itself…”
What this means is that there is a need to keep Africa in the state that it was reduced to in order to continue to feed the colonial mode of production. And so borders, underdevelopment and slavery/trafficking have to be maintained even under so-called black governments.
The popular movement currently chosen to maintain the dispersal of the African Nation, replacing Operation Dudula, is called the March and March and it has been very active this election year, not coincidentally.
Given the criticism of South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa by the current U.S. president Donald Trump, the latter is coalescing with conservative parties here to safeguard imperialist interests. This March and March campaign is also a way to pander to the bourgeoisie of this colony to replace the current neocolonialists with newer, younger and more reactionary ones than the current.
The founder of the March and March movement is Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma who is a white nationalist (she finds darker skinned Africans unsightly but has apologized for having this feeling, not going into what lay at the root of it psychologically). Regardless of her personal stance, below is her movement’s politic quoted directly:
“We exist to protect South African citizens, enforce the rule of law and restore accountability through firm action, responsible governance and the empowerment of communities. Our mission is rooted in fairness, national integrity and a commitment to a future that serves those who call South Africa home.”
The needs of the African working class—if the bourgeoisie becomes more conscious of them than the people themselves—can be used against the class itself ie: the need for order and security or the need to be protected from reactionary things such as drug/chemical warfare and kidnapping becomes weaponized against the very people who are looking for salvation from these things through petty bourgeois campaigns such as the “March and March.”
The bourgeoisie in South Africa is doing this through these black middle class clout-chasers which it is funding for campaigns that align with its own interests. In fact, to prove this, the Democratic Alliance (DA)—which holds prominence in Western Cape—had pushed for a bill that would regulate black people, through passes once again, from coming to that part of our land even within this same colony, and this was in 2015.
The problem with the statements that argue in favor of South Africa against its victims—black people all over the planet earth—is that they assume that the current conditions for South Africa to continue to function are acceptable.
The importance of these borders is the maintenance of the world economy as it stands, and so there is not just the South African/settler bourgeoisie behind this attack but also other imperialists—most notably the United States. The previous year saw U.S. interests become shaky in South Africa, hence Washington called a meeting with their house negro organization, the African National Congress (ANC), to have it reassure allegiance to it, and though Ramaphosa had got away with making a deal with Trump, the conservative sectors within this country have been jointly working on a contingency against the ANC-face of South Africa. The whites or South Africans as they should properly be known, consider themselves the sole natives in our Africa.
Although many of our people on the continent have no sensitivity of what these countries really mean in the political sense, the imperialists know that these borders are an investment into the past and future resources that emerge from our Africa.
It is thus our duty to overturn these charlatans and their organization, as well their narrative, and the building of an African working class consciousness is the key.
