12/6/2009 2:00:00 PM
THE moralistic condemnations that follow each
episode of negrophobia – mistakenly named xenophobia – needs to make way for
explanation.
All the explanations to date have failed to answer the key
question: Why the orgy of violence for so little when there is so much to fight
for?
A related question is: Why are only black
“foreigners” targeted? What we see is in fact the outcome of the creation of the
black as a subjugated non-being by the long period of racist colonisation.
The
350 years of white domination have reduced blacks to the status of sub-humans
who wallow in deep darkness and have lost a sense of the self.
As Steve Biko said: “The white system has
produced throughout the world a number of people who are not aware that they too
are people”.
The fundamental problem is the “unpeopleness” of black South
Africans, from the black squatter up to the politicians.
Blacks are the creation of whites. Modern Africa is a creation of
whites. In the specific case of South Africa the creation of the black is
associated with land dispossession, Christianisation and turning Africans into
mere workers.
Cecil John Rhodes, one of the brutal colonialists, made it clear
back then that blacks couldn’t be allowed to own land and cows because “in the
future nine-tenths of them will have to spend their lives in daily labour” –
basically working for whites.
This is an important issue to consider because we take it for
granted that to work in order to live is a natural state of affairs.
The truth
is we were made workers after being violently dispossessed of our land and black
souls.
What the above shows is that you can make people into what you want
them to be over time. Blacks have forgotten that they own this country, its land
and wealth. T
hey have accepted their position as workers, hence most of the
so-called xenophobic attacks have been directed at those who are perceived to
be stealing our jobs.
What is even more troubling is that the jobs we are
prepared to kill for are the worst-paid jobs. The people of De Doorns are
expelling Zimbabweans so that they can have seasonal farm jobs. This is slave
labour.
These same people have never taken any meaningful action to demand
land for themselves or to share in the local economy, which is owned by whites.
The problem is we have accepted a “workers consciousness” not a black
consciousness, which would be a repudiation of the worker identity, an identity
of subjugation.
Those who know have tried to understand how consciousness is
formed. If we say blacks have over time accepted their position of inferiority
that means they can’t think out of this reality.
Karl Marx has argued that “life determines consciousness”. If this
is true then we have a part explanation for what seems to be the irrational
behaviour of black against black for nothing.
Your circumstances determine who you are. The sense of inferiority
is not just a psychological state. It is produced and reinforced by the material
reality.
That is why whites are never amakwerekwere. They are employment
creators and investors. They give us life. How could we not think of them as
superior?
Let’s take a crude analogy. Hunting dogs catch prey for their owner
and then enter into dog fights over the bones thrown to them by the lazy owner.
The dogs never revolt against the owner.
Luckily for humans our minds can be aroused to higher consciousness
and we can begin to ask questions of our conditions, what Biko has called Black
Consciousness.
Without this consciousness it doesn’t help even if you have the
vote and declare yourself liberated – your mind is still that of a slave.
Your
thinking remains that of a happy hunting dog. To live you fight for bones!
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