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Inside a minority economy

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By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

THE criminal attacks on Africans by Africans which have been misnamed ‘xenophobic’ attacks in South Africa require more than rethinking African majority politics.
They require re-organisation of public education, public information and national security institutions.
Above all, they require humility on the part of African leaders and African intellectuals.
What happened in Libya and is happening in South Africa is the enactment of African deflective self-hatred.
It cannot be called xenophobia because it is the least foreign people who are being targeted.
We see the hatred of ourselves as Africans being rationalised as hatred of foreigners. Deflective self-hatred targets those who look exactly like one-self because it is based on internalised self-hatred and feelings of inferiority.
In 2011 leaders of South Africa, Gabon and Nigeria were pushed by their white-created perceptions of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi into ignoring Africa’s position on Libya and voting instead for the economic and geostrategic interests of the US and its NATO allies.
My April 17 instalment cited Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis who wrote that:
“The economy produces people. The production of commodities may be considered of quite minor importance except as a necessary input into people production.”
This means that at the material level, the power of the continuing apartheid economy to produce people has defeated the capacity of the ANC as the ‘revolutionary’ ruling party to produce a new liberated personality and a new consciousness.
The white economy continues to produce and reproduce both the lumpen proletariat and the comprador bourgeoisie which it needs to protect its interests and to make profits.
The unemployed and unemployable degradados of the former Bantustan and former Group Areas benefit from African deflective self-hatred because it enables them to loot the properties of ‘foreigners’.
The comprador elites and their white partners also benefit because the African expatriate workers so targeted and threatened protect themselves by cheapening their labour, by forfeiting the privileges which even less qualified expatriates from Europe and North America are easily afforded.
That is the meaning of The Sunday Mail story on April 19 2015: ‘Zimbabwean professionals in South Africa live in fear’.
When they live and work in fear, they succumb to intimidation and make compromises which cheapen their labour and expertise for individual employers and for the whole system.
They are neither respected nor glorified the way those from the West are often glorified as experts and expatriates.
But it is important to dig deeper.
First, it is not surprising that the most blunt expression of African deflective self-hatred came from King Goodwill Zwelithini of the unreconstructed apartheid Bantustan of Kwa Zulu Natal which was one of the most effective anti-revolutionary instruments of the apartheid regime.
Zwelithini’s utterances were blunt and meant to incite the unemployed and unemployable lumpen against so-called foreigners.
The ideology and prejudices of the white corporate elite have been internalised by the ruling African elite in South Africa against the African revolution and its values.
Examples of the criminal defamation of the African revolution by South African elites include several court judgments in which white judges ruled that former Rhodesian farmers could attach Zimbabwean Embassy properties in that country to compensate themselves for the land which Zimbabwe redistributed to African peasants once dispossessed by the same white farmers.
The ANC Government did not use international law to stop such moves.
In May 2012, Judge Hans Fabricius of the North Gauteng Court criminally defamed Zimbabweans when he ruled that the South African National Prosecuting Authority should enter Zimbabwe to investigate and arrest Zimbabwean officials allegedly involved in election violence in 2008.
After the ouster of former South African President Thabo Mbeki, the new President Jacob Zuma allowed his International Relations Advisor, Lindiwe Zulu, to defame Zimbabwe and its leadership under the guise of mediating disputes between ZANU PF and the MDC opposition.
The attacks became worse when on the eve of Zimbabwe’s 2013 elections US President Barack Obama joined Ms Zulu in attacking Zimbabwe during his state visit to South Africa.
The dithering approach of politicians and security services to the current African-on-African attacks arises from the compromised positions and attitudes of the same African leaders.
Madzimbahwe then began to wonder in 2013 why Obama’s host, South African President Jacob Zuma, remained silent and failed to correct his visitor the way Zuma’s predecessor, former South African President Thabo Mbeki restrained George W. Bush during a similar visit in 2002?
President Zuma’s failure to make Obama respect the position of the African Union (AU) and Southern African Development Community (SADC) on Zimbabwe at the end of June 2013 became even more significant in July 2013, when Lindiwe Zulu embarked on a personal crusade to amplify the Obama position on Zimbabwe against SADC and AU diplomacy and in direct violation of Zuma’s role as SADC mediator in Zimbabwe.
Ms Zulu had been trying for years to style herself as the Condoleezza Rice of South African diplomacy and this time she came across as no different from the former Rhodesians resident in South Africa.
MDC-T and the white-sponsored press inside Zimbabwe praised Ms Zulu for her attacks on SADC and AU diplomacy, for her contempt of the Constitution of the Republic of Zimbabwe and the decisions of Zimbabwe’s Constitutional Court regarding elections.
The Zimbabwe Independent commented on July 26 2013:
“What a breath of fresh air Lindiwe Zulu has been. She is the sort of person we (who?) need now.”
Lindiwe Zulu became so reckless in her attacks on Zimbabwe that on July 21 2013 SADC and the AU forced President Zuma to censure her, revealing in his statement that Ms Zulu even included lies in her statements on Zimbabwe on behalf of the Zuma and Obama.
The meaning of all this is clear:
l The self-hatred among Africans reflects a continental failure of revolutionary and internationalist education. Therefore humility is needed to deal with this scourge.
l Zwelithini represents the local lumpen; Zulu and others the local elite; and Obama and others the Western elite dimensions of the same problem.
l In Zimbabwe the defamation of war veterans and stoppage of the National Youth Service programme represents a similar failure, even though it is not as severe as in South Africa.
l The culture and opinion climate preceding the African-to-African self-hatred and attacks developed and were nurtured over a long time through a white-dominated economy, a white-dominated media, a white-dominated judiciary and Western-sponsored non-governmental organisations (NGOs) purporting to champion human rights.
Therefore economic indigenisation has to be combined with revolutionary education and public information based on the pungwe model, if Africa is to overcome the causes of violence based on self-hatred.

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