On the 15th
of March Jared Sacks, a journalist and activist, published an article in the
Mail & Guardian asking whether or not Steve Biko, the Steve Biko of 1977,
would have supported Mamphele Ramphele’s recent political initiative. Some
people, including people who had been close to Biko, really liked the piece.
Others, including the well-known public commentator Andile Mngxitama, didn’t
like it at all.
As a
well-known public figure Mngxitama has easy access to the elite public sphere.
He often writes in newspapers, appears on television and speaks at events of
various kinds. But although he has so many platforms from which he can express
his views he has become well known for hurling public insults at people,
including younger black intellectuals and activists, with whom he disagrees.
The insults that he has thrown around have included describing people as ‘CIA
agents’, ‘askaris’, ‘house niggers’ and ‘white supremacists’. In many cases
these insults have very little to do with reality and are just a form of
polemical terror, a way of using labelling and intimidation to shut down debate
and police the lines of what and who is presented as acceptable. This behaviour
is, to say the least, very far removed from the intellectual flourishing that
characterised the Black Consciousness movement in its heyday in the 1970s.
Mngxitama is
certainly not the only figure in our public life that often prefers to try and
intimidate people into silence with insult rather than to engage in real
discussions. In fact this kind of intellectual thuggery, sometimes accompanied
with violence, has often been at the centre of the left in and out of the
ruling alliance. In some cases it has been romanticised in a way that confuses
the intensity of an activist’s macho posturing with the seriousness of their
political commitment. This masculinisation of the idea of political militancy
has often pushed women and men who espouse more gentle forms of politics to the
margins. But in his response to Sacks Mngxitama went beyond the usual polemical
terror and actually issued a public call for violence against Sacks declaring
that "[W]henever we see that little white bastard called Jared Sacks we
must beat the shit out of him ... ". Mngxitama is certainly not the only
public figure to mobilise violent imagery for political purposes. Violent
imagery and posturing have become increasingly common in the political culture
of our elites since Jacob Zuma’s rape trial. It is always dangerous for public
figures to use violent language against imprecisely defined ‘enemies’ – be they
‘criminals’, ‘neoliberals’ or ‘imperialists’. This kind of language aims to
divide society into ‘us’ and ‘them’, good citizens and evil outsiders, in a way
that demands obedience to leaders. It’s also very dangerous for the simple
reason that activists who are breaking no laws can suddenly find themselves
presented as ‘criminals’. In the crude propaganda of politicians like Sidumo
Dlamini or Blade Nzimande people who are critical of Jacob Zuma can suddenly
find themselves presented as ‘neoliberals’, ‘imperialists' or 'CIA agents'.
Every dictatorship is ideologically grounded in this sort of abuse of language.
And every major democratic upsurge across the world and throughout history has
been rooted in a commitment to enabling ordinary people to think and speak for
themselves.
But by
publically calling for violence against a particular individual, a named
individual, Mngxitama crossed a line that no other major figure in our public
sphere has yet crossed. The silence of Jacob Zuma and his backers when there
were calls for violence against Zuma’s accuser in his rape trial was
scurrilous. But even then we did not see public figures go so far as to call
for violence against named individuals. It is clear that the increasing
violence, spying and intimidation by the State, ANC and SACP against dissenters
on the Left or protesters is a dangerous development that must be resisted. But
Mngxitama’s call for violence against a particular person in response to a
newspaper article marks a new moment in the ongoing degeneration of our
commitment to democratic norms. We have no doubt that if it is allowed to pass
unchallenged it will be taken up by others, in and out of the ruling alliance,
in a society in which democratic hopes are already battered by rapidly
escalating political intolerance and violence.
As activists
there is much on which we (Achmat and Pithouse) agree. For instance we have
worked together on campaigns like the struggle against HIV denialism and
pharmaceutical corporations. And we are looking forward to working together on
attempts to build more effective solidarity for Palestine in South Africa. But
there are also many issues on which we disagree. However one of the areas in
which we are in firm agreement is that disagreement needs to be mediated
through rational forms of engagement in which the possibility for mutual
transformation is never foreclosed at the outset of a conversation. For this
reason we are both committed to the struggle to defend and extend our public
sphere, a space where disagreements can be discussed rationally.
We have
both, in quite different ways, passed through forms of politics that imagined
themselves to be emancipatory but which were, in reality, clearly
authoritarian. In Achmat’s case this was a form of Trotskyism within the ANC in
which the group imaged itself to be all knowing. In Pithouse’s case this took
the form of a less formal network organised around a charismatic individual
whose word was law and undergirded with a violent posture. We do not deny the
tremendous value of the knowledge gained through past political affiliations.
But in both of these forms of politics there was very little confidence in the
political capacities of ordinary people and political commitment was measured
by loyalty to the small group rather than success in changing the world. These
kinds of political cultures invariably leave a lot of people damaged,
especially people sincerely looking for paths into a more just future, while
failing, completely - as completely as Mngxitama’s attempts to organise – to
win real victories for real people.
