by Siphokazi Magadla, Thought Leader
The
advent of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) has gained much attention as the
first clear reconfiguration of youth politics in post-apartheid South Africa.
Much has been discussed about the policies proposed by “Commander-in-Chief”
Julius Malema and his commissars, especially those regarding nationalisation
and the appropriation of land. While there has been some discussion about the
significance of the red beret, there has been little discussion about the
significance of the military nature of the language used by the EFF. This
language is important in the South African context because it demonstrates the
extent to which “peace” in South Africa is evidently militarised peace.
This
language arises despite efforts at the national leadership level to move the
country away from the battle-centric conceptions of the fight for liberation
that influenced, for example, the ANC’s call for a “people’s war” during
apartheid. Post-apartheid South Africa however has been symbolised by a different
kind of “revolutionary”, one who marches into the site of “combat” in shiny
designer suits — lest we forget, for instance, former president Thabo Mbeki
being labelled as the “Gucci revolutionary” of the African Renaissance. This
moment in which Malema and company invite South Africans to throw off the
designer garments (albeit momentarily) for the “real” uniform of the guerrilla,
must therefore be taken seriously.
There
has been considerable symbolic recognition of the importance of the armed
struggle in the fight against apartheid. At times this has eclipsed the
recognition given to the non-militarised forms of struggle, such as the trade
union movement, the Black Consciousness Movement or the United Democratic
Front, all of which are widely understood to have been more effective modes of
struggle. However South Africa’s transition has been less clear in the support
given to ordinary military veterans. The transition is cryptically caught
between being defined as a peaceful “miracle”, while simultaneously showing a
distressing failure to account for the thousands of military veterans who feel
they are the excess of democracy. A few years ago Susan Cook made the case that
the profile of the South African military veteran presents us with two
extremes, and these are “a handful of heroes and patriots like Chris Hani, and
the rest — the walking wounded — depressed and violent men [and women] unable
to overcome the traumas of combat and the institutions of war”.
In
the aftermath of apartheid it appears the beret has been exchanged for the
designer suit. In our economic climate this has meant that only a few men and
women like the Motsepe’s, Ramphele’s and Ramaphosa’s, are eligible to enter the
battlefront against “imperial forces”.
In
this context therefore berets are certainly a far cheaper way for ordinary
people to join in the battle for economic liberation. The choice of the EFF to
replace the suit not with a T-shirt but with a beret tells us the new party’s
views of revolution remain restricted in a way that continues to privilege
military power as signalling “real” transformative power. The beret places the
soldier at the top of the hierarchy in how we think of revolution instead of
offering new and interesting ways in which we can think about revolution
without emphasising military cultures that we now know to be problematic. We
know, for instance, that military language is not comfortable with complexity
but relies on binaries of “friend or enemy”.
This
language is useful to the extent to which it makes it easier to draw the lines
of combat, in this case the white-owned mines, the farms and the banks being
the site of combat. The problem with this approach is that due to the
penetration of these same places by several Gucci-wearing black “revolutionaries”
since 1994, the EFF guerrilla will now have to redefine the “real” enemy and
whether ultimately the designer-wearing revolutionary is in “bed” with the
larger revolution. It is these complexities that make military language a
particularly blunt instrument in accounting for these new ambivalent “threats”.
Stephen
Ellis’s book published last year, External Mission: The ANC in Exile 1960-1990,
paints a particularly disturbing and piercing picture of the ANC, but it is one
example that shows how military language can be used to undermine a commitment
to democratic values in situations where cadres are easily eliminated in the
battle as “collateral damage”.
This
“friend versus enemy” language of the military is severely stretched in this
context. The EFF guerrilla entering combat against “enemy agents” known as
“white monopoly capital”, located not only in the mines, farms and banks, but
all over the world must also at the same time reconcile with some blacks whose
livelihoods are intimately attached to the workings of white monopoly capital.
Unlike the 1980s when the black majority was incited into making the state
ungovernable, it would be pretentious to assume that such language captures the
intricacies of this political moment even though black people still for the
most part remain outside of the mainstream economy. This particular context has
far more layers to it which demands a nuanced understanding that does not rely
too heavily on binaries. At the outset it matters that the government is no
longer a “hippo”-driving Boer, but is now largely run by blacks.
The
manifesto of the EFF concludes awkwardly by making a special appeal to the
security forces that they are not the enemy. This is because the rebirth of the
warrior citizen sets up a scenario where the self-appointed commanders in chief
have placed themselves in a situation where they have to re-assure the current
security forces that the EFF guerrilla is not seeking to replace the existing
soldier. This is one of the examples that speak to the complicated nature of
the military language used by the EFF and the operational “battleground” they
find themselves in.
The
return to the warrior citizen is also interesting and concerning because
feminists have long argued that the military has a “profound dependency on
maleness”. When at this time the men of EFF call us to battle, we must wonder
what this implies for the relationships between men and women.
The
party’s “gender and sexuality question” says nothing about the need to
transform violent masculinities in South Africa. It rather makes the case that
economic liberation will deliver both genders, especially women, from present
white and black patriarchal tyranny. This framing of gender, which is actually
just reduced to the “empowerment” of women while saying very little about the
need to seriously reconfigure current masculinities, assumes that economic
liberation is the cure for patriarchy. The EFF Women’s Command has been the
given the daunting and impossible task of organising and mobilising “women with
men if needs be, into ending patriarchy by putting the patriarchal,
white-supremacist, capitalist oppression of women to an end”.
Past
experiences tell us that gender relations ought to be reconfigured during
conflict, not in the aftermath. This means that it is not the aftermath that is
important for gender transformation but how the battle is fought. A serious
commitment to ending patriarchy will have to mean that both the men and women
in the EFF use the “revolution” to re-imagine their femininities and
masculinities in a way that allows them to use the battle-site as a place where
they already practice gender equality for the post-”war” society. Given the
record of the key figures in the new party on gender matters, and the degree to
which its militaristic posture is a masculinist posture, this seems highly
unlikely.
However
it is certainly a real symbolic power in the fact that young people in South
Africa are to be called to the “battlefront” in a country where they are often
silenced for not having struggle history. The return of the warrior citizen
perhaps opens up a space for the young to get their “badge of honour”.
