The Black man in an anti-Black world.

I write with the greatest pain in my heart when I say the deadliest, the most cruel defect of humanity is the elevation of one race ahead of the other because one is perpetually superior and human, the other, in his own land of birth, is perpetually inferior and subhuman.

Equally painful is the fact that there are Blacks, essentially part of the elite, who have made it their duty to rise against the radical black thought on behalf of white supremacy.

This, for me, means that the colonial racist superstructure has succeeded in shaping a part of the black world in its own image. For the radical left, this means that there is no room for complacency. Towards the African revolution the task is to conscientise more blacks while at the same time continuously examining and moving to dismantle white superiority.

To give this piece a Fanonian take, I look to the preface of The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon explains in this 1963 work that “[n]ot so very long ago, the earth numbered two thousand million inhabitants: five hundred million men, and one thousand five hundred million natives. The former had the Word; the others had the use of it. Between the two there were hired kinglets, overlords, and a bourgeoisie, sham from beginning to end, which served as go betweens.”

A friend of mine said something that stayed with me now the other day. He said his child, a six-year old little boy, recently asked him why it is only Blacks who stay in Soweto.

I sat down to think about it, and it hit me - this young boy is actually asking his father to explain why Fanon’s 1963 characterisation of the earth being occupied by “five hundred million men, and one thousand five hundred million natives” still obtains today.

Further, one can read a couple of things from the question the boy is concerned about. One of them is that as an innocent human being, the boy is surprised at the reality of racial segregation. Why are people separated? Who’s idea is it? Why is Soweto, its people and their way of life essentially a tourist attraction and a curious existence worth exploring (to the race that does not stay there)? Why is Soweto, just like other South African townships, a place good enough for Black people only?

The other is that the boy is also expressing a form of pain that sits latent in his heart, waiting for (his father’s) illumination before it devastates him. When his father explains that colonial apartheid deemed Blacks as sub-human and placed them in places that are strategically away from those people who were and are still beneficiaries of colonial apartheid, the boy will come face to face with the violence, the humiliation, the cruelty of anti-Black oppression which is there for everyone to see – squatter camps, hunger, squalor, unemployment, disease, landlessness, etc.

Upon proper reflection, it is inescapable to notice that the boy is asking why Blacks seem to exist for the benefit of white supremacy.

One day soon, if he has not already, the boy will hear about Steve Biko, and he will ask: “Baba, why was Steve Biko killed? Who killed him?” He will ask about June 16 of 1976, about Boipatong Massacre. He will ask about Sharpeville Massacre. He will shake his head in disbelief and shock and anger and then say, “but, father, what about Marikana Massacre? How could it have happened in this new dispensation?”

About Julius Malema the boy will ask: “What conditions pre-existed ‘kill boer, kill the farmer’, a chant that Julius Malema is so passionately hated for today? Who was responsible for those conditions, and what have they done about it?”

What does the father say?

The father will have to explain that in this world, blackness represents what is diametrically opposite to a race synonymous with being opulent, pure, beautiful, gifted, cultured – basically human. That race is white, and it is free of evil and obscurity and decadence and filth.

Will he succumb to the noble, irresistible pressure of calmly telling truth, which would mean properly packaging (given that he addresses a child) and laying bare his anger and resentment at the system? He will have to explain that in this country, as it is the case everywhere in this anti-Black world, Black people are required not only to be Black - which basically means evil and obscurity and decadence and filth, but also to be Black in relation to the white man, to recall Fanon.

In concluding, the father will have the duty to keenly deplore colonial racism. He will have to explain that the beneficiaries of colonial apartheid, even in their minority, are not just everywhere, but are also racist in both overt and subtle ways, mostly subtle ways.

He will have to admit that the beneficiaries of colonial apartheid own the economy. The land. Banks. The minerals. Food. Thought. Everything.

And then the boy will ask: “But father, how can this be? Why have you allowed it?”

I do not know what the father will say, but I know that the most important accomplishment of human kind, which is to humanise every one, must find the downtrodden and oppressed on the move, fearlessly struggling to collapse white supremacy, struggling for freedom from the ruthlessly exploitative beneficiaries of colonial apartheid, the very ones who have arrogated to themselves the possibility to enjoy a life of dignity and prosperity, while reserving misery for the African.