By Gillian Schutte
ABSTRACT
In this article I turn my lens onto the call for decolonisation that the Rhodes must Fall movement gave rise to in 2015. I argue that the impact this movement had on the psyche of white masculine hegemony became the mirror image of what whiteness does to blackness in its gaze upon the ‘black skin’ – that oppressor’s gaze which erases its (wearer’s) humanity thus eviscerating the very soul of black humanity and personhood of the black individual. I argue that this remains the gaze of whiteness on the post liberation black subject even after the so called emancipation of the dispossessed majority in South Africa because neither economic nor cultural emancipation occurred when the ANC sold its people out in the sunset clauses which accrued economic power to the white and wealthy as it ushered in capitalism on steroids in place of socialism. In this non transformed neoliberal capitalist society whiteness has remained caught in the ‘baas’ narrative precisely because not much has shifted in the economic realm for the Black majority, who largely remain dispossessed. Thus the power/race dialectic has never been required to budge in white consciousness, decades after independence was declared, since the white population still sees the black population in terms of the master slave framework where black people largely remain the landless proletariat or worse the unemployed. In Black skin, White masks Fanon points to this syndrome when he writes ‘First, economic. Then, internalization or rather epidermalization of his inferiority.’ He goes on to write that that when the master is white he does not see the black as even potentially human.
As the collective call for decolonisation by a mass body of Black students spread nationally and gained traction, it shook the white status quo to its very roots of coloniality, creating collective paranoia in those who occupied white hegemony – a status quo that has remained obdurate and static in relation to the majority. This crisis then mirrored their own ontological and epistemological violence back onto them as they, in turn, fell into their own crisis mode at the possible invisibilisation, or worse, eradication of themselves in the framework of the possible shifting of power in a decolonised reality. I posit that this neurotic response occurred precisely because, in the white academic imaginary, the possibility of a Black collective challenging their superior positionality in their space of certainty, had not occurred to them as remotely possible. In the white masculine hegemony, particularly in a settler country like South Africa, this gave rise to Fanon’s assertion that “Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.”
I argue that the impact of the threat to white males and their top dog positionality played out in a number of ways. Firstly they internalised their terror of the black dehumanised collective resulting in a neurotic response that revealed their inner crisis which manifested in demeaning and patronising social media commentary on black people in general; secondly as an acting out by the white male collective in a bid to control the decolonial narrative by attempting to infiltrate and dominate it with their Western enlightenment values in order to retain their power and manipulate the struggle into the non-threatening rainbow nation reformist and ‘rational’ framework which, as we know through experience, seeks to protect whiteness and erase black beingness. Thirdly, when none of this worked in the face of Black resistance the white masculine hegemony resorted to both direct and oblique brutal violence against black body in struggle.
Since my focus is on white masculine hegemony I point to White males in this piece as the long-time apex predators in the sphere of the academe and the economy. However this is no way suggests that white women do not fall into this critique as well since it is often white women who uphold this status quo to benefit themselves, and exert their own white skinned dominance over the black subject.
As a social critic and op ed writer I covered many aspects of the Rhodes Must Fall and Fees must Fall uprising between 2015 and 2017 and published my writing in various newspapers. What follows is an extrapolation of some of my observational opinion pieces with additional writing drawn from the fieldwork and film work that both I, and social justice activist Sipho Singiswa, did when we extensively covered the Fallist movement. I must declare that there were many times in the struggle where white presence was inappropriate and sometimes not welcome and I recused myself. Singiswa however, camped out with the students as they occupied Bremner Hall for weeks and recorded the struggle as it grew into a momentous nationwide action which eventually became known as Fees Must Fall, out of which a decolonial body of theory and praxis took place under the title of Fallism.
Looking back
In March 2015, Twenty one years after independence was declared in South Africa (in the framework of liberation) a single student at the University of Cape town performed the act of throwing human faeces onto the statue of Cecil John Rhodes – which was erected on the stairs in front of the main hall on the campus – a monolithic structure of Rhodes staring contemplatively over the landscape towards Timbuctoo, signifying his dream to build a railway track across Africa and colonise all the people, land and resources in its wake.
The fact that this colonial statue still occupied a space of honor in a so-called post liberated South Africa tells us all that we need to know about the utter failure that this ‘liberation’ had been for the majority, because since the negotiated settlement in 1994, though there had been some change as seen in the building of a black middle class and the cessation of apartheid laws, that is where it ended. Not much had, nor has, changed for the majority of black South Africans in the systemic and institutional racism that had continued to plague this a so-called Rainbow Nation. This continues to manifest both in high levels of racial incidents on our social landscape as well as in the silent and violent scourge of the covert and insidious racism that black people are exposed to daily in institutional attitudes by the white and privileged. It is still most obviously seen in the gross economic inequalities between white folk and the majority of Africans who continue to live in desperate poverty, still landless.
Singiswa sums this up in a talk delivered to UCT student during the Rhodes Must Fall occupation of Bremner Buidling:
“I’m from Media for Justice. I’m also a former Robben island political prisoner, and a former guerrilla fighter. We support the position that the students have taken in terms of symbols that constantly remind us of painful history, such as what you see on a daily basis, in social spaces … it’s not unique to this institution of learning. This is a systemic problem all over the country. I am also one of those who were involved in the 1976 student uprising, and one of the reasons we decided to rise up against the system was very similar to your frustration, where we felt that we followed processes after processes, and nothing was working. Like you were saying, we felt like we were hitting our heads on a concrete wall. We also felt that the generation before us had become a prisoner of fear due to the brutal nature of the apartheid government, including the introduction of the equally brutal homeland system. (>>>) Someone mentioned religion, in particular Christianity, where we were told all the time to continuously trust in God and follow these particular processes, which kept us passive for a long time because it was saying turn the other cheek and be slapped on a daily basis and so on. So we decided to reject this because we realised that nothing was going to change… just like a lot of you are also asking what is there to be done when all is failing….
We felt that we were pushed to a corner where we had no other options but to resort to violence to meet violence with violence. I’m not advocating for violence, that’s your choice, you know. I don’t want to be arrested. But, one of the questions we have to ask ourselves is can white supremacy change on its own, can it change willingly. No, it can’t. It’s a very straightforward answer, you know, for those who have daily experiences of brutality, whether it is physical or psychological. For those who live daily on a daily basis in a quagmire of dire poverty 21 years down the line. How much more talking can we continuously do? How much more can we keep on following processes so that we can have a semblance of civilization, you know, where we are asked why are you burning tyres, why are you doing this. The very same media that is owned by white supremacist thinkers, is not on our side. I’m sure many of you can attest to how, for example, the case of the statue being removed is being portrayed in the media. It is clearly antiblack , it doesn’t understand, it has no perception of the time, the patience that you have had for so many years, 21 years now, and we are still having government officials telling us that 20 years is not long enough for change. It’s not long enough for who? Are they implying that 20 years is not long enough for the economic plunder that continues, that continuously brutalizes our people? We also have to look at the DNA, the race DNA of the brutalization. And then you understand that, you know, we are not, or rather, you are not dealing as students with just the question of the removal. You are dealing with a long tradition of racism, hard-core racism that continuously reinvents itself and as it does so, it is continuously dictating the terms of how we should transform. You have an oppressor telling you, for example, that if you want to fight me, this is how you should fight me, you know? How is that going to be possible? It’s not going to happen. So you know South Africa needs, I’m not gonna use the term violence, but it needs a forceful revolution. We’ve had generation after generation, and some of us are passing away, yet we are still waiting to see the transformation that we fought for, that we sacrificed our youth for, including transforming the white education system. Now we are having people globally praising a constitution and telling us that “you know what, you had such a peaceful transition in this country, you know, there was no violence”. I ask, are they saying there was no violence because it wasn’t white people in the suburbs who were dying? Well, families were dying, families got split up. We know about the so called black on black violence which, you know, universities such as UCT hold onto and even socially engineer this to reflect the violence away from them and point to black students.”
View full speech here:
In his writings Singiswa goes on to explain that “what was evidenced In 1994 in what was supposed to be a reconstruction and developmental transformation in the post truth and reconciliation (TRC) period was the inability of whiteness to fully comprehend and accept a South Africa in which equality between black and white was realised. It was obvious to the majority Black population that the TRC had failed dismally to address the issues of reparations and the righting the wrong of their historical dispossession. Instead it played right into the hands of non-Blacks in that it did not manage to move or transform this obdurate collective whitist psyche into an “ubuntuesque” phenomenon ready to share capital, property and opportunity with the black people.”
By the time Maxwele threw human faeces onto the statue of Cecil John Rhodes, it was clear that black people were gatvol of the bourgeois democracy that entrenched whiteness and gave rise to market values in place of a developmental state – which resulted in corporate rule from which the ANC leadership benefitted economically at the expense of the majority in a frenzy of neoliberalism which adamantly put profits before people. The rainbow had long since been shattered and the illusionary electric kool-aid, shoo, wow, non-racism lie had been exposed.
So when student Maxwele executed the subversive act of throwing human faeces on the Rhodes statue that had lauded it over the UCT campus for decades, his civil disobedience gave rise to a collective combustion of defiance premised on the rage of black students and their ongoing struggle against systemic racism in the socioeconomic sense and institutional racism in the university sphere. This act shed light on the collective ontological break experienced by Black youth and gave voice to the crisis of their banishment to the space of non-beingness in the dominant white discourse. It was the cry from Black students collectively as they expressed the outrage they had long supressed around the erasure of black epistemology on white dominated campuses as well as in the societal spaces of a post-liberated South Africa that continued to privilege the white race over the majority. Maxwele’s use of carnivalesque performance, along with tights and cerise pink hard-hat, viscerally made the connections between the phenomena of the perpetuity of social cultural and economic deprivation imposed on the majority indigenous to this land vs the perpetual privileging of whiteness in a so-called liberated South Africa.
This proved to be an alchemical catalyst that provided a stimulus to the expression of the pain and anger at the estrangement from all that is human – that expression that a whitist system demands the black collective endure and keep repressed and hidden. It is this pain that is disregarded by those not Black and who demand that Black pain and Black narratives premised on their lived experience, remain cloaked and invisible so as not to upset or violate their minority comfort zone.
This, Maxwele’s civil disobedience told the world, was the stuff that is too intolerable to withhold. It must come out. It must be seen, smelled and experienced by those who perpetuate it. The genius of throwing faeces collected from the impoverished community he himself grew up in, was a powerful statement about the ongoing dispossession of the black majority who were still forced to live in untenable poverty with little or no adequate sanitisation in conditions that can be described as medieval serfdom, while the white population had largely grown exponentially richer under the neoliberal dispensation that had replaced what was meant to be reconstructive and developmental reformation.
Frantz Fanon writes that racism denies recognition of the dignity and humanity of the colonised subject and relegates him to the zone of non being which is viscerally felt by the black skinned subject relegated to what Fanon calls ‘an extraordinary sterile and arid region, an incline stripped bare of every essential from which a genuine new departure can emerge.
And it was from this dark chamber of the colonial imaginary, this space of nothingness in the face of white superiorist depravity, that Maxwele rose up from in an action of utter defiance of the whitist erasure of his humanity and the humanity of all Black skinned humans. In this act he courageously assaulted white certainty by forcing the system to recognise that this zone of non-being to which they had banished blackness could never erase the palpable humanity of the oppressed. The nothingness of Black skin is only in the eye of the white beholder, not in the souls of the Black subject.
Maxwele’s direct action also brought to light the violence of the whitist erasure of Black beingness (in this case in the academe) – that which causes the splitting off from the self in their collective psyche as Black skinned humans who are forced to traverse and navigate a white dominant epistemological logic that does not recognise the ontological or epistemological reality of Being Black. Moreover it did not acknowledge the impossibility of Black expression of their full human capacity and agency in the straightjacket of a whitist discourse that squeezes the breath from them. Maxwele’s civil disobedience gave life to Fanon’s metaphysical assertion that “Man is a ‘yes’ resonating from cosmic harmonies,”(Fanon 1963). His action was a performative function of life breaking free from that the sterile region to which whiteness has relegated blackness.
Through Maxwele’s action the collective primal scream of Black pain was evidenced in the spontaneous and seismic response to his protest. Students collectively organised around the defiant assertion that whiteness will not continue to erase them and that their subjectivity will never, indeed can never, be fully consummated by whiteness.
And once the lid had come off, the national rising of students was inexorable. It quickly became a spontaneous mass movement predicated on a combined phenomenon of youthful life force that could no longer abide the state of “not being” – of not being recognised as equal to their white counterparts; of not being allowed to be black and proud, of not being offered a slice of the economy via their educational endeavours – and rage.
The renaissance of Black consciousness and Black intellectualism proliferated and the names of Biko, Fanon and Sobukwe rang loud in the corridors of the decolonial struggle that was soon to proliferate in universities across the country.
It was the mass demand to be finally free from the tyrannical shadow of whiteness, white privilege and white supremacy in which blackness is asked to become small or better yet, invisible – to accept their lot in a country that only offered the possibility of incremental benefits in the trope of Black economic empowerment.
When the movement began it did not even occur to the students to look anywhere other than inside themselves and draw the revolutionary fervour from their collective lived experience of blackness that is constantly up against the violence of a white supremacist system that alienates and divides them, rips their skin from their bodies and tells them they are less than they are.
In Singiswa’s interviews with students over this period of Black ontological resurrection they expressed to him that the violence that they spoke of is that which they’ve been encouraged to overlook – to dress up in rainbow colours and non-racism.
This, they said, is the woundedness that must be hidden behind smiles and pleasantries as they are expected to accommodate whiteness and ignore their own agony.
It is they who must turn a blind eye to white privilege and resign themselves to unending glass ceilings, reduced salaries and black tax.
They expressed themselves in frameworks that spoke of the coming of age of a new race discourse, a new race theory that rubbished the notion of non-racism and instead resonated with the unique situation of being Black in South Africa at the same time as being connected to Blackness in the world.
They spoke of the terrorism of whiteness in the constant attack on their psyches via a perpetual anti-black social discourse. They said they lived in a system that expects them to accept their gains in a democracy and overlook the wants and needs of the communities that gave birth to them.
They said they were actively schooled to join the ruling class in their oppression of those other blacks and that they are expected to die to authenticate their selves and be reborn as “more white” to gain acceptance. They said they are expected to be grateful in this space of non-being, of alienation from themselves, of internalised systemic violence and self-doubt.
This, they said, is what most of the older generation of former liberation fighters had settled for and that they, the born-free generation, will never accept.
Theirs was a discourse that ran counter to the institutionalised nation-building, national identity, non-racism propaganda that is pushed by the ANC-led government as the social cohesion that binds us.
But Fallists asked how they were supposed to talk of a national identity in a country with the highest Gini coefficient and separate development? How do they speak of social cohesion when black people indigenous to this land own a mere 3 percent of the economy and white graduates are six times more likely to gain employment than their black counterparts and earn better salaries based on their hue?
How do they speak of non-racism when the macro-economic policy is predicated on protecting white monopoly capital and putting profits before people?
The resounding answer to these questions lay squarely in their mass student uprisings: Their answer to these questions was clear when they declared that they don’t. They erupt instead in their ontological insistence that the black youth are seen, heard and valued.
WHITE MASCULINE HEGEMONY RESPONSE ONE & Two
(Mirroring, the terror of the black collective, paternalism and defeat)
As the visceral call for decolonisation proliferated it created an ontological break in the certainty of white masculine hegemony. It seemed apparent that they were in no way psychologically prepared for this mass action, and in response they set about doing what white males know best how to when their survival is threatened – that is to attempt to dominate and colonise the movement of decolonisation to ensure their longevity and non-erasure in the process of change. This attempt at an ideological coup to unseat the Black collective in the decolonisation wave, masked their neuroses in response to having the very seat of their power threatened by Black epistemology which they do not recognise as fully developed nor remotely plausible. Thus they set engaging in a counter attack that reduced the intellectual basis of the movement into one that was seemingly only concerned with identity politics. This is seen in writing such as Michael Cardos’ patronising article https://www.politicsweb.co.za/news-and-analysis/the-sinister-underbelly-to-the-rhodes-must-fall-ca in which he posits
The genius of the #Rhodesmustfall campaign is that it has seized upon a real and legitimate issue – the fact that black South Africans are, as Aubrey Matshiqi once said, in the numerical majority but cultural minority at institutions – and grafted onto that an illiberal transformation agenda that is likely to be institutionally wholly destructive.
The campaigners share something of the outlook and the zeal of Malegapuru Makgoba. He was the vice-chancellor who “transformed” the University of Natal from a liberal institution of excellence into a nationalist centre of parochialism and mediocrity.
The driving force behind the #Rhodesmustfall campaign is an amalgam of racial nationalists, leftists, self-styled social justice activists, and politically correct ideologues who view the world (and the humanities in particular) through the narrow prism of critical race theory, “whiteness studies” and “white privilege”.
For them, the whole history of humankind can be reduced to the colonial encounter between “black” and “white”, “us” and “them”. This inevitably gives rise to a form of identity politics based on racial mobilization.
Cape Town academic, Jacques Rousseau’s responded to Cardo’s piece with his own attempt at Zizekian analysis, in which he postulates with great white male certainty
I’d encourage you to read Michael Cardo’s piece on the “sinister underbelly” to the campaign that has succeeded in having the Rhodes statue boarded up, pending its removal from campus. I seconded the motion to have the statue boarded up, and voted in agreement for its removal, so while you might expect me to disagree with Cardo – and I do – he nevertheless makes many strong points.
The primary challenge he presents is in the form of questioning whether UCT and the Senate lacked courage in making the decision that we did, and whether we capitulated to both illiberal bullying as well as ideologically-flawed arguments in doing so.
I’m sympathetic to the dangers he points out – it’s certainly true that loud and persistent pressure, as well as muddled political thinking, can result in hasty and unfortunate decisions. However, I think that he’s wrong in this particular instance, and that his error rests in regarding all support for the removal of Rhodes to have originated from majoritarianism, mob rule and the worst sorts of identity politics.
The sinister underbelly of his assertion is the absolute inability of white men to relate their own ‘neo’ ontological break to the centuries of ontological breaking down of Africans by colonialism – and thus to empathise with the urgency of the decolonisation project. Instead, like Cardo, they dug their heals in, or like Rousseau, postulated with pomposity and self-genuflected at the mantle of their own plausible propaganda in which they cast themselves as the reasonable reformists who had a hand in the call for change. This refelected an attempt at the reconstitution of their hegemonic status in a shift out of their congnitive dissonance into a supposedly rational framework in which they would empathise, but on their own terms. Here we witnessed a counter wave of pompous hot air and hubris, a response which most certainly gave them a tenuous sense that they were still in control of their own possible expiration, for, from their perspective no Black skinned collective was going to unseat their power willy nilly and certainly not without their paternal consent.
Underlying this pomposity was the clear signification that the call for the decolonisation of the academy shook at the very roots of white masculine hegemony and gave rise to the notion of a possible social suicide in the scholarly white male collective psyche. If they were going to be shifted out of their seat of power they would be the ones to slit their own throats on their own terms in the performance of a handing over of power – reminiscent of the hand-over of political power from a white rule to black rule in 1994.
As law student Dudzelu Unathi Ndlovu expressed to Sipho Singiswa
“We have been made aware of how unbelievably powerful, sneaky, underhanded and dirty these white men can be – there is no limits at all to what the white man is going to do to stop us – we as a collective must constantly be cognizant of that we cannot go in these battle grounds to fight these battles without our power as a collective.
We are not even trying to say Baba we want to be white – we are looking at privilege right in the face as UCT students – I can be a lawyer or be the next Cyril easily – I don’t want that thing because it iw whiteness and I will never be white – Ill be alienated from whites and Blacks I will be on my own and that is the most painful thing as a black female lesbian I am alone in this space.”
It was during this period that I wrote the following article.
Western civilisation has, since the dawn of patriarchy, privileged white masculine reasoning and meanings and depreciated the experience, knowledge and voices of women. With the advent of colonialism people indigenous to the Americas, Africa and other colonised lands, were also brutally constructed as less than human, “othered” and devalued by this monolithic white masculinist logic.
This is why, some 500 years later, the subjects of depatriarching and decolonising academic institutions, smashing cultural imperialism and democratising public discourse is being hotly debated in the demand for an egalitarian future. The white male epoch is finally showing signs of crumbling.
The politicised youth understand that an egalitarian future is not possible when power resides with one group at the expense of others. Gathering data from the student protests — from #RhodesMustFall to #FeesMustFall — it is apparent that all intersectional oppressions stemming from white male privilege are part of the same struggle. This approach sees the need to form other movements that take the shape of structures supportive to the decolonisation movement.
Central to the public decolonisation debate should be the “how to” — that is how to shift this power base from the stranglehold of its white male gatekeepers and a westernised agenda to make way for new, diverse and accessible narratives that speak to a wider knowledge base and resonate with lived experiences of those historically colonised and othered by white male supremacy.
One would imagine that those who are the survivors and victims of colonialism and apartheid would be acknowledged as leaders of this movement and that their voices would be heard the most on public and media platforms. Instead the public debate seems to have been hijacked by the dominant discourse and has been inundated by whitist concerns and neuroses. Certainly in mainstream media, the topic of decolonisation has, in a strange but not unexpected turn of events, become more about the “pathology of blackness”. This is a learned trick of deflection common in the dominant discourse.
Rather than face the inalienable truth of historical and current white masculine privilege and its negative impact on all others, white male gatekeepers it seems, have set about attempting to alienate black people from a process that directly impacts them. This has happened through consistently critiquing the premise for movements such as Rhodes Must Fall, Fees Must Fall and Patriarchy Must all, referring to them as fallacious, foiled and violent. It is also clear in the fact that roundtable discussions on decolonisation are frequently set with plenty of white men, most of who have never even thought long and hard about this subject until it threatened their status quo.
Judging from commentary on social media around the Rhodes Must Fall movement, and other student movements that call for decolonisation, there has been a gallant attempt to colonise (as it were) the decolonisation process with reproachful white male voices and curiously, in some cases, it is these same white males who lead the roundtable discussions around this process, which is senseless. The oppressor cannot lead the oppressed into an egalitarian future after expediently accepting all the benefits a colonial history has offered them.
But equally curious is where some black public intellectuals have placed themselves in this debate, specifically those who have, perhaps inadvertently, re-inscribed white masculine privilege by assisting in the circumvention of open discussion about the role of white male academics in neo-colonialism.
Achille Mbembe’s recycled essay on the matter caused particular public ire and black backlash. In his article “The state of South Africa” this Cameroonian-born, Wits academic, hypothesises about the collective psyche of middle-class black South Africans. He writes; “Ironically among the emerging black middle class, current narratives of selfhood and identity are saturated by the tropes of pain and suffering. The latter have become the register through which many now represent themselves to themselves and to the world. To give account of who they are, or to explain themselves and their behaviour to others, they increasingly tend to frame their life stories in terms of how much they have been injured by the forces of racism, bigotry and patriarchy. Often under the pretext that the personal is political, this type of autobiographical and at times self-indulgent ‘petit bourgeois’ discourse has replaced structural analysis.”
Mbembe’s apparent psychoanalytical projection did not sit well with many black South Africans and social media exploded with responses that stood in opposition to his position on them. One social media commentator, Moemedi Kepadisa, had this to say: “We must push back at these ‘embedded intellectuals’. That is the only way they will learn. That being in those lofty university spaces gives them no right to talk down at those who are fighting against oppression. Primo Levi had a fine description for people like Achille Mbembe, ‘crematorium crows’. Those Jewish intellectuals who collaborated with their German jailers in those gas chambers. I guess we must also accept that we will also have our fair share of those in our momentous struggle to unshackle ourselves from racism, white supremacy and capitalist exploitation.”
White and whitist male gatekeepers, on the other hand, were overcome with relief and joy at Mbembe’s articles which ratified their disavowal of “the personal is the political” and apparently shifted the onus for black pain, frustration and rage to blacks themselves, suggesting this is a state of mind that should all too easily be transcended since it is not in fact valid. Mbembe asks, “Could it be that the concentration of our libido on whiteness, pain and suffering is after all typical of the narcissistic investments so privileged by this neo-liberal age?”
These essays set off a protracted public debate on the issue of black pathology, deflecting the attention away from the historical privileging of white males. Unfortunately this intervention occurred just at a time when the momentum had been gathered to effectively challenge the politics of language and power.
On social media platforms white academic gatekeepers congratulated Mbembe for his wise words — many taking the opportunity to denigrate black opinion. They also paid particular attention to the “personal narrative”, which they more or less collectively agreed, was a poor substitute for structural analysis. Terms such as “paranoid”, “over the top”, “pernicious”, “violent”, “self-victimised”, “angry” and “irrational” were bandied about in whitist male dissent of the black responses to Mbembe.
In a fit of spontaneous colour-blindness they joined in the chorus that black and white as racial categories do not in fact exist. This narrative of course, works to obfuscate the truth that they have benefited from the social constructs of black and white which undoubtedly do exist and are undoubtedly what students are fighting to deconstruct.
On mainstream media what should have been robust debate about the historical privileging of white male intellectuals in public and academic discourse, instead became a discussion about black behaviours and how to contain and discipline them. It became a discussion seeped in white outrage at the so-called misdirection of black rage and about the low intellectual quality of personal narratives and accounts of lived experience. All of this cast black people in the struggle as either violent or victims, accusing them of entitlement and generally circumventing black concerns. Once again this deflected away from white racism and privilege and overlooked white racist pathology and its dangerous collective libidinal projection onto the black collective.
It also reinscribed the white masculinist tendency to assert power over all it defines. So by defining black responses as “paranoid” “empty” and “personal”, power is maintained in the logic and reliability of the whitist masculine discourse.
These anti-black narratives, some charged, created decoys and distractions that only served the agenda of white supremacy and detracted from the real issue of decolonising academic, social and cultural spaces — all of which speak to the actual shifting of white males out of their historical position of privilege.
This it seemed was the reality that the white male psyche could not fathom.
This seeming inability to self-reflect has to do with the white male’s historical godlike status in the field of analysis, which has been shaken to the core by the call for decolonisation, and in a desperate bid to survive this, privilege intact, they did what they know best how to do — they tried to colonise a process that threatens them.
The insistence on the whitist masculine enlightened input into decolonisation, with its talk of staggered transformation, progress and preferential “structural analysis” in opposition to other knowledge systems and narratives of black pain, rage, suffering, humanity and joy, was simply another form of power that legitimates the structural dominance of western, white, educated middle-class males over all others. It also arrogantly assumed that processes outside of this framework are not intelligent, rational and humane.
Those “not white men” were relegated to the status of the other and essentialised. Their narratives diminutised and scorned as the monolithic white male academic club seem unable to appreciate other human’s capacity for multiple and heterogeneous narratives of knowledge, history, pain, suffering and immeasurable joy, whether in first-person accounts, poststructuralist theory, lyrical lexis or feminist language.
But the decolonial movement in tandum with Fallism declared that time had come when people othered by Western patriarchy had begun to inundate the academic and public spaces with narratives that emphasise the feelings and experiences of the colonised, of women, of gender non-conforming people, of historical pain, alternative knowledge systems and lived experience. This was decolonisation and depatriarching in motion. It happened on the streets, in communities and public spaces. It lived in the realm of a multiplicity of expressions where diverse narratives, personal narratives, feminine narratives, black narratives are used as a means to disrupt and deprivilege the orthodox language of white patriarchy which has held all those “not white men” hostage for way too long.
It was however the unseating of the Cecil John Rhodes statue at UCT that all but did them in as this signified their own demise as top dogs in all that is considered rational and enlightened and this gave rise to more neurosis, recognisable in their by now shaky postulation which emulated from their newfound nervous condition. And then, when they had reconstituted their hegemonic witnessed a counter wave of pompous hot air and hubris, a response which most certainly gave them a tenuous sense that they were still in control of their own possible expiration for from their perspective no Black skinned collective was going to unseat them. The call for the decolonisation of the academy and the actualisation of the fallist movement to have the statue of Cecil John Rhodes removed shook at the very roots of white masculine hegemony and gave rise to the possibility of social suicide in the scholarly white male collective psyche.
On the day of the falling of Rhodes Singiswa filmed the explosion of collective Black pride and power that had taken over the UCT campus.
Fallist Fumisa Ngqele, told Singiswa
“Today is the day where Rhodes will be falling – I’m a proponent of the RMFM – I’ve been occupying Azania house from day one and I’m waiting for 5pm for the statue of this colonialist, this thief – who stole land from black people – who killed millions of black people …
“we are also saying to the people that keep telling us we are privileged, why don’t we use our privilege and intelligence to better ourselves and our communities – by doing this we are bettering society – we are changing the national discourse on transformation because for far too ling – this country which is the most unequal society in the world – has been hiding in the veil of reconciliation – now we know today that the rainbow nation is a myth – economic freedom is a myth – now this statue with its … presence is coming down we are going to be fighting the invisible statues that are controlling the admissions policy of black students here – the invisible statues that are controlling the intake and appointment of black lecturers, black professors – we are slowly but surely transforming this university and make no mistake its going to be a substantial transformation.”
WHITE MASCULINE HEGEMONY RESPONSE THREE. (Direct and oblique physical violence)
WIP
Running concurrent to this performance of epistemological violence was the matter of collective white violence against the Fallists.
As the movement grew so too did the whitelash from the white male hegemony. By the time UCT students had organised under the banner of #RhodesMustFall and had successfully occupied Avenue Hall renaming it Azania house, the violence of whiteness was already being experienced. (add some testiomony)
It was during this occupation that a Black male student was accused of sexually assaulting a Black female student in Azania House. This unfortunate incident provided the impetus for white academics to begin their moral outrage onslaught onto the movement and by doing so alleviate their neuroses about being displaced.
A disclaimer: I am not in a position to declare guilt on the accused sexual assaulter as it was never resolved in a court of law. I am simply pointing to the expedience of the white academics who pounced onto this alleged incident to further its own agenda. See newspaper article below.
No sooner had this alleged rape become public when white male academics seized it and began their campaign of dehumanising the struggle under the notion that Rhodes must fall was collectively made up of rapists. As Media Studies lecturer Ron Irwin expressed on Facebook –
To many these Facebook comments may have seemed innocuous. But the ease at which a UCT academic paints the movement as one which is made up of “rapists” smacks of coloniality and is a violence to collective Black morality.
Dig a bit deeper and the notion of a collective of raping black men that plays out in Irwin’s assertion that the Rhodes must fall movement rape their own fits snugly into Sander Gilman’s writing in his seminal text Black bodies/White Bodies:
“Whites do not project a sexuality on the Black man which they themselves would like to have, but rather project onto others the faults they fear in themselves and thereby purge themselves of those evils.
Fears of an excessive and uncontrolled sexuality are stilled by ascribing this unmanaged, and possibly unmanageable sexuality to Black men and to other groups that are in disfavour, (as seen in the historical repression of womankind.) Thus White men can be rest assured that they are good, because the evil which they secretly fear in their own nature is manifest in other groups who are for reasons scapegoated.”
Perhaps this representation of the unruly sexuality of an entire movement, or at least the black males within the movement is an oblique way of giving expression to the anxiety of living adjacent to a hostile ‘other’ population that had excercised their mass potential to revolt against them at any given moment. It is also the fear of an ‘other’ that remains, to the White South African, ambiguous and unfamiliar. The constant threat felt by White men can only be mentioned obliquely by expressing their view of the Black man as over-sexualised and primal and therefore incapable of running a country.
I argue that the colonial trope of Black men as collective rapists, so easily bandied around by white masculine outrage, laid the foundation for the enactment of brutality on the students on the frontlines as the movement spread across universities. It also pointed to the fact this colonial trope is alive and well in the white imaginary that shrouds white logic when it comes to deep inner beliefs around Blackness.
As white males set about demonising Blackness, with an emphasis on the monsterised, raping, violent Black male, so too did the violence on the student collective proliferate in attacks allegedly by white academics (source) and by the state law and order apparatus.
By making use of and spreading this narrative they also ensured their terrified selves that they were not in fact dealing with fully fledged humans – a trope which is easily used when whitism is threatened.
Turn the clock back a few hundred years, when colonial discourse created this hype around a Black primal and uncontrollable sexuality. Indigenous people were perceived by the European colonisers as wild and rampantly sexual and the enslaved Black man was constructed as a cultural savage, a religious heathen, and socially inferior. The inferiority of the Black male was, of course, constructed as a way to justify the brutality of the slave system, while the notion that the Black man had an insatiable craving to conquer pristine White womanhood was concocted to ease the guilty consciences of White slave masters who characteristically forced themselves on their female slaves. In their minds, the Black man, out of retribution, would do the same thing to White women if given half a chance, thus they had to be brutalized to keep this threat at bay.
So the myth of the black male as sexual deviant was invented to control the sexuality of the Black male by casting him as a sexual terrorist, a sexual monster in alliance with Satan himself.
Fanon said it best when diagnosing the horrifying figure of ‘the Negro’ in the fantasies of his White psychiatric patients, “One is no longer aware of the Negro, but only of a penis: the Negro is eclipsed. He is turned into a penis. He is a penis”.
Irwin’s proclomations on social media represented the white establishment’s savage response to the imagined savagery of the fallist movement.
It is the fear of their own usurpation which always evokes a savage and violent response from whiteness, which they easily project onto that which threatens it. However, this insidious violence from the white echelon went unnoticed in the public sphere. This to me smacked to me of the normalisation of whitist views – as the trick of whiteness is to position itself as reasonable, working within the rule of law and even upholding human rights standards while enacting violence on Black skinned humans. By drawing on all these tropes they are able to convince themselves and the general public that their adversary is not fully human and this they manifest through their ongoing use of derogatory terms in social media for black students. This method is clearly seen in Irwin’s proclamation about Rhodes Must Fall being a movement of rapists. It is unbelievable to me that he got away with these broad brush strokes at the time, evidenced in the lack of response to his public hate speech and ad hominem attack on the Rhodes must Fall movement as a whole. But it was this response that enabled the unleashing of physical violence onto the dissident students as the movement grew.
Though this occurred in the 21st century it is clear to me that that the imagined bestial nature of the colonised Black subject has not shifted much at all in the whitist imaginary and is used in the same way as it was centuries back – right down to the rules of engagement. This lack of recognition of the humanity of those in black skin, in turn, allows whites individually, or obliquely through the whiteness construct, to enact horrific physical violence onto black body. Thus, over and above the epistemological violence for the white academe, you will often find black policemen enacting this violence on behalf of this system which, in the Western world and South Africa, is geared toward protecting white wealth and asset ownership. As Fanon denotes – in most “previous” colonies and settler countries, the role of the state is often reduced to managing white capital using brutal methods as revealed in the ongoing propensity for police and the state to punish and discipline the impoverished black population. This happens even though the protests may be for basic human rights to water and housing education, or against corporate abuses – a systemic reality that alienates an entire of so-called liberated people who are reduced to not human status by being excluded from the trope of Human Rights.
During this period I penned the following piece in response to the violence being meted out against the student uprising.
‘You are killing your children’
BY GILLIAN SCHUTTE ON 10 DECEMBER 2015
November 13 was a cool summer’s night. Students and university workers gathered in the park over the road from the University of Johannesburg to partake in a peaceful vigil against police brutality and in continuation of the #FeesMustFall protest. They hoped it would not rain as the vigil was to last a few hours.
A police barrier line was placed along the road over which students were not allowed to cross. Police officers armed with rubber bullets and pepper spray gathered on the other side of the road in front of the university. Struggle songs filled the night air mingling with the sound of traffic from the constant stream of cars that passed by on the main road between them.
At around 9.45pm social justice activist and filmmaker Sipho Singiswa arrived on the scene. As he reached for his video camera in the boot of his car, police opened fire. He ducked the rubber bullets, grabbed his camera and started filming. What he captured was a one-hour video of what looked like open hunting season on the youth. Gunshots and screams filled the night air.
The police, many of whom had Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department bulletproof vests on, chased fleeing students and shot them from behind. Some were shot in their buttocks, some on their backs, arms and hands. One young woman was rushed to Milpark Hospital after being shot at close range in the side of her throat. She testified that the officer looked her straight in the eyes and shot at her.
In another scene you hear a police officer shout, “Jou moerskont! Come here you shit … come here jou fokken hond,” while he runs after a fleeing student shooting at him from the back. In the background you hear police officers shouting, shoot him shoot him.
A young woman loses it. She shouts at the policemen. “Shoot me, shoot me. You want to kill me so just shoot.” The officers laugh or click their tongues and tell her to move on. But she can’t. Her adrenaline, her rage, her disbelief that middle-aged black men would treat their own children like this. She shouts at them: “You are killing your children — can’t you see that you are killing your children!”
A scuffle ensues and a group of policemen manhandle a young man. He manages to escape from his coat. As he runs away from them two officers open fire and hit him in the back. A student leader gently explains to an officer that it is their right to protest. The cop tells him — “You’re still alive — you should be happy for that”
“This was planned as a peaceful vigil. No one was looking for trouble or provoking the police,” says a Wits academic who was on the scene. She tells Singiswa on camera that at around 9.40pm, after the police barrier looked like it was removed, some students moved across the road to go to the library. This is when all hell broke loose and police allegedly violated all protocol and attacked the students in a bizarre and brutal scene that lasted over an hour. As incriminating as it was, it was not reported in mainstream media and only Singiswa’s video testified to the horror of the extent of the war that the state declared on the students in the #FeesMustFall campaign. The video received more than 12 700 hits in a few days.
According to a report: ” … The police justified their use of force on the ground that the officers were enforcing an interdict that had been granted to the University on 23 October 2015 and amended on 6 November 2015. However, the interdict (as amended) does not apply to the protesters in question. It has been misapplied and used for the unlawful purpose of stamping out all protests, however peaceful and legitimate. To the extent that the interdict is found to apply to any of the applicants, it was erroneously granted in the absence of interested and affected parties; while it is capable of rescission, it is still being used unlawfully to intimidate and abuse students and workers.”
Other incidents of police brutality on other previously black campuses, where police had allegedly been even more ruthless than this, were also under-reported in the mainstream media.
Yet the ANC continues to call the students violent, casting them as perpetrators in what appears to be a propaganda campaign designed to undermine the student collective and cast fear and loathing into the hearts and minds of the general public. This is reminiscent of the conservative media and state collusion in 2012 in which they set about demonising the Marikana strikers to legitimise the state-sanctioned brutality used against them.
In an excerpt from the National Executive Committee (NEC) report released by Gwede Mantashe on November 30 this year the ANC outlined its concerns about the early signs of a counter-revolution that has “been identified” in the recent student uprisings. This comes after the meeting of the NEC held on November 27-28 where among other issues, it reflected on heightened student activism during 2015.
The excerpt reads as follows:
The NEC reflected on heightened student activism during 2015 and applauded the increased conscientisation of students across race and political affiliation; a necessary precondition for the people to be agents of change. On the student protests, the NEC re-affirmed the view that the demand of no fee increase in 2016 was understandable and reasonable.
The swift response of government was appreciated. The NEC however expressed grave concerns about attempts to use genuine concerns of students for other objectives. The question of using students’ grievances to raise issues of collective bargaining was seen as opportunistic. Raising new demands when the original demands were met was seen as an effort to agitate and sustain discontent.
The destruction of property and facilities that are of service to the students themselves was condemned as the work of anarchists who are intent to destroy the future of many students.
Blocking students from writing their year-end examinations after their demand was addressed positively and commitment to further engage was made, was identified as part of the programme to destabilise the country.
Early signs of counter-revolution were identified as follows: –
* Targeting the state and state institutions, particularly the attempt to storm Parliament and Union Buildings when the government was amenable to engagement.
* Slogans about regime change when issues were being addressed.
* Foreign funding that was channelled to various student accounts in a number of campuses.
* Provocation of police into confrontation with the pronounced desire to trigger a massacre, “another Marikana.”
* Setting up of units of destruction in the various campuses under the slogan of total shut-down.
* Undermining of elected Students’ Representative Councils and replacing them with student committees led by individuals from organisations that lost SRC elections.
In view of the above there was agreement that the people of South Africa should be more vigilant and appreciate that the broader threats of counter-revolution beyond the university campuses, as witnessed in other countries, are a reality of the day. The killing of police is part of the programme to undermine the state. The NEC appealed to all South Africans to support the police and encourage them to act decisively in instances of anarchy and blatant undermining of the state and its institutions. Police must be able to ensure the maximum safety and security of the citizens at all time.
Says Singiswa, who was a student leader in the 1976 student uprisings and jailed for seven years as a result, “The old apartheid state did the same thing to us when we were in jail. They wasted a lot of time torturing us to find out who our handlers were and refused to understand that we did not have handlers. It was we, the teenagers, who were protesting and there were no foreign or other forces involved. It is sad that these former liberation soldiers are now using the same tactics of the former South African police and apartheid officials. They are clearly desperate and clutching at straws.”
And students interviewed by Singiswa say that this is just a desperate attempt to deflect the blame onto them. They say that if there is another Marikana it will only be because the ANC-led government has not listened to their cry for equality and a better life and seeks to oppress them further.
Says one student, “If there is any blood spilled it will not be from us — it is they who will end up with our blood on their hands — not the other way round. They are allowing the police to be extra violent towards us even though we are participating in peaceful resistance just like they did in 1976. It is sad that they have forgotten.”
After the momentous falling of the Cecil Rhodes memorial, the revolutionary zeitgeist was in full motion and soon spread outward from Cape Town.
As this agenda broadened universities across the country had staged protests around issues that included poverty, institutional violence against black women, racism, exclusion of poor and black students through exorbitant fees as well as worker rights for outsourced workers on campuses.
Months later the uprisings showed no sign of abating. This spontaneous wave of protest action, now known as the Fallist movement, sprang from the disenfranchised youth, the intellectual black youth who clamoured at the doors of learning and opportunity but were let down time and time again by a counterfeit establishment that so often mouthed empty words about “nation building” “democracy” and “equality”.
CONCLUSION
This epistle to both the psychological and physical (epistemological and ontological) violence against the Black youth by the white male establishment proclaimed the untenable truth that the black body is not safe where whiteness exists, whether in a colony, settler territory or a democracy. It demonstrates that no matter how post-race a multicultural discourse tries to convince us we are, this does not accurately reflect the world.
Like the Marikana Massacre which took place in August 2012, it exposes the awful truth is that in a white supremacist society the black body remains a location of violence. The reality is that the black body has an identity that is still confined to and judged upon the colour of the skin. It is this skin, this exterior of the body, which becomes the fundamental focus in a racialised identity. As Fanon denoted, the white man sees only the black skin. It becomes the foundation for all relations. The black man is reduced to his outer coating and body. There is no depth – only surface. He is flattened out and stripped of psychology, emotion and intelligence. Thus the black man does not really exist as a fully-fledged human in this imaginary – he is an object. But more so he is an object that presents a danger to whiteness. He becomes nothing more than a signifier in service to white fear.