MPHUMZI MDEKAZI | To some Africans, selling out their fellow Africans is second nature

People don’t understand how hard it is to speak the truth to a world full of people who don’t realise they are living a lie.

On many occasions, specially in South Africa, historically and economically oppressed Africans believe their oppressors, [in SA] the DA, will be their true liberators. This is a fallacy because it is not even in their DNA to liberate the oppressed and downtrodden where they govern,  as they do in the Western Cape.

However,  there are house negroes who, when you tell the truth about the dangers of the psychological makeup of the oppressor, are offended. Instead of engaging you intellectually, they take the easy route by attacking or insulting you as the decoder.

[Jamaican political activist] Marcus Garvey characterised this as follows: “The traitor of other races is generally confined to the mediocre or irresponsible individual, but unfortunately the traitors among the negro race are generally to be found among the men with the highest place in education and society, the fellows who call themselves leaders.”

The house negroes are on full steam, effectively willing to compromise their souls as potential traitors who easily succumb to short-term economic seductions from the white man by remaining committed slaves to the capitalist facilitated domination over Africans on their land and everything underneath the land.

Working with the DA might even speed up the cessation objective they have planted. Should that happen, the entire Atlantic flank of the country would be widely open, rendering the country vulnerable from a security point of view.

We all know how desperate the US is when it comes to those waters, for the wrong reasons of course.

The other dimension is that, should it be true there is a massive gas discovery in the Atlantic waters, who is going to benefit?

Ideally these are important factors that ought to be tabled and led by the minister of intelligence. The minister should have been driving this narrative when it comes to a DA coalition, specially from a securocratic point of view.

Under normal circumstances it should have been easy to detect the political motive behind the desperation to have the enemy co-governing is from the markets, and is elitist in nature. The “markets” want short cuts to political power to continue to plunder. If they are so desperate, why didn’t they stick their necks on the ballot, or were they well represented in another form?

By now the minister of intelligence ought to have picked up the conspicuous silence of the “ratings agencies” on the poor performance of our currency, together with the deinvestment pattens of companies such as Shell and Rolex. The silent panic from multilateral platforms such as the Brics countries should have been better managed. The oncoming accident around the issue of Jerusalem-Gaza and the International Court of Justice should have been a deal breaker. There ought to be sufficient sensitivity on the potential reaction at the side of emancipatory legislations which the enemy is hostile to, namely National Health Insurance, BEE and the minimum wage, but alas.

Sensitivity should have been accorded to the healing process of the nation, given our atrocious racial history of injustices. It is not clear what is the content of the political motive of this move, specially on the side of the liberation struggle. Is there a possibility the Western Cape could be a mini-Israel? These are essential elements which could have guided all this.

It is interesting that inside this arrangement there is no talk of an anti-corruption charter as a common denominator since corruption is a cancer in our society, let alone a singular agreed strategy to deal with unemployment. It will be interesting to see how the political pilots are going to navigate around the issues since the parties are serving different constituencies, with different mandates from their party political manifestos.

At least as a barometer, the economic analytical assessment of a black man and his family in the Western Cape should have been thoroughly gauged before the deal was conceptualised and considered. Naturally, that was going to reveal hidden service delivery defects. Was that done?

This is where the question arises: what was the liberation struggle about? Something is trouncing the logic , more so because it is the enemy who is desperately busy dispensing patronage to ensure the deal succeeds. Do they have our interests at heart? Only time will tell.

In his collected writings, , [activist and co-founder of the ANC Youth League] AP Mda answers the question by reminding us there was never ambiguity in the centrality of the African agenda within the liberation movement.

Affirming what Mda raised, South African activist Anton Lembede, in the book edited by Robert R Edgar and Luyanda ka Msumza and foreworded by Walter Sisulu and Mda, Freedom in our Lifetime, Lembede, at the Policy of the Congress Youth League in May 1946, asserted: “Nationalism has been tested in the people’s struggles and the fire of battles and found to be the only effective weapon, the only antidote, against foreign rule and modern imperialism. It is for that reason the great imperialistic powers feverishly endeavour with all their might to discourage and eradicate all nationalistic tendencies among their alien subjects; for that purpose enormous sums of money are lavishly expended on propaganda against nationalism which is dubbed, designated or dismissed as ‘narrow’, ‘barbarous’, ‘uncultured’ and ‘devilish’, etc.”

Lembede was articulating the history of modern time.

He further asserts: “Some alien subjects become dupes of this sinister propaganda and consequently become instruments of imperialism for which great service they are highly praised, extolled and eulogised by imperialistic power and showered by such epithets as ‘cultured’, ‘liberal’, ‘progressive’ and ‘broad-minded’.”

At the 1946 youth conference he said: “Africa is a black man’s country. Africans are the natives of Africa and they have inhabited Africa, their motherland from the time immemorial; Africa belongs to them, Africans are one.”

He cautioned that “the leader of Africans must come from African loins”, obviously not from the DA.

Confirming my assertions, according to  Lembede, no foreigner can ever be a true and genuine leader of African people because no foreigner can truly interpret the African spirit, which is unique and peculiar to Africans only. Some foreigners who pose as African leaders must be categorically denounced and rejected.

As we are witnessing history unfolding in front of our eyes, it is difficult to debunk the emerging theory that a non-African in the form of the DA may assume political power in South Africa through political blackmail at gunpoint and in the disguise of a government of national unity (GNU).

This is facilitated by one of our own. He has a mandate, he is “progressive”, “cultured” and “broad-minded”. He is their friend, a Trojan horse of the imperialists, a committed slave, a sell-out and the enemy of African people because as [former ANC president] Oliver Tambo said on May 2 1984 in Tanzania: “The enemy has won a point, has gained a very important position, a position none of us thought the enemy would get quite so easily and quickly”.

He said that at Solomon Mahlangu College, named after one of our own who was sentenced to death by [former DA leader] Tony Leon’s father. The same Leon who is today leading talks to facilitate a political deal for a GNU.

I wonder what goes through the minds Mahlangu’s family members when they see “modern history” unfolding at the expense of their son’s vocal blood?

In one of Tambo’s interviews with ABCNews, he cautioned: “If you associate yourself too closely with the enemy, don’t blame anybody if people conclude you are part of the enemy.”

This is happening at a time when the oppressors suddenly becomes strong because they are aided and have accomplices among the oppressed.

This is against [former president] Nelson Mandela’s warning when he observed in 2000: “The Democratic Alliance is a party of white bosses and black stooges who only cared for black votes on the eve of the election.”

The question arises: in whose footsteps are some of the decisions to work with the oppressors made if many of our leaders have cautioned us against this?

It would seem we are confirming everything [the former prime minister considered to be the architect of apartheid] Hendrik Verwoerd asserted about Africans.

That is why [anti-colonial nationalist] Mahatma Gandhi shared no mercy and sympathy when he said: “If there is an idiot in power, it means those who elected him are well represented.”

Drawing from [anti-apartheid activist] Walter Sisulu’s courageous words on Radio Freedom during the difficult times in 1963: “The people are our strength. In their service we shall face and conquer those who live on the backs of our people. In the history of mankind it is a law of life that problems arise when the conditions are there for their solution.”

If that was the case in 1963 on Radio Freedom, he was  inspirationally correct to say: “Never has the country and our people needed leadership as they do now, in this hour of crisis. Our house is on fire.”

Mphumzi Mdekazi, PhD candidate, writes in his personal capacity.