The University of Limpopo celebrated 65 years of its existence this year. Recognising that the South African Students Organisation, which was the foremost proponent of Black Consciousness, was launched at that university in 1969, the university devoted the 12th of September to Black Consciousness.
That date also coincided with the 47th anniversary of the brutal murder of Steve Bantu Biko.
What a master stroke on the part of the university!
Imbued with the philosophy of Black Consciousness, the student body at the university, then called the University of the North, played a pivotal role in the struggle for freedom in this country.
Among them was Onkgopotse Tiro, who was expelled by the university and later murdered through a letter bomb in Botswana in 1974.
Advocate Mojanku Gumbi, a hard-boiled Black Consciousness adherent and an alumina of that university, was a guest speaker on September 12.
Before her address, she asked the all-black audience to stand and observe a moment of silence in honour of Maria Makgatho and Lucia Ndlovu, who were allegedly murdered by a white farmer on his farm, a stone’s throw from the university and their bodies allegedly thrown into a pigsty for pigs to feast on.
The irony of it all did not escape some of us. Here we are, the overwhelming majority in this country, who are supposed to have been in political office for the past 30 years, seemingly powerless to do anything about the continuing atrocities against us by a racial group who constitute less than 10% of the population.
In this gesture, we were joining throngs of other black people around Polokwane who fill the Mankweng Magistrate’s Court every time the farmer and his two workers appear in court to sing protest songs before television cameras and complain about the racist whites who -visit one atrocity after another upon us.
Is that all we can do? Complain, cry and protest against white racism and cruelty?
What is the meaning of the freedom we are supposed to have attained?
I remember an incident in Zimbabwe shortly after their independence when a white farmer forced African women to undress before frog-marching them off his farm after he caught them collecting firewood. He was promptly arrested and his farm was forfeited to the state. That was decisive action.
We don’t have much space to talk about the many incidents that continue to happen in our country and the black majority and its government behaving as though 1994 did not happen.
But we can take the absolutely distressing ongoing Hartbeespoort Dam saga. A Ku Klux Klan phenomenon seems to be unfolding before our eyes at this dam and the surrounding land owned wholly by the state.
From reports running over a long time, some white suprema-cists have been refusing black people business opportunities around the dam, blocking off certain areas, assaulting black entrepreneurs, torching their business establishments and generally harassing them in an attempt to keep the area white.
Some of us cringed as we watched black businesspeople being interviewed again and again on TV about their plight at Hartbeespoort Dam. Is this pre-1994 or 30 years after the dawn of democracy?
Once again, we see phenomena where black people are depicted as these weak, vulnerable and defenceless people who live or do business at the mercy of white people.
Even though black people are the vast majority and are supposedly controlling state power, you don’t hear of us perpetrating atrocities against whites.
This happens because many black people, including those in political office, are in awe of whiteness and its cultural and economic power.
That might explain why we are crybabies even when we are in political office.
These are only two examples. We can think of many more in different aspects of our lives.
And we will only defeat this phenomenon when we unshackle our minds and stop worshipping whiteness.
- Mangena is a former cabinet minister, an academic and a former Azapo president
