Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 322

South Africa, Post-Trauma

In the house of the hangman one should not speak of the noose…One wants to break free of the past: rightly, because nothing can live in its shadow, and because there will be no end to the terror as long as guilt and violence are repaid guilt and violence; wrongly, because the past that one would like to evade is still very much alive.

– Theodor Adorno (The Meaning of Working Through the Past) 

In a recent essay published on this site, the political theorist Achille Mbembe painted a compelling picture of the pathologization of black life in South Africa. To be sure, recent events have changed this narrative somewhat, as Mbembe himself has acknowledged. Absent from this current discourse, however, is something that is also frequently absent from the narrative of #feesmustfall and others protests: To what extent has South Africa and have South Africans failed to address the aftermath of Apartheid, the resonances of which can be felt to this day? To what extent are we living in a post-traumatic space?

In his own research on the postcolony in general, Mbembe argues that African socio-political life is mutually constituted, that our existence and mobility within communities is a product of intersubjective relations. With regards to this, he builds off of thinkers like both Steve Biko and Frantz Fanon, who critically engaged with the ways in which white supremacist ideologies connect skin pigmentation with inferiority. Fanon in particular underscored the importance of embodiment and perception in the construction of socio-political life. The black body in Fanon’s France is “surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty” (Black Skin, White Masks 110-111). It is a body which, under the white gaze, is “given back…sprawled out, distorted, recolored” (Black Skin, White Masks 113). The project of decolonization is therefore a project to do not so much with the black bodies negating whiteness, but rather with the desire to self-define, to not be over-determined from the outside. The material manifestations of this psychic project are necessarily political since the black body continues to be an ‘object’ of whiteness’ own neuroses. For Fanon, this is a form of trauma, needing to be overcome.

This brings us to a terrain Mbembe seems wary to tread: that of the psyche and the emotions. Academia has a long and abiding suspicion of emotive language. Fanon, however, did not. His philosophical and psychoanalytical observations stemmed directly from his engagement with his personal narrative and those of the many people he treated in clinics in the context of the Algerian liberation struggle.  As a therapist, Fanon knew that there are certain dynamics which only come to light via the vehicle of narrative. In the aftermath of the violence of apartheid, perhaps the main form of writing that black South Africans can muster currently is that of narrative and, by extension, the autobiographical. There is nothing remarkable or out of place about this, as many societies have adopted this strategy in the past (e.g. profusion of autobiographical writing on the Holocaust and slavery by survivors and/or their descendants). The insistence on the legitimacy of narrative is thus not so much an “indictment” of whiteness, but rather a condemnation of a politics of mis-remembering and, in some instance, a forgetting of our very recent past. The plurality of black life in South Africa will emerge more easily from these kinds of narratives, rather than from academic modes of writing. I would therefore argue that references to Biko and Fanon are better read as springboards to new grammars of the psycho-social experiences of black citizens.

In a country where empty gestures such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which solicited forgiveness from the victims of Apartheid and those they left behind, predominate; where static symbols like the Apartheid Museum and the like abound; and exclusive spaces like Robben Island function as tourist destinations rather than as sites of public memory, it comes as no surprise that articulating black pain is still taboo. Let us compare this with the cultural memory of the Holocaust. To this day, children in Germany and various other European countries are taught about the Holocaust at school. There are a multitude of Holocaust Memory projects around the globe and it is the subject of various academic projects. Survivors and their descendants are still the subject of public debate. Their lives and their selves are their testimony. Apartheid is subject to academic discourse, but the cultural memory of Apartheid, as felt in black bodies, is disproportionally invisible in every day life in South Africa. A child can finish school in South Africa without knowing what Apartheid was, what it meant, and how they are located within its legacy. This is why we have teenagers and university students across all racial divides who think it is progressive to have “one black/white friend” or to be “colorblind” (evidence of this can be seen in the #IAmStellenbosch campaign, but is not limited to that particular space). Our amnesia is an indictment of our society at large. This is trauma at work.

Concomitant with the suspicion of personal narrative and the terms of address, Mbembe argues that “a new anti-decorum” abounds and that this is symptomatic of an “age of fantasy and hysteria”. I disagree. The very idea of decorum is intimately bound up with performances of civility, which protect whiteness from a violent confrontation with its own racism. Insofar as whiteness has already established itself as the center, as the source of civilization, it can dismiss expressions that do not conform to the prescribed modes of politeness as barbaric. Far from coming about as a result of expressions of rage and outrage, hysteria and fantasy are already embedded in racism itself. Taking a lead from Fanon, racism itself is a mental disorder or delusion that plays itself out in socio-political life by attempting to control the reality and social existence of others. Whiteness need not seek to “institutionalize itself” because it has already ensured its domination of all avenues of social, political, and economic realms through the dual systems of oppression: colonialism and Apartheid. This domination involves the psychic life of both whiteness and blackness in the communal imaginary of South Africa.

Take a well known episode in the recent #FeesMustFall protests, during which white allies stood as human barricades between the police and black students, thereby highlighting the extent to which white bodies are protected from brutality by their very pigmentation. Greater force was exercised at historically black universities such as Fort Hare and the University of the Western Cape – to name but a few. The trauma is ongoing. Writing in another context, Judith Butler argues that “those who are unreal have, in a sense, already suffered the violence of derealization…if violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated. But they have a strange way of remaining animated and so must be negated again…and again” (Precarious Life 33). No matter the agent of the violence enacted against black bodies, the meaning behind it is intimately tied up with the reinforcement that black lives do not and cannot matter, precisely because they have yet to be granted the status of human. The numerical dominance of the black population is not enough to dismantle the abiding legacy of dehumanization at the heart of black disavowal in South Africa.

Rather than seeing expressions of pain as redemptive or as a means of gaining coherence with the self and with others, Mbembe instead perceives it as a destructive exercise. But how do we heal if we are not able to express our pain? To be clear, I am not advocating for the acceptance of hate speech and racial hatred. Rather, I’m arguing that black people also need space to feel themselves. Expressions of pain arise not so much out of victimhood, but rather as attempts to make sense of what it means to be a survivor of an unjust past , and to leverage that past to negotiate a more potentially just future. All South Africans are living in a post-traumatic space which, by definition, resists articulation through language. The personal is political precisely because our bodies within this space are still very much politicised.  In order to “resume human life in the aftermath of irreparable loss,” as Mbembe puts it, it is necessary to speak about what we have lost. And sometimes to cry, and sometimes to yell.

Perhaps it is the case that our discussions of political life are inadequate precisely because they neglect to factor in the psychological dynamics embedded within political discourse. What would be valuable would be to examine the ways in which the political and the psychological overlap to form a communal imaginary across all racial divides. This kind of work would involve the revision of who we are and who we are in relation to others. I suspect that consciously inserting memorialization into every day life would be a sufficient first step in this process. Until we are able to acknowledge and pay due credence to our respective positionalities in the aftermath of Apartheid, rather than trying to hold on to the delusion of a just society, we will not be able to be amongst others in an ethically legitimate way.

Purveyors of injustice, we see you, and we also send an insult to your mum

In June 2015, an Afro-capitalist owner of a not-so-popular radio station grabbed one of the only playing fields in the densely populated poor urban settlement of Kosovo, Mathare. It was done, ostensibly, to build a primary school, but there was already a primary school; the community had requested a secondary school during one of the perfunctory image saving “participatory” consultations that was organized by so-called Mathare leaders and with the Nairobi governor in a cameo role.

Fast forward a few weeks later, and the community found out that not only was the school going to be a primary “academy” that few, if any, Mathare children would be able to attend, but that this illustrious institution would block one of the more popular pathways that provided entry into the settlement. And their kids would still be deprived of a playing field.

People were pissed.

Venting at a recently held political accountability and social justice forum organized by Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC) residents declared:

“Ai these rich people keep coming here and they don’t even have a mother in the ghetto!”

“Next time if we are going to vote someone in they have to come and stand and show that they have a mother from the ghetto!”

“Yes” people shouted.

“They have to bring her here!”

“We need to stop voting in tourists!”

“These people cannot come and grab land here. We are going to cross the street to see all the rich people in Muthaiga, take over their gardens and grab their land and say if you ever come over to our side you will see!”

“Yes” people shouted again and again.

“We need a military wing!”

Bigger shouts of “yes”

“And an intelligence wing!”

And slight Okal from Turkana – who came to Nairobi to find work on the day the American embassy was bombed in 1998, and who, like many residents, has since slept in numerous city gutters – a little drunk but full of valour, announced: “I want to say that I volunteer for the intelligence wing”.

And everyone cheered, hard.

But this defiance and resolve to change things cannot immediately override the pervasive neglect that they live, and El-Nino will soon be here to show just how deep this structural disregard is. The last time we were privy to this weather inferno was in 1997, and in Mathare it blew the roofs off people’s houses and swept away homes. When it happens again, the muddy paths will be impassable, and the rates of cholera will go through the roof.

Unsurprisingly the extent of government preparation for the next climate change disaster is the one big drain by Juja road and the purchasing of soap bars that are rumoured to have cost 37,500 Kenya shillings each ($400).

People are long tired of living these same insults over and over again, and so at the forum they created a community-sanctioned insult of their own.

“These people need to be told that Mathare si ya mamako!” one young woman declared with fervour.

And just like that it became the slogan of one of the resulting campaigns; Mathare is not your mother’s!

As in most cases, the English language barely comes close to capturing the venality implicit in this statement; trust me it’s rude. And it also has special significance in Mathare where the current member of parliament, recognized as one of 12 MPs who did not contribute to any legislative debate in 2014, took this electoral seat one term after his mother who had reigned four years before him. As part of his campaign she gave out bribes to residents from her evangelical church, and is said to be the actual brains behind her son who is so absent, you need to buy a TV in order to see him.

And in this community close to where Gideon Njuguna was shot in the eyes, chest and jaw and was later found abandoned in the morgue,

In this area where marking the entrance to Huruma ward is a police station on one side and coffin makers on the other,

In this country where people’s children can’t afford to go to school yet the VP builds a 1.2 billion house complete with a private airstrip, and we are told not to worry because we are a “middle income country” yet we have never known anything more than a minimal income,

This forum taught some of us that we need to take up more insults for justice.

Kenya si ya mamako.

Mathare si ya mamako.

In these places that are “out of justice” it’s not just about the playground. Or about insults. It’s about working towards structural redemptions to ease the million systemic heartbreaks that happen every day (preferably while causing offence).

So if you are one of these people who grab land, kill children and hold up sinister superstructures of disadvantage, know that as we work to shake off the menacing insults of forced evictions, tenure insecurity, police violence and increasing precarity,

We see you,

And we also send an insult to your mum.

*This article is part of Africa is a Country’s Inequality Series. AIAC’s new Inequality Section examines the politics of aid, rights, migration and other topics. The Inequality Series is a partnership with the Norwegian NGO, Students and Academics’ International Assistance Fund (SAIH).

Through writing and dialogue, SAIH aims to raise awareness about the damaging use of stereotypical images in storytelling about the South. They are behind the Africa For Norway campaign and the popular videos Radi-Aid, Let’s Save Africa: Gone Wrong and Who wants to be a volunteer, seen by millions on YouTube.

For the third time, SAIH is organizing The Radiator Awards; on the 17th of November a Rusty Radiator Award is given to the worst fundraising video and a Golden Radiator Award is given to the best, most innovative fundraising video. You can vote on your favorite in each category here.

‘Mathare is not your mother!’ and other insults against injustice

In June 2015, an Afro-capitalist owner of a not-so-popular radio station grabbed one of the only playing fields in the densely populated poor urban settlement of Kosovo, Mathare. It was done, ostensibly, to build a primary school, but there was already a primary school; the community had requested a secondary school during one of the perfunctory image saving “participatory” consultations that was organized by so-called Mathare leaders and with the Nairobi governor in a cameo role.

Fast forward a few weeks later, and the community found out that not only was the school going to be a primary “academy” that few, if any, Mathare children would be able to attend, but that this illustrious institution would block one of the more popular pathways that provided entry into the settlement. And their kids would still be deprived of a playing field.

People were pissed.

Venting at a recently held political accountability and social justice forum organized by Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC) residents declared:

“Ai these rich people keep coming here and they don’t even have a mother in the ghetto!”

“Next time if we are going to vote someone in they have to come and stand and show that they have a mother from the ghetto!”

“Yes” people shouted.

“They have to bring her here!”

“We need to stop voting in tourists!”

“These people cannot come and grab land here. We are going to cross the street to see all the rich people in Muthaiga, take over their gardens and grab their land and say if you ever come over to our side you will see!”

“Yes” people shouted again and again.

“We need a military wing!”

Bigger shouts of “yes”

“And an intelligence wing!”

And slight Okal from Turkana – who came to Nairobi to find work on the day the American embassy was bombed in 1998, and who, like many residents, has since slept in numerous city gutters – a little drunk but full of valour, announced: “I want to say that I volunteer for the intelligence wing”.

And everyone cheered, hard.

But this defiance and resolve to change things cannot immediately override the pervasive neglect that they live, and El-Nino will soon be here to show just how deep this structural disregard is. The last time we were privy to this weather inferno was in 1997, and in Mathare it blew the roofs off people’s houses and swept away homes. When it happens again, the muddy paths will be impassable, and the rates of cholera will go through the roof.

Unsurprisingly the extent of government preparation for the next climate change disaster is the one big drain by Juja road and the purchasing of soap bars that are rumoured to have cost 37,500 Kenya shillings each ($400).

People are long tired of living these same insults over and over again, and so at the forum they created a community-sanctioned insult of their own.

“These people need to be told that Mathare si ya mamako!” one young woman declared with fervour.

And just like that it became the slogan of one of the resulting campaigns; Mathare is not your mother’s!

As in most cases, the English language barely comes close to capturing the venality implicit in this statement; trust me it’s rude. And it also has special significance in Mathare where the current member of parliament, recognized as one of 12 MPs who did not contribute to any legislative debate in 2014, took this electoral seat one term after his mother who had reigned four years before him. As part of his campaign she gave out bribes to residents from her evangelical church, and is said to be the actual brains behind her son who is so absent, you need to buy a TV in order to see him.

And in this community close to where Gideon Njuguna was shot in the eyes, chest and jaw and was later found abandoned in the morgue,

In this area where marking the entrance to Huruma ward is a police station on one side and coffin makers on the other,

In this country where people’s children can’t afford to go to school yet the VP builds a 1.2 billion house complete with a private airstrip, and we are told not to worry because we are a “middle income country” yet we have never known anything more than a minimal income,

This forum taught some of us that we need to take up more insults for justice.

Kenya si ya mamako.

Mathare si ya mamako.

In these places that are “out of justice” it’s not just about the playground. Or about insults. It’s about working towards structural redemptions to ease the million systemic heartbreaks that happen every day (preferably while causing offence).

So if you are one of these people who grab land, kill children and hold up sinister superstructures of disadvantage, know that as we work to shake off the menacing insults of forced evictions, tenure insecurity, police violence and increasing precarity,

We see you,

And we also send an insult to your mum.

***

This article is part of Africa is a Country’s Inequality Series. AIAC’s new Inequality Section examines the politics of aid, rights, migration and other topics. The Inequality Series is a partnership with the Norwegian NGO, Students and Academics’ International Assistance Fund (SAIH).

Through writing and dialogue, SAIH aims to raise awareness about the damaging use of stereotypical images in storytelling about the South. They are behind the Africa For Norway campaign and the popular videos Radi-Aid, Let’s Save Africa: Gone Wrong and Who wants to be a volunteer, seen by millions on YouTube.

For the third time, SAIH is organizing The Radiator Awards; on the 17th of November a Rusty Radiator Award is given to the worst fundraising video and a Golden Radiator Award is given to the best, most innovative fundraising video. You can vote on your favorite in each category here.

Anti-Dominicanism, a no lesser evil

In the recent crisis involving Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the world seems to be lacking stories that show Dominicans in identification with human rights or blackness. In the absence of balanced representations, assumptions turn rash and hopeless.

In the book form of the film documentary series “Black in Latin America,” African American intellectual Henry Louis Gates Jr. goes as far as to suggest a measure of “schizophrenia” on the part of Dominicans. This would be a reckless assertion if it were not that verdicts such as this appear regularly within an atmosphere of negative criticism in the press and social media where an audience seems to grow inured.

Yet, the air to revile so blatantly begs the question of whether the cast diagnosis is not in itself a reflection of the state of disorder reached by some intellectuals and others who inform opinions in the United States, as they seem to be losing patience and clear judgment when dealing with the DR.

Gates is hardly the instigator, for nearly fifty years before in 1967, a Dominican exiled in Venezuela, Pedro Andrés Pérez Cabral, already ground the axe and dissected the national consciousness that he himself identified as partly unsound. He unleashed vitriol against Dominican identity in some sections of a generally useful book titled La comunidad mulata (The Mulatto Community), as he deployed an analytical style seemingly influenced by the works of psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, particularly the Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), which appears listed as a source in La comunidad.

At times, Pérez Cabral’s language suggests homoerotic yearnings of a confused Dominican people who hate their own skin and lust after white leaders. He attacks whitening and implies a defense of blackness, as he claims that pure races have backbone while fusion yields a degraded collective. But his assertions veer often into extremes that reverse his purpose to expose or defeat racism.

For example, Dominican diehard Joaquin Balaguer used a similar line of argument for years to do the opposite: exalt whiteness and demean blackness. In his 1983 La isla al revés (The Backward Island), Balaguer warned Dominicans against mixing with Haitians, for in his view they ruined all attempts at human progress and organized society. And so it is that the junction of parallels becomes true.

Herding Dominicans in as the sheep gone astray is as mistaken as are rants to keep Haitians out. In every case, Haiti is cast as a symbol of blackness and the DR typecast as its negation. Perceptively, African American anthropologist Kimberly Eison Simmons avoids falling in this trench.

In her book, Reconstructing Racial Identity and the African Past in the Dominican Republic, Simmons steered clear of Pathology Road, dealing but moving past the racial contradictions and returning an account of Dominicans that is neither romantic nor singularizing. Her stay and findings in the DR resonated with some of her life experiences in the US, as she suggested the significance of context and the need for observers to relinquish exclusive copyrights to blackness as conditions to appreciate how Dominicans express themselves in a local or US setting.

To study Dominicans on their own terms is a bold line followed by her arranged translation of The African Presence in Santo Domingo, a work of Dominican blackness by local Dominican sociologist Carlos Andújar. Simmons answers the question of black “denial” with a not-so-obvious reply and with the matter for another question: is prejudice all that we should know of the DR?

Anti-Haitianism in the DR is an ideology with a government patent and whose practices are documented. It involves an effort to discriminate and deny recourse to victims of xenophobia and racism. Anti-Dominicanism, as it plumes its feathers on the other hand, comes as an attitude parting from a conviction, ignorance or lack of efforts to present critical information that warns against lampooning a nation and its people. It is an obstinate scheme.

No one takes the stories of Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. only to highlight those blacks who betrayed them and impose the view of duplicity of African Americans. There is hardly a squabble, however, when Dominicans are portrayed widely as the epitome of self-hate and anti-blackness, who blame Haiti for their mental deformation and would sever their skin for a try at racial mutation.

The complex reality of a people is outplayed by this cruel satire which, impervious to changes and sobering facts, is dealt best by indulging in its own theatre of irony, for no light attempt at rectification could alter the tendentious portrayal.

The anticipation for the final act in this “ethno-drama” is infecting the public with rage and many Dominicans with anxiety. How is the story going to end for Hispaniola? It certainly has the sparkle of a classic thriller. When injustices in the DR, such as stripping Dominicans of Haitian descent of their citizenship, are denounced internationally while leaving the impression that Dominicans are not moved to indignation, the stage is set for a famous ending that channels the tragedies of old.

Sodom and Gomorrah, we are told, had a punishment befitting annihilation through scorching cataclysm because not a single soul was free from its folly. The techniques of effacing are no less spectacular today because they employ tactics of economic drought. In this newly rising script, fiery sanctions against the DR can also burn Haiti (the House of Lot). If Judgment Day starts in the form of a ban on Dominican economy—a lit fuse clearing the way to the Overture of 1812 finale—Haitians will have to run faster than Napoleon, and then swim, to avoid some of the exploding brimstone, as fate bound them to their neighbors in one island.

The truth is unsettling as is the fiction. Anti-Haitians and anti-Dominicans work alike for doom and disunion. It is true. One lives in the past prophesying of a coming avalanche of Haitian immigrants fulfilling a conspiracy, and the other lives on the moon demanding an apology of the Dominican people they call “lunatics” for living their history.

George Washington Carver once said: “Where there is no vision, there is no hope.” It is good advice to change what we now see. Anti-Haitianism will live for as long as the politics and activism against it are less about forging ties and more about disqualifying Dominicans as allies for justice. We cannot ignore the mirror and the consequences no matter how big the outrage.

In the DR, Dominicans of Haitian descent can face ugly attitudes that ridicule their ancestry. How will it be different when, in the US, Americans of Dominican descent are told that they too come from a family tree diseased at the roots? This is the fusillade carried by the media, well-funded figures and other bullhorns of monotone determinism. They become that which they eliminate, and that is no less of a problem.

 

 

Anti-Dominicanism, a No Lesser Evil

In the recent crisis involving Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the world seems to be lacking stories that show Dominicans in identification with human rights or blackness. In the absence of balanced representations, assumptions turn rash and hopeless.

In the book form of the film documentary series “Black in Latin America,” African American intellectual Henry Louis Gates Jr. goes as far as to suggest a measure of “schizophrenia” on the part of Dominicans. This would be a reckless assertion if it were not that verdicts such as this appear regularly within an atmosphere of negative criticism in the press and social media where an audience seems to grow inured.

Yet, the air to revile so blatantly begs the question of whether the cast diagnosis is not in itself a reflection of the state of disorder reached by some intellectuals and others who inform opinions in the United States, as they seem to be losing patience and clear judgment when dealing with the DR.

Gates is hardly the instigator, for nearly fifty years before in 1967, a Dominican exiled in Venezuela, Pedro Andrés Pérez Cabral, already ground the axe and dissected the national consciousness that he himself identified as partly unsound. He unleashed vitriol against Dominican identity in some sections of a generally useful book titled La comunidad mulata (The Mulatto Community), as he deployed an analytical style seemingly influenced by the works of psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, particularly the Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), which appears listed as a source in La comunidad.

At times, Pérez Cabral’s language suggests homoerotic yearnings of a confused Dominican people who hate their own skin and lust after white leaders. He attacks whitening and implies a defense of blackness, as he claims that pure races have backbone while fusion yields a degraded collective. But his assertions veer often into extremes that reverse his purpose to expose or defeat racism.

For example, Dominican diehard Joaquin Balaguer used a similar line of argument for years to do the opposite: exalt whiteness and demean blackness. In his 1983 La isla al revés (The Backward Island), Balaguer warned Dominicans against mixing with Haitians, for in his view they ruined all attempts at human progress and organized society. And so it is that the junction of parallels becomes true.

Herding Dominicans in as the sheep gone astray is as mistaken as are rants to keep Haitians out. In every case, Haiti is cast as a symbol of blackness and the DR typecast as its negation. Perceptively, African American anthropologist Kimberly Eison Simmons avoids falling in this trench.

In her book, Reconstructing Racial Identity and the African Past in the Dominican Republic, Simmons steered clear of Pathology Road, dealing but moving past the racial contradictions and returning an account of Dominicans that is neither romantic nor singularizing. Her stay and findings in the DR resonated with some of her life experiences in the US, as she suggested the significance of context and the need for observers to relinquish exclusive copyrights to blackness as conditions to appreciate how Dominicans express themselves in a local or US setting.

To study Dominicans on their own terms is a bold line followed by her arranged translation of The African Presence in Santo Domingo, a work of Dominican blackness by local Dominican sociologist Carlos Andújar. Simmons answers the question of black “denial” with a not-so-obvious reply and with the matter for another question: is prejudice all that we should know of the DR?

Anti-Haitianism in the DR is an ideology with a government patent and whose practices are documented. It involves an effort to discriminate and deny recourse to victims of xenophobia and racism. Anti-Dominicanism, as it plumes its feathers on the other hand, comes as an attitude parting from a conviction, ignorance or lack of efforts to present critical information that warns against lampooning a nation and its people. It is an obstinate scheme.

No one takes the stories of Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. only to highlight those blacks who betrayed them and impose the view of duplicity of African Americans. There is hardly a squabble, however, when Dominicans are portrayed widely as the epitome of self-hate and anti-blackness, who blame Haiti for their mental deformation and would sever their skin for a try at racial mutation.

The complex reality of a people is outplayed by this cruel satire which, impervious to changes and sobering facts, is dealt best by indulging in its own theatre of irony, for no light attempt at rectification could alter the tendentious portrayal.

The anticipation for the final act in this “ethno-drama” is infecting the public with rage and many Dominicans with anxiety. How is the story going to end for Hispaniola? It certainly has the sparkle of a classic thriller. When injustices in the DR, such as stripping Dominicans of Haitian descent of their citizenship, are denounced internationally while leaving the impression that Dominicans are not moved to indignation, the stage is set for a famous ending that channels the tragedies of old.

Sodom and Gomorrah, we are told, had a punishment befitting annihilation through scorching cataclysm because not a single soul was free from its folly. The techniques of effacing are no less spectacular today because they employ tactics of economic drought. In this newly rising script, fiery sanctions against the DR can also burn Haiti (the House of Lot). If Judgment Day starts in the form of a ban on Dominican economy—a lit fuse clearing the way to the Overture of 1812 finale—Haitians will have to run faster than Napoleon, and then swim, to avoid some of the exploding brimstone, as fate bound them to their neighbors in one island.

The truth is unsettling as is the fiction. Anti-Haitians and anti-Dominicans work alike for doom and disunion. It is true. One lives in the past prophesying of a coming avalanche of Haitian immigrants fulfilling a conspiracy, and the other lives on the moon demanding an apology of the Dominican people they call “lunatics” for living their history.

George Washington Carver once said: “Where there is no vision, there is no hope.” It is good advice to change what we now see. Anti-Haitianism will live for as long as the politics and activism against it are less about forging ties and more about disqualifying Dominicans as allies for justice. We cannot ignore the mirror and the consequences no matter how big the outrage.

In the DR, Dominicans of Haitian descent can face ugly attitudes that ridicule their ancestry. How will it be different when, in the US, Americans of Dominican descent are told that they too come from a family tree diseased at the roots? This is the fusillade carried by the media, well-funded figures and other bullhorns of monotone determinism. They become that which they eliminate, and that is no less of a problem.

 

 

After a tough election in Tanzania, a constitutional crisis in Zanzibar

In April 1964, following a racially charged revolution in Zanzibar, its new leaders negotiated a union between the Zanzibari islands, with their 300,000 people, and the country of Tanganyika on the mainland with its 10 million people. The bond was bound to be unbalanced, Zanzibar would remain with its own government, president and vice president, and revolutionary council, while simultaneously being subsumed under the government of a new “united republic,” with its own president and parliament, to be known as Tanzania. Tanganyika no longer had its own government. The Zanzibari president became the First Vice President of Tanzania, while the Tanzanian president’s running mate became its Second Vice President.

The union’s lopsided ambiguity makes it hard to shake, but is also the source of its frustration. Zanzibaris never quite came to a consensus about what their constitutional relationship to the mainland should be, and the opposition makes the appealing case that it should have more autonomy. Many on the mainland agree: why not have a “three-government” system, with both Zanzibar and the mainland operating autonomous governmental structures under an umbrella government overseeing both?

This question was the central ideological issue at stake in the recent Tanzanian presidential elections. The opposition to the ruling CCM party was a coalition of parties allied by their fight against CCM attempts to railroad a constitutional reform process towards their interests.

The elections of October 25, 2015 were the most hotly contested in Tanzania’s independent history. Although the main opposition candidate disputes the results, officially the CCM candidate won by nearly 3 million votes. Despite ongoing litigation in various constituencies, it was a very well run election with indisputably strong showings for both candidates. The CCM candidate was sworn in with great ceremony, and ceremonies mean a lot in this country. The national president is here to stay.

In Zanzibar, however, things got complicated. The candidate for CUF, a member of the opposition coalition, was Seif Sharif Hamad. “Maalim” Seif, as he is known, has run for Zanzibari president in every election since 1995. He has lost every time in elections widely panned as rigged in CCM’s favor. Many Zanzibaris have become intensely frustration with CCM domination and its racially charged propaganda. Throughout this period, Maalim Seif has struggled patiently against hope that one day there would be a clean and uncontroversial election in Zanzibar. He has repeatedly sought legal and electoral recourse, and has never advocated violence or rebellion… at least until last week.

Two weeks ago Monday, the day after the election, Seif called a press conference to announce that according to reported polling results, the trend looked as if he would be the  by a thin margin. Further reported polling results over the next few days showed a strong, if dubious, CCM showing. The Zanzibari Electoral Commission (ZEC) was to announce a winner at 10 a.m. on Wednesday. No announcement came until that afternoon when the chair of the ZEC nullified the entire Zanzibar election. Dozens of legal and procedural questions arose, creating a constitutional crisis.

The ZEC chair cited irregularities and conflict within the ZEC, and claimed that more people voted in CUF strongholds than had been registered. Conceivably, he acted to prevent a CCM victory that would have been almost universally seen as fraudulent. But most Tanzanians assumed that he had acted to obscure the fact that CCM was trying to steal the election. Maalim Seif, opposition leaders, and major embassies all denounced the nullification, while two members of the ZEC said they had not been consulted and they disagreed with the decision. With the current Zanzibari president’s term officially ending, there was the possibility that the islands would be without a legally constituted government as of Monday, November 1.

Frustrated with the silence from the mainland government, who were busy celebrating their victory, Maalim Seif called another press conference the following Friday evening. Pleading for CCM to sit down and talk, but unwilling to sit by passively while the electoral process was so blatantly ignored, Seif said that if positive steps towards a solution were not taken on Monday, then he would no longer restrain his followers from going to the streets to “pursue their rights.” It was an ultimatum.

It seems to have worked, because the current CCM government sent its top military commander to meet with the Zanzibari contestants, and then the outgoing CCM president sat down for a conversation with Maalim Seif. These were positive steps, and between Seif’s calls for restraint and a large military police presence, Zanzibar has remained calm throughout the crisis.

While CCM still retains a lot of goodwill among rural and older voters in the mainland, many Tanzanians thirst for an opposition victory that would be a rebuke against corrupt governance and a sign that Tanzania’s democracy has truly come of age. With the new CCM president firmly in place, an opposition presidency in Zanzibar would not be a threat to its political dominance. CCM is unlikely to find a better negotiating partner in Zanzibar than Maalim Seif. He is a moderate who has consistently chosen compromise over confrontation. Whoever rises to the top of Zanzibari politics in his wake is unlikely to wield the same influence or the same willingness to forgo conflict for the wellbeing of theZanzibari people.

CCM ostensibly opposes his candidacy because they fear that he would try to break up the union, even though CUF has never advocated Zanzibari independence. Seif would certainly bring pressure to revise the current structure, but that pressure is now coming from every direction and needs to be addressed regardless. More deeply, some in CCM might worry that without the united front of CCM government, extremist groups might take root in Zanzibar. But on this score, it is clear that CCM’s intransigence is only seeding the atmosphere with resentment that is already fueling more radical rhetoric: this week, Zanzibar’s first IEDs exploded (without injuries) in its historic Stone Town. Maalim Seif is probably the best placed politician in the country to lead the most frustrated elements of Zanzibari politics back towards the compromise and power-sharing necessary for democratic governance. If Maalim Seif legitimately won the election, CCM would be wise to let him represent the will of his electoral majority and begin to talk about how best to restructure the union to face future challenges.

The current Zanzibari president’s term has been temporarily extended, Maalim Seif is putting together a cabinet, and it remains to be seen whether this week’s discussions will resolve the impasse.

After Tanzania’s national election, things get complicated in Zanzibar

In April 1964, following a racially charged revolution in Zanzibar, its new leaders negotiated a union between the Zanzibari islands, with their 300,000 people, and the country of Tanganyika on the mainland with its 10 million people. The bond was bound to be unbalanced, Zanzibar would remain with its own government, president and vice president, and revolutionary council, while simultaneously being subsumed under the government of a new “united republic,” with its own president and parliament, to be known as Tanzania. Tanganyika no longer had its own government. The Zanzibari president became the First Vice President of Tanzania, while the Tanzanian president’s running mate became its Second Vice President.

The union’s lopsided ambiguity makes it hard to shake, but is also the source of its frustration. Zanzibaris never quite came to a consensus about what their constitutional relationship to the mainland should be, and the opposition makes the appealing case that it should have more autonomy. Many on the mainland agree: why not have a “three-government” system, with both Zanzibar and the mainland operating autonomous governmental structures under an umbrella government overseeing both?

This question was the central ideological issue at stake in the recent Tanzanian presidential elections. The opposition to the ruling CCM party was a coalition of parties allied by their fight against CCM attempts to railroad a constitutional reform process towards their interests.

The elections of October 25, 2015 were the most hotly contested in Tanzania’s independent history. Although many the main opposition candidate disputes the results, officially the CCM candidate won by nearly 3 million votes. Despite ongoing litigation in various constituencies, it was a very well run election with indisputably strong showings for both candidates. The CCM candidate was sworn in with great ceremony, and ceremonies mean a lot in this country. The national president is here to stay.

In Zanzibar, however, things got complicated. The candidate for CUF, a member of the opposition coalition, was Seif Sharif Hamad. “Maalim” Seif, as he is known, has run for Zanzibari president in every election since 1995. He has lost every time in elections widely panned as rigged in CCM’s favor. Many Zanzibaris have become intensely frustration with CCM domination and its racially charged propaganda. Throughout this period, Maalim Seif has struggled patiently against hope that one day there would be a clean and uncontroversial election in Zanzibar. He has repeatedly sought legal and electoral recourse, and has never advocated violence or rebellion… at least until last week.

Two weeks ago Monday, the day after the election, Seif called a press conference to announce that according to reported polling results, the trend looked as if he would be the . Further reported polling results over the next few days showed a strong, if dubious, CCM showing. The Zanzibari Electoral Commission (ZEC) was to announce a winner at 10 a.m. on Wednesday. No announcement came until that afternoon when the chair of the ZEC nullified the entire Zanzibar election. Dozens of legal and procedural questions arose, creating a constitutional crisis.

The ZEC chair cited irregularities and conflict within the ZEC, and claimed that more people voted in CUF strongholds than had been registered. Conceivably, he acted to prevent a CCM victory that would have been almost universally seen as fraudulent. But most Tanzanians assumed that he had acted to obscure the fact that CCM was trying to steal the election. Maalim Seif, opposition leaders, and major embassies all denounced the nullification, while two members of the ZEC said they had not been consulted and they disagreed with the decision. With the current Zanzibari president’s term officially ending, there was the possibility that the islands would be without a legally constituted government as of Monday, November 1.

Frustrated with the silence from the mainland government, who were busy celebrating their victory, Maalim Seif called another press conference the following Friday evening. Pleading for CCM to sit down and talk, but unwilling to sit by passively while the electoral process was so blatantly ignored, Seif said that if positive steps towards a solution were not taken on Monday, then he would no longer restrain his followers from going to the streets to “pursue their rights.” It was an ultimatum.

It seems to have worked, because the current CCM government sent its top military commander to meet with the Zanzibari contestants, and then the outgoing CCM president sat down for a conversation with Maalim Seif. These were positive steps, and between Seif’s calls for restraint and a large military police presence, Zanzibar has remained calm throughout the crisis.

While CCM still retains a lot of goodwill among rural and older voters in the mainland, many Tanzanians thirst for an opposition victory that would be a rebuke against corrupt governance and a sign that Tanzania’s democracy has truly come of age. With the new CCM president firmly in place, and an opposition presidency in Zanzibar would not be a threat to its political dominance. CCM is unlikely to find a better negotiating partner in Zanzibar than Maalim Seif. He is a moderate who has consistently chosen compromise over confrontation. Whoever rises to the top of Zanzibari politics in his wake is unlikely to wield the same influence or the same willingness to forgo conflict for the wellbeing of theZanzibari people.

CCM ostensibly opposes his candidacy because they fear that he would try to break up the union, even though CUF has never advocated Zanzibari independence. He would certainly bring pressure to revise the current structure, but that pressure is now coming from every direction and needs to be addressed regardless. More deeply, some in CCM might worry that without the united front of CCM government, extremist groups might take root in Zanzibar. But on this score, it is clear that CCM’s intransigence is only seeding the atmosphere with resentment that is already fueling more radical rhetoric: this week, Zanzibar’s first IEDs exploded (without injuries) in its historic Stone Town. Maalim Seif is probably the best placed politician in the country to lead the most frustrated elements of Zanzibari politics back towards the compromise and power-sharing necessary for democratic governance. If Maalim Seif legitimately won the election, CCM would be wise to let him represent the will of the Zanzibari majority and begin to talk about how best to restructure the union to face future challenges.

The current Zanzibari president’s term has been temporarily extended, and it remains to be seen whether this week’s discussions will resolve the impasse.

The Hooligans

A black coated Nylophor fence transverses the Union Building lawns the day #FeesMustFall marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria. The fence creating a ceremonial space for protest below and, at the top, the Union Buildings edifice with a tall sculpture of former president Nelson Mandela with his arms wide open in cruel irony. The fence is secured by Bekafix posts and impenetrable (or so we thought). To others, students from Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) Soshanguve campus, especially, it was relative – it could be bent and broken and torn apart: it could be transform from a deterrent into something else, even an entrance, perhaps. In tearing the fence open TUT Soshanguve students altered the relationship between the State and its citizens at that moment of ceremony.

They folded the distance between power and people upon itself, shortening the distance by half. One got the feeling that this particular protest action was not on the cards for most people who were in attendance—for that’s what most of us were there to do, to attend a ceremony where President Jacob Zuma would speak and, hopefully, placate our frustrated energy and tell us something we could take home, something that would render all the effort of driving or taking the Gautrain to Pretoria, worth it.

But TUT Soshanguve – who had by now been derided on social media as ‘hooligans’ – had already muddied our symbolic defiance of the State and made matters worse for everyone. They had caused us great panic and even greater regret to having come to this untethering of Pretoria’s urban youths, to experience the stripped down version of revolution; the one were the state shows its fangs vis-a-vis its heavy handed riot police with its rubber bullets and tear gas and stun grenades and what have you; and the gathered residuum retaliating by equally destructive means – a brick here, a petrol bomb there, a burnt down mobile toilet or two. My friend and I had stood far back enough to notice the happenings by the fence. Each time the TUT Soshanguve students made head way with the fence the police stung them with stun grenades. Every single stun grenade was met with a “Happy!” from the students as though it were New Year’s.

This joy in that which was so blatantly violent was as tragic as it was comical to those of us who deplore violence in all its forms, but at this moment, at this proximity with real revolution, with the real risk of catching a rubber bullet to the leg, our outrage froze inside our bone marrow. So we tweeted it instead. The violence unfolding in front of us and the way in which we casually watched at such close proximity, without raising a single finger or placing our bodies between the riot police and the TUT Soshanguve students, spoke of the ways in which violence is naturalised in this country, especially between the State and its citizens. We all knew something about what was happening and we all knew not to intervene. Violence of the State against its own citizens usually points to its illegitimacy than its power. It points to cracks in the syntax of power. To those who had come with the intent to demonstrate those exact same cracks this state of affairs glimmered with hope. Finally, the South African government, the president himself, would have nowhere to hide his true face. Today he would kill his children and the entire world was watching and the riot police feigned restraint while grinding their teeth behind riot shields.

Tear gas canisters fell from the sky – from a police helicopter – onto anyone and everyone. Teargas chokes, suffocates and repels. It stings the eyes. From here on it was clear that the president wouldn’t come out. TUT Soshanguve students were still working their way through the fence as though tear gas were the very air they breathe in their neighbourhoods. It is important to draw the distinction between ‘symbolic violence’  and the violence the intimate violence of poverty and squalor which snatches food from your cupboards, haunts your dreams and denies you choices, poisoning the water you drink and the very air you breathe. It is inside these homes that symbolic violence finds its similitude in physical violence. It is here that it is mirrored with devastating effects. And it is also here that the signatures of power speak the loudest.

As we watched with teargas filled tears the coterie of sinewy TUT Soshanguve students finally rip through the Nylophor fence, uproot the Bekafix posts and put their hands up in the air in surrender before getting down on their knees to disarm their rage, we were somewhat relieved. It became apparent they only wanted to tear down the boundaries that separate State and citizen. They wanted to be allowed into the space that purports to be theirs to own. In their tenacity to tear down the fence that transverses the Union Building, they had succeeded in restoring the Union Buildings into its proper function as a public institution.

We ambled in after them through the hole in the fence in quiet disbelief.  To some us the fence had a justification somewhere in the back of our heads, if one cared to look there and rummage with both hands. The fence needed to be there, this we knew. Especially those of us of middle class leaning. We are accustomed to high walls and electric fences. We know whom they are meant to deter. But here, at the Union Buildings, in this supposedly public space, our grasp of borders and privileged spaces nearly made a mockery of our own supposed intelligence. Here were these outsiders, writ large in the language of violence and derided as Hooligans on Twitter, demonstrating to us and the rest of the world how to communicate with a government that only speaks fluent violence against its own citizens to preserve middle class illusions and maintain upper class affluence while defending its own unbridled corruption. When The Hooligans climbed the top of Police Nyalas to look the president in the eye had he come out to deliver his speech, some among us joined them. There was a sense of passing through an impossible threshold once you went through the torn down fence. There was a genuine, visceral sense of victory when you drank from the sprinklers with your bare hands and dabbed your teargassed face with the cool water inside the beautifully manicured lawns along the first steps of the Union Buildings.

People gathered tiredly under the tall trees and conversed. The riot police, which were not so long ago a sign of imminent danger were now but negligible gnomes – forming part of the landscaping. To think that to get here it took less than 50 people out of a couple of thousands – potentially – had given me a glimpse of the power we have as citizens. It was clear at this point that the president wasn’t going to come out. If I were him I’d have done the same. Here were people who tore the fence that divided them from power, and with it tore open their hearts and bled right there in front of us in fits of rage for justice. My president enjoys a good laugh but The Hooligans had demonstrated that today would not be a laughing matter. There would be no chortling and clearing of the throat; there would be no meandering around a point and beating about the bush. The language of violence from the State had, on this day, found its mirror. Even better, it had found its partner that would finish its sentences. The Hooliganism of State had finally met what it had procreated in poor communities and in the wells of minds of its most vulnerable citizens. And we stood there, stunned in clumps of bewildered middle class markers, cloaked in suburban revolutionary language, caught in the middle of a conversation between two lovers, who had sized each other up well before hand and had met on this day on terms that only lovers understand. I knew then that it was time to drive home, to get on the freeway to Johannesburg. There was a tension I couldn’t quite decipher. Evening was approaching and I knew that by night lovers will do only what lovers are prone to do. This was only a visceral intuition I could not quite shake off. As we drove onto the M1 the first shots were fired by the riot police and by the time we arrived at Wolves on Corlett Drive in Illovo for a beer, the first police van had been set alight. By the time our partners came to meet us after work, there were students who wanted to abandon the revolution and go home. And by the time I got down to write this, a few universities had agreed to end the exploitive practice outsourcing their general staff, a decision that our erstwhile president, barricaded inside the Union Buildings couldn’t even attempt to make on that decidedly hot Friday afternoon.

If anything, that fateful Friday exposed not only the hubris of power and language of state and the way in which that language and its violence inscribes itself on vulnerable black bodies; it revealed the fissures in the solidarity between privilege black bodies and not so privileged ones in times of struggle; it pointed to the modulations of similitude within the movement itself – where common ground reflects common convenience  and where and when shifts to reflect different class conveniences within struggle itself. The fractures in the student movement are a mere microcosm of the heterogeneous experience of black bodies in South Africa, and as such, were to be expected. In the end, it revealed that fidelity to revolution becomes a matter of convenience or necessity depending on one’s proximity to the centre that holds all the power of economic, political, cultural and social currency.

Asking for a friend

This week’s 20 questions from our friend:

Can Idris Elba’s acting save the Netflix movie ‘Beasts of No Nation’?

Why do African national teams do so well in FIFA age group competitions (Nigeria and Mali play each other in the Under 17 World Cup Final today in Chile) but fail so spectacularly at senior level? (A former Mexico coach–they lost to Nigeria in the semifinal–has a theory.)

Will the child refugees who are the subjects of this New York Times Magazine/Google ‘real time’ storytelling app be able to see it?

Who will win Uganda’s presidential election in 2016?

You know that President Paul Kagame can technically rule Rwanda until 2034? Think about it: North West Kardashian will be 21 and D’Banj will be 54.

Is Africa’s best footballer Yaya Toure mad at John Obi Mikel?

Will the Italian newspaper La Republica at some point explain to the rest of us why it decided to make a blackface film?

Is Bono also your go-to person on global poverty and Ethiopian history?

What is Nigerian Senator Patrick Obahiagbon saying?

Who should we blame for the pitiful state of commercial rap music?

Is Drake Zambian?

Is “Our Brand is Crisis” (the fictionalized movie version with Sandra Bullock of the revealing 2006 documentary film) as bad as we assume it is?

Why is Fareed Zakaria still allowed to make stuff up?

Does the #FeesMustFall movement have its own soundtrack?

Have you gotten your copy of “Apartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy”?

What was NPR thinking?

Who believed Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte (Order of the Blackface) when he pretended to know very little about his country’s deep historical ties to South Africa?

Did the City of Johannesburg take Burning Spear’s advice about social living literally?

Why do US public representatives take their foreign policy advice (on the Democratic Republic of the Congo) from Nicole Ritchie and Ryan Gosling?

Don’t we all miss Brenda Fassie right now?

Beyond the Boundary

On November, 10th 1991, after more than 20 years of isolation from international cricket, the South African cricket team played a One Day International against India in Kolkata. Nelson Mandela had only recently been released from prison. The National Party, the party of apartheid, still ruled in South Africa. The scores were low. Sachin Tendulkar was beginning his career.

Two and a half decades later, in 2015, South Africa once again travelled to India for a series of One Day Internationals named after Mahatma Ghandi and Nelson Mandela. Things had changed. In the first match alone South Africa picked five black players including, test match captain and quickest player to score 6,000 ODI runs and 20 ODI centuries, Hashim Amla, senior campaigner and all-rounder JP Duminy (who has also recently captained South Africa) and the talented young fast bowling sensation Kagiso Rabada. This team produced South Africa’s first ever series victory in an ODI series on Indian soil.

Cricket continues to be a political matter in South Africa. Despite the emergence of significant black cricketing talent over the last two and half decades the debate about race and cricket rages on in South Africa’s living rooms, pages of newspapers (like this), online and even the seats of Parliamentary Portfolio Committee meetings. Parliament regularly discusses the opportunities afforded to specific young black players and the media’s ill treatment of black players like Vernon Philander. As the Caribbean intellectual of sports and politics, CLR James, so eloquently describes in his seminal Beyond a Boundary, cricket was born in politics in England and spread across the world imbued with a puritanical value system and not a small dose of habitual racism. It has always managed to “encompass so much of social reality and still remain a game.”

Let’s be clear: five out 11 players is still significantly below representative in a country in which 10 out 11 people are black. For now, Kagiso Rabada remains one of the only black African players being regularly played in the national team despite the population of South Africa,compromising more than 80% of black Africans (Amla, for example, is Indian South African and Duminy coloured).

Kagiso Rabada is 20-years-old. Born and bred in Johannesburg in post-apartheid South Africa he is what is often referred to in South Africa as a “born free”. He is a sensational fast bowler. Standing at 1.91 metres Rabada regularly bowls at over 145 kilometres an hour and often reaches speeds of over 150 kilometres an hour. Translation for cricket muggles: that’s the equivalent of sprinting a hundred metres in less than 10 seconds. But Rabada is not just raw pace and height, he is an intelligent, composed bowler, with all the variations and skills required to succeed at the top level in international cricket. Rabada burst into the limelight in 2015 at the age of 19, taking six for 25 in the Under 19 World Cup semi-final against South Africa’s fierce cricket rivals, Australia.

Since his international debut against the senior Australian outfit later that same year, Rabada has done nothing, but impress in ten One Day Internationals and eight T20 International matches and just played his debut Test Match in Mohali. Highlights include claiming the Man of the Match award in his ODI debut by taking six for 16 away from home against Bangladesh in July 2015.

Rabada ended the recently concluded Ghandi-Mandela bilateral series in India as the joint highest wicket taker with Dale Steyn, claiming 10 wickets, at a better average, lower economy rate and equal strike rate to the world’s indisputably best bowler. Translation for cricket muggles: he is very good.

He accomplished this in sub-continental conditions which typically do not favour fast bowlers. I repeat. Rabada is a phenomenal player. But why trust me? South Africa’s former captain and fast bowling all rounder Shaun Pollock, when asked on air whether he was a potential future superstar responded: “He is already a superstar.”Allan Donald, South Africa’s former bowling coach says that Rabada is “destined to play for the Proteas for a long time” and has “unbelievable talent.” Makhaya Ntini, South African cricketing legend and South Africa’s most successful black African fast bowler to date, described Rabada as “without a doubt” this next big thing in South African cricket.

Not surprisingly, when it is crunch time – the so-called ‘death overs’ at the end of match, Rabada’s captain, AB De Villiers, has consistently and without hesitation given the twenty year old the ball.And Rabada has excelled.

In the first ODI against India in Kanpur, Rabada was tasked with bowling the final over against India’s captain MS Dhoni. India needed only 11 runs to win. The pressure was on and South Africa’s superstar stepped up. He managed to take two wickets, including Dhoni’s, and conceded only six runs. Cricket muggles: this is like running 100 metres in 9.8 seconds while juggling. He repeated this feat in the next match, again bowling the 50th over to Dhoni, Rabada, as a packed crowd watch in awe at the blunting of their own hero, bowled five balls without conceding a run before being hit for six by Dhoni off of the last ball of the innings.

This is quality cricket. The media coverage has been less so.

Experienced South African cricket journalist Neil Manthorp, writing in South Africa’s Business Day newspaper after the first ODI in Kanpur, credited South Africa’s captain AB De Villiers “genius” in managing to advise and calm young Rabada down, as if Rabada might be completely foreign the match situation or unlikely without AB’s intervention to execute his skills effectively. So fixated is Manthorp on De Villiers, that he even finds space to write about his slow over rate –Note to Cricket muggles:a negative for the captain who may be suspended as a result and the cricketing version of a parking fine– and put even that negative down the his excellent fastidiousness in managing his bowlers, including Rabada.

AB can do no wrong. Rabada can do no right.

Instead in an article titled“De Villiers’ genius shows in Rabada moment” Manthorp commits not a single line to Rabada’s bowling and merely catalogues AB De Villier’s achievements and role in “calming Rabada down.”

Manthorp, as the political scientist (and also Business Day columnist) Steven Friedman observed in a Facebook post, seemed totally incapable of crediting Rabada’s performance, to Rabada’s own talent and temperament. Friedman therefore observes correctly that

“yes, AB de Villiers did very well to give a 20-year-old the final over in a tight match. But when journalists and headline writers can only explain black achievement by pointing to the guiding hand of a white person, then we surely do not need to debate whether racism is alive in well in this country today.”

In the cricketing context there is nothing new about white players being credited for black cricketing excellence or black players cricketing temperaments and minds – as opposed to their exoticised physical ability and power – being ignored. In Beyond a Boundary, CLR James also explained that for decades colonial West Indian authorities could not stomach the appointment of a black captain, especially to play Australia or England, despite the vast majority of their best players being black. Black players were invisible, both in James’s time and, apparently, in Manthorp’s mind. As James wrote then:

There whole point [The white controlled West Indian cricket authorities] was to continue to send to populations of white people, black or brown men under a white captain. The more brilliantly the black men played the more it would emphasise to millions of English people: “Yes they are fine players, but, funny isn’t it, they cannot be responsible for themselves – they must always have a white man to lead them.”

Manthorp’s analysis continues the racist spurt of journalism and commentary that has grown exponentially preceding South Africa’s defeat by New Zealand in the seminal final of the ICC Cricket World Cup earlier this year and the acceleration of Cricket South Africa’s transformation policy to require six black players – of which three must be black African – to play for each team in domestic cricketing competitions.

Vernon Philander, readers of this blog may recall, was blamed for South Africa’s defeat despite his own impressive record, and the fact that Dale Steyn conceded the winning runs at the pivotal moment. Black players are damned if they do and damned if don’t. Succeed and somebody else will largely be credited. Fail and they will be blamed disproportionately not only because of their performance but because of their blackness. White players like Steyn, on the other hand, are praised when they succeed and endured, tolerated and supported when they fail.

Manthorp should not face the music alone. He is just one of many white male cricket journalists in South Africa who continue to suffer from either a total inability to understand the significance of race in cricket or, more commonly, an open contempt for Cricket South Africa’s laudable transformation agenda.

This cacophony of white male voices, constantly claim it is selection “meddling” which “galls” players needs to be put to an end. Unlike Manthorp, De Villiers and the Proteas team appear to feel quite comfortable with Rabada’s brilliance and accept the transformation imperatives which manifest as quotas at a domestic level and guidelines at the international level. White journalists should not mistake their own lack of understanding, discomfort and racist attitudes for nefarious activity in selection and discomfort of players. On the contrary, it is white cricketing journalists who are causing harm to players and disrupting the cricket team’s unity by “meddling” for their own satisfaction, manufacturing of click bait and conservative political agendas.

As South Africa’s cricket players successfully competed in the Ghandi-Mandela series, student activists in South Africa were momentously brandishing the words of black consciousness and ideas of revolution to end outsourcing at universities and eliminate university fees. They are leaving Mandela’s friendly, reconciled rainbow nation behind. Some consider Mandela a “sell out”; they will not tolerate a slow pace of transformation in universities – or cricket teams.

In the same way as Nelson Mandela’s “reconciliatory” politics are being left far behind, so are Neil Manthorp and the white cadre of cricket journalists. They would do well to stop commenting on cricket as if it were capable of being apolitical and the South African team as if it were still the lily white outfit that emerged from isolation in Kolkata in 1991 to face India.

The country is changing quickly. So should they.