Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 409

20 Years of Freedom in South Africa: Elections and captured politics

Recent public commentary has celebrated the virtues of a competitive electoral market in South Africa. The common argument is that the emergence of new political formations on the electoral landscape provides space for increased competition to have a real and meaningful impact on the quality of governance. If followed to its logical conclusion, what this essentially means is that whether we vote for our party preference along partisan lines on May 7th, or tactically shift our support to affect the outcome and send a message to the current governing party, we still have reasons to vote. But in a time of Marikana, of Nkandla, of continued secrecy around party funding and a political class captured by vested interests (irrespective of party affiliation), competitive electoral politics brings little respite from the monumental challenges that fracture our society.

The assumption is widely held, especially among the middle classes, that greater political competition leads to more responsive governance. But, marginalised communities in our cities and the one province under opposition control would beg to differ. Although important, responsive governance is comprised of more than just unqualified audits, clean fiscal management of public money and the absence of scandal. In a society severely marked by inequality it also means prioritising the needs of poor communities first; because trickle down governance does not work. Greater electoral competition and alternation in government has not moved poor communities much closer, if at all, to more accountable and responsive government, let alone socio-economic nirvana. Governance gains such as better basic servicing or safer communities often are the result of intense civil society pressure and mobilisation around social justice struggles. Irrespective of the political party concerned, communities often have to approach the courts in order to hold governments (national, provincial and local) to account for failure to respond to their needs and demands for better governance.

This disillusionment with our politics is because of its capture by narrow and special interests and the lack of responsiveness to ordinary citizens. Party politics has developed a hollowed out ethical core and quite simply; our buffet selection of political parties is increasingly unconvincing and unattractive. Special interest capture of political processes disproportionately trumps the interests and voice of the marginalised and rewards the few who have proximity to the largesse of state power. The palpable frustration driving civil unrest across society is, in part, a symptom of a political game that is rigged in the favour of the few, irrespective of the party political bent of those who govern. So shifting electoral support has brought little in the way of responsive governance outcomes. Simply put, a change in government does not necessarily provide a change in governance. Our challenges require much more than the simple threat of change, or even influence at the ballot box.

A number of individuals and organisations have recently called for the mass spoiling of ballots or abstaining from the process altogether because they are unwilling to swallow their bile and vote for the least bad option. But this has been far too easily dismissed as reactionary, or even silly. The right to vote was hard earned through a difficult struggle. It was not that long ago that millions were deprived of this right and it is therefore as deeply an emotional act to cast a ballot as it is a rational one. So the decision to withdraw a vote through abstention or even choosing to spoil a ballot is not a decision that would be taken lightly. Whether such strategies are an effective protest to a captured politics is another matter altogether. But it is illustrative of the deep discontent with the available choices in particular and quite a damning indictment of our politics in general.

This does not mean that voting and an increasingly competitive electoral politics is not vital for the creation of responsive and accountable governance; it is. But it is wholly insufficient. Voting is not simply a cold rational application of preferences in a process characterised by choice. Nor are market-derived principles of competition a panacea for social justice struggles. The fires in Bekkersdal and Mothutlung reminded us of the rejection of weak political participation framed within the ebb and flow of electoral cycles.

As long as secrecy surrounds those who influence political governance processes; many will remain disenfranchised of their voice between elections. Greater choice or competition is not a salve to this reality. The vote is a mandate to govern. Political parties are not entitled to votes; they have to be earned. In a deeply unequal society like ours this is done through a demonstration of responsiveness to the needs of those who have least access to social, economic and political power.

Cancel Jeremy Clarkson, cancel Top Gear and cancel British jingoism

Like Musa Okwonga, I was not going to write about Jeremy Clarkson mumbling the n-word and feigning indignation at the slap on the wrist he received from the BBC over it. Much like the time he proudly announced he’d named his black Scottish terrier Didier Drogba, or any of the numerous other racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist, anti-worker, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic bullshit that’s dribbled out whenever he’s opened his mouth, the whole incident is following a predictable script.

We’re now in scene one of act two. Clarkson, sent to the naughty corner, has resorted to recrimination and is squealing that moral panic has made him the inevitable victim of an impossible standard of behavior, as though normalizing the racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-worker, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic status quo as he does were somehow brave and those outraged by his actions and long history of escaping accountability are an overly sensitive, pitchfork-wielding mob.

“I’ve been told by the BBC that if I make one more offensive remark, anywhere, at any time, I will be sacked,” he wrote in his weekly Sun column.

“And even the angel Gabriel would struggle to survive with that hanging over his head. It’s inevitable that one day, someone, somewhere will say that I’ve offended them, and that will be that.”

[The sounds of a weeping violin fills the silence as a sympathetic group of mostly white straight cisgender men gather around Clarkson. And scene!]

I’ve lost the appetite for these predictable performances. I’d rather focus on writing about the historical and structural elements to prejudice and ways of perceiving and defeating them through a solidarity of the oppressed, as they are often socially invisible to those who they do not affect directly. And, anyway, my ambivalence about Top Gear (and the kind of car culture Clarkson promotes), which I’d mostly enjoyed watching, made me feel a bit of hypocrite.

However, over the last dozen seasons, the show has frequently left me reeling and I haven’t found the words to express why until the more recent reactions to Clarkson’s offensiveness.

In the season 21 finale, for example, a two-part special set in Burma, the Clarkson remark that rightly caused a public backlash was another cleverly disguised racial slur. But it was telling that there was hardly a fuss made about the episode’s trumpeting of British imperialism as a civilizing force the world over while, at the same, the hosts guffawed disbelievingly at the brutality of Burma’s post-colonial rulers. The show’s producers and hosts had subtly infused much of the episode with this dichotomy of civilizing Britons and unselfgovernable natives, without cognisance of the strong causal links between Britain’s actions in Burma (the divide and rule tactics that embedded a fractious potency into ethnic and racial differences in Burmese society, for example) and the actions of the country’s post-colonial leaders.

This kind of jingoism is a frequent feature on the show, especially in special episodes set in former colonies. I used to read a pathetic and laughable irony into it, like when hearing impotent old men reminisce about their glory days, when they sowed their idiomatic wild oats—code for the often one-sided (or at best disproportionate) pleasure they derived from their sexual conquest of women’s bodies.

But I’ve either become less able to tolerate this kind of militarised industrial-grade irony, for I’ve begun to see how destructive it is, or the show has become distinctly less ironic and more genuinely and unabashedly celebratory of Britain’s imperialist actions. Probably a bit of column A; a bit of column B.

More nauseating than the celebration of Britain’s imperial conquests is how such is socially accepted.

Presently, Britain regards its brutal imperialist actions as so benign that the national broadcaster screened, without compunction, a skit in the Burma special where the punchline was what appears to be an urban legend of a “jam boy”, a young brown man (the “jam boy”) who British gentry in colonial India apparently smeared with jam and used as a decoy to keep insects away while they played golf. In the segment in question, Clarkson—lazying about while the Thai workers he hired (and likely didn’t pay a decent wage) built a bridge the hosts had appointed themselves to bring into existence—made his own “jam bear” using a teddy bear.

Responding to co-host Richard Hammond’s remark that the “jam boy” practice didn’t seem fair, Clarkson said: “Oh, it was [fair]. It was! Because at the end of the day, he [the jam boy] got to keep the [insect-laden] jam.”

The racist imagery and infantilizing (because man vs boy vs teddy bear) needed to make the gag work and level of casual indifference exhibited by the producers and the BBC to repugnant colonialist practices, real or mythical, in this instance is staggering. Entering its 22nd season, the show’s current iteration is littered with many other similar w-t-f moments. That Clarkson and Top Gear are able to romanticize and diminish the crimes of the British empire in this way, with neither adverse reactions nor repercussion, is a mind-blowing illustrative example of how cultural products (like TV shows, books, music, plays, etc) deploy humor and irony to dissimulate and efface the brutality and prejudice of the powerful. These cultural products were once hailed as a boon to plurality, and humor and irony were supposed to be ways to lay bare the contradictions of power.

This suggests that in the contestation of perspectives implicit in cultural production in a multicultural society, the counterfactual idea that Britain (and Europe) civilized as opposed to brutalized the world has prevailed. Unlike imperialism, which is by definition the oppression of one group by another, racism, sexism and such are at least still being contested in mainstream discourse when they reemerge on TV and in music, books, news and opinion, as repetitive as the performance might be.

Worse still is that societies like Britain are hailed as models of success developing nations should follow. It was Arundhati Roy who observed that with no one left to colonise, India is colonising itself; impoverishing its underclasses, destroying homes and habitats, and building gargantuan monuments to itself in the same way its colonial masters did. And, based on recent history, Ngugi wa Thiong’o expressed the fear that Kenya’s governing class “will continue to be no more than mimic men—copying their western counterparts in greed and contempt for the regular folk.”

Here in South Africa, the Marikana massacre woke many up to the reality that Steve Biko’s prediction has come to pass. Instead of a real egalitarian reorganization of our society in 1994, we had only a change in the faces those in government, which is why Black people remain poor and many aspects of our society operate in the same way they did in the centuries the country was run by the oppressors.

Highlighting how Top Gear romanticizes British imperialism (and the invisibility of this action) as I have here should not be taken as diminishing the objectionability of any of Clarkson’s racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist, anti-worker, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic remarks. If anything it gives greater cause to object, because casual bigotry and romanticized views of imperialism are symptoms of the same malaise, the postcolonial melancholia afflicting Britain today. Clarkson’s puerile sensibilities and Top Gear’s jingoism aren’t aberrations. They are the projection to a global audience of Britain’s resistance to multiculturalism and substantive global equality; a resistance made possible by a glib denial and downplaying of the inconvenient aspects of the country’s history.

AIAC’s Elliot Ross asked last year, shortly after Britain settled with the survivors of the Mau Mau massacre, what it will take to break through the jingoism that’s suffused British society so that the nation might finally face up properly to its past. I’m inclined to believe nothing will break this impasse, because few even care to acknowledge it exists. If conscious Britons somehow believe otherwise, a good place for them to start in the here and now is to use this latest incident to get Clarkson and Top Gear off our screens, and to diligently and consistently dismantle every other attempt at using humour, irony or any other rhetorical subterfuge to efface or sanctify bigotry and the history of Britain’s brutal actions.

#BringBackOurGirls: What took the world so long?

Like so many others I am glad to see more people around the world take up the issue of the school girls who were kidnapped more than two weeks ago from Chibok in the north east region of Nigeria. I am relieved to see people of different backgrounds, in my social media feeds join the #WhereAreOurGirls and #BringBackOurDaughters conversations in solidarity with the grieving families of those missing girls. Celebrities including Chris Brown, Keri Hilson and Mary J. Bilge have contributed their support to the #bringbackourgirls campaigns.

But even as the rest of the world finally gets around to paying attention to this story, we should consider this an apt moment to pause and reflect on how we write about conflict in Africa, young girls and how the western media tends to render female children invisible not just by a lack of coverage, but in the language we use to talk about them.

For two weeks, the plight more than 200 girls was barely covered in the western media, which led me to wonder if there are gendered notions of African children that deserve protection from African conflict. African boys seem to have received the lion’s share of western preoccupation when it comes to conflicts on the continent. A google image search for the words “child”, “conflict” and “Africa” are mostly images of male child soldiers holding semi-automatic weapons. Many people familiar with conflict know of the “Lost Boys of Sudan”, or the boy soldiers of “Invisible Children” of Uganda. Perhaps boy child soldiers invoke a western fascination with the myth of African males, who naturally brutish and violent and are easily coerced into killing one another because, “primordial hatred”. But do many people know that in 1996 in Aboke, Uganda, more than 100 school girls between the ages of 13 and 16 were kidnapped by the Lord’s Resistance Army? That many of them were rescued by their school mistress? That it took almost ten years to get most of them back? I have not heard much mention of the Aboke girls at all in coverage of the missing Chibok girls.

Beyond lack of coverage, I questioned on Twitter the language we use to talk about girls who are abducted in conflict situations. News media reports said that a number of the girls have been “sold as brides to Islamic militants for $12” Is it appropriate to call these girls “brides” or “wives” in our reporting just because the militants may refer to them as such? In scanning the Nigerian media, I did not see the words “brides” or “wives” feature as heavily as I did in Western reporting.

There is nothing remotely resembling marriage in what has happened to these girls. In my view, these girls are not brides, but rather they have been trafficked and sold into nothing short of slavery. Imagine if the world headlines read, “235 Children in Nigeria Kidnapped and Sold Into Slavery”, I would bet reactions would be swifter and stronger. If the reports are true, it is very likely that the girls will be forcibly used for sex, perhaps in addition to cooking, cleaning and other types of labor for the militants. Is this not slavery? When do we use the term “child slave” versus “child bride” for African girls?

I reiterate, I am glad that the world is finally taking notice of the Chibok girls. On the other hand, I do grow nervous when overly sensationalized coverage of children in African conflicts in the West go the way of #kony2012. While the language we use to talk about these girls must do the utmost the horror of their plight, but that in our eagerness to “say something” we do not marginalize them further.

Images by Zachary Rosen, taken at yesterday’s #BringBackOurGirls protest, Washington DC.

#Photojournal: Back To The City Festival

Back To The City is a hip-hop and street fashion festival held in Johannesburg’s Newtown Precinct every year on April 27th, South Africa’s Freedom Day. The festival has seen unprecedented growth since its inception in 2006. From a free festival held on one stage under the M1 highway, Back To The City now boasts, among other things, three performance stages, a skateboard rig, and a 20, 000-plus audience. This videos is a photojournal of some moments captured at this year’s festival.

* Music by Becomingphill. Check out his soundcloud.

‘In Search of Freedom’ (in the Democratic Republic of Congo)

“in SEARCH of FREEDOM” is a monthly video journal filmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, offering a glimpse of my quest in the motherland with other afro-european artists such as Badi and Monique Mbeka Phoba.

EDITION 01 : arriving in the capital Kinshasa and stunting on the road.

EDITION 02 : greeting the (he)art of a city to paint a better picture.

EDITION 03 : in the name of the mother, the daughters and holy grandma.

EDITION 04 : shooting a period film challenging colonial myths in Congo is not easy … but Monique did it. / http://vimeo.com/93049910 /

NEXT EDITION: Coming up end of May 2014.

* “in SEARCH of FREEDOM” Journal by Nganji. Music by Badi.

A Rwandan storify: The sensational tale of Rwanda’s gospel-singer-terrorist

Stories shift quickly in our 24-hour news cycle. The sensational tale of Rwanda’s gospel-singer-terrorist is no exception. Authorities have attempted to shape the narrative and control the headlines. For better or worse, Rwanda’s embrace of social media allows us to see how a most clickable story unfolds, and changes, over a few weeks.

Kizito Mihigo has long been a face of popular reconciliation in Rwanda. But after he wrote a song that offended the wrong people–and after he allegedly connected with some shifty people–Kizito found himself in a world of trouble.

American journalist Steve Terrill is known for keeping a watchful eye on Rwanda’s opaque twitterati. He put this Storify together and shared it with Africa is a Country. Steve says he’ll be updating the Storify as new elements emerge. He invites you to send him suggestions and feedback. Just click through:

View “undefined” on Storify

20 Years of Freedom: Seven Things To Tell Young Black South Africans

Last week, the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation held an election debate in Cape Town, in the Western Cape, on intergenerational justice. It would have been great if some terms, like intergenerational justice, had been framed more definitively beforehand. I imagine many people take the term to be a call for a moderation of economic demands on, for example, natural and other resources in this generation so that future generations might also enjoy their benefits.

However, the economic reality is that future generations do not spring forth from the aether, with no connection to the current generation. Parents bequeath their socioeconomic positions to their children, despite the many ubiquitous, grand and oversold tales of a universally available social mobility predicated on “hard work” and “equal opportunity”. And if there is to be intergenerational justice in South Africa, one based on the truism that justice delayed is justice denied, then the present-day racial inequalities—a direct result of centuries of imperialist, colonialist and apartheid policies and actions—will have to be dealt with swiftly, definitively and with a singularity of purpose in this generation’s lifetime.

Alas, this wasn’t the debate that unfolded on the night. Most of the represented political parties—the ANC, the national incumbent; the DA, the party in government in the Western Cape; and two new unrepresented parties, EFF and Agang—ignored the topic and delivered campaign speeches.

The institute had also invited students from Phillipi High School and Cape Academy, two differently resourced schools for poorer Black students, mostly. At question and answer time, the students seemed to have a firmer grasp than some of the politicians of the present state of injustice into which they were born. They asked about gangsterism on the Cape Flats; being made attend school in buildings not made of brick and mortar; and what it means to be Black in South Africa today.

They seemed perplexed that these were still issues present in their lives, two decades after the supposed start of freedom’s reign.

I wasn’t the only one in the audience to realise that they lacked the words and historical context with which to speak to the interrelatedness of their socioeconomic positions and their blackness. And it wasn’t the first time I’d come across this.

Without these words and context, being Black in South Africa today must be a baffling, sometimes humiliating experience.

With that in mind, I drew up a non-exhaustive list of seven Black consciousness themed conversations I will have with my three-year-old nephew and two-year-old niece (and any young person who will listen), so they might cope with being Black in modern-day South Africa. These are the bare-minimum educational conversations we should all be having with young Black South Africans:

1. Apartheid, in substance, was an economic system that took legal form through segregationist policies and disenfranchising Black people. The legal form was abolished in 1994, but the economic system remains. Any reference to apartheid’s “legacy” is speaking about the system proper.

2. Apartheid was the final, all-encompassing consolidation of the white-supremacist economic project that began with the initial Dutch settlement in the Cape.

3. The separation of the colonialist era from the apartheid era is artificial, as is the separation of the “post-apartheid” era from both. History cannot be sealed off from the present through watershed moments, no matter how appealing their emotive value. History is not something that can simply be “moved on” from, not without a radical and massive correction of historical injustices; something that did not happen in this country. Even with such a correction, history is always the lens through which to understand the present.

4. You aren’t poor because you are Black. There is nothing about the tone of your skin, the texture of your hair or the languages and cultural practices of your mothers that makes you innately suitable for lives of servitude. You are poor because it was economically expedient for a group of white men whose interests in empire building and wealth accumulation trumped any notion of justice or commitment to democratic values they might have had.

5. You aren’t poor because you are Black. You are poor because the economic reality is that you inherited the socioeconomic position of your parents, which was crafted by this imperialist colonialist economic project steeped in white supremacy.

6. You aren’t poor because you are Black. You are poor because the intransigence of whiteness meant the people’s movement acting to liberate you from this white-supremacist tyranny was, under threat of war, made to delay the justice to which you are entitled and to offer it to your generation piecemeal. This was always going to be a long, if not impossible, task owing to the nature of the global economy into which this country has locked itself. This is why many of your generation were born into an unjust society and will die in an unjust society.

7. The older generation (and the movements and structures they founded) no longer has the appetite to fight for the justice you deserve. You have to fight for it, and you have to convince others around you of these incontrovertible truths.

* Image Credit: Antoinette Engel.

Tumi Molekane’s New Song

With no Volume to his name, it seemed almost impossible to imagine South Africa-based self-proclaimed poet/emcee Tumi Molekane as a solo artist. He had released two albums before forming a band: A dream led to this and Tao of Tumi, the latter which, if memory serves right, had an accompanying anthology. Yet it’s the years between 2002 and 2012 that Tumi’s profile rose toadmirable heights. As Tumi of Tumi and the Volume, he recorded music and toured extensively with Paulo Chibanga (drums), Dave Bergman (bass) and Tiago Correia-Paulo (guitars). After ten years, the majority of which were spent on the road in Europe, Tumi put a lid on a part of his life which had not only come to define him, but had also loomed large over the other projects released outside of the quartet – notably his own A dream led to this (2007) and Whole worlds (2011).

A mere six months after the break-up, Tumi had assembled a new backing band and begun performing songs from his soon-to-be-released album Rob the Church. A while afterwards, he appeared in front of a full house at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg to present the same set of songs, some of which had gained traction among audiences through their accessibility on-line. It was hard to not draw parallels to a night almost twelve years ago when, backed by The Volume, and with guests including trumpeter Marcus Wyatt and vocalist Pebbles, Tumi and his Volume recorded their seminal Live @ the Bassline album. Tiago talks about those years here.

The night at the Market Theatre felt new; a promise of something else; something untested and daunting and seemingly-insurmountable.

It’s when telling stories that Tumi is most in his element. Those are the songs which stick; songs like Yvonne or People of the light; or Bophelo ba me and Villages and Malls; songs which deal with fully-formed human beings and lend nuance to their lives, like the housewife living her life vicariously through television soapie characters on Moving picture frames, or the BBEE high-flyer gunning for a better future of the cost on Mr Gogetit.

Feel so good is Tumi in sexy mode. Ziyon, known better as the vocalist from house music collective Liquid Deep, proviceds the musical and vocal accompaninent. “Tumi and Ziyon had a mutual admiration for each other’s talents and wanted to lend them to a sexy ballad about courtship and philandering,” reads the blurb on soundcloud.

Molekane represents a class of rappers not afraid to takes risks and chances; he’ll feature on a song with L-Tido, then go head-to-head with a battle emcee of the calibre of Ness Lee and easily hold his own ground. In short, he’s the emcee’s emcee, and this collaboration is further proof of his range.

* I did the images too.

Vogue Italia’s editor wants to help Africa like itself

Remember Vogue Italia’s Rebranding Africa issue? (Elliot Ross got jealous and denigrated Ban Ki Moon’s cover model shot in an epic post.)

Seriously, though, it looks like the editor-in-chief Franca Sozzani, who came up with that brainchild, hadn’t yet been informed why the issue was a flop. Because since then, Vogue Italia has forwarded the dignity of and beauty of black people and their histories by labeling a series of simple hoop earrings “Slave Earrings” and included photostories of white models in blackface milling around a backdrop of taxidermied African plains-animals. Had enough? But there’s more: in March 2012’s editorial spread (so it’s not like Sozzani left this one to minions, and innocently had no hand in this), Vogue Italia featured “pregnant” white models in weaves and gold-teeth, pushing prams and eating at their local Micky D’s while taking selfies on ghetto-glorious bling iPhones. They called it the “Haute Mess” editorial, and said something about how it was inspired by Rupaul.

In Vogue circles, all that adds up to Sozzani being the Bishop Tutu of fashion. So as of June 2012, she became the global goodwill ambassador for Fashion 4 Development. What’s that? It’s an initiative with financial backing from the United Nations (read: my tax dollars go to this). The initiative has the potential to do incredible work, creating support networks for fashion economies in Africa countries and providing fashion workers with scholarships in order to further them in their professions — if they had a less ignorant and racist person at the realm.

How do we know that Sozzani will not be the sunshine in the African fashion universe? First, because she recently turned up to Vogue Festival in London last month wearing what looks like a whole Holstein cow. Is this someone’s misguided attempt to copy Nguni cow hides? I don’t know, but then she opened her mouth and made Naomi Campbell, who was sitting next to her, sound like she’s WEB DuBois. Another clue: Sozzani doesn’t seem to be aware that the fashion industry is alive and well in several African countries, and fashion magazines already have a strong presence, working towards the same goals as the UN’s initiative without all that nice backing.

Here‘s some video of the event. They get to fashion and race around the 3 minute mark.

What’s not in that is Sozzani proceeding to tell the audience that people don’t “believe in Africa”. In her whirring mind, it’s like Africa has been fashioned into the miracle missing-link between land and sea animals, never before seen except in seafarers’ fanciful drawings (not the familiar landmass below her native country, with which Southern Europe has had centuries of cultural, intellectual, and genetic exchange). She adds that because Africa’s been left alone to play by itself for “centuries,” its inhabitants feel unloved:

This continent has been left alone for centuries, now everyone is talking about Africa – so maybe now something will happen. I don’t think I’m wasting my time,” said Sozzani. “We have to help them be comfortable in their own culture.

I know: very important that her dye-job-Italian-blondeness grants us her royal gaze and affirm our existence. We must live up to the generosity of her largesse and perform well or big Italian mama will feel she wasted her time on us. She knows that we are uncomfortable in our skins—so maybe she’s going to give us some Holstein hides to help us stand out get looked at. But not in a good way?

20 Years of Freedom: Zackie Achmat on South Africa’s 5th democratic elections

Throughout the 2000s, Zackie Achmat led what was probably the most recognizable multi-class, mass social movement in South Africa, outside of the wide support enjoyed by the ANC or its trade union ally. Though the Treatment Action Campaign openly clashed with the government led by then ANC President, Thabo Mbeki, and adopted a number of activist strategies including illegal importation of ARV’s, occupying government offices, or calling for the arrest of the ministers of trade and industry as well as health, nonetheless Achmat was still very much ANC. So were many of his members and supporters. In fact, TAC exploited splits in the ANC over AIDS policy. As Mbeki bunkered down on AIDS, Achmat could rely on the very public support of the unions and Nelson Mandela (who visited Achmat at his house and put on one of the HIV Positive t-shirts popular with TAC supporters). Nowadays, with South Africa’s 5th set of general elections* one week away, Zackie is not so ambivalent about his relationship to the ANC. In the wide-ranging interview, below, conducted by Cape Town news site, GroundUp, Achmat breaks down why he won’t vote for the ANC anymore. And in case you wondered, he adds that: “I cannot vote for the Democratic Alliance or any of the parties of the right.”  (Sean Jacobs)

Why have you decided not to vote ANC?

I joined the ANC when I was in prison in 1980. In the 2004 election I spoilt my national ballot by writing HIV causes AIDS on President Mbeki’s face. I voted ANC on the provincial ballot for Ebrahim Rasool and his cabinet who had done a sterling job on HIV. When Rasool was in a coalition govt with the National Party, he was MEC for health. He resisted Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s attempts to delay the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV programme by implementing a pilot programme.

In 2009, I decided to vote ANC after a serious debate. I regret that decision. By that point the ANC had basically destroyed its internal democracy to the extent that there was any party life. It had been invaded by former homeland bureaucrats and opportunists.

To give you an example: Richard Mdluli, who became the crime intelligence boss under Zuma, had been in the apartheid police and had worked with the security police on the repression of activists. That is an extreme example, but in addition to that Thabo Mbeki had based his economic policy on the creation of a black capitalist class and the rapid and dramatic creation of a black middle class. The latter in itself is not a bad thing considering that black people had very little access to education, culture and economic opportunities. But concomitant with that creation of the black middle class was the fostering of crony capitalism based on state tenders.

Now let’s take a step back and look at what elections mean. In any democracy an election is a snapshot of society’s political expression. It is only the expression of those who vote at a particular moment. In our country the vote is one of the most important gains of our democracy. Therefore it is critical that when we discuss whether to vote or not to vote or to spoil our ballot, that we base it on an analysis of what is happening in society.

You say the ANC’s internal democracy has eroded. Is that a sufficient basis for deciding not to vote for them?

No. Let’s first see what the ANC has done. We are celebrating 20 years of democracy. The ANC’s greatest achievement was the 1994 truce between three major forces in society: the forces of liberation led by the working class under the banner of the ANC, the white apartheid state, and corporations. Many people have criticised this as a compromise which has led to a sellout. I can understand why, but you have to understand the balance of forces in our society at that particular time.

The forces of liberation could not destroy the apartheid state. Neither could the apartheid state destroy the forces of liberation. The apartheid state was armed to the teeth and white South Africans remained amongst the most armed people in the world.

The capitalist class was globally in the ascendancy because of Thatcherism and the destruction of the Soviet system which had been the main backer, apart from Sweden, of the ANC. We were in an incipient civil war because the white state included Buthelezi, Mangope and other homeland leaders. The important question here was that they were turning the war into what was called black on black violence. The conflict from 1990 to 94 was the bloodiest in our liberation history. It wasn’t just the massacre at Boipatong, but also the armed Inkatha impis supported by De Klerk.

Had we not made that settlement, let me give you an example of what would not be possible. I once asked a TAC [Treatment Action Campaign] member by the name of Maria in an interview why she loved civil disobedience but still voted ANC. She had lived in Alexandra. She replied, “Because when the ANC took over there was war and now it is a peaceful and nice country.” A critical element of that 1994 truce was the Constitution. If correctly interpreted by the progressive forces of the left, the Constitution creates a qualitatively new moment for taking the struggle for equality and justice forward.

The ANC has also achieved through this a significant moral victory in restoring the political and social dignity of black people. There are many Model C black children and university graduates who never grew up under apartheid and who say the ANC has sold out black people. But for people of my generation and earlier the ending of apartheid established an ineradicable dignity and victory over oppression.

What else has the ANC achieved? There’s been increased access to water, education, sanitation, health-care, shelter and other social goods. One of the most important victories of the working class in SA was the demand by civil society organisations and COSATU for the expansion of the grant system and particularly the child support grant. This grant has avoided a situation where a significant number of people would have gone hungry.

So why not vote for the ANC that has brought us all of this? Let’s start with the 1999 arms deal. It’s mostly attacked for the corruption that involved the leadership of the ANC and multinational companies. However, the most enduring problem caused by it was an executive lawlessness which led to the weakening and in some cases the destruction of independent state bodies such as the Scorpions, the office of the National Prosecuting Authority and above all Parliament. It is in this period that internal democracy in the ANC was destroyed by Thabo Mbeki and his henchmen like Essop Pahad, Alec Irwin and Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.

You blame the arms deal. Do you not think the response to the HIV struggle also resulted in the undermining of these institutions?

The foundation for Mbeki’s success in HIV denialism and the further destruction of independent bodies such as the Chapter nine institutions, had been laid by the arms deal.

Isn’t it historically incorrect to claim that the ANC had true internal democracy?

People treat the ANC as a monolithic body. Unless you lived through the period of the 70s and 80s, it would be hard to realise that the ANC in exile was a divided and weak body kept together by Oliver Tambo and a struggle led by working class youth inside the country. The democracy of the ANC inside the country was a fundamentally different question to what was going on inside the camps and in exile in the ANC.

The most important democratic gain inside the country was the building of the labour movement. To this day, it is still the most democratic part of the tripartite alliance. Therefore in the period 1990 to 1999, there was a flowering of internal party democracy which allowed for the creation of progressive policies. The internal democracy is gone but the policies remain. However, the intention to implement those policies is almost gone too.

Are there any other reasons you won’t vote ANC?

HIV. Local government. Chancellor House, the ANC’s party funding machine. The education system and policing.

But the response to HIV has improved? And the messups with education and policing were made in the early years of ANC rule?

Let’s take a step back. To this days hundreds of thousands of people still die of AIDS every year. Even though new infections have slowed down and life expectancy has increased dramatically, the high number of new infections and deaths is still a legacy of the ANC. To this day, ANC members die and are not open about their HIV status.

The silence of people like Jeremy Cronin, who wrote a few poems condemning Peter Mokaba but never spoke out publicly the way people like Barbara Hogan did, the criminal silence of people like Malusi Gigaba in stark contrast to Zola Skweyiya is a legacy that lives on in issues like the Nkandla scandal. The same silence and collaboration that operated with HIV denialism remains with the struggle against corruption epitomised by Nkandla.

And education?

ZA: To their credit, Zuma and Motshekga ended the policy of outcomes based education, the consequences of which will be with us for a generation or more. However, there are deep class inequalities in education. The vast majority of black working class children continue to face an intellectual dispossession which undermines their dignity, freedom, equality and opportunities to participate in society and the economy. The ANC is in denial about the extent of that crisis and continues to defend [the fact] that there are thousands of pit latrines in schools.

GU: And policing?

This is one the most egregious examples of the failure of the ANC. Reducing crime and creating safe communities is not simply a task for the police. What the struggle for safety in Khayelitsha has revealed is that we have inherited much of the old order. It is capable of committing things like the Marikana massacre which the ANC defends. None of the ministers responsible for the police who were responsible for the massacre have been asked to resign.

So you’ve explained why you won’t vote ANC. What to do instead?

I haven’t come to Nkandla?

What about Nkandla?

Out of deep frustration and anger I would love to spoil my ballot and write “Nkandla” over Jacob Zuma’s face, but the vote is something people have struggled and died for. It is internationally the struggles of the working class that have brought democracy to so much of the world. And that democracy allows us to struggle under better conditions rather than under the conditions of repression which makes organising very difficult. So I am going to use my vote to protest. However, I cannot vote for the Democratic Alliance or any of the parties of the right. I won’t vote for the DA because I believe it’s a party that entrenches division and inequality by exploiting the fears of minorities and promoting the interests of major corporations.

By right, does that include the EFF?

Let me put it differently. The EFF is both a most exciting and most dangerous thing. It shows that young people, particularly young men, who are alienated can be brought into politics on the basis of addressing social and economic injustice and inequality. The danger is that most of the leadership are populists and militarists who rely on slogans rather than the building of concrete knowledge that allows people to contest power.

So who will you vote for?

I am going to cast a protest vote in favour of one of the smaller left parties.

Which ones are you thinking of voting for?

Possibly Themba Godi’s African People’s Convention. People laugh at me and say, “who’s that?” And I say the APC. And people respond “what’’s that?”

Why the APC?

The APC was formed during the floor-crossing time. Like Patricia de Lille, Themba Godi crossed the floor from the PAC, but he has maintained his integrity. He became chair of SCOPA, the Standing Committee on Public Accounts. The beginning of the decline of the ANC was the arms deal and one of the institutions it weakened was SCOPA. It is traditionally chaired by an opposition MP. The ANC imagined if it made Godi chair of SCOPA, it would be able to control him with the offer of goodies. Instead, he has restored integrity to SCOPA by holding departments accountable and supporting the work of the auditor-general. I would like him to be returned to parliament because he has a record of doing good work there.

But you’re not under any illusion that the APC is a serious political force?

No.

What do you think of Ronnie Kasrils and Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge’s call for people to spoil their ballots or vote tactically?

I think the call for a spoilt ballot is a mistake.

Why?

One of the problems of South African democracy, also one of the ANC’s failures, is that about 40% of adults didn’t vote in the last election. In addition there was a large number of spoilt ballots. I’m under no illusions. The ANC will still get well over 60% of the vote. Spoiling one’s ballot, even by a few hundred thousand people, will not decrease their majority. Voting for an opposition party will.

There is the impression that most people vote for the ANC out of blind loyalty, that they’re cannon fodder. Is this true?

The argument made by superficial commentators that people vote ANC out of ignorance or race solidarity is wrong. Most people who vote ANC, vote for decent homes, economic justice, water and what the ANC calls a better life for all. Most peoples’ lives are better off than under apartheid. The majority of ANC voters correctly fear a fragmentation of society into competing groups of people on the basis of race or ethnicity. The ANC has been a force that has bound the country together. It is now undermining that legacy. Most young people are not going to vote. And those young people who are going to the vote for the ANC mostly do not want Zuma in power according to a recent poll.

The question of race and vote is very often misunderstood on the left and right. Racial oppression of black people remains a material fact in our society because of class inequality. Until a mass working class party which understands the connection between race, class and gender is formed there will be no alternative for the majority of ANC voters.

So where’s this workers’ party coming from?

South Africa is in a time of uncertainty and promise. The decision by NUMSA to create a united front and to explore the creation of a mass workers party by breaking with the ANC is an important moment. But the danger is the divisions in the working class and their main movement COSATU. NUMSA and its supporters face the challenge of going beyond small left groups and to return to organising a mass based struggle. For me, as I said at the start of this interview, elections are a snapshot of some people’s will. Real democracy is what happens between elections, the daily participation in political, economic and social struggle based on knowledge. I believe this is what we should all turn our attention to over the next decade.

* On May 7th South Africans go to the polls to vote for national and provincial representatives (the majority party gets to pick the President and the Cabinet). In the lead up to the election, we’ll carry a few pieces. The series started Saturday 27 April, the 20th anniversary of the April 1994 elections–the country’s first democratic elections in which blacks could vote. The first instalment was by Thapelo Tselapedi. This is the second. This interview is republished here with the kind permissions of the editors of GroundUp.