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It’s not hard to believe that Julius Malema went from killing for Jacob Zuma to championing the poor, to colluding with the oppressors.
On tour in the UK, the red brigade met the head honchos of imperialism and masqueraded around Trafalgar Square pronouncing their “socialist” exploits to the stars of the antiblack, white-capitalist show.
Such is the nature of the racist political space that, for a person suffering from antiblack self-hate, the river only rolls where the stones sleep.
A high-profile visit by the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) to the British Empire is in line with the party political position: taking all documentation, struggle heroes, oppressors past and present, and realigning them to suit the purpose of gaining populist power.
Spinning rhetoric based on who is in the audience, allowing the antiblack status quo to remain intact while the hope of change for the black oppressed remains out of reach.
The EFF, founded as a movement that champions the liberation of the working class, can now best be described as a leftist capitalist movement.
Malema went to the great whites and waxed lyrical about the Freedom Charter, calling it “the bible of the South African revolution”.
He showed his loyalty to the ANC by defending the sellout document that embodies his sellout project. It was this Kliptown charter that was rejected by Pan-Africanist Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe and the black consciousness movement’s Steve Bantu Biko; this ANC theologian’s script that refuted the historical injustice of land dispossession by stating “the land shall belong to all who live in it”.
He went on to talk about the “tired”, “old” Nelson Mandela, describing him as a sellout, noting that he sought comfort from whiteness to shape this democracy, which at best can be described as a post-apartheid, apartheid state.
So what does Mandela “the saviour” have to do with Malema “the demagogue”? Well, there is a deep irony in Malema’s meeting with the gatekeepers of white supremacy while talking about Mandela seeking whiteness to clothe this antiblack state. Malema should have recognised the ideal moment to loudly laud Mandela and himself for being generational sellouts, perfect products of the antiblack ANC.
So it is no surprise that Malema believes the road to black liberation travels through antiblack capitalism. Malema meeting Lord Robin Renwick is as normal as Mandela befriending the imperialists to take advice on the protection of white monopoly capital.
So what’s the difference between Mandela and Malema? Mandela never pretended to be pro-black. The rainbow nation was his agenda.
But Malema presents himself as a socialist fighter for the liberation of black people.
Socialism without a contextual position based on the society it finds itself in, and informed by the people it seeks to liberate, can only be antiblack.
Shaped by its dominant thinker, Karl Marx, it is limited to maintaining and advancing white supremacy.
So for Malema to break free from his self-hating antiblack self, he must foreground his being and reading of socialism in black consciousness and Pan-Africanism. This is the only legitimate way socialism can be considered to be a constructive tool towards humanising the black being.
Like all black people, Malema must critically go back and note that every time a black experience has been authored or co-authored by whiteness, it is an expression of the antiblack oppression that dominates black life. And it has been this way since Chief Autshumato, also known as Harry “die Strandloper”, set foot on a Dutch ship nearly 400 years ago.
To genuinely author black liberation means that there must be a principled black unity, building a movement centred on Pan-Africanism and black consciousness that rejects every ounce of liberalism that seeks to position whiteness as the saviour of black people.
Outside of this, like Malema, black people will only ever be leftist capitalists, meeting imperialists to carry out their mission to ensure blacks remain commodified beings in an antiblack, racist, capitalist society. It is time black people reject these collaborators and white interventions, that we take Biko’s words “black man, you are on your own” and walk this journey.
It may be a long walk, we will be rejected, it will just be us, blacks. But if we remain disciplined, we will, in the words of Biko, “be in a position to bestow on South Africa the greatest possible gift – a more human face”.
Maasdorp is the national spokesperson for the Black First Land First movement
