Cry the Beloved Malamulele!: Black Tribalism and Ethnic Chauvinism in the Age of a Post-Modern and Post-Apartheid African Polity.

TOPIC: CRY THE BELOVED MALAMULELE!: BLACK TRIBALISM AND ETHNIC CHAUVINISM IN THE AGE OF A POST-MODERN AND POST-APARTHEID AFRICAN POLITY .

“The study of the African realities has for too long been seen in terms of tribes. Whatever happens in Kenya, Uganda, Malawi is because Tribe A versus Tribe B. Whatever erupts in Zaire, Nigeria, Liberia, Zambia is because of the traditional enmity between Tribe D and Tribe C…Unfortunately, African intellectuals have fallen victims – a few incurably so – to that scheme and they are unable to see the divide-and-rule colonial origins of explaining any differences of intellectual outlook or any political clashes in terms of the ethnic origins of the actors.” Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Introduction: Towards the Universal Struggle of Language, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, 1986.

“As long as people lived in ‘a bright future’, they fought side by side irrespective of nationality – common questions first and foremost! But when doubt crept into people’s hearts, they began to depart, each to his national tent – let every man count only upon himself!…And the more the movement for emancipation declined, the more plentiful nationalism pushed forth its blossoms”. Josef Stalin, the former Eastern European Communist strongman and Soviet dictator, Introduction: Marxism and the National Question.

INTRODUCTION.

The Business Report SA of 05 August 2008 carried a fascinating article by Polo Radebe, the CEO of Identity Development Fund, under the heading ‘Afrikaner empowerment is a powerful model for today’. In the piece, Polo Radebe did not hide her great admiration of how South Africa’s white Afrikaaners, an ethnic group, or white African tribe if you like, mobilised their ethnic chauvinism and tribal sentiment to achieve astonishing economic progress after seizing power in 1948.

Polo Radebe wrote:

“Sanlam/Santam, Absa, Naspers, BHP Billiton, Pepkor, Venfin, Remgro and KWV: these companies are examples of highly successful businesses started by Afrikaner entrepreneurs during the time of Afrikaner nationalism. Afrikaner empowerment history makes for interesting reading. It reminds one that it is possible to turn around the economic fortunes of the previously marginalized. Afrikaners obtained political momentum when the Nationalist Party came into power in 1948. At the time, more than 70 percent of Afrikaners were rural and involved in agriculture. Commerce and industry were dominated by English-speaking white people and the Indian and Jewish communities.”

Clearly, here is an instance in South Africa’s recent history of what Kenya’s literary icon, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, called “the study of African realities” where the non-black African tribes – the white Afrikaaners, white English-speaking South Africans, the South African Indians and the South African Jews – all who are African tribes or ethnic groups, are shown to have made economic progress, not so much because Tribe white Afrikaaners versus Tribe white English-speaking South Africans, or because Tribe Indian South Africans versus Tribe South African Jews, neither because of their mutual enmities or rivalries, but because of how they pulled their ethnic or tribal power, group think and collective resources under the apartheid white dictatorship between 1948-1994 to register very impressive economic progress for their respective ethnic or tribal groups.

Polo Radebe’s piece referred to above is representative of a wide-spread intellectual and political tendency in South Africa’s black community to speak with aware about the white Afrikaaners, as well as South African Jewish, Indian and white English-speaking ethnic communities’ legendary ability to mobilise their groups and self-organise for a definite positive economic outcome, or as is commonly said in the black community, that members of these South African ethnic groups are able “to work together and help each other as groups”.

In this case the Tribe or the ethnic group is not seen as an expression of backwardness. Neither is the Tribe in this case viewed as a hindrance to economic advancement and material prosperity. If anything, the Tribe or ethnic group is seen as a launchpad for economic renaissance.

However, the dominant narrative in the black South African community about the black Tribe or ethnic group is diametrically opposite. One of the best articulation of this hostility towards the black Tribe or ethnic group was provided by Mondli Makhanya in a Sowetan article of 05 June 2012 under the heading ‘That dreaded “T”word in the ANC’. In this article, Makhanya wrote:

“What South Africa’s liberation movements, with the ANC as the main driver, successfully managed to do in the past century was to deal effectively with ethnic difference. They did not do this by killing culture, ethnic identity and traditions. This would have just been fulfilling the objectives of colonialism and apartheid. Rather, they struck a knockout blow at tribalism as a political tool and a form of political identification early on in the life of the liberation struggle. When it reared its head in exile years, in the internal Mass Democratic Movement and the trade unions, it was similarly dealt with. Even when some have tried to stoke the fire for political gain in some of the multi-ethnic provinces in post-1994 South Africa, tribalism has been immediately crushed and its sponsors’ oxygen taken away”.

Mondli Makhanya further quoted the famous pre-ANC Speech of Pixley ka Isaka Seme, one of the founders of the ANC, who railed against “the demons of racialism…and the aberrations…these divisions, the jealousies” of tribalism, which he saw as “the cause of all our woes and all our backwardness and ignorance today”.

I’Nkosi Albert Luthuli, the former President General of the ANC, expressing the ideal of black African unity cutting across tribes in South Africa, wrote in his ‘Let My People Go’ that:

“One of the major purposes of Congress, right at the beginning, was to overcome the divisions and disunity between tribes, and, since we did not then hope to create national unity against the will of the whites who held all the power, at least to develop African unity. Right from its inception the ANC realized the importance of awakening the African people and uniting them in a common loyalty which would cut across all lesser loyalties. Our oppressors have done all in their power to retain and emphasise all lesser loyaties”. (2006, Page 81).

But the harsher, if lesser known, condemnation of tribal divisions in South Africa’s black community was contained in the ANC first secretary general and founder Sol T. Plaatjie’s novel ‘Mhudi – An Epic of South African Native Life a Hundred Years Ago’. Through the mouth of a fictional Ndebele King Mzilikazi, Plaatjie wrote:

“Then, passing his hands before his eyes, as if to wipe out the calamities of which he was the victim, he drew himself up to his full height – a noble and kingly figue, despite adversity – raised his voice and with something of his old dignity he addressed the gathering crowd: –

‘Amandebele, O People of Matshobani, listen to me! We escaped from the tyrant in the land of the rising sun and fought our way through Basuto, Mantise and Bechuana, until we found a resting place in this country, surrounded though it is by vile treachery. You are my witnesses. Have I not been kind to these Bechauana traitors? It was my desire to incorporate them with ourselves so that together we could form one great nation; they pretended to be willing, yet they have always played me false. When they failed to bring tribute I slew them not; yet at the first opportunity they did not hesitate to abuse my kindness. Those Barolong dogs assassinated my indunas, the Bangwaketse beasts led to a desert trap one of my regiments; the Qoranna dissemblers helped my enemy; the Bahurutse and Bafokeng, while professing to be my friends constantly sowed thorns in my path; the deceitful Griquas also laid snares for me. Sechelle is the one friend I found in this country; yet when I appealed to him for an army to support me in my present plight he promised one next moon, when he knew it would be too late. Nevertheless, I do not want to quarrel with the doubtful friendship of his Bakwena. As for those other Bechuana robbers, the infernal spirits they have invoked upon me will recoil on them”. (1989, pages 186-187).

In Sol Plaatjie’s fictionalized account of how the legendary Ndebele King Mzilikazi, after escaping from “one tyrant” (King Shaka Zulu) and in an attempt to “form one great nation” out of various and disparate black tribes of southern Africa, he (King Mzilikazi) was met with “…vile treachery…traitors…beasts…dissemblers…thorns…abuse of my kindness…the deceitful…playing false…doubtful friendship…robbers…infernal spirits”.

Eighty five years after the publication of Plaatjie’s Mhudi, and hundred and three years after the formation of the ANC, the challenges facing the quest for the attainment of black African unity in South Africa, in the context of a non-racial and democratic South African nation, have not gotten lesser or less intimidating.

So, when Samuel P. Huntington, the USA’s leading sociologist and author of ‘Who Are We? – The Challenges to America’s National Identity’ stated that South Africa has been described “…as engaged in ‘the search for identity’…” he was correct (2004, page 12). But what he forgot to clarify was whether we were engaged in “the search” for a positive or negative “identity”, and which will be the final outcome of our national identity search.

On the other hand, Huntington further wrote, very controversially, about the fact of “the virtual disappearance of ethnicity as a source of identity for white Americans” (page 295, Ibid). Yet across former Yugoslavia and across former Soviet states in Eastern Europe, and indeed even across the European Union itself, let alone across democratic South Africa, (eg Orania and Kleinfontein in Pretoria), it is the re-emergence of ethnicity which is providing a renewed impetus to whites to define their collective identity, in contrast to what Samuel Huntington adduced about “the source of identity for white Americans”. The bitter, very destructive and ongoing war in Ukraine, which pits western Ukrainians against Russians of eastern Ukraine, is also indicative of this rise of white ethnic chauvinism in Europe. Much of the Russophobic sentiment amongst the dominant and ruling political and intellectual elites of western Europe and the USA is motivated, historically, primarily also by anti-Slavic and anti-Russian tribal, ethnic chauvinistic predisposition. Whilst Huntington could claim that ethnicity was virtually disappearing as a source of ethnic identity amongst white Americans, the same white American elites, in pursuit of the project of eternal, “uber alles”, unchallengeable and “permanent” American global dominance, have not been shy to themselves play up and fan the fires of tribal and ethnic divisions and animosities amongst the white tribes and ethnic groups of Europe, such as in the former Communist Yugoslav states, the former Soviet Baltic states, southern Europe and now in Ukraine.

Polo Radebe’s article referred to above is a reminder of how the white Afrikaaner tribe of Suth Africa successfully and triumphantly used its narrow, ethnic and tribal identity to mobilise, chauvinistically, for political power and economic prosperity between 1948-1994.

The endurance of “ethnicity as a source of identity” (Samuel Huntington) for many black South Africans was pointed to by The Times SA’s Phumla Matjila in her piece ‘Arching layers of pain – Apartheid architects ensured that townships were zoned along tribal lines – and black neighbours are perpetuating this evil of the past’ of 12 June 2012.

She wrote, inter alia, the following about Soweto in Johannesburg:

“Meadowlands is divided into zones, which were divided into ethnic groups. Zone 8 is predominantly a Shangaan area, Zone 7 a Tswana sweet spot and Zone 6 is home to Zulus…Mamelodi, where I grew up, is not much different to Meadowlands. The Pedis are concentrated in one area and the Ndebeles in another…These living arrangements were part of the apartheid government’s divide-and-rule policy…The divisions were obviously very effective because, even today, take away racism and xenophobia, so that black South Africans take a hard look at themselves and you are left with tribalism and the stereotypes, and even the superstitions, that inform it…When you peel away that layer of tribalism in which stereotypes exist even within tribes, and the superstitions that inform one sub-tribe’s prejudices about another, you wonder if it is possible to have peace in our country.”

The key challenges of black tribalism and ethnic chauvinism in democratic South Africa are of course not confined just to Soweto and Mamelodi alone.

Far from it.

Brad Cibane, in his News24 article of 05 March 2015 under the heading ‘The Black Majority as the Oppressor’, wrote that:

“There are more subtle struggles, like the struggle against cultural domination. English, Afrikaans, isiZulu, isiXhosa and Setswana dominate South African popular culture. Other smaller groups, like Tsongas, Ndebeles and Mpondos, are battling for cultural equality. Whilst their struggles are not as sexy as black culture versus white culture, it is a real struggle”.

And not even Nelson Mandela, a Xhosa, in his much younger age, was spared the humiliation of suffering at the hands of black tribalism and open ethnic chauvinism amongst black South Africans. In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela stated the following about black tribalism in Johannesburg’s Alexandra Township, where he lived for some time:

“Ellen was a Swazi, and though tribalism was fading in the township, a close friend of mine condemned our relationship on purely tribal grounds. I categorically rejected this. But our different backgrounds posed certain problems. Mrs Mabutho, the reverend’s wife, did not care for Ellen, largely because she was a Swazi. One day, whilst I was at the Mabuthos’, Mrs. Mabutho answered a knock at the door. It was Ellen, who was looking for me, and Mrs. Mabutho told her I was not inside. Only later did Mrs. Mabutho say to me, ‘Oh, Nelson, some girl was here looking for you.” Mrs. Mabutho then said to me, ‘Is that girl a Shangaan?’ Although the Shangaans are a proud and noble tribe, at the time, Shangaan was considered a derogatory term. I took offense at this and I said, ‘No, she is not a Shangaan, she is Swazi’. Mrs. Mabutho felt strongly that I should take out only Xhosa girls”. (1994, page 69).

In passing, it is worthwhile noting that in her article, Polo Radebe refers to “Afrikaner nationalism” when writing about the ethnic chauvinist sentiment of South Africa’s white Afrikaaner tribal, ethnic group, on the one hand, whilst Phumla Matjila and Nelson Mandela, in their writings quoted above, refer to “tribalism” in black African townships.

The key issue of tribalism is not a challenging feature of only multi-tribal black African societies like Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, Zambia, Mozambique, Angola, Namibia and South Africa. Even black African societies that are outwardly mono-tribal, such as Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Somalia, are themselves plagued by what Phumla Matjila would refer to as “…layer of tribalism in which stereotypes exist even within tribes, and the stereotypes that inform one sub-tribe’s prejudices about another…”. In the case of Somalia, as the whole world knows by now, the sub-tribal and clannish prejudices have led not just to more than two decades of civil war in that country, but to the resultant Africa and the world’s first classic, complete “failed state”.

Here is a very fascinating example of these kinds of sub-set of prejudices within a tribe as “a layer of one sub-tribe’s stereotypes against another” operating in one of our neighboring countries and from the acclaimed autobiography of the former second president of Botswana since independence, Quett Ketumile Joni Masire, under the title ‘Very Brave or Very Foolish – Memoirs of an African Democrat’. Masire wrote:

“As president, Seretse Khama’s picture had hung on the wall in every government office and most business establishments. Civil servants took it as given that after I became president, my picture should be on the wall. But in the workings of government bureaucracy, it took many months before Seretse’s picture was taken down and exchanged for mine. When the pictures were exchanged, some people, especially some Bangwato, were resentful. Similarly, although Botswana law prescribed that bank notes would carry the picture of a head of state, it took many months after Seretse’s demise before my picture appeared on printed currency. When it did appear at about the same time as the portraits in the offices were exchanged, the issue was raised in the Ngwato kgotla: ‘Masire is, after all, a commoner, and here his image is replacing Seretse who was a chief”. Some objectors even inferred that the value on similar currency notes was not the same! Such incidents hacked back to the resistance against the constitution by the chiefs. On this occasion, however, tribal rivalry was at play; in the Bangwato mind, no one other than a member of the Ngwato royal family could be president. Some from other tribes thought: ‘We don’t mind if Quett Masire is president, but Seretse’s portrait should be on the walls and on the currency'”. (2006, 129).

So even within the larger Tswana tribe that constitutes over 90% of Botswana’s population, there are sub-tribes and clans like the Bangwato, Bakwena, Bakgatla, Bahurutses, Baphiri, Bafokeng and the Barolong, often determined and separated merely by nothing more than their totems, who, as Quett Masire’s autobiography demonstrates, are themselves displaying tribal or clannish prejudices against one another, including, most remarkably, even against a personage of Botswana’s head of state, which position Masire occupied for many years after the death of Botswana’s founding president and anti-colonial hero Sir Seretse Khama.

But in the recent history of South Africa, it does seem like the issue of tribalism has received more salience and greater media coverage with regard to the troubling service delivery protests in Malamulele in the Limpopo province of our country, which service delivery protests are sometimes dressed up in and masked behind deeply troubling tribalistic, ethnic and chauvinistic overtones.

Here the commentariat class, the media, the political class and ordinary people of Malamulele seem to have found their voices in speaking about tribalism, and often in tribal tones, in ways that are very rare for post-apartheid South Africa.

It is like a long-running gangrene on a body has gone burst and revealed all its putrid, pallid contents.

Which is a welcome and terrifying thing, simultaneously.

For too long in post-apartheid South Africa, public discourse about tribalism and ethnic chauvinism has often been treated like a taboo subject or a horrible phobia, similar to a discussion of a horrible act of incest by appalled but reluctant-to-talk affected close-knit family members.

In my Politicsweb article of 21 February 2014 under the heading ‘Thabo Mbeki and the New Tribalism’, I stated that:

“And in case you get mistaken and start thinking that the accusations and counter-accusations about tribalism are leveled only at and among South Africa’s five big black tribes, hold your thought. Some of the recent media analyses of the recent violent service delivery protests in and around Malamulele near Tzaneen, Limpopo province, pointed to acute tribal tensions between our Shangaans/Tsongas and Vendas, arguably South Africa’s two smallest black tribes”.

It therefore came as no surprise when a black EFF Member of Parliament (MP) stood up in parliament during the debate on 2015 SONA and accused the Minister of Public Service and Administration, Collins Chabane, of not supporting “his people” in Malamulele the way “president Zuma is doing in Nkandla”. (See also City Press’s piece “Collins Chabane stuck in the Malamulele middle’ of 13 October 2013). He was in turn accused, in parliament, by the ANC MP and Minister of Small Business Development, Lindiwe Zulu, of encouraging tribalism when the EFF MP implied that president Zuma has focused only on his Nkandla people and requesting Collins Chabane to do likewise.

With this brief parliamentary exchange between the EFF MP and an ANC MP, the discourse on black tribalism and ethnic chauvinism in South Africa was “outed” from the political closet and moved from being a hot-coal, taboo subject of our politics, often conducted in hushed and terrifying eschatological terms, and went, so to speak, viral!

In his book ‘What is Africa’s Problem?’ Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni, angrily condemning those who agitated people around tribalism and narrow ethnic chauvinism during the early years of the rule of his National Resistance Army (NRA) over the then very chaotic and bloody Uganda, following the ousting of Idi Amin’s genocidal rule, wrote the following:

“How do you become divided on the basis of religion or tribe if your interest, problems and aspirations are similar? Don’t you see that people who divide you are only using you for their own interests – interests not connected with that road? They are simply opportunists who have no programme and all they do is work on cheap platforms of division because they have nothing constructive to offer the people”. (1992, page 25).

But what do the overt tribal overtones employed in the discussion about service delivery protests in Malamulele teach us about how democratic South Africa handles the explosive and highly divisive issues of tribalism and ethnic chauvinism mobilized for political and economic gain?

More than sixty years ago, Nelson Mandela observed how the Shangaans/Tsongas, whom he described as “a proud and noble tribe”, had their generic “Shangaan” name viewed in the black Alexandra Township near Johannesburg as “a derogatory term”.

More than sixty years later, in 2015, are the “proud and noble” Shangaans/Tsongas of Malamulele again the subject of black tribal discrimination and narrow ethnic chauvinism? Has the name “Malamulele” itself become “a derogatory term” in post-apartheid South Africa’s political lexicon?

As pointed out by Brad Cibane above, the Shaangans/Tsongas of our country, in a post-apartheid and democratic South Africa, remain one of the ethnic/tribal groups, like Ndebele, Mpondos ( and Khoisans, we should add), who are still battling for cultural identity and against cultural domination, as well as against their maginalisation from the center stage of South Africa’s popular cultural scene, if what Brad Cibane says holds any water.

This is no small matter regarding our South African nation-building and social cohesion project. Neither is the fact that Malamulele is located geographically at the periphery of our country, far up in the north, close to our borders with Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Nor is the fact that it is populated mainly by the people that Nelson Mandela once described as ” a proud and noble tribe” – our Shangaan/Tsonga people, who have for so long been subjected to particulalrly vicious and hateful racial and tribal prejudices and discrimination, from both white and other black South Africans.

CHAPTER ONE: ARE THE MALAMULELE SERVICE DELIVERY PROTESTS A CLASSIC FORM OF BLACK TRIBALISM AND ETHNIC CHAUVINISM IN DEMOCRATIC SOUTH AFRICA?

The ruling Alliance Joint Secretariat (the ANC, SACP, COSATU and the SANCO)’s Statement of 14 February 2015 has the following to say about the Malamulele service delivery protests and the nexus between these service delivery protests, Malamulele’s demand for its own local municipality, and what is generally perceived as Malamulele’s community demands driven by a sense of black on black tribalism and ethnic chauvinism:

“Malamulele – The Secretariat is gravely concerned by the emerging tribal content that seems to motivate the unstable situation in the area.”

The statement did not elaborate on what it referred to as “the emerging tribal content” during the Mlamulele service delivery protests.

Earlier on 03 February 2015 the SABC’s safm Breakfast Show, which is hosted by Sakina Kamwendo, conducted a radio call-in town hall meeting in Malamulele to discuss the then ongoing service delivery protests and to provide the residents of the area with a national platform to air their grievances, which had led them to the drastic decision to completely shut down their area in pursuit of their demand for Malamulele to be declared a separate municipality. This safm radio broadcast provided a very unique and welcome platform for South Africa to directly hear from the voices of the residents of Malamulele themselves, unmediated by politicians and or the broader commercial media, regarding the causes of their intense community protests. It also provided a unique window into why many in Malamulele felt so strongly that they were allegedly suffering from the tribalistic and narrow ethnic chauvinistic abuse at the hands of their fellow Venda speaking citizens who dominate, allegedly, the greater Thulamela local municipality, which Malamulele is part of, and which led to Malamulele’s complete shutdown at some point during the protests.

Malamulele’s demand to be separated from the Thulamela local municipality and for it to enjoy the status of a separate municipality is a burning national issue that received the urgent attention of the Municipal Demarcation Board, the Limpopo provincial government and the national Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs under Minister Pravin Gordhan, who all successfully intervened to bring to an end the complete shutdown of Malamulele.

The debate around black tribalism and narrow ethnic chauvinism which the events in Malamulele have highlighted deserve special and continual study, as they have broader, ongoing and future implications about how this debate should be conducted in a democratic South Africa; how some of the grievances around tribalism resonate with other communities around South Africa, as Brad Cibane implied from the quote provided above; and, more importantly, the crucial lessons democratic South Africa, through Malamulele, can teach to the rest of Africa, and indeed to the rest of the world, regarding how to correctly handle and harness the explosive and divisive issues of tribalism and or narrow ethnic chauvinism.

In this sense, the Malamulele debate around black tribalism and narrow ethnic chauvinism goes way beyond the mandates of our Municipal Demarcation Board and the national Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs.

The Malamulele debate touches on germane universal questions that carry global resonance, given how clanism, regionalism, nationalism, ethnicity, racism, fascism, tribalism and narrow ethnic chauvinism have all become such major destabilizing and negatively disruptive forces of the political design of the new, globalised 21st century.

Malamulele also must assist us as South Africans to answer the very important question contained in the title of Samuel Huntington’s influential book “Who are we?”

Who are we, as South Africans living under a post-apartheid constitutional democracy and governed by our sacrosanct Bill of Rights? Who are we?

How did we, as a new, democratic South African nation, permit a situation to develop wherein one of our two smallest tribes or ethnic groups can so bitterly lament what they perceive as pervasive and unrelenting black on black tribal and narrow ethnic chauvinistic discrimination and bigotry at the hands of another of our two smallest tribes? If tribalism is really this difficult and horrible to confront at the level of South Africa’s smallest tribes or ethnic minorities located in a small, peripheral geographic area of our country, what more of our tribes, such as those enumerated by Brad Cibane as the white English-speakers, white Afrikaans-speakers, Zulus, Xhosas and Tswanas, who populate the center stage of South Africa, geographically, politically, socio-economically and culturally? (See Brad Cibane’s quote above).

Whilst the ANC-led Limpopo provincial government, the Municipal Demarcation Board and the national Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs will all most likely address the root material issues relating to the demand of Malamulele for a separate municipality, given the apparent sense of complete alienation from the allegedly Venda-dominated Thulamela local municipality, and may in the end be granted their wish for a separate Malamulele municipality, what does it all say about our continuing failure to effectively address the issues about “the RDP of the Soul” of post-apartheid South Africa around challenges of tribalism, ethnic chauvinism, racism and bigotry?

During the Malamulele town hall meeting broadcasted by SABC’s safm and hosted by Sakina Kamwendo on 03 February 2015, the clear, overwhelming majority of the residents of Malamulele not only overwhelmingly expressed themselves in favour of a separate Malamulele municipality, but also openly verbalized their grievances around issues of alleged ethnic chauvinistic discrimination at the hands of their Venda-speaking neighbors in the Thulamela local municipality.

In fact, the loudest, prolonged and repeated applauses during the SABC safm’s Malamulele town hall call-in debate were reserved for articulate community speakers and leaders who directly confronted, without fear or favor, the challenging issues of black on black tribalism and narrow ethnic chauvinism suffered by the Malamulele community.

A certain Reverend Maluleka, who introduced himself as one of Malamulele’s grassroots leaders during the town hall meeting, and other speakers gave expression to many of the Malamulele grievances around black on black tribalism and narrow ethnic chauvinism.

They complained bitterly, inter alia, about the fact that there is still a region in South Africa called Venda, about the fact that there is a University of Venda; a Venda EFT training facility; a Venda Agricultural College; that the region was named Venda, although it is populated by other black tribes like Pedis and Shangaans/Tsongas; that allegedly all the municipal managers were Venda speaking; that allegedly all the retail store managers were Venda speaking; that allegedly all the heads of the police stations in the Thulamela municipality were all Venda speaking. Other participants and speakers in the Malamulele town hall meeting hosted by the SABC safm’s Sakina Kamwendo also alleged that all the nurses working in the medical facilities in Malamulele were Venda speakers bussed in every morning from other parts of Thulamela local municipality and from outside Malamulele itself. Other speakers even alleged that scholarships in the Thulamela local municipality were awarded to pupils and students on the basis of ethnicity and were allegedly reserved for Venda-speakers only. Other participants and speakers alleged that the best roads, bridges and houses were in the areas of the Thulamela municipality populated by Venda speakers.

All these incredible and deeply troubling grievances were articulated and vented in the Malamulele town hall meeting which was hosted by the SABC’s safm Breakfast Show on 03 February 2015!

Absolutely first rate, top-of-the-shelves and vintage SABC public broadcaster journalism, arguably on par only with the SABC’s own live broadcast of the August 2012 Marikana massacre in the North West province and the recent on-camera robbery of the SABC’s contributing editor, Vuyo Mvuko.

The grievances of the residents of Malamulele were so incredible to the ears, the radio broadcast listeners must have been incredulous. Were they not broadcasted by our democratic State’s media platform in the form of the SABC’s safm, they might have been dismissed as improbable stories of a Malamulele village idiot and thought of as truly made up and completely fallacious – a definite thumb suck.

The good, almost unprecedented thing about the allegations ventilated during the Malamulele town hall meeting is that they are about things and issues, regarding post-apartheid South Africa, which can be easily verifiable and quantifiable, and which were captured for posterity and eternity by our public broadcaster, the SABC’s safm. For example, it should be really easy to establish whether it is true or not that Venda speaking nurses are bussed daily into Malamulele, to the exclusion of locals; Or whether all the heads of police stations in Malamulele are Venda speaking; Or whether all or the majority of scholarships in the Thulamela municipality are awarded on the discriminatory basis of narrow ethnicity and are reserved for Venda speakers only; Or even whether all the managers at retail stores in Thulamela municipality are Venda speakers.

Of course there were a few callers to the programme who sought to insinuate that it was formerly Mozambican Shangaans/Tsongas – and one or two callers even claimed these were former RENAMO members-refugees – behind the Malamulele community protests.

Yet in her must-read book, very helpfully, the former Zimbabwean-Chinese ZANU-PF exile, freedom fighter and Minister of Education, Fay Chung, stated the following about the bulk of Mozambicans who constituted the backbone and support base of Mozambique’s rebel movement, RENAMO:

“Renamo, formed out of the Shona ethnic group in Mozambique, the same ethnic group as the majority Shona in Rhodesia, was opposed to the FRELIMO liberation movement because of its socialist policies and ethnic dominance of the southerners. Renamo was not only supported by the Rhodesians and the apartheid South African regime, but also by traditional Shona religious leaders in Mozambique and by fundamental Christian sects from the United States”. (Re-Living the Second Chimurenga – Memories from Zimbabwe’s Liberation Struggle, 2006, pages 315-316).

[The “ethnic dominance of the southerners” which Fay Chung refers to in the above quote is the semantic field equivalence for Mozambican Shangaans/Tsongas, who overwhelmingly populate southern Mozambique and are firm supporters and voters of the ruling FRELIMO in Mozambique].

So, that former Mozambican Shangaan/Tsonga refugees and former RENAMO combatants were behind the recent Malamulele community protests, as some callers to safm’s Malamulele call-in town hall meeting of 03 February 2015 seem to adduce, is sheer intellectual dramatics that bears no resemblance whatsoever to reality.

Whatever the veracity or otherwise of the various claims, counter-claims and allegations thrown about in Malamulele, they were at least given in a form of concrete empirical utterances by a credible and creditable SABC safm’s Malamulele town hall radio broadcast.

They all seem to confirm the Statement of the Secretariat of the Tripartite Alliance quoted above that “…the emerging tribal content…seems to motivate the unstable situation” in Malamulele.

The question is: How did the Thulamela local municipal leadership, the Limpopo provincial government and the national authorities allow a situation such as the one in Malamulele to develop, over many years, to a point where some of our people are forced to articulate their grievances in such stark terms of black on black tribalism and narrow ethnic chauvinism, more than twenty years after the end of white racial discrimination and the abominable divide-and-rule policies of the Bantustan system?

How did the rot in Thulamela local municipality and Malamulele’s “RDP of the Soul” get set so far before the envisaged administrative, bureaucratic and technocratic interventions by the Municipal Demarcation Board, the Limpopo provincial government and the national Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs?

Who refused to listen to the cries for help of the Malamulele community when it was confronted with alleged black on black tribal and narrow ethnic chauvinistic bigotry all these years, after we attained our freedom from white racism and its companion in the form of the Bantustan system, until the community exploded in an almost self-destructive orgy of violent service delivery protests and the Malamulele shutdown, including the shutdown of the education and tuition of Malamulele’s school-going pupils?

Now that legislated racial discrimination and Apartheid have been defeated and consigned to the dustbin of history in South Africa, Josef Stalin’s words, quoted above the Introduction to this article, ring truer that “as long as people lived in ‘a bright future’, they fought side by side irrespective of nationality – common questions first and foremost! But when doubt crept into people’s hearts, they began to depart, each to his own national tent – let every man count only upon himself!”.

Or each to his narrow black African tribal and ethnic chauvinistic tent?

It seems this is the case, quite regrettably, also in the Thulamela local municipality of the Limpopo province of our country regarding Malamulele.

At the very time when post-apartheid South Africa’s freedom- and national liberation movements, at the head of which stood the ANC, as Mondli Makhanya eloquently put it in the quote above, seem to be in a terminal decline, black tribalism and narrow ethnic chauvinism in South Africa, on the other hand, seem to be “pushing forth their blossoms”, to paraphrase Josef Stalin.

On 17 February 2015 the SABC ANN7 TV channel’s “Question Time’, hosted by Mpho Tsedu, carried an interview with the Limpopo provincial government spokesman Phuthi Seloba on the four-week Malamulele community service delivery protests. The spokesman initially disagreed that the Malamulele protests were driven by “tribalism”, or that they were about service delivery. He said the Malamulele community protests were about the demand for a separate, new municipality. But later he then contradicted himself by declaring that it should be expected that during such community protests, there would be elements in the community which are driven by “tribalism” and a sense of “service delivery protest”.

There was then an untenable situation where the Limpopo provincial government spokesman does not think “tribalism” is the predominant driving force behind the recent Malamulele community protests, on the one hand, whilst the ruling Alliance’s Secretariat released a Statement stating that “the Secretariat is gravely concerned by the emerging tribal content that seems to motivate the unstable situation in the area.”

Is the left hand unaware of what the right hand is doing regarding the recent Malamulele protests, from the country’s governance point of view?

CONCLUSION: WHY IS IT SO DIFFICULT TO BANISH THE DEMONS OF TRIBALISM IN A POST-APARTHEID, DEMOCRATIC SOUTH AFIRCA?

To best understand why it is proving so hard for the authorities in post-apartheid, democratic South Africa to confront the demons of tribalism and ethnic chauvinism, one would need to bear in mind why a black African tribe is viewed as such a derogatory social construct in the context of contemporary African politics, as the quotes of both Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Yoweri Museveni above demonstrate.

In my Politicsweb article “Thabo Mbeki and the New Tribalism” of 21 February 2014, I referred to this important matter of the juniorisation, if not outright demonization and deliberate mystification, of the black African tribe in what Ngugi wa Thiong’o called “the study of the African realities”. And his classic, ‘Decolonisation of the Mind’, Ngugi gave very persuasive reasons as to why this is so, primarily because of “the tribe”‘s “colonial origins”, as he stated.

In a sense, this line of thought is part of the hegemonic Marxist-Leninist-Maoist canon about “the tribe”, as even Josef Stalin, in his classic, ‘Marxism and the National Question’, wrote, in a cursory, perfunctory and desultory manner, about “the tribe” as “an ethnographic category”, and hardly paused long in his book to investigate “the tribe”. Josef Stalin regarded “the tribe” as something not influenced by the historical laws of evolution from one level of society’s development to the next, higher one, such as “the nationality” was, which in turn was brought into being, according to Stalin’s logic, by the end of feudalism and the rise and triumph of capitalism.

According to the addled and abstruse ideological argument of Josef Stalin:

“What is a nation? A nation is primarily a community, a definite community of people. This community is not racial, nor is it tribal…Thus a nation is not a casual or ephemeral conglomeration, but a stable community of people…But not every stable community constitutes a nation…A nation is formed only as a result of lengthy and systematic intercourse, as a result of people living together generation after generation”. (Ibid, Part I, The Nation).

Stalin went on to distinguish the much-vaunted “nation” from “the tribe” thus:

“A nation is not merely a historical category but a historical category belonging to a definite epoch, the epoch of rising capitalism. The process of elimination of feudalism and development of capitalism is at the same time a process of the constitution of people into nations”. (Ibid).

Of course the primary reason Marxists and Leninists despise “the tribe” is because of their historical condescension to the peasantry, the rural community and to any pre-industrial mode of collective social existence. On the other hand, the same Marxists and Leninists get greatly animated by “the nation”, which is birthed by capitalism and the post-feudalism order, because these latter two result into the coming to life of the industrial proletariat, which is “the grave-digger” of capitalism, according to Marxism and Leninism and Josef Stalin.

But this is a very abrasive and haughty look at “the tribe”. It is also highly mistaken, unscientific and Euro-centric.

In the article ‘Rainbow, renaissance, tribes and townships: tourism and heritage in South Africa since 1994’, Heather Hughes wrote the following about the term “the tribe”:

“As is now well established, the term began its conceptual life as a means for missionaries, colonial administrators and anthropologists variously to create compact units for administrative purposes, to delineate languages for proselytization, and to study and protect exotic cultures. All of them were looking for certain boundaries of belonging and exclusion, timelessness and simplicity…From the 1970s, social scientists and many in the political movements vigorously disputed the use of the term ‘tribe’, precisely because of the connotations of a sense of backwardness, stasis, primitiveness and fixity of membership. Their preferred term became ‘chiefdom’, signifying dynamism and change. Divested of their ideological awkwardness, ‘tribes’ and ‘tribalism’ now seem to have been sanitized and reincorporated into the political and social lexicon…” (The State of the Nation – South Africa 2007, 2007, pages 282-283).

[Heather Hughes’s lucid explanation of the conceptual origin of the term “the tribe” and its subsequent replacement with the term “chiefdom”, clarifies why many black South Africans found the recent controversial and tasteless statement of Max du Preez, the South African white Afrikaaner former newspaperman, current columnist and journalist, that president Jacob Zuma was “…more an African chief than the president of a modern democracy…” so deeply offensive, unjust and unwarranted. Once again what, according to Heather Hughes, was once termed “the tribe” and later re-termed “chiefdom”, at the head of which stands what Max du Preez called “an African chief”, was given a mighty dollop of bad press by Max du Preez, in line with the old, long-running, highly jaundiced – in fact very racist and eugenic white Eurocentric – anthropological studies about black Africa.] (See in this regard Pretoria News article by Max du Preez of 30 Decenber 2014 under the heading ‘Zuma – one man wrecking ball’)

In his magnum opus ‘Africa – A Biography of the Continet’, John Reader makes a similar point as that which Heather Hughes made above when he stated:

“Thus the tribal distinctions that were established to facilitate administration during the colonial period in Africa became substitutes for the social and economic distinctions which have inspired political reform throughout history and around the world”. (Vintage Books, 1999, page 632).

And echoing Josef Stalin’s quote above, John Reader went on to state:

“Once independence had been achieved, however, the nationalist movements too often fractured into political groups of purely ethnic dimensions, whose struggles for power and wealth not only left national issues inadequately addressed and injustices largely unremedied, but also polarized economic and social discontent along ethnic lines – with some dreadful consequences”. (Ibid, pages 632-633).

It definitely sounds like John Reader foresaw the Malamulele troubles in a democratic South Africa of 2014/15!

In the specific case of Malamulele, as the brief parliamentary exchange between the EFF MP and the ANC MP during 2015 SONA, quoted above indicated, what is completely baffling is that the ANC can boast of highly seasoned and experienced national leaders who hail from the two communities implicated in the ‘RDP of the Soul’ failures in Malamulele, namely our Shangaan/Tsonga and Venda leaders, like Collins Chabane, and indeed like the South African and ANC deputy president, Cyril Ramaphosa, as well as the ANC NEC member, Joel Netshitenzhe, who doubles as also the the head of Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflections (MISTRA).

These leaders may indeed be born in urban areas such as Chiawela township in Soweto, south of Johannesburg. But their cultural and ethnic links to the Limpopo province remain solid. For an example, Cyril Ramaphosa is the former Chancellor and Special Ambassador of the University of Venda, which is situated not far from Malamulele. We could all certainly gain from some “strategic reflections” from Joel Netshetenzhe and his MISTRA on the recent community upheavals in Malamulele!

After all, a true and authentic intellectual in the evolving, changing and democratic South Africa is the one who should engage with the kinds of issues thrown up by the recent Malamulele community upheavals, and not necessarily by those of us seeking to define what an intellectual is or is not, and also seeking to locate ourselves as the sole, all-knowing and self-elected gatekeepers to judge as to who is an authentic intellectual and who is not, whilst doing this via discussions and opinion pieces in the for-profit commercial media, and whilst serving on some of the most powerful boards of big capitalist financial services behemoths of our country. A public intellectual is not declared or self-ordained via the for-profit commercial media, but through ongoing, below-the-radar-of-for-profit-commercial media and active interactions and engagement with local communities across the length and breadth of South Africa. Self-acclaimed intellectuals cannot issue academic “fatwas” against those intellectuals they deem less intellectually gifted, so that less intellectual competition results on the field of ideas. It is not their place and time to do so.

Politics remains decidedly local and less self-advertising! Malamulele is no exception.

Given the explosive nature of the issue of black on black tribalism and narrow ethnic chauvinism in South Africa, and broadly in the rest of Africa, it is no wonder that the ANC national leaders, who are even remotely linked and associated with Thulamela local municipality and Malamulele, one way or the other – at one level or another – fear to put themselves in what they possibly consider a potentially compromising and implicating proximity to the recent Malamulele community protests.

Even the EFF’s co-founder and deputy president, Floyd Shivambu, who hails from Malamulele, felt compelled to deny that “tribalism” had anything substantively to do with the recent Malamulele community protests, except in as far as it was expressed through “the tribal undertones” of the Malamulele protestors.

In his Politicsweb article of 21 January 2015 under the heading ‘The troubles in Malamulele: An analysis”, Floyd Shivambu wrote:

“The violent protests that have defined Malamulele to demand a Municipality independent of the Thulamela Local Municipality have largely been defined and characterized in media circles as tribal cries for a tribal authority.. While the consciousness of ordinary people in Malamulele might have tribal undertones, , it is entirely incorrect that a demand for a municipality is solely on the basis of tribal dynamics, wherein Xitsonga speaking citizens do not want to be under a Municipality that is predominated by Tsivenda speaking citizens. It is only lazy minds that reduce the genuine demands into a tribal issue because there are real socio economic aspects and features that need attention in Malamulele”.

It is clear that Floyd Shivambu, through his analysis of the troubled Malamulele situation, sought to achieve several unhelpful things relating to the explosive and divisive matter of black-on-black tribalism and narrow ethnic chauvinism in Malamulele:

He firstly sought to underplay “tribalism” as one of the key drivers of the Malamulele protests, and deliberately subordinated such a key driver – in the event it “might have tribal undertones”, as he lyrically put it – and juniorised it to what he is too happy to identify, as the EFF’s Marxist-Leninist-Fanonist, as the real drivers of the protests, namely “socio economic aspects and features”, which “predominated”, in the mind of Shivambu, over what he must imagine are unsavory “tribal dynamics”. He views the “socio economic aspects” as “the genuine demands”. He says “only lazy minds reduce the genuine demands into a tribal issue”.

This type of one-dimensional, historical materialist and class deterministic analysis is consistent with anyone who views “tribal consciousness” as “a false and destructive consciousness” and “the tribe and ethnicity” as merely social construct that impede progressive societal transformation.

The prevalent but misguided desire on the part of black Africa’s relentless modernists, ruling elite sophisticates, insecure and self-doubting intellectuals and the political classes influenced by Euro-centric radical ideologies and calcified religious dogmas, is behind many a civil war and social strife in post-colonial black Africa.

Perhaps the EFF’s Floyd Shivambu and the ANC’s Collins Chabane, Cyril Ramaphosa and Joel Netshetenzhe, amongst other national and thought leaders of our country, would be best served by remembering the following written words of John Reader:

“…African leaders discovered that their political initiatives – though addressing issues of national importance – were inevitably interpreted as moves designed to benefit their own natal communities and – with more sinister implications – ethnic group. When Jaramongi Oginga Odinga attempted to form a radical socialist party in Kenya, for instance, he found that support came not from the disadvantaged across the length and breadth of the country, whom his proposed reforms were intended to benefit, but almost exclusively from all sections – rich and poor – of the Luo, his own ethnic group. Similarly, despite Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s all-embracing socialist rhetoric in the early years of Nigerian independence, he became the hero not of the working class of Nigeria as a whole but of nearly all classes in Yorubaland”. (Ibid).

[In the South African politics, we should christen this amazing conundrum John Reader alludes to above as “the Jacob Zuma-Msholozi Conundrum”, not because the name “Zuma” is “so easy to pronounce”, and not because president Jacob Zuma “is a leader and a politician”, and not because we “all like to talk about Zuma”, as president Jacob Zuma recently, and rather facetiously, claimed in our elected national parliament on 11 March 2015. No, none of that stuff. But because in the context of the current politics of our country, our national leader, the President of our Republic and our Number One, president Zuma best embodies this conundrum explained by John Reader. This explains why president Jacob Zuma’s leadership has registered consistently growing support for the ANC in his home province of KZN across all black groups and classes and even across all black religions in the province, and why the new EFF, led by Julius Malema, did so well in the Gauteng, Limpopo and North West provinces of our country in last year’s national elections, and so very poorly in KZN, the Eastern Cape and Mpumalanga provinces].

And so, we end up with a contradictory and unacceptable situation where an EFF MP, as I pointed above, informs the nation through our democratic national legislature that he believes that the inaction of Collins Chabane around Malamulele was motivated by lack of his tribal solidarity with his tribesmen and tribeswomen of the troubled area, whilst the EFF co-founder and deputy president Floyd Shivambu reckons that “only lazy minds” read “tribal dynamics” into the Malamulele troubles. Does Shivambu think the EFF MP referred to is a “lazy mind”? Is the EFF speaking through two sides on its mouth on the recent Malamulele community protests? Does the EFF’s left hand not know what its right hand is doing on what Shivambu terms “the Malamulele troubles”?

This is as good as any an example of the EFF’s conflicted analysis of the recent Malamulele troubles.

A very helpful definition of what an ethnic group – or a black African tribe – is, was provided by Nigeria’s student, Ehindola Odunayo Peter, in the dissertation entitled “Ethnic Schism in Nigeria: A Socio-Literary Study of Chinua Achebe’s ‘There Was A Country'”.

In this highly interesting academic work, Ehindola Odunayo Peter wrote:

“Ethnicity is consistently informed by common characteristics which set the group apart from other groups. Ethnicity should be seen as arising in any situation where a group of people, no matter how small, with different cultural and linguistic attributes from those of its neighbors, use these as the basis of solidarity, and interaction with others. In doing so, the group sees itself not only as distinct from, but as a ‘group in itself’. In other words, socio-cultural consciousness of oneness develops and forms the basis of interaction with and participation in other socio-cultural processes, especially in power and resource distribution within a large social group or state”.

Armed with this progressive definition of “ethnicity” – or the black African tribal consciousness – by Nigeria’s Ehindola Odunayo Peter, it should not be necessary, even for our Marxist-Leninists and our Marxist-Leninist-Fanonists, to fear to confront black on black African tribalism, narrow ethnic chauvinism, and even “tribal dynamics” or “tribal undertones” head on, whenever and wherever they rear their ugly heads in our democratic and all-inclusive country, including in their our own respective “tribal” backyards.

Black African ethnicity and black African tribes, properly understood, are not the natural, apriori and historically or anthropologically predetermined enemies of Africa’s post-colonial Renaissance. They do not even have to be hurdles on our way to a larger, non-racial, non-tribalistic, non-sexist, democratic, united and prosperous South Africa based on economic justice for all, in line with all of the immortal Freedom Charter’s clauses, without a single, sole exception.

Given the deplorable, dismal and dismissive level of public intellectual and political discourse in our country, where those who are viewed as politically undesirable are routinely, unscientifically, roundly and mischievously dismissed with a wave of a hand, repeatedly, day in and day out – as long as there is a public microphone standing and awaiting for His Master’s Voices and His Anti-Master’s Voices to ventilate whatever baloney enters the utterers’ minds -, as either “neo-fascists” or “proto-fascists” or “counter-revolutionaries” or “self-elected political messiahs” or “bloody agents” or “intellectual midgets”, it is possible that any other analyses of the Malamulele troubles not sufficiently conformist, will too be dismissed as “a counter revolutionary” mysticism on “the tribe”, and thus “counter revolutionary”. Out of black Africa’s courtier intellectual class ever ready to sing for its supper and for under-handed tenders, something new and insulting every other day!

Yet Pallo Jordan, the ANC’s outstanding organic intellectual, once warned thus against this intellectual witch-hunting tendency on the part of some of us:

“Latter day Marxist oppositionists have been branded as “counter-revolutionaries”, “spies”, and “provocateurs” by the Communist parties…Their works have consequently been ignored, only to be taken up by the real counter-revolutionaries, spies and provocateurs as sticks with which to beat the Left in general”. (Pallo Jordan, ‘Crisis of Conscience in the SACP: A Critical Review of Slovo’s ‘Has Socialism Failed’, February 1990, South African History Online).

It was possibly in anticipation of what Pallo Jordan would later refer to in the above-quoted statement, that the far more far-sighted and deeply strategic leaders of the ANC, like Oliver Tambo, Dr. Yusuf Dadoo, Moses Kotane, Selby Msimang, Ismael Meer, Dr. Xuma, George Champion and Dr. Naicker – all of the outstanding struggle Congress political traditions of our country -, upon learning of the horrible Zulus versus Indians race riot in Natal in 1949, did not hesitate for a minute, and did not engage in self-serving political self-effacing and self-pity in the face of an acute local racial crisis, but plunged head first into the 1949 crisis, and waded into it to provide our two warring national groups at the time – the Zulus and Indians – with outstanding political empathy, leadership and guidance towards their aspirations for a common nationhood and destiny within the nation-state framework of South Africa.

In her biography of the former ANC president Oliver Tambo, entitled ‘Oliver Tambo – Beyond the Engeli Mountains’, Luli Callinicos wrote the following about this 1949 Zulus versus Indians race riot in Natal, and about the great, astonishing and almost instinctual strategic leadership displayed by the ANC leaders at the time:

“Early in 1949, Tambo had for the first time been called upon to act on a national level for the ANC. On an oppressively hot and humid January day in Durban’s inner city an Indian trader struck a black child who had been caught shoplifting. Immediately fistcuffs broke out, and within a few minutes angry onlookers began looting Indian stores. The incident exploded into a horrifying race riot in which 50 Indians and 87 black people were killed, many of the latter by police. Dozens more died later of injuries. Over a thousand were injured and thousands – mostly Indians – were left homeless. The following day, the presidents of the ANC Natal and the Natal Indian Congress issued a joint statement. Xuma, a national president, hurried down and returned a few days later with a team to form part of the joint council – senior members Selby Msimang, JB Marks, Gana Makabeni, Moses Kotane and Oliver Tambo, who had come in his capacity as Acting Secretary for the ANC. Following their discussions the joint council reported that Natal ANC’s George Champion and Natal Indian Congress member Ismael Meer had toured the riot area in an open loudspeaker van to address the people and to appeal for calm. On 6 February, the council made a statement – a benchmark for the opposition organization, observed Ismael Meer, for it was the first multiracial meeting held in Natal – that pointed towards structural as well as racial inequalities”. (2004, pages 164-165).

Unlike Floyd Shivambu’s analysis of the Malamulele troubles, which emphasized only “the socio economic aspects and features” and denigrated any reference to “tribal dynamics” or even “tribal undertones” as the fruits of lazy minds, the joint statement of the Congress movement in 1949 emphasized both “…the structural as well as racial inequalities”.

Luli Callinicos further wrote:

“In the Cato Manor Location, for example, the government had given Indians preferential rights of land ownership. Indians were permitted to operate buses, to the exclusion of Africans, so that they had a monopoly over transport in parts of Durban. Similarly, Indians were given trading licences, and open resentment developed along racial lines…The joint council made its report. ‘This meeting is convinced’, it declared, ‘that the fundamental and basic causes of the disturbances are traceable to the economic and social structure of the country, based on differential and discriminatory treatment of the various racial groups and the preaching in high places of racial hatred and intolerance'”. (Ibid, page 165).

This joint council statement by the Congress movements in 1949 strikes one as much closer to the grievances articulated by the Malamulele residents at the Malamulele town hall meeting hosted by the SABC safm radio’s Sakina Kamwendo on 03 February 2015, than it is to EFF leader Floyd Shivambu’s analysis in his Politicsweb article “The troubles in Malamulele: An analysis”.

The joint Congress statement of 1949 stated categorically and crucially that “…the fundamental and basic causes of the disturbances are traceable to the economc and social structure of the country, based on differential and discriminatory treatment of the various racial groups and the preaching in high places of racial hatred and intolerance”.

The Congress leaders of 1949 did not seek to fudge issues or to call a spade as “a big spoon cladded in a clod”!

That there has not been a repeat of the deeply shameful, bloody Zulus versus Indians race riot of 1949 in Natal and subsequently in KZN since 1994, despite occasional and maybe unavoidable inter-communal tensions and rivalries under Apartheid and indeed in a democratic South Africa, is a brilliant testament to the great, amazing quality of the leadership of the ANC’s earlier stalwarts.

How come are the troubles in Malamulele in 2015 not benefitting from a similar selfless demonstration of quality national, provincial and municipal leadership?

Where have we gone wrong with regard to Malamulele? Where did we stop to read the compass needle of our democratic Constitution, other than belated bureaucratic and technocratic stop-gap interventions?

Is the problem of the protesting Malamulele community, to paraphrase Nigeria’s literary icon, Chinua Achebe, solely “the problem of leadership”? That there is absolutely nothing wrong with Malamulele community’s residents, water, soil, climate, grass, livestock, wild animals, insects, human habitats, oxygen and reptiles?

Will Polo Radebe, the CEO of Identity Development Fund, one day in the misty future, with the benefit of the lodestar of hindsight, choose to write also about “the Shangaan/Tsonga nationalism of Malamulele”, the way she gladly waxed lyrical about “white Afrikaner nationalism” in her Business Report article of 05 August 2008, quoted at the beginning of this piece?

Whilst we ponder all these weighty questions, Cry the Beloved Malamulele!

——————-END——————-

20th Cedia Blog
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
13 March 2015

Written by:

Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
Centre for Economic Diplomacy in Africa (CEDIA)
And,
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