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Spartacist South Africa No. 13 |
Spring 2015 |
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British Colonial and Apartheid Racist Legacy Lives under
Neo-Apartheid
Cecil Rhodes — Colonial Pig
The following is an excerpt from an international
greetings letter sent to the Spartacist League/Britain (SL/B), from Spartacist
South Africa. It was further reprinted in Workers Hammer No. 231, which is the
SL/B’s paper.
Recent events in South Africa have served to highlight how
much the fates of the oppressed peoples in this region have been shaped by the
rise and decline of British imperialism. Beginning a few months ago, students
around the country protested against the prominent memorials to Cecil Rhodes and
other racist colonial pigs that dot the landscape of this country’s
universities — including by appropriately dumping a bucket of shit on the main
Rhodes statue at University of Cape Town. In response, the university
administrations and other bourgeois representatives mouth empty, hypocritical condemnation
of Rhodes’ colonial “excesses” and make pious promises about the need for
“transformation” to address “past” injustices. But the reality is that these
statues are simply the most overt and obscene symbols of the racist legacy of
colonial subjugation that continues to live on under neo-apartheid. In 2003,
Nelson Mandela explained the ideological justification for the bourgeois
nationalist ANC to embrace the likes of Rhodes, responding to the question of how
he could link their names by establishing the Mandela Rhodes Foundation: “To
us, the answer is easy, and we have explained the logic of our decision on a
number of occasions. We have referred to our constitution’s injunction for us
to come together across the historical divides, to build our country together
with a future equally shared by all.” These words should echo in our ears when
we remember the Marikana massacre of 16 August 2012. Rhodes’ name stands like
no other for the British colonial policy of divide-and-rule in southern Africa.
In the final decades of the 19th century, he masterminded the carving up of the
Tswana, Ndebele and other peoples in the region as part of his bid to outflank
the Boers of the Transvaal Republic and Britain’s colonial rivals (mainly Germany
and Portugal). So there is a vicious irony in the fact that the student
protests against Rhodes were eclipsed last month by a new outbreak of
anti-immigrant violence in Durban and Johannesburg, this time resulting in at
least seven deaths and the displacement of thousands to desperate refugee
camps. One of the immediate sparks for the attacks was a chauvinist tirade by
the Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini, who referred to “foreigners” living in South
Africa as “lice” and “ticks” that needed to be “removed” and put “outside in
the sun”, demanding that they pack their bags and leave the country. The
reactionary parasite King Zwelithini is another example of how the ANC-led
Tripartite Alliance government has adapted the tools of bourgeois rule from the
white minority rulers who governed before 1994. Under apartheid, Zwelithini and
his uncle Mangosuthu Buthelezi were pampered by the white supremacist regime in
return for ruling the Zulu “homeland” in Natal with an iron fist and
collaborating in terrorising and murdering ANC and other anti-apartheid activists.
In recent years, however, the ANC-led government has attempted to reinforce the
power and privileges of Zwelithini and his pals in the House of Traditional
Leaders with the Traditional Courts Bill, recognising their usefulness as props
for neo-apartheid capitalist rule. The horrific anti-immigrant attacks
underline the necessity of a Leninist vanguard party, acting as a tribune of
all the oppressed, to combat the poisonous national, racial and other divisions
that the bourgeoisie fosters among the working people. The perspective of
permanent revolution, culminating in an international socialist planned
economy, uniquely points the way to smashing the racist legacy of colonialism
and apartheid rule through a black-centred workers government as part of a
socialist federation of Southern Africa.
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