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It would be an understatement to say that Republicans are vile and bigoted people

Thursday, July 8, 2010

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Watch this clip for an understanding of how truly vile, self-righteous, dangerous, sanctimonious and bigoted Republicans are. While I have always had an understanding of their politics as reactionary and conservative, during recent interactions I have come to know them as deeply offensive people whose raison d’etre is greed, selfishness and bigotry. They are dangerous, what’s even more troublesome is that they will be back in power in the US within three years – and we can look forward to more cruelty and mass murder (for that is what war is). Worse, still, is that they just do not care…

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The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Wish You Weren’t Here
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

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Filed in Cultural Criticism, Culture, Democracy, Politics, United States Media | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Lost and found: when Shatila welcomed Nahr al-Bared

Thursday, July 8, 2010

Hundreds of Palestinian refugees were killed when Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces (ISF) laid siege to the Nahr al-Bared camp in Tripoli, north Lebanon, for over 15 weeks in summer 2007. The operation was called a quest to root out militants from an organisation deemed “terrorist”, Fatah al-Islam.

Nahr al-Bared was created in 1949 to accommodate thousands of refugees displaced with the creation of Israel. Nearly sixty years later, during the 2007 killings, the camp was flattened. Thousands of homes were destroyed and gutted, leaving up to 31,000 Palestinians displaced for the second time in their lives. (Read Further)

Filed in Activism, Exploitation, Inequality, International Relations, Israel, Media, Middle East, Photography, Politics, Poverty, United States Foreign Policy, War | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

A Note on the Double Standards of Western Intellectuals

Thursday, July 8, 2010

In a recent exchange with a western scholar, I was gobsmacked by the lack of humility – and downright arrogance – of the man when he told me, without any sense of compunction, that “the Indians” should institute policies of “good governance” (that which is defined by the World Bank in Washington DC). He pointed to manipulation of salaries and to workers being on the books but that were nowhere to be found. Setting aside the egregiousness of the way he would (discipline and punish) dark-skinned people in Asia – as Europeans have for centuries – I wondered what he would say, or not say, about the New York Times report: ”Cuomo Finds Pattern of Workers’ Inflating Pensions” published on 7 July 2010.

Many New York state and local government workers pad their pensions by drastically increasing their overtime in their last years of employment, according to a report released Wednesday by Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo.

“It is widespread, it is chronic and is very, very expensive,” Mr. Cuomo said at a press conference in Manhattan at which he released preliminary results of a continuing investigation. “We can’t afford it anymore.”

Of the 50 agencies examined by his office, 28 had recent retirees who, before they approached retirement, had never worked overtime or who had worked far fewer extra hours, Mr. Cuomo said. With overtime, the 2008 pay for one employee cited in the report nearly doubled. Pension benefits, Mr. Cuomo noted, are often based on an employee’s total income in the last few years of employment, and not just on base salary. (Read further)

I would not be surprised of the old western penchant for double standards – one for the European world and another for the “others” – were invoked….

Filed in Academia, Democracy Promotion, International Relations, Political Economy, Politics, World Bank | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Killers

Saturday, June 19, 2010

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/picture/2010/jun/19/utah-firing-squad-ronnie-gardner#

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The Relentless Bigotry and Crudeness of Republicans Know no Boundaries

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Rarely a day goes by without the Republicans showing the depth and pervasiveness of their bigotry. The horror is that they will probably elect Sarah Palin to the presidency in the next general election… I lived in South Carolina for four years. In that time I have come across some of the most offensive racists and narrow minded people I have ever met – that includes the racists of apartheid South Africa.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Thank You, South Carolina – The Race to Replace Disgrace
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party
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Stiglitz is Posturing: Again

Sunday, June 6, 2010

Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Laureate for Economics and a former Chief Economist of the World Bank has said that market fundamentalism is dead (See the video below) He is wrong. He is wrong for two reasons. First, because he has, himself, apparently not distanced himself from the “Economics logic” that underpin liberal capitalism – the altar at which market fundamentalists pray. Second, because economists at institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund continue to prescribe market fundamentalist policies to poor countries around the world with the same zeal and self-righteousness  as European/Christian missionaries in a previous era, and there is no evidence that they will stop. Indeed, after Alan Greenspan admitted to having been wrong in his blind loyalty to de-regulation, Economists at the Bank-Fund conveniently ignored their complicity in exporting “the American model” that has failed the middle class and the wealthy in the United States. Liberal capitalism means never having to say you’re sorry.

Stiglitz is wrong, not  because market fundamentalism is a good thing. To be sure, market fundamentalism ought necessarily be opposed in the same way that one ought to oppose religious fundamentalism. He is wrong because mainstream economists, including himself, remain fundamentally loyal to the very principles that constitute this orthodoxy – what Stiglitz described as the basic competitive model in one of his best selling textbooks. Unless Stiglitz refutes all his work of the past three decades, this latest submission is nothing more than the most egregious of posturing. Sure, Stiglitz has made some waves among the middle class, but that’s not very difficult. All it takes, sometimes, is to remind the middle-class of some of the origins of their prosperity. What Stiglitz has avoided is rejecting the de-humanised, self-reinforcing economic theories that he espouses in his own work – least of all for the iniquity that these abstract theories have reproduced in places that followed them loyally and unquestioningly. Indeed, in countries where these theories have been implemented most vigorously (as policy) – places like South Africa and the United States – inequality has grown significantly and poverty has deepened while the wealthy have become wealthier.

Stiglitz is wrong because he is a core member of a group of people who have become comfortable, some even wealthy, from prescribing austere policies to poor countries in Africa and then, when these policies are found wanting, they blame Africans for “not implementing them properly” as another of these Economists, Paul Collier once explained during a personal conversation at the World Bank. Ten years is a long-enough period of silence – these people have to be exposed for the unspeakable  cruelty that they inflict on the poor through their theories and policies.

Not unlike the way in which children in Christian, Muslim and Jewish schools around the world are taught never to question their own gospels, students in almost every Economics department in the United States, especially, are taught the principles of Economics as absolute truth. Worse, still, Economists at the World Bank and IMF prescribe policies based on these principles to poor countries – notwithstanding deepening poverty and inequality – on the basis, purely, that they ‘make sense’ in textbooks, or because Adam Smith (insert Jesus for the Christians, or Muhammad for the Muslims) told them so….

We should not take Stiglitz seriously. His is, as ever, the most self-righteous and egregious posturing that as a rather feeble smokescreen for his own complicity in reproducing injustice and the iniquities that are so fundamentally part of liberal capitalism’s division of labour – of which, ironically, Adam Smith himself was critical. Some economists tend to ignore THAT part of their gospels; perhaps it is because they have become quite quite wealthy for it….

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‘White’ complaints about Africa: Some Contextual Issues – Again!

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

By Ismail Lagardien

“I’m not disillusioned, I’m fucking furious! All I see is darkness.” the South African writer, Rian Malan.

One of the apparent conundrums of post-apartheid South Africa has been the rise in ‘anti-racist’ activism; it is hard to tell whether these new activists share noticeable ideological solidarities – what does stand out, nonetheless, is that almost all of them are white. This apparently new phenomenon raises several questions, many of which are ignored, some of which are answered with nonsensical claims of racism, but almost all the answers provided tend to be ahistorical and fall into a pattern of white ideas, conduct and behaviour that has a deep history in Africa.

It is ironic, of course, when some of the new anti-racist activists rant about being victims of racism they present their cases in a contextual vacuum. For instance, one is tempted to ask individuals like Steve Hofmeyer, who served in the military machine that propped up one of the most explicitly racist social systems in the 20th century, to point to the precise dates and times that he protested against that racist system. Nonetheless, most recently an Afrikaner intellectual and much respected writer and polemicist, Rian Malan (with whom I have been friends for more than 20 years), observed that, ‘whites have reason to moan’.

While I have no desire to engage Malan directly and he is quite free and capable of saying and doing as he wishes, (including turning this discussion into a personalised attack) I want to examine the phrase (and the statement at the top of this post) critically. In other words I want to look at what the text represents placing it in a social and historical context to expose power, dominance and meaning embedded in the statement.

Whites in South Africa

Sometime during the negotiations process that resulted in the political compromise which brought electoral democracy to South Africa, the president at the time, FW de Klerk, asked me to turn off my tape recorder during an interview. This is what he said: ‘Whites deserve a special place in the new South Africa. We built this country and we made it what it is, today.” As an empirical, observable fact, that is of course true. What is perhaps more important is that whatever whites achieved in South Africa over time, did not emerge from the ether. It was built on conquest, oppression, injustice, abuse and violence.

The immediate response by some whites in South Africa would be, perhaps unsprisingly, that that was then – that the history of conquest, oppression, injustice, abuse and violence was irrelevant. In the same breath they may herald their own history and (as De Klerk did) its significance…. One fellow, a white male, who has quite a presence on Youtube launched a verbal tirade against one Julius Malema (Malema is probably not the right person to use in this instance as he is, how shall I put it, not a nice person, but there is a need to use factual evidence in this case and this example is useful) and suggested that he, Malema, had never been ‘a victim of apartheid’. The white fellow said that Malema was born in 1981, when apartheid was dying and that his teenage years were spent during the electoral democracy that was born in 1994. These are, of course, perfectly solid facts, but unless one is a rigid empiricist one may understand that what appears to be simple facts did not appear from the ether; facts tend to be shaped by larger social and historical forces and, more perhaps more controversially, facts are unstable over time because they can be manipulated. The larger fallacy in this context is the idea that apartheid was felled, like a tree, in one swoop, and that it ceased to exist as a state of affairs.

Remembering and reparations are encouraged in almost every case of mass injustice – from the Holocaust of the Second World War to the genocide in Rwanda – but not in South Africa; apartheid, an especially cruel and violent social and historical system seems to have been placed in a museum as if it were an object that can be removed from space and time and its impact and influence thereby nullified. Closer to the truth is the fact that apartheid was a structural and systemic process. It was insidious and shaped society in profound ways – not all of which is always empirically observable. Put another way, you don’t have to see women being beaten with clubs on every street corner as evidence that a particular society was patriarchal; likewise, we don’t have to see black people shot in the street every day to know that you live in a racist society. Parenthetically, the editor of a business newspaper in South Africa once asked me to provide “chapter and verse, chapter and verse” of how his newspapers in the country reproduced racism and racial stereotypes – he readily couched his prejudices in market fundamentalist discourse. In this discourse the legal and political injustices that were considered to be a travesty of justice were, at the flick of a virtual switch sometime in 1994, rendered permissible by “market forces”….

Nonetheless, we get, now, to Rian Malan’s statement: “I’m not disillusioned, I’m fucking furious! All I see is darkness.”

Africa as a Dark Continent and a People Without History or Consciousness

Rian Malan is not the first white (man) in history who has referred to Africa as ‘dark’ – this image of Africa has very deep antecedents the European colonial, especially Victorian notions, that Africans have no history or consciousness and that the continent is a place of darkness. Friedrich Hegel, one of the European world’s greatest thinkers made the following statement about Africa and Africans:

Africa is in general a closed land, and it maintains this fundamental character. It is characteristic of the blacks that their consciousness has not yet even arrived at the intuition of any objectivity, as for example, of God or the law, in which humanity relates to the world and intuits its essence. He [the black person] is a human being in the rough.

The Victorians, too, showed naught for the comfort of Africans. In 1962, driven by a self-image of racial and civilisational superiority, the British historian, Hugh Trevor Roper stated, quite without any sense of irony or compunction that Africans had no history. “Perhaps in the future,” he said, “there will be some history to teach. But at the present, there is none; there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness…”

Of course, I am not suggesting that Rian Malan is racist; I am sure that some of his best friends are black.  What I am saying is that there are clearly identifiable homologies between his statements and that of white (men) in Africa over the past 500 years who, quite without reflecting upon their own historical passage on the continent, or any apparent compunction, seem to reproduce the tendencies of white superiority that drove colonial expansion in the first place. This passage was part of what the British Historian, JM Roberts, described as Europe’s ‘assault on the world’; when capitalists and colonialists travelled to Africa, the Middle East and in East, South and South East Asia filled with ‘religious zeal,’ firm in the belief that they were ‘in possession of the true religion,’ and arrived ‘to do business and then… return home to enjoy the profits’. In their exploitation of the dark-skinned world colonists travelled ‘to serve God and his Majesty, to give light to those who sat in darkness and to grow rich as all men desire to do’. The reference to darkness and light is a consistent feature of the European presence in Africa and shapes the self-image of superiority that gave us racism; it began in Europe and remains part of the European imagination.

Indeed, there is general agreement among social scientists who study the history of colonialism and European expansion that racism refers to the basic structure of social ordering of colonial practice in terms of which white people (Europeans) were placed at the top of a hierarchy and Africans (dark skinned people) at the bottom. This ordering of society across European empires was ‘suffused with a vivid sense of superiority and self-righteousness’ and as a practice, was almost completely absent before the expansion of European colonialism/capitalism. In the same way, them, that anti-semitism is a hatred of Jews, racism refers to notions of superiority on the part of the European world (whites), and the contiguous process of typecasting black people, and Africans in particular, as necessarily inferior. One can hardly imagine Jewish anger at the Nazis being likened to anti-semitism; how, then, is it possible that black anger at white oppression over centuries can be described as racism…. Anyway, an intended or unintended consequence of this social ordering (of whites at the top of a ‘racial’ hierarchy with dark-skinned people at the bottom) produced a cultural system of beliefs and perceptions that continue to shape the hearts and minds of white people around the world and continues to undermine their very being in subtle and not so subtle ways. Racism is inseparable from the advent of ‘the Age of Europe’.

One is tempted, therefore, to suggest that the claim that whites, like Steve Hofmeyer, are being persecuted on grounds of ‘racism’ is spurious, that the ahistoricity and nonsensical nature of such claims are simply the lack of any historical reflexivity. One is tempted to say that Rian Malan was simply acting according to type; in the sense that he is simply reproducing the very deep history of how white men have conducted themselves on the continent for 500 years… but these suggestions might be considered to be counter-productive and against the spirit of  ’forgiveness’ and ‘tolerance’ and ‘reconciliation’ that Mandela represented. What seems clear, nonetheless, is that whites have a right to moan and do as the wish, and black people have to accept what they have to – this, to paraphrase Thucydides, is the standard of justice.

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The Media as Messenger of the Powerful. Reuters and the Pentagon

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Something happened to journalism over the 15 years or so that I left the craft to (eventually) complete a doctorate and embark on a career as an academic. One of the institutions of newsgathering and reportage that I always respected, Reuters, appears to have become one of the messengers of powerful actors – especially of the Government in the United States. While this conclusion is not quite scientific, in the sense that I have not done any systematic study of Reuters reports, a couple of recent reports suggests that journalists, at least those who wrote the pieces mentioned in this post, seem to serve merely as spokespersons or messengers for the US government and/or the Pentagon. Consider these examples:

  1. On 21 April, through my Twitter feed, I received a message from the US military prepared and delivered, as it were, by Reuters. Not unlike the messengers appointed by Kings in the 15th century (King Richard III appointed the first “King’s Messenger” in 1485) Reuters let me know that the Pentagon said the “option of striking Iran [is] never off the table”. (See the screenshot)
  2. Two days earlier, Reuters also reported information gathered from the US military establishment. Based on official military sources, Reuters reported the following: “With sufficient foreign assistance, Iran could probably develop and test an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of reaching the United States by 2015.” (See the full report, here)
  3. Earlier today (12 May 2010) Reuters delivered another message from the US government. The entire report read as follows: “U.S. concerns about China’s policies to promote domestic innovation by imposing unfavorable terms on foreign companies will be a major topic at high-level bilateral talks this month in Beijing, a top U.S. official said on Wednesday. ‘We will be raising the issue of indigenous innovation … throughout the trip, including at the S&ED (Strategic & Economic Dialogue)” meeting, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke told reporters ahead of a clean energy trade mission he is leading next week to China. (See the full report, here)

The Twitter feed from Reuters, Messenger to the Pentagon

A screenshot of the message from the US military. Delivered by Reuters.

Today’s message from the US (as relayed to us by Reuters) can be summed up in the following way.

  1. The US is concerned about China’s policies to promote domestic innovation by imposing unfavourable terms on foreign companies.
  2. The US told Reuters (and Reuters told us) that this concern (by the US), will be a major topic at a forthcoming meeting between the two countries

Apparently, the Reuters reporters are not required to ask probing questions, or investigate any statements by the US – even where it involves the possible loss of life. Let us forget, for a moment, whether or not Iran has the capacity and/or the will to attack the US. Let us ask a few questions ourselves:

1. Are Reuters simply a messenger of official positions – and in this case, the US military?

2. Ought journalists not ask deeper more probing questions and/or investigate the other side of the story? Surely if one person threatens to attack another (in the case of a country this may well result in multiple deaths), ought a journalist not ask deeper questions and report on the multiplicity of issues around the possible killing of large numbers of people?

3. What does Iran (the supposed villain and likely victim of a US military attack) have to say about the matter?

4. Does Iran not have any sovereignty over its own territory and people?

5. What would the US do if it were threatened by a foreign military?

6. Is it indeed true that as the US relayed to us via Reuters, that China has policies to ”promote domestic innovation by imposing unfavorable terms on foreign companies”?

Asking probing questions, examining and presenting more than one perspective on a particular issues, is apparently not part of Reuters journalism.

It would appear that they serve only to produce, in the imagination of their readers, imagined threats against the US – as explained by the US government. I want to turn to an especially apposite observation by Sam Keen, who explained:

“In the beginning we create the enemy. Before the weapon comes the image. We think others to death and then invent the battle-axe or the ballistic missiles with which to actually kill them. Propaganda precedes technology”

In this sense, Reuters establishes the idea that Iran “may be able” (not a fact) to strike the US (based on US military information) and in this way the horror (of an attack) is imagined. In an Orwellian sense, the people who read the Reuters report become  prisoners of this imagined horror which is, by an large, empty of fact-based content and as Orwell himself explained: ultimate reality in 1984 had no existence outside the mind that observes it. Following this imaginary construct of a horror in the minds of people – with little or no factual accuracy or situatedness other than that which the Pentagon claimed – the idea of an attack on the US validates, as it were, the necessity of an attack on Iran.

Filed in International Relations, Media, Middle East, Militarisation, United States Foreign Policy, United States Media, War | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (2)

Reconnecting with old friends and remembering my own prejudices

Thursday, May 6, 2010

One of the great tragedies about oppressive social systems like apartheid is that people who apparently straddle a political divide rarely get complete insights into each other.

Let me hastily add that I am not a wishy-washy liberal who always has to ‘see both sides of the story’ and come out on the side of compromise. The cruelty of slavery, the Holocaust, the slaughter of innocents at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the carpet-bombing of societies in South East Asia and genocidal attacks on groups of people should be a reminder that in cases of mass murder or systemic injustice there can be no compromise. It is impossible to reach a ‘middle ground’. The killing and/or persecuting should stop.

I recently caught up with someone whom I met, and with whom I shared a particular interest, more than 25 years ago. Angelo was/is white and I am black. As with most of the white lads in the group with which we interacted, I assumed he was a racist – and we never really became friends. Indeed, the young men with whom we interacted were particularly odious; I still recall their proud conversations of ‘killing kaffirs’ or ‘floppies’ when they were in the uniform of the South African Defence Force. Their bigotry and cruelty was quite stunning.

One or two of the young men were, however, always more thoughtful, and rarely got into any of the racist banter. I remember being surprised when one of them, a fellow by the name of Mark Lazarus who, I once noticed, wore a NUSAS t-shirt. The National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) were a left of centre group who aligned themselves with the liberation movement during the apartheid era. Of course, not all of the members were left-wing, but they had a core of really progressive thinkers and activists. It would not be a misrepresentation to say that Mark was liberal; as a (liberal) Democratic Party member of South Africa’s parliament, Douglas Gibson once told me, ‘we have an institutional relationship with the [British] Conservative Party’. So the copperbottom liberals during the apartheid period were hardly a liberation movement. As one of its defectors told me after he joined the African National Congress in 1991/92: ’The liberals would see a dog tied on a short leash and collar that cut into the animal’s neck, and loosen the collar. I am interested in freeing the animal. That’s why I joined the liberation movement.’ The analogy seemed dodgy, but I got the message. Whether or not the liberation has succeeded in its emancipatory quest is a subject for another time.

Anyway, I was especially surprised that Mark wore a NUSAS shirt – and that he seemed quite open-minded at the time – since someone very close to him would use phrases like: ‘Guys we got a kaffir hiding today,’ after being beaten in an ice hockey match. It was hard to swallow that, but I had a role to play and a job to do, so it was in my interest to tell them they were bigots, to refuse any deep relationships – without exposing myself too much…. Anyway, I interacted with the group for a couple of years and moved on. I took journalism a lot more seriously and never saw any of them again.

Over the last few of years, through social networking websites, I ‘re-connected’ with a couple of them. Mark still seems like a decent fellow, but another, Angelo Coppola, surprised me. In one of his recent Twitter updates Angelo mentioned that he was off to meet someone who worked with people who had HIV/AIDS – in a township called, Noordegesig! Noordgesig of all places. As a child I spent time in Noordgesig; my mother’s oldest brother (and his 10 or 11 children – I can’t be sure) lived there and we had some wonderful times with them. Noordgesig, I should say, is not one of the better known parts of what are the South Western Townships (Soweto). Eldorado Park, where I grew up, was a ‘coloured’ township, like Noordgesig, and Soweto, a township for indigenous African, were the better known areas. Of course among us, in Eldorado Park and Noordgesig, these divisions meant very little. In fact, the first pool into which I was thrown (because I couldn’t swim) was Father Huddlestone’s swimming pool in Orlando, Soweto; the first live football match I saw was at Orlando Stadium in Soweto; my first pair of glasses was from St John’s Eye Clinic attached to the Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto, and we attended ball room dancing competitions in some of the halls in Soweto… It was home for many years.

Orlando Stadium: The place where I saw my first live football match.

So…. I was quite stunned when Angelo mentioned in his Twitter feed that he was going to Noordgesig, or “Bulte” as it was known to us for many years. I hardly imagined that any one of the group of lads I knew all those years ago, not even Mark, would end up doing work or spending time with HIV/AIDS people in Bulte. It is unfortunate, of course, that I had held such rigid views of the people whom I met all those years ago. But, those were difficult times. Apartheid had placed them, young male conscripts, in the army – and that army would fight a war against its own people…. I was on the opposite end.  To Angelo, then, I tip my hat. Those were strange times, but you showed me, as you mentioned in our recent exchange that ‘people can change’. I guess I am the one who has not changed. I still distrust those young men who boasted about how many black people they killed in Namibia and Angola; I still find them loathsome. Those are my prejudices. You have transcended all of that. There is, of course, another irony. You are still in South Africa, and now doing good work; I am not!

Thanks for staying in touch, and for understanding my prejudices.

A Footnote: As I wrote this post, I remembered receiving a letter, in 1992, from one of the white men I met at the time, in which he apologised to me (personally) for apartheid. I found that extraordinary. In the letter he mentioned that he never quite knew just how terrible apartheid was and that he, like so many white people, had always been shielded from its horrors by the state. The last time I saw this person he was in a long-term nursing home or clinic – for mental problems. It was ironic, he said in the letter, that of all our ‘friends’ at the time, I was the only one who visited him. His name was Michael Parrot. I wonder what ever happened to him….

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The Multiplicity of Complexes Around the Murder of a Farmer in South Africa

Sunday, April 4, 2010
Eugene Terre'blanche, leader of the far-right/Neo-Nazi Afrkaaner Weerstands Beweeging in his prime. Addressing a rally of white people in former Pietersburg in the old Northern Transvaal. (ilagardien©l'engagé)

Eugene Terre'blanche, leader of the far-right/Neo-Nazi group, the Afrikanerweerstands Beweeging in South Africa during his hey-day. Addressing his followers in the former Pietersberg in the old Northern Transvaal, May 1985. ilagardien©l'engagé

The gruesome murder of Eugene Terreblanche, the leader of the Far-Right/Neo-Nazi Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweeging (AWB) movement in South Africa has produced another episode that is reflective of the tense race relations in this beleaguered country. Perhaps understandably, it has evoked much hysteria among South Africans at home and abroad. As with most horrific events, especially those that touch a raw nerve of society, the hysteria has blurred the boundaries between sense and nonsense. There is a multiplicity of contexts that provide the basis for the crime; at least four stand out and can help provide clarity on the event and that require some examination: the historical exploitation of farm workers; the gruesome nature of the crime; the propaganda windfall for racists and white supremacists, and the Malema Factor. When considered jointly these contexts place the murder into a clearer picture than those that evoke claims of a simple “political murder”.

Historical Exploitation of Farm Workers

One known fact is that Terre’blanche was killed following an argument with two employees on his farm. The South African police confirmed that the alleged killers were 21-year-old man and 15-year-old boy who allegedly killed Terre’blanche because “they were not paid for the work they did on the farm”. This non-payment of workers is consistent with the long history of white farmers in South Africa exploiting indigenous African. From exploiting the !Kung San as part of South Africa’s regional migrant worker system, to the veritable servitude into which indigenous Africans were forced as farm labourers – it is impossible to consider the murder of Terre’blanche outside this context.

Notwithstanding significant gains of the Basic Conditions of Employment Act 75 of 1997 (BCEA), most farm labourers in South Africa often live their entire lives on a farm. Like much of the injustice and inequality that emerged since 1994, apartheid’s legal order of farm work was transformed to serfdom under present conditions. The pass laws have been removed, but farm workers under the new dispensation have few options of leaving the farms where they may have spent all their lives – or seek work elsewhere. Indeed one of the key components of the system is that many workers not only work on the farms, but also live there as part of their payment and/or contract.

For many workers, therefore, the loss of their job may mean the loss of their house and home and the farm owner is able to exercise profound control over the workers’ daily lives and their very material existence, resulting in a critical imbalance of power between employer and employee. This is one context that provides some clarity on the brutal murder of Terre’blanche (the farm owner), by two of his workers in the most gruesome nature.

A supporter of the old National Party who was was attacked by Eugene Terreblanche's followers at a meeting in former Pietersberg in the old Northern Transvaal in May 1985. ilagardien©l'engagé

Brutality of the Crime

It is one thing to make the obvious statement that the nature of the crime or that the bludgeoning to death of a man in his sleep was brutal. If, however, we want a better explanation, one that would help establish a more appropriate context for crimes of this nature we may want to look at two causative/explanatory issues: the violence with which the crime was committed and the means used. We can dispense with the latter, first. Let us take a step back to a remark by Winnie Mandela several years ago, when she provided what became known as a cryptic defence for the gruesome “necklace” method of murder, where a car tyre filled with petrol is place around the victim’s neck and set alight. The horrendous nature of the method has been discussed exhaustively; in March 1985, Ms Mandela was reported to have said: “with our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country”.

One other way of looking at this statement – and there is no getting away from its brutality – is that if the activists had conventional weapons they might have employed those. Yet another, and this brings us back to the Terre’blanche murder is to consider the concept of  “rebounding” of colonial violence. So, we may say that the people who murdered Terre’blanche were strategic in their deed, in the sense that they attacked the victim when they felt safe enough to do so, they used the means at hand (as opposed to conventional small arms), and given the long history of violence and injustice against indigenous Africans by whites in Southern Africa, they imagined that brutality was the only effective way of expressing their anger against their employer.  This tendency to “rebound” is as complex as it is pervasive.

Wendy Hamblet, a scholar who has done extensive research into the “philosophy of evil” and on holocaust, genocide studies, human nature/nurture and violence in general, explained this rebounding most pithily in the following manner:

“Suffering teaches its victims that brutality is the only effective defence against a threatening world. It further teaches that violence is legitimate in the hands of ‘righful’ powers. The vicitimised therefore often continue forth from their cruel histories locked psychically within a dialectical identity, trapped within the violence-legitimating myths of domination, and enamoroured of the methodologies of cruelty bequeathed them by their oppressors. … victims can turn to the pitiless practices of their oppressors to seek re-empowerment [and] construct their identities and establish a secure place in their worlds by aggressively expressing their strength against proximate powers. In the worst cases of historical abuse, violence rebounds in frightening force from oppressor to victim populations”

In short, it may be stated that a group of people (as an historical and inter-generational phenomenon) who have experienced unspeakable cruelty, physical and structural violence, such as indigenous Africans at the hands of colonial and white settlers, might show a tendency towards cruelty and brutality that is a rebound from that which they experienced over an extended period. To be sure, one need to only consider the mutilation of indigenous Africans in the Congo region during Belgian rule, where violent amputations were the preferred method of Europeans as a way of inflicting wounds that won’t disappear.

Victims of King Leopold of Belgium's policy of amputations - the wounds that won't go away - against indigenous Africans in the Congo region

So, we can not dismiss the brutality of the crime against Terre’blanche, but should at least try to understand it in its broader context, and not simply in terms of what it means for white people in South Africa.

A Propaganda Windfall for the Far Right and for Whites, in General

It is impossible to avoid cynical exploitation of Terre’blanche’s murder by whites to make claims of “political murder” or of renewed contentions about “African savagery” or “brutality”. Over the past 100 years we, humans, have napalmed groups of people, and carpet-bombed societies in South East Asia, inflicted a near mass-extinction of Jewish people during the Second World War and funded human rights abuses in the oil fields of Nigeria. There is no getting away from our penchant for cruelty. What seems to have happened in South Africa is a veritable rise of white anger over the murder of a white supremacist who often vowed to start a race war.

There really is no evidence to suggest that whites have become an oppressed group in South Africa; they are, undoubtedly, among the victims of crime in the country. Indeed, much of the wealthy elite in the country continue to paddle complacently in the pool of white hegemony. What Terre’blanche’s murder seems to have done is galvanise a small group of right-wingers who have been unable to accept indigenous African leadership (their opposition is often couched in comfortable discourse on crime or affirmative action) and now conceive of the event as evidence of a political killing.

Let us consider this carefully. We can not say with absolute certainty that the alleged murderers killed Terre’blanche for his political beliefs. They reportedly killed him because of a labour dispute; it has been suggested that he failed to or refused to pay them for their labour. To exploit the situation by using it as evidence that black people in South Africa hate white people is nonsense; at the extreme, black people are quite angry that, in general, most of their lives have not improved and consider their erstwhile oppressors to be at least partially to blame for this.

It is, of course, tragic for Terre’blanche’s family, but it is an indictment on society when people are forced to address their labour disputes through brutal physical violence. It does not help, of course, that a few political leaders in South Africa have encouraged the tendency to apply murderous violence against their compatriots.

The Malema Factor

In a society where marginalised people feel they have no access to resources or the law, or where they continue to live under oppressive conditions, there is invariably an increased tendency towards seeking forms of justice through violence. Political leaders are often expected to deal with these tendencies in a way that placates the economically dominant in society. For instance (this is a very simple example) if car hijacking is rampant, the wealthy, who drive more expensive cars tend to feel more aggrieved than people without cars or those whose cars are, well, close to being sent to the scrapyard. In most societies it is the middle classes and the wealthy who are among the more prominent victims of crime. What is dangerous, though, is for political leaders to create an environment in which the recourse to violence is considered to be permissible. Enter Julius Malema (which is not to say that Terre’blanche himself has not delivered subtle and insidious exhortations for violence).

From a distance Malema seems to be an odious character. In the US and Europe we read mainly the news produced by newspapers owned by vested corporate interests and information on social networking sites. It is safe to say that in South Africa social networking sites are dominated by the middle classes and the affluent. Among this group of people Malema is the devil incarnate – I do not, for a minute, suggest that he does not hold toxic views or that his incendiary “messages” to kill farmers do not make him a thoroughly dangerous person. His conduct has come under criticism from some of the most intelligent and reasonable people in the country. From a litany of nastiness and insensitivity, Malema’s comments on date rape, more than a year ago was criticised by Kumi Naidoo, an activist and honorary president of Civicus in the following manner:

As a South African man I hope that all South Africans are ashamed that our leaders feel comfortable expressing such atrocious views of women. It is up to our country’s leadership to make sure that Julius Malema and others know that these views are unacceptable. It is not only degrading, but it reveals a shocking insensitivity towards the issue of rape and gender-based violence that is so sadly prevalent throughout South African society.

On the same matter, Lisa Vetten, a researcher and policy analyst associated at the time with the Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre to End Violence Against Women said:

What do the women’s rights’ activists in the ANC think when Jacob Zuma and his acolyte Julius Malema call for the internment of pregnant teenage girls in education camps? Were all those conceptions the result of parthenogenesis, with no male involvement or responsibility? Do they – like Malema – think Zuma’s accuser had a “nice time”? And how do they uphold a man whose trial for rape was a textbook illustration of legal sexism?

There can be no doubt that Malema is a problematic figure; that he taps the basest sentiments among us and directs them at others through acts of abuse and violence. It is, however, his “song” to kill farmers, which may be added to the contexts that shaped Terre’blance’s murder. What we know about the murder, based on police statements, is that the motive of the alleged killers was a labour dispute. What may be said, based on the evidence, is that the killers used the means at their disposal. What is clear, in a more general sense, is that the crime was enabled, as it were, by a set of historical conditions stemming from years of oppression and abuse, continued marginalisation of poor indigenous Africans who may well believe that rebounded violence was a way of expressing their anger and disillusionment at their plight.

This violent crime took place in an environment shaped by a multiplicity of contexts, one of the most pronounced is without a doubt the sanctification, as it were, by Malema of killing farmers. It would appear that Malema represents an especially reckless and an almost uncouth new breed of political leadership that shows little evidence of introspection and reflexivity – in the sense that he does not seem aware of the impact of his words and deeds, and how they influence the way people respond to them.

When the Dutch politician Pym Fortuyn was killed in 2002, I was briefly stunned by the murder, thinking that “that was not the way the Dutch go about justice in their county”. Indeed, Fortuyn was a nasty bigoted man – but murder was not the way to address one’s political differences where there are the means to legally sorting out differences. His was a political murder; the assassin Volkert van der Graaf explained that he killed Fortuyn to stop him from exploiting Muslims as “scapegoats” and targeting “the weak parts of society to score points”. The evidence before us shows that Terre’blanche was killed over a labour dispute – not for his political exhortations for a race war.


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