The black howler and often misunderstood klipgooier (stone thrower) and leader of BLF, Andile Mngxitama, posted this week on social media "…we come from 400 years of systemic oppression. We have all manner of pathologies and disabilities. If we don’t work and sacrifice for a future that belongs to us. We must forget..."
I couldn’t agree more with his assertion that we come from 400 years of systematic oppression and that we have all manner of pathologies and disabilities. In fact, Mngxitama’s assertion of "systematic oppression" is something discussed in detail in my book Blame Me on Apartheid. The subject of "disability" that Mngxitama touches on is also articulated by senior counsel Vuyani Ngalwana, writing a prologue to the same book, who notes that "People die, and children are born. But psychological damage that comes with systematic deprivation of the ability to think critically, to reason logically, and to make critical choices is inter-generational and therefore long-lasting."
The colonial apartheid oppression of Africans (blacks and coloureds) through land theft, burning of fields and killing of their livestock and being confined to native reserves was not an "event".
The subsequent perpetual post-democratic disenfranchisement, especially for those still based in townships – a morphed version of the native reserves – shows just how black people still bear the harsh brunt of being the biblical cast-out "sons of Shem". This shows how systematically and structurally a pathology and disability system was created and sustained to last for generations, even with a black majority government in charge.
Recently, I visited the towns of Fort Beaufort and Adelaide in the Eastern Cape. I last visited Fort Beaufort 14 years ago; the township I last set foot in more than a decade ago has deteriorated even further. The main road into the township shows signs of neglect way beyond any words can describe.
Besides infrastructural neglect, the stench of poverty, the pain of unemployment and look of disillusionment is just too much to bear. All these are the legacy of the pathologies and disabilities Mngxitama refers to. The mentality of those in power (African administrators) is no different from the colonial apartheid system of letting "native towns" crouch on their knees and die like starving animals.
Being a child of the township, this is a picture I am all too familiar with. Lack of service delivery, staggering unemployment, crime, drug and alcohol abuse. If you are not indirectly affected by one, you are a victim of the other. All the while those in power spew bile and gloat about statistics at every media interview they chance upon.
With all the statistics and political rhetoric, the legacy of apartheid is still very much alive and visible in townships. Township residents often endure commutes of no less than two hours on either taxis, sub-serviced buses that often break down on highways, or congested trains. Transportation alone takes a huge slice of township dwellers’ salaries.
Also, like the grandparents before them who had to sit outside the Johannesburg's Non-European Affairs at 80 Albert Street hoping to be picked up by a white employer, young people from townships are forced to stand with cardboards and CVs at traffic lights in affluent neighbourhoods hoping for a good Samaritan to take their resumés or "make them trend" on social media in a degrading attempt at landing a job.
With no generational wealth, those who want to venture into business will be sent from pillar to post and eventually be rejected by the bureaucratic processes put in place. No different from apartheid exclusion processes. I am yet to come across a young township entrepreneur who can boldly claim to have been helped by state organs and sing praises of such. I bear witness of how I was told to wait for a piece of land I had earmarked for a business, to go on tender. Upon asking about how one can keep track of tender adverts, the response was I need to “buy the newspaper every day”. This is against the common sight of big developers breaking ground and building malls and other "developments".
With "democracy" and "black majority rule", township residents have achieved nothing except for the right to defecate on the same toilets with whites, stand in the same queues and not to be stopped and asked for "passes". This view is also shared by Khehla Shubane, writing in Civil Society in Apartheid and Post-Apartheid South Africa.
Shubane argues that “…from the little that is known about the government’s vision for a ‘new South Africa’, it seems that it is not prepared to negotiate itself out of power…it would appear that its ideal is to retain power while simultaneously extending a vote to all.”
• Malinga is a writer and author of Blame me on Apartheid
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