Speech by Belinda Bozzoli, DA Shadow Minister for Higher Education and Training on Africa Day, Parliament, May 28 2015
Madam Speaker
It is a wonderful thing that we are all expressing our love of and commitment to Africa today. This is a great antidote to the xenophobic hatred and violence we have seen in recent times, and augurs well for a more tolerant and outward looking future.
However we do need to ask which Africa we are committing ourselves to. In my view there are two Africas.
First is the postcolonial Africa so tragically depicted by the great Frantz Fanon, who writes in his prescient book The Wretched of the Earth about what he calls the national bourgeoisie.
This is an undeveloped class which, he says, enriches itself, and indulges, for example, in buying cars and country homes. And which, driven by greed and envy, seeks to replace the colonialists in all the key areas of the society, such law, politics, the administration and the economy without itself displaying any actual productive capacity whatsoever.
This class, he says, is set on a path of ever greater inwardness rather than outwardness.
I think we are well on the way to embracing this vision of Africa. What Fanon calls the national bourgeoisie is there for all of us to see, busy looting and accumulating as fast as it can and seeking, in all its smugness, to grab every possible avenue to lucrative employment irrespective of talent.
And inwardness is the order of the day. How often do we hear that the state represents what our ANC colleagues call "our" people” – meaning Africans - rather than the people as a whole? How often do we hear just the one, linear and one-dimensional, version of history – the ANC’s nationalist version? Soon, perhaps, no other versions will be tolerated or even conceived of.
And we are building walls of belonging and exclusion around groups of people in our society - Africans, Afrikaners, Zulus, foreigners, Pakistanis, Somalis, whites, coloureds, Asians, Muslims, Jews. We are creating little laagers, like the Afrikaner nationalists built around themselves, laagers which soon become fortresses from which we launch our aggression and hatred of those who do not "belong".
But this is not the only vision of Africa on offer. We can learn from history. We can all read Fanon and know only too well of the dangers he and a hundred other analysts have identified. We are painfully aware of the trials and tribulations of the continent. We don’t have to repeat them.
And we can find, if we free ourselves of the nationalist straitjacket, that there is also an enlightened, globalised Africa to aspire to. This is an Africa which many people of all backgrounds have embraced and loved for centuries. It reaches from Cairo to the Cape and includes hundreds, if not thousands, of kinds of people. This Africa is outward looking, not inward-looking, and it is Universalist and modernising rather than particularist and recidivist. It embraces all of humanity as all of humanity has embraced it.
In South Africa, if we look outward, we will see things we never dreamt existed. Let me give you one example: how many of our citizens are aware that we have long been the magnet for eminent people of colour from all over the globe as well as from our own continent, who have contributed to our past and present? How often do we celebrate these people?
For example there is West Indian Pan Africanist Sylvester Williams who in 1900 set up a conference to investigate the dire conditions of the black people of South Africa; or the great Malawian Clements Kadalie, who in the 1920s set up the first significant black Trade Union movement in the country, the ICU, and whose name we rarely hear today; or what about Ralph Bunche, the famous African American civil rights activist, academic and Nobel Peace Prize winner who visited South Africa in the 1920s and whose observations on our country were chillingly prescient and acute.
Where are they, and dozens of others, in our pathetically thin and stifling so-called “good story” of nationalism and political correctness? Nowhere to be seen. And why do we not hear of these great allies and friends? Because they don’t fit into the ANC narrative of the past, a narrative as tedious and predictably teleological as it is plodding and authoritarian.
If we abandon the enlightened and outward-looking Africa in favour of the closed and inward-looking one, Fanon is not very optimistic about our future. He says that over time the national bourgeoisie will gradually decline into nationalist chauvinism, race consciousness, and ultimately ethnic consciousness, turning its face against all whom it defines as ‘’outsiders”. Xenophobia is but one example of the kind of hatred that can result.
And in the end, it will, when it has run out of national, class or ethnic enemies, indulge in a vicious suppression of all who stand in its way, including and especially the very poorest and the marginalised – the “wretched of the earth”.
An enlightened and Universalist Africa is the one we should seek. Where we don’t find it, we need to create it.
Thank you.
