NEWS & ANALYSIS

Cape storms the fault of 'white monopoly capital' - Andile Mngxitama

'There are no more natural disasters, only white made disasters', says BLF leader

Cape Town – White-owned monopoly capital is to blame for the storm that raged across the Western Cape this week, Black First Land First (BLF) leader Andile Mngxitama has said.

Mngxitama was implicated in the #Guptaleaks last week, for allegedly having asked then-Oakbay CEO Nazeem Howa to fund his party. He seemed pretty convinced about who was responsible for Wednesday's storm that affected thousands of lives.

"It may strike many as an outlandish claim that the Cape Storms are a direct product of global capitalism and its local representatives we know as white monopoly capital," he wrote in an opinion piece on Thursday.

"Truth is for the last 500 years or so, capitalists have not just destroyed people through the long holocaust of the cross Atlantic slavery where they came and captured people as if we were animals to enslave.

"At the same time for profits, the same evil forces assaulted nature. What we see today is the ecological costs of capitalism and racism."

Mngxitama acknowledged that "there were storms before capitalism and racism", but "humans understood their range and quite rage (sic)".

"As long as we didn’t disrupt nature, mother nature gave in abundance. But then things changed. The white man appeared, phallic, with gluttonous intentions."

Whites had, therefore, created the ecological disaster in the Cape.

The "violent" West had no sense of tomorrow, he continued.

"When we lost the battle against slavery, colonialism and in (South Africa) SA apartheid, it meant loss of capacity to protect the ecosystem. Those who captured us also captured nature.

"Those who assaulted us also assaulted nature. The circles of floods and droughts are the direct outcomes of the assault. Mother nature can’t breath. We can’t breath. Africa pays the highest ecological cost for the pollution of earth caused by whites. We haven’t stopped paying for their demented good life.

"There are no more natural disasters. We only have white made disasters. The occurrence of any 'natural' phenomenon today from droughts to earthquakes are the direct creation of white hands."

All such "natural" occurrences were anti-black and racist constructs, he said.

White settlers who arrived in the Cape in the mid-1600s gave it the nickname "Cape of Storms".

"The Cape Storms are the creation of global and local capitalist forces. It’s racist to the core. The body bags will show a disproportionate racialised impact.

"The Cape Storms are going to kill black people. Why? Because colonialism and apartheid have placed blacks in harm’s way in order to provide protection to whites."

He also laid some of the blame at the feet of Western Cape Premier Helen Zille. She had a stormy week of her own after the DA suspended her, pending a disciplinary hearing for her tweets about colonialism.

"The deaths must be placed at the door steps of families like the Oppenheimers and the Ruperts with their political arm the Democratic Alliance. Helen Zille must account for more than the denial of colonialism."

Mngxitama said, in the end, the "white lie" would be exposed and his views vindicated.

"Once you have seen black, you can see the very contours of white power and the depths of its evil logic and designs.

"When the black calculus is done the truth shall lay bare like an uprooted tree trunk after the devilish Cape Storms unleashed by evil white forces in search of more to take. More to eat. They have eaten earth dead!"

Eleven people have died so far as a result of the storm and subsequent fires in the Western Cape. Thousands have been displaced.

South Africans, from all races and walks of life, had a field day with his post on Twitter.

News24