POLITICS

The ANC is a native slave hunter government - EFF

Fighters say the black consciousness of Steve Biko is a mission of black liberation

The EFF salutes the father of black consciousness movement - Biko lives

12 September 2014

The Economic Freedom Fighters salutes and remembers the 12th September as the day of Steven Biko. The EFF marks the 37th Anniversary of the brutal murder of Biko by the murderous apartheid regime. This regime, however, could never kill Biko's idea of black consciousness and its popular impact and reverberation domestically and internationally.

Black consciousness is a mission of black liberation which seeks to highlight the situation of black people to themselves. Its starting point is to make the black child aware that she is oppressed and thus call her to action against a system that uses the colour of her skin as a means of oppression.

Black consciousness interprets the black condition in the most radical and lively way in that its object is the very materiality of blackness.

To be black is not so much about the skin, as it is about an attitude of life where the world accepts blacks as cheap and easily disposable inferior beings. To be black conscious is therefore to start mobilising against this condition that seeks to trap people of colour as subservient and sub-human.

Black consciousness teaches black people to love themselves and to fight against any condition that makes them slaves and subservient beings.

This means no one can say they are black conscious and not fight all the conditions that make black people hated, hate themselves and despised.

These conditions are poverty, landlessness, homelessness, miseducation, disease and violence.

Steve Biko also taught us that black consciousness distinguishes between those blacks whose idea of liberation is steeped in the desire to be white. These blacks are prone to sell out the liberation for a false unity with whites. They follow from native slave hunters who used to capture other natives to be sold for slavery in the Americas. In the days of Steve Biko, native slave hunters where epitomised by homeland government leaders like Mangope.

There is no doubt that today, native slave hunters are epitomised in the leadership of the ANC which chooses white monopoly capital over black workers. The government of the ANC is a native slave hunter government that will always choose white monopoly capital over the people and that is why it killed black workers in Marikana.

The EFF embraces the legacy of Steve Biko and that is why on its formation it went to the Hector Pieterson square in Soweto to salute the freedom fighters who were captured by the ideas of Biko. EFF also views its program as expresses in the founding manifesto as a response steeped in black pride and a fight that Biko always called for.

Black people will never be proud and confident until the conditions that make them inferior are removed. These conditions can only be removed when the seven cardinal pillars are implemented, chief amongst which is land expropriation without compensation, the nationalisation of mines, the provision of free quality education, healthcare, housing and sanitation.

The EFF will always draw inspiration from Steve Biko and will ensure that a truly non-racial world exist as he imagines it; a world where the blackness of people of colour does not determine their place in the world.

Statement issued by the Economic Freedom Fighters, September 12 2014

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