“Ilizwe lifile!” The world is dead!
“Ilizwe lifile!” Our ancestors cried as the 1779-1879 Wars of Dispossession expanded the reach of 1652’s settler colonial conquest deep into the South African interior. Our ancestors cried that it was not only Black people who suffered a social death, but the land, indeed, the world, suffered death too. Our ancestors’ cries of the end of the world sounded a cosmological rupture that reverberates across generations, and could be heard throughout the land as their dispossessed descendants wielded the unrest and protest that decisively called the end of the “post”-apartheid rainbow—the end of a world in which they have no stake in, the end of a world built by their continued dispossession.
The cry was heard two months ago, as South Africa convulsed under the worst public violence since apartheid’s official end. “Ayikhale!” came the rallying cry from former president Jacob Zuma’s supporters, as they protested his July 7 prison sentencing for contempt of the constitutional court in the midst of an ongoing state corruption commission. Across Zuma’s home province of KwaZulu-Natal and the economic hub of Gauteng, many answered the call to render the nation “ungovernable”—targeting supermarkets, furnishers, and clothing and electronic stores. In the carnivalesque chaos, the smash and grab, they were soon joined and outnumbered by ordinary citizens answering to a different rallying cry. Citizens grabbing bread and maize meal and diapers jostled alongside those grabbing cake and couches and flat screens, plunging the nation into a cacophony, which the chattering middle classes and their pundits struggled to decipher. As the “Rainbow Nation” went up in flames, the old cry of the “swartgevaar” mobilized property-defending racial laagers which, to the shock of their Black middle class neighbors, turned away and targeted Black citizens regardless of class. With the Phoenix Massacre, the vigilante violence reached its apotheosis with 36 Black people murdered in Durban’s historically Indian township.
If “Ayikhale” was the mobilizing cry that a small but effective group of politically motivated actors answered to, there was another cry—deeper, more resonant—-that mobilized the marginalized majority as they staged what can be understood as post-apartheid South Africa’s most decisive insurrection.
“Ayikhale!” rang out in a nation already crying out in crisis. The economy was in recession before the country recorded its first COVID infection in March 2020. In one of the world’s most spectacularly unequal societies, the state imposed several years of austerity. Once the pandemic hit, a $30 billion COVID stimulus package—equivalent to 10% of the country’s GDP—had been stolen by government officials. By the first quarter of 2021, unemployment—concentrated among Black people—rose to a record high of 43,2%, the highest in the world. Likewise, the 74.7% unemployment rate, among the generation of Mandela’s “bornfrees” raised in the post-apartheid era, is also the world’s highest.
Overwhelmingly, the face of post-apartheid poverty and hopelessness is Black and female. Under what former president Thabo Mbeki infamously christened as South Africa’s “two economies” in his trickle-down empowerment evangelism, poor Black life is rendered surplus and superfluous. Week in, week out, scenes of burning tyres and stone- barricaded township roads, are, at best, euphemized as “service delivery protests” and, at worst, criminalized. Without consequence, the post-apartheid state murders poor Black people during protests or eviction.
It is unsurprising then that the demand—the cry—to be recognized as human is central to the language of Black popular protest. In their statement to the South African Human Rights Commission’s 2015 Hearings, Abahlali baseMjondolo, the Durban shack dwellers’ movement whose members have faced arrest, assault and assassination in their struggle for post-apartheid liberation, cried out that poor Black people “are not counted as human beings.” To the question posed by bureaucrats and chattering classes perplexed by their nation’s status as “the world’s protest capital,” their answer is simple: “The demand for land and dignity is the underlying reason for protest. If people were respected and recognized as human beings there would be no need for protest.”
Indeed, amidst the confusion and chaos, the baton and bullet wielded on Black skin in search of bread and being in the world’s most unequal society, theirs is a cry of historic and cosmological proportions.
“Ilizwe lifile!” Our ancestors cried as the 19th century’s minerals revolution burnished Southern Africa Black with dispossession. In that Gilded Age, where gold had just become the foundation of the global economic system, Southern Africa’s Minerals Revolution began when diamonds were discovered in Kimberley in 1866 and accelerated when 40% of the world’s gold stores were discovered on the Witwatersrand in 1886. From the intense pressure of this Black furnace, one of the world’s most dramatic social and industrial transformations produced the dynastic wealth that made “Randlords” of white men like Cecil John Rhodes and the dispossession that made chibaro—slave labor—of the peoples of the last independent African polities. Rhodes’ feverish imperial dream was Africa’s furious inferno.
Stimela! Hugh Masekela cried of the coal trains, the iron bulls of settler colonial modernity, charging through the hinterlands of Southern and Central Africa, conscripting African men, young and old, as chibaro in the compound mining system pioneered by one Welsh engineer named Thomas Kitto “borrowing” from Brazilian slave-mining compounds. Under the gun’s ring and the sjambok’s crack, enslaved Southern Africans mined the world’s richest mineral stores, producing Black death at a rate as high as one in ten miners.
Today, Black Death continues to produce the Rainbow’s riches. Eighteen years into the arc of the Rainbow Nation, post-apartheid South Africa’s third Black president consigned 34 Black mine workers to death for the crime of striking for a living wage of R12,500 (USD1500). Marikana 2012. The worst state massacre since Bulhoek 1921, Sharpeville 1960 and Soweto 1976. Once again, we hear Winston Mankuku Ngozi’s horn: Yakhal’inkomo. The cry of the bull on the way to slaughter. This time when we hear their cry, it is not Verwoerd or Vorster, it is our third Black President, Cyril Ramaphosa, who calls for Black slaughter. Sitting on the board of Lonmin, the transatlantic monstrosity founded as the London Rhodesia Company in 1909, at the very heart of that bloody minerals revolution, our Black president instructed the police to take “concomitant action” against people who dared contest a rainbow world where it would take a Black miner 93 years to earn what the average mining baas receives as annual bonus.
Are we going forwards or are we going backwards?
“Ilizwe lifile!” Our ancestors cried on the eve of the 1913 Native Land Act‘s cataclysm.
“Awakening on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African native found himself, not actually, a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.” So begins the famous opening line to Sol T. Plaatje’s classic Native Life in South Africa—a singular witness to Black life, death and dispossession as landlessness became the cornerstone of what South Africa’s Marxists later named “racial capitalism.” By forcing the Black majority onto seven percent of the country’s arable land, the settler state reserved the lion share for white settlers, who conscripted Black people into the cheap labor needed to fuel its voracious mining and agricultural furnaces.
Inspired in part by W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folks, Plaatje’s Native Life bore witness to Black people’s spiritual strivings under dispossession of dazzling contradiction and paradox that still circumscribes our lives today and testified: It is one thing to live the double consciousness of a minority, it is quite another to live the double consciousness of a minoritized majority. To be a pariah in the land of your birth is to live the spiritually and psychically disorienting paradox of exile at home. With no home, we are condemned to a wandering spectral existence, haunting the world. Then, as now, Black people are pariahs of the world. Half a century after Plaatje, Barbadian poet Kamau Braithwaite asked questions of this exilic nature of Blackness,
Where then is the nigger’s
home?…Here
Or in Heaven? …Will exile
never
End?
Hear this.
More devastating than the landlessness and homelessness that spools out from Native Life‘s famous opening line, Plaatje confronted more cosmologically devastating questions after encountering the wandering Kgobadi couple, stricken by the loss of their infant who had just succumbed to the privations of their landless life: “The deceased child had to be buried, but where, when, and how?”
Amidst the grief of eviction, the young wandering Black family, condemned to a spectral and fugitive existence on the public roads—“the only places in the country open to the outcasts if they are possessed of a travelling permit”—could not even right the cosmic aberration of a child’s death. With no land, they could not bury and return the child to the ancestors. They had no place on earth. Where, when and how to live? Where, when and how to die? These are questions of spatial-temporal alienation that haunt Black beings in the world. More than questions of landlessness, more than questions of homelessness, these are questions of worldlessness: To have no place to live nor to be buried. To have no place to be alive nor to be dead. To have no place to be in the…
