MIM Notes #225     January 1, 2001

Azania still requires liberation under Mandela and successors

In early November, the South African Broadcasting Corporation 
played a 1998 videotape of six white police officers attempting to 
murder three Blacks by unleashing their dogs to maul them and 
kicking them when the Blacks resisted. The prisoners called to the 
police officers as "baas," so that they would stop the dogs. The 
term means "boss" and is the traditional term of deference in 
colonial Africa.

After the videotape, the government arrested the six officers 
without pay. However, the example is only the tip of the iceberg. 
In less than a year, police murdered almost 700 in custody as 
measured from April, 1999 to March, 2000. 

The continuing division within so-called $outh Africa is a 
reflection of class division. Countless revisionists refer to one 
working class in $outh Africa. In reality the whites are one 
petty-bourgeois mass and oppressor nation while the Blacks are 
super-exploited and constitute another nation. 

It was the white so-called workers who sustained apartheid and 
benefitted from the discriminatory division of jobs and education 
in addition to a higher living standard brought at the expense of 
Blacks. Without the active solidarity of the white so-called 
workers that were actually a labor aristocracy, apartheid could 
not have lasted a day. Today, apartheid is no more, but the 
essential class and national division remains unchanged despite 
changes of political rulers.

Three-quarters of the 41 million people within South African 
borders are Black. Unemployment is 30 percent.

Mandela and the ANC have served as an effective cover for the 
murder of Black people by white occupation forces that the ANC 
nominally commands as of the reformist rise to power of the ANC 
six years ago.

The Blacks within South African borders remain oppressed, 
repressed and super-exploited under ANC leadership. Blacks have 
made progress from the days of apartheid rule of course, as almost 
anything would be progress in that context, but the reformist 
solution adopted by the ANC and hailed by liberals and pacifists 
globally lacks in thoroughness of justice. Doing without armed 
revolution does not mean that the violent losses of the oppressed 
and exploited decrease, quite the opposite.

Note:

International Herald Tribune 10Nov2000, p. 4.