In his article Cannibalising Biko, historian Steve Lebelo adopts the methods of a politician - he over-promises and delivers little, writes Andile Mngxitama.
In his article, Cannibalising Biko’s Thinking Simply Cannot Go Unchallenged, Steve Lebelo presents a typical case of the death of the black intellectual tradition and emergence of charlatans of all sorts in South Africa. The historian adopts the methods of a politician - he over-promises and delivers little.
I leaped to my feet after reading his opening paragraph hoping that finally someone was engaging with our political thinking and praxis in a critical yet enriching way.
I was wrong.
Let’s consider this tantalising promise in the second paragraph, “…the deluded Andile Mngxitama and Mzwandile Manyi argue that by defending Jacob Zuma and the Guptas they are striking a blow for BC against white monopoly capital.”
This is a fallacy of epic proportions, a gross misreading of BC philosophy, driven by nefarious intentions.
Lebelo makes this move after making a theoretically indefensible claim in his opening lines: “To Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness (BC) philosophy, the Guptas and the Ruperts are six of one and half a dozen of the other.”
One then goes into the more than 1 000 words missive waiting to hear how Biko would conflate an aspirant black expatriate capitalist family with a settler monopoly capitalist family ala Johann Rupert. You wait in vain.
Then, you hope that the historian shall also debunk each of the claims I and Manyi make, and show where and how the two argue the things that he says they do.
Again one waits as one does for service delivery after an election season.
I have generally stayed away from Lebelo’s attempts to draw me into a to-ing and fro-ing with him. He strikes me as an over-ambitious, but limited aspirant scholar who clamours for fame as an intellectual of Black Consciousness and in his mind, the best way to achieve this is not to produce path-breaking scholarly works on BC, but to attack those he believes occupy a public position as proponents of BC which he imagines is rightfully his.
His latest article must be understood as yet another attempt to go up by bringing someone down.
Lebelo is not a rigorous historian or thinker; this makes engaging him a frustrating ordeal.
Earlier in the year he lumped myself and Professor Xolela Mangcu in the same theoretical category. Anyone who knows the views each of us hold on BC would have been baffled by this claim.
But most alarming is how Lebelo drops such claims at regular intervals and simply moves on to the next howling session.
Anyone who knows the political orientation of Manyi and myself would not so easily throw us into the same ideological kraal as Lebelo does with aplomb.
Reading the historian, one often gets the impression that the man is oblivious to the basic elements of the protocols of argumentation? For this, I blame the schools and universities he went to. One of the most important ethics of scholarly engagement is the ability to understand your interlocutor’s argument and to present it in the most charitable way before proceeding to mercilessly debunk it. However, it seems like Lebelo has abandoned this sacred scholarly responsibility (like so many other academics) and has chosen to adopt the bad habits of the social media generation.
Here the defining practice is to write fast without the barest attention being given to what the next person is saying.
It’s all about writing incoherent things quickly without the discipline of reading closely.
I surmise that Lebelo takes the idea that I defend Zuma from the campaign of the Black First Land First (BLF) movement titled “Hands Off Zuma - Economic Liberation Now!” BLF issued a pamphlet earlier in the year explaining this campaign and even went further to publish a fairly substantial explanation of the campaign.
It does not look like Lebelo afforded himself the opportunity to read past the first section of the heading of the pamphlet.
The historian scholar stopped reading at “Hands Off Zuma”. Lebelo’s flimsy grasp of BC results in him making a lot of historical factual mistakes as well.
He is totally incapable of channelling BC to deal with any of the contemporary questions that face us.
He has nothing to say about the foundational premise that motivated BLF to take this conditional defence of Zuma.
BLF claims that Zuma is a target of Western imperialism because of the Brics process (by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) of “looking East”. We argue that the neo-fascist removal of the democratically elected president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseau, is “Empire striking back” and as anti-imperialists we need to take a position.
We have gone further to say that there is a local connection to this assault on Brics; it is linked to the call by settler white monopoly capitalists like Johann Rupert and the Oppenheimer family calling for Zuma to go under the #ZumaMustGo campaign! Furthermore, we have said the withdrawal of South Africa from the International Criminal Court (ICC) adds to this mood of moving away from the direct control of the West. Add to this the removal of Nhlanhla Nene as finance minister and the employment of Des van Rooyen (an outsider in the National Treasury) and the picture is clearer.
White capital is not happy with Zuma.
I have, in these pages, argued that President Zuma is involved in what I call a “parallel power praxis” to denote his location outside of the structures of white control and thereby making him a marked man.
The call by BLF to defend Zuma is conditional.
We have put, among other things, the following conditions before the president: land return without paying for it, nationalisation of banks and mines, free education, a minimum wage of R12 500, breaking up monopolies and reparations for Marikana.
Lebelo could have done us all a great favour by shooting down each of our claims and expose our premise as fallacious.
He does nothing of the sort. Instead, we are subjected to a torrent of irrelevant random historical facts which don’t signify anything.
There is also a defence of the BLF position which is based on being truthful to BC.
Lebelo is too embittered by grudges of what the ANC did to him and his comrades in exile and mistakes his ill-feelings towards the ANC as a representation of BC.
In our reading of Biko’s BC, it is the duty of every black person to defend another black person if they are under attack from white supremacy.
You defend first and ask questions later.
Why is this? Because white supremacy doesn’t ask its black victims their political affiliations or past transgressions.
We all appear before white racism as legitimate targets.
Biko’s definition of the black who is a “non-white” has been used to attack and delegitimise BLF’s “Hands off Zuma” stance. But, Lebelo and others miss a small detail in Biko’s definition of “non-white” and its application.
They don’t know that the use of the term “non-white” is only applicable among blacks, what we would call the “horizontal axis”.
It doesn’t apply “vertically” in the white vs black nexus.
It seems Lebelo would not be able to account for the fact that Biko was captured and murdered coming from a mission to unite the liberation movement.
This is a historical fact.
There is enough textual evidence in the archives and published material that shows that Biko was willing to unite the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC), his Black Consciousness Movement and the Charterist ANC into a single fighting force.
I’m tempted to say: “Mr Lebelo, if Biko was prepared to unite with the ANC, who am I to go against building a momentum among all black people to confront our common enemy which has not changed?
Biko died for it; don’t you think it would be the biggest achievement and the best tribute we can pay him to return the children of Sobukwe and Tambo into the path of fighting for land and freedom?”
I’m afraid Lebelo is unlikely to hear me because to him, holding unto the grudge against the ANC for its transgressions in exile is more urgent and important than to force it to fight white capital.
Lebelo is not a rigorous historian or thinker; this makes engaging him a frustrating ordeal
* Andile Mngxitama is an associate of the Sankara Policy and Political School.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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