The political theology of Jacob Zuma

South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma kicked off the new year by declaring that God was on the side of the ruling African National Congress (ANC). Speaking ahead of the ANC’s 105th birthday celebrations which took place at the Orlando Stadium in Soweto, he reiterated a statement he has made several times before – that the party will rule until Jesus comes.

This time he went even further, hitting back at the party’s detractors by declaring:

We believers never forget that, just like the son of man who came to wash away all of our sins, the birth of the ANC happened to free the people who were oppressed.

By implication, it would seem, any president of the ANC must be pretty well in with God, and those against him, on the side of the Devil.

Put aside, for the moment, any thought of whether Zuma actually believes this twaddle. Consider instead that it actually fits the liberation movement cosmology of the ANC.

In the beginning, there was the Garden of Eden, centred in Merrie South Africa, an ancestral land blessed by plenty, peace, wealth, comfort and ubuntu - (or human kindness).

Then came the Fall.

The chosen instrument of Providence?

Originally Africans had had the land, and the whites had come with the Bible. Colonialism and apartheid saw the whites grab the land, leaving the blacks with the Bible. But then along came the ANC, with many clerics at its head, with its fore-ordained mission to restore South Africa to its rightful owners. And save South Africa it did, leading the country to redemption by finally vanquishing apartheid in 1994 under the messianic leadership of Nelson Mandela.

Alternatively, of course, there is the secular version of much the same story, told in psuedo-scientific, Soviet-style Marxist language. This time round, the vehicle of salvation is the class alliance of the ANC with the South African Communist Party. This embodied a simultaneous struggle for national liberation and socialism – although now redemption comes in two stages, first that of the national democratic revolution, and only then, the heaven-on-earth of socialism.

Common to both versions is the certainty of history. It is the ANC that represents the people, and knows their true interests and destiny. Even if, on occasion, it follows the wrong path, as the chosen instrument of Providence it will find its way back to the straight and narrow.

All other parties are therefore heretics and impostors, and are therefore bound to be overcome, for the ANC and the people are one. The ANC will therefore rule until the End of History, or Jesus’ second coming. Which is why, in a previous speech late last year, Zuma had felt confident enough to tell church leaders who had become critical of the ANC to stay out of politics and stick to religion. It is only the ANC, apparently, which is entitled to blur the two. As far as Zuma is concerned, it is the ANC which is the historic bearer of Good News.

For as the ANC slogan had it at the last general election in 2014, the party had “a good story to tell”. Which is a good thing, for in his message to the ANC at its birthday bash, Zuma had little or nothing to say. He acknowledged South Africa had been going through hard times – mostly, he said, because of hostile global conditions – but assured the faithful that continued pursuit of ANC policies of “transformation” would lead to better times ahead.

From saints to sinners

The problem for Zuma’s political theology is that far too many members of the ANC have been experiencing a dramatic loss of faith. They look back in fondness to the years of the struggle against apartheid when the ANC – whatever its earthly faults – was recognisably and unequivocally on the side of right and the righteous.

It had more saints than sinners, and its ethos was one of duty, self-abnegation and sacrifice. The individual was as nothing; the movement, the struggle, was everything. Yet now they look at the ANC of Zuma, and see little else but a leader and his acolytes deeply mired in corruption, the party torn apart by factionalism, and selfishness rampant. The interests of the people, they say, have been forgotten. The party must therefore “self-correct” – and do so quickly if it is to win back its sheep who have strayed.

Is there a Martin Luther within the ranks of the ANC willing to risk all and to nail his or her manifesto of reform to the church door? If so, it is becoming increasingly difficult to see one.

Party deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa has recently positioned himself as the reform candidate to replace Zuma when his term as party president expires in December 2017. He took a firm stand against corruption just prior to the ANC’s birthday. By openly decrying the perversion of the party’s electoral processes, bewailing votes bought by money stuffed in the boots of cars, and deploring “state capture”, he put clear distance between himself and Zuma.

However, he doesn’t make a very convincing reformer. Not only has he previously kept as quiet as a church mouse as Zuma has lurched from scandal to scandal, but he lacks a significant congregation within the ANC.

Nor is it likely that his major rival in the succession race, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the president’s ex-wife, would get to grips with the corruption and patronage that has sunk deep into the ANC.

As she would have been placed in power by Zuma’s own disciples in order to defend their interests and keep their boss out of jail, she would be too deeply compromised to drive the money-changers out from the temple. It therefore seems unlikely that the ANC will prove able to cleanse its soul and present itself as a credible saviour to the voters in the general election in 2019.

It is true, certainly, that the ANC may be able to use its considerable powers of persuasion to lure some lost sheep to the polls. Yet many will not only stay away but cast their votes elsewhere, throwing an ANC victory into question. Zuma may preach that with God on its side, the ANC will never fail. Yet with the ANC in its present state of decline, God seems an unlikely backer at the next general election. God, it would seem, is not an ANC loyalist, but rather a floating voter.



Roger Southall, Professor of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Comparing black people to monkeys has a long, dark simian history

This article is a foundation essay. These are longer than usual and take a wider look at a key issue affecting society.

In the history of European cultures, the comparison of humans to apes and monkeys was disparaging from its very beginning.

When Plato – by quoting Heraclitus – declared apes ugly in relation to humans and men apish in relation to gods, this was cold comfort for the apes. It transcendentally disconnected them from their human co-primates. The Fathers of the Church went one step further: Saint Gregory of Nazianzus and Saint Isidore of Seville compared pagans to monkeys.

In the Middle Ages, Christian discourse recognised simians as devilish figures and representatives of lustful and sinful behaviour. As women were subject to an analogous defamation, things proceeded as one would expect. In the 11th century, Cardinal Peter Damian gave an account of a monkey that was the lover of a countess from Liguria. The jealous simian killed her husband and fathered her child.

Hotbed of monsters

Several centuries later in 1633, John Donne in his Metempsychosis even let one of Adam’s daughters be seduced by an ape in a sexual affair. She eagerly reciprocated and became helplessly hooked.

From then on, the sexist manifestation of simianisation was intimately intertwined with its racist dimension. Already Jean Bodin, doyen of the theory of sovereignty, had ascribed the sexual intercourse of animals and humans to Africa south of the Sahara. He characterised the region as a hotbed of monsters, arising from the sexual union of humans and animals.

The history of a narrative by Antonio de Torquemada shows how in this process Africans became demonised and the demons racialised. In the story’s first version (1570), a Portuguese woman was exiled to Africa where she was raped by an ape and had his babies.

A good century onwards the story had entered the realm of Europe’s great philosophical thought when John Locke in his 1689 essay Concerning Human Understanding, declared that “women have conceived by drills”. His intellectual contemporaries knew well that the stage for this transgressing love-and-rape-story was Africa because, according to the wisdom of the time, drills lived in Guinea.

In the following centuries, simianisation would enter into different sciences and humanities. Anthropology, archaeology, biology, ethnology, geology, medicine, philosophy, and, not least, theology were some of the fields.

King Kong’s reel racism

Literature, arts and everyday entertainment also seized on the issue. It popularised its repellent combination of sexist and racist representations. The climax was the hugely successful classic of Hollywood’s horror factory, King Kong.

At the time of King Kong’s production the public in the US was riveted by a rape trial. The Scottsboro Boys were nine black teenagers accused of having raped two young white women. In 1935 a picture story by the Japanese artist Lin Shi Khan and the lithographer Toni Perez was published. ‘Scottsboro Alabama’ carried a foreword by Michael Gold, editor of the communist journal New Masses.

One of the 56 images showed the group of the accused young men beside a newspaper with the headline “Guilty Rape”. The rest of the picture was filled with a monstrous black simian figure baring its teeth and dragging off a helpless white girl.

The artists fully understood the interplay of racist ideology, reactionary reporting and southern injustice. They recognised that the white public had been thoroughly conditioned by the dehumanising violence of animal comparisons and simianised representations, as in the reel racism of King Kong.

Labelled with disease

Animalisation and even bacterialisation are widespread elements of racist dehumanisation. They are closely related to the labelling of others with the language of contamination and disease. Images that put men on a level with rats carrying epidemic plagues were part of the ideological escort of anti-Jewish and anti-Chinese racism.

Africa is labelled as a contagious continent incubating pestilences of all sorts in hot muggy jungles, spread by reckless and sexually unrestrained people. AIDS in particular is said to have its origin in the careless dealings of Africans with simians, which they eat or whose blood they use as an aphrodisiac.

This is just the latest chapter in a long and ugly line of stereotypes directed against different people like the Irish or Japanese, and Africans and African Americans in particular. To throw bananas in front of black sportspeople is a common racist provocation even today.

Why are blacks abused?

What explains this disastrous association of black people defamed as simian? A combination of factors might be the cause:

• the prevalence of a variety of great apes in Africa, closest in size to humans. The Asian great ape population is more limited, while in the Americas one finds monkeys, but no apes;
• the extent of the aesthetic “distance” between whites and blacks, their greater degree from a white perspective of physical “otherness” (deviant not merely in skin colour and hair texture but facial features) as compared to other “nonwhite” races;
• the higher esteem generally accorded by Europeans to Asian as against African civilisations; and
• above all the psychic impact of hundreds of years of racial slavery in modernity, which stamped ‘Negroes’ as permanent sub-persons, natural slaves, in global consciousness.

Large scale chattel slavery required reducing people to objects. Precisely because of that it also required the most thorough and systematic kind of dehumanisation in the theorisation of that reality.

The origin of species

Long before post-Darwinian “scientific racism” begins to develop, then, one can find blacks being depicted as closer to apes on the Great Chain of Being. Take mid-19th century America in circles in which polygenesis (separate origins for the races) was taken seriously. Leading scientists of the day Josiah C. Nott and George R. Gliddon, in their 1854 Types of Mankind, documented what they saw as objective racial hierarchies with illustrations comparing blacks to chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans.

As Stephen Jay Gould comments, the book was not a fringe document, but the leading American text on racial differences.

Darwin did not discredit scientific racism with ‘On the Origin of Species’ – he just refined it.
Shutterstock

Darwin’s revolutionary 1859 work, On the Origin of Species, did not discredit scientific racism but only its polygenetic variants. Social Darwinism, triumphantly monogenetic, would become the new racial orthodoxy. Global white domination was being taken as proof of the evolutionary superiority of the white race.

If it now had to be conceded that we were all related to the apes, it could nonetheless be insisted that blacks’ consanguinity was much closer – perhaps a straightforward identity.

Tarzan = white skin

Popular culture played a crucial role in disseminating these beliefs. The average American layperson would be unlikely to have been reading scientific journals. But they were certainly reading H. Rider Haggard (author of King Solomon’s Mines and She) and Edgar Rice Burroughs (creator of Tarzan). They were going weekly to the movies, including the genre of “jungle movies”. They were following daily comic strips like The Phantom – Africa’s white supercop, the Ghost-who-walks.

Africa and Africans occupied a special place in the white imaginary, marked by the most shameless misrepresentations. Burroughs would become one of the bestselling authors of the 20th century. Not just in his numerous books, but in the movies made of them and the various cartoon strip and comic spin-offs, of his most famous creation, Tarzan of the Apes.

Tarzan would embed in the Western mind the indelible image of a white man ruling a black continent. “Tar-zan” = “white skin” in Ape, the impressively polyglot Burroughs informs us. It is a world in which the black humans are bestial, simian, while the actual apes are near-human.

Burroughs’s work was unprecedented in the degree of its success, but not at all unusual for the period. Rather, it consolidated a Manichean iconography pervasive throughout the colonial Western world in the first half of the 20th century and lingering still today. In this conflict between light and dark, white European persons rule simian black under-persons.

Lumumba’s announcement

The Belgian cartoonist Hergé’s Tintin series, for example, includes the infamous Tintin au Congo book, which likewise depicts Africans as inferior apelike creatures.

Unsurprisingly, “macaques” (monkeys) was one of the racist terms used by whites in the Belgian Congo for blacks, as was “macacos” in Portuguese Africa. In his 1960 Independence Day speech, Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba blasted the oppressive legacy of Belgian colonialism (to the astonishment and outrage of the Belgian king and his coterie, who had expected grateful deference from the natives). He is reputed to have concluded:

Nous ne sommes plus vos macaques! (We are no longer your monkeys)

The story seems to be apocryphal – no documentation has been found for it – but its widespread circulation testifies to the decolonial aspiration of millions of Africans. Alas, within less than a year, Lumumba would be dead, assassinated with the connivance of Western agencies, and the country turned over to neocolonial rule.

Racist cross-class alliances

The use of simianisation as a racist slur against black people is not yet over, as shown by the furor in South Africa sparked by Penny Sparrow, a white woman, complaining about black New Year’s revelers:

From now [on] I shall address the blacks of South Africa as monkeys as I see the cute little wild monkeys do the same, pick and drop litter.

Sparrow’s public outburst indicates the deep entrenchment of racial prejudices and stereotypes.

America’s First Couple, Barack and Michelle Obama, have been on the receiving end of simianisation.
Reuters/Kevin Lamarque

This does not stop at class boundaries. The internet has overflowed with ape comparisons ever since Barack and Michelle Obama moved into the White House. Even a social-liberal newspaper, like the Belgian De Morgen, has deemed it kind of funny to simianise the First Couple.

Cross-class alliances against declassed others are a hallmark of racism.

Theodore W. Allen once defined it as “the social death of racial oppression”, that is:

… the reduction of all members of the oppressed group to one undifferentiated social status, beneath that of any member of the oppressor group.

Animalisation remains a malicious and effective instrument of such a form of desocialisation and dehumanisation. Simianisation is a version of this strategy, which historically manifested a lethal combination of sexism and racism.

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Together with Silvia Sebastiani, Wulf D. Hund and Charles W. Mills just edited a volume of the Racism Analysis Yearbook on Simianization. Apes, Gender, Class, and Race. Zürich, Berlin, Wien, Münster: Lit 2015/16 (ISBN 978-3-643-90716-5).



Wulf D. Hund, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Department of Socioeconomics, University of Hamburg and Charles W Mills, John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, Northwestern University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

South Africa has work to do to make government more accountable

The South African government completed its term as lead-chair of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) in December 2016. The partnership is an international initiative formed by eight countries in 2011 that has grown to 75 members. Its aim is to improve public sector governance and encourage civil society participation in making governments more accountable and responsive to citizens.

Demonstrators march against corruption in Cape Town. South Africa has some way to go to plug a public accountability deficit. Reuters/Mike Hutchings

Some of the original founding members include Brazil, Mexico, Norway, the Philippines, Britain and the US. Nigeria is the most recent African country to sign up.

Countries are invited to join if they meet the minimum eligibility criteria. These include a framework on open budgets, a law on access to information, public asset disclosure rules and basic protections for human rights.

Member countries are required to develop national action plans that are implemented in a two-year cycle. They are expected to submit self-assessment reports within the period. In addition, the partnership secretariat appoints a country researcher who consults with government and civil society organisations to monitor the implementation of the plans and develops both a mid-term and end of term assessment reports. Ultimately, the OGP provides an international platform for change agents at a country level both within and outside government to make government open, accountable and responsive to citizens.

South Africa has just been given an end of term report for its recently concluded two-year action plan. The report, released in December 2016, shows that it failed to meet key targets it set at the beginning of the process. But it also shows improvements in some areas.

Why people’s involvement matters

During South Africa’s two-year leadership the partnership hosted the Africa regional meeting focused on using open government for sustainable development in Africa.

This was significant because 2016 signalled the beginning of the implementation of the United Nation’s sustainable development goals (SDGs). The goals are premised on the idea of partnerships for development. This includes the establishment of a collaborative platform that involves various stakeholders to ensure that marginalised people have a voice in determining priority areas to achieve the goal of poverty eradication.

Recent events in South Africa make it clear how urgently this ideal must be realised.

During 2016 the country was characterised by protests over the delivery of basic services and higher education fees. These distress calls came against a backdrop of growing concern about “state capture” – the diversion of state resources to benefit an already privileged elite. The problem of state capture shows a public accountability deficit which the partnership aims to address.

South Africa’s end of term report highlights the country’s accountability challenges. This is particularly true in relation to its failure to implement and mainstream public service anti-corruption laws. The report shows that the country failed to fully complete any of its seven commitments. These were the establishment of:

• an accountability/consequences management framework,
• service delivery improvement forums,
• platform for citizen participation in government,
• environmental management information portal,
• online crowd sourcing tool on data conservation,
• schools connectivity project, and a service rights and responsibilities campaign.

The report also shows that, contrary to agreement, the government didn’t formally establish a forum to involve civil society organisations in the partnership process. It still has to set up a joint mechanism to monitor the implementation of government’s commitments.

Transparency may not do much to reverse the disconcerting rise in corruption in both the public and private sectors. But it is a good starting point in promoting public integrity and accountability.

South Africa cannot continue to place the burden of holding the government accountable on just the media and brave whistle blowers.

These shortcomings not withstanding, it was not all doom and gloom.

The government must be applauded for setting up a citizen-based pilot monitoring programme. This was set up to collect community feedback on public services.

What needs to be done

It is important that the lessons of the previous action plan be heeded as South Africa embarks on a new two-year national action plan. The focus here will be to link its partnership commitments with its development goals.

South Africa is now on its third two-year action plan which will run from 2016 to 2018. It includes a commitment – introduced by civil society – to establish community advice offices to promote access to justice. This fits in with goal 16 of the SDGs – to promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions.

Other commitments include citizen-based monitoring of service delivery projects and increasing public participation in government planning and budget processes. Another is to increase the level of civic participation in the provision of basic services.

These commitments require the sustained involvement of civil society. It is high time the South African government established a permanent dialogue mechanism that treats civil society bodies as equal partners. It also needs to develop ways of working more collaboratively so that it can make government work for all citizens.

It’s clear that the South African government recognises the importance of partnerships with civil society. But it stands accused of paying lip service to the idea of inclusivity. Indeed, the shrinking space for civil society in governance that is seen around the world is also evident in South Africa. The country’s civil society organisations are not seen as equal partners when it comes to accountability and governance.

For their part, South Africans need to re-imagine the role of civil society in the governance of their public services and management of their public resources. The partnership initiative offers that platform. But it needs to be implemented effectively and in the spirit of participation by ordinary people.



Fola Adeleke, Fellow, University of the Witwatersrand

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

A prospect of hope for the white minority of South Africa

When the going gets tough, the tough needs to get going. The global and local economic challenges combined with down-scaling of business, favoritism, and uncontrolled affirmative action have resulted in a large number of white people in South Africa living in poverty and unbearable conditions.

In a country with eleven official languages, there are three languages that are freely spoken, Violence, Crime and Corruption and which has a huge impact on the safety and future existence of whites in South Africa.

Afrikaners have always thrived during times of difficulty, hardship, and injustice. The saying ” n Boer maak n plan” can be explained as ” IT DOESN’T MATTER WHERE YOU ARE IN LIFE, WHAT MATTERS THE MOST IS IN WHICH DIRECTION YOU ARE MOVING.

Instead of blaming others for our situation, we need to take control of our future and become leaders rather than followers, and let’s say to our people get BACK ON YOUR FEET!

BOYF (Back on Your Feet) registered in 2015, is a non-profit company with the aim of helping our own people back on their feet.

The Mission of BOYF is:
Take care of those in need
Help people find hope again
Teach people to manage self-development
Make people employable and self-sustainable through skills development
Teach people to be responsible and accountable
To provide counseling, guidance, and support where needed.

For more information on how BOYF are adding value and making a difference, please contact Tess Riekert, +2783270026 / +2783 288 5684 / +27748270803.
Published on South Africa Today – South Africa News

Shocking treatment at a Pretoria Hospital

An angry resident, wrote the following regarding the despicable treatment of elderly patients at the Steve Biko state hospital.

“I had it with Steve Biko state Hospital at Casualty’s
They are one of the worst hospitals in Pretoria.

There is no care for any elderly person in that hospital, but there are elderly people abused in that hospital.
We sent this old lady two weeks a go with a stomach bug to Steve Biko hospital, but with no bruises and this is how they sent her back to us.
Those bruises are from manual handling!
You are not fit to be called a nurse, you are the scum of the earth.”

 Published on South Africa Today
Image credits - Police Pics and Clips