In Defence of Ubuntu

South Africa, like most other countries that have a legacy and reality of inequality, often has to deal with two distinct realities. The one is wealth, opportunity and lavish lifestyles of the "Top Billing" kind, and the other is poverty, lack of opportunity and misery of the "service delivery protest" kind.

Before 1994 it was easy to navigate ones way around these two different realities as they were institutionally enshrined in the laws of the country. The enemy for all intents and purposes were well defined and race based. Whites were undoubtedly the enemy, as the system privileged their ability to access opportunities and thus to accumulate and enjoy wealth. Blacks on the other hand were clearly the victims, beyond the brutality of a race based white supremacy; blacks were denied the opportunity to either acquire wealth or to accumulate it.  This unnatural and draconian institutionalisation of privilege and misery was a great unifier.

The world, blacks and liberal whites, were able to rally together in ecstatic crescendos of Free Mandela concerts as they called for the end of apartheid. Life was so simple then.  Back home, the shared misery and lack of opportunity engendered a solidarity that was only marred by institutional efforts by the Apartheid architects to artificially separate our shared sense of indignity, denial of opportunity and injustice. It brought about a palpable sense of equality among those who drudged through the horror of Apartheid and an even greater camaraderie among those who were prepared to sacrifice their lives to ensure that our equality was not an equality of inferiors, but one based on our shared humanity.

However, in the midst of an ever increasingly violent denial of our shared humanity by the die-hard white supremacists who controlled the state, the urgency of the need for regime change and the brutal manner in which we were eventually to see the birth of a democratic government left many casualties of war. Not only were thousands slaughtered in defence of white privilege during this period, but we lost our sense of equality in the process.

The final push towards democracy with its violence, tensions and uncertainty left us shell shocked and eager for change, any change. When the change finally arrived on that day in 1994, the dignity of the elections and the dignity it conferred on battle weary citizens was accepted with open arms and soon we were in the streets hugging and forgiving in a frenzy of equality that lingered long into the next decade.

But soon the hollow victory of regime change started showing its cracks. The rainbow nation was suddenly being questioned as it became apparent to those who were not lucky enough to be among the elite that all was not well in the state of the rainbow nation. The putrid rank odour of racism and exploitation of the black masses, hidden for so long under the veneer of a black regime was escaping from the cracks, and the patience of the dignified, was wearing thin.

Soon the youth who were not old enough to experience the victory of that first vote, were knocking on the doors of the political elites. Where are our opportunities? Where is our wealth? A rebellion of sorts emerged in the townships of the silently dignified. Silence was no longer the preferred route to dignity.

Alongside this rising discontent, which was fuelled by a deepening poverty, was the rise of the increasingly wealthy and increasingly vulgar black elite. Sushi and Moët was the order of the day.

Here again was the question we had faced so many years ago, in simpler times, when white was the enemy and our solidarity was our shared equality. Stripped of its white supremacist character, Capitalism now faces a new crisis of legitimacy.

Liberal capitalist were the first to realise that apartheid capitalism was doomed to perish, and their biggest fear was that the capitalist baby would be thrown out with the Apartheid bath water. and rallied their extensive resources to ensure that this eventuality did not happen. And indeed their efforts to maintain the economic system was not only warmly welcomed by the new government in waiting but the new government became the champion of the capitalist system, striking up a cosy relationship, spurred on by promises of black economic empowerment and access to lucrative tranches of wealth. Within a decade, the pursuit of wealth became the vehicle by which the African was to be liberated. politicians, civil servants and black people generally rushed to heed the call of our new regime to occupy the heights of the economy, to create jobs and to build a new South Africa.

 

It was not to be that simple and straightforward though. By its nature, the system of capital and its focus on private property and wealth accumulation is not designed to be equalitarian and distributive. It is by its very nature exclusive and non-distributive. In this environment, the gap between the lucky connected elites and the mass of poverty stricken black masses grew ever wider.

In steps the liberal apologist. The liberal apologist cries foul each time a black capitalist (by this I mean someone who has been privileged to accumulate productive or unproductive wealth) is questioned about his wealth, and his unsavoury flaunting of it in the face of greater and deeper inequality and poverty of his peers and community. The liberal apologist uses his liberal credentials to claim that a black man has as much right as any white man to accumulate disgusting amounts of wealth and uses our apartheid past and present to argue that this must be right because not only is the white society racists when they question the wealth of a black man, but so too are his black community when they question his right to accumulate obscene amounts of money and then to flaunt it on extreme extravagances while his community faces hunger every night.

At question is not whether the person worked to acquire the wealth, nor even the person’s skin colour. The liberal apologists` snatching at the proverbial straw of colour and race is actually a thin disguise for the defence of a system that ultimately favours a small elite over the vast majority. The liberal apologist argues in truth for black elites without a change in the system of elite accumulation and concomitant poverty of the black majority. Who cares if we have black millionaires when we have millions of people living in poverty? How does the colour of the elite change the reality of the system? A capitalist system.

What is and what rightfully should be under scrutiny, is why this person is allowed to accumulate such wealth in the first place. Such inequality will always rub up against the millions who daily, honestly scrub, clean and generally labour in the process of creating wealth. Their labours are ultimately what creates the wealth so disgustingly flaunted by the well connected elites and it is their labours and their creation of wealth that ultimately remains alienated from them and which denies them the dignity promised to them when their sons, daughters, fathers and mothers laid down their lives for the ideal of a Free and equal society in which all would share in the wealth of the country. 

The liberal apologist argues that this focus by the South African public on the wealth of the elite is a narrative against black excellence and that black excellence should be seen as an “aesthetic defeat of white supremacy”.  

With friends like this who needs an enemy. 

Lurking under this polemic defence of capital, and should it be allowed to succeed, is instead, the defeat of African knowledge embedded in our traditions of Ubuntu, the principle of sharing and solidarity, and the victory of a Eurocentric way of thinking in which the individual is paramount and placed before the community and where the individual should always strive to maximise the total benefit he is able to weasel out of the system, even at the expense of the greater community.

The question of which is more egregious to the sensibility of the founding ideals of the Freedom Charter and the African spirit of Ubuntu,  the wanton accumulation and flaunting of wealth or the apologists which seeks to alienate the people from the principle of sharing and solidarity, is almost moot. They are two sides of the same coin. 

It would be well to remind the liberal apologist, that here in Africa, a human being is truly human in context of relations to others and that the breakdown of our society is hastened, not halted,  by the crass individualism of European liberal utilitarianism. 

Our ancestors must be rolling in their graves. May they rest in peace.