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by Mphuthumi Ntabeni

G21 Staff Writer

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kabuki theatre of the mind

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G21 AFRICA - FEAR OF THE NATIVE. MPHUTHUMI NTABENI speaks to our Focus Issue of 2006, water.

Mphuthumi Ntabeni

East London, SOUTH AFRICA - A couple of black intellectuals have come together to form what they've called The Native Club. The founders of The Native Club argue that the club is an attempt to fully respond to the circumstances of our country. They say it'll be a platform to deal with the experience of black cultural displacement from the native point of view. To describe the native point of view would be to digress from my argument; suffice to say that most black people feel the liberal mindset of our print media, especially, does not seem to fully appreciate where they're coming from, hence they feel the idea of the Native Club was long in coming. It is no secret that the established media, especially print, is isntitutionalised to a liberal mindset that censors those who do not share it.

It was Edward Said who, in his book Orientalism, analysed 'the affiliation of knowledge with power'. He demonstrated how scholars could provide inte llectual justification for supremacist ideologies, some of which lead to ethnic or racial cleansing. Hence I understand those who're apprehensive of burgeoning intellectual organisations like The Native Club. The history of Nazi Einsatzgruppen, Boer Broederbond and Rwandan Akazu caution us against such things without necessarily condemning all things vulnerable to abuse. The real question is why some people feel organisations like The Native Club are necessary.

The South African print media chattering class jumped for the jugular the moment the existence of the The Native Club came into being. It is understandable for men of letters to not be willing to be excluded from any part of our intellectual inheritance, or avant-gardism, but the virulent opposition to The Native Club seems to reveal something deeply embedded in the psyche of those who oppose it. I venture to say there's an element of the transmogrified avatar of 'a fear of the native' syndrome in it. Rain Malan, in his book My Traitor's Heartputs it thus:

You have to put the black man down, plant your feet on his neck, and keep him that way for ever lest he spring up and split your throat.

To me the only danger The Native Club would need to avoid is becoming an exclusive ghetto with a nationalist and racially segregationist topography. Which brings us to the opposition of some black intellectuals to The Native Club. If not hurt egos - for not being invited as founding members - then perhaps they believe by opposing the Club they're serving democracy. They say they reject The Native Club because they perceive it to be under the tutelage of President Mbeki, and thus it forms part of the imperial trappings of his grip that's speciously removing power from the institutions of democracy to the centre of government. In short, they do not want to be toothless dogs barking at the moon for some beetle-browed idealogy straining on the leash. They're entitled to their opinions, just as those who support the native venture.

What we need in South Africa are ways to define the society we want to be, since we're not a homogenous nation. In fact we're not even a nation in a strict sense of Oertega Y Gasset's notion of 'supercedence of natural unities'. We lack nationhood and common identity 'as the plan of action and a program of collaboration'. We might share past achievements and regrets, but we've no common will that defines us as a nation. This is largely because we've no real loyalty to our undefined collective synergy. We're mostly racists, tribalists, elitists that are unable to form an attitude of common life from what we've inherited. We've no nation's sense of itself shoring our patriotism.

Our problems are legion. Blacks need to mend their fractured identity, recover, and preserve their culture without ossifying it, while moving away from the narrow confines of their political frontiers. There's also the issue Richard Wright noticed long ago of black and white descriptions of society no longer being compatible.

In the past few years of our post-liberal era we agreed to delude ourselves in the dream of Rainbow People we're unable to create because we're haunted by the past, and are not willing to face up to reality. We've succumbed to guru illusions about ourselves.

The received ideas of Hesperian superiority poison the minds of most white people, creating an environment whereby, no matter what we do, the invisible horns of racism emerge, especially during crisis times. They've rot down in our earth only to invisibly fertilize the prejudices of our present. The filth of past imperialism still breeds the vermin of cultural superiority that refuses to face up to its own prejudices.

A lot of those who chose the reprehensible convenience of ignorance during the apartheid years are now all of a sudden keen on racial harmony, by which they mean black people integrating to the white man's world, and living peaceably in spite of past and present injustices.

Bishop Tutu was an enlightened man of God so long as he spoke the language of reconciliation. When he spoke once of our true reality and the coming storm he sees, he suddenly became a deluded dodder in their eyes. It is this denial of the past to suit the present that abuses our collective memory, and the fear of the native. It puts us on different planes of the widening chasm, howling and hurling stones at each other.