JACKIE SHANDU

Natives. We are so broken, it makes me wanna cry. We are addicted to the process of inflicting pain, the spectacle of humiliation, the performance of belittling one another. That’s what almost 400 years of brutal, savage and completely senseless white violence on us has done to us.

Killing Blacks, making them eat shit, burying them alive, raping a man’s wife in front of him and his children or sodomizing him in front them, raiding native quarters in the early hours with vicious dogs trained to devour blacks and the joy of watching natives tremble with terror, others running around naked. All this, and so much more has been the favourite sport of white enslavers and colonizers in dealing with Afrikans, whose humanity whites have always refuted, and still emphatically do. This trauma is deeply entrenched in our minds, bodies and souls and permanently plays itself out in the manner in which we Afrikans deal with ourselves. The lovelessness, the uncalled for harshness, impatience and deep hatred for ourselves and each other. Rape, murder, robbery, body mutilation, ukuthakathi and all other forms of black-on-black monstrous brutalization derives from our unexamined, untreated and, in many instances, unacknowledged racial trauma transferred from one generation to the next.

Where am I going? Black men, what is pleasurable, joyful, thrilling about a black man demolishing a house he had built for his woman – whatever the actual nature of their romantic/sexual liaisons? The sick victory and idiotic triumph you think you enjoy emanate from your own unacknowledged hatred of black women. Many of you envy that useless and foolish man, you wish it was you with the power to inflict that kind of pain on a woman.

We black men hate black women because first and foremost we hate ourselves. We see the meaninglessness of our lives, our spiritual emptiness, mental blankness, emotional hollowness and psychological castration. Our structural inability and sometimes sheer reluctance to attend to black women as grounded, loving, respectful and peaceful partners make us resent them so deeply because we fear they see us the way we see ourselves – as lack, emptiness and nothingness.

We ourselves are a creation historically, our collective subjectivity that is. Our ideas of manhood are not ours, and we are deprived of the means with which to meet the manhood standard as conceived and imposed by whiteness.

Performative obscene misogyny has become our recourse as we have epically failed to uproot the social-economic order that creates our subjectivity as nothing more than tools to sustain and reproduce white supremacy, white privilege and white racism. We can’t be a man as defined by whiteness. The white man lives luxuriously or, at the very least, very comfortably. He lives with his wife and kids, in affluent surbubia. They eat good food, dress smartly, drive fancy cars, have good schools and hospitals. White people in South Afrika enjoy living standards comparable with those of the wealthiest people in high-income industrialized economies of the West. Everything whites have in SA, is a direct result of historical plunder – massive violent land and livestock dispossession, economic super-exploitation and accumulation of white capital through oppressed native free labour.

The creation of monstrous white wealth through grotesque native deprivation and super-exploitation has gotten far worse, more intensive and extensive since the advent of democracy with the ANC slave-catcher government acting as legitimating factor of the viciously racist colonial-apartheid mode of production. Today whites drink the blood, sweat and tears of the dispossessed and deprived Afrikan native majority with a cool conscience, because it’s been blessed by the messianic Nelson Mandela.

We black men hate our reality but we don’t think it through thoroughly and critically. We don’t historicize it. We envy the white man but we know we can never be him, because to be like him we would also have to invade, rape, pillage, maim, disposses and exploit an entire people. We would have to part with morals as the white man has in dealing with black people since transatlantic slavery. We would have to be the super monster and engaging in graphic acts of bestiality on a scale similar to that of white savagery the world over. We know we simply lack the will for such evil. The fun, amusement and thrill we display at the suffering of black women is superficial, and beneath it lies deep pain, hurt, anger, anguish and despair. We need serious healing. We know we are men who are men only in form but have been stripped of everything essential in the shaping of male identity. The manhood was stripped when whites took the land and all its wealth, when the means with which to reproduce ourselves materially as black people were all suddenly confiscated. When our livelihood suddenly totally depended on our slaving for white people – if/when they so desired.

Our trauma can only be treated politically.

But our politicians are mega-sellouts and would never alter the politics to deal with our pain which causes us to perpetuate it on ourselves and on black women. Our politicians are bribed and controlled to dismiss the strong correlation between our violent behavior and our history. Hence their campaign against, and education on, Gender Based Violence is shallow and idiotic. Just as their antiracism campaign does not define racism as undue power to subjugate others on the basis of race, their narrative on GBV is that it is an individual act for which each individual must take responsibility.

For them GBV has no connection to poverty, hopelessness and the ghetto misery that produces bitter, angry, abused and broken boys whose ideas of manhood come from the same ghetto streets. For them, toxic communities do not produce toxic individuals. So they simply say STOP GBV. Just like they say STOP RACISM while leaving intact and fully operational all the conditions that produce both.

We hate ourselves. We hate black women. They hate us too, by the way. Misogyny and Misandry are the two most powerful forces mediating relations between black men and black women today. Whites can only marvel, with a great sense of substantiated triumph. They have won. We see each other through the prisms designed by them. They are very safe!