On Thursday 14 January 2016, Minister Blade Nzimande met with the Student Representative Council’s (SRC’s) from across academic institutions nationally in Kempton Park, Johannesburg. This came after President Jacob Zuma almost robotically announced a Commission of Inquiry into Higher Education Funding.
Since the beginning of the student protests for Free Education, historically black universities and the popular #FeesMustFall campaign, students have been clear on what is needed: Free Education. Hence calling a meeting with a select group, SRC’s who have been rejected by the students and therefore have no legitimacy, is opportunistic and seeks to crush a genuine desire that all should be allowed to learn.
It is an obvious and outdated strategy by the anti-black ANC government to setup a commission, which we know only serves to lull those who demand a basic human right into some kind of inactivity. Having a Commission of Inquiry into Higher Education Funding further enforces that education must be commodified for it to be any good, a lie that goes directly against the demand for Free Socialist Black Centred Education.
The neglect of the students and their basic human rights is seen at a number of levels. Since the ANC government became the operators of the anti-black system they have had 22 years to think and strategise, that’s not considering the 100+ years of planning they should have done. It is now time for action.
The meetings by Minister Blade Nzimande with SRC’s ignored the position taken by students, “Nothing About Us, Without Us!” The announcement of this commission undermines the holistic work done by students around education and further ignores the fact that it is impossible to have a decolonised University in a colonised country, hence the demand for Fees Must Fall is equally the demand for Land!
BLF stands with the students, Nothing About Us, Without Us!
BLF rejects the SRC’s as they are part of the ANC government’s anti-black machine operators maintaining a white-supremacist order. BLF further rejects the Commission of Inquiry into Higher Education Funding as a ploy to supress the students, and buy time to safeguard the ANC’s political ambition for the 2016 local elections.
BLF calls on students from across the country to:
1) continue to isolate sell-outs – SRC, PYA, SASCO, Nehawu and any ANC aligned movements
2) shutdown campuses until the demand for Free Socialist Black Centred Education is met
3) occupy anti-black state institutions such as The Union Buildings, Parliament of South Africa as well as Luthuli House
BLF implores all black people to remember that we cannot decolonise a university in a colonised country, and so the call for Free Socialist Black Centred Education is the call for Land.
ISSUED BY THE NATIONAL COORDINATING COMMITTEE OF THE BLACK FIRST LAND FIRST MOVEMENT
15 January 2016
Contact Details
Black First Land First Mail: blackfirstlandfirst@gmail.com
BLACK FIRST LAND FIRST: THE STRUGGLE FOR FREE SOCIALIST BLACK CENTERED EDUCATION CONTINUES
BLF applauds those who continue to play their part in the student struggle for Free Education, recognising the courageous work done in 2015, including the continual planning over what was meant to be a “festive period”. The principled position taken by the #FeesMustFall movement who rejects the idea of “Business as Normal, in an Abnormal Society”, is exemplary and speaks to the desire for black liberation from an anti-black, white-supremacist society.
APPLYING SANKOFA WISDOM WE LOOK BACK AND LEARN FROM KEY MOMENTS IN THE 2015 #FEESMUSTFALL STRUGGLE:
Unprincipled Unity is No Unity at All! – At the beginning of the #FeesMustFall struggle, BLF warned that an unprincipled unity with ANC via PYA, SASCO and other affiliates is no unity. Later, the #FeesMustFall movement was hijacked by the ANC, where they tried to dilute the radical politics of the movement, which saw it splintering and in need of rebuilding.
Why call unity with ANC aligned organisations unprincipled? Because it is the ANC that makes laws that exclude blacks, it’s ANC laws that legalise outsourcing and it’s the ANC government that killed workers in Marikana.
We call on #FeesMustFall to take a principled Black First position, recognising that the decolonisation project must essentially be rooted in Black Struggle. Furthermore, we warn against the liberalising of the movement, which is a product of unprincipled unity.
CONCERNING VIOLENCE –
We live in a violent state that sees black people as animals. The brutality by police on the UWC, TUT and CPUT students, when these notably black students refused to continue as if the struggle for liberation could simply be postponed, showed us the disdain for black life. Worse still, when these students defended themselves by using anti-black structures to counter institutionalised racism, they were rendered barbaric. We must be clear that violence is the only end toward social change, and to condemn the use of violence for liberation is to be anti-black. Impossible to have a Decolonised Institution in a Colonised Country – All institutions form part of society and has the purpose of serving the ends of society. These colonial institutions of learning thus serve only to promote an anti-black society and to groom black people to be machine operators of an anti-black system that safeguards land theft. We ask, what is education without land? Frantz Fanon says –
“For a colonized people the most essential value, because it’s the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.”
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
The struggle for Free Socialist Black Centred Education must be rooted in the quest to take back the land.
We must continue to use the program of #FeesMustFall to build principled black unity that prepares us for the liberation of the black majority. We recognise that Black History has deployed us into these anti-black institutions to move the black struggle toward liberation. While participating in an anti-black educational system, our analysis of oppression must assist us in the fight for liberation.
We must continue the struggle toEnd Outsourcing Now! – we reject the slave wages paid to our parents, the postponement of insourcing, and the continual refusal to allow worker rights. We must continue to demand that our parents earn a Living Wage, enjoy the full benefits at the institutions they work in, and are seen as co-leaders with the students of the institutions they make up. Without students and workers there will be no institution.
We are the institution, we must decide its future!
The Worker and Student Alliance is thus imperative. There is only one black struggle!
We are principally united Black First. The struggle for #FeesMustFall and the struggle to #EndOutourcingNow is a struggle for liberation, and exists in the context of reclaiming the land that was stolen, the land that brings justice!
BLF recognises that the utterances of Chris Hart and Penny Sparrow have far reaching ideological implications for the consolidation of the white power structure to further its anti-black project in all aspects of the black condition including education and most importantly land. To this end – BLF maintains its demand for the “criminalisation of racism with the provision that blacks can’t be racist” and urges that the rallying call for #FeesMustFall incorporates the complete liquidation of racism.
“NO BUSINESS AS NORMAL, IN AN ABNORMAL SOCIETY”
1) Free Registration – No student should pay for education and all unemployed persons should register to learn
2) Free Education – No student should pay for education, including all human requirements to participate in education (housing, food etc)
3) End Outsourcing Now – In-source all workers, pay living wage with full employee benefits
4) Criminalise racism with provision that “Blacks can’t be racist”
5) Shut down all campus’ nationwide – No campus should be allowed to function if they refuse Free Socialist Black Centred Education and to Insource Workers, paying them a Living Wage, extending full employee benefits and recognising Students and Workers as the highest decision makers.
6) Occupy institutions of governance – Parliament of South Africa, Union Buildings as well as Lethuli House
7) Shutdown SONA – 7pm, Thursday, 11 February 2016
LET’S TAKE BACK THE LAND FOR FREE SOCIALIST BLACK CENTERED EDUCATION!
BLF CONTACT DETAILS
Black First Land First Mail: blackfirstlandfirst@gmail.com
The Black First Land First (BLF) movement shares the grief of the Zimbabwean people on the loss of their beloved son and African revolutionary, Professor Sam Moyo. We learn with heavy hearts from our occupied country, South Africa, that Prof Moyo has passed on from this world.
We share the pain of the world peasants, landless and anti-imperialist community. This loss comes at a time when our world is again in the grip of imperial and colonial aggression and mendacity. In a world saturated with lies, revolutionary intellectual work becomes part of the most important arsenal of the battle for liberation of the oppressed.
We shall forever remember how Prof Moyo stood as a beacon of truth and principle in a sea of sponsored condemnation of the Zimbabwean land struggle. Imperialist propaganda went into overdrive trying to soil the heroic acts of the Zimbabwean people and their government to return the stolen land.
Prof Moyo rejected acclaim and acknowledgement that comes from colonial and imperial scholarship that implores Africans to take the side of Empire against its people. We watched with great admiration how, from every conference, from pages of rarefied academic journals and in books, Prof Moyo again and again defended the Zimbabwean land reclamation struggle.
We will always remember that there was a time when Prof Moyo stood alone with the revolutionary people of Zimbabwe. In international academic platforms he refused the seductive embrace of colonisers which comes with a litany of personal rewards.
We learned from Prof Moyo’s example that the greatest reward is service to the African masses and the oppressed of the world.
We learned from Prof Moyo that the land and agrarian struggles are foundational to the liberation of the African continent. We learned from Prof Moyo’s principled defence of the African revolution that the revolutionary process is served best by rigorous scholarship. From Prof Moyo’s agitation and scholarship we learned the truth of the Zimbabwean land revolution and were able to counter the imperialist lies better.
The avalanche of lies and condemnation from imperialism and its agents never stopped, but in the face of the tireless revolutionary scholarship of Prof Moyo these mountains of lies paled into insignificance. We learned from Prof Moyo that without committed intellectuals the people perish. Africa must grow her own intellectuals, driven by the singular desire to serve this blighted continent.
Today, we march with less certainty because one who could see further than most of us, is no longer amongst us. We however, take solace in the knowledge that Prof Moyo left us foundations strong enough to take the process of building the African revolution further.
We South Africans remain a people shackled by colonial and neo-colonial bondage. We as South Africans remain landless after twenty-one years of pseudo-independence.
We have learned from Prof Moyo how to do battle against the intellectual deceit of the West. On our part, we commit to honor his memory through tirelessly working for the return of our land and attainment of self-reliance because we know only through returning our land first can we be on our way to putting blacks first in a world that puts blacks last.
To the people of Zimbabwe, his friends and colleagues and the entire anti-imperialist world, we say may the black gods strengthen you at this time. To his family, we thank you for sharing with us this brilliant gift from the Black Gods.
Hamba kahle son of the soil!
ISSUED BY THE NATIONAL COORDINATING COMMITTEE OF THE BLACK FIRST LAND FIRST MOVEMENT
23 November 2015
Contact Details
Black First Land First Mail: blackfirstlandfirst@gmail.com
The Marikana massacre brutally thrust blacks into naked enemy fire at the ANC barricades. Objectively, this moment in history marked the spiritual death of black faith in the ANC and the birth of a revolutionary consciousness seeking a revolutionary home. That home has not been found since the promise of the Black First Land First (BLF) Movement. Today an ocean of blood divides the ANC from blacks and it is time for blacks to continue the struggle for freedom without the ANC.
Since Marikana, when the black workers were murdered by the ANC for demanding a living wage, South Africa has never been the same again. ANC boldly put the blame on the striking blacks for, in the first place, daring to go against white monopoly capital. The voices of the Marikana workers are the voices of the millions of blacks who until Marikana could blindly believe in the ANC and seek relief from it regarding their unbearable condition.
As the Black First Land First (BLF) movement we maintain that the fight for a living wage, which the Marikana workers died for, is essentially a battle for land and the return of our mineral wealth. Only by the confiscation of our land without compensation in the interests of blacks and by nationalization of the mines while bringing them under direct worker’s and people’s control can we say that the fight for a living wage is over!
500 years of dehumanization by white supremacy, rendering blacks to a life of slavery and cut off from the civilized world of whiteness, tended to strengthen this faith in the ANC via the miracle of 27 April 1994. Marikana, however, has produced thousands of advanced warriors who have consciously broken with this faith in the ANC. The Marikana legacy will continue to educate blacks in whom the instinct of revolution, strengthened in the protest movement and fostered by political organisation, will destroy this faith to its very foundations.
Apart from those being conscientised by Marikana are millions of blacks, who continue to suffer the anti blackness of white supremacy, in whom this faith in the ANC could still survive. They are not ready for revolution and to replace the ANC’s neo liberal regime with a fully responsive state form. These people, for lack of a revolutionary consciousness, could only plead for acceptance within the ANC’s anti black agenda. But the memory and legacy of Marikana compels the destruction of this faith our people have in the ANC as the agent of revolutionary change. To this end, this historical legacy finds its logical consolidation in the ideas of the Black First, Land First movement.
The magnetism of the basic call to revolution around the organizing ideas of Black First Land First has the potential to influence even the most backward strata of the black masses with its Sankofa approach to politics of drawing lessons from the past to move forward. To this end BLF draws lessons from Marikana with the spirit of no return until the land is returned to our people.
History, which blacks were conducting via mainstream politics without a black first land first approach, has confirmed the correctness of the view that that there can be no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory, and that revolutionary theory delinked from the organized mass struggle is to no revolutionary end.
Blacks who who still harbour a shred of faith in the ANC were not ready for black freedom. Since August 16, 2012 the potential for blacks being ready to embark on a path to overthrow ANC rule was very evident but the absence of a revolutionary movement kept this initiative in a stranglehold of neo-liberalism. With the birth of BLF, which puts black first for land first, the Marikana legacy can be driven to its revolutionary conclusion. The ANC by cowardly driving blacks to the wall gave them their first lessons in barricade fighting. The lessons of the Marikana massacre will not be lost.
May the Marikana warriors who died fighting for a living wage be avenged by the fires of revolution through Black First for Land First.
The BLF rejects the establishment of the presidential commission of inquiry and its pseudo truth findings. We regard the function of the Commission of Inquiry as serving to hide the truth, to manage the justified anger of blacks and to interrupt their revolutionary demands. We demand that the ANC government pay reparations to the families for their pain, suffering and loss of income.
We say that the mines must be nationalised and placed under worker control and the dependents of the murdered should get shares in those mines. Lonmin belongs to the murdered workers! Also BLF calls for all workers to get a minimum wage of R12 500. It’s a reasonable demand, and what the Marikana workers died for.
ISSUED BY THE INTERIM COMMITTEE OF THE BLACK FIRST LAND FIRST MOVEMENT
16 AUGUST 2015
EFF leader Julius Malema has watered down the principle of expropriation without compensation, writes Andile Mngxitama.
Last month, EFF leader Julius Malema abandoned the party’s radical demand for land expropriation without compensation. He opted instead for the amorphous reformist demand of expropriation of “non-productive land”.
The EFF stands on seven “non-negotiable” cardinal pillars, with land expropriation being at the top of the list.
The EFF founding manifesto is clear that land redress cannot be done piecemeal.
The manifesto is emphatic that all land will be expropriated without compensation. What happened here?
The EFF policy document on land is even more strident. It starts off by asking: “What shall we do with the land once it has been reclaimed?”
The document answers itself plainly: “There is a need to place the question squarely: land must be returned because it belongs to black people!” That’s the first principle.
What we would do with the land is none of the business of the land thieves. We want it back because it’s ours. The EFF’s main claim for land is based on the anticolonial logic that all land in South Africa is stolen property.
This logic goes as far as positing that the whole racist organisation of society, which ensures that blacks live in townships, in squatter camps and are landless while whites live in relative security, owning land and the economy, is a direct result of land dispossession.
We would do well to remember that when the EFF arrived in Parliament, it agitated robustly against “land thieves”. Furthermore, the ruling party was offered the EFF’s 6 percent of the national vote to amend the constitution to effect “land expropriation without compensation”.
Malema’s first gesturing towards reformism and the watering down of the land demand was made in his closing remarks at the EFF elective conference in December. He introduced the strange concept of “unoccupied land”.
As usual no one asked what that meant. All land is illegally occupied by dint of colonialism and the racist legal framework.
Faced with a roomful of the Stellenbosch white agricultural capitalist class, those whom the EFF calls land thieves, Malema finally abandoned the first EFF non-negotiable cardinal pillar and assured the white farmers that, as long “as it’s a productive farm, we don’t have to interfere with the production on that piece of land”.
He told them that when there is a part of the land “which is not used for agriculture purposes, we would be having a problem. All we are saying is the land must be used. It must not lie idle.”
Historical redress was replaced by concerns for productivity. Justice was replaced by colonial economics. In effect, the status quo was confirmed and a gradualist approach to land redress introduced.
These guarantees for white landowners diminish the urgency of addressing the land question radically. Instead, the EFF has adopted the ANC tempo, which has failed dismally to deliver land.
Underlying this compromise on the demand for land is the apartheid logic that if land is redistributed to blacks then people will experience food insecurity.
One wishes that the leader of the party had read his own party policies. Had he done so he would have known that a backlash from white landowners and global forces was anticipated, but would not be accommodated as this would be a surrender in the battle for decolonisation.
In Marxist parlance, it can be said that Malema abandoned any notion of socialist transformation, to maintain capitalist agricultural relations. He replaced radical transformation with the inclusion of blacks as farmers into the system.
In other words, he settled for a mere deracialisation of agricultural capitalism instead of agitating for its obliteration. To drive the point home, Malema asked white farmers to “mentor” new black farmers.
Here we see the admiration of the exploitative, violent, racist and environmentally unfriendly agricultural paradigm that puts profits before the people who drive the sector.
One has to ask what kind of mentoring we can expect from white farmers who make profits out of exploitation and produce for the global market using the most harmful chemicals.
Did we not see a violent protest by farmworkers in the Cape Winelands, which preceded the Marikana massacre? We see that, just like the mining sector, whose Cyril Ramaphosas are mentored by its white captains, Malema is asking for this for the agricultural sector.
The address to the white farmers was in effect a salesman’s pitch. In classical salesman style, Malema stroked his racist landed audience’s ego, in effect saying: “We admire you, you feed us, you mentor us, your land is safe, we would interfere only with that which you don’t want or use.”
In other words, he was saying: “Give us the rejected land.”
The sales pitch reached its apex with a plea, cap in hand – as Ian Du Toit of the Gesprek Forum, which invited Malema, told Cape Talk radio the day after his address. Du Toit reported that the EFF leaders ended their talk by asking for donations from the gathered landed settler oligarchy of Stellenbosch.
For their part the farmers were so impressed and so reassured that “many clamoured to have photographs taken with Malema”. Brilliant by any account.
The sting of this whole operation is that a leader who has massive financial problems of his own is seen here trading off one of the principles of his party in exchange for financial donations from the principal enemies of his party programme.
This is a betrayal of the vision of the EFF, which gave so many of us hope and courage. The militancy of the EFF’s demands and uncompromising stance revived hope in many.
The landless and poor believed the EFF was a party that would stand with them against the moneyed and powerful.
But, alas, this dream is fast turning into another nightmare.
The quick transition from expropriation of all land to “unoccupied” then “non-productive” land has had the effect of protecting white farmers. De facto fighters on the ground have been encouraged to occupy unoccupied municipality land to build shacks, thereby not interfering with white-owned land.
We saw in wealthy Ballito in KwaZulu-Natal how EFF members made a hasty retreat as soon as a farmer showed them his plans for the land. One moment the land was “unoccupied”, the next moment there were plans and the landless had to go home.
This is a strategy of deception. It is not calculated to address the rural or the urban land hunger. Land occupations have become a political football for next year’s local government elections.
The truth is that the ruling party has no programme, desire or courage to address these challenges because it is itself beholden to white capital. The landless are on their own.
In 21 years of democracy, only about 8 percent of the land has been returned. It would take more than 100 years to reach a mere 30 percent.
The principled demand for “land expropriation without compensation” is the only real answer to land redress. This demand must be driven by the truth that in 1652 a group of foreigners from Europe arrived here and used force of arms to take land from Africans.
They didn’t ask if the land was being used productively.
The racist scaremongering that blacks can’t farm must also be laid to rest and cannot be used by a party that claims to be radical, militant and socialist.
The agricultural sector is inefficient and racist and does not contribute to food security.
Our country is a net food importer and the sector contributes less than 5 percent to the gross domestic product while hiring an exploited and abused 700 000 farm workers.
This fundamental policy shift poses the question: Will ordinary members of the EFF defend the party’s cardinal pillars, or will they allow their leader to edit its policies and tailor them as he wishes?
The tragedy of this whole turn of events is that the EFF is not broke.
It gets close to R70 million a year from the Independent Electoral Commission and Parliament. The party does not need to go cap in hand to landowners, beg for money and water down party policies in doing so.
The African revolution has failed because leaders abandon principle for money and comfort. We are facing the prospects of an ugly African malaise in our new revolution.
Land is too important to be turned into a political game for small change from those whose fore-bears stole it from us.
Writer, philosopher and revolutionary Frantz Fanon put it elegantly when he said: “For a colonised people the most essential value, because it’s the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.”
*Mngxitama is a former EFF MP.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
On Thursday 14 January 2016, Minister Blade Nzimande met with the Student Representative Council’s (SRC’s) from across academic institutions nationally in Kempton Park, Johannesburg. This came after President Jacob Zuma almost robotically announced a Commission of Inquiry into Higher Education Funding.
BLACK1st LAND1st 