BRYAN ROSTRON: Decolonising the ANC mind

Apartheid scrambled the brains of countless South Africans, most obviously the white population.

Over a quarter of a century later, however, the governing ANC seems to find it challenging to unscramble its policies and ideology from that terrible era. Tackling 21st century problems with time-frozen attitudes has dragged us into a vortex of institutional decline and public distrust.        

Essentially colonialism is the extraction of resources by a foreign power for its own profit and to the detriment of local people. Strangely today the ANC ignores exactly such crude adventurism in Africa. Applying the same definition at home, it is also clear that a number of senior ANC leaders have been party to extracting state money to the detriment of all South Africans. Both are symptoms of a colonised mind.

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s recent “peace mission” confirmed the adage: when politicians fail at home, they seek distraction abroad. Unbelievably, his convoluted “neutrality” over Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has managed to vex both the US and Russia, converting “constructive ambiguity”, a phrase attributed to Henry Kissinger, into “destructive ambiguity”. This clumsy “nonaligned” stance is a result of outdated Cold War attitudes.

Yet while there are apologists for Russia’s “special operation” in Ukraine, there is no outrage over the equally euphemistic “security operations” of Russian mercenaries in Africa. The Wagner Group operates in several African countries, notably the Central African Republic, and their atrocities are well documented. In return for propping up threatened regimes, they are given a free hand to exploit the nation’s resources. Colonialism? Not, it seems, when Russian. 

Nor has there been a peep from our government about Britain’s neocolonial scheme to fly asylum seekers 6,500km away to Rwanda on a one-way ticket. These refugees are from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, Sudan, Afghanistan and Albania and the cruel proposal to ship them to a landlocked central African country is in breach of international conventions.

So far legal challenges have meant that not one of these non-African migrants, most of them fleeing from violence, has yet been deported. Nevertheless, the UK has already bribed Rwanda with £140m to act as its colonial-style dumping ground. Again, too many African leaders are prepared to sell their country’s birthright for a biblical “mess of pottage”.

This confused denial of reality is evident at home. Take the bizarre ritual of referring to party super-capitalists as “comrade”. How can poorly paid cadres address our billionaire president as “Comrade Cyril” with a straight face? Last September at his Phala Phala farm, Ankole cattle, buffaloes and rare game sold at auction for R6.8m. Comrade Cyril can also afford to have half a million dollars stuffed casually in his game ranch sofa. This cries out for a great work of satire.

In fact, it has been written. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the venerable Kenyan writer and perennial Nobel candidate, captured exactly such absurdities in his novel Wizard of the Crow (2006). He was witheringly funny about the rapacious new elite lauding African tradition while chasing the frothy products of Western consumerism. Jet planes, limousines and US medical treatment were for the elite, tradition for the poor.

In an interview with the The Guardian last month, Ngũgĩ, now 85, described how Jomo Kenyatta had been his boyhood hero, but on becoming Kenya’s first president, he claimed, Kenyatta reneged on his promises, merely wanting to replace the white colonialists at the top. After the Zondo commission, who can doubt there are similar aspirations here? 

Earlier, in his seminal essay “Decolonising the Mind” (1986), Ngũgĩ wrote that “the Mobutus, the Mois and the Eyademas of the neocolonial world are not being forced to capitulate to imperialism at the point of an American maxim gun. They themselves are of the same mind: they are actually begging for a recolonisation of their own countries with themselves as the neocolonial governors living in the modern fortress”.

To that list you can add those African countries who today invite ruthless Russian mercenaries to protect the local ruling elite in return for allowing their gold, silver and other valuable minerals to be taken abroad.

This must be the supreme postapartheid irony: for some SA leaders human rights abuses and looting in Africa are glossed over in silence, while supporting an illegal invasion in Europe bolstered by stolen African loot. You cannot get more mentally scrambled than that. 

Liberation movements chased out European colonists, frequently only to replace them. To complete decolonisation, they too need to be chased out.

• Rostron is a journalist and author