The total strategy might be alive: the anti Paul Mashatile presidency might be its manifestation.

The total strategy was apartheid South Africa's response to what it perceived as the total onslaught to annihilate 'white power' and dominance on the African continent as represented by an industrialised Republic of South Africa. As a political survival construct aimed at making the apartheid crime against humanity a frontier to defend an otherwise diminishing influence of colonial power over Africa in general and South Africa in particular, the total strategy was intended to serve several purposes. 

With the perceived threat of communism to global capitalism occupying centre stage in geopolitical strategies of Western powers, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, which positioned the SACP as a key ally of the ANC as leader of the liberation movement, was theorised as an anti-West program. As a result, the total strategy assumed a character of "winning the support of Western governments and their hegemonic intentions". 

 

With the West, then, being originators and practitioners of forms of systemic oppression, such as sexism, classism, racism, colonialism, and its adjunct apartheid, any movement that was targeting these forms of oppression with non-whites as beneficiaries were an affront to white power. In maintaining the privilege of the status quo, systems of oppression killed people and robbed them of the material and social conditions they needed to survive. The apartheid state enjoyed the support of a global imperialist project that saw no sovereign nation outside the Treaty of Westphalia cohort of countries. Consequently, the total strategy was also developed with the purpose "to justify (draconian) repression of the black population or that part of it displaying tendencies towards toppling white power as a global construct". 

 

Given the racial-class benefits of apartheid or sustainability of white power and privilege, white people became a beneficiary constituency to be enrolled on the idea of the anti-apartheid struggle as being an anti-white project. The total strategy was thus calibrated to have a purpose "to brainwash the white population into closing ranks, particularly within the security forces (defence and police) and within the judiciary, even to the extent of unconsciously condoning not only the denial of privileges to non-whites but tacitly endorsing the persecution of those political activists opposed to their status in South Africa". 

 

 As the last bastion or frontier of white power on the African continent and the continent's most organised state, the stability of 'decolonised' democracies around its borders posed an 'art-of-the-possible' existential threat to white power organised as a sovereign state in Africa. The total strategy was thus also purposed "to justify destabilisation of South Africa's neighbours, through cross-border raids, through support for RENAMO, UNITA and other renegade forces and through military invasion of Angola". 

 

While the 1994 democratic breakthrough created a context for South Africa to enter its democratisation phase, with the 1996 Constitution of South Africa as the written account of how we arranged to govern ourselves, the power dynamics in society do not seem to have complied with what the Constitution promises society. As the state's most active agent, the government inherited a state with dominant agents outside its control, save for regulatory power constrained by the adjudicative power of an 'independent' judiciary, which seems to be presiding over the one trillion rands it raises through taxation. The other trillions it raises revenue from are commandeering to the political economy destiny of South Africa with a potential to execute the total strategy as a dimension of the state where the government is legally absented. 

 

The truth is that the South African economy is still a privilege-driven or dictated space. Its design has a mercantilist (of a special type) character. It is extractive, albeit to 'internal colonisers of a special type' who have craftily redefined themselves as foreign direct investors with a domicile of origin still South Africa. The objectives of the total strategy are still intact but driven in private boardrooms and civil society movements that fight for freedoms the Constitution guarantees as a privilege more than a human right. 

 

Without a brief for Paul Mashatile, save to declare that in another rendition, I characterised interest in him as a form of public lynching, the total strategy of brainwashing the privileged to see his politics as a threat to the status quo is reminiscent of what the total strategy was or is still about. In his case, the objective is to brainwash the population into closing ranks, not only against him as a person but a cognition within the ANC he represents. This brainwashing has taken the form of subjecting him to a court of public opinion that has 'perception' as the law he must answer to. The brainwashing is so intense that its protagonists are unaware that they are unconsciously condoning the denial of privileges to those that support his politics and the right to have chosen him as a potential successor to Cyril Ramaphosa. The persistent lynching seems to be tacitly endorsing the persecution of political activists of his ilk, who are overtly opposed to continuing the status quo in South Africa. 

 

The most unambiguous indication that the total strategy is continuing its titanic struggle against the ANC cognition he represents can be seen in how he is being isolated as being the ANC some in society would want to enter into a coalition arrangement with. Through the vast power of mass ideation and discourse funding, they wield, beneficiaries of the system that need its templates recalibrated seem to have picked up where the authors of the total strategy have paused to allow the new context to unfold since 1994. 

 

Capacity such as the one the total strategy objectives had does not evaporate in society. It is at best redeployed and at worst repackaged into a sellable commodity to the extent that there are buyers of what the outcome of its efficiency represents. There is evidence of a pattern within funded civil society movements and platforms that beneficiaries of what the liberation movement has set out to liquidate, apartheid, seem to have been driven by a revanchist strategy to keep the templates of race-differentiated economic dominance intact and overturn the gains of what the 1996 Constitution of South Africa promised society. The liquidation of the in-ANC cognition Paul Mashatile represents might be the polarisation conclusion of that strategy. The 'spokes' of the liberation movement wheel might be rising, notwithstanding. CUT!!