All those who have been members of the ANC, current members, and activists who, in one instance or another, have had a relationship with programs of the ANC would know it is a movement, worldview, paradigm, and a collective psyche about politics. It is not only a convergence of social justice, economic justice, human dignity, human rights, non-racialism, and non-sexism but a convolution of politics and the pursuit of true justice. A construct of baNtu leaders, the ubuNtu that was infused into it makes it a repository of humanism and, thus, an abstraction of what the world can be.
Born
at the time one of the world's leading torments to humanity, racial segregation
and racism, later formalised as a state-sponsored racism program and
subsequently declared a crime against humanity, apartheid, it grew into a
global moral force or lung against racism. Facing one of the world's most
brutal and sophisticated versions of European imperialism, represented by
British colonialism and later a racial oligarchy perfected by the National
party, ANCness morphed into a sophisticated struggle system with which
humanity's imagination of freedom could be codified into several chronicled
documents it championed.
In
its history, the ANC started by establishing itself not just as an organisation
but as an alternative Parliament of abaNTU, hence the office of the Speaker,
later National Chairperson. It produced blueprints that shaped South Africa and
the World. The 1923 Bill of Rights, the African Claims Document, the 1949
program of action with a Freedom in our Lifetime Call by the Congress League,
the 1955 Freedom Charter process and arguably its outcome, the Strategy and
Tactics Documents, and many others until the latest NDP.
Facing
a continuous global force whose mission is to "create (and sustain) an
environment in which Europeans (and later the West) must protect their
privilege and maintain dominance", ANCness had to be more about fracturing
a manufactured reality of racial supremacy. ANCness refused, through theory and
practice, to succumb to this supremacy and introduced in its stead a platform
upon which humanity could cohere, based on the substrate of ubuNtu representing
the baNtuness defining its majority constituency.
The
conception of humanism, ubuNtu, that the ANC has engineered as a subjective
belief, sought to define South Africa and render all who live in it safe,
secure, and opportunity into posterity, still defines ANCness. This has made
ANCness, to the extent that it was or is a liberation movement, universal,
transcendent, and righteous. For this reason, ANCness has thrived in hegemony
and dominion for a while. Its struggle system and what came of it created
amongst its loyal followers and members the entitlement of primacy and imperium
with which it was able and still does, to disrupt the essence of global
coloniality.
Difficult
as it is to fracture the global racial hierarchy, its race-based power
structures, and the anatomical sub-mechanisms submerged in the logic of
standards, ANCness, with its humanism-driven credibility and social and
political power, has been able to prevail from all ends of radicalism and
moderateness it commands as accumulated capital.
Led
by a predominantly liberal democratic leadership, and thus amenable to a
rules-based paradigm of human governance, to ANCness, the struggle endstate had
to be a convergence of national sovereignty and the global legal system. The
victory against apartheid was thus packaged as the victory of human rights,
including to its architects and beneficiaries. To this end, in recent history,
human rights as a substrate of sovereign national interest has made
unprecedented progress and redefined the Palestinian occupation to be an
international justice affair. The predatory character and bare-knuckle power
politics of colonialism and its racially oligarchic adjunct, apartheid,
experienced in South Africa in the 19th century and now a daily experience of
Palestinians, demonstrates the perpetual relevance of ANCness as a paradigmatic
point of departure in humanism-defined politics.
The
iconic victories of ANCness will always be characterised by triumphs of its
unyielding rectitude, which have laid the groundwork for future progressive
causes, such as the elusive national unity. The precondition to be ANC is being
part of the African National. If you are pursuing any National beyond the
sovereign national it uses as the lens of its being or the sub-national it sees
as tribes or various ethnicities, you might not be the comprehensive African it
is all about.
The National it is, Congress
has never been about abandoning the sovereign individual nor vitiating
individual rights as the most significant form of social mobilisation. With the
violation of human rights always being linked to the benefits it has on the
social and economic livelihoods of those oppressing or revenging oppression,
ANCness has, for as long as it has existed, been an antagonistic force for the
opposite. The recipe for winning has always been the mobilisation or
coordination of principled activists, mass movements, and (progressive or
otherwise) political parties to make reasonable bargains to gain (if not balance
the impact of) political power.
At
its apex performance, ANCness, arguably a software of liberation, freedom, or
human emancipation, has allowed several interpretations of freedom, including
variants of its distortions, to plug into the open society wideness it has made
legal arrangements for. The logic of creating a government of national unity,
seen as ANCness's realistic move under the circumstances, has demonstrated its
prowess at making (new and) better and keeping alliances, which are less
threatening to fence-sitters. The GNU logic is more about avoiding
self-destructive aggression associated with non-reconciliatory pathways of
prevailing as a hegemony. True ANCness, which is not in retreat, is about
"rules-based, noncorrupt administrative and legal institutions; a
diversified economy (especially one that’s not based solely on natural resource
endowments); a consensus on which people will get to exercise their democratic
right to national self-determination; and a supportive international neighbourhood
of (liberal) democratic states". CUT!!!
Comments
Post a Comment