We Can Fix Ourselves: Building a better South Africa through Black Consciousness

By Mosibudi Mangena

In We Can Fix Ourselves, while acknowledging other factors, Mosibudi Mangena points out the debilitating effects of a colonial mentality. He argues that Black Consciousness can provide the necessary antidote, so that we can be a more robust South African society. Scrutinising the spheres where we are failing – from healthcare, education and transport to crime – Mangena outlines practical possible solutions. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kwela
• Release date: Aug 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9780795710001

Mosibudi Mangena

Mosibudi Mangena is a former politician, former Deputy Minister of Education (2001) and Minister of Science and Technology (2004-2009), and former President of AZAPO (Azanian People’s Organisation) and contemporary of Steve Biko. He has published seven books and lives in Polokwane.

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9780624089810_FC

Mosibudi Mangena

WE CAN FIX

OURSELVES

Building a better South Africa

through Black Consciousness

KWELA BOOKS

Acronyms

ACC Amadiba Crisis Committee

Armscor Armaments Corporation of South Africa

AZAPO Azanian People’s Organisation

BAMCWU Black Allied Mining and Construction Workers’ Union

BBBEE broad-based black economic empowerment

BCM Black Consciousness Movement

BCP Black Community Programmes

BPC Black People’s Convention

CET Community Education and Training

Chap community health awareness project

CPS Cash Paymaster Services

CSIR Council for Scientific and Industrial Research

ECD early childhood development

GDP gross domestic product

Hawks Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation

ICT information and communications technology

IMF International Monetary Fund

Nehawu National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union

NGO non-governmental organisation

NPA National Prosecuting Authority

NSFAS National Student Financial Aid Scheme

NUM National Union of Mineworkers

PAC Pan Africanist Congress

PRASA Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa

RDP Reconstruction and Development Programme

SAA South African Airways

SABC South African Broadcasting Corporation

SALT Southern African Large Telescope

SAPS South African Police Service

SARCC South African Rail Commuter Corporation

SAR&H South African Railways and Harbours

SASO South African Students’ Organisation

Sassa South African Social Security Agency

SATS South African Transport Services

Scopa Standing Committee on Public Accounts

SIU Special Investigating Unit

SKA Square Kilometre Array

SOEs state-owned enterprises

TNA The New Age

TVET technical vocational education and training

UK United Kingdom

UN United Nations

UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

US United States

VBS Venda Building Society

WHO World Health Organization

Foreword

by Prof. Njabulo Ndebele

The title of the book in your hands is an urgent, confident summons to South Africans to embark on a journey of self-transformation. The intended destination is a country radically different from the current one. The confidence in the summons is based on the belief that the journey into a different future will be well worth making. Mosibudi Mangena offers Black Consciousness as the preferred tool for fixing ourselves. But this tool is not something out there: we are the tool itself.

The self as the tool is an implied metaphor that secured my attention. It led me to formulate three propositions as an aid to my understanding of Mangena’s probable intention behind this book.

The first proposition is that no political party of only white people, those who have subscribed to the ideology of white supremacy, will ever govern South Africa again.

The second is that no ethnic-based political party is ever likely to govern South Africa. The country has become too ethnically cosmopolitan to be subject to any single, ethnic-based governance. A relapse into ethnicities would dangerously fracture the solidarity of the oppressed, which evolved out of the long struggle against apartheid. Indeed, as apartheid worked to divide the black oppressed into competing ethnicities, the oppressed black majority population took a principled and determined stance against the demeaning negations of white supremacy and, in the process, found a positive and emancipatory solidarity in being black.

The third proposition is that the overwhelming predominance of black people in South Africa collectively makes them a demographic norm impossible to disaggregate into apartheid’s intended political ethnicities. Equally so, the geographic and economic imperatives that consolidated the sense of a South African nation-state over the last 150 years led to a toxic political culture that deeply affected and implicated both minority whites, who had the power to impose their will, and majority blacks, who had lost their power to the white conquerors.

The political and economic dominance of whites ultimately failed to impose a politics which, while desiring that all peoples of South Africa be engaged in cooperative economic activity, did not accord to everyone the same political and human rights. The full implication of the third proposition is that any contemporary national political effort that takes no cognizance of the prevalent demographic norm of the day will, by definition, lack legitimacy. This spells a definitive end to white supremacy.

These propositions, which I have read to be embedded in the core message of Mangena’s book, are an invitation to all South Africans to begin to recognise, appreciate and embrace the fundamental and formative cosmopolitanism of the majority South African population, a characteristic of the experience that shaped Black Consciousness.

This is a challenge to all who make up the evolved demographic norm – those who are a product of the last 150 years of South African history and are grounded in the human experience foundational to what came to be known as Black Consciousness – to evolve towards a new and expansive consciousness that will reshape the character of the South African nation-state and will drive the social character, politics, economics and culture of its future.

As the black tribes of South Africa became urban, spreading across the landscape, simultaneously forced and attracted by economic opportunities, they evolved a cosmopolitan consciousness. On the other hand, white South Africans, in pursuit of racial superiority, evolved an isolationist, self-obsessed mindset. This deprived them of the opportunity to play a significant role in the evolution of an inclusive cosmopolitan human environment.

It is against such a context that We Can Fix Ourselves explores what it will take for a cosmopolitan consciousness, grounded in the historical experience of living with the consciousness of being black in South Africa, to evolve with that consciousness towards a resuscitative and inclusive social, political, economic and constitutional order with a strong national capacity and capability to create a new and successful sense of citizenship to be experienced and enjoyed by all South Africans into the foreseeable future. In the resulting withering away of both whiteness and blackness, South Africans will deservedly experience their fullest humanity.

Mangena would like us to anticipate the next 150 years with urgency, commitment, excitement, intelligence and creativity. After all, in being the tool that we are – to ourselves and to our country – we will be our own anticipation, our own responsibility, and no one else’s.

It is from the foundation of this anticipation of ourselves that Mangena takes us on a leap of the imagination. It was with Nelson Mandela’s first democratic government that the oppressed of South Africa held, for the first time, full responsibility for the state, all its people and all its assets. These included land and everything inside it, on it and above it. This asset, the land, is the very source of the wellbeing of the people and their ability to create successful communal livelihoods, as they have done for thousands of years. It is this asset that was taken away and only 13% of it reserved for those dispossessed of it.

It is the land as an asset on which human beings create cultures of livelihood through families and complex communal interactions that results in an array of institutions being developed to manage and govern the social order. The purpose of the modern African state is to reimagine its relationship to the land and the human fabric behind its management and governance, and be so successful at it as to restore African autonomy over African livelihood and, hopefully, redefine human relationships across today’s world.

It is on this basis that Mangena takes us through the entire fabric of national life: how we educate our children into new and accumulated social knowledge; how we strive to stay healthy as a nation; how to revaluate our cuisine to enjoy it better for our sustenance; how to recall, as we redesign markets and businesses, that they are established for the exchange of goods grown or invented out of knowledge and skills distributed across the population first before they are exported to other nations; how transport systems reflect that we travel on trains, taxis and buses for work or leisure; how safe and secure neighbourhoods, free from crime, are a critical enabler of the freedom and the excellence to achieve what we might like to be; how to turn to good account our valuable mineral wealth as something far more important than objects to be gouged out of the earth and exported; how best for human beings to live together with all other forms of life; and how we purposefully govern strongly and creatively the entirety of the world we live in. And finally, to remember that people in Africa are fundamentally a social, communal people: a reality to reflect in the way we redesign current dormitory locations, and design our future towns and cities.

In his attempt to grasp the entirety of the social order and the magnificent challenge to redefine our relationship to it, Mangena’s method is not to indulge in sentiment but often to pry the wound open in order to register the full existential urgency of the work to be done. Indeed, harsh reality is often necessary in order to tone down romantic sentiment, purify intention and focus the mind. Underpinning Mangena’s tone throughout this book is his love for his country and its extraordinary people.

Njabulo S. Ndebele

June 2021

Introduction

In his introduction to We Write What We Like: Celebrating Steve Biko, Chris van Wyk writes: Today we can show the world a more human face. It may not be a face we are proud of yet – thanks to rampant crime, corruption, and our lacklustre commitment to fighting HIV/Aids. But at least now we have the power to mould the face into one we can be proud of.¹

This book of essays by different individuals, edited by Van Wyk, was released in 2007 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the death of Steve Biko in detention.

The quoted extract from Van Wyk’s pen talks of a more human face. It may not be a face we are proud of yet … But at least now we have the power to mould the face into one we can be proud of.

In We Can Fix Ourselves, the focus is on finding the reasons that we seem unable to show the more human face and why it is getting worse than when Van Wyk wrote those words in 2007. Why do we fail to do so even when we have levers of state power in our hands?

While acknowledging the presence of other factors, this book concerns itself with the debilitating role of colonial mentality among the black majority that stymies efforts towards the showing of the more human face.

In the same breath, it posits that a healthy dose of Black Consciousness, or African Humanism, would provide the necessary tonic for a more robust drive towards a normal society in South Africa. It firmly asserts that the establishment of an anti-racist society in this country would be impossible in a toxic milieu characterised by the inferiority/superiority complexes phenomenon. Such an anti-racist society is possible only if the equality of all people is not only a function of a constitution and laws, but when such equality is internalised, lived, felt and practised by the people themselves.

There is no perfect society anywhere in the world. But there is no gainsaying that the biggest fault lines in South African society are predominantly determined by race. The normal society being referred to in this book would be a society where race would not be such an overwhelming factor.

To demonstrate the dearth of Black Consciousness among blacks, the book touches on various spheres of our lives, such as the poor health, education and transport systems; the mismanagement and looting of state-owned enterprises (SOEs); the sloppy management of crime, particularly the insecurity of women and children in our society; the almost non-existent land-reform programme; the woefully inadequate management of migration and immigration; as well as the neglect of our languages, the arts and culture. The book references our lack of pride in that which belongs to us.

As of 2021, South Africa is in dire straits. Our economy is in the doldrums, rating agencies have downgraded the country to junk status, unemployment is dangerously high and most SOEs are near collapse.

The advent of Covid-19 found us in this weakened state, hobbling our ability to respond adequately to the challenges thrown at us by this virus: the impossibility of social distancing in overcrowded human settlements, the challenge of how to wash hands frequently in circumstances of severe water shortages, the difficulties in opening many public schools due to overcrowded classrooms, and other such things that had not been attended to since the democratic government stepped into power. It should not have needed the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic to jolt us into action on things that should have received attention as a matter of redress and social justice many years ago.

Black Lives Matter is a plea to respect and protect black lives against others who might deem such lives cheap and easily dispensable. In the South African context, where blacks are the majority and in political office, to whom is this plea made? Is this not a clear case of people who do not believe in their own agency? People who regard themselves as victims of others? Why is it that we do not take our destiny in our own hands and pull the majority out of poverty and social degradation?

In order to move towards the cherished anti-racist society and bequeath a prosperous and peaceful country to future generations, we need to attend to the inferiority/superiority complexes in our society, among other things.

The philosophy of Black Consciousness is assumed in this book. However, for those who might need to refresh their memories or those who have never encountered it, the essay The Definition of Black Consciousness by Steve Bantu Biko is included as an appendix. Although some aspects of this paper have been impacted upon by the attainment of democracy in 1994, the main thrust remains true.

The aim in this book is to explore the possibilities and relevance of Black Consciousness in the era of democratic governance in which blacks are the majority. The engagement with the material seeks to be as practical as possible, as opposed to a theoretical espousal of the philosophy.

Mamphela Ramphele, a founding member of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), Abu Baker Asvat, a founding member of the Azanian People’s Organisation (AZAPO), Es’kia Mphahlele, the father of African Humanism, and others operated under different circumstances. There is no suggestion that we go back there. References to their heroic actions, service and achievements are made in order to show that it is possible to do the kind of things being suggested in the pages of We Can Fix Ourselves.

To that end, and in addition to suggestions made in the individual chapters, Chapter 16 seeks to concentrate our minds on how we could take advantage of Black Consciousness, or African Humanism, and the democratic dispensation to advance the struggle against poverty, inequality and social degradation; the struggle to restore the dignity and worth of all our people and, by so doing, enhance our chances of success in building a more equal and fairer society. This, against the backdrop of Van Wyk’s assertion that at least now we have the power to mould the face into one we can be proud of.

CHAPTER 1

The health scene

The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.

– Arthur Schopenhauer

The consternation all over South Africa was palpable; tweets and Facebook postings were clogging cyberspace. Conventional media carried stories with screaming headlines that got tongues wagging throughout the country. It was May 2018 and protesting members of the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union (Nehawu) had trashed Charlotte Maxeke Hospital in Parktown, Johannesburg, for the second time, intimidated medical staff and even punched a doctor carrying a sick child he was attending to.²

The then minister of health, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, led the loud fulminations against the shocking actions of workers at the hospital. This was followed in early June by pronouncements by the health ombudsman, Professor Malegapuru Makgoba, that the health system in South Africa was on the verge of collapse.³

Motsoaledi was swift in his rebuttal, calling this description alarmist. He admitted, though, that the system was in crisis, creaking under an increasing burden of disease, especially HIV and lifestyle-induced afflictions, understaffing and the unfair distribution of resources between the private and public healthcare sectors.

A few weeks earlier, Nehawu was involved in another violent strike in the North West province during which public health professionals were intimidated and, in certain instances, chased out of their work stations.⁴ Stories were told of nurses who were looking after premature babies being frogmarched out of their wards, and obstetricians and midwives being prevented by their colleagues and general workers from assisting women to give birth.

In December 2019, members of Nehawu went on an illegal strike at the Pietersburg Provincial Hospital in Polokwane, demanding bonuses.⁵ Again they trashed the maternity ward, chased those nurses helping women give birth out of their work stations, intimidated doctors and nurses who were attending to patients, ripped files out of the hands of their fellow health workers attending to oncology patients and prevented those cancer sufferers from receiving chemotherapy and related medication. They trashed the kitchen and scattered the food on the floor, jeopardising the feeding of patients.

The trash-spilling group at Charlotte Maxeke Hospital, too, were not demanding salaries but bonuses. For most people, not even the loss of a salary is worth the lives of people. How does a union take a decision to throw rubbish all over a hospital, chase health workers around and endanger the lives of the sick just for bonuses? Gratification of any description cannot be achieved at the expense of the health of people, if we understand what the philosopher Schopenhauer was asserting.

In 2017, Makgoba blew the whistle on the gross and cruel abuse of mentally ill patients in Gauteng.⁶ A resultant probe by the retired deputy chief justice, Dikgang Moseneke, revealed that 144 mentally ill patients died horrible deaths at a number of unregistered or ill-equipped privately run centres in different parts of the province. In early 2018, Moseneke awarded each family that lost a loved one and took part in an alternative dispute-resolution process – generally known as the Life Esidimeni hearings – R1,2 million for pain, shock, psychological trauma, funeral expenses and constitutional damages.⁷ The Gauteng health department had to part with about R160 million in effecting all the payments.

The behaviour of the officials in the Gauteng health department was shocking, callous and inhumane. It was particularly the cruelty, ineptitude and don’t-care attitude of the senior officials, almost all of whom were trained medical professionals, that boggled the mind.

Although Life Esidimeni was the most grotesque event ever to hit the health system in South Africa, dereliction of duty, neglect of patients, poor administration, rudeness of nurses and corruption are widespread in the sector.

Ordinary people describe health facilities in South Africa as death traps and are reluctant to go to these facilities when they are sick. Apart from chronic shortages of medical supplies and doctors, their biggest gripe is the attitude of health workers, especially nurses. Although it is not all health workers who cause stress among patients, there are enough of them to tarnish the image of health workers, especially in the public sector.

* * *

In the 1970s, Black Community Programmes (BCP), a component of the BCM, established Zanempilo Clinic in Zinyoka village near King William’s Town.⁸ The banned Biko was heading the BCP at the time and he collaborated with Dr Mamphela Ramphele in its establishment and operation. The clinic was run on a shoestring budget, depending as it did on donations from well-wishers from within and outside the country.

At all times, priority was given to the purchase of medical supplies, then the payment of staff, and if there was money left, Ramphele would get a stipend, which, in many cases, was no more than R200 a month. The attitude was come what may, the patients must get the best care possible.

After her banning and banishment to Lenyenye Township, just outside Tzaneen, Ramphele established Ithuseng Community Health Centre there, which operated on more or less the same model as Zanempilo in Zinyoka. Ithuseng did not only concentrate on curing sick people, but a greater part was on assisting the community to look after their health through awareness programmes, promoting healthy diet, establishing and sustaining projects in the areas of vegetable gardens and early child development.

In 1982, AZAPO’s health secretariat launched its community health awareness project (Chap) under the leadership of the legendary Dr Abu Baker Asvat.⁹

Asvat acquired a caravan he used as a mobile clinic and, together with a team of volunteer healthcare workers and activists such as Thandi Myeza, Joyce Kalaote, Zohra Asvat, Rowayda Halim, Jenny Tissong and others, visited communities in far-flung areas of the country to help people with their health issues. Over and above that, Asvat would recruit other volunteer medical professionals, such as optometrists, psychologists and dentists, to accompany the team on these trips. In the communities they visited, they treated people with flu, high blood pressure, diabetes, sexually transmitted diseases and malnutrition, and performed pap smears. Where required, they referred patients to clinics and hospitals for further attention.

Asvat prepared a handbook on primary healthcare and preventative medicine, which was translated into various indigenous languages and distributed in the communities they visited.

At the invitation of Nomzamo (Winnie) Madikizela-Mandela, the Chap team visited the small Free State town of Brandfort a few times to attend to the health needs of the community there. At the request of Madikizela-Mandela, who was banned and banished to Brandfort, they established a clinic to provide acutely required health services to that community on a continuous basis.

Asvat teamed up with the Black Allied Mining and Construction Workers’ Union (BAMCWU) to campaign against asbestos in the Penge area, Limpopo. An asbestos mine in Penge was a large employer and many workers had already died or were suffering from the debilitating asbestosis disease.

Working under the auspices of Chap, another group of doctors and other health workers, among them Tom Marishane, Dyke Monyebodi, Simon Mashilo and Morokolo Sathekge, established Ga-Radingwana Clinic in the Sekhukhune area.

They took turns in visiting the area and attending to sick people in the village and neighbouring ones free of charge. They travelled at their own expense and, like Asvat, referred cases they could not treat to clinics and hospitals.

Then there was Dr Tshehla Hlahla who served the community of Mahwelereng Township with amazing dedication, love and empathy for nearly 50 years until his death in a car accident in 2017. Hlahla was a medical phenomenon in the area, doing house calls and treating even those patients who could not pay for his services.

* * *

South Africa is a middle-income