ON STUDENTS PROTESTS, LAW, VIOLENCE AND MEDIA BIAS!!!

Ever since the commencement of student protests, beginning with Wits university on Wednesday the 14th of October, which has now, a week later, spread to UCT, Rhodes and other institutions, the students have had to undergo a trial by white media where they are scrutinised for behaving “violently” or breaking certain laws. Questions on legality of certain actions or attempts to enforce on them certain apartheid laws of 1959, to nullify their cause, has been the order of the day…so has been attempts to label them as being violent (in the same fashion that the Marikana miners and many other struggles were branded violent) in order to distract focus on their objectives and purpose of revolt.

Now the white media thinks we do not know their age-old tactics, however we are going to debunk the whole thing now, for they no longer hold clout to scare us on what they report.

The Law and its Oppressive Nature

You see, people most of the time, because white supremacy has enforced it this way, fail to distinguish the difference between law and justice. But the truth of the matter is that Roman-Dutch law has always been unjust, instead it is used as a tool of oppression wherever it has been implemented. Slavery was legal, lynching blacks was legal, apartheid was legal, so was killings in the 1960 massacre and 1976 uprising. By no means did it make this just. Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe taught us that you cannot implement an unjust law justly.

It is by the same logic today that the students have taken to protest, because the laws that are always used to oppress blacks are yet again prevailing. Laws that allow whites to keep 87% of the land, laws that allow whites to still keep 95% of the economy in their hands, laws that allow whites to commodify education and make it de facto inaccessible to blacks, whom they are shunning out of the economy. The same laws that by these stances, have allowed the dehumanisation of blacks through landlessness and poverty, to continue unabated and yet are ironically hailed by the world as the “most progressive” constitution (of course the world in this case means white world, Europe, which sees nothing wrong with the systematic oppression of blacks).

So we are not going to be dictated to by oppressive laws – which are in place to protect our oppressors – on what to do, how to go about and how to behave in freeing ourselves from the oppression that is maintained by the very same laws. It must be understood that only revolutionary law reigns in our cause and nothing else.

Media Bias

The bias of the media is nothing new, it has been prevalent for centuries and it prompted this analysis by Mark Twain: “Do not read the newspaper and you are uninformed, read the newspaper and you are misinformed.”

The media has always been an outlet of dispensing propaganda to twist public opinion to favour the owners of media outlets who are the ruling class, that is obviously white (Tony O’Reilly media empire comes to mind). This is why on Wednesday the 19th October 1977 the apartheid government issued a law yet again, that banned black consciousness groups and media houses; so their undiluted propaganda could prevail in painting them as just while demonising black people.

Such led Malcolm X to brand the media as the most powerful entity in the world, for they have the power to make the innocent look guilty and the guilty look innocent. Students must therefore not be surprised when white media houses and publications label them as savages, uncivilised, violent and whatever else. They are only continuing a job they have been doing for centuries in dispensing propaganda that attempts to justify black oppression.

On Violence

When Maximillen Robespierre speaks on the execution of Louis XVI after the 1789 French revolution, he states beautifully that Regicide (the killing of a king) is not justified by showing that the king committed some crime against the people. The very existence of a king is a transgression against the freedom of humanity; therefore the violence of the people against a monarchy is always defensive.

White supremacy is a monarchy unto blackness, feeding off blackness to sustain itself very much like Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette’s monarchy sustained itself on the back of French peasants in the late 1700s. Therefore we needn’t justify any action we take against white supremacy in any form, because the very existence of white supremacy is a transgression not only to the freedom, but to the very humanness of blacks. Any action taken by blacks against white supremacy is defensive; and by that stance it is already just and justified.

The second part is that whites have no moral ground speaking about non-violence, when white supremacy is the most violent thing the world has known. It is whites who killed over 200 million blacks during the course of slavery, through the most brutal methods known to mankind. It is white people who used black babies as alligator bait, made human leather from the skin of blacks, castrated blacks, burned them, had them ripped apart by stallions running in opposite directions (depicted in the Levi Strauss – Levi’s logo). The same whites who chopped up blacks and buried them in mass graves during apartheid, who shot at unarmed students, who threw people out of skyscrapers and labelled it suicide. Why must the very same people speak about non-violence? Who are they? When they have wiped out whole tribes off the face of the earth in the Americas and Australasia. Today they say they are going to Australia where the population is 90% white precisely because they found Aboriginal Australians and wiped them to near extinction; even issuing hunting licences permitting the hunting of the Aborigines until as recent as 1975.

We will not be told by whites how to behave in freeing ourselves from their oppression, or how to unleash black anger from generations of oppressed forefathers crying for justice in their graves.

Lastly, we do not owe whites forgiveness. It is our onus to forgive or not to forgive, and we will not forgive until our land and economy is back in our hands. Even then, we still are not obliged to forgive, for we learn from Maximillen Robespierre yet again that to punish oppressors of humanity is clemency, to forgive them is cruelty. Why must we then be cruel to humanity when we can serve restorative justice? We will decide then!

Conclusion

Whiteness must be very afraid, because black anger will reach boiling point in the not-so-distant future. We will mete out justice on a grand scale, revolutionary justice. That white boy in a corsa bakkie who drove into students at Empire road in an attempt to run them over was beaten up to send a message that white bodies are not above the violence that white supremacy metes out to blacks on a daily basis in all its structural and institutionalised forms and states. The students prayed for him and his vehicle in charismatic fashion to exorcise him from the grip of the demon of white arrogance that made him think he could just run over black students because in his worldview of whiteness black people are no different from chimpanzees. This is why whites as late as the 1960s still kept human zoos. However, we will exorcise this demon, the charismatic power of revolution is on course and no one is above it. No demon of whiteness shall stand in its way, for each and every one that attempts to stand in the way shall be guillotined.

By Yamkela Fortune Spengane
(I am a very angry black. Sick and tired of the brutalisation of my people by a system of people who fancy themselves to be more human than we are)