The Azanian Delusion, the Mzansian reality

One of the most fantastic ironies of the black radicals in South Africa is their tendency to embrace ideas inherited from Europe. Racial nationalism, leftism and Azania.

Azania was an old Greek epithet referring to the Cushitic lands south of Abyssinia (Ethiopia), before the Bantu expansion crushed and dispersed them. Not only do black radicals seek to use a European word for their country, they are borrowing it from the name of a territory their ancestors eviscerated thousands of years ago before they even showed up in the Southern climes. I for one, am all for a change to the name of our nation, but I tend to favour the name the ordinary people use to refer to it – eMzansi, simply meaning the southland. But I am staunchly against giving into the demands of the genocidally-bent boiler-suit bandits in the EFF, or their Hutu Power colleagues in the BLF and PAC.

These fellows are, like many of the previous iterations of “black liberation” in Africa, alumni of elite Western universities, full of high-minded ideology, childish egotism and base race hatred. For me, the most delicious irony is that the the name of Azania is also the name given to the fictional black republic spawned by an Oxford alumnus in Evelyn Waugh’s 1932 novel Black Mischief. In this book, wealthy and politically privileged reprobate from a wealthy native family and his radical English friend return home to enact the fancy ideas they learned from the British academy. After wrecking his home country through high minded ideas, cronyism and incompetence, it falls to foreign powers and religious leaders, and finally collapses and becomes a United Nations mandate. While Emperor Seth is no socialist, the cartoonish manner in which he is depicted and the depravity of the African aristocratic circle make for just as queasy reading as any African postcolonial history.

Of course, anybody who has read a line or two of modern African history knows what happens when the socialists get in – slavery, slaughter, repression and starvation, followed by collapse or war, and a UN mandate. Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Burkina Faso and Somalia have all made the same stupid mistakes. And lest anybody become tempted to reach for the old tikpyp of WMC conspiracies, it is worth remembering that the Americans supported Somalia’s totalitarian Socialist regime against Ethiopia’s (much like how they supported Batista’s Communist Party in Cuba). It didn’t collapse because of outside intervention, it collapsed in spite of it. And all their political ideas were “Africanised” versions of ideas taken from Europe – Marx, Lenin, Hoxha, and so on. Even the lauded Fanon was not an African, but a Black Westerner, whose ideas were so firmly planted in the European Continental tradition he wouldn’t  know his umnqundu from an umqombothi.

The bizarre thing about these intellectual types in black nationalist movements is just how detached they are from the everyday realities of their own people. There is no talk about the need to provide data and financial services for the informal sector and how to integrate them into the tax system, and there is no discussion of security in public spaces. The big ticket is jobs, because they look at the official stats (which don’t account for the informal sector), and believe that this explains everything. They have made the fatal flaw of believing that facts speak for themselves, the classic error of the academic. Jobs and the spiteful redistribution of wealth, racial vengeance for historical sleights – this is the currency of the fascist, the black-national-socialist, all backed up by endless parrot-quotes from three decades-old statistical ledgers and crusty and mendacious black nationalist pamphlets from yesteryear.

On the ground, while people may be angry, they have little patience for political parties. They’s heard the promise of the coming kingdom, and know that it will not be arriving for them any time soon. But many of our fellow countrymen have lifted themselves out of the kind of abject poverty that was normal thirty years ago. What they want now is functioning services, security and quality education. And they know as well as the old whiteys do that the EFF is even less likely to deliver that than the ANC. But an intellectual can make themselves believe anything, and so those with an internet addiction have busied themselves scapegoating white people or furiously pointing out the flaws in other political parties as if that changes the fact that their lunch on election day is a shit sandwich.

And no ordinary South African calls the country Azania, that’s for sure. They recognise it for the loony bullshit that it is. But plenty call it Mzansi (whether you prefix it with e- or kwa-). Frankly, I would be happy, no, enthusiastic, to change our name to that, and live under the auspicious sign of a name chosen organically through everyday use. Neither South Africa nor Azania are products of the aspirations or the habits and daily rituals of the ordinary resident. And the black nationalists who wish to erase national differences to create a single, English-speaking race of “blacks”, an identity cast in the crucible of colonial ignorance, do not speak to them either, which is why they remain at a stubbornly low 9%.