Hartford: Why we need to unite against global forces seeking SA’s chaos and division

As South Africa stands on the brink of political transformation, the echoes of its colonial past reverberate through the streets. Last week's election marked a watershed moment, stirring fears and hopes alike. The ANC, a once-unifying force, now faces unprecedented challenges, and the country watches as a handful of political leaders navigate a fraught path. The nation's fate hangs in the balance, with the "national question" of what the South African people truly want and need is resurfacing with renewed urgency..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here..By Dirk Hartford.If you think we're on a knife edge, spare a thought for the Americans up to November or the whole of Western Europe in the next few years, and know we're not alone. .___STEADY_PAYWALL___.For us in SA, people are saying rightly that last week's election was the most momentous time ever..Everything that the country's colonial history represents is moving towards some reckoning in the next few generations. We are blessed to be on the cusp of it..Many have wisely feared the consequences of what would happen if the ANC lost the elections. Because it alone has held "the people" together..What comes next? Who knows? We are in a moment when about 20 to 30 people—SA's crop of major political leaders—are going to decide our fate in the next few days..Yes, we know they all have "mandates", but we expect them to be genuine leaders of all the South African people now. But who exactly are the SA people?.In the broad church of the ANC and all its current iterations (including but not limited to the PAC, Group of 8, UDM, COPE, Gayton McKenzie, Marxist Workers Tendency, Cosatu, SACP, Sanco, EFF, ACT, RET faction and by no means least Jacob Zuma's MK) the "national question" has been the trope of the liberation struggle from at least the 1950s till now..Just when everyone in the "national democratic forces" thought the "national question" had been settled by the deal struck 30 years ago, it is raising its head again dramatically..Historically, the "national question" sought to answer, under conditions of extreme colonial/apartheid oppression, who the SA nation actually was..From its inception 112 years ago, the ANC, the oldest liberation movement on the continent, sought to gather the various black tribes in SA under one banner to talk to their white colonial/apartheid oppressors with one African voice..The ANC was a profoundly conservative and middle-class organisation all those years, humbly petitioning their colonial masters – until the likes of Mandela and the ANC Youth League came along in the 1950s..So, when the 1955 Freedom Charter was adopted by the ANC nearly 70 years ago, it represented a profound and radical shift..Not least because it declared boldly in its opening lines the revolutionary vision – "We, the People of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know: that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people"..From then on, the "national question" in the liberation struggle took on the symbolic meaning of being a "national, democratic struggle" for a "non-racial democratic" South Africa..It was not easy to see how this was to be done and what it would look like in the future after generations of white domination. However, Mandela's ANC achieved power in 1994 based on that vision..Now, it appears the only people vigorously championing a non-racial democratic line in word and deed these days are the DA. This irony throws the "national question" into sharp relief again..Of course, everyone is still theoretically non-racial and at pains, like the EFF, to display the handful of white supporters they have to the social media feeding troughs as testimony of this..But today, the ANC, the alma mater of all these organisations, has a handful (less than 10) of minorities in its 100-strong NEC leadership..In 30 years, it has almost gone back to its pre-1985 roots. It feels like a black African nationalist organisation to most white, coloured and Indian ANC comrades of yore..Democratic Africans, whites, coloureds and Indians were organised separately under the banner of the "national democratic struggle against racist oppression" right up until the 90's.White, coloured and Indian comrades were only allowed to join the ANC itself officially from 1985..Nevertheless, the 80s and 90s were the high points of the Freedom Charter's non-racial democratic future ideal..South African minorities were disproportionally represented in the ANC alliance's liberation struggle precisely because they were separately organised minorities..Up until then, the forces arraigned against the apartheid regime had voluntarily organised themselves in their already apartheid-made racial brigades in alliance with each other. – the Coloured People's Congress, the Natal Indian Congress, the white Congress of Democrats, etc.The formation of the UDF itself in the 80s was a result of the coming together of all these balkanised/bantustanised forces under apartheid against the racist oppressor (in the language of those times)..The Freedom Charter was then and remains the lodestar of the entire African national liberation struggle against the colonialism/apartheid forces of the past few centuries. .Revisit the Freedom Charter now as a kind of psychic archetype embedded in the struggle for "national liberation"; for the "national democratic revolution", for a "non-racial democratic future", for a SA who belongs to all, "black and white"..It's much more radical than some might imagine. This is the subliminal image of the "people" (of the ANC and all its surrogates gathered together by this moment), and it's been amplified dramatically by MK, especially right now..Its very idea of the "people" or the "nation" constituting a "non-racial democratic" future is under siege. Tribalism, racism, ethnicism, traditionalism, wokeism etc etc are on the rise..Zuma, aided and abetted by Russian intelligence especially, has catalysed Zulu nationalism (apparently 95% of his votes were Zulu), as well as churches, traditional leaders, mafias, minority gangsters and many of those feeling victimised by the "system"..Not to mention his existing powerful sympathisers in the existing ANC alliance..Gayton McKenzie's PA's outstanding campaign has also helped put "Coloured" back on the map. Not being white enough under apartheid and black enough in the ANC's non-racialism, the "Coloureds" fell off the table. The PA is helping change that perception..The DA and FF+ have represented well enough for the minorities, especially the white minority..However, the DA cannot be the champion of the "non-racial democratic" ideal of the ANC and its surrogates. It is an ideal born from the black struggle against racial oppression.The idea of an ANC coalition with the DA, the symbolic representative of white oppression in these circumstances, is much harder to grasp for the ANC than one with its errant siblings (MK) and children (EFF)..But it is the best hope for Cyril Ramaphosa's ANC, which could split again anytime around these issues if it is to be about the constitution and a united, non-racial democratic South Africa..Knowing how fragile and loaded the very idea of a "non-racial democratic" future could potentially become if "ethnic nations" start coalescing politically, Ramaphosa's ANC must seize the moment again as Mandela's ANC did in 1994..What we should continue to represent in a divided world is that we, as one of the most diverse and multicultural countries on earth, can unite against local and global forces that seek chaos and division..Read also:.Rob Hersov: Release the beast – there is a way out of our ANC-ruled morass🔒 RW Johnson: Cyril's GNU won't work, his dithering already hitting SA hard, costing jobsMashaba doubles down on 'Rainbow Nation' dream of SA overcoming race-based politics

Hartford: Why we need to unite against global forces seeking SA’s chaos and division

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