Barbecue Critique of Mandela at Gunpoint by Frank B. Wilderson III

The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#12, JUNE-AUGUST/2014

Two Afrikaner policemen were in the lane, standing next to their car as we approached Richard’s house. It had been raining. Richard cursed as he saw them and drew up to the front so fast that he splashed their pants with mud. They were furious. Furious White cops, I thought, in sheer terror, furious and drunk. One of them hurled curses at us in Afrikaans. Richard and Botsotso hurled curses back in Zulu. The cops drew their guns. Botsotso was sitting in the backseat – passenger side – in the middle was Khanya, and I was behind Richard, the driver. Botsotso leaned across both Khanya and me and, following Richard’s lead, stuck his gun out the window. Insults ricocheted back and forth. Khanya and I were the only ones who seemed terrified. The police, the tsosis, and Shirley thought it was all quite normal.

Suddenly, and for reasons beyond my comprehension, it was over. The police got in their car and drove off. Botsotso and Richard climbed out of the car laughing their heads off. I was shaken but determined not to appear shaken. We went to the backyard, broke out the beer, and put steaks and chicken on the grill. The meat sizzled succulently as more and more people arrived. There were bus drivers, nurses, gangsters, and students. I marveled at this eclectic gathering and at how little my middle class, Kenwood, and Darthmouth College training had prepared me for it.

The streetlights in Soweto where Richard lived were three stories high. They rained down harsh garish beams on the residents like prison seachlights. As evening settled over Richard’s backyard, most of the people left. Seven or eight diehards took the braai inside. We were all a little tipsy as we arranged ourselves in Richard’s living room: Khanya, her cousin Shirley, Mpo, and one or two others. Richard, Botsotso, a couple of other men and me. When the conversation turned to politics the women went into the kitchen. They carried on a soft but animated conversation in Pedi or Setswana as they sat at the kitchen table, while the men talked about the Defiance Campaign which was sweeping north from Cape Town, and argued about whether or not F.W. de Klerk could really dethrone P.W. Botha. I felt a slight unease. It was an inner tension, mine. There was an outer tension, theirs. The source of their tension revealed itself in short order.

Khanya had remained seated in the living room. Not only was she still in the living room, but she was drinking Richard’s good liquor with even greater alacrity than Botsotso, his own henchman. And, as regards the discussion, she was debating with the best of them, providing as much political analysis and as many cold hard facts about the Defiance Campaign as anyone in the room. Every so often Richard’s eyes flashed at Botsotso. Botsotso mirrored his boss’s exasperation. Khanya was oblivious to it all. She continued to hold forth. She explained why it was necessary for mortgage loan boycotts to run coterminous with rent boycotts. This, she pointed out, would force the cautious and conservative Black bourgeoisie to be carried along by the militant energy of the Black working class and not vice versa. And it would bring landlords and the government to the table more quickly. She said that P.W. Botha could afford to sacrifice a few landlords but a mortgage boycott would affect the banking industry more directly and would bring the economy nearer to a stock market meltdown – and bring us that much closer to victory. It was a brilliant analysis and it would have carried a heretofore-anecdotal debate forward, if not for the fact that Richard had grown cold and silent.

“Botsotso,” he said, as he kept his eyes on me.

“Yebo, induna,” Botsotso said, respectfully.

“Did I tell you I lived in Harlem for three years?”

“Many times, induna.” I braced myself.

Richard had studied in New York to be a dentist. When he got back to South Africa, the apartheid government wouldn’t let him practice. Well, he had thought, if I can’t be a dentist, I’ll fix them, I’ll show them, I’ll become a smuggler instead.

“Now, Botsotso.”

“Yebo, induna.”

“Remember what I said about the Black man in America – about his problem?”

“Some of us should hear it again, induna.”

Richard thrust his drunken face closer to mine and said, “He can’t control his woman.”

I laughed at this. It was a nervous, fitful laugh but he thought I was laughing at him. No one else laughed, not even Khanya. But something in the laughter may have emboldened her for she launched into a long attack on African men and their lack of appreciation for the contributions of African women to the liberation struggle. The more she spoke, the more tentative I became. I felt that she and I were in a paper canoe being pulled toward the falls.

Richard was standing now, looking down at both of us. If he hits her I’m going to have to fight him which means I’m going to die. Even if I could take him, Botsotso would jump in and that skinny guy with the dreads sitting in the corner too- it’ll be three against one. What am I doing in this country?

Richard and Khanya were yelling at each other. She shook her finger in his face. I thought the walls would burst apart at any moment. I finally made an interjection that was heard: “What she’s saying is true, Richard, and you’d know it if you’d read The Handbook for the Black Revolution.” That stumped him. I am only now beginning to understand what really stumped him. It was not the authority of a foreigner who “could not control his woman.” Nor was it the reasoned and well-informed arguments of an African woman, her status as a law student notwithstanding. It was the authority of a book. For most of his life he had sweated and toiled at his kitchen table in the township while other boys were out playing soccer. He’d been studious, steadfast in his conviction that books held a mystical, emancipatory power that can break the shackles over apartheid. But it wasn’t true. He’d found far more freedom in six years of gunplay than he had in sixteen years of study. Nonetheless, the truth of guns had not shaken his faith in books. For he was still a traditional intellectual at heart. So the mention of a “handbook” which he had not read, and which challenged his basic assumptions, gave him pause.

“What handbook?” he said.

“The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon,” I said.

He regained his balance and was about to run roughshod over me when the silent dreadlocked man in the corner said, “Let him speak.”

The room quieted. Botsotso looked at Richard. Richard looked at the slight but able-bodied man in the corner, who was no more than twenty-five years old, a good twenty years younger than Richard. A cultural axiom (a youth does not order an elder about) had been trumped . . . but why, I wondered. Who is this young man and who is he to Richard? Now, we could hear the soft jazz music from the phonograph that was heretofore drowned out by the roar of argument.

“I’d like to hear his views on Frantz Fanon,” the young man said.

“Sure, Jabu,” Richard said, “why not. Go ahead, m’china,” he said to me, “speak.”

Having taught Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, as well as The Wretched of the Earth, I was in my element and all too happy to hold forth in the same way that Khanya had held forth. When I paused, Jabu said, “What, tactically, would Fanon advise in this dispensation; say, for the Defiance Campaign?”

“I don’t know if he’d advise anything, he was a theorist not a tactician. But I know what he’d want.”

“And that is?”

“For Nelson Mandela to be released immediately from prison.” Everyone cheered and raised their fists, including the women in the kitchen, who had moved to the threshold to get a glimpse. It was as though the fight in the living room hadn’t happened. They were all happy, in agreement, ready to forget the “woman question” and the question of “weak” Black American men and to celebrate the fantasy of Mandela’s release.

“And then he should die,” I said, “of natural causes, of course. But quickly, before he can do the revolution any damage.”

Suddenly the sea changed. The room howled curses of anger and indignation at me. Even the women in the kitchen were enraged. Richard and Botsotso leapt to their feet. Khanya was wide-eyed and sober-torn between her affection for me and anger. Well, there goes your chance with her.

But Jabu was neither angry nor enthused. “Let him finish,” he said, soberly, to Richard and Botsotso who were threatening to kill me lest I leave the house that minute. Richard protested. But Jabu raised his hand. “Let him finish,” he said.

I told them that apartheid was no longer the problem; liberalism was the problem, laissez-faire White supremacy was the problem. Though it was clear that Mandela wanted an end to apartheid, it should also be clear that he would not help people like Chris Hani or Winnie Mandela usher in a socialist state. “How do you know?” retorted Botsotso indignantly, “Have you been visiting him in prison?” I said that all anyone had to do was read the symptoms of his letters to the world; those bits of pieces of his thought that have reached us from Robben Island. “The man’s a Christian and a lawyer; that’s the worst combination,” I said. “From what I’ve heard from him, he’d take a jaundiced view toward rent strikes and mortgage loan boycotts. Sure, he’s against apartheid, but how radical is that? It’s like saying you’re against starvation or torture. Hardly the grist of revolutionary thought.”

“So, you’re Mandela’s pen pal,” Richard laughed, and so did everyone else. “Tell us what his mail says m’china.”

“It’s not what’s in the letter that counts,” I said, “it’s who it’s to: none of his letters are written to anyone in this room. They’re written to liberals for a liberal consensus. His letters say we should have the right to eat in Hillbrow if we want to eat in Hillbrow. We should live in the suburbs if we can afford to live in the suburbs. But whatever we do we should go to work, pay our taxes, and get the same gold watch the Whites get at the end. He wants a White state with a Black face. Is that liberation?”

“You’re lying!” said Botsotso.

“So what’s the truth if I’m lying?”

“You can’t come to our country and slander our leaders!” he blurted out.

“You’re moving the goal posts.”

Richard now sat forward on the edge of his chair and put his hand on Botsotso’s arm as if to say, let me handle this. He shook his finger at me and the ice knocked about in the glass he held in his other hand as his drink almost spilled on the floor.

“Hey, m’china! You’re talking about a man who’s been locked up for twenty-five years. Who are you, anyway?”

“I’m no one.” The liquor had gone to my head as it had to all of theirs: in my peripheral vision I noticed the women at the kitchen door listening to every word. Khanya touched my arm, as if telling me to come back to shore, these waters are too deep and too dangerous, Frank.

“I’m an uncredentialed kaffir,” I asserted, unheeding Khanya’s hand on my arm, “just like you, Richard.”

Richard rose to his feet, his fists balled. I thought he was going to drive his fist through my skull. But the young man with dreads said, “You’re suggesting we struggle to free Madiba from prison and then kill him once he’s released – I’d like to understand the analysis behind such a provocative statement.”

Richard was stymied by the question, and curious to boot, so much so that he sat back down. Still, he managed to thrust a finger in my direction and say, “We should kill him!”

“You’re being provocative,” I said to Jabu, ignoring Richard’s latest ballot initiative, “needlessly provocative.”

“Am I?” Jabu smiled, as though he alone knew where this would lead.

“I didn’t say we should kill Mandela. I said it would be nice if he died of natural causes. He would be of great service to the revolution – dead. Just as he’s of great service to us now – in prison.”

“So, he’d be an asset to the Boers if were out of prison and lived too long?” said Jabu.

“Yes, but more to the Brits than to the Boers; and even more to US style ‘liberal democracy’ than to the local Brits. Mandela will ripen the terrain for the ‘peaceful’ invasion of US multinational corporations. The Boers aren’t the problem.”

Botsotso was incredulous: “The Boers aren’t the problem, he says.” He motioned to Richard as he spoke, as if to say: I vote ‘yes’ on the referendum to take him out back and beat the shit out of him. “So those weren’t Boers waiting for us when we arrived this afternoon? Those aren’t Boers driving through Soweto sjamboking children and shooting at us?”

“The world is changing, Botsotso. The Afrikaner’s hard line is isolating him. The sjambokings, the shootings – you’ll long for those days if Mandela is allowed to usher in a liberal consensus.”

“One of my professors says the English are as angry at the Afrikaner as the Blacks,” noted Khanya.

“Yes,” I said, and I felt how the sway of the room had shifted in my favor. It could not be registered at the level of agreement, not even the curious man in the corner had shown any signs of alliance with either me or the blasphemous oracle from which I read; but they all had shifted from aggression to curiosity, which meant that I had been granted the power to pose the question. And the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all. “But your English professor is not vexed with the Boer for the same reasons you or I are vexed with the Boer. Your professor is troubled by his own exclusion from a cosmopolitan West, not with your degradation at the hands of the state. Apartheid has isolated the Brits in this country culturally, intellectually, and economically, but most of all, at the level of esprit de corps from the rest of the Western world. In other words, he doesn’t want to be the only White of Africa; he wants to be a member of a global whiteness, the enlightened and cosmopolitan Whiteness of Europe and America.”

“According to your theory,” said Jabu, reflectively, but with a pinch of skepticism, either because he was skeptical or because he did not want to tip his hand at too great an angle toward mine. “Nelson Mandela is the White English liberal’s only hope, not only for the rejuvenation of finance capital but for the stabilization of a more subtle, nuanced and, what you seem to be describing as international, form of White supremacy.”

“That’s it in a nutshell.”

“Is there anyone in our movement who you approve of,” said Jabu, “since you disapprove of Madiba?”

“Chris Hani. Winnie Mandela.”

“Anyone else?”

“You.” This made him smile. “Khanya. Shirley. Mpo. The other women in the kitchen. Botsotso. Even Richard.”

“A little late to be licking arse, m’china,” Richard sneered and poured himself another drink.

“I’m not licking ass. I didn’t say I liked you. I said I approved of you, politically. I’m making an analysis. Despite your reverence for Nelson Mandela, he would hardly approve of you. Chris Hani and Winnie Mandela may be the only people with Nelson Mandela’s stature, but who aren’t manacled by his vision. Their leadership is essential to a political project that Fanon would be devoted to; one that could validate and mobilize the energy and split-second analysis that sprung from Khanya when she decided to stay right here in this living room and enlighten us as to the importance of a mortgage loan boycott as well as a rent strike instead of going quietly to the kitchen. Mandela would have paid lip service to Khanya’s actions, told you two to put your guns away, and he damn sure wouldn’t support a mortgage loan boycott or the meltdown of the stock market.”

Richard appealed to Jabu, “Do you believe this non-sense?”

“It’s a theory,” said Jabu.

“Voetsek! I want him and his talking-woman out of my house!”

“Your words could precipitate internecine conflict within the ANC,” said Jabu. There’s always that danger.”

“The conflict already exists – my words would just make me a scapegoat.”

“But, still, we don’t want in-fighting in the ANC,” said Khanya.

“I don’t want in-fighting either,” I said. “But it seems to me that a struggle for hegemony is inevitable. It’s either our ANC or it’s their ANC. We can’t very well share it.”

“Nor should we kill Madiba,” said Botsotso.

“You’re twisting my words again!” I said. “What I said was that if he’s released from prison he’ll use his biblical stature to sanctify an accommodationist stance through which cosmetic changes would be heralded as essential changes – and the revolution would be up shit’s creek! We need his legacy but we don’t need him.”

In the kombi from Soweto back to Braamfontein Khanya was still unnerved by the way I’d spoken about Nelson Mandela. It wa not my analysis that disturbed her, for my analysis had simply built upon what she’d said about rent strikes and mortgage loan boycotts as means of mobilization. Rather, she shared, with Richard and the others (except Jabu who never showed his hand), a feeling that whereas Mandela’s ideas could be debated, Mandela the man was sacred.

“You talk like he’s your father,” I scoffed.

Her anger at my cavalier response prompted her to say: “He is my father!” But the look in her eyes that immediately followed was one of regret and embarrassment at her outburst.

We were silent as we walked from the kombi rank on Bree street up the hill to her dormitory at the University of the Witwatersrand. The air was cool but not too cold for a midwinter’s night in July and the moon was high and glistening. It was a perfect night for love. But love, I feared, was not in the air. To my surprise we kissed goodnight and promised to meet the next day.

Excerpted from Frank B. Wilderson III, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile & Aparteid, (South End Press, 2008) pp.104-112.