Sipho Singiswa, in his piece (“Andile Mngxitama’s inconsistency and the politics of denigration and opportunism”), reveals his mental state as a captive to whiteness. He lunges blindly, like a Mandingo, towards his opponent — terrified more of his slave master than of the black figure of his manufactured rage. In this ugly spectacle, the man sees things that never happened.
He imagines his opponent running away from the police, while he stands firmly, hiding behind his camera, proclaiming majestic feats on the battlefield. That does not seem to satisfy his injured psyche; he delves into history and regales us with tales of heroism on Robben Island.
With his white wife goading him on, whispering of sins committed by a black man against white flesh — a product of her colonial master’s imagination — the two conjure up bodies of white women lying prone in my wake. Did Fanon not warn about the psychosis of the white woman in the face of a real black man?
What moved Singiswa into this blind rage? He is overperforming for his wife, on whose behalf he makes battle. My sin? To have denounced the profession of his wife, which is about the appropriation of black pain to make money and a name. I have generally ignored their obsession with me. It is as if they believe I occupy, in the public imagination, a place so deserving of their shared image.
Singiswa thought he had found a vulnerability in my consistent Black Consciousness armour. I made a short critical contribution to a book by a white woman, Kim Heller, entitled White Privilege, Black Pain: The Power of Race in Democratic South Africa.
His wife believes Heller is encroaching on her business turf of black pain. Unfortunately for Singiswa, his attack on me is empty. Biko was not diminished from writing for a paper edited by a white liberal, Donald Woods. Try another angle, boet.
Whiteness always needs black assistants. The colonialists had their native assistants; so too were there slave catchers. Often, the assistant is in a deeper slave cage than those they hunted. That practice continues to this day.
Singiswa and I have no business fighting white women’s battles. The brother needs to be liberated from the embrace of whiteness that comes as tender love.
I will not go into the unethical business model they are both practising. A beautiful, talented black brother perished in a tragic fall from a cliff during filming. These doyens of ostensibly black liberation kept their eyes on the cash register and forgot to secure the filming site — or were they cutting corners with the production budget to ensure bigger profits?
We buried a young black man with heavy hearts. The two collected prizes drenched in the blood of a black man. That is what stands out in our minds when we see them. Justice for our brother is still outstanding. As we say in isiXhosa, ityala aliboli!
Andile Mngxitama is the author of the essay Blacks Can’t Be Racist.
We buried a young black man with heavy hearts. The two collected prizes drenched in the blood of a black man. That is what stands out in our minds when we see them. Justice for our brother is still outstanding. As we say in isiXhosa, ityala aliboli!