ANC Eastern Cape provincial secretary Oscar Mabuyane told me in a post-election interview that coloured people in the two metros in the province voted with the conservative (read: racist) white minority because they could not bring themselves to accept the ANC’s non-racism. I was one of them. Firstly, let me state, I am not a member of a coloured minority. I am a member of a black majority.
That fact of racial self-identity is rooted in the evolution of political thinking in the 70s as Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement held sway in many townships.
In 1969, 14 years after the commitment to non-racism adopted in the Freedom Charter, qualified membership of the ANC in exile was opened to congress alliance members regardless of race.
It was at this moment that nonAfricans like Joe Slovo, Yusuf Dadoo and Reg September, communists all, came to represent a different, multiracial face to the ANC.
But it was only in 1985 that the ANC completely opened its membership to all races, influenced by a communist proposal on the subject, according to Stephen Ellis.
Given the contested history of the ANC as a non-racial political movement, current party leaders’ racialised – and racist – reductionism of voting patterns may not actually be that astounding.
My refusal to vote for the ANC has bugger-all to do with my supposed or legally attributed race.
It has to do with my real concerns about a range of issues that, I believe, the ANC has failed to address – neo-racism within the ruling party being one of them. This is Part 1 of a two-part series. See tomorrow’s Daily Dispatch for Part 2.
Special kind of non-racism
That fact of racial self-identity is rooted in the evolution of political thinking in the 70s as Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement held sway in many townships.
In 1969, 14 years after the commitment to non-racism adopted in the Freedom Charter, qualified membership of the ANC in exile was opened to congress alliance members regardless of race.
It was at this moment that nonAfricans like Joe Slovo, Yusuf Dadoo and Reg September, communists all, came to represent a different, multiracial face to the ANC.
But it was only in 1985 that the ANC completely opened its membership to all races, influenced by a communist proposal on the subject, according to Stephen Ellis.
Given the contested history of the ANC as a non-racial political movement, current party leaders’ racialised – and racist – reductionism of voting patterns may not actually be that astounding.
My refusal to vote for the ANC has bugger-all to do with my supposed or legally attributed race.
It has to do with my real concerns about a range of issues that, I believe, the ANC has failed to address – neo-racism within the ruling party being one of them. This is Part 1 of a two-part series. See tomorrow’s Daily Dispatch for Part 2.
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