Black Lives Matter Movement In Africa

Black Lives Matter Movement In Africa

“Those who help to perpetuate white supremacy are the enemies of the people, even if they are black, while those who oppose all forms of racism form part of the people irrespective of their colour.”

In 1997, while serving as President of a newly democratic South Africa and confronting the resilience of apartheid and colonial patterning, Mandela said,”We have not fallen from heaven into this new South Africa; we all come crawling from the mud of a deeply racially divided past.

And as we go towards that brighter future and stumble on the way, it is incumbent upon each of us to pick the other up and mutually cleanse ourselves.” 

He was signalling that oppressive systems are not manifested excusively in the formal instruments of power, and warning that oppressive pasts will live on unless they are reckoned with tirelessly and consciously.

Slavery lives on in the United States in the form of racialized predictive policing, the mass incarceration of African American men, the killing of George Floyd and many others by law enforcement officers over the years, the disproportionate vulnerability of African American communities to COVID-19, and so on.

White supremacy is alive and well in the United States. It is also alive and well in South Africa. Apartheid lives on in the form of black lives not mattering to representatives and structures of the State, deepening inequality, the killing of Collins Khoza and others by law enforcement officers, the tolerance of a reality in which one in four black six-year-olds suffer from malnutrition and stunting, and so on.

Racism is that apparatus of power which excludes and in other ways oppresses black people and people of colour. It is an apparatus that takes many forms; it is fluid and adaptive; it is everywhere and nowhere; it can be wielded consciously or unconsciously; and, as Mandela argued, it can also be perpetuated by black people.

Nelson Mandela, President of the Republic of South Africa, addressing the fifty-third session of the General Assembly. 21 September 1998. United Nations, New York. UN Photo/Greg Kinch Nelson Mandela, President of the Republic of South Africa, addressing the fifty-third session of the General Assembly. 21 September 1998. United Nations, New York. UN Photo/Greg Kinch

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