I remember at the 3^rd national Students Assembly in July this year the CIC and President of the Economic Freedom Fighters Julius Malema saying “we are not ready for a woman’s command”. The CIC also said we may need it in future, but we are not ready for it right now. I would like to disagree with the CIC when it comes to that.  I don’t think we are not ‘ready’ for a woman’s command. I think we DON’T need it at all. Many of the experiences black women face are not subsumed within the traditional boundaries of race and class discrimination as these boundaries are currently understood, the intersection of gender and patriarchy factors into women’s lives in ways that can’t be captured completely if we look at race, gender/sexism/patriarchy, and class separately. We need to look at them together. In its early formation the EFF was regarded as a highly masculine movement, however the EFF’s internal political will to achieve gender parity becomes a remarkable achievement. The EFF is also a political party that has the word ‘women’ appear the most in its manifesto this year. The representation of Black women is also seen in the party structures at national, provincial and regional structures, the EFF has members of staff who are lesbian woman working for them in important sectors of the organization, and there are ground forces who are LGBT leading in the organization without intimidation from members. There are even EFF Members of Parliament who’ve worked for the movement since its formation who are openly queer!

My objective in this article is not to say that the establishment of the EFF Womens’ Command is a bad idea and should be rejected in its entirety, but it’s to highlight that everything that the Womens’ Command intends to do or will be established to do is already being done by women in the EFF and EFFSC. Equally, history and context determines the effectiveness of identity politics! But that’s a discussion for another day.

The EFF constitution adopted at Mangaung in 2014 states the following in relation to Woman’s Command:

1. The EFF Women Command shall be the women’s wing of the Economic Freedom Fighters which organises women under the banner of Economic Freedom in our Lifetime and primarily guided by the EFF’s constitution, policies and resolutions.

2. The Women’s Command shall be autonomous, yet integral part of the EFF, in that it shall have its own constitution, programs, activities and campaigns and be a legal persona.

3. Every woman who is age 18 years and above can be a member of the Women’s Command.

4. Its main objective is to raise the political consciousness of women into understanding that patriarchy is a societal ill and to this end must organise and mobilise women collectively with men if needs be, into ending patriarchy by putting the patriarchal, white-supremacist, capitalist oppression of women to an end.

5. Moreover the purpose of the Women’s Command is to promote the rights of women and in this regard to remove all impediments to their development as full and equal members of society.

Point number 4 is something that the EFF and EFFSC (especially women) have been doing for the past six years since the establishment of the EFF. For example, in 2017 EFF MP Naledi Chirwa, was at a women-only gathering for the anniversary of the Free Sanitary Towel Campaign at the University of Limpopo in April and urged women to remember that their bodies are their own through her “This Is My Vagina” campaign. Chirwa even faced backlash from people who said she was promoting “promiscuity”. What is significant about the “this is my vagina” campaign is that it speaks to not only heterosexual women taking ownership of their bodies but also transgender women. It speaks to sex workers who are constantly violated because of their choice of work. Chirwa has gone to many platforms advocating for the rights of sex workers as well as the decriminalisation of sex work, which is something many other political parties (and their women wings) are tip toeing around. But the work fighter Naledi has done and continues to do in Parliament and in civil society is just the cherry on top.

On the 18^th of April 2019 EFF Gauteng chairperson Mandisa Mashego alongside women of the Central Command Team marched to the Constitutional Court with more than 5000 women to demand justice and dignity for women who have been and continue to be failed by the justice system – from police stations to the courtroom. It was one of the biggest marches of women we’ve seen after #TheTotalShutdown marches last year. Four months later, on the 22^nd of August, commissar Mashego and the Gauteng PCT went on to organise another march, but this time not only to the Con court but to various criminal justice centres including IPID, SAPS, NPA, public protector and the gender commission, demanding retraining of judges and justice for women and children who are victims of gender based violence, sexual harassment and kidnapping. Again this march was one of the most significant marches of women we’ve seen after #TheTotalShutdown.

Now let me go to point number 1 on “the organising of women under the banner of Economic Freedom in our Lifetime”.

In her masters research, black radical feminist and Rhodes University PhD candidate Simamkele Dlakavu speaks on how black women did not join the EFF for inclusion but “have occupied the space and built the movement”. Her Masters titled Asijiki: Black Women in the Economic Freedom Fighters, Owning Space, Building a Movement seeks to “highlight the ways in which Black women constitute the EFF, because too often patriarchy pretends that it does all the labour in movement spaces”. She profile’s women leaders of the EFF such as Naledi Chirwa, TG Leigh-Anne Mathys, DSG Hlengiwe Mkhalipi, commissar Mandisa Mashego  and CCT member commissar Veronica Mente. Her interview with commissar Mente is what stood out for me the most and made me realise that since the beginning EFF women have been mobilising women and they have been working exceptionally well, even better than their male counterparts.

What struck me in the conversation between Mente and Dlakavu is that commissar Veronica Mente was not active in party politics prior to joining the EFF; but in a presentation on the EFF’s outcomes in the local government elections Mente was named as one of the leaders with the best election outcomes, these results are worth applause considering that it was the first time she and the EFF participated in local elections. Which speaks to women mobilising other women because surely commissar saw the need to get more women to vote for the EFF and join it. She further states this in Dlakavu’s thesis when she spoke about the time she went to an EFF meeting in the Western Cape:

“The moment I knew that there is a meeting. I called an all women team, we were five in the car. Women only, that’s just how I roll. Women only, five in the car. We are going to this meeting, we will listen. I don’t want men, because they are going to want to take over. That’s what I hated, I saw men in the ANC, two men are fighting over useless things

[positions]

, [yet] people have no houses. I am like haaaa fok, these men, once they join political parties they don’t even care. Let me take people that I know that they care”-Mente.

So there are women like Commissar Mente, Mam’Khawula, Hlengiwe Mkaliphi, Amanda Mavuso, Nontsikelelo Nkosi, Phiwaba Madokwe, Sharon Letlape, Siyamthanda Dyantyie (Grahamstowns youngest EFF PR Councillor at the age of 23) Mam’Sonti, Yoliswa Yako, Ntokozo Hlonyana, Nonthando Nolutshungu, and many other women in branch leadership positions, in the students command, in provincial and regional positions, in parliament as well as in the Central Command Team who are working immensely to mobilise women to join the EFF.

I remember when we were mobilising students for the public lecture on mental illness where commissar Leigh was expected to speak on the 1^st of August earlier this year here at Rhodes University, there was a women who came up to me and said “yhooo Siya fam please take my number and save it on Whatsapp and then on the day when TG comes remind me early in the morning or after lunch. There is no way I can miss out on hearing her speak, she inspires me. I have learnt a lot from her in the media, I follow her on Twitter. She is just a marvellous person. Please Siya mfethu”. I took her number. I also remember two women who I had met while we were mobilising at St Marys dining hall calling me after the lecture and saying “thank you Siya bruh, thank you to the students command. After this lecture with Leigh we decided we are joining the students command. We just voted for EFF in May and weren’t active, but after that presentation we understand why people find a home in the EFF”. Just following a women leader of the EFF on social media and seeing her in interviews made some people connect with the EFF. They found teachings from her even before meeting her face to face. Just listening to TG lecture on mental illness and the importance of voting, made two other women find a home in the EFFSC and EFF. One thing we must remember comrades is that “organising women under the banner of Economic Freedom in our Lifetime” doesn’t have a manual. The manifesto doesn’t tell women how to do it. They are not guided and directed. Women are just doing it!

Point 5 says that “the purpose of the Women’s Command is to promote the rights of women and in this regard to remove all impediments to their development as full and equal members of society”. Why do we need a Woman’s Command to do this? We can do it as an organisation of men and women and gender non-conforming bodies without having to establish a women’s wing. The EFF can and is already promoting the rights of women. They are doing this in parliament, EFF PR councillors are doing this in council meetings in their municipalities and fighters are doing this in their communities and institutions of higher learning.

Ankiri the EFF is a “Feminist” organisation. Why do we then need a Woman’s Command?

At the Gender Commission of the EFFSC NSA, one of the male fighters said that “we don’t know the EFF’s stance on Feminism”. This was months after the deputy president Floyd Shivambu said in public that the EFF is a Feminist organisation. I was rather perplexed. I really didn’t understand why the fighter would say they don’t know the EFF stance on Feminism when the entire chief whip of the EFF said earlier in the year that it’s a feminist organisation. Anyway…. Comrades also said in the commission that “fighters shouldn’t be scared of coming out”, here he was referring to LGBTQIA+ fighters and them coming out of the ‘closet’. Even then I was a bit confused and was asking myself, konje why do fighters need to “come out”? For who are they coming out? Do we tell heterosexual/straight fighters to come out? Why must we tell gay people to come out if we don’t ask straight people to do the same? These two comments made me realise that it’s not that the EFF doesn’t have a stance on feminism, it’s just that some EFF and EFFSC members lack political education and understanding on the importance of black radical feminism and they don’t understand why, as Chirwa once tweeted, Feminism is Socialism. A political education school is of paramount importance in this organisation and its formation is needed ASAP because many women are forced to deal with fighters who are deliberately ignorant on woman’s issues. These are people who say the most mean things about women on social media, slut shame women in branches and go further to spread lies and victim blame women who are rape survivors. The emotional scars that these men leaves us with is one of the reasons why women just prefer to work for the EFF only if its woman’s gatherings and not be very much vocal in branches because they are triggered by the high misogyny in the branch and they are tired of being “rocks”. Equally we are tired of suffering from depression and having anxiety attacks because of the emotional abuse we are subjected to by men in this movement that we care so much for and have worked for. Emotional abuse from a few men (not majority) who have no respect whatsoever and feel threatened by the female fighter.

Women wings are usually Heterosexual projects and a place for men to use women for their agenda, that’s why I’m not for it.

If we were to have a woman’s command are we ready to have a transgender women as the president of it? Are we ready for a masculine presenting lesbian women to be the chairperson? Are we ready for a Muslim woman from the streets of Boe-Kaap or Manenburg, to be the Secretary General? Are we ready for a differently abled women to be the deputy president? Are we ready for a sex worker to be the Treasurer General? I’m deliberately asking this because as the EFF and especially as women of the EFF we are not entirely intersectional in our politics and comrades if we don’t put intersectionality at the forefront of this woman’s command, it will be a flip flop.

I’m more concerned about what kind of women this women command will be speaking too. For sure it will be able to reach old women; that is a given. It will be able to speak to young women as well as we see in the membership of the student’s command which has a huge constituency of young women; but will it be able to speak to the LBTQAP+ community? If I speak to my friend who is gender non-conforming and I tell them we have a woman’s command which is for women only they will feel excluded. I just don’t like that the ‘woman’ in woman’s command is very much gendered and creates binaries. I don’t know…maybe it’s just me, but realistically and honestly speaking gender non-conforming bodies exist out there and they are highly suppressed in the feminism discourse.

And then there will be men who will come to some members of the woman’s command just to divide us as women for their own agenda. We already see them doing that now. Shoving women who are their girlfriends to be branch leaders, shoving their girlfriends to be deployed in RCT and SRC, to be delegates at assemblies. Whichever women that’s vocal about issues relating to patriarchy in the movement men are quick to demonise. They want us to think their girlfriends and favourite feminists are the Winnie Mandela’s and the Assata Shakur’s of the EFF/SC. Aaarg please!

We should all strive to be feminists and fight gender related issues. There must not be an “us and them.”

The EFF has proven beyond reasonable doubt that it’s determined in fighting rape culture and gender based violence (GBV) in our country as well as creating a movement which seeks to put women in leadership positions. Members of the EFFSC continue to fight against institutional marginalisation of bodies from the LGBTQIA+ community in institutions of higher learning as well as the lack of safety for women and rape culture in universities and TVET’s. The movement and its leaders have realised that the liberation of oppressed people necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. 

However, we still need to prove strongly to the black queer community in the country that we truly care and committed to fighting for their dignity and we should do this through political action in and outside parliament. I myself as a lesbian and member of the EFFSC & EFF am committed to making sure I continue to conscientise members of the LGBTQIA+ community about the EFF cardinal pillars and also use my position as the gender officer of the EFFSC to educate student command members about issues related to gender and sexuality. The leadership of the EFF has claimed numerously in public (rallies, interviews, press conferences etc.) that it will commit to the fight to end patriarchy, however that doesn’t mean that patriarchy does not exist in the EFF/SC, which is something that needs serious scrutinisation at the 2^nd NPA. Patriarchy in the EFF/SC culture.

Capitalism is not only racial and colonial, but it is deeply gendered which is why we cannot continue to erase gender. The advocacy for women should be custom in our EFFSC branches through political education and programmes, in SRC, RCT, PCT and even CCT contestations, and this advocacy should be consistent. If we do want a “women only wing” then the EFF can form a task team that will be led by the CCT gender office that will consist of women only from the EFF and EFFSC branches who will look at issues in relation to gender and sexuality and what is to be done. Instead of focusing on Woman’s Command we should look forward to having a top 6 in the upcoming NPA that has 50/50 gender representation. Three women and three men! Or better yet, 4 women and 2 men in that executive. Women have proved numerously what they are capable of doing for the benefit of the EFF. Allow them to lead us in the highest structure of the organisation!

DISCLAIMER: From the onset, I want to plead that this piece should by no means be misconstrued as a defense of Mmusi Maimane or be taken as a tool of deflection that functions to preclude meaningful engagement around the development of black-on-black contradictions and which oftentimes plague collective efforts of carving out an agreed on and mutually shared liberation roadmap leading us in freedom. On the contrary, the operative feature here must be understood as re-explaining the meaning of Blackness or “Who Is Still Black” in the face of a possibility to sell out in the context of a confusing post-apartheid social order and how this particular age has destabilized discourses rooted in black ways of seeing and thinking. 

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Let me say it from the onset that this piece’s purpose would be twofold:

1) I will briefly retell, for purpose of contextual argumentation, the recent developments in the Democratic Alliance (DA) and how they relate to its former leader, Mmusi Maimane, particularly in what became his much publicized and dishonorable exit from the said party.

2) I will also challenge us to try and make sense of what has been happening in the DA, while simultaneously making a case against what appears to be a characterization of Mmusi by some as a “non-black” subsequent to these events. I am making this challenge particularly because I think as purveyors of ideas, events happen independently of our influence sometimes, but how we make sense of those events and interpret them depends largely on our ideological development.

In this piece I contest the idea raised by Botsang Moiloa in his recent piece on Mmusi Maimane, in what is called the Black Opinion blog, where he charged that Mmusi’s skin pigmentation was inadequate to qualify an analysis of the sort of overt white violence that befell the said leader from white racists of his former political home, the DA.

But, I shall circle back to this latter point later on in the article.

For starters, it is said that former leader of DA, Mmusi Maimane, if media reports and mainstream analysts are anything to go by, suffered a soft coup in what seemed to have been a buildup of internal pressure by a faction in the DA that saw him abdicate from power as leader of the party, after following what many analysts framed as two life-defining events in the recent history of the DA, namely, the party’s miniscule drop in the electoral polls of this year’s May general elections, and of course, coupled with the dramatic return of a long-standing party member, Hellen Zille who now serves in the party higher echelons, as the Federal Chair.

Mmusi was not alone to jump ships, two more fellow comrades followed in droves, that included his right-hand man and former mayor of Jo’burg (who actually resigned before Mmusi), Herman Mashaba, who too was forced to ship out citing explicitly Zille’s return as a principal reason for his resignation from the party and then also was a former white mayor of Nelson Mandela Bay, Athol Trollip.

The DA, when you one thinks about it, and the fact of being the official opposition party in South Africa of a largely white conservative upper class base and a burgeoning black petit bourgeois stratum, is a project in which if it were smart enough could achieve what Biko had bemoaned as apartheid’s lack of intelligence in an essay he wrote:

“This is one country where it would be possible to create a capitalist black society, if whites were intelligent, if the nationalists were intelligent. And that capitalist black society, black middle class, would be effective very effective … South Africa could succeed in putting across to the world a pretty convincing picture, integrated picture, with still 70 percent of the population being under-dogs”

But Biko I presume of course did not want this separate-ness of economic development to really happen, in other words, he did not want a façade of a one nation-state and that is expressed in how his very philosophy of liberation was rooted in the fundamental critique of the white power structure and its ability to mutate into nuanced forms and expressions, but while still keeping intact the colonial project of the native-settler dialectic.

Importantly, I am mentioning this distorted picture of a staged khumbaya show to demonstrate the inherent regression and lack of imagination in the white community leaders, including those in the DA for not taking heed of Biko’s suggestion. That even when whites could feign an integrated society fail because their anti-black racism always creeps in, and yes, the DA is I do believe is quintessentially a problematic project insofar as my analysis of the South African question is concerned, even when it fashions itself as a viable alternative to the ruling African National Congress (ANC), I do want to give one ideological consideration that assisted in quickening the sharpening of these prevailing contradictions in the DA in the year 2019 as has been a vulgar sudden reappearance of a right-wing offensive hegemony as personalized in the political personality of Hellen Zille (internally) and the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) vocalization (externally).

These contradictions not only unsettled and eventually chased away black zealots who fundamentally believed in the prospects of the DA project of building a one nation-state for all South Africans but they also brought into stark relief the real principles, values and ethos that the DA really stands for to a layman to see, and that for me is an important step forward politically.

So in thinking about the incident of Mmusi Maimane where it appears that as a leader of the DA seamlessly moves from being a driver of structural white supremacy (as the leader of the DA racist project) then to being publicly embarrassed and forced to abdicate. And to make sense of this play out of events involves necessarily understanding South Africa as first and foremost an anti-black racist social order where all black bodies are generally dishonored irrespective of their political and ideological predispositions. I argue therefore that blackness (or the fact of our black skin pigmentation) is not something we can shrug off like a cold whenever we feel like it. Our skin pigmentation is an over-riding aspect of our identity in the context of racialized social neglect and oppression.

And so to place the black experience in your analysis as fundamentally and always over-determined by racial considerations assists one avoid the conceptual slippages evident in Botsang Moiloa’s visceral response to an assault on a black body by institutions and structures of white power. In a long angry fulmination immediately reacting to the Maimane debacle Botsang Moiloa writes:

“Some of us are very clear. We are not going to be fooled to defend pigmentation blindly. Maimane must come out clean to deserve our support and defense. And we shall do it unreservedly for Blacks First and for Blacks Only”

When Botsang takes this visceral approach to what is an intellectually complex problem of black liberation, he wittingly or unwittingly favors experience(s) of black people above their structure of existence: e.g.: the “liberal social character of Mmusi”, but he misses how Maimane’s body was in the first case essentially a political instrument of protest against whiteness. A black body that is constantly negated including at times him being ridiculed and rejected by whiteness, Maimane’s body still represent a protest against the “Otherliness” of the black men and the implied universal inferiority of his status.

This same logic we could extend in trying to make sense of the type of power which certain individuals in the ANC holds and whether that nominal power is enough to insulate them against white racism and performative violence. And it is in this context do I argue that the logic of constantly preoccupying oneself with whiteness must be a permanent feature in our discourse about race, racism and the structural violence of the white project.

So that we could interpret events more analytically, and if Botsang really was a student of Black Nationalist intellectual tradition as he purports to be in his piece, he would for example, in his analysis of defining the struggle on racial terms start from Web Du Bois, as one of the founding fathers of the black radical tradition who wrote clearly on this question at the turn of the previous century already:

“The problem of the twentieth century is a question of the color line – the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea”

Du Bois made that statement not as a theoretical abstract exercise conceptualized in the ether, no, but he spoke of concrete and existential struggles of racial categories in the world and how these have hitherto shaped black existence. Mmusi too is situated within this racialized subjectivity defined by an asymmetrical power relation to whiteness and it is this contradiction of existence that produces structural sanctions that incentivises the ‘dishonourability’ of all black people. It is this dishonourability that saw Mmusi publicly undermined and rejected by the DA because Mmusi is “Black only and Black first”.

I specifically want to over-emphasize the race axis here as an organizing logic of our oppression, and consequently as the same logic that should anchor our collective fight for freedom. This is because white people despite their contradictions and interpersonal differences still cling to each other knowing that their individual privileges and power is derived from their collective membership to the white race. This overstresses the importance of race consciousness in everything we do.

Therefore when Botsang Moliloa writes:

“If your head is clear about the teachings of Steve Biko regarding Black Consciousness (BC) and that of Brother Leader Malcolm X in relation to house negroes, you will clearly understand why I am not yet supporting and fighting on the side of Mmusi Maimane.”

This must be exposed as a populist and reckless statement that reads Biko and Malcom out of context just to sound radical, to throw in the catchy phrase of “house-negro” does not mean that you should, conceptually speaking, dismiss Mmusi Maimane as not being black that reminds at every turn of his blackness, in addition, disavowing his blackness only serves to undercut any possibility in him re-uniting with black forces in pursuance of a collective struggle to destroy white power and the preservation of white privilege. 

But Botsang Moliloa goes further with the anti-Maimane rhetoric, he writes:

“I am not a politician. I am an activist – a rebel with a just cause. And this just cause entails a struggle against the injustices of slavery, colonialism and apartheid – all of which in turn gave birth to the Freedom Charter (FC) and the Democratic Alliance (DA). Yes, the FC is a product of a white supremacist system. In this context, my efforts and commitment are in furtherance of the realization of a just system – one that will ensure that Blacks are treated as human beings. And we can never ever be full human beings whilst we remain landless.”

A striking expression here is that the distortion in Botsang’s piece is a fundamental misunderstanding of how Biko conceptualized the notion of “non-whites”. Furthermore, I would even argue this as not only a semantic difference on the part of Botsang but as fundamentally a conceptual one. Conceptually, in theorizing “non-whites” Biko’s focus was on the horizontal interpersonal strained relations between black people as a group or amongst themselves within the scope of whiteness and the subjects of violence, otherliness, subjugation and dispossession. In other words, this notion is not applicable to whiteness. Put differently, in the crude face of white power all black people are niggerized and generally dishonored and constitute what Frank B. Wilderson lll calls an “ensemble of kaffirs”. And the horizontal contradictions that exist amongst ourselves as black people are always over-determined by the vertical contradiction we have with white power.

Therefore, this interpersonal concept of “non-whites” Biko developed it mindful of how it was over-determined by the difference we have with white power, but he still developed it and as a way to establish some form of checks and balances wherein blacks must call out other blacks who collaborated with a system of oppression, or at times shirked and shunned the political responsibility of the attainment of freedom.

In addition, it was to impress upon them the ethical imperatives of loving yourself as a black person, and that when black people loved and valued themselves would necessarily essentialize the agenda of collective black liberation and understand the implications of their collaborations with the system; but it was never the agenda of black consciousness philosophy of Biko to run around after non-whites terrorizing them. His focus has always been at destroying the white project and rallying as many blacks behind that vision.

Mmusi Maimane as a non-white will learn tough lessons as he has done of how the white project is inherently not accommodative to black aspirations and continuously denies their being present in the very process of national reconstruction. He has now been “conscietized” to the other side of the white master that he has been oblivious to for long.

But we must also understand that the concept of “non-white(ism)” emerges in and through the colonial project. In other words, without racialized oppression this notion is unimaginable. This is why Biko conceived of liberation as premised on first freeing the imagination and the mind of the colonized and believed that the first step in the process of dis-alienation was to effect a different type of consciousness in the minds of the oppressed.

In this way then black consciousness philosophy becomes a perspective developed by the oppressed as a response to white consciousness. This perspective and philosophy does not operate on the subjective will of individuals who arrogate to themselves the right define others outside the scope of who is black and who is not, but it reflects the objective material contradictions as expressed through the concrete struggle between white power and black existentiality. Black consciousness further called upon us to liberate the minds of the oppressed blacks which he saw as captured by the oppressor in service of the oppressor’s agenda.

That is precisely the problem of Maimane, it is a problem of a colonized mind that self-enslaves or one that is obsessed with fake integration projects to protect the master’s project rather than that of the fact of his blackness. Maimane is the proverbial empty shell Biko spoke about and said needs constant teaching, convincing and engaging in the project of dis-alienation as Biko himself started. And I am reminded of Malcom X’s saying that there was a time where we didn’t know what we know today, and to suggest this is not to justify slave-mentality on my part, but it is to do something which Botsang’s piece does not do; and that is to explain. And yes we must critique, but we must also explain more, and this explaining I want to repeat my initial submission and say that historically, politically, culturally and socially Mmusi Maimane remains a black person who lives under the commandment of white power like the rest of us.