I think one of the challenges in the (un)raced discourse is an inability to understand the emergence of disruptive social phenomena, in other words, the persistent rise of issues around poor service delivery, lack of sanitation, increasing informal settlements, poor education, etc., and locate them within a certain relational power structure which gives them an identity. 

For instance, a simple, but profound question to ask is, what does it mean to say that informal dwellings, mass penury, poor sanitation is black in South Africa? 

Conversely, what does it mean to suggest that privilege and social comfort in South Africa has a white face?

Here an orthodox Marxist enthusiast often has a difficult time in understanding the existential dimension of these above-mentioned question because Marxist cartography discounts the centrality of COLOUR as a major determinant of the relations of domination and subordination that characterises the South African social formation. 

Evidence of this has been seen in Sihle Lonzi’s failed attempt at showing a fair analytic grasp of the “Black First” maxim.

Moreover, Lonzi’s dismal failure in appreciating how the “Black First” call as a positive revolutionary call that proceeds from the concrete reality of the South African situation and calling on black people to organize as a unit, in a country where Race and colour by and large still determines everything. 

Lonzi does not appreciate this at all, instead he gives us an infinitesimal philosophical logic and abstraction with little or no bearing to the fundamentality of the question at hand. 

However, my aim here is not to disrupt the false and backward narrative advanced in the article under reply, but I shall throughout this paper, both in manner and temperament do three things:

1. Give a summarized definition of Black consciousness and draw how this definitive effort dovetails the “Black First” maxim.

2. Give a phenomenological account in the centrality of anti-black racism, using Biko and Fanon’s lens in order to assist us not to speak about racism for speaking’s sake, but speak about how anti-black racism impacts our situated lived experiences. 

3. And if space still permits, I will touch briefly on the Class vs. Race dichotomy within the South African context.

At the outset, it is crucial to recall that one of the most outstanding leaders of the black existential question in the 20th century, the late Steve Biko, defined Black Consciousness as follows: 

“Briefly defined therefore, Black Consciousness is in essence the realisation by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their oppression — the blackness of their skin — and to operate as a group in order to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude. It seeks to demonstrate the lie that black is an aberration from the ‘normal’ which is white. It seeks to infuse the black community with a newfound pride in themselves, their efforts, their value system, their culture, their religion and their Outlook to life.”

In the above passage taken from Steve Biko’s collection of Essays in I Write What I Like, we can clearly locate the ideological origin of the “Black First” epithet. It originates in Black Consciousness thought and was Biko’s abiding gift and contribution to us and our struggle, and the succeeding generations in an effort to always anchor our liberation struggle around the cause of our blackness or black skin as an organizing logic in our fight against the enemy. 

However, in approaching the “Black First” question, we should avoid a few things or be careful not to fall into any of the following traps: (1) reduce it into useless philosophical abstraction, (2) idealizes or over-glorify it, and (3) position it as a theory of racial superiority. 

Rather, the ideological grasp to display apropos of “Black First” maxim is to understand that white racism is the major political force in South Africa, and that Africans, Indians and Coloureds are other(ed) at the level of relational power and are therefore oppressed by reason of their skin colour. 

So that in Sihle Lonzi’s own words: “…to take time…is necessary, if we’re to understand the world we exist in”. 

However, here my question is what time is Sihle Lonzi dedicating in thinking if his not able to draw a necessary dialectical conflict between established White Power and the “Black First” front? 

For pedagogical purposes, and in assistance of the uninitiated, BC’s theory of struggle in common parlance, and to appropriate Biko’s dialectical analysis of the contradiction in South Africa, was that, Biko argued the Thesis (problem) in South Africa is white racism, ipso facto, there must be an accumulation of black radical forces and thought to present an Antithesis (confrontation to the problem). 

This picture here clearly depicts the dialectical relationship between the eventual defeat of the oppressor and the ultimate victory of the oppressed. 

A synthesis according to Biko would be an outcome of the collusion between the Thesis and the Antithesis.

To this day, we’ve not had a collusion and therefore in Bikoist sense, South Africa remains a white racist country and it is within this context the consolidation of the “Black First” subjective ideological resolve brings freedom nearer to us, as the racially oppressed group — the Black First! 

But read on!

At a closer glance, we see that Lonzi’s further delineation of what he calls this “attractive logic” of Black First by “Blackists” and “Fanonistas” misses it completely. 

He talks simplistically about what he says they (Fanonistas) argue is the centrality of Blackness in anything, read the following quoted passage: 

He writes:

“The simple logic of this platitude (sic) is that one, before they are anything in the world, is black”.

And further down this quoted passage, Lonzi hints that we have a responsibility to look further and longer than the first glance in terms of understanding what the philosophical implications of this logic is/are. 

And so with that in mind, and in assistance of broadening our horizons, I want to draw our attention to Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks, arguably one of the best books in which Fanon gives a devastating critique of anti-black racism.

Fanon bases Black Skin White Mask on the soul of the Black folks, his prayer and lamentation, “Oh my body makes of me a man who always questions” is expression to this effect. 

In other words, Fanon goes where Lonzi and “Class” the cabal does not go on this question, in terms of examining the soul of black folks in an anti-black racist society. 

Fanon in Black Skins looks at the psychic impact of racism on the living black individual. 

Put differently, he investigate the deeper effect, if what does a lived experience of racism do to a person psychically when they’re seen or pre-determined in terms of their epidermal considerations?

In the same way, Fanon, in his critique of the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic argued when the slave is Black, or the epidermisation of the slave into a Black subject disavowed reciprocity. 

So in a sense here to ask is, when the world sees you in terms of epidermal considerations what are the implications therein, what does it do to your sense of self-esteem? What does that do to your relationship with the world and others? What does it do to your conception of gender relations, and more importantly, how does it impacts a sense of you falling into an inferiority complex? 

The Black First maxim as an organizing logic is therefore sacrosanct when one appreciate how the world sees nothing beyond the representation of the flesh — our skin colour. 

And hence, we shouldn’t just look at racism as a socio-political and economic issue, but we should always ask ourselves about the psychological impacts of racism upon the oppressed living individual. 

In Conclusion:

The very last point I wish to make, which is the Race vs. Class dichotomy, an issue that Lonzi treats as a footnote and divest it of any critical elements, I want to argue that as we grapple with the socio-political and economic woes of society engendered by capitalist relations, we must equally be heavily invested in dealing with the psychological problem of racism which necessities us to unite as Black First. And we must tackle these two aspects in tandem. 

And if you don’t appreciate the centrality of racism and its impact on the situated lived experience, you will fall into the same trap that many Lefts fall into, that is to reduce racism into an epiphenomenon of the socio-political and economic construction.

And this is a distorted logic and a problem that Sihle Lonzi must be disabused of, and it’s not just a theoretical problem, but it’s also a problem of how we organize ourselves as an oppressed people. It’s a problem of how we speak to ourselves. And importantly, it’s a problem of how we understand our oppression and imagine our freedom. 

As Steve Biko understood that it’s impossible to deal with the Class Question in South Africa unless you first understand the development of class relations in SA as always been shaped and determined by racial determination. And, importantly if you miss that, they you fail to deal a blow with our reality and actuality as black people in South Africa. You will not be able to understand that there is no rapport between black workers and white workers because the latter are privileged and consequently the greatest supporters of the system.

Therefore I think the obsessive description of chairs, tables and screwdrivers and its failed attempt to locate their essence is a futile exercise that miss the whole picture. The less said about it the better.

For Lonzi, rather than harp on the “Black First” maxim and not appreciate how this call goes much deeper than the question of class or poor people serves no philosophical critique, it is advisable that Lonzi view and understand this call in line with Black consciousness thought as concerned with Black South Africans as primarily black people.

We’re Black First and we’re resolute! Asijiki!

I was probably still in primary school when the whole country went berserk over Mgarimbe’s Sista Bettina but I can recall that there was an outrage about the use of vulgar language in the song, so much that it was banned from SABC radio stations. The makers of the song had to go to the extent of editing it to remove some words, so to make it radio-friendly. The legacy of this is seen when searching for Sista Bettina on YouTube wherein you won’t be able to find the original explicit version of the song.

Fast-forward to 2019, we now have Amapiano music with the song, “Baby are you coming?” The content of the song is not different from Sista Bettina however, it seems as if there is zero outrage about Amapiano [I’m not complaining].  I’ve heard the song on two radio stations already in the past week alone. Loosely, the male vocalist sings the words, “I take your girl, I make her mine, I fuck good, bare baby are you coming, are you coming? Baby are you coming.” Then a female vocalist enthusiastically responds to him, “I take your man, I make him mine, I suck him good, bare baby are coming? Are you coming? Baby, are you coming?” This particular song follows on from similar songs, in the last 2 to 3 years. Notably, Omunye phez’ komunye of Destruction Boyz and Umshove (uMbali) of Kabza Small and many other songs that pop up as examples of songs that use a language that might usually be unconventional in the popular music scene.  

In contrasting between the public’s reaction to the language used in music of the mid-2000s and the music of today, we are led to two pertinent inquiries; (1) Are these explicitly vulgar songs enough to warrant an engaged re-assessment of the bonis mores of the South African society? And, (2) When applying Hegelian dialectics, what can we predict about the future of South African music, pop culture and social media trends?

The concept of bonis mores is one used in law to refer to the commonly accepted morals of a specific community. It is a legal principle that is mostly utilized to justify the legal norms of a particular society at a given time. At a practical level, law-makers and courts are tasked to study the morality of the people and then make laws that reflect such reality, this culminates into a bonis mores.

The European Union recognizes same-sex marriages and puts in place legislation to protect the rights and bodily integrity of the queer community, in contrast Kenya and Uganda continue to criminalize same-sex relationships by not only out-lawing them but actively sponsoring a culture of violence, corrective rape and related assault on the queer body. Both these are express examples of bonis mores when enacted. Different communities embrace various morals and at specific periods. Bonis mores, unlike most legal concepts, relates not to the correctness nor justness of a community’s morals, but rather its prevalence. Whereas, a progressive law-maker or jurist may correctly seek to put in place liberational laws that protect the queer community in Uganda/Kenya, such a law-maker/jurist will be unable to do so because they’d be bound by bonis mores. The same fate awaits a homophobic law-maker/jurist in the European Union who might have ambitions to legislate anti-gay laws.

It is crucial that we study South Africa’s bonis mores at this current juncture because history shows that bonis mores does have the habit of shifting from time to time. Sometimes it shifts through political processes, revolutions, natural processes and others.

The modern history of Islamic republic of Iran, under the rule of comrade Mohammad Mosaddegh was purely socialist, with a government that presided over extensive nationalization of the country’s minerals, expropriation of land and other socialist policies. After his demise, the Shah took over and modernised [Westernized] the country, privatizing industries, introducing industrial reforms and other pro-capitalist actions. After the demise of the Shah, the clerics took over, turning the country into a fully Islamic republic, governed by the church and under strict Sharia, Islamic law. The Iran example is a simplistic illustration of the fluidity and malleability of bonis mores over a period of time.

The expressions, “I fuck her good” and “I suck him good” still annoys the conservatives in our society, just as “Ngen’ enganeni” and “Nango six eksen’ mina ngyamshova uMbali” would also have them hot under the collar too, yet unlike in the early 2000s, these conservatives lack the conviction to petition all these obscene songs from being played in public spaces.  Numerous inferences could be drawn from this instance, one of those could be that perhaps the number of conservatives has dwindled over the years, and another could be that bonis mores has shifted from pointedly demonizing sex, but rather embraces sex as a part of life that needs to be spoken about freely, openly, humorously, and without fear of scowls from the proverbial elder.

With the knowledge that nothing is as it always seem, and that every present experience is a sum of two realities, because the recent most history and the history of the former, teases an enquiry should seeks to ascertain what this newly found bonis mores might lead to in the near future. When the assumption, dialectically speaking, is that the attitudes of conservatives toward Sista Bettina in the early 2000s is the thesis, and that their attitude towards “Baby are you coming?” is the anti-thesis, what could possibly be the synthesis? Arguments among philosophers from varying and pluriversal epistemic traditions tend to produce three equations to re-conceptualize the formulation of the Hegelian dialectic. The first, 1+1= 2, the second 1+2= 3 and the third, 1+1= 0. The first sums up two similar realities to produce a completely new reality, the second recognizes that there should be a distinct difference between the thesis and the anti-thesis, whilst the third does not concern itself with the difference and similarity of the first two realities but posits that its outcome will be radical departure from the two realities.

All arguments are with basis, but the second tends to be acutely persuasive when compared with the other two. Sex sells, and it always has, but once the South African society has reconciled itself with the fact that sex is just sex, and there is nothing much to it, the music industry will go back to its earlier days of Mdu’s “Oksalayo”, Mandoza’s “Nkalakatha” and others, whose content may have had a sexual connotation but remained largely euphemized. It could get worse too, but 1+2=3 makes it difficult to imagine how things could get any worse than this. Time and space.