In the 370 years of colonial capitalism in SA, the role of black men in shaping and the making of their servitude to white capitalism is narrated as a static story. The way black men’s stories are constructed and told erases their perspectives, distorts their story and at worst silences their voices of protest.
The silencing of black men’s voices is evident in the broader scheme of three narratives of black resistance against white rule. In this historical lens, black men are firstly presented as dignified warriors against colonial expansion, then they are cast as willing servants of industrialising mining and lastly, they are framed as the protectors and promoters of vestiges of patriarchy and its consequences of gender-based violence.
This narrative does not articulate how black men are undermined by sustained economic genocide that benefited white settlers as a result of cheap black men’s labour. When we make reference to economic genocide against black men in SA we have to recognise how the economy, political power and social resources were organised against black men through layers of up to 148 discrimination laws by the end of 1971 that thwarted the rise and development of black men.
In the early colonial period, Khoisan males had to contend with targeted extermination by white raiders when they were accused of ‘stealing’ the cows belonging to the newly arrived whites. In the process, Khoisan women were reduced to being the collateral damage in the war against their men.
The same pattern of black extermination was later repeated in South West Africa/Namibia when the Herero and Namaqua people, particularly males, were hunted and killed by German colonialists between 1904 and 1908 with an estimated135,000 deaths of Namibians.
On our shores the raiding of black villages by Afrikaner commandos for the loot of black children in the Transvaal as 'black ivory' is a story that is not only silenced but is also erased from our history text books.
We argue about economic genocide against black men on two levels. Firstly, we need to appreciate that economic genocide against black men is not an accident of history. It had a strategic plan and focus to consolidate white power and domination, ensuring the transfer of mineral wealth to white males in particular and to white females as beneficiaries, whereas black men have no generational wealth to pass on to their children.
It is going to take a deliberate strategic intent and legislative focus to graft black men into targeted economic systems and productive areas to redress economic exclusion of black men in the economy. Hence, as a country we must correct the narrow view of genocide as merely referring to racial, tribal and militarily conflicts which are covered by international legal systems.
In the same manner we expanded the concepts of reconciliation and amnesty mechanisms in our Truth and Reconciliation Commission, we need to imagine an economic commission to reconstruct the black men’s story of exclusion, reimagine restorative justice, corrective investments and systems of compensation to reverse the stubborn legacy of historical sins against black men.
Rev Meshack M. Mashinini, Soweto