Johannesburg-As the September National Imbizo (SNI) we boldly support our brother and comrade Andile Mngxitama against the allegations meted out to him. Most importantly we refuse to personalise this debacle said SNI spokesperson Phakama Ngceni. Mngxitama’s wager expressed the collective rage after an incitement of violence through distortions by Jared Sacks’ article. 

SNI said it is from this perspective that they understood and therefore support him.

 

“Like Strini Moodley we believe that Black Consciousness’ (BC) exclusion in the post 1994 knowledge production, infers not only its threatening power, but also its potential as a remedial possibility”. 

“But we also understand other  post1994 appropriative impulses – the expedient use of BC by power and the Left isn’t any less sinister than its first omissive exercises” said Ngceni in a statement. 

History is replete with anecdotes of the conspiratorial disdain against BC by both the ANC and the white Left SNI said. 

“So Like Mngxitama we understand Jared Sacks’ inclusion into the Black Consciousness tradition as an assault, if not direct annexation to further tame and distort the only hope and solution for black people in this country”.

 

The recent explosion, which by the way comes emerges two weeks after Mngxitama’s wager, have come to rear their flat-footed opportunism. 

SNI said they seemingly aren’t about Mngxitama’s threats to Sacks, but about settling old scores with him but also coincidentally, prompted by New Frank Talk’s (NFT 13) recent publication of an essay loathed and prohibited by the Left: 

 

The Social Movement’s Hustle. Talk about the brazen censorship of dissenting voices.

In Durban the Leftists who have just recently signed a petition against Mngxitama called in to threaten suing the festival (Time of the Writer) for allowing the essay to be published.

 

“This kind of attitude exposes not only the unproblematised nature of whiteness, but also the impossibility for such problematization. The act of subjecting Mngxitama can also be understood, in fact must be understood, as a natural way whiteness deals with any transgressing black” Pakama Ngceni said. 

They said a wanton terror against Mngxitama the person is nothing but calculated violence against the self-determinative attitude of BC. 

“Though it has found material coalescence in the body of Mngxitama, its principled target is its desired silencing and domestication of the authentic black voice” Ngceni said. 

As Mngxitama et al say in their introduction to NFT13, white people not only want to be conquerors, they also want to be the liberators.

 

Mngxitama’s harangued violence is considerably inconsequential, if not understandably a necessary reflexive act, comparable to the unbridled assault of white supremacy on blacks. 

“The insidious but polite gesticulations of Sacks et al are unavailable to society as violent because the acceptable ubiquity of anti-black racism undergirds social imagination. Therefore Sacks and the Left’s distortions of the black agenda cannot be thought of as vitiations of the long repressed emancipatory project”. 

“This is so because their actions are functional and foundational to the consolidation of power and therefore generalized violence in society” SNI spokesperson said.

 

This contradiction itself was long noted and rebuked by the BC tradition: whites not only kick us, they also tell us how to respond to the kick. And for the chosen transgressor it always has material consequences, as seen through campaigns for Mngxitama to be fired and not given a voice. White liberals can’t stand any black person that doesn’t value their civilizing mission, especially if they debunk its corrosive effect. As known, Jared Sacks and his crew are after the soul of black folk to tame it and civilize it they said. 

“The agenda isn’t any different from the old missionary duty; social movements, to which white leftists have conjoined, are used to recompose the black subject within the limited confines agreeable to the status quo” Ngceni said. 

They are made to bellow for animalistic demands. Blacks are subjected to the naturalization of their historically created circumstances and worst valorizations of those experiences said SNI. 

“There is nothing authentic in staying in shacks or in the ghetto” Pakama Ngceni said.

 

“We as the SNI insist on raising the bar of demands and plead with no one but blacks in this country. We understand that black liberation can only be executed through a program designed by blacks only, as Biko said. So we understand Mngxitama’s rage to be precisely informed by these politics. We don’t care much about Mamphele”. 

“We care as we carve and deepen the consciousness of black people to rise up to the challenge of the historic antagonism. The Left together with the ANC government have been responsible for the collective social death of the black majority in South Africa. Now we aren’t only saying “fuck the Left” but please also: hands off Mngxitama” Pakama Ngceni said.

(Unedited statement from SNI)

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