One of the themes that I explore on this blog is the misrule of ZANU-PF, in Zimbabwe, led by Robert Mugabe. Of course, this is not in anyway trying to get involved in partypolitics, it's simply a matter of justice. It's my simple argument that postcolonial faith is by definition, faith that engage issues of justice. Postcolonial theology articulates the voice of God's hidden people, as they engage their situations of opression under empires, as they struggle towards liberation. They also expose the empire theologies which collude with colonialism.
This is where liberation and liberation theology comes in. Its not simplistically a liberal theology. In fact, Black theology of Liberation has as one of its targets, Liberalism and a Liberal theology, which pretends to stand on the side of justice, yet frantically keeps and protects, the spoil acrued through racism and colonialism. This meant a strategic alliance, or dialogue with liberation movements of all sorts.
Today, I simply want to note (again) that this alliance is not for ever, espescially where liberation movements have evidently gone off the rails and have established sweet-heart elite pacts, with neo-liberal capitalists or where they have degenerated into little fiefdoms of despots like Mugabe. Hence, historical alliances have to be revisted on an ongoing basis, because where these movements don't concern themselves with the poor and the needy anymore, there they've become the new opressor. They've become as vile and despicable as the colonial masters and need to be exposed and deposed..
3 comments:
As Paolo Freire put it, the oppressed internalises the image of the oppressor, and comes to believe that in order to be fully human one must be an oppressor.
Steve, you will have to help us here. My superficial (?) impression is that there is not a lot of research done in this internalisation of the image of the oppressor, in the SA transition since the 90s. We assumed that political/structural change means that the people will change..and its not the case
Consider the aftermath and reconstruction that followed the Anglo-Boer War, when Alfred Lord Milner tried to Anglicise the Afrikaners, force them to speak English and so on. And the Broederbond internalised his image and AP Treurnicht and Ferdi Hazenberg spewed it all out in 1976 when they tried to force the kids in Soweto schools to learn through the medium of Afrikaans.
So what happened in 1994? There was a plan for reconstruction in place and it was a pretty good one, and in his election victory speech Nelson Mandela said it was not negotiable. And a year later it was abandoned, Jay Naidoo was redeployed, and we found that the formerly oppressed had put on the capitalist mask of the oppressors. The ANC is as Thatcherist as they come. Cosatu thought that Zuma might change things, but he sang the same old song:
The working class can kiss my arse
I've got the foreman's job at last.
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