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EFF vs H&M: Is there anything revolutionary in trashing a store?

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Nkateko Mabasa is a journalist at Daily Maverick

While the anger is understandable, the EFF’s method of trashing of the H&M stores is a sign of patriarchy and hyper-masculinity. It is easy to get people roused up in anger, to create racial polarisation. What is harder is to mobilise people through mass political education and consciousness.

The Economic Freedom Fighters entered shopping malls across Gauteng – at Menlyn Park, Mall of the South, Mall of Africa, Sandton City, East Rand and Clearwater on Saturday in protest at H&M. This was a result of the store’s clothing advertisement picturing a black kid wearing a hoodie, on it written, “Coolest Monkey in the Jungle”.

What the company failed to grasp, surely because of a lack of transformation, was how language rooted in our past has been used to dehumanise people and has left a wound that hurts at the slightest touch.

A video was captured, at H&M’s store at the Sandton City Mall, where young black men were seen pulling down the clothing displays and kicking mannequins.

Their frustrations are justified and valid but the target of this frustration is misplaced. This was a display of hyper-masculinity. They believe that the use of aggression and force will solve the issue and is a revolutionary act.

It must be acknowledged that racial capitalism in South Africa still exists and was never dealt with through the 1994 settlement of a democracy, which did not give “justice to the black majority”. This remains a challenge in our socio-economic landscape, and more so today, as debates over economic freedom and land expropriation have become urgent issues.

It requires a great deal of eye-impairing privilege not to see and acknowledge, that poverty runs rampant among black people. One only has to look at the township, a concentrated mass of shacks, debilitated and loosely constructed zinc matchbox houses, at the periphery, to see the extent of deprivation.

It is here, at these shocking-to-look-at places in Alexandra and Khayelitsha, where people are forced to scrape together a survival, where the black condition is ever more tangible, so sharp and awful, and tender and sore. It is only those who have gone through a night, or more, without food and a hunger so gut-wrenching, who can fully understand the anguish.

Furthermore, it requires an extraordinary denial of reality and selective amnesia to refuse to believe, and without much hope of being convinced, that this was caused by intentional spatial planning by the apartheid regime, more than recent failures of the ANC policies and corruption. And the land question is not only an important issue, but the priority issue.

In today’s political landscape, most black people would still be regarded as migrant workers, apparent in Johannesburg and in all cities in South Africa. They have to take a taxi and sometimes even two to commute from home to work. And back again after dark.

That land was taken from the black majority (including the Khoisan) is undeniable. Spatial distribution of people and activities, brought about by the Natives Land Act of 1913 and later the Group Areas Act passed in 1950, still dominate our social landscape.

The private sector too bears witness to ownership patterns in South Africa. Though BEE attempted, with disappointing results, to transform corporate executives and boardrooms, big business and corporations are still owned and are at the hands of whites, especially white males.

The National Treasury recently released a report stating that the actual BEE black ownership is at 9%, instead of the previously reported 20% by the JSE.

Enter into any debate that black people have in this country and you will notice that there is a general agreement about land expropriation – “we want the land back”.

There is a clear universal consciousness that black life is precarious, ever struggling, ever chasing. It becomes apparent to black youth that in earnest, as “umuntu omnyama”, you’re one step removed from the homeless person begging on the street.

The harshness and indifference is dispiriting and takes its toll. This is why most black people sympathise with the EFF’s actions, though reservedly.

If the EFF seeks the true liberation of black people, it ought to consider the underpinnings and later ramifications of destroying property and resorting to brute force.

The target of resistance should be white-supremacist-capitalist patriarchy. It is this complex and not easily discernible system that must be challenged. And what this urges us to do is employ an intersectional approach in the analysis of any situation and in our efforts to dismantle oppression. It is pointless and short-sighted, and immensely cruel, to fight a certain injustice by creating another kind of injustice.

When gender politics and how they play out in everyday ordinary life are not considered, we are in danger of suspending the coming revolution.

Men ought to be taught to unlearn a toxic hyper-masculinity that insists on the use of aggression as the only means to resolve a situation. This fury in releasing anger at disappointed hopes at the hands of a brutal system spills out into the family. We are all too familiar with stories of exiled liberation heroes who are now abusive in homes, as a result of trauma from fighting in the Struggle.

The mess that was made at the store will be cleaned up by black workers, the very same people the EFF claims to be fighting for. And those who committed these acts might face criminal charges.

More often than we would like to admit, political parties take advantage of social instability and people’s desperation in service of their own interests. So it makes sense for parties like the EFF to advocate for such violent acts as they have done with land occupation. It gives these parties media airtime and a look of relevance, at the expense of genuine people’s desperate acts of frustration.

What the party ought to do is encourage constructive resistance that does not put people in danger unnecessarily.

What the EFF does not recognise is that people learn easily enough that this is the only way to resolve conflict. What we must watch against is not what violence does to those we bring it upon, the more insidious effect is what it does to those who use it.

Revolutionary philosopher Frantz Fanon theorised that although the use of violence may serve to bring freedom, it is also necessary to deal with the collective trauma of a people – to bring about self-actualisation.

This has been misunderstood as Fanon’s support of absolute violence in resistance. However, the Algerian philosopher based his findings about the cathartic nature of violence on Freud’s psychoanalytic theories and his work with Algerian soldiers who were suffering from trauma as a result of the violence of war.

He understood that violence can also be detrimental to those who use it. It may cause severe psychological damage and depression. It is only in the service of a revolutionary cause and with the collective that violence, as seen by Fanon, can have the effects of self-actualisation. Not just the random and undirected acts of a few.

We then must ask ourselves, is there anything revolutionary in trashing a store? What is the ideological footing of such an action? What did it seek to achieve? What did it end up achieving?

Without such an approach, people will be encouraged to use violence – aggression and force – to serve their own interests. Those men who trashed the H&M store were angry, and what was apparent was the patriarchy, not their bravery. It was the male privilege of physical strength and entitlement that led them to trash the store.

Racial tension in South Africa needs urgent attention. There will be more racist outbursts. Another white person will post about black people at the beach, will mistreat a domestic worker, or shoot another farmworker. These are an unfortunate reality of our society.

How we handle these incidents will be a measure of the kind of people we have chosen to become. It will show which path we have decided to take. Will we breed a generation of youth who, through violence, stand the risk of destroying the very freedom they seek to attain? Shall we be a society where white corporations continue to disregard black people and the world’s racial past?

These are complex issues which cannot be simplified. They deserve scrutiny and proper attention as we strive to build a society that has true justice. It was Robert Sobukwe, the first president of the Pan Africanist Congress, who advanced a non-violent stance in the party’s first major campaign in 1960.

It is important to note the turbulent time that Sobukwe and his party existed in. Violence, which was more urgent and real, was an everyday experience; black bodies fell victim to the apartheid state. They were all aware of its presence and the danger that was constant and unending. And yet, with this in mind, they still chose to pursue a nonviolent protest. What profound insight did they have that we are not aware of?

On the eve of the anti-pass campaign, Sobukwe addressed the Pan-Africanist gathered and outlined the results of violence:

Let us consider for a moment what violence will achieve. I say quite POSITIVELY, without fear of contradiction, that the only people who will benefit from violence are the government and the police. Immediately violence breaks out we will be taken up with it and give vent to our pent-up emotions and feel that by throwing a stone at a Saracen or burning, a particular building we are small revolutionaries engaged in revolutionary warfare. But after a few days, when we have buried our dead and made moving grave-side speeches and our emotions have settled again, the police will round up a few people and the rest will go back to the Passes, having forgotten what our goal had been initially. Incidentally, in the process we shall have alienated the masses who will be that we have made cannon fodder of them, for no significant purpose except for spectacular newspaper headlines.”

What the EFF is failing to do is the hard work of mass mobilisation using clear, strong and enduring ideological positions. It is easy to get people roused up in anger, to create racial polarisation. What is hard is to mobilise people through mass political education and consciousness. To convince people to refuse to participate in a system that degrades them through intelligent and coherent principles and the conviction of your argument.

In a country where black people are a majority, there should not be a need to use violence of any kind if people are convinced of your ideological stance. Hyper-masculinity encourages men to force their way through a problem rather than the patient and testing long-operation of political consciousness. We therefore continue to seek that Sobukwe voice. DM

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