Free Mandela, economic freedom and land is our claim!

By: Clyde Ramalaine

At what stage do we move on? Is there a time, we the living here and now can free ourselves from the romanticism of the illusion of freedom celebrated in twenty-five years with an anchor in Mandela. 

Perhaps July 18, 2019, confirms we have moved on from Mandela, less in disrespect of his contribution but in conscious rejection of the ductile iconic identity, he himself rejected. An iconic identity created by colonial and apartheid beneficiaries essentially for their own material good. Let there be no doubt or any misconception Mandela in a pantheon of liberation fighters made his unique contribution. He served and represented his generation and time adequately. Yet he is not above question and critiquing him is not cursing our parents.

He, unfortunately, cannot become the means to keep us hostage, eternally muzzled not to engage the shortcomings, failures, and compromises of an ANC leadership in a negotiated settlement deal agreed between the elites on both sides of the proverbial railway line. A negotiated settlement of which, Neville Alexander postulated as mere “regime change, without any alteration of economic power or of the management of the repressive apparatus of the state.” Yes, the trickery of a negotiated settlement that has us manacled. A settlement our children of the #fees-must-fall campaign unequivocally and consciously analyzed as “the 1994 project”. 

This time of the year in what has come to be moments of reflection manifesting in a slew of lectures on Mandela, his legacy imagined and real, airbrushed often misconstrued, affords some to in political personal self-interest agenda pontificate how we all are dutybound to emulate the icon. 

Mandela is served as a drug to tranquilize the rightful revolutionary cries, to sedate questioning and conscious minds. 

Mandela is weaponized to rebuke those who rightfully call for radical economic transformation. Mandela is unleashed in stark reprimand of others. He is made a wielding stick against contrary voices who are labeled as conspirators in a ‘fightback strategy’ against the apparent angelic. Mandela the myth and the re-imagined is consciously abused to stifle the radicalism of the hour and to quell the rightful call for delayed economic transformation. 

It is Mandela who is thrown at us when we call for land redress when Malcolm X told us long ago the struggle was always about land. Mandela is paraded as the closest thing to a deity and those who call for change demonic because they don’t work for social cohesion. It is not impossible that the mind of the false superior race would’ve tempted to remake him so that 500 years from now that society may speak of him as a ‘white’ man who liberated ‘blacks’. 

Mandela is abused to justify racial so-called national sports teams. He is used when Ramaphosa can dare to tell us how good ‘white monopoly capital’s’ leaders are to South Africa.

To this end, I have asked;   

• Free Mandela from being the insurance policy for colonial and apartheid beneficiary interest.
• Free ourselves from the less engaged one-sided mantra of reconciliation that from the time of regime change in 1994 until now remains underwritten by the victims of a combination of colonial and apartheid systems.
• Free Mandela equally from those who make up the beneficiaries of the elitist ANC leaders. These today are the signpost of our economic liberation when the masses still are languished and doomed to and eschatology of abject poverty.
• Free Mandela from those who have benefitted from an apartheid economy who in response continue to defend this structurally flawed and racially defined economy as that which must be protected at all costs. 
• Free Mandela from the buffer-zone, (ANC elites in bed with colonial/apartheid wealth) who deem it their inalienable right to lecture us on Mandela from their glass-towers of self-righteousness after they handsomely took care of themselves and their families and were dry-cleaned by those who are hellbent to eternalize the masses in poverty.
• Free Mandela from being abused as a sjambok to keep us in check when we ask why we are landless, poor, suffer and struggle in a time defined as freedom.
• Free Mandela from being the useful commodity of apartheid and colonial beneficiary access until his Foundation is supersensitive to entertain the ideas of the false ‘white’ identity that remains the fulcrum of colonial and apartheid rule.
• Free Mandela until his own seed from his loins can speak freely their minds on land and injustice.
• Free Mandela from being falsely associated as Zelda Le Grange’s father at the expense of his own Zindzi Mandela.
• Free Mandela from being deliberately separated from his people. 
• Free Mandela from this avuncular, harmless smiling-dancing father-Christmas, let the radical Mandela live.
• Free us from being silenced when we to want to know beyond the very useful Gupta family scarecrow, who else continue to benefit from life-time evergreen contracts from State-Owned Enterprise entities such as Eskom, SAA, Transnet, Denel SAFCOL, etc. Surely if we can be told ”state capture” the DA and media-invented crime that became a useful tool for some of this era’s ANC politicians, looted R1trillion, it must be known how much colonial and apartheid beneficiaries continue to benefit annually.

We free Mandela by rejecting a make-belief celebration of 67 minutes led by campaigns that were designed by the same oppressors, who have always known how to decide what is good for the oppressed. We free him from the lectures of hypocrites.

We consciously do not celebrate Mandela Day because our challenges demand that we remain sober in our cause, militant in our pursuit for radical economic change not as offered but demanded, in full return of land as a first non-negotiable principle, in wider quest to control our own destiny. 

We refuse to be hoodwinked, and labeled as part of the new creation lexicon of ‘fightback’ strategy, hellbent on being corrupt, and thus fighting the efforts of the media- ordained angels. If you hear us protest if you see us gather, and read what we write it is to demand what this hour stands for, economic freedom and return of the land. 

When we on Mandela day bemoan our plight on land it is our rejection of the Mandela, we are force-fed in one-sided narrative a Mandela we did not know. 

Let Mandela rest he is assigned a grave and an eternal rest like all others that equally made their contributions. He played his part as is demanded of us in this epoch, stop being blindsided by the icon as abused by the self-serving. Mandela was not given to live in this epoch because the challenges of this era are ours and we must fight, rally and mobilize regardless of how much it may cost at a personal level. We dare not be intimidated by the whimsical labels we must soldier on. Our long walk is made much longer by the buffer zone who look like us but are the protectors of apartheid beneficiary interest to which they have pledged an eternal loyalty.

Fortunately, this era needs no Mandela real or recrafted, but you and me.