Comrade Solly and his race problem

R.W. JOHNSON / Solly Mapaila, the Communist Party leader, is clearly a man with a sense of humour. He is upset that he has been criticised – including by the present writer – for denouncing the GNU and in particular its DA component in bluntly racial rather than class terms. So – in a speech at an SACP fundraising dinner* — he has decided to set the record straight.

He now wishes to insist that those who depict him as anti-white are themselves racist. But he simply makes that assertion: there is no argument, there are no reasons, nothing to cause us to take him seriously. Instead, he says, what the Communist Party is against is … (one waits in vain for a class term) … whiteness. This is a very peculiar thing for someone claiming to be a historical/dialectical materialist to say. Marx would quite certainly have denounced the notion of ‘whiteness’ as a prime piece of petty bourgeois consciousness.

Let’s be frank — 10 or 20 years ago, no one in South Africa had ever heard of something called ‘whiteness’. It’s one of the airy-fairy post-modernist constructions that come and go, and no one can tell you quite what it means except that it somehow applies to people with white skins. Certainly, in all the years of the Struggle, one never heard any Communist leaders say they were against ‘whiteness’. And Communists in other countries don’t say they are against ‘whiteness’. It is a clearly racist construction.

Mapaila tries to insist that ‘whiteness’ was the ‘racist ideology that formed the DA’s origins’, but no one had ever heard of ‘whiteness’ when the DA was formed in 2000, let alone when the original Progressive Party was formed in 1959, so that can’t be right. As Mark Twain said, ‘It’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s the things you know which just ain’t so.’

And, indeed, Mapaila simply can’t stop himself from returning over and over again to racial depictions. He says, ‘the problem of the GNU lies in one critical issue … the inclusion … of the white-led DA in a country whose population is overwhelmingly African and black’. He refers repeatedly to ‘white privilege’ and to the DA’s ‘white leadership dominance’. There is no argument couched in class terms: his obsession is race. One wonders whether there is such a thing as ‘blackness’. If so, what is it? And does he have it?

Rather pathetically, at one point he lists one Indian and ten white SACP members to prove the Party’s non-racial nature. But both the sole Indian and eight of the ten whites are dead, and the remaining two are very old. The fact is that the SACP, like the ANC, has become an almost uniformly black affair. To be fair, Mapaila is proud of the fact that the SACP was South Africa’s first truly non-racial party – and that is true. But, of course, there were prominent non-racial liberals throughout the 19th century, and the DA today is by far the most racially mixed party.

Still on the same theme, Mapaila says the Party will reject ‘self-recolonisation’. This is a curious and unexplained term. The general idea seems to be that South Africa was ‘colonialism of a special type’ in that it was internally ‘colonised’ by elements of its own population (the whites). And thus the whites again entering government (the GNU) threatens ‘self-recolonisation’.
There are a number of things to be said about this. First, ‘colonialism of a special type’ (CST) effectively depicts the whites as ‘colonial settlers’, and in normal liberation ideology this means they must be driven out.

This is in flat contradiction to the Freedom Charter (which Mapaila quotes approvingly and which the ANC still acknowledges as one of its two programmatic documents), which insists that ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white’. So Mapaila needs to choose which side he is on. He clearly leans to the racist ‘anti-white settler’ side, but he should remember that the SACP’s greatest intellectual, Jack Simons (whom Mapaila proudly cites), flatly denounced that view and insisted that the key thing about South Africa was that it had gradually evolved a ‘common society’. Mapaila doesn’t seem to realise that he is quoting contradictory arguments.

Mapaila refers to the DA’s ‘economic attack on the working class and the poor at large’. But since the GNU has been formed, there has been a noticeable fall in the unemployment figures, which is about the best news the working class can get. No sign of any attack there. And, rather awkwardly, we have now had two sets of polling figures showing that the GNU is popular with voters and that both the ANC and DA have gained support as a result. One wonders what Mapaila makes of that.

There are various gems in Mapaila’s speech. It is quite funny what a fuss he makes over ‘our collaboration with Paramount Queen Clara Mashile, who is also present here with us tonight’. Presumably he addresses her as ‘comrade your majesty’ ? Mapaila argues that South Africa’s municipalities are collapsing mainly because so many people are too poor to pay their bills. Not a word about corruption or mismanagement, no admission that people in townships and informal settlements don’t pay rates and often have illegal water and electricity connections, and of course no explanation as to why his ‘explanation’ doesn’t seem to apply to DA-run municipalities.

Throughout his speech Mapaila insists that ‘South Africa can no longer afford the yoke of austerity’ and demands large state expenditures to industrialise the economy, to provide jobs for everybody, to implement the NHI, etc. In this he sounds rather like Duma Gqubule, the left-wing economist who is a columnist for Business Day, but hails from Cosatu’s research unit, Naledi. Both Mapaila and Gqubule are very critical of the Medium Term Budget.

But there are only two ways of paying for the vast extra public expenditures that these gentlemen want. One is just to print the money – which Gqubule favours, claiming that if the USA could get away with ‘quantitative easing’, so can we. Very few economists agree. Instead, they say that such carefree printing of more money would lead to hyperinflation, just as it did next door in Zimbabwe. The worst of that dreadful situation was borne by the Zimbabwean poor, and there is no doubt that things would be the same here.

The second way of paying for all these things would be by extra borrowing. But we already have debts amounting to 75% of GDP. These huge debts were run up by the Zuma government, created and fully supported by the SACP. The reason that Enoch Godongwana has slammed the brakes on now is that he knows only too well that if our debt burden increases much further we will have to collapse into the arms of the IMF – which will demand tough economies, sweeping privatisations, a cut in the number and the remuneration of public servants, and many other measures which the ANC (and SACP) would find deeply unacceptable.

So Mapaila again has to choose: if we were to adopt his economic proposals, we would get either hyperinflation or an IMF bail-out. Which would he prefer? One has the sneaking feeling that Mapaila may not want anyone to take him seriously, that he just wants to be able to advocate these things at the top of his voice without having to face the consequences.

It reminds one rather of how the conservative intellectual, William F. Buckley, ran for mayor of New York in 1966. Buckley was quite frank that he merely wanted to raise the conservative profile, that he didn’t expect to win and, indeed, that he didn’t much want to be mayor. A journalist demanded what he would do if he actually won? ‘Demand a recount’, he said.

• Speech by the SACP General Secretary, Solly Mapaila, at an SACP fundraising dinner, Kempton Park, Friday 15 November 2024. Published in RED ALERT, vol 1 no 06, Monday 18 November 2024.