Category Archives: The Black Consciousness Movement

We Need to Move beyond Mngxitama’s Gutter Politics

Tuesday, 26 March 2013
Unemployed People’s Movement Press Statement

We Need to Move beyond Mngxitama’s Gutter Politics

Andile Mngxitama has become notorious for trying to privatize the memory of Steve Biko. He is not the only person trying to privatize that legacy, which is a legacy that must be there for all of us. But he is the only one that uses gutter politics to defend his privatization of Biko’s legacy.

They way that Mngxitama insults people is just incredible. If you are not a loyal follower of the Big Man then you are a CIA agent, an askari or a house nigger. He even called one comrade in the Landless People’s Movement a CIA agent while she was being tortured by the police! He has insulted so many young black activists and writers. He has used highly gendered language in these insults too. This is gutter politics. This is not the politics of BC. Aubrey Mokoape always makes the point about the humility of Biko. We learnt to reject the politics of sectarianism in BC during the feud, during hard times. Even when BC was under siege they still put forward ideas. The seminars that were organised across the country in those days were organised to debate ideas, not to attack individuals. Continue reading →

The Unemployed People’s Movement will not be Participating in the So-Called ‘People’s Space’ at the BRICS Meeting in Durban

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Sunday, 24 March 2013
Unemployed People’s Movement Press Statement

The Unemployed People’s Movement will not be Participating in the So-Called ‘People’s Space’ at the BRICS Meeting in Durban

The Unemployed People’s Movement will not be participating in the so-called ‘People’s Space’ at the BRICS meeting in Durban.

Our Umlazi branch received a phone call recently informing us that buses were being provided for us to send our members to the so-called ‘People’s Space’ at the Centre for Civil Society at UKZN. We were instructed to mobilise to fill the buses.

We made it clear that we will not be participating in this space. We were given no role in the process leading up to the BRICS meeting and we have been given no role in planning the so-called ‘People’s Space’ or in its management.

The experience of grassroots movements at the so-called ‘People’s Space’ at the COP17 meeting in Durban, also hosted by the Centre for Civil Society, was terrible. We were not given any role in the planning of that space. We were just bussed in. We were given inferior accommodation and food. We found that our role was just to sit and listen to overseas experts talking to us. There was a protest by the movements against the organisers of that meeting. They responded by buying us fried chicken but did not take our concerns seriously and discuss a better way forward for the future. This was one more insult.

This was not the first time that movements have been expressing their concerns about these NGO organised meetings. Movements have been raising concerns about these meetings for many years but we have either been ignored or criminalised by the NGOs and academics. We are highly aware that when grassroots movements walked out of the Social Movements Indaba meeting, also held by the Centre for Civil Society, at UKZN in 2006 they were called ‘criminals’ in the media and have been attacked by the NGOs and academics ever since. We are prepared for the same treatment.

In the days of the WSSD in Johannesburg grassroots movements had lots of supporters but were organisationally weak. All that the NGOs had to do to secure popular support was to provide buses and hand out T-shirts for movements like the Landless People’s Movement. But Movements are much stronger now in organisational terms and those days are gone.

These so-called ‘People’s Spaces’ are really NGO and academic spaces where the role of grassroots activists is just to be bussed in to listen to experts in exchange for a few crumbs for the movement leaders. The reason that we condemn this is that we subscribe to Black Consciousness. The Black Consciousness movement emerged in 1968 when black students walked out of a NUSAS meeting in Grahamstown because whites were doing all the thinking and talking while blacks were playing a passive role. Today the situation is just as bad or even worse in these so-called ‘People’s Spaces’. Therefore today we continue to walk out of spaces where we are disrespected and are only being bussed in to legitimate other people’s agendas.

Also, we experience these so called ‘reality tours’ as if we are being treated as animals in a zoo. We have made it clear that we will not be collaborating with so-called ‘reality tours’ in our communities. We insisted that a tour scheduled to take place in Umlazi today be cancelled.

The NGOs and donors are trying to control and commercialise our struggles at these international meetings. If they want to work with us in the future they will need to do so on a respectful and fully democratic basis. We want partnership and not domination and exploitation.

We discussed our position on this matter at the Democratic Left Front national steering committee meeting in Johannesburg last week.

We remain committed to the struggle against imperialism but that struggle needs to be rooted in democratic practices.

Bheki Buthelezi, Unemployed People’s Movement (KwaZulu-Natal) 072 639 9898
Ayanda Kota, Unemployed People’s Movement (Eastern Cape) 078 625 6462

Ayanda Kota – brief biography

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Ayanda Kota

Ayanda Kota was born in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape in February 1976 – the year of the national youth insurrection that began in Soweto. He joined the Black Consciousness Movement at the age of 15 years. Militants in the movement made a serious study of works by revolutionary thinkers like Steven Biko, Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Mao Zedong. In 1990 he was elected as a Class Representative and in 1995 he was elected as the Azanian Student Movement Chairperson in Cape Town. In the same year he was arrested and detained in the Cape Town police station for his role in Employ Black Teachers Campaign. The following year he was elected as the Azanian Students Movement National Political Education Secretary in Kimberly. In 2001 he was re-elected to the position of Political Education Secretary at a meeting at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town. In 2003 he was elected as the Black Consciousness Youth of Azania National Secretary for Publicity and Information in Durban at a meeting at the Steve Biko campus of the Durban University of Technology.

In 2005 he formed the United Fighters Football Club in Cape Town. In 2007 he was elected a Shop Steward at Home Choice Catalogue Retail Company in Cape Town and subsequently dismissed for union activities.

In 2009 he founded the Unemployed People’s Movement in Grahamstown and was elected as the first chairperson. He kept this position until 2012 and, from 2010, he also held the elected position of President of the Makana Local Football Association. In 2010 he was arrested and subject to police assault while protesting outside parliament. The following year he was arrested for his role in a protest in Grahamstown. In early 2012 he was arrested on bogus theft charges and assaulted in the Grahamstown police station. In each case charges were dropped against him before the matters went to trial. In 2012 he resigned as the chairperson of the Unemployed People’s Movement but was elected as the movement’s spokesperson.

The Unemployed People’s Movement has members in various parts of the country and vibrant branches in Grahamstown and in Durban. It works closely with the grassroots movements that, like Abahlali baseMjondolo, are affiliated to the Poor People’s Alliance and it is also affiliated to the Democratic Left Front.

Ayanda has two lovely sons, Sibalwethu and Simamkele.