Julian Kunnie
Cape Town - Africa is a continent of immeasurable wealth – her people and all the teeming life in the Earth, air, and sea.
Minerals are not the index of Africa’s wealth as we are constantly and daily brainwashed and indoctrinated into accepting as a cardinal truth by Europhiliac and Eurocentric African regimes and ruling classes.
This is not to demonise western Europe, but to underscore how adopting colonial and capitalist values has always worsened things for the earth, land, water, ecology, women, children, our youth, miners, workers, and indeed all life.
It is out of greed for more and for conquest of other peoples’ lands that colonialism spread to the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, accompanied by slavery and mass genocide followed by predatory capitalism.
Only a tiny number of wealthy elites have benefited and, with their insatiable greed, are dragging all of us into the abyss of further decline and extinction of life.
The electricity crisis and regular outages in South Africa and Zimbabwe particularly, and other parts of Africa, have everything to do with the Earth and capitalism’s failure to understand that coal mining, like all mineral mining and oil drilling, only makes life on Earth impossible.
After all, it’s not just about us two-leggeds, it’s also about preserving life for the four-leggeds, winged creatures, sea creatures, fish, trees, plants, rivers, lakes, streams, hills, and valleys.
In the African and indigenous worldview, all are alive and we are responsible to the Earth as Mother to preserve and conserve.
So shutting down capitalism is the key, shutting down economies that were designed to exploit and impoverish us incessantly is an urgent requirement ... but correspondingly must translate into collective, unselfish, Earth-friendly and respectful ethical ways of living, caring for, and treating each other and all life.
The problem is the system of neo-colonialist oppression and exploitation in Africa, and in other places where colonialism still prevails in new forms.
South Africa, sadly, is no exception, but an integral part of western capitalism, neo-colonialism, and militarism, a leading player on the world economic and political stage in this regard.
She needs to desperately return to Africa, and be accountable to African ancestors, the Earth, so that the dispossessed African lands can be restored and healed, which is impossible under capitalist greed and arrogance.
An Nguni proverb says umhlab awunoni, which translates into the Earth does not become fat from the constant passing away of people and life.
African ancestral wisdom always understood this principle: the Earth as Mother is ultimate and can never be exploited for selfish gain.
We belong to the Earth, the Earth does not belong to us.
Now is the time for a new dispensation, perhaps a Constituent Assembly, almost three decades after the first democratic elections, including all political formations in South Africa/ Azania, including the PAC, Azapo, the Landless Peoples’ Movement (Abahlali basemjondolo), Land First, and other organisations and worker unions, civil organisations, and NGOs, to sit down respectfully and discuss the deep and impending crisis facing all people in South Africa/Azania, Africa, and the world.
The Earth cannot take much more human arrogance and greed.
The martyrs of Sharpeville, Black Consciousness, from Umkhonto we Sizwe, the Chimurenga of Zimbabwe, Frelimo in Mozambique, and other liberation struggles need to be honoured since they are now fully part of the Earth and the spiritual universe to which we all must return whether we like it or not.
The Earth as Mother has always saved us and will continue to save us, not disintegrating capitalism or its Earth-dependent high e-technologies.
Whither South Africa? Whither humanity?
Aluta Continua!
Kunnie is a global educator, researcher, author and activist. His forthcoming fifth book is, “The Earth Mother and the Collapse of Capitalism in the 21st Century” (2023).
Cape Times