I dare to admit that schooling and scholarly accumulation of cognitive and intellectual capacitation are some of the greatest pedagogic weapons one can acquire as a strength in the chosen path of a political career, be it as a professional inter-governmental spy or a great statesman.
One of my professors in my varsity years once said university education was like an intellectual prison in which your high school education became a steady walk towards the gate of the scholarly imprisonment where academic inmates are.
He went on to say when you acquire your undergraduate degree you have started climbing the wall of the academia. Your post-graduate degree represents just a grand peep for you to see what’s in the inside but you have not even tasted what education is about. In isiXhosa one can safely say “useliqaba”.
I deliberately chose the word “iqaba” so as to continue playing that role of an educator since most people, particularly in the ranks of the Xhosa people, have the tendency to misinterpret and therefore misuse the word as a derogatory term.
Well, let me quickly clarify, the word comes from the Xhosa verb “ukuqaba” meaning to smear, as in applying some ointment or something like that on one’s body. So the Xhosa people have the tradition of applying the red or white clay stone “ichitywa” or “imbola” on their bodies, using it as a sunscreen.
It therefore does not have anything to do with being educated or otherwise since one could be educated and still continue with the practice “yokuqaba”. So, calling a person iqaba is no insult. Next time I will explain a related word, “igqobhoka” which is also not derogatory at all.
One of the things we learn at varsity especially as students of language and linguistics, is to master the art of deconstructive criticism.
This is one of the arts of language comprehension used to understand communication better than the ordinary man, who only possesses a pedestrian and shallow understanding of the combination of words in any form of communication.
One of the techniques used in deconstructive criticism is to listen more to what is not said in the communication than what is actually said; it doesn’t matter whether it is written or oral communication.
The other technique of deconstructive criticism is simple interpretation of the written or spoken words. For purposes of this article, I will use both techniques in order to understand the jargon and nomenclature used in Floyd Shivambu’s leaked WhatsApp message which I found both interesting and educational.
First, I must say that the message does look like it was taken from the middle or so, since it starts with the word “ramifications”. Anyway, the message goes:
“…ramifications of power structures within the EFF. My exit is not merely a defection but rather a dialectical response to the hegemonic entropy that has subsumed the party’s leadership apparatus.”
While we do not have the transitory connection the opening word, “ramifications”, it does suggest that his fallout with the party is a consequence of the tables that have turned in the power structures of the EFF. It is quite interesting that he makes mention of the fact that his departure is not merely a defection but rather “a dialectical response to the hegemonic entropy that has subsumed the party’s leadership apparatus.”
Before we decode this very conglomeration of words in this sentence, it will help us to connect our thoughts to the press conference of the EFF leadership that announced Shivambu’s decision to defect to the MK Party, especially the fact that he was quite adamant and fully recalcitrant that he will not entertain or talk about what got him disgruntled in the party.
The choice of his words, I must say, is quite brilliant and one that can easily or only be understood by those trained to communicate as secret agents or in espionage.
The careful combination of the words, “hegemonic” and “entropy” is intended to answer the questions that he was evading at the press conference with Julius Malema and the rest of the leadership of the EFF. These words are suggestive of an unreasonable power dominance by one leader or more over others with the consequence that the objectives of the party would be difficult to achieve in such a recalcitrant dominance that is, seemingly, intolerant of divergent views.
Although this was obvious when one looks at the party from the outside, which is why, by the way, journalists were asking the questions they were asking suggesting a fallout between the two leaders, Shivambu would deliberately not mention it for the sake of conflict avoidance in the public eye.
Many may read this as cowardice but to those who understand the science of politics, it is diplomacy. The message goes on to say: “As a political actor attuned to the nuances of Machiavellian statecraft, I discerned an inevitable teleological trajectory towards a Hobbesian Leviathan; wherein the accumulation of power became antithetical to the principles of collective will and organic solidarity.”
A very clever selection of words there by the former deputy president of the EFF. Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher who spent his life seeking solutions on how to help society live in socio-political harmony without any social conflict.
Hobbes believed in the rule by the monarchy where people had to forfeit some of their socio-political freedoms in favour of the welfare of the monarch.
So the teleological trajectory that Shivambu was now seeing in the EFF was a dangerous one where these tendencies were growing or developing within the party and he calls their eventuality “inevitable”, which literally suggests that the EFF is heading that direction and there is no turning point.
The selection of historical and philosophical nomenclature in this message must be quite plausible as a diplomatic encoding that seeks to avoid further conflict between the belligerent parties, Malema and Shivambu.
This is so because the chronic illness of the organisation and organisational detriment described in the message will not sound offensive to the leadership since the public will naturally be uninterested in decoding the language used. Gramscian hegemony is a very dangerous political concept depicting the beliefs of Antonio Gramsci that were vehemently opposed to the Marxist philosophy.
So his departure which he describes as the exodus, is a result of his critique of these fundamental ideological shifts in the EFF which, according to him, are not based on the founding principles of the party.
The entire message seems to be going at length in dragging the ideas of the French and English philosophers, who basically coined the oppressive concepts of totalitarianism mainly applied during the feudal system thereby turning the state into personal fiefdoms.
One of these thinkers was Michael Foucault of France who Shivambu utilises to describe the counter-revolutionary leadership apparatus within the EFF.
He describes the mechanisms of control within the party as becoming less about the proliferation of emancipatory praxis. The word “panoptic” suggests an intolerable dictatorship where everyone in the structures of leadership must see the political spectrum only in the eyes of one leader or one view, a political stereotype.
At the end, the message describes his departure from the EFF as a phenomenological act of resistance against the calcification of organic tendencies within the party’s ideological substructure.
This seems to suggest that Shivambu did not leave the EFF because he saw no personal growth within the party, but a dangerous development of a political monster driven by dangerous symptoms of occultism.
He further states that this fundamental ideological departure within the party, resulting in the limitation of participatory democracy necessitated by the prevailing power in the superstructure, which cannot be corrected and where all must toe the line.
Although this was sent through WhatsApp, the richness of its language necessitates a comprehensive scope of a university student pursuing a career in critical thinking, literary criticism and philosophy.
However, most significant is the fact that the content is an eye opener to those who thought that founding an organisation together is a guarantee for the total liberation of all.
In my previous article, the open letter to Shivambu, I explain this invoking the historical Bolshevik party and the political tendencies of its totalitarian leader, Joseph Stalin.
Further, it is quite encouraging to read mentally challenging stuff like this, so if indeed the WhatsApp message is a leaked message from Shivambu, I must applaud him for this kind of writing.
Vukile Theo Phanyaphanya is a retired teacher and an active author