The Dangers of Liberalism: A Short Reflection on the African National Congress in South Africa.

• Author: Xaba, Wanelisa
• Position: Special Issue on Human Rights Activists Engagement with Oppressors

People of colour all over the world exist and have to rebuild their humanity deep within the ruins of colonial imperialism and white supremacist heteropatriarchal neoliberal capitalism. For many of us, our sense of orientation is lost between essentialist longing for "pre-colonial Africa" and the violent colonial interpretation of our histories. Can you imagine? Trying to build your humanity amongst the ruins of an all-encompassing, unrelenting, and continuously re-inventing system? It is a big task. This is what any requests to engage with the oppressor must be measured against. Do we have time to engage the oppressor? When we take into consideration the energy and resilience required for us to survive the system (which seeks to kill us at every turn) and reimagine a decolonial antisystem humanity, the answer is clear. It is unequivocally no.

Moreover, asking freedom defenders to engage the oppressors, especially within the context of human rights, makes dangerous assumptions about our oppressors. It assumes that our oppressors have a conscience. It assumes that our oppressors are capable of or want reform. It assumes that our oppression is an accident of nature. No! Our oppression is a carefully engineered system of denigration, disease, and psycho-social death. Every waking moment it dreams up new ways of drowning Black lives. It salivates over Black death. It celebrates our demise and destruction. How can I speak to such a system? What string of sentences and woolen paragraphs can I offer at the altar of death?

As Assata Shakur asserts, "Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them." (1) She is precisely right because the people who oppress us have no moral compass. Our chains and our deaths are evidence of this. The destruction of the world and nature is evidence of this. The bones of our ancestors at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean are evidence of this. The evolution of colonialism and white supremacist heteropatriarchal neoliberal capitalism from its inception until now is evidence that the system has no peace with justice and equality.

One of the greatest failures of the African National Congress (ANC) during the resistance against Apartheid was its timid posture towards the oppressor. The organization and its leadership greatly appealed to the consciousness of the oppressor. At the height of colonial terrorism and white supremacy, this...