The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki IS OUT IN BOOKSTORES.
Do the YCL and the ANCYL ever read books? I dont want to question the SACP and the COSATU, those r well stocked on the Marxist theory and politics of the Soviet Union:lol: :lol: BASTARDS :lol:
Qunta, Roberts and native a**istants:
Why is Roberts being punished?
The empire strikes back! And how. Ronald Suresh Roberts seems to have driven a few people almost mad with his latest book, Fit to Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki.
So they decided not to review it, not to engage with the arguments in the book but rather to interpret Ronald's motives and call him names, the crudest being "lickspittle". Roberts is finding it all very entertaining, particularly since much of it is so angry and incoherent.
I have sympathy with Ronald's attackers. For the last 10 years they've worked so hard to rid the media and public spaces of cheeky natives.
Journalists such as Thami Mazwai, Jon Qwelane, John Dludlu and Jethro Goko have either been pushed out or redeployed, leaving the way open for much less-experienced and less-a**ertive black journalists.
We also know why people such as Itumeleng Mosala, Muxe Nkondo and Duma Gqubule are not asked to be commentators. Bar a few journalists and even fewer commentators, our media is populated by compliant black people who read from a prepared script from which they depart at their peril.
That script has nothing to do with integrity, balance, fairness or advancing critical debate. It has everything to do with discrediting black people in leadership positions and ultimately de-legitimatising the struggle to transform our society in line with a rightwing liberal agenda. No wonder the print media has so little credibility among thinking black people.
Just as the liberals were smelling victory in the battle of ideas, along comes Roberts. To understand the source of their anger one has to take into account that they've invested so much in demonising and discrediting the president of the country, Thabo Mbeki.
He seems not to listen when they admonish him and, worse, he answers back. How does one deal with stubborn natives? You punish them.
In the post-apartheid context you cannot use the "k" word or other explicit racial invective but you can stereotype Africans by calling them corrupt, incompetent, callous and out of touch with the poor, who have suddenly acquired champions among the white elite.
Such stereotyping is repeated often until it is substituted for reality, at which point it becomes "fact".
Hence we know for sure from the media that the president is aloof from ordinary people, denies there is a link between HIV and Aids, centralises power in his hands and is obsessed with race.
So the anger at Roberts is understandable. He's spoiling the party. He's putting in context and correcting the distortions that they have peddled for the last 10 years. A person from Limpopo who read the book used a tshiVenda idiomatic expression when he commented: "Roberts is like a traditional healer who caught the witches in the act."
So he too gets punished. The resort to verbal abuse reveals more about his attackers' prejudices than about the book or Roberts. He's a foreigner (not mentioning the same about David Bullard or Richard Calland or any other white foreigner who is in our public spaces); he's a presidential praise singer.
They also attack anyone who has a**isted him, such as Absa Bank, while omitting to tell the public about Absa's funding of other initiatives such as a book by Karina Turok, wife of vociferous Mbeki critic Zapiro, and the Critical Thinking Forum run by a weekly newspaper.
The irony of it all is that even though the book flew off the shelves as soon as it was launched, the attacks on Roberts and the book would no doubt have contributed to even larger volumes of sales.
The CNA has an exclusive three-month distribution contract and they sold 1 100 within the first week, significantly above the target. And it remains CNA's number-one non-fiction bestseller.
The book is not a biography of President Mbeki. Roberts makes that very clear in the introduction. It is rather "a displacement of certain fictions - an engagement with many of the myths and invidious discourses that have piled themselves high around Mbeki, as around the numerous native leaders of the anti-colonial past.
Rather than producing a nice life story of the cradle-to-grave sort, I want to highlight and contest existing accretions of false impressions - both about the ANC and about Thabo Mbeki."
He certainly delves into the essence of the myths and facts around the Zimbabwe and Aids questions as well as the discourse on race.
It is a tour de force that challenges the liberal hegemony in public discourse as well as the role of what he terms "native a**istants", whom he names. It is trenchant and intellectually stimulating. No wonder he has elicited such furious responses from the liberal establishment and those black people he calls native a**istants.
The response from progressive black people has been so vastly different; it's as if they occupy a different country. They are buying the book in droves and cheer Roberts wherever he goes. Thami Mazwai and Bheki Khumalo have publicly defended the book.
Barney Pityana, vice chancellor of the University of South Africa, in a keynote address delivered at Wordfest 2007, stated in the introduction that he must be among the few people who had not yet read Fit To Govern but that he was a great fan of Roberts and thought his intellectual depth in relation to his biography of Nadine Gordimer was "amazing".
"If Fit to Govern is anything like his other work, one is not surprised at the fireworks that his latest work has elicited."
This book has opened a space for black intellectual thought to once more attain prominence and independence from the liberal stranglehold. It deserves to be read and we should applaud Roberts for a**isting in re-opening that space. I cannot agree more with him when he says: "Our political democracy is not yet a place of egalitarian liberty in the exchanges of information and opinion.
"Our meritless punditocracy, its predominant credential often being alacrity in attacking the ANC, has few competent voices and fewer subversive ones."
Christine Qunta, a Cape Town-based commentator, is Ronald Suresh Roberts' lawyer
