L-R: Mangosuthu Buthelezi, a Zulu leader, his wife and Ademola Araoye

The tentacles of this their God is believed to have an ominously long reach: He is the architect of the life and the fate of each individual on earth. He saved his arbitrary “chosen” ones, on condition that they adhere to the teachings of their amorality spewed out on Sundays in their spiritually dilapidated cathedrals. Their warped interpretation of the Bible—both the Old Testament and the New Testament—is the final authority on religious matters. The implication was that the Afrikaner had been ordained by this evil God as a superior being to black humanity. Beyond the moral dead weight of its spiritual deficiency, Apartheid’s designers were top level Broederbonders with a single pervasive intellectual font that was based on the Dutch theorist, sometimes known as the ‘Calvinist pope’, Dr Abraham Kuyper.

Religion had always been the most powerful formative influence in shaping the values, norms and institutions of Afrikaner community. Among the many sad ironies of life in South Africa, Susan Ritner affirms that perhaps none is more poignant than the role of the dominant Church of the Afrikaner people (the Nederduitse Gereformeeder Kerk). Afrikaners were one of a few in western societies whose values and customs were established by, and expressed through their church. She further highlights that it was the Church that insisted on the progressive sterner definition of separateness. It is then surmised that the local expressions of the global age of hatred in South Africa revolved around racial bigotry, the devaluation of God, the de-legitimation of the humanity of the Black being and the repudiation of fundamentals of the Enlightenment and its spirit. In this Christian Nationalism was predicated on predestination, exclaiming that God broke a threatening uniformity of humankind, provided the ideology of hatred, while the Broederbond ensured organizational traction.

Amassing overwhelming state power, Matisonn notes that the Broederbond established dominant institution through which they converted other groups to Christian nationalism. It is critical to highlight Matisson’s observation, attributed to Bloomberg, that:

All the key theoreticians…agreed that by suddenly breaking up people into language groups, God revealed his will that they should live in separate cultural-ethnic units. A confusion of tongues persist till the end of time, which meant that races, cultures, and nations would persist as discrete entities.

The ideas of Abraham Kuyper drove these developments. A casual check on Abraham Kuyper yielded the following:

Abraham Kuijper, (29 October 1837 – 8 November 1920), generally known
as Abraham Kuyper, was a Dutch journalist, statesman and neo-Calvinist theologian. He founded the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands (the second largest Reformed denomination in the country behind the Dutch Reformed Church), a newspaper, the Free University of Amsterdam, and the Anti- Revolutionary Party. He served as Prime Minister of the Netherlands between 1901 and 1905. In religious affairs, he sought to adapt the Dutch Reformed Church to the challenges posed by the loss of state financial aid and by religious pluralism, rising nationalism, and the Arminian religious revivals of his day which denied predestination. He vigorously denounced modernism in theology as a fad that would pass away. In politics, he dominated the Anti-Revolutionary Party (ARP) from its founding in 1879 to his death in 1920. He promoted pillarisation, the social expression of the anti-thesis in public life, whereby Protestant, Catholic and secular elements each had their own independent schools, universities and social organisations.

In effect, by the doctrine of predestination and the assumed hierarchy of strands of humanity, instead of the sanctity and equal dignity of all races, the oneness of humanity was denied and God, the Calvinist version, was rendered nude. In God’s nudity, man and God were disrobed of their singular catholicity. The world proceeded on the devaluation of God disrobed of its essential catholicity to a mere partisan god to superintend an age of hatred. These steps led to confusion and ambivalence regarding the validity of universal axioms underpinning the topsy-turvy of the Human order. These confusions were expressed epistemologically and intellectually, spiritually and temporally, materially, physically and in the relativity of the now numerous and competing systemic values. The universe of humanity was driven by great cognitive dissonances and associated with it many relativities and dichotomies. The new systemic rot upended the seeming cognitive coherence of a more sane humane and godly dispensation.

The Era of Great Cognitive Dissonances

The era of great cognitive dissonances coincided with the age of hatred and were manifest in:
conceptual and hierarchical dichotomies (black/white/yellow/brown humanities); ethical/value relativity and depreciations (no universal ethical standards); rationalism and the Enlightenment versus the superstitious and irrational; epistemological quackery (bogus science); and authentic narratives versus contrived constructions (utilitarian blasphemy to suppress the Other).

Woven together these constituted the underpinnings of the exterminating externalities under which black humanity has labored until today. It gave a systemic context to what was the eventual fate of South Africa. The conspiracy that led to the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 was predicated on this broken template of a world driven by the fundamental principles of the era of great cognitive dissonances. That era milked the nude catholic God and its depraved predatory Human Order. Every voice was drowned in the imposed silences of hegemonic hatred. Only the narratives of the predator was legitimate. All else was de-validated in the depraved Human order. And their god was of evil. The gods of the subject conquered were banished into rumbling silences. There was a paradox. The subject and conquered had to give up all the essences that clothed their dignity: the narratives of their heroics, their rituals and the placations of their gods, the integrity of their communal spirits. They had to ape and obey the diktats of the new false and foreign gods of the hegemonic order. They had to self repudiate and spiritually die for their rebirth in the false image of the new master. They had to be born again in the name of a squalid, stinking and naked god.

Identity Defection of Black Humanity
The lamentable outcome was, has been and is the continuing mass identity defection of black humanity to all else except their black humanity. In the case of South Africa, as indeed black Africans and people of mixed race accepted their imposed inferiority and self repudiated and converted to the Dutch Reformed Church, church members debated the question of racial separation. Pressures grew for racially separate congregations, and the issue was complicated by the demands of some black church members for their own churches and congregations. Black identity defection was integral to the construction of the depraved Human order that tore the robe off the one God of and for all humanity. The extant Human order was in crisis everywhere.

The situation recalled the scenario that Absalom Jones and his colleague Richard Allen had faced a century or so ago in far away United States. In 1786, the white members of St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia met and decided that black members of the Church should sit only in the balcony. Absalom Jones (1746-1818) and Richard Allen (1760-1831), who had led many blacks into the Church, learned of the decision only when, on the following Sunday, ushers tapped them on the shoulder during the opening prayers, and demanded that they move to the balcony without waiting for the end of the prayer. Following the white gang up, they walked out, followed by the other black members. Meanwhile, President James Monroe in the United States worked assiduously to remove black freedmen from the United States. His main concern was the potential of racial contamination of whites through miscegenation across the races. The policy led to the founding of Haiti and Liberia.

The Exterminating Externalities

There is a familiar history to this. The exterminating externalities that pervaded the era of the Union of South Africa beginning 1910, was, it may be argued, legally preceded by the gang up of the British and the Boers against blacks in the Peace of Vereeniging of 30 May, 1902. In order to accommodate the anti black interests of the Boer republics, the treaty terms excluded universal franchise for both Black and White. Blacks were effectively disenfranchised. The rationale being the British realization that for racial domination to be viable, an alliance with the Boers was necessary. This anti black alliance was instrumental in serving the political interests  of Great Britain whose British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain intimated that Britain’s vision of a negotiated peace to foster unity among the settler populations, was to ensure that that British culture and loyalty to the crown would be the foundation of the new dispensation. South Africa became a Union  with this burden on the 31 May 1910.  These developments were met with undisguised hostility from blacks. This is the contrived broken universe that shaped Mazisi Kunene’s earliest engagement with his environment. They were also the preeminent drivers of the mangled zeitgeist of a thoroughly malevolent global era that baby Mazisi Kunene and his generation were consigned to.

Kunene was born 12 years after World War I, or the First World War. Known also the Great War, WWI was a global war instigated by Europe that lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. The war involved more than 70 million armed men. 60 million Europeans were mobilized and many hapless Africans were co-opted to engage in Europe’s mad krieg that is recorded as the largest of human folly in history. When Mazisi Kunene was nine years old, Europe and its deranged sympathizers, including the Union of South Africa, on both sides were at each other’s throats again. South Africa was embroiled in the limitless madness as the guardian of the Cape route in the course of the war itself. It’s uncertain allegiances were conveniently tossed about by the ebb and flow of the conflict itself. The unfathomable malevolence of that era, in its horrible global manifestations and its specificity and immediacy in the Union of South Africa, Between the founding the Union and 1920, segregation became central to South African political, social, and economic life as whites addressed the “native question.” In 1911 a Mines and Works Act was promulgated. It was revised in 1926 to reserve certain jobs in mining and the railways for white workers.

The Natives’ Land Act followed in 1913. The Land Act demarcated less than one-tenth of South Africa as black as reserves for lands while prohibiting any purchase or lease of land by blacks outside the reserves. The law also restricted the terms of tenure under which blacks could live on white-owned farms. These all, including the Native (Urban Areas), directed the transcendental struggle of Mazisi Kunene. It was a time of great tumult.

The outcome of the Anglo-Boer war was the emergence of a consolidated South African territory through the merging of the four separate British colonies: Cape Colony, Natal Colony, Transvaal Colony and Orange River Colony. It included the territories formerly part of the Boer republics annexed in 1902, South African Republic and Orange Free State .the Cape Colony, Natal, Orange Free State. Yet, in the context of malevolence of that era, the peace agreement and the terms of the Union of South Africa agreed to in 1910 set the stage for the emergence of institutionalized black oppression and the stout resistance that began almost thereafter. The South Africa Act of 1909 could be considered as an empowering of the decisions reached at the National Convention of 1908 by the British Parliament. Also, on the 31 May 1910, exactly eight years after the Boers had made peace with the English through the Treaty of Vereeniging, South Africa became a Union. By ignoring the wishes of the majority of the population, the formation of the Union of South Africa created the political upheaval and turmoil that engulfed the country until the negotiated settlement that gave birth to the Republic of South Africa.

Meanwhile, the Native (Urban Areas) Act segregated urban residential space and created “influx controls” to reduce access to cities by blacks. Blacks were also effectively disenfranchised. Legislation was proposed to increase the reserve areas in order to remove black voters in the Cape from the common roll in 1926. That objective was finally realized through the Representation of Natives Act (1936). Blacks now voted on a separate roll to elect three white representatives to the House of Assembly. That was the world the fathers of Kunene had dreaded and combated.

For the future of the Union and its obnoxious policies, a profane religion based on a corruption of god and man founded on a simple philosophy was necessary to de-validate morality, ethics and to create a new ‘god’ immune to conventional morality. The task of the creation of this mean and immoral god fell to the Broederbond. They searched for and looked up pervert intellectuals wherever they could find such for theoretical justifications. John Mattison observes that South African segregationists found such a character in a Dutch politician, theologian, newspaper editor and academic Dr Kuyper. Matisonn illuminates that the Afrikaner nationalists who followed Kuyper called themselves Christian nationalists. They included the leaders of the Broederbond from the 1920s to the 1970s. Running against the tide of world history that sought to wrestle power from the divine rights of kings and humanize governance, the South African ethnic hegemonists believed that South Africa’s leaders were chosen by God.

Christian nationalism relied on several biblical texts that Kuyper had highlighted. Accordingly, Christian nationalism provided the ideology of a simpleton racist god, the Broederbond the organizational traction, for this human horror. This backdrop of a corrupted idea of a moron god provides the challenging contours all black South Africans had to traverse. The landscape was principally noxious for their continued survival: spiritually, culturally, economically, including the challenges to the very idea of the humanity of the black race. Bullets could destroy power lines and sabotage the economy, but bullets could not pierce this malady. Words and ideas were the principal anti dote against this drunk god and his demented disciples on earth.

Mazisi Kunene and the Struggle for Holistic Emancipation
Against this very bleak backdrop, by 1912, almost two decades before the birth of Mazisi Kunene, Pixley ka Isaka Seme, the founder of the African National Congress, had established Abantu-Batho newspaper, partly in response to the unification and the emergence of the Union of South Africa in 1910. Mazisi Kunene’ life’s struggle can be located in this larger ferment as pivotal to the struggle for holistic revalidation of the essences of a denied humanity and also a strong centrality in the unbroken continuity of an imposed struggle: physical and metaphysical and, with greater precision, spiritual and cultural, of the circuit of like comrades and kindred spirits of the intellectual wars before him.

In the hallowed pantheon of these affirmative resistance in word would be found the AC Jordans, Tiyo Sogas, largely reputed as the first major modern Xhosa intellectual, HIE Dhlomos and his robust intellectual interlocutor Benedict Wallet Vilakazi, whose relationship with Mazisi Kunene cannot be glossed over in deconstructing the trajectory of Kunene’s life, SEK Mqhayi, Clement Martyn Doke, Simon Majakethetha Phamotse, Thomas Mofolo, Azariel M. Sekese, Zakea D.Mangoela, Everitt Lechesa Segoete. The canons of the struggle are codified in Shaka, Kunene’s epic.

Cite page 189, line 31 in Emperor Shake the Great
Our fathers sat telling tales of their past.
They debated and argued over many mysteries of life
The king sat with the councillors, making jokes and laughing happily
From afar could be heard the boom of their laughter.
Thus was peace manifest in the land of our Forefathers
From many regions many people came to sit and talk at the Assembly…
Detesting the ease with which others have access to their masters.

Can anyone challenge these profound truisms?.
In the face of all this, it is imperative to raise questions in relation to the predilections of black humanity to totally immerse itself in identities with foreign connotations and dominant belief systems and to adopt same as the motor driving its devastated societies all over the world. The levers of foreign religions have thus redefined and imposed false identities and strange conceptions of the cosmos that elevate the place of every strand of creation save for the denigration of black humanity in that cosmos.

They are central to the inability of black humanity to emancipate itself from the debilitating existential conditions in which it is universally trapped. The slave let go of the heavy metal contraptions around the necks, wrists and legs of black humanity, after he had internalized toxic influences that have him bound to precepts and dehumanizing worldviews that essentially denigrate his being. Black humanity remains trapped in its old chains of servitude to others of his own volition. In many ways he helps to tighten the shackled contraptions. Kofi Awoonor enunciates this danger when he states that if you come to a people and take away their religion, which is their first line of defense and protection, you dislocate them completely. Surveying the dehumanizing mental landscape created by extraneous influences and now perpetuated by black humanity, he laments that “Africans are the only people who forget” Finally, given the existential situation of black humanity, he calls for some kind of reconstruction of the mental landscape around our objective historical reality.

Transformations of the Social Identity of the Black Earthling
The process of instigating identity defection is adapted as the deadly games of the aspiring dominant forces have evolved. But the end goal has not changed. Accordingly, the reflexive structure of the identity of the Black Earthling is constantly being processed and his social order is constantly fluid and unstable. These transformations of the social identity of the Black Earthling are driven by overt violence, if considered necessary to attain the goal in a cost-effective manner, or subtle engagements instituted by the external Other to change the cognitive appreciation of Self, the destruction of the entrenched social practices and habits that constitute and define behavior as well as give structure to everyday relationships. In essence, the induced genetic modification of the core values, understandings of the universe embedded in the self- appreciation of the locus of the Black Earthling in this cosmos all alter the foundation of the cognitive complexity of reality. The adulteration of this Self transforms the cognition of identity and social reality.