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Xhamela Omde, Omhle!
It is 46 years since you danced to the drumbeat and songs of the ancestors, calling you to the abode of the brave. Yet, for the lovers of Azania, those you shared physical space with, and those who never saw you, it is as if it was yesterday. That is because, Xhamela, you are so alive in the memory of Azanian revolutionaries.
The reasons for your permanent place in our hearts are too many to enumerate.
We know that you loved the South African people in a manner both personal and impersonal at the same time.
The personal is evidenced in the act of being willing to pay the ultimate price, with your life, so that black people could regain their dignity in the land of their forebears. Being alone, lonely, stark naked, shackled, surrounded by your hostile captors, you could have cut a deal with your tormentors, as many have done in revolutions. But you took the blows, refusing to submit, holding on to your internal dignity as they stripped you of your physical integrity and dignity.
The Black Consciousness Movement, which you led in its many formations, was, unquestionably, a dominant force when you were still alive.
The African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) were constrained, in their operations, by exile. Such, Xhamela, could have easily gone into your head and made you claim that the BCM, and the BCM alone, was the sole liberator of the Azanian people, thus placing you in the camp of the arrogant and partisan.
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But you had the revolutionary wisdom to recognise that no single liberation movement had all the answers to all the challenges of the Azanian revolution. This realisation led you to break your banning orders and slip through the nets of the enemy in an effort to speak to various leaders to seek a united front of the liberation movements.
Yet, the foregoing were not the only expressions of your love for us. You left us, black people, with love Letters, anthologised in your book, I Write What I Like. In this beautiful literary, philosophical heritage, you gave us a mandate best expressed by the title of one of your essays titled “Black Consciousness and The Quest For A True Humanity”.
You told us, Xhamela, that the West may have created a world with a military and industrial outlook, but the greatest gift was to come from Africa – giving the world a human face. This statement, at once, projected the Black Consciousness philosophy, as not only seeking liberation for black people, but for all members of the human race.
In Azania, here, the blacker a person is, the more likely she or he will be stopped in the streets, suspected of being an African foreigner, ironically, in Africa, and blocked from entering hospitals, while foreign white people pass by freely.
Black women – whether they are toddlers, girls, middle-aged women or grannies – are sexually violated and murdered by people who are supposed to be their sons, husbands and fathers. This is contrary to the mandate that you gave us, Xhamela. The mandate that you gave us, revolutionary son of Azania, is to dig deep, as you did, into the treasure of our ancestors’ African cultural concepts, and strive to find answers.
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If and when we do so, we will find a beautiful word, that has deep meaning, but is taken for granted, in Nguni languages. That word is “nyoko” (your mother). When broken into two, the word gives us “nyo” (vagina) and “ko”. Reference to inyo tells us the obvious, that every child has come into this world through “inyo”, and that, therefore, “inyo” is sacred and is not something to be violated and treated roughly through rapes or infliction of pain by males with low self-esteem who feel inflated and better about themselves when they inflict pain on women.
In my engagement with many educators, when I ask them to teach their students, especially males, that children came to the world through inyo, they react with shock, saying that the African word sounds rude. Such a reaction reveals to us that our oppressors have succeeded in instilling in our minds that African languages are vulgar and that European languages are carriers of decency, hence the normality in using the word “vagina” and not “inyo”.
That, in essence, means reclaiming the undistorted version of ubuntu of our ancestors to give the world a humane face.
On the occasion of the 46th anniversary of your death, those of us who claim to follow you, need to urgently realise that we are nowhere close to achieving the Black Consciousness’ quest for a true humanity, unless we tell Azanians that sexism is no worse an evil than racism. It is hypocritical, on the one hand, to condemn white racism, while, on the other, speaking in muted voices against African men’s sexism.
In fact, Xhamela, sexism is worse than racism because our African ancestors taught us, rightly so, that the first home of all human beings is the woman’s womb, that a child is more of the mother than they are of the father, and that, therefore, women are sacred.
By our natural proximity to our mothers, women are the first teachers. They are firsts in many ways. This is the meaning and relevance of Black Consciousness in the present, 46 years after your departure, to reclaim African cultural teachings for the liberation of all humankind, both women and men!
*Sesanti is a Professor at the University of the Western Cape’s Faculty of Education.
