On Thursday 14 January 2016, Minister Blade Nzimande met with the Student Representative Council’s (SRC’s) from across academic institutions nationally in Kempton Park, Johannesburg. This came after President Jacob Zuma almost robotically announced a Commission of Inquiry into Higher Education Funding. Continue reading “BLF SUPPORTS STUDENTS CONTINUING WITH PROTESTS AND REJECTS BOTH THE SRC MEETING WITH BLADE NZIMANDE AND THE COMMISSION OF INQUIRY INTO HIGHER EDUCATION FUNDING”
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BLACK FIRST LAND FIRST: THE STRUGGLE FOR FREE SOCIALIST BLACK CENTERED EDUCATION CONTINUES |
| BLF applauds those who continue to play their part in the student struggle for Free Education, recognising the courageous work done in 2015, including the continual planning over what was meant to be a “festive period”. The principled position taken by the #FeesMustFall movement who rejects the idea of “Business as Normal, in an Abnormal Society”, is exemplary and speaks to the desire for black liberation from an anti-black, white-supremacist society. |
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The Black First Land First (BLF) movement shares the grief of the Zimbabwean people on the loss of their beloved son and African revolutionary, Professor Sam Moyo. We learn with heavy hearts from our occupied country, South Africa, that Prof Moyo has passed on from this world.
We share the pain of the world peasants, landless and anti-imperialist community. This loss comes at a time when our world is again in the grip of imperial and colonial aggression and mendacity. In a world saturated with lies, revolutionary intellectual work becomes part of the most important arsenal of the battle for liberation of the oppressed.
We shall forever remember how Prof Moyo stood as a beacon of truth and principle in a sea of sponsored condemnation of the Zimbabwean land struggle. Imperialist propaganda went into overdrive trying to soil the heroic acts of the Zimbabwean people and their government to return the stolen land.
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Prof Moyo rejected acclaim and acknowledgement that comes from colonial and imperial scholarship that implores Africans to take the side of Empire against its people. We watched with great admiration how, from every conference, from pages of rarefied academic journals and in books, Prof Moyo again and again defended the Zimbabwean land reclamation struggle.
We will always remember that there was a time when Prof Moyo stood alone with the revolutionary people of Zimbabwe. In international academic platforms he refused the seductive embrace of colonisers which comes with a litany of personal rewards.
We learned from Prof Moyo’s example that the greatest reward is service to the African masses and the oppressed of the world.
We learned from Prof Moyo that the land and agrarian struggles are foundational to the liberation of the African continent. We learned from Prof Moyo’s principled defence of the African revolution that the revolutionary process is served best by rigorous scholarship. From Prof Moyo’s agitation and scholarship we learned the truth of the Zimbabwean land revolution and were able to counter the imperialist lies better.
The avalanche of lies and condemnation from imperialism and its agents never stopped, but in the face of the tireless revolutionary scholarship of Prof Moyo these mountains of lies paled into insignificance. We learned from Prof Moyo that without committed intellectuals the people perish. Africa must grow her own intellectuals, driven by the singular desire to serve this blighted continent.
Today, we march with less certainty because one who could see further than most of us, is no longer amongst us. We however, take solace in the knowledge that Prof Moyo left us foundations strong enough to take the process of building the African revolution further.
We South Africans remain a people shackled by colonial and neo-colonial bondage. We as South Africans remain landless after twenty-one years of pseudo-independence.
We have learned from Prof Moyo how to do battle against the intellectual deceit of the West. On our part, we commit to honor his memory through tirelessly working for the return of our land and attainment of self-reliance because we know only through returning our land first can we be on our way to putting blacks first in a world that puts blacks last.
To the people of Zimbabwe, his friends and colleagues and the entire anti-imperialist world, we say may the black gods strengthen you at this time. To his family, we thank you for sharing with us this brilliant gift from the Black Gods.
Hamba kahle son of the soil!
ISSUED BY THE NATIONAL COORDINATING COMMITTEE OF THE BLACK FIRST LAND FIRST MOVEMENT
23 November 2015
Contact Details
Black First Land First Mail: [email protected]gmail.com
Zanele Lwana
(National Spokesperson)
Cell: +27 79 486 9087
Lindsay Maasdorp
(National Spokesperson)
Cell: +27 79 915 2957
Mail: [email protected]om
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7WF8Toi9y4]
The Marikana massacre brutally thrust blacks into naked enemy fire at the ANC barricades. Objectively, this moment in history marked the spiritual death of black faith in the ANC and the birth of a revolutionary consciousness seeking a revolutionary home. That home has not been found since the promise of the Black First Land First (BLF) Movement. Today an ocean of blood divides the ANC from blacks and it is time for blacks to continue the struggle for freedom without the ANC.
Since Marikana, when the black workers were murdered by the ANC for demanding a living wage, South Africa has never been the same again. ANC boldly put the blame on the striking blacks for, in the first place, daring to go against white monopoly capital. The voices of the Marikana workers are the voices of the millions of blacks who until Marikana could blindly believe in the ANC and seek relief from it regarding their unbearable condition.
As the Black First Land First (BLF) movement we maintain that the fight for a living wage, which the Marikana workers died for, is essentially a battle for land and the return of our mineral wealth. Only by the confiscation of our land without compensation in the interests of blacks and by nationalization of the mines while bringing them under direct worker’s and people’s control can we say that the fight for a living wage is over!
500 years of dehumanization by white supremacy, rendering blacks to a life of slavery and cut off from the civilized world of whiteness, tended to strengthen this faith in the ANC via the miracle of 27 April 1994. Marikana, however, has produced thousands of advanced warriors who have consciously broken with this faith in the ANC. The Marikana legacy will continue to educate blacks in whom the instinct of revolution, strengthened in the protest movement and fostered by political organisation, will destroy this faith to its very foundations.
Apart from those being conscientised by Marikana are millions of blacks, who continue to suffer the anti blackness of white supremacy, in whom this faith in the ANC could still survive. They are not ready for revolution and to replace the ANC’s neo liberal regime with a fully responsive state form. These people, for lack of a revolutionary consciousness, could only plead for acceptance within the ANC’s anti black agenda. But the memory and legacy of Marikana compels the destruction of this faith our people have in the ANC as the agent of revolutionary change. To this end, this historical legacy finds its logical consolidation in the ideas of the Black First, Land First movement.
The magnetism of the basic call to revolution around the organizing ideas of Black First Land First has the potential to influence even the most backward strata of the black masses with its Sankofa approach to politics of drawing lessons from the past to move forward. To this end BLF draws lessons from Marikana with the spirit of no return until the land is returned to our people.
History, which blacks were conducting via mainstream politics without a black first land first approach, has confirmed the correctness of the view that that there can be no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory, and that revolutionary theory delinked from the organized mass struggle is to no revolutionary end.
Blacks who who still harbour a shred of faith in the ANC were not ready for black freedom. Since August 16, 2012 the potential for blacks being ready to embark on a path to overthrow ANC rule was very evident but the absence of a revolutionary movement kept this initiative in a stranglehold of neo-liberalism. With the birth of BLF, which puts black first for land first, the Marikana legacy can be driven to its revolutionary conclusion. The ANC by cowardly driving blacks to the wall gave them their first lessons in barricade fighting. The lessons of the Marikana massacre will not be lost.
May the Marikana warriors who died fighting for a living wage be avenged by the fires of revolution through Black First for Land First.
The BLF rejects the establishment of the presidential commission of inquiry and its pseudo truth findings. We regard the function of the Commission of Inquiry as serving to hide the truth, to manage the justified anger of blacks and to interrupt their revolutionary demands. We demand that the ANC government pay reparations to the families for their pain, suffering and loss of income.
We say that the mines must be nationalised and placed under worker control and the dependents of the murdered should get shares in those mines. Lonmin belongs to the murdered workers! Also BLF calls for all workers to get a minimum wage of R12 500. It’s a reasonable demand, and what the Marikana workers died for.
ISSUED BY THE INTERIM COMMITTEE OF THE BLACK FIRST LAND FIRST MOVEMENT
16 AUGUST 2015
Contact Details
Black First Land First Mail: [email protected]
Zanele Lwana
(National Spokesperson)
Cell: +27 79 486 9087
Mail: [email protected]
Lindsay Maasdorp
(National Spokesperson)
Cell: +27 79 915 2957
Mail: [email protected]