Colonisation and the Genesis and Perpetuation of Anti-Blackness Violence in South Africa

Abstract

The narrative of the colonisation of South Africa that prevailed and continues to prevail in certain segments of contemporary South African society is that of the white coloniser as an industrious, noble, peaceful and innocent being, divinely tasked with the project of bringing civilisation to the country’s indigenous Black tribal people—people bereft of religion, cognitive competence and incapable of responsible land ownership. In this article, I reflect on the genesis of anti-Blackness over three and a half centuries and argue that despite Black resistance over this period, the systematic orchestration of anti-Blackness through repressive violence, constantly morphing policy legislation and relentless propaganda machinery has imprinted on the psyche of South Africans in particular ways. Black academe in South Africa has been systematically frustrated with Western Eurocentric epistemologies and ontologies and struggle to engage in any substantive epistemological or ontological delinking. Inspiration from decolonial theory is invoked to offer an analysis of the paralysis of the new Black political, economic and academic elite, as they occupy a zone of being co-opted into the stranglehold of white economic and cultural hegemony.