Traoré's Revolution versus South Africa's Death Project

IOL News

3 days ago

Burkina Faso's junta leader Captain Ibrahim Traore attends a meeting.
Image: Angelos Tzortzinis / AFP
In Burkina Faso, Ibrahim Traoré shows the world what it means when an African people refuse to kneel before empire. He has expelled French military forces, reclaimed foreign mining contracts, and redirected national resources toward housing, healthcare, education, and food sovereignty. Sovereignty is not symbolic. It is control over land, minerals, water, and the architecture of daily survival. His politics are not shaped for donor applause or international approval. There is no hiding behind human rights frameworks or soft-focus governance talk. It is the seizure of power and resources back into African hands.
In South Africa, the trajectory moves through an entirely different landscape. This is not simply a matter of corruption or failed governance. What unfolds before us, under the weight of the so-called Government of National Unity, is the multi-pronged roll-out of a corporate and state-driven war on African life, African collectivism, African revolutionary possibility.
Mass unemployment, dispossession, the collapse of public health, the erosion of education, militarised policing in the townships, the criminalisation of Black masculinity, systemic violence against women and children, vigilante terror, and the suffocating normalisation of African poverty form the architecture of this war. Circling around it are the donor-funded NGO campaigns, the media spectacles, the safety and social cohesion projects, the curated dialogues, the public rituals of 'reform' designed to seduce people into believing the system is repairing itself. But this system is not repairing. It is evolving. It is refining. It is perfecting its capacity for devastation.
The mining-industrial complex is its central engine. Multinational corporations, ANC elites, DA neoliberals, white monopoly capital, comprador classes – each holds its place in the circuitry. African minerals are ripped from the earth by the destruction of Black labour and Black communities. These minerals flow outward, become weapons, electronics, luxury goods, industrial tools, then return to the continent as commodities priced beyond African control. African economies are locked as suppliers, locked as dependent consumers, locked out of ownership.
The ANC operates as a broker between capital and the people, using the worn-out language of struggle to contain revolt while smoothing the way for foreign and local elite profits. The DA offers up a streamlined neoliberalism, promising efficiency to investors. These are not rival projects. They are two faces of the same extractive order.
Black-on-Black violence is treated as an inevitable pathology, but it is not accidental. It is actively produced and inflamed to keep the population fragmented. Township disorder, ethnic tensions, factionalised politics, so-called xenophobic attacks pull public attention away from the mineral contracts, the land transfers, the capital flows. They become the ground on which militarised policing expands, where repression becomes ordinary, where state force in Black life is made common sense. Mining companies extract. Political elites contain. Media channels flood the public with images of chaos. Communities beg for order. The security apparatus swells. Investors relax. This is not dysfunction. This is design.
The deepest violence is that the poor, the working class, and the Black middle class are swept into supporting the very system consuming them. Survival in untransformed spaces produces the desperate belief that safety comes through harder policing, tougher leadership, and stricter state control. There is no political party, no police general, no NGO or donor agency committed to protecting the African poor from the system that profits from their dispossession. They exist to protect the elite.
Steve Biko wrote that the wealth of a country must ultimately be enjoyed by the people whose labour has created it, and that only on this basis can a just system be built. Without land, without mineral sovereignty, without water and food security, without collective control over the means of survival, there is no justice. There is only punishment, repression, and a deepening spectacle of containment dressed up as governance.
When militarised crackdowns sweep through township streets, when extrajudicial killings dominate headlines, when clean-up operations leave death scattered in their aftermath, it is the poor who carry the weight. The spectacle is for the wealthy, for middle-class nerves, for investor confidence. For the poor, it escalates the risk of becoming the target, the casualty, the forgotten.
The conditions tearing at South Africa's majority – mass unemployment, forced removals, gangsterism seeded by economic hopelessness, relentless insecurity – will never be addressed through trigger-happy authoritarianism. Uniformed raids, televised arrests, and open killing on the streets do not touch the core devastation. Only a revolutionary project like Traoré's – a project that fights for sovereignty, reclaims land and resources, breaks the stranglehold of foreign and local elites, and turns dignity into redistribution – carries the force to cut into the root.
The tragedy is not only that the resource-deprived and exhausted poor are sacrificed for the security of the elite. It is that they are drawn into cheering for it, pulled into the fantasy that the war crushing them is being waged on their behalf. This is the final cruelty of the neoliberal state: to transform the oppressed into spectators of their own suppression, applauding as the spectacle moves forward, until the moment the weapons shift and the streets erupt and the false skin of protection is torn away.
Marikana was not an episode. It became the template. It became the blueprint for how to discipline the Black working class the moment it threatens to interrupt extraction. The public is taught to demand more policing, more militarisation, more containment. The true architects of dispossession – the mining bosses, the landowners, the financiers, the global firms – remain protected. And Marikana never ended. It rolls out over many landscapes and locations in the brutal killing of the poor.
South Africa is not crumbling. It is functioning precisely as designed. Global capital flows through it with surgical precision, co-opting popular figures, funding intelligence-linked NGOs, saturating media space with distraction, and keeping the pipelines of extraction unbroken.
As a white South African, I have been inside academia, media, and the NGO world, witnessing firsthand how whiteness operates – how it slips easily into human rights language, donor discourse, and faux social justice branding. The human rights and NGO industrial complex is not a space of care. It is camouflage. It is capture. It is part of the machinery that feeds on African dispossession while performing the language of solidarity, protection, and benevolence. It is the shield that pacifies, the soft cover that allows the most brutal devastations to proceed without interruption. It functions as a carefully engineered buffer zone against the inevitable explosion of Black rage.
This, I have come to name for what it is – not humane, not beneficial, but a cold, deliberate, knowing evil. And it is why I know with clarity that no commission, no election, no imported model will transform this system designed to preserve the wealth and power of the privileged while managing, containing, and brutalising the poor. Only full-scale revolution will alter the material and ontological condition of the majority. Only the radical reclaiming of what has been stolen will break the cycle.
Today, perhaps, a South African Traoré has been born. Perhaps she or he is a child now, waiting to emerge. But liberation will not come from one leader alone. The people of South Africa will rise. They will cast off foreign capital, expel comprador elites, break white monopoly power, dismantle intelligence-embedded NGOs, strip donor gatekeepers of legitimacy, and unseat the local managers of empire.
The future will be reclaimed by African hands because behind this orchestrated roll-out of Black-on-Black violence, the collective spirit of the ancestors continues to whisper that the work of liberation can no longer be postponed. That whisper is already thickening, already gathering at the edges of the present, and soon it will break into a scream that will shatter a system that has no intention of yielding, no intention of returning what has been stolen, no intention of loving or respecting the people to whom this land belongs. It will take everything until it is forced to stop. And that force is rising.
Ibrahim Traoré's revolutionary stance in Burkina Faso challenges the status quo, while South Africa grapples with systemic injustices and the struggle for true sovereignty.
Image: IOL
*Gillian Schutte is a film-maker, and a well-known social justice and race-justice activist and public intellectual.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.