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IOL News
5 days ago
- Politics
- IOL News
Two Judicial Sagas, Ten Years Apart: The Mabel Jansen and Selby Mbenenge Cases
Gillian Schutte is a film-maker, and a well-known social justice and race-justice activist and public intellectual. Image: IOL West Indian psychiatrist and decolonial philosopher, Frantz Fanon, wrote that 'the Black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.' He named a violence deeper than physical domination: the psychic capture of the Black subject inside the white imaginary. In the colonial order, the Black man is not seen as a man; he is seen as a body, a phallus, a threat, an object of anxiety. The Black woman is not seen as a woman; she is seen as an overdetermined symbol, hypersexualised, violable, yet erased as a full erotic and political subject. Post-apartheid South Africa continues to move within these patterns. Two judicial sagas, ten years apart – the 2016 exposure of Judge Mabel Jansen and the current tribunal against Eastern Cape Judge President Selby Mbenenge – reveal how deeply colonial logic still shapes our public life, our media, and our institutions. In 2015, during a public debate on my Facebook page, Judge Mabel Jansen entered of her own will. She had been following my social justice feminist work for months, even inboxing me with praise. The debate she chose to join centred on a petition circulating about poor white Afrikaners begging the EU to 'repatriate' them – a discussion already thick with tensions about race, poverty, colonial grievance, and belonging. Into this space, Jansen dropped comments that landed like malfeasance. Here are her exact public statements: '99% of criminal cases I hear are of Black fathers/uncles/brothers raping children as young as five years old. Is this part of your culture? Because then you do not know the truth. And they do it to their children, sisters, nieces, and so on. Is this also attributable to white people somehow, because we take the blame for everything?' 'Fact: Black children and women are raped and abused, and beaten by Black men to an extent that is so sickening that one cannot even cope with it. And that is a fact.' 'Want to read my files: rape, rape, rape, rape of minors by Black families. It is never-ending.' 'Show me one Black woman who has not been molested herself … but culturally that is the viewpoint.' 'Apparently sex is simply to be had when required. And five years old, by the way, is old … apparently it is not regarded as rape, but the exertion of a male's right. And women allow the father to be the first.'When I answered that the majority of Black uncles, fathers, and brothers do most certainly not rape 5-year-olds, she replied, 'Oh yes, they do. 'She also inboxed me privately: 'In their culture, a woman is there to pleasure them. Period. It is seen as an absolute right, and a woman's consent is not required. 'I still have to meet a Black girl who was not raped at about 12. I am dead serious. One of her public posts also asserted that 'while white men also rape, it is not our natural way, whereas with Black men it is a way of life.'As Fanon writes in Black Skin, White Masks, 'The Negro is eclipsed. He has been turned into a penis. He is a penis.' Jansen's words performed this symbolic reduction: the Black man as violent phallus, the Black woman as voiceless body. For a year, I agitated for the system to act. I wrote articles, raised alarms, contacted advocates and constitutional lawyers, and lodged a formal complaint with the Judicial Service Commission (JSC). Silence. It was only when UCT activist-academic Brian Ihirwe Kamanzi shared the screenshots on Black Twitter a year later, after I drew his attention to them, that outrage ignited. The Black Lawyers Association stepped in. Organisers mobilised. Protests were staged, interviews were had, and the JSC could no longer look away. However, during this uprising, the media played a familiar game – they repeatedly referred to Gillian Schutte sharing private inboxed messages and questioned the morality of this. In short, I became the focus instead of the racist inner workings of the Judge and the fact that she presided over gender-based violence cases in her court. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Next Stay Close ✕ They tried valiantly to turn the focus of the protests onto my amorality in order to divert the Black organising against Jansen to me. It failed. In the JSC hearing, Jansen's defence lawyers, using this same trope in their defence, sought to discredit me, portraying me as ideologically radical, emotionally unstable, and mentally unbalanced. How a huge firm with much experience imagined this was a good defence baffled even the judges who presided over the hearing. My own attorney, Tracey Lomax, spoke eloquently to this matter. The defence strategy failed. The JSC prepared for impeachment. Jansen resigned before the process was completed – escaping formal judgment but not public disgrace. My life turned into a living hell with multiple death threats aimed at my family, men with Voortrekker beards parked outside our house every day for a week, tracking our movements, an envelope laced with poison in our post-box which attacked my husband's central nervous system for days, and plentiful murderous social media aimed at instilling a sense of instability in our daily life. The media ignored this onslaught but chose to report on Jansen's claims that her life and the life of her children were being threatened because I wanted my '15 minutes of fame'.Privacy Only Applies to Whites, Then? This political history forms the backdrop to the Mbenenge case. In the current tribunal, private WhatsApp exchanges between Judge President Selby Mbenenge and court secretary Andiswa Mengo – filled with flirtation, erotic humour, playful negotiation, and mutual pleasure – have been hauled into public spectacle as evidence of sexual misconduct. The 'privacy argument' raised to shield Jansen has been discarded without hesitation. Fanon is again essential. In the colonial imaginary, Black male sexuality is imagined as excess, danger, and violence; Black women are imagined as bodies without agency. There is no script to hold African men negotiating desire, speaking of cunnilingus, imagining female pleasure, or showing concern for mutual satisfaction. There is no space to imagine African women as agents of their own pleasure, as partners in joy, as subjects of flirtation and orgasm. This is what Fanon called the white neurosis – a psychic malaise that turns Blackness into a site of phobic fantasy. It is why, in this case, liberal white feminist discourse reproduces the same reductive gaze as Jansen's open white supremacy. Both erase the fullness of Black erotic life. Both install the same whiteness default: the monstrous Black man, the violated Black woman. Yet the messages between Mbenenge and Mengo belong to ukudlalisa ngamazwi – an idiom of wordplay, teasing, humour, and mutual consent, deeply woven into isiXhosa culture. Mengo jokes, withholds, offers, and winks. She participates. She chooses. She suggests. She enjoys. Inside the tribunal, however, Advocate Scheepers has acted not as investigator but as moral accuser, akin to the inquisitors of the 12th-century European witch-hunting inquisitions – cross-examining by assertion, visibly contemptuous when blocked from introducing irrelevant material or over-the-top suggestion, following a script familiar to those who have watched how donor feminism, legal machinery, and liberal media merge into spectacles of moral panic. This script does not rely on careful evidence. It feeds on atmosphere, insinuation, and the rapid buttressing of guilt. Judge President Selby Mbenenge has not denied his role in the mutual flirtation – he has owned his sexuality as well as acknowledged Mengo's right to pleasure without judgment or shaming language. But he has resisted. He has challenged the expansion of charges, insisted on keeping the process tied to the legal question, and unsettled the moral machinery gathering around him. He has foiled the plot to take him down through perception, even while mainstream media is working overtime to create the idea that he is guilty. As in the Jansen case, where the system worried over a white woman's privacy and reputation, then turned its disciplinary gaze onto the whistleblower, in the Mbenenge case, the system moves to discipline a Black man, stripping away the agency of a Black woman, reducing them both to spectacle. Black X and Black AgencyOutside the courtroom, however, another public reads the messages differently. Across social media, across age and gender, people laugh delightedly, joke, make memes, print T-shirts with Mengo's face and the word 'ewe' – marking her participation, her agency, her pleasure. Besides many expressing recognition of 'her gameplay,' no one is going all out to shame Mengo. In this space, indigenous language speakers understand nuance, social cues, cultural code, idioms in isiXhosa and the many languages of South know that when Mbenenge refers to isiXhosa idioms and relational behaviours, he is not harking back to some precolonial animist past as liberal media asserts. He is speaking of DNA memory – the knowledge that African life has not been entirely erased by whiteness, that Ubuntu and cultural coding still live in modern African existence. For white structural racism, this is intolerable. What it cannot understand, it cannot rationalise. What it cannot rationalise, it must sully. What it cannot sully, it must discipline. The inquisitor's grasp moves in to capture, restrain, and reimpose bondage. As Fanon warned, 'the colonised is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards.' Any trace of unapologetic African intellectual and erotic agency, humour, or joy threatens this fragile white psychic order. What Machinery is at Work Here? This tribunal, then, is not only a legal proceeding; it is a political operation, where the machinery of whiteness works hand in hand with state power, NGOs, media platforms, and donor-aligned intellectuals to neutralise a judge who refused to serve colonial interests. It is no coincidence that Judge President Selby Mbenenge blocked Shell's seismic blasting along the Transkei coast, protecting ancestral marine lands from exploitation by powerful international actors. Shell (via BG International) and Impact Africa are leading the Transkei offshore exploration bid, while TotalEnergies, QatarEnergy, and Sasol have been advancing their own offshore successes further west, in the Orange Basin off South Africa's west coast. TotalEnergies and QatarEnergy recently secured significant stakes in Block 3B/4B of the Orange Basin, consolidating a major fossil fuel presence alongside Sasol's earlier partnerships. Mbenenge's ruling against Shell must be seen not merely as environmental justice but as a rare legal obstruction to a growing multinational fossil fuel push, largely headquartered in London, Paris, Doha, and Johannesburg. His landmark directives to rename Eastern Cape courts with indigenous African names also signalled a deeper dismantling of the linguistic and legal scaffolding of colonialism — a stance that may help explain why he has been targeted and discredited in other public arenas. These are decolonial interventions that have rattled both local elites and global extractive interests. And now, on Black X, we see why this moment has caught has become a symbol of a man who refuses shaming, a man who playfully, rather than patriarchally, knows his way around women's pleasure, a man whose unapologetic erotic agency defies the colonial scripts that position Black men as either dangerous or deviant. Mbenenge stands for an African masculinity that refuses containment, that speaks of mutual pleasure, that celebrates the playful, relational, and knowing erotic exchanges of African life. He insists that private flirtation is his right as much as it is Mengo's, arguing with conviction in the face of a non-Black legal team linked to an ecosystem of liberal media, ngo's, and, quite possibly intelligence think tanks, all working in tandem to remove him from his position. Together with his brilliant advocate, Muzi Sikhakhane, Mbenenge has, in many ways, put whiteness itself on trial – exposing how it moves through media headlines, NGO scripts, donor-backed moral campaigns, and institutional inquisitions. This is not the end of his story. It is the beginning of a broader political and cultural eruption – a struggle to reclaim African erotic agency, economic and environmental sovereignty, and decolonial justice. Black X will fight back. *Gillian Schutte is a filmmaker, 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.
IOL News
09-07-2025
- Politics
- IOL News
From Flirtation to Tribunal: The Misuse of Article 5 in the Mbenenge Case
Eastern Cape High Court Judge President Selby Mbenenge. As the case unfolds, the distinction between flirtation and harassment blurs, challenging the integrity of judicial processes in South Africa, writes Gillian Schutte. Image: Office of the Chief Justice As the Judicial Conduct Tribunal against Judge President Selby Mbenenge drags on under intense public and media scrutiny, a curious and dangerous paradox has taken shape: the accused is being tried as if he were charged with violating Article 5 of the Code of Judicial Conduct. But he isn't. Article 5, which demands that a judge must always, and not only in the discharge of official duties, act honourably and in a manner befitting judicial office, has become the moral lens through which the case is viewed. Yet, it is absent from the formal charge sheet. Mbenenge is not being judged on whether his conduct was unbecoming. He is being tried, formally and narrowly, for sexual harassment — a specific and technical offence that must meet a higher threshold of proof. This sleight of hand, whether careless or calculated, has serious implications not only for the principle of due process but for the integrity of judicial discipline in South Africa. The Legal Construct: Charge First, Ethics Second In judicial proceedings, as in criminal law, the accused must meet the case as charged. This is not merely procedural nitpicking. It is a foundational principle of fairness. The JSC process does not allow for a competent verdict, the mechanism in criminal law that permits conviction on a lesser charge if the main charge fails. In the absence of Article 5 on the charge sheet, no finding of 'conduct unbecoming' can lawfully be made, no matter how convincingly the optics are stacked against him. This is why the defence is in an invidious position. They do not deny the existence of WhatsApp flirtation. They argue, rightly, that the exchanges were mutual and private, and that the context reflects consensual banter rather than coercion. But in making this argument, they are trapped in a moral discourse not grounded in the charge, yet reinforced by media narratives, NGO rhetoric, and ideological framing. This has created a scenario where the Tribunal proceedings blur into a cultural inquisition rather than a measured adjudication of whether the conduct in question meets the test of sexual harassment under the JSC Act. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ Ad loading Flirtation, Privacy, and the Politics of Narrative WhatsApp messages between adults, particularly when mutually flirtatious, exist within the protected domain of privacy. When lifted from that domain, stripped of full context, and reframed through ideological filters, they are transformed from interpersonal exchange into evidence of ethical decay. The problem is that this ethical interpretation is being retrofitted to charges it was never designed to support. The media, and those prosecuting the case in the court of public opinion, are back-projecting Article 5 onto a legal process that has not invoked it. There is, in this move, an implicit conflation of flirtation with predation. The Tribunal risks ignoring the cultural, linguistic, and social nuances of communication, particularly in isiXhosa-speaking professional environments, in favour of a universalised Western feminist script in which flirtation between a senior man and a younger woman is always interpreted as an abuse of power, regardless of context, mutuality, or complexity. Ethical Optics as Soft Lawfare What we are seeing is a trial by ethical aesthetics rather than judicial evidence. The complainant's claims are amplified by external experts and NGO representatives who, while asserting neutrality, operate from within donor-funded ideological frameworks that centre presumed guilt in gender-based claims, especially when the accused is a Black man in power. This mode of operation is fast becoming a soft lawfare tactic. Apply the ethics of Article 5 in discourse, but avoid its procedural burdens in law. The result is a hybrid tribunal where the public is encouraged to believe that the judge is 'clearly guilty' of something, even if the charge, as formulated, cannot sustain that belief under scrutiny. The core question is no longer whether the accused committed sexual harassment, but whether he appears respectable enough to bear the burden of his office. But appearances are not evidence. And in a society already fractured by class, gender, and racialised trauma, we cannot afford to replace law with moral performance. A Caution for the Judiciary This Tribunal has the potential to set a dangerous precedent. That optics trump process, and that an ideological charge can succeed even when the legal charge fails. If Mbenenge is found guilty of sexual harassment without meeting the evidentiary requirements of that charge, on the basis of ethical discomfort with his behaviour, then the judiciary will have crossed into a terrain where the rules don't matter and only feelings do. Worse still, such a precedent would not protect women. It would erode procedural fairness in ways that can be weaponised in any direction. Today it is used against a powerful Black man. Tomorrow, it may be used to silence dissent, criminalise political speech, or remove judges who challenge elite interests. We are not obliged to admire Mbenenge's messages. But unless the evidence proves that they constitute harassment rather than flirtation, coercion rather than banter, harm rather than mutual play, then we must be cautious not to abandon the very principles that protect all of us. And we must insist that justice be done as charged, not as imagined. The ongoing Judicial Conduct Tribunal against Judge President Selby Mbenenge raises critical questions about the misuse of Article 5 of the Code of Judicial Conduct. As the case unfolds, the distinction between flirtation and harassment blurs, challenging the integrity of judicial processes in South Africa. Image: IOL
IOL News
04-07-2025
- Politics
- IOL News
'Zionacity': The Audacity of Pretend Intellectualism
Tim Flack critiques Gillian Schutte's term 'Zionacity', revealing how it distorts historical truths and manipulates ideological narratives, ultimately challenging the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination. Image: IOL / Ron AI A reply to Gillian Schutte, by Tim Flack In the now all-too-familiar theatre of progressive thought, where victimhood is currency and language is weaponised to invert truth, we find ourselves confronted with a fresh absurdity. Gillian Schutte, self-styled decolonial thinker and social critic, has coined a term 'Zionacity'. A Frankensteinian mash-up of "Zionism" and "audacity," it is the sort of pseudo-intellectual graffiti one might find scribbled in the margins of a 1st years Marxist seminar notes, rather than in anything resembling serious journalism or moral philosophy. Yet here it is, published with no sense of shame or rigour, paraded as if it were a concept of gravitas, rather than a crude ideological club designed to bludgeon the world's only Jewish state. In just a few short paragraphs, Schutte manages to unravel any credibility she may have had by engaging in an extraordinary exercise in double standards, historical revisionism, and - dare we say it - a rather fashionable brand of antisemitism, cloaked, as always, in the language of virtue. Let us begin with her core assertion: that Zionism is not a political movement rooted in the self-determination of a historically persecuted people, but rather a "psychosis," a "global apparatus of control," a "death cult" feeding on the corpses of others. This is not criticism. This is incitement with adjectives. And it's precisely the sort of grotesque rhetorical overreach that reveals the intellectual poverty of her position. Zionism, for the uninitiated or the wilfully ignorant, is the belief that Jews - a people indigenous to the land of Israel, with a continuous presence there for over three millennia - have a right to national self-determination in their ancestral homeland. It is not imperialism. It is not colonialism. It is not conquest. It is return. That this simple truth must still be defended in 2025, and defended against supposed "anti-racists," is a mark of just how distorted our discourse has become. Schutte accuses Zionists of "elevating one group's trauma" above others. This, she says, is the moral disease of "Zionacity." But this is a malicious and cynical sleight of hand. Jewish trauma - pogroms, inquisitions, expulsions, ghettos, blood libels, forced conversions, and of course, the Holocaust - is not elevated. It is remembered. And it is remembered not to cancel out other people's suffering, but because forgetting it has proven time and again to be a luxury Jews cannot afford. To remember Auschwitz is not to diminish Gaza. But to accuse Jews of weaponizing memory is, in effect, to accuse them of having survived too visibly. She then asserts that Zionism, again, Jewish national self-determination has become a template for "settler-colonialism" globally. Here we enter the realm of hallucinatory projection. Are we seriously to believe that Afrikaner farmers in the Karoo are inspired by Herzl and Ben-Gurion? That global injustice, from Yemen to Donbas, is downstream from Tel Aviv? This is the sort of ideological derangement that used to be confined to fringe pamphlets and badly moderated message boards, not respectable publications. But such is the reach of post-colonial chic that anything, however ludicrous, can be published, so long as Jews are the villains. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ Her most odious claim and let's not be coy here, is that Jewish grief is uniquely manipulative. That it is not just remembered, but "weaponised." That it is not just sacred, but enforced through guilt. In this framing, Jews do not mourn, they plot. They do not suffer, they scheme. This is the old libel, reheated for the Instagram era. Replace the word "Zionist" with "Jew" in her piece and one quickly realises the ideological lineage of her accusations. They are not new. They are not clever. They are simply more dangerous in an age that has forgotten its history. She laments that radical anti-Zionist Jews are "silenced." Nonsense. Anti-Zionist Jews are given front row seats at every anti-Israel protest, paraded as token 'as a Jews' for ideological antisemitism. The fact that they represent a minuscule sliver of global Jewry is irrelevant to Schutte. What matters is their usefulness as fig leaves for her project of demonisation. They are not prophets they are props. The linguistic trickery continues. Israel doesn't defend itself, it "bombs Gaza." It doesn't resist annihilation, it imposes siege. The flattening of language is complete. Hamas is nowhere to be found. The thousands of rockets aimed at Israeli cities are absent. The tunnels, the hostage-taking, the massacre of October 7 are all unmentionable. Because they disrupt the victim-oppressor binary Schutte so desperately needs to maintain. And then, as if to remind us of her seriousness, she expands her lens to the entire world. Venezuela, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Donbas. All tragic. All relevant. But none of them have anything to do with Zionism. Yet she drops them in like seasoning, hoping the reader won't notice the false equivalencies, or worse, will see Zionism as the root of all geopolitical evil. The move is transparent and it is also contemptible. And here lies the irony. The ideology Schutte claims to oppose, one that allegedly monopolises grief and dehumanises others, is, in fact, the one she practises. She demands selective empathy. She criminalises Jewish memory. She pathologizes Jewish self-defence. And she frames Palestinian suffering not as tragedy but as a cudgel to delegitimise an entire people's existence. It is not Zionists who dehumanise others. It is Gillian Schutte who denies the humanity of Israelis, and by extension, the Jewish people. It is she who insists that Jewish survival is inherently supremacist, that Jewish agency is inherently colonial, that Jewish statehood is inherently illegitimate. Let us be very clear, her vision ends with the dismantling of Israel. That is not justice, that is annihilation by another name.
IOL News
02-07-2025
- Politics
- IOL News
Reclaiming the United Nations from Western Decline
In the lead-up to the United Nations' 80th anniversary, voices from the West declare the organisation obsolete, but this critique masks deeper anxieties about shifting global power dynamics, writes Gillian Schutte. Image: IOL In 2025, on the eve of the United Nations' 80th anniversary, a growing chorus of Western voices is declaring the organisation obsolete. The critique, echoed uncritically in South African liberal media, laments the 'ineffectiveness' and 'paralysis' of the UN, suggesting that its time has passed in a rapidly shifting world order. What is striking, however, is that this apparent concern for global governance is being deployed at the moment when the West is losing its grip on that governance. The narrative, rather than being rooted in a desire for democratisation, is shaped by anxiety over the collapse of Western exceptionalism. The Russian Federation has responded by reaffirming its support for the UN, but with a clear call for reform. This reform is not cosmetic. It involves expanding the power of the Global Majority while resisting the return to a world dictated by NATO coalitions and closed-door Western interests. This position, presented in the liberal press as opportunistic, is in fact grounded in both history and realpolitik. It recognises the UN's contradictory nature. It was born from anti-fascist resistance and post-war consensus, but later hijacked by unipolar ambitions during the Cold War and the consolidation of neoliberalism. The UN then presents a dual legacy - both emancipatory and compromised. The United Nations was founded as a post-war mechanism to prevent another global catastrophe. It embodied the hope for international law, collective responsibility, and the protection of sovereignty. The "decolonisation" of Africa and Asia in the mid-20th century was legitimised in part by the UN Charter. It offered, however imperfectly, a platform for the dispossessed to speak. Yet from its inception, the UN was structurally skewed. The Security Council's composition, with five permanent members holding veto power, enshrined the hierarchy of "victors" from World War II - an imbalance that meant that while former colonies could speak in the General Assembly, they could never dictate terms in the Security Council. This imperial architecture was later exploited during the Cold War, most aggressively by the United States in the post-Soviet era. What the Russian critique acknowledges, and what many African analysts echo, is that the UN became a tool of unipolar domination in the 1990s and early 2000s. Humanitarian interventions became a euphemism for regime change. UN bodies were captured to serve neoliberal agendas. Development was reduced to IMF diktats, and peacekeeping mandates protected Western economic interests over local sovereignty. Video Player is loading. 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Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ Ad loading Western Hypocrisy: From Champion to Saboteur The West's current disillusionment with the UN stems from the erosion of its ability to control the narrative. When the UN fails to rubber-stamp NATO interventions or US foreign policy, it is deemed ineffective. When Russia or China exercise their veto rights, it is labelled as paralysis. Yet the same veto was tolerated, even ignored, when it was used by the United States to shield Israel from accountability or to justify illegal wars. This hypocrisy has reached fever pitch in the context of Ukraine and Gaza. The UN's attempts at consensus have been sabotaged by US-led bloc politics. When the General Assembly condemns Israeli aggression, the US invokes its veto. When Russia challenges NATO expansion, it is accused of imperialism. This takes place while NATO continues its own undeclared wars through economic sanctions, proxy forces, and disinformation. In this climate, the Western call for reform rings false. While pretending to seek democratisation, it seeks the removal of obstacles to Western domination instead. The push to abolish or dilute the veto is less about accountability and more about ensuring that no counter-hegemonic bloc can halt the Western agenda. Russian Advocacy: Reform from Below The Russian position does not reject reform. On the contrary, it calls for a more representative UN. This includes reforming the Security Council to reflect the multipolar realities of the 21st century. Russia has consistently backed the inclusion of African, Asian, and Latin American nations as permanent members of the Security Council. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has emphasised that African nations must not only have a seat at the table. They must also have permanent status that reflects their role in global politics and history. Unlike the Western reformers, Russia does not call for the dismantling of the veto. It calls for its preservation as a stabilising mechanism. This is not regressive. It is a brake on militarism and economic coercion. Without the veto, the world would already have seen direct NATO engagement in Syria, Iran, Venezuela, and beyond. Additionally, Russia's call to reform the UN is consistent with its broader doctrine of multipolarity. It rejects the notion of a single rules-based order imposed from Washington or Brussels. It champions a world of sovereign civilisations with diverse pathways to development, governance, and culture. This resonates with the Global South, which has suffered under the homogenising violence of liberalism presented as democracy. South African Liberal Media and the Betrayal of Sovereignty In this context, the repetition of Western anti-UN narratives in South African media is not only disappointing. It is dangerous. To declare the UN obsolete without interrogating whose interests that serves is to function as a mouthpiece for empire. It is to forget the role the UN played in challenging apartheid, in opposing colonialism, and in advocating for non-aligned voices. South African liberal media, shaped by donor money and Western ideological assumptions, has long been complicit in constructing narratives that align with global capital and undermine African agency. Its attack on the UN is another example of its alignment with elite global interests masquerading as progressive critique. It ignores the broader movement in the Global South for a reformed but preserved multilateral order. It ignores the desire for sovereignty to be restored without returning to the logic of Western-led governance. The Real Battle: Collapse or Coexistence The question is not whether the UN is flawed. It is flawed. The question is whether we abandon multilateralism and return to a world of unilateral coercion. That world is shaped by coalitions of the willing, where bombing precedes dialogue and sanctions replace diplomacy. Russia's position, whether one agrees with its geopolitical strategy or not, represents a clear alternative. It calls for the preservation of multilateralism, the reform of international structures, and the restoration of a world order grounded in sovereignty and pluralism. The Global South, and Africa in particular, must not be tricked into dismantling the very platform that once helped to free it. The call to render the UN irrelevant is not liberation. It is surrender. Let us not be fooled into thinking that Western editorial fatigue is a sign of moral clarity. It is the sound of hegemony cracking. The response must not be to join the wrecking crew. The response must be to rebuild the UN into an institution that speaks for the Global Majority. That is the only reform worth fighting for. * Gillian Schutte is a writer, filmmaker and social critic. She challenges liberal orthodoxy, donor-driven journalism, and Western hypocrisy through a lens rooted in African sovereignty and counter-hegemonic critique. ** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.
IOL News
01-07-2025
- Politics
- IOL News
The Real Genocide: South Africa's Betrayal of Its African Majority
Gillian Schutte explores how the Genocide Convention's principles apply to the systemic oppression of South Africa's African majority, revealing a slow genocide that challenges our understanding of justice and equality. Image: IOL In 1948, in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust, the Genocide Convention was adopted to prohibit not only the mass killing of populations, but also their systematic destruction through prolonged deprivation. Article II(c) of the Convention defines genocide to include the 'deliberate infliction on the group of conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.' This clause was intended to capture structural mechanisms of annihilation that may not involve overt violence, but which nonetheless result in the steady elimination of a people. In 2025, the conditions under which the African majority indigenous to South Africa are forced to live closely resemble those anticipated by the drafters of that clause. Against this legal and historical framework, the claim by some Afrikaner groups that they are victims of genocide is not only absurd, but deeply cynical. The real slow genocide is unfolding daily, and not against the privileged white farmers but against the African majority, whose conditions of life have been deliberately structured to remain unliveable. More than three decades after the end of apartheid, South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world. According to the World Bank (2022), the top 10% of the population controls more than 85% of household wealth. Oxford University's 2024 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) reports that over 25 million South Africans continue to live in severe multidimensional poverty. The overwhelming majority of this population is the African. The MPI captures deprivations across education, health, housing, water, sanitation, and nutrition. These are measurable exclusions from the basic elements of life. Racial inequality remains deeply entrenched. A 2023 report by Statistics South Africa found that 64.2% of African majority households lived below the upper-bound poverty line, compared to 1.2% of white households. The African majority is overrepresented across all categories of deprivation. Seventy-five percent of unemployed individuals are from this majority. Eighty-seven percent of people living in informal settlements are from the African majority. More than 70% of households relying on woefully inadequate social grants for survival fall within this group. The slow genociding of the Black and poor in South Africa is no longer explained by the legacy of apartheid alone. It is the result of a post-apartheid order that institutionalised inequality through policy, economic restructuring, and elite consensus. What was promised as transformation became management. Redistribution was replaced with fiscal discipline. Land reform was stalled through bureaucratic impasse. Economic ownership remained virtually unchanged. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ Ad loading The country's political transition was paralleled by an economic settlement aligned to global neoliberal frameworks. From the early 1990s, the new government came under pressure from international financial institutions and Western governments, particularly the United States, to commit to market-friendly reforms. This included the liberalisation of trade and capital flows, a focus on inflation targeting, and the privatisation of public services. These policies were formalised in the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy in 1996. The result was the absorption of the new state into a global system that privileged investor confidence over social redress. In this context, poverty among the African majority became institutionalised through structural austerity. Basic services remain underfunded. According to the Auditor-General's 2023 report, only 41 of 257 municipalities received clean audits. Many are unable to provide clean water, maintain sewage systems, or ensure waste collection. Public health facilities are under-resourced. Hospitals in rural areas operate without functioning equipment, while clinics in informal settlements routinely face medicine shortages. Schools in poor communities often lack electricity, running water, and qualified teachers. In 2022, over 4,500 schools were still using pit latrines. Far from being abstract deficits, these are measurable forms of neglect that directly affect life expectancy and health outcomes. In 2023, the average life expectancy for the Black and poor was 64 years, compared to 77 for white South Africans. The mortality rate for children under five in the poorest quintile is three times higher than in the wealthiest. Malnutrition among children under five has increased over the last five years, particularly in provinces with high unemployment and food insecurity. The psychological impact is equally devastating. A study published in The Lancet (2023) found that suicide rates among youth from the Indigenous African majority in South Africa have risen steadily since 2018, with poverty, hopelessness, and unemployment identified as key drivers. Gender-based violence, substance abuse, and intra-community violence are all symptoms of sustained structural abandonment. These conditions reflect a strategy of economic apartheid underpinned by political inertia. The mechanisms of this containment are enforced through monopoly capital and state complicity. A handful of corporations continue to dominate key sectors of the economy. These firms remain largely white- or foreign-owned, and their profits are often transferred offshore. The state acts less as regulator and more as facilitator, offering tax incentives and infrastructure support while communities living near mining zones or agricultural estates remain without clean water or basic services and are exposed to unregulated blasting and life threatening pollution. Economic policy is crafted in consultation with business interests. Social policy, by contrast, is treated as a liability. These dynamics are legitimised through the language of governance and reform, but they function as instruments of slow elimination. The majority is governed at a distance, spoken for in summits, referenced in policy statements, yet never materially prioritised. When they protest, they are met with violence. When they vote, they are promised inclusion. When they die, they are listed in aggregate. The Government of National Unity (GNU) formed in 2024 represents a continuation of this deprivation strategy. It maintains the neoliberal model. It is an alliance of economic custodianship. Austerity remains intact. Redistribution is avoided. The poor are once again promised delivery through institutional harmony, while the economy continues to serve the elite. This is political convergence around the status quo. The slow genociding of the Indigenous African majority in South Africa conforms to the logic identified by the Genocide Convention. The state and its economic partners have constructed conditions of life that are not survivable over time. The infrastructure of social reproduction -health, education, housing, employment - has been systematically undermined. The result is premature death on a mass scale, disintegration of communities, and intergenerational trauma. The Convention's clause on conditions of life does not require mass graves. It requires evidence of structural processes that lead to physical destruction. That evidence is abundant. What distinguishes South Africa's case is the normalisation of this destruction through the language of democracy. The state performs concern. It hosts dialogues. It commissions reports. But the material conditions do not shift. The poor are slowly erased through inaction, underdevelopment, and neglect that is both chronic and targeted.
