Sam Ditshego, a freelance black conciousness writer, is a member of the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania and he writes in his personal capacity. He expresses his hopes for 2017. He hopes that this year Africans who work for corporate media outlets and the State broadcaster, the South African Broadcasting Corporation, “will not practice self-censorship in order to placate their bosses”. They should let information flow freely without hindrance so that those who feel aggrieved should not see the need to resort to social media. Ditshego argues that Nelson Mandela is no liberation icon at all, he was paid off by wealthy whites
10 January 2017 – Addressing fellow journalists many years ago, John Swinton, a New York journalist said:
“There is no such thing, at this date of the world’s history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it.
Mandela is no icon says writer Sam Ditshego.
There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with.
The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread.
We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”
Late last year I reacted to a study conducted on African people in a letter that was published in the Star of 7 December. On 13 December, a joint letter responding to my 7 December letter and signed by two Professors and two Doctors was published in which they said what I had written was not credible. The following day I responded and provided proof of the dangers of vaccines and emailed my response but the Star decided to halt the debate. As a result, my response was not published.
This is not only censorship but also a violation of my freedom of expression which the constitution of this country guarantees to everyone. This laid bare the truism that freedom of the press exists only to those who own it.
The SABC, both radio and television, continues to be biased in favour of the ANC and its alliance partners. All ANC events are covered live just like their (105th) anniversary on Sunday (8 January 2017). However, other political parties do not enjoy the same privileges.
The media and academic institutions continue to portray Nelson Mandela as an icon. What is an icon? Here is a dictionary definition of an icon: a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol or as worthy of veneration. Mandela is also portrayed as a person who liberated South Africa. There is a special day set aside to celebrate him. His portrait is on South African currency.
Is Mandela a liberator and an icon? Two founding members of the Pan Africanist Congress who were on Robben Island when Mandela was released in 1981, Zeph Mothopeng and Jafta Masemola went to their graves maintaining that Mandela was a sellout. In an interview conducted in 1970, PAC founding President, Robert Sobukwe said Mandela was an opportunist.
There are books published long after those PAC leaders made their pronouncements on Mandela that corroborate these leaders’ observations without acknowledging it openly.
Sobukwe turned down a lectureship at Rhodes University
One of those books was written by John Pilger who never wants to talk about Sobukwe and the PAC even when he addressed students at Rhodes University which had offered Sobukwe a lectureship. Sobukwe declined that post because of his commitment to the struggle for liberation. Pilger’s book is Freedom Next Time and he discusses Mandela and the ANC in a chapter titled Apartheid Did Not Die. The second one is Lost in Transformation by Professor Sampie Terreblanche and the third one is Inside the South African Reserve Bank: Its Origins Secrets Exposed by Stephen Mitford Goodson. The last but not least is MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations by Stephen Dorril.
Mandela startled Pilger during an interview held immediately after Mandela assumed office. He said that privatisation was the fundamental policy of his government. Pilger wrote:
“Mandela, too, fostered crony relationships with wealthy whites from the corporate world, including those who had profited from apartheid. He saw this as part of “reconciliation”. Perhaps he and his beloved ANC had been in struggle and exile for so long they were willing to accept and collude with the forces that had been the people’s enemy”.
Professor Terreblanche revealed that Mandela held secret meetings with Harry Oppenheimer at his Brenthurst estate and after sometime when they were joined by some ANC leaders, the meetings were moved to the Development Bank of Southern Africa and were held at night.
Goodson writes that in the early 1990s, Nelson Mandela is believed to have had 20 million pounds on deposit with Barings Bank. He continued, “For the Rothschilds, whose wealth has been estimated in the hundreds of trillions of dollars, control of South Africa was obtained for petty cash – money which had already been created out of thin air”.
Dorril wrote that Mandela was an MI6 agent and gave MI6 information about Muammar Gaddafi’s biological and chemical warfare programme. He also says Mandela went to the training section of MI6 to go and thank them for having protected him against assassination attempts and that MI6 has a big office in South Africa.
It beats the hell out of me how such a person became an icon and a liberator. He is perhaps an icon and a liberator of colonialists and imperialists. The media continues to canonise Mandela which confirms what Swinton said to his fellow journalists.
The corporate media and academic institutions have made up their minds that Mandela is an icon and a liberator. Their opinions are cast in stone despite palpable evidence to the contrary. They feed this intellectual pap to poor students and bombard their audiences with propaganda. It’s going to take a sea change and a radical paradigm shift in consciousness to put Mandela and the ANC in their right place as sellouts and elevate the right liberators and icons such as Sobukwe, Mothopeng, Masemola, Steve Biko and Onkgopotse Tiro in their right and proper places. It is the task of the PAC and Black Consciousness Movement to perform that task once they are united.