The Dangers of Liberalism: A Short Reflection on the African National Congress in South Africa

Abstract

People of colour all over the world exist and have to rebuild their humanity deep within the ruins of colonial imperialism and white supremacist heteropatriarchal neoliberal capitalism. For many of us, our sense of orientation is lost between essentialist longing for “pre-colonial Africa” and the violent colonial interpretation of our histories. Can you imagine? Trying to build your humanity amongst the ruins of an all-encompassing, unrelenting, and continuously re-inventing system? It is a big task. This is what any requests to engage with the oppressor must be measured against. Do we have time to engage the oppressor? When we take into consideration the energy and resilience required for us to survive the system (which seeks to kill us at every turn) and reimagine a decolonial anti-system humanity, the answer is clear. It is unequivocally no.