It is instructive to begin by saying that although Malaika Wa Azania does not subject the concept “Born Free” to any substantive critique, the reader is invited to access the inescapable truth that there exists no such generation at any grand scale, and that the promises of liberation came to be burdened by the weight of apartheid social engineering.
The book is divided into two sections; the first, Born free? The conditions of growing up in the Rainbow nations, is essentially about the resilient family relationships that helped Wa Azania connect with the identity of Black people. The second section, A kindled flame: Searching for a political home when the centre no longer holds, narrates her personal journey in search to find meaning to her upbringing and to the meaning of the Black child. The book begins through the lens of a manufactured “multiracialism” with stitched up clauses of compromises. In this lens, post-1994 South Africa is re-imagined, rightly so, as a disfigurement of the founding struggle for liberation.
The Beginning starts in Gauteng, ko maboneng, as a result, it situates the start in a space that produced riveting ruptures with apartheid logic, really a cultural milieu that had been imported from Sophiatown. This place was Meadowlands, Soweto, where Black people had been forcibly settled; this was the kasi that was the quintessential apartheid engineering node but simultaneously the focus point of resistance in the final stages of racial segregation.
As Soweto was the location at which “tradition” and new ideas converged, the chapter takes the reader through the preoccupation between a Christian grandmother who appears to live her life via a protestant ethic and a political activist mother who cut her teeth in the Congress of South African Students (COSAS) and the Soweto Youth Congress (SOYCO) where she waged the struggle for liberation. Mme Dipuo Mahlatsi, the mother of the Wa Azania, appears to have broken with the Christian tradition of her grandmothers generation and embraced the organic Marxist formulation of revolution.
In Township education, normality, albeit with a fractured family life and a precarious economic security, seemed to set in after the first democratic elections. Disarmed by moments like the Bafana Bafana win in the 1997 African Cup of Nations coupled with emerging popular kwaito musicians like MaWillies and Brenda Fassie, among many; these happenings seemed to seal the narrative that “Madiba Magic” had indeed defeated apartheid.
In this chapter, however, you come across Wa Azania showing signs of disconnect from Christian stories which “all felt unrealistic”, but an attraction to the history class she tellingly calls “Mandela lessons”. Moreover, the song Haufi Le Morena ‘”touched the depth” of her soul, she says, while Black “excellence” became “a daily narrative for students”. At this point, a tragedy befalls the family. Interestingly, while Wa Azania attributes this tragedy in her family as something that altered her “thinking forever”, which comes across as more of a shift in attitude, I find that the aforementioned were emergent signs of a younger Wa Azania, one whose instinctive likes and dislikes seemed only to leave her with a persistent search. However, her choice of no longer being “the teachers favorite” placed her on a path where she chose the terms of her Black existence.
However, the terms of this existence are chosen within a framework of Blackness. It is no wonder that in Escaping into a world of books, Wa Azania laughs at a teacher who cried over her dead dog (to be honest, I laughed with her here). In her own words, “it seemed absurd to me that an adult would literally cry because a dog had died”, “who cries over dogs”!?, she exclaimed. I can’t help but think of President Zuma’s sentiments in this regard.
Interestingly, the more conscious Wa Azania was beginning to emerge; that politically judicious figure that seeks to tear down the walls of “white supremacy” and its close relative, “capitalism”. We see this in The ugly face of the rainbow nation where, with the apple not falling far from the tree, “dreadlocks are an expression of Blackness” so Wa Azania decides to take her identity along with her to her new “multiracial” school. In My introduction into civil society politics, the actions of Iqbal Masih in Pakistan and Xolani Johnson in South Africa set Wa Azania, in contrast to Congress politics, on a social justice path. However, given her affinity to Black existence, it meant an uneasy relationship with even some of the social justice campaigners in South Africa – Searching for a political home in the abyss is instructive in this regard. Inevitably, this makes Wa Azania a riddle, I suppose to some of the do-gooders. But Wa Azania is also the daughter of Mme Dipuo Mahlatsi: the conversations in Partying ways with the Congress movement are a harbinger to Wa Azania’s own political positions and academic path.
In the second section of the book, Blackwash and SNI experience, with its twists and turns, we see the expulsion of Malaika from September National Imbizo (SNI) – undoubtedly cutting her first political teeth. In her search for “the Black narrative”, she flirts with the Congress Movement. This was a narrative she identified with in the ANCYL of Julius Malema and in her association with SASCO, albeit the latter was more timid. But alas, the Congress Movement also takes its position in a long line of disappointments.
From viewing Black middle class “socialisation as detrimental to the waging of serious struggles aimed at bettering the lives of” Black people, the abandonment of the struggle through corruption and other ailments in the Congress Movement, the persisting problem of sections of the NGO sector unable to shed their whiteness and to a Black consciousness bloc “drunk” in rhetoric, Malaika is, in a great sense, attempting the impossible. My own observations are that the struggle to locate a “space for Africanism in a liberal…” environment has to also mean grappling with the brokenness of humanity; with the imperfection of being. To guard herself against this fragility of being, however, Wa Azania erects a fortress of existence.
In this context, Wa Azania comes across as a revolutionary with a certain kind of individualism that leads her to a non-committal position. While she shares the same general ideological position with the Congress Movement, her non-committal posture to organizational politics may be an issue of her generation. Her idealism lends her to a certain kind of fundamentalism, a purist, in a sense; one that struggles to reconcile the fact that, inherently, beauty and evil co-existent. Perhaps this may be the crisis of her generation; a generation promised with much, yet disillusioned by an environment that screams of defeat all around.
In as much as the Book is dedicated to Mwalimu, the son she will “one day mother”, and Lalibela, her niece, it seems to also be a tribute to her mother, Mme Dipuo Mahlatsi; the principled revolutionary who birthed an African revolutionary in the making, Malaika Wa Azania. In years to come, we can only expect much more from this young daughter of the soil.