South Africa: The People Shall Obey

analysis

In his speech at the memorial service for the soldiers who were killed in the Central African Republic Jacob Zuma presented us, and not for the first time, with the idea that we should receive another accumulation of bodies - of black bodies - as a tragedy, as a cruel consequence of the random movement of the wheel of fortune. Thabo Mbeki, watching our steady accretion of 'tragedies' from the sidelines, might, perhaps, have recalled a line from Shakespeare: "Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky."

This latest tragedy, Zuma implied, will be redeemed by its insertion in the long march of nationalist and Pan-African aspirations from the shattering on the anvil of colonial subjugation and onwards and upwards towards collective and world historical redemption. He quoted from a prize winning oration that Pixely ka Isaka Seme, a central figure in the founding of the ANC, gave at Columbia University in New York in 1906:

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