The language of a region holds the most effective and wide-ranging knowledge of the environment of that particular region. Destroy a people’s language, and you destroy the vocabulary by which they understood their environment, and consequently all the knowledge and information developed in the course of their interactions with that environment.

The language of the outsider becomes the language of power and normality. The vocabulary by which the conquering outsider looks at the conquered, their history, their productive capabilities, is that of the outsider. The colonial education system, enforced by the colonial language, was imbued through and through with the worldview of the outsider looking in. Those who went to the colonial school can remember lessons in geography and history that started with those of Europe.

The educated African may have consciously or unconsciously come to adopt the view of the outsider looking in. And in postcolonial Africa, the European language-educated elite has normalized the viewing of Africa from outside itself.

A country could transition from the colonial to the neocolonial. Neocolonialism is a system in which a country could sing a national anthem, raise a national flag, and still have its economy and politics and even culture controlled from the outside. Imperialism has a colonial and neocolonial phase. The struggle for independence freed us from the colonial phase. We had independence but not necessarily national liberation and social revolution. We may not have put it in those exact terms, but they sum up the shared ideological perimeters that bound us and our talks.

In the South African system, people see the bitter fruition of at least five forces that have bedeviled the development of human beings: classical colonialism, neocolonialism, slave wages, racism, and the usurpation of the people’s sovereignty through the denial of democracy.

But Black South Africans are not endlessly helpless victims of superior forces. Their history presents a people who have been pioneers in the struggle for communal survival, national liberation, and social emancipation. The ferocity of Black South African resistance blunted the determined efforts of European settlers to annihilate them.

Racial oppression carries within it many forms of denial— economic, political, cultural, and psychological. Who does not see themselves reflected in the mirror?

South Africa is me. South Africa is you. South Africa is all the black people of the Earth. South Africa is all the workers of the world. South Africa is all of humanity in its struggles to save itself. If that struggle for the recovery of a sense of human community is led by South Africa’s masses through their political organizations, like the South African Communist Party, and the Pan-African Congress, it is equally true that Nelson Mandela has been its leading symbol.

Whether they achieve that kind of empowerment or not will depend on the extent to which they can resist being pressured by the West to accept the Kenya solution. In 1962, Jomo Kenyatta was released from eight years in prison, and he proceeded to negotiate away everything that the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (the Mau Mau) had fought for. Colonial structures were left intact, and Kenya under Daniel arap Moi became one of the most repressive states in the world, a neocolony completely and pathetically dependent on the West. Kenyatta lost on the negotiating table what had already been won on the battlefield by the Kenyan people.

Black South Africa cannot accept, or indeed afford, to replace the 1910 neocolonial arrangement run by a white minority with a perpetual neocolonial arrangement run by a Black Minority. The history of the last four hundred years calls upon them to overthrow the triple burdens of colonialism, neocolonialism, and racial oppression and to start on a sentient march toward justice for all.