Andile Mngxitama’s inconsistency and the politics of denigration and opportunism

Andile Mngxitama wrote of Kim Heller in White Privilege, Black Pain: The Power of Race in Democratic South Africa: “Heller is upfront about her whiteness and the challenge it presents in writing about the black condition. But this very self-consciousness is part of the sophistication of how whiteness reproduces itself. The book does the job of exposing white power and its inherent unethical nature. But her place as a white person is not diminished; instead, the unethical exercise of power by whiteness is affirmed.”

He wrote those words as a contributor to the same volume. Teresa Oakley-Smith appears in it as well, carrying the corporatisation of nonracialism, where race gets reduced to workshop language, consultancy jargon and career opportunity for the morally ambitious.

My grievance starts there because Mngxitama saw the mechanism clearly enough to name it, then walked into it and helped it along. He seems to think that once he has named the problem, he has settled the matter and placed himself beyond critique.

Revolutionary politics does not work that way. A man who claims the stature of a doyen in the tradition of Bantu Biko must answer to consistency.

I do not read that contradiction as a minor lapse. I read it as political instinct. Mngxitama has long moved towards spaces that offer recognition, safety and status once the demands of realpolitik enter the room. For years, he shouted from the safety of a human rights NGO. He speaks against a formation and still seeks a place inside it. He condemns white confessional power and still helps it travel. That instinct belongs to the present postmodern, post-truth age. It works in tandem with a politics that loves performance and strategic placement. It does not last on the hard ground of struggle.

Perhaps this explains the anxiety he displays around my presence. Years ago at the Lenasia housing protests, when bulldozers destroyed the homes of black Africans who had paid to build there and the conservative Indian community called for their removal, I watched that anxiety burst open when the police arrived. I saw him run like a frightened dog the moment he saw blue lights flashing. That moment stripped the language of resistance away and left the body speaking for itself.

Politics reaches that point sooner or later. A man either stands or he breaks.

Mngxitama still writes about his one night in jail as though it sits anywhere near what black Africans faced in the struggles before his arrival. I wonder how he would have fared at the age of 16 with a gang of white uniformed psychopaths letting Alsatian dogs loose on his genitals, or standing on a brick for four days with no sleep until your body collapsed inwardly? Or being mentally tortured through ongoing amplified noise as well as being told lies about family deaths while being locked alone in a cell for months at a time over a period of two years. How would he have fared being imprisoned for seven full years between Robben Island and Pollsmoor? I speak here of my own experience.

He does not carry that history — nor does he carry that discipline or the test. In the 18 months that he dated my white production manager, which brought him into close proximity with Gillian (my wife) and me, I never saw in him the mettle that 1976 demanded. The state of that time required endurance under pain and a willingness to stand where fear had entered the flesh. His politics suit this postmodern age precisely because this age rewards pose, access and institutional reassurance. It also ignores contradiction,  the type that could have earned him a match and a tyre in the 1970s — because contradiction in struggle endangers the collective.

Perhaps what has always unsettled him most about me is the fact that I did not climb onto the gravy train with some of my Robben Island cellmates and comrades. I stayed with the struggle. I stayed with the people who still live under mines, police, poisoned land, racist labour relations and the long afterlife of white power. I did not barter prison memory for a platform. I did not turn struggle into social currency. I certainly did not build a self out of revolutionary residue. I remain rooted in the ground where politics still exacts a price.

And yet he had the nerve to repeatedly name me a ‘butler’ on social media.

That word came loaded with intent. He wanted to castrate me in the eyes of others. I saw his desire to shrink a black man whose life in struggle exposed the weakness of his own political formation. I read that move as a reflection of white masculinity and the psychic damage colonial life leaves behind. Fanon understood inward damage. Colonial society pushes the black man to seek shape, value and recognition in a white direction. That movement becomes black comprador politics when it throws contempt downward at a black man forged in struggle while extending legitimacy upward to a book organised around white confession. Mngxitama chose proximity to that formation.

I remain close to the places where ordinary black life meets the police, the farmer, the mine and the state face to face. That ground has no patience for fashionable radicalism. That ground exposes every counterfeit. Speaking from the safety of a donor-funded human rights NGO is ‘Butlerism’ on steroids. So is abandoning the Black Land First formation for the security of a career in Parliament.

In truth, I never found heart in Mngxitama’s work. Revolutionaries lead from the heart because the heart ties anger, intellect and force to the people. Heartlessness grows bitter, vain and self-serving. That same absence of heart explains his ease inside Heller’s project, where white conscience stays at the centre of black pain.

Yet Mngxitama spent years trying to tear Gillian Schutte’s work down. He relentlessly accused her of wanting to monetise her critical race writing through books on whiteness. He returned to that line again and again, inviting Heller, as well as white right-wingers such as David Bullard and Dan Roodt, to join the vicious heckling of her on Twitter, as though repetition could turn projection into truth. Schutte never did what he accused her of. Her work never moved through race guilt as a commodity. She never turned black suffering into a stage for white conscience.

Editors, academic journals and publications invited her writing because it carried force, memory, argument and political intelligence. Black Consciousness and critical race theorist Professor Rozena Maart selected her in 2024 as one of 66 women who have impacted South African discourse because of her full-frontal challenge to white supremacy in all its forms. Her work held then and it holds now. It still stands the test of integrity and perpetual relevance because she wrote from conviction, relation, lived contradiction and discipline rather than from the appetites of a racial market.Her argument attacked structure from the beginning. She wrote that “all whites are racist until whiteness is defunct”.

Unlike Heller, she did not call for repentance or more white tears. Schutte’s call names law, property, schooling, media power, inherited reward and the daily machinery that keeps whiteness alive. She went after the order itself. She wrote from a black-adjacent position that began in childhood and continued through adult life as a continuum. Black women helped shape her earliest sense of the world. An eight-year stint in colonial Rhodesia as a child, when her mother married a farmer and moved her children there in 1974, taught her what white rule looked like in daily practice. She majored in the study of African politics and did her thesis on the Rhodesian Bush War to liberate Zimbabwe. She came towards black life through education, experience, love, conflict, thought and commitment. She never confused solidarity with ownership

Mngxitama knew the difference between Schutte’s work and the confessional race market. He still attacked her for years, then (surprise, surprise) joined a white-owned book project that packages black pain, white introspection and black endorsement for public circulation. And no, I am not interested in literary rivalry. I am naming a breach of political integrity. He identified the mechanism of white renewal through confession and then chose to carry that mechanism further. He systematically attacked a writer whose work held its line across time and then attached himself to the formation he once tried to pin on her. He publicly insulted another black man whose politics were forged under conditions he never had the fibre to endure.

What then does Andile Mngxitama really stand for other than himself? And how much change does Heller force through her call for more white repentance, her top-down moral posturing and repeated sloganeering?

In revolutionary politics — nix.

Sipho Singiswa is a veteran Robben Island political prisoner and MK underground operative. He works as a political analyst, documentary filmmaker and activist.