Mr Yengeni,
Respectful salutations to you and your generation for the sacrifice you paid in the liberation of our people. I do this to underscore that the sharp disagreement that follows in these pages, is grounded in that respect and not its suspension.
You would probably appreciate that I am writing my disagreement down since you cut your teeth as a young political activist in the Black Consciousness Movement of the early 1970s. It was a proud tradition of this movement to place value in writing as struggle. After all, we are all indebted to Steve Biko’s many essays that now form the much-celebrated collection; “I Write What I like”.
You also formed part of that unmatched and important generation of Members of Parliament in 1994 – Nelson Mandela’s caucus. Here, you played the important role of Chief Whip during those momentous days of passing the new Constitution. You were also central in the development of South Africa’s new military doctrine signified by the landmark White Paper on National Defence (1996) and the subsequent Defence Review (1998). These blueprints reshaped civil-military relations and laid out the mandate for democratic legislative oversight of our military.
The last role I remember you for was as head of ANC Political Education from 2008 to 2012. The century old congress movement entrusted you with such an important role because you had a demonstrable record as an intellectual within its ranks. It makes sense because true products of Black Consciousness never turn away from the praxis of politics as an inseparable symbiosis of the intellect. We all have to insist on this because anti-black racism, and colonialism in general, rests on the idea that we as Africans are not thinkers. In fact, we are incapable of reason. The result of such a proposition is therefore the sorry idea that we simply act based on wild passions, instincts and bodily senses – rendering us as a mass of substanceless bodies.
It therefore comes as a shock that someone of these credentials and elaborate record in the struggle would say on X;
“I’m always annoyed by those who consider themselves intellectuals/thinkers… they always assume wrongly that they know better than the masses and that they should be preaching to them…! Illegal immigrants are NOT investors. It’s a white lie”.
The post was a reply to Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, tagging me, under a video in which I said Jacob Zuma must account for his role in destroying institutions that had brought Africans together. I take it also as an answer to my broader remarks on the March and March project on SMWX. Either way, the reply requires a serious response — not only because of the exhaustive credentials in intellectual input you have demonstrated, best represented by the constitution as an outcome of your generation. But most importantly, because everywhere, African leaders seem to be “annoyed” by African intellectuals, and have over the years launched a consistent attack on the type of political praxis that actually informed such movements as the one that produced you – the Black Consciousness Movement.
Anatomy of an Anti-Reply
I understand deeply what your statement seeks to achieve. On the face of it, it sounds like a noble attempt to discourage the alienation of African intellectuals from mass struggles on the ground. But in earnest, this is not what you are doing. In fact, it does not even answer the sentence about Zuma and institutions. It does not test whether that sentence is true, half-true, or false. It reclassifies the speaker, essentially seeking to obliterate my voice by confusing me with academics that are detached from mass struggles, so as to claim the space of speaking for the masses only for yourself, and perhaps those who agree with you.
Most worrying is that this statement is consistent with a reactionary and recurring idea that ‘the masses are always right’. On 30 June 2026, the day of the nationwide March and March demonstrations, you wrote that although outstanding individuals contribute to history, “it is the masses that make it.” The next day, 1 July, you wrote: “If you second guess the mood of the masses based on your subjective emotional biases & preferences.. You are bound to reach wrong unscientific & in most cases reactionary conclusions.” On 2 July you made the referent plain: those “thousands of black people who marched in 9 provinces on the same day” were not to be called mad by a Wits political scientist.
You did not write the slogan “the masses are always right.” You do not need to. The practical rule is the same: second-guessing that mood is arrogance; standing with it is science. But Mr. Yengeni, mass work and intellectual work are not opposites. They are part of a single political craft. I have done both, and therefore write not as a man whose identity is based on the lecture theatre, the journal, or the pundit’s chair, but as someone whose public work has always been mass work — including on independently built platforms. I would insist that no one strip you of the same identity: a thinker from inside a mass movement.
But when you dismiss younger Africans who work in that same grain, you are not protecting the people from professors. You are participating in a dangerous habit consistent with anti-black racism: the erasure of African voices from public discourse whenever they are inconvenient, because after all, they are incapable of reason.
Imagine the reverse. Imagine that your own elders in Black Consciousness — older, more decorated — had answered a disagreement they have with you, not with an argument but with annoyance that you, a young thinker, were “preaching to the masses.” You would have called that what it was: anti-intellectual populism, used by intellectuals to silence other intellectuals so that only their line prevails. The credential does not excuse the method. It indicts it.
The mood is not the criterion of truth
In your tweets, you also advocate for uncritical acceptance of the “mood of the masses” when you say such mood must not be second guessed. This, I am afraid is downright reactionary.
As you will remember, during the turbulent years of the 1980s and early 1990s, a mass campaign of witch-burning spread through rural parts of what are now the Eastern Cape and Limpopo. Many believed, as they put it, liberation meant liberation from witches. More than 389 people were killed, most of them elderly African women. These were not isolated incidents. Thousands of villagers in hundreds of villages participated, held public trials and households contributed in cash to all efforts for the hunt of their victims.
It was on these bases that the Ralushai Commission of Inquiry into Witchcraft Violence and Ritual Murders in the Northern Province (now Limpopo) was appointed in 1995. In its Report, Ralushai highlighted horrifying individual incidents of mass mobilisation. One of the interesting and certainly key features of this mass campaign is the involvement of comrades associated with the congress movement – hence the political dimension of the campaign. The Ralushai Commission Report revealed that politicised youth structures systematically organised these actions as part of a broader campaign against traditional authorities and the apartheid state. In one incident in April 1986, 47 individuals were simultaneously “necklaced” and burned to death by youthful “comrades” singing freedom songs.
In addition, lightning and crop failures were read as witchcraft. However, underneath those signs sat a devastating El Niño drought across the region. The people were not inherently evil; they were desperate, hungry, and left in the dark by a lack of scientific and structural explanation. The perceived cause and the conditions of life were not the same thing. This, Mr. Yengeni, is where populism stops, and a revolutionary political program starts. At times, even within the ranks of a progressive mass movement, one still needs to philosophise with a hammer.
In keeping with your formula, if one is to avoid second guessing the “mood of the masses”, that is, tell the truth about what masses believe wrongly to be the case, then one would have to join the crowds and burn old black women suspected of witchcraft. In keeping with your formula, you will have us tell the victims of such a mass movement that masses are right.
This comparison is a test of your formula, and not so much a claim that March and March is part of such a history. The test is simple. If “mass” settles truth, there is no standpoint from which a popular error can be named. It is the case too with all those gruesome twentieth century mass murders in the Holocaust or the Rwanda Genocide.
After all, was Inkatha not itself a mass movement in the 1980 and early 1990s? Did its rallies and marches not draw hundreds of thousands of support from migrant workers, rural and township people?
This leads me to your support of March and March. If such support is based on this formula, meaning, if the test of a line is the size of its crowd on 30 June, then an anti-migrant mobilisation becomes “the masses,” and criticism of it becomes preaching.
Let me state categorically that no one should have to deny the injury those marches mobilised; unemployment, collapsed municipalities, corruption, bribery, crime and a desperate local economy are facts only a fool can deny. A politics that refuses to speak to that wound will not be heard. But a mass that organises that wound onto poor African migrants is still a misdirection of class anger. This country has run that experiment before — in 1994–95, 2008, 2015, 2019, 2022. It has never produced land, wages, or a state that works. It has produced graves, burnt shops, and a thinner idea of who belongs in the working class.
You will say that undocumented migration reduces wages and serves the interests of capital. You are right. But as a student of Marx, you know that the enemy is the mining boss, the agricultural tycoon, and the corporate elite who illegally hire and exploit unregulated labour to maximise profit. When you mobilise against the hungry worker fleeing a broken continent rather than the capitalists exploiting them, you may not be burning witches, but you have successfully shielded White Monopoly Capital from the anger of the masses.
That substitution is not the National Democratic Revolution completing itself. It is a popular bloc choosing a weaker target than class relations. If this is the same formula you use to bless those who seek the destruction of the 1996 settlement your generation worked so hard on, then the cost is clear. Any party that can gather a crowd will look like living history. The Constitution will wrongly look like a product of intellectuals/thinkers who preached to masses. That is what happens when “mood” is asked to do the work of theory.
Your last clause — “Illegal immigrants are NOT investors.. Its a white lie” — was not the subject of the clip. Even if this sentence were granted, it would not turn undocumented workers into the exploiting class. Again, this is ahistorical since this economy was built on migrant labour. The Freedom Charter and the Communist tradition that you were schooled on in Moscow, would insist that we distinguish monopoly capital from labour, including labour that crosses a border without papers. Simply labelling a worker “not an investor” does not make them the class enemy that is named in those pages of the Communist Manifesto.
I ask you, therefore, Mr Yengeni: at what point in the continuum of class struggle in South Africa did mass power last turn against the capitalist exploiting classes? When did the programme for ending the oppression of the working class become a programme against poor immigrants, on the sole ground that they are “illegal”? What is the theoretical justification for such a program in Pan-African thought, in Marxism, or in Black Consciousness?
I suggest that only when the Freedom Charter and the Communist Manifesto have been fed to the rats; only when Seme, Xuma and Tambo have been erased from public memory; only when the killers of Biko, Tiro and Mahlangu are allowed to define what counts as progressive — only then does a cadre celebrate a crowd for choosing the weakest target in reach.
Conclusion
A more human world will not come from those who think the truth requires a mass in order to be the truth. History teaches us that severe crises produce sudden, desperate alignments, and so, Mr. Yengeni, a crowd gathered around a populist promise, however large, is a sign of societal despair, not a validation of a revolutionary program – that is what happens when mood is asked to do the work of revolutionary theory.
Again, with the greatest respect, Salute!
Mbuyiseni Quintin Ndlozi is a host of African Renaissance Podcast, Fellow at Thabo Mbeki Foundation
