My elderly mother showed me a WhatsApp message that has been circulating among whites and non-Africans for weeks. One of her friends — a woman who thrives on racial fear-mongering — had forwarded it to her late at night, to spook us all, as my mother put it. What struck me immediately was the clinical, castrating, surgical use of language. The message was written with the precision of an AI-generated scalpel, and its tone was chilling.

It begins: “At exactly 00:01, the U.S. strikes. Not with bullets. With bans. Not with boots. With bank freezes. Not with speeches. With isolation so severe it silences even the most arrogant microphone.”

The text frames H.R. 2633 — the United States–South Africa Bilateral Relations Review Act — as a sanitary procedure. Terms such as “virus,” “sterilisation,” and “correction” are used with calculated intent. These are not political words. They are clinical, evoking an operating theatre in which Africa is the diseased body and white power stands ready with a scalpel.

Stuart Hall, the Jamaican-born British cultural theorist, wrote that language does not reflect a pre-existing meaning, but constructs meaning, and that those in power “define the terms of reality itself.” This message does exactly that. It casts US imperial power as calm and rational — the adult stepping in to discipline a supposedly unruly Black state. The history of colonial plunder, neoliberal restructuring, and decades of economic extraction disappears, replaced by a story of administrative necessity.

The message names Ramaphosa, Mashatile, Malema, Shivambu, Mbalula, Magashula, and others in a single sweep. There is no attempt to distinguish their ideological positions or political histories. RET vs Thuma Mina has lost its usefulness to white monopoly capital discourse. Their differences are irrelevant. Black skin itself is treated as the guilty verdict. This erasure of complexity is central to the racial logic at work: no matter their politics, they are cast as a single, undifferentiated body awaiting castration through sanctions and isolation.

Frank Wilderson, in Afropessimism (2020), argues that Blackness is positioned not as a Human subject but as “a thing… a being that cannot be a Human subject but is instead an object, a medium, a piece of equipment, through which and upon which Human fantasies are elaborated.” This message follows that logic exactly. Blackness is not treated as a political subject capable of thought or contradiction. It is approached as matter to be cut, controlled, or erased. The fantasy is that white power can restore dominance through a single, decisive act of surgical neutralisation.

Professor Rozena Maart, in an interview with Sipho Singiswa, articulated this with piercing clarity: “How better to castrate the Black man than to kill him and then blame another Black man.” Her words expose the racial fantasy that drives this message. Castration here is not a decorative metaphor. It is the central image through which white power imagines the neutralisation of Black political presence. The act is both symbolic and material: economic sanctions, travel bans, asset freezes, and international isolation stand in for the blade.

This fantasy has been rehearsed before. When Robert Mugabe rejected imperial control and began reclaiming land, Western media outlets spread the claim that he suffered from “syphilis of the brain.” His political defiance was medicalised, his body turned into the site of alleged pathology. In my own life, the trope of the “diseased Black cock” has been frequently used to attack my relationship with my Xhosa life partner precisely because our union is an act of anti-hegemonic work — political, personal, and symbolic. This is the same colonial script: resistance is medicalised, Black masculinity is sexualised and diseased, and white power casts itself as surgeon.

This surgical extraction is no longer theoretical. It has begun. Julius Malema has already been found guilty of firearm charges in a heavily mediatized trial that served to weaken him politically and frame him as dangerous. Political figures linked to contentious moments of resistance have died under suspicious circumstances, with investigations going nowhere. The Zuma period — chaotic, contradictory, and marked by allegations of corruption — has been reduced in the dominant narrative to the singular cause of national decay. This steamrolled representation obscures the material gains made during his presidency. President Zuma expanded access to higher education through the establishment of universities in rural Black areas, including the University of Mpumalanga and Sol Plaatje University. He oversaw significant investment in infrastructure, expanded social grants, pushed forward BRICS membership, and initiated the nuclear energy deal with Russia that could have radically altered South Africa’s energy sovereignty. Yet these complexities have been eclipsed by a singular focus on scandal. The Zuma era has been weaponised as the moral justification for a wide-ranging purge. The operating theatre is not being prepared; the operation is under way.

Meanwhile, white corporate crime remains largely unscrutinised. The original act of mass theft — the seizure of land — was never reversed or held to account. From this foundation grew a vast architecture of white economic power, consolidated through colonial plunder, apartheid accumulation, and post-1994 financial liberalisation. Today, corporate scandals like Steinhoff, which wiped out billions and devastated pension funds, are treated as unfortunate anomalies rather than symptoms of systemic theft. Even when consequences are registered — a global settlement, the occasional fine, or the conviction of a single executive — they unfold as administrative procedures, insulated from any genuine moral or political accountability. There are no loud calls to dismantle white economic networks, no moral panics about the fitness of white business to govern itself. By contrast, allegations of corruption linked to Black politicians and businessmen, including media magnate, Dr Iqbal Survé, who is the only media owner to host Black Consciousness and Brics friendly articles, are narrativised as proof of civilisational decay. It is as though Blackness and Black governance itself is inherently diseased. This is what Hall meant by the “ideological work of crisis”: white economic power sets the terms of public outrage. Black figures are named, charged, and paraded, while white crime is absorbed into bureaucratic processes and quietly forgotten.

Unfortunately, the African National Congress is not entirely blameless. Like many liberation movements transitioning into government, it allowed itself to be infiltrated — by askaris, opportunists, and CIA-aligned operatives — weakening its revolutionary core from within. Noam Chomsky has long observed that “when a country moves towards independence, the United States works to ensure that the outcome will be in line with its strategic and economic interests,” often by “penetrating and influencing key political movements before they consolidate power.” This pattern unfolded in South Africa too.

Decades of corruption, betrayal, and elite capture disfigured the post-apartheid state. Amílcar Cabral warned that betrayal often grows within liberation movements, when nationalist elites seize power only to hand the project back to imperial forces in exchange for their own survival. This is exactly what happened. The ANC acted as a broker between white capital and Black aspiration, signing away economic sovereignty while selling reconciliation and rainbows to the people.

The rainbow nation project pacified citizens and subjects alike. It redirected revolutionary energy into ritualised reconciliation and symbolic gestures. People were encouraged to celebrate a fantasy while capital tightened its grip. The WhatsApp message relies on that pacification. It instructs people to step aside while imperial power moves in. It assumes the population has been softened by decades of managed hope and will accept this intervention as fate.

White power has erased its own role from the story. The existing economic order was designed through negotiations that protected white wealth and opened the country to foreign capital. Donor networks built the NGO and media machinery that disciplined radical thought and neutralised resistance. Western finance extracted wealth for decades while remaining invisible in the dominant account. Now, as the edifice begins to crack, it steps forward as surgeon, pretending to have had nothing to do with what came before.

This is no longer about whether imperial power intends to act — it already has. And no matter how divided Black politics are, it is Blackness as a whole that is under threat. The question now is whether the people native to South Africa will accept symbolic castration and lynching, or whether they will rise in unison to drive back the scalpel of empire and reclaim what was stolen. Across the Sahel region, nations have begun to do just that — ejecting imperial forces, asserting sovereignty, and entering a new geopolitical terrain on their own terms. The shifting multipolar order opens a doorway to a different future, where historical alliances with Russia, China and Cuba can be revisited, outside of dependency as negotiations grounded in sovereignty. There is no better time than now to castrate empire itself, once and for all, and to reassert Africaness as a living, sovereign force. As Bob Marley sang, “Africa unite, ‘cause we’re moving right out of Babylon, and we’re going to our Father’s land… Africa unite, don’t give up the fight.”

* Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, poet, and uncompromising social justice activist. Founder of Media for Justice and co-owner of handHeld Films, she is recognised for hard-hitting documentaries and incisive opinion pieces that dismantle whiteness, neoliberal capitalism, and imperial power.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.

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