Evidently, the erasure of Black people is not aimed only at rendering them invisible and leaving it at that. If this was the case, petty apartheid4 would not have been necessary. The erasure of Black people is aimed at ensuring that in their invisibility, their humanness itself is on trial. Interlocking institutional arrangements that spatialise and ostracise Blackness have the objective of ensuring that justification is given for denying Black people in South Africa a sense of truly belonging – a claim to meaningful citizenship. It is important that, in the conversation on citizenship, we critically engage the question of how zones of exclusion, both from the past and in the present, have made it impossible for Black people to truly belong to the new South Africa.
Peruvian-American activist Felipe Andres Coronel, better known by the stage name Immortal Technique, states in The 4th Branch that: "Democracy is just a word when the people are starving". It is an exercise in futility to con vince a disenfranchised, poor and unemployed people on the receiving end of structural inequalities that their humanity matters – that they belong to a society that animalises and invisibilises them. Black people’s claims to meaningful citizenship in South Africa will only make sense when they are part of the economy from which they have been systematically excluded since the colonial and apartheid eras. It can only make sense when the land question is finally resolved, ensuring that they reclaim their dignity. It can only make sense when institutions of learning are decolonised – when White intellectual thought ceases to be the normative, to the exclusion of Black intellectuals. It is only in belonging, in their rights being respected, that the ghosts of their denaturalisation by the apartheid regime can be laid to rest. Until then, the true meaning of citizenship in South Africa for Black people is vague and a new South Africa, nebulous.