Still no answer to South Africa's "National Question"

Posted by Madibeng Kgwete: 07 December 2010

There is honesty, and there is plain bigotry; and there is DF Malan; HF Verwoed; PW Botha. To that list, you can also add a few contemporaries, amongst them Annelie Botes and Steve Hofmeyer.

Despite their varied backgrounds, ranging from politician to writer to musician, these names share a few common traits.

They all come from privileged backgrounds. They are all generally ignorant. Most significantly, they all have a sense of racial superiority over black people.

In all fairness to the individuals named above, their sense of racial superiority is a heritage from the past. They have internalised the bigotry with which black people all over the world have been treated over centuries.

It is a matter of historical record that the relationship between colonial master Europe and colonial subject Africa resulted in the pillaging and plundering of Africa’s riches.

It is also a matter of historical record that the apartheid system, which sought to protect white privileges at the expense of blacks, was declared by the United Nations as “the supreme crime against humanity.”

At the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), apartheid leaders and their agents were made to apologise for the atrocities committed against black people.

As it turns out, the apologies were mostly superficial, meant primarily to help criminals avoid prosecution for the atrocities committed against black people.

As a result, many a white apartheid agent still walks free today, owing to the generosity of spirit and civility of black leaders such as Nelson Mandela.

Yet, black people in South Africa today are still derided as a lowly bunch, unequal and undeserving of the social and economic status of their white fellows.

Sixteen years after the first democratic elections, a silent but vicious faction of the white community is still stirring up racist rhetoric.

The idea is to keep the black man down “where he belongs”.

So, on a day when members of a white family appeared in a Pretoria court on allegations of producing pornographic material featuring children, singer Hofmeyr reportedly suggested on his Facebook page that blacks are inherently criminal.

With no sense of irony, Hofmeyr is reported to have wrote: “Blacks (God knows, probably not all of them, but most of those I observe) feel justified and 'entitled' in everything, from quotas/low matric marks to land rights/brutality.

"Sorry to emphasise the colour, but I'm struggling to spot the terrible whites who climb over blacks' walls to do that to their children."

Just a week earlier, award-winning Afrikaans author Botes told the Mail & Guardian newspaper that she does not like black men because they are criminals.

Thousands of other white people probably echo similar sentiments in private.
Botes herself claimed to have received more than a thousand emails supporting her statement.

The saddest part, though, is not that these people publicise their racist views. What saddens me is that South Africans are pretending that there are no racial tensions in the country.

In the various sectors of the South African society, apartheid is alive and well. And this occasionally manifests itself in our national discourse, with a few bigots from both sides of the race divide occasionally coming out to throw a slur.

What is evident is that South Africans still do not trust each other. We haven’t cracked the apartheid psychological infrastructure – and we’re not even attempting to.

Former president Thabo Mbeki was admonished and effectively censored for saying during a parliamentary debate on reconciliation and nation building that South Africa had two nations.

To wide derision, Mbeki said: “One of these nations is white, relatively prosperous, regardless of gender or geographic dispersal. It has ready access to a developed economic, physical, educational, communication and other infrastructure.

“The second and larger nation of South Africa is black and poor, with the worst affected being women in the rural areas, the black rural population in general and the disabled.

“This nation lives under conditions of a grossly underdeveloped economic, physical, educational, communication and other infrastructure.

“It has virtually no possibility to exercise what in reality amounts to a theoretical right to equal opportunity, with that right being equal within this black nation only to the extent that it is equally incapable of realisation.”

We now seem to have a choice between the honest truth as told by Mbeki – or the honest truth as told by Hofmeyr and the like. Neutrality on this matter is completely undesirable.

As Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”