Khanya e isoe ho Molimo holimo (orthodox christian blog from South Africa)
When I hear the rhetoric of South Africa political leaders and the
commentariat on the media, I sometimes think I’m stuck in a time warp.
There was that film Back to the future. set in 1985, and going forward to 2015, but now we seem to be going back to 1985.
Suddenly
racism is back in fashion. Whites, we are told, are being genocided. or
are all living on land that they themselves have stolen, depending on
who you listen to. The Zulus hate the Indians and the Indians disrespect
the coloureds. There are narratives of white privilege and white
victimhood, both of which stress the importance of whiteness. The
Rainbow Nation, we are told, is a white lie built on black pain.
Is this revival of racism real, or is it just me and my own idiosyncratic perception?
No, it isn’t just me. My erstwhile colleague Tinyiko Maluleke seems to be having similar thoughts when he writes Time to put Nelson Mandela where he belongs | IOL News:
Our leaders seem to have forgotten how to speak of and to us as a nation. It is one thing for our leaders to speak truthfully and honestly about economic and political disparities.
It is quite another thing, when leaders conceal their lack of a unifying vision of South Africans as a people, by pandering to sectional, provincial and tribal interests.
Every time a South African leader invokes the phrase “our people”, we look at one another with bewilderment, wondering which particular people he or she is talking about.
We have come to know instinctively and to take for granted, that today few leaders if any use the phrase “our people” to refer to all South Africans.
I recall the early 1990s when in the negotiations leading to our
first free democratic elections the ANC adamantly rejected the “group
rights” concept that the National Party wanted. Now the ANC appear to
have swallowed the poisoned racist bait put out by the NP. Truly did
Paolo Freire say that the oppressed internalise the image of the
oppressor, and in the end become just like the oppressor.
As a dog returns to its vomit, so South Africans are returning to
racism and are reviving the “group rights” and groupthink rhetoric of
apartheid. And it is the current leaders of the ANC who are leading the
lemming charge. Not that the leaders of other parties are any better,
but it is the ANC leaders who ought to know better, because it was their
predecessors who strongly resisted the “group rights” concept and
insisted on a democratic non-racial South Africa.
My mind goes back to 1983, when there was a white referendum for the
tricameral parliament. A National Party canvasser called on me to
persuade me to vote for it, and spent the whole afternoon arguing for
it. After about 2-3 hours it finally sank in that I did not accept the
concept of “group rights”. and that I thought that we should forget the
groups and that whites, coloureds, Indians — Assembians, Representatives
and Delegates — should vote together for a single parliament, and that
the blacks, who had been left out of his splendid tricameral vision,
should also vote for the same parliament.
“But that hasn’t worked anywhere,” he protested.
“Yes, it has,” I said, “just look west.”
He did not understand what I was talking about, but having given him
all the clues he needed to work it out, after another half hour of
arguing I had to spell out the answer for him. If you look west from
Pretoria you will see B-O-T-S-W-A-N-A, where it had been working for 20
years. Botswana did not have a house of Assembly for the Bamangwato, a
House or Representatives for the Bakwena, and a House of Dellegates for
the Basarwa, as far as I knew,. But my canvasser’s mind was unable to
think out of the apartheid “group rights” box that his Christian
National Education had locked it into.
And now I wonder why everyone seems to be trying to crawl back into that box.
The people who resisted that, who got us out of that box at Codesa,
were people like Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo.
And now the neo-racists are calling Nelson Mandela a sell-out!
Those
who call Nelson Mandela a sell-out are the real sell-outs, because they
are trying to sell us the long-discarded old puke of Malan, Strijdom,
Verwoerd, Vorster and Botha.
And while a couple of years ago I thought the #colourblind slogan a bit naive and simplistic,
I’m beginning to have a change of heart about that, and to think we
probably need another dose of colour-blindness to cure us of the
neoracist twaddle being peddled on the media (yes, eNCA is beginning to
channel the SABC of the 1970s) and by politicians.
So please read Tinyiko Maluleke’s full article.at the link above. And let’s try to watch that we don’t get sucked into using racist rhetoric, which is rapidly being normalised again.
I keep thinking of what an English friend once said at the height of
apartheid — when South Africa has solved the problem of the black and
the white it will only be beginning to face the real problem — the haves
and the have-nots.
I suspect that the neoracist rhetoric is a smokescreen to hide the real problem of the haves and the have nots.
Viva the Rainbow Nation! Viva!
See also
Photo: The choir from the multi-ethnic Orthodox community (Orthodox Parish) of St. Nickolas of Japan in Johannesburg with Fr. Athanasius (now bishop in Kenya) and Fr. Dn. Stephen at the Elevation of the Cross, September 2013 (from here)
Is capitalism compatible with Orthodox Christianity?
Grace and “the Inverted Pyramid”
Weak, Sick, Poor, Tired: A Story for Losers
Grace and “the Inverted Pyramid”
Weak, Sick, Poor, Tired: A Story for Losers
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