*So much to be done on the South African race question * ** South Africa made world headlines as a pariah state, run by a racist cabal that saw none-white people as sub-human and deserving to be treated as such. This was called apartheid.
So crude was this system that, for all intents and purposes, it was declared, by civilized nations, as a crime against humanity. Equally, so unrepentant were the implementers and sympathizers of the regime that it survived till 1994, with what progressive and liberation movements in South Africa called, and still refer to as the ‘democratic break through.’ So systematic and methodological was apartheid in its debasing and dehumanization, in vocal and practical terms, of none-white people that it became an ideology in itself. A race based exclusionary and adversarial psyche was a thick, dark and dense cloud hanging on South Africa. Accepting that colonialism in Africa was driven by economic exploitation as the ultimate aim, it clearly also had a racist orientation. The race factor was a special case in South Africa. More than anywhere else in the continent, the race question was pronounced and used definitively as political currency. With so many years into the ‘democratic break through’, there is so much to celebrate about the achievements in breaking the psyche of apartheid in many of South Africa’s people. The democratic government has done a lot in fostering race social cohesion. As with so many things, the cliché remains true, there is a lot that needs to be done which calls for serious critical and deliberate intervention. The race social cohesion deficit which is quite evident in today’s South Africa could only have been expected. Nearly three and a half centuries of black and white people viewing each other in contempt cannot, and could not have been solved in a mere 15 years. Notwithstanding other issues, the race issue in apartheid South Africa was the main manifestation of the deep class crisis which gripped the country. It would have been an issue to which the leadership of the country post apartheid would attend to most urgently. But the demands on the leadership were many and varied, complex and interlocking that attention was not paid to the race question with sufficient detail as would have been expected, and indeed promised during the struggle for a democratic South Africa. It was the building of the architecture of a non-racist, democratic and prosperous South Africa which took much of the time and effort. It was the pretences of the thawing of race antagonism which seemed to be given importance in giving a name and surname to a new baby born-a new South Africa, the rainbow nation. The time has come to address the issue. Unfortunately today’s discourse on the race question has been, in a real sense, orphaned, abused and used as a default rather than a product of rational thought. It is always the white people! It is always the question: could this have happened if the person were white? The debacle around the lovely Caster Semenya is a case in point. Objectively, there was no need to invoke the race card, unless one takes the race question as their default argument, rather than an argument of critical and dialectical thought. On the other hand, white people in South Africa have to accept that apartheid was wrong objectively, subjectively and scientifically. The idea it propagated cannot be accepted by anyone that claims to be human. Black people are as much human and talented as white people, and they have no obligation to prove their humanness to anyone. Should white South Africans continue to treat black people as Apartheid instructed them to, they are only putting paid to opportunistic race rhetoric we have witnessed, for instance, in Zimbabwe. That rhetoric would soon find resonance and its way into South Africa. The result is a nation living in a social volcano. In Zimbabwe, one hardly sees white people giving a lift to a black person on our main high ways. He or she would rather drive alone in a huge car, and leave hundreds of people clamoring to hike for transport. There is hardly any crime to talk about in Zimbabwe, and indeed giving a lift to people who are hiking for transport has been a common phenomenon for years. Against this material reality, a frustrated person on the road, not that they are entitled to be given a lift, continues to associate only with black people. He then calls them ‘his own’ people, the question becomes; who are the people that are ‘not his own people.’ It is the ‘othering’ that cracks race social cohesion. I have personally witnessed discourse in Zimbabwe at a hiking spot where people began to say “maybe Mugabe is right in taking these farms, these people don’t see us as human.” Once such talk starts, it is as much corrosive as it breaks the race social fiber and the result can only be a race cold war. That cold war will be more acute in South Africa given its past and hang over of the same. There is as much obligation on white South Africans as there is on black South Africans to create and foster an environment in which the barriers that were created by apartheid are discovered for what they are, irrational! It is an obligation, not only pronounced in some thick complex document called the Constitution, but in our very sense of humanity. With a different style of leadership in President Jacob Zuma, the time is ripe for the issue to be attended to with clinical precision and a view of objective acceptable synthesis. President Jacob Zuma is indeed a breath of fresh air. His warm ability to connect with the ordinary people is what is required in bringing the ordinary white and black South Africans together to create race social cohesion. As Tendai Biti put it, albeit in a different context, “some of these things are out of ignorance, rather than belligerence.” What is needed is mutual education and this mutual education, given the objective past of South Africa, requires an enabler. Who else can do it best other than the man from Nkandla? by Nqobizitha Mlilo in Zimbabwe *This article was originally published on page 4 in the Northwest Post* ** *http://www.nwpost.co.za/files/3rd%20Edition.PDF* -- For more information please call MDC (Zimbabwe) Hon. Mr. Nelson Chamisa 0912940489 National Spokesperson or Mr. Luke Tamborinyoka 0912104416 or [email protected] or Nqobizitha Mlilo (Zimbabwe) 00263913294724 or (South Africa) 0835274650 or 0731539555 or [email protected] or [email protected] "At each point in our proud history we have looked forward not backwards, we have stood for hope not fear, we have believed in love not hate, and we have never lost touch with our democratic values or sight of our democratic goals." ~ His Execellency, Prime Minister of the Republic of Zimbabwe, Mr Morgan Richard Tsvangirai --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. 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