Nation in need of healing
IT IS troublesome that our statesmen instigate racially fuelled aggression in contrast to African intellectual giants like Thomas Isidore Noel Sankara, Haile Selassie, Kwame Nkrumah, Kenneth Kaunda, Julius Nyerere, Patrice Emery Lumumba, Jomo Kenyatta and Samora Machel.
As a coloured, I know it is a derogatory term imposed on us by colonialists but the identities of Khoisan and Griqua (basters) were also coined by German academics and Moravian missionaries, yet one term is palatable and the other nauseating.
This advances the identity crisis and promotes the divisions between coloured and Khoisan.
Let us not forget the Rwandan genocide between Hutus and Tutsis or the killing fields of Sudan where the Arab Maaliya and Rizeigat tribes are murdering each other. We had the Zulus attacking the Indians and Pondos. We have the KwaZulu-Natal killing fields of black-onblack violence based on ideological differences.
In the Eastern Cape, we sit with the citizens of the former Ciskei and Transkei arguing about class differences. First the San, followed by the Khoi and then the Nguni tribes migrated southwards from central Africa as the PAC flag depicts. The Xhosa migrated furtherest south, met the Khoisan in the Eastern Cape and adopted the click sound of the Khoisan and Afrikaans dialect.
The preamble of our constitution – as the supreme law founded on just, equal and fair principles – declares that South Africa belongs to all who live in it.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was cosmetic and true healing has not been achieved. We are still filled with pain and anger which needs to be ventilated.
Africans blame whites for stealing the land and now the Khoisan, as an indigenous first nation, advocate that the Africans are laying claim to what rightfully belongs to the Khoisan.
Where will this vicious cycle end? Another holocaust/mfecane? We all suffered, even the Boers in concentration camps. Our Moral Regeneration programme has not achieved the desired results.
We need a national ubuntu Codesa.