Madiba’s vision squandered
IF MIKE Thurgood were to read John H Crowe’s op-ed article, “Views on how we see each other not changed”, in Thursday’s Cape Argus, it woulddawn on him why the issues of race and colonialism remain so highly contested in South Africa.
The “anti-white scenario” that Mike writes about is self-inflicted and a hangover of a colonial mindset that sees things in a blinkered way.
What about the “whites for whites” scenario that so consistently characterised white society? What about enforced and self-imposed segregation and discrimination?
What about living in the past instead of wholeheartedly grasping Nelson Mandela’s offer of forgiveness and reconciliation and stepping bravely into the future?
Had Mandela been met with a totally proactive and enthusiastic response to the reconciliation he offered and so passionately encouraged, society would have achieved the watershed our country needed. All our respective tributaries would then have drained into one mighty river flowing strongly in one direction. That did not happen, and that is why in 2017 we are still debating the hurtful issue of colonialism.
On Wednesday night, former deputy chief justice Dikgang Moseneke delivered the inaugural annual Thabo Makgoba Development Trust Public Lecture at the University of Western Cape. He highlighted the fact that the primary purpose of colonialism was to extract our country’s mineral wealth for the benefit of the colonial authority. All our railways, therefore, run from hinterland to port.
Behaviour that was born then continued to strengthen in the apartheid period and, sadly, remains alive after its defeat. This is evident from statements that surface ever so often. It was never drastically altered to accommodate a totally new mindset that would willingly attest to the fact that all of us who live in South Africa are proudly and unitedly Africans.
Thabo Mbeki lamented the fact that we remain two nations rather than a united nation with a common vision. The Rubicon has to be crossed, without looking back or, like with Lot’s wife, salt pillars will arise in a parched land.
A failure to cross will also create just cause for those who want decolonisation to be thoroughly completed to up the ante. The law of cause and effect will apply and reaction that is its equal and opposite will manifest itself to keep us divided.
John H Crowe’s piece says it all: we, as Africans, must see what was done to Africa and our fellow Africans by colonialism and apartheid through the same eyes. Only then can we engage with the world as equals and see all developments in every field as the common inheritance of humankind with no subtext and no insinuation.