LET’S ELIMINATE RACIAL CATEGORIES FROM OUR LEXICON

MY BYLINE makes improved literacy my main impetus. Improved literacy on a national, non-racial platform will do a lot to provide every citizen with a fair chance to succeed or fail. To read or not is a choice. To improve literacy levels should be a national imperative.

I sometimes stray from this ostensibly simple remedy for our woes to comment on other arenas of activity, conflict or achievement.

The FW de Klerk utterance and the (inevitable) apology is an example.

One learns that words are powerful tools, and once spoken or written, they cannot be recalled.

De Klerk knows this. His apology is as empty as his denial of the misery his government caused.

I have never accepted the ethnic epithet of “coloured”. And yet I could never escape the demeaning assumptions and cruelties contained in the oft-repeated lie that skin colour has anything to do with being a worthy human being.

What a tragic joke that people still believe that dark skin is directly related to sub-standard in anything and everything.

Another area that deserves focus is my piece on the athletes of colour who could have brought our country Olympic glory as far back as the early 1900s. In this regard, I respectfully point my readers to a very informative and revealing sport link, http://www.athleticsclipboard. I repeat my appeal for readers to come forward with stories about athletes excluded from the world sporting stage because of race.

I visited the site and was overjoyed to read about a young woman who would have brought us gold given half a chance: Audrey Louw. I remember that she was a learner in my class in the 1960s.

A pointed reminder of the need for literacy was contained in a minister’s denial that she took her husband to Switzerland on state expense. She took him to Geneva, yes. Switzerland? Never. And a hale and hearty Zuma returned fresh and renewed from Cuba, assuring us that he will be healthy enough to stand trial and go to prison. He has been to jail before. Is he remembering, and depending on, the classic case of forgiveness on the grounds of ill health called Schabir Shaik.

Our main business for this year remains my appeal to make this the Year of the Parent. We are not advocating a silver bullet that will instantly eliminate the tensions and tragedies that accompany families. We all have only one shot at life. We do not get a second chance to improve on first-round failure.

All the more reason why we should negate and reject the categories that underline difference. All races contain parents.

All parents are to be respected. Therefore, all races should be respected. (I can hear my philosophy 101 lecturer at Unisa having an apoplectic fit at that solipsism).

Remember how we trashed the “k” word through the SA Human Rights Commission? Let’s get to work on the “W”, “C”, “I” words, and the one loosely called “Other”. Let’s eliminate racial categories. We are all South African.