Isolate and show racists the red card
South Africans, black and white together, defeated apartheid
FIVE RECENT shocking events gave a stimulus to this reflection on race and racism. The reflection does not deny the existence of race. It argues that racism should not be used to gain an advantage over others. Its institutionalisation and opportunistic deployment erode South Africa’s democratic dividend. It then creates unnecessary conflagrations and inordinate societal tensions.
Before enumerating the five shocking events, a few comments are necessary. Racism and racial intolerance are not only a threat to our democracy, but they rise and ebb even in old democracies and societies. Turbulences of poverty, social distress, economic hardships, droughts, famine, natural disasters and other acts of God draw out the rawest of human behaviours, and racism becomes the first reaction to these unplanned events.
Apartheid had been designed such that Africans were to be at the receiving end of its racial classifications. Their resistance to injustices against them was achieved through the co-operation of other races, domestic and international. The support and solidarity came from those who were expected to benefit from apartheid (namely whites), or those to whom apartheid was less strictly applied than it was to Africans (namely Coloureds and Indians, in varying degrees of strictness).
This co-operation should not be lost to the memory of our glorious Struggle, but should be harnessed as a collective history of achievement against odds to isolate racists or racists’ behaviour in our societies. In other words, when individuals become racists, they should be shown a red card with an inscription that South Africans across racial divides contributed to the defeat of apartheid’s racism together.
The resurgence of racism and racist behaviour is still a challenge facing the democratic state in its sixth administration. The onus to reverse it rests on the shoulders of all South Africans. However, the leadership to reverse it should fall firstly on those who knew its worst effects, the Africans. Secondly, it should rest on a party whose ideology has for decades, been underpinned by non-racialism, namely, the ANC.
The responsibility is not an easy one, because more often than not it is Africans who are at the receiving end of renewed racism. It is difficult to appeal to victims to approach their victimisation with caution while the perpetrators escape sanction and punishment. It is also difficult for the ANC who have the responsibility of providing answers to the victims and formulating and implementing state policies to reverse the scourge.
What then are these five shocking events? Firstly, the reported assault of a 65-year old female domestic assistant by her employer’s son in the East Rand and the racial undertones underpinning it. The victim has been working for the family for more than 20 years, and the victim raised the perpetrator. The perpetrator is out on R500 bail. The perpetrator’s anger, and violence was ignited by disdain for a black government which was established before he was born.
In his Long Walk To Freedom, president Nelson Mandela wrote: “No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
Secondly, a mayor of a Free State municipality referred to Coloured residents as deserving a “skop and donner” in a derogatory “B” term. The mayor was put through the ANC’s disciplinary process. His utterances resuscitate the pain of pejoratives used by the apartheid government against Coloured people. It also reverses the Struggle gains which were achieved through an emphasis on non-racialism which came about through many trials and tribulations, debates and secessions, resignations and expulsions.
Thirdly, the recent attack on an elderly farming couple in Normandien, 63 years and 60-year-old respectively, in Northern KwaZulu-Natal. It deceptively looked like a robbery. However, singling out the “progressive” couple because of their colour could not be ruled out. These despicable acts of criminality perpetuate the impression, and are opportunistically used by opponents of democracy, to export the narrative of white genocide.
Fourthly, on April 30, South Africa woke up to the sad news of the death of Denis Goldberg. He was one of the last two surviving Rivonia trialists. Goldberg was the only white person who was convicted with Mandela and others.
Fifthly, the former surgeon-general, Lieutenant-General Vejay Ramlakan, passed away on August 27. Known as
“Mandela’s Doctor,” Ramlakan was a committed South African and was prepared to lay down his life for the Struggle for our freedom. He was a South African of Indian descent, a comrade and a true patriot.
These five events require the ANC to reassert its long-standing policy position and empirical practice on non-racialism. Left unattended, the events threaten to dismantle the equality enshrined in our Constitution the majority of these clauses are reflected in the ANC’s own policy documents and have become its DNA. A single act of irresponsibility, and a failure of any ANC member to uphold our noble non-racial stance, reduces our potential to both attract, keep and promote South Africans of non-African heritage within our ranks.
Writing in the Mail and Guardian, columnist Solomon Makgale hit the nail on the head on the scourge of racism and our reactions to it when he said: “Some Whites respond to it with either timidly or, condescendingly in its defence, while some blacks answer with fury or disdainful acquiescence.”
If championed with deserved aggression, non-racialism should consolidate these divergent responses with one South African answer.
The Black Lives Matter movement, ignited by George Floyd’s murder on May 25, has become a global movement against racism. There is resistance and push back from the beneficiaries of racism posing as “balancing” the scales with slogans of White Lives Matter. Tipping towards the precipice of neo-Nazism, whose Hitlerian origins were defeated more than 70 years ago, non-racial discourses such as those encapsulated in or policy documents should be offered as viable, realistic and achievable objectives.
Signing off on his slot on September 5, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria indirectly called for the ANC to expand its lessons on racialism when he said: “Once upon a time, the US taught the world many things, it is now time that the US learnt from the world.”
Ideally, as these racial scenes and reactions appear on TV screens, we should take pride in the strength of the resolve we voluntarily made. However, the three mentioned incidences (among the many unreported) show that we too should be concerned because racists can appear from unexpected quarters and at inopportune times.
Since the ANC was the first organisation to champion non-racialism, the pressure is on it to promote it rather than for non-African South Africans to claim and demand it. Preaching non-racialism is not a sign of defeat
– but wisdom. The embrace should ignore that there is no uptake from the other side. Non-racialism was a conscious decision taken by our forebears without a gun pointed at their heads and because it was the right decision to make.
Naysayers and recalcitrant behaviour should not dampen our resolve to soldier on with our mission. We will continue to have the Vicki Momberg and Adam Catzavelos. Some politicians will tweet praises to colonialism and others will nostalgically refer to the beauty of the apartheid past from which they benefited to the exclusion of other races. There will be subtle racist attitudes as they have appeared from the sports fraternity where black sports people are speaking out.
Racists are slimy characters who can hide their racist attitudes through innocuous references to race. As I was drafting this reflection, a famous departmental store was called out for issuing an advert with heavy racist undertones. The advert referred to black female hair as undesirable because it is “dry, damaged, frizzy and dull”, and preferring white female hair because it is “fine, flat and normal”.
Even a sophomore student realises that on the hair matter, some racists have not forgiven Ms Zozibini Tunzi for being crowned Miss Universe in December in her natural hair.
Even when armed with an anti-racist and anti-exclusionary Constitution, the fight against racism is like chipping a granite block, which needs patience and endurance. Throwing our hands in the air, will give victory to the few, and rob the many of the benefits of an equal, non-racist, non-sexist society.
This is precisely why we should soldier on with non-racialism because the negative forces and instances are few and far between. The heightening of tempers when racists are exposed should embolden us than cause despair. On the contrary, those who disparage are cowered by the overwhelming disapproval of their behaviour. All ANC members should be at the beachhead of disapproving racism and racial behaviour.
The ANC did not immediately embark on a non-racial trajectory when it was formed in 1912. Over time, it has grown a non-racial approach, determined by the stage of its Struggle. A few of these “mile stoning” decisions are discussed below to catalogue how non-racialism is mushrooming in post1994 South Africa, but has been held as a beacon of hope of a future we envisaged for ourselves ages ago.
In the context of its time, the ANC embraced the non-violence of Satyagraha, a philosophical approach of passive resistance adopted by the India leader, Mahatma Gandhi in his struggle against the British in India, but which was exported to the South African political scene. Until the ideas of more robust forms of struggle, starting from the militant mass action of the 1950s culminating into the armed struggle whose time had come in 1961, Satyagraha had dominated as a method of struggle.
When president Mandela was asked to choose one of the 100 most influential persons of the 20th century, he had no hesitation in choosing Gandhi. He called him “the sacred warrior” because of how he combined ethics and morality with a steely resolve that refused to compromise with the oppressor.
The recidivism to racialism undermines the heroic tripartite Struggle waged by the triumvirate of the AB Xuma (president-general of the ANC), Yusuf Dadoo (president of the Transvaal Indian Congress), George Naicker (president of the Natal Indian Congress) pact, officially known as the Joint Declaration of Co-operation, generally known as the Doctors Pact.
At Dr Dadoo’s funeral in 1983, President Oliver Tambo stated: “It would be wrong to conceive Comrade Dadoo only as a leader of the Indian Community of our population. He was one of the foremost leaders of our country, of the stature of Chief Luthuli, Moses Kotane, JB Marks, Bram Fischer, Nelson Mandela and others.”
As early as 1904, Dr Abdullah Abdurrahman formed the African Political Organisation, later named the Africa People’s Organisation as a confirmation that the so-called Coloured people were of African origins. The identification of Coloured people went beyond Dr Abdurrahman to the SA Coloured People’s Organisation, later changed to the Coloured People’s Congress (CPC) in 1953 which joined the Congress Alliance, which became the driving force behind the drafting of the 1955 Freedom Charter.
In addition to the CPC, the Congress Alliance led by the ANC, also included the Congress of Democrats (COD). After the 1952 Defiance Campaign, a group of Whites who shared the sentiments of the Campaign formed the SA People’s Congress. In 1953, this group of whites met with the ANC, the SA Communist Party and the SA Indian Congress with a view of forming the COD. At this time ANC membership was not yet open to whites. The COD became “a small and strictly secondary wing of the Congress Movement”.