It’ll take Your SMS time for SA to ‘exorcise this devil’ views
To do this the nation must have the guts to name and shame the devil
I am not sure what it feels like exactly to be an open-minded American living in that country under the orange shadow of Donald Trump – but I know exactly what it feels like to be a forward-looking South African living in my country right now.
One is overwhelmed by a sense of incredulity, disappointment, confusion. You want to cry but you stop yourself because you know it’s a wasted effort. No one cares.
Yes, as South Africans many of us feel like zombies. Half the time you don’t know where the hell we are as a country.
If you don’t know who you are, there is no hope in hell in even dreaming about what you want to be.
A friend said the other day that if you want to be exorcised of evil, you first have to define the devil that is holding you hostage.
I am not so sure how we begin this exorcism as a nation. The evil spirit that is holding us hostage has mutated so many times, it has become so complex it will take some doing to exorcise ourselves of it. But, as I said, it will have to start with us naming the devil.
Before 1994, we knew who the devil was. We named the devil. It was hard, but we finally defeated apartheid.
It would have been naïve of us to assume that such an evil, which had worked itself into our collective DNA as a nation would be easy to confound. The poison of apartheid was bound to stay in our bloodstream.
While we were still busy fighting the legacy of apartheid which manifested itself in racism – self-hate among black people, poverty, disease, ignorance, a general lack of initiative and open-mindedness – a new evil was stealing a march on us. That we are in trouble as a nation struck me hard yesterday when I recalled how, in 1994, I shed tears of joy – and incredulity of a different kind.
When I voted, I did so in the belief that a new, caring, humane order would sweep away the detritus of colonialism and apartheid. How we sang and danced in celebration of our new-found emancipation.
When Robert Mugabe got started with his madness in 1999, we were still in the paroxysms of celebration. Yes, we admitted, the outcome of those talks between the ANC and the apartheid oppressors and their travelling mates did not give us a perfect outcome. After all, we did not garner our emancipation through the barrel of the gun. It was a negotiated settlement. There were many compromises made. Some would say too many.
But what would have been the alternative? Peacetime revolutionaries say “war”. Those of us who lived in KwaZuluNatal in the late 1980s and early 1990s know what war means. We don’t romanticise the idea of bloodshed.
Anyway, when Zimbabwe began to slide after many years of being the bread basket of the region, some said: South Africa is next!
We rolled on the floor laughing. We said: this will not happen in South Africa. We are not like the rest of Africa.
I am not so sure any more. We have our share of conspicuous corruption, cronyism, nepotism, growing political intolerance and so many hallmarks of dysfunctional societies. And we have added a cherry on top: xenophobia. Or, to be more precise, Afrophobia. Oh, how we hate black people from the rest of the continent!
We blame everything on them. As we mark 23 years of emancipation from apartheid, we need to take stock: is this what we fought for?
We are singing and dancing on the precipice of an abyss. But we still have time to put the wagon back on track. The Chinese say a fish rots from the head. Perhaps its time we removed the head before the rot infects the entire corpus.
We are just like the rest of Africa with nepotism, corruption, and we have added xenophobia