Pain of apartheid is still very real

When a Joburg resident complained on social media a few days ago about a jagged piece of concrete causing a dangerous obstruction on Jan Smuts Avenue, and drew mayor Herman Mashaba’s attention to it, the city’s number one citizen flew into a rage and played the race card.

The people, he tweeted, were beneficiaries of apartheid who were now determined to see a black administration fail. Most of the responses to Mashaba, including from black people, were negative, pointing out that this reaction was typical of the ANC administration which preceded him and that the obstruction had nothing to do with the past.

Mashaba apologised the following day, explaining he had been under pressure and that people did not always understand this.

Fair enough – but your attack, Mr Mayor, on a person making a genuine attempt to improve her city, will have driven even more people away from the DA. Perhaps your outburst was a sign of the simmering, race-driven tensions in the DA at the moment.

All of this is sad, because Mashaba has been an effective, “get the job done” mayor and has won himself fans across the race spectrum. But if he is so easily roused by race and can so easily blame apartheid, then we have to ponder a number of things.

Firstly, the pain of apartheid is still very real – as are its lingering effects, in terms of spatial planning in cities. Not even a man committed to nonracialism, as Mashaba frequently says he is, is beyond feeling that pain. White people take note.

More worrying is the possibility that we were all being hopelessly naive in buying into the “Rainbow Nation” ideal of Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela…

We don’t believe this, though. There is more which unites us than tears us apart.