Won’t be so lucky next time
Racism is a crime. It must be seen as such. If it exists in our hearts, it does so because we allow it to, says The Star’s editor who gave the 6th annual Percy Qoboza Memorial Lecture at Unisa this week
THE WORLD, which Percy Qoboza edited, was closed down on October 19, 1977, and he and scores of other journalists detained. Percy, or PQ as he was known, was held for six months because he wrote about subjects that the prevailing regime didn’t want to read about. He wrote about race, about the horror of apartheid as experienced first hand by its subjects.
In 1981, after a roller-coaster period of being detained, going to Washington on a Nieman Fellowship, coming home editing the Post, which would be banned too, and then becoming “editor-in-residence” at the Washington Star, he wrote an article specifically aimed at white readers.
“If you sometimes get mad at me, because the sentiments I express keep you awake at night, then I am glad,” he wrote. “I do not see why I should bear the brunt of insomnia worrying about what will happen tomorrow. If many of us can keep awake at night, then maybe we will do the sensible thing – talk together about our joint future.”
Thirty-five years later, race is still keeping us awake at night.
We have been free from apartheid for 22 years, but this year we have been seized by the very existential question: Are we free? And, if not, why not?
This year has been bookended by racism, and that racism continues to dominate and will ultimately frame the entire year even though that which I might term racism is called something entirely different.
2016 has also been the year that social media appeared to come of age. If I may borrow a caveat from Facebook, I am conscious that a white man speaking about racism has as much right and relevance as a man speaking about abortion.
This year began literally with the infamous and egregious Facebook posting by KwaZulu-Natal real estate agent Penny Sparrow about the overcrowding of beaches on New Year’s Day, which in turn opened the floodgates to a host of racist diatribes in her defence.
The first lesson we took away, courtesy of radio and TV personality Gareth Cliff ’s attempt to the contrary, was that racism is not something that can be defended under a broad interpretation of freedom of speech.
We learnt too, indirectly through economist Chris Hart, that context and timing often define how a statement can and does transition from being inappropriate to wholly offensive and indefensible with dire consequences – irrespective of the intention of the utterer.
We began to learn that racism is not something that happened in the past, and that even if it did – and ended with the dawn of the miracle of the Rainbow Nation – it cannot be blithely wished away.
We learnt unequivocally, not that we needed reminding, that we are still, sadly, a nation of racists prone to sticking our head in the sand and simultaneously pointing fingers at one another.
In an environment where the economy is teetering on the edge of a recession, the formal job market is shrinking, people are getting laid off, almost everyone is struggling to make ends meet, we have headed back into the laagers of yore, where the racist DNA of almost 350 years of successive racist oligarchies lives and thrives just below the veneer of civility.
There in that binary construct we have two polarised perceptions: one that whites aren’t sufficiently grateful and should instead be put up against a wall and shot à la Velaphi Khumalo, a Gauteng public servant with a deep admiration for Adolf Hitler and gas chambers – and as deep a penchant for Facebook. The second that blacks should just get over themselves and this thing called apartheid that vanished chimera-like on April 27, 1994.
All this, the media has faithfully documented this year, unpicking the bedrock reality of what we now know is structural apartheid and understanding that no conversation can take place about race without first framing the debate around this.
The media has played a key role in foregrounding this debate and continuing to expose those who otherwise would have lived in the dark recesses of social media, like Matthew Theunissen – a quintessential example of white privilege with a private school education and two Master’s degrees, one of which was obtained in Europe through an intervarsity arrangement that was possible only because South Africa is an all-inclusive, non-racial democracy.
We have learnt many lessons this year. Perhaps the first is that Facebook and Twitter might be echo chambers of likeminded fellow travellers, but they’re also foremost public forums. It is not enough to say sorry, just like you can’t apologise after getting into a car drunk and killing someone after you drive off.
We are starting to learn, despite those who wish it wasn’t so, that apartheid did have lasting effects, many of which continue to this day.
We have been taught about structural apartheid; where despite the government’s laudable achievements in doubling university enrolments, the mainly black beneficiaries are faced with multiple hurdles; chief among them the financial resources to register, to pay for their fees before they even think about a place to stay or a meal to eat.
We are starting to learn how structural apartheid means that students qualify for entry to tertiary institutions and even if they can overcome the financial challenges, they face the daunting prospect of being unprepared for the academic rigours because of their prior education in an environment that remains resolutely culturally foreign.
Most of all, as white South Africans, I hope that we are learning that to say “get over it” is possibly the worst – and singularly most hypocritical – epithet we can hurl at any black South African, particularly when we continue to faithfully observe the end of wars more than 100 years before.
Apartheid lives on, but for those who suffered it to forgive the perpetrators, they must be given the space and the opportunity to remember.
Ironically, I learnt that this year from a Jewish Zionist friend who, in turn, learnt it from a Palestinian Muslim during the annual Israel Apartheid Week, which brings me to the next question: Can whites speak about racism? And its converse, can blacks be racist?
If you believe whites have no right to speak about racism, having been the perpetrators, since the first white colonist set foot on the continent, you might be of the view that blacks can’t be racist because they – and their forebears – suffered so grievously.
If that’s correct, then we cannot take issue with the State of Israel over alleged human rights abuses or for perpetrating what many critics argue is a new apartheid in their bid to ensure that no Jew will ever face the risk of genocide again. Then no German could speak out against Israeli human rights abuses for fear of being called genetically anti-Semitic.
It is a ludicrous assertion. The tragic truth is that the oppressed can become the oppressor. Human rights abuses are abuses no matter by whom, where, when or how they are committed.
If we are not a fundamentally racist society, we are at the very least a racial society. We do see things through racial prisms, we do retreat into racial laagers, we do lash out at those who we perceive threaten our livelihoods, like the Somali shopkeepers or the migrants of the African diaspora competing for health care and housing; we just haven’t found the moral courage to call it what it is, hoping instead that a euphemism like xenophobia spares us the guilt of becoming like the white baas asking for our dompas or putting his bulldozers through our homes in Lady Selborne, Sophiatown or District 6.
White South Africans dare not downplay their white privilege either.
Apartheid wasn’t just Sharpeville or Soweto; it goes back so much further but no one puts it better than Sol Plaatje, himself a newspaper editor, in his timeless polemic Native Life in South Africa.
“Awakening on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.”
Plaatje tells the story of a great exodus of people from the farms, of children dying and having to be buried in unmarked graves at the roadside.
Oppressed by a people, Afrikaners, who themselves had been oppressed and had fought a brave and valiant fight against those who would be their overlords.
Indeed in 1948, when those freedom fighters attained their Canaan, they set about ensuring that no one would ever dislodge them. We dare not allow that cycle to take root. Racism is a crime. It must be seen as such. If it exists in our hearts, it does so because we allow it to.
Independent Media, the holding company that owns The Star, recognised precisely this when it launched its #RacismStopsWithMe campaign earlier this year. This is a two-fold campaign that seeks to identify incidents of racism, highlight them and place them beyond the pale of society, and to redress the narrative of years by actively going out to tell positive stories around race, particularly in the celebration of black excellence. I believe the role of The Star is to keep to the letter and the spirit of the #RacismStopsWithMe campaign.
I am not motivated purely by altruism but by self-preservation too; I believe in the rainbow miracle because it gives me my place in the sun, but it is far more than that.
In April 1994, just as the eyes of the world were on us, more than a million people were slaughtered in 100 days. Their crime? They were cockroaches. Tutsis slain by Hutus in the land of 1 000 hills, Rwanda. And us?
We celebrated the birth of the Rainbow Nation. We won’t be so lucky next time.
The price of our survival, literally, is eternal vigilance and zero tolerance for racists. That is the role of the media, as important now as it was in Qoboza’s day to facilitate understanding, to get people talking, to forge a common nationhood for all envisaged in our constitution.
There is no alternative.
We just haven’t found the moral courage to call it what it is, so we use euphemisms