Embrace the power of cultural democracy
AS HUMANS living in a deeply polarised world, we often carry stereotypes and assumptions in our heads about people who are different from us and those who do not fit into our preconceived ideas about the way things should be. One plausible reason may be due to a lack of proper knowledge and open-mindedness needed for empathy and understanding when relating to others.
Attitudes arising from stereotypes we have in our heads about other races, genders, religions, sexualities, nationalities, ethnicities, and classes are way more damaging than we may want to admit. They have become some of the biggest reasons for the social injustice and oppression experienced in many parts of the world.
It is no longer news that South Africa is a deeply unequal society, with a long and chequered history of racism and apartheid. My first real encounter with racial prejudice was during my first visit to South Africa in 2015. I was a visiting student and a keen participant at a two-week Summer School organised by the academic partnership of the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Cape Town (UCT).
I arrived at our accommodation at UCT at the same time as a fellow participant from Malawi. We made our way to the reception where we were welcomed and handed our keys and all else. As we waited in the lobby, I couldn’t help but notice small groups of people huddled together, chattering away like old schoolmates at a reunion.
The whites and other people of colour were segregated in groups of the same ethnicity and each group paid little attention to the other. During the days that followed, the groups formed alliances and cliques divided along geographical lines. At breakfast and dinner, Americans, Brits, Australians and other Europeans sat together while black Africans sat alone. The other people of colour migrated between groups, although it often seemed to be a struggle.
A year later, I would return to South Africa to begin my PhD journey at UCT. It was then that it dawned on me, living in a city like Cape Town, prominent for its racial dichotomies and complexities, how deeply race and difference are played out in everyday South Africa. Being a Nigerian, race was not something I was acutely aware of, even when I had visited a few foreign countries before coming to South Africa.
In Nigeria, ethnicity and religion were the issues but not racism. Living in South Africa has taught me the nuances of race, racism and identity politics.
As I concluded my PhD studies and got immersed in the beautiful and complex place that is South Africa, it became clear to me that what South Africa needs is a concept I was introduced to by a colleague I met at a conference in Dubai – cultural democracy.
Although the concept has far-reaching dimensions, cultural democracy is the promotion of, respect for and protection of cultural diversity; the belief in the possibility of coexistence of different ways of being; and cultural tolerance.
Given her apartheid history and the ripple impact of identity (racial) politics and xenophobia in the country, South Africa needs a new and urgent wave of cultural democracy.