BLACK PEOPLE MUST DELIVER THEMSELVES
AS TIME keeps ticking away with the years of democracy but is unmatched by actual pace of qualitative change, there is cause for serious reflection on the meaning of liberation.
The country is long on rhetoric but short on deeds. It is loud in words but sloppy in action. It keeps raising the volume of promises without care to providing keynotes to the fulfilling melody of a nation at peace with itself.
Indications are that South Africa has forgotten there was a Struggle in the first place.
It is about time thought leaders reclaimed the language of liberation to find a sensible fit in the vocabulary of development defining the new terrain of post-1994 politics.
To continue plastering a recurring wound, in hope for automatic health, constitutes shoddy work in the nation-building project.
No wonder former president Thabo Mbeki’s assertion that South Africa is a country of two nations keeps haunting us.
No new nation can ever hope to emerge for as long as its constituent parts continue to stand on either side of white superordination and black subordination.
For a new nation to be born, material divisive interests that keep the nation at daggers drawn must die. It is better for an inhuman system to die for people to live, rather than to see an unchanging system lasting longer for people to continue dying.
To this end, we must do away with political correctness and speak in honest words to allow for the sleeping human beings that lie in us all to truly awake towards a more humane, just, peaceful and stable, beautiful country that cannot be built with false bricks and fake cement for its aspired strength.
The first step in this journey is to wrest the changing agenda away from political correctness that accentuates appearances and undermines substance.
Whites may or may not be aware of this black objectification, albeit raising them to beneficent status of the all-knowing subjects endowed with wherewithal of what is best for blacks to dispense without question.
We need a genuine language that challenges black and white people to forever ask themselves whether or not they have it within themselves to be human again.
In their contentment with the system, whites may not find its reappraisal urgent to undertake. But blacks have suffered much to hold any longer.
Urgency imposes responsibility on black people to deliver themselves from their objectification.
To entrust non-believers of change to lead, amounts to betraying the good of the cause. It makes policy development an estranging exercise.
In the end, the black voice is subservient or absent. And so does their agency get diminished.
Without active black thought leadership, even when the voice of public policy is primarily about blacks, the content does not come across as being for blacks, of blacks and by blacks.
Once policy is signed, sealed and delivered, its language does not speak the courage for change, but ministers white fears for black accommodation within an unchanging system.
To insist on real change is rude, to the given manners and decorum of the status quo. To talk about revolution is criminalised as a bloodthirsty assignment robbing peace of a chance.
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Ready for the revolution, as (civil rights organiser) Kwame Ture would say. In that revolution stands our appointment with history to be human again.
Failure to stand on the affirmative side of history is the cause of the disjunction between the language of liberation and SA’s post1994 vocabulary of development.