Human Rights Day is the perfect opportunity to confront ongoing racism in SA
Virtually every aspect of our lives in South Africa has serious need for change: from politics to education, healthcare, gender issues, workplace culture and productivity, unemployment, corruption, crime, poverty, race relations and the inequality gap.
If we are hoping someone will come along and magically fix everything, a terrible thing will happen… Nothing! Hope has never been a winning strategy.
I hold a firm and unwavering belief that we each have a moral obligation to help to uplift the people of this country and to create a just and equal society. And, though we cannot individually change the world, we can most certainly change things within our own sphere of influence, which includes our network, the people we interact with and our businesses. We have a long history of trying to change other people in South Africa and it hasn’t worked. Perhaps it’s time that we start trying to change ourselves.
There is a metaphor from Jim Kwik that I love and that I use a lot in our workshops: If the egg is broken from the outside, life ends. If it is broken from the inside, life begins.
Change always begins from the inside. Inside your heart and inside your mind.
For me, the birthplace of change in South Africa is the area of race relations, the most pervasive and destructive outcome of our unjust past. More specifically, learning to talk openly and honestly about race and having the courageous conversations that will open the minds of the people who are struggling with change.
Racism did not miraculously disappear 28 years ago when South Africa became a democracy. It lingers on like a cancer that permeates and touches everything in our society. Trying to pretend it doesn’t exist is naïve at best and irresponsible at worst.
The disingenuity of saying you are colour blind
Unfortunately, something I often hear from white people is: “I am not a racist because I don’t see colour. Everyone is the same to me.”
Firstly, this simply isn’t true. More importantly, when we pretend that skin colour does not matter and all people are the same regardless of colour we are saying that racial judgements that happen daily are happening because of racial differences, not racism. To tell a black person you don’t see colour is offensive because it completely disregards the fact that his/her whole life has been determined by their colour.
To teach a black child that skin colour does not matter is to teach them that the history of their families – a history that banned inter-racial marriages, prohibited black people from doing certain jobs, required pass books and ensured black children could not learn maths and science – wasn’t because of skin colour but because their mothers and fathers, grandparents and great grandparents were inferior and, by extension, that they are also inferior.
This is unacceptable.
It was unacceptable 370 years ago when South Africa was colonised. It was unacceptable in 1910 when racial discrimination was formally instituted.
It was unacceptable in 1953 when the Bantu Education Act officially became law, with Henrik Verwoerd stating: “There is no place for [the Bantu] in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour... What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is quite absurd. Education must train people in accordance with their opportunities in life, according to the sphere in which they live.”
And today, in 2022, it is still unacceptable. And the only way we can make lasting and meaningful change is if we overcome racial biases and effectively work together from a place of mutual respect, trust and tolerance.
DCS spokesperson Singabakho Nxumalo said: “There are [today] no correctional facilities with outsourced catering services in South Africa.” He failed to respond to a follow-up query asking when the practice was officially dropped.
Prison outsourcing gone wild
With the catering contract raking in millions in profit for Bosasa annually, Watson rapidly succeeded in expanding the services being provided to the DCS.
The Zondo Commission heard that the value of a prison’s access control contract was “inflated from the start”. The pricing of a fencing contract was similarly manipulated from the outset.
A television contract awarded to Bosasa by the DCS in March 2006, worth R224-million, was for “developing and training of inmates”, but Cope MP Dennis Bloem told the Zondo Commission that to date no programmes of that kind had been rolled out.
At one point, Gillingham and Mti alerted Bosasa to the urgent need to come up with a new outsourced service. The third State Capture report says they told Bosasa “the DCS had surplus funds in their budget that they needed to use quickly in order to prevent it from going back to National Treasury”.
The hard conversations are the most important
In 1992 I launched Labour Link, a race relations consultancy aimed at confronting racism in the workplace.
At that time I learnt a huge amount about South Africa’s past and the realities of our workspaces. I also learnt the difference between prejudice, discrimination and racism.
Prejudice: The pre-judgement of a person based on the group from which they come.
Discrimination: When you act on your prejudice.
Racism: When prejudice and discrimination are supported by a position of authority and power.
There are powerful messages to get out to our fellow South Africans.
The first is that there is no one group superior or inferior to another. We are all just different and the sooner we learn to respect and tolerate our differences the better off our country will be.
The second is that you cannot ignore the sociopolitical environment in which employees are living and working.
We can’t begin to influence change without asking the difficult questions and having the hard conversations.
The first is extremely personal: “Am I biased towards people who are different from me?” I have personally walked this journey police stations to pick up migrants. As a result, the facility was often massively overcrowded, with residents crammed into inhumane conditions. One source estimated to the Mail & Guardian that as many as 7,000 people were detained at Lindela at one point, far beyond its capacity. Despite becoming notorious for its conditions and the number of inmate deaths – 21 within one eightmonth period in 2005 – Bosasa continued to run Lindela until its 2019 liquidation.
Within the prisons system, the effects of 15 years of Bosasa-driven corruption — and the precedents pointed to by the Jali Commission findings — are still being felt in ways that directly affect the humane treatment of prisoners and working conditions for staff.
In March 2021, Parliament heard that the DCS would have to cut 10,000 jobs over three years. Of all South African correctional centres, only 35% were at that point estimated to be in a “fair to good” state.
Muntingh said not all the problems that continued to plague South Africa’s prisons today could be traced back to Bosasa-style corruption: he lists poor management, lack of skills, a paucity of effective oversight and few consequences for rights violations as also contributing to the challenges.
But JICS spokesperson Cupido told
that “the impact of the evidenced Bosasa corruption” on inmates’ wellbeing “is not hard to imagine”. “
There can be little doubt that Bosasa corruption has burdened the entire correctional system in South Africa and that its sharp edge has fallen most severely, as in other sectors, on the most vulnerable, in this case, the inmates, especially the remand detainees,” she said. and had to painfully admit to myself that I have been biased.
The prejudices I grew up with in my privileged formative years still lurk deeply in my unconscious mind. But I work on it each and every day.
People need to identify how their conscious and unconscious biases were developed. They need to become familiar with the history of social injustice in South Africa and develop a plan to address and overcome their own biases. Most importantly, they must discover how they can each make a difference – and it isn’t by being colour blind.
These are not easy conversations. Nothing worthwhile ever is. But, before we can celebrate Human Rights Day, I believe it is important for us to reflect on what human rights really mean for every man, woman and child in South Africa.
And then let’s take a good hard look at our society and answer whether those rights are being delivered. Because if they are not, it is up to each of us to start making a change, one mindset and conversation at a time.
Despite the current focus on all the other problems we face in South Africa, we should never allow the issue of race relations to slip into the abyss of our minds.