AFFRONT TO MAJORITY
THE profound article by Kevin Ritchie titled “Flying old flag a hate crime” warrants a response. Most non-whites consider the old flag a very deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past. There is no need to respect a symbol that is as evil and vicious to blacks as the Nazi swastika is to the Jews. The public display of this flag is a purposeful affront not only to the majority, but also to humanity in general.
This banner of racism must not be allowed because it allows the mindset of dehumanisation to continue; losers in any war are never allowed to raise their defeated symbol of war.
Invoking freedom of expression to avoid accountability for an outrageous evil, racism, on a nation founded on liberty and freedom, is morally and ethically atrocious.
It’s time to put the symbol of racism behind us and move towards healing and a better South Africa.
Throughout our history, the old flag has been used to enforce the ideology of racial superiority.
Many South Africans are expressing their hatred, deepest prejudices and fierce ideologies by publicly displaying the old flag.
As long as we have politics of race, we will have politics of apartheid war memory.
It is indeed tragic that the present is always embedded in the past; 25 years ago apartheid was abolished, yet its painful legacy remains the central event in our history and an enduring source of public controversy.
No event has left an imprint on our collective memory as apartheid, which was symbolised by the old flag.
We must embrace and cast off a traumatic past for the sake and future of generations to come.
The flag’s continued public display is ubiquitous. A nation’s flag must be a symbol of national unification, not polarisation.
Those clutching the old flag are clinging to a past that can never be again and never quite was. It’s a mythological past. You can’t wallow in the past, so long that it becomes the future; forget the old flag and you open the path for a new dawn and profound reconciliation and forgiveness.
Farouk Araie