No easy escape from our plagues, past and present

Even in the midst of an existential crisis, the legacy of SA’s racist past plagues us like a many-headed hydra. If it wasn’t for apartheid, experts tell the Sunday Times today, the Covid-19 nightmare playing itself out in Khayelitsha and other townships carefully conceived to provide unhealthy living conditions would not be anywhere near as bad. Without apartheid, it’s possible that two teenage aspiring beauty queens — one white, the other black — would not have used the n-word in tweets that have come back to bite them up to a decade later by providing the highly flammable tinder that social media never hesitates to douse with petrol.

It doesn’t help that to a large extent sound-bites have replaced nuance and Twitter’s 280-character limit has reduced every argument to black vs white. It’s “the Nats built Khayelitsha, it’s all their fault” vs “the ANC has had 26 years to fix it”. Or “Bianca Schoombee and Oneida Cooper were impressionable teenagers, give them a break” vs “once a racist, always a racist, off with their heads”.

Beyond the bonfire of inanities — often stoked for short-term gain by people who appear to think a full-blown race war would be just the thing to clear away the apartheid cobwebs once and for all — lies a complex web of problems and realities from which there is no easy escape. Covid-19 is adding a whole new dimension of difficulty, not only in the immediate health crisis but in the long-term economic slump to come.

There’s been much talk over the past week of how the unity of purpose forged by President Cyril Ramaphosa in the early stages of the Covid-19 disaster has begun to crumble. Bickering is replacing solidarity, egos are reasserting themselves, historical grievances are being revived at the expense of an unwavering national commitment to minimise the damage wrought by the Covid-19 tsunami.

It would be unfair to blame Ramaphosa for all of this. Equally, as he showed two months ago when he announced the beginning of the lockdown, again when he extended it, and last week when he acknowledged mistakes had been made, he has the charisma and the moral authority to help us overcome it.