A road worth travelling

IN A week dominated by hateful, intolerant and reckless exchanges – inspired by the serious problems that confront our young democracy – it is tempting to conclude our rainbow nation dream is over.

Instead of starting 2016 full of the hope that a new year normally brings, the problems we face have contorted our body politic to the extent that we risk forgetting who we are as a nation.

Some of us no longer see a need to remain on the high road to our final destination of a truly free, just, peaceful, prosperous and non-racial South Africa united in its diversity.

But we should bear in mind ours was always going to be a long and gruelling walk, as our founding president, Nelson Mandela, put it.

The events of the past few days remind us that although we have come a long way and achieved notable milestones, there are many more hills to climb.

Can we afford to not do something to make our country a better place? We might not all agree on what needs to be done and what will work, but we should welcome constructive debate.

We need to stand together to fight the scourges of racism and bigotry, the dangers of which have been made clear in this country, on the continent and in the world. As part of Independent Media, we pledge our support for the Racism: It Stops With Me campaign to be launched next month.

We should remind ourselves of who we are. As Thabo Mbeki said: “The constitution whose adoption we celebrate constitutes an unequivocal statement that we refuse to accept that our Africanness shall be defined by our race, colour, gender or historical origins. It is a firm assertion made by ourselves that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.

“It also constitutes a tribute to our loss of vanity that we could, despite the temptation to treat ourselves as an exceptional fragment of humanity, draw on the accumulated experience and wisdom of all humankind, to define for ourselves what we want to be.

“Together with the best in the world, we too are prone to pettiness, petulance, selfishness and short-sightedness. But it seems to have happened that we looked at ourselves and said the time had come that we make a super-human effort to be other than human, to respond to the call to create for ourselves a glorious future, to remind ourselves of the Latin saying:

(Glory must be

sought).”