Divisions still rife in new SA
TWENTY-ONE years into what is supposed to be a “Rainbow Nation”, race relations in South Africa are still in a quagmire. Anyone who raises the alarm on the matter is either discouraged, condemned, or both.
It is even harder for those who are said to be “born frees” to speak about race as they are widely believed to be free of apartheid-era racial bias and stereotypes.
Constantly, at school and at play, we are bombarded with messages and practices which promote unity in diversity. We are reminded of how gruesome South Africa was pre-1994 and how things have changed for the better.
We are given titles that perpetuate this kind of rhetoric, including “born frees” (the favourite), the “Mandela generation” and the “Rainbow Nation”. This is done without a thorough, in-depth inspection of the dynamics at play.
These ahistorical practices are, to an extent, if not fully, an erasure of the past.
But who are the people who are at the forefront of these “acts of kindness”, of trying to unite the nation? The principal advocates of the so-called rainbow nation are the gatekeepers of white capital, who do so in the form of advertising and other such facets of the media.
These are, of course your middle and upper class folk who are predominantly white. This is problematic because it is the white community who should be doing all they can for an always-separated people to at last unite. But they seem to have left that to the government; a black government itself preoccupied with protecting white capital.
What the government anticipated was that we who are born post Mandela’s release from prison were going to get along just fine so long as we went to the same schools, shopping malls and, at times, playing grounds.
During the transfer of power the race question was not prioritised. All that was said was white people should relax and not board the next flight to Australia while blacks would not seek revenge. And to the blacks, a promise of a land of milk and honey was made. It becomes clear that freedom for the majority is tied to the comfort of whites. Now, it seems, the chickens have come home to roost.
As we saw recently with the Rhodes Must Fall campaign at UCT and the subsequent spread of it countrywide, those who were supposed to get along just fine, the born frees, are torn apart once more. Black students demanded the fall of Rhodes’s statue while the majority of white students together with staff resisted the motion.