‘Oranje Blanje Blou’ ban a step backwards

ON THE one hand, you have to congratulate the Nelson Mandela Foundation. Two own-goals in one easy move is quite some record. On the other, how pitiful.

That’s an engaging and pleasant place, that larney building in Houghton. It has done many beautiful things, often surprisingly inclusive. I’ve heard FW de Klerk speak there. Many times, you’d be agog at the breadth and diversity of their exhibitions, their debates, their history-keeping.

For long I thought that when we start dividing the ANC into Verligtes and Verkramptes, the foundation would play centre-forward in the Verligte team.

Hm, there’s some history that has dropped down a hole. When Afrikaner nationalism ruled, the side that wanted to open things up, rethink the holy grail of separate ethnic states, was called Verlig, enlightened, except by their internal enemies, the gnarled-up or Verkramp.

Verkramptes spoke of Oorbeligtes, over-exposed or light-blinded, and the word-wrestling gave light punctuation to dire stuff being thrashed out by people who believed survival was at stake.

The ANC is amply supplied with Verkramptes. A thin-lipped approach to anti-liberation histories, or sometimes just a wrong complexion, is not unknown. There are middling-saintly ANC mouths whose off-mic comments on the PAC and Azapo make paint peel.

In counterpoint, the foundation projects wide views and a wide welcome for everyone, even unto the ANC’s own dissidents. Ben Turok made a speech in their auditorium that had me admiring the broadness of their shoulders as much as the boldness of his tongue.

That this is the outfit to now say: “In fulfilment of our opposition to apartheid and its legacy, let us now do what apartheid did, and ban things” is more distressing than I can easily handle.

Banning is primitive, it’s backward. Even the old government twigged that. In the 1960s it wielded bannings like a broadsword, but then they got less and less cocky, not stopping, oh no, but cautious, a bit ashamed, making excuses. Plus recognising the banning order’s annoying habit of boomeranging, creating martyrs, heroes, publicity and stiffened resistance.

Fifty years later, here’s an institution that sets up as a world leader of forward thinking, and from the armoury of arguments that it might muster, it pulls out… a banning order. At this rate of retrogression they’ll be calling for the thumbscrew by 2020.

And then: the flag war is over. It was no war, it was a walkover, won within days or weeks of Sesmmala appearing in April ’94. The country adopted that flag like Getafix sprayed magic potion.

Recall 2010. Flag scarves were everywhere, flag shirts, flag wing-mirrors, flag aerials. What a glory that was, a glory of togetherness. What made it glorious is that the old flag was not banned. Had it been banned, would we have seen that fervour? I wonder.

Those of us to whom liberty matters would have been less able to wave the flag we wanted to wave. And if it had been as widely waved, how would we know that it was freely waved? East Germany’s flag was very widely waved. Not to display one was dangerous.

Had the old flag been banned, we’d still be wondering how much loyalty it commanded.

Now the NMF would make the “Oranje Blanje Blou” a symbol of lawlessness, of foiling the new oppressor, a Righty rallying point.

That’s because – no spoof, the foundation specifies this – two old flags, 2, were displayed at a gathering of people upset by current disorder.

A million reminders of a harsh past would be another matter. Two reminders, the right response is: “Geez, we got you licked, hey?”