Fighting the scourge of racism
These shocking pictures, taken from the 20-second video, which was widely circulated on social media, show Victor Rethabile cowering inside a coffin, as one man pushed a lid on his head and the other threatened to put petrol and a snake inside the coffin
AMAJOR controversy has arisen over the latest racist incident in which two South African white men forced a black man into a coffin and threatening to set him on fire. The incident sparked protects and elicited commentaries in virtually every major newspaper in South Africa, across Africa and the entire world.
The principal responsibility for this nasty incident lies squarely on the two accused, Willem Oosthuizen and Theo Martins Jackson, who are now being held in custody until further trial.
The two white men stand as a big symbol of deeply entrenched white racism both in Africa and worldwide.
Racism in South Africa is entrenched and alarming and Oosthuizen and Jackson are simply the unflinching look of the horrific face of inhumanity bred from racism.
They are just unrepentant and many now feel that legislation against racism has not been deterrent enough.
This latest racism exhibit must force Africans to confront racist whites boldly and tackle their prejudices and pre-conceptions about race, discrimination and violence.
The 20-second video, which was widely circulated on social media, showed the victim, Victor Rethabile, cowering inside a coffin, as one man pushed a lid on his head and the other threatened to put petrol and a snake inside the coffin.
The images showed typical colonial behaviour, the demeaning of black people, the insult of their humanity and the humiliation of the vanquished.
This is pure abuse and racial hatred, and Africans must unreservedly condemn this racism without being apologetic in any way.
The abuse reflects the deep underlying racist attitudes by whites towards black people.
Numerous cases have been documented of racism both inside South Africa and elsewhere across the world on how whites ill-treat black people.
The US is still the epicentre of racism against black people.
But this latest South African case will stand out only as a rare incident of exceptional violence and as a subtle and entrenched white supremacist project of dominating racially inferior peoples.
Those apologetic will say leave everything to the courts.
But the fact still remains, the SA coffin abuse images are about white racism and nothing more.
Blacks in Africa and abroad should not be publicly reluctant to say so, and should find the right words and get them into print just to show their anger.
If Rethabile was white and the perpetrators black, the mainstream international media would have gone in overdrive evoking emotions of racism and to the extent of pushing African leaders to roundly condemn the acts.
To CNN, BBC and the other mainstream international media, this could be seen as genocide!
But the voices against the latest racial violence have been muted.
Only a few people have noted that the images remind them of abuse in apartheid South Africa and police brutality of black people.
It is shameful that most of the black South Africans failed to conceptualise history and the continued subjugation of blacks.
Centuries of racism, colonialism and misappropriated history have created a people who have very little concept of the history of their abuse.
They have simply grown detached from the struggle against white racism.
Really, should Africans hide behind unemployment and other social economic woes to let white racial violence go unchecked?
Despite the problems confronting blacks, they should desist from being a mere segment of humanity which is in a sense rootless, with no real understanding of its own historical experiences.
Blacks should continue to uncover and unmask entrenched white racism which is still alive both inside South Africa, Zimbabwe and across the world.
Naked white racist violence should not be allowed to continue unabated in the face of the Africans’ daily struggles, poverty and political torment that takes place in Africa.
The legacy of slavery and colonialism and the awful brutalisation of Africans should be condemned in every possible way.
Violent racism is traumatic and has psychological implications on the minds of the populace.
It’s humiliating and it must be castigated by all well-meaning people.
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