By Saths Cooper
Practising, inducing or inciting discrimination or prejudice based on race, colour, ethnicity, religion or national origin. Penalty: imprisonment of one to three years and a fine.
This is not the law in South Africa, that bastion of race supremacy until fairly recently, where it is usual for those in power – especially those wielding political and socio-economic power – and other beneficiaries of democracy to loudly proclaim that our liberal democratic Constitution is amongst the best in the world.
But this is the law in Brazil, where it is not unusual to see the above notice, in both Portuguese and English, in responsible hotels and other establishments, and the public at large is enabled to report such crime to the Military and Civil Police.
Arising from the Sharpeville and other pass law massacres on March 21 1960, the United Nations (UN) declared the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination on 20 November 1963. This was adopted by the UN on December 21 1965 as the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. The UN declared apartheid a Crime Against Humanity on December 16 1966. Notably, the UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance was held some 23 years ago in Durban.
Despite the global condemnation of apartheid, racism is alive and well in SA, with apartheid and its symbols being deified, even hankered after, if some citizens are to be believed. During apartheid, it was usual for criminal laws that perpetuated the oppression and exploitation of the majority of citizens to be phrased in strikingly innocuous ways, whereas their essence meant the exact opposite.
The Extension of University Education Act of 1959 formally began the segregation of universities into ethnic colleges, while the notorious pass laws were titled The Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents Act of 1952. The violence and profound impact of the latter and other racist laws have not been seriously acknowledged in the devastation caused to so many millions, imprisoning those over 16 years of age to servitude if found in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Thus developed the insidious narrative of dispossession, of inferiorisation, of negation, of diminishing the majority of citizens in physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual, psychological and other ways, insidiously imprinting themselves in our sense of self, as a demeaned, meaningless nothing.
So adept has this been through education, our skewed and largely abnormal upbringing, all forms of media we consume – even that which we swear by – and the inbuilt violence of words, that we have effectively accepted our lot. As Shakespeare puts it in Julius Caesar, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
For thirty years those who exerted all control over the lives of the majority of citizens in our country during the apartheid era were granted official reprieve. We made expressions of reconciliation that were hardly reciprocated. We bent over backwards, while they mostly continued with business as usual.
Yes, there were warnings by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the caution that there was a liberal democratic constitutional framework, with some notion of human rights being at the core. For the rest, most of them were content to give up political power, offer shares to a few gatekeepers, and seemingly opened the gates to most professions.
In the richest country in Africa, the overwhelming majority are in stark survival mode, existing on the periphery, outside of democracy and its frills, brooding in hopelessness and a rising pall of helplessness.
Can we really blame the teenagers at Pretoria Girls High School for their alleged racism, which clearly is in that school’s DNA? The speed of the School Governing Body to convene a disciplinary hearing for implicated teenagers and its subsequent decision to exonerate them of racism raises more questions than it provides answers. Given the gravity of the allegations, one would have expected that the SGB display a high level of transparency regarding their probe rather than the issuing of a statement.
Not only does our education system tolerate racism, but learning from the apartheid playbook, diminishes its gravity by calling it “micro aggression”. What, one wonders, will macro aggression look like?
These children, like some teenagers at Pinelands High School, come from middle class to very wealthy homes. They school, socialise and play in racial bubbles that are bereft of any real sense of being part of the human family. They reflect what they learn in their school, their home, their sport, their recreation, their social lives, their media, and their political environments.
Any semblance of tolerance of what constitutes the other – especially anyone seen as invading that space which they have terribly come to understand simply does not belong to the other, who just happens to be the majority – is waiting to erupt at anything that injures their inherent insecurity on the southern tip of Africa, where coloniality is the norm, and many of us pray that it remains so.
Recall that members of cabinet did and said nothing when Zulaikha Patel cried out in 2016 that “asking me to change my hair is like asking me to erase my blackness”. We’ve sadly not heard anything to dispute that the parents of these children have enabled their behaviour in their entitled and exclusive spaces.
The attitude of those who still wield power in SA, regrettably still seems to be what it was at the dawn of democracy; those who in one way or the other upheld apartheid feeling, if not inanely stating “apartheid is over, get over yourselves!”
Soon after Members of the 7th democratic Parliament were sworn in on June 14, the news broke about an MP’s racist rants. The chairperson and spokesperson of the ANC’s partner in government have been at pains to explain away what is a total a violation of the rights enshrined in our Constitution. Can we blame our children if adults behave badly? If the powerful can deny their egregious and deeply offensive behaviour, ons is in gevaar!
It is time to overcome racial fear and hatred, and inculcate from early childhood, through high school and university, and into our work and public environments, that elusive common humanity. We cannot allow the nightmares of our horrific past and our evident inability to deal with present demons to be visited on our children, our future. Heaven knows we have grave challenges to face, together, without imposing our fears and uncertainty on our children.
* Prof Saths Cooper is president of the Pan African Psychology Union, a former leader of the Black Consciousness Movement and a member of the 1970s group of activists.
** The views expressed in this articles are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media
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