I would like to believe that the vast majority of South Africans were angered by the racist tweets of Jessica Dos Santos and Tshidi Thamana. The tweets and many people’s responses have trended and re-trended over the last few days. They have been the subject of news reports and political satire.
They have led to intense and heartrending introspection, and rightly so. But what they must not be allowed to do is paralyse us. Nor can they divert attention away from the cause of reconciliation.
The racist remarks of both women offended because they dealt a blow against the country’s proudest achievement; an achievement which President Nelson Mandela expressed in his Presidential inaugural declaration that: “never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another”.
As a nation we have to accept that remarks such as these are not one-off exceptions. The fact is that they reflect the deep complexities of what race means in South Africa today.
‘Yesterday’, after all, ‘is not another country’. We cannot wish the potency of racism away, any more than we can wish away the very divisive history of our country.
As a young leader, I had to face some tough realities when I read these young women’s tweets. They were not made by people who grew up during apartheid, or even in the turbulent transition period. They were made by two young South Africans eighteen years after our first democratic election.
One might have thought that these two young people were part and parcel of a newly emerging non-racial society free of racism and bigotry.
My initial response after reading Jessica’s tweet was of anger at both the words and their public platform. I felt anger that she was able to express such sentiments with apparent impunity.
Then I realised my initial anger was the wrong, if human, response.
My anger was also stirred by a thousand slights that will be familiar to many other black South Africans. More often in life it is the indiscernible and unspoken that troubles us.
I have experienced the haughty tone in a store, an icy stare, the unspoken insinuation that I might not have quite grasped a point, the patronising put down – often because I am black.
Some are so oblique and subtle to almost be invisible. And sometimes they have nothing to do with race. Yet their effect overtime is to construct a worldview which can feed paranoia.
The other sad reality is that there are some who would have silently agreed with Jessica and Tshidi’s online remarks.
Perhaps their silent anger is even more lethal because it is internalised. It seems to me that many people’s anger – on both sides of the racial divide - has intensified, not abated.
We cannot afford to let this hatred simmer. We are stronger when we stand together, not when we are divided. It is each of our responsibility, no matter who we are, to take a firm stand against racism.
It would be naïve to believe that racism can be eliminated in eighteen years – in one generation.
For many black South Africans, the challenge remains to overcome the burdens of the past without becoming embittered by memories of its many injustices.
For many white South Africans, the challenge is to acknowledge that racism does not just exist in the minds of black people. It is a real and debilitating fact of life in South Africa.
However, I do wish to make one thing clear here: by condemning racism, I do not seek to give ‘race’ a meaning that it does not deserve.
The concept of race is a fiction that has been mobilised and twisted by political and ethnic despots for generations. Even Adolf Hitler knew this, despite elevating race as a central concept. His own words and the subject were chilling:
‘I know perfectly well&hellipthat in a scientific sense there is no such thing as race&hellipbut I as a politician need a concept which has hitherto existed on historical bases to be abolished and an entirely new and anti-historical order enforced and given an intellectual basis&hellipAnd for this purpose the concept of races serves me well&hellip’ (Quoted in John Toland's biography ‘Adolf Hitler’)
Race also served apartheid’s architects well. So well, that we live with its dreadful consequences today.
My party, the Democratic Alliance, has, like all people who care about South Africa, been carefully considering the full meaning and measure of reconciliation.
We define reconciliation as the process which brings together South Africans who have been divided by our history of discrimination and oppression.
The Constitution enjoins South Africans to: ‘Recognise the injustices of our past’ and to ‘heal the divisions of the past’.
The impatience of the first part cannot be overstated. Reconciliation requires an acknowledgement that apartheid was wrong; that it caused incalculable emotional pain and material deprivation.
Reconciliation informs us that every South African is a full and legitimate part of our new democracy.
In 1994, the pain and the divisions were so deep on both sides of the racial divide, that only a national process of truth and reconciliation could begin to bind the country’s wounds.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) established the need for the telling of ‘truthful narratives’ and a push to forgive wrongdoers. I think we need to rediscover this spirit of this model of reconciliation. We have lost the momentum that Mandela gave to us.
As political leaders, we must take some responsibility for the mood of our country, which has lost the hope of the Mandela years. The decline of civility and dignified engagement in our politics means that, often, social solidarity has been replaced by defensiveness.
Groups circle their wagons around ‘identity’ concepts of race, ethnicity, language and religion.