A disturbing story came out of South Africa a few weeks ago. In fact so disturbing that I had goose pimples all over when I read it. The parties involved had the guts to publish their video on the internet. I have the luxury of telling you a story that this incident reminds me of, for I strongly believe this is not an isolated event in the so called Rainbow nation where Truth and Reconciliation seems to mean Truth and Continuation. I was in a holiday mood on my way to Cape Town and was changing planes in Johannesburg when these two white women three people in front of me were refusing to be searched by Black airport security, they did not want to come in contact by black and the guards looked content with entertaining these individuals instead of removing them and let other passengers go on. In this era of terrorism this cannot be allowed. Yours truly caused a commotion by telling I as it is. I missed my flight in the end. When I read the article below I was not surprised there must be many more that go unreported. If the South Africans accept the world as it is, they will reach for the world as it might be.
As new racist cracks appear in the veneer of South Africa’s "Rainbow Nation", analysts say the country is feeling the effects of papering over its differences instead of tackling them head-on.Basking in the afterglow of a globally acclaimed transition from whites-only apartheid rule to democracy under black president Nelson Mandela, intolerant pockets continue to fester 14 years later. Last week, simmering tensions were thrust into the spotlight when a video made by four white university students, in which they lead five black workers through a series of degrading mock-initiation activities, was made public. The video shows workers — four women and a man — downing beer, dancing and participating in mock rugby practice, after which they are made to kneel and eat meat on which one of the students was filmed urinating. The home-made film ends with the words: "That, at the end of the day, is what we think of integration." The youths’ work was a protest against forced integration of black and white students in residences at the University of the Free State in what was once an independent Afrikaner republic. Jody Kollapen, chairman of the Human Rights Commission established by the constitution, said last week that Mandela had taken reconciliation too far — to the detriment of true transformation."We have been living in a dream world . . . believing we have overcome the most formidable of our obstacles," Kollapen said. "We hadn’t dealt with our past. Broader society never participated in a discussion about what the past meant for blacks and what the past meant for whites."Arts and Culture Minister Pallo Jordan told public radio the recording was "reprehensible, disgraceful" and had happened "despite the fact that these young people didn’t live under apartheid. But they are deeply infected with racism". In January, a 17-year-old white boy gunned down 10 black people at the Skielik informal settlement in the central North West Province — killing four, including two children, in an apparent racist attack. — AFP.
3 comments:
Are you really surprised? Come on! The sick Apartheid system will let itself be felt for generations. Socialization processes such as this one are very difficult to revert, but nevertheless the clock will not start counting until the South African society at large, and current and forthcoming South African governments in particular, start tackling the problem seriously. "Reconciliation" needs "justice" and "truth", and even when they are present, it does not come overninght.
Whilst I agree with you on these issues raised, the only thing is on time. Time is the indulgence that they do not possess; Africa is a continent in a hurry there is no more time to waste. 15 years have gone by entertaining these crooked and bizarre ideologies from these racist whites and the only thing that has happened is that the racist white have barricaded themselves from the rest of the country by high razor wire fences and created their own safe havens, they still do not believe in integration. We honestly cannot be talking about black and white students starting to share accommodation now 15 years on, at University for that matter. Segregation has been allowed to go on unabated. This is just integration and not talking about the economy and the magnanimity of poverty in the majority of black South Africans, we leave that for another day. Incidents like the one in question trigger cascading events just like the Sarajevo assassination in WW1. In Zimbabwe 15 years after, things fell apart the same way. We have seen it before and we must be better equipped to deal with that because SA is not the only country that has been subjected to Apartheid. With that in mind I become very worried my hopes are on SA to succeed where the others failed.
We agree 100% in this.
Also note social integration is a prerequisite -and a consecuence of- economic progress for the South African majority. That is, social, political, and economic issues are intertwined. And I believe this is the case in Zimbabwe, as well.
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