A few years ago, I had a long discussion with my two boys about racial distrust and hate as well as racism. Right at the time I was beginning to think I was talking to myself because the two had hardly said a word, my eldest then said: “This won’t end until you guys die. So you must hurry up and die then.”
A smirk on his face camouflaged the dead seriousness of the first part of his statement – at least to my mind.
A few years later still, both would come to me. My eldest had been offended by the t-word. We don’t talk enough about the t-word that I doubt you’d remember it without my prompting.
That moment when one refers to another race as they to a person of that race. “I told him that I too am the they so he shouldn’t talk to me as if I am not black.”
The boy is shy but can stand up for himself.
Then recently racial disharmony gate-crashed this future utopia of ours. Boys, who think themselves not black, filmed, themselves selling boys they think are black by auction in Western Cape.
About the same time, black girls at the Pretoria school now notorious for race tensions lifted the veil of illusory rainbow nation off by accusing their white peers and principal of racism.
Suddenly I didn’t feel guilty of not dying to bequeath my children’ this rainbow of haze.
I had been so seduced by the rainbow romance that it didn’t occur to me how prescient the moniker actually was.
You can never reach the rainbow, chase as hard as you might. As you advance to it, it will keep its distance.
While we have been fighting Jacob Zuma, alas, the racism cancer was spreading to the young. “It won’t end…” he was right, right?
This got me thinking of the “bigger man” concept my mother passed on to me.
It decrees that it is incumbent on whoever is privileged to be first to extend the hand of friendship, reconciliation. When South Africans as young as 13 become experts in the use of race as a tool for hurt, clearly aspiring to the rainbow has not worked so we need to find something else. But before we do that, did the 1994 settlement instal blacks as the “bigger man”?
I have been battling with this notion – who’s the bigger man – since the slave-sale video came out. To heal the wounds of the past, South Africa needs whites to speak out against racism by their own. Ditto blacks.
What gives racism wings is that we are blind to it when perpetrated by our own.
Tshwane metro councillors recently filed racism complaints one against the other.
The FF Plus accused the EFF’s Obakeng Ramabodu of racism and the EFF accused FF Plus’ Mark Surgeon of the same.
What drew my attention to this story is that the councillors that reported racism to the Human Rights Commission attended the same meeting yet missed the racism by their own.
The FF Plus only reported racism by the EFF, while the EFF reported that of the FF Plus.
None was ready to be the bigger man and see the racism in both directions – that is not to say either outburst was racist.
The point though is the final step to the eradication of racism will be our ability to put ourselves in the shoes of the other.
Blacks must get to the point at which racism against whites offends them as much as racism against themselves does, and vice versa.
I am a firm believer in names being prophetic, so I must take issue with our characterisation as a Rainbow Nation. I think Archbishop Desmond Tutu meant well but the rainbow doesn’t only symbolise -multi-colouredness, it also is a destination never reached.
We are now confronting the unattainableness of our rainbow – we are finding out that the colours of the rainbow neither cross nor merge. They remain distinct lines of divergence when we need race to be invisible.
The children of Pinelands could never have made this more poignant even if they tried. They who are supposed to be the amalgam that erases the lines, only see half of who they are.
Of course I am happy to ask my boys to stop praying for my demise – martyrdom was -never my interest but I must say that Pinelands was like a dagger through my heart.
A stab by my own people hurts more.
- Bizokwakhe is a columnist at large with obviously too much time on his hands to think silly things
