Johannesburg – This past week, DA politician and Cape Town mayoral committee member for safety and security, JP Smith, found himself deservedly in hot water after he made fun of journalist Abongile Nzelenzele’s surname.
Smith said: “I’m not even going to try that surname, dude. It’s too many vowels, too awkwardly placed.
“You need to have a short compact name, like me, Smith. It also ensures anonymity, nobody can find you in the old phone books. I will go out and look for you on social media. I’ll add myself to your followers. That will be a 4% increase in your fan base.”
When he was rightly roasted on social media, Smith’s sheepish non-defence was: “I have called and spoken with Abongile. He confirms that he took no offense at my remark, nor did he think there was any ill-intent.”
Smith didn’t get why he was being skewered.
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And, more worryingly, he evidently refused to even make an effort to grapple with why there was outrage at all.
For him, it was just another day in the life of a wilfully ignorant white DA politician who simply wishes we would all stop with any talk about race.
Irritatingly, that leaves us as black people with the continuous work of having to explain the obvious.
Black people have a long history of experiencing the erasure of our cultural identities during colonialism and apartheid.
Our names were laughed at and replaced with English names by white people too lazy to learn to pronounce indigenous names, and to appreciate the cultural significance of naming within black communities.
This is linguistic violence that is part and parcel of the greater assault on black dignity.
That is why laughing at black surnames with “too many vowels, too awkwardly placed” isn’t a trivial matter.
Smith’s laughter triggers memories of our cultural identities being trampled on, and of us being objects of unfunny jokes by the children of hegemonic powers. It is also what happens in a society in which black people, after apartheid, have a basket of full political rights but in which we do not yet have social and economic power evenly and justly distributed to us.
Smith can afford to be that blasé precisely because black people, as political analyst Aubrey Matshiqi once opined, are often a cultural minority even in spaces in which we are a numerical majority.
That is the social violence and post-apartheid neo-colonial pain that Smith, and those defending him, are unwilling to see, unwilling to make sense of, to sit with, and to engage with due historical sensitivity.
Of course, in that sense, Smith, like many DA leaders, is simply revealing brand DA to us (yet again), and we had better stop refusing to see the DA for what it is, a political party hellbent on approaching contemporary South African challenges without appreciation of the continued impact that our past has on life in 2021.
It is as if nothing had happened before 1994, and we had all better stop “moaning”.
What is laughable, in fact, is the idea that Smith can pick up the phone and reassure himself that since the MC of the event didn’t take offence, that settles the matter.
Your audience is every single person in the building, and who may be watching from home, and not just the MC you might even be friends with privately. Of course, the very fact that Smith had to call him afterwards tells us that he was not sure whether the joke was acceptable .
But he could tell it precisely because he was secure in his knowledge that white people are licensed to do that kind of thing unthinkingly without consequence.
Humour isn’t innocent.
What we say when we crack jokes does not excuse us.
What we say spontaneously can be far more revealing of who we truly are than remarks we had carefully prepared. Humour is serious business, so #KnowYourDA
• McKaiser is a political analyst, broadcaster and author.
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