Looking at The Star this week, I felt I had slipped back through a rip in the fabric of time to late 1970s Rhodesia. Reporting on the tragic air crash in Limpopo, the paper said “20 locals and two policemen” had found the wreckage of the two planes.
Locals? That’s the phrase we dismissive white soldiers used in our “situation reports” as we fought Ian Smith’s war. Locals – faceless, nameless, nobodies. Just figures, to be moved from place to place or recorded as bodies in a “caught in crossfire” communique.
Yet, in a “liberated” South Africa the phrase had surfaced again. From a white fascist? No – from a black reporter.
It’s proof, the black radicals will say, that Africans (and I use that word, rather than blacks, deliberately) are still the victims of mental apartheid and colonisation. It’s proof that Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu was correct when he said this country still labours under the yoke of racism in various forms and that, therefore, a “guilt tax” on white people is fully justified.
Tutu undoubtedly has a point, though. White people did benefit from apartheid. Many continue to taste those fruits, because of their better education, their connections, the money they inherited.
More than 17 years after the advent of democracy, transformation is lagging in many areas. That cannot be argued. Nor can the fact that the majority of the wealth of this country is still in the hands of white people and that the poverty gap grows wider with each passing day.
However, in assigning guilt to only one sector of the population – and it is very easy to do this, ask Adolf Hitler – those commentators are helping to cover up the debate which is vitally needed in this country. And that debate is about why we, a government and a people, have failed to redress the inequalities in our society.
Blaming apartheid and colonialism for everything from bad teachers to child rape obscures the reality and prevents us from honestly tackling the ills of society.
If apartheid and colonialism are to blame, then there really is no point in tackling the twin evils of incompetence and corruption which have ravaged this country as much as the rest of Africa.
And, if white people are lazy parasites, why do they do so well when forced into exile abroad? And why have countries across Africa collapsed after a white exodus?
Also, while we are living in the past, how much of a clear view will we have of the future?
In heaping blame upon a minority alone, we are playing the same blame game Africa has been playing for the past 60 years. Robert Mugabe is a past master at this, raging at “British homosexuals” for all the troubles his country has gone through.
The irony is that the culture of blame portrays Africans as helpless victims – and as somehow inferior. Hendrik Verwoerd and Ian Smith must be smiling, while Marcus Garvey (one of the founders of pan-Africanism) and Steve Biko (Black Consciousness evangelist) must be cringing in their graves.
Millions of Africans stream to this country for a better life, apparently undeterred by our supposedly horrific unequal society. Yet they are more likely to encounter a necklace than pan-African ubuntu from us.
The only time we see pan-African solidarity is when our “big men” – our leaders – close ranks to protect dictators like Mugabe, Mengistu Haile Mariam Mengistu and Muammar Gaddafi.
The recent images of the appalling hunger tragedy in the Horn of Africa prompt the question: why, if we are the richest continent in terms of resources, are we the poorest in reality?
To answer that, we’ve got to break the cycle of blame and begging. If we don’t there will only be more Somalias ahead. More locals with no future.