Excuse me while I blame apartheid

Many white people see no just cause in blacks blaming apartheid for anything. It ended almost 14 years already; get over it already, they say. Often it is said with indignation, if not irritation, as though to say, how dare they!

Those who insist we stop talking about it tell us it’s in the past, so we should forget about it. Perhaps it would be easy to forget if we didn’t bear the scars of the past. For some it’s not mere scars; some walk around with deep sores that are still healing — slowly. Every now and then, the sore is disturbed and the healing process is reversed.

It is easy for the “perpetrator” (I use that word liberally here) to say: “Forget about it,” because he does not want to be reminded of his sins. At the same time it is also too easy for the victim to keep playing the victim card instead of getting on with it. There is a middle ground somewhere between these conflicting feelings.

When we blame the legacy of apartheid, most white people take it as a personal attack on them for having benefited from the system. Or they accuse blacks of refusing to take responsibility for whatever is going wrong in the country. This is not the case. It is an attack on the system. We are not asking you to feel guilty. If anyone needs to get over anything, it is white people who walk around carrying guilt. This guilt might paralyse them, or even make them unwitting racists. Or, even worse, cause them to overcompensate, thus wiping away any sincerity in their efforts to balance the past.

To be honest, had I been white during the height of apartheid I don’t know if I would have had the moral fortitude to stand up against the National Party government. Perhaps I would have condemned it in the comfort and privacy of my mind.

The legacy of apartheid is very real. Let us not pretend that people don’t have a legitimate reason for blaming it for their current condition, as some excuse for their lack of progress. It is an undeniable fact that the vast majority of black people were denied a good education; some were even denied an education. The government of the day did not bother to build schools for them.

Where there is education, opportunity soon follows, and without it blacks were caught in a vicious cycle of stagnation. They saw no real progress for themselves. Instead of passing on wealth from generation to generation, their descendents inherited poverty and a very visible reality that they were not allowed to prosper in the land of their birth.

To dismiss these realities as mere laziness on the part of the black person is a clear lack of understanding of the position the formerly oppressed find themselves in today. The black person is still playing catch up.

We in the black community are lacking decent education, even with the new government. The teachers who teach most black students did not get a fantastic education themselves. With these steep hills to climb, it is a miracle that so many children who went through those schools have managed to extricate themselves from the web of hopelessness.

Jobless blacks in the townships and in the rural areas do not expect the government to do anything for them. What they want are opportunities so that they can improve their lives — not handouts. Many of them don’t see these opportunities, so they create some for themselves even in the bleak conditions in which find themselves. Young men create car-wash businesses and young women hair saloons, to name just the most obvious examples.

On the other hand, blacks look at white misbehaviour through the prism of race without seeing the core of the problem. When we only look at it that way, we don’t try to solve the issue.

The black community must not confuse with racism the young white man’s anger. He cannot understand why he has to be at the back of the queue when he seeks employment. Let’s say that he is too young even to remember apartheid. Shall we now punish him for benefiting from a system that was not of his choosing? Is it his fault that he just happened to have been born into it? Whether he would have grown up to be a perpetrator of the evils of the previous system or not is immaterial. What matters is that the system ended before he could be a conscious and active participant in it. What do we do now?

Having said all I have, I would like to point out that I am not as naive as to believe that racism does not exist. Sadly it is does. We saw manifestations of it recently at the University of the Free State.

Whether we admit it or not, we are all victims of apartheid. But we cannot be victims forever. We may have been victims, but we don’t have to think and act like them. The only way we can raise above it is when we first seek to understand. However, this must not excuse bad black or white behaviour.

White People Should Join The ANC

The judge in the Zuma case will need balls made of steel

Considering that this is my first post, I would rather be writing about something else, but I feel compelled to tackle the subject at hand — even though it goes against everything I am; my natural sense of optimism.

As I understand it, optimists are not oblivious to the realities of earthly existence and its bleakness. They are familiar with all shades of life, its darkness. Optimists know the darkness; they acknowledge it but they focus on the coming dawn. It may be too soon to be talking about this, even. Rarely is the question asked: Will the judge in the Zuma case be able to render a fair trial? Will the songs outside the courtroom intimidate the judge? I ask again, will the judge render a fair trial under these circumstances?

If the judge is anything like me, he will sit on his chair wearing an adult diaper mainly because of the following statement made by KwaZulu-Natal Cosatu leader Zet Luzipho: “This time there will be blood spilt in the courtroom” if Zuma goes on trial. That sounds a lot like intimidation, even if the statement was later withdrawn.

Words, unfortunately, can be troublesome; they cannot be erased once they roll off the tongue. They remain etched in memories, only to be recalled when it is convenient: “Remember when you said … ”

I wouldn’t want to be a judge in this trial, especially if the verdict ends up being “guilty”. Balls of King Kong made of stainless steel are required of this judge. Whoever he or she will be, I wish him or her balls by the truckload.

Let me point out that after Luzipho’s outburst, Cosatu spokesperson Patrick Craven later said: “Cosatu fully supports an independent judiciary and shares the judges’ fears that it is under threat.”

“We believe, however, that they should not be criticising Cosatu, but [rather] the people who are manipulating the judicial system for their own political ends,” he also said. “The trial against Zuma is a politically motivated exercise … and he has been subjected to trial by public opinion for the past seven years.

“We have been convinced for some time that he will not get a fair trial … workers will not allow the NPA [National Prosecuting Authority] and whoever is handling them to abuse its power in this matter.”

Why is Cosatu so concerned about the abuse of power? Why have the workers allowed the NPA to abuse its power in regard to Schabir Shaik since Zuma’s fate is potentially tied to his?

Thanks to what some people have said, we all know what could happen if Zuma is found guilty. We imagine it, then quickly brush those silly thoughts aside. This country is stronger than that, we tell ourselves. Our democracy can handle it, we tell ourselves. Yet deep down we are not so sure. We live in fear of what could happen. We fear its shape because we don’t know what form it will take. We fear its size because we don’t know how big or small it will be.

Will we be able to fight the Day of the Monster if it visits us? We’d hoped we’d escaped it in 1994. But that very same year Rwanda did not escape its monster. Zimbabwe is in the grips of its dragon. Kenya is wrestling its beast. What will we do if the day comes for us? Will we put it back in its cave like we did in 1994 or will we let it loose?

It all depends on what we do on the day of the verdict. If Zuma is found guilty, will we all accept it? If he is innocent, will we all accept it? All nations have a dark side; every now and then we are called upon to deal with it. What will we do when that time comes? Will we tell it to crawl back to the hole it come from or will we let it take over?

Many have made up their minds about the innocence or the guilt of a man before he has had his day in court. Perhaps those who have judged him guilty cannot see how Shaik can be guilty and Zuma innocent. For them it is as if to say the right side of one’s body is innocent and the left is guilty. It just sounds absurd.

If he is found innocent, those who said there would be no fair trial will be the first to hail our judiciary, as happened after the rape case. The problem with justice is that it is only seen to be done when it suits the victor.

It is a sad state of affairs that some people still call him a rapist even though he was acquitted. When one is pronounced innocent when one is indeed innocent, the verdict is not accepted with joy; rather with relief and anger. And for the guilty, nothing is as unfair as being found guilty when one is indeed guilty.

Let us hope that the judge who gets to try the case will not be afraid of the defendant, the ANC, the screaming hordes outside the courtroom that will be singing Umshini Wami, or those who want him to rot in jail. If Zuma is innocent, then Shaik must be innocent. Unless justice means who has the better lawyer, then justice is not just.