THIS IS THE UNEDITED VERSION OF AN ARTICLE THAT APPEARED IN THE SUNDAY TIMES OF 12 MAY 2024, page 17.
The sight of a post-apartheid South African flag burning in your lounge through a national news agency should have evoked emotions of disdain and insult in a state that has a nation. A national flag is a single symbol that combines the wholeness of a nation, whence its hoisting is never without the nation's praise song, the national anthem. The price of politics is not only the government but also the privilege to become an organ of the state as a person, thus acting in its interest all the time.
Of all the virtues
expected from those who choose politics as a vocation, patriotism or the
feeling of love, devotion, and a sense of attachment to a country or state
should be cardinal. While it is a fact that the 1994 democratic breakthrough
was the departure point towards healing the divisions of the past and
establishing a society based on democratic values, social justice and
fundamental human rights, it is also true that the patriotism we are or have
built is more constitutional than national.
Our racial
discrimination or apartheid policy-induced tormented past, which
institutionalised our non-nation form and character, has created political
attachments instead of being a nation. We are defined, or centred, on a
constitutional order's norms, values, and procedures. In the absence of blood
and faith defining our nationhood, the founders of the political order were
wise enough to work on the truism that people can be brought together by
loyalty to a constitution.
We are patriots because
the Constitution defines us; we have a flag to be identifiable amongst others
but are not inside the flag. Similarly, as we burn public amenities at the
slightest provocation, we are ready to fight on the side of anyone against our
South Africans. It is fashionable to defend or give a better life to
non-nationals than to see our nationals thriving in post-apartheid South
Africa. The near absence of national interest sensitivity in how we relate to
our sovereignty can only manifest in a party funded by the economic
establishment burning the RSA flag without condemnation from them.
Save for the threat of
losing the Islam vote in the Western Cape and in constituencies where the
culture is dominant, the DA's posture on the genocide in Gaza is not dissimilar
to how it reacted in Phoenix. The growing roasting of the ICC and its judges as
individuals is a precursor of how South Africa might be handled once the US
Senate enacts the Bill on the renewal of relations with RSA. Burning the flag
might be the illumination of the lighthouse to indicate where the node of the
battle against our South Africans could be hosted and hoisted. In burning the
RSA flag, the DA is signalling an oncoming barbecue of our sovereignty, and
they might be announcing their readiness to serve as interns.
Not only is the Constitution
demanding a value system etched on human dignity, equality, human rights, the
rule of law, and the supremacy of the Constitution, but also equality and
freedom. The hegemonic force of these principles has liquidated political
excuses to be racist under new guises. Cliches that feed on the sentiments of
apartheid beneficiaries dislodged by a non-racial future have been growing
commensurate with perceptions of loss of political power and influence.
Potentially the reason
why former President Mbeki called for a national dialogue after the elections,
the burning of the South African flag is a manifestation of a sense of loss, a
hunger for oppressive stability, and the difficulty of accepting black majority
rule within the DA's cognitive legal or otherwise clientele. The burning flag
is, at best, a political rant displaying a vocabulary of trauma, which creates
in society a patriotism of despair. With the space our democratic order gives
to maverick politicians and the carelessness most of them use this space for,
parties tend to enjoy feeding society the psychological benefits of irrational
beliefs at no cost to themselves. Still, to the social cohesion we all agree
South Africa has to work towards.
It is an indictment of
the country's democratic order; its people and heritage are not the pride of
all political parties. It is equally treasonous to be hostile to national
symbols. The desecration of nation symbols is equivalent to declaring war on
what defines the basis of being South African. It becomes worse when such an
act is done to access public or political power through an election. The DA act
is unpatriotic because it is not seen in their country, and its most
representative symbol is a sacred artefact defining our collective, unshakable
and singular commitment. Ideologically, it describes the outside as all of us
who see ourselves intertwined with the destiny of being South African.
If it is true that
whenever people or organisations make decisions, they do so in light of a
particular choice of architecture, understood as the background against which
they choose, the question will always linger in the national psyche: what
informed the courage to burn the flag as a sign of loving the nation. First, it
was fighting back, then it was calling people who shot and maimed about three
hundred people heroes, and now it is 'unite and rescue South Africa'. In the
three themes, the common thread is fear of some danger that requires being
fought back, heroes like the ones in Phoenix, and brigades to rescue South
Africa from parties that collectively represent what was at some point in
history characterised within the rubric of 'Swaart en rooi Gevaar'. Like the
Phoenix debacle, the DA should apologise and withdraw the advert.
The greatest prize in
manipulating voter ignorance about national symbols protection in a state that
does not have a nation but is caught in a vortex of constitutional patriotism
is that it can insult both the sovereignty and dignity of being South African. All
political parties, including the governing party, must know that if they care
about us, they must promote our nationhood above all else. CUT!!!
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