A rise in racial tensions makes it essential to reflect on Steve Biko's teachings. Dr FM Lucky Mathebula

Steve Biko stressed the need for South Africans to liberate themselves psychologically and become self-reliant to change South Africa fundamentally. South Africans need to remember that the historical and structural roots of racial inequality and privilege run deep. Notwithstanding that they are less visible, they lie beneath the surface, and institutional templates spread their resilience. The ‘united-in-diversity’ protagonists and advocates of a concentrated space for those who conceive themselves as Westerners on the southern tip of Africa, despite their ‘conveniently manufactured progressive conceits and the best of intentions often, and not always, do not see themselves as part of a race-dependent system of human co-existence.

In their arguments that they are not racist or at the least discriminatory, their constituencies argue that hard work, determination, and living according to the rules of competition will result in fair treatment. What they often overlook is how the templates of economic dominance, undergirded by institutionalised racism, which is mainly off statutes, continually shatter any belief in equal treatment. This is the main part of the core discontent of the Afriforum and Solidarity movement, as it is for all other South Africans who experience the pinches of racial profiling, covertly or overtly.

In response, South Africa has witnessed a groundswell of Afrikaners organising themselves around what they consider a value system that defines them. They chose to create private and parallel institutions, in law, with which they would build a laager into which their cultural independence would be curated. This has emboldened their sense of community empowerment with which they mustered the courage to confront whomever they saw as a perpetrator of policies designed to reconfigure their cultural existence as part of a broader human race. To an organised minority that has baggage of human persecutions it has inflicted on a majority that has the numerical advantage in any condition of democracy, any advance at equalising privilege and advantage will always be seen as microaggressions building towards imagined aggression, reaching out to others for support is in such circumstances a silver bullet solution

Never in the history of South Africa have events, arguably intended as reaching out, ignited by the Afriforum and Solidarity civil society movements made the Steve Biko call, "black man you are on your own", been so relevant. The total disregard of RSA sovereignty and utilisation of the Trump-Musk racial supremacy window gave a glimpse of how close we still are to the race-based land dispossession and conquest tendencies we thought were behaviours that were buried with Apartheid statutes. It will be how the hypersensitive response and narratives of reaching out find outlets of race-based mobilisation to reconfigure race relations in RSA.

The inconvenient truth is that “white supremacy is an ideology, a paradigm, an institutional system, and a worldview many have been born into by virtue of their privilege.” Complicity to its spreading is generically undetectable, including by vocal advocates of non-racialism and advocates of its demise that live in its context. Even when frameworks, laws, and constitutions outlaw racism, the answers to why it continues to happen have pathological dimensions that politics and sociology have failed to unravel. It is interesting that even where everyone has declared not to be racist, racism continues to exist as long as there are different race groups.

When society was starting to believe in the Biko truism that "apartheid (read racism) is a lie, people can work together, people can create together, and that apartheid is inherently a practice of violence", RSA was reminded by the treasonous acts of some amongst us that what apartheid represented and produced as gains must be defended at all costs. Yes, the restitution and affirmative action programs to reverse the mentally genocidal, psychosocial, economic, and cultural effects of the world's most successful race-defined social engineering project might have been compromised by state capability gaps, corruption, and state capture. The liberation movement, led by the ANC, might have failed all of us in advancing matters of restitution when the political and social emotion was right.

However, the issue is not what compromised restitution and affirmative action. What is at issue is establishing a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights. The brute truth is that genuine South Africanness is founded on the values of "human dignity, the achievement of equality and the advancement of human rights and freedoms; non-racialism and non-sexism; and Supremacy of the constitution and the rule of law." It is the state of our collective humanity that should preoccupy our efforts to co-exist as a diverse society allergic to racism and its most potent catalyst, separate development.

If apartheid were a syndrome, what would be consistently occurring together within it would be separate development, the pursuit of being non-African and yet claiming to be African, the pursuit of an ideal to be a concentrated Western community on the Southern tip of Africa, otherwise also called a Volkstaat. The solution for dealing with a syndrome is to target the sicknesses that characterise its existence. Anti-retroviral interventions should be targeted at racism as the virus that weakens our immune system to keep us healthy members of the human race.  

The form, character, content and nature of recommendations in the Afriforum and Solidarity Washington Memorandum represent the extreme end of De La Reyism. General De la Rey was an anti-British colonialism warrior no different from iNkosi Bambatha, despite whom the struggle should benefit. Current ‘De La Reys’ will have the impact of their courage, defining them once again as modern-day Prime Minister Malan, Strydom, and HF Verwoerd. The cost of their herculean behaviour might surpass the June-the-16^th burden BJ Voster loaded on an otherwise good-to-speak and ideate with the Afrikaans language. As sense is finding its way into those who miscalculated the effervescence in the Trump victory to be about the return of race supremacism, it is important that the human face of being Afrikaner outside the current and dangerous laager also come to the fore. 

As the constitutional order bestows on South Africa its human face, so should citizens live according to its edicts and legal prescripts. While the concept of united-in-our-diversity is the most neutral to accommodate race purists and racism in a managed multiracial context, its challenge in RSA is that it is "tied up with apartheid, white supremacy, capitalist exploitation, and deliberate oppression,” as Biko submitted.

Our compatriots should know that South Africans love their Constitution; it falls within what Biko meant when he said, "It is better to die for an idea that will live than to live for an idea that will die". Separate development and all its adjuncts should be an enemy of our collective humanity. It surely must be inhuman to think in race or tribe supremacy terms. The essence of the 1990-1996 compromise is a recognition that "the myth of integration as propounded under the banner of liberal ideology (permeating our Constitution) must be cracked because it makes (we the) people believe that something is being achieved when in reality the artificially integrated circles are soporific..." 

While the thrust of the arguments in this piece locates racism whence it benefits, it is not absolute that those dealing with restitution are immune from its psychosocial grip because of lived experience. Tormented societies have the propensity to flip into the abyss of being perpetrators of what they abhor in the name of ensuring it never happens. The events in Gaza are gradually making the Jewish Holocaust less of a calamity. What is certain, though, is that “a theme that is woven throughout our country’s history is a deep mistrust of blacks by whites, and vice versa.

The mere consideration of any challenge to the privileges occasioned by history and the worldview that underpinned it, imperialism and all its adjuncts, including racism, as a challenge to the identity of some amongst us who believe they are good and moral people is a sign of the depth of work that still needs to be done. Being good and moral to your ‘own’ and acting otherwise to ‘others’ is, at best, an oxymoron. It is the discomfort and anxiety that comes with mistrust, arguably born of race superiority and entitlement, that breeds the fragility with which South Africa is put to the mercy of a foreign nation to resolve its differences.

HAVE A GOOD SUNDAY, SOUTH AFRICA