Published in TimesLive 20 March 2025
The decision by the Afriforum and Solidarity to dare the Ramaphosa-led GNU and mastermind a US-backed campaign to extort outstanding concessions from the CODESA settlement marks a new ideological turn since the 1914 Rebellion against the involvement of the Union of SA in the First World War. This misconstrued De la Rey moment costs the economy substantial value regarding its investment destination prospects. The Trump-in-the-White House reality is exerting pressure on the GNU using AGOA as an incentive to embark on policy reforms.
The global consensus against racism, apartheid as a crime against
humanity, land dispossession and occupation, and the use of genocide to pursue
territorial expansion has shrunk the political legitimacy of conquest as the
basis of justifying ill-gotten rights to dispossessed property. The inability
to legitimise colonial deeds of title written in terms of the occupier property
relations law has put landowners in all previously and currently occupied areas
into dispute with the moral legitimacy of land restitution and associated
claims.
The signing into
legislation of the BELA and the Land Expropriation Acts by President Ramaphosa
triggered a series of discourses on race relations and sociocultural debates
that are already deepening the crisis of the cause of minorities. Avoiding being
the last president of the ANC in government, Ramaphosa's political rhetoric and
actions have pitted the ANC against a land dispossession and occupation sect in
RSA. Consequently, the country saw some Afrikaners re-characterising themselves as ‘a Western
community on the Southern tip of the African continent’. Does this mean an
acceptance of the settler title as opposed to the meaning of indigenous
Afrikaner?
The
prospect or imagination of losing the right to cultural expression through
language and an ability to cohere through single language medium schools or
equivalents grew into mental heuristics that are only seen through a sharpened
pain of experience fraught with unimaginable shame and fear. As the complexity
of reconciling 'own ethnic affairs' and 'separate development' with the
constitutional promise of a non-racial, non-sexist, democratic, united,
prosperous RSA, acting in the interest of your tribe becomes the right kind of
wrong. The correctness of acting in the interest of a group, worse when a
near-memory past torments the form and character of the offensive or defended
group, becomes a wrongness whose chance of survival is inextricably linked to
apartheid-era reparations. The risk of narrow self-determination becomes an
omnipresence that is hard to overcome.
The
end of statutory apartheid in South Africa and its concomitant foregrounding as
a crime against humanity is still one of the classical disruptions of the global
racism ecosystem. It has far-reaching implications for post-imperialism and
colonialism gains that disrupted Indigenous peace and stability around the
world. The beneficiaries of the spoils of colonial conquest and all its
adjuncts, including apartheid, are mounting a nuanced and arguably legitimate
offensive. They have declared they cannot be victims of a past they did not
create and yet inherited its largesse. Their game will always be the wrong one to have played in the first place. They
are a few tries ahead.
Where
(a racism-anchored) ecosystem is disrupted by the freedom of others from what
is being disrupted, the restoration of collaterals like language and culture
requires the partnership of past victims to co-create a new context of
acceptance. Going it alone is an investment in the perpetual tension only an
open conflict can resolve. Any other approach will result in a race to the
bottom context; the racial race will not have a winner but someone in front to
always chase.
South
Africa has civil society movements established to pursue separate development.
Some have appended themselves to a rising global rightwing wave. To the extent
that success is about their tribe, they don't care about human dignity and
social justice. The courage to go to the White House and argue a racialism case
on disputable information and data characterises the desperation to develop
separately.
Given
the base of apartheid and colonialism, being conservative in South Africa's
constitutional history is equivalent to being racist. This has distorted the
'values' of separate development-inspired patriotism and civic pride. The moral
choices of the version of freedom 'conservatives' pursue are contradictory to
non-racialism and the universality of human rights. The cohort of leaders who
executed the idea of accepting the existence of a 'Western community on the
Southern tip of Africa' are now growing into perfect heroes in a separate
development context. The extent to which this is a form of fundamentalism is
something we should acknowledge and decide if we should live with.
The very idea of racial intolerance, born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever s/he wants about their development separate from others, yet living in a non-racial context, is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss of carving ourselves out of the rest that humanity has become. Separatism of any kind carries with it variants of dogma; it feeds on a perpetual seeing of the other as less of the self you are, a feature of racial inequality apartheid has failed to normalise from a crime against all of humanity. It enforces on humanity, as a learned behaviour, the undeserved respect for the unjustified beliefs of others.
The
retreat of non-racialism at the altar of race-defined separatism and dogmatic
cultural diversity is eroding the possibility of a rebirth of new Nelson Mandela
and Beyers Naudes. We are seeing more of JG Strydoms and the black equivalents
emerging as heroes. It might be prudent to locate cultural diversity that
articulates the 'Western community on the southern tip of Africa' and racial
separation. Our systems of human co-existence, like our law does, should
isolate and outlaw such tendencies. CUT!!!
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