Before you misinterpret the title (intentionally or otherwise), please read the whole opinion piece.
I have been keeping to the sidelines for quite a while. It has been a long time since my last piece; and this piece is going to be a bit different. It won’t be particularly long, and it won’t report on facts or events that happened. Instead, I will address some observations I have made and what I have come to believe about the “race debate” in South Africa.
It seems to me that, lately, there is a lot of anti-white sentiment in South Africa. Or, at the very least, a vocal minority are drowning out the silent, hopefully much less hateful majority. I can barely ever look at the news without a divide between black and white being mentioned; I cannot look at any form of social media without being reminded that, yes, South Africa is a country filled with racism by every colour aimed at every colour.
In my humble opinion, black people who still blame white people in South Africa have been sleeping for 22 years. Maybe the end of Apartheid was not handled as “radically” as it could have been, as some claim. Maybe white people could have been banned from education until the majority of black people were educated. Maybe, by law, it could have been so that one cannot hire a white person if a black person also applied for the same post. Maybe all properties owned by white people could have been removed from their ownership and redistributed evenly amongst black people. Maybe all white people could have been chased out of the country. These are the types of demands I have heard from the very radical portion of anti-white opinions – demands and claims that seem to me to fit the saying “cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face”.
These demands – looking to find some sort of closure in indulging in the very racism that Apartheid was forged from – are not what the abolishment of Apartheid was about. The abolishment of Apartheid made us one nation, one people. If you look at a garden, all the flowers are different shapes and colours, but the garden as whole is more beautiful than the sum of its parts. The combination of differences. This is what the defeat of Apartheid meant – that we would all have the chance to bloom in the sun. And yet, we are reverting back, slowly letting hate and fear eat away at the cohesion that the Struggle was supposed to buy.
Black lives in South Africa are cheap.
What do I mean by this? It is no simile, no symbolism. I mean exactly what I wrote. But let me elaborate, as this is not how I think it should be.
Black lives are not cheap in the eyes of white people; that’s not what I mean. Many white people value black lives more than even black people value them! How can I say this? Because daily I see black people not caring about their own lives. People who cross the street without looking. People who stand in the middle of the road, aware of the fact that a car is heading towards them, and not moving a muscle. People running across the highway, when there is a pedestrian bridge a couple of meters away. Women begging at the corners of roads, using children to gain sympathy (sometimes not even their own children) – children who should be in school. That child can have a better future, but they are robbed of it to go beg at a street corner.
I have seen mothers who let their children play in the road. On one occasion, when I asked such a mother why she was not worried about her child – after all, the child could be killed – she simply replied by saying: “I have plenty of children, and I can always have more.”
This isn’t an attitude that white people somehow forced on black people – I can just imagine our local jester, Julius Malema, trying to spin it that way. No, it is an attitude instilled and fostered in the poor by our very own “liberation” government. Our government are content to let the poor stay poor, the uneducated remain uneducated and the majority of South Africans who believed they were liberated in 1994, remain under the thumb of a rich, greedy and powerful minority. This minority I speak of is no longer exclusively white – or even mostly white. It has long since become the very people who were meant to liberate us – the government.
Luxury hotels, luxury flights, luxury meals, large mansions… The government under the ANC have traded the education and betterment of the South African people for a life of luxury, power and greed. Black lives are cheap in South Africa. That doesn’t meant that black lives are cheap. It doesn’t mean that they should be cheap. It doesn’t mean that we can’t change this for the better.
Help me. Fight for better education – and not at university where mostly the rich, the lucky and the elite benefit. Fight for primary schools that are world-class regardless of where in SA they are. Fight for less corruption, wastage, and all the other ways in which our ANC “liberation” government is devouring our dwindling, precious public funds. And when you fight, remember that the fight is not with your neighbour, but with a system that is obsessed with the rich and forgets the poor.
Don’t let that system tell you that a life – of any colour – is cheap: if we let one person be cheap, we let the value of human life itself wither and die.
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