Idioms 101 for the race-sensitive South African

After being criticised for the title of my previous blog I thought it necessary to write a response. Perhaps some of the readers of Thought Leader are so very worried about race that they carry around a little race injection to squeeze into unsuspecting blog posts whenever they can. Crafty of them, but endlessly tireless for people who are trying to critique issues that are not related to race. (Do not gasp so loudly — there are things that are not related to race in South Africa). Sometimes issues aren’t as black and white as you’d like to make them out to be.

For those of you who haven’t read it, my post was about President Zuma criticising former president Mbeki’s position on HIV/Aids during his time as president. The article was titled “The pot calling the kettle black!“. Perhaps idioms are difficult for some people to understand. It’s really not as simple as pulling out a word you recognise and thinking that it can directly translate. So let’s start from the beginning shall we.

The saying “the pot calling the kettle black” has two interpretations. Both are really useful here. The first interpretation suggests that the idiom is used when someone accuses someone of something that they are guilty of themselves. It is basically a pretty way of saying that someone is a hypocrite, a misleader and is unjustifiably criticising someone. So in my article, I was saying that President Zuma had no right to criticise Mbeki, on the grounds that both of them were guilty of Aids denialism and misinformation.

The second interpretation is slightly less applicable, but we can work on it. Imagine a dirty pot that has been cooking over a wood-fire, and a nice clean kettle that is shiny. If the pot then calls the kettle black, it is only recognising its own reflection in the pot. So in plain English, the pot is accusing the kettle of something that is only wrong with it. So where President Zuma says that Mbeki had views that were not part of government policy, what he is doing is subtly avoiding the issue that this was a president who was elected by the ANC party themselves. He was part of the leadership of that party. So the criticism he is levelling at Mbeki can actually be levelled at himself. Hey, I said it was a stretch, but there are elements of truth in the issue.

What is irritating for me is that idioms are pretty funky ways to talk about issues without being, well, treasonous. I am accusing a high-level political figure of hypocrisy, in a very pretty way. The issue was NEVER race. The issue in his criticism of Mbeki was not racialised, and nor was my comment. All President Zuma was doing was showing his true colours — that he is a party agent first and foremost.

If South Africans carrying that little race injection that I spoke of before and continue to inject it into discussion when it is not relevant they prevent real engagement with the issue. In short, it results in an analytical black-out. It does not allow us to look at the situation from a number of different angles. All it does is lend colour to the idea that all politics in South Africa is about race, which it isn’t. Do all people have a skin colour? Yes! Should discrimination based on race be stopped? Yes! Is that relevant to a president criticising a former president for acting outside of party doctrine. NO.

I will not stop using an idiom because it has the word black in it. That is verbal censorship of the worst kind. If that makes me a black sheep, so be it.