It's too much about the colour of the critic

Racism, no matter how disguised or nuanced, remains one of the ugliest and most deeply entrenched dark sides of human nature. It’s been in society since time immemorial. And it was naive of us to dream it would ever disappear — least of all in South Africa.

It has taken on a million faces and called itself a billion names. It has been brazenly public on the streets of Berlin and the beaches of South Africa. It has skulked about in pointy white hats and raved through the streets of Mogadishu and Marabastad. It has preached from pulpits and pamphlets alike. And it has wielded pangas, panzers, purges and propaganda with mind-numbing dexterity.

And, as fellow Thought Leader Ryland Fisher pointed out in his book Race, there’s a nasty little piece of it in every one of us.

We’re told unless we learn from history, we’re doomed to repeat the mistakes of our past. But we’re a wily bunch, and we lack no degree of creativity in couching our bigotry in supposedly socially acceptable ways. To borrow a more fashionable term, we pimp our prejudice.

We’ve called it ethnic cleansing and national socialism, affirmative action and self-determination. We’ve dressed it up in little boys’ sailor-suits and all in equal numbers. And many times we haven’t called it anything, but gone out on a Thursday night and destroyed lives because … because we could. And because we wanted to.

Racism has been called a pigment of the imagination, but skin colour hasn’t always been “the thing” — the Hutus and the Tutsis were pretty much alike; so were Jews and Germans.

Growing up in the conservative Northern Cape where the loss of two Boer wars blended easily with bits and pieces and rusty shrapnel from the Ossewa-brandwag, I was called a “Jood” and beaten black and blue … ’cause that’s what you do to a Jew. Funny thing was I’m not Jewish at all. In fact, my dad was parish priest of the local Anglican Church (same denomination as Desmond Tutu and Njongonkulu Ndungane). But I spoke English and that was die Joodse taal. So it was all kind of logical.

Then my dad was transferred to England and I was beaten up because I was a de facto racist from South Africa. Even in the supposedly scholarly ambience of Rhodes University, studying divinity, I was mocked and made to feel low class, cos-why I spoke lark a rockspider, y’see.

I suppose it was equally naive to think the victims of apartheid would not harbour deep, unspoken reservoirs of resentment. In many senses every one of us was a victim, but I’m talking about black people.

We so wanted to believe Nelson Mandela’s vision of reconciliation. When he laid into an ANC congress in the 1990s for not singing the full version of the national anthem and defied the Dementors in his own party by wearing Francois Pienaar’s Springbok jersey, so, so many of us thought the horror had passed.

But he is only one man and without the Great Reconciler leading from the front, without his towering aura and transcendent charisma, it was inevitable that the evil bigots in each fragment of our society would rise malignantly from the shadows and gradually exert their influence.

They’re farmers in Limpopo or KwaZulu-Natal, panel beaters in Pretoria, heads of racially defined (and legal) entities like the Black Management Forum, odious little creeps in shebeens, vicious thugs in Manenberg, and people in high places — who, of course, deny it vehemently. But everybody knows it’s there beneath the hail-fellow-well-met smiles, the hollow nervous handshakes, the raucous “comradery” and the potbellied bonhomie.

While some who fought and suffered prison and had to raise families in other countries, have risen above the ugly detritus of hatred, many have not. Instead, they have bided their time and now hold sway in boardrooms, newsrooms, classrooms and courtrooms across the length and breadth of our country.

I know several. You probably do too. Powerful people with deep-seated hatreds, roiling egos, unfinished business and the latitude now to build a new, non-white Reich. Where criticism is banned and freedom of expression is just three words.

I know, and so far the pogrom has been growing in its triumph. Watch it screw around with the signal from Polokwane just as it colours the choice of stories various papers and radio stations will cover.

And that’s all the greater reason we journalists must cherish and nurture the higher ideals of our craft — honesty, balance, integrity, depth, accuracy, freedom of expression, freedom of choice, public interest, credibility and humility — and, for heaven’s sake, let’s be careful, very, very careful, with the words we use. They will remain long after the broken bones from the sticks and stones have healed.