by Charles Molele
The New Age
March 4, 2011
The tempest that came this week with the coloured debate has brought to mind the depravity of South African intellectual life.
We are like a people with no sense of history. We have no ears. We have no eyes. We have a convenient memory.
We have forgotten the noble role played by our coloured counterparts in the liberation struggle; the names of Basil February and James April come to mind, above all. Sorry, Trevor Manuel. Next time.
The two young men were the first armed coloured soldiers of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC armed wing. They were part of the ANC’s Luthuli detachment led by Chris Hani on a long march from Zambia to South Africa.
February, a gifted writer who contributed to Dawn, MK’s journal, did not make it home after he died in a gun battle with the Rhodesian police in Bulawayo. He was 24.
Both men were honoured by former president Nelson Mandela for their bravery shortly before dissolution of MK in the early ’90s.
I was quite surprised when I visited Cape Town recently to attend President Jacob Zuma’s state of the nation address when I failed to see any monument or street name in honour of these two brave freedom fighters.
Their communities of Mitchell’s Plain, Athlone, Hanover Park, Bo-Kaap and Mannenberg remain economically depressed.
There is no visible investment in community, sports or cultural projects to speak of and service delivery is almost nonexistent.
As the saying goes in the Cape–rightly or wrongly–the ANC does not care. It is as if coloureds are nobodies. They are the faceless majority.
Read the rest here.
Comment: This is probably the best analysis I have read on the 'coloured/Indian' question(s) that has gripped South African politics in recent months. And, it is significant that it is written by a black African (to use the terminology of the 'post-race' era).
Molele is right to finger the selective memory and induced amnesia that characterizes so much of the debate on race in the South Africa.
This is a worrying and frustrating time indeed.
A big part of the worry is the manner in which race lines are being reconstructed/reassigned to frame a contrived 'black' nationalist framework (a we have overcome to be just like white racists mindset).
A couple of days ago I talked over breakfast with a twenty-something coloured woman (she defined herself so) who said that she and her friends could care less what black folk thought of their "colouredness".
"We are the new generation and the past is the past. I have white and black friends and Indians too. We see things differently than the older generations," she said with a perfect Model C accent.
Her comments made me recall what I used to say to my undergrad students who pointed out that kids were not swayed by skin color on the playgrounds across the US.
That is because skin color is not coded to privilege on those playgrounds. As soon as you add privileges and use power to enforce privileges skin color becomes very important even if the content it describes is absolutely fabricated, I would say in one form or the other.
As the years pass and skin color/race is (re)configured to the (re)designed power construct in South Africa the young woman above will likely feel the racist burn a lot more than she does now. In time she will have to deal with being passed over in favour of newly constructed privileges that degrade her being and draw racialized inferences about her presumed inferiority.
That process is already well on the way (its origins are inside white racism).
Ironically (though tragically so) she will very likely get to know why the older folks are still so vigilant about race and racism.
The only difference for her will be the colour of the dominant oppressor and that is perhaps the saddest part of living in the faux 'post-race' era.
Onward!
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