Why criminalise racism when charter already addresses contentious issue?
The charter provides that 'all national groups shall be protected by law against insults to their race and national pride'.
A newspaper vendor is seen walking along a walkway where the word “kaffir” has been painted, underneath the Hendrick Potgieter Road bridge on 14th Avenue in Roodepoort, 13 January 2015. The graffiti is new and the photographer first noticed it on Saturday. Another passerby mentioned he had not noticed the graffiti before either, but was surprised by it. Picture: Michel Bega
Practicing racism or propagating racial intolerance is shortly to be a crime in South Africa, was one aspect President Jacob Zuma spelt out in his Human Rights Day speech in King William’s Town.
We would take issue in one regard to this pronouncement.
Surely, our much admired constitution already addresses this very issue, taking its cue from the Freedom Charter, a groundbreaking manuscript adopted in 1955, which provided to all our people security of birthright “without distinction of colour, race, sex or belief”.
The charter also provided that “all national groups shall be protected by law against insults to their race and national pride” and that “the preaching and practice of national, race or colour discrimination and contempt shall be a punishable crime”.
In this last phrase, we fully back the president’s intention to hold true to the tenets of a democratic, nonracial society. But we must also question why this has only come to fruition now?
Witch-hunting racists have the danger of accentuating a negative if we truly believe, as do many loyal patriotic citizens, the iconoclastic non-racist stance taken by the charter and leaders as politically persecuted as Nelson Mandela.
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