Every morning when you drive to work, you’re bombarded by various newspaper posters which scream the headlines in the hope to catch your eye and interest and push you to buy a copy.
As I was driving to work the other day, one such screaming poster caught my eye: Boss calls workers baboons, read the Sowetan newspaper poster strapped to a tree trunk on Jan Smuts Avenue.
I then thought that the reason why South Africans, especially a minority of white South Africans, will never respect their black counterparts, is because this is a country born out of compromise.
This means that some white people may not feel they were vanquished in the war of liberation that was waged by the uMkhonto we Sizwe and Apla forces. And MK and Apla cannot stand on a platform and claim outright victory, either.
The compromises that were reached following FW de Klerk’s unilateral ceasefire and move to release political prisoners to pave the way for a negotiated settlement, meant that both MK and Apla on one hand, and the former SADF on the other, are on an equal footing – no one can categorically say one conquered the other.
As there was no conquest in the liberation war, as MK and Apla were still a million miles from a possible victory on the military front, the nation remains with two bulls in the same kraal that are still itching for a go at each other. Such is the life of two bulls in that each time there is a female on heat, the two will have a go at each other as they revert to their old positions, and hence you will hear people calling others names using the K-word, B-word, M-word and so forth.
This is simply because neither the coloniser nor the colonised won, which would have resulted in the defeated bull respecting the victorious bull which now rules the roost.
At the moment, some blacks and whites still want to have a go at each other and hence when one bull invokes the ugly names of the past, the other quickly takes to pawing the ground and giving a war cry, an indication that testosterone is high and that it is ready to fight in order to stamp its authority in the kraal.
We have such wonderful democratic institutions and I think we need to use their power of persuasion to avert civil strife which will result in unnecessary bloodshed. We need to talk this over like adults and learn to live together peacefully for the common good of us all in the country. We need to respect and accept each other as equals – and we need to be non-negotiable about the equals part.
Our situation is unlike Angola, Mozambique, Namibia and Zimbabwe where there was conquest; and the compromises in those countries were only meant to avoid a revolution and to take the countries forward in a peaceful manner.
So, South Africans of whatever race, please grow up and behave like adults and show your leadership to the little ones who are our future, and not burden them with your dirty baggage from the past.
They’re innocent of your sins of the apartheid past.
This is not to say they should not know about the deep injustices of the past, but there are better ways of teaching them the clumsy history of ours than continuing to call people names in this day and age.
