John Matshikiza
WITH THE LID OFF
So my friend and colleague Phillip van Niekerk might find himself in jail in the next few weeks, if he isn’t careful. I have been telling him that if it does come to the worst-case scenario, and he defies the Human Rights Commission’s (HRC) summons to appear before it to answer charges of media racism, he will at last be joining the privileged ranks of the majority of South African males and getting a taste of the country’s appalling prison system.
But this has become a bit of a sick joke – firstly, because I wouldn’t wish any friend such a gory experience and, secondly, because the whole saga seems to have got out of hand.
The bizarre thing is that the summons emanates, indirectly, from another good friend of mine, one of much longer standing. Barney Pityana, chair of the HRC, was a colleague of a different sort – a struggle buddy in the good old, bad old days of exile. We exchanged ideas (he had more to share with me than I with him, since he emerged from the cauldron of apartheid when I had already been insulated away from it for many years). We laughed at the sometimes ludicrous behaviour of “the oppressor” back home and we cried at the funerals of fallen comrades who would never make it back to the promised land.
Hard as it was to be cut off from the land of our ancestors, painful as it was to find ourselves growing increasingly alienated from friends and relatives who had stayed behind, we nevertheless found some kind of comfort and solidarity in the shared experience of exile and in our broadly shared commitment to the principles of the struggle.
Now that we are all, miraculously, back in that fabled motherland, I see more of the “inziles” (of all races) than I do of the exiles, the friends and acquaintances who made life in foreign parts relatively bearable and meaningful. For some reason, we have chosen to try to find our individual ways into the confusing realities of the unknown country we have returned to. We bump into each other from time to time but, in many ways, we no longer know each other. We’ve decided to find our own ways of wrestling with the country’s issues and are, therefore, bound to be puzzled at some of the choices former colleagues make.
Nobody said the struggle was over. It’s just moved into a different phase. That much I understand.
Racism was always the bottom line of the struggle. Apartheid was entirely based on racist principles, and its legacies continue to show their worst ravages among the black population against whom the system was directed.
It is probably true to say that a white person can never truly understand the effect that apartheid, or slavery, or American segregation has had on the minds and bodies of black people, effects that reverberate down the generations. You have to be inside the experience to really feel it. (The same must be true of the Jewish experience of European genocide, or of the destructive impact of men’s superior behaviour towards women.) But that does not mean that every white person is actively and deliberately racist, or that every European (in spite of the advent of Jrg Haider in Austria) is an anti-Semite, or that all men hate all women – although there are factions throughout the world who believe these things to be fundamentally true.
But, hey, there are also Jews (male and female) who hate blacks, and blacks of both genders who hate Jews, and so on. In all the irrational permutations of humanity’s inhumanity to others of the same species, it would take a Solomon with several hundred brains in his head, supported by an international team of scrupulously honest and impartial lawyers (almost an impossible phenomenon) to decide whose injustice was more unacceptable than whose.
Racism is unacceptable. It is still a profoundly damaging part of South African life. It stares you in the face at every turn. People still die because of it.
But it seems to me important that we should be able to distinguish between the kind of racial separation that is advocated on Radio Pretoria (itself pathetically misguided and poorly argued) and the allegations levelled against the likes of the Mail & Guardian. Apart from anything else, I would have thought that a few phone calls to darkies who actually work at places like the M&G would have established whether or not this was a racist environment – although many of us, including myself, are regarded in some quarters as not being black enough to know whether we are in a racist environment or not (see Thami Mazwai’s letter in last week’s issue, if you don’t know what I’m talking about).
Part of the indictment of racism levelled against the M&G involves the editor’s supposed failure to support a black journalist whose work was plagiarised by a white journalist from another paper. That black journalist was me.
Racism is the last accusation I would lay against Van Niekerk in this instance – on the contrary, he was scrupulously supportive of me. But nobody at the HRC, or among those who compiled the report in which this alleged racism was cited, has ever asked my opinion in this matter.
I frequently differ with Van Niekerk and others at the M&G. I do not regard it as my duty to defend all the paper’s opinions under all circumstances. But labelling everything I disagree with as racist would be ludicrous.
I truly regret that, rather than being a source for frank and creative discussion, this important issue that affects all of us has been turned into a source of confrontation between two people whom I know fairly well and whom I respect.
Wild accusations, like the ones that have led to these summonses, are one thing. Threats of imprisonment are quite another.