When racism goes underground
analysis
Mark Heywood
In the last turbulent years before the advent of democracy in South Africa, many lives were lost in urban areas of what was then the Transvaal and Natal. Supporters of the Inkatha Freedom Party, armed by white racists of the ilk of Eugene de Kock, launched merciless attacks on a host of defenceless communities. One such community was Alexandra, in Johannesburg, targeted because of its reputation for organised and effective resistance to apartheid.
In 1992 buses full of Inkatha members arrived outside the township, impis assembled, and then swiftly occupied the two men’s hostels, which were thereafter used as a basis for a sustained terrorist war against the local community.
The skirt around the hostels became a dead zone, aptly named Beirut.
Some of the stories of rape and brutality, told by people kidnapped into the hostels and held as slaves, were collected as affidavits in support of a young resident of Alexandra who was arrested and tried for obtaining weapons to defend his community. They were shocking and real.
At the time it struck me that public attention given to the overt racism of the South African Police and the South African Defence Force, which had accompanied the impis on their take-over mission, was almost a red herring. It was easy to latch on to. But underlying it, the rest of society was gripped by a more pervasive, introvert but equally complicit racism one that professed outrage about, but simultaneously permitted, the carnage.
If the Inkatha impis had disobeyed instructions, rerouted and marched a few kilometres in a different direction, the public response would have been different. If it had forcibly taken over a block of flats in Rosebank or Killarney, had raped and terrorised white residents, set up gun towers in the flower boxes of fourth-floor windows, there would have been a different type of outcry notably, one that addressed rather than excused the problem.
The refugee white children would have been given names and histories; horror stories of former residents would have made it to the newspapers. And there would have been action. Had the original hostel dwellers of Alex been a small ethnic minority in a hamlet in Europe they might even have been rescued by the United Nations.
But this did not happen for Alexandra. The occupation stretched out over years, while refugees remade their homes in churches and council offices. It continues to this day.
Introvert, complicit racism tolerated the massacre of Madala hostel. It is the same type of racism that tolerates the Aids epidemic. In the minds of those that this racism encompasses, it silently diminishes the human value of others. It imagines that the diminished are less capable of feeling, perhaps even less prone to pain and emotion.
It is different to expressions of racism that can be easily identified in vile acts (such as those of the North Rand dog handlers using illegal aliens as “bait”), or in policies of apartheid. But it is more dangerous because it holds society in a vice of inaction and paralysis.
The question must be asked: knowing the statistics about the HIV/Aids epidemic (who doesn’t?), knowing that HIV infection has an almost inevitable consequence of illness and death, why do people with power let it go on?
My uncomfortable answer would be because, across the world, most of the lives affected by Aids are black. The collated unconscious of those with power (which dictates the policies they do not make, rather than those they do; which influences history by omission rather than agency) views black peoples’ lives as less rich, with less plenipotential than white lives, and thus less worthy of protection and effort.
There can be no other explanation.
How else can we view the willingness of the United States government to quickly find and spend billions of dollars going to war in Europe? Or the United Kingdom’s declaration of an emergency to fight foot and mouth disease, even going as far as postponing a general election?
These thoughts frequently strike me as I witness more and more the illness caused by HIV. Attending memorial services of young women, dead by their mid-20s, leaving young children and old parents, I ask: “Why isn’t anybody outside the room screaming?”
When the African National Congress and its allies fought apartheid and turned it into a global struggle against racism, it fought for every life, tried to highlight every indignity.
This much might be obvious. But before the current champions against racism, particularly those in our government and the plethora of human rights commissions, jump up and agree: read on. Particularly tragic is the manner in which the new political and economic elite, no longer a “whites-only” domain, which does have the power to both prevent and repair, seems to have internalised racism or transmuted it into a callousness towards poor people that is little different in its consequences.
By default, it now mimics the actions of its predecessors.
Again, Aids helps illustrate these points. Each year up to 70 000 infants (almost entirely black children) are born with HIV, as a result of mother-to-child HIV transmission. Affluent men and women of all races know the emotions, hopes, fears, deep love and longing that accompany childbirth. So why are these emotions separated from other lives? Why are they not transferred into political action, the mobilisation of resources and information?
Several weeks ago I sat in a house in Sharpeville with a young black woman who has Aids. She is poor but not poverty stricken, badly educated but by no means illiterate. As I talked to her, watched her tears, saw her almost tangible thwarted ambitions float around the room like ghosts in Scooby Doo, it struck me how hollow are our excuses about not being able to offer better treatment and care. Here is the archetypal victim of a new racism here and in a hundred thousand other homes scattered across our land.
Combating racism requires that we dig deep and combat ourselves, and then rather than being a springboard to a soapbox, it needs to be a catalyst to policy and action that bases itself on equal human worth and a readiness to defend that worth regardless of race or class.
In this regard, Aids will be a litmus test. The next World Conference on Racism will be a fitting place to judge our response: will it take place as a wake for a holocaust or as a celebration of social renewal based on a policy response that treated all human life as equal?
Mark Heywood is head of the Aids Law Project at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand