Loose cannon:Robert Kirby
As part of its relentless quest for a just society, the government will soon be considering a piece of new legislation, a Bill which prescribes the extent to which schools, private clubs, banks, hospitals and citizens will in future be allowed to discriminate in choosing their associates and clients.
To be entitled the Prevention and Prohibition of Unfair Discrimination Bill, this one sounds awfully like some of the old National Party favourites: the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act; the Prohibition of Unlawful Organisations Act, and so on. Which, in itself, does not suppose that this new Bill is anything similar. It is the briefest examination of the stated intentions of this new legislation that does.
That busy inquisition, the Human Rights Commission, has been delegated to devise this piece of dramatic social engineering. I am sure the commission’s intentions will be held by some to be entirely honourable, but then so were Hendrik Verwoerd’s when seen through the eyes of his devotees. Where I find difficulty is in accepting the essentially fascist notion which underpins this whole exercise: that the sanctuary of individual human thought or conduct should be supervised, at any level, by politicians and their police.
It doesn’t take more than a splash of subversive thinking to realise that whereas, in his day, Verwoerd imposed laws to tell us who of what colour, nationality, creed or political persuasion we may or may not have legally invited to dinner, the commission now vehemently recommends who we should. Again, just like Verwoerd, the commission threatens fines and even jail terms for those who do not comply.
Of course, they don’t stop at dinner parties. Instructing people – as this Green Paper suggests – that they do not have to submit themselves to, say, medical tests when being considered for a job is analogous to telling them they must. Why should an airline pilot not be tested for sight, health, co- ordination, technical ability and, indeed, undergo psychometric evaluation, before eventually being charged with the safety of hundreds of thousands of lives? By the same token, why should a domestic child-minder not be tested for HIV? Why should a private company be under adamant government constraint when it decides who is to be among its partners? Why should a bank be dictated to in its business decisions?
Among other matters, the commission says that their Green Paper will address “the way in which people are recruited to certain professions, like medicine and law”.
The commission might pause to acknowledge that when a university enrolls students for medical or postgraduate study it usually does so on the basis of candidates’ suitability and record. Within the definition of suitability must surely fall that of language. The commission’s focus in this particular matter is embarrassingly clear: it’s trying to pressure the Afrikaans universities into teaching in English.
The motives are clear. The commission intends overriding an argument used by these universities: that the language of students and instruction should complement each other and that, hence, the majority of the students enrolled in Afrikaans universities are Afrikaners. In the end, all the commission will achieve will be in impersonating the NP when it tried to impose the use of Afrikaans as the only medium of instruction in black schools.
The term that will be used in denigrating this Bill and its subsequent transmogrification into law will be “reverse racism”. Those who use the term will be quite right for that is exactly what it is. Only a brief look at these, its first detailings, reveals much of the supercilious arrogance of official discrimination. Now, God help us, legislated morality. It doesn’t matter which way it leans, this Bill is fascism in the warming-drawer. Listen to the authentic Nuremberg strain in a statement by one of the Bill’s drafters: “Private clubs may be allowed to operate in ways which exclude certain categories of people but then will not be allowed to use public facilities”.
“Certain categories of people”? Is this the genteel racial metaphor now officially approved for use in place of the usual nouns?
As all that went before, this kind of “prohibition legislation” is self-disgracing. In its efforts to be righteous, the commission is cultivating a new, contorted mutation of apartheid: the Doctrine of Good Racism and Bad Racism. Bantustans will in future be of the mind.
Hendrik Frensch would have been delighted to see this urbane new codification of his beliefs – and those of a few others of a century replete with his ilk.