Africa’s past
Cameron Duodu
Letter from the North
In an article for The Guardian, reproduced on page nine of this week’s Mail & Guardian, Chris McGreal catalogued a series of racist incidents in the “new South Africa”.
Taken singly, each incident makes the flesh creep. Taken together as an illustration of how everything has changed in the “new South Africa”, except racist sadism, the incidents are not so much an indictment of those who committed them as of those in power in the “new South Africa”, who permit them to continue.
McGreal wrote, among others, about Pieter Henning, who was imprisoned for 30 years after beating, strangling and decapitating two of his farm workers because one of them called him “Piet” instead of “baas”; the farmer who tied two Eskom workers to a pole for five hours and assaulted them; the farmer who plastered one of his neighbour’s labourers head to toe in toxic silver paint in punishment for taking a short cut across his farm; and, of course, of the Nicholas Steyn bloke who was only given a six-month suspended sentence by Judge Tjibbe Spoelstra, after shooting dead a six-month- old baby.
To say that the judges who encourage such incidents to take place, by imposing ridiculously lenient sentences on the perpetrators, are untouchable because the Constitution guarantees their tenure is a cop-out.
Apart from political steps that can be taken to bring such racist members of the judiciary to heel, there are any number of administrative measures that can be used to clip their wings.
For instance, judges may not be fired, but can’t they be reassigned to other duties? What prevents a notorious clown like Judge Spoelstra from being put in charge of civil cases involving corporate litigation? At least he would then have to demonstrate the quality of knowledge that is supposed to come with his qualifications.
And why can’t non-white judges be posted to areas where black labourers suffer a lot at the hands of white racist farmers?
Now, I know that as soon as the question of black replacing white in any position whatsoever arises in South Africa, the old issue of quality versus colour immediately raises its head. “Black lawyers lack experience.They are not adequately trained,” and so on, and therefore they cannot replace whites in the judiciary.
I am afraid that is cheap crap. The administration of justice is not only about the quality of the legal education possessed by the judiciary, but also about the integrity of the justice they administer. Where a judge is demonstrably racist, he becomes partisan and cannot stay in the judicial system.
Justice, it cannot be said often enough, must not only be done but be seen to be done. When a black person leaves a court crying, “If I were white, this could not have happened to me,” he is repeating a cry that has echoed in the hearts of his people for centuries. The “new South Africa” cannot allow that cry to go unheard. The black majority demands that its wishes, too, must influence governmental action – as in any other democracy.
If there aren’t enough black South African lawyers available to balance white power in the judiciary, black lawyers must be recruited from abroad.
African-American and African lawyers can be given short contracts to fill the void, while black South Africans are being trained.
Ghana was one of the British colonies that had a large number of Ghanaian-trained lawyers at the time of its independence. Nevertheless, a number of West Indian lawyers had to be recruited into the judicial service while the British judges were being phased out.
We weren’t afraid to “borrow” expertise. We hired Sir Arthur Lewis from Trinidad to become economic adviser to the government. Another West Indian, the great political activist, George Padmore, became president Kwame Nkrumah’s adviser on African affairs.
Ghana’s dynamic African policy did not just “evolve”. Our university at Legon accepted white South African lecturers, as long as they renounced apartheid.
Now, I have often been struck, whenever I have visited one or the other of the British newspapers that I write for, by the fact that their offices are so lily white.
Then, in the wake of the inquiry into the death of black youth Stephen Lawrence, some of the editors began to write about why they had no black people on their staff, with whom to cogitate on the issue of institutional racism. They had to “glance down at their boots” when the issue came up at their editorial conferences.
They had been short-sighted: they seemed to expect black journalists to just “evolve” and come to join them. But if these same editors found that their gardens lacked nice plants, they would go and look for some to buy and plant. Or their wives would. They most certainly would not expect the plants to come and plant themselves in their garden.
South Africa can’t do that, either. This country has a destiny to eliminate the vestiges of the brutal treatment of one section of its community by another.
If the brutes and their descendants are tired of hearing the rest of the world talking about such deeds, they can do one thing: put an end to them.
Better still, they can try and imagine what it must feel like, not just having to hear or read about such brutality, but actually having to feel the bullets, the sjamboks and the teeth of the dogs. Of the racists.