Three separate stories in the news this week are worth tying together. The first is the case of Mosoko Rampuru (37), who was allegedly murdered in Sasolburg by being dragged behind a truck. His white employer has been charged with the killing. If the charge is substantiated and the employer is held to be mad, it is to be hoped that he will be sent to a maximum security asylum for the criminally insane. If, on the other hand, he is found responsible and convicted one would hope he is given the heaviest sentence possible.
On first appearances, at least, it is the kind of murder with which this country has become all too familiar – violent crimes facilitated by a state ideology which encouraged the belief that black people were somehow inferior and their lives cheap. It was an ideology which was rightly condemned by the international community as a crime against humanity. It was the crime of racism.
The second story appeared first this week in The Times of London and concerned Nadezhda Tylik. For those who missed the saga of Tylik, she was the mother of a Russian submariner lost on board the Kursk. She was seen on international television being given an injection and collapsing while publicly raging at Ilya Klebanov, the Deputy Prime Minister, for the Russian government’s inept handling of the maritime tragedy. The account of the incident which spun around the globe with the footage was that she was a demonstrator being silenced by a Russian secret service agent. This week The Times interviewed her. Tylik explained that the agent was a medical worker, the syringe contained Cardiomin, one man seen to be holding her was her husband – a former submarine captain – and they had all possibly saved her life, because she had a bad heart condition and was already in a state of near collapse when medication was administered. This alternative explanation must have left many a reader and television viewer around the world ruefully shaking their heads at the realisation that they had seemingly been guilty of stereotyping born, in this particular instance, of Cold War conditioning. The third story, unfolding this week as this newspaper goes to press, is the Conference on Racism which the chief organiser, Barney Pityana, has characterised as the most important conference in the history of South Africa. It is a boast with which we would quarrel. If the conference is about the racism allegedly behind Rampuru’s death then we would offer the view that Pityana’s initiative is misplaced in that it comes too late. The battle has already been won. The battlefield may be populated by the wounded whose cries of pain demand attention. It may still be peppered by undetected enemy mines – in the form of unreformed racists – which will explode from time to time, with often lethal effect. But the white flags have been struck and victory lies with the anti-racist forces. Alternatively the conference seems to be about the stereotyping which apparently lay behind the “assault” on Tylik’s person. In which case the conference is fatally flawed by Pityana’s failure to cast his net with broader effect, to ask the British why they stereotype the Germans, the Swedes why they stereotype the Norwegians, the Protestants why they stereotype the Catholics, the Gentiles why they stereotype the Jews, the men why they stereotype the women … not to mention the black South Africans who would stereotype their white counterparts. “Location, location, location” is the wisdom among estate agents. “Perspective, perspective, perspective” is a wisdom we in the media would do well to hold dear as we pursue the often elusive truth behind the “news”. It is also one which we recommend to the social scientists who would go out hunting for the “racists” among the thickets of stereotyping. Arms and the ministry There is a disturbing arrogance and disregard for the founding principles of our democratic state in the evident attempts of the ministry and secretariat of defence to remove a number of the checks and balances that currently apply to our arms industry. New legislation to remove our arms industry from scrutiny is all the more worrying in view of reports pointing to disturbing aspects of arms deals in which South Africa has been involved. For one, there have been suspicions that some South African officials or their close relatives may benefit unduly from the R32-billion deal to re-equip South Africa’s armed forces. Moreover, there have been indications that a complex network of secret contractual quid pro quos may have accompanied other arms deals. Several mechanisms were put in place during the Mandela era to ensure that at least some minimal measure of morality guided our arms industry. Both the Portfolio Committee on Defence, which consists of MPs, and the National Arms Control Council, chaired by Education Minister Kader Asmal, have significant oversight roles over what arms we sell to whom. New legislation proposes to remove these controls and to give the department of defence virtual carte blanche to run this most amoral of trades as it sees fit. We cannot allowed these proposed changes through. We must tell those in the defence department who may be tempted to think otherwise that we insist on full political and appropriate democratic control over what they do – and that includes control over what arms they can sell to whom. MPs and Asmal’s committee deserve – and may need – public support to beat off this challenge. We must give it to them.