The statement by religious commentator and director of the Institute of Justice and Reconciliation in South Africa, Charles Villa-Vincencio, that South African whites should act in their own ”enlightened self-interest” and put something back into the country has evoked a storm of reaction.
Speaking during a debate on the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s TV1 on Sunday night, Villa-Vicencio, who is also professor emeritus of theology at the University of Cape Town, said it had been laughable for Democratic Alliance (DA) chief whip Douglas Gibson to say that he had never benefited from apartheid.
This arose in the debate about the value of former apartheid law and order minister Adriaan Vlok’s decision to wash the feet of his former enemy, reverend Frank Chikane, as an act of penance.
Villa-Vincencio also said that ”a personal apology” needed to go further.
”I think that personal individual reconciliation perhaps with a religious motive is actually important. But perhaps more important in a political situation is … to build a transformed society. We needn’t necessarily wash one another’s feet.”
Blacks in South Africa had been ”remarkably tolerant and ready to forgive”, but the nation needed to move on to addressing the material context in which people found themselves, he suggested, noting high levels of poverty and people living in informal settlements. This needed a demonstration from those who benefited from apartheid to work for the upliftment the victims of apartheid, he suggested.
Gibson, who was not a guest in the TV debate, said in the view of some, Vlok would ”never be able to apologise enough”, but, he said: ”I despise the continued racial categorisation of people which reminds one of nothing so much as apartheid.”
The DA chief whip argued that 20% of whites voters ”never voted for apartheid”.
He said that ”huge numbers were [now] far too young to be part of the [apartheid] system at all. What people need to do 12 years into democracy is to work hard to make South Africa a success.”
The message, he believed was ”to be law-abiding citizens, to do one’s best to bring up children properly. If one is able to do a little good for [one’s] church, or charities, well and good.”
Former Human Rights Commissioner Rhoda Kadalie — now executive director of the Impumelelo Innovations and Awards Trust, a South African organisation that identifies and rewards projects that alleviate poverty in partnership with public sector enterprises — said a least 60% of those involved in the projects were whites.
One in particular was involved in assisting HIV/Aids orphans in Cape Town’s Khayelitsha township while another had built a whole settlement in Mpumalanga around a school where community upliftment projects abounded. These were just two of countless examples of selflessness, she said.
Pointing fingers at a group — whites — divided that group, she said. It was an attempt to create ”good whites and bad whites”, she said.
Kadalie, who is black, said the Home for All campaign — which called on white South Africans to contribute to reconciliation by recognising the benefits they had received from government policies of apartheid had also divided the community.
The campaign was started in 2000 by Villa-Vincencio and former Black Sash head Mary Burton.
Meanwhile, pressed on whether he would encourage former apartheid president PW Botha and the former head of South Africa’s chemical and biological warfare programme Wouter Basson to apologise for acts of apartheid, Vlok told SABC 1 on Sunday night: ”If they don’t want to, I cannot tell them [to do so]. I did it because I am a Christian.”
When it was pointed out that he had claimed to be a Christian at the time he was a Cabinet minister — when apartheid crimes were being carried out — he said he had not developed ”a personal relationship with the Lord”.
Vlok, who was Member of Parliament for Verwoerdburg (now Centurion) from 1974 to 1994 and Minister of Law and Order from 1986 to 1994, said he was involved in community work and was assisting a black family in Mamelodi township. Vlok obtained amnesty in 1999 for his role in the bombing of the South African Council of Churches’ building, Khotso House, in 1988. – I-Net Bridge