Terrorism “experts” confidently predicted that the Oslo bomber was a “Muslim terrorist”. But it turns out he killed 76 of his fellow Norwegians because he wanted to keep Europe white. Meanwhile, Floyd Shivambu claims, without evidence, that the people who hacked the ANC Youth League’s website are “white right-wingers”. In Diepsloot, a mob kicks a Zimbabwean to death because they want to keep South Africa South African.
Keep Europe white, keep Africa black. Keep Mars green, for all I know. Are we never to be rid of racialism in its evil forms? How long ago did Bob Marley sing: “Until the philosophy which holds one race/ Superior and another inferior/ Is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned/ Everywhere is war, me say war/ Until the colour of a man’s skin/ Is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes/ Me say war.”
Not much of a feminist manifesto, obviously, but stirring stuff when it comes to human rights.
Except that he also sang: “Until the ignoble and unhappy regimes/ That hold our brothers in Angola, in Mozambique, South Africa/ In sub-human bondage/ Have been toppled, utterly destroyed/ Well, everywhere is war.”
Alas, Bob, those regimes have been toppled, if not utterly destroyed. And it seems to have made little difference to the macro issues of racism and its handmaidens, intolerance and corruption. At least in South Africa, the life of the average person has been immeasurably improved but still we are mired in hatred, violence and xenophobia.
To quote that other great mystic and religious rock star, Desmond Tutu, the massacre in Norway showed that “extremism knows no national, cultural or religious bounds — It also showed that people were not doing enough to close the gap on prejudice and intolerance, and to foster broad-mindedness, acceptance of one another and love.”
Tutu says people. I say the hatemongers of the youth league, the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging and all the other self-serving, short-sighted thugs who think in the same way as the monster Anders Behring Breivik. Every time the right-wing morons post blogs about how black people are practising genocide against white farmers, every time the youth league spouts off about how the media is owned by the Broederbond, we move closer to our own monstrous massacre.
The sad truth is that fundamentalists almost always kill their own people. They are only defined as monsters by their dehumanising disregard for the people they are ostensibly trying to liberate. Anyone can hate the other; it is turning your neighbour into collateral damage that makes you a monster.
Unfortunately, in South Africa, we are all monsters.
Chris Roper is the editor of the M&G Online. Follow him on Twitter: @ChrisRoperZA