Apartheid has become so popular over the last month that one might think we have missed it terribly and long for a return. It's come-back has been bigger than that of Justin Timberlake after he released his latest album.
Only someone who never experienced apartheid would have the audacity to say the ANC is bringing back apartheid – even today’s ANC, which is not up to the standard of the ANC of yester-year. The memory of the atrocities is still very fresh in many people’s minds. Every single black person in this country was affected by apartheid. Every. Single. One. Nineteen years is not long enough for people to have forgotten.
Although I was too young to have directly experienced apartheid, I certainly was affected by it very heavily. I was not discriminated against, growing up in a supposedly “free” Transkei, but the mere fact that I was black in South Africa meant I suffered the humiliation too. I remember herding my grandfather’s cattle as a young boy near the national road in a place called Fikeni, not too far away from Mount Ayliff. Every summer holiday, I’d see cars driving to the coast, some towing boats, others with caravans and fishing rods sticking out of the windows. The cars were always driven by white people, filled with white people. I wondered why it was always white people who had nice things and black people did not. I wondered why we only had black people in the poor villages, and yet when I watched TV, white people were always in big houses and having a nice life.
Every now and then, a car would stop and take pictures of us. I’d be holding a stick, probably wearing clothes which were a few sizes too big and had probably been wearing for a few days. My stomach protruding from a mild form of kwashiorkor because I’d probably had mielie meal porridge for breakfast, amaggeu, and would probably have mieliepap for supper, just like the day before’s meal. For all I know, a young me is hanging on some white person’s wall or inside some forgotten album.
When I visited my mother in Mdanstane, I wondered why when we went to East London, white people lived in such nice neighbourhoods with nice houses, while black people lived in township matchbox houses. It was also not lost on me that it was only black people who lived in shacks in East London, in a place called Ziphunzana. I had never seen as much poverty as I had seen while driving past there.
When I was six or seven years old, we went to Durban with my mother. On the day we were due to leave, she decided to get some salt water. I stood at the edge of the ocean, while she stood on a rock to bottle seawater. Out of nowhere, a freak wave descended on her and swept her off her feet. I didn’t see her for a few seconds as the waves rolled over her and returned back to where they were coming from.
My mother was flat on her back. Unmoving. I ran to her crying, when I got to the rock, she lay there unconscious, bleeding from the back of her head. Tears streamed down my cheeks and I raised her unconscious head and put it on my little seven-year-old lap, crying. I screamed to my sister to get one of the people who we had travelled with us to Durban.
It was still early in the morning, maybe around 9am. I couldn’t speak English yet, but I knew a few words. I remember seeing a white couple walking past and screamed “help me!” as I raised a bloodied hand, waving. They looked at me as I waved and screamed the only English words I knew. They just looked and carried on. Soon after a white runner hesitated, but carried on. My mother eventually regained consciousness while she was on my lap. The scar on the back of her head is still there today. Just like the scar of apartheid.
When I was younger, I always thought those white people who just walked past and did not help a young child asking for help, were just not nice people. When I grew up, I realised that it was the law of the land which made them that way. The law taught them we were not really the same. I don’t know if we were at a blacks-only beach, but I know that we didn’t get help.
That was the most obvious experience of apartheid for me. Apartheid was a white thing. Just like nice cars and big houses were white things. This is the reason the DA has rubbed up a great deal of black people the wrong way. The DA is still seen as a white party. Why? Because by its very own admission, it only got 6% of the black vote in 2011. If it continues its current campaign, it won’t fare much better in 2014.
The reason there has been such a massive uproar is because a party many still see as a white party had the gall and audacity to make such a comparison. Apartheid is remembered as a white thing that happened to black people. People still remember marching under the banners of the ANC, being tear-gassed, being shot at, and going to mass funerals. They know all these things. These are not events they learn about at school. These are things they experienced. Saying today’s ANC is like an apartheid party is belittling their experiences. Supporters might disagree with the ANC vehemently, but the recent actions of the DA will only push them back to what they see as home – the ANC.
Marikana ha,s to date, been the most horrific and tragic thing to happen in modern-day South Africa, but it is not equivalent to apartheid. The very same people who are now accusing the ANC of being apartheid-like are the very same people who say the workers were asking for too much money. Their condition is also a legacy of apartheid, but it is disgusting that the ANC hasn’t been able to improve their conditions 19 years after democracy.
I very helpfully wrote an article telling the DA what it needed to do to get the black vote. What it has been doing is exactly what it shouldn’t do. The DA’s recent antics is not going to win it black sympathy.