Poet Mongane Wally Serote writes:
So we shall have buried Apartheid [...]
How shall we look at each other then,
How shall we shake hands [...]
What shall we look like
When that sunrise comes
[...] I ask my people
Since we have said
that South Africa belongs to all
Choosing what to remember is also a way to advise choices for the present and the future.
There’s too much to forget in South Africa. The Country’s neoliberal parties committed in giving birth to one of the extraordinary events in the history of the world society: the complete reversal of all those things that ruled people’s life in South Africa for centuries, guided by the incarnations of racism, regularly ended up in violence.
The violence accompanies this people for long time and it is a pure expression of racism. Does violence implicate hate? Personally I’m ready to uphold that the hate towards whites was still unusual between black South Africans. Hate kills. It is terrible to quantify the deaths. But how many whites have been killed by the black freedom fighters between 1961 and 1990, when the liberation movement decided to use arms?
Sixty six.
The number of the black civilians killed by the whites, starting from the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, is around various thousands; no one really knows how many they are. And today, as it wasn’t enough there are other four thousand victims caused by conflicts between blacks.
The habit of violence has been already infused and this is a problem that, as we know, will be inherited by a new South Africa. The word violence has become popular and used by whites and blacks. Hate is the reason of violence. But apart from a white minority, I’m convinced that the hostile white feelings don’t lead to hate. Fear, in fact, is not always followed by hate. The feeling that comes out between whites is fear, the fear of a punishment for all those things they have done to the blacks and to their ancestors and of which the government they themselves had elected; for all those things they’ve done and also for their silence, for closing their eyes and turning their backs on them. The fear of losing privilege: even though they can convince themselves that they won’t die, they are scared of losing their white privileges. But in the subconscious they recognise hate as the useless feeling for what it is, only considering the utility that might have for them now: absolutely none.
The resentment is a potential source of violence between South Africans. Since different from hate, resentment distorts and paralyses human relationships, it comes from the privileged after the privilege has been evenly taken away; the resentment is something that accompanies the oppressed during all his life, from generations, and that probably continue to exist, animated by the freedom that burns inside from the previous oppression. Whites and blacks, they should find different ways from violence to overcome both types of resentment. Much is done, outside and inside the Country, between those who are against a real change or want to deal with it to their advantage, in order to exploit the cultural differences as a source of violence between whites and blacks in South Africa. But if they abandoned the obsession of the categories based on ethnic groups and stopped neglecting the daily individual relationships, from which human relationships depend on, they would discover that ways of living, customs and traditions imposed by Apartheid, have created differences between whites and blacks and that they are not either the product of different traditions and religions, nor an issue of ethnic nature.
The racist laws and politics were the ones to cause morbid changes in the whites behaviour in favour of violence. The race became an excuse for any form of personal conflict, at home, at work, on the roads. In a society of which people are defined by the colour of their skin, the more common individual defects are ascribable to the race in question. Everybody, whites and blacks, at least one time are caught in following this type of conditional reasoning.
These violent, psychological and historic consequences inherited from the past, have not to be tackled as an unchangeable curse, but as conditioning forms that might unlearn, learn and forget, avoiding the ancient colour differences from which were conceived a dictatorship race, a political system, a religious system and a bizarre social order from which many sufferings derived.
I’m convinced that a material justice must be created before hoping to eliminate violence, by now a tragic habit in South Africa. Once laid the foundations, I think that there are good possibilities to establish relationships between blacks and blacks, whites and blacks, whichever language they speak and whichever ethnic origin they have. I cannot think about another African Country where a high percentage of multiracial people supported the fight for the blacks’ freedom acknowledging it as their own cause like in South Africa. Now it is needed a policy that keeps alive the real justice before hoping to live in peace. New laws must change the majority economic conditions, the healing can occur only from this honesty and efforts. And this healing will need all the patience and tolerance that, I am convinced, many blacks and whites are disposed to grant.
