Eddie making connections among countries with state sanctioned oppressions

Tony Sickle of  ScanZa

Today we listened to Tony, who recounted his experiences of living under the apartheid regime and outlined how people were conditioned by the government to only view and treat people according to the colour of their skin.  He was classified as ‘coloured’ by the authorities and he proceeded to protest that although apartheid disintegrated almost two decades ago, its legacy of frenetic skin categorisation lives on in the older generations.  South Africans born post 1994 are not institutionally encouraged to solely analyse people by colour, as this lens has been shattered asunder. 

The racist apparatus of apartheid was instigated after 1948 until the first race free elections in 1994.  The framework was solidified and unabated.   1994 brought a quandary as to how can you detoxify whole generations of this racist lens?  The Allied powers had the same predicament when they occupied Nazi Germany in the mid 1940s.  An extensive denazification programme was inaugurated but unlike the visible deconstruction of menacing eagles and swastikas; the imprisonment of key officials; the closure of camps and barracks and the splintering of the Nazi code of laws, the denazification of people’s minds was not so tangible.  Legislating on what can and cannot be in a person’s head also brings constitutional and democratic concerns in and of itself.  The hard-won freedoms of the 1940s and 1994 in Germany and South Africa respectively centred on securing unregulated freedoms of speech and assembly for the citizenry, without fear of reprimand or incarceration.  Tony’s discussion underscores the difficulty in recasting people after decades of state sanctioned oppression.  Apartheid utilized a tactic employed by colonialism of divide and rule where certain groups were favoured and awarded privileges over others.  Whites were seated at the top of the hierarchy with ‘Indians’ and those termed as ‘coloured’ afforded slightly better freedoms than blacks (or Africans).  Due to this ranked societal structure those who were at the higher end of these former governmental preferences may still think the same about those which apartheid classified below them.  As Tony articulated this is not conducive to the unity needed to address the problems of today if there are still people who identify with what apartheid created.  An age old remedy for any form of grief whether it be coming to terms with the death of a loved one or the aftermath of a civil war is that ‘time heals all wounds.’ 

As South Africans celebrated their freedoms, a few borders away in the centre of the continent Rwandans fled in terror as almost a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered with machetes.  The Rwandan genocide was truly an epoch of the twentieth century and the repercussions required extremely delicate attention.  All official racial identifications between Tutsis and Hutus were abolished and quotas were installed in the parliament.  The makeup of the cabinet has to reflect the national makeup and the President, Prime Minister and the Speaker must originate from differing parties.  Some Rwandans say time has been a healer others will disagree.  What is clear is that South Africa must observe a fine balance between looking ahead whilst respecting its history and learning from it.