We, the dispossessed

 

Why bring your bulldozers to my home? In 1966 the apartheid government declared District Six in Cape Town to be a whites only area and began the process of demolishing it and moving the ‘non- white’ residents out of there to the Cape Flats, against ongoing protests. By 1982 some 60,000 people had been moved.  In the picture, residents try to clean up after the demolition. Now, these people and their descendants are lodging claims for what they lost

THERE was a reminder of apartheid’s madness on 11 February. Five hundred former residents and families of District Six in Cape Town – proclaimed a “whites only” area in 1966 and demolished according to the Group Areas Act – gathered at the Castle of Good Hope for a memorial.

It had been a vibrant, multicultural, multiracial community in the city centre where all sorts of people lived peacefully together until being forcibly relocated to places on the Cape Flats. By 1982, more than 60 000 people had been moved.

Another reminder of this country’s tortured history took place on Saturday, when President Cyril Ramaphosa handed over title deeds to the Griqua and Khoi communities of Ebenhaeser on the West Coast. Their century-old claim was the first to be finalised by the government after their removal from farms in the 1920s. The returned land will see local communities partnering with established commercial farmers in wine, livestock and game farming on 53 farms comprising 1 566 hectares of land.

The Land Claims Court dealt with the District Six claims. A total of 2 760 land claims from former residents were lodged and verified by 31 December 1998. Of these, 1 449 people opted for financial compensation while the rest opted to return to District Six. The situation ignited political wrangles, and there were other delays. But between 2004 and 2018, 139 housing units were built within the area for claimants.

These two instances are the tip of the iceberg of what needs to happen for this country to heal. Ramaphosa has cautioned whites, in measured tones, to stop frustrating land reform. However it’s often more perception than reality, since the court has dealt successfully with more claims than most people realise. Reportedly, between 1995 and 2014, 1.8 million people who applied for compensation received money. Out of 80 000 claims, about 77 000 cases were resolved.

Radical people are pushing Ramaphosa into more radical positions regarding land ownership for political expediency. Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema, and Black First Land First leader Andile Mngxitama have accumulated political ammunition, and pushed to enable expropriation without compensation, which would be a disaster for the country’s economy. But Malema’s appeal to young black people is obvious, through stories of grandparents and parents being thrown off their land, and left with nothing.

History cannot be undone, but the above gestures are important. The most dangerous time in a country’s life is when citizens are so confused that all they want is a strong leader to bring order. The trouble is, often the leader who arrives wants more than anything to be in charge, and becomes a dictator rather than a saviour.  Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, for example, to say nothing of Hitler. Ultimately, the land issue has to be faced with hard data, and it is up to the major political parties to convince the country of the hard data. District Six can be a touchstone.

GEOFF SIFRIN is a journalist in Johannesburg, South Africa, and former Editor of the SA Jewish Report. Email:  geoffs@icon.co.za 

Words we are not allowed to use: Who decides?

Crude words carry a price: Using the k-word in South Africa today to refer to black people can lead to legal action. In the picture, Vicki Momberg at her trial for abusing black policemen who tried to help her

WHAT SHOULD we do about the k-word? Flight crew evicted a woman from a flight about to take off from Johannesburg to Durban two weeks ago, after she used the word in an sms to refer to the black captain and passengers, and another passenger noticed it and complained to the crew. The woman, Alochna Moodley from Midrand, admitted it was wrong, but protested that the other passenger, Reverend Solumuzi Mabuza, invaded her privacy by reading her sms. She reportedly lost her job at her company as a result. Mabuza later said that although he forgave her after she made a public apology, he still planned to open a charge of crimen injuria (wilful injury) against her.

This follows another case when Vicki Momberg a white, former real estate agent was sentenced to an effective two years in prison for a racist tirade in 2016. She was found guilty of crimen injuria, after she had lashed out at a black police officer who helped her after a smash-and-grab incident in Johannesburg. In a video clip that went viral, she complained about the “calibre of blacks” in Johannesburg. She used the k-word 48 times. In sentencing her, the magistrate said the policemen who assisted her were in their uniform ready to serve, and Momberg’s slurs stripped them of their dignity. There was widespread public support for her sentencing.

The controversial word goes way back in South African history, and was once common among sections of the white population to refer to black people. To South African ears, it is profoundly insulting, implying that the person referred to is inferior, uncultured and subject to the power of the word’s user. Colonialism and apartheid’s cruel spirit embodied in a word.

It appears in important literature, for example through the mouth of a clearly racist Oom Schalk Lourens, a complicated character in a racial country created by one of the country’s admired writers, Herman Charles Bosman. Lourens says: “I could never understand why (G-d) made the ‘k’… and the rinderpest”

The k-word has a close cousin in the United States in the insulting n-word, which has long evoked emotional reactions. In February, two books regarded as literary classics – the Pulitzer-prize winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, depicting racial injustice in Alabama, and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain dealing with slavery in pre-Civil War America, which contains offensive language by racist characters – were removed from school syllabuses in Minnesota over fears their use of racial slurs would upset black students. Both books have been lauded over the years as anti-racist, although set in racially loaded contexts.

The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People supported the decision, saying the books use hurtful language “that has oppressed people over 200 years.” But free speech organisations criticised it, with the National Coalition Against Censorship saying rather than ignore difficult speech, educators should create spaces for dialogue to teach students to confront racism. It’s like banning Charles Dickens for portraying Fagin, the Jew.

The k-word and n-word have been red flags to a bull in South Africa and the United States. Now, in some quarters, including South Africa, a new word has been added: the z-word (Zionist), which has taken on almost as insulting a meaning when mouthed by virulently anti-Israel or anti-Semitic groups. How long will this list of no-nos become?

The South African Jewish Board of Deputies’ decision last week to lay criminal charges for hate speech against three men who posted violent Whatsapp messages against Zionists and Jews, saying the Holocaust will be a picnic compared to what they are going to do to them, will test free speech boundaries. Should those men be punished for hate speech, or are their utterances legitimate political discourse?

This country is early in the process of defining its red lines on speech. EFF leader Julius Malema, a firebrand political figure, uses militant racial statements against whites and Indians, such as accusations that “the majority of Indians are racists,” and barbs against other groups such as coloureds – should it be allowed? In many western countries, such utterances by a politician would end his political career. Crude words, when repeated often enough, tend to provoke violent actions by reckless people. Malema is a potential Mussolini-in-the-making, and dangerous.

The topic tends to become irrational. But confronting it is a necessary process in clarifying post-apartheid South Africa. Remember the reputed banning of the children’s novel Black Beauty during apartheid because censors didn’t want the words ‘black’ and ‘beauty’ on the same page? Some scholars refute this, but whatever the case, the last thing we need now is to go back to that crazy mindset.

GEOFF SIFRIN is a journalist in Johannesburg, South Africa, and former Editor of the SA Jewish Report. Email:  geoffs@icon.co.za 

 

 

Ways of seeing: you, me and them

Does the camera lie? One of the pictures taken by a photojournalist during the 1976 Soweto riots helped bring down apartheid. Today, with cameras in every cellphone, social media can send images, not always accurate, across the world instantly

SAM NZIMA died two days before last week’s killings along the Israel-Gaza border. He was the South African photojournalist for The World newspaper who took the picture during the 1976 Soweto riots of the bloody schoolchild Hector Peterson being carried in the arms of a frantic young boy after being shot by apartheid police. Most people don’t know Sam’s name. But by the next day the photo was splashed across the front pages of newspapers from New York to Moscow and is held worldwide as a symbol of the reality that was black peoples’ lives. It marked a turning point in the struggle.

Israel is not apartheid, nor are Palestinians black South Africans. But the pictures flashing around the world from the Gaza killings are seared into peoples’ minds as symbols of what happened. Israel looks as bad as apartheid – how many Hector Petersons were there that day?

After thousands of words have been written about historical events, it is often the photographs that most define their meaning. For example, the naked 9-year old Vietnamese girl running down a road in 1972 away from a napalm attack – known later as Napalm girl – which made Americans see the Vietnam War differently; the lone man – later called Tank Man – who stood in front of a column of Chinese army tanks in 1989, after the Chinese military had suppressed the Tiananmen Square protests; an unidentified man falling headfirst after jumping from the north tower of New York’s World Trade Center – later nicknamed Falling Man – in 2001 after Al Qaeda terrorists crashed aircraft into the building and destroyed it; the picture of the Jewish boy with a yellow star of David on his lapel, walking out of a building in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, hands in the air, surrounded by German soldiers with rifles, which became emblematic of the Holocaust.

Three Israeli pictures from May 14, when seen together, capture the crudeness of what happened that day: The first is a beaming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the new American embassy building in Jerusalem, with a Barbie-doll-like Ivanka Trump unveiling a plaque with her father’s name – US President Donald Trump – followed by the singing of “Hallelujah” by the right-wing politicians from both countries.

The second smiling image was when 50,000 Israelis congregated in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square to celebrate Israeli singer Netta Barzilai’s win at the Eurovision Song Contest, and hear her sing her song ‘Toy’ twice over.

The third, as if on another planet yet just an hour away, was the bloody confrontation between IDF soldiers and 40,000 Gaza Palestinians who were storming the border fence, resulting in 60 Palestinians killed and thousands injured. To viewers around the world, particularly South Africans, the melee looked like Soweto, June 1976 – stolid security forces facing frantic rioters. It wasn’t, but that’s the way it looked.

“What a glorious day. Remember this moment. This is history,” Netanyahu told the inauguration ceremony at the US embassy. The mixture of the three scenes will be viewed by future historians as so bizarre as to wonder if the facts are correct. Why was he smiling so cheerfully when the Gaza border was burning?

Images can be spread instantly worldwide these days via social media. But life is not made up only of images. Beneath, lies a reality. Gaza is a desperate place. Israel is not fully responsible for what is happening there. Hamas rules cruelly, and wanted the world to see Israelis killing Palestinians. It succeeded wildly.

Sam Nzima’s picture of Hector Peterson influenced millions. Last week’s pictures of Israel, looked at together, swayed millions against it. Can this negative tide be turned, for now and for history?

GEOFF SIFRIN is a journalist in Johannesburg, South Africa, and former Editor of the SA Jewish Report. Email:  geoffs@icon.co.za 

South Africa: Send me!

From a catastrophe to a new dawn? New SA president Cyril Ramaphosa has promised to end corruption, fix government, give jobs to the youth and a host of other remedies, after the disastrous nine years of the Zuma presidency. In the picture, then deputy president Ramaphosa went jogging on the Seapoint beachfront in Cape Town the dawn after Zuma resigned, with former finance minister Trevor Manuel, and met some of  his citizens.

FROM the perspective of their new lives in London, New York and other places to which South African ex-pats have fled over the decades during apartheid and after it, will the revived spirit of hope brought to South Africa by new President Cyril Ramaphosa inspire any of them to consider coming back?

South Africans overseas have often felt smug looking at the country’s decline during the catastrophe of former president Jacob Zuma, when it hurtled towards becoming yet another failed African state. They, after all, had been smart enough to leave and were far from Africa’s problems.

The huge emigration of many whites and others started during apartheid, particularly after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, continuing until Nelson Mandela’s release from jail and his ascendancy to the presidency. Amidst the euphoria, emigration slowed as South Africa seemed again a place with a future. There was talk of expats coming back.

This country’s story is about cycles of betrayal and hope, betrayal and hope, again and again. Can it now return to the spirit of hope?

Today the newspaper headlines on the street poles proclaim “goodbye Zuma” and “a new dawn begins.” Addressing the nation from parliament, Ramaphosa quoted from a song by legendary musician Hugh Masekela – known as the father of SA jazz – about everyone lending a hand.

Masekela’s life is a metaphor for this country. He left after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, helped by anti-apartheid activist Archbishop Trevor Huddleston and international friends such as Yehudi Menuhin and John Dankworth, going to the UK, then to the US.

He married another South African icon, jazz singer Miriam Makeba. Masekela wrote well-known anti-apartheid songs, such as Bring Him Back Home, about the movement to free Mandela. He returned to South Africa in the 1990s after Mandela’s release and continued to compose and perform locally and on the world stage. The muso, affectionately known as Bra Hugh, died last month. A line from one of his songs, Thuma Mina, goes: “I wanna be there when the people start to turn it around.” Indeed, he was.

There are not many Masekelas, and it is unlikely many SA expats will return, no matter how rosy the South African dawn sounds. They have put down roots elsewhere; their children were raised as Canadians, Americans or with other identities. And the changes in South Africa are not yet solid enough. Can Ramaphosa pull off this gigantic task of renewing the country? It is not yet certain.

One consequence of this past decade is that the ANC – Mandela’s glorious liberation movement turned government – has tainted itself by supporting Zuma. Its hands are dirty. Can Ramaphosa cleanse it? Whether he succeeds or not, the manner in which Zuma was sent off into the wilderness according to strict constitutional principles, shows South African democracy’s solidity.

Many expat South Africans look down their noses at this new multiparty African democracy from the comfort of their mature European and American democracies. But maturity is a relative thing. The parliament building in Cape Town from where Ramaphosa spoke so elegantly to the nation this week, is the same place in which the apartheid rulers formulated the brutal racial policies of their time, and also the place where Zuma sat as president while his cronies looted the country’s coffers. Has betrayal turned to trust again? Can expats in London see it or not?

Ramaphosa, when he was still deputy president, was jogging recently along the Seapoint beachfront in Cape Town with former finance minister Trevor Manuel, and encountered some young Jewish women also jogging. A warm, happy selfie of all of them is circulating. Hopefully it will also reach the expats in London. He’s going to need that warmth and trust from everyone if he’s going to untangle the mess of this country.

(GEOFF SIFRIN is a journalist in Johannesburg, South Africa, and former Editor of the SA Jewish Report. Email:  geoffs@icon.co.za )

Israel: Can the enemy of my enemy really be my friend?

A friend of convenience? South Africa’s prime minister John Vorster (second from right) is feted by Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin (right) and Menachem Begin (left) and Moshe Dayan during his 1976 visit to Jerusalem. Photograph: Sa’ar Ya’acov

THE current diplomatic flurry about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visiting numerous African countries all over the continent to strengthen or create ties has many positive angles, but also rattles skeletons in the closet, particularly for South African Jews.

Ties to the 48 states of sub-Saharan Africa have a complicated history with high-points and lows. Israel’s geostrategic interests have long been promoted there, especially in the Horn and East Africa. Training in intelligence and security has been given to countries such as Eritrea, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya, Equatorial Guinea, Togo, Nigeria and others.

What about South Africa? The strong Zionist links to Israel of the South African Jewish community is one aspect. But when older South African Jews think of Israel-SA ties, several uncomfortable affairs come to mind, particularly Israel’s strong military ties to the apartheid regime in the 1970s. A lot has happened since, and it is used today mainly to discredit contemporary Israel. But the notion of who we make friends with is important.

Israel openly criticised apartheid through the 1950s and 1960s, with the spectre of the Holocaust still in recent memory as a moral background. Alliances with post-colonial African governments were forged. Then came the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Under pressure from the Arab world, most African states severed Israeli links, helping to make it a “pariah state”.

Looking around for friends, Israel drew close to another pariah state, South Africa. In 1976 it even invited SA Prime Minister John Vorster – former Nazi sympathiser and leader of the fascist Ossewabrandwag that sided with Hitler – for a state visit. South African Jews were uncomfortable with the ironies, as Vorster visited Jerusalem’s Holocaust Memorial to the six million Jews killed by the Nazis. His visit produced an Israel-South Africa alliance which became a leading weapons developer locally and internationally.

Israel’s attitude was:  “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. They were both states driven by fear, seeing themselves in a struggle for their existence. In Israel until the late 1970s, the threat from its Arab neighbours was very real; the country had fought three wars to protect itself. White South Africans, meanwhile, watched with horror as colonial empires receded and black rule swept Africa. Scenes of whites fleeing Angola, Mozambique and (then) Rhodesia were used by the apartheid regime to terrify white citizens about black rule; phrases such as “swart gevaar” gained traction.

Today, South African Jews would like nothing more than for the SA government and the Israeli government to be on excellent terms. The countries do have formal diplomatic relations, including ambassadors, and below the surface there is much trade and other connections. But politically it remains a cold relationship, epitomised by calls from important ANC members to downgrade the links. The ANC’s criticism towards opposition leader Mmusi Maimane’s public visit to Israel earlier this year, ignoring President Jacob Zuma’s urging for South Africans not to visit there, shows how pervasive anti-Israel feelings still are.

Israel is strong today, no longer the pariah state it once was, even though it is portrayed that way in some places. Even BDS, the worldwide campaign to boycott it, has failed as an economic and diplomatic weapon. Israel’s gross domestic product of some $154 billion in 2006, when BDS began, has nearly doubled to $299 billion for 2015.

Israel still faces the eternal question of how political links should be used. Some of the African states that Netanyahu is courting use Israeli assistance to suppress democracy, engage in civil wars and perpetrate human rights violations. The dilemma about whether politics is only about “interests” or must also be driven by morality has no definitive answer. But it is given special fuel by the South African experience.

(GEOFF SIFRIN is a journalist in Johannesburg, South Africa, and former Editor of the SA Jewish Report. Email:  geoffs@icon.co.za )

 

Statues and heroes: the dangers of erasing too much

Would a man die for a flag? Symbols evoke rage and happiness. Should images of a bad past vanish when times change? America’s Confederate flag and South Africa’s old apartheid flag easily raise tensions

WITS University’s faculty members have been warned to prepare for trouble, as universities brace for protests against university fee hikes for 2018, amidst vehement demands for “decolonisation” in academia and abolition of symbols of the country’s racist past. 

Symbolism contains potent energies everywhere. Recent displays in alt-right marches in Charlottesville in the United States of swastikas and anti-Jewish and anti-black slogans, evoked calls for removing confederate statues across America for celebrating people who defended slavery.

What about statues of anti-Semites? An Israeli organisation on Tuesday demanded New York City remove memorials to Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch director-general of New Amsterdam (now New York), because of his anti-Semitism, saying he “targeted Jews and other minorities including Catholics” and tried prohibiting them from settling there. Yet New York has one of the largest, most successful Jewish communities in the world. Most Jews probably don’t even know of his attitudes and smoked the eponymous brand of cigarettes for years.

The potency of symbolism and stereotypes spills into literature and film. Should Shakespeare and Dickens be banned? Critics say the former’s portrayal of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice is anti-Semitic. And Dickens’ fictional character Fagin, portrayed as a Jew in his novel Oliver Twist, is described as a “receiver of stolen goods.” Fagin has evoked much debate. In an introduction to a 1981 reissue of Oliver Twist, writer Irving Howe said Fagin was considered an “archetypical” Jewish villain.

A theatre in Memphis, Tennessee recently stopped showing the movie Gone With the Wind for being “racially insensitive.” The 1939 classic which won eight Oscars, tells the story of a Georgia plantation owner’s daughter during and after the civil war, based on a Pulitzer prize-winning 1936 novel. Considered a great American work, it is criticised for romanticising slavery. Celebrated writers, Roald Dahl and Graham Greene have been similarly fingered.

In South Africa, myriad symbols of our unhappy past, including statues, street names, the old flag and parts of the national anthem, remain all around us. Four people were arrested last weekend for disturbances at a Cape Town pub after complaining about the old South African flag hanging on the wall, symbolising apartheid. Some people call for Die Stem, the apartheid-era national anthem, to be removed from the current multi-language national anthem.

The Voortrekker monument near Pretoria – now renamed Tshwane – remains intact, with its dramatic frescoes portraying heroic-looking Afrikaners seeking freedom from English domination, fighting off assegai-wielding black warriors defending their land. Any attempt to tamper with this potent symbol of Afrikaner history would provoke violence. However, there have been numerous name changes of streets and towns from apartheid leaders to anti-apartheid fighters, which have been well received. At Cape Town University, in contrast, removal of a statue of arch-colonialist Cecil John Rhodes provoked confrontations.

It is right for people to resist being bombarded with public symbols of oppression, particularly in public spaces. But what about private spaces? In the name of freedom of expression, should people be allowed to display whatever they want there? Such as a pub?

There are no easy answers. Where is the red line for “acceptable” content? Sanitising everything is dangerous – changing the past, rather than putting it into context. If we sanitise everything because of unsavoury aspects, we leech rich texture from history and culture, ending up with only the “party line” dictated by political correctness guardians.

Such was the Soviet Union. And in fascist societies, past and present, the only permitted symbols are those glorifying the regime and its leaders.

Politicians have a significant role to play. Exploiting symbols for populist, sinister goals is always tempting. For students, a university’s role is to teach them to discern the healthy red line. They battle amidst the tensions rampant in the country and the tricks of politicians.

(GEOFF SIFRIN is a journalist in Johannesburg, South Africa, and former Editor of the SA Jewish Report. Email:  geoffs@icon.co.za )

South Africa, be cautious when you romanticise the liberator

Heroes who liberate a country: Will they always do the right thing? Nelson Mandela allowed serious errors in SA’s new democratic constitution, says Madonsela

GIVEN former public protector Thuli Madonsela’s hero-status for exposing state capture under President Jacob Zuma’s government, and her determination to get South Africa back on track – to “re-anchor” it – it was interesting to hear her criticise the visionary who contributed more than anyone else in bringing about non-racial democracy – Nelson Mandela. Not for malice, but naiveté.

Addressing a conference in Sandton on Sunday, she said Mandela had erred by not sufficiently empowering the people in the new constitution adopted in 1996. Its framers gave excessive power to public officials and too little directly to the people. For this, the country had paid dearly as officials from the president down, ran amok with their power, with little regard for the law and the people.

South Africa is admired for adopting, after the first democratic election in 1994, one of the world’s most progressive constitutions. But, said Madonsela, the country believed naively at the time that because of this, and the fact that illustrious struggle heroes – such as Mandela – would occupy major power positions, the spirit and letter of the constitution would be rigorously implemented, creating a better country.

For example, economic growth and redistribution would be actively pursued – crucial to reducing inequality. But instead, misguided government policies with devious agendas and mismanagement, and state capture by powerful private interests, created almost no growth. Overall unemployment was around 30 per cent and youth unemployment 50 per cent, while billions of rands was illicitly laundered through Dubai by officials and private families – the Guptas, although she avoided naming them – with government connections. Some R240m of public funds was used to upgrade President Zuma’s private home.

Contrary to the constitution’s intentions, Zuma and his cronies have abused their powers, rather than being guardians of the people’s interests. Self-enriching guzzlers feeding at the public trough. In many cases, people have watched helplessly as the country slides downwards, while officials appointed by party bosses perform abysmally, yet can only be removed by voting the governing party out at the next election, which takes place every five years.

It is an oft-repeated historical theme that when liberation fighters defeat former despots, they often become as bad as them, while ordinary people remain poor and powerless. Apartheid itself was created by Afrikaners fighting for liberation from English dominance; they then went on to become harsh rulers in their own repressive regime. The rise and rise of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe is another case.

During the decades of apartheid rule, vibrant civil society organisations and individuals rose up to defeat the racial system. After 1996, however, in the euphoria of the new democracy, it was believed the constitution would ensure protection of people’s rights. In many cases the opposite has happened, because of despotic officials and the people’s insufficient say in how institutions and officials operate.

Speaking of her own office when she was public protector – one of several “Chapter Nine” institutions created by the constitution to protect democracy – her initial vision was to be the “voice of the people” to protect them from abuse by officials. But during her tenure, the concept changed to the public protector being more of an “enabler” for helping people speak with each other when necessary – ordinary people and officials.

One case where this had succeeded, she described, was where residents in a rural area who performed work for the government weren’t paid; instead of confronting the usual bureaucratic channels, she brought these people together in a room with officials familiar with the place the complainants came from, so they could explain the situation; the matter was settled.

The lesson of the crisis of South Africa today is to beware of romanticising liberation struggle heroes. Not to believe they are saints, incapable of erring. The chaos and corruption in the ANC – the once revered liberation movement – is enough proof. But even icons like Mandela should be treated with a healthy dollop of caution.

(GEOFF SIFRIN is a journalist in Johannesburg, South Africa, and former Editor of the SA Jewish Report. Email:  geoffs@icon.co.za )

Charlottesville and Joburg: The impact of a blunt instrument

What does it take to talk? Is it possible for the Ku Klux Klan to re-emerge as a force to silence all in their way? Can South Africans get past their racial history?

IT has seemingly again become a trend to stifle arguments with blunt instruments. It might appear to be stretching a point to contrast recent horrific events in Charlottesville, Virginia in the United States, with post-apartheid South African discourse. But as our world increasingly sinks into hatred and intolerance, driven by populist leaders who care only for themselves, trends stand out which are weakening the post-Second World War ideal that people of different cultures and creeds can respect one another, and talk together.

Last year’s election of the lying, tweeting Donald Trump as United States President, with his contempt for ‘the Other’ – Mexicans, refugees and so on – epitomises this. His reaction on Sunday to violent demonstrations by alt-right, anti-Semitic hooligans in Charlottesville, in which a woman demonstrating for peace was killed by a car driven headlong into the crowd by a militant racist – a blunt instrument – confirmed it; he refused to immediately condemn the alt-right, since they were part of the constituency which elected him.

Turning to South Africa: Despite its history and political travails, and the damage President Zuma inflicts, this country is doing relatively well in inter-group tolerance. Remnants of Mandela’s dream remain, even if somewhat sullied. But an illustrative incident occurred at a Jewish-organised Limmud conference session last week in Johannesburg when a young black woman on a panel declared to the audience of mainly white Jews that she was going to be “brave”, and then pronounced vociferously: “There is no rainbow nation!” All whites were inherently guilty, and blacks had to separately re-examine their attitudes towards whites. The session’s topic was “The Tarnished Rainbow: South Africa in 2017”.

Audience members were angered by her bluntly lumping all whites together. In the auditorium were white veteran political activists, participants in projects of cultural engagement, helping the marginalised and poor, and so on. One white person countered her by saying her generation of young blacks had scant personal experience or knowledge of the role some whites played in demolishing apartheid, and their sacrifices.

Then a youngish white man spoke up, saying he agreed the country had racial demons to overcome because of its history. He then said politely but pointedly: “I am white and doing my best. What else do you want me to do now? Will it help, or atone for white sins during colonialism and apartheid, if I give away all the money in my bank account, give up my job and car, and go and sweep the streets?”

The audience waited for some constructive response. Instead, she angrily retorted that his very question exposed his racism, because he seemed to believe black people just “sweep the streets.” A ripple of annoyance ran through the audience. One white woman muttered that the country’s black middle class numbered 6 million today, larger than the white one.

But the interaction showed something important. This young panellist’s ignorance and anger notwithstanding, many South Africans are trying to talk to each other. Indeed, she herself had come to the Limmud forum, to challenge a white audience and be challenged.

Turning back to the thugs in Charlottesville, Virginia, it seems incredible that after all the years since World War Two and the Holocaust, people still needed to protest against unmitigated Nazism from closed-minded people with no desire or willingness to talk. People who carried flags with large swastikas on them. At a Ku Klux Klan rally in Charlottesville on July 8, a sign held by a white-hooded participant read: “Jews are Satan’s children… Talmud is a child molester’s bible.”

Despite how much anger there is in South African society, a sign like that would not be permitted.

It would be naive, of course, to think that all is perfect – far from it. There is as much to worry about in South Africa as anywhere else. But perhaps Donald Trump’s American South can learn something from this country about how people still manage to talk today, even across chasms.

(GEOFF SIFRIN is a journalist in Johannesburg, South Africa, and former Editor of the SA Jewish Report. Email:  geoffs@icon.co.za )

 

South Africa’s solution is “Blowin’ in the Wind”

 

Does Bob Dylan resonate for turbulent South Africa? His poetry which won him a Nobel Prize matches apartheid liberation songs, and echoes the rage of today’s young generation. (Photo: Kevin Mazur)

A STIRRING consequence of Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for literature is the reminder that turbulent times may produce great poets who express rage and dreams so lyrically that they lift the soul, as Dylan did with his words and music.

It was equally true during South Africa’s struggle against apartheid, when liberation songs with potent words and melodies gave people the strength to carry on. A collection of dozens of these freedom songs was beautifully captured in the 2002 documentary film Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, winner of the Audience Award and the Freedom of Expression Award at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival. It features original recordings and new live performances by trumpeter Hugh Masakela, singer Miriam Makeba, pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, guitarist Vusi Mahlasela, and others.

When Nelson Mandela died, masses of people gathered outside his home in Houghton, Johannesburg, and rather than standing mournfully on the pavement, sang praise songs and danced in the street to celebrate his life, despite their feelings of loss. It was a natural expression.

The contemporary political chaos in South Africa has not produced its own “Dylan” yet, but interspersed among the people protesting the situation are poets and balladeers who we will hear more of in the future.

In Dylan’s heyday in the 1960s and 70s, students and hippies promoted free love, slammed the establishment, protested against the older generation’s wars and hypocrisy, smoked marijuana and used LSD to get high. And they saw themselves as the vanguard of a better world. South African students protesting countrywide today for free higher education and a better South Africa are not always clear in their goals, partly because they are young and unformed – like the American students of the 1960s were – but are acting on instincts echoing Dylan’s song: “The Times they are a-Changing”.

The naivety of some members of the “Fallist” student movement – a general term for those fighting for fees to fall and education to be “decolonised” –  is epitomised by a video clip posted on YouTube last week which by Monday had garnered 430 000 hits. In it, an impassioned black student tells the University of Cape Town science faculty that it should “decolonise” science by doing away with it entirely and “starting all over again”.

Science is a product of western modernity and should be scrapped, “especially in Africa” she said. She cited a place in KZN called Umhlab’uyalingana where they believe that through magic “…you are able to send lightning to strike someone.” Scientific explanations don’t work, she says, “because it’s something that happens.”

Laughs aside, what is happening among the youth has a very serious angle. Despite their often misdirected energies, violence, and attempts to force universities to suspend academic programmes, this born-free generation sees historical wrongs done to blacks through white supremacy and colonialism, and want to rectify them. They are challenging the status quo of blacks’ economic exclusion and cultural oppression by “western colonialists”. These are noble goals, even if understood too simplistically by many in this complicated country with its huge social challenges.

Dylan rose from the crucible of angry American students. Now 75, he was raised in a Jewish community in the state of Minnesota, attended Zionist camps in Wisconsin, became a born-again Christian in the 1970s, and returned to his Jewish roots in the ’80s. He held his eldest son Jesse’s barmitzvah at Jerusalem’s Western Wall in 1983. In later decades he participated in holiday services at Chabad synagogues.

It is an understatement to say we live in crazy times worldwide, epitomized by the buffoon Donald Trump coming close to being the president of the world’s most powerful country, and South Africa reeling under its local version of Trump in President Jacob Zuma.

Many South African students have never even heard of Bob Dylan, and would instinctively regard him as a western colonial import. But his iconic songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Masters of War” apply in this country as much as they did in his 1970s America.

Dylan’s young generation didn’t succeed in changing the world – the success of today’s Trumps and Zumas testify to that. But he held up a searing mirror to society. South African students, with their often-irrational fury, are now doing the same.

(Geoff Sifrin is a journalist based in Johannesburg, South Africa, and former Editor of the SA Jewish Report. Email: geoffs@icon.co.za)

Can Israel-Palestine beat half century peace deadline, as SA did?

Tears for the enemy? Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas seems to be holding back tears at the funeral of former Israeli president Shimon Peres, September 30, 2016. Photo i24news

WHEN a senior Johannesburg rabbi this week eulogised the late former Israeli president Shimon Peres for successfully mediating in his lifetime between the opposite poles of political realism involving military force, and resolute belief in the possibility of Israeli-Palestinian peace, he remarked that it is now 40 years since the 1976 Entebbe raid where Israeli commandos flew 4000 km to rescue Israeli hostages at Uganda’s airport.

They were being held there by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which had hijacked an airliner bound for Paris and diverted it to Entebbe. Peres played an important role behind the scenes in approving the commando raid, which some army people thought was so risky that it was doomed to end catastrophically.

But this only gives a tiny glimpse into the anguished history of that region. Indeed, Israel and Palestine – just like historical South Africa – have been in a desperate quest for peace for many decades.

Numerous religious leaders from different faiths in South Africa have taken sides over the years on the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum. Archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu, for example, has been harshly critical of Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians. Other Christian leaders such as Rev Kenneth Meshoe, leader of the African Christian Democratic Party, defend Israel vigorously, saying its security needs have left it no choice but to maintain control over the Palestinian territories. Muslim clerics for the most part support the Palestinian viewpoint.

The rabbi’s comments came during his sermon at a large Johannesburg synagogue for the Jewish New Year, which is traditionally seen as a time of taking stock and making new beginnings.

It is an astonishing fact that in nine months’ time it will be 50 years – half a century! – that Israelis and Palestinians have existed in an occupier/occupied relationship in the West Bank and Gaza. Several generations of Palestinians and Israelis have lived their entire lives in this reality, for which both sides are blameable, each pointing the finger at the other. Ending this deadlock with an independent Palestinian state living in peace alongside Israel is a dream Peres – who died last month – did not see fulfilled, despite tireless engagement with leaders in the conflict including Israelis, Palestinians, Americans, Arabs and others. One notable person at his funeral was Palestinian president, Mahmud Abbas, who was criticised by other Palestinian leaders for being there.

In the 1967 Six Day War Jewish volunteers from all over the world – including South Africa – flocked to Israel to help defeat the combined Arab countries’ attempt to destroy it. The war, which Israel won in six days, resulted in Israel taking over the West Bank and Gaza from Jordanian and Egyptian control respectively, and holding onto them for its security needs. Later, Jewish settlements proliferated there, making a complicated situation even more complicated.

What Israel and these idealistic Diaspora Jewish volunteers never envisaged is that 50 years after that war, there would still be no genuine peace with the Palestinians and Arab world. Even Egypt, after nearly four decades of formal peace, still harbours in its society a deep hatred for Israel.

In 2003 Peres told a Jewish audience at Johannesburg’s Linder Auditorium that when he was younger, he used to believe Israel would end its problems with the Palestinians and Arab world long before South Africa solved its problems – that the South African situation under apartheid was so intractable, it could only result in an extended racial bloodbath into the foreseeable future.

Contrary to his view, South Africa is now a stable democracy, notwithstanding rumblings making it wobble ominously from time to time. Despite the ineptitude and corruption characterising its first two decades of democracy, basic democratic institutions are intact, such as an independent judiciary and free press. Student protests currently taking place at universities for fee-free higher education are expressions of these democratic liberties, even if disturbing, violent excesses sometimes occur from both sides, including students and law enforcement agencies.

Yet the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rages on, with peace-dreamers seeming like Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill which always falls down again. Most countries and people, including the majority of Israelis and Jews worldwide, accept that the only viable answer is the two-state solution. This includes South Africa, which maintains full diplomatic relations with Israel and cooperation with its ambassador, as well as welcoming a Palestinian ambassador.

Going back to the rabbi’s New Year message of hope: Is it possible that before reaching a full half-century of deadlock over control of the Palestinian territories there can be a turn towards a new reality? That rabbis will be able to celebrate not only “miraculous” events like the Six Day War victory and the Entebbe rescue, but also an end to the corrosive yoke both sides carry by being occupier and occupied?

Given current world events, it is clear progress does not depend only on Israelis and Palestinians. The Syrian mayhem, rise of ISIS-inspired terrorism, the buffoon Donald Trump potentially becoming leader of the world’s most powerful nation, and other bizarre developments are just some.

But if religious leaders can influence the goals their followers strive for, Israeli-Palestinian peace before the half-century is reached would be a worthy one.

(Geoff Sifrin is a journalist based in Johannesburg, South Africa, and former Editor of the SA Jewish Report. Email: geoffs@icon.co.za)