24 October 2004
editorial
Johannesburg — PRESIDENT Thabo Mbeki chose in Parliament this week to restate his rage at those in our country whose minds, he said, had been corrupted by the disease of racism.
Instead of responding to a question about the role of rape in the spread of HIV/Aids, he accused the new Democratic Alliance MP who posed it, Ryan Coetzee, of dangerously pretending that racism had died in 1994.
This has been a regular and largely appropriate theme of the President's writings and speeches throughout the past decade of democracy, but as his anger rises, he is slipping into hyperbole that appears to impute the ugly ideas he decries to white people as a class.
He described racists as those who "accuse us, the black people of South Africa, Africa and the world, of being, by virtue of our Africanness and skin colour, lazy, liars, foul-smelling, diseased, corrupt, violent, amoral, sexually depraved, animalistic, savage - and rapists".
For a man who claims membership of the African intelligentsia, that is a crass representation of the challenge we face as a nation seeking redemption after a history of unspeakable bigotry.
Worse was the quotation, which he repeated in full at the end of his answer, from an article written by an African-American about the perception in the US of African-Americans as "rampant sexual beasts unable to control our urges, unable to keep our legs crossed, unable to keep it in our pants".
This was unpresidential language which demeaned the debate about racism to an extent that left many listeners embarrassed, not for the racists, but for the President, who had been provoked by a junior MP into making this unseemly outburst.
White South Africa has, as Mbeki charges, sought to put the issue of racism out of sight and out of mind. He is right that whites have refused to confront the remnants of the ideology that allowed them to claim the right to rule for so long.
In this myopia lies one of the greatest threats to South Africa's long-term success.
Like HIV/Aids, about which the President was asked but refused to speak, it needs to be forced into the open, acknowledged, analysed and eradicated.
Mbeki is right to keep exposing this cancer publicly until whites begin to talk about it in much the same way that society demands open discussion about Aids.
But the nature of the racism that threatens South Africa is more subtle than the vile prejudice the President
describes. If his characterisation fits any of our countrymen, they are so few as to be socially and statistically insignificant.
The President should lead the nation into debate about racism and not polarise the issue with unpresidential venom.
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