Rhoda Kadalie
13 March 2008
opinion
Johannesburg — SA IS the country of double standards. It charges Jacob Zuma but protects Interpol chief Jackie Selebi; some criminals get off lightly while others rot in jail; it condemns Israel but supports the tyranny of Robert Mugabe; it opposes United Nations Security Council resolutions on Darfur and Burma but waxes lyrical about Bush's war in Iraq. This hypocrisy , I fear, has filtered down into the body politic of South African society and poisoned the wells of goodwill ushered in in 1994.
The video saga at the University of the Free State epitomises much of what is dangerous about these double standards. Four students are responsible for a video that is reprehensible, but the whole of white SA, and the Free State University in particular, gets daubed as racist. White journalists and columnists go haywire, beating their breasts, shouting "O mea maxima culpa"; billboards shout "racist campus", "racist residence", etc, and we forget that sexual violence and rape are prevalent and covered up on so many campuses. Ask me, I know about sexual violations at so-called progressive universities, where student leaders were involved in the sexual harassment and rape of fellow students. These campuses were not billed as "campuses of rape", and whole campuses are not painted with the same brush because of those who routinely perpetrate such acts of violence against female students at only one.
Equally, at many predominantly black universities, racial segregation at residences is the order of the day, but nobody speaks about that because it is assumed here that freedom of association is a right . Do you remember the coloured man who moved into Khayelitsha and was hounded out by blacks for daring to go and live in a black area? And how many hundreds of Somalis in Western Cape have been killed by other black people for simply being successful business people? Where are the headlines about this? Where is the Human Rights Commission when it comes to taking up these plights? It shouts sanctimoniously from the rooftops that whites should apologise for apartheid 14 years into our democracy, as though this video has once again given it a reason for existing.
Are these things happening perhaps because the commission has fundamentally failed in one of its key missions, to protect and promote human rights in SA and educate members of the public about it?
Remember the Native Club and all the lofty justification for setting up a race-based club. It was nothing but a safe space for black intellectuals to deal with their collective "woundedness". And so the Forum of Black Journalists follows suit, meeting African National Congress president Jacob Zuma behind closed doors. That black journalists even respond to such an invitation confirms my worst suspicions that, like politicians, they are prepared to defy their own ethics when power is paraded before them. Many, of course, get noticed not so much by their high standards of journalism, as by the enormous racial chips they have on their shoulders.
Notwithstanding the columns by Sipho Seepe and Steven Friedman on this page this week, arguing that racism indeed warrants attention, it is an indictment on this government and all its institutions that should be building democracy that such racial incidents still occur in this country. And the only time the Human Rights Commission seems to find its raison d'etre is when racism rears its ugly head. Remember the gusto with which then commission chairman Barney Pityana took on Judge Dennis Davis and those guilt-ridden editors who actually gave evidence before the commission's hearings into subliminal racism in the media, when in fact they should have boycotted it.
It is this cowardice laced with white guilt and black triumphalism that perpetuates apartheid and inspires universities and the high priests of political correctness to condemn this video, but not acts of murderous racism such as the gruesome farm murders and the killing of Somalis, for example.
Kadalie is a human rights activist based in Cape Town.
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