A chilling lesson from America’s dark symbol

It took  the cold-blooded murder of nine upstanding Christians by a hate-filled racist dressed in the Confederate flag to galvanise America into beginning to get rid of this old emblem of slavery.

As momentum gathered across the US this week for all such symbols to be moved  from the public sphere, the South Carolina legislature voted to remove the flag from its State House.

Meanwhile retailers in virtually every industry – including the auto and movie business – scrambled to get it out of their stores, off their merchandise, internet sites and screens.

In calling for the flag’s removal governor Nikki Haley said that while for some, it represented the past, the flag certainly did not represent the future for the whole state. It would henceforth be replaced by the American flag - the star-spangled banner.

Now, even rightwing presidential hopefuls are lining up behind Haley with Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush pointing to his decision to remove the divisive flag when he was governor of Florida.

For South Africans the lesson from the Charleston massacre should be clear – symbols matter.

That is why statues are the first thing to go whenever there is an overthrow of a government. This is often followed by changes of cities and street names.

The Russians for example, brought down the statues of Lenin and Stalin, and changed the cities named after them to St Petersburg and Volgograd, respectively. I don’t remember anyone in South Africa complaining when that happened.

I also have no recollection of any protestations about the sanctity of history when Saddam Hussein’s statue came crashing down. If anything I remember a great deal of celebration among the chattering classes as one tyrant fell after the other.

This begs the question:  if we agree that colonialism and apartheid were crimes against humanity – just as Nazism and Stalinism were – then why  is there so much defence of statues of people who did terrible things in this country in the name of white supremacy?  Surely, the answer cannot be that they developed South Africa.

Some said Cecil John Rhodes’s should have been kept because he built the University of Cape Town and endowed the Rhodes Scholarship for whites. But he also killed and maimed people, dispossessed them of their lands, deprived them of decent education and laid the basis for segregation and apartheid.

Rhodes is thus condemned for his evil deeds and not celebrated for the good he did for his own kith and kin. Similarly, Russians do not celebrate Stalin for industrialising the Soviet Union. They  condemn him for killing 20 million people.

Shakespeare’s Mark Antony might as well have been describing our times when he said “the evil that men do lives after them”.

But I still have not answered why white South Africans would defend colonial and apartheid symbols when they are ready to condemn those of Hitler, Lenin, Stalin and Hussein.

The answer is two-fold, and can also help us understand the controversy over the Confederate flag in the United States.

First, whether symbols come or go is a reflection of the balance of power in any given country. In all the countries I have mentioned there was an overthrow of an existing regime. In South Africa there was no such thing – not politically, not economically, not culturally and not intellectually. The same goes for the American south.

The Confederate flag has stayed on as a symbol of those American states that went to war to keep slavery because even though the south lost the battle against slavery, it was able to keep the same subjugation of African-Americans going for decades. In fact, the Confederate flag was hoisted atop the State House in South Carolina as a symbol of white supremacist resistance to the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

So power has everything to do with whether symbols come or go, or are seen as legitimate or not.

The irony in South Africa is that nobody really opposed pulling down the old South African flag, and that was because the Afrikaners were on the back foot, politically speaking. The English on the other hand  have always been as powerful as ever, and no more evident was this than in the opposition to the removal of the statue of the greatest colonialists of all, Rhodes.

The second answer to the hypocrisy of celebrating the falling down of Lenin, Stalin and Saddam Hussein while resisting that of Rhodes is sheer human subjectivity.

The Confederate  flag stayed atop the State House all these decades because the majority of white South Carolinians said it represented their past, despite the pain that the past had caused black people.

This led the distinguished African American scholar Cornel West  to argue that if the Confederate flag was the only heritage these people could lay a claim to, then it was perhaps time to start looking for a new  heritage.

What is most tragic about Charleston is that it had to take this violent loss of life for people to come to their senses.

I  have been called an alarmist whenever I have raised the spectre of such a dreadful occurrence in South Africa.  But the fact  is that we do not know what evil lurks in the hearts of men. Whites who are resentful of the changes of the past 20 years could easily resort to such violence, and so could blacks who are angry about the lack of change in their lives.

To the extent that racism still haunts this country, it is imperative for good men and women – black and white – to come together around an anti-racist platform in this country. But that cannot even begin to happen if there are too many white people clinging to symbols of colonialism and apartheid in the name of heritage.

It is time to find or define a new heritage for the white children who never had anything to do with apartheid. But this cannot be done by bequeathing to them the heritage of colonialism and apartheid. All that does is to indoctrinate them in the ways of their parents. The time has come to break the cycle of inter-generational racism in this country if we are to avoid our own Charlestons.

It has taken the #Rhodes Must Fall campaign and other student movements around the country to do something about this void - not only in our history but in the lives of our young people. So effective has this movement been that it had led to similar  “flag must fall” movements in the United States.

But now that Rhodes has fallen and the Confederate flag is about to fall, do we have the leadership to create what Benedict Anders defines as the imagined community?

No, all we have are individuals who wake up every day with nothing else in their minds except how to line up their pockets with government money that day. That is when you know that, in the words of one character  in  Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things, “our minds have been invaded by a war. A war we have won and lost.  The very worst sort of war.  A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.”

The worst thing about such conquest, the character goes on to say, is the inability to retrace one’s footprints because they have been swept away. Such a people can only be disoriented and aimless. Such is our tragedy.

And it’s not that I am asking for Herculean leadership.  For example, I have, over the past 21 years, been asking the ANC government in the Eastern Cape why it has seen nothing wrong with the statue of Queen Victoria in the centre of King William’s Town, surrounded by the very same cannons that were used to colonise black people.  In East London Steve Biko stands like a supporting cast to a white soldier who stands over him as a symbol of conquest, and nobody seems to see anything wrong with that?

All  I am asking is for a government to protect the graves of SEK Mqhayi, Walter Rubusana, John Tengo Jabavu, DDT Jabavu,  etc. How difficult can that be?  Only a self-hating people disregard their founders. But let me not get started here, except to say that nature loves a vacuum. In the absence of leadership, colonial history and symbols fills the void.

The anti-racist social movements emerging around the world- from Black Lives Matter in the United States to Rhodes Must Fall and similar movements- are calling a time-out on the denialism on the part of many whites and the lack of consciousness on those who dress themselves up as leaders.

Charleston has led to some soul-searching in the United States.  But we really don’t need tragedy to come to our senses, let alone elect leaders who care more about us than their pockets.

Xolela Mangcu  is an associate professor in the department of sociology at the University of Cape Town