“I have clean hands!” exclaimed the human rights commissioner, loud enough so everyone at the table could hear she was untainted by our racist past.
I remember feeling a mix of amusement and astonishment – how could anyone who lived on both sides of 1994 claim to have been unaffected by our oppressive history?
The occasion was the final stages of the reconciliation and reparation sessions between four white male students who humiliated five black workers on Free State University campus in 2008.
When I joined the university more than a year later it was clear to me that the problem of racism was not, as my white colleagues insisted, “four bad apples” but an institution that through its history and value system had made racist behaviour normative.
As the four boys asked the workers for forgiveness and they responded with instant love and generosity – “of course, we forgive you” – many of us at the table choked with emotion. It was then I ventured we all have dirty hands, troubled by our divided past; to which the human rights colleague responded with the “clean hands” exclamation.
Unless you were born and grew up on Mars, all South Africans are tainted by that horrible past. In the hierarchy of races, classes and ethnicities that colonialism and apartheid created and reinforced, you were taught to look down on someone else. Skin mattered, hair, language and accent mattered, as did place of residence, schools attended, heritage and culture.
There were people who rushed to be reclassified “upwards” to be reconciled with families separated by the Population Registration Act of the 1950s but others did so simply to enjoy the status and privilege of the higher castes.
Who are we fooling? English whites looked down on Afrikaners who returned the favour to this day; they were called two different races over a century ago, and they hated each other.
There are coloured people who still look down on Africans and Indians who think they are a notch above coloureds and Africans. There were, and still are, Africans who, dominant in numbers, see themselves as superior to other ethnic groups.
And we are now in a time of reverse resentments. Those once at the bottom of racial (but also class and ethnic) hierarchies are resenting the relative power and privileges of those once above them.
Now all you need is a racial populist politician to stoke these resentments and lead us down a path of mutual self-destruction as a nation.
In this flammable context, an individual is enough to explain the group – as in the case of Alochna Moodley, the young woman on a flight from Joburg to Durban who sent a text referring to the black captain by the dreaded k-word.
The black man next to her saw the racist text and she was promptly ejected from the plane. She blamed her education: “My school curriculum did not teach me of the atrocities of apartheid. Any mention of it was in passing without the details of the oppression, especially of black people in this country.”
This is nonsense. She learnt to hate from many other agencies of socialisation including families, friends and, yes, even teachers and other influential adults in her life. To reduce her disgraceful conduct to content missing from the school curriculum is silly.
The curriculum, said one of my favourite thinkers, is the story we tell our children about the past. We can tell stories that divide our people into convenient camps of good and evil.
We can ignore the sell-outs from the black community who propped up the homelands system and tri-cameral parliament, thereby sustaining the myth that all black South Africans were anti-apartheid.
And we can ignore the fact that many Indians, coloureds, Africans and whites stood in solidarity against racial oppression and economic exploitation of blacks over more than a century.
Racial scapegoating by groups such as the EFF and race victimhood by Afriforum is extremely dangerous in seeking political attention in a highly flammable society.
We must, of course, give an account of racial power and privilege and how it shapes the present; but we must also tell stories about interracial solidarity including those who paid the ultimate price for our freedom – such as Neil Aggett, Dulcie September, Jeanette Schoon and Sadhan Naidoo...