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Apparently, we are on the verge of a civil war, if the reactive types are anything to go by. It’s confusing because Syria is having a civil war, so in our situation, who is Isis? If anything is going to drive South Africans to a night of bloody murder, it’s telesales people cold calling to sell mobile phone contracts.
Things are definitely going to change though – duh! The demonisation of the idea of change is part of the language of racism. Think how cranky you get when a friend won’t leave after a dinner party. Imagine 350 years after someone invited themselves over and they were still plonking around redecorating your lounge. I’ve seen white people get pissed that the queue at Woolworths is too long. Hell, I’m one of them, with my puppet groceries. If the Woolworths queue is too much, imagine how we’d be moaning if we’d been given passbooks? Entitlement, it’s a thing.
This race war rhetoric is basically structural racism in disguise. If we were being historically honest, the race war started in 1652 and has been sustained against black bodies consistently since. How the hell do we expect black people not to be angry? It’s like we’re farting and then complaining about the smell.
White South Africans struggle to wait for a pothole to be fixed, according to talk radio. Imagine the pothole was your entire life: “We are experiencing high call volumes. Please wait until your children’s children’s generation until we fix it.”
The problem is that the entire lexicon of thought around how we identify ourselves in the “New South Africa” has been about protecting white feelings at the expense of black people. We are like some overly coddled Teletubbies who have just realised (some still haven’t) that everyone else has been living in a Mad Max movie to our benefit, and would really appreciate it if they would quieten down. It’s ruining our privilege buzz.
Yes, I know the ANC has had many huge failings since it took power, but the simple fact is that we negotiated a deal that has protected us at every turn. Outside of its undoubtedly positive attributes, our Constitution is basically apartheid’s antenuptial contract, its ANC. It let us keep the loot. If we are going to have equal relations with our black compatriots, we need to drop the emotional and economic manipulation.
Black South Africans owe us absolutely nothing, and lecturing them about diversity and rainbows is some A-grade claptrap. Yes, I know we have read about white people, blah, blah, blah, to death. The fastest way to resolve that is to deal with the fact that we are in many ways the Oscar Pistoriuses of history, and fix it.
@chestermissing is an award-winning, double International Emmy-nominated puppet associated with ventriloquist @conradkoch
