Dangers in transformation

by Editor · August 24, 2005

In the dark days of apartheid, the Catholic bishops shone a light of hope in the fight against institutionalised racism.

Driven by people of social justice such as Archbishop Denis Hurley, the Catholic Church was the first denomination to denounce apartheid as “blasphemous” and “intrinsically evil”.

Two and a half decades later, in the mid-1970s, Catholic schools smashed racial segregation in education. This groundbreaking subversion of apartheid was led by religious sisters with the backing of South Africa’s bishops.

Since the welcome demise of apartheid more than a decade ago, the local bishops have frequently made it a point to promote racial and ethnic harmony, as outlined in their 1989 pastoral plan.

Sometimes they have had to step on toes in doing so. In a 2003 pastoral letter, they took white and implicitly coloured and Indian South Africans to task for failing to cross cultural boundaries even in their Church.

As we reported last week, the bishops have now warned that some South Africans are becoming increasingly alienated in the post-apartheid society. In a statement issued after their plenary session in Mariannhill earlier this month, the bishops cited “a groundswell of discontent that has been building up in the coloured community, especially in the Western and Eastern Cape,” over their perceived exclusion from the transformation process.

The bishops said this perceived discrimination concerned in particular the allocation of housing and employment opportunities.

Such perceptions of inequity have not been helped by the comments of Blackman Ngoro, the now dismissed press officer for Cape Town’s mayor Nomaindia Mfeketo, who described coloureds as culturally inferior to Africans and portrayed this very diverse group wholesale as “drunkards”.

Mr Ngoro was disciplined by the mayor’s office (whose outrage at these inflammatory and ignorant remarks was initially merely muted) only after strong pressure from the local press. Mr Ngoro continues to stand by his intolerable remarks.

The bishops rightly warn that such hate speech could “ignite serious racial tension” and undermine “the generally good relations between and among the different racial, language and cultural groups in the country.”

Indeed, any assertion of racial superiority cannot be allowed a place in a post-apartheid society.

Many coloured and Indian South Africans point out that their discrimination under apartheid is often ignored or glossed over. An equitable process of social transformation should not exclude these sections of South Africa’s society.

The bishops condemned “racism in whatever shape or form”. Presumably many white South Africans will wonder whether perceived discrimination against them, especially in the job market, does not also constitute a form of racism.

Whatever euphemisms prospective employers or human resource agents may attach to job advertisements, many are conspicuously excluding potentially qualified applicants on account of their race.

While it is right that the pernicious social engineering of apartheid should be redressed with determination, applying methods which evoke the spectre of that malignant system is not helpful in obliterating the disease of racism in our society.

At the same time, white South Africans must accept the central objectives of the transformation process, not reject it.

The question should not be whether transformation is necessary – it clearly is – but by what means it can be best accomplished.

Maintaining practices that may be seen to tolerate racial discrimination will not achieve the social equilibrium necessary for harmonious coexistence.