Getting over the past

Even after 18 years of democracy, issues of race continue to dominate our public discourse – and that can be healthy, provided it aims at redressing the injustices of the past and eliminating bigotry and resentment.

We are, as recent events have shown, far from meeting the latter objective.

Former President FW de Klerk, whose courage paved the way for a peaceful end to apartheid, made worldwide headline news this month when in an interview with cable news channel CNN he repudiated apartheid as “morally unjustifiable”, but, crucially, “in a qualified way”.

As a minister in the apartheid cabinet under PW Botha from 1978-89, Mr de Klerk had a reputation as a conservative, a verkrampte advocate of apartheid, at least until the mid-1980s, by his own count.

It does not diminish Mr de Klerk’s profound contribution to ask just what had taken him so long to find his moral compass. He has yet to acknowledge, without qualification, his role in facilitating and fostering a system which the Catholic Church, and other religious bodies, held to be “intrinsically evil” and blasphemous.

Mr de Klerk’s evasion from fully assuming a personal responsibility is symptomatic of a general attitude among many of those who benefited from apartheid. They might acknowledge that apartheid was “bad”, but promptly propose that bygones ought to be bygones, suggesting that it is time to move on and the past be forgotten – even as the dismal effects of that past are everywhere to remind us of the grave injustices that were systematically visited upon the majority for many generations.

It is exactly that casual approach of dealing with the past which represents an obstacle on the way to true reconciliation. White South Africans remain, by and large, reluctant to fully recognise that the policies which were implemented in their name – with the sustained and explicit consent of a significant majority – caused incalculable privations which continue to afflict most of the nation even today.

This is not a question of issuing endless apologies, but one of developing a collective consciousness which unconditionally accepts the past with a sense of awareness and unqualified contrition.

A lesson in this can be learnt from the experience of West Germans who had to come to terms with their nation’s responsibility for the Holocaust.

It took more than three decades before West German society openly and expansively dealt with that terrible chapter in its history, a process Germans call Vergangenheitsbewältigung (meaning “coming to terms with the past”). It affected not only those who were in some way complicit in the Holocaust, but even those born many years afterwards.

Germans now have a collective understanding that, as a nation, they owe a moral debt to Jews. It does not preclude criticism of, for example, Israel’s policies, but it involves a consciousness that German history is tainted by the Holocaust, and that Germany bears a historical burden.

Of course, South Africans will not be able to come to terms with the past when the K-word still has social currency.

That it is still widely and thoughtlessly used was illustrated by the furore over its use on Twitter by model Jessica Leandra dos Santos, who in her defence said that she used the derogatory term in anger.

Anger, like alcohol, has a way of revealing one’s true frame of mind. The K-word clearly resides comfortably in the consciousness of people like Ms dos Santos, who thought, presumably from her own experience, that its use was uncontroversial. South Africans would be fooling themselves if they believed that the model’s use of this most hurtful and hateful of words was an aberration.

The poverty of South African discourse on racism was further revealed when fellow model Tshidi Thamana retaliated to Ms dos Santos’ tweet by calling for violence against whites. In the fall-out she also blamed anger for her racist outburst.

Both young women have apologised for their objectionable comments. Whatever the damage to their careers, they should be forgiven, with the hope that they – with all South Africans – may now become agents of change and true reconciliation.