A Nation of Outrage

by Editor · April 2, 2017

In the years after the fall of the Third Reich, some Germans would try and find some redeeming feature in the unspeakable Nazi regime. Typically, it would involve the infrastructural improvements Hitler’s regime made, such as building the Autobahn, the German network of motorways.

For many South Africans, the controversial tweet by veteran politician Helen Zille about colonialism had a similar ring to the German trope of “at least he built the Autobahn”. Colonialism is not a closed chapter. We live with its pervasive effects every day, and are confronting issues arising from it even now.

Conversely, others endorsed Ms Zille’s statement, referring to the colonial legacy in matters such as infrastructure and the system of judicial rights.

The faultlines were drawn mostly by experience: those who see the history of colonialism and its effects as one of racism, exploitation, subjugation and dispossession will have interpreted Ms Zille’s tweet as insensitive or worse. Those whose experience of the colonialist legacy is benign wondered what the fuss was all about.

Colonialism is not a closed chapter. The widespread poverty in South Africa was socially engineered by the colonial and apartheid regimes. We live with its pervasive effects every day, and are confronting issues arising from it even now.

The Native Land Act of 1913, a colonial legislation, enshrined that black Africans could own only 7% of arable land, and when London united the four previously separate British colonies — the Cape, Natal, Transvaal and Orange River — into the Union of South Africa in 1910, it specifically disenfranchised blacks and Indians as well as coloureds living outside the Cape. Apartheid was built on the foundations of colonialism.

The price of these injustices, inter-generationally, is too high to extract gratitude for whatever benefits the colonialists introduced, which in any case were intended mostly to serve whites.

Colonialism was, of course, also the cause of the Boer War, with the atrocities committed against Afrikaner civilians. Through the generations, many Afrikaners have never forgotten the suffering visited upon them by British colonialism.

So Ms Zille’s tweet was ill-considered and betrayed an acute lack of understanding of just how deep the scars of colonialism and apartheid run in the psyche of most South Africans. She was writing from a perspective of privilege.

Her subsequent clarification gave substance to her intended meaning, but she had already played her hand. It is a shame that for many, her years of political service will now be reduced to one thoughtless tweet.

But her tweet has also facilitated a public discussion on how the past remains very present among us, as a nation. Much as many wish to be divorced from the colonial and apartheid past, it is part of our nation’s DNA.

The past cannot be left there, and race has to be brought into the debate when appropriate (and sometimes it isn’t).

The Catholic bishops of Southern Africa acknowledged this last year when they called for an open national public discourse on race. It is necessary that South Africans confront questions of race — and of ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality. Our churches are well-placed to provide a forum for this, and must be encouraged in doing so.

But that discourse also demands of us to hear opinions — those that are on the right side of hate speech and bigotry — with which we strongly disagree, so as to try and correct them. This means that we must express outrage when it is necessary, not when it is just possible.

And we must beware when the outrage machine creates controversy for the sake of it.

Few people are likely to change when they are being labelled. Minds are sensitised and even changed not by aggressive noise and stigmatisation, but by persuasion through engagement in a reasoned dialogue.

The alternative to that is an entrenchment of intolerance and division, with those of a particular viewpoint retreating into their own echo chambers of self-confirming prejudices.

This is not a recipe for peaceful coexistence.

The challenge for all South Africans is to create room for constructive discourse. This requires of us to allow others to express opinions which we may disagree with and to create a space in which such views can be answered — not to silence but to change hearts and minds.