Broken past back to haunt us

When a beefy man named Abel Malan beat up Stellenbosch philosophy professor Anton van Niekerk in his office recently, the more depressing drama was the reaction of South Africans across the country.

That reaction spoke volumes about the state of social and educational transformation in our broken country.

Anton is a good friend, one of the finest minds in ethics and philosophy, and a generous, thoughtful fellow. It must have come as a great shock to the professor to have a thickset man visiting his office under the pretence of wanting to discuss one of his papers, overturn his desk and thrash him on the grounds of a place of higher learning. But I do not want to dwell on the unpleasant details of the physical violence and its traumatic effect on the professor; the media made sure we got the murky minutiae. I want to focus rather on what the reaction to the event says about us, as South Africans.

This was front page news for days in all the Afrikaans newspapers, with a lead story in the Sunday newspaper Rapport. Not a single English-language newspaper carried the story two Sundays ago, including Rapport's sister newspaper, City Press. If this happened to a professor at Wits or UCT, I can assure you the English press would have milked the story. There is no need here for historical melodrama, I suppose, but what does this omission say about the Afrikaans- English divide we do not like to talk about in our country?

In the Afrikaans press, the matter was treated as some kind of tribal skirmish that needed to be sorted out within the group.

"This is bad for Afrikaners," read one headline, as if this thug was any different from other violent offenders across the land. Imagine a man attacking his ethnic brother in KwaMashu, Durban, and somebody writing in the local press that this was bad for Zulus.

"We must talk rather than fight," led the needless Sunday headline in the major Afrikaans paper, citing a literary elder in the white, Afrikaans-speaking community. What is this? Are we talking about five-year olds?

What is true is that Malan and his cronies, who travelled all the way from Mpumalanga to inflict damage on the professor, were acting according to a malicious mandate they no longer had: to discipline, by violence if necessary, any member of the tribe who dared to think outside of established knowledge about the past.

What the professor had mused, in one of his writings, was to make the rather non-radical points about matters like white guilt and responsibility for apartheid. For this he was pulled into line, just as in the good old days. It is the mere threat of insult and even violence that to this day makes it so difficult for people to take an independent and unpopular stand in public on what is regarded in the group as out-group thinking.

Predictably, Malan's cronies came out in full support through the medium of some shady colony called the Volksraad Verkiesings Kommissie. Malan started a brief hunger strike in prison, as if there was some great moral cause for which he was prepared to sacrifice. In the meanwhile, the tribe called for calm and dialogue rather than for unconditional rejection of this violent act. The editorial of one Afrikaans newspaper was emphatic: "It is a fact that Professor van Niekerk's views are controversial."

So what?

It is this dangerous knowledge about the past that came to mind as I read the astonishing tribute from FW de Klerk to apartheid's defence minister, Magnus Malan, on his death last week. The line in the tribute that intrigued me went something like this: "Malan held the fort against the enemies of South Africa until such time that communist rule ended, and then the country could be allowed to enjoy democracy."

In other words, apartheid continued because of communism and, in this logic, if there was no communism, there would have been freedom, democracy and human rights for all.

I understand the need for people to find ways of living with a terrible knowledge of the past; but misrepresenting the past is not the way to do it, for it is such dangerous narratives that feed bitterness and fuel the violence of people like Malan.

We still need to talk about our violent past, openly and honestly, and give our children a chance of confronting the past in ways that enable all of them to embrace more hopeful stories about the future.