Playing on our racial divisions to win votes would be suicidal

Twenty years into our new democracy and it seems that playing the race card is still one of our favourite national pastimes.

New research shows that, of the 10 000 human rights complaints received every year by the SA Human Rights Commission, 80% of them were about racism. Tragically, our rainbow nation appears to be as deeply divided as ever.

Recent events at the University of the Free State, where white students drove a car into a black student before assaulting him, show the extent to which the legacy of apartheid is alive and well in one of the very institutions that we would expect to be leading the fight against it.

And, of course, it is obvious that the complaints received by the commission must constitute only a small fraction of the incidents that every day disfigure our young body politic. Indeed, one has only to briefly engage with social media, or visit an online forum, to see how rapidly discussion on just about any issue often degenerates into racial mud-slinging.

Perhaps, as political analyst Steven Friedman recommends, what we need are "anti-racism programmes". What these might look like, who would be responsible for engineering them and just how they might be implemented would in itself make for some heated debate.

In the meantime, we can only hope that the Human Rights Commission continues to do its work, and that the rest of us can talk to each other, and about each other, in a way that is humane and mindful of the warped history that brought us here in the first place.

This is particularly apposite given that, in the next couple of months, as electioneering reaches fever pitch in the run up to May 7, there will be all kinds of irresponsible remarks by politicians who should know better, hoping to win votes by sowing the seeds of more racial division while promising a better future for all.

A spectacularly good example of the rhetoric we must avoid comes from the deputy president of the ANC, Cyril Ramaphosa, who, while looking sincere, urged voting for his party to "prevent the Boers coming back to control us".