MATHATHA TSEDU | Theatre of the absurd as whites play victim

Last Monday, the St Martin-in-the-Fields Anglican church on Trafalgar Square in London hosted Irish journalist and author Fintan O’Toole as part of its autumn lecture series titled “Here I Stand: At the Heart, On the Edge”.

The series involves weekly lectures by prominent thinkers and writers. On September 15, for example, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who is a respected author, spoke under the title “Here I Stand: Solidarity”. He looked at how the “concept of solidarity had been used as a rallying cry by the labour movement”, the concept’s “central place in struggles for racial justice”, and how the idea of solidarity “is often invoked as the answer to inequality and conflict”.

O’Toole’s theme was “Here I stand: Gulliver’s Warning”, in which he invoked Irish satirist and priest Jonathan Swift’s book Gulliver’s Travels, which looked at greatness and colonial abuse. O’Toole analysed the book using contemporary examples such as the attempted resuscitation of the Orange March in Northern Ireland last weekend and Palestine.

One of the themes that touched me as I sat in that audience on Monday was O’Toole’s assertion that for those used to the entitlement of superiority due to race, gender, sexual orientation and colonial supremacy, the call for equality represented the onset of “victimhood”.

In his view, the colonialists, used to lording it over ordinary colonised locals, find the reassertion of the “dignity of the ordinary” to represent, in an absurd and twisted way, their own victimisation. Equality, therefore, is not justice but persecution.

The racists in charge of the campaign cannot countenance that in this regrettably violent society in which we live, they too fall victim

Thus, to bring it home, the struggle for freedom from colonisation by black people in this country was seen as an attempt to drive whites into the sea and victimise them. The results of the negotiations between the ANC in particular and the apartheid colonial lords led by FW De Klerk, which gave blacks little back, are today being resisted by right-wing whites.

Any attempt by the government to assert the dignity of the ordinary, through either inadequate land reform plans or policies such as BEE, is attacked as racist and designed to victimise whites as a group.

In a country where violent crime devours black women in multitudes and other sectors of black society in thousands each year, the few whites who also fall victim to this scourge are elevated as race-targeted victims and not just statistics like the rest.

So, for a couple of days last month, the National Mall in the US capital, Washington, was transformed into a monument of the absurd, with white crosses planted to mount a campaign to vilify any attempt to give a little dignity to the “non-superior race”, the undignified ordinary.

The racists in charge of the campaign cannot countenance that in this regrettably violent society in which we live, they too fall victim. The farms where so many atrocities still happen should, according to them, be insulated from the insecurity that haunts all of us everywhere else.

The issue of crime that is being made central to the lie of the ‘white genocide’ needs to be tackled, not to protect white farmers or farmers in general but the entire society

Otherwise, how does one explain the growth of the private security industry, not on farms, but in the gated estates of suburbia? These facts are, however, not important and cannot sway the racists here who peddle the lies and their collaborators in the White House and state department.

For them, nothing less than a return to apartheid, but this time maybe, yes, maybe, managed by blacks, can satisfy the hankering for their status as the chosen race. Ambassador Roelf Meyer can hold as many meetings as possible with lobbyists throughout the US, and minister Ronald Lamola can demarche the US ambassador as many times as he likes; it will not change anything because the demand is not what is visible on the table.

Can the US ambassador be tossed out, as some people demand? If that were to happen, would Meyer also return? What would the economic impact be on both countries if and when Donald Trump then imposes impossible tariffs and/or sanctions?

The issue of crime that is being made central to the lie of the “white genocide” needs to be tackled, not to protect white farmers or farmers in general but the entire society. President Matamela Ramaphosa says urgent measures are needed to curb the scourge, but despite being cleared, national police commissioner Fannie Masemola is still at home and not leading his troops from the front.

Why is that? The demand for total surrender of democracy back to the racist past under the guise of white victimhood cannot be dealt with through speeches but, as O’Toole argued, through the assertion “of the dignity of the ordinary all”, not a select white few.

• Tsedu is a former editor of the Sunday Times