JONATHAN JANSEN | Unterhalter’s treatment shows SA is still stuck in apartheid mode

Where are we in terms of race relations almost 30 years since the end of legal apartheid? We should be concerned by some truly disturbing events in the past few days. The one is the announcement that AfriForum is linking up with a conservative coloured grouping, allegedly to build self-reliance in this community. An outspoken white, Afrikaans, ethnic group is looking to bruin Afrikaners to lift themselves from poverty. Why is such nonsense surfacing and why would AfriForum even care about those they deride as kleurlinge? For one, it fits perfectly within a racial backwardness that accepts the old classification systems as real. In other words, there are Zulus and Sothos and coloureds who need our development attention as ethnic groups.

Not as South Africans, but as categories of people labelled by their apartheid nicknames. In the distasteful words of one of the its leaders, quoted on Politicsweb, “AfriForum has already established partnerships with, among others, Zulu, Barolong, the AmaBhele and other cultural communities”. That’s right, a throwback to way back, as the kids say, for these apartheid-era dinosaurs.

The Cape Forum does little to disguise its federal motives – Cape Town for the Cape, a coloured/Afrikaans Bantustan, in other words, with the helping hand of AfriForum. Let me put this bluntly for the province of my birth: what the Cape Forum and AfriForum are about is quite simply to marginalise the African from development in favour of an Afrikaans/coloured grievance against a perceived black nationalism. They must be stopped in their tracks.

Fortunately, their ambitions for mass support will falter because the average South African has no desire to be dragged back into an ethnic past in the name of development.

Which brings me to the interviews for two vacancies in the Constitutional Court. I squirmed as two white men were asked about their commitment to transformation; that’s right, simply because they’re white. There are two problems with this other form of racial backwardness. One, it assumes all black jurists are for transformation and two, that all white jurists are suspected anti-transformation agents simply by virtue of the epidermis.

Why is such nonsense surfacing at the moment and why would AfriForum even care about those they deride as kleurlinge?

There is, by the way, a striking resemblance to the questions of white reactionaries on the Senate judiciary committee in the US, as they lambasted the first black woman, Ketanji Brown Jackson, likely to serve on the Supreme Court. If she’s black, she’s a liberal who is soft on crime, lenient with sex offenders and so far to the left that she cannot possibly qualify for this supreme appointment, qualifications apart. We are like that: your qualifications simply do not matter. Like the EFF, American conservatives don’t mind going down the sewer in their racist crusades. Poor adv Alan Dodson, attacked for being white and male, has to resort to the gratuitous and ridiculous defence in the ConCourt interviews: “I am an African.” What bloody else is the man?

The Constitutional Court is now majority black and will always be so into the future. So why must a jurist of the stature of David Unterhalter be humiliated by the flipside of white nationalists in SA? At a previous hearing Unterhalter was quizzed about his Jewish identity, associations and loyalties. It is a racial meanness, a lack of generosity and a disregard for competence all rolled into one.

When do we arrive at the point where our friendships, our appointments, our daily interactions with each other as black and white South Africans are based on a genuine acceptance of each other’s bona fides?

There is no question that this return to racial nativism in the public discourse is born out of frustration with the almost complete breakdown in governance in the broader society, the extreme economic hardships faced by many citizens and the singular lack of leadership on the democratic project. When last did you hear any significant politician remind us of our common humanity and that everyone matters, regardless of race or ethnicity, in the eyes of the state and in the quest for development?

Nothing. Instead, one of our leaders is tweeting about landing “in” (sic) the moon. Another is “inspecting” a MK Military Veterans’ Association parade, a body disbanded by the ANC. A former minister and head of the ANC Women’s League is found guilty of perjury. Others criminally accused among former ruling party leaders are not only appointed to political office in the provinces, some of them plan to run for president!

It is a pattern all too familiar: when as an ordinary citizen you don’t feel heard or seen or served, you fall back on those primordial identities that threaten to tear us apart as a nation. If ever we needed leadership to equally repair the potholes on our streets and the potholes in our race relations it is now.