We don't need white liberals to speak for us

22 May 2016 - 02:01 By Bongani Madondo
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Asking Eugene ’Prime Evil’ de Kock to leave a literary festival does not make them agents of redress or the healing of black pain, writes Bongani Madondo

On the Richter scale of the truly bizarre, the 2016 Franschhoek Literary Festival was a rather dull affair, until the evening of the second day when it was noticed that a human bomb had dropped into town - a helluva one-street, one-horse dorpie with fabulous stories of wealth, star-anointed chefs, rolling hills and expensive shops.

South Africa's most notorious apartheid assassin and, I suspect, psychopath, Eugene de Kock - a highly decorated police officer who has served, with dignity, more than 20 years' jail time for the atrocities he and his state-sponsored band of marauders committed - arrived at the festival incognito. Pretty weird for a man of his physical stature, if you ask me.

I need not remind you that Eugene Alexander de Kock endured the necessary public humiliation and punishment his bosses - and some of the new ruling bosses who had visited their own brand of bush atrocities on some of their own in exile - never had to endure since they were never made to account for their sins.

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He accompanied his biographer, Anemari Jansen (Eugene de Kock: Assassin for the State), to the soiree at which the shortlists for the Sunday Times Literary Awards were announced - a sort of honey pot and excuse for the publishing industry to, rightfully, celebrate the toil of hard-working authors and get gloriously wasted on hooch while doing so.

It was at this gathering of literary egos - and talent - that De Kock's re-entry into the national discourse played itself out. By several accounts, some of those present (by the last count, I could only confirm three) were traumatised by his presence, and one feisty, assured and talented author, Lauren Beukes, gathered the courage to walk up and ask him to leave.

See, his presence at the festival was unwelcome.

He is a beast who does not belong in decent society. He needs to be "disappeared" in order to make "decent" whites look even holier. He needs to be hidden away, locked up in freedom - just like our government reportedly did when his jail time was up.

All of which sounds like a sort of ideological legalese for "You have served your time, now you are free to go somewhere and never show your face again".

And none of which, tacitly or otherwise, is the sentiment of Beukes or those who agreed with her.

Look, I want to believe that those opposed to De Kock's presence were earnest and that Beukes acted to protect the wellbeing of those emotionally overwrought by his presence - t hose who still feel, despite what he has paid for his sins, that De Kock remains the devil incarnate, or more viscerally, De K*k.

I'm loath to trivialise the wounds of people. None of us has any right to criticise victims - the humiliated and scarred - for locking their pain in the past. And although that might be the case, often the causes of that pain are lodged in the foreground of their souls.

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People had every right to feel uncomfortable and shocked by De Kock's presence. I don't believe he assumed he was going to roll in there and be welcomed as a hero. Damaged though he is, he doesn't strike me as the sort of soldier who wears his hubris on his sleeve.

In fact, one writer, Palesa Morudu, whose brother, a young man of 22, was "disappeared" by De Kock, recalled the shock and horror of seeing De Kock at the festival in an insightful Daily Maverick article: "I saw a broken man when I looked at him."

But this was not the right of the white liberal crowd, including my friend Beukes, who, by chasing De Kock away assumed unearned moral high ground over him.

We speak about this so much but I suspect whiteness, and a specific ideological DNA of whiteness, is immune to hearing us: black South Africans do not need you to do anything for us - even if it is well intended.

By asking De Kock to leave, the privileged liberal - and it doesn't matter that there were black folks who were traumatised - is claiming the agency and urgency of black people to do things for themselves.

To deal with their trauma and shock in a manner of their own choosing.

Chasing De Kock from the event - and by implication the festival - is a dishonest act aimed at expunging whiteness of its guilt. If De Kock is a beast, he is a white beast, a product of the beastly whiteness that protected and maintained the racial, economic and cultural privilege of all white people, including the liberals and white cosmo-polites who would rather we swallow the Kool-Aid lie that they were all down with black people during the now sexed-up "struggle".

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Whiteness - and with it its "reasonable" blacks - will remain whiteness to the majority of black people who cannot even afford a book, let alone be invited to a book event dominated by whiteness.

To the dispossessed, all white people are, necessarily, part of the problem. As such, white people cannot be expected - or lay claim - to be agents of whatever radical redress and self-affirmation and healing black people need.

Now that De Kock has been told "You will never eat lunch in this town again" (the title of the damning memoir of life in Hollywood by Julia Phillips), I wonder how the liberal white project feels about itself. Happy?

Have white people ever asked themselves why black people never threw them all into the raging seas, back in 1994? If they had taken the trouble to do that, they would not have the temerity to stand on any soapbox today, tomorrow or, indeed, ever.

Madondo's book, "Sigh the Beloved Country: Braai Talk, Rock-n-Roll and Other Stories" (Picador Africa) will be launched next month

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