IS THE SOUTH AFRICAN DEMOCRACY FOUNDED ON LIES?
In the past few weeks two seemingly "harmless" and unrelated occurrences took place: the so called complaint against Chief Justice Mogoeng to the JSC by one Paul Hoffman and the anti-competitive complaint by Advocate Simba Chitando against some Cape Town based white law firms and advocates.
Paul Hoffman runs an outfit calling itself the Institute of Accountability in Southern Africa. If the other people listed on the Institute's website are aware of their membership, they are not very active. According to its website its purpose is to "make accountability matter" and its mission is to "hold leaders of the region accountable for respecting, protecting, promoting and fulfilling the rights of the people".
On the other hand Chief Justice Mogoeng is the respondent and the native who dared to speak about the continuing injustices faced by blacks in this country and questioned the current economic power relations between blacks and white. You would think this "token" and "undeserving" Chief Justice would know his place in the food chain and not dare to raise this critical issue. For his troubles and for being a "pliable" and "token" Zuma ally, he had to pay, one way or the other.
The Hoffman-Mogoeng incident and the Adv. Chitando complaint are symptoms of a bigger race relations problem. Unfortunately South African democracy is too romanticized to a point where we would rather pretend that what we have is a miracle and that we are a "rainbow" nation. In this article I seek to trace the origins of this notion that blacks and whites in this country will, by stroke of pen, suddenly live in harmony because it was said, somewhere in 1994, that apartheid is dead.
It is my argument that until and unless we confront the truth about how we came to be where we are today, we run a very huge risk of perpetuating (as we are doing everyday) apartheid and the continued exclusion of the majority of blacks from enjoying what we call the spoils of democracy. It is almost beyond common sense that every house is as strong as its foundation. This analogy applies equally to the current situation in South Africa.