Right wing thinkers do not want to be held accountable.
They will say that you are “race baiting” when you ask them questions about problematic comments they made, but when they hear Julius Malema sing a song they will not hesitate to go to every court. Hypocrisy.
When Afriforum wants to publicly display the apartheid flag they will not hesitate to go to every court. They want to speak freely but they want to control our speech. That is a double standard and that is hypocrisy.
We must not accept this tactic and we must call it out.
The other thing that they will say is “racism/apartheid happened so long ago why are you still talking/singing about it”.
They still talk about issues they care about.
The Anglo Boer war ended in 1902 and Afrikaners still have events and discussions about it. That was 122 years ago.
It’s okay for the Afrikaner people to talk about the anglo-Boer war.
That’s a part of their community history and its part of South African history. It influenced many of the things that happened in the decades after. Historic moments are historic because they influence people for long periods thereafter.
We must not be tricked into forgetting. We must not be tricked into ignoring offensive statements. We must be vigilant. The alert antelope lives another day. The lazy one is supper.
It is important for African people to remain vigilant about hate speech and any type of thinking associated with white supremacist ideologies.
The Jewish community is vigilant and sensitive about antisemitism because they know how blood libels were used to commit pogroms against them. How hate speech was the first step in the commission of the holocaust.
The holocaust was tragic and they should never stop being vigilant.
The death toll of slavery, colonialism and apartheid is much higher than the death toll of World War Two. For instance 10 million people died when the Belgian King Leopold was ruling the Congo.
After World War Two. The Jewish community sought reparations. They built museums and organizations to protect themselves from any future attacks. They still monitor newspapers and the internet for anti semitism. They do this because they have a valid reason and it is prudent to do so.
You are supposed to learn from history to avoid that history repeating itself. Africans have every justification to be sensitive and vigilant about racism, neocolonialism and white supremacist thinking and rhetoric.
That vigilance is even more important when those words and ideas are shared by public figures and more important when they are shared by public representatives. Law makers who have the position, the opportunity and the capacity to influence what laws are made in a nation.
When public representatives and public figures make offensive and discriminatory comments that is something which should concern the public.
The Glen Gray Act was a law that dispossessed Africans of land in Cape Town. Passed in 1894.
The Native Land Act of 1913 continued that deprivation of land.
The Bantu Education Act which created an inferior education system for Africans was passed by a man who said that Africans had no place learning maths.
Hendrik Verwoerd, infamously known as the architect of apartheid, stated: “What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice?
These laws still affect the people today. They have no land and no education. They created intergenerational poverty for Africans.
When a public representative makes or has made supremacist statements it is everyone’s obligation to hold them to account and to push back against those ideas.
Biko was killed for confronting institutional racism.
Chris Hani died for doing this. Patrice Lumumba and Thomas Sankara were killed for this.
Speaking the truth to power.
We have to honor their sacrifices by preventing the re-emergence of supremacist groups who now call themselves “the right wing” or “libertarians” in South Africa.