Miskien moet ons die laaste woord aan 'n Engelse joernalis gee - ons
joernaliste (Afrikaans) is mos nie mans genoeg om die waarheid kaalkop
te vertel nie:
"Spare us the talk of ingratitude, Desmond
"Out to Lunch" - David Bullard (Sunday Times 30.04.2006)
If you happen to have, a white skin then you bear two burdens if you
live in South Africa. The first is that you are assumed to be racist
and therefore unqualified to comment on the widespread corruption,
cronyism and incompetence that impedes our development as a nation. The
other is that you will always be thought ungrateful for the generosity
shown by your black fellow citizens who, out of the goodness of their
hearts, didn't drive you into the sea or knock your head off.
reinforced recently in a speech by Desmond Tutu on the 10th anniversary
of the setting up of the shambolic Truth and Reconciliation Commission
(TRC), which Tutu chaired. The TRC was supposed to be one of those
touchy-feely, nation-healing initiatives set up just after the election
in 1994 to help us all come to terms with ourselves. It was
unintentionally at the vanguard of reality television and many of you
will remember the harrowing scenes of people describing the most
terrible events from the apartheid era before tearfully collapsing into
the arms of the sympathetic chairman. Oprah would have loved it.
However, what the TRC never managed to do was to bring to book those
who had been responsible for such atrocities.
Most whites in South Africa were directly involved in the apartheid
regime, irrespective of whether they voted for the National Party. Like
most ordinary citizens they just wanted good schools for their kids,
hospitals, roads and a reliable electricity and water supply. In short,
they wanted a quiet life and didn't really want to get involved.
When the 1994 elections took place there was surprisingly little
right-wing resistance. The whites joined the winding queues and voted
and then settled back into the daily routine of going to work, taking
the kids to school, filling in their tax forms and all the other
mundane minutiae that make up the average suburban lifestyle.
An excited Tutu marveled that we had managed a peaceful transformation
(as did most South Africans) and dubbed us the "rainbow nation". So
what went wrong and why, 12 years after those elections, are whites
still being maligned for not showing enough gratitude? Is it really
about gratitude or is it about money?
While the TRC may have provided us with some fine theatre it was pretty
ineffectual as a body. Escape deals had obviously been cut with the
previous government and promises made not to go for those who had been
personally responsible for what happened in the last 10 years of
apartheid. Despite the public wailing and gna****ng of teeth, the guilty
were allowed to retire to their farms or join the funds they had
smuggled out of the country. Examples were made of a few of the
apartheid henchmen but when it came to extracting the real truth, the
TRC was hopelessly inept.
So my message to Desmond Tutu is this. We love you dearly, you are a
giant among men, you make us laugh and you make us cry, but if you
still believe that whites have not shown enough gratitude towards
blacks then perhaps the memory of the sham of the TRC is colouring your
judgment."
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