For several years now, more especially over the past five years, South Africans have lived in a time that has felt like that instant between pouring scalding water into a delicate crystal flute and when it shatters.
I have used the analogy elsewhere before.
Apologies for repeating myself.
This instance before a shattering is brought on by daily violence, crime, scenes of blazing property – from trucks to spaza shops in townships, with the customary looting and murder of foreigners – and the uncertain political economic environment.
It has all grown in intensity over the past five years, or so, with the spread of revenge politics. It is as if someone is setting the country alight one public protest at a time.
The most dangerous recent trend is name-calling, insults, and toxic speeches and statements about “non-Africans” (it started with whites, now it is Indians), with the power to determine who is and who is not an African vested in a small, but growing group of people.
We are, indeed, as Mondli Makhanya – my old friend, a former colleague and perpetual North London football rival (I support Arsenal and he is a diehard fan of Tottenham Hotspur, but we share a love for Orlando Pirates) – wrote at the weekend, we are “always just one breath away from the next race-based incident or racial confrontation ...
“We are, in fact a cauldron of resentment and wrath.”
At the thin edge of this wedge is the politics of revenge, and its focus has shifted away from a crude black or white, and is now aimed at Indians.
We would be deluded to believe it will not shift to any other of the very many racial or ethnic groups in the country.
We may dismiss this rise in rhetoric as crude electioneering, but there are valuable history lessons about the toxic power of speech and of namecalling.
The three most prominent examples were Adolf Hitler’s anti-semitism, but closer to us, in time and place, was the hatred against Bosnian Muslims in the former Yugoslavia, which led to the massacre at Srebrenica in July 1995, and the Rwanda genocide of 1994.
Germany, Srebrenica and Rwanda – and currently Myanmar, for that matter – remind us that genocides or pogroms always start with words of hatred and name-calling.
We would be well advised to remember that the holocaust did not start in the gas chambers, it started with the spread of toxic words and creating a situation of “us” against “them”.
Name-calling and labelling rapidly descended into stereotyping, public dehumanising and then physical violence. It’s a slippery slope. Earlier this year letters were sent around Britain promising rewards for anyone who “punished” Muslims.
The “punish a Muslim” letters gave scores for inflicting physical or psychological violence against Muslims – 500 points were awarded for murder “using gun, knife, vehicle or otherwise” and 1,000 points for burning a mosque.
In Rwanda, in the months and years before the 1994 genocide against the mainly Tutsi people, there was a rise in propaganda, name-calling and finger-pointing, all of which were directed at Tutsi speakers who were called injenzi (cockroaches). Hatred against the Tutsi people became widespread in the public sphere, emboldened by political leaders claiming to speak on behalf of Hutus.
In Hitler’s Germany, Jews were identified as collaborators with the enemy of nationalist Germans and often central to all German fears.
The “superior logic” was that there were Jews who were communists, communism was one of the enemies of the German people, ergo all Jews had to be killed.
Politicians do not always have to direct their followers or fellow travellers towards violence.
Quite often a speech about stolen land or of collaboration with perceived or actual enemies has powerful emulative effects, and may influence people who feel dispossessed, disaffected or who are genuinely marginalised.
I’m not surprised that you would get well-heeled types who would dismiss a restaurant waitress, treat her without any sense of shame or compunction on the basis that she holds the key to land that was stolen 400 years ago.
I am sure that the restaurant patron was not directly instructed by a politician who was seeped in the politics of revenge, but the politician’s rhetoric is powerful and emboldening.
We should, thus, not be surprised that the global rise in public rhetoric, shaped by ethno-nationalism, nativism, notions of purity and the politics of revenge, especially in South Africa, correlates with attacks on public or private property, or on individuals who are considered to be “outsiders”.
The “superior logic” is not terribly different from the Nazis’ thinking.
In SA, apartheid was abhorrent, there were people who were accused of having collaborated or benefited from apartheid – which means they have to be taken out, so to speak.
Something or someone is emboldening the politics of revenge in South Africa.
Evidence from around the country shows that this politics of revenge has increased dramatically in the last five years.
I can’t quite place my finger on it ...
Ismail Lagardien writes in his personal capacity.