JOHANNESBURG: As new racist cracks appear in the veneer of South Africa’s Rainbow Nation, analysts say the country was feeling the effects of papering over its differences instead of tackling them head-on.
Basking in the afterglow of a globally acclaimed transition from whites-only apartheid rule to democracy under black president Nelson Mandela, intolerant pockets continue to fester 14 years into democracy.
This week, simmering tensions were thrust into the spotlight when a video made by four white university students, in which they lead five black workers through a series of degrading mock-initiation activities, was made public.
The youths’ work, condemned by parties across the political spectrum, was a protest against forced integration of black and white students in residences at the University of the Free State in what was once an independent Afrikaner republic.
Jody Kollapen, chairman of the Human Rights Commission established by the constitution, said this week Mandela took reconciliation too far — to the detriment of true transformation.
“We have been living in a dream world ... believing we have overcome the most formidable of our obstacles ,” Kollapen said.
“We hadn’t dealt with our past. Broader society never participated in a discussion about what the past meant for blacks and what the past meant for whites.”
Arts and Culture minister Pallo Jordan told public radio the recording was “reprehensible, disgraceful” and had happened “despite the fact that these young people didn’t live under apartheid. But they are deeply infected with racism.”
In January, a 17-year-old white boy gunned down 10 black people in an apparent racist attack.
Last week, white reporters were outraged when they were barred from a gathering of the Black Journalists Forum which was addressed by ruling African National Congress (ANC) president Jacob Zuma.
On Wednesday, the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) research body said racial tensions appeared to have risen in the past month, threatening to undo years of progress.
When the ANC unseated the racially oppressive apartheid state in 1994, Mandela and other leaders took hold of the phrase Rainbow Nation, coined by Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu to describe the country’s multi-racial unity.
But fears are now being expressed that the racial harmony everyone had hoped would come with time is still far off.—AFP
