Mmusi Maimane
Like many of us, I have experienced racism since I was a small boy growing up in Dobsonville.
I remember how society disadvantaged my parents.
I can recall the racist attitudes of police when they roamed our community for one thing or another.
To complicate matters, I am now in what the apartheid system termed a “mixed marriage”.
You get used to the strange looks in the supermarket, but you always know they are there.
So when I first saw Jessica Leandra’s tweets last week Friday, my reaction was the same as most other black South Africans.
I felt personally affronted, I felt angry, I was hungry for retribution.
When I heard that an SA Human Rights Commission complaint had been laid, I hoped that another racist was going to get the punishment they deserve.
What puzzled me was that this young woman grew up after 1994.
She never knew apartheid. And yet she was able to so casually drop a Tweet containing the K-word.
What was going on here?
The more I thought about it, the more I started to think that simply condemning Jessica for her racist Tweet was the wrong way to go.
Yes, she had been racist.
Yes, what she said was indefensible. But didn’t Madiba teach us that to free ourselves we needed to forgive others?
So I resolved to find out more about this woman and what it was that led her to utter those words.
And then I saw the Tweet by Tshidi Thamane.
I understood Tshidi’s anger at a white girl who had used the K-word.
But, at the same time, her words were full of hate for all white people.
They were irrational. Instead of restoring some kind of balance, they took us further backwards.
That is when I wrote an open letter to Tshidi and Jessica asking them to do something to help us move on from this affair.
I offered them the opportunity to come and have breakfast with my wife and I to talk things over and, hopefully, reconcile with one another.
To be honest, I didn’t hold out much hope that they would take me up on the offer.
They probably just wanted to put their heads down and get on with their lives, I thought.
So I was surprised when I received a letter from Jessica saying that she wanted to meet Tshidi and me.
And then Tshidi’s agent contacted me on Twitter and we got the ball rolling.
The breakfast was intriguing.
It is clear that these young women did not understand the gravity of the words they used on Twitter.
Perhaps because they grew up in post-apartheid SA, they did not fully understand the context of their language.
We discussed their naiveté and immaturity in their responses. We spoke about the opportunity that beset them to build a new dialogue, one of unity and reconciliation.
They came to realise what impact they’d had and how out of step their actions were with our long journey to a truly free, united and reconciled SA.
The conclusion we reached was that, in a perfect world, the colour of one’s skin should be as irrelevant as the shape of one’s ears, just like Robert Sobukwe said.
What I learnt from this is that simply condemning racism is only half the battle. If we are going to win the war against racism, we need to go a step further. We need to try to reconcile people.
After all, reconciliation is the SA way.
It was the trail blazed by Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and so many others.
It is up to all of us to do what we can to keep the spirit of reconciliation alive in SA.
Constructive dialogue is where the process begins. If we cannot resolve a spat about a racist incident at a grocery store amicably, how do we expect to redress the material inequalities inherited from apartheid in a way that is sustainable, equitable and just?
Shouting at each other from our own racial corners will never get us there. My experience with Jessica and Tshidi has convinced me that face-to-face interaction is the most powerful way to promote reconciliation.
I hope that one day we can celebrate our diversity instead of being divided by it.
n Mmusi Maimane is the national spokesman for the DA