The other day, a certain luminary was buried, and the rogue Eskom blatantly announced that there would be no load shedding that day. And so it was. And while I mean no disrespect to the deceased, I wonder what kind of moral imperative was at work here. I understand the issue of African royalty, so I tread carefully.
Let us take the other side of the coin. I was introduced to two new and similar-sounding words which haven’t made it to the dictionary the way neologisms do – “caucasity” and “caudacity”. As in the case of the royal funeral, the words interrogate our treatment at the hand of those in power.
Both words have their root in a marriage of the words “Caucasian” and “audacity”. Caucasity is used in the derogatory form as in “That white woman had the nerve to attend the African celebration sporting a corn weave”. The inference is that her action hedges on patrony embedded in her conscious gesture of her relinquishing that which made her “superior” as a fatuous gesture of situational generosity.
Caudacity has more strenuous moral rumblings. It is the audacity of whites doing as they wish because there are different levels of admonition that are race-based. For example, a white boy might steal a bar of chocolate and, on being caught, expects no more than a light reprimand. A black child doing the same thing will expect to have the whole book on jurisprudence thrown at him just because he is black. And he is being punished for the very thing into which he was categorised by whites.
We have come to accept that whites have no problem with their inherited or appropriated material advantage. Our vocabulary irrevocably labels snow as white and pure and soot as black and evil.
It seems that mindless cruelty and dehumanisation based on pigmentation and hair texture is validated without recourse to discursive testing.
I read an article on the origins of mankind which claimed Africa as the root of all nations. The argument went further to say that those who gravitated northwards and away from the equator, produced less melanin and ended up pale-skinned and light-haired. The argument was that exposure to the sun stimulated the cells that produce melanin and, hence, skin colour. If that argument holds, how do we explain the folk who also abandoned the equatorial region and moved south? They are still of darker complexion although the hair seemed unaffected. I am referring to Latinos, the Aztecs, Chileans, in fact, South America.
Before this reduces to a racist rant or racial angst, let me make the point clear. Whites are never going to apologise for being advantaged. No matter how gory their history of mutilation, exploitation, appropriation, degrading and brutalising the colonised. Sadly, it appears that Blacks will always have the race card without openly stating that they aspire to the same position of material advantage.
There is nothing wrong with aspiring towards physical and spiritual well-being. These are the real human rights, purer than the spurious lexicon of the ruling party. Each of us has one shot at a life on this beleaguered planet. What are our intentions about sitting down and working out a better deal for all? This is our only domicile. The differences we exploit in order to gain unfair advantage needs attention. Each one deserves a fair chance.
* Literally Yours is a weekly column from Cape Argus reader Alex Tabisher. He can be contacted on email by [email protected]
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.
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