Social media gives us the best weapon possible in the fight against bigotry and prejudice by allowing us to spot it every time, writes Kevin Ritchie.
When will South Africans ever learn to be more circumspect about social media?
It's something that Helen Zille’s minders are probably mulling over this morning, after the premier of the Western Cape took to Twitter to share a quick thought before she took off - and then landed to a Twar that knocked the Sassa debacle (with its impending disaster for 17million South Africans) clean off the news agenda.
Zille was quick to fall on her sword and issue a grovelling apology, but her haters - who are legion - were worrying her earlier tweet like dogs on a bone.
Zille’s not the first, she won't be the last. The list from last year alone is already long and infamous; starting with Penny Sparrow and including (but not limited to) Velaphi Khumalo , Vicky Momberg, Matthew Theunissen, Judge Mabel Jansen and Ben Sasonof. Most of those involved Facebook.
For Twitter, the gold standard of bigotry remains Justine Sacco, who blithely tweeted “Going to Africa. Hope I don't get Aids. Just kidding. I'm white” in December 2013, just before taking off for Johannesburg to holiday with her family.
By the time she landed, she'd been fired. By the time Zille landed, there was an unprecedented revolt among her fellow party members, many of them MPs, with her own party leader Mmusi Maimane ordering her conduct to be referred to the federal legal commission. The reaction itself is heartening, both for the stand it takes against racism and revisionism, but also the unequivocal speaking of truth to power - in sharp contrast to the way other leaders have been treated by their party faithful in recent weeks.
The reality is that colonialism was appalling - even more so than apartheid. Lest we forget, it was colonialism - under the guise of Cecil Rhodes - which laid the foundations for migrant labour through the hut tax, and spatial segregation in rural areas, which ultimately morphed into the hated Bantustans. Would Johannesburg have become the El Dorado it did, if the mine bosses had been forced to pay fair wages, build decent housing and provide pensions - instead of getting away with the latter-day equivalent of a handful of beads, a bag of mealiemeal and a bicycle to men who had to leave their familes behind thousands of kilometres away for a year at a time to live in hostels?
But, thanks to them, we ended up with electrified cities, telephone networks, roads, railways - all built to serve the industry that their labour made possible.
Colonialism was also deadly. Comparisons with the Nazi
Holocaust are neither theatrical nor over-stated. Australia’s aboriginal population declined from a quarter of a million in 1788 to less than
60 000 by the 1920s due to massacres and diseases imported by the colonists. The Hereros of Namibia - widely recognised as the first genocide of the 20th century - were systematically exterminated by their German colonial masters.
All of this, though, pales into insignificance with the absolute horror of the Congo between 1896 and 1905 when Belgian's King Leopold II amassed a personal fortune from the rubber industry while his concessionaires tortured, maimed, starved and killed millions of indigenous Congolese to force them to work the plantations.
Colonialism, particularly when driven by commercial imperatives, was tyrannical. The local populations had no rights, no access to justice, particularly when their lands were governed by companies with special charters. Major-General Robert Clive’s India is a perfect example. It took the mutiny in 1857 to bring about change. Rhodes’s eponymous Rhodesia, under his British South Africa Company, is another.
Whatever benefits that ever accrued from colonialism, wherever it was practised, were at the expense of others. People lost their natural rights in their birthlands, either because their leaders negotiated them away for a bottle of brandy and a trinket - or the colonists came in and literally stole the land at gunpoint, making the former farmers their serfs - or killing them. We dare not ever lose sight of this.
It's exactly the same with apartheid, which was nothing less than indigenised colonialism. People who benefited from either will find it difficult to speak against the very real advantages that the beneficiaries enjoyed - like 20% of the population enjoying 80% of the national budget for state healthcare or education. They did live in paradise - because everyone else paid for it.
That was legalised apartheid. The legacy of that privilege, the gap between political franchise and economic and social emancipation, is structural apartheid. If ever we needed to be schooled on the meaning and relevance of that phenomenon, the Fallist movement forever shook us out of that.
But there's another phenomenon at play here, too. It's not new. In Zille’s case, it is the perennial narrative of her role as a fearless journalist in forcing the apartheid government to own up to the murder of Steve Biko. We should all respect her for that. She deserves our thanks, too, for being brave when so many of her colleagues in other newsrooms were cowed, craven or just actively didn't care - because they were benefiting from the very system that Biko’s existence threatened.
Past heroics can't be a perpetual panacea for present failings. The Boers were among the first, most storied, freedom fighters on the continent. Paul Kruger, the Transvaal president, was revered in Europe in his day, as Nelson Mandela would become 50 years later.
Today, though, the Afrikaners are synonymous with racist institutionalised repression - with apartheid recognised as a crime against humanity. Six million Jews perished in the Holocaust. Today Israel stands accused of practising apartheid, with every pejorative that that entails, in the Middle East.
Here at home, black South Africans routinely turn on other Africans, people fleeing here for a chance of a better life from the very countries that gave succour and support to our liberation movements. The crime is that we don't call it racism, but hide behind the euphemism that is xenophobia.
We dare not forget our history, especially not revise it. Our todays are built on the price of their
yesterdays.
Perhaps, the greatest gift of all is the intoxicating allure of vanity and social media, which will paradoxically give us the best weapon possible in the fight against bigotry and prejudice by allowing us to spot it every time and hang it out to dry for the dangerous cant that it is.