Black Nationalist Thought in South Africa by Hashi Kenneth Tafira

Author:Hashi Kenneth Tafira
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US, New York

Van Dijk’s words are true to South Africa and are a big intervention in the furore caused by Samantha Vice’s writings on white South Africans’ guilt.203 Secondly, instead of facing the fact that whatever they have is unearned, what they have is the product of the work of others, which is unevenly distributed, they rather fear losing it. The obfuscation of the idea of race and racism is seen in the Brett Murray’s “spear” painting of President Jacob Zuma. The painting is a plain case of racism and objectification of the black phallus. Murray is vindicated because of his “struggle credentials” and claims of his satirical work in the 1980s. In contrast, images of black security guards manhandling a black man who defaced the painting and “gentlemanly” escorting his white counterpart out of the gallery were widely screened.

Incipient racisms have characterized the postapartheid social formation, which is heightened by the presence of black African immigrant identities.204 The result has been black on black racism whose pivot is not only use of debasing racist language but violent pogroms and lynching synonymous with, and ironically at the heart of white anti-black racism. In societies previously structured in racial dominance,205 like South Africa, the formerly racially oppressed imbibe the racist traits of their racist oppressors, which they mete out to those who share a similar colour. Here, we are talking of transferred or delegated racism. I find striking similarities between apartheid notions of the nation, ethnicity, race and discrimination and their replication in the postapartheid. There is a paucity of research on this matter though, which will further enlighten us on this phenomenon. Many elect to deny it, but there certainly are a reconfiguration of race and racism in the postapartheid, very similar to apartheid’s, yet with illusory changes. The apartheid project was built on race denial; rather, they found it opportune to talk of culture and ethnos. We see the culturalism of the new racism after 1994. Then there is the connection between racism and nationalism, a concern with purity of the nation and its “children” in order to maintain its true identity.206 It must, therefore, isolate the “exogenous,” “interbred,” “cosmopolitan” elements within, then eliminate and expel them. The result is “racialization” of populations and social groups whose collective features are deemed impure. Violent racism is transported onto intra-black populations, in the process absolving white South Africans of racism. The latter becomes covert, invisible and masked; the former is overt and visible because it is tangible, like when a “foreigner” is thrown off the train or burnt.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.