Preppy Angst

Let me first start by saying some of you who visit this blog find it daunting that they have to open accounts with my server to post a comment and opt to send their comments straight to me (my email is posted somewhere here no the blog layout). I cannot your comments individually but have decided to incorporate them as part of my discussions. As much as I'll endeavour to engage every sensible comment others are just silly or even downright racist. Those I'll not dignify with an answer.

I'm one of those who believe biographical gossip is a pauper’s criticism. But, though I don't know why such things should matter I must state, for those who seem interested in such things, that I'm not a product of private education. I was educated in Roman Missionary schools in my earlier years, and Transkie (one of South Africa's Bantustan) public schools for High School. I've personally been greatly influenced in my thinking by the late Chief Albert Luthuli, a Nobel laureate, former president of ANC and a humanist with a Christian bias. I share what he wrote in his autobiography, Let My People Go: My ambitions are, I think, modest—they scarcely go beyond the desire to serve God and my neighbour, both at full stretch. But contact with people is the very breath of life for me.

Hence I say Chief Luthuli was a humanist with a Christian bias. He came into politics at the time when liberation struggle leaders could maintain a relaxed personal independence; when philistinism had not yet engulfed political sphere, and politics came as a result of struggles with one's moral earnestness first. He was more concerned with the ideal of the whole man, as a spiritual being. Chief Luthuli treated his faith with utter sincerity as love and service for God and society. I find myself drawn to such people, which includes the likes of reverend Frank Chikane in our times.

I hasten to add I've very little in common with fundamentalist including those whose fundamentalism is in the name of Christ. I find myself respecting tremendously especially Afrikaners who deliberately go against the culture racism they were inured on, like Max Du Preez and Anjie Krog. Here is how chief Luthuli described one of the fathers of their philosophy Mr. De Villiers who was refused acceptance in the Dutch Reformed Church of the period because of his liberal views: “If you find an Afrikaner who is liberal,” he once told us, and I took it that he referred to himself, “you must recognise that he gets to that point only after a good deal of heartsearching and repentance, because he's been brought up to dislike and look down on natives. We've been taught that natives aren't like you people here.”

Has anything changed? Very little according to president Mbeki in his letter at ANC-Today: Freedom from racism – a fundamental human right. In my last post below, All Africans Now? I tried to engage this point. Some of you, like Deborah Mashibhini in St Louis, Missouri (U.S.A) sent their comments directly to me:

"I enjoyed reading your most recent post... it made me think of this statement from WEB DuBois in 1953: I still think today as yesterday that the color line is a great problem of this century. But today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance and disease of the majority of their followmen; that to maintain this privilege men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race.- WEB DuBois, 1953:

"I do believe that our world - our psyche, beliefs, assumptions, perspectives - are all twisted around race as a major factor determining national and global political, economic, and social directions (at least in Africa and America). We claim otherwise, do anything to deny that it all has to do with race - which in the end equals the dehumanization of "others" and the maintenance of power and control by a select few - but if we don't deal with race and all the historical and contemporary results of our obsession with it in a straighforward manner - finally uncover all that hides beneath those heavy rocks - I don't believe there is potential for us to forge a truly humane world for the majority of human beings."

Deborah

Others who rather we talked only about economics and African dictators feel our discussion of the race issue is tantamount to cheap shots, blunderbuss arrant falsifications and superficial complaints. President Mbeki in his letter says: “those who are determined to avoid confronting the difficult issues we raise in this letter seek to divert attention away from discussing the relationship between racism and perception of crime”. He says this “section of our population have deeply entrenched fears that lies in deeply entrenched racism that Africans are Cushites and Endomites, who have since time immemorial been repudiated by a God who is only a God of the whites”. Is that true?

For those of you who keep asking; I am a black male of thirty-something years. Since the language of human rights has taken the place of socialism among those who seek to transform society for the better I define myself, when labels are necessary, as a Christian humanist. In his recent essay, Putting the Human Back into Humanism, Frank Furedi, a university lecturer in England says: The importance of humanism lies not in what it rejects, but in what it upholds: the importance of human experience as the foundation for knowledge.

In spirit of wishing to learn from human experience, and the fact that I believe South Africa in particular has been chosen by history to attend to the issue of racism in close attention I want this blog to be a platform of discussing it. Since I grew up in the township I know how aggrieved most black people in general in this country feel about the issue. I've been assured that the same is true in the US. Most black people feel not enough has been done to address the wrongs of the past, like economical justice. They feel South Africa is in a stalemate position that prevents much needed redeeming discussions about our past while the wounds are festering. As we know, if rage does not make itself known in words it will make itself known in deeds.

The peculiar thing about our times is the reversal of fortunes I see all around. Many who regard themselves as inheritors of the secular, rational Enlightenment tradition, who call themselves progressives, are not necessarily apologists for ethnic and race separateness, but wish to perpetuate the status quo, which does exactly that under the ostensible banner of respecting diversity. Chief Luthuli lamented against similar thing, of course it was then called “Separate Development” or “developing along their own lines.” The aestheticised versions serves the same shit in silk stocking.

I repeat, this platform is for those who do not care much about flattery and hucksterism. If you have something to say, say it in a civilised manner, this is not a platform to vent racist grudges. If you want to read purveyors of empty aphorisms and feel good moronism there's lot going around, pick your choice and stick your head on their shallow sands. There are some who accuse me of 'preppy angst' that's supposed to be fuelling my racial regret. I'm not sure how one 'can feel good about feeling guilty'. I've also been told I oppress the blog 'with essayistic intelligence'. I had thought we would reserve this space for thoughtful political, cultural, and even spiritual introspection and self-examination; the commitment to the unprettified surface of real experience. To allign intelligence to honesty, a rare thing indeed. I hope I'll not hit a clunker!