The values we fought for: If we fail to live by them, our apartheid past will have won

Written by Justice Malala

For the sake of our children and their children, we must constantly remind ourselves why there was a freedom struggle in this country.

It is essential that we do this because many among us believe that the struggle for freedom was about power, that those who fought the apartheid system did so merely because they wanted to replace the heinous apartheid system and its snouts in the trough with their own snouts in the trough. This is not true.

The struggle for freedom was about values, about what we hold most dear as a people and as a country. It was about giving all of us a chance to fulfil our potential without impediment. It was about upholding and reinforcing, in a democratic space, our non-racialism, our non-sexism and our common humanity.

Some of these things have been forgotten. Some of these things are being erased by a fringe that aims to reduce that liberation struggle to nothing. These values of equality and human dignity, and non-racism and non-sexism, need to be protected every day, now more than ever before.

Over the past two weeks, a debate has erupted in largely Afrikaner circles about race relations after author Annelie Botes told the newspaper Rapport that she does not like black people.

"I don't like black people . I don't understand them . I know they are people just like me . I know they have the same rights as me . but I do not understand them. And then I do not like them. I avoid them because I am scared of them," she said.

Botes apparently blamed black people for South Africa's violent crime problem, which had claimed the life of her neighbour, and said the violence showed that blacks were "angry because of their own incompetence".

The nub of Botes' comments lies in the last sentence: blacks are "angry because of their own incompetence". In that one sentence, she stands exposed as a racist. Not someone who, ravaged by crime, has developed a fear of people she thinks represent her violators. She has always seen blacks as "incompetent". To her, this is part of being black, this is what makes up being black.

Crime has numerous effects and consequences. How many people, for example, lock their car doors on seeing a group of young black males walking towards them at a street light at night? This is part of what dehumanises our lives in South Africa. Crime dehumanises us. It does not, however, make all black people rapists, thugs and incompetents, as Botes alleges.

But that is not the issue. The issue is that, in removing apartheid legislation and ushering in democracy, we have failed to entrench values of non-racism among people like Botes and many others. What Botes expressed is as heinous as what Hendrik Verwoerd and other architects of apartheid expressed decades ago: that the black man and woman are inferior and incompetent. In Botes, the discredited racism of these apartheid masters still beats strongly.

The challenge therefore is how can we continue to build a country founded on values of non-racism and non-sexism. The challenge is to ensure that children born around the likes of Botes begin to embrace values that enable them to accept themselves and others as human beings and not as inferior lackeys.

The first step is to accept that memory is crucial. We need to teach our children what happened here and how 46 years of apartheid nationalism nearly ruined us all. We need to teach them, in our schools and in the way we rebuild our country, that a crime as heinous as Nazism took place in South Africa.

Crucially, we need to entrench the values for which we fought in our children. It is not enough for us to just teach, it is also important to be non-sexist and non-racial. Unlike the racism preached by Botes, our children must see us living and mingling freely with our fellow countrymen. How we live our values is far more important than how much we teach them.

It is not easy. The implementation of affirmative action, for example, can lead to fights, insecurity and hurt. The selection of the Springbok team will lead to heated debate. Every day, in our workplaces and in social interactions, these challenges will face us.

But every day gives us a chance to demonstrate that people like Annelie Botes are dinosaurs and are not part of our value system. Every day gives us a chance to demonstrate that, painful as it has been, what we have built in just 16 years is far stronger and more powerful than what was destroyed in 46 years of National Party apartheid.

(This story was provided and used with permission by Timeslive.)