IT IS QUITE DEPLORABLE THAT OUR DEMOCRACY HAS TURNED OUT THIS WAY. The ushering in of a new form of government with its attendant business plan was expected to signify a proud achievement of all South Africans--white and black--  an achievement born in the main by a fairly violent clash of our day-to-day comings and goings; and our revolutionary insistence to not "allow a crisis to go to waste".

 

When the incoming Pres. Mandela said, with euphoric abandon, in his inagaural address, and a virgin speech to an emerging democracy, that "never, never, and never again, shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another, and suffer the indignity of being the skunk of the world", Africa and the world watched in inspired disbelief. The awe felt on the international front emphasized to everyone that the human spirit will triumph time and again. 

 

We, the Rainbow Nation, were beside ourselves at what we had made happen. The possibilities were boundless, or so we felt at the time. And they are--they really are.

 

However, "non-whites" are stubbornly transforming themselves into political "Goliaths", and the rest of the pack, whether white or "non-white", depending on your relation to these "Goliaths", into charity-case "Davids". The phenomenon is looked upon as a meant-to-be outcome of the revolutionary sweat and blood. But it's not. Not one iota, it isn't. Justification? The Freedom Charter.

In the new South Africa, the people that helped produce the Freedom Charter, or at least, the ones who availed themselves to seeing to it that the "Rainbow Promises" got delivered upon to "We, the South African People" are backing off. Effectively, they say the Kliptown Charter is for the birds, all the while shrouding the fact about how that Convent of the People organized us, and world, around the talking point of freedom from "the oppression of one by another". This class of people are, along with their electorate, delivering us to our generational evil.  

 

A bit of political retrospection should help frame a model perspective, because "in the cause of human events" that invariably becomes necessary.

 

In outdistancing himself from a student body dominated, mandated, and ruled by white students, Stephen Bantubonke Biko pioneered a fresh start--an unbeaten path. He thus advocated a rallying around of "non-white" students for a student-body organization they could truly create in their own "non-white" image, the South African Students Organization (SASO).

 

This was to be the paradigm from which to move forward in rejecting the black men's disgust of "standing at the touchlines [and] witness[ing] a game that they should [have] be playing. They want[ed] to do things for themselves and all by themselves."

 

Biko balked at the idea that white and "non-white" students articulate concepts and possible solutions to the broader South African Problem from planks of the same platform, because, as he put it, white people--one and all--are the social problem to black South Africa. Why? Well, the reason was, that every time election time hit, they voted into power the National Party, a party that endorsed White Economic Empowerment in its parliamentary task. 

 

This party was waving a wand of injustice through its biased politics--Apartheid. Yet whites seemed to not care. To be sure, they seemed to express deep gratification via their vote. So that was the source of all evil in Apartheid South Africa. This, I might add, was unparalleled analysis, and it was spot-on.

 

Fast-forward to 2013. Needless to say, you witness the exact opposite of Biko's idea: South Africa's problem is now stemming from the African National Congress, and the people that vote it into power every election time. This was Biko's intellectual story in the last century. That story remains on the loop even today, for it deserves that much airtime. And he stuck to it to his last day of assassination in the hands the Security Police, because for him, "it is better to die for an idea that will live than to live for an idea that will die'.

 

We are going to change South Africa. What we've got to decide is the best way to do that. And as angry as we have the right to be... we are in the struggle to kill the idea that one kind of man is superior to another kind of man... to say we can all build a South Africa worth living in - a South Africa for equals, black or white, a South Africa as beautiful as this land is, as beautiful as we are.[Steve Biko: I WRITE WHAT I LIKE]