Today was not born at daybreak. It has been
long in the making and even longer in the coming. Time, the mother of all
things, is also the light that shines on yesterday’s lies, baking them into
today’s truth. It is said that time heals all wounds – I say it covers all
wounds, fades all memories. Sometimes, it makes fact of legend.
The people of Thokoza, Katlehong, Vosloorus
didn’t just wake up one morning and decide that there will be war between their
respective communities and people who lived in the hostels in those townships.
These communities had until the fateful 80s lived side by side with the migrant
labourers who lived in the hostels, albeit with a measure of mutual contempt. Reportedly
all this was beef between Inkatha and SDUs (self-defence units). This was a long time coming. We could take a
trip back to the days of Mfeqane and the nation building efforts of king Shaka
and Moshoeshoe. But then you would lose interest. The short version is that
there are different nations, delineated primarily by language, customs and
cultural practices. The common ingredient to the nationhood seems to be the
enduring contempt of the other, whoever they may be, as long as they are not of
us. Whatever that means. Sol Plaatjie writes beautifully of the bloodletting in
Mhudi – worth a read.
Batswana, apparently unmatched in their
cowardice (according to amaZulu), would be heard shouting “ko matebeleng”, to
the Ndebeles, whenever there is a twister blowing through the township. Mind
you, Matebele is shorthand for all those that are of Nguni descent. Similarly, amaZulu would have some choice
words for the Basotho and so on and so forth.
Recently, the South Africans of a darker hue refer to similarly hued
Africans as makwerekwere. We all know how that all progressed; from looting
businesses to torching a man alive to gruesome public stabbing of another. Then
of course an elderly gentleman refers to me, by extension to be fair, as a
kaffir without batting an eyelid. He too would be called something unpleasant
by another group and so it goes – a series of yesterdays building up to today.
Here we are, unconsciously if not seemingly comfortably standing on a ledge –
taunting an avalanche.
The thing about name-calling is the death
that seems to follow. The death that is
so long in the coming that the yesterday on which it rode to get here is
blissfully forgotten. It is all taken to have been a sudden change of events,
an inexplicable turn of relations where neighbour took arms against neighbour. A
sudden madness that gripped ordinary folk who otherwise would not harm a fly?
As sudden as the bloodletting that took place between the Thutsi and Hutu
people perhaps?
This is an age-old science, it seems. A
science as old as humanity maybe? It seems human beings simply can’t help
themselves. We make less of the other and that way when the killing begins, it
is not killing as it is extermination of something less than human. It is the
enemy, the women, the homosexuals, the infidels, the albino, the blacks and so
on and so forth. Even as we kill and denigrate and make less and all those
things; sometimes in the name of a higher goal or out come – we covet. Somehow
we believe that by killing off the other, we stand to attain some better
position. The problem is, we can’t kill off the other. The children, even
generations later, return to avenge their own. The long coming yesterday
becomes a blood-drenched today – building up to a similarly blood-drenched
tomorrow.
Perhaps it gets better or even stops, when we
realise that as we US, we OTHER. Come to think of it, aren’t nations the cause
of all wars like living is the cause of all dying?
Letting me be, offensive as my being may be to
you, is the ticket to you being, whatever that may be. Let’s try a different
tomorrow, we’re too late for today.
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