As South Africa marks Human Rights Day, March 21 in remembrance of Sharpeville Massacre of 1960, the question stands: has the power relations picture changed?
Margaret Thatcher said there were a lot of nobodies in the UK who are somebodies in SA. Applying sanctions would increase a lot of nobodies in the UK. Thatcher’s rationale for opposing sanctions. A nobody in the UK, a British citizen angry with Monarchy Phil Craig, is here in South Africa demonstrating audacity to advocate for independence of the Western Cape from the rest of the Republic of South Africa. Craig is white.
Anyone black, from South Africa, doing the same in the UK, is beyond imagination.
Margate Thatcher’s US counterpart and former actor Ronald Reagan dressed his opposition to sanctions with a phrase: “Constructive engagement.”
Black liberation was an impediment to business as usual.
Today, the dehumanised have a vote, rehumanisation is an impediment still to bother business about as priority is investment, (economic) growth and jobs.
The dispensers are clear as is recipients as both assumed their respective superordinate and subordinate positions in a ‘democratic’ South Africa forever irritating with calls of equality to the provocation of US 47th President Donald Trump who has found amazing friends in continuity of the status in the consensus expressed in any language including Afrikaans and English for the preservation of white privilege.
There can be no common and true humanity in the presence of inequality even when papered with that illusive word democracy whose periodic elections are conducted by continuing order of not changing economic policy for business to equally continue as usual as a condition for investment, growth and jobs for dehumanised voters.
What is a ‘human right’ to a dehumanised being whose rehumanisation endeavours are equated ‘as treated others people badly’. What do Human Rights mean to the dehumanised whose perennial black condition in the status quo is neither seen nor heard.
Treating other people good constitutes immutability of white privilege. Tempering with white privilege amounts to treating other people badly. That is the reigning rationale for investor confidence; economic growth and jobs promise for the ungrateful, dehumanised voters.
SA is still in arrears with that great, great dream of Biko’s to give the world a human face.
That human face is not on the agenda of Trump be it in Afrikaans or English wherever in the world where white privilege is a no-go area for change.
How easily liberation gets sanctioned than oppressive dispossession.
Is simply being human and living in a humane world a big ask to make?
