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Withhold race from post-apartheid discussions and you erase history, meaning and race itself

Ismail Lagardien
By Ismail Lagardien
28 Aug 2024
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We are expected to forgive Roman Cabanac and Renaldo Gouws and move on because their racist comments were in the past, with its carefully curated boundaries of remembering.

There’s an analogy I refer to often. It is of a man who believes women are bad drivers. He cruises the streets all day, every day, ignores everything that a male driver may do wrong, then pounces on a woman driver’s mistake and (finally) has his “proof” that women are bad drivers.

Besides being a crude case of misogyny, it has to do, also, with intellectual occlusion and wilful forgetting – and the power to give meaning and value.

Take a moment to read any of the reports and books by new-found interest groups and think tanks that generate income and prestige from everything that is going wrong in South Africa (all of which I have criticised, repeatedly over the past decade or so; you can only write that someone is a dog so many times), and watch public intellectuals, those dancing on South Africa’s grave, frothing at the mouth and gloating gleefully.

A hard call to make, asking someone to take a moment to read something that sits uncomfortably in a world where beliefs are fixed, and new information is ignored, and where they have given value to things selectively.

Anyway, this wilful forgetting and bounded memories, a veritable gorging on selective plates, may be likened to political gluttony and greediness – more a politics of the bowels than of St Augustine’s greediness of the belly – that “debases” intellectuals and turns them into “animals”.

It is a sign of inner disequilibrium, what the late Irish writer William Trevor described as “a form of disguise or compensation for an inner emptiness” that resembles a monstrous perversion of the sensual.

Those who have lost power may never be satisfied with anything that comes after.

This inner emptiness is not always accidental. It is often part of carefully curated boundaries of remembering, of memory shaped by emotion, power and control, the power and the very ability to bestow meaning and value to things.

Erasing meaning, history and race


Reflecting on the permissibility of the entry of Roman Cabanac and Renaldo Gouws into politics and policy-making under the apparent protection of John Steenhuisen, South Africans are quite marvellous at dismissing or minimising those things from our past that make us feel uncomfortable, or that may make us complicit in any past wrongdoings.

We draw lines across and parcel off parts of the past, highlight those things that make us feel good and minimise or completely ignore other parts. All you have to do is withhold race from post-apartheid discussions and you erase history, meaning and race itself.

Some of us recall only the things that have gone wrong since 1994. The refrain is popular: apartheid is over, let’s move on; slavery is over, let’s move on; colonialism is over, let’s move on.

Cabanac and Gouws made terribly racist and offensive comments many months ago, so it is in the past and they should be forgiven. Their acts have been stripped of meaning.

I wonder which of history’s other villains we may forgive? Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, King Leopold?

We are selective, then, of things to remember within periods of cruelty and injustice, violence and destruction. These wilfully drawn boundaries of remembering are often shaped as much by emotion as they are by the power to give meaning and value.

Some of us would find pictures of Nazi prison camps in the 1940s more offensive and disturbing than pictures of “degrading” Australian immigration detention centres, or of refugee camps in Rafa, or Rohingya camps in Bangladesh.

Also in the 1940s, internment camps of Japanese people in the US, the imprisonment and mass murder of Polish or Soviet prisoners of war, and of Roma or Sinti may not be as disturbing to people who feel (justifiably) hurt by images of, say, Jewish people – all the people whom Hitler considered to be “impure” and standing in the way of expansion and reaching his territorial ambitions.

Terrible price


It matters less that Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa was “a war of unprecedented savagery, bent on reducing tens of millions of people to slavery and rooting out Hitler’s ‘Judeo-Bolshevik’ enemy (and that) the Soviet people had to pay a terrible price, with countless millions of soldiers and civilians losing their lives”,  as Jochen Hellbeck, a professor of history at Rutgers University in New Jersey in the US, wrote.

In this way we place higher value on mass deaths and dying, on persecution and injustices against some people, than we do on others. With noteworthy exceptions, today’s injustices are either not as bad as the past, or worse, depending of course on our emotions. Some events of the past are emphasised while others are pushed aside or minimised.

If past injustices are to be left in the past, where is the line of forgetting? Where is the starting line for “moving on”?

Within these boundaries there is also the policing of what may or may not be said, what is the “right” history and what is the “wrong” history, “which” deaths (or “whose” deaths) are more important or significant and more painful to remember.

A woman who survived the Nazi Holocaust remembered how the Nazis destroyed a synagogue in the Polish town of Wloclawek in 1940 and killed Jews while they were at prayer. A Palestinian explains how the Israelis blew up a mosque and killed Muslims while they were at prayer, but we have given different meaning and value to those acts that span more than seven decades.

Spanning these seven or eight decades, what (different) meanings may be attached to two statements?

One such statement was made earlier this month by the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, when he said that his country was, in essence, “the most moral country in the world. We are today the vanguard of civilisation.”

Another by the German Nazi-era philosopher, Martin Heidegger who said, after the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad: “The planet is in flames, the essence of man is out of joint. World’s historical thinking can only come from the Germans… if they preserve the German essence.”

Inherent value


In a Nietzschean way, we give value and esteem to certain events and withhold it from other events. Whatever does not have inherent value is unrecognised until we give it value because of the power of bestowal we have.

The man who goes in search of a woman driving badly went looking for something and ignored everything else. Men behaving badly behind the wheel is meaningless. Women driving badly is given greater meaning.

Present-day social and political actors in South Africa have stripped present-day racism of any meaning, and racism of the past is, well, in the past and no longer has any value and we should forget about it and move on. How we think about the present and the past hinges, then, on the power we have to strip anything and everything of meaning.

The absence of meaning and memory makes discussions (and our writing) rather bland. The single-mindedness of forgetting the past and thinking only about the future makes us shallow and inconsequential, and quite unable to come to terms with our own association with somatic and intellectual (organised) brutality. DM

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