Don’t sacrifice Penny Sparrow

SEXUAL HARRASEMENTJoram Nyathi Spectrum
So long as black people continue to believe the language of the oppressor that there is a nice formula to end oppression, black people shall continue to suffer oppression and the oppressor has no reason to stop enjoying that privilege.

It’s a painful conclusion one has to draw from our bloody intercourse with the whiteman, especially those of the Anglo-Saxon stoke.

We love the whiteman, we love whiteness and the blackman will do everything to be in love and be loved by the whiteman.

For that reason, there is an instinctive tendency, inclination among oppressed blacks to fight anybody who tries to alienate the whiteman by challenging the system and conditions of oppression.

We are patient and persistent; it can’t be true that the whiteman doesn’t love black people.

If we are patient enough, the love will show someday.

The oppression will stop of its own if we show the whiteman goodwill, that we are honest, we grin at his insults, tolerate his abuse more than we can suffer any slight by fellow blacks; one day he will appreciate that we are human.

If we worship his god, we go to the same church, he will accept eventually that we are all God’s children only from different mothers; that we are equal.

It will never happen, so Stop It.

This jeremiad was elicited by what’s happening in that cursed country of the rainbow.

Fortunately that’s where salvation for the blackman might, could, come from.

Well, because the oppressor has become so bold, brazen even, about his privileged place in South Africa which the ruling ANC and the political leadership have embraced as ordained by God.

What do the Calvinists call it — predestination!

In an article we carried in this paper yesterday titled “Why SA should undo Mandela’s economic deals”, Professor Patrick Bond indicates how anti-apartheid stalwart Nelson Mandela sealed the blackman’s subordinate fate with majority rule in 1994 while the architects of apartheid oppression assumed a new, privileged place in the economy.

Since then, the black political leadership has taken the flak for all that goes wrong or is not done to improve the lot of the blackman while the whiteman keeps all his apartheid privileges minus the headache of administering the state.

This has been secured by an ironclad constitution that is so sacred even Moses would be envious despite his own stone tablet of the 10 Commandments.

(Of course if South African leadership had the spine and was not so deadly enamoured of the whiteman, they would do something. Germany’s Angela Merkel hit it on the head this week in support of the deportation of “criminal refuges” when she blurted out: “If the law does not suffice, then the law must be changed.” Blackman, a constitution can be changed if it has become an albatross!)

I said the whiteman will bring salvation to South Africa, and eventually, Africa.

Readers will recall the offensive drawing of President Zuma with that phallic “Spear of the nation” caption.

It was called freedom of expression.

He has recently been likened to a monkey.

All this blacks have tolerated, because the whiteman “means well”, he is joking “with us”, not at our expense.

But we can’t joke back because that would be deemed racist. After all who does the naming, who sets the standard!

Few would have known about a white woman realtor named Penny Sparrow until the end of last year and the beginning the new year. She decided to take fate by the horns and make herself known.

It turns out she’s your kind of Donald Trump, or Botha of the lizard and crocodile fame (is it infamy?).

New Year’s eve and the day after at the Durban beaches were the perfect settings for her rise to fame and racial stardom.

She looked around her with all her white privilege and the purest intentions, and noted with disgust how black creatures of the wild had been allowed to mess around the whiteman’s beach.

She likened them to monkeys on her Facebook page.

When that exploded in her face, she was quick to rationalise it.

Let her tongue roll on, from a website:

“Every year it is the same story; it’s their [black people] day and we don’t go in the beach, we don’t interfere, we let it be. We all know it and there is nothing wrong. We stay out of the way and stay at home,” she said.

“I am sorry that it has taken such a viral turn (the monkey slur), but it was just a statement of how it was. I made the mistake of comparing them [black people] with monkeys. Monkeys are cute and they’re naughty, but they [black people] don’t see it that way, but I do because I love animals,” she said.

“I wasn’t being nasty or rude or horrible, but it’s just that they [black people] make a mess. It is just how they are.”

Sparrow remained largely unrepentant, saying that she had just “said it how she felt it”.

“I put an apology up to say I didn’t mean it personally. That day on that beach it was all black people, I’m sorry to say it, but it is a fact of life. I said it as I felt it and I know it was wrong to do it on a public thing [Facebook] like that. I don’t know how it got out and we were all saying it,” Sparrow added.

It is very, very unfortunate that Ms Sparrow has lost her job at Jawitz Properties for her monkey comments.

She’s simply being victimised for vocalising a shared “secret”.

“I don’t know how it got out and we were all saying it,” she complained when the hypocrites turned against her.

Crimes like apartheid and racism will never end so long we persecute the few who express the general sentiment of the majority in their race.

Reconciliation is despised as surrender, that’s why there is no reciprocity. Let the truth out and people ignite, otherwise there shall be no end to the blackman’s oppression.

I said the whiteman has a prescription to bring everything to a head. The protests against Rhodes’s statue are part of that awakening consciousness of what it means to be black. The whiteman will fight to keep and maintain his privileges in a blackman’s country and continent.

The blackman must behave himself in a whiteman’s world because the law can be changed to strip him of any privilege.

This week the whiteman raised the stakes. White farmers (you should have seen the video clip as they struggled to enter the door as their appeared in court) lynched two hungry blacks they accused of theft. The justification given for the extrajudicial murder was the prevalence of farm murders in South Africa. (Four thousand white farmers are said to have been killed since majority rule in 1994. Compare that to so-much reviled Mugabe where the same 4 000 farmers were safely kicked out of the farms with just about a dozen killed.)

But it is the tension over land which will give South Africa the revolution it needs. President Mugabe is right when he says South Africa needs another revolution. Julius Malema understands this perfectly well.

The ANC government has been ducking and diving, and that could cost it votes because the name of Nelson Mandela cannot bring food to the table.

It is a revolution delayed. Blacks have been taunted for far too long by otherwise too fat apartheid authors and beneficiaries who still control and run the economy.

Lenin asked a profoundly simple question, faced with the challenge of global capitalism (read economic apartheid in South Africa) at the turn of the 20th century: What is to be done?

There are no simple answers.

The truth however is that there will never be a correct method to make the whiteman give up his racial privileges. Zimbabwe long discovered this, hence the so-called chaotic land reform.

The ANC at least still has the sway to direct the course of that necessary anti-apartheid land reform.

It can choose to “change the law” as Merkel says, or to have its dead weight of a constitution consumed in a bonfire.

How do you talk of racial harmony in a country where 5 million whites living in an economic laager view 40 blacks outside that laager as monkeys, “cute” and “naughty”, and perhaps only fit to live in the trees and not on farms? Isn’t chaos better than playing possum?

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