Lorenzo Davids writes that, given South Africa's history of inequality, oppression and discrimination, these three demons of our history continuously wage war on the three necessary frameworks that will secure our future. -Photographer-Tracey Adams
Great democracies are founded upon three well-known established concepts: a just constitution, the rule of law, and a fundamental quality called patience.
Given South Africa's history of inequality, oppression and discrimination, these three demons of our history continuously wage war on the three necessary frameworks that will secure our future.
The overwhelming majority of South Africa’s population has a history of inequality, oppression and discrimination.
Our mental orientation to life is to fight when we perceive that we face discrimination, oppression and inequality.
We react instinctively with aggression when we are confronted with the symbols and perceptions of apartheid.
We have remained distrustful of the Constitution, the rule of law and have become sceptical and exhausted with patience.
Patience is seen as a new and disguised form of extending the practice and power of inequality, oppression and discrimination.
After 30 years of democracy, most people who had lived under apartheid as the target of its vicious laws and have lost land, family, homes, dignity and careers, are orientated to recognise the multiple deceiving powers of inequality, oppression and discrimination. As with all groups, there is a “kumbaya” crowd who endure the old and endow the new with immediate loyalty.
However, the overwhelming majority of South Africa’s people who suffered the brutalities of apartheid are reeling from the hiding that the liberation Struggle got in the May 2024 general elections and are very suspicious of the Constitution, the rule of law and of being asked to show more patience.
The complexity of their current dilemma is that the ANC is both their celebrated liberator and their utter disappointment. The unearthed complexity within our democracy is not that the formerly oppressed reject the 1994 dispensation.
The unearthed complexity is twofold: the untiring power of the race beneficiaries and class custodians of apartheid to reinvent themselves as better liberators than our own and that the oppressed would so willingly abandon their long walk to freedom and accept these reinvented liberators as the new way.
The oppressed supported a constitution that on February 4, 1997 assumed that everyone – oppressed and oppressor - had a level of equity that gave them equality before the law. That is the current fracture and complexity.
The historical and vast ongoing economic, educational, health and employment inequalities are now judged under the assumption of equality, and not the ongoing and existing devastation and destruction sown by apartheid laws.
This is why the entire process of deconstruction through campaigns such as Black Lives Matter, Decolonisation and Reclaim the City are all so important, because unless you first deconstruct the dominant narratives and set the record straight, you cannot develop effective policy to manage the people.
South Africa can only survive if it continues to align itself with the ideals of its Constitution, the rule of law and patience. But because we have failed to spend time doing the hard work of deconstructing the dominant race, economic and colonial narratives of apartheid, and we spent too much time having parties to celebrate our freedom, we have lost our power to shape the narrative.
The establishment of the EFF in 2013 was the first deep sign that we had not done enough to address the politics of deconstruction. French writer Jacques Derrida states that deconstruction begins with the deconstruction of the written and spoken word, which he says is essentially and emphatically a political act.
Our tragic failure in 1994 was that we thought that words like inequality, oppression and discrimination meant the same to the other side as it meant to us. It did not. It still does not. The hard work that awaits us now is to adopt a critical literacy approach to all the narratives that we encounter.
We must continue with the arduous work of deconstruction while we work on constructing the words and language of the country we want to live in. Why were we so damn naïve?
Leading Conversations on Constitutional Sustainability and Development Impact
* Lorenzo A. Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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