For an organisation that is "non-racial" the ruling ANC sure has a strange way of showing it. Comrade Malema was enjoying himself again this past week by proclaiming rather loudly and proudly that all whites are criminals for stealing the black's of South Africa's land.
Now, I get that these things are said to build up hype for the coming election, and that it is the responsibility of the ANC Youth League to bring up different views from the ANC, but surely, this is going a bit far. What has me slightly irritated is that my nation's president was on the same stage as Malema when he uttered those words of his. It came down to vice-president Kgalema Motlanthe apologising and rebuking Malema. Kinda like closing the stable door after the horses have bolted.
As always there is a hint of historical context to what Malema is saying, but how is it any different to what Shaka Zulu did during his reign? The resulting Mfecane saw enormous shift in the population centers in the Transvaal region. Mzilikazi subsequently depopulated most of the region to consolidate his Ndebele. Now not to sound presumptuous, but I am sure he didn't ask the tribes that lived there to move nicely, and Mzilikazi definitely did not reimburse them.
I am not saying that its tit for tat, and that my Afrikaner ancestors were justified in taking the Transvaal for themselves all the way back in the 1800's, far from it. What I am saying is that what the Afrikaners - in fact I can go wider and say all whites - did was not a unique situation in South Africa. It has been happening for centuries, millennium even.
To suddenly say us whites are all criminals for the actions of our forebears is slightly ridiculous. We are all sorry Apartheid happened, and that the blacks were oppressed and treated badly. But where is the line drawn?
I was born in 1987, I started grade 1 in 1994. The year of South Africa's first free and fair election. Did I gain unfair benefit from Apartheid? Not really.
Yet I be a criminal.
