'We must talk to each other'

2008-03-11 20:09

Johannesburg - Racism is alive and well in South Africa, said the SA Human Rights Commission (HRC) on Tuesday.

"I don't think South Africans talk about racism as we should... and the lessons we can learn from the last two or three weeks is that racism is alive and well in South Africa," said HRC chairperson Jody Kollapen at the Johannesburg Press Club.

Kollapen spoke about South Africa's progress and its challenges in the human-rights arena in light of recent events including a racist video which emerged at the Free State university, the Skielik shooting and the barring of white journalists from the Forum of Black Journalists (FBJ).

Kollapen said: "My own view was that the reconciliation process was at the expense of transformation.

"I also argued that and I continue to argue that, in terms of transformation, hardly anything was asked of white South Africans," he said.

"And white South Africa was not really given the opportunity to engage with what happened in the past."

Kollapen said South Africans, black and white, did not have a "common sense" of where they came from and when programmes advancing transformation were put in place, "people say, hold on, this goes against the very idea of reconciliation".

He said the Truth and Reconciliation Commission focused "unduly" on the "excesses" of apartheid; it never really began a conversation between ordinary South Africans.

Continue to be divided

"What the TRC didn't do was to begin a conversation between you and me... we never spoke, we never spoke about what apartheid meant for you and what it meant for me," he told journalists.

"On the one hand is the sense that we continue to be divided by our blackness and our whiteness.

"I think the challenge is to transcend the sense that we have over our blackness and our whiteness...

"I think it requires hard work and I think it requires ordinary people to speak to each other."

Referring to the FBJ, Kollapen said the constitutional right to freedom of association should not be used as a disguise for racism.

The FBJ had provoked vigorous debate on the desirability of racially exclusive organisations.

Kollapen said the objective of an organisation would not necessarily have to be reflected by its membership.

The HRC was expected to release a report on it next week.

Focusing on human rights in its entirety, Kollapen said South Africa's rapid transition to democracy posed a problem in cultivating a culture of human rights.

'Massive gap'

"... you hardly had time to breathe when overnight you had a democratic government underpinned by a progressive constitution... there was hardly time for South Africans to absorb all of this," he said.

"I'm not saying that we should have set low standards, but I think what it demonstrates is that the standards set and the jurisprudence in place are quite far removed from the reality on the ground and the consciousness of people."

He said there was a "massive gap" and this posed a "significant threat" to democracy.

Kollapen said this gap was manifested in the many South Africans who opposed abortion or believed the death penalty should be enforced.

- SAPA