SA whites urged to take stock

2006-06-16 08:43

Johannesburg - South Africa on Friday marked the 30th anniversary of the Soweto uprising, one of the bloodiest chapters of apartheid, amid renewed debate over whether whites should own up to the atrocities of the former regime.

Hundreds of black youths died at the hands of police during protests against the enforced use of Afrikaans in schools that began on June 16, 1976, in Soweto.

The protests marked a turning point in the anti-apartheid struggle and the brutal police response set international public opinion against the white regime.

The 30th anniversary of the 1976 uprising is being celebrated in the wake of a firestorm touched off by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who remarked in late April that whites had not shown enough gratitude for the magnanimity shown by blacks.

His comments drew a strong response from both sides of the racial divide, setting off a deluge of opinion pieces, letters from incensed newspaper readers and phone calls to radio talk shows, confirming that Tutu had struck a raw nerve.

Nkosinathi Biko, son of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, said that as the nation marked 30 years since the Soweto uprising, white South Africans should take responsibility for the sins of apartheid.

"White South Africans must reckon with history for what it is and not for what they wish it to have been," Biko wrote in a newspaper commentary.

Biko, who was six years old when his father died in detention in 1977 after being tortured by security police, told AFP that the new generation of black South Africans might not be as gracious as their contemporaries.

"If Bishop Tutu, who is the embodiment of reconciliation, is making these kinds of statements, should we not be concerned that there may be a growing intolerance?" said Biko.

"We hear a lot of community voices that say 'we are well beyond the honeymoon period'," said Biko, the executive director of the Steve Biko Foundation, which runs programmes to develop youth leadership.

Peaceful transition

The debate over whether whites should atone for the sins of apartheid is a recurring one in South Africa, which has won praise for its peaceful transition to black majority rule since 1994.

A campaign spearheaded in 2000 by former African National Congress (ANC) member of parliament Carl Niehaus to get prominent whites to sign a statement apologising for apartheid fell flat.

Niehaus, who served as South Africa's ambassador to the Netherlands, said whites had failed to recognise that they were the "benefactors of apartheid" and "continue to benefit to this day".

"We don't deal with it properly," said Niehaus. "We seem to want to forget too quickly the damages of apartheid that have been inflicted."

Both Niehaus and Biko point to the urgency of addressing poverty in South Africa, which still has an overwhelmingly black face more than a decade after the ANC swept to power, promising a stake for the black majority in the nation's economic wealth.

Many whites maintain that they did not take part or condone repression of blacks and that they are being made scapegoats for the ANC government's shortcomings in its drive to combat poverty.

- AFP