Speech by DA Gauteng Premier Candidate, Mmusi Maimane, Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg, February 19 2014

TOWARDS A NEW POLITICAL IDENTITY

Sixty-six years ago the National Party won an all-white election with the mandate to assemble what arguably became the most brutal system of discrimination of the twentieth century.

This museum where we gather today was created so that South Africans, and all mankind, can forever look upon this evil, and never forget its face.
Long may our memory last so that we never forget the past which has left our country with so much human suffering, even today, 20 years after the first democratic elections.

Under Apartheid we saw how Gauteng was built on the back of mining operations in need of labour. Not only did the system limit opportunities, it determined where black labour was to be absorbed.

Concentration of labour allowed white government and big business not just control over resources, but control over where people lived and the lifestyle they led.

Families were torn apart as the system designed to provide a steady flow of cheap labour cranked into gear. Millions made Gauteng their home, despite their families being far out of reach for months or years at a time.

In many ways, Gauteng as we know it was founded on the destruction of the black family and community. Thousands of black children across South Africa have grown up without the support system of both a father and a mother because migrant labour robbed us of that.

Flourishing, diverse communities like Sophiatown were destroyed by a government intent on crushing social progress for black South Africans.

A key means to limiting progress was removing the right to own property. Through limiting both the assets and life prospects of black people, total economic dominance was achieved by a minority.

This is not the story of a few black South Africans. This is not the story of a handful of people.

Millions of people were subjugated and suppressed, for reasons only of their skin colour. And so ours is a story defined by race. A story defined by skin colour.

It is also the genesis of my story. To make sense of life under Apartheid I sometimes delve back into my own perception of South Africa in the 1980s, the decade of my early life.

I was born in Dobsonville, Soweto. Like most of us, my parents had come from elsewhere. My mother came here from the Eastern Cape with her parents and 6 siblings.

My father, landless and jobless, came from the former Bophutatswana in the 1960s to settle in Kagiso on the West Rand.

It was here in what was then known as the Transvaal, that he completed matric and started work at a company that made gas bottles for the braais of the white middle class.

My father and mother met, fell in love, and settled in Mmutle Street, Dobsonville. That was the home where I was raised.

My childhood memory is one of stay-aways, unrest, and living under the threat of violence. My first memory of white people was of South African Defence Force soldiers occupying the streets during the state of emergency.

As I get older, the memory of those soldiers remains vivid in my mind. I remember them now as young boys who would get bored standing around on the township streets. They would conduct make-believe sting operations and fire toy guns at us township kids to entertain themselves.

I don't think they ever realised the fear they instilled in us with these games. Or maybe they did. Maybe that was the point.

The social distance between groups in Apartheid South Africa meant I knew very little about whites. My perceptions were based on strange stereotypes and random observations. It has taken me years to shake off the misperceptions I once had.

The white Catholic Priest at our church, for example, always seemed to be under-dressed - even in winter - and so one of my first beliefs was that black people get cold easier than whites.

On a more serious note, I also remember thinking that it was okay to rob whites but not blacks. I never robbed anybody, but I shared this belief with many others because of the economic injustice of Apartheid.

That is why those who owned cars in townships, and there were few, made sure to display a Chiefs or Pirates sticker to show that, because this car was owned by a black man, it would not be right to steal it.

But I never hated whites. I could never hate the many white players who played for my team Kaizer Chiefs, and the cheers for them in the stadium reinforced that I was not alone.

It was the system we hated. It was a system with the power to define us. A system that could put a pencil through your hair, and then tell you where to live, what you were worth, and who you could marry.

I had a friend called Pieter McCarthy. As a coloured man going to collect his dompas, the authorities refused to accept that his surname could be "McCarthy" with a "C". Instead, they told him, "you will be McCarthy with a "K" because that is what you are.

The system thrived on classification - you are white, you are black, you are coloured and you are Indian they told us. We could not self-identify, we had no choice. The individual, the smallest minority, did not exist in the eyes of the state.

When my mother ran through the streets of Soweto in the protests of '76, she did it because she knew that this was a cause worth fighting for. She was fighting for black liberation, for better education for blacks. Her political and racial identity was imposed on her. She and others like her had no choice but to fight Apartheid from within this paradigm.

My own experiences of conflict and violence were closer to home, in the township, where a war was happening between the IFP, ANC and other groups. Indeed Apartheid was so far-reaching in its objectives that it even succeeded in turning black people against each other.

I grew up ke le Motswana, the tongue of my father. Because of the proximity to so much township violence, I do concede that I did in fact fear Zulus as a child. And yet today I speak isiZulu fluently even though the languages of my household were Setswana and isiXhosa.

Can we ever get past this strange and twisted history?

I say we can. But not at the expense of forgetting that this history is a part of our individual identities.

I took a white friend to the Hector Pieterson Memorial the other day. I did it so that he could never again get away with the phrase "I don't see colour". Because, for better or for worse, our history of racial division has shaped us. If you don't see that I am black, you actually don't see me.

There are too many South Africans who claim not to see race. With this attitude comes the notion that we should forget the past, that we should wish it away.

I went to the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria recently. It was an eye-opening experience for me. I saw aspects of Afrikaner heritage that are truly remarkable for their beauty and ingenuity. I saw the trials and tribulations of a proud nation engaged in its own struggle at that time. And I came away realising how important it is to celebrate all our cultures and achievements, whilst never forgetting the suffering of black South Africans.

Our politics does not have to be a choice between black and white, rich or poor, Zulu or Xhosa. We can forge a new kind of politics based on a shared identity that takes nothing away from the individual identities we choose for ourselves.

To bring this closer to home, my wife, who happens to be white, comes from the other side of the railway tracks to me, literally. She grew up in Florida, across the railway line from where I stayed in Dobsonville. I should also add that she grew up relatively poor.

I use the word relatively, because it was relative to other white South Africans. But there was never any doubt about the school my wife would attend. There was no doubt that she would go to university and get a decent job one day.

These historical factors impacting on our innocent love for one another came into play on the evening I first took her to meet my family. Natalie was nervous because I had explained to her that she would be treated differently because she is white, that she would have to work harder than other girls to gain my parents trust.

And so we agreed that on the first meeting my wife would not accept tea, she would instead make tea in the home of my parents. With that gesture, she showed that she did not have a superiority complex, that she was willing to make a gesture, however small, to gain acceptance.

That is the complexity of power relations in South Africa given our history. Reconciliation should not just be a casual interest, it should be a conscious reality for all of us. It is on the basis of this that my wife and I will raise our children.

All South Africans have concessions to make. Just as we need to acknowledge the evils of apartheid and do what we can to redress it, it is equally true that we mustn't allow anger and victimhood to obscure how far we have come, and how much better life is in a democratic South Africa.

I'll be very honest today and say that the rise of racial mobilisation should be a huge worry for all of us.

We see it from all sides of the spectrum. On the one side, it comes from lingering material deprivation, a sense that the majority of South Africans continue to suffer in the new South Africa.

In many ways, this analysis is correct. Patterns of privilege may be starting to change, but whatever way you look at it, we are still a nation of insiders and outsiders.

Poor people are overwhelmingly black and black people are overwhelmingly poor. This should make us all angry.

It makes me angry.

But what angers me more are those who say that racial solidarity will improve the lives of poor South Africans.

Because the truth is that mobilizing on the basis of race, as if we are an oppressed minority only serves to disempower us as black South Africans.

Racial mobilisation is always the tool of the oppressor.

The apartheid regime's ‘swart gevaar' tactics were designed to make white South Africa so frightened of majority rule, that they would be compliant with whatever the government did.

We must never allow ourselves to be abused in the same way. We must never allow any government to manufacture and manipulate our identities for its own ends, as the Apartheid government did.

I believe that all of us are shaped by history, by our communities, by our families. But we are also free-thinking human beings able to form our own unique identity within our own contexts.

That is why I have never believed that reconciliation is simply two nations coming together to make one, as symbolised in our rainbow flag.

For me, reconciliation lies in each individual recognising the unique identity of every other individual.

That is why the signing into law of our Constitution in 1996 was such a profound moment for South Africa. It recognised that individualism and individual rights are the basis of real freedom.

The Constitution went further than that. It recognised that individual rights alone are not enough to guarantee freedom. The state must give individuals the power to overcome the circumstances of their birth. Being free to starve is not freedom at all.

Individual freedom and individual power is at the heart of the political project that I am part of building today.

This does not mean, as some mistakenly believe, that we must forego all those things that have shaped our identities over centuries.

I am proud to say that I am an individual. I am also proud to say that I am an African. Being an African is part of who I am; it is part of who I choose to be.

You can believe in individualism and still have respect for culture and tradition, as long as culture and tradition are never abused to take away the individual rights of others.

You can be confident in your own judgment, but still respect the wisdom of elders.

You can believe in the power of markets for economic growth without foregoing a commitment to assist the least well-off members of society.

You can have your own political beliefs, but still tolerate the beliefs of others.

You can believe in individual freedom and Ubuntu - the idea that a person is a person through other people.

You can recognise that communities are made up of individuals, while recognising that individuals are also the product of communities that shape them.

Our children, like all of us, have the beautiful gift of being able to self-identify. And for them and all South Africans my hope is that our political choices will be made based on values that transcend the pre-ordained identities we inherited from past struggles.

We are part of a new generation with a new historic mission. Our mission is to craft a vision for the future that recognises the forces that shape each of us, without keeping us imprisoned by them.

Now that is a future worth fighting for.

Source: http://www.maimane.com/

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