It would be very difficult to explain to an outsider why the “Ashwin Willemse affair” has enjoyed such lasting and central attention in South Africa. Can a disagreement between sports broadcasters really qualify as news? What are Mallett and Botha accused of saying or doing? Nobody knows. When Willemse said that he had been called a quota player and that he was being undermined, even he did not say that Mallett and Botha had been guilty of these things.
In any case, Mallett had just suggested that Willemse be allowed to speak first because he hadn’t had a chance to speak earlier. Surely this is the opposite of undermining? And why, when Willemse was given his chance to put his case before the legal inquiry did he refuse to do so? He and his lawyers are now proceeding to the Equality Court (the name has an Orwellian ring) but what new evidence can they adduce there? Surely they must realise that unless they can come up with something pretty solid and convincing they are going to look unutterably foolish?
The fact is, of course, that the case – if it can be called a case – agitates stereotypes for all communities. On the one hand many black or Coloured people have found themselves in situations where they are faced with whites whose easy self-confidence makes them feel anxious and insecure. They feel sure that anyone with that degree of self-confidence (and education; and, perhaps, middle class lifestyle) must feel superior, must be looking down on them. This very feeling is undermining and, truth to tell, in many cases their self-esteem was somewhat fragile to begin with.
It is a short cut from that to believing that they are being deliberately undermined. But the damnable thing is that there is nothing they can point to positively. Faced with such a situation some, of course, simply invent things – insist they were called a “nigger” or a “kaffir” or whatever, when actually they weren’t. But in far more cases they will display their discomfort in what others would term “difficult” or “hypersensitive” behaviour.
Different people take different things from such situations. So many black and Coloured people have found themselves in such situations that they are very quick to sympathize with Willemse. Indeed, it is common after such encounters to hear people say things like “I could just see what he was thinking”, “You just know what people of that sort have in their minds”, “He didn’t actually say anything wrong but you could see it was on the tip of his tongue all the time” and so on. Conversely, many white people carry with them stereotypes of the way “difficult” black or Coloured people behave and quickly affix them to someone like Willemse. (These are purely South African types of behaviour. My British family includes many members who would be classified here as white, black or Coloured but all of them, I think, would find the Willemse affair mystifying.)
There has been a large rush to judgement in this case with people as various as Mmusi Maimane, Elna and Allan Boesak and Eusebius McKaiser all weighing in to aver how completely justified Willemse is. (How the Boesaks know that even from America, having neither seen nor heard the programme in question is mysterious. Telepathy, perhaps.)