Steve Hofmeyr's letter to Julius Malema depicts him as an immature attention-seeker who wishes to whip the emotions of white people for personal amusement. But he also confirms what many of us already know: that some white South Africans suffer from anger and/or anxiety about the notion of black power.
‘A significant portion of people among the white community, but by no means everybody who is white...continues to live in fear of the black, and especially African Majority. For this section of our population, that does not "find it too difficult to revert to accustomed world of fear of the future", every reported incident...communicates a frightening and expected message that - the kaffirs are coming!' (Thabo Mbeki; 2007)
"(Now) their task is to spread messages about an impending economic collapse, escalating corruption in the public service, rampant and uncontrollable crime, a massive loss of skills through white emigration and mass demoralisation among the people...because they are white and therefore threatened by the ANC and its policies which favor black people."(Nelson Mandela; 1997)
Helen Zille's ‘Stop Zuma' campaign is an example of how perverse the perceptions could be: that too much power in the hands of a black leader cannot be good. Her predecessor, Tony Leon, adopted a similar strategy (Fight Back) in his campaign against the Mbeki presidency. Out of this habitual hysteria arises a pattern of paranoia, which seeks to police and dissect the behavior of black leaders against the test of intellect, corruption and ultimately, white hostility. As a result, black leaders who are firm and unapologetic about the interest of the African majority are seen to be enemies of white interests.
This is the political climate in which young leaders like Julius Malema find themselves trapped in. Their ability to lead and to articulate developmental ideas is suffocated within the parameters of perceived white intellectual dominance, white liberal chauvinism, class chauvinism and white superiority.
Malema is in fact the most appropriate leader for the moment. The African people have had different styles of leadership over time, from the passive (Bantustan leaders) to the apologetic (liberal reformists like Desmond Tutu and Mamphela Ramphele). The time has come for an explosive and radical character who will advocate for social equality without compromise.
Professor Kader Asmal - in one of his more sensible moments - recently noted that the current crop of white political leadership (DA, FF+, Solidarity, Afriforum, TAU etc), make it impossible for white people to accept a moral responsibility for apartheid. Thus the knee-jerk reactions like comparing affirmative action policies to ‘reverse apartheid' have become a prominent feature in public discourse. Unfortunately, such remarks are downright insensitive and undermine the amount of pain the black people endured during apartheid.
The Times Magazine (22 March 2010), points to the emergence of ‘white anxiety' as one of the major trend for the next decade. Author, Gregory Rodriguez, locates the trend partly around the fact that ‘despite the extraordinary progress in the past 50 years, the sense of white proprietorship - "this is our country and our culture" - still has not been completely eradicated. He further notes that ‘Americans still tend to treat minorities [the former oppressed] as parts and whites [the former oppressor] as representative of the whole."
There is an urgent need for white leaders in the caliber of Joe Slovo, Brian Bunting and Bram Fischer, to mention just a few. Failure to acknowledge this need could only lead the next generations of white South Africans astray.
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