One of the many existential crises in South Africa is that within the deep, dark recesses of our minds resides not a constitutional democracy with its rights and risks, but an arrogant apartheid pattern of existence where life is lived in supremacist and subservient patterns.
Within this Western-wired pattern, we work five days a week and have weekends off to braai. We crave unreasonable prosperity, a possible partner, children by choice, a big house and a well-paying job. We don’t tolerate any other view of life.
Any sense of a constitutional democracy that begins to define itself within an African contextual reality is resisted.
A Euro-American-centric existence with the dominant features being Judeo-Christian, or at least those JC stuff we agree with, is the life we will defend to death.
Government departments all stand in the centre of advancing our constitutional democracy with its rights and risks.
Whereas many public services over the last 30 years were run like spaza shops, they now run the risk of resembling a braai in Belthorn or Bishopscourt where, along with your boerewors, brandy and Coke, you are also given the freedom to express your crass views on whatever aspect that you may not like of South Africa being a constitutional democracy, to the applause of the assembled.
Instead of public service becoming rational and humanised beacons of the government’s interface with civil society, they risk becoming the playground of friendly populist political extremists whose personal political preferences dictate policy instead of advancing and deepening the people’s interface with constitutional democracy.
Because we fail at being constitutional democrats, we have become defenders of the Euro-American Judeo-Christian patterns that exist in our minds. We proudly point homeless people to shelters and moan about land invasions. But we won’t lift a finger to help the cause of the 12 million unhoused people who invade land or occupy civic spaces, out of necessity, to sleep or live.
Where do we expect 12 million unhoused people to suddenly disappear to so that we never have to see them? In this Euro-American-centric existence, we insist that 12 million unhoused people must automatically become invisible to us.
We will call the police on someone who steals to eat but remain silent on the hunger that is destroying our country.
Because, in the deep recesses of our minds, we all want our micro-conservative worlds to be the norm, undisturbed by all the social problems that exist beyond our neat little fences.
To give Gayton McKenzie the moniker of “Lord Gayton” is a revelation of the South African mindset. People applaud him for outing everyone and hang on to his rogue comments.
People urge the Minister of Home Affairs to get rid of all illegal immigrants. People applaud the fast-tracking of work visas of people who will bolster our craving for this Euro-American lifestyle.
But let’s leave the asylum-seekers and refugees to stand in the rain on the foreshore. Welcome to the world of Greg Abbott and Ted Cruz.
It will be entities like the courageous Helen Suzman Foundation who will challenge the State on the Zimbabwean Exemption Permit issue. Not the ANC or DA. Because secretly we don’t want to be a profound constitutional democracy with its risks and rights.
We want what America and Western Europe have. We don’t want to be African. We don’t want African people on “our streets”.
And so, our existential crisis in South Africa continues to find succour in apartheid mindsets. We, black and white, reject the Sophiatowns of our realities and seek the government to give us multiple Triomfs in quick secession everywhere.
We intentionally obliterate 33 million poor people from co-existing with us in our apartheid-created realities.
We face a future where public service is becoming a toxic mix of the flippancy of a Fikile, the superciliousness of a Steenhuisen and the megalomania of a McKenzie. We need better.
* Lorenzo A. Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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