Don’t Be Evil

Today a million people are marching in Paris.  I can’t be there, so my act of solidarity is writing this C4L Bulletin…

South Africa hosted the United Nations Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Intolerance in Durban in 2001.  It generated a 61-page Declaration in 219 clauses.  You can find it on Google, although you couldn’t Google at that time.  An aside is that Google’s unofficial slogan when it went public in 2004 was “Don’t be evil”.  In case you missed it - access to information shines light into darkness.

I have thought a lot about this theme since first reading Jean-Paul Sarte’s Anti-Semite and Jew when I was at university.  I had grown up in colonial Africa, and seen the harsh Belgian system.  I also saw that it was unsustainable.  After completing my education in Canada, decades later, I returned to Africa to work as a missionary.  First behind the iron curtain in Angola, then in socialist Zimbabwe, and for the past 21 years in the free and democratic South Africa.

The xenophobia outbreaks of 2008 in South Africa were a wake-up call.  Intolerance is scary when it characterizes the large majority, in any setting.  Affirmative action in South Africa is close to that edge – attitudinally it can and does go wrong at times.  That is why all opposition parties critique it, even those on the New Left.  Only the ruling alliance keeps it going, and one has to wonder why?

Charlie Hebdo Blues

In an SAPA article in the Mail and Guardian called “MJC: Freedom of speech should not lead to hate speech” the Muslim Judicial Council condemns the attacks in Paris, but says there must be limits to freedom of expression.  The article concludes with the following three paragraphs:

“In May 2010, South African satirist Jonathan Shapiro, widely known as Zapiro, raised controversy when he depicted the Prophet Muhammad in a cartoon. The cartoon showed Muhammad lying on a couch complaining to a psychiatrist: “Other prophets have followers with a sense of humour!”
 
“A meeting was subsequently held between the Mail and Guardian newspaper that published the cartoon and Muslim community members. Then-editor Nic Dawes later said that the newspaper regretted the offence caused by the cartoon and that it had decided to review its editorial policy on religion, especially where it concerned the Prophet Muhammad.
 
“Later, Zapiro himself responded by publishing another cartoon, in which he drew himself on the same therapist’s couch and poured his heart out on the difficulties of censorship on religious grounds.”

In another article in today’s City Press called “Treading the tight line of tolerance”, Ferial Haffajee describes the fall-out at the M&G where she also worked at the time.  She felt the heat again when she published cartoons made by the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten, to illustrate how protests were spreading across Europe.  She writes:

“We do not offend each other on religious grounds.  South Africa has decided, in weighting its rights, that religious rights trump the right to free expression.  Unlike the French, many South Africans are deeply religious – prayer and worship are the most common practices across class and race.”

Then she describes the next surge of heat they took at City Press for publishing The Spear, a Leninesque portrait of President Zuma partially naked.  As she put it “Damnation rained upon us…”

“Our society would not countenance a Charlie Hebdo here – if there was one, it would not survive commercially, and would be subject to court and other civic action.
 
“But in our other national spirit, that of debate, I must ask: have we overcorrected for our past and do we risk sacrificing free expression?”

Then she comes close to the present:

“At the end of last year, in the middle of the season of goodwill, President Jacob Zuma’s praise singer singled out Zapiro, me, City Press and Julius Malema as enemies of the state.

“Malema is a political opponent, not an enemy; City Press is a media title; and Zapiro and I are journalists, not enemies.

“This week’s attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the slaying of colleagues there have opushed me further away from our national consensus and the ways we have chosen to limit free expression.

“I understand and appreciate that consensus, but I no longer support it…”

The Economist has repeatedly rung warning bells about what can happen to a country when affirmative action favours the large majority.  This is unpacked in a M&G article by William Gumede called “Honest politics needed to slay racism dragon”.  It concludes with these five paragraphs:

“To slay the racism dragon demands more honest politics from black leaders, less opportunism in using the race card for self-enrichment and more ethical behaviour. African leaders and governments must govern in the interest of all, rather than a small elite, whether it is their “ethnic” group, region, political faction or party.

“Black communities and countries need to hold leaders more accountable for their actions.
 
“Cornel West, a noted American scholar on race, rightly argues that we must “replace racial reasoning with moral reasoning, to understand the black freedom struggle not as an affair of skin pigmentation and racial phenotype but rather as a matter of ethical principles and wise politics”.
 
“The challenge for South Africa and Africans is not to embrace leaders because they shout the loudest against racism, the continuing effect of colonialism or imperialism, but then go on to use racism to hide their own incompetence, personal self-enrichment and oppression of their own black people.
 
“Unless we do this, blacks in Africa will forever get the same useless, incompetent and self-interested leaders and governments that will perpetuate a continual cycle of black poverty and underdevelopment, helping to reinforce racism against black people and countries.”

Racism is a near and present danger in America as well as Europe and the Middle East - not just in Africa.  How can society tolerate intolerance?

I end on a personal note, in our provincial setting.  A decade ago, C4L echoed – in provincial forums - the courageous national voice of Zakkie Achmat in calling on government to roll out ARVs.  We raised our voice again about morality and leadership when Zuma staged a comeback.  In 2011, C4L did a poster campaign to raise awareness about the January Murders, which had started in 1998.  Seventeen young leaders were lost – not in one massacre like at Charlie Hedblo, but year after year.  Relentlessly, always in January, and always for whistle blowing.  A death squad.  In 2012 we reported corruption in the province’s roll-out of the Community Work Programme (CWP).    This is still with the Hawks, the Public Protector and the High Court.  In 2014 C4L’s first short-term objective was to promote more youth in Parliament.  This succeeded and the results are graphic.  Now we are lobbying that ending poverty and unemployment means ending inequality first.  None of this sits well with the rich and powerful.  The risks to C4L are there.  For example, C4L has been burgled four times in the past month, diminishing its capability.  The police didn’t even bother to come the last time we called them...  I end with the last sentence of Ferial Haffajee’s article:

“But now I want to talk about the right to free speech and how to expand it, not limit it, and how to burnish it and keep it bright.”

Long live Charlie Hebdo!  Vive la France libre!