I am listening to 702 Johannesburg. It's strange to tune in to what
used to be a daily event when living there. The nuance of living away
in a different society, the fact that one is no longer attuned, not only
the accent but to the social background from
which the discussions arise makes the experience very different. You
become sceptical, insulated by what seems the parochial set up which now
a days reflects the callers and their interests. Perhaps it was always so.
Undoubtedly we were dumbed down by the media and influenced by the
governments attitude towards world news and events. Apartheid had made
us a pariah. To the countries to the north we were the enemy who had
entombed their brothers and sisters in a politically
divisive segregation process which had drawn condemnation from right
across the world. It was natural we turned in on ourselves, listened to
our own voices and built our own imaginative defences to respond to so much criticism.
The result was a social drawing together and a light hearted lifestyle
on which we based our existence. The norms of a white South African were
far and away more comfortable than their opposite number overseas. The
comfort and the lifestyle developed a relaxed
environment in which Plumber and Doctor mixed equally. The development
of commerce and in manufacturing, of ideas and standard borrowed from
overseas and afforded by the artificiality of a blocked rand, money was
spent in providing the best most advanced workspaces
of anywhere in the world, the best equipped hospitals, on the roads and
railway expenditure to match the need to respond to outbreaks of
political unrest from that blind spot we all carried with us "the native question".
I use the term "native" much as the 17th and 18th century explorers would use the term or the inhabitants of the
American Deep South would use the more derogatory term nigger. These
terms were no more, or less derogatory than the Indian Dalits (outcasts)
in their divisive caste system, or the Burakumin in Japan, the
Gomecista of Venezuela. All over the world mankind has blighted the
lives of sections within their society. Stalin was particularly fond of
designating whole swathes of people as undesirable and
shooting or shipping them off to Siberia and of course historically religion has cast its dark shadow even to this day. I am a Kafir, an infidel in the eyes of a Islam.
And so now having lived here for 20 years and being "politically cleansed", certain words and phrases are off the
Richter scale of acceptance as we blindly concur to an ideologically
derived concept of our fellow man and woman. There is no scope for
distinguishing
one from another. It is an anathema to do so and in its own way, being
politically "incorrect" is to damn oneself to joining a social band denoted "unclean" and so the spiral of
differentiation continues.
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