ON MODERN SOUTH AFRICA





There is nowhere one can go in South Africa without bumping into a rainbow. Driving down the western coastline from Cape Town towards the Cape of Good Hope, one sees more rainbows leaping across the wet sky than one can count. Sometimes not just one, but two, the second overarching the first, as if Mother Nature had found a spare and could find no better use for it.


Go to Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s office in Milnerton (a northern suburb of Cape Town) and the message on the wall reads: We are the rainbow people. And we make a difference, echoing the sermon he delivered outside Cape Town’s City Hall in 1989, ‘We are the Rainbow people. We are the new people of the new South Africa!’


Meet more than one new South African – whether in an official meeting in a Government Department, in a social get-together, in a public area, or in the Assembly Chamber of South Africa’s Parliament - the recurring image is of a rainbow, its colours drawn from the complexion of every race that lives in that country.


Before 1990, when the unconscionable doctrine of Apartheid was enforced in South Africa as state policy, all colours of its ethnic rainbow mixed to produce the only colour that mattered: White. The Whites floated over the Blacks like the creamy froth in a cup of cappuccino coffee. You were a White South African because God made you so. You were a Black or a Coloured or an Indian/Asian because a White Man said you were.


Even though it was technically possible for persons who felt they had been wrongly classified to be transplanted into an other category – Blacks could become Asians or Coloured, and Asians/Coloured could be relegated to being Blacks, there was never a case, as the Apartheid Museum near Johannesburg informs its visitors bluntly, when a Black was allowed to become a White, or a White asking to be classified as Black.


The multi-racial general elections in 1994 acted as an ethnic prism, fracturing South Africa into a spectrum of equal colours. Overnight, 80% of the population that was a dispossessed minority became an underprivileged majority. The Whites who represented the top 10% of South Africa’s society permeated downwards as best as they could, unable to disguise either their tincture or their wealth. The remainder – Coloured & Indian/Asians – remained where they had been, neither triumphant Black nor conciliatory White.


Today, fourteen years after their first true independence, each shade of South African has a personal reason for accepting the new order. To the Coloureds & Indian/Asians, there was not too much of a choice. To the Whites, acceptance was a shade warmer than admission, and conciliation warmer still. To the Blacks, a Christian forgiveness and reconciliation were sweeter than primeval revenge and reprisals.


Mankind began in Africa, but it has taken thousands of millennia to produce Humanity. Two modern humans - both of them born in South Africa and each a Nobel Prize winner - personify the ineffable virtues that prophets preach, saints suffer from, martyrs die for, and historians scribble about. One of course is Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the other Madiba Nelson Mandela who celebrates his 90th birthday this year.


Desmond Tutu is the younger of the two by 23 years, but while Mandela was languishing in his cell at Robben Island, Desmond Tutu became the first Black Archbishop of Cape Town in 1986. He is a diminutive man, small enough to fit in the pocket of any politician. But, as he said when accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, ‘You cannot put a money value on freedom.’


Today, Desmond Tutu’s work as Chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation has put International Court of Justice at The Hague, Amnesty International and every conscience-driven NGO in a pillory for the world’s public to mock at. Never in the history of mankind, certainly not at the post-World War II Nuremburg trials nor at the trial of Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem twenty years later, has there even been such a mass act of forgiveness by the oppressed towards its oppressors.


“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!” was uttered by a prophet once from the cross. Black South Africans on the anvil of history forgave generations of Whites who had murdered their fathers and their sons.


How was this humanly possible? The answer is quite simply because of the inherent humanity of one human being – Madiba Nelson Mandela. When he proposed such a mass absolution, it would have required someone who had served longer in jail than his 27 years to have out-shouted him. It was perhaps symbolic that at the Joint Sitting of the South African Parliament in Cape Town convened on 27th June to honour Mandela, he should himself have been absent, as he had been during most of the freedom struggle. This time though he was not in jail on Robben Island but in London’s Hyde Park, attending a rock concert to raise funds for his Charitable Foundation.


Every Parliamentarian who spoke at the Joint Sitting repeated the wish that he enjoyed a long life for he above all represented the unity of South Africa. But while Mandela is a man of history, he is nevertheless a man, and so the question remains: After Mandela, who?


Mandela’s successor as president Thabo Mbeki is due to leave this year. His Vice President and likely successor is Jacob Zuma, who was seen to sit through the Joint Sitting in the public gallery, drumming his fingers on his thighs with polite impatience.


Will the ethnic rainbow that is present day South Africa remain, or is it likely to split into irreconcilable fissures that will need another Mandela, another such leader who is yet to be born?


One of the younger Parliamentarians Mbhazima Joel Sibiya of the ruling African National Congress concluded the Joint Sitting with a fiery speech. That he was allotted more time than the former Leader of the Opposition A. J. Leon was one indication of his significance. Another was Jacob Zuma’s whispered reference to him as ‘a firebrand guerrilla fighter’ within the ANC. Sibiya reminded his elder peers of their armed struggle against apartheid. ‘That struggle,’ he said ‘had been suspended, not abandoned.’


The cup of cappuccino that was South Africa has been stirred, but has not yet settled.