When Wits University students’ representative council president Mcebo Dlamini said he loved Adolf Hitler for his leadership style and actions against Jewish people, he was removed from his position for these views.
When senior journalist and respected author Allister Sparks declared that the founding father of apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd, was a smart politician, he was allowed to keep his column in a national newspaper.
How can these double standards be explained?
The black person is punished and the white person is rewarded for committing the same sin?
Dlamini’s admiration of Hitler is sick. It cannot be defended, and it is offensive and reactionary.
The struggle for black liberation, as guided by the likes of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X and Steve Biko, is not driven by acceptance of white thinking and actions.
On the contrary, black power is designed on a different ethical basis and does not crave oppressing anyone, nor does it celebrate the Holocaust.
We blacks do not seek to recreate white civilisation based on violence, hatred, exploitation and suffering.
Verwoerd was an evil and sick man.
Sparks’ comments, therefore, deserve outrage and condemnation.
Verwoerd’s “smart” programmes ensured that blacks received inferior education, were forcibly removed from “white South Africa” and coerced into carrying passbooks in their own country.
Under the legal and political regime of Verwoerd – which he brazenly called apartheid – black people were denied their human rights.
The Sparks and Dlamini incidents, and their different outcomes, again show the need to clarify racism.
It’s only when clarity is gained that we can give substance to “transformation”.
For some time, we have been agitating for “conceptual clarity” on racism to understand its strategies, perpetrators, beneficiaries and victims.
As the anti-racist student movement wrestles with the struggle to transform Wits, it has to confront the reality that there can be no transformed university in a racist society. The battle has to be taken to the national political sphere, where it will find that the ruling party is a defender of white supremacy.
Dlamini’s outrage serves to hide the culpability of the governing party in upholding racism.
As long as South Africa remains racist, the likes of Sparks will continue to enjoy the benefit of the doubt. But blacks shouldn’t expect the same.
Mngxitama is a former EFF member