Going through the recent social media pages of political leaders who are contesting the 2024 general elections, one thing becomes immediately obvious: their pages are filled with photographs of them visiting and talking with poor coloured and black people. Most of it looks awkwardly staged.
This is particularly true of the Western Cape. It is no secret that it is the black and coloured voters of the Western Cape that will determine who the next government of the Western Cape will be.
However, there continues to be no intellectual engagement with black and coloured people.
What is portrayed on these social media pages is the “white political benefactor” syndrome foisted on poor black and coloured people. Nothing looks real. Any honest native from those cultures will tell you this.
In this pursuit of the coloured and black vote, it is convenient to misrepresent the voices of politicians like Fadiel Adams, Gayton MacKenzie, Nazier Paulsen and Axolile Notywala and portray them as past or present extremists.
This is why those platforms and parties with historical roots in being silent about or even endorsing structural apartheid, demonise them, for it is necessary to silence the voices of critical and questioning engagements from the black and coloured communities.
The establishment finds it far easier to go to these communities with the cheap gifts of easy appeasement.
Black and coloured people have a natural inclination to be hospitable to people. We will offer a seat and even serve a meal to our oppressors, while we sit with the painful thoughts of what they did to us. Kindness and hospitality are not forgiveness, rather, it is the deep-ingrained respect we have for people and power.
That’s why the Nationalists could oppress us for so long. That’s why Mandela shook the hand of Betsie Verwoerd. Not to forget but to show that we can live with the triality of respect, anger and pain.
The avoidance of intellectual engagements with black and coloured leaders on data that show the perpetuation of structural and spatial apartheid in the Western Cape is a clear strategy by the establishment.
They have camouflaged the City and Province’s unwillingness to undo structural and spatial apartheid by doing house visits and having Ramadaan meals.
While about 84% of the Western Cape’s population is black and coloured, the tourist, business, academic and political profile displayed across many media platforms is that it is comfortably White.
And while coloured and black poverty remains entrenched as part of the apartheid legacy they were subjugated to, what gets the most media coverage is their violence and crime.
Any social scientist will tell you there is a direct link between lingering poverty and crime. In the Western Cape, that link is deliberately ignored. What we get is more and more Leap officers and cameras.
If the budget spent on Leap officers were spent on undoing structural apartheid and creating inclusive economies with real jobs, we would have had less crime.
♦️In pictures♦️
Door to door recruitment program in ward 39, Gugulethu, Zone 4. #VoteEFF29May #VoteEFF29May2024 pic.twitter.com/n89VRn5Xpb
If the black and coloured people of the Western Cape continue to vote into power parties that protect the legacies of apartheid and allow their communities to be policed by 24-hour surveillance by the establishment, their poverty won’t change. Their sons will continue to have the stark choice between being a security guard or a gang member.
Fadiel Adams, Gayton MacKenzie, Nazier Paulsen and Axolile Notywala are not extremists. They are calling it for what it is. When they are invited to debates, they are made out to be extreme outsiders and are often last to speak, by design.
They are not there because their intelligence is needed, but because they will be demonised by the establishment. The establishment doesn’t want election debates on lingering black and coloured poverty and lingering structural apartheid. The establishment is never challenged on its protection of apartheid’s lingering legacy.
When do we have debates on politicians that protect structural and spatial apartheid?
* Lorenzo A. Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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