“Down south” they may call you “makwere-kwere”– That is hardly a pleasant compliment. In fact, it is an insult. You are a stranger, a foreigner who has no place here! We do not want you here. And don’t talk to me about “xenophobia”. We are not afraid of you. If you don’t go we beat you up because you are stealing our country!
guest column: Fr Oskar Wermter SJ
In the US, Americans of European origin call their black countrymen by all kinds of names. We do not need “negroes” here! And do not bring your cousins, even blacker than you, to us, this is a “white man’s country”.
We, whose country was once called Rhodesia, another “white man’s country”, know all about race and racist slangs and slogans.
France and Germany, neighbours on the European continent, hated each other so much that they waged war on each other three times within less than a hundred years, 1871–72, 1914–18 and 1939–45.
In our family it was well-known that our grandfather, a widely-travelled man, never went to France. France was the “enemy of the State”. It would have been unpatriotic to visit there. The French call their German adversaries “les boches” (a contemptuous term used to refer to Germans, especially German soldiers in World War I or II, see Google), and the Germans call the French “frogs” (Why? Probably because they eat them, the frogs I mean).
And so we could go on forever and ever. You don’t call a good friend such a name. If you want to be friends with our neigbhours on the southern African continent, let us stop calling each other “makwere-kwere” and the like. Never mind “xenophobia”. There is no reason why we should be afraid of each other and call each other ugly names.
Such tensions and frictions occur not only between nations and tribes, but even between religious people all of whom devoutly worship the same God and Father (and his Son as their Saviour).
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Remember Northern Ireland and the war between “Popish” Roman Catholics and “Bible-punching” Protestants? This may be a harmless-sounding speech, and yet it divides families, communities, and peoples. Africa is divided between Christians and Muslim, Church and Islam. A few heroes try to reconcile the two, the people of the Koran and the people of the Bible who have a Pope.
There are even people who cannot eat together or share food. Some we are happy to feed with what we have got, others we starve because they do not vote for our party. Let them perish, we do not care. There is food that is for all, and food that is only for our comrades and associates.
There are many things you can do with food, one of them, the more absurd thing people have invented about food, is to “politicise” it, give it a party political colour and keep it exclusively for those painted in the same colour. Does anyone in the ruling party, any party in fact, care that this is a crime against humanity? That people can hate so much that they even starve opponents to death! That they ignore and neglect this basic need, to feed people and thus preserve their lives, or to deny them food and thus ensure their own party-political triumph even at the cost of losing opponents’ lives. If we honour basic human rights, for example the right to life, to food and to water, then “politicised food” is a poison and a way to assassinate my neighbour.
There is “hate-speech” that dehumanizes, destroys our common humanity and disfigures our faces as children of God, and we must remember that we were created “in the image of God”. Such disfigurement of God’s creature is an insult to the Creator.
“Hate-speech” is a weapon against co-workers, political rivals and business competitors . If you call someone a “communist” , who calls you a “dirty capitalist” there is not much love lost between the two of you. You have hit him / her below the belt and knocked them out. How can you build or rebuild your country if you massacre the citizens through “character assassination”?
Our Constitution assures us all of our dignity as human beings, created “in the image of God” and of our fundamental equality, e.g. between men and women. But if you have no respect for women, how can men and women share the task of governing their common heritage, the country they were born in and were given for sharing the “common good”, food, water, land, crops, trees and animals and everything that keeps us alive?
If you call people “cockroaches”, you won’t mind that the cockroaches with a human face can be squashed underfoot and thrown away as waste!
Not only the Members of Parliament who are in support of the current government deserve our respect, but even the members of the opposition must be recognised for their crucial contribution on the opposition benches. The men and women who have the full responsibility for running the country cannot do it all alone. Their political rivals in the minority have to blow the whistle when the ministers on the government benches turn out to be failures, misled by personal ambition, greed and jealousy.
They are our guardians in this game of power called politics. They must play this game in fairness and according to the rules. They must raise the alarm when the men and women who have the seats of power and use them merely for their own benefit, must be called to order in the interest of the people who voted them into power.
A government which holds the opposition in contempt, calls them bad names and likes to make the opposition the laughing stock of the nation, cannot claim that their politics is something constructive and a basis for building a future for all of us.
A Parliament and a Cabinet who have no respect for the minority which was also voted into power and leadership and responsibility for the country as referees have turned the “august House” into a leper colony, from where a fatal disease may spread everywhere. If there is no respect between leaders and their critics, how can there be respect for the country, its citizens, for human life and dignity according to the Constitution and its Bill of Rights? Were the killers of those six citizens who made use of their constitutional rights ignorant of this basic provision of our constitutional rule book?
Our “body politic” is infected by a bad virus if those who govern and those who are their official critics have no respect for each other, but pull each other down into the mud of mutual contempt.
We, as the original owners of power and government, must have some powerful medicine and effective drug to restore the health of our political society. We need some “medicine men and medicine women”, who have the right drugs for the healing of all of us.
This is the season of the birth of Christ. This is the time when our God makes himself present among his people. This is the time when the Creator and his creatures, the Lord of all and the people, seek peace: “Glory to God in the Highest; peace on earth” (Luke 2:14).
This is the time for husband and wife to reconcile, to talk one language and embrace their children. This is the time for the husband to thank the wife for the children she has borne him and recognise her dignity as mother. This is the time for leaders to speak respectfully to the people who are in their hands. People were speaking a hate language. Now is the time for healing that disease and bring back reverence as basis for love.
“Hate-speech” is verbal violence which in turn becomes bloody violence. Only mutual reverence and mutual love can heal this open wound.
Fr Oskar Wermter is a social commentator.
