Johannesburg - The secretary general of the South African Council of Churches (SACC), Malusi Mpumlwana, said 2022 was a year where racists reigned supreme, forgetting the message of love and peace preached by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Mpumlwana said the SACC was concerned that the unity in diversity project that came into being in 1994 had lost steam, giving rise to an increase in incidents of racism that have made local and international headlines.
Recently, the Free State made news after a group of black people were not allowed to swim in a pool that was apparently reserved for white people. The story made headlines and once again exposed the attitudes that have been harboured in small towns across the country.
It was also in the Free State in 2008 that black workers at a university were forced by white students to do humiliating acts, privileged students who treated them like animals. Racial tensions have also come up in farming towns in the same province.
There were also reports of racism in some schools around Gauteng and other instances of discrimination, which got social media talking about deep divisions in the country.
"It is a great concern that what happened at a resort in the Free State province was not an entirely isolated incident. We have recently been hearing of other incidents of gross displays of racism," Mpumlwana said.
He said in 2022 there was a case of a Stellenbosch University student who urinated on a black student's book bag and other incidents such as the Belinda Magor outlandish pit bull incident calling for the killing of black men and the gross mutilation of black people's wombs to prevent childbearing.
"As black people continue to endure these episodes of humiliation, it becomes much more difficult to hope for national reconciliation and social cohesion as people view such humiliation as an unacceptable sacrifice for and an antithesis to national reconciliation," Mpumlwana said.
Mpumlwana stated that all racist incidents, large and small, were manifestations of widely held attitudes that were not being expressed in a polite environment.
"We have had a litany of high-profile racial incidents over the years. There will be many others that are not publicly known; there are cases of black racial attitudes that are also ingrained, and the white racist expressions simply serve to entrench the black mistrust of the notion of a common society with whites," Mpumlwana said.
The Star