The politics of dignity — our silences breed racist acts

Two things — one a huge positive for our country, and the other a horrible reminder of the work we still need to do as a nation — jolted me into thinking about Arie Wallach’s book Longpath: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs.

To start with the positive, Udeme Okon, the son of a South African mother and a Nigerian father, won gold in the 400m final at the World Athletics U20 Championships. The profundity of his victory must not escape us. Some may want to forget there is Nigerian blood running in his body that helped him to win. Yet South Africa got the gong. We love winners.

That the winner’s name is Okon — or Ogah or Okwonko — should not in the fullness of time mean anything, as long as they’re properly documented, as Okon is. The truth is, if we are going to create a great future for our country, we have no option but to fully embrace the diversity that comes with being part of this rainbow nation — one we must keep trying to create.

However, the case of Zachariah Olivier, 60, Adriaan de Wet, 19, and William Musoro, 45, of Onverwacht farm in Sebayeng, Limpopo, has left many seething with anger. The three men allegedly killed two women and threw their bodies into a pigsty, with some saying the slaying was satanic.

I couldn’t help but ask myself how well the farmer slept that first night after throwing Maria Makgato and Lucia Ndlovu into an enclosure housing about 50 pigs. When he heard the oinks throughout the night, did he imagine the animals had already started feeding on the two women? When Olivier and his workers woke up and discovered the pigs had hardly touched them, would it have occurred to them that perhaps the animals had more humane hearts than they did?

It is, of course, one thing to be a murderer — we have plenty of those. But killing someone and feeding that person’s body to pigs suggests a level of depravity beyond comprehension. That Makgato and Ndlovu were forced to trespass on a farm and try to feed themselves with food left for pigs in itself undermines their human dignity. No person should ever have to share food with pigs. For that person then to be killed and fed to pigs is to humiliate her even in death. Even if the men simply wanted to get rid of the evidence of their alleged crimes, isn’t there a more humane way to dispose of bodies? Is this expecting too much of a killer?

Of course, this heart-wrenching killing reminds us of Mark Scott Crossley, a madman from Hoedspruit who in 2004 not only killed Silence Mabunda but coerced his employees into helping him dump his body in a lion enclosure. We have had many incidents of racism since then — of many and various revolting kinds. But why do they persist?

When Olivier and his workers woke up and discovered the pigs had hardly touched [the women’s bodies]them, would it have occurred to them that perhaps the animals had more humane hearts than they did?

Wallach reminds us: “So it’s important that we remember, the future, we treat it like a noun. It’s not. It’s a verb. It requires action.” If we want to be the great ancestors who leave a future our children will be proud of, that future requires action now. Building the kind of democracy we have is not merely about voting and focusing on job-creation, which are of course important — it’s also about the content and tone of the democracy we want to bequeath to future generations.

The question is, why did those men think they’d get away with it? Our inner self is the repository of the dignity with which we carry ourselves, and which we either accord to others or deprive them of. If our hearts are suffused with the hatred that stems from “othering” people, or if our inner selves are struggling with the “state of nature” thinkers such as John Locke, Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau depicted in their writings about primordial times, then we will perpetrate senseless violence. What is it about throwing a human body into a pigsty that aligns with a farmer’s nature or nurture?

I think our leaders — who, by the way, we very much deserve — provide the impetus for the sort of disrespect for human life we have seen. Leaders, as we know, set the tone for their societies.

We must be grateful for the ANC’s Sisisi Tolashe and the EFF’s Lawrence Mapoulo, both of whom have been visible on the ground, supporting the traumatised families and showing we can create a South Africa that cares. But the silence of our leaders when something so vile, primeval and antithetical to the kind of future we want to create happens is both loud and disturbing. There is no elixir for our rebirth, we just need to fully embrace our diversity, not simply in terms of race relations, but also in terms of intra-race diversities.

This week has shown that, though we concern ourselves with academic questions about who is Nigerian and who South African, both countries can be embodied in one Okon. It has also shown, through our omissions and silences, that we encourage others to behave in ways even pigs find inhuman. We need to take a scythe to these ways that take us back to primordial times.