By Nonkululeko Gobodo
I am thinking about Freedom Day and the subsequent forthcoming 30th anniversary of the dawn of our democracy next year and I find myself asking – What have we achieved as a country in the past 30 years?
I think back to April 1994 as I stood in the queue to vote for the first time. I had not been a citizen of my own country until that day. All of us in the queue were full of hope for the future and we had an expectation of seeing the lives of black people transformed both economically and socially.
I was a chartered accountant and ran a small practice in Mthatha in 1994. I was able to grow my practice into a big black accounting firm with offices in every province in the years of the new dispensation. We must celebrate such achievements because they were not possible in apartheid South Africa. However, fast forward nearly 30 years and we are steadily watching a decline of our country in many areas, the future looks bleak and I am left questioning, am I seeing the South Africa today that I hoped for when I stood in that queue to vote in 1994?
The reality is that the lives of the majority of black people in South Africa have not changed much and the truth is black people are not really free. Many still live in poverty and face racism and discrimination purely because of the colour of their skin. We need to ask ourselves, what did we want in 1994 and what does freedom truly look like?
These are questions we took for granted in 1994. We assumed that freedom would bring economic transformation and a change in social status. We assumed that our leaders would put the country and people first.
As we ponder this question of what freedom looks like, we have to examine why the status of the black majority has not changed much economically and socially in the past 30 years.
Black people have been a victim of one human system after another. They were victims of colonialism, then slavery and racism, and now they are victims of corrupt, irresponsible leaders who are leading the country down a path of destruction. This situation is the same throughout the continent of Africa. Are Africans then destined to be in a perpetual cycle of victimhood? Africans should no longer allow this situation to continue.
We need something new that will bring change to the circumstances of Africans. The question is, how do people who have been conditioned to believe they are inferior, weak and incapable bring about something new? Only minds that are free can bring something new.
We know that oppressive systems that have discriminated against black people have always been structural. Society always needs a group to be at the bottom to facilitate the upward mobility of those who hold power at that time. This has been the case right throughout history in most countries.
Discrimination against certain groups has continued despite the move during the “era of enlightenment” that came up with the concept of “all men are created equal”. This concept has never applied to black people and women. Even after slavery was abolished, we still saw racial inequality continue. Should black people just accept racial inequality which always translates to economic exclusion and exclusion from opportunities? Why then are black people not able to free themselves from a slave mentality, what are they waiting for?
We must acknowledge that we have seen growing numbers of black people move into the middle class in South Africa. This group has been occupying positions of power and are enjoying better opportunities for wealth creation. Can we say that the Black middle class is free when conscious and unconscious bias still prevails in corporate South Africa around black people? It is not fair that black people continue to carry a bigger share of the burden for harmonious race relations by abandoning their true selves in order to make others feel comfortable.
I share in my book Awakened to my true self, how when I was married, I had been conditioned by my culture to be a traditional wife. I therefore behaved and acted according to what my culture dictated. This continued until I woke up and realised that I had always been free to make my own choices in life, and that I was never bound by the dictates of my culture.
How then can people who have been conditioned to believe they’re inferior bring about a new world that can usher in real freedom and economic transformation for themselves and the majority?
We can never transform any system from within itself. This is because we are already conditioned by the system and therefore accept the reality of the system. We are also not able to solve a problem when we are too embroiled in it struggling to find solutions. We have not been able to solve the problems facing us as a country despite all the time and energy spent trying to solve them.
I asked myself, how did previous generations change their societies at times of big challenges as we face in South Africa and the continent of Africa? What I noticed is that those previous generations simply stopped. When you stop struggling you can observe and see the problem for what it is. You then question. When we question, we produce innovative ideas that can bring something new that changes the situation.
We need to question all our human systems; culture and tradition, religion, political and economic systems. How are these human systems contributing to the situation we are currently facing as black people? We forget that we are not just human beings, we are also spiritual beings.
Our capacity to bring something new is unlimited. We have many examples of previous generations bringing something new that resolved the challenges they faced. Things like the reformation of Martin Luther, the era of enlightenment, and the industrial revolution, ushered in new political and economic systems. This generation is well able to bring something new.
When black people are truly free, we will see economic growth that will benefit everyone in our beautiful country.
Nonkululeko Gobodo is the CEO of Awakened Global, a social initiative company that focuses on race and gender inequality. She is a chartered accountant and the author of Awakened … to my true self.
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