Cape Argus editor Gasant Abarder officiated at the launch on Wednesday of Run Racist Run: Journeys into the Heart of Racism, Eusebius McKaiser’s new book. This is his address.
This is Eusebius McKaiser’s third book, and he is growing in stature with each collection of essays he brings us. These are works to be treasured by a brave intellectual who is astute and innovative in how he grapples with complex issues in South African society. With this book it’s racism and specifically anti-black racism.
I was a young editor in my first stint at the Cape Argus about four years ago when I received a very angry phone call from a young man called Eusebius McKaiser. I had never met him before but had read and admired his work and loved the temerity he had to call up a newspaper and challenge the editor.
He was right to be angry. I had handled a very delicate matter of racial tension boiling over between black and coloured people over resources in a municipality near Somerset West, in a very callous way with an over-the-top front page presentation. We spoke for a while and Eusebius agreed to write a piece about the tensions.
The piece was incisive and refreshing. But most of all it was Eusebius’s clarity of thought and candid views on race and race relations that made it memorable.
I am happy to say that in Run Racist Run Eusebius is at his incisive best and he writes as clearly as he thinks about a tough topic – the subliminal racism (or the non-bloody type, less in-your-face type) we have all been guilty of trying to avoid or sweep under the carpet. So we find ourselves in District Six tonight. How apt. It was here that black and coloured people lived in racial harmony before the apartheid government so violently kicked out our families and bulldozed their homes.
In District Six, where nothing stands, remains a painful memory of what could have been. Our people were scattered across the Cape Flats – in places like Manenberg, Gugulethu, Mitchells Plain and Khayelitsha. In the latter, Mitchells Plain and Khayelitsha, our people – coloured and black – live next door to each other yet are worlds apart.
Eusebius reminds us in Run Racist Run that the distance between us is down to the racist design of apartheid – a divider and conqueror. I asked journalist, photographer, fashion designer and social media activist Victor Dlamini about this recently.
He said: “It’s very difficult to get people to coalesce around politics because it’s typically divisive. But when people coalesce around the culture there is a lot that they share. I really think that part of the magic that has to be rediscovered in Cape Town is the shared culture, the shared suffering.
“Anyone who goes to District Six understands the shared uprooting. Right now there’s a sense that race has become the predominant thing. Are you coloured? Are you black?
“And when you take out the context of a common deprivation, but also of a common sense of uniting around a UDF led by people like Popo Molefe, Trevor Manuel and others, then it’s very difficult for people to remember that the last 10 years do not define race relations.”
He says: “It’s very difficult for people to remember in the 80s there was a sense that this UDF was almost the model of racial harmony, when there was unity among the oppressed. Now when I read all these letters and complaints, I almost can’t recognise the new Cape Town. And I think it’s disheartening.”
So why did the Cape Argus partner with Eusebius to launch this book? Eusebius aroused in my colleagues and me a new openness and consciousness about racism and race relations that at times we were guilty of storing in the recesses of our minds for fear of upsetting the status quo.
This is an important conversation he has started and for me, in order to make it relevant, I want it to be the starting point for those once united in their oppression, to find each other again.
I want to do all I can with the platform I have to start breaking down the divide between Bonteheuwel and Langa, Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain – until we find more in our common humanity that unites us rather than keeps us apart. It is the kind of consciousness that Eusebius has helped shape in our dialogues. It is also the kind of revolutionary thinking that represents the new Independent Media – owners of the Cape Argus – which gave me the freedom recently to cede half of my editorial authority to student co-editors so that they can tell their story in their own voices in what was celebrated as groundbreaking in newspapers. What Eusebius and the students have in common is that they have challenged our laziness– and I include myself in that latter category as having been lazy.
Tonight, we are fortunate to have Eusebius with us in conversation with Adam Haupt, associate professor of media studies at UCT.
Among others, Adam is the author of Static: Race and Representation in Post-Apartheid Music, Media and Film.
He occasionally writes for the Mail & Guardian, Thought Leader, The Guardian UK, Africa is a Country and City Press.
He has also worked as a freelance journalist, dabbled in TV and video production and experimented in music, the spoken word, and poetry performance.
Eusebius has worked in radio, is a newspaper columnist, and political commentator, master of ceremonies and is a champion debater who is very tjatjarag on social media.