Alas, the shadow that follows us no matter where we go is not a pretty picture of ourselves. It is dark and trails us like a primeval yoke. Racism is that shadow.
Carl Jung identified the “shadow aspect” as a part of the unconscious mind consisting of repressed weaknesses, shortcomings and instincts when he wrote: “Everyone carries a shadow… and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”
According to Jung, the shadow, in being instinctive and irrational, is prone to projection, turning a personal inferiority into a perceived moral deficiency in someone else. And so it would seem is the case when a true SA patriot like Ben Turok, an ANC veteran on a par with stalwarts such as Nelson Mandela, Ahmed Kathrada and Moses Mabhida, is questioned about his loyalty to his party.
When he refused to vote against his conscience for the secrecy bill, euphemistically couched as the Protection of State Information Bill, he showed guts.
Earlier he dared to tackle issues of racism against white people when he reminded his colleagues that the fight for freedom was not based on race but on principles of human rights.
Racial bashing is essentially a cop-out because it is divisive and will eventually have the boomerang effect of creating a prejudiced nation.
Furthermore, it deflects from dealing with real issues because it is a scapegoat for our frustrations. It is significant that decades after independence, colonised nations still blame their colonisers for their weaknesses.
This is not to underestimate the horrendous nature of racial oppression suffered in Africa through colonisation, which historian Thomas Pakenham addresses in his book The Scramble for Africa, but it is really about challenging ourselves to move on towards building a nation together despite all odds. If we look for common ground we will find many examples of interracial harmony and genuine efforts to overcome prejudices emerging from all sides.
“Ethnic bashing”, however, negates this and tends to lump all individuals of a particular race together.
The first South African to be executed in the apartheid era for an act of political violence of placing a bomb at a railway station was a white idealist by the name of John Harris.
But although men such as Harris paid with their lives for the freedom of their country, many white South Africans in particular, and other South Africans generally, are beginning to feel disillusioned with the present regime and are packing for Perth.
How would Harris have reacted were he alive today? Would he have joined the ranks of disillusioned liberals and regretted the day that he fought for freedom, only to lose his own? Is the motive for the liberal struggle only about self-preservation?
But black South Africans see the reality differently. Joe Lelyveld, Pulitzer Prize winner for his book Move Your Shadow, about black and white relations in SA, describes this contradiction in Chinese symbolism as “spear and shield” thinking.
“At one corner you see the world the way whites want to see it; at the next the world as blacks experience it”, and in-between the two, other racial groups position themselves. The problem, however, rests on the fact that there is a great disparity between non-black and black thinking.
The former wishes to wipe the slate clean and think and act “ahistorically”, as if there was no past, while the latter cannot forget how the past disadvantaged them and still continues to do so financially, educationally, psychologically, culturally and in so many other ways.
The impact of this wide disparity, says sociologist Emile Durkheim, gives rise to a state of anomie, a condition of social conflict. How does one promote social cohesion?
The search for “social glue” is what countries with large ethnic immigrant populations, such as the US and Britain, are battling with. In the case of SA, despite the past, its people have to be embraced as bona fide nationals regardless of race. They need one another for a vibrant nation to survive.
“If SA wishes to transform, it would have to move away from its stubborn obsession with race and focus on the socio-economic backgrounds of people,” Frederik van Zyl Slabbert said.
“If you make yourself hostage to a racist past, you can bank on a racist future.”
Jung’s shadow is upon us and in need of deep scrutiny and exorcism.
l Devi Rajab is an academic, author and columnist.