PERSPECTIVE

PORTRAIT of A BLACK MAN II

"It has become easy for us to rape, kill, rob and so on. We have no respect for ourselves or others… At times I'm ashamed of being a man, knowing all these violent crimes are committed by men" - George Hill

When a young black man and his accomplices enter Meneer van der Walt's farm in Hoedspruit at 02h00 pre-dawn by cutting through his fence, is it their long planted prejudice towards boers or their human criminal mind that, to them justifies the act? Is Mr van der Walt, who their understanding of white people informs them that he might have received military training in the old South African Defence Force, perceived to be a target because "he is white and has stocked his house and shed with stolen property" or simply because he is a white man with guns, money, cars, televisions, video recorders, jewelry and most probably a life that can be easily taken if it was used as a betting chip? Every black person knows about how whites value their families so much that if they are threatened with mass murder they (whites) will give everything they own just to spare them.

The psychoanalysis of a young black man's reaction to his disempowered predicament, which he still believes was caused by deliberate policies of the past apartheid government which polically the whites endorsed in large numbers is going to take years to complete. One positive thing about the young black man is that he knows that while it is difficult to find one white person who attests to have voted for the Nationalist Party not once but many times, it however is still a fact that the nationalists were not dictators, large percentages of whites (who are today as extinct as the dinosaurs) put it in power and gave it a mandate to disempower blacks.

For one, if a young black man rushed into a nearly packed lift, accidentally stepped onto the well-polished shiny shoe of young van der Walt who's on his way to a job interview, and van der Walt undiplomatically brought it to his attention the way whites do, with the black man feeling insulted right now and here, retaliates with arrogance which results in the young boer beating him to pulp, nine out of ten the darkie will attribute his beating to racism. Is it really racism that makes people beat others down because they don't like them or their stepping on their polished shoes? Is it safe for the black man to conclude that he wouldn't have received the same beating if he was white but reacted the same way? Has black people gotten drunk from drinking from the cup of liberation to a point where they have become self-appointed mindreaders suffering from an incurable victims syndrome?

Studying the same analogy of mitigating factors might draw an interesting but abstract conclusion. Young black man believes that the white child is indoctrinated with racism from conception. They grow up detesting everything that does not look like them, and thus while it wouldn't be a safe conclusion that most of the times in their dealings with black people they exercise a certain amount of racist venom, their social conditioning however makes it instinctive, almost second nature for them to violently react when confronted with a black man armed or not. That might also be the reason why when white women have qeued at Automated Teller Machines and they realise that behind them are two black men, then a white man, they are likely to offer the two blacks courtesy to use the machine first, so that they can later use it in the comfort that behind them is their own. Is it racism of intuition? Why does a young black man also feel secure when behind him are two whites than when there are three blacks in jeans and takkies?

It will be perceived in some quarters to be self-insulting to assume that the young black man and the criminal mind are inseparable siamese twins. When the black man and his accomplices enter the farm at Hoedspruit, their motive is pure crime, steal furniture, guns, jewelry, then pack everything in the boer's bakkie and flee. However, somewhere in the back of their minds something tells them that it is justified basically because he stole first. It tells them that if he comes out displaying any little sign of resistance learned in the army, even if he's 90-years-old they are going to teach him a lesson he will never teach anyone else by shooting him several times, rape his 80-years-old wife before killing her too. Such a thinking on an already committed crime scene is based on racist thinking. It is a criminal act with racist connotations, because you are likely to find that the same bunch can not bring itself to raping a 50-years-old black woman but they could do it with a white woman. As it was earlier interrogated whether white children learn prejudice from conception, the next obvious question should be, where did the black child learn to hate white people with such passion to the point where black on white crime is accepted as justified in the townships while same race crime is worthy of community justice?

Young black man grows up in an environment where his grandparents and parents glorify everything white and the white man as a demi-god if not godsend. That is what gets instilled into his fragile mind from inception; aeroplanes, lights, cars, wristwatches, oxygen were invented by whites and blacks are only afforded a favour to consume if they are allowed to be part of that civilization. Aren't the San people denied the right to utilise because they refuse to wear Gucci? What is it that the white man did to make it simple for the black man to kill him with impunity while he can't do the same to his black fellow if he was in the same farm as van der Walt? To a larger extent it suggests that most of the young black men who hate whites do so out of experience, something they have seen happening or felt being done on either themselves or someone they care deeply about.

A 24 years-old man recently confessed that he did not see any reason to hate white people before until he was in Witbank and saw a white farmer fleeing from a thunderstorm by parking his 4x4 bakkie under a tree. 'On the front seats was him and his dog and on the back a black farmworker. It was raining cats and dogs and even lightning and thunder were everywhere, but he parked under a tree and left the darkie in the back to soak and risk being hit by the thunder'.
In this context, the young black man' s detesting of whites can not be justified as racism but pure hatred of the person who unleashed suffering on his likes over many centuries. It is hate begetting hate, chickens coming home to roost. The young black man is incapable of being a racist, but a common criminal.