SPEAK OUT

Politics
Trying to silence critics of rape: ANC Today 22 October 2004, President Thabo Mbeki
ANC Today
Volume 4, No. 42 . 22-28 October 2004
THIS WEEK:
* Letter from the President: Dislodging stereotypes

(EDITOR'S NOTE: On 21 October, President Mbeki answered questions in the National Assembly. One of these, about HIV and AIDS, was posed by a Democratic Alliance MP, pretending to be following up observations made by the President in his Letter in ANC TODAY Vol 4 No 39. In the light of the MP 's reference to matters published by this journal, and the importance of the issue of racism discussed in the Vol 4 No 39 Letter and revisited by the President in his response to the DA MP, the President has agreed that we can use his response to the DA MP as this week's Letter. That response therefore follows below.)

Let me start with some preliminary comments. The remarks to which the Honourable Member refers appeared in a recent edition of the weekly journal, ANC TODAY. As I stand here today, as on previous occasions, I do so as President of the Republic and not as President of the ANC.
Ordinarily, when I speak as President of the Republic, I would decline to engage any Honourable Member of the House to speak on matters I have raised as a member of the ANC. However, in the light of the important matter at issue, I will, today, somewhat depart from this rule. This is my first preliminary comment.
Secondly, I will only address the central issue raised in the Letter in ANC TODAY. This is the issue of racism. Contrary to this, the Honourable Member wants us to discuss questions that refer to the Government's attitude towards, or information about various matters that relate to HIV and AIDS.
Among other things, the Honourable Member wants us to discuss what he describes as "pervasive rape in South Africa" and "prevailing sexual practices and the attitudes of some men towards women", asking whether these "do not account, in large part, for the spread of HIV in the country".

With regard to the third part of the question, which asks whether I "will now play a more active role in leading the fight against HIV/AIDS", whatever this means, I would like to inform the Honourable Member that the Government has taken no decision to change the manner in which it is handling the challenges of better health for our people, both with regard to HIV and AIDS and all the other health conditions we have to confront. We will continue to intensify our efforts to ensure that our people have better access to quality health care. This is my third preliminary comment.
As was the case when I was Deputy President of the Republic, with Nelson Mandela as President, the Deputy President, supported by the Minister of Health, the Ministerial Committee on HIV and AIDS, and the Cabinet, chaired by the President, will continue to lead the Government's response to HIV and AIDS.
In the Letter to ANC TODAY to which the Honourable Member refers, which discussed the serious, continuing and pervasive challenge of racism in the context of particular responses to the Annual Report on Crime Statistics, I said:
"Despite the advances we have made, all of us know that the problem of crime persists. Among other things, we must therefore use the Crime Statistics to improve our effectiveness in both areas of preventing and combating crime.
"In this context we must take note of the concern of the SAPS at the continuing high levels of crime. We must also express our appreciation for the commitment made by the National Commissioner that the Police Service would make a special effort to give additional attention to the crime categories that continue to increase.
"For those genuinely interested and involved in the national effort to improve the safety and security of our people, the crime statistics must indicate that more work needs to be done to prevent the commission of these "contact crimes" especially in their areas of concentration, as identified by the Crime Statistics.
"All those of us who are engaged in the fight against crime have to find the ways and means successfully to motivate and mobilise even the most depressed communities not to impose additional pain on themselves by allowing for the perpetuation of a permissive atmosphere that encourages members of the community to do crime."

Even a perfunctory study of the Annual Crime Report would show that one of the "contact crimes" to which I referred is the crime of rape. I would like to take this opportunity once more to call on all our people to do more work within our communities to combat the terrible crime of rape, as well as violence and other forms of abuse against women and children.
I trust that the Honourable Member [Ryan] Coetzee will also devote time to work among the people, to promote the achievement of this objective, centred on the fundamental task to improve the safety and security of all our people, as I said in ANC TODAY.
As the Honourable Members are aware, and as I have said, rather than discuss the central issues I discussed in ANC TODAY, the Honourable Member Coetzee wants me to engage in a televised debate that will help some people in our country to perpetuate the very dangerous pretence that racism in our country died with the holding of our first democratic elections 10 years ago.
I do not agree, and neither do many concerned South Africans, black and white. Neither do many people everywhere else in the world, who are deeply troubled about racism and xenophobia in human society globally.
Whatever the circumstances, and regardless of the regularity of catholic incantations about "playing the race card", I, for my part, will not keep quiet while others whose minds have been corrupted by the disease of racism, accuse us, the black people of South Africa, Africa and the world, as being, by virtue of our Africanness and skin colour - lazy, liars, foul-smelling, diseased, corrupt, violent, amoral, sexually depraved, animalistic, savage -and rapist.

The question posed by the Honourable Member, arising out of a Letter to ANC TODAY about racism, suggests that he believes that this particular matter, racism, is not serious enough to deserve his attention. Accordingly, in the parliamentary question we are now discussing, he does not raise even one query about racism, the subject matter of the ANC TODAY Letter to which he refers.

He wants me to cooperate with him to put the challenge of racism in our country out of sight, and therefore out of mind. As I have already indicated, I have absolutely no intention to cooperate with the Honourable Member in this dishonest and dangerous exercise.
Recently, death robbed us of a distinguished and humble South African, Dr Franz Auerbach, a first generation citizen of our country, who was born a German Jew. May he rest in peace. Speaking in 2001, he said: "Beliefs based on fixed impressions we call stereotypes are quite hard to dislodge.If you believe MOST young black men are criminals, the experience that a majority of petty thieves and hijackers in your town are in fact young black males (of whom there are in any case about six times as many as young white males, quite apart from poverty and unemployment), will make you think that your stereotype of them is correct, even though it's clearly not true."
Referring to two 19th century Western theoreticians of racism, Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Franz Auerbach said, "The racism built on the Gobineau-Chambelain foundation permeated much economic, social and political thought and practice, particularly during 1850-1950. I believe it remains widespread in many heads in many parts of the world."
In the same year that Franz Auerbach made these comments in 2001, about racist beliefs that are widespread in many heads in many parts of the world, including our country, another honest white person, but this time an American, Cynthia Kaufman, published an article in the journal 'Radical Philosophy Review', entitled "A User's Guide to White Privilege". She wrote:
"Because of our racist history, in the United States, we have a cultural system that often creates the meaning of whiteness as good, through a complex dialectical dance with the identities of people of colour, constructed in our imaginary worlds as 'the other'. "Somewhere in our cultural unconscious lies the image of the brutal, animalistic, sexual, savage. This image was created long ago as part of the cultural work that was done to make whites feel better about slavery. But even now, with slavery long gone, the images are still part of our cultural system and they impact the cultural meanings of white and black especially. Stereotypes of African-Americans as savage leads many whites, often against their conscious intention, to fear blacks and to mistrust them.

"When I walk into a store and the clerks look at me with respect and assume that I am not going to steal anything, the trust that I receive is at least partially built upon the foundation of my distance from the image of the savage. When an African American walks into the store, that unconscious material comes into play in the opposite way. The tom-toms start to beat in the subconscious mind of the clerk."
This year, in an article entitled "The Continuing Miseducation of the Negro", an African American Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, Dr Edward Rhymes, wrote, "We are portrayed as oversexed or lascivious, and yet the porn and adult entertainment industry is dominated by whites.It is African Americans that get accused of being rampant sexual beasts, unable to control our urges, unable to keep our legs crossed, unable to keep it in our pants.

"As we, as a community, declare war on irresponsibility, ignorance, crime, poverty and the vast number of concerns that we face, we must be circumspect. I would think that we, who live in present-day America, would know exactly what it means to declare war on flawed and unproven information."

In the Letter in ANC TODAY to which the Honourable Coetzee refers in his question, I cited two instances of people, one of them a white South African woman, who have written that our cultures, religion and social norms as Africans condition us to be "rampant sexual beasts, unable to control our urges, unable to keep our legs crossed, unable to keep it in our pants" -the rapists the Honourable Coetzee says that, "in large part.(account) for the spread of HIV in the country".

I would like to assure the Honourable Coetzee that the millions of Africans in our country, in Africa and the world did not fight against apartheid racism and white domination to create space for them to continue to be subjected to dehumanising, demeaning and insulting racism.

> On the eve of our liberation, in 1993, a fellow South African, Frank Meintjies, wrote: "The only way to dismantle (our) racist system is by working for increased understanding in the society of the insidious and pervasive ways in which racism functions. It calls for a willingness to re-examine what would be regarded as normal and everyday. It presupposes opening up the subject of racism - no longer isolating and alienating those who dare to raise it. It involves listening and creating the spaces to hear the hurt, anger and aspirations of those expressing race oppression. It means dragging racism from the hushed conversations and murmurs and silences, into the arena of public discussion."
I pray that one day, the Honourable Coetzee, and others like him, will discover within themselves the intellect, the courage and the humanity to hear and understand what Frank Meintjies, Franz Auerbach, Edward Rhymes, Cynthia Kaufman, as well as millions of people in our country and elsewhere on our globe are saying, about the hurt, anger and aspirations of those who know the meaning of race oppression, which the Hon Coetzee clearly does not. In the interest of all humanity, including those who are unwilling to free their minds of the stereotypes that Franz Auerbach said are "quite hard to dislodge", which encompasses those who believe that the African male is conditioned to commit the crime of rape, I do indeed pray that sooner rather than later, all of us, South Africans of all races, will dare to drag racism from the hushed conversations and murmurs and silences, into the arena of public discussion.
When that happens, we will all of us, at last and in rage, confront the insult that K. Wailoo wrote about, as reported by Shalini Bharat of the Indian Mumbai Tata Institute of Social Sciences, which portrays the non-European peoples as "a social menace whose collective superstitious, ignorance and carefree demeanour (stand) as a stubborn affront to modern notions of hygiene and advancing scientific understanding.(a people best understood as) .a disease vector."
MORE INFORMATION: Letter from the President, ANC Today Vol 4 No 39 http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/anctoday/2004/at39.htm