Andrew Kenny
A far better policy, in the face of anyone brandishing a symbol you find hurtful, would be to ignore them, and deny them the honour of your resentment, or the reward of your hurt.
Oh dear! Another moment of folly in the life of South Africa. The Equality Court has judged that the ‘Old South African Flag’ constitutes ‘hate speech’. ‘Gratuitous displays’ of it are now prohibited, but it may be privately shown for ‘academic and artistic purposes’. This judgment and the reactions to it are at once silly and revealing, opening a window on the psychology of race relations in our country.
The old South African flag in question (there were others before it) was not an ‘apartheid flag’. On the contrary, the most die-hard supporters of apartheid despised it. The flag was adopted in 1928, 18 years after the Union. It was a clumsy compromise, trying to unify all British and Afrikaans interests – and completely ignoring black African interests, the biggest population group in the land. The flag was a composite of five flags. The larger flag consisted of the three colours of the Dutch East India Company. Inside it were three small flags: the Union Jack for the Cape Province, the Transvaal Vierkleur and the Orange Free State Flag. Inside the Free State Flag was the flag of the Netherlands. Hard-line Afrikaners loathed it because of the Union Jack. They hated the British far more than they ever hated black people, whom in fact they didn’t hate at all but just looked upon with bigoted detachment. They wanted a ‘clean flag’ – one without a Union Jack. In 1994 they got one, another compromise, but this time trying to unify everyone in an abstract design; they did not seem particularly pleased with it.
Judge Phineas Mojapelo said that the old flag ‘is hurtful, harmful, promotes and propagates hatred towards black people. It demonstrates a clear intention to be hurtful, to be harmful and incites harm and it, in fact, promotes and propagates hatred against black people’. This is nonsense. (I believe one is free to criticize a judgment without denying its authority.) The old flag does no such thing – but it might do a worse thing. In 1928, those who designed the flag had no hostile thoughts towards blacks. The trouble was they had no thoughts about blacks at all. They disregarded them. I believe it is their disregard of blacks, not their hatred of them that produces the humiliation that some blacks claim to feel when they see the old flag brandished aggressively. The whites who brandish the old flag are celebrating their white history, not denigrating blacks but ignoring them. White racists hardly ever think about black people; aggrieved blacks think about white people all the time. This imbalance lies at the heart of our racial problems.
If the old flag stirs up memories of oppression and suffering, there are surely far worse images of hate speech that are shown all the time in South Africa. The worst bloodshed and suffering black South Africans ever endured was under King Shaka. He killed and expelled far more black people than any British colonist or apartheid leader. He drove black multitudes out of their ancestral lands and sometimes out of South Africa altogether. Should the statues of Shaka be declared hate speech?
How about the Union Jack itself? It is the supreme symbol of British Imperialism, and British Imperialism in South Africa was probably more brutal and humiliating for the black population than anything the Boers did. Should ‘gratuitous’ displays of the Union Jack be banned in this country?
Worst of all is the Hammer and Sickle, the accursed symbol of communism. Communism slaughtered over 90 million people in the 20th century, far more than Hitler did (although I’d rate his Holocaust, because of its nature, as the worst crime in history). Communism murdered, tortured, starved and degraded multitudes of poor working-class people all over the world. Sometimes, such as in Cambodia under Pol Pot, the communists murdered people simply because of their race (Vietnamese). Think of the hurt, the pain that so many South Africans must feel when they see the blood-soaked Hammer and Sickle brandished in South Africa and think of their ancestors, friends and relations persecuted under it. The Hammer and Sickle is pure hate speech.
The same goes for T-shirts showing Che Guevara, Fidel Castro’s photogenic torturer and killer, who helped Castro crush working people in Cuba, impoverish the country, persecute homosexuals, terrorise the population and send hundreds of thousands fleeing the country. Ban images of Guevara?
A better policy, though, would be not to be silly about images that somebody or another might construe as hateful, whether it is the Swastika, the Hammer and Sickle, the Union Jack, a Statue of Shaka or the 1928 Flag. Ignore them. If someone tries to bait you with them, laugh at him. Don’t honour him with your resentment; don’t reward him with your hurt. Leave the matter to social disapproval rather than legal action.
Andrew Kenny is a writer, an engineer and a classical liberal.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the IRR.
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