MS Apartheid

Apartheid was an inhumane manifestation of evil incarnate. It permeated every sphere of South African life, enabling all that qualified as beneficiaries of its perversion, and brutally persecuting or eradicating anything or anyone who failed to ascribe to or qualify for its twisted ideology. White people were legally a separate, super-race superior to other racial groupings. Coloureds and Indians were groupings secondary in status to White people, and Black people had to carry documentation proving that they had permission to be about. Life was a constant denigration, deprivation and denial of humanity. Apartheid was a monstrous crime. A crime against humanity. Its maintainance was upheld with cruelty and, in opposition to the nobler concepts of equity, freedom and justice, it flourished. Within the ranks of the perpetrators, local and international pressure forced a mindset-shift. Evidence of the inhumanity and cold harvest of its dark evil revealed the lies and deceit that enslaved the majority of South Africans. The continued safety and security of the minority living off the fat of the land and the capitalistic claim to the spoils of the horror that engulfed this country became the strident alternative to the choice of emancipation for the disenfranchised. The concern for survival trumped, and those who were allowed, voted for the inclusion of POC into a system they themselves were reforming. Them and their enablers, held a separation from those who would see the end of Apartheid as the end of White hegemony - not off the mark, but without the Doomsday perspective. The eventual, essential 'darkening' of all aspects of South African life would become symptomatic of a threat to White existence. The combative, in-opposition-to stance of the previously advantaged made off as an anomalous manifestation of a dying dysfunction. Apartheid was proclaimed dead with what has been variously identified as the hand-over of power, the freeing of the disenfranchised, and the ushering in of Democracy - the grand transformation of racists and racism - but it was never killed. It was laid to rest, its perpetrators absolved and its beneficiaries vindicated. And, if you can bear to connect the dots, if you can hear the truth without accusation, if you can bring yourself to pause for perspective - its legacy blooms in our today. SP