SA looks hopeless if you insist on examining it through a racial prism

OVER the last couple of years there have been light flutters of “coloured” politics: the politics of South Africans whom the earliest European colonists, then Afrikaner and now African nationalists, classified as second or third-class citizens. The issue seems to be arising in coloured communities up and down the country. See here (https://www.news24.com/citypress/voices/westbury-has-no-coloured-problem-20181012), here (https://ewn.co.za/2018/09/28/westbury-residents-accuse-govt-of-wanting-to-get-rid-of-coloured-population?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter), here (https://www.iol.co.za/news/nathaniel-julies-state-doing-all-in-its-power-to-let-coloured-people-die-says-protester-b94eca96-f175-4b15-956a-1bfdf9ef4dc2) and here (https://www.702.co.za/articles/468152/westbury-residents-call-for-solutions-to-reduce-unemployment-crime-in-the-area).

A general belief among coloured people, away from the intellectual and scholarly guff, is that the government cares naught for their comfort. Said one resident of Westbury (https://ewn.co.za/2018/09/28/westbury-residents-accuse-govt-of-wanting-to-get-rid-of-coloured-population?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter), formerly a coloured township outside Johannesburg, about swirling violence, widening fractures and breakdown: “The government knows what is going on. Our people are dying on a daily basis and they’re doing absolutely nothing because they want to get rid of the coloured population.”

Another Westbury resident, Melissa Davids, told the inscrutable Panyaza Lesufi (https://www.702.co.za/articles/468152/westbury-residents-call-for-solutions-to-reduce-unemployment-crime-in-the-area) (he who is constantly in search of ethnic purity and erasure of anything “non-African”) the coloured community was being excluded from services and protection, and reminded him: “It was not only Nelson Mandela – Ashley Kriel also fought during the apartheid era.”..

DEEL