SA is a beautiful and rich country whose historic movement has been animated by grand ideals, particularly in the modern (post-1652) age of the composite nation’s evolution.
The account of the landing of European settlers on the southern tip of the African continent in the 17th century and beyond is now as well-known as the facticity of the migratory descent of black people from central to southern Africa. Such are the movements of humans that culminated in the multiracial character of what we today call “the South African nation”.
The same historical forces that facilitated the insertion of the Indian element into the SA identity also worked to produce what a latter-day political lexicon would refer to as “Coloured” people. Indeed, these categories of identity are no longer helpful in a contemporary era where the driving dream is to deepen unity in diversity.
From the first moment that the feet of every human who has ever come to settle in this part of Africa touched the ground, the beauty of our land has always been conspicuous.
Although science exhorts us always to be mindful that ours is a water-scarce country, our rivers never become humble in their display of grandeur. No one can claim that SA’s breath-taking gorges are less impressive when juxtaposed with the majestic mountains that meander and tower above the gorges.
Even the Karoo seems intent on attaining the highest degree of flatness and dryness, as if bareness has become a sought-after quality. It is amazing how the emptiness of a desert is capable of evoking almost the same intensity of awe elicited by the transfixing sight of the beasts of the Kruger National Park.
Man derives equanimity from the sense of control produced by his consciousness vis-à-vis the overwhelming vastness and harmonious complexity of his natural environment. But consciousness is not capable of giving us mental balance when we are haunted by our deeply felt nothingness each time we stand before the interminably flowing and ebbing ocean.
Such is the depth of powerlessness one feels when standing on the beaches of Cape Town, Durban, Gqeberha and other parts of our sublime coastline. It is at such moments, when nature’s inexplicable greatness rudely awakens us to our fundamental insignificance, that we are forced to confront our spiritual vulnerability as beings endowed with a soul.
We get lost in a transcendental realm where all human languages cease to be intelligible, a boundless ethereal universe where the soul, unlike the monuments of our terrestrial world, does not need a plinth for its balance.
All South Africans, black and white, have always known that their country is beautiful and rich. It is the nationalistic spirit of selfishness that has caused races and tribes to seek a monopoly over the enjoyment of what, from the outset, should have been a plentiful commonwealth.
The first Dutch, German and French immigrants to settle in SA saw the Cape of the Good Hope as their Calvinistic promised land, a place where it was permissively godly to enslave autochthons and plunder their possessions. Those are the settlers whose grandchildren would, more than two centuries later, introduce apartheid.
When the English landed on our shores, they too did not resist the urge to monopolise the beauty and wealth of our land. It was their virulently imperialist spirit that caused the English to murder both African and Afrikaner in wars of conquest that lasted for more than a century.
The Africans themselves are not innocent. Their Mfecane is known as a period of “crushing and forced dispersal”. That is to put it euphemistically. It was an orgy of mass murder, a butchering of an African by another African.
Those are some of the devious grand ideals that have animated the making of modern SA. It was a phase in our troubled history when murder was used to monopolise beauty and wealth.
By the time the savagery and bestial competitiveness came to an end in the last decade of the 20th century, the economic structure of our society had already acquired a stubborn automaticity that sustained the comfort of a minority and reproduced the misery of the majority.
In the early days of the new post-1994 regime, it appeared as though there were sufficient moral resources to dismantle the structure of minority privilege and enact a new equitable socio-economic order.
Alas, the pigs of our animal farm have tasted the apples they found in the offices that control access to SA’s beauty and wealth.
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