Racism has always been closely tied to the use of morality to dehumanise people. When Christopher Columbus first arrived on the shores of what the colonisers would later call America, he wrote a letter describing the indigenous brown-skinned people he encountered as people without religion.
In a letter dated October 1429, Columbus said: “They all go naked as their mothers bore them... I suppose and still suppose that they come from the mainland to capture them for slaves. They should make good servants and very intelligent, for I have observed that they soon repeat anything that is said to them, and I believe that they would easily be made Christians, for they have no religion.”
Columbus’s statement in one fell swoop sums up the link between colonial exploitation of people and racism, the myth that colonised and enslaved people, who throughout history have been predominately black and brown, should be understood to have no religion and by extension no morality of their own.
It has been argued that what separates human life from other forms of life is our recognisable sense of morality. The desire and ability to judge between what is right and wrong. A failure to recognise an individual or group’s morality is a declaration that those people are less than human. This has too often in history justified the inhumane treatment of many generations of people.
The fruits of Columbus's flawed reasoning were once again felt in the justification for the oppression of black people by the apartheid regime in SA. Apartheid was a project to socially, politically and legally reinforce the myth that black people were less than human, to justify economic exploitation and the regime’s clear intention to deny black people basic human rights and dignity.
Apartheid was created because it has become unpalatable that white people lack access to things that fulfil basic human needs that lead to a decent life. Meeting those human needs for a white minority became affordable because it was paid for through the exploitation of the black majority. That extension of humanity to white people came at the expense of the humanity of all other people.
While the regime, like many racist projects before it, used black people as cheap labour to build the infrastructure and service the needs of white people, it in ways that mirrored the very communism they denounced, catered diligently to white people, providing access to quality housing, education, basic services, social welfare and preferential economic opportunities in an explicit effort to raise white Afrikaners out of poverty.
The 1960 Sharpeville massacre that we remember annually on March 21 as Human Rights Day, happened because of the bold political leadership of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, who recognised this link between apartheid as a racist regime and its dehumanisation of black people.
He proposed that black people in SA go to police stations en mass to burn their dompas as an act of resisting that regime’s efforts to take away the humanity of black people. An Africanist, Sobukwe famously said: “There is only one race. The human race.”
This statement affirms the humanity of all people. Sobukwe understood that redressing the material and economic depravation that apartheid visited upon African people requires a political reclamation and affirmation of the humanity of people denied basic human rights.
As SA today grapples with rebuilding our economy, it is worth remembering that questions of racism and dehumanisation have always been closely linked to economic prosperity.
If the economic upliftment of white people during apartheid was fast-tracked by ensuring that their most basic human needs were met, perhaps an aspect of our contemporary political struggle must include deep reflection and radical actions aimed at ensuring that we too affirm the humanity of all people through provisions that meet the most basic human needs.
May we take lessons from Sobukwe’s inaugural PAC speech when he said: “We stand committed to a policy guaranteeing the most equitable distribution of wealth. Socially we aim at the full development of the human personality and a ruthless uprooting and outlawing of all forms or manifestations of the racial myth.”
SA’s efforts to create a prosperous society should centre on change that counteracts the dehumanising legacies of racial oppression with political action that allows every person to realise their greatest human potential.
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