S'THEMBISO MSOMI | Trump and the far-right movement mustn't derail SA's nation-building project meant to break racist past

In exactly one month from today, SA will mark 70 years since the adoption of the Freedom Charter in Kliptown.

It is an important document in the history of our country and one that, it can be argued, laid the foundation for much of our constitution and Bill of Rights.

In that sense, it is regarded by some as equivalent to the US’ Declaration of Independence in 1776 – the founding document of that country in which 13 states formally declared they were no longer going to be subject to British colonial rule.

Though the Freedom Charter didn’t declare liberation from colonial and apartheid rule, it did spell out the vision of a free and united SA.

The most important statement in that vision, which also finds expression in the 1996 constitution we now live under, says “SA belongs to all who live in it, black and white”.

As Sowetan readers would know, it was a highly contested statement at the time – one that led to the first breakaway from a faction of the ANC and the formation of Robert Sobukwe’s Pan Africanist Congress of Azania. Some would say it remains controversial today, though it is probably safe to assume that the majority of South Africans agree with it, judging by which political parties they mostly vote for during elections.

The statement not only guided how the liberation was to be conducted, but it is at the heart of efforts to forge a new nonracial nation, united in its diversity.

Whereas independence for most former colonies often meant the repatriation of the colonisers back to their mother country, here Freedom Day on April 27 imposes on us the duty to live side by side – the formerly oppressed and former oppressor – as one nation.

It is an uneasy project, fraught with many problems that cannot all be resolved in the relatively short period of three decades. But it is the path the majority chose, first through the adoption of the Freedom Charter and later the ratification of the 1996 constitution, whose preamble partly says “SA belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity”.

Yet despite the majority demonstrating through the constitution, the post-apartheid laws and day-to-day conduct that the formerly oppressed genuinely believe in a united nation, some among the beneficiaries of the colonial-apartheid system still hold on to the suspicion that the oppressed harbour a desire for a racial Armageddon.

This is at the centre of the bizarre accusation that SA is engaged in “white genocide” and confiscating land from Afrikaners.

In the US, the false claims have found resonance with President Donald Trump and his fanatical Make America Great Again (Maga) movement, because, like their South African counterparts, they see diversity and a world where one’s prospects are not mainly determined by one’s skin colour as a threat.

Even if violent crime wasn’t such a problem in SA, even if living in our rural communities was as safe as living in the rural hinterland of China or Japan, the white far-right here and in the US was always going to find reason to accuse post-apartheid SA of discriminating against the white minority.

A closer study of the Maga movement reveals a grouping whose greatest fear is that the US’s racial dynamics are slowly changing towards a future where they would not be able to call the country a “white” country, as the majority of its people would be brown and black.

Their efforts, including trying to stop immigrants from Latin America and other parts of the largely black and brown Global South while, at the same time, encouraging white Afrikaners to come in as refugees, are aimed at keeping the US largely white.

So, it should not be a surprise that a multiracial country on the southern tip of Africa that is showing, despite its many unresolved problems, that ending white domination does not necessarily result in a racial Armageddon, is the target of their disinformation campaign.

What we should guard against, however, is allowing the Maga agenda in the US to revive racial divisions and derail the nation-building project in SA. It has been encouraging to see South Africans from all walks of life and different political persuasions coming out to state categorically that Trump’s claims of a “racial genocide” are false.

However, our divided past and ongoing racial inequality, coupled with growing poverty and unemployment, will always leave SA vulnerable to exploitation by those within and outside the country who do not want the nation-building project to succeed.

The one sure way of safeguarding it is to intensify efforts at deracialising the economy and ensuring that access to opportunities is open to all. Trump and his fellow travellers may wrongly call such efforts “apartheid in reverse”, but the truth is that without them, SA will never break with its racist past.