Frederick Douglass was an African American slave who escaped from the South in Maryland and became an abolitionist movement leader in New York. Gaining note for his oratory and incisive anti-slavery writings, he got invited to address the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Sewing Society in 1852. He was puzzled by this invitation but accepted it, nonetheless. The country was in a celebratory mood because of Thanksgiving and hence honouring the Fourth of July Independence Day. The title of his speech which I borrow from here was “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

He started humbly stating that “with little experience and with less learning, I have been able to throw my thoughts hastily and imperfectly together, and trusting to your patient and generous indulgence, I will proceed to lay them before you”. He then proceeded to speak lyrically of the struggle of the Americans against British colonial tyranny and how they ultimately succeeded in gaining their freedom from England. He reminded his audience that “there was a time when to pronounce against England, and in favour of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor!”

Douglass continued: “Feeling themselves harshly and unjustly treated by the home government, your fathers, like men of honesty, and men of spirit, earnestly sought redress. They petitioned, and remonstrated, they did so in a decorous, respectful, and loyal manner. They saw themselves treated with sovereign indifference, coldness and scorn. Yet they persevered. They were not the men to look back.”

Here, I’m reminded at this point of both the Boers in the Anglo-Boer War of 1899 – also known today as the South African War – on the one hand and my own compatriots in the ANC, making petitions to Her Majesty’s government with the founding of the Union of South Africa in 1910 on the other hand.

But England rejected such delegations and petitions, and instead affirmed its justice, and the loftiest eloquence of the British Senate came to its support. “The madness of this course, we believe, is admitted now, even by England, but we fear the lesson is wholly lost on our present rulers”, said Douglass. “Oppression makes a wise man mad.

“They felt themselves the victims of grievous wrongs, wholly incurable in their colonial capacity. With brave men there is always a remedy for oppression. Just here, the idea of a total separation of the colonies from the crown was born”, said Douglass. “The timid and the prudent (as has been intimated) of that day, were, of course, shocked and alarmed by it”.

Or in our case, to war we shall go, said the Boers, and engage in armed struggle, shouted the ANC comrades.

Douglass goes further and reminds his audience of a resolution that was adopted in 1776 on 2 July “whose transparency is at all equal to this, it may refresh your minds and help my story if I read it.

“Resolved: That these united colonies are, and of right, ought to be free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, dissolved.”

He concluded this section of his speech with the words “friends and citizens, I need not enter further into the causes which led to this anniversary (Fourth of July). Many of you understand them better than I do. That this is a branch of knowledge in which you feel, perhaps, a much deeper interest than your speaker. The causes which led to the separation of the colonies from the British crown have never lacked for a tongue”.

He then quotes Shakespeare: “The evil that men do, lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones.”

Douglass’ oration then takes a turn for the worse: “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean citizens to mock me, by asking me to speak today”, he inquired. “I can today take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people. Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”

Douglass, now filled with such anger, looks at his audience and says, “my subject, then fellow citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY!” – or in our case, SOUTH AFRICAN APARTHEID!

“There is not a man under the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery [or in our case, racism] is wrong for him”. He then asks some pertinent questions, “what, am I to argue that is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without [or in our case, minimum] wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men [or in our case, Africans], to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them [their labour] at auction, to sunder obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employment for my time and strengths than such arguments would imply.”

What then remain to be argued? “Is it that Slavery [or in our case, apartheid] is not divine, that God did not establish it, that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may, I cannot.”

He informs us that at a time like this, “scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke.

“For it is not light that is needed, but fire, it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”

We as South Africans, we too need to confront the racism today so prevalent in our society.

What to the American slave, is the Fourth of July? Or in our case, What to the black man is apartheid? And so just like for the white Americans in that hall with Douglass, so too for my white counterparts here in Mzansi: “A day that reveals to him, more than any other day in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham, your boasted liberty an unholy licence, your national greatness, swelling vanity, your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless, your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence, your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery, your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”

Douglass concludes with these chilling final lamentations: “There is not a nation on this earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour. Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolving barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”

Or in our case, after all those travels, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, for inequality, unemployment, poverty and RACISM, South Africa reigns without a rival.

The structural racism persists in our society and we are either unwilling or incapable of confronting it. This yoke of oppression and humiliation of the black man must be spoken about and must be thwarted in its tracks. For anything less will mean that you whites continue to celebrate the outcome of a negotiated settlement at the expense of the black majority in our beautiful country.

What to the black man is apartheid? I too wonder, do you? DM