By happenstance, at about the time 44 prominent Afrikaners wrote an open letter to condemn the racist way that Afrikaner legacy has been abused, I sat down, briefly, with a white Afrikaner man. That should be read slowly. It was intentionally stated the way that it was…
I will call the Afrikaner man Petrus. We had known each other for about 40 years. To me, personally, he represented, all those years ago, everything that I detested socially and politically. He represented all of that which we are, today, being told belongs in the past, that we should move on, that we should acknowledge the good things about colonialism and apartheid, and that the legacy of apartheid is mythical, and that any reference to it is “propaganda”.
What sets Petrus and the 44 Afrikaners (and other like-minded Afrikaners) apart from people who deflect discussions (psychologists refer to projection, blame shifting and aggression, to which I will return) is intellectual honesty and integrity, and accepting responsibility and accountability — and not in a self-pitying manner.
Those claims about intellectual honesty and integrity are strong, but I have been a participant observer for more than four decades; perhaps I am familiar, therefore, with these terms within our social and historical contexts.
Professionally, I saw Petrus as representative of that odious, iniquitous and vile political order that has passed, and from which (according to the discontinuous mind) we are supposed to “move on”. We actually lived the things Steve Biko fought against, and did not simply report on them in exchange for eternal gratitude, blessings and innocence!
Unless, of course, innocence can be bought and sold. In this frame we have to insist on the very real (actual) legacies of vertically segmented privilege over decades, and that it now represents various forms of capital, all of which have been built up in the accumulated history of South Africa since the arrival of Europeans.
Here’s a footnote: during the period when South Africa was in violent turmoil, between, say, 1985 and 1993, John Steenhuisen was attending a formerly whites only, boys only school that promised to “save your son, serve your son… future-proof him. The boys leave here as men of honour.”
Toxic masculinity
There are scientific lessons (notably from psychology) to be learned from the way that “strong boys” become “strong men”, and how it feeds into toxic masculinity — and capital accumulation. It is important to understand the way that capital is formed, and the ways power and privilege (and cultural capital) are handed to inheritors through education systems, and then legitimised.
Let’s set that aside. As a young reporter, and later a political correspondent, I wrote unrelenting and often quite scathing reviews and reports about Petrus. During the national State of Emergency period, I described him as “FW de Klerk’s Machiavellian understudy”. Over all those years, he never said an angry word to me, he was always amenable, available — and once returned a call at a rather inopportune moment. It was early on a Sunday morning. Compare this, now, to the most awful of personal attacks, cries of “reverse racism” or of “race-baiting” (see this eloquent response to charges of “race-baiting”), and appeals that I ought to be censored or silenced. My sustained criticism of the Economic Freedom Fighters and Julius Malema resulted in two or three threats; one was a reference to my grandfather, another said I should “go back to Asia”.
Blame shifting and aggression
The liberal intellectual class, that noblesse de robe of the previous era, now gloating behind masks of “meritocracy” and professing race blindness while clinging to the memories of their noblesse, have made themselves abgesichert. These are all defence mechanisms, and attempts to evade accountability, reproduce social injustices and attempted blame-shifting. It’s all in Theodor Adorno’s book Guilt and Defence (I don’t have a copy of the book, nor electronic access). He referred, especially, to the post-war German tendency to be free from scrutiny (agbesichert), and the denial of responsibility and lack of accountability.
The “fightback”, as it was referred to after 10 May 1994 (along with the mysterious disappearance of race) is an aggression that is sustained in South Africa. The brass knuckledusters in the silken gloves of forced forgetting, “just move on” or “let’s create jobs” and forget about the past are all, now, driven by money and sanctimony, and a sense of eternal innocence.
People wave wads of money (who among us does not like money?). Others build skyscrapers (which is nice if you ignore Skyscraper Seduction, and everything that it represents). Others blame all the ills of today on attempts to roll back the injustices of the past; Black Economic Empowerment is the bullseye of its focus.
About skyscraper seduction — here is a passage from Dolores Hayden’s essay, Skyscraper Seduction/Skyscraper Rape: “Each new argument in favour of the skyscraper may incorporate some response to previous urban protests against it. Yet there is no escape from the contradictions of the capitalist city; as an instrument for enhancing land values and corporate eminence, the skyscraper consumes human lives, lays waste to human settlements, and ultimately overpowers the urban economic activities which provided its original justification.”
The aggression and blame shifting is probably the best way to understand the way that accountability is avoided, and when people make themselves feel good by simply ignoring that “heavy curtain of guilt” that James Baldwin referred to in his 1965 essay, The White Man’s Guilt.
I should return to my brief meeting with Petrus.
I was invited, on two separate occasions over the past month, to a couple of discussions. I declined both. I declined the first one because I would have been called names, and probably cancelled if I said what I really thought, and not what I was expected to say. And anyway, there are some people with whom I simply will not share a platform. Walter Benjamin, who, as a Jew, fled for his life during Germany’s Nazi era, was quite clear about not giving oxygen to certain people whom he believed either acted in bad faith or assumed eternal innocence and wonder. He dissociated with people when he suspected them of being disingenuous, expedient and manipulative.
Awkward cartwheels
I let the second invitation disappear because, joining the British writer Reni Eddo-Lodge, I no longer talk to white people about race. Like James Baldwin, Eddo-Lodge wrote that she could not talk to white people about race “because of the consequent denials, awkward cartwheels and mental acrobatics that they display when this is brought to their attention. Who really wants to be alerted to a structural system that benefits them at the expense of others?”
I made an effort to talk to Petrus, the white Afrikaner man a few weeks ago. Although we were never friends — I don’t think we’ve spent more than an hour in the same room since the early 1990s — I had followed his passage over the past few decades. He had, most recently, acknowledged that he was a white Afrikaner male, that he had been part of what was a white supremacist movement (the National Party) and all the privileges that came with that, and that he had, since the early 1990s, dedicated his life to working on progressive and positive development at home and around the world.
Petrus acknowledged responsibility and accountability, and the privileges he gained from past political orders. He was not among the 44 prominent Afrikaners who signed the open letter. That’s fine. I have known him for more than four decades and have witnessed his transition. Actually, it’s a sad indictment that an online petition “Nie in ons naam nie” (not in our name), had a mere 1,526 signatures by 2pm on Monday, 10 November 2025.
So, I will do almost anything legal to put food on the table, but there are people whom I will not talk to, or with whom I will not share a platform.
Three years or so ago, I unexpectedly shared a platform with someone (whom I’m not allowed to mention), and refused to submit a claim for the payment offered. I actually want to like the person I see in the mirror every morning.
In sum, then, I will speak to Afrikaners, but I will neither speak to, nor break bread with, racists. James Baldwin may have said that avoiding racists was not a solution to racism, but in the racist society that we live, there are, apparently, no racists. A funny twist, eh. DM