Comprehension Passages
I feel angry, dirty and ashamed!
by Max du Preez (from his Maximum Headroom column in The Star)
God help us. I write this minutes after I watched the worst pornography of racism and violence I have ever seen in 27 years of frontline journalism. We are a nation in trouble.
Of course I'm referring to the television pictures of six white policemen savaging three black Mozambicans with their dogs, their fists and their filthy tongues. Scenes that will make most South Africans' blood boil. Scenes that will undo most of the tentative early progress we have made to get black and white South Africans to accept each other as fellow citizens and as human beings. Scenes that will throw the entire SA Police Service into turmoil.
Television visuals that have already gone around the world, and will take most of the shine off the international community's view of us as a miracle rainbow nation. Because we're not.
Right now I don't feel like venturing outside my house tomorrow. Will I be able to look a black person in the eye, knowing that that person might have watched the report on the SAPS' Dog Unit? Those policemen have made me feel dirty and guilty because they are from my race and my tribe. And they have soiled my beautiful mother tongue.
Perhaps now those white South Africans who are always complaining when black people say this is still a racist society, will shut up and look at themselves. Perhaps now those white politicians who protest so loudly when black people remind them of the past and the legacy of racism, will stop and think again.
I had a conversation with three uneducated black farm workers near the Lesotho border last weekend. They wanted to know about life in Johannesburg: if shops really stayed open all night; if crime was really that bad in Gauteng. And then they asked me: "Do you know that man Odendaal?" I had no idea what they were talking about. They explained: the Vanderbijlpark man who is accused of dragging his worker behind his truck until he died.
They then proceeded to tell me about every white farmer in the area who abused his workers, and about two incidents of severe assault that had gone unpunished because the farmers allegedly bribed the policemen in the area.
It made me angry and ashamed, and I thought I should make a few phone calls to senior police officers about the incidents. I never did. Now I will.
I'm sure by the time this column appears, many people will have explained that not all white policemen, not all white people, are like those animals we saw on television. That's not good enough any longer. This was too great a shock to the nation's psyche.
White policemen will now have to stand up and convince the rest of the nation that they are not vicious racists, Perhaps they should do this unit by unit and station by station, or they should be asked by the commissioner to take a special new oath in which they solemnly pledge that they will never be guilty of prejudice and excessive violence.
The astonishing thing is that this Incident happened two years ago. Surely the rest of the Dog Unit and their superior officers must have seen the video, made by one of the policemen, or at least heard of it? And they did nothing.
What are the chances of this violent episode being an "isolated incident", a rare occurrence that one policeman just happened to film? Slim, I would say. Extremely slim. So we should accept that this kind of thing happens often, if not regularly. Where were the "good cops" to speak out against it or expose it?
An equally disturbing thought: if this kind of attitude is common among white policemen, why on earth would it not be common among white soldiers in the SANDF? Perhaps the few violent racial incidents in the army can now be understood a lot better.
It is also not good enough of white people to refer, FW de Klerk-like, to these racists as "a few bad apples".
White South Africans, and their political, cultural and religious leaders, will have to redouble their efforts to erase racism from our society and to convince black South Africans that they're serious about it. The ante has just been upped, as they say
Am I over-reacting, am I temporarily overwhelmed by my disgust at what I saw? I don't think so. I reported on the uprisings in Soweto and elsewhere in 1976/77, I covered the wars in Mozambique, Angola, Namibia and Northern Ireland, the rebellion and repression in South Africa in the 1980's, I was among the first to expose the evils of Vlakplaas, the CCB and the poisoning of activists. I don't upset easily.
I also sat through almost three years of shocking testimony to the Truth Commission. I thought it a remarkable process that had achieved much. But today I'm sad to say that this one incident is undoing so much of that commission's good work.
We'll all have to work much harder from now on.
Questions
- In your own words describe what was on the video Max refers to as "pornography" in the first paragraph.
- Give synonyms for the following words from the article.
- savaging (paragraph 2)
- tentative (paragraph 2)
- venturing (paragraph 4)
- soiled (paragraph 4)
- severe (paragraph 7)
- What do the following idioms and colloquialisms mean?
- to make someone's "blood boil" (paragraph 2)
- to throw something/ someone "into turmoil" (paragraph 2)
- to "take the shine off" something (paragraph 3)
- What do you understand by the term "rainbow nation"? (paragraph 3)
- In your own words describe why Max feels guilty.
- Quote a sentence from the passage which suggests that Max believes South Africa is still a racist country.
- What evidence does Max give to suggest that racists in the police force are not just "a few bad apples"? (paragraph 14)
- Why is "a few bad apples" in quotation marks in the passage?
- Do you think Max believes that we can rid our society of racism? Quote evidence from the passage to support your answer.
Debate Topic
The following topic can be discussed in a "fish-bowl".
How can Racism be removed from our society?
