Footnote 7 What Steve Biko refers to as “Black solidarity”, becomes more of disillusionment as discriminatory practices through political manoeuvring prevail between ethnic and racial groups. Footnote 6 Boesak laments that the challenge is that even in a post-apartheid context some would make futile the efforts of organisations like the United Democratic Front (UDF) that fought for non-racialism during Apartheid because specific organisations and political parties in South Africa would set “their sights on claiming South Africa to be a ‘Black man’s land’ or hide in the draughty cave of ‘Coloured’ politics”. The ethnic contestation between Black Africans, Indians and “Coloured” Footnote 5 people are apparent when going through various forms of media in South Africa.
This vision was fought for during Apartheid in South Africa and was espoused by the African National Congress (ANC) that is currently the governing party in South Africa.
Nonetheless, the lack of political will to concretise Stephen Bantu Biko’s moral vision by the post-apartheid governments in South Africa, ethnic nationalism would endanger the vision of non-racialism. The problem of racial inequality was an issue across the globe, in particular, the African-American contextual politics, of course in South Africa, but also political struggles over racial inequality in many European countries also. Therefore, the issue of “ethnicity” was not properly put on the table as an issue that needs to be discussed within the broader project of decolonisation. Footnote 3 However, we had after Biko and Boesak Footnote 4 also seen other “decolonial” projects in South Africa in terms of “race”, class, gender.
Footnote 2W.E.B Du Bois claimed that the “problem of the twentieth century” was that of the “colour-line”. In Armenian, Herero, and Rwandan genocides, the language of race played a terrifying role alongside the language of a nation.
Not only did European racial thinking develop, at least in part, to rationalise the Atlantic slave trade, but it also played a central role – often a pernicious one – in the development and execution of Europe’s nineteenth – and twentieth-century colonial projects and, with the Nazis, it was central in organising the systemic genocide of millions and millions of people, Jews and Roma, conceived as inferior races, among them.
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