For Racists History Has No Weight/Consequences

Memory of the Present

BY

Gabeba Baderoon

Dominant culture in South Africa benignly recall slavery as part of a vaguely picturesque past that left us with beautiful colonial houses, award-winning wines and tourism.

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This is what I think about on December 1st these days. Though many of us do not mark the day, on December 1st, 182 years ago the institution of slavery was abolished in the colonies that made up South Africa.

Slavery was a prison the size of the world.

It made us not human while building a definition of the human out of those who enslaved us. As a result, to be human was to be not us. And the brutality that exclusion unleashed against us made the world we still live in today.

In the past we tried to forget slavery just to abolish the enormity of its violence against us. But, as Audre Lorde said in another place of slavery and about another kind of silence, forgetting does not protect us.

So we must urgently remember. Slavery and its legacy is a deep well, and we climb out of its steep walls slowly. Enslaved people built the economy of the early South African colonies. This is so indisputable that dominant culture can benignly afford to recall slavery as part of a vaguely picturesque past that left us with beautiful colonial houses, award-winning wines and tourism. A form of forgetting, in other words.

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