Navel-Gazing South Africa

Navel-gazing South Africa

About a month ago I spent the Sunday afternoon reading the Sunday Times of South Africa. I do not even have to enumerate the issues raised but there were some hair-raising things to report about: the gang rape and murder of the young girl Revena at Bredasdorp in the Western Cape, the top athlete and blade runner Oscar Pistorius shooting his girlfriend dead in the own bathroom at his flat in Pretoria, and the dragging of a next to innocent Mozambiquan taxi driver to his death at the back of a police van by police in Daveytown, Gauteng.

Today we are told that the nine police men held in custody at the police station in Boksburg, accused of killing the taxi driver from Mozambique, are living a life in near luxury in their cells with a lot of nice chicken to eat and nice, soft beds.

The story never ends. Every week there are outrageous things to report. South Africa is a haven for tabloid journalists, it seems.

My judgement a month ago was that this nation is a nation that is navel-gazing nation, only being concerned with itself and its own fate, completely indifferent to what is going on, at the other side of the border.

The Sunday Times of last month certainly was a proof of that. I pitied these South Africans who are only able to see their own problems and who seem to like to read about them without end.

However, I now have second thoughts about this navel gazing. First of all, this is by no means unique. British press is for example, despite its claim to having an international coverage, invariably limited to British interests only, and to those parts of the world where English predominates. It is noteworthy that news from Sweden, or the Nordic region for that matter, is very scarce, conspicuous by its absence in the British media.

I also have to concede that Swedish media is not much better. Even though we have a fair amount of reporting from other parts of the world in Sweden, it is most of the time construed on some kind of Swedish interest.

An article recently by the nestor in South African journalism, Alister Sparks, gives me food for thought regarding this navel-gazing. His point was that while the rest of the world seems to be in a process of devolution (countries threatening of leaving the European Union, calls for independence in Scotland, and similar voices in Catalonia, Spain, Kurds only interested in their forming their own Kurdistan, etc.) South Africa is not. The problem in South Africa may be overwhelming, but no voice would cry for devolution or for splitting up this many-facetted place into smaller units.

I must admit that I fell for what Sparks wrote. South Africa may be navel-gazing on Sunday afternoons, but what a country its citizens are looking into: it is a country that is completely diverse in so many ways, in terms of culture, language, ethnic groups, history, level of income, and education etc.

One may excused for being caught up in events and various developments here, it is all understandable; yet – this is a problem, South Africans, as the rest of us, need to be exposed to other places and other people, not least exposed to other parts of Africa.

This is a great place to be. To be sure, South Africa is far more diverse than Europe for example. To travel from Cape Town to Durban by car, as we have just done, is a case in point. You are overwhelmed by the richness of it all. What a wonderful place God has created on this southernmost tip of Africa. South Africa is a sub-continent, a region, more than just a country.

We just have to pray and act towards a situation where poverty is eradicated, to a situation where those who have been disadvantaged all along can see a difference. The many times unprovoked violence that is so shockingly common amongst us here has to take en end. But make no mistake about it – violence, where the victim often is known to the violator, where the victim more often than not is a woman, is not going to end unless there is a shift towards a more equitable, just society. For the sake of the people of this country, but in the end for the sake of all of us who believe that it must be possible to live diversity, we must care for and love this country, navel-gazing or not.