EDITORIAL: Beware of black oppressors!

Black African leaders need to be cautious not to emulate their former authoritarian, racist adversaries from the colonial and apartheid eras. The leaders from those dark periods ruled through racial discrimination. Black leaders fought against those very vices, but some have become oppressors of the same magnitude as racist whites. The white racist regime adopted systems and policies that birthed inequitable opportunities and skewed outcomes for people based on race. Black leaders, instead of proving they were better than their white predecessors, also adopted systems and policies that birthed similar inequalities based on race.

This has been camouflaged as an intervention to rectify past injustices, but the benefits accruing from such policies have routinely only benefitted a tiny clique of black elites.

Black oppressors are the worst because their wrath doesn’t spare even those from their own race. As evil as the racist leaders of the past were, they took care of their own communities. When poverty soars today amid plenty, that’s oppression of the downtrodden, ironically by their own brothers.

When expecting mothers sleep on cold floors with their babies in state hospitals, that’s black-on-black oppression. If one can’t even buy hospital beds, how do we expect them to resolve more capital-intensive issues like land and housing?

In South Africa, black people have started voting for the Democratic Alliance, a perceived white formation, because their racial loyalty has been betrayed for 30 years. It’s betrayal of industrial scale if those who fought against oppression are becoming oppressors themselves. Their skin colour will not save them forever.