Ethnic groups in South Africa

I think that my dad showing me some of his favorite revolutionary Nigerian artists like Felikuti and teaching me about Bob Marley early and showing me Paul Simon's Graceland concert, which...

It's probably on record the last time a white folk boy went to play music for Black South Africans.

I agree.

Yeah, I learned so much about the power of music as a unifying sort of art and its ability to close the gap on our differences relatively quickly.

There is nothing.

And then he gave a speech, which was, you know, what we've come to expect from Zuma, land ownership, Black South Africans must unite as one block, land belong to the ancestors of Black South Africans and should be reclaimed.

He said, the GNU, what is that? The something you.

I don't know what that is.

They're both black voters, you know, reach them in this way.

And that is missing the fact that the black electorate in South Africa is the most socioeconomically diverse electorate there is.

That you have people at the very top of society and people at the very bottom of society and everything in between purely represented among black South Africans.

So it's not as if there's this homogenous mythical black code that you can break for the black vote.

And without repeating the specific words, there were some very harsh things that I got to hear, both from people of African descent whose ancestors had been here in America longer than I had, and from white Americans as well.

And There were very few eyebrows that were raised because Africans have no history and no culture and are monkeys, as was recently shown with the memes that were put out by President Trump himself on his social media platform.

And so when we don't challenge these things, when they feel like they knock us or they're just jokes, it continues to feed this division amongst us.

And whether it's Africans who also, or people of African descent who move here, who also say things that are misinformed and are extremely ignorant, we cannot excuse the hurt that it causes and that sometimes ends up in people being killed.

This child who I'm sure when he was leaving to come to America, his family threw a party in Ghana because he was coming to the land of milk and honey with gold and he was coming to a better life.

And he doesn't even last a year in America and he's dead.

From Jamaica.

So yes, but before you got to Jamaica, where did you think you came from? He said, I don't know, but not Africa.

And when foreigners are carrying AK-47s, why have you ever seen someone, asylum seeker or refugee, carrying AK-47s as a deadly weapon? It's dangerous.

So I want to say to patriotic Black South Africans, I'm not going to speak to brown envelope Black South Africans, because the issue of much and much, I know even the president, it seems like she hates Jacinda.

Jacinda? said that she went to almost all the departments of the state, minister of police, minister of labor.

She went to the president and they sent a petition to the president, the minister of home affairs.

Nobody wants to invite them.

How can you do that to South Africans? This is a venue issue and it's not going to go away.

Are you always going to send the police to suppress black South Africans' concerns? It's a testing of citizenship and refugees and asylum seekers.

It's a very, very serious issue.

Thank you very much for your contribution and for your question.

Before I answer the question, I just want to thank you for the wonderful work you do and for this particular contribution because many Africans or even many people here, people of African descent, they don't remember that Cuba contributed to the decolonization of Africa and Cuba was supported by Russia.

So I agree with you.

If it was not for Russia, we would not be talking about the revolution in the South States.

I was not successful.

I wanted the organizers to put in the document that Ubuntu was going to be the ethos to organize the conversation about reparations.

uh there was a pushback coming from Africans but it has to beat the Russians allow white people in Russia to understand that Ubuntu should be promoted.

When I was the president of the scientific committee of the non-Pan-African Congress, because I had that leverage, I had made sure that Ubuntu be mentioned and inserted in the documents.

governance, legislatures, provincial, whatever, if we relinquish our control over schools and our ability to go to racially segregated schools, if we relinquish our guaranteed places in universities, our control over society and our privilege, that We will be that the state will collapse.

Society will collapse, first of all, because there was a lot of talk about how black South Africans had a different culture.

They had a very different culture.

That was the claim than white people.

I have another friend who went to a boarding school and he told me a story of a gust of wind cracking a window in the middle of the night in his dorm.

And the boys all leapt out of bed and were screaming because they thought it was the beginning of the Black Vengeance movement.

mission and they just were so it was such an idea that was inculcated in them that there would be violent revenge that this fear was omnipresent but the fear was generated and it was held on to it was clung to in order to kind of justify and prevent you from really having to face the injustice that you are complicit in i also think um I met a number of white South Africans who were slow to believe or who didn't wanna believe that black South Africans would not oppress them in the exact same way.

So there was this belief, there's an NGO or kind of a right wing institution, research institution that created an exhibit of what was going to happen over time once the country became a full democracy.

Everybody knew what the outcome was going to be.

It was not unlike the George Washington election, because for the first time, black South Africans could actually participate and vote and own land and all of the things that they weren't allowed to do for so many years.

But it was because they were able to partner together and come up with, I mean, it was just a matter of months between their decision to have this election and actually executing the election, people going to the polls, which is not easy to do.

And they did it.

They took about 80% of all the land for white people.

Black South Africans were forced to carry a 96-page passbook just to walk into a city.

A 96-page book? Just to walk down the street? Yes, and if they forgot it or didn't have the right stamp, they were arrested instantly.

There were separate beaches, separate hospitals, separate schools and even separate park benches.