LETTER: Only his allies get dignity of their names in Cronje’s defence of Habib
What angers people like Frans Cronje is that the ‘slaves’ are exercising their agency and courageously staking their claim to be human
In defence of Adam Habib, Institute of Race Relations (IRR) CEO Frans Cronje invokes the notion of a “mob” (“The mob hounding Adam Habib must be challenged (https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/2021-03-29-the-mob-hounding-adam-habib-must-be-challenged/),” March 29). This notion is part of a violent colonial racist tradition of rendering people, particularly black people, invisible. Instead of seeing people who have been, and are still, at the receiving end of unequal power relations, racists and their sympathisers see a mere aggregate of aggrieved bodies who purposelessly cry victim and believe they are entitled to everything.
To render someone invisible is to absent them in their presence; it is to “unsee” them as human. It is to dissolve them into anonymity, like potatoes in a sack upon which the racist, patriarchal, misogynistic, homophobic and transphobic powers-that-be can act as they wish. Therefore, for that which is “thingified”, as Aime Césaire would say, to stak...
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