LETTER: Apartheid creeps back into SA in a different guise

As a young person growing up in Johannesburg during apartheid, there were many things that disturbed me and remain as an unpleasant memory till today. I lived on a smallholding in Sandhurst, a suburb just outside the city limits. We had horses and cows on the property and a staff of a few men taking care of the livestock. 

On their leave days, workers were required to carry a “passbook” (called the “dompas”). In place of a permanent “passbook” my dad would write a note called a “special”, which attested to their employment and permission to walk the streets. Without the passbook or “special” people were arrested and locked up for no reason other than not being identified as a worker.

These arrests were performed by police who roamed the streets of the city and would apprehend and randomly manhandle people who were not in position of the required document into the back of a truck. This was called a “Black Moriah”. If an employee did not arrive for work we would know he had been arrested and had to be bailed out of police custody. This was one of the most despicable acts of applying unrealistic and inhuman apartheid practices, which remains vividly ingrained in my memory.

Yet today on the streets of SA police are again roaming the streets and informal settlements demanding identity documents as proof that people are SA citizens or permanent residents.  Surely this cannot be legal, but more importantly it is immoral. Is this any different to apartheid? No, this is apartheid, and just another blight on the ANC government. 

Job reservation was one of the foundations of apartheid, with black and coloured people prohibited from most professions and trades, and in practice confined to labour-intensive jobs. This job reservation is now being applied to foreigners.

Apartheid is slowly creeping back into SA, just in a different guise. BEE is another form of apartheid, being discrimination based on race. SA also has a Judicial Service Commission that openly penalises white and Jewish aspirants to judicial positions, which is blatantly racist in its application. And the previous chief justice was severely censored for supporting dialogue between Israel and a local organisation, and was forced to publicly apologise for trivial remarks.  

The ANC government practises a cadre deployment policy that promotes loyal supporters of the party to almost all leadership positions, and those cadres are invariably of a specific race. Call it what you want — official racism is alive and well in SA.

Allan Wolman
Tel Aviv, Israel

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