Ferguson killing: King, Mandela, Truth and Reconciliation
August 25, 2014, 8:41 am

The August 9 fatal shooting of Afro-American teenager Michael Brown by Darren Wilson, a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, has torched worldwide debate on the racism prevalent in the United States (US). At the same time it has revealed some of the daily realities in the US that most of the world does not know about and the urgency with which race prejudice in the country needs to be addressed.

Recent scenes of American police and National Guard troops armed to the teeth confronting unarmed demonstrators, a declaration of a state of emergency, and the imposition of curfews (from midnight to 5 a.m.) has put the US in the spotlight for the very actions that it often condemns when they happen anywhere else in the world. In acting in the same way as so called “rogue regimes”, the American police and army risk eroding the US’s standing on issues of human rights — that it is known to champion globally.

Protesters chase away a police vehicle during a demonstration in Ferguson, Missouri, the United States, on Aug. 15, 2014 [Xinhua]

The contemporary history of the black people in both countries is as similar as it is dissimilar. The history of South Africa is defined by the struggle against apartheid led by the liberation movements, while that of the US is characterized by the struggle for justice led by the civil rights movement. This year marks fifty years of two defining moments where blacks were engaged in largely similar struggles against de-humanising racial discrimination at the hands of whites in both the US and South Africa.

In the US, it is now fifty years since the signing of the Civil Rights Act which, for the first time, forbade discrimination on the basis of sex and race as well as creating the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to implement the law. The Act outlawed unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the general public. Meanwhile, this year South Africa marks fifty years since the Rivonia Trial where ten leaders of the African National Congress were charged of treason, and eight eventually convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

In both struggles, two luminaries would emerge – Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela – both Nobel Peace laureates. It is now fifty years since King received the Nobel Prize which came one year after his seminal ‘I Have a Dream’ speech where he reiterated the call for an end to racism in the US by invoking its creed of the self-evident truth that “all men [and women] are created equal”. Four years later he was assassinated by James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tennessee in a racially motivated attack.

Mandela’s speech from the dock during the Rivonia trial expressed his political beliefs cherishing the “ideal of a democratic society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities”. Thirty years later he would become South Africa’s first democratically elected president when apartheid ended in 1994 and devoted his short tenure to nation building and reconciliation under one of the world’s most progressive constitutions.

Among Mandela’s most revered legacies was the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that acted as a transitional justice mechanism to deal with human rights violations perpetrated (from all sides) during the period of apartheid. While some people feel the TRC did not accomplish much, it was a necessary exercise that enabled South Africans to come to terms with their past on a morally accepted basis which advanced the cause of reconciliation. This could be a model for the US to deal with the long legacy of racial inequalities that still haunts her.

“South Africa and the US should heed Navi Pillay’s call to deal with the root causes of conflict” [Xinhua]

While political apartheid ended in South Africa, twenty years into democracy the ghost of the evil system still rears its ugly head through the structural forms of violence it created on the economic front. This latent conflict has to be confronted sooner, rather than later. Racial inequality cannot be just wished away. South Africa and the US should heed Navi Pillay’s call to deal with the root causes of conflict. It is the only way to build fair, democratic and inclusive societies. And when she says “apartheid is also where the law turns a blind eye to racism” it is indeed a profound truth.