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Take the red flags seriously

SHE is such an ordinary woman, her head wrapped in a scarf, a nondescript cardigan dangling off angular shoulders, skirt down to mid-calf, sandals that have walked many weary kilometres.

We sit on donated office chairs, pulled round to face each other (like so many free gifts NGOs receive, these are faulty – they have lost their back-supports). I strain to hear her quiet voice as two little grandchildren, of about two and four years old, helter-skelter around us.

But the story reaches me through the giggles and shrieks of excitement. This gentle, dignified woman of 55, 26 years a widow, is caring for four grandchildren on NO income (she has battled bureaucracy to access foster grants, with no luck).

She (I’ll call her Mpho) is so quiet, so measured, even when telling me how she struggles to sleep, haunted by memories of her stepfather, who was “always raping” her; so I am not prepared for what happens next: she crumples off her chair, sliding to her knees in front of me; and putting her arms around my neck, she sobs into my shoulder, great, gasping sobs. I can feel her bones, as frail as a bird’s wing under my hands. “When… when… when will it end… the suffer!” she whispers.

That phrase has been haunting me ever since.

It was in my mind as I watched Nicky Newton-King, CEO of the JSE, climb aboard a white flatbed a few days later, to receive the demands brought here by perhaps 50 000 marching members of the EFF.

Mpho is only a few years older than Newton-King. Now the JSE CEO is undoubtedly a brilliant woman, and I have no idea what kind of family she came from – but as someone who grew up poor and white, I can tell you, even if she came from an unmonied, no-trust-fund white family like mine, she still benefited from white privilege, and does to this day.

Mpho started about ten kilometres back in the race, with weights on her feet: a black woman born into a rural area with poor to non-existent facilities, she never even finished high school. Who knows what she could have become if she had had the ghost of a chance, the facilities and infrastructure that people like me gained from? Halfway decent schooling; a balanced diet and water on tap; sport and games and books and healthcare; perhaps a bursary such as I had (even if I had to spend years paying it off).

She could well have had drive and ambition: Mpho has proven herself tough beyond the imaginings of the stockbrokers and ad execs and actuaries and hoteliers who work in the financial heart of South Africa. If they could have seen her mime sweeping tablets into her mouth and downing them with a glass of water, whispering, “Sometimes I think I take the treatment, all of it….” Then she looked around at the two playing little ones: “… but then I think, the children…” It broke my heart.

Mpho has neither the money nor the spare energy to go on marches. But she was represented a couple of weeks ago, by the angry EFF marchers and the students insisting not just on no fees but also on no outsourcing. Both sets of marchers were protesting the inequality that translates into desperate situations like Mpho’s.

And we – the corporate execs, the still-privileged whites of South Africa – have to pay attention. If for no other reason than that we care about our own safety.

Back in 2001, I listened to Patricia Glyn on the radio talking about her recent visit to Zimbabwe, a country newly hit by land-grabs. A farmer’s wife said: “We should have been more forthcoming, more willing to put things right, when independence came. Lots of people had more than one farm, some as many as eight; we should have come forward, asked government what we could do to right the balance…”

At the time, I wondered if any South Africans in the top income-earning layer – even now, 15 years on, still largely dominated by white people – were listening.

Apparently not. Nothing has really changed, except for the worse. I flew in and out of OR Tambo in daylight recently, looking down from my window seat onto serried ranks of blue swimming pools. A few hundred metres away, hidden behind a mine dump or across a highway, you could see the shack communities that I’ve been working in recently as I travel around with CLAW (Community Led Animal Welfare - places of unemployment and despair. A minefield of despair; a minefield primed to explode as the price of food rises and hope, brutally, recedes.

Professor Sampie Terreblanche of the University of Stellenbosch said in a recent interview: “The whites will have to make a sacrifice. We cannot grow out of our dismal situation. We will have to do something at the top to improve the position of the 50% at the bottom.”

Those marchers are a red flag:
… stop, children, what's that sound?
Everybody look – what's going down?
(Buffalo Springfield)

I know it’s counter-intuitive to think of sacrificing, when you’re scared that the economy is caving in. But for the sake of a future in South Africa for all of us, I beg all of you in the higher income brackets to do so, to take those red flags seriously, before it’s too late.

If you see yourself as a progressive, thoughtful person with vision, please, please apply your mind to the issue of genuinely changing the lives of the Mphos of this country and being generous about righting the wrongs of the past. The alternative is truly too dreadful to contemplate.

- Agree or disagree? Share you opinion. It could get published.

*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on twitter.

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