on white south africans who don’t want black people in “their” spaces (in africa!)

Let’s get one thing painfully clear. Africa belongs to Africans. Well, it should in every sense of the word but that is neo-imperialism chat for another day. The issue with people not recognizing the aforementioned fact is that racist white people (even those born on the continent) are so coddled by the delusion of racism that they are comfortable being anti-black on the blackest continent on the planet.

The fucking audacity.

South Africa is a complex study on the dynamics of racism owing to a white supremacist government managing to disenfranchise Black people a country where they are the majority. That set up has resulted in a legacy of entitlement that has manifested in racist white South Africans – people who were born and grew up in a Black country – consistently acting out of pocket. The most recent racist white is man named Adam Catsavelos. Adam was recently on vacation in Greece where he filmed a video on a beach commenting on its lack of Black people. Adam’s exact words when describing the beach were, “not a k***** in sight. Fucking heaven on earth. You cannot beat this.” The ‘k-word’ in South Africa is a derogatory term used to dehumanize Black South Africas during the height of apartheid so…sigh.

Please trust that Black South Africans and white allies were have none of that and promptly unleashed a campaign against the racist-vacationer that got him fired from his own family’s business. His family were quick to condemn Adam and his comments but no racist is an island and the reason he made that video is because he knew that whoever he was sending it to was a receptive audience – had his family really called him before on his racism, would he have bothered recording and sending his blatant racism? The family are suffering for Adam’s sin because multiple business partners have severed ties with the business, that sells meat marinade to large restaurant chains and other food distributors.

During New Years in 2016, Durban-based real-estate agent Penny Sparrow made a racist facebook post about Black people filling up an African beach in Africa. Sparrow compared the beach-goers to ‘monkeys’, a got to in the racism handbook for white people who find no peace in Black people merely existing. She also met swift social media justice, losing her business and even being charged for her bigotry, introducing a significant shift towards and society that sees racism being met with actual consequences.

A substantial part of the psychological violence that racism inflicts is robbing Black people of a safe space on a continent that is supposed to be one for us. Instead, white South Africans who miss “the good old days” get to create their own spaces like the white-only town in the Northen Cape province. “It is an Afrikaner-only town, where only Afrikaans is spoken, because of fears about “diluting culture”, according to BBC who sent a delegation of journalists. The town was established in 1991 and according to its leader Carel Boshoff Jr, “We do not fit in easily in the new South Africa. It [Orania] was an answer to not dominating others and not being dominated by others.” I really wish white people would ask themselves why they can’t share spaces without some sort of power structure having to be established. These people aren’t hiding away in the middle of Northern Cape because they fear domination, they’re hiding because equality is mistaken for oppression for them. Separate but equal is fallacy that has long been debunked.

Many people are surprised that racism can thrive on the African continent because of its racial make-up but that just goes to show the widespread systematic repercussions of a racist system. That a racist can live among Black people all their life and still find the caucasity to be anti-black is astounding. White people need to learn to remove themselves from the situation if people who don’t look like them make them so uncomfortable. White feelings are no longer our problem. Unless you make it our problem. Then Black Twitter have mercy on you.