What a genuine national dialogue must look like

We cannot continue sidestepping structural inequalities that keep the majority excluded

- HARLAN CLOETE

WHILE debates continue in South Africa about the need for a national dialogue, I was reminded of its urgency during a recent visit to the Netherlands.

Invited by the Rotterdam Municipality to serve on an international advisory board on cultural transition, I spent time in Amsterdam's Maritime Museum. There, a statement stopped me in my tracks:

“The colonial history of the Atlantic region impacts the present in many ways. You can see it in street names, public statues, and buildings. It also comes to the fore in institutional racism, the groundwork for which was laid in colonial times. People of colour face the negative effects of colonialism every day - not least in the Netherlands. In theory, every Dutch person is equal, yet in practice, Dutch people of colour find their opportunities limited by racism, however unintended”

This resonates deeply in South Africa, a country colonised twice by the Dutch, followed by grand apartheid, which entrenched inequality in land, property, livestock theft and cultural recognition. The legacy of this colonial/apartheid era is still so evident in the everyday experience of people of colour in South Africa.

The organisers involved in this week's national dialogue should revisit the late Professor Sampie Terreblanche’s comprehensive 1997 submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). He argued that greater knowledge and better understanding of the systematic injustices - which have been part and parcel of the South African system for at least a hundred years — are necessary to succeed with a programme of white adult education about the true nature of twentieth-century events, something highly needed en route towards a durable reconciliation.